Bulfinchs Mythology | Page 7

irreligious. They venerated their
departed ancestors, and in each family the worship of these ancestors
was an important duty. The images of the ancestors were kept in a
sacred place, each family observed, at fixed times, memorial rites in
their honor, and for these and other religious observances the family
hearth was consecrated. The earliest rites of Roman worship are
supposed to be connected with such family devotions.

As the Greeks and Romans became acquainted with other nations, they
imported their habits of worship, even in early times. It will be
remembered that as late as St. Paul's time, he found an altar at Athens
"to an unknown god." Greeks and Romans alike were willing to receive
from other nations the legends regarding their gods, and to incorporate
them as well as they could with their own. It is thus that in the poetical
mythology of those nations, which we are now to study, we frequently
find a Latin and a Greek name for one imagined divinity. Thus Zeus, of
the Greeks, becomes in Latin with the addition of the word pater (a
father) [The reader will observe that father is one of the words derived
from an Ayan root. Let p and t become rough, as the grammarians say,
let p become ph, and t th, and you have phather or father], Jupiter
Kronos of the Greeks appears as "Vulcanus" of the Latins, "Ares" of
the Greeks is "Mars" or Mavors of the Latins, "Poseidon" of the Greeks
is "Neptunus" of the Latins, "Aphrodite" of the Greeks is "Venus" of
the Latins. This variation is not to be confounded with a mere
translation, as where "Paulos" of the Greek becomes "Paulus" in Latin,
or "Odysseus" becomes "Ulysses," or as when "Pierre" of the French
becomes "Peter" in English. What really happened was, that as the
Romans, more cultivated than their fathers, found in Greek literature a
god of fire and smithery, they transferred his name "Hephaistos" to
their own old god "Vulcanus," who had the same duties, and in their
after literature the Latin name was used for the stories of Greek and
Latin origin.
As the English literature came into being largely on French and Latin
models, and as French is but a degraded Latin and retains Latin roots
largely, in our older English poets the Latin forms of these names are
generally used. In our own generation, with the precision now so much
courted, a fashion has come in, of designating Mars by his Greek name
of "Ares," Venus by her name of "Aphrodite," and so on. But in this
book, as our object is to make familiar the stores of general English
literature which refer to such subjects, we shall retain, in general, the
Latin names, only calling the attention of the reader to the Greek names,
as they appear in Greek authors, and in many writers of the more recent
English schools.

The real monarch of the heavens in the mythology of both Greece and
Rome is Jupiter (Zeus-pater, father-Jove) [Jove appears to be a word
derived from the same root as Zeus, and it appears in the root dev of the
Sanscrit, where devas are gods of different forms. Our English word
devil probably comes from the French diable, Italian diavolo, Latin
diabolus, one who makes division,- - literally one who separates balls,
or throws balls about,-- instead of throwing them frankly and truly at
the batsman. It is not to be traced to the Sanscrit deva.]
In the mythological system we are tracing Zeus is himself the father of
many of the gods, and he is often spoken of as father of gods and men.
He is the father of Vulcan [In Greek Hephaistos], of Venus [in Greek
Aphrodite], of Minerva [in Greek Pallas Athene, or either name
separately], of Apollo [of Phoebus], Diana [in Greek Artemis], and of
Mercury [in Greek Hermes], who are ranked among the twelve superior
gods, and of many inferior deities. But Jupiter himself is not the
original deity in these systems. He is the son of Saturnus, as in the
Greek Zeus is the son of Kronos. Still the inevitable question would
occur where did Saturnus or Kronos come from. And, in forms and
statements more and more vague, the answer was that he was born from
Uranus or Ouranos, which is the name of the Heaven over all which
seemed to embrace all things. The Greek name of Saturn was spelled
Kronos. The Greek name of Time was spelled Chronos. A similarity
between the two was imagined. And the whole statement, when
reduced to rationalistic language, would be that from Uranus, the
infinite, was born Chronos, Time,-- that from Time, Zeus or Jupiter
was born, and that he is the only child of Time who has complete sway