Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/63

Rh passions, mingling with men, and sharing their partialities and their feuds.

For the proofs of these assertions, we shall look in vain to the earliest Hellenic literature. But the Vedic poems furnish indisputable evidence, that such as this was the origin and growth of Greek and Teutonic mythology. In these poems, the names of many, perhaps of most, of the Greek gods, indicate natural objects which, if endued with life, have not been reduced to human personality. In them Daphnê is still simply the morning twilight ushering in the splendour of the new-born sun; the cattle of Hêlios there are still the light-coloured clouds which the dawn leads out into the fields of the sky. There the idea of Heraklês has not been separated from the image of the toiling and struggling sun, and the glory of the life-giving Hêlios has not been transferred to the god of Delos and Pytho. In the Vedas the myths of Endymion, of Kephalos and Prokris, Orpheus and Euiydikê, are exhibited in the form of detached mythical phrases, which furnished for each their germ. The analysis may be extended indefinitely: but the conclusion can only be, that in the Vedic language we have the foundation, not only of the glowing legends of Hellas, but of the dark and sombre mythology of the Scandinavian and the Teuton. Both alike have grown up chiefly from names which have been grouped around the sun; but the former has been grounded on those expressions which describe the recurrence of day and night, the latter on the great tragedy of nature in the alternation of summer and winter.

Of this vast mass of solar myths, some have emerged into independent legends, others have furnished the groundwork of whole epics, others have remained simply as floating tales whose intrinsic beauty no poet has wedded to his verse. Whether the whole may be classified in order of priority, may be doubtful; but the strong presumption would be, that those which have not been systematised into coherent narratives are the oldest, as not having sufficiently lost their original meaning. At the least, they exhibit to us the substance of mythology in its earliest form. Thus the legends of Kephalos and Prokris, of Daphnê, Narkissos, and Endymiôn, have come down to us in a less artificial form than that of Herakles, while the myth of Heraklês has been arrested at a less advanced stage than those of Zeus and Apollôn. But all alike can be translated back into mythical expressions, and most of these expressions are found in the