686 BCn.VA, ITS PEOPLE AND PRODLX'TIOXS. 



works to do, ami lie fails iu none. The remembrance of lole may linger in his 

 memory, but there are others who claim his love in the days of his strength and power, 

 and it would seem as though he had forgotten the daughter of Euiytos. But his 

 time draws towards its close : the beautiful maiden, whoso face had gladdened 

 him long ago, returns to cheer him in tlie evening of his life. Witli her comes the 

 poisoned robe (the mantle of cloud) which he strives in vain to tear away from 

 his bleeding limbs. In a deeper and redder stream flows the life-blood, till, after a 

 convulsive struggle, the strife is closed in the dead silence of night. 



"But it is in the case of Herakles that the perfect truth of the old mythical 

 language gave rise more especially to that apparently strange and per])lexing meaning 

 which repelled and disgusted even the poets and philosophers of Greece. Pindar 

 refuses to believe that any God would bo a sensualist or a cannibal : ho might in the 

 same spirit have rejected the tales which impute something of meanness and cowar- 

 dice to the brave and high-souled Herakles. For Herakles fights with poisoned 

 arrows, and leaves them as his bequest to Philoktetes. But the poisoned arrows are 

 the piercing rays which burn on the tropical noon-day, and they reappear as well in 

 the poisoned robe of Deianeira, as in that which the Kolchian Medeia professes 

 to have received from her kinsman Helios. 



" A deeper mythical meaning, however, underlies and accounts for the immorality 

 and licence which was introduced into the transmuted legend of Herakles. The sun 

 looks down on the earth, and the earth answers to his loving glance by her teeming 

 and inexhaustible fertility. In every land she yields her special harvest of fruits 

 and flowers, of com and wine and oil. Her children are countless, but all spring 

 up under the eye of the sun as he journeys through the wide heaven. 



■ " It is easy to see what must be the result when the sun is transmuted into the 

 human, yet god-like Herakles, and how repulsive that myth must become which, 

 in its primitive form, only told how 



' The sunlight clasps the earth 

 And the moonbeams kiss the sea.' ' 



The same explanation removes the mystery of the oven greater degradation to which 

 the Hellenic mythology reduces Zeus himself, the supreme father of gods and men. 

 He who should be the very type of all purity and goodness becomes the very 

 embodiment of headstrong lust and passion, while the holiness of the lord of life 

 and light is transferred to Apollon, and his virgin sister Athene. The difficulty 

 is but slight. Zeus, the Vedic Dyaus, is but another form of Ouranos, the veiling 

 heaven or sky, and again, as in the words of our own poet, who sings how 



' Nothing in the world is single, 

 All things by a law divine 

 In another's being mingle,' 



and how 



' The mountains kiss high heaven,' 



so Ouranos looked down on Gaia, and brooded over her in his deep, unfailing, life-giving 

 love. But these are phrases which will not bear translation into the conditions of 

 human life, without degrading the spiritual god into a being who boasts of his un- 

 bounded and shameless licence." 



The intelligent reader will be amply repaid by studying this interesting subject 

 at greater lengt:h in the work of Cox and other writers, but the above short extracts 

 will, I hope, show by wliat process a pure and spiritual idea becomes converted into 

 an impure and sensuous one. There is one other point also which I will here briefly 

 refer to as connected with the early mental conceptions of man: "Thus far it is 

 only on Iranian soil that we have seen the struggle between day and night, the sun 

 and the darkness, represented as a conflict between moral good and evil, the result 



' Shelly, Zoiv's rhihsophtj. 



