Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
Section XIV.—THE MOON.
BOOK As Endymion sinks into his dreamless sleep beneath the
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„ Latmian hill, the beautiful Selene conies to gaze upon the
being whom she loves only to lose. The phrase was too
transparent to allow of the growth of a highly developed
myth. In the one name we have the sun sinking down into
the unseen land where all things are forgotten—in the other
the full moon comes forth from the east to greet the sun,
before he dies in the western sky. Hence there is little
told of Selene which fails to carry with it an obvious mean-
ing. She is the beautiful eye of night, the daughter of
Hyperion, of Pallas, or of Helios ; the sister of Phoibos
Apollon. Like the sun, she moves across the heaven in a
chariot drawn by white horses from which her soft light
streams down to the earth ; or she is the huntress, roving
like Alpheios, over hill and dale. She is the bride of Zeus,
and the mother of Pandia, the full orb which gleams in the
nightly sky l
or as loving, like him, the crags, the streams,
and the hills, she is beloved by Pan, who entices her into the
dark woods under the guise of a snow-white ram. 2 In other
words, the soft whispering wind, driving before it the shining
fleecy clouds, draws the moon onwards into the sombre
groves. In another version, she is Asterodia, the wanderer
among the stars, the mother of the fifty daughters of
Endymion, the Ursula of modern legend with her many
virgins. 3
In the story of Jo, the moon appears in connexion with
myths have been crystallised round the raturc of the Teutonic tribes. Practiname
of Krishna in ages subsequent to cally the myths of Krishna seem to
the period during which the earliest have been fully developed in the days of
Vedic literature came into existence Megasthenes, who identifies him with
but the myths themselves are found in the Greek Herakles. Nork, s. v.
this older literature associated with Krishna, 398.
other gods, and not always only in 1 ' Pandia, d. h. die ganz leuchtende/
germ. Krishna as slaying the dragon —Preller, Gr. Myth. i. 347.
is simply Indra smiting Vritra or Ahi, 2 Virg. Georg. iii. 391.
or Phoibos destroying the Python. 3 Preller regards the number oO here
There is no more room for inferring as denoting the fifty moons of tho Olymforeign
influence in the growth of any pian Festal Cycle. Gr. Myth. i. 348.
of these myths than, as Pmnsen rightly But the myth must be taken along with
insists, there is room for tracing Chris- the legends of the fifty sons or daughterstian
influence in the earlier epical lite- of Aigyptos, Danaos, or Priam.