Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/333

 The European Sky-god, 309

was burning there, and adds that every year it used less oil, whence the priests inferred that the years were getting shorter and shorter. ^'^^ Apparently they believed that the annual orbit of the sun regulated, or rather was regulated by, their lamps — a belief which might indeed " utterly abolish the science of mathematics, "■^'^^ but was for all that by no means inconsistent with the pretensions of primitive man.^^^ Now the cult of Zeus "A/^jCtwy was thoroughly typical of the Pelasgian Zeus-cult in general. It is therefore probable that the same simple-minded belief obtained elsewhere, and that the maintenance of the sun's heat was commonly connected with (perhaps thought to depend on) the up-keep of the perpetual fire or lamp. This — and, I venture to hold, nothing short of this — will explain the consternation felt when the flame by some accident was extinguished : there was then a danger that the sun itself might fail. This enables us also to understand why such fires among the Greeks were tended by women past the age of child- bearing : the perpetual fire represented the sun, and the idea that women may be impregnated by the sun is common to Greece and many other lands. ^°^ Lastly, the same hypothesis will account for the method by which the Greeks re-kindled their perpetual fires when there was need to do so. Plutarch ^°^ says : " In Greece where they have a per- petual fire, at Pytho and Athens for example, it is tended not by virgins, but by women too old to marry. Should it by any chance go out, as the sacred lamp at Athens is said to have done during the tyranny of Aristion and that at Delphi when the temple was burnt by the Medes, whilst during the Mithridatic and Social Wars at Rome the fire disappeared

^ Plut. de def. orac, 2.

^6 Plut., ib., 3.

^"^ Frazer, Golde7t Bough;- i., 115 ff.

308 lb., iii., 220 ff.

809 piut;_ 2,2y_ Num., 9. Similarly the need-fire of the Lemnians was fetched, not indeed from the sun, but from Delos, the island of the sun-god (Philostrat., hero'ica, p. 740).