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A MULTIPLICITY OF SUNS.

harness. It is difficult at this day for men whose hereditary ideas of nature and its phenomena are such as the long growth of science has made them— it is difficult for minds thus trained and furnished to go back to the point of view from which the primitive Aryans looked upon a world wherein they had everything to learn for themselves. To them it was by no means self-evident that the sun which shone upon them to-day was the same they had seen yesterday or the day before; on the contrary it seemed to them quite as reasonable to suppose that every new day had its new sun. The Greek mythology shows us a whole people of suns* in the Cyclops, giants with one eye, round as a wheel, in their foreheads. They were akin to the heavenly giants and dwelt with the Phæacians, the navigators of the cloud-sea, in the broad Hypereia,† the upperland, i. e., heaven, until the legend transplanted them both to the western horizon.

The morning twilight is represented in the Vedas by twin gods, and the ruddy dawn by the goddess Ushas, who is one in name and fact with the Greek Eôs. Her light was conceived to be a herd of red cows, and she herself figures in some hymns as a

*W. Grimm," Die Sage von Polyphem." p. 27 ff.

+ Homer, Od. vii. 58, 206,

THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.

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quail. Vartikâ, the Sanscrit name of the bird, corresponds etymologically with ortyx, its Greek name; and in the myths of Greece and Asia Minor the quail is a symbol of light or heat. Instead of one Ushas, a plurality is sometimes mentioned, and indeed there was no end of them, since every new dawn appeared to be a new goddess,

The twin brothers who chase away the demons of the night and bring on the morning, are the Asvins, or Riders. There are points of resemblance between them and the twin sons of Leda which may be more than casual. They are extolled for having rescued many men from danger, and particularly for the aid they frequently afforded to storm-beaten sailors, whom they carried safely to shore in their chariot, or on the backs of their horses. They were bounteous givers, too, of wealth, food, and divine remedies for the ills that flesh is heir to. The wife of Cyavana, the son of Bhrigu, with whom they were in love, induced them by stratagem to renew her husband's youth, and this they effected by bathing him in a lake, from which the bather emerges with whatever age he pleases. Here we have for the first time that "fountain of youth" which reappears, after so long a period of apparent oblivion, in the poems of the middle ages. The renovating lake is the cloud water

D

34

SOMA. AMRITA.

AMBROSIA.

which contains the drink of immortality, the amrita of the Vedas, the ambrosia of the Greeks.

This heavenly beverage was brought down to earth and bestowed on mortals by the god Soma, the personification of the soma plant, which the Hindus now identify with the Asclepias acida, or Sarcostemma viminale. This is a plant containing a milky juice of a sweetish subacid flavour, which, being mixed with honey and other ingredients, yielded to the enraptured Aryans the first fermented liquor their race had ever known. The poetic fire with which Burns sings the praises of John Barleycorn may help us, but only in a faint degree, to comprehend the tumult of delight and wonder, the devout ecstasy, with which the first draught of the miraculous soma possessed the souls of a simple race of water-drinking nomades. What a Vedic hymn would Burns have raised had he been one of them! But there was not wanting many a sacred poet to commemorate the glorious event, nor did it fail to be hallowed in the traditions of succeeding generations from the Ganges to the Atlantic. Among all the Indo-Europeans it gave rise to a multitude of myths and legends, having for their subject the simultaneous descent of fire, of the soul of man, and of the drink of the gods. One of the synonymes of soma is

GANDHARVES.

KENTAURS.

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madhu, which means a mixed drink; and this word is the methu of the Greeks, and the mead of our own Saxon, Norse, and Celto-British ancestors.

The Gandharves, a tribe of demigods, are represented in some of the Vedic legends as custodians of the amrita, or soma, and as keeping such close watch over it that only by force and cunning can the thirsty gods obtain a supply of the immortal beverage. The horses of these Gandharves are highly renowned, and they themselves often assume the form of their favourite animals. Among Dr. Kuhn's many interesting discoveries, not the least curious is that of the identity of these Gandharves, in name and in nature, with the half-human, half-equine Kentaurs, or Centaurs, of Grecian fable. The parallel between the Aryan and the Greek semihorses holds good even as to the fight with the gods for the divine drink, which the former refused to share with the latter. The Kentaurs had a butt, or tun, of precious wine, which was given to them by Dionysos, or Bacchus. Pholos, one of their number, allowed Hercules to drink of this wine, and that was the cause of the war between the son of Jove and the Kentaurs. The divine perfume of the wine was wafted to the nostrils of its absent owners, and rushing to the spot they assailed their kinsman's guest with stones and

other missiles. This scene of turbulence, though described as having occurred on earth, must be understood as a piece of cloud-history. The Kentaurs, like the Gandharves, were undoubtedly clouddemons, or demigods, and the wine butt of the former corresponds to the vessel in which the latter kept their amrita, or soma, and which is called in Sanscrit kabandha, a word that signifies both butt and cloud.

According to Nonnus, the Kentaurs were sons of the Hyades, the rainy constellation, who are also spoken of as the nurses of Dionysos. Asklepiades states that the most distinguished amongst these starry nymphs was named Ambrosia. Euripides speaks of the fountains of ambrosia, the drink of immortality, as situated at the verge of the ocean, the region where heaven and earth meet together, and the clouds rise and fall,