544 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



modern inheritance of a pattern of world cultural and racial pluralism. 

 The inspirational works or formulas are accompanied by a collection 

 of narrational commentaries, or the so-called "myths" of the Cherokee, 

 assembled by James Mooney (1891, 1900.) 



THE PRAYERS OR FORMULAS 



The Cherokee ancestors believed that the earth was flat and that the 

 sun sets through a hole in the ground in the west every night and rises 

 through a hole in the ground in the east every morning. Four ropes 

 are attached to the four corners of the earth to hold it up, stretching 

 horizontally outward. At the edge of the earth there is "something 

 hammerlike" which keeps pounding on the ground constantly. When 

 people die their souls must go through this gauntlet and the good suc- 

 ceed but the evil are crushed by the hammer. Heaven is beyond the 

 edge of the earth and is like this world, only more beautiful, with all 

 sorts of fruits and deer meat in plenty. It is also very light there. 

 The moon has a path like the sun and goes down through one hole in 

 the earth and rises through another. A different version has the sun 

 and moon passing around the edge of the four-cornered earth, when 

 invisible in the sky. There are seven worlds above the flat one on 

 which men dwell, and correspondingly there are seven suns and seven 

 moons which go through each world like ours. There are also thought 

 to be seven sets of stars. When one's soul reaches the seventh heaven 

 or world it dies of old age. 



The various natural forces and elements of the world are personi- 

 fied. Fire is regarded as a mother, grandmother, or the old mother 

 (i. e., ancestress). Cure of many diseases is secured by use of the 

 heat of fire and by charcoal and ashes. The moon is the most im- 

 portant heavenly body and is personalized as a man, an elder brother 

 or grandparent. The Cherokee are said to have had a high regard for 

 James Mooney because of his last name. The sun is personalized as a 

 female and generally reckoned as a maternal grandmother, the source 

 of the blood of the clan. The Cherokee mother sings lullabies before 

 daybreak to her child in which she invokes the dawn and the rising 

 sun, in terms of mythical words and ideas. Wind, clouds, lightning, 

 snow, and thunder are also personalized. Control of the weather is a 

 foremost object of Cherokee prayers. All the above-mentioned ele- 

 ments of nature are thought of as causes of disease in man and as re- 

 quiring placation in removing the disease. 



Although the major part of the Cherokee tradition has always been 

 a matter of oral transmission, the invention of a syllabary by Sequoia 

 about 1824 furnished a medium of writing for preservation of the 

 mantic and magical formulas of the conjurers. The existence of these 

 documents was first called to the world's attention by James Mooney 

 in the late nineteenth century (1891) . 



