The lamb, the he-goat, and the sheep are favourite forms of the witch. In the European story, when the beautiful princess, in the absence of the prince, her husband, gives birth to two beautiful sons, the witch induces the absent prince to believe that, instead of real sons, his young wife has given birth to pups. In the seventh story of the third book of Afanassieff, the young queen gives birth, during the king's absence, to two sons, of whom one has the moon on his forehead, and the other a star on the nape of his neck (the Açvinâu). The wicked sister of the young queen buries the children. Where they were buried a golden sprout and a silver one spring up. A sheep feeds upon these plants, and gives birth to two lambs, having, the one the moon on its head, the other a star on its neck. The wicked sister, who has meanwhile been married to the king, orders them to be torn in pieces, and their intestines to be thrown out into the road. The good lawful queen has them cooked, eats them, and again gives birth to her two sons, who grow up hardy and strong, and who, when interrogated by the king, narrate to him the story of their origin; their mother is recognised, and becomes once more the king's wife; the wicked sister is put to death.[766]
The witch is sometimes herself (as a wolf-cloud or wolf-darkness) a devourer of young luminous kids or lambs, such as the Schmierbock in the Norwegian story. The witch carries Schmierbock three times away in a sack; the first and second time Schmierbock escapes by making a hole in the sack; but the third time the witch succeeds in carrying him to her house, where she prepares to eat him. The cunning Schmierbock, however, smuggles the witch's own daughter into his place, and, climbing up, conceals himself in the chimney (a variation of the stove, the place where the young Russian hero usually hides himself, in the same way as in the Tuscan story the foolish Pimpi conceals himself in the oven). From this post of security he laughs at the witch, who endeavours to recapture him; he throws a stone down the chimney and kills her, upon which he descends, rifles her treasure-stores, and carries off all her gold. Here the young hero is called a he-goat; in the chapter on the wolf, we shall find the witch of the Norwegian story actually bears the name of wolf. These two data complete the myth; the wolf which wishes to devour the little hero, and the witch who endeavours to eat the little lamb, are completed by the fable which represents the wolf as, at the rivulet, eating the lamb, which, in the mythical heavens, means the cloudy and gloomy monster which devours the sun.
We have seen above the witch who imitates the voice of the mother of the little hero, in order to be able to eat him, and the wolf who mimics the voice of the goat and eats the kids; but the wolf does more than assume the goat's voice; he sometimes even takes her form.
In the Râmâyaṇam,[767] Aǵamukhî, or goat's face, is called a witch, who wishes Sîtâ to be torn to pieces. In the legend of Ilvalas and Vâtâpis,[768] the two wizard brothers who conspire to harm the Brâhmaṇâs, Vâtâpis transforms himself into a wether, and lets himself be sacrificed in the funeral rites by the Brâhmaṇâs. The unsuspecting Brâhmaṇâs eat its flesh; then Ilvalas cries out to his brother, "Come forth, O Vâtâpis!" and his brother, Vâtâpis, comes out of the bodies of the Brâhmaṇâs, lacerating them, until the ṛishis Agastyas eats of himself the whole of Vâtâpis, and burns Ilvalas to ashes. The Râmâyaṇam itself explains to us why, in these sacrifices, a wether, and not a ram, is spoken of,[769] when it narrates the legend of Ahalyâ. It is said in this passage that the god Indras was one day condemned to lose his testicles by the malediction of the ṛishis Gâutamas, with whose wife, Ahalyâ, he had committed adultery. The gods, moved to pity, took the testicles of a ram and gave them to Indras, who was therefore called Meshâṇḍas; on this account, says the Râmâyaṇam, the Pitaras feed on wethers, and not on rams, in funeral oblations. This legend is evidently of brâhmanic origin. The Brâhmaṇâs, being interested in discrediting the god of the warriors, Indras, and finding him called in the Vedâs by the name of Meshas or ram, invented the story of the ram's testicles, in the same way as, finding Indras in the Vedâs called by the name of Sahasrâkshas (i.e., he of the thousand eyes), they malignantly connected this appellation with the same scandalous story of the seduction of Ahalyâ, and degraded the honourable epithet into an infamous one, he of the thousand wombs, probably by the confusion arising out of the equivoque between the words sahasradhâras, the sun (as carrying, now a thousand stars, now a thousand rays), or sahasrânçus, and sahasradâras, which has a very different meaning.
In the important 116th hymn of the first book of the Ṛigvedas, Ṛiǵrâçvas (i.e., the red horse, or the hero of the red horse) eats a hundred rams belonging to the she-wolf (in the following hymn, a hundred and one); his father blinds him on this account; the two marvellous physicians, the Açvinâu, give him back his two eyes.[770] Evidently the father of the solar hero is here the gloomy monster of night himself; the sun, at evening, becomes the devourer of the rams who come out of the she-wolf, or who belong to the she-wolf; it is for this reason that the monster wolf blinds him when evening comes. The red horse Ṛiǵrâçvas, or the hero of the red horse, who eats the rams of the she-wolf, affords a further key to enable us to understand the expiatory goat, which in the Ṛigvedas itself is sacrificed instead of the horse. We are told in a hymn, that in the sacrifice of the horse the omniform he-goat (aǵo viçvarûpaḥ) has preceded the horse;[771] and the Âitareya Br., commenting on this exchange of animals, also speaks of the he-goat as the last animal destined for the sacrifice. In the Russian stories, too, the goat has to pay the price of the follies or rogueries done by the man, and is sacrificed.[772] This sacrificed he-goat appears to be the same as the ass which undergoes punishment for all the animals in the celebrated fable of Lafontaine (which becomes a bull in the hands of the Russian fabulist Kriloff, who could not introduce the ass, an animal almost unknown in Russia); and we already know that the ass represents the sun in the cloud or the sun in the darkness; and we have also said that the ass and the fool die together in the legend. The she-goat dies in the Russian story to deliver the fool, who, after her death, is a fool no longer, his folly having died with her.[773] The popular story offers us another proof of the identity of the mythical ass and the mythical goat. We have also seen above, in the Norwegian story, how the witch possesses a treasure which is carried off by the Schmierbock, who kills her; the magician, or the devil, is always rich. The ass which the devil gives to Little Johnny throws gold from its tail; the ass personifies the devil. But the devil, as we have observed, also has a predilection to embody himself in a ram, a lamb, or a he-goat. I remember the puppets who every day improvised popular representations in the little wooden theatre on the Piazza Castello, at Turin, when I was a boy; the final doom of the personage who represented the tyrant was generally to die under the bastinadoes of Arlecchino, or to be carried to hell by the devil in the form of a bleating lamb, which came upon the scene expressly to carry him away with him, this disappearance being accompanied by much throbbing of the spectators' hearts, to whom the manager preached a salutary sermon.[774] In the twenty-first of the Tuscan stories published by me, it is not the devil, but the little old man, Gesù, who gives to the third brother, instead of the usual ass, a putrid sheep, which, however, has the virtue of throwing louis-d'or behind it. This putrid, or wet, or damp sheep represents still better the damp night.
Ṛiǵrâçvas, as we have said, eats the ram and becomes blind, his father having blinded him to avenge the she-wolf to whom the rams belonged; but the mother of the rams being the sheep, it is probable that the she-wolf who possessed the rams had assumed the form of a putrid sheep, in the same way as we have seen her above transformed into a she-goat; the father of Ṛiǵrâçvas, who avenges the she-wolf on account of the hundred rams, may perhaps himself have been a horned wolf transformed into a he-goat, and have blinded Ṛiǵrâçvas with his horns. In the popular story, the she-goat, when she is in the forest, takes a special pleasure in wounding people's eyes with her horns; hence is probably derived the name of the reptile aǵakâvas, conjured with in the Ṛigvedas,[775] as durdṛiçikas, or making to see badly, damaging the eyesight, and the name of aǵakâ, given to an illness in the eyes by the Hindoo physician Suçrutas. However, we must not forget the connection between the idea of skin and that of goat, by which the aǵakâ might mean simply the thin membrane that sometimes harms the pupil of the eye, and produces blindness. This thin membrane, stretched over the eye of the solar hero, blinds him. We shall see in the chapter on the frog and the toad, which very often represent, in the myths, the cloud and the damp night, that the toad[776] causes blindness only by means of the venom which it is fabled to exude, like the reptile aǵakâvas.
But, as the hero in hell learns and sees everything, the goat, which deprives others of sight, has itself the property of seeing everything; this is the case, because the goat, being the sun enclosed in the cloud or gloomy night, sees the secrets of hell, and also because, being the horned moon or starry sky, it is the spy of the heavens. We have already observed in the first chapter how the marvellous girl of seven years of age, to answer the acted riddle proposed by the Tzar, arrives upon a hare, which, in mythology, represents the moon. In a variation of the same story given by Afanassieff,[777] instead of riding upon a hare, the royal boy comes upon a goat, and is recognised by his father; the goat, in its capacity of steed of the lost hero, seems here to represent the moon, as the hare does.
We have already spoken of Indras sahasrâkshas, i.e., of the thousand eyes; Hindoo painters represent him with these thousand eyes, that is, as an azure sky bespangled with stars. Indras as the nocturnal sun hides himself, transformed, in the starry heavens; the stars are his eyes. The hundred-eyed or all-seeing (panoptês) Argos placed as a spy over the actions of the cow beloved of Zeus, is the Hellenic equivalent of this form of Indras. In Chapter I. we also saw the witch's daughter of the Russian fairy tale who has three eyes, and with her third eye plays the spy over the cow, which protects the good maiden. In the second story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, when the peasant ascends into heaven upon the pea-plant, and enters into a room where geese, hogs, and pastry are being cooked, he sees a goat on guard; he only discovers six eyes, as the goat has its seventh eye in its back; the peasant puts the six eyes to sleep, but the goat, by means of its seventh eye, sees that the peasant eats and drinks as much as he likes, and informs the lord of the sky of the fact. In another variation of the story, given by Afanassieff,[778] the old man finds in heaven a little house guarded in turns by twelve goats, of which one has one eye, another two, a third three, and so on up to twelve. The old man says to one after the other, "One eye, two eyes, three eyes, &c., sleep." On the twelfth day, instead of saying "twelve eyes," he makes a mistake and says "eleven;" the goat with twelve eyes then sees and secures him. The eye of God which sees everything, in the popular faith, is a variation of Argos Panoptês, the Vedic Viçvavedas, and the Slavonic Vsievedas, the eye of the goat which sees what is being done in heaven. When the moon shines in the sky, the stars grow pale, the eyes of the witch of heaven fall asleep, but some few eyes still stay open, some few stars continue to shine to observe the movements of the cow-moon, the fairy-moon, the Madonna-moon, who protects the young hero and the beautiful solar maiden lost in the darkness of night.
This spying goat's eye is perhaps connected with the constellation of the goat and two kids. Columella writes that the kids appear in the sky towards the end of September, when the west, and sometimes the south, wind blows and brings rain. According to Servius, the goat united with the two kids in the constellation of Aquarius is the same goat which was the nurse of Zeus; he says that it appears in October, with the sign of Scorpio. Ovid, in De Arte Amandi, and in the first book Tristium, and Virgil in the ninth book of the Æneid,[779] also celebrate the goat and the kids of heaven as bringers of rain. Horace, in the seventh ode, elegantly calls the goat's stars insane:—
"Ille nothis actus ad Oricum
Post insana capræ sidera, frigidas
Noctes non sine multis
Insomnis lachrymis agit."