The Holy Person Who Grows Old and Young Again

Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, is the most beloved and central figure among the Diyin Dine'e, the Holy People of Navajo religion, found upon a mountaintop as an infant by First Man and First Woman and raised to maturity within four days by the miraculous power that surrounds her from birth. Her defining characteristic, and the source of her name, is a continual cycle of aging and renewal: traditional accounts describe her growing old with the passing of each year and then, upon reaching old age, walking toward the rising sun until she meets her younger self walking the opposite direction, merging with that younger form and beginning the cycle again, an image Navajo cosmology treats as expressing the essential renewability of life itself rather than a single, one-way arc from birth to death.

Changing Woman is also the mother, by the Sun and by Water, of Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the Hero Twins whose exploits ridding the earth of dangerous monsters make the world safe for the Dine to live in, giving her a foundational maternal role in the wider Navajo emergence and hero narrative that shapes much of the tradition's broader mythology.