Split Boys

The Split Boys, Kiowa Zaidethali ('Half Boys'), are the twin culture-heroes of Kiowa mythology. They come into being when Sun Boy throws his ring against his grandmother's warning and it divides him into two identical youths. As a pair they roam the early world destroying the monsters that prey on people. Their story ends in a double transformation: one of the twins walks into a lake and is never seen again, while the other changes himself into ten portions, becoming the Talyi-da-i or Ten Medicines, the holiest bundles of the tribe. Because Kiowa narrative consistently treats them as a single dyadic hero-pair born of one body, they are registered here as one figure rather than two.

Parentage

• source (the boy from whom they split): Sun Boy

Children

• Ten Medicines

Domains

• monster slaying
• world ordering

Powers

• to hunt down and destroy the monsters that threaten the people
• to vanish, one twin walking into a lake forever

Relations

• creator of: Ten MedicinesWhen their monster-slaying is finished, one of the two Half Boys transforms himself into the ten sacred bundles, the Talyi-da-i or Ten Medicines.James Mooney, 'Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians' (Smithsonian Institution, 1898) (secondary)

Sources

• The Zaidethali or Split Boys are the Kiowa twin culture-heroes, formed by the division of Sun Boy, who destroy the world's monsters before one disappears into a lake and the other becomes the Ten Medicines.: James Mooney, 'Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians', Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution, 1898) (secondary); Benjamin R. Kracht, 'Kiowa Belief and Ritual' (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) (secondary)