Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
The best known example of this variant of the tale is the story of
Bheki, in Sanskrit. Mr. Max Müller has interpreted the myth in
accordance with his own method.[79] His difficulty is to account for
the belief that a king might marry a frog. Our ancestors, he remarks,
'were not idiots,' how then could they tell such a story? We might
reply that our ancestors, if we go far enough back, were savages, and
that such stories are the staple of savage myth. Mr. Müller, however,
holds that an accidental corruption of language reduced Aryan fancy to
the savage level. He explains the corruption thus: 'We find, in
Sanskrit, that Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one
day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked
her to be his wife. She consented, _on condition that he should never
show her a drop of water_. One day, being tired, she asked the king
for water; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bheki
disappeared.' This myth, Mr. Müller holds, 'began with a short saying,
such as that "Bheki, the sun, will die at the sight of water," as we
should say that the sun will set, when it approaches the water from
which it rose in the morning.' But how did the sun come to be called
Bheki, 'the frog'? Mr. Müller supposes that this name was given to the
sun by some poet or fisherman. He gives no evidence for the following
statement: 'It can be shown that "frog" was used as a name for the
sun. Now at sunrise and sunset, when the sun was squatting on the
water, it was called the "frog."' At what historical period the
Sanskrit-speaking race was settled in seats where the sun rose and set
in water, we do not know, and 'chapter and verse' are needed for the
statement that 'frog' was actually a name of the sun. Mr. Müller's
argument, however, is that the sun was called 'the frog,' that people
forgot that the frog and sun were identical, and that Frog, or Bheki,
was mistaken for the name of a girl to whom was applied the old saw
about dying at sight of water. 'And so,' says Mr. Müller, 'the change
from sun to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the
mere spell of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to
miraculous charms more familiar to a later age.' As a matter of fact,
magical metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest
savages than to people in a 'later age.' Magic, as Castren observes,
'belongs to the lowest known stages of civilisation.' Mr. Müller's
theory, however, is this--that a Sanskrit-speaking people, living
where the sun rose out of and set in some ocean, called the sun, as he
touched the water, Bheki, the frog, and said he would die at the sight
of water. They ceased to call the sun the frog, or Bheki, but kept the
saying, 'Bheki will die at sight of water.' Not knowing who or what
Bheki might be, they took her for a frog, who also was a pretty wench.
Lastly, they made the story of Bheki's distinguished wedding and
mysterious disappearance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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