with wings and feet. To the same conception are also due the so-called mystic eye which is often met with on Etruscan vessels of clay, and the part played by the eye in the representation of Osiris.[1] The sun is called in the Malacassa language masovanru, and in Dayak matasu, both of which expressions denote oculus diei.[2] In the Polynesian mythology the sun is the left eye of Tangaloa, the highest god of heaven, hence the Eye of Heaven.[3] The sun accordingly possesses also the attributes of the eye. Thus in the Hebrew poetry we meet with the Eyelashes[4] (i.e. rays) of the Dawn, 'aph'appê shachar (Job III. 9, XLI. 10), as in the Greek with ἁμέρας βλέφαρον (Soph. Ant. 104),[5] and in the Arabic with ḥawâjib al-shams. This notion has so completely become an idiom of the Arabic language, where the mythical force of the 'sun's eyelashes' has retired into the background, that we even find the singular: 'the sun's eyelash is risen,' (ṭala'a ḥâjib al-shams) or 'set' (gâba ḥâjib al-shams).[6]
Among more recent poets Shakespeare is most familiar with the expression eye, eye of heaven, as descriptive of the sun:
Though thy speech doth fail,
One eye thou hast to look to heaven for grace;
The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.
King Henry VI. Pt. I. I. 4.
- ↑ Julius Braun, Naturgeschichte der Sage, I. 41. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 316.
- ↑ E. Jacques, Vocabulaire Arabe-malacassa, in Journ. Asiat., 1833, XI. 129, 130.
- ↑ Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, VI. 242.
- ↑ 'Wimpern der Morgenröthe,' and so Ewald translates aph'appayim in Job, i.e. eyelashes, eyelids being 'Augenlieder.' Yet Gesenius understands the word as palpebrae, i.e. eyelids (though both this word and cilium are occasionally used indiscriminately in either sense). Βλέφαρον is only 'eyelid;' the Arabic ḥawâjib is only 'eyelash.'—Tr.
- ↑ Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 1003. a; compare Orph. VIII. I. 13. In the Thesmophoriazusae v. 17, Aristophanes makes Euripides call the eye 'the imitation of the disc of the sun;' compare Acharn. v. 1184: ὦ κλεινόν ὄμμα 'O glorious eye!' as an address to the Sun.
- ↑ Al Buchârî, IX. 30, 35.
