Lame Gods.
(Vol. ix., p. 295.)
In Mr. Hartland's article on "The High Gods of Australia " (Folk-Lore, December, 1898), the following passage occurs: "The name of Daramulun is a secret known only to the Murring tribes and their congeners. It is said to mean leg-on-one-side, or lame, probably from a personal peculiarity, like Tsuni||goam among the Hottentots."
Whether a personal peculiarity can be the occasion of these recurring epithets is a point of doubt, to say the least. Tsuni||goam is said to mean, literally, wounded knee. This is precisely the attribute of the Finnish divine hero Wäinä-möinen, who, it was said, was building a boat when he wounded his knee with his own hatchet. He was thereafter appealed to for healing, like Tsuni||goam or Wounded Knee.
Lame gods are, in fact, not infrequent in mythologies. It is hardly necessary to remind readers of Hephaistos, the Fire-god of the Greeks, who was cast forth from heaven by the Thunderer and lamed by the fall, and who thenceforth worked as a smith in the nether regions. But I would draw special attention to a curious wood-cut in Mrs. Nuttall's recent study of ancient Mexican religion.[1] It reproduces a Mexican drawing representing a divine figure on one leg, the foot of which is held in a fire-drill. The other leg stands free, so that "the only action possible is that of hobbling on one foot in a circle." Here we have a pictured Leg-on-one-side. This divinity, the chief god Tezcatlipoca, is "usually represented with one foot." When shown walking, one foot planted and the other following, he is within a circle of carefully-delineated footsteps. His foot is said to have been bitten off by an alligator (cf. the Fenris wolf and the god Tyr in Scandinavian mythology); and "the broken end of the leg-bone is commonly depicted with its hollowness accentuated, and puffs of air or breath issuing from it." It was "in descending to the water" that the catastrophe occurred.
- ↑ Zelia Nuttall, "The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisations:" Arch. and Ethnol. Papers of the Peabody Museum (Harvard), vol. ii. (1901), p. 9; fig. 1, p. 10, and fig. 59, p. 279.
