Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/214

182 BOOK II. Lykanihropy. up to the Zeus whom he reverenced as the most high. The zeal of Lykaon was more vehement, and the blood of an infant, or, as some said, of his own child, flowed on the altar of sacrifice. At once the human form of Lykaon was changed into that of a wolf It was the just recompense of his iniquity in a time when men were Unked in a close intercourse with the gods ; but to the grief of Pausanias the increasing wickedness of mankind had put an end to the age of miracles, and the true story of Lykaon had been overlaid by miser- able falsehoods, which affirmed that men turned into wolves at the Lykaian sacrifice were restored to their old shape after ten years, if they abstained from human flesh, but that, if they tasted it, then they remained wolves for ever.

We have here more than the germ of mediaeval Lykanthropy, and little more is needed to bring before us the Were-wolf or Vampire superstition in its full deformity. That superstition has been amongst the most fearful scourges of mankind ; but here, as elsewhere, it is something to learn that a confusion between two words identical in sound, and springing from the same root, laid the foundations of this frightful delusion. The myth of Lykaon is in this incident nothing more than a repetition of the story of Tantalos. His name is but one of a thousand epithets for the sun, who in times of drought offers up on the altar of Zeus (the heaven) the scorched and withered fruits which owed their life to his own vivifying heat ; and for him, as for the Phrygian king, the sin and its punishment inevitably followed the translation of mythical phrases into the conditions of human life.

The Dodo- Like the god of Arkadia, the Zeus of Dodona is nourished by Olympian nymphs, who in this instance are called Hyades, the bringers of moisture from the blue heights of heaven. That the Cretan story is but another version of the Arkadian, the identity of names alone sufficiently proves. The Lykaian hill had its Crete, and the Eleu- therai, to which unintentional trespassers into the Temenos of Zeus were conveyed, reappears in the mythical geography of the Egean island.^ But although Zeus must be wherever there is an Olympian city, yet the greatness of the Eleian Zeus overshadowed the majesty of the Zeus who abode in Crete, Lykosoura, or Dodona, when his temple at Olympia became the sanctuary of the great Panhellenic festival. But here, too, the local legend gives names with which the Cretan and Arkadian myths have already made us familiar. Here, too, it was said that Rhea entrusted the infant Zeus to the care of the Idaian Daktyloi.^ If the name given to these mysterious beings be akin to the Dikte and Lyktos of the Cretan talc, to Artemis Dik-

' Hesiod, Thcog. 54. ^ Paus. v. 7, 4.