guide on the journey, a protector of flocks, a watcher of who and what goes
where, one who can scamper up any slope with the ease of a goat. We do not
know enough about the north European gods of roads to tell whether they
were the same god in origin. If they were, that would put him back from the
Graeco-Aryan to the MIE level.
With the nymphs we cannot trace any one name across linguistic boundar-
ies. But they show such a remarkable uniformity of conception from India to
the Celtic West that the hypothesis of a common Indo-European background
seems unavoidable. Neither independent development nor diffusion has any
plausibility as an explanation. If the Lycian Eliyãna and Wedri are genuine
Luwian survivals, nymphs can be assumed not just for MIE but for PIE,
though confirmation from Bronze Age evidence would be welcome.
Our elves and satyrs, goblins and giants are a more motley crew, and while
we can recognize many recurrent traits, it is difficult to see so coherent an
overall pattern as with the nymphs. It is unlikely that the Indo-Europeans had
no concept of such creatures, but we cannot define with any sharpness of
outline what their conceptions were.
One thing that does seem clear is that these were not gods to whom one
prayed, sang hymns, or made offerings. One might recite spells to ward them
off, as in the Atharvaveda (e.g. 1. 16; 2. 14; 4. 36 f.; 8. 6) we find incantations
to banish demons and injurious spirits (raks
̇
ásah
̇). They are thus in a different
category from the god of ways: there are regular hymns to Pu ̄s
̇
an in the
Rigveda and to Pan and Hermes in Greek, celebrating the deity and seeking
his favour. Nymphs come somewhere in between. There are no hymns to the
Apsarases in the Rigveda, and those addressed to them in the Atharvaveda are
of an apotropaic character. In Greek I think there are none to the Nymphs
until we come to the late, intellectual corpus of Orphic Hymns, composed in
the Imperial period. On the other hand there were genuine popular cults
in Greece and other countries, reflecting the belief that nymphs were resident
in certain places and had a generally beneficent interest in their human
neighbours.
The distinction between ‘regular’ hymns, crafted by professional poets on
traditional metrical and formal principles, and spells and incantations, which
have their own distinctive rhetoric, will be explored in the following pages.
- Nymphs and Gnomes 303