Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/36

 26 The Legends of Krishna.

him one of his wives. " In whatever room thou findest me not," he answered, " she is thine ; " and Saubhari the sage, we are told, visited all the daughters of King Mandhatri at the same time.^

This is not the place to discuss the question of religious dances at any length. This much seems fairly clear, that they are often intended to act as a charm to promote the fertility of the animal and vegetable world. Pausanias tells us that one part of the cult of the chthonic powers, among whom the vegetation deities hold a prominent place, was the smiting of the underground folk with rods ; and to this day at their seasonal dances the Kol girls in India kneel and pat the ground in time to the music, as if coaxing it to be productive.- The dance, then, was apparently a variant of this, and the beating of the ground by the feet of the dancers was an attempt to wake the slumbering gods of growth at each recurring spring. When, as in the Rasa-mandala, the dance took a circular form, another kind of charm was added^ of which the tale of instances is legion.

We may, then, in the first place, compare with this dance of Krishna and the women that of the Grecian nymphs, the spirits of wood and spring, through whom the earth gives its increase. Homer tells us that they have fair dancing grounds and dance round Achelous, while the Agronomoi or wild-wood nymphs disport themselves with Artemis.-^ Their successors, the modern fairies, dance in the " Mid- summer Night's Dream," and rustics sometimes are privi- leged to see their dances in the England and Germany of our days.'* Like these are the dances of the Maenads, that

' Shea-Troyer, Dabistan, iii., 32 ; Wilson-Hall, loc. cit., iii., 274.

2 Pausanias, viii., 15, 3, with Frazer's note ; Jourjial of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, xxxv. (2), 184.

3 Odyssey, vi., 105 : xii., 318 ; Iliad, xxiv., 615 seqq.

'• Aubrey, Remaines, 28; Grimm, loc. cit., ii., 555; Folk- Lore Record, i, 27 ; Jones-Kropf, Magyar Folk-Tales, Intro., xxxiv.