Zoological Mythology Volume I Part 18

[471] _Afana.s.sieff_, vi. 2.

[472] Cfr. Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 409, and the ninth of the _Novelline di Santo Stefano di Calcinaia_, in which the luminous maiden disguised as an old woman is uncovered by the geese, when she puts down the dress of an old woman.

[473] Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 410.

[474] Wuotan also saves him whom he protects upon a mantle;--this is the flying carpet or mantle, hood, or hat, which renders the wearer invisible, and for which the three brothers disputed, which is also represented as a tablecloth that lays itself. Thus the poor man who goes to sell his cow's hide finds the pot of abundance and riches. The dispute for the tablecloth is the same as the dispute for riches, for the beautiful princess who is afterwards divided, or else carried off by a third or fourth person who takes the lion's share. We must not forget the fable of the animals who wish to divide the stag among themselves, of which the lion takes all, because he is named lion. In the _Nibelungen_, Schilbung and Nibelung dispute with each other for the division of a treasure; they beg Sifrit to divide it; Sifrit solves the question by killing them both and taking to himself the treasure, and the hood that makes its wearer invisible (Tarnkappe).

[475] The romance of Berta continues in the _Reali di Francia_ in harmony with the popular stories of an a.n.a.logous character; the false wife really causes King Pepin to marry her, and sends Berta into the forest to be killed; the hired murderers pity her, and grant her her life. Berta, whilst in the forest bound to a tree (like the Vedic cow), is found by a hunter; out of grat.i.tude she works (she, no doubt, spins and weaves), in order that the hunter may sell her work at Paris for a high price. Meanwhile her father and mother dream that she is beset by bears and wolves who threaten to devour her, that thereupon, throwing herself into the water, a fisherman saves her (in the dream, the water has taken the place of the forest, and the fisherman that of the hunter). King Pepin goes into the forest, finds her, recognises and marries her, whilst Elizabeth is burnt alive. The change of wives also occurs in a graceful form (with a variation of the episode of the beauty thrown into the fountain) in the twelfth of the _Contes Merveilleux_ of Porchat, Paris, 1863.

[476] _Histoire de la Vie de Charlemagne et de Roland_, par Jean Turpin, traduction de Alex. de Saint-Albin, Paris, 1865, preceded by the Chanson de Roland, poeme de Theroulde.--Cfr. the _Histoire Poetique de Charlemagne_, par Gaston Paris.

[477] Uhland's _Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und Sage_, iii.

77.

[478] "Seigneur, benissez ce lit et ceux qui s'y trouvent; benissez ces chers enfants, comme vous avez beni Tobie et Sara; daignez les benir ainsi, Seigneur, afin qu'en votre nom ils vivent et vieillissent et multiplient, par le Christ notre Seigneur.--Ainsi soit-il."

Villemarque, _Barzaz Breiz, Chants Populaires de la Bretagne_, sixieme edition, Paris, 1867, p. 423.

[479] Uhland, the work quoted above, p. 81.--In the French romance of _Renard_, on occasion of the apparent death of the fox, the gospel is read, on the contrary, by the horse. In the German customs the bull also appears as a funeral animal, and is fastened to the hea.r.s.e. If, while he is drawing the hea.r.s.e, he turns his head back, it is considered a sinister omen. According to a popular belief, the bulls and other stalled animals speak to each other on Christmas night. A tradition narrates, that a peasant wished on that night to hide himself and hear what the bulls were saying; he heard them say that they would soon have to draw him to the grave, and died of terror. This is the usual indiscretion and its punishment.--Cfr. Rochholz, _Deutscher Glaube und Brauch_, Berlin, 1867, i. 164, and Menzel, _Die Vorchristliche Unsterblichkeits-Lehre_, Leipzig, 1870.--We have the speaking oxen again in Phaedrus's fable of the stag who takes refuge in the stable, ii. 8, where the master is called "ille qui oculos centum habet."

[480] Elle en mangea seze muiz, deux bussars et six tupins; Rabelais, _Gargantua_, i. 4.

[481] Cfr. Porchat, _Contes Merveilleux_, Paris, 1863.

[482] In _Porchat_, Superlatif, while he is a dwarf, is shut up in a clothes-press; he is a male form of the wooden girl, of the wise puppet, of the sun hidden in the trunk of a tree, in the tree of night, in the nocturnal (or cloudy, or wintry) night, full of mysteries, which the little solar hero surprises from his hiding-place. The hero in h.e.l.l, or who, educated by the devil, learns every kind of evil, is a variation of this multiform idea. The dwarf of _Porchat_, who comes out of the clothes-press, is in perfect accord with the popular belief which makes the man be born in the wood, on the stump of a tree, of which the Christmas-tree is a lively reminiscence.

SECTION VI.

THE BULL AND THE COW IN GREEK AND LATIN TRADITION.

SUMMARY.

Preparatory works.--Bos quoque formosa est.--Zeus as a bull.--Io and Europe as cows.--The cow sacred to Minerva, the calf to Mercury, and the bull to Zeus.--Demoniacal bulls.--Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco.--White bulls sacrificed to Zeus, and black ones to Poseidon.--Poseidon as a bull.--The horn of abundance broken off the bull Acheloos.--The bulls of Aietas.--The bull who kills Ampelos.--Dionysos a bull.--The bull that comes out of the sea.--The eaters of bulls.--The sacrifice of the bull.--The intestines of the bull.--From the cow, the lamb.--The bull's entrails are wanting when the hero is about to die, that is, when the hero has no heart.--Even the bull goes into the forest.--The bull that flees is a good omen when taken and sacrificed.--The bull and the cow guide the lost hero.--a.n.a.logy between solar and lunar phenomena.--Herakles pa.s.ses the sea now on the cow's neck, now in a golden cup.--Herakles shoots at the sun.--The moon, the bull of Herakles, becomes an apple-tree; anecdote relating to this.--The moon as a golden apple.--The moon as a cake.--The funeral cake.--Instead of a cow of flesh, a cow made of paste, in Plutarch and aesop.--Ashes and excrement of the cow.--L'eau de millefleurs.--The bulls of the sun.--Herakles stable-boy and cleaner of the herds.--The bull Phaethon.--The myth of the bull and the lion.--The bull's horns.--The G.o.d a witty thief; the demon an infamous one.--The myth of Cacus again.--The worm or serpent that eats bulls.--The bellowing or thundering bull, celestial musician.--The bull and the lyre.--The voice of Zeus--Bull-G.o.d and cow-G.o.ddess.

In descending now from the North upon the h.e.l.lenic and Latin soils, to search for the mythical and legendary forms a.s.sumed there by the bull and the cow, the ma.s.s of available material in point which offers, instead of diminishing, has increased prodigiously. Not to speak of the rich literary traditions of mediaeval Italy and Spain (as to those of France, they are often but an echo of the Celtic and Germanic), nor the significant traditions of the Latin historians and poets themselves, nor the beliefs, superst.i.tious customs, and legends still existing on the half-Catholic, half-Pagan soil of Italy, all of which are notably fraught with the earliest mythical ideas, we here find ourselves face to face with the colossal and splendid edifice of Greek poetry or mythology itself; for that which const.i.tutes the greatness and real originality of Greek poetry is its mythology, by means of which it is that a divinity breathes in every artistic work of h.e.l.lenic genius. The poet and the artist are almost always in direct correspondence with the deities, and therefore it is that they so often a.s.sume such a divine and inspired expression. It would, therefore, be a bold presumption on my part if I were to essay to extract and present, in a few pages, the soul, the contents of this endless mythology. I have, moreover, the good fortune of being able to plead relief from the obligation to venture on any such attempt, by referring the reader to the learned preparatory works published in England, in the same interest, by Max Muller and George c.o.x, upon the h.e.l.lenic myths in relation to the other mythologies. It is certainly possible to take exception to interpretations of particular myths proposed by these two eminent scholars, as, no doubt, might be the fate of many of mine, were I to enter into minute explanations, and were my lucubrations fortunate enough to obtain any measure of consideration.

But as I flatter myself with the hope that, notwithstanding occasional diversions, in which I may have gone aside and lost myself for a few minutes, I am taking the royal road which alone leads to the solution of the great questions of comparative mythology, I recognise with grat.i.tude the labours of Max Muller and c.o.x upon Greek mythology, the writings of Michael Breal upon Roman mythology, the immortal work of Adalbert Kuhn upon the Indo-European myth of fire and water, and a few other helpful beacon-towers which send their light-shafts clear and steady athwart the waste, and serve as useful guides to the studious navigator of the _mare magnum_ of the myths. And because that which there is yet to do is immense in proportion to the little that has been done well, I shall take for granted what has already been demonstrated by my learned predecessors (to one and all of whom I confidently and respectfully refer my readers), and go on with my own researches, restricting myself, however, entirely to the zoological field, in order not to increase, out of all proportion, the dimensions of this opening chapter, which already threatens to straiten the s.p.a.ce I must leave for the rest of my undertaking.

"Bos quoque formosa est,"

says Ovid, in the first book of the _Metamorphoses_, when the daughter of Inachos is transformed into a luminous cow by Jupiter. The bull Zeus of Nonnos is also beautiful, as he swims on the sea, carrying the beautiful maiden Europe. Her brothers wonder why oxen wish to marry women; but we shall not wonder when we remark that Io and Europe are duplicates of one and the same animal, or, at least, that Io and Europe both took the shape of a cow--one as the moon especially,[483]

the other, the far-observing daughter of Telephaessa, the far-shining,[484] as the moon also, or the aurora. In the first case it is the heroine that becomes a cow; in the second, it is the hero who shows himself in the shape of a bull.[485] These forms are, however, only provisional and unnatural, in the same way as in the Vedic hymns the representation of the aurora, the moon, and the sun as cow and bull is only a pa.s.sing one. The cow and the bull send their calf before them; the sun, the moon, and the aurora are preceded or followed by the twilight. Jupiter and Minerva have for their messenger the winged Mercurius; and hence also Ovid[486] was able to sing:--

"Mactatur vacca Minervae, Alipedi vitulus, taurus tibi, summe Deorum."[487]

The fruit of the nuptials of Io and of Europe with Zeus is of a monstrous nature, such as the evil-doing daughters of Danaos, who, on account of their crimes, are condemned in h.e.l.l to fill the famous barrel (the cloud) that is ever emptying (the counterpart of the cup which, in the Scandinavian myth, is never emptied); such too as Minos, he who ordered the labyrinth to be made, the infernal judge, the feeder of the Minotauros (of which the monstrous bull of Marathon, first subdued by Herakles and afterwards killed by Theseus, is a later form), the son of his wife and the gloomy and watery black bull Poseidon. Even Kadmos, the brother of Europe, ends his life badly. He descends into the kingdom of the dead in the form of a serpent. Of good, evil is born, and of evil, good; of the beautiful, the hideous, and of the hideous, the beautiful; of light, darkness, and of darkness, light; of day, night, and of night, day; of heat, cold, and of cold, heat. Each day and each year the monotonous ant.i.thesis is renewed; the serpent's head always finds and bites its tail again. A Tarentine verse of Arn.o.bius expresses very happily these celestial vicissitudes:

"Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco."

Thus, in the romance of Heliodoros (_Aithiopika_) we read that the queen of Ethiopia, being black, gave birth to a white son; that is to say, the black night gives birth to the white moon and to the white dawn of morning. To Zeus (Dyaus, the luminous,) are sacrificed white bulls; to his brother Poseidon, black ones; indeed, entirely black[488] ones, according to the Homeric expression.

Poseidon, in Hesiod (_Theog._ 453), is the eldest brother; in Homer (_Il._ xv. 187), he is, on the contrary, the youngest; and both are right; it is the question of the egg and the hen; which is born first, darkness or light? The son of Poseidon, Polyphemos the Cyclop, is blinded by Odysseus. Poseidon, representing the watery, cloudy, or nocturnal sky, his one-eyed son seems to be that sky itself, with the solar star, the eye of the heavens, in the midst of the darkness or of the clouds (the mouth of the barrel). When Odysseus blinds his son, Poseidon avenges him by condemning Odysseus to wander on the waters (that is, lost in the ocean or the clouds of night). Inasmuch, moreover, as Zeus, properly the luminous one, is often called and represented by Homer as black as the clouds and pluvial,[489] he is a.s.similated to Poseidon, the _presbtatos_ or oldest; in fact, in the oldest h.e.l.lenic myths, Poseidon is essentially the pluvial form of Zeus. When Poseidon, in the form of a bull, seduces Pasiphae, the daughter of the sun and wife of Minos, he appears, indeed, of a white colour, but has between his horns a black spot.[490] This spot, however small, is enough to betray his tenebrous nature. Thus Acheloos, vanquished by Herakles in the shape of a serpent, rises again in that of a pugnacious bull, one of whose horns Herakles breaks,[491] which he gives to the aetolians, who receive abundance from it (the waters of the Acheloos fertilise the country traversed by them; the dragon of the cloud kept back the waters; Herakles discomfits the dragon, _i.e._, the darkness, and it then reappears in the form of a bull; when its horns are broken, abundance is the consequence). This monster reappears in the two perverse and terrible bulls of King Aietas, with copper feet (_tauro chalkopode_), which breathe dark-red flames and smoke, and advance against the hero Ieson in the cavern; in the same way as the king of the monkeys in the _Ramaya?am_ vanquishes the demoniacal bull that fights with its horns, by taking hold of the horns themselves, and throwing it down; so Ieson does in Apollonios.[492] The same bull is repeated in that ridden by the youth Ampelos, dear to Dionysos (who has also the nature of a bull, _taurophuses_, but of a luminous one). Ampelos, persuaded by the death-bringing Ate (_thanatephoros Ate_), mounts on this bull, and is thrown by it upon a rock where his skull is broken, because he was full of pride against the horned moon, her who agitates the oxen, who, offended, sends a gadfly to the bull and maddens it. The bull Dionysos wishes to avenge the young Ampelos, by fixing his horns in the belly of the perverse and homicidal bull.[493] In this myth, the black bull of night and the bull-moon are confounded together in one sinister action.

From the ocean of night comes forth the head of the solar and lunar bull, and on this account, in Euripides[494] Okeanos is called the bull-headed (_taurokranos_); or else the head of the solar bull enters the nocturnal forest, or that of the lunar bull comes out of it. This phenomenon gave rise to several poetical images. The bull is devoured by the monsters of night; hence in the _Seven at Thebes_ (xlii.) of aeschylos, the messenger accuses of impiety the seven eaters of bulls, who touch with their hands the blood of bulls; hence in the forty-third fable of aesop, the dogs flee, horrified, from the peasant who, being of a gluttonous nature (like the old man of the Russian story who eats all his cows), after having devoured sheep and goats, prepares to eat the working oxen themselves.[495] The bulls head, or even the bull itself, or the milch-cow, which must not be eaten, can, however, be sacrificed; nay, he is lucky who offers them up (except when the deity is named Heliogabalus, who receives the _taurobolium_ as a homage due to him, without giving anything in exchange to the devoted sacrificers).[496] According to Valerius Maximus,[497] the empire of the world would, by an oracle of the time of Servius Tullius, belong to the nation who should sacrifice to the Diana of the Aventine a certain wonderful cow belonging to a Sabine (the aurora or the moon, from the sacrifice of which the sun comes out at morning).

The Sabine prepares to sacrifice it, but a Roman priest takes it from him by fraud, whilst the Sabine is sent to purify himself in the water near at hand. This is a zoological form of the epico-mythic rape of the Sabines, of the exchange of the wife or of the precious object, of the exchange effected in the sack.

In Ovid,[498] the same myth occurs again with a variation:

"Matre satus Terra, monstrum mirabile, taurus Parte sui serpens posteriore fuit.

Hunc triplici muro lucis incluserat atris Parcarum monitu Styx violenta trium.

Viscera qui tauri flammis adolenda dedisset, Sors erat, aeternos vincere posse Deos.

Immolat hunc Briareus factu ex adamante securi; Et jam jam flammis exta daturus erat.

Jupiter alitibus rapere imperat. Attulit illi Milvus; et meritis venit in astra suis."

We shall return to this myth in the following chapters. The monster is killed only when his heart, which he keeps shut up, is taken away.

Sometimes he does not keep it shut up in his own body, but in a duck (the aurora), which comes out of a hare (the moon sacrificed in the morning).[499] When this duck is opened, a golden egg (the sun) is found. When the egg is thrown on the ground, or at the monster's head, the monster dies. The golden duck, whence the monster's heart, the sun, comes forth, is the same as the cow which gives birth to the lamb (the night gives birth to the aurora, and the aurora to the solar lamb). The historian Flavius cites, among the prodigies which preceded the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, a miracle of this kind, which took place in the middle of the temple itself, in the case of a cow led thither to be sacrificed. It occurs still every morning in the mythical heavens, and was a phenomenon familiar to human observation in the remotest antiquity, when it became a proverb; but, as often happened, the proverb which affirmed an evident myth, when its sense was lost, was adopted to indicate an impossibility; wherefore we read in the second satire (cxxii.) of Juvenal:--

"Scilicet horreres maioraque monstra putares, Si mulier vitulum, vel si bos ederet agnum?"

In Greek and Latin authors[500] we find frequent examples of the sacrifice of a bull a short time before the death of the hero by whom it was ordered, in which it was noticed as a very sinister omen that the entrails were missing, and particularly the heart or the liver.

Having observed that the monster's heart is the solar hero, or the sun itself, we can easily understand how, in the sacrifice of a bull, this heart must be wanting when the hero approaches his end. In the mythical bull sacrificed at evening, the hero's heart is not to be found; the monster has eaten his intestines, of which, according to the legend, he is particularly greedy.

But the bull does not always let himself be sacrificed patiently; he often flees in order not to be killed. We have seen in the Russian stories how the bull, which his owner intends to sacrifice, flees into the forest, with the lamb (the bull and the lamb are two equivalent forms of the morning and evening solar hero) and the other domestic animals. The proverb of Theokritos, "Even the bull goes into the forest,"[501] can have no other origin than in the two a.n.a.logous myths of the moon which wanders through the forest of night, and of the sun who hides himself in the same forest, when he sees the preparations made for the sacrifice; the sun in the night becomes the moon.

I have said that the bull, when sacrificed, often, on account of his being devoid of intestines, forebodes unlucky occurrences to the hero; the solar bull of the evening is without strength, he has no heroic entrails. But after he has been to pasture freely in the forest, after having exercised his powers in battle with the wolves of night, after having, by his bellowing (in the darkness, in the thundering cloud), filled all the animals with terror, the bull is found again and led towards his dwelling of the morning, full of light, like a sacrificed hero; heroic entrails are found in him; from the black bull who is sacrificed towards morning, from the forest, from the bull of night, come forth the heart, the liver, the life and strength, the sun, the hero-sun; and the human hero, observing his sacrifice, considers it a good omen. We can thus understand the narrative of Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus: "Decimus (taurus) diffractis vinculis, lapsus aegre reductus est, et mactatus ominosa signa monstravit."[502] Whilst he is hidden in the forest, the solar bull is black, but often (_i.e._, in all the nights illumined by the moon), giving up his place to the moon, he appears in the form of a white bull or cow, who guides the hero lost in the darkness. Thoas is called the king of the Tauroi (or bulls) in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ of Euripides, because he has wings on his feet.

The cow Io flees without stopping in the _Prometheus_ of aeschylos.

Euripides[503] says that she gave birth to the king of the Kadm?ans.

Here, therefore, we find once more the intimate relation between Io and Europe, the sister of Kadmos, which I noticed above. Kadmos, the brother of Europe, unites himself with Io. But Io is a cow, and we find a cow, a travelling cow, marked with a white spot in the shape of a full moon (the moon itself, or Io), in the legend of Kadmos in B?otia, according to Pausanias,[504] and to Ovid,[505] who sings--

"Bos tibi, Ph?bus ait, solis occurret in arvis,[506]

Nullum pa.s.sa jugum, curvique immunis aratri.

Hac duce carpe vias, et, qua requieverit herba, M?nia fac condas: B?otia ilia vocato.

Vix bene Castalio Cadmus descenderat antro: Incustoditam lente videt ire juvencam, Nullum servitii signum cervice gerentem.

Subsequitur, pressoque legit vestigia gressu; Auctoremque viae Ph?b.u.m taciturnus adorat.

Jam vada Cephisi, Panopesque evaserat arva; Bos stet.i.t; et, tollens spatiosam cornibus altis Ad c?lum frontem, mugitibus impulit auras.

Atque ita, respiciens comites sua terga sequentes, Procubuit, teneraque latus submisit in herba."

This is the good fairy, or good old man, who shows the way to the heroes in popular tales; it is the cow which succours the maiden persecuted by her step-mother, the puppet which spins, sews, and weaves for the maiden aurora. For just as we have seen that the wooden girl is the aurora herself, which at morn comes out of, and at even re-enters, the forest of night,[507] as is clearly shown by the myths of Urvaci and of Daphne, so in like manner the moon comes out of and re-enters the nocturnal forest, transforming herself from a tree to a cow, and from a cow to a tree, wooden girl, or puppet. Some myths relating to the aurora are also applicable to the moon, on account of the resemblance of the phenomena (the lunar and solar bulls also are interchangeable), as they both come out of the nocturnal gloom, both drop dewy humours, and both run after the sun, of which the aurora is the deliverer in the morning, and the moon the protectress, guide, hostess, and good advising fairy, who teaches him the secret by which to avoid the ambuscades of the monster. Herakles pa.s.ses the sea upon the neck of the cow-moon; but instead of the cow, we also find in the mythical sky of Herakles the golden cup, which is the same thing. From the cow-moon comes forth the horn of abundance; from the cornucopia to the cup the pa.s.sage is easy. It is said that Herakles, approaching the oxen of Geryon, the West, felt himself burned by the sun's rays, and shot arrows at him (in the same way as Indras in the _?igvedas_ breaks a wheel of the car of Suryas, the sun). The sun admires the courage and strength of the hero, and lends him his golden cup, upon which Herakles pa.s.ses the sea. This being accomplished, Herakles restores the cup to the sun, and finds the oxen.

The bull which carries the hero and heroine, in the Russian story, arises again in another form, if its essential part (now the intestines, now the bones, now the ashes) is preserved. The cow which helps the maiden becomes, as we have already seen, an apple-tree, and helps her again in this form. We find the same myth transformed in Greece. In _C?lius_, quoted by Aldrovandi,[508] we read, "c.u.m rustici quidam Herculi Alexicaco bovem essent immolaturi, isque rupto fune profugisset (the bull destined to the sacrifice repairs to the forest of night), nec esset quod sacrificaretur, malum arreptum suppositis quatuor ramis crurum vice, deinde additis alteris duobus ceu cornuum loco, bovem utc.u.mque fuisse imitatos, idque ridiculum simulacrum pro victima sacrifica.s.se Herculi." This account is confirmed by the facts recorded by Julius Pollux,[509] that the apple-tree was sacrificed to Herakles. The moon, on account of its circular form, a.s.sumed, besides the figure of a pea, a pumpkin and a cabbage, also that of a golden apple. As it contains honey, the sweet apple represents well the ambrosial moon. Moreover, in the same way as we have seen the pea which fell on the ground become a tree, and rise to heaven, so the apple became an apple-tree, the tree of golden apples found in the Western garden of the Hesperides.

The moon, besides the form of a horned cow, also a.s.sumed, in the popular aryan belief, that of a tart, of a cake, either on account of its circular shape, or of the ambrosial honey supposed to be contained by the moon, because of the dew or rain which it spreads on the ground. The cake has in Slavonic tradition the same importance as the pea, kidney-bean, or cabbage. The bull or cow of the fool, bartered for a pea, is perhaps the same as the sun or aurora of evening, bartered during the night for the moon, or else meeting the moon. The funereal pea or kidney-bean, the vegetable which serves as provision for the journey in the kingdom of the dead, and which brings the hero riches, is perhaps only the moon, which the solar hero finds on the way during the night, and which he receives in exchange for his cow's hide. When the hero possesses this pea, he is a.s.sured of every kind of good fortune, and can enter or ascend into the luminous sky, as well as come out of the gloomy h.e.l.l, into which the monster has drawn him.

A similar virtue is attributed to the cake, which we find in Indo-European funeral customs instead of the vegetable of the dead.

After this we can understand what Plutarch tells us in the Life of Lucullus concerning the Cyziceni, of whom he writes, that, pressed by siege, they offered up to Proserpine (the moon in h.e.l.l) a cow of black paste, not being able to offer up one of flesh; and he adds, that the sacrifice was agreeable to the G.o.ddess. Thus, in the thirty-sixth fable of aesop, we read of an invalid who promises to the G.o.ds that he will sacrifice a hundred oxen to them in the event of a cure; when cured, as he does not possess a hundred oxen of flesh, he makes a hundred of paste, and burns them upon the hearth. But, according to aesop, the G.o.ds were not satisfied, and endeavoured to play off a joke upon him; an attempt, which, however, did not succeed, inasmuch as the cunning man used it to his own profit; for the solar hero in the night, not being really a fool, merely feigns to be one.

But, to return to the cow-moon: we must complete the explanation of another myth, that of the excrement of the cow considered as purifying.

The moon, as the aurora, yields ambrosia; it is considered to be a cow; the urine of this cow is ambrosia or holy water; he who drinks this water purifies himself, as the ambrosia which rains from the lunar ray and the aurora cleans the paths of the sky, purifies and makes clear (_dirghaya cakshase_) the paths of the sky which the shadows of night darken and contaminate. The same virtue is attributed, moreover, to cow's dung, a conception also derived from the cow, and given to the moon as well as to the morning aurora. These two cows are conceived as making the earth fruitful by means of their ambrosial excrements; these excrements, being also luminous, both those of the moon and those of the aurora are considered as purifiers. The ashes of these cows (which their friend the heroine preserves) are not only ashes, but golden powder or golden flour (the golden cake occurs again in that flour or powder of gold which the witch demands from the hero in Russian stories), which, mixed with excrement, brings good fortune to the cunning and robber hero. The ashes of the sacrificed pregnant cow (_i.e._, the cow which dies after having given birth to a calf) were religiously preserved by the Romans in the temple of Vesta, with bean-stalks (which are used to fatten the earth sown with corn), as a means of expiation. Ovid[510]

mentions this rite:--