The turbulent jorsh enters into Lake Rastoff, and possesses himself of it. Called to judgment by the bream, it answers that from the day of St Peter to that of St Elias, the whole lake was on fire; and cites in proof of this assertion that the roach's eyes are still red from its effects, that the perch's fins are also still red, that the pike became dark coloured, and that the eel-pout is black in consequence. These fishes, called to give witness, either do not appear, or else deny the truth of these assertions. The jorsh is arrested and bound, but it begins to rain, and the place of judgment becomes muddy; the jorsh escapes, and, from one rivulet to another, arrives at the river Kama, where the pike and the sturgeon find him, and take him back to be executed.
The jorsh, arrested and brought to judgment, demands permission to take a walk for only one hour in Lake Rastoff; but after the expiration of the appointed time, it neglects to come out of the lake, and annoys the other fishes in every way, stinging and provoking them. The fishes have recourse for justice to the sturgeon, who sends the pike to look for the jorsh; the little perch is found amongst the stones; it excuses itself by saying that it is Saturday, and that there is a festival in his father's house, and advises him to take a constitutional in the meanwhile, and enjoy himself; on the morrow, although it be Sunday, he promises to present himself before the judges (the analogy between the actions of the jorsh and those of Reineke Fuchs is very remarkable). Meanwhile, the jorsh makes his companion drunk. The Sanskṛit name of the fish, matsyas, from the root mad, we know to mean drunk and joyous, properly damp (Lat., madidus); in Italian, briaco and folle are sometimes equivalent; in the Piedmontese dialect, bagnà (wet) and imbecil (idiot) are expressions of the same meaning. Drunkenness is of two forms: there is a drunkenness which makes impotent and stupid; it is a question of quantity and of quality of beverages, as well as constitution. Thus, there are two kinds of madness; that which makes a man infuriated, to cope with whom the strait-waistcoat is necessary, and that which ends by exhausting all a man's strength in prostration and debility. Indras, when drunk, becomes a hero; the pike when drunk is a fool (cfr. the Italian matto, English mad, which means insane, crazy, with the German matt, which means cast down, exhausted[502]). When the jorsh has made the pike drunk, it shuts it in a rick of straw, where the inebriated fish is to die. Then the bream comes to take the little perch from among the stones, and to bring him before the judge. The jorsh demands a judgment of God. He tells his judges to put him in a net; if he stays in the net, he is wrong; if he comes out, he is right; the jorsh jerks about in the net so much that he gets out. The judge acquits him, and gives him entire liberty in the lake; then the jorsh begins his numerous revenges upon the little fishes, proving his astuteness in continual efforts to ruin them.
As the drunkard and the fool now intensify their strength and now lose it, so they now double and now lose their intelligence. Hence, among mythical fishes we find very wise ones and very stupid ones. The story is very popular of the three fishes of different intelligence, of which the lazy and improvident one allows himself to be caught by the fishermen, whilst his two companions escape; it is found in the first book of the Pańćatantram. In the fifth book of the Pańćatantram, a variety occurs: we read of a fish which has the intelligence of a hundred (Çatabuddhis), of one which has the intelligence of a thousand (Sahasrabuddhis), and of the frog which has the intelligence of one (Ekabuddhis); but that of the two fishes is not intelligence, but presumption; the one intelligence of the frog is better than the hundred and the thousand of the fishes. The frog escapes, but the two fishes fall into the hands of the fishermen.
The little sea-urchin (and the dwarf Vishṇus and the dolphin are equivalent to it, the word çiṅçumâras being equivocal in Sanskṛit) in the Ṛigvedas draws the chariot of riches; in the Eddas, a dwarf in the form of a pike (in Greek lükios, in Latin lucius) watches over gold, and guards the ring; in Russian legends, the little jorsh (formidable, like the josz, by its sharp quills), united with the dolphins, draws out of the sea the casket containing the sultan's ring. The horn of the moon, which appears in the sea of night, belongs now to the bull which carries the fugitive hero, now to the fish çapharî, which, having become large, takes in tow the ship of Manus, and saves it from the waters, that it may not be wrecked. Now it is the solar hero or heroine that takes the form of a fish to save himself or herself; now the fish helps the solar hero or heroine in their escape; now the little golden or luminous fish plunges into the sea, or into the river, to seek the pearl or ring for the hero or heroine who had let it fall, the ring without which King Dushyantas cannot recognise his bride Çakuntalâ; now it vomits out from its mouth or its tail that which it has swallowed—the hero, the pearl, the ring (the solar disc).
In the sixth act of Çakuntalâ, the fisherman finds in the stomach of a fish (the cyprinus dentatus), the pearl enchased in the ring which King Dushyantas had given to Çakuntalâ, in order to be able to recognise her when they should come together again. The genera cyprinus and perca, as the thorny or wounding ones in the order of fishes, have supplied the greatest number of heroes to mythology; the sea-urchin is identified to them on account of its darts; the names hecht, brochet, pike, given to the lucius in Germany, France, and England, express its faculty of stinging, or cleaving with its flat and cutting mouth (the fish lucioperca sandra is an intermediate form between the perch and the pike). The lunar horn, the thunderbolt, the sunbeam, have the same prerogative as these fishes; the dolphin, on account of the two scythe-shaped fins which it has on its anterior extremity, or of its fat and curved dorsal fin, as well as on account of its black and silvery colour, might well serve to represent the two lunar horns and the moon's phases. Thus the pike and the bream, dark or bluish on their backs, are white underneath. The dolphin also has a flat mouth and sharp teeth, like the pike.[503] The lunar horn announces rain; thus the scythe-shaped fin of the dolphin, appearing on the waves of the sea, announces a tempest to navigators, warns them, and saves them from shipwreck; hence, as a çiṅçumaras, it may, like the sea-urchin, have saved or drawn the chariot, that is, the vessel of the Açvinâu, laden with riches. The dolphin which watches over Amphitritê, by order of Poseidon, in the Hellenic myth, is the same as the dolphin, the spy of the sea, or the moon, the spy of the nocturnal and wintry sky. Inasmuch as the sky of night or winter was compared to the kingdom of the dead, both the dolphin and the moon, according to the Hellenic belief, carried the souls of the dead.
The cyprinus, par excellence, the carp (Lat. carpus), is celebrated, in connection with gold, in an elegant little Latin poem of Hieronimus Fracastorus. Carpus was the name of a ferryman of the Lake of Garda, who, seeing Saturn fleeing, took him for a robber who was carrying gold away, and endeavoured to despoil him of this gold; then Saturn cursed him and his companions in the following manner:—
"Gens inimica Deum dabitur quod poscitis aurum:
Hoc imo sub fonte aurum pascetis avari.
Dixerat: ast illis veniam poscentibus et vox
Deficit, et jam se cernunt mutescere et ora
In rictum late patulum producta dehiscunt,
In pinnas abiere manus; vestisque rigescit
In squamas, caudamque pedes sinuantur in imam;
Qui fuerat subita obductus formidine mansit
Pallidus ore color, quamquam livoris iniqui
Indicium suffusa nigris sunt corpora guttis;
Carpus aquas, primus numen qui læsit, in amplas
Se primus dedit et fundo se condidit imo."
From the comparisons which we have made hitherto, it is impossible not to admit that the enterprise of the fish who seeks the gold or the pearl, who finds it, or who contains it in himself, is a very ancient Âryan tradition. In the Vedic hymns we see now Indras, now the Açvinâu, saving the heroes from shipwreck, and bringing riches to mankind; we have also seen the çiṅçumâras (sea-urchin, dolphin, or Vishṇus) draw the chariot of the Açvinâu, who are bringing riches. The Greeks called a fish of a strange shape by the name now of Zeus, now of chalkeüs (the name given to Hêphaistos, or Mulciber, or Vulcanus, the worker in metals), or blacksmith, whence the name of Zeus faber, by which it was known to the Latins. This fish is of a really monstrous shape. Its back is brownish, with yellow stripes; the rest of its body is of a silvery-grey colour; on its sides it has two spots of the deepest black. Its dorsal fin opens like a fan, with rays going out on all sides, and furnished with strong quills, which make this prominence resemble a crest. We remember that the cock and the lark were compared to Christ and to Christophoros, on account of their crest; the same happened in the case of the Zeus faber.[504] The Italian legend says that those two black spots (which make the fish's body resemble a forge, whence its name of blacksmith) were caused by the marks left upon it one day by St Christopher, while carrying Christ upon his shoulders across the river. The fish which wears the crest and Christopher are here identified with each other. But this is not all; at Rome, at Genoa, and at Naples, this same fish is called the fish of St Peter, because it is said to be the same fish which was caught by St Peter in the Gospels, in the mouth of which (as a blacksmith or chalkeüs, it must have known well how to coin money), by a miracle of Christ's, St Peter found the coin which was to serve for the tribute. Is it probable that the legend of the fish with gold in its mouth, so common in Âryan legends, was current in Judea? I do not think so; inasmuch as petrus and the petra, upon which Christ makes a bad Græco-Latin pun, in connection with the fish, is another mythical incident which calls me back to the Âryan world, and tears me away from the Semitic world, and from childish faith in the Judaic authenticity of the evangelical story, though without prejudice to my belief in the holiness of the doctrine.