Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/59

CHAP. III.

(Minos), and reappear as the Seven Wise Men of Hellas, the Seven Children of Rhodes and Helios,^[1] and the Seven Champions of Christendom. The same lot, it would seem, befell another name for this constellation. They who spoke of the seven triones had long forgotten that their fathers spoke of the stars as taras (staras) or strewers of light, and converted the bearward into Boôtes, the ploughman, while the Teutonic nations, unconscious that they had retained the old root in their word stern or star, likewise embodied a false etymology in wagons or wains. But when we turn to the Arkadian tale, that Kallistô, the mother of the eponymous hero Arkas, was changed into a bear by the jealousy of Hêrê and imprisoned in the constellation, we find ourselves in that boundless region of mythology, the scenes of which are sometimes so exquisitely fair, sometimes so gloomy, hideous, and repulsive. The root vah, to convey (the Latin veho), gave a name to the horse, to the flame of fire, and to the rays of the sun.^[2] The magic wand of metaphor, without which there can be no growth or expansion of language, soon changed the rays of the sun into horses. But these horses, vahni, had yet another epithet, Harit, which signified at first the brilliancy produced by fat and ointment. Like the Greek words σιγαλόεις and λιπαρός, applied to things anointed with lard or oil, ghritâ-prishthâh (glittering with fat) furnished a title for the horses (or flames) of Agni, ignis, the fire. Thus the Harits became the immortal steeds who bear the chariot of Indra across the sky and the car of Archilleus over the plains of Ilion. The Greek carried away the name at an earlier stage; and the Charites, retaining simply the qualities of grace and brightness, became the lovely beings who, with Himeros and the Muses, charm earth and heaven with their song. But before the Hesiodic theogony had defined their numbers and fixed their attributes, Charis remained a mere name of Aphroditê, the radiant dawn who springs from the sea before the rising of the sun. Still, though even at that early time Aphroditê was the goddess of sensuous beauty and love, she was yet, with a strange adherence to the old meaning of her name, known as Enalia and Pontia, the child of the sea foam. For yet another title which she bore they could but frame a tale that Argynnis, the beloved of Agamemnon, had died at Kephisos. Yet that title, identified with the Sanskrit arjunî, spoke simply of dazzling loveliness. By a similar process of metaphor, the rays of the sun were changed into golden hair, into spears and lances, and robes of light. Over the shoulders of Phoibos Lykêgenês, the

1. Pind. Ol. vii. 132.
2. See further Max Müller, Rig Veda Sanhitâ, vol. i. p. 26.