Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE STORY OF GUZRA BAI. 285
versions of the story, regards as a local myth of Brabantine CHAP,
origin, the name Helias being a corruption of the Keltic ,
ala, eala, ealadh, a swan. This is but saying, in other
words, that an old myth has been worked into the traditions
of European towns, and attached, like the story of the early
life of Cyrus, to names undoubtedly historical. The tale
itself agrees in all its essential features not only with many
Teutonic legends but with the Hindu story of Guzra Bai,
the Beatrice of the tale of Truth's Triumph. This beautiful
maiden is the Flower Girl, or the Gardener's daughter, in
other words, the child of Demeter playing on the flowery
plain of Nysa or Enna,—the teeming source of life as dis-
tinguished from the dead or inert matter on which it works.
She thus becomes at once, like Beatrice, the mother of
many children; here the number is a hundred and one,
this one being as with Beatrice a daughter. These beauti-
ful children awaken the jealousy and hatred of the twelve
childless wives to whom the husband of Guzra Bai was
already married, and in whom we may see an image of the
months of the year or the hours of the night, in themselves
producing nothing, until the spring reawakens the slumber-
ing earth or the dawn flushes the eastern sky. In either
case, it is but one hour or one day doing the work which
otherwise many hours and many days would be unable to
accomplish. Then follows a series of transformations which
have the effect of counteracting the arts of the twelve
queens as those of Matabrune are frustrated in the western
story, and which end in the change of all the brothers not
into swans but into crows, the only one of Guzra Bai's
children who is saved being the daughter, as Helias alone is
not transformed in the myth of Matabrune. The subse-
quent marriage of Guzra Bai's daughter under the name of
Draupadi to a king who sees her feeding the crows is the
return of Persephone from the lower world in more than her
former beauty. Draupadi now becomes the mother of a
child who avenges her wrongs as Perseus requites the perse-
cutors of Danae, and punishes the demon who, with the
wand of Kirke, had changed his mother's brothers into crows.
The final incident is the deliverance of Guzra Bai from the
'_. .