Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/591

Rh independently. Nor are those that were led to regard the sun as a female to be considered peculiar in so doing; for there is no lack of other peoples in different parts of the world who took the same view of that heavenly body. This, however, by no means precludes our asking, why the sun should be treated as a he by one nation and as a she by another, or even by the same nation in a different stage in its history. Very possibly geography and climate may have had something to do with it, but the question must for the present be regarded as one which the student of mythology has not yet sufficiently studied: it awaits the attention both of him and the anthropologist.

Another difficulty attaching to solar myths is one that has occurred to me in reading M. Gaidoz's remarks already mentioned (p. 55). His summary of the history of the Roman Jupiter, for example, is that he was made, by way of extension, into the god of the sky from being the god of light; but in the early times to which this must refer the god of light must, it seems to me, have meant the god of the sun. Then comes the question as to the relation in which a sun-god of this order stood in the mythology of the Aryans to the younger divinities to whom it usually gives solar attributes. Did the older Sun-god cease to be specially associated with the sun and become identified with the sky at the same time that other solar gods rose into repute? Were the two things brought about by a common cause, and as the working out of one and the same idea? In Greek mythology, for example, the treatment of Apollo and Heracles, as sons of Zeus, would seem to favour an affirmative answer. The