Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/536

504 BOOK In all mythology the earth is treated as the mother of all living things. It may seem almost a paradox to say that the idea of the earth as tinty of a producer or restorer would be inore likely to lead men on to the Dionysos. motion of a power transcending nature than the impressions made on the human mind by the phenomena of the daily or nightly heavens; but on further thought we can scarcely fail to see that the continuance of life on the earth, the unceasing restlessness, the perpetual change which is going on upon its surface, the sensitiveness of all vegetable and animal substances to the influences which act upon them from without, must inevitably lead men on to something more like a scheme of philosophy than any which could be furnished by mere phrases describing the phenomena of the day or the year. It does not follow that the condition of those who were thus led on should be happier than that of those who, from whatever cause, remained content with recording the impressions made upon them daily by the sights and sounds of the outward world. The historj' of the Semitic nations seems to lend no countenance to any such notion. The Aryan was satisfied with noting the birth of the sun from the darkness, his long toil, his battle with countless enemies, his sleep in the land of forgetfulness, and his rising again to life and strength in the joyous regions of the dawn. The Phenician and the Canaanite could not rest here. They were themselves part of a mysterious system which whirled them through the realms of infinite space, a system characterised by an exuberance of power, by a majestic and rhythmical movement, by a force consciously exulting in the joyousness of its strength. In such notions as these we have the surest foundations of an orgiastic worship ; and the worship of all the Semitic tribes was orgiastic to the core. The spirit of such a worship or ritual is beyond doubt aggressive and contagious. The enthusiasm with which it fills the worshippers will never allow him to rest in patient inactivity ; and it