SOURCE: "Laguna Prototypes of Manhood in Ceremony," in MELUS, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1991–1992, pp. 39-61.

Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony unfolds a half-breed's search for identity amidst fragmented shards of his own tribalism, a way of life torn asunder by centuries of oppression. His story is written by a Laguna woman of mixed ancestry who does not speak the old language. Neither does her hero whose name is Tayo. Both however, make their homes at the Keres Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico, and both must forge bridges spanning their biogenetic footing in diverse cultural systems.

Tayo is lost, and his quest is to find his place so that he may attain his identity as a mixed-breed person within the world fabricated by Thought Woman, the Spider. Paula Gunn Allen characterizes this source in The Sacred Hoop, stating, "In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman" or as Silko puts it in her article, "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective," "In the beginning … Thought Woman thought of all these things, and all these things are held together as one holds many things together in a single thought." Spider Woman's tightly woven universe is woman-centered, spun with the warp and weft of matrilineal structure. Edward Dozier isolates three salient criteria of Pueblo social order: first, descent is reckoned along the female line so children belong to the clan of their mother; second, men move to the home of their wife upon marriage so the couple continues to live with or near the bride's mother, forming a residential system congregating women related by blood; and third, women own most property. On the subject of gynecentric groups, Allen remarks that "male relationships are ordered in accordance with the maternal principle; a man's spiritual and economic placement and attendant responsibilities are determined by his membership in the community of the sisterhood."

At the heart of Silko's literary enterprise is the study of relationships: "the perspective I have involves very definitely Laguna and Laguna people and Laguna culture … what I write about and what I'm concerned about are relationships." Therefore, in the ensuing discussion, we shall consider various patterns for masculine relationships not only as they emerge from Silko's pen, but also in terms of how they compare with norms in the milieu of custom and practice at Laguna.

We will chart Tayo's maturation process, noting key prototypes of manhood which frame and influence his behavior. From the "Social Models" established by the men of his immediate family (Uncle Josiah, Robert and Rocky), we will turn to the breed's identification with a traditional figure in folklore in "Tayo as Culture Hero." Next, we will analyze his induction into the travails of manhood in "Lessons for a Warrior" and "Becoming a Hunter," examining the fit between tradition and the literary model. We will conclude by broadening our scope to "Tayo and the Land (Yellow Woman)," showing the articulation between manhood and the feminine principle.

Social Models

For a young Laguna boy, the most important adult male model within his social domain is his mother's brother (Uncle Josiah). Adrift between the Indian world she has come to scorn, and the white world which attracts but won't accept her, Tayo's mother (Laura or Sis) abandons her four-year-old son; she "pushed him gently into Josiah's arms." Tayo's childhood is spent in his matrilineal family trying to reach an equilibrium between his pride about being Indian (through his mother) and his shame about being White (through his father). He attends grade school near home, subsequently going with his cousin/brother Rocky to board at the Indian School in Albuquerque. Both complete their secondary education at the local high school, and throughout mainly have teachers who are Anglo (white), not Native American. As their formal schooling progresses, Rocky increasingly affiliates himself with white values; concomitantly, Tayo grows more skeptical and fearful of Indian beliefs.

Within matrilineal cultures, the extended family forms a household based on the corporate kinline through women; it consists of a mother (Grandma), her spouse and her daughters (Auntie and Sis), their inmarrying husbands (Robert) who move to the wife's place of residence, their unwed brothers (Josiah), children (Rocky and Tayo) and grandchildren. In such families, the father is expected to come and go, but in Tayo's case his biological pater is completely absent. By contrast, mother's brother is fixed, stable and reliable, and the maternal uncle possesses the male jural role for the matriline. Prior to marriage, a man stays with his sister(s) and mother; afterwards, he would leave his wife's house periodically and return to his natal family in order to execute obligations due his maternal kinfolk. He has authority over the children of his sister rather than his own biological offspring, who in turn belong to the clan of his wife. There they would fall under the jurisdiction of her brother, his brother-in-law. To his sister's children, mother's brother is their primary teacher, guardian and disciplinarian; he is the source of their inheritance, makes arrangements for their marriages, and has responsibility for collecting the brideprice for his nephews' marriages. According to Fred Eggan, an anthropologist, the closeness of this relationship is marked at Laguna, and indicated in kinship nomenclature with the reciprocal term "anawe"—the form of address exchanged between mother's brother (Josiah) and sister's son (Tayo, son of Sis, and Rocky, son of Auntie).

Silko's portrait of Uncle Josiah in the novel conforms closely to social standards held for his status as mother's brother. He is warm and affectionate with his nephews; he jokes with them, teaches about life with its hardships and temptations, and guides their behavior. From him, Tayo and Rocky learn masculine tasks pertaining to livestock, horsemanship and hunting. Josiah cooperates with his mother and sister in the management of family affairs and solving problems, although "the sheep, the horses, the fields and everything belonged to them including the good family name." Josiah introduces Tayo to his Mexican girl friend, Night Swan, who bestows sexual favors on both uncle and nephew. Furthermore, she urges Josiah to purchase cattle from her cousin in Sonora; as Swan illustrated in "Symbolic Geography," it is likely that the Mexican herd constitutes Tayo's bridewealth for his union with Ts'eh. Although Josiah dies while Tayo is stationed in the Philippines during World War II, he persists through Tayo's thoughts about him, memories of what Josiah said or did while the boys were growing up. Their interaction is wrought with "all the love there was," and even after Josiah's and Rocky's deaths, Tayo knows that

Josiah and Rocky were not far away … And he loved them as he had always loved them, the feeling pulsing over him as strong as it had ever been … The damage that had been done had never reached this feeling. This feeling was their life, vitality locked deep in blood memory, and the people were strong, and the fifth world endured, and nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained.

In Tayo's legacy from Josiah, his uncle's words prevail. Speech and thought are fundamental human faculties in Laguna precepts. Since words embody thoughts, they create reality. The cosmos sprang from Spider Woman's process of ideation in Ceremony as well as in Laguna origin legends where her intrinsic power is the ability to name. She is regarded, as we have seen, as being the supreme "mastermind" who is the "creator of all" or she is said to have "finished everything." Words mark the inception of reality, so reality becomes a projection of thought made concrete through speech in the verbal art of stories, and storytelling.

Josiah is a consummate storyteller. Silko offers the opinion that "language is story. At Laguna," she continues in "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective," "many words have stories which make them. So when one is telling a story, and one is using words to tell the story, each word that one is speaking has a story of its own too." With all the richness of stories wrapped in stories, Josiah's teachings explain the way the world works. In addition, stories reveal appropriate sanctions indicating what will happen if one breaks normative prescriptions. Behavior and belief among the pueblos unify human with the divine, culture with nature, and thought with reality—they become a single, comprehensive, complex and closely interlocked network. For a people without writing, history is stories. Stories encode the knowledge of generations about how the world and human beings came to be as they are. Stories teach what one must know in order to belong, to have health and prosperity, to survive crisis and rear one's children. Stories are knowledge and knowledge is power over the word. Silko beautifully summarizes this perspective in Ceremony:

They are all we have, you see, / all we have to fight off / illness and death. / You don't have anything / if you don't have the stories … / So they try to destroy the stories / let the stories be confused or forgotten. / They would like that / They would be happy / Because we would be defenseless then.

Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you know where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky. (emphasis added)

As Josiah's stories recur, they continually refresh and inform his cherished place in Tayo's mind. "Memory insures the preservation of tribal heritage … Thus memories heal Tayo as they make the whole Laguna experience cohere." Tayo comes to understand his terror, realizing that "nothing was lost; all was retained between sky and earth, and within himself. He had lost nothing." One might say, perhaps, the story is there within him all the time but it needs to be drawn out, remembered so to speak from the vantage point of a retrospective view. Ts'eh, his lover, pinpoints memory as the device used to maintain and protect reality. She tells Tayo, "As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together." Likewise, memory enables the continuance of Tayo's and Josiah's story. In Tayo's recollections, Josiah's words bespeak the reality of tradition, respect for his people's sayings, responsibility for nature, and adherence to conventional practice. Tayo's wrongdoings are firmly but kindly corrected through stories, reminders affirming the "time immemorial stories" weaving Tayo's behavior into the fabric of the Laguna world view, thereby spinning him into the material of "blood memory."

Josiah's death triggers a series of major changes for Tayo. When his American comrades are ordered to execute the Japanese soldiers, Tayo sees them killing the Laguna. He witnesses Uncle Josiah among the victims despite Rocky's patient explanations that this could not be true: "it was impossible for the dead man to be Josiah, because Josiah was an old Laguna man, thousands of miles from the Philippine jungles and Japanese armies." Yet Tayo is convinced Josiah was there, and further that his own inaction was instrumental in Josiah's death. He tells the healer Betonie, "He loved me. He loved me, and I didn't do anything to save him."

Robert, Auntie's husband, substitutes for Josiah. He assumes his brother-in-law's "anawe" role when nephew Tayo returns from the Veteran's Hospital after the war suffering from the illness the white doctors called "battle fatigue." Robert works with Tayo, has warm words of support, brings him supplies at the sheep camp, helps in caring for the livestock and gathering firewood, and assists Tayo in his search for Josiah's spotted cattle.

After Grandma's decision that Tayo needs treatment by the native methods, she turns first to an elder Laguna priest, Ku'oosh. In "Symbolic Geography" Swan suggests that Ku'oosh serves as a "father" in the absence of Tayo's unknown white father through the ritual sponsorship of Tayo into the Kurena medicine society. At Laguna, religious identity and access to ideology pass through men, so a child belongs to the ceremonial Kiva and dance group of their father. Therefore, it is Robert, now Tayo's surrogate mother's brother, who takes Tayo westward to the hills above Gallup for ministrations at the hands of a Navajo shaman, Betonie, whom Ku'oosh recommends to Grandma.

Consequently, we are left with an impression of the temporary and mobile nature of social designs for manhood within the family circle. In terms of the structural dictates of matrilineality, this logic makes sense, for it is women who represent constancy—they ground the system, own property, and confer identity in the clan name. Men move into and out of the corporate web of relationships keyed to their mothers, sisters and wives. The message is clear—men are transitory. Upon each construct of masculinity in the novel is imprinted the metaphor of substitution: Josiah is replaced by Robert, Ku'oosh acts in lieu of Tayo's biological father, Betonie takes up where Ku'oosh left off, Rocky dies, and Tayo exists in his stead:

It didn't take long to see the accident of time and space: Rocky was the one who was alive, buying Grandma her heater with the round dial on the front; Rocky was there in the college game scores on the sports page of the Albuquerque Journal. It was him, Tayo, who had died, but somewhere there had been a mistake with the corpses, and somehow his was still unburied.

To all intents and purposes, Tayo appears as the converse of Rocky, hence he may serve as a counter for his brother. [A table follows in Blumental's essay, which lists the following traits of each character. Rocky is: object of pride, full-blood, wanted, given advantages, can leave, cleancut, all-American, oriented towared white culture, dead; Tayo is: object of shame, half-breed, unwanted, deprived of advantages, must stay, drinking, irresponsible Indian, avoids white ancestry, alive.] Significant oppositions arise in their upbringing; Auntie treats the boys differentially, even though both stand in a relationship where each would call her "naiya" or mother.

The narrative sets forth Rocky as Auntie's "pride" whom she always favors over the unwanted child of her dead sister. When others are around she "pretended" to handle the boys the same, "but they both knew it was only temporary." Kinship protocol would have Tayo and Rocky address each other as "tiume" or brother, but in Ceremony Auntie explicitly prohibits this term of reference, insisting on the Anglicized concept of "cousin." Tayo knows he is expected to remain behind and help so that "Rocky would be the one to leave home." Rocky "withdraws" from his mother (Auntie), and similarly moves away from "what village people thought" without plans for remaining on the reservation. Rocky pursues Anglo definitions of success: "he was an A-student and all-state in football and track. He had to win … (he) understood what he had to do to win in the white outside world" and he accepts the premise of deferred gratification for that success because he "believes in the word 'someday' the way white people do."

The common perception that Rocky is a hero is inscribed by the insults heaped upon Tayo by his war buddies, especially Emo who compares Tayo to Rocky: "You think you're hot shit, like your cousin. Big football star. Big hero … One thing you can do is drink like an Indian, can't you? Maybe you aren't no better than the rest of us, huh?" What Emo "hates" is the fact "that Tayo is part white." Tayo deeply loves his brother—"he was proud that Emo was so envious." When Rocky is badly wounded, Tayo struggles desperately to carry the stretcher, save his brother, and fulfill his parting promise to Auntie, "I'll bring him back safe." The jungle rains are endless and to Tayo they quicken Rocky's passing. He curses the drenching downpours, praying away the rain in a chant that "flooded out of the last warm core in his chest."

Tayo's universe is founded on a "world made of stories." Consequently, he construes his words as causing the drought afflicting his people and their environment. His illness is cultural. It reflects the deprivation brought on by voicing his destructive thoughts, making him in part responsible for his state of alienation. Also, it echoes his disorientation from tribal modes of thought coded in Spider Woman's universal geometry.

These events initiate Tayo's metaphysical quest when he finally returns home, a sick battle-weary veteran. He moves from the social sphere to that of the sacred where he must, according to indigenous tenets, encounter the mentors requisite for his process of recovery.

In turn Tayo, like Rocky, must become a hero.

Tayo as Culture Hero

Another model of the male individuation process appears in stories providing a behavioral code embedded in the lore of a society nourished by an oral tradition. This mythic description of masculinity is crucial as a prototype because Tayo, hero of the novel, is congruent with a traditional folklore hero.

Among the mythologies of many American Indian societies, tales reporting ceremonies, myths and ritual dwell on the character of a "Culture Hero." Spencer presents a cogent synthesis of the series of events in which the hero commonly engages, a sequence which I have annotated with reference to the personnel and plot of Ceremony:

Typically, the hero experiences a series of misfortunes in which he needs supernatural assistance if he is to survive. Sometimes he precipitates the misadventure himself by actively courting danger or intentionally disregarding prohibitions;… behind the hero's seeming passivity in suffering catastrophe the stories show a deep preoccupation with his active responsibility for provoking the mishaps that plague him [cursing the rain]. Rejection by his family [Auntie and his Mother] or ridicule and scorn on the part of associates [Emo] may set the stage for the hero's reckless behavior. His misadventures usually occur during sexual or hunting exploits [The War might be counted here as well as his relationship with Night Swan, Ts'eh, the Hunter and Mountain Lion] … The hero's misadventures are usually bodily attack or capture by animals, natural phenomenon, supernaturals, or aliens. They may leave him ill, destroyed bodily, transformed [Coyote Witchery], or stranded in an inaccessible place. In this predicament the supernaturals come to his rescue or protect him from further harm. They restore him by ritual treatment [Ku'oosh and Betonie] and from contact with them he acquires ceremonial knowledge and power. Usually it is the restoration ceremony performed over him as the patient that he learns in all its details [Betonie and Shush] … With each misadventure and restoration he gains in … ritual knowledge and power of his own to be able to protect himself [Star map on war shield] with little or no help from supernaturals. In the final events of the story the hero returns to his own people [story in Kiva and family], without resentment for whatever part they may have played in his misadventures. (emphasis added)

In the novel, Tayo displays the attributes normally assigned to the Culture Hero as a mythic archetype. Without question, Silko has crafted her hero in this time-honored persona so popular to native storytelling traditions, showing Tayo's metamorphosis from being a wastrel to his status as a full-fledged hero.

Moreover, to a Laguna youngster, the name "Tayo" would be as familiar as Superman or Batman is to a white child. He is a traditional folklore hero. His story tells of being taken to the sky by his pet eagle, and in flight he sings and the people see him. They go to the mountain at the zenith in the upper world where he goes "northward down" to the home of Spider Woman, then hunts with her grandsons snaring robins to procure a gift for her. He stays for a while.

In Boas' collection entitled Keresan Texts, he comments that Tayo's words are Hopi; furthermore, he notes that originally this was a Hopi tale brought to Laguna presumably along with many other elements derived from Hopi and Zuni. If so, Silko named her hero after a borrowed Laguna mythic hero who at a minimum flies on wings of eagles, sings in Hopi and lives with Spider Woman. In addition, the status of the folklore Tayo may have been enhanced by belonging to a Hopi story, a people reputed to be sophisticated and spiritually prominent among the Western Pueblos, exemplifying how cultural admixture is recognized and incorporated into Laguna mythology.

Lessons for a Warrior

This prototypic scenario of the mythic individuation process buttressed by Tayo's correlation with a relatively minor cultural hero sets the core parameters for Tayo's development into adulthood. Tayo's coming of age as a man rests on gaining prowess first as a warrior and then as a hunter. During Tayo's lessons on becoming a warrior, his fundamental battle is within himself, and he must combat witchcraft. His learning is mediated through symbolic themes stressing incarceration, war trophies (scalps and teeth), and connections to the Japanese through evolution, transformation and uranium. Comparable to his analog in folklore, Tayo's journey starts with the outstretched wings of an eagle. When Rocky and Tayo join up, the Army recruiter gives them a glossy pamphlet featuring "a man in a khaki uniform with gold braid … in the background, behind the figure in the uniform, was a gold eagle with its wings spread across an American flag."

In Ceremony, the theater of Indian/white conflict moves from the arid southwestern desert to the rain forest jungles of the Philippines where Indians and whites are pitted against a common enemy, the Japanese. As Tayo learns, the real antagonist is not the Japanese but witchery, and his relationship to the Japanese acts as a foil for identifying this enemy both within and without. The war in the Pacific islands is a pale shadow, a prelude for the witches' plan of nuclear holocaust. Tayo must come to understand that it is all a matter of transitions and transformations—mistaken identities and knowing the clan to which you belong—mixtures requiring that he unfuse and sort out confusing combinations.

Tayo's white sergeant orders his unit to kill the Japanese prisoners in front of the cave and Tayo sees Uncle Josiah among them: "it wasn't a Jap, it was Josiah, eyes shrinking back into the skull and all their shining black light glazed over by death." Thereafter, Tayo, Rocky and the others are captured, but are not executed outright—instead they are marched to a prison camp. On the way there carrying the blanket holding Rocky, Tayo curses the incessant rain, praying for it to stop. And the wounded Rocky dies. Tayo confuses the tall Japanese soldier, who butts Rocky's skull with a rifle, with an Indian from his school days and "the tall soldier pushed Tayo away, not hard but the way a small child would be pushed away by an older brother" (emphasis added).

Prison camps are jails like internment camps. Internment camps are like reservations and asylums, places to fence in those a given society deems undesirable. Liberated from the Japanese prison camp, Tayo is shipped back to the mental ward of the white Los Angeles Veterans' Hospital. He is discharged. In the L.A. train station on the way home to the Laguna reservation, Tayo faints and receives help from Japanese women and children recently released from the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were captives during the war: "he could still see the face of the little boy, looking back at him, smiling, and he tried to vomit the image from his head because it was Rocky's smiling face from a long time before, when they were little kids together" (emphasis added).

Variations on themes of capture and imprisonment are further enhanced by Laguna notions about war trophies. While Tayo was in the Philippines barely surviving the Bataan Death March, Emo, Harley and Leroy Valdez were on Wake Island; "they were MacArthur's boys," "they had all come back with Purple Hearts." White medals for bravery in combat stirred warrior hearts. It brought pride and a sense of belonging; camaraderie spawned carousing, sharing "good times", and swapping stories. Emo had other war souvenirs—the Bull Durham sack containing "teeth knocked out of the corpse of a Japanese soldier … a Jap colonel." He kept rattling the bag; Tayo fought against the rising tide of nausea caused by the sound associated with death and killing. In the bar, Tayo watches Emo play with the teeth; "he pretended to put them in his mouth at funny angles. Everyone was laughing":

the little Japanese boy [whom Tayo identifies with Rocky] was smiling in the L.A. depot; darkness came like night fog and someone was bending over a small body … "Killer!" he screamed. "Killer!"… Emo started laughing …" You drink like an Indian and you're crazy like one too—but you aren't shit, white trash. You love Japs the way your mother loved to screw white men."

Tayo attacks the real slayer of his brother—Emo the witch, one of the destroyers.

It is kinship bonds which disclose the actual enemy, his Laguna buddies who have joined other practitioners on the evil side. Following the courtesy of giving an "inside" place to outsiders, kin status is extended to the Japanese by Tayo, a process of filiation sanctioned by Betonie's reference to shared heritage, "Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers." So the Laguna men closest to Tayo "become" Japanese in his eyes. Uncle Josiah becomes a Japanese soldier, brother Rocky becomes a Japanese child wearing an army hat, and a Japanese soldier acts towards Tayo as an "older brother" to a child—they are family, kinfolk, members of the same clan:

From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again … united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away. (emphasis added)

Thinking about this casual reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as he watches Emo extract bloody chunks from Harley's quivering body during the witches' rites, Tayo freely associates the atomic destruction of the Japanese with his own abandonment by his drunken mother. Tayo sees himself and the Japanese as mutual victims of American aggression. Thoughts about bombs echo once more as he is talking with both medicine men about his war sickness. To Betonie: "I wonder what good Indian ceremonies can do against the sickness which comes from their wars, their bombs, their lies?" With reference to Ku'oosh: "Ku'oosh would have looked at the dismembered corpses and the atomic heat-flash outlines, where human bodies had evaporated, and the old man would have said something close and terrible had killed these people. Not even oldtime witches killed like that" (emphasis added).

Oldtime witchery and newtime witchery commingle around the traditional prize of war, the scalp. Laguna warriors joined the scalp society, or opi', after they had slain or touched the enemy and taken the scalp—the same Scalp society Silko poetically represents in Ceremony. This group performs in the Scalp Ceremony or War Dance which was held after battle to welcome, cleanse and celebrate the return of the courageous victors. During the course of this ritual "the warriors eat the flesh of the scalp." Honoring the practice of counting coup, they ingested the enemy, assumed aspects of prowess belonging to the dead, and grew in status in the eyes of their community. It's just that Emo was empowered by teeth instead of scalps: "Tayo could hear it in his voice when he talked about killing—how Emo grew from each killing. Emo fed off each man he killed, and the higher the rank of the dead man, the higher it made Emo."

Another figure said to feed on the exploits of warriors is K'oo'ko—a Katcina giantess:

They had things / they must do / otherwise / K'oo'ko would haunt their dreams / with her great fangs and / everything would be endangered … The flute and dancing / blue cornmeal and / hair washing. / All these things / they had to do. (emphasis added)

These precautionary "things" comprise the Scalp Ceremony in which K'oo'ko, the Katcina, dances exhibiting her giant teeth like Emo did in jest. Returning to the text, it is the Scalp Ceremony which Ku'oosh conducts for the returning Laguna war veterans—it "lay to rest the Japanese souls in the green humid jungles, and it satisfied the female giant who fed on the dreams of warriors." But it isn't enough according to Ku'oosh, "There are some things we can't cure like we used to," he said, "not since the white people came. The others who had the Scalp Ceremony, some of them are not better either." However, Betonie states "there was something else"; "it was everything they had seen—the cities, the tall buildings, the noise, and the lights, the power of their weapons and machines. They were never the same after that: they had seen what the white people had made from the stolen land."

Uranium was among the stolen resources. Theft provided the nuclear reaction for the atomic bomb foreshadowing the witches' holocaust. The A-Bomb. Grandma saw the test explosion at White Sands from her kitchen window while Tayo was gone. The bomb that evaporated the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not to the extent that Emo wanted. The bomb made from uranium taken from Mother Earth beneath Laguna feet, mined from their own Cebolleta land grant. The bomb alluded to in Betonie's origin story of witchery as he outlines the destructive and monstrous outcomes of the witches' use for these "beautiful rocks."

The Opi' society for warriors was said to be a "shamanistic society." That is, members assisted in the making, care and feeding of the Katcina masks, called "our mothers," and they were "allowed to impersonate Katcinas." Shamans were thought to possess the same kind of magical powers as deities. Thus, "warriors are believed to know all songs and understand the language of animals and plants"; after they perform the war dance "four seeds of every kind, melon, squash, piñon nuts, and corn are put away to be planted the next spring in order to obtain success in planting." Just as Tayo must learn the lessons of warfare with witchery and whites, so too must he understand the spiritual teachings and discipline requisite for ensuring respect and positive interactions (language) with the network of forces animating his environment. Like Bushido, the way of the warrior in Japan.

Becoming a Hunter

Tayo's mastery of Laguna ideology rests on the balance between giving/taking or providing/killing found in the masculine endeavors of warfare, raising livestock and hunting. This focus is foretold in Betonie's prophecy visioning the elements guiding Tayo's odyssey: "Remember these stars," he said, "I've seen them and I've seen the spotted cattle; I've seen a mountain and I've seen a woman" (emphasis added). These four signs provide critical symbolic markers for various fields of events composing "the Ceremony" Betonie initiates for Tayo's cure. Briefly, the ceremonial structure is this: Tayo travels, spending a sequence of four specific nights on different mountain peaks undergoing treatment and teaching, a plan conforming to the ritual model of many Navajo chantways. On the one hand, his journeys enact the legend of the hero. On the other, his physical movement itself traces the sacred sunwise circuit ordained by Spider Woman, an action intrinsic to his recovery. This was because "his sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything."

Tayo's pursuit of his prophetic signs is related in the second half of the novel. He searches for the spotted cattle, metaphorically portrayed as "desert antelope" on Mount Taylor, Betonie's mountain. The mountain, San Mateo/Mount Taylor, is the mountain where Tayo finds Ts'eh (the Woman), the spotted cattle and himself. It is the Laguna home of Our Mother, Spider Woman with her Emergence Place, and Cakak, the Shiwana rainmaker of snow personified as Winter. (The reader is referred to Swan, "Symbolic Geography," for a more detailed analysis of the underlying structure of this symbolism). Also, it is the stage for scenes of confrontation on the Floyd Lee Ranch. Laguna conceptions include the idea that mountains provide a skeletal framework for the earth; in addition, they become an integral structure within the human being for "It is in their bones." Mountains and bones are coterminous clarifying why Betonie says "It is the people who belong to the mountain" and in Storyteller Silko writes that Mount Taylor is "our mother" where the deceased go to be reborn.

Mount Taylor is the place where aspects of thought so dear to Spider Woman abound—understanding, seeing, prophecy, divination, knowledge, learning and naming—because "Thought Woman, the Spider / named things and / as she named them / they appeared." Powers of this sacred peak are best told in separate Laguna myths presented as Appendix B. These legends endow the Emergence Place (Shipap) and/or Place of Divination with symbolic attributes essential to Tayo's development as a warrior and hunter. The first story is the account of Ts'i'motc'inyi-man (a katcina) entering into a cave or hole on the northern peak of Mount Taylor. His gift to humankind is teeth—teeth that chew; that frame sound into words; that K'oo'ko displays to warriors in dreams and the Scalp Ceremony; that frighten children during initiations when they are whipped by the Katcina, Ts'its'initsi', called "big teeth"; that Emo took in battle as a war trophy. A primary attribute of Thought Woman is her teeth, spider teeth that slant backward to hold her prey. In addition, the identical site is visited by those who wish to see the future as revealed in the story of Ho'tc'ani-tse. This is the spot where you see "anything you think about," surely the epitome of Thought Woman's powerful ability to name.

For Tayo, this awesome power of Mount Taylor is condensed into a deathlike experience where he contacts "the center"—either Spider Woman's Emergence Place where the dead return or the Place of Divination, both of which are situated on Mount Taylor: "He was aware of the center beneath him … he knew how it would be: a returning rather than a separation … he would seep into the earth and rest with the center, where the voice of silence was familiar and the density of the dark earth loved him." He goes to be reborn. There he falls under the aegis of Mountain Lion.

On the flanks of this sacred mountain of the North, Tayo encounters the sacredness of the yellow mountain lion. In Laguna beliefs, yellow is the color of the north, and Mountain Lion authors hunting techniques for the North: he is the sacred animal of the North and the helpmate of hunters. While riding up the North Top of Mount Taylor, Josiah's story about the mountain-lion cub occurs to Tayo, for it describes this locale as traditional Laguna hunting grounds—a fitting background for Tayo's emergence as a hunter. Then, Tayo greets Mountain Lion in person:

He waited for the mare to shy away from the yellow form that moved towards them … The eyes caught twin reflections of the moon; the glittering yellow light penetrated his chest and he inhaled suddenly … Tayo held out his hand. "Mountain Lion," he whispered, "mountain lion, becoming what you are with each breath, your substance changing with the earth and sky." The mountain lion blinked his eyes; there was no fear … and disappeared into the trees, his outline lingering like yellow smoke, then suddenly gone. (emphasis added)

Having gained the hunter's power, Tayo rides in the direction from whence the cougar had come and finds the spotted cattle. He herds them through the hole he cut in the fence on the perimeter of the Floyd Lee Ranch only to lose them. Here Tayo is captured, this time by the Ranch border patrol. Later, the Mountain Lion helps "the hunter" once more, for when the cowboys spot the lion's tracks they decide to let Tayo free so they can pursue new "game," Tayo's mentor of the hunt.

Tayo's offering of pollen in the "four footprints" of the sacred animal stands in stark relief to this wasteful killing by the hunters, which angers Tayo: "he wanted to follow them as they hunted the mountain lion, to shoot them and their howling dogs with their own guns," a reaction expressing his desire to be a trustee of the natural environment, to protect the animals and the earth from the willful, ongoing exploitation of the destroyers.

Imagery of approved hunting techniques continues as Tayo descends Mount Taylor looking for evidence of the cattle's movement. He hears the deer song chanted in Laguna by a hunter who appears carrying a dead deer on his shoulders; Tayo sees blue life feathers adorning the tips of its antlers. The man wears turquoise, silver and traditional garb, "but the cap he wore over his ears was made from tawny thick fur which shone when the wind ruffled through it; it looked like mountain-lion skin" (emphasis added). It seems this is the human personification of mountain lion—"you say you have seen her / Last winter / up north / with Mountain Lion / the hunter." Mountain Lion Man is a katcina who controls game in the North; legends depict him carrying a deer on his back.

From interviews and stories, Boas ascertained that hunters and warriors wear hats made from animal skins. Presumably, then, Ts'eh's companion is the katcina, Mountain Lion Man, since humankind always hunt in pairs rather than alone. They may also possess war shields fabricated from animal skins like the one the Hunter leaves for Tayo to see:

It was made from a hide, elk or maybe buffalo, heavy and stiff enough to stop stones and arrows; long dry years had shrunk and split the edges, and it had lost the round shape. At first he thought the hide had turned black: from age, but he touched it and realized it had been painted black. There were small white spots of paint all over the shield. He stepped back: it was a star map of the overhead sky in late September. It was the Big Star Constellation Old Betonie had drawn in the sand.

Betonie's astronomy elucidates Tayo's sign in the stars. It starts with the story of Kau pa'ta, the evil magician or witch known as the Gambler. He takes the storm clouds—the Shiwana of the cardinal directions—and hangs them on the walls of his house. Capturing the clouds makes the rain cease as effectively as Tayo's curse when he prays away the rain. In both cases, the land and animals dry up. We are told that after receiving a gift, Spider Woman gives the hero (Sun Man) medicine, warnings and instruction; she reveals the secret knowledge he needs to win the guessing game where the stakes are his life and death. She tells him the names of the stars—Pleiades and Orion. So "it happened / just the way Spider Woman said"; he cut out the Gambler's eyes and "threw them into the South sky / and they became the horizon stars of autumn." That is, Pleiades and Orion.

Spider Woman's gift of knowledge to Sun Man permits him to free the clouds so the rains resume. The folklore Tayo visits her, too, and Tayo, hero of the novel, gains her protection (in the form of the stars) ultimately winning back the rain himself like Sun Man does.

Pleiades and Orion, these are Tayo's stars, manifest in the stars Old Betonie drew in the sand; the stars Tayo beholds his first evening with Ts'eh; the stars forming the constellations depicted in the star map painted on the war shield hung on the North wall of Ts'eh's house; the stars heralding the start of autumn—the transition between Summer and Winter when the sun moves "from its Summer place in the sky"; and the stars announcing the fragility of the world at the autumnal equinox. He observes these stars above on his night of nights—his shield:

… but he saw the constellation in the North sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars … His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. (emphasis added)

Accordingly, the story goes on with these stars of the old war shield; they go on, lasting until the fifth world ends, then maybe beyond. The only thing is: it has never been easy.

During this night of his trial by witchcraft, Tayo consciously refrains from acting out his desire to kill Emo. This decision determines his victory over the witchery practiced by his war buddies. Thereby, Tayo negates the "death" imagery and symbolism associated with his roles as warrior and hunter, destructive aspects of his manhood which might be subject to control by the manipulators of witchcraft. His first action, in consequence, is to collect the plant "of light" which Ts'eh asked him to gather. So he plants the seeds "with great care in places near sandy hills … The plants would grow there like the story, strong and translucent as the stars." Finally, Tayo assumes the shape of the culture hero he was destined to be. He displays the divine knowledge of the Katcina, possesses the "magic of supernaturals," and "understands the language of animals and plants." Tayo's development as "the taker of life" and "shedder of blood" essential for establishing his identity as warrior/hunter is paralleled by another cycle, growing into the opposite side of this duality. To wit: becoming a provider, the planter of seeds, and a caretaker, the keeper of animals. In short, a man connected to life, nurturance and stewardship of the land.

Our review of Laguna prototypes of manhood remains incomplete until we examine a central notion in Ceremony—"we came out of this land and we are hers" (emphasis added). For the Laguna the fundamental feminine entity is the earth—it is a holy place. Tayo must, therefore, be reunited with the land. Harmony must be re-newed, integrating nature and culture, the delicate balance shattered by his heedless words praying away the rain.

That humanity and nature are intertwined, a single community in fact, may be seen in Uncle Josiah's sayings. "You see," Josiah said,… "This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going … It's people, see. They're the ones. The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave."

Tayo's words impacted the wider environment and his illness symptomatically reflects the land's barrenness, brought on by the desiccating consequences of his praying. This can be seen in the dehydration of his tongue and his inability to speak and think of names, especially his own. Without words, Tayo lacks reality; anonymity has dislocated him from Spider Woman's dialect. Literally and figuratively, he has lost the definition granted by a name; he is dried up, "slipping away with the wind," an ephemeral being like "invisible white smoke." His thoughts articulated in words effect him just as they effect the earth to which he is inextricably bound. As the land is waterless and eroding, he is speechless, thoughtless and nameless. His disease is mirrored in his environment.

Tayo regains density of form as well as the capacity for voicing "names" in a healing process activating Josiah's words—to be and become one with the earth. Laguna metaphysics engendered by Spider Woman's thought process make the land just as much a product of her conceptualization as Tayo is since it is Silko's words (her story) which confirm the substance of Spider Woman's ideology. In essence, Tayo must become re-aligned with the mechanisms employed by the Laguna to structure meaning in their society, it might be said that he must assume the tongue and cosmography of Spider Woman.

Like real Laguna youth, Tayo learns the social and ceremonial nature of gender within this matrilineal society through his mentors of both sexes: social identity is mediated through women and access to religious knowledge passes through men. In considering characteristics of the cast of personnel from the sacred precincts of Ceremony, I have noted that Silko's attribution of their powers to the respective cardinal directions accords with a master paradigm of space and time. Moreover, Tayo must also be "turned sunwise" so he is consonant with the cycle of movement ordained by Spider Woman as she places the sun: "His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun …" (emphasis added). This sunwise circuit determines the basic path of order. It controls good, by re-establishing wholeness, well being, purity and harmony after evil and disorder are re-moved. As Tayo re-traces the footsteps of the hero portrayed in the legend of Ghostway, he experiences ritual re-instatement. He is re-created through the curative power of words rooted in chants and rites performed upon cardinally-oriented mountain tops. Re-cognition is essential to Tayo's cure through remembrance; he realizes that the placement of the peaks is mapped "in the pattern of the stars" sketched earlier by Betonie in the sand, a position re-inforced and re-presented in the picture adorning the Hunter's old war shield. Tayo's re-turn to the mountain(s) in a sunwise fashion brings re-birth at the home of the Mother, Mount Taylor.

Tayo's re-connection to the enduring feminine principle inherent to Laguna cosmogony is rendered in a gradual process of identification depicted by Silko through imagery of immersion with light, water, the land and women which I analyze in "Feminine Perspectives." This unification takes place in the joining of Tayo with Spider Woman. We have seen the parallel structure between Tayo in folklore as he flies on the wings of an eagle and resides with Spider Woman, while Tayo of the novel goes to war under the insignia of the Army's golden eagle before he lives with Ts'eh, who is a personification of Spider Woman. Allen elaborates this association in her article entitled "The Feminine Landscape of Ceremony":

Our Mothers, Uretsete and Naotsete, are aspects of Grandmother Spider. They are certain kinds of thought forces if you will. The same can be said of Ts'eh.

Ts'eh is the matrix, the creative and life-restoring power, and those who cooperate with her design serve her and, through her, serve life. They make manifest what she thinks.

Ts'eh signifies Yellow Woman, the heroine of many a tale at Laguna and Acoma. "… Yellow Woman," contends Allen, "is in a sense a name that means Woman-Woman because among the Keres, yellow is the color for women … and it is ascribed to the Northwest." Continuing, Allen adds this figure is a "role model" for contemporary Laguna women, "she is … the spirit of Woman." Embodying the feminine principle of the spider matrix, Ts'eh is the source—she becomes Tayo's lover and teacher, his maker and salvation.

But yellow is also the color of personhood at Laguna, a quality invoked in the naming ceremony held for each child. Tayo converts into the color yellow symbolizing the fulfillment of his native identity, a catalytic change fostered by his relationships with both Mountain Lion, who is "yellow smoke," and the Yellow Woman, Ts'eh. Consequently, Tayo's transmutation from one color (white) to another (yellow) in the mythic level may be regarded as a logical transformation of the biological factors enmeshed in his racial identity—he is a half-breed vacillating between the conflicting demands of his paternal "white" blood versus his maternal "yellow" Laguna blood.

This intricate allegory about Tayo's "yellow" nature, then, conveys his re-covery of an Indian name after losing "the thick white skin" that had enclosed him silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief. Following his re-vitalization and re-storation into a sacred manner, Tayo is re-worded with a named position in the linguistic fabric of Spider Woman's theology.

In sum, Tayo emerges as an androgynous being with the content of prototypic models of manhood bonded to the maternal principle which originates and organizes planes of meaning in the Laguna world view. Ultimately, Tayo is defined in terms of Her, the Creatrix, knowing "she had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been there." Tayo and his people are loved; there is a new sense of belonging as Tayo returns home on the autumnal equinox. He comes as the Katcinas do—at sunrise. Balance is restored as He and She become as one, blending time and space with gender, nature and culture, a union built according to the terms governing the sacred and mundane orders of Laguna experience. Tayo achieves his half-breed stature via the masculine and feminine aspects of his manhood which delimit his place in Spider Woman's cosmic tapestry, and in the end normalcy returns to Laguna. The Culture Hero has safely returned home, and the rainclouds are freed to gather once more. As Grandma says, "It seems like I heard these stories before … only thing is, the names sound different" (emphasis added). Now Tayo is a person with a name, a story that brings people together, a story that is inseparable from the land and the one who made it all possible in the first place, Thought Woman.