Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/368

350 the entrance of Night and returned to Day, death should not hold mankind; if the Argo passed the Clashers, the way should lie open between them for ever. The Argo sped through in safety, and the Symplêgades can clash no longer on the passing ship; Maui was crushed, and man comes not forth again from Hades.

There is another solar metaphor which describes the sun, not as a personal creature, but as a member of a yet greater being. He is called in Java and Sumatra 'Mata-ari,' in Madagascar 'Maso-andro,' the 'Eye of Day.' If we look for translation of this thought from metaphor into myth, we may find it in the New Zealand stories of Maui setting his own eye up in heaven as the Sun, and the eyes of his two children as the Morning and the Evening Stars. The nature-myth thus implicitly and explicitly stated is one widely developed on Aryan ground. It forms part of that macrocosmic description of the universe well known in Asiatic myth, and in Europe expressed in that passage of the Orphic poem which tells of Jove, at once the world's ruler and the world itself: his glorious head irradiates the sky where hangs his starry hair, the waters of the sounding ocean are the belt that girds his sacred body the earth omniparent, his eyes are sun and moon, his mind, moving and ruling by counsel all things, is the royal æther that no voice nor sound escapes:

'Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque ad versa recurrens Cynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius æther Regius interitu', qui cuncta movetque regitque Consilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullus Hancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere. Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatus Obtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens, Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.'

Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of the

1 Polack, 'Manners of N. Z.' vol. i. p. 16; 'New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 358; Yate, p. 142; Schirren, pp. 88, 165.

2 Euseb. Præp. Evang. iii. 9.