Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/472

440 BOOK II. Schamir and Sassafras.

any monarch of heaven, as that the same fountain should send forth sweet vater and bitter ; and again they are thrust down into the depths from which they had been rescued, once more to be avenged when the Titans, led on by Zeus, waged a third war of elements, in which Kronos is hurled from his throne, and the child born in the Diktaian (or Light) cave reigns in his stead. But when the Kyklopes are once more set free, Zeus avails himself of their might to crush the Titans ; and finally the Kyklopes themselves are slain by Phoibos in vengeance for the death of Asklepios the Healer and the Saviour. These several contests are not distinguished from each by any peculiar features; and the AATiters of the theogonies simply heap together mountains of words almost as vast as the rocks hurled by the hands of the giants, as if conscious of the barrenness of their theme, and of its lack of interest as compared with myths springing from phrases which, though they may denote the phenomena of nature, strike a responsive chord in the human heart. It is, in fact, the old story of the struggle between Indra and Vritra, regarded from a point of view which removes it altogether from the region of human sympathies.^

Thus, then, the myth of the Kyklopes brings before us in close connexion the two images of the cloud and the lightning. This connexion may be traced through a vast number of stories, in many cases but slightly resembling each other, yet all adhering to the original ideas of mist and -fire. In these the lightning becomes an arrow capable of piercing the mountain-side or the huge storm-cloud, and displaying for a moment marvellous treasures of jewels and gold. The effects produced by this arrow or spear are sometimes good, sometimes disastrous. It may scorch and paralyse, or in times of drought, when the waters are pent up in the cloud, it may cleave the vapours and call the dead earth to life again with the streams let loose upon her parched surface. But the cloud might assume the form not only of sheep and cattle, as in the Vedic hymns and in the Thrinakian legend, but of birds, as of swans or eagles ; and as the clouds carry the lightning with them until the time comes for using the mighty weapons, so the bird carries a stone capable of splitting the hardest substance. Finally the stone becomes a worm, and thus we have the framework of a large family of stories which, if they have their origin among Aryan tribes, have been extended far beyond the limits of that race. In the many versions devised by Hebrew tra-

' In short, these theogonies are the result, in part, of a backward process, which led the mythographer back to the mundane egg, and, in part, of that systematic rearrangement of current myths, which might be carried out in any way most congenial to the worker.