Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c6.80.1

v1.c6.80.1

The gods themselves, who, indeed, in the sagas of the most different peoples take in hand the begetting of famous heroes, step in with their help in the most famous case in the Epic of the love proxyship contrived by the husband: the birth of the chief heroes of the Mahābh., the five Pāṇḍavas (i, 120 ff.). King Pāṇḍu has drawn down on himself the curse that he shall at once die, if he do copulate. Therefore from then on he refrains. But he needs sons. Therefore does he urge his wife Kuntī to get from another what he cannot give her.¹ But she makes answer: “Thou must not speak thus to me, who am a virtuous wife, and find my delight by thee, O lotus-eyed one. But thou, O hero, wilt beget with me, in lawful wise, children endowed with heroes’ strength. I will go into heaven together with thee. Come thou to me that there may be offspring. I myself, indeed, could draw nigh unto no other man in my thoughts but thee. And what man on earth were more excellent than thou?” Then she relates to him the old legend of the loving wife who even got children from her dead husband; and winds up by saying he shall bestow offspring on her in purely spiritual wise, through the yoga powers he has won by stern asceticism. But now he tells her of the primitive hetæristic conditions that were done away with by Çvetaketu, and of the charge which Çvetaketu himself then laid later on his wife Madayantī;