Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/526

494 BOOK cattle of Indra thus stolen by the Panis Sarama is the guardian; each morning she comes forth to lead them to their pastures/ each evening she reappears to drive them home. The same scenes are repeated daily in the Homeric Thrinakia, where the cattle of the sun are tended by the nymphs Phaethousa and Lampetie, the fair-haired children whom Neaira, the early morning, bare to Helios Hyperion. But although the companions of Odysseus are made actually to slay some of these cows, and although strange signs follow their crime, yet the story itself points to another origin for these particular herds. The Thrinakian cattle are not the clouds, but the days of the year. The herds are seven in number, and in each herd are fifty cows, never less, and representing in all the three hundred and fifty days of the lunar year.** Thus in the story that the comrades of Odysseus did not return home with him because they slew the cattle of the sun, we may " recognise an old proverbial or mythological expression, too literally interpreted even by Homer, and therefore turned into mytho- logy." If, then, the original phrase ran that Odysseus reached his home because he persevered in his task, while his companions "wasted their time, killed the days, i.e. the cattle of Helios, and were therefore punished, nothing would be more natural than that after a time their punishment should have been ascribed to their actually devouring the oxen in the island of Thrinakia."®

The swan- On the cloud-origin of the Vedic Gandharvas, the Hellenic Piforkkies ^.entaurs, and the Kyklopes whether of our Homeric or Hesiodic poems, enough has perhaps been said in the analysis of the myths of Urvasi, Psyche, Ixion, and Asklepios. These myths may each run into others which relate more exclusively to the earth or the sun , but the close connexion of earth, light, and vapour, is so constantly present to the minds of all the Aryan tribes that it becomes almost impossible to set down any one myth, as a whole, as a specimen of one definite class ; and thus the language used of the powers of darkness themselves is applied to the gloomy storm-vapours, whether

' In many popular talcs these blue Gaelic story of the Three Widows, pastures with the white flocks feeding Campbell, ii. 224, 228, 237 ; and the on them arc reflected in the water, and German tale of the Little Farmer, the sheep feeding far down in the depths Griiviiii. are made the means by which Boots or * Sir G. C. Lewis, Astronomy of Dumniling (the beggar Odysseus) lures the Aticicuts, 2. his stupid brothers to their death. See ' Cliifs, &c., ii. 166 ; ]{r<jwn, Creat the story of " Big Peter and Little Dionysiak Myth, i. 392. Tctcr," in Dasenl's Norse Tales ; the