Many have asked me if the Flute Player picture in Rock-Art # 1, is really in North Carolina since it is a very common motif in the Southwest.  Well, yes it is that is if you accept that it is a carving of the Flute Player.  There is much written about the Flute Player and it has been documented from deep in Central America to Alberta, Canada and from coast to coast [this is being debated] in the United States.  There is ample evidence that there was a vast trade network throughout the Americas; the best example is within the Hopewell Culture along the Ohio River Valley.  The below photographs are of a petroglyph covered rock near Cullowhee, North Carolina.  Note: I am not suggesting that this boulder was used by the Hopewell Culture nor the local Cherokee who now live in the region.
 
 

The Flute Player

The dots are called cupules.

Look for the Flute Player in the upper left corner of the photograph.

My understanding from speaking with several Hopi people about images with flutes is that they have a lot of different meanings depending on context and the specific features.  At Hopi, the personage called Kokopelli who appears at some dances doesn't carry a flute.  Sometimes, when he's clowning, he borrows one from another katsina. He is a fertility figure and in some stories he carries seeds in a pack, brings the warmth after the winter, etc.

At Zuni, there's a personage in oral traditions called Paiyatamu who played the flute to charm back the corn maidens when they fled away from the village.  Flutes appear in a lot of pueblo traditions in the context of courtship (which could be said to be a fertility link).

Many  Hopi elders say the flute player images in rock art represent the flute clan in its migrations, or the flute society, which has a public ceremony in the Fall.  So, that's why calling everything with a flute "Kokopelli" is controversial.  You can call it that, but be aware that "Kokopelli" is now a recent symbolic construct that doesn't have very much to do with "original" or "native" meanings.  It's the nature of symbols to change and be reinterpreted.  The meanings of have probably always changed, and what was "original" in the AD 600s when some of the earliest flute playing figures show up was no doubt different from the array of meanings the figures had later on, say, in the 1200s-1300s when we see a lot of these images, too.  The meaning at Hopi differed from Zuni, and if you are Hopi Flute Clan the meaning is different for you than if you are Bear Clan, etc.  I don't know about the Eastern Pueblos.  Now it's rock art researchers and New Agers doing the re-interpreting as well.

Kelley Hays-Gilpin
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff Arizona USA

Reprinted with the email permission of Kelly Hays-Gilpin, 11/19/1999

When in east-central Ohio visit the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, in Chillicothe Ohio.   Go to: http://www.nps.gov/hocu/index.htm

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