Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/409

Rh and as Phoibos overcomes the Python, so is she the slayer of CHAP. Tityos.^ It seems unnecessary to draw any sharp distinction between the The Ar- kadian and Arkadian and the Dehan Artemis. If she is no longer the mere Deiian reflexion of Phoibos, she still calls herself a child of Leto,^ and ^'e™is. appears as the glorious morning roving through the heaven before the birth of the sun. This broad-spreading light is represented by her wanderings among the glens and along the mountain summits of Arkadia. Like Athene and Aphrodite, she belongs to or springs from the running waters, and she demands from Zeus an attendant troop of fifty Okeanid and twenty Amnisiad, or river, nymphs.' With these she chases her prey on the heights of Erymanthos, Mainalos, and Taygetos. Her chariot is fashioned by the fiery Hephaistos, and Pan, the breeze whispering among the reeds, provides her with dogs, the clouds which speed across the sky driven by the summer winds. Here, like Arethousa, she is loved and pursued by Alpheios, who fails to seize her.

But the cultus of the Spartan Artemis, whose epithet Orthia Artemis Orthia would seem to denote a phallic deity, is marked by features so and Tauro- repulsive, and so little involved in the myth of the Deiian sister of P° ^' Phoibos, that the inference of an earlier religion, into which xryan mythical names were imported, becomes not unwarrantable.* Whether or not this Artemis be the same as the Artemis known by the epithets Taurica or Tauropola,^ she is a mere demon, glutted with the human sacrifices which seem to have formed a stage in the religious develope- ment of every nation on the earth. We have here manifestly the belief that the gods are all malignant powers, hungering for the blood of human victims, and soothed by the smoke of the fat as it curls up heavenwards." But the prevalence of this earlier form of foith or

' Kallim. Hymn to Artemis, no. worship. 'lb. /coi yap €7^ Atjtojios eiVi. * For Mr. Brown's interpretation of She desires to be worshipped under this epithet, see his Great Dionysiak many names, that she may not need to Myth, ii. 136. His conclusion is that fear the rivahy of Apollon, 7. the word denotes "the Kosmos con- ^ lb. 20, &c. sidered as alive and animated, replete There is something altogether non- with motive life-power." Hellenic in the worship of Artemis gen- * The extent to which these horrible erally, as in that of Zeus under some of superstitions prevailed among the his- his many epithets. The phallic nature torical Greeks as well as among other of this worship is indicated by the state- races and tribes has been excellently ments of Pausanias that Zeus Meilicliios traced by Mr. Paley in a paper on was worshijiped at Sikyon in the form " Chthonian Worship" {Journal of of a pyramid, and Artemis Patroa in Philoloi^y, No. I. June, 1868). His con- that of a column. The cruelty of the elusion is that, as "the proi)itiation of ritual led Bunsen to suppose that the malignant powers rather than the adora- epithet Meilichios was used in irony ; tian of a supreme good seems to have but it is clear that Meilichios repre- formed the basis of the early religions sents the Semitic Moloch, and thus the of the world," so a largo part of the early name accounts for the character of the religious systems of the Greeks exhibits