Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/544

512 BOOK Iduna. The stu- pifying Narcissus.

Then Hermes, at the bidding of Zeus, enters the dismal under world, and Polydegmon consents to the return of Persephone, who leaps with deliglit for the joy that is coming. Still he cannot altogether give up his bride, and Persephone finds that she has unwittingly eaten the pomegranate seed,^ and must come back to Aidoneus again. But even with this condition the joy of the meeting is scarcely lessened. A third part only of the year she must be queen in Hades; through all the other months she is to be once more the beautiful maiden who sported on the plains of Nysa. The wrath of Demeter has departed with her grief, the air is filled with fragrance, and the cornfields wave with the ripening grain.

In Teutonic tradition Persephone is represented by Iduna, the beautiful, whom Loki brings back in the shape of a quail (Wachtel), a myth which cannot fail to remind us of Artemis Ortygia. Loki here distinctly plays the part of Perseus, for the giants of cold hasten after him as he bears away Iduna, as the Gorgon sisters chase Perseus on his way to the Hyperborean gardens. This myth in Bunsen's belief " is an exact counterpart of the earliest myth of Herakles, who falls into the sleep of winter and lies there stiff and stark till lolaus wakes him by holding a quail to his nose." ^ This idea of the palsied or feeble sun is reproduced in the Egyptian Harp-i-chruti (the Grecised Harpokrates), the sun regarded as an infant, the lame child of Isis, the earth, — a phrase which carries us to that wide class of legends, which speak of the sun, or the wind, or the light, as weak, if not impotent, in their first manifestations. Osiris can be avenged only by Horos, the full-grown sun, after the vernal equinox.

Although with the mythical history of Persephone are mingled some institutional legends explaining the ritual of the Eleusinian mysteries, the myth itself is so transparent as to need but little inter- pretation. The stupifying narcissus with its hundred flowers springing from a single stem is in the opinion of Colonel Mure a monstrous hyperbole ; yet that must be a narcotic which lulls to sleep the vege- tation of nature in the bright yet sad autumn days when heaven and earth smile with the beauty of the dying year, and the myth necessarily

' " Am liaufigsten ward dcr Granat- apfel als Symbol des Zeugung und Empfangnissverwendet, waswohl davon herriihrt dass er, wcil seine Kerne zugleich Samenkcrne sind, Samen- beliallniss ist ; und insofcrn diese Kerne in zahlreicher Mcnge in ihm enthalten sind, diente er sehr passend zum Symbol des Geschlechtsverhaltnisses. ... In den My then erscheint der Granalbaum als cntsprossen aus dem auf die Erde gellossenen Blutecines des Zeugegliedes beraiibten Gottes : und Nana, die Tochter des Flussgotts Sangarus, wurde schon dadurch schwanger, weil sie einen Granatapfei in ihren Schoos gelegt hatte (Arnob. adv. Cent. 5)."— Nork, s.v. Apfel.

^ God in History, ii. 488.