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

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by the various official years measured up to the close of the eleven-months year, including the year of the Pleiades Orion and the three-years cycle.
The year that was now begun was that which forms the subject of this Chapter, and we shall see that in its history the opening month of the year was always that Til which the sun was in Gemini.
In addition to the history of the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya given in the Brahmanas, there is another variant form in the Rigveda marriage - hymn telling of the union of Suria, the sun-maiden, born of the bird'Su to the moon- god Soma, the rejuvenated Chyavana. In this poem the wedding oxen were slain in Magh (January—February), when, as we shall see, the year began, and the marriage was consummated in Arjuna or Phalgun (February—March) ending with the vernal equinox. That is to say, the ritualistic record of the year extends from about 10,200 B.C., when the sun entered Gemini in January—February, to 8200 B.C., and after this to the time when the sun was in Gemini in February—March, about 6200 B.C. The Ash- vins brought the bride to this wedding in their threewheeled car made of Palasha (.Kimshuka, Butea frondosa) and Shalmali wood of the cotton-tree (Bombax Heptaph- ylla) *. After the wedding the bridegroom assumes his wife’s clothes (v. 30), showing that it is a marriage of the sexless moon-god with the maiden of the central fire of heaven, the year-bird tending the fire of the never setting or dying Pole Star as the mistress of the House of God, the vault of heaven. She was the Vestal priestess of the navel-fire on the altar, that of Hercules Sandon and Omphale. The united pair who are to give birth to the sexless sun-god of this year, who was, as we have seen, Aurva, the son of the Thigh, are compared in the hymn to the months of the eleven-months year, the ten sons she is to bear to her sexless lord, and he himself as the eleventh 1
1 Kg. x. 85, 8—20.
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(v. 45). These are the months symbolised by the seven stars of the Thigh and the four stars in Pegasus.
We must now return to the story of Aurva, the offspring of this union, as told in the Mahabharata. In the Chaitra- ratha Parva neither his mother or father are named, but she is said to be one of the Bhrigus who were being ruthlessly slaughtered by the Kshatriyas just before the birth of her son. They were the savage conquerors of the age of the eleven-months year, which is further identified as that in which Aurva was conceived by the statement that the nascent god cast the fire of his wrath into the ocean, where it became the head of the sun-horse called Vadavamukha, he who speaks with the left (ivama), that is with the distorted mouth of the Pole Star messenger whose circuits of the heavens are left-handed, the god of the year reckoned by methods different from those used by the ancestors of the indigenous dwellers on the land.
It was at the birth of Aurva that his counterpart Para- shara, the overhanging cloud, son of Shaktri, the god Sakko, son of Vashishtha, who ruled the thirty-three gods of the eleven-months year, became the sun-god of day and performed the great sacrifice in which the gods of the stellar lunar era of Pole Star worship were destroyed, and his father Shaktri sent up to heaven as a star-god *.
He then became, as we learn from the astronomy of the Manvantara, one of the stars of the Great Bear, called Ur-ja, born (ja) of the Thigh (Uru), his full name being Urja- Stambha, the pillar (stambha) of the thigh-born sun-god, the golden pillar Boaz of the Phoenician temples. This list of the fourteen star-parents, headed by Urja-Stambha, is a second edition of the first Manvantara or period of Manu, the astronomical reckoner. In this original list the first of the fourteen parent-stars marking the period of the creating lunar phases is the Svayambhara, the self-begotten1 2, the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxx.—clxxxii., pp. 512-519.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chaps, xliv., xlv. pp. 387, 394.
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Pole Star god, who was originally, as we have seen, Kepheus or Kapi, the ape-god who is worshipped by the Sabaeans as “ the ancient light, the divinely self-created r.”
This sun-god, born of the thigh of the Pole Star ape-god, is, in Greek mythology, Dionysos, son of Semele, the Phoenician goddess Pen-Samlath, the face (gen) of the Name (Shem) of God, the Samlah of Masrekah, the wine-land in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 36, 37. His father was Zeus in his form of the ape-god of the mud (tan), the Cretan Tan, the Carthaginian and Phoenician Tanais or Tanit, the female, and therefore the earliest form of this male parent-god. She is called by Strabo the equivalent of the Zend mother-goddess Anahita, the parent- cloud, the springs whence the Euphrates rose, the Zend form of the Vedic goddess Vrisha-kapT, the rain-ape, wife of Indra1 2 3 4. He was born prematurely, but was taken up by his father and sewn in his thigh, that is to say, he was first, as in the Hindu mythology of the Mahabharata, the son of the Thigh of the mother-ape, the stars of the Great Bear.
When born he passed through two stages. First he was the sun-maiden, a girl brought up by Athamas, or Dumu-zi, Tammuz the star Orion, and Ino the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician Melkarth, the sun-god-master of the city (Karth) 3, the god Ar-chal or Herakles. When Athamas and Ino were made mad by Here, the goddess of stellar lunar time, the Greek form of the madness of Kalmashapada, the god of the eleven-months year of Chapter VI., this maiden- goddess was changed into the sun-ram of the ship Argo, and brought up by the nymphs of Nysa, who became the Hyades4, the companion stars to the Pleiades, the third in the list of the Hindu Nakshatra. That is to say, he was
1   Ilewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,v ol. ii., Essay viii., p. 161.
2 Movers, Die Plionizicr, vol. i. pp. 617, 61S, Strabo, xi. p. 432 ; Kg. x. S6.
3 It is to be noted that this Phoenician Karth, the Hebrew Kiriath, is the same word as the Celtic Caer, for city ; the name is therefore one pointing to the Celtic elements in the population of Semitic cities.
4   Smith, Classical Dictionary, Dionysos, p. 226.
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in the second form of his birth the sun-goddess of the age of the supremacy of the- mother-goddesses, when Semele, the counterpart of Artemis, called Arktos, the goddess of the Great Bear, was ruler of heaven. He was the Dionysos Nuktelios, the night-sun, the Arcadian god of the lower world, the realm ruled by the Southern sun of the winter solstice, the god bom when the sun was in the Hyades, that is in Taurus, in the midst of which they stand at the winter solstice, that is about 10,200 B.C., at the same time when the sun was in Gemini in January—February.
It was at the winter solstice that he was worshipped in the festivals of the lesser Dionysos in Poseidon (December— January). These were held to celebrate the return of Dionysos from the lower world, whither he had gone to bring back the sun-mother Semele, and at Pellene his return was acclaimed by a feast of torches, like that offered to the Pleiades mother Demeter in October—November.   This
Dionysos festival was held in the grove of Artemis Soteira, the Great Bear goddess, the healing female physician x.
At Megara this festival was held in the Akropolis consecrated to Car, the Carian Zeus of the double axe, the two lunar crescents1 2 3 4. At these Dionysiac festivals held in Argolis on the Alcyonian lake, and at Cynethaea in Arcadia, r a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called on to rise up out of .the lake as the bull sun-god of spring3.
It was to him as the spring-god that the festival of the Lenaea or wine-press was held in Gamelion (January— February), the month of the marriage (ya/io?) of Here and Zeus, the beginning of this year. This Pausanias tells us was held at Migonium in Laconia, on a mountain called Larysium, sacred to Dionysos 4, and it, like the slaying of the Magh (January—February) wedding oxen in the Vedic marriage of Suria and Soma, was followed by the Anthesteria
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 27, 1, vol. i. p. 371.
2   Ibid., i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 61, vol. ii. p. 525.
3   Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. 302, 303.
4   Ibid., iii. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 170,
   
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of the 12th of Anthesterion (February—March), the Hindu Arjuna or Phalgun, when the marriage was consummated T.
In another Greek story of the bull of Dionysos he is said to have been the son of Persephone, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, when she was violated by Zeus. This is the exact reproduction of the Hindu story which tells of the birth of Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house (?vastos), the god of the household fire, from this star called RohinT, when she was violated by her father Prajapati Orion. This first form of Dionysos was called Zagreus, born as a hunter with a bull’s head. This god, under the two names of Dionysos and Zagreus, was slain by the Titans, and was eaten by them as the totem bull man-god at the human and animal sacrifices of the rituals of the cycle-year and that of eleven months. His remains were buried under the Omphalos or navel of the tripod altar of the cycle-year 2.
This god born of the Thigh was the sun-god, the <f child of the Majesty of Indra,” born at the Ekashtaka or marriage day, the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January —February), which I have already described in Chapter VI. p. 332, at whose birth the left thigh was offered 3.
He was also the Greek ploughing and sowing-god Triptolemus. He and his brother Zeus Eubouleus, Zeus of good counsel, are said by Pausanias to be traditionally the sons of Celeus or Coeleus, the hollow heaven, or of a brother of Celeus Dysaules. This latter name, as Mr. Frazer has shown, is properly Disaules, he who ploughs
1   The Anthesteria or Festival of Recall (aradeotraodai) was a three days New Year’s Feast beginning with the Pitiioigia, when the souls of the dead issued from the sacred cleft called Pithoi or casks, the Indian Drona or hollowed tree-trunk of the mother-tree. They were greeted on the second day with Choai libations. It was a reproduction in a new year-reckoning of the Hindu New Year’s Festival of the autumnal equinox, when the Pitaro Barishadah were called to sit on the Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass. Harrison, Pandora's Box; Verrall, The Name Anthesteria, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. 1900, pp. 102—no, 116.
2   Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. ii., Orphica, p. 302 ; Frazer, Pan- sanias, vol. iv, p. 143.
3   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Paraskara, Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, 1—10; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 342, 344.
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   Brihaspati
Vishva- devah
Indra
twice, a name ‘like that of Trisaules, he who ploughs thrice I.
In the Satapatha Brahmana we find a complete explanation of the assignment of this name to the year-god. In the ritual of the Rajasuya, the coronation rite of the Indian kings, the last of the ceremonies is the series of observances which begin with the oblation of the Dasapeya or ten cups offered to the gods of the year of the months of gestation, the year ending with the tenth cup, which, as we have seen on p. 394, was offered to the Ashvins. The second sacrifice of this series is that called the Panchabila, an offering presented on a square platter with five divi-   N
sions, as in this diagram. In the East or North-east division there is a cake on eight potsherds for Agni, the god of this W year of the eight-day weeks. In the South or South-east division a cake on eleven potsherds for Indra, the god of   S
the eleven-months year and eleven-days week. A bowl of rice gruel for the Vishvadevah is placed in the Southwest division consecrated to the sun-bird, beginning the year with the setting sun of the winter solstice; and a dish of curds, the curdled milk of the hot summer season, is' placed in the Northern or North-west division sacred to Mitra Varuna, the twin-gods ruling the summer solstice when the rainy season (var) begins. In the central division is placed a bowl of rice gruel for Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, and with this is mixed part of the offerings to the other four year-gods. This centre-god is called “ the white-backed bullock,” the Pole Star ruling the path of Aryaman, the star Capella in the charioteer constellation Auriga, which, as we shall see, drove the year-car of the sun-god of this year 2.
These ceremonies close with the oblation of teams, the twelve cups offered to the twelve months of Orion’s year at the ploughing festival. This took place among the Kuru-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, 2, ii. 14, 3, viii. 15, 4, vol. i. pp. 20,91, 303, iii. p. 81.
2 Eggeling, Sat, Brah., v. 5, x, 1—12 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 120—123.
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Panchalas, the Kurus or Kauravyas united with the Panchala men of the five (panch1) days week. It was held in this year in the early spring or dewy season, that is at the New Moon of Magh (January—February), when the dews which cease in the hot season are still plentiful. It was originally a festival of the winter solstice beginning at the New Moon of Push (December—January), when Pushan was wedded to the sun’s daughter, but in the age of the birth of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, about 10,000 B.C., the year began when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, that is in January—February, and hence the annual ploughing beginning the year was transferred to that month. The plough was driven by the king, who is directed to plough a line forward or northward to represent the Northern course of the sun reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice when the rains begin, and he is to return again southwards when he ploughs the second furrow, representing the sun returning again to the South at the end of six monthsI. In the ploughing of the Magh (January—February) year the first six-months furrow was that ending in July—August.
Hence Triptolemus, the plougher of the two furrows, was originally the ploughing-god of the two seasons of the solstitial sun, who was also called, as the year-god of Orion’s year of three seasons, Trisaules, or the god Qf three plough - ings. In this form he is represented in ancient Greek monuments as standing between Demeter, the barley-mother, originally representing the first six months of the year beginning in November or December, and Persephone, the six months beginning in May or June. When the year was divided into three seasons, each of four months or twenty- four five-day weeks, the centre season or summer, when the sun was in the North, was assigned to him. Hence he received from Demeter the gift of a car, the seven-starred northern chariot of the Great Bear, drawn by dragons, the stars of the constellation Draco2. This god of the dragon-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bruh., v. 5, 2, 1—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 123, 124.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, I, vol. i. p. 20, ii. p. 11S, iv. p. 142.
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car, the thigh of the ape-god, taught Eumelus, the builder of the ploughing (ar) city of Aroe, to sow grain, and instructed Areas, the son of Kallisto the Great Bear mother, in the cultivation of corn, the baking of bread, the weaving of garments, and the spinning of woolI.
It was as the sowing-god who sowed the furrow of heaven, the Indian goddess STta, that Triptolemus became the Etruscan god Tages or Terie’gh, the wise child who was ploughed from the earth in the city of Tarchon (Tarquinii), who civilised the people of Etruria as he had civilised those of Arcadia. His Etruscan images represent him as a legless and armless god, with a lozenge-shaped body terminating in a point, and above this a second face is depicted, so that he has, like the sun-god, a Northern and Southern face. He wears on his breast the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solstitial sun 2.
His counterpart, Zeus Eubuleus, was, like Triptolemus, a partner of Demeter and Persephone in a triad of pig-gods. A sow pregnant for the first time was offered to Demeter, an uncut boar to Persephone, and a sucking-pig to Eubuleus. Thus he was the son of the two year-mothers, the young boar-god, the sun of the winter solstice, as Triptolemus was the sun of summer. It was to these three pig-gods that pigs were thrown into the serpents’ pit at the Thesmophoria festival beginning the Pleiades year 3. We find another phase of the history of the worship of the sun-god born of the Thigh in the story of Jacob. He came to the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, after he left Harran or Kharran, the half-way city of the road (kharran) from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, where the god was Laban, the white god “ of the brick foundations of heaven,” the god of the lunar-solar-gods of the year of the bee-hive palace of the three-years cycle. He had with him, as we are expressly told in Genesis xxxii. 22, his four wives: (1) Leah, the wild cow (le) with the tender eyes, the counter-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 18, 2, viii. 4, 1, vol. i. pp. 354, 376.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 96, 98.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. pp. 118, 119, v. p. 29.
   
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part of the three-eyed Samirus of Babylon and the Hindu Shiva, the mother of six sons and a daughter, the seven children of the Great Bear mother of the cow-born race ; (2) Rachel, the ewe, the mother of Joseph, or Asipu, the interpreter-god of the eleven-months year, who is to become the mother of the sun-ram ; (3) Billah, the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god-mother of the Danava sons of Danu; and (4) Zilpah, the foot of the snake (tsir), a form of Zillah or Tsir-lu, wife of Lamech or Lingal. She was the mother of the fish-sun-god Ashur, who was Assur, the supreme god of the Assyrians, the Hindu Ashadha ruling the summer solstice. Besides these four wives, the four seasons of the eleven-months year, he had with him these eleven months in the eleven children spoken of in this narrative of his contest with the god of the Thigh.
Before crossing the Jabbok, he passed the night at Penuel, the place of the face (pen) of God, the female image of the mother-goddess, the Indian Pennu, the Great Bear, queen of Heaven of the Brythonic Celts. She appeared to him at night, and he wrestled with this goddess of the Thigh till the sun rose, and he found himself transformed into the sun-god, born from the left thigh of the Pole Star ape, who was conceived during the age when the priests who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder bent the left knee to the moon-goddess ruling the yearT, and not the right knee, bent when the sacrificial cord was worn on the left shoulder. Henceforth the sinew of his left thigh was dried up as the virtue had gone out of it, and the right thigh became the offering given to the priests of the sun-god of Benjamin, the son of the ewe-mother of the sun- ram, and the father or ancestor of Saul or Shawul, to whom the right thigh was given at his consecration festival1 2. It was after this transformation that Jacob met his brother Esau, the goat-god of the green pillar, and became his ^colleague as
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 1,2; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 361.
2   Gen. xxxii. 22—32 ; Levit. vii. 32; 1 Samuel ix. 24.
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the golden pillar of the sun-god. After this meeting1 Jacob passed over Jordan and came to Succoth, the place of booths, where the tent-festival of Tabernacles inaugurating the New Year was held.
His passing over Jordan is, as I have shown in Chapter V. pp. 229, 230, significant, for it tells us that he became the son, not of the Euphrates, the Nahr or channel-river of the Pole Star, but of the yellow (yareh) moon-river, the river-mother of Omphale, daughter of Iardanus 2, the navel-fire of the altar and the goddess of the phallic worship of the sexless god Herakles Sandon who wore her clothes. Her father was the river looked on as the national parent-stream of the Phoenician Minyans, the archers of Kudon in the west of Crete, who were most noted bowmen, the picked archers of the Kushika sons of the bow and the antelope. They were the sons of Teucer, son of the mountain and sheep- mother Ida, whose daughter became wife to Dardanus, who was, as we have seen, the antelope sun-god of Troy, and it was Teucer who brought the worship of Apollo-Smintheus, the mouse-god, from Crete to Troy 3. These sons of Iardanus were, according to Pausanias vi. 21, 5, sons of the Idaean Herakles of the Dactyli or priests of the five-days week, and their goddess-mother was the Cydonian Athene, that is of the original tree-mother whose history has been traced in previous chapters 4. They took the name of their sacred river to Elis in Greece, where it was an ancient name of the river on which Phaea, called after the sow Phaea, destroyed by Theseus, stood. Its name meant the shining- moon-city, and it was taken by Nestor 5. The river Iardanus was, in the time of Pausanias, called the Acidas 6. It was as the son of this moon-river that Jacob became god of the eleven-months year while he dwelt in Shechcm, the then
1   Genesis xxxiii. 17.   2 Herod, i. 7.
3   Homer, Od., iii. 292; Hor., Carm. iv. 9, 17 ; Smith, Classical Dictionary, Cydonia, p. 200, Teucer, p. 754.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 21, 5, vol. i. p. 317.
s Homer, Iliad, vii. 135 ; Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. p. 70.
£ Frazer, Pausanias, v. 5, 5, vol. i. p. 243.
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capital of the lands of Ephraim, the men of the two ashes (ephra), the united Northern and Sonthern races, sons of Joseph. It was at Shechem that the Hivite villagers, the Rephaim first settlers in the land, were circumcised. This ceremony was apparently a variant form of the circumcision of the united races performed by Hoshea, the leader of the Ephraimites, sons of Joseph, when he joined Caleb, the dog- star, in robbing the treasury of the bees, and established the eleven-months year.
Prom Shechem Jacob went to Luz, the place of the almond {luz) tree, the nut-tree of the Toda sons of the bull, and parent-tree of the Kohathite priests, and also, as we shall see, of the sun-god of this year. At Luz, which he called Bethel, the place of the pillar of God, Jacob buried the idols of the night-gods of his former worship. From thence he passed on to Bethlehem, where the sun-god of this year, Benjamin, the god of the right hand, was born simultaneously with the death of his mother, Rachel, the ewe-mother of Joseph, the god of the eleven-months year, who wore the star coat of many colours I.
The son of the right hand was born as the sun-god of the worshippers of the Pole Star of the North, now represented by the Sabsean Mandaites, who in worshipping the Pole Star turn their faces to the North, and who have thus the rising sun of the East on their right hand and not on their left, like the Harranites, who face southwards while worshipping2. This is the position of the Roman augurs, whose parent-god was the mother-tree of the South. The Sabsean Mandaites in their annual service inaugurating their year, fix the hour by referring to the position of the Great Bear and the Pole Star, and mark their connection with the age of the sexless gods by substituting a wether for the earlier ram offered on New Year’s Day 3.
1   Genesis xxxiii. 16—xxxv., xxxvii. 3, 4.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xix., Festivals of the Moslems, p. 329.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Sabsean New Year’s Ritual, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 159—164.
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The birth-place of the sun-god, son of the right hand, was Bethlehem, also called Ephrata, the place of the ashes or shrine of the dead faiths of the past. It was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 154, the house of Lehem, the Akkadian twin gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu, the offspring of Lakh, the Akkadian form of the Median and Hindu Ragh the sun-god. It was there, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, that the annual festival of the death and rebirth of Tam muz or Dumu-zi, the year-god Orion, was held.
It was at this ancient shrine of Boaz, the golden pillar, that the new sun-god, rising on the right hand in the East, was born as the son of the left thigh, and he who was first Saul or Shawul, the heirless sun-god of the tribe of Benjamin, who had lost the asses that used to draw his father’s car, was succeeded by David or Dodo the Beloved, who is named as the national god on the Moabite stone, who was the eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is the eighth son of the Thigh, but of the right not the left thigh, the god born not of the sexless gods of the lunar era of the bisexual parent fig-tree, but of the male and female pair, the two trees of the mother Tamar, the date- palm-tree which only bears fruit when the flower of the female-tree has been fertilised by the pollen of the flower of the male tree. As parent of the son of the Thigh, Ishai is also called Nahash, the plough-snake (nahur), the god of the constellation of the Great Bear, the Arabic Nagash, the Indian Nahusha, the Gond Nagur. As Nahush he is the father of Zeruiah the Cleft, the goddess Tirhatha and Abigail, she whose father (ah) is Exaltation, the daughter of the inspired prophet of the gnomon-stone r. He is also called Dodo of Bethlehem, father of El Hanan the merciful, which is, as we have seen on p. 380, the name of David in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi., so that Dodo the son of the Thigh was son of himself, the self-begotten- god2. It was this El Hanan who slew Goliath, son of
1 x Chron. ii. 16, 17 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 25.
2 1 Chron. xi. 26; 2 Sam. xxiii. 24.
   
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Rapha, the giant god of the Rephaim, and his brother Lahmi, a form of Lakhmu, to whom Beth - Lehem was dedicated I. He slew them with five stones out of the brook, their parent river-god, the five days of their week, the last of their rule as year-gods 2.
The sun-god who drew his strength from the left thigh, whence he was born, was, as we have seen, the god of the ten and eleven-months year, and it was at the close of this epoch, when his power as the ruling sun-god was departing, that his left thigh was broken or withered like that of Jacob in the contest at Penuel. This is what happened to the Celtic sun-god Cuchulainn, the hound of Cu, before he was slain by Lugaid, and the story of his end reproduces in a most striking form the history of the supersession of the god of the eleven-months year by the god of the year of eight-day weeks. Lugaid, his slayer, was the son of Fergus Fairge, that is Fergus the Ocean-god of the Southern waste of waters. It was into the lap of Fergus that the brooch with which Maine used to fasten her cloak fell, and Maine was, as we shall see presently, the goddess of the eight-days week of the eight Maine, the links of the chain that bound together this year of fifteen months 3. Lugaid is also called the son of the three Curoi hounds, said to be Cu-chulainn, Conall Cernach, slayer of Lugaid and Curoi, keeper of the cows of light, husband of Blathnat the flower-goddess, the Celtic form of the Greek Korbnis, mother of vEsculapius the sun physician 4. These Curoi were also the Corr or Cranes whence Lugaid got his name of Corr the Crane. They were the three Cranes of Mider, the god of the lower world, of the Southern sun of winter, the* three baleful birds answering to the Greek Harpies or vultures, who tried, in the story of Jason, to kill Phineus the sea-eagle, by taking away his food, and pecking him when he tried to eat. These birds
1 1 Chron. xx. 5 ; 2 Samuel xxi. 19.   * 1 Samuel xvii. 23 ff.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 328.
4   Ibid., Lect. v. p. 472, note 1—474, 552, 676.

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were driven by Zetes and Kalais, sons of Boreas, the Northeast and North-west winds in the Strophades, or turning islands, marking the winter turning-points of the solstitial sun, and became the three weaving sisters in the constellation of the Vulture I. It was these three Cranes in the form of three old women blind of the left eye, the one-eyed Graise whose eye Perseus carried off, who met Cuchulainn on his way to fight Lugaid, and persuaded him to eat the shoulder- blade of the hound, whence he took his name, the year-dog Argus, the constellation Argo. They gave it to him with the left hand, and it was from his left,hand that Cuchulainn ate it, and he put the bone under his left thigh. Thereupon the strength of his left thigh departed, and he was slain by Lugaid 2 3 4. That is to say, the sun-god of the left thigh was slain by the son of the three Cranes of the South land of Fergus Fairge, who gave to Lugaid the brooch of the eight- days week of Maine, and Lugaid, god of the winter solstice, was in his turn slain by Conall, god of the summer solstice, whose horse, the dog-star Sirius, had a dog’s head 3.
B. The story of Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer, builder of the altar of the eight and nine-day weeks.
The sun-god born of the Thigh appears again in the story of Tobit and his son Tobias, who was married by Raphael, one of the seven angels of God, the seven stars of the Great Bear 4, to Sara, who had had seven husbands who all died on their wedding-day. She was the daughter of Raguel, the god fel) Raghu of the Median land of Rages or Ragha, the birth-place of the Zend sun-god worshipped by the Akkadians and in Bethlehem as Lakh. But before dealing with the facts of this story as told in the Apocrypha, I must
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 331—334, 676, 677; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 198, 199.
2   Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, Cuchulainn’s Death, pp. 254—263.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. p. 472.
4   Tobit. chapter xii. 15.
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first show by comparing some of its numerous variants the fundamental features of this historical narrative. In a number of these collected by Mr. Groome, the agent of the final marriage with which the story ends is a dead man, who is one of the previous husbands of the sun-mother the bride, and who has been buried by the future father of the sun-god, who is in Tobit the eighth husband of the bride. The dead and buried husband rises from the dead to aid his benefactor, and in the Russian story he descends from heaven as the angel of God. In all except one of Jack the Giant Killer, which I will discuss after I compare the other variants with the Tobit tale, the girl whom the successful wooer is to marry has had several husbands who died or were either strangled or beheaded by her on their wedding night. There are five husbands in the Armenian story, six in the Russian, and nine in the German version. In the Gypsey and Armenian two dragons and two serpents come out of the mouth of the bride on her wedding night, and in the Russian story one dragon flies into the bridal- chamber to kill the husband, and one comes out of the inside of the bride after she had been sawn in half, and these are slain by the assistant angel. In the German version the saviour of the dead man is supplied by him with a feather shirt, a rod and a sword, and with these he flies after the princess as she, in the guise of the year-bird, makes her way at night through the air to her demon lover of the Pole Star Age. He is thus enabled to answer the three questions as to what she was thinking of which she asks him to answer at his successive daily visits. In the last answer he tells her she is thinking of her lover’s head, the head of the god of the dead-year, which he produces. In the Gypsey and Armenian story the guardian-angel claims half the bride, a reminiscence of the two seasons making the one year, but gives up his claim when the second evil beast, the second season, comes out of her. In the Russian version she is sawn in half by the assistant who restores her to life as the mother of the sun-god of the regenerated year, when the
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dragons leave her. In the German version the bride changes on the wedding night, when dipped in water by the bridegroom, first into a raven, then into a dove, and last into a maiden. These changes mark previous epochs of the life of the year-mother-bird, and we have in all these stories of the resurrection of the slain man, the dead sun returned to life as the Time-spirit or German Zeit-geist, who destroys the evil spirits which in previous ages deformed the year- mother who slew in her successive changes her husbands. And the Time-spirit finally transforms the changing reckoner of the year by wedding her to the sun-god J.
When we turn from these variant versions to the story of Tobit in the Apocrypha, we find that the burier of the strangled man who was, as we shall see presently, one of the husbands of the bride, is Tobit himself, who became blind the night he buried him. On that night Anna his wife got a kid as wages, and was told by Tobit that she stole it, on which she reproached him for his hypocrisy. On this same night Sara, the daughter of Raguel, prayed that she might be provided with a husband whom Asmoaeus would not strangle 1 2 3.
Tobit, the blind-god, husband of Anna, dwelt in Nineveh, the town of the fish-mother-goddess Nana, for the cuneiform ideogram of its name means the city of the fish, and the name for fish, Kha, also means the oracle, the teaching-fish. Hence it was the city of the fish-god first called la. He is called by Berdsus Oannes, which is a form, as Lenormant has shown, of la Khan, la the fish 3 who became the god Assur, the supreme god of Nineveh. Tobit was thus the blind oracle of the fish-mother-goddess, the gnomon-stone. He was uncle to Achiacharus, son of Ana-el, the god Anu, who was cup-bearer to the king, that is the filler of the cups
1   F. H. Groome, ‘Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer,’ Folklore, vol. ix., 1898,
pp. 226 ff.   2 Tobit i. 17—19, ii. 3—14.
3 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary, 178,442; Lenormant, Chaldman Magic and Sorcery, chap. xiii. App. I. p. 203.
   
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of the seasonsI. Hence he, Anna and Achiacharus formed a triad like that of Ilos, Assarakos and Ganymede, that is of Ilos, the father-river or eel-god of the Trojan fig-tree. Assarakos, the god of the bed, and Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods, and the offspring of this triad born in the year-bed of the mother-tree described in Chapter IV. pp. 143, 144, was Tobit, the Jewish Asherah or gnomon-tree pillar, the double of Dhritarashtra, the blind gnomon-stone husband of GandharT, the Pole Star Vega. Anna and Anael, father of Achiacharus, are the bisexual female and male form of the goddess Anna Perennis of Roman ritual, and the goddess of Carthage, sister of Dido or Dodo the beloved sun-goddess.
Tobit belongs to the tribe of Naphtali, the son of Billah, the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god, who sacrificed to the heifer Baal, that is to the mother-cow RohinI Alde- baran, and not to the moon-bull. He alone of his tribesmen went up to Jerusalem to pray, and he was the grandson of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, and therefore a father-god of the age of the three-years cycle, the beehive and tower of God2. It was also to this age that Sara belonged as the daughter of the sun-god Raghu, the father of Rama, who ploughed with the seven stars of the Great Bear, her husbands. She was the cloud-goddess Shar, also called I-shara, the house (/) of Shar, the mother of corn, that is to say, she was the husk-mother of the seed-grain which she, as in the Siamese Cinderella story, fostered and fed. She was the guardian-encloser of the sun-god who was to be born from her as the sun of the corn, the seed of life. Isaac, the laughing-grain born from the ninety-year old withered husk-mother Sara, wife of Abram, the father Ram son of Raghu and brother of Sara. Thus Tobit was the blind tree-trunk, and Sara his wife the mother of the grain- born sun-god. They were both to be rejuvenated, like Chyavana, by the leading angel-star of the Great Bear,
* Tobit i. 21, 22,
2 Ibid. i. 5, 6, S.
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Raphael, the god of the giants \rapha), and both were gods of the Southern faiths which looked to the mother-heifer-star Aldebaran as the parent of life and not to the Northern moon-father.
The regeneration of Tobit and Sara as parents of the god of the right Thigh was to be accomplished by Raphael, the leading star of the Thigh constellation, who had been buried with the dead gods of the age of Pole Star rule of the left Thigh, when fathers offered their eldest sons, the slain Raphael in sacrifice1. Raphael, eight years after Tobit became blind, that is at the end of the year-week of eight days2, led Tobias, the rejuvenated Tobit, the young sun-god born of the old gnomon pillar, to the Northern land of Raghu, the birth-place of the sun-god of day. On their way they caught in the Tigris, the river of the sun-god going South, the Zend Rangha, a fish which tried to devour Tobias, that is the river-fish or alligator constellation Draco. Raphael took from it its heart, liver and gall 3, the seats of the vital essence in primitive physiology. From the heart and liver, when burnt by Tobias at Raphael’s command, rose the fumes which drove away to the South, his home, the evil spirit Asmodeus4, who, as the god of the offerers of human sacrifices representing the dead sun-god of the past year, was the god who killed the former husband of Sara, and of the brides of the variant tales.
He was the god Ashma-deva, the god of the stone-gnomon- pillar (ashman), the Greek Akmon, the anvil of the heavenly smith, the thunder-god of the South, whose year began when the sun was in the South at the winter solstice. Fourteen days after the consummation of the marriage and the regeneration of Sara as the sun-mother, they returned at the summer solstice, after the defeat of the winter-god of the South, to Nineveh. It was then that Tobias, instructed by Raphael, restored to Tobit his eyesight by rubbing his eyes with the fish gall, and made him once more the seeing Pole
4 Ibid. viii. 3.
1 Tobit v. 13.
2 Ibid. xiv. 2.
3 Ibid. vi. 1—5.
   
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Star god of the age of Orion’s year. Tobit, before his approaching death, foretold the erection of a new temple of the sun-god of day, the vault of heaven consecrated, as we shall see, to the fully regenerated Buddha to replace the beehive palace of the gods of nightI.
The age of this history is made capable of identification by the gift of the kid to Anna. This was the constellation Auriga, that of the two kids on the wrist of the driver of this year-car, which was to replace the plough and waggon constellation of the Great Bear. This, as I have shown in Chapter VI. pp. 338—340, was the constellation ruling the year of the zodiacal sun in the Babylonian astronomy. The chief star in this constellation a Aurigae is the star Aryaman 01 Hindu and Zend astronomy, which is, as we shall see, the star of the sun-physician. I have now before completing the review of the historical teaching of the story of Tobit to examine the variant form of Jack the Giant Killer. In identifying him we must remember the nursery rhyme of the House that Jack built, which we shall see was an ancient historical tale. We have seen that the original Akkadian teaching-fish was Iakhan, who became the Oannes of Berosus, the Greek Iohannes, our John, who has also resumed his original Akkadian name of Ia-kh or Jack. He, on St. John’s Day, the 24th of June, still rules the summer solstice. The House that Jack built is depicted for us in the Talmud form of our nursery rhyme. It is founded on the “ kid which my father bought for two pieces of money.” This takes the place of “ the Rat which ate the Malt ” in our version.
Considering the number of the actors in this primitive relic of folklore, there being in the Talmud version ten and in ours nine actors, and the certainty that it can be traced to the god Iakhan, the fish, who, as we have seen, taught the early Akkadians the astronomy of the first stellar year measured by weeks, there is a very strong probability that the actors in this old rhyme represent the bricks or days
1 Tobit viii. 19, xi. 4—13, xiv. 5.
   
forming the weeks which built up this year edifice. This was the beehive palace of the gods of time, beginning with the Laban “brick foundation of heaven,” and the names of the bricks forming its foundation-week were probably, according to the custom of stellar worship, stars connected with the course of the year, and possibly with the zodiacal stations of the moon and sun.
In Chinese astronomy, one of the oldest in the world, there are two Zodiacs in which the signs are the same, but the first denotes the hours of the day beginning at midnight, and the second the zodiacal path of the sun. But the great antiquity of this representation of the sun’s yearly course is shown by the fact that the signs are retrograde and mark the course of the sun going from right to left, according to the rule of the Pole Star Age, and not from left to right as in the solar era. The first of these signs is the Rat, which represents in the annual zodiac Aquarius ; and the second, the ox, is not Pisces, but Capricornus, so that the first sign represents the last month of the year. The signs are : i. The Rat, 2. The Ox, 3. The Tiger, 4. The Hare, 5. The Dragon or Crocodile, 6. The Serpent, 7. The Horse, 8. The Ram,
9.   The Ape, 10. The Cock, 11. The Hog, 12. The Fox1 2. Among the Mongols the signs are: 1. Mouse, 2.Ox, 3.Leopard, 4. Hare, 5. Crocodile, 6. Serpent, 7. Horse, 8. Sheep, 9. Ape,
10. Plen, 11. Dog, 12. Hog, so that with the exceptions of signs 1, 11, and 12, they are the same as the Chinese3. These signs only concern the present discussion in the first sign or brick of the year-house. This is the Rat or Mouse, the Rat that ate the Malt that lay in the house built by Jack. The Rat in Chinese represents Aquarius, and is used as a sign for water. The Babylonian zodiacal year of the ten kings of Babylon ended with Xisuthros, the star Skat S
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, vol. xi. p. 219, note 1. The list in the article Zodiac, Encyc. Brit.. Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 793, substitutes Dog and Pig for the nth and 12th signs.
2   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. iii., Appendix, Part i., Origin of Mexican
Civilisation, p. 521, note.
   
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Aquarius. He was, according to Berosus, the god saved from the Flood, who in the Akkadian form of the Flood Legend was Dumu-zi (Orion), called Dumu-zi of the Flood, and it was he who rose again as the sun of the New Year measured by the ten zodiacal stars, when he entered the constellation Aries in the star Hamal, represented by Alorus, the first of these kings. Thence he passed through eight stars in Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Scorpio, and Capricornus, to return by the path of our zodiacal sun to Skat in Aquarius.
This Babylonian zodiac represented, as I have shown elsewhere, a celestial circle of 360 degrees divided into minutes and seconds. The 432,000 years of the kings or seconds of the circle were the 432,000 years of the Hindu Kali Yuga on which their chronology is based. Hence these two coincident systems of year reckoning mark an important period in the history of the two countriesx. As the year in which this zodiac became the official measure of time is said by the Babylonian historians to have been that in which the traditional flood occurred, and as it began with the Babylonian rainy season, it is most probable that their Hebrew successors, who took their materials from Babylonish sources, took thence the date of this flood-year, which they made to begin on the 17th of Marchesvan (October—November), when the sun was in Aquarius; it would thus be in Aries in December—January; and this zodiacal position marks the date of this year as about
8,200   B.C., and fixes this as the time when this zodiac was first used as the almanac of the official year, and this was the date when the sun was in Gemini in February—March, that beginning the year of which the history is told in this Chapter; or if we take Aries, according the Babylonian Zodiac, as the sign following Aquarius and representing November—December, the year will begin with the sun in 1
1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars.5 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, January, 1890 ; Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 382—384 ; Gen. vi. 6.
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Aries in November—December, and in Gemini in January— February, or about 10,200 B.c. This latter date is that of the year of Dionysos Nuktelios, as shown in p. 398.
Hence we see that in ancient tradition the Water-rat was the founder of the zodiacal year based on the worship of the rain-god, the rain and cloud bird Khu, who brought good crops. This Water-rat became in the evolution of theological astronomy the Mouse-god Apollo Smintheus, the god of the primaeval Semites, whose worship was, as we have seen, brought by Teucer, the archer-god, from Crete to Troy. Having thus shown the coincidence between the Chinese and Mongol zodiacal signs of the Rat and Mouse, their correspondence with the primitive Babylonian zodiac, and their probable reproduction in the Rat of the House that Jack built, I will now proceed to compare the English and Talmud bricks of this house. They are as follows : English—1. Rat, 2. Cat, 3. Dog, 4. Cow, 5. Maiden, 6. Man, 7. Priest, 8. Cock, 9. Farmer. Talmud—1. Kid, 2. Cab 3. Dog, 4. Staff, 5. Fire, 6. Water, 7. Ox, 8. Butcher, 9. Angel of Death. It would require a special treatise to show the full meaning of each of these signs, and I certainly could not write it with my present knowledge, but I will remark that the last two signs, the Sowing Farmer and the Angel of Death, corroborate the belief that it is an old nursery poem made to teach children the history of time, beginning its first annual revolutions with the death of the old year and the sowing of seed in the Pleiades month of the Southern spring, October—November. Also the secpnd sign, the Cat, is significant. She is the cat that drew the year-car of Freya, the sun-hawk, and the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast, mother of the mummied cats, who bears on her head horns and the moon-disk with the serpent under it. This shows that the cat-goddess of the second day is a moon-goddess. Her other name is Sochit, under which she is depicted as a scorpion with horns and disk. This is the scorpion banner- sign of Dan, the Hebrew son of Danu or Billah, the Pole Star goddess. This scorpion is called in Genesis xlix. 17
   
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a serpent. This banner guarded the Israelite camp of the North, containing the tribes of Dan, Asher, and NaphtaliT. The name Sochit of this scorpion or serpent-goddess is connected with the Coptic Sochi, a field, and means in the record of a grant of land at Edfu an area both of high and low land, that is, a village area, so that she is a village- goddess ; and as a star she is symbolised by Antares a Scorpio, the star of the month Tisri (September—October), and also by 7 Draconis, so that her worship goes back to the days of lunar-solar worship of the age of the cycle-year and its equinoxes 2.
If this list represented the primaeval conception of the bricks that make the house of time it must symbolize the week, and as the year of the beehive house of heaven was that of the cycle-year, the number nine is that of the nine days of the week of this year measured by the lunar crescents, the horns of the cat-goddess. But the Talmudic interpretation of this ancient school poem, which in their version contains ten verses, of which the last tells of the final victory of the sun-god born from the ten months of gestation, throws still further light upon the history it accords. In these ten verses, when compared with the English version, we see that, in the original school lesson, the butcher of the eighth verse of the Talmud variant was the sun-cock. The substitution of the butcher for the cock is explained by the Talmud commentators to mean the victory gained by the men of Israel, sons of Edom, over the armies of Gog and Magog, Kush and Pul, that is the conquering progress of the victorious king of Edom, Baal Hanan or David, the eighth son of the Thigh, the sun-god of this epoch 3. Also the nine bricks when accumulated in weeks made up the ten lunar months of gestation from 1 2 3
1   Number ii. 25—31.
2   Brugsch, Religion mid Mythologie der Alien AEgypter, pp. 333, 649 ; Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxix. pp. 289, 290, xxxii. p. 329.
3   Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, The Talmud and the Targums, viii. ; The House that Jack Built, pp. 141—144.
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which the barley - sun was born, to become the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and the ninth of these in the Talmud version is the Angel of Death, the day of the decease of the conquering sun who has butchered his enemies, and who dies when he has done his work to rise again as the sun of the age of solar worship
This interpretation of the connection between the Talmud version of the poem originally describing the year of nine - day weeks and ten lunar months of gestation, and this year of eight-day weeks, is confirmed by the substitution of the kid for the rat as the first brick.
This kid and that given to Anna in the story of Tobit is the constellation of Auriga, the charioteer with two kids upon his wrists, called by the Akkadians Askur the goat. This is the constellation which ruled the year in Babylon when that of the Great Bear pointing to the Pole Star was discarded as an indicator of time. It was believed to watch over the course of the sun through the zodiacal stars 2, and mark the star constellation into which the sun entered when the year begun. This was in the final Babylonian year the constellation Taurus, in which the sun was at the vernal equinox, about 4200 B.C., but its functions began long before that epoch. In this constellation the chief star a Auriga was Capella, the little goat, which replaced the old Pole Star goat as the warder of time. It is called in the Rigveda and Zendavesta Aryaman and Airyaman, the ploughing constellation, the Celtic Airem, the ploughman. This star-god is called in thQ Zendavesta the great healer of diseases who drives away the pestilences 1 *
1   See Appendix B, where the English and Talmud versions of The House that Jack Built are given in full as well as the Basque version. This, as I there point out, throws much fresh light on the origin of this primaeval nursery lesson, and conclusively proves that in one of its earliest, if not its earliest, forms it dates from the age of the cycle-year ruled by the Pole Star goat.
* The god Uz, the goat, is depicted on Babylonian monuments as sitting on a throne watching the revolution of the solar disk. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 285.
   
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brought by Angra Mainyu, the Southern god of the Pole Star era of the worship of the Southern sun, the god summoned by Nairyo-Sangha, the perpetual fire burning on the altar of the sun-god. In the Rigveda he is one of the six Aditya belonging to the father triad of Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman x.
This star as the star of the sun-physician is intimately connected with the stars Gemini, the Ashvins, who were in Hindu mythology the physicians of the gods who rejuvenated and married Chyavana. It was these stars which Aryaman Capella was employed especially to watch as those of the Gate of God through which the sun entered the year. This was the triumphal entry of the sun-god at his marriage in Greece with Here, the moon, in the month Gamelion (January—February), and that of the Vedic marriage of Soma, the male moon-god, and Chyavana with Su-konya, the sun-maiden, in the same month. This was the Hindu Magh (January—February), and the sun was in the constellation or car of the Ashvins in this month, about 10,200 B.C. This was the date when the Babylonian zodiacal year of the ten kings began, when the sun was in Aries in November— December. It was also the date of the first year of the Thigh, the conquering year of the eight-days week, the year of the contest which ended with the final victory of the sun-god and the consummation of the marriage of Su-konya or Suria and Soma, which took place in Arjuna of Phalgun (February —March), the month assigned to it in the Rigveda. That is to say the astronomical war between the two rival systems of lunar-solar Pole Star worship and that of the independent sun-god lasted till the sun was in Gemini in February— March, about 8200 B.C., that is, it occupied the whole period when Vega was the Pole Star from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and ceased with the final victory of the zodiacal sun- 1
1 Darmesteter, Zejidavesta Vcndidad Fargard, xxii. pp. 229, 235; Rg. vii. 66, 3, 4; Hewitt, Rulmg Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 416—422, where the question as to the stellar position of Aryaman is fully discussed.
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god when the Pole Star entered Hercules, the sun constellation, about 8000 E.C.
We have now to complete the review of this phase of history, as told in the various forms of the Tobit story, to return to that telling of the exploits of Jack the Giant-killer, the builder of Jack’s house. He, as we have seen, first built the house of the year of the nine-day weeks, and after that, in the Talmud story, the house of the eight-day weeks of the present year. In his wars against the giants of the eleven-months year he met with the son of Arthur, the Celtic ploughing- god Echaid Airem, the ploughman or farmer who sowed the seed whence the malt seed of life of the year of the eight-days week was to growx. This prince, the counterpart of Tobit, released and buried a corpse arrested on account of the dead man’s debts, the corpse of the dead year of the rule of the Great Bear, the Thigh-god, as the reckoner of the year. He spent all his money in paying the creditors of the dead year, and it was after paying the last penny that he and Jack, whom he had met after the burial of the corpse, set out on their travels like Raphael and Tobias. On their way Jack procured from a threeheaded giant, the giant of the year of the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion), the god of the year of three seasons, the coat of darkness, the cap of knowledge, the sword of sharpness, and the shoes of swiftness, the outfit of the sun-gods Perseus and Sigurd. Provided with these, the equivalents of the heart, liver and gall of the alligator fish in the Tobit story, he and the prince arrive at the house of the lady the prince sought to marry, the Sara with seven husbands. The marriage was agreed to, provided the prince was able to bring her handkerchief, which she placed before him in her bosom, and to guess whose lips she kissed the last thing at night. She gave the handkerchief to Asmodeus, here called Lucifer, and kissed his lips ; but Jack followed her in the sun’s night disguise, took the handkerchief, and 1
1   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, ii., Arthur and Airem, pp. 25 ff.
   
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cut off the horned head of Asmodeus, which he gave to the " princess, who is shown by her two-year tasks to be originally the mother-bird of the solstitial sun-year of two seasons. It was after the death of the horned stone (ashma) god that she recovered her beauty and became the bride of the prince. For the transformation scene we must go back to the German version of the story, in which the bride when plunged into water by her lover becomes successively a raven and a dove? before she became a maiden. These changes we may compare with the raven and the dove sent forth from Noah’s ark, the raven bird-mother of the matriarchal races who disappeared like the evil spirits which disfigured the princess? and the dove who returned as the marrying-bird of the patriarchal races with the olive leaf of the tree-mother Athene in her beak, the leaf sacred to the mother-goddess of Asia Minor. These changes are similar to those made by Thetis, the mud (thith) goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay, before she became the mother of the sun-god Achilles. She became successively a lioness, a dragon, fire and water. Also the seal-god Proteus, called in the Odyssey the Egyptian god assistant of Poseidon, the ape-god of the river Nile, became, when caught by Menelaus, a lion, a dragon or serpent, a leopard, a boar, water, and a lofty tree1. These various forms depict the successive changes in the symbolic representations of the god who measured time in the images I have recorded in the previous pages of this book.
The altar or house of the sun-god ruling the year of eight- day weeks, which was built by Jack the Giant-killer, appears again in the altar built by David on the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the Jewish counterpart of the Hindu year-altar of the Brahmanas. It was built on the mountain of Jerusalem, which became the site of the later temple. This is now surmounted by an octagonal dome with its entrance gate at the North-west, the setting-point
1 Homer, Odyssey, iv. 383, 386, 456—459.
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of the sun of the summer solsticeJ. David’s altar was built to stay the plague among the people, that is, the plague brought, as we have seen, by the Angel of Death on the day of the ninth brick. This plague was sent, according to the Rabbinical commentator, when the conquering sun-god, the butcher, had overcome all his enemies1 2. Similarly, the plague stayed by the building of David’s altar came at the close of his career after he had conquered all his opponents. Among these the chief were, Hanan the merciful, the son of Nahash, king of the Ammonites 3, that is himself as Baal Hanan, who had caused Uriah the Hittite, whose name means Light is god, to be slain as a deceased year-god, and he was the twenty-ninth of his captains 4, the last day of the month in the year of Orion of twelve months of twenty-nine days each. After his death he married his wife Bath-sheba, she of the seven (sheba) measures, the seven wine-bearing stars of the Great Bear, and became the father of Solomon, the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun-god, who built the temple of the year. He had also defeated the conspiracies of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, daughter of Nahash, the Great Bear god, who sought to dethrone him and set up Absalom, the brother of Tamar, the date-palm-tree.
This consecration of the sun-rock at Jerusalem, dedicated to the god of the eight-rayed star and the eight-days week, as the navel of the Semite earth marks an equally decisive period in the Hebrew history of the year as that marked in Hindu history by the sacrifice of Ashtaka.
C. The Hindu gods of the eight-days week.
This god, whose name means the eighth, was, as we have seen, the son of the two Jarat-karus, the heavenly fire-drill
1   O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., The Number Eight, p. 167, The North, P- 443-
2   2 Samuel xxiv. 19—25 ; Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, Second Edition, The Talmud and the Targums, p. 143.
s 2 Samuel x. 1 ff.   * 1 Chron. xi. 40.
   
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and socket turned by the axle-star of the Great Bear, to which Ixion or Akshivan was bound as the turning-god. Ashtaka officiated as the chief-priest at the sacrifice at which Janamejaya, after conquering Takka-sila (Taxila), the stronghold of the Naga power, destroyed all the Naga snake- gods, except the three year-gods of the Takkas, Shesh Nag, Vasuk Nag, and Taksh Nag. Shesh Nag, the god of the spring season, had been made by Vasuki the ocean-snake encircling the mother-mountain, and he did not appear at the sacrifice. Vasuk Nag, the god of summer, was Ashtaka’s maternal uncle, and he likewise did not appear. Taksh Nag, the god of winter, who had slain Parikshit, one of the gods of this epoch, whose history I will tell later on, was saved at the special intercession of Ashtaka x.
The altar on which this sacrifice was offered was that of the eight-rayed star of which the image was drawn on the ground consecrated for the building of the later brick altar of the year-sun-bird rising in the East, the altar measuring in the number of its bricks and stages the whole year. This altar, of which I have given a short description in Chapter V. pp. 269, 270, as depicted on the Breton Linga altar2, is ordered in the ritual of the building of the bird-altar to be marked on the consecrated ground by the sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree drawn by oxen attached to the plough by traces of Munja grass, of which are made the three-strand girdles of the Brahmins, denoting the three seasons of the year. The sides of this square altar face the cardinal points, and the first lines marking it are begun at the Southwest corner, the setting point of the sun-bird of the year beginning at the winter solstice. The first line traced is from the South-west to the South-east corner, the second from the South-west to the North-west, the third from the North-west to the North-east, and the fourth from the Northeast to the South-east completes the square marking the 1
1 Mahabharata Adi (Faushya) Parva, iii. p. 45.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, lvi.—lviii. pp. 154—159.
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year circuit of the’sun-bird. .The first cross line drawn is that of the Pole Star, due South and North from the centre of the line from the South-west to the South-east to mark the year measured by the Pleiades and Canopus in their annual course round the Pole. Then a line is drawn from the South - west to the North-east to mark the year of the solstitial flying-bird beginning with the setting of the sun at the winter solstice in the South-west. Then the line drawn due West and East from the centre of the West line to mark the equinoctial year included in the three-years cycle, and lastly the line from the North-west to the Southeast to denote the year of the eight-rayed star as measured from the setting sun of the summer solstice, the year of
E Under this arrangement the
SE
the six-days week I. w|-^ sw
altar is divided into eight divisions, representing the eight points of the compass and the eight days of the week, and it represents all the primitive ruling years. The Hindu sun-god of this year was the sexless sun-god Bhishma, also called Dyu, light. He was the son of Shantanu, the healer, the great-grandfather of the Kauravyas and Pandavas and of Gunga, the river-mother who identified him, as we are told in the Mahabharata 1 2, with the god Dyu who stole Nandini the year-cow of Vashishtha, the chief star in the Great Bear and the god of the perpetual fire on the altar, for the daughter of Ushlnara, who was, as we have seen, the wife of Kakshivat, the god of the eleven-months year. Bhishma was the eighth son. She threw into the river, to which she gave her name, her first seven sons as soon as they were born, that is to say, killed them like the seven husbands of Sara, and left her husband and her home on earth directly her eighth son was born, just as Jarat-karu quitted his wife when he had done his duty as the departing sun-god and given life
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 326—330,
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcviii., xeix. pp. 293—297.
   
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to his newly born son Ashtaka. Gunga took her child also, called Devavrata, or the law (vrata) of God, and sent him back to earth, when he was grown up, to remain there for a time as the god ruling the year. He was thus like the sun who was nursed for the first three months of his life by the thirty stars.
His genealogy, as told in Rg. x. 72, declares that he was created by Brahmanas-pati, the Pole Star god who from the non-existent brought forth the parent of the existent, Uttanapad, the god with the out-stretched legs, the roots of the mother-tree, the original female symbol f \ of the two productive thighs. From this was born Aditi, the beginning without (a) a second (diti), and Daksha, the showing god of the open hand and the five fingers of the five- days week. They begot the gods of time who brought the sun-god Su-rya from the sea (with the rains of the summer solstice). To Aditi were born seven sons, which she took away with her, leaving on earth the eighth, the Mart-anda or dead egg (anda), the sexless sun-god.
Thus this god, as Bhishma Dyu or Mart-anda, is as clearly born from the seven thigh stars of the Great Bear as the other national sun-gods of this epoch. On his rising on earth he became the king of the land of Jambu-dwipa, the country of the Jambu-tree or North India, the home of the Bharata race lying South of Sakadwipa, the Northern land of the Kushika T. He ruled during the reigns of Chitr-angada and Vichitra Virya, sons of Shantanu by Satyavati, the fish-mother-goddess, and during the infancy of the Kauravya and Pandava, grandsons of Vichitra Virya. He also led the Kauravya army during the first ten days of their eighteen days’ battle with Pandavas. He bore on his banner the date- palm-tree, the mother-tree of the eleven-months year, surmounted with the five stars, called in the Rigveda “ five bulls or eagles ” which sit in the midst of heaven and hold back the “ devouring wolf,” who tries to enter the watery home 1
1 Mahabharata Bhishma (Jamvu-khanda Nirmana) Parva, ix.—xi. pp. 29—39.
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of their realm, the treasure-house of the rain*god I. These stars are the Pole Star and the four stars said in the Zenda- vesta to rule the four quarters of the heavens : 1. Tishtrya or Sirius, ruling the East; 2. The seven stars of the Great Bear, the Haptoiringas or seven bulls, the North ; 3. Vanant or Corvus, the West; and, 4. Satavaesa or Argo, the South. These are also the four Loka-palas of the Hindus 2 3 4. Of these the constellation Hasta, the hand or Corvus, that of the five-day weeks of the hand of Daksha, is the ruling constellation of the Pandavas, who are compared to its five stars as they stood round Drona their tutor, the god of the tree-trunk 3. It was to the centre god of these five ruling bulls that the Pandavas betook themselves after their first victory won by Arjuna, who alone, except Kama, the horned lunar-solar god of the three-years cycle, could string the bow of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, provided for those who entered the contest for the hand of Drupadi. Drupadi refused to accept Kama as a suitor. Arjuna after stringing the bow in Pushya (December—January), the month of the winter solstice, when the wedding took place, and on the 16th, or full-moon day, shot through the central mark in the sky, the palace of the Pole Star, five arrows, the five seasons of the year of the five Pandava brethren, of which I shall give the full account in Chapters VIII. and IX. He thus repeated the feat of Krishanu and won the hand of Drupadi for the five Pandava brethren. It was when the bride was won that they went to the house of the Potter, the master Pole Star, where the marriage was consummated 4.
It was at the end of the Magh year, the end of December —January, that the Pandava wedding took place. This was the year of Bhishma, who died, as we are expressly told in the Mahabharata, at the end of his year on the first of
1   Rg. i. 105, 10, II.
s Hewitt, Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 331, 332.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxvii. p. 403.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Swayam-vara) Parva, clxxxvii., clxxxix., cxc., cxcii. pp. 524, 526, 530, 532, 538, 558.
   
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Magh (January—February), when the sun had begun its Northward course1.
The Hindu god who was the counterpart of Bhishma and the charioteer of Arjuna the Pandava leader, as Bhishma was generalissimo of the Kauravyas, was Krishna. He who was like David the youngest of eight sons was born, according to the popular mythology of,Mathura his birthplace, on the eighth of Bhadon or Bhadra-pada, or at the end of the first week of the second six months, the second stage of this year in its second form dating from 8200 B.C., beginning in Phalgun (February—March) 2. His father was Vasu- deva, the son of the creating-god Vasu, and his mother Devakl. They were brought from Goburdhan on the Jumna, the place sacred to the keeper of the cattle of Ra-hu, to Mathura, sacred to the god of the fire-drill (math), by Kansa, the goose-king of the eleven-months year, in order that he might prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy that the eighth son of Vasudeva and Devakl would kill him. He killed successively their first six sons, but to avoid the slaughter of the seventh the embryo from which he was to be born was transferred from the womb of Devakl to that of Jasoda, meaning the exhausted or superseded goddess, wife of Nanda of Go-kul, the cow-pen, the male god of the Nand-gaon hill. Nanda was, in the local legend of the birth of the Bharata, husband of Ra-dha, the maker (dha) of Ra, the sun-god, whose sacred hill was Barsana, divided from Nandgaon by the valley of the grove of Sanket or the “ place of assignation ” where the lovers met, as the matriarchal village- mothers met their lovers from the next village in the village grove. Barsana and Nandgaon are the two sacred hills of the Bharatpur range, the mother-hills of the Bharatas3. Nanda’s wife Jasoda is also called in local legend RohinI, the star Aldebaran, who was, as we have seen, called, like Ra-dha, the mother of the sun-god, and she as wife of Nanda
1   Mahabharata Anushasana (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, clxvii. pp. 776.
a Mathura, a District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, pp. 50—63.
3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 450—453.
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was the Nandini, the year-cow of Vashistha stolen by Dyu, the eighth god of the Bhishma series of sun-gods.
The son born from this transferred embryo, a process which appears in the birth stories of all Jain Tirthakaras x, was Valarama, the seventh son of Vasudeva and Devaki, called Halayudha, he who has the plough (kal) for his weapon. His banner was the date-palm-tree, but not surmounted by the five stars crowning the palm-tree of Bhishma2. He who stood aloof from the contest between the Kauravyas and Pandavas was thus the leading star in the Plough and Bear constellations. This was the plough borne on the banner of Shalya, god of the arrow-year 3. He was king of the Madras, who led the Kauravya army at their final defeat, and was father of Madri, the intoxicated (mad) mother of the two youngest Pandavas, whose fathers were the Ashvins 4.
The birth of Valarama from the six mother Pleiades, his deceased brethren, signified the marriage of RohinI their queen with the seven Rishis or antelopes of the Great Bear, a marriage succeeding her first union with Orion. It was to celebrate this union that the year of the god of the antelope’s head (mriga - sirsha) was made the national year beginning in Mriga-sirsha (November—December) 5, that is to say when the sun was in Taurus in that month about 12,200 B.c., a year of the age of the eleven-months year.
It was from the union of the Pleiades and Aldebaran with the stars of the Thigh that the god Krishna was born. Though the local legend of Mathura fixes his birthday on the eighth day of the light half of Bhadon, yet in Bombay and the South of India it is celebrated on the eighth day 1 2 3 4 5
1   Jacobi, faina Sfitras, Kalpa Sutra, Lives of the Jainas, 30; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 229.
2   Mahabharata Shalya (Gul-Aytidha) Parva, xxiv. and lx. pp. 135, 233.
3   Mahabharata Drona (Jayad-ratha-badha) Parva, cv. p. 297.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxiv. pp. 364, 365.
5   Eggeling, Sal. Brah., ii. 1, 2, 6—8 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 283, 284.
   
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of the dark half of Shravana (July—August), or about the 8th of August; and it is stated in the Harivansa LVII. to have taken place on the eighth day of the dark half of Bhadon (Bhadrapada), about the 8th of September, and this is the date at which the festival is generally celebrated throughout Northern IndiaT.
The Harivansa tells us it took place like that of the Kauravyas and Pandavas under Abhijit the Star Vega, that is between 10,000 and 8000 B.C., and as the date varied from July—August to' August—September it marked the middle of a year beginning when the sun was in Gemini in January—February and in February—March.
Krishna when born was carried by his father, who eluded the guards of Kansa, across the Jumna to Gokul, on the east bank of the river, and there consigned to Nanda and Jasoda. From the latter Vasudeva took away her newly- born daughter, the twin-sister of Krishna, and placed her in the bed of DevakI, the bed of the year-god and goddess. When the guards of Kansa came to slay the newly-born eighth son she rose up to heaven as the mountain-goddess Durga or Su-bhadra, the blessed Su-bird, the goddess to be borne in the chariot of the Ashvins, as the star Capella in the chariot constellation Auriga, to her wedding as the virgin Suria or Su-konya with Soma the moon-god. She is called in the Harivansa LVIII. the goddess of the sun and moon, and is described as Kushika, the goddess of the Kushika, bearing the trident of the year of three seasons and the lance of Kuntl, the lance-mother of the Pandavas, the lance that pierces the rain-clouds and lights the year’s fires. Her dress was black with a yellow upper garment, and she wore a collar of pearls round her neck and the pearl earrings of the moon-goddess. Her banner was a peacock’s tail, that is of the Greek Here married to Zeus in Gamelion (January—February), and of the Mayura kings 1
1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, Hindoo Fasts, Festivals, and Holidays, pp. 430, 431.
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of the Bharata. She is called the goddess of the ninth day of the dark end of the eleventh day of the light half of the month, that is of the years of nine and eleven-day weeks, who was worshipped as the goddess Kail, to whom human and animal sacrifices were offered during those epochs. Her birthday, the 8th of September, is the day consecrated as the birthday of the Virgin Mother in the Roman Church, which took place nine months after the festival of the Immaculate Conception on the 8th of December, that is in the dark half of the Hindu month Mrigasirsha (November —December). Both the Indian and Christian goddess- mother are called with equal reverence The Blessed One. Krishna, the son and brother of the virgin-mother-goddess, the star Aldebaran who had become in astronomical evolution Capella, was born on the same day as his twin-sister. One of their birthdays, that on the 8th of Bhadon, the 23rd of August, is also the birthday of the Pythian Apollo, called Paian or the healing-god, the sun-physician. He was born on the 7th of Metageitnion (August—September), called Boukatios at Delphir, that is to say the 22nd of August; but this number seven became sacred as the week of Apollo in the year of the next epoch, the seventeen months of seven days each, and was doubtless derived from the seven stars of the Great Bear, his father’s constellation. It was on his birthday that the Pythian games began, which were originally held every eighth year in memory of the eight-days week, and they opened with hymns sung in honour of Apollo Paian, who slew with his arrows the Python snake who had inspired the oracles of Delphi during the age of the eleven-months year when the Ephod was worshipped1 2 3.
This snake was the Dragon of the oracle which Pausanias says Apollo slew at his birth 3. Its name Python is the Greek form of Budhnya in the name of the Vedic god Ahi Budhnya, the snake of the depths, the Greek Buthos, called
1   Hesiod, Works and Days, 771 sq. ; Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp 244,245.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 242.
3   Ibid., X. 7, 3, vol. i. p. 507.
   
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also Ahi Shuva, or the swelling snake, which Indra slew when accompanied by the Maruts I. These Maruts, the daughters of the tree (marom) ape-god Maroti, are said in the sacrifice offered to celebrate the great victory of Indra, Apollo or Krishna to be seven in number, who danced round Indra as he killed the Vritra or enclosing snake2, that is to say, they were the mother-goddesses of the young sun- god, son of the Thigh with its seven stars. In the next hymn to that describing the victory of Indra and the Maruts, Indra’s mother, called Shavasi, the strong one, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 350, the Polar mother-tree from whose side he was born, calls her dead foe Ahi-shuva Aurna- vabha 3, the son of the weaver of wool, that is of the spinning mother Pleiades who bore the ram-sun of the cycle - year. This slain snake is invoked in another hymn as Ahi-budhnya, who is called on to bestow health as a healing god, and to come accompanied by the children of the waters, who bring the stallion swift as thought, the god Dadhiank of the horse’s head 4. This year of the slaying of the snake by the new-born sun-god, told in this series of national year histories, is the year of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, and Valarama, the parent-plough star-god of the year of fifteen months. It was, as we have seen, the year of the first victory of the Pandavas in which they won the tree-mother-goddess DrupadI, and in which Arjuna married Su-bhadra on the Raivataka hill, on which Arishtanemi, the sun-god of the eleven-months year, attained perfection on the 6th day of the light half of Shravana (July—August), about the 20th of July 5. This Raivataka hill is consecrated to Revati £ Piscium, the 27th Nakshatra, that is, to the star marking the close of the year of one epoch and the beginning of
1   Rg. viii. 65, 1—3.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416.
3   Rg. viii. 66, 1, 2.   * Rg. i. 186, 5.
5   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra,, Life of Arishtanemi, 173; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 277. We have seen on p. 428, that according to the mythology of Bombay and the South of India Krishna was born on the Sth day of the dark half of Shravana.
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another. Hence the change of state attained by Arishtanemi on this hill marked the close of his year of eleven months, and the opening of that ruled by Arjuna and Su- bhadra, the nominees of Krishna, who, with Rama, worshipped Arishtanemi on his renunciation of the rule of the year in favour of the new gods of the fifteen-months year. He was followed on his retirement by Raji-mati or Rai-mati, the mother of Ra, the sun-god, a variant form of Ra-dha, wife of Nanda. She who was in the Jain birth story daughter of Vasu-deva, the Bhoja king by his wife RohinT, the star Aldebaran, had been chosen by Krishna as the bride of Arishtanemi, and she on his abdication became, like him, a naked ascetic T, that is, they were stripped of the panoply of the year-god and numbered among the dead years.
D. The year of the Makommedan Twins.
We have seen that this year is ruled by the constellation Gemini, and valuable historical evidence as to the relations between this year and the constellation can be gained from the year of the Mahommedan Arabs as arranged in Mahom- medan ritual. It began with the 15th of July, the first of Mohurrum, when Mahommed went from Mecca to Medina, and this year is closely connected with the twins A1 Hasain and A1 Hosein, who are called in Mahommedan history the sons of Ali and grandsons of Mahommed. But to these have been attached attributes which were originally those of the twin year-gods who had been worshipped in Southwestern Asia for thousands of years before Mahommed. We have seen that this year of fifteen months is one with two beginnings, one in January—Februaiy and the other February—March, marking the times when the sun was in Gemini in those two months. We find a similar change in the Arab year beginning with the birth of the Arabian twins. Their first birth is said to be on the 3rd Sha’ban, 1
1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, Lect. xxii. I—32; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 112—116.
   

[Prometheus]

   
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February—March, when Jerusalem ceased to be the Kebla and Mecca was substituted for it. Jerusalem was the site of the Sabsean worship in which men prayed turning to the North, the religious attitude succeeding that of the Harranites, worshippers of Laban, who, as AlberunI tells us, turned, like the Roman augurs, to the South. The second date of the birth was the 6th of Ramadan (March—April), inaugurating the New Year beginning at the vernal equinox. That these births marked the beginning of a year divided into two periods of six months each is shown by the reputed death of the twins. This is celebrated by the Shias of Persia on the ioth of Moharrum (July—August), or six months after their birth in February—March, and the news of the death of A1 Hasan was brought to Damascus on the 1st of Safar (August—September), six months after the second birth x.
E.   The Roman gods of the year of eight-day zveeks and the year of Lug.
The history of the earlier Twin year-gods, beginning their year when the sun was in Gemini in January—February, can be further illustrated from the Roman ritual chiefly derived from Umbria and Etruria, that is, from Tyrrhenian sources which go back to India. The first of January at Rome was dedicated to a god called Aesculapius Vediovis, the island Vediovis worshipped at Rome and Bovillae. At Rome he had two temples, one between the Arx and the Capitol hill, and one on the Tiber island. He was represented as a young god holding arrows like Arjuna or Apollo; a goat stood beside him and was sacrificed to him1 2. He thus resembles the Pre-Mahommedan god Hobal at Mecca, with seven arrows in his hand, the seven stars of the Great Bear, in whose temple there were 360 gods, the days of the
1   Sachau, AlberunI’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xx., The Festivals of the Moslems, pp. 326, 32S—330.
2   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Januarius I, p. 277, Maius, 21, p. 121, Martius Non, 7, p. 43.
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year1. He is one of three gods worshipped at Mecca as three stones, Hobal, Lata, and Uzza2. They are mentioned in the Koran as the old Arab deities, Allat, A1 ’Huzza, and Manat. Allat is the god called by Herodotus iii. 8, Alilat, a female form of Dionysos called Orotal, the Akkadian goddess of the nether world with the same name, a form of the Southern mother Bahu, worshipped as the light moon. A1 ’Huzza or Uzza was the bisexual god and goddess of the two moons united, the full-moon goddess worshipped as an acacia-tree, the tree-mother of the sun-god Manat, the dark moon worshipped as a huge sacrificial stone 3.
Thus this god Vediovis, like Hobal, was the male form of the bisexual lunar deities of the cycle-year, and, as the god of the temple between two groves, he is the Latin form of the Hindu Nanda and Radha parents of the Bharata race, who used to meet at Sanket, the “place of assignation” between the two hills dedicated to them. As he was originally a god of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks, his festival took place on the 9th of January. He is then called a god of the Agon, that is of the Collis Agonis, another name for the Quirinal hill of the Sabines, which was outside the Palatine city of Romulus 4. On this day the Rex Sacrorum, priest of the Regia, where the vestal fire was, sacrificed a ram to the god of the hill called Janus Geminus, the twin (Geminus), instead of the goat offered to him as Vediovis, the god of the Pole Star age. As the name Janus comes from the same root as Janua, the doors, he is clearly a god strictly analogous to the Egyptian and Phoenician Ptah, the opener, the beginner of the year, and a Latin counterpart of the Hindu Varuna, the Lokapala of the North, whose victim was the ram. The gate called after him Janus was
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 86, 263.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 408.
3   Palmer, The Quran, chap. liii. v. 19, 20; S.B.E., vol. ix. p. 252, vol. vi. Introduction, p. xii. ; Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, p. 67.
4   Mommsen, History of Rome, Translated by Dickson, Popular Edition, vol. i. p. 86,
   
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the North-east gate of Rome, that of the rising sun of the summer solstice, and his images on coins show him as a god with two heads, that is, as a god of the year of two seasons of the solstitial sun who originally began his year at sunset at the winter solstice, the god of the South-west and Northeast line on the altar of the eight-rayed star. But as the god of the gate, the oldest Roman god, whose priest was the Rex Sacrorum, ruling the opening of the year, the month and the day, he has become the two door-posts, the constellation Gemini guarding the gate of the Garden of God, the constellation in which the sun was on the 9th of January about 12,200 B.c., or the beginning of the age of the eleven- months yearJ. Following this festival of the firstborn of the Twin gods, the bisexual twins who were originally male and female gods, the Mithuna of the Hindu zodiac, we have the Carmentalia of the nth and 15th of January, and on the former day the fountain of Juturna, that of the sun-horse, was worshipped.
Carmenta was, as Ovid tells us, a prophet-goddess who told the fortunes of children, and had apparently two forms called Porrima and Postverta. She was a goddess of the South, to whom no animal victims were offered, for no leather or anything dead was allowed near her temple. She was probably a form of the solstitial year-bird, as a prophetess whose festival had been instituted in the age when the sun was in Gemini in December—January, as the year-festival of the year-bird originally born at the winter solstice. Her mid-year festival was the Lucaria of the 19th and 21st of July, divided like the January festival into two parts, separated in January by four and in July by three days. The Lucaria was a festival of the goddess of groves (lucar, Incus), and was apparently a tribal festival of the Luceres, as that of Janus was of the Sabine Titienses1 2. The Luceres were
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius, pp. 280—2S2, 286—2S9.
2   Ibid., Mensis Januarius, Carmentalia, pp. 290—293, Mensis Quinctilis Lucaria, pp. 182—185.
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not only sons of the grove but of the wolf-sun-god, the Greek Lukos, who had come to Italy with the Umbrians, who brought, as we have seen, the priests who introduced into Italy the Indian ritual of the Pole Star age, and who wore, like the priests of the Hindu Pitaro Barishadah, the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder.
The next January festival was the Feriae Sementivae, or the Paganalia of the three days from the 24th to the 26th of January. This was the Roman ploughing festival of the year, when the plough oxen were decorated with garlands and cakes, and a pregnant sow was offered I. This festival is one clearly allied to the great Magh (January—February) festival of the Indian Mundas, and other cognate tribes, with which they begin their year. Also to the January ploughing festival observed in most countries in the world, which I will discuss in full later on when I come to the ploughing festival of the Buddha.
The last of the Roman festivals of January is that of the 27th of the month, the dedication at Praeneste of the temple of Castor and Pollux, the Great Twin Brethren who bathed their steeds, after the battle of the Lake Rcgillus, in the Juturna fountain, worshipped on the nth of January. They were the twins who, as we have seen, ruled all the feasts of the month 2 3.
In the February half of the month of Magh three festivals intimately connected took place almost simultaneously :— The Fornicaria, which closed on the 17th of February, but we are not told when it began ; the Parentalia lasted for eight days, the week of the year, from the 13th to the 21st of •February, and the Lupercalia was celebrated on the 15th 3. They all appear with the festivals of the end of January to form part of one great national festival inaugurating the beginning of the year, and consecrating the whole month of
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius Feriae Sementivae Paganalia, pp. 294—296.
2   Ibid., Mensis Januarius, y£des Castoris et Pollucis dedicata, pp. 296, 297.
3   Ibid., Mensis Februarius, pp. 302—324.
   
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January—February to festivity, as the Mundas in India consecrate the whole of Magh to dancing and revelry.
The Fornicaria was a feast of grain roasted like the grain of the Piets and Indian Pitaro Barishadah, and made into cakes. These were eaten at a common meal held in each of the Curise, or thirty villages, communities into which the Latins were divided ; and the festival of the Quirinalia on the 17th February, which ended it, was a meeting of all the Curiae, at which every man who had failed to celebrate the feast in his own Curia might attend and remedy his omission. It was, in short, a festival beginning the year with a 'recognition and assertion of national brotherhood. It was held in the temple of Ouirinus on the Palatine hill. The two myrtles in front of it were survivors of the two Phoenician pillars.
The Parentalia was the national feast to the dead of the Vestal Virgins (Virgo Vestalis Parentalia), that is, of the race who introduced the sexless gods of the cycle-year, and the cult of the household fire tended by the virgin daughters of the national king. While it lasted all temples were closed and no marriages allowed. This custom accords with the Ooraon rule that no marriages can take place till the bones of the dead of the past year, who have been burnt after their death, are collected from the poles in front of each house where they have been placed, and buried in the burying-place of the family of the deceased. The custom of burying-the dead of each family in the village where their ancestors first settled is a survival of the city of the dead in which all Akkadians and Mundas used to be buried. That of the Mundas is in the province of Tamar, in the ' Lohardugga district. The common funerals of the Ooraons take place in December—January, before the month of Magh. The offerings made at the tombs of the dead during the Parentalia were water, wine, milk, honey, and the blood of black victims. In each household, as Ovid tells us, a family festival, called the Caristia, was held on the 22nd of Feb
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ruary, the ninth day of the Parentalia, when all the family ate together. On the night before this festival, called the Feralia, an old woman, an accredited sorceress, performed rites to the goddess Tacita or Dea Muta, the silent-goddess, the survival of Bahu, the mother-goddess of the Abyss, the female pair of the Hindu Prajapati (Orion), who was worshipped in whispers I. With three fingers she placed three bits of incense at the entrance of a mouse-hole, that of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse-god of death, to keep him aloof from the house. Muttering a spell, she wove white woollen threads in a dark coloured web, the mingled shades of day and night, and kept, while she was weaving, seven black beans in her mouth, sacred to the seven stars of the Great Bear. She then took a fish, the moena, the wonderworking fish of the Tobit story, smeared its head with pitch, sewed its mouth up, dropped wine on it and roasted it before the fire, as Tobias roasted the entrails of the fish to drive away Asmodeus. The rest of the wine she drank with the girls of the house who assisted at the service 2
The Lupercalia was held on the 15th of February, one of the days of the Parentalia. It took place at the cave called Lupercal, in the South-western corner of the Palatine hill, where the Tiber had deposited the wolf-nurtured twins, Romulus and Remus, under the sacred fig-tree. Hence it was a festival of the Ramnes, sons of the wolf, and the mother-tree Silvia, the wood (silva) goddess, who had, as Leto, the tree-trunk, borne Apollo, the wolf, and Artemis, the Great Bear goddess, on the yellow river Xanthus in Lycia.
The festival began with the sacrifice of a goat and a dog, the mother of fire, the Hindu Matari-shvan, the mother of the dog. They were sacrificed by the two Luperci. Cakes were also offered, made by the Vestals from the first ears of last year’s harvest, some of which had been already used at
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra//, i. 4, 5, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 131.
3   Ovid, Fasti, 2, 571 ff. ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Fcbruarius, pp. 308, 309.
   
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the Vestalia on the 9th of June and the 9th of September, the first offering of the ears being more than eight and the second more than five months before this last, which seems to be the birth-festival of the wolf-sun born of the last year’s corn and quickened in September. After the sacrifices the race of the Luperci began. The runners were divided into two companies, each headed by one of the noble Luperci youths, one of whom belonged to the Collegia of the Fabii of the Quirinal, and the other to that of the Quinctii of the Palatine hill. Their foreheads were smeared with the knife dyed with the blood of the victims they had slain, and were then wiped with wool dipped in milk, which as a bath of purification cleansed them of the guilt of the slaughter. They were then obliged to laugh as children of the goat and dog, who rejoiced over their new birth as offspring of the sun-cow born from the sun-ram. They who had been naked hitherto girt themselves with the skins of the goats, the dress of the Akkadian priests and of the Hindu Vaishya at their initiation, and after feasting ran round the base, or part of the base, of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows with strips of skin of the hides of the victims which were supposed to produce fertility.
The course round the Palatine hill is described by Tacitus as starting from the Lupercal and passing by the shrine of the Lares and the Forum. This ran from South-west to North-east, the course of the original sun-bird, and the sunward course of the Roman augurs who turned their faces to the South with the West to their right hand, so that the West was the lucky side from which the runners were to start Northwards by West to East. But it is improbable that both the bands went in the same direction, for we shall see in Chapter VIII., when I describe the similar race round the town boundaries of the Umbrian Gubbio on Whit- Monday, that the party bearing the three Ceri representing the god of the year of three seasons ran with the course of the sun, while the priestly procession went against it,
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and both parties met at the South-east point of the course, the rising-place of the sun of the winter solstice.
The festival is certainly one denoting the close of one year and the beginning of another consecrated to the sun- god, son of the dog Sirius, who as the dog-star rules the mid-months of the year; and the two bands of runners, one taking the pre-solar and the other the solar direction, marked the union of the worshippers of the wolf sun-god of the Palatine with the Sabines of the Quirinal worshippers of the Phoenician cave-mother, before whose temple the twin- pillars were placed.
It marks a year beginning about the 15th of February, or on the 1st of February—March, the Hindu month Arjuna or Phalgun, that of the consummation of the wedding of the sun-maiden Suria, beginning when the sun was in February —March, that is about 8000 B.C. The year thus begun corresponds to that of our popular mythology beginning with St. Valentine’s Day, when the birds pair.
The inauguration of the year by a religious ceremony designed to make the women fertile seems to show clearly that this year was originally begun, like the Magh year of the Ho Kols, by a general pairing of the population at the dances introducing it. At these the men and women of adjoining villages met as the people of the Palatine and Quirinal did at the Lupercal, and their meeting on this authorised day of union was followed at the end of the period of gestation by the birth of the children then begotten. Similar tribal birthdays must have followed other authorised festivals of meeting, at which alone women could legally conceive. Hence we understand how in the history of Cuchulainn he and his father Lug were alone able to defend their Ulster possessions against the Fir Bolg as all the other men were laid up with the sickness of the couvade J, the simulated lying-in of the father when his wife was confined. This story clearly points to a time when all the Ulster ladies were brought to bed at the same time.
1 Rhys, Hilbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 627, 628.
of the Alyth-Making Age.
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The beginning of this year was apparently celebrated by a second sacrifice on the 24th of February, at the end of the first nine-days week of this year. It is not certain whether the victim was a goat or an ox, but Plutarch says that it was offered in the Agora or central market-place of the city, and that the Rex Sacrorum after killing the victim ran away. The flight after this expiatory sacrifice, offered to drive out malevolent wizard-gods, is exactly similar to the flight of the Indian priest after killing the lamb offered at the autumnal equinox at the opening festival of the cycle-year described in Chapter V. p. 224. Also to that of the sacrifice of a bull-calf to Dionysos at Tenedos, when the priest fled away ; and this may have been the spring sacrifice to Dionysos said by Hesychius to have taken place in Anthesterion (February—March), that is at the beginning of the Lupercalia year L The flight apparently represented the disappearance of the year-father of the new year, when he quits his functions at the end of his year and leaves the rule of the coming year to his son.
The Mid-year Festival of this year in the Roman ritual was that of the 12th of August to Hcrculi-invicto, the unconquered Plercules who ruled this year. It is the first of a series of festivals lasting to the close of the month. That to Diana of the Aventine and other gods on the 13th, the Portunalia on the 17th, the Vinalia on the 19th, the Consualia on the 21st, the Mundus Patet on the 24th, the Opiconsivia on the 25th.
The first of these is clearly the festival celebrating the victory of Hercules over Cacus, called Kakios by Diodorus, who has been proved by M. Breal to represent the god of the South-west wind Kaikias, said by Aristotle to bring up the rain 1 2. He dwelt in a cave on the Aventine to the South-west of the Palatine, and Hercules is said in Virgil’s
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Februarius Regifugium, P- 327.
2   M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap. ii., La Legende Latine, pp. 6l, 62, chap, vi., Formation de la Fable, p. in.
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graphic description of the contest to have fought him after he had slain the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion or Orion, the god of the year of three seasonsI. Cacus is described by Virgil as a half-human Centaur, that is a god of the eleven-months year, who belonged to the three-headed brood. The Porta Trigemina commemorates the victory of Hercules over this three-headed antagonist.
At the approach of his vanquisher Cacus retreated into his cave, which he closed behind him, taking with him four bulls and four heifers, the eight days of the week. He drew them inside by their tails, an incident denoting the retrograde path of the zodiac, from right to left, followed by the astronomers of the eleven-months year and still preserved by the Chinese2 3. But the Latin god Hercules, who advanced directly to meet his foe, who retreated with backward steps, is not the Herakles of the Greeks, the Phoenician Ar-chal, but the guardian-god of the demarcated family properties of the ploughing race, the god of the enclosing fence, the Greek Herkos (epnos), the Hindu Lakshman, the boundary-god who kept the sun in his ordained course through the stars. He was the Sabine sowing-god Semo Sancus, who is also said to have conquered Cacus, that is, the sower of the sacred grass (sagmen), that carried as a sign of their mission by all Roman ambassadors3, and the Sabine Salii officiated at the memorial sacrifice of the victory on the Ara Maxima.
The other name of the conquering-god, Recaranus, clearly explains the meaning of the story. It denotes the Re-creator {kar, ker), the second creator, called by Varro with reference to Janus Duonus Cerus es, duonus Janus: Thou art the
1   Virgil, sEn., viii. 201.
2   Ibid., viii. 207—211 :—
Quatuor a stabilis prsestanti corpore tauros Avertit, tolidem forma superante juvencas.
Atque hos, ne qua forent ledibus vestigia rectis,
Cauda in speluncam tractos, versisque viarum Indiciis raptos, saxo occultabat opaco.
3   M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et Csecius, pp. 55, 56 note.
   
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second creator, the second Janus; that is to to say, he and Cacus were two heavenly ploughmen ploughing the year- strips, which were metaphorically ploughed by the Indian Kuru-Panchala kings at the beginning of this year. Cacus, the retrograde plougher of the Pole Star age, ploughed the first strip during the six months when the sun went from South to North, and Hercules, who met him on the furrow as the forward plougher at the turning point of the goal, the cave of Cacus, proceeded alone to plough the returning strip from the North to the South of the heavenly field. Servius tells us that Cacus’ sister pointed out to Hercules the path her brother had gone L She was Diana of the South-west Aventine hill, whose festival was held on the next day, August 13th. She, who was the goddess of the sacred groves, especially that of Aricia, had been originally the mother-tree-goddess of the mud {tana), who had become in the age of lunar-solar time the moon-goddess measuring the year. It is also clear from this story that the original contest between Hercules and Cacus was at the summer solstice, when the sun begins its returning course, and when Indra, the rain-god of the original story, killed Ahi-shuva, the god of drought, who became the Greek oracular snake Pytho at the summer solstice when the rains began in North India.
That the sacrifice offered at the Ara Maxima to celebrate this victory was a national ceremony of the ploughing worshippers of the sun is proved by the rule that only free men were allowed to take part in it. This rule is precisely the same as that laid down by the Raj Gonds of Chuttisghur, sons of the god Ra, who only allow free males, members of the tribe, to join in the sacrifice to their supreme god, Sck Nag, who, as the snake of rain, is the Gond equivalent of the Vedic Ahi-shuva. Those present at the ceremony attended it with bare heads crowned with laurels sacred to the sun- god ; and similarly all Gonds when sacrificing to Sek Nag 1
1 M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancu et Crecius, pp. 59—61.
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must be naked. Also the rule excluding women from the ceremony conclusively proves it to be later than the rites of the Pole Star and Lunar Solar ages, at which both men and women assisted ; and if any sex was excluded from any of the national ceremonies it was the men, who left, the solemnisation of the New Year’s Feast of the Pleiades year, the Thesmophoria, to the women, the only recognised parents of the village races.
The sacrifice was followed by a feast on the flesh of the animals sacrificed, in which all present joined ; but of the two priestly families who with the Praetor presided at it only the Potitii could eat everything offered ; the Pinarii were not allowed to eat the entrails ; and this prohibition, together with the custom of dividing the officiating Salii into two parties, seems to show that it indicated a union between two tribes hitherto opposed to one another.
Another proof of the alliance is derived from the tithes of the booty given by Hercules. This shows that the union was one between allies among whom each kept the produce of its own lands, and only devoted a part to the public benefit, instead of placing the whole in the common granaries according to the custom of the first village communities. Under this new arrangement each family maintained itself on the lands which had become its hereditary property. A modified form of the old common meals was maintained in the sacrificial feasts provided from the tithes, such as that at which Samuel entertained Saul.
The whole ceremony tells of the formation of a new stock born from the joined Southern and Northern races, the Hindu and Jewish Kathi, similar to that formed by the union with the previous population of the Gonds, who brought from Asia Minor to India millets, sesame oil, and the art of building houses, an alliance producing the confederacy of the Vid-arba or double-four, the eight tribes of the Gonds.
The consummation of this alliance between the ploughing immigrants and their predecessors was celebrated at the
   

[Prometheus]

   
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banquet of Hercules by draughts from the loving cup, the immense wooden goblet given by the conquering god, that of the united Ribhus, indicating, not the division of the year into seasons, but the union of its compotent parts into the complete year of the circling sun-god.
The antiquity of the ritual of the Ara Maxima consecrated to this new ploughing sun-god is proved by its situation in the open air, like the primitive Hindu Greek and Phoenician altars, and by its use as the place where the most sacred contracts were made by men with bare heads, and the flint knife in their hand. It was to Roman ritual the great white stone of the Scandinavians on which the most solemn oaths were sworn I.
The characteristics of the festival of the 13th of August following that of the day of the victorious battle of Hercules, completely confirms these conclusions. It was a festival of the South-west Aventine, in the temples of Diana and Vertumnus, the turning (verto) gods of the year, on that hill, and also of Hercules at the Porta Trigemina. It was a feast of the Plebs and slaves, not of the aristocratic worshippers at the Ara Maxima, and indicated the earliest stage of those national autumnal rejoicings at the end of the first six months of the year, that of the days when the ruling year-god was not the male sun-god, but the sun-maiden, the doe brought by the Ashvins or Twins, whose feast was held on this day in the Flaminia lucus, to wed the deer-sun-god of the North, the plougher Vertumnus, who turned the direction of his furrow when the feast was first instituted at the summer solstice. The temple was especially dedicated to Diana the protectress of deer, the doe-goddess of Orion’s year. The festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers, was also held on this day at the Circus Maximus 2. But I will deal with this festival and its historical meaning presently, when
1   M. Breal, Hercuh et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et Crecius, pp. 44—48.
2   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Scxtilis, August 13th, pp. 198—202,
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I have completed the survey of the Roman Festivals of August.
The next of these festivals to be reviewed are those of the Portunalia on the 17th of August, the Vinalia on the 19th, and the Consualia on the 21st. They all seem to be festivals of a race who came into Italy before the sun-worshippers of the eight-days week, and whose gods were those of the retrograde year of Cacus. The Portunalia, called also Tiberinalia, was the festival of the river-god, the father and mother Tiber, and he, as Portunus, was a god who presided at the opening of the year, for according to Verrius he had a key in his hand, and on this day Janus was worshipped at the Theatrum Marcelli. He was apparently the Etruscan god Portumnus, who has been identified by Signors Correra and Milani with the Greek god Palaemon, called both Portunus and Palsemon in Southern Italy, his mother being named Mater Matuta, Eileitheia and Leukothea, as well as Inox. Ino was wife of Atha,mus Tammuz or Dumu-zi Orion. Of her two sons, Learchus and Melicertes, Learchus was killed by his father as the offered victim of his madness, answering to the madness of Kalmashapada or Pausya recorded in Chapter VI. Ino escaped with her son Melicertes as Arusha, the mother of Aurva, the thigh (urn) born god, fled from the slaughterers of her people. Ino threw herself with her son into the sea from the Molurian rock in Megara, and Melicertes was saved by a dolphin, and changed into Palaimon, the god who was landed as the son of the mother-fish on the Isthmus of Corinth, where he was found under a pine-tree 1 2.
This god Melicertes is the Phoenician Melquarth, the lord (malik) of cities (karth), worshipped as the sun-god in all Phoenician towns. His festival was held at Tyre on the 2nd of Peritius, the 25th of December, and his death as
1   Milani, Studi e Materiali di Archeologia t Numismatica, Part i., Correra, Sul Culto di Leucothea a Napoli, pp. 73—79 ; Milani, Ino Leucothea Imagine dell’ Acque e dell’ Aria, pp. 80—86.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 44, 10, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. pp. 68, 71,
   
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a log, the yule log, and his resurrection were celebrated in the annual festival then begun. He was recalled to life by Iolaus x, who was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 263, Baal Iol, charioteer to Baal Makar or Melquarth. He was a form of Lakshman, the boundary-god of the story of Rama, who kept the sun-god in his right place in the sky furrow. It was after the twelve days intervening between this and the 5th of January, of which we have seen the meaning in Chapter III. pp. 101, 102, that this god awoke as the first representative of the sun-god, in the form of Palaimon or Baal Yam, the sea (yam) god, the counterpart of the first birth of the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun- god, the Hebrew Solomon, born under a pine-tree on the 6th of January 1 2 3.
He was thus the sun-god of the year of the twins Learchus and Melquarth, the stars Gemini of the age when the sun was in Gemini, in December—January, about 12,200 B.C., and in the progress of time he became god of the year when the sun was in Gemini, in January—February and February—March, that is from 12,200 to about 8000 B.C., the present age. It was to him as the god whose year began on St. Valentine’s day, the 14th of February, with the Roman festival of the Parentalia on the 15th, that his midyear festival took place on the 17th of August. In his first birth as year-god of the year beginning in January—February he is the god in whose honour the Isthmian games of Corinth were held. They, as we learn from Thucydides, took place in the early spring, for he tells us it was immediately after these games that the Spartan fleet under Alkimenes, which had been waiting for spring weather, sailed from Kenchreae to Chios to attack the Athenians 3. The prize of the Victor in these games was a wreath of pine leaves of the tree under which the infant god was found.
The Vinalia festival of the 19th of August was the mid
1 Berard, Originc dcst Cidles Arcadiens, iv., Le Dieu Fils des Phoeniciens,
p. 254.   2 Ibid.
3   Thucydides viii. 6—10.
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year festival of the Vine-god Dionysos, whose year began with the Anthesteria of the beginning of Anthesterion (February—March). The Consualia held on the Aventine on the 2 ist of August was, as Tertullian tells us, held in a subterranean temple. The god worshipped was the guardian of the stored (condere) grain, and at it horses and asses had, according to Plutarch, a holiday, and were decked with flowers. This is the sun-god, the equivalent of the Celtic sea- god Llyr, who had, as we have seen, p. 63, an underground temple under the Soar at Leicester, and thus the male form of the Southern mother-goddess Bahu, who had become the dolphin-mother who brought Palaimon or Baal Yam to land. This mid-year festival of Consus was also connected with the Opiconsivia held at the Regia at the hearth of the Vestal Virgins on the 25th of August, or three days after the Consualia. It was probably a festival of the blessing of the fires at the half-year.
The whole meaning of these August mid-year festivals is set forth in the ceremony of opening on the 24th of August the Mundus or round pit on the Palatine in the centre of the city. This was sacred to Dis and Proserpine, the two goddesses of the year divided into two seasons of six months each, the pit by which they were supposed to reach the lower world of the South. It was usually closed by a lapis manalis, a stone of fate. This was taken off for three days at the turning of the year, when the sun having reversed its course reached the brink of the Southern pit.
For a full understanding of this system of half-yearly festivals, which seems to have formed part of the ritual of this year of eight-day weeks, we must turn to the history of the Celtic sun-god Lug. He was, as we have seen, the son of Mackinealy, that is of the Wolfs Head. He was thus the Celtic form of the Lycean Apollo, the son of the wolf of light (lukos lux). He was also the successor of 1
1   W. Warcle Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis* Scxtilis, pp. 202, 207, 211—214.
   
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Nuada of the Silver-Hand, god of the cycle-year of the lunar crescents, who was killed by Balor, the Pole Star father of Lug’s mother, with an eye before and behind his head. Balor in his turn was killed by Lug, who was on his victory made king of the Tuatha De Danann x. Lug’s year of rule must have begun in January—February, for his mid-year festival in honour of his nurse Taill-tiu, the goddess of flowers, began on the 15th of July and continued till the 14th of August, the middle-day of the feast being the 1st of August, our Lammas 1 2 3. Hence his year is the same as the Magh year of Bhishma and of Hindu Mundas and Ooraons, and its mid-year festival is paralleled by the great Kurum festival of India held by the Ooraons and Mundas on the bright half of Shravana (July—August), corresponding with the Hindu Naga Panchami festival of the five (_panch) Naga snake-mothers held on the 5th of Shravana. This festival is followed by the harvest festival of the gora or upland rice, which takes place about the middle of August. The Kurum festival, like that of the birthday of Krishna, takes place at various dates, owing, as I have shown, to tribal astronomical reasons for changing the New Year’s Day. Among the Kharwars of Shahabad it begins in the early part of Bhadon (August—September), and lasts for fifteen days, and the Bhumijes of Bankura celebrate it in the dark and not the light half of Bhadon 3.
This most significant festival is held in honour of the Kurum-tree (Nauclea parvifolia), a wild almond-tree answering to the almond-tree at Luz and the almond-rod of Aaron. The tree sacred to this festival is cut in the forest by youths and maidens who fast till they have completed their task, and is brought in solemnly with dances and planted in the middle of the Akra or dancing-ground. On the chief
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 611, 612.
* Ibid., Lect. v. p. 414.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Bhumij, p. 125, Ho, p. 329, vol. ii., Ooraon, pp. 145, 146; Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, pp. 245, 246.
G g
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night of the festival, before the dance round the Kurum-tree begins, the daughters of the head-man of the village bring into the Akra young plants of barley which they have grown in special beds like the pots of the gardens of Adonis. The seed has been sown in sand from the mother-river mixed with turmeric, the holy plant of the yellow race. When they bring the yellow shoots thus grown into the Akra, they first worship the Kurum-tree and lay some of the plants before it; they then distribute the remainder among the dancers, who wear them on their heads during the dance, which lasts all night.
A very remarkable piece of national history is told in connection with the change from the worship of the Kurum- tree of Magh (January—February), in which the birth of the barley-sun-god is celebrated, to that of the next god ruling the month of Phalgun (February—March), the second month of the wedding of Suria or Sukonya to Soma, the month sacred to the Pandava Arjuna.
The sacred river of the Kharwars, the parent-tribe of the Cheroos, rulers of Maghada, is the Kurumnasa, which divides the province of Maghada or Behar from that of Benares. Its name means the destruction (nasa) of the Kurum-tree, and its historical significance is shown by the horror with which it is looked on by all orthodox Hindus. None of them will touch the water or wet their feet in it, and hence at the fords or roads crossing the river, before the present bridge over the Grand Trunk Road was built, the Kharwars and other dwellers on its banks who looked on it as sacred used to make a great deal of money by carrying pilgrims across it. The ritual which superseded that of the Magha Kurum and removed the river from the list of holy streams was that of the Pandavas, the ancestors of the more distinctly Northern or fair {panda) Hindus, who began their year not with the Magh festival but with that called the Pluli, beginning in the bright half of Phalgun (February—March) and ending on the full-moon day. This festival is the Hindu parallel of the European carnival beginning originally, before
   
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it varied with Lent, on the 14th of February, St. Valentine’s Day ; and at the Huli the Hindu women throw red powder at their lovers as confetti are thrown at the Carnival. It marks in Hindu history the victory of the Pandavas over the Kauravyas, who measured time by the eleven-months year.
This great national birthday of February — March is commemorated in Hebrew history by the festival of Purim, which plays the same part in the Jewish national story as that of the Huli does in that of the Hindus. Both celebrate the victory of the men of the red race over the yellow sons of the almond-tree. The Purim victory is that of Mordecai, the god Marduk, the bull-calf of Babylon, and Esther, or Istar, the morning-star, over Haman and his ten sons, the gods of the eleven-months year, who were slain, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 303. This was the final victory of Marduk, or Merodach, over Tiamut and her eleven-fold offspring. It is held on the 14th and 15th of Adar (February—March), that is to say, at the full and not the new moon of the month, and it, like the Roman New Year’s Day of the 1st of March, tells of an age still later than that which began the year with the 14th of February, when the sun entered Gemini on that date, about 8200 B.C. At the beginning of this epoch the old reckoning by new moons was that used, but this was followed by the substitution of full moons for the crescent moons, as we see in the Mahabha- rata, that Bhishma’s year began with the new moon of Magh (January—February), and that of Parikshit the sun- god succeeding Bhishma with the full moon of Cheit (March—April), when he began to run his year’s race, followed and guided by Arjuna of Phalgun, the Marduk of Esther’s story, the young bull-god driving the white sun- horses of the sun of February—March.
We must now return to Lug and the year beginning in January—February, the year of the Greek month Gamelion, the month of the marriage of Zeus and Here, and originally that of Esther and the sun-king of Shushan. The
G g 2
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Greek mid-year festival of this year is the Panathenaia of Athens held every fifth year in the last days of Hekatom- baion (July—August). Its great day was the 28th of the month, answering to the 13th of August, the festival of the goddess Flora and of Diana of the Aventine at Rome, and exactly coinciding with the second stage of the Lug festival of July—August.
But before closing the account of the parallelisms connected with the year of Lug, I must turn to another account of the birth of a sun-god, the equivalent of Lug and the Lycian Apollo. In Franche Comte, near the great French shrine of Lug at Lug-dunum or Lyons, the Yule-log, called La Tronche, was almost in every house in the province, about thirty or forty years ago, taken off the fire on Christmas Eve almost as soon as it had been placed on it. When it had thus been baptized with fire it was taken apart and covered with a cloth. Then the childen came in and 'beat it with sticks to make it bring forth {pour la faire accoucher). Nothing came of this first beating, so they were removed to repent of those sins of the past year which prevented the mother from being good to them. After a time they were brought back, and when the cloth was removed after, they beat it their Christmas presents were disclosed 1.
Here we see an unmistakeable survival of the birth of Melquarth or Archal, the sun-god, from the funeral pyre on the 2nd of Peritius, or the 25th of December, of Apollo from Leto, worshipped as a tree-trunk, and Krishna from the mother-tree, the black virgin Mari-amma. She is the Czech goddess Leto, who, as a doll made of straw, the withered sun-mother of corn, is clothed every year in summer with a shirt, and she and the broom and the scythe she bears in her hands are thrown into the next village 2. This goddess-mother of the tree-trunk was the Yule-log lit on the New Year’s festival in the national palace of the bee-taught
1   C. Beauquier, Les Mois en Franche Comti, p. 137.
2   Mannhardtl Antike Wald und Feld Knltur, vol. i. chap. iii. pp. 155, 156.
   
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race, for the bees are called to in their hives every Christmas Eve in Franche Comte.
But besides the tree-trunk-mother who gives the year gifts, there is, in some parts of Franche Comte, another called Tante Arie, who comes riding on an ass and places the presents on the Christmas pine-tree, the mother-tree of Germany, and this mother is Su-koniya, the year-mother of the ass-riding Ashvins r.
Another most remarkable survival of ancient year mythology is found in the drama of La Creche, or the cradle, which begins at Besangon in December and lasts at intervals till the end of January, so that it is a theatrical representation of the opening of the year in December—January and January—February.
The three actors in the drama are those who are in Germany the Three Kings of Cologne, headed by the black king Melchior, who came to worship the young child on the 6th of January. But in Franche Comte they are the old wine-grower Barbizier, his wife Naitoure, whom he constantly beats, and Verly, who tries to keep the peace between them 2. In these three persons we see unmistakeable survivals of Rama, Sita and Lakshman, for in their journey to find the young sun-god in his cradle in the plough-furrow of the year-stars, they go and ask counsel of the old hermit or astrologer, the stars of the Great Bear with its guiding pointers, who will show the star under which the child is to be found. The story tells how Rama, the god who ploughs his year-path through heaven in the furrow Sita, whom he drives before him, finds Sita as the year-child of the crescent moon in the labyrinthine Southern castle of the ten-headed Ravana in Lanka (Ceylon), after reaching his journey’s end by the road in which he has been kept by Lakshman, the guardian of the boundary stars of the zodiac in which the sun-god is born, and through which he passes in his yearly circuit. The star sought for in the cradle-drama is
1   C. Beauquier, Les Mois en Franche Comte, pp. 136—13S.
2   Ibid., pp. 149—152.
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that in which the sun-child of Naitoure, the bearing (native) mother, is to be born as the Etruscan Tages was born, from the furrow. It is a perpetually recurring drama of the history of time told by the passage of the sun through the Zodiacal stars, and the successive changes of these stars marking the monthly resting-places, and especially those of the solstitial and equinoctial guiding points. In this year of the eight-days week, though the first birth of the young sun-god takes place at the winter solstice, yet the second is in January—February, and the mid-year star of this second, birth is that in which the sun is found on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin on August the 15th, when Athene receives her year Peplos at the Pana- thenaia. This story of the circular year-track of the sun followed by Rama, Sita and Lakshman, is also preserved in that of the universally known Punch, who beats his wife Judy, and is always quarrelling with the policeman, the guardian Lakshman. He proves his Indian origin by his name, which is that of the Indian five (patich) days week, the five Nag-Panchami mothers. The birth-star of this cradle drama is that in which the sun was to be found on the 6th of January, twelve days after the winter solstice, and these twelve days added to the twelve before the solstice during which Archal lay on the funeral pyre make up twenty-four days or a month of this fifteen-months year.
That this year of Lug which we find depicted in these various forms in ancient year-history was a year measured by eight-day weeks is proved by the Celtic week of the eight Maini. They, as the seven Great Bear stars parents of the eighth god, the sun-god of this year, were originally the Secht or seven Maini. As the eight Maini they are called : i. Maine Mathremail, M like his mother; 2. Maine Athremail, M like his father; 3. Maine Morgor, M very dutiful ; 4. Maine Mingor, M little dutiful ; 5. Maine mo Epert, M greater than is said; 6. Maine Milscothach, M of honey-bloom ; 7. Maine Andoe (meaning unknown) ; 8. Maine
   
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cotageib Ule, M that contains them all, that is the sun-god the eighth. They are the eight rings dropped every ninth night by Odin’s ring Draupnir. This week of eight days and nine nights is that of Lug’s eight warders placed to guard him after he became king of the Tuatha de Danann, and the eight warders of the court of Arthur, the ploughing-god Airem, who divided the year between them, and of whom the eighth was the white horse of the sun, Glewlwyd Gavael- vaur, Brave Grey with the Great Grip 1.
F.   The year of Odusseus as god of the Thigh.
In the survey of the sun-gods of the year born of the Thigh who rule this year of eight-day weeks, I have now to return to a sun-god whom I have mentioned several times before. This is Odusseus, the victor, like Arjuna, in a shooting contest for the goddess of the year. He was originally the Northern wandering-god Orwandil of the North, whose great toe was the star Rigel in Orion. He was married to Penelope, daughter of Ikarios, whom he won in a foot-race as leader of the stars going round the Pole. His wife, as weaver of the web (Trrjv77), was originally the Pleiades or spinning-mother, but as the daughter of Ikarios, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 326, changed into the constellation Bootes, she became, as the goddess- mother of the corn-growing races, the constellation Virgo, one of the zodiacal stations of the sun ; and perhaps she was also the leader of the three weaving sisters, the Pole Star Vega, who was, as Gandharl, a child-bearing mother like Penelope. Odusseus was, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 144, the god of the year-bed of the olive mother-tree- goddess Athene, and his connection with the year is further shown by the catalogue of his swine kept by his Phoenician swineherd Eumseus. He owned six hundred sows, lodged in twelve pig-sties, and he had also six hundred boars who
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. iv. pp. 364—372, Lect. vi. pp. 617, 618.
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lived outside, but whose numbers had been reduced to three hundred and sixty by the suitors of Penelope, who killed them as food. They were guarded by four dogs, the four Lokapala stars Sirius, the Great Bear, Corvus and Argo.
Their numbers show that they were the year-pigs of the twelve-months year of the boar-god, and in this reckoning fifty sows were allotted to each month T. These fifty answer to the fifty great gods of the Akkadians, and the fifty daughters of the Hindu god of time, Daksha1 2 3, the fifty daughters of Endymion by Selene, the moon, the fifty sons of Priam, the fifty daughters of Danaus, and the fifty servant- wives left behind in Ithaca by Odusseus when he went to Troy, of whom twelve had become mistresses to the suitors. They were the year-goddesses of old year reckonings, who were to be replaced by the newly-recovered Penelope, whose hand'he has to win in his contest with the suitors 3.
These fifty children of the year-god and the fifty mother- sows apparently mean fifty days, so that the whole year of twelve months would contain six hundred days, and six hundred is the number of the Babylonian cycle of the Great Ner of 600 years. But if this year of twelve months of Nergal, the Great {gal) Ner, contained six hundred days, the term day must have a different meaning from that we attach to it, and if the Odusseus year of six hundred days equalled in length, as it must have done, that of the three hundred and sixty boars of the suitors and the year of three hundred and sixty days, each day must have been made up of fractional parts differing from those which make up our day.
An explanation of this difficulty may be found in the Hindu Tithis or lunar days, which differ in length from the civil days. In the list of the Tithi days of the lunar month given by AlberunI, the eight Vishtis or changes into which it is divided contain thirty Tithis or lunar days, and the first
1   Homer, Odyssey, xiv. 5—22.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 1S3 ; Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 189.
3   Homer, Odyssey, xxii. 419—429.
of the JSIyth-Making Age.
45 7
of these Vishtis is called Vadavamukha, the distorted month, the name of the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year of p. 396 F. But AlberunI does not tell us how this year of Tithis is made up apart from their use in the year of the Karanas, which, as we have seen, was measured by the same days as we use. But we find, perhaps, a clue to the measurement of this year of Odusseus as Vadavamukha, the god of the eleven-months year, in the constantly repeated statement that he returned after his wanderings to Ithaca, and resumed his power in the twentieth year since his departure, when his year-dog Argus, the constellation Argo, fell dead at his feet from joy at his return 2. This number in the account of his vagabond career as an unattached sun-god of the lunar-solar epoch apparently marks the number of lunar months in his year, which was measured, as we shall see presently, by twenty-four lunar phases. This year of twenty months, each containing thirty, or of twelve months each of fifty, Tithi days, would be one of 600 days ; and if every Tithi day contained twenty hours equalling our twenty-four, each month of thirty days would contain 600 hours instead of the 720 of our month, and each year would contain 7,200 hours instead of the 8,640 hours of the year of three hundred and sixty of our days. Such a measurement of time as this is quite practical, and it may have been used by the national .astronomers who measured in the Southern observatories the year of the horse’s head framed in the North as the eleven- months year. These astronomers of Northern descent, before they united with the Southern races and formed our mixed decimal and duodecimal system of reckoning, did all their reckoning in decimals, and this is the reckoning followed in this year I have sketched above. Our mixed system is based on the Dravidian duodecimal measurement of time, which divides the day into sixty Ghatis or hours of twenty-four minutes each, an order reversed by the Baby- *
* Sachau, Alberunl’s India, vol. ii. chap, lxviii. pp. 201—203 ; Mahabharata Adi (Chailra-ratha) Parva, clxxxii. p. 517.
2 Homer, Odyssey, xrii. 327.

[Prometheus]

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lonians, from whom we took our calendar. As the Dravidian system provided a most elaborate division of time into seconds and more minute fractions, it was much more useful for astronomers than the rougher calendar of the North ; hence the latter was superseded for practical use, and only survived in such historical tales of old Northern life as the original story of Odusseus Orwandil.
The correctness of this hypothesis has no bearing whatever on the main argument of this explanation of the Odusseus story, for which it is only necessary to prove him to be a year-god of the primaeval methods of reckoning time. The twelve pigsties for his sows and the three hundred and sixty boars left alive prove this, and further complete proof that he was a god of the Thigh year is given by the mark on his thigh by the gash made by the boar of Parnassus which he slew while hunting with the sons of Auto- lycus, the self {auto) shining (lukos) god, the independent sun-god of that mountain sacred to Bellerophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician, and his horse Pegasus, who made the fountain Hippocrene at its foot. This wound was above his knee (yovvos virep), and immediately after receiving it Odusseus struck the boar on the right shoulder and slew it1. The poet’s description of the fight is thrillingly graphic. The boar charged past Odusseus from his left side, and as he passed gashed with his tusk the spearman’s left thigh, which was in advance of his right leg. He kept straight on his course after delivering his stroke, and Odusseus struck him on the right shoulder as he went by him. The spear went home, and the fighting monarch of the forest fell in the dust with the dying grunt of defiance {hrecrev ev KOVITJO-C fxaicMv), with which he told his foe that he would die fighting to the last. This story is one which could only have been told by a poet who had hunted and slain the undaunted king of the forest who dies fighting to his last gasp.
This mark imprinted on his thigh before he left Ithaca
1 Homer, Odyssey, xix. 449—453.
   
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on his twenty years of wandering was one by which he was known to all his friends, and in his insistance on this point the poet practically tells us that he was looked on as the god whose left thigh was torn. It was by this mark that his nurse Eurykleia, also called Euronyme, recognised him as she washed his feet, and she was the Phoenician Astro Noema, the star Virgo, guardian of the sun-god of the eleven-months yearI. It was by this that he made himself known to Eumaios the swineherd and Philoitios the herdsman of the oxen, who apparently represents Aryaman, the sun-physician, in his first form of Arcturus, the chief star in Bootes, the guardian constellation of the ox (/Sous) 2. They were his two chief assistants in his contest with the suitors. It was also by this sign that he revealed himself to his father Laertes 3. Thus as the god with the wounded and withered left thigh, he was the parallel of Jacob, who had, as we have seen, his left thigh withered in his contest with the god whom he conquered, as Odusseus conquered the boar-sun-god 4.
The final battle of Odusseus with the suitors is an exact parallel with that fought by Arjuna with the wooers of Drupadl. The rules of the contest were that the victor should bend and string the bow of Eurytus, given by his son Iphitus to Odusseus, and shoot an arrow right through the twelve double axes (7re\e/eu?) or twenty-four crescent- moons of the twelve months of the year of the twelve pigsties 5. Whoever should succeed in performing this feat, requiring the supernatural strength and skill of the supreme god, should become the husband of Penelope. Odusseus alone was able to bend the bow and shoot the arrow through the lunar crescents6, and his bow was the self-same bow as that with which Arjuna won Drupadl, for Arjuna’s bow was that of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, drawer (harsh) of the bow, and Krishanu’s name is exactly translated by that
1 Homer, Odyssey, xix.#3SS—393, xx. 5.   2 Ibid., xxi. 216—220.
3 Ibid., xxiv. 330—332.   4 Gen. xxxii. 28.
5 Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 10—32, 68—76.   6 Ibid., xxi. 404—423.
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of Eurytus or Eurutos, the drawer (iplxo). The difference between the mark aimed at in the two contests is most noticeable. Arjuna aimed at the Pole Star bird encircled by the guardian constellation Draco, while the arrow of Odusseus was shot through the twelve double axes, the stations of the twelve zodiacal stars, which were twenty- seven in the furrow of Rama, and became twelve in our zodiac. In these the sun rests while the twenty-four lunar crescents mark his monthly stay in each star.
The fight with and slaughter of the suitors which succeeded the victory of Odusseus was preceded by the capture of Melanthios, the goatherd, the Pole Star goat who went to get arms for the suitors from the bedchamber of Odusseus, containing the heaven’s bed. He was caught in the act of robbing the treasury of heaven and bound, thus succumbing to Philoitios as the star Aryaman, the cattle herdsman. Melanthios had been cup-bearer to the suitors, the filler of the cups of the seasons, and had always derided Odusseus when he returned from his wanderings disguised as a beggar- man, the despised sun-god, who was only recognised by his faithful dog Argus, the constellation Argo, who died to make way for the new year rulerz. The doors of the central hall of the heaven’s palace were closed by Eurycleia and Philoitios, the two guardian-stars Virgo and Arcturus2; and Odusseus then slew all the imprisoned suitors, the false gods of the ages of the worship of the gods of night, those buried by Jacob under the oak tree at Bethel. At the end of the slaughter Melanthios, the goat-god, was brought out, his nose, ears, hands and feet were cut off, and he was emasculated, that is changed from the ape-god of the Thigh to be a sexless gnomon-pillar 3.
The sun-god went after his victory to visit his father Laertes, the gardener of the Garden of God of the Zendavesta. In this he had dwelt with his wife Antikleia, the backward (anti) key, the year-goddess of the retrograde Pole Star
1 Homer, Odyssey, wii. 212—216, 300—327, 369 ff., xx. 172—184, 255.
2   Ibid., xxi. 376—391-   3 Ibid., xxii. 135—193, 474—477.
   
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years wedded to the gnomon tree-trunk, the Indian Lat, the vernacular name for the Sanskrit Yupa, the sacrificial stake, the'Etruscan Larth, or eldest son, the Pelasgian Lar, or national father. He was the Greek form of the Roman Latinus, the father of the Latins, son of Faunas, the deer-sun-god, and Marica, the sea or marsh-mother of the tree-ape, the Hindu Maroti, the Latin Mars Mart-is. He was the god of the sacrificial stakes which first marked the seasons, and became those denoting the months. These Lats surrounded the Hindu Temples, built on the plans of this age, such as that at Sando-paya in Burmah, where the central temple is encircled by Chaityas or shrines, between which are posts, with the Garuda eagle cloud-bird of Vishnu on the top. These Chaityas and Garuda posts are said in the Mahabharata to have been erected by Bhishma, the god of this year, round all Indian temples, and their meaning as calendrical signs is shown by the thirty stone pillars surrounding the sun-circle at Stonehenge, denoting the thirty days of the month x.
Thus Odusseus as the conquering god of the right thigh •is the son of the fruit-bearing tree-pillar, the earthly emblem of the creating fire-drill which begot the sun-god as the sun of the nut-tree. This nut-tree, the fruit of which was scattered before the bridal pair at Roman weddings, is believed by the Jews to have been planted in the Garden of Eden. It became the almond-tree of the Indian Ooraons and Kharwars, and the sacred walnut-tree of the Italian witches. This holy tree grew at Beneventum, and the son of one of the peasants who sold its fruit was one day gathering them. As he opened the fruits to eat their contents a fairy came out of each, and they surrounded him and danced with him, as the stars danced round the beggar sun-god Odusseus. When the dance was over they gave him three nuts, told him to open two, to keep the third for the king’s daughter, 1
1 Simpson, ‘ The Pillars of the Thiiparama and Lankarama Dagabas in Ceylon.’ J.R.A.S., 1896, p. 361; Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cix. 13, *4> P- 327; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 138 ff.
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and to take a basketful of nuts, which they gave him, to the king. From the first of his three nuts there issued so much gold as to make him the richest man in the world, and from the second a splendid summer suit of clothes. He then went to the king and asked for the hand of his daughter, but was refused, as her father said she was promised to another husband, the moon-god. But he was allowed to give the third nut to the princess, telling her not to open it till she went to bed, and then he himself came out of it, and remained with her as her secretly wedded husband. But the Indian custom of the Swayamvara, or self-choice of the year-bride, had penetrated to the Italy of this age, and when the day came when the princess had, like DrupadI and Penelope, to choose her mate among contending suitors summoned by the king, she chose the youth of the walnut-tree, who had resumed his peasant’s garb. In contending with the suitors who exclaimed against her choice, the beggar-sun-god, like Arjuna and Odusseus, vanquished all competitors, and became the father of the sun-god born of the walnut-tree T.
We see in this story a resume of the numerous variant forms of the historical tale told in this Chapter, and trace it with its Indian original features to Italy. We also see how the walnut-tree-trunk became, through its fruit, the mother of the sun-god raised from earth to heaven. This is the tree-trunk which1 was beaten as the lying-in mother in Franche Comte, that is ploughed and stricken like the laboured earth to make it yield its fruits, and we find in this series of symbols the historical origin of the old rhyme,
“A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they’ll be,”
G.   The year of the birth of the Buddha and Parikshit as sun-gods.
I have now in this survey of the history of the sun-god of the year of eight-day weeks the sun-physician to deal
1 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 193, 194.
   
4^3
with, the most graphic of all the birth-stories of this god, the Buddha, the Indian sun-god, who was, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 31, born of the Sal-tree. His mother Maya, a form of Magha, the goddess ruling this year, was otherwise Marlchi or Tara, the Thibetan Pole Star goddess driving the Great Bear constellation of the seven pigs. But this god, who was, as we shall see, born as the sun- physician, according to the original tradition in Magha (January—February), was in the orthodox account of his birth born at the vernal equinox. That is to say he was in the third of his births born when the sun entered Gemini at the vernal equinox, about 6200 B.c., after he had entered the Tusita heaven of wealth in his Vessantara birth, when the sun was in Gemini, in February—March, about 8200 B.C., and the Yamaloka heaven of the Twin (Yama) gods in his Mah-osadha birth as the great medicine (Osadha) god when the sun was 1 in Gemini, in January—February, about 10,200 B.C.
In his history, as told in the Nidanakatha, he was in his earliest existence as the first of the twenty-seven Buddhas, the twenty-seven days of the month of the .cycle-year who preceded him, Dipankara meaning the nascent light, the birth-star Aries, the first of the twenty-seven Nakshatra stars, the sun-god born in Aries, at the autumnal equinox, in the city of Ram-ma, the mother of the ploughing-god Ram, who follows the furrow Sita round the heavens 2. In short he was the sun-god beginning the three-years cycle.
The successor of this sun-god born at the autumnal equinox was the god conceived at the summer solstice, after ten lunar months of gestation. And it is the 'story of this conception at the summer solstice which is told in the Nidanakatha. His mother Maya was then borne in spirit to the Great Sal-tree of the Himalayas standing in the Mano-Sila-tal plain (tai) of the rock (sita) of calculation (inano), the world’s
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories:   The Nidauakatha, Birth of the
Buddha, pp. 67, 78.
2   Ibid., Sumedha and Dipankara, pp. 2 ff.
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gnomon-tree. She was brought thither by the four Lokapala angels, the four stars ruling the four quarters of the heavens. They bathed her in the Anototta, the “ not-heated ” lake, the cool pool of pure water, whence the mother rivers rise. They laid her after her bath with her head to the East, and the young sun-god appeared before her as the elephant cloud-god Gan-isha, who came from the North-east, and entered her right side r. The sun-god thus conceived was born in the Sal grove Lumbini, the village grove common to Kapila- vastu, the city of Suddho-dana, the pure (suddho) seed, and Koliya the town of Maya, who was of the race of the Mallis. This grove Lumbini is the counterpart of Sanket, the place of assignation, where Radha and Na nda, the parents of the Bharatas, met.
The sun-child when born was received by the four Lokapala angels in a net, the star-net of the zodiacal stars. He thence stepped out on the antelope skin of the god Krishna, the black antelope, and took seven strides under the white umbrella held over him by Su-yama, the twins (ydma) of Su, the stars Gemini, under which constellation he was born. His first birth, according to the Nidanakatha, was the Mahosadha birth, followed by the other two births named above. All his births, like those of the Jain Tlr- thakaras, were accompanied by the same historical phenomena, and all took place under the guardianship of Su-yama, the stars Gemini.
In his Mahosadha birth as the sun-physician he came into the world with a branch of Sandal Chandanasaro wood in his hand, that is the tree (saro) of the moon (,chando); that is to say he was the sun-god born of the moon-tree, the Suria wedded in the Vedic hymn to Soma. He told his mother this was medicine, hence he was called Osadha- darika, Medicine-child1 2. This medicine-plant was planted
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, Maha Maya’s Dream, pp. 62, 63.
2   Ibid., Birth of the Buddha, pp. 66—68.
of the. Myth-Making Age.
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in an earthenware pot, his first begging-bowl, of which we shall see the meaning presently.
His first appearance in public was at the Ploughing Festival of Jambu-dwipa. This, as we have seen, took place among the Kuru-Panchalas at the beginning of Magh (January—February), and it answered to our plough festival, commemorated in the name Plough Monday given to the first Monday after the Epiphany. It was the ploughing of Hercules, the forward plougher, ending with the death of Cacus, and still celebrated in the Chinese festival held on the first day of the year beginning in January—February, when the sun and moon are in the same constellation. The Chinese Emperor then ploughs three furrows, each of the three dukes or governors of frontier provinces five, and his nine other ministers nine each1. At the ploughing of Suddho-dana he ploughed two furrows, one forward and the other backward, with a golden plough ; and his ministers, of whom there were one hundred and seven, nine each. Thus the Chinese year is one of three and the Hindu of two seasons of five-day weeks commemorated in the Chinese ritual, while the nine-days week is recalled in the nine times twelve Hindu ploughs and in the nine Chinese ministers and the nine ministerial furrows ploughed in both countries.
The Buddha at this ploughing was seated under the Jambu- tree, the central parent-tree of the royal village, which like the royal province was the centre point of Jambu-dwipa. His shadow is said to have remained stationary as representing the central steadfast point, the earthly embodiment of the motionless Pole Star2. This description of the Ploughing Festival is clearly taken from an original birth- legend of the Kuru-Panchalas of Central India, brought by the Mallis to Kapila-vastu, the shrine of the ancient Kapila, their yellow (kapila) divine parent. There apparently
1 Legge, Li-chi, The Yiieh Ling, First month, 13; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp.
254, 255.
2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: Festival, pp. 74, 75.
H h
The Nidcinakatha, The Ploughing
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the individual Siddharta Gotama, the preacher, teacher and founder of the great religious organisation the Buddhistic Church, was born about 550 B.C. This is the date given by the Chinese for the birth of their great moral teacher Confucius, and it was this same period that produced the Hebrew prophets. These men, who enthusiastically devoted themselves to the task of awakening the national conscience, were the leaders of a wave of religious aspiration after mental and practical perfection which passed over the whole of Southern Asia. The awakening spirit of this new revival was born from discontent with the metaphysical philosophy which had succeeded the formal ritualism in which the early faiths ended. The first period of the belief in the Chinese Tao or path, the yearly recurring round of the imperishable germ of life, had passed away. The Northern sense of individuality and desire for personal success had made the belief in the Tao, and in its yearly task of silently creating life and promoting the physical and moral progress of the nations who remained true to the teachings of its ritual, become unsatisfying to the intellects of those who wished for more activity and less somnolent contentment with the present. To these reformers dutiful submission and unquestioning obedience were no longer the chief virtues. Hence the nations inspired by them desired as a leader a divine son of man who would be followed as an example by the soldiers who joined his banner in the war against apathy and mental stagnation, and this conception and aspiration caused the older belief in the state as a unit bound together by strict routine to disappear, and as it faded away the older form of history based on abstractions which were clear to the initiated but dark to the multitude became changed into tales in which the names which had been first symbols of the departed dead became living heroes who had each lived their lives on earth as men. When the older forms of history were thus distorted and their true meanings forgotten or disregarded, schools of philosophy arose which tried to substitute for traditional history answers to the
   
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riddles of existence spun from thought. It was on the Vedanta and Sankhya systems of philosophy disseminated in the teachings of the Indian Upanishads and the similar questionings of Chinese metaphysicians that both Confucius and Siddharta Gotama founded their systems of ethical religion, which simply taught that man’s chief task on earth was “to make his moral being his prime care.” According to the teaching of the Indian reformer, he was to dismiss from his thoughts all metaphysical speculations as to ultimate causes as unprofitable and useless, and in the system of self-education to which he was to devote himself, he was to abandon the ritualism which enjoined the needless and sinful offering of living victims, to eschew asceticism and valueless mortification of the flesh, and follow the eight-fold noble path of (t) Right views, (2) High aims, (3) Right speech, (4) Upright conduct, (5) Harmless livelihood, (6) Perseverance in well-doing, (7) Intellectual activity, ( Earnest thought. By this discipline men and women were to try to reach a stage of existence in which sin was impossible, and in which all who had attained to or were strenuously striving to reach this state of perfection became members of the Sanga or community of the faithful, the reunited body who had, while attaining the benefits of individual exertion, purged themselves of its temptations.
It was as the leader in this return to a re-glorified past of national righteousness recovered by those received as citizens of the village community of the City of God, that their teacher was installed by his disciples as the Buddha or god *of knowledge ; and though he was actually born as the son of the Headman of the Sakya Gautama village of Kapila-vastu, who was probably also a Manki or provincial chief of the Sakya clan territory, they also invested him with the attributes of the previous national gods of time, which described their birth, life and death in the historical myths. In doing this they merely, as we have seen in the previous chapters of this book, followed the examples of their predecessors, who gave the same birth-history to each
H h 2
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successive manifester of the changing forms of the god who measures time. Consequently in the picture of his life handed down to posterity Siddharta Gotama, who was a teacher imbued with religious zeal, an ardent desire to discover truth and a rare sympathy with the mental difficulties of others, was born and died as the year-god who passed through the ecliptic path of the stars in his yearly round of birth, growth, extinction, and re-birth.
It was as the young sun-god that he took the lead in the symbolic ploughing of the New Year. When once started on his career his first task was to beget a successor. This young sun-god was born as Rahulo, the little sun Rahu, whose mother, unnamed in the Nidanakatha, was Bhudda Kaccani, the eleventh of the Buddhist Theris, or year-mothers, preceded by GotamT Maha Pajapati, the sister of his mother Magha, who had brought him up when his mother died seven days after his birth. She was the female form of Prajapati Orion, and was, as we shall see in Chapter VIII., the goddess ruling the first month of the year of thirteen lunar months.
Rahulo’s mother, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint, or Yasodhara, the renowned (yaso) stream (dhard) J, was the mother-river of the sons of this goddess of the eleven-months year. It was seven days after Rahulo’s birth that the Buddha started on his career as the historical sun-god, whose history is told in a story conceived when the myth of the birth and life, the sun-physician, was first made the most important chapter in national history telling of the revolution in popular theology.
He left his father’s capital on his horse Kanth;ka, the star-horse Pegasus of the year of eleven months, accompanied by his groom Channo, the concealed one, the counterpart of Lakshman in the story of Rama, the hidden power which kept the sun in its right course through the furrow of heaven. They took him thirty yojanas through the heavenly circle of the thirty stars to the banks of the river called Anoma the 1
1 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 155.
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illustrious, consecrated to Anoma-dassin, the sixth Buddha to whom the Arjuna-tree (Terminalia belericci) was sacred. This, as we have seen in the story of Nala and DamayantI, was the tree of Calculation, which instructed Nala, the year god, in the true history of annual time R
It was when he reached the epoch of astronomical calculation that the birth of the sun-god as the sun-physician took place. He then began his career as the sun-god of the horse’s head, and polled his hair, as stated in the Nidanakatha, according to the custom recorded in Chapter VI. pp. 338 ff. He received from the Archangel Ghati-kara, who measured time by the Dravidian method, which divided the day into sixty Ghatis of twenty-four minutes each, the eight requisites of the beggar sun-god. These were the three robes, the leaves, flowers and fruit of the three seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and the winter alms-bowl of earth, that in which healing plant of the sun-physician was planted as a seedling to grow into the year-tree of the next year. To these four were added (1) the razor, the pruning-knife, which gave to the parent-god of the river-born race the firstfruits of the produce grown in the year symbolized in the clipped and offered hair; (2) the threading-needle, which united all the days of the year together ; and (3) the girdle of the circling sun, which bound days, nights, weeks and seasons in the perfect whole. The eighth requisite commemorating the eighth day of the week was the water-strainer, the clouds which sent to earth the rain, the parent of the life disseminated in the earth by the sowing-god, the Latin Semo Sancus 1 2.
It was in this mendicant garb that the sun-god of this year of the eight-day weeks proceeded to the scene of his birth. He began his journey after the death of Kanthikal the star-horse Pegasus, who passed into the Tavatimsa
1   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 79, 82, 85, 40; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 71—82, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 73, 82.
2   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, pp. S6—SS.
47b
   
heaven of the thirty-three gods of his eleven-months year as a star-angel, the son of god {deva-putto)x. He rested on his way under the Pandava rock, the year-rock of the year of Bhishma and of the acquisition by the Pandavas of the year-mother-tree Drupadi, won by Arjuna’s victory as the archer-god of this year.
The final destination of this sun-god about to be born was the land of Uruvela, that is of extended (uru) time {vela). There the birth village was that called Senani, the clustered army {send) of the stars ruled by the Headman, the general Senani, the Pole Star god whose daughter was Su-jata, the sun-mother born (jatd) of the mother-cloud-bird Su or Khu, the bird in the nest of the Pole Star. Her tree-mother was the Nigrodha tree {Ficus Indica), the Banyan fig-tree-mother of the Kushika and of the Buddha’s predecessor, the twenty- seventh Buddha Kassapo or Kashyapa. As an offering to her tree-mother Su-jata took on May Day the full-moon of Vaisakha (April—May), the milk of eight cows selected out of the thousand cows of light which fed in her father’s fields, the Nag-kshatra or fields of the Nag or ploughing stars. These eight selected stars were the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the eighth the sun-god. To heat this milk and make with it rice gruel, the food of the ripened seed of life, the rice-mother-plant of the first founders of villages, a fire was lit by Sakko, the wet {sak) god, the leader of the thirty-three gods of the month in the calendar of the eleven-months year. He and the other three Loka- pala star-gods and the Pole Star god Brahma, the five stars crowning the tree of Bhishma, infused into this rice gruel the madhu or honey-sweet wine of the Mahua {Bassia latifolia), the Sap of life of the races born from the marriage union with this tree in quantities sufficient “to support all the men and angels of the four continents and two thousand islands of the world1 2.” In short the food
1 Fausboll, futaka, vol. i. p. S5.
3 Ibid., vol. i. p. 68; Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidana- kathd, p. 90.

[Prometheus]

PLATE III.
To face p. 471.
 
From a photograph of the cast given by Mr. A. Maudslay to the South Kensington Museum.
THE YI'CATAN GOD OF COPAN CUM-AHAU, LORD OF THE BOWL, DEPICTED AS THE INDIAN ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD GAN-ISHA, LORD OF THE LAND,
SEATED ON THE DOUBLE SU-ASTIKA.
       471
offering was the concentrated essence of the divine creative force.
When it was prepared the bird-mother, the May Queen, sent her servant Punna Completion to the Nigrodha tree, under which she saw the Buddha sitting as the rising-sun born from the tree. She ran back to tell her mistress, who on hearing her report placed the oblation to the rising-sun of the eight-rayed star in a golden bowl and herself gave it to Buddha ; it replaced the earthen bowl of Ghati-kara, which then disappeared.
I must here turn aside from the narrative of the Buddha’s birth as sun-god of the eight-rayed star to call attention to the annexed representation of the Buddha in the act of taking this creating bowl, which points to a much earlier form of the birth-legend than that which has come down to us in the Nidanakatha. This picture appears in one of the sculptures of the great Mexican temple at Copan. This, as shown in the photograph taken on the spot by Mr. Maudsley1, a copy of which is here reproduced, depicts the god holding in his right hand the steaming bowl of rice not as the man Siddharta Gotama but as the elephantheaded cloud-god Gan-isha, and in this portrait, his earliest form of divine existence as the cloud-bird is also recognised, for the bird’s tail protrudes from the back of his head. He is seated on the two Suastikas, the female Su-astika rj-J representing the sun going northward at the winter solstice, and the male Su-astika * denoting the southern path of the sun after the summer solstice. These are combined to form a square, and within this the sun and rain-god is seated with his legs crossed in the form of the St. Andrew’s Cross the sign of the solstitial sun. The seed-vessel in front of the god is also most noteworthy. It answers to the embryo plant-god in the bas-relief of Isilikaia standing between the seed-bearing-mother and her son, the god with the double-
1 Godman and Salvin, Biologia Cenlrale Americana ; Maudsley, Archaeology, Copan, Part I., Plate 9.
472
   
axe, answering to the Etruscan god Sethlans, p. 259. The embryo seed-vessel of this illustration represents the cloud- god Gan-isha ready, as a seed made fertile by the rain, to enter the womb of his mother, the mother-tree. And that Gan-isha is the rain-god, is proved by the trunk whence the elephant emits the water he has drawn up with it to wash himself. In this illustration the water is spouting from the trunk on to the three balls, the three apples of the year of life of the three seasons, to fertilise them as the heaven-sent rain.
To return to the birth-story of the sun-god, when he had received the sun-bowl of the Sap of life he rose from his seat and went sunwise round the Nigrodha tree, with the vessel in his hand, to the banks of the river called Niranjara. This is the water ('niram) of age (jam) or the Phalgu, the river of February—March, in which he was to begin his year. It was the river of the ecliptic stream of time in which, as is said in the Nidanakatha, so many thousand previous Buddhas had begun their year’s reign as sun-gods. He entered the river at the Supathita or firmly-established ferry, the Star into which the sun was to enter on his New Year’s Day. Having bathed he sat down with his face to the East, whence he was to rise, and divided the rice into forty-nine portions, which he ate as the food which was to support him, the god born in his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox on the 20th of March, for forty-nine days, till he rose on the fiftieth day, the 10th of May, as the newly-born emancipated sun-god, whose birth-history is told in the Nidanakatha. These forty-nine food portions answer to the forty-nine oblations offered after the sun-horse of the Ashva-medha sacrifice, the horse who takes the sun-god round the heavens on his annual course, had been started on his year-race, and after the national history told at this yearly spring festival of the New Year had been recited I.
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 1,2, 1, xiii. I, 3, 5, xiii. 4, 3, 2, 4; S.B.E., YOI. xliv. pp. 276, 2S2, notes I, 2, 361, 363.
   
473
When the rising-sun-god had eaten this meal he threw his golden bowl into the river, which bore it to the realm of the Kala Naga Raja, the snake-god of time, and took its place as the lowest of the bowls of the three previous year-gods of epochs, the gods of the three Buddhist heavens of the Sha- tum (hundred) Maharajaka Devaloko, the Tavatimsa heaven of the thirty-three gods ruled by Sakko and the Yama- devaloko, when the year was ruled by the sun after its entrance into the twin (Yamd) constellation Gemini at his first birth in Magh (January—February) as the sun- physician.
He then in his Vessantara birth in the fourth Tusita heaven of wealth (tuso), entered a grove of Sal-trees (Shorea robusta), his birth-trees, and spent the day there. He there received from Sotthya, the god of health (sotthi), the father of the sun-physician, eight bundles of Kusha grass. He took these to the Bo Pipal or Asvattha {Ficus religiosd) tree, the mother-tree succeeding the Kushika Banyan-tree. This was on a rising ground sacred to Durga, the mountain- goddess, the twin sister of Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- deva, and the counterpart of the Buddha as the son of the eight bundles of Kusha grass. He stood under the Bo-tree, facing the North, as the sun going northward. Thence he went round to the West, taking the left-hand path of the female Su-astika, whence he returned to the North looking southward, and came back to the West looking to the East, whence he was to rise at the equinox. He then scattered the grass on the East so as to form a seat fourteen cubits long, or the length of the lunar period intervening between him and his rising.
These eight bundles of Kusha grass were, in the orginal story, the eight rays of the eight-rayed star. In the birth- legend of the caste or guild of the Baidyas or physicians, the men of knowledge (<hudh:), they appear as the bunch of Kusha grass, which Galava placed in the lap of the mother of the race Bir-bhadra, the sainted (bhadra) wood, the central tree of the village grove. From this her son Dhanv-antari,
474
   
the internal (antari) flowing stream (dhanv), the ever-moving river of intellectual thought, was born as the first physician, the counterpart of the Buddha J. His father Galava, meaning in the Rigveda the pure Soma or Sap, is in Pali the tree Symplocus racemosa, called Lodh in Bengal. The bark when mixed with that of Hari-taka (.Terminalia chebula), a myrobolan tree allied to the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica), A1 (:morinda tinctovid) flowers of Dhowra (Grislea to- mentosa) and Munjlt {madder), forms the Ahur or red powder2 thrown by women on their lovers at the Huli festival, which ends at the full moon of Phalgun (February—March). Thus this bundle of Kusha grass, the eight-rayed star, is the traditional parent of the sun-god, begetting his successor in the month ending at the vernal equinox.
When the sun-god had seated himself on his eastern throne of the eight-rayed star he was attacked by Mara, the Pole Star tree (marom) ape, coming against him from the North, and stopping his Northward progress, heralded by the Vijayanuttara trumpet, that of the double (vi) victory (jaya) of the North (uttara), blown by Sakko, the wet-god of the South. Mara wished to make the new sun-god of the ecliptic year-circle the god of the vernal equinox of the age of the three-years cycle. He launched at him nine storms of (i) wind, (2) rain, (3) rocks, (4) lightnings, (5) charcoal, (6) ashes, (7) sand, ( mud, (9) darkness; the nine days of the cycle-year week. He then threw at him his sceptre-javelin, with “a barb like a wheel,” the spear of the god of the year of the wheel revolving like the fire-drill of the heavenly oil-press of the Chukra-varti, or wheelturning kings. This became the flower-garland of the goddess-mother of spring, which over canopied the new-born sun-god as he entered his Vessantara birth in the month of the vernal equinox as the year-god of the Tusita heaven of wealth, the god of the trading merchant kings, whose primitive villages had become ruling cities. This god, who
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal] Baidya, vol. i. pp. 46, 47.
2   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Indica, pp. 415, 416.
   
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puts to flight the armies of Mara, celebrated his birth by- making the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and by healing all diseases as the sun-physician z.
He began his year in Cheit (March—April) with the vernal equinox, to become, as we shall see in the account of his birth as Parikshit, the circling-sun of the Mahabha- rata, the white horse of the sun which entered Gemini at the vernal equinox about 6200 B.C. This was the year sacred to the twin children of the Vessantara god Jali, the net, and Kanha or Krishna Jina 1 2, that is, the conquering black (Kanhd, Krishna) goddess, the goddess Durga of the year of thirteen lunar months, the Pandavas year of Chapter VIII. This year, not measured by the sun, was that which the sun-god, spent on the Vanka-giri, or crooked mountain, and renounced his wife Maddi, the honey-queen, the sun- maiden Suria, to whom he had been married as Soma, the moon-god.
During the first seven days of his new year as the Vessantara god he sat under the Pipal-tree, and on the morning of the eighth day he went to the North-east, whence the sun rises at the summer solstice. He spent seven days standing steadfastly on this spot, and then between this and the Pipal-trec he made the walk running from South-west to North-east, known as the Path of Nineteen Steps of the Buddha. This is close to the Vajrasun or thunder-bolt (vajra) throne of the Buddha at Budh Gaya, the place of the holy Pipal-trec. Underneath the Vajrasun there were found a number of relics in gold, silver and precious stones. There arc nineteen gold relics and seventy-six, or 19 x 4, disks. In a small stupa, near the end of the Buddha’s walk, two small trays of relics were found, among which were nineteen lapis-lazuli beads and nineteen other precious stones 3.
1   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanahatha, pp. 96—104.
2   She is called Krishna Jina in llie form of ihc Buddhist birth-story given in Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism, pp. 180, 181.
J F. Tincott, ‘ The Vajrasun or Thunderbolt seal of the Mahabodhi Temple. ’
476
   
That these nineteen steps and the series of nineteen sacred objects were connected with the measurement of a year more alien in its forms to the solar years measured by zodiacal stars than the lunar year of thirteen months, seems to be proved by the year used by the Babis of Persia and by other evidence, which I will now record. The Babis are a new sect which arose in Persia in 1843 A.D., who claim to be recipients of special divine enlightenment and a new revelation. But they are clearly connected with and are probably a revival of the mystic schools of the Shia Mahommedans of Persia, whose year was, as we have seen, ruled by the twins Hasain and Hosain, the stars Gemini. The prophet who introduced this new faith called himself first the Bab or the Gate, that is the Gate of the Twin Stars, and afterwards Nukta or fount of inspiration, and with him were eighteen disciples, a number probably connected with the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., a year of 360 days. It began in the history of the Buddha, as we have seen, at the vernal equinox. Among the Babis the months are not divided into weeks, but there are in the year nineteen months of nineteen days each, and 361 days in all, one day more than the year of 360 days. The Babis cite the Koran as authorising their year, as in the sentence of the invocation beginning each chapter Bis- mi’llahi’r Rahmani’r Rahim there are nineteen letters, counting the r’s as one letter, and the total numbers of Chapters is 114= 19x6 *1
The nineteen days of the month of this year are represented in the astronomical temple of the British goddess Epona, the White Horse of the sun at Stonehenge. This is oriented to the North-east rising point of the sun of the summer solstice marked by the gnomon-stone called the Friar’s Heel. The shadow thrown by the sun rising behind this stone falls on the line intervening between it and the
Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, 1892, vol. i. pp. 247, 248.
1   E. G. Browne, ‘ The Babis of Persia.’ J.R.A.S., 1S89, pp. 921—923.
   
4 77
sun-circle. It is on this line that the sacrificial stone for the sacrifice of animal victims is placed. The sun-circle is formed by thirty lofty Sarsen stones, the produce of local quarries, joined in pairs to represent the thirty days of the month. Inside this is an older circle of thirty-six syenite stones brought from Dartmoor T, to indicate probably the thirty-six half-months of the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., which was, as we shall see, a year of the white sun-horse, and one of five-day weeks, like the first Pleiades and solstitial years and the year of Orion. To this have been added four Sarsen pillars to increase the number to forty, the forty months of the three-years cycle. To the South-west of the sun-altar of micaceous sandstone from Derbyshire, which is in the centre of the circle, is a semi-circle or horse-shoe of nineteen diorite stones, and behind them is the outer horse-shoe of fourteen Sarsen stones, each pair united by a lintel stone at the top. These represent the horse-shoes of the White Horse of the sun, drawn on so many of the chalk hills in the neighbourhood, the god worshipped with the bloodless rites of the earlier sun-god of Orion’s year.
These two horse-shoes clearly, like the other arrangements of the stones, indicate year measurements; the horse-shoes of fourteen paired stones must denote the fourteen days of the lunar phases of the year of thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days each, which preceded the year of twelve months of thirty days and denoted by the thirty stones of the outer circle, and the only year measurements belonging to the earlier age of the sun-horse of the diorite stones in which nineteen occurs is this year of the nineteen steps of the Buddha 1 2.
The correctness of this hypothesis as to the meaning of the nineteen diorite stones of Stonehenge is corroborated
1   Or perhaps by water up the Avon from the sacred diorite rocks of Britany.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Essay viii., pp. 138—144. When I wrote this description of Stonehenge, though I saw that the temple was connected with the worship of the Buddha, I had not yet grasped the fact of the connection between it and the Buddha’s nineteen steps.
478
   
by the stone circles of Cornwall, whence the diorite stones were brought, for there, near Boscawen and its neighbourhood in Cornwall, are four hundred circles, each of nineteen stones, which must apparently mean the months of the year of nineteen months of nineteen days eachI.
The third week of the birth of the Buddha as the sun-god, the last of the three seven-day weeks making the twenty-one- days month of the seventeen-months year of Chapter VIII., was spent in walking up and down the path of the nineteen steps. The fourth week he passed in a house built by the angels of the seven sacred jewels to the North-west of the Bo-tree, where he thought out the seven books of the Abid- hamma Pitaka, that is to say, organised the next year in this series, the first year of the seven-days week.
This fourth week was the last of the month of the lunar year of thirteen months, and at its end he left the Bo or Pipal-tree and went back to the Nigrodha or Banyan-tree, where he spent the fifth week in completing his task of thinking out the fundamental principles of his system of ethical religion.
He was there tempted by the three daughters of the evil angel Mara, originally the god of the winter season like the Zend Ahriman. They are called Tanha, Craving, AratT, Discontent, and Raga, Lust, and are parallel with the creating principles of the Sankhya philosophy, Tamas, Darkness, or the void ; Rajas, Desire ; and Sattwa, Completion 2. These creating-gods of the metaphysicians were the algebraic form of enunciating the proposition on which their system was based, that is to say, they believed, like Hegel, that nonexistence was stirred into activity by desire of a change, and that from the union of the two being was evolved. That is to say, in their views thought was the origin and measure of all things, and they ignored as inconceivable the underlying self or germ of the Vedantists, or rather they
1   Thurnam, on Megalithic Circles, Decade iv. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and edition, chap. v. p. 117.
2   Ballantyne, Sankhya Aphorisms of Kapil a, Book i., Aphorism 61, p. 71.
   
479
interpreted this self as aspiration. But to the Vedantists this germ was the sole reality, the Tao of the Chinese, the indwelling and ruling will, the Nameless Simplicity, which does nothing itself but drives round on the ordained path, Tao, the whole annually recurring succession of natural phenomena ; it is the inherent electric spark which makes life differ from death. In the words of the Chinese poet, the Tao or path charged with vital electricity is
Simplicity without a name Is free from all external aim,
With no desire, at rest and still All things go right as of their willz.
It was this driving-germ which was brought to earth by the rain, which generated in the mother-tree the fruit which was to rise to heaven as the sun emanating from the elephant- cloud-bird Gan-isha, and in analysis there seems to be no difference between the Sankhya Desire and the Vedantist Self.
It was these metaphysical cobwebs which were the temptations offered to the meditating Buddha, and he cast them aside as vain and frivolous, forbade his followers to enquire into the mysteries of philosophy, and bid them accept the fact that each of them existed, and was able by cultivating his moral being to make his existence on earth a blessing to all whom he or she influenced directly or indirectly during their lifetime, and to return the germ to the other world so consecrated as to be incapable of being defiled by sin in a future existence.
At the end of this fifth week of wrestling with philosophical tempters, he left the Banyan-tree and went to the first mother-tree of edible fruit before the consecration of the Syrian fig-tree. This was the Mucalinda-tree (Barring- tonia Acutangnla), the Ijul or Indian oak, flowering at the beginning of the rainy season, which had been the sacred oak of the Zends and Cymric Druids, the nut-tree of the Todas and Jews, and the walnut-tree of the witch-mothers. It was 1
1   Legge, The Texts of Taoism, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxxix. p. 26.
4 Bo
   
under this that he spent his sixth week. The seventh week completing the forty-nine days of his sustenance on the creating rice of the eight-rayed star-god and his period of Pentecostal preparation he passed under a Raja-yatana-tree (.Buchanonia latifolia), the Pyar or Chironji-tree, bearing a fruit like small almonds, eaten by all the forest-people of Central India. On the forty-ninth day he was fed by Sakko with the fruit of the Haritaka or Myrobolan-tree of Calculation, which was, as we have seen, one of the ingredients of the Huli red powder, sacred to the sun-god of the vernal equinox. He also received from Sakko as a tooth- cleaner and digestive the thorn of the Nagalata or Piper Betul, the Betul creeper, of which the nut is eaten as a digestive by all rice-eating Hindus.
When the sun-god had thus gained complete knowledge, mastered the arts of the astronomical calculation of time and the underlying principles which make spiritual perfection possible and attainable by every human being, he was visited under the Pyar almond-tree by two travelling merchants from the South, who were going North-west to the middle kingdom, Jambu-dwipa, who brought him a rice- cake and a honey-cake. Their names, Tapassu and Bhalluka, show them to represent the eight rays of the eight-rayed star; Tapassu represents the heated and heating-sun [tap). He is a form of Tapatl, the burning-one, the sun-maiden- mother of the Kurus, who was given by Vashishtha, the god of the altar-flame, as a wife to Samvarana, the king of the Bharatas, after Vashishtha had enabled him to overcome the ten Akshauhinis of the PanchalasT. Bhalluka is a form of the bear Bhalla, the Hindi Baluk, and represents the seven stars of the Great Bear, in short, they represent the eight gods of the eight-rayed star, of which the sun is the eighth. They are the two caskets called Tapas, Penance, and Diksha, Consecration, in which, according to the Brahmanas, the Soma or year-sap of the Gayatri metre of the year of the
1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xciv. pp. 280, 281. This is a variant form of the story of Kalmashapada the mad king, told in Chapter VI.
   
481
eight-days week was brought by the Shyena frost (Shy a) bird, called Su-parna or the feather of Su, from Krishanu, the rainbow-god, and given to Kadru, the tree (dm) of Ka, the tree-mother of the Nagas I.
It was these gods of the eight-rayed star who consecrated the sun-god as the ruler and teacher of the united races of Hindus, born of Northern and Southern parents, as sons of the rice-motlicr-cake inspired by the honey of the Northern prophets.
To receive this heavenly food of the rice-mother-sun, the Munda sun-bird, and the honey-eating bear of the North, the sun-god required a new bowl to replace the earthenware and golden bowls he had thrown away. To supply this the Loka-pala angels brought four day bowls of sapphire from the blue sky and four of the jet of night, and from these they made one bowl, said by Hiouen Tsiang to be of a deep blue colour and translucent2. From this bowl, the vault of heaven, the sun-god ate his Pentecostal meal on the eve of the fiftieth day after his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox, or about the 10th of May, when, as we shall see, his next year began, that described in Chapter VIII., the year following the year of the almond-tree.
He now in this last transformation ceased to be the man- god, for he tore all his human hair from his head and became the independent ruler of heaven and earth, whose unerring will was the law of all things.
But in order to fully understand the history of the installation of sun-worship as told in the birth of the Buddha, we must turn to that of his duplicate the circling-sun Parikshit of the Mahabharata. His father was Abhimanyu, the foremost (abhi) mind (;manyii), son of Arjuna and Su- bhadra, the mountain goddess Durga, twin-sister of Krishna. Abhimanyu became, as we are told in the Mahabharata, the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 2, 7—11 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 150, 151
2   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birtii Stories: The Nidduahatha, The Last Epoch, pp. 105—no; Beale, Buddhist Records of the Western World, The Travels of Hiouen Tsiang, vol. ii. p. 130.
482
   
moon-god when all the heroes of this historical poem became starsI. He was slain on the twelfth day of the final battle of eighteen days fought between the Kauravyas and Pan- davas, and his slayer was the son of Dusshasana2 3 4 *.
Dusshasana was a son of Dhritarashtra and brother of Duryodhana, who was, as we have seen, the ruling god of the eleven-months year. In the list of the eleven sons of Dhritarashtra, who ruled the months of this year, Dussha- sana’s name comes second after that of Duryodhana 3. Its four seasons were ruled by Duryodhana, Kama, Shakuni, the raven, and Dusshasana, the ill-omened (dus) son of the moon-hare (shasa), who ruled the autumn rainy season and counselled Drupadi to choose another husband^ when the Pandavas had lost their wealth in gambling with Shakuni, the summer raven of the hot season. This husband was to be Duryodhana, who sought to seduce her by showing his left thigh 5. As the god of the eleven-months year he was the god of the left thigh, and it was as the god of the two parent-thighs that he was slain in single combat by Bhima, the son of Maroti, the tree-ape, when he as selected champion of the Pandavas accepted the challenge of Duryodhana to decide finally by a duel to the death of one or other combatant, the contest in which the Kauravya army had been annihilated. In his challenge Duryodhana claimed to be the ruling god of the year, for he said, “ Like the year which gradually meets with all the seasons I shall meet with all of you in fight6.” The Pandavas represented the five seasons of the year, and Bhima was the god of the summer season ending with the summer solstice. It was this conquering god of summer who ended the war between the gods of the eleven-months and those of the solar-year by breaking
1   Mahabharata (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, iv. 19, p. 12.
2   Mahabharata Drona (Abhimanyu-badha) Parva, xlix. 13, 14, p. 147.
3   Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshavatarana) Parva, lxiii. p. 180.
4   Mahabharata Sabha (Anadyuta), Parva, lxxvi. pp. 202, 204.
s Mahabharata Sabha {Anadyuta) Parva, lxxi. p. 191.
6 Mahabharata Shalya (Gud-Ayudha) Parva, xxxii. 17, p. 127.

[Prometheus]

       48 3
both the thighs of Duryodhana and thus killing the leader of the age when time was reckoned by the fixed stars.
The wife of Abhimanyu, the moon-god, was Uttara, the North Pole Star sister of Uttara, the Polar constellation of the Great Bear, who was charioteer to Arjuna. After the final defeat of the Kauravyas and the death of Duryodhana, Ashvatthaman, the son of Drona, the tree-trunk, the god of the Ashvattha tree (Ficus religiosa) under which the Buddha defeated Mara and entered on his Vessantara birth, entered the camp of the Pandavas by night and slew all the sons of DrupadT, leaving the Pandavas without living heirs, as Abhimanyu had also been slain. Ashvatthaman when arrested by the Pandavas prepared a weapon for their final destruction in the creating blade of Kusha grass, which he threw into the wombs of the Pandava women as Galava threw the Kusha grass into the lap of Bir-bhadra, the mother of the sun-physician. This engendering grass begetting the sun-god liable to yearly death by the winter withering of nature was intended to cause the offspring of Uttara to belong to this class of dying gods, but Krishna frustrated this intention by declaring that he would raise again to life the dying child who would 'rule the world for a cycle of sixty years as Parikshit, the circling sun.
The contest between Ashvatthaman, the last year-god of the age of the mother-tree, and the Pandavas ended in his release on condition of his resigning to them the gem which made him ruler of heaven and earth1 2. This gem was the creative force residing in the year-god, who became henceforth the undying sun-god who made his yearly way round the heavens in the path of the ecliptic stars.'
Thus we see that the father and mother of Parikshit, the sun-god, were Soma, the moon-god, and the sun-maiden, the Pole Star goddess-bird, who was in the Vedic marriage hymn brought to the wedding by the Ashvins, the stars Gemini. The wedding in the Mahabharata is described
1   Mahabharata Shalya (Gut-Aytidha) Parva, lviii. p. 227.
2 Mahabharata Sauptika Parva, xiii. iS—22, xv. 27—35, xvi- 1—16, pp. 48, 52, 53-
I 1 2
484
   
as an alliance between the phallus-worshipping Matsyas, the sons of the river-fish, the eel-god, and the Bharatas, sons of the mother-sun-bird Saljuntala, and it took place after Arjuna, guided by Uttara his charioteer, had, under the banner of the ape with the lion’s tail, the meaning of which I have described in Chapter IV. p. 151, and VI. p. 329 *, recovered the cows of light from the Kauravyas. That the birth of the sun-god Parikshit born of this marriage was parallel with the Vessantara birth of the Buddha in the Tusita heaven of wealth is proved by the Mahabharata narrative. Before the birth took place the Pandava parent-gods of the coming year set forth to the South, the realm of Marutta, the ape-tree-god, under the constellation Dhruva pointing to the Pole, explained as that of Taurus in which RohinI Aldebaran was. Their camp was laid out with six roads and nine divisions, exactly on the model of the Chinese Central Sun Palace called the Hall of Distinction, representing the year which the Emperor opens by the Ploughing Festival2.
w
N
Tenth month Eleventh month Twelfth month
Tenth month '5
' ? S3
; I
5
•S
H   Eleventh month   Twelfth month
3
a
O
a

Sixth month   Fifth month   Fourth month
Fourth month
1   Mahabharata Virata (Vaivahika) Parva, lxxi., lxxii. pp. 181—185.
2   Legge, Li-chi, The Yueh Ling, Book iv., sect, i., part i. 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp. 251, note 1, 252.
df the Myth-Making Age.
485
In this historical diagram the corner squares each represent two, and the centre squares forming the equinoctial St. George’s cross, one of the twelve months, and the centre square the thirteenth month, to be described in Chapter VIII.
On their arrival at the south, that is at the winter solstice, when the sun was in Taurus, about 10,200 B.C., they offered sacrifices to the gods^of the Pole Star age, on an altar thatched with Kush a grass, including the three-eyed Shiva of the cycle-year. They there obtained the gold of the heaven of wealth they sought for in the gold-mines ot Southern India, which now appear to have been first worked, all the former gold being supplied by the river sands of Chutia Nagpur, and the hill streams of the Pamir Himalayas. They returned northwards by short inarches g arriving at the Kauravya city Hastinapur, the city of the Hasta or Pandava constellation Corvus, the modern Delhi, a month after the birth of Parikshit, that is at the end of Phalgun (February—March) at the vernal equinox1 2 3 4.
When Parikshit was first born as the child in the cradle of the Twins, he was lifeless, but was recalled to life by Krishna, the god of the year beginning January—February, and began his life in Phalgun (February—March) 3, when the Buddha was born under the Ashvattha-tree, that is when the sun was in Gemini in that month, about 8200 B.C. It was a week before the full-moon of Phalgun, when, according to the Brahmanas, preparations for the festival of the annual circuit of the heavens by the sun-horse were made 4, and according to the Mahabharata the horse Parikshit started on his course at the full-moon of Cheit (March—April), or about the 1st of April. But the race was begun in Phalgun (February—March), for Phalguna or Arjuna was appointed
1   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxiii., lxiv. pp. 164—171.
2   MahabhSrata Ashvamedha (Anugi(a) Parva, Ixx. 13, 14, p. 178.
3   Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxvi.—lxx., pp. 170—179.
4   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 4, 1, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 34S.
486
   
to attend Parikshit *. Parikshit is not named in the poem as the horse, but is spoken of as a man, but the horse that represented him is said to have had a head like a black antelope, and he was followed by Arjuna in a chariot drawn by white horses 1 2 3 4.   *
The course of the white sun-horse, as described in the
Mahabharata, was first to the North-west, the land of the
*
Trigartas, the place of the summer solstice, from thence it went to the South-west, through the country of Central India ruled by Bhagadatta, the god of the tree with edible fruit (bhaga). From the South it turned to the North-east to Manipur, in Assam, the land of the Naga races, which it reached as the Equinoctial states of the Eastern sun. It was here that Arjuna, who, as protector of the horse, had to meet and vanquish the rulers of the solstices and equinoxes whom he had to pass, was all but slain by his son Vabhru- vahana, son of Chitrangada, daughter of Chitra-vahana, King of Manipur, that is the offspring of the eleven-months year ruled by the star Chitra Virgo 3.
This contest, in which the Naga rulers of heaven tried to bring back the sun under the rule of the cycle-year, is exactly parallel with the Buddha’s fight with Mara at the same period of his year’s course. From the East the sun-horse went to Magadha, whence it returned to Hastinapur, where the sacrifice of the sun-horse took place at the full-moon of Cheit 4. The preparations for the sacrifice of the returning sun-horse, who began his year with the full-moon, and not with the new-moon of Bhishma, began to be made on the full-moon of Magh (January—February), or two months before the sacrifice. This took place fifteen days before the Fordicidia at Rome, when the blood of the October horse was offered. It is noteworthy that the circuit made by the horse as
1   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, Ixxxii., Ixxxiii. pp. 1S1—185.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Amigita) Parva, Ixxxii. 7, p. 184.
3   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, Ixxix., Ixxx. pp. 197—204, Adi (Arjuna-vanavasa) Parva, ccxvi., ccxvii. pp. 593—598.
4   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Amigita) Parva, lxxiv.—lxxxiv. pp. 185—213.
of the. Myth-Making Age.   487
described in the Mahabharata is not made sunwise, but contrary to the course of the sun of the summer solstice. This circuit of the horse of the eight-rayed star was therefore not that of the sun-god finally accepted as the fully emancipated ruler. This last circuit is that of the complete Buddha whose final installation I have described, and who ended his forty-nine days of sustenance on the rice of the golden bowl, about the 10th of May. He then became the sun-god described in the Buddhist birth-stories, who received his birth-offering from Su-jata at the full*moon of Vaisakha (April—May), or about May Day, and who began his year on the 15th of April, as the St. George of our national mythology, the sun-god born from the Easter egg when the sun was in Gemini at that date, or about 4200 B.C., the same epoch as when it was in Taurus at the vernal equinox. But before we reach that date there are other variant forms of the year to be described, and one of these, the year of eighteen months, introduced at the Horse sacrifice of Parikshit, will be the subject of Chapter IX.
In the history of the births of these sun-gods, the Buddha and Parikshit, we have a panoramic picture of the march of time from the age when the year began with the birth of the sun-god in the constellation Gemini at the winter solstice. This was about 12,200 B.c. But in tracing the stages of the successive births we must begin our retrospect before the Mahosadha birth of the Buddha as the sun-physician, which took place, as we have seen, about
10,200   B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in January— February, in the year he appeared at the New Year’s ploughing ceremony, and also before his Vessantara birth, coinciding with that of Parikshit, which took place about 8200 B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in the beginning of February—March. The original form assumed by this conception of the series of consecutive births was apparently, as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 332, the calendar reckoned by both Akkadian and Indian astronomers, which began the
488
   
year with the three months’ concealment of the sun- god, during which the infant sun was guarded by the moon-goddess, called by the Buddhists Gotann Mahapaja- pati, the first of the thirteen Theris ruling the thirteen months of the year, and the female form of Prajapati Orion. During these three months, reckoned in the Akkadian calendar as beginning in Kislev (November—December) and ending at the close of Sebet (January — February), time was measured by the track of the moon through the thirty stars. These three months were also those of the Hindu Ashtakas ending in the last fortnight of Magha (January — February) with the Ekashtaka, when the revealed sun-god, released from his dependance on his moon- nurse, was born “as the son of the majesty of Indra,” and started on his divine mission as the revealer of truth on his horse Kanthika, the star Pegasus, the second of the thirty stars. The three months which in this reckoning began the year of the thirteen Theris ignore the earlier phase of the history of this three months’ seclusion of the infant sun-god as they take no account of his Mahosadha birth in January—February, and place the Vessantara birth of the released sun-god at the close of February—March, or in the phase of the moon succeeding the birth of Parik- shit. The sun-god who emerged from obscurity at the New Year’s ploughing ceremony of January — February, must have begun his three months’ seclusion in October— November with the Deothan, or lifting up of Krishna on the nth of the bright half of Khartik (October—November)1. This is about the date assumed as the beginning of the three months’ trance of Cu-chulainn, who was, as we have seen, a sun-god whose strength lay in his left thigh, and who therefore in his first avatar was a god of the eleven-months year, who began his career by wedding, on the ist of November, Emer, the daughter of Forgall of the Gardens of Lugh, the home of the Southern sun, and who gained his bride
1 Elliot, Memoirs oj the Races of the North-Western Provinces of India, vol. i., Supplementary Glossary, Part il., Dithwan, pp. 245—247.
   
489
by killing twenty-four of her twenty-seven warders, the twenty-seven days of the month of the cycle-year. Three of them, Scibur, Ibur and Cat, Emer’s brethren, he allowed to escape. The contest, in which the sun-god appeared after his three months’ trance as the warrior sun-god, seventeen years old, was that waged for the possession of the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, hidden in Glenn Samaisce, the Heifer’s Glen in Slieve Gullion in North-east Ulster. Ailill, the Welsh Ellyll, the dwarf, and Medb or Meave, who ruled Connaught and the Western home of the setting sun, wished to add this eighth solar animal, the bull of the rising sun of the summer solstice, to the seven they already possessed : the two sun-rams, two sun-horses, two sun-boars owned by them both, and the white horned-bull of Ailill born from Meave’s cows. Daire Mac Fachtna, the guardian of the brown bull, refused to lend it to Mcavc, and she and Ailill determined to take it by force. She summoned to her aid, among others, her sons, the seven Maine, of whom, though seven are mentioned, six only are named in the Ta’in Bo’ Cuailgne, Maithrcmail, Aithremail, Cotageib Ule, Mingor, Morgor and Conda or Maine, Mo’-epert, leaving out Milscotliach or Honey Bloom, and Andoe, which appear in the list of the Maine of the eight-days week. The war was for the possession of the eighth Maine, the Brown Bull, rising in the North-east.
The chief opponent of the advance of the armies of the setting sun was Cu-chulainn, who contended single-handed against them. It was during this contest that his three months’ seclusion took place, after he had been nearly slain by the arts of the Morrigu, the sea (mnir) mother, the goddess Bahu, who appeared, while he fought with Loch More, as a white red-eared heifer, the star RohinI (Alde- baran) of Orion’s year, an eel, the mother of the sons of the rivers of the year of six-day weeks; and the wolf sun- mother-goddess. The wounds she got in this combat were healed by the three draughts of milk Cu-chulainn took- from her, and it was after this reconcilement with the
490
   
Southern mother of life and of the sun of the winter solstice that Cu-chulainn’s trance of regeneration began. He was put to sleep by a man-god in a green mantle, coming from the North-east, and his sleep lasted “ from the Monday before Samhain, the 31st of October, to the Wednesday after the feast of St. Bridget,” the 1st of February, or during the months of October—November, November—December, December—January. It was during this time that his corps of boy-warriors, the companions of the old sun-god of the Pole Star age, were destroyed by the hosts of the West. After awaking from his trance he mounted his scythed chariot, threw off his mantle of invisibility, and appeared as the warrior sun-god clothed in a deer-skin garment, the Hindu sacred skin of the black antelope-god Krishna, the eighth son ofVasudeva. As the revived sun- god he slew the twenty-seven sons of Calatin, the twenty- seven days of the months of the cycle-year. We are told that after Cu-chulainn’s victories, and the death of Ailill’s white horned-bull, slain by the brown bull of the rising sun, Ailill and Meave sent messengers to the astrologers of Alba (East Europe) and Babylon to learn the magical arts by which they could destroy Cu-chulainn, a tradition which adds further evidence to that furnished by the mythology of the Irish and Welsh Celts in proof of the continual emigration to Western Europe of Indian and Eastern theology and astronomical methods of measuring time *.
H.   Patroclus as a year-god of this year.
Before closing the list of sun-physicians the gods of this year, I must call attention to the historical evidence furnished by the story of Patroclus. He was one of the sun-physicians, for it was he who tended and cured Eurupulos, when besought by him as one skilled in medicine to heal his wound inflicted
1   Hull, The Cucliitllin Saga, pp. 60, S3, 114, 115, 119, 157, 164—168, 170— 174, 1S2, 236 ; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. ii. pp. 137, 138, iv. pp. 366, 367.
   
491
by the arrow of Paris, which afterwards slew the sun-god Achilles, by piercing his heel, his only vulnerable part1. Eurupulos, whose name means the wide gate, is said to have been the son of Poseidon, married to Sterope, the daughter of Helios the sun, so he is one of the husbands of the sun- maiden. He was a creating-god of this year, for he gave a clod of earth to Euphemus, who threw it into the sea, where it became the island Kallisto, the most beautiful, that of the Great Bear goddess of the same name, also his connection with the gate marks him as one of the Twins. Patroclus took the arms of Achilles when the sun-god of the Naga worshippers of the serpent Echis, from which Achilles derived his name, was obscured by the mule race of lunar- solar gods. As the sun-god of that epoch, the equivalent of the sun-gods Kama, Perseus, Sigurd, he wore the impenetrable coat of mail, and the helm of awning, the cap of invisibility. These were the arms given to Achilles by Cheiron, the Centaur, but he could not wield the ashen spear which Cheiron gave Peleus, the god of the potter's clay. This was the world’s ash-tree Ygg-drasil, the supporting pole of the heavens, and the fire-drill turned by the Master Potter, the ape-father-god of the Thigh. Instead of this he bore two spears, the two lunar crescents2.
He was slain by Apollo, the Mouse-god, who came behind him in a mist, struck him between the shoulders, and knocked his sun-helmet, the kuncc (/ewer)) or helmet of the dog-star Sirius, which ruled his year with its mid-day in the dog-days. This was assumed by Plector his successor 3. His death is precisely similar to that of Sigurd, who wore, like Patroclus, armour impenetrable in front but vulnerable behind. Sigurd was killed, like Patroclus, by a blow dealt by Hagen, the god of winter, from behind between his shoulders. The most noteworthy part of the story of Patroclus is the establishment of the races and games which were held at his funeral. These funeral games were, according to tradition,
* llunicr, Iliad, xi. 821—S48. 3 I’bid., xvi. 790—800
* Ibid., xvi. IJ5—144.
492     oj the Myth-Making Age.
instituted by Acastus, the husband of Hippolyte. Her name, meaning she who is released from horses, describes her as the moon-goddess ruling the year, and making her own way through heaven without being drawn by the star-horses which drew the chariots of the sun-gods, the stars of day, Krishna and Achilles. She falsely accused Peleus, the father of Achilles, of attempting to violate her, an accusation which, as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 340, note 1, was made against other ruling-gods of the eleven-months year. Acastus, by his name, shows his affinity with the physicians, for it means he who cuts with the knife (a/e?, that is, with the crescentshaped knife of the male moon-god, the god of the crescent new-moon, who was husband of the full-moon, who before the lunar age had been the year-sun-bird of the Pole Star god.
I shall prove in the next Chapter that it was at this epoch of the close of the year of eight-day weeks that the national chariot races inaugurating the year of the independent sun- god were instituted.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE YEARS OF SEVEN-DAY WEEKS AND SEVENTEEN AND
THIRTEEN MONTHS.
HE year of seventeen months succeeded, as we are told
in the Brahmanas, the fifteen-months year. It is one of five seasons, in which both new and full-moon sacrifices were offered, and the year-fires lighted at its commencement must be kindled not with fifteen, as in the fifteen-months year, but with seventeen or twenty-one kindling verses K In the ritual of this year sacrifices were offered in libations, and its duration of seventeen months is first ritualistically attested in the invocations to the five seasons made at the opening sacrifice of the year. The summonses to the season- gods called to these sacrifices contain, as the Brahmanas point out, seventeen syllables, for Prajapati, the year-god, “is seventeen fold/’ and they end with the vashat or varshat call for rain (var) ; so that it is a year-offering with a festival of which the presiding deity is the rain-god 1 2. The number seventeen is also brought prominently forward in the chants of the ritual of the Vajapeya festival with which the year opens. The first ceremony performed outside the sacrificial ground was that summoning the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, by the Bahish-pavamana Stotra. This, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 392, consisted of three Gayatrl triplets, each of twenty-four syllables, so that the whole contained seventy- two syllables, the number of five-day weeks in the year. To the nine lines of this invocation eight are added at the
 
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 3, 5, io, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 97, 98.
2   Ibid., i. 5, 2, 16—20; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 142—144 ; Ilewitt, Kitting Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 165, note 6.
494
   
Vajapeya festival, so as to make the whole hymn contain seventeen lines. Similarly the midday chant Madhyandina- pavamana is increased from fifteen to seventeen verses, and the Arbhava-pavamana, the special chant of this festival, is one of seventeen versesB Also the last chant at the Vajapeya evening sacrifice, called the Brihat-stotra or hymn of Brihati, the goddess of the five-days week, has the same number of verses 1 2 3. Similarly the SamidhenI stanzas of the kindling hymn used at the animal sacrifices of this year are increased from eleven, the number of the stanzas of the Apr! hymns of the original animal burnt-offering, to seventeen by adding nine tristubh verses of eleven syllables each to the original eleven Gayatri stanzas of twenty-four syllables each 3. The two hundred and sixty-four syllables in the hymn of eleven Gayatri stanzas, when added to the ninety-nine tristubh syllables, make up a total of three hundred and sixty-three syllables, the number of days in the eleven-months year. Hence, though this year follows in time the fifteen-months year, we see that it was looked on as a ritualistic descendant of the eleven months, both being years of the sun-horse.
It is a year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each, divided into three seven-day weeks, making a total of three hundred and fifty-seven days, and, by adding a week to this, the three hundred and sixty-four days of the lunar-year of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each was completed, and this year, as we shall see, existed simultaneously with the ritualistic year of Prajapati. That the month of this year was one of twenty-one days is proved by the twenty- one verses of the morning hymn sung at the Keshava-panlya or ceremonial hair-cutting of the king, performed as part of the ceremonies of this year on the full-moon of Jaistha
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, n ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 8, note i.
2 Ibid., v. i, 2, 19; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. n, note I.
3 Ibid., i. 4, 1, 7—39, vi. 2, 1, 22—24; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 102, note I— 113, vol. xli. p. 167, note 1.
1*
       495
(May—June), about the first of June, a year after his coronation 1.
This hymn, called the Uktha-stotra of twenty - one Ukthyas2 3 4, is that addressed to the rising or shining (ukh) sun, symbolised in the gold plate with twenty-one knobs, which the sacrificer puts on when he, as the charioteer of the sun who watches its course round the heavens, carries during his initiation (Diksha) as the symbolic sun, the fire in the firepan, round the sacrificial ground from the North-east point of the rising sun of the summer solstice to the South-east, where the sun rises at the winter solstice 3.
A. The ritual of the making of the fire-pan (Ukha) and the birth from it of the sun-god.
The whole of the ritual of the making and consecration of the fire-pan {Ukha) is significant, as it tells by ritualistic reproductions of past beliefs a great deal of the history of this year. The preparations for making the fire-pan begin with the full-moon of Phalgun (February—March), the full-moon beginning the year about the 1st of March. Then a white hornless goat is offered to Prajapati with a silent service, and the fire for the sacrifice is lighted with seventeen or, as is said further on, twenty-one kindling verses. On the eighth day after the full-moon, about the 8th of March, the sacrificer begins to collect the earth for making the fire-pan which is to be consecrated at the new-moon, that is at the beginning of Cheit (March— April) 4. The sacrificer contemplated in this ritual is almost certainly the Patesi or priest-king of this epoch, who was, as at Girsu and in Egypt, the national High-Priest. But he, like all primitive rulers, was, unless he had exceptional
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 5, 3, 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 126, note 2 —127.
2   Ibid., xii. 2, 2, 6 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 150, 151.
3   Ibid., v. 1, 7, 3, 1,9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 277, 2S0.
4   Ibid., vi. 2, 2,7, S, 18—22, 23—27, 30; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 174, 179, 180, 181, 182.
496
   

[Prometheus]

496
   
force of character, scarcely a free agent. He was bound in the fetters of ritual and custom, and could only act in strict accordance with precedent and rule, being most carefully watched by his counsellors, who, like the Spartan ephors, kept the king in the straight course marked out for him. The lump of clay of which the fire-pan is to be made is dug with a spade made of the hollow female bamboo, the supposed wife of the Ahavamya or libation-fire, to the north of which it is placed at a cubit’s distance before being used. The clay is sought for by the help of the three animals who had been symbolic rulers of time: the sun- horse, the ass of Pushan and the Ashvins, and the Pole Star he-goat. They are led eastward from the Ahavaniya when in search of the clay. They find it on the eastern side of an ant-hill, the emblem of the mother-mountain, and the horse is made to step on it1. The sacrificer digs up this lump and puts it on a lotus leaf, sacred to Indra as the growing water-plant, a plant-parent of the sons of the rivers. This is placed on a black antelope skin and addressed in three Gayatrl stanzas of seventy-two syllables2 3 4, as consecrated by the Atharvans as their son, the sun-priest Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year, and Pathya, the sun-bull, who makes his annual journey (pathi) through the ecliptic star-path of the sun 3. He takes the clay in the black antelope skin to the fire, where he moistens it with the resin of the Palasha-tree (Butea frondosa), and mixes it with goat’s hair, thus consecrating it to the parent- tree and star-gods of the Pole Star age 4. He dedicates the clay which is to make the bottom of the pan to Makha, the fighting god of the head of the sun-horse, and makes it four square. The fire-pan thus made is consecrated at the new-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vi. 3, i, 25—30, vi. 3, 2, 1—10, vi. 3, 3, I—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 197—200, 203—206, 207.
2   Rg. vi. 16, 13, 14, 15.
3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vi. 4, 2, 1—5, vi. 5, 1, 1—4 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 217, 218, 229, 230.
4   Ibid., vi. 5, 2-i ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 233 ff.
of the Myth-M,aking Age.
497
moon of Cheit (March—April). Inside it is placed a layer of powdered hemp (Cannabis Indica), the inspiring bhang or hashish used by the Athravans or fire-priests of the Zendavesta, which is covered with a layer of powdered Munja or sugar-cane grass, of which the Brahmins’ year- girdles are made. He puts it on a fire lit with thirteen kindling sticks, the thirteen months of the alternative measurement of this yearx.
When the fire-pan is ready, the sacrificer sews the gold plate with twenty-one knobs into a black antelope skin, and hangs it round his neck with a triple hempen cord so that it hangs over his navel. He then places the fire inside the fire-pan on a throne (asandz) made of Udumbara wood (Ficus glomerata) covered with treble cords of reed grass and smeared over with clay, and carries the pan in a net, the star net of the zodiacal year. And this throne, with its four feet and four sides, the netting and sling of the gold plate, the pan-fire and the gold plate itself signify, as the author of Brahmana expressly tells us, the thirteen months of this year 1 2 3 4. The sacrificer first stands with his face to the North-east and afterwards to the South-east, where the sun rose at the summer and winter solstices, and invokes the gods of the two solstitial seasons 3.
The sun thus born is the. sun Hiranya-garbha, he of the golden (hzrauya) womb (garbha), born of fhe twenty- one and seventeen kindling verses of this year’s new-year fires 4. He represents a different aspect of the Deity from that conveyed by the name Hiranyahasta, the god of the golden hand [hasta), the sun-god of the five-day weeks, born of the bounteous giver (Puramdhi), the Soma cloud- bird, and the sexless father of the Pole Star age 5. This
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bru/i., vi. 6, i, 23, 24, vi. 6, 3, 7, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 251, 252, note 1, 25S—260.
2   Ibid., vi. 7, 1 —19, 2S ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 265—269, 272.
3   Ibid., vi. 7, 2, 1, 9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 272, 2S0.
4   Ibid., vi. 2, 2, 3—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 172.
s Rg. i. 116, 13, iv. 27, 2, 3.
Iv k
498
   
sun-god Hiranya-garbha is also the son of Prajapati, called Kumara, the ninth of his forms T, the sun-god of the fire- altar, symbolised in the year-plan of nine divisions, illustrating, as explained in Chapter VII. p. 484, the thirteen-months year of India and China.
The eighth of these successive forms, of which Kumara is the ninth, is Ishana, that is to say the son of the god Isha or Gan-isha, who, as we have seen, entered the womb of the mother of the Buddha when he was conceived as the sun- physician. This eighth god is thus the son of Gan-isha, and his predecessor, the seventh form of the creator of time, was Mahan Deva, the moon-god, the male crescent moon Soma, Hence in this descent Kumara, the boy, is the equivalent of Rahulo, the little Rahu, the son of the Buddha as the sun- physician, and of the eleventh Then, the mother-goddess of the eleven-months year, called Bhudda Kaccana, the golden saint, that is the mother with the golden womb.
This young sun-god of the nine forms is the god of the year of Solomon’s seal of nine divisions formed by the union of two triangles enclosed in a circle. This was stolen from him by Sakhr, the wet (sak) god, king of the White Jinn dwelling in the North and owning the sun-mare, the equivalent of Sigurd’s Grani. This god of the North came Southward to fight the black Jinn of the South, the sun-fish Salli-manu or Solomon, and to slay him in his winter house. He found the sun-god, the young sun born at the winter solstice, absent, and his kingdom was ruled by Aminah, the faithful, the moon-nurse of the young sun- god, during his journey through the thirty stars. While Sakhr, who stole the year-ring from Aminah, usurped his throne, Solomon, the young sun-god, wandered as a beggar, like the outcast sun Odusseus, and became cook to the king of Ammon, who was, as we have seen, Nahash the Great Bear constellation. He eloped with Na’uzah, the king’s daughter, the morning-star, and when boiling a fish found 1
 
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brahvi. 1, 3, 8—20; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 159, 160.
   
499
inside it his year-ring, which Sakhr had thrown into the sea and which the fish had swallowed r. This year-ring of the fish-sun-god rising from the constellation Pisces has become the Fisherman’s ring of marriage placed on the finger of each Pope at his consecration and broken at his death. The magic sign of nine depicted on it is the topmost keystone of the vaulted temple of eight sides, the Pantheon of the ruling god of time, the heaven’s vault, symbolised on the last begging bowl of the Buddha who had become immortal and omnipotent as the never-dying sun who pursues his course through the heavens without resting or delegating his powers to a succcessor reborn from him each year. The sign of the interlocked triangles of Solomon’s seal is a sacred symbol on monuments of the Bronze Age1 2 3, and must date from the epoch of this year, which began, as we have seen, with the ncw-moon of Cheit (March—April) at the vernal equinox, when the sun was in Gemini, the ruling constellation of this age, that is about 6200 B.C. This is the ' Masonic sign of the Royal Arch.
B. The Vajapcya sacrifice of this year.
The Vajapeya sacrifice, which gives us the fullest account of the history of this year, is said in the Brahmanas to be that offered by the supreme centre ruler of a circle of subordinate kings 3. Hence it is one instituted at a late period of national development, when confederacies of small states, formed by the union of united provinces and villages governed by the iron discipline of their hereditary rules and customs, were controlled by a supreme lawgiver who maintained peace and regulated trade over a large area, such as those of the seven united kingdoms of India with Jambu-dwipa in the
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘ The Adventures of Balukeya,’ p. 263; ‘The Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,’ vol. i. p. 3S, note 6, ‘Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,’ vol. x. p. 49, note 2 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., p. 295 ff.
2   Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. x. p. 378.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 1, 2, 13, 14; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 4.
500         '
centre and the seven of Tran with the centre in Elam Shu- shan, called in the Zendavesta Hvaniratha, the land of light or KhvanlrasJ. The conception of these seven kingdoms 1 is one belonging to this age, when seven first became the time unit.
According to the account of the installation of the conquering sun-god, the universal ruler as given in the Brahmanas, the control of this year was retained by Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, who appointed Savitri, the sun-god, as his working representative, the supreme impeller (pra-savitri) 2 3 4 5 of this year of Prajapati {Orion'). The first special ceremony inaugurating the birth of this imperial year was the drawing of the five Vajapeya cups for its five seasons. These are the | five cups of the evening libation. At it was chanted the ! Arbhava pavamana Stotra of seventeen verses in the five j metres, Gayatrl, Kakubh, Ushnih, Anushtubh, and Jagati, all of which, as we have seen, represent time measurements. Thus this year was conceived to be one uniting and making use of all previous epochs 3 under the rule of Indra the eel- god parent of the sons of the rivers.
These five cups or seasons are called in the ritual of the Madhyandlna or Mid-day Soma feast, the Shukra, Manthin, Agrayana, Marutvatlya, and Ukthya. They are specially connected with Indra, who is summoned first to the sacrifice. The Shukra cup is called after him as the cup of the god Sak, and it and the Manthin cup are said in the Brahmanas to be offered to the gods Shanda and Marka 4. These, as I have shown elsewhere, mean the crescent and full-moon 5, the moons sacred to this year, and the course of the year signified by these five cups is marked by the third cup, the Agrayana, which is that of the firstfruits offered at the end
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendtdad Fargard, xix. 39; Farvardin Yasht, xxviii. ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 216, notes 1 and 6, xxiii. p. 220, note 1.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., v. 1, 1, 4, 15, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 2, 5.
3 Ibid., iv. 3, 3, 2, iv. 2, 5, 21, 22; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 315, note 2, 332.
4 Ibid., iv. 2, 1, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 278, 279.
5   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 243, 244.
   
501
of the rainy season, and the cup of the autumn season ending with the winter solstice on the last day of the month Agrahan (November—December).   Thus these five cups
denote a year of five seasons, beginning with the Shukra or hot season, followed by the Manthin the rains, Agrayana the autumn, Marutvatiya the winter, and the cup of the shining (nktha) sun the spring. The New Year’s cups of this year celebrate the victory of Indra or Shukra over the Vritra or enclosing snake in the contest with the Ahishuva or swelling cloud-serpent described in Chapter VII, p. 431. In this battle he was accompanied by the seven Maruts, the seven star-mothers of the Great Bear to whom the Marut- vatTya cup of winter is offered in the services, and it was after his victory that the cup of the victorious spring-sun, called the Mahendra cup of the Great Indra, was offered 1.
It is after the offering of these five cups to the gods of the seasons of the year that the most distinctive part of the Vaja- peya ceremonies begins. Two mounds were raised in the Soma consecrated ground, one at the West and the other at the East end of the Soma cart placed in the centre of the space thirty-six steps long, from East to West between the Sadas, the priest’s house and the Uttara-vedi. The Adh- varyu, the ceremonial priest, places himself between the cart and the West mound looking westward, and the Neshtri priest of Tvashtar god of the year of two seasons, and of the female mother-goddesses between the cart and the East mound looking eastwards. The Neshtri is directed to buy Parisrut, apparently the rice-beer usually drunk by the Mundas and other aboriginal and semi-aboriginal races, for a piece of lead from a long-haired man of the primitive tribes who had not cut his hair according to the orthodox Soma tonsure, which required all the hair except the top- knot or pig-tail to be shaved. He and the Adhvaryu offer together one after the other seventeen cups, the Adhvaryu offering cups of the orthodox Tryashira mixture of Indra,
Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 3, 3, 1—19 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp 331—340.
502
   
made of milk, sour milk, barley and running water, and the Neshtri cups of Parisrut or Sura. The Soma cups are offered above and the Sura below the axle, and the cups after being offered are placed on the West and East mounds. The whole number of thirty-four cups is said to be a sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of the months of the eleven-months year, and to Prajapati, the god of this year, the thirty-fourth god 1 of the sun-horse, whose thirty-four ribs were offered, as we shall see directly, at the Ashvamedha sacrifice 2 3.
Thus the ritual of the Vajapeya and of this seventeen- months year is clearly deduced from the previous year of eleven months, and it is intended as a means of consolidating a reconcilement between the unorthodox worshippers of the gods of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers of the year of fifteen months. That this union between the Ivathi or Hittites of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers of that of fifteen months was accomplished by the men of this epoch, is proved by the initial sacrifices in the orthodox ritual of the4 Soma sacrifice to the sun-god, the crowning sacrifice of Hindu theology. These are a cake on eleven potsherds for Agni and Vishnu, and rice gruel for Aditi and her eight sons, including the eighth, the Martanda, or dead egg, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 425, the sexless sun-god Bhishma 3. These are offered with the seventeen kindling verses appropriate to this year, and they are uttered in the low whisper with which Prajapati was addressed before the chants of the later ritual were introduced.
The horse-sacrifice, described in the Rigveda is the same as that offered at the Vajapeya festival opening this year. In the hymn depicting it we are told that thirty-four ribs are to be cut from the horse answering to the thirty-four
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, io—iS ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 8—n ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric limes, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 242.
2   Rg. i. 162, 18.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. I, 3, 1—6 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 12, 13.
   
503
cups of Soma and Sura offered in the Vajapeya ritual. Also the Vedic horse-sacrifice begins with the offering of a goat to Indra and Pushan, the latter being the god called Praja- pati in the Brahmana ritual. Also the sacrifices are conducted by seven priests and there arc seven gods invoked in the Vedic hymn,t the gods of the seven days of the week of this year. These gods Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, Ayu, Ribhuksan and the Maruts, are the counterparts of the Brahmana gods to whom the Arbhava Pavamana is chanted. These are Indra, his two horses, Pushan, Sarasvati, Mitra, Varuna1. Also the Vedic ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse is further proved to be especially connected with this year for the hymn describing it, Rg. i. 162, is one of the series of twenty- four hymns, Rg. i. 140—164, the twenty-four days of the months of the fifteen-months year, ascribed to Dirgha-tamas, the long darkness (.tamas), father of Kakshlvat, the year-god of the eleven-months year, and the Apr! hymn in this collection is of thirteen instead of the eleven stanzas of the other Apn hymns.
After the offering of the thirty-four cups at the Vajapeya sacrifice, the Adhvaryu draws a cup, called the Madhu-graha or honey-cup, in a golden vessel, the golden bowl given to the Buddha by Sujata, and places it among the Soma cups, and then he offers the Ukthya and Dhruva cups. These are the cups of the shining sun (;uktha) and the steadfast Pole Star 2 3. These cups in the full Soma sacrifice to the sun-god of the twelve-months years are the eighth and ninth 3 of the ten cups offered, of which the tenth and last is that offered to the Ashvins, the stars Gemini. They, as we have seen in Chapter VII. pp. 391, 392, were first made partakers of Soma at the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya, and their cup is called the Madhu-graha, or honey-cup
1 Rg. i. 162, 1—3, 5—iS; Eggeling, Sat. Brcih., iv. 2, 5, 22; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 315.
- Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. i, 2, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. II.
3 Ibid., iv. 2, 3, 1—18, iv. 2, 4, 1—24; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 292—305.
5C4
   
of which they got the secret from Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year T.
There is a further and very significant ceremony connected with this honey-cup of the Ashvins. The Adhvaryu and sacrifice^ took it out and gave it to one of the chariot drivers in the chariot-race that followed the sacri- fice, either a Vaishya or trader or a Rajanya or warrior. As soon as he received it the Ncshtri stepped round from the East of the Soma cart and gave him all the seventeen Sura cups in exchange for it, and then took it back to the Adhvaryu. This ceremony shows the consummation of the union between the earlier aboriginal and semi- aboriginal races and the northern worshippers of the white horse of the sun 2.
In the ritual of the sacrifice the offering of victims follows that of the libation cups. These are a he-goat to Agni, with a chant of twelve stanzas. Two he-goats to the Ukthya god Indra-Agni, with fifteen stanzas, and two he-goats and a ram, with sixteen chants to Indra, and these included a record of earlier time reckonings in the twelve stanzas for the twelve months of Orion’s year, and the fifteen and sixteen recall the year of fifteen-months and eight-day weeks.
To these six victims, the gods of the early six-days week, is added the seventh, the special Vajapeya victim, a goat offered to Sarasvati, the river-mother-goddess with the Vajapeya hymn of seventeen stanzas. The last victim offered in this series of sacrifices is ^a spotted barren cow offered to the victorious Maruts, the seven Maruts, the mother-stars of the Great Bear, who rejoiced over the victory of their son, the newly-installed sun-god, whose victory extinguished their rule 3. Finally, seventeen grey he-goats are offered to Praja- pati 4. The year-god Prajapati, to whom these victims are offered, is, as we are specially told in the Brahmanas, the god
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. i, 5, 16—18 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 276, 277,
2   Ibid., v. 1, 5, 28 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 29.
3   Ibid., v. I, 3, 1—3, iv. 4, 2, 17, iv. 5, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 11—13, xxvi. p. 36S, note 2—370, 397, note 2, 398.
4   Ibid., v. 1, 3, 7—12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 14—16.
   
505
called Ka or Who. This is the name given to Prajapati, the creator of all things, in each of the ten stanzas of Rg. x. 121, the Vedic hymn showing the deepest sense of the mystery of creation and of its unknown author. It is repeated in the offering and initiatory formulae of the ritual of the worship of this father-god of the young sun Hiranya- garbha, born of the golden womb z. The inner meaning of the name given in this later ritual to the god who was once the sun-deer Orion is explained in a parable telling us that the key to the mystery is given in the Arka or Shining (ark) plant (Calotropis gigantea). The teacher explains that in this plant is the hidden soul of life from which all things are born conveyed to it by the wind and the rain. This is the germ of life which, though unseen, invisible and intangible, is the unknown power whence the living-fire Agni is produced to create plants, animals and men. This divine being is known by the name of Ka who, and it is to him as Vayu Niyutvat, the shut-in wind, the bearer of the Ka, that the white goats are sacrificed in this ritual 1 2 3. The victims offered are bound to an eight-sided sacrificial post seventeen cubits long, showing that it represents a year of seventeen months ; for, according to the Brahmana, the length of the stake and of the sacrificer’s year should coincide, and a thirteen-cubits stake is prescribed for the thirteen-months year, and fifteen for that of fifteen-months 3. It has a head-piece of a cake made of wheaten dough. The sacrificer and his wife, who is robed by the Neshtri in a skirt made of Kusha grass, ascend the post by a ladder, and proclaim from the top that they have become Prajapati’s children through their union with the sacred creating-wheat 011 the top of the post. The sacrificer then receives seventeen bags of salt wrapped in the leaves of the Ashvattha-tree (Ficus religiosa). He then descends and sits, while the sacrifice is being offered, on an
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah.> vi. 2, 2, 5, 12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 173, 176.
2   Ibid., X. 3,4, 2—5; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 333—336-
3   Ibid., iii. 6, 4, 24—26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 166, 167.
5o6      
Udumbara [Ficus glomerata) throne, over which a goat-skin is spread J.
C.   The Chariot-races of the sun-god of this year.
After the sacrifice of the victims the chariot-race is run. The sacrificer yokes to the chariot first two horses, yoking the right-hand horse first; to these he adds a third beside the right-hand horse and a fourth in front as leader, and offers seventeen platters of gruel made of wild rice to Brihaspati, the Pole Star god 1 2 3.
In the ritual for the consecration of the race-course it is ordered that seventeen drums are to be placed along the edge of the altar, and that an archer of the Rajaniya or warrior caste is to shoot seventeen arrow ranges from the Northern edge of the Uttara Vedi or Northern altar between the Utkara, the mound formed by the earth dug out in constructing the altar and the Chatvala pit, whence the Ashvins were invited to drink Soma with the gods. These are both to the North-east of the consecrated Soma ground, and hence the race-course was to lie to the North-east of the pillar, which, like that at Stonehenge, marks the rising point of the sun of the summer solstice, and this is exactly the position of the old race-course at Stonehenge. At the end of the range of the seventeenth arrow the archer planted a branch of the Udumbara-tree [Ficus glomerata), of which   the sacred plough and the house-pole   of the Sadas
or house   of the gods in the Soma ground   were made.   It
was round this goal that the sacrificer’s chariot and the sixteen four-horse chariots accompanying it were to race. While the race was being run a Brahmin was to stand on a cart-wheel placed on a post as high as his navel near the altar, and to chant the prescribed hymn while the wheel was made to revolve sunwise 3. Thus the race was to represent
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 2, X, I—25 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 29—36.
Ibid., v.   1, 4, 1—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 19—22.
3 Ibid., v.   1, 5, 1—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 22, note 1,   23,   note I, 24,   note
I, 25, note 1.
   
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the contest between the months of the year marking the annual course of the sun going from the South-west to the t North-east between the winter and summer solstice, and returning from the North-east position of the summer solstitial sun to its winter home.
A complete parallel to this race, but one in which the year is measured by seasons and not by months, is to be found in the chariot-race at the games instituted by Achilles at the funeral of Patroclus. Patroclus, as I have shown in Chapter VII. p. 490, was the sun-physician, and he was followed at his death by the sun-god of the new year and epoch which was to succeed him. It is the contest for precedence as the ruler of the opening season of this year of five seasons which is depicted in the chariot-race described by Homer1. There are five champions contending each for his own season among the season cups, and these seasons are not the European seasons of Greece, but those of India, whence this as well as so much more of the Greek mythology was derived. These were: I. Eumelus, son of Admetus, called Hades Admetos (atSys a8grjTos), the untamed god of the lower world, whose wife Alkestis, the sun-maiden, went down like Istar to the realms of death to save his life as the dying sun, whence she was brought back by Herakles, the sun-god of the age when the Pole Star was in the constellation Hercules. He was the year-god of the rainy season, the god who sought his home in the South. II. Diomedes, the counsellor (gf]Sos) of Zeus, son of Tydeus, the hammering {tud) god, the Northern smith, the conquering-god of summer, the Indra who slew Vritra at the summer solstice. He drove the two horses he had taken from ZEneas, which were two of the six which Anclnses stole from Laomcdon, substituting mares for the horses he took, so that of the twelve year-horses which Zeus gave to Tros in exchange for Ganymede, who was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 145, the cupbearer of the gods and god of the winter season, six were mortal
1 Ilunicr, Iliad, xxiii. 2S7—53S.
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mares and six immortal steeds. Two of these immortal sun-horses had become the property of Diomede, who took them from Aineas, son of Anchises, who was the grandson of Assarakos, the god of the bed and brother of Ganymede *. III. Menelaus, husband of the immortal Helen, sister of Polydeukes, the rain-twin and the tree-mother (SevSpins) of the Dorians of Rhodes. He drove the pair of steeds of the original Twin-gods, the mare ^Ethiope belonging to Agamemnon, husband of the other female twin, Clytem- nestra, sister of Kastor, the pole of Ka, and his own horse Podargus. He was the god of the autumn season, originally sacred to the Twins. IV. Antilochus, son of Nestor of Pylos, the city of the gates (7rv\at) of the Garden of God, the god of spring. V. Merione, born of the thigh (gripla), the son of Molos (war), half-brother of Idomeneus, the leader of the Cretan archers1 2, the god of the bow, whence the winter-arrow was shot that pierced the mother-cloud- bird, the god of winter, said by Homer to be the equal of the warrior Ares, the god of war Enyo. He was the representative of the Thigh-born sun-god of the fifteen-months year.
The course was guarded by Phoenix, the year-bird of the date-palm-tree (<polvti-), which rises yearly from its own ashes as the ever-living sun-bird. He is called the servant of Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay, father of Achilles, and was the counterpart of Achilles himself, the independent sun-god who steered his own course through the heavens without being led by the moon-god or watched by the guardian-star of the boundaries, the steerer of the sun-ship Argo. The contest bears a close analogy to that of the Kauravyas and Pandavas; in both the victorious season among the five into which the year was divided was the god of the summer season ending at the summer solstice. This was the season of the Pandava Bhima, the son of Maroti,
1   Homer, Iliad, v. 265—279, 323—327, Xx. 232—240, xxiii. 291, 292.
2   Ibid., ii. 651.
   

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the trec-ape-god, who fought with the striking-club or tree- hammer, whence the father of Diomedes took his name ; and the Kauravya leader Duryodhana, whom he finally vanquished and slew, and both of whose thighs he broke, was the thigh-god of the eleven-months year, who appears in this horse-race as Eumelus, whose chariot was overthrown and he himself maimed, but who subsequently was, like his Pandava prototype, Arjuna, god of the rainy season during the Kauravya war, judged to be in merit next to the sun- god. Arjuna from being the god of the rainy season became the god of the month Phalgun (February—March) ending at the vernal equinox, when this seventeen-months year began, and the god who drove the white horses of the sun- chariot behind Parikshit, the sun-horse who started on his course on the rst of Cheit (March—April). As a recognition of the changed position of the once ruling rain-god, the Mahendra, the Great Indra, Eumelus received from Achilles a brazen corslet surrounded by a band of glittering tin, which had belonged to the Paeonian Asteropaios, the star {aster} chief, son of Pelagon, the stream {Peleg) god, the parent river, the Thracian Axios and leader of the Thracian Paeonians, whose god was the sun-physician (7raiav), and who, as we shall see presently, measured time by the thirteen-months year, the predecessor and equivalent of this seventeen-months year J. In other words he was proclaimed as the sun-physician, the guardian of the young sun-god of this year of the chariot-race, who, as Rahulo in the form of Parikshit, had superseded his father.
The course over which the race was run, as described by Nestor in his advice to his son Antilochus, was one round a withered oak or pine trunk a fathom high, marking the tomb of an ancient chief, which was almost certainly in races run at Troy the tomb and altar, that is the dolmen of Ilos, marked by the parent wild fig-tree of Troy1 2, the
1 Ilomer, Iliad, xxiii. 558—562, xxi. 135—199.
* Ibid., xi. 166, 167.
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Udumbara-tree of the Indian race-course, and described by Homer as standing in the middle of the plain x. This decaying tree-pillar, the image of the mother-goddess of the tree-trunk, the Indian Drona or Mari-amma. It stood between two white stones, the two pillars placed in front of all Phoenician temples, the pillars of the two solstices; and between the pillars and the goal there was space enough for the chariots to turn as they rounded the latter in their returning course, going sunwise from left to right.
In the beginning of the race Antilochus, the driver of the horses of the gates, was first, showing that it began in spring under the guidance of the gate-stars Gemini ; next was Eumelus, the rainy season ; next after him came Menelaus, the autumn, followed by Meriones, the winter god of the bow; and last Diomedes the final victor. But he caught up the three in front of him, while Eumelus passed Antilochus ; and in the returning course, after passing the goal he was immediately behind Eumelus, when Apollo Smintheus, the mouse Apollo of Troy, caused him to lose his whip, and thus cease to gain on Eumelus as he could no longer urge on his steeds. But Athene, the tree-mother, the goddess Pallas of the seed-husk {Pales'), restored it to him and secured him the victory by overturning the chariot of Eumelus. In the final order of the competition Diomedes was first, Antilochus second, Menelaus third, Meriones fourth, and Eumelus, who was ultimately judged to be second, as I have already explained, last; and he received the prize given to the follower and guardian of the sun-god.
The other prizes are also significant. The winner received a female slave, the sun-maiden of the eleven-months year, bearing a cauldron holding twenty-two measures, its halfmonths. The second a mare with a mule foal, also a reminiscence of the lunar-solar year of the male crescent moon and the sun descended from the sun-ass. The third a 1
1 Ilomer, Iliad, xi. 166, 167.
   
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cauldron holding four measures, the four seasons of the eleven-months year. The fourth two talents of gold ; and the fifth a double cup, marking him as the year cup-bearer and guardian of the seasons of the solstitial-year. This was given to Nestor, the ancient warder of the Gates, father of Antilochus, the god of spring, recipient of the mule foal, which he handed to Noemon, the gnomon-stone I.
In the succeeding contests, Odusseus won the foot-race, beating the Locrian Ajax Oileus, the swiftest runner of the Greeks, and Antilochus. But the victory of Odusseus, like that of Diomede, was gained by the aid of Athene, who caused Ajax to stumble and thus win only the moon-ox, the second prize.
The cup which Odusseus won was that of the ruling sun- god of the three contending seasons, the cup of Thoas, the king of the Tauric Chersonesus, who was, as we have seen (p. 93) the Phoenician Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion, in short Odusseus himself in his first form as a year-ruler. He now won this cup of the leading season as the ruling sun-god of this new sun-year, that of seventeen and thirteen lunar months 1 2«
These two winning year-gods who won the races of the sun-year had a special connection with this thirteen-months year. Both were favourites of Athene, the tree-mother of the South, and uniter of the Northern and Southern races, and the tent of Odusseus, as that of the centre star Orion was in the centre of the Grecian camp 3. The thirteen-months year was that of the Northern Thracians, and it was Dio- medes and Odusseus who, under the guidance of the deceitful spy Dolon, sent by Plector, found the year-king Rhesus sleeping in the centre of his guard of twelve surrounding months. These thirteen were slain by Diomede, and the horses of their 3^ear-chariot were taken b}^ Odusseus 4.
1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 262—270, 612—617.   Ibid., xxiii. 739—7S2.
3   Ibicb, xi. 5, 6.   4 Ibid., x. 471—501.
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D.   Odusseus and other Greek year-gods rulers of the seventeen and thirteen-months year.
It was as a god born of the year of thirteen lunar months that Odusseus appeared in Ithaca as the returning pauper sun-god, for he came from the land of the Phaeacians, that is, of the dusky (cpair)) land of night, ruled by twelve kings, whose over-lord was Alkinoos the thirteenth, and it was they who sent him to Ithaca in their year - ship with fifty- two oarsmen, the fifty-two weeks of the year I. The story of his arrival at Scheria, the Phaeacian country, clearly shows him to be a risen sun-god, the ruler of the year. He came from Ogygia, the island of Calypso, the hidden (KakvirTao) goddess, where he had remained eight years2. He was sent from thence to Scheria at the command of Hermes, the god of the sun-gnomon-pillar, where he was to arrive on the twentieth day 3, and whence he was to be sent to Ithaca. He thus came as the sexless son-god, hidden in the era of the sun-god of the eight-days week. Poseidon, the snake-god of the trident-year and owner of the horses of the sun, was, on his return from the Southern land of the .Ethiopians, aware of the coming of this new sun-god armed with the cap of darkness (tcdKvTTTpi]), the golden year-girdle, and silver white (apyvfaos) tunic of the conquering sun of the eight-days week measured by the two lunar crescents of the double axe (7re'Ae/eu?) of the Carian Zeus which he carried. These arms, marking him as the sun-god, he had got from Calypso. Poseidon fearing this new usurper of the rule of heaven raised a tempest which wrecked the raft of Odusseus, the raft of the transition period of the year of the eight-days week, immediately after he, on the eighteenth day of his voyage, had arrived in sight of Phseacia 4. He was saved by Ino, the daughter of Kadmus, in the likeness of a sea-gull. She was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 397, the mother of Melicertes, the sun-god Melquarth, with
1 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 390, 391, 35, 36, 48.   * Ibid., vii. 253-263.
3 Ibid., v. 34 38.   4 ibid., v. 229—236, 277—318.
   
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whom she leaped into the sea, whence he was conveyed by his mother as the dolphin-mother-goddess Tirhatha to the mother - pine - tree, whence he was to be born as the sun-god son of the virgin fir-tree. She gave to Odusseus the magic sail, the kredemnon J, like the upright fin of the dolphin, which gave it, in the Hindu flood story of Manu, the name of the horned fish. This wing of the sea-bird and sea-dolphin, he put on after he had taken off the dress of the conquering sun-god,given him by Calypso, and thus after two days’ tossing in the sea, which was finally calmed by Athene, it brought the naked sun-god Odusseus to the Phaeacian coast, where he made himself a bed under the two parent olive-trees of the sun-mother Athene, the olive- tree-mother, whose tree, as we have seen, made his olive-tree bed of the sun-god in Ithaca. These trees were the wild olive-tree   and the cultivated olive (eXaia), and it
was under these trees that he awoke as the new sun-god of this year on the twenty-first day of its first month passed in the voyage from Ogygia. Here he was met by Nausicaa, the sun-maiden, who re-robed him and brought him to the palace of her father Alkinoos and her mother Arete 2.
. In this story we see clearly that the new sun-god of this year, the victor in the chariot and foot races at the funeral games, belonged to a different race from that in which he was born, in what the Buddha of the Jataka, or birth stories, would call his former births. For it was not till Odusseus had lost the garments of the sun-god of the year of the eight-days week, who was slain by the trident of Poseidon at the end of the epoch of his rule, the impenetrable tunic, the cup of darkness and the double axe, that he became the naked sun-god of the new era, the sun-god who rose from the salt-waters of regeneration to be the sun-god born of the olive-tree, the immortal ruler of time.
1   For further evidence as to the history of the year-god Odusseus, god of the path (680s) of Time, told in the mythology of Ino and the kredemnon, see Appendix C.
2 Homer, Odyssey, v. 333—35°> 372. 373, 382—3SS, 459, 460, 476—493-
L 1
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It is to this age, when Poseidon was the enemy of the sun- god of the post-lunar age, and ruler of time during the lunar- solar epoch when he owned the horses of the sun, that the thirteen-months year of Otus and Ephialtes must be referred. They were the reputed sons of Aloeus, the god of the salt sea, the son of Poseidon, who was also the father of his twin sons, the god of the thirteen-months year. Their description in Homer marks them as dating, like their counterparts the twin stars Gemini, from the age of the cycle-year. For when they were nine years old they were nine cubits broad across the shoulders, and three fathoms, three times nine, or twenty-seven cubits high. They rebelled against the gods, declaring they would make a path to heaven by piling mountains on mountains, that is to say, they changed in their thirteen-months year the course of the year path which led to heaven, and made it no longer the path of the sun, but that marked by the new and full-moons. Thus in this year they bound Ares, the ploughing {ar) god of increase, in chains for thirteen months, but they were slain before they attained manhood by Apollo, that is to say their system of year-measurement was ^rejected. Ares was released from his captivity by Hermes, the god of the* gnomon-pillar, who was warned of his captivity by the step-mother of Ares, Eeriboia, the mist or cloud-goddess I.
This captivity of Ares, brought about by the two giant twins born of the salt sea, forms of the constellation Gemini, which was, in this age, the guiding station of the sun’s entry on his yearly circuit of the heavens, appears in a variant form in the ballad recited by Demodokos, at the banquet in which Alkinoos proclaimed himself the thirteenth and chief ruler of Phaeacia, the supreme centre month among his twelve subordinate chiefs. Demodokos told how the sun warned Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill, that Aphrodite, the fire-socket, the earth-goddess, had deserted him for Ares, the ploughing-god of the plough constellation of the
1   l-Iomer, Odyssey, xi. 305—320; Iliad, v. 386—391.
   
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Great Bear. He accordingly prepared a web to catch this warrior sun-god, described as the fastest runner of the gods, and his paramour from which they could not free themselves, and summoned the gods to behold them in the year-net he had made for them. Hermes and Apollo came together with Poseidon, but the sun-god and the god of the gnomon- pillar made, in this version of the story, no effort to free this sun-dog, to whom dogs were offered as the year-god Sirius, and it was at the intercession of Poseidon, who, through his twin sons was the creator of the thirteen-months year, that Ares was released. The web in which Hephaistos bound the warrior year-sun and his paramour, the Aminah of the story of Sakhr and Solomon’s ring, was clearly the year-circle of the lunar phases, which kept the sun from its Northern and Southern solstitial paths; and that this is the correct solution is made most probable by Homer’s statement that Ares, when released, went North to Thrace, and Aphrodite, who, like Aminah, ruled the South, went to Paphos in Cyprus, where the three Charites, the year mother- goddesses of the year of three seasons bathed her in the regenerating waters of the Southern sea, and re-robed her as the sun-mother of the released and ruling-sun T.
We find also a picture of the sun-god of this era in the stories of the marriage of Plippodameia to Pelops, and of the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapithae, which took place when Hippodameia was wedded to Pirithoos. This year-goddess Hippodameia, the tamer of horses, daughter of CEnomaus, the only (otVo?, Lat. anus) measurer, the Pole Star god, is another form of the goddess Hippolyte, she who is released by horses, wife of Acastus. She is the independent moon-goddess, the Plere or mistress who is wedded to the sun-god, and her wedding is thus clearly distinguished from the wedding of the parent-gods of the year of eight-day weeks, when the moon-father-god was married to Suria, the sun-maiden. In the chronology of the present year the 1
1 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 265—366. L 1 2
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moon has become the female goddess of the Southern nations, and is no longer the male moon of the North, while on the other hand the sun has become the ruling king of the North born of the Thigh and not the sun-bird of the South.
In the story of the wedding of Pelops to Hippodameia, she is won from her father (Enomaus in a race of chariots drawn by four horses, like those on the Indian racecourse. Pelops won the race by bribing Myrtilus, the charioteer of (Enomaus, to take out the linch-pins of his master’s chariot, and thus he escaped the fate of his thirteen predecessors, who were slain by the conquering (Enomaus. In the present, race (Enomaus was killed by falling from his broken chariot, as Eumelus his counterpart in the race with Diomede was also disabled. In the frieze at Olympia depicting the preparations for the contest, there are thirteen figures, that of Zeus in the centre with six figures on each side of him, those of Pelops and his friends on one side, and those of (Enomaus and his supporters on the otherr. Thus these thirteen months are exactly arranged like those in the Vedic cosmological hymn, I. 164, 15, with the supreme month in the centre, and the six paired months on the two sides. In this hymn the central seventh month alone is self-created, the others are said to be born by divine ordinance, and each discharges the functions alloted to it by the Creator. This central month occupies the position assigned to Jaistha (May—June) in the ceremonies of this year, for it was on its full moon, about the 1st June, that the twenty-one and seventeen versed hymns are chanted at the morning and mid-day services of the Keshava - panlya or ceremonial shaving of the king, who offers the New Year sacrifices.
This is the month called Krodha in the list of the thirteen months of this year, called in the Mahabharata the thirteen wives of Kashyapa, father of the Kushite race. They are:
I.   Aditi, 2. Diti, 3. Danu, 4. Kala, 5. Danayu, 6. Sinhika,
1 Frazer, Patisanias, v. 10, 2, vol. i. p. 250 ; vol. iii. p. 505.
   
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7. Krodha, 8. Pradha, 9. Vishva, 10. Vinata, 11. Kapila> 12. Muni, 13. Kadru. That Krodha, the central month of this year, is one close to the summer solstice is proved by the fact that Pradha, the eighth month, is said to be the mother of the thirteen Apsarus or water-goddesses, that is of the month in which the rains beginning at the summer solstice are most violentT.
The frieze at Elis illustrating the fights between the Centaurs and the long-haired Lapithse at the wedding of Hippodameia with Pirithous also apparently refers to the traditional history of this year. It contains twenty-one figures, of which the central is Apollo. He must certainly be Apollo Paean, the sun-god of this epoch, the sun-physician of the Pseo'nians, who, as we have seen, measured time by the thirteen-months year. On the right of Apollo is a group in which Pirithous, the runner (thous) round {peri) the circling-sun, the Greek equivalent of the Hindu Parikshit, who was king of the Lapithee, defends Hippodameia from a Centaur; and on his left is another group, in which Theseus rescues from a Centaur a woman, apparently Hip- podameia»s mother2.
In this battle in which the Centaurs were defeated we see a picture of the struggle between the long-haired race of the Lapithre, the men from whom the Sura was bought at the Vajapeya sacrifice, and the Centaurs, sons of the sun-horse, who polled their hair and drank milk till Pholos, the guardian of the national cask of the waters of life, the sacred tree- trunk Drona containing the Soma, opened it for Hcraklcs when the water came forth as wine. It was when the vine of Dionysos and the Gis-kin or palm-tree, whence Dumuzi was born 3, became the parent-trees in the days of Samlah of Masrekah, the vine lands that, according to Pindar, the Centaurs “ learnt the sparkle of the honey-sweet wine and 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv. pp. 185, 1S7.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 516—522.
3   Sayce, Jlibbcrt Lectures for 1 SS>7, Led. iv. p. 23S, note 2.
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pushed the milk from their tablesJ.” The stories of this series are shown to refer to the question of the sacramental drink consumed at the seasonal festivals by the name of Pholus. It is the ZEolic form of %d\os ykoos, meaning the golden-green, and is an exact translation of the epithet Hari-Zairi, used in the Zendavesta to denote Soma. Also Pholus is proved to be the Soma-god filling the cups of the seasons by the triple flagon (?TpCka^vvov 8eiras>), the three- cupped cup of the three seasons, which he gave to Geryon, the Phoenician Charion, the star Orion ruling the year of three seasons 2. The Centaurs were apparently of the same race as the milk-drinking Massagetae. who, according to Herodotus, worshipped only the sun-god, to whom they offered horses 3. They on reaching the country of the Lapithae, whose name means the Plunderers or Destroyers (lap, Xa7rd£ft>, to plunder), the fierce long-haired men of the Ugro-Finn race, the Ugrosena of the eleven-months year, attacked them, and the war ended in a union between the two races, in which the Northern sons of the sun-horse took the leading place. Their union is marked in the Vajapeya sacrifice by the addition of the pure Soma to the intoxicating Sura of the long-haired race. But in the contest there was developed a belief in a more refined symbolism than that of the realistic representations of the gods of the Lapithae phallus-worshippers, the linga-worshippers of India, called in the Rigveda Sisna-deva, or those whose god is the phallus. Hence after the defeat of the Centaurs by the Lapithae, when the year of Hippodameia with its seven-day weeks was introduced, the Centaur archer-god Eurytion, the rainbow-god, was thrown out of doors and his nose and ears were cut off4. That is to say, he was made like Melanthios, the goat-herd-god of the suitors whom 1 2 3 4
1   Pindar, Frag. 147, Boeckli, ii. 637; Meyer, Indo Germainsche Mythen Gandharva Kentauria, p. 41.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 549—551 •
3   Herodotus, i. 216
4   Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295—303.
   
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Odusseus treated in the same way, the featureless sun-gnomon pillar, the Hir-men-sul, the great sun-stone of the North ; and the pillar-worship of the Phoenicians replaced the idol- worship of the lunar solar-era.
E. The thirteen-months year of the Santals, the thirteen wives of Kashyapa and the thirteen Buddhist Theres.
This year of thirteen months is the sacred year of the Santals, and its adoption by them throws a most vivid light on its history. They are physically nearly a pure Dravidian race, of very dark complexions, with flat noses, large mouths, thick lips, black somewhat curly hair and doliko-kephallic skulls; and their traditional history shows that on the father’s side they were descended from Northern ancestors. They call themselves the sons of the wild-goose (hdsduk), and their original settlement in India was, they say, at Champa on the Ganges, which was, as we have seen, the capital of Kama, king of Anga, and the Angiras priesthood. Their chief god is Marung Burn, the great mountain (maruug), the equivalent of the mother-mountain-goddess Su-bhadra and the Gond mountain-mother Koi or Koh (kai-kaia). They trace their descent on the father’s side from the god Morcko, the peacock (mor) god, one of five brothers, the five Pandava brethren called the Bharatas, born of the peacock (mayura Hindi mohr), the totem-god of the Bhars and the Maurya or Peacock kings. Their maternal ancestors are the two sisters of these brethren, Jair Era, goddess of the village-grove (jahir) and Gosain Era, the saintly (gosain) goddess. Thus they say that their separate nationality dates from the age when the peacock with its starry tail became the sacred bird of Here, the moon- goddess, and when men began to measure the year by the track of the moon and sun through the zodiacal stars. They used to sacrifice human victims, and the story of their descent shows that they belong to the race ol Kansa, the goose-son of Ugra-sena, the Bhoja king ; that is to say that

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their Northern ancestors on the father’s side were the Ugro- Altaic Finns, who have, as Dr. Sayce tells us, from time immemorial used a year of thirteen lunar months, which they apparently derived from the Turkic tribes, and who introduced the seven-days week among the AkkadiansT. They brought into Southern Asia their knowledge of metals and ores, and their handicrafts as workers in gold and silver, leather, fibres and wood.
The Finn ancestors of the Santals who came to India with this influx of artisan immigrants are shown, by the Santal customs, to be nearly allied to the patriarchal ancestors of the Kandhs of Orissa, as in both tribes property descends in the male line. The matriarchal side of Santal descent is shown in their marriage ceremonies, in which both bride and bridegroom are separately married to a mahua-tree (Bctssia latifolia:), [the tree whence the honey drink of the age of the Ashvins was brewed, and in the orgiastic festivals with which they celebrate the changes of the seasons, especially those of the Sohrai at the winter solstice and the Magh festival of January—February. Also one of their principal septs is that of the Sarens or descendants of the Pleiades, and among the Saren clan the Naiki-Khil Sarens are a sect of incipient Levites who are so careful to preserve their purity that they will not enter a house where any of the inmates are ceremonially unclean, and have a special village grove and priest of their own.
All the Santals, both women and men, worship as family- gods the seven Orakbonga, called i. Baspahar, 2. Deswali, 3. Sas, 4. Goraya, 5. Barpahar, 6. Sarchawdi, 7. Thunta- tursa. These seven days of the week are embodiments of the mountain (pahar) goddess, the goddess of the village grove (des-wali) and the boundary-god (goraya), and most probably were originally the seven stars of the Great Bear, worshipped as the Seven Sisters by their congeners the Rautias2, and they are certainly parallel deities to the seven
1   Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii. pp. 195, 196.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Rautia, vol. ii. p. 204.
   
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communal ghosts worshipped by the Bhulyas, called Darha, Kudra, Kudri, Dano, Pacheria, Haserwar, Pakahi T. Here Darha or Dharti, the goddess of the springs, is the Kushika mother Gandhari, the Pole Star Vega ; Ivudra, is the moon- goddess ruling our Monday, and Dano is the Pole Star judge, the earlier form of Odin, the god of wisdom ruling our Wednesday.
But though these gods of the seven days are generally worshipped openly by both sexes in each family as a survival from the days when they represented the seven stars of the Great Bear, the ritual of the worship of the thirteen months of the year called Abge-bongas is preserved as a profound secret among the male Santals, their names being only known to the head of each family and his eldest son. They can only, like Sek Nag, the secret god of the Ivaj Gonds, be worshipped by males, but not like Sek Nag by the males of the tribe assembled together, but by the males of each family separately, who partake together of the offerings made. Their names are 1. Dhara-sor or Dhara-sanda, 2. Ketkomkudra, 3. Champa-dena-gurh, 4. Gurhsinka, 5. Lila- chandi, 6. Dhanghara, 7. Kudra Chandi, 8. Bahara, 9. Duar- seri, 10. Kudraj, 11. Gosain Era, 12. Achali, 13. Deswali. Here the thirteenth goddess is the queen of the village grove, the mother-tree, the equivalent of Kadru, mother of the Na- gas, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. But the predominant god in the list is the moon-god, especially the centre seventh moon-goddess, Kudra-Chandi. In her name we find both the Hindu word for moon Chandi and the Finnish Ku, which appears in the Finnic Ivuta-ma, the Esthonian Ku, Mordvin Kua, Ostiak Khoda-j, and in Kuhu, a name for the waning moon in the Atharvaveda 1 2, also in Ku-ar, the name of the month Ashvayujau (September—October) in Western India. It is also noticeable that the names of the two months of generation, the tenth Kudraj and the eleventh Gosain Era,
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes oj Bengal, Bhuiyasl vol. i. p. 115.
2   Lenormant, Chaldican Magic, p. 304, Atharvaveda, v. S, 47 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. iii. p. 1S9.
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are masculine and feminine, and denote the marriage of the male moon - god, the Soma of the Vedic marriage, to the saintly (gosain) goddess of the mother-tree, sister of Jair Era, goddess of the village grove. The name of this goddess-mother is the equivalent of the eleventh Buddhist Then, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saintr.
The comparison between the Santal names of these thirteen year-gods and those of the thirteen wives of Kashyapa is most interesting, for it shows the hatred with which the later Hindus, who had learnt to read and write, regarded the year reckoning brought in by the artisan races, who, like the Peruvians and ancient Chinese, kept their records by the Santal method of knotted cords, the Peruvian Quipas1 2. This feeling is shown by the name Krodha anger, and Krura the cruel one, given to the central-goddess of the Kushite year, and marks how deeply the memory of their ruthless conquest was impressed on the minds of the people, a memory which has extended far beyond India, and has caused the number thirteen to be looked on as unlucky all over Europe.
The evidence as to this thirteen-months year given by its adoption as the Santal year and its incorporation into Buddhist theology as the year of the thirteen Theris, headed by Malta GotamI Pajapati, the sister of the Buddha’s mother and his nurse, seems to show that this year with its week of seven days was first brought to India by the Northern artisan races, who settled in the country as conquerors in the beginning of the Bronze Age; and that the seventeen- months year, into which the seven-days week was incorporated, was one framed by the ritualistic priesthood, who tried to unite the two races of the Northern conquerors and their Southern predecessors, and to combine the conservative tendencies of the races who wished to retain the orgiastic festivals and the sacrifices of the earlier epochs with those
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Santals, vol. ii. pp. 225—233.
2   Prescott, History of Peru, vol. i. p. 112; Legge, Texts of Taoism ; S.B.E., vol. xxxix. p. 122.
   
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of the moral reformers who set their faces against indulgence in strong drink and the licence of the national festivals, and who, under the influence of the Hittite Jain teachers, insisted on moral self-discipline. It was these reformers who banished strong drink from the Soma sacrifice, and changed the Soma cup from the Sautramani cup, described in Chapter VI. pp. 322, 323, made of Kusha grass, fruits, malted barley, rice, and millets, mixed with spirits and milk into the pure cup of Indra, made of sweet and sour milk, barley, and running water. We find a similar change in the composition of the Greek sacramental cup of Demeter. This called the Kukeon (tcvtcecov) is said in the Iliad to be made of barley-meal, grated cheese, and Pramnion wine, and to this Circe added honey and magical drugs r. But in the hymn to Ceres the wine is left out, and it is made of barley-meal (aXcfitTa), water, and mint, and this was the cup drunk at the Eleusinian mysteries2. This change was brought about by the sons of the date-palm-tree, the Tamar of the Jews, the water-drinking race of horsemen of the desert who made the cult of the date-palm the national creed of the Babylonians, who in their bas-reliefs represent their priest-kings or demi-gods as impregnating the mother-palm-tree with the pollen of the male tree. The leaders in this belief in the virtues of temperance in drink were the tribe called the Banu Hanlfa, meaning they who do what is right, to which Abram is said in the Koran to have belonged. They called a mixture of dates, butter, and dry curds, named Hals, their god, and said that they lived by eating him 3. In short, they believed that the life-giving spirit of the living God was incorporated into their inmost nature by this sacramental meal which made them sons of God. It was these water-drinkers, who took the name
1   Homer, Iliad, xi. 624, 641; Ibid., Odyssey, x. 234, 316.
2   Ibid., Cer., 20S ; Ilewitl, Ruling Races of Prehistoric 'Rimes, vol. i., Preface, p. xlviii.
3   Palmer, Qur'an, chap. ii. 129; S.li. IV, vol. vi. p. 19, note i ; Sachau, Alberuni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. viii. p. 193 ; Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘ Story of Gharib and his brother Ajib,’ vol. v. pp. 215, 216.
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of the Hanifa or the Righteous, who made Bhishma and Valarama, and the ruling races of India represented by these mythic sun and moon-gods, sons of the date-palm ; and it was the union between these reformers, who introduced among the upper class in India the belief in the duty of abstinence from strong drink, and the earlier and more savage invaders of the age of the eleven-months year, which was commemorated in the ritual of the Vajapeya and Raja- suya consecration sacrifices. In the latter of these the king, newly consecrated on a tiger-skin as the son of the tiger, runs a chariot race in a chariot drawn by four horses, and as he ascends the chariot claims to be an avatar of the Mahabharata god Arjuna1.
F.   The years of seventeen and thirteen months in the Mahabharata chronology.
To obtain further insight into the history of this year we must turn to the Mahabharata. There we find its origin mythically attributed to the fifth year of the Pandavas’ exile- of thirteen years. It was at the end of the fourth year that they went Northward, as the gods of the year they began in the South, on their tour of pilgrimage of the sacred shrines described in the Tirtha-yatra sections of the Vana or Forest Canto. They reached the Northern point of their year’s journey in the Himalayas on the seventeenth day of their departure from the South, and remained for seven days, the first week of this year, at the Gandha-madana, the grove of intoxicating odours, near the mount Mainaka, born of Meneka, the moon-goddess who measures {men) time2. It was there that they were joined by Arjuna, the god of the rainy season of the summer solstice, who then returned to earth from his five years’ sojourn in Indra’s heaven.
The traditional history of this year is told in the story of Skanda, the sun-lizard, the god who was, as we have seen
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah. v. 4, 3, 1 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 98 ff.
2   Mahabharata Vana (Yaks ha- Yttd/ia) Parva, clvii., clxiv. pp. 467, 468, 497,
   
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in Chapter V. p. 279, born from the kettle of Kesari-tar. In the Mahabharata story he is the son of Svaha, the daughter of Prajapati disguised as one of the Pleiades and of Agni, in other words, the god born of the union of the matriarchal and patriarchal races, sons of the household fire, the sun-god born of the fire-flame. He was born in the land of Chaitra- ratha, that is, in the land ruled by the star Virgo (Chitrd), which ruled the year of eleven months, and was called Kartikeya, the son of the Krittakas or Pleiades. He was a god of six faces, looking North, South East, and West, to the zenith and the nadir, who worshipped the sun-cock, that is to whom cocks, the offerings to the sun-physician, were sacrificed. This god, also called Guha, the concealed one, whose sixth face was that of the Pole Star goat, was attacked by Indra. From the blow of the thunderbolt of the god of the rainy season the second Skanda, the god Visakha, was born as the ruler of the month March—April, called after him, the first of the two months preceding the rainy season, and the mid-month of the Pleiades year. It was after the birth of Visakha on the fifth day of the bright half of Visakha that the son of Skanda and seven mothers, the seven stars of the Great Bear called Sisu, the child of the eight-rayed star, was born as the ninth god Kumara, whom I have described in p. 498 as the god of this yearI.
Skanda was married to Devasena, known by the eight names of Shashti, Lakshmi, Asa, Sukhaprada, Sinivali, Kuhu, Satvritti and Aparajata, that is to the goddess of the eight-rayed star-mother of the child Sisu, the eighth ruling god of a year measured by the waxing moon Sinivali and the waning moon Kuhu, the year of new and full-moon sacrifices. After his marriage he went out to lead the seventh army corps of heaven in its search for a ruler of time to replace Abhijit, that is the star Vega, who had ceased to be the Pole Star, showing that the rule of Skanda was after
1 Mahabharata Vana (Markandeya^Samdsyd) Parva, ccxxxii.—ccxxxvii. pp. 679—691,
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8000 B.C. and during the age when the Pole Star was in Hercules. It was then that, according to the Mahabharata story, the Krittakas or Pleiades were made the rulers of heaven succeeding Abhijit (Vega). Under their rule the thirteen wives of Kashypa, the thirteen months of this year, were made mothers of heaven ; and of them Vinata the tenth, Aditi, Diti, the mother of the Asuras and Kadru, the mother of the Nagas, are named, and they are said to be worshipped as Kadamba or almond-trees, the sacred tree of the Ooraons and Kharwars. It was after the installation of this new age that Skanda and Visakha (April—May) destroyed the Danava sons of the Pole Star god and their leader Mahisha, the buffalo, who was, as we have seen (p. 349), ’once the god Indra ; and Skanda became after his victory the god with the fifty-one names recorded in the Mahabharata, that is the ruling god of this year of seventeen months and fifty-one weeks of seven days each 1.
This year of Skanda appears also in the history of the Pandavas in the account of the attempted rape of DrupadI by Jayadratha, which took place at the end of the eleventh year of the Pandava exile, and after Durvasa the ill-omened (dur) emissary of Duryodhana, Dusshasana, Kama and Shakuni, the gods of the four seasons of the eleven-months year, had fled from Krishna, who was on his arrival especially summoned by DrupadI to replenish, as the creator of time, her “sun-vessel,” the beggar-bowl of the Buddha, “which till then always remained full after she had eaten.” She besought Krishna to refill the exhausted bowl so as to enable her to give a meal to Durvasa and his attendants, which they would not stay to eat 2. The revolution in timereckoning, fore-shadowed in this refilling of the exhausted sun-bowl, was that caused by the arrival of Jayadratha, who arrived close to the Pandavas camp after the reinstal
1   Mahabharata Vana (Matskandeya-Samasya) Parva, ccxxviii., ccxxix., ccxxx., pp. 695—710.
2   Mahabharata Vana (G/iosha-ydtru) Parva, cclvii., cclxi. pp. 763, 777—779.
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lation of Dritpadi by Krishna. He was king of the moon {siii) kingdom of Sin-dhu, who drove in his chariot horses of the Saindhava or moon-breed, which were in the story of Nila and DamayantT driven by Nila and Rituparna, the ruler of the seasons (ritu), when Nala learnt the art of time- calculation under the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica) tree. Jayadratha ruled the Sau-viras, the sons of the mother-bird Su, and as leader of this year of thirteen months he was followed by twelve Sau-vira princes named Angarika, Kunjara, Guptaka, Satrunjaya, Srinjaya, Suprabiddha {buddha ?), Prabhankara, Bhramara, Ravi, Sura, Pratapa, Kuhana. He whose banner was the silver boar1, the moon- year-god, was the son of Vriddha-kshatra, the old (vriddha) field (kshetra), and the husband of Dus-shala, the hundred' and first child and only daughter born from the egg. laid by GandharT, the Pole Star Vega, wife of Dhritarashtra2. She was the Hindu counterpart of Dinah, the female form of Dan, the Pole Star judge, and the thirteenth child and only daughter of Jacob.
Jayadratha, the moon-god, the silver-boar, when he attempted to carry off Drupadi was seeking for a bride to replace Dus-shala, the goddess of the Kauravya year of eleven months ; and he passed the Pandava camp while the Pandava princes were out hunting, each of them as year-gods ruling the seasons of the year having gone, as we are told in the poem, to a different point on the horizon. Yudishthira, the god of .spring, the sun rising in the East between the winter solstice and vernal equinox, was in the East ; Bhima, the god of summer, the sun coming from the South to reach the summer solstice in the North from his starting-point in the South, was in the South ; Arjuna, the god of the rainy season beginning at the summer solstice, was in the West ; and the twin-brethren Sahadeva and Nakula, the gods of autumn and winter, were
1   malulbharata Drona (.Abhimanyu-badha) I’arva, xliii, 3, p. 134.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxvii. p. 342.
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to the North, the point from which they started for their Southern home.
When Jayadratha, who boasted his descent from the seventeen high clans, the seventeen months of his year, saw Drupadi leaning on a Kadamba-almond-tree as the tree-mother of the race born of the Kurum almond, the parent-tree of the Ooraons and the Jewish prophet-priests, the Kohathites, and of the thirteen year-mothers of the year of Skanda and the Kushika, he sent an emissary to try and persuade her to elope with him. When she refused he came himself with six followers, as the year-god of the year of seven-day weeks, to where she was standing. And when she declined to accompany him he carried her off forcibly and placed her in his chariot.
This was the rape of the goddess of the Kurum-almond- tree whose sacred river was the Kurumnasa, which heralded the fall of the ancient faith in the goddess of the mother- tree and the introduction of the new worship of the rising white horse, the sun of the East, who succeeded the Pole Star as the ruler of heaven (p. 450).
Jayadratha was followed by the Pandavas on their return, and they released Drupadi and forced Jayadratha to declare himself the^ slave of the Pandavas and the god of their year of five seasons. When he escaped from his captors he implored Shiva, the three-eyed-god, for aid to revenge his defeat, but all Shiva would grant him was immunity from death at the hands of any of the Pandavas, except Arjuna, and one victory over his four brethren1. As for Arjuna, Shiva declared that he was the counterpart of Vishnu, the embodiment of the primitive water, the rain impregnated with the soul of life which came down from heaven to earth to people it with living forms. In this rhapsodical panegyric we have apparently a historical guide mark, showing that in. this year the fifth or rainy season was added to the four
1 Mahabharata Vana (Dranpadi-harana) Parva, cccxiii.—cclxxi. pp. 780 —801.
   
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seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter of the eleven- months year; and we find in this further proof, in addition to those already given, of the intimate connection between this year and that of the year of eleven months.
The promise of the short career of victory given to Jayadratha by Shiva was fulfilled in the eighteen-days battle between the Kauravyas and Pandavas. When Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Su-bhadra, was on the day of his death overthrowing all the foes he met, Jayadratha checked his career, and defeated in single combat Yudishthira and Bhima, as well as the five sons of Drupadi and the Panchala chief Dhrishthadyumna, the seen (drishthd) bright one (dyumna). But he met his doom on the next day after Abhimanyu’s death, the fourteenth day of the contest, when he was slain by Arjuna. Arjuna cut off his head with a magical shaft, which bore the head to the lap of Vriddha-kshatra, the Pole Star god, and thence it fell to earth, and as it fell the head of the Pole Star god broke into pieces, and his career as the world's ruler was ended z. In the story of the death of Jayadratha and Vriddha- kshatra, and the miraculous loss of the head of the former, we have a parallel to the disfigurement of Melanthios and Eurytion. Like them Jayadratha, the god with earrings ruling the year of the new and full-moon sacrifices, was when his career was ended changed from a god depicted in human form to be the sun-pillar god.
We have already seen in the history of the thirteen-months year, as told in Santal ritual, that it came to India during the age of the rule of Kansa, the goose-god of the Ugro- Altaic Finns, and this conclusion is corroborated in the history of the thirteen Buddhist Theris. In this, as recorded in the Manoratha PuranI of Buddhaghosha, we are told that they were all born in Hamsa-vati, the city of the moon- goose Hamsa or Kamsa, when Padumuttara, the Northern 1
1 Mahabharata Drona (Abhimanyu-badha) Taiva, xliii. pp. 133, 134, (fiyad- ratha-bad/ia) Parva, cxlvi. pp. 456, 457.
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(iuttara) lotus (paduma), was Buddha1. He was the thirteenth Buddha, that is to say, the god of the lunar-year of thirteen months, whose capital was Hamsa-vati, the son of Ananda, the moon-bull-god Nanda, and of Su-jata, the goddess who consecrated the new-born Buddha under the Nigrodha-tree (Ficus Indicd), the parent-tree of the Kushikas and of Kashyapa, whose wives were the thirteen months of this year. Su-jata gave this sun-god of the Banyan fig- tree the bowl of rice cooked with the milk of the eight cow-stars of the year of the eight-days week. The sacred tree of this Northern lotus-god was the Sal-tree (Shorea- robusta), which gave birth, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 464, to the Buddha who entered his mother’s womb as the elephant-headed rain-cloud, the god Gan-isha 2.
This year brought into Southern Asia by the Ugro-Altaic Finns became the year of the thirteen children of Jacob, of which the thirteenth was first Dinah, the female form of Dan, and the equivalent, as we have seen, of Dusshala, Jayadratha's first wife, as well as of Kadru, the tree (dru) mother of the Nagas, and the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. In the patriarchal form of the year history Dinah, wife of the king of Shechem, the capital of Ephraim, became Ephraim or the two ashes (ephra), the second son of Joseph, who is represented in the tribal lists by his eldest son Manasseh.
G.   The seventeen and thirteen-months year in Egypt.
This year appears in Egyptian mythology in Chapters CXLIV.—CXLVII. of the Book of the Dead, describing the journey after death of the souls of Ani, called Ani- Osiris, and his wife Thuthu through the Arits and Pylons
Bode, ‘Women Leaders of the Buddhist Reformation.’ J.R.A.S., 1893, p. 522 IT. This statement as to the birth of Maha Pajapati GotamI is repeated in the life story of each successive Theri. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 69—S3.
2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, The Distant Epoch, 231, p. 42.
of the. Myth-Making Age.
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of Sekhet Aanre to the house of Osiris Nu, the god of the monthly and half-monthly festivals of the new and full- moons. Sekhet is the goddess depicted with a lion’s head and also as a scorpion with horns and a disk. She is symbolised in astronomy as the star Antares a Scorpio ruling the autumnal equinox, and the temples at Thebes dedicated to her as Mat, the mother, are oriented to y Draconis, when it was the nearest rising and setting star to the Pole Starr. It was the seven scorpions sacred to this lunar-goddess, called Tefne, Bene, Mastet, Mastetef, Petet, Thetet and Matet, which showed Isis the way to the Papyrus Marsh, near the crocodile city of Pisni sacred to Osiris. She was there to be delivered of the second Horus, the sun-god, the older Plorus being, as we have seen, the son of Hat-hor, the earlier form of Isis as Nebt-hat, the mistress of the house (hat) dwelling in the Pole Star1 2.
The souls of Ani and his wife pass through the seven Arits and Pylons, depicted in the Papyrus of Ani, illustrating the Book of the Dead, as stages in the series of historical pictures seen by the souls of the departed on their way to the Elysian fields. In these are portrayed the ritual and symbolic forms of the successive gods, measurers of time, who succeeded the original tree and ape-gods of the matriarchal age, and had been worshipped as rulers of time by the Egyptian worshippers of the household fire, the sacrifice to which forms the subject of the first Vignette of the series.
The first and second Arits, the first two days of the week of this year, are guarded by Sekhet, and the remainder by other gods, and at the entrance to the first Arit, a hare, the moon-hare, a serpent, and crocodile are sitting, and at the second, a lion, a man, and a dog, who also guard the seventh Arit. In the Vignette of the Pylons instead of twenty-one there are fourteen shrines, though in the text twenty-one Pylons are described, thus apparently proving that the
1   Lockyer, Daivn of Astronomy, chap. xxix. pp. 2S9, 290.
2   Brugsch, Religion und Mythologic dcr Alton Aigypter, pp. 402—404.
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pictured story dates from the earlier age of the thirteen- months year, while the verbal text was composed during the time when the year of seventeen months had been made the national ritualistic year; and it seems to be all but absolutely certain that the seven Arits and fourteen and twenty-one Pylons represent the weeks, half-months, and months of this year *.
The year of the sun-god of this and of the year of eiglit- day-weeks is apparently that called in Egyptian mythology the year of the Khepera, the beetle whose oval body (Q) represents the union of two crescent moons, that is to say, it depicts a year in which, as in the thirteen-months year, the months began with the new moon. The birth of the sun- god of this year called Ra, the Kheper, is described in the account given by Brugsch of the picture and inscription at Erment telling of his birth ; this represents it as taking place in Pharmuthi (January—February). His mother is in the pains of labour supported by the midwife Renpit, the year, and Nit or Neith, the vulture-weaving {neith) goddess, the constellation Vega, and also the female form of Kheper, the beetle. The child when born is given to a waiting-woman Menat, meaning the breast, that is to a wet nurse, who gives it to Khnumet, the female form of the architect-god Khnum; and Amen-Ra, god of the South, and Rechebt, the Northern goddess, were witnesses of the birth. The seven Hat-hors from Upper and seven from Lower Egypt fly round as birds to protect the place of birth. They were the seven Khus, the masters of knowledge, raised from the primaeval water by the eight gods of creation to be the directors of the Meh-urt cow, the cow-goddess {urt) of the Flood (melt), that of the era of the year of the Ten Kings of Babylon of Chapter VII., the last of whom, Xisuthros, was saved from the flood. The Meh-urt cow was also the goddess Nit. The Khus rose on earth out of the pupil of the eye of the rising sun,
1 Bulge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chaps, cxliv.—cxlviii. pp. 240—261.
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and ruled the world with the god Thoth or Dhu-ti, the moon-bird. They were the seven sparrow-hawks, the sun- birds, and the seven days of the week of this year of the beetle x.
The story of the birth of this sun-beetle is also told in Chapter XVII. of the Book of the Dead, where he is said to be Ra, who gave birth to himself, and rose in the city of Sutenhenen, that is of the king (suten) of advancing time (henen\ as the god Tern, the sun-god of day, moving from East to West. He came forth from the pool of Maat, that is in the age when Vega (Maat) was the Pole Star in the boat in which Tern goes to Sekhet Aaru, the realm of the goddess Sekhet of the seven scorpions. He passed through the gates of Shu, the fire-god, called Tchesert, meaning the gates of holy things, the ttwo door-posts of heaven, the stars Gemini, and was borne in the arms of the gods Hu and Su, who attend upon Ra. They are described as the two drops of blood falling from the phallus of Ra when he mutilated himself, that is became the sexless sun-pillar-god. Their names are the dialectic forms of the primaeval cloud-bird Khu, the two birds of Night and Day, who in Rg. I. 164, 20, sit on the top of the world’s tree. The day of his birth is that when Horus fought with Set, and when Thoth (Dhuti) emasculated Set and brought forth and healed the right eye of Ra. This god of the rising sun was born from the Meh - urt cow, the vulture - goddess Nit, represented in Vignette VIII. of the Papyrus of Ani, with disk and horns. His eye (utchat) was filled by Osiris Ani, after it had been blinded by the filth cast by Set at Horus. The gods of the train of Horus, who were summoned by Ra, are the four sons of Horus, the four stars of tfie constellation Pegasus, whom he addressed as followers of the goddess Hetep- sekhus, that is of the sun at rest (>hetep), the setting sun which began the solstitial year of the Pole Star age, and they became four of the seven Khus who attended on 1
1 Brugsch, Religion tend Mythologie der Allen sEgypter, pp. 164, 116, 521.
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Ra when he declared himself to be the divine soul dwelling between the two Tchafi, the Northern and Southern sun, and also the divine cat who fought by the Persea- tree when the foes of Neb-er-tcher, the lord of the boundaries (icher), were destroyed. He is finally declared to be the god who goes round heaven robed in the flame of his mouth, who commands Hapi, the ape-god of the Nile. He is Nemu, the reporter of Osiris, Horus, Thoth (Dhu-ti) and Anubis rolled into one, and he as Kheper is watched over by the mothers Isis and Nebt-hat, who are called in line 125 of this chapter the ape-goddesses1.
Thus this conquering sun-god of the year of the beetle, born in January—February, when he came from the pool of the Pole Star Vega through the gates (tdiesert) of the Twins, the stars Gemini, is the rising sun, son of the sun-god of the eight-rayed star, the eight creating-gods, who was born when the sun was in Gemini in January—February and when Vega was the Pole Star, that is about 10,200 B.C., as the first of the series of sun-gods whose evolution has been traced in this Chapter and Chapter VII. He was the god of the year of the moon-cat, who ruled the second day of the week of Jack the Giant-killer, and his year was controlled by Thoth (Dhu-ti), the moon-god.
The sun-god of this year of thirteen months also appears in Vignette III. of the Papyrus of Ani as Anubis, the Jackal of the constellation of the Little Bear, who tests the tongue of the Balance in which the soul of Ani is to be weighed and judged by the testing-god and his twelve colleagues, who are depicted as setting behind the weighing scales. Their judgement is to be delivered after receiving the report of the weighing given by Thoth (Dhu-ti), who stands ready to prepare it with the scroll in his left and the pen feather in his right hand.
The representation of the central god of this year as Anubis, the jackal, shows that this thirteen-months year belongs to the second stage of the Horus myth. In the first
1 Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xvii. pp. 47—58.
   
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he is the bird-headed sun-god, born- of Hat-hor, and his assumption of the head of the jackal marks the age of the lunar cult, of which this thirteen-months year is the most unequivocal expression. The transition from the birdheaded to the jackal-headed Horus is shown in the figure found in Egyptian temples depicting him with the heads of the bird and the J ackalx.
The connection of the jackal-god with this year is also preserved in the Buddhist cosmogony of the thirteen Theris, in which he is the son of the thirteenth Theri Sigala-Mata, the mother of the jackal. The Egyptian biography of Ra also shows that his year of thirteen months was made the official year long before its priestly developement of the year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each was introduced.
This year of thirteen months, in which the year-god was delivered by the midwife-goddess Nit or Neith, furnishes in its birth-story further evidence of the connection I have already noted between it and the year of eleven months. Neith, the weaver, is the Egyptian Athene, the goddess of the weaving races of Lybyans who wove the flax whence the sacred garments both of the Egyptian and Jewish priests were made. I have already, in Chapter VI. p. 308, shown that the Indian Telis or oil-sellers, who worshipped the eleven gods of the year are the sons of the Sesame flax-plant, which also yields oil, and that they brought it to India from Asia Minor. It must have been from the same quarter, and probably by way of India, that both the years of eleven and thirteen months were brought to Egypt by the Kushite merchant kings.
H.   The thirteen-months year of the Nooktas of British Columbia.
This year is that used by the Nooktas of British Columbia, who show, both in their physique and their mode of life, strong affinities with the Polynesians and the seafaring
* Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 149.
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Dravidians of India. That have flat noses, thick lips and broad Dravidian features, and both long and short heads are found among them. They clothe themselves in bark dresses and wear a cap in the shape of a truncated cone, somewhat like the Hittite cap. They wear their hair either hanging loose or divided into tufts, and the only Columbian Indians who cut their hair are the Haidas. They tatoo themselves like the Ooraons and Burmese, and pluck out the beard. They live in large houses capable of holding all the living generations of a family, and build their houses on piles, both of which are Polynesian customs, and, like the Dravidian Males, they place totem poles in front of their houses. They use the bow and are also great fishermen, and build large flat canoes without the outrigger of the Polynesians and Malays, and which are, from their description, very like the large flat boats of Madras. They make fire by twirling a stick of cedar in a socket of softer wood, and cover the outside of their houses with painted designs, like those I have often seen on the houses of Santals in Bengal, and the Santals are the only forest tribes on whose houses I have seen these designsJ. In short, the people are very like maritime Santals and the Turano Dravidian coast races. They trace their descent in a curious way. The family descends through the wife, who brings her father’s position and privileges to her husband, but he avails himself of them only as her deputy, the real possessor being her son, but she on her marriage goes and lives in her husband’s village, and certain privileges descend in the paternal line. The family crest, representing the totem ancestor and conferring the privileges of noble, free or slave origin, descends through the mother. The members of each village community are, as among the Khands in Orissa, thought to be descended from a common ancestor. The strange mixture of patriarchal and matriarchal customs making up their very intricate system of tribal law clearly marks them as a mixed race 1
1   Ratsel, History of Mankind, Translated by A. J. Butler, vol. ii. pp. 19, 91—100.

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descended, like the Indian Dravidians, from matriarchal and patriarchal ancestors 1.
I.   The May perambulations of boundaries dating from this year.
Before I conclude the history of this year I must show by its connection with ancient perambulations of boundaries in May how widely its use was extended over Europe. We have seen in the history of the births of the Buddha that in his progress through the Mahosadha birth as the sun- physician, the Vessantara birth in the Tusita heaven of wealth, and his final birth as the deified sun-god who had left earth for heaven, he was born first at the beginning of Magh (January—February), that his Vessantara birth took place about the end of Phagun (February—March) at the vernal equinox, and that it was fifty days after this that he became the sun-god, the supreme ruler of heaven, who circled the sky on the path he had marked out for himself among the zodiacal stars, and had ceased to yield obedience to the Pole Star god or to the crescent and full- moon-gods of the lunar era, as the Pole Star god’s head was broken when that of Jayadratha with its lunar-earrings was cut off.
We have also seen that the son of Skanda, the new sun- god of this year succeeding that of Jayadratha, was born on the 5th of Visakha (April—May), a date nearly answering to St. George’s Day, and this month is prominently represented in the lives of the Buddhist Theris, for both the third Theri Padumavati and the ninth Bhudda Kundalakesha, the curly-headed saint, also called Su-bhadda or Su-bhadra, the
1 Boas, The Social Organisation and the Secret Societies of the Kiuatiutl Indians, pp. 334—338. The Noolka are a branch of the KwatiutI Indians, p. 632. They used to sacrifice human beings, the sacrifice taking place during the great annual festival lasting from the middle of November to the middle of January, showing that like the Santnls they kept the festival of the winter solstice, p. 636.
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mountain-goddess, were in the course of their transformations daughters of Visakha, and the fifth Dhammadinna was once his wife; that is to say, they all three belonged to years beginning in Visakha (April—May)I.
The sun-horse Parikshit was offered at the full-moon of Cheit (March—April), when his successor began his rule, so that the beginning of the year of this changing sun-god varied like our Easter from the vernal equinox to the 23rd of April. And with this variation in the starting date there was a similar variation in the date of the birth of the ascended and immortal sun-god, which fell fifty days after that of his mortal predecessors, the sun-horse and its rider. Judging by the persistent endeavours of the ancient ritualists to introduce history into their rites by the very recondite methods I have noted in previous chapters, it seems probable that these fifty days were connected with this year of fifty- one weeks or of some lunar mode of reckoning by months of fifty Tithi or lunar days, measured by a different scale of hours from that which we use, such as I have suggested in Chapter VII. p. 457, and in this latter case the fifty days would represent one month of the year, which was to be completed b)*- those intervening between his ascent into heaven and the end of his year. But whatever the explanation solving the difficulty may be, there can apparently be no doubt that the assumption of an interval of fifty days between the Easter birth of the sun-god and his ascent into heaven originated in this epoch, and arose out of the history of this'year of seventeen and thirteen months; and that it was then that the birth of the sun-child Sisu, son of Devasena, the moon-bird-goddess of the eight names, was celebrated by the Easter-eggs and the adoration of the moon-hare, which still survive in the symbolic Easter confectionery of Germany.
The history of these successive rebirths of the sun-god, beginning at Christmas and ending at Pentecost, is, as we
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii-, pp. 74—77> 8°*
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have seen, depicted in the life of the Buddha, and the universal diffusion of this dramatic panorama of the scenes of the moving scroll of time is proved by the reproduction of the Eastern pictorial series in the life of the Western king Arthur. The story of Arthur or Airem, the ploughman, son of Uther, that is Uther Bran of the wonderful head, the gnomon-stone I, who was originally the ploughing- sun-god, a Western form of the Eastern Rama, has been brought in its modern forms into accordance with Christian theology; but it was originally a history of pre-Christian faiths culminating in the worship of the white horse or mare of the sun. Her temple, that of the British goddess Epona, is close to Amesbury, whither Guinivere, his queen, who was originally Gwen-hwyvar, the white (given) spirit (,hwyvar), one of the three-year wives of the ploughing-god with the same name 2 3 4, betook herself, after Arthur had met his death at the hands of his son Modred, the archer and the winter- king 3. It is in the story of the coronation of Arthur that we find the record of his successive rebirths from the time when he as the sun-god entered Gemini in December— January, about 12,000 B.C., to his Easter birth in Gemini at the vernal^ equinox, about 6ooo B.C., and his final consecration at the end of fifty days at Whitsuntide. His birth as the sun-god was manifested by his drawing from the sun-gnomon-stone the sun-sword, a feat, like that of the stringing of the year-bow of Arjuna and Odusseus, only to be accomplished by the ruling year-god. Arthur proved that he alone could take the sun-sword from the stone in five repeated trials, which were wholly unnecessary to prove his power, for which one trial was enough. These were at Christmas, Twelfth Night, Candlemas, Easter and Whitsuntide, at which last festival he was finally crowned king 4. Thus
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 97.
2 Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, chap. ii., pp. 25, 35, 36.
3 Ibid., chap. ii. pp. 38, 39; Malory, Morle d'Arthur, Globe Edition, Book i. chaps, xvii., xviii., xxv. pp. 42—44, 48, 49, Book xxi. chap. vii.
4   Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Book i. chaps, iii., iv., v., pp. 28, 31.
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this story, when repeated in its pre-Christian form, tells us that in the progress of ages he showed his right to rule first, as the sun-god awoke, like the Phoenician Archal, from his twelve-days sleep at Christmas; secondly, as the sun- child born on Twelfth Night; thirdly, as the ploughing- sun-god of the year beginning in January—February; fourthly, as the god of the Easter year of the vernal equinox; and fifthly, as the ruler of the universe born and crowned in heaven at Whitsuntide.
In the interval between the Easter birth and the ascension and rebirth at Pentecost there are held, almost everywhere throughout Europe, New Year’s festivals, in which the boundaries of each village and parish are circumambulated. It is in the Roman ritual that we find most satisfactory evidence of the ritualistic teaching conveyed in these ceremonies. There are two of these festivals in May, one on the 15th and the other on the 29th, in which processions went round the city boundaries as the representative sun-god of this year went round in his chariot the race-course, symbolising his zodiacal circuit.
The festival of the 15th of May is called that of the Argei, and is dedicated in the Fasti to Jupiter and to Mercurius of the Circus Maximus, the god of boundaries. The procession on this day ended at the Pons Sublicius, the ancient bridge over the Tiber, in the construction of which no iron was used. It was led by all the Pontifices or priests, by the Flaminica Dialis or female priestess of Jupiter in mourning, and by the Vestal Virgins carrying twenty-four Argei or puppets, made of rushes to resemble men bound hand and foot, and they threw these into the Tiber from the bridge. The name Argei given to these rush dolls shows that they were connected with the twenty-four shrines, the Sacella Argcorum, which marked the boundaries of the Servian city of Rome, and round which the Salii carried the year-shields in the March festivals beginning the year, which I have described in Chapter V. p. 239. No one who has read the account, which I will give presently, of the ancient procession
   
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of the 15th May, held at Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the capital of Umbria, will be it seems to me able to doubt that the procession of the twenty-four Argei went round the boundary shrines of the city before reaching the bridge, and that each of the shrines contributed a slain victim for the final sacrifice to the river-parent-god. Thus the whole ceremony denoted a national mourning for the death of the old year of fifteen months of twenty-four days each, or of the twenty-four lunar phases of the year of twelve months, a mourning marked by the dress of the Flaminica Dialis representing the mother of the dead sun-god.
That this sacrifice of the puppets, the dead remains of the old year, was a survival from a more ancient human sacrifice offered throughout Europe and Asia at the end of the year is indubitably proved by the evidence of national rituals. In the festival of Thargelion (May—June) at Athens to Artemis and Apollo, corresponding to the Roman festival of the 15 th of May, a man and a woman crowned with flowers and fruit, like sacrificial victims, were thrown from a rock with curses and led over the frontierr. Similarly, in Bavaria at Whitsuntide a boy in some places, a puppet in others, is decorated and carried round the fields, and thrown from a bridge into the river; and there is a similar Whitsuntide sacrifice at Halle of a straw doll called Der Alte or the old man, which is strictly analogous to the Roman festival, in which the victims were traditionally old men, as is shown by the saying “ Sexagenarios de pontc ”—The old men from the bridge. The observance of this custom, almost universal throughout Germany, was forbidden at Erfurt by a law of 1551 prohibiting the ducking of people at Easter and Whitsuntide2. This sacrifice was also simulated in the Indian ritual of the making of the fire-pan, in which a sham man was carried about with the gold plate and twenty-one knobs ; and in the consecration service 1
1 Muller, Die Dorter, Hook ii. chap. viii. § 2, p. 329.
* Mannhnnlt, Baumkultus, pp. 331, 359, 420 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Maius, 111 —121,
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beginning the building at the new year of the brick Aha- vanlya altar of the year-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox a human sacrifice was actually offered, and the head of the victim buried, as I shall show in Chapter IX., at the East end of the altar.
The second sacrifice in May, accompanied by a circuit of boundaries, is the Ambarvalia or solemn perambulation of the fields. Its date, as given in the calendars, is the 29th of May. Three animals, a bull, a sheep and a pig, were driven three times round the limits of each estate and municipality by a crowd crowned with garlands and carrying olive branches in their hands, and the animals were sacrificed when "the third round was completedI. An exactly similar sacrifice was held every year at Athens on the 6th of Thargelion (May—June), when the same animals were sacrificed 1 2.
J.   The perambulations of boundaries in Gnbbio and Echternach.
We have fortunately in the Eugubine Tables fuller information about this sacrifice and its early ritual than is extant for any other religious rite of ancient worship in any country, except those described in the Indian Brahmanas. In these we find a minute description of the annual circumambulation of Gubbio, the Umbrian capital Iguvium, and we can, as I shall show presently, supplement and illustrate these old official instructions by the observances of the modern successor of the ancient rite which takes place every year at Gubbio on the 15th of May, the same date as that of the procession round the Servian walls of Rome.
The tables give the rules for two different official circuits of the boundaries of Iguvium, dominated by the sacred hill Ingino, a name which irresistibly connects the city, its worship of the household fire, and the mother-mountain,
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Men sis Mains, pp. 124—128.
2   Diogenes Laertius Socrates, c. 23 ; Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite Antique, pp. 186, 187.
   
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with the ancient German Ing, Inguina, the Ingaevones of Tacitus, who describes them as the eldest sons of Mannus, son of Tuisco, dwelling nearest the ocean1. They are the men of the household-hearth and the ingle-nook, and it was to these ancient parent-gods that the Umbrian city and confederacy were dedicated.
In both the circuits described 2, the priests had before the ceremony to take the auspices from the birds, and if they were favourable, the priest called the Adfertor or arranger (answering to the Hindhu Adhvaryu, the advancer on the road (<adhvan)), and his two assistants, had to be invested with the praetexta or official robe with purple stripes, and to place the sacrificial cord on his right shoulder, according to the pre-solar custom of the Hindu Pitaro-Barishadah of the Pole Star Age. He was then to pray to the sacred owl (parra), and again to take the auspices at the augur’s chair in the sacred augural templum or enclosure, which was with the temple of Vista in the centre of the city, whence the four roads leading to the four points of the compass branched off. He must then make the circuit of the city, driving before him the victims for the sacrifice, the pigs, sheep and bulls, and must on reaching the boundary expel any aliens who have settled in the city without becoming naturalised Umbrians. At the end of each of the three circuits silent prayers must be said to Cerfus Martius, Praestita Cerfia and Tursa Cerfia of Cerfus Martius.
In this ritual it is perfectly clear that we have a very close approximation to that observed in the old pre-Vedic sacrifices in India. The rules as to the wearing of the sacrificial cord and the bearing of the fire on the right shoulder, as well as the injunction to pray silently, are identical with those of the worship of Prajapati; also the three circuits of the walls must like the three Hindu circuits
1   Tacitus, Germania, 2.
2   Bovver, The Ceri at Gnbbio. Published by the Folklore Society, 1S97. Appendix, Lustration of the Iguvine People, Eugubine Tables vi. and vii. pp. 132—140.
   
round the altar in the Pole Star age, have been left-handed against the course of the sun, the direction in which as will be seen presently the priests make their circuit in the modern procession. Furthermore the triad to whom prayers are addressed is a reproduction of the gods of the Gond trident of Pharsi-pen and of the three tree-gods of the Tri-kadru-ka sacrifice. Both Br6al and Biicheler, the editors and interpreters of the Eugubine Tables, agree in thinking that Cerrus is the Latin equivalent of the Umbrian Cerfus, and they derive it from the root Cer or Ker, to create, which is also the root of the name Ceri, given to the three pedestals carried in the modern procession at Gubbio. Cerrus is used by Pliny, Hist. Nat. xvi. 6, as the name of a species of oak, the Quercus Cerrus of Linnaeus, which grows in the Apennines and Piedmont. Hence these three Cerfi would be the three oaks, the Drei-eich or three oak mothers of Germany, of Grimm, and the Tri-kadru-ka of India. The three stems of the three parent mother-trees, the goddess Mari-amma or the tree-mother of India, the Sanskrit Drona or hollowed tree-stem holding the sacred Soma, and the Greek mother-goddesses Leto and Artemis Orthia, worshipped as tree-trunks. The Asherah or tree-pillars of the Jews, which became among the Northern races who worshipped the Hir-mensul or great gnomon-stone of the sun, the Perrons of Germany, the village sun-stones, surmounted as in the Perron of Augsberg, with the pine cone as the sign of the tree-mother. It was this stem of the parent- tree which was the Thyrsus of Bacchus, with the pine cone on the top. The names of the gods of this triad also give further proof of their close connection with the Gond and Takka triads, for they are identical with the gods of the Gond triad of Pharsipot, in the fact that they represent the central father-god, the middle prong of the trident and his two wives, who in the Gond trident are the two tigen-mothers Manko and Janko Rayetal (p. 160). These last are here called Praestita, or the protecting, and Tursa, or the towered Cerfia, the latter being the goddess wearing the tower of
   
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Cybele and Isis, and she is, as we shall see presently, the ‘goddess with a temple consecrated to herself, to whom heifers are offered, and not the boars and sows sacrificed to Cerfus Martius and Praestita Cerfia. That these three gods were represented like the Indian Jugahnath by consecrated logs or tree-stems is also proved by the modern Ceri. These are made of stout wooden poles, of which the outward shape, when they are carried in procession, is that of hour-glasses, as their upper and lower halves form a cage-shaped protuberance, so that each Cero is shaped similarly to the Hindu altar in the form of a woman, broad at the ends and contracted at the waistx. The modern Ceri are doubtless imitations of those of the three mother-tree-goddesses carried in the old lustral procession, preserved by the conservative instinct which is so strong a characteristic of the Umbrian and Tuscan people.
The Eugubine Table VII. gives the ritual of a procession round the boundary shrines of Gubbio, which is clearly part of the series of services of which the procession of Table VI. is the opening service. It tells us where and how the sacrifices offered during the circuits were to be made. Three of these were offered apparently at the three gates which formed the entrances to Iguvium as to other Etrurian towns 1 2. The first sacrifice was at Fontuli, where three boars, red or black, were offered to Cerfus Martius with silent prayers and wavings of incense censors, as in the Indian worship of the age of the Pandavas, whose priest was Dhaumya or the son of the incense smoke (dJmmo). Corn, sour wine and spelt meal, the parched meal of the Pitaro Barishadah, were also offered. At Rubinia three sows, red or black, were offered to Praestita Cerfia with drink offerings of sour wine, corn, and cakes. This was followed by libations and silent prayers over the black vessels consecrated to Praestita Cerfia, which were succeeded
1   See Plate V. ; Bower, The Ceri at Gubbio, p. 50.
2   Bower, The Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, p. in, note 1.
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by those over the white vessels dedicated to her, and the four vessels, two white and two black, were placed, as the ritual expressly says, crosswise, that is in the form of the St. Andrew’s Cross, representing the solstitial sun, so that Praestita Cerfia was the sun-hen, the Indian goddess Ahalya, or Vrisha-kapi, the rain-ape with the lunar earrings given to Utanka (p. 313). She was wife of Gautuma or Indra, in the days when he was the rain-ape-god Maroti, the god of the tree (marovi), and the West wind Martu, whence he came to Italy as Martius.
After the libations to the goddess of the solstitial seasonal vessels a cake and spelt meal were offered to Fisovius Sancius, the Iguvine form of the sowing-god Semo Sancus, the god born of the sacred grass, who slew Cacus (p. 442). He was the god of the Fisian hill, now called Ingino, the god of the cleft (fissns), perhaps the male form of the Syrian Tirhatha, the cleft, and of the river issuing from the cleft to form the town brook. He clearly is a god belonging to the ritual of the Southern mothers, to whom only first-fruits and no living victims were offered. The third sacrifice was offered after the third circuit beyond Sata, and after the Adfertur and his two assistants, wearing the lustral prsetexta, had prayed in silence in the temple of Cerfia Tursa, called Tursa Jovia, whence it appears that this goddess was worshipped in a shrine consecrated to her instead of in the open air, like the two other gods. She was tjie goddess of the later age following that when men worshipped on the mountain tops or on artificial hills. It was from her temple that the three heifer-calves to be sacrificed to her were driven to the decurional or centre forum. After they were caught in a sham hunt they were taken to Aquilonia, and there sacrificed to Tursa Jovia with drink-offerings, corn and a cake. At each of the sacrifices pieces were to be given, these were doubtless, as in Indian ritual, the pieces of the victims given to the townspeople to bury in their fields to secure good crops. We see in this ritual that it is female animals that are sacrificed to female goddesses, and the heifers offered
   
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to Tursa are like the Jewish heifer-offerings and the sacrifice of a cow on the Indian Ashtaka, and belong apparently to an older ritual than those in which the oxen of the age of the sexless gods and bulls were offered.
The whole of the ritual of Iguvium was under the control of the twelve Attidian brethren, who, whether they were priests of the Phrygian god Attis or not, were clearly a branch of the same order of dancing priests originating in Asia Minor, to which the Roman Salii, the priests ot Mars, belonged, and who succeeded, in South-western Asia, the female dancers of the Indian matriarchal villages, the offspring of the mother-tree and the tree-ape-god Maroti, the prototype of the Umbrian Martius, who became the Etruscan Maso, the god of increase.
There is no mention in the ritual of the Iguvine circuit processions of the sacrifice of a sheep, which was apparently an addition to the earlier ritual in which pigs first and afterwards heifers were offered. But the ritual of a sheep sacrifice is given in the Eugubine Tables, and it apparently belonged to the series of those offered at the birth and ascension to heaven of the Easter sun-god. The object of the ritual of this sheep sacrifice is the sanctification of the temple spring, the fountain welling forth from the prints of the hoof of the sun-horse. For this a special priest was appointed from the Collegia of the Attidian brethren. He chooses a sheep for the sacrifice, which is brought in from the country with the sacred fire. The sheep is carried on a litter divided into two, an upper and lower compartment, like those of the Ceri. The sacrifice is offered after the priest enters the temple, apparently that of Tursa, to various deities, among whom arc Jupiter, Pumunus Publicus and Tursa, and wine and corn arc offered with it. But the fact that it is a sacrifice in which the priest turns to the right, shows that it was an offering of the solar age, belonging to the creed of the worshippers of the male Su-astika, the sun who begins his annual journey by going South at the summer solstice. The sheep sacrificed is the Easter lamb eaten by
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the Jews at the Passover, the lamb of the year beginning with the feast of Purim, that sacrificed by the Bulgarians to St. George on his day, and that eaten on Easter day in almost every house in Greece. It was the substitute for the animal sacrifice of the eldest son, the child eaten by the Sabaean Haranites, who pray turning not to the North, like the Mandaite Sabseans, but to the South, and who were the followers of the White God Laban in the age of the eleven-months year. In the Mandaite New Year’s sacrifice at the autumnal equinox, a wether and not a lamb is slain T.
We have now, in seeking further illustrations of the inner meaning and historical significance of the ceremonies beginning the Umbrian New Year of the Easter sun-god, to turn to the festival celebrated every year at Gubbio on the 15th of May, of which Mr. Bower, in his account of the procession, has given us a picture in which the smallest details are artistically recorded. He begins with a description of the three Ceri. The first of these is now dedicated to St. Ubaldo, but formerly it was that of St. Francisco, and originally the Cero of Ingino, the mountain-mother. The other two are called those of St. George and St. Anthony, a dedication marking the festival, in which they appear as principal actors, as one to the year-gods of the year of three seasons, originally that of Orion, but beginning, when it was dedicated to St. George, at the autumnal equinox. This was, as we have seen in Chapter V., the season sacred to St. George as the ploughing- god, who was originally born at the autumnal equinox as god of the upright four-armed cross with equal arms, called after him, but who became in the course of the evolution of religious belief I have described in this and the previous
1 Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. 114, 115 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Preface, p. xvi., Essay vii., pp. 55, 56; Essay viii., p. 164; Chwolsohn, Ssabier tend der Sabiismus, ii., Excursus to chap. ix. PP- 3*9, 364; Garnett and Stuart Glennie, Women of Turkey, chap. xii. PP- 332, 333-
   
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chapters, the god of the Easter sun. St. Anthony, who carries a fire-ball in his hand z, is, in Italian popular mythology, the god of the household fire-place, and the especial protector of pigs 2. In considering the history of these three survivals of ancient creeds, we must not forget that St. Ubaldo’s body is believed to be imperishable, that he is reclothed every year before his festival, and that one of his titles to the supremacy among the three Cero saints is that he conquered eleven cities for the Iguvians 3. In these attributes he is clearly declared to be the never-dying sun-god of this epoch, who yearly reclothes himself in the green leaves and flowers of summer, and who, as the conqueror of the god Dadhiank of the horse’s head ruling the eleven-months year, has become the supreme ruler of heaven and earth. These properties and victories of the conquering sun-god, set forth in the original ritualistic history, have been transferred to St. Ubaldo in the modern transformation of the old birth-story.
The bearers who carry these Ceri in the procession wear a uniform, of which the most noticeable articles are the red cap with its long strings and tassel, and the white or red shirt. The red colour marks the wearers as members of the rqd race of Adam, the red earth, but the cap is the most significant part of the dress. It is the cap of the red-capped goblin, the Leprechaun of Ireland, who is believed to guard treasure, and who is the parent-god of the dwarf mining races; and his red head is an inheritance from his bird- parents, the red-headed wood-pecker. This wood-pecker, the wood-king Picus, was beloved by the witch-goddess Circe, the hawk (kirke) ruler of time in the West, the land of the setting sun. He refused her advances, and was changed by her into a wood-pecker 4. He was the father of Faunus, the deer or antelope sun-god, and the grandfather of Latinus. He is, in short, the bird-parent of the forest miners, whose 1 2 3 4
1   Bower, Procession of the Ceri, p. 114.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 23S—240, 252.
3   Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. 13, 17, 22, 30, 123.
4   Virgil, sEucid, vii. iSy—191.

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emigration I have traced from the Ural mountains through Europe and Asia, where their memory has been preserved in the traditional history of every country where they have settled. They were all sun-worshippers, and their red-capped goblin-parent, son of the red-headed wood-pecker, is believed to be a guardian of mineral wealth by the Algonquin Indians, as well as by the Italian, Irish, and German peasants1. It was the believers in this bird as the messenger and embodiment of the god of wealth, who made the female Su-astikas found in old Indian tombs in Mississipi and Tennessee, in which the beak and head of this wood-pecker form the arms of the Su-astika 2. This was the bird-guardian of the treasure of the dwarfs, who is said by Pliny to have the power of opening any mountain or closed place by the virtue of a plant it gathers at the night season of the moon, and he calls it Picus Martius, or the bird sacred to the god Martius of Gubbio, the divine wood-pecker. He is said by Suidas to be worshipped in Crete as Pekos Zeus (mjKos Zeus), and to foretell rain; and is apparently identical with the sacred bird of St. Martin, the Saint of November, who ruled the original year of the Pleiades, the ice-bird of Aristotle who sits on her eggs in winters It was this bird, whose history shows it to have been looked on as a bird ruling time in the earliest year-reckonings, who led the Finn miners to India, where they disseminated their belief in the Southern god of the winter solstice as the god of wealth, and as the god who brings from the South the rich gifts of spring at the vernal equinox. It was under the banner of this god that the Pandavas came back to the sacrifice of the sun- horse with the wealth they had taken from the Southern mines; and it was from the Tusita heaven of this god of 1 2 3
1   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 162—165.
2   See Figures 263, 264, 269, Wilson on the Suastika, pp. 906, 907. Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, United States National Museum, 1896.
3   De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vii. pp. 543, 346; Pliny, 10, 18, 20; Aristotle, De Gen. Animalium, v.
   
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wealth {tuso) that the Buddha was born in his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox.
These red - capped Ceraioli wearing the livery of this treasure-guardian are divided into three bodies. The first, who bear the Cero of St. Ubaldo, belong to the Society of the Muratori or Masons. Their leader is the First Captain or chief director of the festival, who entertains the principal guests present at the feast celebrating the day. He is elected by lot on St. Ubaldo’s day, the 16th of May, from among the Society of Masons, but he must be of noble birth. He holds office for twelve months, and in the days when Gubbio was the capital of a republic he was the national Presidentr. The Ceraioli of St. George belong to the Guild of Traders, and those of St. Anthony are Contadini or countrymen ; so that the three saints are the patron-gods of the Nobles, the Traders, and Cultivators, answering to the Indian castes of the Kshatrya or warriors, Vaishya, village {visit) artisans, and Sudras or farmers.
The day of the procession is the eve of St. Ubaldo’s day, and therefore a fast. Hence the principal dish at the feast held before the procession is one of boiled peas and cuttlefish, the millets and river-fish of the sons of the rivers. This is followed by a number of fish courses, the sacramental dishes of the fish-sun-god Salli-manu] or Solomon, who died yearly in the constellation Pisces, or the fish, the last Nakshatra Revati, and rose again in the constellation Aries of the sun-rain as the bearer of the Seal of Solomon,—the mystic marriage ring of the Pope, with its nine divisions, which was to be the topmost stone of the vaulted roof of the heavenly palace of the immortal sun-god built by the Masons of the holy craft, who first began the year-palace by arranging the bricks of the days of the weeks by which time was measured. It is they who rule this Gubbio festival, and who, as the widely-disseminated association of Free Masons, have adopted the seal of the two interlocked triangles enclosed 1
1 Bower, The Procession of the Cert, pp. 6, 7, 65, 66.
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in a circle as the signet of the Royal Arch, their highest grade.
This meal is washed down with large draughts of wine, which is also, as we shall see, consumed during the procession, which takes place in the evening, thus marking it as a survival of the early orgiastic festivals to the seasonal gods of the setting stars and sun.
While the Cero of St. Ubaldo is being raised, and before the procession starts, water is thrown on it, thus showing that the original festival was a national prayer for rain, like the water-throwing festivals of the Sal-tree, held at the end of March or the beginning of April in India and Burmah. The cortege is arranged at noon, and is led by the Captain with a drawn sword and a man in a red shirt carrying an axe covered with a white cloth, the survival of the doubleheaded axe of Parasu Rama and the Carian Zeus, which had cut down the mother-trees carried at the ancient procession, when the trees were, like the Kurum or almond-tree of Chutia Nagpur, solemnly cut by fasting villagers, who went into the forest to seek it. These two march in front of St. Ubaldo’s Cero, which leads the way, but before starting the Cero is turned violently round three times against the course of the sun. At first the bearers of the Ceri visit, one after another, the houses of a number of prominent citizens, and opposite each house the Cero is turned three times as at starting. During these visits each Cero takes its own independent course, and after them they all meet for the final procession at the Piazza Signorina, the town market-place. There they have the third meal of the day, the second being taken at the various houses they visit. These are the three meals of the sun-god of the early mythology of the North, breakfast, dinner and supper.
After Vespers, the final procession begins with the Cero of St. Ubaldo in front, followed by St. George the summer and autumn saint, next, and by St. Anthony the winter saint, last; and the great bell only rung five times in the year announces the time of departure. The Ceri are carried by
   
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the bearers at a rapid rate, and they start on a sunward course round the town till they meet near the South-east gate with the episcopal procession. This is led by men in white garments with black mourning capes, like the mourning worn by the Flaminica Dialis in the Roman procession of the 15th of May. They are the attendants of the dead, and the death they mourn is that of the departing year. They are followed by the members of the Society of Santa Croce wearing blue capes, the garments of the day-sun of the new year, and after them more mourners in black. The last in the procession was the Bishop, who was preceded by the Canons of the Cathedral walking behind the picture of St. Ubaldo. They began their tour of the town by going first Northward, then Westward, and thence by the South to the East, so that their course was contrary to that of the sun, a course prescribed in Canonical rules for Penitential processions x. When they reached the South-east point of the circuit at the end of the Via Dante, they were met by the Ceri and their bearers, who dash at full pace Southwards till the Bishop stops their career by holding up the Host, answering to the ancient emblem of the rising sun.
After acknowledging the holy symbol the bearers with the Ceri rush past the clergy till they arrive at the first halting-place ; which is, when we consider the extraordinary conservatism of ritual, almost indubitably cither the actual spot where the first sacrifices were offered in the procession described in the Eugubine Tables, or a substitute for it. It is at the Palazzo Ferranti, the South-west point of the circuit, and therefore the setting place of the sun of the winter solstice which rose in the South-east, where the Ceri met the clergy. It is on the banks of the stream flowing through the city. Here they halt for a draught of wine, and the First Captain, mounted on horseback and attended by a tiumpeter, takes command of the whole bod)', and under him is the Second Captain with two axe-bearers.
1 Bower, The Procession of (he Ceri, p. 125.
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They, followed by the Ceri, go North and then East to the Great Piazza. There a second halt for rest and wine is made, after the Ceri have gone several times round the Piazza against the course of the sun. They start thence for their final halt and a draught of wine at the Porta Ingino, leading up to Mount Ingino. They then take the Ceri up the hill, and carry them three times round the court of the Monastery. The ceremonies end with the lighting of the year’s fires and, like other ancient New Year festivals, with a two days’ fair.
I have now, before closing the account of these May Pentecostal processions celebrating the New Year of the sun-god enthroned in heaven, to turn to another similar festival to that of Gubbio. This is the dancing procession at Echternach in Luxemburg, held yearly on Whit Monday. Echternach is dedicated to St. Willibrod, who died there in a monastery he founded after he had converted the people of Echternach and its neighbourhood to Christianity. He was an English monk who took the vows in the monastery at Ripon in Yorkshire, and it was he who first converted the Frisians. He came to Trier, the seat of the Roman provincial government near Echternach in 698 A.D., and died in 739 A.D. Echternach, on the right bank of the Sauer, had been probably for ages before Willibrod came there, the site of a holy well: one of those welling forth under the hoofs of the sun-horse, to whom the well and the small conical hill rising above it was dedicated. It was a typical Celtic site, hallowed by a hill sacred to the mountain-mother, and a well near the village grove at the foot of the hill. It is in the country of the Eburones, whose territory extended from the Eiffel country on the North as far South as Lake Neufchatel, of which the Roman name is Lacus Eburodunensis, the Lake of the fort (dun) of the Eburi, and they ruled the whole of the country of the Ardennes. They probably take their name from the boar Eber, the sun-boar of Orion’s year, and the Wild Boar of the Ardennes.
   
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When Willibrod came to Echternach as a missionary, he found, as we are told in his life, that an annual dancing festival was held there every year in honour of the sun- physician, who gave healing properties to its waters, and to whom the conical hill on which the parish church now stands was dedicated. The people danced there for three days and three nights together, just as they do at the Munda seasonal festivals ; and this sun-festival was attended, as it is now, by people from a considerable distance, so that it must have originated in very ancient times. It was held like that at Gubbio at about the same time when the present Christian festival takes place ; that is to say, it was a May festival of the consecration of the boundaries of holy sites hallowed by the healing-sun-god. When the people were won to Christianity by St. Willibrod’s preaching they agreed to change their dancing festival into a Christian procession, but the change was really merely nominal, and they substituted the name of St. Willibrod in their prayers for health and prosperity for that of the heathen sun-god l. Both here and at Gubbio, the clerical teachers, who taught the people to call themselves Christians and tried to train them in the practice and love of Christian virtues, followed the advice given by Gregory the First to St. Augustine and the missionaries he was taking to England, and did not alter the festivals of the people beyond bringing them, as far as they found it possible to do so, to renounce practices denounced as sinful by Christian ethics.
Hence the dance which distinguished the ancient heathen procession was still performed at Echternach, with its remarkable step of three paces forward and two backwards, and its own special music2. It is apparently a survival of the ancient Tripudium or measured step of the Dionysian Choric
1   Die Spring prozession und der Wallfahrt znm Grade des hciligcn Willibrod in Echternach, von J. Bern; Krier, Religions Ichrcr am Progymnasium zu Echternach, pp. 66 ff.
2   Purior, Echternach St. Willibrod ct la Procession dansantc, p. 13 ; Krier, Die Spring prozession, p. 113.
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dances, and its five steps point to a connection with the Celtic five-days week. It is with this step that the Echter- nach processionists now make the circuit of their town, and a similar step was probably used at Gubbio, which has now degenerated into the running pace of the Ceraioli bearers' of the Ceri.
We have a minute account of the procession recorded by Brower in 1617 A.D., in his Metropolis Ecclesia Treviritz and A/males Trevirenses, which shows that it then differed in some respects from that of the present day. It began, as now, at the linden-tree of St. Willibrod on the left bank of the Sauer, the mother-tree of Echternach, and a linden is the sacred tree of almost all villages in Belgium and the Eiffel country. There they danced three times round the cross of St. Willibrod under the tree facing the crossing of the Sauer leading to the town. At Echternach, as at Gubbio, there were three special stages in the procession, which went sunwise round the town, and this circumambu- lation of the cross was the first of the three. The triple circuit round St. Willibrod’s was repeated in that round the interior of the Abbey Church and round the cross outside the Parish Church1. In the Abbey Church they danced under the great chandelier in the centre dedicated to the twelve Apostles, and fitted for seventy-two lights, to represent, as we are told, the seventy-two disciples sent out by our Lord to preach the gospel2. This certainly looks very much like a survival of the ancient tradition of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year, which were still remembered by the very conservative people who have kept intact so many old beliefs and customs in Gubbio
1   Krier, Der Springprozession, pp. 158, 63, 68.
2   Luke x. 1—17. Our version speaks only of seventy disciples, but many ancient manuscripts give the number as seventy-two, and this was certainly the number recognised by the makers of the Echternach chandelier, unless indeed they had the Celtic number of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year in their mind. The original dancing festival was certainly one which had descended from the ancient Pre-Celtic Piets and the earlier sons of Dagda and Brigit to the Goidelic and Brythonic Celts.
   
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and Echternach, and, as we have seen in so many instances recorded in this work, in all the countries peopled by the successive ruling races of the ancient world.
The arrangement of the procession is most interesting and instructive. No one who has seen it can fail to see in the demeanour of the processionists that it is looked on by all who take part in it as a most solemn religious ceremony. In the Middle Ages it was divided into two separate services, and the second of these was reserved for the creeping penitents, who, like the priests at Gubbio, made their way slowly round the circuit, beginning their journey by creeping through a hole in a holy stone near St. Willibrod’s cross, which, like the similar holy stone at Anderlecht near Brussels, was supposed to possess healing virtues. Sick human beings and Easter lambs used to be passed through the Anderlecht stone. The Echternach stone was originally about two feet high, and it was raised a foot higher by Paschasius, who was abbot from 1657 to 1667 A.D.
The pilgrims who attend the festival come from considerable distances, and the first place in the dancing procession immediately after the walking priests, headed by the Dean, is reserved for the people of Priim, the capital of the Eiffel, about sixty miles from Echternach. For some days before Whit Monday pilgrims begin to come in, and it is almost more interesting to watch their arrival than to see the procession itself. All the pilgrims from each village, men, women, boys, girls, and children, come in together in one troop accompanied by their village band, and they spend their time on the journey in reciting the Litanies of St. Willibrod. Certainly all that I met near the town were thus engaged, though whether they continually recited the services throughout the long journey on foot, that some of them had to take, I cannot say.
The procession begins with a sermon, and in it each village takes its allotted place. The men, women, boys, and girls, in separate rows for each sex and age, dance in
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step behind their village band, and take with them their village flag. It is a surviving likeness of the processions of matriarchal communal villages, each having, like those in Chutia Nagpur, their own flag and village musicians ; and I am certain that in the days when the pilgrimage was made to the healing well of the sun-physician, the pilgrims looked on their journey and the ritual of the services as an equally holy duty as that their modern descendants now perform in the hope of obtaining the intercession of St. Willibrod. Any one in those remote ages staying in Echternach for some days before the festival would have met the villagers coming to the town in groups,, reciting prayers to the sun-physician, who, as the Buddha of the Vessantara birth, healed the diseases of all those whom he was pleased to help.
The festival ends, like that of Gubbio, with a fair, and though no bonfires are lighted at it, yet from the close similarity between the two feasts it is certain that those who introduced it among the Eburoncs brought it from some town centre, inhabited by a section of amalgamated tribes who had formed themselves into the nationality of the sons of the Easter lamb, and adopted a new sun-year for their national use. By these it was regarded as a New Year’s feast, but when incorporated into the ritual of the Celts, who retained their old November year of the Pleiades, it was looked on as a holy festival which would bring blessings to the country, and accepted without any alteration of their previous annual reckonings. ' These latter, in the conservative countries of primaeval times, could only be changed by an immigration of the men of the new year large enough to make the new comers much more numerous and powerful than their predecessors; and even then the change in any of the town-centres, whence all innovations started, was first made by the assignment of a special quarter to the new comers, wherein, as in the separate divisions of the seven hills of Rome, they could follow their own ritual. It was only after a long series of quarrels, recon
   
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ciliations, and general amalgamation of the alien sections with each other by intermarriage, that the composite ritual of the primitive mythologies which have come down to us were made into one national round of annual festivals, embodying those of the component tribes united as one state. It is as one of these incorporated festivals that the New Year processions and verification of boundaries, which began the year of the Easter-born sun-god raised to heaven at the Pentecost, survive in all countries of Europe, and are retained in England in the circuits made round parish boundaries in Rogation week.
To complete the account of this year and to show its position in the history of human developement, marked by the successive measurements of annual time, I must close this Chapter with a description of the altar of the Garhapatya hearth dedicated to this year, and designed in India at this epoch as the first of the two brick altars embodying the final record of the history of the year told in Hindu ritual.
K.   The ritual of the building of the Garhapatya altar of this thirteen-months year.
The space for the altar was swept by a Palasha (Butea frondosa) branch, and was sprinkled with the river sand, whence the sons of the rivers were born, mixed with salt, so as to consecrate it, in the language of the Brahmanas, to those united races, sons of the river and sea-mothers, who trace their descent from the inner membrane (amnion) of the womb of the flax (uma) mother, the oil-bearing flax- plant, the Sesamum orientaleT. The ground for the altar was enclosed with twenty-one enclosing stones, the twenty- one days of the month of this year, and in placing them
1 Eggeling, Sal. ffrah., vii. I, i, i—7, vi. 6, 1, 24: S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 29S, 299, 252.
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a sunwise direction was to be followed. The bricks were then to be laid down in the order stated in the accompanying diagram, representing the altar inside the circle of twenty-one stones. The first four bricks are to be laid down from North to South to represent the body and arms of the sun-god going Southward at the summer solstice. After these the builder, proceeding sunwise, is to place the two Western bricks to represent the two thighs, placing the Southern brick first. He then goes round and places the Eastern bricks to represent the head, placing the North bricks first, so that the first eight bricks form a cross, representing the effigy of the father of fire lying on his back with outstretched arms and his head to the East. To complete the year-square, represented by the altar, four more bricks are added, the ninth brick in the South-east being divided into two parts, so that the whole makes the square of the thirteen months of this year, measuring one fathom in diameter, placed inside the circle of twenty-one stones T. This altar or hearth, is to be built of one layer as the womb of life 2, that of the birth-year of the worship of the sun, who was to rise to heaven as the sun-bird born from this year of seventeen and thirteen months, the bird of the Ahavaniya brick altar, to be described in the next chapter. This sun-bird was to be born from this hearth of national generation as the offspring of the fire kindled on it, combined
with that of the fire-pan which was transferred to it.
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1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 1, x—12, 37; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 301—309.
2   Ibid., vii. 1, 2, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 315.
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CHAPTER IX.
THE YEARS OF EIGHTEEN AND TWELVE MONTHS, AND
OF FIVE AND TEN-DAY WEEKS.
A. The Hindu year of eighteen months and that of the Mayas of Mexico.
WE have seen in the last chapter that the seventeen- months year closing the exile of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, ended before the sacrifice of the sun-horse at the full moon of Cheit (March—April), and it was at this sacrifice, as vve learn from its ritual described in the poem, that the eighteen-months year began. These months were represented by the eighteen sacrificial stakes set up for the victims to be sacrificed to the gods of this year, instead of the eleven stakes set up for the gods of the eleven- months year of the Aprf hymns. Six of these were of Bilva or Bel-wood {HSgle marmelos), the sacred tree of the sun-physician, and one of the totems of the Bhars. Six of Khadira-wood (Acacia catechu), the tree of Kadru, mother of the Nagas, of which the eleven stakes of the ritual of the eleven and thirteen-months year were made, and the wood of the sacred fire-socket or mother of fire T. Six of Sarvavarnin or Palasha-wood, the mother-tree of the Soma sacrifice of the sun-bird. Besides these, two stakes were made of Devadaru (Pinus deodara) wood, of which the triangle enclosing the fire on the altar of animal sacrifices was made, and one of Cleshmataka (Cordia latifolia), the fruit of which is eaten medicinally and for food. It furnishes the drug called by Roxburgh Sepistan or Sebes-
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 4, I, 20, iii. 6, 2, 12; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. go, note 5, 151.
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tena I. These three stakes were probably added to make the numbers of the stakes twenty, or the number of days in the month of the eighteen-months year, and twenty-one or the number of days in that of seventeen months. A brick altar was also built on the sacrificial ground, said to be made of golden bricks, and called the Agni Chayana, or altar of heaped-up fire. It was ten cubits long and eight cubits broad, and was thus an altar of the year of 8 + 10, that is, of eighteen months. It was made of four rows or layers of bricks and not of five, which, as we shall see, was the orthodox number in the great Ahavanlya altar of the Brah- manas, and was surmounted by a golden bird in the shape of a triangle, to represent the Garuda or Gadura, the sun- bull (gud) and sacred bird of Krishna. This Gadura was the second son of Vinata, the tenth wife of Kashyapa, born from an egg, and the devourer of the Nagas 2. This is the earlier sun-bird of Indian ritual, which was originally the sun-hen, and differs from the cloud-bird of the brick altar of the Brahmanas, which, as we shall see, was depicted on its lowest layer.
This year of eighteen months of twenty days each, divided into four five-day weeks, marks the culmination of the ritualistic eras, of which the history is given in the Mahabharata. It marks a return to the earlier year of three hundred and sixty days and seventy-two weeks, and was the outcome of the final victory of the Pandavas fighting under Arjuna’s banner of the ape-father-god. It denoted the birth of a union of originally alien people, comprising in the one nationality of the Great Bharata all the different alien races of Southern and Northern origin which made up the population of India. It is their history which is told in the eighteen cantos of the poem. This was the year which was taken from India to Mexico in the Bronze Age, which lasted in America till after the Spanish conquest. For
1   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Zndica, pp. 198, 199.
2   Mahabharata Ashvanredha (Anugila) Parva, Ixxxviii. pp. 222, 223 ; Adi (Astika) Parva, xvi. p. 77.
   
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when the Spaniards came to Mexico the highly civilised, learned, and accomplished natives of the country were ignorant of the use of iron, though iron-stone of the purest quality abounds all over the Mexican territoryx. Hence all Indian computations of time and of the ritual of the worship of Indian year-gods brought thither must have left India before the use of iron was known in that country, for if the emigrants had left India in the Iron Age they would have brought the knowledge of iron-work, now known to all metal-working castes.
This eighteen - months year is that of the Mayas or Toltecs, meaning the architects, and also of four other Mexican tribes, the Tzental, Quiche-Cakchiquel, Zapotcc, and Nahuatl, who also used a sacred year of thirteen months. These tribes used hieroglyphic characters no longer intelligible to their descendants, and unfortunately no one has succeeded in finding such an exact clue to their interpretation as will enable them to be read easily. Each of the twenty days of the month has a name, and the first and eleventh days are named after the alligator and monkey-god, both of whom held, as we have seen, a prominent position in Indian Chronography2.
In Mexico the Toltecs, who came from the North, ruled the country long before it was conquered by the cannibal Aztecs, who governed it when the Spaniards came. But these Aztecs, though they became rulers of the land after the Toltecs, were probably the descendants of earlier immigrants into America, who belonged, like the Carib cannibals of the West Indian islands, to the Neolithic Stone Age, and had not, like the Toltecs, learnt the art of making bronze. The level of the civilisation of these men of the Bronze Age far exceeded that of other Indian tribes, and they never sacrificed human beings, but only animal victims on their altar. The cannibal tribes offered human sacrifices,
1   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. p. 117.
2   Ibid., chap. iv. p. 92 ; Thomas, ‘Day Symbols of the Maya Year,’ vol. 16, Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 206, 212, 243.
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especially of children, to Tlaloc, the rain-god, and they also offered special victims, generally captives, who were, like those sacrificed by the Khands of Orissa in India, chosen for the sacrifice a year before the festival of fTezcatlipoca, the creating-godrat which it took place. During this period the victim, like the Meriah victims of Orissa, lived in the midst of every luxury and indulgence. The god to whom this victim was offered was represented as a handsome young man, whose image was made of black stone, garnished with gold plates and ornaments. His most characteristic ornament was a shield polished like a mirror, in which he could see the doings of the world reflected1. He is represented also as the one-footed Pole Star god, bound like Ixion, to the wheel of Time, the Great Bear2 3.
His description reads very much like that of the ninth form of Prajapati, the Kumara or young sun-god, with his gold plate, to whom, as we shall see, a human victim, whose mouth, nostrils, and ears were stuffed with gold chips, was offered at the building of the brick altar of the year-bird. These Mexicans also in their chronometry showed a further approach to that of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, for they divided time into cycles of fifty-two years, divided into four periods of thirteen years, each answering to the thirteen years’ exile of the Pandavas. At the close of this cycle, which ended with the culmination of the Pleiades at midnight in November, the month sacred to the Pleiades in India, all fires were put out, and were only re-lighted from the fire kindled on the breast of a slaughtered human victim taken by the priests to the top of a mountain and there slain and burnt on a funeral pyre, lit with the fire kindled on his breast at the auspicious moment; and from this fire all the fires in the country were lighted 3. This sacrifice probably took place about the new moon of Agrahayani or
1   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. pp. 9, 10, 62, 63, 70, vol. ii. p. 128.
2   Zelia Nuttall, Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisation, pp. 9, 10, Papers of Peabody Museum, Harvard University, vol. ii. 1901.
3   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. pp. 105—107.
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Mriga-sirsha (November—December), the month which, as dedicated to Orion of the deer’s (inriga) head (sirsha), was intimately connected with that of the Pleiades or Krittakas (October—November), and their queen-star RohinI (Alde- haran), for Manu says that all Brahmins should offer the Ishti, that is, the new and full-moon sacrifices of new grain in Agrahayani, together with an animal sacrifice, and this is to be offered at the solstices called Turayana. Hence the normal winter animal sacrifice was offered at the end of Mriga-sirsha, which closed the night before the winter solstice with, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 89, the death of the year-deerx. This special cycle sacrifice, if it was derived by the Mexicans from India, was probably offered at the meeting-point of the solstitial month Mriga-sirsha (November— December), and the Pleiades month Khartik (October— November), as that on which the union between Orion and RohinI took place, from which Vastospati, the god of the household fire, was born.
In the cosmogony of the Sias, a tribe of artistic potters occupying in Mexico a position similar to that of the sons of the Great Potter in early European and Asiatic history, their descent and that of other Mexican tribes is traced to Sus-sistinnako, the Spider. He is the exact counterpart of the Hindu Krittikas, the goddess Klrat or Krittida, the Spinner, the Pleiades constellation which appears in the Vedic birth story of Vastospati, and in the Mexican firelighting sacrifice at the end of the cycle as the mother of the year’s fires. Sus-sistinnako, in creating life on earth, sat in the South-west quarter of the sun-circle, divided into four equal parts by the meal cross of the ploughing-corn-god St. George, that is to say, at the point where the sun set at the opening of the year of the winter solstice. He there sang into life the two seeds he had placed in the North-west and North-east quarters. From these were born Now-ut’sct, the buffalo-mother of the West, and of those who lighted their fire with the West stick used to light the fire on the
1 Biihler, Maun, iv. 26, 27, vi. 10; S.LJ.E,, vol. xxv. pp. 133, 200.
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Hindu altar; and Ut’set, the mother of corn and of the race born of the deer-sun rising in the East, who lighted their fire with the East stick of the four laid in the form of St. George’s Cross as the kindling-sticks of the tribal fires1. Among the tribes born from these mothers, two, the Maya and Nahuatl, to whom the Aztecs belonged, had brought with them to Mexico the custom of circumcision practised by the Col- chians, ancient Egyptians, and some races of Asia Minor and Syria, but not by all Semites ; for it was unknown among the Phoenicians and Philistines 2, who, as Kaphtorim or sons of the ape Pole Star god, were the Keftenu or Phoenicians of Egyptian theology. These Mayas and Nahuatl, both of whom use the eighteen-months year, have names very like those of the Hindu maritime Maghas or Mughs, the Hindu mother Magha, Maya, the mother of the Buddha, and of the Nahusha, sons of the Naga snake, whose worship survives in Mexico in the snake-dance. This takes place at the great August festival, one of those founded by the sons of the united buffalo and deer-born races, who inhabited Mexico when the Spaniards conquered it.
B. The antelope and snake-dances of Mexico.
It corresponds in its ritual with the Hindu consecration of July—August to the Naga snake-gods, whose festival, called the Naga-panchami or the feast of the five snake-mothers, is held on the fifth of Shravana (July—August); a month also dedicated in Celtic chronometry to the marriage of Lug. The whole of a Mexican month of twenty days is devoted to this festival, which, in its Celtic form of that of Lug’s marriage month, lasts from the fifteenth of July to the fifteenth of August. The reports of the three village celebrations seen by Mr. Fewkes, who visited them as the delegate of the American Bureau of Ethnology 3, show that they do not
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 248 ff., 237.
3   Ibicl., vol. i., Essay v., p. 492; Cheyne, ‘Circumcision,’ Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. v. p. 790; Bancroft, Native Races of America, vol. iii.
3 Fewkes, ‘Tusayan Snake Ceremonies,’ Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1894—1895, vol. xvi. pp. 274—308.
   
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begin exactly on the same day everywhere, but that the nine ceremonial days of the festival must fall some time in August. The dates when these nine days begin, as given by Mr. Fewkes, are : Oraibi, nth; Cipaulovi, 15th; Cunopavi, 16th of August; and he says that the exact date is determined sixteen days before it actually takes place. The first seven of the twenty days allotted to it are spent in preparations by the priests of the antelope-god. The next nine days, each of which has its special name, are devoted to the secret ceremonies of antelope and snake-worship, ending with the dances held on the last two or last of these days. The remaining four days of the month are days of purification or general rejoicing, answering to the Hindu orgiastic feasts.
The directors of the proceedings are the antelope and snake-priests, chosen in the village from the members of the priestly clan, answering to that of the Pahans or priests of the Ooraon villages of Chutia Nagpur. These are the descendants of families who have handed down to their sons from generation to generation the knowledge of the ritual of the national festivals observed in each township, together with the words and music of the songs to be sung at them, and who thus maintained the unbroken continuity of the form of worship established in each village.
Among the village gods the Mexican antelope-god, answering to the Hindu Krishna, the black antelope, occupies a very important place. In the Sia cosmogony, of which I have given a full abstract in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, the antelope-god ruled the zenith from the top of the mountain where he dwelt. He was the last of the old false gods of the land killed by the twins Uyunyewc and Ma’ascwc, sent by their father with bows and arrows and three rabbit sticks, the three seasons of the years of the Mexican cycles beginning with the year of the Rabbit *, to banish idolatrous worship from the land. These twins successively killed the Wolf of the East, the Cougar or Tiger of the North, the Bear 1
1 l’l cscotl, History of Mexico, vol. i. p. 97.
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of the West, the father and mother Eagle of the South with their offspring, and the Fire-mother of the Nadir, the fire- socket, whom they burnt in her own fire. They next attacked the Antelope of the Zenith, described as the eater of children, the god to whom children were offered. They were led up his mountain by the mole, who made an underground way enabling them to approach him unseen. Through this hole Ma’asewe shot the antelope, who was looking westward from below I. He thus killed the antelope-sun-god of the setting sun in the same way as Sigurd killed Fafnir, the snake-ruler of time, by digging a hole in the path traversed by him in his yearly circuit of the heavens, in which he hid himself and shot him from below; as Krishanu, the rainbow-god, shot the Shyena-bird in the Pole Star circle at the winter solstice.
These twins play in Mexican historical chronology the same part as that assigned to the stars Gemini in the zodiacal records of past years. They, as I have shown in Chapters VII. and VIII., guarded the gates or months through which the sun entered on his yearly course, and thus marked the dates of the successive changes in the yearreckoning, ritual and doctrines of sun-worship, beginning with the birth of the young sun-god at the winter solstice. Consequently the death of the antelope in Mexican history corresponds with the death, which I shall describe presently, of Krishna, and all the Mahabharata gods of the age which worshipped the sun as the star of light going round the Pole, born as the year-god at the beginning of his year's course and dying at its end to make way for his son and successor.
This form of worship of the age of the Mexican twins ended with the revels, at which they celebrated their victories in feasts, where honey-drink, the Hindu Madhu of the age of the Ashvins, was consumed. After this they went up the
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 266— 272 ; Stevenson, ‘ The Sia,’ Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, vol. ii. pp. 52, 53.
   
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rainbow bridge to their father, the Pole Star god, and were succeeded as rulers of time by the sun-god Poshai-yanne, born of a virgin-mother made pregnant by eating two nuts of the Pinon-tree, the tree reaching up to heaven, down which the twins had come from the nest of the Eagle of the South. This god born of the nut-tree, the sacred almond tree of India and of the Jews, began his career, like the beggar sun-god Odusseus, as servant to the Ti'amoni, or priest-king, the Patesi of the Akkadians; and won from him, by his skill at games, the rule of the regions of the North, South, East, West, Nadir and Zenith. He is, as I have shown in the complete account I have given of his history, the reproduction of the Buddha sun-god of India in his final transformation as the immortal and unchanging ruler of time; and his name as completely reproduces that of the Chinese Im-sho, meaning the Buddha, as the Mexican year reproduces the Rabbit year of China. That the Indian Buddhist birth-stories of the Indian double of the Mexican Poshai-yanne were conveyed to Mexico, and received there as sacred legends, is proved by the picture of the Buddha found, as I have shown in Chapter VII. pp. 471, 472, among the bas- reliefs of Copan, representing him as Gan-isha sitting on the double Suastika, marking the year sun-god, *and holding in his hand the steaming bowl of rice-gruel he received from Su-jata as his pentecostal food for the fifty days spent in preparing for his ascent into heaven.
To return to the antelope and snake dance which reproduce the revels of the conquering twins, who ruled time before Poshai-yanne. The August festival at which they take place is held almost at the same time as the birthday of Apollo Paian, the sun - physician. At it both the antelope and snake-priests have “ kivas,” or closed circular shrines, erected for this festival, in which their secret rites are carried on. Only the antelope-priests have altars, which are made during the first days of the festival according to elaborate patterns prescribed by ancient custom. The antelope Kiva is placed at the East and the snake Kiva at the
   
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West of the road entering the town where the feast is celebrated. The altar is not built of earth or brick but is made of sand strewn on the ground, like that scattered on the ground where the Garhapatya hearth was built, and the oblong figure of sand is adorned with symbolic figures, representing horned males and hornless females, and also with cloud and lightning symbols. It is bordered with bands of sand of different colours. At Oraibi there are two antelope-heads placed at the North-east and South-west corners of the altar. The antelope-priest is also distinguished from the snake-priest by carrying during the ceremonies a tiponi or idol. This is called by the Sia Ya’ya, a name similar to the Hittite Ya, meaning the full moon, which appears in India in the names of the god Yayati and his son Yadu, the twin brother of Turvasu, who, as sons of the goddess Devayani, rule the Devayana and Pitriyana, the two seasons of the solstitial year in the Brahmanic ritual. The Ya’ya is said to be an image of Ut’set, the corn-mother, and is an ear of maize, the Indian corn, placed in a basket woven with cotton-wool and crowned by eagles’ and parrots’ feathers, which completely conceal it. It is renewed at the end of every four years, that is, at the end of each of the thirteen divisions into which the fifty-two-years cycle is divided. This seems to me to be derived from the “ Rice- child ” of the Malays, which it exactly resembles, and to be a form of the corn-baby cut as the last sheaf, which is common all over the world, and which was almost certainly adopted from the Malay Malli, as a symbol of the virgin- grain-mother, by the Indian Panchala Srinjayas, or men of the sickle (sriui), with which they cut their corn. This image of the virgin-mother of corn is placed near the Northeast corner of the antelope altar, the point whence the sun rose at the summer solstice.
The dances all took place at sunset in front of the “ kisi,” or shrine built of the sacred cotton wood, the Vedic Shalmali- tree {Bombax heptaphylla), of which the car of the Indian Gemini, the Ashvins, was made. This was placed in the
   
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South of the piazza or market-place, and in the centre of this piazza there was the Pahoki or principal shrine.
The only public ceremony occurring at sunrise at this festival was the snake-race, a reproduction of the Greek year- race in which Atalanta was defeated, and won as his bride Uz, the victor sun-god, who delayed her steps by throwing before her the three golden apples, the M three seasons of the year. This was run on the morning after the antelope- dance, and on- the same day on which the snake-dance was danced in the evening. All the circuits made during the performances both by the antelope and snake-priests, each performance beginning with four circuits, were made to the left against the course of the sun. Also the antelope- priests at Oraibi wore, like the Hindu and Umbrian priests, the sacrificial cord over their right shoulder and a band of wool round the left knee, but no cord was worn by the snake- priests. The antelope-chief-priest carried the tiponi or corn idol over his left arm, and he also carried in one hand a bow with red horsehair attached to the string. This bow of the rainbow-god, which became the weapon of the Mexican twin-gods, was also carried by the snake-priests, who had no idol.
At the snake-dance, after the four circuits to the left had been made, the priests were divided into parties of three ; one of each party knelt before the kisi or shrine and there received a snake, which he took up and placed in his mouth with its head to the left. He then carried it round the piazza accompanied by the second priest with his hand on his shoulder. When he had reached the end of his circuit he took the snake out of his mouth and put it on the ground, when it was picked up by the third man of the group, who threw it into a ring circled with sacred meal and divided into four parts by the cross of St. George, formed by meal lines drawn to each of the four points of the compass. This is an exact .reproduction of the creating- circle of Sus-sistinnako in the Sia cosmogony. When all the snakes had been carried round the priests rushed into
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the snake-ring, and each took up as many as he could get hold of and threw them outside to the cardinal points as marked for them in the meal cross.
At the antelope-dance the antelope-priest carried in his mouth instead of a snake a bundle of corn and vine stalks round the ground, just as the snake-priests carried the snakes, and he was accompanied by the snake-priest who kept his hand on his shoulder.
In these ceremonies, the evening dances, the left-hand circuits, the wearing of the cord on the right shoulder, and the binding of the left knee are exact copies of the Hindu ritual of the barley-eating fathers. Also the corn-god is a reproduction of the Malay rice-child, the first and best bunch of seven female ears wrapped up in a white cloth like babies’ swaddling-clothes, and tied with a cord of “ terap ” bark, which is placed in a small basket and preserved as the soul of the rice to be mixed with the grain thrashed from the last sheaf cut at the next harvest *. The deity worshipped in these Mexican ceremonies as well as the Malay rice-god, and the firstfruits of the corn borne in Bacchic processions in the basket called the mystic winnowing basket of Iacchus, the young sun-god, is the germ of life infused into the national food by the rain from heaven, which a disseminates the indwelling god, giving life to all who partake of the rain-born food.
In these Mexican dances the dancers are the men of the village, and not the women dancers, who among the Indian Mundas and other cognate tribes keep up the custom of seasonal dances; and therefore they are much more like those of the Salii, Dactyli-Kouretes, and other associations of dancing-priests of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, than those of the matriarchal races. These latter succeeded the matriarchal dances when the family became the national unit instead of the village, and it is this stage which has been reached by the Mexican tribes, who all live in long houses
1 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 225, 226, 249.
   
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large enough to contain several generations of a family ; and their ritual also seems to date from the Kushika age when the priests formed guilds, which, after passing through the stages indicated by the barber-priests and the Ooraon Pahans or village-priest clan, developed into the Indian caste of the Brahmins. But these patriarchal tribes retained, in their mixed ritual, the ancient seasonal festivals with their dances and offerings of fruit and flowers without the sacrifice of living victims; and it was the transition stages of the ancient rites which were reproduced in this Mexican August festival, answering to that of the Panathenaia at Athens, where Athene, the mother-goddess of weavers, received the peplos, her woven year-garment. The corresponding Hindu age of this festival was that of the Kushika trade guilds, the barber-priests of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, and the Ooraon Pahan clans; and the Mexican ceremonies point to a ritual derived from the Indian and Malay worshippers of the grain-soul and the Naga snake. These latter are called in the Rigveda Varshagiras, or praisers of rain as the parent of life, and Nahusha, or sons of the ploughing-snake \Nagur), whose name seems, as I have already suggested, to be reproduced in America in that of the Mexican Nahuatl.
It was the age of the worship of the Great Bear constellation, which was, as we have seen, as the Thigh of the ape-god, the parent of the sun-god ; and that this was the • traditional epoch of the Mexican immigration is shown by the story of the escape of Ut’set, the corn-mother, from the lower world to the upper corn land, whither she was led to save her and her people from the floods, which, like those which nearly drowned the newly-born millet-growing Gonds at the sources of the Jumna river of the twins, made her ancient home uninhabitable. She made her way up to this Mexican reproduction of the Gangetic Doab, enclosed between the Ganges and Jumna, by the river reed. The way into the corn plateau was opened for her first by the locust, and then by the badger. After her came the demand buffalo and the beetle carrying the star bag, which may
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indicate the epoch of the immigration as that of the thirteen- months year of the Egyptian Kheper-Ra, the beetle-sun-god, of which I have given the history in Chapter VIII. The last comer into the new land was the turkey T. The beetle had allowed all the stars to escape except the Pleiades, the three stars of Orion’s belt, and the seven stars of the Great Bear. These last Ut’set placed in the sky as the parent-stars of the nation.
It was thus, according to national tradition, in the age of the rule of the Great Bear constellation that these ante- lope-born sons of the corn and snake came to Mexico, bringing with them the worship of these parent-stars. And with the worship of the three stars of Orion’s belt they brought with them, in a variant form, the Indian story of the birth of the Palasha-tree, bringing to earth the sap of life sent down from heaven in the blood of the Shyena Soma bird of frost (shyct), the Pole Star bird of the winter solstice. This story of Krishanu, the rainbow-archer-god, the rainbow-father of the Mexican twins, is depicted on the cross at Palenque, as is shown in the annexed illustration. The stem of the cross is shaped as the feathered arrow, the traditional arrow of the three stars of Orion’s belt, the three seasons of the year. It shoots the turkey seated on the top of the cross. On each side of the cross stands a priest, and the left-hand priest who is cutting up the slain turkey, to consult the augural signs. He wears a cap crowned with a sheaf of corn and a fleur-de-lys, a reproduction of the trident- god, a pig-tail, and a girdle, which is probably tied with the three knots of Orion’s stars, tying the girdles of Brahmins and Asiatic dervishes.
That the Mexicans were emigrants from a country where the ruling races were of mixed Southern and Northern nationality is proved by their parent-stars, the Pleiades mother of the Southern Indian forest races, Orion parent
1 Stevenson, ‘ The Sia,’ Publications of the American. Bureati of Ethnology, I 35—37-
 
Drawn from the Photograph of a Plaster Cast given by Mr. A. Mauds- lay to the South Kensington Museum.
CKOSS AT TALENQUE,
REPRESENTING   T1IE
BIRD SLAIN EY TI1E ARROW, ITS SHAFT, AND DISSECTED UY THE
AUGUR PRIESI ON THE LEFT. A variant form of the story of Rigveda IV. 27, of Shyena, tlie Pole Star bird shot by Krishami, the Rainbow archer-god.
 
   
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1
of the Northern sons of the sun-deer, and the Great Bear parent of the wizard races of the West, who adored the bear-mother Artemis and sacrificed human victims to her. The Naga Kushikas who ruled India in the epoch of Great Bear worship, worshipped, like the Mexicans, the moon as a goddess, the Gond Pandhari or Mu-chundri, the Greek Here or Selene, the Latin Luna; and the sun as a male god, the sun-lizard Skanda, the Greek Helios, the Latin Sol. Consequently their theology differed from that of the early Kushikas, who worshipped the sun as Ahalya, the hen, who was wife to Gautama, the moon-bull, and from that of the Vedic hymn, in which Soma, the moon-god, was married to Suria, the sun-maiden. The date of the first worship of the male sun-god seems to go back to Orion’s year, in which the sun-god was the male deer of the herd of deer-stars, who became the rider on the sun-horse. This was followed by the first worship of the male moon-god as the crescent-moon bearing the Harpe and beginning the months. But this method of measuring time apparently did not penetrate to Mexico, and the ruling god of their thirteen-months lunar year was the moon-goddess, answering to the Greek Here, who in Greek mythology was the ruling goddess before the birth of Herakles, the young sun-god, whom she hated ; and the stage of belief indicated in the Sia cosmogony as that which was the national faith when the Toltecs established their rule in Mexico seems to be that which prevailed in India during the seventeen-months year, when Skanda was the sun-god. And it was at the close of this period that they took the eighteen-months year of the Pandavas with them to America, which they apparently reached by Behring’s Straits, whence they made their way along the coast to Mexico, though perhaps some adventurous navigators of those days may have made their way across the open sea to a more Southern part of the American coast than that of Behring’s Straits.
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C. Indian history of the epoch following the eighteen-months year as told in the Mahdbhdrata.
To return to the history of India after the introduction of the eighteen-months year. The horse-sacrifice which inaugurated it was the last of the orgiastic festivals in which animals were sacrificed and spirits drunk as sacramental drink by the orthodox Hindu priesthood. It was after this sacrifice, according to the Mahabharata, that the revisor of the ritual appeared in Nakula the mun-goose, one of the two Pandava twins, sons of the Ashvins and of MadrI, the intoxicated {mad) prophetess, the second wife of Pandu. He was engaged as the trainer of the horses of the king Virata during the thirteenth year of the Pandavas’ exile, which they spent among the Matsyas as the hidden sun- gods, that is to say, during the age when time was measured by the thirteen lunar months. He as the fifth Pandava was the god of the winter season of the year, who trains the sun’s horses for their yearly circuit round the heavens T.
He as the sacrificial reformer preached the doctrine that “ the destruction of living creatures can never be said to be an act of righteousness,” and that sacrifices should be “ offerings of seeds and liquids, not of animals 1 2.” This was one of the cardinal doctrines taught by the Jain priests, and was in accordance with the rule governing the earliest sacrifices of the primitive village races, at which flowers and fruit were offered. This primitive sacrifice, with the addition of the sacramental Soma or mingled milk, sour milk, barley, and water, poured forth as libations to the gods, and drunk by the worshippers joining in the sacrifice, was finally accepted as the orthodox sacrifice of Indian ritual. At the sacrifices held after the new rule was made the law of the land, the only drink allowed to those who took part in the sacrifice was the vrata or fast milk, which was their only sustenance
1   Mahabharata Virata (Pandava-pravesha) Parva, sect. xii. pp. 26, 27.
2   Mahabharata Ashvaniedha (Anugita) Parva, xci. 14, 20, p. 239.