Tregear. — Polynesian Folk-lore. 395 



in Central Asia this word obtains. Eeferring to pillars made of 

 stones placed on each other in regular order, it is said : " This 

 emblem is also to be found in China and Thibet inscribed with 

 Sanscrit letters, which serve further to designate the parts. 

 Thus the lowest, marked a, means the 'earth;' the circle, va, 

 stands for 'water;' the triangle, ra, 'fire.'"* (Maori, cf. ao, 

 " the earth ;" war, " water ;" ra, " sun.") 



The ura word descended from antiquity into the most 

 common of those Aryan myths which have given us such lovely 

 stories as the bases of classic poetry. If the theory of the solar 

 mythologists is correct, the myths of the Dawn, and of the 

 Sun chasing the Dawn and conquering the Darkness, are the 

 foundations of the greater part of our pre-historic legends. 

 Max Muller says : "Hence we find that names beginning with 

 uru in Sanscrit and with evpv in Greek are almost invariably 

 names of the Dawn, or Twilight.! Names of the Dawn are 

 Euryphaessa, the mother of Helios ; Eurykyde, or Eurypyle, the 

 daughter of Endymion; Eurymede, the wife of Glaucus ; Eury- 

 nome, the mother of the Charites ; and Eurydike, the wife of 

 Orpheus."| 



But side by side with the polished versions deifying the 

 shining light, existed an actual worship of the sun and fire 

 deities which we are not accustomed to consider as descending to 

 almost modern days. We are apt to forget that the Romans, 

 though acknowledging a whole pantheon of deities, (and not 

 absolutely fire-worshippers in the sense in which the Parsees 

 are thus to be considered,) paid the very greatest respect to 

 those fire-deities having charge of the domestic hearth — the 

 Vesta, or Hestia worship ; the devotion to the Lares. It may 

 be urged that the Lar-worship was entirely a worship of the 

 spirits of ancestors, however cloaked under differing names — 

 as the Genius, Lares, Penates, Vesta, or Manes. The pitris, 

 or "fathers," were worshiped by the Sanscrit-speaking peoples, 

 the Sama-Veda being devoted to the ceremonial directions. The 

 old Slavonians also paid their devotion to the ancestral spirits : 

 "There is no doubt as to their belief that the souls of the 

 fathers watched over their children, and their children's chil- 

 dren ; and that, therefore, departed spirits, and especially those 

 of ancestors, ought always to be regarded with pious veneration, 

 and sometimes solaced by prayer and sacrifice. "§ 



Dr. Shortland has very ably j| shown the close parallelism 

 between the worship of the manes and of the Maori ancestral 



* " Tree and Serpent Worship," Fergusson. p. 115. 



t cf. Maori uru, " the west." — E.T. 



\ " Chi2?s from a German Workshop," vol. ii., p. 112. 



S " Songs of Russia," Ralston, p. 126. 



|i "Maori Religion and Mythology," chap. i. 



