Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/55

Rh would be used to describe the action of the beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind: and every word or phrase became the germ of a new story, as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name.

Thus in the Polyonymy which was the result of the earliest form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of mythical tradition. There was no bound or limit to the images suggested by the sun in his ever varying aspects; and for every one of these aspects they would have a fitting expression, nor could human memory retain the exact meaning of all these phrases when the men who used them had been scattered from their original home. Old epithets would now become the names of new beings, and the legends so framed would constitute the class of secondary myths. But in all this there would be no disease of language. The failure would be that of memory alone,—a failure inevitable, yet not to be regretted, when we think of the rich harvest of beauty which the poets of many ages and many lands have reaped from these half-remembered words.

It mattered little, then, of what object and phenomenon they might happen to speak. It might be the soft morning light or the fearful storm-cloud, the wind or the thunder. In each case there would be Polyonymy, the employment of many names to denote the same thing. In each case, their words would express truthfully the