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8

The Ninth-Night Summary

Beginning soon after midnight during the ninth night, the group of men rises and prepares for the final Basket-drum Ceremony. The Sandpainting Ceremonies have all been performed and the Holy yé'ii-People have come to bless and have gone again their ways. Now the task remains to sum up all the available blessings of the preceding nights. The patient returns to his regular place in the hogan; evidently it is no longer infectious. For a final medicinal measure in the cere­monial, yucca leaves are burned and given to the patient to drink, suspended in water. The cleansing power of yucca (soapweed) is so combined and put to work with the cleansing power of fire. All the basket-drum songs are repeated, full-length, on this last night. By the time all the songs are chanted a new day will be dawning in the east.

       During the last of all the songs the patient again leaves the hogan. Then, while the singing continues, accompanied only by the rattle, the drumstick is taken apart. The now power-imbued maize kernels are taken out and distributed among the participants. The place is swept and what little of the illness that might still have remained by this time is carried outside.

       Eventually the patient returns. Everybody relaxes and is content. There is Happiness before us. There is Happiness behind us. The blessings of Talking-god and the holy Coyote People are floating all about us. "I feel real good, real good," says Luke Cook.

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       After our last breakfast together we all depart. The practitioner, who until now has maintained toward me the dignified distance re­quired by his professional role, now clasps my hands and pats my shoulders for about a minute—perhaps the closest intimacy possible by Navajo custom among friends: "Ya 'at 'eeh, Ya'at'eeh!"—It is good, it is good! The Coyoteway is now recorded. It will not be forgotten.

       Following a ceremonial of this magnitude, nothing is quite the same anymore for anyone among the participants—not to speak of the severe cold with which this ten-day camping trip has burdened me. The greatest transformation, however, is traditionally experienced by the patient. Initiated into the mysteries of the Coyote People, he has become a new person. His relationship to the Coyote-gods is evident by his new life-style. He must from here on out never harm a coyote, dog, fox, bobcat, badger, porcupine, or skunk. In his new relationship of close union with the holy Coyote People, these animals must now be considered his relatives. Moreover, he may no longer eat chokecherries because the branches and leaves of this bush have been used to stuff the fox skin for the final yé'ii ceremony. Eating these berries could be taken as eating his tutelary animal. Nevertheless, this same man is at the same time leaning toward acceptance of Christianity. It seems

 

 


All the basket-drum songs are repeated, full-length, on this last night.

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appropriate therefore to provide the reader with a few glimpses of the greater ontological landscape in which his religious thinking presently may roam:

       Mysticism, the ultimate religious posture that implies that man surrender his ego to be absorbed into a greater-than-human reality, is universally understood by religious people. Christian mystics become one with the universal Christ; Navajo Coyoteway singers and patients become one with the universal Coyote. The external differences among these two kinds of mysticism are related directly to the differences which exist among the concerns and fascinations in the traditions of monarchial herdsmen and primal hunters.

       Coyote and his carnivorous relatives are predators—in relation to man they are fellow hunters and not sacrificial victims of the hunt. By contrast, the Christian savior is generally encountered within the thought structure of a sheepherder's world; he is the atoning and sacri­ficial Lamb of God. Coyotes eat lambs; and it is for this and other reasons that some Navajo Christians, shepherds, have concluded that Coyote is the Navajo devil. The counterpart to the Lamb of God in the traditional Navajo hunter religion is Deer (see Luckert 1975). The holy Deer People gave their flesh and blood sacrificially to the hunter ancestors of the Navajos.

       Whether the Christian storyteller likes it or not, deity, in Navajo tradition, is revealed, among others, also in Coyote. God "appeared in flesh"—if you like—as a fellow hunter-person. He stood his ground aggressively, after the manner in which Christ "barked at"—again if you like—the anti-human forces of his time. Christ stood his ground until he lost and was killed. In the eyes of some he was executed as an agent of the Devil; to the eyes of those who know better he has revealed himself as the heavenly Shepherd's sacrificial Lamb, sent for the sal­vation of humankind. Coyote, while insisting on his incarnate dignity as a fellow hunter person, was in the end himself hunted and killed. Coyotes, in predator-animal form, are killed because to some they appear to be agents of evil; from the perspective of those who know better. Coyotes must die in accordance with a procedure prescribed by Coyote gods, to furnish the paraphernalia and means for saving human patients.

       In our post-hunting era many Navajo hunter gods have lost their influence over the people. Roaming now mainly among shepherds and planters, many have also lost their reputation with regard to being dependable savior gods. And so it seems the more remarkable that a rather pure hunter mysticism has survived to this day, intact, in the nearly extinct Coyoteway healing ceremonial. This book may, there­fore, be compared to the efforts of a landscape painter who, enrap­tured by trans-human dimensions of beauty, is trying to sketch the

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radiant play of colors in a cloudy sunset—before it all disappears. Coyoteway is the afterglow of a type of human fascination that long ago has been the property of all humankind. It is the shimmering light of an era along the human trail which is now fading into the dark recesses of forgotten aeons, carried along swiftly by the small currents of eternity.

       For every sunset there is a sunrise. In the history of Coyoteway, as in the histories of many other Navajo ceremonials, this rising sun is the Talking-god, grandfather and chief of the pantheon. His leadership and supervision on the eighth morning puts authority behind the activities of the Coyote Girls. Then, at the moment when in the hogan the last song of Coyoteway ebbs away into silence, the Talking-god rises outside in his cosmic dimension as the White of Early Morning Dawn. Talking-god is an ancient anthropomorphic hunter tutelary who never appeared in animal clothes. The same divine-human process, which gives birth to Christ in a candlelit Christmas vesper, which lifts him from his tomb at an Easter morning sunrise, is what helps the solarized anthropomorphic Talking-god prevail against the wear and tear of time. He will outlive the animal revelations of the hunter era, of Coyote, and of his brothers and sisters.



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