BOOK I.
another phase she is Kalypsô, the beautiful night which veils the sun
from mortal eyes in her chamber flashing with a thousand stars, and
lulls to sleep the man of many griefs and wanderings.[1] Lastly, she is
St. Ursula, with her eleven thousand virgins (the myriad stars), whom
Cardinal Wiseman, in a spirit worthy of Herodotos, transforms into a
company, or rather two companies, of English ladies, martyred by
the Huns at Cologne, but whose mythical home is on Horselberg,
where the faithful Eckhart is doomed to keep his weary watch.
Labouring on in his painful rationalism, Cardinal Wiseman tells us
of one form of the legend which mentions a marriage-contract made
with the father of St. Ursula, a very powerful king, by which it was
arranged that she should have eleven companions, and each of these
a thousand followers.[2] There are thus twelve, in addition to the
eleven thousand attendants, and these twelve reappear in the Hindu
tales, sometimes in dark, sometimes in lustrous forms, as the twelve
hours of the day or night, or the twelve moons of the lunar year.
Thus in the story of Truth's Triumph a raja has twelve wives, but
no children. At length he marries Guzra Bai, the flower girl, who
bears him a hundred sons and one daughter; and the sequel of the
tale relates the result of their jealousy against these children and
their mother. Their treacherous dealing is at last exposed, and
they suffer the fate of all like personages in the German and Norse
tales.
The battle of light and darkness. There is, in fact, no end to the many phases assumed by the struggle of these fairy beings, which is the warfare between light and darkness. But the bright beings always conquer in the end, and return like Persephonê from the abode of Hades to gladden the heart of the Mater Dolorosa.[3] The child in the Deccan stories appears not only as Guzra Bai, but as Panch Phul Ranee, as Surya Bai, as the wife of Muchie Lai, the fish or frog-sun.[4] All these
- ↑ Od. V. 60, c:c.
- ↑ Essays on Religion and Literarure, edited by Archbishop Manning (1865), p. 252.
- ↑ Grote, History of Greece, i. 55.
- ↑ The frog prince or princess is only one of the thou and personifications of names denoting originally the phenomena of day and night. As carrying the morning light from the east to the west, the sun is the bull bearing Europe from the purple land (Phoinikia); and the same changes which converted the Seven Shiners into the .Seven .Sages, or the Seven .Sleepers of Ephesus, or the Seven Champions of Christendom, or the Seven Bears, transformed the sun into a wolf, a bear, a lion, a swan. As resting on the horuon in the morn-
Mylitta, the Syrian moon-goddess.—Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, second series, "Melusina." Mr. Gould connects Melusina, as first seen close to a fountain, with the Apsaras, or water-maidens, of Vedic mythology, and the swan maidens of Teutonic legend. She thus belongs to the race of Naiads, Nixies, and Elves, the latter name denoting a running stream, as the Elbe, the Alpheios. The fish's or serpent's tail is not peculiar to Melusina, and her attributes are also shared with the Assyrian fish-gods, and the Hellenic Proteus.