BOOK II. The Rivers seen Land. Poseidon as the god of the sea, and of the sea alone. So long as the word Kronides remained a mere epithet, the Zeus of Olympos was also Zenoposeidôn, and as Zeus Katachthonios he would be also Hades, Ais, or Aidoneus, the king of the lower world; and the identity of the two is proved not only by these titles, but also by the power which, after the triple partition, Hades, like Poseidôn, retains of appearing at will in Olympos. Zeus then, as Hades, is simply the unseen, or the being who can make himself as well as others invisible. As such, he wears the invisible cap or helmet, which appears as the tarn-kappe or nebelkappe of Teutonic legends. This cap he bestows on Hermes, who is thus enabled to enter unseen the Gorgons' dwelling, and escape the pursuit of the angry sisters. But his home is also the bourne to which all the children of men must come, and from which no traveller returns; and thus he becomes the host who must receive all under his roof, and whom it is best therefore to invoke as one who will give them a kindly welcome,-in other words, as Polydektês, Polydegmôn, or Pankoitês, the hospitable one who will assign to every man his place of repose. Still, none may ever forget the awful character of the gate-keeper (TUλáρτns) of the lower world. He must be addressed, not as Hades the unseen, but as Ploutôn the wealthy, the Kuvera of the Ramayana; and the averted face of the man who offered sacrifice to him may recall to our minds the horrid rites of the devil-worshippers of the Lebanon.1 Hades, then, in the definite authority assigned to him of the Un- after the war with the Titans, is the only being who is regarded as the lord who remains always in his dismal kingdom, for Persephonê, who shares his throne, returns for half the year as Korê to gladden the hearts of men, and Zagreos, Adonis, and Dionysos are also beings over whom the prince of darkness has no permanent dominion. Of the Like Hermes, and Herakles, Hades has also assumed a burlesque form, as in the German story of Old Rinkrank, who dwells in a great cave into which the King's daughter falls in the mountain of glass (ice). The unwilling wife contrives to catch his beard in a door, and refuses to let it free until he gives her the ladder by which he climbs out of the mountain-depths into the open air. Thus escaping, she returns with her heavenly lover, and despoils Rinkrank (Ploutôn) of all his treasures. THE RIVERS OF HADES. geography of this land of the dead we need say little more than that it is no genuine growth of mythology. It was easy for poets and mythographers, when they had once started with the idea of a gloomy land watered with rivers of woe, to place Styx, the stream which makes men shudder, as the boundary which separates it from the world of living men, and to lead through it the channels of Lêthê, in which all things are forgotten, of Kokytos, which echoes only with shrieks of pain, of Pyryphlegethon, with its waves of fire.' SECTION II.-ELYSION. But, in truth, such details as these, produced as they are, not by the necessities of mythical developement but by the growth or the wants of a religious faith, belong rather to the history of religion, and not to the domain of mythology, which is concerned only or mainly with legends springing from words and phrases whose original meaning has been misunderstoood or else either wholly or in part forgotten. Thus, although the ideas of Elysion in the conception of the epic or lyric poets may be full of the deepest interest as throwing light on the thoughts and convictions of the time, their mythological value must be measured by the degree in which they may be traced to phrases denoting originally only the physical phenomena of the heavens and the earth. With the state and the feelings of the departed we are not here concerned; but there is enough in the descriptions of the asphodel meadows and the land where the corn ripens thrice in the year, to guide us to the source of all these notions. The Elysian plain is far away in the west where the sun goes down beyond the bounds of the earth, when Eôs gladdens the close of day as she sheds her violet tints over the sky. The abodes of the blessed are golden islands sailing in a sea of blue, the burnished clouds floating in the pure ether. Grief and sorrow cannot approach them; plague and sickness cannot touch them. The barks of the Phaiakians dread no disaster; and thus the blissful company gathered Acheron, the remaining river, is probably only another form of Achelôos, the flowing water, and may perhaps VOL. II. Y have been in the earlier myths the one II. BOOK together in that far western land inherits a tearless eternity.' Of the other details in the picture the greater number would be suggested directly by these images drawn from the phenomena of sunset and twilight. What spot or stain can be seen on the deep blue ocean in which the islands of the blessed repose for ever? What unseemly forms can mar the beauty of that golden home lit by the radiance of a sun which can never go down? Who then but the pure in heart, the truthful and the generous, can be suffered to tread the violet fields? And how shall they be tested save by judges who can weigh the thoughts and intents of the heart? Thus every soul, as it drew near to that joyous land, was brought before the august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos; and they whose faith was in truth a quickening power might draw from the ordeal those golden lessons which Plato has put into the mouth of Sokrates while awaiting the return of the theoric ship from Delos. These, however, are the inferences of later thought. The belief of earlier ages was content to picture to itself the meeting of Odysseus and Laertes in that blissful land, the forgiveness of old wrongs, the reconciliation of deadly feuds as the hand of Hektor is clasped in the hand of the hero who slew him. There, as the story ran, the lovely Helen, 'pardoned and purified,' became the bride of the short-lived yet long-suffering Achilleus, even as Iolê comforted the dying Herakles on earth, and Hêbê became his solace in Olympos. But what is the meeting of Helen and Achilleus, of Iolê, and Hêbê, and Herakles, but the return of the violet tints to greet the sun in the west, which had greeted him in the east in the morning? The idea was purely physical, yet it suggested the thoughts of trial, atonement, and purification; and it is unnecessary to say that the human mind, having advanced thus far, must make its way still further. The Meadows. To these islands of the blessed only they could be adAsphodel mitted who on earth had done great things, or who for whatever reasons might be counted among the good and noble of mankind. But of the beings who crossed the fatal streams of Styx, there would be some as far exceeding the TARTAROS. common crowd in wickedness or presumption as these were unworthy to tread the asphodel meadows of Elysion. Hence one of the names of the unseen world, which denoted especially its everlasting unrest, would be chosen to signify the hopeless prisons of the reprobate. There can be little doubt that in the name Tartaros we have a word from the same root with Thalassa, the heaving and restless sea, and that Tartaros was as strictly a mere epithet of Hades as Ploutôn or Polydegmôn. The creation of a place of utter darkness for abandoned sinners was a moral or theological, not a mythical necessity; and hence the mythology of Tartaros as a place of torment is as scanty and artificial as that of the Nereid and Okeanid nymphs; for when the Hesiodic Theogony makes Tartaros and Gaia the parents of the Gigantes, of Typhôeus, and Echidna, this only places Tartaros in the same rank with Poseidôn, who is the father of Polyphêmos or of Hêrê, who, according to another myth, is herself the mother of Typhâon, another Typhôeus. 323 CHAP. IX. CHAPTER X. THE DARKNESS. BOOK The story of Sarani and Helen. SECTION I.-VRITRA AND AHI. No mythical phrases have so powerfully affected the history of religion as the expressions which described originally the physical struggle between light and darkness as exhibited in the alternations of day and night. These phrases stand out with wonderful vividness in the hymns of the Rig Veda. The rain-god Indra is concerned with the sacrifices of men, chiefly because these supply him with food to sustain his steeds in the deadly conflict, and the drink which is to invigorate his own strength. On the Soma, of which, as of the Achaian Nektar, all the gods have need, the might of Indra especially depends; and as soon as he has quaffed enough, he departs to do battle with his enemy. This struggle may be considered as the theme, which in a thousand different forms enters into all the conceptions of Indra and into all the prayers addressed to him. Like himself, his adversary has many names; but in every word we have the contrast between the beaming god of the heaven with his golden locks and his flashing spear, and the sullen demon of darkness, who lurks within his hidden caves, drinking the milk of the cows which he has stolen. The issue of the battle is always the same; but the apparent monotony of the subject never deprives the language used in describing it of the force which belongs to a genuine and heartfelt conviction. So far from the truth is the fancy that great national epics cannot have their origin in the same radical idea, and that the monotony which would thus underlie them all is of itself conclusive proof that in their general plan the Iliad and the |