Dine Bahane, the Navajo Emergence

Dine tradition holds that the people who exist in this world today passed through a series of earlier, lower worlds before arriving at the present one. Most tellings count four such worlds beneath this one, often described in terms of color, ranging from a dark, insect-like first world through successive worlds of increasing light and complexity, each populated by beings whose conduct and conflicts eventually make that world unable to sustain them, forcing an escape upward into the next. Recurring causes for leaving a lower world include quarrels among the beings living there, moral failures, and floods that rise to force an ascent, themes comparative scholars have connected to the wider emergence-narrative pattern documented across many Indigenous traditions of the North American Southwest, while Dine accounts retain their own distinct sequence, figures, and vocabulary throughout.

First Man and First Woman are described as taking shape in the course of this passage between worlds, formed from ears of corn brought up through the successive worlds along with other sacred items, and their presence and conduct in each world shapes what the people carry forward into the next, including both the knowledge and the conflicts that will need to be resolved in the world still to come.

The passage into the present world, most often called the Glittering World, comes as the people flee a great flood in the world below by climbing upward, in many tellings through the inside of a great reed or cane that grows tall enough to reach a small hole in the sky of the world beneath this one. Emerging through that opening, the people find a still-unfinished world of mountains, mesas, and open land, one that First Man, First Woman, and other holy figures continue to shape and place in order, fixing the Four Sacred Mountains at the cardinal points that bound the Dine traditional homeland, Dinetah, and setting the sun, moon, and stars in their courses.

The emergence account continues into further narrative cycles central to Dine religious life, including the origin of Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, whose own story and the Kinaalda ceremony celebrating a girl's coming of age are among the most important elements of ongoing Dine ceremonial practice, and the birth of the Hero Twins, who travel to their father the Sun to obtain weapons and then use them to rid the new world of a series of monsters threatening the people. Because these narratives are carried forward through specific ceremonial complexes, including the Blessingway, performed under the authority of particular medicine people and clans rather than freely recounted, this entry follows the published scholarly literature on Dine cosmology and philosophy in describing the emergence account's shape and themes, rather than reproducing fuller ceremonial tellings themselves.