own accord; but there is no reason to suppose that they did.  Kama is one of the later gods of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe that the Hindoos borrowed him from the Greeks, as the Romans did.  In Sakuntala (27) there is a reference to the Greek women who form the king’s body-guard; in Urvasi (70) to a slave of Greek descent; and there are many things in the Hindoo drama that betray Greek influence.

Besides being artificial and borrowed, Kama is entirely sensual.  Kama means “gratification of the senses,"[281] and of all the epithets bestowed on their god of love by the Hindoos none rises distinctly above sensual ideas.  Dowson (147) has collated these epithets; they are:  “the beautiful,” “the inflamer,” “lustful,” “desirous,” “the happy,” “the gay, or wanton,” “deluder,” “the lamp of honey, or of spring,” “the bewilderer,” “the crackling fire,” “the stalk of passion,” “the weapon of beauty,” “the voluptuary,” “remembrance,” “fire,” “the handsome."[282]

The same disregard of sentimental, devotional, and altruistic elements is shown in the Ten Stages of Love-Sickness as conceived by the Hindoos:  (1) desire; (2) thinking of her (his) beauty; (3) reminiscent revery; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement; (6) lamentations; (7) distraction; (8) illness; (9) insensibility; (10) death.[283]

DYING FOR LOVE

The notion that the fever of love may become so severe as to lead to death plays an important role in Hindoo amorous sophistry.  “Hindoo casuists,” says Lamairesse (151, 179), “always have a peremptory reason, in their own eyes, for dispensing with all scruples in love-affairs:  the necessity of not dying for love.”  “It is permissible,” says the author of Kama Soutra, “to seduce another man’s wife if one is in danger of dying from love for her;” upon which Lamairesse comments: 

“This principle, liberally interpreted by those interested, excuses all intrigues; in theory it is capable of accommodating itself to all cases, and in the practice of the Hindoos it does thus accommodate itself.  It is based on the belief that the souls of men who die of ungratified desires flit about a long time as manes before transmigrating.”

Thus did the wily priests invoke the aid even of superstition to foster that national licentiousness by which they themselves profited most.  Small wonder that the Hitopadesa declared (92) that “there is perhaps in all the world not a man who covets not his neighbor’s wife;” or that the same collection of wise stories and maxims should take an equally low view of feminine morals (39, 40, 41, 54, 88); e.g. (in substance):  “Then only is a wife faithful to her husband, when no other man covets her.”  “Seek chastity in those women only who have no opportunity to meet a lover.”  “A woman’s lust can no more be satisfied than a fire’s greed for wood, the ocean’s thirst for rivers, death’s desire for victims.”  Another verse in the Hitopadesa (13) declares frankly that of the six good things in the world two of them are a caressing wife and a devoted sweetheart beside her—­upon which the editor, Johannes Hertel, comments:  “To a Hindoo there is nothing objectionable in such a sentiment.”