The direct source is the legend which Sonnerat tells of the origin of the Paria-goddess Mariatale.[91] Indirectly, however, the sources are found in Sanskrit literature. Two parts may be distinguished: The story of the temptation and punishment, and the story of the interchange of heads.[92] The former story is that of the ascetic Jamadagni and his wife Rēṇukā, who was slain by her son Rāma at the command of the ascetic himself, in punishment for her yielding to an impure desire on beholding the prince Citraratha. Subsequently at the intercession of Rāma she is again restored to life through Jamadagni's supernatural power. The story is in Mahābhārata iii. c. 116 seq.[93] and also in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Bk. ix. c. 16,[94] though here the harshness of the original version is somewhat softened.[95]
The second story is found in the Vētālapañcaviṃs'ati, being the sixth of the "twenty-five tales of a corpse-demon," which are also found in the twelfth book of the Kathāsaritsāgara.[96] It relates how Madanasundarī, whose husband and brother-in-law had beheaded themselves in honor of Durgā, is commanded by the goddess to restore the corpses to life by joining to each its own head, and how by mistake she interchanges these heads.
The two stories were fused into one and so we get the legend in the form in which Sonnerat presents it. Goethe followed this form closely without inventing anything. He did, however, put into the poem an ethical content and a noble idea. Both the Indic ballads are a fervent plea for the innate nobility of humanity.
Here the influence of India on Goethe's work ends. The progress of Sanskrit studies could not fail to excite the interest of the poet whose boast was his cosmopolitanism,[97] but they did not incite him to production. For India's mythology, its religion and its abstrusest of philosophies he felt nothing but aversion. Especially hateful to him were the mythological monstrosities:
Und so will ich, ein für allemal,
Keine Bestien in dem Göttersaal!
Die leidigen Elephantenrüssel,
Das umgeschlungene Schlangengenüssel,
Tief Urschildkröt' im Weltensumpf,
Viel Königsköpf' auf einem Rumpf,
Die müssen uns zur Verzweiflung bringen,
Wird sie nicht reiner Ost verschlingen.[98]
Goethe classed Indic antiquities with those of Egypt and China, and his attitude towards the question of their value is distinctly expressed in one of his prose proverbs: "Chinesische, Indische, Aegyptische Altertümer sind immer nur Curiositäten: es ist sehr wohl gethan, sich und die Welt damit bekannt zu machen; zu sittlicher und aesthetischer Bildung aber werden sie uns wenig fruchten."[99]
After all, Goethe's Orient did not extend beyond the Indus. It was confined mainly to Persia and Arabia, with an occasional excursion into Turkey.
To this Orient he turned at the time of Germany's deepest political degradation, when the best part of its soil was overrun by a foreign invader, and when the whole nation nerved itself for the life and death struggle that was to break its chains. The aged poet shrank from the tumult and strife about him and took refuge in the East. The opening lines of the first Divan poem express the motive of this poetical Hegire.
The history of the composition of the Divan is too well known to require repetition. It is given with great detail in the editions prepared by von Loeper and Düntzer.[100] Suffice it to say that the direct impulse to the composition of the work was the appearance, in 1812, of the first complete version of Persia's greatest lyric poet Hāfiḍ, by the famous Viennese Orientalist von Hammer. The bulk of the poems were written between the years 1814 and 1819,[101] although in the work as we now have it a number of poems are included which arose later than 1819 and were added to the editions of 1827 and 1837.[102]