SECTION II.
The Worship of the Bull and of the Cow in India, and the Brâhmanic Legends relating to it.
SUMMARY.
The princes called bulls.—The bull the symbol of the god Çivas.—The cow was not to be killed.—Exchange of the bull and the cow for other animals; the bull and the cow, considered as the greatest reward desired by the legislating priests of India.—The cow's hide in nuptial usages a symbol of abundance; its elasticity and power of extension; the cow and its hide during the pregnancy of women an augury of happy birth, and in funeral ceremonies an augury of resurrection.—Cows sent to pasture with auguries.—Cows seen by night in a dream are a sinister omen; meaning of this Hindoo superstition.—The black cow which produces white milk in the Vedic hymns.—The reins of the cow or black goat sacrificed in funerals given as a viaticum or provision to the dead man, that they may contribute to his resurrection.—The variegated cow comes again in a brâhmaṇam, and is interpreted as a cloud.—The coming out of the cow-dawns feasted.—The cornucopia.—The milk of the cows is the serpent's poison.—The salutary herb.—The enchanted gem, the ring of recognition.—The moon, as a female, a good fairy who works for the aurora, and who entertains and guides the hero.—The moon, as a male, a white bull.—The city of the moon.—Indras consoles and nourishes the unhappy Sîtâ.—Râmas assimilated to Indras.—The coadjutors of Râmas are those of Indras.—The bull Râmas.—The names of the monsters and the names of the heroes in the Râmâyaṇam.—Râmas, the Hindoo Xerxes, chastises the sea.—The celestial ocean; the cloud-mountains carried by the heroes; the bridge across the sea made of these mountains; while the bridge is being made, it rains.—The battle of Râmas is a winter and a nocturnal one, in a cloudy sky.—The monster barrel again; the monster trunk with a cavity; Kabandhas.—The dying monster thanks the hero, who delivers him from an ancient malediction, and becomes again a handsome luminous youth.—The dawn Sîtâ sacrificed in the fire.—Sîtâ daughter of the sun.—The Buddhist legend of Râmas and Sîtâ.—Sîtâ predestined as the reward of valour.—An indiscretion of the husband Râmas causes him to lose his wife Sîtâ.—The story of Urvaçî again, the first of the auroras; the wife flees because her husband has revealed her secret, because her husband has looked at another woman, because he has let himself be seen naked; the fugitive wife hides herself in a plant.—The wife stays with her husband as long as he says nothing displeasing to her.—The wife kills her sons; the husband complains and the wife flees.—The contrary.—The story of Çunaḥçepas again.—The god Varuṇas, who binds; the son sacrificed to the monster against his will by his father.—The hero-hunter.—The middle son sold, the son of the cow.—The cow herself, Aditi, or Çabalâ, or Kâmadhuk, wife of Vasishṭas, sacrificed instead of the son of Viçvâmitras.—Indras delivers the bound hero, i.e., he delivers himself. The aurora, or the daughter of the black one, liberates Çunaḥçepas, bound by the black one, that is, she delivers the sun her husband.—The fetters of Varuṇas and of Aǵigartas are equivalent to the bridle of the horse and to the collar of the dog sold to the demon in European fairy tales.—The golden palace of Varuṇas on the western mountain.—Monstrous fathers.—Identification of Hariçćandras, Aǵigartas, and Viçvâmitras.—The contention of Viçvâmitras and Vasishṭas for the possession of the cow Çabalâ.—Demoniacal character of Viçvâmitras.—The sister of the monster-lover or seducer of the hero.—The cloud drum.—The cloudy monster Dundubhis, in the form of a buffalo with sharpened horns, destroyed by the son of Indras.—The buffalo a monster, the bull a hero.—Kṛishṇas the monster becomes a god.—The god Indras fallen for having killed a brâhman monster.—The three heads of the monster cut off at a blow.—The three brothers in the palace of Lañkâ; the eldest brother has the royal dignity; the second, the strong one, sleeps, and only wakens to eat and prove his strength; the third is good and is victorious.—The three brothers Pâṇdavas, sons of Yamas, Vâyus and Indras in the Mahâbhâratam; the first is wise, the second is strong, the third is handsome and victorious; he is the best.—Again the three working brothers entertained by a king.—The three disciples of Dhâumyas.—The blind one who falls into the well.—The voyage of Utañkas to hell.—He meets a bull.—The excrement of the bull, ambrosia.—The stone uplifted with the help of the lever, of the thunderbolt of Indras.—The earrings of the queen carried off; their mythical meaning.—Indras and Kṛishṇas also search for the earrings.—The three Buddhist brothers.—The eldest brother frees the younger ones by his knowledge in questions and riddles.—The hero and the monster ill or vulnerable in their feet.—The two rival sisters.—The good sister thrown into the well by the wicked one.—The prince comes to deliver her.—The wicked sister takes the place of the good one.—The three brothers again.—The sons make their father and mother recognise each other.—The third brother, Pûrus, the only good one, assists his aged father Yayâtis, by taking his old age upon himself.—The old blind man, Dîrghatamas, thrown into the water by his sons.—Yayâtis and Dîrghatamas, Hindoo King Lears.—The queen Sudeshnâ makes her maid or foster-sister take her place; a Hindoo form of Queen Berta.—The blind and the crooked or lame, or hunchbacked, again with the three-breasted princess.—They cure each other.—The bride disputed by the brothers.—The aurora and the sun flee from each other.—The beautiful girl, the daughter of the sun, flees after having seen the prince upon the mountain.—The prince cannot overtake her; the third time, at last, the prince marries the daughter of the sun.—The marvellous cow of Vasishṭhas.—The hero Vasishṭhas wishes to kill himself, but cannot; he is immortal; he throws himself down from the mountain and does not hurt himself; he goes through fire and is not burnt; he throws himself into the water and does not drown; mythical signification of these prodigies.—The wind runs after women.—Conclusion of the study of the myth and of the legends which refer to the bull and the cow of India.
Just as the importance of the cattle to primitive and pastoral Aryan life explains the propensity of the Aryan mind to conceive of the mobile phenomena of the heavens, at first considered living beings, as bulls and cows, so the consecration of these animals, associated and identified with the celestial phenomena and the gods, naturally gave rise to the superstitious worship of the bull and the cow, common to all the Aryan nations, but particularly, through the intervention of the brâhmanic priests, to the Hindoos.
It is a remarkable fact that the words vṛishas, vṛishabhas, and ṛishabhas, which mean the bull as the one who pours out, the fœcundator, is often used in Sanscrit to denote the best, the first, the prince; and hence the bull, that is to say, the best fœcundator, is in India the most sacred symbol of royalty. For this reason the phallic and destroying god, the royal Çivas, who inhabits Gokarṇas (a word which properly means cow's ear), has both for his steed and his emblem a brâhmanic bull, i.e., a bull with a hunch on its back; the nandin, or joyful attribute, being given to Çivas himself, inasmuch as, being the Deus phallicus, he is the god of joyfulness and beatitude.[132]
Still more honour is paid to the cow (like the Vedic dawn anavadyâ, innocent or inculpable[133]), which therefore it was a crime to kill.[134] An interesting chapter of the Âitareya-brâhmaṇam,[135] on the sacrifice of animals, shows us how, next to man, the horse was the supreme sacrifice offered to the gods; how the cow afterwards took the place of the horse; the sheep, of the cow; the goat, of the sheep; and, at last, vegetable products were substituted for animals;—a substitution or cheating of the gods in the sacrifice, which, perhaps, serves to explain even more the fraud of which, in popular stories, the simpleton is always the victim; the simpleton here being the god himself, and the cheater man, who changes, under a sacred pretext, the noblest and most valued animals for common and less valuable ones, and finally for vegetables apparently of no value whatever. In the Hindoo codes of law we have the same fraudulent substitution of animals under a legal pretext. "The killer of a cow," says the code attributed to Yâǵńavalkyas,[136] "must stay a month in penitence, drinking the pańćagavyam (i.e., the five good productions of the cow, which, according to Manus,[137] are milk, curds, butter, urine, and dung), sleeping in a stable and following the cows; and he must purify himself by the gift of another cow." Thus, according to Yâǵńavalkya,[138] the killer of a parrot is purified by giving a two-year-old calf; the killer of a crane by giving a calf three years old; the killer of an ass, a goat, or a sheep, by the gift of a bull; the killer of an elephant by the gift of five black bulls (nîlavṛishâp). And one need not be astonished to find these contracts (which remind one of that between Jacob and Laban) in the Hindoo codes of law, when, in the Vedic hymns themselves, a poet offers to sell to whoever will buy it, an Indras of his, that is to say, a bull, for ten cows.[139] Another interesting verse of Yâǵńavalkyas[140] tells us they die pure who are killed by lightning or in battle for the sake of the cows or the brâhmans. The cow was often the object heroes fought for in heaven; the Brâhman wished to be the object heroes should fight for upon earth. We learn from the domestic ceremonies referred to by Gṛihyasûtrâni with how much respect the bull and the cow were treated as the symbols of abundance in a family. In Âçvalâyanas,[141] we find the bull's hide stretched out near the nuptial hearth, the wife seated upon it, and the husband, touching his wife, saying, "May the lord of all creatures allow us to have children;"—words taken from the Vedic nuptial hymn.[142] We have seen above how the Ṛibhavas, from the hide of a dead cow, formed a new and beautiful one, or, in other words, how, from the dusk of evening, by stretching it in the night, they formed the dawn of morning. This cow's hide plays also an important rôle in the popular faith; an extraordinary elasticity is attributed to it, a power of endless expansibility, and for this reason it is adopted as a symbol of fecundity, upon which the wife must place herself in order to become a mother of children. The cow's hide (goćarman), in the Mahâbhâratam,[143] is the garment of the god Vishṇus; and the goćarman divided into thongs, and afterwards fastened to each other, served formerly in India to measure the circumference of a piece of ground;[144] hence the cow's hide suggested the idea of a species of infinity. Further on we shall find it put to extraordinary uses in western legend; we find it even in the hymns of the Vedic age used to cover the body of a dead man, the fire being invoked not to consume it, almost as if the cow's hide had the virtue of resuscitating the dead.[145] The cow, being the symbol of fruitfulness, was also the companion of the wife during pregnancy. Âçvalâyaṇas[146] tells us how, in the third month, the husband was to give his wife to drink of the sour milk of a cow that has a calf like itself, and in it two beans and a grain of barley; the husband was then to ask his wife three times, "What drinkest thou?" and she was to answer three times: "The generation of males." In the fourth month, the wife, according to Âçvalâyaṇas, was to put herself again upon the bull's hide, near the fire of sacrifice, when they again invoked the god Praǵâpatis, lord of all creatures, or of procreation; the moon, like a celestial bull and cow, was invited to be present at the generation of men;[147] and a bull, during the Vedic period, was the gift which sufficed for the priest. In the Vedic antiquity, neither bulls nor cows were allowed to go to pasture without some special augury, which, in the domestic ceremonials of Âçvalâyaṇas,[148] has been also handed down to us; the cows were to give milk and honey, for the strength and increase of whoever possessed them. Here we have again the cows not only as the beneficent, but as the strong ones, they who help the hero or the heroine who takes them to pasture.
But although beautiful cows, when seen by day, are a sign of good luck, seen in dreams they are of evil omen; for in that case they are of course the black cows, the shadows of night, or the gloomy waters of the nocturnal ocean. Already in the Ṛigvedas, the dawn, or the luminous cow, comes to deliver the fore-mentioned solar hero, Tritas Aptyas, from the evil sleep which he sleeps amidst the cows[149] of night. Âçvalâyaṇas, in his turn, recommends us when we have an evil dream, to invoke the sun, to hasten the approach of the morning, or, better still, to recite the hymn of five verses to the dawn which we have already referred to, and which begins with the words, "And like an evil dream amidst the cows." Here the belief is not yet an entirely superstitious one; and we understand what is meant by the cows who envelop us in the sleep of night, when we are told to invoke the sun and the dawn to come and deliver us from them.
A cow (probably a black one), often a black goat, was sometimes also sacrificed in the funeral ceremonies of the Hindoos, as if to augur that, just as the black cow, night, produces the milky humours of the aurora, or is fruitful, so will he who has passed through the kingdom of darkness rise again in the world of light. We have already seen the black night as the mother of the white and luminous aurora; I quote below yet another Vedic sentence, in which a poet ingenuously wonders why the cows of Indras, the black ones as well as the light-coloured (the black clouds, as well as the white and red ones), should both yield white milk.[150] And even the gloomy nocturnal kingdom of Yamas, the god of the dead, has its cows of black appearance, which are nevertheless milk-yielding; and thus the black cow of the funeral sacrifices comes to forebode resurrection. In the same way the viaticum, or provision of food for his journey, given to the dead man is a symbol of his resurrection. The journey being considered as a short one, the provision of food which is to sustain the traveller to the kingdom of the dead is limited, and each dead hero carries it with him, generally not so much for himself, as to ensure a passage into the kingdom of the dead. For this reason we read, even in the domestic ceremonials of Âçvalâyaṇas, that it is recommended to put into the hands of the dead man,[151] what is the greatest symbol of strength, the reins of the animal killed in the funeral sacrifice (or, in default of an animal victim, at least two cakes of rice or of flour), in order that the dead man may throw them down the throats of the two Cerberi, the two sons of the bitch Saramâ, so that they may let the deceased enter scatheless into the death-kingdom, the mysterious kingdom of Yamas; and here we find the monster of the popular tales, into whose house the hero, having passed through many dangers, enters, by the advice of a good fairy or of a good old man, giving something to appease the hunger of the two dogs who guard its gate.