The Little Men told them they must take a box with them, and when they got to Tsûsginâ′ĭ they would find all the ghosts at a dance.
They must stand outside the circle, and when the young woman passed in the dance they must strike her with the rods and she would fall to the ground.
Then they must put her into the box and bring her back to her mother, but they must be very sure not to open the box, even a little way, until they were home again.
They took the rods and a box and traveled seven days to the west until they came to the Darkening land.
There were a great many people there, and they were having a dance just as if they were at home in the settlements.
The young woman was in the outside circle, and as she swung around to where the seven men were standing, one struck her with his rod and she turned her head and saw him.
As she came around the second time another touched her with his rod, and then another and another, until at the seventh round she fell out of the ring, and they put her into the box and closed the lid fast.
The other ghosts seemed never to notice what had happened.
They took up the box and started home toward the east.
In a little while the girl came to life again and begged to be let out of the box, but they made no answer and went on.
Soon she called again and said she was hungry, but still they made no answer and went on.
After another while she spoke again and called for a drink and pleaded so that it was very hard to listen to her, but the men who carried the box said nothing and still went on.
When at last they were very near home, she called again and begged them to raise the lid just a little, because she was smothering.
They were afraid she was really dying now, so they lifted the lid a little to give her air, but as they did so there was a fluttering sound inside and something flew past them into the thicket and they heard a redbird cry, “ kwish!
kwish!
kwish!
” in the bushes.
They shut down the lid and went on again to the settlements, but when they got there and opened the box it was empty.
So we know the Redbird is the daughter of the Sun, and if the men had kept the box closed, as the Little Men told them to do, they would have brought her home safely, and we could bring back our other friends also from the Ghost country, but now when they die we can never bring them back.
The Sun had been glad when they started to the Ghost country, but when they came back without her daughter she grieved and cried, “My daughter, my daughter,” and wept until her tears made a flood upon the earth, and the people were afraid the world would be drowned.
They held another council, and sent their handsomest young men and women to amuse her so that she would stop crying.
They danced before the Sun and sang their best songs, but for a long time she kept her face covered and paid no attention, until at last the drummer suddenly changed the song, when she lifted up her face, and was so pleased at the sight that she forgot her grief and smiled.
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 distinct spiritual agents (Little Men, ghosts, the Sun as a grieving mother) who interact directly with humans and inhabit specific places like the Ghost country.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The narrative serves as an etiological myth explaining the origin of death and the permanent separation between the living and the dead.
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 central plot device involves the Sun's daughter transforming from a human girl into a redbird to escape confinement, illustrating the fluidity of form among divine or preternatural beings.