Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE WANDERINGS OF 10. 139
the myths of Hermes, Prometheus, and other tales. 16 is CHAP,
pre-eminently the horned being', whose existence is one of / ,
brief joy, much suffering, and many changes and wanderings ;
in other words, her life is the life of the moon in its several
phases, from full to new, and thence back to the full again.
She is the pure priestess of the great queen of heaven, on
whom Zeus, the lord of the untroubled ether, looks down
with unfailing love. 1 But Here is the wife of Zeus, and thus
at once she is jealous of 16, whom she changes into a heifer 2
(the well-known symbol of the young or horned morn), and
places in the charge of Argos Panoptes, the being with a
thousand eyes, some of which he opens when the stars arise,
while others he closes when their orbs go down. Whether
these eyes are, as in some versions, placed on his brow and
on the back of his head, or, as in others, scattered all over
his body, Argos is the star-illumined sky watching over the
moon as she wanders
Pale for very weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth. 3
Iii this aspect Argos appears in the Cretan myth as
Asterion, or the Minotauros, the guardian of the Daidalean
labyrinth, the mazes of the star-clothed heavens.
Prom this terrible bondage she is rescued at the bidding of Argos
Zeus by Hermes, who appears here as a god of the morning- PanoPtes -
tide. By the power of his magic rod, and by the music of
his flute, the soft whisper of the morning breeze, he lulls even
Argos himself into slumber, and then his sword falls, and
the thousand eyes are closed in death, as the stars go out
when the morning comes, and leave the moon alone. 4 This
rescue of 16 by Hermes is, in the opinion of Preller, the tem-
1
16 becomes a mother e| eimrvoias of the Old Man and the Hind, where the
Aios, iEseh. Supp. 18; a myth which
may be compared with the story of the
transformation is precisely owing to the
jealousy of Here for 16 and her offmares
of Diomedes. spring.
" In the Norse story of Tatterhood, 3
It is not likely that Shelley was
the younger of the two sisters who thinking of the myth of Argos Panoptes
answer to the Dioskouroi is changed when he wrote these lines; but he has
into a calf, and the tale immediately singularly reproduced this idea of the
connects the transformation with the antagonism between the moon and the
voyage of Isis. The same incidents are stars.
found in the Arabian Nights in the story
4 The myth is thus explained which