Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/130

98 BOOK I.

The battle of light and darkness.

another phase she is Kalypso, the beautiful night which veils the sun from mortal eyes in her chamber flashing with a thousand stars, and lulls to sleep the man of many griefs and wanderings.^ Lastly, she is St. Ursula, with her eleven thousand virgins (the myriad stars), whom Cardinal Wiseman, in a spirit worthy of Herodotos, transforms into a company, or rather two companies, of English ladies, martyred by the Huns at Cologne, but whose mythical home is on Horselberg, where the faithful Eckhart is doomed to keep his weary watch. Labouring on in his painful rationalism, Cardinal Wiseman tells us of one form of the legend which mentions a marriage-contract made with the father of St. Ursula, a very powerful king, by which it was arranged that she should have eleven companions, and each of these a thousand followers.^ There are thus twelve, in addition to the eleven thousand attendants, and these twelve reappear in the Hindu tales, sometimes in dark, sometimes in lustrous forms, as the twelve hours of the day or night, or the twelve moons of the lunar year. Thus in the story of Truth's Triumph a raja has twelve wives, but no children. At length he marries Guzra Bai, the flower girl, who bears him a hundred sons and one daughter ; and the sequel of the tale relates the result of their jealousy against these children and their mother. Their treacherous dealing is at last exposed, and they suffer the fate of all like personages in the German and Norse tales.

There is, in fact, no end to the many phases assumed by the struggle of these fairy beings, which is the warfare between light and darkness. But the bright beings always conquer in the end, and return like Persephone from the abode of Hades to gladden the heart of the Mater Dolorosa.* The child in the Deccan stories appears not only as Guzra Bai, but as Panch Phul Ranee, as Surya Bai, as the wife of Muchie Lai, the fish or frog-sun.'' All these

Mylitta, the Syrian moon-goddess. — Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, second series, "Mclusina." Mr. Gould connects Melusina, as first seen close to a fountain, with the Apsaras, or water-maidens, of Vedic mythology, and the swan maidens of Teutonic legend. She thus belongs to the race of Naiads, Nixies, and Elves, the latter name denoting a running stream, as the Elbe, the Alpheios. The fish's or serpent's tail is not peculiar to Melusina, and her attributes are also shared with the Assyrian fish-gods, and the Hellenic Proteus.

• Od. V. 60, c:c.

^ Essays on Religion and Literafure, edited by Archbishop Manning (1865), p. 252.

' Grote, Hi sto>y of Greece, i. 55.

one of the thou and personifications of names denoting originally the pheno- mena of day and night. As carrying the morning light from the east to the west, the sun is the bull bearing Europe from the ]iurplc land (Phoinikia) ; and the same changes which converted the Seven Shiners into the .Seven .Sages, or the Seven .Sleepers of Ephesus, or the Seven Champions of Christendom, or the Seven Bears, transformed the sun into a wolf, a bear, a lion, a swan. As resting on the horuon in the morn-
 * The frog jirince or princess is only