4 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



wide distribution of the stories and their inexhaustible 

 wealth. 



We will take first the stories in which pregnancy is 

 attributed to eating or drinking. Heitsi-eibib, the 

 divine ancestor of the Hottentots, owed his birth to 

 this cause. In one of the legends a young girl picks a 

 kind of juicy grass, chews it, and swallows the sap. 

 Thence becoming pregnant she gives birth to the hero. 

 In another legend it is a cow that eats of a certain 

 grass, and Heitsi-eibib is consequently born as a bull- 

 calf. 1 The quasi-divine hero of the tribes of British 

 Columbia, Yehl, was many times born. His ordinary 

 proceeding was to transform himself into a spear of 

 cedar, a blade of grass, a pebble, or even a drop of water. 

 In this form he was swallowed by the lady who was 

 destined to bear him. 2 The Sia, a pueblo-people of 

 the south-west of North America, relate that their hero 

 Poshaiyanne, was born at the pueblo of Pecos, New 

 Mexico, of a virgin who became pregnant from eating 

 two pinon-nuts. 3 According to the sacred legends of 

 the Hopi, another pueblo-people, a horned Katcina, a 

 mythological personage, appeared in a time of re- 

 ligious laxity and of distress to the oldest woman of 

 the Patki tribe, and directed that the oldest man 

 should go and procure a certain root and that she and 

 a young virgin of the clan should eat of it. After 

 a time the old woman, he said, would give birth to a 

 son who would marry the virgin and their offspring 

 would redeem the people. The Katcina was obeyed, 



1 Hahn, Tsuni-\\goam, 69, 68. 



a Bancroft, iii. 99, apparently quoting Holmberg, Ethn. Skies.; 

 Niblack, Nat. Mus. Rep. 1888, 379. The incident is very 

 common in stories of the North- West. 



* Rgp. Bur. Ethn. xi. 59. 



