BOOK II.
Rhea.
The Kou-
retes and
Idaian
Daktyls.
myth afiSrmed that he received the name Picumnus as being the god to whom the woodpecker was consecrated.
Another representative of the earth is Rhea/ herself a child of Ouranos and Gaia, and the wife of Kronos, by whom she becomes the mother of the great Olympian deities Hestia, Demetcr, Here, Hades, Poseidon, all swallowed by their father, and lastly, Zeus, who is saved to be brought up in the cave of Dikte. But throughout Rhea remained a name and a power, worshipped as the great repro- ductive force of the world, as producing life through death, and thus as honoured by the sacrifice of the reproductive power in her ministers. Thus she became pre-eminently the great mother, worshipped under the titles Ma and Ammas, and perhaps even more widely known and feared as Kybele or Kybebe.^
With the name of Rhea are connected the mystic beings known, as the Kouretes, the Korybantes, the Idaian Daktyloi, and the Ka- beiroi. It is as possible that these names may, some or all of them, denote races displaced and overthrown by the advancing Hellenic tribes, as that the Trolls may represent aboriginal inhabitants driven to the mountains by the Teutonic invaders. According to Thirlwall, the name Telchines is only another name for the historical Phenician people, and the legends related by them " embody recollections of arts introduced or refined by foreigners who attracted the admiration of the rude tribes whom they visited."^ It is enough to remark here that the art of the Telchines is simply that of Hephaistos. Like him, they forge iron weapons or instruments for the gods : and they resemble the Kyklopes net only in this their work, but in their parentage, which exhibits them as sor.s of Poseidon, or Thalassa, the troubled sea. Thus also we see in them not only the fellow-helpers of Hephaistos in the Iliad, but the rude shepherds of the Odyssey. They are creatures without feet, as the Phaiakian ships have neither rudders
' The origin of the name is doubtful. Preller (Gr. JJyth. i. 502) inclines to regard it as a form of Gea, Gaia, Deo, instancing as changes of 5 into p the Nvords KTjpvKeiov, caduceus ; meridies, medidies.
- This name Preller explains, after
Hesychios, as denoting her abode on the hills : but such interpretations must be regarded sith great suspicion. A large number of foreign words were associated with the worship of such deities as Rhea and Dionysos, and we are as little justi- fied in identifying one with another as we are in adopting the conclusion of Herodotos, that Athene is only another form of the Egyptian; word Neith, the name of a veiled deity, often associated with rhlhah, the pigmy god, answering, jjerhaps, to the Hari of the Hindu. To Was, as a name of Rhea, Papas as a title of the Phiygian Zeus precisely cor- responds. — Preller, t'l). i. 51 1. They are no more than the terms Pater and Mater applied to Zeus and Deo, or All- Father as a name of Odin. Tlie old title of Rhea is applied, whether with or without design, to the Virgin Mary. Thus Dr. Faber, writing to Mr, Watts Russell, asks him to think of him "amid the glories of Chrislian Rome on those Sunday evenings in October, all dedi- cated to dearest Mama." — Zi/'e, p. 329,
- I/isi, Greece, part i. ch. iii.
