October, 1870.
IV. LIGHT AND DARKNESS.
WHEN Maitland blasphemously asserted that God was but "a Bogie
of the nursery," he unwittingly made a remark as suggestive in
point of philology as it was crude and repulsive in its
atheism. When examined with the lenses of linguistic science,
the "Bogie" or "Bug-a-boo" or "Bugbear" of nursery lore turns
out to be identical, not only with the fairy "Puck," whom
Shakespeare has immortalized, but also with the Slavonic "Bog"
and the "Baga" of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both of which
are names for the Supreme Being. If we proceed further, and
inquire after the ancestral form of these epithets,--so
strangely incongruous in their significations,--we shall find
it in the Old Aryan "Bhaga," which reappears unchanged in the
Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has left a memento of itself in the
surname of the Phrygian Zeus "Bagaios." It seems originally
to have denoted either the unclouded sun or the sky of noonday
illumined by the solar rays. In Sayana's commentary on the
Rig-Veda, Bhaga is enumerated among the seven (or eight) sons
of Aditi, the boundless Orient; and he is elsewhere described
as the lord of life, the giver of bread, and the bringer of
happiness.[94]
[94] Muir's Sanskrit Texts, Vol. IV. p. 12; Muller, Rig-Veda
Sanhita, Vol.
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