Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/214

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bulk. The Tacullies have no new light to throw on the origin of man.[1]

The Thlinkeets, who are neighbours of the Tacullies on the north, incline to give a crow or raven the chief rôle in the task of creation, just as the Australians allot the same part to the eagle-hawk, and the Yakuts to a hawk, a crow, and a teal-duck, while Odin in Scandinavian mythology has marked affinities with the eagle. We shall hear much of Yehl later, as one of the mythical heroes of the introduction of civilisation. North of the Thlinkeets, a bird and a dog take the creative duties, the Aleuts and Koniagas being descended from a dog. Among the more northern Tinnehs, the dog who was the progenitor of the race had the power of assuming the shape of a handsome young man. He supplied the protoplasm of the Tinnehs, as Purusha did that of the Aryan world, out of his own body. A giant tore him to pieces, as the gods tore Purusha, and out of the fragments thrown into the rivers came fish, the fragments tossed into the air took life as birds, and so forth.[2] This recalls the Australian myth of the origin of fish and the Ananzi stories of the origin of whips.[3]

Between the cosmogonic myths of the barbarous or savage American tribes and those of the great cultivated American peoples, Aztecs, Peruvians, and Quiches, place should be found for the legends of certain races in the South Pacific. Of these, the most

  1. Bancroft, iii. 98; Harmon's Journey, pp. 302–303.
  2. Hearne, pp. 342–343; Bancroft, iii. 106.
  3. See "Divine Myths of Lower Races." M. Cosquin, in Contes de Lorraine, vol. i. p. 58, gives the Ananzi story.