Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/395

Rh gush forth from the ground to supply him at the end of the day with a refreshing bath. The ring associated with Lunet becomes in some stories a wheel, as, for instance, in that from which Gwydion's mistress was called Arianrhod, or She of the Silver Wheel; and the same conception probably entered into the story which made Cúchulainn's sister Dechtere the charioteer of her brother, king Conchobar; while in Norse literature we meet with it in the obscurely mentioned 'deep wheel' of Gefjon (p. 284).

In these goddesses and others like them, such as Duben the mother of Cairbre's children (p. 308), we seem to have a group of the mythic beings loosely called dawn-goddesses; but the location of some of the Celtic ones here in question, on an island or peninsula towards the west, would suggest that they at least would be as correctly designated dusk-goddesses. Neither dusk, however, nor dawn can help us so much to understand their nature as their connection with the ancient week and all it connoted. This gives, among other things, a very pregnant meaning to the intimate relations between them and the Culture Hero, whom the most important versions of the myth treat as the father by them of the Sun Hero, and sometimes of another birth representing darkness and night. It may perhaps seem at first sight somewhat daring to place Athene in the category of goddesses of the kind here discussed; but I would go further, and add that the name of Athene's Italian counterpart Minerva or, as it is less usually written, Menerva, brings us back again to the group of names which have been already