Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE RIVERS OF HADES. ?>21
geography of this land of the dead we need say little more CHAP,
than that it is no genuine growth of mythology. It was
IX-
„
easy for poets and mythographers, when they had once
started with the idea of a gloomy land watered with rivers of
woe, to place Styx, the stream which makes men shudder,
as the boundary which separates it from the world of living
men, and to lead through it the channels of Lethe, in which
all things are forgotten, of Kokytos, which echoes only with
shrieks of pain, of Pyryphlegethon, with its waves of fire. 1
Section II.—ELTSION.
But, in truth, such details as these, produced as they are, The
not by the necessities of mythical developement but by the of the*
growth or the wants of a religious faith, belong rather to the Dcad -
history of religion, and not to the domain of mythology,
which is concerned only or mainly with legends springing
from words and phrases whose original meaning has been
misunderstoood or else either wholly or in part forgotten.
Thus, although the ideas of Elysion in the conception of the
epic or lyric poets may be full of the deepest interest as
throwing light on the thoughts and convictions of the time,
their mythological value must be measured by the degree in
which they may be traced to phrases denoting originally
only the physical phenomena of the heavens and the earth.
With the state and the feelings of the departed we are not
here concerned ; but there is enough in the descriptions of
the asphodel meadows and the land where the corn ripens
thrice in the year, to guide us to the source of all these no-
tions. The Elysian plain is far away in the west where the
sun goes down beyond the bounds of the earth, when Eos
gladdens the close of day as she sheds her violet tints over
the sky. The abodes of the blessed are golden islands sailing
in a sea of blue, the burnished clouds floating in the pure
ether. Grief and sorrow cannot approach them ; plague and
sickness cannot touch them. The barks of the Phaiakians
dread no disaster ; and thus the blissful company gathered
1
Acheron, the remaining river, is have been in the earlier myths the one
probably only another form of Acheloos, river of Hades,
the flowing water, and may perhaps
VOL. II. T