The Olympic games not a harvest festival, but based on astronomical considerations.
Whatever may be thought of these speculations, the great Olympic festival cannot have been, like our Lammas, a harvest festival: the quadrennial period of the celebration and the season of the year at which it fell, about halfway between the corn-reaping of early summer and the vintage of mid-autumn, alike exclude the supposition and alike point to an astronomical, not an agricultural, basis of the solemnity. Accordingly we seem driven to conclude that if the winners, male and female, in the Olympic games indeed represented divinities, these divinities must have been personifications of astronomical, not agricultural, powers; in short that the victors posed as embodiments of the Sun and Moon, then at the prime of their radiant power and glory, whose meeting in the heavenly bridechamber of the sky after years of separation was mimicked and magically promoted by the nuptials of their human representatives on earth.
§ 6. The Slaughter of the Dragon.
Widespread myth of the slaughter of a great dragon. The Babylonian story of the slaying of Tiamat by Marduk is a myth of the creation of cosmos out of chaos.
In the foregoing discussion it has been suggested that Delphi, Thebes, Salamis, and Athens were once ruled by kings who had, in modern language, a serpent or dragon for their crest, and were believed to migrate at death into the bodies of the beasts. But these legends of the dragon admit of another and, at first sight at least, discrepant explanation. It is difficult to separate them from those similar tales of the slaughter of a great dragon which are current in many lands, and have commonly been interpreted as nature-myths, in other words, as personifications of physical phenomena. Of such tales the oldest known versions are the ancient Babylonian and the ancient Indian. The Babylonian myth relates how in the beginning the mighty god Marduk fought and killed the great dragon Tiamat, an embodiment of the primaeval watery chaos, and how after his victory he created [pg 106] the present heaven and earth by splitting the huge carcase of the monster into halves and setting one of them up to form the sky, while the other half apparently he used to fashion the earth. Thus the story is a myth of creation. In language which its authors doubtless understood literally, but which more advanced thinkers afterwards interpreted figuratively, it describes how confusion was reduced to order, how a cosmos emerged from chaos.[330] The account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, which has been so much praised for its simple grandeur and sublimity, is merely a rationalised version of the old myth of the fight with the dragon,[331] a myth which for crudity of thought deserves to rank with the quaint fancies of the lowest savages.
Indian story of the slaying of Vṛtra by Indra. The story may be a myth descriptive of the beginning of the rainy season in India.
Again, the Indian myth embodied in the hymns of the Rigveda tells how the strong and valiant god Indra conquered a great dragon or serpent named Vṛtra, which had obstructed the waters so that they could not flow. He slew the monster with his bolt, and then the pent-up springs gushed in rivers to the sea. And what he did once, he continues to do. Again and again he renews the conflict; again and again he slays the dragon and releases the imprisoned waters. Prayers are addressed to him that he would be pleased to do so in the future. Even priests on [pg 107] earth sometimes associate themselves with Indra in his battles with the dragon. The worshipper is said to have placed the bolt in the god's hands, and the sacrifice is spoken of as having helped the weapon to slay the monster.[332] Thus the feat attributed to Indra would seem to be a mythical account not so much of creation as of some regularly recurring phenomenon. It has been plausibly interpreted as a description of the bursting of the first storms of rain and thunder after the torrid heat of an Indian summer.[333] At such times all nature, exhausted by the drought, longs for coolness and moisture. Day after day men and cattle may be tormented by the sight of clouds that gather and then pass away without disburdening themselves of their contents. At last the long-drawn struggle between the rival forces comes to a crisis. The sky darkens, thunder peals, lightning flashes, and the welcome rain descends in sheets, drenching the parched earth and flooding the rivers. Such a battle of the elements might well present itself to the primitive mind in the guise of a conflict between a maleficent dragon of drought and a beneficent god of thunder and rain. The cloud-dragon has swallowed the waters and keeps them shut up in the black coils of his sinuous body; the god cleaves the monster's belly with his thunder-bolt, and the imprisoned waters escape, in the form of dripping rain and rushing stream.
Similarly the other tales of the slaughter of the dragon may be mythical descriptions of the changes of the seasons.
In other countries a similar myth might, with appropriate variations of detail, express in like manner the passage of one season into another. For example, in more rigorous climates the dragon might stand for the dreary winter and the dragon-slayer for the genial summer. The myths of Apollo and the Python, of St. George and the Dragon have thus been interpreted as symbolising the victory of summer over winter.[334] Similarly it has been held with much probability that the Babylonian legend of Marduk and Tiamat reflects the annual change which transforms the valley of the [pg 108] Euphrates in spring. During the winter the wide Babylonian plain, flooded by the heavy rains, looks like a sea, for which the Babylonian word is tiamtu, tiamat. Then comes the spring, when with the growing power of the sun the clouds vanish, the waters subside, and dry land and vegetation appear once more. On this hypothesis the dragon Tiamat represents the clouds, the rain, the floods of winter, while Marduk stands for the vernal or summer sun which dispels the powers of darkness and moisture.[335]