s a matter of little significance to the
Egyptian: but the modern Egyptian _fellah_, and no doubt his
predecessors also, regard eclipses with much concern. Such events
excite great alarm, for the peasants consider them as actual combats
between the powers of good and evil.

In other countries where rain is a blessing and not, as in Egypt, merely
an unwelcome inconvenience, the clouds play a much more prominent part
in the popular beliefs. In the Rig-Veda the power that holds up the
clouds is evil: as an elaboration of the ancient Egyptian conception of
the sky as a Divine Cow, the Great Mother, the Aryan Indians regarded
the clouds as a herd of cattle which the Vedic warrior-god Indra (who in
this respect is the homologue of the Egyptian warrior Horus) stole from
the powers of evil and bestowed upon mankind. In other words, like
Horus, he broke up the clouds and brought rain.

The antithesis between the two aspects of the character of these ancient
deities is most pronounced in the case of the other member of this most
primitive Trinity, the Great Mother. She was the great beneficent giver
of life, but also the controller of life, which implies that she was the
death-dealer. But this evil aspect of her character developed only under
the stress of a peculiar dilemma in which she was placed. On a famous
occasion in the very remote past the great Giver of Life was summoned to
rejuvenate the ageing king. The only elixir of life that was known to
the pharmacopoeia of the times was human blood: but to obtain this
life-blood the Giver of Life was compelled to slaughter mankind. She
thus became the destroyer of mankind in her lioness _avatar_ as Sekhet.

The earliest known pictorial representation of the dragon (Fig. 1)
consists of the forepart of the sun-god's falcon or eagle united with
the hindpart of the mother-goddess's lioness. The student of modern
heraldry would not regard this as a dragon at all, but merely a gryphon
or griffin. A recent writer on heraldry has complained that, "in spite
of frequent corrections, this creature is persistently confused in the
popular mind with the _dragon_, which is even more purely
imaginary."[176] But the investigator of the early history of these
wonder-beasts is compelled, even at the risk of incurring the herald's
censure, to regard the gryphon as one of the earliest known tentative
efforts at dragon-making. But though the fish, the falcon or eagle, and
the composite eagle-lion mon