Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/151

 same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also is a woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double lines to greet her and let her pass. She has a lover among the dead, who has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained by the blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of Bogota, the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of the child of the sun; she was a woman before her husband banished her to the nelds of space. The moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya, and he was guilty of the unpardonable offence of admiring his mother-in-law. As a general rule, the mother-in—law is not even to be spoken to by the savage son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his passion, hence the moon's spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends a beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they shall be born again. Because the spots in the moon were thought to resemble a hare, they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis that a god smote the moon in the face with a rabbit; in Zululand and Thibet by a fancied translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.

The Eskimo have a peculiar myth to account for the moon's spots. Sun and moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once