"Matre satus Terra, monstrum mirabile, taurus
Parte sui serpens posteriore fuit.
Hunc triplici muro lucis incluserat atris
Parcarum monitu Styx violenta trium.
Viscera qui tauri flammis adolenda dedisset,
Sors erat, æternos vincere posse Deos.
Immolat hunc Briareus factu ex adamante securi;
Et jam jam flammis exta daturus erat.
Jupiter alitibus rapere imperat. Attulit illi
Milvus; et meritis venit in astra suis."
We shall return to this myth in the following chapters. The monster is killed only when his heart, which he keeps shut up, is taken away. Sometimes he does not keep it shut up in his own body, but in a duck (the aurora), which comes out of a hare (the moon sacrificed in the morning).[499] When this duck is opened, a golden egg (the sun) is found. When the egg is thrown on the ground, or at the monster's head, the monster dies. The golden duck, whence the monster's heart, the sun, comes forth, is the same as the cow which gives birth to the lamb (the night gives birth to the aurora, and the aurora to the solar lamb). The historian Flavius cites, among the prodigies which preceded the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, a miracle of this kind, which took place in the middle of the temple itself, in the case of a cow led thither to be sacrificed. It occurs still every morning in the mythical heavens, and was a phenomenon familiar to human observation in the remotest antiquity, when it became a proverb; but, as often happened, the proverb which affirmed an evident myth, when its sense was lost, was adopted to indicate an impossibility; wherefore we read in the second satire (cxxii.) of Juvenal:—
"Scilicet horreres maioraque monstra putares,
Si mulier vitulum, vel si bos ederet agnum?"
In Greek and Latin authors[500] we find frequent examples of the sacrifice of a bull a short time before the death of the hero by whom it was ordered, in which it was noticed as a very sinister omen that the entrails were missing, and particularly the heart or the liver. Having observed that the monster's heart is the solar hero, or the sun itself, we can easily understand how, in the sacrifice of a bull, this heart must be wanting when the hero approaches his end. In the mythical bull sacrificed at evening, the hero's heart is not to be found; the monster has eaten his intestines, of which, according to the legend, he is particularly greedy.
But the bull does not always let himself be sacrificed patiently; he often flees in order not to be killed. We have seen in the Russian stories how the bull, which his owner intends to sacrifice, flees into the forest, with the lamb (the bull and the lamb are two equivalent forms of the morning and evening solar hero) and the other domestic animals. The proverb of Theokritos, "Even the bull goes into the forest,"[501] can have no other origin than in the two analogous myths of the moon which wanders through the forest of night, and of the sun who hides himself in the same forest, when he sees the preparations made for the sacrifice; the sun in the night becomes the moon.
I have said that the bull, when sacrificed, often, on account of his being devoid of intestines, forebodes unlucky occurrences to the hero; the solar bull of the evening is without strength, he has no heroic entrails. But after he has been to pasture freely in the forest, after having exercised his powers in battle with the wolves of night, after having, by his bellowing (in the darkness, in the thundering cloud), filled all the animals with terror, the bull is found again and led towards his dwelling of the morning, full of light, like a sacrificed hero; heroic entrails are found in him; from the black bull who is sacrificed towards morning, from the forest, from the bull of night, come forth the heart, the liver, the life and strength, the sun, the hero-sun; and the human hero, observing his sacrifice, considers it a good omen. We can thus understand the narrative of Ammianus Marcellinus: "Decimus (taurus) diffractis vinculis, lapsus ægre reductus est, et mactatus ominosa signa monstravit."[502] Whilst he is hidden in the forest, the solar bull is black, but often (i.e., in all the nights illumined by the moon), giving up his place to the moon, he appears in the form of a white bull or cow, who guides the hero lost in the darkness. Thoas is called the king of the Tauroi (or bulls) in the Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, because he has wings on his feet. The cow Iô flees without stopping in the Prometheus of Æschylos. Euripides[503] says that she gave birth to the king of the Kadmœans. Here, therefore, we find once more the intimate relation between Iô and Eurôpê, the sister of Kadmos, which I noticed above. Kadmos, the brother of Eurôpê, unites himself with Iô. But Iô is a cow, and we find a cow, a travelling cow, marked with a white spot in the shape of a full moon (the moon itself, or Iô), in the legend of Kadmos in Bœotia, according to Pausanias,[504] and to Ovid,[505] who sings—
"Bos tibi, Phœbus ait, solis occurret in arvis,[506]
Nullum passa jugum, curvique immunis aratri.
Hac duce carpe vias, et, qua requieverit herba,
Mœnia fac condas: Bœotia ilia vocato.
Vix bene Castalio Cadmus descenderat antro:
Incustoditam lente videt ire juvencam,
Nullum servitii signum cervice gerentem.
Subsequitur, pressoque legit vestigia gressu;
Auctoremque viæ Phœbum taciturnus adorat.
Jam vada Cephisi, Panopesque evaserat arva;
Bos stetit; et, tollens spatiosam cornibus altis
Ad cœlum frontem, mugitibus impulit auras.
Atque ita, respiciens comites sua terga sequentes,
Procubuit, teneraque latus submisit in herba."
This is the good fairy, or good old man, who shows the way to the heroes in popular tales; it is the cow which succours the maiden persecuted by her step-mother, the puppet which spins, sews, and weaves for the maiden aurora. For just as we have seen that the wooden girl is the aurora herself, which at morn comes out of, and at even re-enters, the forest of night,[507] as is clearly shown by the myths of Urvaçî and of Daphne, so in like manner the moon comes out of and re-enters the nocturnal forest, transforming herself from a tree to a cow, and from a cow to a tree, wooden girl, or puppet. Some myths relating to the aurora are also applicable to the moon, on account of the resemblance of the phenomena (the lunar and solar bulls also are interchangeable), as they both come out of the nocturnal gloom, both drop dewy humours, and both run after the sun, of which the aurora is the deliverer in the morning, and the moon the protectress, guide, hostess, and good advising fairy, who teaches him the secret by which to avoid the ambuscades of the monster. Hêraklês passes the sea upon the neck of the cow-moon; but instead of the cow, we also find in the mythical sky of Hêraklês the golden cup, which is the same thing. From the cow-moon comes forth the horn of abundance; from the cornucopia to the cup the passage is easy. It is said that Hêraklês, approaching the oxen of Geryon, the West, felt himself burned by the sun's rays, and shot arrows at him (in the same way as Indras in the Ṛigvedas breaks a wheel of the car of Sûryas, the sun). The sun admires the courage and strength of the hero, and lends him his golden cup, upon which Hêraklês passes the sea. This being accomplished, Hêraklês restores the cup to the sun, and finds the oxen.
The bull which carries the hero and heroine, in the Russian story, arises again in another form, if its essential part (now the intestines, now the bones, now the ashes) is preserved. The cow which helps the maiden becomes, as we have already seen, an apple-tree, and helps her again in this form. We find the same myth transformed in Greece. In Cœlius, quoted by Aldrovandi,[508] we read, "Cum rustici quidam Herculi Alexicaco bovem essent immolaturi, isque rupto fune profugisset (the bull destined to the sacrifice repairs to the forest of night), nec esset quod sacrificaretur, malum arreptum suppositis quatuor ramis crurum vice, deinde additis alteris duobus ceu cornuum loco, bovem utcumque fuisse imitatos, idque ridiculum simulacrum pro victima sacrificasse Herculi." This account is confirmed by the facts recorded by Julius Pollux,[509] that the apple-tree was sacrificed to Hêraklês. The moon, on account of its circular form, assumed, besides the figure of a pea, a pumpkin and a cabbage, also that of a golden apple. As it contains honey, the sweet apple represents well the ambrosial moon. Moreover, in the same way as we have seen the pea which fell on the ground become a tree, and rise to heaven, so the apple became an apple-tree, the tree of golden apples found in the Western garden of the Hesperides.
The moon, besides the form of a horned cow, also assumed, in the popular Âryan belief, that of a tart, of a cake, either on account of its circular shape, or of the ambrosial honey supposed to be contained by the moon, because of the dew or rain which it spreads on the ground. The cake has in Slavonic tradition the same importance as the pea, kidney-bean, or cabbage. The bull or cow of the fool, bartered for a pea, is perhaps the same as the sun or aurora of evening, bartered during the night for the moon, or else meeting the moon. The funereal pea or kidney-bean, the vegetable which serves as provision for the journey in the kingdom of the dead, and which brings the hero riches, is perhaps only the moon, which the solar hero finds on the way during the night, and which he receives in exchange for his cow's hide. When the hero possesses this pea, he is assured of every kind of good fortune, and can enter or ascend into the luminous sky, as well as come out of the gloomy hell, into which the monster has drawn him. A similar virtue is attributed to the cake, which we find in Indo-European funeral customs instead of the vegetable of the dead.