The origin of the seasons

At a Glance

• Central figures: Selu (Corn Mother) and Kanati (the Lucky Hunter), the first woman and first man in Cherokee tradition, and their two sons - the Wild Boy and the Boy.
• Setting: Cherokee tradition (Southeast Woodlands, southern Appalachian highlands); the story belongs to the body of sacred narratives recorded by James Mooney in the late nineteenth century from Eastern Cherokee sources.
• The turn: The two boys spy on their mother Selu and see how she produces corn and beans from her own body; horrified, they decide she is a witch and resolve to kill her.
• The outcome: Selu, knowing what they intend, instructs them to drag her body across cleared ground seven times after her death so that corn will grow; the boys only drag her body twice over a partial clearing, and so corn grows in only some places and requires hard labor to cultivate, and the world divides into seasons of growth and seasons of dormancy.
• The legacy: The Cherokee planting cycle and the Green Corn Ceremony are tied to Selu’s gift; corn itself, in Cherokee understanding, carries her body forward into every harvest.

Kanati never came home empty-handed. He went into the woods alone each morning and returned by evening with a deer slung across his shoulders, or a turkey, or sometimes a bear. His wife Selu would take whatever he brought and prepare it, and alongside the meat she would set out corn and beans - more than seemed possible for one woman to grow. The boys ate without asking where it came from. Children don’t ask.

But the Wild Boy asked. He was not born in the usual way. He had come up out of the river where Selu washed the game blood from her hands - a child formed from blood and water, fierce and suspicious from his first breath. He lived in the woods for a while before the Boy, Selu and Kanati’s own son, lured him home. The two became inseparable. And once there were two of them, they began to watch things more carefully.

The Storehouse

Selu kept a storehouse set apart from the house. She went in alone. She told the boys to stay out. The Wild Boy said: why? The Boy said nothing - he had learned not to question his mother - but the Wild Boy’s asking planted the question in him too.

One morning after Kanati left for the hunt, the two boys crept to the storehouse and found a crack in the wall where they could see inside. Selu stood over a large basket. She leaned forward and rubbed her stomach, and corn poured from her body into the basket. She rubbed the sides of her body, and beans fell. The basket filled.

The Wild Boy pulled back from the wall. He looked at the Boy.

She is a witch. The food comes from inside her. We have been eating her.

The Boy felt sick. He could not argue with what he had seen. By the time Selu came out of the storehouse with the basket on her hip, both boys had decided. They would kill her.

Selu’s Instructions

Selu set the food before them. She looked at their faces. She knew. She did not need to ask or to read signs - she was Corn Mother, and she understood what the boys had decided before they had fully decided it themselves.

She did not argue. She did not run. She sat with them and gave instructions.

When you have killed me, clear a large piece of ground in front of the house. Clear it of every stone and root. Drag my body over the ground seven times, and wherever my blood touches the earth, corn will come up by morning. Seven times. Do not forget.

The boys listened. The Wild Boy was already holding the sharpened stick.

They killed her in front of the storehouse. Her blood went into the dirt.

The Dragging

The boys began to clear ground. But they were boys, and grief - or guilt, or impatience - made them sloppy. They did not clear a wide space. They cleared a few small patches, not the broad field Selu had described. Then they dragged her body, but not seven times. Twice. They dragged her twice over the cleared spots and then stopped.

Corn came up in those places. By morning the stalks were already pushing through the soil, green and heavy-leaved. But only in those few patches. Not everywhere. Not across the whole face of the earth, as it would have been if they had followed her words exactly.

Because the boys dragged her only twice, corn would not grow everywhere and in all seasons. It would grow only where people cleared the ground themselves, worked the soil with their own hands, and planted with care. And it would grow only part of the year. The rest of the year the ground would go cold, the stalks would brown and break, and the people would live on stored food and whatever Kanati’s kind - the hunters - could bring home from the winter woods.

This is how the seasons came to be split. The growing time is Selu’s gift, the months when her body still yields corn to those who do the work she asked. The cold months are the consequence of the boys’ failure to follow her instructions completely. Had they dragged her seven times across a properly cleared field, corn would grow year-round and the earth would never go dormant.

Kanati’s Stone

Kanati was still in the woods when Selu died. He had his own secrets - he kept the game animals penned inside a hollow rock in the mountains, and each day he rolled the stone aside just enough to let one deer slip out, then sealed it again. The boys found this out too, eventually. They followed their father and rolled the stone wide open, and every animal in the world escaped at once - deer, elk, turkey, rabbit, raccoon, all of them scattering into the mountains in every direction. After that, hunting became difficult. The animals were wild and scattered and did not come easily.

So both halves of the food supply - the corn and the game - were damaged by the boys’ impatience. Selu’s corn grew only in certain places during certain months. Kanati’s game ran free and had to be tracked through hard country. The easy world that the first family had known was over.

Kanati and Selu left after that. Some versions say they went west, to the Darkening Land where the sun goes. Others say they went to live with the wolves. The boys were left behind with the consequences of what they had done, and every generation after them inherited those consequences - the labor of planting, the difficulty of the hunt, the turning of the year from green to brown and back again.

The Corn That Remains

Cherokee women planted Selu’s corn each spring in the river bottoms of the southern Appalachian valleys. They cleared the ground carefully. They knew whose body was in the seed. The Green Corn Ceremony, held when the first ears ripened, marked the moment when Selu’s gift came through again - another year, another yield from ground that did not owe them anything.

The fields went fallow each autumn. The frost came down from the high ridges. The corn dried on the stalk. And the people put the seed away in storage and waited through the cold months, knowing that the turning of the seasons was not a punishment exactly, but the shape of a world made imperfect by two boys who could not finish what their mother asked them to do.