Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/641

Rh the Mabinogi slaying Arawn's enemy for him; for on the whole Pwyỻ is scarcely to be regarded a Sun-god in the same sense, for example, as Lug. Perhaps one might venture to treat him as a Sun-god in the sense in which the Celtic Zeus has been explained to have been solar (p. 575), or else he may be a Culture Hero. I find it hard to decide, though I am inclined to the former view. In either case it is to be noticed that Pwyỻ's action in slaying Arawn's foe is subjected by Arawn to a restriction which seems only capable of being accounted for on the supposition of its having originally applied only to the Solar Hero. I allude to Pwyỻ's being warned by Arawn not to deal the hitter's enemy more than one blow, as that single blow would be fatal to him, while we are left to infer that a second blow would have marred the effect of the first. It looks as though the habit of regarding the Sun-god finishing the contest by a single effort, as in the case of Lleu and Lug, had been generalized into a rule that the Sun-god was bound never to repeat the blow, and as though that rule had then been somewhat loosely extended to others. At any rate, it would be hard to explain how any such a limitation applied in the first instance either to the Culture Hero or to the Mars-Jupiter of the Celts. On