Kachina (Katsina)

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Intermediary spirit beings who carry human prayers to the powers above and return rain, fertility, and blessing to the villages.
Role in Mythos: They are the messengers between the Hopi and Pueblo peoples and their gods, arriving each winter to dance the crops into being.
Relation to Humans: Mostly benevolent, they visit the villages to help with the ordinary work of survival and to discipline the young, and they are impersonated by masked dancers who take on their spirits. They answer human reverence and withdraw from human contempt, a bargain the people are careful never to break again.

Snow still crusts the mesa when the first of them comes up the trail at dawn, a figure in a carved mask the color of storm light, feathers trembling at its crown, turtle-shell bells marking each deliberate step. Cornmeal is scattered on the ground before it. Children press against the adobe walls, half in delight and half in fear. This is the season the Hopi have waited for since midsummer, the stretch of months when the spirits come down from the mountains and walk again among the living.

The kachinas, katsinam in the Hopi tongue, are not gods, though they stand close to them. They are the middle beings, the ones who carry human need up to the powers that answer it and bring the answer back down as rain. There are hundreds of them, more than four hundred by some reckonings, and they refuse to settle into a single shape. One is the chief of weather. One is a crow-winged mother to all the rest. One plants seeds and plays a flute with a hump on his back. One hoots like an owl and keeps the law. Another is a clown, striped black and white, who misbehaves and gorges and blunders so that the people can laugh at their own worst habits. To name them all would take a lifetime, and the Hopi keep learning new ones.

Because no two are alike, appearance is best read off the mask. A kachina wears a helmet of carved cottonwood or worked hide, painted in the colors that belong to the directions: yellow for the northwest, blue-green for the southwest, red for the southeast, with white and black between. Above it may rise a tableta, a stepped wooden tablet cut into the terraced silhouette of thunderheads, or a crown of eagle feathers, or great red ears, or horns, or a fan of parrot plumes. The body is painted and kilted, hung with fox pelts and fresh spruce, belled at the ankle so the dance can be heard before it is seen. The effect is meant to be nothing like a human face. When a man lowers the mask over his head, the Hopi say, his own features are gone, and the spirit takes the space where he used to be.

Where the kachinas first came from depends on who is telling it. In one account they climbed up into this world alongside the people from the world below, good-natured from the beginning, and wandered with them across the land until both settled and the spirits repaid their hosts with ceremony, with rain, with harvest that a desert had no obligation to give. They were help and comfort in a hard country. For a long while the arrangement held.

Then something broke, and the stories disagree on what. In one, raiders fell on the villages and killed the kachinas outright, and their souls sank back down to the underworld. In another, gentler and more damning, the people simply stopped being grateful. They took the rain as their due, let the reverence go slack, treated the spirits as servants. So the kachinas left. They left because they were not thanked. But before they went they gathered a few faithful young men and taught them the songs, the masks, the paint, and the steps, and told them to carry the ceremonies on without them. When the rest of the people understood what they had thrown away, they turned in shame to those young men, and the impersonation began. A third telling is plainer still: the spirits grew weary of ferrying the souls of the dead up to the San Francisco Peaks, and decided they would sooner be represented by humans than keep at the labor forever.

Whichever way it went, the outcome is the same, and it is the strange center of the whole tradition. The spirits are absent and present at once. A masked dancer in the plaza is a man everyone in the village knows by name and, for the length of the ceremony, is not a man at all.

What the kachinas can do follows directly from what they are. They bring the rain, and with it the corn and beans and squash on which a mesa-top people stake their year. They carry prayers upward and blessing back. They discipline the reckless: the ogre kachinas, Nataska and his terrible kin, arrive with saws and empty baskets and the announced intention of carrying off children who have misbehaved, a threat that parents negotiate down with gifts of food and solemn promises, cruelty worn as a teaching mask. And they escort the dead, taking the souls of the recently gone back with them to the sacred peaks.

But their power runs on a current that can be switched off, and the Hopi learned this the hard way. The kachinas answer respect and starve on contempt; the whole catastrophe of their leaving turned on a village that forgot to be thankful. They keep to a calendar and cannot be summoned outside it, arriving near the winter solstice and going home after the summer one at the Niman ceremony, so that for half the year the plaza holds no spirit at all. And the impersonation is only as strong as its faith. A mask worn carelessly, a song sung with the wrong heart, a ceremony gone through for show, carries nothing up the mountain and brings nothing back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kachina?

A kachina, or katsina, is a spirit being in the religion of the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest. Kachinas act as intermediaries between humans and the gods, bringing rain and fertility, carrying prayers, and visiting the villages each winter. There are hundreds of distinct kachinas, each representing something in the natural or social world, from weather and crops to animals, ancestors, and moral order.

What do kachinas do for the Hopi?

Kachinas bring the rain that allows corn, beans, and squash to grow in the desert, which is their central purpose. They also carry human prayers up to the gods, escort the souls of the dead to the sacred San Francisco Peaks, and enforce good behavior, with fearsome ogre kachinas threatening to carry off children who misbehave. During the kachina season they dance in the plazas to secure the community’s health and harvest.

Are kachina dolls the same as the kachina spirits?

No. The carved figures, called tithu in Hopi, are not toys or idols but teaching objects, given mainly to girls and new brides during ceremonies so they can learn to recognize the many kachinas. Each doll is carved from cottonwood root in the likeness of a specific spirit, mirroring the mask and regalia the masked dancers wear. The spirit, the masked dancer, and the doll are three separate aspects of the same kachina concept.

Why did the kachinas stop coming to the villages?

According to Hopi tradition, the kachinas withdrew to the underworld, and the stories give more than one reason. In one version they were all killed when raiders attacked the villages; in another, the people took them for granted and lost their reverence, so the spirits left in disappointment. Before departing, the kachinas taught a few faithful young men their songs, masks, and dances, which is why Hopi men have impersonated them in ceremony ever since.

Are kachinas gods?

Kachinas are not gods themselves but spirit intermediaries who stand between the Hopi and their deities. They are mostly benevolent beings who came from the underworld and serve as messengers, carrying human needs to the powers above and returning with rain and blessing. Some, like the chief kachina Eototo, hold great authority over weather and ceremony, but their role is to mediate rather than to rule.