Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/478

446 BOOK of the Winds. Like the Asvins and Agni, like Proteus, Phoibos, and the other fish-gods, Rudra can change his form at will.

" Father of the Maruts, may thy felicity extend to us : exclude us not from the light of the sun.

" Thou, Rudra, art the chiefest of beings in glory. Thou, wielder of the thunderbolt, art the mightiest of the mighty.

"Where, Rudra, is thy joy-dispensing hand? Firm with strong limbs, assuming many forms, he shines with golden ornaments." ^

Like Hermes, Rudra is worshipped as the robber, the cheat, the deceiver, the Master Thief ^ The mocking laughter of the wind as it passes on after wreaking its fury could not fail to suggest the same ideas in the most distant lands. As we might expect, Rudra, like Siva, whose gracious name was a mere euphemism to deprecate his deadly wrath, at length eclipses Indra, as Indra had put Dyaus and Varuna into the background, and he becomes associated most closely with that phallic worship which seemingly found but little favour in the true Vedic age.*

Hindu and '^^^ character of the more gentle Vayu, who comes with the Greek blush of early morning, carries us to the strange legend of Hermes ; the wind, and we have to see how the phrases which yielded but a slight harvest of myth in the East grew up in the West into stories enriched by an exquisite fancy, while they remained free from the cumbrous and repulsive extravagances of later Hindu mythology, and how true to the spirit of the old mythical speech and thought is the legend of that son of Zeus, who was bom early in the morning in a cave of the Kyllenian hill, who at noon played softly and sweetly on his harp, and who at eventide stole away the cattle of Phoibos.*

The story Rising from his cradle (so the story runs), the babe stepped forth from the cave, and found a tortoise feeding on the grass. Joyously seizing his prize, he pierced out its life with a borer, and drilling holes in the shell, framed a lyre with reed canes, a bull's hide, and

341. the same as Grimm's story of the Spirit
 * H. H. Wilson, R. V. S. ii. 289. the Fisherman and the Jin in the Ara-
 * Muir, Scmskr. Texts, part iv. p. bian A'ights. This tale is substantially

of the evidence on which the negative case, the jar in the other, represents the conclusion rests. — Sanskr. Texts, 'w.'^. cradle to which Hermes comes back after 348. striding like a giant over heaths and sudden growth of Hermes, followed by the bag of winds which he places in the an equally rapid return to his infantile hands of Odysseus, shape and strength, explains the story of of Hermes.
 * Dr. Muir fully admits thescantiness in the Bottle. The bottle in the one
 * Hymn to Hermes, 17, 18. The hills, as well as the cave of Aiolos and