64 SENECA FICTIOJT, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth ann.S2 



At this point the fictitious Msm-being who was Stone-chid parted 

 company forever with the personified nature force or process that 

 was frost-bearing and icc-chid. The former was gradually reduced 

 to a peculiar species of mankind — the stone giant, for he was repre- 

 sented as stone-clad, while the latter retained his first estate as one 

 of the chief characters in the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples. 



The ordinary Iroquoian concept of the Stone Coat or Stone Giant 

 indicates, to the student at least, that the Winter God, the Great 

 P^rost Giant of the common Iroquoian Genesis myth, was its source. 

 Aside from the evident etymologic connection, the most significant 

 feature is the constant tradition that the home land of these anthro- 

 poid monsters is in the regions of the north where this same authority 

 usually places the burial place of the Winter God after his defeat and 

 death at the hands of his twin brother, the Life God, sometimes 

 called the Master of Life. 



The tales which relate how the Stone Coat people are made from 

 perverse men and women first by carefull_v covering the body with 

 pitch and then by rolling and wallowing in sand and down sand 

 banks repeatedly, shows how utterly forgotten is the true source of 

 this inleresting concept among the story tellers and their hearers. 

 There is no doubt that the original " Stone Coat " was the " Ice-Clad 

 Winter God." In the Curtin collection there are eight stories which 

 refer to the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats, .sometimes called Stone 

 Giants, but there is nothing in them to connect these peculiar ficti- 

 tious monsters with the original conception. In none are the opera- 

 tions of the winter process predicated of these fictitious beings. They 

 are merely exaggerated human figures and not symbols of a process 

 of nature J their deeds are the deeds of men, and are not the acts of 

 a process of nature expressed in terms of human activity. 



And thus is founded the race of the Stone Giants or Stone Coats, or 

 more popularly the Giants. When once these fictitious beings were 

 regarded as human monsters they soon became confused with cruel 

 hermits and bloodthirsty sorcerers who because of evil tastes 

 were cannibals and dwelt apart from the habitations of men, who 

 shunned and feared them, and the tales about them became narra- 

 tives that do not detail the activities of the W^inter God — the pensoni- 

 fied process of nature; and so, like their human prototypes, they 

 increased and midtiplied mightily, and so were as numerous as the 

 leaves on the trees. 



The persons or figures produced by the attribution of human life 

 and mind to all objective and subjective things were, by virtue of the 

 reality of the elements they embodied, the deities or the gods of this 

 system of thought. In brief, they wei"e composed of both the meta- 

 morphosed and of the unchanged first or ancient people who in dis- 

 tinctive character. were conceived of as the formal and outward ex- 



