24

Appendix 24

Eduard Stucken (Astralmythen, pp. 190ff.) and, later, F. W. Albright (JAOS 40, pp. 329f.) drew attention to the very same method employed when Rishyasringa, son of Vibhandaka (son of Kashyapa) and a hind, was lured by a courtesan, ordered by King Lomapada, into the latter’s town, because only with Rishyasringa present would the country have rain. (Compare H. Luders, “Die Sage von Rsyasrnga,” in *Philologica *Indica [1940], pp. 1-42; also Luders, “Zur Sage von Rsyasrnga,” Philologica Indica, pp. 43-73.)

The major difference between GE and the story told in the Mahabharata 3.110-13 (Roy trans., vol. 2, pp. 242-48) is that Father Vibhandaka is the one “whose body was covered with hair down to the tip of the nails . . . and whose life was pure and was passed in religious meditation”; seduced is the son, not a hairy one, apparently, but “there was a horn on the head of that magnanimous saint”. “Saints” they were both — those Indians of “high and far-off times” were in the habit of building up tapas, “ascetic heat,” an instrument of the utmost cosmic “efficiency,” if we may style it thus.