Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/165

MYTHOLOGY 153 his gods also have their battles. The chief foes of Indra are Vrittra and Ahi, serpents which swallow up the waters, pre cisely as frogs do in Australian and Californian and An daman myths. It has already been shown that such creatures, thunder-birds, snakes, dragons, and what not, people the sky in the imagination of Zulus, Red Men, Chinese, Peruvians, and all the races who believe that beasts hunt the sun and moon and cause eclipses. 1 Though hostile to Asuras, Indra was once entangled in an intrigue with a woman of that race, according to the Atharva-Veda (Muir, S. T., v. 82). The gods were less numerous than the Asuras, but by a magical stratagem turned some bricks into gods (like a creation of new peers to carry a vote), so says the Black Yajur-Veda. 2 Turning to separate gods, Indra first claims attention, for stories of Heaven and Earth are better studied under the heading of myths of the origin of things. Indra has this zoomorphic feature in common with Heitsi Eibib, the Namaqua god, 3 that his mother, or one of his mothers, was a cow (E.- V., iv. 18, 1). This statement may be a mere way of speaking in the Veda, but it is a rather Hottentot way. 4 Indra is also referred to as a ram in the Veda, and in one myth this ram could fly, like the Greek ram of the fleece of gold. He was certainly so far connected with sheep that he and sheep and the Kshatriya caste sprang from the breast and arms of Prajapati, a kind of creative being. Indra was a great drinker of soma juice ; a drinking-song by Indra, much bemused with soma, is in R.-V., x. 119. On one occasion Indra got at the soma by assuming the shape of a quail. In the Taitt. Samh. (ii. 5 ; i. 1) Indra is said to " have been guilty of that most hideous crime, the killing of a Brahmana." 5 Once, though uninvited, Indra drank some soma that had been prepared for another being. The soma disagreed with Indra ; part of it which was not drunk up became Vrittra the serpent, Indra s enemy. Indra cut him in two, and made the moon out of half of his body. This serpent was a uni versal devourer of everything and everybody, like Kwai Hemm, the all-devourer in Bushman mythology. If this invention is a late priestly one, the person who introduced it into the Satapatha-Brahmana must have reverted to the intellectual condition of Bushmen. In the fight with Vrittra, Indra lost his energy, which fell to the earth and produced plants and shrubs. In the same way plants, among the Iroquois, were made of pieces knocked off Chokanipok in his fight with Manabozho. Vines, in particular, are the entrails of Chokanipok. In Egypt, wine was the blood of the enemies of the gods. The Aryan versions of this sensible legend will be found in /Satapatha-Brahmana. 6 The civilized mind soon wearies of this stuff, and perhaps enough has been said to prove that, in the traditions of Vedic devotees, Indra was not a god without an irrational element in his myth. Our argument is, that all these legends about Indra, of which only a sample is given, have no necessary connexion with the worship of a pure .nature-god as a nature-god would now be constructed by men. The legends are survivals of a time in which natural phenomena were regarded, not as we regard them, but as persons, and savage persons, and became the centres of legends in the savage manner. Space does not permit us to recount the equally puerile and barbarous legends of Vishnu, Agni, the loves of Vivasvat in the form of a horse, the adventures of Soma, 1 See Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 288, 329, 356. 2 The chief authority for the constant strife between gods and Asuras is the Satagatha- Brahmana, of which one volume is translated in Sacred Books of the East (vol. xii.). 3 Hahn, Tsiini-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Hottentots, p. 68. 4 See Muir, S. T., v. 16, 17, for Indra s peculiar achievements with a cow. 5 Sacred Books of the East, xii. 1, 48. 6 //>., xii. 176, 177. nor the Vedic amours (paralleled in several savage mytho logies) of Pururavas and Urvasi. 7 Divine Myths of Greece. If any ancient people was thoroughly civilized the Greeks were that people. Yet in the mythology and religion of Greece we find abundant survivals of savage manners and of savage myths. As to the religion, it is enough to point to the traces of human sacrifice and to the worship of rude fetich stones. The human sacrifices at Salamis in Cyprus and at Alos in Achaia Phthiotis may be said to have continued almost to the conversion of the empire (Grote, i. 125, ed. 1869). Pausanias seems to have found human sacrifices to Zeus still lingering in Arcadia in the 2d century of our era. " On this altar on the Lycasan hill they sacrifice to Zeus in a manner that may not be spoken, and little liking had I to pry far into that sacrifice. But let it be as it is, and as it hath been from the beginning." Now "from the beginning " the sacrifice, according to Arcadian tradition, had been a human sacrifice. In other places there were manifest commutations of human sacrifice, as at the altar of Artemis the Implacable at Patrae, where Pausanias saw the wild beasts being driven into the flames. 8 Many other exam ples of human sacrifice are mentioned in Greek legend. Pausanias gives full and interesting details of the worship of rude stones, the oldest worship, he says, among the Greeks. Almost every temple had its fetich stone on a level with the pumice stone, which is the Poseidon of the Mangaians. 9 The Argives had a large stone called Zeus Cappotas. The oldest idol of the Thespians was a rude stone. Another has been found beneath the pedestal of Apollo in Delos. In Acha3an Pharae were thirty squared stones, each named by the name of a god. Among mon strous images of the gods which Pausanias, who saw them, regarded as the oldest idols, were the three-headed Artemis, each head being that of an animal, the Demeter with the horse s head, the Artemis with the fish s tail, the Zeus with three eyes, the ithyphallic Hermes, represented after the fashion of the Priapic figures in paintings on the walls of caves among the Bushmen. We also hear of the bull and the bull -footed Dionysus. Phallic and other obscene emblems were carried abroad in processions in Attica both by women and men. The Greek custom of daubing people all over with clay in the mysteries results as we saw in the mysteries of Negroes, Australians, and American races, while the Australian turndun was exhibited among the toys at the mysteries of Dionysus. The survivals of rites, objects of worship, and sacrifices like these prove that religious con servatism in Greece retained much of savage practice, and the Greek mythology is not less full of ideas familiar to the lowest races. The authorities for Greek mythology are numerous and various in character. The oldest sources as literary documents are the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. In the Iliad and Odyssey the gods and goddesses are beautiful, powerful, and immortal anthropomorphic beings. The name of Zeus (Skr. Dyaus] clearly indicates his con nexion with the sky. But in Homer he has long ceased to be merely the sky conceived of as a person ; he is the 7 On the whole subject, Dr Muir s Ancient Sanskrit Texts, with translations, Lud wig s translation of the Rig- Veda, the version of the Satapatha- Brahmana already referred to, and the translation of the Aitareya- Brahmana by Haug, are the sources most open to English readers. Mr Max Muller s translation of the Rig - Veda unfortunately only deals with the hymns to the Maruts. The Indian epics and the Puranas belong to a much later date, and are full of deities either unknown to or undeveloped in the Rig- Veda and the Brahmanas. It is much to be regretted that the Atharva- Veda, which contains the magical formulfe and incantations of the Vedic Indians is still untranslated, though, by the very nature of its theme, it must contain matter of extreme antiquity and interest. 8 Pausanias, iii. 16 ; vii. 18. Human sacrifice to Dionysus, Paus.. vii. 21 ; Plutarch, De Is. et Os. 35 ; Porphyry, De Abst. ii. 55. 9 Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 60. XVII. 20