Mr. Max Muller on Demeter Erinnys.
Like Mannhardt, our author in his new treatise discusses the strange old
Arcadian myth of the horse-Demeter Erinnys (ii. 537). He tells the
unseemly tale, and asks why the Earth goddess became a mare? Then he
gives the analogous myth from the Rig-Veda, {65} which, as it stands, is
'quite unintelligible.' But Yaska explains that Saranyu, daughter of
Tvashtri, in the form of a mare, had twins by Vivasvat, in the shape of a
stallion. Their offspring were the Asvins, who are more or less
analogous in their helpful character to Castor and Pollux. Now, can it
be by accident that Saranyu in the Veda is Erinnys in Greek? To this
'equation,' as we saw, Mannhardt demurred in 1877. Who was Saranyu?
Yaska says 'the Night;' that was Yaska's idea. Mr. Max Muller adds, 'I
think he is right,' and that Saranyu is 'the grey dawn' (ii. 541).
'But,' the bewildered reader exclaims, 'Dawn is one thing and Night is
quite another.' So Yaska himself was intelligent enough to observe,
'Night is the wife of Aditya; she vanishes at sunrise.' However, Night
in Mr. Max Muller's system 'has just got to be' Dawn, a position proved
thus: 'Yaska makes this clear by saying that the time of the Asvins, sons
of Saranyu, is after midnight,' but that 'when darkness prevails over
light, that is Madhyama; when light prevails over darkness, that is
Aditya,' both being Asvins. They (the Asvins) are, in fact, darkness and
light; and _therefore_, I understand, Saranyu, who is Night, and not an
Asvin at all, is Dawn! To make this perfectly clear, remember that the
husband of Saranyu, whom she leaves at sunrise, is--I give you three
guesses--is the Sun! The Sun's wife leaves the Sun at sunrise. {66} This
is proved, for Aditya is Vivasvat=the Sun, and is the husband of Saranyu
(ii. 541). These methods of proving Night to be Dawn, while the
substitute for both in the bed of the Sun 'may have been meant for the
gloaming' (ii. 542), do seem to be geistvolle Spiele des Witzes,
ingenious jeux d'esprit, as Mannhardt says, rather than logical
arguments.
But we still do not know how the horse and mare came in, or why the
statue of Demeter had a horse's head. 'This seems simply to be due to
the fact that, quite apart from this myth, the sun had, in India at
least, often been conceived as a horse . . . . and the dawn had been
likened to a mare.' But how does this explain the problem? The Vedic
poets cited (ii. 542) either referred to the myth which we have to
explain, or they used a poetical expression, knowing perfectly well what
they meant. As long as they knew what they meant, they could not make an
unseemly fable out of a poetical phrase. Not till after the meaning was
forgotten could the myth arise. But the myth existed already in the
Veda! And the unseemliness is precisely what we have to account for;
that is our enigma.
Once more, Demeter is a goddess of Earth, not of Dawn. How, then, does
the explanation of a hypothetical Dawn-myth apply to the Earth? Well,
perhaps the story, the unseemly story, was first told of Erinnys (who
also is 'the inevitable Dawn') or of Deo, 'and this name of Deo, or
Dyava, was mixed up with a hypokoristic form of Demeter, Deo, and thus
led to the transference of her story to Demeter. I know this will sound
very unlikely to Greek scholars, yet I see no other way out of our
difficulties' (ii. 545). Phonetic explanations follow.
'To my mind,' says our author, 'there is no chapter in mythology in which
we can so clearly read the transition of an auroral myth of the Veda into
an epic chapter of Greece as in the chapter of Saranyu (or Surama) and
the Asvins, ending in the chapter of Helena and her brothers, the
[Greek]' (ii. 642). Here, as regards the Asvins and the Dioskouroi,
Mannhardt may be regarded as Mr. Max Muller's ally; but compare his note,
A. F. u. W. K. p. xx.