Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/226

212 straightforward myth of descent from a beast (for the Arcadians claimed descent from Areas, the she-bear's son) and of starry or bestial metamorphosis was ever told by Cahrocs or Kamilaroi. Another story ran that Artemis herself, in anger at the unchastity of Callisto, caused her to become a bear. So the legend ran in a Hesiodic poem, according to the extract in Eratosthenes.

Such is the ancient myth, which Otfried Müller endeavours to explain by the light of his lucid common sense, without the assistance which we can now derive from anthropological research. The nymph Callisto, in his opinion, is a mere refraction from Artemis herself, under her Arcadian and poetic name of Calliste, "the most beautiful." Hard by the tumulus known as the grave of Callisto was a shrine, Pausanias tells us, of Artemis Calliste. Pamphos, he adds, was the first poet known to him who praised Artemis by this title, and he learned it from the Arcadians. Müller next remarks on the attributes of Artemis in Athens, the Artemis known as Brauronia. "Now," says he, "we set out from this, that the circumstance of the goddess who is served at Brauron by she-bears having a friend and companion changed into a bear, cannot possibly be a freak of chance, but that this metamorphosis has its foundation in the fact that the animal was sacred to the goddess."

It will become probable that the animal actually was the goddess at an extremely remote period, or, at