Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/24

14 Beanstalk, is always fair game, and it is rather a respectable act to plunder him.

Again, the demon Pralamba, disguising himself as a youth, challenges Krishna and his companions to race. Balarama mounted on the shoulders of the demon, who forthwith ran away with him. But Balarama squeezed and beat him to death, and from this feat gained his name — Rama, "the strong one." Many other demons assumed the forms of savage beasts and met the same fate — Kesin as a wild horse, Byomâsur a wolf, Arishta a bull — all types of the rude animal forms which have attacked mystics and religious men and women since the dawn of religious history. Of another type is the witch Putânâ, who tries to suckle the divine child with her devil's milk; but Krishna sucked so hard at her breasts that he drained her life-blood and caused her to perish miserably.

But, beside dragon-slaying, Krishna does many deeds of mercy. He cures the hump-backed woman Kubjâ with a touch ; he rescues the son of the Brâhman Sandîpani, who had been slain by the ocean-demon Panchajana. Him Krishna drags from the deep of the sea, and then, like so many divine personages, in the spirit of the Homeric Nekuia, he invades the underworld and rescues the Brâh- man boy from the clutches of Yama, god of death, as Herakles saves Alkestis. Another echo of Homeric folk- lore meets us in his contest with the whirlwind-demon, Trinâvarta, who would have whirled him away ; which reminds us of the Thuellai, or wind-gusts, which carry off the daughters of Pandareus, a myth which later on developed into that of the hideous Harpies of Vergil. The event is commemorated at a cell in Mahâban, where