Nakulas is the name given in Sanskṛit to the ichneumon, the enemy of mice, scorpions, and snakes. The word seems to be derived from the root naç, nak = necare, whence nakulas would appear to be the destroyer (of nocturnal mice).
The mouse, mûsh, mûshas, mûshakas, is the thief, the ravisher, whence also its name rat (a rapiendo).
The Hindoo names of the ant are vamras and vamrî (besides pipîlakas). Vamrî is connected with vapâ, vapram, vaprî, ant-hole, and, by metathesis, valmîkam (i.e., appertaining to ants), which has the same meaning. The Latin formica unites together the two forms vamrî and valmîkam. The roots are vap, in the sense of to throw, and vam, to erupt or to throw out, as the ants do when they erect little mounds of earth.
In the Mahâbhâratam, the hole of a serpent is also called by the name of valmîkam; from this we can explain the fable of the third book of the Pańćatantram, where we have a serpent fighting against ants. He kills many of them, but their number is so interminable that he is at last forced to succumb. Thus, in the mythical Vedic heavens, it is in the shape of a vamras or ant that Indras fights victoriously against the old monster that invades the sky.[72] Nay, more, in the Pańćatantram, the ants sting and bite the serpent and kill it; thus Indras (who, as we have just said, is an ant in the cloud or the night) gives to the ants the avaricious serpent, the son of Agrus, dragging it out of its hiding-place.[73] Indras is therefore a variety of the Captain Formicola of the Tuscan fairy tale. Finally, the Ṛigvedas offers us yet another curious particular. The two Açvinâu come to assist Vamras (or Indras in his form of an ant, i.e., they come to assist the ant) whilst it is drinking (vamraṁ vipipânam). The ant throws or lifts up little hillocks of earth by biting the ground. The root vap, which means to throw, to scatter, has also the sense of to cut, and perhaps to make a hole in. The convex presupposes the concave; and vam is related to vap (as somnus is related to hüpnos, to svapnas, and to sopor). Indras, as an ant, is the wounder, the biter of the serpent. He makes it come out of its den, or vomits it forth (eructat); the two etymological senses are found again in the myth. The weapons with which Indras wounds the serpent are doubtless now the solar rays, and now the thunderbolts. Indras, in the cloud, drinks the somas. The ant drinks, and the Açvinâu, whilst it drinks, come to its help, for no doubt the ant when drinking is in danger of being drowned. And this brings us to the story of the grateful animals, in which the young hero finds an ant about to be drowned.
In the twenty-fourth of the Tuscan fairy tales published by me, when the shepherd's son, by a good advice which he has received, determines to do good to every one he meets, he sees on the path an ant-hill, which is about to be destroyed by water; he then makes a bank round it, and thus saves the ants;[74] in their turn the ants pay back the debt. The king of the land demands of the young man, as a condition of receiving his daughter in marriage, that he should separate and sort the different kinds of grain in a granary; up marches Captain Formicola with his army, and accomplishes the stipulated task. In other varieties of the same story, instead of the embankment, we have the leaf that the hero puts under the ant to float it out of the water contained in the footprint of a horse, which again recalls the lotus-leaf on which the Hindoo deity navigates the ocean. This water in which the ant is drowning was afterwards changed into the proverbial ants' milk,[75] which is now used to express an impossibility, but which, when referred to Indras, to the mythical ant, represents the ambrosial and pluvial moisture. In the sixth Sicilian story of Signora Gonzenbach, the boy Giuseppe, having given crumbs of bread to the hungry ants, receives from the king of the ants the present of an ant's leg, in order that he may use it when required. When he wishes to become an ant, in order to penetrate into the giant's palace, he has only to let the ant's leg fall to the ground, with the words, "I am a Christian, and am becoming an ant," which immediately comes to pass. In the same story Giuseppe procures sheep, in order to attract the serpent by their smell, and induce it to come out of its lurking-place. Here we evidently return to the Vedic subject of the ant Indras, who tempts the serpent to come out in order to give it to the ants. In the eighth story of the fourth book of the Pentamerone, the ant shows the third part of the way to the girl Cianna, who is going to search for the mother of time; on the door of her dwelling Cianna will find a serpent biting its tail (the well-known symbol of the cyclical day or year, and of time, in antiquity), and she is to ask the mother of time, on the ant's part, advice as to how the ants can live a hundred years. The mother of time answers to Cianna that the ants will live a hundred years when they can dispense with flying, inasmuch as "quanno la formica vo morire, mette l'ascelle" (i.e., the wings). The ant, grateful for this good advice, shows Cianna and her brothers the place underground where the thieves have deposited their treasure. We also remember the story of the ants who bring grains of barley into the mouth of the royal child Midas, to announce his future wealth. In Herodotus (iii.), and in the twelfth book of the stories of Tzetza,[76] I find the curious information that there are in India ants as large as foxes, that keep golden treasures in their holes; the grains of wheat are this gold. The morning and evening heavens are sometimes compared to granaries of gold; the ants separate the grain during the night, carrying it from west to east, and purifying it of all that is unclean, or cleansing the sky of the nocturnal shadows. The work assigned every night by the witch to the maiden aurora of evening is done in one night by the black ants of the sky of night. Sometimes the girl meets on the way the good fairy (the moon), who comes to her help; the maiden, assisted by the ants, meets the madonna-moon. But the moon is called also the leaper or hopper, a nocturnal locust; the darkness, the cloud and the dark-coloured earth (in lunar eclipses) are at the same time ant-hills and black ants, that pass over or before the moon; and, therefore, in the race between the ant and the locust, it is said in the fable that the ant won the race. The locust, or çarabhas, or çalabhas, is presented to us as an improvident animal in two sentences of the first and fourth books of the Pańćatantram. The green grasshopper or locust leaps; the fair-haired moon leaps. (I have already noticed in the chapter on the ass how the words haris and harit mean both green and fair, or yellow; in the second canto of the sixth book of the Râmâyaṇam, the monkey Çarabhas is said to inhabit the mountain Ćandras or Mount Moon; Çarabhas, therefore, appears as the moon.) Locust and grasshopper jump (cfr. the Chap. on the hare); hence the ant is not only in connection with the locust, but also with the grasshopper: the Hindoo expression çarabhas means both grasshopper (in Sanskṛit, also named varshakarî) and locust. In one of the popular songs of the Monferrato collected by Signor Ferraro, we have the wedding of the grasshopper and the ant; the magpie, the mouse, the ortolan, the crow, and the goldfinch bring to the wedding a little cut straw, a cushion, bread, cheese, and wine. In the popular Tuscan songs published by Giuseppe Tigri, I find the word grilli (grasshoppers) used in the sense of lovers. In Italian, grillo also means caprice, and especially amorous caprice; and medico grillo is applied to a foolish doctor.[77] And yet the grasshopper ought to be the diviner par excellence. In Italy, when we propose a riddle, we are accustomed to end it with the words "indovinala, grillo" (guess it, grasshopper); this expression perhaps refers to the supposed fool of the popular story, who almost always ends by showing himself wise. The sun enclosed in the cloud and in the gloom of night is generally the fool, but he is at the same time the fool who, in the kingdom of the dead, sees, hears, and learns everything; and the moon, too, personified as a grasshopper or locust, is the supposed fool who, on the contrary, knows, sees, understands, and teaches everything; from the moon are taken prognostics; hence riddles may be proposed to the capricious moon, or the celestial cricket. In Italian, the expressions "aver la luna" (to have the moon), and "avere il grillo" (to have the grasshopper), are equivalent, and mean to suffer from a nervous attack, or the spleen. I also find the wedding between ant and grasshopper in a very popular, but as yet unpublished Tuscan song. The ant asks the grasshopper whether he desires her for his wife, and recommends him, if he does not, to look after his own affairs, that is, to leave her alone. And then the narrative begins. The grasshopper goes into a field of linen; the ant begs for a thread to make herself aprons and shirts for the wedding; then the grasshopper says he wishes to marry her. The grasshopper goes into a field of vetches; the ant asks for ten vetches, to cook four in a stew, and to put six upon the spit for the wedding-dinner. After the wedding, the grasshopper follows the trade of a greengrocer, then that of an innkeeper; but his affairs succeed so badly, that he first puts his own trousers in pawn, and then becomes bankrupt, and beats his wife the ant; at last he dies in misery. Then the ant faints away, throws herself upon the bed, and beats her breast for sorrow with her heel (as ants do when they die).[78] The nuptials of the black ant, the gloom of night, with the moon, locust, or grasshopper, take place in the evening; the grasshopper dies, the moon pales, and the black ant, the night, also disappears. In the Pańćatantram, the locusts are destroyed by fire. In the so-called letter of Alexander the Great to Olympias,[79] I find the ants scared away by means of fire, whilst they are endeavouring to keep horses and heroes at a distance. These extraordinary ants recall to us the hippomürmêkes of the Greeks, or ants of horses. The ants, the insects of the forest of night, molest the hero and solar horse that traverse it; the black ants of night are dispersed by the solar fire of the morning: this we can understand all the better when Tzetza, quoted before, speaking of the Indian ants, calls them as large as foxes; when Pliny, in the eleventh book of his History, says they are of the colour of a cat, and the size of Egyptian wolves; and when Solinus tells us that they have the shape of a large dog, with lion's feet, with which they dig gold up. Ælianos calls them guardians of gold (tôn chrüsôn phülattontes). Evidently the ants have already taken here a monstrous and demoniacal aspect. Several other ancient authors have written concerning these Indian ants, including Herodotus, Strabo, Philostratos, and Lucian. I shall only mention here, as bearing on our subject, that, according to Lucian, it is by night that they dig up the gold, and that, according to Pliny, the ants dig up gold in winter (night and winter are often equivalent in mythology). "The Indians, moreover, steal it during summer, whilst the ants stay hidden in their subterranean lurking-places on account of the vapours; however, tempted forth by the smell, they run out, and often cut the Indians in pieces, although they flee away on very swift camels, they are so rapid, ferocious, and desirous of gold."[80] This monster ant, with lion's claws, which Pliny also describes as horned, approaches very closely to the mythical black scorpion of the clouds and the night, the Vedic Vṛiçćikas, which, now a very little bird (iyattikâ çakuntikâ), now a very small ichneumon (kushumbhakas, properly the little golden one, perhaps the young morning sun), destroys with its tooth (açmanâ, properly with the biter), absorbing or taking away the poison, as jars take off the water, i.e., the sun's rays dissipate the vapours of the sun enclosed in the cloud or the gloom.[81] Here the ichneumon (viverra ichneumon) appears as the benefactor of the scorpion rather than as its enemy; it takes its poison away, that is, it frees the sun from the sign of Scorpio, from the vapours which envelope it. The ichneumon is in Sanskṛit called nakulas. In the twelfth story of the first book of the Pańćatantram, we see it, on the contrary, as the declared enemy of the black serpent, which it kills in its den. But inasmuch as the weasel-ichneumon bites venomous animals, it is itself obliged to deliver itself from the venom it has in consequence imbibed. Therefore, in the Atharvavedas, mention is already made of the salutary herb with which the nakulas (which is also the name of one of the two sons of the Açvinâu, in the Mahâbhâratam) cures himself of the bite of venomous animals, that is, of serpents, scorpions, and monstrous mice, his enemies. The weasel (mustela), which differs but little from the ichneumon, is almost the same in the myths. The weasel, too, as we learn from the ninth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, fights against serpents, after having eaten the famous herb called rue, the smell of which is said to be insupportable to serpents. But, as its Latin name tells us, it is no less skilful as a hunter of mice.[82] The reader is doubtless familiar with the Æsopian fable of the weasel which petitions the man for its liberty for the service which it has rendered him by freeing his house from rats; and with that of Phædrus, of the old weasel which catches mice in the flour-trough by rolling itself in the flour, so that the mice approach, under the impression that it is a solid mass. Plautus's parasite reckons upon a good dinner for himself from having met with a weasel carrying away the whole of a mouse except its feet (auspicio hodie optumo exivi foras; mustela murem abstulit præter pedes); but the expected dinner never appearing, he declares that the presage is false, and pronounces the weasel a prophet only of evil, inasmuch as in one and the same day it changes its place ten times. According to the ninth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the maid Galanthis was changed by the goddess Lucina (the moon) into a weasel, for having told a lie, announcing the birth of Hêraklês before it had taken place:—
"Strenuitas antiqua manet, nec terga colorem
Amisêre suum, forma est diversa priori;
Quæ, quia mendaci parientem juverat ore,
Ore parit."
The popular superstition which makes the weasel bring forth its young by its mouth, probably had its origin in this fable. From the mouth intemperate words are brought forth. Simonides, in Stobeus, quoted already by Aldrovandi,[83] compares wicked women to weasels. The moon that changes the chattering Galanthis into a weasel appears to be the same as the white moon itself transformed into a white weasel, the moon that explores the nocturnal heaven and discovers all its secrets.
Ants, mice, moles (like serpents), love, on the contrary, to stay hidden, and to keep their secrets concealed. The ichneumon, the weasel, and the cat generally come out of their hiding-places, and chase away whoever is concealed, carrying away from the hiding-places whatever they can. They are both themselves thieves, and hunt other thieves.
It is easy now to pass from the Latin mustela to the Sanskṛit cat mûshakârâtis, or mûshikântakṛit.
In the Pańćatantram, the cat Butter-ears (dadhikarṇas), or he of the white ears, who feigns to repent of his crimes, is called upon to act as judge in a dispute pending between the sparrow, kapińǵalas and the hare Quick-walker (sîghragas), who had taken up his quarters in the dwelling of the absent sparrow. Butter-ears solves the question by feigning deafness, and requesting the two disputants to come nearer, to confide their arguments in his ears; the hare and the sparrow rely on his good faith, and approach, when the cat clutches and devours them both. In the Hitopadeças,[84] we have, instead of the sparrow, the vulture ćaradgavas, which meets with its death in consequence of having shown hospitality to the cat, "of which it knew neither the disposition nor the strength" (aǵńâtakulaçîlasya). In the Tuti-Name,[85] we have, instead of the cat, the lynx,[86] that wishes to possess itself of the lion's house, which is guarded by the monkey; it terrifies the lion, and drives it to flight. In the Anvari-Suhaili,[87] instead of the cat or lynx, we find represented the leopard. In the Mahâbhâratam,[88] we find again the fable of the penitent cat. The cat, by the austerity which it practises on the banks of the Ganges, inspires confidence in the birds, which gather round it to do it honour. After some time, the mice imitate the example of the birds, and put themselves under the cat's protection, that it may defend them. The cat makes its meals upon them every day, by inducing one or two to accompany it to the river, and fattens exceedingly fast, whilst the mice diminish every day. Then a wise mouse determines to follow the cat one day when it goes to the river; the cat eats both the mouse that accompanies it and the spy. Upon this the mice discover the trick, and evacuate altogether the post of danger. The penitent cat is already proverbial in the Code of Manus.[89] In the Reineke Fuchs of Goethe,[90] the cat goes to steal in the priest's house, by the wicked advice of the fox, when every one falls upon him—