point; then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his strength returned. A certain hero discovered the secret of Tukaitawa’s strength and slew him at noon.[1] It is possible that even in lands outside the tropics the fact of the diminished shadow at noon may have contributed, even if it did not give rise, to the superstitious dread with which that hour has been viewed by various peoples, as by the Greeks, ancient and modern, and by the Roumanians of Transylvania.[2] In this fact, too, we may perhaps detect the reason why noon was chosen by the Greeks as the hour for sacrificing to the shadowless dead.[3] The ancients believed that in Arabia if a hyaena trod on a man’s shadow it deprived him of the power of speech and motion; and that if a dog, standing on a roof in the moonlight, cast a shadow on the ground and a hyaena trod on it, the dog would fall down as if dragged with a rope.[4] Clearly in these cases the shadow, if not equivalent to the soul, is at least regarded as a living part of the man or the animal, so that injury done to the shadow is felt by the person or animal as if it were done to his body. Whoever entered the sanctuary of Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia was believed to lose his shadow and to die within the year.[5] Nowhere, perhaps, does the equivalence of the shadow to the life or soul come out more clearly than in some
- ↑ Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, p. 284 sqq.
- ↑ Bernard Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen, pp. 94 sqq., 119 sq.; Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,4 ii. 972; Rochholz, Deutscher Glaube und Brauch, i. 62 sqq.; E Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest, i. 311.
- ↑ Schol. on Aristophanes, Ran. 293.
- ↑ [Aristotle] Mirab. Auscult. 145 (157); Geoponica, xv. 1. In the latter passage, for κατάγει ἑαυτήν we must read κ. αὐτόν, an emendation necessitated by the context, and confirmed by the passage of Damīrī quoted and translated by Bochart, Hicrozoicon, i. c. 833, “cum ad lunam calcat umbram canis, qui supra tectura est, canis ad eam [scil. hyaenam] decidit, et ea illum devorat.” Cp. W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, i. 122.
- ↑ Pausanias, viii. 38, 6; Polybius, xvi. 12, 7; Plutarch, Quaest. Graec. 39.
