Krishna and Mithra as Messiahs

IN a previous article in this journal' I have attempted to show that many early peoples interpreted the solar eclipse as a dragon monster rising up from the earth to swallow the sun, a concept the artist incorporated in the mask. This does not mean, of course, that every dragon was exclusively an eclipse monster. Once the astronomer learned about the orbits of the sun and moon and the shadow of the latter projected to the earth during such an eclipse, the picture was changed to a composite animal, the unicorn,2 with a long tapering and grooved horn growing from the middle of his forehead; this animal has never been seen, so far as is known, by any civilized man. Since symbolism is cumulative throughout the ages, certain features of the early monster survived into the next stage: the painter of the Eleusis vase saw fit to use the face of the medusa but also added the cone-shaped shadow on the forehead;3 the painter of a black figured vase in the Louvre4 added the openmouthed serpentine monster to the scene of the blinding of Polyphemos by Odysseus and his men; the stag horns of the early monster still cling to certain versions of the unicorn. Likewise, when we pass from the second to the third or messianic stage, some of the manifestations of the first stage still cling to the human figure: Moses and Siegfried have the horned skin of the old dragon, the serpent clings to the rock from which Mithra was born, and the unicorn of the second stage was long known as a symbol of the messiah; he is found in a scene of the crucified Christ.5 Let us now review the features of the sun, moon and shadow and their changes throughout the three stages of eclipse symbolism: the sun was presented as a disc between two outstretched wings or

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