‘Listen, yon heaven. Attend; mayoya, listen.
Listen, heaven. It does not thunder with loud thunder.
It thunders in an undertone. What is it doing?
It thunders to produce rain and change of season.’
Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously; the princess sings again and it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her, but she is left unharmed.[[606]] West Africa is another district where the Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud; and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of this latter deity, the Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by Riis, ‘The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and uncertain, and often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world (sorro) which lies beyond human reach; and hence the same word is used also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.’[[607]] The same transition from the divine sky to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed’s mind scarcely if at all separates the visible personal Heaven from the divinity united with it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same original nature; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the bearer of the Firmament, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds, the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs.[[608]] So far as the evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Universe. The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity; they may say that his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked, that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight, penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven.[[609]]
With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the Heaven-god among our Indo-European race. This being, adored in ancient Aryan religion, was—
‘... the whole circle of the heavens, for him
A sensitive existence, and a God,
With lifted hands invoked, and songs of praise.’
The evidence of language to this effect has been set forth with extreme clearness by Professor Max Müller. In the first stage, the Sanskrit Dyu (Dyaus), the bright sky, is taken in a sense so direct that it expresses the idea of day, and the storms are spoken of as going about in it; while Greek and Latin rival this distinctness in such terms as ἔνδιος, ‘in the open air,’ εὔδιος, ‘well-skyed, calm,’ sub divo, ‘in the open air,’ sub Jove frigido, ‘under the cold sky,’ and that graphic description by Ennius of the bright firmament, Jove whom all invoke:—