ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS

BY

ANGELO DE GUBERNATIS

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE ISTITUTO DI STUDII

SUPERIORI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO, AT FLORENCE

FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY

OF THE DUTCH INDIES

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON

TRÜBNER & CO., 60 PATERNOSTER ROW

1872

[All rights reserved]

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND COMPANY
EDINBURGH AND LONDON

TO

MICHELE AMARI AND MICHELE COPPINO

This Work

IS DEDICATED

AS A TRIBUTE OF LIVELY GRATITUDE AND

PROFOUND ESTEEM

BY

THE AUTHOR.

[Pg 1]

ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY;

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS.

First Part.

THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.

CHAPTER I.

THE COW AND THE BULL.

Section I.—The Cow and the Bull in the Vedic Hymns.

SUMMARY.

Prelude.—The vault of Heaven as a luminous cow.—The gods and
goddesses, sons and daughters of this cow.—The vault of Heaven
as a spotted cow.—The sons and daughters of this cow, i.e. the
winds, Marutas, and the clouds, Pṛiçnayas.—The wind-bulls subdue
the cloud-cows.—Indras, the rain-sending, thundering, lightening,
radiant sun, who makes the rain fall and the light return, called
the bull of bulls.—The bull Indras drinks the water of strength.—Hunger
and thirst of the heroes of mythology.—The cloud-barrel.—The
horns of the bull and of the cow are sharpened.—The
thunderbolt-horns.—The cloud as a cow, and even as a stable or
hiding-place for cows.—Cavern where the cows are shut up, of
which cavern the bull Indras and the bulls Marutas remove the
stone, and force the entrance, to reconquer the cows, delivering them
from the monster; the male Indras finds himself again with his
wife.—The cloud-fortress, which Indras destroys and Agnis sets
on fire.—The cloud-forest, which the gods destroy.—The cloud-cow;
the cow-bow; the bird-thunderbolts; the birds come out of
the cow.—The monstrous cloud-cow, the wife of the monster.—Some[Pg 2]
phenomena of the cloudy sky are analogous to those of the
gloomy sky of night and of winter.—The moment most fit for an
epic poem is the meeting of such phenomena in a nocturnal tempest.—The
stars, cows put to flight by the sun.—The moon, a milk-yielding
cow.—The ambrosial moon fished up in the fountain, gives
nourishment to Indras.—The moon as a male, or bull, discomfits,
with the bull Indras, the monster.—The two bulls, or the two
stallions, the two horsemen, the twins.—The bull chases the wolf
from the waters.—The cow tied.—The aurora, or ambrosial cow,
formed out of the skin of another cow by the Ṛibhavas.—The
Ṛibhavas, bulls and wise birds.—The three Ṛibhavas reproduce
the triple Indras and the triple Vishṇus; their three relationships;
the three brothers, eldest, middle, youngest; the three brother
workmen; the youngest brother is the most intelligent, although
at first thought stupid; the reason why.—The three brothers
guests of a king.—The third of the Ṛibhavas, the third and
youngest son becomes Tritas the third, in the heroic form of
Indras, who kills the monster; Tritas, the third brother, after
having accomplished the great heroic undertaking, is abandoned
by his envious brothers in the well; the second brother is the
son of the cow.—Indras a cowherd, parent of the sun and the
aurora, the cow of abundance, milk-yielding and luminous.—The
cow Sîtâ.—Relationship of the sun to the aurora.—The aurora as
cow-nurse of the sun, mother of the cows; the aurora cowherd;
the sun hostler and cowherd.—The riddle of the wonderful cowherd;
the sun solves the riddle proposed by the aurora.—The aurora
wins the race, being the first to arrive at the barrier, without
making use of her feet.—The chariot of the aurora.—She who
has no feet, who leaves no footsteps; she who is without footsteps
of the measure of the feet; she who has no slipper (which
is the measure of the foot).—The sun who never puts his foot
down, the sun without feet, the sun lame, who, during the night,
becomes blind; the blind and the lame who help each other, whom
Indra helps, whom the ambrosia of the aurora enables to walk and
to see.—The aurora of evening, witch who blinds the sun; the sun
Indras, in the morning, chases the aurora away; Indras subdues
and destroys the witch aurora.—The brother sun follows, as a
seducer, the aurora his sister, and wishes to burn her.—The sun
follows his daughter the aurora.—The aurora, a beautiful young
girl, deliverer of the sun, rich in treasure, awakener of the sleepers,
saviour of mankind, foreseeing; from small becomes large, from
dark becomes brilliant, from infirm, whole, from blind, seeing and
protectress of sight.—Night and aurora, now mother and daughter,[Pg 3]
now sisters.—The luminous night a good sister; the gloomy
night gives place to the aurora, her elder or better sister, working,
purifying, cleansing.—The aurora shines only when near the sun
her husband, before whom she dances splendidly dressed; the
aurora Urvaçî.—The wife of the sun followed by the monster.—The
husband of the aurora subject to the same persecution.

We are on the vast table-land of Central Asia; gigantic
mountains send forth on every side their thousand rivers;
immense pasture-lands and forests cover it; migratory
tribes of pastoral nations traverse it; the gopatis, the
shepherd or lord of the cows, is the king; the gopatis
who has most herds is the most powerful. The story
begins with a graceful pastoral idyll.

To increase the number of the cows, to render them
fruitful in milk and prolific in calves, to have them
well looked after, is the dream, the ideal of the ancient
Aryan. The bull, the fœcundator, is the type of every
male perfection, and the symbol of regal strength.

Hence, it is only natural that the two most prominent
animal figures in the mythical heaven should be the cow
and the bull.

The cow is the ready, loving, faithful, fruitful Providence
of the shepherd.

The worst enemy of the Aryan, therefore, is he who
carries off the cow; the best, the most illustrious, of his
friends, he who is able to recover it from the hands of
the robber.

The same idea is hence transferred to heaven; in
heaven there is a beneficent, fruitful power, which is
called the cow, and a beneficent fœcundator of this
same power, which is called the bull.

The dewy moon, the dewy aurora, the watery cloud,
the entire vault of heaven, that giver of the quickening
and benignant rain, that benefactress of mankind,—are
each, with special predilection, represented as the beneficent[Pg 4]
cow of abundance. The lord of this multiform
cow of heaven, he who makes it pregnant and fruitful
and milk-yielding, the spring or morning sun, the rain-giving
sun (or moon) is often represented as a bull.

Now, to apprehend all this clearly, we ought to go
back, as nearly as possible, to that epoch in which
such conceptions would arise spontaneously; but as the
imagination so indulged is apt to betray us into mere
fantastical conceits, into an à priori system, we shall begin
by excluding it entirely from these preliminary researches,
as being hazardous and misleading, and content ourselves
with the humbler office of collecting the testimonies of
the poets themselves who assisted in the creation of the
mythology in question.

I do not mean to say anything of the Vedic myths
that is not taken from one or other of the hymns contained
in the greatest of the Vedas, but only to arrange
and connect together the links of the chain as they
certainly existed in the imagination of the ancient
Aryan people, and which the Ṛigvedas, the work of
a hundred poets and of several centuries, presents to
us as a whole, continuous and artistic. I shall indeed
suppose myself in the valley of Kaçmîra, or on the banks
of the Sindhus, under that sky, at the foot of these
mountains, among these rivers; but I shall search in
the sky for that which I find in the hymns, and not in
the hymns for that which I may imagine I see in the
sky. I shall begin my voyage with a trusty chart, and
shall consult it with all the diligence in my power, in
order not to lose any of the advantages that a voyage so
full of surprises has to offer. Hence the notes will all,
or nearly all, consist of quotations from my guide, in
order that the learned reader may be able to verify for
himself every separate assertion. And as to the frequent[Pg 5]
stoppages we shall have to make by the way, let me ask
the reader not to ascribe these to anything arbitrary on
my part, but rather to the necessities of a voyage, made,
as it is, step by step, in a region but little known, and by
the help of a guide, where nearly everything indeed is to
be found, but where, as in a rich inventory, it is easier to
lose one’s way than to find it again.

The immense vault of heaven which over-arches the
earth, as the eternal storehouse of light and rain, as
the power which causes the grass to grow, and therefore
the animals which pasture upon it, assumes in the Vedic
literature the name of Aditis, or the infinite, the inexhaustible,
the fountain of ambrosia (amṛitasya nabhis).
Thus far, however, we have no personification, as yet we
have no myth. The amṛitas is simply the immortal, and
only poetically represents the rain, the dew, the luminous
wave. But the inexhaustible soon comes to mean that
which can be milked without end—and hence also, a celestial
cow, an inoffensive cow, which we must not offend,
which must remain intact.[1] The whole heavens being thus
represented as an infinite cow, it was natural that the
principal and most visible phenomena of the sky should
become, in their turn, children of the cow, or themselves
cows or bulls, and that the fœcundator of the great mother
should also be called a bull. Hence we read that the wind
(Vâyus or Rudrâs) gave birth, from the womb of the celestial
cow, to the winds that howl in the tempest (Marutas
and Rudrâs), called for this reason children of the cow.[2]
But, since this great celestial cow produces the tempestuous,
noisy winds, she represents not only the serene, tranquil
vault of the shining sky, but also the cloudy and tenebrous
[Pg 6]mother of storms. This great cow, this immense
cloud, that occupies all the vault of heaven and unchains
the winds, is a brown, dark, spotted (pṛiçnis) cow; and
so the winds, or Marutas, her sons, are called the children
of the spotted one.[3] The singular has thus become a
plural; the male sons of the cloud, the winds, are 21;
the daughters, the clouds themselves, called the spotted
ones (pṛiçnayas) are also three times seven, or 21: 3 and
7 are sacred numbers in the Aryan faith; and the number
21 is only a multiple of these two great legendary numbers,
by which either the strength of a god or that of a monster
is often symbolised. If pṛiçnis, or the variegated cow,
therefore, is the mother of the Marutas, the winds, and of the
variegated ones (pṛiçnayas), the clouds, we may say that
the clouds are the sisters of the winds. We often have
three or seven sisters, three or seven brothers in the legends.
Now, that 21, in the Ṛigvedas itself, involves a reference
to 3, is evident, if we only observe how one hymn speaks
of the 3 times 7 spotted cows who bring to the god
the divine drink, while another speaks of the spotted
ones (the number not being specified) who give him three
lakes to drink.[4] Evidently here the 3, or 7, or 21 sister
cows that yield to the god of the eastern heavens their
own nutritious milk, and amidst whose milky humours
the winds, now become invulnerable, increase,[5] fulfil the
pious duties of benevolent guardian fates.
[Pg 7]But if the winds are sons of a cow, and the cows are
their nurses, the winds, or Marutas, must, as masculine,
be necessarily represented as bulls. In reality the Wind
(Vâyus), their father, is borne by bulls—that is, by the
winds themselves, who hurry, who grow, are movable as
the rays of the sun, very strong, and indomitable;[6] the
strength of the wind is compared to that of the bull or the
bear;[7] the winds, as lusty as bulls, overcome and subdue
the dark ones.[8] Here, therefore, the clouds are no longer
represented as the cows that nurse, but with the gloomy
aspect of a monster. The Marutas, the winds that howl
in the tempest, are as swift as lightning, and surround
themselves with lightning. Hence they are celebrated
for their luminous vestments; and hence it is said that
the reddish winds are resplendent with gems, as some
bulls with stars.[9] As such—that is, as subduers of the
clouds, and as they who run impetuously through them—these
winds, these bulls, are the best friends, the most
powerful helpers, of the great bellowing bull; of the god
of thunder and rain; of the sun, the dispeller of clouds
and darkness; of the supreme Vedic god, Indras, the
friend of light and ambrosia—of Indras, who brings with
him daylight and fine weather, who sends us the beneficent
dew and the fertilising rain. Like the winds his
companions, the sun Indras—the sun (and the luminous
sky) hidden in the dark, who strives to dissipate the
[Pg 8]shadows, the sun hidden in the cloud that thunders and
lightens, to dissolve it in rain—is represented as a powerful
bull, as the bull of bulls, invincible son of the cow,
that bellows like the Marutas.[10]

But in order to become a bull, in order to grow, to
develop the strength necessary to kill the serpent,
Indras must drink; and he drinks the water of strength,
the somas.[11] “Drink and grow,”[12] one of the poets says
to him, while offering the symbolical libation of the cup
of sacrifice, which is a type of the cup of heaven, now
the heavenly vault, now the cloud, now the sun, and now
the moon. From the sweet food of the celestial cow,
Indras acquires a swiftness which resembles that of the
horse;[13] and he eats and drinks at one time enough to
enable him to attain maturity at once. The gods give
him three hundred oxen to eat, and three lakes of ambrosial
liquor[14] to drink, in order that he may be able to
kill the monster serpent. The hunger and thirst of the
heroes is always proportioned to the miracle they are
called upon to perform; and for this reason the hymns
of the Ṛigvedas and of the Atharvavedas often represent
[Pg 9]the cloud as an immense great-bellied barrel (Kabandhas),
which is carried by the divine bull.[15]

But when and how does the hero-bull display his extraordinary
strength? The terrible bull bellows, and
shows his strength, as he sharpens his horns:[16] the splendid
bull, with sharpened horns, who is able of himself to
overthrow all peoples.[17] But what are the horns of the
bull Indras, the god of thunder? Evidently the thunderbolts;
Indras is, in fact, said to sharpen the thunderbolts
as a bull sharpens his horns;[18] the thunderbolt of Indras
is said to be thousand-pointed;[19] the bull Indras is called
the bull with the thousand horns, who rises from the sea[20]
(or from the cloudy ocean as a thunder-dealing sun, from
the gloomy ocean as a radiant sun—the thunderbolt being
supposed to be rays from the solar disc). Sometimes the
thunderbolt of Indras is itself called a bull,[21] and is
sharpened by its beloved refulgent cows,[22] being used, now
to withdraw the cows from the darkness, now to deliver
[Pg 10]them from the monster of darkness that envelops them,[23]
and now to destroy the monster of clouds and darkness
itself. Besides the name of Indras, this exceedingly
powerful horned bull, who sharpens his horns to plunge
them into the monster, assumes also, as the fire which
sends forth lightning, as that which sends forth rays of
light from the clouds and the darkness, the name of
Agnis; and, as such, has two heads, four horns, three
feet, seven hands, teeth of fire, and wings; he is borne
on the wind, and blows.[24]

Thus far, then, we have heavenly cows which nurture
heavenly bulls, and heavenly bulls and cows which use
their horns for a battle that is fought in heaven.

Let us now suppose ourselves on the field of battle, and
let us visit both the hostile camps. In one we find the sun
(and sometimes the moon), the bull of bulls Indras, with
the winds, Marutas, the radiant and bellowing bulls; in
the other, a multiform monster, in the shape of wolves,
serpents, wild boars, owls, mice, and such like. The bull
Indras has cows with him, who help him; the monster
has also cows, either such as he has carried off from Indras,
and which he imprisons and secretes in gloomy caverns,
towers, or fortresses, or those which he caresses as his
own wives. In the one case, the cows consider the bull
Indras as their friend and liberating hero; in the other,
[Pg 11]those with the monster are themselves monsters and
enemies of Indras, who fights against them. The clouds,
in a word, are regarded at one time as the friends of the
rain-giving sun, who delivers them from the monster
that keeps back the rain, and at another as attacked by
the sun, as they who wickedly envelop him, and endeavour
to destroy him. Let us now go on to search, in
the Ṛigvedas, the proofs of this double battle.

To begin with the first phase of the conflict, where
in the sky does Indras fight the most celebrated of all
his battles?

The clouds generally assume the aspect of mountains;
the words adris and parvatas, in the Vedic language,
expressing the several ideas of stone, mountain, and
cloud.[25] The cloud being compared to a stone, a rock,
or a mountain, it was natural,—1st, To imagine in the
rock or mountain dens or caverns, which, as they imprisoned
cows, might be likened to stables;[26] 2d, To
pass from the idea of a rock to that of citadel, fortress,
fortified city, tower; 3d, To pass from the idea of a
[Pg 12]mountain, which is immovable, to that of a tree which,
though it cannot move from its place, yet rears itself
and expands in the air; and from the idea of the tree
of the forest to the shadowy and awe-inspiring grove.
Hence the bull, or hero, or god Indras, or the sun of
thunder, lightning, and rain, now does battle within a
cavern, now carries a fortified town by assault, and
now draws forth the cow from the forest, or unbinds it
from the tree, destroying the rakshas, or monster, that
enchained it.

The Vedic poetry celebrates, in particular, the exploit
of Indras against the cavern, enclosure, or mountain in
which the monster (called by different names and especially
by those of Valas, Vṛitras, Cushṇas, of enemy, black
one, thief, serpent, wolf, or wild boar) conceals the herds
of the celestial heroes, or slaughters them.

The black bull bellows; the thunderbolt bellows, that
is, the thunder follows the lightning, as the cow follows
its calf;[27] the Marutas bulls ascend the rock—now, by
their own efforts, moving and making the sonorous stone,
the rock mountain, fall;[28] now, with the iron edge of their
rolling chariots violently splitting the mountain;[29] the
valiant hero, beloved by the gods, moves the stone;[30]
Indras hears the cows: by the aid of the wind-bulls he
[Pg 13]finds the cows hidden in the cavern; he himself, furnished
with an arm of stone, opens the grotto of Valas, who keeps
the cows; or, opens the cavern to the cows; he vanquishes,
kills, and pursues the thieves in battle; the bulls
bellow; the cows move forward to meet them; the bull,
Indras, bellows and leaves his seed in the herd; the
thunder-dealing male, Indras, and his spouse are glad
and rejoice.[31]

In this fabled enterprise, three moments must be
noted: 1st, The effort to raise the stone; 2d, The
struggle with the monster who carried off the cows;
3d, The liberation of the prisoners. It is an entire epic
poem.

The second form of the enterprise of Indras in the
cloudy heavens is that which has for its object the
destruction of the celestial fortresses, of the ninety, or
ninety-nine, or hundred cities of Çambaras, of the cities
which were the wives of the demons; and from this
undertaking Indras acquired the surname of puramdaras
(explained as destroyer of cities); although he had
in it a most valuable companion-in-arms, Agnis, that is,
Fire, which naturally suggests to our thoughts the notion
of destruction by fire.[32]

In a hymn to Indras, the gods arrive at last, bring their
axes, and with their edges destroy the woods, and burn
[Pg 14]the monsters who restrain the milk in the breasts of the
cows.[33] The clouded sky here figures in the imagination
as a great forest inhabited by rakshasas, or monsters,
which render it unfruitful—that is, which prevent the
great celestial cow from giving her milk. The cow that
gives the honey, the ambrosial cow of the Vedâs, is thus
replaced by a forest which hides the honey, the ambrosia
beloved by the gods. And although the Vedic hymns
do not dwell much upon this conception of the cloudy-sky,
preferring as they do to represent the darkness of night
as a gloomy forest, the above passage from the Vedâs is
worthy of notice as indicating the existence at least
during the Vedic period of a myth which was afterwards
largely amplified in zoological legend.[34]

In this threefold battle of Indras, we must, moreover,
remark a curious feature. The thunder-dealing Indras
overpowers his enemies with arrows and darts; the same
cloud which thunders, bellows, and therefore is called a
cow, becomes, as throwing darts, a bow: hence we
have the cow-bow, from which Indras hurls the iron
stone, the thunderbolt; and the cord itself of that
bellowing bow is called a cow; from the bow-cow, from
the cord-cow, come forth the winged darts, the thunderbolts,
called birds, that eat men; and when they come
forth, all the world trembles.[35] We shall come upon the
same idea again further on.

Thus far we have considered the cow-cloud as a victim
of the monster (that Indras comes to subdue). But it is
[Pg 15]not uncommon to see the cloud itself or the darkness,
that is, the cow, the fortress, or the forest represented as
a monster. Thus, a Vedic hymn informs us that the
monster Valas had the shape of a cow;[36] another hymn
represents the cloud as the cow that forms the waters,
and that has now one foot, now four, now eight, now
nine, and fills the highest heaven with sounds;[37] still
another hymn sings that the sun hurls his golden disc
in the variegated cow;[38] they who have been carried off,
who are guarded by the monster serpent, the waters, the
cows, are become the wives of the demons;[39] and they
must be malignant, since a poet can use as a curse the
wish that the malign spirits, the demons, may drink the
poison of those cows.[40] We have already seen that the
fortresses are wives of demons, and that the demons possessed
the forests.[41]

It is in the beclouded and thundering heavens that
the warrior hero displays his greatest strength; but it
cannot be denied that the great majority of the myths,
and the most poetical, exemplify or represent the relation
between the nocturnal sky (now dark, tenebrous,
watery, horrid, wild, now lit up by the ambrosial moon-beams,
and now bespangled with stars) and the two
glowing skies—the two resplendent ambrosial twilights of
[Pg 16]morning and evening (of autumn and spring). We have
here the same general phenomenon of light and darkness
engaged in strife; here, again, the sun Indras is hidden,
as though in a cloud, to prepare the light, to recover from
the monster of darkness the waters of youth and light,
the riches, the cows, which he keeps concealed; but this
conquest is only made by the hero after long wandering
amidst many dangers, and is finally accomplished by
battles, in which the principal credit is often due to a
heroine; except in those cases, not frequent but well
worthy of remark, in which the clouds, hurricanes,
tempests of lightning and thunderbolts, coincide with
the end of the night (or of winter), and the sun Indras,
by tearing the clouds, at the same time disperses
the darkness of night and brings dawn (or spring)
back to the sky. In such coincidences, the sun Indras,
besides being the greatest of the gods, reveals himself to
be also the most epic of the heroes; the two skies, the
dark and the clouded, with their relative monsters, and
the two suns, the thundering and the radiant, with
their relative companions, are confounded, and the myth
then assumes all its poetical splendour. And the most
solemn moments of the great national Aryan epic poems,
the Râmâyaṇam and the Mahâbhâratam, the Book
of Kings, as well as those of the Iliad, the Song of
Roland and the Nibelungen, are founded upon this very
coincidence of the two solar actions—the cloudy and
shadowy monster thunderstruck, and the dawn (or spring)
delivered and resuscitated. In truth, the Ṛigvedas itself,
in a passage already quoted,[42] tells us that the clouds—the
three times seven spotted cows—cause their milk
to drop to a god (whom, from another similar passage,[43]
[Pg 17]we know to be Indras, the sun) in the eastern sky (pûrve
vyomani), that is, towards the morning, and sometimes
towards the spring, many of the phenomena of which
correspond to those of the aurora. The Pṛiçnayas, or
spotted ones, are beyond doubt the clouds, as the Marutas,
sons of Pṛiçnis, or the spotted one, are the winds that
howl and lighten in the storm cloud. It is therefore
necessary to carry back the cloudy sky towards the
morning, to understand the Pṛiçnayas feeding the sun
Indras in the eastern heavens and the seven Añgirasas,
the seven sunbeams, the seven wise men, who also sing
hymns in the morning;—it seems to me that the hymn
of these fabled wise men can be nothing else than the crash
of the thunderbolts, which, as we have already seen, are
supposed to be detached from the solar rays. Allusions
to Indras thundering in the morning are so frequent in the
Vedic hymns, that I hope to be excused for this short
digression, from which I must at once return, because my
sole object here is to treat in detail of the mythical animals,
and because the road we have to take will be a long one.

Even the luminous night has its cows; the stars, which
the sun puts to flight with his rays,[44] are cows: the cows
themselves, whose dwellings the dwellings of the sun’s
cows must adjoin, are called the many-horned ones.[45]
These dwellings seem to me worthy of passing remark,
[Pg 18]they are the celestial houses that move, the enchanted
huts and palaces that appear, disappear, and are transformed
so often in the popular stories of the Aryans.

The moon is generally a male, for its most popular
names, Ćandras, Indus, and Somas are masculine; but
as Somas signifies ambrosia, the moon, as giver of
ambrosia, soon came to be considered a milk-giving cow;
in fact, moon is one among the various meanings given in
Sanskrit to the word gâus (cow). The moon, Somas, who
illumines the nocturnal sky, and the pluvial sun, Indras,
who during the night, or the winter, prepares the light of
morn, or spring, are represented as companions; a young
girl, the evening, or autumnal, twilight, who goes to draw
water towards night, or winter, finds in the well, and takes
to Indras, the ambrosial moon, that is, the Somas whom
he loves. Here are the very words of the Vedic hymn:—”The
young girl, descending towards the water, found the
moon in the fountain, and said: ‘I will take you to Indras,
I will take you to Çakras; flow, O moon, and envelop
Indras.'”[46] The moon and ambrosia in the word indus, as
well as somas, are confounded with one another; hence,
Indras, the drinker par excellence of somas (somapâtamas),
is also the best friend and companion of the ambrosial or
pluvial moon, and so the sun and moon (as also Indras
and Vishṇus) together come to suggest to us the idea of
two friends, two brothers (Indus and Indras), two twins,
the two Açvinâu; often the two twilights, properly
speaking, the morning and the evening, the spring and
the autumn, twilights, the former, however, being especially
associated with the red sun which appears in the
morning (or in the spring), and the latter with the[Pg 19]
pale moon which appears in the evening (or in the
autumn, as a particular regent of the cold season). Indras
and Somas (Indrâsomâu) are more frequently represented
as two bulls who together discomfit the monster (rakshohaṇâu),
who destroy by fire the monsters that live in
darkness.[47] The word vṛishaṇâu properly means the two
who pour out, or fertilise. Here it means the two bulls;
but as the word vṛishan signifies stallion as well as bull,
the two stallions, the vṛishaṇâu Indras and Somas, are, by
a natural transition, soon transformed into two horses or
horsemen, the two Açvinâu. Hence, in popular tales, we
find near the young princess the hero, who now leads out
the cows to pasture, and now, as hostler or groom, takes
excellent care of the horses. But we must not anticipate
comparisons which we shall have to make further on.
Having noticed that, in the Ṛigvedas, we find the moon
represented either as a bull or a cow (the masculine, Indus,
somas, ćandras, is always a bull; while the feminine, râkâ,
suggests more naturally the idea of a cow), let us now
consider the bull Indras in relation to the cow Aurora
(or spring).

Five bulls stand in the midst of the heavens, and chase
out of the way the wolf who crosses the waters;[48] the
luminous Vasavas unbind the cow that is tied by its foot.[49]

How now is this cow brought forth?

This ambrosial cow is created by the artists of the
gods, by the three brothers Ṛibhavas, who draw it out
of the skin of a cow; that is, they make a cow, and,
[Pg 20]to give it life, cover it with the skin of a dead cow.[50] It
being understood that the cow Aurora (or Spring) dies
at even (or in the autumn), the Ṛibhavas, the threefold sun
Indras, i.e., the sun in the three watches of the night, prepares
the skin of this cow, one Ṛibhus taking off the skin
from the dead cow, another Ṛibhus preparing it during
the night (or winter), and the third Ṛibhus, in the early
morning (or at the end of winter) dressing the new cow,
the aurora (or the spring) with it. Thus it is that Indras,
in three distinct moments, takes the skin from off the girl
that he loves, who had become ugly during the night,
and restores her beauty in the morning.[51] And the three
Ṛibhavas may, it seems to me, be the more easily identified
with the triple Indras, with Indra-Vishṇus, who
measures the world in three paces, since, as Indras is
called a bull, they also are called bulls;[52] as Indras is
often a falcon, they also are named birds;[53] and their
miracles are sometimes also those of Indras. This identification
of the bulls Ṛibhavas, whom we speak of here as
producers of the cow Aurora (the same sterile cow of the
sleeping hero Çayus, that which the Açvinâu, the two
horsemen of the twilight, restored to youth by the
[Pg 21]Ṛibhavas, rendered fruitful again),[54] with the bull, or
hero Indras, appears to me to be of the greatest importance,
inasmuch as it affords us the key to much that is
most vital to the Aryan legends.

The Ṛibhavas, then, are three brothers. They prepare
themselves to procure the cups which are to serve for
the gods to drink out of. Each has a cup in his hand;
the eldest brother defies the others to make two cups
out of one; the second defies them to make three out of
one; the youngest brother comes forward and defies them
to make four. The victory is his, and the greatest workman
of heaven, the Vedic Vulcan, Tvashtar, praises their
wonderful work.[55] The youngest of the three brothers is
therefore the most skilful. We find in the Ṛigvedas the
name of Sukarmas, or maker of fine works, good workman,
given to each of the three brothers; and though
only one of them, who is properly called Ṛibhus, or Ṛîbhukshâ,
is said to serve the god Indras in the quality of
a workman (whence Indras himself sometimes received
the name of Ṛibhukshâ, Ṛibhvan, or Ṛibhvas), yet the
other two brothers, Vâǵas and Vibhvan, are in the
service, one of all the gods, the other of Varuṇas, the
god of night.[56] It would seem natural to recognise in
Ṛibhus, the protégé of Indras, the most skilful of the
three brothers, who, as we have seen above, was the
youngest; yet, as we cannot infer anything from the
order in which the hymns name the three brothers—as,
[Pg 22]in one, Vâǵas is first named, then Ṛibhukshâ, and finally
Vibhvan; in another, Vâǵas first, Vibhvan second, and
Ṛibhus third;[57] in another, again, Ṛibhus is invoked
first, then Vibhvan, and lastly Vâǵas; and as we also
find all the Ṛibhavas saluted under the common epithet
of Vâǵas, and Vâǵas himself by the name of Indras,
or rather Indras saluted in his triple form of Ṛibhus,
Vibhvan, and Vâǵas,[58] it remains uncertain which of these
was the proper name of the third brother of the Ṛibhavas.
But what seems to be sufficiently clear is, that Indras is
identified with the Ṛibhavas (Indravantas), that the
third brother is the most skilful, and that the three
brothers serve the lords of heaven as workmen. And
here we meet with an interesting element. In two
hymns of the Ṛigvedas, the host of the Ṛibhavas appears
as one only, Indras himself, or the sun (Savitar), under
the name of Agohyas (i.e., who cannot be hidden).
During the twelve days (the twelve hours of the night,
or the twelve months of the year) in which they are the
guests of Agohyas, they bring as they sleep every species
of prosperity to the land, by making the fields fertile,
causing the rivers to flow, and refreshing the grass of the
field. In this, however, let us not forget that they are the
beneficent sons of Sudhanvan, the good archer, and archers
themselves, representatives of the great celestial archer,
of the thunder-dealing and rain-giving Indras; and that
therefore their sleep is only a figure of speech to express
their latent existence in darkness and the clouds of night.
[Pg 23]But the Ṛigvedas introduces the three brothers under
other names, and especially in one, and that an important
aspect. The third brother is called Tritas, or
the third, and as such, is also identified with Indras.
Thus, for instance, the moments of Indras in the sky are
three—evening, night, and towards morning; and the
horse of Tritas (the horse that Tritas has received from
Yamas) is now mysteriously Yama himself, now the son
of Âditis (whom we have already seen to be the cow, or
the son of the cow), now Tritas himself, whom Tritas
alone can yoke, and Indras alone ride upon, a horse bedewed
with ambrosia, which has three relationships in
heaven, three in the waters, three in the ocean;[60] that is to
say, one relation is Yamas, the elder brother; the second is
the son of the cow, or the second brother; the last is Tritas
himself, or the youngest brother. This Tritas is called
intelligent; he therefore corresponds to the third brother,
who makes four cups out of one. How then does he
appear sometimes stupid? The language itself supplies
the explanation. In Sanskrit, bâlas means both child and
stolid; and the third brother is supposed to be stolid, because,
at his first appearance especially, he is a child,—and
we constantly see him as a child do wonderful things, and
give proofs of superhuman wisdom. With this key, the
meaning of the myth is obvious. The eldest brother,
Yamas, the dying sun, with all his wisdom and experience,
is unable of himself to recover the ravished or
missing princess; the son of the cow Âditis, that is,
Âdityas, the sun in the middle of the night, gives often[Pg 24]
proof of strength great enough to disperse the darkness
and the clouds, and break the incantation; but, generally
it is the third sun, the morning sun, Indras in his third
moment, Vishṇus taking his third step,[61] the third brother,
Tritas, who seems to obtain the victory, and deliver the
young aurora from the monster of night. All this seems
to me to be very evident.

Tritas, like Indras, drinks the water of strength, and
thereupon tears the monster in pieces;[62] the victory of the
young hero must be achieved in the same way in which
it is accomplished by Indras, his more splendid and
grandiose impersonation. But Tritas, or Trâitanas, after
having killed the monster of the waters, is afraid that the
waters themselves may devour him; after cutting off the
head of the monster, some enemies have lowered him
down into the waters.[63] The sun has vanquished the
monster that kept the fountain of waters shut—he has
unchained the waters, but he himself has not been able
to break through the cloud; he has delivered from the
dark and cloudy monster the princess, the dawn that was
to have been its prey, but he himself does not yet come
forth—is still invisible. Now, who are the enemies here
that have placed the young hero in the cistern, down into
the well, in the sea? We have already seen that Tritas has
two brothers; and it is these two brothers who, in a fit
[Pg 25]of jealousy, on account of his wife, the aurora, and the
riches she brings with her from the realm of darkness, the
cistern or well, detain their brother in the well,—all
which is told us in a single but eloquent verse of the
Vedas. The intelligent Tritas in the well calls out (rebhati)
on account of his brothers;[64] and the two horsemen of the
twilight, the Açvinâu, come to deliver the invoker (rebhas)
covered and enveloped by the waters.[65] In another hymn,
the deliverer appears to be Bṛihaspatis, the lord of prayer,
who having heard how Tritas, thrust down into the well,
was invoking the gods, made the large from the small;[66]
that is to say, opened for the young hero a way to escape
from the well and show himself in his glory.

Having seen how in the Vedic hymns Tritas, the third
brother, and the ablest as well as best, is persecuted by his
brothers, it is interesting to note the form of the myth
in popular Hindoo tradition:—”Three brothers, Ekatas
(i.e., the first), Dvitas (i.e., the second), and Tritas (i.e., the
third), were travelling in a desert, and distressed with
thirst, came to a well, from which the youngest, Tritas,
drew water and gave it to his seniors. In requital, they
threw him into the well, in order to appropriate his property,
and having covered the top with a cart-wheel, left
him within it. In this extremity he prayed to the gods to
extricate him, and by their favour he made his escape.”[67]

Thus have we brought the three brothers, of whom
Tritas is the youngest, into close affinity with the three
[Pg 26]Ṛibhavas, and both the former and the latter into an
equally close connection with the three moments of Indras.
We have already said that the Ṛibhavas created the cow;
in the same way Uçanâ Kâvyâs, the desiring wise one
protected by Indras, another name for the sun-hero of the
morning, sends the cows together before him;[68] and Indras
himself is the only lord of the cows, the only real celestial
shepherd;[69] or, rather, it is he that begets the sun and
the aurora,[70] or, as another hymn says, who gives the
horses and the sun and the cow of abundance.[71]

Here, therefore, the aurora is explicitly the cow of
abundance; she is still also the milk-giving and luminous
cow, in which is found all sweetness;[72] and finally, usrâ
or ushâ are two words, two appellations, which indiscriminately
express aurora and cow as the red or brilliant
one. The identification of the aurora with the cow, in
the mythical sky of the Vedas, is therefore a certainty.

Another of the names which the milk-yielding cow
assumes in the Ṛigvedas, besides the ordinary one of
Ushâ, is Sîtâ, whom Indras also causes to descend from
heaven, like the aurora, and who must be milked by the
sun-god Pûshan,[73] the nourisher, the fœcundator, compared
in one hymn to a pugnacious buffalo.[74] This Indras, protector
and friend of Sîtâ, prepares therefore Vishṇus, the
protector, in the form of Râmas, of his wife Sîtâ. And
[Pg 27]even the Ṛibhavas are the protectors of the cow, as well
as the producers.[75]

But Indras, whose special function it is to lighten, to
thunder, to fight the monster of darkness, and to prepare
the light, generally figures in the popular imagination, at
dawn (aurora), as the sun, under his three names of
Sûryas, of Ṛitas, and of Savitar.

The sun, with respect to the aurora, is now the father,
now the husband, now the son, and now the brother.
As begotten of Indras simultaneously with the aurora, he
is the brother; as following and embracing the aurora,
he is the husband; as simply coming after the aurora, he
is the son; and as sending the cow or the aurora before
him, he is the father. These four relationships of the sun
to the aurora or dawn are all mentioned in the Ṛigvedas.

In one of the hymns, the pure effulgence with which
the aurora chases away the shadows of night is said to
resemble the milk of a cow;[76] that is, the whitish light of
the daybreak precedes in the eastern heavens the rosy
light of aurora. The aurora is the cow-nurse, and the
oriental mother of the old sun; at the sound of the
hymn in praise of the dawn, the two horsemen of twilight,
the Açvinâu, awaken.[77] Two cows—[i.e., the two twilights,
that of the evening and that of the morning, related to
the two horsemen, the evening one and the morning one,
whom we also find together in the morning, the one
white and the other red, the one in company with daybreak
and the other with the aurora, and who may
[Pg 28]therefore be sometimes identified with the two morning
dawns, the white dawn (alba) or daybreak, and the red
dawn (aurora), and, from another point of view, the lunar
dawn and the solar one]—drop milk towards the sun, in
the heaven.[78] The aurora is the mother of the cows.[79]

As the sun approaches, the heavenly cows, who walk
without covering themselves with dust, celebrate him[80]
with songs. The red rays of the high sun fly and
join themselves to the sun’s cows.[81] The seven wise
Añgirasas (the seven solar rays, or else the Angiras,
the seven-rayed or seven-faced sun, as another hymn[82]
represents him) celebrate in their songs the herds of cows
which belong to the aurora, who appears upon the mountain.[83]
Let us notice more particularly what is said of
the aurora that appears with the cows upon the mountain.
It is the sun that enables the Añgirasas to split the
mountain, to bellow along with the cows, and to surround
themselves with the splendour of the aurora.[84] The
aurora, the daughter of the sky, the splendid one, appears;
at the same time, the sun draws up the cows.[85]
The aurora is carried by red luminous cows, whilst the
.
[Pg 29]sun, the hero-archer, kills the enemies.[86] The aurora
breaks open the prison of the cows; the cows exult towards
the aurora;[87] the aurora comes out of the darkness
as cows come out of their stable.[88] As the solar hero,
Indras, is the guardian or shepherd of horses and of cows,[89]
so the auroras are often celebrated in the Ṛigvedas as
açvâvatîs and gomatîs, that is, as provided with and
attended by horses and cows. The aurora keeps together
the herd of red cows, and always accompanies them.[90]

Thus have we passed from the pastor-hero to the
pastoral heroine upon the mountain. The pastoral
aurora, unveiling her body in the east, follows the path of
the sun;[91] and the sun is represented to us in the following
riddle as a wonderful cowherd:—”I have seen a
shepherd who never set down his foot, and yet went and
disappeared on the roads; and who, taking the same and
yet different roads, goes round and round amidst the
worlds.”[92] The sun goes round in the ether, and never
puts down a foot, for he has none; and he takes the same,
yet different, roads in the sky, i.e., luminous by day, and
gloomy by night. The puzzle of the riddle lies in its
self-contradiction; and the beautiful girl is the prize appointed
for him who, by his actions, resolves it. A similar
[Pg 30]riddle is, in the Ṛigvedas itself, proposed to Mitras, the
sun, and to Varuṇas, the night. The riddle is as follows:—”The
first of them who walk afoot (padvatînam) comes
without feet (apâd);” and the two divine heroes are
asked, “Which of you two has guessed it?”[93] He who
solves this enigma we may be sure is Mitras, the sun, who
recognises the aurora, the girl who comes making use of
feet, although she seem to have none, for she comes
borne in a chariot, of which the wheels appear to be feet,
which is the same luminous chariot that rolls well,[94] given
by the Ṛibhavas to the two horsemen Açvinâu (represented
sometimes as two old men made young again by the Ṛibhavas,
and sometimes simply as two handsome youths),
into which chariot she mounts by the help of the Açvinâu;
and the daughter of the sun is, in the race, the first to
come to the winning-post, amid the enthusiastic plaudits
of the gods.[95] Then the hymns to the aurora sometimes
represent that vast chariot as belonging to the eastern
aurora, who guides a hundred chariots, and who, in turn,
helps the immortal gods to ascend into the chariot beside
her.[96] The aurora, as the first of those who appear every
day in the eastern sky, as the first to know the break of
day,[97] is naturally represented as one of the swiftest
[Pg 31]among those who are the guests of the sun-prince during
the night; and like her cows, which do not cover themselves
with dust (this being an attribute which, in the
Indian faith, distinguishes the gods from mortals, for
the former walk in the heavens, and the latter upon
earth), she, in her onward flight, leaves no footsteps
behind her. The word apâd (pad and pada, being
synonymous) may, indeed, mean not only she who has no
feet, but also she who has no footsteps (that is, what is the
measure of the foot), or, again, she who has no slippers,
the aurora having, as appears, lost them; for the prince
Mitras, while following the beautiful young girl, finds a
slipper which shows her footstep, the measure of her foot,
a foot so small, that no other woman has a foot like it,
an almost unfindable, almost imperceptible foot, which
brings us back again to the idea of her who has no feet.
The legend of the lost slipper, and of the prince who tries
to find the foot predestined to wear it, the central interest
in the popular story of Cinderella, seems to me to repose
entirely upon the double meaning of the word apâd, i.e.,
who has no feet, or what is the measure of the foot,
which may be either the footstep or the slipper; often,
moreover, in the story of Cinderella, the prince cannot
overtake the fugitive, because a chariot bears her
away.

The word apâd, which we have heretofore seen applied
to the heroine, was applied, moreover, to the hero, giving
rise to another popular legend, of which the Ṛigvedas
offers us the mythical elements. We have already seen
the sun as anipadyamanas, i.e., the sun who never puts
his foot down; but this sun who never puts down his
foot easily, came to be conceived of and represented as
a sun without feet, or as a lame hero, who, during the
night, by the perfidy of the witch, the dusk of evening,[Pg 32]
became also blind. In one hymn, the blind and the lame
are not one, but two, whom propitious Indras guides;[98]
in another, the blind-lame is one person, with the
name of Pâravṛig, whom the two horsemen Açvinâu,
the two friends of the dawn, enable to walk and to see.[99]
The lame one who sees, shows the way to the blind who
is able to walk, or the lame carries the blind; Indras, the
hidden sun, guides the blind and the lame; or, the blind
and the lame, lost in the forest, help each other; in the
morning, the Açvinâu, the two horsemen, friends of the
aurora, with the water of sight and of strength (that is,
Páravṛig, the blind-lame having discovered the hidden
fountain of the young girls of the dawn,[100] with the
ambrosia of the aurora, with the aurora itself), make the
blind see, and him who has no feet, the lame, walk; that
is, they burst forth into the upper air again, transfigured
now into the luminous sun who sets out on his heavenly
voyage. I have said above that the hero becomes blind
and lame through the perfidy and magic of the evening
aurora: nor was the assertion unfounded; for the Vedic
hymn in which Indras guides the blind and the lame,
i.e., himself or the sun, in the gloomy tardy night, is the
very same hymn in which is celebrated his heroic and
manly enterprise of the destruction of the daughter of
the sky. The sun Indras revenges himself in the morning
[Pg 33]upon the aurora of the morning, for the wrong done
him by the aurora of the evening, beautiful, but faithless.

For the aurora counts among her other talents that of
magic; when the Ṛibhavas created the aurora cow of
morning, investing her with the skin of the aurora cow
of evening, they endowed her with Protean qualities
(Viçvarûpâm), and on this account the aurora herself is
also called witch or enchantress (Mâjinî).[101] This aurora,
this virago, this Amazon, this Vedic Medea, who,
treacherously plunging her husband, or brother, the solar
hero, into a fiery furnace, blinds and lames him, is
punished in the morning for her crime of the evening.
The hero vanquishes her, overcomes her incantations, and
annihilates her. The Vedic hymn sings—”A manly
and heroic undertaking thou hast accomplished, O Indras,
for an evil-doing woman, the daughter of the heavens,
thou hast smitten; the growing daughter of the heaven,
the aurora, O Indras, thou hast destroyed; from the
chariot, broken in pieces, fell the aurora, trembling, because
the bull had struck her.”[102] Here the mythical
animal reappears on the same stage with the heroes, and
for the image of the hero and the heroine there is substituted
that of the cow and the bull.[103]

The sun and the aurora, therefore, do not always seek
each other from promptings of affection only, nor is the
hateful part always played by the aurora. The sun,
also appears as a perverse persecutor in his turn.
[Pg 34]One Vedic hymn advises the aurora not to stretch
out the web she works at too far, lest the sun, like a
robber, with hostile intention, set fire to and burn
her.[104] Another hymn tells us that the handsome one
follows the beautiful one, the brother the sister, like a
lover,[105]—the aurora fleeing from the sun, her brother, out
of shame, and her brother following her, actuated by a
brutal instinct. Finally, a third hymn shows us the
Vedic Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, the sun Tvashṭar,
called also the omniform sun (Sâvitâ Viçvarûpah), as
father of Saraṇyû, another name for the aurora, omniform
herself, like her father (and, like the cow, undergoing the
triple transmutation at the hands of Tvashṭar, i.e., the
three brothers, the Ṛibhavas), creating another form of
himself, that is, the sun Vivasvant, to be able to espouse
the aurora. Saraṇyû, perceiving perhaps that Vivasvant
is her father under another shape, creates another woman
like herself, and flees away on the chariot that flies of
itself, and that was before given her by her father; and
thereupon Vivasvant, in order to overtake her, transforms
himself into a horse.[106]

But sometimes the alienation the sun and the aurora,
the young husband and wife, is not due to evil propensities
in themselves, but the decree of fate working through the
machinations of monsters. The two beautiful ones are at
bottom united by love and reciprocal gratitude; for now
it is the sun who delivers the aurora, and now the aurora
[Pg 35]who liberates the sun; and we have already seen the
aurora making the ambrosial milk drop for the sun from
her cows, and the sun drawing up and delivering the cows
of the aurora. There is a hymn in which the divine
girl, the aurora, comes up in the east, with a lascivious
air, smiling, fresh, uncovering her bosom, resplendent,
towards the god who sacrifices himself,[107] that is to say,
towards the sun, towards Çunahçepas (the sun), who,
in three verses of another hymn,[108] invokes her, the well-known
legend of which, narrated in the Âitareya-Brâhmaṇam,
I shall briefly relate. The aurora has also
the merit of having, with her pure and purifying light,
opened the gates of the gloomy cavern, discomfited the
enemies, the shades of night, and exposed to view the
treasures hidden by the darkness (and here we have Medea
again, but this time in a benignant form); she awakens
to activity the sleepers and everything with life (and
therefore, among the living sleepers, the sun, her son,
whom one of the hymns represents as sleeping profoundly
in the bosom of the darkness of night); she is the saviour
of mortals,[109] that is to say, she protects mortals from
death, and resuscitates them; she sees and foresees everything.[110]
The awakener is also the awakened; the illuminator
[Pg 36]is also the illumined, or the wise; and the illumined
or luminous one is also the beautiful one. From
being small, she is become large[111] (the heroes and heroines
of mythology are only small at birth, and pass at once
into fulness of stature); from being infirm and sombre-visaged,
by the grace of Indras and of the Açvinâu, she
is cured and restored to strength and clearness.[112] But why
was she dark at first? Because her mother, the night, is
the black one; she, the white one, is born of the black
one.[113]

During the night, the young girl was blind, and she
recovers her sight by the grace of a wise one, one who,
protected by Indras, another shape of Indras, has become
enamoured of her. We have seen above that it is the
Açvinâu who, with the aurora, give back to the sun his
sight; here it is the sun who makes the aurora see, it is
the sun who gives her light; and she who, having been
blind, recovers her sight, becomes the protectress of the
blind and preserver of vision,[114] like St Lucia, virgin and
martyr, in the Christian Mythology. Physical truth and
the mythical narration are in perfect accordance.

The night is now the mother, now the sister of the
aurora; but the gloomy night is sometimes her step-mother,
sometimes her half-sister. There is a riddle
which celebrates the luminous night and the aurora, as
two diversely beautiful ones who go together, but of whom
[Pg 37]one goes while the other comes.[115] Another hymn sings
of them thus: “The brilliantly-decked one approaches,
the white aurora comes; the black one prepares for her
her rooms. The one immortal having joined the other, the
two appear alternately in the heavens. One and eternal
is the path of the two sisters; they follow it, one after
the other, guided by the gods; they do not meet, and
they never stand still—the two good nurses, night and
aurora, one in soul yet different in form.”[116] The two
good nurses, night and aurora, whose hues alternate
eternally, nourish between them one and the same child
(the sun).[117] But the Ṛigvedas itself tells us that the
night is not always the legitimate sister of the aurora;
the latter “abandons now the one that is, now the one
that is not, properly its sister.”[118] Here probably we must
understand by the proper sister of the aurora the
luminous or moonlight night, and by the half-sister, the
gloomy night, the night without a moon. This is the
sister whom, in a hymn, the aurora removes, sends far
away from her, while she shines to be seen of her husband;[119]
and her half-sister, the night, is obliged to
resign her place to her elder or better sister,[120] the
word ǵyeshṭhas meaning not only the eldest, but the
[Pg 38]best. We have already seen that the aurora is the first
to appear; as such, and as she who in the evening precedes
the night (the evening aurora), she is the first-born,
the eldest, the most experienced, the best; while, from
another point of view, she is represented to us as the
little one who becomes great, and, in this case, as younger
sister of the night (the morning dawn). The dawns,
or auroras, are saluted with the epithet of workwomen,[121]
just as the good sister, with respect to the bad one, is
always she who works, doing wonderful work, that is,
spinning or weaving the rosy cloth. But the auroras are
not only the workers, they are also the pure purifying
and cleansing ones;[122] hence one can understand how one
of the tasks imposed upon the youngest sister was that of
purifying, purging, or separating the grain during the
night, taking from it all that is impure, in which task
she is assisted sometimes by a good fairy, sometimes by
the Virgin Mary, who, according to all probability, is the
moon.

One of the singular qualities of the younger sister is
that she displays her beauty only before the eyes of her
husband. The wife aurora manifests herself in the
sight of her husband;[123] united, in her splendour, with the
rays of the sun,[124] like a wife she prepares the dwelling
of the sun.[125] Very brilliant, like a wife cleansed by her
mother, she uncovers her body;[126] like a bather who shows
[Pg 39]herself, the shining one unveils her body;[127] she adorns
herself like a dancer, uncovering, like a cow, her breast;[128]
she displays her luminous garments;[129] all-radiant, with
beautiful face, she laughs;[130] and he who has made the
aurora laugh, her, the beautiful princess, who, at first, that
is, during the night, did not laugh, espouses her; the sun
espouses the aurora.

The celestial nuptials take place, and the ceremony is
minutely described in the 85th hymn of the 10th book
of the Ṛigvedas. But the marriage of the two celestials
is never consummated except under conditions; these
conditions are always accepted and afterwards forgotten,
and it is now the husband who, by forsaking his wife,
now the wife who, by abandoning her husband, violates
the promise given. One of these estrangements, these
temporary alienations of husband and wife, is described
in the Ṛigvedas by the poetical myth of the dawn Urvaçî
and her husband Purûravas, one of the names given to
the sun. Urvaçî says of herself, “I have arrived like the
first of the auroras;”[131] thereupon Urvaçî suddenly abandons
her husband Purûravas, because he breaks an agreement
made between them. We shall see further on in
this chapter what this agreement was. Besides, having
given him a son before her departure, she consoles him
by permitting him to come and find her again in heaven,
that is, by endowing the sun with the immortality she
possesses herself. In the morning the aurora precedes
[Pg 40]the sun; he follows her too closely, and she disappears,
but leaves a son, i.e., the new sun. In the evening the
aurora precedes the sun; he follows her again, and she
loses herself, now in a forest, now in the sea. The same
phenomenon, a divorce of husband from wife, or a separation
of brother and sister, or the flight of a sister from
her brother, or again, that of a daughter from her father,
presents itself twice every day (and every year) in the sky.
Sometimes, on the other hand, it is a witch, or the
monster of nocturnal darkness, who takes the place of the
radiant bride, or the aurora, near the sun; and in that
case the aurora, the beauteous bride, is spirited away into
a wood to be killed or thrown into the sea, from both of
which predicaments, however, she always escapes. Sometimes
the witch of night throws the brother and sister,
the mother and son, the sun and the aurora, together
into the waves of the sea, whence they both escape again,
to reappear in the morning.

All these alternative variations of a mythical representation
become each in turn a legend by itself, as we shall
see again more in detail, when the study of the different
animals that take part in them shall furnish us with
opportunities of doing so. In the meantime, we have
here finished our enumeration of all that in the hymns of
the Ṛigvedas refers in any way to the bull and the cow,—to
the wind, moon, and sun bulls, to the cow-cloud, moon,
spring and aurora,—leaving it, however, to be understood
how natural it is to pass from the bull to the handsome
hero-prince, and from the cow to the beautiful girl, the
rich princess, the valiant heroine, or the wise fairy. For
though in the mythical hymns of the Ṛigvedas we have
little more than hints or foreshadows of the many popular
legends which we have thus referred to, often without
naming them, these are so many and so precise that it[Pg 41]
seems to me to be almost impossible not to recognise
them. To demonstrate this, however, it will be necessary
for me to show further what form the mythological ideas
and figures relating to the animals dispersed in the Vedic
hymns afterwards assumed in the Hindoo traditions.

SECTION II.

The Worship of the Bull and of the Cow in India, and the
Brâhmanic Legends relating to it.

SUMMARY.

The princes called bulls.—The bull the symbol of the god Çivas.—The
cow was not to be killed.—Exchange of the bull and the cow
for other animals; the bull and the cow, considered as the greatest
reward desired by the legislating priests of India.—The cow’s hide
in nuptial usages a symbol of abundance; its elasticity and power
of extension; the cow and its hide during the pregnancy of women
an augury of happy birth, and in funeral ceremonies an augury
of resurrection.—Cows sent to pasture with auguries.—Cows seen
by night in a dream are a sinister omen; meaning of this Hindoo
superstition.—The black cow which produces white milk in the
Vedic hymns.—The reins of the cow or black goat sacrificed in
funerals given as a viaticum or provision to the dead man, that
they may contribute to his resurrection.—The variegated cow
comes again in a brâhmaṇam, and is interpreted as a cloud.—The
coming out of the cow-dawns feasted.—The cornucopia.—The
milk of the cows is the serpent’s poison.—The salutary herb.—The
enchanted gem, the ring of recognition.—The moon, as a female,
a good fairy who works for the aurora, and who entertains and
guides the hero.—The moon, as a male, a white bull.—The city
of the moon.—Indras consoles and nourishes the unhappy Sîtâ.—Râmas
assimilated to Indras.—The coadjutors of Râmas are those
of Indras.—The bull Râmas.—The names of the monsters and the
names of the heroes in the Râmâyaṇam.—Râmas, the Hindoo
Xerxes, chastises the sea.—The celestial ocean; the cloud-mountains
carried by the heroes; the bridge across the sea made of
these mountains; while the bridge is being made, it rains.—The[Pg 42]
battle of Râmas is a winter and a nocturnal one, in a cloudy
sky.—The monster barrel again; the monster trunk with a cavity;
Kabandhas.—The dying monster thanks the hero, who delivers
him from an ancient malediction, and becomes again a handsome
luminous youth.—The dawn Sîtâ sacrificed in the fire.—Sîtâ
daughter of the sun.—The Buddhist legend of Râmas and Sîtâ.—Sîtâ
predestined as the reward of valour.—An indiscretion of the
husband Râmas causes him to lose his wife Sîtâ.—The story of
Urvaçî again, the first of the auroras; the wife flees because her
husband has revealed her secret, because her husband has looked
at another woman, because he has let himself be seen naked; the
fugitive wife hides herself in a plant.—The wife stays with her
husband as long as he says nothing displeasing to her.—The wife
kills her sons; the husband complains and the wife flees.—The
contrary.—The story of Çunaḥçepas again.—The god Varuṇas,
who binds; the son sacrificed to the monster against his will by
his father.—The hero-hunter.—The middle son sold, the son of
the cow.—The cow herself, Aditi, or Çabalâ, or Kâmadhuk, wife
of Vasishṭas, sacrificed instead of the son of Viçvâmitras.—Indras
delivers the bound hero, i.e., he delivers himself. The aurora, or
the daughter of the black one, liberates Çunaḥçepas, bound by the
black one, that is, she delivers the sun her husband.—The fetters
of Varuṇas and of Aǵigartas are equivalent to the bridle of the
horse and to the collar of the dog sold to the demon in European
fairy tales.—The golden palace of Varuṇas on the western mountain.—Monstrous
fathers.—Identification of Hariçćandras, Aǵigartas,
and Viçvâmitras.—The contention of Viçvâmitras and Vasishṭas
for the possession of the cow Çabalâ.—Demoniacal character of
Viçvâmitras.—The sister of the monster-lover or seducer of the
hero.—The cloud drum.—The cloudy monster Dundubhis, in the
form of a buffalo with sharpened horns, destroyed by the son of
Indras.—The buffalo a monster, the bull a hero.—Kṛishṇas the
monster becomes a god.—The god Indras fallen for having killed a
brâhman monster.—The three heads of the monster cut off at a blow.—The
three brothers in the palace of Lañkâ; the eldest brother has
the royal dignity; the second, the strong one, sleeps, and only
wakens to eat and prove his strength; the third is good and is
victorious.—The three brothers Pâṇdavas, sons of Yamas, Vâyus
and Indras in the Mahâbhâratam; the first is wise, the second is
strong, the third is handsome and victorious; he is the best.—Again
the three working brothers entertained by a king.—The three disciples
of Dhâumyas.—The blind one who falls into the well.—The[Pg 43]
voyage of Utañkas to hell.—He meets a bull.—The excrement of
the bull, ambrosia.—The stone uplifted with the help of the lever,
of the thunderbolt of Indras.—The earrings of the queen carried
off; their mythical meaning.—Indras and Kṛishṇas also search
for the earrings.—The three Buddhist brothers.—The eldest
brother frees the younger ones by his knowledge in questions and
riddles.—The hero and the monster ill or vulnerable in their
feet.—The two rival sisters.—The good sister thrown into the
well by the wicked one.—The prince comes to deliver her.—The
wicked sister takes the place of the good one.—The three brothers
again.—The sons make their father and mother recognise each
other.—The third brother, Pûrus, the only good one, assists his
aged father Yayâtis, by taking his old age upon himself.—The
old blind man, Dîrghatamas, thrown into the water by his sons.—Yayâtis
and Dîrghatamas, Hindoo King Lears.—The queen
Sudeshnâ makes her maid or foster-sister take her place; a Hindoo
form of Queen Berta.—The blind and the crooked or lame, or
hunchbacked, again with the three-breasted princess.—They cure
each other.—The bride disputed by the brothers.—The aurora and
the sun flee from each other.—The beautiful girl, the daughter of
the sun, flees after having seen the prince upon the mountain.—The
prince cannot overtake her; the third time, at last, the prince
marries the daughter of the sun.—The marvellous cow of Vasishṭhas.—The
hero Vasishṭhas wishes to kill himself, but cannot; he
is immortal; he throws himself down from the mountain and does
not hurt himself; he goes through fire and is not burnt; he throws
himself into the water and does not drown; mythical signification
of these prodigies.—The wind runs after women.—Conclusion of
the study of the myth and of the legends which refer to the bull
and the cow of India.

Just as the importance of the cattle to primitive and
pastoral Aryan life explains the propensity of the Aryan
mind to conceive of the mobile phenomena of the heavens,
at first considered living beings, as bulls and cows, so the
consecration of these animals, associated and identified
with the celestial phenomena and the gods, naturally gave
rise to the superstitious worship of the bull and the cow,
common to all the Aryan nations, but particularly, through
the intervention of the brâhmanic priests, to the Hindoos.

[Pg 44]

It is a remarkable fact that the words vṛishas, vṛishabhas,
and ṛishabhas, which mean the bull as the one who
pours out, the fœcundator, is often used in Sanscrit to
denote the best, the first, the prince; and hence the bull,
that is to say, the best fœcundator, is in India the most
sacred symbol of royalty. For this reason the phallic
and destroying god, the royal Çivas, who inhabits Gokarṇas
(a word which properly means cow’s ear), has both
for his steed and his emblem a brâhmanic bull, i.e., a bull
with a hunch on its back; the nandin, or joyful attribute,
being given to Çivas himself, inasmuch as, being the Deus
phallicus, he is the god of joyfulness and beatitude.[132]

Still more honour is paid to the cow (like the Vedic
dawn anavadyâ, innocent or inculpable[133]), which therefore
it was a crime to kill.[134] An interesting chapter of the
Âitareya-brâhmaṇam,[135] on the sacrifice of animals, shows
us how, next to man, the horse was the supreme sacrifice
offered to the gods; how the cow afterwards took the place
of the horse; the sheep, of the cow; the goat, of the
sheep; and, at last, vegetable products were substituted
for animals;—a substitution or cheating of the gods in
the sacrifice, which, perhaps, serves to explain even more
the fraud of which, in popular stories, the simpleton is
[Pg 45]always the victim; the simpleton here being the god himself,
and the cheater man, who changes, under a sacred
pretext, the noblest and most valued animals for common
and less valuable ones, and finally for vegetables apparently
of no value whatever. In the Hindoo codes of law we
have the same fraudulent substitution of animals under a
legal pretext. “The killer of a cow,” says the code attributed
to Yâǵńavalkyas,[136] “must stay a month in penitence,
drinking the pańćagavyam (i.e., the five good
productions of the cow, which, according to Manus,[137] are
milk, curds, butter, urine, and dung), sleeping in a stable
and following the cows; and he must purify himself by
the gift of another cow.” Thus, according to Yâǵńavalkya,[138]
the killer of a parrot is purified by giving a two-year-old
calf; the killer of a crane by giving a calf three
years old; the killer of an ass, a goat, or a sheep, by the
gift of a bull; the killer of an elephant by the gift of five
black bulls (nîlavṛishâp). And one need not be astonished
to find these contracts (which remind one of that
between Jacob and Laban) in the Hindoo codes of law,
when, in the Vedic hymns themselves, a poet offers to
sell to whoever will buy it, an Indras of his, that is to
say, a bull, for ten cows.[139] Another interesting verse of
Yâǵńavalkyas[140] tells us they die pure who are killed by
lightning or in battle for the sake of the cows or the
brâhmans. The cow was often the object heroes fought
for in heaven; the Brâhman wished to be the object
heroes should fight for upon earth.
[Pg 46]We learn from the domestic ceremonies referred to
by Gṛihyasûtrâni with how much respect the bull and
the cow were treated as the symbols of abundance in a
family. In Âçvalâyanas,[141] we find the bull’s hide
stretched out near the nuptial hearth, the wife seated
upon it, and the husband, touching his wife, saying,
“May the lord of all creatures allow us to have children;”—words
taken from the Vedic nuptial hymn.[142] We have
seen above how the Ṛibhavas, from the hide of a dead
cow, formed a new and beautiful one, or, in other words,
how, from the dusk of evening, by stretching it in the
night, they formed the dawn of morning. This cow’s hide
plays also an important rôle in the popular faith; an
extraordinary elasticity is attributed to it, a power of
endless expansibility, and for this reason it is adopted
as a symbol of fecundity, upon which the wife must
place herself in order to become a mother of children.
The cow’s hide (goćarman), in the Mahâbhâratam,[143] is
the garment of the god Vishṇus; and the goćarman
divided into thongs, and afterwards fastened to each
other, served formerly in India to measure the circumference
of a piece of ground;[144] hence the cow’s hide suggested
the idea of a species of infinity. Further on we shall
find it put to extraordinary uses in western legend; we
find it even in the hymns of the Vedic age used to cover
the body of a dead man, the fire being invoked not to
consume it, almost as if the cow’s hide had the virtue of
resuscitating the dead.[145]
[Pg 47]The cow, being the symbol of fruitfulness, was also the
companion of the wife during pregnancy. Âçvalâyaṇas[146]
tells us how, in the third month, the husband was to give
his wife to drink of the sour milk of a cow that has a
calf like itself, and in it two beans and a grain of barley;
the husband was then to ask his wife three times, “What
drinkest thou?” and she was to answer three times:
“The generation of males.” In the fourth month, the
wife, according to Âçvalâyaṇas, was to put herself again
upon the bull’s hide, near the fire of sacrifice, when they
again invoked the god Praǵâpatis, lord of all creatures,
or of procreation; the moon, like a celestial bull and
cow, was invited to be present at the generation of men;[147]
and a bull, during the Vedic period, was the gift which
sufficed for the priest. In the Vedic antiquity, neither
bulls nor cows were allowed to go to pasture without
some special augury, which, in the domestic ceremonials
of Âçvalâyaṇas,[148] has been also handed down to us; the
cows were to give milk and honey, for the strength and
increase of whoever possessed them. Here we have again
the cows not only as the beneficent, but as the strong
ones, they who help the hero or the heroine who takes
them to pasture.

But although beautiful cows, when seen by day, are a
sign of good luck, seen in dreams they are of evil omen;
for in that case they are of course the black cows, the
shadows of night, or the gloomy waters of the nocturnal
[Pg 48]ocean. Already in the Ṛigvedas, the dawn, or the
luminous cow, comes to deliver the fore-mentioned solar
hero, Tritas Aptyas, from the evil sleep which he sleeps
amidst the cows[149] of night. Âçvalâyaṇas, in his turn,
recommends us when we have an evil dream, to invoke
the sun, to hasten the approach of the morning, or, better
still, to recite the hymn of five verses to the dawn which
we have already referred to, and which begins with the
words, “And like an evil dream amidst the cows.” Here
the belief is not yet an entirely superstitious one; and
we understand what is meant by the cows who envelop
us in the sleep of night, when we are told to invoke the
sun and the dawn to come and deliver us from them.

A cow (probably a black one), often a black goat,
was sometimes also sacrificed in the funeral ceremonies of
the Hindoos, as if to augur that, just as the black cow,
night, produces the milky humours of the aurora, or is
fruitful, so will he who has passed through the kingdom
of darkness rise again in the world of light. We have
already seen the black night as the mother of the white
and luminous aurora; I quote below yet another Vedic
sentence, in which a poet ingenuously wonders why the
cows of Indras, the black ones as well as the light-coloured
(the black clouds, as well as the white and red
ones), should both yield white milk.[150] And even the
gloomy nocturnal kingdom of Yamas, the god of the
dead, has its cows of black appearance, which are nevertheless
milk-yielding; and thus the black cow of the
funeral sacrifices comes to forebode resurrection.
[Pg 49]In the same way the viaticum, or provision of food for
his journey, given to the dead man is a symbol of his
resurrection. The journey being considered as a short
one, the provision of food which is to sustain the traveller
to the kingdom of the dead is limited, and each dead hero
carries it with him, generally not so much for himself, as
to ensure a passage into the kingdom of the dead. For
this reason we read, even in the domestic ceremonials
of Âçvalâyaṇas, that it is recommended to put into the
hands of the dead man,[151] what is the greatest symbol of
strength, the reins of the animal killed in the funeral
sacrifice (or, in default of an animal victim, at least two
cakes of rice or of flour), in order that the dead man may
throw them down the throats of the two Cerberi, the two
sons of the bitch Saramâ, so that they may let the
deceased enter scatheless into the death-kingdom, the
mysterious kingdom of Yamas; and here we find the
monster of the popular tales, into whose house the hero,
having passed through many dangers, enters, by the
advice of a good fairy or of a good old man, giving
something to appease the hunger of the two dogs who
guard its gate.

They who return from the funeral must touch the
stone of Priapus, a fire, the excrement of a cow,[152] a grain
of barley, a grain of sesame and water,—all symbols of
that fecundity which the contact with a corpse might
have destroyed.

The Vedic hymns have shown us the principal mythical
aspects and functions of the cow and the bull; we have
also seen how the brâhmanic codes confirmed, by the
sanction of law, the worship of these animals, and how
jealously the domestic tradition of the Hindoos has
[Pg 50]guarded it. Let us now see from the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam,
how the Brâhmans themselves, those of the
era immediately following that of the Vedâs, interpreted
the myth of the cow.

We have recognised in the Vedic heavens, as reflected
in the hymns of the Ṛigvedas, three cows—the cow-cloud,
the cow-moon, and the cow-aurora. These three cows,
and especially the first and the third, are also quite distinct
from one another in the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam.

It tells us how the gâuh pṛiçnih, the variegated cow,
or spotted cow, of the Ṛigvedas, must be celebrated to
make the earth fruitful[153] (or that one must sing to the
cloud that it may fertilise the pastures and fields with
rain), and how one must sacrifice a bull to Viçvakarman
(or the one that does all), who is transformed into the
god Indras when killing the demon Vṛitras,[154] or the monster
who keeps the rain in the cloud.

It shows us the full moon, Râkâ, joined to the aurora,
as a source of abundance,[155] and the aurora with the
cow.[156] It tells us explicitly that the characteristic form
of the aurora is the red cow, because she moves with
the red cows.[157] The gods, after having discovered
the cows in the cavern, open the cavern with the third
libation of the morning;[158] when the cows come out, the
gods, the Âdityâs, also come out; hence the coming
[Pg 51]forth of the gods (Âdityânâm ayanam) is equivalent to
the coming forth of the cows (gavâm ayanam). The
cows come out when they have their horns, and adorn
themselves.[159]

The aurora is a cow; this cow has horns; her horns
are radiant and golden. When the cow aurora comes
forth, all that falls from her horns brings good luck;
hence in the Mahâbhâratam,[160] the benefits received from
a holy hermit, called Matañgas, are compared to those of
a gavâm ayanam, i.e., a coming out of cows. To understand
this simile, besides a reference to the Vedic texts,
it is necessary to compare it with the modern usages of
India, in which, in celebration of the new solar year, or
the birth of the pastoral god Kṛishṇas (the god who is
black during the night, but who becomes luminous in the
morning among the cows of the dawning, or among the
female cowherds), it is customary, towards the end of
December, to give cows to the Brâhmans, exchange presents
of cows and calves, besprinkle one another with
milk, to adorn a beautiful milch cow, crown her with
flowers, gild her horns, or paint them various colours, to
deck her to overloading with flowers, fruit, and little
cakes, and then hunt her from the village to the sound of
drums and trumpets, in order that, full of terror, she
may flee away with distraction and impetuosity. The
cow loses her ornaments in her flight, and these, being
estimated as propitious treasures, are eagerly picked up
by the faithful, and preserved as sacred relics.[161]

In the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam,[162] the sun is born of the
cows (goǵâ), is the son of the cow aurora; as the sun’s
[Pg 52]mother she naturally nourishes him with her milk; hence
the same Âitareya[163] tells us that the gods Mitras and
Varuṇas, by means of the curdled milk, took from the
drink of the gods the inebriating poison which the long-tongued
witch (Dîrghaǵihvî) had poured into it. This
curdled milk is the same milky sea, with health-giving
herbs scattered in it, and which the gods agitate to form
ambrosia, in the Râmâyaṇam, the Mahâbhâratam, and
the Puranic legends; a sea and herbs which we find
already spoken of together in a Vedic hymn.[164] But in
the sky, where the ambrosial milk and the health-giving
herbs are produced, there are gods and demons; and the
milk, which is at one time the rain, at another ambrosia,
is now in the cloud, now in the moon (called also
Oshadhipatis, or lord of herbs), now round the dawn.
Hanumant, who, in the Râmâyaṇam, goes in quest of
the health-giving grass to restore their souls to the half-dead
heroes, looks for it now between the mountain bull
(ṛishabhas) and the heavenly mountain Kâilasas, now
between the Mount Lunus (Çandras) and the mountain
cup (Droṇas); and the mountain which possesses the
herb for which Hanumant is searching is itself called
herb (oshadhis), or the one that causes to rejoice with
perfumes (Gandhamâdanas[165]), which two words are used
[Pg 53]synonymously. Here the milky, ambrosial, and healthful
humour is supposed to be produced, not by a cow, but
by an herb. And the gods and demons contend in heaven
for the possession of this herb, as well as for the ambrosia;
the only difference being that the gods enjoy both one and
the other without corrupting them, whilst the demons
poison them as they drink them; that is to say, they
spread darkness over the light, they move about in the
darkness, in the gloomy waters, in the black humour
which comes out of the herb itself, which, in contact with
them, becomes poisonous, so that they in turn suck the
poison. On the other hand, the Gandharvâs,[166] an amphibious
race, in whom at one time the nature of the gods
predominates, at another that of the demons, and who
consequently take now the side of the gods, now that of
the demons, are simply guards who, as against theft, keep
watch and ward over the perfumes and healthful herbs,
which are their own property, and the healthful or
ambrosial waters, the ambrosia which belongs to their
wives, the nymphs; they are, in a word, the earliest
representatives of the enjoying and jealous proprietor.
We have already heard, in the Ṛigvedas, the demoniacal
monsters call on each other to suck the poison of the
celestial cows; and we have seen that the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam
accuses a witch of being the poisoner of the
divine ambrosia; we have, moreover, noticed that a Vedic
hymn already associates together the ambrosial milk
and the healthful herb, and that, in the brâhmanic cosmogony,
the milk and the herb which produces it are
manifested together, which herb or grass is beneficent
or the reverse according as the gods or the demons enjoy
it; from all which it will be easy to understand this[Pg 54]
interesting Hindoo proverb, “The grass gives the milk
to the cows, and the milk gives the poison to the
serpents.”[167] It is indeed the milk of the cow of the
dawn and of the cow of the moon which destroys
the serpents of darkness, the demoniacal shadows of
night.

But the idea of the healthful herb is incorporated in
another image, very familiar to the popular Indo-European
legends, and which is contained even in the Vedic hymns.
The cow produces the sun and the moon; the circular
shape, the disc of sun and moon, suggests variously the
idea of a ring, a gem, and a pearl; and the sun, Savitar,
he who gives the juice, and the generator, is introduced in a
Vedic hymn, as the one who has immortal juice, who gives
the pearl.[168] The humours of the cow have passed to the
herb, and from the herb to the pearl; and the naturalness
of this figure recommends itself to our modern conception,
for when we would describe a diamond or other gem as of
the purest quality, we say it is a diamond or gem of the
first water. Even the pearl-moon and the pearl-sun, from
their ambrosial humours, have a fine water. In the Râmâyaṇam,[169]
at the moment of production of ambrosia from
the stirring up of the milky sea, we see, near the healthful
herb, the gem Kâustubhas, the same which we afterwards
find on the breast of the sun-god Vishṇus, and which is
sometimes his navel; whence Vishṇus, in the Mahâbhâratam,[170]
is saluted by the name of ratnanâbhas—that is
to say, he who has a pearl for his navel; as the sun is in
like manner saluted by the name of Maṇịçṛiñgas—i.e.,
[Pg 55]who has horns of pearls.[171] In the Râmâyaṇam,[172] the
bright-shining grass and the solar disc appear together
on the summit of the mountain Gandhamâdanas; no
sooner does he smell its odour than the solar hero
Lakshmaṇas, delivered from the iron that oppressed him,
lifts himself up from the ground; i.e., scarcely has the
sun formed his disc, and begun to shine like a celestial
gem, than the sun-hero, whom the monsters had vanquished
during the night, rises in victory. And it is
on the summit of the mountain that, with a mountain
metal of a colour similar to that of the young sun,[173] the
sun Râmas imprints a dazzling mark on the forehead of
the dawn Sîtâ, as if to be able to recognise her—that is
to say, he places himself upon the forehead of the aurora
or dawn. When the sun Râmas is separated from the
dawn Sîtâ, he sends her in recognition, as a symbol of his
disc, his own ring, which appears again in the famous
ring given by King Dushmantas to the beautiful Çakuntalâ,
the daughter of the nymph, and by means of which
alone the lost bride can be recognised by the young and
forgetful king; and Sîtâ sends back to Râmas, by the
hands of Hanumant, as a sign of recognition, the dazzling
ornament which Râmas had one day placed upon her
forehead in an idyllic scene among the mountains known
to them alone. This ring of recognition, this magic
pearl, often turns up in the Hindoo legends. It is enough
for me to indicate here the two most famous examples.

The aurora who possesses the pearl becomes she who
[Pg 56]is rich in pearls, and herself a source of pearls; but the
pearl, as we have already seen, is not only the sun, it is
also the moon. The moon is the friend of the aurora;
she comforts her in the evening under her persecutions;
she loads her with presents during the night, accompanies
and guides her, and helps her to find her husband.

In the Râmâyaṇam, I frequently find the moon as a
beneficent fairy, who succours the dawn Sîtâ; for the
moon, as ráganîkaras (she who gives light to the night),
assumes a benignant aspect. We have already said that
the moon is generally a male in India; but as full moon
and new moon it assumes, even in the Vedic texts, a
feminine name. In a Vedic hymn, Râkâ, the full moon
is exhorted to sew the work with a needle that cannot be
broken.[174] Here we have the moon personified as a marvellous
workwoman, a fairy with golden fingers, a good
fairy; and in this character we find her again in the
Râmâyaṇam, under the form of the old Anasûyâ, who
anoints the darkened Sîtâ (for Sîtâ, like the Vedic girl, is
dark and ugly during the night, or winter, when she is
hidden) in the wood, with a divine unguent; gives her a
garland, various ornaments, and two beauteous garments,
which are always pure (as, i.e., they do not touch the
earth, like the cows of the Vedic dawn, who do not cover
themselves with dust), and similar in colour to the young
sun;[175] in all which the fairy moon appears as working
during the night for the aurora, preparing her luminous
garments—the two garments, of which the one is for the
evening and the other for the morning, one lunar and of
[Pg 57]silver, the other solar and of gold—in order that she may
please her husband Râmas, or the sun Vishṇus, who is
glad when he sees her thus adorned. In the Svayamprabhâ,
too, we meet with the moon as a good fairy, who,
from the golden palace which she reserves for her friend
Hemâ (the golden one), is during a month the guide, in
the vast cavern, of Hanumant and his companions, who
have lost their way in the search of the dawn Sîtâ. To
come out of this cavern, it is necessary to shut the eyes,
in order not to see its entrance; all Hanumant’s companions
are come out, but Taras, who shines like the
moon,[176] would wish to return. The same moon can be
recognised in the benignant fairies Triǵâtâ, Suramâ,
and Saramâ, who announce to Sîtâ that her husband
will soon arrive, and that she will soon see him. The
first, while the arrival of Râmas is imminent, dreams
that the monsters, dressed in yellow, are playing in a
lake of cow’s milk;[177] at the time when Suramâ announces
to Sîtâ the approach of Râmas, Sîtâ shines by her own
beauty, like the opening dawn;[178] finally, Saramâ (who
seems to be the same as Suramâ), whom Sîtâ calls her
twin-sister (sahodarâ), penetrating underground, like
the moon Proserpine, also announces to Sîtâ her approaching
deliverance at the hands of Râmas.[179] As to
Triǵaṭâ, it is not difficult to recognise in her the moon,
when we remember that Trǵiaṭas is a name which is
frequently given to the evening sun, or rising moon, Çivas,
who is represented with the moon for a diadem, whence his
[Pg 58]other name of Çandraćûḍas (having the moon for his diadem).
Suramâ I believe to be, not a mythical, but only an
orthographical variation, and more incorrect one, of Saramâ,
whose relation to the moon we shall see in detail when
we come to the chapter which treats of the mythical dog.

Thus far we have a moon fairy; but we find the moon
designated at other times in the Râmâyaṇam by its common
masculine name. The guardian of the forest of
honey, Dadhimukhas, in which forest, with its honey, the
heroes who accompany Sîtâ enjoy themselves, is said to
be generated by the god Lunus.[180] And the moon, who
assists Hanumant in his search of Sîtâ, is said to shine
like a white bull with a sharpened horn, with a full horn;[181]
in which we come back to the moon as a horned animal,
and to the cornucopia. Moreover, we find the same lunar
horn again in the city of Çṛiñgaveram, where first the
solar hero Râmas, and afterwards his brother Bharatas,
are hospitably received when the sun is darkened,[182] by
Guhas, king of the black Wishâdâs, who also is of the
colour of a black cloud;[183] and Râmas and Bharatas take
their departure in the morning from Guhas, who is said
to wander always in the forests.[184] Now, this Guhas, who,
though always hidden, yet wishes to entertain the solar
hero during the night with presents of the town of
Çṛiñgaveram, appears to me to be just another form of
the solar hero himself, who enters and hides himself in the
night, hospitably received in the lunar habitation, another
form of the god Indras, whom we have seen in the Ṛigvedas
[Pg 59]united during the night to Indus or Somas—that is, to
the moon—and who, in the Râmâyaṇam[185], when Sîtâ is
in the power of the monster, comes down during the
night to console her, lulls her keepers to sleep, and
nourishes her with the ambrosial milk (with Soma, the
moon, the same moon which, in the Ṛigvedas, the dawn,
the girl beloved of Indras, and whom therefore he does
good to, brings him as a present), encouraging her with
the prospect of the near advent of Râmas, the deliverer.

But it remains to us to adduce clearer evidence to show
that in the Râmâyaṇam Râmas is the sun, and Sîtâ the
dawn, or aurora.

Without taking into account that Râmas is the most
popular personification of Vishṇus, and that Vishṇus is
often the solar hero (although he is not seldom identified
with the moon), let us see how Râmas manifests himself,
and what he does in the Râmâyaṇam to vindicate especially
his solar nature.

It is my opinion that the best way to prove this is to
show how Râmas performs the very same miracles that Indras
does. Râmas, like Indras, gives, while still young,
extraordinary proofs of his strength; Râmas, like Indras,
achieves his greatest enterprises while he is himself
hidden; Râmas, like Indras, vanquishes the monster,
reconquers Sîtâ, and enjoys of right the company of his
wife. Till Râmas goes into the forests, as Indras into
the clouds and shadows, his great epopee does not begin.
Indras has for assistants the winds (the Marutas); Râmas
has for his greatest help Hanumant, the son of the wind
(Mârutâtmagah);[186] Hanumant amuses himself with the
monsters, as the wind with the archer-clouds of the
thousand-eyed Indras;[187] and it is said that Râmas gets on
[Pg 60]Hanumant’s back, as Indras does on the elephant Âiravatas.
The elephant with a proboscis is not unfrequently
substituted, in the brâhmanic tradition, for the horned
bull of the Vedâs.[188] But the bull Indras is reproduced in
the bull Râmas, and the monkeys who assist Râmas have
kept at least the tail of the Vedic cows, the helpers of
Indras, whence their generic name of golâñgulâs (who
have cows’ tails).[189] The bow with which Râmas shoots the
monsters is made of a horn, whence his name of Çârngadhanvant
(he who shoots with the horn);[190] Râmas receives
the shower of hostile darts, as a bull upon its horns
the abundant rains of autumn.[191] Sîtâ herself calls both
her Râmas and his brother Lakshmaṇas by the name of
siṇharshabhâu,[192] or the lion and the bull, which are conjoined
so frequently in the mythology, on account of
equal strength; hence the terror of the lion when he hears
the bull bellow in the first book of the Pańćatantram,
and in all the numerous Eastern and Western variations
of that book. Indras has his conflicts in the cloudy,
rainy, and gloomy sky; these are also the battle-fields of
Râmas. The names of the monsters of the Râmâyaṇam,
as, for instance, Vidyuǵǵivas (he who lives upon thunderbolts),
Vaǵrodarî (she who has thunderbolts in her
stomach), Indraǵit (who vanquishes Indras with magical
arts), Meghanâdas (thundering cloud),[193] and others, show
[Pg 61]us the nature of the battle. In the battle-field of Râmas,
instead, the assisting hero is now a bull (ṛishabhas), now
an ox’s eye (gavâkshas), now gavayas (bos gavœus), and
beings of similar appellations, which remind us of the
Vedic deities. Indras strikes with lightning the celestial
ocean; Râmas, an Indian Xerxes, chastises the sea with
burning arrows.[194] Indras, in the Ṛigvedas, crosses the
sea and passes ninety-nine rivers; Râmas crosses the
ocean upon a bridge of mountains, in carrying which
Hanumant, the son of the wind, shows himself peculiarly
skilful; the winds carry the clouds, which we have seen,
in the language of the Vedâs, represented as mountains.
And that clouds, and not real mountains, are here spoken
of, we deduce from observing, as we read, that while the
animal army of Râmas carries the bridge on to the ocean,
or the winds carry the clouds into the sky, the sun cannot
burn the weary monkey-workers, because that clouds
arise and cover it, rain falls, and the wind expires.[195] The
field of this epic battle is evidently the same as that of
the mythical battle of Indras. And in the Râmâyaṇam
we find at every step the similarity of the combatants to
the dark clouds, the bellowing clouds, the clouds carried
by the wind. The forest which Râmas goes through is
compared to a group of clouds.[196] The name of wanderer
by night (raǵanîćaras), afterwards given frequently in
the Râmâyaṇam, to the monster whom Râmas combats,
implies, of course, that the battle is fought by night.
The fact that, as we read, the witch Çûrpaṇakhâ comes
in winter to seduce Râmas whilst he is in the forest,[197] and
[Pg 62]the monster Kumbhakarṇas awakens after six months’
sleep, like a rainy cloud which increases towards the end
of summer (tapânte),[198] shows us that the epic poem of
Râmas embraces, besides the nightly battle of the sun
over darkness, also the great annual battle of the sun in
winter to recover and rejoin the spring. Anyhow, it is
always a battle of the sun against the monster of darkness.
Râmas, in the very beginning of the great poem,
says to his brother Lakshmaṇas:—”See, O Lakshmaṇas,
Mârićas is come here with his followers, making a noise
like thunder, and with him the wanderer by night
Subâhus; thou wilt see them to-day, like a mass of
dark clouds, dispersed by me in a moment, like clouds
by the wind.”[199] Here we find almost the whole battle of
Indras.

And similar battles in the clouds are found in several
other episodes of the Râmâyaṇam. The dart of Râmas
falls upon the monster Kharas (the monster ass), as upon
a great tree falls the thunderbolt hurled by Indras.[200]
Heroes and monsters combat with stones and rocks from
the great mountain, and fall, overthrown on the earth,
like mountains. The monster Râvaṇas carries off Sîtâ
with the magic of the wind and the tempest.[201] Heroes
and monsters fight with trunks of trees from the great
forest; moreover, the trunks themselves, having become
monsters, join the fray, stretch out their strange arms,
and devour the hero in their cavities. And here we come
upon the interesting legend of Kabandhas, in which we
[Pg 63]find again the forests and trees combating, and the barrel
of the Vedâs carried by the divine bull. The Dânavâs
or demons also appear, in the Mahâbhâratam,[202] in the
forms of sounding barrels. In the Râmâyaṇam, the
highest of the demons (dânavottamah) is called by the
name of Kabandhas (barrel and trunk), compared to a
black thundering cloud, and represented as an enormous
trunk, having one large yellowish eye, and an enormous
devouring mouth in his chest.[203] In Tuscany, we say of
water that gushes copiously out of a reservoir, that it
pours as from a barrel’s mouth. The monster Kabandhas
draws towards himself, with his long arms, the two brothers
Râmas and Lakshmaṇas (compared several times in the
Râmâyaṇam[204] to the two Açvinâu, who resemble each
other in everything). Râmas and Lakshmaṇas, i.e., the
two Açvinâu, the morning and evening, the spring and
autumn suns, the two twilights, who, in a passage of the
Râmâyaṇam, are called the two ears of Râmas, cut off the
two extremities, the two long arms, of the monster Kabandhas;
upon which the trunk, able no longer to support
itself, falls to the ground. The fallen monster then relates
to the two brothers that he was once a beautiful demon;
but that, by a malediction, Indras one day made his head
and legs enter his body; his arms having been lacerated
[Pg 64]by the two brothers, the monster is disenchanted from this
malediction, and having resumed his form of a splendid
demon, he ascends to heaven in a luminous form. Here
we have the all-radiant sun shut up in the cloud, he being
the yellow eye, the burning mouth, of Kabandhas, and, in
union with the cloud, forming a hideous monster; the
hero comes to destroy his monstrous form, and the monster
thanks him, for thus he becomes the glorious god,
the splendid being, the handsome prince he was before.
Râmas who delivers Kabandhas from his monstrous
form by cutting off his two arms, is the sun Râmas
coming forth from the gloomy forest, and uncovering the
sky in the east and in the west. Râmas delivering
Kabandhas is simply the sun delivering himself from
the monster of gloom and cloud that envelops him. And,
indeed, the greater part of the myths have their origin in
the plurality of appellations given to the same phenomenon.
Each appellation grows into a distinct personality,
and the various personalities fight with each other.
Hence the hero who delivers himself becomes the deliverer
of the hero, viewed as a different person from the hero;
the monstrous form which envelops the hero is often
his own malediction; the hero who comes to kill this
monstrous form is his benefactor.[205]

This theory of the monster who thanks the hero that
kills him, agrees with what we find on several other
occasions in the Râmâyaṇam, as in the case of the stag
Marîćas,[206] which, after being killed by Râmas, re-ascends
to heaven in a luminous form; of the sea-monster, which
Hanumant destroys, and restores to its primitive form,
that of a celestial nymph; of the old Çavarî, who, after
having seen Râmas, sacrifices herself in the fire, and
[Pg 65]re-ascends young and beautiful to heaven (the usual Vedic
young girl, the dawn whom, ugly during the night,
Indras, by taking off her ugly skin, restores to beauty in
the morning); an episodical variation of what afterwards
happens to Sîtâ herself, who, having been ugly when in
the power of the monster Râvaṇas, recovers her beauty
by the sacrifice of fire, in order to prove her innocence to
her husband Râmas, and shines again a young girl, like
the young sun, adorned with burning gold, and wearing a
red dress;[207] and when Râmas comes near (like the young
dawn, when she sees her husband), she resembles the
first light (Prabhâ), the wife of the sun.[208] This Sîtâ,
daughter of Ǵanakas (the generator), whom the Tâittiriya
Brâhmaṇam calls Savitar[209] or the sun, seems to me to
be no other than the dawn, the daughter of light, the
daughter of Indras, the god of the Vedic texts. These,
indeed, sometimes represent Sûryâ, the daughter of the
sun, as the lover of the moon (who is then masculine);
but we find more frequently the loves of the dawn and
the sun, of the beautiful heroine and the splendid solar
hero, while the moon is generally the brother, or the pitying
sister of the hero and the heroine, the beneficent old
man, the foreseeing fairy, the good hostess, who aids
them in their enterprises; although we also find the dawn
as a sister of the sun and his succourer. In fact, the
Buddhist tradition of the legend of Râmas, illustrated by
Weber,[210] represents Sîtâ to us as the sister of the two
[Pg 66]brothers Râmas and Lakshmaṇas, who go into banishment
for twelve years to escape the persecutions of
their cruel step-mother (of whom the Kâikeyî of the
Râmâyaṇam offers a confused image), in the same way
as the Vedic dawn is united to the twin Açvinâu; and
the same tradition makes Râmas, at the termination of
his exile, end with marrying his own sister Sîtâ, as the sun
marries the dawn. And the fact of Sîtâ being not born
from the womb, but produced from the ground, a girl of
heavenly beauty, destined to be the reward of valour,[211]
not only does not exclude her relationship with the dawn,
but confirms it; for we have seen the dawn rise from the
mountain, as the daughter of light and the sun, whom
the young sun wins for his bride, as a reward for his
wonderful skill as an archer against the monsters of darkness;
and we have seen that the dawn marries only her
predestined husband, and her predestined husband is he
who performs the greatest miracles, restores her lost
gaiety, and most resembles her. We have just seen the
old Çavarî and the ugly Sîtâ, at the sight of the sun
Râmas, deliver themselves in the fire from every mortal
danger, and become beautiful and happy once more.

But the concord between the mythical husband and
wife is not more steadfast than that of mortal couples.
Râmas is very apt to be suspicious. Having returned to
his kingdom of Ayodhyâ, he allows himself to brood upon
what his subjects may say of him for having taken back
his wife, after she had been in the hands of the monster
(they were not present at the first fire-sacrifice of Sîtâ);
Râmas reveals his suspicions to Sîtâ, and blames the evil-speaking
of the citizens for originating them; she submits[Pg 67]
a second time to the trial by fire, but, offended by
his continual suspicions, she flees from her husband, and
on a car of light, drawn by serpents (Pannagâs), goes
down again underground (which appears to mean simply
this—the dawn, or spring, marries the sun in the morning,
or she stays all day, or all summer, in his kingdom,
and in the evening, or in the autumn, goes down into
the shades of night, or of winter).[212] It is an indiscretion
of the husband which causes his wife to abandon him.

Thus, in the Ṛigvedas, we have seen Urvaçî, the first
of the dawns, flee from the sun Purûravas. In Somadevas,[213]
the king Purûravas loses his wife Urvaçî, because
he has let it be known in heaven that she was with him;
in Kâlidâsas’s drama of Vikramorvaçî, the king Purûravas,
having helped Indras in the fight, receives from
him Urvaçî to wife, with whom he engages to stay till a
child is born to them; the king, shortly after having
espoused Urvaçî, looks at another nymph, Udakavatî (the
watery). Urvaçî, offended, flees; she enters a wood to
hide herself, and is transformed into a creeper. In the
brâhmanic tradition of the Yaġurvedas, referred to at
length by Professor Max Müller, in his “Oxford Essays,”
Purûravas loses sight of Urvaçî, because he has let himself
be seen by her without his regal dress, or even
naked.

We find yet another similar legend in the Mahâbhâratam.[214]
The wise and splendid Çântanus goes to the chase
on the banks of the Gañgâ, and there finds a beautiful
nymph whom he becomes enamoured of. The nymph
responds to his suit, and consents to remain with him,
on condition that he will never say anything displeasing
[Pg 68]to her, whatever she may do or meditate; and the
enamoured king assents to the grave condition. They
live together happily, for the king yields to the nymph
in everything; but in the course of time, eight sons are
born to them; the nymph has already thrown seven into
the river, and the king, although inwardly full of grief,
dares not say anything to her; but when she is about to
throw the last one in, the king implores her not to do it,
and challenges her to say who she is. The nymph then
confesses to him that she is the Gañgâ itself personified,
and that the eight sons born to their loves are human
personifications of the eight divine Vasavas, who, by
being thrown into the Gañgâ, are liberated from the
curse of the human form: the only Vasus who is pleased
to remain among men is Dyâus (the sky), in the form of
the eunuch Bhîshmas, whom Çântanus would not allow
to be thrown into the waters. The same curse falls upon
the Vasavas for having ravished the cow of abundance
from the penitent Apavas. We shall find a legendary
subject analogous to this one of Çântanus in several of
the popular tales of Europe, with this difference that, in
European tradition, it is generally the husband who
abandons his indiscreet partner. The Hindoo tradition,
however, also offers us an example of the husband who
abandons his wife, in the wise Ǵaratkarus, who marries
the sister of the king of the serpents, on condition that
she never does anything to displease him.[215] One day the
wise man sleeps; evening comes on; he ought to be
awakened in order to say his evening prayers; if he does
not say them, he does not do his duty, and she would do
wrong did she not warn him. If she awaken him, he[Pg 69]
will be enraged. What is to be done? She takes the
latter course. The wise man awakes, becomes enraged, and
abandons her, after she had given him a son.[216]

The glowing aspect of the sky, morning and evening,
suggested the idea, now of a splendid nuptial feast, now of
a fire. In this fire, sometimes the witch who persecutes
the hero and heroine is burnt, and sometimes the hero
and heroine themselves are immolated. The sacrifice of
Çavarî and of Sîtâ, who are delivered by the sun Râmas,
is only a variation of that of Çunaḥçepas, liberated by the
dawn in the Ṛigvedas. The story of Çunaḥçepas has
already been made known by Professor Rodolph Roth,[217]
and by Professor Max Müller,[218] who translated it from the
Âitareya-brâhmaṇam; and I refer the reader to these
translations, as well as to the English version which Professor
Martin Haugh has given us of all the Âitareya. I
shall, therefore, here give but a short account of it, with
a few observations apropos to the subject in hand.

The king Hariçćandras has no sons; the god Varuṇas
the coverer, the gloomy, the watery, the king of the
waters,[219] obliges him to promise that he will sacrifice
to him whatever is born to him. The king promises; a
child is born, who is named the red (Rohitas). Varuṇas
[Pg 70]claims him; the father begs him to wait till the child has
cut his teeth, then till his first teeth are cast, then till he
is able to bear armour. It is evident that the father wishes
to wait till his son be strong enough to defend himself
against his persecutor, Varuṇas. Varuṇas thereupon
claims him in a more resolute manner, and Hariçćandras
informs the son himself that he must be given up
in sacrifice. Rohitas takes his bow and flees into the
woods, where he lives by the chase. This first part of
the legend corresponds with those numerous European
popular tales, in which, now the devil, now the aquatic
monster, now the serpent, demands from a father the son
who has just been born to him without his knowledge.
The second part of the story of Çunaḥçepas shows us the
hero in the forest; he has taken his bow with him, and
hence, like Râmas in the Râmâyaṇam, who has scarcely
entered the forest than he begins to hunt, Rohitas turns
hunter, and hunts for the six years during which he
remains in the forest. But his chase is unsuccessful; he
wanders about in quest of some one to take his place as
the victim of Varuṇas; at last he finds the brâhmaṇas
Aġigartas, who consents to give his own second son,
Çunaḥçepas, for a hundred cows. The first-born being
particularly dear to the father, and the third being especially
beloved by the mother, cannot be sacrificed; the
second son, therefore, is ceded to Varuṇas, the gloomy
god of night, who, like Yamas, binds all creatures with
his cords. We have already observed how the middle
son is the son of the celestial cow Aditis, the hidden sun,
the sun during and covered by the darkness of night, or,
in other words, bound by the fetters of Varuṇas—and
it is his own father who binds him with those fetters.
His sacrifice begins in the evening. During the night he
appeals to all the gods. At last Indras, flattered by the[Pg 71]
praise heaped upon him, concedes to him a golden chariot,
upon which, with praises to the Açvinâu, and help from
the dawn, Çunaḥçepas, unbound from the fetters of
Varuṇas, is delivered. These fetters of Varuṇas, which
imprison the victim, bound and sacrificed by his own
father, help us to understand the second part of the
European popular tale of the son sacrificed against his
will to the demon by his father; for Çunaḥçepas, towards
the end of the European story, takes the form of a horse,
Varuṇas that of a demon, and the fetters of Varuṇas are
the bridle of the horse, which the imprudent father sells
to the demon, together with his son in the shape of a
horse;[220] the beautiful daughter of the demon (the white
one, who, as usual, comes out of the black monster)
delivers the young man transformed into a horse; as in
the Vedic story of Çunaḥçepas, it is explicitly the dawn
who is the young girl that delivers.[221] Varuṇas is called
in the Râmâyaṇam the god who has in his hand a rope
(pâçahastas); his dwelling is on Mount Astas, where the
sun goes down, and which it is impossible to touch, because
it burns, in an immense palace, the work of
Viçvakarman, which has a hundred rooms, lakes with
nymphs, and trees of gold.[222] Evidently, Varuṇas is here,
not a different form, but a different name of the god
Yamas, the pâçin, or furnished with rope, the constrictor
par excellence; for we are to suppose the magic display
of golden splendour in the evening heavens not so
much the work of the sun itself, as produced by the
[Pg 72]gloomy god who sits on the mountain, who invests and surprises
the solar hero, and drags him into his kingdom. As
to Hariçćandras and Aġigartas, Rohitas and Çunaḥçepas,
they appear, in my opinion, to be themselves different
names for not only the same celestial phenomenon, but
the same mythical personage. Hariçćandras is celebrated
in the legends as a solar king; Rohitas, his son, the red
one, is his alter ego, as well as his successor Çunaḥçepas.
Hariçćandras, moreover, who promises to sacrifice his son
to Varuṇas, seems to differ little, if at all, from Aġigartas,
who sells his own son for the sacrifice. The Râmâyaṇam,[223]
has given us a third name for the same unnatural father,[224]
in Viçvâmitras, who asks his own sons to sacrifice themselves,
instead of Çunaḥçepas, who is under his protection,
and as they refuse to obey, he curses them.

The variation of the same legend which we find in the
Harivanças[225] proves these identities, and adds a new and
notable particular. The wife of Viçvâmitras designs, on
account of her poverty, to barter her middle son for a
hundred cows, and with that view already keeps him
tied with a rope like a slave. The grandfather of Rohitas,
Hariçćandras’s father, Triçañkus, wanders through the
woods, and delivers this son of Viçvâmitras, whose family
he thenceforth protects and maintains. The deeds of
Triçañkus, who begs of Vasishṭas to be allowed to ascend
to heaven bodily, and who, by grace of Viçvâmitras,
obtains instead the favour of remaining suspended in the
[Pg 73]air like a constellation, are also attributed to his son
Hariçćandras; whence we may affirm, without much risk
of contradiction, that as Triçañkus is another name for
his son Hariçćandras, so Hariçćandras is another name for
his son Rohitas, and that, therefore, the Triçañkus of the
Harivaṅças is the same as the Rohitas of the Âitareya,
with this difference, that Triçañkus buys the son destined
to the sacrifice in order to free him, while Rohitas buys
him to free himself. But the first hundred cows given
by Triçañkus to Viçvâmitras do not suffice for him, and
the fruits of his hunting in the forest are not enough to
maintain the family, a circumstance which weighs upon
him almost as much as if the family were his own; upon
which, in order to save Viçvâmitras, in order to save
Viçvâmitras’s son, and, we can perhaps add, to save himself,
he resolves to sacrifice, to kill the beautiful and
dearly-prized wife of Vasishṭas (the very luminous). I
have said the wife of Vasishṭas, but the Harivaṅças
says, speaking strictly, it was the cow of Vasishṭas who
was killed. But we know from the Râmâyaṇam[226] that
this cow of Vasishṭas, this kâmadhuk or kâmadhenus,
which yields at pleasure all that is wished for, this cow
of abundance, is kept by Vasishṭas, under the name of
Çabâlâ, as his own wife. Viçvâmitras is covetous of her;
he demands her from Vasishṭas, and offers a hundred
cows for her, the exact price which, in the Harivaṅças,
he receives from Triçañkus for his own son. Vasishṭas
answers that he will not give her for a hundred, nor for
a thousand, nor even for a hundred thousand cows, for
Çabâlâ is his gem, his riches, his all, his life.[227] Viçvâmitras
carries her off; she returns to the feet of Vasishṭas,
[Pg 74]and bellows; her bellowing calls forth armies, who come
out of her own body; the hundred sons of Viçvâmitras are
burned to ashes by them. These armies which come out
of the body of Vasishṭas’s cow remind us again of the
Vedic cow, from which come forth winged darts, or birds,
by which the enemies are filled with terror. Vasishṭas is
a form of Indras; his cow is here the rain-cloud. Viçvâmitras,
who wishes to ravish the cow from Vasishṭas,
often assumes monstrous forms in the Hindoo legends,
and is almost always malignant, perverse, and revengeful.
His hundred sons burned to cinders by Vasishṭas remind
us, from one point of view, of the hundred cities of Çambaras
destroyed by Indras, and the hundred perverse
Dhṛitarâshtrides of the Mahâbhâratam; whence his
name, Viçvâmitras, which may also mean the enemy
of all (viçva-amitras), would agree well with his almost
demoniacal character.

This story of the cow of Vasishṭas, whose relationship
with the legend of Çunaḥçepas cannot be doubted, brings
us back to the animal forms of heroes and heroines from
which we started. In the story of Vasishṭas, the cow-cloud,
the cow çabâlâ, or the spotted-cow, plays in the
epic poem the part of the cow Aditis, the cow pṛiçnis
(spotted, variegated), with which we are already familiar
in the Vedic hymns. This cow is benignant towards the
god, or the hero, or the wise Vasishṭas, as the pṛiçnis is to
the god Indras. But we have seen in the Ṛigvedas
itself the cloud as the enemy of the god, and represented
as a female form of the monster, as his sister. This
sister generally tries to seduce the god, promising to
deliver into his hands the monster her brother, and she
sometimes succeeds, as the witch Hidimbâ of the Mahâbhâratam,
who gives up her brother, the monster
Hidimbas, into the hands of the hero Bhîmas, who thereupon[Pg 75]
espouses her. On the other hand, Çûrpaṇakhâ, the
sister of the monster Râvaṇas, does not succeed in her
intent; making herself beautiful, she endeavours to win
the affection of the hero Râmas; but being ridiculed by
him and by Lakshmaṇas, she becomes deformed, and
sends forth cries like a cloud in the rainy season,[228] exciting
her brothers to annihilate Râmas.

The same cloud-monster is found again in the Râmâyaṇam,
under the name of Dundubhis, in the form of a
terrible buffalo with sharpened horns.[229] The buffalo, as a
wild animal, is often chosen to represent the principle of
evil, in the same way as the bull, increaser of the bovine
herds, is selected as the image of good. This bellowing
buffalo, whence his name of Dundubhis (drum), strikes
and knocks with his two horns at the door of the cavern[230]
of the son of Indras (Bâlin), the king of the monkeys.
But Bâlin takes Dundubhis by the horns, throws him on
the ground, and destroys him.

Dundus is also a name given to the father of Kṛishṇas,
or the black one, who in the Ṛigvedas is still a demon,
and only later becomes the god of cows and cowherds, a
govindas, or pastor par excellence.[231] Indras, his enemy in
the Vedas, having fallen from heaven, he became one of
[Pg 76]the most popular gods, and even sometimes the most
popular form of the deity. In the Mahâbhâratam, for
instance, he is almost the deus ex machina of the battles
between the Pâṇḍavas and the Dhârtarâshṭrâs, and presents
many analogies to the Zeus of the Iliad; whereas
Indras plays only a part in the episodes, the rain-giver and
thunderer being often forgotten for the black one who prepares
and hurls the light. But the fall of Indras begins in
the Vedâs themselves. In the Yaǵurvedas, Viçvarûpas, the
son of Tvashṭar, whom Indras kills, appears as no less than
the purohitas or high-priest of the gods, and son of a
daughter of the Asurâs; he has three heads, of which one
drinks the ambrosia, another the spirituous drink, while
the third eats food. Indras cuts off Viçvarûpas’s three
heads, in revenge of the one which drinks his ambrosia;
he is therefore charged with having killed a Brâhman,
and decried as a brâhmanicide.[232] In the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam,[233]
the criminality of Indras in this regard is
confirmed, to which the Kâushîtaki-Upanishad also
refers. In the seventh book of the Râmâyaṇam, even
the multiform monster Râvaṇas is represented as a great
penitent, whom Brâhman fills with supreme grace; in
the sixth book, the son of the wind, Hanumant, cuts off
the three heads of the Râvanide monster Triçiras (having
three heads), as one day Indras cut off the three heads
of the monster Vṛitras, son of Tvashṭar;[234] and he cuts all
the three heads off together (samas), as the hero of the
[Pg 77]European popular tales must cut off, at a blow, the three
heads of the serpent, the wizard, otherwise he is powerless,
and able to do nothing. The monster, like the hero, seems
to have a special affinity for the number three: hence
the three heads of Triçiras, as also the three brothers of
Lañkâ—Râvaṇas, the eldest brother, who reigns; Kumbhakarṇas,
the middle brother, who sleeps; Vibhishaṇas, the
third brother, whom the two others do not care about, but
who alone is just and good, and who alone obtains the gift
of immortality.[235] We have evidently here again the three
Vedic brothers; the two eldest in demoniacal form, the
youngest a friend of the divine hero, and who, by the victory
of Râmas over the monster Râvaṇas, obtains the kingdom
of Lañkâ. As to the brothers Râmas and Lakshmaṇas,
and the brothers Bâlin and Sugrîvas, their natural place is
in the story of the two twins, which will be referred to in
the next chapter, although Hanumant, the son of the wind,
figures second to them in the character of strong brother.

The three interesting heroic brothers come out more
prominently in the Mahâbhâratam, where of the five
Pâṇdavas brothers, three stay on one side, and are
Yudhishṭhiras, son of the god Yamas, the wise brother;
Bhîmas (the terrible), or Vṛikodâras (wolf’s belly), son of
Vâyus (the wind), the strong brother (another form of
Hanumant, in company with whom he is also found in
the Mahâbhâratam, on Mount Gandhamâdanas); and
Argunas (the splendid), the son of Indras, the genial,
dexterous, fortunate, victorious brother, he who wins the
bride. The first brother gives the best advice; the
second shows proof of greatest strength; the third
brother wins, conquers the bride. They are precisely
the three Vedic brothers Ṛibhavas, Ekatas, Dvîtas, and[Pg 78]
Tritas, in the same relationships to one another and with
the same natures; only the legend is amplified.[236] As to
their other brothers, twins, born of another mother,
Nakulas and Sahadevas, they are the sons of the two
Açvinâu, and feebly repeat in the Mahâbhâratam the
exploits of the two celestial twins. Bhîmas or Vṛikodâras,
the second brother, is considered the strongest, (balavatâṁ
çreshthaḥ), because immediately after birth, i.e., scarcely
has he come forth out of his mother (like the Vedic
Marutas), than he breaks the rock upon which he falls,
because he breaks his fetters as soon as he is bound
with them (like Hanumant when he becomes the prisoner
of Râvaṇas), because he carries his brothers during the
night (as Hanumant carries Râmas), as he flees from the
burning house prepared by the impious Duryodhanas
(i.e., from the burning sky of evening), and because in
the kingdom of serpents, where Duryodhanas threw him
down (that is, the night), he drinks the water of strength.
A serpent, wishing to benefit Bhîmas, says to Vasukis,
king of the serpents—”Let there be given to him as
much strength as he can drink from that cistern in which
is placed the strength of a thousand serpents.”[237] Bhîmas,
at one draught, drinks the whole cisternful; and with
similar expedition, he drains consecutively eight cisterns.[238]
The first-born of the Pânḍavas is dear to his
father Yamas, the god of justice, Dharmarâǵas,—and is
[Pg 79]himself indeed called Dharmarâǵas; and when he prepares
himself to ascend into heaven, the god Yamas
follows him in the form of a dog: by his skill in solving
enigmas, he saves his brother Bhîmas from the king of
the serpents. The third brother, Arǵunas, son of Indras,
is the Benjamin of the Vedic supreme God. Indras welcomes
him with festivals in heaven, whither Arǵunas had
gone to find him. Arǵunas is an infallible archer, like
Indras; like Indras, he several times regains the cows
from the robbers or from the enemies; and, like Indras,
he wins and conquers his bride; he is born by the assistance
of all the celestials; he is invincible (aġayas); he is
the best son (varaḥ putras);[239] he alone of the three
brothers has compassion on his master Droṇas and delivers
him from an aquatic monster.[240]

But there is yet another particular which shows the
resemblance between the three brothers Pâṇḍavas and the
three brothers of the Vedas; it is their dwelling, hidden
in the palace of the king Virâṭa, in the fourth book of the
Mahâbhâratam. They are exiled from the kingdom, like
Râmas; they flee from the persecution of their enemies,
now into the woods, now, as the Ṛibhavas, disguised as
workmen in the palace of Virâṭas, to whom their presence
brings every kind of happiness.

We meet with these three brothers again, episodically,
in the three disciples of Dhâumyas, in the first book of the
Mahâbhâratam.[241] The first disciple, Upamanyus, takes
his master’s cows out to pasture, and, out of sensitive regard
for his master’s interest, refuses to drink not only
their milk, but even the foam from their mouths, and fasts
till, like to perish of hunger, he bites a leaf of arkapatrâ
(properly, leaf of the sun, the aristolochia indica),
[Pg 80]when he instantly becomes blind. He wanders about and
falls into a well; he there sings a hymn to the Açvinâu,
and they come immediately to deliver him. The second
brother, Uddâlakas, places his body, as a dike, to arrest
the course of the waters. The third brother is Vedas, he
who sees, he who knows, whose disciple Utañkas is himself
in the form of a hero. Utañkas, like the Vedic
Tritas, and the Pâṇḍavas Arǵuṇas, is protected by
Indras. He is sent by the wife of his master to abstract
the earrings of the wife of King Pâushyas. He sets out;
on his way he meets a gigantic bull, and a horseman,
who bids him, if he would succeed, eat the excrement of
the bull; he does so, rinsing his mouth afterwards. He
then presents himself to King Pâushyas and informs him
of his message; the king consigns the earrings to him,
but cautions him to beware of Takshakas, the king of the
serpents. Utañkas says that he is not afraid of him, and
sets out with the earrings; but as he puts down the earrings
upon the shore, in order to bathe, Takshakas presents
himself in the shape of a naked mendicant, whips
them up, and flees away with them. Utañkas follows
him, but Takshakas resumes his serpent form, penetrates
the ground, and descends under it; Utañkas
attempts to follow the serpent, but does not succeed in
cleaving the entrance, which corresponds to the Vedic rock
under which the monster keeps his prey. Indras sees
him tiring himself in vain, and sends his weapon, in order
that it may be for a help to Utañkas; that weapon, or
club, penetrating, opened the cavern.[242] This club, this
weapon of Indras is evidently the thunderbolt.[243] Utañkas
[Pg 81]descends into the kingdom of the serpents, full of infinite
wonders. Indras reappears at his side in the shape of a
horse,[244] and obliges the king, Takshakas, to give back the
earrings; having taken which, Utañkas mounts the
horse, that he may be carried more swiftly to the wife of
his master, from whom he learns that the horseman seen
by him on the way was none other than Indras himself;
his horse, Agnis, the god of fire; the bull, the steed of
Indras, or the elephant Âiravatas; the excrement of the
bull, the ambrosia, which made him immortal in the
kingdom of the serpents. In another episode of the
same (the first) book of the Mahâbhâratam,[245] we again
find Indras busied in the search of the earrings, that is
to say, of the excessively fleshy part hanging from the
ears of Karṇas, the child of the sun, who, as soon as
born, had been abandoned upon the waters. We have
seen above how the two Açvinâu are also represented in
the Râmâyaṇam as the two ears of Vishṇus Râmas (as
the sun and moon are said to be his eyes); hence it
seems to me that these mythical earrings, coveted by
Indras, and protected by him, are nothing else than the
two Açvinâu, the two luminous twilights (in connection
with the sun and the moon), in which Indras, and, still
more than he, the aurora, his wife, take such delight.[246]
[Pg 82]In the commentary of Buddhagoshas on the Buddhist
Dhammapadam, we have the three brothers again; the two
eldest are represented as fleeing from the persecution of
their cruel step-mother; the third brother, Suriyas (Sûryas,
the sun), goes to overtake them. The eldest counsels or
commands, the second lends his aid, and the youngest
fights. The second and third brothers fall into a fountain,
under the power of a monster; the first-born saves them by
his knowledge, as, in the Mahâbhâratam, Yudhishṭhiras,
by his skill in solving riddles, delivers the second brother
from the fetters of the forest of the monster serpent.

This mode of delivering the hero, by propounding a
question or a riddle, is very common in the Hindoo
legends. Even in the Pańćatantram,[247] a Brâhman who
falls under the power of a forest monster who leaps on
his shoulders, frees himself by asking why his feet are so
soft. The monster confesses that it is because, on account
of a vow, he cannot touch the earth with his feet. The
Brâhman then betakes himself to a sacred pond; the
monster wishes to take a bath, and the Brâhman throws
him in; the monster orders him to stay there till he has
bathed and said his orisons. The Brâhman profits by
this opportunity to make his escape, knowing that the
monster will not be able to overtake him, as he cannot
put his feet to the ground. It is the usual vulnerability,
weakness, or imperfection of the hero, or the monster, in
the feet, and, if an animal is spoken of, in the tail.[248]
[Pg 83]The Mahâbhâratam has shown us the three Vedic
brothers, of whom the youngest has fallen into the well;
it also presents to us, in the witch (asurî) Çarmishṭhâ,
daughter of Vṛishaparvan, king of the demons, and in
the nymph Devayânî, daughter of Çukras, who credits
herself with the virtue of Indras as the rain-giver,[249] the
two rival sisters of the Vedas, the good and the evil. In
the Râmâyaṇam,[250] the witch Çûrpanakhâ, who seduces
Râmas, in order to take the place of Sîtâ at his side, is
compared to Çarmishṭhâ, who seduced Nâhushas. In the
Mahâbhâratam, Çarmishṭhâ assumes the guise of Devayânî,
whom she throws into a well. Yayâtis, son of
King Nâhushas, goes to the chase; feeling thirsty, he
stops near the well; from the bottom of the well a young
girl looks up, like a flame of fire.[251] The prince takes her
by the right hand and draws her up; and because in the
marriage ceremony, the bride is taken by the right hand,[252]
the prince Yayâtis is said to marry Devayânî. But even
after she is a wife, Çarmishṭhâ continues to seduce her
husband, to whom she unites herself. Two sons are born
of Devayânî, Yadus and Turvasas, similar to Indras and
Vishṇus (a new form of the twins, of the Açvinâu); three
are born of Çarmishṭhâ, Duhyus, Anus, and Pûrus; and
here also the third brother is the most glorious and
valiant. And in this way the episode is connected with
the essential legend of the Mahâbhâratam, and one and
the same general myth is multiplied into an infinity of
particular legends. As the genealogy of the gods and
heroes is infinite, so is there an infinite number of
forms assumed by the same myth and of the names
[Pg 84]assumed by the same hero. Each day gave birth in the
heavens to a new hero and a new monster, who exterminate
each other, and afterwards revive in an aspect
more or less glorious, according as their names were more
or less fortunate.

It is for the same reason that the sons always recognise
their fathers without having once seen them or even
heard them spoken of; they recognise themselves in
their fathers. Thus Çakuntalâ and Urvacî enable their
mother to find again the husband that she has lost, and
their father to recover his lost wife. Thus in the episode
of Devayânî and Çarmishṭhâ, when the former wishes to
know who is the father of the three sons of Çarmishṭhâ,
so similar to the sons of immortals, she turns to them,
and they tell her at once.

For this fault, Yayâtis, from being young, is fated to
become old. He then beseeches the two eldest of the
three sons that he had by Çarmishṭhâ to take on themselves
the old age of their father; they refuse, but the
third son, Pûrus, out of reverence for his father, consents
to become old in his stead, to give up his youth to his
father. After a thousand years, the king Yayâtis, satiated
with life, restores to his son Pûrus his youth, and although
he is the youngest, along with his youth, the kingdom,
because he found him the only one of the three who
respected the paternal will; and he expels the two eldest
brothers.[253]

Sometimes, however, the blind old father is entirely
abandoned by his sons. Thus the old Dîrghatamas (of the
vast darkness), blind from birth, is deprived of food, and
thrown into the water by his wife and sons,[254] but a heroic
king saves him, in order, by his wife, to beget sons for
[Pg 85]him. We have in Dîrghatamas and Yayâtis, King Lear
in embryo.

In the same legend of Dîrghatamas, we find an
exchange of wives. Queen Sudeshnâ, instead of going
herself, sends her servant-maid, her foster-sister, to be
embraced by Dîrghatamas.[255] In the cunning Sudeshnâ
we have an ancient variation of Queen Berta.

Other blind men occur frequently in the Hindoo
legends. I shall here cite only Andhakas (the blind one)
and Vṛishṇis (the sheep, as the lame one),[256] who appear
in the Harivanças[257] as the two sons of Mâdrî. But we
know from the Mahâbhâratam, that the two sons of
Mâdrî are a human incarnation of the celestial twins, the
Açvinâu; and here we come again upon the blind-lame
one of the Vedas, the solar hero in his twin forms, the
two Açvinâu protected by Indras, and companions of the
dawn.

The Pańćatantram[258] represents the blind and the
crooked, or hunchbacked,[259] in union with the three-breasted
princess (i.e., the triple sister, the aurora in the evening,
the aurora in the night, the aurora in the morning; the
breast of the night nourishing the defective, the monstrous,
which the morning sweeps away). The crooked guides
the blind with a stick; they both marry the three-breasted
[Pg 86]princess. The blind recovers sight by the steam of the
poison of a black serpent, cooked in milk (the darkness
of night, or of winter, mixed with the clearness of day,
or of the snow); he then, being a strongly-built man,
takes the hunchback by the legs, and beats his hunch
against the third and superfluous breast of the princess.
The anterior prominence of the latter, and the posterior
one of the former, enter into their respective bodies;[260]
thus the blind, the crooked, and the three-breasted
princess help and cure each other; the two Açvinâu and
the aurora (or the spring) reappear together in beauty.
The Açvinâu and the aurora also come forth together
from the monstrous shades of night; the Açvinâu contend
for the aurora; as we shall see soon, and in the next
chapter, the delivered bride disputed for by the brothers.

The sun and the aurora flee from each other; this
spectacle has been represented in different ways by the
popular imagination; and one of the most familiar is certainly
that of a beautiful young girl who, running more
quickly than the prince, escapes from him. This incident,
which is already described in the Ṛigvedas, occurs
again in the Mahâbhâratam,[261] in the legend of the loves
of the virgin Tapatî, daughter of the sun (the luminous
and burning aurora, and also the summer season, ardent
as Dahanâ), with the king Saṁvaraṇas, son of the bear
(ṛikshaputras, a kind of Indras). The king Saṁvaraṇas
arrives on horseback with his retinue at the mountain, in
order to hunt; he ties his horse up and begins the chase,
when he sees on the mountain the beautiful girl, the
daughter of the sun, who, covered with ornaments, shines
like the sun; he declares his love and wishes to make her
[Pg 87]his own; she answers not a word, but flees and disappears
like the lightning in the clouds;[262] the king cannot overtake
her, because his horse, while he was hunting, has
died of hunger and thirst; he searches in vain through
the forest, but not seeing her, he throws himself almost
breathless to the ground. As he lies there the beautiful
girl appears again, approaches and wakens him; he again
speaks to her of love, and she answers that he must ask her
father the sun, and then, still quite innocent, she disappears
swiftly on high (ûrdhvam). The king again faints; his
minister sprinkles him with the water of health, and makes
him revive, but he refuses to leave the mountain, and
having dismissed his hunting company, he awaits the
arrival of the great purohitas Vasishṭhas, by whose mediation
he demands from the sun his daughter Tapatî to
wife; the sun consents, and Vasishṭhas reconducts to
Saṁvaraṇas, for the third time, the beautiful girl as his
legitimate wife. The husband and wife live together happily
on the mountain of their loves; but as long as King
Saṁvaraṇas remains with Tapatî upon this mountain, no
rain falls upon the earth; wherefore the king, out of love
for his subjects, returns to his palace, upon which Indras
pours down the rain, and begins again to fructify the earth.[263]

We said a little ago that Vasishṭhas himself caused it
to rain (abhyavarshata); and the mention of Vasishṭhas
reminds us of the particularly rain-giving, cloudy, and
lunar function of his cow Kâdmadhenus, whose wonderful
productions are again described in the Mahâbhâratam.[264]
Besides milk and ambrosia, she yields herbs and gems,
which we have already referred to, as analogous products
[Pg 88]in mythology. The cow of Vasishṭhas is, besides her
tail, celebrated for her breasts, her horns, and even her
ears ending in a point; whence her name of çañkukarṇâ
(the masculine form of which is generally applied to the
ass). And in the Mahâbhâratam, also, the wise Viçvâmitras
is covetous of this wonderful cow; the cow bellows and
drops fire from her tail, and radiates from every part of
her body armies which disperse those of the son of Gadhis.
Viçvâmitras then avenges himself in other ways
upon the sons of Vasishṭhas; having, e.g., become a
cannibal, he eats them.

Vasishṭhas cannot endure the pain this causes him:
he tries to throw himself down from the summit of Mount
Merus, but he falls without hurting himself; he throws
himself into the fire, but does not burn himself; and,
finally, he leaps into the sea, but is not drowned. These
three miracles are accomplished every day by the solar
hero, who throws himself down from the mountain into
the gloomy ocean of night, after having passed through
the burning sky of evening.

Vasishṭhas ends by freeing, with the help of charmed
water, the monster Viçvâmitras from his curse; and the
latter is no sooner delivered from the demon who possessed
him, than he begins again to illumine the forest with his
splendour, as the sun illumines a twilight cloud. The friendships,
enmities, and rivalries of Vasishṭhas and Viçvâmitras
seem to be another version of those of the two Açvinâu,
whom we shall particularly describe in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, it is high time, as the reader will think, to
conclude this part of our study, which treats of the
mythical cow of India. We might easily, indeed, have
made it much larger, had our design been to chain
together, link by link, all the traditions and legends in
which the cow plays a primary or subordinate part. But[Pg 89]
it is better to stop short, lest, by expatiating further, we
should lose sight of the essential aim of our work, and be
tempted into digressions from the legends relating to
beasts to those relating to men; besides, we think that
we have sufficiently proved the thesis of this chapter,
and shown how the principal mythical subjects of the
Vedic hymns are not only preserved, but developed, in the
posterior Hindoo traditions. It is not entirely our fault
if, from cows, we pass so often to princesses, and from
bulls to princes; the myth itself involves and indicates
these transformations. Hence we find the bull Indras,
the winner of the cows, become a winner and a seducer of
women; we see the bull Wind, who aids Indras in the
conquest of the cows, become the violator of a hundred
damsels;[265] we read of the bull and god Rudras, as
husband of Umâ, given up to sensual indulgence for a
hundred years without a pause; that the son of the bull,
or of the wind, Hanumant, does prodigies of valour and
strength for the sake of a beautiful woman, and receives,
as a reward for his zeal, from the king Bharatas, a
hundred thousand cows, sixteen wives, and a hundred
servant-maids.[266] What could Hanumant have done with
so many wives and maids, if he were simply a bull? or
what could he have done with so many cows, if he had
been an ape? It is these inconsistencies which have
caused mythology to be condemned by the crowd of old
but prolific pedants, as a vain science; whereas, on the
contrary, it is precisely these inconsistencies which
raise it, in our esteem, to the rank of a valid science.
[Pg 90]He who handed down to us the feats of Hanumant, took
care also to tell us how he had the faculty of changing
his form at will; and this faculty, attributed to this impersonation
of a celestial phenomenon, is the fruit of one
of the most naïve but just observations of virgin and
grandiose nature.

SECTION III.

The Bull and the Cow in Iranian and Turanian Tradition.

SUMMARY.

The bull the first created in Persian tradition.—The bull of Mithra.—Mithra
and Yamas.—The excrements of the celestial cow and
bull.—Exorcisms for chasing the evil one away from the beasts of
the stable.—The salutary herb, rue.—The heavenly cypress and
the mythical forest.—The mountain and the gem.—The mountain
of the heroes.—The defenceless soul of the bull recommends itself
to the mercy of the gods.—The moon, as a cow or bitch, guides
the hero over the funereal bridge.—The many-eyed god.—The
golden-hoofed bull.—The spinners of the sky.—Friendship between
sun and moon.—The Geusurva is the full moon.—The
purifying moon.—Ardhvî-Çûra-Anâhita, the Persian aurora, has
all the characteristics of the Vedic aurora, elevated, luminous,
discomfiter of the demons, deliverer of the hero Thraetaona from
the water, having golden shoes, swift, the first to arrive with her
chariot, guesser of riddles, revered at the break of day.—The aurora
sung to by her own name, the cow-aurora.—Mithra, the shepherd-god,—Mithra,
the hero who fights to recover his cows.—The
bull Veretraghna.—Thrita and Thraetaona.—The three brothers in
the Avesta.—The two brothers.—The three sisters.—The strength
of the solar hero consists in the wind.—The winds have golden
shoes and an especial foible for women, as the women have for
them.—Indras envious of the Marutas.—Kereçâçpa envious of the
wind.—The wind, with its whistling and wailing, makes everything
tremble; the hero presses him tightly and forces him to be
silent.—The bound hero.—The bow-cow, and the birds coming
out of the cow in the Avesta.—The darts, horns of the cow.—The
rich brother and the poor one.—The poor one, who has a[Pg 91]
lean ox and a lean horse, makes his fortune.—Ashis Vag̃uhi,
another equivalent of the aurora who also frees the hero Thraetaona.—Other
names of the three Persian brothers.—Importance
of the Avesta on account of its mythical contents.—The hero
exposed on the mountain.—The hero-shepherd, the wonderful child,
Cyrus.—Feridun.—The three brothers, sons of Feridun; the
third brother is the best, and is murdered by the two elder ones.—Sal,
with white hair, the hero exposed and nourished by a bird,
solves riddles, and receives in reward the daughter of the king.—The
hero Rustem, with the mace of a bull’s head, with the strong
horse that vanquishes the lion, the strong hero, the Persian
Orlando, kills and binds demons, monsters, and giants, who fight
with rocks.—From black comes white.—The prince Kawus recovers
his sight after the death of the monster.—The demon in
the mountain, who keeps back the waters, is the same as the
demon in the mill.—The hero Rustem unites himself with the
daughter of the demoniacal and hostile king.—Sohrab is born of
this union, with a demoniacal nature.—Gurdaferid, the Persian
amazon princess, assailed in her white castle by the hero-demon
Sohrab.—Rustem fights, wins, and kills his son Sohrab; he then
retires from warfare.—Explanation of this myth.—The end of
Rustem in an ambuscade.—Sijavush persecuted by his stepmother,
whose love he had disdained; the young prince submits to the
trial by fire, and comes out safely: the cruel stepmother was to
have undergone the same trial, but Sijavush intercedes for her;
she continues to persecute him; Sijavush dies in the country of
his demoniacal father-in-law, and is avenged by Rustem, who kills
the cruel stepmother.—The child-hero Kai Khosru consigned to the
care of shepherds; during his childhood he performs prodigies of
valour, and passes a river with dry feet.—The strength of the hair
of the hero Firud.—The two hero-brothers again; one brother
avenges the other.—The old hero becomes a penitent, and disappears
in a tempest upon a mountain.—The seven heroic undertakings
of Isfendiar.—The legend of Iskander.—The Tuti-Name.—The
hero who wishes to kill himself for the king’s sake; the
deity prevents the sacrifice.—The story of the poor man and
the rich one again.—The beautiful woman persecuted by her
brother-in-law the seducer; the oriental Crescentia or Geneviève.—The
sea, invited to the wedding, brings pearls and gold.—The
maiden who discovers the thief by means of a riddle.—The girl
who gives his eyesight back to the blind man against her will.—The
lovers flee upon the bull’s back.—The lover forsakes his mistress[Pg 92]
on the shore after having despoiled her.—The three brothers
deliver the beautiful maiden and dispute for her; the maiden
takes refuge in a convent.—The wise child who distinguishes
false from true, honest from dishonest.—The money of the dead
man.—The adulterer condemned to death who bites off the
nose of his companion in guilt and dissoluteness.—The wife
despoiled of her riches by her husband and thrown into the water.—Romeo
and Juliet in the East.—The three brothers: the seer;
the strong carrier, or Christophoros; the victorious one.—The
disputed bride again.—The little pipkin of abundance; Perrette
in the East.—The small porringer of abundance, which the
two brothers contend for.—The shoes which take one in an
instant wherever one wishes to go.—The little purse which is
filled as fast as it is emptied.—The sword which makes a city
rise.—The animals which contend for the division of the prey,
and the third comer who profits between two disputers.—The
four mines of the four brothers.—Why old men have white hair.—Calmuc
and Mongol tradition.—The six companions are the
same as three.—The bride torn in pieces.—A man unites himself
with a cow, which brings forth a Minotaur of a good nature,
who fights against the demons in favour of the gods.—The gem in
the cow’s litter.—The bull lost.—The three sisters; the third sister
marries the monster bird; she loses him, because she has burned
the aviary.—The painter and the woodman in Paradise; the
painter is burned.—The two brothers, the rich one and the poor
one; the rich brother ends badly.—The husband who despoils
his wife and hides her in a chest in the sand of the desert.—The
gem of the prince falls to the ground; his nose bleeds and he
dies; explanation of this myth.—The wonderful hammer, which,
when used, brings one whatever is wished for.—The rich and
poor brothers; the poor one becomes rich.—The lengthened nose
and the corresponding Italian proverb.—The wife kills her husband
with the hammer, wishing to knock a protuberance off his nose.—The
old man who eats his last cow; his wife continues, even
after its death, to nourish and protect him until the wild beasts
in the cavern devour him.—The woman disguised as a solar hero.—The
lion and the bull friends, or foster-brothers; their friendship
is put an end to by the fox.—The projects of Perrette
again.—The horns of the dead buffalo.—The grateful animals.—The
laughing princess.—The wise herd-children.—The wise puppets.—The
prince born of a cake.—The boy learns in the forest
every art, even devilish ones.—The son of the wolves who understands[Pg 93]
their language.—Heroes and demons cut in pieces multiply
themselves.—The hero has good luck, because he has performed
funeral services to the dead.—Four young shepherds, a new form of
the Ṛibhavas, make a beautiful maiden of wood, and then dispute
for her.—The wife throws her husband into the fountain out
of jealousy, having heard another voice, perhaps the echo of her
own.—The princess Light of the sun, who must be seen by no
one, and who is visited by the minister Moon.—Turanian tradition
in Siberia.—The three brothers dream upon the mountain; the
third brother is persecuted on account of his dream; he finds the
blind woman and lame man, and induces them to adopt him; he
hunts, fights against the devil, and vanquishes him; from the
body of the demon come forth animals, men, and treasures; he
fishes up in the sea of milk the casket which contains the eyes of
the blind woman; receives extraordinary gifts, and above all the
faculty of transforming himself; wins his predestined bride, and
kills his own cruel father.—The hero who solves enigmas.—Ancient
and modern riddles.—The cow devours the wolf, and the wolf
devours the cow.—The bow of horn.—The wolves fastened to the
calf’s tail.—The soul of the black bull in the rainbow, the bridge
of souls, wounded by the young hero, who then espouses the
daughter of the sky, after attaining the third heaven, and accomplishing
heroic undertakings to merit her.—The sleeper in the cup,
the gem in the fish.—The Argonauts and Medea in Turan.—The
Finnish Diana.—The Finnish thundering God, Kave Ukko.—The
little sun, the Finnish dwarf-hero.—The second of the three
brothers.—The strong bear.—The monster giant darkness or cloud.—The
Orpheus and the lyre of the Finns; grief the inspirer of
song.—Finnish and Aryan myths.—The Sampo.—Esthonian
tradition.—The three sisters; the third is the most beautiful, and
is persecuted by her stepmother, and delivered by the prince.—The
bird of light.—The maiden transformed into a pond-rose,
and delivered by her husband in the shape of a shrimp.—The witch
is burned in the form of a cat.—The gold of the witch.—Explanation
of several myths.—The third brother is the swiftest.—The
wise maiden.—The golden fairy.—The puppet.—The magical rod
makes the cock come out of the mountain.—The fairy is good
towards the good, and punishes the wicked.—The cow lost.—The
old hospitable dwarf.—The leaf which carries the hero across the
waters.—Heroic undertakings against the serpent and the tortoise.—The
third brother, expelled from home, travels and solves riddles
on the way.—The rod which makes a bridge.—In heaven and in[Pg 94]
hell time passes quickly.—The hero under-cook.—The golden birds
and the voyages to hell.—The brothers punished, and the bride
won by the magical sword.—The son of thunder.—The weapon
carried off from the god of thunder.—The weapon recovered.—The
fisherman-god.—The marvellous musical instrument; the
magical flute.—The three dwarfs.—The hat that makes its owner
invisible, made of men’s nails; the shoes which carry one where-ever
one wishes, and the stick which fights of itself.—The proverb
of the third who profits between two disputers again.—The third
brother is the son of a king, exposed when a child; he awakens
the princess who sleeps in the glass mountain; non est mortua
puella, sed dormit.—Passage from the dawn of the day to the dawn
of the year.—The child sold by his father without the latter’s
knowledge.—The boy exchanged.—The boy sets out to deliver the
maiden from the demon.—The pea, the kidney-bean, the cabbage,
and the pumpkin of funerals accompany the solar hero in his
nocturnal voyage.—The symbol of abundance, of generation, of
stupidity.—The nuptial beans.—Meaning of the myth concerning
vegetables.—The region of silence.—The region of noise.—The wise
girl helps the hero.—The cow milked and the calf bound.—The
luminous ball comes out of the calf.—The antithesis of white and
of black.—Hungarian proverbs.—The luminous ball comes out of
the stone.—The luminous ball and the ring.—The fearless hero
frees the castle from spirits.—The Esthonian story of Blue Beard.—The
charivari in the nuptials of widowers.—The widow who
burns herself.—The hero exposed, and then brought up among
cowherds, feels himself predestined to reign, and learns the art
by guiding herds.—The German (or Western) witch endeavours
to take the red strawberries from the Esthonian hero.—The boy
avenges this injury by causing her to be devoured by wolves, who
will not touch her heart.—The gardener’s daughter.—The broken
ring; the two parts of the ring unite again; the husband and
wife find each other once more.—The maiden born of the egg in
the shape of a puppet.—The casket which brings good luck disappears
when the young couple are married.

Moving now from India westwards, we find on one side
the Iranian, and on the other the Turanian traditions. We
cannot pass into Europe without at least indicating the
general character of each.

In the Persian cosmogony, the bull (gâus aevo dâto) is[Pg 95]
one of the first of created existences, being as old as the
elements. It is, moreover, well known how much importance
was ascribed to the bull among the Persians in
the mysteries of the solar god Mithra, who is represented
as a beautiful youth, holding the horns of a bull in his
left hand, and having the knife of sacrifice in his right.
Mithra sacrificing the bull is just the solar hero sacrificing
himself in the evening. Indeed, in the Persian tradition,
Mithra, like the Hindoo Yamas, holds the office of god of
the dead, and as such, like Yamas, is of a monstrous
aspect, and is found in the Yaçna represented with a
thousand ears and ten thousand eyes.

As in India, so in Persia, the urine of the cow is used
in ceremonies of purification, during which it is drunk.[267]
We have already seen in the story of Utañkas how the
excrement of the bull, upon which Utañkas fed, was
ambrosia itself; and, indeed, all is beneficial which is
given by the cow of abundance (the moon, the cloud, and
the aurora), and by the divine bull (the moon and the
sun). The mythical belief was natural, however disgusting
when we insist on literal interpretation.

And even in the Persian tradition itself, a distinction
already exists between common bulls or oxen and sacred
or privileged ones. This distinction appears in the legend
of Gemshid, whose bulls were all devoured by the devil,
as long as they were protected by no magical rites; whilst,
when he was given a red ox (or bull) cooked in old, that
is strong, vinegar, to which was added garlic and rue
(famous for its potency in exorcism), he disappeared
and was never seen again.[268] The rue is probably the
[Pg 96]fabulous plant which the Zend tradition surmises to have
sprung from the sea Vôuru-Kasha, whence Ahura Mazda
draws the clouds, from which all healthful water is
derived, and which corresponds to the sea of milk of
Hindoo tradition, in which the ambrosia is agitated.

Thus the funereal cypress of Kishmar (planted by Zarathustra,
with a branch from the tree of Paradise), under
which more than two thousand cows and sheep could
pasture, and the innumerable birds of which darkened
the air, obscuring the light of the sun, reminds us of the
celestial forest of the Vedâs, in which the shepherd-hero
and the hunter-hero wander and are lost.

The idea of the funereal tree recalls to us that of the
Persian mountain Arezûra or Demâvend, where the demons
met together to plot evil, and where was the gate of hell.[269]

The Zend word açma, which signifies stone and heaven,
yields us, in its double meaning, the key to the interpretation
of the myth. This stone, inasmuch as it is dark, is
of evil omen; inasmuch as it shines, it is a gem, or gives
the gem (the moon or the sun); whence, according to the
Minokhired, the sky is the progeny of a precious stone.[270]

Thus to the mountain of the demons (where the sun
goes down), is opposed in Persian tradition the glorious
mountain, out of which are born the heroes and the kings
[Pg 97](or from which the sun rises and the moon); because
Haoma is born there (the Hindoo Somas), the ambrosial,
golden, and health-bringing god, who gives them the
divine nourishment, and because the sacred bird, which
stays on that mountain, feeds them with ambrosia,
whence the Yaçna[271] invites Haoma to grow on the road
of the birds.

In a rather obscure passage of the Gâthâ Ahunavaiti,
confirmed by the Bundehesh, the soul of the bull (or of
the cow, as the case may be), despoiled of his body by
the evil one, complains to the Supreme Creator that he is
without defence against the assaults of his enemies, and
that he has no invincible protector. Ahura Mazda seems
to wish only to give him spiritual help, but the bull continues
to declare himself unsatisfied, until Zarathustra, the
defender, accords it, and he receives the gift of efficacious
favours which Ahura Mazda alone possesses.[272] Zarathustra
is himself also born upon a mountain;[273] while his son
Çaoshyańç, the deliverer, comes out of the waters.

A sacred cow, or at least a bitch which guards the
cows (paçuvaiti), seems, besides a good fairy, to be, in
the Vendiad itself,[274] the conductor of the souls across the
bridge Ćinvat, created by Ahura Mazda, to the kingdom
of the blessed. The cow, as the guide of the souls[275] lost
in the kingdom of the dead, and placed upon the bridge,
is probably the moon; the bitch (also the moon) reminds
us of the Hindoo Saramâ, the bitch which aids the heroes
[Pg 98]who have lost themselves in the nocturnal forest, grotto,
or darkness. In the same chapter, after accounts of the
bridge, we read the praise of the good Çaoka, who has
many eyes (like the brâhmanic Indras, disguised as a
woman, having a thousand eyes, and, after the adventure
of Ahalyâ, a thousand wombs—the god hidden in
the night, who looks at the world through a thousand
stars); after Çaoka, of the splendid Veretraghna (who corresponds
to Vṛitrahan, properly the discomfiter of the all-covering
darkness); and after him, of the luminous star
Tistar, which seems a bull with golden hoofs,[276] which
again must refer to the moon; as the Gâhs, who, according
to Anquetil, “sont occupées à filer des robes pour les
justes dans le ciel,” like the cows and Madonnas in our
popular tales, cannot be very different from the fairy, or at
least from the stars which form her crown. The Khorda
Avesta, in its hymns in praise of Mithra, celebrates the
perfect friendship which reigns between the sun and the
moon, and sings of the moon immediately after singing
of the sun Mithra, and the splendid Tistar immediately
after the moon, whose light is said to come from the
constellation Tistrya.

We can thus divine the meaning of Geusurva (the soul
of the bull or the cow), of which, besides the soul, the[Pg 99]
body also is invoked in the Yaçna.[277] The Geusurva
appears in the Yaçna itself[278] as the protectress of the
fourteenth day of the month, or of the full-moon, viewed
as a full cow. And when it is said in the Khorda
Avesta[279] that one must not sacrifice to the Geusurva at the
time when the Daevas, or demons, are practising their evil-doings,
it seems to me to indicate clearly enough that the
sacrifice was to take place while the moon was increasing,
and not while it was diminishing. Thus Asha Vahista,
who reminds us of the Hindoo Vasishṭhas and his marvellous
cow, has the power of conjuring away illness,
north winds—in a word, evil of every kind—only when
Ag̃ro-maiṇyus appears without help.[280]

We have seen in the legend of Utañkas how, as the
youth is on his way to take the queen’s earrings, he
meets a bull, upon the excrement of which he feeds, as
upon ambrosia; that this ambrosial bull stays near Indras,
as Indras and Somas are invoked together; and we
noticed that from this mythical belief was derived the
superstitious Hindoo custom of purifying one’s self by
means of the excrement of a cow. The same custom
passed into Persia; and the Khorda Avesta[281] has preserved
the formula to be recited by the devotee, whilst he
holds in his hands the urine of an ox or cow, preparatory
to washing his face with it:—”Destroyed, destroyed be
the demon Ahriman, whose actions and works are cursed.
His actions and works do not come to us. May the
thirty-three Amshaspands (the immortal saints, who correspond
to the thirty-three Vedic devâs), and Ormazd,
[Pg 100]be victorious and pure!” It is said this remedial formula
was used for the first time by Yima, when, from having
touched Ahriman, in order to extricate from his body, by
fraud, Takh mo Urupa, whom the demon had devoured,
he had an eruption on his hand. Finally, it is interesting
to learn that one of the Zend names of the moon is
gaoćithra, which means he that contains the seed of the
bull, since, according to the Bundehesh, the seed of the
primitive bull passed into the moon, who, having purified
it, used it to procreate other cattle (pôuru çaredho).

As to the aurora, there seems to be no doubt but that
she was represented in ancient Persia by Ardvî Çûra
Anâhita, the elevated, the strong, the innocent or pure,
according to the interpretation of Professor Spiegel; she
also drives a chariot drawn by four white horses, which
she guides herself; she has a veil, a diadem, and bracelets
of gold, beautiful earrings (the Vedic Açvinâu), a
dress of beavers’ skin, and prominent breasts; she is
beautiful, and she is a good young girl who protects men
and women. She is often invoked in the Khorda Avesta,
like the Vedic aurora, to exorcise the demons, and to help
the heroes who combat them; she herself has the strength
of a thousand men, and is a marvellous heroine, like the
Vedic amazon whom Indras fought with; her body is
girt round with a girdle. The probability of this comparison
seems to pass into certainty after reading a hymn
of the Khorda Avesta,[282] even in the version of Professor[Pg 101]
Spiegel, who perhaps would have introduced some little
variation if he had recognised the aurora in Ardvî Çûra
Anâhita. In this hymn, the victorious and mighty
Thraetaona, in the form of a bird, flies for three days and
three nights, which reminds us of the fugitive Indras of
the Ṛigvedas, who wades across the rivers after his
victory; at the end of the third night he arrives near the
aurora, and beseeches Ardvî Çûra Anâhita (that is, as it
seems to us, the aurora herself, elevated, mighty, and
innocent) to come and help him, that he may pass the
waters and touch the ground at her habitation. Then
Ardvî Çûra Anâhita appears in the shape of a beautiful,
strong, and splendid girl, having a golden diadem and
wearing shoes of gold (cfr. the Yast, xxi. 19) on her feet
(this is perhaps another feeble foreshadow of Cinderella’s
slippers); the beautiful girl takes him by one arm (the
bird has, it seems, become a hero), and gives him back
health and strength. But the certainty increases still
more when, as the Vedic aurora is the first of those who
arrive, winning the race in her chariot, the so-called
Ardhvî Çûra Anâhita appears in the Khorda Avesta as
“the first who guides the chariot;”[283] and we are recommended
to offer up sacrifices to her at break of day, before[Pg 102]
the sun rises.[284] We have seen the Vedic aurora and
the sun propose and solve riddles; we have seen the
Hindoo solar hero free himself from the monster by proposing
or solving insoluble enigmas; in the same way,
in the Avesta, the hero Yaçto Fryanananm asks Ardvî
Çûra Anâhita to help him to solve ninety-nine enigmas,
in order that he may free himself from the monster
Akhtya.

Add to this that Ardvî Çûra Anâhita, like the Vedic
aurora, is a giver of cows and horses, and that these
animals are offered to her by her devotees. The aurora
herself, in the invocation made to her in the sixth prayer
of the Khorda Avesta, is also called “elevated,” and furnished
with swift and splendid horses.[285] The fact of
finding the Anâhita drawn by four white horses, like
the sun Mithra, enhances the evidence of this identity.
And if the aurora is not explicitly represented in
the Avesta as a cow, we infer that it was so conceived
of, from the worship of Mithra, who was adored from the
first streak of daylight till midday. Mithra often receives
the epithet of “he who possesses vast pasture-lands;”
the morning sun is therefore a pastoral god; and if so, we
are constrained to think of the Persian aurora too as, if
not a cow, at least a female cowherd.
[Pg 103]But Mithra is not a god of mere idyllic exploits, he
is also a hero; the Vendidad[286] salutes him as “the most
victorious of the victors.” The booty of his victory
[essentially due to his immediate predecessors Veretraghna
(Vṛitrahan) and Çraosha][287] must have been
the cows of the aurora, without which his immense
pasture-lands would have been of no use to him. Indeed
it is said that Mithra enables owners of herds to
recover their lost oxen.[288]

But Mithra is not the only prominent hero of the
Avesta. Besides him, the above-cited Veretraghna, with
all his secondary and tertiary reflections, plays an important
part in it. Now, this Veretraghna, who offers
numerous analogies to the Vedic Indras, killer of Vṛitras,
is, like Indras, now a hero, now a horse, now a bird, now
a sheep, now a wild boar, and now a bull.[289] As the bull
Indras assists Tritas, Trâitanas, and Kavya Ućanas[290] in
the Ṛigvedas, so the bull Veretraghna in the Avesta, partaking
of the nature of one Thrita[291] who is rich, splendid,
and strong, and who, like Indras, cures maladies by the
help of the guardian of the metals (the usual co-relation
between the hero and the magic pearl), assists Thraetaona,
the killer of the serpent Duhâka (Azhi Dahâka)
[Pg 104]and the hero Kava Uça, of which Kava Haoçrava is
another name rather than another form. The Thrita and
Thraetaona of the Zend are peculiarly interesting, because
they remind us, though vaguely, of the Vedic myth of
the three brothers. Only the Avesta names Thrita and
Thraetaona as two distinct divine heroes; it attributes
to Thraetaona the second place among the three brothers;
and as in the Mahâbhâratam, it is the second brother,
the strong Bhîmas, who falls into the waters, whilst the
third brother, Arǵunas, delivers others from the marine
monster by his valour, so in the Avesta it is Thraetaona
who comes out of the waters, or who is the son of Athvya
(-Âptya). But every one can see the point of contact,
connection, or identification between the two hero-brothers.
It is Bhîmas who comes out of the waters, and
Arǵunas who extricates him, that is, who extricates his
own strength, expressed in Bhîmas (the subject, and his
virtue, become the object, being inclosed in one person).
They are confounded together, inasmuch as Thraetaona,
son of him who stays in the waters, or of the watery one,
or he who comes out of the waters, and kills the demon,
must be the same as Thrita, the third one, who has the
virtue of curing demoniacal diseases. Thraetaona, the
killer of the serpent, and Thrita, who destroys the evil-doing
ones, are found again, with a different splendour,
in the same heroic adventure. Scarcely an instant transpires
between the time when the hero was a victim and
that in which Veretraghna, or Thraetaona, or Thrita, the
hero, triumphs in his own liberation.

In the Yaçna,[292] we find three men who, by their piety,
win the favour of the god Haoma (Soma, the lunar god,
the moon, the good magician, the good fairy). The first[Pg 105]
is Vivaghâo, the second Âthvya, and the third Thrita;
from which we are led to conclude that Vivaghâo is the
eldest brother, Âthvya the second, and Thrita the youngest.
On account of their piety, they obtain sons; the son of
Vivaghâo is Yima (the Vedic Yamas), the wise, the
happy, the heavenly; the son of Âthvya is Thraetaona,
the warrior who discomfits the monster; the third, Thrita,
called the most useful, has two sons, Urvâksha and
Kereçâçpa, who remind us of the Açvinâu. Âthvya’s
son and Thrita being confounded in one person, Thraetaona,
or Thrita, forms a new triumvirate with Urvâksha
and Kereçâçpa, as the Vedic Indras with the two Açvinâu.
The story of the three brothers and that of the two brothers
seem to be interwoven even in the myth, as they certainly
are afterwards in the legend. To the three brothers,
moreover, correspond, in the Avesta, the three sisters, the
three daughters of Zarathustra and of Hvôvi: Freni,
Thriti, and Pourućiçsta.[293] The first seems to correspond to
Yamas, the second to Âptya and his son Thraetaona (or
Thrita), the third, the luminous, the beautiful (as being
the aurora), to the two handsome brother horsemen,
Urvâksha and Kereçâçpa (the Açvinâu).

The solar hero comes out of his difficulties, and triumphs
over his enemies, not only by force of arms, but by his innate
strength and prowess. This extraordinary strength,
by which he moves and is borne along, and which renders
him irresistible, is the wind, invoked by the heroes in the
Avesta under the name of Râman. The wind, according
to the Avesta, is not only the swiftest of the swift, but
the strongest of the strong (like the Marutas, Hanumant,
or Bhîmas, Hindoo winds, or sons of the wind). Even in[Pg 106]
the Avesta, he fights and assures the heroes of victory,
and is dear to woman and girls. (In the same way,
Sîtâ has a leaning for Hanumant, and Hidimbâ, of all
the Pâṇḍavas, gives the preference to Bhîmas.) Moreover,
in the Avesta, girls invoke the wind in order to
obtain a husband.[294]

A hymn of the Ṛigvedas, however, celebrates a kind
of quarrel between the winds Marutas and the god Indras,
prompted by rivalry; a quarrel which ends in Indras
having the advantage. It is interesting to find in the
Persian tradition[295] the same rivalry between the wind
(vâta) and the son of Thrita, the hero Kereçâçpa. An
evil genie informs the wind that Kereçâçpa boasts of
being superior to him in strength. Thereupon the wind
begins to howl and rage in such a terrifying manner that
nothing can resist him, and the very trees are cleft in
two or torn up, till Kereçâçpa comes and squeezes him
so tightly in his arms that he is obliged to cease. This
interesting mythical incident is a prefigurement of the
loud whistle of the heroes and the monsters in fairy
tales, which is brought to an end in a summary fashion,
similar to that of the Persian legend; which also leads
us to suppose that Thraetaona vanquished the serpent
Dahâka, merely by tying him to the demoniacal mountain
Demâvend.[296] This style of vanquishing the enemy
by binding him occurs often enough in the Persian
[Pg 107]legends and in the Avesta itself;[297] and is also mentioned
in the Hindoo traditions. The arrows of the monsters
hurled against the heroes of the Râmâyaṇam bind them;
the god Yamas and the god Varuṇas bind their victims;
the first draws tight, tightens the reins (i.e., the evening
sun shortens his rays); the second envelops, covers and
binds with the darkness that which Yamas reined in.
The solar ray which shortens itself, the shadow which
advances, are images of the ensnarer of heroes; whereas
the solar ray which lengthens itself, the thunderbolt
which traverses all the heavens, surrounded by clouds
and darkness, represents the hero who grasps around,
presses tightly, and strangles the monster.

The bow of Mithra is formed of a thousand bows, prepared
from the tough hide of a cow; these bows, in the
Avesta, also hurl a thousand darts, which fly with winged
vultures’ feathers.[298] This carries us back again to the
Vedic myth of the birds which come out of the cow.

The bow being considered a cow, this cow sharpens its
horns; whence the Khorda Avesta celebrates the horned
darts of the bow of Mithra, i.e., the horns of the cow,
which have become weapons[299] or the thunderbolts.

The legend of the two brothers is connected more with
the myth of the horse than with that of the cow or the
ox. But inasmuch as it presents the two brothers to
us as the one poor and the other rich, the riches are
symbolised by the ox. However, if I am not mistaken,
[Pg 108]there are two heroes, celebrated in the Avesta one after
the other (and whom I therefore suppose to be brothers),
who derive their origin from this legend; one is called
Çrîraokhsan (or who has a fine ox), the other Kereçaokhsan
(or who has a lean ox). As the Avesta does not go
on to develop this subject more in detail, I dare not
insist upon it; nevertheless it is gratifying to me to remark
that, of the two brothers, Kereçaokhsan was the
most valiant, as of the two brothers Urvâksha (a word
which may perhaps signify the one who has the fat horse,
and which is perhaps synonymous with Urvâçpa[300]) and
Kereçâçpa (he of the lean horse), it is the second who is
the glorious hero; as in the Russian popular tales, we
shall find the third brother, though thought to be an
idiot, despised by the others, and riding the worst
jade of the stable, yet becoming afterwards the most fortunate
hero. Kereçâçpa avenges his brother Urvâksha
against Hitâçpa, whom Professor Spiegel[301] interprets to
mean the bound horse, but which can also be rendered
he who keeps the horse bound, which would bring us
back again to the story of the bridle and of the hero-horse,
whom the demon keeps bound to himself, which
we have already noticed above in the story of the sacrifice
of Çunaḥçepas, delivered by the aurora.

It is uncertain whether we must recognise the aurora
or the moon, in the Avesta, in the so-called Ashis Vag̃uhi,
the elevated (like Ardvî Çûra Anâhita), who appears upon
the high mountain, rich, beautiful, splendid, golden-eyed,
beneficent, giver of cattle, posterity, and abundance, who
discomfits the demons, guides chariots, and is invoked by
[Pg 109]the son of the watery one, Thraetaona, in the Ashi Yast,[302]
in order that she may help him to vanquish the three-headed
monster-serpent Dahâka. Now, Thraetaona, the
victorious and rich in oxen,[303] being a well-known form of
the solar hero Mithra, it is interesting to learn how the
heroine, the so-called Ashis Vag̃uhi (the aurora, or the
moon, as the three words Ardvî Çûra Anâhita are simple
names of the aurora), having the same supreme god for her
father, has three brothers, of whom the first is Çraosha,
the pious; the second, Rashnus, the strong; and the
third, Mithra, the victorious.

She is, moreover, herself represented as being pursued
by enemies on horseback; and it is now a bull, now a
sheep, now a child, anon a virgin who hides her from her
pursuers. Not knowing where to go, whether to ascend
into heaven, or creep along the earth, she applies to
Ahura Mazda, who answers that she must neither ascend
into heaven nor creep along the earth, but betake herself
to the middle of a beautiful king’s habitation.[304] How is
it possible not to recognise in her the moon, or the
aurora, who follows the path of the sun her husband,
the moon, or the aurora, who appears on the summit of
the high mountains?

Other facts not devoid of mythological interest might
perhaps be found in the Avesta, which, on account of the
[Pg 110]uncertainty attending the translation of the original texts,
has hitherto been, it seems to me, utterly neglected by
mythologists. And yet, though Anquetil, Burnouf,
Benfey, Spiegel, Haugh, Kossowicz, and all who have
turned their talents and science to the interpretation of
the Zendic texts, disagree in the more abstruse passages,
there are many of which the interpretation is certain, in
which the learned translators agree, which offer interesting
mythological data, and permit us, in any case, to extract
from the Avesta an embryo of mythology, in the same
way as an embryo of grammar has already been extracted
from it. The brief references which I have now made to
the myth of the cow and the bull in the Avesta, anyhow
appear to me sufficient to warrant the conclusion I draw,
that the cow and the bull presented the same aspects,
and generated the same myths and the same beliefs in
Persia as in India, albeit in a form far more feeble and
indeterminate.

The solar hero of Persia occurs again in the costume
of historical legend in the Cyrus (Κυρος) of Herodotus
and Ktesias, the first of which represents to us the child
exposed by his parents, saved and educated during his
infancy (like the Hindoo Karṇas, child of the sun, and
Kṛishṇas) among the shepherds, where for some time he
gives extraordinary proofs of his valour; the second
shows us the young hero who wins his own bride,
Amytis, daughter of Astyages.

Finally, the same hero appears in several splendid and
glorious forms in the Shahname.

As in the Ṛigvedas, Tritas or Trâitanas, and in the
Avesta, Thraetaona (of whom Thritas is a corresponding
form), accomplish the great exploit of killing the monster,
and more especially the serpent, so Feridun, the Persian
synonym (by means of the intermediate form Phreduna)[Pg 111]
for the Zendic Thraetaona is, in subsequent Persian
tradition, the most distinguished hero in the struggle
against the monster. I shall not insist upon the deeds of
Feridun and his mythical valour, after the learned paper
written upon the subject by Professor R. Roth, which
appears in the Transactions of the Oriental Society of
Leipzig, and the able and highly-valued essay by Professor
Michael Bréal on the myth of Hercules and
Cacus. I shall therefore content myself with quoting
from the legend of Feridun the episode of his old
age, which reminds us of the Vedic myth of the three
brothers.

The great king Feridun has three sons, Selm, Tûr,
and Ireǵ (Selm, Tûr, and Er are also the sons of
Thraetaona); he divides the world into three parts and
gives the west to the first-born, and the north to the
second, whilst he keeps Iran for the youngest. The two
eldest are jealous, and announce to their father their intention
of declaring war against him, unless he expels
their younger brother Ireǵ from the palace. Feridun
replies to their impious threat with haughty reproofs,
and meanwhile warns the young Ireǵ of the danger he
is in. The youth proposes to go in person to his brothers,
and induce them to make peace; his father is unwilling
to let him go, but finally consents, and gives him a letter
for the two brothers, in which he commends him as
his best-loved son to their care. Ireǵ arrives at his
brothers’ dwelling; their soldiers see him, and cannot
take their eyes off him, as though they already recognised
him for their lord. Then Selm, the eldest, advises Tûr,
the second, the strong one, to kill Ireǵ; Tûr thereupon
assaults the defenceless Ireǵ, and transfixes his breast
with a dagger. Ireǵ is afterwards avenged by the son
of his daughter (born after his death of a maid whom he[Pg 112]
had left pregnant), the hero Minućehr, who kills Selm
and Tûr.

The hero who succeeds Minućehr is Sal, the son of
Sam, whom, because born with white hair, his father had
exposed upon Mount Alburs, where the bird Simurg
nourished and saved him. Sal proves his wisdom before
Minućehr by solving six astronomical riddles which
King Minućehr proposes to him. The king, satisfied,
orders him to be dressed in festive clothes; he then, to
prove his strength, challenges him to run a tilt with the
horsemen; Sal is victorious, and obtains another robe of
honour and innumerable royal gifts; after which he
espouses Rudabe, daughter of King Mihrab.

Sal distinguishes himself, like Minućehr, in his wars
against the perverse Turanians, the dragons and the
monsters, in which he takes along with him as his chief
helper the mighty hero Rustem, whose weapon is a club
surmounted with the head of a bull[305] or a horned mace
(the hero is the bull, the thunderbolts are his horns), and
whose horse is so powerful as by itself to fight and
vanquish a lion while Rustem is asleep. The hero himself
kills a dragon, and a witch transformed into a
beautiful woman, but who resumes her monstrous shape
as soon as the hero pronounces the name of a god. He
thunders like a cloud, is dark, and describes himself as a
thunder-cloud which hurls the thunderbolt.[306] He binds
the warrior Aulad, and obliges him to reveal where the
demons detain in prison King Kawus, who is become
blind in their kingdom of darkness. Kawus then informs
Rustem that to recover his sight his eyes must be anointed
[Pg 113]with three drops of blood from the slain demon Sefid;
upon which Rustem sets out to kill the demon. The
demons can be vanquished only by day; when it is
light, they sleep, and then they can be conquered, says
Aulad to Rustem; for this reason, Rustem does not
begin the enterprise till the sun is in mid-heaven;[307] then
he thunders and lightens at the demons. Like a sun, he
sets out towards the mountain (no doubt, towards sunset),
where the demon Sefid sits, and arrives at the mouth
of a deep and gloomy cavern, from which Sefid sallies
forth in the form of a black giant just awakened from
his sleep. The giant himself, like an enormous mountain
assaulting the earth, hurls a rock like a millstone at
Rustem; Rustem strikes the monster on the feet, and
lops away one of them; the lame giant continuing the
fight, Rustem at last wrestles with him, lifts him into
the air, then beats him several times furiously against
the ground, and so takes his life. He throws the body of
Sefid into the mountain cavern, whilst his blood saturates
the earth, and gives back to the prince Kawus his eyesight
and his splendour. The myth is a beautiful and an
expressive one. As from the black venomous serpent
comes white healthy milk, so from the black monster, at
his death, comes blood, which gives back his eyesight to
the blinded prince; the red aurora is here represented as
the blood of the nocturnal monster, discomfited by the
solar hero.

Let me ask the reader to notice the Persian comparison
of the rock thrown by the demon to a millstone, as it is
important to explain a superstition still extant in the[Pg 114]
West, to the effect that the devil goes under the millstone
to carry out his evil designs. The stone or mountain
fractured by the waters was naturally compared to
a millstone moved by the waters; the demons inhabit
the cavernous mountain to guard the waters; thus the
devil, the evil one, the hobgoblins, prefer mills as their
dwellings.

Rustem fights, in the Shahname, many other victoriously
successful battles against Afrasiab the Turanian, and
other demoniacal beings, in the service of sundry heroic
kings, with epic incidents to boot, which are nearly all
uniform. His struggle against his son Sohrab, however,
is of an entirely different character.

Rustem goes to the chase. In the forest, Turkish bandits
rob him of his invaluable horse while he sleeps; he
then sets out, alone and sad, towards the city of Semengam,
following the track left by his horse. When he appears,
emerging from the wood, the king of Semengam and his
courtiers note the phenomenon as though it were the
sun coming out of the clouds of morning.[308] The king
receives Rustem with great hospitality, and, as if to fill
to the full the measure of his courtesy, he sends at night
to the room where he sleeps his exceedingly beautiful
daughter Tehmime. The hero and the beauty separate in
the morning; but Rustem, before parting from Tehmime,
leaves her a pearl of recognition. If a daughter is born
to their loves, she is to wear it as an amulet in her hair;
if a son, he is to wear it on his arm, and he will become
an invincible hero. After nine months, Tehmime gives
birth to Sohrab; at the age of one month he seems a
year old, at three years of age he amuses himself with[Pg 115]
arms, at five he gives proof of a lion’s courage, and at
ten he vanquishes all his companions, and asks his mother
to inform him of his father, threatening to kill her if she
does not tell him. Scarcely does Sohrab learn that he is
the son of Rustem, than he conceives the desire of becoming
king of Iran and supplanting Kawus; he then
commences his persecution of the Iranian heroes by
assaulting the white castle (the white morning sky, the
alba), defended by a beautiful warrior princess, Gurdaferid,
dear to the Iranian warriors. Sohrab conquers
and destroys the white castle, but in the moment of
triumph, the warrior maiden disappears. The old hero
Rustem then moves against his own son Sohrab; the
latter throws him down, but Rustem, in his turn, mortally
wounds Sohrab. In the old Rustem thrown down on
the mountain it is not difficult to recognise the setting
sun; in Sohrab mortally wounded by Rustem, the sun
itself, which dies; and in fact, the dying sun has a different
appearance from the new sun which rises and
triumphs in the heavens: these two appearances might
give rise to the idea of a struggle between the old and
the young sun, in which both are sacrificed. Indeed,
Rustem feels, when he mortally wounds Sohrab, that he
is wounding himself; he curses his work and immediately
sends for a healing balsam; but in the meantime Sohrab
dies. The only one who could destroy the young sun
was the old sun; the sun grows old and dies; Rustem
alone could kill Sohrab. With the death of Sohrab the
glory of Rustem is also eclipsed; he retires unto solitude,
and the most grandiose period of his epic life comes to an
end. After this he only reappears in episodic battles or
enterprises; as, for instance, in his setting fire to Turan,
in which he resembles Hanumant, burner of Lañkâ; in
the liberation of the young hero Bishen, who had been[Pg 116]
taken prisoner and incarcerated by the Turanians; in the
killing of the powerful and perverse Turanian Afrasiab;
and in his own death in an ambuscade set by young
rivals of the old lion, who dies taking vengeance on his
enemies.

In the very palace of Kawus (he who was protected
by Rustem), a notable legendary drama takes place.
Sijavush, son of King Kawus, is seduced by the queen-mother
Sudabe, who burns with love for him. The
youth spurns this love, upon which she accuses him to
King Kawus as her seducer. The father, after hearing
his son’s defence in proof of his innocence, cannot believe
the queen; and thereupon she devises another method
for destroying the young Sijavush. She concerts with a
slave she has, who is a sorceress, and persuades her to
create two little venomous monsters, which she straightway
proclaims aloud are the children of Sijavush. Then
Sijavush, to prove his innocence, submits willingly to the
trial by fire; he enters the flames upon his black horse,
after having embraced his trembling father; both horse
and horseman come out of the immense fire, amid the
plaudits of all the spectators. Then the king gives orders
to strangle the unnatural queen; but his son Sijavush
intercedes in her favour, and Sudabe is allowed to live
by grace of the young prince, whom, however, she continues
to persecute, till, on the death of Sijavush, Rustem,
who bewailed him as his own son, or as his other self,
avenges him first by killing Sudabe, on account of
whom Sijavush had been obliged to repair to Turan,
and afterwards by carrying the war into Turan, where,
after a very agitated life, Sijavush had fallen into the
power of his father-in-law, Afrasiab, and been put to
death.

The wife of Sijavush, Ferengis by name, being pregnant,[Pg 117]
is hospitably entertained by Piran, and gives birth
to the hero Kai Khosru; and no sooner is he born than
he is consigned to the shepherds of the mountain. As
early as seven years of age, his favourite amusement is
that of drawing the bow; at ten, he confronts wild boars,
bears, lions, and tigers with only his shepherd’s staff.
When Afrasiab sees the young shepherd, he inquires at
him about his sheep and the peaceful pursuits of shepherds;
the boy replies with stories of lions having sharp
teeth, and of other wild animals, of which he is not afraid.
As soon as he comes to manhood, he flees from Turan,
followed by the Turanians; he arrives at the banks of a
river, where the ferryman asks impossible conditions to
take him over; upon which, like Feriḍun, he crosses the
river safely, but without a boat, and on dry feet (it is the
sun traversing the cloudy and gloomy ocean without
wetting himself);[309] arrived at length in Iran, he is feasted
and fêted as the future king. His reign begins; he then
assigns different tasks to different heroes, among whom
is his brother Firud, born of another mother, of whom it
is said that a single hair of his head has more strength in
it than many warriors (one ray of the sun is enough to
break the darkness). One evening, however, at sunset,
Firud is killed in his castle upon the mountain, being
surrounded by a crowd of enemies, after having lost his
horse, and after his mother Cerire had dreamt that a fire
had consumed both mountain and castle. His mother
Cerire (the evening aurora) throws herself among the
flames with her maids, and dies also. Kai Khosru bewails
the loss of his brother Firud all the night through,[Pg 118]
till the cock crows; when morning comes he thinks of
avenging him.

After this, the life of Kai Khosru is consumed in
battles fought by his heroes against the Turanians.
Only towards the end of his days does he become a
penitent king; he will no longer allow his subjects to
fight, and his only occupation is prayer; he takes leave
of his people and his daughters in peace, ascends a
mountain, and disappears in a tempest, leaving no trace
of himself. In a similar manner the heroes Yudhishṭhiras,
Cyrus, and Romulus disappear (not to speak of the
biblical Moses, still less of Christ, as we do not wish to
complicate a comparison of which the materials are
already so extensive, by mixing up the Aryan elements
with those of Semitic origin; although the legends of
the serpent, of Noah, of Abraham and his regained wife,
of Abraham and his son Isaac, of Joseph and his brethren,
of Joshua, of Job, and other and more recent biblical
heroes, by their mythical or astronomical import, present
numerous analogies with the Indo-European legends); in
a similar manner, the old sun, weary of reigning in the
heavens and fighting for his life, becomes invisible every
evening on the mountain-peaks.

The Shahname contains numerous other legends besides
those which we have thus far briefly described; and one
of the most notable is, beyond a doubt, that of Isfendiar,
who goes with his brother Bishutem to deliver his two
sisters, imprisoned in a fortress by the Turanian king
Ardshasp. The seven adventures of Isfendiar, i.e., his
meeting with the wolf, the lion, the dragon, the witch
(who makes herself beautiful, but who is no sooner bound
with the enchanted necklace of Isfendiar [the solar disc]
than she becomes old and ugly again), the gigantic bird,
the tempest and the river, all of which dangers he[Pg 119]
victoriously overcomes, are reproductions, in an analogous
form too, of the seven adventures of Rustem.

Finally, the legend of Iskander or Iskender (the name
of Alexander of Macedon), full of extraordinary adventures,
became exceedingly popular in Persia, and thence,
no doubt, passed with all its charms into Europe. The
audacity and good fortune, the glory and the power of the
great conqueror were the reasons why there grouped
round his name so many extraordinary stories, which
wandered dispersedly through the world without epic
unity. To make up one glorious and never-to-be-forgotten
hero, were combined together the achievements
of many anonymous or nearly forgotten ones. The
Persian Iskendername of Nishâmi, is, as its name denotes,
entirely taken up with the celebration of the deeds
of the Macedonian hero, of which the most illustrious are
the liberation of the princess Nushâbe (taken prisoner by
the Russians), and the voyage in search of the fountain
of life and immortality, which, however, Iskander cannot
find. From Persia the same legend afterwards passed,
with new disguises, into Egypt, Armenia, and Greece,
whence it was diffused during the middle ages over
almost the whole of Western Europe.[310]

As a bridge of transition between the Hindoo and
Persian, and the Turk or Tartar traditions, we shall make
use of three works: the Turkish version[311] of the Persian
Tuti-Name, itself a translation and in part a paraphrase
of the Hindoo Çuka-Saptatî, i.e., the seventy (stories) of
the parrot; the Mongol stories of Siddhi-kûr, and the
[Pg 120]Mongol history of Ardshi-Bordshi Khân,[312] the first being
a paraphrase of the Hindoo Vetâla-Pańćavinçatî, i.e., the
twenty-five of the Vetâla (a kind of demon), and the
second of the Hindoo Vikrama-ćaritram (the heroic
action).

We have seen in the Âitareya Brahmânam the father
who prepares to offer up his son, and in the Mahâbhâratam,
the son who forfeits youth that his father may
live. In the Tuti-Name,[313] the faithful Merdi Gânbâz
prepares to sacrifice his wife and sons, and afterwards
himself, to prolong the life of the king; but his devotion
and fidelity being proved, he is arrested by God before
he can accomplish the cruel sacrifice, and receives numberless
benefits from the king.

In the story of the goldsmith and the woodcutter, the
Tuti-Name[314] reproduces the two brothers or friends, of
whom one is wicked, rich, and avaricious, while the
other is defrauded of the money due to him, because,
though, in reality intelligent, he is supposed to be an
idiot. The woodcutter avenges himself upon the goldsmith
by a plan which we shall find described in the
legend of the bear, and recovers, thanks to his craftiness,
the gold which his brother or friend had kept from him.

In the interesting story of Merhuma,[315] we read of the
wife who is persecuted by the seducer her brother-in-law.
To avenge her refusal, he causes her to be stoned during
the absence of his brother; being innocent, she rises
again from under the stones; being sheltered by a
Bedouin, a monster of a slave seduces her; being repulsed,
he accuses her of the death of the Bedouin’s
[Pg 121]little son, whom he had himself killed; the beautiful
girl flees away; she frees a youth who was condemned
to death, and who in his turn seduces her. She then
embarks in a ship; while she is at sea all the sailors become
enamoured of her and wish to possess her; she
invokes the god who caused Pharaoh to be drowned and
who saved Noah from the waters. The waves begin to
move; a thunderbolt descends and burns to ashes all who
are in the ship, with the exception of the beautiful girl,
who lands safe and sound upon the shore (it is the aurora
coming out of the gloomy ocean of night, and the monsters
who persecute her are burned to ashes by the
thunderbolts and the sun’s rays); she thence escapes
into a convent, in which she ministers to the unfortunate,
cures the lame, and gives eyesight to the blind.
Among the latter is her persecutor, the brother of her
husband; she pardons him and gives him back his eyesight;
in the same way she cures all her other persecutors.
It is scarcely necessary for me to remind the
reader how this oriental tale, which developed itself
from the myth of the persecuted and delivering
aurora which we have seen in the Vedic hymns, reappears
in numerous very popular western legends, of
which Crescentia and Geneviève are the most brilliant
types.

The aurora comes out of the gloomy ocean and is
espoused by the sun; these heavenly nuptials in proximity
to the sea gave rise to the popular tale[316] of the king who
wishes the sea with its pearls to be present at his nuptials;
the pearls of the bride-aurora are supposed to come
out of the sea of night. The sea sends as gifts to the
king a casket of pearls, a chest of precious dresses, a[Pg 122]
horse that goes like the morning wind, and a chest full
of gold.

The wise aurora figures again in the story of the ingenious
princess[317] who discovers, by means of a story-riddle,
the robbers who, during the night, stole the
precious gem destined for the king.

The aurora imparts splendour and eyesight to the
blinded sun. The story of the three-breasted princess
who, while she meditates poisoning the blind man, in
order that she may enjoy unrestrained the affections of
her young and handsome lover, relents and gives him
back his sight, reappears in a rather incomplete form in
the Tuti-Name.[318]

The girl who has been married to a monster, whom
she flees from to follow a handsome young lover, who,
arriving at the banks of a river, despoils her of her riches,
leaves her naked and passes over to the other side, after
which she resigns herself to her fate and resolves to return
to her husband the monster,[319] represents the evening
aurora, who flees before the monster of night to follow her
lover the sun, who, in the morning, after adorning himself
with her splendour, leaves her on the shore of the gloomy
ocean and runs away, the aurora being thereupon obliged
in the evening to re-unite herself to her husband the
monster. It is interesting, moreover, as bearing upon our
subject, to note the expression of which the youth who
flees with the beautiful woman makes use to express his
fear of discovery. He says that the monster-husband
will follow them, and that should he sit upon the horns
of the bull (the moon) he would be sure to recognise him.
[Pg 123]The story of two young people fleeing upon a bull, and
followed by the monster, occurs again in the Russian
popular tales. By the horns of the bull, the youth means
the most prominent and visible situation; and he knows,
moreover, that if the monster overtakes them, he will be
sure to demonstrate the truth of the brave proverb which
advises us in arduous undertakings to take the bull by
the horns.

It is also the aurora who is represented by the beautiful
maiden[320] whom her father, mother, and brother have,
without each other’s knowledge, severally affianced to
three youths of different professions. The three young
men contend for her person, but while the quarrel is undecided,
the girl dies. The three then go to visit her
tomb; one discovers her body, the second finds that there
is still some life in her, and the third strikes her and
raises her up alive, upon which the quarrel is resumed.
She flees from them, and withdraws into another living
tomb, a convent. In the most popular form of this
legend the three companions, or three brothers, fighting
for the bride, divide her; the aurora is torn into pieces
as soon as the sun, her true lover and rightful suitor,
appears.

From darkness comes forth light; from the old, the
young; from death, life; from the dust of a dead man’s
skull, tasted by a virgin, is born a wonderful child, who
knows how to distinguish false pearls from real, dishonest
women from honest ones[321] (the morning sun can distinguish
between light and darkness); the wise boy (the
young sun) is the brother of the wise girl (the young
aurora). The flesh of a killed Brâhman is turned into
gold in another story of the Tuti-Name.[322]
[Pg 124]We have seen that the aurora and the sun are mother
and son, brother and sister, or lover and mistress. The
sun in the evening dies ignominiously, is sacrificed and
hanged upon a gibbet, and with himself sacrifices his
mother or his mistress. The legend is popular and
ancient which speaks of the robber son, when about to
end his life upon a gibbet,[323] biting the nose off his mother,
who gave birth to him and brought him up badly. In
the Tuti-Name,[324] it is the young adulterer (and robber
too) who, condemned to death for his adultery, asks to see
his mistress once more before his death and kiss her, and
who, as she does so, gratifies his revenge by inflicting
upon her a like indignity. It is remarkable how, even
in the Hindoo popular tale, the story of the adulterer is
confounded with that of a thief; the adulterer ends by
being thrown into the water (the sun and the aurora
fall into the gloomy ocean of night).

In the next story it is the wicked husband who, travelling
with his rich wife for change of dwelling-place,
despoils her of her clothes, and then throws her into a
well in order to ensure possession of her jewels and wardrobe.
These riches, however, do not last long; he becomes
poor and goes begging alms, dressed as a mendicant,
until he finds his wife again, who had been saved by
divine intervention from the well, and provided anew with
clothes and jewels of equal gorgeousness. The husband
passes some time with his wife, and then sets out again
on a voyage with her; he arrives at the same well, and
throws her in as before to enjoy alone her stripped-off
garnitures and riches. (The meaning of the myth is evident;
[Pg 125]it is the sun throwing the splendid aurora into the
gloomy waters of the night.)

A king becomes enamoured of the beauteous Mahrusa;[325]
his councillors tear him from his love, upon which he
pines away in solitude and dies. The beautiful girl
unites herself to him in the grave (Romeo and Juliet,
the evening aurora and the sun die together).

The story of the three brothers, the Ṛibhavas, occurs
again in the Tuti-Name,[326] with other particulars which
we already know. The first brother is the wise one; the
second is a maker of talismans (amongst other things he
can make a horse which will run in one day over a space
of ground that would take other horses thirty); the third
and youngest brother is the victorious archer. They set
out to search for the beautiful maiden who has fled by
night from the house of her father. The first brother discovers,
by his wisdom, that the maiden was carried off by
the fairies into an island-mountain which men cannot
reach. The second creates a wonderful animal upon
which to traverse the intervening waters (Christophoros
or Bhîmas). Having arrived at the island-mountain, the
third and youngest brother fights the demon, the lord of
the fairies, vanquishes him, and frees the beautiful girl,
who thereupon is conducted back to her father. Then
there arises the usual quarrel between the three brothers
as to who is to possess the bride.

In the Vedâs, we have the sky and the moon represented
as a cup. From the little cup of abundance
(the moon) it is easy to pass to the miraculous little
pipkin (the moon), in which the kind-hearted but poor
housekeeper of the Pâṇḍavas, in the Mahâbhâratam, still
finds abundance of vegetables, after her powers of hospitality
[Pg 126]had been exhausted on the god Kṛishṇas disguised
as a beggar—to the pipkin from which can be taken
whatever is wished for. In the Tuti-Name,[327] a woodcutter
finds ten magicians round a pipkin, and eating out
of it as much and whatever they want; they are pleased
with the woodcutter, and, at his request, give him the
pipkin. He invites his acquaintances to a banquet at
his house, but not able to contain himself for joy, he
places the pipkin upon his head, and begins to dance.
The pipkin falls to the ground and is broken to
pieces, and with it his fortune vanishes (the story of
Perrette).

A variation of the small cup is the wooden porringer
(the moon), which two brothers (the Açvinâu) dispute for,
in the history of the king of China,[328] and from which can
be taken whatever drink and food is wished for; as, in
the same story, we find the enchanted shoes which carry
us in an instant wherever we wish to go;—which brings
us back to the fugitive Vedic aurora, the swiftest in the
race, and to the popular tales relating to Cinderella, who
is overtaken and found again by the prince only when
she has lost her enchanted slipper. With the porringer
and the enchanted shoes we find, in the popular tales, the
little purse full of money which fills again as fast as it is
emptied (another form of the cup of abundance), and a
sword which, when unsheathed, causes a fine, rich, and
great city to arise in a desert, which city disappears
when the sword is put back into the sheath (the solar
ray is the drawn sword, which makes the luminous city
of the rich aurora arise; scarcely does the sun’s ray
vanish, or scarcely is the sword sheathed, than the marvellous
city vanishes). The rest of the story is also
[Pg 127]interesting, because it applies to three men a double and
well-known fable of the animals which contend for the
prey (as the three brothers contend for the beautiful
maiden whom they have found again). The animals
cannot divide it equally; they refer to the judgment of
a man passing by; he divides it so well that the animals
are ever after grateful to him, and help him in every
danger. The story of the Tuti-Name touches upon this
form of the myth, but soon abandons it for another
equally zoological, and a more familiar one, that of the
third who comes in between two that quarrel, and enjoys
the prey. The young adventurer undertakes to put an end
to the dispute of the two brothers as to the division of
the purse, the porringer, the sword and the wonderful
shoes; he does so by putting the shoes on his feet and
fleeing away with the other three articles contended for
(the two brothers Açvinâu, the two twilights, contend for
the moon and also for the aurora, as we shall see better
in the next chapter; the sun puts an end to their quarrel
by espousing her himself).

We are already familiar with the Vedic Ṛibhavas
who out of one cup make four. Probably upon this legend
depends that of the four brothers of the Tuti-Name,[329]
who, as they let each a pearl fall from their forehead
upon the ground, see four mines open, one of copper, the
second of silver, the third of gold (the third brother is
here again the favourite), the fourth only of iron. The
gem appears to be the sun itself. The four mines seem to
me to represent respectively the coppery sky in the evening,
the silver sky in the moonlight night, the sky in
the morning, golden with the dawn, and the iron sky, the
grey or azure, of the day. The word nîlas in Sanskrit[Pg 128]
means azure, as well as black, and between azure and
black is grey, the colour of iron.

Of the three brothers, the most learned, he who solves
the enigmas, is often the eldest; and in the story of the
Tuti-Name,[330] the eldest of the three brothers explains why
old men have white hair, saying that this whiteness is a
symbol of the clearness of their thoughts.

Let us now pass to the Calmuc and Mongol stories of
Siddhi-kûr, which, as we have said above, are also of
Hindoo origin.

In the first story, the three companions, forming at
first three groups of two, have resolved into six. The
night-time is divided into three, into six, into seven (six,
plus an extraordinary one, born afterwards), into nine
(three groups of three), into twelve (three groups of
four). Hence, near the monster with three, six, seven,
nine, or twelve heads, we find sometimes three, sometimes
six, seven, nine, twelve brother-heroes. The
last head (or the last two, three, or four heads) of the
monster, the decisive one, is the most difficult, and even
dangerous, to cut off; the last of the brothers is he who,
by cutting it off, is victorious. In the first Calmuc story
of Siddhi-kûr, six brothers or companions separate where
six rivers take their rise, and go in search of fortune.
The first-born perishes; the second, by means of his
wisdom (he partakes of the wisdom of the first-born, with
whom he is grouped), discovers the place where the dead
one is buried; the third, the strong one, breaks the rock
under which the eldest is hidden; the fourth resuscitates
him by means of a health-bringing drink, as Bhîmas, the
strong hero of the Mahâbhâratam, arises again when he[Pg 129]
drinks the water of health and strength; the fifth brother
creates a bird, which the sixth colours; this bird flies to
the bride of the eldest brother, and brings her among
his companions, who, finding her exceedingly beautiful,
become, one and all, enamoured of her; they fight for
her, and, that each may have a part, end by cutting
her to pieces. We already know the mythical meaning
of this legend.

The third and fourth Calmuc tales introduce explicitly
the bull and the cow. In the third, a man who possesses
but one cow unites himself to her, in order to make her
fruitful. Of this union a tailed monster is born, having
a man’s body and a bull’s head. The man-bull (Minotauros)
goes into the forest, where he finds three companions—one
black, one green, and one white—who
accompany him. The man-bull overcomes the enchantments
of a dwarf witch; his three companions lower him
into a well and leave him there, but he escapes. He
meets a beautiful maiden drawing water, at whose every
footstep a flower arises; he follows her, and finally finds
himself in heaven; he fights against the demons, in
favour of the gods, and dies in this enterprise. This
story, of Hindoo origin, where the bull and the cow take
the place of the hero and the maiden, appears to me to
justify the amplitude of the comparisons.

We have already seen the beneficial qualities of the
excrement of the cow. In the fourth story, it is under
the excrement of a cow that the enchanted gem, lost by
the daughter of the king, is found. It is of the cow that
the pearl is the secretion. The moon-cow and the aurora-cow
are rich in pearls; they are pearls themselves, like
the sun; the sun comes out of the aurora, the pearl comes
out of the cow.

The subject of the seventh tale is the three sisters who,[Pg 130]
taking the cattle to pasture, lose a buffalo, or black bull.
In their search for it, they came across an enchanted castle,
tenanted by a white bird, who offers to marry them. The
third sister consents, and marries him. The bird turns out
then to be a handsome cavalier (a form of Lohengrin).
But having, by the advice of a witch, burned the aviary,
she loses him, and cannot recover him till the aviary is
restored. We shall see the sun as a bird in the Vedic
hymns; the aurora is the aviary, made of flames, of this
divine bird. When the aviary is burned at morn, the
aurora and the sun separate; they meet again in the
evening, when the aviary is reconstructed.

Another beautiful myth of analogous import occurs
again in the eighth story. A woodman and a painter
envy each other; the painter makes the king believe that
the woodman’s father, who is in heaven, has written
ordering his son to repair to paradise, in order to build
him a temple, and to take the route that the painter shall
indicate. The king orders the woodman to set out for
paradise. The painter prepares a funeral pyre, by way
of exit; from this the woodman succeeds in escaping,
and, going back to the king, he tells him that he has
been to paradise, and presents a letter which his father
has given him, ordering the painter to come by the same
road, and paint the temple. The king requires the summons
to be obeyed, and the perfidious painter perishes
in the flames. The morning sun emerges safe and sound
from the flames of the morning aurora; the evening sun
passes through those flames, and dies.

The tenth Calmuc tale gives us the myth of the two
brothers; the rich one avaricious and wicked, and the poor
one virtuous. The story ends in a manner analogous to
that of the dying adulterer, who, as we have seen in the
Tuti-Name, bites off his mistress’s nose.

[Pg 131]

The eleventh story is a variation of that of the lover,
or husband, who abandons or kills his wife, after having
despoiled her of her riches; but instead of the waters of
the sea, we have here the sea of sand, the sandy desert,
in a cavity of which is deposited the young girl, shut up
in a chest, the same chest which in other popular tales
drifts about on the surface of the water.[331] But into the
place where it was laid, the chest having been taken away
by a young prince, a tiger enters; the unworthy husband
turns up himself to abstract the chest, and is torn to
pieces by the tiger. The sterile night is a vast desert, a
sea of waters, a sea of sand; the sun-prince frees the
aurora from the waters, out of the well, or the cavern of
the desert; the tiger kills the monster-husband.

In the twelfth tale, a thief steals the enchanted gem
from the prince; he throws the gem to the ground, the
consequence of which is that the prince’s nose bleeds so
excessively that he dies. The nose is the most prominent
part of the face, the most conspicuous and splendid part;
it is the gem of the sun-prince. The sun falls at night
upon the mountain; the gem falls to the ground; the
prince’s nose bleeds; he has struck his nose against the
ground, and it bleeds. The sun-prince dies, and the
evening sky is tinged red, blood-colour; the sun, who
loses his blood in the evening, dies.

The thirteen Calmuc stories are followed by ten Mongol
tales; in all, twenty-three, of which the sixteenth, however,
is lost.

The fourteenth tells us of the rich and avaricious man
whose poor brother goes in despair into the forest to die
upon a rock; but his presence not being known to the[Pg 132]
spirits, he has the good luck to come upon a hammer and
a sack, of which the former, when struck against an
object, produces whatever is desired by the owner, the
latter being used to carry away the objects thus obtained,
this hammer and this sack having been left there by the
hobgoblins. Thus the poor brother becomes rich, and is
envied by the other, who goes to the same place, in hopes
of experiencing the same good fortune; but as he does
not hide himself, the hobgoblins see him, and believing
him to be the man who stole the hammer and the sack,
avenge themselves upon him by lengthening his nose,
and covering it with protuberances. To this myth may
perhaps be referred the origin of the Italian expression,
“Restare con uno o due palmi di naso,” to remain with
one or two spans of the nose; that is to say, to be laughed
at, and with the gesture by which derision is accompanied,
and which is addressed to the man who is laughed
at, by applying one or sometimes both hands to the
end of one’s nose. The poor brother, now rich, visits
the miserly brother, who has a long nose covered with
protuberances, and knocks them off with his hammer.
He had already knocked off eight, and only one remained,
when, at his wife’s request, he desisted and left the last
one on. The rich man’s wife, seeing how the protuberances
had been taken off by striking them, tries
herself to remove the last one, and strikes it with a
hammer; but not calculating her aim accurately, she
splits her husband’s head open, and he dies.

In the seventeenth Mongol story, an old man and an
old woman have nine cows. The old man is fond of
meat, and eats all the calves; the old woman, on the
other hand, has a great liking for milk and butter, with
which she satiates herself. When the old man has eaten
all the calves, he thinks that one cow more or less will[Pg 133]
not affect his wealth; reasoning thus, he eats all the cows
except one, which he spares out of respect for the whim
of his old wife. But one day that the old woman is
out, the old man cannot resist the temptation, and kills
the last cow. His wife returns, is angry, and abandons
him, upon which he throws after her one of the cow’s
breasts. The woman, in grateful memory of the milk and
butter she liked so much, takes it up and goes up the
mountain, where she strikes the cow’s breast against the
summit of the rock, and thereupon there flow out milk
and butter in rivers. She satisfies her appetite, and then
remembers that her husband is perhaps dying of hunger,
feeding, as he does, upon ashes; she therefore, but secretly,
throws butter into the house down the chimney, and then
disappears. In this attention the old man recognises the
love of his wife, and resolves upon the plan of following
her footsteps during the night upon the snow. He comes
to the mountain, sees the breast, and cannot resist the
temptation it offers; he eats it, and takes the butter
away with him. The old woman wanders about till she
comes upon a herd of deer, who pasture freely, and who,
instead of fleeing, let themselves be milked. Again, she
thinks of her husband, and she throws deer’s butter down
the chimney. The old man follows her over the snow,
finds her near the deer, and kills them in his inordinate
passion for meat. The old woman continues to wander
about, and stumbles this time upon a cavern of the wild
beasts, guarded by a hare. The hare defends her from
the wild beasts; but she then conceives the idea of giving
her husband a stick, and throws it down the chimney
whilst he is taking the ashes up with a spoon. He follows
her, and comes to the cave of the wild animals, who, seeing
them arrive together, tear them to pieces. Here again we
have the myth of the sun and the aurora (or the fine season);[Pg 134]
the hare who guards the cavern and tames the wild
beasts is, as we shall see in the chapter which treats of it,
the moon, the cows and the deer being the same. The
ferocious animals of the cavern of night rend both sun and
aurora (or fine season), both old man and old woman.

The eighteenth Mongol story is too indecent for me to
relate, or for the reader to peruse; suffice it to say, that
we have in it a comic variation of the Amazon heroine,
and that this heroine calls herself Sûrya (the sun) Bagatur
(to which corresponds the bagatír; or hero, of the
Russians).

In the twentieth tale we have a calf and a lion’s whelp
brought up together by a lioness upon the same milk.[332]
When grown, the lion goes and inhabits the forest, or the
desert, and the bull, the mountain illumined by the sun,
meeting as good friends and brothers to drink the same
water. This good understanding is, however, put an end
to by their perfidious uncle the fox, who persuades the
lion to believe that the bull designs to kill him, and adds
that when the bull in the morning strikes the ground
with his horns, and bellows loudly, will be the sign that
he is going to carry his purpose into effect; he then tells
the bull that the lion has a similar design against him.
In the morning, when the two brothers, bull and lion, go
to drink the same water, they approach each other with
suspicion, engage in battle and kill each other, the fox, or
wolf, being the only one to benefit by the quarrel. This
is a form of the story of the two twilights (the Açvinâu),
which we shall illustrate in the following chapter.

The beginning of the twenty-first Mongol story offers
a new analogy with the apologue of Perrette.[333] A poor
[Pg 135]father and mother find a little lamb’s-wool; they consult
together, and resolve with the wool to make cloth, and
with the cloth to buy an ass. Upon this ass they will
place their little child, and go a-begging; by begging they
will become yet richer, and buy another ass. Of the two, a
young ass will be born. The youngster immediately exclaims
that if a young donkey is born he will ride upon it;
whereupon his mother answers, “You would break its
back,” when, accompanying these words with the movement
of a stick, she strikes the youngster’s head with it,
and kills him; with him the fine projects of the poor
parents also vanish.

In the last of the stories of Siddhi-kûr, which is joined
to the three legends of the grateful animals, the disguises,
and the laughing princess, a man uses the horns of his
dead buffalo to grub up the roots upon which he lives in
exile.

The history of Ardshi-Bordshi also contains several
interesting stories.

It begins with a challenge among the children who
keep the king’s cows to run a race from the summit of a
mountain. The first who comes to the winning-post is
honoured as a king by his companions for that day, and
acts and judges on the spot where the race takes place
as a real king; indeed, he judges and decides as a court
of final appeal on cases which have not been well
examined by the great king of the country. He unmasks
and convicts robbers and false witnesses acquitted
by the king as innocent, and sends a missive to the king,
recommending him to be more cautious in future in his
judgments, or else to resign his royal dignity. The great
king wonders at the extraordinary wisdom of the king of
the children, and ascribes his preternatural sagacity to
the magical influence of the mountain where the children[Pg 136]
who guard the cows play their games. On another
occasion, the king of the children, by his craftiness,
detects a demon in one whom the king had thought to
be the legitimate son of his minister. The discovery is
made by means of a challenge to the minister’s real son
and his demoniacal counterfeit to get into a small jug at
hand. The real son cannot; but the supposititious makes
himself small and enters the jug, in which the king of
the children shuts him up with a diamond, and administers
thereupon fresh reproof to the great king for his
carelessness. The great king then visits the mountain of
the children, and sees a golden throne with thirty-two
steps emerge from the ground; upon each step there is a
wooden puppet (the moon). The great king has the
throne carried into his palace, and endeavours to ascend
it; the puppets arrest him, and one of them tells him
that this was once the throne of the god Indras, and
afterwards of King Vikramâdityas. The great king
inclines himself in reverence, and one of the puppets
begins to narrate the history of Vikramâdityas.

The history of Vikramâdityas, narrated by the puppets,
refers to a wise child, born of the wife of the king,
after she had eaten a cake made of earth mixed with oil,
and dissolved in water in a porcelain vase (of which cake
the servant-maid eats the remainder). The young Vikramâdityas
passes his infancy in the forests, where he learns
all the arts, not excluding the art of thieving, taught him
by the most experienced robbers, as well as every kind of
mercantile fraud; by cheating, he becomes possessed of
an enchanted gem which was in the hip of a dead man,
and of a child who has the faculty of understanding the
language of the wolves, and who calls himself son of the
wolves, but was, in fact, born by the roadside of the maid
who had eaten the rest of the cake; this child is nursed[Pg 137]
by his mother, and although at first ill-favoured, becomes
in the long run very handsome. Vikramâdityas afterwards
kills the king of the demons in battle, in which it
is remarkable that as many new demons arise to combat
him as there are pieces into which the hero cuts the
demon, until the hero multiplies himself in his turn, and
to every demon opposes a lion sprung from his own body.
Vikramâdityas mounts upon a throne where those who
had sat before him had all perished, each after a reign
of twenty-four hours, because they had omitted to offer
up funeral sacrifices to the dead during the night;
Vikramâdityas, with his companion, the son of the wolf,
fulfils the sacred duty, and escapes death.

In the same story, which reminds us of the Ṛibhavas
and the four cups and the cow, four young shepherds, one
after another, work at the same piece of wood; one gives
it the general shape of a woman, the second colours it,
the third imparts the features peculiar to the feminine
form, and the fourth gives it life; they then dispute for
her person. The case is referred to the king; a wise
man pronounces that the two first who worked the wood
are the father and mother, the third is the priest, the
fourth, who gave it life, is the legitimate husband. Thus
the four become three, by making a group of the first
two.

Next comes the legend of the wife who, taking her
husband by the feet, makes him fall into a fountain,
because she hears a melodious voice, perhaps an echo of
her own, which charms her; she sees a monster instead,
and bewails her lost husband. In zoological mythology,
the fable of the dog who, at the sight of his own shadow,
lets the meat drop into the river, is analogous to this
legend, which, however, we introduce here, only because
of its relation to the similar stories of the wife who kills[Pg 138]
her husband, and of the husband who kills his wife by
throwing her into the water, already vaguely hinted at
in the Vedic hymns.

The last of the tales contained in the history of Ardshi
Bordshi shows us, on the other hand, a far too complaisant
wife. A king has a daughter, named Light of
the sun, who is to be seen by no one. The daughter
asks to be allowed to go out into the city to walk on the
15th of the month (at full moon); this granted, the king
orders every one to stay that day in his house, and all
the doors and windows to be shut; and capital punishment
is the penalty of disobeying the king’s command.
(The like occurs again in the British legend of Godiva,
the Countess of Mercia, in the eleventh century.) A
minister, Ssaran by name (moon), cannot repress his
curiosity, and observes her from a balcony; the girl
makes signs to him, inviting him to join her; the wife
of the inquisitive minister interprets the signs to him,
and urges him to overtake the beautiful girl, giving him,
at parting, a pearl of recognition. Light of the sun and
Light of the moon meet at the foot of a tree, and spend the
night until sunrise in amorous dalliance. One of the persons
employed to guard the princess discovers this intrigue,
and denounces it before the king; the wife of the minister
Ssaran ascertains, by means of the pearl, that her husband
is in danger; she rejoins him, disguises and disfigures
him, suggesting a formula of oath by which Light of the
sun swears that it was the monster, and the monster only
she embraced; which seeming impossible to the king
and courtiers, the minister Ssaran and Light of the sun
are acquitted. (The aurora, or the sun, hides during the
night, and no one sees, no one is allowed to see her;
the god Lunus shows himself; he remains during the
night with the sun, or with the solar aurora, whom no[Pg 139]
one can see during the night; the god Lunus then
transforms and disfigures himself, so that he becomes
unrecognisable, invisible; the guilty one glides away,
and escapes; it then seems impossible that the god
Lunus, who is no longer seen, can have been with the
light of the sun; their loves having come to an end,
the adulterers being separated, their guilt is no longer
believed, their innocence is recognised, and the morality
of the myth is left to take care of itself as best it can.)

But the Calmuc and Mongol stories Siddhi-kûr, and
the history of Ardshi Bordshi, being, as they are, only
paraphrases of Hindoo tales, would not alone suffice to
prove the derivation from the zoological legends of Aryan
mythology of the oral Turco-Finnic tradition, properly
speaking. We must, therefore, search for the proofs of
their influence in other quarters as well.

A Turanian story of the south of Siberia[334] combines
together several of the mythical subjects which we are
already acquainted with.

A poor old man and woman have three sons; the
three sons go upon the mountain to dream; the two
eldest dream of riches, and the third dreams that his
father and mother are lean camels, his brothers two
hungry wolves running towards the mountains, while he
himself, between the sun and the moon, wears the morning
star upon his forehead. The father orders the brothers
to kill him; they dare not do so; they only expel him
from the house, and kill the dog instead, the blood of
which they take to their father, who, thinking it is his
son’s, says they have done well. The young man wanders
about till he comes to a hut where a lame old man and[Pg 140]
a blind old woman are eating out of a golden cup, which
of itself fills with meat as they empty it (the moon).
The hungry youth helps himself to some of this meat,
but the old man finds, as he continues to eat the food,
that some one has put his teeth into it; with a hook,
which he whirls around him, he clutches hold of the young
man, who begs for his life, pledging himself to be the
eye of her who has no eyes, and the foot of him who has
no feet. This proposal pleases the old couple, and they
adopt him as their son; he makes himself a bow and a
wooden arrow, and goes to hunt wildfowl for their support.
The old man lends him his iron-grey horse, one
day old, but advises him to ride him only by day; the
young man, thinking that by night he conceals treasures,
cattle, and people, disobeys, and rides by night. What
the horse then does we shall see in the next chapter. The
youth fights and vanquishes the demon, by fastening one
of his lips to the heavens, and the other to the earth;
the defeated demon advises him to rub himself with the
fat of his stomach; inside his stomach he will find a
casket of silver, inside that a casket of gold, and inside
that another casket of silver; he is to take it and throw
it into the sea of milk. From the monster’s stomach,
cut open, come forth innumerable animals, men, treasures,
and other objects. Some of the men say, “What noble
man has delivered us from the black night? what noble
man has shown us the clear day?” The youth finds in
the caskets money and a white handkerchief, which he
puts into his pocket; from the last casket come forth
more men, animals, and valuables of every kind; he
drives the white cattle before him and returns home,
where the old couple are asleep. He opens the handkerchief,
and finds in it the old woman’s eyes; whilst he is
smoking near the fire, the old people waken, see him, and[Pg 141]
embrace him. The old man then endows him with the
power of transforming himself into a fox, a wolf, a lion,
a vulture, and other shapes, at will. He goes, to find for
himself a wife, to the residence of the prince Ai-Kan; the
latter promises to give his daughter to whoever will bring
him the necessary amount of gold. It is in the shape of
a vulture[335] that the young man sets out to search for it;
he then wins the young maiden who has the gold, and
she, who is herself the daughter of Ai-Kan, says to him,
“Thou art my husband.” After various other transformations,
in one of which the two lean camels reappear,
i.e., his two parents, of whom he had dreamt, whom he
loads with a sack, he ends by taking to himself another
wife, the daughter of Kün-Kan, and he lives now with one,
now with the other, to whom he gives the flesh of his own
infanticide father to eat. Let us recapitulate the moments
of this significant legend:—1st, We have the presage, the
dream of the mountain-peak; 2d, The three brothers, the
third of whom, predestined to good fortune, the others
wish to sacrifice; 3d, The lame and the blind in the
forest; 4th, The hero’s hunt; 5th, The struggle with
the monster of night; 6th, The treasures, spiritual and
material, which come out of the monster; 7th, The cattle
in conjunction with the sea of milk; 8th, The passage of
the hero from the milky sea to the fireside, from the
alba to the aurora, from the whitish sky to the reddish
one; 9th, The awakening of the sleepers, and restoration
of sight to the blind, whilst he sits by the fire, whilst the
sun is united to the aurora; 10th, The transformation of
the hero himself; 11th, Winning his bride, by procuring
the necessary amount of gold; 12th, His marriage of two[Pg 142]
wives; 13th, His revenge on his persecuting father. The
legend is in itself an epic poem, and we can only regret
that the Altaic story-tellers did not give it a more artistic
form than that in which it appears in the excellent collection
of Radloff.

Another interesting Turanian story, in the same collection,
which preserves several traces of the primitive myth,
is another version of the story of the hero who solves the
riddle proposed by his father-in-law, and thus wins his
wife. A father has three sons; the first-born dreams
that their cow has devoured a wolf; he goes to see, and
finds it is true (the aurora destroys the night). We have
already seen that, as the third brother is the wise child,
so the first-born of the three is often the one who possesses
the secret of solving riddles. The father of the three brothers
wishes to obtain a wife for his first-born son, and the
bride’s father, to give her up, demands that the bridegroom’s
father should come to take her, arriving, the
first time, with a fur-coat and without one (in the morning
the old man, by the advice of the eldest son, departs
wearing a coat of fur which seems to be one, but is not,
being in reality a coat of mail), and coming, the second
time, without touching the road, yet not off the road,
on horseback, yet without horses (the old man, by the
advice again of his first-born son, arrives at the father-in-law’s
abode, going on the side of the road, and riding on
a stick; thus he obtains permission to take the bride
away for his son).

Professor Schiefner gives a Finnic variation of the
same story. A king orders the son of a peasant to come
neither by day nor by night, neither by the road nor by
the road-side, neither on horseback nor on foot, neither
dressed nor naked, neither inside nor outside. The intelligent
boy makes a robe of goat’s skin, goes to the[Pg 143]
city lying in the bottom of a coffin, during the morning
twilight, having a sieve fastened to one foot, and a brush
to the other, and stops on the doorstep of the antechamber,
with one leg out and the other in.

Such was the humour, and such the wisdom of our
fathers; ingenuity was measured by skill in solving
astronomical riddles. Now the riddles have taken another
form; they are strokes of diplomacy, amorous
hieroglyphs, ethical ambiguities, metaphysical nebulosities,
which we, the men of progress, must solve; but not
wishing to acknowledge our inferiority in acuteness to the
children of the legends, we are fain to persuade ourselves
that the new riddles are more obscure than the ancient.

In the Vedic riddles proposed to one another by the
aurora and the sun, we have seen how they were solved in
the morning by the nuptials of the guesser and the guessee.
Thus in the two riddles which we have just described,
the son of the old man and the child solve the riddle in
the morning. As to the sieve, the brush, and the coffin,
they are mythical furniture of great interest and obvious
import. The nocturnal sky is the great coffin; to sweep
the sky of night, we must have a brush; to sunder the
good grain from the bad during the night, as the cruel
mother-in-law commands, we must have a sieve; the
child-sun arrives, in the twilight, in the bottom of the
coffin, at the doorstep of the royal palace, and presents
to the maiden aurora (the Vedic cleaner or purifier) the
brush and the sieve. The sun, at twilight, is neither in
nor out. In the second Scottish story of Mr J. F.
Campbell, the giant commands the hero, among other
things, to cleanse, in one day, the stables which had not
been cleansed for seven years (Heraklés and Augeias).

But let us continue our subject, for the path is a long one.

A Mongol tradition, contained in the Mongol Crestomathy[Pg 144]
of Papoff,[336] speaks of the boy who comes riding
upon a black ox, instead of in a coffin.

We have seen above the cow who eats the wolf; in
another Altaic legend we find an old woman who gives
up her seven azure (dark-coloured) cows to be eaten by
the seven wolves, in order that the latter may spare the
child Kan Püdai, whom she had found at the foot of a
tree; meanwhile the child, who has fed upon two hundred
hares,[337] has become strong, and breaks his iron cradle (the
iron sky of night is the cradle of the young sun); from
the horns of six roebucks he makes himself a bow; from
the skin of a colossal marine animal (the cloud, the
gloomy one), he makes a string for the bow (the string
of the Hindoo bow is also called go, i.e., cow, as a
cloud in the sky, and as being formed from the hide
of a cow); he rides upon the azure calf (the dark
calf, which recalls our attention to the black ox, and
leads us to conclude the colossal animal to have been
a cow), and subdues and tames it; he then comes to
a field of snow, upon which he breathes a black and
numbing wind, and where he finds the seven wolves; he
ties them to the tail of his calf, and drags them along
the ground till they die. The boy continues his wild
beast hunt; he kills the black and fat ones, and leaves
the yellow and lean ones alone. He goes into a black
sea, and erects there a black castle, into which he receives
both the old woman who had sustained him, and his
azure (i.e., dark-coloured) calf. Thereafter the young
Kan Püdai, applying himself to warfare, forsakes or
exchanges his calf for a horse. We shall see in the next
[Pg 145]chapter what he does with his horse;—suffice it to notice
here, that, in the end, he meets the black bull, who will
one day be the king of the Altaï. The soul of the black
bull takes refuge in a red thread in the middle of the
rainbow (in the popular belief of the East the rainbow
was supposed to be a bridge, a road traversed by the souls
of mortals); the young Kan Püdai transfixes it with his
arrows. He wins the white cattle, kills the monstrous
Kara Kula, and, taking the latter’s wife and daughter
with him, returns home; and for seven days there is eating,
drinking, and festivity in the house of Kan Püdai.
But up to this point it is not said that he has espoused
the daughter and the wife of Kara Kula. Kan Püdai is,
on the contrary, passionately enamoured of Tämän Ökö,
the daughter of the sky (duhitar divas, or daughter of the
sky, is the name usually given to the aurora in the Vedic
hymns), and ascends, in order to secure her and make her
his wife, to the third heaven (it is the third step of
Vishṇus; it is the third brother, the sun of the third
night-watch, who carries off the palm against the gloomy
monster). In order to become worthy of the daughter of
the sky, Kan Püdai has to kill two monsters; to scatter
ashes on the field of victory, and lead away from it the
white cattle; to catch the three bears; to take the three
black bulls and make them swallow three hills; to take
the tiger and give it the grass of the three mountains to
eat; to kill the whale in the azure sea (all different forms
of one and the same mythical and heroic battle); and,
finally, to play upon the mountain-peak with the golden-haired
monster Andalma. He then obtains his bride, and
returns with her to his own country, where he hunts, and
makes war, and vanquishes all his enemies, until he grows
old; he then renounces all except his old companion (the
old sun and the old aurora meet again in the evening).

[Pg 146]

Here evidently the mythology is really zoological.

In the complicated legend of Ai-Kan, we have in the
brother Altyn Ayak, who sleeps in the form of a golden
cup, and who awakens to help Ai-Kan, a figure which,
though not the same as, is similar to, that of the sleeping
brother Kumbhakarṇas (conch-ear) in the Râmâyaṇam,
who awakens to help Râvaṇas. We have the inebriating
liquor which gives strength to the hero, who is resuscitated
three times from death, after having been the food
of dogs; the wolves who devour Sary-Kan, or the fair-haired
prince; the hero (the sun) who beats the wife
(the aurora) given him by the two brothers (the Açvinâu);
the friendly dog and cat; the golden cup in which the
brother of Ai-Kan is shut up asleep, and which falls
into the sea; the grateful animals which search for
the cup; the gem found in the stomach of a fish (from
the whale of the nocturnal ocean the gem comes forth);
and the consequent awakening of the sleeping Altyn
Ayak.

The following is from an Altaic saga, in the collection
of Radloff:—Beyond the sea, on a rock surrounded with
treasures, a dwarf girl is brought up, against whom
aggressive warriors can prevail nothing. She sends all
enemies away, after loading them with gold and silver,
and placing on their heads part of the hair of her forehead,
which proves to be sufficient to cover seven men.
In this marvellous hair, in this enchanted maiden, and in
the warriors who come by sea, who does not recognise
the veil of the maiden aurora of the Vedâs, who uncovers
her bosom before the sun her husband, and the sea which
the warrior-sun crosses, and from which he emerges to
come to the aurora?—who does not recognise the golden
fleece, Jason, Medea, the Argonauts of Hellenic tradition?

[Pg 147]

In the Finnic mythology of the Kalevala[338] also, we
have upon the mountain a good and pure hostess, a
generous giver, from the golden windows of whose house
are observed the women who give the wildfowl; but in
this Finnic representation, it is not the heroic girl-aurora,
it seems to me, we recognise, but the moon, Diana the
huntress (the German Helljäger), who also appears on the
mountain-peak, surrounded by the stars of the nocturnal
forest, where the wildfowl is found, which she can therefore
lavish upon the hero.

The Finns worship a thundering god, united with the
clouds, who has the thunderbolt for his sword, and who
is called Ukko,[339] father of Väinämöinen, the valorous and
wise hero, who speaks in the womb of his mother, who
performs prodigies when yet a child, and who produces
the sun and the moon.

This child-hero occurs again in their dwarf-god (pikku
mies), who, although, like the Hindoo Vishṇus, he is but
a span long, wields in his hand an axe the length of a
man, with which he cuts down an oak-tree that no one
had yet been able to bring to the ground. The sun-hero
is little; but his ray, his thunderbolt, his weapon,
his hand, lengthen themselves, extend themselves as far
as the dwarf-hero can desire, in order to destroy the
[Pg 148]enemy, who wears here the well-known aspect of the
trunk of a tree, or of a dark forest. The woodcutter is
therefore a favourite figure in popular tradition. And
the fact that Väinämöinen, having grown old and truthful
in speech, cuts down in the Kalevala,[340] by the help of
the little god, the prodigious oak, shows us that this little
god is a new and junior form, a younger and victorious
brother, or self-reproduction of the erewhile child-hero
Väinämöinen, who has lived his life of a day. The
valiant child-sun of morning has become the experienced
old sun of evening; but as this old sun is not strong
enough to cut down the oak-tree, under whose shadow
he loses himself, he is obliged to become a child again to
develope the requisite amount of strength; he needs a
younger brother, a hero or dwarf-god, to free him from
the evil shades of the forest of night. To this end he
also invokes the sun and the moon to illumine the forest,
and also the bear (the middle brother)—(in the Kalevala,
of the three heroes it is the bear Ilmarinen who shows
the greatest strength, and who wins the virgin for his
bride)—in order that by his strength he may root up the
tree. But to root up the tree is all that bears can do, while
Väinämöinen wishes it to be cut down; and so this victorious
enterprise is intrusted to the dwarf-god. Thus,
without explicit mention of their names, we find the
three brothers described in the entirely mythical epopee
of the Finns.

Alongside of the dwarf, by force of antithesis, there
arises, even in the Finnic mythology, the idea of a giant,
a Titan who amuses himself with uplifting and hurling
rocks and mountains. The cloud, the monster of darkness,[Pg 149]
being represented as a mountain, the monster
inhabiting this country must fight by means of the
mountain itself. The cloudy mountain moves; it is a
giant monster that moves it; it is the second brother, the
strong brother, the son of the cow, the bear, who amuses
himself with it, who shakes, carries, and throws it like a
weapon. And such mythical battles must have seemed
so much the more natural in the age in which the greater
number of the myths were conceived and produced, as we
know it to have been the age which archæologists call
the age of stone. The sun, as a dwarf, destroys the vast
cloud, the vast darkness, viewed as a giant.

But battles are not always going on in the heavens;
even the wild animals of the gloomy forest become tame
and rest themselves; music fills the soul with calm sentiments.
Therefore even the warrior Gandharvâs of the
Hindoo Olympus are transformed into expert musicians,
who entrance the very gods with wonder. The song of
the Sirens attracts and seduces the traveller; the lyre of
Orpheus draws after it mountains, trees, and animals;
the harp of Väinämöinen, in the Kalevala, makes the wolf
forget his ferocity, the bear his wildness, the fish his coldness.
And it is grief which is the first inspirer of song;
the first stanza of the poet Vâlmîkis had its origin in
the sorrow he felt upon seeing a bird bereft of its companion.
Orpheus (the Thracian sun) sings and plays for
grief, when the serpent (the shade of night) has bitten
and thrown into the gloomy regions his sweet bride
Eurydice (the aurora), and moves the demons to pity;
the harp of Väinämöinen is also born of sorrow.[341][Pg 150]
The epopee of the Finns contains, moreover, several
other myths cognate with those of Aryan mythical tradition;—such
as the resuscitated hero; the winning of the
maiden by display of heroism; the bride heroically won
and afterwards cut in pieces; the cup of abundance, or
the cornucopia (the Sampo); the golden cradle; the
marvellous vessel in which the hero crosses the sea; the
three sisters, of whom one gives black milk, one white,
and one red (night, the alba or moon, and aurora); the
invulnerable shirt; the magician who makes children of
gold and silver; and others of secondary importance,[342]
but all tending to prove that formerly the Turanian and
Aryan races, in their neighbouring abodes, were originally
much more similar to each other than they now appear,
on account of partly diversity of language, and partly
their different degrees of civilisation.

I have just named the Finnish Sampo as a cup of
abundance or cornucopia; it does, in fact, yield marvellous
abundance to whoever possesses it, and wherever it
falls. It is made of the feather of a swan, or of a duck
(the swan and the duck are, as we shall see, confounded
together in tradition, and the duck, like the hen, is a
symbol of abundance), of a tuft of wool, of a grain of
corn, and of chips from a spindle, all evident symbols of
abundance; and it becomes so large that it has to be
carried by a hundred-horned ox (reminding us of the
horns of the cow which spin). The ox bears abundance
upon its horns, it yields abundance from its horns. The
cornucopia is, in my mind, unmistakably implied in these
mythical data.[Pg 151]
The same mythical correspondence which we have
found to exist between the Finnic epos and the various
legendary Aryan traditions is observable between the
latter and the Esthonian popular tales. In the collection
of Frederic Kreuzwald[343] we find numerous proofs of this
correspondence.

In the first story we have, in a hut in the forest, three
sisters, of whom the youngest is the most beautiful. The
old witch, her step-mother, persecutes her, and always
gives her filaments of gold to spin, hiding from time to
time the gold she has spun in a secret room. During the
summer the old woman goes out of the house, no one
knows where, after having apportioned their respective
tasks to the three sisters. While the old woman is out,
a young prince, having lost himself in the forest, finds
his way to the hut, and becomes enamoured of the
youngest of the three sisters. The young couple speak
to each other of love in the light of the moon and of the
stars; while the old king, impatient at the absence of
his son, falls into grief, and sends everywhere to look for
him. After three days he is found; before going back
to the palace, he secretly promises to the youngest sister
that he will return. Meanwhile the old woman comes
back, finds the work badly done, curses, threatens, and
maltreats the girl. Early in the morning, while the old
woman and the two elder sisters are slumbering, the
maiden slips out, and leaves the house. During her
childhood she had learned the language of birds; accordingly,
when she meets a crow, she salutes him by the
name of “bird of light,” and sends him as a messenger
to the young prince, to warn him not to come back to see[Pg 152]
her, on account of the fury of the old woman. The
prince then names her another trysting-place, and the
young couple meet under a tree, between the second and
third crowing of the cock; and when the sun rises, they
flee away together. The old witch causes them to be followed
by a ball made of nine evil herbs, and carried by
malignant winds. The fugitives are overtaken on the
banks of a river, where the ball strikes the prince’s horse;
it rears up on its hind legs, and the girl falls off into the
river, into the hands of a marine monster; upon which
the prince is struck by a disease which no one can cure.
By eating the flesh of a hog, the prince acquires a knowledge
of the language of birds; he sends the swallows as
messengers to the magician of Finland, that he may teach
him the way to free a girl who has been transformed into
a pond-rose (lotus-flower). The answer, instead of being
brought by the swallows, is brought by an eagle. The
prince must become a shrimp, in order to enter the water
without being drowned; he must detach the lotus by its
root, draw it along the surface of the water to the bank,
near a stone, and pronounce these words, “From the
pond-rose, a maiden—from the shrimp, a man.” The
crow confirms the eagle’s words. The prince hears a
song issue from the rose; he then determines to deliver
the girl. The two young people emerge together from
the water. The maiden is ashamed of being naked, and
the prince goes to procure nuptial robes for her; after
which he conducts her to the palace in a beautiful chariot,
where a joyous and gorgeous wedding-festival is celebrated.
Soon afterwards the old witch dies, to appear
again in the form of a cat, which is taken by the tail and
flung into the fire. In the witch’s house are found mountains
of spun gold, which serve for the dowry of the
three sisters. We have already said that the three sisters[Pg 153]
correspond to the three brothers, and the youngest sister
to the youngest brother. The epithet of young is often
given to the Vedic aurora, whom the sun marries. Here
the prince marries the youngest of the three sisters; the
morning aurora is united to the sun. Towards night she
falls into the water; it is the witch (night) who throws
her in; the hog which the prince (the sun) eats we shall
see to be a figurative representation of the nocturnal
monster, or the moon. Eating the hog, staying in the
forest of night, the prince learns the language of birds.
The prince frees the maiden from the waters; the sun
delivers the aurora from the gloomy ocean of night, and
robes her in his splendour, causing the witch of night to
be burned in the flames of the aurora, and taking from
the witch’s abode the spun gold or golden fleece.

In the third Esthonian story, a woman, called mother-of-gold,
bears, by the favour of a dwarf, three dwarf-sons
at the same time, who become three heroes. The first is
the seer (the wise brother), the second has a ready arm
(the strong brother), the third runs swiftly in the race
(a quality distinctive of the third brother, Arǵunas, in
the Mahâbhâratam, and which is applicable to the victorious
sun of morning, who wins the race, together with
the aurora).

A variation of the story relating to the youngest sister
and the dwarf is that of the girl seven years old, the wise
girl (the aurora), in the fourth Esthonian tale, who, being
persecuted by her step-mother, retires into the forest (the
night). While there, it seems to her that she is in
heaven, where, in a house of crystal and pearls, she is
received by a well-dressed woman of gold (the fair-haired
moon). The girl asks the golden woman to be allowed
to take care of the cattle, like the cowmaid aurora. In
the history of Ardshi Bordshi we have seen the wise[Pg 154]
puppet. This form of the wise girl, the dressed girl of
wood, occurs again in the Esthonian story; in which
she is made of wood from the forest, of three anchovies,
of bread, of a black serpent, and of the blood of the girl
herself, to whom the image has a great likeness, and
which may be beaten by the old step-mother without being
hurt. From the forest-tree, wood, or wooden box of the
night, with the juice of the black serpent of night and
the blood of the girl aurora of evening, comes forth the
maiden aurora of morning, the wise, the speaking puppet,
the puppet who guesses the riddles. The girl who comes
out of wood is represented as a wooden puppet; more
frequently the puppet is the moon, the wise fairy who
comes out of the forest. In the same story we have the
magic rod which produces a cock upon the mountain,
beside which a tablecloth spreads itself out, while the
chairs range themselves in their places, and the dishes
are filled of their own accord. The story ends with the
usual marriage between the beautiful maiden, and a king’s
son returning from the chase (or the son who comes out
of the forest of night, viewed as infested by ferocious
animals).

In the sixth Esthonian tale, the poor girl finds a
woman in a white robe (the moon), adorned with gold,
upon a rock near a fountain, who announces her approaching
marriage with a youth as poor as herself;
but the good fairy godmother—for in the legends the
godmother is represented as good, as the stepmother is
wicked—promises to make them both rich and happy.
She calls herself the lady of the waters, secret wife
of the wind, and she judges the criminals who present
themselves at her tribunal (Proserpina or Persephonê).

In the seventh tale, a boy nine years of age, the third[Pg 155]
son of two poor people, goes out to be a cowherd; his
master treats him well, but his mistress gives him more
floggings than bread. One day the young cowherd is
unfortunate enough to lose a cow; he searches for it all
through the forest, but in vain. He re-enters the house
with the cattle, after the sun has set some time. The
observant eye of his mistress perceives at once that there
is a cow missing; she beats the boy without pity, and
sends him out to look for it, threatening to kill him if he
returns without it. He wanders through the forest; but
when the sun arises from out the bosom of the dawn, he
resolves to stay out of the house, and not to return to his
persecutor (the young morning sun flees from the old
and perverse night). In the evening, the boy finds an
old dwarf, who is his host during the night (the moon),
and who says to him, “When the sun rises to-morrow,
carefully observe the spot in which he rises. Thou must
go in that direction, so that every morning thou may’st
have the sun before thee, and every evening the sun
behind thee. Thus thy strength will increase more and
more every day.” How can one indicate better the
apparent course of the solar hero, or of the sun in the
night? The hero, in order to go towards the morning
sun, must necessarily have the sun of evening behind
him. The old dwarf also gives him a sack and a little
barrel, in which he will always find the food and drink
he requires; but he recommends him never to eat or
drink more than is necessary, that he may have to give
to a hungry bird or a thirsty wild beast. He also leaves
him a rolled-up leaf of burdock, upon which, by rolling
it out, he will always be able to cross water (a new form
of the cup). We know how the Hindoos represented
their god as floating upon a lotus-leaf in the midst of the
waters, and how Padmaǵas (born of the lotus-flower,[Pg 156]
or the rose of the waters, which shuts during the night)
was one of the names of Brâhman; here we have the god
or hero shutting himself up in the flower, from which he
afterwards comes out. In the chapters on the Serpent
and the Frog we shall again see how the god sometimes
shuts himself up in a monstrous form in this flower, the
rose, on account of a curse from which he is to be freed
by a beautiful maiden. We have seen how the Esthonian
girl, who was by the curse of the old woman thrown into
the water, was transformed into a water-rose or lotus-flower,
and delivered by the young prince. The Esthonian
boy finds himself before a small lake; he throws
the leaf in, and it becomes a magical boat, which carries
him over. Meanwhile he has become strong. Upon
the mountain he sees a serpent, a tortoise, and an
eagle, all three of enormous dimensions, approaching to
attack him, with a man upon a black horse, which has
wings on its feet, in the rear of them. He kills the
serpent and the tortoise, but the eagle flies away. The
man with the black horse takes the boy into his house,
and appoints him to look after the dogs, that they may
not get loose from their chains, a danger against which
the man provides by making twelve colossal oxen fetch
rocks upon rocks, to repair the damage done by the dogs.
The rocks, touched by a magical rod, arrange themselves
upon the car drawn by the oxen. At last, by
the advice of the eagle, he steals his master’s horse,
and departs to sojourn among mankind, taking a wife
with him.

In the eighth Esthonian story too, the third brother is
the cunning one. His two elder brothers, after the death
of their father, despoil him of his share of the inheritance,
and he is reduced to wander alone and impoverished
about the world in quest of good fortune. He falls in[Pg 157]
with a woman who complains to him that her husband
regularly beats her when she is unable to procure for him
the things he wants, which he asks for in the form of a
riddle. The third brother solves the enigma for the
woman (the moon), who, in gratitude, gives him provisions
for his travels. He then comes to a palace, where
the king is engaged in celebrating a summer festival, and
he undertakes to provide and prepare the feast. A
magician presents himself at the festival in the shape of
an old man, and asks to taste the food. The young man
suspects him, but, seeing a ring upon his finger, he consents
to allow him if he gives him a pledge. The magician
vows that he has nothing to give. The youth asks
for his ring, and the old man in his gluttony at once
gives it up; upon which the youth, who, along with the
ring, has taken all the magician’s strength away, first
binds and derides him, and then has him beaten by seven
strong men. The old man breaks the ropes and disappears;
however, the young man, having the ring in his
hands, possesses the means of tracking his footsteps and
making him his. (This is the usual disc, lasso, or bridle
which is now in the hands of the hero, now in those of
the monster.) The youth follows the magician underground.
The latter, it appears, is served by three maidens,
who, when they perceive that the sorcerer has lost his
ring, and that they have a young man for companion,
enjoy themselves with him while the magician is asleep.
The youth learns from them that the old wizard also
possesses a sword which can destroy armies, and a
magical rod which can create a bridge to span the sea;
these, therefore, he steals, and departs, returning by a
wonderful bridge thrown over the sea to the palace
whence he had started. It seems to him as if his journey
had lasted only two nights, instead of which a year has[Pg 158]
passed.[344] He finds on his arrival his two brothers in the
king’s service, one as coachman and the other as a valet,
both enriched because they have received the pay due to
their younger brother for having prepared the great feast.
The young man now engages himself in another capacity,
in a species of service especially dear to the young hero,
next to those of stable-boy and cowherd; that is to say, he
becomes under-cook of the king. (In the Vîrâṭa-Parvam
of the Mahâbhâratam, it is the second of the brothers
who disguises himself as a cook, in order to prepare good
sauces and substantial food for the king whose guest he
is; the elder brother is disguised as a Brâhmanas, a wise
adviser; the third brother, Arǵunas, the agile, the swift
one, pretends to be a eunuch, is given in exchange for a
woman, and teaches dancing, music, and singing in the
gynecium. Of the two sons of the Açvinâu, one becomes
a groom, the other a cowherd.) His brothers continue to
dislike him, and because he boasts to them that he had
seen in hell golden birds, they induce the king to send
him to hell in order to procure them. He accomplishes
this undertaking with great difficulty, and brings the
birds in a sack made of spiders’ webs, which is so strong
that the birds enclosed in it cannot extricate themselves.
In the same sack, during another expedition, the young
man brings from hell many precious objects of gold and
silver. In compensation, he only asks of the king to
send the princess, his daughter, to listen for one evening
to the conversation of his two brothers the coachman and
the valet. Both boast of having enjoyed to satiety the
favours of the princess. The latter, indignant and full
of shame, runs to tell the king everything, upon which[Pg 159]
he arraigns them before him and has them judged. The
third brother is named Counsellor; with his enchanted
sword he destroys an entire army of enemies, and obtains
in reward for his services and his valour the king’s
daughter to wife.

The ninth Esthonian story presents to us the son of
the thunder, who sells his soul to the devil, on condition
that the latter serves him for seven years. The time
agreed upon is nearly come to an end, and the son of the
thunder wishes to escape from him, and profits by an
opportunity which has chanced. The devil sees a black
cloud, which is a sign of an approaching tempest; he is
afraid, hides himself under a stone, and asks the son of
the thunder to keep him company. The latter consents;
but seeing that the devil is afraid, at each thunderclap
he presses his ears and eyes in such a manner as to make
him perspire and shiver all over. The devil, believing
this to be the effect of the thunder, promises the son of
the thunder that he will not only leave him his soul, but
give him three other souls, if he will deliver him from
the evils which he suffers on account of the thunder, by
taking from the thundering god, the father of the clouds,
his weapon (which is also a musical instrument). This
weapon, having been ravished from the god, is taken by
the devil into hell, into a chamber of iron, shut up
within seven castles. A great drought coming upon the
earth, the son of the thunder repents of having rendered
such a service to the devil; he finds means, however, of
informing the thunder-god where his weapon is concealed.
The thunder-god then becomes a child, and
engages himself in the service of a fisherman, near a lake
which the devil is accustomed to visit to steal the fishes.
He surprises him in the act of robbery, and by the help
of a magician takes him prisoner, and has him beaten[Pg 160]
without pity, until he promises to pay a heavy ransom
in money to be let free, the fisherman and his child to
accompany him to hell itself to receive the sum of
money. Arrived in hell, the devil entertains them like a
gentleman. The child tells the fisherman to ask the
devil to show them the musical instrument which he
keeps enclosed in the iron room. The devil kindly consents,
but cannot draw from the instrument anything
more musical than the mewing of a cat or the grunting
of a pig. The fisherman then laughs at the devil, and
says that his boy can play better. The devil does not
believe it, and laughingly gives the instrument, which
he calls bagpipes, to the boy. The latter blows into
them and makes such a noise that all hell resounds with
it, and the devils fall to the earth as if dead. The child
then becomes the god of thunder again, and returns to
heaven, where by the noise of his instrument he opens
the celestial reservoirs and lets out the beneficent rain.
The description of the tempest which occurs in many
Vedic hymns is the germ of this interesting myth. The
drum or kettledrum thunder is a familiar image in
Hindoo poetry, and the Gandharvâs, the musician-warriors
of the Hindoo Olympus, have no other instrument
than the thunder. The conch of the warrior
Pâṇḍavâs in the Mahâbhâratam, and the famous horn of
Orlando (which comes from the golden horn of Odin),
are epical reminiscences of thunder. Orpheus, who in
hell plays on his lyre and tames the animals, is a more
lucid and more perfect form of this Esthonian thunder-god
who plays the bagpipes in hell. It is also remarkable
how, in harmony with the pastoral bagpipes, in the
tenth Esthonian story, which is a variation of the preceding
one, the god transformed into a powerful boy is
called a little shepherd or cowherd—another interesting[Pg 161]
fact, which completes his identification with Orpheus.[345]
The magic flute is a variation of the same celestial
musical instrument. The magic flute, the bagpipes or
wonderful pipe, occurs again in the twenty-third
Esthonian story, in which the good Tiidu, by means of
it and of his virtue, obtains riches. The magical harp
of Gunnar in the Edda has the same marvellous effects.

Evidently the monster-dwarf is a favourite subject of
Esthonian tradition, and it often occurs in the Hindoo
and in the German traditions, as well as in the Franco-Latin
tradition of Charlemagne. The eleventh story
introduces us to three dwarf-brothers who contend for
the inheritance left by their father, consisting of a
miraculous hat, which enables its wearer to see everything,
whilst he can himself be visible or invisible at
pleasure (this hat is made of pieces of men’s nails cut
up);[346] of a pair of slippers which transport the owner in
an instant wherever he wishes (we must not forget that
Cinderella, when she loses the slipper, is overtaken by
the prince bridegroom); and of a stick which strikes of
itself, and destroys everything, even stronger than the
thunderbolt (the thunderbolt itself). The three brothers
maintain that these three articles, to be really useful,
[Pg 162]must be the property of one; but who is to enjoy this
privilege? A man comes up to put an end to the dispute,
and feigns disbelief in the virtue of these three
things, unless he proves it himself. The three simpletons
give them to him that he may prove them. The man
takes them off, and the three dwarfs are left to meditate
upon the truth of the above-quoted proverb, “Between
two disputers the third profits,” or at least that variation
of it which their own case suggests “Between three
that dispute, the fourth profits.”

In the thirteenth Esthonian story, the privileged
character of the third brother is explained, as we are
told that he is the son of a king, but was exchanged by
a witch during his infancy for the child of a peasant.
The latter died in the palace, whilst the king’s son grew
in the hut, showing in every action his royal pedigree.
Here we have the story of the hero who is exposed on
the mountains intimately connected with that of the
third brother. To this third brother, who alone shows
himself to be devoted to his father, and who alone makes
a vow to watch by his grave, is also attributed the merit
of having delivered, upon a high mountain of crystal,
from a seven years’ sleep, a princess, who then becomes
his wife. We have seen the aurora-awakener in the
Vedic hymns—the sun and the aurora arouse each other:
the sun sends forth the aurora; the aurora draws out
the sun. The myth reproduces itself every day, and
expresses in its entirety a daily phenomenon of light in
the heavens. In Northern countries, where the contrast
is great between winter and spring, and therefore the
impression is striking which is caused by the cessation
of vegetation in autumn, the earth also assumed the
aspect of a dead young princess; but an omniscient
magician having said, Non est mortua puella, sed dormit,[Pg 163]
the third brother, predestined to the enterprise, lays
down his poor robes, and dresses himself, on the first occasion,
in the colour of bronze; on the second, the colour of
silver; on the third, the colour of gold, and ascends the
mountain of crystal, or ice, whence he brings forth the
beautiful spring. The sky, grey in autumn, snowy in
winter, and golden in spring, corresponds to the grey
sky of evening, the silver one of night, and the golden
one of morning. Spring is the dawn of the year; the
primitive myth is but amplified; the last hour of the
day awakens the aurora; the last month of the solar
year awakens the spring. The application of the myth
of the day to the year is one of the greatest simplicity.

In the fourteenth story, the king of the golden country
loses himself in the forest full of ferocious animals, and
cannot find his way out. A stranger (no doubt the
devil) conducts him out, on condition that he will give
him whatever first comes to meet him. The king promises.
The first thing he sees on his return is his royal
child, who, carried by his nurse, stretches out his arms to
his father. The king exchanges him for a peasant’s girl,
whom he gives up to the stranger, allowing his own son
to be brought up among the peasant’s herds. The king’s
son, having grown to manhood, determines to go and deliver
the poor girl. He disguises himself as a poor man,
puts a sack of peas on his shoulders, and goes into the
forest where his father was lost eighteen years before.
He also loses himself, and meets the stranger, who promises
to direct him if he will give him the peas which
are in the sack, as they will serve, he alleges, to recompense
the assistants at the funeral of his aunt, who died
in poverty during the night.—This pulse in funeral
ceremonies refers to a very ancient custom. The Vedic
ceremonials already mention them in connection with[Pg 164]
funerals; and in the Greek belief, the dead carried
vegetables with them to hell, either for the right of
passage or as provisions for travelling. In Piedmont, it
is still the custom on the second of November (All Soul’s
Day) to make a great distribution of kidney-beans to the
poor, who pray for the souls of the dead. Vegetables,
peas, vetches, and kidney-beans are symbols of abundance,
and to this belief may be traced the numerous Indo-European
stories in which mention is made of beans
which multiply themselves in the pipkin, or of peas which
grow up to the sky, and up the stalk of which the hero
climbs to heaven. The vegetables necessary for being introduced
into the kingdom of the dead, and the pea by
means of which the hero enters heaven, are variations of
the same mythical subject. In Hindoo tradition, besides
the pea or kidney-bean, we have the pumpkin as a
symbol of abundance, which is multiplied infinitely, or
which mounts up to heaven. The wife of the hero
Sagaras gives birth to a pumpkin, from which afterwards
come forth sixty thousand sons. The kidney-bean, the
pea, the vetch, the common bean, and the pumpkin are
also symbols of generation, not only on account of the
facility with which they multiply, but also on account of
their form. We have seen in the Vedic ceremonials what
organs are represented by the two kidney-beans; we shall
also see, in the chapter on the Ass, how the names given
to the organs of generation are also used to designate
fools. Now, it is worthy of notice that the Sanskrit word
mâshas (or kidney-bean) also signified the foolish, the
stolid one, in the same way as in Piedmont a bonus vir
is called a kidney-bean. Thus, too, the pumpkin, which
expresses fecundity, also means, in Italian, idiocy or
stupidity. As to beans, I have already remarked, in my
work upon “Nuptial Usages,” upon their symbolical[Pg 165]
meaning, and cited the Russian and Piedmontese custom
of putting a black and a white bean into the cake eaten
at Epiphany, one of which represents the male and the
other the female, one the king and the other the queen.
The two who find the beans kiss each other with joyful
auguries. As all these vegetables personify the moon,
which we know to be considered as a giver of abundance,
and which, by its form of a turning ball, can well be represented
by the turning pea, in this personification we
must search for the solution of the principal myths relating
to vegetables.—The young prince of the Esthonian
story, having obtained the stranger’s favour in the gloomy
forest by means of the peas, engages himself in his
service, with intent to deliver the girl who had freed him
by taking his place with the stranger during eighteen
years. He therefore follows him; but on the way he
lets a pea fall to the ground from time to time, in order
to know the way back. He is conducted by a strange
and wild subterranean passage, where silence as of the
tomb reigns—it is, in fact, the kingdom of the dead—where
birds have the appearance of wishing to sing, dogs
to bark, and oxen to low, but cannot, and where the
water flows without a murmur. The young prince feels
in his heart a kind of anguish; the universal stillness in
the midst of animated beings oppresses him. Having
passed the region of silence, they come to that of deafening
noise. The young prince thinks he hears the excruciating
din of twenty-four saws at work; but the old
stranger tells him that it is only his grandmother who
has fallen asleep, and is snoring. At last they come to
the stranger’s dwelling, where the prince finds the beautiful
maiden, but the old stranger will not let him speak.
He sees in the stable a white horse and a black cow,
with a white or luminous-headed calf. This cow the[Pg 166]
young prince is ordered to milk until there is not a drop
of milk in its breast; instead of milking it with his
fingers, he, by the advice of the girl, uses for that purpose
red-hot pincers. Another time the youth is told to
lead away the enchanted calf with the white or luminous
head. In order that it may not escape, the girl gives
him a magic thread, of which one end is to be tied to the
left leg of the calf, and the other to the little toe of the
prince’s left foot.—The little finger, although the smallest,
is the most privileged of the five. It is the one that
knows everything; and in Piedmont, when the mothers
wish to make their children believe that they are in communication
with a mysterious spy, who sees everything
that they do, they are accustomed to awe them by the
words, “My little finger tells me everything.”—At last
the two young people resolve to flee. Before starting,
the prince splits open the forehead of the white-headed
calf; from its skull comes forth an enchanted little red
ball, which shines like a small sun. He wraps it up,
leaving part of it uncovered to light the way, and flees
away with the girl. Being followed by malignant spirits,
who are sent by the old man to follow them, the two
fugitives, by means of the enchanted little ball (or pearl),
turned round three times, become, first the one a pond
and the other a fish, then the one a rose-bush and the other
a rose, then again the one a breeze and the other a gnat,
until the stone which covers the entrance to the subterranean
world having been lifted up, they arrive again
safe and happy upon the earth; and by means of the little
red ball, they show themselves to mankind in splendid
and princely robes. I scarcely think it necessary to explain
to the reader the sense of this lucid mythical story.
The black cow which produces the calf with the white or
luminous head is a Vedic antithesis which we have already[Pg 167]
seen;[347] the cow (night) produces the calf (the moon).
The prince takes the little red ball out of the calf; by
means of this ball, the girl is delivered from the regions
of gloom. The little ball moves the stone; the sun and
the aurora come out together from the mountain, after
having travelled together in the kingdom of shadows;
the sun delivers the aurora. This story unites together
and puts in order several myths of an analogous character,
but born separately.

The three next stories describe other voyages made by
the solar hero to heaven, or in hell, and end by meaning
the same thing. In the eighteenth story we again
find the enchanted ring, called Solomon’s ring, which the
young hero goes to search for; when he finds it, by
taking it from the daughter of hell, and puts it on his
finger, he is of a sudden endowed with such strength
that he can split a rock with one blow of his fist. The
little red ball of the story just described, which lifts up
the rock, and this ring which splits the stone, represent
the same mythical object, i.e., the sun, the sun’s ball or
disc.

The twenty-first story shows us the fearless hero who
frees a castle from the presence of the demons, and who
thus gains a treasure; riches are the reward of valour.[Pg 168]
The twentieth Esthonian story is a variation of the
exceedingly popular tale of Blue Beard, the killer of his
wives. The Esthonian monster-husband has already
killed eleven, and is about to murder the twelfth, by way
of punishing her for having, against his express prohibition,
visited the secret room opened by the golden key
(perhaps the moon), when a youth who takes care of the
goslings, the friend of her childhood, comes to deliver
her. From the subject itself, and the expressions used
in this story, we can discover the origin of the terrible
charivari in the nuptials of widowers or widows. This
savage custom is intended not only to deride the lust
of the old man or woman who marries again, but to
warn the girl who marries the one, or the youth who
marries the other, of the possibility of a fate similar to
the first wife or husband. When, therefore, the wife
apatighnî (who does not kill her husband) is praised to
the Vedic husband, we must understand that the patighnî
(or killer of her husband) is a widow, whom no one must
marry, as being suspected of murder. Hence, to free
herself from this suspicion, an honest Hindoo wife (like
Gudrun in the Edda) was to throw herself into the fire
after the death of her husband; the evening aurora, after
the death of the sun, dies too.

In the twenty-second story we have once more the
myth of the young pastoral hero; he is the son of a king.
By the order of his step-mother, a witch, who carries off
shepherds, steals him from the palace during his infancy,
and abandons him in a solitary place, where he is brought
up by cowherds, and becomes himself an excellent cowherd.
An old man finds him and says, looking at him
and at the cattle, “Thou dost not seem to me born to
remain a cowherd.” The boy answers that he knows he
was born to command, and adds, “Here I learn the[Pg 169]
duties of a commander by anticipation. If things go
well with the quadrupeds, I shall also prosper with
bipeds.” The shepherd is therefore a little king; a good
shepherd will become a good king. The boy goes through
several adventures, in which he displays his valour. A
wicked German lady wishes to take from him the
strawberries which he has plucked. He defends himself
bravely; his mistress persecutes him; and he takes twelve
wolves, shuts them up in a cavern, and each day gives
them a lamb to eat, in order to avenge himself upon his
wicked mistress, to whom he simply says that the wolves
have devoured them. At last he causes her to be devoured
herself by the wolves, who eat her all up, leaving only
the heart (the sun) and the tongue, which are too full of
venom for the wolves of the night, because they burn
their mouths. At the age of eighteen, the youth has
several other adventures. He becomes enamoured of a
gardener’s daughter, and is found again by the king his
father, who, before allowing him to marry the beautiful
gardener’s daughter, wishes to prove that they are predestined
to each other. He cuts a ring in two with his
sword, and gives one part to the young prince and the
other to the maiden; the two halves must be preserved
by both, and one day they will meet of themselves and
form again the whole ring, in such a manner that it will
be impossible to find the place where it was broken.—In
a Tuscan story, the beautiful maiden gives half her necklace
to the third brother. The young couple lose each
other; their meeting again and mutual recognition take
place when the two parts of the necklace join each other.
The use of the wedding-ring has a mythical origin. The
solar (and sometimes the lunar disc) is the ring which
unites the heavenly husband and wife.—When, after
other adventures, the two young people of the Esthonian[Pg 170]
story join together the two halves of their ring, their
misfortunes come to an end; they marry and live together
happily, whilst the cruel step-mother, who meanwhile
has become a widow, is expelled from the kingdom.

The last Esthonian story tells of the extraordinary
births, in the same day, of a handsome prince and a
beautiful princess. The princess is born in a bird’s egg,
laid like a pearl in the bosom of the queen; she has at
first the form of a living puppet, and afterwards, when
warmed in wool, she becomes a real girl. Whilst she
undergoes this transformation, the queen also gives birth
to a beautiful boy. The two children are considered as
twins, and baptized together. To the baptism of the
girl there comes as godmother, in a splendid chariot
drawn by six horses, a young woman dressed in rose-coloured
and golden robes, who shines like the sun, and
who, as she lets her veil drop, like the beautiful Argive
Helen, fills the bystanders with admiration. [The aurora,
who, before appearing in the form of a beautiful girl, is
enclosed in the wood of the forest, is a wooden puppet,
and becomes a wooden puppet once more when, fleeing
from the sun, she hides herself in a creeping-plant, like
the Hindoo Urvaçî (the first of the dawns), or in a laurel-plant,
like the Hellenic Daphne (the Vedic Dahanâ-aurora).
The aurora is born together with the sun; the
beautiful doll-maiden is born with the little prince. The
mother and the beneficent godmother seem to be the
moon, or a more ancient aurora.] The mother, dying,
leaves her daughter, putting it upon her breast, a gem
which is to bring her happiness; that is, the little basket
which contained the bird’s egg, with the eggshell itself.
By means of the magical little basket, and by pronouncing
some magic words, the maiden can find all that she
searches or wishes for. The young man and woman end[Pg 171]
by marrying each other, having discovered that, although
both born of a king, they are children of different fathers;
they marry, and the little basket of happiness mysteriously
disappears.

SECTION IV.

The Bull and the Cow in Slavonic Tradition.

SUMMARY.

The red cow and the black cow; what they prognosticate.—The red
hue of evening.—The bull that drinks.—The bull corrupts the
water.—The bull’s hoofs.—The cow in the bartering of animals.—The
hero ascends into heaven.—The bull sold to the tree; the
tree, split open, yields gold.—The fool sells the bull.—Two bulls
conduct the poor brother to riches.—The bull carries the fugitive
home.—The bull is split in two, and is useful even after death.—Ivan
and Helen, followed by the bear, flee upon the bull with
their faces turned to the part whence the bear is likely to come.—The
dwarf comes out of the bull’s bones; the dwarf dies amid the
flames.—The beasts of prey help the hero.—John and Mary, sun
and aurora of the Christians.—The saviour-bull again.—From the
dead bull an apple-tree springs up.—Ivan delivers Mary.—Mary,
the step-daughter, and persecuted.—The cow that spins, the
good fairy, the Madonna, the moon.—The maiden who combs the
hair is the same as the purifier.—The demoniacal cow obliges
men to kiss her under her tail.—The witch who sucks the beautiful
girl’s breast whilst the latter combs her hair.—The hide of the
demoniacal cow taken off.—The eye which does not sleep and
plays the spy.—From the cow, the apple-tree; from the apple-tree,
the branches which wound the wicked sisters, and let the good
one pluck their fruit; from the apple, the husband.—The maiden
bows to the right foot of the beneficent cow; a tree springs up
again from the killed cow.—The red apples which cause horns to
grow, and the white ones which give beauty and youth.—Ivan,
the sun, persecuted by the witch his sister, is saved by the sister
of the sun, the aurora.—The mythical scales; the scales of St
Michael.—The cows with golden horns and tails.—The black
demoniacal bull strikes the ground with his horns, in order to
prevent a wedding from taking place.—The hare and the crow
put obstacles in the way of nuptials.—The demon blinded whilst
drinking.—The third son of the peasant throws down the bull.—The[Pg 172]
avaricious merchant.—The epidemic among the animals, and
the bull killed because he has stolen some hay from a priest.—The
bull in the forest.—The robber of cows and of oxen.—The
black bull led away by Ivan, by means of a cock.—The hero
comes out of the cow.—The intestines of the calf eaten by the fox.—Out
of the calf come birds.—The son of the cow, the strongest
brother.—The three brothers reduced to one with the qualities
of the three.—The third brother mounts into heaven by means
of the cow’s hide.—He who ascends does not come down again.—Dreams.—The
wife of the old man, carried to heaven in a sack,
is let fall to the ground and dies.—The ascent into heaven by
means of vegetables.—Turn-little-Pea, the third brother, the killer
of monsters; Turn-little-Pea and Ivan identified.—Ivan followed
by the serpent-witches.—The female serpent tries to file the iron
gate with her tongue, which is caught by the pincers and burned.—The
three brothers, the evening one, the midnight one, and the
clearly-seeing one; the third is the victorious hero; he delivers
three princesses out of three castles of copper, of silver, and of
gold, and receives from them three eggs of copper, of silver, and of
gold, new forms corresponding to those of the three brothers;
the third brother, abandoned by his elders, after various vicissitudes,
finds his bride again; explanation of this beautiful myth.—Ivan
identified with Svetazór.—The mother of the birds, in gratitude,
delivers the hero.—The third brother, the cunning one,
despoils his two elder brothers of their precious objects.—Ivan
of the dog is equivalent to Svetazór; the story of the goldsmith.—Ivan
the great drinker.—Ivan the prince, Ivan the fool; Ivan and
Emilius, foolish and lazy, are one and the same person.—The red
shoes in the legend.—The sister kills her little brother to take
his red shoes; a magical flute discovers the crime.—The slippers
attract the bridegroom; corresponding nuptial usages.—The
slipper tried on; the toe cut off.—The change of wives.—The
ugly one becomes beautiful.—The grateful pike.—The barrel
full of water, which walks of its own accord.—The forest which
is cut down and walks of itself, the chariot which goes on by
itself, the stove that moves and carries Emilius where he wishes,
the cask in which the hero and heroine are shut up and thrown
into the sea, all forms of the cloud and of the gloom of night;
the ugly becomes beautiful; the poor, rich and pleasing.—The
wine allowed to run out of the barrel, i.e., the cloud which dissolves
itself in rain.—Ivan, thought to be stupid, makes his fortune
out of having watched by his father’s grave.—Ivan, thought to be
stupid, speculates upon his dead mother; his brothers try to do the[Pg 173]
same by their wives, and are punished.—The law of atavism in
tradition.—The foolish mother and the cunning son.—The funereal
storks.—The thief cheats the gentleman in several ways, and finally
places him to guard his hat.—Ivan without fear; a little fish terrifies
him.—Various heroical forms of Ivan in Russian tradition:
Alessino, the son of the priest, invokes the rain against the monster-serpent;
Baldak spits in the Sultan’s face—the star under his
heel; Basil and Plavaćek, who demand a gift from the monster;
the fortunate fictitious hero; the cunning little Thomas; the
third brother, who does not allow himself to be put to sleep; the
thief Klimka, who terrifies the other thieves in order to rob them;
the Cossack who delivers the maiden from the flames, and receives
precious gifts; Ilia Muromietz and his companions; the merchant’s
son educated by the devil; the boy who understands the language
of birds; the virtuous workman, who prefers good advice to a
large reward.—The flying ship; the protector of the unfortunate
rewarded; eating and drinking.—The girl who solves the riddle
of the prince, who comes with the hare and the quail, and obtains
her husband.—The dwarf Allwis obtains the bride by answering the
questions of his father-in-law.—The wonderful puppet (the moon),
that sews for the priest’s daughter (the aurora) the shirt destined
for the prince.—The girl-heroine, protectress of her brother, helper
of the young hero in dangers and trials of heroism.—The cow-herd’s
daughter, who never says anything displeasing to her
husband the king, whatever the latter does.—By contact with the
monster, the heroine is perverted, and also becomes a persecutor
of the hero, her brother or husband; analogous types of the
perfidious woman.—Dangerous trials imposed on the hero.—The
sister bound to the tree.—The wife subdued, and the magical
belt.—The tooth of a dead man thrust into Ivan’s head; the
animals deliver him; the fox knows better than the rest how to
manage it.—The towel which causes a bridge to spring up across
the water; the hero’s sister steals the towel, and unites herself to
the monster-serpent; she demands from her brother Ivan wild
beasts’ milk, and the flour or powder of gold which is under a
mill guarded by twelve gates.—The monster burned, and the
hero’s sister condemned to weep and to eat hay.—The exchange
of the hero.—The crow brings the water of death and of life.—The
stepmother who persecutes Ivan.—Ivan resuscitated by his
two sons.—Ivan chaunts his death-song; the liberating animals
appear to help him.—Ivan and his preceptor persecuted by his
wife Anna.—The blind man, the lame man, and the beautiful girl
whose breast is sucked by the witch.—The witch is forced to find[Pg 174]
the fountain of life and of health; the blind man sees, the lame
walks, and the girl recovers her good health.—The maiden
blinded; the wife changed; the dew which gives eyesight; the
girl finds her husband; a Russian variety of the legend of Berta.

Having drawn so far the general outline of the Turanian
boundaries of Slavonian tradition, it is now time to begin
to study the tradition of the Slaves itself, as far as it concerns
the myth and the legend of the bull and the cow.

The Russian peasants and shepherds are accustomed to
remark that the weather will be fine when a red cow
places herself at the head of the herd, and that it will
rain or be bad weather when, on the contrary, the first
of the cows to re-enter the stable at evening is a black
one. We already know what the black and the red cow
signify in the language of the Vedâs. The aurora of
morning and evening, that is, the red cows promise fine
weather; the cloud (or black cow) announces wet weather.
In Piedmont, when a beautiful evening aurora is observed,
it is the custom to say—

Let us now follow the Russian tradition relating to the
cow and the bull in two of the many invaluable collections
of popular stories already printed in Russia, as well as
in the celebrated fables of Kriloff.[348][Pg 175]
We shall begin with those stories and fables in which
the cow or the bull is explicitly mentioned. They show
us the bull who protects the hero and the heroine, the
bull who enriches the hero, the bull that is sold, the
grateful bull, the bull who sacrifices himself, the persecuted
bull, the demoniacal bull; the cow who spins, the
beneficent cow, the son of the cow, the birds that come
out from the cow, the cow’s hide which becomes a rope
to mount up to heaven, the cow exchanged, the demoniacal
cow, the cow’s horns. Here, again, therefore,
we have the double aspect of the Vedic cow; the dark-coloured
one (cloud and darkness), generally monstrous,
the luminous one (moon and aurora), usually divine and
beneficent.

One of the special characteristics of the bull and of the
cow is their capacity of drinking. We have already
seen how much the bull Indras (the sun in the cloud)
drank. In the third story of the first book of Afanassieff,
when the good maiden, persecuted by the witch, stretches
out a towel, and thus causes a river to arise, in order
that the witch may not overtake her, the latter leads
forward the bull to drink up the river (a form of the
Hindoo Agastyas, who, in the Mahâbhâratam,[349] absorbs
the sea). But the bull, who could dry up the river,
refuses to do so on account of a debt of gratitude he
owes to the good maiden. The water where this bull,
or cow, belonging to the witch, drinks, has the property
of transforming into a calf the man who drinks of it;[350]
nay, to drink out of the hoof of the bull itself is enough
to turn him into a calf.[351] The water which comes out of
the hoof of the demoniacal bull is the opposite of the
[Pg 176]water of Hippokrene, which flows from the hoofs of the
divine horse of the Hellenes, the Pêgasos.

In the second book of Afanassieff, there is a story
which speaks of the exchange of animals in the very same
order as in the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam, i.e., the gold for a
horse, the horse for a cow, the cow for a goat or sheep.
The Russian peasant goes on with his unfortunate
exchanges; he barters the sheep for a young pig, the
young pig for a goose, the goose for a duck, the duck for
a little stick with which he sees some children playing;
he takes the stick home to his wife, and she beats him
with it. In the twelfth story of the fifth book of
Afanassieff, an old man also begins to barter the golden
stockings and silver garters received in heaven from God
for a horse, the horse for a bull, the bull for a lamb; his
last exchange is for a little needle, which he loses. In
the second story of the sixth book, the same foolish
liberality is attributed to the third brother, the stupid
one (who, in another Russian variation of the same
story, is the cunning one), who, having learned that in
heaven cows are cheap, gives his cow for a fly, his ox for
a horse-fly, and mounts up to heaven.

But, generally speaking, the bull and the cow are the
beginning of good luck for the heroes of popular
tales.

In the fifty-second story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,
the third brother, the truthful and fortunate fool, has, for
his inheritance from his father, one bull alone; he goes
to sell it, and passes a dry old tree, which rattles; thinking
that the tree wishes to buy his bull, he gives it,
promising to come back for the money. On his return
the bull is gone; he asks the tree for the money, and,
receiving no answer, proceeds to cut it down with his
hatchet, when from the tree there drops out a treasure[Pg 177]
which some robbers had hidden in it;[352] the young man
then takes it up and carries it home. In a variation of
the same story, in the collection of Erlenwein,[353] the third
son of the miller, before going to sell his bull, or ox, seeing
the second son milking the cow, endeavours to milk
the bull too; finding that his efforts are in vain, he
resolves upon selling an animal which appears to him
to be so utterly useless.

In the thirty-fourth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,
we meet again the two brothers, one rich and miserly, the
other poor; the poor one borrows from a neighbour two
bulls, and is conducted by Misery (gory) to a stone, under
which he finds a cavity full of gold. The poor man fills
his waggon, and, on coming out, tells Misery that there
is plenty more inside. Misery turns in to see; the ex-pauper
thereupon closes up the entrance with the stone,
and returns home.[354]

But the bull and the cow do not only provide the hero
with riches, they help him in danger. In the eleventh
story of Erlenwein,[355] Ivan Tzarević, or the Prince John,—the
name of the favourite hero of Slavonian popular tradition
(he is the third brother, the strongest, the most fortunate,
the victorious, the most intelligent, after having
been the most foolish)—wishes to flee from the serpent,
and, not knowing how, sits down on the trunk of a tree
and weeps. The hare comes to carry him away, but is
[Pg 178]killed by the serpent; the wolf comes, but is killed too.
At last the ox or bull comes, and carries him off. Ivan
having arrived at his dwelling, the ox has himself divided
in two; one part must be placed under the sacred images,
which ornament a corner of every room in Russian houses,
the other part under the window; Ivan must then look
out sharp till two dogs and two bears appear, who will
serve him in the chase, and be his strength.

In the twenty-seventh story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,
Ivan Tzarević and the beautiful Helen are pursued
by a monstrous bear with iron bristles; they escape upon
a bull (the moon), and Ivan, by the bull’s advice, rides
him with his face turned towards the place whence the
pursuing bear is likely to come, in order that he may not
take them by surprise. When Ivan sees that the bear is
coming, the bull turns round and tears his eyes out; the
blind bear follows them still, but the fugitives pass a river
on the bull’s back, in which the bear is drowned. Ivan
and Helen feel hungry; the bull tells them to cut him to
pieces and eat him, but to preserve his bones, and to
strike them together; from the bones of the bull, when
struck, a dwarf, the height of a finger-nail, but with a
beard a cubit long, comes out; he assists Ivan in finding
the milk of a wolf, a she-bear, and a lioness, until he is
swallowed by the burning bird, whose eggs he wished to
steal. (The bear is the night; the bull is the sun’s steed
in the night, the moon; the bull-moon is sacrificed; then
comes forth a little sun with long rays, the dwarf with a
long beard, an alter ego of Ivan, who ends his life in the
burning furnace of the phœnix, or of the evening aurora.)
Ivan is threatened with death when the dwarf dies, but
he is at that moment helped by the wild beasts he had
tamed and fed, who save him from danger. These were,
as we have seen before, given to him after the death of[Pg 179]
the bull, his deliverer, being born of the bull himself, cut
in pieces (the wild animals of the forest of night are born
as soon as the evening sun is sacrificed).

The same subject occurs again, with some variations,
in the twenty-eighth story, which follows; only instead
of John and Helen, we have John and Mary, the sun and
the aurora of the Christians. Near the abode of Ivan
and Mary a funeral pile arises, on which the bull sacrifices
himself. The bull’s bones are sown in three furrows;
from the first furrow a horse comes forth, from the second
a dog, and in the third an apple-tree grows up. Ivan
mounts upon the horse, followed by the dog, and hunts
wolves’ whelps and young bears, which he afterwards
tames and uses to kill the serpent, who has shut up his
dog in a cavern, and carried off his sister; he forces the
entrance of the place where the dog is hidden, by striking
the bolt of the door with three small branches of the apple-tree;
the bolt breaks into pieces, the door bursts open,
and the dog is delivered; dog, wolf, and young bear then
worry the serpent, and Ivan liberates the Princess Mary.

In the sixth book of Afanassieff,[356] the young Mary,
being persecuted, is miraculously assisted by a cow. An
old woman has three daughters of her own (of whom
one has one eye, another two, and the third three), and a
step-daughter called Mary; her own three do nothing,
and eat much; the step-daughter must work hard and
eat little. Her step-mother gives her for one night alone,
while she takes the cow to pasture, to spin, make into
skeins, weave, and bleach, the weight of five pounds.
The maiden goes to the pasture-ground, embraces her
variegated cow, leans on her neck and bewails her fate.
The cow says to her, “Beautiful girl, enter one of my[Pg 180]
ears, and come out by the other, and all will be done.”—In
the Italian variety of this story,[357] the cow spins with
her horns for the good maiden, whilst she combs the head
of the old woman or the Madonna. I think I have already
said that I recognise in this good old woman, fairy, or
Madonna, the moon. The moon, like the sun, is considered
as in relation with the aurora, and especially the evening
aurora, which she accompanies; she is the hostess, the
guide, and the protectress of the hero and heroine of
evening, lost and pursued in the night; after the evening
aurora, the white moon comes out, in the same way as
after the morning aurora the sun comes out in effulgence.
We have seen that the name of purifier, cleanser, is given
to the Vedic aurora; from this expression to the image
of comber or cleanser of the head of the old Madonna the
transition is easy;[358] from, i.e., after, the aurora, the moon
comes out shining and clean, in a beautiful and serene
sky; and on this account pearls fall from the Madonna’s
head; but when, on the other hand, the beautiful maiden,
the aurora, does not come, when the step-mother sends to
the pasture-ground, near the old woman, one of her own
daughters, foul lice fall from the head of the old fairy or
Madonna, inasmuch as the moon cannot show herself in
her splendour amid the shadows of the cloudy and black
night. The Russian story shows us how the beneficent
cow of the good maiden, who caresses her and serves her
well, and the Madonna or good old woman grateful for
[Pg 181]the careful combing of her hair of Italian tradition, are
one and the same thing. In the thirty-fifth story of the
fifth book of Afanassieff, on the contrary, where the cow
appears in a demoniacal aspect, whom the hero Ivan,
condemned from a prince to become a cowherd, must
kiss under her tail, which she lifts with this intent, we
meet with an old witch who sucks the white breasts of
the beautiful girl, while the latter is obliged to hunt the
vermin in her head; in the witch, as well as in the cow
who insolently lifts up her tail, we can recognise the
gloomy night, an explanation which is justified by the
fact that the hero-shepherd Katoma, the adorned one,
the agile-footed, ends by flaying the shameless cow (the
morning sun, shepherd of the luminous cows, takes off
the skin of the dark-coloured cow of the gloomy night).
But, to return to the fifty-fourth story.—When the stepmother
sees that the girl has done all the work assigned
her, she begins to suspect that there is some one who
helps her, and so sends next night her first daughter, who
has but one eye, to watch the daughter-in-law, who goes
to the pasture-ground. The young Mary then says to
her, “Eye, sleep;” and immediately her step-sister
falls asleep, thus allowing the cow to assist her without
any one perceiving it. The second night, the second
daughter, who has two eyes, is sent; Mary says twice to
her, “Eye, sleep,” and obtains, without being seen, the
same favours from the cow. The third night, the third
sister, who has three eyes, is sent; Mary does not
remember the third eye, and only says twice, “Eye,
sleep:” and so the third sister sees with her remaining
eye[359] what the cow does with Mary, and in the morning
tells everything to her mother, who gives orders that the[Pg 182]
cow be killed. Mary warns the cow; and the cow
recommends her to eat none of her flesh, to keep the
bones, sow them in the garden, and water them. The
maiden does so; every day, however hungry she may be,
she eats none of the meat, only collects the bones together.
From the bones sown in the garden arises a marvellous
apple-tree, with leaves of gold, and branches of silver,
which prick and wound the three daughters of the stepmother,
whilst, on the other hand, they offer apples to
the beautiful maiden, in order that she may present one
to the young and rich lord who is to make her his wife.
In the following story, the fifty-fifth, which is a variation
of the preceding one, the girl is named Mary, and her
husband Ivan Tzarević; when she goes to the pasture,
and when she returns, she is accustomed to make
obeisance to the right foot of the cow. When the cow,
being killed, revives again in the shape of a tree, it swarms
with birds, which sing songs for kings and peasants alike,
and make the sweet fruits fall upon Mary’s plate.

The apples that cause horns to grow, and those which
beautify and make young, mentioned in the thirty-sixth
story of the fifth book, and again in the last book of the
collection of Afanassieff, as well as in other European
variations of the same subject, are connected, in my
opinion, with the myth of the evening sky, and of the
lunar night, in the shape of an apple-tree. In the
fifteenth story of the collection of Erlenwein, the third
brother, the usual Ivan, comes to an apple-tree which
has red apples, and eats four of them, upon which
four horns grow on his head, to such a height that
he cannot enter the forest; he goes to an apple-tree that
bears white fruit, eats four apples, and the four horns disappear.
(The solar hero at evening approaches the tree
with the red apples, the evening aurora, and immediately[Pg 183]
becomes deformed; horns grow on his head; he loses
himself in the shades of night; in the moonlight and the
alba, he approaches the tree with the white apples, loses
his horns, and becomes young and beautiful again.)

In the fifty-seventh story of the sixth book of Afanassieff’s
collection, Ivan Tzarević is presented with the
apples which restore youth to him who eats them, by the
sister of the sun, to whose abode he is lifted in the following
manner: Ivan (the sun) has for his sister (no doubt
half-sister) a serpent-witch (night), who has already
devoured his father and mother (the sun and the aurora
of evening, which create the night, and are destroyed by
it); the witch persecutes her little brother Ivan, and endeavours
to eat him; he flees, and she overtakes him in the
vicinity of the dwelling of the sister of the sun (the aurora,
the true sister of Ivan). The witch makes a proposal
to Ivan, that they be weighed together in the scales.
Ivan accepts this proposal, upon which the one enters the
one scale, and the other the other; no sooner does the
witch put her foot on the scale than, as she weighs so much
more than Ivan, he is lifted up to heaven, the dwelling
of the sister of the sun, where he is welcomed and admitted.
(A beautiful myth, of which the meaning is evident.
Ivan is the sun, the aurora is his sister; at morning, near
the abode of the aurora, that is, in the east, the shades of
night go underground, and the sun arises to the heavens;
this is the mythical pair of scales. Thus, in the Christian
belief, St Michael weighs human souls: those who weigh
much sink down into hell, and those who are light arise
to the heavenly paradise.)

By means of the sister of the sun, Ivan saves himself
from the witch. In another story in Afanassieff,[360] by[Pg 184]
means of the sister of the hero Nikanore, the same Ivan,
running after the cows, causes them to have golden horns
and tails, with sides formed of stars; and afterwards, with
the assistance of the hero Nikanore in person (of the sun,
that is, of himself), he kills the serpent.

We have already seen the cloudy and the gloomy sky
represented in the Vedic poems, now as a black cow, now
as a stable which encloses the bulls and cows. The black
bull or cow of night is considered to be demoniacal.
In a story given in Afanassieff,[361] we find the devil in the
shape of a bull, which bellows, and throws up the earth
with its horns, arresting a nuptial procession. From a
bull he turns into a bear, then a hare, and then a crow,
to put obstacles in the way of the marriage, until, having
presented himself in the form of a devil, a soldier-hero
blinds him while he is drinking. A variation of this
soldier is the third son of the peasant,[362] who is so strong
that with a snap of his fingers he makes the bull and the
bear fall dead, and then by a single pinch strips off their
skins. The same hero hires himself to a merchant, whom
he engages to serve for two years, on condition of receiving
as his reward, at the end of them, the permission
to give him a snap with the fingers and a pinch. The
merchant thinks he is getting the man’s service for
nothing, but pays for it with his life. The merchant
seldom plays a good part in popular stories. He and
the miser are synonymous,—the miser is the monster
which keeps treasures hidden; and on this account, as we
have already seen in the Vedic hymns themselves, the
enemies of the gods, the monsters that ravish and conceal
the treasures, are represented as paṇayas or merchants,
cheats, robbers, or misers. The currency of this epithet
[Pg 185]as a term of infamy must have been owing in part to
the dislike with which the priestly sacrificers of the last
Vedic period regarded the merchants, in whom they saw
only a pack of misers, because, on account of their
wandering life, they had neither cows nor bulls to give
them for sacrifice, but carried with them all their fortune,
and did not require the fertilising rain of the god Indras
to multiply their gold and their silver.

The celestial bull comes out of the night or the nocturnal
stables either, as we have seen, to help the hero,
to be sacrificed, to flee from persecution, or because he
has been stolen by a skilful thief.

In one of Kriloff’s fables, God sends a terrible plague
among the animals, of which they perish in great numbers.
They are so terrified by it that they forsake their
habits, and begin to wander aimlessly hither and thither.
The wolf no longer eats the sheep; the fox leaves the hens
unmolested; the turtle-doves no longer make love to each
other. Then the lion holds a council of the animals, and
exhorts them all to confess their faults. The cunning fox
essays to quiet the lion-judge by assuring him that though
he stole some sheep, he did not thereby commit a fault;
and so he justifies his own ravages; as also do the bear,
the tiger, the wolf, and all the most wicked of the
animals. Then the simple bull comes forward, and, in
his turn, confesses that he stole a little hay from the
priest. This crime appears so heinous that the council
of animals sentences the bull to be offered in sacrifice.[363]

Sometimes, on the contrary, the bull, either because
he cannot bear the bad treatment that he receives from
his masters, or in order to avoid the danger of being
killed or sold by the stupid son, who is in need of money[Pg 186]
that he may marry a wife, a danger of which he has a
presentiment, abandons the stable with other animals,
constructs a hut or isbà and shuts himself up in it.[364]
He has with him the lamb, the goose, the cock, or else
some other tame animals. The fox passes by, hears the
crowing of the cock, and goes to call his friends the bear
and the wolf to help him. The bear opens the door, the
fox enters, and the bull by goring him with his horns,
the lamb by butting against his sides, and the cock by
pecking his eyes out, put an end to the unwelcome intruder.
The wolf, who goes in, curious to see what is
going on, has the same fate, and the bear, who comes
last, only succeeds with great difficulty, and after having
been severely maltreated, in effecting his escape. In
another variation of the same story, the bear dies of fear,
and the stupid son takes his skin, sells it and makes
money; then, the danger of being sold having passed by,
the bull and his company return home. The battle
between the tame and the savage animals, won by the
former, is an expression in zoological form of the victory
of the heroes (the sun and the moon) over the monsters
of darkness.

The story of the hero-thief is generally connected with
the carrying off of his master’s horse; but not unfrequently
the hero, like the monster, becomes a robber of cows and
oxen.

The thief Ivan[365] is required to steal from his master a
black bull or ox tied to the plough; if he succeeds, he is
to have a hundred roubles for his reward; but if he does
not, he is to receive instead a hundred bastinadoes. In
[Pg 187]order to steal it, Ivan adopts the following device: he
takes a cock, plucks it, and puts it alive under a clod
of earth. The ploughmen come with the oxen; while
they are ploughing, the cock starts up; they leave the
plough to run after it, upon which Ivan, who was hidden
behind a bush, comes out. He cuts off one ox’s tail and
puts it in another ox’s mouth, and then leads away the
black ox. The ploughmen, not having been able to
overtake the cock, come back, and when they see only
two animals instead of three, conclude that one ox has
eaten the black ox and is beginning to eat the tail of the
other, the variegated ox. In the twenty-first story of the
fifth book of Afanassieff, the boy-dwarf steals an ox
from the priest and eats its tripe.[366]

From the cow the hero is born; under a putrid cow
thrown into a ditch lies Ivan Tzarević; a bird takes the
water off and Ivan Tzarević comes forth.[367] In another
story of Afanassieff, the fox-heroine, companion of the
wolf, whilst the wolf is absent, eats the intestines of the
calf, their common property (which they had received
from cowherds in exchange for a certain cake contaminated
by their excrement, the usual excrement
which is the beginning of riches); she then fills the
calf or cow with straw and sparrows, and departs. The
wolf returns, is astonished that the calf should have
eaten so much straw that it comes out, and draws out the
straw. The birds fly away, the calf falls, and the wolf
flees away terrified.[368] With these two myths are connected
two more, that of the son of the cow and
[Pg 188]that of the ascent into heaven by means of the cow’s
hide.

The king has no sons; he catches a pike, which the
cook washes, giving thereafter the dirty water to the cow
to drink; the fish they give to the black girl to carry to
the queen; the black girl eats a piece of it on the way,
and the queen eats what remains. At the expiration of
nine months, the cow, the maid, and the queen, give
each birth to a son. The three sons resemble each
other completely; but the son of the cow, the hero-tempest,
is the strongest of the three brothers, and
accomplishes the most difficult enterprises. In another
variation of the same story, in Afanassieff,[369] instead of the
cow we have the bitch giving birth to the strongest of
the three brothers.[370] In the nineteenth story of Erlenwein,
instead of the cow and the bitch, we have the mare; the
strongest brother is here the son of the black girl, Burghraver
or the hero-tempest (Burya-Bagatír). In the third
story of Erlenwein, Ivan Tzarević appears as the son of
the black girl. As in numerous other Russian stories, Ivan
Tzarević, usually the third brother, appears not only (as)
the most skilful, but the strongest of the brothers, we
are driven to recognise in the three brothers, the son of the
black girl, the son of the cow, and the queen’s son, who
alternately accomplish the same heroic undertakings, the
same solar personage, whose mother, Night, is represented
now as a queen, now as a cow (we have just seen Ivan
Tzarević come out of the putrid cow), now as a black
slave (the negro washerwoman, the Saracen woman of
Italian stories [Holda]; the cleaned fish which is carried
by the black girl may perhaps be a link connecting the
imagery of Russian tradition with that of Italian legend).
[Pg 189]In the second story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,
the third brother, the cunning one, by means of the hides
of his cows and oxen converted into thongs, ascends into
heaven; thus, in a variation of the same story, the third
brother thinks to let himself down by the cow’s hide, cut
into pieces and made into thongs, being fastened to the
confines of heaven; but he perceives on the way that the
thong is not long enough. Some peasants are threshing
corn, and the chaff rises into the air; he tries to make a
rope with this chaff, but the rope breaks and he falls to
the ground. This successful ascent into heaven, followed
by an unlucky descent, is often referred to, with curious
details, in Russian popular legend; to which a play of
words in the language must have not a little contributed.
It is as follows, “He who mounts does not descend,”[371] i.e.,
when one is doing one thing he cannot be doing the contrary.
This elementary truth was afterwards altered by
changing the tenses. “He who has been able to ascend
will not be able to come down again;” which is only
partly true, and means that while in dreams we require
only a thin thread to mount up high, when we wish to
come down from the world of dreams to that of reality,
the fall is heavy; we come down with leaden wings,
with that difficulty in breathing which oppresses us in
dreams when we seem to fall from a height with painful
slowness. And as at the end of the dream, after the[Pg 190]
painful fall from the sky, we awaken alive, so the story
does not say of the hero who fell from heaven that he is
dead, only that his dreams are dead. He is only unlucky
when, the second time, he attempts the descent with a
greater weight.

While reasonings such as these may have helped to
diffuse the myths, I believe that the myths, at their formation,
pleased more as images of nature than of reason,
and as the images of mythology are almost all celestial,
so in the third brother, or old man of other varieties of
the story, who mounts up to heaven and comes down
again by means of the cow’s hide, I always recognise the
sun. The old man who ascends into heaven, after the
cow is dead, does so also by means of a vegetable of
funereal omen which grows up in a marvellous manner.

An old man and an old woman have one daughter;
she eats some beans and lets one fall to the ground; a
plant (the moon) grows up till it reaches the sky. The
old man mounts up and then comes back again. He
tries to take his wife up in a sack, but unable to bear
the weight, he lets her fall to the ground, when she dies.[372]

A cabbage grows up near an old man’s dwelling, till
in like manner it rises up to the sky. The old man
climbs up, makes a hole in the sky, and eats and drinks
to satiety. He then returns and narrates everything to
his wife. She wishes to go up too; when they are half
way, the old man lets the sack drop, the old woman
dies, and her husband prepares her funeral, calling in the
fox[373] as a mourner.

Other variations of the same story offer us, instead of
[Pg 191]the cow’s hide, the cabbage, and the beanstalk, the pea-plant,
and even the oak-tree, which grows up to heaven.[374]

From the vegetable or funereal plant,—a symbol, as we
have already remarked, at once of abundance and resurrection,—by
which the hero ascends to heaven, where he
finds riches and abundance of food, the transition was
very natural to the pea which turns round, of which the
hero Turn-little-Pea (the son of the king of the peas) is
born.

In the second story of the third book of Afanassieff,[375]
Turn-little-Pea appears as the third of the brothers, as
the youngest brother, who delivers his sister and his two
brothers from the monster. But the ungrateful brothers
(perhaps covetous of the maiden, here called a sister, but,
who is virtually the same, the bride delivered and disputed
for by the three brothers in numerous Indo-European
legends), tie him to an oak-tree and go home alone.
Turn-little-Pea unroots the whole oak and goes off. He
afterwards kills three more monster-serpents, and the
she-serpents their wives.

In the thirtieth story of the second book of Afanassieff,
this enterprise against the serpents, male and female, is
attributed to the usual Ivan. He goes with his brothers
against the serpent with twelve heads, and with his iron
stick alone kills nine of them, and the three remaining ones
by the help of his two brothers. Then the she-serpent
and her three daughters persecute the three brothers, and
[Pg 192]Ivan in particular. She causes them to find a beautiful
cushion upon the ground; Ivan, who is suspicious of
some trick, first beats the cushion, upon which blood
gushes out of it (in the story of Turn-little-Pea, the
young hero averts the danger by making the sign of the
cross with his sword, when blood comes out). The
serpent then tempts them by an apple-tree with gold
and silver apples. The brothers wish to pluck some;
Ivan, however, first strikes the tree, and blood flows
from it. They then come to a beautiful fountain, where
the brothers would like to drink; Ivan strikes the
fountain, and again blood comes from it. The cushion,
the apple-tree, and the fountain were the three daughters
of the serpent. Then the serpent, having failed to deceive
them, rushes upon Ivan; the latter escapes with his
brothers into a forge shut by twelve iron gates; the
serpent licks the doors with her tongue to force a passage,
and her tongue is caught with red-hot pincers.

In the fourth story of Erlenwein, the three brothers
occur again with interesting mythical names. A woman
bears three sons; one at evening, who is on this account
called Većernik, or the evening one; the second at
midnight, whence he is named Polunoćnik, or the midnight
one; the third at the aurora, who is named
Svetazór, or the clearly-seeing. The three brothers
become adults in a few hours. The most valiant of the
three is Svetazór, the last one. To prove his strength,
he goes to the blacksmith and orders an iron club that
weighs twelve puds (480 pounds); he throws it into the
air and catches it on the palm of his hand, the club
breaks. He orders one of twenty puds (800 pounds),
throws it up, catches it on his knee, and it breaks.
Finally he orders one of thirty puds (1200 pounds),
throws it up, and catches it on his forehead; it bends but[Pg 193]
does not break. Svetazór has it straightened and takes
it with him, as he goes with his two brothers to deliver
the three daughters of the Tzar, carried off by three
magicians into the three castles of copper, silver, and gold.
Svetazór, after having drunk the water of strength, and
received from the first princess an egg of copper, from
the second one of silver, and from the third a golden
one, delivers the three princesses and brings them out.
The two brothers, seeing that the third princess is more
beautiful than the others, think that the youngest brother
is reserving her for himself, and throw him into the water.
Svetazór wanders about the subterranean world, and
delivers the daughter of another Tzar by killing a
monster and burying him under a rock. A soldier
boasts before the Tzar of having accomplished this heroic
act. Svetazór invites the soldier to prove his strength,
and so the truth of his boast, by lifting the rock up. He
does not succeed, and Svetazór wins the trial of strength,
upon which the soldier is executed by order of the Tzar.
After this, Svetazór, for having once spared the life of a
crow, is carried by it into the world of the living, on
condition that he gives it something to eat by the way.
Svetazór has at length to feed the crow with his own
flesh, yet is in the end set down again safe and sound,
with all his flesh, in the world above, where, with the
eggs of copper, silver, and gold, he causes the castles
formed of these metals to arise, in which are found
the ring, the slipper, and the robe demanded from their
bridegrooms by the three princesses, who hoped by this
expedient to see again their lost Svetazór. Then Svetazór
begins to sweep out the terrace of the golden castle.
The third princess expresses her intention to take
him for her husband. The nuptials are celebrated,
Svetazór pardoning his two elder brothers and giving[Pg 194]
them the two elder sisters of his bride. (The princess of
the copper is the evening aurora, the princess of the
silver is the silvery moon, and that of the gold is the
morning aurora, to whom Svetazór, the clearly-seeing,
the illumined, the sun, is married.)

In the sixth story of the first book of Afanassieff, the
same undertaking is accomplished by the third brother,
Ivan. The monster which carries off the three sisters is
an aquatic one, an otter. Abandoned by his brothers in
the nether world, Ivan is overtaken by a great tempest;
he takes pity upon some young birds that are bathing,
and saves them under his dress, upon which the grateful
mother of the birds brings him back to the upper world.
In the fifteenth story of Erlenwein, the third brother is
the cunning one, who, by a stratagem, and by means of
his purse, which is self-replenishing, steals from his two
brothers the snuff-box out of which issue as many armies
as are wished for, and the cloth which makes the wearer
invisible (both figures to represent the cloud from which
come forth riches, solar rays, thunderbolts, and weapons,
and which hides the hero, that is, renders him invisible).
In the fifty-fourth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,
Ivan of the dog, the hero sacrificed by his brothers, is the
strong one, he who delivers the three princesses, who
possesses the three rings, and gives them to the goldsmith
from whom they were ordered, and who is not
able to make them, by which means he is recognised.

Ivan Tzarević, inasmuch as he was born of a cow, as we
have also seen above, was necessarily represented as a
bull; the bull displays part of his strength by drinking;
Ivan Tzarević drinks, at a gulp, whole barrels of wine
of marvellous strength. In this capacity he resembles
Indras, the great drinker of somas, and the drinker
Bhîmas, the second brother of the Pâṇḍavas.

[Pg 195]

The third brother is now Prince Ivan (Ivan Tzarević,
Ivan Karoliević, Ivan Kraliević), now the stupid Ivan
(Ivan durak), Ivan the little fool (Ivan Duraćiok). But, as
I have already remarked, the fool generally makes his fortune,
either because the kingdom of heaven is for the poor
in spirit, or because the stupidity of Ivan is feigned, or else
because the fool becomes wise. In a story given in Afanassieff,[376]
the fool is also lazy, and takes the name of Emilius.

Emilius is sent with a barrel to draw water; he only
goes on account of the promise made him by his sister,
that he will receive as a reward a pair of red boots.—This
desire of the boy-hero, and of the girl-heroine, is spoken
of in many popular songs, and among others, in a Piedmontese
one, as yet unpublished. In the seventeenth story
of the fifth book of Afanassieff,[377] the sister kills her
brother, Little John, to possess herself of his red strawberries
(as in the Esthonian tale), and his red little shoes.
Upon his grave a fine cane grows; a shepherd makes a
flute of it, and the flute, pressed to the lips, begins to
emit the following lamentation:—

When the flute is pressed to the sister’s lips, instead of the
word “little shepherd,” it says, “Little sister, thou hast
betrayed me,”[378] and her crime is thus discovered. These
[Pg 196]little red shoes are simply a variation of the slippers which
are lost by the fugitive aurora, and found again by the
sun, and which both wish to wear. (I refer to this myth
the origin of the nuptial custom in Europe of maidens,
towards the new year, throwing the slipper to know whether,
during the next year, they will be married, and who
is to be their husband.)[379] The slipper lost by the maiden,
Little Mary (Masha, the Marion of Piedmontese and
French legends), and found by the prince, also occurs in
the Russian tales. In the thirtieth of the sixth book of
Afanassieff, Little Mary’s elder sister begins by trying
on the slipper; but it is too small; the foot will not go
in. Seeing this, Little Mary’s step-mother advises her
daughter to cut off her great toe, which would not enter;
then the foot goes in, and the messengers of the prince
lead the eldest sister away; but two doves fly after them
and cry out, “Blood on her foot, blood on her foot.” The
deceit is discovered, and the eldest sister sent back; the
prince causes his true and predestined bride, Little Mary,
to be carried off. (This is the usual exchange of wives,
upon which I have remarked in my “Essay on the Comparative
History of Nuptial Usages,” and of which the[Pg 197]
legend of Queen Berta is one of the most popular
examples. The Russian Little Mary, like Cinderella, is
at first of ugly aspect, and then beautiful. In the Russian
story, the maiden becomes beautiful by mounting upon
the stove. Sîtâ comes forth, beautiful in her innocence,
passing through the fire; the morning aurora only seems
beautiful when it passes through the flames of the Eastern
sky. The stove brings us back to the interrupted story
of the foolish and lazy Emilius (or Ivan).—On account,
therefore, of the promise made to him of the red boots,
he goes to the fountain with the barrel to draw water.
In the fountain he catches a pike, who beseeches him to
set him at liberty, and promises in return to make him
fortunate. Being lazy, the greatest favour that he wishes
for at this moment is that he may be helped to carry the
barrel; the grateful pike performs the miracle of the
barrel full of water which walks of its own accord. (I
have already endeavoured to explain this myth: the
cloud is represented as a barrel in the Vedic hymns; it
moves on of its own accord; the barrel does the same; the
hero, as long as he is shut up in the cloud, remains
foolish; the barrel of the fool walks of itself.) Emilius
is then sent to cut wood; by favour of the grateful pike,
it is enough for him to send his hatchet, which cuts the
wood of itself; the wood piles itself upon the waggon,
and the waggon, without being drawn by any one,
advances, passing or crushing whatever it meets; they
endeavour to arrest its progress, when the trunk of an
oak-tree detaches itself from the waggon, and, like a stick,
beating on every side, sweeps the road (these are all
curious variations of the walking forest or cloud). The
Tzar then sends to invite him to court, and knowing his
weak penchant for things of a red colour, he promises
him a red robe, a red hat, and red boots. When the[Pg 198]
Tzar’s envoys arrive, Emilius, like his alter ego Ivan
Durak (Ivan the fool), is warming himself at the stove;
grudging all trouble, he obtains from the pike the favour
of being carried by the stove itself to the Tzar at court.
The Tzar’s daughter falls in love with him; the Tzar
shuts the young couple up in a cask (the usual cloud-barrel,
which occurs in the form of a little chest in other
stories, a variation of the wooden dress), and has them
thrown into the sea. Emilius, who was drunk in the
cask, sleeps; the princess wakens him, and beseeches
him to save her; by means of the pike, the cask comes
to a beautiful island, where it breaks open; Emilius
becomes handsome, rich, and happy in a beautiful palace
with the young princess. (The aurora and the sun of
evening are thrown together into the ocean of night, until
they land on the happy isle of the east, where they reappear
again together in all their splendour.) One of the
most popular stupidities of the fool is that of letting the
wine contained in the barrel flow out upon the ground,
when he is left alone at home; in the Russian story, too,
Ivan the fool leaves the beer that is fermenting in the
barrel open (Indras with his lightning makes a hole in
the cloud-barrel, and the rain comes out).[380]

The fool Ivan takes his good luck from the living, but
he also does so from the dead. On account of having
watched three nights by the tomb of his father, his luck
begins,[381] the shade of his father having blessed him; but,
as the dead bring good luck (a belief which, at any rate,
has always been entertained by the heirs of rich men
deceased), the third brother speculates on the body of his
own mother. We do not know whether he does so out
[Pg 199]of pure simplicity, or with some hidden and far-seeing
design, presumable from the ease with which he exchanges
the character of a fool for that of a cunning schemer (the
first Brutus of popular tradition). In the seventeenth
story of Erlenwein, after he has carried a treasure home,
by selling his ox to the tree, and then cutting down the
tree, which contains money, he always guards his money,
and sleeps upon it. His brothers know this, and resolve
to go and kill him. But that very night, the third, the
foolish brother, leaves his mother in charge of the treasure;
the brothers come and kill his mother by mistake,
instead of him. He turns up, and threatens to give
them up to justice; they bribe him with a hundred
roubles to keep silence. Then the third brother takes
his mother’s body and carries it into the middle of the
road, in order that a merchant’s waggon may crush it;
when this happens, he accuses the merchant of murder,
until the latter gives him a hundred more roubles to say
nothing about it. He then comes to a village by night
with his mother’s corpse; he places it against a peasant’s
door, and knocks at the window; the peasant opens the
door, the body falls, and the peasant treads upon it, upon
which the so-called stupid son cries out that he has killed
his mother, and receives another hundred roubles, on
promise of silence. Then the two elder brothers, finding
that it is possible to speculate upon corpses, and make
one’s fortune, kill their wives, and go to town with their
bodies; they are immediately arrested and put into prison.

The law of atavism evolves itself in the generation of
the heroes of mythical legends, no less than in that of
simple mortals upon earth. Of a stupid father is born a
wise son, and then the wise son in turn has a foolish one.
I do not as yet know how to explain this singular fact of
natural history; its appearance in mythology, however,[Pg 200]
is not difficult to understand. To the luminous day succeeds
the gloomy night, and then again to the dark night
the luminous day; to summer succeeds winter, and to
winter summer; to white black, and to black white; to
heat cold, and to cold heat.

On this account, in legends, when the mother is intelligent,
the son, generally speaking, is silly; whereas, when
the mother is silly,[382] the son is usually intelligent.

In the fifth story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, a
soldier enters the house of a woman, while her son is
travelling, and induces her to believe that he has just
returned from hell, where he had seen her son employed
in taking the storks to pasture, and greatly in want of
money; the soldier says that he is about to return to
hell, and will be happy to take with him whatever the
woman wishes to send to her son. The credulous woman
gives him some money, directing him to take it immediately
to hell, and give it to her poor child. The soldier
disappears, and shortly afterwards the woman’s son returns
home; his mother is greatly astonished at his appearance,
and tells him how she has been deceived; he gets angry
and leaves the house again, swearing never to return till
he finds some one more foolish than his mother. He is a
skilful thief; he steals from a lady, whilst her husband is
absent, a hog with its little pigs, and puts them in safe
concealment; the husband returns, hears what has taken
place, and follows the thief with a carriage and horses.
The robber hears him coming; squats down on the
ground, takes off his hat, and pretends to be covering[Pg 201]
with it a bird or a falcon, which wishes to escape. The
husband comes and asks him if he has seen the robber;
the latter answers that he has seen him, but that he is a
long way off, and that the roads by which he can be
overtaken are many and winding. The husband, who,
perhaps, does not know the proverb which says, “Who
wishes, let him go; who wishes not, let him send,” asks
the robber to overtake the fugitive; the thief demurs,
saying that he has under his hat a falcon, which cost his
master three hundred roubles, and that it may escape.
The gentleman promises to take care of it, and if the
falcon escapes, to pay the three hundred roubles. The
thief does not believe his promise, and desires the three
hundred roubles in pledge of his good faith; the gentleman
gives them, and the thief goes off with the carriage,
the horses, and the three hundred roubles. The gentleman
stays till evening looking at the hat, waiting for his
friend to return; at last he loses patience, wants to see
what there is under the hat, and finds nothing—but a
proof of his own stupidity.[383]

Ivan (John), and oftener still Vaniusha (Little John,
the Giovannino of Italian legends), distinguishes himself,
not only by his thieving accomplishments, but also by his
courage. In order to play the part of a thief, as Little
John does in all the Indo-Europeans legends, not only
industry, but courage must be called into requisition;
hence he acquires, like the Chevalier Bayard, the good
reputation of a hero without fear and without reproach.
The hero Ivan is now the son of a king, now of a[Pg 202]
merchant, and now of a peasant; the merchants wished,
no less than the peasants, to appropriate to themselves the
most popular hero of tradition. In the forty-sixth story
of the fifth book of Afanassieff, neither the shades of
night, nor brigands, nor death, can make the hero afraid;
but he is terrified and dies, falling into the water, when
the little iersh (the perch) leaps upon his stomach, whilst
he is asleep in his fishing-boat. In the Tuscan story,[384] the
fearless hero Giovannino, after having confronted every
kind of danger, dies from the terror the sight of his
own shadow inspires him with. In the same way, in the
Ṛigvedas, the god Indras, terrified at his own shadow,
or, probably, that of his dead enemy, takes to flight after
the killing of the serpent Ahis.[385]

The following heroes are also variations of Prince
Ivan, Ivan the son of the cow, Ivan the peasant’s son,
Ivan the merchant’s son, and the cunning Ivan:—1st,
Alessino Papović, the son of the priest (it is well known
that the Russian priests are not bound to celibacy), who
kills Tugarin, the son of the serpent, by prayer, that is,
by praying to the Holy Mother of God, to order the black
cloud to cause drops of rain to fall on the monster’s
wings, upon which the son of the serpent, like the Vedic
Ahis, when Indras opens a way for the rivers to come
out, instantly falls to the ground;[386] 2d, Baldak, son of
Boris, the boy seven years old, who succeeds in spitting
in the Sultan’s face—(I have already remarked, in the
preface to this work, that the king of the Turks is, in
the Slavonic tradition, as well as in that of Persia, the
representative of the devil; the demon, when the hero
[Pg 203]approaches, smells the odour of human flesh in India, of
Christian flesh in Western stories,[387] and of Russian flesh in
Russian fairy tales)—but who afterwards becomes the
Sultan’s prisoner, because he appears to the third daughter
of the latter with a star under his heel, or shows his heel
(which is the vulnerable part of both hero and monster);
3d, Basil Bes-ćiastnoi, who goes, by his father-in-law’s
order, into the kingdom of the serpent, in order to receive
a gift from him, with adventures similar to those of the
young Plavaćek in Bohemian stories, when he goes to
seek the three golden hairs of the old Vsieveda (the all-seeing,
the Vedic sun Viçvavedas);[388] 4th, The third brother
who exchanges two sacks of flies and gnats he has caught
for good cattle.[389] The same hero takes the name of Little
Thomas Berennikoff; being blind of one eye, he kills an
army of flies, and boasts of having killed an army of
heroes; he thus dishonestly gains the reputation of being
a hero, and is fortunate in having an opportunity offered
him of proving his bravery by killing a monster-serpent,
who, out of foolhardiness, shuts both eyes when he sees
that Thomas has but one; he afterwards destroys an
army of Chinese with the trunk of a tree, rooted up by
his indomitable horse, which a real hero had bound to the
tree;[390] 5th, The cunning rogue, Little Thomas (Thomka;
the quacks in Piedmont are accustomed to give the name
of Tommasino to the little devil which they conjure out
[Pg 204]of a phial), who, by means of disguises, cheats and robs
the priest;[391] 6th, The third brother who does not suffer
himself to be put to sleep by the witch (as we have seen
above the third sister who keeps one of her three eyes
open);[392] 7th, The famous robber, Klimka,[393] who, by means
of a drum (in Indian tales a trumpet), terrifies his accomplices,
the robbers, and takes their money, and then steals
from a gentleman his horse, his casket of jewels, and even
his wife; 8th, The Cossack who delivers the maiden
from the flames, and carries her to his golden house,
where there are two other maidens (be it understood, the
one in the silver house, and the other in that of copper);
from which three maidens the Cossack receives a shirt
which renders him invulnerable, a sword which produces
the most marvellous effects in slaughtering men, and a
purse which, when shaken, drops money;[394] 9th, The
celebrated Ilia Muromietz (Elias of Murom), round
whom, as also around Svetazór and Svyatogor (holy
mount), Dobrynia Nikitić, and the heroes of Vladimir, is
grouped an entire heroic Russian epic poem.[395]
[Pg 205]Other variations of the same hero are the son of the
merchant given up to be educated by the devil, who
teaches him every kind of craft; the boy Basil, who
understands the language of birds, and who makes his
parents serve him;[396] the merchant or son of a peasant,[397]
who, because he prefers good advice to money, acquires
a fortune; the virtuous workman, who receives by
way of pay for his labour only three kapeika, which,
spent in good works, enables him at last to marry the
king’s daughter, or the princess who did not laugh.[398]

The legend of the hero Ivan has yet other interesting
forms, reflective of the beautiful Vedic myth of the Açvinâu,
who into their flying chariot-vessel also take up the unhappy.
In Afanassieff,[399] the third brother, thought to
be foolish, is ill-treated by his parents, who dress and
feed him badly. The king issues a proclamation, that
whoever can make a flying vessel will obtain his daughter
to wife. The mother sends forth her three sons in quest
of the necessary enchantment; to her third son she gives
a little brown bread and water, whilst the two eldest go
provided with good white loaves and some brandy. The
fool meets on the way a poor old man, salutes him, and
begins to share with him his scanty store of food; the
old man transmutes his brown bread into white, and his
water into brandy, and then advises him to enter the
forest, to make the sign of the cross upon the first tree
he finds, and to strike it with his axe; then to throw
himself on the ground and stay there until he wakens;
he will see a vessel ready before him: “Sit down in
it,” added the old man, “and fly whither your behest
requires you; and by the way take up beside you as
[Pg 206]many as you meet.”[400] This chariot is freighted with
abundance, both to eat and to drink; the young man
overtakes several needy beggars, and invites them up
into the chariot; he receives only poor people, not a
single rich man.[401] But these poor men afterwards show
their gratitude to the hero, and help him in other adventures
imposed upon him by the Tzar, who hopes by this
means to get rid of a son-in-law of such vulgar origin.
One of the new tasks imposed requires him to eat
twelve oxen, and to drink at one gulp forty barrels of
wine; in this he is helped by Eating (Abiédalo) and by
Drinking (Apiválo), whom he had entertained in his
chariot-ship, and who eat and drink instead of him.[402]
At last he comes to claim and marry the young princess.
(The hero-sun, taken up into the chariot of the Açvinâu,
by the grace of the Açvinâu, invoked by him in danger,
is delivered, and espouses the aurora.)

In a variation of this legend, a prince, fifteen years of age,
who has been lost by his parents, is found again by means
of a riddle which they propose, and which he alone
can solve.[403] In the Vedic hymns it is now the aurora, the
beautiful maiden, who delivers the hero-sun, and now the
hero-sun who delivers the beautiful maiden, the aurora.
[Pg 207]In the forty-first story of the sixth book of Afanassieff,
a little girl, seven years old (semilietká), presents herself
to the Tzar, who must marry her, inasmuch as she solves
the riddle proposed by him, by arriving riding on a hare
(an animal which represents the moon), with a quail (an
animal which seems to represent the sun) tied to her
hand.[404] She too, like the aurora, knows all; she too
protects the poor against the rich, and the innocent
against the guilty. The dwarf Allwis is a form of
this child. Allwis is the omniscient man of the Edda,
who solves all the questions put to him by the god
Thor, in order to obtain his daughter; when he is
done with answering these questions, day breaks, and
the sun shines.