But to begin ab ovo also means to begin at the beginning. Horace says that he does not begin from the twin eggs the description of the Trojan war—
"Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ovo,"
alluding to the egg of Lêda, to which the Greek proverb, "Come out of the egg" (ex ôou exêlthen), also alludes, said of a very handsome man, and referring to fair Helen and her two luminous brothers the Dioskuroi. But here the white cock has became a white swan, of which we shall speak in the following chapter.
[CHAPTER X.]
THE DOVE, THE DUCK, THE GOOSE, AND THE SWAN.
SUMMARY.
White, red, and dark-coloured doves, ducks, geese, and swans.—The funereal dove; it is united with the owl; kapotas.—The doves flee from unhappy persons.—The dove and the hawk.—Two doves sacrifice themselves, one for the other; a form of the Açviṇâu.—The dove and the ant.—Transformation of the hero and heroine into doves.—The two prophetic doves upon the cross-trees of the mast.—Among funereal games, that of shooting arrows at a dove which hangs from the mast of a ship.—The doves of Dodona.—The dove and the water.—St Radegonda as a dove preserves sailors from shipwreck.—A dove guides the Argonauts.—The soul of Semiramis becomes a dove.—It is sacrilege to eat a dove.—Hero and heroine become doves, in order to escape.—The dove as the bringer of joy, of light, of good; it is a symbol of the winter that ends, and of the spring which is beginning.—The daughters of Anius become white doves.—Two doves separate the barley for the girl.—The fireworks, the stove, and the car of Indras, perform the same miracles, i.e., they make beautiful the girl with the ugly skin.—Zezolla benefited by the dove of the fairies.—The doves on the rosebush.—The nymph Peristera helps Aphroditê to pluck flowers.—The phallical dove.—The word haṅsas; the guç-lebedi of Russian tales.—Agnis as a haṅsas.—The Marutas as haṅsâs.—The horses of the two Açvinâu as haṅsâs.—The duck makes its nest upon the thief's head.—Bṛibus on the thieves' head; Bṛibus as Indras, and as a bird.—Brahman upon the haṅsâs.—The sun as a golden duck.—The betrothed wife as a duck.—The arrows of Râmas as haṅsâs.—Kabandhas drawn by haṅsâs.—The haṅsâs as love messengers.—The geese-swans and the young hero in Russian tales.—The serpent-witch and the princess as a white duck.—The golden and silver eggs of the duck.—The golden egg of the duck causes the death of the horse.—The geese of the Capitol.—The goose which, after having been cooked, rises again alive.—Geese as discoverers of deceits.—The Valkiries as swans.—Berta the Reine pédauque.—The wild goose on the bush.—The goose eaten on St Michael's Day.—The hero and the swan.—The kingdom of the San Graal.—The legend of Lohengrin; a variety of the myth of the Açvinâu; Lohengrin and Elsa's brother, the sun and the moon.—The legend of the Dioskuroi; Zeus as a swan; the Dioskuroi deliver Helen, as Lohengrin delivers Elsa.
Inasmuch as there is the white dove and the dove-coloured one,[434] the white duck and goose, the duck and the dark-coloured or fire-coloured goose, the white swan and the flamingo, the red swan and the black, these birds, dove, goose, duck, and swan, from the diversity of colour which they assume upon the earth, also assumed mythical aspects which are sometimes contradictory when translated to the sky to represent celestial phenomena. While the white ones served for the more poetical images of mythology, the red and the dark ones offered aspects now benignant, now malignant, alluring the hero now to his ruin, and now, instead, to good fortune. The red hues, for example, of the western sky appear as flames into which the witch wishes to precipitate the young hero; the roseate tints of the eastern heavens, on the contrary, are generally the pyre or furnace in which the hero burns the ill-favoured witch who endeavours to ruin him; from the dawn of morning, from the white sky, from the snow of winter, from the white earth or white swan, the golden egg (the sun) comes forth; now the beautiful maiden, now the young hero emerges from it—the aurora and the sun, or else the spring and the sun. The evening sun and aurora in the night, the sun and the verdant earth, which divests itself of its varicoloured attire in autumn, veil, cover, and lose themselves; their most vivid hues become obscure in the gloom of night, or are covered by the snow of winter; the hero becomes a dark-coloured dove, or a gloomy swan which crosses the waters. I have noted more than once how the night of the year corresponds to those of the day; the sun which hides itself in the night of evening, and the sun which veils itself in the night of winter, are often represented by the same mythical images.