μῦθοι Mythoi
Motif

The Soul.

The dead. · The soul. · The Soul. · view the constellation · filed as E700

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“When the elder sister saw that the rabbit had all been eaten, she became very angry, and said, “Now I have a mind to kill you.” So the little sister arose quickly, took her little brother on her back, and said, “I am going out to look for wood.”’ As she went out, she followed the narrow trail through the prickly-pears and met her six brothers in the brush. Then they decided to leave the country, and started off as fast as they could go.”

Tales of the North American Indians, Tale 64 · served from our shelf  receiptuncorrected OCR — being verified against the scan

Attested across traditions
Scholars’ trail — 10references

The index’s own references — the collections where scholars sighted this story-shape, tradition by tradition. Titles on our shelf are live links; the rest is the frontier, not yet shelved.

  • Irish myth*Cross
  • EstonianLoorits Grundzüge I 182–190, 251–266, 491–506
  • GermanMeyer Germanen 68ff.
  • JewishNeuman
  • N. Am. Indian (Iroquois)Hewitt The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul (JAFL VIII 107).
  • general **Tobler
  • general **Feilberg Sjæletro (København, 1914)
  • general Åke Hultkrantz Conceptions of the Soul among the North American Indians (Stockholm, 1953)
  • general Hilda R. Ellis The Road to Hell, A Study in the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (London, 1943) 170ff. Greek: Waser Über die äussere Erscheinung der Seele in den Vorstellungen der Völker, zumal der alten Griechen (Archiv für Religionswissenschaft XVI [1914] 336)
  • general Skandinavian: *K. S. Kramer Die Dingbeseelung in der germanischen Überlieferung (München, 1939)
Within the index
8 finer motifs beneath it
Names given the soulSoul of objectComposition of the soulCreation of soulsSoul forgets everything at birthAbode of unborn soulsPerson with more than one soulSoul sustained on pleasant odors
Travels with
Fairies as souls of departed. (Cf. E700.)Murder causes dwarf to lose his soul. (Cf. E700.)
Keeps company with — shares receipted episodes
Bear paramour. (Cf. B601.1., B631, B635.)Vital bodily members. They possess life independent of the rest of the body. (Cf. F1096.)Achilles heel. Invulnerability except in one spot

wander