22 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



thereby quickening life within her, so that she bore 

 Quetzalcoatl. 1 



Wind has been deemed sufficient to cause the 

 birth of gods and heroes. The examples most 

 familiar to us are those of Hera, who conceived 

 Hephaistos without male concurrence by simply 

 inhaling the wind, and of the maiden (in Longfellow's 

 poem called Wenonah) who was quickened by the 

 west wind and bore Michabo, the Algonkin hero better 

 known to us as Hiawatha. The incident appears in 

 the mythology of more than one American people. In 

 the Finnish Kalevala the virgin Ilmatar is fructified 

 by the east wind and gives birth to the wizard Vaina- 

 moinen. 2 The Minahassers of Celebes claim to be de- 

 scended from a girl in primaeval days who was 

 fecundated by the west wind. 3 According to the 

 tradition current in the Luang-Sermata group of islands 

 in the Moluccas the earth and the sky were once 

 nearer together than they are now. The sky was 

 then inhabited, but not the earth. One day, however, 

 a sky-woman climbed down along a rotan-palm-tree 

 whose root is still shown turned to stone on the 

 island of Nolawna. Arrived on earth she was im- 

 pregnated by the south wind and bore many children, 

 who had access to the sky, until the Lord Sun, as the 

 result of strife with them, cut the rotan in two. 4 In a 



1 Brinton, Amer. Hero-Myths, 90 ; Bancroft, iii. 271 ; both citing 

 the Mexican Codex in the Vatican and the Codex Telleriano- 

 Remensis. See also Preuss, Globus, Ixxxvi. 362, who claims that 

 according to Mexican belief the masculine breath was necessary to 

 conception. 



2 Kalevala, runes i. xlv. ; cf. Abercromby. Finns, i. 316, 318, 322. 

 * J. A. T. Schwarz, Int. Arch, xviii. 59. 



4 Riedel, 312. 



