Notes by Gerald Massey on the twins-motif in mythology, astronomy and royal genealogies

The English poet, writer and Egyptologist, Gerald Massey, observed that the twin motif was pervasive throughout the world and to be found in the mythologies of origins as well as royal genealogies among the civilizations and tribes of the world, the earliest myths beginning in female forms, and then proliferating as the warring twin brothers’ motif. Massey was a believer of spiritual evolution, a kind of “Darwinistic spiritualism theory” and had a lot to teach us about the Divine Descent in mythologies.

“The theory contains only one half the explanation of man’s origins and needs spiritualism to carry it through and complete it. For while this ascent on the physical side has been progressing through myriads of ages, the Divine descent has also been going on – man being spiritually an incarnation from the Divine as well as a human development from the animal creation. The cause of the development is spiritual. Mr. Darwin’s theory does not in the least militate against ours – we think it necessitates it; he simply does not deal with our side of the subject. He can not go lower than the dust of the earth for the matter of life; and for us, the main interest of our origin must lie in the spiritual domain.”

Below extracted from his book “The Natural Genesis” Section 8, pp. 458 – are the portions of his book relating to the twins motif found in mythologies from Africa to East Asia:

“There was continual warfare between the twin-brothers, the crow taking every possible advantage of his nobler foe, the eagle; but the latter had ample revenge for his insults and injuries. At length the deadly struggle ceased, and peace was established by an agreement that the Murray Blacks should be divided into two classes, those of the eagle-hawk, the Mak-quarra, and those of the Kii-parra or crow totem. The same war is described in the Irish myth between the two brothers, Heber and Heremon, and it was perpetuated in Egypt as the war that went on for ever between Sut and Horus, in the eschatological phase of the mythos. …

The first twins are two brothers. They consist of a bright being who is held to be divine, and a dark one who comes to be considered devilish, and who began as the devil in physical phenomena. In the beginning the mother Darkness opened and gave birth to her brood of elementaries as the evil-working powers. This beginning with darkness internal and external, and the starting from the night side of phenomena will account for the dark power, the deity as devil, being the uppermost of two with many of the primitive tribes. It was the dark power born of darkness, whose shadow put out the light, that was first dreaded by the black race; the influence earliest feared and longest believed in, whose type survived in Egypt as the black Sut, the black Hak or Kak, and the black Osiris. Although the latter were but forms of the nocturnal sun, they continued the type of terror in a psychotheistic phase.
The first twins are two brothers. They consist of a bright being who is held to be divine, and a dark one who comes to be considered devilish, and who began as the devil in physical phenomena. In the beginning the mother Darkness opened and gave birth to her brood of elementaries as the evil-working powers. This beginning with darkness internal and external, and the starting from the night side of phenomena will account for the dark power, the deity as devil, being the uppermost of two with many of the primitive tribes. It was the dark power born of darkness, whose shadow put out the light, that was first dreaded by the black race; the influence earliest feared and longest believed in, whose type survived in Egypt as the black Sut, the black Hak or Kak, and the black Osiris. Although the latter were but forms of the nocturnal sun, they continued the type of terror in a psychotheistic phase.

The devil of a god who is recognised by the West Coast negroes is black, malignant, and mischievous. How should poor Caliban have apprehended otherwise when his chief teachers were wrath and danger; the blackness spitting fire and growling as if heaven were fuller of wild beasts than the forests of earth; the snap of the crocodile, the sting of the serpent, the stroke of the sun, the whirlwind, flood, and all the torments of incomprehensible disease? If there were a conscious power postulated behind phenomena it must appear of a very bad nature to Caliban[61].

Burton asked the negroes of the East Coast about the deity, and they wanted to know where he was to be found, that they might slay him. They said, ‘Who but he lays waste our homes, and kills our wives and cattle?'[62] Such being their very natural interpretation of the intemperate phenomena of nature.

In the Bundahish the evil demon and tempter is the darkness, and he shouts out of the dark his insidious, vile suggestions to the primal human pair, Mashya and Mashyoi. Their turning aside from the right way to worship the dark power is represented as the ‘Fall.’ But this form of Kotou from fear was primordial, the root of a religious awe, and as such the feeling has been sedulously fostered up to the present time! The dark power was primal.

The same conflict of the twins is celebrated in the legends of the Australian aborigines. The story told by a man of the Wa-woo-rong or Yarra tribe is that ‘Pundjel was the first man. He made every thing; the second man (Kar-ween) he made also, as well as two wives for Kar-ween. But Pundjel made no wife for himself and after a lapse of tune he came to want Kar-ween’s wives—but he watched them very jealously, and wouldn’t let Pundjel get near them. The latter, however, was clever enough to steal both the wives in the night, and take them away. Kar-ween, taking some spears, pursued Pundjel, but he could find neither him nor his wives. In a short time Pundjel came back, bringing with him two women. He asked Kar-ween to fight on the following day, and proposed that the women should fall to whoever conquered. To this Kar-ween agreed, having a different plan in his mind, which was this, to make ingargiull or corrobboree. Kar-ween spoke to Waugh (the crow) and asked him to make a corrobboree. And many crows came, and they made a great light in the air, and they sang as they danced round. Whilst they were thus singing Pundjel danced. Kar-ween took a spear, and threw it at him, and wounded him a little in the leg, but not in such a manner as to hurt Pundjel much. Pundjel however was very angry, and, seizing a spear, threw it at Kar-ween, and with such good aim that it went through Kar-ween’s thigh, who could walk about no more, became sick, lean as a skeleton, whereupon Pundjel made Kar-ween a crane, and that bird was thereafter called Kar-ween. Pundjel was the conqueror and had the women.’

In another version we learn that the two beings who created all things had severally the form of the crow and the eagle. The conflict that was waged between the rival powers is thus preserved in song

Thinj-arni balkee Mako; Nato-panda Kambe-ar tona.
Knee strike cow; Spear father of him.
The meaning of which is ‘Strike the cow on the knee, I will spear the father.’

The war was maintained with vigour for a long time. The crow [p.479] took every possible advantage of his nobler foe the eagle; but the latter generally had ample revenge for injuries and insults. Out of their enmities and final agreement arose the two classes, and thence a law governing marriages amongst the classes.
The war was maintained with vigour for a long time. The crow [p.479] took every possible advantage of his nobler foe the eagle; but the latter generally had ample revenge for injuries and insults. Out of their enmities and final agreement arose the two classes, and thence a law governing marriages amongst the classes.

Mr. Bulmer says: ‘The Blacks of the Murray are divided into two classes of the Mak-quarra or Eagle and the Kil-parra or Crow. If the man be Mak-quarra the woman must be Kil-parra. The children take their caste from the in other, not from the father. The Murray blacks never deviate from this rule. A man would as soon many his sister as a woman of the caste to which he belongs. He calls a woman of the same class Wurtoa (sister).'[68]

Here we find the crow and the eagle, the birds of darkness and of light, are the two totemic signs of the people that were first divided into two different castes, just as they are the two symbols of the earliest divisions into light and dark, or the heaven into south and north, which shows what was meant by calling the raven the ‘Bird of separation.’ Moreover, we see the beginning with the dark power and type, the black bird being for a long time the superior one, and the conquest made by the bird of light over his brother. This is shown in another way. ‘Waugh’ is one name of the crow and of the ‘Second Man’—he who was first in time. In the Phoenician legend, according to Sanchoniathon, Hypsuranius and Usous are a form of the two brothers who quarrel and are at enmity with each other. These, the typical dividers, are said to have been begotten when the intercourse between the sexes was so promiscuous that women accompanied with any man they might chance to meet, and men with their own mothers[69]. The Eskimos of Greenland relate that in the beginning there were two brothers, one of whom said, ‘There shall be Night and there shall be Day, and men shall die one after another.’ But the second said, ‘There shall be no Day but only Night all the time, and men shall live for ever.’ Then they wrestled for the supremacy; the dark one was worsted in the long struggle and the day triumphed at last[70]. The Singhalese have a pair of twins, Gopolu and Menkara, born of a queen on the Coromandel Coast. The mother died and the twins were suckled by a cow. The brothers quarrelled, and Gopolu being slain was changed into an evil demon who sends diseases from his abode in a Banyan tree in Arangodde. Mangara is worshipped as god or demi-god. The Mexican Great Mother who was called the woman with the serpent, and the woman of our flesh, was represented as the mother of the twins. She is depicted on a monument in the act of conversing with the serpent whilst her twin children are standing behind her; they are differently coloured in token of their diverse characters, and one of them is [p.480] likewise portrayed as overcoming or slaying the other. These twins were also born of Cihuacohuatl as two serpents. Her name is the Female Serpent, which shows her to be a form of the dragon Tiamat and Typhon the genetrix. She gave birth to the twins of light and darkness as her two serpents. One is, however, considered male, the other female; and to these the Aztecs referred the origin of mankind. Hence twins and serpents are synonymous as Cocahua—cohua being the singular for serpent, cocohua the plural. — Source: Book 8, The Natural Genesis“

… Continued below …

“One of the legends in the Mahabharata, describes Kaçyapas as taking two wives fruitful. One is Kadrü, the dark or red one; the other is Vinatâ, the swollen one, that is the gestator, the mother of breath, she who emanes the egg, out of which issued the serpent[44].

Sufficient has now been shown of the Great Mother in her two phases of the virgin and gestator, also as the two sisters of sociology.

It is the most ancient and most primitive myths that are the most universal; and one of the most universal is that of the twin-brothers, born of the genetrix either in her single or her dual character. The abyss of darkness, is said, in the Bundahish, to be in the middle of the earth, and to have been formed there when the Evil Spirit pierced and rushed into the earth at the time when ‘all the possessions of the world were changing into duality,’ and the conflict and contention of high and low began[45]. It is also said in the Bundahish that ‘Revelation is the explanation of both these spirits together;’ the two spirits of light and darkness that manifest in space and time[46]. This was in the division or bifurcation of all beginning. The abyss of darkness became the hell as antithesis of heaven. The evening and the morning were the twin boundary in the first formation of night and day. And in Hebrew the evening or darkness has the same name as the raven, the blackbird, the gareb, identical with the Latin corvus, old German kraben, old Norse [p.473] harfn; Greek korōnë, Maltese hrab, Scotch garble, which modifies into crow. The same word in Egyptian khereb signifies a first formation, the model figure. ‘The evening (gareb) and the morning were the first day,’ and the raven was the type of the dark side. The dove is one form of the bird of light. This in Lithuanic is the golub; the golamboin Polish, and columba in Latin. Both birds were equally types of the first formation and both are named from that origin. The raven and dove are equivalent to the bird of darkness and the bird of light, which constitute the double-headed type of Sut-Horus and Sut-Nubti in Egypt.

It was argued in the earlier volumes of this work that the legend of Sut-Horus was pre-monumental, and belonged to the time of the Shus-en-Har, to whom an historical period of 13,420 years is assigned[47]. This view has since been corroborated by the inscriptions discovered at Saqqara. In the later phase the twin-brothers are called the ‘Sons of Osiris,’ as was the way after the fatherhood had been established. They are described as having quarrelled and fought for the succession, whereupon Taht intervened, and assigned to each his domain, one having the north, the other the south. Hence, the first division of the heaven, or the land of Egypt, by north and south was the result of the quarrel and division of the twinborn brothers[48]. These are the two brothers of universal mythology, and the myth is now proved to be incalculably ancient in Egypt; not a later importation from Asia as some had previously thought.

In the Magic Papyrus, the genetrix in two characters which may be identified with Earth and Heaven, or the two horizons of the solar myth is represented by Anata (Neith), and Astarte, the ‘Two Great Goddesses who conceive and do not breed.’ These two are said to be opened by Sut, and to be shut up or sealed by Horus[49]. The figure of Sut-Horus was at first a dual type of that which is negative and positive in phenomena, whether as the alternate dark and light, or the double lunation, or the twin horizons, represented by the human being, as the impubescent boy, and the virile male; the one who opened and sealed the genetrix in his two characters. The earliest phenomenal form of the Twins as darkness (Sut) and light (Horus), shows us why Taht, the lunar god, should be chosen as mediator betwixt them and the determinator of their two boundaries, because he came between the darkness of night and the light of day as lord of the lunar orb.

Sut-Horus then is portrayed as the double manifestor of light and darkness on the two horizons, with the heads of two birds, one being the black vulture, the Neh; the other the gold hawk of the solar fire. It is a figure of the Two Truths of day and dark, the two elements of water and fire with other applications of the type to phenomena. [p.474] Horus was said to duplicate or rise again as the white god. ‘Black and crystal are the faces of those attacked to him.’[50] In the Avesta the Good Spirit is white, the Bad Spirit black. A am ah ve ho, the white man above, is likewise the Cheyenne name for god[51]. In the earlier time the white or light god was the golden. Another name of this dual divinity is Sut-Nub, the original of Sothis-Canopus in the stellar phase; and Nub signifies the golden, Sut is black, like the English soot. The Sut-Horus or Sut-Nub reappears in Australia as War-pu, the male eagle or the hawk eagle who represents the star Sirius (Sothis-Sut), and War who represents the star Canopus. Thus the Egyptian Sut-Har (or Sut-Nub), the dual Har in Egypt is identical with the dual War of the Victorian Blacks; and the two-faced divinity is represented by the stars Sothis and Canopus. In the northern part of Victoria the natives say the beings who created all things were the eagle and the crow. And the hawk-eagle and crow are one with the bird of light and the black bird which form the dual type of the well-known Sut-Horus, or Sut-Nub in Egypt.

There was continual warfare between the twin-brothers, the crow taking every possible advantage of his nobler foe, the eagle; but the latter had ample revenge for his insults and injuries. At length the deadly struggle ceased, and peace was established by an agreement that the Murray Blacks should be divided into two classes, those of the eagle-hawk, the Mak-quarra, and those of the Kii-parra or crow totem. The same war is described in the Irish myth between the two brothers, Heber and Heremon, and it was perpetuated in Egypt as the war that went on for ever between Sut and Horus, in the eschatological phase of the mythos. This identification of Canopus is very remarkable, for, according to Plutarch[52], Canopus was the helmsman of the solar god. His wife’s name was Menuthis, a form of the old suckler Typhon. In the Inscriptions on the Tablet of San[53], Sut-Nub is called the overthrower of the enemies of the sun in the Boat of Millions of Years. The golden Sut, the golden dog (jackal) was represented by the golden star, and a learned priest toldAristides the orator, that Canopus signified the ‘golden floor.’[54] The golden hawk of the Sut-Horus type is one of the golden images of the male Sut.

The Australian Blacks of Victoria account themselves to be very great astronomers. That is, they have preserved some of the primitive types which were first stelled in the heavens. We shall find they have the Great Mother of the beginnings not only in her earliest phase, as the bringer-forth in space, but also in time as the Bear, or goddess of the Bears and the waters. The Bushmen also identify the star Sirius as the Great Mother, or the grandmother of Canopus[55]. Sirius or Sothis was the star of Sut. In its feminine type it[p.475] represented the Great Mother of beginnings in the Southern Heaven; and Canopus (Nub) is her starry son, in a pre-solar mythos. Thus we find the same mythos in Egypt and Victoria, whilst the connecting link supplied by the Bushmen serves as a bridge by which we can cross from inner Africa to Australia. Although not so obvious in every case, yet the entire system of the most ancient mythology which Egypt shows to be Kamite, is as surely one and the same in its origin.

The Orientals called the raven the ‘Bird of Separation,’[56] and it is primary, because darkness was reckoned to be first. The bird of light issues from it in the double-headed Sut. The rock sculptures of the North American Indians show the contending twins as gods of the north and south who continue the conflict for ever on behalf of warm and cold weather. The god of the south has two birds, the plover and crow, the equivalent of the hawk and the raven. These are sent out when he wants warm weather, and contests the supremacy of the world with the northern divinity. The crow, however, is the representative of the dark power[57].

The British Arthur must likewise have been represented by the two birds of light and darkness, for it is an extant Cornish and Welsh superstition that King Arthur did not die but transformed into a raven, in the shape of which he is living still. In Jarvis’ translation of Don Quixote[58] it is said that in the annals of England Arthur, whom the Spaniards know as King Artus (Art, Irish, is the Great Bear), it is a recorded tradition that Arthur did not die but was changed into a raven by magic art and that he would rise again and reign; ‘for which reason it cannot be proved that from that time to this any Englishman has killed a raven.’ The raven is our phoenix, the bennu of the resurrection. So the raven remained a type sacred to Apollo, in Greece, who was the Horus of Egypt.*

* Both birds were united in the phoenix as they are in our Royston or Dunstable Crow, which is white and black, and is called thefineog in Irish. The phoenix is the bird of transformation, and it is an English superstition that the cuckoo transforms into a sparrow-hawk in spring. So in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus[59], when the cuckoo asks the other birds why they flee from him, who is not ferocious, they tell him they fear the future sparrow-hawk!

The earliest form of the motherhood is inseparable from the son who takes a dual shape under various types, as the child and pubescent youth who preceded the fatherhood, or the child of darkness and the hero of light.

Vari, the Mangaian Great Mother, gives birth to the dual child her Sut-Horus who is half-human and half-fish, the division being like the two halves of a human body. He has two magnificent eyes, rarely visible at the same time. Whilst one shines in the heaven [p.476] above, the other illumines Savaiki. These are now supposed to be the sun and moon, as we find them in an address to Khnum: ‘O thou Lord of Lords, Khnum, whose right eye is the sun’s disk, whose left eye is the moon.’[60]

Burton asked the negroes of the East Coast about the deity, and they wanted to know where he was to be found, that they might slay him. They said, ‘Who but he lays waste our homes, and kills our wives and cattle?’[62] Such being their very natural interpretation of the intemperate phenomena of nature.

In the Bundahish the evil demon and tempter is the darkness, and he shouts out of the dark his insidious, vile suggestions to the primal human pair, Mashya and Mashyoi. Their turning aside from the right way to worship the dark power is represented as the ‘Fall.’ But this form of Kotou from fear was primordial, the root of a religious awe, and as such the feeling has been sedulously fostered up to the present time! The dark power was primal.

An evil being that is propitiated and flattered or glorified so that it may not work any harm is always found to be related to natural phenomena which are inimical to man. He is connected by the Hottentots with thunder as well as with disease and death. Dr. Hahn shows that the worship of Gaunab, the bad being or inimical power, [p.477] who dwells in the black sky, was probably of a much older date than that of the good being Tsuni-Goam[63].

The Gabe Bushmen, the Ai Bushmen, the Nunin, and others, know, fear, and propitiate the evil-doer Gaunab, whereas the good power, Tsuni-Goam, is entirely unknown or unrecognised amongst them[64]. In Mangaia it was the dark god Rongo who was the principal deity of the twins, and who had to be appeased by human sacrifice. With various other races the dark power is the worshipful, because it works harm to man.

Dr. Hahn learned from an old Habobe-Namaqua that TsuniGoam was a powerful chief of the Khoi-Khoi (Hottentots). In fact he was the first from whom they took their origin. Tsuni-Goam went to war with Gaunab because the latter always killed great numbers of Tsuni-Goam’s people. In the continual conflict, however, the good god, though repeatedly overpowered by Gaunab, grew stronger and stronger with every battle he waged. At last he grew strong and big enough to give his enemy a fatal blow behind the ear, which put an end to Gaunab. But whilst Gaunab was expiring he gave Tsuni-Goam a stroke on the knee, from which the conqueror received his name of Tsuni-Goam or ‘Wounded-Knee.’ Henceforth he could never walk properly because of his lameness, but he was victor for the future. He could do wonderful things, and was very wise. He could tell what would happen in years to come. He died several times, and several times he rose again. When he came back there was a great festival of rejoicing. He dwells in a bright and beautiful heaven, and his opponent Gaunab dwells in a dark heaven, quite separate from the heaven of Tsuni-Goam[65].

There are several renderings of Tsuni-Goam’s name and story. In Bleek’s Hottentot Fables we have another version of the twins. ‘At first they were two! One had made a large hole in the ground, and sitting by it told passers-by to throw a stone at his forehead. The stone, however, rebounded, killing the thrower, who fill into the hole. At last Heitsi-Eibip was told that many people died in this way. So he arose, and went to the man, who challenged HeitsiEibip to throw a stone at him. The latter declined, being too prudent; but he drew the man’s attention to something on one side, and while he turned round to look at it Heitsi-Eibip hit him behind the ear, so that he died and fell into his own hole. After that there was peace, and people lived happily.’[66]

Another variant reminds one of the negro chant, ‘Chase the devil round the stump.’ The two opponents hunt each other round the hole or abyss. We are told that ‘All men who came near to that hole were pushed into it by Ga-gorip (the pusher into the hole), as he knew well where it lay. Whilst thus employed there came the Heitsi-Eibip (also [p.478] called Heigeip) and saw how the Ga-gorip treated the people. Then these two began to hunt each other round the hole, saying, “Push the Heigeip down,” “Push the Ga-gorip down.” With these words they hunted each other round for some time, but at last the Heigip was pushed down. Then he said to the hole “support me a little;” and it did. Being thus supported he came out, and they hunted each other again with the same words. A second time the Heigip was pushed down, and he spoke the same words, “support me a little,” and thus got out again. Once more these two hunted after each other, till at last the Gagorip was pushed down, and he came not up again. Since that day men breathed freely, and had rest from their enemy, because he was vanquished.’[67]

The same conflict of the twins is celebrated in the legends of the Australian aborigines. The story told by a man of the Wa-woo-rong or Yarra tribe is that ‘Pundjel was the first man. He made every thing; the second man (Kar-ween) he made also, as well as two wives for Kar-ween. But Pundjel made no wife for himself and after a lapse of tune he came to want Kar-ween’s wives—but he watched them very jealously, and wouldn’t let Pundjel get near them. The latter, however, was clever enough to steal both the wives in the night, and take them away. Kar-ween, taking some spears, pursued Pundjel, but he could find neither him nor his wives. In a short time Pundjel came back, bringing with him two women. He asked Kar-ween to fight on the following day, and proposed that the women should fall to whoever conquered. To this Kar-ween agreed, having a different plan in his mind, which was this, to make ingargiull or corrobboree. Kar-ween spoke to Waugh (the crow) and asked him to make a corrobboree. And many crows came, and they made a great light in the air, and they sang as they danced round. Whilst they were thus singing Pundjel danced. Kar-ween took a spear, and threw it at him, and wounded him a little in the leg, but not in such a manner as to hurt Pundjel much. Pundjel however was very angry, and, seizing a spear, threw it at Kar-ween, and with such good aim that it went through Kar-ween’s thigh, who could walk about no more, became sick, lean as a skeleton, whereupon Pundjel made Kar-ween a crane, and that bird was thereafter called Kar-ween. Pundjel was the conqueror and had the women.’

In another version we learn that the two beings who created all things had severally the form of the crow and the eagle. The conflict that was waged between the rival powers is thus preserved in song

Thinj-arni balkee Mako;	Nato-panda Kambe-ar tona.
Knee strike cow;	Spear father of him.

The meaning of which is ‘Strike the cow on the knee, I will spear the father.’

Here we find the crow and the eagle, the birds of darkness and of light, are the two totemic signs of the people that were first divided into two different castes, just as they are the two symbols of the earliest divisions into light and dark, or the heaven into south and north, which shows what was meant by calling the raven the ‘Bird of separation.’ Moreover, we see the beginning with the dark power and type, the black bird being for a long time the superior one, and the conquest made by the bird of light over his brother. This is shown in another way. ‘Waugh’ is one name of the crow and of the ‘Second Man’—he who was first in time. In the Phoenician legend, according to Sanchoniathon, Hypsuranius and Usous are a form of the two brothers who quarrel and are at enmity with each other. These, the typical dividers, are said to have been begotten when the intercourse between the sexes was so promiscuous that women accompanied with any man they might chance to meet, and men with their own mothers[69]. The Eskimos of Greenland relate that in the beginning there were two brothers, one of whom said, ‘There shall be Night and there shall be Day, and men shall die one after another.’ But the second said, ‘There shall be no Day but only Night all the time, and men shall live for ever.’ Then they wrestled for the supremacy; the dark one was worsted in the long struggle and the day triumphed at last[70]. The Singhalese have a pair of twins, Gopolu and Menkara, born of a queen on the Coromandel Coast. The mother died and the twins were suckled by a cow. The brothers quarrelled, and Gopolu being slain was changed into an evil demon who sends diseases from his abode in a Banyan tree in Arangodde. Mangara is worshipped as god or demi-god. The Mexican Great Mother who was called the woman with the serpent, and the woman of our flesh, was represented as the mother of the twins. She is depicted on a monument in the act of conversing with the serpent whilst her twin children are standing behind her; they are differently coloured in token of their diverse characters, and one of them is [p.480]likewise portrayed as overcoming or slaying the other. These twins were also born of Cihuacohuatl as two serpents. Her name is the Female Serpent, which shows her to be a form of the dragon Tiamat and Typhon the genetrix. She gave birth to the twins of light and darkness as her two serpents. One is, however, considered male, the other female; and to these the Aztecs referred the origin of mankind. Hence twins and serpents are synonymous as Cocahua—cohua being the singular for serpent, cocohua the plural.

The Mangaians relate that the genetrix who took the dual form of the two women, as Vari below and Papa above, bore two children. Tangaroa, the fair one, was the first by right, and ought to have been the firstborn, but was said to have politely given precedence to his brother Rongo, the dark one, just as Jacob gave precedence to Esau, but recovered the birthright from him afterwards. Rongo the Dark came up from the Mute-land-home of Vari, the first of the two mothers who never ascended from the lower world. Soon after this birth the genetrix, as Papa, the second of the two mothers, suffered from a great swelling. She resolved to get rid of it by pressing it. This she did; the core flew out, and it was Tangaroa. Another account says that Tangaroa came right up out of Papa’s head, the precise spot being indicated by ‘the Crown,’ with which all their descendants have since been born. That is the double crown which is still considered to be auspicious. Tangaroa instructed his brother Rongo in the arts of tillage: he was the husbandman of the Phoenician and Hebrew myths, as Esau is a man of the field. Their father was desirous of making Tangaroa, the fair one, the sole lord of all that the parents possessed. So Isaac, the father of the twins, loved Esau. But Papa, the mother, interposes on behalf of Rongo, the dark one, as Rebekah interposed on behalf of Jacob, to secure the blessing for him. In each version of the myth the mother had her own way. Hence, whenever a sacrifice was offered to Rongo, the refuse was thrown to the mother who dwelt with him in the shades below. Through the cunning of Papa, the government, feasts, the drum of peace, all honours and power were secured to Rongo. Nearly all sorts of food fell to the elder twin-god, with this exception. Tangaroa was admitted to be lord of all the red on earth or in ocean. This was his lot; the red taro, the red yam, the red chestnut; four kinds of fish, all scarlet, and all other things that were red. This possession by the fair god of all the red on earth as his share[71] is the exact parallel of Esau, the red man who is fed with a mess of red. If Tangaroa is not described as a red man, he has red or sandy hair. Rongo’s hair is raven-black. Here, also, red and black correspond to the red heaven of Tsuni-Goam and the black heaven of Gaunab in the Khoi-Khoi myth. It has been previously suggested that Jacob was a form of the Egyptian god Kak, whose name means darkness[p.481] or black. At a feast made by the twin-gods each collected his own kinds of food only, and to this the mother and father were invited. Tangaroa, lord of the red, made a vast pile of all things red, crowned atop with red land-crabs, and all the crimson fish he could find in the sea. Rongo’s pyramid was immensely greater, and the parents said that while Tangaroa’s offering carried the palm for beauty Rongo’s excelled in abundance. Tangaroa was so displeased at the preference shown to Rongo that, although he did not kill his brother as Cain did, yet he left the land of Rongo, became the earliest navigator, and went forth to find, or found, a place where he could dwell by himself. This corresponds to the rival offerings of Cain and Abel. Abel’s were blood-offerings, and Rongo was the god of blood-sacrifice. In consequence of the preference shown to Abel’s sacrifice Cain fell upon him, and then, like Tangaroa, he went forth to build a city in the land of Nod. According to the true mythos Cain is really the good brother, the light one of the twins, whereas Abel is the dark and disappearing one. Hence the doctrine of the Gnostic Cainites, who declared that Cain derived his being from the power above, and not from below[72]. In the Algonquin versions it is the child of light who commits the fratricide. The sympathies of the Hebrew writers, however, have gone with ‘righteous’ Abel instead of Cain, as they do with Jacob, another type of the dark deceitful one, instead of Esau. But how honest nature rises in revolt against the treacheries and sharp practices described in the Hebrew scriptures! In a Syrian story relating to the ‘seven oaks’ on a hill in anti-Libanus, told by a native of the village of Zebdani, Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam, are called Rabid and Habil.*

* Or Kabil and Habil.

The whole world was divided between them; and this was the cause of their quarrel, Habil moved his boundary stones too far; Rabid threw them at him; and Habil fell. His brother in great grief carried the body on his back for 500 years, not knowing what to do with it. At last, on the top of a hill, he saw two birds fighting, the one killed the other, washed him, and buried him in the ground. Habid did the same for his brother’s body and planted his staff to mark the spot. That staff grew up into the seven trees[73]. This shows that Habil was the encroaching dark one, and it restores the true mythos. The two contending birds, and the staff which marks the boundary, appear as in various other versions.

Jacob and Esau are a form of the mythical twins who struggle for supremacy in the mother’s womb. Esau is really the god of light, the red Tsuni-Goam, or the Red Sun (Atum) of the solar mythos. Jacob is the demon of darkness, who was Kak (Eg.), the elemental darkness continued by name as Kak or Kã (Eg.), the nocturnal sun. Jacob appears in both these phases. Esau the red is the hairy man, [p.482] a type of pubescence. The Jewish traditions, which are worth the history in the Pentateuch ten times over, tell us that Esau, when born, had the likeness of a serpent on his heel. This shows two things. He was a personification of the light-god that bruised the serpent’s head, and Jacob, who laid hold of Esau’s heel, was primarily the serpent or devil of darkness—hence the wily one, the deceiver, by nature and by name. Esau is said to have sold his birthright for a ‘mess of red’ (מדא), and the traditions assert that he was called the red because he sucked his mother’s blood before his birth[74]. This, likewise, shows him to have been the divinity imaged by the solar hawk, which symbolised blood ‘because they say that this Bird does not drink water, but Blood, by which the soul is sustained.’[75] The hawk and serpent conjoined are a well-known type of the primordial divinity of a dual nature. In his second struggle Jacob wrestles all night with the opposing power and becomes a form of the Hottentot ‘Wounded-knee,’ who wrestled or fought with Gaunab, the dark and evil being, therefore it may be inferred that Jacob, like Kak, passed out of the elementary into the distinctly solar character of the nocturnal sun, as in other versions of the same mythos.

The hawk and eagle are interchangeable types of the soaring bird of fire or light; the eagle and serpent appear in the following Miztec myth. In this the twin brothers are the two sons of the parents of the gods called the Lion-Snake and the Tiger-Snake. One of these was the Wind of Nine Snakes, the other the Wind of Nine Caves. When the elder desired to amuse himself he took the form of an eagle, flying thus far and wide; the younger turned himself into a small beast of a serpent shape, having wings which he used with such agility and sleight that he became invisible, and flew through walls and rocks even as through air. The two, therefore, correspond individually to the double Horus who was represented by a serpent and a hawk, also to the feathered serpent which was twinned in the Quiche legends as the type of primordial power. These two agreed to make a sacrificial offering to their parents, the gods. Then they took each a censer of clay, and put fire therein, and poured in ground beleño for incense; and this offering was the first that had ever been made in the world. Next they created a beautiful garden and left the home of their parents to go and live in it and tend it. They prayed to the gods to shape the firmament, lighten the darkness of the world, and to establish the foundation of the earth, or rather to gather the waters together so that the earth might appear, as they had no place to rest in save only their one little garden[76]. To make their prayers effectual they pierced their ears and tongues with flakes of flint, sprinkling the blood that dropped from their wounds over the trees and plants of the garden with a willow branch.

[p.483]

The beginning was with darkness and its division into dark and light, in the elementary stage of the mythos.Eznik, an Armenian author of the fifth century, who wrote a book on heresies, containing a refutation of the false doctrine of the Persians, says, ‘Before anything, heaven or earth, or creature of any kind whatever therein, was existing, Zeruan (time) existed.’[77] He offered sacrifices for a thousand years in the hope of obtaining a son, Ormizt by name, who was to create heaven, earth, and everything therein. Whilst he was sacrificing and cogitating Ormizt and Arhmen were conceived in the womb of their mother. Ormizt as the fruit of his sacrifices, Arhmen as that of his doubts. When Zeruan was aware of this event he said, Two sons are in the womb he who will first come to me is to be made king. Ormizt having perceived his father’s thoughts revealed them to Arhmen, saying, Zeruan, our father, intends to make him king who shall be born first. Having heard these words Arhmen perforated the womb and appeared before his father. But Zeruan, when he saw him, did not know who he was, and asked him, ‘Who art thou?’ He told him, ‘I am thy son.’ Zeruan answered him, ‘My son is well-scented and shining, but thou art dark and ill-smelling.’ While they were thus talking Ormizt, shining and well-scented, appeared before Zeruan who, seeing him, perceived him at once to be his son Ormizt, and handed over to him his rod (the Barsom) and blessed him. Then Arhmen approached him saying, ‘Hast thou not vowed to make that one of thy two sons king who should first come to thee?’ Zeruan in order to avoid breaking his vow, replied to Arhmen, ‘Oh, thou liar and evil-doer, the empire is to be ceded to thee for nine thousand years; but I place Ormizt over thee as chief and after nine thousand years he will reign and do what he likes.’ Then Ormizt and Arhmen began the work of creation; everything produced by Ormizt was good and right, and everything wrought by Arhmen was bad and perverse[78]. In the Hebrew version of the twins, Jacob and Esau, Isaac the father takes the place of Zeruan, Esau is the firstborn, but Jacob wins the birthright by deceit. Isaac, like Zeruan, tries to determine which is the true heir by smelling him. When the disguised Jacob came near his father, his father ‘smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord bath blessed.’[79] Jacob is represented as being the ‘well-scented,’ like Ormizt in the Persian account.

In some forms of the myth the two powers are antiphonal rather than antagonistic; they meet amicably like Satan and the lord of light in the Book of Job, or in Faust[80]. In an ancient version of the relationship of Sut and Horus the two stand on two opposite eminences in the character, as it were, of two land surveyors, they solemnly agree respecting the natural boundaries of each other’s [p.484] domains and each pronounces the formula, ‘The land of An is the boundary of the land.’[81]

The circle of day and night was also typified by an egg which divided and gave birth to the twin brothers. The two Dioscuri are depicted with half of the severed shell on each of their heads as a cap or helmet. TheDioscuri are curiously portrayed upon the coins of the Greek city of Istros in Moesia. The opposition, alternation, conflict or contention of the twins is ingeniously illustrated. M. Lenormant has pointed out that their two heads seen on the obverse side are there placed side by side but in opposite directions, so that when one of them appears to the spectator in its normal position, the other is reversed, forehead downwards[82]. Chaldaeo-Babylonian art had adopted the same combination to symbolise the opposition of the twins of the zodiac. Their ordinary representation on the cylinders of hard stone, which were used as seals, consisted of two small figures of men placed one above the other, with their feet in opposite directions[83].

In referring to the Chaldean form of the twin brothers, a fragment of Babylonian legend may be quoted here as a sort of summary of the earliest creations. So ancient is this recovered relic that the entire literature of the cuneiform inscriptions, contains nothing with which it has been correlated. It states that in the beginning the great gods created two kinds of men in the likeness of birds. ‘Warriors with the bodies of Birds of the Desert (and) Men whose faces were Ravens. Tiamat gave them suck: their life was created by Bilat-Ili (the Mistress of the Gods). In the midst of the earth they grew up and became strong; and … Seven Kings brethren were made to come as begetters.’[84] The oldest of the seven brothers is named Memangab, the Thunderbolt. This brief rendering of a broken tablet contains the perfect legend of the typhonian creation, with Tiamat, the Deep, in place of the Abyss, Tepht. Tiamat and Bilat represent the two sisters into which the genetrix divided; one gives suck (water-source), the other soul (breath of life). The two kinds of bird-men correspond to the dual Sut-Horus, with the two birds of light and darkness for heads; the twins that issue from the egg. Following the twin-birth the total progeny of Typhon and of Tiamat is seven in number, i.e., seven altogether. ‘The Sons of the Abyss (there are) Seven of them.’[85] These were represented under one figure as the seven-headed thunderbolt of Tiamat: ‘the Thunderbolt of seven heads like the huge serpent or dragon of seven heads.’[86] Here the first of the seven is the thunderbolt by name. This is in agreement[p.485] with the adze of Anup or thunderstone of Sut. So thunder was reckoned the primary element by the ancient Chinese; and the stone from heaven is the firstborn of the Great Mother in certain American myths.

The ancient Slovakians had the twins as the Biel-Bog, a white god, and Czerny-Bog, the black god. Czerny-Bog was also the dark deity of the Anglo-Saxons called Zernebok[87].*

* ‘Mista, Skogula, and Zernebok, gods of the Ancient Saxons.’[88]

Bog is the common Slavonic word for God. This is a worldwide root-name for a spirit, found in the bwg, Welsh,ghost, or object of terror; bug, Puck, or bogey, English; puca, Irish, goblin; puke, Swedish, devil, bogy and boye, the spirit, ghost, or terror by night, with the blacks of Australia; pogooch (Pine Plain), a spirit; buk-ha (Vayu), distilled spirits; but the spirit, or God, may be either light or dark. Bogi, in Fijian, is night. Bogi, black, in the inner African languages. The Vedic Bhaga is the ‘white one.’ ‘Let us invoke the Victor in the morning (that is the light which has defeated the darkness of night), the strong Bhaga, the son of Aditi (Bhaga was one of the Adityas or elementaries) who disposes all things.’[89] Bagha is likewise known as the divider, and the type-name may be traced to the root with that meaning in many languages. Bagha, in the Avesta, denotes portion;pech, Breton, a division or piece; pagu, Tamil, to divide; phakh, Vayu, to halve; pekh (Eg.), to divide in two;peka, Maori, the branch, fork, or division in two. So the Bog divides into the white and black god, and is identical with the dual Sut-Horus.

The Asvins are a Hindu form of the twin brothers, the twin-born children of Aditi. They date from the earliest phase of the twinship, when the two brothers were simply the representatives of day and dark, or moisture and light, as the dew of evening and the light of dawn. These also were the first who struggled and contended for birth in the womb of the genetrix. Their separate characters have been almost lost in the legends of their twinship, and they have to be divided in order to be distinguished. The Asvins are born here and there (ihehajâte) on the two horizons of light and shade; the one is bright, the other black, like the Sut-Horus. According to the commentator, Yâska, the place of the Asvins is first among the deities of the sky. They are said to ‘appear when one black cow sits among the bright cows.’ They ‘walk along during the night like two black goats.’[90] One of them is born in the sky and one in the air. They are associated with two of the elements as moisture and light. So the Twins Shu and Tefnut represent light and moisture. The Asvins are also identified with the Gemini of the zodiac who are Shu and Tefnut in Egypt. Here, how [p.486] ever, two sets of the Twins have been confounded. The Asvins are two males, whereas the Gemini proper are male and female. Heaven and earth are said to be the Asvins who are born here and there, which identifies them with the two divisions in space. It is because they represent the day and dark that their place of meeting and twinning is the twilight, when light and dark are contending in their interfusion. This is called the time of the Asvins, and the nature of the one is to share in the darkness which penetrates into the light of the other to share in the light which vanquishes the darkness. Their vagueness has continued from the elementary stage. One form of the twins in Egypt was the double Anubis, a dual figure of the watchdog, in the stellar phase of the mythos. English sailors still keep a watch between four and eight in the evening called the dogwatch. This is divided at six o’clock (the time of twilight at the equinox!) into two dogwatches of two hours each. From four to six the watch is that of the dog of the light, and from six to eight is the watch of the dog of darkness. These dogwatches are commonly derived from an idea of a dog sleeping with one eye kept open to watch. But they are really a survival of the double Anubis and the Sut-Horus. These have two different types. In one the heads are two birds; one light and one black. In the other the heads are those of the dog or jackal. So the dog of Yama is double-headed, one head keeping watch while the other is sleeping; and this likewise has an alternative type in a double-headed bird. Thus our double-headed dog dividing the twilight watch is a survival of the double Anubis, the black and golden who was Sothis in one character and Mercury in his planetary phase, the watch-dog of twilight both at evening and dawn.

The earliest type of Sirius, the Dog-star, however, was not the dog of Europe, not the jackal of Egypt, not the fox-dog (fenekh) of Abyssinia, but the giraffe of inner Africa. This is the ser by name and it was a figure of Sut-Typhon. From ser we derive the name of Sirius as we do that of Sothis from Sut. The giraffe is an animal that can see two ways at once without turning its head or its eyes. This then was the perfect primary type of the fixed and steadfast watcher begotten by that nearness to external nature which belonged to primitive man. The ser, giraffe, is the proper African type for Sothis. The name is a word of words for measuring, calculating, regulating, arranging, disposing, organizing, renewing, also relating to science and wisdom. The ser was followed by the fox-dog and the dog. The giraffe was continued in the gryphon type of Sut-Typhon[91], which is often confounded with the ass. Also the name of the giraffe retains an older or equivalent form of ser (Eg.) and in Khoi-Khoi the jackal is the garib, and the dog is arib.

In some myths the twins and their types show that one is the [p.487] keeper of the fire and the other of the water. Sut the dark one brings the inundation and Horus the solar fire. Both were united in Sut-Canopus. In the Australian myth War, the male crow and brother of War-pil, was the first to bring fire from space (tyrille) and give it to the aborigines, before which they were without it. This can be read by the hawk of fire. Another account of the mode in which the aborigines of Australia first obtained fire is thus given by Mr. J.Browne[92]. A long time ago a little bandicoot was the sole owner of a firebrand that he cherished with the greatest jealousy, carrying it about with him wherever he went, and never allowing it out of his own care, even refusing to share it with the other animals, his neighbours; so they held a council, when it was decided to get the fire either by force or strategy. The hawk and pigeon were deputed to carry out this resolution, and after trying to induce the fire-owner to share its blessings, the pigeon, seizing an unguarded moment, as he thought, made a dash at the prize. The bandicoot, seeing affairs had come to a crisis, threw the fire in desperation towards the water, to quench it for ever. But fortunately for the black man, the hawk was hovering near, and seeing the fire falling into the water made a dart towards it, and with a stroke of his wing knocked the brand far over the stream into the long dry grass of the opposite bank, which immediately ignited and the flames spread over the country. The black man then felt the fire and said it was good. Both the hawk and dove are birds of light or fire. The bandicoot is the bird of darkness, a type of the water that put out the solar fire[93].

The first divinity of fire and light was in a sense pre-solar. He began as an elementary or an element, before the sun was a timekeeper and before it was known to be the same sun that set and rose again. For illustration, Ptah is an Egyptian solar-god, and yet not the sun itself, in the later sense. But as a form of the Egyptian Vulcan or Hephaistus he is a god of fire, because the elemental was first and the fire or light was primary, whether the fire of the sun, or the lightning-flash, or the conflagration, as one of the elementaries. So was it in India.

Wilford learned from the Hindus that Agni, or fire, was an elementary divinity before the sun was created, or before the element was concentrated in the solar god[94], as it was in Egypt, and in Africa beyond—whereogon is fire simply in Akurakura; ikan or ag-an in Anan; akan in Bode; and the Yoruban god of blacksmiths is named Ogun, with whom we may compare Ogon, the Slavonic god of fire.

It is apparent in the Mangaian and other forms of the mythos that the sun making the passage out of sight was apprehended as the element of fire in the underworld. The observers saw that in the [p.488] dark void, the lair of light, between sunset and sunrise, the great fire was rekindled. The god Maui descends there to wrest his hidden wisdom from Mauike, the god of fire, and there he learns how to reproduce the element at will, because that was the place where the fire was reproduced. The god of light and heat was primally the daemon of lightning and the solar fire. Thus the lame god is the fire god. Hephaistus in Greece, and the crooked-legged antipodal Ptah is a kind of pre-solar sun-god in the elemental aspect; fire or heat having been the first solar type. This fire was almost put out by night when the dark one overcame the bright one. But it was reproduced each day from the fireplace in the nether world by the lame and limping god who warred against the darkness and all its creeping things, as Khepra (Ptah) the transformer and recreator. Kep(Eg.) means to kindle, to heat, to light, to cause a ferment, and this supplied a Kamite root for the name of Hephaistus. Thus the god of fire was an early opponent of the darkness and only in this elementary stage do we reach the rootage of the solar Horus. When Sut as Sut-Anubis is said in the later texts to ‘swallow his father Osiris,’ the sun, there is a reversion to the type derived from the ancient darkness. A perfect identification of the fire with the sun may be found in the Huron myth of the twin-born brothers, the light and the dark. Iouskeha, the light one was recognised as the sun who was their benefactor, and but for him they said their kettles would not boil, as it was he who learned from the tortoise the art of creating fire. The tortoise was a type of the ancient Typhon, one of whose names is Kar-tek, the spark-holder, the mother of the elementaries, whose sparks were the starry fires. This beginning with the god of fire or solar heat necessitated such a distinction, for instance, as the later ‘Sun in his disk,’ the Aten-sun of the so-called disk worship and the sun itself as Ra which followed the Har-Sun and representative of fire, in the elementary phase.

In his treatment of the Hottentot myths Dr. Hahn does not distinguish their phenomenal phases. All is sacrificed to the idea of a Supreme Being who is one and the same under various names and types. But this non-evolutionary treatment never can reach the origins. In the Namaqua dialect, for example, eibi is first. Whence eibib is he who is the first. And it is said, ‘At first there were two (gods) Heitsi-eibib and Gama-gorib.’[95] These are the two opposite powers who were elementary. Next Heitsi-eibib can be traced in the lunar phase, and lastly Tsuni-Goam, the Wounded-knee, is the hero of light in the solar phase of the mythos, the nocturnal sun who brings back the red dawn, and is the lord of all things red like Tangaroa.

In the Hottentot, as in the Fijian mythology, the moon is also a type of the Twin Truths. But the moon in its dual lunation had two [p.489] different messages for men, just as the natural phenomena are still susceptible of a double interpretation to the theist and the atheist. The moon sent the hare to tell mankind that as the lunar god died and rose again so should they also be renewed and rise again. But the hare played false and perverted the message. She told mankind that like as the moon died and did not rise again, so men should perish and should not rise again. This was the dark aspect of the moon and that was the true message at the time when it could not be known that the same moon re-arose. When this fact became known and the moon was recognised as the true prophet of immortality, then the hare was discarded. The moon is now the Khoi-Khoi deity who promises men immortality.

In a Caroline-island myth it is said that in the beginning mankind only quitted life on the last day of the dying moon to be revivified when the new moon reappeared. But there was a dark and evil spirit that inflicted a death from which there was no revival. The dark spirit and the fatal message were first in fact, and the assurance of revival like the moon depended on its being identified as the same moon that rose again.

Jack and Jill are a lunar form of the twins as we may see in the Norse version of the Younger Edda[96]where they are Hjuki and Bil the twin children of the moon. Hjuki denotes the one who nourishes and cherishes, the increasing new moon corresponding to tekh (Eg.); Bil is an interstice, an interval corresponding to the latter half of the lunation; the fall and vanishing of the moon. In the Tuscarora myth, recorded by David Cusic, the twin brethren are the two children of Aataensic who is identified as the moon and the genetrix of the gods. This was the ancient mother who alighted from heaven on the back of a tortoise and bore her twin sons. The Hurons claimed her as their grandmother. The names of her twins in the Oneida dialect signify respectively the light one and the dark one. According to Cusic they were Enigorio, the Good Mind, and Enigonhahetgea, the Bad Mind, or more accurately the Beautiful spirit and the Ugly one; the god and devil of objective phenomena. The Good Mind wished to create light but the dark one desired the world to remain in its natural darkness. The Bad one made a couple of clay images in the shape of man but whilst he was in the act of creating them they turned into apes. The Good Mind formed two images of the dust of the earth, breathed into their nostrils, gave them living souls, and named them Ea-gwe-howe or ‘Real people.’[97] This expression alone proves the true myth. The doctrine was not derived from the missionaries, who assuredly knew nothing of the ape being the type of the dark half of the lunar twins, as it became in Egypt.

At length there was a final struggle between the two brothers to determine which should be master once for all. The light one played false, as did Jacob with Esau, and persuaded the dark one to fight [p.490] him with flags, or, in another version, the fragile wild-rose, as this would be fatal to himself. He then chose a weapon of deer’s horn. The dark one was discomfited and went sorely wounded, dropping his blood at every step and wherever the life-drops fell they turned into flint stones. When dying the dark one claimed that he would have equal power over souls in the life hereafter, and on being thrust down into the earth, or abyss, he became the evil spirit, the Satan of later theology[98].

The two birds of Sut and Horus are the black vulture (Neh) and the gold hawk. The lunar ibis is black and white and its pied nature typifies the dual lunation. Birds and brothers both appear in the mythos of the Thlinkeet as the twin deities of light and dark. The two brothers are Yethl and Khanukh. The raven is the bird of Yethl, but it is described as a black raven that once was white, the same alternation of black and white as in the ibis. The white bird is represented as getting black in passing up through the flue of Khanukh’s fireplace. This is a form of the Phoenix which transforms from black to white (or into the gold hawk), and from white to black in its passage to and from the underworld, Khanukh’s flue.

Another legend tells how Yethl shot the large bird which had a long glittering bill; its name was the ‘Crane that can soar to heaven.’ This he skinned, and when he wished to fly he clothed himself in the crane’s feathers. The crane is a heron, the hieroglyphic equivalent of the lunar ibis.

The ibis-headed Taht was lord of the eighth region, and Yethl was born in the eighth month, and his aunt was watched over by eight red birds called kun[99]. Yethl supplied light to mankind. In the Thlinkeet tongue yethlsignifies a raven, and khanukh a wolf. The wolf, or jackal, is a type of darkness. Khanukh is described as raising a magical darkness, in which Yethl, the light-bringer, howled helplessly. In a discussion between them as to which is the elder, Khanukh asserts that he has been in the world ever since the time that the ‘liver came out from the belly.’*

* ‘Seit der Zeit, entgenete Khanukh, als von unten die Leber herauskam.’[100]

Then said Yethl, ‘Thou art older than I.’ Darkness was first, and the blood-source preceded that of the breath. The liver was looked upon as solid blood, and blood as fluid liver, or life; which shows the allusion to the first of the Two Truths in the biological phase. Hence Khanukh is the keeper of the waters, and has to be outwitted by Yethl before he can take possession of them in turn and give new life to the world[101].

It is possible that the Hindu Krishna and Bala-Rama may be as old as the elemental phase of light and shade. ‘Do you not know,’ asks Krishna of Bala-Rama, ‘that you and I are alike the origin of the [p.491] world?’[102]As the twins of creation, in a later phase, Krishna is said to be an incarnation of Vishnu, and Bala-Rama of the serpent Sesha. But the twins are earlier than Vishnu, and if not elementary like the Asvins, they were lunar before passing into the solar mythos. One is black, or rather, slate-blue, the other white. Krishna is reputed to have been produced from a black hair of Vishnu, and Bala-Rama from a white hair. The name of Krishna is identical with that of the dark half of the lunar month, from full to new moon. Also ens (or krish) signifies to wane, as the moon, to attenuate and become small. Bala means virile seminal force; rama, the phallic giver of pleasure. Bala-Rama impersonates the pubescent phase, he is the one who waxes in power like the horned moon, whereas Krishna is the one that wanes and becomes the little one, the child. Yet it is he who conquers the dragon of darkness in the underworld, just as the lunar child Khunsu is the slayer of the giants in the Kamite mythos. Bala-Rama is named San-Karshana, the withdrawing one, or the one who is withdrawn, although the withdrawal was different from that of another twin with which it has to be compared. In the present instance Bala-Rama gives precedence to the dark one, Krishna, but the double-motherhood of the two, heavens is employed, and the two women are both made use of to give birth to the twins; Bala-Rama being withdrawn from the womb of Devaki, to be born from that of Rohini.

There is a Babylonian legend of the twin brothers who are opposed to each other, which was preserved byCtesias, and Nicolas of Damascus[103]. In this Adar-Parsondas, a solar god, comes every night into the power of his dark rival Shin-Nannaros, who is called his brother. Shin deprives Adar of his virile power. The two succeed each other alternately in their dominion over nature. The elder brother is said to kill the younger, whom he sends to the dwellings of death. Shin, the moon-god, is called the Royal Twin; sini(Assyrian), and shen (Eg.), denoting plural, or twin. The twins in relation to the moon first personified the double gibbousness, the waxing and waning of the orb. Here, however, the twins would seem to be luni-solar. Adar is the Babylonian Herakles. But Herakles is also luni-solar in the Egyptian Khunsu, the youthful solar-god who carries the sun and moon on his head, and in whom the twins were unified. Khunsu is called the son of Amen-Ra and Maut, i.e., phenomenally the sun and moon. Both are twinned in him as their child because he typifies the solar light when it was known to be reborn in the moon. The legend thus interpreted supplies a luni-solar link in the chain of continuity, which extends from the elemental to the final solar phase.

The Hindu writers say the black one has never failed to give way to the white one in the eternal conflict of day and dark. But there are two sides to the fact, and in early forms of the myth we see it [p.492] is the light one who, like Tangaroa and Esau the red, has to give way and go forth on his own account to seek an abiding-place.

This going forth of the parting twins to found a city or find the second place, is a mode of describing the division of the whole into the two halves, and the two horizons of day and night, light and dark.

According to Bishop Callaway, the Zulus thought the white man made the world[104]. But their white man did not originate with the European. It was the light spirit opposed to the dark. In this sense the first world was made, or the world was first made, when the two horizons were distinguished the one from the other as those of light and shade, by the gold hawk and black vulture; the eagle-hawk and crow, or the dove and the raven. In a Tongan form of the myth the elder and younger brothers divide the world between them, each dwelling apart; they were the two progenitors of the black people and light people, or the Noes and Yeas. The founding of a city or building of a temple by a fratricide is one of the common traditions of mankind. Cain kills his brother Abel and then builds the city of Enoch. Romulus slays Remus and the city of Rome is founded in his brother’s blood. Olus, or Tolus, was murdered by his brother’s slaves and his head was placed beneath the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Agamedes, co-builder with Trophonius of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, is killed by his brother, who carries away his head. The building of a city is of course a late illustration. The establishing of the two solstices and distinguishing the heavens north and south, and marking these by two mountains, trees, stars or constellations would be earlier; these being followed by the signs of the four quarters, and the building of the Tetrapolis above. Belin and Brennus, the twin brothers of the British legends are, like Heber and Heremon in the Irish, identifiable as a form of the twins of the universal mythos, the light one and the dark one, the prince of peace and the turbulent warrior, combined in the Sut-Horus; and when Belin had conquered Brennus, we are told that he mapped out the island and made four roads through the length and breadth of the kingdom[105]. But before cities were built or roads were made a stake was stuck in the ground. We still speak of having a stake in the soil. The stake and tree are equivalents. When the suicide was buried at the parting of the ways, or the crossroads, a stake was thrust through the body as a mode of fixing; this being related to the fourfold foundation of the cross. One of the earliest celestial types is the tree. This becomes twain in the two trees of the north and south; as well as in the rod or staff of Kepheus (Shu-Kafi) whose figure may be found in the decans of the Waterman.*

* Plate in present volumei. See Oedipus Judaicus, Drummond, pl. 16i, for Kepheus with his staff north and south, a twin-type of the tree which was divided to mark the two solstices.

On the Mithraic monu- [p.493] mentsi the two trees mark the east and west[106]. Planting the tree would be a primitive mode of marking the boundary, and in the traditions of Central America there is a story of two brothers, who before starting on a journey to Xibalba, the land of disappearing, plant a cane in the middle of their grandmother’s house, on purpose for her to know whether they are living or dead, according to the flourishing or withering condition of the cane. The cane is a sign of one of the four cardinal points in the Mexican symbolism. Grimm traces this type in the story of the ‘Two Gold Children’ who leave their father two golden lilies, saying: ‘from these you will see how we fare. If they are fresh we are well; if they fade we are ill; if they fall we are dead.’[106a] The story is widespread like the myth of the twins themselves. Egypt will tell us who were the two gold children. They were the twins in a dual stellar phase of the mythos. Sut-Nubti (or Sothis-Canopus) was the golden Sut of a dual nature, represented double-headed, or as the golden twin; and the type would be the same if called the double Anubis (the goldendog, canis aureus), or if it were taken for the sun and Sirius, or the sun and Saturn in a later phase. The reader may see the golden Sut (jackal or dog) in the tree which is planted in the decans of the grand or great mother, Isis, who personates the sign of Virgoi.

The ‘Two Brothers’ in Grimms’ Household Stories are another form of the twins[107]. First we have them as the rich and poor brothers, the dark one being the rich one, as the dark Rongo is in the Mangaian myth. With this opening of the tale we may compare an Eastern tradition of the first two brothers of humankind current among the Ishudes, which relates that the elder brother acquired great wealth from his gold mines, but that the younger being envious, drove him away and forced him to take refuge in the East[108]. The gold mines would be in the west where the light went down.

In the German tale the gold mines are represented by the golden bird which lays the golden egg; the roc, orrekh, i.e., the phoenix in Egypt. Then follows the tale of the twins. These go out into the world, but can find no place where they may dwell together. So they said to one another: ‘It cannot be otherwise, we must separate.’ The huntsman at parting gave them a bare knife, saying: ‘If you separate, stick this knife in a tree by the roadside, and then if one returns to the same point, he can tell how his absent brother fares; for the side upon which there is a mark will rust if he dies, but as long as he lives it will keep bright as ever.’ The knife is a type of the division. The younger of the twins becomes the slayer of the dragon which has seven heads, and lies coiled round the top of a mountain. He cuts off the monster’s seven heads and rescues the princess who is waiting ready to be devoured. Ultimately he marries her and has the usual [p.494] ‘half the kingdom besides’, which dates from the heaven of only two divisions.

The twin brothers are found in the folktales of many lands. In the Norse they reappear as True and Untrue, where they are still identified with time by means of the year. Once on a time there were two brothers; one was called True, and the other Untrue. True was upright and good to all, but Untrue was bad, false, and full of lies. Their mother was a widow. They went forth and at evening they quarrelled, when Untrue, the dark one, plucked out his brother’s eyes. The blind one climbs up a tree for the night and hears the confabulation of the bear, the wolf, the fox, and the hare, who come to keep Midsummer’s Eve beneath the tree. From these he learns that he is in the tree of life and healing power, and from its leaves he recovers his sight.

The brother True, with his eyes put out by Untrue, is one with Horus sitting solitary in his blindness and darkness. In one account Sut wounded Horus in the eye; in another he plucked it out and swallowed it. ‘I am Horus,’ says the blinded brother; ‘I come to search for my eyes.’ In the Ritual the eye is restored at the dawn of day[109]. There is also an eye that is the sign of a year. The meeting of the brothers True and Untrue is periodic; the time being at the summer solstice, where the Kamite year began; and Sut, the dark one dominated when the sun began to descend from its highest altitude. The bear, wolf, and fox, together with the hare (which is a North American Indian type) are suggestive of the four quarters. The tree of the solstice is an Egyptian sign, and the ancient genetrix, the mother of the mythical twins who preceded the fatherhood, survives as the widow. True of course is finally the victor. Through what he learned from the talking animals he becomes a saviour. He discovers a well of water for the king and restores his eyesight. He recovers the lost speech and hearing of the young princess, and gets her for his wire with half the kingdom besides. This is a clear and easily-traced continuation of a myth in the reduced form of the folktale, but twenty others are just as truly so, even where the likeness is far less apparent. The same types of mythology are minified in the folk- or fairy-tale, and magnified in theology. The Norse True is one at root with the Egyptian True Word (Har-Makheru), and with him who was True in the Book of Revelation[110]. Dr.Dasent asks how is it that the wandering Bechuanas have got the story of the two brothers, the groundwork of which is the same as the ‘Machandelboom’ and the ‘Milk-white Doo,’ and where the incidents and even the words are almost the same? How is it that in some of its traits the Bechuana story embodies those of that earliest of all popular tales recently published from an Egyptian papyrus? My reply is, [p.495] because the origin was inner African and Egypt is the connecting-link with the outside world[111].

The twins appear in an American myth, and in a form that looks comparatively late in Egyptian mythology. In the Osirian solar phase the child Horus duplicates to become Har-Tema and avenge the death of his father. In the American version the child commands his grandmother to cleave him in twain, in order that he may become the double avenger of his father’s death. Thus he is transformed into the duplicated one and is then called by the name of the ‘One-Two.’ The father of Har-Tema the twin or total Horus, was slain by Typhon, one of whose names is Stone-head, another being Stone-arm. The father of One-Two is killed by Stone-Shirt, and ‘One-Two’ in his duplicated character is the avenger. The shrewmouse was sacred to Horus in Skhem, the place of transformation and annihilation; and in the American myth One-Two transforms into the mouse or mice to make war upon Stone-Skirt[112].

A single type will serve to express different developments and applications of the one primary idea. These vary, according to phenomena, but are determined and limited by the prototypal Two Truths.

At first these Two Truths are simply day and dark, or dawn and dusk. Next the twins enter the sphere of time as two stars or constellations on the two horizons, or are the two gods of north and south. Then the double lunation is personified by the two children of the genetrix, and, lastly, the twins are the two Horuses of the solar myth. A glimpse of the mode in which the type was continued with a change of personages may be seen in Indra and Agni, the solar gods who are twinned as the Asvinia; Indra and Agni being the two later divinities of moisture and light, or the solar fire.

The twin brothers are Egyptian in every phase, whether elementary, stellar, lunar, or solar, beginning with the Sut-Horus (elementary), the twin lion-gods of light and darkness which the lunar genetrix boasts that she bears in her womb; the double Anubis (stellar), Sut-Nubti (stellar or soli-stellar), Hermanubis or Taht-Aan (lunar); and they were continued as the two Horuses in the Osirian mythos. Here there is alternation but no contention. The Twins are two representatives of the annual Sun that descends and the Sun that ascends. The first Horus is the child, the impubescent, maimed, or crippled deity, the phantom that fades and disappears or transforms into the virile Horus of the resurrection. Lastly, there is a moral and religious stage in which the Sut and Horus of the beginning typify good and evil, deity and devil, as the final form of the male twins.

The twin brothers in the Avesta can be traced from their natural genesis in physical phenomena as the ever-alternating light and [p.496] dark to their latest phase, as divinity and devil in Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyus. They are called the ‘Twins’ by name in Yasna 30. This description, says Bleeck, agrees with that contained in the Armenian writers, Eznik for example, where they are both the ‘Sons of Time,’ that is the twins of light and dark, considered not merely as a dual manifestation in space, but also as manifestors of time[113]. We learn that both these heavenly beings, the twins, of themselves manifested the good and the evil, and the wise do rightly distinguish between them; not so the foolish or imprudent. These two heavenly beings came together in the beginning to that which was the first creation. Whatsoever is living is through the purpose of Ahura-Mazda, who is the life, and whatsoever is lifeless or of death is through the purpose of Anra-Mainyus the destroyer. They are designated the Two Creators, the Two Masters, who are sometimes spoken of as the Two Spirits of Ahura Mazda[114]. And Haug argues that ‘in consequence of an entire separation of the two parts of Ahura-Mazda, and the substitution of two independent rulers governing the universe, the unity of the Supreme Being was lost, and monotheism was superseded by dualism.’[115] He attributes the Persian dualism to a personal Zoroaster, and observes that ‘this great thinker of antiquity having arrived at the grand idea of the unity and indivisibility of the Supreme Being, undertook to solve the great problem, how are the various kinds of evil in the world compatible with the goodness, holiness, and justice of God? He solved this difficult question philosophically by the supposition of two primeval causes, which, though different, were united. The one who produced the reality is called the Good Mind; the other, in whom originated non-reality, bears the name of the Evil Mind. All good, true, and perfect things, which fall under the category of reality are produced by the Good Mind; whilst all that is delusive and belongs to the domain of non-reality, is traceable to the Evil Mind. These are the two moving causes of the universe, united from the beginning, and therefore called the twins (Yema; Sanskrit, Yamau).’[116] In Manichaeism the development of doctrine culminated, and the eternal antagonists were separately enthroned in ceaseless conflict in the domain of what are termed spirit and matter; the original division of day and night was deepened and darkened into a great gulf riven right through the constitution of all things and the moral nature of man. But the myths do not disclose any deeper meaning by our reading into them the ideas of later times; we are only imposing on them a sense quite foreign to them in order that they may impose upon us and others in return. Each phase of the mythos out of Egypt can be identified and interpreted by the Kamite typology from the beginning to the end; and to the beginnings we must go back to learn.

The mythical twins also became the dual messiah of theology. [p.497] So profoundly ignorant of the doctrinal origins have theologians been that even writers like Gfrörer have maintained the improbability of the Jews being in possession of the dogma of a dual messiah in pre-Christian times[117]; and it has actually been contended that after the Christian era the outwitted Jews had to invent a secondary messiah as the lowly suffering one, the son of Joseph, who was a failure, because their messiah, ben-David, had not come in his expected glory. Whereas, so ancient is the twin-type of the messiah son, that the suffering one of the two who was at last represented as the crucified may be found in the New Zealand legend of Rupe, where instead of being crucified he falls off the beam which was laid at the crossing, when he formed the great house of the sun. This suffering messiah is as old in Egypt as the name of the month Mesore, in which the mesi (Eg.), or infant Horus was reborn. He, too, may be seen at the crossing or on the scales of the zodiac, whence Rupe fell, and the sun began to descend. The double Horus of Egypt survived in the cult of the Gnostics. Irenaeussays of Valentinus: ‘He also supposed two beings of the name of Horus.’[118] They show, he says, that this Horus of theirs has two faculties—the one, of supporting, the other, of separating. Insomuch as he supports and sustains he is Stauros (a cross), while insomuch as he divides he is Horus. They also ‘represent the Saviour as having indicated this twofold faculty, first, the sustaining power, when he said “Whoever doth not bear his Cross (Stauros) and follow after me cannot be my disciple;” and the separating power when he said, “I came not to send Peace, but a Sword.”‘[119] It is a startling discovery for all who ever dip, not to say dive, into the iconography of the catacombs, to find these palpable remains of the dead religion of the pagan past taking life as the divinity of the new. The twins are there extant, and were often reproduced by the artists of Rome, in whose representations two distinct characters of the Christ are frequently found, and these are generally portrayed in juxtaposition. One of the Christs is the eternal youth, the ‘Universal Lad’ of the Osirian myth; the blooming boy Bacchus of the Greek mythos; the youthful Mithra of the Persians; the fair Apollo of Greece in his beardless beauty. The favourite figure, says Didron, is that of a beautiful and adorable youth of about fifteen or eighteen years of age, beardless, with a sweet expression of countenance, and long abundant hair flowing in curls over his shoulders; his brow is sometimes encircled by a diadem, or bandeau, like a young priest of the pagan gods; a graceful youth, just as Apollo was depicted by the pagans[120]. The other Christ is little, old, and ill-favoured, like the bad-smelling one of the Persian twins[121]. The two are frequently found together.

[p.498]

Many examples are given by Bosio and others of the twin Jesus; Christ the younger and Christ the elder. The American writer Lundy is pitiably perplexed at what he comes across in the Christology of the Roman tombs. The only possible explanation, he says, of the double Jesus, the young-elder, and the juxtaposition of the youthful Christ and the old one is that this contradiction is intended to depict the two natures in Christ, the divine and the human; the little, old, ugly, hairy man being the human likeness, and the youthful, majestic beardless figure the type of the divine[122]. The treatment is simply that of the Sut-Horus, and of Horus the elder and Horus the younger. The elder Horus, Har-Ur, was the old first one, the mortal, the one who wears the human image, he who was born to descend and suffer and die because he represented the declining sun in the lower signs. Horus the younger was the perennial youth, called the Lord, the Majesty, the God of the Beautiful Face. He was the sun-god, as the young immortal, the type of the eternal sonship. It is the same dual type that is traceable all mythology through. So Prajapati was one-half mortal, one-half immortal, and with his mortal half he feared death.

The statues of Dionysus show the same duality as the elder or bearded and the younger or beardless god. The duality is that of Shu, who is expressly designated the ‘Young-elder’ in consequence. It was the duality of Sut-Horus and of the twins of the Avesta; the primordial type being that of light and darkness; the latest psychotheistic.

The typical twins thus identified as simply a continuation of the type of the Double-Horus, the dual Mithras, the biune Bacchus, the two-faced Janus or Sut and Horus, prove that this twinship could no more portray a personal Jesus than the supposed Christ in Revelation who is a male figure with female paps, the hermaphrodite divinity of the mythos. These things are unthinkable apart from their origin, and hence they have become the unfathomable mysteries of theology.

Eros and Anteros are a Greek version of the twins. Eros (Cupid) accompanies Venus, the gestator; Anteros represents the negative character; and in some versions he is made the active antagonist of Eros, and shares the character of the dark mind in other myths. Plato, in the Symposium, allows us to see that he had not bottomed the Horus or Eros myth. Phaedrus calls Eros the oldest, Agathon the youngest, of the gods; and both appeal to ancient versions as their authority[123]. Each was Horus was both. Har-Ur was always the oldest; Har-Ahi for ever the youngest; both were blended in Har-Makheru, the True Word. But he had continued the mythical twin-type, and this he has copied as his portrait of the soul, which he [p.499] calls ‘double’ and says it has two faces conformably to its ‘paradigm,’ according to the circle of the same and the circle of the different[124].

Peter, in the Clementine Homilies[125], adverts to the great power, which is also called the kuria (mistress), from whom two angels were sent forth, the one to create the world, the other to give the law, ‘each of which, on account of his work, proclaimed himself to be the sole Creator,’ and thus caused the ancient feud. This is a later form of the twins with the kuria in the place of the Great Mother. The bird of light and shade might likewise be traced all through. Horus, the child, the dark and disappearing one in the solar phase, whose bird-type is the phoenix of transformation in the lower world, is sometimes depicted with the hawk of his brother flying at the back of his head or skullcap[126], the hawk and phoenix being the two birds of light and shade in the latest Egyptian form of the myth.

This also survived in the Christian typology as a form of the dove of the Holy Ghost which blended both birds in one. A Franco-German miniature of the eleventh century shows the dove with six wings represented half in light and half in shade, with the forepart yellow and hinder-part dark. The golub (dove), and gareb(blackbird) are thus blended together, even as the two were twinned in the black and white ibis of the moon[127].

The ‘Two Women’ who brought forth the twin brothers were placed in the zodiac six signs apart. The one, Virgo, was the Virgin Mother of the child-Horus, the negative one of the twins who is born first, but who, in the solar mythos, has to be reborn, and this time begotten by the father, Osiris, or Atum, in the menti or ‘re-foundry’ of the male generator. This second Horus, the ‘only-begotten of the father (or from a father), full of grace and truth’—each phrase may be found applied to Horus, the redeemer—was reborn of the gestator in the sign of Pisces; and the dual imagery of the zodiac, the two women and the two children who were first born as Sut and Horus, and lastly as Horus the elder and Horus the younger, is perfectly paralleled or preserved in the gospel according to St. Luke. Elizabeth the barren, who is described as the barren when she was six months gone with the child John, brings forth six months earlier than Mary[128]. The barren breeder can only be understood according to the typology of the mythos[129]. One horizon was the lower, considered to be that of earth, the other that of heaven. The imagery is reproduced by John, who says of himself and Jesus, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ ‘He that cometh from above is above all; he that is of the earth is of the earth, and of the earth he speaketh.’[130] The precise characters and relationship of the mythical twins is [p.500] preserved. John represents the element of water; Jesus the fire or spirit. John precedes the light, as does the dark one in all the true legends, and says, ‘He that cometh after me is preferred before me; for he was before me,’ as was Jacob, Ormizt, or Tangaroa, who was first by right of birth, although the latest born.

The description of Mercury in the Mysteries given by Apuleius proves how the old Egyptian mythology had found its way to Rome. ‘Here, awful to behold, was the messenger of the gods above, and of those in the realms beneath, standing erect with his face partly black and partly golden, carrying a caduceus in his left hand, and waving in his right a green branch of palm. Close behind him followed a cow in an erect position, sealed on the shoulders of one of the devotees of this divinity; this cow being the prolific likeness of the All-parent Goddess.’[131] Mercury was the Egyptian Sut-Anubis who passed into Taht, or Hermanubis, in the lunar stage. The double visage of black and gold is identical with the black bird and gold hawk of Sut-Horus and Sut-Nubti.

In the Australian version of the mythos we find the remarkable statement that it was out of the enmity and final agreement of the two brothers that the first two classes originated, and thence a law that governed marriages between those two classes[132]. Thus the mirror of mythology reflects the primitive sociology and shows us the very bifurcation of the one into duality, as the primary stage of distinguishing from general promiscuity.

Here it will bear repeating that the first of the two original brotherhoods of the Choctaw gentes was designated the ‘Divided People’ i.e., the people who first divided and became the twin brothers of sociology and legendary lore. This separation of the people into two phratries was followed by the four subdivisions, and eight totems altogether. The Iroquois, the Onondago, Seneca, and Cayuga likewise began with the dual brotherhood, or twin phratries, the members of which were not permitted to intermarry. The two phratries were divided into eight gentes, answering to the eight classes of the Kamilaroi, which were also founded on the dual brotherhood with the dual motherhood of the two sisters at the head of all[133]. Captain Burtonfound the two divisions and eight totems extant on the Gold Coast. The twin-children of the Mother-moon became totemic with the Arab tribes amongst whom the Banu Badr were named the sons of the full moon, and the Banu Hilal the sons of the new moon. The Greek φρατρία or organisation of the phratry is later. It is founded on the solar triad. Each of the four tribes of the Athenians was organised in three phratries, separately composed of thirty gentes, making a total of twelve phratries and three hundred and sixty gentes. This adjustment corresponds to the four [p.501] quarters, the thirty days to the month and the three hundred and sixty degrees of the ecliptic which corroborates and continues the astronomical beginnings.

The mythical twins are represented by the royal twinship. Royalty in Dahome is invested with this dual character. In one aspect the monarch is king in town, in the other he is king in the bush[134]. In like manner the Egyptian Horus has two titles; one being the ‘Youth in Town,’ the other the ‘Lad in the Country.’[135] So the pharaohs of Egypt were crowned kings of the double horizon and the Sut-Ra continued the dual type of Sut-Horus. The twin-brothers who divided in the mythos are reunited in the Egyptian pharaoh. In the ‘Foundation of the Temple of the Sun’ at An (Heliopolis) Usertasen I says the god had exalted him as lord of both parts of Horus and Sut (Peseshti) whilst he was yet an infant in the womb. The god Amen says to Tahtmes III that he has ‘united the hands of the pair of brothers to bless’ the king[136]. Japan until recently had her Tycoon and Mikado, the sacred and secular sovereigns. In ancient Sparta likewise we find the royal twinship or government by twin kings. Also the Samoan chief, whose title is ‘You Two,’ preserves the title of twinship founded on the impubescent child and virile male who were united in one at puberty. This is what is meant by mythology being a mirror to the earliest sociology.

JAPANESE MYTHOLOGY & FOLKLORE

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Notes by Gerald Massey on the twins-motif in mythology, astronomy and royal genealogies

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