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Myths of the Cherokee · 82 of 220

Myth 54b

Then he cautiously climbed to the top and looked over and saw the Ustû′tlĭ still slowly working its way toward the summit. He went down to the base of the mountain, opened his fire pouch, and set fire to the grass and leaves. Soon the fire ran all around the mountain and began to climb upward. When the great snake smelled the smoke and saw the flames coming it forgot all about the hunter and turned to make all speed for a high cliff near the summit. It reached the rock and got upon it, but the fire followed and caught the dead pines about the base of the cliff until the heat made the Ustû′tlĭ’s scales crack. Taking a close grip of the rock with its hind feet it raised its body and put forth all its strength in an effort to spring across the wall of fire that surrounded it, but the smoke choked it and its hold loosened and it fell among the blazing pine trunks and lay there until it was burned to ashes.
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Themes
Animismcosmology

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 world populated by distinct spiritual agents, specifically the Ustû′tlĭ (a great snake spirit) and a hunter who interacts with it as a sentient being within the landscape.

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