The history of the turnskin leads up to several conclusions, of which the most important is, that superstitions often grow uglier as they grow older. They descend, they rarely ascend. This experience should make us pause before we pronounce hideous beliefs to be, in a true sense, primitive. The idea of transformation is one of the oldest of human ideas, much older than transmigration, but at the outset, far from lending itself to such repulsive applications as man-tigers and demon-men, it gave birth to some of the fairest passages in the poetry of mankind which he calls his religion. It is impossible to imagine a more beautiful myth than the Vedic belief in the swan-maidens, the Apsarases who, by putting on skirts of swan feathers, could become swans. Their swan-skirts stretch from the hot East to the cold North, for they are the same that are worn by the Valkyries. All these early legends of swans bring into particularly clear light the moral identity of the impressions received from things seen by man at the bottom and at the top of the ladder of intellectual progress. Natural objects, lovely or terrible, raise archetypal images of things lovely or terrible which in our minds remain shapeless but to which the primitive man gives a local habitation and a name. Swans, sailing on still waters or circling above our heads, inspire us with indefinite longings which took form in the myth of the Apsarases and appear again in the Vedic story of the sage who, by deep knowledge and holiness, became a golden swan and flew away to the sun. To this day, if the Hindu sees a flight of swans wending its mysterious way across the sky, he repeats the saying almost mechanically (as a Catholic crosses himself if he pass a shrine): “The soul flies away, and none can go with it.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XIV THE HORSE AS HERO