We have again the very common incident in the folk-tales of animals understanding the speech of human beings, and men learning the tongue of birds, and the like. Solomon, according to the Qurân, knew the language of animals; in the tales of Somadeva, the Vaisya Bhâshâjna knows the language of all beasts and birds, a faculty which in Germany is gained by eating a white snake.[3]
Then there is the large cycle of tales in which the grateful animal warns the hero or heroine of approaching danger, as in the story of Bopuluchi, or brings news, or produces gold. The idea of grateful animals assisting their benefactors runs through the whole range of folk-lore.[4]
Another series of cognate ideas has been very carefully analyzed by Mr. Campbell. The spirits of the dead haunt two places, the house and the tomb. Those who haunt the house are friendly; those who haunt the tomb are unfriendly. Two classes of animals correspond to these two classes of spirits—an at-home, fearless class, as the snake, the rat, flies and ants and bees, into which the home-haunting or friendly spirits would go; and a wild, unsociable class, such as bats and owls, dogs, jackals, or vultures, into which the unfriendly or tomb-haunting spirits would go. In the case of some of these tomb-haunting animals, the dog, jackal, and vulture, the feeling towards them as tomb-haunters seems to have given place to the belief that as the spirit lives in the tomb where the body is laid, so, if the body be eaten by an animal, the spirit lives in the animal, as in a living tomb.[5]
Other animals, again, are invested with particular qualities, fierceness and courage, strength or agility, and eating part of their flesh, or wearing a portion as an amulet, conveys to the possessor the qualities of the animal. A familiar instance of this is the belief in the claws and flesh of the tiger as amulets or charms against disease and the influence of evil spirits.
Many animals, too, are respected for their use to man or as scarers of demons, as the cow; as possessors of wisdom, like the elephant or snake; as semi-human in origin or character, as the ape. But it is, perhaps, dangerous to attempt, as Mr. Campbell has done, to push the classification much farther, because the respect paid to any particular animal is possibly based on varied and diverging lines of belief.
Lastly, as Mr. Frazer has shown, many animals are regarded as representing the Corn spirit, and are either revered or killed in their divine forms to promote the return of vegetation with each recurring spring.
Horse-worship.
To illustrate some of these principles from the worship of certain special animals, we may begin with the horse.
War horses were so highly prized by the early Aryans in their battles with the aborigines, that the horse, under the name of Dadhikra, “he that scatters the hoar frost like milk,” soon became an object of worship, and in the Veda we have a spirited account of the worship paid to this godlike being.[6]