I was interested in the commonality of 4 showing up in many of the myths throughout the book.
In class we discussed the number 4 being representative of the four seasons or the four cardinal winds but I had a feeling that 4 went deeper than that. I pondered to come up with at least half an answer of why across Native American cultures and stories that may have been told years and miles apart that this number was steadfast in stories.
My first inclination was to look for the modern interpretations of the number 4 in numerology and see if there was any type of parallel there and I was unsurprisingly left with a spiritual definition of four that was useless to me in understanding the myths. I briefly read through the book “Handbook of Native American Mythology” by Dawn Elaine Bastian, Judy K. Mitchell and I found that both the Navajo and Hopi peoples believed in four worlds. The Hopi believed that this world was the fourth created after the first three worlds or earths were destroyed from man’s evil actions and the Gods banished them to start over again on a different earth/world after too much evil was committed. The Creator destroying a world full of evil people and evil actions (could also be interpreted as sin/sinful) is a familiar narrative that appears in many cultures world-wide; a tale with universal moral appeal no doubt. The Navajo believed that this was the fifth world that humans had come to after leaving the first four worlds because of lack of animals. In this Hopi fifth world birds and mammals exist.
While it is easy to draw a connection between the Navajo belief of four worlds and human migration as a whole across the continents I feel gratified in saying the significance of 4 is one representative of past lives, past mistakes and where one has come from in spiritual journey and physical one. 4 is the four worlds traveled through and destroyed or left desolate but nonetheless ones where a mark was left. Could 4 be the true mark of man?
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