The stories about Grendel's mother and Long Meg are similar to those still repeated in the Scottish Highlands. These contrast sharply with characteristic Germanic legends, in which the giant is greater than the giantess, and the dragon is a male, like Fafner, who is slain by Sigurd, and Regin whom Siegfried overcomes. It is probable, therefore, that the British stories of female monsters who were more powerful than their husbands and sons, are of Neolithic and Iberian origin--immemorial relics of the intellectual life of the western branch of the Mediterranean race.

In Egypt the dragon survives in the highly developed mythology of the sun cult of Heliopolis, and, as sun worship is believed to have been imported, and the sun deity is a male, it is not surprising to find that the night demon, Apep, was a personification of Set. This god, who is identical with Sutekh, a Syrian and Asia Minor deity, was apparently worshipped by a tribe which was overcome in the course of early tribal struggles in pre-dynastic times. Being an old and discredited god, he became by a familiar process the demon of the conquerors. In the eighteenth dynasty, however, his ancient glory was revived, for the Sutekh of Rameses II figures as the "dragon slayer". [178] It is in accordance with Mediterranean modes of thought, however, to find that in Egypt there is a great celestial battle heroine.

This is the goddess Hathor-Sekhet, the "Eye of Ra". [179] Similarly in India, the post-Vedic goddess Kali is a destroyer, while as Durga she is a guardian of heroes. [180] Kali, Durga, and Hathor-Sekhet link with the classical goddesses of war, and also with the Babylonian Ishtar, who, as has been shown, retained the outstanding characteristics of Tiamat, the fierce old "Great Mother" of primitive Sumerian folk religion.

It is possible that in the Babylonian dragon myth the original hero was Ea. As much may be inferred from the symbolic references in the Bible to Jah's victory over the monster of the deep: "Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?"[181] "Thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters; thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness";[182] "He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud (Rahab). By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens: his hand hath formed (or pierced) the crooked serpent";[183] "Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces as one that is slain: thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm";[184] "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing (or stiff) serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea".[185]

In the Babylonian Creation legend Ea is supplanted as dragon slayer by his son Merodach. Similarly Ninip took the place of his father, Enlil, as the champion of the gods. "In other words," writes Dr. Langdon, "later theology evolved the notion of the son of the earth god, who acquires the attributes of the father, and becomes the god of war. It is he who stood forth against the rebellious monsters of darkness, who would wrest the dominion of the world from the gods who held their conclave on the mountain.

The gods offer him the Tablets of Fate; the right to utter decrees is given unto him. " This development is "of extreme importance for studying the growth of the idea of father and son, as creative and active principles of the world". [186] In Indian mythology Indra similarly takes the place of his bolt-throwing father Dyaus, the sky god, who so closely resembles Zeus. Andrew Lang has shown that this myth is of widespread character. [187] Were the Babylonian theorists guided by the folk-lore clue?

Now Merodach, as the son of Ea whom he consulted and received spells from, was a brother of "Tammuz of the Abyss". It seems that in the great god of Babylon we should recognize one of the many forms of the primeval corn spirit and patriarch--the shepherd youth who was beloved by Ishtar. As the deity of the spring sun, Tammuz slew the winter demons of rain and tempest, so that he was an appropriate spouse for the goddess of harvest and war. Merodach may have been a development of Tammuz in his character as a demon slayer. When he was raised to the position of Bel, "the Lord" by the Babylonian conquerors, Merodach supplanted the older Bel--Enlil of Nippur. Now Enlil, who had absorbed all the attributes of rival deities, and become a world god, was the

being "lord of the anunnaki", or "earth spirits". As agriculturists in early times went to war so as to secure prisoners who could be sacrificed to feed the corn spirit, Enlil was a god of war and was adored as such:

He was also "the bull of goring horns ... Enlil the bull", the god of fertility as well as of battle.[188]

Asari, one of Merodach's names, links him with Osiris, the Egyptian Tammuz, who was supplanted by his son Horus. As the dragon slayer, he recalls, among others, Perseus, the Grecian hero, of whom it was prophesied that he would slay his grandfather. Perseus, like Tammuz and Osiris, was enclosed in a chest which was cast into the sea, to be rescued, however, by a fisherman on the island of Seriphos. This hero afterwards slew Medusa, one of the three terrible sisters, the Gorgons--a demon group which links with Tiamat. In time, Perseus returned home, and while an athletic contest was in progress, he killed his grandfather with a quoit.

There is no evidence, however, to show that the displacement of Enlil by Merodach had any legendary sanction of like character. The god of Babylon absorbed all other deities, apparently for political purposes, and in accordance with the tendency of the thought of the times, when raised to supreme rank in the national pantheon; and he was depicted fighting the winged dragon, flapping his own storm wings, and carrying the thunder weapon associated with Ramman.

Merodach's spouse Zer-panitum was significantly called "the lady of the Abyss", a title which connects her with Damkina, the mother, and Belit-sheri, the sister of Tammuz. Damkina was also a sky goddess like Ishtar.

Zer-panitum was no pale reflection of her Celestial husband, but a goddess of sharply defined character with independent powers. Apparently she was identical with Aruru, creatrix of the seed of mankind, who was associated with Merodach when the first man and the first woman were brought into being. Originally she was one of the mothers in the primitive spirit group, and so identical with Ishtar and the other prominent goddesses.

As all goddesses became forms of Ishtar, so did all gods become forms of Merodach. Sin was "Merodach as illuminator of night", Nergal was "Merodach of war", Addu (Ramman) was "Merodach of rain", and so on. A colophon which contains a text in which these identifications are detailed, appears to be "a copy", says Professor Pinches, "of an old inscription", which, he thinks, "may go back as far as 2000 B.C. This is the period at which the name Yaum-ilu, 'Jah is god', is found, together with references to ilu as the name for the one great god, and is also, roughly, the date of Abraham, who, it may be noted, was a Babylonian of Ur of the Chaldees."[189]

In one of the hymns Merodach is addressed as follows:--

The monotheistic tendency, which was a marked feature of Merodach worship, had previously become pronounced in the worship of Bel Enlil of Nippur. Although it did not affect the religion of the masses, it serves to show that among the ancient scholars and thinkers of Babylonia religious thought had, at an early period, risen far above the crude polytheism of those who bargained with their deities and propitiated them with offerings and extravagant flattery, or exercised over them a magical influence by the performance of seasonal ceremonies, like the backsliders in Jerusalem, censured so severely by Jeremiah, who baked cakes to reward the Queen of Heaven for an abundant harvest, and wept with her for the slain Tammuz when he departed to Hades.

Perhaps it was due to the monotheistic tendency, if not to the fusion of father-worshipping and mother-worshipping peoples, that bi-sexual deities were conceived of. Nannar, the moon god, was sometimes addressed as father and mother in one, and Ishtar as a god as well as a goddess. In Egypt Isis is referred to in a temple chant as "the woman who was made a male by her father Osiris", and the Nile god Hapi was depicted as a man with female breasts.

Abstract

God and Heroes and the "Seven Sleepers"--Quests of Etana, Gilgamesh, Hercules, &c.--The Plant of Birth--Eagle carries Etana to Heaven--Indian Parallel--Flights of Nimrod, Alexander the Great, and a Gaelic Hero--Eagle as a God--Indian Eagle identified with Gods of Creation, Fire, Fertility, and Death--Eagle carries Roman Emperor's Soul to Heaven--Fire and Agricultural Ceremonies--Nimrod of the Koran and John Barleycorn--Gilgamesh and the Eagle--Sargon-Tammuz Garden Myth--Ea-bani compared to Pan, Bast, and Nebuchadnezzar--Exploits of Gilgamesh and Ea-bani--Ishtar's Vengeance--Gilgamesh journeys to Otherworld--Song of Sea Maiden and "Lay of the Harper"--Babylonian Noah and the Plant of Life--Teutonic Parallels--Alexander the Great as Gilgamesh--Water of Life in the Koran--The Indian Gilgamesh and Hercules--The Mountain Tunnel in various Mythologies--Widespread Cultural Influences.

One of the oldest forms of folk stories relates to the wanderings of a hero in distant regions. He may set forth in search of a fair lady who has been taken captive, or to obtain a magic herb or stone to relieve a sufferer, to cure diseases, and to prolong life. Invariably he is a slayer of dragons and other monsters. A friendly spirit, or a group of spirits, may assist the hero, who acts according to the advice given him by a "wise woman", a magician, or a god. The spirits are usually wild beasts or birds--the "fates" of immemorial folk belief--and they may either carry the hero on their backs, instruct him from time to time, or come to his aid when called upon.

When a great national hero appealed by reason of his achievements to the imagination of a people, all the floating legends of antiquity were attached to his memory, and he became identified with gods and giants and knight-errants "old in story". In Scotland, for instance, the boulder-throwing giant of Eildon hills bears the name of Wallace, the Edinburgh giant of Arthur's Seat is called after an ancient Celtic king,[190] and Thomas the Rhymer takes the place, in an Inverness fairy mound called Tom-na-hurich, of Finn (Fingal) as chief of the "Seven Sleepers". Similarly Napoleon sleeps in France and Skobeleff in Russia, as do also other heroes elsewhere. In Germany the myths of Thunor (Thor) were mingled with hazy traditions of Theodoric the Goth (Dietrich), while in Greece, Egypt, and Arabia, Alexander the Great absorbed a mass of legendary matter of great antiquity, and displaced in the memories of the people the heroes of other Ages, as those heroes had previously displaced the humanized spirits of fertility and growth who alternately battled fiercely against the demons of spring, made love, gorged and drank deep and went to sleep--the sleep of winter. Certain folk tales, and the folk beliefs on which they were based, seem to have been of hoary antiquity before the close of the Late Stone Age.