ururavas calls himself Vasistha, which,
as we know, is a name of the sun; and if he is called Aido, the son of
Ida, the same name is elsewhere given {69c} to Agni, the fire. '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.' {69d}

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. Muller 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. {70a}

Here, then, as Kuhn says, 'we have three essentially different modes of
interpreting the myth,' {70b} 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 wer