sfigured
her face. Elsewhere the sun is the girl, beloved by her own brother,
the moon; she blackens her face to avert his affection. On the Rio
Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl who loved her
brother and visited him in the dark. He detected her wicked passion by
drawing his blackened hand over her face. The marks betrayed her, and,
as the spots on the moon, remain to this day.[150]

Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great
beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood
is used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an
Egyptian myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there
is no end to similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as
a man, or even as a beast.

To return to the stars--

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'hold many of the planets to be
transformed adventurers.' The Iowas 'believed stars to be a sort of
living creatures.' One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and
showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California,
according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and
lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each
other's faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such
accidents in the future. But the very oddest example of the survival
of the notion that the stars are men or women is found in the 'Pax' of
Aristophanes. Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to
heaven. A slave meets him, and asks him, 'Is not the story true, then,
that we become stars when we die?' The answer is, 'Certainly'; and
Trygaeus points out the star into which Ios of Chios has just been
metamorphosed. Aristophanes is making fun of some popular Greek
superstition. But that very superstition meets us in New Zealand.
'Heroes,' says Mr. Tylor, 'were thought to become stars of greater or
less brightness, according to the number of their victims slain in
fight.'

The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there are ludicrous notions
to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have seen that
Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars are souls
of the dead. The Persians had the same belief,[151] 'all the
unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.'[152] The German
folklore clings to the same belief, 'Stars are souls; when a child
dies God makes a new star.' Kaegi quotes[153] the same idea from the
Veda, and from the Satapath