Taime

Taime (Tai-me) is the most sacred object of the Kiowa and the living focus of their great summer ceremonial, the Sun Dance or K'ado. Described by Mooney as a small human figure about two feet high, carved of dark green stone, robed in white feather-down and ermine and hung with strands of blue beads, it was kept wrapped in the eleventh tribal medicine bundle and unveiled only when the Sun Dance lodge was raised, where it stood at the western side facing the dancers. The Kiowa regarded the Taime as sharing in the divinity of the Sun, mediating between the people and the sun's power. Mooney records that the image came to the Kiowa about 1770 from an Arapaho man who had obtained it from the Crow; its keeper held a hereditary office of great sanctity. Though the Sun Dance was suppressed in the late nineteenth century, the Taime remains a revered tribal treasure.

Domains

• sun dance
• solar power

Powers

• to mediate between the people and the spiritual power of the sun
• to renew the life and well-being of the assembled Kiowa

Epithets

• TáiméJames Mooney, 'Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians' (Smithsonian Institution, 1898) (secondary)

Relations

• subordinate to: SunThe Taime is understood to share in and mediate the divinity of the Sun (Pái), standing at the west of the Sun Dance lodge as the focus of solar power.Benjamin R. Kracht, 'Kiowa Belief and Ritual' (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) (secondary)

Sources

• Taime is the sacred effigy-being of the Kiowa Sun Dance, a small feathered human-form image embodying the power of the sun and serving as the tribe's chief palladium.: James Mooney, 'Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians', Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution, 1898) (secondary); Benjamin R. Kracht, 'Kiowa Belief and Ritual' (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) (secondary)