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Abducted Lamanite Daughters/Hopi Lakon, Maraw, and Owaqolt ceremonies.

Have you ever wondered while reading Mosiah Chapter 20 why the Lamanite daughters that were abducted by the Priests of Noah were dancing in the wilderness? I have considered this a few times myself. In my studies of the Hopi culture I ran into the some ceremonies that I found quite intriguing because of what I had read in Mosiah. I was surprised even more to hear Hugh Nibley correlate these ceremonies with this same chapter in Mosiah. In Mosiah chapter 20 in a place called Shemlon the Lamanite daughters gathered themselves to sing dance and make themselves merry. It tells that eventually the Priests of Noah who had been keeping an eye on these daughters of the Lamanites eventually abducted 24 of them.

During the months following the snake ceremony the Hopi women hold three ceremonies. According to Hugh Nibley and Tom Cryers these festivals which generally follow the pattern of all ceremonials and derive from temple times when the maidens of Jerusalem, all dressed in white, went in the vineyards close to the city and danced and sang in a circle of the Day of Atonement, the time when an opportunity was offered to young men to select their companions for life. The ceremonies are four days long, as was the customary lament of virginity practiced by the daughters of Israel. The women erect elaborate altars, have kiva ceremonies, and dance in the plaza.

The first is called Lakon which is based on the theme of rain, corn and fertility of women. Songs are sung with desires for impregnation and motherhood. The primary emphasis of Lakon is how the village is blessed by women. Without going into too much detail the next is the Maraw. In the plaza performance, a pair of virgins, hoping for marriage, throws food to the spectators from inside a singing circle of women holding cornstalks.

The final women’s celebration, called Owaqolt, has the establishment of marriage as its theme. The culmination of this celebration is the tossing of gifts from a circle of maidens who wear headdresses that have a horn hair do on the right and a squash blossom one on the left and who have their faces and feet painted yellow like the Mayan and Aztec brides. These female celebrations are meant to impress upon the mind the blessings brought forth by mother earth and womankind.

This goes to show that the Lamanite daughters were more than likely performing ceremonies similar in meaning and actions to these performed by the Hopi women. Parts of the above three ceremonies are actually performed in the wilderness away from the actual village. Because they are held in the same general time frame each year it would make sense why the Priests of Noah would know when to expect the daughters to be alone in the wilderness and ripe for abduction.

Hopi Snake Ceremony Part 2

Every ceremony performed by the is laced with so much symbolism that it is almost impossible to be able to trace the root of each of them. In Tom Cryers book, “Visual Testament” he attempts to do just that. He noted that during the last four days of the Snake Ceremony these days are dedicated to the hunt of snakes for the final dance ceremony. The First day of the hunt, the Hopi Snake Priests go northward. The second day they go westward, the third, southward, and the fourth and last day they go eastward. It is through the gathering of serpents from the four corners of the earth that the Hopis enact the formation of man, the gathering of Israel.

Part of the Snake Priests outfit is the zigzag motif on the kirtle (kilt) worn by the priests. This motif represents the plumed water serpent Paleuleukang. The bars, symbolic of the two records, divided by a tripod shaped symbol considered to be snipe tracks, which correspond to “the Word,” even as ibis footprints correspond to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing.

Their headdress is made up of eagle breast feathers dyed red. To the ends of these are tied bluebird feathers. The joining of these two colors, red and blue, hearkens back to antiquity. It also is a visual forecast of a future joining of the blue and red nations. This particular headdress has been referred to as the nakwa, “wish\prayer.” The blue and red nations are considered Judah and Joseph…the Jews and the Native Americans.

This would make sense considering the design on the kilt has the two bars considered records and the ibis footprint representing Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing is more than likely a prophecy of the joining of the records of Judah and Joseph in the form of the Bible and the Book of Mormon.