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the act, mixes with the secretions, and penetrates its mother’s womb as an embryo *. It is elear, from this curious anticipation of Freudian theories, that the Gandharva is both a child spirit and a lover of its mother. If religious conceptions and myt.hs reflect actually existing conditions, we can say without hesitation, that such a peculiar embryology conld only arise in a society in which the identification of mother and lover was not abnormal. We know of such soeieties: they are the same which sanctionned wedlocks between nearest relatives and evolved the worship of the »Great Goddess«, mother and lover in one person. Recent archeological discoveries show that it would be a mistake to con-sider these civilizations as primitive ones. We may add that the Gandharva conception is also by no means a primitive one, if only for its implication of individual immortality *.

4. The Buddhist doctrine of Gandharva is hardly reconcilable with the Rig-Vedic picture of the heavenly Gandharva, the guard-ian of the Soma, and so there arises the query whether the Buddhist or the Rig-Vedic conception should be considered as morę original. The controversy is an old one and it is not necessary to reproduce all the pros and cons. Two statements in favour of the identification of the Gandharva with the garbha, as did Pischel⁸, may be howeyer madę in this connection: 1) that the Buddhist Gandharva, the child spirit and lover of its mother, is by no means a monkish fancy, nor a mis-interpretation of Vedic mythology ^{1 2 3 4}, but a genuine element of an original and probably un-Aryan folk-lore, and 2) that the tendeney for ratio-nalization and sublimation of foreign erotic and orgiastic elements is a salient feature of High-Brahmanism. as represented by the Rig-Veda and the Brahmaęas. The Gandharva in the Vedic reli-gion is obyiously »a composition of different and in essence dis-parate ideas ⁵«, but for this very reason when discussing the

1

Chinese translation, Taishó Issaikyó, vol. 29, p. 46; de la Vallee Pous-sin, I/Abhidharmakośa de Yasubandhu, III, p. 50.

2

^a Cf. de la Vallóe Poussin, Totemisme et Vógetali9me. Acadómie Royale de Belgique. Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences Morales et Politiąues. 1926, p. 49.

3

   Vedische Studien, I, p. 77 and II, p. 234.

4

   As maintained by A. Hillebrandt, Vedisclie Mythologie, I, p. 15 and 374.

5

⁶ Keith, Religion and Philo9ophy of the \ eda, p. 181.