In Navajo culture, a person who has been struck by lightning is to be distrusted.
Not because he is evil. But because he has been touched by a deep strangeness.
He has been touched by this strangeness therefor his actions cannot be trusted. What he will do, why he will do it, how he will react. Not like normal people do. He's strange.
In truth, a lightning bolt is indeed a very strange thing.
It is a transformed cosmic ray.
A spark from very very far away. From a very strange celestial object. A pulsar. In another galaxy.
There's enough that lightning is a well known symbol. I've recorded oral histories on the Hopi mesas that featured individuals and cursed places being struck as divine justice. 3 is also a symbolically important number that features prominently in regional mythology.
Actually, there is plenty of lightning out there in that part of the country.
Years ago in a chapter of my life that has since been completed, I worked in the Four Corners area on a seismic crew. Our work took us from the depths of the canyons to the tops of the mesas and up the slopes of the mountains. It is truly some of the most beautiful country in the USA.
It was a pretty normal summer day to be able to watch the clouds form over the isolated mountains. Then, in early afternoon they would break free of the mountain's grasp and go scooting across the countryside wetting the sunflower and bean crops on the mesas and kicking off small flash floods in the lower canyon creeks. I assure you that there was plenty of lightning with these isolated storms and their formation always caused us to pause our work so that we could ascertain which direction they would likely go.
We carried with us large quantities of dynamite and many blasting caps. Personally, I started each day with a 75# (34 kg) backpack loaded with paper-rolled sticks of dynamite like you see in old cartoons and 150 caps with a 10 foot long lead (~3m). By the end of a good day all of that would be loaded into shotholes we had drilled, each hole with 1/2# (.23 kg) of dynamite and a single cap.
Safety training told us to be sure all the caps were shunted since all it took to detonate the cap was 1/2V of electricity. On a very dry day, static electricity could accidentally pop the cap, as the story went.
We all had a weather eye out for any flashes, so to speak, and if anyone saw anything we sought two things - separation from the backpacks, and cover from the storm. When you're on a mesa, the slope of the mountain, or out on the flat in the bottom of the canyon the terrain limits your movement and sometimes there simply is no opportunity to put space between you and the explosives in your pack. You just have to get down low and hope for the best.
A lot of good times out there. I have photos I took of our crew taking cover under one of our vehicles during a bad storm. I thought it was funny at the time because the powder box on the buggy had a half ton of dynamite and hundreds of caps in it. I had placed myself in the rain down-slope though I still had my pack. I was just hoping for the best and, as usual, that's what we got that day. A great drenching, a scare from the proximity of the lightning, and a lot of work done under much cooler conditions after the storm passed. The clarity of the sky was remarkable, as if it had been scrubbed of all the dust and everything old was new again.
There's plenty of lightning out there on and around the Navajo, White Mountain Ute, and Hopi Reservations and all across the country surrounding them. I've worked on and driven through that part of the world many times.
Personally, I live and grew up out there. The lightning here tends to be much closer than elsewhere. I’ve even had a few strike trees around my home. One woke me from a deep sleep-so deep I couldn’t move. On,y time that’s happened to me.
That region is my favorite region in the US. Small towns that are fairly isolated, each with its own character. Tremendous geological features that draw the eyes at every turn of the road or trail. Hidden ruins to hint at lives and societies long passed into a history that was only recorded on lonely canyon frescoes in shades of the local rock or carefully carved into the sandstone cliff faces. Tales told only to those clever enough to decipher the clues in the placement and composition of the creatures and symbols. Fingerprints in the mud chinking or adobe bricks used to build their shelters and granaries make you wonder whether the maker knew that they would last hundreds of years unaltered.
It is truly a special region to me and I wish I had been able to spend more of my life out there. I understand why people settled there originally.
---
In Navajo culture, a person who has been struck by lightning is to be distrusted.
Not because he is evil. But because he has been touched by a deep strangeness.
He has been touched by this strangeness therefor his actions cannot be trusted. What he will do, why he will do it, how he will react. Not like normal people do. He's strange.
In truth, a lightning bolt is indeed a very strange thing.
It is a transformed cosmic ray.
A spark from very very far away. From a very strange celestial object. A pulsar. In another galaxy.
Very strange. Immensely powerful.
Consider Lovecraft's Azathoth : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azathoth