The story of the Ancestral Puebloans lives on in the mythology of the Hopi, considered by many to be the most mysterious and mystical of all Native Americans. It begins with the claim that their ancestors emerged from the Third World through a crack, into this, the Fourth World, in a placed known as Sipapu. .
Some, like Frank Walters in “Book of the Hopi”, have noted that seeing the Sipapu as a place of emergence is a myth, and that the Hopi use the Colorado River merely as a symbol for the water to the west. Waters argues that unlike the emergence from the First and Second World, the emergence from the Third World into ours was “merely” a voyage by sea by those deemed worthy to survive the last catastrophe. As such, the Sipapu cannot be seen as a place of emergence, as the Fourth World did not have any.
Either way, at the beginning of the Fourth World, they were greeted by Maasaw, the caretaker of the land. He had also been appointed the head of the Third World, but had become a little self-important, lost his self-humility and other deities had therefore made him the deity of death and the underworld. But Maasaw was given a second chance in the Fourth World. He ordered the survivors to separate into clans, to begin a series of migrations across the continent, whereby the stars would guide them. Eventually, they would meet again and settle. Maasaw gave each clan one or more sacred tablets, which would guide them along their migrations.
The rest of the article.....http://www.philipcoppens.com/hopi.html
The Emergence Myth
http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/Emergence-Hopi.html
http://jimmcgillis.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-giant-navahopi-sipapu-awaits-its-time.html
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