Draw Your Own Kokopelli
Kokopelli's Design Elements
![[kokopelli]](kokop2.gif)
Please begin reading this page in the middle of it!
Kokopelli, the hump backed flute player of the American Southwest, is a trickster who will take over your imagination for a while if you let him. He belongs to a number of Uto-Aztecan and Keresan people in the American Southwest, and many stories are told about him. I think that Kokopelli is a trickster, willing to wander from his people to play tricks on all the peoples of the earth. Here are some notes about how to draw the hump backed flute player like the ancient Anasazi drew him on the rocks of their desert homeland.
Crest: The crest represents the paired antennae of the insect form of the Kokopelli. There is usually an even number of crest elements. If multiple they may project from the hump as well as the head. Sometimes they appear to represent rays of light. Ends of crest elements are sometimes recurved or bulbous. According to Frank Waters and Oswald White Bear Fredericks (in their well known Book of the Hopi)the insect is paired, with the one without antennae representing the Blue Flute Clan, the one with antennae the Gray Flute Clan; while the one with bulbous antennae represents the kachina of that name.
Head and Eye are not very variable.
Hump: The hump may be an arc which may cover the entire back, or only the lower half. Often, particularly in present day Anglo Kokopelli designs, the hump may be represented as a curve of the entire body, as if the dancer were bending forward. The hump might represent a hunchback deformity, or the curved back of the insect, or the back-pack of a wandering peddler.
Arm chevron: The arms are usually depicted as a chevron, representing the elbows pointing earthward.
Flute: The flute is usually a straight line or pair of lines. Often the end is flared or bulbous like the end of a clarinet. This flare is ancient, and is not a contemporary addition to the design. Occasionally Kokopelli plays two flutes, like an ancient Greek aulos.
Shape notes: The two musical shape notes are entirely my own contribution. They represent the descending interval Do-La in Swan seven-note (New Harp of Columbia) notation, the familiar two note "Johnny!" of a mother calling her distant child. John McCutcheon wrote an entire song ("Calling all the Children Home", on Live at Wolf Trap1990) around this theme.
Phallus: Not represented here, an erect phallus often projects upward from the lower body. This element is ancient, being clearly represented on a thousand year old bowl displayed at Mesa Verde National Park. It may be a simple line or an arrow. The phallic arrow may be drawn transfixing the trunk, evoking the insect transfixed by an arrow, but I'm not certain of the authenticity of this element. (I think I may have dreamt it.)
Forward leg: The forward leg is a continuation of the curved line that delineates the hump.
Backward leg: Similarly, the backward leg continues the straight line of the front of the body.
Posted to the Web February 14th, 1999
What I wrote here turns out to be of very dubious authenticity. I have left it on the Web, almost unchanged, as an example of the fancies that get spun about Kokopelli, by me and a lot of other people.
Since posting this page to the Web, I have found a rather remarkable book, Ekkehart Malotki's Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon (University of Nebraska Press 2000, ISBN 0-8032-3213-6). I would urge anyone who is doing ANYTHING with Kokopelli motifs to read this book.
Ekkehart Malotki is professor emeritus of languages at Northern Arizona University, where he taught Hopi and German, and Latin. He was one of the "Hopi Prophecy Consultants" for the film Koyaanisqatsi. Dr. Malotki writes to me that he "provided the concept of Koyaanisqatsi for Godfrey Reggio's movie. The same is true for the sequel Powaqqatsi [1987] and the soon to be released [late 2002] third part of his qatsi trilogy, Naqöyqatsi."
Ekkehart Malotki is probably the first person to write about Kokopelli who speaks Hopi fluently (though not as a native) and has access to most of its dwindling speech community. He uses oral texts (which he transcribes bilingually in the book) to show that the mythic figure we call Kokopelli is actually a conflation of two figures.
The prominently hump-backed robber fly is called Kokopelli (which Malotki spells Kookopölö, with the two umlaut sounds like German Löffel 'spoon' or French feu 'fire'), and the kachina with this name does not have a flute and is not associated with the Len (Flute) Societies. The kachina scatters food from his hump and is promiscuous. Kookopölö has a female counterpart, Kokopölmana.
We have conflated the Kookopölö with a second emblematic insect, the Maahu. The Maahu is a cicada; not a locust and not a katydid, and of course not a robber fly. Hopis call the rock-art flute-player images Maahu, and not Kokopelli. The cicada is the emblem of the Flute Societies. (Confusingly enough, there is a cicada kachina, who neither has a flute nor is humpbacked.)
Malotki considers our familiar "Kokopelli" to be mythographically inauthentic, but probably not harmful. His book concludes by describing the beloved hump-backed flute player as "an intercultural wanderer, revealing not only the derivativeness and the lack of taste and cultural respect in our world but also the innovative potential inherent in any meeting of cultures."
I e-mailed Dr. Malotki in early May 2002 to ask him to comment on my review of his book, and he replied to me:
"To put it bluntly, the bottom line of my book is that the term "Kokopelli" has no justified use in the field of Southwestern rock art. I tell all of my rock art friends to avoid the K-word in this context and simply refer to the motif as a fluteplayer. On the other hand, the K-word is appropriate in all curio stores that have commercialized the motif as a good-luck charm. However, there is no cultural foundation for this figure in any of the American cultures. Kokopelli is thus a total fabrication (come about through a misalignment of a Hopi kachina with the rock art symbol) of the dominant white society."
Dr. Malotki gave me permission to quote this e-mail on my Web site, and I have done so.
It appears that Kokopelli is an Urban Legend.
Revised August 17th, 2001
Additions May 8th, 2002
Updated July 7th, 2006
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