BOOK II.
The con-
flict be-
tween
light and
darkness.
rise In the heavens, must seem to woo the queen of the deep blue ether, must rouse the anger of her lord, must be hurled down from his lofty place. Hence, Ixion must wTithe on his fiery cross, and Sisyphos must roll the huge stone to the hill-top only to see it dash down again to the plain beneath. There would not be wanting more terrible crimes and more mysterious complications. The Sun must be united again in the evening to the mother from whom he was parted in the morning ; and hence that awful marriage of Oidipous with lokaste, which filled his house with woe and brought his lineage to an end in blood. Iphigeneia must die that Helen may be brought back, as the evening twilight must vanish away if the light of dawn is to come again. But Iphigeneia has done no Tong. She is the darling of her father's heart, and the memories linked with her image are those only of tenderness and love. Must there not then be vengeance taken for the outpouring of her innocent blood ? And can Ate rest till she has visited on Agamemnon himself the death of his guiltless child ?
Without going further, we have here the germs, and more than the germs, of doctrines which, from the time that these ideas were awakened in the human mind, have moulded the theolog)' of the world — the doctrines of irresistible force, of the doom which demands blood for blood, of the destiny which shapes a man's life even before he is born. These doctrines necessarily assume at an early age 3 moral or a spiritual character ; but the ideas which underlie them were evoked by the physical phenomena of nature. The moral con^ flict and antagonism between Ormuzd and Ahriman points to the earlier struggle in which Indra fights with and slays the biting snake, the thief, the seducer, who hides away his prey in his dismal cave ; and the battle between spiritual good and evil takes form from the war between the light of the Sun and the darkness of the night. But while these ideas were passing more and more into the region of things spiritual, and were becoming cr}'stallised in theological systems, the growth of a physical mythology was not wholly arrested. The vengeance for iniquity may belong to the fearful Erinyes ; but the Erinys is still a being who wanders in the air. The wrath of Ate may never slumber, so long as the murderer remains unpunished ; but she is still the tangible being whom Zeus seizes by her long-flowing locks, and hurls from the portals of Olympos. But the impulse to a moral mythology once given could not but call into existence other beings answering to Ate or the Erinyes in their purely spiritual aspects. From the idea of a being who can see all that is done by the children of men would come the notion of three beings, each having as its
