eads up to the vision in Revelations (xii., 7
_et seq._): "There was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought
against the dragon; and the dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed
not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great
dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the Devil and Satan, which
deceiveth the whole world: he was cast into the earth, and his angels
were cast out with him."

In the later variants the original significance of the Destruction of
Mankind seems to have been lost sight of. The life-giving Great Mother
tends to drop out of the story and her son Horus takes her place. He
becomes the warrior-god, but he not only assumes his mother's role but
he also adopts her tactics. Just as she attacked Re's enemies in the
capacity of the sky-god's "Eye," so Horus as the other "Eye," the sun,
to which he gave his own falcon's wings, attacked in the form of the
winged disk. The winged disk, like the other "Eye of Re," was not merely
the sky weapon which shot down to destroy mankind, but also was the god
Horus himself. This early conception involved the belief that the
thunderbolt and lightning represented not merely the fiery weapon but
the actual god.

The winged disk thus exhibits the same confusion of attributes as we
have already noticed in Osiris and Hathor. It is the commonest symbol of
life-giving and beneficent protective power: yet it is the weapon used
to slaughter mankind. It is in fact the healing caduceus as well as the
baneful thunder-weapon.

[203: The history of the thunder-weapon cannot wholly be ignored in
discussing the dragon-myth because it forms an integral part of the
story. It was animated both by the dragon and the dragon-slayer. But an
adequate account of the weapon would be so highly involved and complex
as to be unintelligible without a very large series of illustrations.
Hence I am referring here only to certain aspects of the subject.
Pending the preparation of a monograph upon the thunder-weapon, I may
refer the reader to the works of Blinkenberg, d'Alviella, Ward, Evans
and A. B. Cook (to which frequent reference is made in these pages) for
material, especially in the form of illustrations, to supplement my
brief and unavoidably involved summary.]

[204: As in Egypt Osiris is described as "a ray of light" which issued
from the moon (Hathor), _i.e._ was born of the Great Mother.]

[205: "Religion vedique," i., p. 173, quoted by S. Reinach, "AE