Many explanations of the Jason myth have been given by Scholars who thought they recognised elemental phenomena in the characters.  As usual these explanations differ widely.  Whenever a myth has to be interpreted, it is certain that one set of Scholars will discover the sun and the dawn, where another set will see the thunder-cloud and lightning.  The moon is thrown in at pleasure.  Sir G. W. Cox determines {96} ’that the name Jason (Iason) must be classed with the many others, Iasion, Iamus, Iolaus, Iaso, belonging to the same root.’  Well, what is the root?  Apparently the root is ’the root i, as denoting a crying colour, that is, a loud colour’ (ii. 81).  Seemingly (i. 229) violet is a loud colour, and, wherever you have the root i, you have ’the violet-tinted morning from which the sun is born.’  Medea is ‘the daughter of the sun,’ and most likely, in her ‘beneficent aspect,’ is the dawn.  But (ii. 81, note) ios has another meaning, ’which, as a spear, represents the far-darting ray of the sun’; so that, in one way or another, Jason is connected with the violet-tinted morning or with the sun’s rays.  This is the gist of the theory of Sir George Cox.

Preller {97a} is another Scholar, with another set of etymologies.  Jason is derived, he thinks, from [Greek], to heal, because Jason studied medicine under the Centaur Chiron.  This is the view of the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius (i. 554).  Jason, to Preller’s mind, is a form of Asclepius, ‘a spirit of the spring with its soft suns and fertile rains.’  Medea is the moon.  Medea, on the other hand, is a lightning goddess, in the opinion of Schwartz. {97b} No philological reason is offered.  Meanwhile, in Sir George Cox’s system, the equivalent of Medea, ’in her beneficent aspect,’ is the dawn.

We must suppose, it seems, that either the soft spring rains and the moon, or the dawn and the sun, or the lightning and the thunder-cloud, in one arrangement or another, irresistibly suggested, to early Aryan minds, the picture of a wooer, arriving in a hostile home, winning a maiden’s love, achieving adventures by her aid, fleeing with her from her angry father and delaying his pursuit by various devices.  Why the spring, the moon, the lightning, the dawn—­any of them or all of them—­should have suggested such a tale, let Scholars determine when they have reconciled their own differences.  It is more to our purpose to follow the myth among Samoans, Algonquins, and Finns.  None of these races speak an Aryan language, and none can have been beguiled into telling the same sort of tale by a disease of Aryan speech.