Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/67

Rh supreme father of gods and men. He who should be the very type of all purity and goodness becomes the very embodiment of head-strong lust and passion, while the holiness of the lord of life and light is transferred to Apollôn and his virgin sister, Athênê. The difficulty is but slight. Zeus, the Vedic Dyaus, is but another form of Ouranos, the veiling heaven or sky; and again, as in the words of our own poet, who sings how

and how

so Ouranos looked down on Gaia, and brooded over her in his deep, unfailing, life-giving love. But these are phrases which will not bear translation into the conditions of human life, without degrading the spiritual god into a being who boasts of his unbounded and shameless licence.

The same process which insured this degradation insured at the same time the local boundaries which were assigned to mythical heroes or their mythical exploits. When the adventures of Zeus assumed something like consistency, the original meaning of his name was less and less remembered, until his birthplace was fixed in a Cretan cave, and his throne raised on a Thessalian hill. So Apollôn was born in Lykia or in Delos, and dwelt at Patara or Pytho. So Endymiôn had his tomb in Elis, or slept his long sleep on the hill of Latmos. So Kephalos first met Prokris on the Hymettian heights, and fell from the Leukadian cape into the Western Sea. So, as she wandered westward in search of her lost child, Têlephassa (a name which, like those of Phaethousa, Lampetiê, and Brynhild, tells its own tale), sank to sleep on the Thessalian plain in the evening.

Yet although much was forgotten, and much also, it may be, lost for ever, the form of thought which produced the old mythical language had not altogether died away. Showing itself sometimes in directly allegorical statement of historical fact, sometimes in similar descriptions of natural objects or of the incidents of common life, it still threw the halo of a living reality over everything of which it spoke. So the flight of Kaunos from Miletos to Lykia, and the sorrow of the sister whom he had left behind, figured the migration of colonists from the one land to the other. So in the Hesiodic