Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v2.c27.s2.41

v2.c27.s2.41

The Forms of Krishna.—The Tatar nations, who are all of Indu race, like the Rajputs and German tribes, adored the moon as a male divinity, and to his son, Budha, they assign the same character of mediator. The serpent is alike the symbol of the Budha of the Hindus, the Hermes of the Egyptians, and the Mercury of Greece : and the allegory of the dragon’s teeth, the origin of letters, brought by Cadmus from Egypt, is a version of the Hindu fable of Kanhaiya (Apollo) wresting the Vedas (secrets) from Budha or wisdom (Hermes), under his sign, the serpent or dragon. We might still further elucidate the resemblance, and by an analysis of the titles and attributes of the Hindu Apollo, prove that from the Yamuna may have been supplied the various incarnations of this divinity, which peopled the pantheons of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. As Nomios, who attended the herds of Admetus, we have Nonita,¹ the infantine appellation of Kanhaiya, when he pastured the kine of Kesava in the woods of Vindra, whence the ceremony of the sons of princes assuming the crook, and on particular days tending the flocks.² As Muralidhara, or the ‘ flute-holder,’ Kanhaiya is the god of music ; and in giving him the shepherd’s reed instead of the vina or lyre, we may conjecture that the simple bamboo (bans) which formed the first flute (bansli) was in use before the chahtara,³ the Grecian cithara,⁴ the first invented lyre of Apollo. Thus from the sixwired instrument of the Hindus we have the Greek cithara, the English cithern, and the Spanish guitar of modern [539] days. The Greeks, following the Egyptians, had but six notes, with their lettered symbols; and it was reserved for the Italians to add a seventh. Guido Aretine, a monk in the thirteenth century, has the credit of this. I, however, believe the Hindus numbered theirs from the heavenly bodies—the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,—hence they had the regular octave, with its semi-tones: and as, in the pruriency of their fancy, they converted the ascending and descending notes into *grahas*, or planetary bodies, so they may have added them to the harmonious numbers, and produced the *nauragini*, their nine modes of music.¹ Could we affirm that the hymns composed and set to music by Jayadeva, nearly three thousand years ago,² and still chanted in honour of the Apollo of Vraj, had been handed down with the sentiments of these mystic compositions (and Sir W. Jones sanctions the idea), we should say, from their simplicity, that the musicians of that age had only the diatonic scale; but we have every reason to believe, from the very elaborate character of their written music, which is painful and discordant to the ear from its minuteness of subdivision, that they had also the chromatic scale, said to have been invented by Timotheus in the time of Alexander, who might have carried it from the banks of the Indus.