CHAPTER IX.

THE ANTELOPE, THE STAG, THE DEER, AND THE GAZELLE.

SUMMARY.

Luminous stag and black stag.--The Marutas drawn by antelopes, and dressed in antelopes' skins.--The stag, the gazelle, and the antelope as forms assumed or created by the demon to ruin several heroes whilst they hunt.--Marîcas.--Indras kills the mrigas.--The solar hero or heroine transformed into a stag, a gazelle, or an antelope.--Aktaion.--Artemis and the stag.--The stags of the Yggdrasill.--The stag Eikthyrner.--The hind as a nurse.--The hind and the old woman on the 1st of January.--The hind and the snow; the white hind.

The stag represents the luminous forms that appear in the cloudy or the nocturnal forest; these, therefore, are now lightning and thunderbolts, now the cloud itself from which the lightning and thunderbolts are discharged, now the moon in the gloom of night. The mythical stag is nearly always either entirely luminous or else spotted; when it is black it is of a diabolical nature, and represents the whole sky of night. Sometimes the luminous stag is a form assumed by the demon of the forest to compass the ruin of the hero.

The _Rigvedas_ represents to us the Marutas, or winds that lighten and thunder in the clouds, as drawn by antelopes. The Marutas "are born shining of themselves, with antelopes, with lances, amid thunder-peals and flashes of lightning."[124] "They have yoked, with a red yoke, the antelopes.[125] The young battalion of the Marutas goes of itself, and has an antelope for its horse."[126] The horses of the Marutas, which we already know to be antelopes, are called winged,[127] and are said to have golden fore-feet.[128] The antelopes of the Marutas are splendid.[129] Nor are the Marutas only carried by antelopes; they also wear upon their shoulders antelopes' skins.[130]

But the antelope, the gazelle, and the stag generally, instead of helping the hero, involve him rather in perplexity and peril. This mythical subject is amplified in numerous Hindoo legends.

In the first scene of Kâlidâsas' _Çakuntalâ_, a black-spotted (krishnasâras) gazelle misleads King Dushyantas.

In the _Mahâbhâratam_,[131] King Parîkshit pursues a gazelle and wounds it (as the god Çivas one day wounded the gazelle of the sacrifice); he then follows its track, but the gazelle flees at sight of him, inasmuch as it has taken the path of heaven in its primitive (_i.e._, celestial) form. The king loses the track of his prey, and in trying to find it again, brings death upon his head.

In the same _Mahâbhâratam_,[132] King Pandus dies at the moment when he is uniting himself with his wife Mâdrî, because he had one day in the chase transfixed a male gazelle at the instant when it was about to have fruit of its union with a female gazelle.

In the _Vishnu P._,[133] King Bharatas, who has abandoned his throne to give himself up entirely to penitence, loses the fruit of his ascetic life, by becoming passionately enamoured of a fawn.

In the _Râmâyanam_,[134] Marîcas, who is possessed by a demon, becomes, by order of Râvanas, the king of the monsters, a golden stag spotted with silver, having four golden horns adorned with pearls, and a tongue as red as the sun, and tempts Râmas to pursue him in order to procure his silver-spotted skin, for which Sîtâ has expressed a desire, that she might lie down upon it and rest herself. In this way the stag (here an equivalent of the hare) succeeds in separating Râmas from Sîtâ. It then emits a lamentable cry, imitating the voice of Râmas, so as to induce Lakshmanas, his brother, to come to his assistance, and leave Sîtâ alone, that Râvanas may then be able to carry her off with impunity. Lakshmanas leaves her unwillingly, because, perceiving that the stag shines like the constellation of the head of the stag (or gazelle, Mrigaçiras), he suspects it to be an apparition of Marîcas, who, as a stag, has already caused the ruin of many other princes who have hunted him. The moon, in Sanskrit, besides the name of Çaçadharas, or who carries the hare, has also that of Mrigadharas, or who carries the gazelle (or stag). The solar hero loses himself in the forest of night while pursuing the gazelle-moon. A demoniacal gazelle seems to appear even in the _Rigvedas_, where Indras fights and kills a monster called Mrigas. In Germanic tradition there are numerous legends in which the hero who hunts the stag meets with his death or is dragged into hell.[135]

As the moon is a stag or gazelle, and comes after the sun, so it was also sometimes imagined that the solar hero or heroine was transformed into a stag or hind.

In the _Tuti-Name_,[136] a king goes to the chase, kills an antelope, doffs the human form, and disguises himself as an antelope. This mythical disguise can be understood in two ways. The evening sun reflects its rays in the ocean of night, the sun-stag sees its horns reflected in the fountain or lake of night, and admires them. At this fountain sits a beautiful and bewitching siren, the moon; this fountain is the dwelling of the moon; she allures the hero-stag that admires itself in the fountain, and ruins it, or else the stag attracts the hero to the fountain, where it causes him to meet with his death.[137] The stag of the fable, after admiring itself in the fountain, is torn to pieces by the dogs who overtake it in the forest because its horns become entangled in the branches; the solar rays are enveloped in the branches of the nocturnal forest. Aktaion, who, for having seen Artemis (the moon) naked in the bath, is changed into a stag and torn by dogs, is a variety of the same fable. In _Stesichoros_, quoted by Pausanias, Artemis puts a stag's skin round Aktaion and incites the dogs to devour him in order that he may not be able to wed the moon. Sun and moon are brother and sister; the brother, wishing to seduce his sister, meets with his death. A Lithuanian song describes the moon Menas (the Hindoo Manu-s) as the unfaithful husband of the sun (who is a female), being enamoured of Aushrine (the Vedic Usrâ, the morning aurora). The god Perkuns, to avenge the sun, kills the moon. In a Servian song, the moon reproaches his mistress or wife, the morning aurora, on account of her absence. The aurora answers that she travels upon the heights of Belgrade, that is, of the white or the luminous city, in the sky, upon the lofty mountains.

The king in the _Tuti-Name_ who assumes the guise of an antelope, appears to be a variety of the solar hero at the moment of the approach of night, or of the ass that invests itself in the lion's skin. But inasmuch as the Indian moon is Mrigarâgas, or king of the wild animals, no less than the lion, inasmuch as the moon succeeds the sun, one mrigas another, one lion another, or one stag another, when the solar hero or heroine enters into the night, he or she appears in the form of a luminous stag or hind, no longer as the sun, but as the moon, which, although luminous, penetrates into hell, and is in relation with demons and itself demoniacal.

Artemis (the moon) is represented as a hunting goddess in the act of wounding, with her left hand, an antelope between the horns. To this goddess is also attributed the merit of having overtaken the stags without the help of dogs, perhaps because, sometimes, she is herself a dog, surprising the solar stag of evening. The four stags of Artemis connect themselves in my mind with the four stags that stay round the tree Yggdrasill in the _Edda_, and which come out of the river Häeffing. The stag Eikthyrner which, eating the leaves of the tree Lerad, causes all its waters to flow out, seems, on the other hand, to refer to the sun as it merges and loses its rays in the cloud (the solar stag is also referred to in the _Edda_).

Artemis, who substitutes a hind for Iphigeneia, who was to have been sacrificed, seems to point to the moon-hind as taking the place of the evening aurora. We also recognise the moon in the hind which, according to Ælianos and Diodoros, nourished Telephos, son of Hêraklês (Hêraklês in his fourth labour overtakes the stag with golden horns), who had been exposed in the forest by the order of his grandfather; as well as in that which, according to Justinus, fed with its milk in the forest the nephew of the king of the Tartessians, and afterwards, according to the "Lives of the Saints," the blessed Ægidius, the hermit who lived in the forest. There are numerous mediæval legends which reproduce this circumstance of the young hero abandoned in the forest and nourished now by a goat, now by a hind, the same which afterwards serves as a guide to the royal father in recovering the prince his son, or to the prince-husband in recovering the abandoned princess his bride. It was probably by some such reminiscence of the mythical nourishing hind that, as I read in Du Cange,[138] silver images of stags (cervi argentei) were placed in ancient Christian baptistries.

Among the customs of the primitive Christians condemned by St Augustine, St Maximus of Turin, and other sacred writers, was that of disguising one's self on the 1st of January as a hind or an old woman. The old woman and the hind here evidently represent the witch or ugly woman of winter; and inasmuch as the winter is, like the night, under the moon's influence, the disguise of a hind was another way of representing the moon. When the moon or the sun shines, the hind is luminous and generally propitious, the wild goat is beneficent (the wild goat, the deer, and the stag are the same in the myths; the same word, _mrigas_, serves in India to express the constellation of the gazelle and that of the capricorn or wild goat), and hunts the wolves away from the sleeping hero in the forest.[139] When the sky is dark, the hind, from being luminous, has become black, and, as such, is the most sinister of omens; sometimes, in the midst of the night or of the winter, the beautiful luminous hind, or moon, or sun, disappears, and the black monster of night or of winter remains alone. In the ninth story of the _Pentamerone_, the Huorco (the rakshas or monster) transforms himself into a beautiful hind to allure the young Canneloro, who pursues it in the hope of securing it. But it decoys him into the midst of the forest (of winter), where it causes so much snow to fall, "che pareva che lo cielo cadesse" (the white hind into which the witch transforms the beautiful maiden, in the story of Madame d'Aulnoy, would seem to have the same meaning); then the hind becomes a monster again in order to devour the hero. The period in which the moon is hidden or on the wane, in which the night is dark, was considered ill-omend by the ancient Hindoos, who held, on the other hand, that the time of full moon, or at least of the crescent moon, was propitious. Our country-people have preserved several superstitions relative to a similar belief. In a Rutenian legend, published by Novosielski, the evening star (Lithuanian, _vakerinne_; Slavonic, _vecernitza_, the evening aurora) prays its friend Lunus (the moon is masculine in Slavonic as in Sanskrit) to wait a little before rising, that they may rise together, and adds, "We shall illumine together sky and earth: the animals will be glad in the fields, and the traveller will bless us on his way."

FOOTNOTES:

[124] Ye prishatîbhir rishtibhih sâkam vâçîbhir angibhih--agâyanta svabhânavah; _Rigv._ i. 37, 2.

[125] Upo ratheshu prishatîr ayugdhvam prashtir vahati rohitah; i. 39, 6.

[126] Sa hi svasrit prishadaçvo yuvâ ganah: i. 87, 4.

[127] Â vidyunmadbhir marutah svarkâi rathebhir yâtha rishtimadbhir açvaparnâih; i. 88, 1.

[128] Açvâir hiranyapânibhih; viii. 7, 27.

[129] Çubhe sammiçlâh prishatîr ayukshata; iii. 26, 4.

[130] Anseshu etâh; _Rigv._ i. 166, 10.--Concerning the use of similar skins for dress in India, cfr. the long and instructive note of Professor Max Müller, _Rigveda-Sanhita Translated and Explained_, i. 221-223.

[131] i. 1665.

[132] i. 3811, _et seq._; i. 4585, _et seq._

[133] ii. 13, translated by Wilson.

[134] iii. 40, 48, 49.

[135] Cfr. Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 354.

[136] ii. 258, Rosen's version.

[137] Oft führt der Hirsch nur zu einer schönen Frau am Brunnen; sie ist aber der Unterwelt verwandt und die Verbindung mit ihr an die Bedingung geknüpft, dass die ungleiche Natur des Verbundenen nicht an den Tag gezogen werde.

[138] Du Cange adds: "Quoad baptismam, quomodo cervus ad fontes aquarum, summo desiderium perveniendum esse monstraretur."

[139] Cfr. Porchat, _Contes Merveilleux_, xiii.