Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/312

280 BOOK Asklepios.

entreaties of the nymph Echo is nearer to the spirit of the old phrase, which spoke of the sleep of the tired sun.^ His very name denotes the deadly lethargy {vdpK-q) which makes the pleadings of Selene fall unheeded on the ear of Endymion; and hence it is that when Persephone is to be taken at the close of summer to the land of darkness, the narcissus is made the instrument of her capture. It is the narcotic which plunges Brynhild into her [profound slumber on the Glistening Heath, and drowns Briar Rose and her fellows in a sleep as still as death,

lamos and From the lot of Endymion, Narkissos, and Tithonos, Apollon is freed only because he is regarded not as the visible sun who dies when his day's journey is done, but as the Uving power who kindles his light afresh every morning The one conception is as natural as the other, and we still speak of the tired or the unwearied sun, of his brief career and his everlasting light, without any consciousness of inconsistency. Phoibos is then the ever-bright sun, who can never be touched by age. He is emphatically the Akersekomes, the glory of whose golden locks no razor is ever to mar. He is at once the comforter and healer, the saviour and destroyer, who can slay and make alive at wdll, and from whose i)iercing glance no secret can be kept hid. But although these powers are inseparable from the notion of Phoibos Apollon, they are also attributed separately to beings whose united qualities make up his full divinity. Thus his know- ledge of things to come is given to lamos ; his healing and life-giving powers to Asklepios.^ The story of the latter brings before us another of the countless instances in which the sun is faithless to his love or his love is faithless to him. In every case there must be the separa- tion ; and the doom of Koronis only reflects the fate which cuts short the life of Daphne and Arethousa, Prokris and lokaste.* The myth

' The myth of Eclio merely repro- Eilhart, the Russian hero Dobruna duces that of Sahnakis, p. 290. Nikitisch, of the Sc<:ittish Macduff, of which cannot be explained by referring before she died, of Signrd, and of Sceaf it to any Greek or Aryan words. Mr. the son of Scild, the child brought in Brown says that Asklepios was early the mysterious skifi", which needs neither identified with the Phenician Esmun ; sail, rudder, nor oarsmen. Whence but this leaves the name just where it came the popular belief attested by was. — Great Dionysiak Myth, ii. 258. such a phrase as that which Grimm ' The story of the birth of Asklepios quotes from the Chronicle of Peterhousc, agrees substantially with that of Diony- "dentalibusexcisislitera; testanturquod, SOS ; and the legends of other Aryan si vita comes fuerit, felices in mundo tribes tell the same tale of some of their habeantur?" — Deutsche Mythologie, 362. mythical heroes. Of children so born, The Teutonic myths must clearly be Grimm says generally, " Ungeborne, compared with that of Hlodr (Lodur), d. h. aus dem Mutterleib geschnittne who is born with helmet and sword, and Kinder pflegen Helden zu werden," and this again with the story of Athene, adds that this incident marks the stories who springs fully armed from the fcre- of the Persian Rustem, the Tristram of head of Zeus.
 * This name belongs to the class Volsung who yet kissed his mother