Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies

Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies is the great agricultural goddess of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages of the upper Missouri and, after the creator pair, among the most important of the Mandan sacred beings. Maximilian, Prince of Wied, recorded in the 1830s that she was believed to live somewhere in the south and to make the crops grow, sending the migratory waterfowl north each spring as her tokens and representatives — the wild goose standing for the maize, the wild swan for the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. At the spring corn-medicine feast of the women, scaffolds were hung with dried meat as offerings to her; old women representing the goddess carried ears of maize on sticks, and grains of the consecrated corn were mixed with the seed corn to fertilize it, while in autumn the departing birds were believed to carry the people's offerings back to her lodge in the south. The women's Goose Society, whose members were women in their middle years, danced in her honor at the arrival and departure of the waterfowl and for the good of the corn. Recent scholarship has traced her iconography and cult deep into the pre-contact archaeology of the region.

Domains

• corn and garden crops
• migratory waterfowl

Powers

• to make the corn and garden crops grow
• to send the wild geese, swans, and ducks north in spring as her tokens
• to live on from age to age without dying

Sources

• Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America, translated by H. Evans Lloyd, London: Ackermann and Co., 1843.
• Alfred W. Bowers, Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.
• Martha Warren Beckwith, Mandan-Hidatsa Myths and Ceremonies (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 32), New York: J. J. Augustin for the American Folklore Society, 1938.
• "Mandan", in Timothy J. O'Leary and David Levinson (eds.), Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol. 1: North America, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.