[472] "Wie wir den Hugschapler sogar auf den Pfauen schwören sehen, legten sie die Angelsachsen auf den Schwan ab (R. A. 900), den wir wohl nach den obigen Gesange Ngördhs, S. 343 als den ihm geheiligten Vogel (ales gratissima nautis, Myth. 1074) zu fassen haben, &c." Simrock, the work quoted before, p. 347.—A Hindoo proverb considers the dove in connection with the peacock; it says, "Better a pigeon to-day than a peacock to-morrow" (Varamadya kapoto na çvo mayûraḥ). According to the Ornithologia of Aldrovandi, the peacocks are the doves' friends, because they keep serpents and all venomous animals at a distance.
[473] The Russian fable of Kriloff presents to us the ass as a judge between the nightingale (the kokilas of Western poets) and the cock in a trial of singing; in Sanskṛit çikhin, or crested, means cock and peacock; besides mayûras, peacock, we have mayûraćaṭakas, the domestic cock. Mayûras is also the name of a Hindoo poet.—In the chapter on the Cuckoo we saw the cuckoo and the nightingale as rivals in singing; the kokilas and the peacock are the equivalents of the nightingale and the cuckoo; we have also identified the cuckoo with the swallow, and seen the swallows as rivals of the swans in singing; cfr. the chapter on the Crow.
[474] Hence Aldrovandi writes with reason, that the smoke of the burnt feathers of a peacock (that is, of the celestial peacock), when taken into the eyes, cures them of their redness.
[475] Â mandrâir indra haribhir yâhi mayûraromabhiḥ; Ṛigv. iii. 45, 1.
[476] Â tvâ rathe hiraṇyaye harî mayûraçepyâ; viii. 1, 25.—Klearchos relates in Athênaios, that a peacock in Leucas loved a maiden so much, that when she died it also immediately expired.
[477] According to the Pańćatantram (i. 175), in the very house of Çivas (the phallical god), the animals make war against each other; the serpent (the night) wishes to eat the mouse (which seems here to be the grey twilight); the peacock (here, perhaps, the moon), wishes to eat the serpent (cfr. the preceding notes; according to Ælianos, a certain man who wished to steal from the King of Egypt a peacock, supposed to be sacred, found an asp in its stead); the lion (the sun) wishes to eat the peacock. (The Hindoo name of mayûrâris, or enemy of the peacock, given to the chameleon, is remarkable; the animal which changes its colour is the rival of the bird which is of every colour; gods and demons are equally viçvarûpâs and kâmarûpas.)
[478] Indras, as a warlike god, does not know fear, or rather, he kills fear (the hymn says, "Aher yâtâraṁ kam apaçya indra hṛidi yat te ǵaghnuso bhîr agaććhat"; Ṛigv. i. 32, 14), and lets himself be terrified by a trifle, which may be either a nightly shadow (the dark man of fairy tales), or the terror caused to him by some fish (the moon) which leaps upon him in the waters which he himself has set free.—In the twenty-second of the Tuscan stories published by me, the young hero who passed through all the dangers of hell without being afraid, dies at the sight of his own shadow. (We have also referred to this when treating of the dog and the lion who meet with their death, allured by their own shadow.)—In the forty-sixth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, the merchant's son, who did not know fear, who feared neither darkness nor brigands nor death, is terrified and dies when he falls into the water, because the little perch entered into his bosom whilst he was sleeping in his fishing-boat.—It is also easy to pass from the idea of Indras, who inebriates himself in the soma to that of the fish, when we consider that the Hindoo word matsyas, the fish, properly means the inebriated, from the root mad, to inebriate and to make cheerful.
[479] Açnâpinaddham madhu pary apaçyam matsyaṁ na dîna udani kshiyantam; Ṛigv. x. 68, 8.
[480] Mbh. 2371-2392.
[481] Mbh. i. 5078-5086.—In another variety of the same myth, the semen of the wise Bharadvâǵas comes out at the sight of a nymph; the sage receives it in a cup, out of which comes Droṇas, the armourer and archer par excellence; i. 5103-5106.