Hopi Snake Dance, Mishongnovi, Arizona

On a clear, sunlit day in 1925, the psychologist Carl Jung stood by the small river that runs through the middle of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Writing later about this experience, Jung described silent, blanket-wrapped figures on the flat roofs of the adobe buildings, absorbed by the sight of the sun, and by the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range rising above the sweeping plateau (see Scully essay in this book, fig. 5). An elderly Indian spoke unexpectedly from behind the visitor: “Do you not …

The Southwest touched my imagination when, as a college student in Nebraska in the early 1960s, I received a letter and some photographs from my friend Deane who had stopped in Arizona while traveling west; she described the towering rock formations around Sedona and the studio she was renting, once the residence of Surrealist artist Max Ernst, who left behind a yard still strewn with sculptural fragments. Among these was one that I was amazed to identify as the original for his famous 1948 …