Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/333

 THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN FOLK-LORE.

Vol. XIII. — JANUARY-MARCH, 1900. — No. XLVIII.

��THE CHEROKEE RIVER CULT. 1

From the beginning of knowledge, Fire and Water, twin deities of the primitive pantheon, have occupied the fullest measure of man's religious thought, holding easy precedence over all other divinities. Others were gods of occasion, but these twain were the gods of very existence, and in a hundred varied and varying forms, whether as beneficent helpers in the cheering blaze and the soft-falling rain, or as terrible scourges in the consuming conflagration or the sweeping torrent, they were recognized always as embodiments of power, mas- ters and conservators of life itself. If they differed in degree of honor, the first place must be given to water, without which life was impossible. In every cosmogony the world itself is born from the water, and the symbolic rite of purification by ablution was so much a part of the ancient systems that even the great teacher of Galilee declares that except a man be born of water he cannot enter the kingdom.

As the reverence for fire found its highest and most beautiful expression in sun worship, so the veneration for water developt into a cult of streams and springs. From the east to the extremest west, primitive man bowed low to the god of the river and the foun- tain, and a newer religion consecrated the rite that it could not destroy. The sacred river of the Hindu, the holy wells of Ireland, have their counterpart in the springs of the Arapaho and the Navajo, with their sacrificial scarfs and pottery fastened upon the overhang- ing branches or eposited upon the sandy bank.

In Cherokee ritual, the river is the Long Man, YiVfnvi Gunahita, a giant with his head in the foothills of the mountains and his foot far down in the lowland, pressing always, resistless and without stop, to a certain goal, and speaking ever in murmurs which only the priest may interpret. In the words of the sacred formulas, he holds all things in his hands and bears down all before him. His aid is

1 Read before the Columbus meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, August, 1899.

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