has mistresses and human children, such as Circe and Aeetes.(2)

(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 45.

(2) See chapter on Greek Divine Myths.

The sun is all-seeing and all-penetrating. In a Greek song of to-day a
mother sends a message to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but
an unconscious repetition of the request of the dying Ajax that the
heavenly body will tell his fate to his old father and his sorrowing
spouse.(1)

(1) Sophocles, Ajax, 846.

Selene, the moon, like Helios, the sun, was a person, and amorous.
Beloved by Zeus, she gave birth to Pandia, and Pan gained her affection
by the simple rustic gift of a fleece.(1) The Australian Dawn, with her
present of a red kangaroo skin, was not more lightly won than the chaste
Selene. Her affection for Endymion is well known, and her cold white
glance shines through the crevices of his mountain grave, hewn in a
rocky wall, like the tombs of Phrygia.(2) She is the sister of the sun
in Hesiod, the daughter (by his sister) of Hyperion in the Homeric hymns
to Helios.

(1) Virgil, Georgics, iii. 391.

(2) Preller, Griech. Myth., i. 163.

In Greece the aspects of sun and moon take the most ideal human forms,
and show themselves in the most gracious myths. But, after all, these
retain in their anthropomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the
fancy of Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be commonly thought that
the existence of solar myths is denied by anthropologists. This is a
vulgar error. There is an enormous mass of solar myths, but they are not
caused by "a disease of language," and--all myths are not solar!

There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the same character in
which the stars are accounted for as transformed human adventurers.
It has often been shown that this opinion is practically of world-wide
distribution.(1) We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, among the
Bushmen, in North and South America, among the Eskimos, in ancient
Egypt, in New Zealand, in ancient India--briefly, wherever we look. The
Sanskrit forms of these myths have been said to arise from confusion
as to the meaning of words. But is it credible that, in all languages,
however different, the same kind of unconscious puns should have led to
the same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous and Greek star-myths
(such as that of Callisto, first changed into a bear and then into a
constellation) are familiar to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit
star-s