Sacred Texts: Native American

Seneca Indian Myths: Rain Old Man and the Horned Snake (L...

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This is a Native American oral narrative from the Seneca tradition (Haudenosaunee/Iroquois), belonging to the genre of mythological tale or legend. A Seneca warrior, while pursuing a bear during wartime, is lured into a den where he discovers a supernatural old man (identified as Rain Old Man) presiding over a group of spirit beings. The old man performs a ritual death-and-rebirth on willing visitors — dismembering, pounding, and reconstituting their bodies — to restore them to youthful strength and vigor. The renewals serve a specific purpose: Rain Old Man needs supernaturally empowered champions to destroy his enemy, a colossal horned serpent imprisoned in a great rock at the edge of the world, a creature he and his people have been unable to kill themselves. Two Senecas undergo the transformation, are granted immortality, and ultimately slay the serpent by shooting it with their full strength. The tale is distinctive for framing rain, rejuvenation, and cosmic monster-slaying within a reciprocal relationship between humans and a Rain deity — tobacco is the price of divine favor — and for granting ordinary mortals permanent supernatural status as a reward for cosmological service.

Seneca Indian Myths: Rain Old Man and the Horned Snake (L...

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