thought of in union with night than with day; therefore it is said in Arabic, 'more liberal than the rainy night' (anda min al-leylâ al-mâṭirâ).[1] Not only the rain, but the Wind also, in contrast to the merry laughing sunshine, is conceived as closely connected with the night.[2] In the Mohammedan cosmogonic legend it is said that the rough Wind lives on the curtain of the Darkness.[3] Hence also we see that the myth does not distinguish between the Morning Glow and the Evening Glow, but denotes the phenomenon by itself, without caring whether it precedes or follows the night. In connexion with this stands the fact that, as Steinthal has recently briefly noted,[4] mythic thought did not attain to the category of Causality; for this category presupposes a clear consciousness of succession, or of one event following another in time. Only thus can we explain myths which speak of the Dawn now as the daughter, now as the mother of the Day. On the domain of language some phenomena in the semasiology of Arabic words can be explained from this fact of the development of conceptions, as e.g. when the lexicographers translate the verb safar II. IV. to 'pasture early or late': IV. V. 'to come at the morning or evening glow'.[5] Except by the operation of the above-named psychological fact, the express combination of these two definitions of time in one word would seem to be impossible.
But the very fact just mentioned, that it is characteristic of mythical ideas to put one phenomenon into a family relation towards another, and to speak of mother, brother, son, daughter, &c., furnishes the first elements of and impulses towards the discrimination of Succession in
- ↑ Kitâb al-aġânî, I. 133. 19. Compare al-Meydânî, ed. Bûlâḳ, II. 262. 4.
- ↑ Both wind and rain are placed in connexion with the night in the Dîvân of the Hudailites, ed. Kosegarten, p. 125, v. 5: ta‘tâduhu riḥu-sh-shimâli biḳurrihâ * fî kulli leylatin dâjinin wa-hutûni, 'the Northwind blows over it with his coldness every cloudy rainy night.
- ↑ Yâḳut's Geogr. Dictionary, I. 24. 2.
- ↑ Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, &c. 1874, VIII. 179.
- ↑ See Böttcher's article on this group of roots in Höfer's Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft der Sprache (Greifswald 1851), III. 16.
