A girl dreams of her lover who has fallen into the water; she tries to save him, but first has to pull seaweed and sea-grass from the water; then she catches him. In an African myth the hero, after his act, must first be disentangled from the seaweed. In a Polynesian myth the hero's ship was encoiled by the tentacles of a gigantic polyp. Rê's ship is encoiled by a night serpent on its night journey on the sea. In the poetic rendering of the history of Buddha's birth by Sir Edwin Arnold ("The Light of Asia," p. 5) the motive of an embrace is also found:
"Queen Maya stood at noon, her days fulfilled,
Under a Palso in the palace grounds,
A stately trunk, straight as a temple shaft,
With crown of glossy leaves and fragrant blooms;
And knowing the time come—for all things knew—
The conscious tree bent down its boughs to make
A bower about Queen Maya's majesty:
And earth put forth a thousand sudden flowers
To spread a couch: while ready for the bath
The rock hard by gave out a limpid stream
Of crystal flow. So brought she forth the child."[65]
We come across a very similar motive in the cult legend of the Samian Hera. Yearly it was claimed that the image disappeared from the temple, was fastened somewhere on the seashore on a trunk of a Lygos tree and wound about with its branches. There it was "found," and was treated with wedding-cake. This feast is undoubtedly a [Greek: i(ero\s ga/mos] (ritual marriage), because in Samos there was a legend that Zeus had first had a long-continued secret love relation with Hera. In Plataea
