Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/151

Rh sprang from the waste pieces which they threw away; therefore an elephant partakes of the nature of man. The shapen eighth son was called Vivasvat, the sun. If one might argue on a priori grounds, it would be natural to maintain that the Aditi of the Brahmana is the earlier conception, and the pantheistic Aditi of the Vedic hymn the later conception. The Brahmana is written in a savage spirit, the Vedic hymn in a spirit of pure mysticism. The story in the Brahmana exactly corresponds with that of the birth of Maui, the New Zealand hero. The hymn is an expression of profound, and, as we are inclined to think, of advanced thought. But all this is matter of dispute, and touches the very essence of the problem of mythology. It is not to be expected that many, if any, remains of a therimorphic character should cling to a goddess so abstract as Aditi. When, therefore, we find her spoken of as a cow, it is at least as likely that this is only part of "the pleasant unconscious poetry" of the Veda, as that it is a survival of some earlier zoomorphic belief. Gubernatis offers the following lucid account of the metamorphosis of the infinite (for so he understands Aditi) into the humble domestic animal:—"The inexhaustible soon comes to mean that which can be milked without end" (it would be more plausible to say that what can be milked without end soon comes to mean the inexhaustible), "and hence also a celestial cow, an inoffensive cow, which we must not offend. . . . The whole heavens being thus represented as an infinite cow, it was natural that the principal and most