Swan,

Part Third.

THE ANIMALS OF THE WATER.

ZOOLOGICAL MYTHOLOGY;

OR

THE LEGENDS OF ANIMALS.

First Part.

THE ANIMALS OF THE EARTH.

CHAPTER V.

THE HOG, THE WILD BOAR, AND THE HEDGEHOG.

SUMMARY.

The hog as a hero disguise.—The disguises of the hero and of the heroine.—Ghoshâ, the leprous maiden.—The moon in the well.—Apâlâ cured by Indras.—Apâlâ has the dress of a hog.—Godhâ, the persecuted maiden in a hog's dress.—The hogs eat the apples in the maiden's stead.—The meretricious Circe and the hogs.—Porcus and upodaras.—The wild boar god in India and in Persia.—Tydœus, the wild boar.—The wild boar of Erymanthos.—The wild boar of Meleagros.—The Vedic monster wild boar.—The dog and the pig.—Puloman, the wild boar, burned.—The hog in the fire.—The hog cheats the wolf.—The astute hedgehog.—The hedgehog, the wild boar, and the hog are presages of water.—The porcupine and its quills; the comb and the dense forest.—The ears and the heart of the wild boar.—The wild boar and the hog at Christmas.—The devil a wild boar.—The heroes killed by the wild boar.—The tusk of the wild boar now life-giving, now deadly; the dead man's tooth.—The hero asleep; the hero becomes a eunuch; the lettuce-eunuch eaten by Adonis, prior to his being killed by the wild boar.

The hog, as well as the wild boar, is another disguise of the solar hero in the night—another of the forms very often assumed by the sun, as a mythical hero, in the darkness or clouds. He adopts this form in order sometimes to hide himself from his persecutors, sometimes to exterminate them, and sometimes on account of a divine or demoniacal malediction. This form is sometimes a dark and demoniacal guise assumed by the hero; on which account the poem of Hyndla, in the Edda calls the hog a hero's animal. Often, however, it represents the demon himself. When the solar hero enters the domain of evening, the form he had of a handsome youth or splendid prince disappears; but he himself, as a general rule, does not die along with it; he only passes into another, an uglier, and a monstrous form. The black bull, the black horse, the grey horse, the hump-backed horse, the ass, and the goat, are all forms of the same disguise with which we are already acquainted. The thousand-bellied Indras, who has lost his testicles; Arǵunas, who disguises himself as a eunuch; Indras, Vishṇus, Zeus, Achilleüs, Odin, Thor, Helgi, and many other mythical heroes, who disguise themselves as women; and the numerous beautiful heroines who, in mythology and tradition, disguise themselves as bearded men, are all ancient forms under which was represented the passage of either the sun or the aurora of evening into the darkness, cloud, ocean, forest, grotto, or hell of night. The hero lamed, blinded, bound, drowned, or buried in a wood, can be understood when referred respectively to the sun which is thrown down the mountain-side, which is lost in the darkness, which is held fast by the fetters of the darkness, which plunges into the ocean of night, or which hides itself from our sight in the nocturnal forest. The illumined and illuminating sun, when it ceases to shine in the dark night, becomes devoid of sight, devoid of intelligence, and stupid. The handsome solar hero becomes ugly when, with the night, his splendour ceases; the strong, red, healthy, solar hero, who pales and grows dark in the night, becomes ill. We still say in Italy that the sun is ill when we see it lose its brightness, and, as it were, grow pale.

In the 117th hymn of the first book of the Ṛigvedas, the Açvinâu cure the leprous daughter of Kakshîvant, Ghoshâ, who is growing old without a husband in her father's house, and find her a husband; the Açvinâu deliver the aurora from the darkness of night, and marry her.[1]

In the eightieth hymn of the eighth book of the Ṛigvedas, the same myth occurs again with relation to Indras, and in a more complete form. We have already remarked, in the first book of the Ṛigvedas, the maiden Apâlâ who descends from the mountain to draw water, and draws up the somas (ambrosia, or else the moon, whence, as it seems to me, the origin of the