Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/102

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Two essays in this volume are especially worthy the attention of the comparative mythologist, those on the Supreme Deity of the Aryans and on the Aryan Cosmogonies. In the latter the author develops with great skill the idea that creation myths are in their origin storm myths. To primitive man the rebirth of the visible world after the stress and confusion of the storm suggested the thought that the first creation had been an act of the same nature. The chaos out of which the universe emerged was conceived by him as similar to the dark and tumultuous cloud-mass out of which the lightning strikes the fertilising rain, which the wind carries away out of sight, or which the sun, rising in the heavens, gradually dissipates. Every form of the conquest and dispersal of the threatening cloud-masses was the mythic germ of a fresh cosmogonical idea. As the early naturalism became obscured a metaphysical value was given to the existing cosmogonical formulas, and in this way the mystic cosmogonies assumed shape. Thus the strife of the lightning with the storm cloud was early figured as the deliverance of a captive light-maiden from the clutches of the darkness-dragon by an enamoured god or hero; and in the oldest texts which ascribe the creation act to Love it is still the lover-god, the personified lightning, who is thought of, and who, as Schömann has remarked, is described in terms which to us seem more fitting in connection with Typhon than with Eros. But a later age made of this lover-god, a God Love, an embodiment of the sexual principle in its widest sense, and thus originated a series of very remarkable conceptions. In the former essay M. Darmesteter