HKB
That silent aspect wakened in the human mind the conception of the Infinite, the Immortal, the Divine; and the names of the Dawn became naturally the names of higher powers.[554:9]
"This imagery of the Aryans was applied by them to all they saw in the sky. Sometimes, as we have said, the clouds were cows; they were also dragons, which sought to slay the Sun; or great ships floating across the sky, and casting anchor upon earth; or rocks, or mountains, or deep caverns, in which evil deities hid the golden light. Then, also, they were shaped by fancy into animals of various kinds--the bear, the wolf, the dog, the ox; and into giant birds, and into monsters which were both bird and beast.
"The winds, again, in their fancy, were the companions or ministers of India, the sky-god. The spirits of the winds gathered into their host the souls of the dead--thus giving birth to the Scandinavian and Teutonic legend of the Wild Horseman, who rides at midnight through the stormy sky, with his long train of dead behind him, and his weird hounds before.[555:1] The Ribhus, or Arbhus, again, were the sunbeams or the lightning, who forged the armor of the gods, and made their thunderbolts, and turned old people young, and restored out of the hides alone the slaughtered cow on which the gods had feasted."[555:2]
Aryan myths, then, were no more than poetic fancies about light and darkness, cloud and rain, night and day, storm and wind; and when they moved westward and southward, the Aryan race brought these legends with it; and out of these were shaped by degrees innumerable gods and demons of the Hindoos, the devs and jinns of the Persians; the great gods, the minor deities, and nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs of Greek mythology and poetry; the stormy divinities, the giants, and trolls of the cold and rugged North; the dwarfs of the German forests; the elves who dance merrily in the moonlight of an English summer; and the "good people" who play mischievous tricks upon stray peasants among the Irish hills. Almost all, indeed, that we have of a legendary kind comes to us from our Aryan forefathers--sometimes scarcely changed, sometimes so altered that we have to puzzle out the links between the old and the new; but all these myths and traditions, and old-world stories, when we come to know the meaning of them, take us back to the time when the Aryan race dwelt together in the high lands of central Asia, and they all mean the same things--that is, the relation between the Sun and the earth, the succession of night and day, of winter and summer, of storm and calm, of cloud and tempest, and golden sunshine, and bright blue sky. And this is the source from which we get our fairy stories, and tales of gods and heroes; for underneath all of them there are the same fanciful meanings, only changed and altered in the way of putting them by the lapse of ages of time, by the circumstances of different countries, and by the fancy of those who kept the wonderful tales alive without knowing what they meant.