Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/589

Rh another ~as each may need them. The night again, as lit up by a CHAP. grave and sombre beauty, or as oppressing men by its pitchy darkness, is represented by the other daughters of Phorkys and- Keto who are known as the Gorgons. Of these three sisters, one only, Medousa, as embodying the short-lived night, is subject to death ; the others, Stheino and Euryale, as signifying the eternal abyss of darkness, are immortal. According to the Hesiodic poet, Poseidon loved Medousa in the soft meadow among the flowers of spring ; and when her head fell beneath the sword of Perseus, there sprang from it Chrysaor with his gleaming sword, and the winged horse Pegasos — an incident which is simply the counterpart of the birth of Geryoneus from Kal- lirhoe and Chrysaor. According to another version, Medousa had once been beautiful, but had roused the wrath of Athene as becoming the mother of glorious children, or as having dared to set her own beauty in comparison with the loveliness of the Dawn herself The rivalry was indeed vain. The serenest night cannot vie with the exquisite hues of the morning : and henceforth, to requite her daring, the raven locks of Medousa must be turned into hissing snakes, the deadly glance of her joyless face should freeze all who gazed on it into stone, and even Perseus could bring her long agony to an end only by fixing his eye on the burnished mirror while the sword of Phoibos fell on the neck of the sleeping Gorgon.^

The notion of these serpent enemies of the bright gods runs The Night through the mythology of all the Aryan nations. Sometimes they ^"^ '^^ have three heads, sometimes seven or even more : but we cannot forget that the words Ahi, Echidna, anguis, expressed an idea which had nothing in common with the thought denoted by the dragon. The latter was strictly the keen-sighted being, and as such belonged to the heavenly hierarchy. The dragons who bear the chariot of Medeia through the air, or who impart to the infant lamos the gift of pro- phecy, are connected only by the accident of a name with the snakes whom Herakles strangles in his cradle, whom Piioibos slays at Delphoi, or Indra smites in the land of the Panis.^ But when by the Winter.

' Mr. Brown {The Unicorn, 49) remarks with great force that " the Gorgon-power = Nocturnal = darkness + moon, not darkness merely, or the moon merely. Darkness is especially a devourer or swallower." With Gorgo, therefore, we may etymologi- cally compare Charon. Gorgo is thus " the devouring darkness which has a brigb.t head — the Moon, a head cajiable of being cut off". Hence the combined beauty and horror (hideousness) of the Gorgo, a hideousness which does not arise in the first instance from the lunar serpent rays ; and hence the open mouth, so marked a feature in the Gorgoneion, and one not in the least lunar." lie adds (53) that "the petrifying stare of Medousa is the moon-glare on the darkness, when the colour, sound, and motion of the world of day have gone."

^ In Teutonic folk-lore the night or darkness is commonly the ravening wolf,