ABSTRACT
Yaroslav Vassilkov (1994–5) explored the parable of the man hanging from a tree, head downward, over a pit, in a wood roamed by multi-headed threatening wild animals (Mbh. 11), but despite his desperate plight, the man enjoys some drips of honey. The parable illustrates our addiction to trivial pleasures despite our parlous existential condition. The parable occurs widely, not only in oriental texts but also (as the story of Barlam and Josaphat) in mediaeval Christianity. Although he mentions archetypes (esp. that of the world tree), Vassilkov also sees the image as part of the Indo-European cultural heritage – an idea followed up here by drawing on the Odyssey. Odysseus hangs like a bat, from a fig tree, over the pit formed by Charybdis when she sucks down the sea water, close to the cliff inhabited by the multi-headed, man-eating Scylla. Some thirty rapprochements are explored, and it is proposed that they go back via oral transmission to a common origin in early Indo-European mythology. The comparison is then related to other India–Greece rapprochements (esp. that in Ch. 6), but the monsters are also compared with the three animals at the centre of the Buddhist Wheel of Life (Ch. 13).
