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The Religion of the Veda

book of Genesis.[1] Many echoes are called up by the story of Cyavana the Bhārgava who, old and decrepit as a ghost, is pelted with clods by the children of the neighborhood. Then he punishes their families by creating discord, so that "father fought with son, and brother with brother." Cyavana finally, through the help of the divine physicians, the Açvins, enters the fountain of youth (queckbronn) and marries the lovely Sukanyā.[2] Like an oasis in the desert comes the ancient tale of Purūravas and Urvaçī, whose mythic meaning has been much disputed or altogether denied.[3] Already the Rig-Veda knows the story, and the Hindu master-poet Kālidāsa, perhaps a thousand years later, derives from it one of his loveliest dramas. It is a story which contains the same motif as the Undine, Melusine, and Lohengrin stories. A heavenly nymph (Apsaras), Urvaçī by name, loves and marries King Purūravas, but she abandons him again because he violates one of the conditions of this intrinsically ill-assorted

  1. ↑ See Eggeling's translation of the version of this legend in the Çatapatha Brāhmana, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xii., p. 216 ff. For the story of the flood in general see Usener, Die Sintflutsagen (Bonn, 1899); Andree, Die Flutsagen (Brunswick, 1891); and Winternitz in Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, vol. xxxi (1901), p. 305.
  2. ↑ Çatapatha Brāhmana 4. 1. 5. 1 ff.
  3. ↑ See, last, the author in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. xx., p. 180.
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