According to one version of the Navajo creation story, Black God is first encountered by First Man and First Woman on the Yellow (third) world.
Other times he is imagined as a “a moody, humorless trickster” who “passes himself off as poor so that people will be generous to him.”[2] Black God has a crescent moon on his forehead, a fullmoon for a mouth, the Pleiades on his temple and he wears a buckskin mask covered in sacred charcoal with white paint.
Snatching Black God's pouch away from him, Coyote scatters the remaining stars into the sky forming the Milky Way.
These stellar fables functioned as an enduring "cultural text" which was said to "record [the] laws that… govern mankind for all time.” The Constellation of Pleiades and its placement on the mask of Black God is emblematic of the Navajo philosophy of ‘Sa’a naghai bk’e hozho’ which pertains to the Nightway ritual and its fundamental goal of the restoration of balance, beauty, health, and wholeness.
Pleiades’ progress across the sky throughout the winter months renders it a sort of celestial ‘clock’ for gauging the number of hours until dawn.
[4] Despite his importance in the act of creation, Black God (or Haashch’eezhini) appears very seldom in Navajo ritual.
The impersonator carries with him a fire-drill (a device that uses friction to incite ignition) and shredded bark (tinder) with which he will demonstrate his pyromancy.