Again,
the Sun must needs destroy its parents, the Night and the
Dawn; and accordingly his parents, forewarned by prophecy,
expose him in infancy, or order him to be put to death; but
his tragic destiny never fails to be accomplished to the
letter. And again the Sun, who engages in quarrels not his
own, is sometimes represented as retiring moodily from the
sight of men, like Achilleus and Meleagros: he is short-lived
and ill-fated, born to do much good and to be repaid with
ingratitude; his life depends on the duration of a burning
brand, and when that is extinguished he must die.
[105] It should be borne in mind, however, that one of the
women who tempt Odysseus is not a dawn-maiden, but a goddess
of darkness; Kalypso answers to Venus-Ursula in the myth of
Tannhauser. Kirke, on the other hand, seems to be a
dawn-maiden, like Medeia, whom she resembles. In her the
wisdom of the dawn-goddess Athene, the loftiest of Greek
divinities, becomes degraded into the art of an enchantress.
She reappears, in the Arabian Nights, as the wicked Queen
Labe, whose sorcery none of her lovers can baffle, save Beder,
king of Persia.
The myth of the great Theban hero, Oidipous, well illustrates
the multiplicity of conceptions which clustered about the
daily career of the solar orb.
Pages:
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170