line.[1] We will now first return to Jephthah, the Opening Sun. This conception of the Sun as Opener receives a remarkable illustration in a passage of the Persian national epic by Firdûsî, in which occurs an expressive echo of this mythical view. The sun is there actually a golden key, which is lost during the night.[2] As the lighting up of the sun is conceived as an unlocking, so the darkness is a locking up. 'Who commandeth the sun and it riseth not, and who locketh up the stars,' is said in Job IX. 7, of the God who brings on darkness. The solar character of Jephthah receives confirmation from another side, but likewise on Semitic ground. In the version of the Phenician Cosmogony furnished by Damascius[3] it is related, on the authority of Mochus, that the spiritual God Ulômos begot Chrysoros τὸν ἀνουγέα, 'the Opener'. The Sanchuniathon of Philo Herennius identifies this Opener with Hephaestus, who was the first inventor of iron implements (Tûbhal-Ḳayin of the Hebrews). Now, although in its latest development this cosmogony does not pretend to mean any thing else than the opening of the Egg of the world,[4] there can be no doubt that this version belongs to a very late, perhaps the last phase of development of the myth which lies hidden in the background—a stage at which all that makes the myth a myth is quite washed out and changed by the prevalence of theological ideas into an artfully systematised cosmogony. But originally nothing else can have been understood by the Opener than the firstborn brother of the pair, Sun and Night. Another mythic trait which we know of this Opener testifies to his solar significa-
- ↑ Muslim's Collection of Traditions, edition with Commentary, Cairo 1284, V. 118. The commentator, Al-Nawawî, puts the name al-ʿÂḳib in combination with another name of the Prophet of identical meaning, viz. al-Muḳfî. The name al-ʿÂḳib occurs elsewhere also as a proper name, e.g. as the name of a friend of the poet al-Aʿsha (Kitâb al-aġânî, VI. 73).
- ↑ Shâhnâmeh, ed. Mohl, VII. v. 633, according to Rückert's ingenious interpretation in the Zeitschrift der D.M. G., 1856, X. 145.
- ↑ De Principiis, ed. Kopp, p. 385.
- ↑ The sun itself is called a golden egg (Ad. Kuhn, Zeitschr. für verg. Sprachforschung, I. 456).
