the Nile. Souls of Pharaohs were fed on milk provided by, among other goddesses, the vultures of Upper and Lower Egypt “with long hair and hanging breasts”[1] who were the female counterparts of Hapi, the Nile god. “Water of life” was not ordinary water. It contained “life-substance.” “The water of King Unis is wine like (that of) Ra.”[2] Nut with “long hair and pendant breasts”[3] provided celestial milk—the milk of “the Milky Way.” Hathor, who poured out the “water of life” from her sycamore, provided, apparently, sycamore-fig “milk” or water impregnated with fig milk. Siret[4] has recently called attention to the fact that the Tiber was anciently called “Rumon,” a name derived from ruma (milk) like rumen (teat). Figs were sometimes called “teats.” The ancient Romans who revered the goddess of the sky and of the ruminal fig tree connected her with the Tiber, which they believed was impregnated with “terrestial milk” from the “Milky Way” (“Milk of Juno”) and with the “milk” nourished the earth. Deva Rumina was one of the names of the All-nursing mother goddess. We meet, in Hindu mythology, with the “Sea of Milk”[5] and, as in Celtic, with rivers of wine, mead, etc. In Greece “fig milk” was an elixir and was given to newly-born children.
The Scottish “milk tree” was the hazel, which was connected with the sky and the sacred well and river. The
- ↑ Breasted, op. cit. p. 30.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 137.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 139.
- ↑ L'Anthropologie, 1921.
- ↑ In the Udyoga Parva of the Maha-bharata (Section ci: Roy's trans, pp. 309 et seq.) it is “Milky Ocean,” which was created by “a single jet only of her (the Mother Cow goddess's) milk falling on the earth.” The verge of this ocean “is always covered with white foam resembling a belt of flowers.” Ascetics are called “Foam drinkers” because they live “on nothing else save that foam.” The Cow Mother is mother of the four cows of the cardinal points. The “waters” of “Milky Ocean” “had all been mixed with the milk of these four cows.” At the “churning of the Ocean” the waters gave forth Amrita, the “prince of steeds,” the “best of gems” and the goddess Lakshmi. “Milk-yielding trees” are referred to in Bhishma Parva, section vii.
