Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/568

536 BOOK II. Indra and Achitleus.

POOK with which he hides his grief behind the clouds, in the vengeance - which he takes on the dark powers who have dimmed his glory, in the serene and dazzling splendour which follows his victory, in the restoration of his early love, who now comes before him as the evening twilight with the same fairy network of luminous cloud, there can be no monotony. It is a tale which may be told a thousand times without losing its freshness, and may furnish the germ of countless epics to those who have hearts to feel its touching beauty. They who see monotony here may well see monotony also in the whole drama of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that the phrases which produced the myth of Indra must have given birth to the Iliad.

The two stories are, in truth, the same. The enemy of Indra keeps shut up in his prison-house the beautiful clouds which give rain to the earth ; and the struggle which ends in their deliverance is the battle of Achilleus with Hektor, and of the Achaians with the men of Ilion, w^hich ends in the rescue of Helen. The weary hours during which the god fights with his hidden foe are the long years which roll away in the siege of Troy ; and the lightnings which seal the doom ot the hated thief represent the awful havoc in the midst of which Paris the seducer receives the recompense of his treachery. Of this story the most ancient hymns addressed to Indra exhibit the unmistakeable outlines. In its simplest form the fight of Indra with the demon is nothing more than a struggle to gain possession of the rain-clouds.^ But the ideas soon become more fully developed, and his enemy assumes a thoroughly hateful character as the throttling snake of darkness. In the less simple hymns the strictly mythical imagery is, as M. Breal well remarks, intermingled with phrases which speak not of the anthropomorphised god, but of floods, clouds, winds and darkness. ^

Throughout these hymns two images stand out before us with overpowering distinctness. On one side is the bright god of the heaven, as beneficent as he is irresistible ; on the other the demon of night and of darkness, as false and treacherous as he is malignant. On both of these contending powers the Hindu lavislied all his wealth of speech to exalt the one and to express his hatred of the other. The latter (as his name Vritra, from var, to veil, indicates) is pre-eminently the thief who hides away the rain-clouds. But although the name comes from the same root which yielded that of Varuna, the lurking-place of Vritra has nothing to do with that broad-spreading veil which Varuna stretches over the loved earth

• Ureal, Hocnh et Cact/s, 89. » Ih. 93, &c.

The Struggle bet een Ligl t nnd Darkness.