Note 112.1 — Chapter V · THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN SAGAS.

To the aborigines of North America, however, this unusual mode of generation has always been within the limits of belief. Yehl, the famous hero of the North-west Coast, effected one of his numerous births by transforming himself into a spear of cedar or a blade of grass, or, as it is told in a variant, a drop of water, and being swallowed by his principal opponent’s daughter, or sister, as she was drinking. Most legendary heroines have been satisfied with one such miracle. This lady seems to have been specially unfortunate; and we do not wonder at the suspicions of her natural guardian, when we are expressly told that she was not allowed to eat or drink anything until the chief had examined it, as she had become pregnant from eating certain things many times before. One man cannot know all Yehl’s adventures, as the Thlinkit very truly assert; for all their accounts differ. The adventure we are now dealing with was undertaken for the purpose of rescuing the sun, moon and stars, which his antagonist, whose favourite grandson he thus became, had stored away in three mysterious chests. On a previous occasion he had assumed the unlikely form of a small pebble on the sea-shore. A woman whose sons had all been slain by her brother was pacing the beach and weeping for the dead, when a large fish—it is equally credible whether a dolphin or a whale—pitied her and spoke to her, telling her to swallow the pebble and drink some sea-water. She did so, and bore a child, Yehl, who avenged her on his uncle. After all his various achievements on behalf of mankind, Yehl became the totem of the Raven Clan of the Thlinkit.112.1 When America was discovered, the Aztecs, though they had not emerged from the Stone Age, were, compared with the Thlinkit, a civilised people. Yet they continued to believe in the generation of their famous god Quetzalcoatl in a similar manner to that of Yehl. One account relates that he owed his birth to a precious green stone, identified by Captain Bourke with the turquoise, which his mother Chimalma found one day while sweeping, and swallowed.113.1