first promulgated, goats and sheep were forbidden food.[1]
Turning from the Vedas to the Brahmanas, we find a curiously savage myth of the origin of species.[2] According to this passage of the Brahmana, "this universe was formerly soul only, in the form of Purusha." He caused himself to fall asunder into two parts. Thence arose a husband and a wife. "He cohabited with her; from them men were born. She reflected, 'How does he, after having produced me from himself, cohabit with me? Ah, let me disappear.' She became a cow, and the other a bull, and he cohabited with her. From them kine were produced." After a series of similar metamorphoses of the female into all animal shapes, and a similar series of pursuits by the male in appropriate form, "in this manner pairs of all sorts of creatures down to ants were created." This myth is a parallel to the various Greek legends about the amours in bestial form of Zeus, Nemesis, Cronus, Demeter, and other gods and goddesses. In the Brahmanas this myth is a explanation of the origin of species, and such an explanation as could scarcely have occurred to a civilised mind. In other myths in the Brahmanas, Prajapati creates men from his body, or rather the fluid of his body becomes a tortoise, the tortoise becomes a man (purusha), with similar examples of speculation.[3]
- ↑ Mr. M'Lennan has drawn some singular inferences from this passage, connecting, as it does, certain gods and certain classes of men with certain animals, in a manner somewhat suggestive of totemism (Fortnightly Review), February 1870.
- ↑ Satapatha Brahmana, xiv. 4, 2; Muir, 2d edit., i. 25.
- ↑ Similar tales are found among the Khonds.
