Angelo de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology or The Legends of Animals (Vol. II of II), London,  Trubner & Co.,1872.

CHAPTER II.

THE CRAB.

SUMMARY

    The riddle, how it is a fish, and not a fish.--The crab appears  and the sun goes back; the crab-moon draws the solar hero back.--The crane and the crab.--The crab kills the serpent and   releases the solar hero.--The crab draws the chariot.--Palinurus.--The crabs prick and waken the hero.—The race between the crab and the fox.--The prince becomes a crab to release his beloved from the waters.--The nightingale, the stag,  and the crab as awakeners.--The crab as an antidote for the venom of the toad, and as a remedy for the stone.

In the eighth Esthonian story, a husband beats his wife because she is unable to solve the riddle which he proposes, to provide him a fish to eat, which is not a fish, and which has eyes, but not in its head. The third brother, the cunning one, recommends his mother to cook the crab, which lives in the water like a fish, and which has eyes, but not in its head.

When the sun seems to enter, in the month of June, into the tropic which bears the sign of the crab (Lat. _cancer_; Gr. _karkinos_; Sanskṛit, _karkaṭas_, _karkas_, _karkaṭakas_; the Hindoo constellation of the crab is called  karkin, or furnished with the crab, in the same way as the leaping moon, furnished with the hare, is called _çaçin_), it is said to come back again; on the first day of summer the days begin to shorten, as on the first of winter they begin to lengthen; the sun in the month of June was therefore compared to a crab, which retraces its steps, or was represented as drawn by a crab, which, in this case, is particularly the moon. We all know the myth of Hêraklês, who, when combatting the hydra of Lerne, was caught and drawn back by the crab, which Hêra, therefore, transformed into the celestial constellation of the crab. In the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_, Alexander returns in terror from his journey to the fountain of immortality, when he sees that the crabs draw his ships back into the sea. In the same work, we find a crab caught which contains seven precious pearls; Alexander has it shut up in a vase, which is enclosed in a large cage, fastened by an iron chain; a fish draws the cage a mile out to sea; Alexander, half dead with terror, thanks the gods for the warning, and so saving his life, persuading himself that it is not fit to attempt impossible undertakings. In the seventh story of the first book of the _Pańćatantram_, the old crane, on the other hand, terrifies the crab and the fishes by threatening them with a visitation of the gods in the chariot of Rohinî, the red wife of the Lunus, that is, in the constellation of the Wain or the Bulls (the fourth lunation of the moon), in consequence of which the rain will cease to fall, the pond will be dried up, and the crabs and fishes will die; the fishes allow themselves to be deceived by the crane, who eats them on the way; but the crab, on the contrary, when it has got half way, perceives the deceit of the crane, kills it, and returns back again. Professor Benfey has found a variation of this story in the Buddhist sacred and historical books of Ceylon. In the Æsopian fables, the crab kills the serpent. In the twentieth story of the first book of the _Pańćatantram_, the crab causes, at the same time, the death of the serpent and the crane, by means of the ichneumon; the crab, which walks a little backwards and a little forwards, when transported into the sky, causes now the death of the solar hero and now that of the monster, now delivers the solar hero from the monster and now drags it into the waters. In the fifteenth and last story of the fifth book of the _Pańćatantram_, the young hero Brahmadattas takes, for his companion in his journey, the crab, who, whilst he sleeps in the shade of a tree, kills the serpent which comes to kill him. This mythical crab, this red animal which kills the serpent, is sometimes the sun, but, perhaps, oftener it may be compared to the horned moon, which increases and diminishes, and releases the solar hero, asleep in the shadow of the night and of the winter, from the black serpent who endeavours to turn his sleep into death; Brahmadattas, when he wakens, recognises the crab as his deliverer. Thus we have already seen the moon considered more than once, in several forms, as the saviour of the solar hero and heroine. When the sun falls in the evening, in the west, it must necessarily go back like the crab, to reappear in the morning on the same eastern side from whence it came; when the sun goes back and the days grow shorter, after the summer solstice, the crab, in the Zodiacal cycle, retraces its steps. When the sun goes back, the moon either rules the darkness of the frigid night, or in autumn brings on the autumnal rains; the horns of the moon, and those of the crab, serve now to draw the hero into the waters (in the evening, and after solstice of June), now to draw him out of the waters (towards dawn and towards spring). The sun is now represented as having transformed himself into the moon, and now as having been deceived or saved by the moon. The sun which retraces its steps is a crab; the moon which draws back, or draws out, is also a crab, and, in this respect, seems to hold the same place as the sea-urchin with the hundred oars, or of the dolphin with the scythe-shaped fin, which draws the chariot of the solar hero, or the solar hero himself. In the fable of Kriloff, the crab draws the

chariot with the pike and the heron (the latter taking the place here of the crane, which we have seen above in connection with the crab, and which is also called in Sanskṛit by the same name as the crab, that is, karkaṭas). It is well known that the sea-crab, Palinurus vulgaris, took its name from the pilot Palinurus, who fell into the sea. In the fourteenth story of the first book of _Afanassieff_, the crabs prick and waken the young hero Theodore (gift of God, an equivalent of Brahmadattas, given by the god Brahman), put to sleep by the witch; they are grateful to the hero, because he divided the caviare into equal parts among the crabs who were disputing for it.

  We have seen the challenge to a race with the hare and the locust, the hare and locust both seem to lose the race. Afterwards we saw the challenge to a trial of flight of the beetle and the wren with the eagle, in which the animal that symbolises the moon, on the other hand, wins the race. Thus, in the same way, as to spring succeeds June or the month of the crab, we find represented in the fifth story of the fourth book of _Afanassieff_ a race between the fox (which, as it symbolises the twilights of the day, represents also the equinoxes in the year) and the crab (it is well known that the crab, _Palinurus vulgaris_, was called by the Latins by the name of _locusta_). The crab fastens itself to the fox's tail; the latter arrives at the winning-post without knowing of the crab's presence; the fox then turns round to see whether his opponent is far off, upon which the crab, letting go the fox's brush and dropping quietly on the ground, looks up and placidly remarks that it has been waiting for some time.

  In the first of the Esthonian stories, the young prince, in order to release from the waters his beloved, who had become a water-rose, by the eagle's advice takes off his clothes, covers himself with mud, and holding his nose between his fingers, snivels out, "From a man, a crab;" then he instantly becomes a crab, and goes to draw the water-rose out of the water, to bring it to shore near a stone, at which, when arrived, he says, "From the water-rose, the maiden; from the crab, the man." (This myth appears to represent the amours of the sun as a female, with the moon as a male.) I observe that among the Sanskṛit meanings of the word karkaṭas, which means a crab, there is that of a heap of water-roses, or a heap of lotuses.

We have already seen the nightingale and the stag as images representing the moon; here we also find a crab as a lunar figure. The moon is the watcher of night; either it sleeps with its eyes open like the hare, or it is watchful like the stag, or, as a nightingale, it justifies the Greek proverb of the watchers who sleep less than the nightingales (oud' hoson Aêdones üpnôousin), or, as crab, it wakens up with its claws those who are asleep and menaced by any danger.[505] In Pliny we find the nightingale, the stag, and the crab in concord; he informs us that crab's eyes, with the nightingale's flesh, tied up in a stag's skin, are useful to keep a man awake. The moon, in fact, not only herself watches, but makes men watch, or prolong their vigils; we know, moreover, of the excitement with which her presence agitates the quail, which cannot sleep when the moon shines in the sky. Pliny also recommends the river-crab, cut in pieces and drunk, as a remedy against any poison, but especially against the venom projected by the toad. In the _Heisterbac. Hist. Miracul._, we read of a man named Theodoric, and surnamed Cancer, that the devil persecuted him in the form of a toad; he kills the diabolical toad more than once, but it always rises again; then Cancer, recognising the devil in this form, forms a heroic resolution, uncovers one of his thighs, and lets himself be bitten; the thigh inflames, but he is cured at last, and from that day forward he is and continues a holy man. German superstition, therefore, combines with Græco-Latin to consider the crab as an enemy of the monster; but as in Græco-Latin beliefs, besides the crab which awakens, there is also, as we have seen, the crab which seeks to ruin the solar hero, so in Germanic mythical tradition, the death of the solar and diurnal hero Baldur takes place, when the sun enters the Zodiacal sign of Cancer.

FOOTNOTE:

[505] We know that lynx's eyes, or lynx-like eyes, mean very sharp-sighted ones; ancient physicians recommended against the stone or the disease of the gravel, now the lyncurium, the stone which was supposed to be made of the urine of the lynxes, given by India to Bacchus, according to Ovid's expression, and now crab's eyes. The moon destroys with its light the stone-sky, the sky of night; hence crab's eyes are recommended against the disease of the stone. When the moon is not in the sky of night, the stone is there.