Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/62

 The Religion of the Veda book of Genesis. Many echoes are called up by the story of Cyavana the Bhargava who, old and decrepit as a ghost, is pelted with clods by the children of the neighborhood. Then he punishes their families by creating discord, so that "father fought with son, and brother with brother." Cyavana finally, through the help of the divine physicians, the Açvins, enters the fountain of youth (queckbronn) and marries the lovely Sukanya." Like an oasis in the desert comes the ancient tale of Purūravas and Urvaçi, whose mythic meaning has been much dis- puted or altogether denied. Already the Rig-Veda knows the story, and the Hindu master-poet Käli- dāsa, perhaps a thousand years later, derives from it one of his loveliest dramas. It is a story which con- tains the same motif as the Undine, Melusine, and Lohengrin stories. A heavenly nymph (Apsaras), Urvaçi by name, loves and marrics King Pururavas, but she abandons him again because he violates one of the conditions of this intrinsically ill-assorted 46 See Eggeling's translation of the version of this legend in the Çatapatha Brahmana, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xii., p. 216 ff. For the story of the flood in general sec Usener, Die Sintflutsagen (Bonn, 1899); Andree, Die Flutsagen (Brunswick, 1891); and Winternitz in Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, vol. xxxi (1901), p. 305. 2 Çatapatha Brahmana 4. 1. 5. 1 f. 3 See, last, the author in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. xx., p. 180.