ARYAN MYTHOLOGY. The Aryans do not appear to have had any tradition of a Creation. They seem to have conceived of the Powers of Nature very much in the same way as the _Maori_ did,—namely, that the mysterious power of Generation was the operative cause of all things. Hesiod in his Theogony relates that the first parent of all was Chaos. From Chaos sprang Gaia (=Earth), Tartarus, Eros (=Love), Erebus, a dark son, Night, a dark daughter, and lastly, Day. From Gaia alone sprung Ouranos (=Heaven), Hills, Groves, and Thalassa (=Sea). From Heaven and Earth sprung Okeanos (=Ocean), Japetus, Kronos (=Saturn), Titans. Hesiod also relates how Heaven confined his children in the dark caverns of Earth, and how Kronos avenged himself. In the “Works and Days” Hesiod gives an account of the formation of the first human female out of Earth, from the union of whom, with Epimetheus, son of the Titan Japetus, sprung the human race. So far Hesiod’s account may be derived from Aryan myths. The latter and greater part, however, of Hesiod’s Theogony cannot be accepted as a purely Aryan tradition; for colonists from Egypt and Phœnicia had settled in Greece, at an early period, and had brought with them alien mythical fables which were adopted in a modified form, in addition to the antient family religion of worship of ancestors. Herodotus asserts that Homer and Hesiod made the Theogony of the Greeks; and to a certain extent this may be true, for the bard was then invested with a kind of sacredness, and what he sung was held to be the effect of an inspiration. When he invoked the Muses his invocation was not a mere formal set of words introduced for the sake of ornament, but an act of homage due to the Divinities addressed, whose aid he solicited.⁴ ⁴ Hom. Il., 2-484. Invocat. to Muses:— Tell me now, O Muses, ye who dwell in Olympus; For ye are goddesses, and are present, and know all things, But we hear only rumour, and know not anything. The traditions prevalent in Bœotia would naturally be strongly imbued with fables of foreign origin; and Hesiod, who was a Bœotian by birth, by collecting these local traditions and presenting them to the public in an attractive form, no doubt contributed, as well as Homer, to establish a national form of religion, made up of old Aryan tradition and what had been imported by Phœnician and Egyptian colonists. Thus Zeus and the other Olympian deities formed the centre of a national religious system; but at the same time the old Aryan religion of worship of ancestors maintained a paramount influence, and every tribe and every family had its separate form of worship of its own ancestors. The prayer of the son of Achilles, when in the act of sacrificing Polyxena to the manes of his father, is a striking instance of the prevalent belief that the deified spirits of ancestors had power to influence the destinies of the living.