Aryan Religions

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

THAT morning speech of Belarius (in Cymbeline) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature religion in its simplest garb :

" Stoop, boys ; this gate
Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you
To morning's holy office : the gates of monarchs
Are arched so high, that giants may get through
And keep their impious turbans on without
Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven !
We house i' the rock, yet use thee not so hardly
As prouder livers do."

Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, now free alike from its cares, and temptations, and moral responsibilities. He gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. "Hail, thou fair heaven I" There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-reproach. And in this respect taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers. Is this the voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion ? Not altogether, for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria ; and it will be remembered that when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system ; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency if no more towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology. But the Aryans grew up and formed themselves into nations, and developed the germs of their religion apart from external influence, and in a land which from the earliest times had belonged to them alone. Their character, their religion, their national life, were their own; and though in after times these went through distinctive modifications, when the stems of nations that we know, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and the rest, grew out of the Aryan stock, they yet bore amid these changes the memory of a common ancestry. The land in which they dwelt was favorable to the growth of the imaginative faculties, and to that lightness and brightness of nature which afterwards so distinguished the many-minded Greeks, rather than to the slow, brooding character of the Eastern mind. There, down a hundred hillsides, and along a hundred valleys, trickled the rivulets whose waters were hurrying to swell the streams of the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And each hill and valley had its separate community, joined indeed by language and custom to the common stock, but yet living a separate simple life in its own home, which had, one might almost say, its individual sun and sky as well as hill and river. No doubt in such a land innumerable local legends and beliefs sprang up, and these, though lost to us now, had their effects upon the changes which among its various branches the mythologies of the Aryans underwent; mythologies which are before all remarkable for the endless variations to which the stories of their gods are subject, the infinite rainbow tints into which their essential thoughts are broken.

Despite these divergencies, the Aryans had a common chief deity, the sky, the "fair heaven." This, the most abstracted and intangible of natural appearances, at the same time the most exalted and unchanging, seemed to them to speak most plainly of an all-embracing deity. And though their minds were open to all the thousand voices of nature, and their imaginations equal to the task of giving a personality to each, yet none, not even the sun himself, imaged so well their ideal of a highest All-Father as did the over-arching heaven. The traces of this primitive belief, the Aryan people carried with them on their wanderings. This sky-god was the Dyâus (the sky) of Indian mythology, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans, and the Zio, Tew, or Tyr of the Germans and Norsemen. For all these names are etymologically allied. Zeus (gen. Dios) and Dyâus are from the same root as are Jupiter (anciently Diupiter) and the compound form Dyâus-pitar (father Dyâus); and Zeo and Tew also bear traces of the same origin. Indeed it is by the reappearance of this name as the name of a god among so many different nations that we argue his having once been the god of all the Aryan people. The case is like that of our word daughter. As we find this reappearing in the Greek thugatcêr, and the Sanskrit duhitar, we feel sure that the old Aryans had a name for daughter from which all these names are derived; and as we find the Sanskrit name alone has a secondary meaning, signifying " the milker," we conclude that this was the origin of the word for a daughter. Just so, Zeus and Jupiter and Zio and Dyâus show a common name for the chief Aryan god; but the last alone explains the meaning of that name, for Dyâus signifies the sky.

This sky-god then stood to the old Aryans for the notion of a supreme and common divinity. Whatever may have been the divinities reigning over local streams and woods, they acknowledged the idea of one over-ruling Providence whom they could only image to their minds as the over-spreading sky. This, we may say, was the essential feature in their religion, its chief characteristic ; whereas to the Semitic nations, the sun, the visible orb, was in every case the supreme god. The reason of this contrast does not, it seems to me, lie only in the different parts which the sun played in the southern and more northern regions : or if it arises in the difference of the climate, it not the less forms an important chapter in religious development. There are in the human mind two diverse tendencies in its dealings with religious ideas. Both are to be found in every religion, among every people; one might almost say in every heart. The first tendency is an impulse upwards a desire to press the mind continually forward in an effort to idealize the deity, but by exalting or seeming to exalt Him into the highest regions of abstraction, it runs the risk of robbing Him of all fellowship with man, and man of all claims upon His sympathy and love. Then comes the other tendency, which oftentimes at one stroke brings down the deity as near as possible to the level of human beings, and leaves him at the end no more than a demigod or exalted man. One may be called the metaphysical, the other the mythological tendency : and we shall never be able to understand the history of religions until we learn to see how these influences interpenetrate and work in every system. They show at once that a distinction must be drawn between mythology and religion. The supreme god will not be he of whom most tales are invented, because, as these tales must appeal to human interests and relate adventures of the human sort, they will cling more naturally round the name of some inferior divinity. The very age of mythology so far as regards the beings to whom it relates is probably rather that of a decaying religion.

In any case, there will probably be a metaphysical and a mythological side to every system. Thus among the Egyptians, Amun, the concealed, was the metaphysical god; but their mythology centred round the names of Osiris and Horus. And just so with the Aryans, the sky was the original, most abstracted, and most metaphysical god ; the sun rose into prominence in obedience to the wish of man for a more human divinity. And if the Semitic people were more inclined towards sun-worship, the Aryans rather towards heaven-worship, the difference is consistent with the greater faculty for abstract thought which has always belonged to our race.

The two influences are perfectly well marked in Aryan mythology. The history of it represents the rivalry between the sky-gods and the gods of the sun. It is on account of his daily change that the last less fitly becomes the position of a supreme god. Born each day in the east, faint and weak he battles with the clouds of morning; radiant and strong he mounts into the midday sky, and then, having touched his highest point, he turns to quench his beams in the shadowy embrace of night. Even the Egyptians and Assyrians, in view of these vicissitudes, were driven to invent a sort of abstract sun, separated in thought from the mere visible orb.

This daily course might stand as an allegory of the life of man. The luminary who underwent these changing shows, however great and godlike in appearance, must have some more than common relationship with the world below ; he must be either a hero raised among the gods, or, better (for of this thought the Aryans too had their dim foreshadowing), he is an Avatar, an Incarnation of the Godhead, comedown to take upon him for a while the painful life of men. This was the way the sun-gods were regarded by the Indo-European nations. Accordingly, while their deepest religious feelings belonged to the abstract god Zeus, Jupiter among the Greeks and Romans, Dyâus and later on Brahma (a pure abstraction) among the Indians, the stories of their mythology belonged to the sun-god. He is the Indra of the Hindoos, who wrestles with the black serpent, the Night, as Horus did with Typhon ; he is the Apollo of the Greeks, likewise the slayer of the serpent, the Pythôn ; or else he is Heracles (Hercules), the god-man sometimes worshipped as a god, sometimes as a demigod only the great and mighty hero, the performer of innumerable labors for his fellows ; or he is Thorr, the Hercules of the Norsemen, the enemy of the giants and of the great earth-serpent, which represent the dark chaotic forces of nature ; or the mild Baldur, the fairest of all the gods, the best-beloved by gods and men.

It is clear that a different character of worship will belong to each. The sacred grove would be dedicated to the mysterious pervading presence ; the temple would be the natural home of the human-featured god ; and this the more because men worshipped in forest glade or upon mountain top before they dedicated to their gods houses made with hands. Dyâus is the old, the primevally old, divinity, the "son of time" as the Greeks called him.' Whenever, there-fore, we trace the meeting streams of thought, the cult of the sun-god and the cult of the sky, to the latter belongs the conservative part of the national creed, his rival is the re-forming element. In the Vedic religion of India, Indra, as has been said, has vanquished the older deity ; we feel in the Vedas that Dyâus, though often mentioned, no longer occupies a commanding place, not however without concessions on both sides. Indra could not have achieved this victory but that he partakes of both natures. He is the sky as well as the sun, more human than the unmoved watching heavens, he is a worker for man, the sender of the rain and the sunshine, the tamer of the stormwinds, and the enemy of darkness. And if one should examine in detail the different systems of the Aryan people he would, I think, have no difficulty in tracing throughout them the two influences which have been dwelt upon, and in each connecting these two influences with their -sky- and sun-gods. Whatever theory may be used to account for it, the change of thought is noticeable. Man seems to awake into the world with the orison of Belarius upon his lips; he is content with the silent unchanging abstract god. But as he advances in the burden and heat of the day he wishes for a fellow-worker, or at least for some potency which watches his daily struggles with less of godlike sublime indifference. Hence arise his sun-gods, the gods who toil and suffer, and even succumb and die. -

It would be too long a task to try and show these varying moods among all the Aryan folk. Among most the traces are obscure, for the religions themselves have been almost lost. Even in those with which we are best acquainted, as for instance, the religions of the Greeks' and Norsemen, we must not attempt a complete or scientific exposition, but let the reader draw from a rough sketch their general character. Let us turn first to the Greek. The chief religious influences in Hellas came from Zeus and Apollo, and belonged to two separate branches of the same race who came together to form the Hellenic people. The ancestors of the Greeks had, we know, travelled from the Aryan home by a road which took them south of the Black Sea, and on to the table-land of Asia Minor. So far a comparison of names and traditions shows them advancing in a compact body. Here they separated; and after a stay of some centuries, during which a part had time to mingle with the Semitic people of the land, they pushed forward, some across the Hellespont and round that way by land through Thrace and Thessaly, spreading as they went down to the extremity of the peninsula; others to the western coast of Asia Minor, and then, when through the lapse of years they had learnt their art from the Phoenician navigators who frequented all that land, onward from island to island, as over stepping-stones, across the AEgean.

Penetrating to every pleasant bay or fertile valley by the coast, but most of all to those upon the east, the new-comers mingled with or drove away the former occupants, whom they called Pelasgi, and who were in fact their brethren who had first gone round by land to Greece. These, who had advanced little in civilization, and still lived their early pastoral life, worshipping their gods in groves or upon hillsides, these Pelasgi preserved especially their Aryan god Dyâus, whose name had now become Zeus. This is why we hear of the Pelasgic Zeus; and why Zeus' great shrines lay in the least disturbed districts of Greece proper, in the west, in the sacred groves of Dodona and Elis.

But the worship of Apollo belonged to the sailors from the Asiatic coast. He is the patron of the arts, of all that higher civilization which the Greeks had learned in contact with older nations, especially of the divine arts of music and song. He was worshipped by both divisions of the new Greek race, the Dorians and Ionians, whose personality was so great that it almost obliterated that of the older dwellers in the European peninsula. So too the worship of Apollo spread after the Dorians and Ionians throughout the land. But it began in the east, as Apollo himself was said to have sprung from the island of Delos.

As before by a comparison of words, so now in mythology by a comparison of legends, we form our notion of the remoteness of the time at which these stories were first passed current. Not only, for instance, do we see that Indra and Apollo resemble each other in character, but we have proof that nature-myths stories really narrating some process of nature were familiar alike to Greeks and Indians. The Vedas, the sacred book from which we gather our knowledge of ancient Hindoo religion, do not relate their stories of the gods in the same way, or with the same clearness and elaboration, as do the Greek poets. They are collections of hymns, prayers in verse, addressed to their gods themselves, and what they relate is told more by reference and implication than directly. But even with this difference, we have no difficulty in signalizing some of the adventures of Indra as almost identical with those of the son of Lêtô. Let one suffice. The pastoral life of the Aryans is reflected in their mythology, and thus it is that in the Vedas almost all the varied phenomena of nature are in their turn compared to cattle. Indra is often spoken of as a bull; still more commonly are the clouds the cows of Indra, and their milk the rain. More than one of the songs of the Rig-Veda allude to a time when the wicked Panis (beings of fog or mist 1) stole away the cows from the fields of Indra and hid them away in a cave. They obscured their footprints by tying up their feet or by making them drag bushwood behind them. But Indra sent his dog Sarama (the dawn or breath of dawn), and she found out where the cattle were hidden. But (according to one story) the Panis overcame her honesty and gave her a cup of milk to drink, so that she came back to Indra and denied having seen the cows. But Indra discovered the deception, and came with his strong spear and conquered the Panis, and recovered what had been stolen.

Now turn to the Greek myth. The story here is cast in a different key.

Hermes (Mercury) is here the thief. He steals the cattle of Apollo feeding upon mount Pieria, and conceals his theft much as the Panis had done. Apollo discovers what has been done, and complains to Zeus. But Hermes is a god, and no punishment befalls him like that which was allotted to the Panis ; he charms Apollo by the sound of his lyre, and is forgiven, and allowed to retain his booty. Still, all the essentials of the story are here ; and the story in either case relates the same nature-myth. The clouds which in the Indian tale are stolen by the damp vapors of morning, are in the Greek legend filched away by the morning breeze ; for this is the nature of Hermes. And that some such power as the wind had been known to the Indians as accomplice in the work, is shown by the complicity of Sarama in one version of the tale. For Sarama likewise means the morning breeze ; and, in fact, Sarama and Hermes are derived from the same root, and are almost identical in character. Both mean in their general nature the wind ; in their special appearances they stand now for the morning, now for the evening breeze, or even for the morning and evening themselves.

The next most important deity as regards the whole Greek race is Heracles. It is a great mistake to regard him, as our mythology books often lead us to do, as a demigod or hero only. Originally, and among a portion of the Greek race, he was one of the mightiest gods ; but at last, perhaps because his adventures became in later tradition rather preposterous and undignified, he sank to be a demigod, or immortalized man. The story of Heracles' life and labors is a pure but most elaborate sun-myth. From his birth, where he strangles the serpents in his cradle the serpents of darkness, like the Pythôn which Apollo slew through his Herculean labors to his death, we watch the labors of the sun through the mists and clouds of heaven to its ruddy setting; and these stories are so like to others which are told of the northern Heracles, Thorr, that we cannot refuse to believe that they were known in the main in days before there were either Greek-speaking Greeks or Teutons. The closing scene of his life speaks the most eloquently of its natural origin. Returning home in victory his last victory to Trachis, Deianira sends to him there the fatal white robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. No sooner has he put it on than his death-agony begins. In the madness of his pain he dashes his companion, Lichas, against the rocks ; he tears at the burning robe; and with it brings away the flesh from his limbs. Then seeing that all is over, he becomes more calm. He gives his last commands to his son, Hyllus, and orders his funeral pile to be prepared upon mount OEta, as the sun, after its last fatal battle with the clouds of sunset, sinks down calmly into the sea. Then as, after it has gone, the sky lights up aglow with color, so does the funeral pyre of Heracles send out its light over the AEgean, from its western shore.

Another deity who was distinctly of Aryan origin was Dêmêtêr (Ceres), a name which is, in fact, none other than Gêmêtêr, "mother earth." The association of ideas which, opposite to the masculine godhead the sun or sky, placed the fruitful all-nourishing earth, is so natural as to find a place in almost every system: we have seen how they formed a part of the Egyptian and Assyrian mythologies. There is evidence enough to show that each branch of the Aryan folk carried away along with their sky- and sun-worship this earth worship also. Tellus was one of the divinities of the old Roman pantheon, though her worship gave place in later times to that of Cybele and Ceres: Frigg, the wife of Odin, filled the same position among the Teutons. But among none of the different branches was the great nature-myth which -always gathers round the earth-goddess, woven into a more pathetic story than by the Greeks. The story is that of the winter death or sleep of earth, or of all that makes earth beautiful and glad. And it was thus the Greeks told that world-old legend. Persephone (Proserpine) is the green earth, or the green verdure which maybe thought the daughter of earth and sky. She is, indeed, almost the reduplication of Dêmêtêr herself; and in art it is not always easy to distinguish a representation as of one or the other. At spring-time she, a maiden, with her maidens, is wandering careless in the Elysian fields, plucking the flowers of spring, "crocuses and roses and fair violets," when in a moment all is changed. Hades, regent of Hell, rises in his black-horsed golden chariot; unheeding her cries, he carries her off to share his infernal throne. and rule in the kingdoms of the dead. In other words, the awful shadow of death falls across the path of youth and spring, and Hades appears to proclaim the fateful truth that all spring-time, all youth and verdure, are alike with hoary age candidates for service in his Shadowy Kingdom. The sudden contrast between spring flowers and maidenhood and death gives a dramatic intensity to the scene and represents the quiet course of decay in one tremendous moment.' To lengthen out the picture and show the slow sorrow of earth robbed of its spring and summer, Dêmêtêr is portrayed wandering from land to land in bootless search of her lost daughter. We know how deep a significance this story had in the religious thought of Greece; how the representation of it composed the chief feature of the Eleusinian mysteries, and how these and other mysteries probably enshrined the intenser, more hidden feelings of religion, and continued to do so when mythology had lost its hold upon the popular mind. It is, indeed, a new-antique story, patent to all and fraught for all with solemnest meaning. So that this myth of the death of Proserpine has lived on in a thousand forms through all the Aryan systems.

Besides these gods, the Greeks had some whose origin was, in part at Ieast, Semitic. Almost the chief of these was the Phoenician moon-goddess Astarte, out of whom grew the Aphrodite (Venus) of the Greeks, and in great measure Artemis (Diana) and Athênê (Minerva) as well. The more sensuous the character in which Aphrodite appears, the more does she show her Asiatic birth; and this was why the Greeks, when regarding her especially as the goddess of love, called her Cypris or Cytheraea, after Cyprus and Cythera which had been in ancient days stations for the Phoenician traders, and where they had first made acquaintance with the Greeks. She was the favorite goddess of these mariners, as, indeed, a moon-goddess well might be; and they gave her her most corrupt and licentious aspect. For she had not this character even among all the Phoenicians; but oftentimes appears as a huntress, more like Artemis, or armed as a goddess of battle, like Athênê. Doubtless, however, goddesses closely allied to Aphrodite or Artemis, divinities of productive nature and divinities of the moon, belonged to the other branches of the Indo-European family. The idea of these divinities was a common property; the exact being in whom these ideas found expression varied with each race.

If we travel from Hellas and from India to the cold north the same characteristic features reappear. In the Teutonic religions, as we know them,' Odin has taken the place of the old Aryan sky-god, Dyâus. This last did, indeed, linger on in the Zio or Tyr of these systems; but he had sunk from the position of a chief divinity. The change, however, is not great. The god chosen to fill his place resembles him as nearly as possible in character. Odin or Wuotan,1 whose name means "to move violently," "to rush," was originally a god of the wind .rather than of the atmosphere of heaven; but along _with this more confined part of his character, he bears almost all the attributes of the exalted sky-god, the Dyâus or Zeus. Only he adds to these some parts peculiar to a god of wind; and we can easily understand how, as these Aryan people journeyed northwards, their wind-god grew in magnitude and power.

It was Odin who lashed into fury their stormy seas, and kept the impatient vikings (fjord-men) forced prisoners in their sheltered bays. He it was who rushed through their mountain forests, making the ancient pine-tops bend to him as he hurried on; and men sitting at home over their winter fires and listening to his howl told one another how he was hastening to some distant battle-field, there to direct the issue, and to choose from among the fallen such heroes as were worthy to accompany him to Valhalla, the Hall of Bliss.' Long after the worship of Christ had overturned that of the sir,' this, the most familiar and popular aspect of Odin's nature, lived on in the thoughts of men. In the Middle Ages the wind reappears in the legend of the Phantom Army, a strange apparition of two hosts of men seen to join battle in mid-air. The peasant of the Jura or the Alps could tell how, when alone upon the mountain-side, he had beheld the awful vision. Sometimes all the details of the fight were visible, but as though the combatants were riding in the air; sometimes the sounds of battle only came from the empty space above, till at the end a shower of blood gave the fearful witness a proof that he was not the dupe of his imagination only.' In other places, especially, for instance, in the Harz mountains, the Phantom Army gave place to the Wild Huntsman our Herne the Hunter. In the Harz and in other places in Germany he was called Hackelbarend or Hackelberg; and the story went how he had been chief huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, but for impiety or for some dreadful oath, like that which had brought vengeance on the famous Van der Decken, had been condemned to hunt for ever through the clouds for ever, that is, until the Day of Judgment.' All the year through he pursues his way alone, and the peasants hear his hollow, mingled with the baying of his two dogs.1 But for twelve nights between Christmas and Twelfth night he hunts on the earth; and if any door is left open during the night, and one of the two hounds runs in, he will bring misfortune upon that house.

Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears as the heaven-god all-embracing the father of gods and men, like Zeus. " All-father Odin " he is called, and his seat is on Air-throne ; there every day he ascended and looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth's border. And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness upon the earth, that he set to rights; and he kept watch against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last the race of giants he could not utterly subdue and exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods themselves of which we cannot tell more now.

In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to that of the " wide-seeing " Zeus. " The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all," says one poet; or again, as another says, " Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, and that which is over all."

Behind Odin stands Tyr of whom we have already spoken and Thorr and Baldur, who are two different embodiments of the sun. The former corresponds in character very closely with Heracles. He is the mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agriculture,' and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which represents not only cold and darkness, but the barren, rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, Thorr is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, " faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants)," as the Eddas often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs three labors, which may be paralleled from the labors of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking from a horn; this is the sun "sucking up the clouds" from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and Peneus, which Heracles performs. Then he tries to lift (as he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the under-world. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old woman, and is worsted; but in reality he has been wrestling with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off the victor. So we read in Homer. that Heracles once wounded Hades himself, and " brought grief into the land of shades," and in Euripides' beautiful play, Alcestis, we see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with Thanatos, Death himself. In these labors the Norse hero, though striving manfully, fails ; but the Greek is always victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the character of the two creeds.

Baldur the Beautiful the fair, mild Baldur represents the sun more truly than Thorr does: the sun in his gentle aspect, as he would naturally appear to a Norseman. His house is Breidablik, " Wide-glance," that is to say, the bright upper air, the sun's home. He is like the son of Lêtô seen in his benignant aspect, the best beloved among gods, the brightener of their war-like life, beloved, too, by all things on earth, living and inanimate, and lamented as only the sun could be the chief nourisher at life's feast. For, when Baldur died, everything in heaven and earth, " both all living things and trees and stones and all metals," wept to bring him back again, "as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one." A modern poet has very happily expressed the character of Baldur, the sun-god, the great quickener of life upon earth. Baldur is supposed to leave heaven to tread the ways of men, and his coming is the signal for the new birth, as of spring-time, in the sleeping world.

" There is seme divine trouble
On earth and in air ;
Trees tremble, brooks bubble,
Ants loosen the sod,
Warm footsteps awaken
Whatever is fair,
Sweet dewdrops are shaken
To quicken each clod.
The wild rainbows o'er him
Are melted and fade,
The light runs before him
Through meadow and glade.
Green branches close round him,
Their leaves whisper clear
He is ours, we have found him,
Bright Baldur is here."

The earth-mother of the Teutons was Frigg, the wife of Odin; but perhaps when Frigg's natural character was forgotten, Hertha (Earth) became separated into another personage. "Odin and Frigg," says the Edda, " divide the slain; " and this means that the sky-god received the breath, the earth-goddess the body. But on the whole she plays an insignificant part in our late form of Teuton mythology. Closely related to her, as Persephone is related to Dêmêtêr, with a name formed out of hers, stands Freyja, the goddess of spring, and beauty, and love; for the northern goddess of love might better accord with the innocence of spring than the Phoenician Aphroditê. Freyja has a brother Freyr, who but reduplicated her name and character, for he too is a god of spring. Very beautiful is the myth which reverses the sad story of Persephone (and Baldur) and tells of the barren earth wooed by the returning spring. Freyr one day mounted the seat of Odin which was called air-throne, and whence a god might look over all the ways of earth. And looking out into giant land far in the north, he saw a light flash forth as the aurora lights up the wintry sky.' And looking again, he saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful had just opened her father's door, and that this was her beauty which shone out over the snow. Then Freyr left the air-throne and determined to send to the fair one and woo her to be his wife. Her name was Gerda.3 Freyr sent his messenger Skirnir to carry his suit to Gerda; and he told her how great Freyr was among the gods, how noble and happy a place was Asgard, the home of the gods. For all Skirnir's pleading Gerda would give no ear to his suit. But Freyr had given his magic sword (the sun's rays) to Skirnir; and at last the ambassador, tired of pleading, drew that and threatened to take the life of Gerda unless she granted Freyr his wish. So she consented to meet him nine nights hence in the wood of Barri. The nine nights typify the nine winter months of the northern year; and the name of the wood, Barri, means "the green "; the beginnings of spring in the wood being happily imaged as the meeting of the fresh and barren earth.

All the elements of nature were personified by the spirit of Aryan poetry, and it would be a hopeless task wearisome and useless to the reader to give a mere category of the nature gods in each system. Those which had most influence upon their religious thought were they who have been mentioned, the gods of the sky and sun and mother earth. The other elemental divinities were (as a rule) more strictly bound within the circle of their own dominions. It is curious to trace the difference between these strictly polytheistic deities coequal in their several spheres and those others who arose in obedience to a wider ideal of a godhead. Thus the Indians had a strictly elemental heaven or sky, as well as their god Dyâus. Him they called Varuna, a word which corresponds etymologically to the Greek Ouranos, the heaven. In the later Indian mythology Varuna came to stand, not for the sky, but for the wide expanse of ocean, and so corresponds to the Greek Poseidon, the Latin Neptune, and the Norse OEgir. All these were the gods of the sea and of all waters. The wind, as we saw, combined in the person of Odin with the character of a highest god; but in the Greek the part was played by an inferior divinity, Hermes. In India there is no actual wind-god; but the character is divided among a plurality of minor divinities, the Maruts. And in revenge a being of the first importance in the Indian system receives scarcely any notice in the others. This is Agni, the god of fire, who corresponds to Hephaestus and Vulcan; and in the north is not a god at all, but an evil being called Loki. This is enough to show that the worship of Agni rose into fervor after the separation of the Aryan folk.

We postpone to the next chapter the mention of the gods of the underworld.

The religions of which we have been giving this slight sketch have been what we may call " natural " religions, that is to say, the thoughts about God and the Unseen world which without help of any special vision seem to spring up simultaneously in the minds of the different Aryan peoples. But one among the Aryan religions still in pre-historic times broke off abruptly from its relation with the others, and, under a teacher whom we may fairly call god-taught, in beauty and moral purity passed far beyond the rest.

This was the Zoroastrian, the faith of the Iranian (ancient Persian) branch, a religion which holds a pre-eminence among all the religions of antiquity, excepting alone that of the Hebrews. And that there is no exaggeration in such a claim is sufficiently witnessed by the inspired writings themselves, in which the Persian kings are frequently spoken of as if they as much as the Hebrews were worshippers of Jehovah. " Cyrus the servant of God," " The Lord said unto my lord (Cyrus)," are constantly recurring expressions in Isaiah. In some respects this Zoroastrianism seems to stand in violent opposition to the Aryan religion; in other lights it appears as merely a much higher development of it. In either case, we may feel sure that the older system was before the coming of the " gold bright " reformer, essentially a polytheism with only some yearnings towards monotheism, and that Zoroaster settled it upon a firmly monotheistic basis. This very fact leaves us little to say about the Iranian system considered strictly as a religion. For when once nations have risen to the height of a monotheism there can be little essential difference in their beliefs; such difference as there is will be in the conception they have of the character of their gods, whether it be a high, a relatively high, or relatively low one; and this again is more perhaps a question of moral development than of religion. Their one god, since he made all things and rules all things, cannot partake of the exclusive nature of any natural phenomenon; he cannot be a god of wind or water, of sun or sky. The Zoroastrian creed did afterwards introduce (then for the first time in the world's history) a very important element of belief, namely, of the distinct origin, and almost if not quite equal powers, of the good and evil principles. But this was later than the time of Zarathustra.

The name which Zarathustra taught the people to give to the one God was unconnected with Aryan nature-names, Dyâus or Varuna, or Indra. He simply called him the " Great Spirit," or, in the Zend, Ahura-mazda; in later Persian, Hormuzd or Ormuzd. He is the all-perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, all-beautiful. He is the creator of all things. And still nearer to our Christian belief before the creation of the world, by means whereof the world itself was made, existed the Word. Some trace of this same doctrine of the pre-existing Word (Hanover, in the Zoroastrian religion ) is to be found in the Vedas, where he is called Vach. It would be here impossible to enter into an examination of the question how far these early religions seem to shadow forth the mystical doctrine of the Logos. The evil principle opposed to Ormuzd is Agra-Mainyus (Ahrimanes), but in the true doctrine he is by no means the equal of God, no more so than is Satan. The successive corruption of pure Zoroastrianism after the time of its founder is marked by a constant exaggeration of the power of the evil principle (suggested perhaps by intercourse with deity-worshipping nations of a lower type) until Ahrimanes becomes the rival of Ormuzd, co-equal and co-eternal with him.

Such is the simple creed of the Persians, accompanied of course by rites and ceremonies, part invented by the reformer, part inherited from the common Aryan parentage. It is well known that the Persians built no temples, but worshipped Ormuzd chiefly upon the mountain tops; that they paid great respect to all the elements that is to air, water, and fire, the latter most of all a belief which they shared with their Indian brethren, but stopped far short of worshipping any. That they held very strongly the separate idea of the soul, so that when once a body had lost its life, they considered it to be a thing wholly corrupt and evil; a doctrine which carried in the germ that of the inherent evil of matter, as the philosophical reader will discern.

It remains to say something of their religious books. The Zend Avesta was supposed to comprise the teaching of Zoroaster, and was believed to have been written by him. Only one complete book has been preserved it is called the Vendidad. The Zend language in which the Avesta is written is the oldest known form of Persian, older than that in use at the time of Darius the Great; but this is no proof that it dates back to the days of Zarathustra_ Part of it is in prose and part in verse, and as in every literature we find that the fragments of verse are they which survive the Conquest, it has been conjectured that the songs of the Zend Avesta (Gâthâs they are called) may even have been written by the great reformer himself.