Hopi Initiation Ceremony

The idea of initiation can fill your mind with countless things, good, bad and most importantly, memorable. While these memories might bring you back to First Communion, boys scouts, High School graduation, fraternity, sports team, your weeding, or Bat Mitzvah, these initiations all resonate with you till this day. While the idea of initiation brings back memorable memoires, long nights, boring times, or even stressful years, yet the flashback of memories that resonates most with us are not the difficult times, but the positive ones. The ones of us with our childhood neighbors, friends, teammates, parents, siblings, ex girlfriends, favorite teachers are the things that come to mind. Although we all have such memories, the initiation ceremony
and rituals specific to Native Americans are recognizable similar, but incomparable different, in many ways. In spite of the fact that we can relate to Native Americans in terms of initiation ceremonies as a whole, the unique style, impact and traditional methods to which Native Americans of all types use initiation ceremonies are vastly different from anything we have experienced in our own ceremonial experience.
To the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, initiation ceremonies are an influential aspect of traditional way of life and a ritual process which the Hopi initiate their children into their religious livelihood. Despite the countless meaning we might associate to the rituals of our past, the Hopi bring a more unique, traditional and fascinating ideology to their initiation, which few have experienced or witnessed first hand. In Gill’s reading from February 15th Disenchantment: Religious Abduction reading we are presented with the purpose of Hopi initiation- to reveal the fullness of reality-one with nature of religion itself. For religion springs from the unique human capacity to grasp and to create dimensions of reality that are beyond the material, beyond the obvious, beyond even human existence, and to exercise this capacity by utilizing the material and obvious dimensions of
ordinary human life (Gill, “Disenchantment”pg 70). Despite the very conservative and private lifestyle to which the Hopi people live, their animal-like ancestors the Kachina, who live in the mountains of San Francisco, and venture out to visit the Hopi people play a big role in this initiation process. The core of this ritual process lies in the whipping by the Tungwup Kachinas. Despite the initial fear and anxiety to which the whipping possesses, the whipping is used as an understanding that, the Kachinas are not real gods, but men dressed as gods. Following this initial whipping process, Hopi children are abducted from their childhood naïveté into maturity, and for us to consider more fully this initiatory process may open not only a deeper appreciation for Hopi religious practices, but also for widely used religious techniques (Gill, “Disenchantment”pg 58). While the childhood hear of the Kachina, the whipping process and even the abduction are all part of tradition and ritual, the fundamental purpose of such a process is much deeper than the childhood fear.
To the Hopi, the initiation is constructed in a way that a child’s religious life begins in a state of seriousness and reflection. Motivated by a sense of doubt and skepticism, that the very nature of reality had become threatened (Gill, “Disenchantment”pg 66). While in many ways, this process of whipping, fear and realization is a rather unusual approach from childhood to adulthood. Some similarities can be made in the way many of our own religious traditions play out in our childhood experiences. For instance, Catholics around the world are presented with the idea that Santa is a real, functioning, possessed individual that grants us with happiness every December 25th. While many of us have experienced the harsh reality that Santa isn’t real and that this immortal like figure that we had been told, read about, dreamt about and envisioned, is actually a make belief thing. But despite this realization of Santa not being real at some point throughout your childhood, you still embody the traditional associations, rituals and celebrations of Santa Clause for the vast majority of your life. This same realization of reality can be seem in the children of the Hopi following their own initiation of reality to the Kachina, whipping and
initiation.