Hashtahli (the Sun)

Hashtahli is the Choctaw name for the sun regarded as a supreme overseeing power. Ethnographers from the nineteenth century onward record that the Choctaw held the sun to possess an all-seeing eye that watched human behaviour and upheld honesty; a person swearing to the truth spoke the oath 'in the face of the sun', calling the sun to witness. Swanton, drawing on Choctaw informants and on earlier collectors such as Henry S. Halbert, analyzes the name from 'hashi', sun, and treats the moon as a night-sun associated with the day-sun, while the stars were spoken of as the sun's own. In some accounts the solar overseer is identified or blended with a creator named Aba (the one above), an overlap scholars read as theological fluidity rather than two wholly separate gods.

Domains

• sun and daylight
• moral order and oaths

Powers

• to watch over and bear witness to all human conduct
• to give light and sustain life as the sun

Epithets

• Hashi Tali

Sources

• Swanton, John R. 'Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians.' Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 103. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1931.
• Cushman, Horatio Bardwell. 'History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians.' Greenville, Texas: Headlight Printing House, 1899.