Australians. Death introduced by woman going to tabooed tree.
MYTHS OF DEATH. To account for death, regarded by some savage races as unnatural. Usually some custom or taboo is supposed to have been broken, or some ritual neglected or mismanaged, and death has followed. The reasons given by the different races are as follows:
Greeks. Death comes from lifting cover off Pandora's box.
Hindus. Yama is pioneer to the Otherworld.
Southern India. Death (snake) bites men while God sleeps. God makes dog drive away snake; thus dogs howl at approach of death.
Ningphos (Bengal). Think they became mortal through bathing in tabooed water.
Bushmen. The mother of the little hare is dead. The moon strikes the hare on its lip, splitting it in two, and tells it that its mother is really dead and will not live again as the moon does.
Hottentots. The moon sends the hare to men to tell them that they will live again as he (the moon) does, but the hare forgets the message and tells men that they will surely die, for which mistake the moon burns a hole in his lip.
Namaquas. The hare and the moon's mother.
Central Africans. Sleep unknown; woman offers to teach man how to sleep; holds his nostrils; man never wakes; dying made easy.