enemy. Indra cut him in two, and made the moon out of half of
his body. This serpent was a universal devourer of everything and
everybody, like Kwai Hemm, the all-devourer in Bushman mythology.
If this invention is a late priestly one, the person who introduced
it into the Satapatha-Brahmana must have reverted to the
intellectual condition of Bushmen. In the fight with Vrittra, Indra
lost his energy, which fell to the earth and produced plants and
shrubs. In the same way plants, among the Iroquois, were made of
pieces knocked off Chokanipok in his fight with Manabozho. Vines,
in particular, are the entrails of Chokanipok. In Egypt, wine was
the blood of the enemies of the gods. The Aryan versions of this
sensible legend will be found in Satapatha-Brahmana.[1] The civilized
mind soon wearies of this stuff, and perhaps enough has been said
to prove that, in the traditions of Vedic devotees, Indra was not a
god without an irrational element in his myth. Our argument is,
that all these legends about Indra, of which only a sample is given,
have no necessary connexion with the worship of a pure nature-god
as a nature-god would now be constructed by men. The legends
are survivals of a time in which natural phenomena were regarded,
not as we regard them, but as persons, and savage persons, Alcheringa
folk, in fact, and became the centres of legends in the savage manner.
Space does not permit us to recount the equally puerile and barbarous
legends of Vishnu, Agni, the loves of Vivasvat in the form of a horse,
the adventures of Soma, nor the Vedic amours (paralleled in several
savage mythologies) of Pururavas and Urvasi.[2]
Divine Myths of Greece.—If any ancient people was thoroughly civilized the Greeks were that people. Yet in the mythology and religion of Greece we find abundant survivals of savage manners and of savage myths. As to the religion, it is enough to point to the traces of human sacrifice and to the worship of rude fetish stones. The human sacrifices at Salamis in Cyprus and at Alos in Achaia Phthiotis may be said to have continued almost to the conversion of the empire (Grote i. 125, ed. 1869). Pausanias seems to have found human sacrifices to Zeus still lingering in Arcadia in the 2nd century of our era. “On this altar on the Lycaean hill they sacrifice to Zeus in a manner that may not be spoken, and little liking had I to pry far into that sacrifice. But let it be as it is, and as it hath been from the beginning.” Now “from the beginning” the sacrifice, according to Arcadian tradition, had been a human sacrifice. In other places there were manifest commutations of human sacrifice, as at the altar of Artemis the Implacable at Patrae, where Pausanias saw the wild beasts being driven into the flames.[3] Many other examples of human sacrifice are mentioned in Greek legend. Pausanias gives full and interesting details of the worship of rude stones, the oldest worship, he says, among the Greeks. Almost every temple had its fetish stone on a level with the pumice stone, which is the Poseidon of the Mangaians.[4] The Argives had a large stone called Zeus Cappotas. The oldest idol of the Thespians was a rude stone. Another has been found beneath the pedestal of Apollo in Delos. In Achaean Pharae were thirty squared stones, each named by the name of a god. Among monstrous images of the gods which Pausanias, who saw them, regarded as the oldest idols, were the three-headed Artemis, each head being that of an animal, the Demeter with the horse’s head, the Artemis with the fish’s tail, the Zeus with three eyes, the ithyphallic Hermes, represented after the fashion of the Priapic figures in paintings on the walls of caves among the Bushmen. We also hear of the bull and the bull-footed Dionysus. Phallic and other obscene emblems were carried abroad in processions in Attica both by women and men. The Greek custom of daubing people all over with clay in the mysteries results as we saw in the mysteries of negroes, Australians and American races, while the Australian turndun was exhibited among the toys at the mysteries of Dionysus. The survivals of rites, objects of worship, and sacrifices like these prove that religious conservatism in Greece retained much of savage practice, and the Greek mythology is not less full of ideas familiar to the lowest races. The authorities for Greek mythology are numerous and various in character. The oldest sources as literary documents are the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. In the Iliad and Odyssey the gods and goddesses are beautiful, powerful and immortal anthropomorphic beings. The name of Zeus (Skr. Dyaus) clearly indicates his connexion with the sky. But in Homer he has long ceased to be merely the sky conceived of as a person; he is the chief personage in a society of immortals, organized on the type of contemporary human society. “There is a great deal of human nature” in his wife Hera (Skr. Svar, Heaven).[5] It is to be remembered that philologists differ widely as to the origin and meaning of the names of almost all the Greek gods. Thus the light which the science of language throws on Greek myths is extremely uncertain. Hera is explained as “the feminine side of heaven” by some authorities. The quarrels of Hera with Zeus (which are a humorous anthropomorphic study in Homer) are represented as a way of speaking about winter and rough weather. The other chief Homeric deities are Apollo and Artemis, children of Zeus by Leto, a mortal mother raised to divinity. Apollo is clearly connected in some way with light, as his name φοῖβος seems to indicate, and with purity.[6] Homer knows the legend that a giant sought to lay violent hands on Leto (Od. xi. 580). Smintheus, one of Apollo’s titles in Homer, is connected with the field-mouse (σμίνθος), one of his many sacred animals. His names, Λύκιος, Λυκηγενής, were connected by antiquity with the wolf, by most modern writers with the light. According to some legends Leto had been a were-wolf.[7] The whole subject of the relations of Greek gods to animals is best set forth in the words of Plutarch (De Is. et Os. lxxi.), where he says that the Egyptians worship actual beasts, “whereas the Greeks both speak and believe correctly, saying that the dove is the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis,” and so forth. Each Greek god had a small menagerie of sacred animals, and it may be conjectured that these animals were originally the totems of various stocks, subsumed into the worship of the anthropomorphic god. For the new theory of vegetation spirits and corn spirits see The Golden Bough. Apollo, in any case, is the young and beautiful archer-god of Homer; Artemis, his sister, is the goddess of archery, who takes her pastime in the chase. She holds no considerable place in the Iliad; in the Odyssey, Nausicaa is compared to her, as to the pure and lovely lady of maidenhood. Her name is commonly connected with ἀρτεμής—pure, unpolluted. Her close relations (un-Homeric) with the bear and bear-worship have suggested a derivation from ἄρκτος—Ἄρκτεμις. In Homer her “gentle shafts” deal sudden and painless death; she is a beautiful Azrael. A much more important daughter of Zeus in Homer is Athene, the “grey-eyed” or (as some take γλαυκῶπις, rather improbably) the “owl-headed” goddess. Her birth from the head of Zeus is not explicitly alluded to in Homer.[8] In Homer, Athene is a warlike maiden, the patron-goddess of wisdom and manly resolution. In the twenty-second book of the Odyssey she assumes the form of a swallow, and she can put on the shape of any man. She bears the aegis, the awful shield of Zeus. Another Homeric child of Zeus, or, according to Hesiod (Th. 927), of Hera alone, is Hephaestus, the lame craftsman and artificer. In the Iliad[9] will be found some of the crudest Homeric myths. Zeus or Hera throws Hephaestus or Ate out of heaven, as in the Iroquois myth of the tossing from heaven of Ataentsic. There is, as usual, no agreement as to the etymology of the name of Hephaestus. Preller inclines to a connexion with ἧφθαι, to kindle fire, but Max Müller differs from this theory. About the close relations of Hephaestus with fire there can be no doubt. He is a rough, kind, good-humoured being in the Iliad. In the Odyssey he is naturally annoyed by the adultery of his wife, Aphrodite, with Ares. Ares is a god with whom Homer has no sympathy. He is a son of Hera, and detested by Zeus (Iliad, v. 890). He is cowardly in war, and on one occasion was shut up for years in a huge brazen pot. This adventure was even more ignominious than that of Poseidon and Apollo when they were compelled to serve Laomedon for hire. The payment he refused, and threatened to “cut off their ears with the sword” (Iliad, xxi. 455). Poseidon is to the sea what Zeus is to the air, and Hades to the underworld in Homer.[10] His own view of his social position may be stated in his own words (Iliad, xv. 183, 211). “Three brethren are we, and sons of Cronus, sons whom Rhea bare, even Zeus and myself, and Hades is the third, the ruler of the people in the underworld. And in three lots were all things divided, and each drew a lot of his own,[11] and to me fell the hoary sea, and Hades drew the mirky darkness, and Zeus the wide heaven in clear air and clouds, but the earth and high Olympus are yet common to all.”
Zeus, however, is, as Poseidon admits, the elder-born, and therefore the revered head of the family. Thus Homer adopts the system
- ↑ Sacred Books of the East, xii. 176, 177.
- ↑ On the whole subject, Dr Muir’s Ancient Sanskrit Texts, with translations, Ludwig's translation of the Rig Veda, the version of the Satapatha-Brahmana already referred to, and the translation of the Aitareya-Brahmana by Haug, are the sources most open to English readers. Max Müller’s translation of the Rig Veda unfortunately only deals with the hymns to the Maruts. The Indian epics and the Puranas belong to a much later date, and are full of deities either unknown to or undeveloped in the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas. It is much to be regretted that the Atharva-Veda, which contains the magical formulae and incantations of the Vedic Indians, is still untranslated, though, by the very nature of its theme, it must contain matter of extreme antiquity and interest.
- ↑ Pausanias iii. 16; vii. 18. Human sacrifice to Dionysus, Paus. vii. 21; Plutarch, De Is. et Os. 35; Porphyry, De Abst. ii. 55.
- ↑ Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 60.
- ↑ Cf. Preller, Griechische Mythologie, i. 128, note 1, for this and other philological conjectures.
- ↑ The derivation of Ἀπόλλων remains obscure. The derivation of Leto from λαθεῖν, and the conclusion that her name means “the concealer”—that is, the night, whence the sun is born—is disputed by Curtius (Preller i. 190, 191, note 4), but appears to be accepted by Max Müller (Selected Essays, i. 386) Latmos being derived from the same root as Leto, Latona, the night.
- ↑ Aristotle, H. An. 6; Aelian, N. A. iv. 4.
- ↑ Her name, as usual, is variously interpreted by various etymologists.
- ↑ xiv, 257; xviii. 395; xix. 91, 132.
- ↑ The root of his name is sought in such words as πότος and ποταμός.
- ↑ We learn from the Odyssey (xiv. 209) that this was the custom of sons on the death of their father.
