The dog is a medium of chastisement. Our Italian expressions, "Menare il cane per l'aia" (to lead the dog about the barn-floor), and "Dare il cane a menare" (to give the dog to be led about), are probably a reminiscence of the ignominious mediæval punishment of Germany of carrying the dog, inflicted upon a noble criminal, and which sometimes preceded his final execution.[71] The punishment of laceration by dogs, which has actually been carried out more than once by the order of earthly tyrants, has its prototype in the well-known myth of Kerberos and the avenging dogs of hell. Thus Pirithoos, who attempts to carry off Persephônê from the infernal king of the Molossians, is torn to pieces by the dog Trikerberos. Euripides, according to the popular tradition, was lacerated in the forest by the avenging dogs of Archelaos. It is told of Domitian, that when an astrologer on one occasion predicted his approaching death, he asked him whether he knew in what way he himself would die; the astrologer answered that he would be devoured by dogs (death by dogs is also predicted in a story of the Pentamerone); Domitian, to make the oracle false, ordered him to be killed and burned; but the wind put the flames out, and the dogs approached and devoured the corpse. Boleslaus II., king of Poland, in the legend of St Stanislaus, is torn by his own dogs while wandering in the forest, for having ordered the saint's death. The Vedic monster Çushnas, the pestilential dog Sirius of the summer skies, and the dog Kerberos of the nocturnal hell, vomit flames; they chastise the world, too, with pestilential flames; and the pagan world tries all arts, praying and conjuring, to rid itself of their baleful influences. But this dog is immortal, or rather it generates children, and returns to fill men with terror in a new, a more direct, and a more earthly form in the Christian world. It is narrated, in fact, that before the birth of St Dominic, the famous inventor of the tortures of the Holy Inquisition (a truly satanic Lucifer), his mother, being pregnant of him, dreamed that she saw a dog carrying a lighted brand about, setting the world on fire. St Dominic truly realised his mother's dream; he was really this incendiary dog; and, therefore, in the pictures that represent him, the dog is always close to him with its lighted brand. Christ is the Prometheus enlarged, purified, and idealised; and St Dominic, the monstrous Vulcan, deteriorated, diminished, and fanaticised, of the Christian Olympus. The dog, sacred in pagan antiquity to the infernal deities, was consecrated to St Dominic the incendiary, and to Rocco, the saint who protects the sick of the plague. The Roman feasts in honour of Vulcan (Volcanalia) fell in the month of August; and the Roman Catholic Church fêtes in the month of August the two saints of the dogs of the fire and the plague, St Dominic and St Rocco.
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE CAT, THE WEASEL, THE MOUSE, THE MOLE, THE SNAIL, THE ICHNEUMON, THE SCORPION, THE ANT, THE LOCUST, AND THE GRASSHOPPER.
SUMMARY.
Mârǵâras, mârgaras, mṛigas, mṛigâris, mṛigarâǵas.—Nakulas.—Mûsh.—Vamras, vamrî, vaprî, valmîkam, formica.—The serpent and the ants.—Indras as an ant; the serpent eaten by the ants.—Vamras drinking, assisted by the Açvinâu.—The grateful ant; the hermit-dwarfs.—Ants' milk.—Ants' legs.—The ant dies when its wings grow; the ants and the treasure.—The ants separate the grains.—The locust and the ant; çarabhas as the moon.—Grasshopper and ant.—Avere il grillo, aver la luna; indovinala, grillo.—Wedding between ant and grasshopper.—Locusts destroyed by fire.—Hippomürmêkes.—The Indian locust that guards honey again.—The scorpion, and its poison absorbed.—The ichneumon, enemy of the serpent.—The weasel.—Galanthis.—The cat with ears of butter.—The cat as a judge.—The lynx.—The penitent cat.—The beneficent cat.—The cat with a golden tail.—Cat and dog as friends; the dog carries the cat; they find the lost ring again.—The new-born son changed for a cat.—The cat that sings and tells tales.—The cat created by the moon; Diana as a cat.—The sacred cat.—The funereal and diabolical cat.—Cat and fox.—The cat hangman.—Le chat botté.—Chatte blanche; the cat that spins and weaves.—The cat becomes a girl.—The enchanted palace of the cats.—The cats of February; the black cat; the cat dreamed-of.—The cat becomes a witch at seven years of age.—The cat in the sack.—The mewing of the cat.—The cats dispute for souls.—Battle of cats.—The mice that bite their tails or that gnaw the threads of the net.—The mouse in the honey.—The mouse that becomes a maiden; the mouse and the mountain.—The mouse that becomes a tiger.—The souls of the dead pass into mice; funereal and diabolical mice; superstitions relating to this belief.—The mouse that releases the lion and the elephant from the trap.—Ganeças crushes the mouse; Apollo Smyntheus.—When the cat's away the mice can dance.—The mouse plays blind-man's-buff with the bear.—The grateful mouse.—The mouse that foresees the future.—Mouse and sparrow, first friends and then enemies.—The batrachomyomachia.—The mouse, the tooth, and the coin.—Hiraṇyakas; the squirrel.—The monster mole; the mole as a gravedigger; the blind mole.—The snail in the popular song; the snail and the serpent; the snail as a funereal animal.
I unite in one series several mythical nocturnal animals, which, although really of very different natures, enter into only one order of myths.
They are thieving and hunting animals, and are therefore very aptly placed in the darkness of night (naktaćârin is an epithet applied in Sanskṛit both to the cat and the thief), in the nocturnal forest, in connection now with Diana the huntress, or the good fairy the moon, and now with the ugly witch; now appearing as the helpers of the hero, and now as his persecutors.
The etymologies of several Hindoo words may be of some interest to the reader, and may with propriety be adduced here. Mârǵâras, the cat, means the cleanser (as the animal that, in fact, cleans itself). Referring to the myth, we know already that one of the principal exactions of the witch is that her step-daughter should comb her hair, or else clean the corn, during the night; and that the good fairy, the Madonna, while she too has her hair combed, scatters gems about, spins, and cleans the corn for the good maiden. The witch of night forces the maiden aurora to separate the luminous wheat of evening from the dark tares of night; the moon with its silvery splendour disperses the shades of night. The mârǵâras, or cleanser of the night, the white cat, is the moon. Araṇyamârǵâras, or cat of the forest, is the name given to the wild cat, with which the lynx, too, is identified. As a white cat, as the moon, it protects innocent animals; as a black cat, as the dark night, it persecutes them. The cat is a skilful hunter; moreover, it is easy to confound the word mârǵâras (the cleanser) with the word mârgaras, the proper meaning of which is hunter, investigator, he who follows the track, the mârgas, or else the enemy of the mṛigas (as mṛigâris); the road is the clean part of the land, as the margin is the white or clean part of a book. The hunter may be he that goes on the margin or on the track, or else he that hunts and kills the mṛigas or forest animal. The moon (the huntress Diana) is also called in Sanskṛit mṛigarâǵas, or king of the forest animals; and, as kings are wont, it sometimes defends its subjects and sometimes eats them. The cat-moon eats the grey mice of the night.