THE PEACOCK.
SUMMARY.
The starry sky and the rayed sun.--The peacock becomes a crow; the
crow becomes a peacock.--Peacock and swan; the dove and the
peacock.--The kokilas and the peacock.--Indras now a peacock, now
a cuckoo.--The peacock's feather.--Indras's horses have peacock's
feathers and peacock's tails.--Skandas rides upon the
peacock.--Argus becomes a peacock.--The peacock as the _avis
Junonia_; Jove is the bird of Juno.
We end our mythical journey in the kingdom of winged animals with the
bird of all the colours.
The serene and starry sky and the shining sun are peacocks. The calm,
azure heavens, bespangled with a thousand stars, a thousand brilliant
eyes, and the sun rich with the colours of the rainbow, offer the
appearance of a peacock in all the splendour of its eye-besprinkled
feathers. When the sky or the thousand-rayed sun (sahasrânçus) is
hidden in the clouds, or veiled by the autumnal waters, it again
resembles the peacock, which, in the dark part of the year, like a
great number of vividly-coloured birds, sheds its beautiful plumage,
and becomes dark and unadorned; the crow which had put the peacock's
feathers on then returns to caw amongst the funereal crows. In winter
the peacock-crow has nothing remaining to it except its disagreeable
and shrill cry, not dissimilar to that of the crows. It is commonly
said of the peacock that it has an angel's feathers, a devil's voice,
and a thief's walk. The crow-peacock is proverbial.[471]
The peacock hides itself when it becomes ugly; so does the sky, and so
does the sun when the autumnal clouds cover it; but in the summer
clouds the thunder rumbles, and thunder made upon the primeval races
of men the impression of an irresistible, much-loved, and wished-for
music, resembling the song of the melodious kokilas (the cuckoo), or
of the watercock (the heron, the halcyon, the duck, or the swan).[472]
In the _Râmâyanam_, as we observed in the chapter on the Cuckoo, the
peacock and the kokilas appear as rivals in singing; although the
watercock laughs at the peacock for its pretentiousness, this rivalry
is no slender proof upon which to admit the mythical identity of two
rival birds.[473] The Hindoo myth, in fact, shows us the god Indras
(now sky, now sun) as a peacock and as a cuckoo (like Zeus). When the
sky is blue, serene, and starry, or when the sun shines with its
thousand rays, and in the colours of the rainbow, the sahasrâkshas, or
thousand-eyed Indras, is found as a peacock; when the sky or the sun
in the cloud thunders and lightens, Indras becomes a kokilas that
sings. In the twentieth of the stories of Santo Stefano di Calcinaia,
two brothers steal a peacock's feather from their younger brother, and
kill him (that is, they kill the peacock, in the same way as in the
Russian story the red little boots are stolen from the little brother,
and he is killed). Where the little brother of the peacock's feather
is killed and buried, a sapling grows up; a stick is made out of the
sapling, and out of the stick a pipe, which, when played upon, sings
the dirge of the little brother who was killed for a peacock's
feather. When the luminous sky or the sun is hidden in the clouds,
when the luminous feathers of the peacock are torn off,[474] when the
peacock is buried, the tree which is its tomb (the cloud) speaks, at
the return of spring, like the cornel-tree of Polidorus in _Virgil_,
and the trunk of Pier delle Vigne in Dante's _Inferno_; the tree
becomes a cane, a magic flute, a melodious kokilas. Indras-kokilas
remembers Indras-peacock, Indras whose horses, even in the Vedic
hymns, have "peacocks' feathers,"[475] and "tail (or phallos) of
peacocks."[476] We have already seen that the body of Indras was,
after intercourse (as sun) with Ahalyâ in adultery, covered with a
thousand wombs (waves or clouds; cfr. the equivoque _sahasradhâras_,
given to the solar disc, properly because it has a thousand darts that
wound), which were already a thousand eyes (stars or sunbeams), whence
his names of Sahasradriç, Sahasranayanas, Sahasranetras, and
Sahasrâkshas, which are equivalent. The long refulgent tail of the
peacock took a phallical form. According to the Petropolitan
Dictionary, mayûreçvaras (or Çivas-peacock), is the proper name of a
liñgam or phallos, the well-known emblem of Çivas, which also calls
our attention to Mayûrarathas, Mayûraketus, Cikhivâhanas, and
Çikidhvagas, names of Skandas, the god of war, who is also a phallical
god, like Mars, the lover of Venus, and like the Hindoo Kâmadevas, or
god of love, who rides upon the parrot, and which therefore brings us
back to the lunar phallical symbol.[477] The sky with the sun, as well
as with the moon, is superseded by the sterile sky with the stars of
the night or the clouds of autumn; the phallos falls; the impotent sky
remains--Indras the eunuch, Indras with a thousand wombs, Indras
plunged into the waves of the spotted clouds, Indras a ram, the
pluvial or autumnal Indras, Indras lost in the sea of winter, Indras
the fish, Indras without rays, without lightning, and without
thunder, Indras cursed, he who had been beautiful and resplendent like
a crested peacock (çikhin), Indras as the peacock enemy of the serpent
(ahidvish, ahiripus), into which form he returns by the pity of the
gods. According to the _Tuti-Name_, when a woman dreams of a peacock,
it presages the birth of a handsome son.
The Greeks were also acquainted with the myth of the peacock, and
amplified it. In the first book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, Argus, with
the hundred eyes, who sees everything (Panoptês and son of Zeus), by
the order of the goddess Juno, the splendid and proud wife of Jove, to
whom the peacock is sacred (and therefore called _avis Junonia, ales
Junonia_; the peacock of Juno is Jove himself, as we have already seen
that Jove's cuckoo is himself; Argos the son of Zeus is Zeus himself),
whilst two eyes rest (perhaps the sun and the moon), watches with the
others (the stars) Io (the daughter of Argus himself, priestess of
Juno, identified with Isis the moon, loved by Jove). Mercury, by means
of music, puts Argus to sleep, and kills him as he slumbers. The eyes
of the dead Argus pass into the tail of the peacock (that is, the dead
peacock rises again). The peacock, which annually loses and renews its
various colours and splendours, and is fruitful in progeny, served,
like the phoenix, as a symbol of immortality, and a personification of
the fact that the sky is obscured and becomes serene again, that the
sun dies and is born again, that the moon rises, is obscured, goes
down, is concealed, and rises once more. It is said of Pythagoras that
he believed himself to have once been a peacock, that the peacock's
soul passed into Euphorbos, that of Euphorbos into Homer, and that of
Homer into him. It was also alleged that out of him the soul of the
ancient peacock passed into the poet Ennius, whence Persius--
"Postquam destituit esse
Mæonides quintus pavone ex Pythagoræo."
If the peacock be Zeus, if Zeus be Dyâus, if Dyâus be the luminous and
splendid sky, the divine light, which of my readers would disclaim the
Pythagorean belief? The dream of being the sons of the divine light, and
destined to return to the heavenly fatherland, certainly is much more
consoling than the dreary conclusion of modern science, which reduces
us, in our origin and final lapse, into unconscious vegetables upon the
surface of the earth. The only drawback is, that this same heretical
mythology, which often, even in its grossest forms, such as the animal
ones, opens up to our incredulous reason a ray of hope in the
immortality of the soul, that this mythology which resuscitates and
transfigures into new living forms all its dead, does not permit us to
believe in an eternity of joy in heaven; heaven, like earth, is in
perpetual revolution, and the gods of Olympus are no more secure on
their divine throne than our royal automata that sit upon their earthly
ones. The metempsychosis does not end when the soul goes to heaven; on
the contrary, it is in heaven that it is fated to undergo the strangest
and most diverse transformations; from the heroic form we have seen it
pass into that of a quadruped and a biped. Nor is its curse yet come to
an end; the deity or the hero must humble himself yet more, and assume
in the zoological scale the most imperfect of organisms; the animal god
will lose his speech in the form of a stupid fish; he will creep like a
serpent or hop grotesquely like a filthy toad.
FOOTNOTES:
[471] Cfr. the chapter on the Crow.
[472] "Wie wir den Hugschapler sogar auf den Pfauen schwören sehen,
legten sie die Angelsachsen auf den Schwan ab (R. A. 900), den wir wohl
nach den obigen Gesange Ngördhs, S. 343 als den ihm geheiligten Vogel
(ales gratissima nautis, Myth. 1074) zu fassen haben, &c." Simrock, the
work quoted before, p. 347.--A Hindoo proverb considers the dove in
connection with the peacock; it says, "Better a pigeon to-day than a
peacock to-morrow" (Varamadya kapoto na çvo mayûrah). According to the
_Ornithologia_ of Aldrovandi, the peacocks are the doves' friends,
because they keep serpents and all venomous animals at a distance.
[473] The Russian fable of Kriloff presents to us the ass as a judge
between the nightingale (the kokilas of Western poets) and the cock in
a trial of singing; in Sanskrit _çikhin_, or crested, means cock and
peacock; besides mayûras, peacock, we have mayûracatakas, the domestic
cock. Mayûras is also the name of a Hindoo poet.--In the chapter on
the Cuckoo we saw the cuckoo and the nightingale as rivals in singing;
the kokilas and the peacock are the equivalents of the nightingale and
the cuckoo; we have also identified the cuckoo with the swallow, and
seen the swallows as rivals of the swans in singing; cfr. the chapter
on the Crow.
[474] Hence Aldrovandi writes with reason, that the smoke of the burnt
feathers of a peacock (that is, of the celestial peacock), when taken
into the eyes, cures them of their redness.
[475] Â mandrâir indra haribhir yâhi mayûraromabhih; _Rigv._ iii. 45,
1.
[476] Â tvâ rathe hiranyaye harî mayûraçepyâ; viii. 1, 25.--Klearchos
relates in Athênaios, that a peacock in Leucas loved a maiden so much,
that when she died it also immediately expired.
[477] According to the _Pancatantram_ (i. 175), in the very house of
Çivas (the phallical god), the animals make war against each other;
the serpent (the night) wishes to eat the mouse (which seems here to
be the grey twilight); the peacock (here, perhaps, the moon), wishes
to eat the serpent (cfr. the preceding notes; according to Ælianos, a
certain man who wished to steal from the King of Egypt a peacock,
supposed to be sacred, found an asp in its stead); the lion (the sun)
wishes to eat the peacock. (The Hindoo name of mayûrâris, or enemy of
the peacock, given to the chameleon, is remarkable; the animal which
changes its colour is the rival of the bird which is of every colour;
gods and demons are equally viçvarûpâs and kâmarûpas.)
Third Part.
THE ANIMALS OF THE WATER.
CHAPTER I.
FISHES, AND PARTICULARLY THE PIKE, THE SACRED FISH OR FISH OF ST PETER,
THE CARP, THE MELWEL, THE HERRING, THE EEL, THE LITTLE GOLDFISH, THE
SEA-URCHIN, THE LITTLE PERCH, THE BREAM, THE DOLPHIN, AND THE WHALE.
SUMMARY.
Why Indras, the fearless hero, flees after having defeated the
serpent; the fish causes the death of the fearless
hero.--Çakrâvatâras and the fisher.--The stone and the
fish.--Adrikâ, Girikâ, the mother of fishes.--The matsyâs as a
nation.--Çaradvat.--Pradyumnas.--Guhas.--The fishes laugh.--The
fish guards the white haoma.--The water of the fish drunk by the
cook.--The devil steals the fishes.--The dwarf Andvarri and the
pike as the guardian of gold and of a ring.--The goldfish and the
pike.--The dwarf Vishnus as a little goldfish.--The legend of the
Deluge.--Vishnus as a horned fish draws the ship of Manus; the
sea-urchin or hedgehog of the Ganges, the little destroyer.--The
dolphin with the horned bull draws the chariot or vessel of the
Açvinâu.--The little turbulent perch.--The thorns of the
sea-urchin compared to a hundred oars.--The whale as a bridge or
island; the whale devours a fleet.--The pike.--The bream.--The
phallical fishes; the phallos and the simpleton.--Why fishes are
eaten in Lent, that is, spring; and on Friday, the day of Freya or
Venus.--The _poisson d'avril_.--The herring.--The eel.--The bream
cleans the workman.--The phallical and demoniacal eel; _anguilla_
and _anguis_.--The eel and the cane; _ikshus_ and
_Iskshvâkus_.--Diabolical fishes.--The red mullet.--The bream and
the ring.--Cimedia.--The whale vomits out the vessels; the whale
as an island.--The little perch finds the ring and draws the
casket by the help of the dolphins.--The war of the little perch
with the other fishes.--The eel pout.--The perch.--The
sturgeon.--The little perch is the fox of fishes.--The words
_matsyas_, _matto_, _mad_, _matt_, _mattas_, _madidus_.--The
drunken pike.--The three fishes.--Çakuntalâ, the pearl and the
fish.--The genera _cyprinus_ and _perca_; _lucius_, _lucioperca
sandra_; the lunar horn.--The dolphin.--The carp.--The fish _Zeus
Chalkeus_, the fish _faber_, the fish of St Peter; the fish of St
Christopher; the equivoque of _crista_ and _christus_ again in
conjunction with the legend of St Christopher.
The god Indras, in the _Rigvedas_, after having killed the monster,
flees in terror across the ninety-nine navigable rivers; the pluvial
god, after having lightened, thunder-stricken and thundered, is
terrified by his own work; the Vedic poet asks him what he has seen,
but the god passes on and answers not; killing the monster, he has
unchained the waters; the pluvial god has wounded himself while
wounding his enemy; the monster's shadow or his own shadow pursues
him; the waters increase and threaten to drown him. The god Indras
fears the very waters he has caused to flow. The god Indras was
condemned to remain hidden in the waters (of night and winter) during
the period of his malediction, for defiling in adultery the nuptial
bed of Ahalyâ. The god shut up in the waters, the wet god, is his most
infamous and accursed form.[478] The celestial metamorphosis into a
fish is perhaps the vilest transmutations of animal, and therefore the
most feared; the fish lives especially in order to reproduce itself;
to represent, therefore, the decadence of the god after a phallical
crime of his, he is condemned to lie down in the waters. We know that
the fisher, in the _Çakuntalâ_, lives at Çakrâvatâras (that is, the
fall of Indras). We have seen the sister of Latona, and Rambhâ and
Ahalyâ, after having transgressed, the one with Jupiter and the others
with Indras, become stones in the waters. The fish, rendered powerless
and stupid, becomes inert and motionless like a stone (sun and moon
pass into sky or cloud). We already find the image of the stone with
the honey brought, in the _Rigvedas_,[479] into close affinity to that
of the fish which lies in shallow water, or of the fish made powerless
and deprived of its vital qualities.
The legend of the nymph Adrikâ (from the word _adris_, which means a
stone, a rock, a mountain, or a cloud) presents the same analogy between
the stone-cloud, that is, the stone in the waters, and the fish. By a
divine malediction, Adrikâ is transformed into a fish, and lives in the
Yamunâ. Being in these waters, she picks up a leaf upon which had fallen
the sperm of King Uparicaras, enamoured of Girikâ (or of Adrikâ herself,
the two words _adrikâ_ and _girikâ_ being equivalent); this leaf had
been let fall into the waves of the Yamunâ by the bird çyenas, that is,
by the hawk. Having fed upon this sperm, the nymph fish is caught by
fishermen, and taken to King Uparicaras; the fish is opened, and the
nymph resumes her heavenly form; of her a son and a daughter are born,
Matsyas the male fish, and Matsyâ the female one.[480] The male
afterwards becomes king of the matsyâs or fishes, which some authorities
have, in vain, as I think, endeavoured to identify with a historical
nation; for it is not enough to find them named as a people in the
_Mahâbhâratam_, to prove their real historical existence, when we know
that the whole basis of the _Mahâbhâratam_ is mythological. Moreover,
when we find the Matsyâs in the Vedic hymns, it is one more argument
from which to infer the mythical nature of the peoples named in the
_Rigvedas_ in connection with the waters. In another legend of the
_Mahâbhâratam_, the semen of the penitent Çaradvat (properly the
autumnal or the pluvial one), provoked by the sight of a beautiful
nymph, falls upon the wood of an arrow; the wood of the arrow splits in
two, and two sons are born of it, who are given to the king; a variety
of this legend will be found further on in the Western traditions
connected with the story of the fish.[481]
To the ninety-nine or hundred cities of Çambaras (the clouds)
destroyed by Indras, correspond the ninety-nine rivers which Indras
crosses. In the _Vishnu P._,[482] a fish receives the hero Pradyumnas
(an appellation of the god of love), thrown into the sea by Çambaras,
and enables him to recover and wed Mâyâdevî.
King Guhas (the hidden one? the dark one?) the king of the black
Nishâdâs, the king of Çriñgaveras (in which we have already recognised
the moon), who, during the night, receives Râmas on the banks of the
Ganges, hospitably entertains him, offering him beverages, meat, and
fishes.[483]
In the _Çukasaptatî_, and in the _Tuti-Name_, the fishes laugh at the
prudery of an adulterous servant-girl; we have already shown, in the
first chapter of the first book, the phallical signification of the
fish that laughs.
In the _Khorda Avesta_, we find a fish with acute eyesight
(Karo-maçyo, the posterior Khar-mâhî), which guards the white haoma,
that is, the ambrosia (with which sperm was also identified).
In the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_, Alexander, having arrived at the
luminous fountain which scatters perfumes, asks his cook for something
to eat; the cook prepares to wash the fish in the refulgent water; the
fish returns to life, and disappears from his sight; but the cook
drinks some of the water of the fish, and gives some to Alexander's
daughter Une, who becomes, by the curse of Alexander himself, a nereïd
or marine nymph, whilst he fastens a stone to the cook's neck, and
orders him to be thrown to the bottom of the sea. It is unnecessary
for me to demonstrate the analogy between this legend and the myth of
Indras, or to insist upon the phallical meaning of the myth.
We already know that phallical images and demoniacal ones sometimes
correspond; hence, in the ninth Esthonian story, the devil steals the
fishes from the fishermen; hence, in the _Eddas_, the brigand Loki now
assumes the form of a salmon, and now catches the pike, into which
the dwarf Andvarri has transformed himself. The pike is the guardian
of gold and of a ring which is taken from him; the fish enters into
the stone, and predicts that gold will be the cause of the death of
the two brothers. The ambrosial rain which comes out of the cloud, and
the ambrosial dew, are the water in which the fish is washed, and the
ambrosial dew is the water or seed of the fish; the fair-haired and
silvery moon in the ocean of night is the little gold fish, and the
little silver fish which announces the rainy season, the autumn, the
deluge. Out of the cloudy, nocturnal, or wintry ocean, comes forth the
sun, the pearl lost in the sea, which the gold or silver fish brings
out.
The little goldfish of our aquariums, the _cyprinus chrysoparius_, the
_cyprinus auratus_, the _cyprinus sophore_ (the Hindoo _çapharas_, in
the feminine _çapharî_), and the luminous pike, like the moon, can
expand and contract. We are already acquainted with the sea-monster
which, in the _Râmâyanam_ (like the siren fish), allures from the sea
the shadow of Hanumant, and can make itself now small, now large; we
have seen the dwarf Andvarri of the _Eddas_, who hides himself in the
form of a pike; we are familiar with the god Vishnus or Haris, who,
from being a dwarf, becomes a giant (Haris means fair-haired or
golden, and refers now to the sun, now to the moon); Vishnus, in his
incarnation as a fish, first takes the form of the little golden fish,
the çapharî; and, in this form, the god Vishnus is especially
identified with the moon, the ruler of the rainy season. As the moon
(which we have already seen as a little learned puppet) grows by
quarters, and from being exceedingly small, becomes large, so, in the
Hindoo legend of the Deluge, narrated in the Vedic commentaries, in
the _Mahâbhâratam_, and in the Pâuranic legends, the god Vishnus or
Haris begins by being an exceedingly small fish, a çapharî, which
beseeches the penitent Manus to be taken out of the great river, the
Ganges, where it is afraid of being devoured by the aquatic monsters.
Manus receives the little fish in the vase of water in which he
performs his ablutions (a Hindoo proverb says that the çapharî is
agitated from petulance in water an inch deep, whilst the rohitas, a
kind of carp, does not become proud even in bottomless depths[484]);
in one night (evidently in its character as the moon) the fish grows
so much that it can no longer remain in the vase; Manus carries it
into a pool, afterwards into the Ganges; finally, the fish increases
so much in size that Manus, recognising Vishnus in it, is obliged to
give it entire liberty in the sea. Then the grateful fish announces
that in seven days the waters will inundate the world, and all the
wicked will perish; he orders him (as the biblical God does Noah) to
build a ship: "Thou shalt enter into it," says Vishnus to him, "with
seven sages, a couple of every kind of animal, and the seeds of every
plant. Thou shalt wait in it the end of the night of Brahman; and when
the vessel is agitated by the waves, thou shalt attach it by a long
serpent to the horn of an enormous fish, which will come near thee,
and will guide thee over the waves of the abyss." On the appointed
day, the waters of the sea came up over the surface of the earth; the
fish made its appearance to draw the ship in order to save Manus. The
ship stopped upon the horn, that is, upon the peak of a mountain. Now
this little goldfish, in which Vishnus is incarnate, when it becomes
horned to draw the ship of Manus, assimilates itself to another
interesting sea animal, the sea-urchin or hedgehog of the Ganges,
(çinçumâras, which is also one of the names of the dwarf Vishnus (we
have already seen Vishnus as a wild-boar), and which means properly
the little destroyer. The eighteenth strophe of the precious 116th
hymn of the first book of the _Rigvedas_, shows us the çinçumâras or
sea-urchin, which, together with another horned animal, the bull (we
have already seen the moon as a horned bull) draws the chariot of the
Açvinâu, full of riches;[485] we know that the chariot of the Açvinâu
is often a vessel. Çinçumâras also means in Sanskrit the dolphin;[486]
and the dolphins and the fish called jorsh (the little perch), with
its little horns, thorns, and thin shape, sharpened at one end like a
pole ending in a point, called in Russian stories the turbulent one
(kropacishko), are in relation with each other, as they draw the
casket away; the jorsh takes the place of the "little destroyer," of
the çinçumâras, of the sea-urchin, concerning which there is a very
interesting Sicilian verse, which compares the stings of the
sea-urchin to a hundred oars, with which it must row, carrying its
little invokers; after having caught it, Sicilian children scatter a
little salt over it, and sing--
"Vócami, vócami, centu rimi,
Vócami, vócami, centu rimi."
(Row for me, row for me, hundred oars). Then it moves, and the
children are delighted. In the Russian little poem, _Kaniok Garbunok_,
of Jershoff, already mentioned by us in the chapter on the Horse, Ivan
must seek, for the sultan, a ring shut up in a casket which has fallen
into the sea (the evening or the autumnal sun). Ivan upon his
crook-backed horse arrives in the middle of the sea, where there is a
whale which cannot move because it has swallowed a fleet, that is to
say, the solar vessel. The part played here by the whale is the same
as that of the sea-monster who swallows Hanumant in the _Râmâyanam_,
to vomit him out again, as in the case of the biblical Jonah (the
night devours the sun, or carries it into its body). Hanumant enters
into the fish by its mouth, and comes out at its tail; however, in the
narrative given of it in the fifty-sixth canto of the fifth book by
Hanumant himself, he says that the sea-monster having shut its mouth,
he came out of it by the right ear. When the night is with the moon,
instead of swallowing the hero, the bull-moon or fish-moon carries him
or serves as a bridge for him. In Russian fairy tales the brown pike
(which, on account of its colour, is called the chaste widow)[487] is
now a form assumed by the devil in order to eat the young hero, who
has become a little perch,[488] and now an enormous fish with great
teeth, which slaughters the little fishes.[489] Now, instead, it
serves as a bridge for Ivan Tzarevic, who is seeking for the egg of
the duck which is inside the hare under the oak-tree in the midst of
the sea;[490] now it is caught in the fountain (as the moon, soma, in
the well) by the foolish and lazy Emilius, and because Emilius saves
its life, it makes him rich by performing several miracles for him,
such as that of the barrels full of water, of the trees of the forest,
of the waggons or the stoves which move off by themselves, and finally
that of the cask thrown into the sea, into which Emilius is shut with
the beautiful daughter of the Tzar, and which comes to shore and
breaks open.[491] Now the phallical pike with the golden fins[492] is
caught, washed, quartered, and roasted; the dirty water is thrown away
and drunk by the cow (in _Afanassieff_) or by the mare (in
_Erlenwein_); a portion of the fish is eaten by the black slave,
whilst she is carrying it to table, the rest by the queen; hence three
young heroes, considered as brothers, are born at the same time to the
cow (or mare), to the black maiden, and to the queen. Now the pike (as
in the satirical fable of Kriloff) draws the car in company with the
crab and the heron; and here, it would appear, these two animals are
rather stupid than intelligent, inasmuch as, whilst the pike draws the
car into the water, the crab draws it back on the earth and the heron
essays to mount with it into the air. Here we have the usual
correspondence between the phallical figure and that of the simpleton.
Thus, in the Piedmontese dialect, the phallos and the stupid man is
called _merlu_ (blackbird). From the word _merlo_ (Lat. _merula_) was
derived the name of the fish called _merluccio_ or _merluzzo_ (_gadus
merlucius_, the melwel or haddock), called _asellus_ by the Latins and
_onos_ by the Greeks. The ass is a well-known phallical symbol, and
Bacchus being also a phallical god, we read in Pliny, "Asellorum duo
genera, Callariæ minores, et Bacchi, qui non nisi in alto (in the
deep) capiuntur." The Italian name _baccalà_, given to the cod-fish,
seems to me to be derived from the union of the two names Bacchus and
Callaria. In the Piedmontese dialect, a stupid man is also called by
the name of _baccalà_. There is also a fish called _merula_, of which
the ancients describe the extraordinary salacity, by indulging which
it literally consumes itself away and perishes.[493] In Italy we find
the following phallical proverbs: "The blackbird has passed the Po,"
and "The blackbird has passed the river;" to denote a woman or a man
exhausted, to impotence. The ancients wrote of the fish called
_chrüsofrüs_ by the Greeks, and _aurata_ by the Latins, that it would
let itself be taken in children's and women's hands, and (according to
Athenaios) it was sacred to Aphroditê. Aphroditê, Venus, goddess of
love, especially, represented in myths the aurora and the spring
(hence in Lent and on Friday, the day of Freya, _dies Veneris_, we eat
fishes); therefore the _gemini pisces_, the two fishes joined in one,
were sacred to her, and the joke of the _poisson d'Avril_, as I have
already mentioned in the first chapter of the first book, is a jest of
phallical origin, which should be abandoned.[494] Aphroditê and Eros,
pursued by Typhon, transformed themselves into fishes and plunged into
the Euphrates. The Hellenic Eros was also represented riding (instead
of the phallical butterfly) on a dolphin; according to other accounts,
he rides upon a swan with dolphins before him. In an epigram of the
_Anthologia Græca_, the dolphin, moreover, carries a weary
nightingale. In several parts of Alsace, on the evening of St Andrew's
Day, girls eat herrings to dream during the night of the husband who
is to quench their thirst.[495] The fish _julis_ of Pliny, or Julia,
is called _donzella_ (damsel) in Italian, and _menchia di re_ (king's
phallos) at Naples and in Venetia, and other fishes also take their
name from the organs of generation.[496] The phallos is called _u
pesce_ at Naples, and, in Italian, _nuovo pesce_ (a new fish)
signifies a stupid man. An essentially phallical character, moreover,
is possessed by the eel, which, according to Agatharchides, quoted by
Hippolitus Salvianus, the Boeotians crowned as a victim and sacrificed
solemnly to the gods, which, according to Herodotos, the Egyptians
venerated as a divine fish, and which Athenaios pompously calls the
Helen of dinners. The eel became proverbial; the Italian proverbial
expressions, "To take the eel," "To hold the eel by its tail," "When
the eel has taken the hook it must go where it is drawn," are all
equivocal. The Germans also have a proverb concerning the eel, which
reminds us of the story of the cook who steals the fish from
Alexander, and, together with Alexander's daughter, drinks its
water.[497] The phallos discovers secrets, and therefore, in a German
legend,[498] the faculty of seeing everything which is under the water
is ascribed to a woman who had eaten an eel (a variety of the story of
the fish that laughs, which, in the ninth story of the third book of
_Afanassieff_, enriches whoever possesses it, and the fish _silurus_
(the bream), so called from the Greek words _sillô_ and _oura_,
because it shakes its tail, which, in the fifty-eighth story of the
sixth book of _Afanassieff_, cleans the workman who had fallen into
the mud, and makes the princess laugh who had never laughed before).
In the eighteenth story of Santo Stefano di Calcinaia, a fisherman
catches an eel with two tails and two heads, which is so large that he
has to be assisted in carrying it. The eel speaks, and commands that
its two tails be planted in the garden, that its intestines be given
to the bitch, and its two heads to the fisherman's wife. Two swords
are born of the tails in the garden (in the Hindoo legend we saw two
sons born of the wood of Çaradvat's arrow), two dogs are born of the
intestines to the bitch, and two beautiful young men of the heads to
the wife (the two Açvinâu, drawn, as we have seen in the Vedic hymn,
by the sea-urchin). In the chapter on the Dove, we saw the two young
lovers, when pursued, take the form of doves. In the fourteenth
Sicilian story of Signora Gonzenbach, the young man and the maiden
pursued by the witch transform themselves first into church and
sacristan, then into garden and gardener, then into rose and
rosebush, and finally into fountain and eel. In the first volume of
the _Cabinet des Fées_, the fairy Aiguillette is taken in the form of
an eel. In the fourth of the stories of Santo Stefano di Calcinaia,
the beautiful maiden is asked by the servant-maid of the priest (that
is, by the servant-maid of the black man, by the black woman or the
night), who went to wash clothes at the fountain, to come down from
the tree. The maiden descends, is thrown into the fountain and
devoured by an enormous eel. The fishermen catch the eel and take it
to the prince; the witch has it killed and thrown into a cane-brake.
The eel is then transformed into a large and beautiful cane, which is
also carried to the prince, who, cutting it gently with a penknife,
makes his beautiful girl come out (this legend is a variety of that of
the wooden girl).[499] This form of a diabolical eel has a close
relationship with the monster-serpent; the _anguilla_ reminds one of
the _anguis_; hence, in the ninth story of the first book of the
_Pentamerone_, instead of the eel as a foecundator, as in the
eighteenth Tuscan story, we find the fish called _draco marinus_ (in
Italian, _trascina_), of which it is curious to read, what
Volaterranus writes, that--"Si manu dextra adripias eum contumacem
renitentemque experieris, si læva subsequentem,"--as if he meant to
imply that the left hand is the hand of the devil. Thus Oppianos
describes the wedding of the muraina eel (the _murana_) with the
serpent (the viper according to Ælianos and Pliny). Other fishes have
assumed an essentially diabolical character, such as the fish called
_alôpêx_ (Lat. _vulpes_, _vulpecula_), of which Ælianos relates that
it swallows the hook and then vomits it out with its own intestines;
the _rana piscatrix_, also called the marine devil; the _trügôn_ (Lat.
_pastinaca_, It. _bruco_), which, according to Oppianos, kills men
with its dart (fame reports that Ulysses was killed with the bone of a
_trügôn_) and dries up trees (although it is strange that to cure
one's self from such a fatal wound, as it was supposed by the ancients
to be venomous, Dioscoris only recommends a decoction of sage). The
sea-scorpion (whose wounds, according to the ancients, were cured by
means of the _trigla_, the red mullet--Lat. _mullus_--sacred according
to Athenaios and Apollodorus to Artemis, or to Diana Trivia, the moon;
Plutarch writes that it was sacred to Diana as a hunting fish, because
it kills the marine hare, noxious to man; but we have seen that the
mythical hare is the moon itself), the bream, or _silurus_, _glanis_,
or _piscis barbatus_, which, in Hungary, according to Mannhardt
(Manardus, quoted in the sixteenth century by Ippolito Salviano), had
the reputation of attacking men, so much so, that it is said that one
of these fishes, which are, in fact, very voracious, was once found
with a man's hand, covered with rings, in its intestines. But these
rings in the fish's body (like the gem called cimedia,[500] which,
according to the popular belief, is found in the brain of a great
number of fishes) recall us to the interrupted poem of Jershoff, to
the little perch, the dolphins, the whale, and the ring fallen into
the water and found again by the fish, which is perhaps the most
interesting subject of legends in the mythical cycle of the fishes,
and, if I may say so, their epic exploit.
Ivan, therefore, has come with his hump-backed little horse into the
midst of the sea near the whale which has swallowed a fleet;[501] upon
the whale a forest has grown; women go to seek for mushrooms in its
moustaches. Ivan communicates his wish, and the whale calls all the
fishes together, but no one can give information except one little fish,
the little jorsh, or little perch, which, however, is at the time
engaged in chasing one of its adversaries. The whale sends ambassadors
to the jorsh, which unwillingly desists for an instant from the fight,
in order to search for the casket; it finds it, but is not strong enough
to lift it up. The numerous army of the herrings come and try, but in
vain; at last two dolphins come and raise the casket. Ivan receives the
wished-for ring; the whale's malediction comes to an end; it vomits the
fleet forth again, and is once more able to move about, whilst the
little perch returns to pursue its enemies. This war of the little perch
with its adversaries has had in popular Russian tradition its
Herodotuses and its Homers, who have celebrated its praises both in
prose and verse. Afanassieff gives in the third book of his stories,
from a manuscript of the last century, the description of the judgment
of the little perch (jorsh) before the tribunal of the fishes. The bream
(leçc) accuses the little jorsh, the wicked warrior (as the sea-urchin
is the little destroyer; the confounding of the sea-urchin with the
little perch is all the easier in Russian legends, inasmuch as the
former is called josz, and the latter jorsh), who has wounded all the
other fishes with its rough bristles, and compelled them to forsake the
Lake of Rastoff. The jorsh defends itself by saying that it is strong in
virtue of its inherent vigour; that it is not a brigand, but a good
subject, who is known everywhere, highly prized and cooked by great
lords, who eat it with satisfaction. The bream appeals to the testimony
of other fishes, who give witness against the little perch, who
thereupon complains that the other fishes, in their overweening
importance, wish, by means of the tribunals, to ruin him and his
companions, taking advantage of their smallness. The judges call the
perch, the eel-pout, and the herring to give witness. The perch sends
the eel-pout, and the eel-pout excuses itself for not appearing,
pleading that its belly is fat, and it cannot move; that its eyes are
small, and its vision imperfect; that its lips are thick, and it does
not know how to speak before persons of distinction. The herring gives
witness in favour of the bream, and against the little perch. Among the
witnesses against the jorsh, the sturgeon also appears; it maligns the
jorsh, alleging that when he attempts to eat it he must spit more out
than he can swallow, and complains that when it was one day going by the
Volga to Lake Rastoff, the little perch called him his brother and
deceived him, saying, in order to induce him to retire from the lake,
that he had once also been a fish of such size that his tail resembled
the sail of a ship, and that he had become so small after having entered
Lake Rastoff. The sturgeon goes on to say that he was afraid, but
remained in the river, where his sons and companions died of hunger, and
he himself was reduced to the last extremities. He adduces, moreover,
another grave accusation against the jorsh, who had made him go in
front, in order that he might fall into the fishermen's hands, cunningly
hinting that the elder brothers should go before the younger ones. The
sturgeon confesses that he gave way to this graceful flattery, and
entered into a weir made to catch fish, which he found to be similar to
the gates of great lords' houses--large when one goes in, and small when
one goes out; he fell into the net, in which the jorsh saw him, and
cried out, deriding him, "Suffer for the love of Christ." The deposition
of the sturgeon makes a great impression upon the minds of the judges,
who give orders to inflict the knout upon the little jorsh, to impale it
in the great heat, as a punishment for its cheating; the sentence is
sealed by the crayfish with one of his claws. But the jorsh, who has
heard the sentence, declares it to be unjust, spits in the eyes of the
judges, jumps into the briar brake, and disappears from the sight of the
fishes, who remain lost in shame and mortification.
In the thirty-second story of the fourth book of _Afanassieff_, we
find two varieties of this zoological legend.
The turbulent jorsh enters into Lake Rastoff, and possesses himself of
it. Called to judgment by the bream, it answers that from the day of
St Peter to that of St Elias, the whole lake was on fire; and cites in
proof of this assertion that the roach's eyes are still red from its
effects, that the perch's fins are also still red, that the pike
became dark coloured, and that the eel-pout is black in consequence.
These fishes, called to give witness, either do not appear, or else
deny the truth of these assertions. The jorsh is arrested and bound,
but it begins to rain, and the place of judgment becomes muddy; the
jorsh escapes, and, from one rivulet to another, arrives at the river
Kama, where the pike and the sturgeon find him, and take him back to
be executed.
The jorsh, arrested and brought to judgment, demands permission to
take a walk for only one hour in Lake Rastoff; but after the
expiration of the appointed time, it neglects to come out of the lake,
and annoys the other fishes in every way, stinging and provoking them.
The fishes have recourse for justice to the sturgeon, who sends the
pike to look for the jorsh; the little perch is found amongst the
stones; it excuses itself by saying that it is Saturday, and that
there is a festival in his father's house, and advises him to take a
constitutional in the meanwhile, and enjoy himself; on the morrow,
although it be Sunday, he promises to present himself before the
judges (the analogy between the actions of the jorsh and those of
Reineke Fuchs is very remarkable). Meanwhile, the jorsh makes his
companion drunk. The Sanskrit name of the fish, _matsyas_, from the
root _mad_, we know to mean drunk and joyous, properly damp (Lat.,
_madidus_); in Italian, _briaco_ and _folle_ are sometimes equivalent;
in the Piedmontese dialect, _bagnà_ (wet) and _imbecil_ (idiot) are
expressions of the same meaning. Drunkenness is of two forms: there is
a drunkenness which makes impotent and stupid; it is a question of
quantity and of quality of beverages, as well as constitution. Thus,
there are two kinds of madness; that which makes a man infuriated, to
cope with whom the strait-waistcoat is necessary, and that which ends
by exhausting all a man's strength in prostration and debility.
Indras, when drunk, becomes a hero; the pike when drunk is a fool
(cfr. the Italian _matto_, English _mad_, which means insane, crazy,
with the German _matt_, which means cast down, exhausted[502]). When
the jorsh has made the pike drunk, it shuts it in a rick of straw,
where the inebriated fish is to die. Then the bream comes to take the
little perch from among the stones, and to bring him before the judge.
The jorsh demands a judgment of God. He tells his judges to put him in
a net; if he stays in the net, he is wrong; if he comes out, he is
right; the jorsh jerks about in the net so much that he gets out. The
judge acquits him, and gives him entire liberty in the lake; then the
jorsh begins his numerous revenges upon the little fishes, proving his
astuteness in continual efforts to ruin them.
As the drunkard and the fool now intensify their strength and now lose
it, so they now double and now lose their intelligence. Hence, among
mythical fishes we find very wise ones and very stupid ones. The story
is very popular of the three fishes of different intelligence, of
which the lazy and improvident one allows himself to be caught by the
fishermen, whilst his two companions escape; it is found in the first
book of the _Pancatantram_. In the fifth book of the _Pancatantram_, a
variety occurs: we read of a fish which has the intelligence of a
hundred (Çatabuddhis), of one which has the intelligence of a thousand
(Sahasrabuddhis), and of the frog which has the intelligence of one
(Ekabuddhis); but that of the two fishes is not intelligence, but
presumption; the one intelligence of the frog is better than the
hundred and the thousand of the fishes. The frog escapes, but the two
fishes fall into the hands of the fishermen.
The little sea-urchin (and the dwarf Vishnus and the dolphin are
equivalent to it, the word _çinçumâras_ being equivocal in Sanskrit) in
the _Rigvedas_ draws the chariot of riches; in the _Eddas_, a dwarf in
the form of a pike (in Greek _lükios_, in Latin _lucius_) watches over
gold, and guards the ring; in Russian legends, the little jorsh
(formidable, like the josz, by its sharp quills), united with the
dolphins, draws out of the sea the casket containing the sultan's ring.
The horn of the moon, which appears in the sea of night, belongs now to
the bull which carries the fugitive hero, now to the fish çapharî,
which, having become large, takes in tow the ship of Manus, and saves it
from the waters, that it may not be wrecked. Now it is the solar hero or
heroine that takes the form of a fish to save himself or herself; now
the fish helps the solar hero or heroine in their escape; now the little
golden or luminous fish plunges into the sea, or into the river, to seek
the pearl or ring for the hero or heroine who had let it fall, the ring
without which King Dushyantas cannot recognise his bride Çakuntalâ; now
it vomits out from its mouth or its tail that which it has
swallowed--the hero, the pearl, the ring (the solar disc).
In the sixth act of _Çakuntalâ_, the fisherman finds in the stomach of a
fish (the _cyprinus dentatus_), the pearl enchased in the ring which
King Dushyantas had given to Çakuntalâ, in order to be able to recognise
her when they should come together again. The genera _cyprinus_ and
_perca_, as the thorny or wounding ones in the order of fishes, have
supplied the greatest number of heroes to mythology; the sea-urchin is
identified to them on account of its darts; the names _hecht_,
_brochet_, _pike_, given to the _lucius_ in Germany, France, and
England, express its faculty of stinging, or cleaving with its flat and
cutting mouth (the fish _lucioperca sandra_ is an intermediate form
between the perch and the pike). The lunar horn, the thunderbolt, the
sunbeam, have the same prerogative as these fishes; the dolphin, on
account of the two scythe-shaped fins which it has on its anterior
extremity, or of its fat and curved dorsal fin, as well as on account of
its black and silvery colour, might well serve to represent the two
lunar horns and the moon's phases. Thus the pike and the bream, dark or
bluish on their backs, are white underneath. The dolphin also has a flat
mouth and sharp teeth, like the pike.[503] The lunar horn announces
rain; thus the scythe-shaped fin of the dolphin, appearing on the waves
of the sea, announces a tempest to navigators, warns them, and saves
them from shipwreck; hence, as a çinçumaras, it may, like the
sea-urchin, have saved or drawn the chariot, that is, the vessel of the
Açvinâu, laden with riches. The dolphin which watches over Amphitritê,
by order of Poseidon, in the Hellenic myth, is the same as the dolphin,
the spy of the sea, or the moon, the spy of the nocturnal and wintry
sky. Inasmuch as the sky of night or winter was compared to the kingdom
of the dead, both the dolphin and the moon, according to the Hellenic
belief, carried the souls of the dead.
The _cyprinus_, _par excellence_, the carp (Lat. _carpus_), is
celebrated, in connection with gold, in an elegant little Latin poem
of Hieronimus Fracastorus. Carpus was the name of a ferryman of the
Lake of Garda, who, seeing Saturn fleeing, took him for a robber who
was carrying gold away, and endeavoured to despoil him of this gold;
then Saturn cursed him and his companions in the following manner:--
"Gens inimica Deum dabitur quod poscitis aurum:
Hoc imo sub fonte aurum pascetis avari.
Dixerat: ast illis veniam poscentibus et vox
Deficit, et jam se cernunt mutescere et ora
In rictum late patulum producta dehiscunt,
In pinnas abiere manus; vestisque rigescit
In squamas, caudamque pedes sinuantur in imam;
Qui fuerat subita obductus formidine mansit
Pallidus ore color, quamquam livoris iniqui
Indicium suffusa nigris sunt corpora guttis;
Carpus aquas, primus numen qui læsit, in amplas
Se primus dedit et fundo se condidit imo."
From the comparisons which we have made hitherto, it is impossible not
to admit that the enterprise of the fish who seeks the gold or the
pearl, who finds it, or who contains it in himself, is a very ancient
Âryan tradition. In the Vedic hymns we see now Indras, now the
Açvinâu, saving the heroes from shipwreck, and bringing riches to
mankind; we have also seen the çinçumâras (sea-urchin, dolphin, or
Vishnus) draw the chariot of the Açvinâu, who are bringing riches. The
Greeks called a fish of a strange shape by the name now of Zeus, now
of chalkeüs (the name given to Hêphaistos, or Mulciber, or Vulcanus,
the worker in metals), or blacksmith, whence the name of _Zeus faber_,
by which it was known to the Latins. This fish is of a really
monstrous shape. Its back is brownish, with yellow stripes; the rest
of its body is of a silvery-grey colour; on its sides it has two spots
of the deepest black. Its dorsal fin opens like a fan, with rays
going out on all sides, and furnished with strong quills, which make
this prominence resemble a crest. We remember that the cock and the
lark were compared to Christ and to Christophoros, on account of their
crest; the same happened in the case of the Zeus faber.[504] The
Italian legend says that those two black spots (which make the fish's
body resemble a forge, whence its name of blacksmith) were caused by
the marks left upon it one day by St Christopher, while carrying
Christ upon his shoulders across the river. The fish which wears the
crest and Christopher are here identified with each other. But this is
not all; at Rome, at Genoa, and at Naples, this same fish is called
the fish of St Peter, because it is said to be the same fish which was
caught by St Peter in the Gospels, in the mouth of which (as a
blacksmith or chalkeüs, it must have known well how to coin money), by
a miracle of Christ's, St Peter found the coin which was to serve for
the tribute. Is it probable that the legend of the fish with gold in
its mouth, so common in Âryan legends, was current in Judea? I do not
think so; inasmuch as _petrus_ and the _petra_, upon which Christ
makes a bad Græco-Latin pun, in connection with the fish, is another
mythical incident which calls me back to the Âryan world, and tears me
away from the Semitic world, and from childish faith in the Judaic
authenticity of the evangelical story, though without prejudice to my
belief in the holiness of the doctrine.
FOOTNOTES:
[478] Indras, as a warlike god, does not know fear, or rather, he
kills fear (the hymn says, "Aher yâtâram kam apaçya indra hridi yat te
gaghnuso bhîr agacchat"; _Rigv._ i. 32, 14), and lets himself be
terrified by a trifle, which may be either a nightly shadow (the dark
man of fairy tales), or the terror caused to him by some fish (the
moon) which leaps upon him in the waters which he himself has set
free.--In the twenty-second of the Tuscan stories published by me, the
young hero who passed through all the dangers of hell without being
afraid, dies at the sight of his own shadow. (We have also referred to
this when treating of the dog and the lion who meet with their death,
allured by their own shadow.)--In the forty-sixth story of the fifth
book of _Afanassieff_, the merchant's son, who did not know fear, who
feared neither darkness nor brigands nor death, is terrified and dies
when he falls into the water, because the little perch entered into
his bosom whilst he was sleeping in his fishing-boat.--It is also easy
to pass from the idea of Indras, who inebriates himself in the _soma_
to that of the fish, when we consider that the Hindoo word _matsyas_,
the fish, properly means the inebriated, from the root _mad_, to
inebriate and to make cheerful.
[479] Açnâpinaddham madhu pary apaçyam matsyam na dîna udani
kshiyantam; _Rigv._ x. 68, 8.
[480] _Mbh._ 2371-2392.
[481] _Mbh._ i. 5078-5086.--In another variety of the same myth, the
semen of the wise Bharadvâgas comes out at the sight of a nymph; the
sage receives it in a cup, out of which comes Dronas, the armourer and
archer _par excellence_; i. 5103-5106.
[482] v. 27.
[483] _Râmây._ ii. 92.
[484] Cfr. Böhtlingk, _Indische Sprüche_, i. 59.
[485] Revad uvâha sacano ratho vâm vrishabhaç ça çinçumâraç ca yuktâ.
[486] Our readers will not be astonished at seeing the dolphin, the
whale, and the sea-urchin classed here with fishes. We are not
treating of natural history according to the classifications of
science, but of the gross classifications made by impressionable
popular imaginations. Thus, amongst the animals of the water we shall
find the serpent described, although it be amphibious, because popular
belief makes the dragon watch over the waters.
[487] The pike becomes in spring of an azure or bluish or
greenish-blue colour; hence the name of _golubbi_--_però_ (that is, of
the azure or bluish fins; in German, the bluish colour is called
_echt-grau_--that is, grey of pike; in the nineteenth of the Russian
stories of _Erlenwein_, golden fins are ascribed to the pike), which
is also given to it in Russia. _Golub_, or brown, violet and azure, is
a name given in Russia to the dove; so in Italy we say, that the dove
is _pavonazzo_ (properly the colour of the peacock, which is generally
blue and green). But in Sanskrit, amongst the names of the peacock
there is that of _haris_, a word which represents both the moon and
the sun. By the same analogy, the bluish or greenish pike may
represent the moon. But another analogy, caused by a similar
conception, is found again in the word _çyâmas_, which means black,
azure, and also silvery; whence it serves to represent the
_convolvolus argenteus_ (we must remember that the Latin name of the
pike is _lucius_; the Greek, _lükios_--that is, the luminous one). The
pike takes the colour of the water in which it lives, and the waters
are dark, black, azure, greenish, silvery; as being azure, or
greenish, or silvery, the pike represents the moon; as being dark, the
tenebrific night, the cloud, the wintry season.--In the thirty-second
story of the fourth book of _Afanassieff_, the little perch relates
that the pike was once luminous (that is, in spring), and that it
became black after the conflagration which took place in the Lake of
Rastoff from the day of St Peter (June 29) to the day of St Elias
(July 20), or in the beginning of summer. As we learn in the
_Pseudo-Callisthenes_, near the black stone, which makes black whoever
touches it, there are fishes which are cooked in cold water, and not
at the fire, I recollect here also that the _Hecht-könig_, or king of
pikes, is described as yellow and black-spotted.
[488] _Afanassieff_, v. 22.
[489] _Afanassieff_, i. 2.--Cfr. the eleventh of the _Novelline di Santo
Stefano di Calcinaia_; a monstrous fish devours the princess; the fish
is said to be a shark (pesce cane); and v. 8 of the _Pentamerone_.
[490] Cfr. _Afanassieff_, ii. 24.
[491] Cfr. _Afanassieff_, v. 55, vi. 32.--It is the same fish which,
saved by the girl who is persecuted by her step-mother, comes to her
assistance, separates the wheat from the barley for her (like the
Madonna, the purifying moon-fairy, the nightly cleanser of the sky),
and gives splendid robes to her, in vi. 29.--In the story v. 54,
instead of the pike as a foecundator we find the bream, which is also
called "of the golden fins" (szlatopioravo), of which the colours are
the same as those of the pike.
[492] In the nineteenth Russian story of _Erlenwein_, and in a variety
of the same in the last book of Afanassieff's stories.--In an
unpublished story of the Monferrato, communicated to me by Dr Ferraro,
a fisherman catches a large fish which says to him, "Let me go, and
you will always be fortunate." The wife of the fisherman opposes this,
roasts and eats the fish, from whose bones are born to the fisherman
three sons, three horses, and three dogs. Evidently the story has been
corrupted.
[493] Cfr. Salvianus, _Aquatilium Animalium Historiæ_, Romæ, 1554.
[494] At Berlin, children sing on the first of April--
"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 Häring abzubeissen. Sobald man nämlich aus der Kirche kommt,
wird ein Häring, nun muss jeder mit geschlossenen Beinen, die Arme
fest an den Leib gedrückt, in die Höhe springen und dabei suchen, ein
Stück abzubeissen." And Karl Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 561,
writes: "In der Mark muss man zu Neujahr Hirse oder Häringe essen, im
Wittenbergischen Heringssalat, so hat man das ganze Jahr über Geld."
[496] Cfr. Salvianus, _ut supra_. The habit certain fishes have of
ejecting froth from the mouth may have suggested a phallical image.
[497] Bei Hans Sachs, Nürnberger, Ausgabe von 1560, ii. 14, 96, Eine
Frau und Magd essen den für den Herrn bestimmten Aal; eine Elster
schwatzt es aus; ran sich zu rächen, rupfen die Weiber ihr den Kopf
kahl. Daher man sprichwörtlich von einem kahlen Mönche sagt: der hat
gewiss vom Aale ausgeschwatzt; Menzel, _Die Vorchristliche
Unsterblichkeits-Lehre_.
[498] In the same: "So erzählt Gilbert bei Leibnitz Script. rer.
Brunsw. i. 987. Ein Frauenzimmer, welches Aal gegessen, habe plötzlich
Alles sehen können was unter Wasser war."
[499] It is well known that the word _ikshvâkus_ has been referred to
the word _ikshus_, the sugar-cane. In the fortieth canto of the first
book of the _Râmâyanam_, one of the two wives of Sagaras gives birth
to a son who continues his race; the other wife gives birth to an
ikshvâkus (gourd or cane) containing 60,000 sons.
[500] Cfr, Du Cange, _s. v._, and Salvianus, the work quoted before.
[501] In the thirteenth story of the first book of _Afanassieff_ (of
which the Bohemian story of _Grandfather Vsievedas_ is a well-known
variety), the whale complains that all the footmen and horsemen pass
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 shore.
[502] If I am not mistaken, the German words _Narr_, fool, and _nass_,
wet, are in connection with each other by the same analogy which gives
us the Sanskrit _mattas_, drunk, and the Latin _madidus_, damp, from
the root _mad_.
[503] A superstitious belief quoted by Pliny concerning the cramp-fish
merits being recorded here: "Mirum quod de Torpedine invenio, si capta
cum Luna in Libra fuerit, triduoque asservetur 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 prick 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_;
Sanskrit, _karkatas_, _karkas_, _karkatakas_; 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
_çaçin_), 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
Hêraklês, who, when combatting the hydra of Lerne, was caught and
drawn back by the crab, which Hêra, 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 ships 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 gods 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 gods in the chariot of Rohinî, 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 Æsopian
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 Sanskrit by the same name as the crab,
that is, karkatas). 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 _Afanassieff_, the
crabs prick and waken the young hero Theodore (gift of God, an
equivalent of Brahmadattas, given by the god 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 _Afanassieff_ 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 shore 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
Sanskrit meanings of the word _karkatas_, 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 Aêdones üpnôousin), 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 shines 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
superstition, therefore, combines with Græco-Latin to consider the
crab as an enemy of the monster; but as in Græco-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 _kaçyapas_ (by the
intermediate form, _kaçapas_).--Explanation of the myth of the
production of the ambrosia, by means of the mandaras.--Mantharas
as a tortoise.--Kûrmas.--Kacchapas the lord of the shores.--The
tortoise and the elephant.--Kaçyapas as Pragâpatis.--Somas and
Savitar.--Kaçyapas and the thirteen daughters of Dakshas;
Dakshagâ.--The funereal tortoise and the frog.--The tortoise and
the lyre; the Schild-kröte; the shields of the Kureti; kacchâs,
kacchapî; kûrmas as a poet and as a wind.--The tortoise and the
warriors.--The shields 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 principal Hindoo names of the tortoise, _kûrmas_,
_kacchapas_, and _kaçyapas_, the third alone, in connection with the
second, seems to have any importance in the history of myths. The
expression _kûrmas_ is the word usually employed to designate the real
tortoise, whilst the expression _kaçyapas_ gave rise to mythical
equivoques, which deserve to be observed.
We know of the famous incarnation of Vishnus as a tortoise, treated of
in the _Kûrma 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 gods had recourse to the mandaras, which was made
to serve for the purpose, as the king of the rods, _kaçapas_; the gods
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 Aphroditê 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 _kaçapas_
and _kacchapas_ (subsequently changed into _kaçyapas_) 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
analogy which offers us the means of understanding how the equivoque
of kaçapas, confused with kacchapas, and which afterwards became
kaçyapas or tortoise, became popular, just through the word _kûrmas_,
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 _Hitopadeças_, 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 kaçapas,
which were originally one and same, were at length distinguished from
each other, the kaçapas, at first a kaçyapas 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 kaçapas 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 god Vishnus 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 kaçapas, the tortoise, as kûrmas, serves well for
this office of a carrier, an assertion I venture to make, inasmuch as
in _kûr-mas_ I think I can recognise the same root which appears in
the Sanskrit _gur-u-s_, fem. _gur-v-î_, superlat. _gar-ishth-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 kaçyapas, applied to the tortoise, should be referred, it properly
means the lord, the guardian of the shores, he who occupies the
shores, and is a perfectly apt designation for the tortoise, and an
expression _à 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
shores 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 Açvinâu, 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 garudas, 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 _Mahâbhâratam_[507] of the
tortoise and the elephant carried into the air by the Vishnuitic
bird, there is still another interesting circumstance or variation,
which corroborates the cosmic interpretation of the myth of the
tortoise now proposed by me. The divine Kaçyapas is mentioned in it;
he desires to have a son, and therefore has himself served by the gods
(since it is the gods 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 kaça-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 Kaçyapas, the name of
Pragâpatis 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. Kaçyapas 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 Kaçyapas also appears as the
foecundator of the thirteen daughters of Dakshas, who correspond to
the thirteen months of the lunar year (Dakshagâ is the name of a lunar
asterism and of the wife of a phallical Çivas, and dakshagâpatis one
of the Hindoo names given to the moon; Dakshas is also identified with
Pragâpatis; whence Kaçyapas 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 Kaçyapas,
everything that lives was born,--gods, demons, men, and beasts,--so
that in the cosmogony of the mandaras, of the Kaçapas, 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; Çivas,
the god of Paradise, becomes the destroying god; Plutus and Pluto are
identified. Thus, in a note of Professor Haugh to the _Âitareya 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
Vishnus now represents the sun and now the moon (the sun and the moon,
as Indras and Somas, were called together rakshohanâu or
monster-killers), is identified now with the tortoise, now with the
bird garudas, the enemy of the tortoise. Here is, however, the note of
Professor Haugh: "At each Atirâtra of the Gavâm ayanam the so-called
Chayana ceremony takes place. This consists in the construction of the
Uttarâ Vedi (the northern altar) in the shape of an eagle. About 1440
bricks are required for this structure, each being consecrated with a
separate Yagusmantra. 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 Hermês had made
the lyre, had been transfigured into it. I may remark here that the
German name for the tortoise is Schild-kröte (toad with shields), 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 shields with their lances. It is interesting to observe, that in
Sanskrit also, kacchâs is the name given to the little shields of the
tortoise or kacchapas; that kacchapî is the term applied to the noise
of the thundering Sarasvatî, or the thunder; that several Vedic poets
are called Kaçyapas; that Kûrmas (another designation of the tortoise)
is also the name of the Vedic poet, the son of Gritsamadas, 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 ass, we saw this _flatus_ compared to the noise of a
trumpet or a kettle-drum; here we have the thunderbolts that strike
upon the shields, 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 Hellenic myth,
the tortoise obtained from Zeus himself--that is, from the pluvial
god, from the god of the clouds, the god in connection with the
shield-clouds which concealed his birth, and we may add, from the god
tortoise,--the power of concealing itself under shields, 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 shield. 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-god; the tortoise, on account of its shields, makes the
new-born child a warrior, and predicts dominion to him; my
well-informed readers will remember how a shield, 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 ætherio venit ab axe fragor.
Ter tonuit sine nube Deus, tria fulgura misit.
Credite dicenti: mira sed acta loquor.
A media coelum regione dehiscere coepit:
Submisere oculos cum 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 assumed 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 circumstance 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 passed
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 passes 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 Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, the
earth, which comes out of waters--an island[510] (as the moon and the
cloud)--is also called by the name of kûrmas, _i.e._, a tortoise
(properly the curved, the humped, the eminent, the prominent; mantharas
is a name given to the tortoise, and Mantharâ is the name of the
humpbacked woman who causes the ruin of Râmas in the _Râmâyanam_). 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 Vishnuitic bird Garudas. The two are now
identified and now fight against each other (we must remember that it
was by the advice of Kaçyapas that the bird Garudas 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 Garudas, wishes to eat a tortoise (here perhaps the
moon) which lies upon the shore 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 Sanskrit roots, _kar_, _kur_, _gur_, _gûr_.
[507] i. 1353-1456.
[508] Savitâ vâi prasavânâmiço.--_Âit. Br._ The story of Cunahçepas;
he appears evidently as a form of Pragâpatis.
[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 ducunt)
Armaque et ad certos verba canenda modos."
--_Fasti_, iii. 389.
[510] It is interesting in this connection to find in the translation of
Lane a passage from the _Agáïb-el-Makhlookát_ (_Marvels of Creation_), a
work of the thirteenth century: "The tortoise is a sea and land animal.
As to the sea tortoise it is very enormous, so that the people of the
ship imagine it to be an island. One of the merchants relates as follows
regarding it: 'We found in the sea an island elevated above the water,
having upon it green plants, and we went forth to it, and dug [holes for
fire] to cook; whereupon the island moved, and the sailors said, "Come
ye to your place, for it is a tortoise, and the heat of the fire hath
hurt it, lest it carry you away." By reason of the enormity of its
body,' said he [_i.e._, the narrator above mentioned], 'it was as though
it were an island, and earth collected upon its back in the length of
time, so that it became like land, and produced plants.'" Evidently here
the tortoise occupies the same place as, in popular tradition, the lunar
whale recorded by us in the chapter on the Fishes. Cfr. Lane, _The
Thousand and One Nights_, London, 1841, vol. iii. chap. xx. n. 1 and 8,
p. 80 _seq._--Grein, _Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie_,
Göttingen, 1857, 1, 235, the Celtic legend of St Brandan and the
_Pseudo-Callisthenes_.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FROG, THE LACERTA VIRIDIS, AND THE TOAD.
SUMMARY.
The mândukâs or frogs as clouds in the _Rigvedas_.--Bhekas.--The
frog announces the summer; the _canta-rana_ announces Christ.--The
serpent, the hero, and the frog.--The frog and the ox.--Dionysos
and the frogs.--Indras and the frogs.--The dumb frogs.--Proserpina
and the frog.--Rana cum gryllo.--The frog finds the sultan's
ring.--The frog and the rook.--The frog as the serpent's
daughter.--The demoniacal frog.--The yellow and the green
frog.--The beautiful maiden as a frog.--The demoniacal toad.--The
sacred toad.--The beautiful maiden as a toad.--The toad in
Tuscany, in Sicily, and in Germany.--The handsome youth as a
toad.--Women who gave birth to toads.--The venomous and the
alexipharmic toad.--Kröte and Schildkröte.--The toad swallows the
dew.--The stone of the frog.--The horned lizard.--Eidechse,
hagedisse.--Apollo as sauroktanos.--The lizard on St Agnes's
Day.--The little lizards must not be killed in Sicily, being
intercessors before the Lord.--The amphisbhæna.--The _lacerta
viridis_.--The _couleuvre_ as a good fairy.
I am sorry to be unable to concur entirely in the opinion of the
illustrious Professor Max Müller, when, in translating a hymn of the
_Rigvedas_, in his _History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature_, he remarks,
"The 103d hymn, in the seventh Mandalam, which is called a panegyric of
the frogs, is clearly a satire on the priests." It is possible that at a
later period, in deriding a brâhmanic school similar to that of the
mândûkâs, a satirical sense would have been ascribed to this hymn, but
it does not seem to me that the intention of the author of the Vedic
hymn was such. Professor Max Müller has shown well in his History how
the Vedic hymns have suffered in the hands of the Brâhmans, by means of
their arbitrary interpretations; the interesting story of the
hypothetical god Kas is a very convincing proof of it; it is, therefore,
possible, and even probable, that attempts were made to use this Vedic
hymn as an arrow for satire; but if I am not mistaken, no trace of a
satirical meaning can be found in the hymn itself. Above all, I must
observe that the Anukramanikâ of the _Rigvedas_ properly calls the hymn
only parganyastutis, or hymn in honour of Parganyas, the hymn of the
tempest; secondly, it scarcely seems possible that a satirical hymn,
intended to caricature the priests, should be inserted in the seventh
book, which is attributed to Vasishtas, the most religious of all the
legendary Brâhmans, and he who, for the glory of Brâhmanism and the
rights of the sacerdotal caste, maintained such a protracted and
disastrous war against Viçvâmitras, the champion of the warrior race;
hence, if a satirical hymn against priests had been found in the third
book of the _Rigvedas_, ascribed to the wise Viçvâmitras, I should not
have thought it so strange, whilst it would be misplaced in the hymns
said to be written by Vasishtas. To me it seems rather that, when
speaking of frogs, the hymn does not allude to the frogs of the earth,
but to the clouds, the cloud-frogs, attracted by the pluvial moon,
whilst the tempest is at its height. We know that in the _Rigvedas_, the
wives of the gods weave hymns in honour of the lightning and thundering
god Indras, who has killed the monster serpent which kept back the
waters of the heavenly cloud; we have also, in the first chapter of the
first book, heard the cows lowing and exulting joyfully before their
deliverer Indras, who lets his seed drop in the midst of them as soon as
they are released from the cave where they were imprisoned. In the
seventh book, the hymns 101 and 102 are sung in honour of Indras as
Parganyas; the hymn 103 is also sung in his honour, but by the clouds of
the sky themselves, by the celestial frogs, inasmuch as the frog which
croaks, when transported into the sky, is nought else then the
thundering cloud; in fact, in Sanskrit the word _bhekas_, which means
frog, has also the meaning of cloud. We have seen that the cuckoo who
sings in spring, and admonishes the tillers of the soil to begin their
work, personifies the thunder in the sky: the frog has the same office;
it, like the thunder, announces the approaching tempest. And because,
when the first claps of thunder are heard, it is the summer which
announces its coming, so the frog that croaks and the frog that sings
served specially to announce the summer. I remember that, a few years
ago, there still existed at Turin, among children, the custom of
sounding in the Holy Week (in order to greet the approaching festival of
the resurrection of Christ, who died amongst flashes of lightning and
peals of thunder) a wooden instrument, which emitted a sharp squeak
resembling the croaking of a frog, and which was therefore called
_canta-rana_ (the frog sings). It was also the custom on Easter Eve to
strike all the doors violently with sticks, as if to reproduce under
another form the sound of the _canta-rana_. According to Pliny, the
frogs die in winter, and are born again in spring; when the frogs ask
for a king, and obtain, in the Greek fable[511] a serpent, and in the
Russian fable of Kriloff a heron, the serpent and the heron symbolise
the autumnal and wintry seasons. Indras, Zeus, and Christ are born and
born again amid the noise of musical instruments, shields, arms, winds
and thunder, among the lowing of cows, the bleating of goats, the
braying of asses, and the croaking of frogs, called by Aristophanes
_philôdon genos_. In the 103d hymn of the seventh book of the
_Rigvedas_, one mandûkas (frog or cloud) lows like a cow (gomâyus);
another like a goat (agamâyus); one is priçnis, or variegated; another
haritas, or fair-haired, golden, red (the cloud born by the lightning
and the violence of the wind), and, as a frog, green or grey; the
mandûkas or frog being transported into the sky, or identified, as a
gomâyus, with the cow, it is no wonder that, in the fable, the frog has
the presumption of thinking it can inflate itself to the size of an ox;
but when the little cloud has become a large one, it ends by bursting,
and so does the frog in his attempt to distend himself and become as
large as the ox. (In the eighteenth Esthonian story, we find a monster
who has a body like that of an ox, and feet like those of a frog.) When
Indras and Zeus have accomplished their work in the celestial cloud,
when the cloud has passed away and dispersed, when the frogs are drunk
with water, they cease their croaking; thus, in the _Frogs_ of
Aristophanes, when Dionüsos (nüseios Dios) has passed the Stygian marsh,
they stop croaking; whilst Zeus, on the other hand, floods the earth
with water, they (Dios pheugontes ombron) retire into the depths of the
waters to dance in chorus (as the ap-sarâs). On the other hand, before
the pluvial god satisfies their desires, before it rains, they croak
incessantly; the thunder always makes itself heard before the rain, and
at the outbreak of the tempest; hence, in the _Rigvedas_ itself, Indus
(the moon), as a bringer of rain (or the rain itself), is implored to
run and plead with Indras, the pluvial god, to satisfy the desire of the
frog.[512] Here, therefore, it is especially Indus who satisfies the
frogs' desire for rain. Indus, as the moon, brings or announces the
somas, or the rain; the frog, croaking, announces or brings the rain;
and at this point the frog, which we have seen identified at first with
the cloud, is also identified with the pluvial moon. Another
characteristic of the frog made this identification all the more
natural, and that was, its green colour (harit). By the word _harit_
(which, as we, several times, have remarked, means yellow and green in
Sanskrit) not only the moon, but the green parrot was designated, and
also the frog. The identification having been effected, the Greeks could
then relate fables concerning the frog of the Island of Seriphos
(batrachos ek Seriphou), which was dumb; so in the Lives of St Regulus
and St Benno, we read that when these two saints, as they preached the
Christian faith, were annoyed by the croaking of the frogs, they ordered
the frogs to be silent, and they became dumb for ever. In truth, the
frogs are silent (and even die, according to Pliny) in winter, which is
under the especial dominion of the silent moon; the frog and the moon
are exchanged one for the other. In _Ovid_, the metamorphosis of the
frog is made to enter into the lunar myth, that is, into the myth of
Proserpina; it was the form of the frog which certain peasants of Lycia
assumed who dirtied the water of which Ceres and Proserpina wished to
drink; their croaking (coax) is the punishment to which the goddesses
condemned them, because in those waters they had emitted a vile sound
from their mouths.[513] Another proof of the identity of the frog with
the moon is the Latin proverb, "Rana cum gryllo," which afterwards
served to represent two opposite things, but which, in fact, are the
same, on account of their shrill voice, their way of hopping, and their
common mythical connection with the leaping moon. We are reminded of the
moon and the cloud in the war waged between the frogs and the mice, who
are mutually destroying each other until the falcon comes with
impartiality to annihilate both. We are, moreover, reminded of the
little goldfish, the fair-haired moon, and the pike, in the frog which,
in the _Tuti-Name_, finds the sultan's ring, which had fallen into the
river, for the young hero, in gratitude to him for having saved it from
the serpent who was about to devour it; it is said that both the frog
and the serpent were two fairies who, freed from their curse, united
themselves to protect the young hero (the new sun). In the twenty-third
Mongol story, the golden frog (the moon) is dancing; the rook (the
night) carries it off to eat it; the frog recommends it to wash it in
water; the rook is taken in, and the frog, like the jorsh of Russian
stories, succeeds in escaping; this frog is said to be the daughter of
the prince of the dragons, who watches over the pearl. As the daughter
of a serpent, the golden frog (the moon), when it is darkened, itself
appears as a diabolical serpent or pythoness, and is more like a toad
than a frog; then it becomes, according to Sadder, a meritorious service
to kill the frogs: "Ranas si interfecerit aliquis quicunque fortis eorum
adversarius, ejus quidem merita propterea erunt mille et ducenta. Aquam
eximat eamque removeat et locum siccum faciat et tum eas necabit a
capite ad calcem. Hinc Diaboli damnum percipientes maximum flebunt et
ploratum edent copiosissimum."
In the second Calmuc story of Siddhikür, two dragons who keep back the
river which irrigates the earth and makes it fruitful, and who eat a
man every year, assume the form of frogs (one yellow and the other
green), and speak to one another of the way in which they can be
killed. The king's son understands their language, and kills them,
helped by a poor friend of his, with whom he enriches himself, but
only to encounter (like the two mythical brothers) the most dangerous
adventures afterwards.
But the diabolical form of a frog is sometimes assumed by the
beautiful maiden (or else by the handsome youth) as the effect of a
malediction or an enchantment. Thus it is in the interesting
twenty-third story of the second book of _Afanassieff_. There is a
Tzar who has three sons; each son must shoot an arrow; where the arrow
falls, each brother will find his predestined wife. The two eldest
brothers marry in this way two beautiful women; the arrow of the
youngest brother Ivan, however, is taken up by a frog, whom he is
obliged to marry. The Tzar wishes to see which of the three brides
makes the handsomest present to her husband. All three give their
husbands a shirt, but that of the frog is the most beautiful; for
whilst Ivan sleeps (that is, in the night), she casts her skin,
becomes the beautiful Helen (generally the aurora, but here, it would
seem, the same transformed into the good fairy moon), and orders her
attendants to prepare the finest shirt possible; she then again
becomes a frog. The Tzar (a truly patriarchal Tzar) then wishes to see
which of his three daughters-in-law bakes bread best; the first two
brides know not what to do, and send secretly to see what the frog
does; the frog, who sees all, understands the trick, and bakes the
bread badly on purpose; afterwards, when she is alone and Ivan asleep,
she again becomes the beautiful Helen, and orders her attendants to
bake a loaf such as those which her father ate only on feast-days. The
loaf of the frog is pronounced the best. Lastly, the Tzar wishes to
see which of his daughters-in-law dances best. Ivan is sorrowful,
thinking that his bride is a frog; but Helen consoles him, sending him
to the ball, where she will join him; Ivan rejoices to think that his
wife has the gift of speech, and goes to the ball; the frog takes her
robes off, becomes the beautiful Helen once more, dresses herself
splendidly, comes to the ball, and all exclaim as they pass by her (as
to the Homeric Helen), "How beautiful!" They first sit down to table
to eat; Helen takes bones in one hand, and water in the other; her
sisters-in-law do the same. Then the ball begins. Helen throws water
from one hand, and groves and fountains spring up; and bones (we
remember a similar virtue in the bones of the cow) from the other,
from which birds flutter upward (the same is narrated in a story I
heard in Piedmont when a child). Meanwhile, Ivan runs home to burn the
frog's skin. Helen returns home, can no longer become a frog, and is
sorrowful; she goes with Ivan to bed, and awakening at morn, says to
him, "Ivan Tzarevic, thou hast not been patient enough; I would have
been thine; now, as God wills it, Farewell! Seek me in the
twenty-seventh earth, in the thirtieth kingdom" (_i.e._, in my
opinion, in hell, in the night into which the moon and the aurora
descend, and whence the moon comes out again and renews itself after
twenty-seven days; the Russian story is evidently a variety of the
fable of Cupid and Psyche).[514] She then disappears. Ivan goes to
seek his bride at the dwelling of the frog's mother, who is a witch;
he takes from her the spindle which spins gold, throws part of it
before him, and the rest behind. Helen appears once more, and the pair
flee away upon the carpet which flies by itself. Here the helped
aurora and the helping moon are assimilated.
But in popular stories the hero and heroine assume by witchcraft,
instead of the form of a dark frog, that of a toad, and sometimes that
of a horned lizard,[515] whence the verse of Mehun--
"Boteraulx et couleuvres, visions de deables."
Inasmuch as the toad is a form proper to the demon, it is feared and
hunted; inasmuch as, on the contrary, it is considered as a diabolical
form imposed by force upon a divine or princely being, it is respected
and venerated as a sacred animal. In Tuscany it is considered by the
peasants a sacrilege to kill a toad. A low Tuscan song heard by me at
Santo Stefano di Calcinaia records the transformation of the beautiful
maiden into a toad; the mother toad speaks to her daughter to console
her, inspiring her with the hope of being soon married to the king's
son--
"Botta, gragna,[516]
Il figlio del re che poco ti ama
Se non t'ama, t'amerà,
Quando per isposa lui t'avrà."
(Wretched toad! the king's son, who little loves thee, if he love thee
not, will love thee when he has thee for his wife.) The prince weds
the toad, which is immediately transformed into a beautiful maiden.
With regard to the superstitions concerning the toad current in
Sicily, it is interesting to note what my friend Giuseppe Pitrè writes
to me--"The toad brings fortune; he who is not fortunate must provide
himself with a toad and feed it in his house[517] upon bread and wine,
a consecrated nourishment, inasmuch as it is alleged toads are either
'lords' or 'women from without,' or 'uncomprehended genii,' or
'powerful fairies,' who have fallen under some malediction. Hence they
are not killed, nor even molested, lest when offended they should come
at night to spit water upon the offender's eyes which never heal, not
even if he recommend himself to the regard of Santa Lucia." Hence the
poet Meli, in his _Fata Galanti_, writes that he prevented a peasant
from killing a toad--
"Jeu ch'avia 'ntisu da li miei maggiuri
Che li buffi 'un si divinu ammazzari,
Fici in modu chi l'ira e lu rancuri
A ddu viddanu cci fici passari."
As a recompense for having saved its life, the toad soon afterwards
appears to him in the shape of a very beautiful woman, and promises to
assist him all the days of his life--
"Oh picciotti furtunatu!
Eu ti prutiggirò d'ora nn' avanti,
Jeu su' dda buffa, chi tu, gratu e umanu
Sarvasti antura da l'impiu viddanu."
In Piedmont, I have heard a popular story[518] related in which the
toad is, on the other hand, the diabolical form assumed by a handsome
youth; in Aldrovandi, several things are narrated of women who gave
birth to toads.[519]
From the double and contradictory aspect in which the toad was
regarded, popular medicine, although believing that the humour which
the toad, when provoked, ejects from behind, is fatal, and that the
toad not only poisoned men, but even all the plants over which it
passed, still recommends the wearing of dried toads under the armpits
as amulets against plague and poison. The same alexipharmic virtue was
also ascribed to the stone called and believed to be toad's-stone (or
bufonite), which was said to change colour when its wearer was
poisoned. The bufonite was supposed to be taken out of a toad's head,
but science has demonstrated that the bufonite, sold by quacks is made
of the tooth of a fossil fish.[520] Out of the toad, the dark animal
of the night, the gloom or winter, the solar pearl comes; thus popular
German stories regard the _Schild-kröte_ (or toad with the shield) as
sacred, on account of the pearl supposed to be contained in its head.
In Hungary it is said that the toad swallows the dew in the dry
season; it is believed, moreover, that the frog, like the serpent,
vomits forth, in spring, a precious stone called the stone of the
serpent or the stone of the frog. According to what Count Geza Kuun
writes to me, in the testament of a citizen of Kaisa three golden
rings are mentioned, one of which contained a "frog's stone."
I have observed above that the toad's place is sometimes taken in
popular tales by the horned lizard; the lizard also represents the
demoniacal shape, the shape of a witch. On this subject there was an
interesting discussion by Karl Simrock upon the word _Eidechse_ (the
lizard in German), derived from the ancient form _Hagedisse_ which is
the same as _Hexe_ or witch. It is as a witch that the lizard is killed,
in the Greek myth, by Apollines, whence its name of _sauroktanos_.[521]
But, inasmuch as the lizards appear in spring and announce the fine
season, they are considered (according to Porphyrios) sacred to the sun,
and therefore of good augury. A Bolognese proverb says, "Sant' Agnes, la
luserta cor pr' al paes," to indicate that the season is beginning to
improve, inasmuch as with the appearance of the lizards on the Day of St
Agnes, which is in the beginning of March, spring begins to make itself
felt. In Sicily it is believed that the little lizards called San
Giuvanni must not be killed, because they are in the presence of the
Lord in heaven, and light the little lamp to the Lord (as we have
already seen the firefly give light to the grain). And when they are
killed, in order that they may not curse one, one must say to the tail
which is shaking, that it was not the real killer, but the dog of St
Matthew who committed the crime,
"Nun fu' ieu, nun fu' ieu:
Fu lu cani di San Matteu."
They are believed to be powerful intercessors before the Lord, for
which reason Sicilian children warm them in their bosoms, and feed
them on crumbs of bread soaked in water.
But an especially sacred character is ascribed to the _lacerta
viridis_ (It. _ramarro_; Sicilian, _vanuzzu_, a diminutive of
Giovanni) and to the _amphisbhoena_, of which the ancients believed
that it had two heads (like the Hindoo ahîranis), its tail being taken
for one. The _amphisbhoena_ is still held sacred and revered in
India.[522] The green lizard of popular superstition is partly solar
and partly lunar; the firefly and the quail, as summer animals, are
sacred to the sun; as watchers by night, to the moon. Thus the green
lizard, as a summer animal which hunts away the serpent of winter,
appears particularly in relation with the sun; but inasmuch as there
is also the serpent of night, the green lizard or green _ramarro_
takes the place of the crab-moon, that is, it wakens the young solar
hero who sleeps in the night, and wakens the sleeping man lest the
serpent should bite him. The moon of winter wakens the sun of spring,
the moon of night wakens the sun of day; the moon-lizard, like the
moon crab, hunts the serpent or black monster away. In Piedmont,
Tuscany, and Sicily, the green lizard is believed to be the friend of
mankind; indeed, it is called _guarda omu_ in Sicily, where it is
believed to cure from incantations, perhaps on account of the yellow
cross which the people think they can see upon its head. At Santo
Stefano of Calcinaia it is said that the green lizard hisses in the
ears of Christians like a Christian when the serpent approaches a man;
they even relate several cases of shepherds or peasants who, being
asleep, were saved by the green lizard passing over them (Aldrovandi
speaks of a similar superstition). It is, moreover, believed that the
green lizard, if caught and put in a vase full of oil, will produce
the oil of a _ramarro_, which is said to be good against wounds and
poisons. In the _Contes Merveilleux de Porchat_, a fairy protects the
poor Laric and brings fortune to him in the shape of a grateful
_couleuvre_, which he, in winter, found frozen and warmed in his
bosom. The _couleuvre_ makes radiant coins fall to Laric from the
beaks of certain partridges, enables him to find whatever he is in
need of, and puts a golden chain round the neck of his wife. Thus the
myths of the golden (or green) fish, the golden (or green) frog and
the golden (or green) lizard, correspond to each other in the
beautiful myth of the good moon-fairy, who protects the solar hero or
heroine in the nights both of the day and the year.
FOOTNOTES:
[511] Cfr. the first story of the fourth book of the _Pancatantram_,
where the king of the frogs invokes the help of a black serpent to
avenge himself upon certain frogs who are his enemies, and, instead of
this, draws down death upon all the frogs and upon his own son.
[512] Vâr in mandûka ichatîndrayendo pari srava; _Rigv._ ix. 112.
[513] A similar tradition was current concerning the tarantula
(stellio). Ceres, being thirsty, wished to drink; the boy Stelles
prevented her, and the goddess transformed him into a _stellio_.
According to Ulpianus, from the _stellio_ was derived the _crimen
stellionatus_.
[514] Cfr. also _Afanassieff_, vi. 55; Masha (Mary), the wife of Ivan,
at first appears as a goose, afterwards as a frog, a lizard, and a
spindle.
[515] In the eighth story of the first book of the _Pentamerone_ it is
a lacerta cornuta (horned lizard, the moon) which watches over the
destiny of the girl Renzolle (the aurora).
[516] It was thus that I heard it recited, but it should, as it
appears to me, be corrected both in rhyme and sense, and _gragna_
changed into _grama_, unless _gragna_ is a verb and stands for
_grandina_ (hail); in Italy, there is a superstitious belief that the
toads are generated of the first large drops of rain which fall into
the dust at the beginning of a tempest.
[517] A similar superstition is current in Germany, as I find in
Rochholtz, the work quoted before, i. 147: "Auch die Hauskröte, Unke,
Muhme genannt, wohnt im Hauskeller und hält durch ihren Einfluss die
hier verwahrten Lebensmittel in einem gedeihlichen Zustand. Dadurch
kommt Wohlstand ins Haus, und das Thier heisst daher Schatzkröte. In
Verwechslung mit dem braunschwarzen Kellermolch wird sie auch Gmöhl
genannt und soll eben so oft ihre Farbe verändern, als der Familie
eine Veränderung bevorsteht."--The various popular superstitions
concerning the salamander are well known,--viz., that it resists the
power of fire, that it lives in fire, that it becomes like fire: "immo
ad ignem usque elementarem orbi lunari finitimum ascendere" (according
to Aldrovandi), and that, devoid of hairs itself, it causes the hairs
of others to fall out by means of its saliva, whence Martial, cursing
the baldness of a woman's head--
"Hoc salamandra caput, aut sæva novacula nudet."
Pliny therefore recommends against the poisonous venom which is
ascribed to the salamander, the seeds of the hairy and stinging
nettle, with broth of a tortoise (which it resembles by its yellow
spots). The salamander of popular superstition seems to me to
represent the moon which lights itself, which lives by its own fire,
which has no rays or hairs of its own, and which makes the rays or
hairs of the sun fall.
[518] It was narrated to me by a peasant woman who heard it at Cavour
in Piedmont:--
A man who is paralytic has three daughters, Catherine, Clorinda, and
Margaret; he sets out on a journey to consult a great doctor, and asks
his daughters what they wish him to bring them when he returns; Margaret
will be content if he bring her a flower. He arrives at his destination,
a castle; everything is prepared to receive him, but the doctor is not
to be found; he sets out to return home, but on the way he recollects
the flower, which he had forgotten; he goes back to the garden of the
castle and is about to pluck a daisy (margherita), when a toad warns him
that he will die in three days if he does not give it one of his
daughters to wife. The father informs his daughters of this, upon which
the two eldest refuse; but the youngest, in order to save her father's
life, consents. Her father is cured, and the wedding takes place; during
the night the toad becomes a beautiful youth, but warns his bride never
to tell any one, for if she does, he will always remain a toad, and he
gives her a ring by means of which she will obtain whatever she wishes
for. The sisters have an inkling of some mystery, and make her confess;
the toad falls ill and disappears; she calls him with the ring, but in
vain; seeing this, she throws the ring, as useless, into a pond, upon
which the beautiful youth steps out, and never becomes a toad again;
their happiness together thereafter is unbroken.