More than elsewhere
mythic figures seem here to cling to the dear memories of their birth
and youth. This is due in part to the unequaled impressiveness of nature
in India; in part to the dogged schematism of the Hindu mind, which
dislikes to let go of any part of a thing from the beginning to end. On
the one hand, their constant, almost too rhythmic resort to nature in
their poetry, and on the other, their Ved[=a]nta philosophy, or for
that matter their _Ars amatoria_ (_K[=a]mac[=a]stra_), the latter worked
out with painstaking and undignified detail, illustrate the two points.
Hence we find here a situation which is familiar enough in the Veda, but
scarcely and rarely exhibited in other mythological fields. Dogs, the
two dogs of Yama are, but yet, too, sun and moon. It is quite surprising
how well the attributes of things so different keep on fitting them both
well enough. The color and brightness of the sun jumps with the fixed
epithet, "spotted," of the sun-dog Cabala; the moon-dog is black
(Cy[=a]ma or Cy[=a]va).
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