BOOK II. The forge of He phaistos. which he is to avenge the death of Patroklos, as Regin the smith of Hialprek the king of Denmark fashions a new sword for Sigurd at the intercession of his mother Hjordis. But in spite of all his power he himself is subject to great weakness, the result, according to one version, of his mother's harshness, in another, of the cruelty of Zeus. The former relates that Hêrê was so horrified by his deformity and limping gait that she cast him forth from Olympos, and left him to find a refuge with the Ocean nymphs Thetis and Eurynomê. The other tells how when once he was taking his mother's part in one of her quarrels with her husband, Zeus, indignant at his interference, seized him by the leg and hurled him out of heaven. Throughout the livelong day he continued to fall, and as the sun went down he lay stunned on the soil of Lemnos, where the Sintians took him up and tended him in his weakness. The myth also ran that he had no father, as Athênê has no mother, and that he was the child of Hêrê alone, who in like manner is called the solitary parent of Typhon. The mystery of his birth perplexed Hephaistos: and the stratagem in which he discovered it reappears in the Norse story of the Master Smith, who, like Hephaistos, possesses a chair from which none can rise against the owner's will. In the one case it is Hêrê, in the other it is the devil who is thus entrapped, but in both the device is successful. 1 The Olympian dwelling of Hephaistos is a palace gleaming with the splendour of a thousand stars. At his huge anvils mighty bellows keep up a stream of air of their own accord; and giant forms, Brontês, Steropês, Pyrakmon (the thunders, lightnings and flames) aid him in his labours. With him dwells his wife, who in the Iliad, as we have seen, is Charis, in the Odyssey Aphrodite. In its reference to Hephaistos the lay of Demodokos which relates the faith The tradition which assigns this incident as the cause of his lameness refers probably to the weakened powers of fire when either materials or draught fail it. The Vedic hymn speaks of Agni as clothed or hindered by smoke only at his birth; but with a feeling not less true to the phenomena of fire, the poets of the Iliad represent him as always halting, and so furnishing the gods with a source of inextinguishable laughter, as they see him puffing and panting in his ministrations as the cup-bearer. The golden supports which hold him up as he walks are the glittering flames which curl upward beneath the volumes of smoke which rise above them. HEPHAISTOS AND LOKI. lessness of Aphroditê is worthy of note chiefly as it attributes to him the powers of Daidalos. The thin chains which, catching the eye scarcely more than spiders' webs, entrap Arês and Aphroditê in a network from which there is no escape, at once suggest a comparison with the tortuous labyrinth made for Pasiphaê in the land of Minôs. 199 СНАР. IV. Athênê. In our Homeric poems no children of Hephaistos are Hephaismentioned. In Apollodoros we have the strange story which tos and makes him and Athênê the parents of Erichthonios, and the legend which represents him as the father of the robber Periphêtês, who is slain by Theseus-myths transparent enough to render any detailed explanation superfluous. The Christian missionaries converted Hephaistos into a demon, and thus he became the limping devil known in Warwickshire tradition as Wayland the Smith. Of the Latin Vulcan little more needs to be said than that he too is a god of fire, whose name also denotes his office, for it points to the Sanskrit ulka, a firebrand, and to the kindred words fulgur and fulmen, names for the flashing lightning. Like most other Latin gods, he has in strictness of speech no mythology; but it pleased the later Roman taste to attribute to him all that Greek legends related of Hephaistos. The Latin The name Loki, like that of the Latin Vulcanus, denotes The firethe light or blaze of fire, and in such phrases as Locke dricker god Loki. vand, Loki drinks water, described the phenomena of the sun drinking when its light streams in shafts from the cloud rifts to the earth or the waters beneath. The word thus carries us to the old verb liuhan, the Latin lucere, to shine, and to Logi as its earlier form, the modern German lohe, glow; but as the Greek tradition referred the name Oidipous to the two words oida and oidéw, to know and to swell, so a supposed connexion with the verb lukan, to shut or lock, substituted the name Loki for Logi, and modified his character accordingly." He thus becomes the being who holds In the Gaelic Lay of Magnus, the smith or forging god appears under the name Balcan, his son being the sailor. This looks as if the Latin name had been borrowed. In this story the twelve ruddy daughters of the King of Light 2 Grimm. D. M., 221. BOOK Loki the thief. the keys of the prison-house, like the malignant Grendel in Beowulf, or the English fire-demon Grant mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury, a name connected with the Old Norse grind, a grating, and the modern German grenz, a boundary. At no time, however, did Loki exhibit the features of the Semitic devil or the Iranian Ahriman. Like Hephaistos, a god of the fire, he resembles him also in his halting gait and in the uncouth figure which provokes the laughter of the gods; and if we are not told that like him Loki was hurled out of heaven, yet we see him bound for his evil deeds, and, like Prometheus, he shall be set free, we are told, at the end of the world, and shall hurry in the form of a wolf to swallow the moon, as the deliverance of Prometheus is to be followed by the overthrow of his tormentor. Hence the Norse phrase, 'Loki er or böndum,' answering to the expression, ‘Der Teufel ist frei gelassen,' the devil is loose.' The last day of the week bore, in Grimm's opinion, the name of this deity.2 In place of our Saturday we have the Old Norse laugardagr, the Swedish lögerdag, the Danish löverdag, a word which at a later period was held to mean the day appointed for bathing or washing, but which was more probably used at first in the original sense of brightness attached to Loki's name. When, however, this meaning gave way before the darker sense extracted from the verb lukan, to shut or imprison, Loki became known as Sætere, the thief who sits in ambush. The Christian missionaries were not slow to point out the resemblance of this word to the Semitic Satan and the Latin Saturnus, who were equally described as malignant demons; and thus the notions grew up that the name of the last day of the week was imported from the old mythology of Italy, or that the Teutonic god was also the agricultural deity of the Latin tribes. The root of the two myths of Loki and Prometheus is thus precisely the In each case the benefactor of man is a being as subtle as he is wise, and as such he is expelled from the same. family of the gods. The vulture of SECTION IV.-PROMETHEUS. IV. Hesiodic ages. Another and in some versions a very different account of CHAP. fire is given in the myths of Prometheus. In the Hesiodic Theogony Prometheus is a son of the Titan Iapetos, his bro- The thers being Epimetheus, Atlas, and Menoitios. But even of these the Hesiodic account cannot easily be reconciled with that of the Odyssey. In the latter, Atlas (Skambha) is the guardian and keeper of the pillars which hold up the heaven above the earth, and he knows all the depths of the sea. In the former he is condemned by Zeus to support the heaven on his head and hands,' while Menoitios undergoes a punishment corresponding to that of Sisyphos or Ixîôn, and with his father Iapetos is consigned to the abyss of Tartaros. In short, if we put aside the assertion that in some way or other Prometheus was a giver of the boon of fire to men, the story is told with a singular variety of inconsistent details. Nothing can be more clear and emphatic than the narrative in which Eschylos asserts the utter and hopeless savagery of mankind before Prometheus came to their aid. They had no settled homes, no notion of marriage or of the duties which bind the members of a family together; they burrowed in the ground like the digger Indians, and contented themselves with food not much better than that of the insect-eating Bushmen, because they knew nothing about fire, and how far it might raise them above the beasts of the field. This wretched state was their original condition, not one to which they had fallen from a higher and a better one, and it was from mere compassion to their utter helplessness that Prometheus stole fire from the house of Zeus, and hiding it in a ferule, imparted it to men, teaching them at the same time how to cook their food and build houses. With this notion the narrative of the Hesiodic Theogony is in complete antagonism. In this legend the existence of man upon earth began with a golden age, during which the earth yielded her fruits of her own accord, and in which plagues and sicknesses were unknown. They were subject indeed to the 1 Odyss. i. 52. Grote, Hist. Gr. i. 101. 2 Hesiod, Theog. 516. BOOK II. doom of death; but they died as though they were merely going to sleep, and became the righteous demons who, wandering like the Erinyes everywhere through the air, watch the ways and works of men, to uphold the righteous and overturn the wicked. The second is the silver age, the men of which incurred the wrath of Zeus, and were hidden by him beneath the earth for impiously witholding the honours due to the immortal gods. Still when they die they are reckoned among the blessed, and are not without honours themselves.' The brazen age which followed exhibits a race of men who ate no corn and had hearts of adamant, and whose hands sprung from their vast shoulders. These were the workers in brass (for men had not yet needed or come to know the use of iron), and their weapons were used to their own destruction. Like the men sprung from the dragon's teeth in the Theban and Argonautic myths, they fought with and slaughtered each other, and went down. without a name to the gloomy underworld of Hades. But it must not be forgotten that the Hesiodic poet knows of no transitional periods. The old age does not fade away insensibly into the new. It is completely swept off, and the new takes its place as virtually a new creation. Thus the earth becomes the possession of a series of degenerating inhabitants, the race of the poet's own day being the worst of all. These The portions thus allotted to the departed of the golden and silver races tended to foster and develope that idea of a moral conflict between good and evil which first took distinct shape on Iranian soil. The evil spirits are there the malignant powers of darkness who represent both in name and in attributes the gloomy antagonist of the sun-god Indra. The Hesiodic myth coincides completely with this sentiment, while it extends it. Here the spirits of the men belonging to the golden age are the good demons, these demons being generically different from the blessed gods of Olympos but it was easy to assign to the departed souls of the silver age a lower, or even a positively malignant, character. They are not called Daimones by the Hesiodic poet, but they have a recognised position and dignity in the realm of the air. There was no : reason, therefore, why they should not be represented by others as evil demons; and this step which, as Mr. Grote remarks, was taken by Empedokles and Xenokrates, led to that systematic distinction of which the Christian teachers availed themselves for the overthrow or rather the transformation of the system itself. It only remained for them to insist on the reality of the evil denions thus brought into existence, and then, as the gods themselves are in the Iliad and Odyssey and elsewhere called demons, to include all together in the one class of malignant devils: and at once the victory of the new creed was insured. The old mythology was not killed, but it took a different shape, and, losing all its ancient beauty, acquired new powers of mischief and corruption. Grote, Hist. Greece, i. 96, &c. |