Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

142 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
SURVIVAL OF THE SOUL
At death the soul leaves the body and becomes a ghost (aSGf'na).
It travels to the ghost country (tsu'sGtnoyi), in the Night Land
(u^so'^'yi'), in the west, in seven days.
It does not haunt the settlements, nor the burial places, nor does
it ever return. Some informants are not so sure as to this: they claim
that the ghosts sometimes return, viz, when they come to make
people ill, or to come and fetch them before they die, to show them
the way to the ghost coimtry. These opinions, however, I am inclined
to consider as individual beliefs, based chiefly on dreams and personal
experiences.
In tlie Night Land the ghost people live exactly according to the
native pattern; they live in settlements, have chiefs and councils,
clans and families (everybody who dies goes and joins the relatives
who have preceded him); they go hunting and fishing, have ball
games and dances, etc.
There does not seem to exist any differentiation based upon moral
conduct in this life, the Cherokee believing that morality is to be
observed for its own sake, without hope of recompense or fear of
punishment in the next life. These conceptions are now slowly being
superseded by hazy beliefs influenced by Christian oschatology.
Some interesting facts on this score are being revealed by dreams,
which indicate that some kind of a differentiation must once have
been believed in, of which people now have lost all recollection.
One informant (AV.) told me his mother (Ayo.) was wont to tell
him of the following experience of hers:
Shortly after the Civil War the Cherokee were visited with smallpox.
She was one of the many stricken, and she died (sic); she went along
a road and came to a settlement where the people lived who had died
as she traveled on slie came to another settlement, the chief of which
had been a chief in his lifetime; she had known him. The chiefs held
a council about her and decided that she could not come and live
mth them yet. They sent her back. So she walked back to where
she lived. She recovered from the smallpox. "And it was not a
dream cither," the informant added.
Another, far more interesting experience was told by the individual
to whom it happened, T. (PI. 10, c.) He relates it as follows:
About 37 years ago ho was very ill; all his relatives expected him
to die, and they had gathered by his bedside. He became unconscious;
it seemed to him as if he fell asleep. The people who were
with him told him later that he actually died; he did not breathe for
half an hour.
It seemed to him as if he got up from his bed, walked out of the
cabin, and started traveling ahuig a path. lie clhubcd to the top of
a mountain, where suddenly he saw a beautiful plain, a meadow,