as husband and wife is
uncertain. Such a conception is world-wide, and myth frequently explains
in different ways the reason of the separation of the two. Among the
Polynesians the children of heaven and earth--the winds, forests, and
seas personified--angry at being crushed between their parents in
darkness, rose up and separated them. This is in effect the Greek myth
of Uranus, or Heaven, and Gaea, or Earth, divorced by their son Kronos,
just as in Hindu myth Dyaus, or Sky, and Prithivi, or Earth, were
separated by Indra. Uranus in Greece gave place to Zeus, and, in India,
Dyaus became subordinate to Indra. Thus the primitive Heaven personified
recedes, and his place is taken by a more individualised god. But
generally Mother Earth remains a constant quantity. Earth was nearer man
and was more unchanging than the inconstant sky, while as the producer
of the fruits of the earth, she was regarded as the source of all
things, and frequently remained as an important divinity when a crowd of
other divinities became prominent. This is especially true of
agricultural peoples, who propitiate Earth with sacrifice, worship her
with orgiastic rites, or assist her processes by magic. With advancing
civilisation such a goddess is still remembered as the friend of man,
and, as in the Eleusinia, is represented sorrowing and rejoicing like
man himself. Or where a higher religion ousts the older one, the ritual
is still retained among the folk, though its meaning may be forgotten.

The Celts may thus have possessed the Heaven and Earth myth, but all
trace of it has perished. There are, however, remnants of myths showing
how the sky is supported by trees, a mountain, or by pillars. A high
mountain near the sources of the Rhone was called "the column of the
sun," and was so lofty as to hide the sun from the people of the
south.[766] It may have been regarded as supporting the sky, while the
sun moved round it. In an old Irish hymn and its gloss, Brigit and
Patrick are compared to the two pillars of the world, probably alluding
to some old myth of sky or earth resting on pillars.[767] Traces of this
also exist in folk-belief, as in the accounts of islands resting on four
pillars, or as in the legend of the church of Kernitou which rests on
four pillars on a congealed sea and which will be submerged when the sea
liquefies--a combination of the cosmogonic myth with that of a great
inundation.[768] In some mythologies a bridge or ladder conn