Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/484

BOOK II. and Sarameya or Hermeias is the Dawn-child. Into the conception of the former, Professor Max Miiller rightly asserts that the idea of storm never entered; and the passages in which mention is made of Sarameya lead him also to exclude this notion from the character of Hermes. With him, then, Hermes is " the god of twilight, who betrays his equivocal nature by stealing, though only in fun, the herds of Apollón, but restoring them without the violent combat that is waged for the same herds in India between Indra the bright god and "Vala the robber. In India the dawn brings the light, in Greece the twilight is itself supposed to have stolen it, or to hold back the light, and Hermes the twilight surrenders the booty when challenged by the sun-god Apollo."^[1] This view explains at most only two or three of the traits which make up the character of the Hellenic Hermes; it does not show us how the functions of the twilight could be carried on through the live-long night;^[2] still less does it account for the radical idea of sound connected with Hermes as contrasted with the light which is the chief characteristic of Apollón. Yet Professor Max Müller himself supplies the clue which may lead us through the labyrinth when he tells us that Hermes is born in the morning, "as Sarameya would be the son of the twilight, or, it may be, the first breeze of the dawn."^[3] The idea which lies at the root of the Vedic Sarama and Sarameya is that of brightness; the idea which furnishes the groundwork for the myth of Hermes is essentially that of sound. There is nothing to bewilder us in this fact. Both ideas are equally involved in the root Sar, which expressed only motion; and the degree of difference discernible between the Vedic Sarama and the Greek Hermes is at the worst precisely that which we should expect from the disintegrating process brought about by a partial or complete forgetfulness of the original meaning of words. That the tales of one nation are not borrowed directly from the legends of another, the whole course of philological science tends, as we have seen, more and more to prove. Names which are mere attributes in one mythology are attached to distinct persons in another. The title Arjuni, which in the Veda is a transparent epithet of the dawn, becomes in the West Argennos, known only as a favourite of Agamemnon; and the mysterious Varuna of the Hindu is very inadequately represented by the Hellenic Ouranos. The Greek Charites and the Latin Gratiae are in name identical with the Sanskrit Harits: Erinys is Saranyu, and Helen is Sarama. But the Greek did not get his Charis from the Harit of the Brahman; the

1. Lect. on Lang. second series, 475.
2. Hymn to Hermes, 141.
3. Lect. on Lang. second series, 473.