1894-95. | THREE CARRIER MYTHS. 13

reproduced in the Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology?
explains these mysterious relations. Now the cause assigned to venereal
diseases was the serpent, and the serpent was regarded according to the
commentary thereon “as that from which their diseases proceeded in

9»)

their commencement’.

The culture hero of the Aztecs, in whom was also worshipped the
human reproductive principle, was Quetzalcoatl. According to Dr. D. G.
Brinton’, who speaks after Torquemada‘, “he was the god on whom
depended the fertilization of the womb,” and “sterile women made
their vows to him, and invoked his aid to be relieved from the shame of
barrenness.” Now one correct translation of his name is “the beautiful
serpent” and one of his surnames is, in the Nahuatl language, synonymous
with the virile member. Serpent and phallus—and, by implication,
woman—are here again associated.

In the volume emanating from the Bureau of Ethnology quoted
above is also reproduced what looks as a pictograph which is stated
to have been found in Guatemala. It represents two personages, one,
a skeleton, probably symbolical of death, and the other, a person with
an emaciated face and in a recumbent position, evidently indicative of
a state of sickness. The cause of this is clearly shown in the shape of
the serpent, which here again has the same suggestive relation to man,
since it is made to encircle the loins of the diseased personage’.

But a still stronger argument can be derived from the prevalence of the
serpent myth among the American aborigines. We have already noticed
it among two different Déné tribes. Among the Abenakies the story is
that an oft-married woman was followed by her sixth husband to a wild
place among the rocks and finally to a pond. Aftershe had sung a song, a
serpent came out of the deep which twined around her and enveloped her
limbs and body in its folds®. Here we have, therefore, adulterous inter-
course with death as its consequence, viz., that of her successive husbands.
A variation of the same myth recounts the similarly guilty commerce
between a married woman and Atosis, a beautiful serpent.

Among the Zunis, the serpent is said to have gained power over the
daughter of a priest-doctor who was wandering near a lake and married

her.

1 Washington, 1893, Plate XLIX.

2Tenth Annual Report, etc., p. 614.

3 American Hero-Myths, p. 128. Philadelphia, 1882.
4 Monarquia Indiana, Lib. X1, Cap. XXIV.

5 Ubi Supra, p. 730, fig. 1235.

6 American Antiquarian, Vol. XVI, p. 29.