Beliefs

The Blue Star Kachina

Saquasohuh, the ninth sign
The final sign before the Day of Purification: a blue star that falls from the heavens and ends the Fourth World. Its paper trail starts in 1963.
Documented

The printed sign

Waters' Book of the Hopi (1963, pp. 333-334) gives White Feather's ninth sign: a dwelling-place in the heavens that falls with a great crash and appears as a blue star, after which Hopi ceremonies cease; Mexico Mystique (1975) supplies the name Saquasohuh. Thomas Banyacya carried the warning to the UN Habitat Forum in 1976 and the General Assembly on December 10, 1992: the gourd of ashes had already fallen, twice.

Assessment: Documented: the books and the speeches exist; the printing dates are the finding.
Stories

The chain of custody

Jason Colavito's archival search found no Blue Star Kachina in print before 1963, and no nine-signs checklist before Jochmans' Rolling Thunder (1980). The earliest trace is Methodist pastor David Young, who picked up a hitchhiker called White Feather in 1958 and wrote the signs from memory, in a pamphlet carrying strong Christian apocalyptic framing. The 1987 Harmonic Convergence drew thousands to Prophecy Rock; no Hopi participated, and elders decried it.

Assessment: Documented as provenance: the checklist's birthday is twentieth-century print.
Interesting claims

The invention question

Armin Geertz's The Invention of Prophecy (1994) argues Hopi prophecy is continuously recreated to read current events, and that roughly ninety percent of printed prophecy statements came from three Traditionalist spokesmen, Katchongva, Monongye and Banyacya, in a factional contest the Tribal Council side mostly answered with silence. In 2000 the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office wrote to a self-declared carrier of Hopi prophecy telling him to stop.

Assessment: Interesting claims: the prophecy is real as living Hopi political practice; the checklist is real as publishing history.
Sources and further reading
  1. Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (1963), the ninth sign, pp. 333-334
  2. Frank Waters, Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness (1975), the Saquasohuh naming
  3. Jason Colavito, Did the Hopi Predict the End of the World? (2013): the 1958 David Young pamphlet chain and the 1980 first printing of the nine signs
  4. Armin W. Geertz, The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion, University of California Press (1994)
  5. Thomas Banyacya, address to the UN Habitat Forum, Vancouver (1976), Cultural Survival Quarterly; UN General Assembly, December 10, 1992
  6. Hopi Tribe Cultural Preservation Office letter to John Kimmey (2000), reported by Indian Country Today
Worth asking

The most quoted Native prophecy in the world cannot be found in print before 1963; at what point does a text become a tradition?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+