Note.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Somadeva Bhatta, active 11th century and Tawney, C. H. (Charles Henry)
Oesterley tells us that in the Turkish Tútínámah (Rosen, II, p. 178,) a sorceress takes the place of Múladeva. She gives the young man a small seal in place of the pill or globule. He is then married to a son of the king’s. Then the young man escapes with the princess, who in the day keeps the seal in her mouth and so appears as a man; then the sorceress goes in the form of a Bráhman to the king, who has to give her 10,000 gold pieces as he cannot give back her daughter. The story is No. 23 in the Persian Tútínámah, Iken, p. 97. Oesterley refers also to the story in the 7th Chapter of the Kathá Sarit Ságara; (Oesterley’s Baitál Pachísí, pages 203–205). The tale in one way resembles the Greek fable of Cæneus, and also that of Tiresias. The story of Iphis and Ianthe is perhaps still more apposite. According to Sir Thomas Brown, (Vulgar Errors, Book III, ch. 17) hares are supposed by some to be both male and female. He mentions Tiresias and Empedocles as instances of “transexion.” Benfey gives a number of stories of this kind in the 1st Volume of his Panchatantra, pp. 41–52. He traces them all back to a tendency of the Indo-Germanic race to look upon their deities as belonging to both sexes at once.
Source notes
1 His name Manaḥsvámin would imply that he ought to be.
2 For gaja the Sanskrit College MS. reads mada.
3 The word siddha also means a class of demigods who travel through the sky: Śaśin means moon.
4 Cp. the shaving, by the help of which Preziosa, in the Pentamerone, turns herself into a bear. (Liebrecht’s translation of the Pentamerone of Basile, Vol. I, p. 212.) As soon as she takes it out of her mouth she resumes her human shape.
5 Compare Vol. I, p. 45.
6 This part of the story bears a certain resemblance to the myth of Achilles.
7 The 10 stages are thus given by Śivadása: (1) Love of the eyes; (2) attachment of the mind (manas); (3) the production of desire; (4) sleeplessness; (5) emaciation; (6) indifference to objects of sense; (7) loss of shame; (8) distraction; (9) fainting; (10) death. (Dr. Zachariæ’s Sixteenth Tale of the Vetálapanchavinśati, in Bezzenberger’s Beiträge).
8 Here the MS. in the Sanskrit College has mantrináśe múlanáśád rakshyá dharmakshatir dhruvam̱, which means, “we should certainly try to prevent virtue from perishing by the destruction of its root in the destruction of the minister.”