Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/206

192 this fashion. First the sun may have been regarded (in the manner familiar to savage races) as a personal being. In Homer he is still the god "who sees and hears all things," and who beholds and reveals the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. This personal character of the sun is well illustrated in the Homeric hymn to Hyperion, the sun that dwells on high, where, as Mr. Max Müller says, "the words would seem to imply that the poet looked upon Helios as a half-god, almost as a hero, who had once lived upon earth." It has already been shown that this mythical theory of the origin of the sun is met with among the Aztecs and the Bushmen. In Homer, the sun, Helios Hyperion, though he sees and hears all things, needs to be informed by one of the nymphs that the companions of Odysseus have devoured his sacred cattle. He then speaks in the Olympian assembly, and threatens that if he is not avenged he will "go down to Hades and shine among the dead." The sun is capable of marriage, as in the Bulgarian Volkslied, where he marries a peasant girl, and, by Perse, he is the father of Circe and Ætes. According to the early lyric poet Stesichorus, the sun sails over ocean in a golden cup or bowl. "Then Helios Hyperionides went down into his golden cup to cross Ocean-stream, and come to the deeps of dark and sacred Night, to his mother, and his wedded wife, and his children dear." This belief, in more barbaric shape, still survives in the Greek islands.