Similar feats were ascribed to the Northern thunder-god, Thor, whose practice it was to kill the two buck goats that drew his car, cook them for supper, and bring them to life again next morning by touching them with his hammer.
Kelly further adds that in "the gloomy season of the winter solstice the Ribhus sleep for twelve days in the house of the sun-god Savitar; then they wake up and prepare the earth to clothe itself anew with vegetation, and the FROZEN WATERS TO FLOW again."
The tributaries of the Humber are remarkable on account of their liabilities to sudden floods; and their constant recurrence, after long periods of drought, would suggest to a primæval people the interference of celestial beings which possessed the attributes assigned to these Arbhus or Ribhus. Referring to the Greek form of this myth, Kelly says:—
"We see how the cruder idea of the Ribhus sweeping trees and rocks in wild dance before them by the force of their stormy song grew under the beautifying touch of the Hellenic imagination into the legend of that master of the lyre whose magic tones made torrents pause and listen, rocks and trees descend with delight from their mountain beds, and moved even Pluto's unrelenting heart to pity."
The estuary on the opposite coast of Britain to the Severn, now known as the Wash, is called by Ptolemy, Metaris. May not this name have had, originally, some connection with Varuna's friend Mithra? Kelly says:—
"When the sun was still a wheel, a store of gold, a swan or a flamingo, an eagle, falcon, horse, and many other things, it was also the eye of Varuna; just as amongst the Anglo-Saxons and other Germans it was held to be the eye of Woden. Varuna and Mithra (the friend), the god of daylight, used to sit together at morning on a golden throne, and journey at even in a brazen car."
The sun, at the dawn at least, gilded the waves of the eastern estuary, and shed its ruddier glow at evening on the western or Severn sea. Under any interpretation, the coincidence of so many names and half-hidden characteristics, to say the least, is very remarkable.
There is nothing extravagant in this attempt to show that the terms thus applied conveyed both a literal, or earthly, as well as a figurative, or celestial, meaning. All mythology is fashioned out of such materials. Primitive languages are limited in the number of their words, and, of necessity, are highly figurative. The tongues of all the North American Indians, as well as those of the tribes of Aryan and Semitic origin, markedly exhibit this peculiarity. Farrer, in his essay on the "Origin of Language," says:—
"To call things which we have never seen before by the name of that which most nearly resembles them is a practice of every-day life. That children at first call all men 'father' and all women 'mother' is an observation as old as Aristotle. The Romans gave the name of Lucanian ox to the elephant, and camelopardus to the giraffe, just as the New Zealanders are stated to have called horses large dogs. The astonished Caffers gave the name of cloud to the first parasol which they had seen; and similar instances might be adduced almost indefinitely. They prove that it is an instinct, if it be not a necessity, to borrow for the unknown the names already used for things known."