![]() Going to water, Mooney concluded, was “a part of the ritual for obtaining long life, for winning the affections of a woman, for recovering from a wasting sickness, and for calling down prosperity upon the family at each return of the new moon.” This ceremony of communion touched on nearly all spheres of social life. In daily life, the Cherokee acknowledged the spiritual significance of their local rivers, streams, and ponds with a ritual called “going to water.” Each morning at daybreak, Mooney wrote, a party of Cherokee would be led by a healer down to a running stream, where the group would face the rising sun and immerse themselves completely in the flowing water, enacting a kind of rebirth. ![]() When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again.” We begin in water and we return to water. In “Myths of the Cherokee,” published in The Journal of American Folklore, he recorded the nation’s origin story, in which the Cherokee conceived of the earth as “a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault. Water, Mooney discovered during his season with the Eastern Band, appeared at the very beginning of Cherokee cosmology. ![]()
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