Haudenosaunee TraditionRealm
The Sky World
The world above the sky in Haudenosaunee cosmology, with its people, lodges, and a great light-giving tree, from which Sky Woman fell through the hole left when the tree was uprooted.
About The Sky World
The world before this one
Haudenosaunee cosmology begins not with emptiness but with another world: a Sky World above, where beings lived much as people do, in lodges, under a chief. At its centre stood a great tree whose blossoms gave light. When the tree was uprooted, whether because the chief dreamed it must be, or out of jealousy, or for reasons tellers give differently, a hole opened, and Sky Woman fell through it to the waters below.
After the fall
The Sky World does not disappear from the story. In Parker's Seneca material Sapling visits his father there, and in several tellings Sky Woman returns to it. It is, in a sense, the model of which the earth is a copy, and the place from which the seeds of the first plants came.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Arthur C. Parker, Seneca Myths and Folk Tales
- J.N.B. Hewitt, Iroquoian Cosmology, Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports 21 and 43
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.