24 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



their sacred books, fell from him. They are preserved 

 by the agency of angels and at the appointed time a maid 

 bathing in the lake Kasava will come in contact with 

 it, will conceive by it and bring forth Saoshyant, the 

 Saviour who is to reduce all peoples under the yoke 

 of the true religion and prepare the world for the 

 general resurrection. 1 In the twelfth century the 

 Moorish philosopher Averrhoes of Cordova related, 

 as having actually occurred, a case of a woman who 

 became pregnant in a bath by attracting the semen of 

 a man bathing near. In Christian Europe, it is need- 

 less to say, parthenogenesis was long held possible. 

 Controversy on the subject was lively even in the 

 seventeenth century. 



Rain has begotten children too. Montezuma, the 

 culture-hero of the Pueblos of New Mexico, was the 

 son of a maiden of exquisite beauty but fastidious and 

 coy. When the drought fell on her people she opened 

 her granaries and fed them out of her abundance. 

 " At last with rain fertility returned to the earth ; 

 and on the chaste Artemis of the Pueblos its touch 

 fell too. She bore a son to the thick summer shower, 

 and that son was Montezuma." 2 The Pimas of Cali- 

 fornia, the Mojave of the Rio Colorado in Arizona, 

 and the Apaches all tell the same story. 3 According 

 to the Chinese historian Ma-twan-lin, the founder 

 of the kingdom of the Fou-yu was the wonderful son 



1 Indeed she will be thrice fecundated and bear three sons ; or 

 three maidens will be thus successively fecundated. Sacred Books, 

 iv. Ixxix ; v. 143 note, 144; xxiii. 195, 226. See also Tavernier, 

 Six Voyages, 1. iv. c. viii ; E. Blochet, Rev. Hist. Rel. xxxviii. 61. 



8 Bancroft, iii. 175 note; DeCharencey, 235 ; Gushing, ZuniF. T. 



65 

 8 Payne, i. 414 note; Journ. Am. F. L. ii. 178. 



