CHAPTER III.

THE TORTOISE.

SUMMARY.

Equivoque between the words _kacchapas_ and _kaçyapas_ (by the intermediate form, _kaçapas_).--Explanation of the myth of the production of the ambrosia, by means of the mandaras.--Mantharas as a tortoise.--Kûrmas.--Kacchapas the lord of the shores.--The tortoise and the elephant.--Kaçyapas as Pragâpatis.--Somas and Savitar.--Kaçyapas and the thirteen daughters of Dakshas; Dakshagâ.--The funereal tortoise and the frog.--The tortoise and the lyre; the Schild-kröte; the shields of the Kureti; kacchâs, kacchapî; kûrmas as a poet and as a wind.--The tortoise and the warriors.--The shields fallen from the sky.--The demoniacal tortoise.--The tortoise as an island.--The hare and the tortoise.--The tortoise defeats the eagle.

Of the three principal Hindoo names of the tortoise, _kûrmas_, _kacchapas_, and _kaçyapas_, the third alone, in connection with the second, seems to have any importance in the history of myths. The expression _kûrmas_ is the word usually employed to designate the real tortoise, whilst the expression _kaçyapas_ gave rise to mythical equivoques, which deserve to be observed.

We know of the famous incarnation of Vishnus as a tortoise, treated of in the _Kûrma P._ The problem was to stir up the ocean of milk to make ambrosia; the sea had no bottom, inasmuch as the earth had as yet no existence; to stir up the waters of the ocean, something of colossal size was needed; the gods had recourse to the mandaras, which was made to serve for the purpose, as the king of the rods, _kaçapas_; the gods and the demons shook the rod, and the ambrosia came forth; no sooner was the ambrosia produced, than the world of animated beings began to be created. The character of this cosmogony is preternaturally phallical; the white froth of the sea (born of the genital organs of Ouranos, castrated by his son Kronos), whence Aphroditê rises, and the cosmic ambrosia, being nothing else than the genital sperm. At a later period a mountain was seen in the mandaras, and the words _kaçapas_ and _kacchapas_ (subsequently changed into _kaçyapas_) being confused, the king of the rods or phallos, _par excellence_, was converted into a tortoise. The mandaras (from the root _mand-mad_, to inebriate, to make joyful), however, might mean the agitator, that which makes joyful; but as from _mad_ is derived the word _matsyas_, the fish now drunken, now stupid, so the word _mandaras_ also has, for its proper meanings, slow and large, and is closely connected with mandas, which, besides slow, lazy, soft, also means drunken; with mandakas, foolish; and with mandanas, merry; and, as such, we can understand how there was in the celestial Paradise, in the mandanas or making joyful, the tree mandaras, the inebriating. Finally, it is connected with manthanas, the agitator, and identified with mantharas, which also means the agitator, the slow, and the lazy. But there is also another analogy which offers us the means of understanding how the equivoque of kaçapas, confused with kacchapas, and which afterwards became kaçyapas or tortoise, became popular, just through the word _kûrmas_, which, as we have said, means a tortoise. When the mandaras or mantharas was conceived of as a producer of ambrosia, they soon identified the mantharas itself (the slow, the late, the curved) with the tortoise; in fact, _mantharas_ is the name given to a tortoise in the _Hitopadeças_, and the name _mantharakas_ is applied to another in _Somadevas_ and in the _Pancatantram_. Considered simply as the slow and the curved, the thought of the tortoise, which answers this description, naturally arose in connection with the name; the primitive myth became complicated, and the mandaras and the kaçapas, which were originally one and same, were at length distinguished from each other, the kaçapas, at first a kaçyapas or kacchapas or tortoise, and, _vice versa_, the mandaras or mantharas also; the words in course of time lost their primitive meaning, the mandaras (as the slow one) became a mountain (which does not move), and the kaçapas a tortoise, supporting the mountain, at once vast, ponderous, and inert. As it often happens in mythology that two distinct personalities spring out of two names at first applied to the same mythical object or being, and both being names which indicate something heavy, it was surmised that the one heavy thing carried the other, and that the heavy tortoise, into which the god Vishnus transformed himself, sustained the weight of the heavy mountain placed upon it by his _alter ego_ Indras. The ideas of weighty and curved being united in both the mandaras and the kaçapas, the tortoise, as kûrmas, serves well for this office of a carrier, an assertion I venture to make, inasmuch as in _kûr-mas_ I think I can recognise the same root which appears in the Sanskrit _gur-u-s_, fem. _gur-v-î_, superlat. _gar-ishth-a-s_ (Lat. _gra-v-is_, from _garvis_), and in the Latin _curvus_.[506]

As for the name of kacchapas, to which the equivocal Hindoo epithet of kaçyapas, applied to the tortoise, should be referred, it properly means the lord, the guardian of the shores, he who occupies the shores, and is a perfectly apt designation for the tortoise, and an expression _à propos_ to what is related of it in the legend quoted by us in the chapter on the elephant. Both animals (sun and moon) frequent the banks of the same lake, and have conceived a mortal dislike one for the other, continuing in their brutal forms the quarrel which existed between them when they were not only two men but two brothers. As the elephant and the tortoise both frequent the shores of the same lake, they mutually annoy each other, renewing and maintaining in mythical zoology the strife which subsists between the two mythical brothers, who fight with each other for the kingdom of heaven, either in the form of twilights, or of equinoxes, or of sun and moon, or of twilight and sun, or of twilight and moon, in any of the various interpretations which can, all with same basis of truth, be given to the myth of the Açvinâu, according to their appearance among celestial phenomena, which, although distinct, have nevertheless a great resemblance. In this particular mythical struggle between the tortoise and the elephant, terminated by the bird garudas, who carries them both up into the air in order to devour them, the tortoise and the elephant seem, however, especially to personify the two twilights of the day and the two twilights of the year--that is, the equinoxes, or the sun and the moon in the crepuscular hour, the sun and the moon in the equinoctial day, upon the banks of the great heavenly lake.

But, in the legend contained in the _Mahâbhâratam_[507] of the tortoise and the elephant carried into the air by the Vishnuitic bird, there is still another interesting circumstance or variation, which corroborates the cosmic interpretation of the myth of the tortoise now proposed by me. The divine Kaçyapas is mentioned in it; he desires to have a son, and therefore has himself served by the gods (since it is the gods who make the mandaras, the producer of ambrosia, turn round) in the sacrifice adapted to produce children. The phallical Indras carries on his shoulders a mountain of wood, which evidently corresponds to the mandaras or kaça-pas, and, on the way, offends the dwarf hermits born of the hairs of the body of Brahman, that is, the hairs themselves; to this Kaçyapas, the name of Pragâpatis or lord of generation is given. We here again meet with the monstrous phallos which produces the ambrosia (or the Somas to which corresponds Savitar, the generator and the lord of the creatures[508]) and generates living beings in the world. Kaçyapas being considered as the generator, he was therefore placed in relation with the movements of the moon and the sun, who are also generators (as Somas and Savitar); and it is in this respect that Kaçyapas also appears as the foecundator of the thirteen daughters of Dakshas, who correspond to the thirteen months of the lunar year (Dakshagâ is the name of a lunar asterism and of the wife of a phallical Çivas, and dakshagâpatis one of the Hindoo names given to the moon; Dakshas is also identified with Pragâpatis; whence Kaçyapas must have united himself, probably as the phallical moon, with his own daughters, or with his thirteen lunations). Of the thirteen wives made fruitful by Kaçyapas, everything that lives was born,--gods, demons, men, and beasts,--so that in the cosmogony of the mandaras, of the Kaçapas, and hence of the tortoise, the mandaras, when shaken, produced the phallical ambrosia, of which all animated things were spontaneously generated.

But the tortoise, taken in connection with the moon, sometimes also had a funereal signification. The souls of the dead go into the world of the moon, into the sky of night, and the souls of the living descend from the world of the moon, that is, from the night; Çivas, the god of Paradise, becomes the destroying god; Plutus and Pluto are identified. Thus, in a note of Professor Haugh to the _Âitareya Br._, I think I can recognise the tortoise, as representing in particular the dying moon, the burnt-up moon, which has the fire of spring for its tomb, round whose corpse the moon also moves in the here equivalent form of a frog (being _haris_, which means both yellow and green), and who is herself afterwards turned out. We know how Haris or Vishnus now represents the sun and now the moon (the sun and the moon, as Indras and Somas, were called together rakshohanâu or monster-killers), is identified now with the tortoise, now with the bird garudas, the enemy of the tortoise. Here is, however, the note of Professor Haugh: "At each Atirâtra of the Gavâm ayanam the so-called Chayana ceremony takes place. This consists in the construction of the Uttarâ Vedi (the northern altar) in the shape of an eagle. About 1440 bricks are required for this structure, each being consecrated with a separate Yagusmantra. This altar represents the universe. A tortoise is buried alive in it, and a living frog carried round it and afterwards turned out." According to Pliny, the blood of a tortoise is an antidote to the venom of a toad (in the same way as the hare and a stag's horn is also recommended as of similar efficacy on the old principle of _similia_ _similibus_; the hare is the moon, the stag's horn the moon's horn; the blood of the killed tortoise would appear to represent the moon itself as in a manner chasing the gloom of night away). The tortoise is also found in connection with frogs in a fable of Abstemius; the tortoise envies the frogs, who can move rapidly, but ceases to complain when it sees them become the prey of the eel.

One of the ten stars of the constellation of the tortoise, situated in the northern heavens--that is, in the cloudy and gloomy autumnal sky, and therefore especially ruled by the moon--was called the lyre by the Greeks, and it was fabled that the tortoise of which Hermês had made the lyre, had been transfigured into it. I may remark here that the German name for the tortoise is Schild-kröte (toad with shields), that the Koribantes[509] produced their noisy music, and accompanied their Pyrrhic dances with kettledrums and the sound of arms, and that the Kureti, in order to conceal from Kronos the birth of Zeus, struck their shields with their lances. It is interesting to observe, that in Sanskrit also, kacchâs is the name given to the little shields of the tortoise or kacchapas; that kacchapî is the term applied to the noise of the thundering Sarasvatî, or the thunder; that several Vedic poets are called Kaçyapas; that Kûrmas (another designation of the tortoise) is also the name of the Vedic poet, the son of Gritsamadas, and also an epithet applied to the _flatus ventris_, which is compared to a clap of thunder (Cfr. the roots _kar_, _kur_, _gar_, _gur_). In the chapter on the ass, we saw this _flatus_ compared to the noise of a trumpet or a kettle-drum; here we have the thunderbolts that strike upon the shields, the spots of the celestial tortoise, of the rainy moon, upon the clouds, attracted by or formed from the moon's spots, that is, which produce the thunder. According to the Hellenic myth, the tortoise obtained from Zeus himself--that is, from the pluvial god, from the god of the clouds, the god in connection with the shield-clouds which concealed his birth, and we may add, from the god tortoise,--the power of concealing itself under shields, and of carrying its house along with it. The Romans were accustomed to bathe new-born babes in the concavity of a tortoise, as if in a shield. It was predicted that Clodius Albinus would one day attain to sovereign power, because, when he was born, an enormous tortoise was brought to his father by some fishermen. The tortoise protects Zeus, the new-born warrior-god; the tortoise, on account of its shields, makes the new-born child a warrior, and predicts dominion to him; my well-informed readers will remember how a shield, fallen from the sky, presaged to the Romans the glories they should achieve as a warlike people, according to Ovid's verses--

"... Totum jam sol emerserat orbem: Et gravis ætherio venit ab axe fragor. Ter tonuit sine nube Deus, tria fulgura misit. Credite dicenti: mira sed acta loquor. A media coelum regione dehiscere coepit: Submisere oculos cum duce turba suo. Ecce levi scutum versatum leniter aura Decidit: a populo clamor ad astra venit."

Under this aspect the tortoise becomes the dark moon, in opposition to the luminous one, the slow moon, in opposition to the jumping one. Being slow or tardigrade, in the myths the tortoise is the moon, but the winter one; and sometimes it becomes also now the cloud, now the earth, now even the darkness (as such it appears demoniacal in a German legend, where two devils who have assumed the forms of monstrous tortoises, prevent the foundations of the cathedral church of Merseburg from being laid; the tortoises are exorcised, and their bodies slain, in memory of which circumstance it is said that the cups of these tortoises are preserved, hung up in the church; in the fourteenth fargard of the _Vendidad_, too, the tortoises are, as demoniacal, to be killed). We have seen in the first chapter of the first book, the hare-moon passed over and crushed by the cow's waggon, suggesting to us the cloud (as the moon, now a bridge, now an island of the sky, as sea), which passes over the moon, but he perhaps, again, of the eclipse of the moon by the means of the earth, which is also called a cow in Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, the earth, which comes out of waters--an island[510] (as the moon and the cloud)--is also called by the name of kûrmas, _i.e._, a tortoise (properly the curved, the humped, the eminent, the prominent; mantharas is a name given to the tortoise, and Mantharâ is the name of the humpbacked woman who causes the ruin of Râmas in the _Râmâyanam_). Hence we also have in the West, besides the fables of the leaping hare (the moon) and the cow, of the leaping locust (the moon) and the ant, the apologue of the hare and the tortoise who run together; the hare, relying on its swiftness, falls asleep and loses, while the tortoise by steady perseverance wins the race.

We have already seen the tortoise in the Hindoo legends as the rival of the eagle or the Vishnuitic bird Garudas. The two are now identified and now fight against each other (we must remember that it was by the advice of Kaçyapas that the bird Garudas ravished the ambrosia from the serpents). In Greece, the proverb of the tortoise which vanquishes the eagle, was already diffused; now it is the eagle which carries the tortoise into the air, or rather makes it fly, now it is, on the other hand, the tortoise which defies the eagle to arrive first. It is interesting to compare with this the Siamese apologue published by A. Bastian in the _Orient und Occident_, of evidently Hindoo origin. The bird Khruth, no doubt a limited and particular form of Garudas, wishes to eat a tortoise (here perhaps the moon) which lies upon the shore of a lake. The tortoise consents to be eaten, under the condition that the Khruth accepts a challenge to a trial of speed, and arrives soonest on the other side of the lake, the bird to go through the air, and the tortoise through the water. The bird Khruth accepts the wager; then the tortoise calls together millions and millions of tortoises, and places them all in such a way that they surround the lake, each distant a few steps from the water. Then it gives the signal to the bird to commence the race. The Khruth rises into the air, and flees to the opposite bank; wherever he essays to alight, he finds the tortoise has been there before him. (This myth represents, perhaps, the relation of the sun to the lunations).

FOOTNOTES:

[506] Cfr. the Sanskrit roots, _kar_, _kur_, _gur_, _gûr_.

[507] i. 1353-1456.

[508] Savitâ vâi prasavânâmiço.--_Âit. Br._ The story of Cunahçepas; he appears evidently as a form of Pragâpatis.

[509] The Koribantes remind us of the Salii of the Latins, to whom Numa gives the arms and the words, to be sung leaping. According to Ovid's distich--

"Jam dederat Salii (a saltu nomina ducunt) Armaque et ad certos verba canenda modos." --_Fasti_, iii. 389.

[510] It is interesting in this connection to find in the translation of Lane a passage from the _Agáïb-el-Makhlookát_ (_Marvels of Creation_), a work of the thirteenth century: "The tortoise is a sea and land animal. As to the sea tortoise it is very enormous, so that the people of the ship imagine it to be an island. One of the merchants relates as follows regarding it: 'We found in the sea an island elevated above the water, having upon it green plants, and we went forth to it, and dug [holes for fire] to cook; whereupon the island moved, and the sailors said, "Come ye to your place, for it is a tortoise, and the heat of the fire hath hurt it, lest it carry you away." By reason of the enormity of its body,' said he [_i.e._, the narrator above mentioned], 'it was as though it were an island, and earth collected upon its back in the length of time, so that it became like land, and produced plants.'" Evidently here the tortoise occupies the same place as, in popular tradition, the lunar whale recorded by us in the chapter on the Fishes. Cfr. Lane, _The Thousand and One Nights_, London, 1841, vol. iii. chap. xx. n. 1 and 8, p. 80 _seq._--Grein, _Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie_, Göttingen, 1857, 1, 235, the Celtic legend of St Brandan and the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_.