Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 2 of 3: or the Central and Western Rajput States of IndiaTod, James
History
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 2 of 3: or the Central and Western Rajput States of India
Tod, James
Rajasthan (India) -- History; Rajput (Indic people) -- History
=The Forms of Krishna.=—The Tatar nations, who are all of Indu race,
like the Rajputs and German tribes, adored the moon as a male divinity,
and to his son, Budha, they assign the same character of mediator. The
serpent is alike the symbol of the Budha of the Hindus, the Hermes of
the Egyptians, and the Mercury of Greece: and the allegory of the
dragon’s teeth, the origin of letters, brought by Cadmus from Egypt, is
a version of the Hindu fable of Kanhaiya (Apollo) wresting the Vedas
(secrets) from Budha or wisdom (Hermes), under his sign, the serpent or
dragon. We might still further elucidate the resemblance, and by an
analysis of the titles and attributes of the Hindu Apollo, prove that
from the Yamuna may have been supplied the various incarnations of this
divinity, which peopled the pantheons of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. As
Nomios, who attended the herds of Admetus, we have Nonita,[4.20.28] the
infantine appellation of Kanhaiya, when he pastured the kine of Kesava
in the woods of Vindra, whence the ceremony of the sons of princes
assuming the crook, and on particular days tending the flocks.[4.20.29]
As Muralidhara, or the ‘flute-holder,’ Kanhaiya is the god of music; and
in giving him the shepherd’s reed instead of the _vina_ or lyre, we may
conjecture that the simple bamboo (_bans_) which formed the first flute
(_bansli_) was in use before the _chahtara_,[4.20.30] the Grecian
cithara,[4.20.31] the first invented lyre of Apollo. Thus from the
six-wired instrument of the Hindus we have the Greek cithara, the
English cithern, and the Spanish guitar of modern [539] days. The
Greeks, following the Egyptians, had but six notes, with their lettered
symbols; and it was reserved for the Italians to add a seventh. Guido
Aretine, a monk in the thirteenth century, has the credit of this. I,
however, believe the Hindus numbered theirs from the heavenly bodies—the
Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,—hence they had the
regular octave, with its semi-tones: and as, in the pruriency of their
fancy, they converted the ascending and descending notes into _grahas_,
or planetary bodies, so they may have added them to the harmonious
numbers, and produced the _nauragini_, their _nine_ modes of
music.[4.20.32] Could we affirm that the hymns composed and set to music
by Jayadeva, nearly three thousand years ago,[4.20.33] and still chanted
in honour of the Apollo of Vraj, had been handed down with the
sentiments of these mystic compositions (and Sir W. Jones sanctions the
idea), we should say, from their simplicity, that the musicians of that
age had only the diatonic scale; but we have every reason to believe,
from the very elaborate character of their written music, which is
painful and discordant to the ear from its minuteness of subdivision,
that they had also the chromatic scale, said to have been invented by
Timotheus in the time of Alexander, who might have carried it from the
banks of the Indus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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