196 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



and eat this basket of grass-seed pinole." He touches 

 the basket and its contents vanish. Thereupon the 

 girl swoons. When she returns to consciousness, 

 behold ! she has already given birth to a son. The 

 Red Cloud tells her : " You love me now ; that is my 

 boy, but he is not of this world. . . . He shall be 

 greater than all men ; he shall have power over all, 

 and not fear any that live. Therefore shall his name 

 be Oan-koi-tu-peh (the Invincible). Whenever you 

 see him, think of me. This boy has no life apart from 

 me ; he is myself." 1 Compare with this the statement 

 concerning Cuchulainn, one of the mythological heroes 

 of Ireland, and himself a new birth of the god Lug. 

 The great epic cycles took final shape after the wars 

 with the Danes in the eleventh century. A manu- 

 script of that period relates that the men of Ulster 

 took counsel about Cuchulainn, because they were 

 troubled and afraid he would perish early, " so for that 

 reason they wished to give him a wife that he might 

 leave an heir, for they knew that his re-birth would be 

 of himself." 2 



These passages, though related of more than 

 common men, point to a belief shared by the ancient 

 Irish with the Maidu of California that the son is in 

 some sense identical with his father a new birth, a 

 new manifestation of the same person. This curious 

 belief, implicit throughout the laws and philosophy of 

 the Indian Aryans, finds categorical expression in the 

 great Brahman compilation known as the Laws of 



1 Powers, Tribes of Calif ornia y Contrib. N. Amer. Ethn. Hi. 299. 

 The Haida tell of a mythological hero whom they identify with the 

 moon, that he married a woman "from whom he was presently re- 

 born in the form of a woman " ( Swan ton, Jesup Exped. v. 204). 



2 Kuno Meyer, The Wooing of Emer, Arch. Rev. i. 70. 



