Myths of the Cherokee

A long time ago several young men made up their minds to find the place where the Sun lives and see what the Sun is like. They got ready their bows and arrows, their parched corn and extra moccasins, and started out toward the east. At first they met tribes they knew, then they came to tribes they had only heard about, and at last to others of which they had never heard.

There was a tribe of root eaters and another of acorn eaters, with great piles of acorn shells near their houses. In one tribe they found a sick man dying, and were told it was the custom there when a man died to bury his wife in the same grave with him. They waited until he was dead, when they saw his friends lower the body into a great pit, so deep and dark that from the top they could not see the bottom. Then a rope was tied around the woman's body, together with a bundle of pine knots, a lighted pine knot was put into her hand, and she was lowered into the pit to die there in the darkness after the last pine knot was burned.

The young men traveled on until they came at last to the sunrise place where the sky reaches down to the ground. They found that the sky was an arch or vault of solid rock hung above the earth and was always swinging up and down, so that when it went up there was an open place like a door between the sky and ground, and when it swung back the door was shut. The Sun came out of this door from the east and climbed along on the inside of the arch. It had a human figure, but was too bright for them to see clearly and too hot to come very near. They waited until the Sun had come out and then tried to get through while the door was still open, but just as the first one was in the doorway the rock came down and crushed him. The other six were afraid to try it, and as they were now at the end of the world they turned around and started back again, but they had traveled so far that they were old men when they reached home.

This story, obtained from John Ax, with additional details by Swimmer and Wafford, has parallels in many tribes. Swimmer did not know the burial incident, but said – evidently a more recent interpolation – that when they came near the sunrise they found there a race of black men at work. It is somewhat remarkable that the story has nothing to say of the travelers reaching the ocean, as the Cherokee were well aware of its proximity.

What the Sun is like – According to the Payne manuscript, already quoted, the Cherokee anciently believed that the world, the first man and woman, and the sun and moon were all created by a number of beneficent beings who came down for the purpose from an upper world, to which they afterward returned, leaving the sun and moon as their deputies to finish and rule the world thus created. “Hence whenever the believers in this system offer a prayer to their creator, they mean by the creator rather the Sun and Moon. As to which of these two was supreme, there seems to have been a wide difference of opinion. In some of their ancient prayers, they speak of the Sun as male, and consider, of course, the Moon as female. In others, however, they invoke the Moon as male and the Sun as female; because, as they say, the Moon is vigilant and travels by night. But both Sun and Moon, as we have before said, are adored as the creator.... The expression, ‘Sun, my creator,’ occurs frequently in their ancient prayers. Indeed, the Sun was generally considered the superior in their devotions” (quoted in Squier, Serpent Symbol, p. 68). Haywood, in 1823, says: “The sun they call the day moon or female, and the night moon the male” (Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tenn., p. 266). According to Swimmer, there is also a tradition that the Sun was of cannibal habit, and in human form was once seen killing and devouring human beings. Sun and Moon are sister and brother. See number 8, “The Moon and the Thunders.”

The Indians of Thompson river, British Columbia, say of the sun that formerly “He was a man and a cannibal, killing people on his travels every day.... He hung up the people whom he had killed during his day’s travel when he reached home, taking down the bodies of those whom he had hung up the night before and eating them.” He was finally induced to abandon his cannibal habit (Teit, Thompson River Traditions, p. 53).

In the same grave – This reminds us of the adventure in the voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, as narrated in the Arabian Nights. The sacrifice of the wife at her husband’s funeral was an ancient custom in the Orient and in portions of Africa, and still survives in the Hindu suttee. It may once have had a counterpart in America, but so far as known to the author the nearest approach to it was found in the region of the lower Columbia and adjacent northwest coast, where a slave was frequently buried alive with the corpse.

Vault of solid rock – The sky vault which is constantly rising and falling at the horizon and crushes those who try to go beyond occurs in the mythologies of the Iroquois of New York, the Omaha and the Sioux of the plains, the Tillamook of Oregon, and other widely separated tribes. The Iroquois concept is given by Hewitt, “Rising and Falling of the Sky,” in Iroquois Legends, in the American Anthropologist for October, 1892. In the Omaha story of “The Chief’s Son and the Thunders” (Dorsey, Contributions to North American Ethnology, VI, 1890), a party of travelers in search of adventures “came to the end of the sky, and the end of the sky was going down into the ground.” They tried to jump across, and all succeeded excepting one, who failed to clear the distance, and “the end of the sky carried him away under the ground.” The others go on behind the other world and return the same way. In the Tillamook myth six men go traveling and reach “the lightning door, which opened and closed with great rapidity and force.” They get through safely, but one is caught on the return and has his back cut in half by the descending sky (Boas, Traditions of the Tillamook Indians, in Journal of American Folk-Lore, Jan., 1898). See also number 1, “How the World was Made” and number 3, “Kana′tĭ and Selu.”