[382]. J.G. Müller, Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 429.
[383]. See this question treated and its literature cited in Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 3rd ed., I. 57.
[384]. For the description of the Sun as an Opener, I am enabled to insert a supplementary datum, borrowed from a book which was published when p. 97 of the present work (to which I refer back) was already printed. In a cuneiform Hymn to Samas, the Sun-god, he is addressed thus:
O Samas! from the back of the heavens thou hast come forth:
The barrier of the shining heavens thou hast opened;
Yea the gate of the heavens thou hast opened.
(German translation of George Smith’s Chaldean Account of Genesis, with additions by Dr. Fr. Delitzsch, Leipzig, 1876.) The passage quoted is one of Delitzsch’s additions, p. 284. I think this Hymn is a remarkable illustration of our hypothesis that Yiphtâch, ‘the Opener,’ is a linguistic description of the Sun.
[385]. I owe to the kindness of my honoured friend Dr. Hampel, Custos of the archeological section of the Hungarian National Museum, the verification of a reference in the Bulletino dell’ Instituto di Correspondenza Archeologica, 1853, p. 150, to a stone which exhibits the same representation of the head of Janus as the coin in question, viz.: ‘una testa doppia, di cui una facie è barbata, l’altra giovanile.’
[386]. See Naphtali, discussed in [§ 14] of this Chapter; p. [178].
[387]. Compare Sol languidus (Lucretius, De rerum nat., V. 726).