ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS

BY

ANGELO DE GUBERNATIS

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE ISTITUTO DI STUDII

SUPERIORI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO, AT FLORENCE

FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY

OF THE DUTCH INDIES

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

LONDON

TRÜBNER & CO., 60 PATERNOSTER ROW

1872

[All rights reserved]

[CONTENTS.]

Part First.

THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.

(Continued.)

Part Second.

THE ANIMALS OF THE AIR.

Part Third.

THE ANIMALS OF THE WATER.

[ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY;]

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS.

[First Part.]

THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.

[CHAPTER V.]

THE HOG, THE WILD BOAR, AND THE HEDGEHOG.

SUMMARY.

The hog as a hero disguise.—The disguises of the hero and of the heroine.—Ghoshâ, the leprous maiden.—The moon in the well.—Apâlâ cured by Indras.—Apâlâ has the dress of a hog.—Godhâ, 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.—Tydœus, 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 hedgehog, 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; the hero becomes a eunuch; the lettuce-eunuch eaten by Adonis, prior to his being killed by the wild boar.

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 sometimes 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 represents the demon himself. 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; Arǵunas, who disguises himself as a eunuch; Indras, Vishṇus, Zeus, Achilleüs, 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 darkness, 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 in the dark night, becomes devoid of sight, devoid of intelligence, 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 Ṛigvedas, the Açvinâu cure the leprous daughter of Kakshîvant, Ghoshâ, who is growing old without a husband in her father's house, and find her a husband; the Açvinâu deliver the aurora from the darkness of night, and marry her.[1]

In the eightieth hymn of the eighth book of the Ṛigvedas, 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 Ṛigvedas, the maiden Apâlâ 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, consents, 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, a skin of the sun, for Apâlâ, who has been thrice purified, by the wheel, by the chariot itself, and by the rudder of Indras's chariot.[3] And the same myth occurs once more in a clearer and more complete form in a legend of the Bṛihaddevatâ. Apâlâ beseeches Indras, loved by her, to make for her a beautiful and perfect (faultless, unimpeachable) skin. Indras, hearing her voice, passes over her with wheel, chariot, and rudder; by three efforts, he takes off her ugly skin. Apâlâ then appears in a beautiful one. In the skin thus stript off there was a bristle (çalyakaḥ); above, it had a hirsute appearance; below, it resembled the skin of a lizard.[4] The bristle or thorn upon the skin of Apâlâ 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 Apâlâ, of the ugly or the hog's skin, and Ghoshâ, 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 Russian 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.[5] In another story of White Russia,[6] 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 communicated 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 Apâlâ, it would seem to me to have a phallic signification. Indras may have cured Apâlâ by marrying her, as the Açvinâu, by means of a husband, cured the leprous Ghoshâ, who was growing old in her father's house. In the tenth story of the Pentamerone, the king of Roccaforte 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 meretricious 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 Epistolæ—

"Sirenum voces, et Circes pocula nosti,
Quæ si cum sociis stultus cupidusque bibisset
Sub domina meretrice fuisset turpis et excors
Vixisset canis immundus, vel amica luto Sus."

The hog, as one of the most libidinous of animals, is sacred to Venus; for this reason, according to the Pythagorian doctrines, lustful men are transformed into hogs, and the expression "pig" is applied to a man given over to every species of lust. In Varro[7] we read:—"Nuptiarum initio, antiqui reges ac sublimes viri in Hetruria in conjuctione nuptiali nova nupta et novus maritus primum porcum immolant; prisci quoque Latini et etiam Græci in Italia idem fecisse videntur, nam et nostræ mulieres, maximæ nutrices naturam, qua fœminæ sunt, in virginibus appellant porcum, et græce choiron, significantes esse dignum insigni nuptiarum." The rudder of Indras, which passes over the upodaras (or lower bosom) of Apâlâ, is illustrated by this passage in Varro.

As to the wild boar, its character is generally demoniacal; but the reason why the Hindoo gods were invested with this form was in a great degree due to equivocation in language. The word vishṇus means he who penetrates; on account of its sharp tusks, in a Vedic hymn,[8] the wild boar is called vishṇus, or the penetrator. Hence, probably, by the same analogy, in another hymn, Rudras, the father of the Marutas, the winds, is invoked as a red, hirsute, horrid, celestial wild boar,[9] 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;[10] 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.[11] Vishṇus himself, in the Ṛigvedas, at the instigation of Indras, brings a hundred oxen, the milky gruel, and the destroying wild boar.[12] 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 Vishṇus, 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 Pâuranic traditions, Vishṇus, in his third incarnation, when killing the demon Hiraṇyâkshas (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).[13] According to the Râmâyaṇam,[14] Indras took the form of a wild boar immediately after his birth.

The Arcadian wild boar of Mount Erymanthüs is familiar to the reader. Hêraklês killed it in his third labour, in the same way as Vishṇus 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;
Et setæ densis similes hastilibus horrent.
Stantque velut vallum; velut alta hastilia setæ,
Fervida cum rauco latos stridore per armos
Spuma fluit, dentes æquantur 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 Hêraklês goes to the infernal regions, all the shades flee before him, except those of Meleagros and Medusa. Meleagros and Hêraklês resemble each other, are identified with each other; as to Medusa, we must not forget that the head of the Gorgon was represented upon the ægis 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 Hesperîdes, where the golden apples grow which Hêraklês loves.

In the sixty-first hymn of the first book of the Ṛigvedas, the god, after having eaten and drunk well, kills, with the weapon stolen from the celestial blacksmith Tvashṭar, the monster wild boar, who steals that which is destined for the gods.[15] In the ninety-ninth hymn of the tenth book of the Ṛigvedas, Tritas (the third brother), by the strength which he has received from Indras, kills the monster wild boar.[16] In the Tâittiriya Brâhmaṇam, 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 consequence, discovers the treasure.[17] In the fifty-fifth hymn of the seventh book of the Ṛigvedas, the hog and the dog lacerate and tear each other to pieces in turns;[18] the dog and the pig are found in strife again in the Æsopian fable.

In the Mahâbhâratam,[19] Puloman assumes the form of a wild boar to carry off the wife of Bhṛigus; she prematurely gives birth to Ćyavanas, 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 tormenting 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 Apâlâ). Thus, in the first Esthonian story, the prince, by eating pork (or in the night forest), acquires the faculty of understanding 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,[20] the 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 wolf's 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 hedgehog, the swiftness of the wolf, the resignation of the dog, and the complexion of the naguir.[21] A verse attributed to Archilokos says:—

"Poll' oid' alôpêx, all' echinos en mega,"

which passed into the proverb: "One knavery of the hedgehog is worth more than many of the fox." In the Âitarey. Br.,[22] the hedgehog is said to be born of the talon of the rapacious hawk. In the Æsopian 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 while the danger of fighting remains. Hence the common 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 to me to combine in one the dwarf Vishṇus and the wild boar Vishṇus, the exterminator of monsters, who, as we know, almost always assume, in Hindoo mythology, the form of a wolf or a serpent. And inasmuch as Vishṇus, 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 presage wind and rain. The wild boar, when dreamed of, is, according to Artemidoros, quoted by Aldrovandi,[23] an omen of tempest and rain deluge. To this, refers also the fable spoken of by Ælianos and Pliny concerning the hogs carried 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,[24] that women "Ad discriminandos capillos, ut illos conservent illæsos, aculeis potius hystricum, quam acubus utuntur." This information derived from 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.[25] 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 fugitive 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 Pańćatantram, the ears and the heart of the credulous ass, torn by the lion, are eaten. In Babrios, the rôle of the ass is sustained by the stag (which is often in myths a variation of the foolish hero). In the Gesta Romanorum,[26] 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 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 Redeemer 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.[27] The wild boar is also described as an aversier (or demon) in the romance of Gavin le Loherain[28]—

"Voiés quel aversier,
Grant a le dent fors de la gueule un piet
Mult fu hardis qui a cop l'atendié."

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 Vishṇus changed himself into a wild boar, and the hog was sacred to the Scandinavian Mars, so was the wild boar sacred to the Roman 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 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 particular 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 Kolophonios, quoted by Aldrovandi, that Adonis was struck by the wild boar after having eaten a lettuce. Ibykos, a Pythagorean poet, 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 Arǵunas, 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 chien et loup.—The dog and the moon.—The bitch Saramâ; her double aspect in the Vedâs and in the Râmâyaṇam; 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; Sârameyas and Hermês.—The favourite dog of Saramâ; 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 Persians; the penitent dog; the two dogs equivalent to the two Açvinâu.—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 Hiraṇyahastas; the word vadhrimatî.—The demoniacal dog.—The strength of the mythical dog.—Monstrous 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 ignominious 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 Açvinâu. It was a fugitive phenomenon of but an instant'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;[29] 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 as we have seen that, of the two Açvinâu, 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, if I am not mistaken, 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. We have, therefore, thus far three mythical dogs. One; menacing, is 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 morning, 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 Saramâ, 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,[30] is perhaps the same dog that barks to show that robbers are near. In the 108th hymn of the tenth book of the Ṛigvedas, we have a dramatic scene between the misers or thieves (the Paṇayas) and the bitch Saramâ, the messenger of Indras, who wishes for their treasures.[31] In order to come to them, she traverses the waters of the Rasâ (a river of hell); the treasure that is hidden in the mountain consists of cows, horses, and various riches; the Paṇayas wish Saramâ to stay with them as their sister, and to enjoy the cows along with them; Saramâ answers that she does not recognise their brotherhood, inasmuch as she is already the sister of Indras, and the terrible Añgirasas.[32] In the sixty-second hymn of the first book, the bitch Saramâ discovers the cows hidden in the rock, and receives in recompense from Indras and the Añgirasas nourishment for her offspring; then men cry out, and the cows bellow.[33] Going towards the sun, in the path of the sun, Saramâ finds the cows.[34] When Indras splits the mountain open, Saramâ shows him first the waters.[35] 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.[36] This noise may refer either to the waters, the sounding rivers (nadâs, nadîs), 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 equivoque lies in the root sar. In the Ṛigvedas, we have seen Saramâ disdaining to pass for the sister of the thieves or the monsters; in the Râmâyaṇam,[37] the wife of one of the monsters, of the very brother of Râvaṇas the robber, is called Saramâ, and takes, instead of the monster's part, that of Râmas and Sîtâ the ravished wife. We have already several times seen the moon as a beneficent cow, as a good fairy, or as the Madonna. Saramâ (of which Suramâ, another benignant rakshasî, is probably only an incorrect form[38]), the consoler of Sîtâ, who announces prophetically her approaching deliverance by her husband Râmas, appears to me in the light of another impersonation of the moon. It is on this account that Sîtâ[39] praises Saramâ as a twin-sister of hers (sahodarâ), affectionate, and capable of traversing the heavens, and penetrating into the watery infernal regions (rasâtalam).[40] The benignant sister of Sîtâ 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 Hêraklês was the first to bite. The dog of the Æsopian fable,[41] 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 Pańćatantram, 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 Saramâ preserve several of their mother's characteristics. Now they are spoken of together as Sârameyâu; now they are mentioned together, but distinct from one another; now one alone of them, the most legitimate, by the name of Sârameyas, whose identity with the Greek Hermês or Hermeias has already been proved by Professor Kuhn. Saramâ in connection with the Paṇayas, merchants or thieves, and Saramâ as the 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 clearness 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 Saramâ, having four eyes, spotted, who occupy the right path, and to come to the benignant Manes" (for there are also the malignant ones, or Durvidatrâḥ); 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."[42] But the Ṛigvedas itself already shows us the two sons of the bitch Saramâ, as the two who look in turns (one after the other), whom Indras must put to sleep.[43] One, however, of the two sons of Saramâ is especially invoked and feared, the Sârameyas par excellence. The Vedic hymn speaks of him as he who returns (punaḥsaras), 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."[44] The bitch Saramâ is passionately fond of her 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 Mahâbhâratam,[45] the bitch Saramâ curses King Ǵanameǵayas, because his three brothers, when attending the sacrifice, maltreated and flogged the dog Sârameyas, 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 Künosargês was given to that place). The same legend occurs again, slightly modified, in the seventh book of the Râmâyaṇam.[46] Râmas sends Lakshmaṇas, his brother, to see whether there are any disputes to be settled in the kingdom; Lakshmaṇas returns, saying that the whole kingdom is at peace. Râmas sends him again; he sees a dog erect on the doorstep of the palace, barking. The name of this dog is Sârameyas. Râmas enables him to enter the palace. The dog complains that he has been beaten without just cause by a Brâhman. The Brâhman is called, appears, confesses his fault, and awaits his punishment. The dog Sârameyas proposes as his punishment that the Brâhman 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 assuming the shape of a dog. After this the dog Sârameyas, who remembers his previous states of existence, returns to do penitence at Benares, whence he had come.

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 metempsychosis 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 committed, and which has provoked the deity's indignation.[47]

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 Mahâbhâratam, where the god Yamas becomes a dog, and follows Yudhishṭhiras (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.

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 Ṛigvedas 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;[48] it invokes the Açvinâu to destroy on every side the barking dogs;[49] it solicits 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.[50] 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 a 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 Ṛigvedas, 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."[51] Here we find the dog in connection with a bird.[52] In the twenty-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 Rocco, 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 Küna, whence Cyrus might have been nourished, like Asklêpios, with the milk of a dog. I have already said that the story of the dog is connected with the myth of the Açvinâu, 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 Saramâ, the messenger of the gods, does in the Ṛigvedas.[53] 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 Afanassieff, 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.[54] The 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 Açvinâu 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 wolf's 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 the 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 recovers 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 Tzarević has received from two fairies, together with a wolf's whelp, a bear's, and a lion's cub, tear the monster serpent to pieces. The two dogs carry us back to the myth of the Açvinâu. 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 resuscitate 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 Sârameyâu[55]). In 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 Açvinâu are now two horses, now two dogs, now a dog and a horse (now a bull and a lion).[56] Ivan Tzarević, whom the horse and the dog save from danger, is the same as the Vedic hero, the sun, whom the Açvinâu save from many dangers.

In the Russian 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 persecuted princess is cut off. In the thirteenth story of the third book of Afanassieff,[57] 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, 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 Bellerophôn), 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,[58] 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 mentioned, 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.[59] 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—

"Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one,
Were as seven phials of his sacred blood,
Or seven fair branches springing from one root."[60]

In Hindoo myths, the hand of Savitar having been cut off, one of gold is given to him, whence the epithet he enjoys of Hiraṇyahastas, 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 Hiraṇyahastas—i.e., Golden-hand—for her son. The Vedic hymn says that the Açvinâu gave Golden-hand as a son to the Vadhrimatî.[61] The word vadhrimatî 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 Açvinâu 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 Açvinâu give to Viçpalâ, who had lost his own in battle, an iron leg.[62] The Ṛigvedas, 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 agility[63] in running, his strength holds a prominent place in the myth. The Kerberos shows an extraordinary strength in rending his enemies. In the Russian 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 immolated to appease the fury of the Canicula, and whence the verse of Ovid—

"Pro cane sidereo canis hic imponitur aræ,")

at the time of the Canicula or of the Canis Sirius, to 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 (künophontis), besides the barking dogs that appear in the groin of Scylla,[64] 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.[65] 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.[66] In the district of Florence, it is believed that the wolf, as well as the dog, when it happens to be the subject of a dream, is (as in Terence) a prognostic of sickness or death, especially if the dog is dreamt of as running after or trying to bite one. In Horace (Ad Galatheam) it is an evil omen to meet with a pregnant bitch—

"Impios parræ præcinentis omen
Ducat et prœgnans canis."

In Sicily, St Vitus is prayed to that he may keep the dogs chained—

"Santu Vitu, Santu Vitu,
Io 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 cira
E di ferru filatu;
Pi lu nuomu di Maria
Ligu stu cani
Ch' aju avanti a mia."

When the dog is tied up, they add—

"Fermati, cani
Ca t' aju ligatu."[67]

In Italy and Russia, when the dog howls like a wolf, that is, plays the wolf, it forebodes misfortune and death. It is also narrated,[68] that after the alliance between Cæsar, Lepidus, and Antony, dogs howled like wolves.

When one is bitten by a dog[69] 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,[70] 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 l'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 mediæval punishment of Germany of carrying the dog, inflicted upon a noble criminal, and which sometimes preceded his final execution.[71] The 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 Persephônê from the infernal king of the Molossians, is torn to pieces by the dog Trikerberos. Euripides, according to the popular tradition, was lacerated in the forest by the avenging dogs of Archelaos. It is told of Domitian, that when an astrologer 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 Çushnas, the pestilential 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 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 Rocco, the saint who protects the sick of the plague. The Roman feasts in honour of Vulcan (Volcanalia) fell in the month of August; and the Roman Catholic Church fêtes in the month of August the two saints of the dogs of the fire and the plague, St Dominic and St Rocco.

[CHAPTER VII.]

THE CAT, THE WEASEL, THE MOUSE, THE MOLE, THE SNAIL, THE ICHNEUMON, THE SCORPION, THE ANT, THE LOCUST, AND THE GRASSHOPPER.

SUMMARY.

Mârǵâras, mârgaras, mṛigas, mṛigâris, mṛigarâǵas.—Nakulas.—Mûsh.—Vamras, vamrî, vaprî, valmîkam, formica.—The serpent and the ants.—Indras as an ant; the serpent eaten by the ants.—Vamras drinking, assisted by the Açvinâu.—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; çarabhas as the moon.—Grasshopper and ant.—Avere il grillo, aver la luna; indovinala, grillo.—Wedding between ant and grasshopper.—Locusts destroyed by fire.—Hippomürmêkes.—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 botté.—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; funereal and diabolical mice; superstitions relating to this belief.—The mouse that releases the lion and the elephant from the trap.—Ganeças 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.—Hiraṇyakas; the squirrel.—The monster mole; the mole as a gravedigger; the blind mole.—The snail in the popular song; the snail 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 therefore very aptly placed in the darkness of night (naktaćârin is an epithet applied in Sanskṛit 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. Mârǵâras, the cat, means the cleanser (as the animal that, in fact, cleans itself). Referring 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 from the dark tares of night; the moon with its silvery splendour disperses the shades of night. The mârǵâras, or cleanser of the night, the white cat, is the moon. Araṇyamârǵâras, or cat of the forest, is the 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 mârǵâras (the cleanser) with the word mârgaras, the proper meaning of which is hunter, investigator, he who follows the track, the mârgas, or else the enemy of the mṛigas (as mṛigâris); 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 mṛigas or forest animal. The moon (the huntress Diana) is also called in Sanskṛit mṛigarâǵas, 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 Sanskṛit to the ichneumon, the enemy of mice, scorpions, and snakes. The word seems to be derived from the root naç, nak = necare, whence nakulas would appear to be the destroyer (of nocturnal mice).

The mouse, mûsh, mûshas, mûshakas, is the thief, the ravisher, whence also its name rat (a rapiendo).

The Hindoo names of the ant are vamras and vamrî (besides pipîlakas). Vamrî is connected with vapâ, vapram, vaprî, ant-hole, and, by metathesis, valmîkam (i.e., appertaining to ants), which has the same meaning. The Latin formica unites together the two forms vamrî and valmîkam. 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 Mahâbhâratam, the hole of a serpent is also called by the name of valmîkam; from this we can explain the fable of the third book of the Pańćatantram, 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.[72] Nay, more, in the Pańćatantram, 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.[73] Indras is therefore a variety of the Captain Formicola of the Tuscan fairy tale. Finally, the Ṛigvedas offers us yet another curious particular. The two Açvinâu come to assist Vamras (or Indras in his form of an ant, i.e., they come to assist the ant) whilst it is drinking (vamraṁ vipipânam). 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 hüpnos, 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 Açvinâu, whilst it drinks, come to its help, for no doubt the ant when drinking is in danger of being 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 published 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;[74] 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,[75] 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 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 l'ascelle" (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,[76] 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 çarabhas, or çalabhas, is presented to us as an improvident animal in two sentences of the first and fourth books of the Pańćatantram. The green grasshopper or locust leaps; the fair-haired moon leaps. (I have already noticed in the chapter on the ass how the words haris and harit mean both green and fair, or yellow; in the second canto of the sixth book of the Râmâyaṇam, the monkey Çarabhas is said to inhabit the mountain Ćandras or Mount Moon; Çarabhas, therefore, 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 çarabhas means both grasshopper (in Sanskṛit, also named varshakarî) and locust. In one of the popular songs of the Monferrato collected by Signor Ferraro, we have the wedding of the grasshopper 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 grilli (grasshoppers) used in the sense of lovers. In Italian, grillo also means caprice, and especially amorous caprice; and medico grillo is applied to a foolish doctor.[77] 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 expression 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 grasshopper or locust, is the supposed fool who, on the contrary, 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 grasshopper whether he desires her for his wife, and recommends him, if he does not, to look after his own affairs, that is, to leave her alone. And then the narrative 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).[78] The nuptials of the black ant, the gloom of night, 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 Pańćatantram, the locusts are destroyed by fire. In the so-called letter of Alexander the Great to Olympias,[79] I find the ants scared away by means of fire, whilst they are endeavouring to keep horses and heroes at a distance. These extraordinary ants recall to us the hippomürmêkes 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. Ælianos calls them guardians of gold (tôn chrüsôn phülattontes). 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."[80] 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 Vṛiçćikas, which, now a very little bird (iyattikâ çakuntikâ), now a very small ichneumon (kushumbhakas, properly the little golden one, perhaps the young morning sun), destroys with its tooth (açmanâ, properly with the biter), absorbing or taking away the poison, as jars take off the water, i.e., the sun's rays dissipate the vapours of the sun enclosed in the cloud or the gloom.[81] 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 Sanskṛit called nakulas. In the twelfth story of the first book of the Pańćatantram, we see it, on the contrary, as the 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. Therefore, 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 Açvinâu, in the Mahâbhâratam) 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. The weasel, too, as we learn from the ninth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, fights against serpents, after having eaten the famous herb called rue, the smell of which is said to be insupportable to serpents. But, as its Latin name tells us, it is no less skilful as a hunter of mice.[82] The reader is doubtless familiar with the Æsopian 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 Phædrus, 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 præter 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 changed by the goddess Lucina (the moon) into a weasel, for having told a lie, announcing the birth of Hêraklês before it had taken place:—

"Strenuitas antiqua manet, nec terga colorem
Amisêre suum, forma est diversa priori;
Quæ, 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,[83] 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 transformed into a white weasel, the moon that explores the nocturnal heaven and discovers all its secrets.

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 concealed, 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 Sanskṛit cat mûshakârâtis, or mûshikântakṛit.

In the Pańćatantram, the cat Butter-ears (dadhikarṇas), 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, kapińǵalas and the hare Quick-walker (sîghragas), 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 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 Hitopadeças,[84] we have, instead of the sparrow, the vulture ćaradgavas, which meets with its death in consequence of having shown hospitality to the cat, "of which it knew neither the disposition nor the strength" (aǵńâtakulaçîlasya). In the Tuti-Name,[85] we have, instead of the cat, the lynx,[86] 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,[87] instead of the cat or lynx, we find represented the leopard. In the Mahâbhâratam,[88] we find again the fable of the penitent cat. The cat, by the austerity which it practises on the banks of the Ganges, inspires confidence 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 to the river, and fattens exceedingly fast, whilst the mice diminish 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 of Manus.[89] In the Reineke Fuchs of Goethe,[90] 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 wüthend entschlossen
Zwischen die Schenkel des Pfaffen und biss und kratzte gefährlich."

The Roman du Renard,[91] 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 présenta la patte;
Il fait le saint, il fait la chatte!
Mais à bon chat, bon rat! Renard aussi le flatte!
Il s'entend à dorer ses paroles de miel!
Si l'un est saint, l'autre est hermite;
Si l'un est chatte, l'autre est mite."

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,[92] 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 Afanassieff, 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 Açvinâu. In the sixty-seventh story of the sixth book, the two Açvinâu 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,[93] 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 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 Tzarević, 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;[94] the supposititious son immediately bathes the princess's eyes with hot water, and she recovers 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 Russian variation of the same story, the three sons are changed by the witch into three doves; the princess, 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 Açvinâu, 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.[95] 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 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 wintry 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 burgomaster. United together, they terrify the wolf and the bear,[96] the cat climbing up a tree. In the Æsopian 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 Catonaiević, the son of Cato (this name is derived from the equivoque between the words catus and caton; in French, besides chat, we have chaton, chatonique, &c.), delivers the cock twice from the fox, but the third time the fox eats the poor bird. In a Russian variety of this story, the cat kills the five little foxes and then the fox, after having sung as follows:—

"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."[97]

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 Russian 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 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 été quelque temps enveloppé dans une nue; ses cheveux blonds étaient épars sur ses épaules; ils tombaient par grosses boucles jusqu'à ses pieds. Sa tête était ceinte de fleurs, sa robe, d'une légère gaze blanche, doublée 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 Æsopian 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 retains her feline nature, runs after it.

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.[98]

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 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.[99] 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,[100] 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 Roccaforte, 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 è peo nce vole a chi accatta la gatta dinto lo sacco." In Sicily, when the Rosary is recited for navigators, the mewing of the cat presages a tedious voyage.[101] 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 probably 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.[102]

In the 105th hymn of the first book of the Ṛigvedas, and in the thirty-third of the tenth book, a poet says to Indras, "The thought rends me, thy praiser, as mice tear their tails by gnawing at them."[103] 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 Pańćatantram 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 penitent 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 Yaǵurvedas, the mouse is sacred to the god Rudras, the wind that howls and lightens in the cloud); the maiden refuses—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 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 appears 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 Hîtopadeças 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, transforms 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 Pańćatantram. 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 mountain come forth the mice of night, the shadows of night, to which the cat-moon and the cat-twilight give chase; the 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.[104] 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 Sarmatiæ, 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 Miçćislaus, 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 presaged at Rome the first civil war, by gnawing the gold in the temple; and it was, moreover, alleged that a 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 (caligæ) 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),[105] and sometimes 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 evening 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 supposed that it was the mouse which gnawed the ropes and set at liberty now the elephant, as in the Pańćatantram, now the lion, as in the Æsopian fable.

The Hindoo god Gaṇeças, 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.

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 forest[106] 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.)

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 Afanassieff,[107] 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 Afanassieff, it is the mouse that warns Ivan Tzarević 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 something to eat, to do what the witch, her step-mother, had commanded.

In the twenty-third story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, 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 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 Russian 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 complain 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 Batrachomyomachia, attributed to Homer, the royal mouse Psicharpax (properly ravisher of crumbs), the third son of Troxartes (eat-bread), boasts to Phüsignathos (he who inflates his cheeks), the lord of the frogs, that he does not fear the man, the point of whose finger (akron daktülôn) 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 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 (lüchnôn 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, naturally disappear.

The mouse is never conceived otherwise than in connection with the nocturnal darkness, and hence, by 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 compensation. The mouse is dark-coloured, but its teeth and fore-parts are white and luminous. The mouse Hiraṇyakas, or the golden one, in the Pańćatantram, is the black or grey mouse of night. It is the red squirrel that, in an Æsopian 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 prepared against its enemies. In the Edda, the squirrel runs upon the tree Yggdrasil, and sets the eagle and Nidhögg at discord.

The mole and the snail are of the same nature as the grey mouse. The Hindoo word âkhus, or the mole (already spoken of as a demon killed by Indras, in the Ṛigvedas[108]), properly signifies the excavator.

In the Reineke Fuchs the mole appears as a gravedigger, as the animal that heaves the earth up, and makes ditches underground; it is, in fact, the most skilful 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 cœcitatem, hæc conqueri?"

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, Cleopatra, to be blinded, and also because he had revealed the secret thoughts of Zeus.[109]

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 mulots
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—

"Iesce, iesce, corna
Ca mammata te scorna,
Te scorna 'ncoppa l'astreco
Che fa lo figlio mascolo."

In Piedmont, to induce the snail to put its horns out, children are accustomed to sing to it—

"Lümassa, lümassora,
Tira fora i to corn,
Dass no,[110] i vad dal barbé
E it tje fass taié!"

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—

"Chióćciola marinella,
Tira fuori 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."[111]

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
Stäk dîne vêr Horns herut."[112]

[CHAPTER VIII.]

HARE, RABBIT, ERMINE, AND BEAVER.

SUMMARY.

The hare is the moon; çaças and çaçin.—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 Sanskṛit, the çaças 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. Hence the names of çaçin, or furnished with hares, and of çaçadharas, çaçabhṛit, or he who carries the hare given to the moon. In the first story of the third book of the Pańćatantram, the hares dwell upon the shore of the Lake Ćandrasaras, or lake of the moon; and their king, Viǵayadattas (the funereal god, the god of death), has for his palace the lunar disc. When the hare speaks to the king of the 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 forgiveness, 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 tranquilly on the shores of the moon-lake, and are no longer crushed under the ponderous feet of their huge companions. 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 Pańćatantram 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 Ṛigvedas, in which the fox comes to visit the western lion (the sick lion[113]), in which we have the lion who falls into the trap[114] (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 lagôs lionta chrüsinô brochô," in the same way as in the Pańćatantram, it allures him into the well), and in which the hare devours the western monster[115] (a variety of the Hellenic tradition of the hare brought forth by a mare, 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,[116] and the calf defeats the bull.[117] 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 Râmâyaṇam, where the great king of the monkeys, Bâlin, regards the king of the monsters, Râvaṇas, as a lion does a hare, or as the bird Garuḍasa serpent.[118]

In Æsop 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 Æsopian fable, the rabbit avenges itself upon the eagle which has eaten its young ones, 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 mrigarâǵas 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.[119]

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 Ardvîçûra is invested (white and silvery as the white dawn, rosy and golden as the aurora; unless Ardvîçûra, 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 reputation it has as a eunuch (castor a castrando) in popular superstition; whence the words of Cicero concerning beavers,[120] and the verses of Juvenal—

"Imitatus castora qui se
Eunuchum ipse facit cupiens evadere damnum
Testiculorum, adeo medicatum intelliget unguen."[121]

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, the fæcundatrix, 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 sahasrâkshas, or of the thousand-eyed god (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,[122] 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 Russia, the bear is substituted for it; the Russian 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 Afanassieff, and in Russian 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 protectress of marriages and births, the benefactress of mankind, must not meet the car; if she opposes the wedding (perhaps 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 superstition. In the Russian 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.[123] The girl of seven years of age, 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.

[CHAPTER 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.—Marîćas.—Indras kills the mṛigas.—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 represents 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.

The Ṛigvedas represents to us the Marutas, or winds that lighten and thunder in the clouds, as drawn by antelopes. The Marutas "are born shining of themselves, with antelopes, with lances, amid thunder-peals and flashes of lightning."[124] "They have yoked, with a red yoke, the antelopes.[125] The young battalion of the Marutas goes of itself, and has an antelope for its horse."[126] The horses of the Marutas, which we already know to be antelopes, are called winged,[127] and are said to have golden fore-feet.[128] The antelopes of the Marutas are splendid.[129] Nor are the Marutas only carried by antelopes; they also wear upon their shoulders antelopes' skins.[130]

But the antelope, the gazelle, and the stag generally, instead of helping the hero, involve him rather in perplexity and peril. This mythical subject is amplified in numerous Hindoo legends.

In the first scene of Kâlidâsas' Çakuntalâ, a black-spotted (kṛishṇasâras) gazelle misleads King Dushyantas.

In the Mahâbhâratam,[131] King Parîkshit pursues a gazelle and wounds it (as the god Çivas 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 Mahâbhâratam,[132] King Pandus dies at the moment when he is uniting himself with his wife Mâdrî, 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 Vishṇu P.,[133] 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 Râmâyaṇam,[134] Marîćas, who is possessed by a demon, becomes, by order of Râvaṇas, 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 Râmas to pursue him in order to procure his silver-spotted skin, for which Sîtâ 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 Râmas from Sîtâ. It then emits a lamentable cry, imitating the voice of Râmas, so as to induce Lakshmaṇas, his brother, to come to his assistance, and leave Sîtâ alone, that Râvaṇas may then be able to carry her off with impunity. Lakshmaṇas leaves her unwillingly, because, perceiving that the stag shines like the constellation of the head of the stag (or gazelle, Mṛigaçiras), he suspects it to be an apparition of Marîćas, who, as a stag, has already caused the ruin of many other princes who have hunted him. The moon, in Sanskṛit, besides the name of Çaçadharas, or who carries the hare, has also that of Mṛigadharas, or who carries the gazelle (or stag). The solar hero loses himself in the forest of night while pursuing the gazelle-moon. A demoniacal gazelle seems to appear even in the Ṛigvedas, where Indras fights and kills a monster called Mṛigas. In Germanic tradition there are numerous legends in which the hero who hunts the stag meets with his death or is dragged into hell.[135]

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.

In the Tuti-Name,[136] 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.[137] The stag of the fable, after admiring itself in the fountain, 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 nocturnal 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 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 Usrâ, 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 Mṛigarâǵas, or king of the wild animals, no less than the lion, inasmuch as the moon succeeds the sun, one mṛigas 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, surprising 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 Häeffing. 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 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 Ælianos and Diodoros, nourished Telephos, son of Hêraklês (Hêraklês 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 Ægidius, the hermit who lived in the forest. There are numerous mediæval 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,[138] silver images of stags (cervi argentei) were placed in ancient Christian baptistries.

Among the customs of the primitive Christians condemned 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, 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, mṛigas, 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.[139] When the sky is dark, the hind, from being luminous, has become black, and, as such, is the most sinister of omens; sometimes, 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 transforms 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 Rutenian legend, published by Novosielski, the evening star (Lithuanian, vakerinne; Slavonic, većernitza, the evening aurora) prays its friend Lunus (the moon is masculine in Slavonic as in Sanskṛit) 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."

[CHAPTER 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.—Âiravanas and Âiravatas.—The elephant becomes diabolical.—Nâgas and nagas; çṛiñgṁ.—The monkeys fight against the elephants.—The elephant in the marsh.—The elephant and the tortoise; war between 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 contributed 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;[140] the horns of the antelopes, the tusks of the wild boar, the trunk and tusks of 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 strength[141]—to a wild elephant that, in the season of loves, is, on all hands, in a constant state of feverish agitation.[142] The god Agnis is invoked to come forth like a formidable king upon an elephant.[143]

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 conception of four elephants that support the four corners of the earth.[144] Indras, the pluvial god, rides upon an enormous elephant, Âiravatas or Âiravaṇas, the cloud or darkness itself, with its luminous eruptions; âiravatam and âiravatî are also appellations of the lightning. The elephant Âiravaṇas or Âiravatas 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 Râvaṇas, the monster king of Lañkâ, still bears the scars of the wounds given him by the elephant Airavatas, in the war between the gods and the demons,[145] although this same Râvaṇas boasts of having one day defeated Indras, who rode upon the elephant Âiravaṇas.[146]

But the mythical elephant did not always preserve the character of an animal beloved of the gods; after 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 mountain, 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 (ṛishayas, 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 mountain[147] (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 nâgas, elephant, and nagas, mountain and tree; the word cṛiñgin, 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 Sannâdanas was one day victorious over the elephant Âiravatas.[148] (The northern path of the moon is called âiravatapathâ.)

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 Râmâyaṇam,[149] 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 equivalent 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. . Therefore the eagle, or king of birds, or the bird Garuḍas, the solar bird, is represented as a mortal enemy now of the serpent, now of the elephant (the word nâgas means equally serpent and elephant; Âiravatas is also the name of a monstrous serpent), and now of the tortoise. In the Râmâyaṇam,[150] the bird Garuḍas 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 Mahâbhâratam,[151] 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 Garuḍas (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 Pańćatantram, 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 connected with the pluvial Indras; but when Indras fell, to give place to Brahman, Vishṇus, and Çivas, his elephant was also fated to become the prey of the bird of Vishṇus, of the bird Garuḍas (or the sun). In the fable of the Pańćatantram 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 and laid its eggs, which were broken in consequence. The Vishṇuitic legend of the Mahâbhâratam relating to the bird Garuḍas, which carries the elephant into the air, offers several other analogous and interesting particulars. The bird Garuḍas 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 Garuḍas 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. Kaçyapas Praǵâpatis, 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 mountain 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 Garuḍas, the steed of Vishṇus, which naturally makes war against the steed of Indras, the elephant.

[CHAPTER XI.]

THE MONKEY AND THE BEAR.

SUMMARY.

Monkey and bear are already associated together in India; Ǵambavant is a great monkey and the king of the bears.—Haris, kapis, kapilâ, kapidhvaǵas; ṛikshas, arkas, ursus, arktos, rakshas; the Great Bear; ṛishayas, harayas.—The Marutas as rivals of Indras; Vishṇus as Indras' rival; the monkeys allied to Vishṇus; the Vedic monster monkey killed by Indras; Haris or Vishṇus.—Harî mother of monkeys and horses.—Bâlin, king of the monkeys, son of Indras, defeated by his brother Sugrîvas, son of the sun.—Hanumant in opposition to Indras; Hanumant son of the wind; Hanumant as the brother of Sugrîvas; 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 Hiraṇyanabhas.—Hanumant makes himself as small as a cat in order to search for Sîtâ; Hanumant proves his power to Sîtâ by making himself as large as a cloud or a mountain; he massacres the monsters with a pillar; Dadhyańć, Hanumant, Samson; Hanumant bound; he sets fire to Lañkâ with his tail.—The monkey sacrificed to cure the burns of horses.—Sîtâ has a weakness for Hanumant.—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.—Triçañkus with the skin of a bear; the seven ṛishayas.—Ṛiksharâǵas; the moon as a reputed father.—Bears and monkeys in the forest of honey; Balarâmas; 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 Milôn; 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, ṛikshikâ.—Ivanko Medviedko.—Kalistos.—The bear as a musician.—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 Âryan 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 tenaciously 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 characteristics which more or less distinguish and meet in bears as well as in monkeys.

In the Râmâyaṇam, the wise Gâmbavant, the Odysseus of the expedition of Lañkâ, is called now king of the bears (ṛikshapârthivaḥ),[152] now great monkey (mahâkapiḥ).[153]

The word haris means fair, golden, reddish, sun, and monkey; the word kapis (probably, the changeful one) means monkey and sun. In Sanskṛit, the vidyut or thunderbolt, the reddish thunderbolt, of the colour of a monkey, is also called kapilâ. Arǵunas, the son of Indras, has for insignia the sun or a monkey, whence his name of Kapidhvaǵas.

Professor Kuhn also supposes that the word ṛikshas, which means bear and star, is derived from the root arć in the sense of to shine (arkas is the sun), on account of the reddish colour of the bear's skin.[154] But ṛikshas (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 Ṛigvedas, the Marutas are represented as the most powerful assistants of Indras; but a Vedic hymn already shows them in the light of Indras' rivals. The god Vishṇus in the Ṛigvedas 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 Vishṇuitic bird, of the wind, father of Hanumant, and of a monkey, as enemies of Indras' elephant. In Hindoo epic tradition, Vishṇus, personified in Râmas, has the monkeys for his allies. The most luminous and effulgent form of the god is very distinct from his occult and mysterious appearances. Vishṇus, 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 Ṛigvedas 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 Ṛigvedas, Vishṇus, personified in Kapis (monkey), or Vṛishâkapis (monkey that pours out, pluvial monkey), comes to destroy the sacrificial offerings loved by Indras. Indras, being superior to all, cuts off his head, as he wishes not to be indulgent to an evil-doer.[155] 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 Ṛigvedas as assisting the supreme deity. A difference having arisen between Vishṇus and Indras, and between the Marutas and Indras, the Marutas took Vishṇus' part, and became monkeys like Vishṇus,—the word haris, which is a favourite name of Vishṇus (now moon, now sun), meaning also monkey. Vishṇus surrounds himself with fair, reddish, 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. Râmas kapirathas is simply an incarnation of Vishṇus, who usurps the rights of Indras, which last, as we have seen, had lent his harayas to Vishṇus, in order that he might take his three famous steps. Evidently Vishṇus forgot to return the fair-haired ones to his friend; hence from this time the strength of Indras passes almost entirely into Vishṇus, who, in the form of Râmas, 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 Lañkâ. The Mahâbhâratam informs us that monkeys and horses had Harî for their mother.[156] The splendid Marutas form the army of Indras, the red-haired monkeys and bears that of Râmas; and the mythical and solar nature of the monkeys and bears of the Râmâyaṇam manifests itself several times. The king of the monkeys is a sun-god. The ancient king was named Bâlin, and was the son of Indras (Çakrasûnus). His young brother, Sugrîvas, he who changes his shape at pleasure (kâmarûpas), who, helped by Râmas, usurped his throne, is said to be own child of the sun (bhâskarasyâurasaḥ putraḥsûryanandanah).[157] Here it is evident that the Vedic antagonism between Indras and Vishṇus 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 have already seen that the legend of the two brothers, Bâlin and Sugrîvas, is one of the forms which the myth of the Açvinâu assumes. Râmas, who treacherously kills the old king of the monkeys, Bâlin, is the equivalent of Vishṇus, who hurls his predecessor, Indras, from his throne; and Sugrîvas, the new king of the monkeys, resembles Indras when he promises to find the ravished Sîtâ, in the same way as Vishṇus, in one of his incarnations, finds again the lost Vedâs. And there are other indications in the Râmâyaṇam[158] of opposition between Indras and the monkeys who assist Râmas. The great monkey Hanumant, of the reddish colour of gold (hemapiñgalah), has his jaw broken, Indras having struck him with his thunderbolt, and caused him to fall upon a mountain, 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.[159] (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 represents 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 monkeys[160] (kapikuńǵaras), now keçarin, the long-haired sun, the sun with a mane, the lion sun (whence his name of keçariṇaḥ putraḥ). From this point of view, Hanumant would seem to be the brother of Sugrîvas, 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 Bâlin, Hanumant, and Sugrîvas brothers, now Râmas, Hanumant, and Lakshamaṇas. 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 between 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 vrishâkapis), 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 (ǵîmûta iva garǵati), and the shadow that he leaves behind him in the air resembles a line of clouds (megharâǵîva vâyuputrânugâminî);[161] he draws the clouds after him.[162] Thus all the epic monkeys of the Râmâyaṇam 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 (vâyuvegasamâs), changing their shape at pleasure (kâmarûpiṇas), 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 Bâlin, the king of the monkeys, comes out of the cavern, as the sun out of the cloud (toyadâdiva bhâskaraḥ).[163]

In the same way as we have seen the harayas, or horses of Indras, the gandharvâs, and the mythical ass in connection with the salutary waters, with the herbs, and with the perfumes, so in the Râmâyaṇam 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 perceives this shadow, and by it attracts Hanumant to himself. (We have already seen the fearless hero who is misled by his own shadow and lost.) Hanumant is kâmarûpas, like Sugrîvas, 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 proportions; when she does so, Hanumant (repeating the miracle of his type Haris, or the dwarf Vishṇus), becomes as small as a man's thumb, enters into the vast body of the monster, and comes out on the other side. Hanumant continues to fly across the ocean, in order to arrive at the island of Lañkâ. The ocean takes pity upon him, and, to help him, raises up Mount Hiraṇyanabhas, i.e., of the golden navel, the mountain whence the sun comes out; indeed, Hanumant says[164] 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 Siṅhikâ (the mother of Râhus, the eclipse with a serpent'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.[165] When he arrives in Lañkâ, Hanumant, that he may search for and find Sîtâ by moonlight, becomes as small as a cat (vṛishadaṅçapramâṇas); when he finds her, and offers to carry her away from Lañkâ, she cannot believe that so small an animal is able to accomplish so great an enterprise; then Hanumant makes himself as tall as a black cloud, as a high mountain; he breaks down the whole forest of açokâs, mounts upon a temple that stands on a thousand columns, claps his hands, and fills all Lañkâ with the din; he tears from the temple a pillar adorned with gold, and, swinging it around, devotes the monsters to wholesale slaughter.[166] The mythical monkey and the mythical ass resemble each other; hence the analogy between the legend of Dadhyańć (quoted in the second chapter), that of Samson, and that of Hanumant. But the legend of the monkey Hanumant presents another curious resemblance to that of Samson. Hanumant is bound with cords by Indraǵit, son of Ravaṇas;[167] he could easily free himself, but does not wish to do so. Ravaṇas, to put him to shame, orders his tail to be burned, because the tail is the part most prized by monkeys (kapînâṁ kila lâñgulam ishṭam, 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 Lañkâ. But Sîtâ 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 burning to ashes the city of Lañka.[168] (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 enterprise of the Marutas in the Ṛigvedas, and that of the monkey Hanumant in the Râmâyaṇam, assume such dimensions that they obscure the fame of both Indras and Râmas; the former without the Marutas, the latter without Hanumant, would be unable to defeat the monsters. Sîtâ perceives this so clearly, that, at the end of the poem, she makes Hanumant such a present that Râmas might well become jealous. Hanumant, however, is an honest and pious cavalier; it suffices him to have 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;[169] they weep (rodanti) for others. The same is true of the Rudrâs, 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; nevertheless, they themselves afterwards feel, as solar rays, the benefit of weeping, that is, of rain. In the Râmâyaṇam, 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 Balarâmas, who, in the Vishṇu P.,[170] destroys the demon Dvividas, who had taken the form of a monkey. In the eighteenth story of the first book of the Pańćatantram, 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 communicated by the wool of a ram which the cook had chased away from the kitchen with a burning brand) to a 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 incendiary 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 presage 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 the Molossians 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 Rome 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 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:—

"Malo verrat humum quam sit tibi causa decoris,
Quam tegat immundas res bene munda nates."

In India the analogy between the monkey and the ass, as a stupid animal, is of still more frequent occurrence. In the Pańćatantram we have the monkeys who try to warm themselves by the light of the glowworm; a monkey presuming to correct the handiwork of a carpenter, meets with its death by putting its hands into the cleft of a tree trunk, and heedlessly withdrawing the wedge that caused it. In the Tuti-Name,[171] we find a variety of the story of the ass and the lyre, i.e., the wise Sâz-Perdâz, who learns from the monkey, assisted by the wind, the way to form musical instruments. (The thundering cloud is the mythical musical instrument par excellence; it is the wind that moves it, it is the wind that makes it sound: the hero in the cloud, gandharvas, ass or monkey, is a musician.)

The strong, powerful, and terrible bear of the Marutas,[172] or winds, in the stormy, lightning and thundering cloud, is already mentioned in the Vedic hymn. So the constellation of the she-bear[173] seems also to be referred to in them. In the Râmâyaṇam,[174] we find in connection with it the legend of King Triçañkus, who, cursed by the sons of Vasishṭhas, becomes a ćandalas, covered with the skin of a bear (ṛikshaćarmanivâsî). Viçvâmitras, the rival of Vasishṭhas, promises to introduce it into heaven, under cover of his own body; but Indras scorns to admit it, and indignantly spurns it, hurling it down heels over head. Viçvâmitras arrests it in its descent as it falls with its head downmost, within the constellation of the seven ṛishayas or wise men, that is to say, in the constellation of the Great Bear. And as the bear is in relation with the polar constellation, with the north, the frigid regions, the winter and the stars, so the moon, who rules particularly over the cold night in the icy season, is called in Sanskṛit ṛiksharâǵas and ṛiksheças, or king of the luminous ones, king of the stars, king of the bears. The king of the bears also takes part in the expedition to Lañka. The king of the bears (here in relation to the moon) is the eunuch, the reputed, father, the St Joseph, of the king of the monkeys, Sugrîvas, who was, on the contrary, really generated in the bosom of the wife of the bear-king, by the magnanimous sun.[175] Led on by the bear or monkey Gâmbavant, the king of the bears (ṛikshapârthivas), the monkeys enter into the forest of the honey (madhuvanam), guarded by the monkey Dadhimukhas (mouth of butter, generated by Somas, the ambrosial god Lunus),[176] and devastate and ransack the forest in order to suck its honey.[177] In the Vishṇu P.,[178] even Balarâmas, brother of the god Kṛishnas, makes himself drunk with the spirituous liquor contained in the fissure of a tree.

The bear-eater of honey is an extremely popular subject of Russian tradition; the very name of the bear, medv-jed, means in Russian, "he who eats honey" (miod is honey, and iest to eat; but the form medv [medu] is more perfectly equivalent to the Hindoo madhu = the sweet honey ambrosia; the bear in the madhuvanam corresponds entirely to the medvjed or bear who eats honey of the Russians). In a Slavonic story referred to by Afanassieff in the observations to the first book of the Russian stories, the bear, deceived by the hare, is left shut up in the trunk of a tree. A peasant passes by; the bear begs him to deliver it from this trunk, promising to show him a bee-hive, and beseeching him not to tell any one that a hare had deceived it. The peasant frees the bear; the bear shows the bee-hive, the peasant takes the honey and goes home.[179] The bear goes and listens at the door to overhear the conversation. The peasant narrates how he had procured the honey by means of a bear who, following a hare, had been caught in a tree. The bear determines to have its revenge. One day it finds the peasant in the field, and is about to fall upon and rend him,[180] when the fox makes its appearance, shakes its tail, and says to the peasant, "Man, thou hast ingenuity in thy head, and a stick in thy hand." The peasant immediately understands the stratagem. He begs the bear to let him perform his devotions first; and offers, as a devotion, instead of doing penance, to carry the bear, shut up in a sack, three times round the field, after which the bear is to do with him whatever it likes. The bear, proud of being carried by the man,[181] enters into the sack; the man binds it strongly, and then beats it so with his stick that it dies.

The bear, representing usually the luminous one in the darkness, has frequently in Slavonic tradition a demoniacal character,[182] or else that of a fool, like the ass. In the first of the Russian stories, the fox terrifies the bear, and then delivers the peasant from it. (The peasant in popular rustic narratives is almost always a heroic personage, who becomes a wiseacre and a prince.) The peasant cheats his companion, the bear, twice: when they sow turnips together, the peasant reserves for himself whatever grows underground, and leaves to the bear whatever comes out of the earth and appears above; when they sow wheat, the bear, thinking to be very knowing, takes for his own part what grows under, and gives to the peasant what grows above the ground. The peasant is about to be devoured by the bear, when the fox comes to the rescue.[183] In the first story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the fox goes to pass the winter in the bear's den, and devours all the provision of hens that the bear had laid up. The bear asks what it is eating, and the fox makes him believe that it is taking meat from its own forehead. The bear asks whether it is good, upon which the fox gives him some to taste; the bear then tries also to take meat from his forehead, and dies; thus the fox has enough to eat for a year.

The romance of the fox also presents to us the fox in opposition to the bear, whom he induces to put his paws into the cleft of the trunk of a tree, as happened to the Hindoo monkey of the Pańćatantram. In the Russian story,[184] instead of the fox, we have the peasant, and instead of the monkey and the bear, we have the gentleman (who in the poor man's eyes is often a personification of the demon) who is caught by his hands in the fissure of a tree. The peasant revenges himself in this way upon the gentleman who had, after having bought from others a little canary for fifteen roubles, refused to buy from him a large goose for a hundred roubles. The very strong athlete Milôn of Kroton, who in one day used to eat an ox four years old, a legendary hero, is torn to pieces by wild beasts, having been caught by the hands in the crevice of a log which he was splitting. Animal and hero continually alternate in myths. In the fourth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, the peasant meets with his death on account of the funereal and demoniacal storks and the bear. The peasant binds himself to his waggon in order not to fall off; the horse wishes to drink, and drags the waggon into a well. The bear, being pursued, passes by, falls unexpectedly into the well, becomes involved with the waggon, and, in order to extricate himself, is constrained to drag out waggon, peasant, and all. Soon afterwards the bear, in search of honey, climbs up a tree; another peasant passes, sees the bear upon the tree, and wishing to secure the animal, cuts down the tree; bear and waggon fall down, and the peasant is killed, whilst the bear releases itself and escapes. The bear which is looking for honey and the bear in the well remind us of the asinus in unguento, and of the ass in the roses: the ass who is the friend of the gardener or of the priest of Flora and Pomona, in the fable of La Fontaine,[185] has the same signification. In the twenty-eighth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, King Bear lies hidden in a fountain (we have already seen the Hindoo monkey that draws a king into a fountain, into the monster's jaws); a king goes to hunt; feeling thirsty, he wishes to drink at this fountain; the bear clutches him by the beard, and only releases him on condition that he will give up in his stead whatever he has at home without knowing it (this is a variation of the story of Hariçćandras). The king consents, and returning home, learns that twins, named Ivan and Maria, are born to him. To save them from the bear, their father has them lowered into a subterranean cavern, well furnished and very deep, which he supplies with abundant provisions. The twins grow up healthy and strong; the king and queen die, and the bear comes to search for the twins. He finds in the royal palace a pair of scissors, and asks them where the king's sons are; the scissors answer, "Throw me upon the ground in the courtyard; where I fall, there search." The scissors fall over the very place under which Ivan and Maria are concealed. The bear opens the ground with his paws, and is about to devour the young brother and sister; they beg for their lives, and the bear spares them, at sight of the abundance of hens and geese provided for them. The bear then resolves to take them into his service; they twice attempt in vain to escape, the first time with the help of a hawk, the second with that of an eagle: at last a bull succeeds in releasing them. Pursued by the bear, they throw down a comb, and an impenetrable forest springs up; the bear lacerates and wounds himself all over in passing through. Ivan then spreads out a towel which makes a lake of fire; at this sight the bear, who is afraid of being burned, who does not like heat, but, on the contrary, prefers cold, goes back.

In the twenty-seventh story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, a demoniacal bear with iron hairs, devastates a whole kingdom, devouring all the inhabitants; Ivan Tzarević and Helena Prekrasnaia alone remain; but the king has them placed with provisions upon a high pillar (a new form of Mount Hiraṇyanabhas, whence the sun issues forth, which comes up from the bottom of the sea, and upon which the great monkey Hanumant places himself. The bear is also found in connection with a gem in the Vishnu P.[186]) In the Tuti-Name,[187] the carpenter teaches two bears to take their food upon a statue which is a perfect image of his companion the miserly goldsmith, who had defrauded him of some money. By means of the bears, whom he represents as the two sons of the goldsmith who had run away from him, he terrifies him. The goldsmith, perceiving the carpenter's craftiness, gives him back his money. The famished bear approaches the pillar. Ivan throws him down some food; the bear, after having eaten, goes to sleep.[188] While he sleeps, Ivan and Helena flee away upon a horse; the bear awakes, overtakes them, brings them back to the pillar, and makes them throw him down some food, after which he again goes to sleep. The young brother and sister then try to escape upon the backs of geese; the bear again wakens, overtakes them, burns the geese, and takes Ivan and Helena back to the pillar. Having a third time supplied the bear with food, it is again overcome by sleep; this time the deliverer comes in the shape of a bull, who blinds the bear with his horns, and throws him into a stream, where he is drowned. In the same story, the demon, wishing to expose Ivan to certain death, sends him to search for the milk of a she-bear.[189] The demon appears again in the form of a bear in the fiftieth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, where the dog of a soldier rends him to pieces. But although the bear is demoniacal, the bear's cub, on the other hand, helps the hero.[190] In the eleventh story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, a woman who is gathering mushrooms loses herself and enters into the bear's den—the bear takes her to himself. We have already seen the bear that plays at blind-man's-buff with the mouse, thinking that he is playing with the beautiful maiden. The wind Rudras and Æolus, king of the winds, we have already seen, in the first chapter of this book, to be passionately fond of beautiful nymphs. In a Norwegian story (a variation of that of the White Cat), in Asbiörnsen, the hero is disguised as a bear, and becomes a beautiful young man by night. His wife, by her indiscreet curiosity, i.e., because she had wished to see him by lamplight, loses him, and her place is taken by the long-nosed princess, until, with the help of a golden apple and a horse, she is able to find her husband again. In the sixth story of the second book of the Pentamerone, it is, on the other hand, the girl Pretiosa who, to escape the embraces of her father, goes into the forest disguised as a she-bear. A young prince, the son of the king of the water, becomes enamoured of her, and takes her to the palace. The prince becomes ill for love of the she-bear; she assists him and cures him. While he is kissing her, she becomes a beautiful girl ("la chiù bella cosa de lo Munno"). We learn from two mediæval writings quoted by Du Cange (s. v. Ursus), that it was already the custom in the Middle Ages to lead the bear round to make him play indecent games ("Nec turpia joca cum urso vel tornatricibus ante se facere permittat"), and that hairs of a bear stained in some ointment used to be sold, "Tamquam philacteria, ad depellendos morbos, atque, adeo oculorum fascinos amoliendos." The Athenians called she-bears the virgins sacred to the chaste Artemis, the friend of closed places; and to this, it would appear, must also be referred the interesting Christian legend of the virgin St Ursula,[191] whom Karl Simrock identifies with the demoniacal, funereal, somniferous, death-bringing Holda. Were this identification accepted, Ursula would be, moreover, in close ideal and etymological relation with the Vedic monster Ṛikshikâ.

But to return to the Russian story, the woman who enters into the bear's den unites herself with him, and subsequently gives birth to a son, who is a man down to the waist, and a bear from the waist downwards. His mother, therefore, names him Ivanko-Medviedko (Little John, the son of the bear). This half-man half-bear becomes a cunning animal, and cheats the devil, making him fight with the bear, and persuading him to think that the bear is his middle brother (that is, the strong brother). In a Danish tradition we read of a girl violated by a bear, who gives birth afterwards to a monster. According to the Hellenic myth, the nymph Kalistos, daughter of King Lykaon, violated by Zeus, is changed by Juno or by Artemis into a she-bear, gives birth to Arkas, and, being killed with her son by shepherds, is converted into a star.

The cunning bear appears again as a musician (like the ass) in the seventeenth story of the third book of Afanassieff, where he sings so well that he deceives the old shepherdess, and succeeds in carrying off her sheep. In a note to the ninth Esthonian story of Kreutzwald, Herr Löwe observes, that in the Northern languages, the god of thunder and the bear are synonymous. The bear, the monkey, the ass, and the bull (all of which are personifications of the cloud), form a musical quartette in a fine fable of Kriloff. The bear is made to dance like the monkey,[192] the ass, and the gandharvas, his mythical equivalent. In the same way as the ass's skin chases away fear, the eye of a bear dried and hung upon a child's neck preserves from fear.[193] In the legends of the saints, especially of the hermits, to whom the bear, inspired by God, often gives up his den in obedience to their commands, we read of St Maximin that he transformed a bear into an ass because he had eaten an ass that carried a load.

In the nineteenth fable of the twelfth book of La Fontaine, the monkey appears as a messenger of Jove, with the caduceus, to

"Partager un brin d'herbe entre quelques fourmis;"

while two enormous animals, the elephant and the rhinoceros, are contending for the superiority. The monkey, as Mercury, as an intermediate and mediating form between two heroic similar animals, comes near to the knowing fox, the reddish colour of which (as well as of the bear) it partakes of. It is no longer the pure fair sun of day, and it is not yet the black monster of night; it is too black to be red, and too red to be black; it has all the cunning of the devils, and is acquainted with all the habits of the saints. The monkey, the imitator of man (a Darwinist would say his progenitor), partakes, like man, of the nature of the brutish demon and of the intelligent god.

[CHAPTER XII.]

THE FOX, THE JACKAL, AND THE WOLF.

SUMMARY.

Lopâças, lopâçikâ.—The jackal takes in Hindoo tradition the place of the fox.—What the fox represents in mythology, and why the jackal is his mythical equivalent.—Double aspect of the mythical fox, in connection with the cock and in connection with the wolf, turned towards the day and towards the night, now friendly, now hostile to the hero.—The fox deceives all the other animals, in order to have all the prey to itself.—The fox is the monster's enemy.—The blue jackal.—The inquisitive jackal.—The avenging jackal.—The astute fox; the woman more cunning than the fox.—The fox's skin.—The buttered tail of the jackal.—The fox eats the honey, the butter, or the cake belonging to the wolf, and then accuses him.—The fox sends the wolf to fish.—The fox eats the woman whom he had promised to bring to life.—The fox as a mourner.—The peasant ungrateful to the fox.—"Cauda de vulpe testatur."—The fox eats the bear; the bird feeds the fox, and afterwards draws it in among the dogs.—Former hospitality is to be forgotten.—The fox as the cat's wife.—The round cheese of the myth is the moon.—The fox steals the fishes.—The fox is of every profession.—The grateful fox enriches the poor hero.—King Fire and Queen Loszna.—The house of the fox and that of the hare.—The fox deceives the cock; the cock deceives the fox.—The fox's tail in the beaks of the chickens.—The fox's malice; the ideal of a prince according to Macchiavelli; fox and serpent.—The fox cheats almost all the animals; it does not, however, succeed in cheating the other foxes, and sometimes not even the lion.—The Catholic Church furnishes new types for the legend of the fox.—Union of the fox with the wolf.—Diverse nature of the wolf.—The red wolf.—The thieving wolf.—The wolf (or the devil) and the fishes; the fish in shallow water.—The dog and the wolf.—The wolf as a shepherd.—Wolf's belly.—The good wolf and the good maiden.—The son of the wolf understands the language of birds.—The she-wolf as a nurse; she-wolves and strumpets.—Disguises in a wolf's skin.—Wolf-hunter.—The wolf's shadow.—Wolves that chastise in the name of God; sanctified wolves.—The dead wolf; the wolf's skin.—Diabolical wolves.—The white wolf.—Wulfesheofod.—Ysengrin.—The wolf sings psalms.—The cunning of the wolf.—The wolf's tail.—The dwarf in the wolf's body; the dwarf in the wolf's sack.—The she-wolf at Rome.—Dante's she-wolf.

The fox is scarcely spoken of once in the Ṛigvedas by the name of lopâças (alôpêx), as penetrating to the old Western lion; this word (like lopâkas, which is interpreted in the Petropolitan Dictionary as "a kind of jackal") seems to mean properly "the destroyer" (according to Professor Weber, Aasfresser). The Sanskṛit language also gives us the diminutive lopâçikâ, which is interpreted as the female of a jackal and as the fox (vulpecula). The legendary fox, however, is generally represented in Hindoo tradition by the jackal, or canis aureus (sṛigâlas, kroshṭar, gomâyus, as a shouter). The fox is the reddish mediatrix between the luminous day and the gloomy night: the crepuscular phenomenon of the heavens taking an animal form, no form seemed more adapted to the purpose than that of the fox or the jackal, on account of their colour and some of their cunning habits: the hour of twilight is the time of uncertainties and of deceits. Professor Weber[194] supposes that all the cunning actions attributed to the jackal in Hindoo fables were taken on loan from the fox of Hellenic fables. We must certainly assign no undue importance to the expressions vańćakas and mṛigadhûrtakas (the cheater of animals), given in Hindoo lexicons to the jackal, inasmuch as these lexicons are not of very remote antiquity; but at the same time we must confess, that the cunning of the fox has been exaggerated by popular superstition as much as the stupidity of the ass, for a mythical reason, and from tradition, far more than by the observation of exceptional habits in these animals, which could easily be identified in mythology, in which, as I have already observed, some few gross and accidental similarities are enough to cause the same phenomena to be represented by animals of a very different genus. Thus the hairy reddish bodies of the bear and the monkey, and certain postures which they assume in common, are enough to make us understand how they are sometimes substituted for each other in legends; for the same reason, to the monkey and to the bear are attributed some of the enterprises for which the legendary fox is celebrated. How much greater, therefore, must have been the confusion which arose between the canis vulpes (the reddish fox) and the canis aureus (or jackal), animals which agree in showing themselves towards night, in feeding upon little animals, in having skins of the same colour, who have very bright eyes, and several other zoological characteristics in common?

The legendary fox (or the jackal, which is its mythical equivalent) has, like nearly all mythical figures, a double aspect. As it represents the evening, and as the sun is represented as a bird (the cock), the fox, the proverbial enemy of chickens, is, in the sky too, the robber and devourer of the cock, and as such the natural enemy of the man or hero, who ends by showing himself to be more cunning than it is, and by effecting its ruin. The fox cheats the cock in the evening, and is cheated by the cock in the morning. It is therefore an animal of demoniacal nature, when considered as the devourer or betrayer of the sun (cock, lion, or man), in the form of the red western sky, or of the evening aurora, and as being killed or put to flight by the sun itself (cock, lion, or man), in the form of the red eastern sky, or the morning aurora.[195] We have already seen, in the first chapter of this work, the aurora both as a wise girl and a perverse one; in its animal metamorphosis, the fox reproduces this aspect. But the aurora has not this mythical aspect alone. If, as she is turned towards or against the sun, she is supposed to be the killer of the luminous day in the evening, and to be chased away by the luminous day in the morning, she also, when considered as turning towards or against the night, assumes a heroic and sympathetic aspect, and becomes the friend and assister of the solar hero or animal against the wolf of the darkness of night. In these two mythical aspects is contained and explained all the essential legendary story of the fox, to narrate which, as far as it concerns Western tradition, volumes have already been written. I shall limit myself to culling and summarising from Oriental and Slavonic tradition their chief characteristics, in order to compare them briefly with the most generally known particulars of Western legendary lore; as it seems to me that when I shall have shown the double nature of the fox in mythology, as representing the two auroras, when I shall have proved that the sun is personified now as a hero, now as a cock, and now as a lion, and the night as a wolf, it will be easy to refer to this interpretation the immense variety of legendary subjects to which, on account of the smaller proportions to which I have been obliged to reduce this work, I shall be unable to allude.

In the Mahâbhâratam,[196] a learned jackal, who has finished his studies, associates with the ichneumon, the mouse, the wolf, and the tiger, but only in order to cheat them all. He makes the tiger kill a gazelle, and then sends all the animals to bathe before eating it. Then, when the tiger returns, he makes him run after the mouse, by representing it as having boasted that it had killed the tiger; he makes the mouse flee, persuading it that the ichneumon has bitten the gazelle, and that its flesh is therefore poisonous; he makes the wolf take to its heels, by informing it that the tiger is coming to devour it; he makes the ichneumon glad to escape, by boasting that he has vanquished the other three animals; then the jackal eats the whole gazelle himself. In the Pańćatantram,[197] the jackal cheats, in a similar manner, the lion and the wolf out of their part of a camel; we have already seen how it cheated the lion out of the ass. In the twentieth Mongol story, the fox stirs up discord between the two brothers, bull and lion, who kill each other in consequence.

In the Râmâyaṇam,[198] the jackal appears as the hero's friend, inasmuch as by howling, and vomiting fire, he is of sinister omen to the monster Kharas, who prepares to attack Râmas. In the Khorda-Avesta, a hero devoured by Agra-Mainyu, the god of the monsters, is named Takhmo-urupis, or Takhma-urupa, which means strong fox.

One of the most interesting fables, in a mythological point of view, is that of the jackal who, falling among pigments, comes out blue, or of opaline lustre, and passes himself off as a peacock of the sky. The animals make him their king, but he betrays himself by his voice: hearing other jackals howling, he howls also; upon which the lion, the real king of the beasts, tears him to pieces.[199] This is a variety of the ass dressed in the lion's skin, but yet more so of the crow that takes up and decks itself in the peacock's feathers; the black night shines as an azure sky, as sahasrâkshas (an appellation of Indras and of the peacock, as having a thousand eyes or stars). The evening aurora, the fox, transforms itself into the azure sky of night, until at morn, the deceit being exposed, the lion (i.e., the sun) rends the fox, and disperses the night and the aurora.

The Pańćatantram contains two other narratives relating to the legendary jackal—viz., the inquisitive and silly jackal, who, in an attempt to break the skin of a drum to see what is inside, breaks one of his teeth, and who, wishing to eat the string of a bow, has his mouth lacerated and dies;[200] and the vile jackal who, brought up among the lion's cubs, reveals his vulpine nature when he should have thrown himself with the two lions, his adoptive brothers, upon the elephant, but, instead of that, took to flight.[201] In the Tuti-Name,[202] the jackal desires to revenge himself upon the parrots, whom he judges indirectly implicated in the death of his young ones; up comes the lynx, who is astounded that the jackal, celebrated for its craftiness, is unable to devise a way of ruining the parrots. At last the lynx advises him to pretend being lame, and let himself be followed by a hunter as far as the abode of the parrots, at which place he will be able to skulk away, and the hunter, seeing the parrots, will set his nets and catch them.

In the Tuti-Name we also find several other particulars relating to the jackal, which will pass into the Russian stories of the fox.

The jackal makes the wolf come out of his den, which the latter had taken possession of, by calling the shepherd.[203] In another place, the cunning fox laughs at the stolid tiger, but the woman proves herself to be more cunning than the fox.[204] It is also in the Tuti-Name[205] that we read of a companion of the poor Abdul Meǵid, enamoured of the king's daughter, who teaches him how to enrich himself, or rather to appear rich, in order to wed her. In a much more scientific and interesting variety of this legend, in the Russian stories, it is, on the contrary, the fox who enriches the poor hero. The nineteenth Mongol story, in which the false hero makes his fortune by means of the spoils of a certain designated fox, is another intermediate form between the two traditions, the Hindoo and the Russian.

The name of a jackal in the Pańćatantram is Dadhi-puććhas, which means tail of butter, buttered tail (the aurora is ambrosial).

In the first of the stories of Afanassieff, the fox eats the honey belonging to the wolf (which reminds one of the sentence of Plautus, "Sæpe condita luporum fiunt rapinæ vulpium"[206]), and then accuses the wolf of having eaten it himself; the wolf proposes a sort of judgment of God; they are to go together to the sun, and he who pours out honey will be accounted guilty: they go and lie down; the wolf falls asleep, and when the honey comes out of the fox, he pours it upon the wolf, who, when he awakes, confesses his fault. In the first story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the cock and the hen bring ears of corn to the old man and poppies to the old woman; the old couple make a cake of them and put it out to dry.[207] Up come the fox and the wolf and take the cake, but finding that it is not yet dry, the fox proposes going to sleep whilst it is drying. While the wolf sleeps, the fox eats the honey that is in the cake, and puts dung in its place. The wolf awakens, and after him the fox too pretends to waken, and accuses the wolf of having touched the cake; the wolf protests his innocence, and the fox proposes, as a judgment of God, that they shall go to sleep in the sunshine; the wax will come out of him who has eaten the honey.[208] The wolf really goes to sleep, and the fox goes meanwhile to a neighbouring beehive, eats the honey, and throws the honeycombs upon the wolf, who, wakening from his slumbers, confesses his fault, and promises in reparation to give his share of the prey to the fox as soon as he procures any. In the continuation of the story, the fox sends the wolf to fish with his tail (the same as the bone of the dog) in the lake, and, after having made his tail freeze, feigns to be himself ill, and makes the wolf carry him, murmuring on the way the proverb, "He who is beaten carries him who is not beaten." In a variety of the same story, the fox eats the wolf's butter and flour; in another, the fox pretends to be called during the night to act as the rabbit's midwife, and eats the wolf's butter, accusing him afterwards of having eaten it himself; in order to discover the guilty one, they resolve upon trying the judgment by fire, before which the two animals are to go to sleep, and the one from whose skin the butter shall come out, is to be accounted guilty; whilst the wolf is asleep and snoring, the fox upsets the rest of the butter over him. In the seventh story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the fox promises to an old man to bring his wife to life again; he requests him to warm a bath, to bring flour and honey, and then to stand at the door without ever turning round to look at the bath; the old man does so, and the fox washes the old woman and then eats her, leaving nothing but the bones; he then makes a cake of the flour and honey, and eats that too, after which he cries out to the old man to throw the door wide open, and escapes. In the first story of the first book, the old man whose wife is dead goes to look for mourners; he finds the bear, who offers to do the weeping, but the old man thinks that he has not a sufficiently good voice; going on, he meets the fox, who also offers to perform the same service, and gives a good proof of his skill in singing (this particular would appear to be more applicable to the crying jackal than to the fox). The old man declares himself perfectly satisfied, and places the cunning beast at the foot of the corpse to sing a lament, whilst he himself goes to make the grave; during the old man's absence, the fox eats everything he finds in the house, and the old woman too. In the ninth story of the fourth book the fable ends otherwise; the fox does his duty as a weeper, and the old man rewards him by the gift of some chickens; the fox, however, demanding more, the old man puts into a sack two dogs and a chicken, and gives it to the fox, who goes out and opens the sack. The dogs run out and pursue him; he takes refuge in his den, but neglects to draw in his tail, which betrays him. "Cauda de vulpe testatur," said also the Latin proverb. In a variety of the first story of the first book, it is as a reward for having released the peasant from the bear that the fox receives a sack containing two hens and a dog. The dog pursues the fox, who takes to his hole, and then asks his feet what they have done; they answer that they ran away; he then asks his eyes and ears, which answer that they saw and heard; finally he asks his tail (here identified with the phallos), which, confused, answers that it put itself between his legs to make him fall. Then the fox, wishing to chastise his tail, puts it out of the hole; the dog, by means of it, drags out the whole fox, and tears him to pieces. In the fourth story of the third book, the fox delivers the peasant from, not the bear, but the wolf; the peasant then cheats him in the same way, by putting dogs into the sack; the fox escapes, and to punish his tail for impeding his flight, leaves it in the dog's mouth, and runs off; afterwards the fox is drowned by falling into a barrel which is being filled with water (the deed of the phallos; cfr. the chapter on the Fishes), and the peasant takes his skin. In another Russian story, recorded by Afanassieff in the observations to the first book of his stories, the fox, having delivered the peasant from the bear, asks for his nose in way of recompense, but the peasant terrifies him and puts him to flight. In a Slavonic story referred to in the same observations, the bird makes its nest, of which the fox covets the eggs; the bird informs the dog, who pursues the fox; the latter, betrayed by his tail, holds his usual monologue with his feet, eyes, ears, and tail. In the twenty-second story of the third book, the fox falls with the bear, the wolf, and the hare, into a ditch where there is no water. The four animals are oppressed by hunger, and the fox proposes that each should raise his voice in succession and shout his utmost; he who shouts feeblest will be eaten by the others. The hare's turn comes first, then that of the wolf; bear and fox alone remain. The fox advises the bear to put his paws upon his sides; attempting to sing thus, he dies, and the fox eats him. Being again hungry, and seeing a bird feeding its young, he threatens to kill the young birds unless the parent brings him some food; the bird brings him a hen from the village. The fox afterwards renews his threats, desiring the bird to bring him something to drink; the bird immediately brings him water from the village. Again the fox threatens to kill the young ones if the old bird does not deliver him out of the ditch; the bird throws in billets of wood, and thus succeeds in helping him out. Then the fox desires the bird to make him laugh; the bird invites him to run after it; it then goes towards the village, where it cries out, "Woman, woman, bring me a piece of tallow" (babka, babka, priniessi mnié sala kussók); the dogs hear the cry, come out, and rend the fox. In the twenty-fourth story of the third book, the fox again delivers the peasant from the wolf, whom he had shut up in a sack to save him from the persecution of the hunters. The wolf is no sooner out of danger than he wishes to eat the peasant, saying that "old hospitality is forgotten."[209] The peasant beseeches him to await the judgment of the first passer-by; the first whom they meet is an old mare who has been expelled from the stables on account of her age, after having long served her masters; she finds that the wolf's sentence is just. The peasant begs the wolf to wait for a second passer-by; this is an old black dog who has been expelled from the house after long services, because he can no longer bark; he also approves the wolf's decision. The peasant again begs them to wait for a third and decisive judgment; they meet the fox, who resorts to a well-known stratagem; he affects to doubt that so large an animal as the wolf could get into so small a sack. The wolf, mortified at so unjust a suspicion, wishes to prove that he has told the truth, re-enters into the sack, and is beaten by the peasant till he dies. But the peasant himself then proves ungrateful to the fox, saying, too, that old hospitality is to be forgotten (properly the hospitality of bread and salt, hlieb-sol). In the eighth story of the fourth book, the fox brings upon his back to her father and mother a girl who, having lost herself in the forest, was weeping upon a tree. The old man and woman, however, are not grateful to the fox; for on the latter asking for a hen in reward, they put him into a sack with a dog; the rest of the story is already known to the reader. In the twenty-third story of the fourth book, the fox marries the cat and puts the bear and the wolf to flight. We have already mentioned the fox of the Russian story who sends the wolf to catch fish in the river with his tail, by which means the tail is frozen off. In a popular Norwegian story, instead of the wolf, it is the bear who is thus cheated by the fox. In a Servian story, we hear of a fox who steals three cheeses off a waggon, and afterwards meets the wolf, who asks where he had found them. The fox answers, in the water (the sky of night). The wolf wishing to fish for cheeses, the fox conducts him to a fountain where the moon is reflected in the water, and points to it as a cheese; he must lap up the water in order to get at it. The wolf laps and laps till the water comes out of his mouth, nose, and ears (probably because he was drowned in the fountain. The wolf, the black monster of night, takes the place of the crow in connection with the cheese (the moon) and the fox; the Servian story itself tells us what the cheese represents[210]). In a Russian story, published in the year 1860, by the Podsniesznik, and quoted in the observations to the first book of the stories of Afanassieff, the fox is killed by a peasant whose fish he had stolen; the peasant takes his skin and goes off. Up comes the wolf, and seeing his god-father without a skin, weeps over him according to the prescribed ceremony, and then eats him. We have already seen the fox as a mourner and as a midwife. In the twentieth story of the third book of Afanassieff, the fox wishes to work as a blacksmith. In other Russian stories we have the fox-confessor and the fox-physician; finally, the fox as a god-mother is a very popular subject of Russian stories. In a Russian story, published in the fourth number of the Russian Historical and Juridical Archives of Kalassoff, the fox appears as a go-between for the marriage of two young men with two princesses. But, above all, the fox is famous for having brought about the wedding of the poor Buhtan Buhtanović and of his alter ego, Koszma Skorobagatoi (Cosimo the swiftly-enriched) with the daughter of the Tzar. Buhtan had only five kapeika (twopence in all). The fox has them changed, and asks the Tzar to lend him some bushels to measure the money with. These bushels are each time found too small, and larger ones are demanded, using which, the cunning fox always takes care to leave some small coin at the bottom. The Tzar marvels at the riches of Buhtan, and the fox then asks for Buhtan the Tzar's daughter to wife. The Tzar wishes first to see the bridegroom. How dress him? The fox then makes Buhtan fall into the mud near the king's palace whilst they are passing over a little bridge. He then goes to the Tzar, relates the misfortune, and begs him to lend him a dress for Buhtan. Buhtan puts it on, and never ceases regarding his changed appearance. The Tzar being astonished at this, the fox hastens to say that Buhtan was never so badly dressed before, and takes the first opportunity of warning him in private against conduct so suspicious. Then, withdrawn from himself, he does nothing but stare at the golden table, which again astonishes the Tzar; this is accounted for by the fox, who explains that in Buhtan's palace similar tables are to be found in the bath-room; meanwhile the fox hints to Buhtan to look more about him. The wedding ceremony is performed and the bride led away. The fox runs on before; but instead of leading them into Buhtan's miserable hut, he takes them to an enchanted palace, after having, by a trick, chased out of it the serpent, the crow, and the cock that inhabited it.[211]—Poor Kuszinka has only one cock and five hens remaining. He takes the fox by surprise whilst he is attempting to eat his hens, but moved by the fox's prayers, releases him. Then the grateful fox promises to transform him into Cosimo the swiftly-enriched. The fox goes into the Tzar's park and meets the wolf, who asks him how he is become so fat; he answers that he has been banqueting at the Tzar's palace. The wolf expresses a desire to go there too, and the fox advises him to invite forty times forty more wolves (that is 1600 wolves). The wolf follows his advice, and brings them all to the Tzar's palace, upon which the fox tells the Tzar that Cosimo the swiftly-enriched sends them to him as a gift. The Tzar marvels at the great riches of Cosimo; the fox uses the same stratagem twice again with the bears and the martens. After this, he asks the Tzar to lend him a silver bushel, pretending that all Cosimo's golden bushels are full of money. The Tzar gives it, and when the fox sends it back, he leaves a few small coins at the bottom, returning it with the request that the Tzar would give his daughter to Cosimo in marriage. The Tzar answers that he must first see the pretender to her hand. The fox then makes Cosimo fall into the water, and arrays him in robes lent by the Tzar, who receives him with every honour. After some time, the Tzar signifies his desire of visiting Cosimo's dwelling. The fox goes on before, and finds on the way flocks of sheep, and herds of hogs, cows, horses, and camels. He asks of all the shepherds to whom they belong, and is uniformly answered, "To the serpent-uhlan." The fox orders them to say that they belong to Cosimo the swiftly-enriched, or else they will see King Fire and Queen Loszna,[212] who will burn everything to ashes. He comes to the palace of white stone, where the king serpent-uhlan lives. He terrifies him in the same way, and compels him to take refuge in the trunk of an oak-tree, where he is burnt to death. Cosimo, the swiftly-enriched, becomes Tzar of all the possessions of the uhlan-serpent and enjoys them with his bride.[213] (I need not dwell upon the mythological importance of this story; the serpent consumed by fire is found in the most primitive myths; here the canis-vulpes, the red bitch, the fox seems to play part of the rôle of the Vedic messenger-bitch.)

In the first story of Afanassieff, the fox chases the hare, instead of the serpent, out of its home. The fox has a house of ice and the hare one of wood. At the arrival of spring, the fox's house melts; then the fox, under the pretext of warming itself, enters the hare's house and sends its occupant away. The hare weeps, and the dogs come to chase the fox away, but it cries out from its seat by the stove, that when it leaps out, whoever is caught will be torn into a thousand pieces; hearing which, the dogs run away in terror. The bear comes, and then the bull, but the fox terrifies them too. At last the cock comes up with a scythe, and loudly summons it to come out or be cut to pieces. The terrified fox jumps out and the cock cuts it to pieces with the scythe. In another story of Little Russia, mentioned by Afanassieff in the observations to the first book of his stories, the fox, on the contrary, is the victim which the hairy goat wishes to expel from its home. Several animals, wolf, lion, and bear, present themselves to help it, but the cock alone succeeds in expelling the intruder. Here the cock appears as the friend of the fox and the enemy of the goat. In the twenty-third story of the third book of Afanassieff, the fox defends the sheep against the wolf, who accuses it of having dressed itself in his skin, and brings about the ruin of the wolf by its craftiness. In the third story of the fourth book, the cat and the lamb release the cock from the fox; these contradictions are explained by the double mythical significance which we have attributed above to the fox, and by its double appearance as aurora in the evening and in the morning. In the evening, it generally cheats the hero; in the morning it cheats the monster. In the second story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the fox requests the cock to come down from a tree to confess itself to him. The cock does so, and is about to be eaten by the fox, but it flatters him so much that he lets it escape again. (The solar cock, supposed to be in the fox's power at night, escapes from it and comes forth again in the morning.) The third story of the fourth book gives us the interesting text of the words sung by the fox to deceive the cock:

"Little cock, little cock,
With the golden crest,
With the buttered head,
With the forehead of curdled milk!
Show yourself at the window;
I will give you some gruel
In a red spoon."[214]

The cock, when caught by the fox, invokes the cat's assistance, crying, "Me the fox has carried away; he carried away me, the cock, into the gloomy forest, into distant lands, into foreign lands, into the three times ninth (twenty-seventh) earth, into the thirtieth kingdom; cat Catonaiević, deliver me!"

The knavish actions of the fox, however, are far more celebrated in the West than in the East. A proverb says that, to write all the perfidious knaveries of the fox, all the cloth manufactured at Ghent, turned into parchment, would not be sufficient. This proverb justifies me in saying but little of it, as I am unable to say as much as I should wish. Greeks and Latins are unanimous in celebrating the sagacity and perfidy of the fox. The cynic Macchiavelli, in the eighteenth chapter of the Principe, asserts that a good prince must imitate two animals, the fox and the lion, (must, that is to say, have deceit and strength), but especially the fox; and this answers to the sentence attributed by Plutarch (in the Memorable Sayings of the Greeks) to Lysander, "Where the lion's skin does not suffice, put on that of the fox." Aristotle, in the ninth book of the History of Animals, also considers the fox as the serpent's friend, probably because of the analogy existing between them in respect of perfidiousness, according to another Greek saying, viz., "He who hopes to triumph, must arm himself with the strength of the lion and the prudence of the serpent." A proverbial Latin verse says—

"Vulpes amat fraudem, lupus agnam, fæmina laudem."

There is scarcely an animal which is not deceived by the fox in Greek and Latin fable; the fox alone does not succeed in deceiving the fox. In Æsop, the fox who has lost his tail in a trap endeavours to persuade the other foxes of the uselessness of that appendage; but the latter answer that he would not have given them such advice were he not aware that a tail is a useful member. The fox deceives the ass, giving it up as prey to the lion (as in the Pańćatantram); it deceives the hare by offering it as a prey to the dog, who, pursuing the hare, loses both hare and fox;[215] it deceives the goat, by cozening it into the well that it may escape out of it, and then leaving it there to its fate; it cheats in several ways now the cock, now the wolf; and it imposes upon even the powerful king of beasts, whom, however, he sometimes cannot deceive. A graceful apologue of Thomas Morus shows us the counterpart of the Hellenic fable of the fox and the sick lion, that is to say, the sick fox visited by the lion:—

"Dum jacet angusta vulpes ægrota caverna
Ante fores blando constitit ore leo.
Etquid, amica, vale. Cito, me lambente, valebis,
Nescis in lingua vis mihi quanta mea.
Lingua tibi medica est, vulpes ait, at nocet illud
Vicinos, quod habet, tam bona lingua, malos."

But when we come down to the Middle Ages, the fable of the fox develops into such manifoldness, that the study of all the phases in which it unfolds itself ought to be the subject of a special work.[216] Suffice it to notice here that, to popularise in Flanders, and subsequently in France and Germany, the idea of the fox as the type of every species of malice and imposture, it is the priest who, for the most part, is the human impersonation of the masculine Reinart. The Procession du Renart is famous; it was a farce conceived in 1313 by Philippe le Bel, on account of his quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII., and acted by the scholars of Paris. The principal personage was a man disguised in the skin of a fox, and wearing over all a priest's surplice, whose chief industry it was to give chase to chickens. This form of satire, however, directed against the Church, is certainly much older than those times, and goes back to the epoch of the first differences between the Church and the Empire in the eleventh century, at which time two mediæval Latin poems appeared, Reinardus Vulpes and Ysengrimus; with the schism of England and the Reformation of the sixteenth century, however, Reinardus Vulpes decisively became a Romish fox. The finesse and perfection of the satirical poem which S. Naylor, its English translator, calls "the unholy bible of the world," also increased the fox's popularity, and made it yet more proverbial. The principal subjects of the poem existed previously, not only in oral, but also in literary tradition; they were grouped together and put in order, and a more human, more malicious nature was given to the fox, a nature more hypocritical even than before, and more priestly, whence it now more than ever—

"Urbibus et castris regnat et ecclesiis."

Macchiavelli, St Ignazio di Loyola, and St Vincenzo de' Paoli took upon themselves the charge of propagating its type over the whole world.

The wolf is better, when he is a wolf, for then we know at least what he wants; we know that he is our enemy, and are accordingly on our guard; but he, too, sometimes disguises himself, by imposture or magic, as a sheep, a shepherd, a monk, or a penitent, like Ysengrin; and from this point of view resembles not a little his perfidious god-mother the fox; it is well known that amongst the exploits of Reinart there is that of his extra-matrimonial union with the she-wolf.

In the Ṛigvedas we already find several interesting mythical data concerning the wolf; he is in it entirely demoniacal, as the exhausted Vṛikas, to which, in a hymn, the Açvinâu give back its strength,[217] seems, as it appears to me, not to be the wolf, but the messenger crow which, during the night, must carry the solar hero.

As in the Zendic Vendidad,[218] the souls of good men, when on the way to heaven, are afraid of meeting the wolf, so in the Ṛigvedas, the devotee says that once the reddish wolf (which seems to be confounded here with the jackal or the fox) saw him coming on the way, and fled in terror;[219] he invokes the (luminous) night to send the wolf, the robber far away,[220] and the god Pûshan (the sun) to remove the evil wolf, the malignant spirit, from the path of the devotees, the wolf that besieges the roads, thieving, fraudulent, double-dealing.[221] The poet, after having called the enemy Vṛikas, prays, with imprecations, that he may lacerate his own body;[222] and the wild beast, full of witchcraft,[223] which Indras kills, is probably a wolf. But, besides this, I think I can find in the Ṛigvedas the lupus piscator of Russian and Western tradition; (according to Ælianos there were wolves friendly to fishermen near the Palus Mœotis.) In the fifty-sixth hymn of the eighth book, Matsyas (the fish) invokes the Âdityas (that is, the luminous gods) to free him and his from the jaws of the wolf. So in another strophe of the same hymn, we must in reason suppose that it is a fish that speaks when she who has a terrible son (i.e., the mother of the sun) is invoked as protectress from him who in the shallow waters endeavours to kill him.[224] We also find a fish lying in shallow water explicitly mentioned in another hymn;[225] which proves to us the image of the fish without water, which was widely developed in later Hindoo tradition, to have been in the Vedic age already a familiar one. We find the dog as the enemy of the wolf in the Hindoo words vṛikâris vṛikârâtis, and vṛikadanças. (In the thirteenth story of the fourth book of Afanassieff, the wolf wishes to eat the dog; the latter, who feels himself too weak to resist, begs the wolf to bring him something to eat, in order that he may become larger, and be more tender for the wolf's teeth; but when he is in good condition, he acquires strength and makes the wolf run. The enmity of the dog and the wolf was also made popular in the Æsopian fables.)

In the Râmâyaṇam,[226] we already meet with the proverbial expression of the sheep who do not increase when guarded by the wolf or jackal (rakshayamâṇâ na vardhante meshâ gomâyunâ).

In the Mahâbhâratam, the second of the three sons of Kuntî, the strong, terrible, and voracious Bhîmas, is called Wolf's-belly (Vṛikodaras, the solar hero enclosed in the nocturnal or winter darkness). Here the wolf has a heroic and sympathetic form, as in the Tuti-Name[227] he, although famished, shows compassion upon a maiden who travels to fulfil a promise; as in the same Tuti-Name[228] he helps the lion against the mice, and in the story of Ardschi Bordschi, the boy, son of a wolf, understands the language of wolves, and teaches it to the merchants with whom he lives; like the Russian she-wolf that gives her milk to Ivan Karoliević, in order that he may take it to the witch, his wife, who induced him to fetch it in the hope that he would thereby meet with his death;[229] and like the she-wolf of the fifteenth Esthonian story, who comes up on hearing the cry of a child, and gives its milk to nourish it. The story tells us that the shape of a wolf was assumed by the mother of the child herself, and that when she was alone, she placed her wolf-disguise upon a rock, and appeared as a naked woman to give milk to her child. The husband, informed of this, orders that the rock be heated, so that when the wolf's skin is again placed upon it, it may be burnt, and he may thus be able to recognise and take back to himself his wife. The she-wolf that gives her milk to the twin-brothers, Romulus and Remus, in Latin epic tradition, was no less a woman than the nurse-wolf of the Esthonian story.[230] The German hero Wolfdieterich, the wolves who hunt for the hero in Russian stories, sacred to Mars and to Thor as their hunting dogs, have the same benignant nature. (The evening aurora disguises herself in the night with a wolf's skin, nourishes as a she-wolf the new-born solar hero, and in the morning puts down her wolf's skin upon the fiery rock of the East, and finds her husband again.) What Solinus tells us of the Neuri, viz., that they transformed themselves into wolves at stated periods; and what used to be narrated of the Arcadians, to the effect that when they crossed a certain marsh, they became wolves for eight years,—suggests us a new idea of the zoological transformations of the solar hero.[231] In La Fontaine,[232] the shadow of the wolf makes the sheep flee in the evening. As a hero transformed, the wolf has a benignant aspect in legends. According to Baronius, in the year 617, a number of wolves presented themselves at a monastery, and tore in pieces several friars who entertained heretical opinions. The wolves sent by God tore the sacrilegious thieves of the army of Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, who had come to sack the treasure of the holy house of Loreto. A wolf guarded and defended from the wild beasts the head of St Edmund the Martyr, King of England. St Oddo, Abbot of Cluny, assailed in a pilgrimage by foxes, was delivered and escorted by a wolf; thus a wolf showed the way to the beatified Adam, in the same way as, in Herodotos, the wolves served as guides to the priests of Ceres. A wolf, having devoured two mares which drew a cart, was forced by St Eustorgius to draw the cart in their stead, and obeyed his orders. St Norbert compelled a wolf, first to let a sheep go after having clutched it, and then to guard the sheep all day without touching them. We read of the youth of the ancient Syracusan hero Hielon that, being at school, a wolf carried off his tablets in order to make him pursue it; no sooner was Hielon out, than the wolf re-entered the school, and massacred the master and the other scholars.

And even after his death the wolf is useful. The ancients believed that a wolf's hide, when put on by one who had been bitten by a mad dog, was a charm against hydrophobia. According to Pliny, wolf's teeth rubbed on the gums of children during teething relieves the pain (which is quite credible, but any other sharp tooth would serve the same purpose, by making the teeth cut sooner). In Sicily it is believed that a wolf's head increases the courage of whoever puts it on. In the province of Girgenti shoes are made of wolf's skin for children whom their parents wish to grow up strong, brave, and pugnacious. The animals themselves that are ridden by persons who wear these shoes are cured of their pain. The animal allupatu (that is, which has once been bitten by a wolf) becomes invulnerable, and never feels any other kind of pain. It is also believed in Sicily that when a wolf's skin is exposed in the open air, it causes drums to break when they are beaten. This superstition reminds us of the fable of the fox that kills itself by breaking the drum or biting the string of a bow; the mythical drum (that is, the cloud) is destroyed when the wolf's skin is taken off. In Æsop's fable, the wolf's skin is recommended by the fox as a cure for the sick lion.

But the wolf of tradition usually has a perverse or diabolical signification; and as the demon is represented now as a master of every species of perfidy and wickedness, and now as a fool, so is the wolf. In the Hellenic myth, Lycaon, King of Arcadia, became a wolf because he had fed upon human flesh. According to Servius, the wolves among the people, called for this reason Hirpini (the Sabine word hirpus meaning a wolf), carried off the entrails of the victim sacrificed to Pluto, and therefore brought down a pestilence upon the land. Wolves tore the hero Milôn to pieces in the forest. Wolves are an omen of death; the loup garou of popular French tradition is a diabolical form.[233] In the Edda, the two wolves Sköll and Hati wish to take, one the sun and the other the moon; the wolf devours the sun, father of the world, and gives birth to a daughter. He is then killed by Vidarr. Hati precedes the luminous betrothed of the sky; the wolf Fenris, son of the demoniacal Lokis, chained by the Ases, bites off the hand that the hero Tyr, as an earnest of the good faith of the Ases, had put into his mouth,[234] when chained to the western gate. Nanna, of the Pentamerone, after having travelled over the world, is disguised in the shape of a wolf, and changes in character and in colour, becoming malicious; the three sons of the Finns go to inhabit the Valley of the Wolf, near the Wolf's Lake, and find there three women spinning, who can transform themselves into swans. On Christmas Eve, the King Helgi meets a witch who rides upon a wolf, having eagles for bridles.[235] Wolves eat each other; the wolf Sinfiölti becomes a eunuch; the wolf who flees before the hero is an omen of victory, as well as the wolf who howls under the branches of an ash-tree. (The howling of the wolf, the braying of the ass, the hissing of the serpent, announce the death of the demoniacal monster; this howling must necessarily take place in the morning, or the spring, when the hero has recovered his strength, as the Edda says that "a hero must never fight towards sunset)." If Gunnar (the solar hero) loses his life, the wolf becomes the master of the treasure, and of the heritage of Nifl; the heroes roast the wolf. All these legendary particulars relating to the wolf in the Edda concur in showing us the wolf as a gloomy and diabolical monster. The night and the winter is the time of the wolf spoken of in the Voluspa; the gods who enter, according to the German tradition, into wolves' skins, represent the sun as hiding himself in the night, or the snowy season of winter (whence the demoniacal white wolf of a Russian story,[236] in the midst of seven black wolves). Inasmuch as the solar hero becomes a wolf, he has a divine nature; inasmuch, on the contrary, as the wolf is the proper form of the devil, his nature is entirely malignant. The condemned man, the proscribed criminal, the bandit, the utlagatus or outlaw, were said in the Middle Ages to wear a caput lupinum (in England, wulfesheofod; in France, teste lœue). The wolf Ysengrin, descended partly from the Æsopian wolf, and partly from Scandinavian myths, which were propagated in Germany, Flanders, and France, possesses much of the diabolical craftiness of the fox; he usually adopts against sheep the same stratagems which the fox makes use of to entrap chickens. The French proverb makes the fox preach to the fowls; the Italian proverb makes the wolf sing psalms when he wishes to ensnare the sheep. As we have seen the jackal and the fox confounded in the East, so Reinart and Ysengrin are sometimes identified by their cunning in Western tradition. A recent French writer, who had observed the habits of the wolf, says that he is "effrayant de sagacité et de calcul."[237] In the second story of the second book of Afanassieff, the same wizard-wolf who knew how to imitate the goat's voice to deceive the kids, goes to the house of an old man and an old woman, who have five sheep, a horse, and a calf. The wolf comes and begins to sing. The old woman admires the song, and gives him one sheep, then the others, then the horse, next the calf, and finally herself. The old man, left alone, at last succeeds in hunting the wolf away. In the preceding story, where the animals accuse each other, the demoniacal wolf, when his turn comes, accuses God. We have already spoken of the wolf who, by the order of St Eustorgius, draws the cart instead of the mares which he had eaten. In the twenty-fifth story of the third book of Afanassieff, the wolf comes up to the sleeping workman, and smells him; the workman awakes, takes the wolf by the tail,[238] and kills him. Another time the same workman, when he goes with his father to the chase, after having enriched himself with money which he had taken from three brigands who had hidden it in a deserted mill, meets again with two wolves who eat the horses, but, entangling themselves in the reins, they are compelled to draw the car home again themselves; here, therefore, we have the miracle of St Eustorgius reduced to its natural mythical proportions. Here, evidently, the wolf begins to show himself as a stupid animal; the demon teaches his art to the little solar hero in the evening, and is betrayed by the hero himself in the morning; the fox cheats the solar cock in the evening, and is deceived by it in the morning; the wolf succeeds by his wickedness in the evening, and is ruined in the morning. We have already mentioned the Norwegian story of the little Schmierbock, who, put into a sack by the witch, twice makes a hole in the sack and escapes, and the third time makes the witch eat her own daughter. Schmierbock is the ram; the witch or night puts him into the sack. In the Piedmontese story,[239] and in the Russian one, instead of Schmierbock, we have Piccolino (the very little one), and the Small Little Finger (malćik-s palćik, that is, the little finger, which is the wise one, according to popular superstition). The Russian story is as follows: An old woman, while baking a cake (the moon), cuts off her little finger and throws it into the fire. From the little finger in the fire, a dwarf, but very strong son, is born, who afterwards does many wonderful things. One day he was eating the tripe of an ox in the forest; the wolf passes by, and eats dwarf and tripe together. After this, the wolf approaches a flock of sheep, but the dwarf cries out from within the wolf, "Shepherd, shepherd, thou sleepest and the wolf carries off a sheep." The shepherd then chases the wolf away, who endeavours to get rid of his troublesome guest; the dwarf requests the wolf to carry him home to his parents; no sooner have they arrived there than the dwarf comes out behind and catches hold of the wolf's tail, shouting, "Kill the wolf, kill the grey one." The old people come out and kill it.[240] The mythical wolf dies now after only one night, now after only one winter of life. To the mythical wolf, however, bastard sons were born, who, changing only their skin, succeeded in living for a long period among mortals in the midst of civil society, preserving, nevertheless, their wolf-like habits. The French proverb says, "Le loup alla à Rome; il y laissa de son poil et rien de ses coutumes." The pagan she-wolf gave milk to the Roman heroes; the Catholic wolf, thunderstruck by Dante,[241] on the contrary, feeds upon them—

"Ed ha natura sì malvagia e ria,
Che mai non empie la bramosa voglia,
E dopo il pasto ha più fame che pria.
Molti son gli animali a cui s'ammoglia."

[CHAPTER XIII.]

THE LION, THE TIGER, THE LEOPARD, THE PANTHER, AND THE CHAMELEON.

SUMMARY.

Lion and tiger symbols of royal majesty.—Tvashṭar as a lion.—The hair of Tvashṭar in the fire.—Winds that roar like lions.—The lion-seducer.—The lion and the honey; the lion and riches.—Nobility of the lion.—The lion's part.—The monster lioness.—The old and sick lion; the lion with a thorn in its foot.—Monster and demoniacal lions.—The lion is afraid of the cock.—Sterility of the lion.—The story of Atalanta.—The sun in the sign Leo.—The virgin and the lion.—Çivas, Dionysos, and the tiger.—A hair from the tiger's tail; the Mantikora.—The chameleon; the god chameleon.

The tiger and the lion have in India the same dignity, and are both supreme symbols of royal strength and majesty.[242] The tiger of men and the lion of men are two expressions equivalent to prince, as the prince is supposed to be the best man. It is strength that gives victory and superiority in natural relations; therefore the tiger and the lion, called kings of beasts, represent the king in the civic social relations among men. The narasinhas of India was called, in the Middle Ages, the king par excellence; thus in Greece the king was also called leôn.

The myth of the lion and the tiger is essentially an Asiatic one; notwithstanding this, a great part of it was developed in Greece, where lion and tiger were at one time not unknown, and must have, as in India, inspired something like that religious terror caused by oriental kings.

We have already mentioned the Vedic monster lion of the West, in which we recognise the expiring sun. The strong Indras, killer of the monster, Vṛitras, is also represented as a lion. In the same way as the Jewish Samson is found in connection with the lion, and this lion with honey, and as the strength of the lion and that of Samson is said to be centred in the hair (the sun, when he loses his rays or mane, loses all his strength), so in the parallel myth of Indras we find analogous circumstances. Tvasḥṭar, the Hindoo celestial blacksmith, who makes weapons now for the gods and now for the demons (the reddish sky of morning and of evening is likened to a burning forge; the solar hero or the sun in this forge, is a blacksmith), is also represented in a Vedic hymn[243] as a lion, turned towards which, towards the west, heaven and earth rejoice, although (on account of the din made by him when coming into the world) they are, before all, terrified. The form of a lion is one of the favourite shapes created by the mythical and legendary blacksmith.

In the Mârkaṇdeya-P.,[244] this same Tvashṭar (which the Ṛigvedas represents as a lion), wishing to avenge himself upon the god Indras, who had (perhaps at morn) killed one of his sons, creates another, son, Vṛitras (the coverer), by tearing a lock of hair off his head and throwing it into the fire (the sun burns every evening in the western forge, his rays or mane, and the gloomy monster of night is born). Indras makes a truce with Vṛitras (in Russian stories, heroes and monsters nearly always challenge each other to say before fighting whether they will have peace or war), and subsequently violates the treaty; for this perfidy he loses his strength, which passes into Mârutas, the son of the wind (the Hanumant of the Râmâyaṇam. In a Vedic hymn, the voice of the Mârutas is compared to the roar of lions),[245] and into the three brothers Pâṇḍavas, sons of Kunti (the passage of the legend from the Vedas to the two principal Hindoo epic poems is thus indicated). Thus, in the same Mârkaṇdeya-P., Indras, having violated Ahalyâ, the wife of Gâutamas, loses his beauty (in other Puranic legends he becomes a eunuch or has a thousand wombs. Indras is powerful as the sun; he is powerful, too, in the cloud, by means of the thunderbolt; but when he hides himself in the serene and starry sky, he is powerless), which passes to the two Açvinâu, who afterwards renew themselves in the two Pâṇḍavâu sons of Mâdrî, as the sons of the demons were personified in the sons of Dhṛitarâshṭras.