ie TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou. V.

A story of the Tusayans relates the adventures of a mystic Snake
Youth, who brought back and married a strange woman. She gave birth
ne i
to rattlesnakes which, biting the people, compelled them to migrate’.

In the Blackfeet mythology the story of the woman and the serpent
is so much alike to that of our Carriers that we must trace its main
details to a common origin. Briefly told, it is as follows :—The wife of a
hunter had a black-snake for a lover, which lived in a cavern or den in
a patch of timber. The children set fire to the timber and were chased
by the head of their mother, while the body went after the father. The
children threw sticks behind them, which became forests; stones, which
became mountains; moss, which became a river, into which the head
rolled and was drowned?.

Now as to the identification of these various traditions with sacred
history. According to the Carrier legend, a wife had criminal relations
with two big serpents—why wo will soon be explained. Her husband
kills the snakes, cuts off his wife’s head and throws it out of the lodge
with the result that her children become miserable, wandering over land
which is not theirs and incessantly pursued by their mother as if they had
to pay for her own guilt. In the same manner, through guilty inter-
course with the serpent hailing, as in the American legend, from the
tree of “knowledge”, Eve deserved death at the hands of her. Lord and
was punished even in her posterity. She was driven out of the terrestrial

paradise, and her children have now to suffer for the sin of their first
parent.

The myth as current among the Déné (Carrier and Chippewayan) and
the Algonquin (Blackfeet) tribes is rendered even more significant by
the fact that even in far-off Ceylon, the natives venerate a statue represent-
ing the first woman naked and with a snake coiled round her. Now that
woman is represented there /eadless and at the door of the temples, while
her head is, according to Petitot®, placed on the outside of houses as a
talisman against her own malefic powers.

“As to the two serpents of the Carrier myth, the duality of the reptile is
a matter of mere mysticism of numbers. The sacredness of the number

seven among the Semitic nations is well known. Persons ever so little

conversant with American mythology are no less aware of the frequent

occurrence in native legends of the number four and the mystic virtue

1A study of Pueblo Architecture, by Victor Mindeleff.

Eighth Annual Report Bur.
Ethnol., 1891, p. 17.

2Rev. S. D. Peet in Am. Antiq., Vol. XVI, p. 30.

8 Traditions indiennes du Nora- Ouest, p. 393.