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Apart from the Hindu myths in the world literature a reader does find many facets of different religions in the vast ocean of literature. No doubt the world literature comprises many cultural sections originated from Greek, Zorastrian, Egyptian, Islamic and Christian religions. The myths pertaining to these religions may be regarded as non-Hindu myths. As the Greek religion has been most ancient one, some of the myths related to that religion are referred to and explained here in brief. i) Greek Myths A study of Greek mythology begins with a consideration of what political and religions systems existed in Europe before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North to East. The whole Neolithic Europe, to judge from serviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many titled mother-goddess who was also known in Syria and Libya. Early Greek Mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly or twice yearly sacrifices, and end, at the time when the Iliad, was composed and king boasted. We are far better than our

95 fathers; with he eclips by an unlimited male monarchy. Numerous African analogues illustrate the progressive stages of this change. Thus large part of Greek myth is politico - religions history. Ballerophon masters winged pegasus and kills the chimeara. (Persus, in a varient of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads pegasus mother, the Gorgon Medusa much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero). All early myths about the God's seduction of nymphs refer apparently to marriages between Mellenic Chieftains and local Moon priestesses; bitterly opposed by Hera, which means by conservative religious feeling. The Gods of the Greeks were complex characters, with both northern and Meditarranean strains in their ancestry, and there is something to be said for taking them as we find them. It is interesting, and not always difficult to separate the strands that have been interwoven in their making. In the judgement of many scholars the Apollo of the Iliad is what he is because the Greeks took over and hellenized a native Asiatic deity. He is single living god and a very great one. Since that what he is to the Greeks, nothing else matters very much. The two main types of religion which appear among the classical Greeks, and so after give an air of paradox to their expressed beliefs, are represented by the Olympians of blomer on the one hand, and on the other, by the kind of cult of which we have an example, considerably modified by official Athenean sentiment, in the Eleusinian mysteries. These were celebrated in honour of Demeter, the matter of life, whose

96 worship in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean goes (to quote sir John Myres) "as far back as either records or monuments carry as. It was an orgiastic religion involving a belief in possession by the god where by for a fleeting instant, under the influence of torches, wine, heady music and dancing, the worshipper felt lifted out of himself and exalted to the plane of the divine. It is natural affinities seem to be all with the fertility cults of the Mediterranean basin, and have nothing in common with the prosaic Achaean religion. Yet Dionysos is the god of a Nothern people, the Thracians, speaking in Indo-European tongue, and whatever accretions his cult may have acquired from the lands through which it spread, ecstacy, and immortality are the gifts of the native Thracian religion. ii) Zeus Greek literature begins with Homer, and from Homer the Greeks took their portraits of the gods. In Homer they already appear as fully formed, clear-cut, characters, and these divine charecters inherited by the classical Greeks. First and foremost zeus is the god of the sky and wheather whom all Indo-European peoples acknowledged under names variously derived from the same root. This root originally meant "to shine". As such zeus is, as Nilsson says, purely Hellenic, a part of the inheritance which the Greeks brought with them when they broke off from the common stock and started the migrations which finally settled them around the shores of the Aegean. In this aspect zeus is

97 known to everyone, and there is no need to spend much time in multiplying examples to illustrate the fact that for the Greeks zeus was primarily the god of the sky and weather. From Homer onwards zeus dwells in the sky, and is also spoken of as being the sky itself. The primary thought is men's minds is that he is the ruler and the father. This position of the zeus in the Illiad. Son of Koronos is his convenctional title, but koronos himself is scarcely mentioned. He is known to have been banished by zeus at some time in the dim past, but there are no reminiscences of the struggle for power which that fact implies. We possess the inscription recording the introduction of the cult of Dionysos at Magnesia on the Maeander in the third or the second century B.C. A plane tree in the city had been blown down by a storm, and an image of the god was found inside it. Thecitizens sent it envoys to Delphi to ask the meaning of the portent. There follows the metrical text of the oraccle's reply. It bids them build a temple to Dionysos and fetch three maenads from Thebes to instruct them in the rites of the god and found thiasoi of worshippers in the city. Finally the prevalence of the tree-cult in Crete has been demonstrated from the archaeological evidence by sir Arthur Evans. These tree gods embody the life of the vegetation. They are inturn child of the Earth, for she bears them and brings them forth from her bosom, and they inturn as they grow maturity produce their seed which she receives into her womb again.

98 iii) Hera Hera to the Greeks had two main aspects; she was the one legitimate wife of zeus, and she was the patron and guardian of the institution of marriage. She appears in several guises, or performs several functions upon which all are agreed, and which are naturally connected. She was originally a moon goddess. She may surely have ridden in a chariot and at one place (Lehadeia in Boeotia) have been addressed as the chariteer, without being the moon, even though the moon, like the Sun, was thought to rid in a chariot. Being preeminently the goddess of marriage and child birth, Hera is, of course, in the words of professor Rose, "much concerned with fecandity." Again Hera was said to be the mother of strange, monsters, such as Typhoes and the Lernean Hydra, of a kind which elsewhere are said, like the whole race of the Giants, to have sprung from the earth. Indeed, Hesiod makes the earth and the mother of Typhoeus, whereas Stesichoros and the author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo call him Son of Hera. iv) Apollo Apollo presents us with a curious state of affairs. He is the very embodiment of the Hellonic spirit. Everything that marks off the Greek outlook from that of the other people, and in particular from the barbarians who surrounded them - beauty of every sort, whether of art music, poetry or youth, Sanity and moderation - all are summed up in Apollo. Apollo's connection with Hyperboreans are strong,

99 both in myth and cult. The earliest literary reference which has been preserved is to a Delphic myth. It is from a poem of Alcaeus (600. B.C.). When Apollo was born zeus intended him to go to Delphi to dispense law to the Hellenes. Instead, he made use of the swan chariot with which he had been provided to fly to the land of the Hyperboreans, where he remained for a whole year before turning back to Delphi in response to the paean, song anddances of the young men with which the Delphians had been invoking him. What then of the Asiatic side? Its champions start from Apollo's ancient epithet Lykios or Lykoes, which they say means Lycian, of Lycia in Asia minor. The alternative is to interpret it as "wolf-God" which was the interpretation of the Greeks themselves. Support for the Asiatic origin of Apollo is found in the fact that at most of his great cult centres on the mainland of Greece he appears as an intruder. At Delphi the Greeks recognized this themselves, at other places there is clear evidence that he has taken over the worship previously paid to another god. v) Hermes He was given a phallas to promote fertility and finally emerged as a fully human figure. Yet even the herms which stood infront of Athenian houses in the fifth century had not thrown off all traces at their origin, but were no more than half human in shape. Since the pillar and cairn were set by the wayside to serve as landmarks, the

100 commonest function of Herms was to be the guide of way farers and god of roads. Another purpose of cairns was to mark the boundaries of estates and Herms was set up for this purpose too. He is thus in one aspect the equivalent of the Roman Terminus, another figure who was both boundary stone and tutelary dacmon. His virtue lay in his speed and his wits, not in his strength. It was natural that he should become 'cleverest of the Gods" and even "crafly" a thief and patron of thieves, as well as the averter of evel and the giver of good things. It was good luck to meet him, and a peace of good luck was called a gift from Hermes. Among the gods he is not great, but rather their clever servant, used by zeus to run his errands and take his messages to mankind. His worship flourished particularly, and a very early date, in Arcadia, land of shepherd which may have been either cause or effect. He is also the god of the marketplace or assemblies of men, agoraios. The outstanding characteristic of Hermes is his protectiveness seen alike in his guidance and help to way farers and in his guardianship of the flocks. On the red figured vase showing Hermes standing upright in his heap of stones, a libation is being offered to him by Kephalos, who is doubtless soliciting his favour in the hunt. In front of him stands Artemis, dressed for the chase with two spears in her hand. The conclusion is that the male deity is a Master of Animals, corresponding in this to the goddess prominent in Minoan art who appears to have been a Mistress of Animals. The strong animal headed demons are his especial minions, in virtue of which they

101 themselves have power over the beasts as he does. He is moreover the spirit of thestone-heaps to which we see the same demons offering libation, in its anthropomarphic form. The Minoan god combines the character of a spirit of the stone heaps and a lord of the wild beasts. Hermes among the Greeks, and Hermes alone, does the same. vi) Poseidon Poseidon is a god who is generally supposed to be Greek in origin. In the division of the universe between the three great brother gods, as described in the Iliad, the see was alloted to poseido, as the sky to zeus and the underworld to Hades. He is lord of fresh water as well as salt, and many springs were attributed to a blow from his trident. The most famous is of course that which he struck from the rock of the Akropolis at Athons. Pagasos, whom Homer does not mention although he tells the story of Ballerophon, is in any case said by Hesoid to have been poseidon's Son. Poseidon, then, if we may follow the lead of wilamowitz was Gaiaochos because he lived in the earth from which he sent up spring and rivers of water to fertilize the land. He only became the great god when his original nature, and doubtless also the origin of hisname were forgotten, when he was assigned leadership over the new element that had entered into the life of the Hallenes and was to be for them, during the period when they were separated off from the barbarians, their means of access to other lands, for some of their livelihood, and to all an ever present force that filled them with fascination and dread.

102 vii) Artemis Artemis had the epithet Agrotera, she of the wild, used in Greek literature from Homer onwards. In particular she took the young of all creatures under her protection. This was a goddess whom the Greeks must have found on every hand when they came to occupy Greece, Crete and parts of Asia Minor. viii) Dionysos The worship of Dionysos is something which can never be wholly explained. Historical research into his antecedents and the adduction of antropological parallels have done much. Literary descriptions and artistic representations are available sufficient to give us an adequate idea of the main features of Dionysiac orgia in their most typical, untamed form. Moreover, there features have been made so familiar by modern writers that they need only be briefly recaptulated here. The greatest gift of Dionysos was the sense of after freedom, and in Greece it was the women, with their normally confined and straitened lives, to whom the temptation of release made the strongest appeal. Dionysos, continue the chorus, "pricks them to leave their looms and shuttles." According to the story, not wholly explained, of his birth, semele when pregnant with him was blasted by the lightening. Some said and this version is alluded to in the Bacchae that Hera out of jealousy had tempted her to make the fatal mistake of persuading zeus to let her see him in his true form. Zeus saved his son by -

103 snatching him from her womb and thrusting him into his own thigh until the time came for his birth. Thus according to the canons of Greek mythology his arrival in Thebes as narrated by Euripides was strictly speaking a homecoming. The identity in Greek eyes of the cretan zeus and Dionysos is best illustrated by another passage of Euripides, the fragment of the lost cretans which has already been quoted. Here we have the omophagia ("eating rau"), of which the chorus in the Bacchae also speak, performed by a cretan initiate of Idaean zeus. It was an original feature of both the cretan and the Thracian cults, no doubt because an original connection is to be assumed between the two peoples.