Title: Dine bahane': The Navajo Creation Story Author: Traditional/Oral, recorded and translated by Paul Zolbrod Creation Date: Oral tradition of great antiquity, first comprehensive transcription published 1984 Location: North America
Summary
Dine bahane' is the Navajo creation narrative, telling how the Holy People emerged upward through a series of coloured worlds — black, blue, yellow, and white — each time driven out by conflict or transgression, until they arrived in the present Glittering World (the surface of the earth between the four sacred mountains). In each world, beings learn, fail, and transform. First Man and First Woman create the elements of the present world — mountains, rivers, stars — through thought and song. The narrative then follows the birth of Changing Woman (Asdzaan Nadleehe), the most revered Navajo deity, and her sons the Monster Twins (Monster Slayer and Born-for-Water), who destroy the monsters that threaten human life. The cycle concludes with the establishment of the Navajo clans, the Blessingway ceremony, and the principles of hozho — the ideal of beauty, balance, and harmony that structures Navajo life.
Why This Book Matters
The Navajo creation narrative is one of the most elaborate and philosophically sophisticated oral literary works in human history. Its vision of emergence — beings moving upward through layered worlds toward greater consciousness — constitutes a complete cosmological and ethical system. The concept of hozho (variously translated as beauty, harmony, balance, and wholeness) is not merely an aesthetic preference but an ontological principle: the universe tends toward hozho, and human responsibility is to restore and maintain it through proper thought, speech, and ceremony. This narrative is the foundation of Navajo healing ceremonies (the chantways), which are themselves among the most complex ritual-literary compositions in the world — some lasting nine nights and involving hundreds of songs. Without understanding this creation story, neither Navajo culture nor one of the world's great philosophical traditions is comprehensible.
Historical Context
The Navajo (Dine) are an Athabaskan-speaking people who migrated to the American Southwest centuries before European contact, developing a unique culture through interaction with Pueblo peoples, the desert landscape, and their own Athabaskan heritage. The creation narrative is not a fixed text but a body of knowledge held by hataalii (medicine people/singers), each of whom knows portions of the vast cycle. It has never been fully recorded — the complete body of Navajo ceremonial knowledge is estimated to be equivalent in scale to the encyclopaedias of medieval Europe. Zolbrod's transcription drew on multiple sources, including the work of Washington Matthews (1890s) and recordings made by Navajo collaborators, to assemble the most comprehensive English-language version of the central creation narrative.
Literary Significance
The literary power of Dine bahane' lies in its synthesis of narrative, poetry, and philosophical instruction within a single organic structure. The emergence through worlds creates a natural architecture of escalating complexity — each world is richer, more dangerous, and more beautiful than the last. The Monster Twins sequence is a hero cycle of great dramatic force, combining supernatural combat with moral instruction. The prose is punctuated by songs and prayers of extraordinary lyric beauty — the Dawn Song, the Blessingway prayers — that function as the emotional and spiritual centres of the narrative. The text embodies a literary principle foreign to most Western literature: that beauty is not ornament but structure, that the aesthetic and the sacred are identical.
Research Notes
Zolbrod's version is the most literary and readable English transcription, but it is a composite drawn from multiple sources across a century of recording. Some Navajo scholars have expressed concern about publishing ceremonial knowledge in book form — the creation narrative is not "literature" in the Western sense but living ceremonial knowledge with protocols governing who may tell it, when, and in what context. Readers should understand they are encountering a translation of a translation — from performance to transcription, from Navajo to English, from sacred to secular.
The Reading
The First World: The Black World
In the beginning there was only blackness, and in that blackness there was a world — small, dark, and crowded. The beings who lived there were not yet people and not quite animals. They were the insect beings: the Air-Spirit People, the mist beings, the dark ants, the beetles, the dragonflies, the locusts. They existed in a space with no sun and no moon, lit only by columns of light — white in the east, blue in the south, yellow in the west, black in the north — that rose from the edges of the world.
In this First World, First Man was formed where the white and black clouds met in the east, and First Woman was formed where the blue and yellow clouds met in the west. They found each other in the darkness. First Man had a crystal for fire. First Woman had a turquoise for fire. When they met, their fires merged, and there was warmth.
But the beings of the First World could not live in peace. There was quarrelling, there was adultery, there was witchcraft. Coyote was already present — trickster, troublemaker, agent of chaos and necessary change. The conflicts became unbearable, and the beings looked upward and saw a hole in the sky. They climbed through it.
The Second World: The Blue World
The beings emerged into the Blue World, which was larger and brighter but still not the world of daylight. Here they encountered the Blue Birds, the Blue Hawks, the Blue Jays, the Blue Herons — the feathered beings who already inhabited this realm. At first there was welcome. The insect beings were given places to live. But again, there was conflict — quarrelling, transgression, the violation of the hospitality that had been offered.
The Swallow People, who were chiefs of the Blue World, told them: "You do not know how to behave. You must leave." And so the beings searched again for a way upward. They sent scouts — the locust, the white-faced hornet, the wind — to find a passage, and again they found an opening in the sky and climbed through.
The Third World: The Yellow World
The Yellow World was larger still, with rivers and mountains and the presence of water in many forms. Here lived the Grasshopper People, the Snake People, and other beings of greater power. The newcomers were given land to farm. They began to build, to plant, to create a society.
In this world, First Man and First Woman had a great quarrel. The cause was the relationship between men and women — who needed whom more, who could survive without the other. The men and the women separated. The men crossed the river to live on one side, the women remained on the other. Each side was certain it could thrive alone.
For a time, both groups managed. The men hunted and farmed, though their clothes grew ragged and their camps were filthy without the women's labour. The women planted and gathered, though without the men's strength the heavy work of clearing fields went undone. But as the separation continued, something darker emerged. Lonely and desperate, beings on both sides began to satisfy their desires with unnatural acts — with animals, with objects, with the water itself. From these acts of aberrant desire, monsters were conceived — terrible beings that would later threaten the world.
The separation lasted four years. At last, the women called across the river: they missed the men, the children missed their fathers, life apart was diminishing both sides. The men agreed. The people reunited, and there was weeping and relief and the acknowledgment that men and women are complementary, that neither is complete without the other, that the world requires both.
But the water was rising. A great flood was coming — the consequence, perhaps, of the disorder that had been created. Coyote, roaming near the water's edge, had stolen the Water Monster's children and hidden them under his blanket. The Water Monster, enraged, was sending the flood. The people fled upward again, planting a great reed that grew through the sky into the next world. They climbed the reed as the water rose behind them.
The Fourth World: The Glittering World
They emerged at last into the present world — the Glittering World, Ni'hodilhil — through a hole in the ground beside a lake. This is the world between the four sacred mountains: Blanca Peak in the east, Mount Taylor in the south, the San Francisco Peaks in the west, and Hesperus Peak in the north. The light was blinding. The land was vast.
But the world was empty and unformed. It had no sun, no moon, no seasons. First Man and First Woman set about the work of creation, and their method was extraordinary: they created through thought, through speech, through song. First Man opened his medicine bundle — the jish that contained the seeds of all things — and from it brought forth the sacred mountains, placing them at the four cardinal points and fastening them to the earth with bolts of lightning, with sunbeams, with rainbows, with sheets of rain.
They created the sun and the moon. First Man fashioned a disc of turquoise for the sun and a disc of white shell for the moon, and these were carried across the sky by bearers who demanded a price for their labour: the death of living beings. This is the origin of death — it entered the world as the cost of light, the price of the sun's passage. Without death, the sun would not move, and the world would remain in darkness. The people debated this terrible bargain and accepted it.
First Man placed the stars in the sky, carefully, in constellations that told stories and marked the seasons. But Coyote, impatient, grabbed the remaining stars from First Man's pouch and flung them across the heavens in a great scatter. This is why some constellations are orderly and meaningful, and the rest of the sky is a chaos of light — order and disorder, First Man's careful design and Coyote's reckless toss, woven together in the same sky.
The Holy People created the plants, the animals, the weather, the cycles of day and night. They created the four sacred plants — corn, beans, squash, and tobacco — and taught the people how to farm. They created the rivers and the rain and the wind. Each element was placed with intention, with song, with prayer. The world was being sung into existence.
Changing Woman
Of all the Holy People, none is more revered than Changing Woman — Asdzaan Nadleehe. She was found as a baby on the top of Gobernador Knob, a mountain in the Dinetah, the Navajo homeland. First Man and First Woman raised her, and she grew with supernatural speed, reaching maturity in twelve days, her growth mirroring the passage of the seasons. She is called Changing Woman because she embodies the cycle of the earth itself: young and beautiful in spring, mature and full in summer, ageing in autumn, old in winter, and young again with each new spring. She does not die. She changes.
Changing Woman was lonely on the earth. One day she lay on a flat rock and the Sun came to her, and from this union she conceived. She also went to a waterfall and let the water wash over her, and from this union she conceived again. She bore twin sons: Monster Slayer (Naayee Neizghani) and Born-for-Water (Tobajishchini). These are the Hero Twins, and their story is the great epic within the epic.
The Monster Twins
The world into which the twins were born was terrorised by monsters — the Nayee, the alien gods, the terrible beings conceived during the separation of men and women in the Third World. There was Big God, a giant who roamed the land devouring people. There was the Horned Monster, who lived on a peak and could kill with a glance. There were the Bird Monsters, enormous raptors who carried people to their nest on Shiprock and fed them to their young. There were the Tracking Bear, the Rolling Rock, the Swallowing Monster. The earth was not safe.
Monster Slayer and Born-for-Water set out to destroy them, but first they needed weapons and knowledge. They undertook a perilous journey to the house of their father, the Sun. The path was blocked by guardians and obstacles: they crossed a field of cutting reeds, a desert of burning sand, a passage of crushing rocks, a lake of boiling water. At each barrier, the Holy Wind whispered in their ears, telling them the words of power that would let them pass.
When they reached the Sun's house in the sky, they were tested. The Sun was not certain they were his sons — or perhaps he knew but wished to test their worthiness. He tried to kill them: he threw them against spikes of flint, he locked them in a room with poison, he subjected them to a sweat bath hot enough to melt stone. The twins survived each test through the protection of the Holy People and the power of the songs and prayers they had been taught.
At last the Sun acknowledged them. He offered them weapons: lightning bolts, sunbeams, a rainbow, a stone knife. Monster Slayer chose the lightning. Born-for-Water chose to carry the medicine bundle, the spiritual power that would protect them. Together they descended to the earth and began the great work.
Monster Slayer confronted Big God first. The giant laughed at the small figure before him. Monster Slayer hurled the lightning bolt, and it struck Big God in the chest, and the giant fell. The earth shook. Monster Slayer struck again and again. Where Big God's blood flowed, it hardened into the dark lava flows that still mark the landscape between Mount Taylor and the Rio Puerco. The land itself remembers.
One by one, the twins destroyed the monsters. They killed the Horned Monster by climbing above his peak and striking from where he could not see. They destroyed the Bird Monsters' nest on Shiprock, saving two young eagles whom they transformed into the eagles and owls of the present world. They defeated the Tracking Bear, the Rolling Rock, the Eyes That Kill.
But not all the monsters were slain. When Monster Slayer had killed the great ones, he went to find the remaining Nayee: Old Age, Cold, Poverty, Hunger, and Death. These monsters were different. Old Age said: "If you kill me, people will never grow old, and the young will have no room, and the world will be crowded beyond bearing." Cold said: "If you kill me, the snow will never fall, and the rivers will dry up, and the earth will burn." Poverty said: "If you kill me, people will have no reason to work, and they will grow lazy and quarrelsome." Hunger said: "If you kill me, people will never feel the satisfaction of eating, and food will have no meaning."
Monster Slayer lowered his weapon. He understood. These were not enemies to be destroyed but conditions of existence to be endured, part of the balance of the world. To live is to age, to hunger, to feel cold, to lack, and finally to die. The hero's wisdom was not only in knowing how to fight but in knowing when to stop fighting.
The Blessingway
With the monsters defeated and the world made safe, the Holy People turned to the work of establishing the ceremonies, the songs, and the prayers that would maintain hozho — beauty, balance, harmony, wholeness — for all time. The greatest of these is the Blessingway, the foundational ceremony of Navajo life, given by Changing Woman herself before she departed to her home in the western ocean.
The Blessingway is performed for births, for weddings, for the consecration of a new hogan, for the restoration of harmony after illness or misfortune. It is, at its heart, a retelling of the creation — a re-singing of the world into being. The songs of the Blessingway are among the most beautiful in all oral literature:
"In beauty I walk. With beauty before me, I walk. With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk. With beauty above me, I walk. With beauty all around me, I walk. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty."
This is not merely aesthetic sentiment. Hozho is an ontological principle — the fundamental nature of the cosmos when it is in its proper state. Illness, conflict, and misfortune are disruptions of hozho, and the ceremonies exist to restore it. The hataalii — the medicine person, the singer — is not a priest interceding with a distant god but a practitioner re-harmonising the patient's relationship with the cosmos through the precise performance of song, prayer, and sand painting.
Changing Woman taught that the ceremonies must be performed exactly — every word in its place, every song in its sequence, every sand painting drawn correctly and destroyed at the proper time. The power is in the precision. A Blessingway performed correctly does not petition for healing; it enacts healing. The words do not describe beauty; they create it.
The Clans and the People
Changing Woman also created the first four Navajo clans, fashioning them from the skin of her own body — from her breast, her back, and under each arm. These are the Towering House Clan, the Bitter Water Clan, the Big Water Clan, and the One-Who-Walks-Around Clan. From these four original clans, all Navajo kinship descends. Clan identity determines whom you may marry (never within your own clan or your father's clan), where your obligations lie, and how you are related to every other Navajo person. It is a system of extraordinary social sophistication, ensuring that the bonds of kinship extend across the entire nation.
Then Changing Woman departed for her home on an island in the western ocean, where she lives still, changing with the seasons, never dying. She told the people: "You will never see me again, but whenever you sing the Blessingway, I will hear you. The songs are the path between us."
The Holy People also withdrew from the surface of the earth, going to live within the sacred mountains, in the sky, in the water, in the earth itself. They are not gone — they are everywhere, in every element of the natural world. The wind that whispers in your ear is the Holy Wind. The rain that falls on the cornfield is the gift of the water bearers. The dawn light on Blanca Peak is the presence of the Holy People in the east.
The Dine were left in Dinetah, the homeland between the four sacred mountains, with everything they needed: the ceremonies, the clan system, the farming knowledge, the stories, the songs, and the principle of hozho to guide them. The creation was complete — not in the sense that it was finished but in the sense that the pattern was established. The world would need to be re-created, re-sung, re-harmonised in every generation, through every ceremony, through every dawn prayer spoken facing east.
The narrative does not end so much as open outward. The creation is not a past event but an ongoing process. Every Blessingway performed is a new emergence. Every dawn is a new creation. The story is not over because the story is the world, and the world, held in balance between beauty and danger, between First Man's order and Coyote's chaos, between the light of the sun and the price of death, continues.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Paul Zolbrod's Dine bahane': The Navajo Creation Story (University of New Mexico Press, 1984) is the most literary and readable English transcription of the central creation narrative. It is a composite of multiple recorded versions and should be understood as a scholarly approximation of a living ceremonial tradition.
Paul Zolbrod translation. University of New Mexico Press, 1984. The most comprehensive English-language version of the central creation narrative.
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