Topic: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC

[Prometheus]

   
577
during its continuance1. At the sacrifice itself the sacramental cup was the mixture of milk, sour milk, barley, and running water mixed with the sap of the Soma plant I; and it was these ingredients which were offered in all libations, except that to Mitra-varuna, in which the libation was of Soma and milk2. No intoxicating liquid was allowed to be used in any part of the sacrifice. Also it was at this time that all high-caste Hindus became, like the Arab sons of the date-palm-tree, total abstainers, who thought it disgraceful to drink any spirituous liquids, even the palm wine made of the fermented sap of the date-palm-tree, a favourite drink in North-western India, being forbidden.
The inauguration of this new age is described in the Mausala Parva, the seventeenth canto of the Mahabharata. It is traced to the iron bolt conceived by the hermaphrodite Camba, child of the lance (Shctmbci), and said to be heir to Vasu-deva, the father of Krishna, the god Vasu, who set up on the Sakti mountains, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 190, the bamboo pole of Vasu, the Asherah of the Jews. This iron bolt apparently denotes the beginning of the Iron Age. In order to avert any evil portended by the iron thunderbolt, it was ordained that the Vrishnis, Andhakas and Bhojas should cease to make intoxicating drinks. But this decree did not avert the portents nor prevent the onward march of epoch-making time, which showed by the disappearance of the four sun-horses of Krishna’s car that the yearly-dying sun, the charioteer of heaven, should rule the year no more ; and with the sun-horses Krishna’s standard of the Garuda or sun-bird and Valarama’s banner of the date-palm- tree also vanished. The doomed heroes betook themselves to Prabhasa, that is to the port of Baragyza or Pragjyotisha, the modern Broach, at the mouth of the Ncrbudda. There they indulged in one last orgy, which ended in a mutual fight, in which all the Yadava demi-gods slew one another, and
1 Eggeling, Sat. Bn\h., iii. 1, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 5. 0.
3   Ibid., iv. 1, 4, S ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 271.
I> p
573
   
Krishna joined in the slaughter. When they had all been slain, Krishna, sending Daruka, his charioteer, to fetch Arjuna as his successor, went to Valarama, whom he found under a tree, and watched his death, accompanied by his transformation into a Naga snake. After the disappearance of Rama among the gods of the past, Krishna laid himself down to die, and was slain by an arrow shot from the bow of Jara, old age, which entered his heel, which was like that of the sun-god Achilles, the only vulnerable part of his body.
Arjuna, on his arrival at Dwaraka, collected all the Vrishni and Andhaka wives who had lost their husbands, and having seen Vasu-deva, father of Krishna, the creating- god of the bamboo sun-pole, the tree Asherah, die, he left Dwaraka, which was swallowed up by the sea on his departure. He took the Yadava wives to Indraprastha {Delhi), though many of them were taken away by the Abhirya tribes, the modern Ahirs or cattle-herdsmen, on the march, an incident indicating the amalgamation of alien races, which marked the change in religious belief.
When this duty was done, all the Pandava princes, the rulers of the transition age, decided to leave their kingdom, resign their sovereignty to their sun-worshipping successors, and betake themselves to a life of penance in the woods. Yudishthira accordingly gave up his throne to Yuyutsu, son of Dhrita-rashtra by a Vaishya wife of the village ('vish) races, and therefore born of the mixed Northern and Southern stocks, who now became the united Plindu nation. Yuyutsu, their new king, was the god of the eleventh month of the eleven-months year of the Kauravyas, ruled by Du- ryodhanaI. That is to say, he was the equivalent in the national genealogical history of Rahulo, the young sun-god Rahu, son of the Buddha, and the eleventh Then Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint.
1 Mahiibharata (Mahaprasthanika) Parva, pp. i—io, Adi (Adivanshava- tarna) Parva, Ixiii. p. 1S0,
   
5 79
The five brethren, accompanied by Drupadi, were followed by the dog of Yudishthira, the dog-star Sirius, which had ruled the year of the white horse of the sun, that of the Zen- davesta, in which Tishtrya (Sirius), as a white horse pierced and slew the black horse, the black rain-cloud of the summer solstice x. He was the dog-star to whom the dog-day festivals of July and August were dedicated. After Arjuna had cast into the sea his bow Gandiva, whence the year-arrows of the time-god of the old faith were shot, and his two inexhaustible quivers of year-arrows, indicating the two seasons of the solstitial year, they made the year circuit of the earth on a sunwise course. They went first Southward with the sun of the summer solstice, and afterwards Westward.
As they marched onward on their yearly course the god of each season died as his season was ended. Drupadi died first, as the goddess of the rainy season. Her name, meaning the foot (pada) or root of the tree (dru), marks her as the tree and corn-goddess of the ploughing Kuru-Panchalas, called Srinjaya, or men of the sickle. She is the goddess answering, in the cosmogony of the eighteen-months year of the dying Pandavas, to the Mexican corn-mother Ut’set of the Maya year of eighteen months, who was superseded as ruler by Poshai-yanne, the sun-god born of the nut-tree. She was the corn-goddess of the August antelope festival, and the Ka- damba or almond-nut-tree-mother of the barley-growing Kharwars and Ooraons, who celebrate her festival as the goddess of the Kurum almond-tree in July—August. She was the tree-goddess who received the Pcplos of Athene in August. Sahadeva, the fire-god, god of the autumn, died next, and he was followed by Nakula, the winter-god. After him Arjuna, the spring-god, died, who had followed the sun- horse Parikshit in his circuit; and the last of the seasonal gods to die was Bhima, the summer-god.
Yudishthira, as the leader of the year-star Sirius, went on 1
1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta TJr Yasht, 12—34; S.15.K.. vol. xxiii. pp. 97—102.
   
580
alone, and was taken up to heaven in the car of Shukra, the rain-god. But at first his dog was not allowed to accompany him ; Shukra saying that he was looked on by the Krodha-vashas as unclean, that is to say, he was looked on as an unclean animal by the Semite moon-worshippers, who measured time by the thirteen-months year, and called the mid-ruling month of their year Krodha. The dog was finally received as the god Dharma, the ruler of law and order, the director of the year’s course beginning at the summer solstice, when the season of Sirius began.
Yudishthira, when he arrived in heaven, found all those whom he had known as rulers on earth and all the heroes of the Mahabharata transformed into stars or directing powers of nature, as Vyasa, the alligator encircling the Pole as Draco, had previously told him would be the case J.
These closing scenes add further proof of the correctness of the conclusion conveyed by every part of the poem, that it is an allegorical history of India during the ages which intervened between the first entry into the country in the Neolithic Age of the Northern tribes, who brought in the oil, millet and corn crops of Asia Minor, and the close of the Bronze Age. The period comprised in the original nucleus of the poem, which has been translated from its original language and edited and re-edited by many generations of Sanskrit-speaking bardic poets, was that of the eleven, fifteen, thirteen and seventeen-months years. The object aimed at by the original author, who grouped together the picture of the events which made the history of these ages of progress of vital importance to the nation, was apparently to paint, in his panoramic narrative, a vivid and consecutive story in dramatic form. The successive acts were represented as following one another in an ideal year of eighteen months or cantos, culminating in the rule of a new and righteous race who had been moulded into a nation in India,
1 Mahabharata (Acramavasika) Parva, xxxi. pp. 69—71-
   
58i
and who were to give to it the government which the Pan- davas had tried to introduce under Yudishthira, but which was overthrown in the epoch of the thirteen-months year by the revolt of the Kauravyas. It was then that the rule of India fell into the hands of a mixed race, whose theology was founded on the worship of the sun-god of the North as the god of light and the ruler of annual time. They substituted a system of education based on individual self- improvement for the communal ethics of the earlier ages. And the votaries of the various forms of this new creed grouped themselves into associations, which separated themselves in a greater or less degree from the castes or unions founded on supposed community of birth or on community of function. The religious movement following the introduction of sun-worship originated, as it has done among the Jains, some entirely new castes or communal associations, and left certain of the old associations apart, such as the Kurmis and Koiris, who were the Unitarian believers in Kabir, the Pole Star ape-god, whose image was on the banner of Arjuna.
This individualism engendered by the new creed replaced in a great measure the teachings of the earlier ages, in which all were trained to follow the rules of conduct laid down by the heads of their village, their tribe, or their family. And the revolution thus caused was the result arising out of the increase of wealth which followed the continual extension of land and maritime trade brought about by the trade guilds ruled by the sons of the date-palm-tree.
They in their trading voyages settled members of the guilds as agents in Western Europe, for it was only a resident population who could have set up the calendar stones of Carnac in Britany, or made there the multitudes of oriented chambered tombs on patterns brought from Asia Minor ; and it is Indian and Phoenician theology, derived from India, which is, as we have seen, a dominant factor in Greek and Roman ritual and belief. And this same people also went in large numbers to America, and thus
582
   
included in their sphere of influence the whole of the then civilised world. The prosperity engendered by this worldwide trade caused the growth on the shores of the Indian Ocean of a population which had become like that depicted in that most vivid description of Oriental life, the Arabian Nights. There all classes of the community, including the kings and their ministers, are engaged in trade; and when a prince or man of high birth falls into misfortune and finds himself an unacknowledged outcast in a foreign country, he becomes a trader, just as Prince Zan-al-Makan in the story of Omar-bin-al Nu’uman and his sons becomes assistant to the man who lighted the fires in the public baths of Damascus, and Badr-al-Din Hasan, the son of the Wazir Nur-al-Din Ali, became a cook and confectioner in the same city I. There is little or no indication in these stories of the existence of settled landowners holding large estates, or of a division of ranks based on birth; and the marriages to the king’s daughter of Abdullah the fisherman, and Ala-ed-din, the son of a poor widow, when they were enriched by the gifts of Abdullah the Merman, and of the slaves of the wonderful lamp and ring, are spoken of as quite consonant with propriety2. All people seem to be equal in birth, and to move up or down the scale of rank according to their good fortune, their industry or their talents; and they seem to live in the midst of settled communities, whose relations were generally peaceable, for war is scarcely ever spoken of in this whole collection of stories telling the national history as handed down by the successors of official framers of historical tales, and depicting the characters of the people. In the whole twelve volumes of Burton’s Arabian Nights there are only two stories, those of Omar-bin-al Nu’uman and his sons, and of Gharib and his brother Ajib, in which the chief actors are soldiers 3.
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, 4 Story of Badr-al-Din Ali and his son Badr-al- Din Hasan,’ vol. i. pp. 179 ff.
s Ibid., ‘Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman,’ vol. vii. p. 237 If., 4 Ala-ed-din and the Wonderful Lamp,’ vol. x. p. 33 ff.
3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 306'—310.
       583
It was only in an age of peace, when the kings and their principal advisers were merchants like Anatha Pindika, the chief adviser of the king of Sravasti in Buddhist history, and the Kewat or fishermen kings of Tamralipti and Southwest Bengal, that the commerce of the Turvasu-Yadavas, sons of the date-palm-tree, with China and the islands of the Malay Archipelago on one side, and Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, could be kept up. But the ruling chiefs of these trading states were not Turano Dravidians, but belonged, like the Beni Hanifa, the Arab sons of the date-palm-tree, to races of much purer Northern descent. For the evidence of their marriage customs proves that under their rule the endogamous marriages of the Northern Gothic races superseded among the trading population of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Western India, the exogamic unions of the Turano-Dravidians. Almost all the heroes and heroines of the stories in the Arabian Nights are endogamous, and entirely ignore the exogamous restrictions of India caste rules; the marriage most sought after was that of first cousins, and the Persian kings, like Abram of the Beni Hanifa, used to marry sisters. In India similar disregard of the earlier laws which made endogamous marriages of near relations or of members of the same gotra or village unlawful is shown by some of the castes, who prove their Kushika descent by binding the hands of the bride and bridegroom together with Kusha grass as the sign of marriage. The Kooch Rajbunsi, who are all children of Kashyapa, and who are not divided into septs, profess to disallow marriages between relations nearer to one another than seven generations on the father’s and three on the mother’s side, but they are very lax in the observance of this rule, and prefer to marry a daughter of a neighbour, even when nearly related to them, to leaving home to seek a wife 1. But from the evidence of the Satapatha Brahmana we learn that in the West of India, among the fYadu-Turvasu races,
r Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kooch, p. 494.
584
   
who offered the new and full-moon sacrifices of the year of seventeen months and five seasons, the marriage laws were nearly, if not quite, as lax as to the marriages of near relations as those of the people described in the Arabian Nights. It says that both husband and wife may, among the observers of this ritual, be no more distant from one another than the third generation from the common father. And Harisvamin, the commentator on this passage, says that the Kanvas allow intermarriages frvom the third generation, the Sau-rashitras or trading Saus from the fourth, and that the Dakshinatyas, that is the people of the Malabar coasts, permit marriage between first cousins either on the father’s or mother’s side*. The Kanvas here mentioned are the men of the new {kana) race of priests, who are the reputed authors of the Eighth Mandala of the Rigveda and the priests of the Yadu-Turvasu, the trading races of the Hittite land of Khatlawar.
A similar state of society to that existing in the lands ruled by these peace-loving merchant-princes seems to have prevailed among the Mexican Toltecs, whose historical mythology is so similar to that of the Antelope and Naga races of India, and who measured time by the Pandava year of eighteen months. Among them, as among the Kushikas, each trade had its own guild, a special quarter of the city was appropriated to it as in Indian bazaars, and each guild was ruled by its chief, and worshipped its own tutelar deity at the festivals held as enjoined in the guild ritual. * The profession of artisan was looked upon as especially honourable, and the merchants held the highest rank in the state. Those who traded to foreign countries travelled in caravans guarded against attack by an armed escort, which was sometimes so large as to amount to an army, as in the case where a trading caravan stood a siege of four years in Ayotlan and finally were left in undisturbed possession of the town. These traders assumed insignia and devices of their 1
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 3, 6j S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 238, note 1, 239.
   
535
own, like the banners of the Yadu-Turvasu chiefs, and in Tezcuco they controlled by a council of finance the expenditure of the State. They were called “ Uncle” by the king, and held their own courts both for civil and criminal casesg and they were, in short, the chief rulers of the land.
The supremacy in India of the merchant traders seems to have originated in the age of the fifteen-months year, when the Northern sun-worshippers reorganised the country after the disturbed age of that of eleven months, and it was under their rule that standing armies for defensive purposes begun to be entertained. These were, as I have shown, organised by the chiefs of the border provinces of each state, and were only clansmen trained in military exercises, who appeared at musters, but, when not summoned for duty, were ordinary husbandmen engaged in the cultivation of their lands ; and there is no evidence that the trade of soldier was looked upon in those days as a separate profession ; the people were all Vaishya or men of the villages.
D. The conquest of the Bhdrata merchant-kings by the Sanskrit-speaking sun-worshippers.
The rule of these peace-loving merchant-kings of the age of Sallimanu or Solomon, the fish-sun-god, was that of the epoch when the year began with the entry of the sun into Gemini at the vernal equinox, that is between 6000 and 7000 B.C., when the Pole Star was in Hercules. It was apparently at the close of this age, when the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, about 4000 B.C., that the iron bolt introducing the Iron Age descended in the irruption of the poor but warlike races of the North, who coveted the wealth of the prosperous traders. An invasion ending in a dislocation ol the allied confederacy of the trade guilds and the separation of the united links of the chain of alliances which bound 1
1 Prescott, I I is lor v of Mexico, vol. i. chap. v. pp. 1.24- 120.
586
   
together the merchant states into alien kingdoms, each of which looked on its neighbours not as friends, but as foes meditating projects of conquest. The history of this war which made the Sanskrit-speaking races, who called themselves Arya, or the noble people, the rulers of India, is told but very cursorily in the Rigveda and the national chronicles. In the history of the war between the Kauravyas and Pan- davas they appear on the side of the Kauravyas as the Sarasvatas, led by Uluka, the owl, the son of Shakuni, the raven-mother-bird. They formed the last remnant of the Kauravya army destroyed on the eighteenth day of the battle by Sahadeva, the fire-god, and Nakula, the mun-goose, the two Pandava twins 1. Their name shows that they had then become settlers in the holy land of the Kuru-kshethra, between the Sarasvatl and Drishadvatl. They appear in the Rigveda as the Arya, who, with their allies the Arna or men of the Aruna or fire-drill, and the Chitra-ratha, or sons of the star Virgo (Chitra), the mother of corn, were defeated by the Yadu-Turvasu on the Sarayu or Sutlej, and this war shows them to be the enemies of the trading Hittite races, who ruled the country as the merchant kings 2.
But it is in the story of the battle of Sudas and the Tritsu, the people who make fire by rubbing (trit), with the ten kings of the Bharatas, that we find the most satisfactory account of the war. Sudas, the king of the Tritsu, is called the son of Divo-dasa, that is, of the ten (dasha) months of gestation, and Divodasa is called the son of Vadhri-ashva, the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year and of the river-mother Sarasvatl 2 This king is the son-god, the giver (das) of Su, the sun-bird, descendant of the river-mother, whose name as the goddess Shar was brought to India by the fire-worshippers of Asia Minor, who first adored her as the tribal river-goddess of the Harah-vaiti
* Mahabharata Udyoga (Yana-sandhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Shalya (Slialya* badhd) Parva, xxviii. pp. 106, 107.
2   Rg. iv. 30, 17, iS.
3 Ibid. vii. 18, 25, vi. 61, I.
   
5 87
of Herat in Kandahar, the tenth of the good lands, created by Ahura Mazda 1. Hence he was the sun-god of the Bactrian races of Ragha, the Asiatic home of the worshippers of the sun-god Ra, the speakers of the inflexional languages of North-western Europe.
His prophet-priest was Vashishtha, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 396, the god of the sacrificial flame on the altar, and the father of the sun-god Aurva, born of the Thigh-stars of the Great Bear.
The Bharatas, foes of the Tritsu, were the followers and sons of Vishvamitra, the god of lunar time, and opponents of Vashishtha, priest of the sun-god, whose cows of light he stole. He was the father of Sakuntala, the bird-mother of the Bharata, the offspring, as we have seen, of the three- years cycle.
Hence the two armies which were to contend for the rule of India were those of the fire and sun-worshippers, the invaders from the North, and those of the lunar-solar race of the Bharatas and Kushika Khati or Hittites, who entered India in the epochs of the three-years cycle, and the eleven-months year, and who had amalgamated themselves with the previous dwellers in the land, and established the lunar-year of thirteen, and the lunar-solar year of seventeen months together, with the government of the merchant kings of the Ikshvaku and Yadava races.
The list of the tribes on each side is given in the graphic account of the decisive action of the war told in the battle hymn, Rg. vii. 18, attributed to Vashishtha. There the leading tribe of the sun-worshippers is called Tritsu, but in Rg. vii. 33, 1—6, and vii. 83, 1, these Aryan conquerors of the Bharatas are called Pritha-Parshu. This name shows them to belong to a mixed tribe formed from the union of the Parthians with the Persians or Parsis, the fire-worshippers. These Pritha are the sons of Pritha, the Pandava begetting {pent) mother, also called KuntI, the lance, and
Darmcstelei, Zcmiavesla Vcndidad Airraid, i. 13; S.K.K., vol. iv. p. 7.
588
   
throughout the Mahabharata the Pandavas, and especially Arjuna, are called Partha or Parthians. They, the sons of the begetting (pern) mother, born, like the sons of Pritha, the virgin made pregnant by the gods without the intervention of a human father, were originally the sons of the mother-tree. Their name of Parthava the Parthian is given in the Rigveda to Abhyavartin Cayamana, who, as leader of the Srin-jayas or Panchalas, conquered the Vrishivans or Yadavas and the Turvasu at Hariyuplya, the sacrificial stakes (yupa) of Hari or Shari, that is Mathura *. Also in the Periplus Minnagora, the port on the Indus which succeeded Patala, is said to be ruled by the Parthians 1 2 3. In the Rigveda Parshu is used as the name of a tribe in the passage where Tirindira is called the Parshu 3, and in the feminine form Parshu, whose name means also the ribs or a crescentshaped knife, is said to be with Manavi, the daughter of Manu the measurer, the mother of twenty sons, which may be the twenty days of the month of the eighteen-months year 4. These Parthians and Persians are clearly the men of Central Asia, also called Scythians or Sakyas, the name of the clan in which Siddartha Gautama, the real living Buddha, was born. They were the fire-worshippers of the Zoroastrian birth-land of Ragha or Media, who had invaded India and established themselves on the Sarasvati as Sanskrit-speaking immigrants into the country of the Turano- Dravidians.
The allies of the Tritsu, named in Rg. vii. 18, are: (i) The Paktha, (2) Alinas, (3) Bhalanas, (4) Vishanin, and (5) Shiva. The Paktha are clearly the people called by Herodotus Paktues, who, he says, wear goat-skin tunics, and are armed with bows and daggers. He describes them as Bactrians, whose native home was near Armenia, but who had settled in India, and occupied the city of Kaspaturos, that is Multan, or the place of the Malli, which they called the city of
1   Rg. vi. 27, 5, 7, S.
2   Periplus, 38; Zimmer, Alt Indisches Leben, p. 433.
3   Rg. viii. 6, 46.   4 Ibid., x. 86, 23.

[Prometheus]

   
589
Kashyapa, said by Hecataeus to belong to the Ghandftri, the native tribes of Kandahar1. They arc, in short, the Afghan Pathans or mountaineers, who speak Pushtu, that is the Paktian or Pushtian language. It belongs to the Indo- European family of inflectional languages, but, like that of their Sanskrit and Zend-speaking allies, it uses the Dravidian cerebral letters, thus showing that they, who when they invaded India married Dravidian wives, had children who learnt to speak their Northern tongue with a Dravidian accent.
These Afghans, with the Parthians and Persians, were the leaders of the invading armies of Sudas, who brought into India the iron-bolt which destroyed the confederacy of the Yadavas and Bhojas, and dethroned their year-god Krishna. For the Bhavishya Purana tells us that Shamba, the son of Krishna, brought Magian priests from Saka-dwipa to officiate in the temple of the Sun at Multan2. This Shamba, the throwing spear or javelin of the Sakyas and Homeric heroes, was the tribal symbol carried in front of their armies as the united fire-drill and socket of the American warrior Indians, and it in its female form as the fire-socket was the Shamba who brought forth the iron-bolt which destroyed the empire of the Vishnuite merchant-kings of the Western sea-board.
The whole story, when translated from allegorical language to a plain statement of facts, tells how the worship of the old gods was overthrown by the fire-worshippers from Saka- dwipa, the land of the Sakyas, who substituted temples to the sun for the shrines dedicated to the creating-god, who descended from the mountain-tops wreathed with mist to bring to earth the rain-water which was to fill the rivers and fertilise the soil with the germs of life, and who as the Pole Star father-god, the creating goat, ruled time and
1 Herodotus, iii. 93, 102, vil 67 ; A. Weber, India and lhe HeU in Ola Days, p. 6; Ilcwitt, ‘Early History of Northern India, I’arl ii. /.A'.st.S., 1889, p. 224.
1 A Weber, India and the lVest in Old Days, p. 20.
59°
History and Mythology
made the moon and sun measure the year by moving round the heavens in the star-marked path he bade them tread.
Thus this historical tale tells us of the Aryan invasion as an irruption led by the nomad warlike tribes of Scythia, the early Persian races, who were taught to ride, shoot with the bow, and speak the truth, and of whose language the Vedic, Sanskrit, Zend and Pushtu are dialectic forms.
These Northern invaders as they settled in the country found allies in the Alinas, Bhalanas, Vishanin, and Shiva. The two first I am unable to identify, but the Vishanin seem certainly to be connected with the god Vishnu, and the votaries of Vishnu, who allied themselves with the sun- worshippers, must be those who worshipped him as the sun-god of the eight-rayed star, the eighth son of Vasudeva, the year-god of the fifteen-months year who was born in Mathura. They were the tribe also called the Shura-sena or army of heroes, who are named in the Mahabharata and Manu as adherents of Krishna, who lived near Mathura1. They were the class of Rajputs called the Agni-kulas or men of the fire family. They are called in the Vaya and Matsya Puranas the Saisa-nagas, and belong to the Gaur Tagas, a mixed race allied to the Gonds and the Jat Takkas, who were supporters of the Buddhist doctrines 2, and whose parent- king Sisu-nag was the first of the traditional Chiroo kings of Magadha.
The Shiva are undoubtedly the shepherds and cattle- herdsmen whose god was the white (svetd) Shiva, the threeeyed bearer of the trident, and the Pinaka bow-husband of the weaving-goddess Uma (flax). He was the son of UshT- nara, the man-god (nard) of the East, and the shepherd- god of the pastoral races who had been the earliest invaders of India from the North, and who were the Takkus or Tri-gartas who marched under the banner of the Yupa,
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuya-rambha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47 ; Biihler, Manu, ii. 19, vii. 193; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp, 32, 247.
2   Beames, Elliot’s Memoirs of the Races of the North- Western Provinces of India, vol. i., Gaur Taga, pp. 108, 109, vol. ii. p. 77.
of the Myth-Making Aye.
591
or sacrificial stake borne by Bhuri-shravas, the grandson of Vahlika, their leader and brother of Shantanu. His name, meaning the man of Balkh on the Oxus, shows his Bactrian origin. They are named in the Rigveda, x. 59, 10, the Ushinara, and are said in the Aitarcya Bvdhmana to live in the middle country, the Gangetic Doab, with the Kuru- PanchalasJ. They are called the Seboi in the history of the Indian campaign of Alexander the Great, and Strabo places them near Multan, between the Indus and Acesincs (Chitiab)1 2. They are thus the early worshippers of the household fire Agni Valshvanara, the fire of the men (nara) of the villages (visit), the Northern cultivators who now allied themselves with the new comers who had added the worship of the sun-god to that of the holy fire.
The invading Aryan forces therefore included the Par- thians, Persians, and Pathan hill tribes, led by the Scythians of Medea and North Persia, who had allied themselves in India with the cattle-herdsmen and corn-growers of the central country of the Gangetic Doab, the Shiva or Tugra, and the Srinjaya Panchalas.
Their opponents were the Bharata followers of Vishva- mitra, the father of Bharata’s mother Sakuntala, and the protecting god of the mad-star king Kalmasha-pada, lie of the spotted (kalmasha) feet, whose epoch was, as we have seen in Chapter VI., that of the eleven-months year. These Bharatas are called in Rg. vii., 18, 18, 19, the Bheda, that is sons of the cleft (bheda), the female symbol, the yoni of the linga. Hence they were the Linga worshippers, the followers of the bisexual parent gods, whose goddess-mother in Syria was Tirhatha, the cleft.
The ten tribes led by their ten kings, the ten lunar months of gestation, were : (1) The Turvasu, whose leader is called Puro-dasa, the sacrificial rice-cake offered at the New and Full Moon sacrifices of the seventeen-months year to Piishan,
1   Act. Brdh., S, 14; Zimmer, All fmiischcs Lcbcn, pi 130.
2   Diodorus, 17, 19 ; Strabo, xv. S.
592
History and Mythology
the hands of Savitri, that is to Push, the first month of the year1. This cake is called in Rg. vii. i8, 19, the Yakshu, that is the firstfruits offering of the year of the moving or hunting (yaksh) sun-star going round the Pole Tur. Hence Puro-dasa, the leader of the Turvasu, seems to be the leading god of their year, the god of its first month. (2) The Matsya sons of the eel-fish-god born of Adrika, the sun-hawk in the river Tamas, the darkness, whence their eel-parents Matsya and Satyavati passed, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 191, into the Yamuna or Jumna, where Satyavati, as wife of Shan- tanu, became the mother of the Kauravyas and Pandavas. (3) The Bhrigu, the original fire-worshippers, who also adored the linga. (4) The Druhyu or sorcerers, sons of theVedic witch-goddess Druh, the Druj of the Zendavesta.   (5) The
Vaikarna or two (vi) horned (karna) people, whose country Vi-karnika is identified by Hema-chandra with Kashmir. They were the Naga races, worshippers of the two-horned sun-god Karna. Their twenty-one warriors are said in Rg. vii. 18, 11, to have been slain by Su-das, who thus, as the sun-god of the new era, slew the twenty-one days of the month of the seventeen-months year. (6) The Anu. (7) The Purus. These two tribes and the Druhyu were the descendants of the three sons of Yayati and Sharmishtha, the mother-banyan-fig-tree of the lunar races, speakers of non- Aryan languages, as shown by the epithet mridha-vac applied to the Purus in Rg. vii. 18, 13, meaning the speakers of the soft Dravidian speech. ( The Ajas or sons of the goat, the Pole Star goat-god of the cycle-year. (9) The Shigru, whom I am unable to identify. (10) The Yakshus. These are certainly identical with the very ancient race who in Greece called the young sun-god born at the Eleusinian mysteries Iakkhos, which is the same word as Yak-shu. The name of this parent-god (hz/cyos) also appears in that of the Akkadian Ia-khan, the fish-god, that is the sun-god who at the close of his annual circuit through the heavens marked
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra/it i. 2, 2, 1—4, i. 6, 2, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42, 43, 162.
   
593
by the stars of the Hindu Nakshatra emerged as the sun-fish from the constellation Revati Pisces to become the sun-god of the new year in Aries. This god, the ever-living fish, was the sun-god of the cycle formed by the procession of the equinoxes, beginning with the entry of the sun into Aries at the autumnal equinox. In this cycle, after each of the other zodiacal stars have in their turn become the star in which the sun enters at the autumnal equinox, the sun returns to the original Aries, which opened the original cycle-year 24,400 years before. The name of the father-god of these Yakshu, who measured the year by the passage of the moon and sun through the zodiacal stars of the Nakshatra, is in Genesis Joktan or Jokshan, the mover or advancer (yak), who in one account of his birth was the son of the Iberian father Eber, and the brother of Peleg, the stream, in whose time the earth was divided into the lands of the sons of the rivers, and of the worshippers of the moon and sun, who measured their year by their passage through the stars. In another genealogy Jokshan is the son of Keturah, the encircling (ketur) or incense-mother, the eastern wife of Abram l. His thirteen sons are called the children of Shem, the name of God, that is of the bisexual mother Shemi-ramot, and their Eastern boundary was the mountain of the East, the Akkadian Khur-sak-kurra, and the Kushika mother-mountain. Two of their thirteen sons were Havilah and Ophir, representing the Indian lands watered by the Indus, the Sindhu, and the Yavana of the Mahabharata. These Yakshus thus belong to the tribes of South-western Asia, who as the astronomical Indian tribes and the Chaldmans of Babylon, whose Indian origin I have shown in Chapter II. p. 48, were careful observers of the stars. The)* founded the Babylonian Zigurats or towers of observation. They mapped the annual and monthly paths of the sun and moon in the Hindu Nakshatra, and the Arabian and Sabaean lists of Lunar mansions. Their year-god was the antelope-sun-god Krishna, the bearer of the discus or year-circle of zodiacal stars, and
1 Gen. x. 25—31, xxv. 2.
Q q
594
History and Mythology
they were thus the Yadavas, who measured their year by thirteen lunar-months ; a year-measurement which, as we have seen in Chapter VIII., was very ancient, and which became in the solar-lunar chronometry of the worshippers of the sun of the eight-rayed star, the seventeen-months year.
Hence we see that the army of the Bharata was composed of the pre-Sanskrit races of the Turvasu - Yadavas, the Druhyu, Anu and Puru, that is of the five tribes descended from Yayati, DevayanI and Sharmishtha, who were the Kushika, ruled by the Khati or Hittites, the founders of the mercantile dynasties, together with the Bhrigu, worshippers of the fire and the linga, the Vaikarna Nagas, worshippers of the horned sun-horse, and the Ajas, worshippers of the Pole Star goat. These tribes, representing the rich trading population who ruled the rivers and sea- coasts of India, united to overthrow the Northern sun-worshipping invaders, whose indigenous allies were the corngrowing farmers of the country villages and the shepherd and pastoral races. It was a war of the rude inland population against the traders and artisans, who had founded the commerce of the country.
The most graphic account of the combat is that given in the war-song of the Vashishtha party, Rg. vii. 18, a poem which re-echoes the battle paeans telling the victorious sun- worshippers of the glorious deeds of the hero-soldiers of the sun. It, with the two other Vashishtha poems telling of the war, Rg. vii. 33 and 83, and the Vishvamitra hymn, Rg. iii. 33, sums up in one battle, in which Su-das overthrew the ten kings, the story of what was doubtless a contest prolonged for many years. The Bharata kings, the rulers of the land, led the army they collected to drive out the Sanskrit-speaking intruders who had settled on the Saras- vati, whence they could command the navigation of the Jumna, and paralyse the trade both of the Jumna and Ganges, by seizing Kosambi at the junction of the two rivers, which became the capital of the Sakya kings r. The
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 391 ff.
       595
importance attached to the Jumna by both parties is proved in Stanza 19 of Rg. vii. 18, where Indra is said to have helped the Yamuna and Tritsu.
It was to oust the invaders from the land between the Sarasvatl and DrishadvatT, whence they commanded the very important strategic post of Indra-prastha, or Delhi, on the Jumna, that the Bharata attacked the Tritsu from the North-west, and collected their forces in the country assigned by Arrian to the Kathi or HittitesJ, between the Purushni or Ravi and Chinat. The Tritsu and their allies were assembled south of the Beas or Vepash, and the Sutlej or Shatudri, and it is to these two rivers that Vishvamitra, in Rg. iii. 33, prays to give an easy passage to the Bharata forces. But the Tritsu would not await the attack of their antagonists, and determined to be themselves the attacking party. Hence they marched through the country of their allies the Trigartas or Shivas, lying between the Beas and Sutlej, the modern districts of Jalandhur and Hoshiarpur, and found the Bharata encamped on the north bank of the Purushni or Ravi. They were surprised and confused at the appearance of their enemies, and rashly determined to cross the river and destroy them. But in their hurry they failed to find a practicable ford, and rushed into the rapidly flowing stream, “thinking,” according to the picturesque language of the warrior bard, “ fools as they were, to cross it as easily as on dry land; but the lord of the earth, Prithivi,” the parent-god of the Parthians, “seized them in his might, and herds and herdsmen were destroyed.” They were thus easily and completely routed by Su-das, who followed up his victory by crossing the river and taking their seven cities. Here the narrative ceases to be the dramatic tale of an eye-witness and becomes the historical story of the conquest of the Bharata year-god by a god introducing another epoch. Hence the seven cities were the seven days of the week of the thirteen and seventeen-months year, just
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 215 ff.
Q q 2
59^
   
as the twenty-one Vai-karna champions slain by Su-das were the twenty-one days of the month of the latter year. Su-das established himself as the year-god who divided the goods of the Anu and Druhyu among the Tritsu, conquered the Purus, and made the Ajas, Shigrus, and Yakshus pay horses’ heads as tributeT.
But to understand the history of this momentous war clearly we must turn to the account given of it in the Mahabharata, where the Vedic Su-das, the giver of Su, the sap of life, the year-god, descended from the Sarasvati and Vadhri-ashva, the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year, is called Samvarana. This name means the Place of Sacrifice, the ground consecrated as the site of the national altar of the year, said in the Brahmanas to represent the whole earth1 2. The creating spirit-god, Samvarana, whose earthly dwelling-place is the central national altar, is the giver of the Su or germ of life. Samvarana is mentioned once as an individual in Rg. v. 33, 10, where he is called the Rishi, the antelope-god, "who gathers wealth by his might, to whose stalls the cows (of light) come,” that is to say, he is the sun-god. This will appear still more clearly when we examine his genealogy, the history of his reign, and the story of his marriage to Tapatl. In the Mahabharata he appears as the ruler who was summoned by Vashishtha to reign as the supreme king of the Bharatas, and as the father of Kuru, in whose name the holy land, watered by the Sarasvati and Drish- advati, was consecrated as Kuru-kshetra, the field of the Kurus. This was, as we have seen, the land of Taneshur, where the mother-tree, born of the southern mud (tan), emerged on earth as the mothcr-banyan-fig-tree, the tree of Sharmishtha, the wife of Yayati. But to bring out fully the meaning of the history we must look to the ancestry of Samvarana.
1   Rg. vii. 18, 19.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 7, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 175.
   
597
He is directly descended from Bharata, son of Dushmanta and Sakuntala, who was, as we have seen, p. 280, born as the son of the three-years cycle, that is as the god of the eleven- months year. Hence his reign, according to the genealogist, was a time of confusion. He begat nine sons, the nine days of the week of the cycle-year, but slew them, and remained childless till, by the help of Bharadvaja, the sun-lark, the father of Drona, the holy Soma tree-trunk, he became the father of Bhumanyu, the son of the soil {bhuman), who ruled in the epoch of the eleven-months year the united races of the Kurus, the Northern conquerors and the previous dwellers in the land. Bhumanyu’s son was Su-hotra, the pourer {hotra) of Su, a name equivalent to that of Su-das, the giver of Su, and his son was Aja-midha, the warring {midha) goat {aja), who is said in Rg. i. 67, 5, to sustain the earth. The word aja {goat) also means creator, and in Rg. v. 82, 6, he is said to be the creating germ taken by Visvakarman, the maker [karman) of living things (visva) from the waters whence all the gods were born. He found himself alone in the navel of the unborn where all life is hidden. In other words, this creating father-goat is the germ of life, the Chinese Tao, dwelling in the navel of the heavens, the Pole Star, surrounded by the mists of the mother waters. This Pole Star creating-god married DhuminI, the daughter of smoke {dhumo), the sacrificial flame on the Southern altar of burnt-offering, which disseminated life-giving heat through the world. From her was born Riksha, the constellation of the Great Bear, who, as we have seen, begot as the Thigh of the ape-god, united with the Pole Star goat, the sexless sun-god of the year of fifteen months, the god of the sons of the date-palin-tree. This was the god Samvarana, who was in his first Avatar the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year. He, according to the genealogist, was attacked by the Panchalas with ten Akshauhinis of troops, those of the ten months of gestation of the cycle-year, and driven to the forests at the foot of the Himalayas on the banks of the Sindhu or
History and Mythology
598
Indus. There he remained childless and in exile for a thousand years, during the rule of the mercantile kings of the seventeen and thirteen - months year, till he was brought forth by Vashishtha, who set him on the throne as the ruling sun-god of a new era I. His return to power as the conquering sun-god who was to unite the new sun- worshippers with the Bharata is told in the story of his marriage to Tapatl, the heating {tap) mother. She was the daughter of Vivasvat, the god of the two lights called Surya, the sun, and was the younger sister of Savitrl the sun-maiden. She was the mother-goddess of the South, the home of the Southern sun, whence it brings heat to the earth. Samvarana, who as the rising sun of the coming era awaited his hour of enthronement in the forests of the South, died there for love of this goddess, and lay insensible for twelve days, till he was recalled to life by Vashishtha, as the Ribhus, makers of the seasons, were awoke by the dog sent by the Pole Star goat, after sleeping twelve days in the house of Agoya, the Pole Star2 3. Vashishtha united the reborn sun-god to Tapatl, the sun- goddess of the winter solstice, and thus made him a year sun-god, who reproduced the year of Orion in which the sun-god slept for the last twelve days of his year 3.
E.   The twelve-months year of the sun-worshippers.
The year of this sun-god was like that of Orion, one of twelve months and three hundred and sixty days, but it was not, like Orion’s year, divided into months of twenty- nine days, but into thirty-day months, and it was not measured by seventy-two five-day weeks, but by thirty- six weeks of ten days, the decades of the Egyptians and Athenians. These were the weeks of the two hands ex-
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, icciv. pp. 279—2S1.
2   Rg. i. 161, 13.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxiii.—clxxv. pp. 492—500.
   
599
hibiting the completeness of the power of the sun-god ; the weeks of the Anjalika weapon of the joined hands with their palms placed together with which Arjuna slew the year-god Kama, after he had overturned his car with the iron arrow, the thunderbolt of this era which destroyed all the old-year gods1. The year thus measured was one which could be easily manipulated by the priests, who had exactly learnt the length of the year, and could always add an intercalary month of thirty days every sixth year to maintain the average length of three hundred and sixty- five days for the year, and the error still left uncorrected by this process was repaired in a system of cycles like the fifty-two-years cycle of Mexico, in which the intercalary days necessary to make the calendar exactly correct were added. We shall see in the sequel that in the instructions for building the year-altar the Hindu priests actually, according to the Brahmanas, added thirty-five or thirty-six intercalary days every sixth year, which was more than enough. It was a year in which constant astronomical observations could be dispensed with, and was therefore one suited to the unastronomical warriors of the North.
The sun-god who ruled this year, which began, as we have seen in discussing the fifty days reckoned for his resurrection interval in April—May and May—June, was under this change of time-reckoning released from the yoke of the stars Gemini, and it was no longer neccessary to begin the year when the sun entered that constellation. The last year apparently measured by this constellation was that beginning when the sun was in Gemini at the vernal equinox. This year calculation lasted till the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, and it is from this epoch, about 4200 B.C., that modern zodiacal observations have been held to date.
This change in the year-reckoning accompanying the victory of the sun-worshippers of the rising sun of day,
1 Mahabliarata Kama Parva, xc. So—S4, xci. 39—49? PP- 359> 3^5? 3^6-
6oo
   
and the total discomfiture of the votaries of the moon-god and those who began their year with the setting sun and stars, seems to furnish an explanation of the Bible story of the disruption of society consequent on the fall of the Tower of Babel. The Tower of the Gate (hah) of God (el) is a metaphorical name for those successive measurements of annual time which were ruled by the stars Gemini, the guardians of the gate of the divine garden, the field of heaven circuited by the sun in its annual journey through the zodiacal stars which bounded it.
We have seen that in the reckonings of the zodiacal year from the epoch of the year of fifteen months annual time was measured by the entry of the sun into Gemini, a mode of reckoning beginning when the sun entered Gemini at the winter solstice, between 12,000 and 13,000 B.C. There was also long before this a persistent deification of the Ashvin twin stars, for in the Hindu constellation of Shimshu-mara, the alligator, which, with its fourteen stars, drove the stars round the Pole, the twin stars Gemini were its hands and the divine physicians. It was the new deification of the sun-god as a god independent of the Pole Star governing the tower of the Garden of God, which overthrew this tower, overturned the trading governments of the merchant-kings, which united all the maritime people in a confederacy of allied states and replaced the age of national brotherhood and friendly trade rivalry by one of international suspicion and jealousy, in which every state feared its neighbours as possible robbers who were scheming to appropriate their lands. Hence every national tribe used only its own language, and the knowledge of the common language of commercial intercourse disappeared from the earth. This revolution apparently dates from the time when the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox. It was then that the Kirubi or flying bulls of Assyria, the Hebrew Cherubim, replaced the twin stars, the giants Gog and Magog, as guardians of the Gate of God, and as warders of the doors of the temples. It was as a consequence of this revolution and the disruption of
   

[Prometheus]

 
601
society it caused, that Adam, the red man, who had been beguiled by the serpent, ruler of the Garden of Eden, was sent forth from the peaceful settlements of the trading age to till the waste earth, which was henceforth to be disturbed by the wars of conquest and spoliation waged by the united tree and sun-worshippers against the money-making progeny of the Naga snake. On his departure from the land of the mother-tree, the tree of life, the Eastern gates of his former home were guarded by the two Cherubim or flying bulls x. In this story the triumph of the son of the sun-god and the enmity between the old and new beliefs is told in the sentence of punishment passed on the serpent.
F.   History as told in the ritual of the building of the brick altar of the sun-bird of the twelve-months year.
It was for the worship of this new sun-god introducing Orion’s year of twelve months, who rose from the East as the sun-bird, that the new brick Ahavanlya altar of libations was built in India as the culminating embodiment of the theology of the Brahmanas. It was devoted to the celebration of the ritual in which living victims were no longer to be offered, but the sacrifices were to consist of libations of milk, sour milk, barley, running water, and the sap of the Soma plant, poured on the altar and consumed by the worshippers as sacramental food which incorporated into their frames the spirit of the living god.
This altar was not a brand new creation of a revolutionary sect whose object was to entirely obliterate the old faiths, but of one which sought to retain the recollection of and reverence for the ancient creeds while they substituted for their errors, improvements taught by the advance of knowledge and experience. It was intended to unite the new comers with the ancient population in a bond of national union, and this intention is manifested in every stage of the ritual of the building ceremonies.
1 Gen. iii. 22—24.
602
   
These begin with the foundation of the altar. The land
o
on which it was to be built was ploughed with the sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree {Ficus glovierata). To this the oxen were yoked with traces of the Munja sugar-grass {Sacchanmi Munja) of which the Brahmins’ year-girdles of three strands are made. In yoking the oxen, aGayatri, or eight-syllabled, and a Tristubh, or eleven- syllabled verse, were recited, so that they were dedicated to the god of the years of eleven and eight-day weeks. In this ploughing, as I have said in Chapter VII. pp. 423, 424, the first furrow was ploughed from the South-west to the Southeast, according to the diagram there drawn ; the second from the South-west corner to the North-west, then from Northwest to North-east, and from North-east to South-east, so as to form a square representing the annual course of the sun-bird beginning its year at sunset at the winter solstice, and going round the four quarters of the heavens to return to its Southwest home at the next winter solstice. This South-west quarter from which the sun starts is called in the Brahmanas the Nirriti or unorthodox quarter
After finishing the year-square the cross-lines are ploughed to form the eight-rayed star of the fifteen-months year enclosed in it. The first line is the North and South line going from the middle of the South-west to South-east line, to the North-west and North-east line. This is the line of the Pole Star and of the year measured by the circuit round it of the stars led by the Pleiades and Canopus first and the Pleiades and Orion afterwards, when the year was changed from the two-seasons year of the Pleiades to Orion’s year of three seasons. After this the line from South-west to North-east, indicating the course of the solstitial year- bird round the ploughed square, was drawn. Then the line from West to East, indicating the year measured by the equinoxes as well as by the solstices, beginning with the cycle-year of three years opening at the autumnal equinox, the age in which the zodiacal path of the moon and sun
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 1, S ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 320.
   
603
began to be measured. The last line, from North-west to South-east, was the line of the white sun-horse of the healing fountains and wells, or white bull of the year of the eight-days week, who began his year at sunset at the summer solstice E
The next process is the consecration of the altar site on which the sacred sign of the eight-rayed star in the sun- square has been ploughed. First a bunch of Kusha grass (Poet cynosuroides) was placed in the centre of the star, and five libations of ghi or clarified butter are poured on it as offerings to the gods of the five-days week and the five seasons of the year, and then the priest consecrated the ground to the year-god by thirteen sentences, indicating, as we are told, the thirteen months of the year. These set forth the inner meaning of the five layers of bricks of which the altar was built, and declare that it was built to the year- god of a year measured by lunar phases and the rising sun bringing forth the cows of light. It is said to be the altar of the year of the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the sun-god and sun-horse, of the household-fire and the mother- mountain Ida, mother of the cows of light, and of the creat- ing-god invoked at it 2.
Then twelve jars of water, denoting the twelve months of the year which was to be henceforth the national year, were poured over the ploughed ground, and three additional jars over the whole site of the consecrated area, making fifteen jars poured over the whole area, indicating the twelve months and three seasons of Orion’s year, the model of that now instituted. Then seeds of corn and healing herbs were sown on the whole consecrated area from a jar of Udumbara-wood {Ficus glome rat a). While sowing this seed fifteen Gayatrl stanzas were recited of Rg. x. 97, attributed to Bhishak Atharvana, the healing fire- priest, and called Osadhastuti, the praiscr of medicine, twelve stanzas during the sowing of the ploughed area, and three
1 Eggcling, Sat. finl/i., vii. 2, 2, 1—14; S.K.E., w|» xxi. pp. 325- 330.
- Ibid., vii. 2, 3, 1—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 332—335.
6c 4
   
during the sowing of that unploughed. This hymn of the sun-physician traces the healing virtues of the plants whose effects it extols to the holy trees, the Ashvattha {Ficus religiosa) and the Parna or Palasha {Butea frondo so), the two Soma trees, and ascribes their growth to Brihaspati, the Pole Star god. It dedicates the seed sown while reciting them to the god of the fifteen-months year. In the thirteenth of these stanzas Yakshman {fever) is called on to fly forth with the jay *, and we learn from the lives of the Buddhist Theris that the blue jay was the sacred bird during the age of the year of thirteen months and seven-day weeks. Padumavati, the third Theri, was born as one of the seven sisters, the seven days of the week, in the palace of Kiki, the blue jay, king of Kashi, and in the birth after this she was born as a village maiden, who gathered the mother-lotus of five hundred seeds, which gave her in her next birth her child, the eldest son of the king, called Mahapadumo the great lotus, and sons to each of the other four hundred and ninety-nine kings’ wives 2.
It is the leaf of this lotus that was placed in the centre of the site of the Ahavanlya altar, but before it was laid down sand was scattered over it, and the whole area, measuring about forty feet each side, was made level with the square mound, the Uttaravedi, measuring seven feet on each side, which was its centre. The sand was scattered with a six-versed hymn, and these six stanzas, with the four bricks placed on the boundary lines and two verses sung to make the seed grow, make up, we are told, the twelve months of the year, that is of the Brahmins’ year divided into two seasons of six months each, the Devayana season, i in which the sun goes North, and the Pitriyana, in which it goes South 3.
The next ceremony is that of the Pravargya, or the offering of the large pot and the Upasads. The ritual of 1 2 3
1 Eggeling, Sat. Bruk., vii. 2, 4, 1—30; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 335—342.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 74—77.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 3, 1, 1—47; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 342—355.
   
605
the Pravargya is somewhat complicated, but it may shortly be described as representing the birth of the twelve-months year of the altar from the thirteen-months year and those preceding it The earth for the Pravargya pot is dug with a spade made of Udumbara wood, and it is made of five materials, the five days of the week : (1) potter’s clay, (2) clay from ant-hills, (3) clay from earth torn up by the year boar, (4) Adari or Soma plants, and (5) goats’ milk. Three pots, two milking-bowls, and two platters consecrated to RohinI, the red cow Aldebaran, are made, and goats’ milk is poured on these seven representatives of the seven-days week. When the materials are ready, the great pot Mahavira is placed on the fire, surrounded with thirteen pieces of Vikuntula (Flacourtia sapida) wood, to denote the thirteen months of the year, and a gold plate is placed on its top. The milk heated in it is that of the cow RohinI, who is accompanied by her calf, the young sun-god. She is milked into the pot, goats’ milk being afterwards mixed with her milk. On the fire are burnt successively three bundles of fire faggots. During the burning of the first and second the AgnTdhra or fire-priest stands up, while the last is being burnt he sits down like a woman being delivered of a child. These three faggots denote the three-years cycle of the year of the goat from which the sun-god was born, and before the milk is boiled the twelve gods of the new year are invoked. The whole ceremony closes with the offering of thirteen libations to the thirteen gods of the months, among whom Surya, the sun-god, is given the seventh or central place. These arc offered after the heated milk has been drunk by those taking part in the sacrifice1. This sacrifice, and that of the Upasads to the three seasons of Prajapati’s (Orion s) year of the arrow, cover in their ritual the whole history of the solstitial sun-year 2
After these ceremonies a red-ox skin is placed in front 1 2
1   Eggeling, Saf. I'rii/i., xiv. i, i, I — xiv. 3, 2, 31; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 441—510.
2   Ibid., iii. 4, 4, 14—17; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 10S.
6o6
   
of the Garhapatya altar with its neck to the East. It is consecrated to RohinI, and it is on a similar skin that Hindu brides are seated after their marriage I, and before its consummation. The bricks for the first layer are placed on it, and sprinkled with a bunch of Kusha grass dipped in ghi or clarified butter, and then a white horse is led up to the bricks at sun-set2 3 4 5. In laying down the first layer of bricks a gold plate with twenty-one knobs on it was placed over the lotus leaf laid in the centre of the raised altar mound. On the plate there was put the gold image of a man lying on his back with his head to the East. Over him the first five stanzas of Rg. iv. 4 were repeated, calling upon Agni to drive away the wicked fiends. Beside the man were laid two offering spoons, one of Karshmarya (Gmelina arborea) wood of which the enclosing triangle was made on the Soma Uttaravedi altar 3, succeeding that in the form of a woman with its triangle of Palasha twigs ; the other offering spoon was made of Udumbara (Ficus glomerata) 4. Then a Svayam-atrinna, a self-perforated brick made with a hole in it, was placed on the man, and there are three of these in the altar in the centre of the first, third and fifth layers, so as to leave an open passage through the altar. This aperture is that for the stalk of the lotus called in the Zendavesta the golden tube of Saokanta, the mountain of the wet (sak) god. It is through this that the life-giving water generated in the lotus growing beneath the mother- mountain represented in the altar goes up to its top as the mist which descends to the earth in rain and dew 5. This self-pierced brick is called Drirva, or that born of the firm
1   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Grihya Sutra of Hiranyakeshin, i. 7, 22, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xxx. p. 193.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 3, 2, 1—19; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp, 355—362.
3   Ibid., iii. 4, 1, 16; S. B.E., vol. xxvi. p. S9.
4   Ibid., vii. 4, 1, 1—45; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 362—376.
5 Ibid., vii. 4, 2, 1—9, viii. 1, 1, 1; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 377—379, xliii. pp. 1, note I, 2; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Khorshed Nyayis, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 352, note 3 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 144.
   
607
(dhruva) Pole Star, and on it is laid a plant of Durva or Dub grass (Panicum dactylon), the creeping grass growing near the banks of rivers and watercourses, which always remains green during the hottest and driest weather. Next to this central brick on its East side a brick called Dvi-yajus, or the double-worship, was placed, and then five more bricks with different names, representing the generating Agni and the spring season, were laid in the same direction leading up to the most important brick of all, the eighth brick from the centre Polar brick. This is called the Ashadha brick, sacred to the month of that name (June—July), which begins the year opening with the rains of the summer solstice. This eighth centre-brick is the beak of the year-bird of the altar I.
South of this Ashadha brick, representing the beak of the sun-bird rising in the North-east at the summer solstice, and which rises in the East at the vernal equinox, the live tortoise of Kashyapa, the father-god of the Kushikas, was buried with its head to the West, and anointed with curds, honey and ghi. It was placed between two rows of Avaka (Blyxa octandra) plants, growing like the lotus on marshy lands. To the North of the Ashadha brick a pestle and mortar of Udumbara wood for the pounding of Soma was buried, and on the top of this Northern effigy of the generating Pole Star revolving-god was placed the fire-pan (ukhd), the making of which I have described in Chapter VIII. pp. 495 ffi, and it, which conveyed the heat which begot life in the sons of the rivers and th£ cow, was filled with sand and milk 2.
The heads of the five victims slain at this sacrifice of consecration were then placed in the fire-pan. Those of the horse and the ram on the North side, the bull’s and goat’s heads on the South, and the man’s head in the centre on the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., vii. 4, 2, 10—40; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 379~3% ! also see the plan of the first layer of bricks, Eggeling, Sal. Brdh., S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 17.
2   Ibid., vii. 5, 1, 1—34, vii. I, 1, 40—44; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 3S9—399. 310, 3IX.
6o8
   
sanded milk, after putting chips of gold in their mouths, nostrils, eyes, and ears.
Then the building of the altar was proceeded with. Five bricks called Ahasya or water-bricks, reminiscences of the mother-sea surrounding the mother-mountain, were laid at the West, South, and East ends of the cross, inside the circle forming the skeleton of the body of the altar bird, and five more bricks called Chandrasyah or metrical bricks dedicated to the five metres, Gayatri, Tristubh, Jagatl, Anushtubh and Pankti, representing, as we are told, the five seasons of the year, that is of a year beginning when the sun was in the North, the place of the metres. The Gayatri represented the spring, Tristubh the summer, JagatT, the rainy season, Anushtubh the autumn, Pankti the winter f.
Thus we see that the history of the year is wrapped up in the rules for laying this first layer which represents the spring season. I shall not give the details of the building of each of the other layers with the same minuteness as I have described the first, as to do so would be merely to repeat for each layer the year history I have given for the first, for each layer illustrates a separate section of the successive sequence of years I have depicted in the previous chapters of this book.
Each layer represents a season of the year, the first layer the spring, the second summer, the third the rainy season, the fourth autumn, the fifth winter.
The second layer, begun by laying down five Ashvini bricks to the five seasons of the year, is especially dedicated to the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the ritual of the laying of the bricks closes with an invocation in fifteen stanzas to the gods of the fifteen-months year, beginning with the goat and ending with the four-year-old bull1 2. The third layer is by the first eleven bricks laid down dedicated to the eleven-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 5, 2, 1—62, v. 4, 1, 3—7; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 401—417, 9i-
2 Ibid., viii. 2, 1, 1—9, 16, viii. 2, 4, 1—15; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 22—27, 29, 37—39-
   
609
months year, preceding that of fifteen months1. In the fourth layer of the autumn season the first eighteen bricks are dedicated to the eighteen months of the year or the eighteen-fold Prajapati, and the latter part of the layer to the seventeen-months year of the seventeen-fold Prajapati, with a hymn of praise to the thirty-three gods of the year of eleven months of thirty-three days2. The fifth or top layer of the winter season represents the vault of heaven encircling and overarching the altar, and it rests on the outside twenty-nine Stomabhaga bricks, called Nakasads or bricks of the firmaments, the twenty-nine days of the months of Orion's year of the Karanas 3. Inside this fifth layer a new Garhapatya hearth is inserted. It is dedicated, like the hearth described in Chapter VIII. pp. 559, 560, to the year of thirteen months. It is built of eighteen bricks, two rows of eight bricks, the first called Chiti, and the second placed on it Punashchiti, and on these are placed two Ritavya or seasonal bricks, the whole representing the eighteen-months year, and on the top are placed two Vis- vajyotis or living star bricks, to make up the twenty days of the months of the year 4.
The altar thus built was, as the Brahmana tells us, encircled * with three hundred and sixty enclosing stones distributed as follows round the altars : twenty-one round the Garhapatya hearth, seventy-eight round the eight Dhishnya hearths appropriated to the priests, and two hundred and sixty-one round the Ahavnniya altar. These represent the three hundred and sixty nights of the year. The days are represented by the three hundred and sixty Yajush-mati bricks laid down with formulas, and the hours arc represented by the ten thousand eight hundred Lokamprini or space-filling bricks denoting the Mohurtas of forty-eight minutes each, of which there are thirty in a day, and ten thousand eight
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brci/t., viii. 3, 4, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 57.
2   Ibid., viii. 4, 1, 27, 28, viii. 4, 3, 1—20; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 6S, 71 —77.
3   Ibid., viii. 5, 3, 1—8, viii. 6, 1, 1, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 92—94, 97, note I, 98.
4   Ibid,, viii. 6, 3, 1, viii. 7, 1, 24 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 117—131.
R r
6 io
   
hundred in a year of 360 days. But in the verbal instructions for laying the bricks on each layer, three hundred and ninety-five are ordered to be laid I. The extra thirty-five, with an additional day added for the earth used in the altar, represent the thirty-six days intercalated every six years to make the year-reckoning correspond with actual time. But this lumber or that of thirty-five days for the intercalary month would make the six-years cycle too long. It would seem that the number thirty-six appears in the calculations as a reminiscence of the thirty-six stones which originally, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 105, surrounded in the Neolithic Age the sun-circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. The official explanation of the intercalary month given in the Brahmana is that stated in the commentary on the sixty-six stanzas of the Shata-rudriya hymn of the hundred (.shata) Rudras, the hundred gods of the oldest Buddhist heaven of the Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, recited on the Mahavrata day when the altar was consecrated. This hymn contains, according to the Brahmana, three hundred and sixty invocations representing the three hundred and sixty days of the year, thirty representing the thirty days of each of its twelve months, and thirty-five for the intercalary days added at the end of every six years 2.
The Dhishnya or priests’ hearths are built with Lokam- prini bricks laid without formulas, thus showing them to represent the years before that of the building of the altar of the risen sun ; and the rules for their construction, like that of the chief altar, reproduce a record of the history of time. Thus the Hotri’s hearth contains twenty-one bricks, the days of the month of the seventeen-months year of libations. The hearth of the Bnihmanacchamsin or Indra contains eleven bricks, the eleven days of the week and months of the year of the rain-god of the South-west wind, the Indra who brought up the rains of the summer solstice with the help
1   Eggelrng, Sat. Brdh., x. 4, 2, 1—27, x. 4, 3, 8—21, ix. 4, 3, 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 349—354, note 2, 357—360, 244, 245, note 1.
2   Ibid., ix. 1, 1, 43, 44; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 167, 16S, 150—155.
   
611
of the seven Maruts, the seven stars of the Great Bear, as
1   have shown in Chapter VII. p. 4311. The Margaliya altar of the antelope (1mriga) is built of six bricks, the six days of the week of the first antelope-year, in which the circling {mriga) antelope was the sun-bird. The other five altars are each made of eight bricks, the eight days of the week of the fifteen-months year 2.
The reproduction of the ancient time measurements is further shown in the use of the ten-days week, which besides its meaning of the double hands or of the sacrifice of the whole man, also commended itself to these Northern ritualists by measuring the year in decimals. The altar was especially consecrated to the thirty-six weeks of this year by the recitation of the Brihat-Saman, sacred to the goddess Brihati of the thirty-six syllabled metre, who is said to make the year. This was chanted at the consecration of the altar at its North-east corner, the rising place of the sun-bird 3. These weeks are called in the Rigveda the Dashagva or the ten. They are said to be descended from the nine Angiras, the nine-days week of the three-years cycle 4, and to be their best representatives ; also to be, as directors of the course of the independent sun, irresistible and uncontrollable 5. They help Indra in bringing forth the cows of light and find them in the darkness, that is at dawn6. These decades were therefore the weeks of the rising and not of the setting sun, the course of which was measured by the five-day weeks.
This record of national history told in the ritual and rules for building the brick altar of the sun-bird is the crowning achievement of the Indian historiographers who drew the pictures of the past in symbols, the meaning of which was thoroughly understood by the educated people of the age in which they lived. These had all been instructed in the
' liggcling, Sat. Bruit., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416.
2 Ibid., ix. 4, 3, 9, iv. 6, 6, 1—5 ; S.B. li., vol. xliii. p. 245, note 1, xxvi. pp. 433, 434.
3   Ibid., ix. I, 2, 37, vi. 4, 2, 10: S.B. li., vol. xliii. p. 179, vol. xli. p. 220.
4   Rg. x. 62, 6.   5 Ibid. viii. 12, 2.   0 Ibid. i. 62, iii. 39, 5.
R r 2

[Prometheus]

612
   
national schools in the rules laid down for their interpretation by the priests and expounders of the meaning of the mythological stories and ritual. In this age the priests and teachers of the people were in India distributed over the country as members of the local schools of Brahmanic learning, who wrote, as ritualistic hymns, the poems of the Rig- veda. These are divided into Mandalas or sections, each of which contains the selected poems of the guild named in its title. Thus the second Mandala is the work of the Bhargavas or sons of Bhrigu, the Median priests, the third of the Vishvamitra Kushikas, the fourth of the Gotamas, the fifth of the Atriyas, the sixth of the Bharadvajas, the seventh of the Vashishthas, and the eighth of the Kansa priests of the Yadu Turvasu, The first and tenth Mandalas are made up of grouped contributions from separate schools, the works of each being placed in its own section, and the authors of the hymns of the ninth Mandala are the priests of the Soma moon-god, called Soma Pavamana, the god of the rain-bringing wind (pavana). The gods invoked in the 1,028 hymns preserved in this collection are all year-gods, measurers of time, and the intensity of the conservative belief in and reverence for the oldest national creating gods, the rain and tree-gods, is shown in the very large proportion of the hymns addressed to them. Six hundred and eighty- one hymns are invocations to the three chief gods of the Soma sacrifice. In one hundred and twenty-three of these the god invoked is Soma, the creating sap of the mother-tree brought by the cloud-bird Su or Khu, called the father and begetter of the gods I, the lord of thought (manasas- pati) 2 and of speech (vacas-pati) 3. Three hundred and fifty- four are hymns to India, the rain-god, father of life, and the especial parent of the sons of the rivers and of the river eel; and two hundred and four to Agni, the god of the household and altar fire, and their associate gods. There are also thirty-five hymns to the Maruts or wind-bringing goddesses,
1 Rg. ix. 87, 2.   2 Ibid. ix. 99, 6.   3 Ibid. ix. 26, 4, 101,6,
       613
daughters of the tree-ape-god Maroti. Sixty to the Ashvins or the stars Gemini, which were, as we have seen, gods who take a most prominent place in the history of this year, and there are eleven hymns to the Ribhus or makers of the seasons. In short the whole ritual of the Indian Church as expounded in the Rigveda and the Brahmanas or ritualistic manuals, is that of the worship of the gods who measure time, and it was the successive phases of their worship marked in the changing computations of the year which formed the epochs of the national chronology. It was these records which were preserved by the schools of the prophets among the Jews, by the Collegia or Leagues of Dervishes or ceremonial priests of Asia Minor, South-western Asia and Egypt, who also organised the national rituals in Greece, Italy and all other countries where the trading merchants of the Indian Ocean and their Mediterranean brethren settled.
But the memory of the methods of these ancient historians' decayed under the rule of the Northern sun-worshippers, who apparently introduced into the countries they conquered a long period of confusion and anarchy, similar to that which marked the later ages of the Roman empire when Roman law and order was trampled under foot by the Northern invaders. During this period the priestly historians were replaced by the genealogical bards, who, instead of making the personified nation or tribe the heroes of their narratives, and telling the history of the nation’s fortunes, filled their songs with recitals of the deeds of individuals. Thus they were the records of personal prowess, and in their genealogies all the persons named were conceived as individuals who were once actually existing, ancestors of the kings and warriors whose praises they sang. It was also owing to the growth of individualism that state astronomy became judicial astrology, employed in the making of horoscopes predicting the good or evil fortunes of the persons at whose birth were drawn those prophetic pictures of the positions then occupied by the stars which, according to astrological belief, then dealt out the
614
   
changes and chances allotted by them to each human life. Another cause of the gradual disuse of the methods and forgetfulness of the meanings of the ancient histories, was the introduction of annals in which the national scribes recorded the events of successive years, characterising each year by some remarkable event occurring in it, or by its place in the years of the reigns of their kings. These annals formed the groundwork of the national chronicles of the Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians, and to make their records complete imaginary figures, which sometimes, like those *of the Ten Kings of Babylon, reproduced astronomical computations, were assigned to the reigns of pre-annalistic rulers, whose names had been symbols in the pre-solar histories. This introduction of annalistic chronicles separates the age when history was told in symbolic stories depicting the institutions, customs and daily lives of the people "who framed them, from that of modern history, which gives us detailed biographies of individuals, kings, warriors and lawgivers, but which, until recently, almost ignored the social movements they directed and the influence they exercised over the progress of the people whom they ruled. Under these influences the old system of recording the lapse of past time by the apparent movements of the stars, sun, and moon round the Pole, the changes in the Pole Stars and the month by stations of the sun and moon in the zodiacal circle, were discarded and almost forgotten in popular ritual.
The stories of the old gods recording the sequence of natural phenomena, the conclusions of primitive science, and the history of the past as told in the astronomical succession of different methods of reckoning the year, became in the new literature narratives of somewhat superhuman magnified men and women. They were thus so distorted that when their original forms and meanings were forgotten, they seemed to describe the gods of our forefathers as monsters of iniquity. Hence the divine origin of this mythology was disbelieved by the philosophical teachers of the new spiritual religion based on the study of the mental and moral
ft
       615
faculties and the standard of duty they taught. And they like Plato denounced the ancient myths as blasphemous lies invented by the poets, and banished the works in which they were used as dramatic plots from the curriculum of their ideal schools 1.
It is only by a study of the old rituals, tribal and local customs and institutions, religious and historical myths, the stages of advance in the knowledge and practice of methods of government, agriculture, fruit-growing, pharmacy, architecture and mechanical arts, and the development of international trade by land and sea, that we can correct these erroneous interpretations of ancient mythology, and reproduce a correct picture of life in the ancient world. In doing this we interpret the old national histories in the sense in which they were composed by the national historiographers, the Pra-shastri or teaching- priests of the Hindus, the Asipu or interpreters of the Akkadians, who became the Semitic Rabbi, the Exegetae of the Greeks, and the Druid bard-priests of the Celts. These were prepared with careful deliberation and enquiry and with scrupulous regard to the truths as believed in by their authors, and they were handed down to their successors as divinely inspired lessons teaching them the methods by which national prosperity was secured and the faults by which it was lost. We must no longer look on these old mythologies as unintelligible records of a time when, as some assert, men deliberately cultivated the mythopaeic art of compiling national stories as a means of amusement, answering to the most frivolous of our modern novels, but as the solemnly recorded teachings of ancestors who bequeathed these symbolic histories to their descendants for their instruction and guidance.
I have tried in this work to set forth their true meaning as far as they record the methods of computing time, and the attempts made in the past to find out the real nature of the creating powers who ordained natural and moral laws, and
1 Jowctt, Plato, The Republic, Book ii. vol. iii. bp. 249—257.
616         
I only hope that I may have succeeded in stimulating others to work in this field of research, in which innumerable discoveries can yet be made by those who read, interpret and edit the numerous works which were once the sources whence ancient sages drew their lore, but which now only exist as almost neglected manuscripts. It is not only from these that additional knowledge is to be gained, but also from the buried relics of the ancient and unexplored cities of India, of the countries on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and between the Mediterranean on the West and the Caspian Sea and the Euphrates Valley on the East. There, and also in Europe, are many sites which will, when thoroughly excavated, furnish harvests of relics no less valuable than those which have revealed to us so much of the previously obliterated history of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt. It is in India that we shall find in the ruins of such cities as those of Pushkala-vasti, or Hastinapore in the Swat valley, in Taxila or Takshasila, Kapila-vastu, Mathura and many others, authentic records of the rule of the Kushika, Khati or Hittite merchant-kings, and probably recover pre-Sanskrit tablets in the ancient Hittite syllabic alphabet. This must certainly have been used in the country in combination with the indigenous methods of preserving and transmitting oral records committed to memory by successive generations of pupils and teachers.

[Prometheus]

APPENDIX A.
LIST OF THE HINDU NAKSHATRA STARS BY BRAHMA
GUPTA.
1.   Ashvini or Ashvayujau.
2.   Bharani or Apa Bharani.
3.   Krittaka or Krittakas.
4.   RohinI (Aldebaran).
5.   Mrigasirsha, Andhaka, Aryika,
Invika or Ilvala.
6.   Ardra or Bahu.
7.   Punarvasu.
8.   Pushya, Tishya, or Sidhya.
9.   Ashlesha, Asresha, or Ashleshas.
10.   Magha or Maghas.
11.   Purva, Phalguni or Arjuni.
12.   Uttara Phalguni.
13.   Hasta.
14.   Chitra.
15.   Svati or Nishtya.
16.   Visakha or Visakhi.
17.   Anuradha.
18.   Jyeshtha.
19.   Mula or Vichritau,
20.   Purva, Ashadha or Apya.
21.   Uttara, Ashadha or Vaishoa.
22.   Abhijit, meaning now (abhi) con
quered {jit). This sign was omitted after Vega ceased to be the ruling Pole Star, that is, after 8000 B.C.
23.   Shravana, Shrona, or Ashvattha.
24.   Shravishtha or Dlianistha
25.   Sata bhisaj.
26.   Purva Bliadrapada, Proshthapada
or Pratishana.
/3 Arietis. a Muscce.
23 Tauri (Pleiades).
« Tauri.
A Orionis. a Orionis (?).
/3 Geminorum.
5 Caneri. e Hydras.
Regulus a Leonis.
5   Leonis.
6   Leonis Alsarfa.
7   or 5 Corvi.
Spica a Virginis. Arcturus.
i Librae.
5 Scorpionis.
Antares a Scorpionis. A Scorpionis.
5 Sagittarii. o- Sagittarii.
Vega a Lyras A1 nasr alwaqi. a Aquila^, A1 nasr altair.
P Delphini.
A Aquarii.
a Pegasi.
6iS
Appendix A.
27.   Uttara Bhadrapada.   7 Pegasi or a Andromedse.
28J. Revati (this after the elision of Vega Abhijit) was the 27th Nakshatra, and probably was the original 27th star before Vega became the Pole Star when it was first included in the list as the ruler of the stars.   ? Piscium.
1 J. Burgess, C.I.E., ‘Hindu Astronomy J J.R.A.S., Oct., 1893, p. 756.
APPENDIX B.
   4   
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.
English Version.
1.   This is the Malt that lay
In the House that Jack built.
2.   This is the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
3.   This is the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
4.   This is the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
5.   This is the Cow with the crum
pled horn
That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
6.   This is the Maiden all forlorn That milked the Cow with the
crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
Version of ilie Talmud.
1.   A Kid, a Kid, my father bought For two pieces of money.
2.   Then came the Cat and ate the
Kid
That my father bought For two pieces of money.
3.   Then came the Dog and bit the
Cat
That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
4.   Then came the Stick and beat
the Dog
That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
5.   Then came the Fire and burnt the Stick
That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
620
Appendix B.
7.   This is the Man all tattered and
torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
8.   This is the Priest all shaven and
shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
9.   This is the Cock that crowed in
the morn
That waked the Priest all shaven and shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
6.   Then came the Water and quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
7.   Then came the Ox and drank the Water
That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
8.   Then came the Butcher and slew the Ox
That drank the Water That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
Appendix B.
621
10.   This is the Farmer that sowed the corn
That fed the Cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the Priest all shaven and shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
Basque Version.
1.   Akherra hor heldu da Arthoaren yatera Akherrak arthoa
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! Arthoa gurea zen.
2.   Otsoa hor heldu da Akherraren yatera Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! Arthoa gurea zen.
9.   Then came the Angel of Death and killed the Butcher That slew the Ox That drank the Water That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
10.   Then came the Holy One, blessed be He,
And killed the Angel of Death
That killed the Butcher
That slew the Ox
That drank the Water
That quenched the Fire
That burnt the Stick
That beat the Dog
That bit the Cat
That ate the Kid
That my father bought
For two pieces of money.
Translation.
The Goat has come there To eat the Corn (maize)
The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
The Wolf has come there To eat the Goat The Wolf (eats) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
622
Appendix B.
3. Chakurra hor heldu da Otsoaren yatera Chakurrak otsoa,
Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! knen ! Arthoa gurea zen.   The Dog has come there To eat the Wolf The Dog (eats) the Wolf The Wolf (eats) the Goat The Goat feats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
4. Makhila hor heldu da Chakurrareh hiltzera Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The stick has come there To kill the Dog The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
5. Sua hor heldu da Makhilaren erret zera Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The Fire has come there To bum the Stick The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
6. Ura hor heldu da Suaren hilt zera Urak sua Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen 1 khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The Water has come there To quench the Fire The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
7. Idia hor heldu da Uraren edatera Idiak ura Urak sua Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa   The Ox has come there To drink the Water The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf
Appendix B.
623
Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.
8.   Buchera hor heldu da Idiaren hiltzera Bucherak idia
Idiak ura Urak sua Suak makhela Makhelak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.
9.   Herioa hor heldu da Bucheraren hiltzera Herioak buchera Bucherak idia Idiak ura
Urak sua Suak makhela Makhelak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen h
The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
The Butcher has come there To kill the Ox The Butcher (kills) the Ox The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours
Death has come there To kill the Butcher Death (kills) the Butcher The Butcher (kills) the Ox The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
On comparing the stones of this House of the Year-weeks in these three versions, we find them arranged in the following order :—
I   2   3   4   5   6   7
English—Rat   Cat   Dog   Cow   Maiden   Man   Priest
Talmud—Kid   Cat   Dog   Stick   Fire   Water   Ox
Basque — Goat   Wolf Dog   Stick   Fire   Water   Ox
1 J. Vinson, Folklore du Pays Basque, Canlilenes et Fonmilettes, Les Litteratures Populaires, Tome XV., p. 216, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris.
624
Appendix B.
8   9   10
English —Cock   Farmer   Malt
Talmud—Butcher   Death   God
Basque — Butcher   Death   Corn
Here we have in all three versions the re-risen sun-god who was to return to life after being slain by the evolution of the nine days of the cycle-week embodied in the conception of the Barley-Malt, the maker of the Water of Life, the Corn and the Creating gods. This is the revealed form of the Being who has implanted in the barley, maize and the creating week of time his innermost essence, the life which is God-born and re-born from his temporary death. We also see in the Basque version the oldest form of the brick house, that built by the Pole Star Goat, who precedes the Kid star, the constellation Auriga, and the Rat, the Chinese Aquarius. Also in this Basque version we find the Wolf of Light, the mother of Apollo in Greece, and of the Vedic Golden-handed sun Hiranyahasta, born of the blind sexless father Rijrashva, the upright horse, the gnomon-stone, and his wolf consort*, who is the predecessor of the cat- goddess of the Egyptians and the witches of the fully developed science of sorcery. We also find in the Basque and Talmud versions an epitome of the creed of the fire- worshippers, who worshipped the fire-dog, the star Sirius, the dog which still attends all Parsi funerals, and who sends on earth the seed of fire transmitted through the Stick, the fire-drill, which generates fire in the fire-socket, the mother of fire, the fifth of these algebraic signs. It was this fire in the form of the lightning - charged cloud which produced the rain, the water of life drunk by the Ox, the sexless parent of the offspring born from the ten months of gestation of mother-moon-cow of the cycle-year. From this ox and the life-giving water there was generated the change of state of the embryo born to the birth of death, followed
1 Rg. i. 116, 13, 17, 18, 117, 17, 18, 24.
Appendix B.
625
by emergence into the new life opening out at the end of the ten months of gestation signified by the tenth sign.
In the English version the creation creed symbolised in signs 5 to 9 differs from the spiritualistic belief of the fire-worshippers in sexless generation. In this Northern creed, the heavenly parents of life are the dog-star Sirius, and the moon-cow, from whom are born the parent Twins, the Hindu Mithuna, the mother-night and the sun-father of day. They, united by the sexless fire-priest, the Hindu Agnldhra, the guardian of the fire on the altar of the sun- cock, give birth to the ploughing-farmer Rama, who sows the corn, whence the sons of the barley and its life-giving malt are to be born.
What is most certainly proved by these three versions, to which further research would probably add others, is that this ancient school-lesson was disseminated from Asia to Europe by the worshippers of the Pole Star Goat, who afterwards in Babylon substituted for the Pole Star the Kid constellation Auriga as the director of the year. Also that the original version was altered into a variant form by the believers ‘in the anthropomorphic parent-gods of the eleven-months year, who began their year when the sun was in the Rat constellation Aquarius, that of the last of the ten star-kings of Babylon. These believers in the bisexual creating parent-gods were the second race of fire-worshippers, described in Chapter V. Section C., whose priests were the Hindu Angiras, who offered human sacrifices and dedicated their children to the Fire-god. They substituted for the sexless fire-drill and socket the Stick and Fire of the Talmud and Basque versions, the Moon-cow Maiden and Man. These last the Hindu male and female Twins Mithuna were the parents of the race born in the Zend Garden of God, laid out, planted and tended by Yima the Twin. This was the Garden of the cycle-year described in the Zendavesta, the gates of which were guarded by the twins Gemini, its doorposts, and on the gate was the Tower where the sun-god of the three-years cycle was born. It was built of kneaded
S s
626
Appendix B.
clay “ with a window self-shining within ” (the generating moon and sun) “ and a door sealed up with the golden ring ” of the ten months of gestation. In this garden were sown the   |
seeds whence were born the offspring of the Sun-Cock, the   |
Sun-physician iEsculapius, to whom cocks were sacred. Their i produce yielded the best and finest trees and plants, and the best bred sheep and oxen, and none of the human children of the seed sown by the Twins was to be hump-backed or deformed, insane, impotent, or leprous. They were all to be men and women endowed with full strength bodily and mental, who were to become the parents of the perfect human race, the Sons of God of the fifteen-months year T.
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendlddd Fargard, li. 27, 28. 29, 30, 31 ; S.B.E., vol. iv. pp. 17, 18.


APPENDIX C.
HISTORY AS TOLD IN THE VARIANT FORMS OF THE
LEGEND OF INO, THE MOTHER OF MELICERTES, OR
MELQUARTH, THE TYRIAN HERAKLES, THE GODDESS
OF THE KREDEMNON OR ZODIACAL RIBBON.
INO was the daughter of Kadmus and Harmonia, the latter being, as I have shown in the Preface, the goddess- mother crowned with the bridal veil of the starry heavens, within which Kadmus, 'the creator or arranger, carried on his creating trade. They both drove the ploughing oxen of light, the sun and moon, round the heavens in their appointed path through the zodiacal stars. Ino was the sister of Scmele or Samlah, the vine mother, the birth-tree of the creating wine-god Dionysus. Semele died after the conception of her son, and the embryo was born from the Thigh of his father Zeus, and thus she was the mother of the sun-god, son of the seven Thigh stars of the Great Bear, the god of the year of fifteen-months and eight-day weeks. This god born of the Thigh, whose mother died at his conception, is the equivalent of the Indian sun-god, the Buddha, whose mother Maya died seven days after his birth, and who was brought up by her sister Maha Gotami Pajapati, the female form of the star- god Prajapati Orion, and the star and moon mother-leader of the thirteen Theris, the thirteen months of the year in which Rahulo, the young sun-god, son of the Buddha, was born in the eleventh month. In the story of Semele the part of Maha Gotami Pajapati fell to Ino, for she nursed the young Dionysos in the sea-shore cave at Brasiae, the womb of the pregnant mother-mountain rising from the
S s 2
628
Appendix C.
sea on the site, as Pausanias tells us, of the Garden of God*. She also, like Gotami, was the double of the Star Orion, for she was, as the successor of Nephele the cloud, the second wife of Athamas, the Ionic Tammas, the Hebrew Tammuz, and the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion. She was originally the goddess of the age of human sacrifices, when, according to Semite custom, the eldest son was offered. The eldest children of Athamas, born of Nephele, the mother-cloud- bird of early mythology, were Phrixus, the roasted or parched (^plyoo) barley grain, and Helle its husk. They were to be sacrificed by their father to the Laphystian Zeus, whose image was, as Pausanias tells us, set up at Coronea next to that of the Itonian Athene. Both images were in her temple, where the perpetually burning national fire was preserved upon her altar, thus showing her to be the housemother of the nation. The Zeus, her male counterpart, was the Cretan god Itanos2, and therefore the Akkadian god Danu or Tanu 3, the Pole Star god of the world’s tree, with its roots in the creating-mud {tan) of the South.
The festival at which this sacrifice, instituted by Athamas, was to be offered was that of the Pan-Bceotian New Year’s Day, that of the autumnal equinox beginning their year. At that festival, according to the author of the Minos, the eldest sons of the family which claimed descent from Athamas used to be sacrificed down to the 4th century B.c. This sacrifice is also spoken of by Herodotus vii. 197, and according to him it was instigated by Ino 4. But as the legends tell us not only of the sacrifice of Phrixus, but also of that of Learchus, Ino’s son, her share in their institution is merely a form of the statement that human sacrifices of the eldest son began to be offered when she was first worshipped as the goddess-mother of life.
Learchus is said to have been slain by Athamas when
1   Fraser, Pausanias, iii. 24, 3, vol. i. pp. 173, 174.
2   Ibid., ix. 34, 1—5, vol. i. pp. 4S6, 4S7.
3   Lenormant, La Langue Primitive tie la Chaldee, pp. 99, 100.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, v. pp. 169—172.
Appendix C.
629
mad, and this phase of the story shows it to be one which told how Athamas became in the course of his avatars a mad star-god, who instituted human sacrifices, and who was thus the counterpart of the Hindu mad king Kalmashapada, he of the spotted or starry feet, the Pole Star god who first introduced human sacrifices. The pairs of victims in the story, Phrixus and Helle, born of Nephele, and Learchus and Melicertes, sons of Ino, are the two seasons of the solstitial sun whose annual course was ruled by Harmonia, mother of Ino.
These sacrifices of the eldest son mark the beginning of the rule of the Northern races, who worshipped the creator as the god of generation and looked on blood and not on water as the source of life. In accordance with this belief the land was each year to be fertilised by the blood of the eldest son of its ruler or by some specially selected human victim, representing the sun of the old year as dying at his year’s end and fertilising with his dying blood the land to be ruled during the next year by his successor.
The identification of Athamas with Kalmashapada shows him to be in one phase of his history the god of the eleven- months year, this being that of the sacrifice of Learchus. But in that of Phrixus preceding it, Athamas is the god of the cycle-year of three years, beginning, like the Boeotian and Jewish year, with the autumnal equinox, when the sun was in Aries, the star of the Ram with the Golden Fleece which carried off Phrixus and Helle. This, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 207, fixes the date of the legend as between 14,000 and 15,000 B.c. It was after this that Ino escaped from her mad husband with her son Melicertes, the Phoenician Melquarth, the sun-god, and leaped with him into the sea, whence he was saved by the dolphin which landed him by the mother-pine-tree of Cybele ; and it was in honour of this god that the Isthmian games were held at the winter solstice, in which the prize of the victor was a pine wreath. The leap into the sea of the goddess-mother of the year-sun betokens the descent into the constellation Pisces and the
630
Appendix C.
yearly journey to the Southern stars of winter of the goddess who traced the appointed path of the sun through the starry heavens. And it is as a star-goddess of the South that Ino, mother of the sun born at the winter solstice, was depicted in the original form of her legend, when she was regarded, as she was in Southern Italy, as the Mater Matuta, the mother of life, who was, as we have seen, the goddess Bahu ruling the Southern abyss. As the Queen of the Stars of the South she is represented as riding on a marine monster called in Latin Pistrix, which is the name given by Cicero to the constellation Cetus, the Whale It is on this monster that she rides in two of her statues at Florence and in one at Naples, and it is depicted in the Middle Age traditional illustrations of Aratus as a dragon, identical in form with that of the Florence and Naples statues, with stars on its tail2. As the rider on the star Whale she is not accompanied by her son, but in these illustrations she holds in her hands the two ends of a ribbon, called in Greek the Kredemnon, which forms an arch over her head ; and that this arch is the zodiacal line marking the annual path of the sun through the heavens is proved by its appearance on a coin of M. Aurelius, where its ends are held by the Twins, the stars Gemini, who ushered in the years of fifteen and thirteen months 3.
Further proof that the Kredemnon indicates the sun’s path through the stars, which was first thought to be marked by the Milky Way, the original Kredemnon, is given in the story of Odusseus. He, when he left Ogygia, the island of Kalypso, the hiding {Kakvirru}) goddess, after being detained by her for seven years, was arrayed in the panoply of the sun-god she gave him, the impenetrable coat of mail,
j
1   Cicero, A rati, 152.
2   Milani, Studi c Materiali di Archceologia c Numismatica, vol. i., Pantala L pp. 77—80; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, or the Heavenly Display, 398, p. 44.
3   Milani, Studie e Materiali di Archceologia e Numismatica, vol. i., Pantala i.
Fig. 16, p. 48
Appendix C.
631
the silver-white mantle or veil (apyvfeov (frapos) worn by Kronos, the year girdle, the covering helmet of invisibility (,fcaXvTTTpr}) and the double axe (prekeKvs) of the Carian Zeus, the Cretan Itanos x. His voyage from Ogygia to Scheria, the land of Alkinoos, the god of the thirteen-months year, was one of twenty-one days 1 2, the month of the seventeen- months year, the temporary year which finally became that of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each. On the eighteenth day his raft was wrecked by the storm sent by Poseidon on his return from the ^Ethiopian realms of the Southern sun of winter, and he was saved by Ino or Lencothea in the shape of a seagull, who told him to divest himself of his solar garments and to trust to the Kredemnon she gave him for safety 3. After two days and two nights in the water, during which he was supported by the Kredemnon 4, he reached the Phaeacian coast on the twentieth day, and slept, after throwing the Kredemnon into the sea, on a bed made of the leaves of the wild (<pv\ii7) and cultured olive 5, before, on the twenty-first day, he was found as the sun of the zodiacal chain of stars rising from Pisces, to be the sun of the thirteen-months year saved from the sea by Nausicaa, the sun-maiden. Ino in this story appears in her original form of the cloud-bird bringing the storms from the South, the home of the Southern constellation of Cetus, the Whale, the storms which were driving the sun Northward. It is in her other form of the goddess Scylla that we find the classical story of Ino as the goddess of the South dwelling in the constellation of the Whale. In this phase of her history she appears again in the Odyssey as connected with Odusseus in his adventures as a year-god before he reached the island of Ogygia, wherein he dwelt as the concealed sun-god of the cycle and eleven-months year. Ino as Scylla is depicted in the Odyssey as a monstrous whale (K7]TOS?) barking like a dog, who dwells in a
1 Homer, Odyssey, v. 228—236.   2 Ibid., v. 34.   3 Ibid., v. 279—376.
4 Ibid., v. 388.   5 Ibid., v. 477.
632
Appendix C.
cave in the straits between Italy and Sicily. She is said to have twelve feet and six heads, each furnished with three rows of teeth, and her name Scylla means the tearer. She exacts a toll of six men, whom she devours, from each ship that approaches her cave while passing through the StraitsJ, and she took this number of victims from the ship of Odus- seus immediately before it reached the land of Trinacria 2. This was the island of the triangle where the three hundred and fifty oxen and three hundred and fifty sheep of the sun were pastured by the nymphs 3. The comrades of Odusseus, after they had consumed the provisions on their ship, killed as sacrifices and ate for seven days these oxen, in spite of his prohibitions. Consequently when they put to sea again the ship was sunk by a storm sent by the gods from the West, and Odusseus alone was saved by lashing himself to the mast and ship’s keel with a rope of ox-hide. This saving girdle and gnomon-tree of the sexless gods of the cycle-year brought him again to the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis, and took him to the rock of the latter goddess, on which grew the world’s tree of the Kushika and Dardanian race, the great wild fig-tree (ipiveos), the tree of Troy, under which lay Charybdis. He clung to the branches of this tree, and thus saved himself from being swallowed up by her when she first drank up the waters of the sea and all they contained three times daily and then vomited them up. He waited there holding on to the branches like a bat (zw/cTepk) till the mast and ship’s keel she had swallowed appeared again, and when they came bound together by the ox-hide rope he dropped on this raft, and using his hands as oars arrived on the tenth day at Ogygia, the world’s navel, the island of Calypso 4.
Here we have clearly a year-story of Odusseus as the year-god before he became the sun-god of the seventeen and thirteen-months year, and the beggar-sun-god who bent the bow of Eurytus, and vanquished the suitors who competed
1 Homer, Odyssey, xii. 84—100. 3 Ibid., xii. 101—136.
2 Ibid., xii. 246.
4 Ibid., 303—452.
Appendix C.
6.33
with him for the rule of the year and the hand of Penelope, who was first the goddess Rohini, queen of the spinning Pleiades, and afterwards the Star Vega, the weaving-sister who wove the web (7rr\vri) of Time. The present episode was subsequent to that in which he became the year-god of the right thigh, whose left had been disabled by the gash of the tooth of the year-boar.
This story of the year-god saved from death by the world’s fig-tree which he grasped, is one evidently concocted, not in the lands and islands of the tideless Mediterranean, but in those washed by the ocean where the tide ebbs and flows daily like the water swallowed by Charybdis and by the Hindu Agastya, the controller of the tides, the star Canopus.
The story of the year-god saved from death by clinging to the branches of the world’s tree appears in its Indian form in that of Bhujyu, the Tugra, the son of the Tugras or Tir- gartas, the men of the three (tri) pits ((garta), who worshipped the Takka trident as the Yiipa or sacrificial stake. This was the weapon of Poseidon, who raised the storm in which Odusseus was saved by Ino. Bhujyu, whose name means either he who bends, the god of the circle of time or the enjoyer or devourer, is, like Odusseus, a time-god of the theology of the year of three seasons and the cycle-year. His story in the Veda is told in several fragments which have to be pieced together. It tells how he was three days and nights in the ocean, and was being carried away by the floods, its swiftly moving tides, when he saved himself by clinging to a tree standing, that of Charybdis, in the midst of the roaring flood of the rushing waters she swallowed. He was taken thence by the circling-bird (.Mriga, Zend Meregh, Hindi Murghi), the year-bird who takes the sun yearly round the Pole. It was sent to his aid by the Ashvins, who were first the Twins Day and Night (Ushasa- nakta), and afterwards the stars Gemini. This bird bore him aloft to heaven as the year-god, and becomes in the variant forms of the story, one ship with a hundred oars, four ships, three waggons with six horses having a hundred
634
Appendix C.
feet, also winged brown horses, and the special team of the Ashvins, which was, as we have seen, the asses which drew their year’s car h
We have seen that the Twins Day and Night, and the stars Gemini, play a most important part in astronomical time reckonings from the days of the cycle-year downwards, and doubtless, if we had the myth of Bhujyu before us in the same detail as that in which the transformations of Odusseus, the year-god, are told, we should find him spoken of as the year-god or bird drawn by the hundred-oared ship, the constellation Argo, called Satavaesa or that of the hundred creators or rowers, by the four year-ships or four sections of the cycle-year, and by the asses and horses of the sun- god’s chariot, where he would be the counterpart of the bird Garuda, sitting at the back of that of Krishna. We have no indications in the story of Bhujyu to show us the exact date when he first became the year sun-god, who sank at his setting into the roaring waters of the Southern sky ocean, those of the constellation Pisces. But in that section of the story of Odusseus, which is a variant of that of Bhujyu, we ought to be able by the numbers of the oxen and sheep of the sun to locate the age in the history of annual time in which it must be placed.
The three hundred and fifty oxen, and the like number of sheep, making up seven hundred in all, recall the seven hundred and twenty days and nights into which the 360 days of the year-sun-calf born of the moon-cow are divided in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda i. 164, n. Thus the story seems to be one of a year-measurement, like that of the Hindu Karanas, in which there were twelve months of twenty-nine days each, making up a year of 348 days, or twelve days short of the 360 days of the Vedic year. These twelve days were, as we have seen, added to the year by the twelve days’ rest, revel or sleep, of the sun-god, who awoke or rose from the dead to be the sun-god of the new 1
1 Rg. i. 182, 5—7, i. 116, 3—6, i. 117, 14, i. 11S, 6, i. 119, 4.
Appendix C.
635
year born at the winter solstice. The ten days of the year of Odusseus still left uncompleted at the end of the time when he quitted the fields of the 350 slain day oxen, appear to be those which he passed in reaching the world’s tree and the island of Calypso, to which he came on the tenth day*.
Thus the story seems to be a variant of that of the year of the sun-deer, and in this Odusseus’ year the Northern decimal ten was the unit instead of the Southern duodecimal of the deer year. We have already seen that the division of the sun-circle of 360 degrees into tenths was a very ancient custom observed by the Neolithic erectors of the sun-circles of Solwaster in Belgium, and the ancient custom was recalled again to life by the Athenians and Egyptians, who divided their year into thirty-six decades of ten days each. If these decades were grouped into months of thirty-six days each we should have a reproduction of the old Romulean ten- months year of the Roman kings 1 2 3. This is the same year as that called in the Mahabharata the year of the ten daughters of Daksha, named Kirti, Lakshmi, Dhriti, Medha, Pushti, Cradha, Kria, Buddhi, Lajja, and Mati3. They are the wives of Dharma, the god of law and order, the months of the year of the showing-god Daksha, denoting his ten fingers and the tenMivisions of his sun-circle, beginning with the October—November month of the Kirats or Pleiades, and ordered by the boundary-god Lakshman, who marked the course of the year of Rama.
This year, when adapted to the Northern custom of leaving a number of days at the end of the year which were not included in the monthly measurement, would be one of ten months each of thirty-five days divided into seven five-day weeks, followed by the two five-day weeks during which Odusseus went to the island of Ivalypso. These answer to
1   Homer, Odyssey, xii. 447.
2   See for the Romulean Year, Hewitt, ‘ Early History of Northern India,’ Part V. /.R.A.S., 1890, pp. 569, 570.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Farva, cxvi. p. 189.
636
Appendix C.
the Vedic days of rest of the sun-god after he had reached the house of Agohya, the Pole Star, at the top of the world’s tree. This was the resting-place of the Ribhus, the makers of the seasonsI, where they lay twelve days among its branches, where Zikum and Europa, the Akkadian and Western mothers, dwelt under the starry veil which covered it, as explained in the Preface, p. xxi.
These ten days made up the three hundred and sixty days, and the division of the year into fives enabled the year regulators to add an extra five-days week to make up the 365 days of the year, an addition which was made in very early times by the Egyptians, as we learn from the story of the killing of Osiris by Set and his seventy-two assistants, that is by the seventy-three weeks of the year.
This reckoning of seventy instead of seventy-two five-day weeks as the number completing the year of months enables us to account for the frequent substitution of seventy for seventy-two as the number of sacred messengers, such as the seventy ruling elders of Israel appointed by Moses 2, who, as in the story of Set, are increased, in Exodus xxiv., to seventy- three by the addition of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu. Similarly the seventy Budela or assistants under-propping the hierarchy of Dervishes, as explained in the Preface, p. xlvi., are increased to seventy-three by the addition of the three head Dervishes, the Kutb, or Pole Star Pillar, and his two Umena or faithful ones.
This year of ten months of thirty-six days each was apparently that of the Ten Star-kings of Babylon, for the 432,000 years of their reign are the number of seconds in the circle of 360 degrees ; and this number is also that of the Hindu Kali-Yuga on which the whole of their calendar is based. It began when the sun was in Hamal a Arietis, the star of the first king Alorus, the king of the Akkadian sheep (In), the sheep of the sun of Odusseus’ year, and the last star of the ten, the star of Xisuthrus, the king of the
1 Eg- iv. 33, 12.
2 Numbers xi. 16.
Appendix C.
63 7
Flood, is Skat in Aquarius T. This is the first star of the thirty stars marking the track of the moon through the first three months of the Akkadian year, beginning in Kislev (November—December), with the entry of the moon into the star Skat in Aquarius. Thence it, during the months of Kislev, Tebet and Sebet, from November—December to January—February, took, according to the words of the Akkadian tablet describing the year, “ the road of the sun,” and this star is also said to be “ a gate to be begun,” in short, the gate through which the young sun-god, nursed by the moon, entered the year 1 2 3.
Thus according to the combined history of the year beginning with the passage of the moon through the thirty stars, which it enters from the star Skat in Aquarius, in November—December, and the year of ten months of the ten kings, beginning when the sun passed from Skat in Aquarius to Aries in November—December, the year was one which began about 10,000 B.C., when the sun entered Aries in November—December. This entry into Aries followed the flood of Marchesvan (October—November), the month of the Flood of Noah, the tenth of the patriarchal kings of Genesis. This began on the seventeenth day of Marchesvan in the six hundredth year of Noah, when he had completed his Ner or Babylonian epoch of 600 years 3. It was at the close of the Flood season, when the sun entered Aries in November—December, that the dove sent forth after the disappearance of the primaeval mother-bird, the raven, announced the birth of the new earth of the olive-tree mother Athene by returning with the olive-leaf in its beak 4. This flood, which thus ushered in the year of the Itonian goddess of the tree of which the year-bed of Odusseus, described in Chapter IV. p. 144, was made, appears to be
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 3S3, 384, 385.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars.’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, January, 1890.
3   Gen. vi. 11.   « Ibid. viii. 11.
638
Appendix C.
the same traditional catastrophe as that in which Bhujyu and Odusseus were all but overwhelmed, when Bhujyu was saved by the Ashvin stars Gemini, who sent him a year-car and brought him forth as the risen sun-god who entered Gemini in January—February, after being in Aries in November—December. Similarly Odusseus was finally saved from the Flood by Tno in the form of a seagull, the bird which appears in the Bhujyu legend as the Mriga, or circling year-bird.
The year thus introduced, about 10,000 B.C., began when Vega, the Egyptian goddess Maat, meaning The Truth, was the Pole Star, and this star sacred to the goddess of law and order, was depicted on the jewel-locket worn round the neck of the Egyptian judges 1, answering to the breastplate of the Jewish High-priest. It appeared in Indian historical mythology as the star of the god Dharma, the god of right and justice (dharm), and the husband of the ten daughters of Daksha, the ten months of the year which I have just sketched. This was apparently the year of Ino, and the original form of the thirteen-months year of the thirteen Buddhist Theris, led by Maha Gotami Pajapati, the female form of Prajapati or Orion, the husband of Ino, who was the sister of Semele, mother of Dionysos, son of the Thigh, and the counterpart, as we have seen, of Maga, the mother of the Buddha, the sun-physician.
Ino, as the goddess-mother of the year, the year bird who saved Bhujyu and rescued Odusseus with the zodiacal Kre- demnon, was also the goddess Scylla, represented in the ancient statues I have named as riding on the marine monster or Pistrix, which depicted in primitive pictorial astronomy the Southern constellation Cetis. It is in the form of the goddess with the body of the whale that she appears in the Aineid, where Scylla is described as having a human face, woman’s breasts, the body of a whale (pistrix), the tail of a dolphin, the dolphin mother of Melicertes or Melquarth, and the womb
1 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgypter, pp. 477, 47S.
Appendix C.
^39
of a wolfT, the wolf-mother of the sun-god. But the most significant appearance of the goddess Scylla and her companion whale Pistrix in the /Eneid is that given in the accounts of the race between the Trojan ships. The story of the Alneid is, like those of the Odyssey and Iliad, founded on old historical legends, and among these latter, as I have shown in Chapter VIII. Section C., the chariot-race won by Diomedes at the burial of Patroclus tells a most remarkable history of changes in the year’s reckoning. The year horses which won this race were, as we have there seen, two of those horses of the sun taken by Anchises, the father of tineas, when he substituted six mares for the six horses he stole2, and thus made a year which replaced that of the twelve horses of the sun of Orion’s year by one measured by six paired months, six male and six female, with the thirteenth month described in Rg. i. 164, 15, in the centre. The year games described in the ^Eneid, which correspond to those at the burial of the year-god Patroclus, whom we have seen in Chapter VII. Section H. p. 490, to be a counterpart of the sun-physician, are those which took place on the ninth and last day of the festival held to inaugurate the year of Anchises, the founder of this 3'ear reckoning. It was held at the port in Sicily of Acestes, son of the river Crimisus, who was clothed in the skin of a she-bear 3. This was the first port touched at by the Trojan fleet after it had sailed northward from Africa, leaving the sun-maiden Dido burning on her funeral pyre as the dead-year-goddess, and it was here that the New Year was ushered in, measured by the sun-god of the sons of the rivers and the Great Bear mother constellation, a year beginning with a nine-days festival, reproducing the nine-days week of the cycle-year. The race which, like the chariot-race of Diomedes, began the year games held on this ninth day was that of the four picked ships of the Trojan fleet. These, which were all emblems of successive year 1
1 Virgil, Amid, iii. 424—428.   2 Homer, Iliad, v. 26S— 270
3 Virgil, Amid, v. 1—65.
640
Appendix C.
reckonings, were (1) The Chimaera, the ship of the cycle- year, the monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon, slain by Bellerophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician of the eleven-months year ; (2) The'Centaur, the Vedic Dadhiank, with the head of a horse and the body of a man, who was in Greece Chiron the Centaur, with the horse’s body and man’s head, and thus both these were personations of the mythology of the eleven- months year ; (3) Pistrix the whale ; and (4) Scylla its head- piece, to which the honours of the race were to fall, and they represented the thirteen-months year of Ino and GotamT Pajapati.
The race, like the Trojan chariot contest, was run on a course representing that of the sun round the zodiac. The solstitial turning-point, which was in the race at Troy the pine or fig-tree of Ilos, was a rock rising from the sea at some distance from the shore. In rounding this rock the Centaur struck on it, broke its oars and was disabled, while the Pistrix passed her and almost caught the Scylla, which won the race, being brought to the winning goal by the hand of Portunus, the god who, as we shall now see, was the son of Ino, who secured the victory of the year-reckoning of his mother, the goddess riding on the back of the whale constellation of the South, the ruler of the mid-month of the thirteen which measured the yearT.
The god Portunus who gained the race for his mother as Athene by confounding the machinations of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse-god, gained the Trojan chariot-race for Diomedes, was originally the god Melicertcs or Mel- quarth, the sun-master (malik) of the city (kctrth), who was awoke from his twelve days’ sleep at the close of his year by the quails who arrived at the winter solstice. He was changed into the god Palaimon or Baal Yam, meaning the god of the seas2, by the descent of his mother into the Southern Ocean, whence the sun rose from the constellation
1   Virgil, sEneid, iv. 104—243.
2   Berard, Origine des Culles Arcadiens, p. 234.
Appendix C.
641
Pisces to tread the circle of the zodiacal stars. It was as the god of the seas born of the dolphin or womb (Se\(f>v$) mother, the dolphin Apollo, that he became the Etruscan god Portunus, god of the ports depicted as holding the keys of the gates of time. His festival was held at Rome on the 17th of August, almost simultaneously with that of his counterpart the god Vertumnus, ruling the turning (verto) of the year held on the Aventine or the 13th of August1 2. He was the tutelary god of the Etruscan seaport Populonia or Papluna, the city of Papluna or Fufluns, the Etruscan Dionysos, who was identical with the Greek Dionysos, the Roman and Etruscan god Vertumnus, and the god Janus or Dianus with the double-axe of the Carian Zeus, and all were later male forms of the Etruscan mother Voltumna, at whose shrine the annual national councils of Etruria were held 2.
This male god was the sun-god originally born from the mother-tree growing in the Southern mud, and now reborn from the whale or dolphin-mother, the goddess of the Southern Ocean, whose son started on his annual journey from the constellation Pisces. His year coincided with that of Portunus, and their mid-year festival was in August,, answering to that of Lug and Tailltiu, the flower-goddess, to whom the month July—August was dedicated. Hence it began, like that of Lug in February—March, with the entry of the sun into Gemini in that month between 8000 and 9000 B.C., and it is apparently this year which is symbolised in the installation of Odusseus as the year-god rising from the sea by the help of the Kredemnon.
As the outcome of this analysis of these connected myths we see that the drownings of Bhujyu and Odusseus, the god of the year of the sun-horse with the impenetrable armour, before they rose from the sea as sun-gods pursuing their
1   Fowler, The Roman Festivals, pp. 201, 202, 203.
2   Milani, Museo Topografico dell' Etruria, pp. 31, 43—46, 143—145, notes 39,41, 47; Deecke, Etruria, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 634—636; Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, p. 70.
T t
642
Appendix C.
paths through the stars, the myth stories of Ino, Melicertes, Palaimon and Portunus, and the victory of the year-ships of Ino as Scylla, the year-mother riding on the whale, which are told' in the dramatic narratives I have quoted, were intended by their original authors to tell of the contest lasting for thousands of years between the year-gods of the Pole Star and lunar solar-age and the sun-god of the solar epoch. This contest ended in the final victory of the sun-god of the seventeen and thirteen-months year.