m mythic into scientific language, means
the Zodiacal Light, and the Bridge Bifroest, the Milky Way.

How curious, to trace in the grotesque mythic cosmogonies of India,
Greece, and Scandinavia, modern geology, botany, chemistry, etc.,--the
vast and brutal giants of the Eddas and other old mythic scriptures
being recognized as impersonations of the forces of Nature! The old
mythic cosmogonists and the modern geologists and astronomers do not
differ amongst themselves so much, after all. The mythic physicists had
personal agents at work, in place of our simple elemental ones; the
result is the same. Take the mythic cosmogonies of ancient Greece,
Scandinavia, and India, and the geologies and astronomies of the
present day, and compare their pages, changing things personal into
things impersonal. The expulsion and banishment of the old shapeless
mundane deities by a new and more beautiful race of gods, the cosmical
divinities, the powers and rulers of an ordered world, are intelligible
enough when translated into our modern geological nomenclature. The
leaves of the Stone Book, as the rocky layers of the earth have been
called, and the blue hieroglyphic page of heaven, also, are more
intelligibly read by the aid of the mythic glosses of old religion, of
Saga, Rune, and Voluspa. They spell the telluric records aright in
their own peculiar language. The assaults of the Typhons and Joetuns
upon the celestial dynasty, and their attempts to scale the fiery
citadels of the gods by making ladders of mountains, indicate clearly
enough the different revolutions read by geology in the various strata
and rocky layers piled upon the primitive granite of the globe, the
bursting through of eruptions from the central fire, extruding and
uplifting mountains, and the subsidence of the ocean from one
ripple-marked sea-beach to another lower down. In those dim geologic
epochs, where annals are written on Mica Slate, Clay Slate, and
Silurian Systems, on Old Red Sandstones and New, on Primary and
Secondary Rocks and Tertiary Chalk-beds, there were topsy-turvyings
amongst the hills and gambollings and skippings of mountains, to which
the piling of Pelion upon Ossa was a mere cobblestone feat. Alps and
Apennines then played at leap-frog. Vast basaltic masses were
oftentimes extruded into the astonished air from the very heart and
core of the world. In truth, the old mythic cosmogonies of the ancient
East, South, and North are not a whit too grot