Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/590

574 under another Welsh name which was also feminine, namely, huan. This occurs in a poem in the Book of Taliessin:

'Nj ỽyr neb pan rudir y bron huan:'

Nobody knows where the Sun reddens her breast.

The allusion would seem to be to a ruddy sunset, but it must be admitted to be somewhat obscure. Nor is it very evident what the word huan means, but it would seem to have been originally the exponent of a myth associated with the sun as a female, though we are left without the means of realizing clearly what that myth was. Whatever it and that connected with the word haul may have been, they go with the names of the later order; and these last, together with the others noticed, belong to the period of the separate existence of the nations using them, and not to that of the undivided Aryan family. This may be regarded as sufficiently shown by their lack of agreement in the important matter of gender, and also probably by the comparatively scanty nourishment which the mythological ivy, so to speak, is found to have drawn from them. Had the Celts, or, still better, the Goidelic Celts, been alone in making the sun feminine at a certain point in their history, one would have been tempted to see in that tendency the influence of a non-Aryan race conquered and absorbed by them; but the divergence of gender pointed out is not such as to favour that view: it only warrants the inference that each nation acted