Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

4
MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK name which appears again in that of Arjuna, the companion
. n -
. of Krishna, and the Hellenic Argynnis.
Her Bnt the conception of the morning in the form of Aphro-
^ children.
g^^g none f the severity which marks the character
of Athene. She is the dawn in all her loveliness and splen-
dour, but the dawn not as unsullied by any breath of passion,
but as waking all things into life, as the great mother who
preserves and fosters all creatures in whom is the breath of
life. She would thus be associated most closely with those
forms under which the phenomena of reproduction were uni-
versally set forth. She would thus be a goddess lavish of
her smiles and of her love, most benignant to her closest
imitators ; and as the vestals of Athens showed forth the
purity of the Zeus-born goddess, so the Hierodouloi of
Corinth would exhibit the opposite sentiment, and answer
to the women who assembled in the temples of the Syrian
Mylitta. The former is really Aphrodite Ourania ; the latter
the Aphrodite known by the epithet Pandemos. Aphrodite
is thus the mother of countless children, not all of them
lovely and beautiful like herself, for the dawn may be re-
garded as sprung from the darkness, and the evening (Eos) as
the mother of the darkness again. Hence like Echidna and
Typhon, Phobos and Deimos (fear and dread) are among the
offspring whom the bright Paphian goddess bore to Ares,
while Priapos and Bacchos are her children by Dionysos.
Nor is her love confined to undying gods. The so-called
Homeric hymn tells the story how in the guise of a simple
maiden she came to the folds where the Trojan Anchises was
tending his flocks, and how Aineias was born, whom the
nymphs loved by the Seilenoi and Hermes the Argos-Slayer
tended and cherished. 1
Share of In the Iliad, Aphrodite, as the mother of Aineias, fights
Aphrodite on tlie s ic i e f iiion, not so much because she has any keen
Trojan wish for the victory of the one side rather than the other, as
war*
because she desires to preserve her child and make him a
fa,ther of many nations. Nowhere in fact do we more clearly
see the disintegration of the earliest myths than in the part
which the several deities play in the long struggle before the
1 Hymn to Aphrodite, 2o8.