The Ashes of a God. Bain Francis William

27] living at the very bottom of the sea, who has a hundred daughters. And were beauty the necessary weapon in this instance, any one of them would serve the turn, since all of them have bodies formed as it were of ocean-foam, with lips of coral, and eyes like pools, and hair longer than themselves, and voices like the echo of the waves; and only lately I heard them singing all together as I passed, on an island shore, and was myself all but bewitched, so that unawares I paused, hanging in the air to listen, waylaid as it were by the magic and the spell of that melancholy sound, forgetting my journey for the sake of their refrain. But now, since something more is necessary, you must abandon all the others, and betake you to the youngest of them all, who is rightly named Kalánidhi, though she is the ugliest and cleverest woman in the three worlds, for she is a very ocean of craft and trickery and guile,[28] and very knavish in disposition, as full of deception and caprice as the element in which she lives. And if you can get her to assist you, I do not doubt you will succeed. And perhaps, if you tell her that this is a matter in which all the heavenly nymphs have failed, she will help you out of spite; for she is very jealous of them all, and this is a glorious opportunity for her to show herself able to accomplish a thing which has baffled the ingenuity and beauty of everybody else. But certainly, if she either cannot or will not overcome this obstacle, I think that even the elephant-headed Lord of Obstacles himself would fail. For though beauty is a power stronger than any other, it may nevertheless sometimes be successfully resisted. But feminine ingenuity is a far more formidable antagonist, which no man has ever yet successfully encountered since the beginning of the world, since it is half protected by his own innumerable scruples in its favour, being utterly destitute of any sort of scruple of its own. And so, should Kalánidhi assist you, and fail after all, there is nothing to be done: and under the weight of this Brahman's mountain of accumulated merit, you must sink to the very bottom of the ocean of defeat, like an earth bereft of the tortoise to save it on its back.

      1

      The old argument: there is immorality in the stones of the gods; ergo, the men must be the same, is a monotheist calumny. Books like Kingsley's Roman and Teuton, where all the vice is imputed to the Roman, and all the virtue to the Teuton, are

1

The old argument: there is immorality in the stones of the gods; ergo, the men must be the same, is a monotheist calumny. Books like Kingsley's Roman and Teuton, where all the vice is imputed to the Roman, and all the virtue to the Teuton, are merely an inversion of the fact. "The truth is," says Professor Lewis Campbell on Æschylus, "that while religious custom lay upon the Greeks with a weight almost as deep as life, the changing clouds of mythology rested lightly on their minds, and were in their very nature, to some extent, the sport of fancy and imagination." This is equally true of the Hindoos.

2

The dictum of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whose India is merely a misrepresented Anglo-India, that there ain't no Ten Commandments there, is superficially a truism, and essentially a foolish libel. No man has done more to caricature and misinterpret India, in the interests of military vulgarity, than this popular writer, to whom Hindoo India is a book with seven seals.

3

The observations of Mr. Theophilus G. Pinches, on the means by which, in ancient Babylon, "an enlightened monotheism and the grossest polytheism could, and did, exist side by side," apply accurately to India. (The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of Assyria and Babylonia, p. 10.)

4

Olymp. vii.

5

Apud Bocharti Phaleg. p. 184.

6

James Mill's criticism of the Indian ethic is a criminal offence, a sin against literature. The coryphæus of the Inductive Philosophy, dogmatising on a language of which he could not even read a single word!

7

i. e. Maheshwara.

8

That is, so as to touch the ground with all eight parts of the body at once.

9

Legendary dwarfs. Agastya was a very little man.

10

i. e. an animal, a brute; a synonym for the absence of all culture and intelligence.

11

The Lord of Animals, i. e. Shiwa, is the ascetic par excellence.

12

i. e. an ocean of thirst. This thirst, trishá, is the technical name for what Schopenhauer calls the will to live (vitai semper hiantes).

13

Watsa is a term of endearment, equivalent to our "darling"; the whole word means "a heifer." [Pronounce each a like the u in hut.]

14

i. e. Krishna; who solved Plato's old difficulty of the One and the Many, by "keeping company" with each of his love-sick milkmaids at once.

15

Sthiti, the established world-order, is one of the three terms of the universe, as opposed to sarga, its creation, and pralaya, its destruction and end.

16

The smashána is rather a burning-ground than a cemetery. But it is often called pitrigriha– "the home of the fathers," and thus cemetery may stand, as an equivalent.

17

i. e. goblins and vampires.

18

Maheshwara, who is speaking, wears a necklace of skulls.

19

i. e. a naked mendicant ascetic.

20

Nemo potest supra seipsum, said the Schoolmen – a profound observation exactly in harmony with old Hindoo ideas on moral force.

21

i. e. Indra. Mátali is his messenger, the Hindoo Mercury.

22

This singular idea, familiar now to Europe, in the form of the prayer-wheels of Tibet, is not wholly without parallels in the West. The only difference is, that the Hindoos are a very logical people, and carry the absurd to its extreme.

23

The wife of the sage Gautama, with whom Indra had an intrigue that covered him with shame, in more ways than one.

24

Chaturmukha.

25

i. e. Maheshwara himself, who burned Love with fire from his eye.

26

Max Müller, to whom students of the Rig-Weda owe so much, was nevertheless essentially mistaken in saying that the word weda means knowledge. It does not mean knowledge, in our sense of the word, scientific,

28

There is a pun in her name, which as applied to the moon, means a store of digits, but also signifies an ocean of wiles.