When we in the present century speak of the last hours of the day, we use precise and exact terms; we say, “It is late; the sun is setting; the moon rises; it is night.” Our ancestors also had occasion to mention these same hours, but as they did not speak of the facts of nature without investing them with some of their own personality, they preferred to say, “Dawn flies before the sun.” “The sun loves--pursues--embraces the dawn.” “She dies in the arms of the sun.” They spoke of the sun growing old--decaying--dying. Besides these general terms our ancestors used special designations, which the nature of their language suggested; the hymns of the Rig-Veda supply instances. One of these modes of speech it would be difficult for me to render in French, but the English language has the impersonal verb which will illustrate my meaning, for all such atmospheric phenomena such as rain, thunder, the light of day; instead of _it_ rains, _it_ thunders, _it_ shines, our ancestors said, _he_ rains, _he_ thunders, _he_ shines, without knowing who was this _he_, who for us is the third person masculine; but, naturally for them, _he_ meant the rainer, the thunderer, the lightener, or, in other words--the agent.
Mythology, taken in its entirety, is the outcome of myths which preceded it. If the original meaning of the Greek word Logos--as both word and thought--has revealed to us a forgotten truth; the original meaning of _mythos_ is also indispensable for the study of mythology. This Greek term means simply _word_ as opposed to _deed_, and hardly differed at first from Logos. Afterwards, however, a distinction was made between myth,--a fable, a story, and logos, a historical account. Thus a myth was at first a word. Almost all terms used in the first spontaneous stage of language had for their basis striking metaphors, whose signification may have been forgotten, and these terms having lost their original as well as poetical meaning, remained words only, current in familiar conversation.
I give the following myths as they have come down to us.
Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of Æthlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus; for, according to Greek customs, the reigning race of Elis derived its origin from the king of the gods. Endymion is one of the many names of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun; it is derived from a verb which originally meant _to dive into_; an expression such as “the sun dived” presupposes an earlier conception, that it dived into the sea. But the verb _enduo_ is never used in classical Greek for setting, because the simple verb _duo_ had become the technical term for sunset. Thus this myth of Endymion owes its origin to the use probably of _enduo_ in some Greek dialect, though not the commonly received term for sunset. The original meaning of Endymion being once forgotten, what was told originally of the setting sun was now told of a name, which in order to have any meaning, had to be changed into a god or hero.