327.
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY
TI1K LEGENDS OF ANIMALS
ANGELO OE GUBEKNAT1S
I'KOKF.SSOR OF SANSKRIT AM) f.OM PA H ATI V F. UTF.RATIRK IX TH F, ISTITUTO DI STl'l
SUPF.RIOHI F. DI PF.RFKZ1ONAMK.XTO, AT FI.ORKXCE
I'DIJKKJN MK.MHKR OK Til K KOVAT, IXSTITCTF. OK IJH I I,OI.OUY AND ETHNOfiRAPH Y OF THE DUTCH INDIKS
IN TWO I'OLUMEti
VOL. II.
LONDON TUUBNEPv & CO., GO PATERNOSTER ROW
1872
Detroit: Reissued by Singing Tree Press, Book Tower, 1968
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-58904
CONTENTS.
|)ari Jfirst THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.
(Continued.}
PA OK
CHAPTER V. THE HOG, THE WILD BOAR, AND THE HEDGEHOG, 1
CHAPTER VI. THE DOG, ... 17
CHAPTER VII.
THE CAT, THE WEASEL, THE MOUSE, THE MOLE, THE SNAIL, THE ICHNEUMON, THE SCORPION, THE ANT, THE LOCUST, AND THE GRASSHOPPER, .... .41
CHAPTER VIII. THE HARE, THE RABBIT, THE ERMINE, AND THE BEAVER, . 76
CHAPTER IX. THE ANTELOPE, THE STAG, THE DEER, AND THE GAZELLE, . 83
CHAPTER X. THE ELEPHANT,
CHAPTER XL THE MONKEY AND THE BEAR, . 96
CHAPTER XII. THE Fox, THE JACKAL, AND THE WOLF, 121
vi CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE LION, THE TIGER, THE LEOPARD, THE PANTHER, AND THE
CHAMELEON, 153
CHAPTER XIV. THE SPIDER, 162
|)a;ri Stmntr. THE ANIMALS OF THE AIR
CHAPTER I. BIRDS,
CHAPTER II.
THE HA"WK, THE EAGLE, THE VULTURE, THE PHCENIX, THE HARPY, THE STRIX, THE BAT, THE GRIFFON, AND THE SIREN, 180
CHAPTER III. THE WREN, THE BEETLE, AND THE FIREFLY, .... 207
CHAPTER IV.
THE BEE, THE WASP, THE FLY, THE GNAT, THE MOSQUITO, THE
HORSEFLY, AND THE CICADA, 215
CHAPTER V.
THE CUCKOO, THE HERON, THE HEATHCOCK, THE PARTRIDGE, THE NIGHTINGALE, THE SWALLOW, THE SPARROW, AND THE HOOPOE, 225
CHAPTER VI.
THE OWL, THE CROW, THE MAGPIE, AND THE STORK, . . . 243
CHAPTER VII. THE WOODPECKER AND THE MARTIN, 264
CHAPTER VIII. THE LARK AND THE QUAIL, .
CONTEXTS.
CHAPTER IX.
THE CocK AND THE II EX, . .2/9
CHAPTEtl X.
THE DOVE, THE DUCK, THE (.Joosr, AND THE SWAN, . - 294
( 'RAFTER XI. THE PARROT, .
CHAPTER XI 1. THE PEACOCK, .
f nrt
THE ANIMALS OF THE WATEH.
CHAPTER I.
^FISHES, AND PARTICULARLY THE PlKE, THE SACRED FlSH OR
FISH OF ST PETER, THE CARP, THE MELWEL, THE HERRING, THE EEL, THE LITTLE GOLDFISH, THE SEA-URCHIN, THE LITTLE PERCH, THE BREAM, THK DOLPHIN, AND THE WHALE., .
CHAPTER II. THE CRAB,
CHAPTER III. THE TORTOISE,
CHAPTER IV. THE FROO, THK LACERTA VIRIDIS, AND THE TOAD,
CHAPTER V.
THE SERPENT ASP THE AQUATIC MONSTER, . CONCLUSION, ......
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY;
OR
THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS.
font fari THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.
CHAPTER Y.
THE HOG, THE WILD BOAR, AND THE HEDGEHOG. SUMMARY.
The hog as a hero disguise. — The disguises of the hero and of the heroine. — Ghosh&, the leprous maiden. — The moon in the well. — Apala cured by Indras. — Apala" has the dress of a hog. — Godh&, the persecuted maiden in a hog's dress. — The hogs eat the apples in the maiden's stead. — The meretricious Circe and the hogs. — Porcus and upodaras. — The wild boar god in India and in Persia. — Tydoeus, the wild boar. — The wild boar of Erymanthos. — The wild boar of Meleagros. — The Vedic monster wild boar. — The dog and the pig. — Puloman, the wild boar, burned. — The hog in the fire. — The hog cheats the wolf. — The astute hedgehog. — The hegehog, the wild boar, and the hog are presages of water. — The porcupine and its quills ; the comb and the dense forest. — The ears and the heart of the wild boar. — The wild boar and the hog at Christmas. — The devil a wild boar. — The heroes killed by the wild boar. — The tusk of the wild boar now life-giving, now deadly ; the dead man's tooth. — The hero asleep j the hero be come a eunuch ; the lettuce-eunuch eaten by Adonis, prior to his being killed by the wild boar.
VOL. II. A
2 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
I
THE hog, as well as the wild boar, is another disguise of the solar hero in the night — another of the forms very often assumed by the sun, as a mythical hero, in the darkness or clouds. He adopts this form in order sometimes to hide himself from his persecutors, sometimes to exterminate them, and sometimes on account of a divine or demoniacal malediction.* This form is some times a dark and demoniacal guise assumed by the hero; on which account the poem of Hyndla, in the Edda, calls the hog a hero's animal. Often, however, it repre sents the demon himself. v When the solar hero enters the domain of evening, the form he had of a handsome youth or splendid prince disappears ; but he himself, as a general rule, does not die along with it ; he only passes into another, an uglier, and a monstrous form. The black bull, the black horse, the grey horse, the hump-backed horse, the ass, and the goat, are all forms of the same disguise with which we are already acquainted. / The thousand-bellied Indras, who has lost his testicles; Ar^unas, who disguises himself as a eunuch ; Indras, Vishnus, Zeus, Achilletis, Odin, Thor, Helgi, and many other mythical heroes, who disguise themselves as women ; and the numerous beautiful heroines who, in mythology and tradition, disguise themselves as bearded men, are all ancient forms under which was represented the passage of either the sun or the aurora of evening into the dark ness, cloud, ocean, forest, grotto, or hell of night. ' The hero lamed, blinded, bound, drowned, or buried in a wood, can be understood when referred respectively to the sun which is thrown down the mountain-side, which is lost in the darkness, which is held fast by the fetters of the darkness, which plunges into the ocean of night, or which hides itself from our sight in the nocturnal forest. The illumined and illuminating sun, when it ceases to shine
THE MYTH OF
in the dark night, becomes devoid of sight, devoid of in telligence, and stupid. The handsome solar hero becomes ugly when, with the night, his splendour ceases ; the strong, red, healthy, solar hero, who pales and grows dark in the night, becomes ill. ' We still say in Italy that the sun is ill when we see it lose its brightness, and, as it were, grow pale.
In the 117th hymn of the first book of the Rigvedas, the A§vinau cure the leprous daughter of Kakshivant, Ghosha, who is growing old without a husband in her father's house, and find her a husband ; the Acvinau deliver the aurora from the darkness of night, and marry her.1
In the eightieth hymn of the eighth book of the Rigvedas, the same myth occurs again with relation to Indras, and in a more complete form. We have already remarked, in the first book of the Rigvedas, the maiden Apala who descends from the mountain to draw water, and draws up the somas (ambrosia, or else the moon, whence, as it seems to me, the origin of the double Italian proverb, " Pescare, or mostrare la luna nel pozzo," to fish up, or show the moon in the well, which was afterwards corrupted to indicate one who says, or narrates, what is untrue or impossible), and takes it to Indras, the well- known drinker of ambrosia (here identified with the moon, or somas). Indras, contented with the maiden, con sents, as she is ugly and deformed, to pass over the three heavenly stations, that is, to pass over his father's head, her vast breast and her bosom.2 In the last strophe of the hymn quoted above, Indras makes a luminous robe,
1 Cfr. the chapter on the Duck, the Goose, the Swan, and the Dove.
2 Imani trim vishtapa tanindra vi rohaya giras tatasyorvanlin ad idam ma upodare.
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
a skin of the sun, for Apala, who has been thrice purified, by the wheel, by the chariot itself, and by the rudder of Indras's chariot.1 And the same myth occurs once more in a clearer and more complete form in a legend of the Brihaddevatd. Apali beseeches Indras, loved by her, to make for her a beautiful and perfect (faultless, unim peachable) skin. Indras, hearing her voice, passes over her with wheel, chariot, and rudder ; by three efforts, he takes off her ugly skin. Apal& then appears in a beautiful one. In the skin thus stript off there was a bristle (galyakah) ; above, it had a hirsute appearance ; below, it resembled the skin of a lizard.2 The bristle or thorn upon the skin of Apala is naturally suggestive of the hedgehog, the porcupine, the wild boar, and the bristly hog. The aurora, as the Vedic hymn sings, shines only at the sight of her husband ; thus Apal4, of the ugly or
1 Khe rathasya khe 'nasah khe yugasya gatakrato apalani indra trish putvy akrinoh suryatvadam.
2 Sulomam anavadyangim kuru mam gakra sutvadam Tasyas tad vadanam grutvii pritas tena purandarah Rathadhidrena tarn indrah gakatasya yugasya 6a Prakshipya nigdakarsha tris tatah s& sutvac"& 'bhavat Tasyaih tvac"i vyapetSyam sarvasyam galyako 'bhavat Uttara tv abhavad godha krikalagas tvag uttama. Godhd seems to signify lie who has the form of a hair (go, among its other meanings, has that of hair). As an animal, the dictionaries also recognise in the godha a lizard. But perhaps we may also trans late it by toad or frog ; we could thus also understand the fable of the frog which aspires to equal the ox. I observe, moreover, to ex emplify the ease with which we can pass from the ox to the frog, and from the frog to the lizard, how in the Russian story of Afanassief, ii. 23, a beautiful princess is hidden in a frog ; in Tuscan and Pied- montese stories and in Sicilian superstitions, in a toad. In the stories of the Pentamerone, the good fairy is a lacerta cornuta (a horned lizard). Ghosha, too, has for its equivalent in Sanskrit, karkatagringi, which means a horned shrimp. In other varieties the young prince is a he-goat or a dragon.
THE LEPROUS MAIDEN— CINDERELLA. 5
the hog's skin, and Ghosha, the leprous maiden, become splendid and healthy by the grace of their husband. Thus Cinderella, or she who has a dress of the colour of ashes, or of a grey or dark colour, like the sky of night (in Kussian stories Cinderella is called Cernushka, which means little black one, as well as little dirty one), appears exceedingly beautiful only when she finds herself in the prince's ball-room, or in church, in candlelight, and near the prince : the aurora is beautiful only when the sun is near.
In the twenty-eighth story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, the maiden persecuted by her father and would-be seducer, who wishes to marry her, because he thinks her as beautiful as her mother (the evening aurora is as beautiful as the morning aurora), covers herself with a hog's skin, which she takes off only when she marries a young prince.1 In another story of White Eussia,2 we have, instead, the son of a king persecuted by his father, who is constrained to quit his father's house with a cloak made of a pig's skin. In an unpublished story of the Monferrato, the contents of which Dr Ferraro has com municated to me, the girl persecuted by her step-mother is condemned to eat in one night an interminable number of apples ; by means of two hog's bristles, she calls up a whole legion of pigs, who eat the apples in her stead.
As to the rudder of Indras's chariot in the lower bosom of Apala, it would seem to me to have a phallic signification. Indras may have cured Apala by marrying her, as the A9vinau, by means of a husband, cured the leprous Ghosh&, who was growing old in her father's house. In the tenth story of the Pentamerone, the king
1 For the persecuted maiden in connection with the hog or hogs, cfr. also the Pentamerone, iii. 10. 2 Afanassieff, v. 38.
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
of Eoccaforte marries an old woman, believing he is espousing a young one. He throws her out of the window, but she is arrested in her fall by a tree, to which she clings ; the fairies pass by, and make her young again, as well as beautiful and rich, and tie up her hair with a golden ribbon. The aged sister of the old woman who has grown young again (the night) goes to the barber, thinking that the same result may be attained simply by having her skin removed, and is flayed alive. For the myth of the two sisters, night and aurora, the black maiden and she who disguises herself in black, in grey, or the colour of ashes, consult also the Pentamerone, ii. 2. According to the Italian belief, the hog is dedicated to St Anthony, and a St Anthony is also celebrated as the protector of weddings, like the Scandinavian Thor, to whom the hog is sacred. The hog symbolises fat ; and therefore, in the sixteenth Esthonian story, the hog is eaten at weddings.
The companions of Odysseus, transformed by the mere tricious enchantress Circe, with the help of poisonous herbs, into filthy hogs, care only to gratify their bodily appetites, whence Horace, in the second of the first book of the Epistolce —
u Sirenum voces, et Circes pocula nosti, Quae si cum sociis stultus cupidusque bibisset Sub domina meretrice fuieset turpis et excors Vixisset canis immundus, vel arnica luto Sus."
The hog, as one of the most libidinous of animals, is sacred to Venus ; for this reason, according to the Pytha- gorian doctrines, lustful men are transformed into hogs, and the expression "pig" is applied to a man given over to every species of lust In Varro1 we read : — "Nuptia- rum initio, antiqui reges ac sublimes viri in Hetruria in
1 J)e lie Rustica, ii. 4.
THE RUDDER OF INDRAS.
conjuctione nuptial! nova nupta et novus maritus pri- mum porcum immolant ; prisci quoque Latini et etiam Grseci in Italia idem fecisse videntur, nam et nostrae mulieres, maximse nutrices naturam, qua fceminaa sunt, in virginibus appellant porcum, et grsece choiron, signifi- cantes esse dignum insigni nuptia,rum." The rudder of Indras, which passes over the upodaras (or lower bosom) of Apala, is illustrated by this passage in Varro.
As to the' wild boar, its character is generally demon iacal ; but the reason why the Hindoo gods were invested with this form was in a great degree due to equivocation in language. The word vishnus means he who penetrates ; on account of its sharp tusks, in a Vedic hymn,1 the wild boar is called vishnus, or the penetrator. / Hence, pro bably, by the same analogy, in another hymn, Eudras, the father of the Marutas, the winds, is invoked as a red, hirsute, horrid, celestial wild boar,2 and the Marutas are invoked when the thunderbolts are seen in the form of wild boars running out from the iron teeth and golden wheels ; 3 that is, carried by the chariot of the Marutas, the winds, who also are said to have tongues of fire, and eyes like the sun.4 Yishnus himself, in the Itigvedas, at the instigation of Indras, brings a hundred oxen, the
1 Rigv. i. 61, 7.
2 Divo varaham arusham kapardinam tvesham rupam namasa ni hvayamahe; Rigv. i. 114, 5.
3 Pagyan hiranyadakran ayodaiishtran vidhavato varahan; Rigv. i. 88, 5.
4 Agnigihva manavah sftradakshasali ; Rigv. i. 89, 7. — In the Edda, the chariot of Frey is drawn by a hog. The head of the mythical hog is luminous. In the twenty-eighth story of the second book of Afanassieff, Ivan Durak obtains from the two young heroes, who miraculously appear to him, three marvellous gifts, i.e., the hog with golden bristles, the buck with golden horns and tail, and the horse with mane and tail also of gold.
ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
milky gruel, and the destroying wild boar.1 Therefore Indras himself loves the shape of a wild boar, which, in the Avesta, is his alter ego. /Verethraghnas assumes the same form. We know that the sun (sometimes the moon), in the form of a ram or he-goat, thrusts and pushes against the cloud, or the darkness, until he- pierces it with his golden horns ; and so Vishnus, the penetrator, with his sharp golden tusks (thunderbolts, lunar horns, and solar rays), puts forth such great strength in the darkness and the cloud that he bursts through both, and comes forth luminous and victorious. According to the Pauranic traditions, Vishnus, in his third incarnation, when killing the demon Hiranyakshas (or him of the golden eye), drew forth or delivered the earth from the waters (or from the ocean of the damp and gloomy night of the winter).2 According to the Rdmdyanam?
1 Vi9vet ta" vishnur abharad urukramas tveshitah cjatam mahishan kshirapakam odanam var&ham indra errmsham ; Rigv. viii. 66, 10. — In the Thebaid of Statius (v. 487), Tydoeus, too, is dressed in the spoils of a wild boar —
" Terribiles contra setis, ac dente recurvo, Tydea per latos humeros ambire laborant Exuviae, Calydonis honos."
2 According to other fables, the three persons of the Trinity at one time disputed as to who had the pre-eminence. Brahman, who, from the summit of the lotus where he was seated, saw nothing in the universe, believed himself the first of creatures. He descended into the stem of the lotus, and finding at last Narayanas (Vishnus) asleep, he asked him who he was. " I am the first-born," replied Vishnus ; Brahman disputed this title and dared even to attack him. But during the struggle, Mahadeva (Qiva) threw himself between them, crying, " It is I who am the first-born. Nevertheless I will recognise as my superior him who is able to see the summit of my head or the sole of my feet." Vishnus (as hidden or infernal moon), transforming himself into a wild boar, pierced through the ground and penetrated to the infernal regions, where he saw the feet of Mahadeva. The latter, on his return, saluted him as the first-born of the gods ; Bournouf, Ulnde Franchise. 3 ii. 119.
THE MONSTER WILD BOAR.
Indras took the form of a wild boar immediately after his birth.
TheArcadianwild boar of Mount Erymanthiis is familiar to the reader. Herakles killed it in his third labour, in the same way as Vishnus in the third of his incarnations became a wild boar ; Ovid describes him very elegantly in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses —
" Sanguine et igne micant oculi, riget horrida cervix j Et setaB densis similes hastilibus horrent. Stantque velut vallum, velut alta hastilia setae , Fervida cum rauco latos stridore per armos Spuma fluit, dentes aequantur dentibus Indis, Fulmen ab ore venit frondes afflatibus ardent."
The wild boar of Meleagros is a variety of this very monster ; it is, therefore, not without reason that when Herakles goes to the infernal regions, all the shades flee before him, except those of Meleagros and Medusa. Meleagros and Herakles resemble each other, are identi fied with each other ; as to Medusa, we must not forget that the head of the Gorgon was represented upon the segis of Zeus, that Gorgon is one of the names given to Pallas, and that the Gorgons, and especially Medusa, are connected with the garden of the Hesperides, where the golden apples grow which Herakles loves, fr In the sixty-first hymn of the first book of the Rigvedas, the god, after having eaten and drunk well, kills, with the weapon stolen from the celestial black smith Tvashtar, the monster wild boar, who steals that which is destined for the gods.1 In the ninety-ninth hymn of the tenth book of the Itigvedas, Tritas (the third brother), by the strength which he has received from
1 Asyed u matuh savaneshu sadyo mahah pitum papivafi darv anna musLayad vislinuh padatam sahiyam vidhyad varaham tiro adrim asta;
str. 7.
io ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
Indras, kills the monster wild boar.1 In the Tdittiriya Brdhmanam, we find another very interesting passage. The wild boar keeps guard over the treasure of the demons, which is enclosed within seven mountains. Indras, with the sacred herb, succeeds in opening the seven mountains, kills the wild boar, and, in conse quence, discovers the treasure.2 In the fifty-fifth hymn of the seventh book of the Itigvedas, the hog and the dog lacerate and tear each other to pieces in turns ;3 the dog and the pig are found in strife again in the JEsopian fable. '
In the McihdbMratam* Puloman assumes the form of a wild boar to carry off the wife of Bhrigus ; she pre maturely gives birth to Cyavanas, who, to avenge his mother, burns the wild boar to ashes. The thunderbolt tears through the cloud, the sun's ray (or the lunar horn) breaks through the darkness. In the popular Tuscan story, the stupid Pimpi kills the hog, by teasing and torment ing it with the tongs, which he has made red-hot in the fire. In the ninth of the Sicilian stories collected by Laura Gonzenbach, the girl Zafarana, throwing three hog's bristles upon the burning embers, causes the old prince, her husband; to become young and handsome again ; it is ever the same lucid myth (a variety of Apala). Thus, in the first Esthonian story, the prince, by eating pork (or in the night forest), acquires the faculty of under-
1 Asya trito nv ogas& vridhano vipa varan am ayoagraya ban ; str. 6.
8 Varahoyam vamamoshah saptanam girlnam parastad vittam vedyam asuranam vibharti, sa darbhapirigulam (piii^alam ?) uddhritya, sapta girin bhittva tarn ahanniti, already quoted by Wilson, Rigv. Sew. i. 164. — Cfr. tbe chapter on the Woodpecker.
8 Tvam sukarasya dardrihi tava dardartu sukarah; str. 4. — The dog in relation with the hog occurs again in the two Latin proverbs : " Canis peccatum sus dependit," and " Aliter catuli longe olent, aliter sues." * L 893.
THE CUNNING HOG AND THE HEDGEHOG, n
standing the language of birds ; the hero acquires malice, if he has it not already ; he becomes cunning, if he was previously stupid ; we therefore also find in a story of Afanassieff,1 tire wolf cheated, first by the dog, then by the goat, and finally by the hog, who nearly drowns him. The wolf wishes to eat the hog's little ones ; the hog requests him to wait under a bridge, where there is no water, whilst he goes, as he promises, in the meantime to wash the young porkers ; the wolf waits, and the hog goes to let off the water, which, as it passes under the bridge, puts the wolfs life in danger. Hence the belief noticed by Aristotle, that the hog is a match for the wolf, and the corresponding Greek fables. This prudence is found carried to the highest degree in the hedgehog. The Arabs are accustomed to say that the champion of truth must have the courage of the cock, the scrutiny of the hen, the heart of the lion, the rush of the wild boar, the cunning of the fox, the prudence of the hedge hog, the swiftness of the wolf, the resignation of the dog, and the complexion of the naguir,2 A verse attributed to Archilokos says : —
"Poll' old' al6p£x, all' echinos en mega,"
which passed into the proverb : " One knavery of the hedgehog is worth more than many of the fox." * In the Aiiar ey. Br.? the hedgehog is said to be born of the talon of the rapacious hawk. * In the ^Esopian fables, the wolf comes upon a hedgehog, and congratulates himself upon his good luck ; but the hedgehog defends itself. The wolf flatters it and beseeches it to lay down its arms, but it answers that it is imprudent to do so
1 iv. 13. * Daumas, La Vie Arabe, xv.
• iii. 3, 26.
12 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
while the danger of fighting remains. Hence the com mon belief that the wolf is afraid of the hedgehog; hence the proverb, " It is very easy to find the hedgehog, but very difficult to hold it."/ In a fable of Abstemius, the hedgehog appears as an enemy, not only of the wolf, but also of the serpent ^ it pricks the viper which has taken refuge in its den. Then the viper begs it to go out, but it answers, " Let him go out who cannot stay." The hedgehog has the appearance of a little wild boar ; and as an enemy of the wolf and of the serpent, it appears $/)p*fc to combine in one the dwarf Vishnus and the wild boar Vishnus, the exterminator of monsters, who, as we know,, almost always assume, in Hindoo mythology^he form of a wolf or a serpent. And inas much as Vishnus, like Indras, is a thundering and rain- giving god, in his character of sun in the cloud, or nightly and autumnal moon, the hedgehog, too, is believed to pre sage wind and rain/ The wild boar, when dreamed of, is, according to Artemidoros, quoted by Aldrovandi,1 an omen of tempest and rain deluge. To this, refers also the fable spoken of by -ZElianos and Pliny concerning the hogs car ried off by the pirates, which make the ship sink. The cloud-hogs are evidently represented by this myth.
^The porcupine seems to be an intermediate form between the hedgehog and the wild boar. According to the popular belief, the ashes of a dead porcupine are, when scattered on the head, an excellent remedy against baldness, and a hair-restorative. ' And inasmuch as it is difficult to make the porcupine's quills fall, I read in Aldrovandi,2 that women "Ad discriminandos capillos, ut illos conservent illsesos, aculeis potius hystricum, quam acubus utuntur." This information derived from
3 Cfr. Aldrovandi, De Quadrup. Digit. Viv. ii. 2 Ibid.
MYTHICAL COMBS.— SACRIFICIAL HOGS. 13
Aldrovandi is interesting, as enabling us to understand a not uncommon circumstance in Russian stories. The hero and heroine who flee from the monster that pursues them have received from a good magician or a good fairy the gift of a comb, of such a nature that when thrown on the ground it makes a dense thicket or impenetrable forest arise, which arrests the pursuer's progress.1 This is a reminiscence of the porcupine with the thick-set quills, of the bristly wild boar, of the gloomy night or cloud itself, of the horned moon, which hides the fugi tive solar hero and heroine from the sight of the pursuer. Notwithstanding this, the hog and the wild boar generally play in Indo-European tradition a part resembling that of the scape-goat and of the ass souffre- douleur. In the Pantatantram, the ears and the heart of the credulous ass, torn by the lion, are eaten. In Babrios, the rdle of the ass is sustained by the stag (which is often in myths a variation of the foolish hero). In the Gesta Romanorum? the wild boar loses, by his silliness, first one ear, then the other, then his tail ; at last he is killed, and his >heart eaten by the cook. In Germany, it is the custom, as it formerly was in England, to serve up at dinner on Christmas Day an ornamented boar's head, no doubt as a symbol of the gloomy monster of lunar winter killed at the winter solstice, after which the days grow always longer and brighter. For the same reason, the common people in Germany often go to sleep
1 Cfr. Afanassief, v. 28.
2 Ixxxiii., quoted by Benfey in his Einleitung to the Pancatantram. — The fable is taken from the thirtieth of Avianus, where the wild boar loses his two ears and is then eaten, but the cook (who represents in tradition the cunning hero) has taken its heart to eat it :—
" Sed cum consumpti dominus cor quaereret Apri Impatiens, fertur (cor) rapuisse coquus."
i4 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
on Christmas Day in the pig-sty, hoping to dream there ; this dream is a presage of good luck. The new sun is born in the sty of the winter hog ; even the Christian Eedeemer was born in a stable, but instead of the hog it was the ass, its mythical equivalent, that occupied it. For this reason, too, the devil often assumes in German superstition the form of a monstrous boar, which the hero kills.1 The wild boar is also described as an aversier (or demon) in the romance of Garin le Loherain 2 —
" Votes quel aversier, Grant a le dent fors de la gueule un piet Mult fu hardis qui a cop 1'atendieV'
The author of Loci Communes says that Ferquhar II., king of Scotland, was killed by a wild boar ; other writers tell us, on the contrary, that his death was caused by a wolf; but we already know how, in the myth, wolf and wild boar are sometimes equivalent the one to the other.
In the same way as Vishnus changed himself into a wild boar, and the hog was sacred to the Scandinavian Mars, so was the wild boar sacred to the Eoman and Hellenic Mars ; and even Mars himself assumed the shape of a monstrous lunar wild boar in order to kill the young Adonis, beloved of Venus. There is no god or saint so perfect but has once in his life committed a fault, as there is not a demon so wicked as not to have done good at least once. The adversaries exchange parts. In Servius, it is with a wild boar's tusk that the bark is cut off the tree in which Myrrha, pregnant with
1 In Du Cange, too, " aper significat diabolum; Papias M. S. Bitur. Ex illo Scriptures : * Singularis aper egressus est de silva.' " — Cfr. also Uhland's Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und Sage, iii. 141, et seq.
2 ii. 220, et seq.} quoted by Uhland.
LIFE-GIVING AND DEATH-DEALING TUSK. 15
Adonis after her incest with her father, shuts herself up (we have above seen, on the contrary, Indras who opens with an herb the hiding-place of the wild boar, in order to kill it). We here have again the incestuous father, the girl in the wooden dress, the forest, the penetrating tusk of the wild boar which bursts through the forest of night, and enables the young hero to come forth, whom he kills in the evening out of jealousy. In the ancient popular belief of Sweden, too, the wild boar kills the sun whilst he is asleep in a cavern and his horses grazing. Notice, moreover, the double character of the tusk of the nocturnal lunar wild boar ; in the morning it is a life-giving tusk, which enables the solar hero to be born ; in the evening it is a death-dealing one ; the wild boar is alive during the night, and the darkness is split open by the white tooth of the living wild boar. The lunar wild boar or hog is sacrificed, — it is killed at morn, in the nuptials of the solar hero. The tooth of this dead wild boar, in the evening, causes the death of the young hero or heroine, or else transforms them into wild beasts. In popular fairy tales the witch, feigning a wish to comb the head of the hero or the heroine, thrusts into his or her head now a large pin, now a dead man's tooth, and thus deprives them of life or human form. This is a reminiscence of the tusk of the cloudy, nocturnal, or wintry wild boar who kills the sun, or metamorphoses him, or puts him to sleep.
To represent the evening sun asleep, a curious par ticular is offered us in the myth of Adonis. It is well- known that doctors attribute to the lettuce a soporific virtue, not dissimilar to that of the poppy. Now, it is interesting to read in Nikandros Koloplionios, quoted by Aldrovandi, that Adonis was struck by the wild boar after having eaten a lettuce. Ibykos, a Pythagorean poet,
16 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
calls the lettuce by the name of eunuch, as it is that which puts to sleep, which renders stupid and impotent ; Adonis who has eaten the lettuce is therefore taken from Venus by the lunar wild boar, being eunuch and incapable. The solar hero falls asleep in the night, and becomes a eunuch, like the Hindoo Argunas, when he is hidden ; and otherwise, the sun becomes the moon.
CHAPTER VI.
THE DOG.
SUMMARY.
Why the myth of the dog is difficult of interpretation. — Entre cliien et loup. — The dog and the moon. — The bitch SaramS, ; her double aspect in the Ved&s and in the Rdmdyanam ; messenger, consoler, and infernal being. — The dog and the purple ; the dog and the meat ; the dog and its shadow ; the fearless hero and his shadow ; the black monster; the fear of Indras.— The two Vedic dogs; Sarameyas and Hermes. — The favourite dog of Saram& ; the dog that steals during the sacrifice ; the form of a dog to expiate crimes committed in former states of existence ; relative Hindoo, Pythagorean and Christian beliefs.— The dog Yamas. — The dog demon that barks, with the long bitter tongue. — The red bitch towards morning a beautiful maiden during the night. — The intestines of the dog eaten. — The hawk that carries honey and the sterile woman. — Dog and woodpecker. — The dog carries the bones of the witch's daughter. — The dog-messenger brings news of the hero. — The nurse-bitch. — The dog and his collar; the dog tied up ; the hero becomes a dog. — The dog helps the hero. — The branch of the apple-tree opens the door. — The dog tears the devil in pieces. — The two sons of Ivan think themselves dog's sons. — The intestines of the fish given to be eaten by the bitch. — Ivan the son of the bitch, the very strong hero, goes to the infernal regions. — Dioscuri, Kerberos, funereal purifying dogs of the Per sians; the penitent dog; the two dogs equivalent to the two Agvinau. — The luminous children transformed into puppies; relative legends ; the maiden whose hands have been cut off obtains golden hands ; branches of trees, hands, sons born of a tree ; the myth compared and explained in the Vedic hymns, with the example of Hiranyahastas ; the word vadhrimati. — The demoniacal dog. — The strength of the mythical dog. — Monstrous
VOL. II. B
i8 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
dogs. — The dog Sirius. — To swear by the dog or by the wolf. — A dog is always born among wolves. — The dog dreamed of. — Double appearance of the dog; the stories of the king of the assassins and of the magician with seven heads. — St Vitus invoked in Sicily whilst a dog is being tied up. — The dog of the shepherd behaves like a wolf among the sheep. — The dog as an instrument of chastisement; the expressions to lead the dog and the igno minious punishment of carrying the dog. — The dogs that tear in pieces ; the death caused by the dog prognosticated ; the dogs Sirius and Kerberos igneous and pestilential ; the incendiary dog of St Dominic, the inventor of pyres for burning heretics, and the dog of the infected San Rocco.
THE myth of the dog is one of those of which the interpretation is more delicate. As the common dog stays upon the doorstep of the house, so is the mythical dog generally found at the gate of the sky, morning and evening, in connection with the two A§vinau. A It was a fugitive phenomenon of but an in stant's duration which determined the formation of the principal myth of the dog. When this moment is past, the myth changes its nature. I have already referred to the French expression, " entre chien et loup," as used to denote the twilight j1 the dog precedes by one instant the evening twilight, and follows by one instant that of morning : it is, in a word, the twilight at its most luminous moment. Inasmuch /as it watches at the gates of night, it is usually a funereal, infernal, and formidable animal ; inasmuch as it guards the gates of day, it is generally represented as a propitious one; and a'&'Ve
1 Leukoph6s ; a verse of Vilkelmus Brito defines it in a Latin strophe given in Du Cange —
" Tempore quo neque nox neque lux sed utrumque videtur;" and further on —
" Interque canem distare lupumque."
According to Pliny and Solinus, the shadow of the hyena makes the dog dumb, i.e., the night disperses the twilight; the moon vanishes.
THE THREE DOGS. 19
have, £een that, of the two Agvinau, one is in especial relation with the moon, and the other with the sun, so, of the two dogs of mythology, one is especially lunar, and the other especially solar. Between these two dogs we find the bitch their mother, who, ^f^^^^j^tQ^ /tafebC represents now the wandering moon of heaven, the guiding moon that illumines the path of the hero- and heroine, now the- thunderbolt that tears the cloud> and opens up the hiding-place of the cows or waters,. Afcy&a^re^t]^^ three mythical dogs. . One,,
menacing,^ found by the solar hero in the evening at the western gates of heaven; the second, the more active, helps him in the forest of night, where he is hunting, guides him in danger, and shows him the lurking-places of his enemies whilst he is in the cloud or darkness; the third, in the morn ing, is quiet, and found by the hero- when he comes out of the gloomy region, towards the eastern sky. &
Let us now examine briefly these three forms in Hindoo mythology. I have said that the mythical bitch appears to me sometimes to represent the moon, and sometimes the thunderbolt. In India, this bitch is named Sarama, properly she who walks, who runs or flows. We are accustomed to say of the dog that it barks at the moon, which the popular proverb connects with robbers. The dog that barks at the moon,1 is perhaps the same dog that barks to show that robbers are near. In the 108th hymn of the tenth book of the Rigvedas, we have a dramatic scene between the misers or thieves (the Panayas) and the bitch Sarama, the messenger of Indras, who wishes for their treasures.2 In order to come to
1 The dog was sacred to the huntress Diana, whom we know to be the moon, hence the Latin proverb, " Delia nota canibus."
2 Indrasya dutir ishit& data-mi maha idhanti panayo nidhin vah; str. 2.
20 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
them, she traverses the waters of the Kasa (a river of hell) ; the treasure that is hidden in the mountain con sists of cows, horses, and various riches ; the Panayas wish Sarama to stay with them as their sister, and to enjoy the cows along with them ; Sarama answers that she does not recognise their brotherhood, inasmuch as she is already the sister of Indras, and the terrible Aiigirasas.1 In the sixty-second hymn of the first book, the bitch Sarama discovers the cows hidden in the rock, and receives in recompense from Indras and the Angirasas nourishment for her offspring ; then men cry out, and the cows bellow.2 Going towards the sun, in the path of the sun, Sarama finds the cows.3 When Indras splits the mountain open, Sarama shows him first the waters.4 Having previously seen the fissure in the mountain, she showed the way. The first she guided rapidly, the band of the noisy ones having previously heard the noise.5 This noise may refer either to the waters, the sounding rivers (nadas, nadis), or the lowing cows (gavas). Now, this bitch that discovers the hiding-places, inasmuch as she breaks through the darkness of night, seems to be the moon ; inasmuch as she breaks through the cloud, she seems to be the thunderbolt. The secret of this
1 Rasaya ataram payaiisi ; str. 2. — Ayaih nidhih sarame adribudhno gobhir agveblrir vasubhir nyrishtah; str. 7. — SvasSram tv£ krinavai ma" punar ga apa te gavam subhage bhagama ; str. 9. — Naharii veda bhratritvam no svasritvam indro vidur arigirasag daghorah ; str. 10.
2 Indrasyafigirasam deshtau vidat saram& tanayaya dhasim brihas- patir bhinad'adrim vidad gah sam usriyabhir vavaganta narah ; str. 3.
3 Bitarii yati saram& ga avindat. — Ritasya path& sarama vidad gah; fiigv'v. 45, 7, 8.
4 Apo yad adrim puruhuta dardar £vir bhuvat sarama" pftrvyam te j Eigv. iv. 16, 8.
5 Vidad yadi sarama" rugnam adrer mahi p^thah pftrvyam sadhryak kah agram nayat supady akshar&nam adh^, ravam pratham^, ^anati gat; Jtigv. iii. 31, 6.
THE BITCH SARA MA. 21
equivoque lies in the root sar. In the Itigvedas, we have seen Sarama disdaining to pass for the sister of the thieves or the monsters ; in the Rdmdyanam?* the wife of one of the monsters, of the very brother of Ravanas the robber, is called Sarama, and takes, instead of the monster's part, that of Ramas and Sita the ravished wife. We have already several times seen the moon as a beneficent cow, as a good fairy, or as the Madonna. Sarama (of which Surama, another benignant rakshasl, is probably only an incorrect form2), the consoler of Sita, who announces prophetically her approaching deliverance by her husband R&mas, appears to me in the light of another impersonation of the moon. It is on this account that Sita3 praises Sarama as a twin- sister of hers (sahodara), affectionate, and capable of traversing the heavens, and penetrating into the watery infernal regions (rasatalam).4 The benignant sister of Sita can only be another luminous being ; she is the good sister whom the maiden of the Russian story, persecuted by her incestuous father, in Afanassieff, finds in the subterranean world, where she is consoled and assisted in escaping from the power of the witch ; she is the moon. The moon is the luminous form of the gloomy sky of night, or of the funereal and infernal region ; whilst its two luminous barriers in that sky, in the east and in the west, are morning and evening aurora ; the luminous forms of the cloudy sky are lightning and thunderbolts. And it is from one of these luminous mythical forms that the Greeks, according to Pollux, quoted by Aldrovandi, made of the dog the inventor of purple, which the dog of Herakles was the first to bite.
1 vi. 9. 2 v. 62. 3 vi 1().
* Cfr. the Vedic text above quoted.
22 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
The dog of the ^Esopian fable,1 with meat in its mouth, is a variation *of this myth. The red sky of evening appears purple in the morning, and in the evening as the meat that the dog lets fall into the waters of the ocean of night. In the Panca,tantram , we have instead the lion -of evening (the evening sun), who, seeing in the fountain (or in the ocean ^of night) another lion (now the moon, now his own shadow, the night, or the cloud), throws himself into the water to tear him to pieces, and perishes in it. The hare (the moon) is the animal which allures the famished lion of evening to perish in the waters. The two sons of the bitch Sarama preserve several of their mother's characteristics. Now they are spoken of together as Sarameyau; now they are mentioned together, but distinct from one another ; now one alone of them, the most legitimate, by the name of Sarameyas, whose identity with the Greek Hermes or Hermeias has already been proved by Professor Kuhn. Sarama in connection with the Pan ay as, merchants or thieves, and Sarama as the
1 In the Tuti-Name, instead of the dog with the bone or piece of meat, we have the fox. The dog who sees his shadow in the water ; the fearless hero who, in Tuscan stories, dies when he sees his own shadow ; the black monster (the shadow) who, in numerous stories, presents himself instead of the real hero to espouse the beautiful princess, carry our thoughts back to Indras, who, in the Rigvedas, after having defeated the monster, flees away over the rivers, upon seeing something which is probably the shadow of Vritras, killed by him, or his own shadow. In the Aitar. Brahm. iii. 2, 15, 16, 20, this flight of Indras is also recorded, and it is added, that Indras hides himself, and that the Pitaras (i.e., the souls of the departed) find him again. Indras thinks that he has killed Vritras, but really has not killed him ; then the gods abandon him ; the Marutas alone (as dogs friendly to the bitch Sarama) remain faithful to him. The monster killed by Indras in the morning rises again at eve. According to other Vedic accounts, Indras is obliged to flee, stung by remorse, having committed a brahmariicide.
THE DOGS AS GUARDIANS OF TREASURES. 23
divine messenger, gives us the key to the legend of Mercury, god of thieves and merchants, and messenger of the gods. In a Vedic hymn we find described with great clear ness the two dogs that guard the gates of hell, the monsters' dwelling, or the kingdom of the dead. It prays for one departed, "that he may be able to pass safely beyond the two dogs, sons of Sarama, having four eyes, spotted, who occupy the right path, and to come to the benignant Manes " (for there are also the malignant ones, or Durvidatrah) ; these dogs are called " the very fierce guardians, who watch the road, observing men, have vast nostrils, are long-winded, and very strong* the messengers of Yamas ; " they are invoked " that they may cause to enjoy the sight of the sun, and give a happy life."1 But the Rigvedas itself already shows us the two sons of the bitch Sarama, as the two who look in turns (one after the other), whom Indras must put to sleep.2 One, however, of the two sons of Sarama is especially invoked and feared, the Sarameyas par excellence. The Vedic hymn speaks of him as he who returns (punahsaras), and represents him as " luminous, with reddish teeth, that shine like spears, in the well-rooted gums," and implores him to sleep, or "to bark only at the robber, or at the thief, not at the singers of hymns in honour of Indras."3 The bitch Sarama is passionately fond of her
1 Ati drava sarameyau gvanau datarakshau gabalau sadhuna patha atha pitrint suvidatran upehi — Yau te gvanau yama rakshitarau daturakshau pathira.kshi nridakshasau — Urunasav asutripa udumbalau yamasya dutau darato ganan anu — Tav asmabhyam drigaye suryaya punar datam asum adyeha bhadram ; Rigv. x. 14, 10-12.
2 Ni shvapaya mithudrigau ; Rigv. i. 29, 3.— The Petropolitan Dictionary explains the word mith. by " abwechselend sichtbar."
3 Yad arguna sarameya datah pigafiga yadhase viva bhra^anta rishtaya upa srakveshu bapsato ni shu svapa ; stenam raya sarameya taskararh va punahsara stotrin indrasya rayasi kim asman dudhunayase ni shu svapa ; Rigv. vii, 55, 2, 3.
24 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
son ; in recompense for her discovery of the cows of Indras, she demands nourishment for her son, which nourishment the commentator explains to be the milk of the liberated cows ; the first rays of the morning sun and the last rays of the evening sun drink the milk of the dawn or silvery twilight. In the Mahdbhdratam,1 the bitch Saram4 curses King (jranamegayas, because his three brothers, when attending the sacrifice, maltreated and flogged the dog S&rameyas, who had also gone there, although he had neither touched with his tongue nor desired with his eyes the oblations destined to the gods (as, on the contrary, the white dog did, who, in the sacrifice of Dion, near Athens, stole part of the victim, whence the name of Klinosarges was given to that place). The same legend occurs again, slightly modified, in the seventh book of the Rdmdyanam.2 E&m,as sends Lakshmanas, his brother, to see whether there are any dis putes to be settled in the kingdom ; Lakshmanas returns, saying that the whole kingdom is at peace. Eamas sends him again ; he sees a dog erect on the doorstep of the palace, barking. The name of this dog is Sarameyas. Eamas enables him to enter the palace. The dog com plains that he has been beaten without just cause by a Br&hman. The Brahman is called, appears, confesses his fault, and awaits his punishment. The dog S&rameyas proposes as his punishment that the Brahman should take a wife (the usual proverbial satire against wives), and become head of a family in the very place where he himself had supported the same dignity prior to assum ing the shape of a dog. After this the dog Sarameyas, who remembers his previous states of existence, returns to do penitence at Benares, whence he had come.
1 i. G57, GG6. 2 Canto 62.
THE DOG AT THE SACRIFICE— YAMAS. 25
Therefore the dog and the Kerberos are also a form into which the hero of the myth passes. The Hindoo and Pythagorean religious beliefs both teach that metem psychosis is a means of expiation ; the curse of the offended deity is now a vengeance now a chastisement for an error that the hero or some one of his relations has com mitted, and which has provoked the deity's indignation.1
Sometimes the deity himself assumes the form of a dog in order to put the hero's virtue to the proof, as in the last book of the Mahdbhdratam, where the god Yamas becomes a dog, and follows Yudhishthiras (the son of Yamas), who regards him with such affection, that when invited to mount into the chariot of the gods, he refuses to do so, unless his faithful dog is allowed to accompany him.
•f Sometimes, however, the shape of a dog or bitch (as it is easy to pass from Yamas, the god of hell in the form of a dog, to the dog-fiend) is a real and specific form of a demon./ The Itigvedas speaks of the dog- demons bent upon tormenting Indras, who is requested to kill the monster in the form of an owl, a bat, a dog, a wolf, a great bird, a vulture ;2 it invokes the A£vinau to destroy on every side the barking dogs ;3 it solicits
1 Thus Hecuba, the wife of Priam, after having suffered cruel tribu lation as a woman, in Ovid —
11 Perdidit infelix hominis post omnia formam
Externasque novo latratu terruit auras,"
In the Breviarium Romanum, too, in the offices of the dead, God is besought not to consign to the beasts (ne tradas bestiis, <fec.) the souls of His servants.
2 Eta u tye patayanti gvayatava in dram dipsanti dipsavo 'dabhyam — Ulukayaturii gugulukayatum gahi gvayatum uta kokay&tum supar- nayatum gridhrayatum drishadeva pra mrina raksha indra ; JZigv. vii. 104, 20, 22.
8 Gambhayatam abhito r^yatah; Riav. i. 182, 4.
26 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
the friends to destroy the long-tongued and avaricious dog (in the old Italian chronicle of Giov. Morelli, misers are called Cani del danaro, dogs of money), as the Bhrigavas have killed the monster Makhas.1 And the skin of the red bitch is another monstrous form in which is dressed every morning (as the aurora in the morning sky), in the twenty-third Mongol story, the beautiful maiden who is in the power of the prince of the dragons ; she (as moon) is beautiful maiden only at night ; towards day she becomes a red bitch (the moon gives up her place to the aurora) ; the youth who has married her wishes to burn this bitch's skin, but the maiden disappears ; the sun overtakes the aurora, and he disappears with the moon. We have already seen this myth.
In the eighteenth hymn of the fourth book of the Rigvedas, the thirteenth strophe seems to me to contain an interesting particular. A devotee complains as follows : — " In my misery I had the intestines of the dog cooked ; I found among the gods no consoler ; I saw my wife sterile ; the hawk brought honey to me."2 Here we find the dog in connection with a bird.3 In the twenty-
1 Apa 9vanaih Qnathishtana sakhHyo dirghagihvyam — Apa ar&dhasam hat£ makham na bhrigavah ; Riyv. ix. 101, 1, 13.
2 Avarty& guna antrani pec"e na deveshu vivide marditaram apagyarii l^&yam arnahiyamanam adh£ me gyeno madhv a ^abhara; Rigv. iv. 18, 13. The bird who brings honey has evidently here a phallical mean ing, as also the intestine, the part that is inside of now the dog, now the fish, and now the ass (all of which are phallical symbols), desired as a delicacy by the women of fairy tales, must be equivalent to the madhu brought by the bird.
3 In the fifth story of the fourth book of the Pentamerone, the bird does the same that a dog does in the third story of the third book ; the bird brings a knife, the dog brings a bone, and the imprisoned princess, by means of this knife and bone, is enabled to make a hole in the prison, and to free herself.
THE MESSENGER DOG, BIRD, AND HORSE. 27
fifth story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, we find the woodpecker that brings food and drink to its friend the dog, and avenges him after his death. In the forty-first story of the fourth book, the dog is killed by the old witch, because he carries in a sack the bones of her wicked daughter, who has been devoured by the head of a mare. In the twentieth story of the fifth book, we have the dog in the capacity of a messenger employed by the beautiful girl whom the serpent has married ; he carries to her father a letter that she has written, and brings his answer back to her. In the legend of St Peter, the dog serves as a messenger between Peter and Simon the magician ; in the legend of San Eocco, the dog of our Lord takes bread to the saint, alone and ill under a tree. The name of Cyrus's nurse, according to Textor, was Ktina, whence Cyrus might have been nourished, like Asklepios, with the milk of a dog. I have already said that the story of the dog is connected with the myth of the A£vinau, or, what is the same thing, with that of the horse ; horse and dog are considered in the light of coursers : the horse bears the hero, and the dog usually takes news of the hero to his friends, as the bitch Sarama, the messenger of the gods, does in the Rigvedas.1 The hero who assumes the shape of a horse cautions his father, when he sells him to the devil, not to give up the bridle to the buyer. In the twenty-second story of the fifth book of Afanas- sieffy the young man transforms himself into a dog, and lets his father sell him to a great lord, who is the devil in disguise, but tells him not to give up the collar.2 The
1 In the Pentamerone, i. 7, the enchanted bitch brings to the princess news of the young hero.
2 In the seventh Esthonian story, the man with the black horse binds three dogs tightly ; if they get loose, no one will be able to keep them back. — In the Edda, Thrymer, the prince of the giants, keeps the grey dogs bound with golden chains.
28 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
gentleman buys the dog for two hundred roubles, but insists upon having the collar too, calling the old man a thief upon the latter refusing to consign it into his hands. The old man, in his distraction, gives it up ; the dog is thus in the power of the lord, that is, of the devil. But on the road, a hare (the moon) passes by ; the gentleman lets the dog pursue it, and loses sight of it ; the dog again assumes the shape of a hero, and rejoins his father. In the same story, the young man adopts, the second time, the form of a bird (we shall see the Acvinau as swans and doves in the chapter on the swan, the goose, and the dove), and the third time that of a horse. In the twenty-eighth story of the fifth book, a horse, a dog, and an apple-tree are born of the dead bull who protects Ivan and Mary fleeing in the forest from the bear. Riding on the horse, and accompanied by the dog, Ivan goes to the chase. The first day he captures a wolfs whelp alive, and carries it home ; the second day he takes a young bear ; the third day he returns to the chase, and forgets the dog ; then the six-headed serpent, in the shape of a handsome youth, carries off his sister, and shuts the dog up under lock and key, throwing the key into the lake. Ivan returns, and, by the advice of a fairy, he breaks a twig off *he apple-tree, and strikes with it the bolt of the door which encloses the dog ; the dog is thus set at liberty, and Ivan lets dog, wolf, and bear loose upon the serpent, who is torn in pieces by them, and re covers his sister. In the fiftieth story of the fifth book, the dog of a warrior-hero tears the devil, who presents himself first in the form of a bull, and then in that of a bear, to prevent the wedding of the hero taking place. In the fifty-second story of the sixth book, the dogs which Ivan Tzarevic has received from two fairies, together with a wolf's whelp, a bear's, and a lion's cub, tear the monster
THE FISH WITH GOLDEN FINS. 29
serpent to pieces. The two dogs carry us back to the myth of the A9vin£u. In the fifty-third story of the sixth book, the monster cuts Ivan's head off. Ivan has two sons, who believe themselves to be of canine descent ; they ask their mother to be permitted to go and resus citate their father. An old man gives them a root, which, when rubbed on Ivan's body, will bring him to life again ; they take it, and use it as directed. Ivan is resuscitated, and the monster dies. Finally, in the fifty- fourth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, we learn how the sons of the dog are born, and their mode of birth is analogous to that mentioned in the Vedic hymn. A king who has no sons has a fish with golden fins ; he orders it to be cooked, and to be given to the queen to eat. The intestines of the fish (the phallos) are thrown to the bitch, the bones are gnawed by the cook, and the meat is eaten by the queen. To the bitch, the cook, and the queen a son is born at the same time. The three sons are all called Ivan, and are regarded as three brothers ; but the strongest (he who accomplishes the most difficult enterprises) is Ivan the son of the bitch, who goes under ground into the kingdom of the monsters (as of the two Dioscuri, one descends into hell, like the two funereal dogs, light-coloured and white, of the Avesta, which are in perfect accordance with the Vedic Sdrameydu1). In
1 Einen gelblichen Hund mit vier Augen oder einen weissen mit gelben Ohren; Vendidad, viii. 41, et seq., Spiegel's version. And Anquetil, describing the Baraschnon no schabe, represents the purifying dog as follows : — "Le Mobed prend le baton a neuf nceuds, entre dans les Keischs et attache la cuillere de fer au neuvilme noeud. L'impur entre aussi dans les Keischs. On y amene un chien j et si c'est une femme que Ton purifie, comme elle doit £tre nue, c'est aussi une femme qui tient le chien. L'impur ayant la main droite sur sa tete et la gauche sur le chien, passe successivement sur les six premieres pierres et s'y lave avec Purine que lui donne le Mobed." — In the Kdtydy. Sd.
30 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
the same story, besides the three brother-heroes, three heroic horses are brought forth by the three mares that have drunk the water in which the fish was washed before being cooked ; in other European variations, and in the Russian stories themselves, therefore, we sometimes have, instead of the bitch's son, the son of the mare (or the cow). The two Agvin&u are now two horses, now two dogs, now a dog and a horse (now a bull and a lion).1 Ivan Tzarevic, whom the horse and the dog save from danger, is the same as the Vedic hero, the sun, whom the A§vinau save from many dangers.
In the Eussian stories, as well as in the Italian ones, the witch substitutes for one, two, or three sons of the prince, who have stars on their forehead, and were born of the princess in her husband's absence, one, two, or three puppies. In these same stories, the hand of the persscuted princess is cut off. In the thirteenth story of the third book of Afanassieff? the witch sister-in-law accuses her husband's sister of imaginary crimes in his presence. The brother cuts her hands off; she wanders into the forest ; she comes out again only after the lapse of several years ; a young merchant becomes enamoured of her, and marries her. During her husband's absence,
the question is seriously discussed whether a dog, who was seen to fast on the fourteenth day of the month, did so on account of religious penitence. — Cfr. Muir's Sanskrit Texts, i. 365.
1 Dog and horse, with bites and kicks, kill the monster doe and free the two brother-heroes in the Pentamerone, i. 9.
2 Cfr. also the sixth of the third book. — In the second story of the third book of the Pentamerone, the sister herself cuts off her own hands, of which her brother, who wishes to marry her, is enamoured. — Cfr. the Mediaeval Legends of Santa Uliva, annotated by Professor Alessandro d'Ancona, Pisa, Nistri, 1863 ; and the Figlia del Re di Dacia, illustrated by Professor Alessandro Wesselofski, Pisa, Nistri, 1866, besides the thirty-first of the stories of the Brothers Grimm.
THE YOUNG WOMAN WITHOUT HANDS. 31
she gives birth to a child whose body is all of gold, effigies of stars, moon, and sun covering it. His parents write to their son, telling him the news ; but the witch sister-in-law abstracts the letter (as in the myth of Belleroph6n), and forges another, which announces, on the contrary, that a monster, half dog and half bear, is born. The husband writes back, bidding them wait until he returns to see with his own eyes his new-born son. The witch intercepts this letter also, and changes it for another, in which he orders his young wife to be sent away. The young woman, without hands, wanders about with her boy. The boy falls into a fountain ; she weeps ; an old man tells her to throw the stumps of her arms into the fountain ; she obeys, her hands return, and she recovers her boy again. She finds her husband ; and no sooner does she uncover the child in his sight, than all the room shines with light (asviatilo).
In a Servian story,1 the father of the maiden whose hands had been cut off by the witch, her mother-in-law, causes, by means of the ashes of three burned hairs from the tail of the black stallion and that of the white mare, golden hands to grow on the maiden's arms. The apple- tree, with golden branches, which we have already men tioned, is the same as this girl who comes out of the forest (or wooden chest) with golden hands. From the branches it is easy to pass to the hands of gold, to the fair-haired son who comes out of the trunk.2 The idea of a youth as the branch of a tree has been rendered poetical by Shakspeare, who makes the Duchess of Gloster say of the seven sons of Edward —
1 The thirty-third of the collection of Karadzik, quoted by Professor Wesselofsky in his introduction to the story of the Figlia del Re di Dacia.
2 Cfr. my little essay on the Albero di Natale.
32 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
" Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one, Were as seven phials of his sacred blood, Or seven fair branches springing from one root."1
In Hindoo myths, the hand of Savitar having been cut off, one of gold is given to him, whence the epithet he enjoys of Hiranyahastas, or he who has a golden hand. But in the 116th and 117th hymns of the first book we find a more interesting datum. The branch is the hand of the tree ; the branch is the son who detaches himself from the maternal trunk of the tree ; the golden son is the same as the golden branch, the golden hand of the tree. The mother who obtains a golden hand is the same as the mother who has Hiranyahastas — i.e., Golden- hand — for her son. The Vedic hymn says that the A9vinau gave Golden-hand as a son to the Vadhrimati.2 The word vadhrimati is equivocal. The Petropolitan Dictionary interprets it only as she who has a eunuch, or one who is castrated, for her husband, but the proper sense of the word is she who has something cut off, she who has, that is, the maimed arm, as in the fairy tale, for which reason she is given a golden hand. As the wife of a eunuch, the Vedic woman, therefore, receives from the A9vinau a son with a golden hand ; as having an imperfect arm, she receives only a golden hand, as in the 116th hymn of the first book, the same Agvinau give to Vicpala, who had lost his own in battle, an iron leg.1
1 King Richard //., act. i. scene 2.
2 Qrutam tac" dhasur iva vadhrimat y£ hiranyahastam a9vinav adattam; Rigv. i. 116, 13. — Hirahyahastam a9vin& raran& putrain nar& vadhrimaty^l adattam; i. 117, 24. — The dog in connection with a man's hand is mentioned in the Latin works of Petrarch, when speaking of Vespasian, who considered as a good omen the incident of a dog bringing a man's hand into the refectory.
3 Sadyo gaiigham ayasim vic,palayai dhane hite sartave praty adhat- tam; str. 15.
THE CANICULA. 33
The Rigvedas, therefore, already contains in its germ the very popular subject of the man or woman without hands, in same way as we have already found in it, in embryo, the legends of the lame man, the blind man or woman, the ugly and the disguised woman.
But to return to the dog. Besides his agility1 in run ning, his strength holds a prominent place in the myth. The Kerberos shows an extraordinary strength in rending his enemies. In the Eussian stories the dog is the hero's strength, and is associated with the wolf, the bear, and the lion. In popular stories, now terrible lions and now dreadful dogs are found guarding the gate of the monster's dwelling. The monk of San Gallo, in Du Cange, says that the " canes germanici " are so agile and ferocious, that they suffice alone to hunt tigers and lions ; the same fable is repeated in Du Cange of the dogs of Albania, which are so great and fierce, " ut tauros premant et leones perimant." The enormous chained dog, painted on the left side of the entrance of Roman houses, near the porter's room ; the motto cave canem ; the expiations made in Greece and at Rome (whence the names "Canaria Hospitia " and " Porta Catularia," where a dog was im molated to appease the fury of the Canicula, and whence the verse of Ovid —
" Pro cane sidereo canis hie imponitur arae,") at the time of the Canicula or of the Canis Sirius, to
1 It is perhaps for this reason that the Hungarians give to their dogs names of rivers, as being runners ; but it is also said that they do so from their belief that a dog which bears the name of a river or piece of water never goes mad, especially if he be a white dog, inasmuch as the Hungarians consider the red dog and the black or spotted one as diabolical shapes. In Tuscany, when a Christian's tooth is taken out, it must be hidden carefully, that the dogs may not find it and eat it ; here dog and devil are assimilated.
VOL. II. C
34 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
conjure away the evils which he brings along with the summer heat, in connection with the sol leo, and the corresponding festival of the killing of the dog (kiinop- hontis), besides the barking dogs that appear in the groin of Scylla,1 are all records of the mythical dog of hell. The dog, as a domestic animal, has been confounded with the savage brute which generally represents the monster. The dog is scarcely distinguishable from the wolf in the twilight. In Du Cange we read that in the Middle Ages it was the custom to swear now by the dog now by the wolf.2 In the country round Arezzo, in Tuscany, it is believed that when a she-wolf brings forth her young ones, a dog is always found among them, which, if it were allowed to live, would exterminate all the wolves. But the she-wolf, knowing this, no sooner perceives the dog-wolf than she drowns it when she takes the wolves to drink.3 In the district of
1 Scylla laves her groin in a fountain, the waters of which the enchantress Circe has corrupted, upon which monstrous dogs appear in her body, whence Ovid —
" Scylla venit mediaque tenus descenderat alvo, Cum sua foedari latrantibus inguina monstris Aspicit, ac primo non credens corporis illas Esse sui partes, refugitque, abiitque timetque Ora proterva canum."
8 Hsec lucem accipiunt ab Joinville in Hist. S. Ludovici, dura foedera inter Imp. Joannem Vatatzem et Comanorum Principem inita recenset, eaque firmata ebibito alterius invicem sanguine, hacque ad- hibita ceremonia, quam sic enarrat : lt Et ancore firent-ils autre chose. Car ils firent passer un chien entre nos gens et eux, et d^couperent tout le chien a leurs espees, disans que ainsy fussent-ils ddcoupez s'ils failloient Fun a 1'autre." — Cfr. in Du Cange the expression " cerebrare canem."
3 In a fable of Abstemius, a shepherd's dog eats one of the sheep every day, instead of watching over the flock. The shepherd kills him, saying, that he prefers the wolf, a declared enemy, to the dog, a false friend. This uncertainty and confusion between the dog and the
THE BITCH AS SPY. 35
Florence, it is believed that the wolf, as well as the dog, when it happens to be the subject of a dream, is (as
wolf explains the double nature of the dog ; to prove which I shall refer to two unpublished Italian stories : the first, which I heard from the mouth of a peasant-woman of Fucecchio, shows the bitch in the capacity of the monster's spy ; the second was narrated a few years ago by a Piedmontese bandit to a peasant-woman who had shown hospitality to him, at Capellanuova, near Cavour in Piedmont. The first story is called The King of the Assassins, and is as follows: —
There was once a widow with three daughters- who worked as seamstresses. They sit upon a terrace ; a handsome lord passes and marries the eldest ; he takes her to his castle in the middle of a wood, after having told her that he is the chief of the assassins. He gives her a she-puppy and says, " This will be your companion ; if you treat her well, it is as if you treated me well." Taking her into the palace, he shows her all the rooms, and gives her all the keys ; of four rooms, however, which he indicates, there are two which she must not enter ; if she does so, evil will befall her. The chief of the assassins spends one day at home and then three away. During his absence she maltreats the puppy, and gives her scarcely anything to eat ; then she lets herself be overcome by curiosity, and goes to see what there is in the two rooms, followed by the puppy. She sees in« one room heads of dead people, and in the other tongues, ears, &c., hung up. This sight fills her with terror. The chief of the assassins returns and asks the bitch whether she has been well treated ; she makes signs to the contrary, and informs her master that his wife has been in the for bidden rooms. He cuts off her head, and goes to find the second sister, whom he induces to come to him by under invitation to. visit his wife ; she undergoes the same miserable fate. Then he goes to take the third sister,, and tells her who he is ; she answers, "It is better thus, for I shall no. longer be afraid of thieves." She gives the bitch soup, caresses her, and makes herself loved by her; the king of the assassins is con tented, and the puppy leads a happy life. After a month, while he is out and the puppy amusing itself in the garden, she enters the two rooms, finds her two sisters, and goes into the other rooms, where there are ointments to fasten on limbs that have been cut off, and ointments to bring the dead to life. Having resuscitated her sisters, and given them food, she hides them in two great jars, furnished with breathing holes, and asks her husband to take them as a present to her mother, warning him not to look into the jars, as she will see him.
36 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
in Terence) a prognostic of sickness or death, especially if the dog is dreamt of as running after or trying to bite
He takes them, and when he tries to look in, he hears, as he had been forewarned, not one voice, but two whispering from within them, " My love, I see you.'* Terrified at this, he gives up the two jars at once to the mother. Meanwhile his wife has killed the bitch in boiling oil ; she then brings all the dead men and women to life, amongst whom there is Carlino, the son of a king of France, who marries her. Upon the return of the king of the assassins he perceives the treachery, and vows revenge ; going to Paris, he has a golden pillar constructed in which a man can be concealed without any aperture being visible, and bribes an old woman of the palace to lay on the prince's pillow a leaf of paper which will put him and all his servants to sleep as soon as he reclines on it. Shutting himself up in the pillar, he has it carried before the palace ; the queen wishes to possess it, and insists upon having it at the foot of her bed. Night comes ; the prince puts his head upon the leaf, and he and his servants are at once thrown into a deep sleep. The assassin steps out of the pillar, threatens to put the princess to death, and goes into the kitchen to fill a copper with oil, in which to boil her. Meanwhile she calls her husband to help her, but in vain ; she rings the bell, but no one answers ; the king of the assassins returns and drags her out of bed ; she catches hold of the prince's head, and thus draws it off the paper; the prince and his servants awake, and the enchanter is burnt alive.
The second story is called The Magician of the Seven Heads, and was narrated to me by the peasant-woman in the following terms : —
An old man and woman have two children, Giacomo and Carolina. Giacomo looks after three sheep. A hunter passes and asks for them ; Giacomo gives them, and receives in reward three dogs, Throttle -iron, Run-like-the-wind, and Pass-everywhere, besides a whistle. The father refuses to keep Giacomo at home ; he goes away with his three dogs, of which the first carries bread, the second viands, and the third wine. He comes to a magician's palace and is well received. Bringing his sister, the magician falls in love with her and wishes to marry her ; but to this end the brother must be weakened by the abstraction of his dogs. His sister feigns illness and asks for flour; the miller demands a dog for the flour, and Giacomo yields it for love of his sister; in a similar manner the other two dogs are wheedled away from him. The magician tries to strangle Giacomo, but the latter blows his whistle, and the dogs appear and kill the magician and the
THE DOG AND ST VITUS. 37
one. In Horace (Ad Galatheam) it is an evil omen to meet with a pregnant bitch —
" Impios parrae praecinentis omen Ducat et prcegnans cania."
In Sicily, St Vitus is prayed to that he may keep the dogs chained —
" Santu Vitu, Santu Vitu, lo tri voti vi lu dicu : Va', chiamativi a lu cani Ca mi voli muzzicari."
And when tying the dog up, they say —
" Santu Vitu, Beddu e pulitu, Anghi di eira E di ferru filatu ; Pi lu nuomu di Maria Ligu stu cani Ch' aju avanti a mia."
sister. Giacomo goes away with the three dogs, and comes to a city which is in mourning because the king's daughter is to be devoured by the seven-headed magician. Giacomo, by means of the three dogs, kills the monster; the grateful princess puts the hem of her robe round Throttle-iron's neck and promises to marry Giacomo. The latter, who is in mourning for his sister, asks for a year and a day ; but before going he cuts the seven tongues of the magician off and takes them with him. The maiden returns to the palace. The chimney sweeper forces her to recognise him as her deliverer; the king, her father, consents to his marrying her j the princess, however, stipulates to be allowed to wait for a year and a day, which is accorded. At the expiration of the appointed time, Giacomo returns, and hears that the princess is going to be married. He sends Throttle-iron to strike the chimney-sweeper (the black man, the Saracen, the Turk, the gipsy, the monster) with his tail, in order that his collar may be remarked ; he then presents himself as the real deliverer of the princess, and demands that the magician's heads be brought ; as the tongues are wanting, the trick is discovered. The young couple are married, and the chimney-sweeper is burnt.
38 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
When the dog is tied up, they add —
" Fermati, cani Ca t' aju ligatu."1
In Italy and Eussia, when the dog howls like a wolf, that is, plays the wolf, it forebodes misfortune and death. It is also narrated,2 that after the alliance between Caesar, Lepidus, and Antony, dogs howled like wolves.
When one is bitten by a dog 3 in Sicily, a tuft of hair is cut off the dog and plunged into wine with a burning cinder ; this wine is given to be drunk by the man who has been bitten. In Aldrovandi* I read, on the other hand, that to cure the bite of a mad dog, it is useful to cover the wound with wolf's skin.
The dog is a medium of chastisement. Our Italian expressions, "Menare il cane per 1'aia" (to lead the dog about the barn-floor), and " Dare il cane a menare " (to give the dog to be led about), are probably a reminiscence of the ignominious mediaeval punishment of Germany of carrying the dog, inflicted upon a noble criminal, and which sometimes preceded his final execution.5 The
1 Cfr. the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Popolari Siciliane, edited by Gius. Pitre, ii. canto 811.
8 In Richardus Dinothus, quoted by Aldrovandi.
3 From a letter of my friend Pitre.
4 De Quadrup. Dig. Viv. ii.
5 Cfr. Du Cange, s. v. "canem ferre." The ignominy connected with this punishment has perhaps a phallic signification, the dog and the phallos appear in connection with each other in an unpublished legend maliciously narrated at Santo Stefano di Calcinaia, near Florence, and which asserts that woman was not born of a man, but of a dog. Adam was asleep ; the dog carried off one of his ribs ; Adam ran after the dog to recover it, but brought back nothing save the dog's tail, which came away in his hand. The tail of the ass, horse, or pig, which is left in the peasant's hand in other burlesque traditions, besides serving as an indication, as the most visible part, to find the lost or fallen animal again, or to return into itself, may perhaps have
DEATH BY DOGS. 39
punishment of laceration by dogs, which has actually been carried out more than once by the order of earthly tyrants, has its prototype in the well-known myth of Kerberos and the avenging dogs of hell. Thus Pirithoos, who attempts to carry off Persephone from the infernal king of the Molossians, is torn to pieces by the dog Trikerberos. Euripides, according to the popular tradi tion, was lacerated in the forest by the avenging dogs of Archelaos. It is told of Domitian, that when an astro loger on one occasion predicted his approaching death, he asked him whether he knew in what way he himself would die ; the astrologer answered that he would be devoured by dogs (death by dogs is also predicted in a story of the Pentamerone) ; Domitian, to make the oracle false, ordered him to be killed and burned ; but the wind put the flames out, and the dogs approached and devoured the corpse. Boleslaus II., king of Poland, in the legend of St Stanislaus, is torn by his own dogs while wandering in the forest, for having ordered the saint's death. The Vedic monster Qushnas, the pesti lential dog Sirius of the summer skies, and the dog Kerberos of the nocturnal hell, vomit flames ; they chastise the world, too, with pestilential flames ; and the pagan world tries all arts, praying and conjuring, to rid itself of their baleful influences. But this dog is
a meaning analogous to that of the tail of Adam's dog. — I hope the reader will pardon me these frequent repugnant allusions to indecent images ; but being obliged to go back to an epoch in which idealism was still in its cradle, while physical life was in all its plenitude of vigour, images were taken in preference from the things of a more sensible nature, and which made a deeper and more abiding impres sion. It is well known that in the production of the Vedic fire by means of the friction of two sticks, the male and the female are alluded to, so that the grandiose and splendid poetical myth of Pro metheus had its origin in the lowest of similitudes.
40 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
immortal, or rather it generates children, and returns to fill men with terror in a new, a more direct, and a more earthly form in the Christian world. It is narrated, in fact, that before the birth of St Dominic, the famous inventor of the tortures of the Holy Inquisition (a truly satanic Lucifer), his mother, being pregnant of him, dreamed that she saw a dog carrying a lighted brand about, setting the world on fire. St Dominic truly realised his mother's dream ; he was really this incendiary dog ; and, therefore, in the pictures that represent him, the dog is always close to him with its lighted brand. Christ is the Prometheus enlarged, purified, and idealised ; and St Dominic, the monstrous Vulcan, deteriorated, diminished, and fanaticised, of the Christian Olympus. The dog, sacred in pagan antiquity to the infernal deities, was consecrated to St Dominic the incendiary, and to Eocco, the saint who protects the sick of the plague. The Eoman feasts in honour of Vulcan (Volcanalia) fell in the month of August ; and the Eoman Catholic Church fetes in the month of August the two saints of the dogs of the fire and the plague, St Dominic and St Eocco.
CHAPTER VII.
THE CAT, THE WEASEL, THE MOUSE, THE MOLE, THE SNAIL, THE ICHNEUMON, THE SCORPION, THE ANT, THE « LOCUST, AND THE GRASSHOPPER.
SUMMARY.
Margaras, margaras, mrigas, mrigaris, mrigaragas. — Nakulas. — Mush. — Vamras, vamri, vapri, valmikam, formica. — The serpent and the ants. — Indras as an ant ; the serpent eaten by the ants. — Vamras drinking, assisted by the Agvinau. — The grateful ant ; the hermit- dwarfs. — Ants' milk. — Ants' legs. — The ant dies when its wings grow ; the ants and the treasure. — The ants separate the grains. — The locust and the ant ; 9arabhas as the moon. — Grasshopper and ant. — Avere il grille, aver la luna; indovinala, grillo. — Wedding between ant and grasshopper. — Locusts destroyed by fire. — Hippomiirmekes. — The Indian locust that guards honey again. — The scorpion, and its poison absorbed. — The ichneumon, enemy of the serpent. — The weasel. — Galanthis. — The cat with ears of butter. — The cat as a judge. — The lynx. — The penitent cat. — The beneficent cat. — The cat with a golden tail. — Cat and dog as friends ; the dog carries the cat ; they find the lost ring again. — The new-born son changed for a cat. — The cat that sings and tells tales. — The cat created by the moon; Diana as a cat. — The sacred cat. — The funereal and diabolical cat. — Cat and fox. — The cat hangman. — Le chat botte. — Chatte blanche ; the cat that spins and weaves. — The cat becomes a girl. — The enchanted palace of the cats. — The cats of February ; the black cat ; the cat dreamed- of. — The cat becomes a witch at seven years of age. — The cat in the sack. — The mewing of the cat. — The cats dispute for souls. — Battle of cats. — The mice that bite their tails or that gnaw the threads of the net. — The mouse in the honey. — The mouse that becomes a maiden ; the mouse and the mountain. — The mouse that becomes a tiger. — The souls of the dead pass into mice;
42 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
funereal and diabolical mice ; superstitions relating to this belief. — The mouse that releases the lion and the elephant from the trap. — Ganegas crushes the mouse ; Apollo Smyntheus. — When the cat 's away the mice can dance. — The mouse plays blind-man's-buff with the bear. — The grateful mouse. — The mouse that foresees the future. — Mouse and sparrow, first friends and then enemies. — The batrachomyomachia. — The mouse, the tooth, and the coin. — Hiranyakas ; the squirrel. — The monster mole ; the mole as a gravedigger ; the blind mole. — The snail in the popular song ; the saail and the serpent ; the snail as a funereal animal.
I UNITE in one series several mythical nocturnal animals, which, although really of very different natures, enter into only one order of myths.
They are thieving and hunting animals, and are there fore very aptly placed in the darkness of night (naktacdrin is an epithet applied in Sanskrit both to the cat and the thief), in the nocturnal forest, in connection now with Diana the huntress, or the good fairy the moon, and now with the ugly witch ; now appearing as the helpers of the hero, and now as his persecutors. '•
The etymologies of several Hindoo words may be of some interest to the reader, and may with propriety be adduced here. Mdrgdras, the cat, means the cleanser (as the animal that, in fact, cleans itself). Eeferring to the myth, we know already that one of the principal exactions of the witch is that her step-daughter should comb her hair, or else clean the corn, during the night ; and that the good fairy, the Madonna, while she too has her hair combed, scatters gems about, spins, and cleans the corn for the good maiden. The witch of night forces the maiden aurora to separate the luminous wheat of evening- frgm the dark tares of night ; the moon with its silvery gplendour disperses the shades of night. " The mdrgdras, or cleanser of the night, the white cat, is the moon. Aranyamdrfidras, or cat of the forest, is the
ETYMOLOGIES. 43
name given to the wild cat, with which the lynx, too, is identified. As a white cat, as the moon, it protects innocent animals ; as a black cat, as the dark night, it persecutes them. The cat is a skilful hunter ; moreover, it is easy to confound the word mdrgdras (the cleanser) with the word mdrgaras, the proper meaning of which is hunter, investigator, he who follows the track, the mdrgas, or else the enemy of the mrigas (as mrigaris)^; the road is the clean part of the land, as the margin is the white or clean part of a book. The hunter may be he that goes on the margin or on the track, or else he that hunts and kills the mrigas or forest animal. The moon (the huntress Diana) is also called in Sanskrit mrigardgas, or king of the forest animals ; and, as kings are wont, it sometimes defends its subjects and sometimes eats them. The cat-moon eats the grey mice of the night.
Nakulas is the name given in Sanskrit to the ichneu mon, the enemy of mice, scorpions, and snakes. The word seems to be derived from the root naf, nak = necare, whence nakulas would appear to be the destroyer (of nocturnal mice).
* The mouse, mtish, mdshas, mdshakas, is the thief, the ravisher, whence also its name rat (a rapiendo). *
The Hindoo names of the ant are vamras and vamrt (besides piptlakas). Vamrt is connected with vapd, vapram, vapri, ant-hole, and, by metathesis, valmikam (i.e., appertaining to ants), which has the same meaning. The Latin formica unites together the two forms vamrt and valmikam. The roots are vap, in the sense of to throw, and vam, to erupt or to throw out, as the ants do when they erect little mounds of earth. ^
In the Mahdbhdratam, the hole of a serpent is also called by the name of valmikam ; from this we can explain the fable of the third book of the Pandatantram,
44 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
where we have a serpent fighting against ants. He kills many of them, but their number is so interminable that he is at last forced to succumb. Thus, in the mythical Vedic heavens, it is in the shape of a vamras or ant that Indras fights victoriously against the old monster that invades the sky.1 Nay, more, in the Pancatantram, the ants sting and bite the serpent and kill it ; thus Indras (who, as we have just said, is an ant in the cloud or the night) gives to the ants the avaricious serpent, the son of Agrus, dragging it out of its hiding-place.2 Indras is therefore a variety of the Captain Formicola of the Tuscan fairy tale. Finally, the Rigvedas offers us yet another curious particular. The two Agvinau come to assist Vamras (or Indras in his form of an ant, i.e., they come to assist the ant) whilst it is drinking (vamram vipipanam). The ant throws or lifts up little hillocks of earth by biting the ground. The root vap, which means to throw, to scatter, has also the sense of to cut, and perhaps to make a hole in. The convex presupposes the concave ; and vam is related to vap (as somnus is related to hiipnos, to svapnas, and to sopor). Indras, as an ant, is the wounder, the biter of the serpent. He makes it come out of its den, or vomits it forth (eructat) ; the two etymological senses are found again in the myth. The weapons with which Indras wounds the serpent are doubtless now the solar rays, and now the thunderbolts. Indras, in the cloud, drinks the somas. The ant drinks, and the Agvinau, whilst it drinks, come to its help, for no doubt the ant when drinking is in danger of being
1 Vriddhasya 6id vardhato dyam. inakshatah stavano vamro vi gaghana samdihah ; Rigv. i. 51, 9.
2 Vamribhih putram agruvo adanam niveganad dhariva a gabhartha; Jtigv. iv. 19, 9. — Another variation is the hedgehog, which, as we have seen in Chapter V., forces the viper out of its den.
THE ANTS HELPED BY THE HERO. 45
drowned. And this brings us to the story of the grateful animals, in which the young hero finds an ant about to be drowned.
In the twenty-fourth of the Tuscan fairy tales pub lished by me, when the shepherd's son, by a good advice which he has received, determines to do good to every one he meets, he sees on the path an ant-hill, which is about to be destroyed by water ; he then makes a bank round it, and thus saves the ants j1 in their turn the ants, pay back the debt. The king of the land demands of the young man, as a condition of receiving his daughter in marriage, that he should separate and sort the different kinds of grain in a granary ; up marches Captain Formicola with his army, and accomplishes the stipulated task. In other varieties of the same story, instead of the embankment, we have the leaf that the hero puts under the ant to float it out of the water contained in the footprint of a horse, which again recalls the lotus- leaf on which the Hindoo deity navigates the ocean. This water in which the ant is drowning was afterwards changed into the proverbial ants' milk,2 which is now used to express an impossibility, but which, when referred to Indras, to the mythical ant, represents the ambrosial and pluvial moisture. In the sixth Sicilian story of Signora Gonzenbach, the boy Giuseppe, having given crumbs of bread to the hungry ants, receives from the king of the ants the present of an ant's leg, in order that he may
1 The dwarf-hermits, who transport a leaf upon a car, and are about to be drowned in the water contained in the foot-print of a cow, and who curse Indras, who passes smiling without assisting them, in the legend of the Mahdbhdratam, are a variety of these same ants. — Cfr. the chapters on the Elephant and on the Fishes, where we have Indras who fears to be submerged.
2 Fa cunto ca no le mancava lo latto de la formica ; Pentamerone, i. 8.
46 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
use it when required. When he wishes to become an ant, in order to penetrate into the giant's palace, he has only to let the ant's leg fall to the ground, with the words, " I am a Christian, and am becoming an ant/' which immediately comes to pass. In the same story Giuseppe procures sheep, in order to attract the serpent by their smell, and induce it to come out of its lurking-place. Here we evidently return to the Vedic subject of the ant Indras, who tempts the serpent to come out in order to give it to the ants. In the eighth story of the fourth book of the Pentamerone, the ant shows the third part of the way to the girl Cianna, who is going to search for the mother of time ; on the door of her dwelling Cianna will find a serpent biting its tail (the well-known symbol of the cyclical day or year, and of time, in antiquity), and she is to ask the mother of time, on the ant's part, advice as to how the ants can live a hundred years. The mother of time answers to Cianna that the ants will live a hundred years when they can dispense with flying, inasmuch as " quanno la formica vo morire, mette Tascelle" (i.e., the wings). The ant, grateful for this good advice, shows Cianna and her brothers the place underground where the thieves have deposited their treasure. We also remember the story of the ants who bring grains of barley into the mouth of the royal child Midas, to announce his future wealth. In Herodotus (iii.), and in the twelfth book of the stories of Tzetza,1
1 Billion Istorikon, xii 404. — In the Epist. Presb. Johannis, we find als.o: — " In quadam provincia nostra sunt formicae in magnitudine catulorum, habentes vii. pedes et alas iv. Istae formicae ab occasu solis ad ortum morantur sub terra et fodiunt purissimum aurum tota nocte — quaerunt victum suum tota die. In nocte autem veniunt homines de cunctis civitatibus ad colligendum ipsum aurum et imponunt elephantibus. Quando formicae sunt supra terrain, nullus ibi audet accedere propter crudelitatem et ferocitatem ipsarum." — Cfr. infra.
THE ANTS AND TREASURE— THE LOCUST. 47
I find the curious information that there are in India ants as large as foxes, that keep golden treasures in their holes ; the grains of wheat are this gold. The morning and evening heavens are sometimes compared to granaries of gold ; the ants separate the grain during the night, carrying it from west to east, and purifying it of all that is unclean, or cleansing the sky of the nocturnal shadows. The work assigned every night by the witch to the maiden aurora of evening is done in one night by the black ants of the sky of night. Sometimes the girl meets on the way the good fairy (the moon), who comes to her help ; the maiden, assisted by the ants, meets the madonna- moon. But the moon is called also the leaper or hopper, a nocturnal locust ; the darkness, the cloud and the dark- coloured earth (in lunar eclipses) are at the same time ant-hills and black ants, that pass over or before the moon ; and, therefore, in the race between the ant and the locust, it is said in the fable that the ant won the race. The locust, or garabhas, or palabhas, is presented to us as an improvident animal in two sentences of the first and fourth books of the Pancatantram. The green grasshopper or locust leaps ; the fair-haired moon leaps. (I have already noticed in the chapter on the ass how the words liaris and harit mean both green and fair, or yellow ; in the second canto of the sixth book of the Rdmdyanam, the monkey Qarabhas is said to inhabit the mountain Candras or Mount Moon ; Qarabhas, there fore, appears as the moon.) Locust and grasshopper jump (cfr. the Chap, on the hare) ; hence the ant is not only in connection with the locust, but also with the grasshopper : the Hindoo expression garabhas means both grasshopper (in Sanskrit, also named varshakart) and locust. In one of the popular songs of the Monferrato collected by Signor Ferraro, we have the wedding of the grasshopper
48 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
and the ant ; the magpie, the mouse, the ortolan, the crow, and the goldfinch bring to the wedding a little cut straw, a cushion, bread, cheese, and wine. In the popular Tuscan songs published by Giuseppe Tigri, I find the word griUi (grasshoppers) used in the sense of lovers. In Italian, grillo also means caprice, and espe cially amorous caprice ; and medico grillo is applied to a foolish doctor.1 And yet the grasshopper ought to be the diviner par excellence. In Italy, when we propose a riddle, we are accustomed to end it with the words " indovinala, grillo" (guess it, grasshopper) ; this expres sion perhaps refers to the supposed fool of the popular story, who almost always ends by showing himself wise. The sun enclosed in the cloud and in the gloom of night is generally the fool, but he is at the same time the fool who, in the kingdom of the dead, sees, hears, and learns everything ; and the moon, too, personified as a grass hopper or locust, is the supposed fool who, on the con trary, knows, sees, understands, and teaches everything ; from the moon are taken prognostics ; hence riddles may be proposed to the capricious moon, or the celestial cricket. In Italian, the expressions "aver la luna" (to have the moon), and " avere il grillo " (to have the grasshopper), are equivalent, and mean to suffer from a nervous attack, or the spleen. I also find the wedding between ant and grasshopper in a very popular, but as yet unpublished Tuscan song. The ant asks the grass hopper whether he desires her for his wife, and recom mends him, if he does not, to look after his own affairs, that is, to leave her alone. And then the narrative
1 Of this expression a historical origin is given, referring it to a Bolognese doctor of the twelfth century, named Grillo. — Cfr. Fanfani, Vocalolario dell 'uso Toscano> s. v. " grillo."
THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT. 49
begins. The grasshopper goes into a field of linen ; the ant begs for a thread to make herself aprons and shirts for the wedding ; then the grasshopper says he wishes to marry her. The grasshopper goes into a field of vetches ; the ant asks for ten vetches, to cook four in a stew, and to put six upon the spit for the wedding- dinner. After the wedding, the grasshopper follows the trade of a greengrocer, then that of an innkeeper ; but his affairs succeed so badly, that he first puts his own trousers in pawn, and then becomes bankrupt, and beats his wife the ant ; at last he dies in misery. Then the ant faints away, throws herself upon the bed, and beats her breast for sorrow with her heel (as ants do when they die).1 The nuptials of the black ant, the gloom of night,
1 Here are the words of the song of this curious wedding, which I heard sung at Santo Stefano di Calcinaia, near Florence : —
" Grillo, mio grillo, Se tu vuoi moglie, dillo ; Se tu n' la vuoi, Abbada a' fatti tuoi.
Tinfiilulilalera Linfillulilalk.
" Povero grillo, ;n un campo di lino, La formicuccia gne ne chiese un filo. D'un filo solo, cosa ne vuoi tu fare ? Grembi e camicie ; mi vuo' maritare, Disse lo grillo : — Ti pigliero io. La formicuccia : — Son contenta anch' io. Tinfillul., &c.
* Povero grillo, 'n un campo di ceci ; La formicuccia gne ne chiese dieci Di dieci soli, cosa ne vuoi tu fare ? Quattro di stufa, e sei li vuo' girare. Tinfillul., <fec.
" Povero grillo facea 1'ortolano L'andava a spasso col ravanello in mano ;
VOL. II. D
50 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
with the moon, locust, or grasshopper, take place in the evening ; the grasshopper dies, the moon pales, and the black ant, the night, also disappears. In the Pancatan- tram, the locusts are destroyed by fire. In the so-called letter of Alexander the Great to Olympias,1 I find the ants scared away by means of fire, whilst they are en deavouring to keep horses and heroes at a distance. These extraordinary ants recall to us the hippomiirmekes of the Greeks, or ants of horses. The ants, the insects of the forest of night, molest the hero and solar horse that traverse it ; the black ants of night are dispersed by the solar fire of the morning : this we can understand all the better when Tzetza, quoted before, speaking of the Indian ants, calls them as large as foxes ; when Pliny, in the eleventh book of his History, says they are of the colour of a cat, and the size of Egyptian wolves ; and when Solinus tells us that they have the shape of a large dog, with lion's- feet, with which they dig gold up. JElianos calls them guardians of gold (ton chrlis6n
Povero grille, andava a Pontedera, Con le vilancie pesava la miseria. Tinfillul , <fcc.
" Povero grillo, 1'andiede a Monteboni, Dalla miseria Timpegno i calzoni ; Povero grillo facea 1'oste a Colle, L'ando fallito e bastonb la moglie. Tinfillul., &c.
" La foruiicuccia andb alia f esta a il. Porto, Ebbe la nova che il suo grillo era morto La formicuccia, quando seppe la nova La cased in terra, stette svenuta uu 'ora. La formicuecia si butto su il letto, Con le calcagna si batteva il petto.
Tinfillul.," &c. 1 Cfr. Zaclier, I'seudo-Callisthtnes, Halle, 18G7.
MONSTER ANTS— THE SCORPION. 51
phulattontes). Evidently the ants have already taken here a monstrous and demoniacal aspect. Several other ancient authors have written concerning these Indian ants, including Herodotus, Strabo, Philostratos, and Lucian. I shall only mention here, as bearing on our subject, that, according to Lucian, it is by night that they dig up the gold, and that, according to Pliny, the ants dig up gold in winter (night and winter are often equivalent in mythology). "The Indians, moreover, steal it during summer, whilst the ants stay hidden in their subterranean lurking-places on account of the vapours ; however, tempted forth by the smell, they run out, and often cut the Indians in pieces, although they flee away on very swift camels, they are so rapid, ferocious, and desirous of gold/'1 This monster ant, with lion's claws, which Pliny also describes as horned, approaches very closely to the mythical black scorpion of the clouds and the night, the Vedic Vrigcikas, which, now a very little bird (iyattika §akuntika), now a very small ichneumon (kushumbhakas, properly the little golden one, perhaps the young morning sun), destroys with its tooth (a£mana, properly with the biter), absorbing or taking away the poison, as jars take off the water, ue^ the sun's rays dissipate the vapours of the sun enclosed in the cloud or the gloom.2 Here the ichneumon (viverra ichneumon) appears as the benefactor of the scorpion, rather than as its enemy ; it takes its poison away, that is, it frees the sun from the sign of Scorpio, from the vapours which envelope it. The ichneumon is in Sanskrit called nakulas. In the twelfth story of the first book of the Pancatantram, we see it, on the contrary, as the
1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xi. 31.
2 Iyattika sakuntika sak& gaghasa te visham; Jjtigv. i. 191, 11.
52 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
declared enemy of the black serpent, which it kills in its den. But inasmuch as the weasel-ichneumon bites venomous animals, it is itself obliged to deliver itself from the venom it has in consequence imbibed. There fore, in the Atharvavedas, mention is already made of the salutary herb with which the nakulas (which is also the name of one of the two sons of the Acvinau, in the Mahdbhdratam) cures himself of the bite of venomous animals, that is, of serpents, scorpions, and monstrous mice, his enemies. The weasel (mustela), which differs but little from the ichneumon, is almost the same in the myths. Xte jweasel^ too, as we learn from the ninth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, fights a.gaJngt_ serpents, after having eaten the famous herb called rue, the smell of which is said to be insupportable to serpents, jbut, as its Latin name teHs 'tis, ~it~is no less_skilful jis a hunter of mice.1 The reader is doubtless familiar with the ^Esopian fable of the weasel which petitions the man for its liberty for the service which it has rendered him by freeing his house from rats ; and with that of Phsedrus, of the old weasel which catches mice in the flour-trough by rolling itself in the flour, so that the mice approach, under the impression that it is a solid mass. Plautus's parasite reckons upon a good dinner for himself from having met with a weasel carrying away the whole of a mouse except its feet (auspicio hodie optumo exivi foras ; mustela murem abstulit prseter pedes) ; but the expected dinner never appearing, he declares that the presage is false, and pronounces the weasel a prophet only of evil, inasmuch as in one and the same day it changes its place ten times. According to the ninth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the maid Galanthis was
1 iv. 1.
THE WEASEL. S3
changed by the goddess Lucina (the moon) into a weasel, for having told a lie, announcing the birth of Herakles before it had taken place : —
" Strenuitas antiqua manet, nee terga colorem Amisere suum, forma est diversa priori ; Quae, quia mendaci parientem juverat ore, Ore parit."
The popular superstition which makes the weasel bring forth its young by its mouth, probably had its origin in this fable. From the mouth intemperate words are brought forth. Simonides, in Stobeus, quoted already by Aldrovandi,1 compares wicked women to weasels. The moon that changes the chattering Galanthis into a weasel appears ,to be the same as the white moon itself trans formed into a white weasel, the moon that explores the nocturnal heaven and discovers all its secrets. V Ants, mice, moles (like serpents), love, on the contrary, to stay hidden, and to keep their secrets concealed. / The ichneumon, the weasel, and the cat generally come out of their hiding-places, and chase away whoever is con cealed, carrying away from the hiding-places whatever they can. They are both themselves thieves, and hunt other thieves. '
It is easy now to pass from the Latin mustela to the Sanskrit cat mtishakdrdtis, or mfishikdntakrit.
In tkePancatantram^he cat Butter-ears (dadhikarnas), or he of the white ears, who feigns to repent of his crimes, is called upon to act as judge in a dispute pending between the sparrow, kapirigalas and the hare Quick- walker (sighragas), who had taken up his quarters in the dwelling of the absent sparrow. Butter-ears solves the question by feigning deafness, and requesting the two
1 De Quad. Dig. Viv. ii.
54 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
disputants to come nearer, to confide their arguments in his ears ; the hare and the sparrow rely on his good faith, and approach, when the cat clutches and devours them both. In the Hitopadegas,1 we have, instead of the sparrow, the vulture caradgavas, which meets with its death in consequence of having shown hospitality to the cat, " of which it knew neither the disposition nor the strength " (agnatakulagilasya). In the Tuti-Name,2 we have, instead of the cat, the lynx,3 that wishes to possess itself of the lion's house, which is guarded by the monkey ; it terrifies the lion, and drives it to flight. In the Anvari- Suhaili* instead of the cat or lynx, we find represented the leopard. In the Mahdbhdratam,5 we find again the fable of the penitent cat. The cat, by the austerity which it practises on the banks of the Ganges, inspires con fidence in the birds, which gather round it to do it honour. After some time, the mice imitate the example of the birds, and put themselves under the cat's protection, that it may defend them. The cat makes its meals upon them every day, by inducing one or two to accompany it
1 i. 49. * ii. 22.
3 The forgetfulness of the lynx, as well as of the cat, is proverbial. St Jerome, in the Ep. ad Chrisog. — " Verum tu quod natura lynces insitum habent, ne post tergum respicientes meminerint priorum, et mens perdat quod oculi videre desierint, ita nostrae es necessitudinis penitus oblitus." Thus of the lynx it is said by ^Elianos that it covers its urine with sand (like the cat), so that men may not find it, for in seven days the precious stone lyncurion is formed of this urine. The cat that sees by night, the lynx that sees through opaque bodies, the fable of Lynkeus, wno, according to Pliny, saw in one day the first and the last moon in the sign of Aries, and the lynx that, accord ing to Apollonios, saw through the earth what was going on in hell, recall to us the moon, the wise and all-seeing fairy of the sky, and the infernal moon.
4 Quoted by Benfey in the Einleitung to the Pancatantram. 6 v. 5421-5448.
THE PENITENT CAT. 55
to the river, and fattens exceedingly fast, whilst the mice dimmish every day. Then a wise mouse determines to follow the cat one day when it goes to the river ; the cat eats both the mouse that accompanies it and the spy. Upon this the mice discover the trick, and evacuate altogether the post of danger. The penitent cat is already proverbial in the Code ofManus.1 In the Reineke Fuchs of Goethe,2 the cat goes to steal in the priest's house, by the wicked advice of the fox, when every one falls upon him —
" Sprang er wiithend entschlossen Zwischen die Schenkel des Pfaffen und biss und kratzte gefahrlich."
The Roman du Renard? when the priest is mutilated by the cat, makes his wife exclaim —
" C'en est fait de nos amours ! Je suis veuve sans recours !"
In the same Roman, when the cat Tibert, the ambassador of King Lion, arrives at Mantpertuis, where the fox reigns, we read —
" Tibert lui pre"senta la patte ;
II fait le saint, il fait la chatte ! Mais k bon chat, bon rat 1 Renard aussi le flatte ! II s'entend a dorer ses paroles de miel ! Si Tun est saint, 1'autre est hermite; Si Tun est chatte, 1'autre est mite."
1 " Let no man, apprised of this law, present even water to a priest who acts like a cat;" iv. 192, version of Jones and Graves' Chamney Haughton, edited by Percival, Madras, 1863. — In a Russian story quoted by Afanassieff in his observations to the first volume of his stories, the cat Eustachio feigns itself penitent or monk in order to eat the mouse when it passes. It being observed that the cat is too fat for a penitent, it answers that it eats from the duty of preserving its health.
3 iii. 147, Stuttgart, Gotta, 1857.
8 Translation by Ch. Potvin, Paris and Brussels, 1861.
56 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
In the romance of the fox, the fox endeavours to destroy the cat by inducing it to catch the mice that are in the priest's house. In an unpublished Tuscan story,1 we have, on the contrary, the fox that invites the mouse to the shop of a butcher who has recently killed a pig. The mouse promises to gnaw the wood till the hole is large enough for the fox to pass through it ; the fox eats till it is able to pass, and then goes away ; the mouse eats and fattens so much that it can no longer pass ; the cat then comes and eats it.
In the thirty-fourth story of the second book of Afanas- sieff, the cat occurs again, as in India, in connection with the sparrow, but not to eat it ; on the contrary, they are friends, and twice deliver the young hero from the witch. This is a form of the Agvinau. In the sixty-seventh story of the sixth book, the two A§vinau return in the shape respectively of a dog and a cat (now enemies one of the other, as the two mythical brothers often show themselves, and now friends for life and death). A young man buys for a hundred roubles a dog with hanging ears, and for another hundred roubles a cat with a golden tail,2 both of which he nourishes well. With a hundred roubles more, he acquires the ring of a dead princess, from which thirty boys and a hundred and seventy heroes, who perform every kind of marvel, can come forth at the possessor's will. By means of these wonders, the young
1 From the peasant-woman Uliva Selvi, who told it to me at Antignano, near Leghorn.
2 Cfr. Afanassief, v. 32, where a cat is bought by a virtuous work man for the price of a kapeika (a small coin), the only price that he had consented to take as a reward for his work; the same cat is bought by the king for three vessels. With another kapeika, earned by other work, the workman delivers the king's daughter from the devil, and subsequently marries her.
DOG AND CAT. 57
man is enabled to wed the king's daughter ; but as the latter wishes to ruin him, she makes him drunk, steals his ring, and departs into a far distant kingdom. The Tzar then shuts the youth up in prison ; the dog and the cat go to recover the lost ring. When they pass the river, the dog swims and carries the cat upon his back (the blind and the lame, St Christopher and Christ). They come to the place where the princess lives, and enter into her dwelling. They then engage themselves in the service of the cook and the housemaid ; the cat, following its natural instinct, gives chase to a mouse, upon which the mouse begs for its life, promising to bring the ring to the cat. The princess sleeps with the ring in her mouth ; the mouse puts its tail into her mouth ; she spits, the ring comes out, and is taken by the dog and the cat, who deliver the young man, and force the fugitive Tzar's daughter to return to her first abode.
In the following story of Afanassieff, when the youngest of the three sisters bears three sons to Ivan Tzarevic, her envious elder sisters make the prince believe that she has brought forth a cat, a dog, and a vulgar child. The three real sons are carried off; the princess is blinded and enclosed with her supposed child in a cask, which is thrown into the sea. The cask, however, comes to shore and opens ;x the supposititious son immediately bathes the princess's eyes with hot water, and she re covers her sight, after which he finds her three luminous sons again, who light up whatever is near them with their splendour, and is again united to her husband. In a Eussian variation of the same story, the three sons are changed by the witch into three doves ; the princess,
1 Cfr. analogous subjects in Chapter I., e.g., Emilius the lazy and stupid youth, and the blind woman who recovers her sight.
53 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
with her supposed son, is saved from the sea, and takes refuge upon an island, where, perched upon a gold pillar, a wise cat sings ballads and tells stories. The three doves are transformed into handsome youths, whose legs are of silver up to the knee, their chests of gold, their foreheads like the moon, and their sides formed of stars, and recover their father and mother.
Thus far we have seen the cat with white ears, who hunts the hare (or moon), the morning twilight, and the penitent cat who eats mice at the river's side, and which is mythically the same. We have observed that, of the two Agvinau, one represents especially the sun, and the other the moon ; the thieving cat, who is the friend of some thieves and the enemy of others (whence the Hungarian and Tuscan superstition, to the effect that for a good cat to be a skilful thief, it must itself have been stolen ; then it is sure to catch mice well), is now the morning twilight, now the moon who gives chase to the mice of the night. According to the Hellenic cosmogony, the sun and the moon created the animals ; the sun creating the lion, and the moon the cat. In the fifth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the gods fled from the giants, Diana took the form of a cat.1 In Sicily the cat is sacred to St Martha, and is respected in order not to irritate her : he who kills a cat will be unhappy for seven years. In the ancient German belief, the goddess
1 Hue quoque terrigenam venisse Typhoea narrat, Et se mentitis superos celasse figuris ; Duxque gregis, dixit, fit Jupiter ; unde recurvis Nunc quoque formatus Lybis est cum cornibus Aramon Delius in corvo, proles Semeleia capro Fele soror Phcebi, nivea Saturnia vacca, Pisce Venus latuit, Cyllenius ibidis alis.
—v. 325-332.
CAT AND FOX. 59
Freya was drawn by two cats. At present, the cat and the mouse are sacred to the funereal St Gertrude. In the sixty-second story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, we have the chattering cat, which the hero Baldak must kill in the territory of the hostile Sultan (that is, in the win try night). In the eighth story of the fourth book of the Pentamerone, we also find a she-cat that plays the part of the ogre's spy ; in the tenth story of the Pentamerone, and in the first of the Novelline di Santo Stefano di Calcinaia, on the contrary, the cat reveals the witch's treachery to the prince. In the twenty-third story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the cat Katofiei appears as the husband of the fox, who passes him off as a burgo master. United together, they terrify the wolf and the bear,1 the cat climbing up a tree. In the ^Esopian fables, on the contrary, the cat and the fox dispute as to which is the superior animal ; the cat makes the dog catch the fox, whilst it itself climbs up a tree. In the third story of the second book of Afanassieff, the cat associates with the cock in the search for the bark of trees ; it delivers its comrade three times from the fox that had run off with it ; the third time, the cat not only liberates the cock, but also eats the four young foxes. In the thirtieth story of the fourth book, the cat Catonaievic, the son of Cato (this name is derived from the equivoque between the words coins and caton ; in French, besides chat, we have chaton, chatomque, &c.), delivers the cock twice from the fox, but the third time the fox eats the poor bird. In a Eussian variety of this story, the cat kills the five little foxes and then the fox, after having sung as follows : —
1 In the eighteenth story of the third book of Afanassieff it is in company with the lamb (in the nineteenth, with the he-goat) that the cat terrifies the wolf and the bear.
60 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
" The cat walks upon its feet In red boots ;
It wears a sword by its side, And a stick by its thigh ; It wishes to kill the fox, And to make its soul perish."1
In another variety, the cat and the lamb go to deliver the cock from the fox. The latter has seven daughters. The cat and the lamb allure them by songs to come out, and they kill them one after the other, wounding them in their foreheads ; they then kill the fox itself, and so deliver the cock. In the romance of the fox, the cat is the hangman, and ties the fox to the gibbet.
In the third story of the first book, the witch's cat, grateful to the good girl who has given her some ham to eat, teaches her how to escape, and gives her the usual towel which, when thrown on the ground, makes a river appear, and the usual comb which, in like manner, causes an impenetrable forest to arise before the witch who runs after the girl to devour her.
We have already seen the Vedic moon who sews the wedding-robe with a thread that does not break. In the Eussian story we have already remarked how the little puppet, to oblige the good maiden, makes a shirt destined for the Tzar, which is so fine that no one else can make the like. In the celebrated tale of the witty Madame d'Aulnoy, La Chatte Blanche, we have the white cat
1 il Idiot kot na nagah. V krasnih sapagah ; Nessiot sabliu na plessie" ; A paloc"ku pri bedrid, Hodiet lissu parublt, leia dushu zagubit."
Puss-in-boots (le chat botte"), helps the third brother in the tale of Perrault.
THE WHITE CAT. 61
Blanchette, veiled in black, who inhabits the enchanted palace, rides upon a monkey, speaks, and gives to the young prince, who rides upon a wooden horse (the forest of night), inside an acorn, the most beautiful little dog that ever existed in the world, that he may take it to the king his father — a little dog, "plus beau que la canicule" (evidently the sun itself, which comes out of the golden egg or acorn), which can pass through a ring (the disc of the sun), and then a marvellously painted cloth, which is so fine that it can pass through the eye of a small needle, and is enclosed in a grain of millet, although of the length of " quatre cents aunes " (the eye of the needle, the acorn, the grain of millet, and the ring are equivalent forms to represent the solar disc). This wonderful cat finally herself becomes a beautiful maiden, " Parut comme le soleil qui a ete quelque temps enveloppe* dans une nue ; ses cheveux blonds £taient e/pars sur ses epaules ; ils tpmbaient par grosses boucles jusqu'a ses pieds. Sa tete etait ceinte de fleurs, sa robe, d'une 16gere gaze blanche, doublee de taffetas couleur de rose." The white cat of night, the white moon, resigns her place in the morning to the rosy aurora ; the two phenomena that succeed each other appear to be metamorphoses of the same being. The white cat, with its attendant cats, before becoming a beautiful maiden, invites the prince to assist in a battle which he engages in with the mice. To this we can compare the ^Esopian fable of the young man who, in love with a cat, beseeches Venus to transform her into a woman. Venus gratifies him ; the youth marries her; but when the bride is in bed (i.e., in the night, when the evening aurora again gives up its place to the moon, or when it meets with the grey mice of night), a mouse passes by, and the woman, who still re tains her feline nature, runs after it.
62 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
When the sun enters into the night, it finds in the starry heavens an enchanted palace, where either there is not a living soul to be found, or where only the cat-moon moves about. Hence, in my opinion, the origin of the expression that we make use of in Italy to indicate an empty house — " Non vi era neanche un gatto" (there was not even a cat there). The cat is considered the familiar genie of the house. The enchanted palace is always situated either at the summit of a mountain, or in a gloomy forest (like the moon). This palace is the dwelling either of a good fairy, or a good magician, or of a witch, or a serpent-demon, or at least cats. The visit to the house of the cats is the subject of a story which I have heard told, with few variations, in Piedmont and in Tuscany.1
We have hitherto seen only the luminous or white cat, the cat-moon and twilight, under a generally benignant aspect. But when the night is without a moon, we have only the black cat in the dense gloom. This black cat then assumes a demoniacal character.
In the Monferrato it is believed that all the cats that wander about the roofs in the month of February are not
1 In Tuscany the previously mentioned story-teller, Uliva Selvi, at Antignano, near Leghorn, narrated it to me as follows : — A mother has a number of children and no money j a fairy tells her to go to the summit of the mountain, where she will find many enchanted cats in a beautiful palace, who give alms. The woman goes, and a kitten lets her in ; she sweeps the rooms, lights the fire, washes the dishes, draws water, makes the beds, and bakes bread for the cats; at Last she comes before the king of che cats, who is seated with a crown on his head, and asks for alms. The great cat rings the golden bell with a golden chain, and calls the cats. He learns that the woman has treated them well, and orders them to fill her apron with gold coins (rusponi). The wicked sister of the poor woman also goes to visit the cats, but she maltreats them, and returns home all scratched, and more dead than alive from pain and terror.
THE BLACK CAT. 63
really cats, but witches, which one must shoot. For this reason, black cats are kept away from the cradles of children. The same superstition exists in Germany.1 In Tuscany, it is believed that when a man desires death, the devil passes before his bed in the form of any animal except the lamb, but especially in that of a he-goat, a cock, a hen, or a cat. In the German superstition,2 the black cat that places itself upon the bed of a sick man announces his approaching death ; if it is seen upon a grave, it signifies that the departed is in the devil's power. If one dreams of a black cat at Christmas, it is an omen of some alarming illness during the following year. Aldrovandi, speaking of Stefano Cardano, narrates that, being old and seriously ill, or rather dying, a cat appeared unexpectedly before him, emitted a loud cry, and disappeared. The same Aldrovandi tells us of a cat which scratched the breast of a woman, who, recognising in it a supernatural being, died after the lapse of a few days. In Hungary it is believed that the cat generally becomes a witch from the age of seven years to that of twelve, and that witches ride upon tom-cats, especially black ones ; it is, moreover, believed that to deliver the cat from the witch, it is necessary to make upon its skin an incision in the form of a cross. The cat in the bag of proverbs has probably a diabolical allusion. In the tenth story of the Pentamerone, when the King of Eoccaforte, thinking that he is marrying a beautiful maiden, finds that, on the contrary, he has espoused a hideous veiled old hag (the night), he says, " Questo e peo nee vole a chi accatta la gatta dinto lo sacco." In
1 Cfr. Rochholtz, Deutscher Glaube und Braucke, i. 161.
2 Ib. — I find the same belief referred to in the twenty-first Estho- nian story of Kreutzwald.
64 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
Sicily, when the Rosary is recited for navigators, the mewing of the cat presages a tedious voyage.1 When the witches in Macbeth prepare their evil enchantments against the king, the first witch commences with the words —
" Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed."
In a German belief noticed by Professor Rochholtz, two cats that fight against each other are to a sick man an omen of approaching death. These two cats are pro bably another form of the children's game in Piedmont and Tuscany, called the game of souls, in which the devil and the angel come to dispute for the soul. Of the two cats, one is probably benignant and the other malignant ; they represent perhaps night and twilight. An Irish legend tells us of a combat between cats, in which all the combatants perished, leaving only their tails upon the battlefield. (A similar tradition also exists in Piedmont, but is there, if I am not mistaken, referred to wolves.) Two cats that fight for a mouse, and allow it to escape, are also mentioned in Hindoo tradition.2
In the 105th hymn of the first book of the Rigvedas, and in the thirty-third of the tenth book, a poet says to Indras, " The thought rends me, thy praiser, as mice tear
1 It is almost universal]y believed that when the cat cleans itself behind its ears with its wet paw, it presages rain. And yet the Latin proverb says —
11 Catus amat pisces, sed aquas intrare recusat ;"
and the Hungarian proverb, that the cat does not die in water. It is for this reason, perhaps, that it is said, in a watery autumn the cat is worth little — (" The cat of autumn and the woman of spring are not worth much ;" Hung, prov.)
2 Folier, Mytholoyie des Indes, ii. 571.
THE MOUSE BECOMES A MAIDEN. 65
their tails by gnawing at them. ';1 But according to another interpretation, instead of "tails," we should read " threads ; " in this case, the mice that rend the threads would refer to the fable of the mouse that delivers from the net now the elephant, and now the lion (of which fable I shall endeavour to prove the Vedic antiquity in the next chapter).
The twelfth story of the third book of the Pan6atan- tram is of great mythological interest. From the beak of a hawk (in another Hindoo legend, from two cats that are disputing for it) a mouse takes refuge in the hands of a penitent, whilst he is bathing in the river. The peni tent transforms the mouse into a beautiful maiden, and wishes to marry her to the sun ; the maiden declines — he is too hot. The penitent next wishes to marry her to the cloud which .defeats the sun ; the maiden declares it is too dark and cold. He then proposes to give her to the wind which defeats the cloud (in the white Yagur- vedas, the mouse is sacred to the god Eudras, the wind that howls and lightens in the cloud) ; the maiden re fuses — it is too changeful. The penitent now proposes that she should wed the mountain, against which the wind cannot prevail, but the girl says it is too hard ; and
1 Musho na gigna vy adanti madhyah stotaram te gatakrato ; Rigv. i. 105, 8. — The commentator now interprets $i$nd by sutrdni, threads, and now calls the reader's attention to the legend of the mice that lick their tails after plunging them into a vase full of butter, or some other savoury substance ; but here vy adanti can only mean, they lacerate by biting, as in the preceding strophe we have the thought that tears by biting, as the wolf tears the thirsty wild beast (ma vyanti adhyo na trishnagam mrigani). — The mouse in the jar of provisions also occurs in the fable of the mouse and the two penitents in the Panca- tantram, in the Hellenic fable of the son of Minos and of Pasiphae, who, pursuing a mouse, falls into a jar of honey, in which he is suf focated, until recalled to life by a salutary herb.
VOL. II. E
66 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
finally the penitent asks if she would be willing to part with her affections to the mouse, who alone can make a hole in the mountain ; the maiden is satisfied with this last proposal, and is again transformed into a female mouse, in order to be able to wed the male mouse. In this beautiful myth (which is a variation of the other one which we have already mentioned of the cat-maiden that, though transfigured, still retains its instinct as a huntress of mice), the whole revolution of the twenty-four hours of the day is described. The mouse of night ap pears first ; the twilight tries to make it its prey ; the night becomes the aurora ; the sun presents itself for her husband ; the sun is covered by the cloud, and the cloud is scattered by the wind ; meanwhile the evening aurora, the girl, appears upon the mountain ; the mouse of night again appears, and with her the maiden is confounded. The HUopadepas contains an interesting variety of the same myth. The mouse falls from the vulture's beak, and is received by a wise man, who changes it into a cat, then, to save it from the dog, into a dog, and finally into a tiger. When the mouse is become a tiger, it thinks of killing the wise man, who, reading its thoughts, trans forms it again into a mouse. Here we find described the same circle of daily celestial phenomena. The succession of these phenomena sometimes causes transformations in the myths.
The well-known proverb of the mountain that gives birth to the mouse, refers to the myth contained in the story of the Paiicatantram.. We already know that the solar hero enters in the evening with the solar horse into the mountain and becomes stone, and that all the heavens assume the colour of this mountain. From the moun tain come forth the mice of night, the shadows of night, to which the cat-moon and the cat-twilight give chase ; the
THE SOULS OF THE DEAD AS MICE. 67
thieving propensities of the mice display themselves in the night. In German superstition the souls of the dead assume the forms of mice, and when the head of a house dies, it is said that even the mice of the house abandon it.1 In general, every apparition of mice is considered a funereal presage ; it is on this account that the funereal St Gertrude was represented surrounded by mice. The first witch in Macbeth, when she wishes to persecute the merchant who is sailing towards Aleppo, and shipwreck him, that she may avenge herself upon his wife, who had refused to give her some chestnuts, threatens to become like a rat without a tail.. In the Historia Sarmatice, quoted by Aldrovandi, the uncles of King Popelus II. , whom, with his wife for accomplice, he murders in secret, and throws into the lake, become mice, and gnaw the king and queen to death. The same death is said to have been the doom of Migcislaus, the son of the Duke Conrad of Poland, for having wrongfully appropriated the property of widows and orphans ; and of Otto, Archbishop of Mainz, for having burned the granary during a famine. Mice are said to have pre saged at Eome the first civil war, by gnawing the gold in the temple ; and it was, moreover, alleged that a
1 Den Mausen pfeifen, heisst den Seelen ein Zeiehen geben, um von ihnen abgeholt zu werden ; ebenso wie der Rattenfanger zu Hameln die Lockpfeife blast, auf deren Ton alle Mause und Kinder der Stadt mit ihm in den Berg hineinziehen, der sich hinter ihnen zuschliesst. Mause sind Seelen. Die Seele des auf der Jagd entschla- fenen Konigs Guntram kommt schlangleinartig aus seineni Munde hervor, um so in einen nachsten Berg und wieder zuriickzulaufen. Der goethe'sche Faust weigert sich dem Tanz mit dem hiibschen Hexen- madchen am Blocksberg fortzusetzen : —
u Den mitten im Gesange sprang Ein rothes Mauschen ihr aus dem Munde."
— Rochholtz, Deut. Glaube u. Branch, i. 156, 157.
68 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
female mouse had given birth in a trap to five male mice, of which she had devoured two. Other prodigies, in which mice were implicated, are mentioned as having taken place at Rome, even in the times of Cato, who was accustomed to make them the butt of his indignant scorn. To a person who told him, for instance, how the mice had gnawed the boots, he answered that this was no miracle ; it would have been a miracle if the boots (caligce) had eaten the mice.
The mouse in the fable is sometimes in connection with the elephant and the lion, whom it sometimes insults and despises (as in the Tuti-Name),1 and some times comes to help and deliver from their fetters. The meaning of the myth is evident : the elephant and the lion represent here the sun in the darkness ; in the even ing the mouse of night leaps upon the two heroic animals, which are then old or infirm ; in the morning the sun is delivered out of the fetters of the night, and it is sup posed that it was the mouse which gnawed the ropes and set at liberty now the elephant, as in the Pancatantram, now the lion, as in the ^Esopian fable.
The Hindoo god Ganecas, the god of poets, eloquence, and wisdom, is represented with an elephant's head, and his foot crushing a mouse. Thus, among the Greeks, Apollo Smintheus, so called because he had shot the mice that stole the yearly provisions from Krinos, the priest of Apollo himself, was represented with a mouse under him. As the Christian Virgin crushes the serpent of night under her foot, so does the pagan sun-god crush under his feet the mouse of night.
When the cat's away, the mice may play ; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.
1 i. 268.
BLIND-MAN'S-BUFF. 69
In the fifteenth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, the witch step-mother desires her old husband to lead away his daughter to spin in the forest1 in a deserted hut. The girl finds a little mouse there, and gives it something to eat. At night the bear comes, and wishes to play with the girl at the game of blind-man's-buff (this very popular game has evidently a mythical origin and meaning ; every evening in the sky the sun amuses itself by playing blind-man's-buff ; it blinds itself, and runs blind into the night, where it must find again its predestined bride or lost wife, the aurora). The little mouse approaches the maiden, and whispers in her ear, " Maiden, be not afraid ; say to him, ' Let us play ; ' then put out the fire and hide under the stove ; I will run and make the little bells ring." (Mice seem to have an especial predilection for the sound of bells. It is well- known how, in the Hellenic fable, the council of mice resolve, to deliver themselves from the cat, to put a bell round its neck ; no one, however, undertakes to perform the arduous enterprise.) The bear thinks he is running after the maiden, and runs, on the contrary, after the mouse, which he cannot catch. The bear tires himself out, and congratulating the maiden, says- to her, " Thou art my mistress, maiden, in playing at blind-man's-buff ; to-morrow morning I will send you a herd of horses and a chariot of goods." (The morning aurora comes out of the forest, delivers herself from the clutches of the bear, from the witch of the night, and appears drawn by horses upon a chariot full of treasure. The myth is a lucid one.)
1 The mouse that passes over the yarn occurs again in German tradition: — " Gertrudenbuchlein ab: Zwei Mauschen nagen an einer flachsumwundenen Spindel; eine Spinnerinn sitzt am St Gertrudentag, noch in der Zeit der Zwolften, wo die Geister in Gestalt von Mausen erscheinen, darf gesponnen werden ;" Rochholtz, ut supra, i. 158.
70 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
In other numerous legends we have the grateful mouse that helps the hero or heroine. In the thirteenth Calmuc story, the mouse, the monkey, and the bear, grateful for having been delivered, from the rogues that tormented them, by the son of the Brahman, come to his help by gnawing and breaking open the chest in which the young man had been enclosed by order of the king ; afterwards, with the assistance of the fishes, they help him to recover a lost talisman.
In the fifty-eighth story of the sixth book of Afa- nassieff,1 the mouse, the war-horse, and the fish silurus, out of gratitude assist the honest workman who has fallen into a marsh, and cleanse him ; upon seeing which the princess, that has never laughed, laughs, and thereafter marries the workman. (The young morning sun comes out of the marsh or swamp of night ; the aurora, who was at first a dark, wicked, and ugly girl, marries the young sun whom the mouse has delivered out of the mud, as it delivered the lion out of the toils.)
In the fifty-seventh story of the sixth book of Afa- nassieff, it is the mouse that warns Ivan Tzarevic to flee from the serpent- witch (the black night) his sister, who is sharpening her teeth to eat him.
In the third story of the first book of Afanassieff, the mice help the good maiden, who had given them some thing to eat, to do what the witch, her step-mother, had commanded.
In the twenty-third story of the fifth book of Afa- nassieff, the mouse and the sparrow appear at first as friends and associates. But one day the sparrow, having found a poppy-seed, thinks it so small that he eats it up
1 Cfr. Pentamerone, iii. 5. — In the story, iv. 1, the grateful mice assist Mined Aniello to find the lost ring by gnawing the finger on which the magician wears it.
THE BATRACHOMYOMACHIA. 71
without offering a share to his partner. The mouse hears of it, and is indignant ; he breaks the alliance, and declares war against the sparrow. The latter assembles all the birds of the air, and the mouse all the animals of the earth, and a sanguinary battle commences. In a Eussian variety of the same story, instead of the sparrow, it is the mouse that breaks the compact. They collect together the provisions against winter, but when, towards the end of the season, they are all but finished, the mouse expels the sparrow, and the sparrow goes to com plain to the king of the birds. The king of the birds visits the king of the beasts, and sets forth the complaint of the sparrow ; the king of the beasts then calls the mouse to account, who defends himself with such humility and cunning, that he ends by convincing his monarch that the sparrow is in the wrong. Then the two kings declare war against each other, and engage in a formidable struggle, attended with terrible bloodshed on both sides, and which ends in the king of the birds being wounded. (The nocturnal or wintry mouse expels the solar bird of evening or of autumn.)
In the Batrachomyomacliia, attributed to Homer, the royal mouse Psicharpax (properly ravisher of crumbs), the third son of Troxartes (eat-bread), boasts to Phiisig- nathos (he who inflates his cheeks), the lord of the frogs, that he does not fear the man, the point of whose finger (akron dakttilon) he has bitten while he was asleep ; whilst, on the other hand, he has for his enemies the falcon (which we have already, in the Hindoo story, seen let the mouse fall from its beak) and the cat. The frog, who wishes to entertain the mouse, invites it to get upon his back, to be carried to his royal mansion; at first the mouse is amused with its ride, but when the frog makes it feel the icy water, the poor mouse's heart begins
72 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
to fail ; finally, at the sight of a serpent, the frog forgets its rider and runs away, throwing the mouse head-over- heels into the water to be the prey of the serpent. Then, before expiring, remembering that the gods have an avenging eye, it threatens the frogs with the vengeance of the army of the mice. War is prepared. The mice make themselves good boots with the shells of beans ; they cover their cuirasses of bulrushes with the skin of a flayed cat ; their shield is the centre knob of the lamps (Ilichn6n to mesomphalon, i.e., if I am not mistaken, a fragment of a little lamp of terra-cotta, and, properly speaking, the lower and central part) ; for a lance they have a needle, and for a helmet a nutshell. The gods are present at the battle as neutrals, — Pallas having declared her unwillingness to help the mice, because they stole the oil from the lamps burning in her honour, and because they had gnawed her peplum, and being equally indifferent to the frogs, because they had once wakened her when returning from war, and when, being tired and weary, she wished to rest. The battle is fiercely fought, and is about to have an unfavourable result for the frogs, when Zeus takes pity upon them ; he lightens and hurls his thunderbolts. At last, seeing that the mice do not desist, the gods send a host of crabs, who, biting the tails, the hands, and the feet of the mice, force them to flee. This is undoubtedly the representation of a mythical battle. The frogs, as we shall see, are the clouds ; the night meets the cloud ; the mouse fights with the frog. Zeus, the thunder-god, to put an end to the struggle, thunders and lightens ; at last the retrograde crab makes its appearance ; the combatants, frogs and mice, natu rally disappear.
The mouse is never conceived otherwise than in connection with the nocturnal darkness, and hence, by
THE SQUIRREL— THE MOLE. 73
extending the myth, in connection also with the darkness of winter, from which light and riches subsequently come forth. In Sicily it is believed that when a child's tooth is taken out, if it be hidden in a hole, the mouse will take it away and bring a coin for the child in com pensation. The mouse is dark-coloured, but its teeth and fore-parts are white and luminous. The mouse Hiranyakas, or the golden one, in the Pahkatan- tram, is the black or grey mouse of night. It is the red squirrel that, in an ^Esopian fable, answers to the query of the fox why it sharpens its teeth when it has nothing to eat, that it does so to be always pre pared against its enemies. In the Edda, the squirrel runs upon the tree Yggdrasil, and sets the eagle and Nidhogg at discord.
The mole and the snail are of the same nature as the grey mouse. The Hindoo word dkhus, or the mole (already spoken of as a demon killed by Indras, in the Itigvedas1), properly signifies the excavator.
In the Reineke Fuchs the mole appears as a grave- digger, as the animal that heaves the earth up, and makes ditches underground ; it is, in fact, the most skil ful of gravediggers, and its black colour and supposed blindness are in perfect accordance with the funereal character assigned to it by mythology. In an apologue of Laurentius, the ass complains to the mole of having no horns, and the monkey of having a short tail ; the mole answers them —
" Quid potestis hanc meam Miseram intuentes ccecitatem, haec conquer! ? "
1 Alayyasya paragur nandga tarn & pavasya (pavasva according to Aufrecht's text, and according to the commentator — cfr. Bollensen, Zur Herstellung des Veda, in the Orient und Occident of Benfey, ii. 484) deva soma; akhum c"id eva deva soma; Rigv. ix. 67, 30.
74 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
According to the Hellenic myth, Phineus became a mole because he had, following the advice of his second wife, Idaia, allowed his two sons by his first wife, Cleo patra, to be blinded, and also because he had revealed the secret thoughts of Zeus.1
In Du Cange I find that even in the Middle Ages it was the custom on Christmas Eve for children to meet with poles, having straw wrapped round the ends, which they set fire to, and to go round the gardens, near the trees, shouting —
" Taupes et mulcts Sortez de nos clos Sinon je vous brulerai la barbe et les os."
We find a similar invocation in the seventh story of the second book of the Pentamerone. The beautiful girl goes to find maruzze, and threatens the snail to make her mother cut off its horns —
" lesce, iesce, corna Ca mammata te scorn a, Te scorna 'ncoppa 1'astreco Che fa lo figlio mascolo."
In Piedmont, to induce the snail to put its horns out, children are accustomed to sing to it —
" Liimassa, liimassora, Tira fora i to corn, Dass no,2 i vad dal barbe" E it tje fass taie" ! "
1 Cfr. the Antigone of Sophocles, v. 973, et seq.
2 This doss no of the Piedmontese means " if not," and is evidently of Germanic origin. The Piedmontese dialect has also taken from the Germanic languages the final negative. — In Germany, children sing to the snaila —
" Schneckhus, peckhus, Stak din ver horner rut, Sust schmit ick di in'n graven Da fre'ten di de raven." — Cfr. Kuhn und Schwartz, N. d. S. M. u. G., p. 453.
THE SNAIL. 75
Sicilian children terrify the snail by informing it that their mother is coming to burn its horns with a candle —
" Nesci li corna ch 'a mamma veni E t' adduma lu cannileri."
In Tuscany they threaten the white snail (la marinella), telling it to thrust out its little horns to save itself from kicks and blows —
" Chi6c'ciola marinella, Tira f uori le tue cornella, E se tu non le tirerai Calci e pugni tu buscherai."
In Tuscany it is believed, moreover, that in the month of April the snail makes love with the serpents, and is therefore venomous ; hence they sing—
" Chi vuol presto morire Mangi la chiocciola d' aprile."1
The snail of popular superstition is demoniacal ; hence it is also invoked by children in Germany by the name of the funereal St Gertrude—
" Kuckuck, kuckuck Gerderut Stak dine ver Horns herut." 2
* In Rabelais, i. 38, when Gargantua has eaten five pilgrims in his salad, another still remains hidden under a leaf of lettuce. His father says to him — "Je crois que c'est la une corne de limasson, ne le mangez point. Pourquoy? dist Gargantua, ilz sont bons tout se moys."
2 Simrock, Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie, 2te Aufl., p. 516.
CHAPTER VIII.
HARE, RABBIT, ERMINE, AND BEAVER.
S U M M A K Y.
The hare is the moon ; $a$as and $a$in. — The hares at the lake of the moon; the king of the hares in. the moon. — The hare and the elephant. — The hare and the lion. — The hare devours the western monster ; the hare devours his mother the mare. — Mortuo leoni lepores insultant. — The hare and the eagle. — The hare that guards the cavern of the beasts. — The hare comes out on the 15th of the month and terrifies the wolf. — The hare transformed into the moon by Indras. — Ermine and beaver. — Hare's-foot. — Hare and moon fruitful. — Hare and moon that guide the hero. — Somnus leporinus. — The hare and the bear. — The hare and the nuptial procession. — The hare that contains a duck. — The girl riding upon the hare.
THE mythical hare is -undoubtedly the moon. In San skrit, the f af as means properly the leaping one, as well as the hare, the rabbit, and the spots on the moon (the saltans), which suggest the figure of a hare.f' Hence the names of ga$in,or furnished with hares, and of qapadharas, gofdbhrit, or he who carries the hare given to the moon. In the first story of the third book of the Pancatantram, the hares dwell upon the shore of the Lake (Jandrasaras, or lake of the moon ; and their king, Vigayadattas (the funereal god, the god of death), has for his palace the lunar disc. When the hare speaks to the king of the
THE HARES AND THE ELEPHANTS. 77
elephants who crushed the hares (in the same way as we have seen the cow do in Chapter I.), he speaks in the moon's name. The hare makes the elephant believe that the moon is in anger against the elephants because they crush the hares under their feet ; then the elephant demands to see the moon, and the hare conducts him to the lake of the moon, where he shows him the moon in the water. Wishing to approach the moon and ask for giveness, the elephant thrusts his proboscis into the water; the water is agitated, and the reflection of the moon is disturbed, and multiplied a thousand-fold. The hare makes the elephant believe that the moon is still more angry because he has disturbed the water ; then the king of the elephants begs for pardon, and goes far away with his subjects ; from that day the hares live tran quilly on the shores of the moon-lake, and are no longer crushed under the ponderous feet of their huge com panions. The moon rules the night (and the winter), the sun rules the day (and the summer). The moon is cold, the sun is hot. The solar elephant, lion, or bull, goes down at even to drink at the river, at the lake of the nocturnal moon ; the hare warns the elephant that if he does not retire, if he continues to crush the hares on the shores of the lake, the moon will take back her cold beams, and then the elephants will die of thirst and excessive heat. The other story of the Pan6atantram is a variety of the myth, which we mentioned in the chapter of the dog, of the hare who conducts to his ruin the hungry lion who wishes to eat her, by making him throw himself into a fountain or well. This myth, which is analogous to that of the mouse as the enemy of now the elephant, now the lion, and now the hawk, is already very clearly indicated in the Vedic hymns. In the twenty-eighth hymn of the tenth book of the liigvedas,
78 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
in which the fox comes to visit the western lion (the sick lion1), in which we have the lion who falls into the trap2 (and whom the mouse insults in the evening, and delivers in • the morning by gnawing at the ropes which bind it : in the Hellenic proverb it is the hare that draws the lion into the golden net — " elkei lagos lionta chrlisind broch6," in the same way as in the Paiicatan- tram, it allures him into the well), and in which the hare devours the western monster3 (a variety of the Hellenic tradition of the hare brought forth by a maro, and which immediately thereafter devours its mother) — in this hymn we find the germ of several fables of animals of the same cycle. The inferior animal vanquishes the superior one, and upon this peculiarity the whole hymn turns ; for this reason, too, in the same hymn, the dog or jackal (canis aureus) assails the wild boar,4 and the calf defeats the bull.5 The hare occurs again as the proverbial enemy of the lion (whence the Latin proverb, " Mortuo leoni lepores insultant," or saltant ; the moon jumps up when the sun dies), in the last book of the Rdmdyanam, where the great king of the monkeys, Balm, regards the king of the monsters, Ravanas, as a lion does a hare, or as the bird Garudasa serpent.6
In jEsop we find the hare that laughs at its enemy, the dying eagle, because the hunter killed it with an arrow furnished with eagle's feathers. In another ^Esopian fable, the rabbit avenges itself upon the eagle which has eaten its young ones,
1 Lopacah sinham pratyandam atsah ; Rigv. x, 28, 4.
2 Avaruddhah paripadarii na sinhah; x. 28, 10.
3 Qagah kshuram pratyandam gagara ; x. 28, 9.
4 Kroshta varaharii nir atakta kakshat; x. 28, 4.
5 Vatso vrishabham 911911 vfmali • x. 28, 9.
0 Sinhali gagamivalakahya garuclo va bkugafigamam ; Rdmdy. xxiiL
THE HARE AND THE WOLF— THE BEAVER. 79
by rooting up and throwing down the tree upon which the eagle has its nest, so that the eaglets are killed.
In the seventeenth Mongol story, _the hare is the guardian of the cavern of the wild beasts (or the moon, the mrigara^as and guardian of the forest of night) ; in the same story an old woman (the old fairy or old Madonna) is substituted for the hare. In the twenty- first Mongol story> the hare sets out on a journey with the lamb, on the fifteenth day of the month, when the moon comes forth, and defends the lamb from the wolf of night, terrifying the latter by telling it that it has received a writing from the god Indras, in which the hare is ordered to bring to Indras a thousand wolves' skins.
In a Buddhist legend, the hare is transfigured by Indras into the moon, because it had freely given him its flesh to eat, when, disguised as a pilgrim, he came up begging for bread. The hare, having nothing else to offer him, threw itself upon the fire, that Indras might appease his hunger.1
v In the Avesta we find the ermine as the king of the animals, and the beaver as the sacred and inviolable animal, in whose skin the pure Ardvigura is invested (white anol silvery as the white dawn, rosy and golden as the aurora ; unless Ardvigura, whose diadem is made of a hundred stars, should also be interpreted as denoting the moon, which is now silvery, and now fair and golden). Moreover, for the beaver to represent the moon (the chaste Diana) is in perfect accordance with the reputa tion it has as a eunuch (castor a castrando) in popular
1 Cfr. Memoires sur les Contrees Occident ales, traduits du Sanscrit par Hiouen Thsang, et du Chinois par St Julien, i. 375.
8o ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
superstition ; whence the words of Cicero concerning beavers,1 and the verses of Juvenal — •
" Imitatus castora qui se Eunuchum ipse facit cupiens evadere damnum Testiculorum, adeo raedicatum intelliget unguen."2
In the twenty-first Esthonian story, a silly husband is called by the name of Hare's-foot. In Aldrovandi, on the other hand, Philostratos narrates the case of a woman who had miscarried seven times in the act of child-birth, but who the eighth time brought forth a child, when her husband unexpectedly drew a hare out of his bosom. Although the moon is herself the timid and chaste goddess (or eunuch), she is, as pluvial, thefcecundatrix, and famous as presiding over and protecting child-birth ; this is why, when the hare-moon, or Lucina, assisted at parturition, it was sure to issue happily. The mythical hare and the moon are constantly identified. It is on this account that in Pausanias, the moon-goddess instructs the exiles who are searching for a propitious place to found a city, to build it in a myrtle-grove into which they should see a hare flee for refuge. The moon is the watcher of the sky, that is to say, she sleeps with her eyes open ,; so also does the hare, whence the somnus leporinus became a proverb. In the ninth Esthonian story, the thunder-god is compared to the hare that sleeps with its eyes open ; Indras, who transforms the hare into the moon, has already been mentioned ; Indras becomes a eunuch in the form of sahasrakshas, or of the thousand-eyed god
1 Redimunt ea parte corporis, propter quam maxime expetuntur; Pro jEmilio Scauro. It is said that when the beaver is pursued by hunters, it tears off its testicles, as the most precious part for which beavers are hunted, popular medical belief attributing marvellous virtues to beavers' testicles.
8 xii. 35.
THE HARE AND MARRIAGES. 81
(the starry sky in the night, or the sun in this starry sky) ; the thousand eyes become one, the milloculus becomes monoculus, when the moon shines in the evening sky ; hence we say now the hundred eyes of Argos, and now simply the eye of Argos — the eye of God.
In a Slavonic tale,1 the hare laughs at the bear's cubs, and spits upon them; the bear runs after the hare, and in the hunt is decoyed into an intricate jungle, where it is caught. As the lion is unknown in Eussia, the bear is substituted for it ; the Eussian hare allures the bear into the trap, as the Hindoo and Greek one causes the lion to fall into it. This hare which does harm to the solar hero or animal of evening is the same as that which, in the fiftieth story of the fifth book of Afanas- sieff, and in Eussian popular tradition, meeting the nuptial car, bodes evil to the wedding, and is of evil omen to the bride and bridegroom. The hare-moon, the chaste protec tress of marriages and births, the benefactress of mankind, must not meet the car ; if she opposes the wedding (per haps at evening and in the autumn), or if the hare is crushed or overtaken by the car (as the proverb says), it is a bad presage, not only for the wedded couple, but for all mankind ; solar as well as lunar eclipses were always considered sinister omens in popular super stition. In the Eussian popular tales we frequently find mention of the hare under a tree, or on a rock in the midst of the sea, where there is a duck, which contains an egg ; the yoke of this egg (the solar disc) is a precious stone ; when it falls into the hands of the young hero, the monster dies, and he is able to espouse the young princess.2 The girl of seven years of age,
1 Cited by Afanassieff in the observations on the first volume of the Russian stories. a Cfr. Afanassieff, i. 14, ii. 24, v. 42.
YOL, n. F
82 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
who, to solve in action the riddle proposed by the Tzar, who offers to marry her, rides upon a hare, is a variety of this myth. By the help of the moon, the sun and evening aurora arrive at the region of the morning, find each other, and are married ; the moon is the mediatrix of the mythical nuptials ; the hare which represents it must therefore not only not oppose them, but help them materially ; at evening the moon separates the sun from the aurora ; at morning she unites them again.
CHAPTEK IX.
/ /
THE ANTELOPE, THE STAG, THE DEER, AND THE GAZELLE.
SUMMARY.
Luminous stag and black stag. — The Marutas drawn by antelopes, and dressed in antelopes' skins. — The stag, the gazelle, and the antelope as forms assumed or created by the demon to ruin several heroes whilst they hunt. — Maridas. — Indras kills the mrigas. — The solar hero or heroine transformed into a stag, a gazelle, or an antelope. — Aktaion. — Artemis and the stag. — The stags of the Yggdrasill. — The stag Eikthyrner. — The hind as a nurse. — The hind and the old woman on the 1st of January. — The hind and the snow ; the white hind.
' THE stag represents the luminous forms that appear in the cloudy or the nocturnal forest ; these, therefore, are now lightning and thunderbolts, now the cloud itself from which the lightning and thunderbolts are discharged, now the moon in the gloom of night. The mythical stag is nearly always either entirely luminous or else spotted ; when it is black it is of a diabolical nature, and repre sents the whole sky of night. Sometimes the luminous stag is a form assumed by the demon of the forest to compass the ruin of the hero. '
V The Rigvedas represents to us the Marutas, or winds that lighten and thunder in the clouds, as drawn by antelopes. The Marutas "are born shining of them selves, with antelopes, with lances, amid thunder-peals
84 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
and flashes of lightning." 1 "They have yoked, with a red yoke, the antelopes.2 'The young battalion of the Marutas goes of itself, and has an antelope for its horse."3 The horses of the Marutas, which we already know to be antelopes, are called winged,4 and are said to have golden fore-feet.5 The antelopes of the Marutas are splendid.6 Nor are the Marutas only carried by antelopes ; they also wear upon their shoulders antelopes' skins.7
XBut the antelope, the gazelle, and the stag generally, instead of helping the hero, involve him rather in per plexity and peril. < This mythical subject is amplified in numerous Hindoo legends.
In the first scene of Kalidasas' (Jakuntald, a black- spotted (krishnas&ras) gazelle misleads King Dushyantas.
In the Mahdbhdratam,8 King Parikshit pursues a gazelle and wounds it (as the god Qivas one day wounded the gazelle of the sacrifice) ; he then follows its track, but the gazelle flees at sight of him, inasmuch as it has taken the path of heaven in its primitive (i.e., celestial) form. The king loses the track of his prey, and in trying to find it again, brings death upon his head.
In the same Mahdbhdratam* Kins' Pandus dies at the
1 Ye prishatibhir rishtibhih sakam va^ibhir ari^ibhih — a^ayanta svabhanavah ; jRigv. i. 37, 2.
2 Upo ratheshu prishatir ayugdhvam prashtir vabati rohitah ; i. 39, 6.
3 Sa hi svasrit prishadagvo yuva ganah : i. 87, 4.
4 A vidyunmadbhir marutah svarkai rathebhir yatha rishtimadbhir agvaparnaih ; i. 88, 1.
5 Agvair hiranyapanibhih ; viii. 7, 27.
6 Cubhe sammiglah prishatir ayukshata ; iii. 26, 4.
7 Anseshu etah ; Rigv. i. 166, 10. — Concerning the uso of similar skins for dress in India, cfr. the long and instructive note of Professor Max Muller, Rigveda-Sanhita Translated and Explained, i. 221-223.
8 i. 1665. 9 i. 3811, et seq. ; i. 4585, et seq.
THE INDIAN MYTHICAL STAG. 85
moment when lie is uniting himself with his wife Madri, because he had one day in the chase transfixed a male gazelle at the instant when it was about to have fruit of its union with a female gazelle.
In the Vishnu P.,1 King Bharatas, who has abandoned his throne to give himself up entirely to penitence, loses the fruit of his ascetic life, by becoming passionately enamoured of a fawn.
In the Rdmdyanam? Maricas, who is possessed by a demon, becomes, by order of Kavanas, the king of the monsters, a golden stag spotted with silver, having four golden horns adorned with pearls, and a tongue as red as the sun, and tempts Kamas to pursue him in order to procure his silver -spotted skin, for which Sita has expressed a desire, that she might lie down upon it and rest herself. In this way the stag (here an equivalent of the hare) succeeds in separating Kamas from Sita. It then emits a lamentable cry, imitating the voice of Kamas, so as to induce Lakshmanas, his brother, to come to his assistance, and leave Sita alone, that Kavanas may then be able to carry her off with im punity. Lakshmanas leaves her unwillingly, because, perceiving that the stag shines like the constellation of the head of the stag (or gazelle, Mriga§iras), he suspects it to be an apparition of Maricas, who, as a stag, has already caused the ruin of many other princes who have hunted him. The moon, in Sanskrit, besides the name of Qacadharas, or who carries the hare, has also that of Mrigadharas, or who carries the gazelle (or stag). The solar hero loses himself in the forest of night while pursuing the gazelle-moon. A demoniacal gazeUe seems to appear even in the Iligvedas, where Indras fights and
1 ii
13, translated by Wilson. 2 m 40, 48, 49.
86 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
kills a monster called Mrigas. In Germanic tradition there are numerous legends in which the hero who hunts the stag meets with his death or is dragged into hell.1 I As the moon is a stag or gazelle, and comes after the sun, so it was also sometimes imagined that the solar hero or heroine was transformed into a stag or hind. 7
In the Tuti-Name,2 a king goes to the chase, kills an antelope, doffs the human form, and disguises himself as an antelope. This mythical disguise can be understood in two ways. The evening sun reflects its rays in the ocean of night, the sun-stag sees its horns reflected in the fountain or lake of night, and admires them. At this fountain sits a beautiful and bewitching siren, the moon ; this fountain is the dwelling of the moon ; she allures the hero-stag that admires itself in the fountain, and ruins it, or else the stag attracts the hero to the fountain, where it causes him to meet with his death.3 The stag of the fable, after admiring itself in the foun tain, is torn to pieces by the dogs who overtake it in the forest because its horns become entangled in the branches ; the solar rays are enveloped in the branches of the noc turnal forest. Aktaion, who, for having seen Artemis (the moon) naked in the bath, is changed into a stag and torn by dogs, is a variety of the same fable. In Stesichoros, quoted by Pausanias, Artemis puts a stag's skin round Aktaion and incites the dogs to devour him in order that he may not be able to wed the moon. Sun and moon are brother and sister; the brother, wishing to
1 Cfr. Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 354.
2 ii. 258, Rosen's version.
3 Oft fiihrt der Hirsch nur zu einer schonen Frau am Brunnen ; sie 1st aber der Unterwelt verwandt und die Verbindung mit ihr an die Bedingung gekniipft, dass die ungleiche Natur des Verbundenen nicht an den Tag gezogen werde.
ARTEMIS AND THE STAG. 87
seduce his sister, meets with his death. A Lithuanian song describes the moon Menas (the Hindoo Manu-s) as the unfaithful husband of the sun (who is a female), being enamoured of Aushrine (the Vedic Usra, the morning aurora). The god Perkuns, to avenge the sun, kills the moon. In a Servian song, the moon reproaches his mistress or wife, the morning aurora, on account of her absence. The aurora answers that she travels upon the heights of Belgrade, that is, of the white or the luminous city, in the sky, upon the lofty mountains.
The king in the Tuti-Name who assumes the guise of an antelope, appears to be a variety of the solar hero at the moment of the approach of night, or of the ass that invests itself in the lion's skin. But inasmuch as the Indian moon is Mrigara^as, or king of the wild animals, no less than the lion, inasmuch as the moon succeeds the sun, one mrigas another, one lion another, or one stag another, when the solar hero or heroine enters into the night, he or she appears in the form of a luminous stag or hind, no longer as the sun, but as the moon, which, although luminous, penetrates into hell, and is in relation with demons and itself demoniacal.
Artemis (the moon) is represented as a hunting goddess in the act of wounding, with her left hand, an antelope between the horns. To this goddess is also attributed the merit of having overtaken the stags without the help of dogs, perhaps because, sometimes, she is herself a dog, sur prising the solar stag of evening. The four stags of Artemis connect themselves in my mind with the four stags that stay round the tree Yggdrasill in the Edda, and which come out of the river Haeffing. The stag Eikthyrner which, eating the leaves of the tree Lerad, causes all its waters to flow out, seems, on the other hand, to refer to
88 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
the sun as it merges and loses its rays in the cloud (the solar stag is also referred to in the Edda).
Artemis, who substitutes a hind for Iphigeneia, who was to have been sacrificed, seems to point to the moon- hind as taking the place of the evening aurora. We also recognise the moon in the hind which, according to ^Elianos and Diodoros, nourished Telephos, son of Herakles (Herakles in his fourth labour overtakes the stag with golden horns), who had been exposed in the forest by the order of his grandfather ; as well as in that which, according to Justinus, fed with its milk in the forest the nephew of the king of the Tartessians, and afterwards, according to the " Lives of the Saints," the blessed ^Egidius, the hermit who lived in the forest. There are numerous mediaeval legends which reproduce this circumstance of the young hero abandoned in the forest and nourished now by a goat, now by a hind, the same which afterwards serves as a guide to the royal father in recovering the prince his son, or to the prince- husband in recovering the abandoned princess his bride. It was probably by some such reminiscence of the mythical nourishing hind that, as I read in Du Cange,1 silver images of stags (cervi argentei) were placed in ancient Christian baptistries.
Among the customs of the primitive Christians con demned by St Augustine, St Maximus of Turin, and other sacred writers, was that of disguising one's self on the 1st of January as a hind or an old woman. The old woman and the hind here evidently represent the witch or ugly woman of winter ; and inasmuch as the winter is, like the night, under the moon's influence,
1 Du Cange adds : " Quoad baptismam, quomodo cervus ad fontes aquarum, summo desiderium perveniendum esse monstraretur."
THE DEMONIACAL HIND. 89
the disguise of a hind was another way of representing the moon. When the moon or the sun shines, the hind is luminous and generally propitious, the wild goat is beneficent (the wild goat, the deer, and the stag are the same in the myths ; the same word, mrigas, serves in India to express the constellation of the gazelle and that of the Capricorn or wild goat), and hunts the wolves away from the sleeping hero in the forest.1 When the sky is dark, the hind, from being luminous, has become black, and, as such, is the most sinister of omens ; some times, in the midst of the night or of the winter, the beautiful luminous hind, or moon, or sun, disappears, and the black monster of night or of winter remains alone. In the ninth story of the Pentamerone, the Huorco (the rakshas or monster) transforms himself into a beautiful hind to allure the young Canneloro, who pursues it in the hope of securing it. But it decoys him into the midst of the forest (of winter), where it causes so much snow to fall, "che pareva che lo cielo cadesse" (the white hind into which the witch trans forms the beautiful maiden, in the story of Madame d'Aulnoy, would seem to have the same meaning) ; then the hind becomes a monster again in order to devour the hero. The period in which the moon is hidden or on the wane, in which the night is dark, was considered ill-omend by the ancient Hindoos, who held, on the other hand, that the time of full moon, or at least of the crescent moon, was propitious. Our country- people have preserved several superstitions relative to a similar belief. In a Eutenian legend, published by Novosielski, the evening star (Lithuanian, vakerinne ; Slavonic, vecernitza, the evening aurora) prays its friend
1 Cfr. Porchat, Contes Merveilleux, xiii.
90 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
Lunus (the moon is masculine in Slavonic as in Sanskrit) to wait a little before rising, that they may rise together, and adds, " We shall illumine together sky and earth : the animals will be glad in the fields, and the traveller will bless us on his way/'
CHAPTEE X.
THE ELEPHANT.
SUMMARY.
The myth of the elephant is entirely Indian. — The Marutas as elephants ; Indras as an elephant. — The elephant ridden by Indras and Agnis. — The four elephants that support the world. — Airavanas and Airavatas. — The elephant becomes diabolical. — Nagas and nagas ; Qringrh. — The monkeys fight against the elephants. — The elephant in the marsh. — The elephant and the tortoise ; war be tween them. — The eagle, the elephant, and the tortoise. — The bird, the fly, and the frog lure the elephant to his death. — Hermit dwarfs. — Indras and his elephant fall together.
THE whole mythical history of the elephant is confined to India. The strength of his proboscis and tusks, his extraordinary size, the ease with which he carries heavy burdens, his great fecundity in the season of loves, all con tributed to his mythical importance, and to his fame as a great ravager of the celestial gloomy or cloudy forest, as an Atlas, a supporter of worlds, and the steed of the pluvial god.
The elephant has a place even in the Vedic heavens.
The Marutas, drawn by antelopes, are compared to wild elephants that level forests ; 1 the horns of the ante lopes, the tusks of the wild boar, the trunk and tusks of
1 Mrig& iva hastinah khadath& van& yad &runishu tavishir ayugdh- vam ; Rigv. i. 64, 7.
92 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
the elephant, are of equivalent significance, and are seen in the solar rays, in lightnings and thunderbolts. The pluvial and thundering god Indras is compared to a wild elephant that expends his strength1 — to a wild elephant that, in the season of loves, is, on all hands, in a constant state of feverish agitation.2 The god Agnis is invoked to come forth like a formidable king upon an elephant.3 ,/-
The elephant generally represents the sun as it shuts itself up in the cloud or the darkness, or comes out of it, shooting forth rays of light or flashes of lightning (which were also supposed to be caused by the friction on the axle of the wheel of the sun's chariot). The sun, in the four seasons, visits the four quarters of the earth, east and west, south and north ; hence, perhaps, the Hindoo concep tion of four elephants that support the four corners of the earth.4 Indras, the pluvial god, rides upon an enormous elephant, Airavatas or Airavanas, the cloud or darkness itself, with its luminous eruptions ; airavatam and airavatt are also appellations of the lightning. The elephant Aira vanas or Airavatas is one of the first of the progeny of the heavens, begotten of the agitation of the celestial ocean.
It plays a prominent part in the battles of Indras against the monsters ; hence Bavanas, the monster king of Lanka, still bears the scars of the wounds given him by the elephant Airavatas, in the war between the gods and the demons.5 although this same Eavanas boasts of having one day defeated Indras, who rode upon the elephant Airavanas.6
But the mythical elephant did not always preserve the character of an animal beloved of the gods ; after
1 Mrigo na hasti tavishim ushanah"; Rigv. iv. 16, 14.
2 Dana mrigo na varanah purutra caratharii dadhe; Rigv. viii 33, 8.
3 Yahi ragevamavan ibliena ; Rigv. iv. 4, 1.
4 Ramdy. i. 42. 5 iii. 36. c ill 47.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE WATERS. 93
other animals were admitted into special favour, it too assumed, in time, a monstrous aspect. The sun hides itself in the cloud, in the cloudy or nocturnal moun tain, in the ocean of night, in the autumn or the snowy winter. Hence we have the white elephant (Dhavalas), the malignant killer of wise men (rishayas, the solar rays) ; the wind, father of Hanumant, in the form of a monkey, lacerates him with his claws, and tears out his tusks ; the elephant falls like a mountain1 (the mountain of snow, or white cloud, dissolve themselves ; this white elephant and the white mountain, or Dhavalagiris, are the same; the equivoque easily arose between n£gas, elephant, and nagas, mountain and tree ; the word cringin, properly horned, means tree, mountain, and elephant; the wind breaks through and disperses the cloud, and pushes forward the avalanches of snow). Thus it is said that the monkey Sannadanas was one day victorious over the elephant Airavatas.2 (The northern path of the moon is called &iravatapath£.)
We have already seen the elephant that crushes the hares under his feet on the shores of the moon-lake, and disturbs with his trunk the waters of this lake. In the Rdmdyanam? Bharatas considers it as of a sinister omen his having dreamed of a great elephant fallen into marshy ground. The sun plunges into the ocean of night, and of the autumnal rains.
The elephant near or in the waters is mythically equiva lent to the lunar and solar tortoise that dwells on the shores of the lake and sea, or at the bottom of the sea. In the Hindoo cosmogony, it is now the elephant and now the tortoise that supports the weight of the world. For this reason there is rivalry between these two mythical animals.
1 JKdmdy. v. 3. 2 vi. 3. a iL 71.
94 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
Therefore the eagle, or king of birds, or the bird Garudas, the solar bird, is represented as a mortal enemy now of the serpent, now of the elephant (the word ndgas means equally serpent and elephant; Airavatas is also the name of a monstrous serpent), and now of the tortoise. In the Rdmdyanam,1 the bird Garudas carries into the air an elephant and a tortoise (the relative occidental fables are evidently of Hindoo origin), in order to eat them. The same legend is developed in the Mahdbhdra- tam,2 where two brothers dispute with each other about the division of their goods, each curses the other, and they become, the one a colossal elephant, and the other a colossal tortoise, and, as such, continue to fight fiercely against each other in a lake, until the gigantic bird Garudas (the new sun), takes them both and carries them to the summit of a mountain.
In the fifteenth story of the first book of the Panca- tantram, we find birds represented as enemies of the elephant, on account of the ravages it commits, where the bird, the fly, and the frog work the ruin of the elephant ; the fly enters into one of the elephant's ears ; the bird pecks at its eyes, and blinds it ; the frog croaks on the banks of a deep pool ; the elephant, impelled by thirst, comes to the pool and is drowned.
The Vedic elephant has a divine nature, being con nected with the pluvial Indras ; but when Indras fell, to give place to Brahman, Vishnus, and Qivas, his elephant was also fated to become the prey of the bird of Vishnus, of the bird Garudas (or the sun). In the fable of the Pancatantram quoted above, the elephant brings upon its head the vengeance of the sparrow, because it had rooted up a tree upon which the sparrow had made its nest
1 iii. 39. 2 i. 1353, seq.
INDRAS AND THE ELEPHANT. 95
and laid its eggs, which were broken in consequence. The Vishnuitic legend of the Mahdbhdratam relating to the bird Garudas, which carries the elephant into the air, offers several other analogous and interesting particulars. The bird Garudas flies away with the elephant and the tortoise ; on the way, being tired, it rests upon the huge bough of a tree ; the bough breaks under the enormous weight. From this bough are suspended, with their heads down, in penitence, several dwarf hermits, born of the hairs of Brahman ; then the bird Garudas takes in its beak the whole bough, with the little hermits, and carries them up in the air till they succeed in escaping. These hermit dwarfs upon the branch (who remind us of the ants), had one day cursed Indras. Kagyapas Pra^apatis, wishing one day to make a sacrifice in order to obtain the favour of a son, orders the gods to provide him with wood. Indras, like the four elephants who support the world, places upon his shoulders a whole moun tain of wood. Laden with this weight, he meets on the way the hermit dwarfs, who were carrying a leaf in a car, and were in danger of being drowned in a pool of water, the size of the foot-print of a cow. Indras, instead of coming to their assistance, smiles and passes by ; the hermit dwarfs, in indignation, pray for the birth of a new Indras ; on this account the Indras of birds was born— the bird of Garudas, the steed of Vishnus, which naturally makes war against the steed of Indras, the elephant.
CHAPTER XL
THE MONKEY AND THE BEAR.
SUMMARY.
Monkey and bear are already associated together in India ; Gambavant is a great monkey and the king of the bears. — Haris, kapis, kapil£, kapidhvagas ; rikshas, arkas, ursus, arktos, rakshas ; the Great Bear ; rishayas, harayas. — The Marutas as rivals of Indras ; Vishnus as Indras' rival; the monkeys allied to Vishnus; the Vedic monster monkey killed by Indras ; Haris or Vishnus. — Hari mother of monkeys and horses. — Balin, king of the monkeys, son of Indras, defeated by his brother Sugrivas, son of the sun. — Hanumant in opposition to Indras ; Hanumant son of the wind ; Hanumant as the brother of Sugrivas ; Hanumant is the strong brother or companion. — Hanumant flies ; he presses the mountain and makes the waters come out of it ; he draws the clouds after himself. — The epic monkeys and the Marutas. — The monkey and the water. — The monkeys and the salutary herbs. — The sea- monster draws to itself the shadow of Hanumant and swallows him ; Hanumant comes out of the monster's body safe and sound ; the mountain Hiranyanabhas. — Hanumant makes himself as small as a cat in order to search for Sita ; Hanumant proves his power to Sita by making himself as large as a cloud or a mountain ; he massacres the monsters with a pillar; Dadhyand, Hanumant, Samson ; Hanumant bound ; he sets fire to Lanka with his tail. — The monkey sacrificed to cure the burns of horses. — Sita has a weakness for Hanuniant. — Dvividas a monster monkey. — The monkey destroys the sparrow's nest. — The monkey draws a king into the jaws of an aquatic monster. — The demoniacal monkey ; monkey and fox. — The monkey deceiver. — Sinister omens of the monkey. — The monkey envies the fox's tail. — The stupid monkey. — The bear of the Marutas. — Tric,aiikus with the skin of a bear ; the seven rishayas. — Riksharagas ; the moon as a -reputed father. —
MONKE Y AND BEAR. 97
Bears and monkeys in the forest of honey ; Balaramas ; medvjed ; the bear and the honey ; Italian proverbs ; the bear and the peasant ; the deceived bear ; the vengeance of the bear ; the bear in the sack ; the demoniacal bear ; the bear and the fox ; the monkey and the woodcutter ; the bear and the trunk of a tree ; the peasant and the gentleman ; the death of the athlete Mil6n ; the bear entangled in the waggon that had fallen into the cistern. — The king bear, monster of the fountain ; sons sacrificed to the bear by their father ; the young men flee from the bear ; the sleep of the bear. — The bear's cub. — The bear and women. — The hero-bear ; the heroine she-bear. — The virgin she-bears. — Ursula, rikshik£. — Tvanko Medviedko. — Kalistos. — The bear as a musi cian. — The quartette of animals. — Bear and monkey. — Bear and ass. — The monkey as a messenger, an intermediate form.
I HERE unite under one heading two animals of very diverse nature and race, but which, from some gross resemblances, probably helped by an equivoque in the language, are closely affiliated in the Hindoo myth. I say Hindoo in particular, because the monkey, which is so common in India, was long unknown to many of the Indo-European nations in their scattered abodes, so that if they had some dim reminiscence of it as connected with that part of Asia where the Aryan mythology took its rise, they soon forgot it when they no longer had under their eyes the animal itself which had suggested the primitive mythical form. But as they held tena ciously by the substance of the myth, they by and by substituted for the original mythical animal, called monkey, in the south the ass, and in the north often the bear. Even in India, where the pre-eminent quality of the monkey was cunning, we already find monkeys and bears associated together. A reddish colour of the skin, want of symmetry and ungainliness of form, strength in hugging with the fore paws or arms, the faculty of climbing, shortness of tail, sensuality, capacity for instruction in dancing and in music, are all char-
VOL. II. G
98 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
acteristics which more or less distinguish and meet in bears as well as in monkeys.
In the Rdmdyanam, the wise Gambavant, the Odysseus of the expedition of Lanka, is called now king of the bears (rikshaparthivah),1 now great monkey (mahakapih).2
The word Jiaris means fair, golden, reddish, sun, and monkey ; the word kapis (probably, the changeful one) means monkey and sun. In Sanskrit, the vidyut or thunderbolt, the reddish thunderbolt, of the colour of a monkey, is also called Tcapild. Ar^unas, the son of Indras, has for insignia the sun or a monkey, whence his name of Kapidhvagas.
Professor Kuhn also supposes that the word rikshas, which means bear and star, is derived from the root arc in the sense of to shine (arkas is the sun), on account of the reddish colour of the bear's skin.3 But rikshas (like ursus and arktos) may also be derived from rakshas, the monster (perhaps as a keeper back, a constrictor, arctor) ; so that the very word which names it supplies the point of transition from the idea of the divine bear to that of the monster bear.
In the liigvedas, the Marutas are represented as the most powerful assistants of Indras ; but a Vedic hymn
1 Rdmdy. iv. 63. 2 v. 55.
3 For the connection between the seven rikshas (rishayas, wise men, stars, or bears) of the Hindoos and the septemtriones, the seven stars of the she-bear (Arktos, Arkturus), and the Arctic regions, cfr. the interesting discussion of Professor Max Miiller, in the second series of his Lectures. — The seven rishayas are the same as the seven Arigirasas, the seven harayas, and the Marutas, who are seven (multiplied by three, that is, twenty-one). In the Marutas, as harayas, we have the monkeys. Even the wife of the king of the monkeys is named Tara, or, properly, the star. Thus there seems to exist between the monkey and the star the same relation as between the bear and the star, a new argument to vindicate the identity of the two animals in mythology.
THE WORD HARIS. 99
already shows them in the light of Indras' rivals. The god Vishnus in the Rigvedas is usually a sympathetic form of Indras ; but in some hymns he already appears as his antagonist. In the preceding chapter we spoke of the Vishnuitic bird, of the wind, father of Hanumant, and of a monkey, as enemies of Indras' elephant. In Hindoo epic tradition, Vishnus,. personified in Kamas, has the monkeys for his allies. The most luminous and effulgent form of the god is very distinct from his occult and mysterious appearances. Vishnus, the sun, the solar rays, the moon and the winds that lighten, are an army of golden monkeys to fight the monster. For the same reason the monkey, on the contrary, has in the JRigvedas a monstrous form ; that which was diabolical becomes divine in the lapse of time, and similarly that which was divine, diabolical. In the eighty-sixth hymn of the tenth book of the Rigvedas, Vishnus, personified in Kapis (monkey), or Vrishakapis (monkey that pours out, pluvial monkey), comes to destroy the sacrifical offerings loved by Indras. Indras, being superior to all, cuts off his head, as he wishes not to be indulgent to an evil doer.1 This monkey is probably the pluvial, reddish lightning cloud carried by the wind, which Indras pierces through with his thunderbolt, although these same lightning and thundering clouds, carried by the winds or Marutas (i.e., the Marutas themselves), are usually represented in the Rigvedas as assisting the supreme deity. A difference having arisen between Vishnus and Indras, and between the Marutas and Indras, the Marutas took Vishnus' part, and became monkeys like Vishnus, — the word haris, which is a
1 Priya tashtani me kapir vyakta vy adudushat giro nv asya ravishaiii na sugarii dushkrite bhuvarii vigvasmad indra uttarah ; str. 5.
TOO ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
favourite name of Vishnus (now moon, now sun), meaning also monkey. Vishnus surrounds himself with fair, red dish, or golden monkeys, or with harayas (solar rays or lightning, thunder-striking and thundering clouds), in the same way as the Vedic Indras was drawn by harayas. Eamas kapirathas is simply an incarnation of Vishnus, who usurps the rights of Indras, which last, as we have seen, had lent his harayas to Vishnus, in order that he might take his three famous steps. Evidently Vishnus forgot to return the fair-haired ones to his friend ; hence from this time the strength of Indras passes almost entirely into Vishnus, who, in the form of Eamas, helped by the harayas or red-haired ones, i.e., by the monkeys, moves across the Dekhan (a region densely inhabited by monkeys) to the conquest of the isle of Lanka. The Mahdbhdratam informs us that monkeys and horses had Hart for their mother.1 The splendid Marutas form the army of Indras, the red-haired monkeys and bears that of Eamas ; and the mythical and solar nature of the monkeys and bears of the Rdmdyanam manifests itself several times. The king of the monkeys is a sun-god. The ancient king was named Balin, and was the son of Indras (Qakrasunus). His young brother, Sugrivas, he who changes his shape at pleasure (kamarupas), who, helped by Eamas, usurped his throne, is said to be own child of the sun (bhaskarasyaurasah putrahsuryanan- danah).2 Here it is evident that the Vedic antagonism between Indras and Vishnus is reproduced in a zoological and entirely apish form. The old Zeus must give way to the new, the moon to the sun, the evening to the morning sun, the sun of winter to that of spring ; the young sun betrays and overthrows the old one. We
1 i. 2628. 2 ill 75.
INDRAS AND THE MONKEYS. 101
have already seen that the legend of the two brothers, Balm and Sugrivas, is one of the forms which the myth of the Agvinau assumes. Kamas, who treacherously kills the old king of the monkeys, Balin, is the equivalent of Vishnus, who hurls his predecessor, Indras, from his throne ; and Sugrivas, the new king of the monkeys, resembles Indras when he promises to find the ravished Sita, in the same way as Vishnus, in one of his incarna tions, finds again the lost Vedas. And there are other indications in the Rdmdyanam 1 of opposition between Indras and the monkeys who assist Kamas. The great monkey Hanumant, of the reddish colour of gold (hema- pingalah), has his jaw broken, Indras .having struck him with his thunderbolt, and caused him to fall upon a moun tain, because, while yet a child, he threw himself off a mountain into the air in order to arrest the course of the sun, whose rays had no effect upon him.2 (The cloud rises from the mountain and hides the sun, which is unable of itself to disperse it ; the tempest comes, and brings flashes of lightning and thunderbolts, which tear the cloud in pieces.)
The whole legend of the monkey Hanumant repre sents the sun entering into the cloud or darkness, and coming out of it. His father is said to be now the wind, now the elephant of the monkeys3 (kapikurigaras), now ke§arin, the long-haired sun, the sun with a mane, the lion sun (whence his name of keparinah putrah). From this point of view, Hanumant would seem to be the brother of Sugrivas, who is also the offspring of the sun, the strong brother in the legend of the two brothers connected with that of the three ; that is to say, we should have now Balin, Hanumant, and Sugrivas
i
iv. 5. 2 v. 2, vii. 39. 3 v. 3.
102 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
brothers, now Kamas, Hanumant, and Lakshamanas. The strong brother is between the other two ; the sun in the cloud, in the darkness or in the winter, is placed between the evening sun and that of morning, or be tween the dying sun of autumn and the new one of spring.
Hanumant flies (like the ass) ; his powers of flight are seated in his sides and his hips, which serve him for wings. Hanumant ascends to the summit of Mount Mahendras, in order to throw himself into the air ; whilst he presses the mountain (a real vrishakapis), he makes the waters gush out of it ; when he moves, the trees of the mountain-forest are torn up by their roots, and follow him in the current made by him as he cuts his way through the air (here we meet once more with the mythical forest, the mythical tree that moves of itself like a cloud). The wind in his armpits roars like a cloud (gimuta iva gargati), and the shadow that he leaves behind him in the air resembles a line of clouds (meghara^iva vayuputr&nugamini) ;* he draws the clouds after him.2 Thus all the epic monkeys of the Rdmd- yanam are described in the twentieth canto of the first book by expressions which very closely resemble those applied in the Vedic hymns to the Marutas, as swift as the tempestuous wind (vayuvegasamas), changing their shape at pleasure (kamarupinas), making a noise like clouds, sounding like thunder, battling, hurling mountain-peaks, shaking great uprooted trees, armed with claws and teeth,, shaking the mountains, uprooting trees, stirring up the deep waters, crushing the earth with their arms, lifting themselves into the air, making the clouds fall. Thus Balin, the king of the monkeys,
1 Rdmdy. v. 4, v. 5. * v. 55.
THE FL YING MONKE Y. 1 03
comes out of the cavern, as the sun out of the cloud (toyadadiva bhaskarah).1
In the same way as we have seen the harayas, or horses of Indras, the gandharvas, and the mythical ass in con nection with the salutary waters, with the herbs, and with the perfumes, so in the Rdmdyanam it is the monkeys that carry the herbs and the salutary roots of the mountain, that is, of the cloud-mountain or of the mountain of perfumes.
The cloud in which the sun Hanumant travels through the air throws a shadow upon the sea ; a sea-monster per ceives this shadow, and by it attracts Hanumant to him self. (We have already seen the fearless hero who is misled by his own shadow and lost.) Hanumant is kamartipas, like Sugrivas, and like all the other monkeys, his companions. When he sees that the monster is about to swallow him, he distends and expands his figure out of all measure ; the ogress assumes the same gigantic pro portions ; when she does so, Hanumant (repeating the miracle of his type Haris, or the dwarf Vishnus), becomes as small as a man's thumb, enters into the vast body of the monster, and comes out on the other side.) Hanu mant continues to fly across the ocean, in order to arrive
1 Rdmdy. iv. 12, v. 6. — The monkey on the sea is also to be found in a Greek apologue, but the subject is somewhat different. A monkey, which during a tempest had been washed from a ship, and tossed about upon the stormy waves under the promontory of Attica, is mistaken by a dolphin for a man ; the dolphin, having great affection for the race to which he presumed he belonged, takes him up and carries him towards the shore. But before letting him touch firm ground, he asks him whether he is an Athenian ; the monkey answers that he is of illustrious birth ; the dolphin asks if he knows the Piraeus ; the monkey, thinking that it is a man's name, answers that he is a great friend of his; upon which the dolphin, indignant at having been deceived, lets the monkey fall again into the sea,
104 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
at the island of Lank^. The ocean takes pity upon him, and, to help him, raises up Mount Hiranyanabhas, i.e., of the golden navel, the mountain whence the sun comes out ; indeed, Hanumant says1 that he struck the mountain with his tail, and broke its summit, that shone like the sun, in order to rest upon it. Hanumant then recommences his flight, and finds a new obstacle in the marine monster Sinhika (the mother of Eahus, the eclipse with a ser pent's tail, which devours now the sun, now the moon). She also draws to herself the shadow of Hanumant ; Hanumant, resorting once more to his former stratagem, becomes small, and enters into her body ; but he is no sooner inside than he increases in bulk, swells out, tears her, kills her, and escapes, a feat for which he receives the homage of the birds, who will thenceforth be able to cross the ocean with impunity.2 When he arrives in Lanka, Hanumant, that he may search for and find Slta by moonlight, becomes as small as a cat (vrishadaiigaprama- nas) ; when he finds her, and offers to carry her away from Lank4, she cannot believe that so small an animal is able to accomplish so great an enterprise ; then Hanu mant makes himself as tall as a black cloud, as a high mountain ; he breaks down the whole forest of a9okas, mounts upon a temple that stands on a thousand columns, claps his hands, and fills all Lanka with the din ; he tears from the temple a pillar adorned with gold, and, swinging it around, devotes the monsters to wholesale slaughter.3 The mythical monkey and the mythical ass resemble each other; hence the analogy between the legend of Dadhyaric (quoted in the second chapter), that of Samson, and that of Hanumant. But the legend of the monkey Hanumant presents another curious re-
1 Rdmdy. v. 56. 3 v. 8. 8 v. 37.
THE TAIL OF THE MONKEY. 105
semblance to that of Samson. Hanumant is bound with, cords by Indragit, son of Ravanas ;* he could easily free himself, but does not wish to do so. Ravanas, to put him to shame, orders his tail to be burned, because the tail is the part most prized by monkeys (kaplnam kila langulam ishtam, whence the fable of the monkey who complains of having no tail). Hanumant's tail is greased and set on fire, and himself thereafter marched in this plight ignominiously through the streets of Lanka. But Slta having invoked the favour of the god Agnis, the fire, though it plays round the tail of Hanumant, does not burn it, and Hanumant by this means is able to avenge himself for the insult, by setting fire to and burn ing to ashes the city of Lanka.2 (The tail of Hanumant, which sets fire to the city of the monsters, is probably a personification of the rays of the morning or spring sun, which sets fire to the eastern heavens, and destroys the abode of the nocturnal or winter monsters.) The enter prise of the Marutas in the Rigvedas, and that of the monkey Hanumant in the Rdmdyanam, assume such dimensions that they obscure the fame of both Indras and Ramas ; the former without the Marutas, the latter without- Hanumant, would be unable to defeat the monsters. Sita perceives this so clearly, that, at the end of the poem, she makes Hanumant such a present that Ramas might well become jealous. Hanumant, however, is an honest and pious cavalier ; it suffices him to have
1 Edmdy. v. 56.
2 v. 50. — In the Pancatantram, v, 10, it is said, on the contrary, that monkeys possess the virtue of healing the wounds of horses that have been scalded or burned, as the sun of morning chases the darkness away. According to a variety of this story contained in the Tiiti- Name, i. 130, the bite of a monkey can be cured only by the blood of the very monkey who had inflicted it.
io6 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
defended justice in the service of his master, nor does he ask to be recompensed for the hard achievement that he has accomplished. For the rest, a popular Hindoo sentence says that monkeys are not accustomed to weep for themselves;1 they weep (rodanti) for others. The same is true of the Kudras, or winds, that weep in the cloud ; they do not lament for themselves ; their tears fall upon the ground in beneficent rain that fertilises our fields and tempers the heat of our summers ; neverthe less, they themselves afterwards feel, as solar rays, the benefit of weeping, that is, of rain. In the Rdmdyanam, monkeys who die in battle are resuscitated by rain ; when the cloud dissolves itself in rain, the fair-haired, the golden ones, the harayas, the sunbeams or monkeys^ show themselves again in all their vigour.
We have seen thus far the cloud-monkey, from which the sun emerges, and into which he re-enters. But we have already said more than once that the sun often assumes a monstrous form, when enclosed in the cloud or the darkness. It is thus we explain the divine hero Balaramas, who, in the Vishnu P.,2 destroys the demon Dvividas, who had taken the form of a monkey. In the eighteenth story of the first book of the Pancatantram, a monkey, whilst the wind blows and the rain falls, shakes a tree upon which a sparrow has made its nest, and breaks the eggs in pieces. In the tenth story of the fifth book, the king of the monkeys, by means of a crown of pearls, attracts a king of men who had killed monkeys to cure his horses (to which the fire had been communi cated by the wool of a ram which the cook had chased away from the kitchen with a burning brand) to a
'pi pritim kurvanti vanarah atmarthe 6a na rodanti; Bohtliiigk, Indische Spruche, 107. 2 v. 36.
THE TAIL OF THE MONKEY. 107
fountain guarded by a monster who devours the king and his suite. In the eleventh story of the same book, a monkey upon a tree is the friend of one of the two crepuscular monsters, and this monster invites it to eat the man ; the man, however, retaliates, and fiercely bites its long tail ; the monkey then believes this man to be stronger than the monster, and the latter believes the man who holds the monkey by the tail with his teeth to be the monster of the other twilight, i.e., the morning twilight. Here the monkey is confounded with the fox, which is a mythical animal of a specially crepuscular nature, and which also comes to ruin on account of its tail. The reader has already observed how the incen diary monkey-tail of Hanumant corresponds to the tails of the foxes, in the legend of Samson. The Hellenic and Latin proverbs generally regard the monkey as a very cunning animal, so much so that Hercules and the monkey represented the combination of strength and deceit. According to Cardano, a monkey seen in dreams is a pre sage of deceit. According to Lucian, it was an augury of an unlucky day to meet with a monkey in the early morning. The Spartans considered it an omen of most sinister import that the monkey of the king of theMolossians had upset their urn while they were going to consult the oracle. According to Suetonius, when Nero thought he saw his horse flee, having the shape of a monkey in his hind parts, he believed it to prognosticate death. The monkey, accordingly, was usually conceived of in Greece and at Kome as a cunning and demoniacal animal. The hero in the cloud, in the dark, or in hell, on the other hand, learns wisdom ; and just as before this he is only a poor fool, so the monkey, too, is also sometimes represented in the ancient fables of Southern Europe as an animal full of simplicity. In Italy we have a proverb
io8 ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY.
which says that every monkey thinks her young ones beautiful ; this refers to the apologue of the monkey that believes her young ones to be the most beautiful animals in the world, because Jove, seeing them one day leaping about, could not refrain from laughing. The fox, in an epigram, laughs at the monkey who craves from him the half of his tail, on the plea that it would disencumber himself of just so much useless appendage, and supply his suitor with the very covering required to protect his all too naked buttocks : —