Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/197

Rh of Uranus or Hymi could figure as the Celtic Zeus; so we should, in the case suggested, be left to suppose that the precarious personality of the former had been early forgotten, and that his names had come to be treated as mere synonyms of those of the god whom one may, for brevity's sake, call the Celtic Zeus or Mars-Jupiter. Hence the confusion that was likely to follow, as, for example, when Welsh Nûᵭ and Irish Nuada are found to occur in the pedigree of Gwyn and Finn respectively. It is worthy of a passing remark that we have a glimpse of somewhat similar confusion in the East, where Dyaus and Varuṇa look, from our western point of view, just as if they had exchanged places. Thus it is Dyaus, the namesake, so to say, of Zeus, that his son Indra severs from Pṛithivî or Earth, and it is he that is usually consigned to insignificance and oblivion; while it is Varuṇa, the namesake of Uranus, that assumes the rôle of a supreme god, the upholder of the universe, and the preserver of order both physical and moral. It is right, however, to say that another view is possible, namely, that the Aryans of the pro-ethnic period used the prototypes of the names Zeus and Uranus loosely, without settling which was to be Zeus and which Uranus, and that their descendants decided their respective application independently of one another, and in such a way that he who was called Zeus by one branch of the family was called Uranus by another. But on the whole it seems safer to regard the usage as fixed for all in the earlier stage, and to treat the difference to which reference has just been made as of later growth, the result, in fact, of the synonymity of the two sets of names.