ARYAN MYTHOLOGY.
The Aryans do not appear to have had any tradition of a Creation. They seem to have conceived of the Powers of Nature very much in the same way as the [pg 6] Maori did,—namely, that the mysterious power of Generation was the operative cause of all things.
Hesiod in his Theogony relates that the first parent of all was Chaos.
From Chaos sprang Gaia (=Earth), Tartarus, Eros (=Love), Erebus, a dark son, Night, a dark daughter, and lastly, Day.
From Gaia alone sprung Ouranos (=Heaven), Hills, Groves, and Thalassa (=Sea).
From Heaven and Earth sprung Okeanos (=Ocean), Japetus, Kronos (=Saturn), Titans.
Hesiod also relates how Heaven confined his children in the dark caverns of Earth, and how Kronos avenged himself.
In the “Works and Days” Hesiod gives an account of the formation of the first human female out of Earth, from the union of whom, with Epimetheus, son of the Titan Japetus, sprung the human race.
So far Hesiod’s account may be derived from Aryan myths. The latter and greater part, however, of Hesiod’s Theogony cannot be accepted as a purely Aryan tradition; for colonists from Egypt and Phœnicia had settled in Greece, at an early period, and had brought with them alien mythical fables which were adopted in a modified form, in addition to the antient family religion of worship of ancestors.
Herodotus asserts that Homer and Hesiod made the Theogony of the Greeks; and to a certain extent this may be true, for the bard was then invested with a kind of sacredness, and what he sung was held to be the [pg 7] effect of an inspiration. When he invoked the Muses his invocation was not a mere formal set of words introduced for the sake of ornament, but an act of homage due to the Divinities addressed, whose aid he solicited.[4]
The traditions prevalent in Bœotia would naturally be strongly imbued with fables of foreign origin; and Hesiod, who was a Bœotian by birth, by collecting these local traditions and presenting them to the public in an attractive form, no doubt contributed, as well as Homer, to establish a national form of religion, made up of old Aryan tradition and what had been imported by Phœnician and Egyptian colonists.
Thus Zeus and the other Olympian deities formed the centre of a national religious system; but at the same time the old Aryan religion of worship of ancestors maintained a paramount influence, and every tribe and every family had its separate form of worship of its own ancestors. The prayer of the son of Achilles, when in the act of sacrificing Polyxena to the manes of his father, is a striking instance of the prevalent belief that the deified spirits of ancestors had power to influence the destinies of the living.
“O son of Peleus, my father, receive from me this libation, appeasing, alluring, the dead. Come now, that you may drink the black pure blood of a virgin, which we give to thee—both I and the army. And be kindly disposed to us, and grant us to loose the sterns [pg 8] of our ships, and the cables fastening to the shore, and all to reach home favoured with a prosperous return from Ilium.”[5]
Euripides would not have put these words into the mouth of the son of Achilles had they not been in accord with the sympathies of an Athenian audience.
Comparing the Greek mythological traditions, such as they have come down to us, with those of the Maori, some striking resemblance is to be observed. First, there is the fact that both treat the elements of nature, and abstract notions as persons capable of propagating from each other by generation. In both Light springs out of Darkness. The sons of Heaven and Earth in both accounts conspire against their father for the same reason—that their father had confined them in darkness. And lastly the first human female, in both, is said to have been formed out of earth. The first woman, in the Maori Mythology, drags down her offspring to Po (=Night), meaning to death. And the first woman of the Greek Mythology, Pandora, introduces all kinds of afflictions as an heritage for hers.
It is also to be noticed that just as Zeus and the Olympian Gods were national deities for Greeks, so their old mythical deities—Po, Rangi, Papa, Tiki, &c., were invoked alike by the whole Maori race, especially in the ceremonies required to free a person from the sacred restrictions comprised under the term tapu. They were the Maori national Gods, for they were their common ancestors. But at the same time [pg 9] every Maori tribe and family invoked independently each its own tribal and family ancestors, just as was the practice of the Greeks and Latins.
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