Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt, but it usually causes us to stop paying attention. We tend to take some rather astonishing things in the natural world for granted.

What if, for instance, you only saw one male cardinal in your lifetime? That would certainly be a red-letter day! Chances are you see a male cardinal every day of your life without really appreciating them fully or even partially or at all.

The trick is to try to keep paying close attention on a daily basis to the world around us. Not easy. Sometimes, when dealing with the familiar, it helps to gain new perspectives.

The first people to closely observe the natural world here in the southern mountains that we have written or oral reports from are the Cherokees. It’s material that can help jump-start our perceptions.

The ancient Cherokees, by necessity, were close observers of the natural world. They divided their cosmos into three realms: (1) the Upper World of hope, peace, and the hereafter ... best symbolized by birds; (2) the Under World of darkness, death, and eternal decay ... best symbolized by serpents; and (3) the Middle World of humans and four-legged animals. They were constantly evoking the bright powers of the Upper World to help them do battle against the dark forces of the Under World so as to bring harmony and balance into this everyday world of mundane existence.

The everyday birds were very important to them as symbols of hope. Here is one of their ancient sacred formulas (or prayers):

Calling Like a Distant Bird



Listen!

Dressed in the sunrise

I might sing like a red bird.

But I shake my clothing until it fades

so that you and I are dressed alike.

Our souls are aligned.

Be thinking of me.



We are as the red bird.

We are as the blue bird.

We are as the yellow bird.

We are as the mythic bird.



Now!

Look at me ... talk with me ... no apart

ness.

In the very middle of the morning we

stand.

And we walk about in splendor

into the very middle of the rainbow.

Each day we are remade by the spirit

that never dies.

In Myths of the Cherokees (1900), James Mooney records two cardinal stories. The first, “How the Redbird Got His Color,” is relatively simple. A raccoon had tricked a wolf and plastered his eyes with dung so that he couldn’t open them. In return for some red paint, “the brown bird” agreed to peck the dung away from the eyes of the wolf, who then showed the bird a rock with veins of bright red pigment.

“The little bird painted himself with it and has ever since been a redbird.”

This tale perhaps has something to do with the differences the Cherokees observed between the drab female of the species and the rather gaudily-attired male, a common sexual difference in appearance that ornithologists call “dimorphism.”

But it is primarily a straight-forward explanation for what one actually encounters in the natural world; that is, the particular bird in question (the cardinal) is, after all, the bird that looks as if it had been coated with rich, red pigments.

From a number of informants in Western North Carolina and Oklahoma, Mooney stitched together another redbird tale ... one of his most interesting renderings of Cherokee spiritual lore.

In “The Daughter of the Sun: The Origins of Death,” we are told that the redbird is the metamorphosed form of the daughter of the sun. It’s a complex story with undercurrents of meaning that I can only briefly summarize here.

The earth became dark after the sun’s daughter was slain. The benevolent Little Men told the Cherokees they must go to “Tsusginai” ... to “the Ghost country in ‘Usunhiyi,’ the Darkening land in the west,” and bring back the lost daughter in a box in order to restore light in their homeland.

“The Little Men told them that they must take a box with them, and that when they got to ‘Tsusginai’ they would find all the ghosts at a dance. They must stand outside the circle, and when the young woman passed in the dance, they must strike her with sourwood rods and she would fall to the ground. They must then put her into the box and bring her back to her mother, but they must be very sure not to open the box, even a little way, until they were home again.”

This they did. On the way home, however, they heard the young woman wailing. She cried out that she had no air and was dying. They tried to withstand these pleas, but finally succumbed and lifted the lid of the box “just a little” to give her air.

“There was a fluttering sound inside and something flew past them into the thicket and they heard a redbird cry, ‘kwish! kwish! kwish!’ in the bushes ...”

Eventually the Cherokees did manage to appease the sun’s grief with artful dancing and singing ... and so the light returned.

This is how we know that the redbird, which we call the cardinal, is the lost daughter of the sun.

I won’t force my personal understanding of this story upon you ... but the next time a cardinal flutters up out of the underbrush and perches like a gleaming omen in the slanting winter light, you’ll surely see him with new eyes.

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News