ON KRISHNA, AND SOLAR MYTHS. 175 
27. But we do not wonder that Mr. Proctor seems somewhat 
shaky about his authorities, when we read that, “‘ in each case ”’ 
of the many avatars of Vishnu, ‘‘ the new-born God hada virgin 
mother.” The first avatar was a fish, the second a tortoise, 
the third a Loar, the fourth a man-lion, the fifth a dwarf. 
Whether these were lusus nature, or whether we are to 
understand a virgin fish, a virgiv tortoise, and a virgin pig 
we are not told. A virgin mother of a dwarf would have 
been feasible. But these strange facts are not to be found, 
I believe, in the Hindu books. Neither are many other of 
the supposed facts, by which the theory of the universal 
adaptation of the solar myth, as the origin of all religious 
worship, is supported, to be found in what ought to be taken 
as the proper authorities. When the solar-myth does appear 
—and we do not question that the worship of the sun did 
greatly affect early religion—it appears as a degradation of 
the true, or an addition to the past, as when Manes identified 
Christ with Mithras, and placed his dwelling in the sun. And 
wherever we can really find the distinct account of a virgin- 
mother, birth in a cave on December 25th, a herald star, songs 
of angels, and presents of gold and frankincense, We., at the 
birth of a professed incarnation of Deity, it will be in the 
romancing that took place, as in the later accounts of the 
Buddhists, for instance, after the commencement of the 
Christian era. 
28. It must remain—at least, for the present—an open 
question whether Krishna was a purely imaginary person, or 
whether such a name occurred in the original legends of the 
war of the Mahabharata, as denoting the charioteer of 
Arjuna. If the latter, it is to be observed that the Yadava 
tribe, to which, in the Puranas, Krishna is said to have 
belonged, is traced in the Mahabharata to Yadu, the son of 
a Kshatriya rajah, Yayiti, and Devayini, the daughter of a 
Brahman. Now the names of Yadu and 'Turvasu, brothers, 
are both mentioned in the Rig Veda as ancestors of the 
Aryan race. The name Yadu is, therefore, a very ancient 
one. On the other hand, the tribe of Yidavas, which is said 
to be historical, would appear to have been a nomad tribe of 
Vaisyas—the third, or lowest, caste of the Aryan Bean 
Here, then, the descent of the tribe from the son of 
been borrowed from some ancient Latin writing, in which, because of the 
close resemblance between the story of Krishna . . . and that of Christ, 
Krishna is called Jezeus. . . . ButI should say the chances must be 
very heavy against this guess being correct.”—(Anowledge, Dec. 1886.) The 
italics are my own. Mr. Proctor here does not say where he “ found” this 
epithet Jezeus applied to Krishna. 
