So much for the myth of the sea, or river, of death. A most important change was wrought in belief when the custom of burning the dead was introduced. It would seem that our Aryan ancestors were the beginners of this rite. Whence it arose we cannot say; but if the God of Fire was a prominent divinity, the thought of committing the dead into his charge seems a simple and natural one. Among the Aryan people the only deep traces of fire-worship are to be seen in the Vedic and Iranian religions,[29] while the fire-burial survived in all: but the former may well have held a prominent place in their older creed. Or--and this is far from unlikely--the custom of fire-burial may have arisen out of the sun myth, just as the belief in the soul's journey after death was suggested by watching the sun's journey to the west. The two great fire-funerals mentioned in Greek and Teutonic mythology are the funerals of sun-gods. Heracles burning on Mount Œta, on the western coast of the Ægean, may have been first thought of by Greeks who saw the sun setting in fire over that sea; and Baldur's bale on the ship _Hringhorn_ is evidently the Norse edition of the same story, his blazing ship the blaze in the sky, as the sun sinks into the water. Burning the dead never seems to have been a universal practice; rather a special honour paid to kings and heroes. But then we must remember that immortality itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all men indiscriminately, only to the greatest. We see at once that with the use of fire-burial many of the old beliefs had to be given up; all those, for instance, which depended upon the preservation of the bodily remains. Of old time men had buried treasures with the corpse in the expectation that they would be of some kind of use to it; the body itself was at first imagined to descend to the under-world or to travel the western journey to the home of the sun. But now the body is visibly consumed upon the funeral pile, where, too, are placed, by a curious survival of old custom, the precious things which would formerly have been buried with it in the ground. The body and these things have been consumed, are gone; where have they gone? Have they perished utterly, and is there nothing more left than the earliest belief of an Ἀ-ίδης--a nowhere; is nothing true of all those myths of the soul passing away to a home of bliss? Instead of giving up this faith, the Aryan people have only spiritualized it, robbed it of the too literal and earthly clothing which in earlier times it wore. The thought which had once identified the life with the breath comes again into force, or, if some material representation is still wished for, we have the smoke of the funeral pyre, which rises heavenwards like an ascending soul. In this spirit we find in long after years, in the description of the funeral fire of Beowulf the Goth, it is said that the soul of the hero _wand to wolcum_, "curled to the clouds," imaging the smoke which