Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/22

 12 The Legends of Krishna.

divergent cults. The fact, again, that some of our English dragons, like those of Sockburn or Wantley, where the dragon has been euphemised into a roguish attorney, have their home on a hill or prehistoric tumulus, suggests that some cult of the dead may be at the root of the matter. When the myth became Christianised, the overthrow of rival beliefs becomes more obvious, as in the case of St. George, St. Patrick, and St. Mac Creiche in Ireland, St. Philip, who slew the dragon of Hierapolis, St. Martha and the Tarasque dragon in Provence, St. Florent and the dragon of the Loire, St. Cado, St. Maudet and St. Pol in Brittany, St. Keyne in Cornwall, St. O'Heany and the Banagher worm, and many others.^

The monster-slaying feats of Krishna are of various kinds. One day the children of the herdsmen were playing and entered what they supposed to be a cave in the rocks, but which was really the expanded jaws of the serpent king, Aghasura. He drew a deep breath and sucked them in, but Krishna bade them be of good cheer, and swelled his body to such a size that the serpent burst, and all the children stepped out unharmed.^ Here we have the com- mon myth of the swallowing and the disgorging, which appears in the tale of Jonah and the whale, that of Kronos and Herakles, and all through savage folklore.^

On another occasion an immense boa-constrictor seized Nanda, Krishna's foster-father, on which the youthful god set his foot on the head of the monster, which was forth- with transformed into a lovely youth. For, ages before, a Ganymede of the Court of Heaven, Sudarshan by name, in his insolence danced before Angiras, the sage. The holy

' Maury, Essai sur ks legendes pieuscs du Moyen Age, 144 ; ist Series Notes and Queries, vi., 147, 519; 3rd Series, ix., 29, 158; 8th Series, vi., 113 ; 2nd Series, viii., 509 ; Tezcatlipoca in Mexico, Bancroft, /i?<r. cit., iii.,

283.

Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (2nd ed.), i., 295.
 * Growse, loc. cit., 57.