“The story of Joa lo Praube is repeated almost word for word in the adventures of the Kamtchatkan god ‘Kutka;’ or, to be more exact, there is a myth in which it is narrated that that god had a great many tricks played upon him, in one of which he runs sticks into his gluteal region.”—(Steller, translated by Bunnemeyer.)
This god Kutka was a great sodomite, and in some points, resembled the anti-natural god of the Sioux.
Speaking of the god “Aidowedo,” the serpent in the Rainbow as believed by the Negroes of Guinea, Father Baudin says: “He who finds the excrement of this serpent is rich forever, for with this talisman he can change grains of corn into shells which pass for money.” (“Fetichism,” Rev. F. Baudin, New York, 1885, p. 47.) He goes on to narrate a very amusing tale to the effect that the negroes got the idea that a prism in his possession gave him the power to bring the Rainbow down into his room at will, and that he could obtain unlimited quantities of the precious excrement.
Another myth of the foolish god “Kutka” represents him as falling in love with his own excrement and wooing it as his bride; he takes it home in his sleigh, puts it in his bed, and is only restored to a sense of his absurd position by the vile smell.—(Steller, translated by Bunnemeyer.)
Possibly all this may be a myth to explain or to represent the state of mind into which those who indulged in the “muck-a-moor” were thrown, but even this interpretation seems far-fetched.
Sir John Moore, it is stated, fell in love with his own urine, and we have read from Montaigne the story of the French gentleman who preserved his egestæ to show to his visitors.
The tribes of the Narinyeri, Encounter Bay, South Australia, have a legend that difference in language was caused when certain of their ancestors “ate the contents of the intestines of the goddess ‘Wurruri.’”—(“Nat. tribes of South Australia,” Adelaide, 1879, p. 60, received through the kindness of the Roy. Soc., Sydney, N. S. Wales, T. B. Kyngdon, Secretary.)
In the same chapter we are told of the omission of one or two ceremonies “which were too indecent for general readers” (p. 61).
In the “Bachiller de Salamanca,” Le Sage has a hero whose misfortunes would lead us to suspect that Le Sage had been reading of some of the doings of the Kamtchatkan god “Kutka,” who, among the numerous pranks played upon him by his enemies, the mice, suffered the ignominy of having “a bag made of fish-skin attached to his orificium ani while he lay sound asleep. On his way home Kutka desired to relieve nature, but was much surprised, on leaving, at the insignificant deposit notwithstanding he had freed himself of so great a burden.