Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/14

 4 The Legends of Krishna.

new revelation may have owed its inspiration to Christian or other Western influence. It has been supposed that on the one hand Buddhism profoundly influenced the Western Church, and the analogies between Lamaism in Tibet and the ritual and organisation of the Roman Catholic Church have attracted the attention of many observers. It has been supposed again that the episode in the Mahabharata where Narada the Saint visits Sweta-dwipa, " the White Island," implies early relations between Brahmanism and Alexandrian Christianity.^ I need hardly dwell upon the indications in the Krishna mythus, presently to be related, w'hich suggest the same inference. The question has, however, hardly yet been settled to the satisfaction of scholars,- and in any case it would lead me too far from the special subject of this paper.

I pass on to the popular traditions concerning Krishna.^

To put the story as briefly as possible, we find a branch of the great Yadava clan of Kshatriyas, who probably owed their origin to a Yu-echi invasion from Central Asia, settled on the banks of the River Jumna, with Mathura as their capital. That they were outsiders or new-comers is impor- tant when we come to consider certain elements in the cultus which indicate foreign influence. Krishna, we are told, was the son of Vasu-deva and Devaki. The former, by one interpretation of his name, is one of the old celestial genii, "the bright ones"; the latter, Devaki, "the divine one," has been identified with the seductive water-nymph of folklore. But more probably in Devaki and Krishna we may see representatives of the world-wide group of the divine mother and the fateful child — Nana of Babylon, Isis and Horus in Egypt, Lucina and her child in Latin tradition.

Weber, Indische Studien, i., 400, ii., 168 ; Frazer, Literary History of India, 231 ; Ray, Mahábhárata, viii., 752.

See Dutt, Ancient India, ii., 276.

The most accessible authorities are Growse, Mathtira, a District Memoir Allahabad, 1883 ; Lallu Lâi, Prem Ságar, translated by E. B. Eastwick.