Kokopelli

The robber fly works the mesa in high summer. It hunts on the wing, takes other insects out of the air and drains them dry, and it carries a long stiff proboscis like a spike. Its back humps up behind the head. When it mates it hooks its abdomen around and stays coupled in the open, on a stem, in full sun, for as long as it pleases. The Hopi have a name for that insect. The name is kokopelli.

Jesse Walter Fewkes wrote it down in 1903, in the twenty-first annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the sentence is as flat as a fence post. The Hopi call a certain dipterous insect kokopelli, he says, and apply the same name to a personation introduced by the Asa clan. Dipterous means fly. The katsina takes his name from the insect, and nearly everything true about him follows from that.

Fewkes described the figure from drawings made for him by Hopi artists. The head is black with a white line running down the middle of the face. The snout is long and pointed and painted in a black and white spiral. A white circle sits on each side of the head, crossed through with black lines. One warrior feather stands upright on top. The body is black under an embroidered sash, the leggings buckskin, stained yellow and green. The hump is always there, in every picture and every carved doll. Fewkes was told that in older times many of these beings came at once. He never saw the performance himself, and he said so.

There is no flute in that description. The word turns up all through the rest of the volume and never once in his entry on Kokopelli, and the female counterpart he recorded on the same plate carries no flute either. Kokopelli mana has the same slender spiral snout, and in her hand she holds two packets of mush wrapped in corn husks.

A katsina is not quite a god. The word covers a being that embodies a life force or a natural phenomenon, with power over rain and crops and fertility, whose office is to carry messages between people and the gods, and who is made visible when a masked dancer takes that being on. Kokopelli’s part in this is increase, of both kinds at once. He carries seed on his back and he carries children, and he gives them out as he passes through. A Hopi carver made one of these figures in cottonwood before the end of the nineteenth century, fourteen inches of it, with feathers and animal hair and cotton cord, and a collecting expedition took it off First Mesa in 1904. It is in Brooklyn now, catalogued under the name the museum gives it, which is Assassin Fly Kachina Doll.

He does not play the flute. Alph Secakuku, the first Hopi to say so in print, wrote one line about it in 1995: Kokopölö is a katsina with a hump-back, he is not a Flute player, though he has been mistakenly referred to as such. Ekkehart Malotki, who spent years on the Hopi language and on this question in particular, traced how three separate things got folded into one. There is the katsina, humped and fertile and modelled on the fly, with no flute. There is a prehistoric rock art motif out of the Four Corners country whose old meaning nobody now knows. And there is maahu, the cicada, whose playing warms the ground and ripens the crop. The souvenir is all three at once, wearing the name of the only one that never had an instrument.

The cicada has the better claim to the music. In the Hopi account of the emergence, two maahu led the people up into the fourth world, and the eagles guarding the entrance shot them through with arrows as they came. They kept playing. The music closed the wounds as fast as the arrows opened them, and the people climbed up behind the sound. Hopi artists still carve maahu. When Hopi people speak of the flute players on the rocks, the words they reach for are maahu, or lelenhoya, the flute player, or Lelentiyo, the flute boy. Kokopölö is not among them.

The rock art deserves better than the name it was given. At the Wells Petroglyph Preserve on Mesa Prieta in New Mexico there are somewhere near a hundred and fifty flute players pecked into the stone. Some are humped. Plenty are frankly insect-like, with segmented bodies and antennae. Some sit, some lie down, some walk, some dance, and a fair number are visibly aroused. The oddest ones there go on four legs rather than two, animals with flutes, which no one has explained.

The instruments were real, and some of them have been dug out of the ground. At a Basketmaker site in the Prayer Rock District of northeastern Arizona, now called Broken Flute Cave, excavators found four wooden flutes cut from boxelder, six finger holes apiece spaced three and three, all four tuned alike. Two of them had been tied together and put away that way. Each was decorated near the mouth end with black, blue and red bird feathers, and they date to the middle of the seventh century. At Pueblo Bonito, in Room 33, George Pepper found eight more. One ran to over three and a half feet. One was painted black and orange and green with circles and cloud bands, and two carried a bear and a mountain lion carved in relief at the far end.

None of them work the way a recorder works. They are rim-blown flutes, open tubes with holes drilled in them, and to get a note out of one you hold it away from your face at something near forty-five degrees and split your breath on the far edge of the opening. That is why nearly every figure on the rock holds the thing out at that angle with both hands. It is not a stylistic quirk. It is a man playing. The flute sold today as a Native American flute is a different instrument entirely, a two-chambered Plains courting flute with a block fitted on top, and it comes centuries later.

What the modern figure lost first was the phallus. The old rock art does not hide it and the Hopi katsina does not hide it, and the version on the wind chimes has been tidied out of existence, which removes the one organ that made him a spirit of fertility in the first place. A story circulates that Spanish missionaries leaned on Hopi carvers to leave it off. It may well be true. Nobody has produced a source for it. What can be shown is duller and worse, because Dennis Slifer traced most contemporary Kokopelli images neither to the katsina nor to the rock art but to stick figures on Hohokam pottery, related to either only at a distance.

The correction has been attempted. Anasazi State Park in Boulder, Utah, ran an exhibit for a year, built with help from members of the Hopi Flute clan, whose entire purpose was to tell visitors that the flute players on the rocks are not Kokopelli. The keyrings outsold it. The katsina is still there, still humped, still named for a fly that hunts in midair over the mesa and mates where anyone can watch, and he still does not play anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kokopelli the flute player?

No. The Hopi katsina Kokopelli, or Kookopölö, does not carry a flute. Alph Secakuku stated this plainly in 1995, and the earliest detailed record of the katsina, made by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1903, describes the figure in full and mentions no instrument at all. The humpbacked flute player of Southwestern rock art is a separate figure that acquired Kokopelli’s name later.

What is Kokopelli named after?

Kokopelli is named after a fly. Fewkes recorded in 1903 that the Hopi apply the word to a certain dipterous insect and use the same name for the katsina, and the insect is generally identified as the robber or assassin fly, which has a humped back, a long spike-like proboscis and a conspicuous public mating habit. The Brooklyn Museum catalogues its Hopi carving of the figure as an Assassin Fly Kachina Doll.

What does Kokopelli actually look like?

Fewkes described a black head with a white line down the centre of the face, a long pointed snout striped in a black and white spiral, a white circle crossed by black lines on either side of the head, and a single warrior feather standing on top. The body is black under an embroidered sash, with buckskin leggings stained yellow and green. A hump is always present, in painted images and carved dolls alike.

Who is the flute player in Southwestern rock art, if not Kokopelli?

Hopi people generally call the rock art flute players maahu, the cicada, or lelenhoya, the flute player, or Lelentiyo, the flute boy. In the Hopi emergence account two maahu played the people up into the fourth world and kept playing while the eagles’ arrows went through them. Among the Zuni the best known flute player is Paiyatuma, god of dew and of the dawn. The original meaning of the rock art figure itself is not known.

Why does the modern Kokopelli image have no phallus?

The commercial Kokopelli has been sanitised, and the erect phallus that marked the older images as a sign of fertility is gone from almost every modern version. A widely repeated story blames Spanish missionaries for pressuring Hopi carvers, but no source has been produced for it. Dennis Slifer traced most contemporary images back to stick figures on Hohokam pottery rather than to the katsina or to the rock art.

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