Zoological Mythology Volume Ii Part 7

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 Kalidasas' _cakuntala_, a black-spotted (k?ish?asaras) gazelle misleads King Dushyantas.

In the _Mahabharatam_,[131] King Pariks.h.i.t pursues a gazelle and wounds it (as the G.o.d civas 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 _Mahabharatam_,[132] King Pandus dies at the moment when he is uniting himself with his wife Madri, because he had one day in the chase transfixed a male gazelle at the instant when it was about to have fruit of its union with a female gazelle.

In the _Vish?u 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 pa.s.sionately enamoured of a fawn.

In the _Ramaya?am_,[134] Maricas, who is possessed by a demon, becomes, by order of Rava?as, 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 Ramas to pursue him in order to procure his silver-spotted skin, for which Sita has expressed a desire, that she might lie down upon it and rest herself. In this way the stag (here an equivalent of the hare) succeeds in separating Ramas from Sita. It then emits a lamentable cry, imitating the voice of Ramas, so as to induce Lakshma?as, his brother, to come to his a.s.sistance, and leave Sita alone, that Rava?as may then be able to carry her off with impunity. Lakshma?as leaves her unwillingly, because, perceiving that the stag shines like the constellation of the head of the stag (or gazelle, M?igaciras), he suspects it to be an apparition of Maricas, who, as a stag, has already caused the ruin of many other princes who have hunted him. The moon, in Sansk?it, besides the name of cacadharas, or who carries the hare, has also that of M?igadharas, 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 _?igvedas_, where Indras fights and kills a monster called M?igas. In Germanic tradition there are numerous legends in which the hero who hunts the stag meets with his death or is dragged into h.e.l.l.[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 Usra, the morning aurora). The G.o.d 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 a.s.sumes 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 a.s.s that invests itself in the lion's skin. But inasmuch as the Indian moon is M?igara?as, or king of the wild animals, no less than the lion, inasmuch as the moon succeeds the sun, one m?igas 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 h.e.l.l, and is in relation with demons and itself demoniacal.

Artemis (the moon) is represented as a hunting G.o.ddess in the act of wounding, with her left hand, an antelope between the horns. To this G.o.ddess 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 Haeffing. The stag Eikthyrner which, eating the leaves of the tree Lerad, causes all its waters to flow out, seems, on the other hand, to refer to the sun as it merges and loses its rays in the cloud (the solar stag is also referred to in the _Edda_).

Artemis, who subst.i.tutes 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 aelianos and Diodoros, nourished Telephos, son of Herakles (Herakles in his fourth labour overtakes the stag with golden horns), who had been exposed in the forest by the order of his grandfather; as well as in that which, according to Justinus, fed with its milk in the forest the nephew of the king of the Tartessians, and afterwards, according to the "Lives of the Saints," the blessed aegidius, the hermit who lived in the forest. There are numerous mediaeval legends which reproduce this circ.u.mstance 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, _m?igas_, 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 superst.i.tions relative to a similar belief. In a Rutenian legend, published by Novosielski, the evening star (Lithuanian, _vakerinne_; Slavonic, _vecernitza_, the evening aurora) prays its friend Lunus (the moon is masculine in Slavonic as in Sansk?it) 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."

FOOTNOTES:

[124] Ye p?ishatibhir ?ishtibhi? saka? vacibhir an?ibhi?--a?ayanta svabhanava?; _?igv._ i. 37, 2.

[125] Upo ratheshu p?ishatir ayugdhvam prash?ir vahati rohita?; i. 39, 6.

[126] Sa hi svas?it p?ishadacvo yuva ga?a?: i. 87, 4.

[127] a vidyunmadbhir maruta? svarkai rathebhir yatha ?ish?imadbhir acvaparnai?; i. 88, 1.

[128] Acvair hira?yapa?ibhi?; viii. 7, 27.

[129] cubhe sammicla? p?ishatir ayukshata; iii. 26, 4.

[130] A?seshu eta?; _?igv._ i. 166, 10.--Concerning the use of similar skins for dress in India, cfr. the long and instructive note of Professor Max Muller, _?igveda-Sanhita Translated and Explained_, i.

221-223.

[131] i. 1665.

[132] i. 3811, _et seq._; i. 4585, _et seq._

[133] ii. 13, translated by Wilson.

[134] iii. 40, 48, 49.

[135] Cfr. Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 354.

[136] ii. 258, Rosen's version.

[137] Oft fuhrt der Hirsch nur zu einer schonen Frau am Brunnen; sie ist aber der Unterwelt verwandt und die Verbindung mit ihr an die Bedingung geknupft, da.s.s die ungleiche Natur des Verbundenen nicht an den Tag gezogen werde.

[138] Du Cange adds: "Quoad baptismam, quomodo cervus ad fontes aquarum, summo desiderium perveniendum esse monstraretur."

[139] Cfr. Porchat, _Contes Merveilleux_, xiii.

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.--airavanas and airavatas.--The elephant becomes diabolical.--Nagas and nagas; c?ing?.--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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, rides upon an enormous elephant, airavatas or airava?as, the cloud or darkness itself, with its luminous eruptions; airavatam and airavati are also appellations of the lightning. The elephant airava?as or airavatas is one of the first of the progeny of the heavens, begotten of the agitation of the celestial ocean.

It plays a prominent part in the battles of Indras against the monsters; hence Rava?as, the monster king of Lanka, still bears the scars of the wounds given him by the elephant Airavatas, in the war between the G.o.ds and the demons,[145] although this same Rava?as boasts of having one day defeated Indras, who rode upon the elephant airava?as.[146]

But the mythical elephant did not always preserve the character of an animal beloved of the G.o.ds; after other animals were admitted into special favour, it too a.s.sumed, 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 (?ishayas, 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 nagas, elephant, and nagas, mountain and tree; the word _c?ingin_, properly horned, means tree, mountain, and elephant; the wind breaks through and disperses the cloud, and pushes forward the avalanches of snow). Thus it is said that the monkey Sannadanas was one day victorious over the elephant airavatas.[148] (The northern path of the moon is called airavatapatha.)

We have already seen the elephant that crushes the hares under his feet on the sh.o.r.es of the moon-lake, and disturbs with his trunk the waters of this lake. In the _Ramaya?am_,[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 sh.o.r.es 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 Garu?as, the solar bird, is represented as a mortal enemy now of the serpent, now of the elephant (the word _nagas_ means equally serpent and elephant; airavatas is also the name of a monstrous serpent), and now of the tortoise. In the _Ramaya?am_,[150] the bird Garu?as 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 _Mahabharatam_,[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 Garu?as (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 _Pancatantram_, 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, Vish?us, and civas, his elephant was also fated to become the prey of the bird of Vish?us, of the bird Garu?as (or the sun). In the fable of the _Pancatantram_ quoted above, the elephant brings upon its head the vengeance of the sparrow, because it had rooted up a tree upon which the sparrow had made its nest and laid its eggs, which were broken in consequence. The Vish?uitic legend of the _Mahabharatam_ relating to the bird Garu?as, which carries the elephant into the air, offers several other a.n.a.logous and interesting particulars. The bird Garu?as 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 Garu?as 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. Kacyapas Pra?apatis, wishing one day to make a sacrifice in order to obtain the favour of a son, orders the G.o.ds 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 a.s.sistance, smiles and pa.s.ses 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 Garu?as, the steed of Vish?us, which naturally makes war against the steed of Indras, the elephant.

FOOTNOTES:

[140] M?iga iva hastina? khadatha vana yad arunishu tavishir ayugdhvam; _?igv._ i. 64, 7.

[141] M?igo na hasti tavishim usha?a?; _?igv._ iv. 16, 14.