NYMPHSOver almost all the Indo-European area we find the belief in a breed of
supernatural females who haunt the lonelier parts of the land, especially the
waters, the trees, and the mountains. They go by different names in every
country, but they can conveniently be summed up by the Greek appellation
‘Nymphs’.
Indian nymphsThe Indian term is Apsarás-, or less often Apsara ̄ ́. The name was taken, rightly
or wrongly, to contain ap- ‘water’, and this association is sometimes apparent,
as in a verse where the samudríya ̄ Apsarásah
̇
, the Apsarases of the vat, repre-
sent the waters ritually mixed with the Soma.^13 Outside the Rigveda they are
represented as frequenting forest lakes, rivers, trees, and mountains (cf. AV 4.
- 4; 14. 2. 9; TS 3. 4. 8. 4; MBh. 1. 16. 2, 111. 6; 3. 107. 10). They love to sing,
dance, and play (S ́B 11. 6. 1; MBh. 1. 114. 43, 49; 2. 4. 31, 7. 21, etc.). They have
swings in the branches of trees (AV 4. 37. 5, al.).
They are of outstanding beauty (S ́B 13. 4. 3. 7 f.); women in the epic are
praised as being ‘as beautiful as an Apsaras’ (MBh. 1. 96. 3, 100. 23). They are
accordingly very attractive to men. Indra sends them to tempt ascetics whose
power he fears (1. 65. 21ff., 120. 5ff.; 5. 9. 9ff.). Sometimes the mere sight of
one makes a holy man ejaculate. On encountering a lovely woman a hero
is liable to ask, ‘Are you a goddess... or perhaps an Apsaras?’ (1. 92. 31,
cf. 142. 4; 3. 248. 10; 4. 8. 13). But they are to be feared, being liable to cause
mental derangement. They are manomúhah
̇
, ‘mind-bewildering’ (AV 2. 2. 5);
‘it is the Gandharva and the Apsarases who madden him who is mad’ (TS 3. 4.
- 4).
They do occasionally have liaisons with mortals, and some royal and
priestly families traced their descent from such unions. The Bha ̄ratas, for
example, were descended from the Apsaras S ́akuntala ̄. The most famous
legend of a marriage between a mortal king and an Apsaras is the story of
Puru ̄ ravas and Urvas ́ı ̄. This involved the folk-tale motif that the unequal
syzygy could only last so long as the mortal partner observed a taboo, which
(^13) RV 9. 78. 3, cf. AV 2. 2. 3. There is a remarkable parallel in the Greek elegist Euenus
(fr. 2. 3), who with reference to the proportionate mixing of wine and water says that Bacchus
‘loves being mixed as fourth with three Nymphs’. On the Apsarases in general cf. Macdonell
(1898), 134 f.; Oldenberg (1917), 254–7; Oberlies (1998), 229 n. 384.
284 7. Nymphs and Gnomes