CHARACTERISTICS OF SPECIAL MYTHOLOGIES.
Egyptian religion of ancient Egypt held a middle position between that of the Semitic and Aryan nationalities. The cen tral myth was that of Osiris, or, as he was otherwise called, Ra. The story told in many versions was that he was slain, and that the child Horns, aided by Isis, the wife of Osiris, brought him to life again. This myth unquestionably sprang from the soil of nature-worship. Osiris is the sun, or the sun-god, who may be said to die daily, and to fall a prey to the demon of darkness; but the night, represented by Isis, the moon goddess, and the young dawn, the child Horns, again bring on the sun, another, yet the same.
This was the physical background of the myth, but before the earliest remaining monuments of the Nile Valley had been set up the myth had assumed an ethical signification. Osiris had become the type of man whose soul is immortal, and, though he seemingly die, yet shall revive again; and of organic nature, which, though it wither and fade away in the season of cold or drought, shall yet bloom again and carpet the earth with green. The unchanging life amidst the ever-changing phenomena was what caught and fired the Egyptian's intellect. This one central idea revealed itself to him, whether he meditated on the daily death and birth of the sun, on the recurring seasons, or on the annual ebb and flow of his great river. Hence his abstractest term for God was "He who ever renews himself;" and as the unity of life thus became manifest through the analysis of its infinite revelations, he reached a monotheism which, though reserved for the illuminated, was none the less positive in its expression.
Aryan Alythology.—The Aryans pursued other paths and reached other conclusions than the nations of the Nile Valley. They were far more migratory; they were brought into contact with more varied surround ings; their language was more supple and ductile than that of the sub jects of the Pharaohs. Though solar myths are common in their relig ions, the story of the sun had not a commanding, position. The earliest Aryan god was the sky, the bright upper heaven, called Dyaus, Zeus, Jove. The contrast between day and night impressed itself broadly on
them, not as the individual history of the sun-god. They lived in lands where the seasons contrasted sharply and the weather was marked by extremes. Hence many phenomena of little prominence in Egypt attracted their attention. The winds and the storms, the thunder and the lightning, the clouds and the rain, the fountains and the sea—all claimed and received recognition in their composite mythology. Their pantheon was filled with varied forms, its history rich in dramatic inci dent, its characters vivid and substantial. For the poet, the dreamer, the field was teeming with suggestive combinations.
But for religious philosophy it was sadly sterile. There was no such sense of all-pervading, ever-renewed life as we have seen in Egypt. On the contrary, the shadow of death lies like a pall over all the Aryan creeds. Not merely was there a dark hopelessness about the fate of the individual himself, but over the whole of nature—ay, over the bright gods themselves —there was creeping that black shadow of extinction. We see it in the gay Olympian gods who "stand chid before the eye of Fate," and whose destinies are as fixed by the implacable Moire as are those of man; we see it in the Ragnarok of the Edda, the " Doom of the gods," in whose murky twilight Odin and all his crew shall vanish; we see it in Persian myth, where beyond all the dust of the conflict of Ormuzd and Ahriman stands the unmoved and eternal Zeruana Akerana, before whom even these great est of gods are but " children, sons of fleeting time;" and finally, in the Brahmanism of India, where Kala, time, is the infinite abyss which shall finally swallow gods, mortals, and matter alike.
Nor did Aryan mythology tend to lift its votaries from the slough of polytheism. We find most rarely any clear glimpse of that truth taught so positively by Mohammed: "God is alone; God is eternal; Begetting not, neither begotten, His like is not."—Koran, Sura xix.