14 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. V. 



A story of the Tusayans relates the adventures of a mystic Snake 

 Youth, who brought back and married a strange woman. She gave birth 

 to rattlesnakes which, biting the people, compelled them to migrated 



In the Blackfeet mythology the story of the woman and the serpent 

 is so much alike to that of our Carriers that we must trace its main 

 details to a common origin. Briefly told, it is as follows : — The wife of a 

 hunter had a black-snake for a lover, which lived in a cavern or den in 

 a patch of timber. The children set fire to the timber and were chased 

 by the head of their mother, while the body went after the father. The 

 children threw sticks behind them, which became forests; stones, which 

 became mountains ; moss, which became a river, into which the head 

 rolled and was drowned 2. 



Now as to the identification of these various traditions with sacred 

 history. According to the Carrier legend, a wife had criminal relations 

 with two big serpents — why tivo will soon be explained. Her husband 

 kills the snakes, cuts off his wife's head and throws it out of the lodge 

 with the result that her children become miserable, wandering over land 

 which is not theirs and incessantly pursued by their mother as if they had 

 to pay for her own guilt. In the same manner, through guilty inter- 

 course with the serpent hailing, as in the American legend, from the 

 tree of " knowledge ", Eve deserved death at the hands of her Lord and 

 was punished even in her posterity. She was driven out of the terrestrial 

 paradise, and her children have now to suffer for the sin of their first 

 parent. 



The myth as current among the Dene (Carrier and Chippewayan) and 

 the Algonquin (Blackfeet) tribes is rendered even more significant by 

 the fact that even in far-off Ceylon, the natives venerate a statue represent- 

 ing the first woman naked and with a snake coiled round her. Now that 

 woman is represented there headless and at the door of the temples, while 

 her head is, according to Petitot^^, placed on the outside of houses as a 

 talisman against her own malefic powers. 



As to the two serpents of the Carrier myth, the duality of the reptile is 

 a matter of mere mysticism of numbers. The sacredness of the number 

 seven among the Semitic nations is well known. Persons ever so little 

 conversant with American mythology are no less aware of the frequent 

 occurrence in native legends of the number four and the mystic virtue 



^ A study of Fueblo Architecture, by Victor Mindeleff. Kighth Annual Report Bur. 

 Ethnol., 1891, p. 17. 



''Rev. S. D. Peet in Am. Antiq., Vol. XVI, p. 30. 



' Traditions indiennes dii Nora-Ouest, p. 393. '^ 



