LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066121082

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       POSTSCRIPT

       A BOOK OF MYTHS

       PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA

       PYGMALION

       PHAETON

       ENDYMION

       ORPHEUS

       APOLLO AND DAPHNE

       PSYCHE

       THE CALYDONIAN HUNT

       ATALANTA

       ARACHNE

       IDAS AND MARPESSA

       ARETHUSA

       PERSEUS THE HERO

       NIOBE

       HYACINTHUS

       KING MIDAS OF THE GOLDEN TOUCH

       CEYX AND HALCYONE

       ARISTÆUS THE BEE-KEEPER

       PROSERPINE

       LATONA AND THE RUSTICS

       ECHO AND NARCISSUS

       ICARUS

       CLYTIE

       THE CRANES OF IBYCUS

       SYRINX

       THE DEATH OF ADONIS

       PAN

       LORELEI

       FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS

       THE DEATH OF BALDUR

       BEOWULF

       ROLAND THE PALADIN

       THE CHILDREN OF LÎR

       DEIRDRÊ

       INDEX

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

Just as a little child holds out its hands to catch the sunbeams, to feel and to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so, down through the ages, men have stretched out their hands in eager endeavour to know their God. And because only through the human was the divine knowable, the old peoples of the earth made gods of their heroes and not unfrequently endowed these gods with as many of the vices as of the virtues of their worshippers. As we read the myths of the East and the West we find ever the same story. That portion of the ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia, through the rocky defiles of what we now call “The Frontier,” to populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons, Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. Originally they gave to their gods of their best. All that was noblest in them, all that was strongest and most selfless, all the higher instincts of their natures were their endowment. And although their worship in time became corrupt and lost its beauty, there yet remains for us, in the old tales of the gods, a wonderful humanity that strikes a vibrant chord in the hearts of those who are the descendants of their worshippers. For though creeds and forms may change, human nature never changes. We are less simple than our fathers: that is all. And, as Professor York Powell[1] most truly says: “It is not in a man’s creed, but in his deeds; not in his knowledge, but in his sympathy, that there lies the essence of what is good and of what will last in human life.”

The most usual habits of mind in our own day are the theoretical and analytical habits. Dissection, vivisection, analysis—those are the processes to which all things not conclusively historical and all things spiritual are bound to pass. Thus we find the old myths classified into Sun Myths and Dawn Myths, Earth Myths and Moon Myths, Fire Myths and Wind Myths, until, as one of the most sane and vigorous thinkers of the present day[2] has justly observed: “If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in religion and astronomy, when you find that the

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