Begochiddy- Navajo GodDeity"The Creator"

The Worlds Below

In Father Berard Haile's recording of the Emergence Way, Begochiddy appears golden-haired and nádleehi, a being of both male and female nature. No other Holy Person carried that color. In the dark First World, where nothing had form yet, Begochiddy created insects. Small things first: ants and beetles, the crawling creatures that would later quarrel among themselves and force everyone upward. Each new world Begochiddy entered, this creator filled with mountains and running water before the trouble started.

The trouble always started. Quarrels among the insect people, or floods sent by water monsters, drove everyone out. Begochiddy planted a great reed that pierced the sky of one world and grew through solid rock into the floor of the next. The insect people and the animal people and the Holy People climbed its hollow stalk single file. Four times they rose. Four times Begochiddy shaped a new world to receive them, each brighter and more alive than the last. What other Holy People achieved through command, Begochiddy did through patient making. The worlds were not empty stages. Someone had already furnished them.

Pollen and Butterflies

Begochiddy's first creations were insects, and the link never broke. Caterpillars from the lower worlds became butterflies in the upper ones. The pollen they carried, tádídíín, became the mark of blessing in Diné ceremony. Singers still dust it across their prayers today. Begochiddy's golden hair carried the same hue as that pollen, and where the insects traveled, so did the color of the creator.

In the Glittering World, the final world, the one the People walk now, every mountain and stream showed Begochiddy's hand. It was built, world by world, from the bottom up. Haile recorded a tradition in which the one who built it all was neither man nor woman but both, golden-haired and patient, and worked from the dark ground toward the light.