An owl--One of the commonest claims put forth by the medicine men is that of ability to understand the language…
- Date of account
- Material collected chiefly 1887-1890; published 1900
- Source
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
- Reference
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology · selected passage 181
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English with Cherokee names and material translated from oral testimony
- Translation
- Collected and edited by James Mooney
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
an owl--One of the commonest claims put forth by the medicine men is that of ability to understand the language of birds and to obtain supernatural knowledge from them, particularly from the owl, which is regarded with a species of fear by the laity, as the embodiment of a human ghost, on account of its nocturnal habit…
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyan owl--One of the commonest claims put forth by the medicine men is that of ability to understand the language of birds and to obtain supernatural knowledge from them, particularly from the owl, which is regarded with a species of fear by the laity, as the embodiment of a human ghost, on account of its nocturnal habit and generally uncanny appearance. A medicine man who died a few years ago among the Kiowa claimed to derive his powers from that bird. The body of an owl, wrapped in red cloth and decorated with various trinkets, was kept constantly suspended from a tall pole set up in front of his tipi, and whenever at night the warning cry sounded from the thicket he was accustomed to leave his place at the fire and go out, returning in a short while with a new revelation.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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