Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/16

 6 The Legends of Krishna.

which is so familiar an agency in the growth of religious belief. He may, in other words, be only a figure-head round which local myths have centred, like Alexander or Karl the Great. In the case of the Greek Apollo, for instance, the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, the mouse, the laurel probably represent so many variant cults, some of them possibly totemistic, which came to be grouped round and identified with one dominant divine personage. When from this point of view we come to examine the Krishna mythus we find his connection with cattle specially prominent. His most popular titles are Govinda and Gopala, "the cowherd;" and as a protector of kine he may be readily compared with similar deities in other parts of the world. Thus, in Greece we have Apollo Nomios, and in another shape Krishna as Murli-dhara, " the flute-player," reminds us of Apollo Mousegetes, the leader of the Muses, the patron of music and song. So in Greece and Rome, Hermes and Pan, Pales and Priapus, •Faunus and Lupercus, Bubona and Epona, and possibly the Babylonian Eabani,^ are in various forms the deities who give increase to the flocks and protect domestic animals from wild beasts and other dangers — a cult in no sense primitive, but based on the needs of a society in which cattle-breeding and husbandry are already well advanced. From this point of view he has his kinsfolk in the local divinities of modern India — Siddhua and Buddhua, Nagar- deo, Chaumu, Kaluva and Bir-nath, who shield the herds from harm.- So his brother Bala-rama seems to have been an old agricultural god known as Halabrit, " the plough-bearer," with the lustful temper of Pan or Silenus, just as Sita, " the furrow," was embodied in the Rama myth. He may thus in his most primitive form have been an old cattle god adopted into the Brahmanical pantheon,

' Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, 576.

^ Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, ii., 81 seqq. ; Tribes and Castes of the North- Western Provinces and Oudh, \., 63 seqq.