'The conclusion of the argument is that
antiquity spoke of the naked sun, and of the chaste dawn hiding her
face when she had seen her husband. Yet she says she will come again.
And after the sun has travelled through the world in search of his
beloved, when he comes to the threshold of Death and is going to end
his solitary life, she appears again, in the gloaming, the same as the
dawn, as Eos in Homer, begins and ends the day, and she carries him
away to the golden seats of the Immortals.'[64]

Kuhn objects to all this explanation, partly on what we think the
inadequate ground that there is no necessary connection between the
story of Urvasi (thus interpreted) and the ritual of sacred
fire-lighting. Connections of that sort were easily invented at random
by the compilers of the Brahmanas in their existing form. Coming to
the analysis of names, Kuhn finds in Urvasi 'a weakening of Urvanki
(_uru_ + _anc_), like _yuvaca_ from _yuvanka_, Latin _juvencus_; ...
the accent is of no decisive weight.' Kuhn will not be convinced that
Pururavas is the sun, and is unmoved by the ingenious theory of 'a
crying colour,' denoted by his name, and the inference, supported by
such words as _rufus_, that crying colours are red, and therefore
appropriate names of the red sun. The connection between Pururavas and
Agni, fire, is what appeals to Kuhn--and, in short, where Mr. Mueller
sees a myth of sun and dawn, Kuhn recognises a fire-myth. Roth, again
(whose own name means _red_), far from thinking that Urvasi is 'the
chaste dawn,' interprets her name as _die geile_, that is, 'lecherous,
lascivious, lewd, wanton, obscene'; while Pururavas, as 'the Roarer,'
suggests 'the Bull in rut.' In accordance with these views Roth
explains the myth in a fashion of his own.[65]

Here, then, as Kuhn says, 'we have three essentially different modes
of interpreting the myth,'[66] all three founded on philological
analysis of the names in the story. No better example could be given
to illustrate the weakness of the philological method. In the first
place, that method relies on names as the primitive relics and germs
of the tale, although the tale may occur where the names have never
been heard, and though the names are, presumably, late additions to a
story in which the characters were originally anonymous. Again, the
most illustrious etymologists differ absolutely about the true sense
of the names. Kuhn is disposed to see fire everywhere, and
fire-myths