Sqel (Old Marten)
Sqel, the pine marten, is the animal-person worn by the great Klamath transformer and lawgiver, the hero Gatschet titled 'Old Marten.' In Gatschet's cycle, recorded from the interpreter Minnie Froben, Old Marten travels with his younger brother Weasel, the pair tricked by the wicked daughter of an ogre who tears out the hero's heart. In the Crater Lake tradition the same figure is named Skell, Chief of the Above World, whose cataclysmic war with Llao of the underworld attends the collapse of Mount Mazama; the underworld beings seize Skell's heart for a ball-game, yet he prevails and the head of his slain enemy becomes Wizard Island. Modern scholarship recognises Marten, Mink and Skell as personae of the wider Gmukamps (K'mukamtch) transformer complex.
Domains
- transformation and world preparing
- law and the ordering of the myth age
Powers
- to transform beings and prepare the world for the coming people
- to overcome the chief of the below-world in single combat
Epithets
Relations
- subordinate to: K'mukamtchScholarship treats Old Marten / Skell as one of the guises assumed by the transformer Gmukamps (K'mukamtch), who takes the character and name of Marten in this branch of the cycle.Deur, Douglas, In the Footprints of Gmukamps, National Park Service, 2008 (secondary)
Sources
- Sqel, the pine-marten transformer also called Skell, is the Klamath culture-hero who, with his brother Weasel, orders the world and defeats the chief of the underworld to form Crater Lake.: Gatschet, Albert S., The Klamath Indians of Southwestern Oregon (Contributions to North American Ethnology 2), 1890 (secondary); Curtin, Jeremiah, Myths of the Modocs, Boston: Little, Brown, 1912 (secondary); Deur, Douglas, In the Footprints of Gmukamps, National Park Service, 2008 (secondary)