Tradition : Principally with Reference to Mythology and the

MYTHOLOGY. 173
weapon pierced or clove him; for Baldr-I should say
Adam-was invulnerable, as was Achilles and Meleager,
except in one single respect.
I believe that instances might be indefinitely multiplied.
I shall content myself, however, with the following,
which I think will be generally considered among
the happiest illustrations of nature worship. 13
"And as it is with this sad and beautiful tale of
Orpheus and Euridike (Euridice). [The story of Euridice
was this-' Euridice was bitten by a serpent, she
dies, and descends into the lower regions. Orpheus
follows her, and obtains from the gods that his wife
should follow him if he promised not to look back, &c.'
It reads to me like a sad reminiscence of Adam and Eve.' «
Mr Max Miiller proceeds-' so it is with all those which
may seem to you coarse, or dull, or ugly. They are so
only because the real meaning of the names has been
half-forgotten or wholly lost. (Edipus and Perseus (vide
13 Granting the tendency to nature-worship, I conclude that the conspicuous
luminaries of the heavens would become primary objects of such
worship. In amusing illustration of this I remember a friend of mine
telling me that he happened to ask a young lad, the sou of one of his
tenants, who had just returned from a voyage to the Northern seas, how
he liked his captain ? vful man-he swore by
the sun, moon, and stars" Still less do I deny the tendency to sun-worship.
It was, as Gibbon tells us (ii. 438, iii. 150), the last superstition Constantine
abandoned before his conversion, and the first to which Julian
betook himself after his apostacy.
It may, moreover, be urged, that the sun figures in all these legends.
I say, on the other hand, so also does the serpent. This sferpent may be
the serpent " of darkness," and still be the serpent of tradition, but how
darkness or night is aptly personified by a serpent I am at a loss to perceive.
Then again the sun may always be only the symbol of what is
bright and heavenly. But when (Max Miiller, ii, 171) we see this serpent
Zohak, called by the Persians " by the name of Dehak, i.e., ten evils,
because he introduced " ten evils into the world" we cannot help recalling
the profane expressions attributed to the devil when he saw the ten commandments-proscribing
the ten evils in question.