Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/206

174 BOOK not less graceful once than true became coarse and mischievous, we may learn to curb our indignation when we find that both the process and the result were alike inevitable.

Its trans- But the name Zeus is not confined to Greeks and Hindus. The . 2eus Pater of the former and the Dyaus-pitar of the latter represent the Jupiter of the Latins, and the Tuisco, Zio, Tyr and Tiw of the German nations. The etymological changes of the word are indeed almost numberless. The brightness of the heaven reappears in the Latin dies, the Sanskrit dyu, and our day : and from the same root spring the Greek Theos, the Latin Deus, and the Lithuanian Diewas. These changes have been fully traced by Professor Max Miiller ;^ but we must here note that the Greek Zen, Zenos answers to the Latin Janus, Januspater ; that Janus again, resolved into Dianus and Diana, carries us to the Greek digammated forms Atos, At Fa, and appears again in the word divine. With these may be taken the forms con- nected with Zeus by the transition of dy (Dyaus) into j (Jupiter, Janus, Juno), or dj, as in the Djovis of Oscan inscriptions and the old Italian deity Vedjovis (Vejovis). Akin to all these is the Sanskrit deva, a word which like Dyaus denoted only splendour, but was afterwards used as a name for the gods ; but although it had thus acquired the general notion of deity, it was never applied to any but the bright gods who were the companions of Lidra. The evil powers of night or darkness are Adeva, atheists, or enemies of the devas ; and thus even on Lidian soil we find the germ of that moral and spiritual meaning which was imported into a myth purely physical in its origin. While the adeva grew, like Asmodeus,'-^ into malignant demons, Vritra the cloud enemy of Indra was gradually passing into the evil god of Iranian theology. If the Diabolos of the New Testament, a word not found in the Septuagint, is to be referred to forms like Dyavan and Diovis, the name deva had lost in the West the meaning of brightness which it retained in the East,' though the evil spirit was still regarded as the prince of the powers of the air. The Teutonic devil is thus traced to that Iranian source from which the Jews derived their later complicated demonology. That the term Diabolos, as applied to Satan, should be regarded as identical with the Greek word denoting a slanderer, is a confusion precisely similar to that which turned Lykaon and his sons into wolves and the .seven arkshas or shiners into bears.

' Leitures on Language, second ' Eshem-dev, aeshma-daeva, " le series, 453. For Mr. I'eile's remarks demon de la concupiscence." — Breal, on the connexion of Theos and Deus Ucrcidc et Cactis, 135. see note p. 149. ' Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 939.