Chapter I

THE COW AND THE BULL.

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

SUMMARY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How now is this cow brought forth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SECTION II.

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

SUMMARY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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