Myths of the Cherokee · 122 of 220

Myth 80b

There is another story, that once while all the warriors of a certain town were off on a hunt, or at a dance in another settlement, one old man was chopping wood on the side of the ridge when suddenly a party of the enemy came upon him—Shawano, Seneca, or some other tribe.

Throwing his hatchet at the nearest one, he turned and ran for the house to get his gun and make the best defense that he might.

On coming out at once with the gun he was surprised to find a large body of strange warriors driving back the enemy.

It was no time for questions, and taking his place with the others, they fought hard until the enemy was pressed back up the creek and finally broke and retreated across the mountain.

When it was over and there was time to breathe again, the old man turned to thank his new friends, but found that he was alone—they had disappeared as though the mountain had swallowed them.

Then he knew that they were the Nûñnĕ′hĭ, who had come to help their friends, the Cherokee.

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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 centers on the Nûñnĕ′hĭ, a class of spirit beings who inhabit the landscape (mountains) and actively intervene in human affairs to protect their people, exemplifying the plurality and locality of divine agents.

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Shapeshifting Transformationtheology

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 spirits appear as warriors and then vanish 'as though the mountain had swallowed them,' implying a mutable form or the ability to shift between visible human-like presence and invisible spirit state.

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