You have seen the silhouette on rusted-metal yard art, turquoise keychains, and even the wall by Walter White's pool: a hunchbacked figure playing a flute. Almost everyone recognizes Kokopelli, and almost no one knows who he is. This deep dive traces how a powerful fertility deity revered by the Hopi, Zuni, ancestral Puebloans, and Hohokam became a generic logo for the American Southwest.

We explore what fertility meant in a brutal desert environment where a failed crop or a difficult birth could end a village, why the hump on his back is described in Hopi myth as a sack of unborn children, and how his flute music was believed to chase away winter and summon rain. Then we weigh two competing origin theories, the Aztec pochteca trader theory with its glaring timeline problem and the desert robber fly theory, before examining how Spanish miss ...