Are the Hopi Prophecies Coming True?

What I learned when I visited one of their elders

What follows is an excerpt from my book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006; recently reprinted as Quetzalcoatl Returns; audio version available here). I visited the Hopi in 2023, I believe, and wrote about my meeting with Martin Gasheseoma, an elder prophecy-holder, for the final chapter of my book. As the U.S. moves toward Civil War, I keep thinking about our conversation, so I thought I would share that chapter with all of you here. Of course, I also recommend the book as a whole. I believe it is a veryuseful primer for our situation now. Unfortunately, people got hung up on the date of 2012 — I often wonder if it was a mistake to include that date in the original title, although deadlines are useful to get people’s attention. I do feel that "we are still in that short threshold of crescendo and catastrophe which was denoted by “2012,” rather than an exact date. For Gasheseoma, there was an inevitability to what was going to take place. The Hopi view of time is different than ours; it is one in which everything has already happened, but we experience it from our particular vantagepoint in space and time.

I hope you enjoy the chapter. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

One story remains to be told, one more strand to be woven into this fable—of myth meshing into history, of the artifice of modern time unraveling to unveil the rudiments of a new reality. It is the story of the timeless time—what anthropologist Armin Geertz calls the “continuum consciousness”—of the Hopi, considered the original denizens of the North American continent, living in arid deserts of Arizona, awaiting the long-prophesied, long-delayed return of “Pahana,” the elder white brother who wandered off at the beginning of this cycle, to usher in an age of universal peace. “The coming of the Hopi’s lost white brother Pahana, the return of the Mayas’ bearded white god Kukulcan, the Toltecan and Aztecan Quetzalcoatl, is a myth of deep significance to all the Americas,” wrote Frank Waters in his Book of the Hopi. “It is an unconscious projection of an entire race’s dream of brotherhood with the races of all continents. It is the unfulfilled longing of all humanity.” Waters collected testimonies from thirty Hopi elders for his 1963 book, documenting the myths, rituals, and oral history of the tribe, whose drastic foretellings have long been a New Age cliché.

According to the Hopi, we are currently completing the cycle of the Fourth World—Tuwaqachi, “World Complete”—on the verge of transitioning, or emerging, into the Fifth World, with several more worlds to follow. In each of the three previous conditions, humanity eventually went berserk, bringing ruin upon themselves through destructive practices, wars, misused technologies, and loss of connection to the sacred. As the end of one cycle approaches, a small tunnel or interdimensional passage—the sipapu—appears, leading the Hopi and other decent people into the next phase, or incarnation, of the Earth. As in Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology, the worlds represent increasing phases of densification, the involuting descent of spirit into matter, where “the way becomes harder and longer,” as the creation-spinning deity Spider Woman told the Hopi after the flood ending the Third World.

I had often heard that the Hopi believe we have received most of the signs, recounted in their prophecies, preceding the emergence into the Fifth World. These include a “gourd of ashes falling from the sky,” destroying a city, enacted in the atomic blasts obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a spiderweb across the Earth, which they associate with our power grids and telephone lines. According to the accounts of the elders compiled by Waters, the Fourth World will end in a war that will be “a spiritual conflict” fought with material means, leading to the destruction of the United States, “land and people,” through radiation. Those who survive this conflict will institute a new united world without racial or ideological divisions “under one power, that of the Creator.”

Before visiting the Hopi, I had several vivid dreams that seemed foreshadowings. After seeing Godfrey Reggio’s film Naqoyqatsi (a Hopi word meaning “Life as War”), the last in his trilogy beginning with Koyaanisqatsi (“Life Out of Balance”), I had a dream of fiery demons at computer work stations, and awoke with the sense of a visceral supernatural presence flying through my house. The night before leaving for the Southwest, I had an even more specific and frightening nightmare in which I was killed and dismembered by a disgusting-looking daimon—who was simultaneously, in typical dream dislogic, the postmodern conceptual artist Bruce Nauman. After being killed, I returned to Nauman’s studio or the daimon’s home and said, “Great—now that you have killed me, I control you.” I went to a bookshelf and picked up a huge leather-bound volume titled Grimoire (a medieval catalogue of spells) and melted it down over a fire, as if it were wax. As I did this, I heard incredibly loud Native American chanting followed by maniacal laughter. I awoke once again with a sense of a powerful presence, wildly unhinged and amoral, looming overhead and then soaring away.

In 2002, I was contacted by a graduate student who was studying the Hopi language at the University of Arizona after studying Sanskrit for some years. He had also spent time with the Secoya, the tribe I had visited in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We spoke several times over the next year. He told me about his own visionary episodes related to the Hopi prophecies. While camping out at Chaco Canyon—a vast desert valley with high rock promontories and enormous earthwork structures, built by the Anasazi, direct ancestors of the Hopi, over a thousand years ago—he had felt compelled to climb up late one night to the top of a nearly sheer cliff carved with ancient petroglyphs. This is a difficult feat, as well as a highly illegal one. A blue light had flooded him from above, and he had received a transmission of the dance and hand gestures of the “Blue Star Kachina.” Kachinas are the nature spirits of the Hopi, thought to control elemental forces, and in their ceremonies, Hopi men dress up as kachinas and perform dances, seeking their benevolent influence. The return of Saquasohuh, the Blue Star Kachina, is a penultimate event in the Hopi foretellings. When Saquasohuh dances in the plaza during a ceremony and removes his mask, it will signify the end of the Fourth World and the emergence into the Fifth.

Noting it was a “New Age wet dream” to be part of the Hopi prophecies, the graduate student—an earnest, blond-bearded young man who offered to take me to visit the Hopi—had not told any of his indigenous contacts about this experience. After centuries of exploitation and theft, the Hopi carefully guard their cultural patrimony and ritual knowledge from the prying attention of outsiders. It was an active debate among the tribe whether non-Hopi should even be allowed to learn their language. Driving around Phoenix, his hometown, the graduate student told me some of what he had gleaned about the Hopi, corroborating bits of knowledge I had heard but not fully believed. While Hopiland and Tibet are on opposite sides of the Earth, these two sacred cultures situated on high and dry plateaus have a few intriguing correspondences. Certain words in the Hopi and Tibetan language have reversed meanings—for instance, the Hopi word for day, “Nyma,” is the Tibetan word for night. The word for Moon in Tibetan, “Dawa,” is the Hopi word for Sun. One of the most important Tibetan lamas, the Karmapa, visited Hopiland, and the graduate student decided to embark on his Hopi studies after attending the meeting.

At my new friend’s house, I scanned books on Hopi mythology, and learned about Maasaw, their ambiguous protector-deity. When the Hopi emerged into the Fourth World, they met Maasaw, who gave them the rules of conduct for life on this new land and introduced them to the rudiments of their agricultural system. Maasaw brought the Sun into the Fourth World, but once he had accomplished this, he left the daylight for ever to haunt the realms of night and darkness. The name Maasaw literally means “corpse demon” or “death spirit,” and he is considered the ruler of the land of the dead. According to Book of the Hopi, he had been “appointed head caretaker of the Third World, but becoming a little self- important, he had lost his humility before the Creator. Being a spirit, he could not die, so Taiowa . . . decided to give him another chance.” Since his exile from the Earth, Maasaw often appears in nightmares of the Hopi as a terrifying presence, wearing a ghoulish mask.

From these descriptions, I suspected this was the spirit who had introduced himself in my dreams. I found it significant that Maasaw had identified himself with Nauman, an artist who lives in New Mexico, and whose work has a compulsive, repetitive quality. Nauman’s videos feature insane clowns on tape loops, caught in impossible situations or weeping while sitting on the toilet. Other works include videos of screaming heads, and plastic sculptures of twisted, hanging deer limbs. I had never understood Nauman’s cachet in the art world, but now it seemed to me that he was unconsciously projecting this archetype of the Hopi’s caretaker and corpse daimon, revealing Maasaw’s workings in our contemporary world—an anal-sadistic, almost autistic undertone or trapped vibration reflected in the mausoleum-like malls, plastic wraps, and air-conditioned monoliths we had imposed across the continent. Maasaw seemed a masculine variation on the Kali-Shakti archetype, a powerful spiritual energy that could be helpful or malevolent, depending on people’s actions and attitudes toward him.

My student friend chose a long, circuitous route, stopping to visit an acquaintance of his, Judith Moore, a self-proclaimed “thirteen dimensional channel,” outside Santa Fe, and then Chaco Canyon, on the way to Hopiland. Moore had connections to the Hopi elders, and had also published a book of channeled material on the crop circles, purportedly from “Laiolin,” “a member of the Council of Abborah and keeper of the Records of Ra.” While I had come to feel at home with ideas that most would consider fantastical, Moore’s mystical shtick was too much even for me. Representing the fruitloop fringe of the New Age, she claimed she was an “Arcturian ambassador,” receiving transmissions from an Arcturian mothership located somewhere around the Big Dipper. We seemed to develop an immediate aversion for each other.

After a night sleeping on her outdoor trampoline, I awoke to find this large woman in a tizzy, complaining of a frightening nightmare in which a figure of black slate had hovered over her bed. She thought this malevolent figure was sent through me, and wanted us to leave right away. She suggested I might have been a subject in the Montauk Project, which was, according to her, a malevolent psychic experiment conducted by the U.S. military in the 1970s, using the “fear vibrations” emanated by sexually abused children to tear holes into other dimensions. I assured her I had no part in this paranoid fantasy, and told her I didn’t appreciate her negative projections onto me. This seemed to clear the air between us. Our visit was not without synchronicity. Before we left Moore’s chaotic enclave, I found out that her uncle was Tony Shearer, a poet whose 1971 Lord of the Dawn introduced the Mesoamerican prophecies of Quetzalcoatl and the cycles of the Mayan calendar to the modern West. Shearer’s interpretation of the Tzolkin and Mayan prophecy inspired José Argüelles, among others, who used Shearer’s ideas for the “Harmonic Convergence” of August 16, 1987. After some prodding, I also managed to get from her the name of the Hopi elder, lineage holder, and seer she had met at a festival, Martin Gasheseoma, who lived on Third Mesa, in the town of Oraibi.

As we drove onward through desert wastes, my graduate student friend became increasingly nervous and tense. He distrusted my intentions, thinking I expected some magical episode to immediately transpire. I tried to reassure him that I was not attached to any particular outcome, as long as I had the chance to talk to the Hopi and see one of their ceremonies. We spent a few hours in the extraordinary wind-sculpted cliff-scape of Chaco Canyon, wandering around enormous ruins—round structures with rabbit warrens of rooms that had initiatory purposes—and peering at petroglyphs carved on the cliffsides. Pueblo Bonito, the largest ruin, covering three acres, contains thirty-two kivas and eight hundred rooms, housing up to twelve hundred people at one time. Like the archaic observatory of Stonehenge, the structures built within the canyon are precisely aligned to the orbits of Sun, Moon, and constellations. Like the temple-cities of the Maya, Chaco Canyon had been abandoned for unknown reasons—my friend conjectured that some large-scale magical experiment had backfired dangerously, as archaeological evidence suggested the settlements were hurriedly abandoned. Chaco established a direct link between the Hopi and the Mesoamerican civilizations, as sculptures of plumed serpents were found in chambers filled in with rubble when the Anasazi suddenly split the scene. Hopi oral traditions tell of clans migrating from Palatkwapi, a mysterious Red City of the South, that may have been a Toltec or Mayan center.

Slowed by a flat tire, we did not arrive in Hopiland until late Saturday night, and slept in my friend’s car. When I awoke the next morning, he told me he would have to leave immediately—his fiancée, apparently, was having a crisis. Although the crisis did not sound urgent to me, he was adamant he had to hurry back. I suspected he was insecure about my purpose, and perhaps his own as well—simultaneously embarrassed and spooked by his personal connection to the prophecies, if his Blue Star Kachina vision had validity.

Nested within the much larger Navajo reservation, Hopiland is spread across three rocky mesas, with many miles of boulder-strewn desert in between each enclave, connected by one narrow highway. I didn’t see how I could get around without a car, but having made it this far, I felt I had no choice but to stay. Furious at the graduate student for abandoning me, I took a room in the local hotel and cultural center. At the front desk, I learned there was a kachina dance on Walpi, a town on the First Mesa, that day. I got directions and began to walk there in the desert heat.