Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/130

114 of the Greeks were savages like the Maori; and its origin is to be sought in the animism so characteristic of the savage mind, that is to say, its tendency to endow the sun, the moon, the sky, or any feature of the physical world admitting of being readily individualized, with a soul and a body, with parts and passions, like their own. In the instance in question, the Aryan ancestors of Greeks and Hindus are found to have been at one with those of the Chinese and the Polynesians of later times, in making of the sky and the earth a wedded couple of savages like themselves; and to the savage idea this would be no mere metaphor or simile, for the childish simplicity of his mind is such as to be realized by us only with great difficulty. But the effort to do so in the instance which more especially concerns us just now, will serve to correct the views we had formed of the Father Sky of the early Aryans by taking up the study of the myth at the wrong end.

Among the Aryan nations, however, the Greeks were not singular in possessing the myth here in question: it was known in a modified form to the Hindus, and it is to be found in the Norse Edda; while in the light of these kindred literatures it is possible to detect traces of it in Celtic. In Sanskrit, the god known by the name of Dyaus, a word identical with one of the names of the Sky or the Heavens, is usually referred to in company with Pṛithivî, or Earth, which were once joined, and subsequently separated from one another. The Norse version is, however, more explicit; and instead of a