



Produced by Barbara Tozier, Douglas L. Alley, III, Bill
Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net











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,
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 _Rigvedas_ 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 _Rigvedas_, 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, Vritras,
Cushnas, 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
Cambaras, 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 Vedas, 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 Vedas 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 _Ramayanam_ and the _Mahabharatam_, 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 _Rigvedas_ 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 (_purve vyomani_), that is, towards the morning, and
sometimes towards the spring, many of the phenomena of which correspond
to those of the aurora. The _Pricnayas_, or spotted ones, are beyond
doubt the clouds, as the Marutas, sons of Pricnis, 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 Pricnayas feeding the sun Indras in the eastern heavens
and the seven _Angirasas_, 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, _Candras_,
_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 _gaus_ (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 Cakras; 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_ (somapatamas), is also
the best friend and companion of the ambrosial or pluvial moon, and so
the sun and moon (as also Indras and Vishnus) together come to suggest
to us the idea of two friends, two brothers (Indus and Indras), two
twins, the two Acvinau; 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 (_Indrasomau_)
are more frequently represented as two bulls who together discomfit
the monster (_rakshohanau_), who destroy by fire the monsters that
live in darkness.[47] The word _vrishanau_ properly means the two who
pour out, or fertilise. Here it means the two bulls; but as the word
_vrishan_ signifies stallion as well as bull, the two stallions, the
vrishanau Indras and Somas,