Talking God

Talking God, Haashchééltií, is among the most important of the Yei, the class of Holy People central to several major Navajo chantway ceremonies, generally described as the eastern chief of the Yei and closely associated with dawn, the east and correct, sacred speech, standing in a complementary pairing with Calling God, associated with the west and the evening.

Talking God holds particular prominence in the Nightway, one of the longest and most significant Navajo healing ceremonies, a nine-night rite in which trained ceremonial practitioners and dancers wearing sacred masks representing Talking God and other Yei perform the ceremony's culminating public dances, making him one of relatively few Navajo Holy People with an established tradition of direct masked ceremonial representation. The Nightway and related chantways are understood as restoring hozho, correct order and health, for the person the ceremony is conducted for, and Talking God's role within them reflects a broader Navajo pattern in which specific Holy People are associated with specific ceremonial traditions and the particular kinds of imbalance or illness those traditions are understood to address.

The Nightway and the sacred masks used to represent Talking God and the other Yei within it are treated with considerable ceremonial seriousness and, in many respects, restricted or protected status within Navajo tradition, since the masks are understood to hold real sacred power rather than functioning as costume, and their construction, use and care follow specific protocols maintained by trained medicine people rather than being generally accessible knowledge, a pattern this atlas notes without attempting to describe the restricted ceremonial detail itself, consistent with how it treats comparable masked and empowerment-bound material elsewhere. Navajo Sacred Places documents how the Nightway and related ceremonies also connect directly to specific sacred geography within Navajo traditional territory, reinforcing the broader pattern in Navajo religion of major ceremonial traditions being tied to particular places as well as particular Holy People, and the continued regular performance of the Nightway by Navajo medicine people and communities today reflects Talking God's status as an actively venerated figure in a living ceremonial tradition rather than one known only through historical or ethnographic record.