T&F Proofs: Not for distribution 18 Running head Myth Herman Tull History German Romanticism and the Study of Myth F. Max Müller Late Nineteenth-Century Developments The Study of Vedic Mythology The Study of Post-Vedic Mythology: Epic and Purāṇa Concluding Reflections Modern studies of myth invariably begin by pointing out that, for scholars studying culture, history, and religion, the term “myth” does not mean what it is commonly understood to mean, namely, something false or unfounded (Cohen 1969: 337; Doniger 1998: 1; Dundes 1984: 1; Eliade 1963: 1; Middleton 1967: x). As Percy Cohen points out, this usage is “almost always intended pejoratively: here my beliefs are a strong conviction, yours a dogma, his a myth” (1969: 337). Looking beyond (or beneath) the modern sense of myth as falsehood, scholars point to the primary role of myth in traditional societies, in which it appears as a sacred narrative, one that frequently speaks of origins and, in particular, is “shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it” (Doniger 1998: 2; cf. Cohen 1969: 337; Dundes 1984: 1; Eliade 1963: 5). Yet, despite the scholarly distaste for the notion of myth as falsehood, it is not a bad place to begin delving into myth, for it reflects the fact that myths open windows into unreachable realms and that they therefore do not reflect and are not subject to everyday notions of truth. But, of course, not being true in an ordinary sense does not mean that myths are falsehoods (if they are not subject to ordinary notions of truth, then, too, they are not subject to ordinary notions of falsehood). The difficulty of locating myth is apparent in an observation made by Mircea Eliade, one of the premier historians of religion of the latter half of the twentieth century, that myth is a “true history” describing the acts of “Supernatural Beings” who existed in the long-ago of the “transcendent times of the ‘beginnings’ ” (1963: 6; cf. Pettazzoni 1984: 99). Yet, this “true history” describes something that has 1 252 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull Running no empirical existence and hence, is neither “true” nor “history” in head the ordinary sense of these words. Cohen, in presenting a survey and general assessment of modern theories of myth, avoids these notions of truth and falsehood by noting that myths narrate events that often belong to their own world; Cohen’s definition is a comprehensive one and largely agrees with the characterizations of myth proposed by other modern scholars: “A myth is a narrative of events; the narrative has a sacred quality; the sacred communication is made in symbolic form; at least some of the events and objects which occur in the myth neither occur nor exist in the world other than that of myth itself; and the myth refers in dramatic form to origins of transformations” (1969: 337; cf. Honko 1984: 48–51). History Notwithstanding Cohen’s definition, the notion of myth as falsehood is deeply embedded in the word’s history. The English word “myth” descends directly from the Greek mythos, a word widely used for a tale or a speech that, particularly as used in epic language, denoted a powerfully persuasive type of speech (Kirk 1970: 8; Lincoln 1999: 12–17). By Plato’s time, however, and in his usage, mythos primarily indicates the stories told by the poets about the gods, stories that taken as a whole are seen as largely false (Republic 377a, d). Along with their falsity, Plato rues what he sees as the deplorable values represented in the Greek myths, citing both the wars, plots, and family intrigues between the gods and the gods’ deceptive natures (Republic 377–80; see also Lincoln 1999: 37–42), and concludes that the old myths must be abandoned. Plato, however, also follows earlier Greek usage in acknowledging the persuasive power of mythos; accordingly, in the Republic, he suggests that myths—when chosen judiciously—be employed to educate the young; indeed, insofar as myths promote uplifting values, Plato states that the false may be treated as true (Republic 382d). Within a few centuries, along with the growth and establishment of Christianity, even this slightly positive assessment of myth is lost. For the Christian church, myth stood in opposition to biblical narrative, the one true and authoritative source of sacred history; accordingly, at least up to Renaissance times, myth remained relegated to the shadowy realm of the false story (Lincoln 1999: 47). German Romanticism and the Study of Myth The modern rehabilitation of myth—and the modern study of the mythology of India—coincided with, and was to a great degree impelled by, the emergence of the German nationalist and romantic movements in 1 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Myth 253 Running the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A key element in head this coordinate development was the idea of the Volk—literally, “folk”—but more extensively referring to a people as defined by certain shared cultural and racial characteristics, people whose ancestral heritage was preserved in their tales (“folktales”) and myths. In an odd confluence of historical factors, just as German intellectuals were developing their ideas about the Volk—and seeking out their own ancestral Volk—translations from Sanskrit texts (e.g., William Jones’ Śakuntalā and Horace H. Wilson’s Hitopadeśa) became available for the first time in Europe. The results of this confluence are clearly visible in the work of Johann Herder (1744–1803), a seminal figure in the early German romantic movement. He, like so many of the later German romantics, extracted a glorified image of India from his reading of the Hindu texts. Depicting the ancient Indians as “pure” and “childlike”— particularly in their conception of the divine—Herder saw ancient India as the first stage in mankind’s cultural development, a development from which Greek, Roman, and eventually European cultures emerged; in other words, for Herder, ancient India represented Europe’s own “childhood” (Halbfass 1988: 69–71; Lincoln 1999: 52–54).1 Herder’s idiosyncratic ideas—which over time undoubtedly would have disappeared on their own—received unexpected support from the nascent study of Indic languages. William Jones, famed eighteenth-century British Orientalist, jurist, and linguist, in his oft-celebrated third address to the Asiatic Society, declared that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin (and so too by extension the modern Romance languages) had a common origin: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin…yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source. (Jones 1993a: 173) Although Jones’ assessment was absolutely correct—indeed, its prescience is still celebrated to this day—as Bruce Lincoln has recently shown, its basis was more tenuous and slightly less original than is generally supposed (1999: 81–93), for it appears that Jones’ ideas about language were driven in part by his romantic notion that ancient man lived in a single ur-culture, the existence of which he had already attempted to prove in a groundbreaking comparative study of Greek, Roman, and Indian mythology, in which he showed a number of spurious connections between the ancient gods (1993b: 179). 1 254 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull F. Max Müller Running head These several streams—the nascent field of comparative philology, the romantic notion of and yearning for a common childlike past, and a deep, though often unrealistic fascination with ancient India—culminate in the second half of the nineteenth century in the work of F. Max Müller, who was a Sanskrit scholar and an astute student of religion and produced a copious body of scholarly and popular publications. Although Müller’s work was paradigmatic in establishing the value of studying mythology as a means of understanding religion, Müller is often remembered for his unfortunate theory that myths result from a “disease of language” (see Dorson 1955: 25; Stone 2002: 3–5). In brief, according to this theory, myths originate from the misunderstanding or perversion of mankind’s aboriginal language, a language Müller believed to be pure, simple, and childlike: There was a tendency to change the original conception of divine powers, to misunderstand the many names given to these powers, and to misinterpret the praises addressed to them. In this manner, some of the divine names were changed into half-divine, half-human heroes, and at least the mythes which were true and intelligible as told originally of the sun, or the dawn, or the storms, were turned into legends or fables too marvelous to be believed of common mortals. (Müller 1867b: 259–60)2 In Müller’s schematization, myths emerged directly from mankind’s urperiod and thus contained not only a great deal of man’s aboriginal yearnings and thoughts, but also the earliest forms of the human religious imagination. Unfortunately, once formed into myths, these noble thoughts became “absurd and irrational”—evidenced, Müller noted even among the ancient Greeks and “honest Brahmans,” who were shocked by the immoral elements contained in the stories told of their gods (1867a: 11, 14); however, Müller also believed that through the comparative study of ancient language this largely meaningless mythical veneer could be penetrated. Continuing in the tradition of the German romantics and bolstered by the evidence he saw in the comparison of languages, Müller proposed that the earliest glimmerings of man’s “childhood” could be seen nowhere more clearly than in the ancient Indian Vedic texts (ca. 1600 BCE), the authors of which Müller argued were the direct ancestors of the Germanic and European people: “An unbroken chain connects our own generation with the ancestors of the Aryan race…and the Veda is the oldest book we have in which we have to study the first beginnings of our language and all that is embedded in language” (Müller 1873: 4). Müller imagined that the Vedic 1 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Myth 255 Running head texts preserved a mythology that was not yet tainted by misunderstanding and misinterpretation; it was, in his words “a whole world of primitive, natural, and intelligible mythology” that reflected the simple expression of the “human mind endowed with the natural consciousness of a divine power.” This divine power was that of the natural world, particularly that found in solar phenomena, as evidenced by the “original” names of the Vedic gods—Sūrya, “sun”; Dyaus, “sky”—before they became mired in mythologies of marriages, offspring, and human and divine relations (Müller 1867a: 75–77). Late Nineteenth-Century Developments Although many of Müller’s ideas were short-lived, his influence on the study of Hindu mythology was profound.3 In particular, Müller changed the way in which scholars viewed myths; though he saw myths themselves as the perversions of some original, nobler aspirations, he strongly affirmed that underlying myths were layers of deep meaning—if not profound truth— awaiting interpretation, a principle that remains standard for modern historians of religion (although vastly different interpretive tools—among them the insights of psychoanalysis and structuralism [see O’Flaherty 1980: 5–7]—have taken the place of Müller’s generally flawed linguistic approach). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, anthropologists and folklorists, following the lead of E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang (who was a fierce opponent of Müller’s theories of mythology [see Dorson 1968: 208–12]), moved sharply away from the romantic approach that depicted myths as the preserve of early man’s noble aspirations. In its place, they asserted that early man lived largely in a state of savagery and that myths and folklore were “survivals” from the “lower” stages of human culture, the flotsam and jetsam of a rude past that remained irrationally preserved in modern thought. As Richard Dorson has observed of this position: “While the main march of mankind is upward, from savagery through barbarism to ascending levels of civilization, relics of savagery, such as witchcraft, still survive among civilized peoples, and occasionally burst into revivals, as in the fad of spiritualism, a revival of primitive sorcery” (1968: 193). Though the implicit social evolutionary stance in this theory of survivals was later seen as deeply flawed—particularly in the study of religion (see Bellah 1972: 37)—Tylor’s and Lang’s work gave a tremendous boost to the general study of folklore and mythology, especially among ethnologists who were concerned with studying myth in situ and who placed great emphasis on how myths functioned as an element of a larger societal system. Among the most influential theories to emerge from this school were those of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, whose central theory of myth asserted 1 256 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull Running that myths function in a particular society as support and justifi cation head for all types of social mores, cultural values, and even religious beliefs. Here, myths are seen as statements of social and cultural reality and not symbolic statements possibly masking some deeper underlying truth (Malinowski 1954: 146, 1984: 199). At least initially, however, Tylor’s and Lang’s theories had little effect on the study of Hindu mythology. Following Müller’s lead, it continued to focus on Vedic religion and mythology—that is on textual rather than ethnological materials4—and continued to reflect at least in muted tones Müller’s idea that underlying the myth was the direct celebration of the powers of the natural world and that the myths themselves were symbolic expressions (flawed or not) of those natural powers (see, for example, Hillebrandt 1980: 5; Keith 1925: 45; Oldenberg 1988: 25; Winternitz 1981: 60, 67). As these studies advanced, however, greater recognition was given to the notion that the obscure nature of the Vedic mythology was not due to the directness of man’s early language (or its later diminution in malapropisms) but to the fact that the Vedic texts were overwhelmingly oriented to the Vedic sacrificial rituals, whether in the form of praises to the gods (as, for example, in the Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā) or in the form of symbolic explications and dialogic discussions of the higher meaning of the Vedic sacrifices (as in the Brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads).5 Indeed, the enigmatic quality of the Vedic myths itself stands as an important element of the cosmic mystery that underlies the Vedic rites (Bonnefoy 1991: 27). As Wendy Doniger, the doyenne of scholars of Hindu mythology, observes of the Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā: Although “one does sense a mythological corpus behind the [Ṛg Vedic] hymns,” the fact is that “the Rig Veda has no true mythology; it is written out of a mythology that we can only try to reconstruct from the Rig Vedic jumble of paradoxes heaped on paradoxes, tropes heaped on tropes” (1981: 18). The Study of Vedic Mythology Despite the obscure nature of Vedic mythology, its general parameters are well known and have been described repeatedly by scholars (Bergaigne 1969–73; Bhattacharji 1970; Doniger 1981; Hillebrandt 1980; Jamison and Witzel 2003; Keith 1925; Macdonell 1897; O’Flaherty 1975; Oldenberg 1988). Best known are Indra, the warrior god, and personification of the Āryan warrior par excellence, who is known for his feat of conquering the cosmic serpent Vṛtra and for the prodigious draughts of soma he imbibes; Agni, the god of fire, the priest of the sacrifice, whose mysterious birth is clearly connected to the enactment of the sacrificial ritual; and Soma, the personification (or deification) of the pressed plant and its juice that was imbibed as part of the Vedic ritual. The Vedic mythology knows several 1 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Myth 257 Running head classes of divine beings, such as the Ādityas (of whom Varuṇa and Mitra are best known), the Maruts, the Asuras, and the Devas (the term that eventually became the generic one for the highest divine beings), and there are references to enmity between some of these classes of beings. There are slight references to the names of two gods who later dominate Hindu mythology—Viṣṇu and Rudra (the latter is an older name of the god more often called Śiva). In addition to these bits and pieces of mythology about the Vedic gods, the texts enumerate several creation stories, cite certain details regarding the nature of the afterlife, and contain a small but significant stock of tales that have a “folkloristic” quality (O’Flaherty 1985). The Study of Post-Vedic Mythology: Epic and Purāṇa Given the difficulty of elucidating the Vedic myths, the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century scholarly tendency to focus on the Vedic texts alone had a retarding effect on the general study of Hindu mythology. It was not until scholars turned their attention to the post-Vedic texts, the Epics (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, ca., 400 BCE to 400 CE) and, most especially, the Purāṇas (completed sometime between 400 and 600 CE)— texts that chiefly hold the riches of Hindu India’s mythological traditions— that progress in the study of Hindu mythology resumed. Ironically, some of the earliest studies of Hindu texts undertaken by Europeans focused on the Purāṇas (Burnouf 1840; Kennedy 1831; Ward 1817–20; Wilson 1840); however, the mid-nineteenth-century “discovery” of the Veda and the general romantic bias toward exploring India’s “original” Āryan culture doomed these studies to second-class status (Rocher 1986: 5). Additionally, scholars inclined to study the Purāṇas confronted a number of discouraging factors, among them the vast size and somewhat unfixed nature of the textual corpus (the total of the eighteen major Purāṇic texts is estimated at 400,000 verses; there are also eighteen minor Purāṇas, though the list of texts varies [see Rocher 1986: 5, 30–34, 53, 67]); uncertainty about whether the texts were original or were adulterated forms of an as-yet unfound urtext (Wilson 1980: iv); and, perhaps most important of all, the overtly sexual nature of a number of the myths found in these texts—as one reviewer noted: “Many of them are highly extravagant; and even, viewed as allegories, they are degrading, and, in some respects, immoral” (Freer 1844: 391; cf. Winternitz 1981: 384). Whereas the Vedic texts have a piecemeal mythology woven through them, the Epics and the Purāṇas contain extensive narrative tales that revolve around the deeds of gods, men, and heroes who lived in the long-ago. And, unlike the Vedic texts, which were recited in limited circumstances and only to a limited audience of religious cognoscenti (for they are represented as holy 1 258 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull Runningfrom head writ, or śruti), the Epics and the Purāṇas and the tales they originated were the preserve of an ancient bardic tradition and were openly recounted as a means of upholding right action, whether in battle or in devotion to the gods (Rocher 1986: 54; Winternitz 1981: 499). Although the myths found in the Epics and the Purāṇas may derive from a narrative tradition that once stood parallel to the Vedic texts and certainly show a basis common to those referred to in the Vedic texts, they long ago lost their direct connection to the Vedic mythology. The Epics and the Purāṇas share a great many similarities—“the Mahābhārata is to a great extent a Purāṇa and even the later books and chapters of the Rāmāyaṇa partake of the character of the Purāṇas” (Winternitz 1981: 495; cf. Hopkins 1915: 2)—and a great deal of common material, including extensive narratives recounting the deeds of divine beings and semidivine men, king-lists, descriptions of the duties of the castes, discussions of the afterlife, the nature of time, and the constitution of the cosmos. The Epics each center on a lengthy hero narrative. In the case of the Mahābhārata, the narrative frame is that of the war between two factions of the great Bharata clan; in the Rāmāyaṇa, it is the coming of age and exile of Prince Rāma and the abduction and rescue of his wife, Princess Sītā. A great mass of mythological material hangs, though sometimes only by a thread, on these hero narratives. (This material was described by Hopkins [1915], and substantial elements of the Mahābhārata material have been carefully and brilliantly analyzed in recent years by Hiltebeitel [1988–91, 1990, 1999, 2001].) Unlike the Epics, the Purāṇas do not have a central core; although they are ostensibly sectarian, the majority of them devoted to one or the other of the two great Hindu gods, Viṣṇu or Śiva, and the texts are loosely structured6 with wide-ranging mythological materials that may be devoted to any of several gods (Rocher 1986: 21). The dominant religious force of the Purāṇic milieu is devotionalism (bhakti), and it clearly colors the mythology; related to this is the highly syncretistic nature of the stories recounted in these texts, as the feats of originally distinct gods are amalgamated into the feats of a single god, a process that is clearly visible in the myths of Viṣṇu’s incarnations (avatāras; Dimmit and van Buitenen 1978: 59), and the cycle of Śiva and his wife-consort Pārvatī (Devī) (O’Flaherty 1973: 30–32, 319– 20). The effects of Hindu devotionalism are perhaps best exemplified in the mythology of Kṛṣṇa, who is depicted as an incarnation of Viṣṇu but is possibly rooted in the figure of an ancient king, whose life-story dominates one of the most popular Purāṇic texts, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Bryant 2003: xii). The authors of this text recount in detail Kṛṣṇa’s life-story from his birth and infancy, through his boyhood and adolescence, to his kingship and death, employing alternating tones of intimacy and wonder and thereby providing his devotees with numerous models for his worship (e.g., the 1 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Myth 259 Running love of a mother for her infant, the infatuation between adolescents, or head the respect of subjects for their king) and impressing on them a deep sense of the deity’s divine majesty and mystery. In recent decades, the study of Purāṇic mythology and the general study of Hindu mythology have been advanced considerably through the work of Wendy Doniger (who has also written under the surname O’Flaherty).7 Doniger’s studies of myth began with a groundbreaking exposition of the mythology of Śiva (1973), a deity whom she notes “is in many ways the most uniquely Indian god of all” (1)—but one whose mythology, with its deep erotic undertones, had been hardly touched by scholars—and in recent years has developed into a rich body of work that ranges freely through a great variety of mythologies while still remaining centered in Indic (particularly Sanskrit) materials. Doniger has long resisted defining myth, stating that her interest is not in what myth is but in what myth does (1998: 1); accordingly, her work, though textual in nature, also possesses a strong element of seeking out the meaning of myths in situ, “to use methods which reveal what the Hindus saw in them, to enjoy them as the exotic and delightful creations they are” (O’Flaherty 1973: 2). Doniger has referred to her general methodology as the “toolbox approach” (i.e., employing a range of interpretive tools—historical, linguistic, psychoanalytic, theological, and so forth—and often chosen intuitively, to tease out the widest range of meanings from the text; O’Flaherty 1980: 5). A central point in Doniger’s interpretative methodology has been the stucturalist approach espoused by the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Among the many important elements of this method (some of which, unfortunately, defy logical analysis—but then, as Doniger or Lévi-Strauss might say, myths are not logical), two have stood out in Doniger’s work: first, that myths embody oppositions, sometimes overtly and sometimes under the cover of their resolution within the myth; and second, that “every version [of a myth] belongs to a myth” (Lévi-Strauss 1955: 94, 98). In application, the recognition of the oppositions contained within a myth effectively reveals the myth’s own logic, expressed both in the mysterious terms of its own symbolism and in the terms of the cultural truths it upholds (recalling the functionalist approach to myth); the second methodological element, that all versions of a myth contribute to its meaning, opens up the text-historical dimensions of myth, for in each instance of a myth’s telling what is not said in a myth is often as important as what is said. Concluding Reflections More than any other class of Hindu literature, the Purāṇic tales fulfill the criteria that modern scholars see as fundamental to myth: they have a 1 260 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull Running narrative quality; they speak of the long ago of the world’s origins andhead of the origins of various social institutions; they serve as a model for human behavior; and they interpenetrate—at least on a symbolic level—elements of the world of ritual performance (Honko 1984: 49–51; cf. Cohen 1969: 337). Yet, as Cornelia Dimmit and J. A. B. van Buitenen point out, “India, extraordinarily rich in myth, has no special word for it” (1978: 3). The Sanskrit word “purāṇa” means “belonging to the past,” and the term itself is frequently associated with the word “itihāsa”, “thus it was said” (Winternitz 1981: 496); taken together the terms indicate a “narrative of past events” and thus are more akin to the Western concept of history than they are to the concept of myth (Rao 1993). This notion of purāṇa questions the pervasive Western notion of myth as “falsehood,” or at least as the representation of events that are empirically unverifiable and thus stand beyond the pale of ordinary belief, just as it does the idea that history is truth, narrating events that actually occurred. Indeed, within the last century, the interpenetration of “history” and “myth” in India has taken on a special significance as the so-called “Hindutva” movements have looked to “mythical” narratives of the ancient king Rāma as hard evidence of the nature of past Indian regimes (Tamminen 1996). Here, the idea of empirical verification—of “true history”—succumbs to the larger role of myth as the repository of a culture’s most deeply held values and ideologies; from the perspective of myth, what is believed to have happened has a far greater hold on human minds than that which actually has happened. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 At the same time, Herder, like other German romantics, took a harsh view of many of India’s institutions, such as the caste system and the idea of karma (Halbfass 1988: 71); in a similar vein, Arthur Schopenhauer extolled the Upaniṣad texts, yet remarked that he found Indian poetry and sculpture to be “tasteless and monstrous” (cited in Müller 1879: lxi). Müller’s theory was not entirely original but appeared to extend a principle already enunciated by Jones, who attributed the rise of mythology to the perversion of “historical, or natural truth…by ignorance, imagination, flattery, or stupidity” (1993b: 179). A number of studies, more broadly devoted to Müller’s general theories of ancient Āryan mythology appeared throughout the late nineteenth century; see, for example, Cox (1870); Titcomb (1889); see also Dorson (1968: 174–76). Ethnological studies of India did draw on the influential theories of Malinowski; see, for example, von Fürer-Haimendorf (1948: 99). Within the general study of mythology, particularly as espoused by Raglan (1955), the theory arose that myths are in nearly all cases intimately connected to rituals, either as explanation or as part of their enactment. Although in certain 1 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Myth 261 Runninginhead cases the Vedic myths do relate directly to the myths seen, for example, the mythology of the cosmic man and the ritual building of the fire altar (see Tull 1989: 57–69), for the most part the myth-ritual theory throws little light on the interpretation of ancient Indian mythology and was not adopted by scholars studying these myths. 6 Purāṇas are said to be characterized by five marks, that is, five subjects that they describe: creation; recreation; genealogies of gods and sages; the ancient ages of man; and the genealogies of the kings. In fact, it has been estimated that less than three percent of the material in the Purāṇas is devoted to the topics specified under the five marks (Rao 1993: 87). 7 Although, following Doniger’s lead, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the Purāṇas, these texts still largely remain the specialist’s domain. Dimmit’s and van Buitenen’s work (1978) remains the only translation of a broad range of Purāṇic mythology. Other recent works translating Purāṇic myths have either included Hindu myths from several periods and textual milieus (Bhattacharji 1970; O’Flaherty 1975) or from one specific Purāṇa (Bryant 2003) or have focused on a single deity (Courtright 1985). Two important general studies of the Purāṇas are Doniger (1993) and Rocher (1986). References Cited Bellah, Robert N. 1972 [1964]. “Religious Evolution.” In William A Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds, Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 36– 50. New York: Harper and Row. Bergaigne, Abel. 1969–73 [1878–97]. Vedic Religion According to the Hymns of the Ṛgveda (trans. V. G. Paranjpe). 4 volumes. Poona: Aryasamskrti Prakasana. Bhattacharji, Sukumari. 1970. The Indian Theogony: A Comparative Study of Indian Mythology from the Vedas to the Purāṇas. London: Cambridge University Press. Bonnefoy, Yves, ed. 1991 [1981]. 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Albany: State University of New York Press. 1 262 T&F Proofs: Not for distribution Herman Tull head Doniger, Wendy. 1998. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology Running in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Dorson, Richard. 1955. “The Eclipse of Solar Mythology.” In Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Myth: A Symposium, 25–63. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dorson, Richard. 1968. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dundes, Alan. 1984. “Introduction.” In Alan Dundes, ed., Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, 1–3. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1963. Myth and Reality (trans. Willard R. Trask). New York: Harper & Row. Freer, Allan. 1844. “The Vishnu Purána; A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition.” The North British Review 1, 2: 366–96. von Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph. 1948. The Raj Gonds of Adilabad: A Peasant Culure of the Deccan. London: Macmillan. Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1988 [1981]. 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