The Hero Twins

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South of Grants, in west-central New Mexico, a river of black rock lies across the ground for miles. It is basalt, ropy and broken and sharp enough to cut a boot, spilled from the vents of the Zuni-Bandera field and hardened where it stopped; the youngest of the flows, the McCartys, ran out over the plain roughly three thousand years ago, which by the reckoning of the rock makes it new. The Spanish who crossed it named it for what it did to their animals — El Malpais, the bad country, the badlands. The Diné, whose sacred mountain of the south stands just to the north of the flow, name it for something else. This is the blood of Yéʼiitsoh, the Big Giant, spilled where Monster Slayer felled him below the turquoise mountain and left to harden into stone. Begin, then, with the evidence — a scar of lava a person can walk out onto and touch — and move back from it to the two who left it: the brothers who went to their father the Sun, came back armed with lightning, and cleared the world of the things that were eating the people.

The two who were born to clear the world

They are the sons of Changing Woman, Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, the mother who ages and renews with the seasons, and of the Sun, Jóhonaaʼéí, who carries the daylight across the sky. In the telling the Diné carry, Changing Woman conceived them at a spring. Every morning for four mornings she lay with her body open to the sunrise until noon, when the Sun stood overhead; and where she lay the water of the spring dripped over her. From the sun and the dripping water the two were made, and the two natures are written in their names. The elder is Naayééʼ Neizghání, Monster Slayer, the one born of the Sun’s own force. The younger, born of the water, is Tóbájíshchíní, Born for Water, also called Naʼídígishí, “He Who Cuts Life Out of the Enemy.” One is half sky and the other half water; one strikes, and the other holds the fire and the prayer while his brother fights. The reference record of the emergence narrative preserves the pairing exactly, the elder the slayer and the younger born of the spring’s water at the Sun’s noon.

They were born into a broken world. The naayééʼ — the monsters bred in the worlds below and loose upon this one — were hunting the Earth-Surface People and devouring them, and the people were being reduced. This is the condition the Twins exist to end. Everything they do proceeds from a single need: that the naayééʼ must be killed if the Diné are to live, and that to kill them the brothers must first find and claim their father, the Sun, and win from him the means. Their whole account is the working-out of that necessity, and it belongs to the sacred history the singers hold — the Diné Bahaneʼ, the long narrative of the emergence and the ordering of the world between the four sacred mountains, kept and sung by the hataałii, the ceremonial singers. It is not a tale about the past. It is the charter of a world the Diné still live inside.

Where the account also survives on paper, the paper is an outsider’s. The fullest early transcription is the Navaho Legends of Washington Matthews, an Army surgeon posted to Fort Wingate who set the narrative into print in 1897; Gladys Reichard worked through its symbolism in Navaho Religion (1950), and Father Berard Haile recorded a great deal more in the same decades. These are careful books and they are the eyes of visitors, writing from outside the frame in a colonial century, and some of what they wrote down was ceremonial knowledge given to them under conditions. The Twins are older than their transcription and they belong to the people who carry them. The books hold the account at arm’s length; the singers hold it as their own.

A lava field at El Malpais National Monument, south and west of Grants, New Mexico. The Diné hold this black rock to be the hardened blood of Yéʼiitsoh, the Big Giant felled by Monster Slayer below the sacred mountain of the south. Garland3, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The road to the Sun

The Twins did not know the way to their father, and the road was made to kill whoever tried it. What set them on it alive was the counsel of an old woman. Naʼashjéʼii Asdzą́ą́, Spider Woman, who lives near the inner mountain of Dził Náʼoodiłii, took the young men in, told them the road east to the Sun’s house, and armed them against it. She gave them the naayééʼ atsʼos, a sacred hoop of feathers taken from the great monster eagles, and she taught them the song to sing and the way to hold the hoop out so that the dangers along the road would let them pass. The whole later shape of the Diné world runs, in part, through that transaction — the small persistent grandmother and the two frightened brothers she sent on prepared. Her part is her own; here it bears only on the Twins, who could not have reached their father without it, and the fuller account belongs to Spider Woman.

East they went, along the Rainbow Trail, and four times the road tried to end them. First the rocks that clash together, closing on whatever passes between. Then the reeds that cut, and then the cane cactuses that slash a traveler to shreds, and last the boiling sands, Séítʼáád, that would scald them to death. At each the brothers held out the feathered hoop and sang Spider Woman’s song, and each time the danger drew back and let them by. The four deadly places are fixed in the telling in that order — the crushing rocks, the cutting reeds, the cane cactus, the boiling dunes — and the passing of them is the first proof that the Twins are more than they look.

At the Sun’s house the proof had to be made again, and harder, because Jóhonaaʼéí did not at once own them. A father who is the Sun does not take a stranger’s word that two boys are his sons. He tested them, meaning to kill them if they were not. He seized them and hurled them against the walls of his house, which were set with spikes of sharp shell; he shut them in a sweathouse and poured water on heated stones to raise a killing steam; he offered them a pipe of poison tobacco. Each time they lived. Wind, Nííłchʼi, had whispered to them what was coming, and the sweathouse held a hidden hollow they were shown, and the poison did not take — and behind all of it was Spider Woman’s hoop and Spider Woman’s counsel, carried from the trail into the house. When the last test was past and the boys still stood, the Sun acknowledged them: these were his sons.

Then he armed them, and the arming is the hinge of the whole account. He fitted them with helmets and shirts of hard flint scales — armor that no monster’s blow could break — and he gave them the weapons of the sky. Chain-lightning arrows, atsiniltłʼish kʼaaʼ; sheet-lightning arrows, atsoolaghał kʼaaʼ; and the arrows of the sunbeam, shá bitłʼóól, which are the deadliest of the three. With the lightning of their father on their backs and the flint of their father on their bodies, the two who had gone east as suppliants turned back west as warriors. They came looking for their father to get the means to destroy the monsters, and now they had it.

The killing of the monsters, and the four left alive

The first and the greatest of the naayééʼ was Yéʼiitsoh, the Big Giant — and here the account turns on a hard fact, because Yéʼiitsoh, too, was a son of the Sun. Jóhonaaʼéí had fathered monsters as well as heroes, and in arming the Twins he was arming them against his own get. The Giant came down to drink at Tó Sido, a warm spring below Tsoodził, the mountain the maps call Mount Taylor, the turquoise mountain that bounds Dinétah on the south. There Monster Slayer met him. Four times the Giant hurled his lightning and four times it missed; four times Monster Slayer loosed the arrows of the sky, and with the sunbeam arrow he brought Yéʼiitsoh down. The blood came out of the Giant in great streams and flooded across the ground. And Wind cried a warning — stop the blood before it reaches the water, or the two streams will join and the Giant will come alive again. So Monster Slayer took his knife and scored a line across the flow to keep the blood from running together, and the blood that had spread over the plain cooled and hardened where it lay. It is the black lava south of the mountain to this day — the malpais, the tradition holds, that is Yéʼiitsoh made stone. The reference record of the narrative keeps the same detail: that the blood flowed from the Giant’s mouth and remains on the ground near the spring.

The others fell in turn. Déélgééd, the great horned monster, could not be approached across open ground, so Gopher dug a tunnel to a point beneath the beast and Monster Slayer crawled up it and drove a chain-lightning arrow into the animal from below. Tsé Nináhálééh, the monster bird that carried men off to feed its young, he killed at the great rock in the north country. Tsé dah Hódziiłtáłii, who sat on a ledge above a trail and kicked passing travelers off the cliff to the creatures waiting below, he threw down in turn. Binááʼ yee Aghání, the ones who killed with a glance of their eyes, he destroyed. One by one the monsters that had been eating the people were taken off the earth, and the country was made fit to live in — the clearing that stands behind the ordinary safety of walking out onto the land.

But the clearing was not total, and the point at which it stops is the deepest teaching the Twins carry. When the great monsters were dead, Monster Slayer went looking for the last of the naayééʼ, and he found four more he meant to kill. Wind stopped him. These four, Wind said, must be left alive. They were Są́, Old Age, an old woman bent and slow; Hakʼaz Asdzą́ą́, Cold Woman, thin and shaking on the snow line; Téʼéʼį́ Dineʼé, the Poverty people, ragged and wanting; and Dichin Hastiin, Hunger, gaunt and never filled. Each in turn told the warrior why he must not strike. Kill Old Age, and no one will ripen into knowledge or pass it down; the young will not become the wise. Kill Cold, and the seasons will not turn and the snow will not come that the springs need. Kill Poverty, and nothing will ever be mended or made new, for it is want that drives the making of new things. Kill Hunger, and no one will ever again know the taste of food, or plant, or hunt, or strive. So Monster Slayer put up his weapons and let the four live. The account is exact that these four were spared, not out of mercy but out of necessity, each having argued its own indispensability. It is a striking thing for a warrior narrative to say: that a world scoured entirely clean of hardship would be a world without renewal — no age to carry wisdom, no cold to turn the year, no want to spur the work, no hunger to make the meal worth eating. The Twins clear the world of what devours it and leave standing exactly what makes it move.

This is warfare turned toward restoration, and it is the reason the Twins sit at the center of the ceremonial system the way they do. The whole religion labors to keep and to restore hózhó — the state of beauty, order, and balance that is the right condition of the world — and the Twins’ work is hózhó won back by force from the things that had broken it. They do not conquer for conquest. They kill so that the people can live in balance, and they stop killing at exactly the line past which more killing would break the balance again. The elder is the striker and the younger the keeper of the fire and the prayer, and between the two of them the act of war is held inside the discipline of order.

Written on the land and carried in the ceremony

The Twins’ work did not stay in the account; it stayed on the ground. Where Yéʼiitsoh fell, the lava. And in the north country, at the great winged rock the Diné call Tsé Bitʼaʼí, “the rock with wings,” the tradition sets the killing of the monster bird. The rock is a 7,177-foot volcanic neck of black minette in San Juan County, New Mexico, the throat of a volcano that solidified some twenty-seven million years ago and was left standing when the softer ground around it wore away — the peak the maps call Shiprock. There, the telling holds, Monster Slayer killed the adult bird monsters, Tsé Nináhálééh, and rather than destroy the two young ones he changed them: one into the eagle, whose feathers the people would need, and one into the owl, who would speak of things to come. The fuller account of the winged rock is Shiprock’s own; for the Twins it is the second of their deeds written into the land the Diné cross every day.

When the last monster was dead and the four left alive, the work was finished, and the Sun took back what he had lent. The lightning arrows and the flint armor returned to their father in the sky, for weapons of that power are not left lying in the world of the people. And the Twins withdrew. They went to Tó Aheedlí, the place where the waters flow together — the confluence where the Pine River joins the San Juan in the north — and there, the tradition says, they went down to live below the earth, marked at the water by a figure cut into the rock above it. The clearers of the world do not rule it. Their task done, they set down the weapons and stepped out of the story they had finished.

Their living afterlife is a ceremony. The Enemyway — Anaʼí Ndááʼ — descends directly from the Twins’ return from killing the monsters, and it does for a living person what the Twins’ own return required for them: it lays the chʼį́įdii, the ghost, of a slain enemy or an outsider, and restores a person who has been contaminated by contact with death or with the world beyond the four mountains. The reference record names its purpose plainly — that the formal intention of the Enemyway is to lay the ghost of an outsider, with Monster Slayer himself standing at the center of the multi-day rite. It was held, famously, for Diné soldiers coming home from the Second World War — the code talkers and other veterans, returned from foreign ground and foreign dead, restored by the same ceremony the Twins’ homecoming first required. Its public social element, the night dance to which young women invite young men, is the part outsiders long saw and long mislabeled with a name — the “Squaw Dance” — that the word alone marks as a stranger’s coinage rather than the ceremony’s own.

What the Enemyway holds within itself is held within the tradition. The chant, the hataał sung across its days; the iikaah, the sandpaintings laid down in colored earth and swept away before dawn; the masks and the impersonations — these are not set out here, because the Diné do not set them out for strangers, and where the knowledge is closed the right thing from outside is to stop at the edge of it. The outline above is the outline already in the public record; the interior is the singers’, and it stays with them. Monster Slayer’s figure recurs across that closed ceremonial world — in the chants, in the paintings, in the protection rites — but it recurs there under the tradition’s own keeping, and it is named here only from the distance the record allows.

Two ways of knowing the Twins run alongside each other, and both hold. The first is the tradition’s: the two sons of Changing Woman and the Sun who went east for the lightning and came back to clear the world, whose spilled monster-blood is the black rock a person can walk out onto below Mount Taylor, whose battle with the monster bird stands at the winged rock in the north. The second is the documented one: a field of basalt whose youngest flow the geologists date to some three thousand years ago, a volcanic neck twenty-seven million years old, and a written record that reaches back through Reichard and Haile to Matthews in 1897 — an outsider’s transcription of a possession that was never his. The two do not cancel. The geology says how the rock came to lie where it lies; the tradition says whose it is and what it means. And the people who say what it means say it in the present tense — the hataałii who carry the Enemyway, and the Diné who name the black flow below the turquoise mountain not the bad country but the blood of the Giant their warriors brought down so that the world could be lived in. The rock is still there. So is the telling, and so are the people whose telling it is; the deeper account of that people belongs to the Diné.

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