The Emergence Through the Lower Worlds

Before reading

This is part of the Diné origin story, which many Diné families teach should be told only in winter. It is summarised here at the level of published sources, chiefly Washington Matthews's Navaho Legends (1897) and Paul G. Zolbrod's Diné bahaneʼ (1984), both by non-Diné authors, and the Diné-authored Navajo History (1971). Diné tellings differ in the number of worlds, their colours, their inhabitants, and the order of events; the outline below is not the authoritative version, and it omits ceremonial knowledge.

The lower worlds

The story begins in a world below this one, small and dark, inhabited by beings that many tellings call Air-Spirit People or insect people. They quarrel and behave wrongly, and in consequence they are driven out, often by rising water or by the powers of the world around them. They fly or climb upward through an opening in the sky into a second world, where they meet other beings, and there again wrongdoing leads to their departure; and so on through a third world and a fourth. Tellings give different colours to these worlds, often black, blue, and yellow, and the fourth is sometimes described as white or glittering. In the course of the journey First Man and First Woman come into being, and with them Coyote and others.

The separation of the sexes

In one of the lower worlds, many tellings place a quarrel between First Man and First Woman over which of them contributes more. The men and women separate and live on opposite sides of a river. At first each side thinks it can manage alone; over time both suffer, and they come back together. But during the separation, according to many tellings, things happened that later gave rise to the monsters that would prey on the people.

Coyote and the Water Monster

In the last of the lower worlds, Coyote does something that endangers everyone: he steals the child of Tééhooltsódii, the Water Monster, and hides it. The Water Monster, searching for its child, causes the waters to rise. The flood grows until it threatens to drown everything.

The reed

The people search for a way out. In Matthews's version and others, they plant a great reed, which grows up until it reaches the sky above, and the people climb inside it to escape the rising water. At the top, animals such as the locust or the badger help to open the way through into the world above. When the people emerge, the waters follow; the theft is discovered, Coyote is made to give the Water Monster's child back, and the waters recede. The place of emergence is identified differently by different tellers.

The Glittering World

The people come out into this world, the fifth in many tellings, called the Glittering World. There the Holy People set things in order: the sacred mountains are placed at the four directions, the sun and moon are set on their courses, and the stars are placed, a careful work that Coyote disrupts by scattering the rest. The world is ready for Changing Woman, whose story comes next.

Meaning

The emergence story is often described as a journey toward order and balance, in which each world is left because of disorder and the people learn, slowly and at great cost, how to live properly. It grounds the Diné in their land: they did not come from somewhere else, but emerged into the world bounded by the sacred mountains.