Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snewscast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by Red Lotus Pedals. Tonight, we'll read the opening fairy tale from The Descent of the Sun, a cycle of birth, published in 1903. This book was purportedly translated from unidentified Sanskrit manuscripts by F.W. Bain. More likely, the stories were only inspired by ancient Hindu myths. Bain, a British academic and translator, presented his works as delicate artifacts from the East, complete with ornate introductions, describing his supposed discoveries. At the time, readers were fascinated by such found works, and many took them at face value, seeing them as glimpses into an exoticized vision of Indian literature. Only later did scholars conclude that Bain had likely authored the stories himself, drawing loosely on Hindu philosophy and mythological themes. Whether authentic translation or original invention, the descent of the sun blends the cadence of classical myth with the romantic imagination of turn of the century fantasy. The tales explore creation and rebirth, the intertwining of fate and desire, and the enduring victory of love over hardship, framed in the lyrical, almost musical prose that Bane favored. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bad. Now take a few deep breaths. The descent of the sun. Long ago, on the slopes of Himalayas, there lived a young king of the spirits of the air, named Kamala Mitra, for he was a portion of the sun, and he worshipped Shiva, and he turned his back on the pleasures of the senses, and went afar off and dwelt alone among the icy peaks and snowy plateau that lie around Mount Calas. And there he remained, living at first upon leaves, and then upon smoke, and finally upon air, performing severe penances. Until after a hundred years, that Lord of creatures was moved to compassion, and he appeared to him in the twilight of evening, in the guise of an ascetic, but in stature like a tall tree with with the new moon in his hair, and said, I am pleased with thy devotion, so now I grant thee a boon, ask. Then the young king bowed before him and said, Blessed one, let me continue in this contemplation of thee, that is enough. Then said Shiva, This is well said, nevertheless, ask of me some boon. Then said Kamala Mitra. Since it is so, and I must absolutely choose, then give me a wife whose eyes, like these hills and this sky, shall be full of the dusky luster of thy throat and thy moon, as if, insatiate of gazing at thee, they had become, not transitory mirrors, but pictures permanently stained with thy glory. or so shall she be a medium of devotion between me and thee."

Then the moon-crested God was pleased, but he looked into the future by his magic power of divination and saw what was coming, and he said slowly, I, such as these, will be dangerous, not only to others, but also to their owner. Nevertheless, I have given the aboon thou shalt have thy desire. Then he disappeared and Kamala Mitra returned home, rejoicing. by the favor of the deity, all the amaciation and fatigue of his penances left him, and he became strong as Bima and beautiful as Arjuna. And he arrived at his His palace on the evening of next day, and went into the garden to repose as the sun was going down. And as he went, he looked before him, and suddenly he saw a woman, Floating on a pool of white lotuses in a boat of sandalwood with silver ores. And her glances fell on those snowy flowers and turned their tint to blue for her eyes were lowered. And she was resting her chin on one hand as she lay, And with the other dropping one by one into the water, the petals of a lotus red as blood. And the round curve of her hip stood up like a sandbank and was mirrored again in the silent water below. And her lips moved, for she was counting the petals as they fell. And Kamala Mitra stood still, holding his breath and gazing at her, fearing to move, for he thought it was a dream. Then all at once she looked up and saw him and smiled, bathing him with the color of her eyes. And it seemed to Kamala Mitra that he stood in a pool of color, formed by the essence of all the blue lotuses in the world.

And then suddenly, he remembered the boon of the God who is clothed with heaven, and he exclaimed, Surely thou art my own wife,

sent me by the God who keeps his promises,

and none other.

For yesterday I gazed at his glory, and now I am gazing at thy two eyes, and it is the same. And if it be so, by what name shall I call thee?" Then she said, my name is Anushaini, and for what purpose did the Creator form these eyes, but to reflect the image of their Lord. Then, Kamala Mitra, having thus obtained her from the deity, took possession of his lovely wife, and thereafter remained with her in the mountainous region about Kailas, utterly bewildered and intoxicated by constantly gazing at those mirrors of deity, her two great eyes. and he plunged into their sea and was drowned in it. And the whole world seemed to him to be made of lotus blue. And like a vessel filled to the brim and running over, her, he was so overflowing with delight in her beauty, and the pride of having so unique a specimen of woman kind all to himself, that he could not contain his emotion, but sought relief in going about everywhere, talking about her, and trying to get everybody to acknowledge what he thought himself. That all other women in the world were absolutely nothing in comparison with his own wife. Alas, a woman is one thing, and emancipation quite another. So, it happened that on a day when he was disputing about her with one of his friends and teasing him for not readily admitting all his own eulogies of his wife. That friend of his suddenly burst out laughing and exclaimed, For all things, there is a cure. Even for a snake bite, there is a cure.

But there is a cure, even for a snake bite there is a cure, but there is no cure for one who has been bitten with a woman's beauty. No, O thou infatuated lover, that the golden glamour of our other half, woman, is not like a simple musical theme, but one infinitely various containing 10,000 notes, and stirring like a churning stick, all the emotions in the ocean of the soul of man. And however beautiful may be the wife's eyes. Still, eyes are only eyes, and a woman is not all eye, but something more. Or one woman which is us, like a waterfall waterfall with the music of her bubbling laughter, and another entrances us like a forest pool with the peace of her shadowy silence. one and tangles us in the nectar-nooses of her hair, while another pierces us with the archery of her darting eyes. One inflames us like the sun in the fever fire of desire, while another soothes us like the moon by the camphor of her dewy kisses. Come all a meter of broken and impatiently away with the fascinations of all the women in the three worlds past, present, or to come. Could they unite to form the very body of the God of love, yet the eyes of Anushaini alone would reduce them to ashes. I, those eyes with their blue irresistible invitation would succeed in corrupting sages. Then his His friend laughed and said, boasting is useless, and in words, all men can do everything. Babble no more of her beauty, but come, let your paragon of wife put her power to the proof, for hard by here, in the wood on the hillside, is an aged sage, named Papana Shana, whose austerities terrify even the gods, he would be an admirable touchstone for the eyes of this wonderful wife of yours, whose beauty exists like a bubble only on the stream of your words. And then, stung by the taunt, Kamala Mitra exclaimed in wrath. Fool, if she does not turn him from his asceticism as easily as amber draws after its stubble and grass. I will cast myself into the ganges. Then his friend laughed again and said, Do nothing rash. Once gone, My head can never be restored. But Kamala Mitra hurried away to find Anushaini, and he found her in the garden by the lotus pool and told her of his brag and said, come instantly and make the experiment and vindicate the power of those wonderful eyes of thine and my own faith in them without delay. I burn to convict that foolish skeptic of his folly, by ocular demonstration. Then Anusha Yuni said slowly, Dear husband, that word angry and therefore indiscreet, and a fear, lest by doing evil we may bring on our self-sponishment, for expiation follows guilt, as surely as a Ryan treads on the heels of Roeneny. There is sin and danger in this rash experiment. And now it will be better for us not to venture upon the verge of a precipice over which we may both fall into irreparable disaster. But as she spoke, her eyes rested on Kamala Mitra and bewildered him and destroyed the persuasion of her words. For he heard nothing that she said, but was full of the blindness of passion, and more than ever convinced of the omnipotence of her beauty. And so, seeing that she could not turn him from his will, Anushaini gave in and yielded to him as to her deity, nay, in the interior of her heart she rejoiced to find that she could not dissuade him, for she was filled with curiosity herself. To see whether in truth her beauty would prevail over the ascetic, though she trembled for the consequences. Alas, where beauty and curiosity and youth and self will and intoxication combine like a mad elephant, where is the cotton thread of self-control? Then those two lovers kissed each other passionately, like travelers who have been separated for a year, and yet they knew not that they were doing so for the last time, and then they went together to the forest to find that old ascetic, and hand in hand they rambled about like a pair of loves arrows in human form, till they penetrated to the very heart of that wood. And there, on a sudden that they came upon that old sage, and saw him standing, plunged in meditation, motionless as a tree. And round him, the ants had built up their hills, and his beard and hair trailed from his head, like creeping vines, and ran down along the ground, and were covered with leaves, and over his withered limbs played a pair of lizards, like living emeralds. And he looked straight before him, with great eyes that mirrored everything, but saw nothing, Clear and unfathomable and still. Like mountain tarns in which all the fish are asleep. Kamala Mitra and Anusha Y looked at him a while in silence, and then at each other and trembled, for they knew that they were staking their souls. But as he wavered, the thought of his friend's derision came back into Kamala Metra's mind and filled him with anger. And he said to Anushayini, advance and let this old ascetic see you and I will mark the result. So Anushaini went forward and stepped over the leaves with feet lighter than themselves till she stood in front of the sage. And when she saw that he did not move, she raised herself on tiptoe to look into his eyes, saying to herself, possibly he is dead. And she looked into those eyes, and saw there nothing safe to images of herself, like two incarnations of timidity that seemed to say to her as it were, beware. And as she stood there, trembling in the swing of uncertainty, Kamala Mitra watched her with ecstasy and laughed to himself and said,

certainly that. Nature watched her with ecstasy and laughed to himself and said, Certainly that old sage is no longer alive. For otherwise she would have reached his soul through the door of his eyes, where it down in the lower world. So as they stood there, waiting, gradually that old sage came to himself, for he felt that his meditations were being disturbed by something or other, And he looked and saw Anushaini standing before him like the new moon at the cloves of day, a pure form of exquisite beauty, a crystal without of law, tinged with the color of heaven, and instantly by the power of his own mystical meditation, he divined the whole truth in the exact state of the case. And he cast at that wayward beauty a glance, sorrowful as that of a deer, yet terrible as a thunderbolt, and immediately courage fled from her soul and strength from her knees and she sank to the ground with drooping head like a lotus broken by the wind. But Kamala Mitra rushed forward and caught her in his arms. As they stood together, the old ascetic spoke slowly. Irreverent lovers, now shall that beauty which occasioned this insolence meet with its appropriate reward. Descend now into mortal wombs and suffer in the lower world the pangs of separation till ye have purged away your guilt in the fire of human life. Then, hearing the doom of separation, wild with grief, they fell at his feet and implored him, saying, Fix at least a term to the curse and a period to our pain. And he said again, When one of you shall slay the other, the curse shall end. Then the two lovers looked at each other in despair, and they drew in that instant from each other's eyes a deep draft of the nectar of mutual contemplation, as if to sustain them in their pilgrimage over the terrible sea of separation, saying as it were to each other but in vain, remember me. Then all of a sudden They disappeared and went like flashes of lightning somewhere else.

But Shiva. Like flashes of lightning, somewhere else. But Chiva, from his seat on Kailas, saw them go. For as fate would have it, he chance to be looking in that direction and grasping the whole truth by mystical intuition. He remembered his boon to the spirit of the air and he sat to himself. Now has the future which I foresaw become the present, and the eyes of Anushaini have produced a catastrophe. But I must not leave her lovely body to the play of chance, for it has in it something of my own divinity. and Kamala Mitra, after all, was not so much to blame, for he was bewildered by my own glory, reflected in her eyes. So I am the culprit who is responsible for this state of affairs. And so I must look after this pair of lovers. Moreover I have a mind to amuse myself with their adventures. So, after considering a while, that master yogi took alotus and placing it on the earth in a distance he became an island, and he made in it by his magic power, an earthly copy of a heavenly type of a nature known to himself alone for the future to unfold. And having completed his arrangements, he allowed the chain of events to take its course. for old sage Papa Noshana, when those two lovers had disappeared, remains in the forest alone, and their images forsook the mirror of his eyes, and faded away from his mind, like the shadow of a cloud traveling over the surface of a great lake and vanished and were utterly forgotten. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld. Yn yw'n gweld.w'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y