Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/111

Rh sung by the poets of Greece, are deities conceived as under a human form, but still imperfectly isolated from the phenomena which they personify. If, as Max Müller thinks, Aditi, of the Vedic mythology, is likewise a name for the dawn, we see clearly that the worship is addressed at first to the personified phenomenon, or to the spirit of the dawn conceived as inseparable from the phenomenon itself. A passage in the Vedas calls the dawn the face of Aditi. Moreover, if Pallas Athene was also the dawn with the Greeks, does not the fact that she was born issuing from the brain of Zeus—that is, of the sky—indicate that the worship was originally addressed to the personification, even before it was carried over to the goddess regent, of the phenomenon?

Wind and thunder have also been personified, or made objects in which was seen the action of a personal being having a sensible form appropriate to its office. To the savage the wind is produced by a blowing being, thunder by a thundering being. The Lapps imagine a living existence, who soars in the air, carefully listening to the words of men, and always ready to strike down any one whom he condemns. The Bushmen believe that the wind is a person. One of them met him one day in the country of the Boers, and threw a stone at him, when the wind fled to the mountain. In the "Iliad" Homer represents the winds as seated at the table of Zephyr, when Iris solicits their intervention to kindle the flames on the funeral pyre of Patroclus. In our own times, even in Europe, according to Mr. Tylor, the Carinthian peasant places on a tree in front of his house various foods to appease the hunger of the wind. In the Palatinate, when a storm is raging furiously, the peasant throws a handful of meal in the direction opposite to the wind, and calls out: "Stop, wind, here is food for your child; go away!" In South America, the Payaguas, when the wind shakes their huts, rush against the storm, waving fire-brands; while other tribes, under like circumstances, offer it tobacco. The forms given to the personification of the wind are extremely various. In Central America, it is often a bird; on the Congo, a horse; the American Indians make it a hare; the Botocudos represent it by a dog with clipped ears; the Germans gave it the figure of coursing dogs; and the Greeks represented it by cherubim's heads with swelled cheeks.

The idea of a distinction between the manifestations of the wind and thunder, and the being which produces or controls them, seems to have been gradually developed. The Dakotas attribute thunder to a great bird and its progeny. The male produces the isolated claps by the beating of its wings, and the reverberations are due to the beatings of the wings of the younger ones. To the Navajos, the winds are produced by four swans.