BOOK
whose harp is the harp of Orpheus, rousing all things into Hfe and
energy. With these maidens he dances, hke Apollon with the Muses,
each maiden fancying that she alone is his partner (an idea which we
find again in the story of the sorcerer Naraka). Only Radha, who
loved Krishna with an absorbing affection, saw things as they really
were, and withdrew herself from the company. In vain Krishna
sent maidens to soothe her and bring her back. To none would she
listen, until the god came to her himself His words soon healed the
wrong, and so great was his joy with her that he lengthened the night
which followed to the length of six months, an incident which has but
half preserved its meaning in the myth of Zeus and Alkmene, but
which here points clearly to the six months which Persephone spends
with her mother Demeter. The same purely solar character is im-
pressed on the myth in the Bhagavata Purana, which relates how
Brahma, wishing to prove whether Krishna was or was not an
incarnation of Vishnu, came upon him as he and Balarama were
sleeping among the shepherd youths and maidens. All these Brahma
took away and shut up in a distant prison, and Krishna and his
brother on awaking found themselves alone. Balarama proposed to
go in search of them. Krishna at once created the same number of
youths and maidens so precisely like those which had been taken
away that when Brahma returned at the end of a year, he beheld
to his astonishment the troop which he fancied that he had broken
up. Hurrying to the prison he found that none had escaped from it,
and thus convinced of the power of Krishna, he led all his prisoners
back to him, who then suffered the phantasms which he had evoked
to vanish away. Here Ave have the sleep of the sun-god which in other
myths becomes the sleep of Persephone and Brynhild, of Endymion or
Adonis, — the slumber of autumn when the bright clouds are imprisoned
in the cave of Cacus or the Panis, while the new-created youths and
maidens represent merely the days and months which come round again
as in the years that had passed away. In his solar character Krishna
must again be the slayer of the Dragon or Black Snake, Kalinak, the
old serpent with the thousand heads, who, like Vitra or the Sphinx,
poisons or shuts up the waters.^ In the fight which follows, and
as the Inrlra of the cows thou shalt be many bruises were inflicted on the hood called Govinda." — Vishnu Purana, H. by the pressure of the toes of Krishna. II. Wilson, 528. Among the many foes conquered by
' The F/>/^;/w /V/rawa (Wilson, 514) Krishna is Naraka, from whom he tells us how, stirred up by the incite- rescues elephants, horses, women, &c, ments of Nanda, Krishna lays hold of "At an auspicious season he espoused the middle hood of the chief of the all the maidens whom Naraka had snakes with both hands, and, bending carried off from their friends. At one it down, dances upon it in triumph. and the same moment he received the Whenever the snake attempted to raise hands of all of them, according to the Ids head, it was again trodden down, and ritual, in separate mansions. Sixteen
