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In this myth the churning-stick, with its flying serpent-cords, is the lightning, and the armrita, or drink of immortality, is simply the rain-water, which in Aryan folk-lore possesses the same healing virtues as the lightning. "In Sclavonic myths it is the water of life which restores the dead earth, a water brought by a bird from the depths of a gloomy cave."
It was the Aryan race, to which we Europeans belong, which adopted this teaching and became essentially Christian, although this race is psychologically the most idolatrous of the world, as far as the æsthetic idol not the common fetish is concerned. Let us inquire into the cause of this remarkable fact.
The limitation of civil rights by religious tests is indeed one of those common inheritances from the old Aryan world that we find again and again cropping out, even down to the exclusion of Catholics from the House of Commons from 1562 to 1829.
Its historical horizon, racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction, moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of the Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula.
To this day the visitor to Snowdon is told the touching story, and shown the place, called Beth-Gellert, where the dog's grave is still to be seen. Nevertheless, the story occurs in the fireside lore of nearly every Aryan people. Under the Gellert-form it started in the Panchatantra, a collection of Sanskrit fables; and it has even been discovered in a Chinese work which dates from A. D. 668.
The tenth century B. C. is the latest date which will account for all the phenomena involved in the case, and with this result we must be satisfied. Even on this showing, the Iliad and Odyssey appear as the oldest existing specimens of Aryan literature, save perhaps the hymns of the Rig-Veda and the sacred books of the Avesta.
This is, doubtless, another indication of our Aryan brotherhood. Peelajee is industrious after the Oriental method that is to say, he is always doing something, but is economical of energy rather than time. If there are more ways than one of doing a thing, he has an unerring instinct which guides him to choose the one that costs least trouble.
Though belonging to this family, however, they form a perfectly distinct branch of it. Not only that, but when you notice a crowd of Coreans you will be amazed to see among them people almost as white and with features closely approaching the Aryan, these being the higher classes in the kingdom.
Darkness is for us the absence of light, not a mysterious and threatening presence which fills the sky while the kindly god of day sleeps. Light consists of vibrations in ether emitted from a tremendously hot, material substance instead of being a beneficent force under the control of a radiant being. But other races than the Aryan were less inclined to embellish and humanize nature.
Caste, it may be inferred from the Sanskrit word Varna, which means colour, originally discriminated only between the Aryan conquerors of relatively fair complexion and the darker aborigines they had subdued.
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