Dine tradition begins with emergence: the Dine Bahane tells how the people rose through a succession of lower worlds into this, the Glittering World, where the Holy People, the Diyin Dine'e, set the four sacred mountains in place and taught the ways of right living. Most beloved of the Holy People is Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, who grows old and young again with the seasons; she gave the people their central blessing rites and is the mother of the warrior twins who cleared the world of monsters. James McNeley's study of Holy Wind, nilch'i, shows how a single animating wind, standing within every person and the world alike, carries thought, speech and guidance, a philosophical psychology embedded in the language itself.
The purpose of Dine ceremony is hozho, a word gathering harmony, beauty, order and health into one idea. When illness, contact with dangerous things or disorder disturbs it, a hataalii, a singer who has spent years learning a single ceremonial, restores it through a chantway: nights of song, prayer and precise ritual action, often including sandpaintings through which the Holy People are present, made and unmade within the ceremony itself. Blessingway holds the central place, with other ways addressed to particular needs.
Ceremonial knowledge belongs to the tradition's own practitioners, and the Nation has repeatedly gone to court to protect the living places of that religion, as in the long litigation over the San Francisco Peaks. This atlas therefore describes, and does not reproduce.