s. The
motif in the Babylonian cosmogony is the bringing of order out of
disorder, in which work the creation of light is an incident. In
ethically advanced religious systems, such as the Hindu and the Persian,
the good Powers are connected with light and the wicked Powers with
darkness, but a conflict between these adjuncts is not brought out
clearly. No such conflict appears in Greek mythology. Where a
supernatural being intervenes in defense of light (as when a god
destroys a dragon-creature who attempts to swallow the sun), this is
simply an explanation of a physical phenomenon, and not a conflict
between light and darkness.

+858+. The theory, widely held, that a great body of early myths,
including the conception of the characters and functions of many
deities, represent the struggle between light and darkness, is,
therefore, not sustained by the facts. Such a generalization is found in
late philosophic systems, but it does not belong to early religious
thought, which deals with concrete personal agents.[1492] A conflict
between two gods is often to be explained as the rivalry of two
districts or of two forms of culture. Attacks on luminous bodies, or
defenses of them, are common as aetiological myths, and an antagonism
between light and darkness then naturally appears, as is observed above,
as an accessory or incident, but not as an immediate object of mythical
portraiture. The closeness of the relation between the
light-and-darkness theory and the solar theory of myths is obvious.

+859+. _Myth and legend._ In the course of the formulation of myths they
have naturally become mingled with legend. As they narrate the
achievements of the great supernatural figures of the past, these
achievements have often become blended in the twilight of tradition with
actual (though embellished) experiences of the clan or tribe and of the
great men therewith connected.[1493] In such cases it is generally
difficult to decide where legend ends and myth begins, and every story
must be investigated separately, and its nature determined from what is
known of the real history of the time and of the development of mythical
ideas. Familiar examples of this combination of legend and myth appear
in connection with the Homeric poems, certain Asian and Greek cults, and
the early histories of Greece and Rome and Israel.[1494] The elucidation
of such narratives must be left to the technical investigator in the
various historical periods. In