Note 146.1 — LIST OF SOME OF THE WORKS REFERRED TO

While these sheets were passing through the press, Comte H. de Charencey, of whose studies I have availed myself in the foregoing pages, republished the substance of his articles on the Virgin’s Son, with additions, in a work entitled Les Folklore dans les deux mondes (Paris, Klincksieck, 1894). He seeks there to show that the New World borrowed many of its legends from the Old, and among them that of the Supernatural Birth. If I understand him aright, he follows M. Angrand in attributing Mexican civilisation to an Asiatic origin, and declares that while traditions of a powerful hero born without a father are found among the tribes whose culture was drawn from this source, they are not found among other peoples, like the Mayas and the Peruvians, whose civilisation is to be ascribed to an easterly provenience. It is always dangerous to assert a negative. We have already seen (ante, p. 118) that the Peruvians had a tradition of the Supernatural Birth, although the offspring did not turn out a hero. But Hiawatha was a hero exactly of the kind referred to; and the foremother of the Bakaïrí of Central Brazil gave birth to the twin culture-heroes and parents of the race from swallowing two finger-bones. Von den Steinen, 373. The myth is far too widely spread, and far too deeply rooted in the savage beliefs of both hemispheres, to be simply accounted for by borrowing.