Waking East, Dying North

I learned this from reading Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police mysteries. They're fun.

Based on what I've read, the Navajo people believe in Gods, but the gods are just sort of super-humans, with their own problems. Humans are merely human, full of problematic inconsistencies, in other words, just what you see in the mirror, nothing more, nothing less.

In an interesting twist, traditional Navajo belief is that when you die, the 'good' in you moves on, in a four day journey, to the next life. Left behind are your 'bad' aspects. And this 'bad' karma stays behind as a palpable presence. So if at all possible, traditional Navajo don't die 'inside.' Especially not in the hogan where the family lives. Navajo death beds are always outdoors. If a person does die inside a hogan, that hogan becomes a 'death hogan' and no traditional Navajo will live in it.

The Navajo hogan is built in a place that enjoys a 'pretty' view. ('Pretty,' of course, is in the eye of the beholder.) The entrance to the hogan always faces east, so that in the morning the inhabitants can more easily say good morning to the Sun.

If someone dies in a hogan, an exit is punched through the north wall of the hogan and the body is taken out that way. So if you're hiking in the four-corners area of the USA, and you come across a hogan with a rough doorway punched though the north wall, that's a death hogan, and there's a sort of a ghost inside. Best stay out.

The Navajo, like many 'simple' people, are essentially socialists. If you accumulate more than you need, you have to search among your relatives and your neighbors for those who are in need, and you give away what you have extra. Weird, huh?