II. BOOK 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 nebel-kappe 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 (vλápTMηs)1 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." The Rivers of the Un Hades, then, in the definite authority assigned to him after the seen Land. 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 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 'These are the gates of the walls built by Poseidôn, which all the dead must enter, and within which lie the realms of darkness. In the Iliad and Odyssey πύλαι "Αιδου, "Αιδου δῶμα are, with others, familiar phrases. Jacobi, Mythologie, s.v. Hades. The same idea is found in Attic tragedy, ἥκω νεκρῶν κευθμῶνα καὶ οκότου πύλας λιπών, Eur. Hek. i. Alk. 127, and in the gates of the Semitic Sheol which Hezekiah dreaded to enter. These gates are to be assaulted by the Church to which Jesus committed the work of the world's salvation, and are by it to be finally battered down, the words οὐ κατισχύ. σουσιν αύτης denoting only that they will not be strong enough to resist the attacks made on them by the children of the light. The Christian world has chosen to misconstrue the phrase, and endless wars, turning on theories of Primacy, Indefectibility, and Infallibility, have been the result. 2 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 ris beard in a door, and refuses to let free until he gives her the ladder by which he climbs out of the mountai depths into the open air. Thus es caping, she returns with her heavenly lover, and despoils Rinkrank (Plouta) of all his treasures. THE RIVERS OF HADES. 533 IX. the world of living men, and to lead through it the channels of CHAP. Lêthê, in which all things are forgotten, of Kokytos, which echoes only with shrieks of pain, of Pyryphlegethon, with its waves of fire.1 SECTION II.-ELYSION. But, in truth, such details as these, produced as they are, not by The the necessities of mythical developement but by the growth or the of the Judges wants of a religious faith, belong rather to the history of religion, and Dead. not to the domain of mythology, which is concerned only or mainly with legends springing from words and phrases whose original meaning has been misunderstood 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 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 one river of Hades. 1 Acheron, the remaining river, is probably only another form of Achelôos, the flowing water, and may perhaps have been in the earlier myths the · ἄδακρυν νέμονται αἰῶνα. Pind. Οl. ii. 120. BOOK The II. Asphodel tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos; and they whose To these islands of the blessed only they could be admitted who Meadows. 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 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 Typhoeus, 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 Typhoeus. CHAPTER X. THE DARKNESS. SECTION I.-VRITRA AND AHI. IX. The story No mythical phrases have so powerfully affected the history of religion CHAP. as the expressions which described originally the physical struggle between light and darkness as exhibited in the alternations of day of Sarama and night. These phrases stand out with wonderful vividness in the and Helen. 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 Odyssey, the story of the Volsungs and the Nibelung Song, the Ramayana of Hindustan and the Persian Shahnameh have nothing in common. In the brief and changeful course of the bright but short-lived sun; in his love for the dawn, who vanishes as he fixes his gaze upon her, and for the dew which is scorched by his piercing rays; in his toil for creatures so poor and weak as man, in his grief for the loss of the beautiful morning which cheered him at his rising, in the sullenness BOOK II. Indra and The Struggle between Light and with which he hides his grief behind the clouds, in the vengeance which he takes on the dark powers who have dimmed his glory, in the serene and dazzling splendour which follows his victory, in the restoration of his early love, who now comes before him as the evening twilight with the same fairy network of luminous cloud, there can be no monotony. It is a tale which may be told a thousand times without losing its freshness, and may furnish the germ of countless epics to those who have hearts to feel its touching beauty. They who see monotony here may well see monotony also in the whole drama of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that the phrases which produced the myth of Indra must have given birth to the Iliad. The two stories are, in truth, the same. The enemy of Indra keeps shut up in his prison-house the beautiful clouds which give rain to the earth; and the struggle which ends in their deliverance is the battle of Achilleus with Hektor, and of the Achaians with the men of Ilion, which ends in the rescue of Helen. The weary hours during which the god fights with his hidden foe are the long years which roll away in the siege of Troy; and the lightnings which seal the doom of the hated thief represent the awful havoc in the midst of which Paris the seducer receives the recompense of his treachery. Of this story the most ancient hymns addressed to Indra exhibit the unmistakeable outlines. In its simplest form the fight of Indra with the demon is nothing more than a struggle to gain possession of the rain-clouds.1 But the ideas soon become more fully developed, and his enemy assumes a thoroughly hateful character as the throttling snake of darkness. In the less simple hymns the strictly mythical imagery is, as M. Bréal well remarks, intermingled with phrases which speak not of the anthropomorphised god, but of floods, clouds, winds and darkness.2 Throughout these hymns two images stand out before us with overpowering distinctness. On one side is the bright god of the heaven, as beneficent as he is irresistible; on the other the demon of night and of darkness, as false and treacherous as he is malignant. On both of these contending powers the Hindu lavished all his wealth of speech to exalt the one and to express his hatred of the other. The latter (as his name Vritra, from var, to veil, indicates) is pre-eminently the thief who hides away the rain-clouds. But although the name comes from the 'same root which yielded that of Varuna, the lurking-place of Vritra has nothing to do with that broad-spreading veil which Varuna stretches over the loved earth 2 Ib. 93, &c. 1 Bréal, Hercule et Cacus, 89. |