Zoological Mythology Volume Ii Part 27

"April! April! April!

Man kann den Narren schicken wohin man will."

[495] Another custom concerning herrings is described by Baron von Reinsberg, relating to Ash-Wednesday, when people return from church in Limburg: "Begiebt man sich zuerst nach Hause, um nach gewohnter Weise den Haring abzubeissen. Sobald man namlich aus der Kirche kommt, wird ein Haring, nun muss jeder mit geschlossenen Beinen, die Arme fest an den Leib gedruckt, in die Hohe springen und dabei suchen, ein Stuck abzubeissen." And Karl Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 561, writes: "In der Mark muss man zu Neujahr Hirse oder Haringe essen, im Wittenbergischen Heringssalat, so hat man das ganze Jahr uber Geld."

[496] Cfr. Salvia.n.u.s, _ut supra_. The habit certain fishes have of ejecting froth from the mouth may have suggested a phallical image.

[497] Bei Hans Sachs, Nurnberger, Ausgabe von 1560, ii. 14, 96, Eine Frau und Magd essen den fur den Herrn bestimmten Aal; eine Elster schwatzt es aus; ran sich zu rachen, rupfen die Weiber ihr den Kopf kahl. Daher man sprichwortlich von einem kahlen Monche sagt: der hat gewiss vom Aale ausgeschwatzt; Menzel, _Die Vorchristliche Unsterblichkeits-Lehre_.

[498] In the same: "So erzahlt Gilbert bei Leibnitz Script. rer.

Brunsw. i. 987. Ein Frauenzimmer, welches Aal gegessen, habe plotzlich Alles sehen konnen was unter Wa.s.ser war."

[499] It is well known that the word _ikshvakus_ has been referred to the word _ikshus_, the sugar-cane. In the fortieth canto of the first book of the _Ramaya?am_, one of the two wives of Sagaras gives birth to a son who continues his race; the other wife gives birth to an ikshvakus (gourd or cane) containing 60,000 sons.

[500] Cfr, Du Cange, _s. v._, and Salvia.n.u.s, the work quoted before.

[501] In the thirteenth story of the first book of _Afana.s.sieff_ (of which the Bohemian story of _Grandfather Vsievedas_ is a well-known variety), the whale complains that all the footmen and hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.s over it and consume it to the bones. It begs the hero Basilius to ask the serpent how long it has still to undergo this fate; the serpent answers, when it has vomited forth the ten vessels of the rich Mark.--In the eighth story of the fourth book of the _Pentamerone_, the whale teaches Cianna the way to find the mother of time, requiring her, in recompense, to be informed of the way in which the whale may be able to swim freely to and fro in the sea without encountering rocks and sandbanks. Cianna brings back for answer, that it must make friends with the sea-mouse (_lo sorece marino_, perhaps the same as the sea-urchin), which will serve as its guide.--In the eighth story of the fifth book of the _Pentamerone_, the little girl is received in the sea by a large enchanted fish, in whose belly she finds beautiful companions, gardens, and a beautiful palace furnished with everything.

The fish carries the girl to the sh.o.r.e.

[502] If I am not mistaken, the German words _Narr_, fool, and _na.s.s_, wet, are in connection with each other by the same a.n.a.logy which gives us the Sansk?it _mattas_, drunk, and the Latin _madidus_, damp, from the root _mad_.

[503] A superst.i.tious belief quoted by Pliny concerning the cramp-fish merits being recorded here: "Mirum quod de Torpedine invenio, si capta c.u.m Luna in Libra fuerit, triduoque a.s.servetur sub dio, faciles partus facere postea quoties inferatur."

[504] _s. v. citula_, Du Cange writes concerning the fish faber or Zeus: "Idem forte piscis, quem Galli doream vocant ab aureo laterum colore, nostri et Hispani Galli Baionenses jau, id est gallum, a dorsi pinnis surrectis veluti gallorum gallinaceorum cristis." The fish Zeus lives in solitude; hence it appears to me to be the same sacred fish, called anthias, of which Aristotle, in the ninth book of the _History of Animals_, says that it lives where no other animal is found.

CHAPTER II.

THE CRAB.

SUMMARY

The riddle, how it is a fish, and not a fish.--The crab appears and the sun goes back; the crab-moon draws the solar hero back.--The crane and the crab.--The crab kills the serpent and releases the solar hero.--The crab draws the chariot.--Palinurus.--The crabs p.r.i.c.k and waken the hero.--The race between the crab and the fox.--The prince becomes a crab to release his beloved from the waters.--The nightingale, the stag, and the crab as awakeners.--The crab as an antidote for the venom of the toad, and as a remedy for the stone.

In the eighth Esthonian story, a husband beats his wife because she is unable to solve the riddle which he proposes, to provide him a fish to eat, which is not a fish, and which has eyes, but not in its head. The third brother, the cunning one, recommends his mother to cook the crab, which lives in the water like a fish, and which has eyes, but not in its head.

When the sun seems to enter, in the month of June, into the tropic which bears the sign of the crab (Lat. _cancer_; Gr. _karkinos_; Sansk?it, _karka?as_, _karkas_, _karka?akas_; the Hindoo constellation of the crab is called _karkin_, or furnished with the crab, in the same way as the leaping moon, furnished with the hare, is called _cacin_), it is said to come back again; on the first day of summer the days begin to shorten, as on the first of winter they begin to lengthen; the sun in the month of June was therefore compared to a crab, which retraces its steps, or was represented as drawn by a crab, which, in this case, is particularly the moon. We all know the myth of Herakles, who, when combatting the hydra of Lerne, was caught and drawn back by the crab, which Hera, therefore, transformed into the celestial constellation of the crab. In the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_, Alexander returns in terror from his journey to the fountain of immortality, when he sees that the crabs draw his s.h.i.+ps back into the sea. In the same work, we find a crab caught which contains seven precious pearls; Alexander has it shut up in a vase, which is enclosed in a large cage, fastened by an iron chain; a fish draws the cage a mile out to sea; Alexander, half dead with terror, thanks the G.o.ds for the warning, and so saving his life, persuading himself that it is not fit to attempt impossible undertakings. In the seventh story of the first book of the _Pancatantram_, the old crane, on the other hand, terrifies the crab and the fishes by threatening them with a visitation of the G.o.ds in the chariot of Rohini, the red wife of the Lunus, that is, in the constellation of the Wain or the Bulls (the fourth lunation of the moon), in consequence of which the rain will cease to fall, the pond will be dried up, and the crabs and fishes will die; the fishes allow themselves to be deceived by the crane, who eats them on the way; but the crab, on the contrary, when it has got half way, perceives the deceit of the crane, kills it, and returns back again. Professor Benfey has found a variation of this story in the Buddhist sacred and historical books of Ceylon. In the aesopian fables, the crab kills the serpent. In the twentieth story of the first book of the _Pancatantram_, the crab causes, at the same time, the death of the serpent and the crane, by means of the ichneumon; the crab, which walks a little backwards and a little forwards, when transported into the sky, causes now the death of the solar hero and now that of the monster, now delivers the solar hero from the monster and now drags it into the waters. In the fifteenth and last story of the fifth book of the _Pancatantram_, the young hero Brahmadattas takes, for his companion in his journey, the crab, who, whilst he sleeps in the shade of a tree, kills the serpent which comes to kill him. This mythical crab, this red animal which kills the serpent, is sometimes the sun, but, perhaps, oftener it may be compared to the horned moon, which increases and diminishes, and releases the solar hero, asleep in the shadow of the night and of the winter, from the black serpent who endeavours to turn his sleep into death; Brahmadattas, when he wakens, recognises the crab as his deliverer.

Thus we have already seen the moon considered more than once, in several forms, as the saviour of the solar hero and heroine. When the sun falls in the evening, in the west, it must necessarily go back like the crab, to reappear in the morning on the same eastern side from whence it came; when the sun goes back and the days grow shorter, after the summer solstice, the crab, in the Zodiacal cycle, retraces its steps. When the sun goes back, the moon either rules the darkness of the frigid night, or in autumn brings on the autumnal rains; the horns of the moon, and those of the crab, serve now to draw the hero into the waters (in the evening, and after solstice of June), now to draw him out of the waters (towards dawn and towards spring). The sun is now represented as having transformed himself into the moon, and now as having been deceived or saved by the moon. The sun which retraces its steps is a crab; the moon which draws back, or draws out, is also a crab, and, in this respect, seems to hold the same place as the sea-urchin with the hundred oars, or of the dolphin with the scythe-shaped fin, which draws the chariot of the solar hero, or the solar hero himself. In the fable of Kriloff, the crab draws the chariot with the pike and the heron (the latter taking the place here of the crane, which we have seen above in connection with the crab, and which is also called in Sansk?it by the same name as the crab, that is, karka?as). It is well known that the sea-crab, _Palinurus vulgaris_, took its name from the pilot Palinurus, who fell into the sea. In the fourteenth story of the first book of _Afana.s.sieff_, the crabs p.r.i.c.k and waken the young hero Theodore (gift of G.o.d, an equivalent of Brahmadattas, given by the G.o.d Brahman), put to sleep by the witch; they are grateful to the hero, because he divided the caviare into equal parts among the crabs who were disputing for it.

We have seen the challenge to a race with the hare and the locust, the hare and locust both seem to lose the race. Afterwards we saw the challenge to a trial of flight of the beetle and the wren with the eagle, in which the animal that symbolises the moon, on the other hand, wins the race. Thus, in the same way, as to spring succeeds June or the month of the crab, we find represented in the fifth story of the fourth book of _Afana.s.sieff_ a race between the fox (which, as it symbolises the twilights of the day, represents also the equinoxes in the year) and the crab (it is well known that the crab, _Palinurus vulgaris_, was called by the Latins by the name of _locusta_). The crab fastens itself to the fox's tail; the latter arrives at the winning-post without knowing of the crab's presence; the fox then turns round to see whether his opponent is far off, upon which the crab, letting go the fox's brush and dropping quietly on the ground, looks up and placidly remarks that it has been waiting for some time.

In the first of the Esthonian stories, the young prince, in order to release from the waters his beloved, who had become a water-rose, by the eagle's advice takes off his clothes, covers himself with mud, and holding his nose between his fingers, snivels out, "From a man, a crab;" then he instantly becomes a crab, and goes to draw the water-rose out of the water, to bring it to sh.o.r.e near a stone, at which, when arrived, he says, "From the water-rose, the maiden; from the crab, the man." (This myth appears to represent the amours of the sun as a female, with the moon as a male.) I observe that among the Sansk?it meanings of the word _karka?as_, which means a crab, there is that of a heap of water-roses, or a heap of lotuses.

We have already seen the nightingale and the stag as images representing the moon; here we also find a crab as a lunar figure. The moon is the watcher of night; either it sleeps with its eyes open like the hare, or it is watchful like the stag, or, as a nightingale, it justifies the Greek proverb of the watchers who sleep less than the nightingales (oud' hoson Aedones upnoousin), or, as crab, it wakens up with its claws those who are asleep and menaced by any danger.[505] In Pliny we find the nightingale, the stag, and the crab in concord; he informs us that crab's eyes, with the nightingale's flesh, tied up in a stag's skin, are useful to keep a man awake. The moon, in fact, not only herself watches, but makes men watch, or prolong their vigils; we know, moreover, of the excitement with which her presence agitates the quail, which cannot sleep when the moon s.h.i.+nes in the sky. Pliny also recommends the river-crab, cut in pieces and drunk, as a remedy against any poison, but especially against the venom projected by the toad. In the _Heisterbac. Hist. Miracul._, we read of a man named Theodoric, and surnamed Cancer, that the devil persecuted him in the form of a toad; he kills the diabolical toad more than once, but it always rises again; then Cancer, recognising the devil in this form, forms a heroic resolution, uncovers one of his thighs, and lets himself be bitten; the thigh inflames, but he is cured at last, and from that day forward he is and continues a holy man. German superst.i.tion, therefore, combines with Graeco-Latin to consider the crab as an enemy of the monster; but as in Graeco-Latin beliefs, besides the crab which awakens, there is also, as we have seen, the crab which seeks to ruin the solar hero, so in Germanic mythical tradition, the death of the solar and diurnal hero Baldur takes place, when the sun enters the Zodiacal sign of Cancer.

FOOTNOTE:

[505] We know that lynx's eyes, or lynx-like eyes, mean very sharp-sighted ones; ancient physicians recommended against the stone or the disease of the gravel, now the lyncurium, the stone which was supposed to be made of the urine of the lynxes, given by India to Bacchus, according to Ovid's expression, and now crab's eyes. The moon destroys with its light the stone-sky, the sky of night; hence crab's eyes are recommended against the disease of the stone. When the moon is not in the sky of night, the stone is there.

CHAPTER III.

THE TORTOISE.

SUMMARY.

Equivoque between the words _kacchapas_ and _kacyapas_ (by the intermediate form, _kacapas_).--Explanation of the myth of the production of the ambrosia, by means of the mandaras.--Mantharas as a tortoise.--Kurmas.--Kacchapas the lord of the sh.o.r.es.--The tortoise and the elephant.--Kacyapas as Pra?apatis.--Somas and Savitar.--Kacyapas and the thirteen daughters of Dakshas; Daksha?a.--The funereal tortoise and the frog.--The tortoise and the lyre; the Schild-krote; the s.h.i.+elds of the Kureti; kacchas, kacchapi; kurmas as a poet and as a wind.--The tortoise and the warriors.--The s.h.i.+elds fallen from the sky.--The demoniacal tortoise.--The tortoise as an island.--The hare and the tortoise.--The tortoise defeats the eagle.

Of the three princ.i.p.al Hindoo names of the tortoise, _kurmas_, _kacchapas_, and _kacyapas_, the third alone, in connection with the second, seems to have any importance in the history of myths. The expression _kurmas_ is the word usually employed to designate the real tortoise, whilst the expression _kacyapas_ gave rise to mythical equivoques, which deserve to be observed.

We know of the famous incarnation of Vish?us as a tortoise, treated of in the _Kurma P._ The problem was to stir up the ocean of milk to make ambrosia; the sea had no bottom, inasmuch as the earth had as yet no existence; to stir up the waters of the ocean, something of colossal size was needed; the G.o.ds had recourse to the mandaras, which was made to serve for the purpose, as the king of the rods, _kacapas_; the G.o.ds and the demons shook the rod, and the ambrosia came forth; no sooner was the ambrosia produced, than the world of animated beings began to be created. The character of this cosmogony is preternaturally phallical; the white froth of the sea (born of the genital organs of Ouranos, castrated by his son Kronos), whence Aphrodite rises, and the cosmic ambrosia, being nothing else than the genital sperm. At a later period a mountain was seen in the mandaras, and the words _kacapas_ and _kacchapas_ (subsequently changed into _kacyapas_) being confused, the king of the rods or phallos, _par excellence_, was converted into a tortoise. The mandaras (from the root _mand-mad_, to inebriate, to make joyful), however, might mean the agitator, that which makes joyful; but as from _mad_ is derived the word _matsyas_, the fish now drunken, now stupid, so the word _mandaras_ also has, for its proper meanings, slow and large, and is closely connected with mandas, which, besides slow, lazy, soft, also means drunken; with mandakas, foolish; and with mandanas, merry; and, as such, we can understand how there was in the celestial Paradise, in the mandanas or making joyful, the tree mandaras, the inebriating. Finally, it is connected with manthanas, the agitator, and identified with mantharas, which also means the agitator, the slow, and the lazy. But there is also another a.n.a.logy which offers us the means of understanding how the equivoque of kacapas, confused with kacchapas, and which afterwards became kacyapas or tortoise, became popular, just through the word _kurmas_, which, as we have said, means a tortoise. When the mandaras or mantharas was conceived of as a producer of ambrosia, they soon identified the mantharas itself (the slow, the late, the curved) with the tortoise; in fact, _mantharas_ is the name given to a tortoise in the _Hitopadecas_, and the name _mantharakas_ is applied to another in _Somadevas_ and in the _Pancatantram_. Considered simply as the slow and the curved, the thought of the tortoise, which answers this description, naturally arose in connection with the name; the primitive myth became complicated, and the mandaras and the kacapas, which were originally one and same, were at length distinguished from each other, the kacapas, at first a kacyapas or kacchapas or tortoise, and, _vice versa_, the mandaras or mantharas also; the words in course of time lost their primitive meaning, the mandaras (as the slow one) became a mountain (which does not move), and the kacapas a tortoise, supporting the mountain, at once vast, ponderous, and inert. As it often happens in mythology that two distinct personalities spring out of two names at first applied to the same mythical object or being, and both being names which indicate something heavy, it was surmised that the one heavy thing carried the other, and that the heavy tortoise, into which the G.o.d Vish?us transformed himself, sustained the weight of the heavy mountain placed upon it by his _alter ego_ Indras. The ideas of weighty and curved being united in both the mandaras and the kacapas, the tortoise, as kurmas, serves well for this office of a carrier, an a.s.sertion I venture to make, inasmuch as in _kur-mas_ I think I can recognise the same root which appears in the Sansk?it _gur-u-s_, fem. _gur-v-i_, superlat. _gar-ish?h-a-s_ (Lat. _gra-v-is_, from _garvis_), and in the Latin _curvus_.[506]

As for the name of kacchapas, to which the equivocal Hindoo epithet of kacyapas, applied to the tortoise, should be referred, it properly means the lord, the guardian of the sh.o.r.es, he who occupies the sh.o.r.es, and is a perfectly apt designation for the tortoise, and an expression _a propos_ to what is related of it in the legend quoted by us in the chapter on the elephant. Both animals (sun and moon) frequent the banks of the same lake, and have conceived a mortal dislike one for the other, continuing in their brutal forms the quarrel which existed between them when they were not only two men but two brothers. As the elephant and the tortoise both frequent the sh.o.r.es of the same lake, they mutually annoy each other, renewing and maintaining in mythical zoology the strife which subsists between the two mythical brothers, who fight with each other for the kingdom of heaven, either in the form of twilights, or of equinoxes, or of sun and moon, or of twilight and sun, or of twilight and moon, in any of the various interpretations which can, all with same basis of truth, be given to the myth of the Acvinau, according to their appearance among celestial phenomena, which, although distinct, have nevertheless a great resemblance. In this particular mythical struggle between the tortoise and the elephant, terminated by the bird garu?as, who carries them both up into the air in order to devour them, the tortoise and the elephant seem, however, especially to personify the two twilights of the day and the two twilights of the year--that is, the equinoxes, or the sun and the moon in the crepuscular hour, the sun and the moon in the equinoctial day, upon the banks of the great heavenly lake.

But, in the legend contained in the _Mahabharatam_[507] of the tortoise and the elephant carried into the air by the Vish?uitic bird, there is still another interesting circ.u.mstance or variation, which corroborates the cosmic interpretation of the myth of the tortoise now proposed by me. The divine Kacyapas is mentioned in it; he desires to have a son, and therefore has himself served by the G.o.ds (since it is the G.o.ds who make the mandaras, the producer of ambrosia, turn round) in the sacrifice adapted to produce children. The phallical Indras carries on his shoulders a mountain of wood, which evidently corresponds to the mandaras or kaca-pas, and, on the way, offends the dwarf hermits born of the hairs of the body of Brahman, that is, the hairs themselves; to this Kacyapas, the name of Pra?apatis or lord of generation is given. We here again meet with the monstrous phallos which produces the ambrosia (or the Somas to which corresponds Savitar, the generator and the lord of the creatures[508]) and generates living beings in the world. Kacyapas being considered as the generator, he was therefore placed in relation with the movements of the moon and the sun, who are also generators (as Somas and Savitar); and it is in this respect that Kacyapas also appears as the f?cundator of the thirteen daughters of Dakshas, who correspond to the thirteen months of the lunar year (Daksha?a is the name of a lunar asterism and of the wife of a phallical civas, and daksha?apatis one of the Hindoo names given to the moon; Dakshas is also identified with Pra?apatis; whence Kacyapas must have united himself, probably as the phallical moon, with his own daughters, or with his thirteen lunations). Of the thirteen wives made fruitful by Kacyapas, everything that lives was born,--G.o.ds, demons, men, and beasts,--so that in the cosmogony of the mandaras, of the Kacapas, and hence of the tortoise, the mandaras, when shaken, produced the phallical ambrosia, of which all animated things were spontaneously generated.

But the tortoise, taken in connection with the moon, sometimes also had a funereal signification. The souls of the dead go into the world of the moon, into the sky of night, and the souls of the living descend from the world of the moon, that is, from the night; civas, the G.o.d of Paradise, becomes the destroying G.o.d; Plutus and Pluto are identified. Thus, in a note of Professor Haugh to the _aitareya Br._, I think I can recognise the tortoise, as representing in particular the dying moon, the burnt-up moon, which has the fire of spring for its tomb, round whose corpse the moon also moves in the here equivalent form of a frog (being _haris_, which means both yellow and green), and who is herself afterwards turned out. We know how Haris or Vish?us now represents the sun and now the moon (the sun and the moon, as Indras and Somas, were called together rakshohanau or monster-killers), is identified now with the tortoise, now with the bird garu?as, the enemy of the tortoise. Here is, however, the note of Professor Haugh: "At each Atiratra of the Gavam ayanam the so-called Chayana ceremony takes place. This consists in the construction of the Uttara Vedi (the northern altar) in the shape of an eagle. About 1440 bricks are required for this structure, each being consecrated with a separate Ya?usmantra. This altar represents the universe. A tortoise is buried alive in it, and a living frog carried round it and afterwards turned out." According to Pliny, the blood of a tortoise is an antidote to the venom of a toad (in the same way as the hare and a stag's horn is also recommended as of similar efficacy on the old principle of _similia_ _similibus_; the hare is the moon, the stag's horn the moon's horn; the blood of the killed tortoise would appear to represent the moon itself as in a manner chasing the gloom of night away). The tortoise is also found in connection with frogs in a fable of Abstemius; the tortoise envies the frogs, who can move rapidly, but ceases to complain when it sees them become the prey of the eel.

One of the ten stars of the constellation of the tortoise, situated in the northern heavens--that is, in the cloudy and gloomy autumnal sky, and therefore especially ruled by the moon--was called the lyre by the Greeks, and it was fabled that the tortoise of which Hermes had made the lyre, had been transfigured into it. I may remark here that the German name for the tortoise is Schild-krote (toad with s.h.i.+elds), that the Koribantes[509] produced their noisy music, and accompanied their Pyrrhic dances with kettledrums and the sound of arms, and that the Kureti, in order to conceal from Kronos the birth of Zeus, struck their s.h.i.+elds with their lances. It is interesting to observe, that in Sansk?it also, kacchas is the name given to the little s.h.i.+elds of the tortoise or kacchapas; that kacchapi is the term applied to the noise of the thundering Sarasvati, or the thunder; that several Vedic poets are called Kacyapas; that Kurmas (another designation of the tortoise) is also the name of the Vedic poet, the son of G?itsamadas, and also an epithet applied to the _flatus ventris_, which is compared to a clap of thunder (Cfr. the roots _kar_, _kur_, _gar_, _gur_). In the chapter on the a.s.s, we saw this _flatus_ compared to the noise of a trumpet or a kettle-drum; here we have the thunderbolts that strike upon the s.h.i.+elds, the spots of the celestial tortoise, of the rainy moon, upon the clouds, attracted by or formed from the moon's spots, that is, which produce the thunder. According to the h.e.l.lenic myth, the tortoise obtained from Zeus himself--that is, from the pluvial G.o.d, from the G.o.d of the clouds, the G.o.d in connection with the s.h.i.+eld-clouds which concealed his birth, and we may add, from the G.o.d tortoise,--the power of concealing itself under s.h.i.+elds, and of carrying its house along with it. The Romans were accustomed to bathe new-born babes in the concavity of a tortoise, as if in a s.h.i.+eld. It was predicted that Clodius Albinus would one day attain to sovereign power, because, when he was born, an enormous tortoise was brought to his father by some fishermen. The tortoise protects Zeus, the new-born warrior-G.o.d; the tortoise, on account of its s.h.i.+elds, makes the new-born child a warrior, and predicts dominion to him; my well-informed readers will remember how a s.h.i.+eld, fallen from the sky, presaged to the Romans the glories they should achieve as a warlike people, according to Ovid's verses--

"... Totum jam sol emerserat orbem: Et gravis aetherio venit ab axe fragor.

Ter tonuit sine nube Deus, tria fulgura misit.

Credite dicenti: mira sed acta loquor.

A media c?lum regione dehiscere c?pit: Submisere oculos c.u.m duce turba suo.

Ecce levi scutum versatum leniter aura Decidit: a populo clamor ad astra venit."

Under this aspect the tortoise becomes the dark moon, in opposition to the luminous one, the slow moon, in opposition to the jumping one. Being slow or tardigrade, in the myths the tortoise is the moon, but the winter one; and sometimes it becomes also now the cloud, now the earth, now even the darkness (as such it appears demoniacal in a German legend, where two devils who have a.s.sumed the forms of monstrous tortoises, prevent the foundations of the cathedral church of Merseburg from being laid; the tortoises are exorcised, and their bodies slain, in memory of which circ.u.mstance it is said that the cups of these tortoises are preserved, hung up in the church; in the fourteenth fargard of the _Vendidad_, too, the tortoises are, as demoniacal, to be killed). We have seen in the first chapter of the first book, the hare-moon pa.s.sed over and crushed by the cow's waggon, suggesting to us the cloud (as the moon, now a bridge, now an island of the sky, as sea), which pa.s.ses over the moon, but he perhaps, again, of the eclipse of the moon by the means of the earth, which is also called a cow in Sansk?it. In Sansk?it, the earth, which comes out of waters--an island[510] (as the moon and the cloud)--is also called by the name of kurmas, _i.e._, a tortoise (properly the curved, the humped, the eminent, the prominent; mantharas is a name given to the tortoise, and Manthara is the name of the humpbacked woman who causes the ruin of Ramas in the _Ramaya?am_). Hence we also have in the West, besides the fables of the leaping hare (the moon) and the cow, of the leaping locust (the moon) and the ant, the apologue of the hare and the tortoise who run together; the hare, relying on its swiftness, falls asleep and loses, while the tortoise by steady perseverance wins the race.

We have already seen the tortoise in the Hindoo legends as the rival of the eagle or the Vish?uitic bird Garu?as. The two are now identified and now fight against each other (we must remember that it was by the advice of Kacyapas that the bird Garu?as ravished the ambrosia from the serpents). In Greece, the proverb of the tortoise which vanquishes the eagle, was already diffused; now it is the eagle which carries the tortoise into the air, or rather makes it fly, now it is, on the other hand, the tortoise which defies the eagle to arrive first. It is interesting to compare with this the Siamese apologue published by A. Bastian in the _Orient und Occident_, of evidently Hindoo origin. The bird Khruth, no doubt a limited and particular form of Garu?as, wishes to eat a tortoise (here perhaps the moon) which lies upon the sh.o.r.e of a lake. The tortoise consents to be eaten, under the condition that the Khruth accepts a challenge to a trial of speed, and arrives soonest on the other side of the lake, the bird to go through the air, and the tortoise through the water. The bird Khruth accepts the wager; then the tortoise calls together millions and millions of tortoises, and places them all in such a way that they surround the lake, each distant a few steps from the water.

Then it gives the signal to the bird to commence the race. The Khruth rises into the air, and flees to the opposite bank; wherever he essays to alight, he finds the tortoise has been there before him. (This myth represents, perhaps, the relation of the sun to the lunations).

FOOTNOTES:

[506] Cfr. the Sansk?it roots, _kar_, _kur_, _gur_, _gur_.

[507] i. 1353-1456.

[508] Savita vai prasavanamico.--_ait. Br._ The story of Cuna?cepas; he appears evidently as a form of Pra?apatis.

[509] The Koribantes remind us of the Salii of the Latins, to whom Numa gives the arms and the words, to be sung leaping. According to Ovid's distich--

"Jam dederat Salii (a saltu nomina duc.u.n.t) Armaque et ad certos verba canenda modos."

--_Fasti_, iii. 389.