Not all nations are equally mythological, and some ■which have historical myths to show are not rich at all in religious myths. The Arj^an race had in most of its divisions, as among the Hindus, the Greeks, the Ger- mans and Northmen, and the Slavonians, a great rich- ness of conception and imagination in this respect ; but to none was it given as to the Greeks to stamp the im- press of beauty on their mythology, so that their art and poetry, although built on mythology, still charms the Christian world. The Romans were poor in the number of their religious myths, for which tlie reason may be that they were formal and conscientiously scrupulous in their worship rather than free and ga}'; or possibly their myths may have been driven into ob- livion by early culture derived from Greece. The She- mitic nations and Egypt had also a poor mythology, copious as the pantheon of the last mentioned was. It is said that the myth of Isis, Osiris, and Typhon was their only one. Thus it must either have expelled others from circulation, or none ever existed. Probably there were other myths in remote times. The Persian re- ligion was of Aryan origin, although in centring all interest on the lasting strife between Ormusd and Ah- riman it seems to have somewhat chilled the myth- making power. Its pantheon of inferior gods or dfe- mons was copious enough, but the grand moral idea swallowed up every other. Their myth-making faculty is exercised in their cosmogony and eschatology, but
concerns itself little with special historical relations be- tween man and the divinities. The primitive tribes of this continent were far from wanting in this power, al- though the forms of their myths are like the imaginings of children. All this shows that mankind are much the same in all races, that resemblances do not necessarily prove one or another race to have been the borrower, and that the religions of nature, man being what he is, have a necessary existence. Again, the myths of a re- ligious character, in which the gods enter into human history, show a craving on the part of man for inter- course with the gods. It was no strange thing that myths should arise where there was no revelation, or where a primitive revelation had been lost; it was equally not strange that a real revelation should take the historical form.
There are certain raj'ths which narrate the origin of the world and the births of the gods. These cosmo- gonical and theogonical narratives are found alike among the Indians of this continent, among the Greeks, the Syrians, in the Teutonic race, and elsewhere. These of course can be, in great part, nothing else than early human speculations put into a religious mythic shape. They are the rude, childish philosophy of early men, who try to solve the riddles presented to human reflection without knowledge of law and of the world. We be- lieve we may affirm it to be a general truth that no natural religion conceives of a creation out of nothing, and to a great extent the gods had no eternal existence. There was, then, a necessity of a primitive form or stuff out of which the life and thought of the world was evolved. In the Greek speculation on the first origin of things, the rudest shape of matter was the first, and the progress was towards the more perfect, until their thought reached the present condition of things. In Hesiod's theogony there is a strange mixture of true personalities and allegorical ideas, but a connection of one with another, a birth or evolution, runs through all except the first. Chaos came to be (tysvsro); then the broad-breasted Earth, and Tartarus in the dark re- cess of spacious Earth, and Eros (most beautiful among the immortal gods). From Chaos Erebus and Night were born {tyivovro) ; from Night ^Ether and Day, the progeny of Night and Erebus. Earth first bare starry Uranus to cover her over on every side, with the Hills and the Pontus, without sexual love ; then to Uranus she bore many children — the Titans, among whom was Kronus (Saturn), the Cyclops, and the hundred-handed ones. Uranus hid his children, as they were born, in a cavern below the earth, but Kronus mutilated him with the advice of Gaja, and reigned in his stead. From Kronus and Rhea a new class of gods were born, whom the god swallowed, lest any of them should seize his throne, which Uranus and Gtea forewarned him of as being his destiny. When, however, Zeus was born, he was privily conveyed away, and a stone wrapped up in an infant's clothing was swallowed in his stead by Kronus. These children, with the stone, Kronus was made to disgorge, and Zeus, overcoming his father and his Titans, took the throne. In this strange medley, where allegorical beings and such as never received divine honors are put among the gods, we find the Ti- tans playing a great part, who can have had no venera- tion as gods in the earliest Greek religion. We find also three dynasties: Uranus and Ga\i, Kronus and Rhea, and Zeus with Hera. Schelling, following an earlier writer, supposes this to be a tradition of three successive forms of worship, the first and second of which were dualistic. But there is no evidence within the Greek records worth anything going to show that Ura- nus was ever an object of worship. It is probable that the word itself is connected -with Varuna, a highly honored Aryan divinity of the Vedic times. The prev- alence, however, of such a worship in Greece, or of a worship of Kronus (i. e. either of time personified, or of a divinity corresponding in part with the Roman Satur- nus, and having also some Phoenician characteristics