Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/21

 The Legends of Krishna. li

Krishna again appears as a slayer of dragons and mon- sters. Like all great cycles of myth, that of the worm- slayer seems to be founded on more than one train of thought. In one phase, as in the defeat of Ahi or Vritra by Indra, or in the legend of Imra as told by the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, it is a pure nature-myth. The snake, like the frog or lizard of many savage mythologies, swallows the waters, which are released when the monster is destroyed. Again, while the theory advanced by some writers^ that the myth is a reminiscence of the struggles of early man with some

" Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime,"

is opposed to all the conclusions of palaeontology, on the other hand the tale may in some cases be based on the discovery of the gigantic bones of some extinct saurian. One famous group of tales of this class, that in which the hero slays the dragon which demands a human victim, an impostor appears and claims the reward, the trick being discovered by the production of the tongue or some other part of the slaughtered dragon, probably, as Mr. Hartland shows,^ points to a reaction against an early custom of offering a victim to some water spirit conceived in dragon form.

But in many cases the myth seems to represent a conflict of rival cults. Such, for instance, seems to be the most reasonable explanation of the slaughter of the python by Apollo. Here the dragon may be associated with the worship of Ge or some of the other chthonic powers, which was overthrown by the new-comer god. In other cases, as in that of Athena associated with the earth-snake, Erechtheus-Erichthonios, we may suspect the fusion of

' Gould, Mythical Monsters, chap. vi.

2 Hartland, loc. cit., iii., 66 seqq. ; Frazer, Pausanias, i., 476 ; ii., 528 ., 60, 143.