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"Become a human being, and even in that state you shall not enjoy the happiness of married life. When you are a maiden of sixteen years, you shall abandon the body and come here. But an ugly mortal, who has become such by a curse, on account of his falling in love with the daughter of a hermit, and who possesses a magic sword, shall then become your husband, and he shall carry you off against your will to the world of mortals. There you, being unchaste, shall be separated from your husband. Because that husband in a former life carried off the wives of eight other men, he shall endure sorrow enough for eight births. And you, having become a mortal by the loss of your supernatural science, shall endure in that one birth the sufferings of eight births.[1] For to every one the association with the evil gives an evil lot, but to women the union with an evil husband is equivalent to evil. And having lost your memory of the past, you shall there take many mortal husbands, because you obstinately persisted in detesting the husband fitted for you. That Vidyádhara Madanaprabha, who, being equal in birth, demanded you in marriage, shall become a mortal king and at last become your husband. Then you shall be freed from your curse, and return to your own world, and you shall obtain that suitable match, who shall have returned to his Vidyadhara state." So that maiden Anangaprabhá has become Anangarati on the earth, and returning to her parents, has once more become Anangaprabhá.
"So go to Vírapura and conquer in fight her father, though he is possessed of knowledge and protected by his high birth, and obtain that maiden. Now take this sword, and as long as you hold it in your hand, you will be able to travel through the air, and moreover you will be invincible." Having said this, and having given the sword to him, the goddess vanished, and he woke up, and beheld in Ids hand a heavenly sword. Then Jívadatta rose up delighted and praised Durgá, and all the exhaustion produced by
- ↑ Compare the remarkable passage which M. Lévêque quotes from the works of Empedocles (Les Mythes et les Legendes de l' Inde, p. 90).
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I have adopted the readings of Ritter and Preller, in their Historia Philosophiæ, in preference to those of M. Lévêque. It is clear that Empedocles supposed himself to be a Vidyádhara fallen from heaven in consequence of a curse. As I observed in an article in the Calcutta Review of 1875, "The Bhagavad Gítá and Christianity," his personality is decidedly Indian.
