Indo-European Poetry and Myth

(There are) seven herds of cows, and as many fair flocks of sheep,

andfifty in each; they give birth to no young,

and never perish, and there are goddesses to herd them,

have every appearance of being an old riddle, the 350 cows and 350 sheep
standing (as Aristotle saw) for the days and nights of the lunar year. They may
not have had that meaning for the poet of the Odyssey, but it is surely what
they signified originally.^89

THE WORLD WIDE WEB

We saw in Chapter 5 that the radiance of the morning sky and the starry
splendour of the night sky were sometimes pictured, both in India and in
Greece, as the raiments of Dawn and Night. In certain Vedic passages the
creation of these fabrics is conceived as a continuing process. They are
woven by the two goddesses themselves; the sun may also play a part.
This is four-dimensional cosmology, with the time axis as an integral
component.

The weaver [fem.,sc. Dawn] has rolled up again the spread-out (fabric);

in mid activity the craftsman has laid down the work. (RV 2. 38. 4)

With your best (steeds) you (Su ̄ rya) come, tearing apart the weft,

pulling down the black garment, O god. (4. 13. 4)

A certain pair of maidens of different hue

attend the six-pegged loom and weave:

one draws out the threads, the other inserts them;

they do not break them off, they do not reach an end.

I, as they dance round, so to speak,

cannot distinguish which of them is ahead.

A male weaves it, ties it off;

a male has spread it out on the firmament. (AV 10. 7. 42 f.)

(^89) Arist. fr. 175. For the Dawns as cows in Indo-European metaphor (and Slavonic riddle) cf.
pp. 223 f. The seer Polyidus was famous for solving the riddle of a cow that changed colour
three times a day, every four hours, from white to red to black (Hyg. Fab. 136. 2, cf. Aesch. fr. 116,
Soph. fr. 395, Apollod. 3. 3. 1). His solution was ‘a ripening blackberry’. But this does not fit the
daily cycle given by Hyginus. In the Veda black, red, and white are the colours of the cows that
represent night, dawn, and day. This must have been the original reference of Polyidus’ riddle.
Cf. Ohlert (1912), 91 f. He compares the Russian tale of Vasilissa, who on her way to Baba Yaga
saw a white horse and rider, later a red one, and later a black one. She asked Baba Yaga about
them, and the witch explained that they were ‘my shining day, my red sun, and my black night’
(Mannhardt (1875), 94 f.).
372 9. Cosmos and Canon