The prophet of the world then said, ‘We deem it sinful to kill harmless, but right to slay ravenous, animals. Were all ravenous animals to enter into a compact not to kill harmless animals, we would abstain from slaying them, and hold them dear as ourselves.’
Upon this the wolf made a treaty with the ram, and the lion became friend of the stag. No tyranny was left in the world, till man (Dehak) broke the treaty and began to kill animals. In consequence of this, none observed the treaty except the harmless animals.[4]
This fable, from the Aryan side, may be regarded as showing the reason of the evil repute which gathered around the name of Dehak or Zohak. The eating of animal food was among our Aryan ancestors probably the provisional commissariat of a people migrating from their original habitat. The animals slain for food had all their original consecration, and even the ferocious were largely invested with awe. The woodcutters of Bengal invoke Kalrayu—an archer tiger-mounted—to protect them against the wild beasts he (a form of Siva) is supposed to exterminate; but while the exterminator of the most dangerous animals may, albeit without warrant in the Shastr, be respected in India, the huntsman is generally of evil repute. The gentle Krishna was said to have been slain by an arrow from the bow of Ungudu, a huntsman, who left the body to rot under a tree where it fell, the bones being the sacred relics for which the image of Jugernath at Orissa was constructed.[5]
It is not known at what period the notion of transmigration arose, but that must have made him appear cannibalistic who first hunted and devoured animals. Such was the Persian Zohak (or Dehak). His Babylonian form, Nimrod, represented also the character of Esau, as huntsman; that is, the primitive enemy of the farmer, and of the commerce in grains; the preserver of wildness, and consequently of all those primitive aboriginal idolatries which linger in the heaths (whence heathen) and country villages (whence pagans) long after they have passed away from the centres of civilisation. Hunting is essentially barbarous. The willingness of some huntsmen even now, when this serious occupation of an early period has become a sport, to sacrifice not only animal life to their pleasure, but also the interests of labour and agriculture, renders it very easy for us to understand the transformation of Nimrod into a demon. In the Hebrew and Arabian legends concerning Nimrod, that ‘mighty hunter’ is shown as related to the wild elements and their worshipper. When Abraham, having broken the images of his father, was brought by Terah before Nimrod, the King said, ‘Let us worship the fire!’
‘Rather the water that quenches the fire,’ said Abraham.
‘Well, the water.’
‘Rather the cloud that carries the water.’
‘Well, the cloud.’
‘Rather the wind that scatters the cloud.’
‘Well, the wind.’