Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/241

Rh CHAP. forth all leaves, fruits, and flowers, should fall to the ground, and thus men of all ages began to yield to the power of death. The connexion of Soma with Uma has been already noticed. Soma and Another couplet of deities is found in Soma and Surya, the daughter of Surya the Sun ; and here the twin Asvins stand by the side of Soma as the friends of the bridegroom. A later version, which says that, although Savitar had destined his daughter Surya to be the wife of Soma, she was nevertheless won by the Asvins,^ repeats the stor)' of Pelops and Hippodameia, which represents the maiden as be- coming the prize of the hero who can overtake her in a foot race. So again Arjuna, the Argennos of the myth of Agamemnon, stands to Krishna, who is represented as declaring him to be his own half, in that dual relation which links Phaethon with Helios, Patroklos with Achilleus, Theseus with Peirithoos, Telemachos with Odysseus, and which is seen again in the stories of Pelias and Neleus, Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Epimetheus, Hengest and Horsa, and in the Teutonic tales of the Two Brothers and of the Faithful John who guards his prince as carefully as the Luxman of Hindu folk-lore guards Rama. This dualism we find again in the Hellenic Eros and Anteros, and still more plainly in the myth of Hermaphrodites.^ The tale which describes Arjuna as receiving from Mahadeva the Pasupata (or sceptre which guides the cows) under a strict charge not to use it rashly as it might destroy the whole world,^ carries us to the ill-omened gifts which brought destruction to Phaethon and Patroklos. In the same way Rama is linked with his brother Laxmana, and one myth which regards Rama as a mortal hero speaks of both as wounded and rendered senseless by a cloud of serpents transformed into arrows.* To the poets of all ages and countries the phenomena of morning The lonely and evening are full of pathos and sadness. The course of the day ^^anderer. itself is but brief, and the career of the bright being who bears it across the heaven may be little more than a series of struggles with the vapours which strive to dim his splendours. All his life long he must toil for the benefit of the mean thing called man, and look


 * M^yya, Contributions to a Knffivledge rejects her love, until the nymph lays of Vedic Theogony, 3. hands on him as Aphrodite does on


 * This story is after all only a coun- Adonis.

terpart of the legends of Echo and * Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv. 196, 225. Selene, whose part is here played by the * //>. 384. The modern version of nymph of the well, Salmakis. Like the story has been already given, book i. Endj-mion and Narkissos, the youth ch. viii.