THE CUCKOO, THE HERON, THE HEATHCOCK, THE PARTRIDGE, THE NIGHTINGALE, THE SWALLOW, THE SPARROW, AND
- Date of account
- English edition published 1872
- Source
- Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2)
- Reference
- Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2) · selected passage 52
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
l wolf, the malignant spirit, from the path of the devotees, the wolf that besieges the roads, thieving, fraudulent, double-dealing.[221] The poet, after having called the enemy Vrikas, prays, with imprecations, that he may lacerate his own body;[222] and the wild beast, full of witchcraft,[223] which Indras kills, is …
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyl wolf, the malignant spirit, from the path of the devotees, the wolf that besieges the roads, thieving, fraudulent, double-dealing.[221] The poet, after having called the enemy Vrikas, prays, with imprecations, that he may lacerate his own body;[222] and the wild beast, full of witchcraft,[223] which Indras kills, is probably a wolf. But, besides this, I think I can find in the _Rigvedas_ the _lupus piscator_ of Russian and Western tradition; (according to Ælianos there were wolves friendly to fishermen near the Palus Moeotis.) In the fifty-sixth hymn of the eighth book, Matsyas (the fish) invokes the Âdityas (that is, the luminous gods) to free him and his from the jaws of the wolf. So in another strophe of the same hymn, we must in reason suppose that it is a fish that speaks when she who has a terrible son (_i.e._, the mother of the sun) is invoked as protectress from him who in the shallow waters endeavours to kill him.[224] We also find a fish lying in shallow water explicitly mentioned in another hymn;[225] which proves to us the image of the fish without water, which was widely developed in later Hindoo tradition, to have been in the Vedic age already a familiar one.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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