Zoological Mythology

Abstract

THE claims which these volumes make to our consideration as students of Nature is that their stories of birds, beasts, and fishes are treated as being Natural History, not indeed in an ordinary, but in an extraordinary sense. It is asserted that they are descriptions in mythical language of the great phenomena of the earth and sky. To no small extent this assertion is indisputably true. In ancient poetry or story, it often happens that the teller of a myth incidentally lets us know what his underlying meaning is. Thus many a passage from the Veda shows that the minds of that poetic race of herdsmen, the ancient Aryans, were so moulded to the dominant ideas of the pasture and the stall, that they saw throughout all heaven and earth the analogues of their beloved herds. The winds chasing the clouds seem, to their fancy, bulls rushing among the cows. The sky is a beneficent cow, giving rain for milk. Indra, the Heaven-god, is a bull of bulls, whose horns are the thunderbolts, who smites in storm the mountain cavern where the cloud-cows are imprisoned, and sets them free. The sun may be fancied a herdsman, as in this ancient Vedic riddle: “I have seen a shepherd who never set down his foot, and yet went and disappeared on the roads; and who, taking the same and yet different roads, goes round and round amidst the worlds.” Horses, too, as we moderns know by the classic chariot of the sun, figure in mythic astronomy. Prof. De Gubernatis gives us the beautiful little Russian nature-tale of the maiden Basiliça, who, on her way to the old witch's house, sees a black horseman all in black on a black horse, and then night falls; then she sees a white horseman on a white horse, and day dawns; then a red horseman on a red horse, and the sun rises. The story has been told already in England, but deserves telling again for its absolute certainty of meaning, which hardly requires the old witch's explanation that the black, white, and red horsemen are mythic personifications of night, day, and sun. If, then, we meet with stories very like unquestionable nature-myths, there is a strong case for the mythologists who say these stories are also nature-myths, whose original meaning has been forgotten, so that they have fallen into the state of mere fanciful tales. Thus, in an Esthonian story quoted by our author, this same notion appears of the three horsemen who are personifications of the great periods of light and darkness. The hero comes to deliver the princess from the glass mountain where she sleeps, and he comes dressed first in bronze colour on a bronze-coloured horse, next in silver on a silver-coloured horse, and lastly in golden garb on a golden horse. This certainly looks like a story suggested by the victorious noonday sun coming at last with glowing rays to accomplish the task he had failed to perform in darkness or twilight, to deliver the Spring from the icy fortress of Winter, or, as our nursery tale has it, to awaken the Sleeping Beauty in the Palace where the spell of Winter has bound her and hers in numbness and silence. Valeat quantum.

Zoological Mythology; or, the Legends of Animals.

By Angelo De Gubernatis, Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Literature in the Istituto di Studii Superiori e di Perfezionamento at Florence. 2 vols. (London: Trübner and Co., 1872.)