` 1886.] Some Deities and Demons of the Navajos. 845 
west, is their most honored divinity. Various accounts are given 
of her origin. Some versions of the myth declare that she was 
found by First-man and First-woman ; others add that they found 
her at the foot of a rainbow; but the version which I regard as 
the most ancient and purest gives an elaborate account of a spe- 
cial creation, by the gods, of two divine women, one of whom 
was made of a piece of blue turquoise and the other of a piece 
of white shell, precious substances highly valued among the 
Navajos. The former, she of the turquoise, was Astsanat/ehi, the 
latter, called her sister, was Yo/kat-estsan, or White-Shell Woman, 
who figures as a less important character in the myths, This 
Estsanailehi afterwards became the wife of the sun-god, who like 
a true savage god is a polygamist. He has a wife in the east and 
another in the west; but Astsanatlehi, the goddess of the west, is 
beloved. She embodies attributes of various queens of heaven, 
of various wives of the highest deities which appear in a hundred 
mythologies. She has, however, none of the low jealousy and 
Petty spite of her sister Juno; she reminds one more of the Scan- 
dinavian Frigga. If one’s opinions of the Indian is based on the 
Popular accounts of their excessive cruelty, he will marvel that 
such an embodiment of benevolence can have a place in their 
mythology. If his estimate of the social status of the Indian 
‘woman is the one most common in current literature—for she is 
usually represented as the over-worked slave of a pitiless master 
—he will marvel that to a female should be assigned such a high 
place among the gods. But an intimate observance of this peo- 
ple demonstrates that she may fairly represent the Navajo matron 
at her best, 
The name Estsanatlehi signifies the woman who changes or 
rejuvenates, and it is said of her that she never remains in one 
State, but that she grows to be an old woman, and in the course 
of time, at will, she becomes a young girl again, and so passes 
on through an endless cycle of lives, changing but never dying. 
In the light of this narration we see her as none other than our 
Own Mother Nature, the goddess of the changing year, with its 
youth of spring, its middle age of summer, its senility of autumn, 
_STowing old only to become young again. The deity of fruitful 
nature is, it will be admitted, fitly a goddess, and fitly also the 
wife of the sun, to whase potent influence she owes her fertility. 
Our Aryan forefathers never conceived a more consistent myth 
