KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 303 
which he relates. He recites them as they were 
told to him, in pursuance of some immemorial tra- 
dition of which nobody knows either the origin or 
the meaning. Yet in most instances the contrast 
between the good and the evil powers, between the 
god of light and warmth and comfort on the one hand 
and the fiends of darkness and cold and misery on the 
other, is so distinctly marked in the features of the 
immemorial myth that the story-teller—ignorant as 
he is of the purport of his talk—is not likely alto- 
gether to overlook it. As a general rule the attri- 
butes of Hercules are but seldom confounded with 
those of Cacus. Now and then, however, a con- 
fusion occurs, as we might expect, where there ig 
no obvious reason why a particular characteristic 
should be assigned to a good rather than to an evil 
hero. In this way some of the relatively neutral 
features in a solar myth have been assigned indiffer- 
ently to the powers of light and the powers of dark- 
ness. It seems to have puzzled Max Miiller that, in 
the myth of the Trojan War, the night demon Paris 
should appear invested with some of the attributes of 
solar heroes. But I think it is natural that this should 
be so when we consider how far the myth-makers 
were from intending anything like an allegory, and 
how slightly they were bound by any theoretical con- 
sistency in the use of their multifarious materials. 
The old antithesis of the good and the bad has gener- 
ally been well sustained in the folk-lore which has de- 
scended from the myths of antiquity, but incidents not 
readily thus distinguishable have been parcelled out 
very much at random. Bearing this in mind, we have 
no difficulty in understanding why the black magician’s 
