The symbolic unity of the sun and earth : An Apachean girl's puberty ceremony

In the anthropological literature of Apachean myths and rituals, one will find a strong relationship between a girl at her puberty ceremony and a mythic being called the White-Painted-Woman. A puberty ceremony is held when a girl has her first menses, and is regarded by the Apachean community as central to cultural and social values. In a religious sense, what is important about the girl's puberty ceremony is that the girl for whom the ceremony is held becomes the White-Painted- Woman during the ceremony. In this paper, I locate the girl's puberty ceremony in a matrix of rites of passage from the birth ceremony to the funeral ceremony and explore its religious and symbolic meanings. It is well known that the girl not only symbolically becomes the White-Painted-Woman but also ritually reenacts the mythic event of a sexual union between a girl and the sun, out of which the mythic hero called the Slayer of the Monsters was born. I argue that the girl's puberty ceremony takes place in a broader mythic and legendary world, in which women also give birth to monsters. This mythic and legendary background points out the mythic dual nature of women, which functions as a mythic background for the girl's puberty ceremony.