Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/359

 in movements and activities. Such a god (probably) is the Greek Apollo.

If we look at the sky, again, the process is identical. The visible sky ceases, in the general thought of men, to be a person, and the old personal conception separates itself, assumes anthropomorphic form, and becomes (under an old name for sky) the deity called Zeus, a deity with supreme powers. But he, unluckily for religion, attracts into his legend or inherits very many of the most repulsive myths of the early savage and magical extra-natural beings, and this misfortune befalls all, or nearly all, the gods of the higher mythologies, such, for example, as Indra.

It chances, too, that the various parts, as we said, have often their "under-studies." If Apollo was originally the sun, it is certain that he has laid aside most of his solar attributes, and put on attributes purely human and divinely Greek. But between him and the old "sun-person" (the sun conceived as a person) of savage thought he has left Helios Hyperion, a being very like the actual sun in some regards, in others a heroic or divine character who controls the course and drives the chariot of the sun. In the same way the old personal rivers concentrate themselves into river-gods, and detach their new personality from the water, and the old personal sea perhaps becomes Nereus, or adds some of his attributes to Poseidon. Thus, through ascending strata of gradually purifying thought, we pass from the magical and theriomorphic powers, subject even to death, whom we meet in savage myths, to the deathless anthropomorphic Greek