Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/19

 The Legends of Krishna. 9

tried by the king he decides that the child belongs to both mothers, to one by maternity, to the other by adoption, and hence it was called Bakula, " he of the two septs " ; of Buddhasatva, who entered into Chandra-devi and was conceived of her.^

So we have triple maternity in the tale of Siva in his form as Tryambaka, " he who has three mothers," " as Dionysus was Dimetor, the Bimatris of Ovid.'^ In the same way Heimdall was the son of nine mothers, giantesses. Reinhart, after the Caesarean operation, was brought to birth in the stomachs of newly-slaughtered swine, and Agni was the son of many mothers.* A further development occurs in the tales of adoption, as that of Herakles and Hera, where the adopting mother goes through the farce of a simulated birth, which Diodorus tells us was a practice of the bar- barians of his time.^ In the Legenda Aurea we read of the birth of Judas, announced to be a fateful child, exposed and taken up by the queen of the Isle Scarioth, who simulates pregnancy, and represents the recovered child to be her own.^ Lastly, it has passed into modern folklore in the tale of Seven Mothers and their Son,'^ naturally suggested by the conditions of a polygamous household.

All the fateful children of the folktales have miraculous powers at birth. Otus and Ephialtes, another case of dualism, who were born of monstrous size ; ^ the new-born Apollo, who in the Homeric hymn, when he tastes the nectar and ambrosia, leaps from his swaddling clothes,

' Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal, xxxiv., 226 ; Ward, Hindoos, ii.,

55, 395-

- Barth, Religions of India, 161.


 * Metam., iv., 12.

also compare the story of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, Bancroft, Native Races, iii., 310 seqq.
 * Grimm, loc. cit., i., 234, 389 ; Rig Veda, iii., 23, 3 ; x., 45, 2 ; i., 141, 2 ;

^ Hartland, loc. cit., ii., 419.

^ Cap. xlv., a reference for which I am indebted to Mr. Hartland.

' Temple-Steel, Wideawake Stories, 98 seqq.

® Odyssey, xi., 305 seqq.