rlds
were once joined; subsequently they separated".

(6) Theog., 175-185.

(7) Apollod., i, 15.

(8) Theog., 209.

This story was one of the great stumbling-blocks of orthodox Greece. It
was the tale that Plato said should be told, if at all, only to a few
in a mystery, after the sacrifice of some rare and scarcely obtainable
animal. Even among the Maoris, the conduct of the children who severed
their father and mother is regarded as a singular instance of iniquity,
and is told to children as a moral warning, an example to be condemned.
In Greece, on the other hand, unless we are to take the Euthyphro
as wholly ironical, some of the pious justified their conduct by the
example of Zeus. Euthyphro quotes this example when he is about to
prosecute his own father, for which act, he says, "Men are angry with
ME; so inconsistently do they talk when I am concerned and when the gods
are concerned".(1) But in Greek THE TALE HAS NO MEANING. It has been
allegorised in various ways, and Lafitau fancied that it was a distorted
form of the Biblical account of the origin of sin. In Maori the legend
is perfectly intelligible. Heaven and earth were conceived of (like
everything else), as beings with human parts and passions, linked in
an endless embrace which crushed and darkened their children. It became
necessary to separate them, and this feat was achieved not without
pain. "Then wailed the Heaven, and exclaimed the Earth, 'Wherefore
this murder? Why this great sin? Why separate us?' But what cared Tane?
Upwards he sent one and downwards the other. He cruelly severed
the sinews which united Heaven and Earth."(2) The Greek myth too,
contemplated earth and heaven as beings corporeally united, and heaven
as a malignant power that concealed his children in darkness.

(1) Euthyphro, 6.

(2) Taylor, New Zealand, 119.

But while the conception of heaven and earth as parents of living things
remains perfectly intelligible in one sense, the vivid personification
which regarded them as creatures with human parts and passions had
ceased to be intelligible in Greece before the times of the earliest
philosophers. The old physical conception of the pair became a metaphor,
and the account of their rending asunder by their children lost all
significance, and seemed to be an abominable and unintelligible myth.
When examined in the light of the New Zealand story, and of the fact
that early peoples do regard all phenomena as human being