Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/317

Rh CHAP. morning from a beautiful lake by the deep-flowing stream of Ocean, and having accomplished his journey across the heaven plunges again into the western waters. Elsewhere this lake becomes a magnificent palace, on which poets lavished all their wealth of fancy ; but this splendid abode is none other than the house of Tantalos, the treasury of Ixion, the palace of Allah-ud-deen in the Arabian tale. Through the heaven his chariot was borne by gleaming steeds, the Rohits and Harits of the Veda ; but his nightly journey from the west to the east is accomplished in a golden cup wrought by Hephaistos, or, as others had it, on a golden bed.^ But greater than his wealth is his wisdom. He sees and knows all things ; and thus when Hekate cannot answer her question, Helios tells Demeter to what place Kore has been taken, and again informs Hephaistos of the faithlessness of Aphrodite. It is therefore an inconsistency when the poet of the Odyssey represents him as not aware of the slaughter of his oxen by Eurylochos, until the daughters of Neaira bring him the tidings ; but the poet returns at once to the true myth, when he makes Helios utter the threat that unless he is avenged, he will straightway go and shine among the dead. These cattle, which in the Vedic hymns and in most other Greek myths are the beautiful clouds of the Phaiakian land, are here (like the gods of the Arabian Kaaba), the days of the lunar year, seven herds of fifty each, the number of which is never increased or lessened ; and their death is the wasting of time or the killing of the days by the comrades of Odysseus.

The same process which made Helios a son of Hyperion made Helios and him also the father of Phaethon.^ In the Iliad he is Helios Phaethon P^aethon. not less than Helios Hyperion ; but when the name had come to denote a distinct personality, it served a convenient purpose in accounting for some of the phenomena of the year. The hypothesis of madness was called in to explain the slaughter of the boy Eunomos by Herakles : but it was at the least as reasonable to say that if the sun destroyed the fruits and flowers which his genial warmth had

' Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 303. by the stariy, spotted Leopard of the The incident is the same as that which night, and where the noble beast is is signified by the myth of Uionysos caught while going down the dark Dithyreites, the two doors being those, passage and perishes, although only to necessarily, of the East and the West. be reborn in triumph at the Eastern It is also exhibited in the contest of the Gate. The two animals, as protagonists

heraldic Lion and Leopard, the simple of night and day, are thus naturally interpretation being that "the Lion, hostile." — Brown, The Unicorn, 76. type of the hunting, radiate, diurnal ^ Some have held that the name Sun, speeds across heaven towards his Helios reappears in the Slavonic Volos, fate and death in the Den of the Two the god of cattle. — Ralston, Songs of Entrances, the nocturnal cave tenanted the Russian People, 252.