he above; and they, her children, feel safe,
and sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help
that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month.
It is ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the
place of all.

"Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his
children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn;
so she must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. You see the
Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark
will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a
little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of
her. But soon more of her children are gone, and again she must put on
her face the pitch and the black."

Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the explanation is as
advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the
sun goes when he passes from our view. And still the Great Spirit is
over all: Religion comes athwart Myth.

Mr. Tylor quotes(1) a nature myth about sun, moon and stars which
remarkably corresponds to the speculation of the Piutes. The Mintira of
the Malayan Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The stars
are the moon's children; once the sun had as many. They each agreed
(like the women of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children;
but the sun swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers.
When the sun saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to
kill her. Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an
eclipse. The Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but say
that the sun cleft the moon in twain for her treachery, and that she
continues to be cut in two and grow again every month. With these sun
and moon legends sometimes coexists the RELIGIOUS belief in a Creator of
these and of all things.

(1) Primitive Culture, i. 356.

In harmony with the general hypothesis that all objects in nature
are personal, and human or bestial, in real shape, and in passion
and habits, are the myths which account for eclipses. These have so
frequently been published and commented on(1) that a long statement
would be tedious and superfluous. To the savage mind, and even to the
Chinese and the peasants of some European countries, the need of an
explanation is satisfied by the myth that an evil beast is devouring the
sun or the moon