Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/326

294 BOOK generally, in the disorder, decay, unseemliness, and filth which must follow from it. The clouds, here the cattle of Augeias, may move across the sky, but they drop down no water on the earth, and do nothing towards lessening the evil. Of these clouds Augeias promises that Herakles shall become in part the lord, if he can but cleanse their stables. The task is done ; but Augeias, like Laomedon, refuses to abide by his bargain, and even defeats Herakles and his companions in a narrow Eleian gorge. But the victory of Augeias is fatal to him- self, and with Kteatos and Eurytos he is slain by Herakles.

•The Mara- The myth of the Cretan bull seems to involve a confusion similar bull, to that which has led some to identify the serpent who is regarded as an object of love and affection in the Phallic worship, with the serpent who is always an object of mere aversion and disgust.^ The bull which bears Europe from the Phoinikian land answers to the bull Indra, which traverses the heaven, bearing the dawn from the east to the west. The Cretan bull, like his felloAv in the Gnossian labyrinth, who devours the tribute children from the city of the dawn-goddess, is a dark and malignant monster driven mad by Poseidon ; but Crete lay within the circle of Phenician influence, and the bull may be the savage and devouring Moloch of the Semitic tribes. Although Herakles carries this monster home on his back, he is compelled to let it go again, and it reappears as the bull who ravages the fields of Marathon, till it is slain by the hands of Theseus, who is the slayer also of the Minotauros. The clouds and vapours pursued and conquered by the hero are seen again in the mares of Diomedes, which consume their master and are thus rendered tame, perhaps as the isolated clouds are unable to resist the sun when the moisture which has produced them has been subdued. They appear also as the Stymphalian birds, with claws, wings, and beaks resembling those of the Sphinx, and like her being eaters of human flesh or destroyers of men and beasts. 'Phese birds, it is said, had taken refuge in the Stymphalian lake, because they were afraid of the Avolves — a phrase which exhibits the dark storm-clouds as dreading the rays (Lykoi) of the sun, which can only appear when themselves have been defeated. These clouds reappear yet again as the cattle stolen by Geryon, and recovered by Herakles — a myth of which the legend of Cacus exhibits the most striking and probably the most genuine form. Nor is the legend of the golden apples guarded by the Hesperides anything more than a repetition of the same idea, being itself, as we have seen, a result of the same kind of equivoca- tion which produced the myths of Lykaon, Arktouros, and Kallisto.

' Sec sccliun xii. of ihis chaplcr.