There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the same character in which the stars are accounted for as transformed human adventurers. It has often been shown[1] that this opinion is practically of world-wide distribution. We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, among the Bushmen, in North and South America, among the Eskimo, in ancient Egypt, in New Zealand, in ancient India—briefly, wherever we look. The Sanskrit forms of these myths have been said to arise from confusion as to the meaning of words. But is it credible that, in all languages, however different, the same kind of unconscious puns should have led to the same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous, and Greek star-myths (such as that of Callisto, first changed into a bear and then into a constellation) are familiar to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit star-stories are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana.[2] Fires are not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be lighted under the stars called Krittikâs, the Pleiades. The reason is that the stars were the wives of the bears (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as the Rishis (sages) were originally called the Bikshas (bears). But the wives of the bears were excluded from the society of their husbands, for the bears rise in the north and their wives in the east. Therefore the worshipper should not set up his fires under the Pleiades, lest he should thereby be separated from the company of his wife. The Brah-
- ↑ Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths;" Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; J. G. Müller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53.
- ↑ Sacred Books of the East, i. 283–286.
