https://archive.org/details/historyandchron00hewigoogTHE Myth-making Age, the history of which I have sketched in this book, comprises the whole period from the first dawn of civilisation, and the initial efforts made in organising self-governing communities of human beings, down to the time when the sun entered Taurus at the Vernal Equinox between 4000 and 5000 B.c. In fixing the dates I have calculated from the recorded position of the sun at the different seasons of the year from which time was measured, I have treated this event as occurring about 4200 B.C. This I have generally used as the pivot date from which I have deduced all* others similarly calculated. But I have not in any of the authors I have consulted been able to find any exact year fixed on trustworthy astronomical authority for this event, and I have found that some writers place it tentatively at 4700 B.C. It is a date which I am quite unable to determine, and one which if it is exactly soluble can only be fixed by astronomers. But it seems to be certainly assumed by all who have dealt with the subject, that this closing event of the Myth-making Age certainly fell between 4000 and 5000 B.C. It was then, as I show in Chapter IX., that it ceased to be a universally observed national custom to reco73 history in the form of historic myths, and that national history began to pass out of the mythic stage into that of annalistic chronicles recording the events of the reigns of kings and the deeds of individual heroes, statesmen, and law-givers. These latter histories were, when formed into national historical records, always prefaced by a summary of the previous mythic narratives which were more often than not manipulated and distorted from their original form by the authors of what may be called the Individualist School of
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History. These legends were, down to the days of Niebuhr and the introduction of the study of Comparative Philology and Mythology, generally believed to be based, as averred by those who cited them, on the biographies of individuals. Since this new school of investigators has proved that the heroes of the Mythic Age were not living men like the leading actors in modern histories, it has come to be an almost universally accepted article of faith among those who try to portray the history of the remote past that the primitive myths of what is called the Prehistoric Age must be looked on as inventions of later times mixed with small fragments of genuine ancient tradition. Though no one explains why men should have wasted time in their manufacture if they were useless lies, or how, if they were made up by modern authors to suit the appetite for local history in each place, they should everywhere show traces of being derived from some central and often far-distant source.
The real truth is that these myths in their original form are surviving relics of the genuine ancient history of the earliest ages of human culture. One of my principal aims in writing this book and my previous work, the Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, is to show that the opinion as to the recent origin and unreliability of Mythic History is erroneous, and to prove that our wise forefathers, whose initiative ability, perseverance, and foresight laid the foundations of our civilisation and knowledge, framed these tales with the object of handing down to their successors a true account of the national progress of the nations they ruled. I also hope to prove that we have misunderstood the true meaning of the histories they have bequeathed to us, and that our failure to comprehend the purport of the information they meant to convey arises from our ignorance of the true method of interpreting their utterances, which were all prepared under rules which I have tried to set forth in my analysis of their contents, but which were ignored and forgotten by the writers of Individualistic History.
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The rules of interpretation, which give a clue to the true meaning of these histories, were during the Myth-making Age carefully taught to each rising generation by the national teachers, and the oblivion into which they fell is one of the great misfortunes inflicted on posterity'by the Gotho-Celtic invaders from the North, who are now called Aryans. They, whose chroniclers were the family and tribal bards who celebrated the prowess of their foremost soldiers, broke up, as I show in Chapter IX., the organisation of the communities of agriculturists, artisans* mariners and traders, who ruled Southern Asia and Europe, and introduced the epoch of military conquests made by nations whose leaders were ambitious warriors, who sought to substitute their own despotic personal rule and that of their heirs for that of the previous kings, who governed as the heads of the hierarchy of the national councils of provinces, towns and villages confederated under the constitutional customs I have here Sketched.
In beginning the elucidation of the historical riddles of civilisation, and the translation into forms intelligible to modern minds of the actual thoughts of the primitive races, we must first go down to the root-germ whence national life began to grow, and start our survey from the primary sources indicated by the laws of human progress. These tell us that the first birth process in the creation of national life is the formation of associated groups of human beings united as the members of a permanent village community, a family, or a tribe. It was in the South, as I have shown in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Timer, and as I prove more fully in the following pages, that the first village communities and the provincial governments originating from them were founded by the forest races of Southern India and the Indian Archipelago, and it was in the North that '
the family expanded into the tribe. Neither the village communities of the South nor the tribes of the North were able to exist as permanent units holding a definite place of their own, or to work their way forward on the paths of
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social advance till they had framed laws binding society together, a history of their past career, and a national religion. The two first preserved them from internal dissensions and showed the pitfalls to be avoided by those who would reach the goal as winners, while the third in its initial stages was in the belief of its expounders the animating soul of patriotic life, which alone saved the land whence they drew their subsistence from being withered and depopulated by drought, famine and pestilence. For it taught that the primary “ religio ” or binding duty of each community was to secure the favour and protection of the unseen powers who ordained the succession of night and day, seed time and harvest, and of the recurring seasons of the year, and who punished the neglect or infraction of their laws by disease, social ruin, and death.
Hence one of the first tasks undertaken by each associated community was that of ascertaining the order and approximate dates when the seasons followed each other, so that they might be able to begin each season with the ordained propitiatory ceremonies. Consequently thejiupreme national God of the earliest organisers of society was the Maker and Measurer of time, the God who imparted the knowledge of its sequence to the animals pursued by the hunting races, who gave life, with its accompanying seasonal changes, to the trees and plants, and fitted the earth to receive the seeds sown, and to grow and ripen the crops reaped by the tillers of the soil. He was the Being by whose ordeirs the sun, moon and stars rose and set, and went daily round the Pole; and the rules of the ritual of the worship of this Creator of time, and the life to which it gave birth, were preserved together with their other distinctive national customs as the most precious of their protecting observances by every section of the original social units, which emigrated to other lands as offshoots from the parent stems.
The Pole Star in the North and the central starless void in the South, round which the heavenly bodies revolved, were in the eyes of these primitive pioneers the dwelling-
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places of the parent-creating power, the soul of the ever- engendering germ of life, the Tao or creating year-path of the Chinese, as conceived in the creed of the theology sketched in Chapter VII. p. 479. This is the year-god called in Greek mythology, as will be shown in the course of this work, Odusseus, the God of the Path (oSos) of Time, whose wife was the weaver of its web ('mjvr)), the goddess Penelo.per»-who was in heaven the goddess of the Pleiades, called in India the Krittakas or Spinners, and her husband was the year-star Orion, who, as I show in Chapter III., succeeded in primitive astronomy Canopus as the leader of the stars, headed by the Pleiades, round the Pole. He was the Orwandil or Orendel of the Northern historical legends, whose toe was the star Rigel in Orion, and the story of whose voyage in seventy-two ships, the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year, to find his bride Brigit, the Sanskrit goddess Brihati, is told in Chapter II. pp. 64, 65. The seed germ engendered by this dual but united heavenly and sexless parent-god, who was the mother and father of life, came down to earth in the rain and engendered the mother-tree, which grew, according to the belief I have described in_ Chapter II., in the mud of the Southern Ocean. The rain- germ ascended through its trunk and branches as the creating- sap whence the seed of life was born, and this seed in the indigenous Southern worship of the rice as the plant or tree of life was the rice soul which, as explained in Chapter IV. p. 139, note 3, was believed to impart its life to its consumers.
The God who disseminated the life-giving rain at the fitting times was the being whose favour was to be propitiated at the festivals held at the beginning of each recurring season of the year, which was, as I show, reckoned by different rules in different parts of the world, and at different successive periods of time. It is the history of the various and consecutive series of year-reckonings calculated by the dominant races, who ruled the growing world, in their attempts to learn the laws of time measurement, which is the principal subject dealt with in this book.
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The first of these years was that measured by the founders of permanent villages, who began their year when the Pleiades first set after the sun on the 1st of November. This was chosen by them as their New Year’s Day, because it marked the beginning of Spring in that region of the Southern and Northern hemispheres which lay close to the Equator, and of which Ceylon, called Lanka, was the centre. This central island was in Hindu mythological astronomy the land ruled by Agastya, the star Canopus, which, as the brightest of the revolving stars near the Pole of the Southern heavens, was looked on as‘the king of antarctic polar space. It was believed to lead the Pleiades and the starry host, their attendant followers, round the Pole ; and in this daily and annual circuit the Pleiades set before the sun during the six months from the ist of May till the 31st of October, and began on the ist of November to set for the next six months after the sun.
The year thus measured was not reckoned by months, which were as yet unknown, but by nights and weeks of five days, the number of the fingers of the creating hand. Thirty-six weeks covered each of the periods between November and May, and May and November, so that the whole year was one of seventy-two weeks or three hundred and sixty days. This year, which was that reckoned by the Celtic Druids, as well as by the earliest founders of Indian villages, began with a three days’ feast to the dead, which survives in our All Hallow Eve, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, also with the election of village officers, a custom still preserved in the election on the ist of November of English Mayors and Aldermen. It was, as I show in Chapter II., once the official year throughout South-western Asia and Europe, and became in Ireland the year of Bran, meaning the Raven, who had been in the South the raven-star Canopus, and of the two Brigits, daughters of Dagda, the Indian Daksha, the god of the showing {dak) hand, the Celtic forms of the Sanskrit Brihati, who is, in the ritual of the Indian Brahmanas, the goddess of the thirty-six five-day weeks of each of the two halves of the Pleiades year.
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The revolution of the heavenly bodies by which our forefathers measured this and the other years they reckoned, was thought to be caused by the winds, and their visible leader was the black-cloud, the “^rd^Khui of the Akkadians and Egyptians, which became the divine raven. This bird, the bearer of the creating rain, was in the early genealogies, which traced the national descent to the seed of life it brought, the parent of the Indian trading races, who used sibilants as representing Northern gutturals. Perhaps the interchange was one made by both races, the Northern changing an original Southern sibilant into a guttural, and calling the Southern cloud-bird Shu, Khu, or the Southerners may have reversed the order and changed the Northern Khu into Shu. At any rate it was as the reputed sons of the cloud-bird that the Indian traders called themselves Saus or sons of Shu. This name was changed by the Sumerians of the Euphratean Delta into Zu, the storm-bird, who stole the “ tablets of Bel 2,” and he became, in Egypt, Dhu-ti, the bird [dim) of life (tz), the god we call Thoth, who had a bird’s head and a bird’s feather, the recording pen of the time chronicler, in his hand.
The time-measuring winds of early astronomy were those of the South-west and North-east Monsoons, which bring the regularly recurring periodical rains to the tropical equatorial lands at the ordained seasons. They drove Agastya, the star Canopus, the pilot of the constellation Argo, the mother-ship of heaven, the Akkadian Ma and the Pleiades, with their following stars, round the Pole, and distributed the seasonal rains over that region of the earth on the shores of the Indian Ocean which was the cradle of infant civilised humanity.
During the first period of of Pole Star worship, the eartl
1 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, Sign 73. Khu is the Egyptian word represented by the hieroglyph of the bird.
2 Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lect. iv. p. 297.
my historical survey, the age rwas thought to be a station-
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a/tfr
ary oval plain, resting on the mud of the Southern Ocean,
y
whence the world’s mother-tree was born from the seed brought by the rain-cloud-bird, the offspring of the Cauldron of Life, the creating-waters stored by the Pole Star god as the Holy Grail or Blood of God, and guarded by his raven vice-gerent, the god whose Celtic name is Bran, in the watch-tower called the Caer Sidi or Turning Tower of the heavens I.
The Tree of Life grew up from its roots fixed in the Southern mud through the superincumbent soil, and appeared on earth as the central tree of the village grove growing vin the centre of the world’s central village, just as the group of forest-trees left standing in the centre of the cleared land ? was the midmost home of the parent-tree-gods of all villages founded by the Indian forest.-races. ^ f
In the next age of Lunar-Solar worship a different cosmogony was developed. In this the world was looked on as an egg laid by the great cloud-bird, which had"~been the monsoon raven-bfrcl, which was now believed to dwell in the Pole Star. This was the bird called by the Arabs thej'-fZ Rukh, the bird of the breath (;makh) of God, the Persian Simurgh or Sin-murgh, the moon {sin) bird (;murgli), the Garutmat of the Rigveda, which dwells in the highest heavens, its Pole Star home, and begets the sun 2. This egg became in Hindu historical mythology, as told in Chapter VI. p. 310, that laid by Gan-dharl, the Star Vega in Lyra, the Pole Star from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C., from which were born the hundred Kauravyas, sons of the world’s tortoise {kitr), the oval earth, and this was a reproduction of an earlier birth- story, telling of the birth of the Satavaesa, or hundred {sata) creators (•vaesa) of the Zendavesta, from the mother constellation Argo, the Akkadian Ma, meaning also the ship.
This egg was, in popular belief, divided into a Northern
1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, xiii., ‘The Origin of the Holy Grail,’ pp. 300—314
B Rg. i. 164, 46, x. 149, 3.
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and Southern half, the large and small ends of the egg surrounded in the centre by the ocean-snake, on whose waters it rested. In the centre of the Northern or large half of Gan-dhari’s egg, ruled by her Kauravya sons, was their Indian land called Kuru-kshetra, or field {kshetra) of the Kurus, where the world’s tree, the parent Banyan fig- tree [Ficus Indica), emerged. It had its roots in the Southern mud, as explained in Chapter II. p. 26, and on its top sat the parent-ape, whose thigh was the constellation of the Great Bear. This ape, in the first conception entertained of his functions, performed the part assigned to the winds in the first cosmogony, and turned the stars round the Pole with his mighty five-fingered hand, the five days of the week. But in a further development of the belief in the ape as the God crowned by the Pole Star, whose thigh was the Great Bear, he was thought to turn the tree and the star-flowers on its branches by the pressure of the Thigh Stars.
The Southern small end of the egg penetrated below the waters guarded by the encircling ocean-snake to the mud whence the mother-tree grew, and the men of the Southern mountain-land, emerging from the ocean, were in ancient belief the race called by the Celts Fo-mori, or men beneath (fo) the sea (uiuir), the dwellers in the land lighted by the Southern sun of winter, the sea-born race of the primitive historical mythology preserved in the Arabian Nights.
This cosmogony was developed by the mixed races formed by the union in Euphratean lands of the emigrating descendants of the first founders of Indian villages with the Northern Ugro-Finn races. These Finns traced their descent to the egg laid by Ukko, the storm-bird, who became in Indian history Kansa, the moon-goose (>kans), son of Ugra-sena, the king of the army (send) of the Ugras or Ogres, the Ugur- Finns whose story is told in Chapter VI. In this cosmogony of the floating egg the regularity of the annual course of the moon and sun through the stars was thought to be preserved by the watching-god, the boundary (laksh) snake-god, the Gond Goraya, and the god Lakshman of the story of Rama,
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as told on p. 208. He determined the direction in which the stars should be turned by the ape, so as to make the track of Sita, the furrow Rama’s plough driven with the ecliptic path of the moon and sun, uniform in all the revolutions of the heavens round the egg.
It was during this age that the reckoning of time by the presence of the sun in the zodiacal stars of the Nag-kshetra, or field of the Naga snakes, first began. The evidence I have been able to collect as to its date seems, as I have pointed out in Chapter V. Section A., On the Birth of the Sun-god dated by Zodiacal stars, pp. 205 ff., to show that the first year thus reckoned was one of which the beginning was fixed by the entry of the sun into Aries at the Autumnal Equinox. According to other recorded positions of the sun in that year it was in Cancer at the winter solstice when Rama was installed as ruler of the Indian year of the three- years cycle.
This three-years cycle-year was begun in Syria at the Autumnal Equinox with the entry of the sun into Aries, and this New Year’s Day still survives in that of the Jews, who open it with blasts on ram-horn trumpets. This was, as I show in note 1, p. 208, probably that reckoned by the early Zend fire-worshippers who founded the rule of the Kushika kings. The Indian evidence on the other hand, as I show on pp. 207, 208, and the Malay traditions referred to in note 3, p. 207, date back to a time when the year of Rama began, when the sun was in Cancer at the winter solstice. But the framers of this year, with true Indian conservatism, preserved the memory of the reckoning of Orion’s year, and also that of the sun-bird beginning at the winter solstice, as shown on p. 22, for in preparing their list of zodiacal Nag-kshetra stars of the year beginning with the Autumnal Equinox, they placed /3 Arietis as the first star in it. The list closes with Revati £ Piscium, the star marking the close of the month Bhadrapada (August—September). It then, as I show on p. 209, ushered in the New Year of the sun-ram of the Autumnal Equinox. He was the god born from the tree
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of the fish-mother-star, worshipped throughout South-western Asia as the Akkadian goddess Nana, the Syrian Atergatis, Derceto, and Tirhatha, whose memory is preserved in the constellations Pisces, the Dolphin, and, as I show in Appendix C., of Cetus the Whale. She was, as I prove on pp. 230, 231, the traditional mother of Shem-i-ramot, the bisexual goddess of the three-years cycle-year. The year thus reckoned is one which is shown by the position of the sun in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox (September— October), in Cancer at the winter solstice (December— January), and in Pisces (August—September), to date from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.c. The evidence as to its use proves that it was the year reckoned by the priestly astronomers who determined the dates of the annual festivals throughout India, the Malayan countries and South-western Asia, whence it was carried to Western Europe, as is shown by the Breton stone calendars described in pp. 266—269. The zodiacal reckoning of time thus begun, was, as I show from the recorded dates, determined by the position of the sun in zodiacal stars, regularly continued throughout the whole of the remaining epochs of the Myth-making Age, including those of the years of eleven and fifteen months, and the subsequent year-reckonings up to the time when the sun was in Taurus at the Vernal Equinox.
The conception of the earth as a stationary floating-egg was followed by one which pictured it as turning on its axis, and thus reversed the doctrine of the revolving heavenly bodies. This change originated in the brains of the Northern worshippers of the household-fire, and was developed when built houses began to supersede the caves, rock-shelters, and rude huts made of branches of trees stuck in the ground, which were the dwelling-places of the primitive agricultural and hunting races. These human beavers, sons of the Twins Night and Day, called by the Greeks Castor, the unsexed beaver, and Polu-deukes, the much {poht) wetting (detikes) god, were the first users of moistened earth for building, and their descendants the first makers of sun-dried bricks, and
b 2
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of pottery made on the potter’s wheel. These latter changed the polar ape who turned the stars with his hand, and the Thigh stars of the Great Bear into the Great Potter, the wise-ape Kabir, the Northern form of the Dravidian ape Kapi. In the first form of the theology of the turning-tree, which engendered the heat whence life was born as the fire- drill breeds fire, the stars turned with it as it was driven round, according to Greek belief by Ixion, the Sanskrit Akshivan, the man of the axle (aksha), who was bound by Hermes, the god of the time-recording gnomon-pillar, to the stars of the Great Bear. But in its subsequent development the stars were, as in the first belief, detached from the tree in which the Potter ape sat. They then became the stationary lights of heaven, visible through the web of the overarching heavens’ tent.
This tent was first the Peplos or bridal-veil given to Harmonia as a wedding gift by her husband Kadmus, the man of the East (kedeni), and the arranger {kad, root of fcdfa, to arrange). She was the goddess called in Syriac or
Aramaic Kharmano, the Chaldaic Kharman, meaning the snake which encircled as its guardian mother-ring of tilled land the primaeval village grove, and hence the dialectic forms of her name Harmonia and Sarmo-bel were formed. Sarmo-bel is the distinctive name of the Agathodaemon, the good snake depicted under the sacred Phoenician sign ^). It indicated the path of the sun-bird round the boundary of the heavenly village, called in Hindu astronomical mythology the Nag- kshetra or field of the Naga race. The boundary stars marked the track of the sun-bird of the first solar year of the Indian Mundas described in Chapter II. p. 22, which began when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. This sun-goddess of the flying-snake was the goddess Taut, the Phoenician form of the Egyptian Dhu-ti or Thoth, the bird (dhu) of life (ti), who was originally the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dtimu) of life (si), the star Orion, which succeeded Canopus as the leader of the stars round the Pole when the latter Southern star became invisible to the
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Indian emigrant farmers who had reached Asia Minor as the Rephaim or sons of the Giant (repha) star Canopus.
This name Tut also appears in that of the Roman god Tut-anus, in the title Tuticus, meaning supreme, given to the Oscan chief-magistrate Meddix-tuticus, and also in the Tut-ulus or conically dressed hair worn by the Roman Flamines or fire-priests, as a type of the heavenly veil concealing the hidden creating thought in the divine brain.
This veil was, according to Pherecydes of Syros, who wrote about 600 B.C., thrown by Zeus over the winged oak, the revolving-world’s tree, the parent-oak of the Lapps, Esthonians, and Druids1. On this veil were depicted the stars, or rather they were seen through it. Zeus also gave it to Europa, the goddess of the West (ereb), the sister of Kadmus, and she is represented on the coins of Gortyna in Crete as sitting in the branches of the parent-oak-tree with the veil over her head 2 3.
This goddess of the veil was also called Khusartis, from Khurs, a circle, and was personified in her male form, that of her husband Kadmus, the arranger, as the dwarf Kabir, Chrysor, or Khrusor, the circle-maker and ordainer, who, as the creating-wise-ape, the smith, put all things in circular order. She was also named Thuroh the Law, the Hebrew Thorah, of which Doto, named by Horn. II. lxviii. 43, among the Nereids, is an Aramaic form ; and the bridal-veil of Harmonia, as the goddess Doto, is said by Pausanias II. 1, 7, to be preserved at Gabala, a Syrian seaport bearing the name of Gi-bil or Bil-gi, the Akkadian fire-god who produced the creating-fire by the revolving fire-drill, the world’s tree 3.
In the house or tent roofed by the over-arching veil of the firmament the mother-goddess, looked on in one aspect as the guardian-snake, and in another as the flying sun-bird
1 O’Neill, Night of the Gods, Wearing the Veil, vol. ii. p. 877.
2 Ibid., Axis Myths, vol. i. p. 308; Lenormant, Origine de VHistoire, i. pp. 9Si 568, 569, 573 ; Goblet d’Alviella, Migration of Symbols, p. 168 note.
3 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xiii. pp. 504—507, chap. iii. p. 103, chap. xiii. p. 658 ; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, Polar Myths, vol. i. p. 316
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measuring the year, was, like the Finn house-mother, the guardian of the Joula or never-extinguished fire of the house kindled by the revolving-stem of the world’s tree. Also it was under this roof that her mate, the fabricating Master Smith and the Master Potter of the turning Great Bear Constellation, pursued his creating trade.
In the evolution of belief the trunk of the world’s tree, with its three roots penetrating, like those of the parent-ash-tree the Ygg-drasil of the Edda T, to the Urdar fountain of the circling waters of the South, became the Trident or Trisula worshipped by the Takkas of India, as described in Chapter IV. p. 175. This, which symbolised successively the three seasons of Orion’s year and the three years of the cycle-year, was the creating-weapon of the Greek god Poseidon and of the Japanese twin-creators, Izanagi and Izanami, by which they raised the land from the sea as butter is raised from the churned milk.
It was by the revolutions of this trident of Creating Time that the Indian creator Vasuki raised the Indian land of the Kushikas with its central mountain Mandara, meaning the Revolving {maud) hill which emerged from the surrounding ocean as the clay cone rising from the potter’s wheel, and brought up with it the Tortoise-land, the Indian continental area, the appanage of the Kauravyas or Kushikas, the sons of Kur and Kush the tortoise, and of Kaus the bow.
This mother-mountain raised under the heavenly veil is, in another form of the myth, the central mountain of the Himalayas, the crowning summit ofThe Pamir plateau, the Hindu Mount Meru. In the primitive form of the Akkadian and Kushika birth story it was the Western peak of this plateau, called by the Akkadians Khar-sak-kurra, meaning “ the wet (sak) entrails (khar) of the mountain of the East ” (-hurra), or “the chief (sak) ox (khar) of the East (kurra) 2.” 1
1 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, Bohn’s Edition, The Prose Edda, 15, 16, pp. 410-413.
Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i.„ Essay iii., p. 143, note 4;
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It was from this mountain that the parent-river of the Kushikas, the Haetumant of the Zendavesta, the modern Helmend, descended to the Lake Kashava or Zarah in Seistan ; and, in the reeds of this lake, Kavad, the infant- parent of the Kavi or Kabir Kush kings, was found by Uzava, the goat-god Uz, called Tum-aspa, the horse of darkness. He was, as I show in Chapter IV. pp. 141, 142, the Pole Star goat ruling the year of three seasons I.
But this mother-mountain of the Akkadians and Kuskikas was not the first of the national parent-mountains worshipped by the Gonds of India and the Kurd sons of Mount Ararat, for all these legends can be traced back to the pregnant mother-mountain of the Northern Finns, round which the hunter-star drove the reindeer-sun-god, who, as described in Chapter III. p. 89, was slain at the close of his year at the winter solstice.
In the form of this historical legend telling of the rising of Mount Mandara, we are told in the Mahabharata that there rose with it and its fringe of continental land the sun- ass, or horse, who] took the place of the reindeer sun-god of the North and of both the Southern cloud-bird Khu and the sun-hen flying round the heavens. All these, instead of remaining stationary like the stars seen through the veil, within which Mount Mandara revolved, circled it, and the revolving world it took round with it like the rain-shedding cloud, which, in the original form of the myth of the sun- year, drew the cloud chariot of the female and male Twins Night and Day in which they bore the sun-maiden. This horse, called in the Mahabharata Ucchaishravas, the ass with the long ears, is that called in the Rigveda Trikshi and Tarkshya, the horse of the Nahusha sons of the Ocean- snake and of the revolving Great-Bear constellation (Nagur
Lenormant, Chaldoean Magic, pp. 302, 30S, 169 ; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, No. 399.
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p 145 ; Dar- mesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, x. 66, Farvardin Yasht, 131 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 302, 221 ; West, Bundahish, xxxi. 23; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136.
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Nahur). This horse, under the name Tarkshya, meaning the son of Trikshi, is called Arishta-nemi, the ass of the unbroken (<arishta) wheel (nemi), in Rg. x. 178, 1, the name given, as I show in Chapter VI. p. 316, to the horse’s head, the year- god of the eleven-months year1. This last god, whose genealogy shows him to be the son or successor of the ass sun-god of the three-years cycle, was born, as I there show, under the star Spica a Virgo, the mother of corn, the Eygptian Min, the mother-star of the Minyan race. The birth took place when the sun was in Virgo at the Vernal Equinox, that is between 13,000 and 12,000 B.C., or about 2000 years after the age of the long-eared sun-ass when the sun was in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox.
This primaeval ass, the Vedic year-god Trikshi, who is said in Rg. viii. 22, 7 to traverse the holy road of the divine order, or the path of the god of annual time, was the god of the boring (tri) people, the bee-inspired race of Chapter IV. p. 169, and hence the year-god of the Greek Telchines of Rhodes and Lycia, whose name substituting / for r, and a guttural for a sibilant, reproduces that of the Vedic god Trikshi whose sons they were. They, like their Indian prototypes, the Takkas, were deft artificers, the first workers in metal, who introduced bronze and made the lunar sickle of Kronos, that of the Indian Srinjaya or men of the sickle (srini), the sons of the corn-mother Virgo, and the creating trident of Poseidon. This latter god was nurtured by them with a nymph, the daughter of ocean Kapheira, the Semitic Kabirah, the Arabic Khabar, the goddess-mother of the Kabiri and another form of Har- monia, mother of the sons of the smith of heaven. She was also the black Demeter of Phigalia, the goddess with the horse’s head 2, who was violated by Poseidon, who was, as I show in Chapter IV. p. 143, originally the snake parent-god Erectheus or Ericthonius, from whose three thousand mares the North-wind god.Boreas begot, accord-
1 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xvii. p. 78 ; Rg. viii. 22, 7, vi. 46, 7, 8, 9.
2 Frazer, Pausauias, viii. 42, l—3, vol. i. p. 428.
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ing to Horn. II. xx. 220—225, the twelve horses of the year. Hence Poseidon, the god nurtured by the Telchines, was the snake-father of the horses of the sun, two of which he gave to Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay {ytt]\os), the Great Potter and the father of Achilles1; and the Telchines his votaries, who were first sons of the sun-ass Trikshi, became by their union with the northern sons of the sun-horse the ruling artisan race of the year of eleven months of the god called Tarkshya, the son of Trikshi, and also Arishta-nemi or the god of the unbroken wheel.
We can thus by their genealogy trace their traditional^ <? ^ history from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C., to between "13,000 and 12,000 B.C. These priests were the Kuretes whose religious dances were circular gyrations like those of the heavenly bodies round the pole 2.
In these cosmogonies we see specimens of the scientific r and historical myths of the men of the primitive age of civilization. They were originally evolved from the dramatic nature-myths, framed for the instruction of the village children by the elders of the first village communities, such as the story of Nala and Damayanti, telling of the wooing and marriage of Nala, meaning the channel {nala) of the ' seasonal rains, the god of the two monsoons with the earth that is to be tamed {damayanti). This same use of dramatic metaphor which characterised these primitive stories, was t continued, when histories telling of events spread over long ages of time were added to the catalogue of national literature. Hence, as I show in Chapter I. p. 10, Chapter V. pp. 217, 218, and in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,
Vol. I., Essay II., pp. 64—76, the story of Nala and Damayanti was expanded into a much more extensive history than that contemplated by the first framers of the myth, for it became the Epic history of the Mahabharata or
1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 277, 278.
a Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. iii. p. 987, s.v., Telchines; O’Neill Night of the Gods, vol. ii. p. 847 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 104—109, 183.
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Preface.
Great Bharatas, the race - begetters (bliri), the people formed from the amalgamation of the races who successively- ruled India down to the close of the Myth-making Age, and who called it Bharata-varsha, the land of the Bharatas. This covers the whole period reviewed in this work, beginning even before the first date I have recorded, 21,000 B.C., when a Kepheus was the Pole Star.
During the whole of the three ages of Pole Star, Lunar- solar and Sun-worship comprised in this Myth-making epoch all ancient histories were framed on similar ground- plans to those used by the successive authors of the Mahab- harata legends, and were recited to the people at the national New Years’ festivals, as I show in Chapter VI. pp. 297, 298. By the rules of their construction, they only furnish exact information as to the course of the national changes they describe when they are interpreted in the sense intended by their authors to be conveyed to those for whose use they were intended. These men lived in an age when the object of the national historians was to record the progress of the .nation or tribe for whose benefit they worked, and thus to furnish guide-marks to the descendants of each generation, which thus by these did bequeath its experiences to its children. For this purpose the record of the names of the national leaders was in their eyes useless. Hence they substituted for the living actors symbolically named persons whose names gave a key to the inner meaning of these narratives, and these, when they had completed the tasks attributed to them in the historic dramas prepared by the national historiographers the Prashastri, or teaching and recording priests of the Hindus, the Zend Frashaostra who became the Jewish scribes and the Greek Exegetse, only lived as guides to memory, or were like the heroes of the Mahab- harata transferred to heaven as stars. They thus took their place in the historical nomenclature of the Constellations, which, as will be seen in the course of this work, tell in their names the history of the world.
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Seeing that the narrators of these officially prepared ancient histories, which were believed to be divinely inspired utterances painting in pictorial language the national results achieved in the course of ages, always used the names of the actors they spoke of as keys to their meaning, it is a fatal mistake to regard these embodied symbolical sign-marks of the primitive form of history as indicating individuals. In these narratives the actual leaders who had been honoured, loved and followed during the lifetime they had devoted to the service of their country, were only remembered after death in the records of the victories they had gained over the obstacles raised by ignorance and lawless licence, over human foes and climatic impediments. This memorial, furnished by the benefits secured by their deeds, was the only remembrance they wished and sought for, as the end for which they toiled was not so much personal aggrandisement as the continued stability and improvement of the state fabric they and their fathers had reared. This was in their eyes a far more noble monument than that of personal praise, and one which best repaid their constant devotion to what they had learnt to be their highest duty.
Under this system of oral historical record, in which each generation handed down its experiences to its descendants, each successive leader became the reproduction of those who preceded him in the task of nation-building, or, in the words of the Mahabharata, the son was the father reborn from the mother-sheath. Thus in religious evolution, as will be shown hereafter, each newly deified manifestation of divine power became the successor under different names and attributes of the original creating Spirit-God. This conception appears in its most fully developed form in the sequence of the births of the Buddha, recorded in the Jatakas or Birth- Stories, and partly told in Chapter VII. Section G. In these his first embodiment as a God of Time is said by himself in Jataka 465 I, to be his birth as the king Sal-tree 1 Rouse and Francis, The Jatakas, vol. iv. pp. 96—98.
xxviii Preface.
[Shorea robusta), the mother-tree, from which he was afterwards born as the sun-god. This tree was the pillar which supported the palace of king Brahmadatta, the ruler, given (datta) by the Creator [Brahma). This palace was the heavenly vault lit with stars, which I have described above as the dome sustained by the world’s tree with its roots fixed in the mud of the Southern Ocean and its top crowned by the Pole Star.
A variant form of this tree was the Erica-tree supporting the palace of the king of Byblos, the modern Ji-bail, the Phoenician Gi-bal, the city of the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil or Bil-gi, where, as we have seen above, the Peplos of Harmonia was kept. In this tree Isis found the coffin of Osiris, the year-god, containing his body, which on her arrival in Egypt was cut into fourteen pieces by Set and his seventy-two assistants, who changed the year-god of the growing tree who had measured the year by seventy-two five-day weeks into that of the lunar-solar god who measured his year by the fourteen days of the lunar phases 1.
This doctrine of re-birth survived among the poet-bards of the Gotho-Celtic Northern sun-worshippers, who initiated the new history succeeding that of the Myth-making Age, and told of the deeds of individual heroes who were actually living men. It was under this influence that they mingled with their biographies of famous warrior-kings, such as Cyrus, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, legends taken from earlier records, which assigned to them birth-stories told originally of their mythic predecessors. Thus they made Cyrus the son of the daughter of Astyages, that is Azi Dahaka, the biting snake, the Indian Vritra, slain by Trita and Thraetaona and other conquering heroes of the Rigveda and Zendavesta. Alexander the Great became the descendant of Peleus, the Potter-god of the Potter’s Clay (7797X05), and of Achilles, the sun-god. And they associated
1 Frazer, Golden Bough, First Edition, vol. i., chap. iii. pp. 302, 303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 128, 129.
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Charlemagne with the sun-charioteer, the Wain of Karl, the Great Bear, and the sun hero Roland. These bards reproduced the old traditional histories in the Sagas of the North, and in those on which the Iliad, Odyssey and ^Eneid are founded ; and all these, like the later Shah Nameh of Persia, the much earlier Mahabharata, and the still more primitive Gond Song of Lingal, make the sun, moon, star and atmospheric heroes of the earliest national legends actors in historic dramas, which, while purporting to represent comparatively recent historical events, really tell those of a very remote past. It was the conquering races, whose historians were their tribal bards, who, on their amalgamation with their foes, instituted the last year dealt with in these Chapters, the year of twelve months of thirty days each, divided into ten-day weeks, and who built the brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East. The composite theology of this new year is described in Chapter IX.
The histories of the Myth-making Age were, as will be seen in the sequel of this work, told in three forms, (i) The verbal histories prepared by the official historians of each governing state. (2) The pictorial histories told in the engraved bas-reliefs and picture Papyri of Egypt, and of the Turano-Hittite trading races who drew the rock-picture of Iasilikaia, copied on p. 259. This is only one specimen form of a large number of similar pictographs; and this pictorial history is told also in symbols, such as those on the Breton form of the Hindu Linga altar, described in Chapter V. pp. 269—272. (3) The histories handed down in the forms
of the national ritual, such as that told in Chapter V. p. 205 ffi, which recorded by the sacrifice of a ram at the autumnal equinox the first measurement of the year beginning when the sun entered Aries on the day after the evening sacrifice of the ram, the sun-god of the dying year; also that told in the epitome of national history recorded, as is related in Chapter IX., in the ritual of the building of the brick altar of the year sun-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox, the crowning manifesto of Indian theology.
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Preface.
In estimating the value of the historical deductions to be drawn from these surviving customs, time-reckonings, rituals, histories and religious beliefs, we must never forget that they must be looked on as signs proving each race who adopted them to be distinct from its neighbours, whose customs differed from theirs. Each stock which became a separate nation had its own special customs, traditions and religion, and these were the birth-marks and national treasures which each emigrating section took with them to other lands from their parent home.
I have traced the course of some of these emigrations, beginning with the most historically important of them all, that in which the descendants of the first founders of Indian villages made their way in canoes hollowed out of forest trees, grown on the wooded coasts of Western India, to the then barren shores of the Persian Gulf on which no shipbuilding timber has ever grown. In these lands, and others to which they subsequently penetrated, the early wanderers found large tracts of vacant space wherever they settled, and thus all countries in which they found unoccupied territories possessing favourable soil and climate, were studded with groups of settlers, each^jdiffering from its neighbours in customs, history, the symbolism of religious belief and ritual, and each measuring time after its own fashion. Each group carried with it It's own religion for the personal use of its members, and looked on the abandonment of its tenets, or the attempt to bring over proselytes from other groups, as gross impieties. Even the conception of apostacy of this kind never entered into the minds of the first founders of society, who looked on the religion professed by each group as one which must inevitably be that of every affiliated member. Hence any one passing through the territories thus peopled in the early ages, before tribal wars had promoted distrust, and caused the national customs to be concealed from strangers under a veil of secrecy, would on moving from one group to another find himself to be traversing a series of states varying from each other like the different
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patterns of a kaleidescope, but possessing fundamental similarities under their apparent differences. These customs were all most carefully preserved under the influence of the intense national conservatism which is the most marked characteristic of the human race. It is owing to this that even now, after the lapse of thousands of years disseminating their obliterating influences, there are still, as in the primitive era, affinities to be found between those who have travelled over and settled in regions of the earth’s surface very distant from each other, and disparities between those who live near together.
Hence under these distributions of the population the numerous tribes recorded by ancient writers as dwelling in each of the countries of South-eastern Asia and Europe must be looked on as grouping together, under each tribal name, persons and families whose ancestors had formed their separate unions in a very remote past, while many, if not most, of the groups traced their descent from a distant centre of origin. It is this persistent preservation of the tribal ritual and history which explains the close likeness between Celtic mythology and that of Southern India, which I have shown to be revealed to us by the study of the year-reckonings, and the ritual of the Druids. These latter were the priests of the Fomori or men beneath {fo) the sea (muir) and the Tuatha de Danann, sons of the goddess Danu, the descendants of emigrants who had, in the course of ages, made their way from the Southern’Iands~of the Indian Archipelago, thoSe'~cTf the Southern end of the world’s egg, of which the Kauravya plain of Northern India was the top. They preserved in Ireland, Britain and Gaul the ancient beliefs of the Indian Danava, sons of Danu, the mother-goddess worshipped by the Druids,
Each of these national units believed it to be its chief duty to maintain intact the historical customs and religion of their forefathers, and to measure time as they did ; but though they occasionally naturalised members of other groups, yet the naturalised man had to abandon all links of association
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with his ancient relatives, unless they or a large body of them joined him in forming a new group with an offshoot from another tribal centre. This incorporated the customs of both sections in an altered form, making a new code adopted by the united confederates. Hence it is that we find the root-forms whence society grew, and the folk-tales recording primitive beliefs universally distributed, and it was, as a consequence of this patriotic dissemination of national relics to all quarters of the compass, that I myself have heard the same fairy stories told to me in my youth in Ireland, repeated by a naked wild Gond at the sources of the Mahanadi in India, who had never seen a white man before, and whose country, though not far separated from more advanced districts, was practically so isolated that the people knew of no currency except cowrie-shells, and I had to take them with me when I visited their forests.
During the first ages when the world was peopled by agricultural, hunting and fishing races, the separate confederacies into which they were divided generally lived at peace with each other, for war, except in the form of petty quarrels about boundaries, was almost unknown. All people alike lived on the fruit of their exertions, and none of them had any surplus wealth to excite the cupidity of their neighbours. Their only possessions were the soil and its produce, the articles they made from stone, earth, wood, and animals’ bones, and certain minerals and shells they valued as ornaments. As crops were only grown for home consumption, the forcible robbery of the crops of prosperous neighbours only led to the starvation, retaliation or emigration of the victims, and left no future prey for the robbers. Hence this form of predatory warfare never became general among agricultural communities, and as military prowess had not yet become an avenue to personal distinction, the raids for heads and scalps made by savage tribes of the later fighting races had not yet begun to disturb the public peace. Wars of the predatory type first appear among the pastoral races, who frequently, when their flocks and herds were
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decimated by drought or murrain, replenished their exhausted stocks by seizing on the nearest herds which had not suffered from the same evils.
It was not till the invasion of the savage sheep and cowfeeding races of the North, who introduced human sacrifices and the three-years cycle-year described in Chapter V., that wars of conquest became frequent. But these were not like the later wars of the races who introduced the present form of history, accompanied by the enslavement of the subdued population. The introduction of these wars is marked by the grouping of the frontier provinces occupied by the defending corps of the national army round the central province occupied by the king, as described in pp. 192—194.
These Northern invading races, like the agricultural communities of the South, looked on the unseen power who measured time by the returning seasons of the year as the Creating-god. But they depicted this being not as the soul of the mother-tree or plant, but as the invisible parent of animal life dwelling in the divinely impregnated parent- blood, who sent on earth as his symbol the reindeer, who marked the changes of the year by dropping his horns in autumn, and by their re-growth in spring. This deer-sun- god of the hunting races was succeeded by the eel-god of the unitedjxu4*ters and agriculturists, who called themselves in Asia Minor and Europe the Iberians, that is the Ibai-erri or people {erri) of the rivers (Ibai), the Iravata of India, sons of the eel-mountain-goddess Ida, Ira or Ila. They measured their year by the migration of the eels to the sea in autumn and their return in spring, as described in Chapter IV. Their confederacy was that of the Northern hunters united with the Southern Indian farmers, who called the Iberian mother- mountain Ararat their mother, and they became in Europe the Basques or sons of the forest (fraso), who first brought wheat and barley thither, and founded there on Indian models the villages of the Neolithic Age. In India they were the worshippers of the forest creating-god Vasu or Vasuki, called also Lingal by the Kushika Gonds, who came down as the
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first swarm of the sons of the mother-mountain, and introduced there the Sesame oil-seeds which they brought from Asia Minor, and furnished the first holy oil which has since played such an important part in early medicine and religious ritual. They also introduced the millets of the sacred oil-land, and were afterwards followed by the barleygrowing tribes in the order described in Chapters III. and IV.
These first Northern immigrants into India formed by their union with the previously settled Finn Dravido Munda races the confederacy of the Khati or Hittites, meaning the joined races of the North and South, sons of. the Twin gods Night and Day, who, when transformed into the zodiacal stars Gemini, became the gateposts of the Garden of God, through which the sun entered on his annual circuit in the years of fifteen and thirteen months, described in Chapters VII. and VIII. These latter years were those of the white horse of the sun, the Northern sun-god who succeeded the sun-deer and the sun-ass, and the black horse whose head ruled the year of eleven months of Chapter VI. It was under the auspices of the white sun-horse that the systems of solar worship were developed.
It was from the intercourse of the originally alien Northern and Southern races that the changing confederacies described in this book were developed, and each of those which attained supreme power introduced a new method of measuring time, and a fresh series of festivals of the creating year-gods. These festivals still survive in Saints’ Days, and have left their footprints in all those modern calendars which still reveal to those who have learnt the sequence of the successive year-reckonings the order of the succession of acts unfolding the evolution of the drama of human progress. They thus exhibit to us the stages of the production of the final outcome of the Myth-making Age, the foundation of the states ruled by the race of skilled farmers, artisans, mariners and traders, who covered Southern Asia, North Africa and Europe with the commercial communities
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founded first by the people called the Minvans, the sons of Min, the star Spica Virgo, the corn-mother, who in their ultimate .development were the Yadu-Turvasu of India, the Tursena of Asia Minor, the Tursha of Egypt, and the Tyrrhenians of Italy. It was they who became in the countries east of India the commercial race of the Pre- Sanskrit Bronze Age, who established in Mexico the rule of the Toltecs or Builders, whose Indian affinities I have traced in ^Chapter IX. of this book, and Essay IX. Vol. II. of thz~KuUng Races of Prehistoric Times. They took with them to Mexico the Indian year of eighteen months of twenty days each, instituted during the last period of the Pandava rule, which became the Maya year of Mexico.
It was the members of the Southern sections of these trading guild brotherhoods, the worshippers of the Munda sun-bird, as distinguished from the sun Ra or Ragh of the Northern gnomon-stone and the stone-circles, who distributed over the maritime countries they visited in their commercial voyages the sign of the Su-astika, the symbol of their sun-divinity. It represented in its female pIJ-J and male forms, the annual circuits of the sun-bird round the heavens, going North as the hen-bird at the winter, and returning South as the sun-cock at the summer solstice, as described in pp. 98, 99. This symbol has been found in American graves in the Mississippi and Tennessee States, in Mexico, India, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coasts as far North as Norway.
It is one of the thirty-two sacred marks depicted on the feet of the Indian Buddha, whose image seated on the throne of the double Su-astika is shown in the illustration on p. 471. There it is that of the elephant-headed rain-god Gan-ishn, the lord (isha) of the land (gan), who in the Nidanakatha is said to have entered his mother’s side when he was conceived. This image comes from Copan in Mexico, and proves that in the legend of the sun-god of the Indian Su-astika known to the Toltec priests, this god was first the cloud-bird,
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Preface.
whose tail appears at the back of the elephant’s head. The name of his symbolic throne ought to be written Su-ashtaka, for it is the symbol of the Indian eighth (ashta) god of the eight-rayed star, the hero of the Mahabharata called Astika in the Astika Parva, where he is the son of Jarat-karu, the sister of the creating-god Vasuki, and Ashtaka in the Sam- bhava Parva, where he is the grandson of Yayati, both his progenitors being gods of time1. He was the chief priest of the sacrifice described in Chapter V. p. 271, at which Janamejaya, victorious (jayd) over birth (_janam), destroyed all the Naga snake-gods of the Pole Star era, and introduced the worship of the sun-god, who did not, like his predecessors, die at the end of his yearly circuit of the heavens. Ashtaka, the sun of the eight-rayed star, who was once the cloud-bird Khu, became the newly-risen sun-bird, whose image crowned the last official altar of Hindu ritual, the building of which is described in Chapter IX.
The symbol of the Su-astika is thus shown to have been probably first used as a year-sign by the worshippers of the eight-rayed star. It apparently succeeded the Triskelion, the earlier symbol of the revolving sun of the year of three seasons. This, which was originally the sign became the three-legged crest of the Isle of Man, which has on a Celtiberian coin, depicted by Comte Goblet d’Alviella, the sun’s face in the centre. It appears on a coin of Aspendus with the sun-cock beside it, and on a Lycian coin the feet become cocks’ heads. The original sign has been found on a coin of Megara, on pottery from Arkansas, on a Scandinavian spear and brooch of the Bronze Age, and on the gold pummel of a sword found in Grave IV. in
1 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xlviii. -p. 140. In Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxviii.—xciii., and in the Udyoga (Bhagavat-yana) Parva, cxviii. p. 347, he is Ashtaka. For the Udyoga Parva story of his birth as the fourth son of Madhavi, the goddess of mead (madhu), daughter of Yayati, of whom the god Shiva was the third, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 318.
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Schliemann’s Excavations at Mycernz. It gave the name Trinacria or Triquetra, the three-pointed isle, to Sicily, which is in the Odyssey the home of the 350 oxen and 350 sheep of the sun-god, the meaning of which is discussed in Appendix C. p. 634J. It is apparently a product of the age of the worship of Poseidon, the father of the sun-horse begotten of the horse-headed black Demeter, as the Great Potter, wielder of the creating Trident who raised islands from the sea. For the Triskelion, the three (tri) legged (cr/ceAos) symbol of the year-god, the Su-astika was substituted when the sun-god, on whose feet it was depicted, became the god circling in his annual course the heavenly dome over-arching the eight-rayed star. It was first used as the female Su-astika aj the symbol of the sun-god born from the night of winter, and beginning its annual journey Northward at the winter solstice, and it was derived from the equilateral St. George’s Cross -j— of the cycle-year. The date to which its origin must be assigned is apparently that traced in Chapter VII. Section A., The birth of the sun-god born from the Thigh, pp. 396—399, when the sun- god or sun-bird born from the Thigh-stars of the Great Bear, who circled the heavens as the independent measurer of annual time, was in Taurus at the winter solstice, and in Gemini in January—February about 10,200 B.C. After this he became the sun-god of the male Su-astika who was nursed by the moon-goddess Maha GotamT Pajapati, the nurse of the Buddha, who tended him as he passed through the zodiac of the thirty stars during the three months November—December, December—January, and January— February, and was born as the “ son of the majesty of Indra,” the eel-god of the rivers of Chapter IV., the conquering 1
1 Goblet d’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 54, Figs. 23 a and d, p. 181, Figs. 87, 89; Nuttall, ‘Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisations,’ vol. ii., Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, pp. 28, 29; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. ii. pp. 635 ff. ; Shuchhardt, Schliemann’s Excavations, Fig. 229, p. 232.
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rain-god, at the Ekashtaka (p. 399) on the eighth day of the dark fortnight, or on the 23rd of Magh (January—February). He became the ruler of the year beginning in Greece on the 12th of Anthesterion (February—March) with the Festival of the Anthesteria, or that of the Recall of the souls of the dead ; and started on his career as the conquering god of spring, who was to become at the summer solstice the victorious god of the elephant-headed rain-cloud, the god Gan-isha, who was then to begin his course Southward as the god of the male Su-astika. In this form he was the god of the year of thirteen months, whose yearly course beginning with his three-months passage through the thirty stars is traced in Chapter VII. p. 48S.
The sun-bird, the original parent-god of this long series of offspring forming the historical genealogy of the sun-god, is the Akkadian and Egyptian Khu, the Hindu Shu or Su. It was apparently, in the primaeval solar ritual, the red-headed woodpecker, for it is the heads and beaks of these birds that form the images of the Su-astika found in the American graves in Mississippi and Tennessee, and depicted in Figs. 263, 264, 265, pp. 906 and 907 of Mr. Wilson’s treatise on the Su-astika, published by the Smithsonian Institution at Washington*. In the centre of Fig. 264 are the points of the eight-rayed star surrounding a solstitial cross in a
circle
, and in Fig. 263,
which is reproduced in Fig. 29 of
Comte Goblet d’Alviella’s Migration of Symbols, ip. 58. There the central circle with the cross inscribed in it is surrounded with twelve instead of eight points. Both prove conclusively that the woodpecker represented in the form of a Su-astika the bird flying round the square in which the sun-circle is placed, and thus completing its year by circular course. This red-headed woodpecker, the sacred bird of the Algonquin Indians, is also the sun-bird Picus, the woodpecker of Latin
1 ‘The Swastika.’ Report of the United States tValional Museum, 1S94, Washington, 1S96.
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mythology, who became the red-capped Leprichaun, the dwarf guardian-god of treasure in Ireland and Germany J. Picus was the father of Faunus, the Italian deer-sun-god, and grandfather of Latinus. He is the god of the Indian Lat, our Lath, the wooden sun - gnomon - pillar on which Garuda is placed in the circle of Lats round the Indian temples. Garuda or Gadura is the sacred bird of Krishna the sun-antelope-god, who sits in his chariot and is represented in the Mahabharata as the egg-born son of Vinata, the tenth wife of Kashyapa, and the tenth month of gestation of the Hindu lunar year of thirteen months. He was created, like Astika or Ashtaka, to devour the Naga snakes, the offspring of Ka-dru, the tree (dru) of Ka, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa, and the thirteenth month of the year 2.
