TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

338
CONDITION OF GODS.
hole lie lias bored (Sn. 86), and of an eagle, to fly away in haste
(86), Loki that of a fly, in order to sting (131), or to creep through
a keyhole (356) ; no larger designs are ever compassed by such
means. So, when Athene flies away as a bird, it expresses the
divinity of her nature and the suddenness of her departure. But
the swan or bull, into which Zeus transformed himself, can only be
explained on the supposition that Leda too, and lo and Europa,
whom he was wooing, were thought of as swan-maidens or kine.
The form of animal would then be determined by the mythus, and
the egg-birth of the Dioscuri can be best understood in this way
(see SuppL).
In the Asiatic legends,
it seems to me, the manifestations of
deity are conceived deeply and purely in more profoundly than in those of India.
comparison, and nowhere
The god comes down and
abides in the flesh for a season,
for the salvation of mankind.
Wherever the doctrine of metempsychosis prevailed, the bodies of
animals even were eligible for the avatara;
and of Vishnu s ten
successive incarnations, the earlier ones are animal, it was in the
later ones that he truly became man (see SuppL). The Greek
and Teutonic mythologies steer clear of all such notions ;
in both
of them the story of the gods was too sensuously conceived to have
invested their transformations with the seriousness and duration of
an avatara, although a belief in such incarnation is in itself so
nearly akin to that of the heroes being bodily descended from the
gods.
I think that on all these lines of research, which could be
extended to many other points as well, I have brought forward a
series of undeniable resemblances between the Teutonic mythology
and the Greek. Here, as in the relation between the Greek and
Teutonic languages, there is no question of borrowing or choice,
nothing but unconscious affinity, allowing room (and that inevit
ably) for considerable divergences. But who can fail to recognise,
or who invalidate, the surprising similarity of opinions on the!
immortality of gods, their divine food, their growing up overnight,
their journeyings and transformations, their epithets, their anger
and their mirth, their suddenness in appearing and recognition ati
parting, their use of carriages and horses, their performance of allj
natural functions, their illnesses, their language, their servants and)