Art: MAGIC IN SAND

According to legend, the Navajo Indians learned art from their gods. The gods painted lasting pictures on buckskin, but they told the Navajos to make sand-paintings and destroy them as soon as they were used. Art is magic, the gods explained, and magic for mortals is a sometime thing.

The sand-painting on this page is one of scores that Navajo medicine men know by heart and create (and destroy) within a day. It is an integral part of the Navajo Night Chant, a nine-day rite which takes place soon after autumn’s first frost. Its purpose is to heal the very ill.

The medicine man makes the painting by trickling powdered sandstone and charcoal from his fist on to a smooth bed of sand. He works entirely by tradition, not inspiration, painting the gods precisely as they are supposed to have pictured themselves to his ancestors.

In this Night Chant painting, a protective rainbow encloses the picture on the North, West and South. The East (at top here) is left open, because good influences come from that direction. In the center of the painting is a sacred cornstalk, growing from what the Navajos call a “Shapen Cloud.” Four benevolent Humpback deities stand at the outer edges, carrying staffs and black clouds filled with the fruits of the earth. Grouped around the cornstalk are eight gods and goddesses gathering healing pollen. On the north are the roundheaded earth gods, black and red, with white-coated, oblong-headed goddesses. On the south are blue and yellow water gods, with goddesses. Each god is laced with zigzag lightning, haloed with plumes of the red-tailed woodpecker, and armed with a bow and rattle.

To transfer the healing power of the gods to his patients, the medicine man must first awaken each god in his picture separately. He does it by chanting:

He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs. Among the lands of dawning, he stirs, he stirs; The pollen of dawning, he stirs, he stirs . . .

When the gods have stirred to wakefulness, the patients sit among them for a while, absorbing their peace and power. Afterwards, a plumed wand is used to destroy the painting, starting at the center where the medicine man began it.