Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/80

48 II. The process of analysis and comparison will have deprived these legends of all claim to the character of historical traditions; and even if it were maintained in the last resort that the myth as brought from the common home grew up from some historical fact or facts, still no such title can be made out for the same incidents when we find them repeated in the same order and with the same issue in different ages and different lands. If in the primaeval home there was a war brought about by the carrying off of a beautiful woman, a strife between two chieftains, and a time of inaction for the hero of the story followed by his signal victory and his early death, then unquestionably these incidents, with a hundred others common to the background of these legends, did not repeat themselves at Ilion and Delphoi, in Ithaka and Norway, in Lykia and Iran.

This is the goal to which we must be brought if the track be of this kind; and the matter may perhaps be soonest brought to an issue if we take the most complicated myths of the Hellenic tribes as our starting-point. We can scarcely read the legends of Heraklês and Dêmêtêr, of Theseus, Kadmos, Perseus, and a host of other mythical heroes, without feeling that a few simple phrases might well have supplied the germ for the most intricate of these traditions. Every incident in the myth of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr may be accounted for, if only men once said (with the conviction that the things of which they spoke had a conscious life), "The earth mourns for the dead summer. The summer lies shut up in the prison of Hades, the unseen"—or, as in the language of the Northman, "She sleeps in the land of the Niflungs, the cold mists, guarded by the serpent Fafnir; and the dwarf Andvari keeps watch over her buried treasures." The tale of Endymion seems to speak for itself; "The moon comes to gaze on her beloved, the sun, as he lies down to sleep in the evening." In the stor}' of Niobê, we seem to see the sun in his scorching power, consuming those who dare to face his dazzling brightness; in that of Orpheus, we seem to hear his lamentation for the beautiful evening which has been stung by the serpent of the night, and which he brings back to life only to lose her at the gates of day. In the myth of Eurôpê we have the journey of the sun from the far East to the Western land, until Têlephassa, the far-shining, sinks down wearied on the Thessalian plain. Still more transparent appear the tales of Kephalos and Daphnê. Prokris, even in the mouth of the Greek, is still the child of Hersê, the dew: Eos is still the morning, Kephalos still the head of the bright sun. In Daphne we seem to behold the dawn flying from her lover and shrinking before his splendour. In the Homeric Hymn, Lêtô, the