BOOK II. The Wind and the Fire. The Ar rôneus. the name of any deity. In the Greek dialects the word itself seems to have been lost, while the Latin ignis, with which it is identical, is merely a name for fire; nor are any myths associated with the Lithuanian Agni, the Slavonic Ogon, beyond that of his being sprung from Svarog, the heaven.1 SECTION II-PHORÔNEUS AND HESTIA. The myth of Hermes brings before us one of the many modes in which men were supposed to have become first possessed of the boon of fire. But although Hermes is there said to have been the first to bestow this gift upon mankind, it is simply as supplying or kindling the materials, not as being himself the fire. The hymn-writer is careful to distinguish between the two. He is the fire-giver because he rubs the branches of the forest trees together till they burst into a flame: but the wood thus kindled and the meat which is roasted are devoured not by himself but by the flames. Hermes remains hungry, although he is represented as longing for the food whose savour fills his nostrils. Nothing can show more clearly that we are dealing simply with the wind or with air in motion, in other words, with the bellows not with the fire. Hence with a keen sense of the meaning of the myth, Shelley, in his translation of the line, speaks of Hermes as supplying to men "matches, tinderbox, and steel" for the kindling of the flame. Another discoverer or bestower of fire is the Argive Phorôneus, give Pho- who represents the Vedic fire god Bhuranyu, and whose name is thus seen to be another form of the Greek Pûr, the Teutonic feuer and fire. Phorôneus is thus the fire itself, and as such he dwelt on the Astu Phorônikon of Argos,-in other words, he is the Argive Hestial with its holy flame of everlasting fire. In this aspect he was naturally represented as the first of men and the father of all who are subject to death; and as such, he is also described, in accordance with the myth of the Askingas, as springing from an ash-tree. To Phorôneus himself more than one wife is assigned. In one version he is the husband of Kerdo, the clever or winsome, a name pointing to the influence of fire on the comfort and the arts of life; in another of Mr. Brown refers us to no Semitic form The worship of Ogon, Mr. Ralston hearth, of which the stove has taken the place. Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 37. Ib. Melia, of course, becomes a nymph, and is said to be wedded to Inachos, who thus becomes the father of Phoroncus. PHORÔNEUS AND NIOBÊ. IV. 423 Telodikê, a word which indicates the judicial powers of the Greek CHAP. Hestia and the Latin Vestia. For the same reason, he is also wedded to Peitho, persuasion. Among his children are Pelasgos, Iasos, and Agenor, of whom a later tradition said that after their father's death they divided the kingdom of Argos among themselves. He is thus described as the father of the Pelasgic race, in contrast with Deukalion, who is the progenitor of the Hellenic tribes. But it is unnecessary to enter the ethnological labyrinth from which it seems as impossible to gather fruit as from the barren sea. It is enough to say that Agenor, in this Argive myth, is a brother of Eurôpê, while in that of the Phoinikian land he is her father, and that Argos and Phoinikia are alike the glistening regions of the purple dawn. The phrase that Eurôpê, the broad-spreading morning light, is the daughter of Phorôneus, corresponds precisely with the myth which makes Hephaistos cleave the head of Zeus to allow the dawn to leap forth in its full splendour. But from fire comes smoke and vapour, and Phorôneus is thus the father of Niobê, the rain-cloud, who weeps herself to death on Mount Sipylos. As gathering to one centre the Argives, who had thus far dwelt Hestia. scattered without a notion of social order and law, Phorôneus discharges the functions of Hestia. Nay, his Astu is Hestia, the inviolable fire on the sacred hearth which may not be moved but stands fast for ever. But no great accretion of myths was possible in the case either of Phorôneus or of Hestia. The legend, such as it is, belongs to that class of transparent stories among which the myths of Endymiôn, Narkissos, Daphnê, Sarpêdôn, and Memnôn are among the most conspicuous; and the beneficial influence of her cultus is perhaps most strongly marked by the almost complete absence of folk-lore in connexion with her name. the fire on the hearth, the symbol and the pledge good faith, of law and order, of wealth and fair dealing, that it was impossible to lose sight of her attributes or to forget their origin; and except under these conditions there can be no full developement of mythology. Of no other deity perhaps was the worship so nearly an unmixed blessing. Falsehood and treachery, fickleness and insin The names Astu and Hestia are both referred by Preller to the Sanskrit vas, to dwell, the cognate Greek forms being and (w, thus connecting together the Latin Vesta and sedes, a permanent habitation. But on the other hand it is urged that the name Hestia may more reasonably be referred to the root vas, to shine, which has She is so clearly of kindliness and yielded Vasu as a name for Agni, as cerity, were to her things utterly hateful. Her purity could brook no uncleanness; her youth could know no decay, and thus her sacred dwelling became the centre of influences which breathed some life into a society prone to become more and more heartless and selfish. From the horrible devil-worship of Artemis Orthia, or Tauropola, we may turn to the redeeming cultus of Hestia and Asklepios,-the shrines of the one being the stronghold of generosity and sympathy, the temples of the other being devoted to those works of mercy, which we are disposed to regard as the exclusive products of Christianity.1 Hestia in the common legend is the eldest daughter of Kronos and Rheia, and is wooed both by Phoibos and Poseidôn; but their suit is vain. Hestia makes a solemn vow that she will never be a bride, and as her reward she receives honour and glory both among gods and among men. As the pure maiden, she is to have her home in the inmost part of every dwelling, and at every sacrifice offered to Zeus and the other deities she is to preside and to receive the first invocation and the first share. As apart from her there can be no surety for truth, peace, and justice, each town, city, and state must have its own Prytaneion, with its central hearth, uniting the citizens in a common faith and in common interests. Here the suppliant should obtain at the least the boon of a fair trial, here should all compacts, whether between states or private men, receive their most solemn sanction; and when it became necessary to lighten the pressure of population at home by sending forth some of the citizens into new countries, from this hearth should the sacred fire be taken as the link which was to bind together the new home with the old. This fire should never be extinguished; but if by chance such calamity should befall, it was to be lit again, not from common flame but as Hermes kindled fire, by friction, or drawn by burningglasses from the sun itself. Hands unclean might not touch her altar, and the guardians of her sacred fire should be pure and chaste as herself. All this is so transparent that we cannot be said to have entered here on the domain of mythology; and even the great hearth of the Universe is but an extension to the whole Kosmos of the idea which regarded Hestia as the very foundation of human society. The temples of Asklepios were practically large hospitals, where something like the aid of Christian charity was extended to the sick and afflicted by physicians whose knowledge raised them far above the empirics and spellmutterers of the Middle Ages. SECTION III.-HEPHAISTOS AND LOKI. IV. maimed tos. In Hephaistos, the ever-young, we see an image of fire, not as CHAP. the symbol and pledge of faith and honour, of law and equity, but like Agni, dark and stunted in its first beginnings but able to do The wonders in its power over earths and metals. He is the mighty Hephaisworkman who, at the prayer of Thetis, forges for Achilleus the irresistible armour in which he is to avenge the death of Patrôklos, as Regin the smith of Hialprek the king of Denmark fashions a new sword for Sigurd which is brought to him by his mother Hjordis. But in spite of all his power he himself is subject to great weakness, the result, according to one version, of his mother's harshness, in another, of the cruelty of Zeus. The former relates that Hêrê was so horrified by his deformity and limping gait that she cast him forth from Olympos, and left him to find a refuge with the Ocean nymphs Thetis and Eurynomê. The other tells how when once he was taking his mother's part in one of her quarrels with her husband, Zeus, indignant at his interference, seized him by the leg and hurled him out of heaven. Throughout the livelong day he continued to fall, and as the sun went down he lay stunned on the soil of Lemnos, where the Sintians took him up and tended him in his weakness. The myth also ran that he had no father, as Athênê has no mother, and that he was the child of Hêrê alone, who in like manner is called the solitary parent of Typhon. The mystery of his birth perplexed Hephaistos: and the stratagem in which he discovered it reappears in the Norse story of the Master Smith, who, like Hephaistos, possesses a chair from which none can rise against the owner's will. In the one case it is Hêrê, in the other it is the devil who is thus entrapped, but in both the device is successful. of He The Olympian dwelling of Hephaistos is a palace gleaming with The forge the splendour of a thousand stars. At his huge anvils mighty bellows phaistos. keep up a stream of air of their own accord; and giant forms, Brontês, Steropês, Pyrakmon (the thunders, lightnings and flames) aid him in 1 See note, p. 421. The tradition which assigns this incident as the cause of his lameness refers probably to the weakened powers of fire when either materials or draught fail it. The Vedic hymn speaks of Agni as clothed or hindered by smoke only at his birth; but with a feeling not less true to the phenomena of fire, the poets of the Iliad represent him as always halting, and so furnishing the BOOK Hephaistos and Athêné. The Latin The firegod Loki. his labours. With him dwells his wife, who in the Iliad, as we have seen, is Charis, in the Odyssey Aphroditê. In its reference to Hephaistos the lay of Demodokos which relates the faithlessness of Aphroditê is worthy of note chiefly as it attributes to him the powers of Daidalos. The thin chains which, catching the eye scarcely more than spiders' webs, entrap Arês and Aphroditê in a network from which there is no escape, at once suggest a comparison with the tortuous labyrinth made for Pasiphaê in the land of Minós. In our Homeric poems no children of Hephaistos are mentioned. In Apollodoros we have the strange story which makes him and Athêne the parents of Erichthonios, and the legend which represents him as the father of the robber Periphêtês, who is slain by Theseusmyths transparent enough to render any detailed explanation superfluous. The Christian missionaries converted Hephaistos into a demon, and thus he became the limping devil known in Berkshire tradition as Wayland the Smith. Of the Latin Vulcan little more needs to be said than that he too is a god of fire, whose name also denotes his office, for it points to the Sanskrit ulka, a firebrand, and to the kindred words fulgur and fulmen, names for the flashing lightning. Like most other Latin gods, he has in strictness of speech no mythology; but it pleased the later Roman taste to attribute to him all that Greek legends related of Hephaistos. The name Loki, like that of the Latin Vulcanus, denotes the light or blaze of fire, and in such phrases as Locke dricker vand, Loki drinks water, described the phenomena of the sun drinking. when its light streams in shafts from the cloud-rifts to the earth or the waters beneath. The word thus carries us to the old verb liuhan, the Latin lucere, to shine, and to Logi as its earlier form, the modern German lohe, glow; but as the Greek tradition referred the name Oidipous to the two words olda and oidéw, to know and to swell, so a supposed connexion with the verb lukan, to shut or lock, substituted the name Loki for Logi, and modified his character accordingly." He thus becomes the being who holds the keys of the prison-house, like the malignant Grendel in Beowulf, or the English fire-demon Grant mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury, a name connected with the Old Norse grind, a grating, and the modern German grenz, a boundary. In the Gaelic Lay of Magnus, the smith or forging god appears under the name Balcan, his son being the sailor. This looks as if the Latin name had been borrowed. In this story the twelve ruddy daughters of the King of Light marry the twelve foster-brothers of Magnus the hero-the months of the year. Campbell, iii. 347; Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology', i. 326. Grimm, D. M. 221. |