PRIMITIVE VIEWS OF NATURE.

7

paratively familiar to them; even the coming and going of the celestial luminaries might often be regarded by them with the more composure because of their regularity; but they could never surcease to feel the liveliest interest in those wonderful meteoric changes, so lawless and mysterious in their visitations, which wrought such immediate and palpable effects, for good or ill, upon the lives and fortunes of the beholders. Hence these phenomena were noted and designated with a watchfulness and a wealth of imagery which made them the principal groundwork of all the Indo-European mythologies and superstitions. The thunder was the bellowing of a mighty beast, or the rolling of a wagon. The lightning was a sinuous serpent, or a spear shot straight athwart the sky, or a fish darting in zigzags through the waters of heaven. The stormy winds were howling dogs or wolves; the ravages of the whirlwind that tore up the earth were the work of a wild boar. Light clouds were webs spun and woven by celestial women, who also drew water from the fountains on high, and poured it down as rain. The yellow light gleaming through the clouds was their golden hair. A fast-scudding cloud was a horse flying from its pursuers. Other clouds were cows, whose teeming udders refreshed and replenished the

8

ARYAN VIEWS OF NATURE.

earth; or they were buck goats, or shaggy skins of beasts dripping water. Sometimes they were towering castles, or mountains and caverns, rocks, stones, and crags,* or ships sailing over the heavenly waters. In all this, and much more of the same kind, there was not yet an atom of that symbolism which has commonly been assumed as the starting point of all mythology. The mythic animals, for example, were, for those who first gave them their names, no mere images or figments of the mind; they were downright realities, for they were seen by men who were quick to see, and who had not yet learned to suspect any collusion between their eyes and their fancy. These "natural philosophers"-to speak with Touchstone-had in full perfection the faculty that is given to childhood, of making everything out of anything, and of believing with a large and implicit faith in its own creations.

The beings whom they first recognised as gods were those that were visible to them in the sky, and these were for the most part beasts, birds, and reptiles. Some of the latter appeared to combine the flight of birds with the form of creeping things,

* Nearly all the Sanscrit words for rock, stone, cliff, crag, &c., signify also cloud.

Schwartz, U. M. 12.

and then the heavenly fauna was enriched with a new genus, the winged dragon. Glimpses of other human forms besides those of the cloud women were seen from time to time, or their existence was surmised, and gradually the divine abodes became peopled with gods in the likeness of men, to whom were ascribed the same functions as belonged to the bird, beast, and snake-gods. By-and-bye, when all these crude ideas began to shape themselves into something like an orderly system, the surplusage of gods was obviated by blending the two kinds together, or subjecting the one to the other. Thenceforth the story ran that the gods changed themselves from time to time into animal forms, or that each of them had certain animals for his favourites and constant attendants in heaven; and these were sacred to him on earth.

Let us not think too meanly of the intelligence of our simple ancestors because they could regard brutes as gods. It was an error not peculiar to them, but common to all infant races of men. The early traditions of every people point back to a period when man had not yet risen to a clear conception of his own pre-eminence in the scale of created life. The power of discerning differences comes later into play than that of perceiving resemblances, and the

primeval man, living in the closest communion with nature, must have begun with a strong feeling of his likeness to the brutes who shared with him so many wants, passions, pleasures, and pains. Hence the attribution of human voice and reason to birds and beasts in fable and story, and the doctrine of the ・ transmigration of souls. To this feeling of fellowship there would afterwards be superadded a sense of a mysterious something inherent in the nature of brutes, which was lacking in that of man. He found himself so vastly surpassed by them in strength, agility, and keenness of sense; they evinced such a marvellous foreknowledge of coming atmospheric changes which he could not surmise ; they went so straight to their mark, guided by an instinct to him incomprehensible, that he might well come to look upon them with awe as beings superior to himself, and surmise in their wondrous manifestations the workings of something divine.*

The distinction made in historic times between gods of the upper sky, the waters, and the subterranean world, was unknown to the primitive Aryans. The horizon, where earth and sky seem to meet together, was the place in which the supernatural powers were most frequently descried. When they

* Herder, Ideen. Hertz, Der Werwolf.

were not there they were beyond the clouds, in their own world, which was common to them all, and which extended indefinitely above and below the surface of the earth. The origin of most watergods and nymphs of the European Aryans may be traced back to the storm and rain deities of the parent stock; and the greater part of the myths relating to the sea are to be understood as primarily applying not to the earthly, but the cloud-sea, for no other great collection of waters was known to the first Aryans in their inland home. In like manner mythical mountains, rocks, and caverns are generally to be understood as clouds. It was in the clouds that men first beheld the deities of the under-world, whose abode was fixed in later times in the regions from which they might have been supposed to ascend when there was wild work to be done in mid-air.

Although, as we have said, the cloud-sea of the first Aryans has been generally transferred to the earth in the mythologies of the West, nevertheless the existence of an ocean overhead continued to be an article of wide-spread belief in Europe, down at least to the thirteenth century; nor is it quite extinct in some places even at this day. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, fought hard against it in the ninth century. Many persons, he says, are so insensate as to believe