THE SNAKE LEAVES. V. 95 wound, and the dead snake was alive again. The prince applying CHAP. the leaves to his wife's body restores her also to life. The following are the words of Apollodoros1 in relating the story, also told by Ælian, of Glaukos and Polyidos :-"When Minos said that he must bring Glaukos to life, Polyidos was shut up with the dead body; and, being sorely perplexed, he saw a dragon approach the corpse. This he killed with a stone, and another dragon came, and, seeing the first one dead, went away, and brought some grass, which it placed on the body of the other, which immediately rose up. Polyidos, having beheld this with astonishment, put the same grass on the body of Glaukos, and restored him to life." a Brothers. These magic leaves become a root in the German story of the The Two Two Brothers, a tale in which a vast number of solar myths have been rolled together. The two brothers, "as like one another as two drops of water," are the Dioskouroi and the Asvins, or the other twin deities which run through so large a portion of the Aryan mythology. They are also the Babes in the Wood, although it is their father himself who, at the bidding of his rich brother, thrusts them forth from their home, because a piece of gold falls from the mouth of each every morning. They are saved by a huntsman, who makes them marksmen as expert as Kastor and Polydeukes. When at length they set out on their adventures, the huntsman gives them a knife, telling them that if, in case of separation, they would stick it into a tree by the wayside, he who came back to it might learn from the brightness or the rusting of the blade whether the other is alive and well. If the tale thus leads us to the innumerable stories which turn on sympathetic trees, gems, and stones, it is not less noteworthy iii. 3, I. See further Professor Max Müller's "Essay on the Migration of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. i. p. 500. In this essay the strange and unexpected ramifications of stories are traced with wonderful skill; and the presence of a story in Iceland and Italy, without its being found in other parts of Europe, is shown to be not necessarily conclusive proof of their independent origin. But the chronological test, wherever it can be applied, dispenses with this inquiry. The presence of the story of the Snake Leaves in India and in Germany in our own day leaves it barely possible that it may have been taken straight from Germany to India, or from India to Germany; but when we find it in the pages of Apollodoros, the fact of its having been known in Europe two thousand years ago is established beyond dispute. It is the same with the story of the Master Apollodoros, iii. 3, 1. Mr. Gould, BOOK I. as bringing before us almost all the brute animals, whose names were once used as names of the sun. The two brothers lift their weapons to shoot a hare, which, begging for life, promises to give up two leverets. The hare is suffered to go free, and the huntsmen also spare the leverets, which follow them. The same thing happens with a fox, wolf, bear, and lion, and thus the youths journey, attended each by five beasts, until they part, having fixed the knife into the trunk of a tree. The younger, like Perseus, comes to a town where all is grief and sorrow because the king's daughter is to be given up on the morrow to be devoured by a dragon on the summit of the dragon's mountain. Like Theseus and Sigurd, the young man becomes possessed of a sword buried beneath a great stone, and, like Perseus, he delivers the maiden by slaying the dragon. Then on the mountain-top the youth rests with the princess, having charged his beasts to keep watch, lest any one should surprise them. But the victory of the sun is followed by the sleep of winter, and the lion, overcome with drowsiness, hands over his charge to the bear, the bear to the wolf, the wolf to the fox, the fox to the hare, until all are still. The Marshal of the kingdom,' who here plays the part of Paris, now ascends the mountain, and, cutting off the young man's head, leads away the princess, whom, as the dragon-slayer, he claims as his bride. At length the sleep of the lion is broken by the sting of a bee, and the beast rousing the bear asks the reason of his failing to keep watch. The charge is passed from one beast to the other, until the hare, unable to utter a word in its defence, begs for mercy, as knowing where to find a root which, like the snake leaves, shall restore their master to life. A year has passed away, and the young man, again approaching the town where the princess lived, finds it full of merriment, because she is going on the morrow to be married to the Marshal. But the time of his humiliation is now past. The huntsman in his humble hostel declares to the landlord that he will this day eat of the king's bread, meat, vegetables, and sweetmeats, and drink of his finest wine. These are severally brought to him by the five beasts, and the princess, thus learning that her lover is not dead, advises the king to send for the master of these animals. The youth refuses to come unless the king sends for him a royal equipage, and then, arrayed in royal robes, he goes to the palace, where he convicts the Marshal of his treachery by exhibiting the dragon's tongues which he had cut off and preserved in a handkerchief bestowed on him by the princess, and by showing the necklace, In the romance of Tristram, the Steward of the King of Ireland plays the part of the Marshal. THE STAR-CLAD QUEEN. of which she had given a portion to each of his beasts, and which is, in fact, the necklace of Freya and the Kestos or cestus of Aphrodite. But the tale is not told out yet, and it enters on another cycle of the sun's career. The youth is no sooner married to the princess than, like Odysseus or Sigurd, he is separated from her. Following a white doe into a forest, he is there deceived by a witch, at whose bidding he touches his beasts with a twig, and turns them into stones, and is then changed into a stone himself. Just at this time the younger brother returns to the place where the knife, now partially covered with rust, remained fixed in the tree. He becomes, of course, as in the myth of Baldur, the avenger of his brother, and the witch undergoes the doom of Punchkin or of the Giant who had no heart in his body; but when he tells the younger brother that even his wife had taken him to be her husband, and admitted him into her chamber, the latter cuts off the elder's head. The magic root is again brought into use, and he learns how faithful his brother had been when his wife asks him why, on the two previous nights, he had placed a sword in the bed between them. The story thus, in its last incident, runs into the tales of Sigurd and the Arabian Allah-ud-deen.1 as 97 CHAP. V. and the Stars. If we sought to prove the absolute identity of the great mass of Myths of the Night, Hindu, Greek, Norse, and German legends, we surely need go no the Moon, further. Yet there are other points of likeness, at least as striking any that have been already noticed, between the stories which in the East and West alike relate to the phenomena of night. In the Hindu tale the disguised wife of Logedas Raja finds Tara Bai on a gold and ivory throne. "She was tall and of a commanding aspect. Her black hair was bound by long strings of pearls, her dress was of fine-spun gold, and round her waist was clasped a zone of restless, throbbing, light-giving diamonds. Her neck and her arms were covered with a profusion of costly jewels, but brighter than all shone her bright eyes, which looked full of gentle majesty." But Tara Bai is the star (boy) child, or maiden, the Asteropaios of the Iliad, of whom the Greek myth said only that he was the tallest of all their men, and that he was slain after fierce fight by Achilleus, whom he had wounded. Elsewhere she reappears as Polydeukes, the glittering twin brother of Kastor, and more particularly as the fairy Melusina, who is married to Raymond of Toulouse. This beautiful being, who has a fish's tail, as representing the moon which rises and sets in the sea, vanishes away when her full form is seen by her husband. In The Norse tale of Shortshanks (Dasent) is made up in great part of the materials of this story. 2 II. xxi. 166, &c. 8 The name Melusina is identified by H The I. battle of light and darkness. another phase she is Kalypsô, the beautiful night which veils the sun. from mortal eyes in her chamber flashing with a thousand stars, and lulls to sleep the man of many griefs and wanderings. Lastly, she is St. Ursula, with her eleven thousand virgins (the myriad stars), whom Cardinal Wiseman, in a spirit worthy of Herodotos, transforms into a company, or rather two companies, of English ladies, martyred by the Huns at Cologne, but whose mythical home is on Horselberg, where the faithful Eckhart is doomed to keep his weary watch. Labouring on in his painful rationalism, Cardinal Wiseman tells us of one form of the legend which mentions a marriage-contract made with the father of St. Ursula, a very powerful king, by which it was arranged that she should have eleven companions, and each of these a thousand followers.2 There are thus twelve, in addition to the eleven thousand attendants, and these twelve reappear in the Hindu tales, sometimes in dark, sometimes in lustrous forms, as the twelve hours of the day or night, or the twelve moons of the lunar year. Thus in the story of Truth's Triumph a raja has twelve wives, but no children. At length he marries Guzra Bai, the flower girl, who bears him a hundred sons and one daughter; and the sequel of the tale relates the result of their jealousy against these children and their mother. Their treacherous dealing is at last exposed, and they suffer the fate of all like personages in the German and Norse tales. There is, in fact, no end to the many phases assumed by the struggle of these fairy beings, which is the warfare between light and darkness. darkness. But the bright beings always conquer in the end, and return like Persephonê from the abode of Hades to gladden the heart of the Mater Dolorosa." The child in the Deccan stories appears not only as Guzra Bai, but as Panch Phul Ranee, as Surya Bai, as the wife of Muchie Lal, the fish or frog-sun. All these Mylitta, the Syrian moon-goddess.— Mr. Gould connects Melusina, as 1 Od. v. 60, &c. 2 Essays on Religion and Literature, edited by Archbishop Manning (1865), p. 252. 3 Grote, History of Greece, i. 55. The frog prince or princess is only one of the thousand personifications of names denoting originally the phenomena of day and night. As carrying the morning light from the east to the west, the sun is the bull bearing Europê from the purple land (Phoinikia); and the same changes which converted the Seven Shiners into the Seven Sages, or the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, or the Seven Champions of Christendom, or the Seven Bears, transformed the sun into a wolf, a bear, a lion, a swan. As resting on the horizon in the morn VESSELS OF PLENTY. :V. 99 women are the daughters of a gardener or mijkwoman, in whom we CHAP. see the image of Dêmêtêr, the bountiful earth, who lavishes on her children her treasures of fruits, milk, and flowers. In her hand she holds her mystic cup, into which falls the ripe mango, which is her child transformed, as the ripe fruit falls on the earth. This cup, again, is the horn of Amaltheia, the table of the Ethiopians, of which Herodotos speaks as laden continually with all good things, the cup into which Helios sinks each night when his course is run, the modios of Serapis,' the ivory ewer containing the book of Solomon's Occult knowledge, which Rehoboam placed in his father's tomb, the magic oil-bowl or lamp of Allah-ud-deen, and finally the San-Greal which furnishes to the knights of Arthur's round table as splendid a banquet as their hearts can desire. ing, he is Apollon swathed by the 66 story,' says Professor Max Müller, was known at the time when Kapila wrote his philosophical aphorisms in India, for it is there quoted as an illustration. But long before Kapila, the story of Bhekî must have grown up gradually, beginning with a short saying about the sun-such as that Bhekî, the sun, will die at the sight of water, as we should say that the sun will set when it approaches the water from which it rose in the morning."-Chips from a German Workshop, ii. 248. In the Teutonic version, the change of the sun into the form of a frog is the result of enchantment; but the story of the Frog Prince has more than one point of interest. The frog is compelled to jump into the fountain, out of which only the youngest daughter of the king has the power of drawing him. These daughters again are the companions of Ursula; the daughters of the raja who are jealous of their 1 Duncker, History of Antiquity, i. |