Religion
The religious conceptions of the Kato tribe are grouped around two deities: Chénĕśh or T'cenes, the creator, who is identified with thunder and lightning, and his companion, Nághai-cho or Nagaicho, the Great Traveler. The latter is a somewhat mischievous personage, who in the myth, constantly urges Chénĕśh to acts of creation, while pretending that he has the knowledge and power to perform them, if only he has the desire to do so.
In mythology, as in other phases of their culture, the Kato tribe showed their susceptibility to the double influence to which they had been exposed. With a creation story of the type prevailing in central California, they preceded it with an account of a race of animal-people who were swept from the earth by the deluge — a theme characteristic of North Pacific Coast mythology.
The creator, Chénĕśh, who is identified with lightning, dwelt in the sky. Below was an expanse of water, with a rim of land in the north. With his companion, Nághai-cho, he descended and turned a monstrous deer into land. Chénĕśh created the people, but Nághai-cho made the mountains and the streams. In everything, the latter tried to outdo Chénĕśh, playing the role (usually assigned to coyote) of the buffoon and trickster.
Cahto people also belonged to the Kuksu religion.
Read more about this topic: Cahto People, Culture
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“One’s religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success.”
—J.M. (James Matthew)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made—no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)