ive mythology are devious, but we have now pursued
them long enough I believe, to have arrived at a tolerably clear
understanding of the original nature of the divining-rod. Its power of
revealing treasures has been sufficiently explained; and its affinity
for water results so obviously from the character of the lightning-myth
as to need no further comment. But its power of detecting criminals
still remains to be accounted for.

In Greek mythology, the being which detects and punishes crime is the
Erinys, the prototype of the Latin Fury, figured by late writers as a
horrible monster with serpent locks. But this is a degradation of the
original conception. The name Erinys did not originally mean Fury, and
it cannot be explained from Greek sources alone. It appears in Sanskrit
as Saranyu, a word which signifies the light of morning creeping over
the sky. And thus we are led to the startling conclusion that, as the
light of morning reveals the evil deeds done under the cover of night,
so the lovely Dawn, or Erinys, came to be regarded under one aspect
as the terrible detector and avenger of iniquity. Yet startling as the
conclusion is, it is based on established laws of phonetic change, and
cannot be gainsaid.

But what has the avenging daybreak to do with the lightning and the
divining-rod? To the modern mind the association is not an obvious one:
in antiquity it was otherwise. Myths of the daybreak and myths of
the lightning often resemble each other so closely that, except by a
delicate philological analysis, it is difficult to distinguish the one
from the other. The reason is obvious. In each case the phenomenon to be
explained is the struggle between the day-god and one of the demons
of darkness. There is essentially no distinction to the mind of the
primitive man between the Panis, who steal Indra's bright cows and
keep them in a dark cavern all night, and the throttling snake Ahi or
Echidna, who imprisons the waters in the stronghold of the thunder-cloud
and covers the earth with a short-lived darkness. And so the poisoned
arrows of Bellerophon, which slay the storm-dragon, differ in no
essential respect from the shafts with which Odysseus slaughters the
night-demons who have for ten long hours beset his mansion. Thus the
divining-rod, representing as it does the weapon of the god of day,
comes legitimately enough by its function of detecting and avenging
crime.

But the lightning not only reveals strange treasur