Kokopelli

Kokopelli is playing his flute as he dances around this wedding vase which was crafted by M. Redhorse, a Navajo.

He is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player (often with feathers or antenna-like protrusions on his head), who has been venerated by some Native American cultures in the Southwestern United States. Like most fertility deities, Kokopelli presides over both childbirth and agriculture. He is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music.

Among the Hopi, Kokopelli carries unborn children on his back and distributes them to women; for this reason, young girls often fear him.

Kokopelli has been revered since at least the time of the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. The first known images of him appear on Hohokam pottery dated to sometime between 750 and 850 AD.