Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/238

206 BOOK exultation of Polyphemos when he has drunk the wine given to him by Odysseus.

Comple- mentary deities. The dual- ism of Nature. Functions of the Asvins.

A very sUght acquaintance with the language of the Vedic hymns will suffice to show that the idea of any one deity rarely failed to suggest to the mind of the worshipper the idea of another god, whose attributes answered to, or were contrasted with, his own. The thought of Dyaus, the sky, was bound up with that of Prithivi, the earth, who was his bride; and their very names, blended into one word Dyava-prithivi, denoted their inseparable union. The idea of Varuna, the veiUng heaven, brought up that of Mitra, the light- illumined sky.

The connexion was forced upon them by the phenomena of the outward world. We cannot sever in our minds the thought of day from that of night, of morning from evening, of light from darkness ; and " this palpable dualism of nature " ^ has left its most marked impression on the mythology of the Veda. The dawn and the gloaming, the summer and the winter may, it is obvious, be described as twins or as sisters, standing side by side or dwelling in the same house. Thus, not only are Dyava-prithivi, heaven and earth, de- scribed as twins, but Indra and Agni are spoken of in the dual as the two Indras, Indragni, not only ushasanakta, the dawn and the night, but ushasau, the two dawns," and the two Varunas. Like Indragni again, the twin Asvins, or horsemen, are called Vritrahana, destroyers of Vritra.^

These Asvins have been made the subject of a perhaps unneces- sarily lengthened controversy. Their features are not very definite, but in the oldest hymns they are worshipped with a peculiar rever- ence, as able not merely to heal sicknesses but to restore the aged to youth. Their relations to each other and to their worshippers are placed in a clearer light by a reference to Greek mythical phrase- ology. Speaking of these beings, the commentator Yaska says that their sphere is the heaven, and remarks that some regard them as heaven and earth, as day and night, or as sun and moon, while they who anticipated the method of Euemeros affirmed that they were

' Max Miiller, Lectures on Language, second series, 486. « 3. 487, 495- • This dualism seems to reach its acme in the phrase which speaks of Osiris as "the Lion of the double lions." "These two lions, two brothers, the two lion-gods, are two solar phases, as diurnal and nocturnal, Har and Let, Shu and Tafnut ; and as there is but one solar orb, so he is ' the Lion of the double lions.'" — Brown, 77ie Unicom, So.