The Tree of Light and Flowers (Jane Whitefield #10)

Front Matter

In the beginning before there was any earth, there was a world above, in the sky… There was no sun or moon or stars; instead, there was a great tree that shed light half the time and half the time kept dark, so that the sky-beings had a kind of night and day.

… The youngest of the four brothers took the tree down to the ground.

Then the whole tree, roots, trunk, branches, and leaves, plunged through the hole…

When they came to the place where the tree had stood, they saw only the hole in the plain.

The man-being stood at the edge of the pit and looking down saw a light.

He called to his wife, “Come and look. Sit down by me.” So she did.

Then he blessed the tree that had fallen through the earth for the new creation and he blessed the young tree that remained.

While they sat there and gazed at the light below, an air came up through the hole in the earth, very tender, and they heard the sound of the south wind, which is the air of life.

And from this air she conceived a child.

He said to her, “Do you see plainly the light below?” She answered, Yes.”

“There shall be your new home, on a new-created earth below, and you shall be the mother of the earth-beings,” he said. And he pushed her off the edge of the pit and she fell through the hole in the sky.

—The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, by Anthony F. C. Wallace, Vintage Books, 1972