Achiyalabopa (also Achiyalatopa; Knifewing)

Wind moves through dry juniper above the mesa, and somewhere overhead a sound like a hundred striking blades cuts the air. The Zuni knew the noise before they saw the shape that made it. Then the shadow passed, edged in rainbow color, and any field hand caught beneath it learned to keep his eyes on the ground. The bird had a name with knife in it.

Achiyalabopa, also written Achiyalatopa and known in ethnographic shorthand as the Knifewing god, is the great sky war being of the Zuni of New Mexico. He is a half-human, half-eagle figure whose wings, tail, and pinions are not feathered but bladed. Each quill is a thin sheet of flint, sharpened to a cutting edge, and each blade is dyed the colors of a struck rainbow. He carries the Great Flint-Knife of War. He draws the Bow of the Skies, which is the rainbow itself. His arrows are made of lightning, and the Mountain Lion of the North walks beside him as a warrior of the upper regions. In Frank Hamilton Cushing’s nineteenth-century transcription of Zuni cosmology he is the original war god, and the protector spirit of several Zuni societies. He is also, depending on the story, an enemy.

On a clear afternoon a Zuni runner notices a thin streak of color higher than the swifts have any business flying. The streak fans, drops to a glide, and a single flake of flint, almost weightless, twirls down and buries itself half an inch into the packed clay between his feet. By the time he picks it up, the sky is empty again.

The older stories remember him as someone who had to be brought to heel. In Cushing’s accounts, Achiyalabopa was once inimical to humans, raiding pueblos to carry off women to his city in the sky. The accounts describe what came next as a binding rather than a kill. A council of other gods worked with the most accomplished ritualists of the people, and together they fixed him in place long enough to draw a settlement out of him.

In the aftermath of that binding, the blades on his pinions still caught the noon light. He was held inside a ring of magic and divine effort, the rainbow on his back dimmed to a colder set of greens and blues, and the bargain proceeded in silence. What he gave was not surrender. It was instruction.

The Hle’wekwe, sometimes rendered as the Wood Fraternity, became the inheritors of that instruction. Two of their chief officers received from him the art of swallowing swords, and the rite they perform in winter still names him as its source. The performers down a length of polished hardwood the way Achiyalabopa once carried a flint blade in his throat between strikes. It is a survival ceremony dressed as a feat of strength.

The visual form attested in Zuni iconography is unusually specific for a creature of such cosmic scale. He stands like a man, with the head and the great splayed wings of an eagle, and where bird-feathers should run along the pinions and tail there are instead the flat, lance-shaped flakes of worked flint, knapped and edged and overlapping. Painters and silversmiths give him the rainbow’s full bandwidth across that plumage, reds and oranges sliding through yellows and greens into deep cold blues, so that a Knifewing pendant catches sun the way the bird himself is said to. The size attested to him is the size of a god rather than a bird. Old stories say a single beat of his wings could kill a man who failed to show respect.

Origins are quiet in the surviving record. Achiyalabopa belongs to the deep cosmological layer of Zuni tradition. He may once have been credited, in some lines of telling, with much of creation itself, before the role narrowed to war and to weather. The cosmological work that survives gives him the high zenith and the storms, the lightning he shoots, the rainbow he draws, the rains the parched mesa country lives or dies on. Whatever creative office he held earlier sits folded inside the storm-god he became.

Plenty stays unsaid. The transmitted myth focuses on the encounter, the abduction stories, the eventual binding, the gift of the ceremony, and lets the rest stay private to the societies that keep it. The Zuni do not put their religion out for tourists.

His powers extend naturally from what he is. The flint-bladed wings can be thrown as weapons, sent in volleys mid-flight. He looses lightning from a rainbow bowstring. He rules the high sky and the storm. He commands the Great Mountain Lion of the North and that of the upper regions as his guardians. None of his weapons is decorative. Each does precisely what its name says.

His limits are harder to read, because the stories about his defeat give credit to whole assemblies rather than a single weakness. He could be subdued, but only by a combined effort of other gods and the most accomplished ritualists working together. No mortal acted alone against him. Disrespect was the surest way to invite the strike. A person who failed in proper deference would not be given time to make it right.

He kept his blades and his sky city. The rainbow remained on his back, the lightning still in his bow. What he gave the Zuni was a winter ceremony and a name to whisper before a fight. The shadow still passes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Achiyalabopa?

Achiyalabopa is the Zuni Knifewing god, a celestial war being from the Pueblo people of northwestern New Mexico. He rules the high sky and storms, and Frank Hamilton Cushing’s nineteenth-century records identify Achiyalabopa as the original war god of the Zuni and the patron spirit of several Zuni societies.

What does Achiyalabopa look like?

Achiyalabopa appears as a half-human, half-eagle figure whose wings, pinions, and tail are made of flint knives rather than feathers. Each blade is dyed in the colors of a rainbow, and the figure is described as being of immense, godlike scale.

What weapons does Achiyalabopa carry?

Achiyalabopa wields the Great Flint-Knife of War, the Bow of the Skies (the rainbow itself), and arrows made of lightning. He can also throw the flint blades from his own wings and tail as weapons, and the Great Mountain Lion of the North fights beside Achiyalabopa as a guardian.

Why is Achiyalabopa associated with sword swallowing?

According to Zuni tradition, Achiyalabopa taught the art of sword swallowing to two chief officers of the Hle’wekwe, the Wood Fraternity. Their winter ceremony, in which performers swallow lengths of hardwood, still names Achiyalabopa as its source.

Is Achiyalabopa good or evil?

Achiyalabopa is both. Older Zuni stories describe him as originally inimical to humans, raiding pueblos to carry off women to his sky city, until other gods and ritualists subdued him. After his binding Achiyalabopa became a tutelary deity, protecting several Zuni societies and demanding respect.

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