Myths of the Cherokee · 18 of 220

Myth 6b

He climbed higher and higher, but every time he looked up the hole seemed to be farther than before, until at last he was tired and came down again.

When he reached home he found his father very weak, but still alive, and one draw at the pipe made him strong again.

The people planted the seed and have had tobacco ever since.

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Themes

Cosmogonycosmology

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 text serves as an etiological myth explaining the origin of tobacco for humanity through a divine or heroic intervention.

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Shamanic Journeypraxis

The living practitioner's deliberate trance-journey into spirit, underworld, or upper realms — Lemminkainen's descent into Tuoni and Wainamoinen's entry into Wipunen's body in the Kalevala, the Siberian shaman's drum-mediated travel, Inuit angakkuq's submarine journey to Sedna, classical katabasis as ritual technique. The practitioner returns with knowledge, songs, lost-words, or a recovered soul. Distinct from psychopomp_journey (which guides the *dead* soul through afterlife realms) and from spiritual_ascent (which is the soul's *upward* return to source); shamanic_journey is the *living* practitioner crossing into ordinarily-inaccessible domains as a worked technique.

The protagonist undertakes a trance-like or physical journey into a spirit realm (the hole) to retrieve a sacred substance (tobacco seed) that benefits the community upon his return.

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