Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/18

 8 The Legends of Krishna.

or perhaps in the cases where male and female deities are grouped in pairs the idea of the world of sense developed by the normal connection of the sexes.

Here, too, we have the familiar case of the god or hero born in some abnormal way. Often he is motherless or unborn or springs from his father alone, as Athena from the thigh of Zeus, which suggests the couvade, or the mother is delivered by the Caesarean operation. One or other of such incidents presents itself in the tales of Dionysus, Asklepios, Lychas, Sakya-muni, Tristram, Macduff, Dubrune Nikititsch, and Sigfried.-^

But the tale of the transfer of the embryo from one mother to the other is more unusual, and several threads of folk belief seem to be combined which is not easy to disentangle. To begin with, abnormal birth is regarded as auspicious, for instance, in the Hindu belief that children born by the foot presentation are lucky.^ Next, we have the common belief in the possibility of birth transference, where by cutting off part of a child's clothes, soaking it in water and drinking it, causes a barren woman to conceive, or the Chinese theory that the soul of a great man is incarnated in one of the women who watch his funeral.^ The Aruntas of Australia, as described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, have adopted this as the normal explanation of the fact of con- ception. We meet similar cases of interference with and transfer of the embryo in the legend of Indra, who fearing that Aditi would bear a child superior to himself, entered her womb and cut the foetus into forty-nine pieces ; of the child born at Kausambi, swallowed by a fish and carried to Benares, where he is adopted by the wife of a nobleman and recognised by his true mother ; when the case comes to be

' Ploss, Das Weib, ii., 405, 407 ; Grimm, Teutonic Mythology (trans. Stallybrass), i., 385 ; Elton- Powell, Saxo Gratumatiais, intro., Ixiv.

^ Panjab Notes and Queries, iii., 78.

^ Ibid., iii., I16. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, i., 160; Frazer, Golden Bough, i., 239.