character ascribed to them for lying; but that deserves no serious consideration, and the Cretans in their mysteries are supposed to have represented the god going through the stages of his history every year.[1] A little beyond the limits of the Greek world a similar idea assumed a still more remarkable form, namely, among the Phrygians, who are said by Plutarch to have believed their god to sleep during the winter and resume his activity during the summer. The same author also states that the Paphlagonians were of opinion that the gods were shut up in a prison during winter and let loose in summer.[2] Of these peoples, the Phrygians at least appear to have been Aryan, and related by no means distantly to the Greeks; but nothing could resemble the Irish couvade of the Ultonian heroes more closely than the notion of the Phrygian god hibernating. This in its turn is not to be severed from the drastic account of the Zeus of the Greek Olympus reduced by Typho to a sinewless mass and thrown for a time into a cave in a state of utter helplessness. Thus we seem to be directed to the north as the original home of the Aryan nations; and there are other indications to the same effect, such as Woden's gold ring Draupnir, which I have taken (p. 366) to be symbolic of the ancient eight-day week: he places it on Balder's pile, and with him it disappears for a while into the nether world, which would seem to mean the cessation for a time of the vicissitude of day and night, as happens in midwinter within the Arctic circle. This might be claimed as exclusively Icelandic, but not if one
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VI. GODS, DEMONS AND HEROES.
