Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/111

Rh though spiritualized, persists in the popular conception, while the place of the creation of the god is taken by the concept of Puruṣa, or "Spirit," which is one of the names of Prajāpati, entering into the material Prakṛti. The creative power of Prajāpati exercised by himself is actually compared to child-birth and serves as the precursor of the androgynous character of the deity, which is formally expressed in the figure of Śiva as half man and half woman both in literature and in art.

Another conception of the creative activity of Prajāpati is that he took the form of a tortoise or a boar: thus in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (VII. v. 1. 5) we learn that he created offspring after he had assumed the form of a tortoise; and that as the word kaśyapa means "tortoise," people say that all creatures are descendants of Kaśyapa. This tortoise is also declared to be one with the sun (Āditya), which brings Prajāpati into connexion with the solar luminary, just as he is identified with Dakṣa, the father or son of Aditi, the mother of Āditya. The same Brāhmaṇa (XIV. i. 2. 11) tells us that the earth was formerly but a span in size, but that a boar raised it up, and that Prajāpati, as lord of earth, rewarded him. In the Taittirīya Saṁhitā (VII. i. 5. 1) and the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa (I. i. 3. 1) this boar is definitely identified with Prajāpati, and the later Taittirīya Āraṇyaka states (X. i. 8) that the earth was raised by a black boar with a hundred arms. From these germs spring the boar and tortoise incarnations of Viṣṇu in the epic and in the Purāṇas. Yet another avatar is to be traced to the story in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (I. viii. 1. 1) of the fish which saves Manu from the deluge, though that text does not give the identification of the fish with Prajāpati, which is asserted in the epic.

There is, however, another side to the character of Prajāpati which exhibits him in an unfavourable light. The Brāhmaṇas tell that he cast eyes of longing on his own daughter, reproducing here, no doubt, the obscure references in the Ṛgveda (X. lxi. 4-7) to the intercourse of Dyaus ("Sky") with his daughter