Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/209

Rh Ouranos hid away in the secret places of Gaia who called on Kronos to avenge her wrongs and his own. From the blood of the mutilated Ouranos which fell on the broad sea was born the laughter-loving Aphrodite.^ Thus the goddess of love and beauty is, like the Kyklopes, older than the Father of gods and men ; nor can anything show more clearly how thoroughly the mythology of the Aryan world was in conflict with its religion. Kronos and Rhea, then, became the parents of Hestia, Demeter, Here, and Hades ; but these are all swallowed by Kronos, who knows that some day he will be dethroned by some child of his own. In grief of heart, Rhea, shortly before the birth of Zeus, betakes herself to Ouranos and Gaia, who send her to the Cretan Lyktos, and there Zeus, like Mithras and Krishna, was born in a cave which ApoUodoros calls the cave of Dikte. A stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes was presented to Kronos, who, taking it for the new-born babe, swallowed it as he had swallowed the others. Deceived at length by Gaia, Kronos disgorged them all, the stone first and the living children afterwards.^ The stone was set up by Zeus for a memorial in Pytho. But Zeus, when he became the husband of Metis, felt the same strange desire which had led Ouranos and Kronos to consume their children ; and thus, by the advice again of Ouranos and Gaia, he swallowed Metis before she became the mother of Athene. In these exaggerations of a late age we trace the same thought which made the Vedic poet speak of the Dawn as making men old, yet as ever young herself The light of the heaven calls all things into life ; but the heaven retains its unchangeable beauty while generations spring up on the earth and pass away. The children swallowed are thus produced again ; and so the Heaven or the Dawn

' This is probably the only meaning the week, and actually swallows six. which the word (piotJ.fj.ei5rjs conveyed to The seventh, the youngest, escapes by the poets of the //iad and Odyssey. But hiding herself in the clockcase ; in other the whole mythology of Aphrodite ren- words, the week is not quite run out, ders it far more likely that we have and before it comes to an end the mother here a confusion similar to that which of the goats unrips the wolfs stomach turned Lykaon into a wolf, and that the and places stones in it in place of the epithet was originally ((>iXofjL/xri5r)s, not little goats who come trooping out, as perhaps, as in the line (200) marked as the days of the week begin again to run spurious in the Hesiodic Theogony, '6ti their course. I may mention that this ixn^iwv i^tcpadudfi, but from the attri- explanation, whatever it may be worth, butes which made her the vehement was published some time before the lover of Adonis. With this epithet we appearance of the first edition of Mr. may compare that of Pallas (the Phallic) Tylor's Primitive Culture. Mr. Tylor Athene. adopts this explanation (i. 308) without the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats instance in which an acknowledgement presents a striking parallel. The wolf of priority would have been at least is here the night or the darkness which graceful. tries to swallow up the seven days of
 * With this myth Grimm's story of referring to this fact. It is not the only