Deals with the winter festival of the Eskimo and with the related myth of the goddess Sedna. This festival possesses many features in common with the spring fertility ceremonies of Europe and with the puberty rites of more primitive peoples (death and rebirth, masked phallic demons, renewing of fire, etc.). Both ritual and mythical elements appear to be composite in nature, one portion being native in origin, or at any rate developed among a people living by the sea, the other imported from more central parts of the American continent. On the psychological side there is revealed a complicated structure resulting from amalgamation of various aspects of the Oedipus complex, while it is suggested that factors connected with the birth trauma and even phylogenetic elements (in the sense of Ferenczi's view of individual birth as a recapitulation of the racial emergence from the water to the land) are also active.