Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/252

220 BOOK II.

Origin of these myths.

maiden plays the part of Aphrodite in the legend of Psyche. TTie animals here befriended by the trusty servant, -who is Eros, or Boots, or Odysseus, or a thousand others, are fishes, ants, and ravens — names which carry us to the fish or frog sun, to the Myrmidons and the clouds ; and the tasks are the recovery of a ring,^ the picking-up of some bags of millet seed, and the finding of the apple of life (the sun's orb). The first is accomplished by the fishes, one of which, as in the story of Polykrates, brings the ring in its mouth, the second by the ants, and the third by the ravens.

That these tales, of which the most familiar type for English chil- dren is that of Beauty and the Beast, have been borrowed directly from the apologue of Appuleius, no one probably will venture to maintain. With as little likelihood can it be said that they were suggested by the Vedic myth of Urvasi and Pururavas. Their relationship to the latter is precisely that of the Latin and Greek dialects to the ancient Sanskrit ; and thus they must be placed in the class of organic myths. They spring up on all soils from the seed which the Aryan tribes carried away with them when they left their common home, and every variation may therefore be noted as ex- hibiting the power of growth inherent in the old mythical ideas. In few cases is there even a plausible ground for saying that any one tale is copied or consciously adopted from another ; in none is there any necessity for the assumption. The Teutonic nurse was as little conscious that the Frog Prince and Boots were one and the same person, as the grandams of the Punjab were that Bheki was but another form of Urvasi. As an example of the measure in which the myth, retaining still the essential idea, may become modified, we may take the tale of the Soaring Lark."^ In this story, the maiden knows that the being who, like Herakles with the lion's skin on his back, is during the day a lion is at night a man, but no ray of light must fall upon him while he is in his human shape. At her entreaty, how^ever, he goes to the bridal feast of the elder sister, where a single ray of light streams in upon him through a chink in a door made of unseasoned wood, and the maiden entering the room finds a dove, which says that for seven years he must fly about in the world, but that at every seventh mile he will let fall a drop of blood

' Compare also the Gaelic story of M.ic Iain Direach, Campbell, Talcs of the West Highlands, ii. 359. be compared the story of Tulisa (a tale which in Professor Benfey's opinion is very ancient), obtained from a washer- woman at Benares, and published in the Asiatic yournal See also the tales in the Poitaincron of Basil, 15, 19, 44; and Hahn's Greek and Albanian Talcs. A complete analysis of the falJe of Appuleius is given in Friedlaiiter's Sit- tengeschichte Koms.
 * Grimm. With these legends may