Beauty Way

The Beautyway is a path of healing among the Navajo.  I would like to share with you this story.  In this tale two sisters are to be given in marriages which they do not desire, and so they go to the outskirts of the camp to talk and rest together.  While there they see two distant balls of light and smell wonderful sweet smells.  Following these lights they encounter two beautiful young men adorned with many necklaces of shells and beads.  They follow the two men, only to discover in the morning that they are in fact Oldman Bear and Oldman Snake.  Fleeing the situation, Older sister eventually finds Mountainway and Younger sister finds the Beautyway.  

"Young Sister flees toward the west.  She climbs mountains, trudges through mud and water, is stopped at one point by Endless Snakes, is helped by the Weasel People, but is always pursued relentlessly by Snake Man's tobacco smoke.  She grows more and more tired and disheveled.  Then, it seems, it happened that  out of the trees some strange thing extended up which turned out to the Black Rock.  She goes to the top of Black Rock and then sees a pool and its base and goes down to get a drink.  A voice calls, shhh, shhh four times.  In vain, she looks about.  At last she sees someone standing over her, slim of form, painted with bluish white clay, his face painted, a skirt about him, with arm attachments, and a necklace and a rain plume.  He had many beads.  The handsome young man tells her that earth people shouldn't walk around here.  She says she is fleeing old man.  He says that the old man dosen't know the way down in there where the people are living.  The youth taps Black Rock at each of the compass points and the stone tilts over and reveals a land below the earth.  Out of the underearth a ladder extends, and wind rushes from the hole.  Younger sister descends into this crevice in the earth.  As she walks in this lower land she is met by Mountain Sheep people and she plays with them.  She wanders among ruins.  She goes into a cornfield and picks corn.  She comes at last to the home of Snake People.  She makes cornmeal and cooks for them and then they feed her.  While she is staying with Snake People and before she learns the rites there is a series of happenings in which she disobeys instructions given her and has to be rescued and healed each time.  Healing ceremonies are given both for original illness and for the misfortunes that befall her when she disobeys.  These ceremonies are learned by her in all their complex details.  Eventually the Snake People tell her, 'You shall now start for your home.  These songs, with which you have become familiar, and the prayersticks, prayers, and sand paintings, and ceremonies, all of which have become known to you, shall be of use to the earth surface people from now on and in time to come.'  They told her that after the ceremony she would be holy, that her body and the ceremony would become one.  At last she returns 'home' with the full Beautyway rite, learned over a long time, and after many mistakes and great difficulties.  She has been away four years.  It takes her four days to teach her family Beautyway.  It is a very elaborate and careful teaching.  At dawn of the fourth day they face the east and take the rites into themselves.  Snake Woman returns to Black Rock and to the Snake People Holy Ones, to be reunited to them and in some way to Snake Man." From Changing Woman and Her Sisters, by Sheila Moon, Psychological Studies Publishing House, 1984

Coatlique, Aztec version of Snake Woman

In my first Ayahuasca ceremony I had a journey on the Beautyway.  I walked into a pile of earth, a nice hillside of soft sweet smelling earth, and into a tunnel located therein.  I descended into the tunnel and walked for a long time through darkness, the sounds and smells of earth surrounding me.  I recognized at this point a Beautyway journey, and was delighted to continue along the tunnel.  Eventually I came out among vast sweeping meadows, grasses of many shades of yellow and green dancing in the wind, forests extending beyond the meadows, great vistas.  I danced in the meadows in sweet walking patterns and came to a pause somewhere in the middle of all that expanse.  The grasses were soft and the wind was softer still.  The breezes blew upon my heart and face, my hands, and I received them into my body.  I stood with the sun on my face for a long time, and then I asked, what is your gift to me, what shall I bring back to my people?  Two gifts were given me and then I made a heartfelt and spontaneous promise.  The gifts were first the task of being in constant communion with nature, and second a beautiful alabaster jar.  What these gifts have come to mean to me, and how I am incorporating them into my daily life is a deeply personal story, enacted in many ways both spontaneous and thoughtful.  

enormous marble jar inside the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

I awoke just yesterday thinking of the Beautyway.  I made cornmuffins with walnuts on top of them for breakfast, I offered prayers and burned some incense.  I did my washing and a great deal of writing, some meditation and dance.  In the afternoon we went down to the meadows at the back of our house.  While sitting there with our feet in the river, discussing dinosaurs and boats and such, a sudden rainstorm burst forth from the sky!  We danced and laughed in the grasses and the rain, cow poo and all, smiling and leaping for joy.  Soaked completely through we began to run, and the children led the way home.  All we met smiled as we splashed in the puddles on the road with bare feet, cracking ourselves up.  What a nice gift from Corn Mother and Snake People Holy Ones!  What a nice complement to the mornings prayers.  Aho!