THE DEATH OF KRISIINA. which Hindu art has especially delighted in symbolising, Krishna freed himself from the coils of the snake, and stamped upon his heads until he had crushed them all. The sequel of the myth in its more recent form goes on to relate his death,-how Balarama lay down to sleep beneath the Banyan tree,-how from his throat issued a monstrous snake, like the cobra of Vikram in the modern Hindu story,-how Krishna himself became sorely depressed,-how, as he lay among the bushes with his foot so placed that his heel, in which alone he, like so many others, was invunerable, was exposed, a huntsman, thinking that he was aiming at a gazelle, shot him with an arrow, and the ground was bathed with his blood,-incidents which are at once explained by a reference to the myths of Baldur, Adonis, or Osiris.1 SECTION XIV.-THE MOON. 371 CHAP. Pan. II. As Endymiôn sinks into his dreamless sleep beneath the Latmian Selênê and hill, the beautiful Selênê comes to gaze upon the being whom she loves only to lose. The phrase was too transparent to allow of the growth of a highly developed myth. In the one name we have the sun sinking down into the unseen land where all things are forgottenin the other the full moon comes forth from the east to greet the sun, before he dies in the western sky. Hence there is little told of Selênê which fails to carry with thousand and one hundred was the number of the maidens; and into so many forms did the son of Madhu multiply himself, so that every one of the damsels thought that he had wedded her in her single person."-Vishnu Pu rana, ib. 589. This myth is beyond all doubt simply that of Prokris in another form. The dew becomes visible only when the blackness of the night is dispelled, and the same sun is reflected in the thousands of sparkling drops: but the language of the Purana is in singular accordance with the phraseology in which Roman Catholic writers delight to speak of nuns as the brides of Christ. In Slavonic traditions, cited by Afanasief, the place of Naraka is taken by a seven-headed snake, which carries off a girl (Korê, Persephonê) as she is taking food to her two brothers in the forest. These two brothers go in search of her, and find her in the snake's dwelling; but failing to eat the iron bread given to them for food, they are killed by the snake, who plucks out their eyes and hangs their bodies on a beam. their mother is weeping one day (the mourning Dêmêtêr), she sees a pea come As it an obvious meaning. She is rolling along, and eating it becomes the It is, of course, true that these BOOK Io the heifer. the beautiful eye of night, the daughter of Hyperîôn, of Pallas, or of Helios, the sister of Phoibos Apollôn. Like the sun, she moves across the heaven in a chariot drawn by white horses from which her soft light streams down to the earth; or she is the huntress, roving like Alpheios, over hill and dale. She is the bride of Zeus, and the mother of Pandia, the full orb which gleams in the nightly sky;1 or as loving, like him, the crags, the streams, and the hills, she is beloved by Pan, who entices her into the dark woods under the guise of a snow-white ram. In other words, the soft whispering wind, driving before it the shining fleecy clouds, draws the moon. onwards into the sombre groves. In another version, she is Asterodia, the wanderer among the stars, the mother of the fifty daughters of Endymion, the Ursula of modern legend with her many virgins. In short, the moon may be spoken of as the king of the realm of night, and the father, brother, or husband of the sun which springs from it. Or, if it be regarded as feminine, it may be his mother, his nurse, his sister, or his bride. It may be friendly to him, as is Iao, or hostile, as is the Unicorn. It may chase him, as he sinks in the western sea, or may seek to hide herself from his blinding splendour, as he rises in the east." In the story of Iô, the moon appears in connexion with the myths of Hermes, Prometheus, and other tales. Iô is pre-eminently the horned being," whose existence is one of brief joy, much suffering, "Pandia, d. h. die ganz leuch- It 3 Preller regards the number 50 here Brown, The Unicorn, 69. In the sun brings on him the wrath of Per- The Moon wedded the Sun Wandering by night alone, 5 This horned being becomes at length the Unicorn of Heraldry, whose history Mr. Brown has traced in his very valuable monograph on "The Unicorn," 1881. It is scarcely necessary to say that this Unicorn is more the Rhinoceros than the serpent, which bites women (note', p. 345); is an adder or a cobra. It is endowed, as Garcias says, with "a wonderful horn, which it would sometimes turn to the left and right, at others raise, and then again depress." The changes of the moon are THE WANDERINGS OF IÔ. II. 373 and many changes and wanderings; in other words, her life is the life CHAP. of the moon in its several phases, from full to new, and thence back to the full again. She is the pure priestess of the great queen of heaven, on whom Zeus, the lord of the untroubled ether, looks down with unfailing love.' But Hêrê is the wife of Zeus, and thus at once she is jealous of Iô, whom Zeus vainly changes into a heifer' (the wellknown symbol of the young or horned morn) in the hope of saving her from Hêrê. Hêrê gains possession of the heifer, and places her in the charge of Argos Panoptês, the being with a thousand eyes, some of which he opens when the stars arise, while others he closes when their orbs go down. Whether these eyes are, as in some versions, placed on his brow and on the back of his head, or, as in others, scattered all over his body, Argos is the star-illumined sky watching over the moon as she wanders Pale for very weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth.3 In this aspect Argos appears in the Cretan myth as Asteriôn, or the Minotauros, the guardian of the Diadalean labyrinth, the mazes of the star-clothed heavens. From this terrible bondage she is rescued at the bidding of Zeus Argos Panoptês. by Hermes, who appears here as a god of the morning-tide. By the power of his magic rod, and by the music of his flute, the soft whisper of the morning breeze, he lulls even Argos himself into slumber, and then his sword falls, and the thousand eyes are closed in death, as the stars go out when the morning comes, and leave the moon alone.1 This rescue of Iô by Hermes is, in the opinion of Preller, the temporary disappearance of the moon, during her wanderings in unknown regions until she appears as Pandia, the full moon, in the eastern here as clearly described as the effects of wind in the myth of Hermes.Brown, The Unicorn, 12. 116 becomes a mother involas Aiós, Esch. Supp. 18; a myth which may be compared with the story of the mares of Diomêdês. In the Norse story of Tatterhood, the younger of the two sisters who answer to the Dioskouroi is changed into a calf, and the tale immediately connects the transformation with the voyage of Isis. The same incidents are found in the Arabian Nights in the story of the Old Man and the Hind, where the transformation is precisely owing to the jealousy of Here for Io and her offspring. BOOK II. Iô and Prometheus. heaven. This time was naturally conceived as one of trouble and toil, and so the myth went that Iô was driven from one place to another by a gadfly sent by Hêrê, who suffers her neither to rest by day nor to sleep by night. These wanderings have been related by Æschylus in his immortal drama of the bound Prometheus. They carry her over regions, some of whose names belong to our earthly geography; but any attempts to fix her course in accordance with the actual position of these regions is mere labour lost. That for such accuracy Æschylus cared nothing is plain from the fact that the course which Iô takes in his play of the Suppliants cannot be reconciled with the account given in the Prometheus. It is enough to note that the poet takes his moon from the West towards the North, gradually approaching the East and the South, until in the beautiful Aigyptos she is suffered to resume her proper form, or in other words, appear as the full moon," the shape in which she was seen before Zeus changed her into the horned heifer or new moon. This mention of Egypt, or the land of the Nile, as the cradle of her child Epaphos, naturally led the Greeks to identify Iô with the Egyptian Isis, and her son with the bull Apis,3-an identification to which no objection can be raised, so long as it is not maintained that the Hellenic names and conceptions of the gods were borrowed from those of Egypt. The great Athenian poet would naturally introduce among the places visited by Iô, places and peoples which excited his curiosity, his wonder, or his veneration. She from whom was to spring the deliverer of Prometheus must herself learn from the tortured Titan what must be the course of her own sufferings and their issue. She must cross the heifer's passage, or Bosporos, which bears her name: she must journey through the country of the Chalybes, beings akin to the Kyklôpes who forge the thunderbolts of Zeus; she must trust herself to the guidance of the Amazons who will lead her to the rocks of Salmydessos, rocks not unlike the Symplegades in the Argonautic story: she must encounter the Graiai and the Gorgons in the land of the gloaming and the night, and finally she is to see the end of her sorrows when she reaches the well or fountains of the sun. There her child will be born, and the series of genera 1 Gr. Myth. ii. 39. Mr. Brown (The Unicorn, p. 27) cites some Mardian coins as furnishing the earliest known instances of the lunar emblem which exhibits three crescent moons issuing from the full moon, in connexion with the unicorn. This emblem explains at once the threelegged unicorn ass of the Bundahish, and also the arms of the Kingdom of Man, in which we see three legs at tached to a central orb. This calf-god was supposed to manifest himself from time to time in a bull, which, being recognised by certain signs, was consecrated and received high worship. It was not suffered to live more than twenty-five years, and his burial was followed by a general mourning until a new calf, with the proper mark, was discovered. Apis, deified after death, became Serapis. HEKATE AND PHOIBOS. 375 tions will roll on, which are to end in the glorious victories of her CHAP. descendant, Heraklês.1 II. To Phoibos, as Hekatos, the far-shooting lord of light, Hekatê Hekate. stands in the relation which Diana holds towards Dianus or Janus. She falls, in short, into the ranks of correlative deities with the Asvins and the Dioskouroi, Suryâ and Savitri, and many others already named. Her keenness of hearing and sight is second only to that of Helios, for when Dêmêtêr is searching in agony for her lost child, it is Hekatê alone who says that she has heard her cries, while Helios is further able to tell her whither Hades has departed with the maiden. She is then the queen of the night, the moon, and as such she may be described as sprung either from Zeus and Hêrê, or like Phoibos himself, from Lêtô, or even from Tartaros, or again, from Asteria, the starlit night." In a comparison of offices and honours it is hard to see whether Phoibos or Hekatê stands higher; and all that can be said is that the Hesiodic poet could hardly have spoken of her in a strain so highflown if the thought of Apollôn and his wisdom, incommunicable even to Hermes, had at the moment crossed his mind, just as the worshipper of Brahma or Vishņu must have modified his language, had he wished to bring it into apparent consistency with what he may have said elsewhere in his devotions to Varuņa, Dyaus, or Soma. She is the benignant being, ever ready to hear those who offer to her a holy sacrifice. Nor has she fallen from the high estate which was hers before Zeus vanquished the Titans ; but she remains mighty as ever, in the heavens, on the earth, and in the sea. She is the giver of victory in war, the helper of kings in the ministration of justice, the guardian of the flocks and of the vineyards; and thus she is named pre-eminently Kourotrophos, the nurse and the cherisher of But these great powers could scarcely fail to throw over her an air of mystery and awe. She would be sometimes the solitary inhabitant of a dismal region, caring nothing for the sympathy or the love of others; and the very help which with her flaming torch she gives to Dêmêtêr would make her a goddess of the dark nether world to which she leads the sorrowing mother. Her ministers therefore must be as mysterious as herself, and thus the Kourêtes and Kabeiroi become the chosen servants of her sacrifices. Like Artemis, she is accompanied by hounds, not flashing-footed like that which Prokris. received from the twin-sister of Phoibos, but Stygian dogs akin to men. It is, of course, quite possible that with this particular myth of Iô some features borrowed from Semitic mythology may have been designedly blended. The Phenician Astarte, Ashtaroth, was also represented as a wandering heifer, or a horned maiden. Both alike lose 2 Hes. Theog. 411. |