girl, dressed in gay raiment, her neck and arms resplendent with collars
and bracelets of wampum. She inquired for the guests, but Ioskeha, anxious
to save them, dissembled, and replied that he knew not what she meant. She
went forth to search for them, when he called them forth from their hiding
place and bade them flee, and thus they escaped.

It was said of Ioskeha that he acted the part of husband to his
grandmother. In other words, the myth presents the germ of that conception
which the priests of ancient Egypt endeavored to express when they taught
that Osiris was "his own father and his own son," that he was the
"self-generating one," even that he was "the father of his own mother."
These are grossly materialistic expressions, but they are perfectly clear
to the student of mythology. They are meant to convey to the mind the
self-renewing power of life in nature, which is exemplified in the sowing
and the seeding, the winter and the summer, the dry and the rainy seasons,
and especially the sunset and sunrise. They are echoes in the soul of man
of the ceaseless rhythm in the operations of nature, and they become the
only guarantors of his hopes for immortal life.[1]

[Footnote 1: Such epithets were common, in the Egyptian religion, to most
of the gods of fertility. Amun, called in some of the inscriptions "the
soul of Osiris," derives his name from the root _men_, to impregnate, to
beget. In the Karnak inscriptions he is also termed "the husband of his
mother." This, too, was the favorite appellation of Chem, who was a form
of Horos. See Dr. C.P. Tiele, _History of the Egyptian Religion_, pp. 124,
146. 149, 150, etc.]

Let us look at the names in the myth before us, for confirmation of this.
_Ioskeha_ is in the Oneida dialect of the Iroquois an impersonal verbal
form of the third person singular, and means literally, "it is about to