d. Transformation from human to animal or mineral forms and the
reverse are to be found, as we have seen, everywhere. The slaying of
dragons by gods or heroes is often connected with creation, but belongs
sometimes in the category of cultural or nature myths. Abnormal forms of
birth and generation may be sometimes products of savage fancy, or they
may be attempts to set forth the mysterious or the supernatural in
certain beings, or they may be nature myths: in various mythologies a
god or a hero is born from the side or the thigh or the head of the
mother or the father; fecundation by other means than sexual union
appears in North America, Egypt, Greece, and generally in savage
tribes.[1436] The representation of the primeval parents, Heaven and
Earth, as having been originally united in a close embrace and then
separated, Heaven being lifted up and Earth remaining below, is so
remarkable that it might be doubted whether it arose independently in
different places; yet, as it is found in New Zealand,[1437] in
Egypt,[1438] in India,[1439] among the Masai of Eastern Central
Africa,[1440] and as the supposition of borrowing for these widely
separated communities would be difficult (except, perhaps, as between
Egypt and the Masai land), it is simpler to regard the myth as a natural
effort of early science.[1441] It need hardly be added that with all the
similarities in the various cosmogonic systems the diversities among
different peoples are as numerous as the differences of surroundings and
character.

+838+. Among most early communities the great figures of the past
(creations of imagination) to whom are ascribed the introduction of the
arts of life and the general betterment of society are regarded as
demigods, descended from parents one of whom is divine and the other
human; it is sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, that is
divine.[1442] This conception is a simple and natural explanation of the
supposed extraordinary powers of the personages in question. A more
refined conception represents man as receiving life from the breath of
God,[1443] whence easily comes the idea that man is the child of God and
has in him a spark of divinity.

+839+. _Ethnogonic myths._ Early science has to account not only for
the origin of the world and the human race, but also for the origin of
particular tribes and their surroundings. The area involved is the known
world, which among savage peoples is small in extent but increases