Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/379

Rh the tail-fishing is attributed in different countries to one animal after another, the bear, the wolf, the hyæna, the jackal, the racoon, the monkey, and the jaguar, authorizes the opinion that, in most cases at least, it is one of those floating ideas which are taken up as part of the story-teller's stock in trade, and used where it suits him, but with no particular subordination to fact.

Lastly, another Old World story which has a remarkable analogue in South America is that of the Diable Boiteux. This, however, in the state in which it is known to modern Europe, is a conception a good deal modified under Christian influences. In the old mythology of our race, it is the Fire-god who is lame. The unsteady flickering of the flames may perhaps be figured in the crooked legs and hobbling gait of Hephæstus, and Zeus casts him down from heaven to earth like his crooked lightnings; while the stones which correspond with the Vulcan-myth on German ground tell of the laming of Wieland, our Wayland Smith, the representative of Hephæstus. The transfer of the lameness of the Fire-god to the Devil seems to belong to the mixture of the Scriptural Satan with the ideas of heathen gods, elves, giants, and demons, which go to form that strange compound, the Devil of popular mediæval belief.

There is something very quaint in the notion of a lame god or devil, but it is quite a familiar one in South Africa. The deity of the Namaquas and other tribes is Tsui'kuap, whose principal attributes seem to be the causing of pain and death. This being received a wound in his knee in a great fight, and "Wounded- knee" appears to be the meaning of his name. Moffat's account, which is indeed not very clear, fits with a late remark made by Livingstone among another people of South Africa, the Bakwains. He observes that near the village of Sechele there is a cave called Lepelole, which no one dared to enter, for it was the common belief that it was the habitation of the Deity, and that no one who went in ever came out again. "It is curious," he says, "that in all their pretended dreams or visions of their god he