Myths of the Cherokee · 119 of 220

Myth 78e

Then the hunter says, “De′tsătă, you have my arrow, and if you don’t give it up I’ll scratch you,” and when he looks again he finds it.

There is one spirit that goes about at night with a light.

The Cherokee call it Atsil′-dihye′gĭ , “The Fire-carrier,” and they are all afraid of it, because they think it dangerous, although they do not know much about it.

They do not even know exactly what it looks like, because they are afraid to stop when they see it.

It may be a witch instead of a spirit.

Wafford’s mother saw the “Fire-carrier” once when she was a young woman, as she was coming home at night from a trading post in South Carolina.

It seemed to be following her from behind, and she was frightened and whipped up her horse until she got away from it and never saw it again.

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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 describes a specific spirit entity (Atsil′-dihye′gĭ) that inhabits the landscape and is feared by the community, reflecting a worldview where natural phenomena and places are populated by distinct spiritual agents.

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