Page:Fairy Tales Their Origin and Meaning.djvu/35

I.] brightness of midday, the gloom of evening, the darkness of night, the flash of the lightning, the roll of the thunder, and the rush of the mighty storm-wind. It seems strange to us that those who could imagine the one Heaven-Father should degrade Him by making a multitude of Gods; but this came easily to them, partly out of a desire to account for all they saw in Nature, and which their fancy clothed in divine forms, and partly out of reverence for the great All Father, by filling up the space between Him and themselves with inferior Gods, all helping to make His greatness the greater and His power the mightier.

We cannot look into this old religion of the Aryans any further, because our business is to see how their legends are connected with the myths and stories which are spread by their descendants over a great part of East and West. Now this came about in the way we are going to describe.

The mind of the Aryan peoples in their ancient home was full of imagination. They never ceased to wonder at what they heard and saw in the sky and upon the earth. Their language was highly figurative, and so the things