Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/124

92 BOOK I. Charms or spells in the Odyssey and in Hindu stories.

but bring before us new phases of those old forms of which mankind, we may boldly say, will never grow weary. The golden slipper of Cinderella is the slipper of Rhodopis, which an eagle carries off and drops into the lap of the Egyptian king as he S'ts on his seat of judgement at Memphis.^ This slipper reappears in the beautiful Deccan story of Sodewa Bai, and leads of course to the same issue as in the legends of Cinderella and Rhodopis. The dragon of the Glistening Heath represents the seven-headed cobra of the Hindu story, and in the legend of Brave Seventee Bai the beautiful Brynhild becomes his daughter, just as the bright Phoibos is the child of the sombre Leto. In the Greek myth dragons of another kind draw the chariot of Medeia, the child of the sun, or impart mysterious wisdom to lamos and Melampous, as the cobras do to Muchie Lai. That the heroes of Greek and Teutonic legends in almost every case are separated from, or abandon, the women whom they have wooed or loved is well known ; and the rajas and princes of these Hindu stories are subjected to the same lot with Herakles and Odysseus, Oidipous and Sigurd, Kephalos and Prokris, Paris and Oinone. Generally the newly-married prince feels a yearning to see his father and his mother once more, and, like Odysseus, pines until he can set his face homewards. Sometimes he takes his wife, sometimes he goes alone ; but in one way or another he is kept away from her for years, and reappears like Odysseus in the squalid garb of a beggar.

Curiously enough, in these Hindu stories the detention of the wandering prince or king is caused by one of those charms or spells which Odysseus in his wanderings discreetly avoids. The Lotos- eaters and their magic fruit reappear in the nautch-people or con- jurors, whom the rajah who has married Panch Phul Ranee, the Lady of the Five Flowers, asks for rice and fire. The woman whom he addresses immediately brings them. " But before she gave them to him, she and her companions threw on them a certain powder, containing a very potent charm ; and no sooner did the raja receive them than he forgot about his wife and little child, his journey and all that had ever happened to him in his life before : such was the peculiar property of the powder. And when the conjuror said to him, 'Why should you go away ? Stay with us and be one of us,' he willingly consented." ^ Unless the translator has designedly modified

' .('Elian, V, H. xiii. 33 ; Strabo, xvii. p. 808. Gubernatis, Zoological JJythology, i. 31, 126. on the part of the solar hero is brought about in many of the German stories by his allowin;^ his ]5arents to kiss him on one side of his face, or on his lips. In the Gaelic story of the Battle of the Birds neither man nor other crea-
 * This forgetfuiness of his first love