THE WATER CANNIBALS Besides the friendly Nûñnĕ′hĭ of the streams and mountains there is a race of cannibal spirits, who stay at the bottom of the deep rivers and live upon human flesh, especially that of little children.
They come out just after daybreak and go about unseen from house to house until they find some one still asleep, when they shoot him with their invisible arrows and carry the dead body down under the water to feast upon it.
That no one may know what has happened they leave in place of the body a shade or image of the dead man or little child, that wakes up and talks and goes about just as he did, but there is no life in it, and in seven days it withers and dies, and the people bury it and think they are burying their dead friend.
It was a long time before the people found out about this, but now they always try to be awake at daylight and wake up the children, telling them “The hunters are among you.” This is the way they first knew about the water cannibals: There was a man in Tĭkwăli′tsĭ town who became sick and grew worse until the doctors said he could not live, and then his friends went away from the house and left him alone to die .
They were not so kind to each other in the old times as they are now, because they were afraid of the witches that came to torment dying people.
He was alone several days, not able to rise from his bed, when one morning an old woman came in at the door.
She looked just like the other women of the settlement, but he did not know her.
She came over to the bed and said, “You are very sick and your friends seem to have left you.
Come with me and I will make you well.” The man was so near death that he could not move, but now her words made him feel stronger at once, and he asked her where she wanted him to go.
“We live close by; come with me and I will show you,” said the woman, so he got up from his bed and she led the way down to the water.
When she came to the water she stepped in and he followed, and there was a road under the water, and another country there just like that above.
They went on until they came to a settlement with a great many houses, and women going about their work and children playing.
They met a party of hunters coming in from a hunt, but instead of deer or bear quarters hanging from their shoulders they carried the bodies of dead men and children, and several of the bodies the man knew for those of his own friends in Tĭkwăli′tsĭ.
They came to a house and the woman said “This is where I live,” and took him in and fixed a bed for him and made him comfortable.
By this time he was very hungry, but the woman knew his thoughts and said, “We must get him something to eat.” She took one of the bodies that the hunters had just brought in and cut off a slice to roast.
The man was terribly frightened, but she read his thoughts again and said, “I see you can not eat our food.” Then she turned away from him and held her hands before her stomach— so —and when she turned around again she had them full of bread and beans such as he used to have at home.
So it was every day, until soon he was well and strong again.
Then she told him he might go home now, but he must be sure not to speak to anyone for seven days, and if any of his friends should question him he must make signs as if his throat were sore and keep silent.
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 is a quintessential example of animism, describing a cosmos populated by distinct spirits (Nûñnĕ′hĭ and water cannibals) inhabiting specific natural locations like streams, mountains, and rivers.
The persistent form or image of a human being that exists from birth to death, distinct from the impermanent physical matter.
The concept of a 'shade or image' left behind that mimics the dead person's actions but lacks life and eventually withers closely parallels the idea of a persistent form or astral body distinct from the living spirit.
Guided passage of the soul through afterlife realms.
An old woman spirit guides a dying man from his bed to an underwater settlement, acting as a psychopomp who leads the soul (or near-death consciousness) through a threshold into another realm.
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 narrative centers on the water cannibals' ability to replace human bodies with lifeless shades that mimic the dead, and the old woman's ability to manifest food from thin air, demonstrating a fluidity of form and substance characteristic of shapeshifting.