And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, ‘the proper time for dying,’ must have been originally the wind. And in this we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original and literal meaning, the breath[104]--‘the spirit does but mean the breath.’ What more natural, therefore, than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god? This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to the Aryans’ charge, as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of the _body_ in another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul? The more external causes of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace. The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men’s minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted more than any other to this form of interment. Balder, the Northern sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the death of Heracles exemplifies the double significance of the sun’s westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When, therefore, this fire-burial was thoroughly established in custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely upon their belief that the body continued in an after-life. The thought of the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In place of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or, if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of this vital power, the smoke[105] of the funeral pyre may typify the ascending soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (_Il._ xxiii.) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which seems to be applicable to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish for anything more striking and impressive.