Calling of the Spirits Posture
The Calling of the Spirits Posture is one of the few that Dr. Felicitas Goodman categorized as a celebration posture. Her discovery of this posture is a story with an interesting twist, as recounted in her book Where Spirits Ride the Wind. After attending an event at The School of American Research in Santa Fe, she was given a guided tour of its private museum collection of American Indian art and artifacts.
“Always on the lookout for new postures” she writes, “I immediately noticed a male statuette in an unfamiliar stance. It was only about five inches high, made of yellowish clay with red-brick markings, and it stood on a small pedestal which carried the inscription, ‘Calling the Spirits.’” She had only time to jot down a brief description, and not the identifying code. She went back to find it, to no avail. The curators did an extensive search. It simply did not exist in the collections.
