Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/268

236 BOOK yet she wanders in the air and hears the summons addressed to her from the land of darkness.^ In the fact that at Athens there were statues only of two Erinyes, we have perhaps a memory of that early dualism which is so marked a feature in the mythology of the Veda.

Arjiini. But if Eos and Zeus remained to the Greeks what Ushas and Dyaus were to the Hindu, there were other names which seem to have been transplanted to Hellenic soil only to die. Among these is Argennos in whose honour Agamemnon is said to have built a temple to Aphrodite Argynnis on the banks of Kephisos. The name in the West had no meaning : but in the Vedic Arjuni we have simply an epithet denoting the brilliance of the dawn, while in the later Hindu mythology, Arjuna comes before us as standing to Krishna in the relation of Luxman to Rama, of Phaethon to Helios, or of Patroklos to Achilleus,

The cows The analysis of all these myths proves convincingly that for of the^Sun- human thought in its earliest stages the danger lay not in the poverty gods. of language, but in its superabundant wealth. The heaven, the sun, the dawn, the clouds, might be described by a thousand names, all truthfully and vividly denoting the thing spoken of in one of its countless aspects. But the characteristic features so marked were found in more than one object If the sun shone brightly or moved rapidly, so did the horse. If the clouds gave nourishment to the thirsty earth, so did the cows bestow a gift scarcely less necessary for man. The words which told of the one would serve also to designate the other ; and so in fact we find that they did. The cow received its name as the moving animal ; the horse was named from its speed, asvan, or from its colour, harit, the glistening — rohit, the brown : and all these names were of necessity applied to the sun, tlie dawn, and the sky, first in their strictly etymological sense, but insensibly, and by an inevitable result, in the meaning to which usage gradually confined each word. Thus, when the name asvan was reserved especially for the horse, the sun, who had been hitherto called asvan simply as speeding through the sky, now himself became the steed who hurries across the broad heaven.^ The impulse once given issued in an almost incredible wealth of metaphor. The horse as the bearer of burdens was called vahni ; ® but the flames also bore their burdens into the air, and the rays of the sun brought his light


 * //. X. 571. » The root is found in the Latin

hy rrofessor Max Miiller, "Comparative poimd words as cervix, the neck, as Mythology," C/ii/s, (Sr-v., ii. 132, &c. carrying the head.
 * The luocess is completely analysed vehere, the Greek fx*'". J^n^' "i coni-