Connected with the fall of Satan is his lameness. The devil is represented in art and in legend as limping on one foot; this was occasioned by his having broken his leg in his fall.
Hephæstus, who pursued Athene and attempted to outrage divine Wisdom, was precipitated from heaven into the fire-island Lemnos, and was lamed thereby. Hermes cut the hamstring out of Typhon, therewith to string his lyre. The Norse god Loki lusted after Freya, and was lamed therefore. Wieland the smith (Völundr), who ventured to do violence to Beodohild, was lamed, and was known thereby. Phaethon, daring to drive his father’s chariot of the sun, was cast out and thrown to earth.
The natives of the Caroline Islands relate that one of the inferior gods, named Merogrog, was driven by the other gods out of heaven, and he took with him a spark of fire which he gave to men.[[16]] This myth resembles that of Prometheus, “the contriver, full of gall and bitterness, who sinned against the gods by bestowing their honours on creatures of a day, the thief of fire,” as Hermes calls him. He reappears as Tohil among the Quiches, the giver of fire, hated, yet adored.
The Northern Californians say that the supreme God once created invisible spirits, of whom one portion revolted against him, headed by a spirit named War or Touparan, and that the Great Spirit having overcome him, drove him from the plains of heaven, and confined him along with his comrades in a cavern, where he is guarded by whales.[[17]]
The Egyptian Typhon, already alluded to, did not belong to Egypt alone, but also to Phœnicia and Asia Minor, and thence the story passed into Greece, where it took root, and has been preserved to us as the attack of the hundred-headed dragon against the heaven-god Zeus. Typhon desired to obtain supremacy over gods and men, and, in order to win for himself this sovereignty, he fought against the gods; but he was defeated, bound, and precipitated into Tartarus, or, according to another version, was buried under the flaming mountains.
According to a tradition of the Salivas, a people of New Granada, a serpent slew the nations, descended from God, who inhabited the region of the Orinoco, but a son of the God Puru fought him and overcame him, and bade him depart with his curse, and never to enter his house again, and, say these Salivas, from the flesh of the serpent sprang the Caribees, their great foes, as maggots from putrid meat.[[18]]
But these stories might be infinitely extended. How far they refer to a tradition common to the human race, and how far they relate to the strife between summer and winter, sun and storm-cloud, I do not pretend to decide. It is one of those vexed questions which it is impossible to determine.
II.
ADAM.
1. THE CREATION OF MAN.
Certain of the angels having fallen, God made men, that they might take their vacated places.