Gods of Fire, Gods of Stone

Bird Springs, Arizona  

I recently journeyed to Flagstaff for a few days to see my youngest daughter, Isadora, a chemistry major at Northern Arizona University. It was a rather rushed visit, but we did find the time to buy several vintage vinyl records at Bookman’s, drink a mocha at Macy’s, and grab an egg sandwich for breakfast at the Galaxy Diner.

Normally to get back home to Grand Junction, I drive straight north on U.S. 89 to U.S. 160, head northeast through Tuba City and Kayenta to Mexican Water. In Mexican Water, I catch U.S. 191 north all the way through Moab, Utah to Interstate 70. I take this east to Junction, which is just over the Colorado line. It’s a wonderful drive through some of the Southwest’s most interesting landscapes – the pyramidal peaks of the San Francisco Mountains, the Moenkopi Plateau’s Painted Desert, Kletha Valley with its twisted canyons, the mysterious frozen wave of Comb Ridge, the high bluffs surrounding the San Juan River, the Utah canyon lands’ easternmost reaches, and the towering La Sal Mountains. Visually, the La Sal Mountains closely echo the San Francisco Peaks, and both snow-capped ranges create perfect bookends for the drive. They also possess a strong mythological parallel: the La Sals are the home of the Ute Sun God, and the San Francisco Peaks are the dwelling place of the Hopi deities known as the Kachinas.

But this time, I wanted to see some different territory, so I went east along Navajo Route 15. This highway starts near Flagstaff in the small mining town of Winona, and passes through a sequence of Navajo villages – Leupp, Bird Springs, Dilkon, Indian Wells, and Lower Greasewood – finally connecting with U.S. 191 near Ganado. From there it’s due north through Chinle, Many Farms, Round Rock, Rock Point, and finally Mexican Water, where I linked back up with my usual route. What I enjoy most about taking Navajo 15 are the expansive spaces, the absence of traffic, and the traditional Navajo towns, with their octagonal hogans, stucco chapter houses, and modern schools, where students with backpacks queue up for big yellow buses to take the long ride home. Between towns, the grasslands hold half-wild horses, wool muffled sheep, and native herding dogs, which N. Scott Momaday describes in his essay “The Indian Dog” as being “marvelously independent and resourceful” and “having an idea of themselves . . . as knights and philosophers.”

 

From Winona to Lower Greasewood, the voyager passes through many volcanic necks, ash cones, and basaltic buttes – all a part of the San Francisco volcanic field, named for the San Francisco Peaks. This zone of volcanism is eight million years old, and contains over 600 volcanoes, all of them extinct, at least for now. A mere 750 years ago, one of these volcanoes, Sunset Crater, erupted. According to Ekkhart Molotki in the book Earth Fire (Northland Press, 1987), Sunset Crater entered Hopi legend as a Ka’nas Kachina’s fiery revenge on the village of Musangnuvi because some jealous people there tricked his wife into committing adultery.

As I drove through this volcanic field along Navajo Route 15, I thought about the Hopi Mesas only fifty miles to the north, and speculated, not for the first time, that the proximity of such an extensive volcanic landscape had helped shape the attributes of the Hopi god Masau’u.

As explained by Hamilton A. Tyler in Pueblo Gods and Myths (University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), Masau’u is the “god of death and fire … who was kept at bay by the magic of fire rituals.” However, he is also associated with fertility, for he tends an underworld fire which can cause “his crops to grow with magic speed” (4). While having a trickster nature, he is also a god of boundaries, property, and travelers. In Hopi spiritual practice, the One Horn Society priests guide the spirits of the dead to the kiva of Masau’u, from whence they enter the underworld. Because of these powers, the Hopi associate Masau’u with the stone piles and slabs that mark the boundaries of a clan’s farmland, a tribe’s territory, and graves.
 

Now, readers of my last dispatch from Mack, Colorado may be noting the remarkable similarities between Masau’u and the Greek god Hermes. Hermes, whose name means “he of the stone heap,” is also associated with the stone markers that delineate property, territory, and graves. Therefore, like Masau’u, he is a deity connected with death and travel. Hermes is also a god of fertility, and, as with the Hopi fire god, can make plants “grow with magic speed.” This Hermes does when he steals the Cattle of the Sun, and butchers several of them by making willows surge out of the ground and tear the animals asunder, an act that also demonstrates Hermes’ identity as a trickster. Like Masau’u, Hermes’ trickery emerges from his identity as “the crosser of boundaries.” And just as Masau’u is a god of fire, it is said that Hermes invents fire; and while the One Horn priests guide the dead to Masau’u, Hermes himself guides the dead to Hades.

There is a profound archetypal pattern here, welling up on opposite sides of the planet in two agricultural city-state cultures that blended a deeply mystical nature with an empirical pragmatism needed to survive in a semi-arid environment amid hostile neighbors.

And while there were signs pointing the way on Navajo Route 15, not stone markers, I believe the spirit of Masau’u, and perhaps of Hermes too, still dwells in the volcanic rocks, mesas, and mounds through which I passed on the two-lane asphalt ribbon leading me home.

Postscript

The author of over thirty books, Roger Zelazny, who passed away in 1995, was one of the 20^th century’s greatest authors of science-fiction and fantasy. For nearly a quarter of a century, Zelazny lived in Santa Fe, and the Southwest became the setting for a number of his pieces, most notably Eye of Cat, his novel about a Navajo tracker pursued into Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly by a shape-shifting alien. One of his last novels, Night in the Lonesome October, is a wondrous blend of 1930’s movie monsters, Sherlock Holmes, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos – all told from the point of view of Jack the Ripper’s dog. Zelazny constructed the novel in 31 chapters, one for each day in October. Currently, Jane Lindskold, Zelazny’s companion and a superb fantasy author in her own right, is celebrating the novel with a Twitter book club, and will share tweets devoted to each chapter on each day in October. It’s not too late to join in. Details at https://www.facebook.com/janelindskold #LonesomeOctober.