American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The scholar undertaking a study of the origins of drama among the world’s peoples is drawn, by the magnet of cultural conditioning, through the lineage of Western theater to its historic emergence among the Ancient Athenians-only to be confronted by a maze of theories concerning the nature of ritual, catharsis, and Dionysos. These essential issues may seem remote and even irrelevant in the context of a worldly, industrialized culture. The notion of origins too often is presumed to imply an evolutionary development from a crude original form to something more sophisticated or effective. Any such assumption separates us from our ability to understand the potency of earlier theater forms by attributing their vitality to a stage of human development in which people were more easily deluded. The search for beginnings also too often leads to a close scrutiny of localized historical-political factors, which overlooks the more constant factors of the human psyche, which this author believes to be the true source of the power of the art of drama. A cross-cultural approach, which examines performance forms which are clearly on the dividing edge between ritual and drama, can be of use to clear the air. The Water Serpent puppet plays of the Hopi Indians provide such an example. Moreover, these plays concern a central character demonstrating numerous striking and significant cross-cultural parallels to the Greek Dionysos, the founding deity of Athenian theatre.