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ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS

BY

ANGELO DE GUBERNATIS

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE ISTITUTO DI STUDII
SUPERIORI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO, AT FLORENCE
FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY
OF THE DUTCH INDIES

_IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. I.

LONDON

TRUeBNER & CO., 60 PATERNOSTER ROW

1872

[_All rights reserved_]




PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND COMPANY
EDINBURGH AND LONDON




  TO

  MICHELE AMARI AND MICHELE COPPINO

  This Work

  IS DEDICATED

  AS A TRIBUTE OF LIVELY GRATITUDE AND

  PROFOUND ESTEEM

  BY

  THE AUTHOR.




ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY;

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS.

First Part.

THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.




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, Pricnayas.--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 Ribhavas.--The Ribhavas, bulls and wise
    birds.--The three Ribhavas reproduce the triple Indras and the
    triple Vishnus; 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 Ribhavas, 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 Sita.--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 Urvaci.--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 _foecundator_, 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
_foecundator_ 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 _a 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 _Rigvedas_, 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 Kacmira, 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 (_amritasya nabhis_). Thus far, however, we
have no personification, as yet we have no myth. The _amritas_ 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 _foecundator_ of the great mother should also be called a bull.
Hence we read that the wind (_Vayus_ or _Rudras_) gave birth, from the
womb of the celestial cow, to the winds that howl in the tempest
(_Marutas_ and _Rudras_), 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 (_pricnis_) 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 (_pricnayas_) 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
_pricnis_, or the variegated cow, therefore, is the mother of the
Marutas, the winds, and of the variegated ones (_pricnayas_), 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 _Rigvedas_ 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 (_Vayus_), 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,
