Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE HEALERS. 66
very name denotes the deadly lethargy (vaptcij) which makes CHAP.
the pleadings of Selene fall unheeded on the ear of En- ^ ,
dymion ; and hence it is that when Persephone is to be
taken at the close of summer to the land of darkness,
the narcissus is made the instrument of her capture. It is
the narcotic which plunges Brynhild into her profound
slumber on the Glistening Heath, and drowns Briar Rose
and her fellows in a sleep as still as death.
From the lot of Endymion, ISTarkissos, and Tithonos, iamos and
Apollon is freed only because he is regarded not as the Asklepios.
visible sun who dies when his day's journey is done, but as
the living power who kindles his light afresh every morning.
The one conception is as natural as the other, and we still
speak of the tired or the unwearied sun, of his brief career
and his everlasting light, without any consciousness of in-
consistency. Phoibos is then the ever-bright sun, who can
never be touched by age. He is emphatically the Aker-
sekomes, the glory of whose golden locks no razor is ever to
mar. He is at once the comforter and healer, the saviour
and destroyer, who can slay and make alive at will, and from
whose piercing glance no secret can be kept hid. But
although these powers are inseparable from the notion of
Phoibos Apollon, they are also attributed separately to
beings whose united qualities make up his full divinity.
Thus his knowledge of things to come is given to Iamos ;
his healing and life-giving powers to Asklepios. The story
of the latter brings before us another of the countless in-
stances in which the sun is faithless to his love or his love
is faithless to him. In every case there must be the separation
; and the doom of Koronis only reflects the fate which
cuts short the life of Daphne and Arethousa, Prokris and
Iokaste. 1 The myth is transparent throughout. The
1 The story of the birth of Asklepios Eilhart, the Russian hero Dobruna
agrees substantially with that of Diony- Nikitisch, of the Scottish Macduff, of
sos ; and the legends of other Aryan Volsung who yet kissed his mothpr
tribes tell the same tale of some of their before she died, of Sigurd, and of Sceaf
mythical heroes. Of children so born, the son of Scild, the child brought in
Grimm says generally, ' Ungeborne, the mysterious skiff, which needs neither
d. h. aus dem Mutterleib gesehnittne sail, rudder, nor oarsmen. Whence
Kinder pfiegen Helden zu werden,' and came the popular belief attested by such
adds that this incident marks the stories a phrase as that which Grimm quotes
of the Persian Rustem, the Tristram of from the Chronicle of Pderhoime, ' de
VOL. II. D