236 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [Oct. 



Brahman a (section 33), Dawn is represented to have, in fear of her 

 father, assumed the form of a red deer, whereupon Prajapati assumed 

 the form of a fierce animal, named rishya, and chased her. The gods, 

 disgusted at the sight of the incestuous attempt, but unable individu- 

 ally to check the ravisher, put forth the aggregate of their most fear- 

 ful qualities in the form of a god named Bhutavan or Rudra, who 

 pierced, with an arrow, the lustful brute, which immediately transform- 

 ed itself into the constellation Orion. A counterpart to this myth has 

 been found in a German tradition by Professor Kuhn, and the letter 

 contains an abstract of a paper on the subject recently published by 

 him. Professor Kuhn writes — 



1 Both in our ancient and modern popular traditions, there is univer- 

 sally spoken of the Wild Hunter, who sometimes appears under 

 the name of Wodan or Goden, and was, in heathenish times, the 

 supreme god of the ancient German nations. This god coincides, 

 both in character and shape, with the ancient Rudra of the Vedas, vide 

 p. 99. Now there is a class of traditions, in which this ancient god 

 is said to hunt a stag and shoot at it, just as Rudra in the Brahmanas 

 is represented as shooting at the ricya and rohit. The stag, in 

 German mythology, is the animal of the god Freyr, who, like Prajapati, 

 is a god of the sun, of fertility, &c, so that the shot at that stag is 

 to be compared with Budra's shooting at the ricya = Prajapati. I have 

 further endeavoured to show that some indications exist in the medi- 

 aeval penitentials of Germany and England, which give us to under- 

 stand that at the close of the old year, and at the beginning of the 

 new one (we call that time " die Zwolften" or the twelve days, the 

 dvadacaha of the Indians), there were mummeries performed by the 

 country people, in which two persons seem to have been the principal 

 performers, the one of whom was disguised as a stag, while the 

 other was disguised as a hind. Both represented a scene, which 

 must have greatly interested and amused the people, but very 

 much offended the clergy by its sordid and hideous character ; and 

 from all the indications which are given in the texts, communicated 

 by me, pp. 108-180, we may safely suppose that the chief contents of 

 this representation was the connexion of a stag and a hind (or of an old 

 woman), which was accompanied by the singing of unchaste songs. 

 From English customs at the New. Year's Bay, we may also infer that 



