Kokopelli

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On a sandstone face above the San Juan River, in the panel at Sand Island near Bluff, Utah, a long crowd of figures has been pecked into the desert varnish: bighorn sheep, handprints, spirals, lines of dancers. Off to one side a small man leans back on his haunches. His spine is bent into a hump and a thin line runs from his mouth, as if he were blowing a pipe. He has been there for something close to a thousand years, and he is one of perhaps thousands of his kind across the Four Corners — the same bent back, the same forward-tilted head, the same flute. The figure has a modern name, Kokopelli, and the name does a great deal of work, most of it imprecise. What stands on the rock is older and stranger than the word.

Kokopelli petroglyph, a humpbacked flute-player pecked into desert-varnished sandstone. Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The figure on the rock and the name it carries

The humpbacked flute-player belongs to the rock-art and ceramic record of the American Southwest — the lands of the Hohokam in the southern deserts and of the Ancestral Puebloans on the Colorado Plateau, and of their descendants among the Pueblo nations who live there still. He is among the most widely repeated motifs in that record. Dennis Slifer and James Duffield, cataloging the imagery for their 1994 study, documented several hundred examples scattered through the canyons and river courses of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, many never recorded before. He is not one image. He is a category of image, made by many hands over many centuries.

His antiquity is real and his earliest form is not quite the figure of the souvenir shops. The seated flute-player without a hump appears already in the Basketmaker III rock art of the early Ancestral Puebloan world, roughly the fifth to seventh centuries of the common era — a stick figure, often seated, piping. The humped and ithyphallic form that the modern eye reads as Kokopelli consolidates later. The first images generally cited are on Hohokam pottery dated to roughly 750 to 850, and a humpbacked flute-player appears on the painted ceramics of the Mimbres in southern New Mexico around 1000 to 1150; the earliest petroglyphs usually dated to the figure cluster around the year 1000 (as the archaeological surveys summarize). From there the figure was pecked and painted across the Plateau and the deserts, recurring on rock and pot and kiva wall, and the practice of making him persisted, by some accounts, into the eighteenth century. This is the scholarly bedrock: a long-lived, widely distributed Southwestern image, attested in stone and clay across more than a thousand years.

The name is a different and more tangled matter, and the tangle is the heart of the figure’s story. “Kokopelli” is an English word built out of a Hopi one. The Hopi, a living Pueblo people of northeastern Arizona, know a katsina — one of the hundreds of spirit-beings of their religion — whose name is usually written Kookopölö. Early Spanish and then Anglo-American observers, learning the name from Hopi speakers and applying it to the flute-players they saw on the rocks, produced the corruption that hardened into “Kokopelli.” The transfer was an act of identification, and the identification was, in the strict sense, mistaken. The German-born linguist Ekkehart Malotki, who spent decades working with Hopi consultants and who wrote the standard study of the figure’s modern career, made the case bluntly: the rock-art flute-player and the Hopi Kookopölö are not the same being, and the merging of them was a confusion that nineteenth-century investigators set in motion and the twentieth century never undid.

That distinction has to be marked at the outset, because almost everything else depends on it. There is the ancient figure on the rock, whose makers’ own name for him — if there was a single name — is not recoverable. There is the living Hopi katsina Kookopölö, a being of an ongoing religion. And there is “Kokopelli,” the word and the brand, a modern composite. They overlap; they are not identical; and the most consequential errors in the literature come from treating them as one.

The flute, the seed, and the hump

Within the world the figure inhabits, what does he do? The rock-art player is bound, in most readings, to fertility — the fertility of crops, of game, and of human increase. He is the piper who brings the warmth and the planting, and the flute is the load-bearing instrument of that meaning. The breath that drives the flute is also wind; and wind, in the Pueblo agricultural imagination, is the carrier of the forces from which rain and maize and life proceed. To play the flute is to call the warm season, to summon the rain, to ripen the corn. The minstrel walking from settlement to settlement, conjuring the harvest with his music and, in the bawdier tellings, seducing the young women along his road, is a figure of increase in every register at once: the field, the herd, the human bed.

The hump is read in several ways, and the readings are not exclusive. In the most common interpretation it is a sack — a bag of seeds he scatters as he travels, or a bundle of songs, or a load of trade goods carried on the back the way a packer carries his burden. The seed-sack and the song-sack are tradition-friendly readings, of a piece with the fertility and the music. The trade-goods reading shades into a specific and contested historical hypothesis: that the figure preserves the memory of the pochteca, the long-distance merchants of Mesoamerica who are thought to have reached the Southwest, traveling with their wares slung across their backs and, in some accounts, announcing their peaceful approach with a flute. It is an attractive idea and it remains in doubt; the chronology does not sit comfortably, and the figure’s roots in the local Basketmaker tradition predate any plausible Aztec contact. It is better held as one hypothesis among several than as settled fact.

The roles the figure has been assigned in the literature run wider than fertility alone, and the spread is itself instructive. Across the surveys and the ethnographic notes he has been read as a fertility symbol, a rain priest who calls the storms, a hunting magician who charms the game, a roving minstrel, and a long-distance trader — and as the trickster who is all of these at once and answerable to none of them. The variety is not only the variety of modern guesses; it reflects a real diversity in the images. The flute-players of the rock are not a uniform sign stamped out to one template. They differ in posture, in headgear, in the presence or absence of the hump, in whether they are seated or striding, solitary or ranked in rows, plain or phallic, paired with animals or with other dancers. Some are insect-like enough that the cicada and the robber fly press their claims; some are unmistakably men. To gather all of them under a single name and a single meaning is to do exactly what the modern icon does, and the diversity of the originals is the standing rebuke to it.

The phallus is the third recurrent element, and it is the one the modern reproductions almost always remove. In a great many of the rock-art and ceramic images the flute-player is explicitly ithyphallic — erect, emphatic, unmistakably a figure of generative power. This is not incidental decoration. It is the fertility made visible, the same meaning the flute and the seed-sack carry, stated in the most direct available terms. The trickster’s lewd humor that runs through the later Pueblo tellings — the wanderer who chases women, whose appetites are a joke and a force at once — is continuous with this. The figure is comic and potent together, and the comedy is part of the potency.

Here the registers have to be kept apart. That the flute-player is associated with fertility, music, rain, and a trickster’s sexuality is as close to consensus as the subject allows, supported by the iconography and by the testimony of Pueblo people. What the makers themselves understood him to be — whether a deity, a spirit, a class of spirits, a remembered man, or several different beings that later eyes have lumped together — is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty grows the further one reaches behind the living record into the centuries that left only images. The honest description stops where the evidence does.

Ancestral Puebloan petroglyph panel at Sand Island, Utah, with a flute-player at left. Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Kookopölö, Maahu, and the living religion

The Hopi katsina from whom the name was borrowed deserves its own careful description, drawn only from what is in the public and nation-sanctioned record, and rendered at a respectful distance. Kookopölö is one of the katsinam — the spirit-beings who, in the Hopi religious year, are present among the people for part of the cycle and embodied by initiated dancers. He is a being of fertility, humpbacked and, in his traditional form, phallic. He is associated, in Malotki’s account, with the robber fly, a humped, vigorously mating insect; and he is, importantly, not a flute-player. The flute that defines the rock-art figure is precisely the attribute the Hopi katsina of the same name does not carry. The flute-music that warms the earth and ripens the crops belongs, in the Hopi telling Malotki recorded, to a different being — Maahu, the cicada, whose piping brings the heat of the growing season. The figure of the souvenir, then, is a fusion: the hump and the name of Kookopölö, the flute of Maahu or of the rock-art player, and the fertility shared among them, soldered into a single image that corresponds exactly to none of its sources.

The living religion that holds Kookopölö is guarded, and the guarding is deliberate and long-standing. The Hopi have repeatedly asserted that their ceremonial knowledge, imagery, and sacred objects are not public property to be photographed, recorded, sold, or reproduced at outsiders’ convenience. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office regulates research in the villages, restricting photography, sketching, and note-taking, and reviewing publications so that restricted material is not divulged. The objection has teeth and a recent history: in 2013 the tribe wrote to a Paris auction house to demand the cancellation of a sale of some seventy katsinam, its preservation officer stating that putting a price on such religious objects was an offense (as NPR reported at the time). For that reason the description here goes no further than the public record. The point is not to catalog the katsina but to mark the line: Kookopölö belongs to a people who are present, sovereign, and entitled to control their own sacred things, and the existence of a commercial figure wearing a corruption of his name does not transfer any of that to the market. The same care extends across the Pueblo world — the Zuni, the Tewa, the Keresan villages — where flute societies and flute-associated beings of their own, distinct from the Hopi and from one another, complicate any attempt to read a single pan-Puebloan “Kokopelli” off the rocks. The flute-player of the Pueblo world is plural, and the nations who keep him are living.

Reception: from the canyon wall to the cafe sign

The figure has had three afterlives, and they pull in different directions. The first is the archaeological one. The flute-player is among the most photographed and surveyed motifs of Southwestern rock art, a fixture of the great-house and canyon landscapes — the Mimbres bowls, the panels along the San Juan and the Colorado, the imagery of the world that built the great houses of Chaco Canyon. He is a workhorse of the discipline precisely because he is so recognizable and so common, and the surveys that catalog him — Slifer and Duffield’s among them — are the closest thing the figure has to a documentary record. This is the figure read as evidence: a recurring image whose distribution, dating, and stylistic change can be tracked even where its meaning cannot be fixed.

The second afterlife is the scholarly reckoning with the name itself, and Malotki’s Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon (1994 in German, 2000 in English from the University of Nebraska Press) is its sharpest statement. Tracing the word’s career from nineteenth-century misidentification to twentieth-century brand, Malotki found in his predecessors “confusion and conflation, semantic misconceptions and, in a few instances, outright fabrications” — a chain of errors by which a corrupted Hopi name, a fly-modeled katsina, a cicada, and an ancient rock motif were welded into a single icon that the marketplace then ran with. The World History Encyclopedia’s treatment of the question makes the same essential move, insisting on the distinctions the popular figure erases. This is a reception that consists, properly, of taking the icon apart.

The third afterlife is the one most people meet, and it has to be named plainly and set apart. Beginning especially in the 1990s, the flute-player became a pan-Southwestern logo — pressed into silver, painted on tiles, cut into metal yard-art, stamped on T-shirts and mugs and tote bags, hung over the doors of cafes and real-estate offices and tourist stops from Sedona to Santa Fe and far beyond. The commercial Kokopelli is a simplified, looping line: hump, raised knee, jaunty headdress-feathers, flute. He is also, almost without exception, sanitized — the erect phallus that was central to the ancient image quietly removed, the figure, in one critic’s phrase, “emasculated” to make him safe for mass consumption. The rise of New Age and ecological enthusiasm gave the icon a following ready to receive him as a wistful emblem of an idealized, vanished Indian — which is to say, the figure was absorbed into the old “noble savage” sentiment, detached from any living people, and sold. Scholars who study the phenomenon describe the result as a postmodern pastiche: a hybrid that is not a genuine figure of any single ancient culture, and certainly not the property of the Hopi whose word was taken to label it.

The kitsch is worth criticizing precisely because it is so effective at hiding what it is. It presents itself as Native, ancient, and authentic, and it is in fact modern, composite, and detached — a brand assembled out of a mistranslation. None of that diminishes the figure on the rock. The bent back and the lifted flute above the San Juan, the players on the Mimbres bowls, the spirit the Pueblo nations still know by their own names: these are the real matter, dignified and old, and they do not become souvenirs because someone has printed a cartoon of them on a coffee mug. The piper of the seed and the song was carved into the canyons of this world for a thousand years before there was a market to flatten him, and the carving is what endures when the signage is taken down.

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