tories are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana.(2) Fires are
not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be lighted under the stars
called Krittikas, the Pleiades. The reason is that the stars were the
wives of the bears (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as
the Rishis (sages) were originally called the Rikshas (bears). But the
wives of the bears were excluded from the society of their husbands, for
the bears rise in the north and their wives in the east. Therefore
the worshipper should not set up his fires under the Pleiades, lest
he should thereby be separated from the company of his wife. The
Brahmanas(3) also tell us that Prajapati had an unholy passion for his
daughter, who was in the form of a doe. The gods made Rudra fire an
arrow at Prajapati to punish him; he was wounded, and leaped into the
sky, where he became one constellation and his daughter another, and the
arrow a third group of stars. In general, according to the Brahmanas,
"the stars are the lights of virtuous men who go to the heavenly
world".(4)

(1) Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths"; Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; J. G.
Muller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53.

(2) Sacred Books of the East, i. 283-286.

(3) Aitareya Bramana, iii. 33.

(4) Satapatha Brahmana, vi. 5, 4, 8. For Greek examples, Hesiod,
Ovid, and the Catasterismoi, attributed to Eratosthenes, are useful
authorities. Probably many of the tales in Eratosthenes are late
fictions consciously moulded on traditional data.

Passing from savage myths explanatory of the nature of celestial bodies
to myths accounting for the formation and colour and habits of beasts,
birds and fishes, we find ourselves, as an old Jesuit missionary says,
in the midst of a barbarous version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It has been
shown that the possibility of interchange of form between man and beast
is part of the working belief of everyday existence among the lower
peoples. They regard all things as on one level, or, to use an old
political phrase, they "level up" everything to equality with the human
status. Thus Mr. Im Thurn, a very good observer, found that to the
Indians of Guiana "all objects, animate or inaminate, seem exactly
of the same nature, except that they differ by the accident of bodily
form". Clearly to grasp this entirely natural conception of primitive
man, the civilised student must make a great effort to forget for a time
all that science has taught him of the differ