ans the sun is a great
beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood is
used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian
myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there is no end to
similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even
as a beast.

To return to the stars--

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'hold many of the planets to be
transformed adventurers.' The Iowas 'believed stars to be a sort of
living creatures.' One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and
showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California,
according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and
lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other's
faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the
future. But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that
the stars are men or women is found in the 'Pax' of Aristophanes. Trygaeus
in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him,
and asks him, 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we
die?' The answer is 'Certainly;' and Trygaeus points out the star into
which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed. Aristophanes is making
fun of some popular Greek superstition. But that very superstition meets
us in New Zealand. 'Heroes,' says Mr. Taylor, 'were thought to become
stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their
victims slain in fight.' The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there
are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have
seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars
are souls of the dead. The Persians had the same belief, {134a} 'all the
unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.' {134b} The German
folklore clings to the same belief, 'Stars are souls; when a child dies
God makes a new star.' Kaegi quotes {134c} the same idea from the Veda,
and from the Satapatha Brahmana the thoroughly Australian notion that
'good men become stars.' For a truly savage conception, it would be
difficult, in South Africa or on the Amazons, to beat the following story
from the 'Aitareya Brahmana' (iii. 33.) Pragapati, the Master of Life,
conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter. Like Zeus, and
Indra, and the Australian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself
under the shape of a beast,