Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[632]

This incident of the passing of Dislyi Neyani is referred to in the Songs of the Thunder, of which the opening stanza of the first and the second stanza of the twelfth follow:

I

Thonah, Thonah!
There is a voice above,
The voice of the Thunder,
Within the dark cloud
Again and again it sounds!
Thonah, Thonah!

12

The voice that beautifies the land,
The voice above,
The voice of the grasshopper,
Among the plants.
Again and again it sounds,—
The voice that beautifies the land.

The ostensible purpose of any given presentation of the Night Chant is to cure sickness, but it is made the occasion of invoking the Unseen Powers on behalf of the people at large. The first four days are by way of preparation and purification, four being the sacred Navaho number, the number of the four quarters. The other five are essentially dramatic, beginning on the fifth day with an attempt to create the mise-en-scene with dry sand paintings on the floor of the Medicine Lodge.

Heretofore all pictorial designs of this sort have been studied wholly from the point of view of their relation to the religious significance of the rite. If the sand paintings, reproductions of which are to be found in reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, instead of being spread out flat, and the ritual performed around them, were stood up on edge with the ritual performed in front, we should quickly discover what seems clearly indicated, the operation of the dramatic instinct. Disciples of Gordon Craig and the symbolists would require very little assistance from the ethnologist to make out the relevance of the sand paintings to the action going on around them.

Nor is this the only green twig of modem stagecraft which may be observed at the Night Chant. The legerdemain of the