THE DAUGHTER OF THE SUN The Sun lived on the other side of the sky vault, but her daughter lived in the middle of the sky, directly above the earth, and every day as the Sun was climbing along the sky arch to the west she used to stop at her daughter’s house for dinner.
Now, the Sun hated the people on the earth, because they could never look straight at her without screwing up their faces.
She said to her brother, the Moon, “My grandchildren are ugly; they grin all over their faces when they look at me.” But the Moon said, “I like my younger brothers; I think they are very handsome”—because they always smiled pleasantly when they saw him in the sky at night, for his rays were milder.
The Sun was jealous and planned to kill all the people, so every day when she got near her daughter’s house she sent down such sultry rays that there was a great fever and the people died by hundreds, until everyone had lost some friend and there was fear that no one would be left.
They went for help to the Little Men, who said the only way to save themselves was to kill the Sun.
The Little Men made medicine and changed two men to snakes, the Spreading-adder and the Copperhead, and sent them to watch near the door of the daughter of the Sun to bite the old Sun when she came next day.
They went together and hid near the house until the Sun came, but when the Spreading-adder was about to spring, the bright light blinded him and he could only spit out yellow slime, as he does to this day when he tries to bite.
She called him a nasty thing and went by into the house, and the Copperhead crawled off without trying to do anything.
So the people still died from the heat, and they went to the Little Men a second time for help.
The Little Men made medicine again and changed one man into the great Uktena and another into the Rattlesnake and sent them to watch near the house and kill the old Sun when she came for dinner.
They made the Uktena very large, with horns on his head, and everyone thought he would be sure to do the work, but the Rattlesnake was so quick and eager that he got ahead and coiled up just outside the house, and when the Sun’s daughter opened the door to look out for her mother, he sprang up and bit her and she fell dead in the doorway.
He forgot to wait for the old Sun, but went back to the people, and the Uktena was so very angry that he went back, too.
Since then we pray to the rattlesnake and do not kill him, because he is kind and never tries to bite if we do not disturb him.
The Uktena grew angrier all the time and very dangerous, so that if he even looked at a man, that man’s family would die.
After a long time the people held a council and decided that he was too dangerous to be with them, so they sent him up to Gălûñ′lătĭ, and he is there now.
The Spreading-adder, the Copperhead, the Rattlesnake, and the Uktena were all men.
When the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more, but now the world was dark all the time, because the Sun would not come out.
They went again to the Little Men, and these told them that if they wanted the Sun to come out again they must bring back her daughter from Tsûsginâ′ĭ, the Ghost country, in Usûñhi′yĭ, the Darkening land in the west.
They chose seven men to go, and gave each a sourwood rod a hand-breadth long.
The doctrine and worldview that natural phenomena, places, and objects possess inherent spirit, soul, or personality — and that the cosmos is populated by countless local, plural, embodied divine agents: kami in mountain and tree, sidhe in cairn and well, landwights in field and stone, nymphs in spring and grove, haltija in forest and lake, lares and penates in household and threshold, Iamblichean daemons in element and place. Distinct from monotheism (single transcendent God), pantheism (one underlying substance), and emanation_hierarchy (cascading single source); animism's signature is the plurality, locality, and embodied-in-landscape character of the divine.
The passage depicts a cosmos populated by numerous embodied divine agents (Sun, Moon, Little Men) and spirits inherent in natural phenomena (snakes, Uktena), where the divine is plural, local, and interacts directly with the landscape and human affairs.
Guided passage of the soul through afterlife realms.
The text describes a mission by seven men to travel to the Ghost country (Tsûsginâ′ĭ) in the Darkening land to retrieve the dead daughter of the Sun, representing a guided passage into and through the afterlife realm.
Form-mutability as a constitutional property of divine and preternatural beings — gods, heroes, spirits, and their human practitioners possessing inherent capacity to alter form across human, animal, plant, or elemental states. Loki and Odin's transformations in Norse, Math's pigs and Blodeuwedd's owl-shape and Pwyll's exchange with Arawn in the Mabinogion, the Greek Proteus, the Indian dasavatara, Vainamoinen's bird-flight in the Kalevala, Ovid's metamorphoses, the shamanic and witch's capacity for ritual form-change. Distinct from anthropomorphism (divine taking specific human form, single embodiment) in that anthropomorphism establishes a stable form whereas this concept establishes form's plurality and instability.
The narrative centers on the Little Men using medicine to transform human men into various snakes (Spreading-adder, Copperhead, Rattlesnake, Uktena), demonstrating form-mutability as a key property of these beings.