The Rain Priesthood and the Ceremonial Year

Zuni Pueblo's religious life is carried by a set of interlocking institutions rather than by a single priesthood or church. A rain priesthood, organized in several priesthoods each responsible for a cardinal direction and a season, oversees the ceremonial calendar and the prayers that call rain to the pueblo's dry mesa-top fields. Medicine societies, entered through initiation and curing, hold responsibility for healing and for specific ceremonial knowledge passed within the society rather than published outside it. Kiva groups, organized by ceremonial rather than residential affiliation, carry the kachina religion, the complex of masked impersonation through which ancestral and nature spirits are understood to visit the pueblo at fixed points in the yearly cycle.

The ceremonial year culminates each late autumn or early winter in Sha'lako, when giant masked figures representing messenger spirits bless newly built houses across the pueblo in an all-night ceremony that is Zuni's most widely known public observance, though even its public portions are governed by protocols Zuni religious authorities set and can withdraw. Matilda Coxe Stevenson's 1904 study, produced with Zuni cooperation at a moment before the community had settled its own view of what should be published, remains the fullest early outside record of this structure; Zuni religious leaders have since made clear, repeatedly and to researchers directly, that its more detailed passages describe more than the tradition wishes non-Zuni readers to know, and the atlas follows that request here.