Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/402

370 BOOK whose harp is the harp of Orpheus, rousing all things into Hfe and energy. With these maidens he dances, hke Apollon with the Muses, each maiden fancying that she alone is his partner (an idea which we find again in the story of the sorcerer Naraka). Only Radha, who loved Krishna with an absorbing affection, saw things as they really were, and withdrew herself from the company. In vain Krishna sent maidens to soothe her and bring her back. To none would she listen, until the god came to her himself His words soon healed the wrong, and so great was his joy with her that he lengthened the night which followed to the length of six months, an incident which has but half preserved its meaning in the myth of Zeus and Alkmene, but which here points clearly to the six months which Persephone spends with her mother Demeter. The same purely solar character is im- pressed on the myth in the Bhagavata Purana, which relates how Brahma, wishing to prove whether Krishna was or was not an incarnation of Vishnu, came upon him as he and Balarama were sleeping among the shepherd youths and maidens. All these Brahma took away and shut up in a distant prison, and Krishna and his brother on awaking found themselves alone. Balarama proposed to go in search of them. Krishna at once created the same number of youths and maidens so precisely like those which had been taken away that when Brahma returned at the end of a year, he beheld to his astonishment the troop which he fancied that he had broken up. Hurrying to the prison he found that none had escaped from it, and thus convinced of the power of Krishna, he led all his prisoners back to him, who then suffered the phantasms which he had evoked to vanish away. Here Ave have the sleep of the sun-god which in other myths becomes the sleep of Persephone and Brynhild, of Endymion or Adonis, — the slumber of autumn when the bright clouds are imprisoned in the cave of Cacus or the Panis, while the new-created youths and maidens represent merely the days and months which come round again as in the years that had passed away. In his solar character Krishna must again be the slayer of the Dragon or Black Snake, Kalinak, the old serpent with the thousand heads, who, like Vitra or the Sphinx, poisons or shuts up the waters.^ In the fight which follows, and

as the Inrlra of the cows thou shalt be many bruises were inflicted on the hood called Govinda." — Vishnu Purana, H. by the pressure of the toes of Krishna. II. Wilson, 528. Among the many foes conquered by

' The F/>/^;/w /V/rawa (Wilson, 514) Krishna is Naraka, from whom he tells us how, stirred up by the incite- rescues elephants, horses, women, &c, ments of Nanda, Krishna lays hold of "At an auspicious season he espoused the middle hood of the chief of the all the maidens whom Naraka had snakes with both hands, and, bending carried off from their friends. At one it down, dances upon it in triumph. and the same moment he received the Whenever the snake attempted to raise hands of all of them, according to the Ids head, it was again trodden down, and ritual, in separate mansions. Sixteen