In the winter of 1905, a museum in Chicago published a book with a plain brown cover and a plain title: The Traditions of the Hopi. The man who had spent years collecting it was Henry Voth, a Mennonite missionary who had come to the Hopi mesas of northern Arizona to replace the Hopi religion. In the middle of that work, he learned the language, sat through the ceremonies, and wrote the stories down with a care most of his contemporaries never managed. A few years earlier, Jesse Walter Fewkes, working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, had been writing down versions of the same traditions, though his attention was fixed more on the migrations, on how the clans moved across the land after they came into this world.
Between the two of them, at the very turn of the century, the Hopi tradition was set down on paper by people who had actually been in the room when it was spoken. The record even keeps the names of the tellers. The origin myth in Voth’s book was told to him by a man named Coyima of the village of Oraibi. The account of the world below and the account of the city that was destroyed both came from a man named Lomantiwa of the village of Shupaulovi.
Oraibi sits on Third Mesa and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the entire United States. People have lived there since around 1100, roughly nine hundred years without a break, through the arrival of the Spanish in 1540 and everything that came after it. So when Coyima told Voth how the world began, he was not reciting a dead myth from a vanished people. He was a living man in a living town older than almost any other town on the continent, telling a story his people had carried the whole time that town had stood.
The tradition does not start here in this world. It starts underneath it. Voth’s origin myth opens with a line of striking quietness: a very long time ago, there was nothing but water. In the east lived a being the book calls Hard Being Woman, the owner of all hard and precious things, shells and coral and turquoise and beads.
Another such being lived in the ocean in the west in a house like the underground rooms the Hopi still build. The sun already existed, and every dawn it dressed first in the skin of a gray fox for the first pale light, then laid that off and put on a yellow fox skin for the bright yellow dawn of the morning. Little by little, these two beings drew dry land up out of the water until there was earth to stand on. Then the making begins, done entirely by hand and by song.
The sun kept passing over the new land and kept noticing that nothing living moved on it anywhere. So the two beings met, crossing to each other over a rainbow, and decided to make a small bird. The deity of the east shaped a wren out of clay, covered it with a piece of cloth, and the two of them sang a song over it. After a little while, the clay began to stir under the cloth.
When they lifted the cover, a living bird came out, and it asked them a question the tradition puts in the mouths of nearly every created thing after it: why do you want me so quickly? They sent the wren out to fly across the whole earth and see if anything living was already there. It came back and reported that it had found nothing, though the tradition adds quietly that Spider Woman was already living somewhere in the southwest at the edge of the water, and the little bird had failed to notice her. Then they made the rest.
The deity of the west made many birds of every kind under that same cloth, sang over them, lifted the cover, and there they all were, asking the same question. They were taught the sounds they should make and sent out in every direction. Then all the animals were made of clay the same way, sung awake the same way, taught their own languages, and sent out to fill the earth. And then at last people.
The deity of the east made of clay first a woman and then a man and brought them to life exactly as the birds and the animals had been. When they asked why they had been wanted, they were told that they should live upon this earth and that they should understand everything. There is one more piece of that making that matters. After the first two people were alive, the being of the east made two small tablets out of some hard substance, stone or clay, the tradition says it is not certain which, and drew certain marks on them and handed them over.
The man and the woman looked at the tablets and had no idea what the marks meant. So she took their hands and rubbed their palms with her own, first the woman’s and then the man’s, as though understanding were a thing you could pass along skin-to-skin. There is a footnote in Voth’s book in his own dry museum voice: the events of this creation are understood to have happened in the lower world, not in this one. This present world is not where life was made.
Life was made below, in the world that would eventually have to end. So what went wrong with it? For the account of exactly how it went bad, Voth turned to Lomantiwa’s story, titled The Coming of the Hopi from the Underworld. It begins almost gently.
A long time ago, the people were living below. There were a great many of them, but they were often quarreling with one another. The first symptom of a dying world in the Hopi telling is a small and painfully human thing: the people would not stop fighting each other. It deepened from there.
Some of them, Lomantiwa said, were very much depraved. They abused the women and the maidens, and that led to very many contentions. That is the wrongness at the center of it: a moral collapse coming up from inside the people themselves, cruelty and the abuse of the ones with the least power to defend themselves, and out of that cruelty an endless spreading conflict that poisoned the whole world below. Now watch what the leaders do.
The chiefs down below were worried and angry about what their world had become, and they held a council and concluded that they would try to find another place to live. They sent a bird up first, a bird named Matsnya, to search the sky above them for a way out. He flew high but was too weak and came back with nothing. Then they sent the mockingbird, who was stronger, and he flew up and up until he found an opening, a way out of the world entirely.
And while the mockingbird was still up there searching, the chiefs did something that stops the reader cold: they caused a great flood. Their own leaders in their own world brought the water down on it. The corruption below had grown so total that the chiefs themselves decided the world could not be saved, only escaped and ended. The tradition is exact about the ending.
Many Balülookongwü came up out of the ground with the water. Voth glosses that word for us in a footnote: great water serpents. They came out of the ground with the flood, and a great portion of the people were destroyed. The ending had a specific terrible cost, because the tradition counts it.
As the survivors climbed up toward the opening, the mockingbird sat at the top and sang, and his songs were what held the whole escape together. But there were so many people, and before they were all out, his songs ran out. Now my songs are gone, he said. And in that instant, the people who were still down on the ladders stopped climbing and began going back down into the drowning world.
A very great many had already come up. But an equally great number were still below when the songs ended, and they stayed below, and the water had them. The door did not stay open long enough for everyone. And even for the ones who made it, the tradition refuses to give a clean escape.
The wrongness of the old world did not stay in the old world. It came up through the hole with the people. In the underworld, the people had been very bad, Lomantiwa said, there being many sorcerers and dangerous people who put diseases into the people. And one of those sorcerers found his way out with everyone else.
Nobody noticed at first. Then in the fresh new world, the half-grown son of the head chief suddenly took sick and died. They buried him. The first death in the new world, and it was a child.
The grieving chief was certain a witch had come up with them. So he took a ball of fine cornmeal and threw it high up into the air over all the assembled people, and told them that whoever’s head the ball came down on, that was the guilty one, and that person he would throw back down through the sipapuni into the drowned world below. The ball went up and came down, and it landed on the head of the chief’s own nephew. And the nephew, about to be thrown back into the dead world, said, wait, let me show you something first.
He told the grieving chief to look down through the sipapuni back into the world they had just escaped. And when the chief looked down, he saw his dead son alive down there in the world below, moving among the others. That in the tradition is the root of one of the deepest Hopi beliefs: the dead go back down, the lower world is where the dead return. The world that ended before this one did not simply vanish.
It became the country of the dead, the place everyone goes back to. The floor of this world is the ceiling of the last one. The exact same pattern plays out a second time in daylight in this world, in a place you can go and physically stand in. This is the destruction of Palatkwapi, the red-walled city.
Lomantiwa placed it somewhere southeast of Flagstaff in southern Arizona, and its name comes from a high bluff of red stone. Voth adds a line that changes what kind of claim is being made: the extensive ruins at that place are proof that the people remained there a long time. The people there, Lomantiwa said, and especially the young men, became very bad. They ill-treated the people, sometimes in a disgraceful manner, a favorite cruelty being to ambush and humiliate anyone who stepped away to relieve himself.
The same disease as the world below: the strong tormenting the weak, a community rotting from the inside out. Once again, the leaders decided the place could not go on. The way they ended it is one of the eeriest passages in the entire book. The village chief and his son were themselves Powakas, sorcerers, and the chief chose to stage a slow terrifying reckoning that would look to the town like the end of the world walking toward it.
He dressed his son in a stack of masks, the masks of specific Katsina figures, one pulled on over another. He tied bundles of fingers cut from dry old corpses to the young man’s wrists as rattles. And he sent him out into the night to set the distant timber on fire, and then come rushing back through the village like a ghost. For three nights it went on.
The disguised son would light fires far out in the woods, then dash into the town, climb to his father’s house, grind a little corn on the stone, and sing a strange song, and vanish again before anyone could hold him. The people grew more and more certain that something was coming for them. Finally, on the fourth night, they put watchers everywhere, and it was the weakest of them, a young orphan posted down by the water, who caught him and held on and cried out that he had the ghost. They dragged him into a kiva and made a light and began cutting the masks off his head, one after another, until they finally reached the face underneath.
Then came the flood. A man was painted and dressed to represent the Balülookongwü, the great water serpent, the same being that rose with the water when the lower world drowned. And the water came, and the red-walled city was destroyed. Two endings, two worlds, the same cause and the same weapon.
A community turns cruel, the strong prey on the weak, the leaders judge that it cannot be redeemed, and the flood and the serpent close it. There is a version of this tradition that has spread across the internet, tidier than this one. In the popular version, there are four worlds, each with its own name, destroyed in a neat sequence by fire and then by ice and then by flood, overseen by a creator called Taiowa and his nephew Sotuknang. That tidy four-world scheme comes very largely from a single later book, published in 1963, called Book of the Hopi, assembled by a writer named Frank Waters through an interpreter.
It is a mid-twentieth-century literary retelling that smooths a great many separate and varying traditions into one grand unified system. Going all the way back to the earliest careful writing down, to Voth in 1905 and Fewkes just before him, you do not find that clean numbered machine. Voth’s own footnote says the emergence is related by variant traditions, told a little differently by different people in different villages. You find one lower world described with real disagreement around the edges, closed by a flood the chiefs themselves called down.
It is messier and quieter, and it sounds like something living people actually carried and argued over across centuries rather than a single tidy scripture handed down whole. The reason this tradition survived nine centuries at Oraibi is not that it makes a good horror story. It survived because it is a moral account of the world, and the morality is the entire point. A world is a fragile thing, and it is not owed to anyone.
What holds it up day to day is the way the people inside it treat one another. When they are decent, it stands. When cruelty takes over, when the strong abuse the weak and the quarreling never stops, the world quietly loses its right to exist and it ends. A remnant is allowed to carry the lesson forward into whatever comes next.
The flood is not really about weather at all. It is about consequence. And notice who does the destroying in both accounts. There is no distant god reaching down to punish helpless people.
In the world below, the ones who end it are the chiefs themselves. At Palatkwapi, it is the village leaders. The people who end each place are the people who were running it. The tradition puts the ending inside the community itself.
Oraibi still stands on Third Mesa. The Hopi are here now, a sovereign people, and these traditions are still alive inside their ceremonies, not on a museum shelf. The reason we even have the 1905 telling in this much detail is bound up with a hard century. This was the era of forced boarding schools and relentless pressure to make Native children stop speaking their own languages and stop carrying their own stories.
A tradition that lives only in speech is always just one broken generation away from silence. If the elders who held these particular accounts had not been able to pass them to anyone, and for a stretch of years the whole weight of the schools and the agencies was bent on making sure they could not, then that first world would have gone dark a second time, this time for good. That it did not is partly plain luck, partly the sheer stubbornness of the Hopi themselves, and partly a few hundred written pages with a museum stamp on the front, produced by a man whose own church wanted the religion inside them gone. The world before this one drowned because it stopped being good.
The people who climbed out of it never once let themselves forget why.
