Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy by James Kale McNeley

Abstract

354 Western American Literature To slightly paraphrase certain points from these pages, Man cannot pray to the Eagle, or ask favors, or pray for grace, because the Eagle reflects equally and at once all living things. The Eagle feeds on awareness, consuming the awareness of creatures alive on earth a moment before. Now dead, they swarm to the Eagle’s beak. The Eagle has granted a gift to any living thing. They can, if they wish, keep the flame of awareness, seeking an opening to freedom. Naguals were created by the Eagle to guide living things through the opening. Naguals are double beings to whom the rule has been revealed. The rule is actually a map. Naguals, male and female, operate in pairs. Their “team” is made up of four female warriors and one male courier. The female warriors are called the four directions, the four corners of a square, the four winds, the four moods. Like the male warriors and courier, the female warriors each represent a basic personality type in the human race. In addition, four other female warriors are exact replicas of the stalkers but they are dreamers and three other couriers can be male or female. If the Nagual is powerful enough, he can add more warriors to his team in multi­ ples of four. The female Nagual is taken to the other world to serve as a beacon for the party. The male Nagual and his remaining team members are then commanded to forget. They spend years at the task of remembering them­ selves and the Eagle. Their forgetting is so complete that they become scat­ tered. Only if they have the strength and forbearance to remember can they realize the Eagle’s Gift. When their remembrance is complete, their final task before they pass on to the next existence is to find a new pair of double beings to serve as the Nagual’s for the next cycle. Most of this book is devoted to Castaneda’s remembering his selection as the next Nagual by Don Juan and the training that was involved. As it turns out, Castaneda has a triple body, not the double body of a Nagual. The special purpose of a triple-bodied human is not revealed. We can expect book number 7. JANE HOLDEN KELLEY University of Calgary Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy. By James Kale McNeley. (Tucson: Uni­ versity of Arizona Press, 1981. 136 pages, $6.95.) This work focuses on the role of the Wind archetype in Navajo belief in a rigorously anthropological manner. It was compiled using oral accounts from Navajo singers who carry in their memories the complex ritual and symbolic substance of their religion. This primary source of information is augmented by the author’s careful citation of previous studies and by an extensive appendix of Navajo/English transcriptions of the interviews which Reviews 355 is referenced to the book’s text. This painstaking scholarship should appeal to serious students of Navajo religion and language and make this book a worthy addition to the existing body of knowledge in these fields. As an informed layman rather than a specialist in Navajo studies, my own acquaintance with The People has been balanced with equal measures of delight and perplexity. The former comes from the great intelligence, wisdom and humor I’ve encountered and the latter from the fact that the Navajo way of approaching reality is formidably different from my own Anglo means. I was fascinated by the book’s elucidation of the Navajo mind, in which the concept of Holy Wind serves to relate the individual both to the immedi­ ate world of perception and to the sacred or “inner” forms of existence by viewing wind as equally a natural and a spiritual phenomenon. Rather than polarizing the individual soul and the world, they seem to see a continuum in existence in which nothing is either purely personal or exclusively sacred and universal. The essential issue here is maintaining a harmonious and abiding interplay between the diverse aspects. While this book is primarily scientific document, there is also a sense that Mr. McNeley’s association with the Navajo — by study, teaching and marriage — has given...