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

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B. The Khati or Hittites.
The Shambara or Parthian riders and throwers of the javelin, who measured time by the cycle-year of forty months, were, and are still, a powerful tribe called the Yohihas or Yaudheyas, who owned the country at the junction of the five Punjab rivers and the ancient capital of Multan, a form of Malli-sthana, or the place of the Mallis. They are called Yaudheyas in the list of tribes said, in the Mahabharata, to have brought tribute to Yudishthira, the eldest Pandava, when he celebrated the Rajasuya sacrifice as ruler of India x. They are divided into three clans, which show by their names of Langa-vira, the worshippers of the Linga or Viru ; Madho-vira or Madhua, the drinkers of the inspiring and intoxicating honey (madh) drink; and Adam- vira, the sons of Adam the red man, that they belong to the oldest races of the Northern invaders, the warrior tribes who marched under the banner of the Naga snake2. By their name Yaudheya they show their connection with the Yadu- Turvasu named in Rg. ix. 61, 2 as allies of the Shambara. These Yadu-Turvasu, who became, according to the Mahabharata 3, Yadavas or worshippers of the full moon, the Hittite Ya45 and Yavanas or barley (yava) growers, are the descendants of the twin-sons of DevayanI, the second wife of Yayati, the son of Nahusha, the Naga snake-god, who succeeded Sharmishtha, the most protecting (shannon), the Banyan fig-tree mother of the Druhyus, Anus and Purus of the year of three seasons of Chapters III. and IV. DevayanI is said in the Mahabharata to have been hidden in a well by Sharmishtha, the daughter of the Asura king Vrisha-parvan, the god of the rainy (vrisha) quarter (parva), that is to say she was the sun-mother hidden in the tower of the three-years cycle. Her father, called Kavi *
* Mahabharata Sabha (Dyula) Parva, Hi. p. 145.
2   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 244—246.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixxxv. p. 260.
4   Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv., Sign 24, p. 21S.
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Ushana or Shukra, the son of Bhrigu, was the rain-god of the Asuras, the sons of Diti, the second mother, and conquerors of the Danavas. He said, “ It is I who pour rain for the good of creatures and his names, Shukra and Ushana, the god Ush, show him not only to be the Wet-god, Sak or Shak, but also the rain-bird of the Finn ancestors of the Kushika Kabirpuntis. Ush is the Hindu form of the Finn-creating bird-god Uk-ko, “the great (uk) begetter,” who dwells in the Pole Star TahtI, in the navel of heaven1 2 3. He is the chief god in the Finnish triad of Vai’namoi'nen, Ilmarinen and Ukko, and the epithet Kavi given to him in the Rigveda and Mahabharata, is the Zend and Sanskrit form of the north-god Kabir, and the Dravidian Kapi, the ape, applied to the Kushite kings, who are all called Kavi Kush. It is as the storm-bird, the slayer of the year, that he appears in Rg. v. 34, 2, where he is said to have given to Indra the weapon called, in Rg. i. 121, 12, the thunderbolt, with which he slew the deer-sun (inriga) year-god Orion, and this marks him as a year-god of the cycle-year following Orion’s year of three seasons. He is also said to have made Agni, the fire-god, the Hotri, or pourer of libations of sacrifice 3, that is to say, he instituted the ritual of burnt-offerings which were first offered on the national altars in this epoch. His daughter, Devayani, mother of the Yadu-Turvasu, is the goddess ruling the six Devayani months beginning with the winter solstice, and hence her two sons then begotten were the gods of the cycle-year beginning at the autumnal equinox. The names Yayati and Yadu mark them as the sons of Ya, the full-moon-god of the Cypriotes and Hittites, that is of the Minyans or measurers of Asia Minor 4, who became the sons of Manu
1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191, Ixxviii. pp. 241, 243, lxxxiii. p. 253.
s Kirby, Hero of Estkonia, Introduction, p. xxvii. ; Schcefer Castren, Finnish Mythology, pp. 32, 33.
3   Rg. viii. 23, 17.
A Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv. p. 21S, Symbol 24.
   
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in India. These names show them to be parent-gods of the joined races called Kathi in India, Khatti or Khita in Assyria and Egypt, and Hittites by the Jews, whose national symbol is that of the two brothers joining hands T.
They are represented on the Egyptian monuments as a beardless race, a characteristic which distinguishes them from the hairy sons of the bull. They also wear the peaked tiara, the Chiroo cap, and shoes turned up at the toes. This last sign, combined with the fact that they habitually wore leather shoes, connects them with the very ancient immigrant race of India, the beardless Chamars, who work in leather and tan hides, one of the earliest occupations followed by the pastoral races. They use for this process myrobolans, the name of the fruit of the Arjuna tree (Terminalia Belerica), which is one of the most important modern exports from India to Europe, and was doubtless also exported thence by the ancient trading Turvasu. The important part assigned to this tree, its products, and the tanners who used them in ancient traditional history, is proved by the historical story of Nala and DamayantI, on which the plot of the Mahabharata is founded. Nala, the god of the channel (inala), the ordinary course of nature, was wedded to Daina- yanti, meaning “she who is being tamed,” the earth subdued under the civilising influences of agriculture and industry. They lived happily together during the spring months of their marriage, but with the hot weather, Pushkara the gambler, the scorching west winds, came and stripped the earth of its verdure and fruits, and drove Nala and Dama- yanti into the forests, where they wandered during the rainy season. Nala escaped to the North-east to Ayodhya, where he became charioteer to the king Ritu-parna, the recorder of the seasons (ritu), the god of the North-east Monsoon. He drove Ritu-parna back to the South-west with the Northeast Monsoon in a chariot drawn by horses of the Sindliu or moon (Sin) breed, those measuring time in this lunar 1
1 Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv. p. 233, Symbol 161.
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epoch, to be again re-united with Damayantl. On the way Ritu-parna taught Nala the science of calculation and foresight, of determining the times of the seasons and the means of using their influences in the orderly developments of the valuable products yielded by the earth-mother of growing life. This lesson was imparted by instructing him how to reckon the leaves and fruits on the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica) tree, the fruits of the industry of the trading community, who used this tree as one of the most valuable aids to their commerce. This tree is the representative in this graphic historical story of the Arjuna (the fair) god of the North parent of Kutsa*, the charioteer of Indra, whose history as High-Priest of the Varshagiras or praisers of rain, and the ruling Purus, I have told in Chapter IV., p. 182. Also of the Arjuna of the Mahabharata, the son of Indra, the god of the rainy season in the Pandava year, who restored to power the Pandavas, beggared and driven into exile, like Nala, by the gambler Shakuni, the storm-bird, who here takes the place of Pushkara in Nala’s story1 2. In this story we read a history told in ancient cryptogramic language, of the great advance made in the important knowledge of the rules of time measurement by the trading races and the workers in leather, who devised the intricate rules for measuring the cycle-year and for providing for an accurate determination of the immutable laws governing the order by succession of the days, months and seasons of the year measured by the solstices and equinoxes. And if we could recover the ancient sources of history, the national birth-stories of these primitive races, we would find that the origin of the story of Arjuna, as told in the Mahabharata, and of Kutsa in the Rigveda, was told in the birth-tale of the Arjuna from the Myrobolan tanning-tree, as that of the birth of the Buddha sun-god is told in those of the birth of the sun from the cypress and Sal-tree sun-mother.
1   Rg. iv. 26, 1, vii. 19, 2.
2   For the full details and interpretation of the story of Nala and Damayantl, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 64—72.
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Further proof of the great early influence of the Chamars, and of the important place they occupied among the rulers of India, is furnished by the history of their religious creed. They call themselves the descendants of Rai Das, that is of the sun-god Rai or Raghu, and their Northern descent is marked in Chuttisgurh, where I know them best, by their fair skins and the beauty of their women. Their connection with the religious ceremonies of child-birth, which distinguished the ritual of the cycle-year, is shown by the custom which has made the Chamar women the most sought-for midwives in India, whose presence at a birth brings luck to the family. They also in their tribal ritual show that their original year was the cycle-year of the nine-days week, by celebrating their Dasahara or autumn festival on the 9th of Assin (Ashva-yujau, September—October), that is nine days after the autumnal equinox, or a day before it is ended by other castes, who begin it on the 1st of Assin (September— October), the day when the Jewish year begins, and'continue the feast to the 10th of the month1. At this New Year’s feast they sacrifice pigs, goats, and drink spirits. It is also in this month that they celebrate their new year’s feast to their dead, who are buried and not burnt.
That these people, who are cultivators as well as workers in leather, belong to the group of invading barley-growers and traders headed by the Kaurs and Kurmis is shown by their marriage ceremonies, in which the wrists of the wedded pair are bound with mango leaves, the marriage-tree of the Kurmis and Kaurs ; and they also, like the Kaurs, worship the seven sisters, the seven stars of the Great Bear. That they are the sons of the red-cow-star RohinI Aldebaran, and of the growers of cotton, is indicated by the custom of washing the feet of the bride and bridegroom with cotton steeped in red-lac dye. This is done by the barber who officiates as marriage-priest2.
In Chuttisgurh, the home of ancient faiths and customs,
1   Monier Williams, Religions Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431.
2   Risley, Tribes an4 Castes of Bengal, Chamars, vol. i. pp. 176—1S1.
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the Chamars occupy a very peculiar position arising out of their religious tenets. They are the leaders of the Sat Nam sect of worshippers of the one god, the True {sat) Name (nam), a sect which is the rival of that of the Kabirpuntis. But the Sat-Nam belief is united with phallic practices from which the religion of the Kabirpuntis is free x, and in Eastern Bengal the greater number of the Chamars are followers of Sri Narayan, the woman-man-god, one of the forms of Vishnu.
Their name for the Supreme and only god Sat Nam, the True Name, shows them to belong to the Semite confederacy of the sons of Shem, the Name, who adored the Name of God as that of the phallic potter, the pole-turning father, and not the God of the Creating Word, and they represent the earliest phallic form of fire-worship, not the later cult of the sexless fire-god represented by the unsexed male and female priests, the Galli of South-western Asia.
C. The worship of sexless and bisexual gods.
It is this latter form of worship which appears to be the special product of this cycle epoch. As it is the year of the sun-ass, the year chariot of the god ruling it is drawn by asses, and they draw the car of the Ashvins, the twin riders on horses, or rather asses (ashva), that with three wheels, the three years of the cycle. They are called the Nasatya, that is the Na-a-satya, those who are not (na) untruthful (asatya), that is, who are reliable trustworthy recorders of time1 2 3 4. They are called in the Brahmanas the first Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests of the gods 3, and it is to them that the cup of the tenth month, that concluding the four divisions of the cycle-year, is offered at the Soma sacrifice 4. Also the cycle - year began in India with the
1   Hewitt, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of the Chuttisgurh District, s. no—113, 130—136, pp. 33, 34, 47, 48.
2   Rg- i- 34= 9 ; i. 116, 2 ; viii. 74, 7.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. i, 2, 17; S.B.E.,vol. xii. p. 16.
4   Ibid., iv. i, 5, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276.
   
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month consecrated to them, Ashva-yujau (September— October).. The original twins of the creed of the Kabiri were, as we have seen on p. 147, male and female, the fire- drill and fire-socket, when the fire-drill-god became the Great Potter. They were the male and female creators, the days and nights, who made the potter’s wheel of the earth revolve by turning the tridents of the three seasons of the year, and raising the earth from the ocean. This symbolism remained dominant during the present epoch. In it the Ashvin twins were the hands of the gods in the fourteen star constellation of the Simshumara or Alligator. These hands were the stars Kastor and Pollux in Geminir, represented in astronomical notation by the square which succeeded the circle of the year measured by seasons. This square is guarded by these twin Stars, its door-posts, called in Akkadian Masu-Mahru, the Western twin (.Kastor), and Masu-arku, the Eastern twin (Pollux)1 2. The door they guarded as the West and East stars was that looking Southward, like the doors of the Sabaean temples and Mahommedan mosques, and leading to the Northern realm of the Pole Star god. This was represented in the Zenda- vesta as the garden of God, called the Vara-Jam-kard, the rain (var) garden made by the twins Yima. It is the garden symbolised as circled by the sun-bird in the four equal divisions of his three years’ flight round the heavens, and is described as an exact square, two hathras, or about two miles long on every side. In it was built a house of kneaded clay (the brick age had not yet arrived) with fires, the home of the household-fire of the earth, and it was stocked with the human products of the seeds of the most thoroughbred men and women, the flower of the red race, the Yaudheya Adam-vira, and with the best breeds of cattle, sheep, dogs, and birds, also with the best fruit and timber trees, and
1   Sachau, AlberunT’s India, vol. i., chap. xxii. p. 242.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Researches into the Origin of Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 359, note on p. 338,
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no permanently diseased or impotent persons were admitted into it. It was to be divided into three districts, the three years of the cycle, the largest containing nine, the middle six, and the third three streets, the nine and six-day weeks, and the three years of the cycle, a division tracing the gradual growth of this conception of time measurement from the year of three seasons. It was to be sealed up with a golden ring, the ring of the cycle, and to be entered by the door to which the ring was attached x, the door with the stars Gemini for its door-posts. The number forty, the forty months of the cycle, was to be its sacred number, for every fortieth year each male and female couple were to have a male and female child. These children of the two sexes were born from the one-stemmed Rivas plant, the mother-tree, out of which they grew as one bisexual being which was to be the parent of future life2. They were thus the symbols of the bisexual creating sun-god born in the fortieth month of the cycle. The gate of this garden of life, the successor of the consecrated village grove, was called in Greece the Dokana, of which the two side-posts were the brother twins Kastor the pole (stor) of Ka the unsexed beaver, the house-builder, and Polu-deukes, the much (7TOXV) wetting (8evco), the rain-father-god who brought the seed of life to earth.
This square garden entered by the holy gate became the Templum of the Roman Augurs, the field of the parent- rain-bird, divided into four equal parts by the lines drawn North and South, and East and West from the centres of its four sides, to- form the Greek equilateral cross of St. George, the cross on the back of the cycle-ass. It was this cross of the ploughing-god, called also in Syria El Khudr, the rain-god, the Greek Elias, which represented the four equal divisions of the cycle-year, beginning with the autumnal equinox. The day of the finding this cross, and its adop-
1 D&rmesteter, Zendavesia VendJddd Fargard, ii. 25—41 ; S.B.E., vol. iv, pp. 16—20.
** West, Bundahish, xv. 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. v. p. 53.
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tion as the national sign for God, as the new year’s day of the cycle, is recognised in the popular mythology of the Lebanon, where the feast of the Invention of the Cross, ’Id El Saib, is still celebrated every year on the 14th September, the first day of the week, at the end of which the new sun-god is to be born T.
It was in this age of the three-years cycle ruled by the Angiras priests of the burnt - offerings that the offering of roasted totem victims, afterwards consumed by the assembled tribes-folk, first began. Originally the victims were eaten raw, and their blood drunk, according to the Arab custom of eating all but human victims raw2, a custom still observed in Southern India in the worship of Potraj. He is the male counterpart of the stone-mother- goddess of fire, whose stone image is covered with vermilion, and who is the Indian form of the Phrygian cave-goddess Cybele, whose image is a fire-stone.
The Potraj festival is a festival of the pre-Sanskrit population, at which Pariah priests officiate, and in which the Mangs, or workers in leather, play a principal part. The sacrifice lasts for five days, showing that it originally dated from the age of the five-days week, and the first animal slain at it is the sacred buffalo, who had been turned loose as a calf and allowed to roam in freedom through the village fields, till the day of the Dasahara festival held, as we have seen, by the Chamars of Bengal on the 9th of Assin (September—October).   It is killed on the second day of
the feast, and its head struck off, according to the universal Dasahara practice, with one blow. Round its body are placed vessels containing the cereals grown in the village, and close to it a heap of mixed grains with a drill-plough in the centre showing the festival to be one to the plough-god. The carcase is then cut up into little pieces, one being given to each cultivator to bury in his field. The blood and offal are collected in a large basket, over which some pots of
1   Burton and Tyrrwhitt Drake, Unexplored Syria, vol. ii. p. S9.
2   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 2x0.
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cooked food had previously been broken, and a live kid is hewn in pieces and scattered over the whole by the Pot raj priest. A Mang then takes the basket on his head and throws its contents right and left as an offering to the evil spirits, as he, followed by the other Pariahs, runs round the village boundaries. On the fifth day the whole community marches to the temple, and a lamb, concealed close by and found by the priest, is placed by him on the Potraj altar. He makes this victim, the Ram sun of the dying year, insensible by striking it with his wand of office, and after his hands have been tied behind his back, he rushes at it, tears open its throat with his teeth and eats the flesh. When it is dead he is lifted up, and he buries his face in a dish of the buffalo meat-offering given to him. This, with remains of the lamb, is buried beside the altar, and the slaughtering priest fliesz. This buffalo autumnal sacrifice is one celebrated by the male Todas, who then eat a young male buffalo, though they will not touch the flesh at other times1 2, and this sacrifice is probably a variant of the bear feast of their Aino congeners, described on p. 117. We see in this festival the transition from the ritual of the Bhrigus, who ate the animals they sacrificed raw, to that of the Angiras, who cooked their victims, and mixed this cooked meat with the raw buffalo offal and blood. This is the festival of the autumnal equinox celebrated all over Central and Southern India at the Dasahara New Year’s feast, held on the 10th of Assin (September—October), at which a buffalo is slain, and it answers to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles held on the 15th of Tisri (September—October).
The radical change in the national customs accompanying the introduction of this new measurement of time is marked by the change in the date of the annual feast to the dead. The original feast was that which began the Pleiades year
1 G. L. Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, chap. ii. pp. 22—25 ; Sir W. Elliot, Journal Ethnological Society, N.S., i. 97—100.
2   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vii. p. 281,
   
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with three days’ mourning, of the 31st of October and the 1st and 2nd of November. This was first altered, as we have seen on p. 169, by the Iranian sons of Ida, who worshipped the Fravashis, or souls of their ancestors, at the summer solstice, during the epoch of the year of three seasons and the six-days week. But this local ritual was not accepted in India when the pastoral barley - growing tribes united the Indian 'people in the confederacy of the Kushika. It was to celebrate the formation of this national union, beginning with the autumnal equinox, that the last fortnight of Bhadrapada (August—September), called the Pitri-paksha, was dedicated to the fathers *. This is the month of the blessed (bhadra) step, consecrated to the Pole Star goat - god, which became the month of the sons of the ox, when it received the name translated in Sanskrit as Prosthapada, the ox-footed month. The latter half of this month was the season of Sraddhas, or memorial celebrations of the sons of the cloud-goddess Shar, to whom the autumn called Sharad was dedicated. It was to the next month (September—October), called Boedromiori, the course of the ox, a reproduction of the Indian name of the previous month, that the Nekusia, or feast to the dead, was celebrated in Athens. The ordinary Pitriyajna or sacrifice was offered once a month at the New Moon, showing it to be a sacrifice of a year beginning with the New Moon, but, as in the beginning of the cycle-year, the New Moon of Ashva-yujau (September—October) was consecrated to the sun-god of the New Year. It was the last days of tthe departed year which were dedicated to the dead fathers and called the days of the Maha-pitri-yajna, or sacrifice to the Great Fathers.
The fathers to whom this festival was especially consecrated were the worshippers of the Pole Star, who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder and bent their left knee in their circumambulations of the altar, which were
1   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. ii. chap, lxxxvi. p. 180; Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chaps, xi., xvi. pp. 308, 431.
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always made contrary to the course of the sun, from right to left1. They are called the Pitaro Barishadah, or the fathers who sat on the sheaves (barhis) of Kusha grass (Poa cyno- suroides). They, as we are told in the Brahmanas, were the first fathers to whom cooked sacrificial food was offered. They were men of the Neolithic stone age, who buried their dead, and preceded the last series of fathers recognised in the Brahmanas as commemorated at this Festival. These were the Pitaro’ Gnishvattah, those “ consumed by fire,” a name proving them to belong to the Bronze Age, when the dead were burnt as in the Vedic ritual, and that now followed by all high-caste Hindus 2 3.
The predecessors of these two classes of barley-eating fathers were the Pitarah Somavantah, or fathers possessed of Soma, that is, the sons of the tree and its life- giving sap (soma). These first fathers were fed -at this festival with rice on six platters, the six days of their week. This rice was brought by the sacrificing priest to the north of the Garhapatya or circular household (Gnrh) fire-altar, whence he took it southward and threshed it at the north of the Dakshina or southern fire, shaped like a crescent moon 3. After threshing the rice he ground it between two millstones placed on the skin, sloping to the south, of the black antelope, the successor of the deer-sun and the year-god of the Kushika, sons of the Kusha grass, the antelope’s favourite food. He placed the cakes made of this ground rice, divided into six portions or platters, to the south of the Garhapatya 4 altar, after it had been mixed, in the ceremony presided over by the Aptya or water (ap) gods (the Trita Aptya of this epoch), with water brought by the unsexed Agnldhra or fire-priest, who also buttered the dough before it was baked by the Adhvaryu or ceremonial-priest 5.
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 2, ii. 6, I, 8, ii. 6, 2 n.; S.B.E., vol. xii.
pp. 361, 421, 441.   2 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421.
3   Ibid., The Agniyadhana, or Establishment of the Sacred Fires; S.B.E.,
vol. xii. p. 275.   4 5 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 4, 8, 9; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 421, 422.
5 Ibid., i. 2, 2, 1—18 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42—47.
   
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The Adhvaryu, after preparing the sacrifice for the riceeating fathers, began to prepare that for those- born of the Kusha grass. For them he prepared a new altar, differing from the circular Garhapatya and the semi-circular or crescent-shaped Dakshina altar of the earlier races. For this altar he built a four-sided shed south of the Dakshina fire, the tower of the three-years cycle, with its door to the north, instead of being on the south side, like the door of the garden of the Twins. Inside this he built the national sacrificial fire-altar of earth, made in the form of the woman enclosed in the tower, who was to be the mother of the sun-god born of the cycle-year1. The altar was placed with its sides facing the cardinal points, like the early sun- altar at Borsippa, near Babylon, and it was to measure a fathom on the west and three or more cubits from west to east. Also the east side was to be shorter than the west. The breadth was to be contracted in the middle to resemble a woman’s waist, and it was to slope towards the east2. This altar, called the Vedi or altar of knowledge, was sprinkled with water by the Adhvaryu before he thatched it with Kusha grass. Seven sheaves or Barhis were made of this grass in the later ritual of the seven-days week, but only four for this earlier festival. With three of these the altar was thatched by the Adhvaryu, as the Barhis on which the Pitaro Barishadah sat. For this ceremony he in the later ritual shifted the sacrificial cord to the left shoulder, and laid the grass in three circuits of the altar made sunwise 3. The fourth was the Prastara or rain-wand, the Zend Baresma, made of three united sheaves, the three years of the cycle, flowering shoots denoting the flowers of each of the three years being added to each sheaf 4.
After the altar was thatched the priest placed the fire removed from the crescent moon-shaped Dakshina altar to the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah.,u. 6, 1, 10; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 422, notes.
3 Ibid., i. 2, 5, 14—17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 62—64.
3 Ibid., i. 3, 3» 3 J 6, I, I 4 *4-I5 1 vo1- xii- PP- 84, note 2, 424, 425.
4   Ibid., ii. 5, 1, 18 ; voi. xii. p. 389, note 1.
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centre of the new altar, calling the fire-wood “ the black deer living in a den,” the fire of generation hidden in the womb of the black-antelope-altar T. He encircled the fire with the Paridhis, the enclosing mother-triangle of the cycle- year, made of three sticks of Palasha wood (Butea frondosa), with its apex towards the south, and laid the northern stick, denoting the northern origin of the fathers, first2. Thus the figure of the altar was as follows—
with the sacred triangle, the womb, impregnated with the fire-seed in the centre. This fire was the Agni Jatavedas, the Agni who knows (vedas) the secrets of birth (fata), which was thus invoked by the Hotri or libation-priest in the words of the Vedic ritual 3: “We place thee, O Jatavedas, in the place of Ida (the mountain-daughter of Manu and the sheep (eda) mother of the ram-sun), in the navel of the altar to carry our offeringsThis fire was the sacred fire, NabhI-nedeshtha, nearest to the navel (nabhi), born as Vastospati, the lord (pati) of the house, the household fire, from the union of Prajapati (Orion) with his daughter RohinI Aldebaran, and transferred from this Garhapatya altar to the new altar, made in the form of a woman, when RohinI became the red cow and the god born from the fire of the altar became the husband of his mother, kindling the fire in the navel of the altar, and the begetter of the successive children born of the cycle, who were finally to produce the perfect sun-god, rising from the fire to the sky.
The offering made on this altar to the fathers who buried their dead was barley-grain, parched on the fire but not ground. This was the same food as that of the Piets, which
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, i, n, i. 3, 3, 1; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, note 3, 84.
2   Ibid., i. 3, 3, 13, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pd. 87, 89, 90.
3   Rg. iii. 29, 4.
 
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oj the Myth-Making- Age.
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they buried for their year’s consumption in subterranean chambers, such as those still made by ryots in Chutia Nagpur. It was these Piets who traced descent in the female line, like the Nairs of Madras, the Lycians, Cretans, Dorians, Athenians, Lemnians, Etrurians, Egyptians, Orchomenians, Locrians, Lesbians, Mantinaeansx, and all the races comprised under the names of Tursena, Tursha and Tyrrhenians, the rulers of the Minyan empire. They are called in Irish Cruithni, and in Welsh Priten or Pryden, meaning men of the “ form or shape ” of the animal-parents, from whom they claimed descent. They in Europe tattooed their tribal marks on their foreheads, and covered their bodies, according to Herodian, “ with the figures of animals of all kinds,” that is with those of their totem-parents. It was these men who gave to our islands the Welsh name of Yuys Pridain, the Piets’ island, called by Strabo and Diodorus the IIperaviKaL NijaoL, whence the name of Britain arose1 2. It was apparently their congeners who came to India as the fathers who ate parched barley, tattooed their bodies as the Ooraons still do, and painted on their foreheads the sign or Tiloka of the Naga snake, and of the trident of Vishnu, their sacrificial stake, a mark still worn by all Vishnuites, the tribal mark which the sons of Jamvavan, the bear, were said to bear in the Mahabharata (p. 119).
It was this race of barley-growing sons of the cross of St. George, the worker (ovp<yo<?) in the earth (7fj), the plough- god of the three-years cycle, born from the navel-fire of the altar, who became in European traditional history the parents of the second race of the sons of the rivers, the first cultivators who tilled land with the plough. They were bom from the god-kings of Lydia, Herakles, the star Orion, wor
1   Morgan, Ancient Society, Macmillan and Co., 1877, chap. xiv. pp. 343, 351 ; Bachofen, Die Mutterrecht, passim; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. ii., The Pictish Question, pp. 36—74.
2   Sir H. Maxwell, A Duke of Britain, pp. 31, 393 ; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, pp. 76, 79, note 2, 80 ; Professor Rhys, Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Sept. 6, 1900.
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shipped as the sun-god1, and Omphale, the navel, who succeeded the sons of Attis the Phrygian of the Bhrigu race, the ape-grandfather-god Pappos2 3 4. They were the Hindu Asura, who succeeded the Danava, the Danaoi of the Greeks, the Turanian sons of Danu of the Zendavesta, the sons of Dan of the Jews. These latter were in Jewish history the sons of Billah, the old Pole Star mother, and Dan’s sons were the race called Hushim and Shuham3, the Hus and the Shus, the subjects of the Zend and Vedic kings Hu-shrava and Su-shrava, the glory of the Hus and Shus, the king called in the Biblical historical genealogy of Edom (the land of the red men), preserved in Genesis, Husham, king of the Temanites or Southern Arabia. He was the son of Jo-bab, the gate (bah) of God (Jo), the constellation Gemini, and grandson of Zerah, the red son of Tamar, the palm-tree mother and predecessor of Hadad Rimmon, the hastening (hadad) pomegranate, the sun-god 4.
This widely-spread race of the Kushite Asura, the ploughers of the earth and the growers of corn, were the people who worshipped the bisexual mother-goddess, called by the Phoenicians Shemi-ram-ot, meaning She of the exalted (ram) name (Shem), a name by which one of the classes of officiating Levites is called in I Chron. xv. 18, 20. She was a goddess whose statues at Ashkelon on the Mediterranean and Mabug (Hierapolis) on the Euphrates are described by Diodorus Halicarnassus and Lucian. At Ashkelon, Diodorus ii. 4 says that in her temple outside the city she was portrayed with the crescent-moon over her head, a spear in her left, and a dove, the bird of marriage, on her right hand. Her foot was placed on the head of her fish-mother, the goddess Derketo. Lucian, De Dea Syria, 33, says that her image at Mabug stood between that of Chiun, the pillar- god, the gnomon-stone, and Tirhatha, meaning the cleft,
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 472.
2   Herod, i. 7.
3   Gen. xlvi. 23 ; Numb. xxvi. 42.
4   Gen. xxxvi. 33—35.
   
231
the Phoenician form of the name of the fish-mother-goddess, changed by the Greeks into Derketo and Atergatis.
She had a dove on her head, and was represented as a Hermaphrodite, half-man and half-woman, with the male and female attributes of the other two gods of the triad. She was called Semeion or Semi, and the story of her birth was that she was the daughter of Hadad, the sun-god of Damascus, who sent her to the sea to get water from thence to drive away the evil spirits from the springs. Her mother was Tirhatha, the fish-mother-goddess, depicted at Mabug as bearing a sceptre in one hand and a spindle, the sign of the spinning Pleiades, in the other. A tower-crown of the year-goddess, like that of Kybele and Isis, was on her head, which was surrounded with a halo. She wore the girdle of the ruling year-goddess round her waist, and she was a sea-goddess into whose temple-cleft or pool sea water was brought twice a year in sealed jars. She abandoned her daughter Shemiramot on the mountains, and she was brought up by the doves, the Pleiades, the Greek Peleiades. They got milk for her from the shepherds, and the shepherd Simmas gave her the name Shemiramot when she was a year old x. Thus she was a goddess born from the central mountain, the earth-altar encircled by the salt sea, the ocean- snake surrounding the mother-mountain, and she, like her mother, measured time.
Her festival fairs at Mabug were held in spring and autumn at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and they were accompanied by orgiastic rites requiring the temple Kedesha to prostitute themselves to strangers paying the fixed fee into the treasury of the goddess1 2 *. She, the goddess of the doves, is called by Herodotus i. 105, Aphrodite Ourania, and is said to have sent the female disease upon the Scythians who plundered her temple at Ascalon. That
1   Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 46S; chap. xvii. pp. 5SS, 59S, 631, 632, 634.
2   Ibid., vol. iii., Das Phoenische Altertlium, chap. vii. pp. 136, 137, vol. i.
P- 63S-
232   History and Chronology
is to say that the establishment of her worship caused the ritual requiring the performance of the divine ceremonies by unsexed male and female priests to become universal throughout South-western Asia. But in India, where the earlier cult of the Bhrigu priests was established, this phase of worship only produced the one unsexed priest, the Agnidhra. It was he, the helper of the cooking-priest, who brought water and butter for making the sacrificial cake for the Pitarah Somavantah in the festival of the dead fathers described above, and who in the preparations for the offerings made to the Pitaro Barishadah wiped the dust from the three lines drawn by the Adhvaryu, either East or West or North and South across the altar, and laid the fire-logs and sacrificial sheaves by the altar with their tops to the South *.
The ritual of the Galli or unsexed priests of Cybele, Istar, Mylitta, and all other forms of the cycle-mother-goddess, was that of Herakles Sandon, a form of the god Moloch, the master (malik). He is described in his Grecian legendary history as exchanging the beast skin he wore as the deer or lion sun-god for the flesh-coloured, transparent garment of his paramour Omphale, the navel. His male priests wore the women’s garments depicted as those of Herakles on Lydian coins, and the women marched to the sacrifice armed with swords, lances and the sickle-shaped knife, the implement used for killing the victims of Moloch worship, among whom they sacrificed eldest sons. This son was in Jewish ritual redeemed at the Passover by the lamb substituted for him as the sacrificed Ram-sun, but in the early Semitic worship these sacrifices were universally offered by all Semites. The lamb might be substituted for the ass, the sun-ass of this cycle-year, but for no other animal was a substitute allowed, and their necks must be broken 1 2.
The high places on which these rites were performed were
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, r, 12; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, note 3, 423, note 3.
2   Ex. xiii. 11—16 ; Jer. xxxii. 35.
   
233
the consecrated hills of hilly lands, symbolising the central mother-mountain, and to supply these in plain countries artificial hills were raised, which were called in South-western Asia the hills of Shemiramot*. The most universally celebrated of these artificial hills is that of Borsippa near Babylon. The name of this city is in Akkadian Ka-dingira, the gate of the Creators, translated by the Semites into Bab-ili, the gate of II the god. This name, which represented the theology of the cycle epoch of the Gate Stars Gemini, was substituted for the earlier title of Tintir-ki, the place of the tree of life, the mother-grove 1 2 3 4 5. The hill of Borsippa, called by the Akkadians Tilu eilu, the illustrious mound 3, is that to which the seventh month of their later year, called Tul-ku, the holy mound or altar (September—October), was dedicated. This was the first month of the cycle-year, the Jewish Tisri, the Indian Ashva-yujau, the Attic Boedromion; and it was in the previous month, Ki-Gingir-na (August— September), that of the circuit of Istar the creatrix (Gingir), that Istar descended to the realms of Allah, the goddess of the Southern world, to recover the dead sun-god Dumu-zi, and bring him back to earth as the ram-sun-god born at the autumnal equinox on the top of the Holy Hill. On entering the abode of the sun-goddess of the South, Istar had to divest herself of the ornaments marking her as a lunar year- goddess, including the year-girdle of the Syrian Tirhatha and the lunar earrings of the Hindu Kama 4.
It was on these hills that the New Year’s festival of the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles was held. This began according to the Levitical Jewish law on the 15th of Tisri at the full moon 5, but in the epoch we are now dealing with, it was the New Moon feast of the cycle-year. We have
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 480, 483, chap. xiv. p. 674.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i., chap. viii. p. 314.
3   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 405.
4   Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 221—227; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. p. 13.
5   Levit. xxiii. 34.
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History and Chronology
seen in Chapter II. p. 49, that this was originally the New Year’s festival of the Sabsean sons of the tree, held on the 1st of November to commemorate their descent from the mother-village grove, and like their feast to the dead in India, it was changed by the corn-growing races to the autumnal equinox. The festival is called by Hesychius Sakara, the feast of the Saka, or sons of the wet-god Sak, and it was in India the Saka-medha, or sacrifice of the Sakas. The corresponding festival held to celebrate the beginning of Orion’s year at the winter solstice was, as we have seen in Chapter III. p, 96, the Rudra-Tri-ambika. The sun-god then conceived when the Pole Star was in Cygnus, from 17,000 to 15,000 B.C., was the sun-god brought up from the nether world in August—September, to be born as the ruler of the cycle-year at the autumnal equinox. But this New Year’s Hindu festival of the corn-growing races was also like that of the Arabians originally held in October— November, and this original date was retained in the Vedic ritual of the Brahmanas, which gives the full moon of Khartik (October—November) as the date of the Saka- medha I. But this, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 197, in the account of the slaying of Jarasandha, the god of the year of three seasons and six-day weeks, by Bhima, was originally held on the new moon of Khartik2. To judge by the date of the Shraddha feast to the dead held at the autumnal equinox to replace one originally celebrated in October—November, there can be but little doubt that when this festival received the Akkado-Semitic name of the Saka sacrifice, it was held with the feast to the dead as the New Year’s festival of the barley-eating fathers.
It was called by the Phoenicians Sakut, meaning the booths, the Hebrew Succoth. It was at the place called by this name that Jacob built his first house, and made
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., Chaturmasiyani, or Seasonal Sacrifices, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 383.
2   Mahabharata Sabha (/arasandha-badha) Parva, xxiii. p. 72.
   
235
booths for his cattle after he crossed the parent Semite river Jordan ", the Greek Iardanos, the river-god to whom, according to Herod, i. 7, Omphale the Navel, the female form of the bisexual Herakles, was a slave. This description marks the New Year’s feast of Jacob’s house-warming at which he lit his household fires for the year, as that of the house-building Kushika or Hittite Khati, who built the three-years tower of God.
In India it was the Bengal Durga-Puja, or Nava-ratra, held on the 10th day of the light half of Assin (September— October), the festival of the mountain-goddess Su-bhadra, described in the Mahabharata as that held on the Raivataka hill, whence Arjuna eloped with Su-bhadra1 2 3. This, as we have seen on p. 209, was the festival of Revati, the closing and opening festival of the year. She was the hill-eel-goddess, the blessed bird (Su) who, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 96, succeeded the Tri-ambika mothers, and this mountain- goddess was, as Strabo tells us, xi. 8, pp. 431,432, the Persian goddess Anahita, the Greek Anaitis, the Ardvi Sura Anahita of the Zendavesta, the mother-river Euphrates, sent down to water the earth of the sons of the Gate of God by the creating (kairya) bird Hu-kairya, the Zend form of Su-bhadra. She was the goddess Tanais of Carthage, a form of Danu, the Phoenician Thenet, who was, as Berosus tells us, also the national god of the Saka 3. The worship of this mountain-goddess extended from the East in India to the West of Europe, for we have in the hill of Avebury in Gloucestershire an example of the artificial hills erected in her honour. In this cycle-year the two festivals of the solstitial year held at intervals of six months in each year were incorporated, and to these two festivals the equinoctial festivals were added, and each of these festivals was the beginning of a fresh year of ten lunar months of gestation.
1   Gen. xxxiii. 17 ; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. vi. pp. 4S0—483.
2   Adi (Subhadrd-Harana) Parva, sects, ccxxi.. ccxxii. pp. 603—607.
3   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xvii. p. 620.
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Consequently the New Year's feast of the autumnal equinox was repeated at the summer and winter solstices and the vernal equinox.
D.   The festivals of the three-years cycle.
The feast beginning the ten-months year following that opening at the autumnal equinox was that of the summer solstice. This feast at Babylon was the Saka Feast of Booths, commemorating the marriage of Shemiramot to Ninus or Nimrod, the hunter-star Orion of the year of three seasons. It was held on the hill of the Illustrious Mound, and took place, according to Berosus, on the 16th of Loos (June—July), and the date of the festival coincides with that of the setting of Orion at sunset, who was said to have been put in the sky by Ninus, that is to say, the Wild Hunter Ninus became the year-star Orion x.
The festival lasted for five days, and was ruled by the bisexual-goddess Shemiramot, represented by a male slave. He sat on a throne with his face painted white and red, wore chains, lunar earrings and a red robe, and held the cup of the seasons in one hand and a double axe, symbolising the two monthly lunar crescents, in the other. He was surrounded by women, and during the feast he, like the Satnam Guru of the Chuttisgurh Chamars and the ruling priests of the Maharaja Vishnu sect in Western India, had rights over all the women in the camp. During the first day there was a general feast. On the second Ninus, the setting Orion, was imprisoned underground, and placed in charge of the springs then being filled by the rains of the rainy season. On the removal of Ninus, homage was done to his hermaphrodite double, Shemiramot, as queen. On the last of the five days the slave who represented her was burnt as the sacrifice of the dying sun-god2, a rite marking an earlier *
* Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 472, 480, 497 ; Chron. Paseh vol. i. p. 64; Codremus, vol. i. p. 27 ; Athenceus, xiv. p. 639.
2   Ibid., vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 491, 492 ; Curtius, v. 1.
of the Myth-Making- Age.
23 7
form of the sacrifice on the fifth day of the lamb slain at the Potraj festival in South India.
This festival of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus (Orion), with the interchange of male and female clothes, characterising the age of lunar-solar worship, beginning with the cycle-year, was celebrated all over South-western Asia, and in Tarsus a dog, the dog-star Sirius, was burnt as the south-going sun-god I.
This same festival is celebrated in India as the Rath-jatra, or chariot wedding procession of Krishna or Rama, the antelope sun-god Orion, or the ploughing ox, with his twin- sister Durga or Su-bhadra, the mountain-goddess. It is held at Mathura, the holy shrine of Krishna, sacred to the “turner of the earth” (math), on the 17th of Ashadha, the modern Asarh (June—July), that is at the beginning of July. This festival is also held in Chutia Nagpur at the same time, so that they agree exactly in date with that of Shemiramot at Babylon.
The year-bride in the story of Rama, son of Kushaloya, the house or mother of the Kushite race, was Sita, who was, as we have seen on p. 208, united’to him as king of the cycle- year. She was first the furrow ploughed in the sky by Rama, the ox, in his monthly circuit round the heavens of the Nag-kshetra stars ; and afterwards the crescent-moon, which made the same circuit. She was freed from the clutches of Ravana, the ten-headed giant of the cycle-year, ruling its ten months of gestation, and of his three generals, the three years of its duration2: Prahasta, the foremost hand (hasta), the stars Gemini, the hands of the gods ; Kumbha-karna, the maker (karna) of the year water-jars (kumbha), the Great Potter ; and Indrajit, the maker of the
1   Movers, Die Phonhier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 457, 497.
2   In the variant form of the story of Rama and Sita told in the Buddhist Jataka, book xi. no. 461, Rama is said to have returned from his wanderings, that is, from his circuit of the sky as a year-god after three years’ absence, thus shewing that he was a year-god of the three-years cycle. Rouse, Jataka, vol. iv. book xi. no. 461, p. 82.
23B
History and Chronology
year-net of the cycle time measurement, in which Rama and his brother Lakshman, the guider of the plougher of the furrow, were all but suffocated, till they were revived by the water of life. Of these rulers of the cycle-year, Prahasta was slain by Vibhishana, the brother of Ravana the year-god, who conducted Rama’s army to Ravana’s southern stronghold, in Ceylon, over the year-bridge of 360,000 monkeys (360 days), Kumbha-karna and Indrajit by Lakshman r. It was Rama himself, the god of the new- year of the sun-horse, to be described in the next Chapter, who slew Ravana from the year-car of Indra, into which he was conducted by Vibhishana, the year-god 1 2 3 4.
After this victory, the June—July wedding procession of Rama and Sita from Ceylon began and ended with the installation of Rama as king of Ayodhya in the North-east, in the beginning of Sravana (July—x^.ugust)3, as described in the Mahabharata. This midsummer festival to the year- god of the mother-mountain, crowned with the lunar- crescent, is also that of the Devil Dancers, held yearly in Dardistan, the traditional birth-place of the Indian Dar- danian sons of the antelope. It is held on the slopes of the central Pamir table-land, the Hindu Mount Meru, which became in the later days of sun-worship the successor of Mount Mandara, the first central mountain of the Indian Kushikas 4.
The third feast of the cycle-year was that of the vernal equinox, beginning the third year of ten lunar months, extending from the vernal equinox to the winter solstice. This division of the cycle-year is that marked in the Latin year reckoning by the name of December the tenth {decern) month given to that which concludes it. The best historical evidence as to this festival, and its connection with the
1   Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxxii., cclxxxv.—cclxxxviii. pp. 839, 844—853.
2   Ibid., cclxxxix. pp. 855—857.
3   Ibid., ccxc. p. 862.
4   Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, Third Edition, chap. xiii. pp. 200—223.
i
of the MytJi-Making Age.
239
measurement of time, is that given by the Roman festivals of—(1) The twenty-three days’ procession of the fully-armed twelve Quirinal and twelve Palatine Salii, or dancing priests, carrying the twelve Ancilia, or year-shields, through the twenty - four Argei, or stations marking the boundaries of the ancient city, and ending with the Tubilustrium, or Purification of the Trumpets (tuba), with which the opening of the year was announced, and the sacrifice of a lamb representing, as in the other cycle festivals I have noticed, the Ram-sun; (2) The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th of March ; and of (3) Anna Perenna on the 15th full-moon day of the" month.
The Sabine Mamurius is the male god of this connected series of New Year religious ceremonies. He is the equivalent of Quirinus, the god of the revolving or running year (>kur), whose priests, the Salii, danced in circles round the Pole, the central god of the rotating earth, like the dancing dervishes of the East, wearing the three-knotted girdle of the three seasons of Orion’s year. He was the god of Increase or growth, the Etrurian Maso, and a form of the Sabine god called Semo Sancus, who, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 164, is the god of the sacred grain (sagmen). Hence he was the god of the sons of the Kusha grass who made the spring grass to grow.
This series of March festivals is in the Roman Calendar entirely based on the New and Full Moons, by which the months of the cycle-year were measured. They begin with the new moon of the 1st of March, when the year fires of Rome were lighted, and the first especially sacred day after this New Year’s Day is the 9th of March, when the Calendar tells usjthat they (i.e. the Salii) move the Ancilia. No extant authorities tell us what this ceremony actually was, but the fact that it took place on the ninth day, the last day of the cycle-week, marks it as connected with the epoch. The next special ceremony connected with the circuit of the Salii is that of the Feriae Marti on the 19th, when the shields of the Salii were purified; and this seems
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History and Chronology
to be connected with the second nine-days week, ending on the 18th of March, after which the purifying ceremony was performed at the beginning of the third and last week of the month. The last special ceremony of the Salii procession was that of the Tubilustrium on the twenty-third. This took place fourteen days after the 9th, a number which may perhaps be the result of the reformation made in the calendar, and the adoption of the seven-days week.
The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th, and of Anna Perenna on the 15th of March, when taken together as parts of one series of ceremonies, show a close approximation between these spring equinoctial celebrations and those of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus at the summer solstice. On the 14th of March Mamurius Veturius, clad in skins, the old {veins) year-god of the deer-year, was beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. This expulsion of the old year-god of increase at the close of his year is an exact parallel to the underground imprisonment of Ninus {Orion) on the day after his marriage1. This expulsion of the male side of the combined male and female figures of the bisexual year-god, the warrior-god represented in the military array of the Salii, is followed by the license of the New Year’s festival of the female Shemiramot Anna Perenna, installed as year-queen, and mother of the sun-god, on the deposition of her male counterpart, thrown out of the hive like a drone bee. During this festival the Roman people lived in booths in the Campus Martius on the banks of the Tiber, the mother-river 2 3, and it was therefore one of the ancient series of New Year’s Feasts of Booths or Tents. The following lines of Ovid describing it show clearly that these feasts were a* reproduction of the dancing seasonal festivals of the sons of the village tree:—
1 W. Waule Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martius, pp. 48, note 2,
49 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 208.
3   Ibid., pp. 50 ff.
   

[Prometheus]

   
241
“ I dibus est Annas festum generate Perennae,
Haud procul a ripis, advena Tibre, tuis.
Plebs venit, et virides passim disjecta per herbas Potat, et accumbit cam pare quisque sua.
Sub love pars durat: pauci tentoria ponunt:
Sub quibus e ramis frondea facta casa est.
Pars ibi pro rigidis calamos statuere columnis :
Desuper extentas deposuere togas.
Sole tamen vinoque calent: annosque precantur,
Ouot sumunt cyathos ; ad numerumque bibunt.
Illic et cantant, quod didicere theatris ;
Et ducunt posito duras cratere choreas,
Nunc mihi cur cantant superest obscsena puellas Dicere, nam coeunt certaque proba canunt.” ;
Ovid, Fasti III. 38qff.
When we consider the great strength of the evidence proving that very many of the rituals of Europe, and especially those of the Southern maritime countries, were imported from the East, there can be little doubt that this Anna, the Roman goddess of the vernal equinox, is the Carthaginian virgin-goddess Anna, sister and predecessor of Dido, the beloved one (dod), the sun-goddess, also called Elissa, a reproduction of the Phoenician El Hazeh, the strong one. She and her male double are apparently spring parallels of the two goats of the autumnal scape-goat sacrifices, survivals of a year of two seasons of the goat-god, measured by the equinoxes. In these, as described on p. 142, the scape-goat Aziz or Azazel was driven into the wilderness like Mamurius, the male form of Anna, and either Dido, with the arms and clothes of her male counterpart ./Eneas, or, according to Varro, Anna, was burnt as the god sacrificed in this age of burnt-offerings in the March sacrifice to Anna Perenna mentioned by Macrobius E
This Phoenician and Roman Anna is therefore the Anath or village goddess of Palestine called Anah, the name of the 1
1   Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap, xviil pp. 612—616; Firg. Ain., iv. 495—507 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martins, p. 51 ; Macrobius, Sal., i. 126.
R
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History and Chronology
mother of Aholibama, the Hittite wife of Esau, the goat- god T, the goddess of the tent (Ahol) festivals, denounced by Ezekiel xxiii. 36—46, as carried on by the worshippers of Aholah and Aholibah1 2 3 4. She was the Akkadian and Hindu goddess Anu, and as the primaeval mother-goddess she was the mother-tree. It is in her Indian festivals as the goddess of the Sal-tree-mother of the sun-god, the Munda-Dravido tree-mother, that we find the earliest form of the annual dances of the sons of the rivers at the vernal equinox, which survives in the European carnival. This festival is called that of the Sar-hul, or the blossoming of the Sal-tree, or Bahu Puja, the festival of the goddess Bahu, and is one of the chief festivals of the Mundas, Ooraons and Santals. The two former celebrate it at the beginning of the month of Cheit (March — April), that is at the New Moon after the vernal equinox, the original date at which it was held, while among the Santals it takes place during the previous month, Phalgun or Arjuna (February—March) 3, that is at the date of the Roman festival of the procession of the Salii, a retrogression caused by the subsequent changes in year reckonings, which will be told in future chapters. This was the tree clasped by the mother of the Buddha at his birth, that is the tree from which the sun-god was born 4, and his birth was, greeted by a shower of rain. This is still commemorated by the throwing of water by the women over their male friends, from a peculiarly shaped bottle made for this festival by the Santals. It is also universally observed in Burmah, and among the Ooraons it begins with the worship of the Sarna Burhi, or tree-mother of the Sarna village grove, to whom five fowls, in commemoration of the original five-days week, are offered.
1   Gen. xxxvi. i.
2   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 492; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect. iii. p. 18S.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Munda, p. 104, Ooraon, p. 146, Santal, p. 233.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Nidanakatha, p. 66.
   
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The general water-battle begins with the drenching of the Pahan or priest with water by the women of each house, to whom he presents sal flowers.
It is the Munda date of this festival which survives in Greece in the Greater Dionysia, held in Elaphebohon (March —April), the month of the sprouting of the deer’s (eXafos) horns, a name commemorating the spring festival of the deer-sun-god. This god was Dionusos, son of Scmele, the Phoenician goddess Samlath, a form of Shemiramot.
The fourth festival of the cycle-year was that of the winter solstice, at which the sun-god, the offspring of its four periods of gestation, was to be conceived so as to be born at the autumnal equinox. This was a reproduction of the old feast of the death and birth rof the deer-sun-god, and it was in India a festival of the harvest-home, when the rice crops were stored, called Pongol by the Madras Dravidians, and Sohrai by the Santals.
In Italy this harvest festival of the South was reproduced in the Consualia of the 15th December. This was in the Roman ritual a subordinate festival to that of the Consualia of August 21st. That is to say, the earlier December festival was superseded in sanctity by the later August feast, which was, as we shall see later on, a mid-year feast of the year of fifteen months, to be described in Chapter VII. The god Consus, the god of the storing (condere) of the crops, was a god worshipped in an underground temple like that of Llyr at Leicester, described on p. 63. His priest was the Flamen Ouirinalis, that is the priest of the god Ouirinus of this cycle-yearT. The festival of the December harvest-god was followed by the seven days of the Saturnalia, beginning on the 17th of December, the New-Moon feast of the ten-months year, beginning with the Hindu month of Push (December—January), the month of the barley-god Push-an. The corresponding Greek fes- 1
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis December, pp. 267, 268, Mensis Sextilis, pp. 206-20S.
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tival was that of the Lesser Dionysia held in Poseidon (December—January) in honour of Dionysius Nuktelios, the Arcadian god of the lower world, the home of the winter- sun. He was worshipped at Megara at the winter solstice, his feast celebrating his descent into the lower world to seek Semele, the daughter of Kadmus, whose sister Ino was the wife of Athamas, Ionic Tammas, the Akkadian Dumu-zi, and the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician sun- god Melkarth, lord (malik) of the city {kartJi). This Dionysius Nuktelios, husband of Semele Samlath, or Shemiramot, was the male god who was to bring her to the North as the summer sun, and make her mother of the sun-god born at the autumnal equinox. This Megara festival of the marriage of Dionysius Nuktelios with Shemiramot at the winter solstice was accompanied by the same orgiastic dances which marked the other festivals of the cycle-year*. This winter descent of the sun-god into the subterranean regions of the South was also celebrated at the festival held in Argolis on the Alcyonian Lake, near Lerna, and at Cynaethae in Arcadia, when a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called to come up out of the lake as the young bull-god of Spring I, the father of the god to be born at the autumnal equinox 1 2, the night sun (Helios) god of winter.
The ruling gods of this cycle of three years, with its four successive festivals, separated by equal intervals of ten lunar months, were the mother-goddess, originally the mother-tree, and her spouse the rain-god, who made his way into her enclosing tower of the three revolving years. This was the marriage-chariot of Krishna and Su-bhadra of Shemiramot and Ninus. But before their incarceration in this tower of the Garden of God, watered by the life-giving rain, they were separate male and female deities. The male deity was the father-god whose sacrifice, in that of his counterpart, his eldest son, fertilised the earth, into which the blood, the
1   Frazer, Pansanias, i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 6i, ii. 525.
2   Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. pp. 302, 303.
   
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divine seed, flowed, and made it bear a numerous offspring. This god was in the Mahabharata the king Somaka with a hundred wives, but only one son, Jantu, born after long years of expectation. The sacrifice of the son was followed by the pregnancy of all the hundred wives, who each bore a son, and among these Jantu was re-born as the second son of his motherI.
E.   Human Sacrifices.
The history of this rite of human sacrifice with its attendant ritual is told most clearly in that of the worship of Zeus Lykaios, of Arcadia, and the Semite mountain- father-god. The altar of this god, said in Arcadian tradition to have been erected by Lycaon, the wolf (Xv/cof), god of light and son of Pelasgus, the Hebrew Peleg, for the sacrifice of his new-born son, was a mound of earth2 3 4. It was placed, as described by Pausanias, on the highest summit of the central Lycsean mountain, and before it, when he saw it, were two pillars nearly facing the East, on which two gilt eagles were engraved 3. But to ascertain the full meaning of this altar, and the ritual of the human sacrifices offered on it, we must turn to another example of it, in which its inner meaning has been told by the rules of construction enjoined by the priestly guardians and transmitters of the national traditions. This altar of a mound of earth, made in the form of a woman, appears with its explanatory adjuncts in the national altar of the Chinese Empire placed on the top of the round hillock near Pekin, under the triple-roofed circular temple, recalling in its three roofs the three years of this cycle. This is oriented to the sun of the winter solstice 4, the time when Orion’s year and that of the solstitial sun-bird began, and dedicated to Shang-ti, the Pole Star god. The traditions of this altar, on which
1   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha- Yatra) Parva, cxxvii., cxxviii. pp. 386, 3S9.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 2, 1, vol. i. p. 374.
3   Ibid., viii. 38, 7, vol. i. 424.
4   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. ix. pp. 88, 89.
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the Emperor offers yearly, while facing the North, a firstborn male animal as a whole-burnt sacrifice, clearly points to the cycle epoch of the nine-days week, and the year divided into months of twenty-seven days each. These last are commemorated by the twenty-seven steps to the top of the platform on which the altar stands, and the nine-days week by the nine circles of marble slabs round the circular stone forming the altar. The innermost of these circles is one of nine slabs, and each circle increases its slabs in multiples of nine up to the ninth circle of 9x9=81 *. Thus the mound-altar was the altar of the ritual of the cycle-year 2.
The two pillars before the altar of Zeus Lykaios, described by Pausanias, were those said by Herodotus ii. 44 to stand before the temple of Herakles at Tyre, and which were set up in front of all Phoenician and Egyptian temples. Of these one was dedicated to the god Chiun, the pillar which became Solomon’s pillar Jachin, its hiphil form. This was the pillar of Usof the hunter, the Hebrew Esau, called Khamraam or Hammam, the green pillar, the pillar of the god of the summer solstice ; and the other was that of Usof’s brother Hypsuranius, the golden pillar, the Boaz or moving pillar of the winter solstice 3. The eagles on these two pillars were the mother-cloud-bird, the Zend Hu Kairiya. This altar of Zeus Lykaios was exactly similar to that of Saturn Balcaranensis in Africa 4.
This primitive altar with the two pillars in front of it was placed under the open sky, and had no temple attached to it, but when the pastoral shepherd races began to leave the mountain heights and descend to the river villages
1   Professor Douglas, Confucianism and Taoism, pp. 82—87.
2   The Irish ritual of the sacrifice of eldest sons to Crom Croich, the god of the central pillar of the sun circle, proves that these victims were offered to the sun-god. Meyer and Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Ritual Sacrifice in
? Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 149, 150.
3   Movers, Die Phouizier, vol. i. chap. vii. p. 292 , chap. viii. pp. 343, 346.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, ii., Le Culte de Zeus Lycaios, pp. 72, 73-
   
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to feed their herds, a change of ritual followed their descent. This appears in the cult of the Lycaean Zeus, in the Temenos or sacred enclosure’ dedicated to this god on the lower slopes of the mountain, and that of Saturn Balcaranensis. This Temenos was a survival of the village grove of the primaeval faiths, and it was to judge from the copy of it made at Megalopolis, and described by Pausanias, surrounded by stones, like the sun circles at Solwaster. In its centre was the stone temple of Zeus Lykaios, open in front with two altars before it and two tables along the side walls, above each of which was an eagle with outspread wings extending to the length of the tables I. But this enclosure, copied apparently from the stone circles of the North, was not like the village grove, open to all comers, and especially to the dancers at the festivals. Entrance to it was forbidden under pain of death. This prohibition marks the temple, to the precincts of which it was applied, as a product of the age of the worship of the virgin-mother and unsexed father, of the creed of the worshippers of the central mountain revolving in the surrounding ocean. It was as a reproduction of this conception of the abode of the creating gods that Phoenician temples, like that of Am al Hayat, described by Renan, and that at Mabug by Lucian, were placed in the centre of a natural or artificial lake2, that made by Elijah round the altar he built on Carmel 3. This temple was reproduced in Egypt in the lake-temple at Buto dedicated to , Latona, goddess of the tree-trunk, and her son Apollo, as described in Herodotus ii. 156.
These were the temples of the Turanian king Frangrasyan} built in the Chaechasta lake, the modern Urumiah in Adar- baijan, whom Hushrava slew 4. This was a salt-water lake representing the salt sea whence the goddess Shemiramot was born. The building of these lake temples, which could
1   Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 38, 6, 30, 2, vol. i.jjpp. 424, 463 ; Berard, Origine ties Cultcs Arcadiens, pp. 72, 73, 87, 88.
2   Renan, Phenicie, pp. 63—67 ; Lucian, De Ded Syria, pp. 45, 46.
3   I Kings xviii. 30 ff.
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Gos Yasht, iv. ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 114.
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History and Chronology
only be approached by boats provided by the priests, marks the growth of sacerdotal influence, and it was from these shrines, which human feet could not reach without help, that the idea arose of the sanctity of the temple precincts, and the prohibition of entering them with shodden feet.
The tables within them were the altar of incense and the table of shew-bread in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish tabernacle and temple, the latter being that on which the firstfruits were offered. It was on this table that the Athenian Cecrops, son of Erectheus the snake-god, offered the Pelanoi or cakes of honey, barley, meal, and oil which he presented as the earlier firstfruits’ offering instead of the later eldest son offered by Lycaon on the altar of sacrifice *. This table and the temple sanctuary in which it stood were placed in the sun-circle surrounded with the gnomon-stones, within which, according to primaeval custom, no blood could be shed, while the altar of sacrifice on the top of the mountain answered to the dolmen or stone of sacrifice of the Palaeolithic age of the northern totemistic clans.
E.   Incense worship and i)iternational trade.
The second table in the sanctuary, the incense altar, gives us a complete clue to the history of this epoch. The incense there burnt was a substitute, conceived in the lowlands, for the clouds which wreathed the mountain tops where the earliest altars were made. This ritual of burnt sacrifice accompanied by incense was that of the priest-god Dhaumya of the Mahabharata, the priest of smoke ('dhnmo) of the Pandava brethren. The incense whence the sacred fumes arose was that extracted from the Indian incense tree, the Salai (Boswellia thurifcra\ which grows on the top of every rocky hill in Central India where nothing else will grow. This frankincense with the Indian gold washed from the sand of the rivers of Chutia Nagpur, the Sone, the river of gold {sona), the Subonrika or Suvarnariksha, the river of the tribe 1
1 Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 2, I, vol. i. p. 374.
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(varna) of the Sus with its golden sand, and those of the brooks of Sona-pet, the golden womb, the ancient treasure- houses of Indian wealth, and the spiees of the South, was the most valuable merchandise exported to foreign lands by the descendants of the Indian twin-gods Yadru-Turvasu. These Hittite sons of the Full Moon ( Ya), whose god (vasu) was the revolving Pole [tur) Star god, the dweller in the Caer Sidi or Turning castle where the Holy Grail, the seed of life, was preserved in the mother-tree of the Southern Ocean, were the founders of the three most ancient ports in Western India:—the Yadava port of Dwarika, the door (dwar) of Khatlawar, the holy land of the Khati or joined twins, that of Pragjyotisha or Baragyza, the modern Broach, called in the Mahabharata Prabhasa, at the mouth of the Nerbudda, and Surparaka, the modern Surat, at the mouth of the Payoshni, now called Tapti, built according to the Mahabharata by a Vidarba, that is by a Gond or Haihaya king who used the Semite word “arba” to denote four1. The name Pragjyotisha, the star (jyotis) of the East, shows the importance attached to it as the port of the mother-river of the Haihaya kings who were the earliest imperial rulers of North India. This and Surparaka were the two ports of the king called in the Mahabharata Bhagadatta, the offspring of the tree of edible fruit (bhaga), the fig and mango tree. Pie is called the King of the Yavanas, or growers of barley (yava), who were, as we are told elsewhere, the Turvasu, the king who bore on his head the most wonderful jewel on earth, the light of the Western sun, the Pole Star. He was subordinate to Jarasandha2, and though he was the maternal uncle of the Pandavas, brother of KuntI, or Prithi their mother, and that of Karna, he fought in the final battle between the Kauravyas and Pandavas on the side of the former, and was slain by
1   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha- Yalrct) Parva, cxviii., cxix., cxx. pp. 363, 364, 365, 371*
2   Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuyarambha) Parva, xv. p. 45, Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260.
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Arjuna, as Krishna had formerly slain Naraka, the man (nara) god, the bisexual god of this epoch L
It was from these ports that the Turvasu or Yavana ships carried the wealth of India to the foreign lands on the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Their first foreign station was the island in the Persian Gulf, whence, according to Theophrastus, the Phoenicians said they originally came. This, the modern Bahrein, celebrated for its pearl fishery, they called Turos. It was the holy Akkadian island Dilmun, the Isle of God (dil), where la first appeared to human eyes as En-zag, the first-born (sag) son of god (e/t), the fish-born son of the waters. He was worshipped as Pati, the lord which identifies him with the Hindu Praja-pati3. It was thence they began their career as the roving merchants of South-western Asia, whose ships made their way along the coasts of Arabia to the country called by the Akkadians Magana, the jewel mines of Sinai, or the Mountain of Sin, the moon, a name they brought with them fr,om the Indian land of Sindhu. This name Sin was originally, according to Lenormant, Singh or Sik, and was given first to the land of the Sumerians, the Euphratean Delta. This is called Shinar in the Bible, Singara by the Greeks, Sindjar by the Arabian geographers, and was that ruled by the three-eyed and two-horned wild-bull-god Samir-us or Shemiramot, who ruled Babylon, as we have seen, after Nimrod or Ninus (Orion).
He was the bisexual-god, the male form of Shemiramot, who invented weights and measures and the art of silkweaving 3. This was the three-eyed-god Shiva of the Hindus, whose wife or female counterpart was the weaving Uma, the flax (uma) goddess, the goddess-mother of the flax weavers of Asia Minor, who became the Egyptian goddess Neith, meaning the weaver ; the goddess who supplied the mummy cloths of the dead in Egypt, all of which are made 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Drona (Samsaptika-badha) Parva, xxix. pp. 95—98.
2   Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for 18S7, Lect. ii. p. 114, note 1.
3   Lenormant, Chaldccan Magict pp. 395, 396, note 2, 402.
   
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of flax, and from this flax were made the most sacred dresses of the Egyptian and those of the Jewish priests R The silks woven by their worshippers were those called by Hiouen Tsiang Kauseya or Kushite cloth, made from the cocoons of the jungle tusser moth, which supplied the yellow robes worn by the early Buddhist mendicants called Kasayam, and which were, he tells us, the common garments of the people of the Northern and Southern Punjab3. They also wore garments of kshauma or hemp, the modern jute, the flax of Uma, as well as of cotton, and wove fine goat’s- liair blankets, Kambala, which now appear as Rampore Chudders, whence the Kambhojas of the Northern Punjab and the men of Kambojia, in the north of the Malay Peninsula, got their names.
The cotton garments of these sons of the weavers and potters were originally made of the cotton of the Simul (Bombax heptaphylla), or red-cotton tree, the Sanskrit Shil- mili. It was from the wood of this tree and that of the Kimshuka, the Palasha {Butea frondosa) tree, that the car was made in which the Ashvins drove the sun-maiden when they brought her to be married to Soma, the male moon- god 3. This cotton-tree is the sacred tree of the offerers of human sacrifices, which was always planted with appropriate rites above the sacrificial stone where the Meriah victims were to be slain whenever a new village was founded by the Kandhs of Orissa, who call themselves Kui-loka, the people of the Gond mother-goddess Koi, and who retained the rite of human sacrifice longer than any other race in India 4.
But on the coming of the Kurmis or Kaurs the cotton of this tree was superseded by the cotton Karpasi (gossy- 1 2 3 4
1   Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, Tin Ancient Egyptians, vol. ii. chap. lx. p. 15S. The flax plant in India is not now used for weaving but only for its oil-seeds.
2   Beal, Records of the Western llorld, vol. i. pp. 75, 165, 16S.
3   Rg. X. 85, 20.
4   Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 145; Rislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kandhs, p. 297.
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History and Chronology
pitim herbaceum), which they sowed yearly, and whence the Western land of Saurashtra, the kingdom (rashtra) of the Saus, the inland part of Khatlawar, got the name of Karpasika, the cotton land, by which it is called in the Mahabharata L It was the cloth woven from this which was called in the earliest Babylonian documents Sipat Kuri, or the cloth of the land of Kur, and also Sindhu, from the land of Sin or Singh, the horned-moon-god, the sadln of the Old Testament and the sindon (aivSeov) of the Greeks2.
It was these merchants who also imported into Arabia and Europe the cinnamon of Ceylon, mentioned by Herodotus
iii.   HI as one of the products brought by the Phoenician traders. Their generic name, when they settled in Arabia, was, as I have told in Chapter II., that of Atjub, or collectors of-incense {tib\ the original form of the Greek name of ^Ethiopian 3; and they were the Midianites of the Bible, who organised the land caravans which brought Eastern produce overland along the course of the Euphrates, and thence to the Mediterranean through the city of Haran, the road (,kharram). This was the city of Laban, meaning “ the white-god,” called in Assyrian inscriptions “ the builder of the brick foundation of heaven 4,” the tower of the Garden of God of this epoch, whose image was a stone surmounted by a star.
This city of the moon-god of the tower is the father of Lot and son of Terah, the antelope, who was also father of the Hebrew Ab-ram, the father-ram, the Hindu Rama. Lot means concealment and a veil, and the root meaning of the word is “incenses.” Thus in Lot we find the incense- god of the men of Haran, the city of .the white-moon-god “ of the brick foundation of heaven,” the god of the three- years cycle; and we also learn from this historical genealogy 1 2 3 4
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Dyuta) Parva, li. p. 141.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lecturesfor 1887, Lect. i., iii. p. 138.
3   Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien und Africa, p. 10.
4   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 18S7, Lect. iv. p. 249, note 3. s Gesenius, Thesaurus, s.v. Lot, p. 748; Gen. xi. 27, 28.
   
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that this incense ritual concealing the hidden god from profane eyes was that of the sons of the antelope and of the god Ram, whose eastern wife was Keturah, meaning the “ incense ” mother T.
The sons of Lot, the incense-god, were Ammon, the supporter, and Moab, the father (ah) of the waters, begotten of his two daughters, the two wives of the trident father-god, when he was inspired by the wine consumed by the creating gods of this epoch, and when he dwelt in the mother-cave of the Turanian races2. Of these Ammon, the supporter, was the earlier Egyptian god of Thebes, Amon, the Hidden, called in the Book of the Dead “prince of the gods of the East, lord of the two horns, the divine bull-scarab 3,” the roller or turner of the earth ball. In Chapters CLXV. and CLXIII. he is depicted as an ithyphallic man-beetle, with plumes on his head, standing in front of a man with a ram’s head on each shoulder, and as a horned serpent with legs and a lunar disk on his head. He is thus the turner of the pole of the revolving earth, hidden in the clouds of incense which filled the Egyptian temples, the god descended from the original parent-bird and snake who had become ruler of the cycle-year.
For the history of Moab, the father (ah) of the waters, we must turn to that of the contemporaneous twin gods of the Greek incense mythology, Kastor and Poludeukes, who became the twin stars Gemini, the door-posts of heaven. They were the sons of Leda, the feminine form of Ledon (XrjSov), the mastich-shrub (Pistaccia lentiscus) yielding the incense Ledanon burnt in the Greek temples. This was, according to Herodotus iii. ill, originally used in religious sacrifices by the Arabians, and was, as we now see, brought from India to Arabia by the Turvasu traders, who carried it, with the other mercantile contents of their caravans, to Haran on the Euphrates, whence the incense ritual passed 1
1 Gen. xxv. 6.   s Gen. xix. 26—3S.
3   Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chaps, clxv., clxiii. pp. 295, 292.
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through Syria to the shores of the Mediterranean and thence to Greece. There the twin gods, sons of the incense- mother, became the patron gods of the Dorian immigrants from Asia Minor and of Sparta, the country in which the Indian Dravidian customs of common meals and the state education of children were more deeply rooted than in any other Grecian territory. They were the reputed sons of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, the hammer (tiid, tund') god of the North, the divine smith of the Kabiri. But Tyndareus was the father only of Kastor, the pole (stor) of Ka, the sexless beaver, the house-builder of the Northern races. Poludeukes, the wetting (Sevco) rain-god, the Semitic Moab, father (ad) of the waters, was the son of Zeus, the Pole Star god, and the mother-cloud-bird. They belonged to the crew of the original star-ship Argo, the mother constellation of the dwellers on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was the merchant traders of India, worshippers of these twin star-gods, guardians of the gate of heaven, who brought the cycle-year to Europe, where they set up its calendar, which i'l shall describe presently, in the ten rows of stones at Kermario, near Carnac in Britany, and placed in them the two index - stones marking the sunrise at the solstices and equinoxes l. It was they who made the year beginning with the autumnal equinox that of Syria, Asia Minor, and Southern Greece. They brought with them a fresh influx of Indian traditional history, ritual and local customs, in addition to the Indian teachings of the Amazonian races. The Dravidian mariners, who had learnt the arts of navigation in the Indian Ocean, and established the sea-faring trade of India with the Euphratean countries, Arabia and Egypt, now, on the shores of the Mediterranean, joined the matriarchal races, and the Basque population descended from them. These amalgamated Dravido - Turano Dorian tribes descended from the spear Dor, became the subjects of Minos, and among these the Dravidian seafarers were
1 Gaillard, L'Astronomic Prehistorique, vii. p. 73.
   
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the Carian seamen who, according to Herodotus i. 171, made the Minyans rulers of the islands of the ZEgean sea and of Greece. They, according to Aristotle, cited by Strabo viii. p. 374, occupied Epidaurus in Argolis, the sacred city where ./Esculapius, the divine physician, was said to have been born, and his Indian origin is marked by the snake twisted round his left arm, and the cocks sacrificed to him.
The Carians, also like the Indian Pitaro Barishadah, buried their dead, and their supreme god Zeus was depicted as bearing the double axe of the two lunar crescents measuring the cycle-year1. Herodotus, in describing them, attributes to them the origin of three special customs, (1) of wearing cock’s combs on their helmets, (2) of painting scutcheons on their "shields, and (3) of holding their shields by a wooden handle. The two first of these are clearly derived from the Indian people who worshipped Ahalya, the hen-bird, as the sun-bird circling the heavens, the wife of the lunar bull-god Gautama, and sacrificed cocks, the Munda sun-offerings, and painted their caste totem marks on their foreheads. He also says that the Carian women never pronounced their husband’s name, a thoroughly Indian and Munda custom2 3.
The introduction into Greece of the Munda jungle fowl must date from the epoch when, as we have seen, cocks and hens were the sacred birds of Herakles, the sun-god, and his wife Hebe, a reproduction of the Indian Ahalya. They were also, according to Plutarch, sacrificed to Ares, the ploughing (ar) god in Sparta, and were the sacred birds ^ of the Roman Mars, thus marking him as originally the Indian Maroti, the ape-god of the South-west Monsoon 3. The Carians also placed the figure of a cock at the end of their lances. The cock was the bird sacred to Minos and the Minyans, for a cock was the crest painted on the shield
1   Frazer, Pansam'as, vol. iii. pp. 154, 155.
2   Herodotus, i. 171, 146.
3   De Gubernatis, Die Thieve (German Translation), p. 561.
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of the statue of Idomeneus, the leader of the Minyan Cretans in the Trojan war, placed among the offerings of the Sicilian Agrigentines in Elis, and there was a figure of a cock on the helmet of the statue of Athene, the Ionian tree-mother, in the Akropolis of Elis1. Cocks and hens were the birds used for augury by the augur priests, who sacrificed them and examined the signs shown by their entrails in the sacred square, the Roman Templum, divided into four equal parts by the cross of St. George. This field was that called in the Rigveda and Zendavesta the four-cornered field of Varuna, the barley and ram sun-god of this epoch, which is said to have conquered the triangle of the year of three seasons 2 3 4. This land of the conquering square is said to have been the fourteenth of the lands created by Ahura Mazda, and that in which Thraetaona, the Vedic Trita, who was, as we have seen, the ruling god of the cyle-year, was born.
The ritual founded on the prophetic signs given by the Indian cocks and hens, the sun-birds, was taken to Rome with the worship of the Twin Brethren, and those who diffused the cult were the seafaring Minyans, called Tursena by the Lydians, Tursha by the Egyptians, and Tyrrhenians by the Romans and Greeks, the worshippers of the supreme god of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, who is called Pator Tur, the father Tur, in the inscription in Cypriote letters on a whorl dedicated to him, and found in the sixth settlement from the bottom of the buried cities of Troy. It was he who gave his name to the Phrygian city of Turiaion 3, and who was originally the Pole Star mother-goddess, the counterpart of the Indian and Finnic Tara, the Etrurian mother-goddess Tur-an. It was she who in the Etrurian * folk-tale quoted by Leland4 gave the father of the future
1   Frazer, Pctusanias, v. 25, 4, vi. 26, 4, vol. i. pp. 277, 324 ; Homer, Iliad, ii. p. 643.
2   Rg. i. 152, 2 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Fargard, i. 18, Introduction, iv. 12 ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 9, lxiii.
3   Schluchhardt, Schliemann’s Excavations, Appendix i. p. 334.
4   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Tur-anna, pp. 39—41.
   
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sun-god, the ragged peasant, the despised sun, the basket of nuts, the fruit of the World’s tree, which was to make the king’s daughter, the tree-sun-mother, pregnant, and who was looked on as the Pole Star mother of light and life. These Tursena were, as Herodotus i. 57 tells us, a different race from the Pelasgians who emigrated from Lydia to Umbria in Italy. From the Eugubine tables describing the ritual of Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the capital of Umbria, we learn that the Umbrian priests, who divined by the birds, wore, like the Pitaro Barishadah of India and the Dervish priests of South-western Asia, sacrificial girdles; and that both the Umbrian priests and the Pitaro Barishadah were directed in their official sacrifices to wear this girdle-cord over the right shoulder. It was also on this shoulder that the Umbrian priests were to carry the fire-brazier. They were also to pray for protection to the owl (parra) L This was the bird sacred to Athene, the tree-mother-goddess of the Ionian race, descended from matriarchal mothers. The owl is in India a bird form of Indra, who is called Uluka, the owl-god, and the sacred owl of Athene was, according to the birth-legend told of her origin, the night-bird-mother of the sun-god, the horned moon. She was Ethiope, that is, she was a daughter of the Atyub or incense men, the daughter of Nykteus, king of the matriarchal island of Lesbos> or according to other authorities, of .Ethiopia, that is of the Indian incense collectors. She lay by her father, as Myrrha, or Shemiramot, lay by her father Thoas, whom we have seen to be a form of Dumu-zi and to be the year-star Orion, and was pursued by him with his sword, but was saved by Athene, who changed her into an owl, as Myrrha was changed into a cypress-tree to become the mother of the sun-god Adonis 1 2. Thus we see that the owl was, according to Greek history, the sacred bird of the age of incense worship, that
1   Breal, Les Tables Eitgubines, v. pp. xliv., xlv. ; Bower, Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, Appendix, Translation of the Ancient Lustration of the Iguvine People, p. 132.
2   De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vi. p. 52S.
S
258   History and Chronology
is of the three-years cycle. And in the genealogy of the Mahabharata, Uluka is the son of Shakuni the raven, the early sacred storm-bird. The sons of the owl, the Ulukas, are in the Mahabharata described as a powerful tribe in the North-west, living near the fire-worshipping dwellers in the Sarasvatl, who were conquered by Arjuna. They joined the army of the Kauravyas with the men of the Sarasvati, and both fought under the command of Shakuni, the raven. Uluka, his son, was sent as an ambassador to the Pandavas by Duryodhana, the Kauravya leader, before the war, and he insulted Arjuna in the course of his embassy, while his father Shakuni had, like Pushkara in the story of Nala, ruined them by winning their wealth in gambling. Both he and his father Shakuni were slain by Sahadeva, the fire- god among the Pandavas, ruling the autumn season beginning at the autumnal equinox, and their forces were the last remnant of the Kauravya army, whose defeat and destruction left the Pandavas the victorious rulers of India *.
Hence in this ritual of the Umbrian divining priests who worshipped the moon-owl of night we see evidence of the migration to Italy of the men of the cycle-year, who made the owl their mother-bird instead of the earlier raven, and made it the sacred bird of their tree-mother-goddess Athene. This was the Athene called the Itonian, who was the protecting goddess of the Pan-Boeotian confederacy, whose sanctuary containing her image, and that of her male counterpart the Zeus of the lower world, called Itanos, the god of the South, was the national Boeotian temple at Coronea, where the festival of the united gods was held yearly at the autumnal equinox when the Boeotian year began 1 2. It was under the protection of this goddess, to whom the owl was sacred, that the Boeotians under Kadmus entered Europe from the East, and thence they made their way to
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Digmjaya) Parva, xxvii. pp. So, Si, Udyoga (Yana- sandhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Udyoga (Sainya-Niryana) Parva, clx.—clxiv. pp. 462 —485, Shalya {Hf-ada-Pravesha) Parva, xxviii., xxix. pp. 105—no.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, 1, vol. i. p. 4S6, vol. v. p. 169.
 

 

PLATE II,
To face/. 259.
 
From Iasilikaia in Cilicia.
   
259
Italy as the Minyan race, sons of the owl-goddess, whom they called Mena, Menfra or Minerva, and who was both a phallic-serpent and a winged-goddess, the moon-bird of night, the protectress of brides I, and the measuring {men) mother the Egyptian goddess Min, the star, and Virgo.
G. Plant worship.
The creed of these Hittite descendants of the Indian Turvasu and the owl-mother-goddess of the Minyans is depicted in the historical bas-relief of Iasili Kai'a in Cilicia. This represents the Hittite father-god wearing the Hittite peaked tiara, and their shoes with turned-up toes, descending from the mountain, and bearing in his right hand the polar sceptre, his magic rain-wand of office, surmounted with the earth globe. In his left hand is the symbol of the pollen-bearing flower with the seed-vessel rising out of the calix, and the sacred antelope, wearing the Hittite cap, runs by his side. He, in the copy of the bas-relief drawn by Puchstein2, which is reproduced 011 the plate annexed, meets, after he has come down to the plain and mounted on the shoulders of his Hittite priests, the mother-goddess Rhea, the mother of the sons of the rivers. She also wears the Hittite shoes and the tower head-dress of the goddess of the revolving-year, stands on a leopard, and bears in her right hand the symbol of the blossomed flower with its petals springing from the calix, and bearing the seed-vessel already swelling from the infusion of the seed of the male flower. This represents the marriage of the plant-parents of life at the four wedding festivals of the cycle-year, and behind them, standing like his mother on a leopard, the sacred animal of Dionysus, son of Semelc or Shemiramot, is the son born of their union. Between1 the mother and her full-grown
1   Deecke, Etruria, ^Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 637 ; Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Mena, p. 132.
2   This, according to Signor Milani, is more carefully drawn than that given by Perrot, iv. fig. 321.
S 2

[Prometheus]

26O
   
son is the walking seed-vessel, the infant who has not yet assumed his final human form. In his form of the man-god he bears in his right hand the staff on which he leans, and in his left the double axe of the Carian and Hittite Zeus, while behind him is bound the pickaxe or mattock, headed by the lunar crescentx.
It is the birth of this sun-plant-god which is represented in the story of the combat between Horus the son of Hat-hor, the Pole Star goddess, and Set the pig-god, told in Chapters XVII. and CXII. of the Book of the Dead1 2. Horus is the sun of this cycle-year born from the tree crowned by the Pole Star, and Set or Suti was, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 75, the god who was changed in his Northern avatar from Canopus the ape-god of the South, into the Pig Pole Star god in the constellation Kepheus. This pig-god is said to have blinded Horus by throwing filth, that is earth, in his eyes, thus making him the blind-tree-father and mother of life born from the earth. Horus, or rather Thoth, that is Dhu-ti the bird (d/m) of life, the moon emasculated Set, that is to say, they made him like the emasculated Phrygian god Attys, the father-god only visible in the sexless pine-tree, the fire-drill. The whole parable tells us that the theology of the plant-god of the cycle-year succeeded the worship of the Pole Star and the solstitial sun-bird.
This son of the parent-plants, born of the virgin flower- mother, is the exact representation of the Etrurian god Sethlans the heavenly smith, and he is in the Indian theogony the god called Parasu Rama, or Rama of the double-axe, who appeared to the Pandavas clad in a deerskin on the fourteenth day of the moon, thus marking himself as the lunar god of the stellar lunar month of twenty- seven days, and who also showed himself on the eighth, that is on the eve of the ninth day of his week. He was
1   Milani, Studi Di Archceologia, i., Part i., Nota Esegetica Sulla Stele di Amrit., pp. 35, note 5, 37, figs. 2, 3 ; Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien, Taf. x.
2   Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chapters xvii. 67—70, cxii. 2—9, PP- 52> 177-
   
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the great grandson of Bhrigu the fire-god, and son of Jamadagni the twin {jama) fires engendered by Richika the fire-spark in the mother-trees, the Banyan fig-tree {Ficus Indica) of the Kushikas and the Pipal-tree {Ficus Religiosa) sacred to the sun-god. This twin-born god, the seed of life, married Renuka the flower-pollen {rout), and her fifth son was Parasu-Rama, that is the son born from the union of the parent-plants like the Hittite son of the mother-flower who became the Etrurian Sethlans.
He recovered the year-calf begotten in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda from the year-cow after ten months of gestation J, which had been stolen by Arjuna the fair {arjuna) Haihaya king, the sun-god with the thousand arms, and slew the stealer, that is to say, became ruler of the year of the united moon-cow and sun-calf. The brothers of Arjuna, the star sons of Kartavirya, or Krituvirya, the male (?virya) star-parent, the warrior-star Orion, slew Jamadagni, Rama’s father, in revenge, and were all slain by Rama with his double axe Parasu, in the field of Tan-eshur, the home of the mud-god Tan, the centre of Kuru-kshethra, the land of the Kurus, where he filled the five adjoining {sa- mantd) lakes called Samanta-Panchaka with their blood, that is to say, he became ruler of their year with its five- day weeks 2.
H. Emigration of the men of this age as told by their
monuments.
These Turano-Semitic seafaring races were the founders of the earliest Cyclopean architecture of the one-eyed {Cyclops') sons of the Pole. In this the walls were built of polygonal stones, accurately fitted together without mortar, as in the oldest parts of the prehistoric buildings of Tiryns, Mycenre, Orchomenos. They were also the builders of the earliest type of stone dwelling-house, modelled on the earth and wattle heehive huts of Phrygia, of which specimens are
1   Rg. i. 164, 1—10.
2   Mahabharata Vana {Tirt/ia-Yatra) Parva, cxv.—cxvii. pp. 354—362.
262
   
found in the Piets’ houses of Scotland and Ireland burrowed under earth mounds. The sacrificial pits which were, as we have seen, a distinguishing feature of their ritual in India, are reproduced in those in the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae, in the temple of the Kabiri in Samothrace, and in that of the Great Kabir near Thebes, while near the sacrificial pit at Mycenae is a wall-painting representing a procession of ass-headed figures wearing gay garments, who arc apparently votaries of the ass-riding Hindu Ash- vins T. This architecture also survives in that of the Nuraghs or circular towers of Sardinia, the zigurrats or sacred observatories of the ancient astronomers of the age of the tower of the Garden of God, the Plebrew Pen-u-el of the face {pen) of God, the Midianite tower of Zibah and Zal- mana, which, with the booths (sakut) of Succoth, the place of booths, were destroyed by Gideon, who cut down the Asherah, or divine pillars, and overthrew the altar of Baal, that of this cycle age, and substituted the worship of the Ephod1 2 3 4. This was the garment of the prophetic priest of the spoken oracle, who was inspired by the Bhang or Hashish {Cannabis Indica) which succeeded the intoxicating drink of this epoch, and which is said in the Zenda- vesta to have taught the divine law to Plvdgvi or Shu-gvi, the coming-bird {Shu), the wife of Zarathustra, and to his priests, who wore the Chista or ephod 3. These Nuraghs were built by the Turano-Semites from the East, who settled in Sardinia, under the lead of Sardis, called on Sardinian coins Sard Pater. His name, which was also that of the capital of Lydia, the home of the Tursena, is said by Xanthus to mean “ a year,” and it is allied to the Sanskrit Sharad, the autumnal equinox, the Armenian Sard, the Persian Sal, a year 4.
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 121, 223, v. 136, 137.
2   Judges, vi. 25—32, viii. 1—29.
3   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 15, 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 267, 26S.
4   Rawlinson, Herodotus, vol. i. p. 150, note 7.
       263
This year-god of the autumnal equinox was the son of Makaris, Baal Makar, the god of the lunar sickle, the Phoenician Melkarth, or Herakles, and he was the Herakles Sandan of the unsexed male and female priestsJ. He was assisted by Iolaus, the Phoenician Baal Iol, the charioteer of Herakles, who was the first of the five Dactyls or finger-gods, the first victors of the Olympian games of Elis, who, with Iasius, Kastor, Poludeukes and Herakles, won all the contests at the first festival : Iolaus winning the chariot-race as the leader of the year; Iasius the horse-race ; Kastor the foot-race; Poludeukes the boxing match ; and Herakles, the cycle-sun-god, the wrestling and pancratium. They were originally the five Idaean Dactyls of the early five-days week who guarded the infant Zeus Itanos, the son of Rhea, at Ida in Crete. They are called by Pausanias Herakles, Paeonaeus (the healer Paion), Epimedcs, Iasius, and Idas 1 2.
These ancient builders who measured their year by the cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and led this emigration from East to West, were those who set their cities on a hill, and made the Akropolis on its summit the centre of the city, as in the cities of Orchomenos, Tiryns, Mycenae and Athens. This Phoenician Greek type is that which was transferred by these emigrants to Etruria, where Fiesole (Fcesulce), Arezzo (Arretium), Cortona, Chiusi (Clusium), Volterra and Perugia all stand on hills, and are surrounded by walls of Cyclopean architecture. Each of these also marks its independent origin as the ruler of the province of which it is the centre by the ceremony of lighting the year’s fires at the national city feast held on their New Year’s Day. This is at Volterra, as I learnt by inquiry in the town, the 20th of September, or the day of the autumnal equinox. In most of these cities the rocks
1   Fraser, Pausanias, x. 17, 1—4, vol. i. p. 523, v. pp. 320, 322; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. pp. 417—421.
2   Ibid., v. 7, 4, S, 1, x. 17, 4, vol. i. pp. 245, 247, 523, vol. v. p. 323; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 435.
264
   
forming the hills on which they are built supplied materials for the walls, but the hill of Perugia, rising 1,700 feet above the sea, is a gravel deposit from the neighbouring Tiber, and the stones for its walls, some of which are of enormous size, must have been brought from quarries at a distance and carried up the hill.
These immigrants also introduced into Etruria the chambered tombs which reproduce those of Bahrein on the Persian Gulf, called the Mounds of Ali, where one of these mound- tombs, thirty-five feet high, seventy-six feet in diameter, and one hundred and fifty-two paces in circumference, was opened by Mr. BentL It contained in one chamber the bones of a horse, and in that below it unburnt human bones. The builders of these tombs took the pattern to Asia Minor, where it appears in the tomb of Midas and those adjoining it, one of which is an exact representation of a Phrygian peasant’s cottage. There are similar tombs also at Dorylaum in Phrygia, on the Sangarius, and others pierced in the rocks of the Taurus range in Cilicia1 2. It is with tombs like these that the hills on which Chiusi stands and those in its immediate neighbourhood are honeycombed, the tombs in one hill, the Poggio Gajella, rising in successive stories from the bottom to the top. One of the most remarkable of the tombs at Chiusi is that called the Deposito della Scimia, or the tomb of the Ape. It is a collection of chambers hollowed in the tufa of which the hill is made, and closed by a tufa door. Each chamber is provided with three stone beds, each with its stone pillow, on which the dead were laid in their last sleep, the burial taking place before the introduction of the custom of burning the dead in the Bronze Age. Above each of these is a picture painted in outlines of red antimony. The most interesting of these is that which gives its name to the tomb, and which represents th£ dead man taking leave of his relatives on earth and
1   Bent, Southern Arabia, chap, i. pp. 24—28.
2 Leake, Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, pp. 20 ff., 106, 107.
   
265
riding on the horse of death to the underworld. There he meets the king of the dead, behind whom is the ape-god, the god Kapi of India, the wise ape who is his inspiring genius. These same people also brought with them from the East the Dardanian Apollo, the god of Troy and of Larissa in the Troad, called by Homer the capital of the Trojan Pelasgi h These Pelasgi Dardanians were allied to the men of the same race in Thessaly, where there is another Larissa, meaning perhaps the city of the Lares or ancestral spirits. Their Apollo was, as Plato tells us in the Cratylus, the god 'Airkm1 2 3, that is the Etrurian Aplu, the Semitic Abel or Ablu the son. But this Apollo of the Troad was, according to Homer 3, Apollo Smintheus, or Apollo the mouse (cr/xivOo?), which was, according to Isaiah, eaten at their annual festivals by the ancient Semites 4 as the devouring-god of time. It is this god which we find holding a conspicuous place as a year-god in one of the most remarkable historical monuments of Etruria. This is the sacred ship found in the tomb of a warrior High-Priest of Vetulonia, whose ashes were, like those of Hector in the Iliad, enclosed in a golden urn covered with purple cloths 5. The ship is a Phoenician barque, and is evidently a religious ark, the ship in which the national gods were carried in all religious processions in South-western Asia and Egypt. Its contents tell us of the course of the evolution of religious belief in the creating year-god from a period beginning with the year of the deer- sun-god Orion.
On its prow-deck is an image of the dwarf guardian-god, the Patoikos, who is depicted as a flower like that of the lotus springing from between two snakes coiled on a substructure of four pillars, which seem to represent the four divisions of the cycle-year. At the end of the prow is the head of the deer-sun-god with horns of nine points, the nine
1   Homer, Iliad, ii. 840—843.
2   Jowett, Plata, Cratylus, vol. ii. p. 228.
3   Homer, Iliad, i. 38.   4 js. lxVi. 17.
s Homer, Iliad, xxiv. 794, 795.
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days of the cycle-week, and on the topmost point of the horns two parent-snakes are seated. This head of the year- god is bound to this representative of the star-ship Argo by ropes, the year-days, which the mouse-god is gnawing from below, while on the top of the ropes the sun-lizard, worshipped by all Dravidians as the sun-god of marriage 1 2 3, is lying. He, as we shall see presently, is the sun-god born of the Finn mother-goddess Kesari-tar, the daughter {tar) of the cauldron of life {kcsari), after three years’ pregnancy. Upon its head another mouse is sitting.
In the centre-deck of the ship are two yoked oxen with wooden balls at the end of their horns, an ass or calf, a wild sow with two young pigs, a gelt pig, a ram or ewe, and a dog, the domestic animals of the age when the pig was a sacred animal3. It represents the Argo or mother-ship, the constellation which brought the twin-gods Gemini to Argos, the land consecrated to the holy fish, and which was carried as a sacred talisman by the emigrants who went still further westward to Etruria.
From Etruria we can trace these Turano-Semite traders to Gades (Cadiz), where Heraldes, their Ar-chal, slew the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion) 3. P'rom thence they made their way by sea to Britany, where we find similar chambered tombs to those of Etruria and Asia Minor. There they have left in the megalithic, flat-sided stones, near Carnac, a series of stone calendars giving a history of their successive measurements of annual time.
There are three of these stone calendars close to Carnac. One at Kermario, in which the stones are ranged in ten rows, while in that at Menec there are eleven, and at Kerlescan thirteen rows of stones. That these may be justly called calendars has been proved by M. Gaillard of Plouharnel,
1 Beauchamp, Dubois’ Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, vol. i. part ii. p. 218.
2   Milani, Aluseo Topografico Dell Etruria Vetulonia, pp. 28—.33.
3   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 437.
   
267
who has observed and studied them for forty years. He found that all the stone-lines run from South-west to Northeast, and that the narrow ends of the stones point in this direction. At the South-west end of each series there. is an oval enclosure fenced in by stones, in which there was one stone used as a point of observation. Corresponding with this he found in each series a second stone standing among the aligned stones, but at right angles to them. By constant observations made with scientific instruments, M. Gaillard found that these two related gnomon-stones were so placed as to mark for an observer standing at the Southwest stone in the oval the day when the rising sun sent its rays over the second stone so as to fall exactly on the line between the two stones. The days thus indicated were in the Kermario series of ten stones, the summer solstice and the equinoxes, in the eleven rows of Menec the summer solstice, and in the thirteen rows of Kerlescan the autumnal equinox *. He also found that all the other surviving ranges of stones in Britany, similar to but much more imperfect than those of Carnac, were erected on the same plan.
Also the examination of the entrance passages of the chambered dolmens used as burial-places showed that by far the greater number of these were directed towards the Southeast, where the sun rose at the winter solstice, and in a detailed summary of the directions of the entrances of the 156 dolmens in Morbihan,he states that 54 point either to the rising of the sun at the summer or winter solstice, and 98 to the rising or setting sun of the winter solstice 1 2. These dolmens are all situated under a mound raised over them, like the artificial hills of Shemiramot, to represent the mother-mountain, and the greater number belong to the Neolithic age in which
1   Gaillarcl, VAslronomie Prehistoriquc, ire Partic, Lea Alignments des Menhirs dans le Morbihan Revue Mensuelle d’Aslronomie de Meleorologic cl dcs Sciences d’Observation pour 1S97, PP- 1—39, 73-
2   Ibid., Partie II., Les Dolmens ct coffrcs de Pierre, pp. 125, 126.
268
   
the dead were buried lying on their sides, with their legs bent and their knees raised to their breasts, and their arms similarly raised *. This is exactly the position of a foetus in the womb, which the partaker of the Soma sacrifice is directed to assume at his baptism in the Brahmanas2; and it was one which would naturally suggest itself to the people of the cycle age of gestation, which was based on the year of the growing foetus of ten lunar months. This is the same position as that in which the dead are found in prehistoric tombs in Egypt, and also in those of the Neolithic age throughout Europe 3. Also in Britany some of the skeletons have been exposed to the air before burial so as to clean the flesh off the bones 4, as is the custom among the Ooraons of Chutia Nagpur s ; and both animals and human beings were sacrificed at the funerals.
All these facts prove that in Britany in the Neolithic age of the dolmens with internal chambers under hills or artificial mounds, these tombs were placed with reference to the rising or setting of the sun at the solstices, and that in Morbihan, of which Carnac is the religious capital, the greater number of the dolmens are oriented to the position of the rising or setting sun at the winter solstice, and a large number to the South-west setting points of the same sun, which marked the beginning of the earliest Indian year measured by the solstices.
The stone calendars must have been arranged on similar principles, and they all have their observatories situated at the South-west, the home of the mother-bird of the years of the Pleiades and Orion, which began with the setting of the sun in the South-west. It is also clear that the 1 2 3 4 5
1   Gaillard, HAstronomie Prehistorique, Partie ii. p. 112.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdk., iii. 2, 1, 5—16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 26—29 J Max Muller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, pp. 395—398.
3   Petrie, History of Egypt, vol. i., Addenda, p. xix. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 148.
4   Gaillard, VAstronomie Prehistorique, Partie ii. p. no.
5   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 236.
   
269
arrangements of the stone avenues must, like the orientation of the dolmens, and the positions of the index-stones and observatories attached to them, have some connection with the reckoning of the year. We find in the Hindu ritual of the Soma sacrifice that eleven sacrificial stakes were placed outside the East side of the consecrated Soma ground, to which were tied the eleven victims offered to the gods of the eleven months of the year, which forms the subject of Chapter VIT. It is therefore probable that the rows of stones of Britany, which mark in other particulars their descent from Indian year reckonings, denote, like the Hindu sacrificial stakes, years of ten, eleven and thirteen months.
This probability is raised almost to a certainty by the Linga stone altar In the collection of M. du Chatellier at Kernuz, near Pont L’Abbe, Finist£re. Its form follows the rules laid down in the Hindu religious books for the making of a sacrificial Linga or stake. When I examined in M. du Chatellier’s house this stone, which is nearly three feet high, and is of Breton granite, I saw at once from the designs engraved on its top and four sides that those who made it must have learnt the theology expressed in the engravings in India.
On the top there was drawn the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solstitial sun, the sign of the flying year-bird beginning its flight at the winter solstice. On one side was a pattern of interlaced female Su-astikas ^f-», representing the annual
course of the sun, beginning its journey round the heavens by going northward at the winter solstice. On the side
N
next to this was the square of the eight-rayed star v
 
E
s
representing the union of the St. Andrew’s Cross of the 1
1   See Plan of Sacrificial Ground, Eggeling, Sat. Brah. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi.
P- 475-
270
   
Solstitial ^ with the St. George’s Cross of the Equinoctial sun +• This square with the eight-rayed star inscribed in it was that directed to be marked inside the circling stones of the Soma sacrificial ground by the plough made of the sacred fig-tree, the Udumbara ('Ficus glomerata), to which the oxen were yoked by traces made of three strands of Munja grass (Saccharum Munja), of which the Brahmin year girdles, denoting the three seasons of the year, were made. The guider of the plough in making this square was directed to begin at the South-west corner, where the sun of the winter solstice sets, and to mark from this point the two South and West sides of the square first. In drawing the transverse lines the Polar line from South to North was ploughed first, as’that round which the sun and stars revolve, that from the South-west to the North-east, marking the year of the flying sun-bird, second, the equinoctial West and East line third, and the North-west and South-east line lastI.
This sacred symbol told the history of the sun-year including that of the solstitial and equinoctial three-years cycle which preceded the year of the Ikshvaku kings, sons of the sugarcane (;iksha), which is the year described in Chapter VII. Upon this square the later brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East, the successor of the sun setting in the West, was ordered to be built. This eight-rayed star of the solstitial and equinoctial year was called by the earliest Akkadians of Girsu Dingir the Creator, and Anu or Esh-shu, meaning god, and an ear of corn 1 2. It was in Hindu mythology the symbol of the two united female and male Su-astikas, the solstitial star denoting the course of the sun going from South to North at the winter and from North to South at the summer solstice. The name embodies that of the god Astika, or rather, as he is also called in the Mahabharata,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., val. xli. pp. 326—330.
* 2 Ball, ‘ Akkadian Affinities of Chinese.’ Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, § viii., China, Central Asia, and the East, p. 685.
   
2/1
Ashtaka the eighth I. He was, according to one account, grandson of Yayati, and to another, son of the father ascetic of the Yayavara or full-moon {Yd) sect, and of his wife, the sister of Vasuki the snake-god of the summer solstice. Both his father and mother were called Jarat-karu, or makers of time (jarat), that is to say the two seasons of the year, and their son, the eight-rayed star, was the high-priest of King Janam-e-jaya, the conquerer {jayd) of birth (janavi) in the sacrifice of the fire-altar, in which all the snake-gods except Takshaka, god of the winter, and Vasuki, god of the summer solstice were destroyed2 3. It is this history and that of the Su or Khu year-bird which explains the meaning and historical importance of the name Su-ashtaka, denoting the yearly course round the eight (ashta) points of the heavens of the sun-bird.
On the third side of this conical linga altar was a pattern
of four leaves   exactly the shape of Palasha leaves,
arranged in the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross; and these leaves denote the Palasha leaves grown from the feather of the Shyena or frost {shya), which fell to earth when the year-bird of the winter solstice was wounded by the arrow of Kushanu the rain-bow-god, drawer (>karsh) of the heavenly bow 3. On the fourth side, engraved in the form of a St. George’s Cross, is the Palasha tree with its flowers and fruit, from which the leaves denoting the solstitial year fell.
Round the top of these designs there runs a scroll of female Suastikas, and at the bottom one of snakes coiled in the form of the cross-bar of the male Su-astika This stone, sculptured in Britany, was found by M. du Chatellier at the end of an avenue marked by two rows of uncut stones, and it stood with the side marked by the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixxxix.—xcii. pp. 265—272.
2 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) l’arva, xlv.—xlviii., lv.—lviii. pp. 132—140, I53—I59-
3   Rg. iv. 27, 3; Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., i. 7, 1,1; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 1 S3, note 2.
2^2
   
female Su-astika looking eastwards, about a hundred yards to the west of a dolmen under a mound, which contained calcined bones but only flint implements, and it was therefore a grave of the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age, when bodies were burnt before they were buried.
According to the rules for making a stone linga, given by Varahamihira in the Brihat-samhita, lviii. 8, the maker is ordered to choose a stone of the length he wishes, and to divide it into three parts. The top part is to be rounded like the top of a phallus, and the bottom to be square, exactly like the Breton stone, but Varahamihira says the middle part should be eight-sided I. This last is the figure made by changing the eight-rayed star in a square into a figure in which the bases of the eight triangles it forms are the sides of an eight-sided figure. It is this eight-sided figure which is that prescribed for the Yupa or sacrificial stake in the Satapatha Brahmana. As for its length, the Satapatha Brahmana says it may be five or six cubits long if the worshipper measures the year by five or six seasons, eleven cubits long if he measures the year-thunderbolt by eleven months, twelve if he measures it by twelve months, and so on through the series of recorded year measurements, showing clearly that the altar was one erected to the god ruling the year 2. It was doubtless to this god of time that the earliest stone-altar or sun-gnomon-stone was erected, and similarly the original tree Yupa, the tree-trunk, denoted the god who measured time by the changes of the plant with its three seasons of winter bareness, summer leaves and flowers, and autumn fruit. The designs engraved on this stone-altar, when interpreted by the Indian ritual from which they were derived, say as clearly as written words could do, “ This is the altar of the God of Time, who sent the sun-bird of the winter solstice to fly its annual course from South
1   Sachau, Alberunl’s India, chap, lviii. vol. ii. pp. 103, 104.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 4, 17—27; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 126, 127.
   

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to North and North to South round the Pole, and to supply the light and heat which nourish the tree-mother of life on earth, and enable it to bring forth its flowers and seed, the parents of future generations.”
The theology of which the creed is stated in the pictured writing on the Linga has in Britany examples of the still earlier phases of this belief when the altar was the sun- gnomon-stone, the solitary menhirs which abound in the country.' The whole evidence proves that the maritime people who lived in Britany in the Neolithic Age, and erected there the menhirs, dolmens and stone calendars, were descended from the Indian Dravidian races mixed in their long journey from East to West with other stocks ; that they brought with them their national creed and social institutions as expressed in the ritual and customs of the successive worshippers of menhirs, the builders of sacrificial and burial dolmens, and of the people who buried their dead in the elaborate chambered tombs of the later age of this form of burial on the Persian Gulf and Asia Minor, Etruria and Britany.
A conspicuous place among the component members of this Turano-Semitic maritime confederacy must be assigned to the two races of Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, the first of whom apparently belonged to the Gothic sons of the bull and wolf. They seem to have been the leaders of society in the palaeolithic stone age of menhirs, who looked up to the wise woman inspired by the bee and its mead as the divine prophetess, and believed in the river and tree-goddess-mother, Anahita and Rhea, as the queen of wisdom, from whom she derived her lore. These were the people living under the Amazonian rule of the queens of the Ionian races, who introduced into Greece the name yvvrj for woman, meaning the mother, the Gothic gind, the Saxon quena, our queen, which became in Sanskrit Jani. They were succeeded as ruling powers by Celts of Brythonic origin, whose language is spoken in Britany, and who changed the name of the mother, the queen, into the
T
274
   
Brythonic Pen T, and who called the Pole Star mother in India Tarl Pennu, the mother-star. They gave the name of Pen-Samlath, the mother or face of Samlath or Semele, to the daughter of Kadmus, the man of the East (kedem), who became the mother of Dionysus, and who was both the bisexual Phoenician mother Shemiramot, and the Samleh of Masrekah, the Vine-land1 2 3, of the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 35, 36. This bisexual ruler succeeded Hadad, the sun-god of the pomegranate Rimmon, who was her father, and he was the conqueror of the Mi- dianites, and was thus the counterpart of Gideon, the founder of the worship of the Ephod, the sacred woven garment worn by the priests of these trading merchant mariners.
The flow of this stream of Eastern immigration to the trading regions of the West can be traced still further in the Celtic mythology of Wales and Ireland, and especially in that of the latter country. A blurred outline of the history of the successive arrivals of the differing races of eastern invaders is to be found in the story of the never dying father-god of Erin Tuan, the son of Starn, the Pole Star, told by him to Finnen (the Finn) of Maige Bile, the plains of the hill of the holy-tree (bile) 3.- First he came to Ireland with Panthalon, evidently a name substituted for the original title of the divine leader by a later editor of the history. He was the son of Sera, who may be the Wesh Ser, a star, and was accompanied by four and twenty couples, probably the four and twenty lunar phases of the earlier lunar year of Orion. Tuan was the only survivor of this first immigration, which may represent the first matriarchal races who came with Hu, the Mighty, from Deffrobani, Ceylon, and introduced the worship of Bran, the raven. Secondly, he became the stag-god, that is, the
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. i. pp. 2, 7.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 54, note 2.
3 Meyer and Nutt, Voyage of Bran, vol. ii., Appendix A, pp. 285 ff.
   
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deer-sun Orion, of the sons of Nemed, the grove (nemeton)I, the Basque races of Asia Minor, born from the union of the Indian sons of the village grove with the Northern hunting-races. Thirdly, when these sons of Nemed died he became the wild boar sun-god, the boar of the age of the six-days week, whose slaughter was the first of the exploits of Krishna, the antelope sun-god, and of Arjuna, the Pandava god of the summer solstice. This was the boar who slew Adonis, the sun-god, born of the cypress-tree, and who in Celtic mythic history was killed on the last day of the year by Diarmait, the ruling year-god, husband of Grainne, the goddess of light, the female form of the Gaelic sun-god Grannos 2 3 4 *, and therefore the equivalent of Suria, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was brought in the car of the Ashvins, made of Palasha and Shilmali cotton-tree wood, to wed Soma, the moon-god 3. Diarmait, like the Semitic'Ram, was the son of one of two twins, whose mother was Duben. Their father was her brother Cairbre Muse, called the cat-headed Cairbre. Core, meaning the cropped, the father of Diarmait, got his name from his cropped ears, which were bitten off before his birth by Cormac his brothers This incident bears a close resemblance to the attempted supersession of Perez, ancestor of Ram, the sun-god, by his twin brother Zerah, before they were born as the children of the incestuous union of Tamar, the palm-tree, with her father-in-law Judah 5.
The ruling men of this age of the boar-sun-god are called in Tuan’s story the Gailioin, or men of the spear Gai, who were noted magicians 6, the Fir Domnann, or sons of the goddess of the deep, Domnu, the Syrian goddess Derketo, and the Fir Bolg, the men of the Bag or womb, born after
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. i. pp. 100—102.
2   Ibid., Lect. i. p. 22, Lect. v. pp. 506—511.
3   Rg. x. 85, 9—20.
4   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 18S6, Lect. iv. pp. 308, 309, 313.
s Gen. xxxviii. 27—30.
6 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 598—600.
T 2
276
   
ten lunar months of gestation 1. These last claimed as their father Semion, the son of Stariath, the great sorceror Simon Drui, who made the revolving wheel of Fal, or of the paddles which enabled him to fly through the air. He is the II Vecchio Simeone Santo, the king of Wizards, of Italian popular mythology, who must be invoked by a Novena prayer to the wise gods, the nine-days week of the cycle- year 2 3 4. He, as the turner of the heavenly time-wheel, was the counterpart of Ixion or Akshivan, the driver of that wheel, who was bound to it, and by its revolutions made the earth turn round ; and both the Greek Ixion, twin brother of Koronis, and the Irish wheel-magician Simon were the male forms of the bisexual goddess of this cycle-epoch, Semi or Shemiramot3. Therefore these Fir Bolg, the bag-born sons of the wheel-god or goddess, were the men of the epoch of this cycle-year of three years, with its recurring periods of ten lunar months of gestation. Thjese Fir Bolg are described by McFirbis, in his “ Book of Genealogies,” as having dark hair and eyes, slender limbs like those of the Hindu races, and short stature ; and Skene classes them with the Basque Silures4,the Aquitanian sons of the goat, the mixed race formed by the union of the short Finns with the Indian Dravidian farmers and the northern hunters. They are said by McFirbis to have lived in under-ground houses burrowed under mounds, like the neolithic long- barrow tombs 4. During the fourth avatar of Tuan he was the sun-hawk of the Tuatha De Danann, the sons of the goddess Danu and of the sons of Beothach, son of the prophet Iarbonel, that is to say he was the sun-hawk Adrika of the Mahabharata, the mother of the holy eels, the fish- parents of the sons of the rivers, the hawk-goddess Freya of the Edda, Hathor the hawk Pole Star mother of the hawk-headed Horus, the sun-god of the Egyptian H01-
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 596—598.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 243—247.
3   Rhys, Hibbert lectures for 1SS6, Lect. vi. pp. 210—214.
4   Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, p. 78.
   
277
shesu and Zarathustra in his form of Karshipta, the hawk who knew the language of birds and divined by bird augury. They are described by McFirbis as tall, with golden or red hair, fair skin, blue or grey eyes ; and as the builders of houses they lived in huts or pit dwellings L The battle in which these sons of the goddess Danu and the bird- prophet overcame the Fir Bolg, called also Fo-mori or the men beneath (fo) the sea (muif), the men of the South and the Fir Domnann, is said to have been fought on the last day of October, that is at the end of the Pleiades year, and in it the Tuatha De Danann were led by Nuada of the Silver-hand, the god of the lunar-crescent measuring the cycle-year, who was slain in the battle by Balor, leader of the Fir Bolg, and succeeded by Bres, meaning war1 2 3, who was the son of Brigit, the goddess Brihati of Chapter II. p. 71, and whose father Elatha came out of the sea and left a ring, the year-ring, with her at his departures. So that the birth of Bres was similar to that of the Indian Bharatha, the son of Sakuntala, who was, as we shall see presently, the sun-god born of the three-years cycle. Also this victory of the sun-hawk-god of the Tuatha De Danann introduced, as we shall see, the age of the sun-god Lug.
In his fifth avatar Tuan became the sun-fish, the river- salmon who made the Queen of Erin pregnant, the god of the Milesian sons of Mile or Bile, who conquered the Tuatha De Danann, and who were the Brythonic Basques from Spain. They defeated at Tailltin in Meath, on the Boyne, these sons of Danu, called the men of the fairy mounds, the mound-builders of the Neolithic Age, who “ had always three trees bearing fruit, one pig always alive and one ready to be cooked, and a vessel always full of excellent ale.” Mile or Bile, the parent of these conquering Brythons, was, according to Professor Windisch, “ a tree growing over a holy
1 Isaac Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 78.
a Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 5S6, 5S7.
3   Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 275, Lect. iv. p. 478, note 3.
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well or in a fort,” or, in other words, the mother-tree of the sons of the river-pool or the mountain-fort1. The sun-fish-god of these sons of the mother-tree and holy well was “the two undying fish which swim in Bowscale Tarn” of Cumberland mythology, the Akkadian fish-god Salli- mannu, the Hebrew Solomon, son of Bath-sheba of the seven measures, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Makara or river-porpoise, the form assumed by Pra-dyumna, the especially {pro) bright (dyumna) god, son of Krishna, the year-antelope, the Irish sun-god Lug, born, as we shall see, in the three-years tower, and saved from the sea2 3 4 5, the Greek sun-god Perseus, who was an Assyrian god, according to Herodotus vi. 53, whose name means a fish3, and who was drawn from the sea in a chest by a fisherman named Dictys, a net.
I. Story of the tower of the three-years cycle.
It is the story of the birth of this sun-fish-god from the tower of the three-years cycle, as told in popular mythology, that I have now to tell to complete the history of this epoch. Its earliest form is that of the Finn story which tells of the three years’ pregnancy of Kasari-tar, the daughter of the kettle (kasari) 4. This was the Celtic Southern cauldron of regeneration of the god Dagda, the year-god^father of Brigit, the Sanskrit Daksha, represented as a ram, the ram-sun of this epoch, and called Mendh Ishwara, the ram-god of boundaries (menr), the Gond god Goraya, who was the father of the twenty-seven Nakshatra, the twenty-seven wives of Chandra the moon-god, the twenty-seven days of the month of the cycle-year 5. He was the Greek god Hermes of the pillar
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. p. 588, Lect. i. pp. 90, 91, Lect. ii. pp. 147—149, Additions and Corrections, p. 67S.
2   Ibid., Lect. iv. p. 316.
3   Ailian, N. A., 3, 28.
4   Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, Part ii. ; Folklore, vol. i. p. 331.
5   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, s.v., Menr, a boundary, p. 249; Ma- habharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixvi. p. 189.
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(epfxa), the Hermes Kriophoros who bore the ram-sun on his shoulders. This cauldron was the treasure of the Tuatha De Danann and it was made pregnant by the heated froth of the boiling sea of the South, churned by the revolving pole. At the end of the three-years period she gave birth to the sun-lizard, who comes forth to greet the sun in spring, and who was thus the symbol of the sun to the worshippers of the gnomon menhir with its recording shadows. It is called by the Finns “ the eye of Hiisi,” the wooded mother-mountain. The race who adopted this story of the birth of the Southern sun of winter from the cauldron of regeneration of the South were the sons of the volcanic Mount Ararat, raised from the waves of the Caspian and Black Sea by the churning pole of the trident god of the year of three seasons to be the original home of the Kushite sons of Kur, the Kurds of Kurdistan, the Kauravya of India, born of the Kur or Araxes river, the Daitya or second mother-river of the Zendavesta.
This story becomes in India that which tells of the birth of Bharata, who was, as we have seen, one of the triad gods Rama, Lakshman (the boundary laksJi), and Bharata, who were sons of the sun-god Raghu, called Dasaratha, or the god of the ten chariots (ratha), or months of gestation. Bharata, who was the ruling god during the exile of Rama, son of Kushaloya the Kushite mother, was the son of Kai-kaia the Gond mountain (koi) mother. But in the form of the story which describes Bharata as the parent god whence the Kauravyas and Pandavas were descended, he was the son of Sakuntaia the bird (Shakuna) mother, the crow who was born of Menaka the white-robed moon, the measuring (men) goddess, the first of the six Apsaras, or dwellers in the watery (ap) abyss, the six days of the week 2. Her father was Visvamitra, the friend (:mitra) of the village races (vishva)y the prophet-god of the Bharatas, who raised Tri-sankhya, the 1
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii. pp. 256, 257. s Maha bharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxii., lxxiv. pp. 213, 223.
28O
   
Ikshvaku king of the three (tri) numbers (sankha), to heaven as the triangle of the three weaving sisters, the three stars in the constellation of the Vulture now called Lyra, which are looked upon by the Chinese as the measurers of time. One of them is Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C.1.
Menaka was brought to Vishvamitra by Maroti the tree- ape-god, and she gave birth to her daughter Sakuntala on the banks of the Malini, the mother-river of the Malli, the mountain races of North-east India. Dushmanta, he of the hard mush) sayings (manta), King of Ayodhya, in the age of the cycle-year met Sakuntala in the forest dwelling of Kanva, the bard of the new (kana) age of the lunar solar reckoning of time, whose disciples are the reputed authors of the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda, and she, after three years’ pregnancy2 3 4, bore him a son called Bharata., Dushmanta had left on his departure from Kanva’s asylum a ring with Sakuntala, to ensure her future identification as the mother of his son, but she lost her ring in the river, and she and her son were disowned by Dushmanta, when she took him to his father. But when the ring was found in a fish brought by a fisherman to the King, Bharata was acknowledged as the royal heir 3,
Bharata is the father-god of the begetting (bhri) races, who looked on the father as the true parent and the son as the reproduction of the father born from the mother sheath 4. His children became the ruling race of Bhars, who as the wheat-growing building races succeeded the first milletgrowing Gond Kushikas. It was they who were the traditional rulers of all India, who built the city of Pampapura, of which the ruins remain in the Mirzapur district. Their totemistic descent is from (1) the Bans-rishi, the bamboo of the antelope (;rishya) race, that of Vasu the rain-god of the
1   Legge, The Shik King Decade, V., Ode 9; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363,
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxiv. p. 223.
3   Ibid., lxxi.— lxxiv. pp. 211—228; Kalidasa, Sakuntala, Act vii.
4   Ibid., lxxiv. p. 226.
   
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summer solstice ; (2) the Bel or ^gle Marmelos, the tree, as we shall see, sacred to the sun Physician ; (3) the tortoise ; and (4) the Mayura or peacock. This is the form which, as we are told in the Jatakas, was that assumed by the sun-god in the heaven of the thirty-three archangels, the rulers of the year described in Chapter VI., with its eleven months of thirty-three days each *. This golden peacock is the Indian bird into which Argus, the hundred-eyed .South Pole god Argo, was transformed by Here when Hermes slew him with the Harpe or lunar crescent, thus introducing the cycle-year of the god of the gnomon-pillar (ep/ia) ruled by the lunar crescent. This transformation, accompanied by the introduction of the Indian peacock into Greek mythology, marked, like the introduction of the worship of the Indian sun-cock and hen, a fresh migration of Indians into Greece. In India the sons of the peacock were the race ruled by the dynasty of the Maurya or peacock kings, among whom the great Asoka was the celebrated ruler in days long after the remote period with which I am now dealing. He marked his traditional descent from the ruling races of the cycle-age of the ass-drawn Ashvins by adopting the ass as his cognizance. For it is this ancestral ass which he placed as a representation of his sign-manual on the top of the pillar he erected about 240 B.C. on the traditional site of the Buddha’s birth in the Lumbini village grove. The ass has disappeared, but its presence is recorded in the inscription on the base of the pillar describing it as Vi-gada- bhi with the ass (,gada) on it3.
It was from these ruling Bhars that India took its ancient vernacular name of Bharatavarsha, the land of the Bharatas, and that its traditional historical poem was called the Maha*- bharata or History of the Great Bharatas.
These children of the cycle-year of the birth of Bharata were the race who disseminated the story of the birth of the 1 2
1   Rouse, The Jalaka, vol. ii. No. 159, p. 25.
2   V. A. Smith, ‘The Birth Place of Gautama Buddha.’ J.R.A.S.., 1897, pp. 618, 619.
282
   
sun-god born from the river-eel in the tower of the three- years cycle in the Garden of God. This came from India to Greece by way of Assyria in the story of the birth of Perseus, the fish, from Danae, the Pole Star goddess, the female form of the god Danu, who was shut up in a brazen tower by her father Akrisius, the god of the mountain-top (iaicpov), and made pregnant by Zeus in the form of the golden #rain. This is reproduced in the Celtic story of Ethnea and her son Lug. Ethnea was the daughter of Balor, the giant-leader of the Fir Bolg, or men of the Bag, who measured time by the cycle-year. He had two eyes, one before and one behind his head, the morning and evening star, and represented the sun-gnomon-stone, the Celtic form of Kastor, the Pole (stor) of Ka. Balor’s Druid, the bird augur or djvining-priest, told him his grandson would slay him. To make the birth of a grandson impossible he, like Akrisius, shut up his only child, his daughter Ethnea, in an almost inaccessible tower, called Tor More, at the eastern end of Tory Island, the island of the Tur, and set twelve matrons, the year-months, to guard her. Balor made himself ruler of the year by stealing the year-cow of Mackinealy, meaning the son of the Wolfs head, that is of the wolf of light, the sun-god of day. Mackinealy’s Druid told him that the cow could not be recovered till Balor was killed by his grandson. Mackinealy was then conveyed to the tower of Ethnea by the fairy Biroge of the mountain as a woman hunted by a cruel tyrant, or in other words, entered it as the rain-cloud hunted by the storm, the golden-rain of the Perseus story. He made Ethnea the mother of three boys, the three years of the cycle. Balor put them in a boat, as Akrisius treated Perseus and Danae, and launched them on the sea to be drowned in a whirlpool, the revolving-cycle. In this two of the sons were drowned, but before the boat reached it the eldest of the three fell out of it and was saved by its fairy godmother, who took it to Mackinealy, who gave it to his brother Gavida, the smith, to nurse. Balor, thinking that all his grandchildren were dead, caught Mackinealy and cut
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off his head on a large white stone, the sacred stone-altar of the Scandinavians L
The sun-god thus saved was the god Lug, the god of light (lux-lucis), whose name is connected with that of Loki, the fire-god of the Edda, and with that of the Lycian Apollo, the wolf (\VKOS) of light born of the wolf-mother on the yellow river Xanthus in Lycia, the sun-god of Western Europe and father-god of the Guelph or wolf race, one of whose chief shrines is Lug-dunum, Lyons, the fort {dun] of Lug2.
In another story of his birth we find the three-years period of the cycle more distinctly shown than in that of Ethnea or Danae. In this he is the son of Dech-tere or Daeg-ter, the day-goddess, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was driven in the chariot of the Ashvins, and who drove that of Conchobar, the year-god, as his charioteer. She at the head of fifty maidens disappeared from Emain, the capital of Conchobar, and returned every year for three years as wild birds who destroyed the crops. Conchobar and some of his nobles set out Southwards towards the end of the three years to find the birds, and came to a place where he was entertained by an old man and woman living in a cottage, Orion and the Pleiades mother. Bricriu, the Ulster genius of mischief, who was with Conchobar, going put at night saw a magnificent mansion which had been invisible by day, the night sky lit up by stars. He was met at the door of the palace of the stars Gemini by Dech-tere, who sent a purple mantle, the clouds of sunset, to Conchobar, and came to his bed, where she was delivered of the young sun-god Lug. For the original form of this god Lug, born from the three-years tower, we must turn to his Welsh counterpart Llew, the son of Arianrhod, the moon-goddess of the Silver Wheel, and Gwydion, the parallels of Dech-tere *
* Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 314—318.
2 Ibid., Lect. v. p. 496, note 1, 497, 501, 502; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 213; Muller, Die Dorter, Book ii., chap, ii., § 2, p. 21S, Book ii., chap, vi., § S, pp. 305, 306.
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and Conchobar. Llew was disowned by his mother Arian- rhod, who after having by various means retarded his recognition as the young sun-god, declared that no living woman should marry him. A wife Blodeued, meaning the flower, was made for him from flowers, the Greek goddess Kordnis in her form of the flower-mother, but she was unfaithful to Llew, and attempted to murder him by the aid of her paramour. But the arrow with which he was hit, the year-arrow shot by Krishanu at the Pole Star mother-bird, only changed him into an eagle, which flew into Gwydion’s lap, and he brought him back to his former shape. Llew then slew the murdering archer with his sun- spear, and Blodeued was changed into the owl-mother-bird of this epoch. It is as a variant form of this avatar of the sun-eagle that Llew is represented as having been changed in the same place where he became the sun-eagle into the Aurwrychyn, or the beast “with the golden bristles,” that is to say, he became the Ram with the Golden Fleece, the ram-sun-god of the cycle-year L There are two accounts of the death of Balor slain by Lug: one that Lug slew him at the close of the battle in which he led the Tuatha De Danann, after Balor had killed their king Nuada with the Silver Hand ; and in this battle the Fir Bolg led by Balor, and the Fir Domnann under Indech, were the opponents of the Tuatha De Danann. In the other accounts Lue killed Balor in the forge of his guardian uncle, Gavida the smith 2.
This sun-god Lug or Llew, born as the sun-god of the cycle-year of the Hittites who wore the peculiar Hittite shoes, was also an excellent shoemaker, for it was by making leather shoes for his mother Arianrhod, the moon-goddess, that he first secured her recognition 3. He was also the patron-god of the Lugoves or shoemakers, mentioned in a *
* Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii, pp. 239—241, v. pp. 404, 405, 423, 434-
2   Ibid., Lect. vi. p. 587, v. pp. 396—398, iv. pp. 316, 317.
3   Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 237.
   
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Latin inscription found in the Celtic Uxama, the modern Osma, a town in Spain. He and his father Gwydion were two of the three golden shoemakers, the makers of the shoes of the sun of the three-years cycle*. This mythic occupation of the sun-god marks him as the god of the Hittite race, who became in India the Chamar workers in leather, whose tribal history, as we have seen, dates back to this cycle epoch.
Another variant form of this age of the three years’ imprisonment of the virgin sun-mother is that given in the historical story of Kamar-al-Zaman, the moon of the age, the son of the king of the Islands of the West, the Canary Islands, the crescent-moon-god of the races who began their day and year with the setting sun, and Budur, the full-moon daughter of the Eastern emperor of China. Her father built for her seven palaces, in which she dwelt till he, on her refusal to marry, imprisoned her in a separate building, where, like Ethnea, she was guarded by ten matrons, the ten months of the year of gestation. Kamar-al-Zaman, who also, like Budur, refused to marry the mate chosen for him by his father, was imprisoned for fifteen days, the length of a phase of the crescent-moon, on the same day as Budur. They were brought together in Kamar-al-Zaman’s prison by two Ifrits, spirits of the dust {afar), male and female, the gods of day and night, who carried Budur thither. The night of their meeting was Friday, called in Arabic Juma, the day of meeting, or of the twins, the day sacred to the Northern mother- goddess Friga, the mother of seed (frio), followed by that of Saturday, the day of the seed {satur) father-god. The story says that this night was the first of Zu’l-kadah or Dhu’l-kadah, the month of the bird Zu or Dhu, and it is stated to have been a time of hard frosty weather. I have, in Chapter II. p. 54, shown reason to believe that this month at one time coincided with that of the first month of the Pleiades year, October — November, which would 1
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. pp. 424, 425, 541.

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not answer this’description. But from the story of Kamar- al-Zaman, which states that the first of Zu’l-kadah was a great state festival, apparently that of the marriage of the sun-god, which Kamar-al-Zaman refused to celebrate *, it would seem that in the age before the cycle-year the month beginning the life of the year-bird was transferred from its original place at the beginning of the Pleiades year to the winter solstice, when the national year-festival beginning Orion’s year was held as a festival, which was continued during the cycle-year. This was also one of the dates beginning the Jewish year, before they finally adopted the year beginning with the autumnal equinox. It is still kept as the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, held at the winter solstice, the temple being the star-clad vault of heaven of Orion’s year, the temple of the Hindu god Varuna. It was on the new year’s day of the new cycle age when the sun-god to be born at the autumnal equinox was to be begotten by the sexless parent-gods of this epoch, that the moon-gods who were to rule the new era were brought into the prison of the Garden of God, where they exchanged the ring of marriage of the ten-months year of gestation, but as each was asleep when the other took the ring they had no conversation together. In the morning Budur was taken back to her prison in China, and remained there for three years, till Kamar-al-Zaman was brought to her by her foster-brother Marzawan, the warden of the marches or boundaries, the boundary-star-god of heaven, the counterpart of Lakshman in the story of Rama. He, at Budur’s request, went by sea to the Canary Islands to seek Kamar-al-Zaman, but he brought him back to China by land, thus completing the course assigned for the Southern star-ship Argo in the original legend of its voyage, commented on by Hecataeus. This makes the Argo sail from Aia in the East of the Black Sea, and to come down, how
1 Burton, Arabian Nights, Tale of Kamar-al-Zaman, vol. iii. pp. 17—30, 36, 43» 47—51
   
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it is not said, to the Indian Ocean, whereas the Argo of this story, steered by Marzawan, the star Canopus, starts from a port in China, in the Pacific, which was originally in the Indian version one in Ceylon, the island of Agas- tya Canopus. From this Indian Ocean the Greek Argo went to the lake Tritonis, in West Africa, in the South-west, where Athene, the tree-mother-goddess, was born. There it rested for twelve days, showing that the story was one describing the course of the year of the Phoenician Archal, and the three Indian Ribhus, as described in Chapter III. pp. 101, 102. This lake Tritonis was, in the story of Marza- wan’s voyage, the Canary Islands, where he was shipwrecked and taken up, like Agastya, who drank up the tides “with his belly full of water.” After his twelve days’ rest at the court of Kamar - al - Zaman’s father, the two escaped by land to China, where Budur broke the chain, which had confined her for three years, and married Kamar-al- Zaman under the condition that she, as the circling moon- goddess, was to return once a year to her father.
J.   The Indian and European land tenures of this age.
It is apparently to this age that we must refer the origin of the peculiar system of land tenure still existing in the Ooraon Lohardugga district, the especial property of the Chutia Nagpur Raja, held by him as lord paramount of the group of ancient kingdoms included in the area of the Chutia Nagpur Commissionership. During the growth of the Kushika rule, the civilised world surrounding the Indian Ocean was divided, as we have seen, into allied groups of provinces, formed from the union of the villages within the area of each province. It was the Kushikas or Haihayas who united the provincial confederacies into larger unions, ruled by the king of the central group of the union. The States formed on this system do not seem to have possessed any standing army, except the internal police, the still surviving village Chokidars or watchmen, and the men
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of the villages in the frontier provinces, who were bound by their tenures to defend the country against any invading enemy. But when the Pre-Celtic races, who painted their tribal marks on their foreheads, and whose food was the parched barley of the North, overcame the Haiheyas, a more distinctly military rule was introduced, and the government was divided between the king, who was law-giver, judge and high-priest, and his principal subordinate, the Sena-pati or lord of the army {send), the Commander-in-chief, to whom the largest and most important of the frontier provinces was assigned. This in the Chutia Nagpur confederacy was Ram-gurh, now called Hazaribagh. It was under this semimilitary constitution that the peculiar Ooraon land tenures, which bear so strong a resemblance to those of the Cymri in Wales, grew up.
Among the Ooraons, as among the Goidelic Welsh, society was divided into four classes, (i) The royal class, including the families of the central king and his subordinate hereditary rulers of provinces. These had, as we shall see, special land rights, and the younger members of their families were entitled to grants of land for their maintenance. (2) The class called among the Ooraons Bhun- hiars, the Celtic Uchelwyr, from whose families, among the Ooraons, were chosen the holders of the offices of the Munda or head-man, the Pahan or priest, and the Mahto or steward of the villages, in which they held ancestral rights. (3) The class of tenants who were members of the village community ruled by the three hereditary officials, who were the Vaishya of the later Hindu organisation, and resembled in their hereditary rights to the village lands the Celtic bonedegion. (4) The hereditary village servants, who developed under Kushika rule into the classes of artisans and tradesmen, and who were under Cymri rule, the taeogion or edition, the un-free persons*.
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. Ancient Laws and Customs, p. 191,
   
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The king in each village of the central royal province of Chutia Nagpur, and the provincial governor in each of those on the frontier into which the Ooraon property law was introduced, was entitled to a large share of the land which was cultivated for him by the tenants who were not Bhunhiars, under the superintendence of the Mahto, and in payment for this service a special area of land called Beth-kheta is assigned to them as common property. This royal land is called Manjhus, and the crops gathered from it were stored in the granaries distributed over the province to supply food for the maintenance of the king and his followers during the constant progresses through their dominions, which they, as well as the Cymric kings, were obliged by custom to make. This royal land in the Cymric system was the king’s Maerdref, under the superintendence of the land Maer, the Ooraon Munda. This consisted not of land in every village but of two trefyd or areas, each of 256 erwan or acres, that is of 512 erwan in every cymwd or province, the Hindu Parha. This was cultivated by the eitttion or taeoghs, the non-Cymric holders of the land, in each village, called Tyr Cyfrif or registered land, which was all held in common, and partitioned for cultivation among all the males of the village above the age of fourteenx. The register of this land was kept by the Canghellor or Chancellor, the Ooraon Mahto, who has become the Pat- wari or village accountant of Northern India, and the Kul- karni of Bombay and the Dekhan. These alien cultivators, who had occupied the country before the Celts, held in Wales the position assigned among the Ooraons to the tenant members of the village community who were not Bhunhiars, and both among the Celts and Ooraons they were required, as a service-rent for their land, to repair the king’s houses, to erect temporary dwellings for him and for his retinue when they visited the cymwd during the 1
1 Seebohm, The Tribal Systesn in Wales, p. 18; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 218—220, chap. ix. p. 400.
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royal progresses. Among the Cymri the rule was that the king’s sojourn in each cymwd was to be limited to nine days, the nine-days week of this cycle-year ; and during this time he was fed by the Uchelwyr, an obligation which does not entirely fall upon the Ooraon Bhunhiars, as they have only to supply firewood and such articles of consumption as were not furnished by the royal granaries I.
Under the land system set forth in the Welsh Codes, the old village organisation which forms the basis of the Ooraon land- laws appears to have been replaced by one in which the cymwd or province was the unit instead of the village. Within the cymwd was the king’s demesne and his waste land, and in it the Maer and Canghellor had the land attached to their offices, while the remaining area was divided into villages, some of which were occupied by the Uchelwyr, or free-tribes- men holding Tir-gwelyawg or family land, and others by the alien edition or teaoghs holding lands in common tenancy. Thus the Cymric cymwd with its king’s land, the lands of the Maer and Canghellor, the villages of the free-tribesmen and those of the alien tenants, was an exact enlargement of the Ooraon village with the king’s Manjhus land, the lands of the Bhunhiar families filling the offices of Munda, Pahan, and Mahto, with those of the tenant members of the community. But this Ooraon organisation, which included glebe land for the priest in every village, was also recognised in some of the Cymric villages where the priest occupied a position intermediate between that of a village servant and a free tenant. In the former capacity he had a contribution from each plough of land in the district in which he was an authorised teacher, like the Hindu Prashastri or teaching-priest and the Ooraon Ojha, and as a free tenant the land attached to his office in his village 1 2. That this glebe land was, in the Celtic villages where the pre-Cymric
1   Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, pp. 157, 15S ; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 220, note 2, 224.
2   Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, p. 67.
   
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organisation of the Piets was preserved, mixed with the land of the other tenants, like those of the Ooraon Pahan, is proved by the map of Iiitchin in Hertfordshire, in Mr. Seebohm’s “ English Village Community,” where the plots of glebe land are scattered over the cultivated area just as they were allotted under the original system of periodical redistributions of the land which was formerly customary throughout England, and survives in the yearly allotments of common grazing lands existing in many villages. In India, where the tenant’s rights, under the customs of Chutia Nagpur and Chut- tisgurh, did not entitle him to the continued holding of the same fields from year to year, he obtained at the village distributions a certain defined area of each kind of soil cultivated in the village, proportionate to the number of his plough cattle. Thus the owner of four plough-oxen got twice the area given to the tenant with only two. The whole system was based on the accurate discrimination of the different kinds of land in the village, and the measurements of the areas of each class of land. This has been from time immemorial most carefully determined in India. But the oldest measurements there are not made, as among the Cymri, by linear measurements of areas'divided into plough- strips, but by an estimate of the quantity of seed that would be sown in each plot. The whole cultivated area is measured by the number of maunds (2 lbs.) that would be required to sow it, a different area being calculated for the rice lands and for those sown with dry crops; and the results thus obtained, as I have frequently found by comparing the seed areas with those given by linear measurements, are surprisingly accurate. The existence of a similarly exact calculation of land areas among the Cymri is proved by the measurement of the cymwd, as defined in the Venedotian Code. The unit was the erw or acre of about 4,320 square yards, somewhat less than the acre of 4,840 square yards, and this was probably originally measured by the seed sown in it. There were four erwan in every tydyn {homestead). Four tydenan or 16 erwan in every Rhandir {land-
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share). Four Rhandiroed or 64 erwan in every Gafael {holding). Four Gafaelion or 256 erwan in every tref (itown-ship). Four trefyd or 1,024 erwan in every maenol. Twelve maenolyd and two trefyd for the king, or 4,608 erwan in every cymwd.
Here the tref or maenol, the latter having the average area of an Indian village in Chuttisgurh, is the original foundation on which the subsequent provincial organisation is laid ; and the maenol or maenaur, the English manor or the area surrounded by stones (maen), is the original Gond village with its carefully preserved boundaries, marked in Babylonia by stone boundary-marks *.
The original pre-Celtic village system in England was apparently similar to that of the Ooraons, for there was originally in every village an area of land called the Thane’s inland or demesne, which was cultivated for him by the tenants in the same way as the Ooraon tenants cultivated the “ manjhus ” land ; and in the village of Chippenham, in Wilts, we find a most interesting instance of the 16 carucates of this demesne land belonging not to the over-lord but to the village community as a whole. This corresponds exactly to the Gond custom of allotting one share of the village land to the head-man. Thus in Chuttisgurh,.where the village lands are divided into five or more koonts or sections, one koont always belongs to the head-man. Another custom which shows the close affinity between the Ooraon and pre-Celtic English village is the custom of recognising the village servants as hereditary members of the community. These in Chutia Nagpur and Chuttisgurh sometimes have distinct allotments of land, but are more frequently paid by contributions of grain; and in England, as in the village of Aston in Oxfordshire, we find frequently distinct fields set apart as those belonging to the village servants 2. This village system was superseded by
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. p. 218, notes 1 and 2, 219.
2   Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 135 ; Gomme, The Village Com- munity, chap. viii. pp. 174—176, 163.
   
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the Cymwd organisation, in which the villages held by the Uchelwyr or free-tribesmen were separated from those of the Pict-tenants, who were aliens to the Goidel conquerors ; and we see this separation of tenures still subsisting in India in the divisions of villages into sections, one inhabited by the superior and the other by the inferior or original tenants ; and also in the conversion, almost universal in some districts of the North-west Provinces, of the original communal villages into those held on the Jat system of Puttidari, in which the villages are divided into puttis or shares, belonging to the families descended from the founding-brotherhood, which exactly answers to the Uchelwyr villages of the Cymri. Again in the Dekhan we find villages in which the part of the lands seized by the invading Jat and Cheroo conquerors is partitioned into fields, called by the family name of the original appropriators, and held in hereditary descent by their successors, while the rest of the lands are held on the old communal system by the Mahrs, who represent the earlier tenants r. 1
1   The whole system of the Munda, Ooraon, and Jat land tenures is explained at length in Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Tinies, vol. i., Essay ii. PP- 90_9S) 118—123.
CHAPTER VI.
THE YEAR OF THE HORSE’S HEAD OF ELEVEN MONTHS
AND ELEVEN-DAY WEEKS.
THE period I have now reached in this historical survey of primaeval history is that represented in Indian mythological history by the worship of the horse’s head, called in the Rigveda Dadhiank. This is the horse’s head which was originally placed on the roofs of all houses in Gothic lands, after the sacrifice to Odin of the horse to which the head belonged. This is still carved in wood and affixed to the principal gables of houses in the Lithuanian and Gothic provinces of Mecklenburgh, Pomerania, Ltineberg and Holstein L This horse-sacrifice was also pffered by the Mordvinian Ugro Finns of the Volga, the conquering races who succeeded the sons of the ass of the cycle-year, and first brought the horse to South-western Asia to supersede the wild ass, which, as we have seen, drew the year-car of the Ashvins, and which drew the chariots of the early Assyrian kings 1 2 3. At the Mordvinian horse-sacrifice, according to a description of it by an eye-witness at the end of the 16th century, the Italian traveller Barbaro, the horse was tied by the neck to the sacrificial stake in the sacrificial pit, a survival of the ritual of the Pitaro Barishadah of the age of the Trigarta sacrifices, and killed with arrows. Its skin was then torn off and the flesh eaten. The skin, stuffed with straw, was lifted to the top of the sacred tree of the sacrificial ground, and adorned with rags and ribbons 3. The
1 Baring Gould, Strange Survivals and Superstitions on Gables, pp. 38—41.
3 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, Egypt and Chaldsea, p. 770.
3 Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. p. 469.
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head of this year-horse sacrificed at the beginning of the year symbolised its course, and was replaced at the end of the year by that of the horse sacrificed to consecrate the next year. This was the head found, according to the Rigveda i. 84, 13, 14, by Indra in the Sharyanavan, the ship (nava) of the arrow (sjiarya), the arrow of the year of three seasons, marked by its feathers, shaft and barb. It was this new conception of the year, a revival of the arrow-year of Orion, which superseded and destroyed the cycle-year; and it was with the bones of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank, called in the Tait. Brah. i. 5, 8, the ten-head breaking (Shiro-bhida) spells (mantrah) of Atharva, Dadhiank’s father, the sun-god of the Atharvans or sun-priests, that Indra slew the Vritra or worshippers of the encircling-snake, called the ninety-nine1. This number proves clearly that the year-god slain was the god of the three-years cycle, for the new year of the head of the sun-horse was, as we shall see, one of eleven months of thirty-three days each, and especially consecrated to the thirty-three gods ; hence the ninety-nine false year-gods overthrown by Dadhiank’s bones are those of three years measured by the year-reckoning of the thirty-three gods of the new ritual order, that is the gods of the three years of the cycle-year. The field of battle was the centre of the land of Kuru Kshetra, where, as I have shown in Chapter II. p. 26, the world’s tree grew up from the southern-mud (tan) to be the Pole Star tree of the Kurus, the mid-tree of the world’s village grove. It was here where Parasu Rama, the god of the double-axe of the three-years cycle, had slain the Haihayas; that Indra, according to the scholiast on the Veda, found the conquering horse’s head near the sacred lake of Tan-eshur, that of the god Tan 2. It was then consecrated to Staneshvara, the gnomon-pole of Sthanu, the leader, after Bhrigu their father, of the eleven Rudras, the gods ruling this year 3.
1   Rg. vi. 16, 14, i. 84, 13 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. v. p. 27.
2   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Staneshvara, p. 335.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 18S.
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The Atharvans, priests of the sun-god of the horse’s head, are the successors in the priestly genealogy of the Angiras and Navagvas, the priests of the nine-days week, and their genealogical line of descent from Bhrigu, the first of the Budras, is given in the Rigveda as that of the Bhrigus, Angiras, Navagvas, AtharvansI. That is to say, the first in the sacerdotal genealogy were the Bhrigus, worshippers of the household fire; secondly, the Angiras or officers of burnt-offerings in the age of the six-days week; thirdly, the Navagva priests of the cycle-year with its nine-day weeks ; and lastly, the Atharvans, the priests of the sun-horse, the fire-god Athar (Zend A tar), also known as Atri,the devouring (ad) three (tri) 2 This name marks the year as descended from the early year of three seasons, which had been* that of the sun-deer.
A. The genealogy of the sun-god with the horse's head and the ritual of his worship.
We find this line of descent expressly declared in the story of the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of Victory (Sig), for it was from Hinda-fjall, the hill of the deer (hinda), that Sigurd started to run his annual course through the heavens on his sun-horse Grani, given to him by Grip, the seizing dog, the star Sirius ruling the year of the six-days week beginning at the summer solstice. His year’s journey began after he had killed Fafnir, the snake-god of the three-years cycle, and gained possession of his treasures and the insignia of the sun-god of the year:
(1)   The helm of aweing, the night-cap of invisibility given to Perseus, born in the tower of the three-years cycle;
(2)   the golden impenetrable mail worn by Kama and Achilles; and (3) the golden year-ring, that given by Dush- manta to Sakuntala, and with which Sigurd wedded Brun- hilda, the Valkyr or bird-mistress of the springs (<briinnen),
1   Rg. x. 14, 6.
2   Grassmann, Worlerbuch sum Rigveda, s.v. Atri.

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when he found her asleep on the top of the hill whence he was to set forth on his year’s circuit of the heavens z.
The Atharva priests of the sun-god, the third in succession of the Indian priestly lines of the Bhrigus, Angiras and Atharvans, were the counterparts in Indian ritualistic history of the Jewish Kohathites or prophet-priests headed by Aaron, meaning the Chest, who was appointed to be the speaking-prophet to Moses, as the wearer of the priestly ephod which revealed the counsels of God1 2 3 4. Their predecessors were, as I have shown elsewhere, the sons of Gershom, answering to the Angiras, and those of Merari, answering to the Bhrigus 3.
These, called Athravans by the Zends, were the itinerant preaching-priests said, in the Din Yasht, to have been sent forth to preach the law of the holy Chest, the inspired teachings revealed to them by the Bhang or Hashish, of which I have spoken in Chapter IV. p. 171 4. These teachers became the national official historians, for, as we are told in the Upanishads, the Atharvas and Angiras were the authors of the Itihasa Purana or national histories surviving in the Mahabharata, Harivansa, Ramayana, the Shah Nameh, the poems combined to form the Kalevala, the Greek and Roman historical myths, the mythological Sagas of Scandinavia and Iceland, and the endless series of local historical legends. We are told in Buddhist records that the knowledge of these national histories was an essential part of the instruction instilled into the mind of every Brahmin, and they were also known by every Druids. They were recited at the annual festivals marking the changes of the year, and especially
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 117—124.
2   Ex. vii. 1.
3   Hewitt, Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Preface, pp. xv.—xvii.
4   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 17; Aban Yasht, 86; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 268-74.
3   Rhys David, ‘ Dialogues of the Buddha from the Nikayas,’ iv., Sonadanda Sutta, 114, where it is said that it was necessary for every perfect Brahmin to be a repeater of the legends, that is to know them by heart. Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. ii. p. 146.
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at the New Year’s Festival, a custom which survives in the recitation of the Jewish Thora at the New Year’s Feast in the beginning of Tisri (September — October)1. In the Brahmanas this recitation was ordered to be made by the Hotri, the pourer {Jut) of the libations 2, who was the Zend Zaotar, the chanter of the hymns, the speaking-priest 3. The root Hu, whence the name is derived, shows the connection of the office with the cloud-rain-bird Khu. He was the priest of the bird Karshipta, the sun-hawk, who brought the law of Mazda into the Garden of God, and taught the priests who divined by bird-augury to speak the language of birds 4.
The year of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank is said in the Rigveda to have been imported with the horse’s head by the Ashvins, who taught in it the secrets of Tvashtar, the framer of the solstitial year of two seasons. The gods of this year were thirty-three, or three elevens, who accompany the Ashvins to drink madhu or mead s. Thus it was a year of eleven months, each of thirty-three days, divided into three weeks of eleven days, a combination of the five and six-day weeks of the years of two and three seasons, so that there were the same number of weeks in the year as there were days in the month. It was the year of the second, in point of time, of the Buddhist historical heavens, called the Tavatimsa, or that of the thirty-three gods ruled by Sakko, the rain {sale) god. They succeeded the gods of the first heaven, the Shatum Maharajika Devaloko, or the hundred angels born from the constellation Argo, the Shata- vaesa or hundred creators.
This year became the Zend ritualistic year ruled by the “ thirty-three gods of the ritual order, who are round about
1   Max Miiller, Chandogga Upaniskad, iii. 4, 1, 2; S.B.E., vol. i. pp. 39, note 1, 40.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., xiii. 4, 3, 2—15 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 361—371.
3   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendtdad Fargard, v. 58; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 64, note 1.
4   Ibid., ii. 42; West, Bundahish, xix. 16; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 21, vol. v.
p. 70.   s Rg. i. 117, 22, i. 34, 11.
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the Havani,” the mortar in which the holy Haoma or Soma, the water of life, is mixed; that is to say, the gods of the year regulating the storage of the life-giving rain in the mother-Soma-tree or plantr, the mortar of the earth’s Soma or sap of life.
We find further evidence of the existence of this year of eleven months in the eleven sacrificial stakes erected outside the east end of the Soma consecrated ground, to which the eleven victims sacrificed to the gods ruling the months of this year were tied; the last of the eleven gods who ruled the close of the year was Varuna, and the first Agni 1 2, the god of the national fires. These eleven gods are also invoked in the eleven stanzas of eight out of the ten Apr! hymns in the Rigveda, recited at the animal sacrifices, and the twelve and thirteen stanzas of the other two hymns are addressed to the gods ruling the twelve and thirteen-months year. The first four stanzas of these hymns summon to the sacrifice the four seasons of the year: (1) Agni, the god of the sacrificial flame lit by the Samidhs or kindling sticks of the spring. (2) The wind-god of the burning West winds of the Indian summer called Tanu-napat, the son (napdt) of his own body, the self-produced or Nara Shamsa, praised of men, the fire •burning on the altar. (3) The Id or Idah, the mother- goddess of the rains of autumn. (4) The Barhis or sacrificial seats of Kusha grass allotted to the Kushika fathers of the winter season. ^The fifth stanza invokes the gates of the sacrificial enclosure, the two door-posts, and the two pillars in front of the Phoenician temples, the Semitic Bab-el or Jo-bab, the gates of God, the stars Gemini. The sixth, the twins Night and Day. The seventh, the two Hotars, the singers and speakers of truth, the two original seasons of the year, the pourers of libations and distributors of rain.
1   Mill, Yasna, i. 10; Darmesleler, Zeudavesia Vendldad Far gard, iii. 1) S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 198, vol. iv. p. 23, note 1.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 9, I, 4—23 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 21S—221.
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The eighth, the three mother-goddesses Bharati or Mahl, Ida, Sarasvatl, the three seasons of Orion’s year. The ninth, Tvashtar, the creator of time measured by days, nights, weeks and years. The tenth, Vanaspati, the lord (patz) of the wood (vanas), the primaeval mother-tree. The eleventh summons all the gods who obey the cry of Svaha or Hail, and who were not invoked in the previous stanzas. The god left behind is said, in the Satapatha Brahmana, to be the god of cattle, Rudra, called Svishta-krit, meaning he who offers a right sacrifice. He is the god of the Northern immigrants, called the god who “ rose in the North with his raised weapon,” that is the god of the gnomon-stonex, the ithyphallic Hermes, which I have seen set up as a boundary - mark in Chuttisgurh, the facsimile of the phallic Hermae of Greece. This, the only god of those named in the hymns to whom animal sacrifices were offered, was the god in whose honour these hymns were composed, the sun-god of the Northern Asuras for whom the dolmen altars were built, and whose blood-stained offerings were not admitted into the sun-circle of the earlier parent-gods.
These stanzas set before us a record of the past religious history of the country, beginning with the worship of the mother-tree, whence, in the ritual of this eleven-months year, the sacrificial stake was made 2. This is followed by the worship of Tvashtar, the Pole Star god of the stellar-year, who sent the Pleiades Argo and the sun-bird round the Pole as the heralds of the years of two seasons. After the mother- tree and the primitive gods of time and of the year of two seasons, came the three mother-goddesses of the three-seasons- year, the rain-guardians : the two Hotars, the twins Night and Day, and the door-posts of the gate of the Gardens of God, whence the four seasons of the cycle-year of Agni,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 5, 4, 1—5, i. 7, 3, 1—9; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 152, 153, 199, 200, note 2—202.
E This is the Khadira tree (Acacia catechu) of which the fire socket and sacrificial stake were made. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 161 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 4, 1, 19, 22, iii. 6, 2, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 90, note 5, 91, 151.
   
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the god of the household fire, and the fathers of the Kushika race issue. The seasons of the Ribhus, the makers of the year-cow, were, as I have shown in Chapter III., three: spring, summer and winter ; but these were, according to the Rigveda, increased to four by Ribhuksha, the third Ribhu of Indra, the rain-god, who said “ let us make four,” thus adding to the original Vedic year the fourth, the autumn rainy season x.
The sacrifice offered at the recitation of these Apr! hymns is, according to the Aitareya Brahmana, one to the thirty- three gods who do not drink pure Soma but the intoxicating drink the Sura, offered at the Sautramani sacrifice1 2 3, which is, as we shall see later on, a part of the ritual of the New Year’s Festival of this year. In the orthodox Soma animal sacrifice the offerings of the eleven slain animals are divided into thirty-three parts, called fore-offerings, after-offerings, and by-offerings. The by-offerings are the hind-quarters of the victims divided into eleven parts for the eleven gods 3. These offerings were made on the Uttara Vedi altar at the east end of the sacrificial ground. This was erected for this sacrifice, offered at the Varuna Praghasah, the festival of the summer solstice, and especially dedicated to Varuna, to whom, as we have seen, the last of the victims was offered. This special altar is placed on the top of the original Northern altar, covered with the Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass of the Kushikas. It is roofed with branches of the Plaksha-tree (Ficus infectoria), the tree consecrated at Puryag, the junction of the Jumna and Ganges, the meeting- place of the Northern millet and barley-growing Gonds coming down the Jumna and the earlier dwellers in the land. On this altar the enclosing triangle surrounding the sacred fire on the navel is made, not as on the Kushika altar in the form of a woman, of Palasha twigs (Bntea fron-
1   Rg- iv. 33. 3. 4, 5. 9-
2   Haug, Ait. Briih., ii. 2, iS, vol. ii. p. no.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. S, 4, I, II —18, iii. S, 5, I—4; S.B.E.,vol. xxvi. pp. 210—212, note 2, 213, 214.
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dosa), but of Pitudaru wood (Pinns Deodara), sacred to the sons of the Northern mother Cybele and the pine-tree of Phrygia. Also the omentum, the membrane enclosing the entrails of the animals offered, is roasted at the Northern fire on spits made of the Karshmarya (Gmelina arborea) wood1. The ritual of the animal sacrifice as performed by the orthodox Vedic priests is admitted, in the Satapatha Brahmana, to differ from the orginal ritual of the Asuras, who instituted it and divided the whole sacrifice into portions, one for each of the year-gods, whereas only specified portions were divided in the later ritual 2 3. There can be little doubt that, in the original sacrifice, thirty-three portions divided into three elevens were offered to the gods of the thirty-three days of the month and the eleven days of the week.
The whole ritual tells us that those who instituted it were a Northern race who originally worshipped the pine-tree of Cybele, the mother-cave and tree, and looked on the god ruling the year as the sun-ram, born of the tree nurtured by the rains of Varuna. But in this sacrifice the original ram had become, under the influence of the ritual of the three- years cycle of the sexless gods, a wether. Hence a tuft of wether’s hair with bdellium and fragrant reed-grass was placed on the altar, with pine-tree twigs forming the triangle. The Karshmarya-tree (Gmelina arborea) supplying the roasting. spits is also significant. It is the tree called Gumi, furnishing the sacred house-pole, Gumi Gosain, of the Northern Males and their later congeners the Cheroos and Kaurs. Its wood will never rot in water, and hence it was valuable as ship-building timber 3.
The eleven months of this year are also commemorated in the eleven stanzas of the Samidheni hymn sung' at the kindling of the year’s fires, and also in the Tristubh metre of the three (tri) praises (stubh), in which each line contains
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brahii. 5, 2, 5, iii. 5, 2, 14, 18, iii. 8, 2, 16—28 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 392, note 1, 393, xxvi. pp. 125, 194, note iff.
1 Ibid., iii. S, 3, 29; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 207.
3   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Indie a, p. 4S6.
   
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eleven syllables1. These months are spoken of in the Akkadian hymn describing the combat between Tiamat and Merodach or Marduk, the Assyrian form of the son of la Silik-mulu-khi, meaning he who gives good to men, the household-fire-god, the Agni of the Rigveda, and king of the grove of Tin-tir, the Sarna of Babylon 2 3 4. They are there called the eleven-fold offspring of Tiamat, the bird and dragon-mother (mat) of living things (tia), the original rain- cloud. And it was on the eighth and eleventh day of the New Year Festival at Babylon, the last day of the eight-days week of the year of fifteen months, described in Chapter VII., and the last day of the eleven-days week of this year, that Bel, the fire and sun-god, was said to sit on his throne as king of heaven and earth 3.
The victory of Bel Merodach over the el even-fold offspring of Tiamat is also told, under another form, in the Book of Esther. Esther is the Akkadian goddess Istar, who, in the Semitic ritual, has become, according to Dr. Sayce, the evening-star, the sun-maiden wedded to the horned- moon-god, the Ashtoreth Karnaim, that is of the double- horn^ She who is, in the Bible version of the story, niece of Mordecai, the god Merodach or Marduk, the calf of the double-horn, becomes the wife of the king of Shushan, the great Susi-nag, in place of Vashti, the female form of Vash- ishtha, the burning fire on the altar. It is she and Mordecai, the female and male form of- the conquering sun and moon- god, who overcame Haman or Baal Khamman s, the green pillar of Uzof, the goat-god, and his ten sons, the eleven months of the year, and crucified Haman, as the deposed year-god of an abandoned epoch, on the equinoctial cross
1   Eggeling, Sal. Brdh., i. 3, 5, 5, i. 4, 1, 7—39; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 102, note 1—113.
2   Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, chap. xiii. pp. 190—195.
3   Sayce, Hibbcrt Lectures for 1887, Lcct. vi. p. 3823 Ibid., Babylonians and Assyrians, chap, xi., Religion, p. 247.
4   Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 256, 257, note 1.
s Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 394—396.
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of the year-god of St, George’s CrossT. Thus they brought in the year of the sun-god, heralded by the morning and evening stars, in his daily progress through the heavens on the cloud-sun-horse.
The eleven months of this year became, according to the custom of ancient historical astronomy, star-gods, the eleven stars of the dream of Joseph who wore the coat of the many- coloured stars1 2 3 4. Joseph, whose name is a form of the Assyrian Asipu, or interpreter, was the eleventh son of Jacob, described in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17 (New Version) as having the horns of the wild ox, the horns of Leah, the wild cow, those of the god of the year measured by lunar- crescents. He went down into Egypt, where these eleven stars are depicted in Vignette ix. of the Egyptian Papyrus of Ani. They there appear as the four sons of Horus, the four stars of the constellation Pegasus and the seven stars of the Great Bear, which, as we have seen, ruled the cycle- year. This year of Pegasus is ? that of the Akkadian constellation of Lik-barra or the striped-dog 3, the tiger-father of the Indian Mallis and Licchavis, the Vajjian sons of the tiger (vidghra), the rulers of India consecrated on a tiger- skin 4. As the year of the sun-horse it is the year of the fountain (7^7777) or well, that of Hippocrene, opened by the horse of Bellerophon, the Phoenician god Baal Raphon, meaning the god of healings. He was the slayer of the triple-monster the Chimsera—with its fore-part like a lion, its middle-part with the head of a goat, and its hinder-part like a serpent—the god of the three-years cycle. The flying- horse which secured him the victory was the sun-horse, who by striking the earth with his hoof made the fountain of Hippocrene to swell forth as the first of the holy wells of healing distributed as objects of worship throughout
1   Sachau, Alberunl’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, p. 274.
2   Gen. xxxvii. 9, 10.
3   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. pp. 68, 69.
4   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 3, 5, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 81.
3   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, p. 116.
   
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Europe and Asia, the holy well near which the Irish Milesians made their settlements.
B.   The Sun-physician.
We see in this healing-god, the rider on the sun-horse, the prototype of Cheiron, the Centaur, half-man and half-horse, the king of the race of sun-worshippers who succeeded the Lapithae, the sons of the storm (\air \ai\ayf), whose goddesses were the three Harpies, one of the emblems of the three years of the cycle-year. They were the gods of time who buffeted and pecked at Phineus, the sea-eagle or (f>r}vr)), whenever he attempted to eat, and half-starved him, that is, interrupted his annual series of religious festivals. These troublers of the mother-cloud-bird and disturbers of the yearly measurement of time were driven from their usurped office of time-rulers by Zetes and Kalais, the sons of Boreas, the North, the North-east and Northwest winds, the winds of the sun of the summer solstice rising in the North-east. They sailed on the Argo with Jason the healer (MS), a form of the Hindu Vivasvan, the god of the two (vi) lights night and day. The Harpies were sent to the Strophades or turning islands, those marking the solstitial changes of the sunJ, This god, the sea-eagle Phineus, was competitor with Perseus, the sun-god born from the cycle-year, for the hand of Andromeda, the Phoenician Adamath, the star-mother of the red (Adam) race. He interrupted their wedding, and was changed by Perseus from the storm-bird of the South-west Monsoon into a stone- god, the gnomon-stone 1 2.
It was Cheiron, called by Pindar the teacher with the gentle hand   and the tutor of Jason and vCsculapius,
the sun-physician, who taught the use of drugs, oil and salves, and the practise of massage so extensively used in
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 190, 199.
2   Ibid., vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 213; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 49; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, vol. i. p. 3.
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India1. The Centaur race introduced into Greece the use. of the medical febrifuge, called the Kentaurion of Cheiron (xeipooviov /cevravpiov), for which Pelion, the mountain on which Cheiron dwelt, was famous 2 3 4.
Cheiron gave to Peleus, the god of the potter’s clay (7rrjXos), on his marriage as the Great Potter with Thetis, the Southern mother-goddess of the mud (,thith), the mighty ashen-spear, the creating fire-drill and supporter of the heavens, the centre-pole of the world-house cut from the top of Pelion, which no other Greek, not even Patroclus who wore his armour, could wield 3. This spear was the stem of the world’s ash-tree of the Edda, the ash Yggdrasil; and the evidence thus furnished as to the origin of the story of the spear-bearing sun-god riding on the horse Pegasus of the fountains and wells proves that it was the Northern worshippers of the sun-horse who first brought to the South the knowledge of natural plant remedies, and of the use of the oil of Asia Minor as medical remedies preferable to the magical incantations and the system of cautery which formed the ground-work of medical practice in the age of sorcery and witchcraft. These Northern warriors were wielders of the spear of Cheiron, the Shelah of the Jews, the fire-drill of the revolving world’s-tree which superseded the arrow of the first Centaur Eurytos, the drawer (epvco) of the heavenly bow, .the rain-bow-god, the Indian Krishanu, whose bow descended to Odusseus or Orion 4. Eurytos was the god who led the Centaurs in their battle with the Lapithae at the wedding of Pirithous, the revolving-one, the Pole Star god, son of Ixion, with Hippodameia, the moon-goddess tamer of horses. It was
1   Pinch, Nem., iii. 55 : —
PaOvpifjTa Xelpaiv Tp&tpe AiOivtp *\acrov evfiov rlyei Kal eiremv >AcrK\r\m6v rbv <papp.(XKv SlSajje juaAafcoxetpa. vofiov.
Hewitt, Rilling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 521—526.
2   Mannhardt, Antihe Wald ttnd Feld Kultur, Part ii. chap. ii. pp. 47, 48.
3   Horn. Iliad, xvi. 139—144; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 526—530.
4   Homer, Odyssey, viii. 224 ff,
   
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then that the nose and ears of Eurytus were cut off, and he was changed, like Phineus, into the gnomon-stone-god of the cycle-yearx.
The introducers into India of this new medical knowledge were the founders of the caste of the Telis or oil-men, who are called the Ekadas or worshippers of eleven gods. They brought from Asia Minor to India the holy oil called Til, extracted from the Sesamum plant (Sesamum Orientate). It is with this oil that every Hindu child is anointed after birth, and everyone, both men and women, anoint themselves with oil as a medical precaution against disease. In the marriage ceremonies of the Kayasth or writer, and the Kshatriya or warrior castes, both of which arrange their marriages by the help of the barber, who is, as we shall see, the priest of this age, the bridegroom and bride are smeared with oil1 2 3 4. But this use of oil does not occur in the marriage ceremonies of the Brahmins, nor is oil used in any of the ritualistic ceremonies enjoined in the Satapatha Brahmana, not even in those of the king’s coronation, called the Raja-suya sacrifice. In this the king is anointed with holy water rubbed over him with the horn of a black antelope, and not with oil; and this water, mixed with Kusha grass, fried rice and black Kesari millet, was poured on the king’s head in the oldest references to the coronation ceremony of Rama given in the Mahabharata 3. The use of oil is ascribed to the ten-headed Ravana of the cycle-age and his co-adjutors 4, and the holy ointment in the orthodox ritual is ghi or clarified butter. Thejanly oil which pure Telis can make is that extracted from the Sesamum, and the antiquity of the caste is proved
1   Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295—303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 555, 521.
2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kayasth, pp. 447, 448, Vol. ii., Rajput, p. 188.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., Abhishechanlya, or Consecration Ceremony, v. 4, 2, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 94—96 ; Mahabharata Vana (Dranpadi-karana) Parva, cclxxviii. pp. 820, 821.
4   Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxix. pp. 826, S27.
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by their worship of the eleven gods, and the Panch Pirs or five gods of the primaeval week, and the boundary-god Goraya, to whom the Dosadhs, their priests, offer pigs. Their mother-tree is the Chumpa-tree (Liriodendron grandiflora), on which the bridegroom sits as the bride is carried round it, and the Chumpa flowers are those most prized for sacred garlands. These flower garlands are worn by the Hindus at all religious ceremonies, and are reminiscences of the ancient flower-mother of the year, who marked the year’s circle by a perpetual succession of fresh blossoms, the crown- circlet or coronet of flowers of the Greek Crow-goddess Kordnis, the sister of Ixion or Akshi-van, the turner of the heavenly axle, and the mother of Aisculapius, the sun- physician. She was a variant form of the tree-mother- goddess Athene, whose name is derived from the same root as avOos, a flower1. The Teli legendary history tells how the first two Telis were made by the goddess Bhagavati, the tree with the edible fruit (bhaga), the nut or acorn-tree of Baal Bahai, spelt with an ain, implying the former gh of the god {el) Bagh, the Persian garden. She made them out of turmeric or yellow paste, the plant sacred to the Hindu Vaishya or yellow race, which is used to anoint Brahmin bridegrooms and brides2 3; and it is mixed with oil and ghi or clarified butter in anointing those of the Kayasth and Rajput castes. The Telis arc said in the Brahma Vaivartha Purana to be the eleventh in the lists of castes, and to be descended from the Kumhar or potters and the Ghorami or builders; that is to say, they belonged to the races who looked on themselves as descended from the Great Potter, and who were the first builders of houses 3.
The eleven gods of the Telis were also the eleven local gods of the Kandhs of Orissa, the conquering race of the Kui-loka or mountain-people, who trace their descent from
1   Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, No. 304.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Brahmans, vol. i. p. 149.
3   Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 306—309; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Tunes, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 85—87,

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the sword, and who sacrifice human victims to ensure good harvests, especially of turmeric, their most valuable export. They anoint this victim, after cutting his hair, with oil- turmeric and ghi, with which Rajput brides and bridegrooms are anointed, and they thus celebrate his marriage with the Pole Star goddess Tari Pennu, to whose home in the other world he is to be transferred 1 ; and this marriage is analogous to that of Peleus, the god of the ashen-spear- tree Yggdrasil, of which the roots reach to the Southern Ocean, the fountains of life, with the goddess Thetis of the Southern mud (thith). The age during which this year was the official year in India is that marked by the rule of the Kauravyas, who, in the war of the Mahabharata, led eleven akshauhinis, or monthly revolutions of the axle, against the seven akshauhinis of the2 3 Pandavas, who measured time by the seven-days week of the seventeen-months year of Prajapati, and their thirteen-months lunar-year of exile, the subjects of Chapter VIII., who were also sons of Ambalika, the seven stars of the Great Bear. The rulers of the eleven-months year were, according to the Mahabharata, the eleven great Maharathas or chariot drivers of the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, headed by Duryod- hana the Kauravya leader 3. Their mother was Gandh.ari, the vulture, the daughter of Suvala, the circling (vala) bird (Su), sister of Shakuni, the raven. She was the wetter (dhari) of the land (gan), the goddess Dharti worshipped by the Cheroos and higher semi-aboriginal castes. She is the star Vega in the constellation of the Vulture, now Lyra, which was the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and was wedded to the blind Dhritarashtra, the world’s pole and spear, the central tree, meaning he who upholds (dhrita) the kingdom (rdshtrci), son of Ambika, who was, as I have shown in Chapter III. p. 97, the Pole Star in Cygnus. In the
1   Dalton and Macpherson, quoted by Elie Rectus, Les Primitifs, pp. 355, 356 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Kandh, vol. i. pp. 397, 39s, 404, 405.
2   Mahabharata Udyoga (Sanjayayana) Parva, pp. 43, 44.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Adivanshdva tarna) Parva, lxiii. p. 1S0.
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Northern land of Gandhara, the wet (dhara) land, the parent- home of the Kushite race, she gave birth to a hundred sons, the hundred Kauravyas. Their birth-place is the modern Kandahar on the Kushite mother-river the Helmund, the country of the accumulated waters, which descend to fertilise the plains of India in the Indus and the five rivers of the Punjab.
They were born from an egg which lay two years in her womb. When produced the egg was, by the orders of Vyasa, the uniter, the constellation Draco, father of Dhrita- rashtra, sprinkled with the water of life. It then divided into one-hundred parts, each about the size of the thumb- the hundred Naga snakes. They were, according to the original form of the myth, the hundred children of the constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or that of the hundred {shata) creators, the Greek goddess Hekate, meaning a hundred. They were the snakes forming the Anguineum Ovum of the Druids, the tree (dru) priests of the Piets, the snake’s egg hung up in the temple of Herakles at Tyre I. They were each put into a jar of clarified butter, and thus became the children of the cow-mother. They were kept covered up for two years, at the end of which time they came to life as a hundred sons and a daughter Dushala. The eldest of the sons was Duryodhana, who brayed like an ass at his birth, thus showing him to be the son of the cycle-year of the three-legged ass2 3, the four divisions of which, each of ten lunar months of gestation, marked the four years of the parturition of the Kauravyas, the two years during which they were in their mother’s womb, and the two in the jars of clarified butter. The travelling car of Duryodhana was, as we learn afterwards, drawn by mules, thus showing him to belong to the race born from the union of the sun-horse and ass 3.
The eleven ruling months of this year in India appear
1 Macdonald, Druidism, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. vii. p. 477.
3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cx., cxv. pp. 328, 329, 337—339.
3 Mahabharata Adi ( fatugriha) Parva, cxlvi. pp. 430, 431.
   
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also in the eleven sons of the blind Dirghatamas, the long age (clirghd) of darkness {tamas), when the stars and moon were worshipped as the rulers of time. The mother of his eleven sons was Ushlnarl, sister of Shiva, the three-eyed god of the three-years cycle, and the eldest of these was Kakshivat, the socket (kaksha) of the revolving-pole of the earth, also called the son of Gautama, the father of the bull- race. He is said to be the father of Chandra-Kaushika, the moon of the KushikasT. In the Rigveda the Ashvins are said to have made for Kakshivan a hundred vessels of Sura (spirits) to flow from the well opened by the hoof of the sun- horse 2. In other words, he was the counterpart of the Greek Bellerophon, the Phoenician Baal Raphon.
A further history of this age is given in the Mahabharata, in the story of king Kalmashapada with the spotted {kalma- sha) feet, the ruling god of the starry heaven, son of Su-dasa He is called, in the variant forms of his story, Saudasa, the son of the ten (dashan) birds (su), and Paushya, the god Pushan, who wedded the sun’s daughter when the sun was in Cancer {Pushyd) at the winter solstice, as we have seen on p. 207, and became the god Push of the first month of the Hindu year. He ruled in the age of Vashishtha, the god of the altar-flame, and his hundred sons, the equivalents of the hundred sons of Gandharl. The eldest of these was Shaktri, the wet (Shuk) god of rain, called also Shakra, Shukra or Sakko, who, at the close of the Buddhist age of the hundred Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, became the ruling god of the thirty-three Tavatimsa gods. The star-king, Kalmashapada, the Pole Star god, became mad when he was cursed by Shaktri and deserted by Vishvamitra, the moon-god, who had ruled the cycle-year. That is to say, he became invisible as the Pole Star during the interval between the Pole Star in Cygnus in 15,000 B. c. and the Pole Star Vega in the Vulture, B.C. 10,000, when no Pole 1
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, civ, p. 316, Sabha (Jarasandha• badha) Parva, xxi. p. 63, Udyoga Parva, cxvii. p. 345, Sabha (Rujasuya• ratnbJta) Parva, xvii. p. 55.   2 Rg. i. 116, 7.
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Star was seen during this age of the year of the head of the sun-horse. It was in this period that the wandering Pole Star god devoured Shaktri and all the hundred sons of Vashishtha, and offered human sacrifices. Vashishtha, the god of the sacred-fire, then fled to the river Shata-dru (Sutlej) of the hundred springs, and only returned after twelve years, when Kalmashapada’s wife gave birth to a son, Ashmaka, the god of the gnomon-stone (ashma), who was begotten by Vashishthax, and born after twelve years’ pregnancy. With this son was born the son of Adrishyanti, the rock (adrika) wife of Shaktri, called Parashara, the overhanging {para) cloud, and Aurva, the son of the thigh {uni)' the seven stars of the Great Bear, the thigh of Set, the ape, from which he was born. He was the god, as we shall see, of the next year of the eight-days week, the subject of Chapter VII 1 2 3 4.
The inner meaning of this mythic history appears in the story of Utanka, the weaver {ut a part, of Vd, to weave), the maker of the web of time. The first part of it is told in the beginning of the Mahabharata, and the last in the Ash- vamedha Parva, after the Pandava victory and before the birth of Parikshit, the circling-sun, the later development of the sun-god with the horse’s head. Utanka was in his last avatar made by Krishna the god of the Utanka rain-clouds, which gathered before the birth of Parikshit, and were sup- plied with water by the hunter-star Orion 3.
He first began his career as a year - god as one of the three disciples of Gautama, also called Veda 4 or Know
1   Mahabharata Adi (Chltra-ratha) Parva, clxxviii., clxxix. pp. 504, 511, clxxxiv. p. 519—521.
2   Mahabharata Adi [ChUra-ratha) Parva, clxxx.—clxxxii., pp. 512-517. The identity of Aurva and Parashara, which is obscure in parts of the story where two mothers appear to be spoken of, is clearly shown in the end of clxxxii., where the fire cast by Aurva, also called Parashara, into the sea to destroy the world is said to have become the head of the sun-horse.
3   Mahabharata Aslivamedha {Anugita) Parva, Iv. p. 145.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. pp. 51—59, Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lvi.—lviii. pp. 145—155.
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ledge, when he was the god of the year of three seasons. But he became decrepit and lost his vigour during the cycle- year, and did not regain his youthful strength till he was wedded to the daughter of Gautama and his wife Ahalya, the hen, that is to the sun-maiden, who was wedded in the Rigveda first to Pushan, that is to Kalmashapada or Paushya, and afterwards to Soma, the moon-god r, here called Utanka. He agreed to‘ bring as a present to his mother-in-law the ear-rings of Madayanti, the wife of Saudasa, also called Paushya and Kalmashapada. That these ear-rings were the lunar crescents marking the course of the months is proved indubitably by their description, for they are said “ to shine brightly at night, attracting the rays of the stars and constellations1 2 3.” Utanka, when he went to fetch the ear-rings, was met by a giant god riding on a bull to the house of Paushya, the, devourer of human beings and offerer of human sacrifices, ruling the first month of the Hindu year, beginning at the winter solstice. The giant on the moon-bull, the three-eyed Shiva of the cycle-year, made Utanka' eat its dung and drink its urine to sanctify him as the leader of the New Year of the moon-bull. Paushya, when his wife had given the ear-rings to Utanka, became blind, like Dhritarashtra and Dirghatamas, the ruling gods of the eleven-months year 3. Utanka, when he got the ear-rings, wrapped them up in the black antelope- skin of the antelope-sun-god. While he was eating the fruits of the Vilva or Arjuna-tree (Tenninalia bclericd) (whence Nala, in the story of Nala and DamayantI, obtained the powers of calculation, making him the god of a year of months) the package fell to the ground, and was picked up by the snake-god Takshaka, who took it underground as the sun of the winter solstice. Utanka went beneath the earth to recover the sign-marks of his year, as Orpheus, the Greek form of the Ribhus, Avent to Hades to recover his
1   Rg. vi. 58, 4, x. S5, 9.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lvii. 25, p. 150.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva iii. pp. 54, 55.
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bride Eurydice, who, as the year-goddess, the sun-maiden, had been killed by the snake which bit her heel. He reached the nether earth, the underground mansions of the Southern Naga year-gods, by the help of Indra’s thunderbolts aiding the revolutions of his staff, the fire-drill of the revolving-pole. On arriving there he was helped, according to one account, by a man with a horse, the god Indra, and according to another by a black horse with a white tail l, who suffocated the Nagas with smoke, the smoke of the incense offered to the god of the cycle-year of the ass, and that of the eleven- months year of the horse’s head, and made them restore the ear-rings to Utanka. He, when he reached the upper earth, mounted the black horse to take the ear-rings to Ahalya. These became the ear-rings of Utanka’s bride when he became the moon-god riding the black sun-horse, whose head was the Dadhiank of the Rigveda. That the whole story has a mythological meaning, giving the history of the reckoning of the year, is further proved by the sights seen by Utanka in the nether world, while waiting for the ear-rings. He there saw two women, the nights and days, weaving the cloth of time with its black and white threads, and the wheel of time turned by six boys, said in the poem to be the six seasons of the year, but who were originally the six days of the week, the six Aditya or beginning-gods of the Rigveda.
C.   The New Year's Day of the eleven-months year.
Having thus shown, by this long chain of evidence, that the epoch of the eleven-months year of the black horse’s head was that succeeding the cycle-year of three years, I must now proceed to show in what part of the year’s circle the New Year’s Day of this year of 363 days was fixed.
The evidence as to the date fixed for the beginning of the
1 Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. p. 57, Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lviii. p. 154.
   
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Roman year of the horse’s head is most conclusive x. It began on the Ides, the 15th of October, sacred to the god Fons, of the fountains, that is of the springs brought to the surface by the hoofs of the sun-horse of this epoch. On this day there was a horse race of two-horsed chariots in the Campus Martius, and the near-horse of the winning pair was killed, according to Timseus1 2 3. The tail of the horse was carried to the Regia, the ancient royal palace, which could only be entered by the Vestal Virgins guarding the fire on the national hearth of Vesta, in its central hall 3. This was the temple of the god Consus, the storing-god, the guardian of the harvested grain, and represented the central national house, the village hall of the Munda head-man, in which was the village fire tended by his daughters, who became the Vestal Virgins of Rome.
The blood from the tail was allowed to drip on the hearth, and carefully kept by the Vestals for future use. The head was cut off and decked with cakes, like the head of the Mordvinian sacrificed horse, and a contest for it took place between the men of the Via Sacra on the Palatine, who placed it, if they won, on the Regia as the gable-horse ; and by the men of the lower and older region of the Suburra, it was placed on the Turris Manilia, the representative of the Caer Sidi, or Turning-castle of the Pole Star age.
This New Year’s Festival of the 15th of October corresponded with the Greek festivals of the Pyanepsion of Apollo and the Oscaphoria, or bringing home of the grape or vine bunches (ocr/eos), of Dionysos, a festival still celebrated in the Roman Campagna. They were held in the beginning of Pyanepsion (October—November), on the 15th of October. It also answers exactly to the Hindu New Year’s Day of the Dlpa-vali, the circling ivali) lamps, the stars, which begins two days before the end of Ashvin or Assin (September—
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis October, pp. 240—250.
2   Polyb., De Bello Fitnico, 12, 46.
3   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Sextilis, pp. 212—214.
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October), and the New Year’s six-days festival lasts till the 4th of Khartik (October—November)I.
The god who began his year at this season is an altered form of the Dionusos Nuktelios, who went below the earth to seek for Semele (Persephone) at the winter solstice, and the year thus begun was totally unconnected with the solstices or equinoxes which had marked the course of the sun in Orion’s year and that of the three-years cycle. Hence we can understand how the god of this year, in which the Northern human sacrifices of the cycle-year were continued, was looked on as a mad god who despised and dishonoured the former gods of time.
The age in which this year was the official year is called in Jain chronology that of Arishtanemi, the unbroken (arishta) wheel (nemi). For he, the son of Ugrasena, king of the Bhojas, was, under his other name of Kansa, the goose deposed and slain by Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- deva, the ruler of the year of the next epoch, described in Chapter VII. The year of Arishtanemi was, according to the phraseology of the Jain Sutras, that in which the moon was in conjunction with Chitra, that is with the star Virgo, the Egyptian Min, the mother of corn and mother- star of the Minyan race. It was in Chitra (March—April) that this year-god was born2. That is to say, this year dates from the time when the sun was in Virgo at the vernal equinox, about 12,200 B.c., or about 2,000 years after the cycle-year, during which, as we have seen on pp. 207, 208, the sun was in Aries at the autumnal equinox and in Cancer at the winter solstice ; and this year continued to be the official year till about 10,000 B.C., when Vega became the Pole Star, and when the Pole Star, circled by the sun, again ruled time. Arishtanemi, the god of this year, is called in the Rigveda Tarkshya, the sun-horse, “who has begotten
1   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 432.
2   Jacobi, faiua Sutras, Life of Arishtanemi, s. 170, 149; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 276, 271. The remaining incidents of Arishtanemi’s life are taken from this Jain history.
   
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from the water the five lands,” the five provinces into which India was divided, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 199 L He is mentioned in another hymn as a year-god with Indra, Pushan and Brihaspati, the Pole Star god2. His year’s history is told in that of the twenty-second of the Jain Tlrthakaras, his place being a multiple of eleven, and denoting the half-months 3 in his year. He was the son of Ugra- sena, king of the Bhojas, the army {send) of the mighty (Ugra), the traditional cannibals who have become our ogres. He is called in the Rigveda Ugra-deva, the god Ugra, and invoked as a companion of the Yadu-Turvasu 4 of the cycle- era. His mother was Shiva, who here becomes a female goddess, and he is thus marked as a year-god descended from the cycle-year of the three-eyed god. He took the form of a living embryo in the womb of his mother Shiva, that is, was quickened five months before his birth. He was
1   Rg. x. 178, 1—3.   2 Ibid., i. 89, 6.
3   He was the duplicate of the eleventh Chakravartin or universal monarch, Jaya Victory. Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Ultaradhyayana, xvii. 43 ; S.B.E., vol. xlv. p. 86.
4   Rg. i. 36, 18. The name Ugra, as that of the national god, seems to mark these invaders as the Akkadian Finns, allied to the races who still call themselves sons of Ugur, and are known as the Ugro or Uigar Finns. These people, according to Dr. Sayce (Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lecture iii. p. 196), called Nergal, the god of the South, the king Nerra, and “the mighty sovereign of the deep,” and also Ugur, the falchion or sickle-shaped knife, the Kherpe or Harpe with which Merodach slew Tiamat and Hermes Argos, and which was the weapon of Kronos. It was the lunar-crescent with which the father-god Ugur measured the year, and it is with this knife, the Ghurka-kukri, that the year-buffalo is always slain in India at the Dasahara festival. It has been the sacrificial knife since the days of Parasu - Rama, and this is the sword from which the Khands of Orissa, the human sacrificers, claim to be descended, and which I have seen set up as a god on a hill-shrine in Burwah in the Lohardugga District of Chutia Nagpur. These sons of the sword-knife are sons of the lunar-crescent or sickle. Thus these Ugro Finns of the Bronze Age called themselves sons of Ugur, or the crescent-shaped moon-knife. This, their father- god, was, as Dr. Sayce shows, the Phoenician god Sar-rabu, the great king, and he was worshipped by the Shuites on the western banks of the Euphrates as Emu, a name which is “letter for letter the same as Ammi, the national god of the Ammonites” (Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 196, note 1).
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begotten on the twelfth day of the dark half of Khartik (October—November), two days before the Bengal Kali Puja, the year-festival of this time-goddess, held on the last day of Khartik, when she is worshipped as the cannibal goddess, to whom goats, sheep and buffaloes are then offered I. His history, which has already stated that he was born in Chitra (Cheit) (March—April), then goes on to say that he was born on the 5th day of Shravana (July—August), a statement which must mean that he was then begotten.
This is the date of the Nag-Panchami, the annual festival to the five snake-mothers. He installed himself as the year- god on the 6th of Shravana (July—August), that is the day after his conception, and probably that following the birth of the Naga goddess, his mother, who, like the early year- gods, conceived at her birth. His immaculate conception is probably referred to in the story of his virgin-wife RajT- mati, who vowed virginity with him on Mount Raivataka 2 3, and who was almost certainly in the original year-story also his virgin-mother. This installation took place on the sacred Jain hill of Girnar, about ten miles to the East of Juna or Yona-gurh in Kathiawar, the birth-city of the Yonas or Yavanas, the growers of barley (yava). This is the Raivataka hill near Dwaraka, consecrated to Su-bhadra or Durga, the mountain-goddess, when she was at this Nag-Panchami festival carried off and married by the Pandava Arjuna, the rain-god 3. He was there worshipped by Rama, the god Halayudha, who has a plough \Jial) for his weapon (ayudha), and Krishna, called Keshava, the hairy-god. And it is this hill; which was sacred to Revati, the constellation Pisces, from which the year-sun-god was to be born.
It was on the last day of Ashvin or Assin (September— October), that is on the 15th of October, the day of the Roman sacrifice of the sun-horse, that he attained perfection
1   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, pp. 430, 431.
2 Jacobi, fain a Sutras Uttarddhyayana, xxii. 28—48 ; S.B.E., vol. xlv. pp. 115—119.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sabhadrd-harana) Parva, ccxxi., ccxxii. pp. 603—607.
   
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under the Vetasa or Banyan-tree {Ficus Inclica). Thus we see in this history of Arishtanemi, called the black-god with the belly of a fish, born from the fish constellation, that he was clearly the equivalent of the Roman October horse and the year-god of the Ugro-Finn conquerors of India. This sun-god riding on the black horse of night circled the heavens as the sun-star of day, going round his circuit in an unbroken ring of eleven months, divided into four seasons ruled by the four seasonal-gods invoked in the first four stanzas of the AprI hymns. And we find in the history of this year-god, reverenced as one of the founders of the Jain creed, most interesting historical testimony as to the fundamental changes in religious belief made by the founders of the year. The Jains in their ritual and religious organisation stand quite apart from the holders of the earlier creeds, who looked on the gods of time, the Pole Star, Pleiades, Orion and the Creating-rain-god, as the gods of villages, provinces or local national confederacies, who gave good crops, health and national prosperity to the localities they ruled—provided that they were propitiated by sacrifices and religious dances correctly performed in strict accordance with the ritual prescribed by the national elders and priests. In this religion the personal morality of the worshippers had no place, except as regarding the strict obedience required to the local rules of social organisation. But among the Jains, as among the early Hebrews, we find the first traces of the germs of the conception of personal religion and of the formation of a character by efforts in moral improvement. These appear in the belief that they could by asceticism and imitation of the lives of the saints of the community become individually holy, and attain to such a sensitiveness of conscience as to make it impossible for them to sin; an ideal infinitely higher than the conception of an unvarying obedience to imperious commands required from the slaves of a hard task-master. In contradistinction to this narrow view, which looked on fear of punishment as the only preventive of sin, the Jains believed that the lapses in
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moral progress, caused by yielding to temptations, could be atoned for and made less frequent in future by increased earnestness in ascetic discipline. But intermixed with this system of improving self-training there was the old trail of the notion of sacrifice, for the penances became, as they are among many of the Hindu devotees, a temporary or permanent sacrifice to God of the devotee undertaking a limited or unlimited life-task, such as that, common among pilgrims, of journeying to the shrine to be visited by prostrations, in which the devotee lies down flat on the ground and begins his next prostration by placing his feet where his head was in the last. The belief in the possibility of selfregeneration was held in unison with the custom of national sacrifices, the most effectual of these being those in which human victims were offered. In these the primal belief in the creative power of the rain imbued with the germs of life, which was that of the first founders of villages, the sons of the mother-tree, had been changed into the creed which ascribed the origin of life not to the pure rain which ripened the seed and made it grow, but to the rain which had become the blood of the father-god. It was this blood transfused into the veins of the animal-father which became the vital seed making the father the transmitter to his offspring of the life-giving blood. This blood shed in human and animal sacrifices fertilised the earth and made it produce food, and hence arose the custom, followed in the Meriah human sacrifices of the Kandhs, and in New Year animal sacrifices throughout India, of giving to each cultivator in the village where the sacrifice was offered a piece of the victim to bury in his field. It was these practices, and the alterations made in the dates of the local festivals by these sons of the sun- horse, that caused them to be regarded with horror by the votaries of the old faiths. Hence, in the Krishna legend the rule of the Bhoja king Ugrasena and that of his son Kansa, the Jain Arishtanemi, whose mothor was Kalanemi, the wife of Shiva, the goddess Kali, was spoken of as that in which priests and cattle were ruthlessly massacred, and
   

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the temples of the gods defiled with blood. It is the age called in the Zendavesta that of the usurpation of Keresani, the Krishanu of the Rigveda, the archer-god of the North, who said, "No priest shall walk the lands for me as a counsellor to prosper them, he would rob everything of progress I.” It was the rule of these ruthless Northern conquerors, followers of the Patesi, the bearded priest-kings of the Akkadians of Girsu and their prophet-priests, the preachers of personal religion, which was put an end to by the victory of the true and holy Haoma, the Soma god, who was worshipped, not with blood and libations of the intoxicating drinks consumed by his worshippers, but by the pure sacrifice of the Tri-ashira, or three mixings of Indra, the sacramental cup made of Gavashir milk, Dadhyashir sour milk, Yavashir barley. This was, as we are told in the Rigveda viii. 2, 11, 12, first mixed with Sura (spirits), but afterwards, according to the ritual of the Brahmanas, with water from a running stream2 3. In this mixture the Dadhyashir, typifying the summer, is the ingredient of Varuna and of Dadhiank or Dadhikra3, the god of the horse’s head.
We find the religious history of this age of transition depicted in the ritual of the Sautramani, the New Year’s Soma sacrifice of this epoch. It is said to be offered for the healing of Indra, the rain-god, whose divine power had left him at the end of the rainy season, during which he had completed his victory over Na-muchi, the antelope-god of summer, the Asura who does not (net) set free (much) the rain 4. He is said in this Satapatha Brahmana and Rigveda to have killed the god of drought by the foam of the waters, the wet wind of the South-west Monsoon 5. He
1   Mill, Yasna, ix. 24; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. pp. 237, 23S ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 462, 463.
2   Eg. v. 27, 5, viii. 2, 7; Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 9, 3, 15 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 232, note 2 —23S.
3   Rg. iv. 38, 2.   4 Benfey, Glossary, s.v., Na-muchi.
5   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., xii. 7, 3, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 222, 223; Rg. viii. 13, 14.
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was healed, that is his power of bringing the rain-showers drained by the heavy falls of his rainy season contest with Na-muchi was restored to him, as we are told in the Satapatha Brahmana, by the thirty-three gods of this year *. Therefore it is clear that this sacrifice took place after the rains, like the New Year’s sacrifice of the Roman horse, offered on the 15th of October, or about the first of the Indian month Khartik (October—November), the day of the national Dlbali festival, beginning in India the year of the Krittakas or Pleiades, and that on which Arishtanemi attained perfection. The Satapatha Brahmana does not give any exact date for the sacrifice which formed part of the Rajasuya or Coronation ceremonies1 2. It evidently became in later times one shifting, like the New Year’s sacrifice to Rahu, described on p. 187, with the New Year’s Day of the sacrificer’s year, but it must be begun three days before the New or Full Moon; and undoubtedly when originally instituted by the Asuras these three days were those before the New Moon beginning their year; that is probably three days before the 1st of Khartik, when Arishtanemi or Indra, by his victory over the evil spirits who kept back the rain, became the conquering god of the year, so that it is a counterpart of the Roman Equiria held on the same date.
During the first three days the annual offerings of a grey he-goat to the Ashvins, a ram to SarasvatT, the mother-river of the Kurus, and sons of the ram-sun, and a bull to Indra are made; and the Sura or spirituous liquor to be drunk at the sacrifice and poured out in libations is prepared. It is made of stalks of Kush a grass and fruits of the different species of Baer shrub (Zizyphus Jujuba), which grows profusely over the sandy plains of Northern India, where it feeds, when placed upon these shrubs, the lakh insects producing the red lakh dye and the tusser silk-worms who spin the silk which was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 251,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brahxii. 7, I, 14; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 216, 217.
2   Ibid., v. 5, 4, 1—35; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129—138.
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so much worn in ancient times by the people of the Punjab T. With these are mixed spices, parched rice, malted barley, and millets, the food of the Kusha grass fathers, and the first immigrant Gonds. Into the mixture thus made is poured the milk of one cow on each of the three days during which it is fermenting 1 2 3 4. On the fourth day thirty-three libations of fat gravy, obtained from the cooking of the victims, were offered in bull’s hoofs used as cups, and three cups of milk were offered on the Northern and three cups of Sura on the Southern altar to the gods of the six days of the week, and a fourth animal, a bull, was offered to Indra as god of the fourth season, together with a cake on eleven potsherds 3.
Thus we see that this New Year’s sacrifice of the eleven- months year of the sun-horse was accompanied by the same drunken orgies which marked the earlier religious festivals. Though the year appears in its Indian form to have been one of four seasons, it seems probable that it was originally like the Pleiades or Solstitial years, one measured by two seasons, with a sacrifice in the middle, the Vishuvan or midyear sacrifice of the Brahmanas, answering to the April sacrifice at Rome of the unborn calf mixed with the blood of the October horse slain on the 15th of October, the day on which this Indian year began. This was held in Rome on the 15th of April, exactly six months after the October Equiria. At the festival called the Fordicidia 4 thirty pregnant cows were offered, one for each of the thirty Curias, the villages or parishes into which the Latin State was divided, and the unborn calves were torn from their wombs, and burnt by the Vestal Virgins. These ashes were kept, and
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., v. 5, 4, 22; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129—138, xii. 7, 1, 2 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 214, note 3.
2   Ibid., xii. 7, 2, 9, xii. 7, 3, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, 223, note 2, 224.
3   Ibid., xii. 7, 1, 1, xii. 7, 2, iS, xii. 7, 3, 13, 14 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, note 2, 220, 221, 225, note 1, 227, 228.
4   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Aprilis Fordicidia, p. 71, Parilia, pp. 79 ff.
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were at the Parilia or Palilia on the 21st of April mixed with the blood of the October horse and thrown upon the heaps of burning bean-straw, laurel and olive wood, from which the national fires were lighted on this New Year’s Day.
This new opening of the year, transferred from the 15th of October, marks a later chronological date for this year than that given by the traditional birth of Arishtanemi on the 5th of Cheit (March—April), and makes this New Year, which was still under the influence of Virgo, as one dating from the time when the sun was in Virgo, in April — May, the Hindu month VTsakha. This was the month in which Parsva, the Jain Tlrthakara succeeding Arishtanemi, was born from the embryo quickened in Push at the winter solstice 1 2 3 4 ; also that in which the Syrian year, opening with St. George’s Day on the 23rd of April, begun ; as well as the Gond year beginning with the Akkhadi, or ploughing festival, on the 18th of Visakha (Baisakh). This was the official year beginning about 2,000 years after that of Arishtanemi, or between 10,000 and 11,000 B.C., a year under the influence of Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and the apex of the triangle of the three stars in the constellation of the Vulture or Lyra, called by the Chinese the three weaving sisters, who are said to measure time by “ passing on a day through the seven stages of the sky 3.”
This New Year’s Festival, described by Ovid 3, was originally the rustic feast of the shepherds, held in honour of the bisexual-god Pales, the god of the chaff or husk (palea) of the seed-grain, answering to the rice-mother husk described in the Annamite version of the Cinderella story given in Chapter II. pp. 60, 61 4. This god of the double-husk is the
1   Jacobi, Jain a Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Parsva; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 271, 272.
2   Legge, The Shih King, Decade v., Ode 9 ; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363.
3   Ovid, Fasti, 721—782.
4   Pal in Akkadian   No. 6, Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary,
Assyrian Palu, means a year, or the Pudenda Muliebria. It is perhaps this word which became in Latin Pales, the grain-husk, and in Hindi Bar, Bar-as,
   
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god of the two brothers Palici, worshipped in Southern Italy as the sons of Jupiter and Thalia1, the tree-mother, the twin cotyledon leaves of the parent-grass sacred to the god Sancus in Italy, and the Kusha grass of the Asiatic Kushites. The sheep-fold, sacred to the sun-ram, and its gates, the doorposts of the Apr! hymns, were decorated with green boughs and garlands. The sheep and the fold were sprinkled with water and purified by the shepherds at earliest dawn ; and the sheep were driven through the fire of bean-straw, laurel and olive wood to consecrate them to the creating-fire of the olive-goddess, the Greek Pallas, the Roman Minerva, the Egyptian goddess Min, the star Virgo. The shepherds then offered millet and millet cakes, milk and food offerings, to the wooden image of Pales, who is apparently the god of the Palladium, or wooden image of the goddess Pallas, a form of Pales. A prayer was then recited by the shepherds, with their faces to the East, asking Pales to bless them with good crops of grain and wool, and the increase of their flocks by the birth of healthy lambs. While saying this prayer they washed their hands in the morning dew and sprinkled themselves with dew from »a laurel branch. A wooden bowl of ancient form was then brought filled with heated wine, and after drinking this both men and women leaped three times through the mother-fire, exactly as the Dosadh priests do in their New Year’s sacrifice to Ra-hu, the sun-god.
In this festival we see the first beginnings of the belief in the baptismal virtues of holy water as more sanctifying than the blood-baths of the Phrygian ritual ; and also the worship of the rising-sun of day instead of the setting-sun and stars of night. It was followed by the Vinalia of the 23rd of April, the day of St. George in Europe and Syria, called in Rome the festival of Venus Erycina. This was the
the year, the Tamil Var-usliam. Pal is a Finnic equivalent for bar orvar,as the Akkadian Bil is an equivalent for Phur fire. Hence the goddess called Pallas was originally the mother-goddess of the year, and a goddess brought from the Euphratean countries to Troy, like Assaracus, the god of the bed Asurra.
1   Virg. s£n., ix. 585 ; Macrobius, s.v., 19.
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Greek Erigone, priestess of Dionysos, who gave the first wine known to mortals to Ikarios her father. He was slain by the peasants with whom he shared it, as they thought themselves poisoned. Erigone was led to the corpse of her father by Maira, her dog, and hung herself on a tree. Thus the father and daughter, the bisexual-year-goddess Shemi- ramot of the three-years cycle, in which Dionysos Nuk- telios was born from the imprisoned sun-mother, were slain at the end of their year, and went up to heaven with their dog as the constellations Virgo, Bootes, and the dog-star SiriusI. This virgin-star-goddess is the Phoenician Erek- hayim of length (erek) of days, the goddess of health, who ruled both this year of eleven months and that of Arishta- nemi preceding it, which was also an eleven-months year. These two year epochs were those falling between the days of the Pole Star in Cygnus and those of Vega in the Vulture constellation, that is the period from about 15,000 to 10,000 B.c.
The sacrifice of the sun-horse, which began this year in Rome on the 15th of October, was in India, according to the Mahabharata, offered on the Full Moon of Cheit, that is about the 1st of April2, as the initiation sacrifice of the coronation of Yudhishthira ; but as the New Year’s sacrifice of this year, ruled by the crescent-moon, it must have originally taken place at the New Moon, and it was transferred to the Full Moon as a preliminary sacrifice to the dying year-god of the year ending at the close of Cheit and beginning at the New Moon of Visakha (Baisakh). This sacrifice as an offering preceding the new year beginning in Visakha, under the constellation Virgo, about the 15th of April, would therefore date from about 10,200 B.c. It was certainly one to the thirty-three gods of this eleven- months year, for we are expressly told that the horse was
1   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, Les Deesses, pp. 148—150, Les Couples Divins. pp. 179, 180, Eratosph., Ccitast, Edition Robert, pp. 39 ff. ; Roscher, Lexicon, Art. Ikarios.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxxii. p. 181.
   
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cut into pieces according to the directions of the Veda, that is into thirty-four pieces, and that the horse to be sacrificed was placed under the guardianship of Drupadl, the mother- goddess, daughter of the tree (dm) wife of the Pandavas *, who was thus, like Subhadra, the mountain-mother-goddess, made the bride of the sun-horse. She is thus marked as the star-mother-goddess Virgo, wedded to the Pandavas after they left the kingdom of Chaitra-ratha, the chariot (ratha) of Chitra Virgo, under the guidance of the incense-priest (dhnmo) Dhaumya2.
The ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse in the Mahabharata is, as we shall see later on, compounded of various forms adapted to the fifteen, seventeen and eighteen-months years, described in Chapters VII., VIII. and IX., but the observation of the fundamental rule of the Vedic ritual that the horse was to be cut into thirty-four pieces, each containing one of its ribs 3, shows that it was originally a sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of this year and the sun-god. In the first form of the ritual of the sacrifice given in the Satapatha Brahfnana, the horse, when led up, is addressed in a hymn of eleven stanzas sacred to this year, but the horse is not slaughtered according to the ritual requiring its jugular vein to be cut and the blood shed into the sacrificial pit, but strangled, and it is said that the verse 18 of Rigveda i. 162, directing it to be cut into thirty- four pieces, may be left out, but the queen was placed, like Drupadl, lying down near the horse 4.
The horse sacrifice of the Mahabharata was accompanied, like the Sautramani and Palilia festival, with much drinking, for we are told that both men and women were drunk at it 5. Hence it was offered before the days when high-caste Hindus 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Ashvaraedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. 2, 3, p. 224.
2   Mahabharata (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxxv. pp. 520, 521.
3   Rg. i. 162, iS.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 5, 1, 16—18, xiii. 5, 2, 2; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 3S4, 3S5, 386.
s Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. 41, p. 227.
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became what they now are, strict teetotallers, who think it disgraceful to drink intoxicating liquor. It was not, as we shall see in the sequel, till the death of Krishna and the year-gods of the early ages of time reckoning that abstinence from drink became universal among the upper-classes, and was enjoined on all Buddhists, but not on Jains or Brahmin ascetics, unless we are to include this as one of the prohibitions covered by the rule that Brahmins were obliged to observe purity in eating l. Abstinence from intoxicating drink must also in Vedic times have been enjoined as a religious duty on all partakers of the orthodox Soma sacrament of the Brahmanas, in which the ingredients were mixed with water and not with the Sura or spirits of the Sautra- mani sacrifice. We shall see later on, in Chapter VIII., that this reformation dates after the seventeen-months year of Prajapati, inaugurated by the Vajapeya sacrifice of the chariot-horse race.
D.   The horses of the sun-chariot.
An important question arising out of the year of the sun-horse is that connected with the k belief, originating at this epoch, that the chariot of the sun was drawn by horses, and with the number attached to the sun’s car. We have seen that in the cycle-year the car of the year-god was drawn by asses, and the change of the ass into the horse was one made by the Parthian cavalry, who introduced into Asia Minor, Syria and Southern Arabia the horses of the Ugrian Finn tribes of the Volga, who have always sacrificed horses. These became the horses of the Pandava sons of Pritha, mother of the Parthava or Partha, a name given in the Mahabharata to the Pandavas, and she was also called Kunti, the lance or javelin of the horse-riding Shambara. The horses which drew the chariot of Krishna were two, Saivya and Su-griva. The first is the horse of
1   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. xxii.; Bidder, Baitdhayana, ii. io, 18, 2; S.B.E., vol. xiv. p. 279.
   
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Shiva, the three-eyed god of the cycle-year, the year-bull ; the second, the bird-headed ape, who married Tara, the Pole Star goddess in Kepheus *. These correspond to Vrishabha, the bull, and Shimshumara, the alligator, the constellation Draco, who drew the Ashvins’ car bearing the sun’s daughter to the house of Divo-dasa, the ten (,dashan) months of the cycle-year2. Similarly Achilles’ horses were originally two, Xanthus, the yellow, and Balios, the dappled star-horse, sons of the West wind, given to his father Peleus, god of the potter’s clay, the Great Potter, by Poseidon, who was originally Erectheus or Ericthonius, the snake-god of the very fertile (ipi) earth (%0a>v), who first owned the three thousand mares, the mother - stars, from whom twelve horses were begotten by Boreas, the North wind 3. The two original sun-horses, or star-season gods, became the three horses of Krishna driven by Daruka, the god of strong-drink (dam), given by Krishna to Satyaki, the son of Shini, the moon-goddess, who, with his ten sons slain by Bhurishravas, the bearer of the Yupa or sacrificial stake 4, represented, like Haman and his ten sons, the eleven months of this year. This chariot was given to Satyaki before he encountered Kama, the horned-god of the three- years cycle, and the third horse is called Meghapushpa Valahaka, the cloud (megha) flower, the circler (vala) S. This was a horse belonging to the car of Uttara, the North-god answering to the Greek Boreas, who was son of the king of Virata, and drove the car of Arjuna when he encountered the Kauravyas as a sexless warrior under the banner of the ape with the lion’s tail; but in the description of Uttara’s car the horse Meghapushpa Valahaka becomes two, giving his car a yoke of four horses, the four seasons of this year 6. This third horse in the chariot of Achilles is the mortal
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Sabha-krigii) Parva, ii. p. 4.
2   Rg. i. 116, 17, 18.
3   Homer, Iliad, xvi. 149, xx. 219—225, xxiii. 277, 278.
4   Mahabharata Bhishma (.Bhishma-vadha) Parva, lxxiv. 20—23, P- 273.
s Mahabharata Drona (Jayadratha-badha) Parva, cxlvii. 45—48, p. 461.
6 Mahabharata Virata {Goharana) Parva, xlv., xlvi. pp. 107, 109.
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horse Pedasus, taken by him from Heetion, the father of Andromache, wife of Hector, together with the golden lyre of the sun-god z. Thus the third sun-horse of Satyaki and Achilles is the horse born of the cycle-year with its ten months of human generation.
E.   The Thibetan year of eleven months.
I have already shown that this year of eleven months of thirty-three days each was probably the official year of the original Telis, Kandhs and Kaurs, and that it was the ritualistic year of the Northern Yavanas or barley-growers during the age of the worship of the year-god, symbolised in the head of the sun-horse. Further conclusive evidence on this point is given by the ancient Thibetan religion and the ritual of the Mossoos living to the South-east of Thibet, between it and Yunnan. They are called by Marco Polo Mossooman, and according to Chinese history they, under the leadership of Mong Tsu, invaded China from Thibet, and founded the Mossoo kingdom with its capital Li-kiang. It was reconquered by China in the 8th century A.D.; but after the conquest the Chinese at first retained the royal dynasty as rulers under the supervision of a Chinese resident, and since they were deprived of their administrative powers they have been allowed to live in their ancient capital as Mandarins of the third degree.
These people, though nominally Buddhists, still retain their old religion and their priests, whom they call Tong-pa, according to M. Bonin, and Bonbo by Mr. Rockhill. They worship the Buddha Shen-rab, to whom they offer living animals, and especially fowls. They make their circuits round their sacred buildings, answering to the circuits of the' altar in the ritual of the Brahmanas, from right to left, against the course of the sun, instead of using the prescribed Buddhist Padakkhino, the sun-circle from left to right, with which every disciple was required to salute the orthodox 1
1   Homer, Iliad, xvi. 153, 154, ix. 186—iSS.
   
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BuddhaL M. Bonin, the French Vice-President in Indo- China, visited their country on an official mission in 1895, and acquired a peculiarly intimate knowledge of their customs from one of their priests, who gave him a copy of their ritual written in Mossoo characters, with a translation in Chinese of the first six pages, giving the Chinese equivalent for each Mossoo hieroglyphic. These latter are strictly pictographic ; thus the sign of the family is a house with a man and woman in it, that of prayer an altar, similar symbolisms being used for other abstract ideas ; but there are no characters denoting verbs. It therefore represents the earliest form of pictorial writing. In this ritual the ruling-goddess is the female Buddha, Kouei Ying, with the conch-shell of the year-god Vishnu, to whom rice and incense are offered. She is the goddess of the mother-tree, and her consort the male Buddha, her son, the sun-god, is represented with a halo round his head. Besides these gods, the sacred spear or fire-drill, the two birds of day and night, the original cloud Khu birds, the chief of the evil Genii, the god of the under-world, are represented, the last wearing the robes of a Thibet Lama. M. Bonin, in a paper read before the Oriental Congress at Paris in 1897, translated thirty stanzas of this ritual 1 2 3. They apparently describe the course of the year opening with a blast from the conch of the year- goddess. It begins under the constellation of the Tiger and the protection of the rising sun and moon. The Tiger, as one of the Chinese signs of the Zodiac, is, as Professor Douglas informs me, the constellation Wei, containing e, fju, £, r], 6, t, K, v, Scorpio, and this is the constellation said in the Li-chi to culminate at dawn at the beginning of their year in January—February, when the sun is in Shih a Pegasus 3. This later constellation seems to have been that of the Tiger in Akkadian astronomy, for it is there called
1   Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 217.
2   M. Bonin, Note sur nn Manuscrit Mossoo Actes du Onzieme Congres Lnter- national des Orientalistes Paris, 1897, sect. ii. pp. I—10.
3   Legge, Li-chi, Bk. iv., The Yiieh Ling; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 249.
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Lik-barra, or the Striped-dog, by the Akkadians. It is the second in the Tablet of the Thirty Stars, beginning with Skat in Aquarius, called the Star of the Foundation1. These stars represent the course of the moon through the first three months of a lunar solar-year, beginning with Kislev (November—December), and in Chinese astronomy this month begins when the constellation Pi 7 Pegasus and a Andromeda culminates at dusk2 3 4. They appear in Rg. x. 189, where they are called “the thirty stations ruled over by the mighty bull,” the moon-god. In the Grihya Sutra they are the thirty sisters ruling the three Ashtakas or monthly festivals following the AgrahayanT full moon of November—December, that is exactly the same three months as those covered by the course of the Thirty Stars in the Akkadian Tablet. It was at the third festival called the Ekashtaka, or wife of the year, held on the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January—February), that the sun-moon-child, the “ child of the majesty of Indra,” was born 3. This child was, as we shall see in Chapter VII., the sun-god of the year beginning in Magh (January— February), the sun-physician who started on his career as the healing-sun-god on his horse Kanthaka, the sun-horse Pegasus, seven days after his son Rahulo, the little Rahu or sun-god, was born on the full moon of Magh 4. This sun, born as the rider on Pegasus, was, like Horus, whose sons are the four stars in Pegasus, the sun born of the Thigh, the constellation of the Great Bear, the Thigh of Set, the Ape-
1   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars,’ vol. ii. pp. 67—70.
2   Legge, IA-chi, Book iv., The Ytieh Ling ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 301.
3   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, a—k ; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 341—343.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, pp. 82—84. The date here given for the departure of the Buddha on Kanthaka is the full moon of Asalhi (Asarh), June—July. But that was the date of the Glorification of the Perfect Buddha, the sun-god of the summer solstice, not of the birth of the first Buddha, the sun-physician, which is that stated in the Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5 c.
   
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god. It was as an offering to this father-thigh-god that on the day following each of the Ashtakas a cow was sacrificed, and the left thigh and ribs presented to the presiding deity of the Fathers. Strong drink and garlands, the flower garlands of the Teli mother-goddess, were also offered to the Mothers L
The tiger and his tiger wives were, as we have seen, the parents of the Mons or Mallis, who, with the Licchavis or sons of the Akkadian dog (Lig), formed the confederacy of the Vajjians orsons of the tiger (Vyaghra), who ruled the country on the borders of Nepal which intervened between it and Thibet. This Tiger country was that in which the Buddha was born, and it was the year of the tiger and the Tiger-star Pegasus, which made its way into China, as is shown by the Chinese Calendar in the Ll- chi, in which the year beginning in January—February, the year of the birth of the Ekashtaka sun-god, is said to begin, when the sun is in Shih or Pegasus1 2 3 4. The year-sun born of the Tiger mother, the Mossoo goddess Kouei Ying, is the sun-god called Kwan-tsz’tsan, the self- existing sun-god also called Kwan Yin 3, or the male form of his mother the Buddhist Avalbkatesvara, the visible (avalokita) god, the sun of the Buddhist year of three seasons, who, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 36, was represented in the statues seen by Hiouen Tsiang atTiladaka in Magadha as born from Tara, the Pole Star, and the Buddha. He is represented as sitting on his mother’s lap in one of the Chinese statues in the Musee Guimet in Paris 4.
This Mossoo year begins with the birth of the Tiger-sun, and in stanza 14 of M. Bonin’s translation of the ritual
1 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 8—n, Sankha- yana Grihya Sutra, iii. 14, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 344, 105.
2   Legge, Li-cht, Bk. iv., The Yiieh Ling, i. 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 249.
3   Beale Buddhist Records of the Western World, Hiouen Tsiang, vol. i. pp. 60, note 210, 127, note 28, 12S.
4   Guide au Muste Guimet Vitrine, 20, pi 135.

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the thirty-three days of the months of this year are called the thirty-three genii of heaven, while its twenty-two halfmonths are called the twenty-two genii of earth. It closes with the constellation of the Pig. This in Thibetan astronomy is the constellation of the Great Bear ruled by the goddess Marlchi, the spouse of Haya-griva, the god of the horse’s (haya) neck (griva) or head, the ruling god of this eleven-months year, the sun-god born at its commencement. He is driven away by the Buddhist priests, as the most powerful of evil spirits, at the beginning of the sacramental service of three pills of flour, sugar and butter, partaken with beer, at the annual national festival, beginning their year in Magh (January—February) q which is thus the same as the Mossoo year. This god, called in Thibetan Tam-ding, is" also married to Tara, the Pole Star. Hence Tara, the Pole Star, married to Su-griva, the bird-headed-ape, and Marlchi to Haya-griva, the horse-headed god, are equivalents. Marlchi means the fire-spark, and is feminine in Sanskrit. She is called in Rg. x. 58, 6 the goddess in the light heights of heaven, to whom the dead go. In the Mahabharata she becomes the male Marlchi, the father of Kashyapa1 2 3 4 5, the father of the Kushika, and one of the six sons of Brahma. In Hindu astronomy he is represented as one of the stars of the Great Bear, and with his son Kashyapa, he is one of the tail stars in the constellation Simshumara, the alligator 3. It is as a star, to which the Great Bear points, that Marlchi is represented in Thibetan theology. Then she is the goddess called also Vajra Varahi, the sow (varahi) of the thunderbolt, who has three faces, the left being that of a sow, and sits upon a lotus throne, driving the seven pigs, the seven stars of the Great Bear 4. She also appears in Japan as the war-god seated on a boar s, and we see
1   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 361, 446, 44S, 502, 503.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxv. p. 185.
3   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chap. xlv. p. 390, xxii. p. 242.
4   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, p. 361.
5   Guide an Mnsee Guimet Vitrinc, 7 Classe des Tens, pp. 20S, 209.
   
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in him the boar-god who was once the Poie Star sow, the god who slew at the end of his year’s course, in the constellation of the seven pigs, Adonis, the sun-god born of the Cypress tree, who was originally the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion. This boar-god is the equivalent of the Akkadian god Mer-mer or Martu, the West wind, called the pig-god, and in his female form of Istar called Biz-bizi, the pig (pes) motherT.
It seems probable that the constellation of the Great Bear was called that of the Seven Pigs in Akkadian as well as in Thibetan astronomy, for the planet Saturn is called Kakkab Ila Ninpes, the star of the god of the Lord of the Boar or pig 1 2. But in the early astronomy, as we know from the Zendavesta, the planets were looked upon as rebels, or wandering stars not belonging to the divine -host of the ruling fixed stars. But this planet of the pig is, as its Roman name Saturnus shows, the planet of sowing (satur), that is the planetary analogue of the stars of the Plough, the Septemtriones, or seven oxen of the Great Bear. These in the ploughing age of the sun-ox Rama, were the successors of and substitutes for the early Phrygian parent-stars of the pigs, the flock led by the year-boar of heaven, the boar and deer-sun-star Orion.
We find also in Celtic mythology most important evidence confirming the conclusion that the Great Bear stars were once called, throughout Europe and Asia, the seven pigs. This is furnished by the story telling of the hunting by Arthur of Twrch Trwyth, meaning the king’s boar and his seven swine-children, which proves that the Thibetan mythology of the seven pigs was that of the early pre-Celtic Piets. This boar-god, Twrch Trwyth, carried between his ears a comb, a razor and pair of shears, the mythical weapons for arranging the hair of the year-god in this age, when the cult of the hair was a dominant part of the national
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 1S1.
2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii., chap. xv. pp. 215, 216.
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ritual. It was to get these weapons of the year-god that Arthur or Airem, the sun - ploughman, pursued Twrch Trwyth and slew him and his seven sons, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the eight ruling powers before the age of the sun-god of the eight-rayed star of Chapter VII. These ruling gods were those of the primitive Pictish population, called in Britain Prydain, or sons of the form (pryd), the people who tatooed their totems on their persons- The swine of heaven, the stars, were herded by the three stout swineherds of the Isle of Prydain. (i) Pryderi, the man of the form {pryd), son of Pwyll or Arawn, the' god of the Southern Hades, from whom he got his swine, as the stars of the South; (2) Drystan, son of Tallwch; and (3) CoH, son of Coilfrewi, the three seasons of the year of March, the god of the horse’s ears, whose ears were, as we have seen in Chapter V., first the ears of the ass-god Midas. Another form of Drystan is Drostan, the Druid who brought back the foes of Bran to life by a bath of new milk. He is apparently the summer-tree {dm) god. The story of the victory of Arthur over Twrch Trwyth and his seven pig-sons tells of the end of the rule of the Pole Star god and of the conversion of his worshippers to the service of the sun-god, for we find in the Mabinogion a dramatic version of the dialogue, in which Gwalch-mei, the Hawk of May, brought Drystan to leave the service of the ass- god March and to swear fealty to Arthur 1.
To return to the year of the Mossoos, who worship the seven stars of the Great Bear as the Seven Pigs. It is one began under the constellation of the Tiger or Horse Pegasus, and concluding under that of the Great Bear. It is thus the exact equivalent of the year of Horus in Egypt, ruled by the eleven stars of these constellations. Thus both years were years of eleven months of thirty-three days, each containing 363 days; and that this was the year of Horus in Egypt is made still more probable by the
1   Rhys, Celtic Folklore, chap. ix. pp. 509,510, 509—519,521 ; The Arthurian Legend, chap. i. p. 12, chap. xii. pp. 281—-284, chap. xvi. pp. 37S—380.
   
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statement in the Egyptain official myth of Horus, analysed by M. Naville, that Horus started with his son for Egypt to conquer Set in the three hundred and sixty- third year of his reign U
This year was also that of the Swabian goddess Ursula, the Little Bear, the German Horsel, who went cruising for three years, those of the cycle, with ten companions in eleven galleys, to free herself from the marriage proposals of a heathen king. As the price of her freedom she was to collect 11,000 virgins, and these were brought to the shrine of the gods of the three-years cycle, the Three Kings of Cologne, where, at the end of their three years’ task, they were all slaughtered by the Haus 2.
These Mossoos, or Mon-su, were the sons of the mountain (mon) and the bird (su), the two mother-birds they worshipped. They, who ruled India before the Kauravya Ku~ shikas, came up thence and conquered the Thibetans, the Kout-song and the Min-kia, who are the aboriginal inhabitants of Yunnan, and are both named in the Mossoo ritual. They were worshippers of Hayagriva, the horse (haya) headed god, represented with three heads and four arms, one pair holding and shooting the bow of heaven 3; he is thus a Thibetan Eurytus, the Centaur. This is the Indian black- barley mare, Yavadiya, the mother of the horse of Guga, one of the five Pirs or gods of the old five-days week, headed by Ram-deo, the god Ram 4. The Mossoos are described by M. Bonin as entirely matriarchal in their sexual relations, for the women did not marry but united themselves to temporary partners, a practice the Chinese have sought to stop by fining heavily all fathers of families who do not provide legitimate husbands for their daughters. 1 2 3 4
1   Naville, My the d’ Horns ; Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxvi. p. 390.
2   Baring Gould, ‘Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,’ Ursula, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 13.
3   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 364, 444—446.
4   Crooke, Introduction to the Popular Religions and Folklore of Northern India, pp. 130—132.
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F.   The connection between this year and ceremonial haircutting.
The Mossoos, like the Chinese, wear pig-tails, and this is also a characteristic mark of the Mundas. It was they and the Bhils, the men of the bow, who introduced into India the custom of hair-cutting. This was originally an offering to the river-parent-gods of a lock of hair, in which the strength of the body dwelt, according to the belief of the Jewish Nazarites, as set forth in the story of Samson. We see in the Creation story of the Edda how the sacrifice originated. It is there said the Ymin, the roarer, the thundercloud-god, made grass and trees of his hair. This hair thus offered was the firstfruits, which it was the duty of all men and women to offer to the creating rain-god-parent of the rivers. Thus Achilles sent a lock of his hair by the hand of his dead friend Patroclus to his parent-river Sper- cheios T. This custom of cutting off the front hair as an offering made at puberty apparently began in this epoch. It was a distinctive tribal mark of the Abantes of Euboea, whose weapons were the ashen spears of the sons of the northern ash-tree, Yggdrasil, sacred to the sun-horse2. This tonsure offering, ascribed to the Celts under the name Celtic tonsure, was that made by all young Athenians as a preliminary observance necessary before they could claim, at the age of eighteen, their share in the village land and admission into the Phratria. It was originally required both from women and men, for Pausanias tells us that the women of Trcezen used to offer a lock of their hair to Hippolytus, the constellation Auriga 3, called by the Akkadians Askar, the goat.
This constellation is also called by Aratus4 the goat. The goat-star is one on the left shoulder, and the kids two 1
1 Iliad, xxiii. 141—146.   2 Ibid., ii. 535—544.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 32, vol. i. p. 121.
4   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., The Phainomena, or Heavenly Display of Aratus, IS5, 166, 679—682.
   
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stars on the left hand of the Driver or Charioteer. This driver is Poseidon or the ocean-snake-god Ericthonius, king of the realms below the ocean on which the earth floats, who is called the Olenian1 or Taraxippos, the frightener of horses. This epithet of Olenian, also given to the goats which he bears on his left shoulder, is derived from the Greek Olene (d>\ev7)), arm, and marks this driving-god as he who bears the goat of the Pole Star on his arm, an epithet exactly similar to that which calls Hermes, Krio- phorus, the Ram-bearer. Both epithets indicate that these year-gods are sons of the mother-tree growing on the very fertile (epixddov) earth, from which the snake-god took his name. Thus he was the ruler of the cycle-year of the goat, and he, as we have seen, gave the sun-horses of this year to Achilles. He is also thus equated with Thor and Pushan, from the latter of whom he may have taken his name of Poseidon, the god with the form (etSo?) of Push, as they were both gods whose year-chariot was drawn by goats 1 2; and we have seen that Pushan was the year-god who wedded the sun-maiden when the sun was in Cancer at the winter solstice, about 14,200 B.C., that is in the cycle-year. This god of the year-car, also called Hippolytus, is in this form the son of Theseus, meaning the Organiser or Civiliser, who learnt from the star-goddess Ariadne (Corona Borealis) to measure the course of the sun through the year by the stars. She thus furnished him with the clue by which he reached the centre of the labyrinth of the Minotaur, the year-god of the early Pole Star age, which he slew. The mother of Hippolytus was Hippolyte, daughter of Mars, the god of the South-west wind Martu, the tree-mother of the South; and he, like Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, who saw in his dream the eleven stars of this year, was accused of attempting to violate the second wife of Theseus Phcedra, the moon- goddess of the myrtle-tree, and torn to death by his own
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 20, 8, vol. i. pp. 315, 316.
2   Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, 21, p. 417 ; Rg. vi. 55, 6.
Z 2
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horses at the end of this year, during which he drove the year-chariot1. He was restored to life by Aisculapius, the god of Trcezen2 3 4, where hair offerings were made, and he then became Virbius, who, as we have seen, was the male- god of the Grove of Aricia, ruled by Diana or Tana, the tree- goddess of the Southern mud (tan), p. 34. This constellation of the god who drove the year-chariot of the goat became the guardian constellation of the Babylonians, the star- messenger of the Pole Star goat. They called the star Capella a Auriga, the little goat on the left wrist of the driver Dilgan, the god (dil) of the land (gan), and it was by the position of this star in relation to the new moon of the vernal equinox that the Akkadians, according to Dr. Sayce, determined the beginning of the year 3. It was also used as a year-star by the prehistoric Hor-shesu in Egypt, for Sir N. Lockyer tells us of three temples at Karnak, Memphis and Annu oriented to Capella as a setting-star, at dates varying from 5500 B.C. to 3050 B.C.4 These were
1   A similar accusation was made against Bellerophon, Baal Raphon, the rider on Pegasus, and Peleus, father of Achilles, both gods of this year of transition from Pole Star worship to that of the zodiacal sun, who was not the ploughing-sun Rama, guided by Lakhsman, but the sun making his own path through the appointed stars. Bellerophon was accused by Anteia, the backward {ante) goer, the moon-goddess of the stars going widershins round the Pole. She was wife of Prcetus, king of Tiryns, the oldest city of Argos, the land of the Southern sons of the constellation Argo. Peleus’ accuser was Hippolyte, a female form of Hippolytus, he who was loosed by horses who circled the heaven as a night-star, in the path of the solar lunar zodiac. Her husband was Akastos, king of Thessay, and his name connected with &Ke<nns, a healer, and aicrj, a knife, as well as the cn^ccra Avypd, or dreadful signs, carried by Bellerophon as his death warrant (Homer, Iliad, vi. 178, 179), traced on a tablet {irivaKi), tell of this age of incipient sun-worship as the Brouze Age in which the barber-surgeons began to use the knife and written pictographic characters were first employed. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., p. 523—532.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 31.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 419, note 2, 420; Sayce, Herodotus, p. 402 ; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘ Euphratean Stellar Researches.’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, May, 1893, p. 324.
4   Lockyer, Dawn of Astrono?ny, chap. xxxi. pp. 316, 318, chap. xxx. p. 312.
   
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temples to Ptah, the opening (patah) god, who was, as we have seen, the Southern creating-ape of the worshippers of the evening stars. Annu also is On, the city of the sun-god, whose high-priest gave his daughter Asenath as wife to Joseph z, the interpreter (asipu) god of this year, who wore the star-coat of many colours, and ended his year as the star-god, the eleventh son of Jacob, in the pit dug for lions2, that is under the constellation Leo, ruling the year of the ape with the lion’s tail. This year of Babylon ruled by Capella, beginning at the vernal equinox, was one equivalent to this eleven-months year in India, which was, as we have seen, measured by the constellation Chitra or Virgo ruling the month March—April, and it thus furnishes us with valuable evidence as to the chronology of the year of the hair-offerers.
But to return after this digression to the historical evidence given' by the customs of cutting the hair, we learn from Pausanias that offerings of hair were made before marriage by the girls of Megara and Delos 3 ? and that the hair of the children of the Dorian city of Corinth was cut in remembrance of the children of Medea 4, who was the counsellor of Jason, the healer (ias), in the year-voyage of the Argo, the mother-constellation of the South, and of the Turano- Dravidian races who brought to Greece the Dravidian and Dorian customs of communal village holdings, communal education of the village children and common meals.
Hence the custom of the ceremonial cutting of the children’s hair was one* apparently brought from India. The ritual of the ceremony, which was performed on girls as well as boys, is described in the Grihya Sutra 5. It requires that the hair of all children should be cut off in the 1
1 Gen. xli. 50.   2 Ibid, xxxvii. 20—24.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 43, 4, vol. i. p. 66.   4 Ibid., ii. 3, 6, vol. i. p. 75.
5   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra, Shankayana Grihya Sutra, i. 2S, 1—24 ; Ashval- ayana Grihya Sutra, i. 17, 1—19, Paraskara Grihya Siitra, ii. 1, 1—17, Grihya Sutra of Gobhila, ii. 9, 1—29 ; S.B.E., vol. Icxix. pp. 55—57, 1S4—186, 301— 303, vol. xxx. pp. 60—63.
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first or third year, or according to family custom, and this rule prevails among the Bhils, who do not acknowledge Hindu ritual, but who shave their children’s hair when they are three or five years old. The custom is also observed by the Malays, who in India are the Mallis or Mons, the men of Malabar. They cut the hair in the first week after birth or a few days after the child is named, and in some cases leave the central lock, the top-knot of the. Mundas, Mossoos and Chinese, but generally shave all the hair off1. But this custom of shaving, which involves the use of a sharp razor, belongs to a later age than that with which we are now dealing. It would be impossible for the barber-priest of the Grihya-Sutras, who performs the religious ceremony of the Hindu tonsure with a copper razor and one of Udumbara {Ficas glomerata) wood, to shave the heads on which he operated.
It is most probable that the ceremony was originally performed at the age of puberty, and in the case of women before marriage, and that then only a few locks were cut off. Mr. Skeat saw seven cut from the head of the Malay bride at whose tonsure he officiated 2. These locks with the water in which they were placed were buried at the foot of a barren fig-tree in hopes of making it bear fruit, a ceremony repeating the belief of the Edda that trees and grass were the hair of the creator Ymin. That the Hindu ceremony of the ceremonial clipping of the hair, succeeding that of the ceremonial offering of hair to the river-gods made by the Greek youths and maidens,,was one dating from the age of this year is rendered probable by the ritual and the evidence as the institution of the barber’s trade.
The barbers of Bengal are divided into the three castes of Bhandaris, Hajams and Napits. Their caste customs prove that they were originally associations of Kushika priests, who belonged to the age of the worship of the Panch Pirs, or five village gods of the Telis, who, as we
1   Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. vi. p. 341.
3 Ibid., chap, vi, pp. 353—355-
   
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have seen, trace their descent from the gods of the eleven- months year. Thus the Bhandaris, the barbers of Orissa, still in some villages are the priests of these gods, and hold land rent free in payment for their services. Hence in Orissa, one of the birth-places of Indian ritual, the country of the great temple of Jagahnath at Poori, and of the Mahendra mountain sacred to Parasu-Rama, who was, as we have seen, a god of the cycle-era, the institution of barber-priests dates back to the days when grants of land were set apart for the village servants, and when the Mahto or superintendent of the Manjhus land allotted to the king was one of the village rulers, for the Mahto still exists in all Orissa villages. There also the rules as to the tenure of land are similar to those of the Ooraons, which I have shown in Chapter V. to be like those of the Pre-Celtic Welsh. The Bhandaris are marked as a Kushika caste by their marriage rites, for among them the bride and bridegroom are united not by the earlier Sindurdan ceremony of marking the partings of the bride’s hair with red, as a symbol of making blood brotherhood, but by tying the hands of the wedded pair together with a wisp of Kusha grass I.
The Hajams, the barber-surgeons of Behar or Magadha, the Chiroo country of the sun-god Ra-hu, marry by the rite of Sindurdan, but worship the five Pirs. They are the universal match-makers, the assistants of the Brahmin priest in the marriages of the higher and the marriage-priest of the lower castes. They also like the Bhandaris are village servants, getting a stipulated payment in grain in Behar, and an allotment of land in Chutia Nagpur and Manbhum. Their wives act as nurse-tenders to women during the last six days of their confinement, succeeding the Chamar or Dhanuk nurse who acts during the first six days. The Dhanuks, who are allied to the Chamars or workers in leather, are the sons of the bow (dhanu), who are the personal servants and
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Bhandari, vol. i. pp. 92—94.
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watchmen in the higher caste households of the old Maghada kingdom of Behar and of the North-west provinces. They are connected with the leading agricultural caste of the Kurmis, one of whose seven sub-divisions is called Dhanuk.
They as a caste are divided into two sections, called Naga and Kashyapa. That is to say, they are the survivals of the old Naga Kushika, sons of Kashyapa, who, as I have shown in Chapter III. p. 86, were originally like the Dhanuks, sons of the bow (.Kaus)x.
In Bengal the barber-surgeon is called Napit, and gets an allotment of land as a village servant. He is the marriage agent and the marriage priest. In the Napit marriage, after the bridegroom has been anointed with mustard oil and turmeric as a member of the yellow race, he and the bride are both dressed in the sacred red tusser Kausya silk, and are united by the bride placing her hands palms downward on the palms of the bridegroom. The Napit barber, who officiates as priest, dictates the mantras the wedded pair are to repeat, and finishes the ceremony by instructing them in their duties in the words of the Gaur-vachana, or discourse telling of the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, the mountain- goddess, in her form of Gauri, the wild cow or Indian bison1 2 3.
The ceremonies of the Hindu tonsure, called Chula- karman or arrangement of the hair, confirm the conclusions as to the great antiquity of their craft drawn from the caste usages of the barbers. They prove that the hair was originally only clipped as a firstfruits’ offering of the growing products of the body, answering to the crops grown from the earth. Both were in primitive creeds the offspring of the rain, and hence arose the Malay rule forbidding coverings to be worn on the head 3. This must be left open, like the crops, to the life-giving air and rain, and most of the Indian lower castes, including the Ooraons, who tend their hair carefully, keep their heads bare. It was from the belief in
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Hajam, Dhanuk, vol. i. pp. 306—
309, 220.   2 Ibid., vol. ii. Napit, pp. 125—129.
3   Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. ii. p. 43 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 189.
   
345
the sanctifying efficacy of water that each lock of hair was moistened before it was cut, and this was a repetition of the bathing of the child which preceded the hair-clipping. It was an early form of the baptismal rite common to all the yellow sons of the rivers who worshipped the wolf-sun-god, the Lycian Apollo, born on the yellow river Xanthus, in which he was bathed by his mother; and in this ceremony the child was believed to be impregnated with the seed of life stored by the rain-god of heaven in the waters of the parent-river. The barber used mixed hot and cold water to moisten the head, and placed next each lock before he cut it a bunch of Kusha grass which he cut with the hair. He first wet the head three times from left to right, in the direction of the sun, with water, fresh butter and curds, but in cutting the hair he took the right-hand side first, and thence cut three or four locks. He then cut from the left side two or three locks, making the whole number of locks five or seven, answering to the five and seven days of the week. The Gobhila Grihya Sutra directs that seven locks are to be cut, beginning with the right side, whence the barber proceeds to cut seven locks first from the back and then-from the left side, thus going round the head contrary to the course of the sun. The twenty-one locks thus cut answer to the twenty-one days of the month in the seventeen-months year of Chapter VIII. In this last ceremony it is clear that the cutting leaves three single tufts to be arranged, one on each side and one at the back of the head. These answer to the three locks worn by the Dakota or joined Indians I, the American representatives of the Hindu Khati. They have, as I have shown in the “ Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,” reproduced in America the ceremony of the self-torturing Churuk or swinging Puja, a relic of this ascetic Hindu age. It is celebrated in Bengal about the beginning of Baisakh (April—May), a month which, as we
1   Mallory, ‘Picture Writing of the American Indians.’ Publications of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, vol. x. p. 433. Fig. 55S.

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have seen, began the year of this epoch opening with the Roman Palilia and its associated festivals. Also they associated with this festival the Ooraon rites of cutting down the sacred Kurum or almond-tree and the buffalo dance I. The hair when cut by the Indian barber is to be placed on Kusha grass, bull’s dung or Shami leaves, and, according to the Shankayana Sutra, to be buried in a garden, like the hair of the Malays. The Kusha grass, like that cut with the hair by the barber, shows that the ceremony dates from the age of the Kushika, while the leaves of the Sham! (Prosopis spicigera), the hundred-branched (shata-valsha) tree, show that the ritual of the Ashvalayana Grihya Sutra, in which it and twenty-one bunches of Kusha grass are used, belonged to the later age of the Pandavas and of the seventeen-months year. This Shami tree is that in which the Pandavas hid their bows during their seclusion in Virata in the thirteenth year of their exile from power. It was from this tree that Arjuna took his bow when he went forth with Uttara, the North-god, as his charioteer to fight the Kauravyas, under the banner of the ape-god with the lion’s tail, who ruled this year. His bow was the Gandiva, the god {diva) of the land {gan), the rain-bow of the rain-god, which was, we are told, successively the bow of Sakra, the wet {sak) god, of Soma, the mother-tree-god, and of Varuna, the ram- rain (var) god of heaven, the rain-sun-god 2.
The barber’s fee for this baptismal ceremony was rice, barley, sesamum seeds, and beans or millet, thus showing that it belongs to the age when barley and millets had been brought from Asia Minor to India with the sacred oil {sesamum orientale) of the Telis.
The custom of ceremonial hair-cutting, of which I have now sketched the first beginnings was apparently exported from India to all the countries on the Persian Gulf and
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix. pp. 291—293.
2   Mahabharata Virata (Pandava-f raves ha) Parva, v. pp. 12, 13, Virata (Go- harana) Parra, xli., xlii. pp. 100, 101 ; Zimmer, Alt indisches Leben, chap, iii. pp. 59, 60.
   
34 ;
Southern Arabia, for Jeremiah xxv. 20—23, speaks of the people of Dedan in the Persian Gulf and of Tema, or Southern Arabia, as “ having the corners of their hair polled.” This expression apparently refers to a ceremonial cutting of the side locks like that prescribed in the Indian ritual. But the cutting of the side locks seems in Southern Arabia, according to Herodotus iii. 8, to have become a shaving of the temples and a cutting of the hair in front, after the fashion of Dionysus. He, whose car was drawn by Indian leopards, was originally the Indian god Shiva: the .god of dancing accompanied by the consumption of ardent drinks, who was transported to Arabia, whence he brought to Greece the cult of Dionysus. He was, as I have shown in Chapter V. pp. 243, 244, the son of the Phoenician goddess Semele or Samlath, whose images were-worshipped under the Brythonic Celtic name of Pen or Pen Samlath, the lady {Pen) Samlath or Shemiramot; and this name of the Celtic queen of heaven was given to the mother of the wine»-god by the Indian Turvasu, who called the Pole Star Tar! Pennu. This shaving of the front of the head instead of only the side locks is the Celtic tonsure. It became in the later days of sun-worship, when men began to worship the rising-sun of the East instead of the setting- sun of the West, the tonsure which left only the scalp-lock on the top of the head uncut. This was the rite prescribed for all those who offered the sacrifices of the year of three seasons at the Vaishvadeva, Varuna Praghasah and Saka- medha festivals. The hair was to be cut for these festivals, and before partaking of the later Soma sacrament, with a copper razor, as in the ceremonies of the Grihya Sutra ritual J. It was this all-round tonsure, or clipping of all hair except the scalp-lock, which produced the pigtail of the Mossoos, Chinese, Mundas, and all high-caste Hindus. 1
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 4, 5—7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 450.
34§
   
G.   The Bronze Age in India.
This evidence of the early history of ceremonial haircutting proves that it originated in the Copper Age preceding that of Bronze. This last is called in the Rigveda and Brahmanas the epoch of the third-class of Fathers, the Agnishvattah, or fathers who burnt their dead. They are the race whose remains are found with bronze metal vessels and spear-points in the circular mound-tombs in the Nilgiris, answering in their form to the round burrows of the Bronze Age in Europe. The people who made these graves are depicted^ in the clay figures found in them as wearing high hatsl. Native tradition says that these tombs are those of the Pandyan kings, the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, and assigns them to the Kurumbas, the mixed shepherd and cultivating race, of whom the Kurmis, the Madras Kadumbis, are the leading members. These Kurmis are, according to the traditions of Central India, the rulers of the country who succeeded the Gonds, and who still survive also in the Kaurs, whom I have described in Chapter IV. pp. 195, 196. The hat shows them to belong to the race of the Chiroos, or sons of the bird (Chir), the ancient kings of Magadha, the Chiroos of Madras, and to the Dard sons of the antelope. That is to say, they are a branch of the Hittites, who are depicted on ancient monuments as wearing a high-peaked cap and shoes with turned-up toes, like those made by the Chamars in some parts of India. Offerings are made to these Fathers of the Bronze Age at the Pitriyajna, held at the autumnal equinox, and they are also invoked in the Vedic hymn summoning the fathers to this sacrifice2 3. To them, as to the Pitaro Barishadah, parched barley is offered, but the half-share allotted to them is ground and made into a porridge with the milk of a cow suckling an adopted calf 3. This is the Karambha, or barley -
1   Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Nilgiri Hills, vol. x. p. 322.
2   Rg. x. 15, 11.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 1,6; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421.
   
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porridge offered to Pushanx, the year - god of the winter solstice, and husband of the sun-maiden, by whom he became the father of the sun-god born at the autumnal equinox.
The stipulation that this porridge should be made of the milk of a cow suckling an adopted calf conveys most important historical information, for it tells us of a time when the cow-mother-goddess of Indian ritual nursed a foreign calf, which was to supersede her. It tells in short of the supersession of the old worship of the buffalo, the animal always sacrificed in Central and Southern India at the Dasahara on the tenth of Sshvina (Assin) (September —October), that is on the tenth day after the new moon of the autumnal equinox. In this festival the first nine days of the week of the cycle - year celebrate the victory of Durga or Subhadra, the mountain-goddess of the North, over a female buffalo Mahishasur 2. It was for this primaeval buffalo that the bull, cow and calf were substituted as sacrificial animals, and it is only these which are offered in the ritual of the Brahmanas and Grihya Sutras.
But this sacred buffalo appears in the Rigveda as Indra himself. In the account of his birth 3 he is called the buffalo (inahisa) son of the cow who had only once calved (grsti) 4, and his father is called Vyansa, that is, as we have seen, the constellation Draco which ruled the year measured by seasons. He is said in another hymn to have killed this father as the Vritra or enclosing snake after drinking Soma at the six-days Tri-ka-dru-ka festival of the summer solstice, and he is there called Danu or son of the Pole Star 5. It was the Pole Star god of Orion’s year that Indra, the buffalo, slew, and after his death, and the warning he received from his mother that the year-god had forsaken him, he called Vishnu the year-god of months, the antelope-god Krishna, to his aid, 1 2 3 4 5
1   Rg. vi. 5*6, i, iii. 52, 7.
2   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431.
3   Rg. iv. 18, 10—13.
4   Grassmann, Worterbuch sum Rigveda, s.v. grsti.
5   Rg- i- 32. 3—9-
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Vishnu asked him how he can hope to be trusted when he had killed his father, and Indra replied that (it was true) that he had once eaten dog’s entrails ; that is, accepted the sacrifice of the dog offered, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 184, at the summer solstice, and become god of that dead year, the Vritra he slew, but that he was now converted, and would partake of the Soma of the Shyena or frost (shya) bird of the winter solstice I. That is, he would become the son of the mother of the sun-god begotten at the winter solstice and born at the autumnal equinox. That he was born in this hymn as the rain-god of a new era is shown by his saying before his birth 2 that he would be born from his mother’s side as the sun-god, the branch of the mother-tree, begotten by the rain-cloud who entered his mother’s womb, from the right side, as Gan-isha, the elephant-cloud-god, entered the right side of the Buddha’s mother 3. He then promised that when thus born as the sun-god of a new era of years measured by months instead of those measured by seasons and weeks, he would betake himself to Vishnu.
That this buffalo-god born of a buffalo-cow was a year- god is proved by Rg. ix. 113, 1—3, where the sun’s daughters are said to have brought him, impregnated by Parjanya, the rain-god, to Sharyanavan, the ship (ndva) of the arrow, that is of the arrow-year of three seasons, when he as Indra shall drink Soma as the slayer of Vritra. These sun-maidens were the ten maidens or lunar months of gestation of the cycle-year, whose singing makes the Soma flow for Indra and Vishnu, in their new alliance as year-gods of this year measured by lunar months4.
The buffalo is the sacred animal of the Malays, which they believe to support the earth as it floats on the ocean. It is the animal always offered and eaten at their sacrificial feasts, and is thus the counterpart of the Indian Dasahara buffalo. But this totem buffalo is not the sacred buffalo of the Malay
1   Rg. iv. 18, 11 —13.   2 Ibid., iv. 18, I, 2.
3   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, p. 63.
4   Rg- ix. 56, 3, 4-
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tin miners, who trace their origin to the Bronze Age. They sacrifice a white buffalo, which is thus the sun-buffalo of the sun-god born as the buffalo Indra of this year succeeding the three-years cycle. It is never killed in the mine, where, as in the Indian sacrificial ground sacred to the sun-god, no blood may be shed, but portions of every part of its carcase are deposited inside the spirits’ audience-chamber outside the mine, and they invoke the god they summon to the sacrifice as the White Sheikh, king of the virgin jungle. But the flesh of this white buffalo, the Indra allied with Vishnu, is never eaten *.
This was the buffalo-calf of the fathers burnt after death, and adopted as the son of the mother-cow of the Todas and Gautamas. That this age of the worship of the white sun-buffalo and of the white pig Vishnu of the Brahmins’ daily meditations 1 2 3 * on the history of time-reckoning, was one in which the heavenly bodies were believed to go round the Pole as stars of night and day, is proved in the ritual of the Brahmanas. In the Pitriyajna the priests make six circuits of the altar, the first three contrary to the course of the sun, from right to left, and the other three from left to right, sunwise. They wore the cord on the right shoulder, according to the rules of primitive Pole Star worship, except when they are kindling the fire, and then they shift it to the left shoulder, and become sacrificially invested as sun-worshippers. When the cakes and porridge are presented to the Fathers the sacrificer with the cord on his right shoulder walks round the altar, sprinkling it from right to left 3. And thus in the ritual of these ancestral gods the ruler of Pole Star moon and sun-worship are intermingled, marking the sacrifice as one of the age of transition from the
1   Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 56, 189, 190, 268, 269.
2   Dubois and Beauchamp, Hindu Manners and Customs, chap, xiii., The Sam-kalpa, 3, vol. i. p. 147.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. 4, 2, 9, ii. 6, 1, 12—34; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp.
363. 423. 424» note 2, 428—433.
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primaeval star and moon worship to that of the adoration of the sun.
It was these sons of the buffalo totem parent of the Malay rice-growing' races who were joined in India by the Northern worshippers of the horse’s head, the god Dadhiank, the Atharvan, or son of the fire-god Atar, and he, according to the Brahmanas, imparted to the aboriginal Indians the mystery of honey, the inspiring mead I. The history of this union, which marked the beginning of the Copper and Bronze Ages in India, is given in the ethnology of the castes of the miners and workers in metal, who formed, according to the custom introduced by the Naga Kushikas, trade guilds united by community not of descent but of function.
The only mining castes of Bengal and Central India, who are smelters of ore, are the Asuras and Lohars of Chutia Nagpur. The Asuras are the survivals of the Vedic Asuras, who traced their descent to the primaeval man-ape, the great KapJ or Kabir, and offered human sacrifices to the fire and sun-god. He was, in the ritual of the Finns, not the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, but a male deity, the Thoas Tammuz, or Dumu-zi, king of the Tauric Chersonesus, the sun-god Orion, the Jewish Moloch, and the Northern sun-god Sigurd, the rider on - the sun-horse Grani, who cooked and ate the heart of Fafnir, the snake-god, his predecessor as ruler of the year, and who was the Northern form of the Indian Vritra slain by Indra, after which feat he ate the dog’s entrails, or the heart of the fire-dog, the creator of fire2 3. These sacrifices to the male sun-gods, which were first human sacrifices, were the only burnt- offerings of the Eastern Finns, who transmitted the same custom to the Arabs 3. They were also the burnt-offerings
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iv. i, 5, 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 277.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 121 ; Rg. iv. 18, 13.
3   Abercromby, Pre and Protohistoric Finns, vol. i. chap. iv. p. 167 ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 210.
   
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of the Angiras priesthood of the age of the cycle-year preceding the eleven-months year of the Atharvans, and this marks their Finnish descent.
The Asuras, retaining the name of the Angiras priests, call themselves Aguryas, or Angurias, the men of charcoal {angarci), who prepare the charcoal for ore smelting, and this name, together with that of the land of Anga, the volcanic Behar country ruled by Kama, the horned (keren) moon-god of the cycle-year, point to their descent from Phrygian Asia Minor, whence, as we have seen, the Itonian Athene of Boeotia got the name of Onka, which appears in India as Anga. This was the birth-land of the Hittite sons of the goat, whose year was the cycle-year of ten months of gestation, and the ancient name of ten as the number of the months of the heating and smelting of the sun-god of the workers in metal, born in the tenth month of gestation, survives in the word Agoor, ten, in the dialect of the Hindu Kasbhara, or workers in bell-metalI. This word Agur, ten, is also found in the name of Agurnath, the reputed ancestor of the caste of Agurwalas, the wealthy guild of jewellers, bankers and usurers who trace their descent from the Vaishya Rajas of Agroha, on the borders of Raj- putana. It is to this caste that many of the wealthiest merchants of Behar and the North-west provinces belong. The god-king from whom they were descended was Guga, or Goga, Pir, the fifth of the five Pirs, the snake or Naga kings of Agroha; and, as we have seen on p. 337, he was the rider on the black sun-horse, born of Yavadiya, the barley- mare, and he and his horse together formed the Centaur- god of the Thibetan Buddhists and Mossoos, Haya-griva. Thus he was the Indian form of the Northern sun-god Sig-urd, the pillar (urdr) of victory (sig) gnomon-stone. His festival is on the ninth day of the dark half of Bhadon (August—September), or about the 9th of September 2, and
1   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, vol. i. p. 161, § v. Kasbhara.
2   Ibid., Goga Pir, vol. i. p. 257.
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he is associated with a duplicate of himself, Ghazi Miyan I, whose festival takes place in Jaistha (Jeth) May—June, as the god with bushy-hair2, the full-grown hair offered as the firstfruits of the summer solstice. Hence as the god of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks he is the god Orion, the god of the Rathjatra of Krishna and Subhadra, wedded at the summer solstice as Ninus and Shemiramot at Babylon. He is said, as Agurnath, to have instituted eighteen sacrifices of the eighteen gotras, or sections of the Agurwalas, to Lakshmi, the goddess of the boundary-pillar (laksh), the female form of the pillar-sun-god Sigurd, half of which only, nine sacrifices 3, were accomplished, and hence he is the god of the fourth part of the year of seventy-two weeks into which the cycle-year, as that of the five Pirs or five- day weeks, was divided. These were weeks of five nights and four days, whence the conception of the nine-days week arose. As the Agurwalas trace descent in the male line 4, his clan came from the north, and he, as Goga or Gog, was apparently the god of the bed of thirty-six cubits, the Og of the Bible, the god of the people called, in Ezekiel xxxviii., xxxix., Gog and Magog, who lived in the land of Rosh, the sun-god Ragh, Meshech and Tubal. This was the country of the Moschoi and Tiberinoi, who are described by Herodotus iii. 94, vii. 78, as wearing wooden helmets. It is called Meschia by Cedrenus. Gesenius identifies it with North Georgia or Iberia, and mentions the wall between the Caspian and Euxine seas, called the wall of the Ya-yuj and Mayuj, which was built as a defence against northern invaders. It was from these people that Hermes, the god of the pillar, got the Phoenician name of Moschophorus, or calf-bearer 5, the god who, as
1   Miyan is the 27th division of the Persian Lunar Zodiac representing the stars y Pegasi a Andromedae, so that his constellation is that of the horse Pegasus. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Euphratean Stellar Researches, p. 10.
2   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, Ghazi Miyan, vol. i. pp. 251, 252.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5.
4   Ibid.
5   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 299.
   
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the sun-gnomon-pillar, produced the sun-calf, the calf-born Indra. This was the sun-god of the Sakya Kunti-bhojas, the Bhojas of the lance (kunti) of the race of the Bhoja king Ugrasena, who founded Kosambi at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges, and called the country round it Vatsa- bhumi, the land of the calf (vatsa), the ancient name of Bundelkund. They belonged to the army of the Iberian Finn miners, worhippers of Ya, the full moon, who came to India from Colchis, another name of the Gog and Magog country, whence, according to Herodotus, circumcision was first introduced. This country, called also Tubal after the father of the workers in metal, was a land of great mineral wealth. These dealers in minerals, who called Agur- nath, the lord of ten (Agzir), their ancestral god, were apparently the introducers of the Northern decimal system of notation, differing from the Southern duodecimal system of counting by “ gundas ” or fours, and they united the Northern and Southern races in India. For their father- god Agurnath or Goga (the equivalent of Dasaratha, he of the ten chariots or lunar months, the father of Rama) married the daughters of two Naga Rajas, and he stipulated that the children of one of the two princesses should bear their father’s name, while those of the other wife should trace their descent from the mother, according to the custom of the Naga races1. They were thus the successors of the Naga Kushika, and as Agurwalas they are strict monogamists like the Finns. Their native land in Asia Minor is called, in Ezekiel xxxix. n, 12, Hamon Gog, which is apparently the land of Baal Khamman, the pillar-god. It was from this god of the lunar months that the eighteen tribes of the Bhojas, or sons of Druhyu, the sorcerer-god, originated2. They are the sons of Gog, who are called in the Recueil des Histoires de Troye, of the Middle Ages, sons of a race of giants, the Rephaim descended from the
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5.
2   Mahabharata Sabha (Rujasttya-rambha) Parva, xiv. p. 46, Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260.
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thirty-three daughters of Diocletian, the thirty-three days of the months of this year. They are also descendants of the twin door-posts of the Garden of God, the Stars Gemini, who as Gog and Magog stand at the door of the Guildhall in London.
The Lohars, congeners of the Agurias or Asuras, were first workers in copper (loha), a name that means the red, “ roh,” metal, and this change of r into 1 marks them as allied to the Finn races, who in Greece changed the name of the Phrugyes, or sons of fire (fkur), into Phlegyes. Their caste institutions prove them to be a mixed race, who were first sons of the mother-mountain, which they worship as Mohangiri, the Marang Buru of the Mundas, and in Chutia Nagpur their priests are the village Pahan and the provincial Ojha, but the sub-caste of Sad-Loharsg immigrants from the Hindu (Sad) districts, employ the village barber as their marriage priest. They are most closely allied with the Bagdis, who were originally a caste of hill fishermen, sons of the tiger and the sun-cock, one of whose totems is the Sal-machh, or fish of the Sal-tree z.
Both Lohar and Bagdi bridegrooms begin their wedding ceremonies by marrying the Mahua tree (Bassia latifolid). This tree, through the use of its honey-sweet flowers in making intoxicating drink, has become the honey-tree of India, which gave honey to the Ashvins and the sons of Dadhiank, the horse’s head. This mahua mead replaced the rice and murwa beer of the Mundas and Thibetan Buddhists. Both the Lohars and Bagdis worship the wise snake-goddess Manasa, the female form of Manu, to whom rice, sweetmeats, fruit and flowers are offered as the mother-snake-goddess of the early village founders. But to these are added, at her festivals held on the fifth and twentieth of the four rainy months from the middle of June to the middle of October, 1
1   Their totems are :—Ardi the fish, Bagh-rishi the tiger, Kachchap the tortoise, Kasbak the heron, Pak-basanta the bird, Pat-rishi the bean, Ponk-rishi the jungle-cock, Sal-rishi or Sal-machh the Sal-fish. Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Bagdi, vol. ii. Appendix i. p. 5.
   
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the moon-goat and sun-ram of the Northern immigrants. Both these castes, as well as all those of the barbers and workers in metal, burn their dead, and thus trace their origin to the Bronze Age. The connection between them and the men of the eleven-months year is shown in their custom of performing the shradh or funeral ceremony on the eleventh day after death, or at the end of a week of that year1. This custom is 'also observed by the Kamis, the Nepal branch of the Kamars or metal workers of Bengal, and the Bhan- daris, the barbers of Orissa 2 3 4.
Their goddess Manasa is the sister of Vasuki, the snake- god of the summer solstice, and mother of the sun-god Ashtaka. She is the Hindu counterpart of the snake Erectheus at Athens, fed with monthly honey-cakes, who occupied the western end of the Erictheum, the eastern being the temple of Athene Polias 3, the tree-mother-goddess Onka or Anga of the mining races. They, in India, are the sons of the Sal-tree, whence the best charcoal is made, and this as a resin-bearing-tree is the Hindu equivalent of the resinous pine-tree of the Finn country, the pine-tree of the cave-mother Cybele. Manasa is also the female form of the snake Fafnir of the story of Sigurd, the year-god slain by this rider on the sun-horse, who guarded the year-treasures of Andvari, the wary (vari) dwarf. These dwarf-gods were the parents of the dwarf Finn races, the Ugrian-Finns, the first workers in metal who lived in the country between the Volga and the Ural mountains, where copper has been smelted from time immemorial, and where gold is also found. It was the Ostiak and Mordvin Finns who introduced into India the horse-sacrifices which they still offer, as well as the use of horses in preference to buffaloes and bullocks 4, and they
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Lohars, vol. ii. pp. 22, 23, Bagdis, vol. i. pp. 37—43-
2   Ibid., Bhandaris-Kamis, voi. i. pp. 94, 395.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, Erichthonius Erictheum, vol. ii. pp. 168, 169, 3301!'.
4   Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap. iv., Their Prehistoric Civilisation, vol. i. p. 217.
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brought also their acquaintance with mining. They were of the race of the dwarfs who made the honey (Mordvin, med) mead, drunk by the gods of the Edda, who ate the flesh of the boar Soehrimnir. They, who were gold-washers in the Volga country, became in Chutia Nagpur the Jharas, or gold-washers, who extracted gold from the river sands of the Sona-pet or womb of gold in the Munda country, and who took gold from the sands of all the rivers watering the South of the Chutia Nagpur plateau from East to West. Their name for gold is embodied in that of the Sone, meaning the “ golden ” river. It was on the banks of the Niranjara or Phagun river, which was once the main stream of the Sone 1, that the Buddha obtained enlightenment, when sitting under the Nigrodha or Indian Banyan tree of the Kushika races. The word for gold, whence the river-name was derived, is in Pali Sopnam, spelt with the Dravidian cerebral n, which is a substitute for an original r preceding it, as the Sanskrit Suvarna becomes in Pali Suvanno. Hence the original name for gold is Sornar, its Tamil name, and this is reproduced in the Mordvinian Sirna, the Votiak Zarni, Ostiak Sarni, which became the Zend Zar2, the primitive root of the Sanskrit hiranya. The Finnic worker in gold has become the Hindu Sonar, the banker and gold merchant.
These Sonars of the East are the wealthy representatives of the Western Saus, sons of Su, the bird who came from Saurashtra, the Western kingdom (rdshtra) of the Saus, to settle in the eastern land of Anga. They traced their descent to Marudevi, the mountain (piaru) goddess, wife of Nabhl, the navel, the central fire on the altar, who were parents of the first Jain .Tirthakara Rishabha, the bull of the Kashyapa clan, born in the land of the Ikshvakus on the eighth day
1   The Sone has like the Kusi and Gunduk on the north bank of the Ganges moved in the course of ages from East to West, so that the present course is very far removed from that it followed in the ages of this epoch.
2 Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap. v., The Iranian Period, p. 232.
 

[Prometheus]

   
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of the dark-fortnight, that is on the twenty-second of Cheit (March—April), when the sun was in the constellation Uttarashadha Sagittarius, that is about 15,000 B.c. or the beginning of the cycler-year L He was the predecessor of Arishtanemi, who was, as we have seen, the Jain ruler of this eleven-months year. It was apparently at this epoch, when the Bronze Age began, that the Jain merchants ruling the Naga confederacy came from the West to the East. They made Parisnath on the Barrakur in Chutia Nagpur, formerly the sacred mountain of the Mundas, the holy High Place of the Jain Panris or Paris, the trading (pani) races, and fixed their headquarters in Chutia Nagpur, the mother country {chut) of the Nagas, and in the plains of Anga and Magadha forming the Western side of the Gangetic valley.
By the help of the Finn miners who accompanied them they obtained large and constant supplies of gold from the sands of the rivers, diamonds from the diamond fields, and opened up the copper mines at Baragunda on the Northern slopes of Parisnath, and at Lando in Seraikela in Singh- bhum. These were worked throughout the long period intervening between the opening of the mines and the establishment of Mussulman rule in Bengal, and hence the immense supplies of ore contained in these vast deposits have now been almost exhausted. But no one who has visited them can fail to be impressed with the magnitude of the works and the great trading energy of the race who superintended them. They made their capital at Dalmi on one of the gold-bearing rivers, the Subon-rikha or Suvarna- riksha, the channel (riks/ia) of the race (varna) of the Sus. And the ruins of the city they founded still exist on its banks, and from thence they ruled the whole of Bengal and Behar2. Their seaport was Tamluk, at the mouth of the
' Jacobi, Jaina Sulras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Rishabha ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 281, 2S2.
2   Tamluk in Orissa was the ancient seaport not only of Chutia Nagpur, but of Behar, the country of Anga in the West of the Gangetic valley, and Kashi Benares. It was commercial goods from Orissa and the port of Tamralipti
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Hooghly and Rupnarain. Its Sanskrit name, of which the modern Tamluk is a corruption, is Tamra-lipti, the copper {tamra) port; and it was, according to tradition, the capital of the Peacock (mayura) kings of the Bhars or Bharatas, whose descendants still rule the adjoining semi-independent state of Moharbhunj. The original Mayura dynasty was succeeded, as maritime trade developed, by the Kaivarta or Kewut kings, a caste of fishermen and merchants, who make marriages by mingling the blood of the bride and bridegroom, in addition to the ordinary Sindurdan ceremony. That the country was originally ruled by races in touch with the Ooraon rulers of Chutia Nagpur is proved by the fact that the Kadamba almond-tree of the Ooraons is the sacred tree in the precincts of the ancient Tamluk temple of Kali, dedicated to Vishnu, the year-god of the peacock race, whose deification has been discussed in Chapter V. p. 281 L The name of this seaport shows first that the founders were of Dravidian origin like the Ooraons, whose native language is a Dravidian dialect, for the Sanskrit Tamra is a form of the Tamil Thambiram ; and secondly, it stamps the city as the seaport of the copper merchants of the Bronze Age, and proves that they must have been great exporters of that metal. This was originally used without alloy, as we learn from the copper razors of the barbers, the copper axes belonging to Colonel Samuells found near Baragunda, and the copper knives found by Dr. Schliemann in the oldest but one of the six superimposed Trojan cities. But it must have very soon been mixed with alloys of zinc and tin. These metals, and also copper, are found near together in Udaipur in Rajputana2; and it was there probably in the
that Tapassu and Bhalluka were bringing to Kushi in five hundred carts when they met the Buddha at his final transformation into the sun-god, Lord of Heaven, when the four bowls of sapphire and four of jet, the skies of day and night, brought by the four Loka Palu angels, ruling the four quarters of the heavens, became the one bowl or canopy of the sun-god, the universal ruler. Rhys D.avid, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, p. no.
1   Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Tamluk, vol. xiii. pp. 172—173.
2   Ibid., Udaipur, vol. xiii. p. 401.
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adjoining country of Khatiawar, sacred to the year-god Krishna or Vishnu, that Indian brass and bronze were first made, and the ancestors of the Kassara or Kasbhara hereditary braziers probably accompanied the Jain Khati kings of the Peacock dynasty to Chutia Nagpur, where they established the brass trade of Manbhum, the district in which Dalmi is situated.
It was these trading kings who fought their way through India who founded the great merchant caste of Bengal, the Subarna or Suvarna Baniks, the Suvarna traders, the Bengal Shus. It is to this caste who boast their descent from the Kushika father-gods, Kasyapa, Gautama and Vyasa, and which is celebrated for the beauty of its women, that the great merchant families of the Pals, who gave the dynasty of the Pal kings to Bengal, Lahas, Des, Chandras, Sinhas or Sils, belong, and they show equal ability in literature and in commerceR Barbers occupy a prominent position among them as priests at their weddings.
It was apparently during the rule of the barber-priests and merchant-kings that Tamra-lipti was made the principal trading port between Bengal and Malacca, the great tin- producing country; and it was hence that tin was procurable much more easily than from Eastern India, for the only tin deposit in Chutia Nagpur is so poor in quality that it has never been worked. It was the exchange of the copper of Tamluk with the tin of the Malay miners, brethren of the Mallis of India, which made bronze the metal of India and inaugurated the Bronze Age of the Pandava kings.
The historical retrospect thus traced from the trade traditions, ritual and caste customs of the men of the Copper and Bronze Age, who burnt their dead, coincides exactly with that deduced from the Mahabharata and Harivansa. It tells us how the Suvarna, the race of Sus dwelling on the banks of the Indus, and in Saurashtra and Khatiawar founded in the West, the empire of the Yadu-Turvasu or
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Subarnabanik, vol. ii. pp. 261—266.
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Yavanas, the sons of the barley (yava), who became the Ikshvaku kings of Patala, and afterwards of Patali-putra, the son of Patala {Patna). These Khati or Hittite Nagas founded from the artisan classes of village servants and cultivators the trading guilds or castes united by community of function. They under the guidance of the Finn mining races first established the Yavana or Yona rule from their capital of Yonagurh near the Girnar hill of Arishtanemi, the year-god of this epoch. He was, as we have seen, the ruling deity of the Ugra-sena or Ugro Finns, and of their King Kansa, the moon-goose, who, as king of the lunar dynasty, ruled the West of India as far East as Magadha, where Jarasandha, whose subordinate he was, reigned as central emperor, the Chakravarti or wheel-turning king.
He was the son of the mango, born, as we have seen, of the two Kushi or Kushite queens Ambika, and Ambalika, the Pole Star in Cygnus, and the Great Bear mother.
The rule of these ruthless conquerors was overthrown by Krishna, and the Pandava Bhima, who killed Kansa and Jarasandha, and made Krishna or Vishnu the year-god instead of Jarasandha’s god, the three-eyed Shiva of the three- years cycle, to whom he offered human sacrifices. It was after this victory that the Jain community of merchant- warriors established the rule of the Su-varna in Eastern India, and made the sons of Rishabha, the bull, supreme rulers of the land. It is as a survival of the imperial rule of the sons of Indra, the eel-god, who became the buffalo- bull, that the Rajas of Chutia Nagpur wear on the day of their coronation a turban twisted into a peculiar shape to represent the ancestral bull’s horns, and the maker of this turban holds a village granted to his ancestors free of all payments except the discharge of his duty of providing the official head-dress of the Raja.
It was from this amalgamation of the alien and indigenous races that the Bharata confederacy was formed under the rule of the Mayura or Peacock kings. Their leaders were the Licchavis, the sons of the Akkadian dog {lig), who joined
   
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the tiger-born Mallis to form the confederacy of the eighteen tribes of the Vajjians, sons of the tiger (vyaghrd), who ruled the country to the North-east of the Gangetic yalley. Their chief clan was that of the warrior Gnatikas J, or sons of the mother gfia, the Greek 7wrj, called the fire-mother in Rg.
iv.   9, 4. She is the “ even ” or queen mother of the Goidelic Celts who always burnt their dead, and who were thus the Pitaro Agnishvattah of this new confederacy. They were the dwarf Celtic race of miners, who, in Europe, became the Celts of Auvergne and Central France. In India they were the dwarf Asuras and Lohars, among whom the average male height is only about 163 centimetres, or 5 ft. 4 in., and their Cephalic index 75 1 2 3 4. It was they who introduced into India the Ooraon land tenures, giving an area of royal land in each village to the king, which, as I have shown in Chapter V. p. 287 ff, were very similar to those of the Goidelic Celts in Wales, both being founded on the earlier tenures of the Piets, the painted Pitaro Barishadah, to whom parched barley was offered.
This race of the fathers who burnt their dead was allied with the sons of the mother-fire-goddess, called in the Rigveda Matar-i-shvan, the mother of the dog (shvan), who came to India, according to the title of the Second Mandala of the Rigveda, as the Median collected race, the Saunaka, or sons of the dog-mother, and of Bhrigu the fire-father. These were the yellow Finns, who, as the race of Hari the mother-goddess Shar, furnished twenty-two of the twenty- four Jain Tirthakaras 3. These were the men of the new or young (kana) race represented by the Kanva priests, the reputed authors of the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda. Their representative parent Kanva was the nominal father of Sakuntala, mother of Bharata, bom on the Malli river Malini 4.
1   Jacobi, Jaina Sfitrus, Kalpa Sutra, 110 ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 256.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Anthropometric Data, vol. i. pp. viii., xxxiv,
3   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 21S.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxi. p. 218.
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These Kanvas were priests of the Yadu-Turvasu and of the mountain-god Arbuda, whose shrine is the sacred Jain mountain Arbuda or Abu in Sirohi in Rajputana. This is the god called in the Rigveda the son of the Ahi Urna-vabha, the weaver of wool, the goddess-mother of the Ram-sun 1 who was slain by Indra, and who is named six times in the second and eighth Mandalas out of the seven times he is mentioned in the Rigveda. On his sacred mountain near the copper mines of Sirohi and the, tin and copper mines of Udaipur are two of the finest existing Jain temples. One of Adi-nath or Rishabha, the first Tlrthakara, and one of Nemi-nath or Arishta-nemi, the twenty-second Tlrthakara and ruler of this year 2 3 4. They are the upper and nether mill-stones of Jain theology, and it is under this symbol that the snake Jarat-karna and his counterpart Arbuda are worshipped in the Vedic ritual. They are the two pressing or grinding-stones which extract the sap of the sacrificial Soma, and in the ritual of the Soma sacrifice they are invoked in four Vedic verses : two to Savitar, the sun-bird Su, which is the root of Savitar, and two to Indra 3. After these are recited fourteen stanzas of the hymn Rg. x. 94, ascribed to the Rishl-Arbuda. In this hymn (stanzas 6, 7, the pressing-stones are invoked as drawn by ten horses furnished with bridles and harnessed to ten poles, the ten sacrificial stakes indicating the ten lunar months of the cycle-year. Before the last stanza of this hymn, Rg. x. 76, ascribed to Jarat-karna, and x. 175, ascribed to Arbuda, are recited, and they are both addressed to the gravanah or pressing-stones, pierced with the holes through which the bar uniting them is inserted 4. In the titles of these hymns Jarat-karna is called the Airavata or elephant-bull, and Arbuda Urddhvagrava, the pressing-stone lifted up to
1   Rg. viii. 32, 26.
2   Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Abu, vol. i. pp. 8, 9.
3   Rg. i. 24, 3, v. 81, 1, viii. 81, 1, viii. 1, 1.
4   Ibid., x. 94, 11.
   
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heaven, and both are said to belong to the serpent (Sarpa) race of NagasT, Arbuda being the son or counterpart of Kadru the mother-tree (<dru) of the Nagas, the goddess Ka or Who ? This ceremony forms part of the ritual of the mid-day pressing sacred to the meridian-sun, to which Indra is summmoned as the chief god.
These father and mother-stones, the revolving heaven- drill which presses out on the nether mother-stone the life- giving sap of the Soma plants placed between them, are the pair called in the Mahabharata Jarat-karu, they who make old {Java). The male belongs to the sect of the Yaya-vara, the wandering mendicants, who were the early Jains, whose god was Yayati, the full-moon-god (Ya), father of the Yadu-Turvasu. The female was the sister of Vasuki, the snake-god ruling the summer solstice. The male Jarat- karu, as the dying sun-god who has fulfilled his yearly task of begetting his successor, leaves his mate when Ashtaka is begotten as the god of the eight (ashta), the sun-god of the true Soma of Chapter VII 1 2 3. He is the god of the eight-rayed star of day worshipped by the Akkadians as Din-gir and Esh-shu, words meaning both god and an ear of corn 3. They are, in short, the fire-drill and socket which gave birth to the sun-god born from the altar flame kindled by the wood of the mother-tree.
H.   The story of the two thieves who robbed the treasure- house of heaven.
The name Arbuda given to the tree-mother-god means also the god of the Semitic Arba or four, the Hittite name which, as we have seen, appears in that of the Naga Gond kingdom, called Vidarba, or the double (vid) four {arba),
1   Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. ii., Hymns 785, 786, 7S7, pp. 412—415 ; Eggeling. Sat. Brah., iv. 3, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 331, note I, 332.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xlv.—xlvii. pp. 132—139.
3   Ball, ‘Akkadian Affinities of Chinese.’ Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, § China, Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 685 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. Preface, p. xxviii.
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the eight Gond tribes. The Hebrew history of this epoch of the deification of the four ruling gods, the four seasons of this year of eleven months, is to be found in the history of Caleb, the dog (kalb), the star Sirius. He was brother of Ram, the sun-god and grandson of Perez, the cleft, the male form of the Phoenician goddess Tirhatha, with the same meaning, who was, as we have seen, the fish-mother-goddess of the Phoenicians, mother of Shemiramot. He and his brother Ram were both descended from Tamar, the date- palm-tree. In the historical genealogies of the Chronicles various lines of descent are assigned to him. As the great- grandson of Tamar his father is Hezron, brother of Hamal, the star /3 Arietis, from which the sun was born in the cycle-year. Hezron died in Caleb-Ephratah, the city of ashes (ephra) of Caleb, which marks him as god of the city of the sun-god, in the year ruled by Sirius. In another genealogy he is the brother of Shuhah, Judah’s first wife, the bird (Shu) goddess, who preceded Tamar, and the ancestor of Ir-Nahash, the city (ir) of the Nagas, and the son of Jephunneh, the beautiful youth T. In short, he is the star Sirius, which was first the dog-star guarding the sun’s path along the Milky Way, then the young man, fifteen years old, who became afterwards the Zend Tishtrya (Sirius), the white horse of the sun, the Zend form of Indra, as the white buffalo, who made the black cloud, the horse’s head, give up the rains of the rainy season at the summer solstice2. He is in his second Avatar as a star-god ruling this year Tishtrya, the bull with golden horns, who intervened between Tishtrya, the bright youth, fifteen years old, Caleb’s father, Jephunneh, and Tishtrya, the white sun-horse.
It was he who killed the old trinity of Southern Palestine, the gods Shesh-ai, Ahiman, and Tol-mai. These words, as all Hebrew- scholars admit, are not Hebrew. They seem to me to be god-names imported into Hebrew theology
1   I Chron. ii. io—16, 18, 19, 24, iv. 11, 12, 15 ; Gen. xxxviii. 2.
2 Darmesteter, Zemtavesta Tir Yasht, vi. 10—24; S. B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 96—102,
   

by the Turvasu, who brought the gods and national customs of India to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coasts. Thus Shesh-ai is the wet-god Shesh or Sek Nag, the spring-god of the Takka triad. Ahiman, the Egyptian Ahi, a name of Osiris and the Sanskrit form of Echis, the holding- snake, the European Vritra, the encloser, and the equivalent of the Takka Vasuk, or Basuk Nag, the snake-god Vasuki, while Talmai is the mother Tal, the female form of the Akkadian Tal-tal, the very wise one of the name of la z. He is the counter-part of the Takka Takshaka, or Taksh Nag, the biting-snake of winter. It was to these three seasons that Caleb, as the god of this year, added the fourth season of this year, and commemorated the institution of this new measure of time by calling Hebron the capital of the tribe of Judah, the parent-altar-fire of Caleb, Kiriath- Arba,the city of the four 1 2 3 4 5. This was the year ruled by four Akkadian stars of the seven Lu-masi 3 : (1) Kakshisha, the horn (shi) star (shal the door {kak) Sirius, the star of summer. (2) En-te-na-mas-luv Hydra, the divine (en) foundation (te) of the prince (na) of the black (luv) antelope {mas), the star of the rainy autumn. (3) Ta-khu or Id-khu, the creating {id) mother-bird (Mu), the winter-star. (4) Papil- sak, the sceptre {pa), the wet or great (sak) fire {pit), the star of spring 4. In the theology of this year Masu. the Hebrew Moses, the leader of Caleb and the Israelites, was the star Regulus sC~This was the year of the ape with the lion’s taiTdepicted on the banner of Arjuna when he defeated the Kauravyas, rulers of this year with Uttara, the North-god of the summer solstice, as his charioteer. This year was led by the dog of the Pandavas, the last surviving com-
1   Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, Syllabary No. 16.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 189, note 2.
3   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘ Euphratean Stellar Researches,’ ii., Tablets YV, A, I, iii., lvii., No. 6, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, May,
1893, p. 328.
4   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 370—372.;
5   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49.
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panion of Yudishthira when he went up to heaven at the close of his career to join his brethren, its dead seasons. His faithful dog was changed into the star Sirius, the chief minister of the god Dharma, the Pole Star god1, author of law and order (dharm), and of the unvarying sequence of national phenomena, the Egyptain goddess Ma’at, the Pole Star Vega in Lyra from 10,000 to 8000 B.c.
But in order to understand fully the story of Caleb and to realise his connection with this year, we must turn to the historical chronicles compiled for oral recitation and transmitted by the national reciters of the countries in which the trading Turvasu or Yavanas of India became the ruling powers. They brought with them their eleven-months year, which they established as the official year of all lands where they ruled, the sea-coasts from India to Britany. And in this last country we have seen that this year is commemorated in the calendar of the eleven rows of stones at Menec, near Carnac, in Britany, in which the year-gnomon- stone was oriented to the rising sun of the summer solstice. One of the historical stories in which they recorded the history of this year and its foundation on the substructure of the three-years cycle with its forty months, is the widely disseminated tale of the Two Thieves who stole the king’s treasure. Variants of this story, which is told in Herodotus ii. 121, of the robbery of the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt, are found in India, in story No. 2 in the Katha Sarit Sagara, and No. 11 of Lai Behari Dey’s Folk Tales of Bengal2. But the two forms of this story, which was intended to portray graphically the history of the great revolution in time-reckoning wrought by the Indian and Phoenician trading guilds when they substituted the year of eleven-months for the three-years cycle, are those of Tropho- nius and Agamedes, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Trophonius and Agamedes were sons of Erginus, king of the
1   Mahabharata Mahaprashthanika Parva, iii. 17, p. 8.
2   For other variants see list in Frazers’ Patisanias, vol. v. pp. 176—179.
   
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Minyans, a form of the snake-god Ericthonius, the god Poseidon. They were noted builders, who built the sanctuary of their father Poseidon near Mantinaea, and the bridal chamber of Alkmene, the goddess of the moon-bow (alk, arc) mother, the sun-god Herakles I. But the building which indicates most clearly their historical position as star-year- gods of a year measured by nights, who marked the stages in heaven through which the sun-god was to run his annual course, is the treasury of King Hyrieus at Delphi, of which they were the architects. In this, like the pyramid thieves of the story of Rhampsinitus, they contrived that one of the stones could be removed from the outside so that they might enter and pilfer the hoard every night. This treasure was that of the god of the bee - hive or vault of heaven, called Hyrieus (vplevs from vpov, a hive, vpiov, honey-comb). This was the Pole Star god ruling the bee-hive of Mordvin theology, described in Chapter IV. p. 169. In this world’s temple of the bees, the star-gods of heaven, the priests and priestesses who uttered the commands and counsel of the father-god in oracles were the working-bees. These were the Greek Melissai, the bees, the official name of the priestesses of the mother-goddess of Ephesus, of Demeter and Persephone. The Semite prophet priestesses are commemorated under the name of Deborah, the bee of the date-palm-tree, the nurse of Rebekah, the mother of Isaac (laughter\ the blind god of the laughing corn of harvest, who ruled Israel with Barak, the lightning-god, the Centaur-god of the heavenly bow. She was buried at Bethel under the Oak of Weeping (A//on - bacuth)2, after Jacob, the supplanter sun-god, had destroyed the idols and false gods of the Pole Star god, his predecessor. Thus she was the mother-year-goddess, the queen bee, whose annual death was lamented at her year’s end, like that of Dumuzi. It was the prophet star-bees, the measurers of
1   Frazer, Patisanias, ix. 37, 4, 5, viii. 10, 2, ix. ir, i, vol. i.
2   Ibid., vol. iv. pp. 223, 224; Gen. xxxv. 1—8 ; Judges iv. 4!!. v.
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the year, who nursed the young Zeus in Crete as the son of Rhea, the tree-mother of the sons of the rivers. The hive of these holy bees, the over-arching heavens, was the tower of the three-year cycle, and it was in the age of the cycle-year that the article of the national creed was made requiring belief in the world as a bee-hive, whence honey was taken for the preparation of the inspiring mead and for generating physical and mental life on earth.
This conclusion will be made still more clear by examining the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The latter, whose number is the same as that of the months of the cycle- year, had buried their treasure in a cave, the dark amphitheatre of the night sky, the cave of Cybele. Ali Baba, who found it, was a poor wood-cutter with three asses, those which drew the car of the Ashvins, the three seasons of the year of the three-legged ass of the Zendavesta. His brother, Kasim, whose name means the collector of tribute in kind I, was wealthy and prosperous:   They signify the two seasons of
the equinoctial year of the cycle, the despised season of winter, beginning at the autumnal and the wealthy season of spring, and summer beginning at the vernal equinox. It was at the autumnal equinox that the treasure was discovered. When Ali Baba came Upon the thieves he watched them from a hiding-place, and learnt that they opened the door of the treasure-house by saying Open Sesame, and shut it by saying Shut Sesame. Thus this discoverer is the ruling twin of the eleven-months year of the oil growers whose sacred plant was the Sesamum Orientale. When Ali Baba’s brother Kasim discovered his brother’s good fortune, and was told the secret of the pass-word, he took ten mules, the ten sexless months of gestation of the cycle-year, to the cave, which he opened by calling out Open Sesame, and shut it by saying Shut Sesame. But when after taking ten muleloads of treasure he wanted to return, he forgot the password, and called out Open Barley, showing that he was the
? Burton, Arabian Nights, vol, xii. p. 13, note 2.
   
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summer and autumn god of the barley - growers whose revenue he collected. He was found in the cave, and slain as the autumn harvest-god by the forty thieves of the cycle-year, and they divided his body into two parts, which they hung up on each side of the cave door as the twin door-posts of the holy temple of the Garden of God opening at the autumnal equinox, when the cycle- year began.
Ali Baba, the ruling twin of the eleven-months year, removed these gate-posts of the cycle-age, and was sought after by the thieves as the unknown destroyer of their carefully constructed clock of time. They were baffled and finally slain by Marjanah, the maid-servant of Kasim, whose name means red-coral. She, who was the slayer of the forty cycle-months or thieves, was the fish-sun-mother of the sun- god conceived at its close, who married Ali Baba’s son, the sun-god of the winter solstice *. She was the sea-mother- goddess, the counterpart of Thetis, the ocean-mud (thith), who, as the Black Demeter of Phigalia in Arcadia, with the horse’s head of the black-horse-god Dadhiank, bore the sun-god of this eleven-months year1 2 to Poseidon, the god who gave the sun-horses to Peleus.
When we return to the story of Trophonius and Agamedes, sons of Erectheus Poseidon, the Greek Ali Baba and Kasim, we find still further evidence connecting the robbery of the treasure with the substitution of the eleven-months year of the sun-god, with the horse’s head for the cycle-year. These twin robbers of the treasury they built were the counterparts of the Hindu Ashvins, the stars Gemini who ruled both the cycle and the eleven-months year, the two door-posts of the House of God. Agamedes, like Kasim, was caught in a snare, from which he could not be freed, and slain by his brother, who cut off his head to escape detection, as Ali Baba carried
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ vol. x. pp. 209 ff.3 216, note i, 234.
2   Berard, Origine dcs Cnltcs Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, pp. 104—109; Frazer, Pausanias, viii., xlii. pp. 428, 429.
B b 2
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away his brother’s body. According to Pausanias, as Trophonius carried away his brother’s head the earth opened and received Trophonius in the sacrificial pit consecrated to Agamedes, the Hindu Pole Star goat (aja), in which a black ram was offered to him as the ram-sun-god of the cycle-year slain at its close I.
As for Trophonius, he is the god worshipped at Lebadea in Bceotia as Zeus Trophonius, the Phoenician Baal Tropha, the healing-god 2 3 4 *. His cave and grove, which were frequented by worshippers who sought advice from his oracles, and who wore at his shrine shoes made of the skins of animals sacrificed to him 3, were on the river Hercyna, that of the goddess Erycina, the Phoenician Erek Hayim, the preserving goddess, the star Virgo. She, according to the legend told by Pausanias, was the goddess holding the goose, the Hindi? Kansa, the goose-king of this epoch which fled from her to Persephone, who, as the autumn mother of the goose-god born from the sun-god, hid it under a stone 4.
This goose layer of the sun-egg was the Egyptian god or goddess who laid the egg of Nekekur the Great Cackler under the great sycamore-tree, in the sacred sun-city of On. She is called also the star (seb) god Seb, who laid the egg in the growth of which Osiris lives s. This egg laid by the star-god is the egg of the god Bes, a form of Seb, whose ancient name is Bes-bes the goose 6 7. He or she is called in the Book of the Dead the being within the sixteenth Pylon, or gate of the gods through which the soul of Ani passes, the Lady of Victory who burneth with flames of fire (Bes), creator of the mysteries of the earth 7. That is to say, she
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 37, 2, 3, 39, 4, vol. i. pp. 490, 491, 493, 494, vol. V. p. 201.
2   Ibid., vol. v. p. 197 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 293, 294.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 202, 203.
4   Ibid., ix. 39, 1, 2, vol. i. pp. 492, 493.
s Budge, Book of the Dead, chaps, liv., lix. pp. 105, 108, 109.
6   Brugsch, Religion tend Mythologie der Alten AEgypter, pp. 172, 173, 576, 577-
7   Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. cxlv. 56, Translation, p. 250, Text, p. 344.
   

[Prometheus]

 
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is the goddess of the South, the fire-mother who heats into life the egg she is to lay, that of the Southern ape or raven- god of the mother constellation Argo. This god Bes is, as we have seen, the god in the form of the ape with the lion’s tail, who follows and succeeds the ape-god Hi, the Southern god 1. He bears a sacrificial knife in each hand, representing the lunar phases of the months of this year. He is the counterpart of the ape with the lion’s tail on the banner of the sexless Arjuna, ruling the year of the four Akkadian stars: i. Kakshisha, Sirius; 2. Entenamasluv, Hydra; 3. Takhu or Id-khu, Aquila; 4. Pa-pil-sak, Leo; the year of the prince [no) of the black (lav) antelope (mas), the god of the rains of Hydra the water-snake, that of the black antelope-god Krishna, Arj ana’s charioteer in the final contest with the Kauravyas, the god of the year in which the world’s egg was laid.
This year in Hindu history is that in which Gandhari, the vulture-mother of the Kauravyas, laid the egg from which her hundred sons, the rulers of the world, were born. She is the Pole Star mother, the star Vega a Lyrae. This egg, we are told in the Mahabharata, remained for two years in Gandharl’s womb, and its offspring remained two more years in holy water and clarified butter before they came to life. Hence the children born of the egg were the offspring of the four divisions, each of ten lunar months, of gestation of the cycle-year. It was laid simultaneously with the birth of Yudishthira, the eldest Pandava son of Kunti or Prithi, the lance or conceiving (pent) mother of the Parthavas and Dharma, the Pole Star god. Yudishthira was born on the fifth day of Khartik (October—November), about the 20th of October, under the constellation Jaistha Scorpio, and the star Antares a Scorpio at the Muhurta or hour sacred to the star Abhijit ( Vega) 2.
1   Gardiner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. pp. 148, 150, Fig. 535-
- Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv., cxxiii. pp. 338, 359. There is a difficulty here about dates. We have seen in the history of the birth of
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Hence the beginning of the year when the world’s egg was laid coincided with the year opening with the sacrifice of the Roman horse on the 15th of October, and it began twenty-one days earlier than the birth of Arishtanemi or in the lunar phase preceding it. He was the goose (Kansa) son of Ugrasena, who was born on the 12th day of the dark fortnight of Khartik (October—November), or about the 13th of November; and who like Duryodhana, the eldest Kauravya, was a ruling-god of this eleven-months year. This was also the month sacred to Trophonius, the robber of the treasury, who as the god of the river of Erycina or Erek-hayim, the goose-mother, the son of the egg, which in another form was that from which Castor and Poludeukes, the sons of Leda, were born.
But this star-mother Erek-hayim was, as we have seen, the star Virgo, which, as the sun-star, ruled the mid-month of this year, beginning on the 15th of October and commencing its second period of six months at the Roman festival of the Fordicidia on the 15th of April. This was the Hindu year beginning on the 1st of Baisakh (April— May), and that succeeding the year mentioned in the alternative account of Arishtanemi’s birth, which fixed it at the vernal equinox when the sun was in Virgo. The year when the sun was in Virgo at the 15th of April was about 10,200 B.C., or about the time when Vega began to be the Pole Star, under which Yudishthira and the Kauravyas were born. It was also a year consecrated to Antares a Scorpio, called
Arishta-nemi, pp. 316—318, that he was quickened in Khartik and born in Cheit (March—April), when the sun was in Virgo, about 12,200 B.c. If we apply similar reasoning to the date of the birth of the Kauravyas and Yudishthira in order that they should be born under Scorpio in 12,200, they must be born in May—June, the month Jaistha, in which the sun was in that constellation. They might, when born at the end of this month, the summer solstice, be conceived at the beginning of Khartik (October—November). The difficulty cannot be cleared up without a full examination of the texts, but in spite of this difficulty the connection between the births of the Pandava, Yudishthira, and Arishta-nemi is clear. Both were born about 12,200 B.C., and Yudishthira apparently in Jaistha, May—June, at the summer solstice.
   
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in the Akkadian Tablet of the Thirty Stars the Lord of Seed of the month Tisri (September—October), that is, the Lord of its offspring, the star of the storm, Zu bird, Lugal- tuddax, the layer of the autumnal egg.
This star heralding the season of the autumnal equinox in India and Babylonia also fulfilled a similar function in Egypt and Greece, where temples erected for the worship of a year-god whose year, like that of the three-years cycle, began at this date. It was regarded in Egypt as an equinoctial star, marking the setting of the sun at the vernal and its rising at the autumnal equinox 1 2 3 4 It was to this star that the great temple of Here, the Herceum, at Argos was oriented 3. Also as marking the connection of this year of Trophonius with the star Spica a Virgo, I may notice that in Egypt this star, called Min or Khim, was also looked on as that of a mummy-goddess who ruled the years beginning with setting stars, and Sir Norman Lockyer concludes from the orientation of the temples dedicated to this star that they celebrated the worship of a god whose year began on the ist May 4. This was the year of Persephone, the year of the Pleiades epoch, who appears, as we have seen, in the Trophonius legend. We thus see in this long analysis of ancient mythologies and astronomical legends that the age of the three-years cycle was that of the primaeval beehive robbed and conquered by the twin-gods of the eleven- months year which succeeded it. Also that this year is that ruled by the Pole Star Vega of the Vulture constellation, who ushered in this new year about 10,000 B.C. by hatching the world’s egg, from whence the Kauravyas who were to rule it were born. That this date of the birth of the Kauravyas coincided with that of Yudishthira, the Pandava ruler, and with the New Year’s Day of this year beginning with the
1   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars/ vol. ii., Antares, xxiv. pp. SS, S9.
2   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxx. p. 314.
3   Ibid., pp. 289, 308, 360, 3S8, 419.
4   Ibid., chap. xxxi. pp. 31S, 319.
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sacrifice of the sun-horse at the Roman Equiria on the 15th of October. This was also the year of the ape with the lion’s tail, borne by the sexless god Arjuna, the chief warrior of the Pandavas.
As the year of the ape with the lion’s tail was that begun under the auspices of the star Sirius, the star of Caleb, the conquering dog (kalb) star of the tribe of Judah, it was that in which he and Joshua or Hoshea, the Ya or Yahveh of the Hus or Hushim, the Danava sons of Dan, after wandering for forty years in the wilderness (the forty months of the cycle-year) broke into and conquered the treasure-house of the bees ruled by Deborah, the queen-bee. This land flowing with milk and honey was that discovered by these two spies or thieves who had dwelt in it for forty daysE This conquest was made after the death of Moses or Masu, the star Regulus in Leo which ruled the last season of this year. This is the constellation which lies due south of the pointer-stars of the Great Bear, that called by the Akkadians Su-gi, the spirit-reed {gi) of the Su bird, the reed-cradle in which he, with his Kushite wife Zipporah, the little bird, was guarded in his infancy by his virgin-sister Miriam, the Greek Mariam, the Hindu Mari-amma, the prophet-star Virgo which precedes Leo in the zodiacal list of stars 1 2. The birth-story of Moses is parallel with that of Kavad, the ancestor of the Kushite kings, who was found as an infant in the reeds of the lake Kushava or Zarah by Uzava, the goat Pole Star god. The constellation Leo, as ruler of the year, died on Mount Nebo, sacred to the prophet-god of that name, the planet Mercury, which was to herald the birth of the sun-god of Chapter VII., the
1   Numbers xiii. 33, 34.
2   Ibid. xii. 1 ; Exodus ii. 2—4, 21 ; Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 819, derives the Hebrew Miriam from the Greek Mariam, and the last is certainly the same word as the Hindu Tamil Mariamma, the mother (amma), Mari, the tree (marom) mother. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 357—362, where the history of the constellations of the Great Bear and Virgo is discussed at length.
   
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god of the eight-rayed star. These invaders acquired the lands ruled by Og, the king of the Rephaim of Bashan, who was, as we have seen, the god of the revolving year-bed of the heavens or beehive-house of God. Their leader was Hoshea, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim x, or the two ashes {ephra), the united sons of Jacob, the supplanting sun-god of the pillar of Bethel and husband of Leah, the wild (le) cow-mother with the weak eyes, the three-eyed mother Gauri, wife of Shiva, and of Joseph or Asipu, the son of Rachel the ewe, the ram-sun-god. Nun, the father of Hoshea, was the chief god of the four creating male and female pairs of the lunar-solar Egyptian mythology who were led and inspired by Thoth or Dhu-ti, the moon- bird {dim) of life (ti), and formed by Chnum the artificer, the Great Potter, the soul of Shu, the fire-god. They were called Nun, Nunet, Heh, Hehet, Kek, Keket, Gorh, Gorhet, the spirits of the air and the earth. They are the embodiment of the theology of the Mehueret cow, the year-cow of the year of three seasons made by the Ribhus, manifested in Nunet, the vulture-wife of Nun, the water or cloud-god2. They were the metaphysical form of the earliest eight gods of the fire-worshippers: (i) Shu, the heat; (2) Tefnut, the effluence or flame ; (3) Seb, the star or egg ; (4) Nut, the over-arching heaven; (5) Osiris, Orion; (6) Isis, the mountain (zs) goddess ; (7) Set, the ape-star Canopus first, and afterwards the Pole Star in Kepheus; and ( Nebh-hat, the mistress of the house, the tender of the sacred fire and the Pole Star mother-goddess, wife of Set.
It was from these eight parent-gods that Horus the young sun-god was born, the god depicted on the square zodiac at Denderah as ruling the equinoctial points North, South, East and West of the planisphere or eight-partitioned plan of the heavens drawn on the panther’s hide, the sacred garment of the Egyptian priests. In this the stars are
1   Numbers xiii. S.
2   Brugsch, Religion und Mylhologie dcr Alien sEgyplcr, pp. 116, 123, 124, 444, 469-
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placed in their respective quarters in the sky, and the mother of Horus Hathor or Nebt-hat rule the intermediate Northeast, South-west, South-east, North-west points, those marking the St. Andrew’s Cross indicating the yearly circuit of the sun-bird. Thus Horus, who is represented on the walls of the temple as born from the womb of the Pole Star goddess, is the son of the eight-rayed star1.
The Hebrew Hoshea is thus, as the son of Nun and the eight, the counterpart of the Egyptian Horus born of the Pole Star, and his mother was Nunet, the Vulture Pole Star Vega, while his father Nun was the ocean-god Num of the Finn Samoyedes, who divided the rule of the world between Jumala, the heaven god, and Num, the water god2. He was also a god of the Ugro-Finn Akkadians of Elam, the land of the great Naga snake Susi-Nag, for Elam, the South-eastern land of Akkadian geography, is called Mat Num-maki, the land of the lady (mak) Nun 3. The name of the god or goddess of the sun of the winter solstice rising in the South-east is indicated by the cuneiform symbol >-m>- meaning the three gods the Assyrian Rabu, the Hebrew Rabbi, the Hindu Ribhus. This parent of the sun-god was in Hebrew belief the fish-mother-goddess, for Nun means a fish in Hebrew. In other words, she was the goddess Tirhatha, or the cleft, the pool who was originally the mother Iiahu who gave birth to the sun-god born from the mother-tree grown in her ocean mud.
It was under the two robber leaders, the dog-star Sirius and the young sun-god succeeding the lion-star, the ape with the lion’s tail, that Jericho, the moon or yellow (Yarah Yareh) city, was betrayed by Rahab, the crocodile-mother, the constellation Draco, who admitted the two spies or *
* Marsham Adams, The Book of the Master of the Secret House, chap, vi., The Temple of the Virgin-Mother, pp. 71—73.
2   Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology „ vol. i. p. 261.
3   R. Brown, pun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. chap. xiv. pp. 163—165; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary Sign 361,498.
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thieves sent by Hoshea 1 to rob the Treasury of the heavens, of which this constellation was the crown and keystone. It was the Hindu Shunshu-mara of which the stars Gemini were the hands, the alligator, the constellation Vyasa, the parents of the fathers of the Kauravyas and Pandavas Dritarashtra and Pandu. Rahab, the crocodile constellation which, like Trophonius, connived at the robbery of the treasure-house she built, was converted into a mother-star of the new solar worship, and became the mother of Boaz 2, the sun-pillar of the twin-pillars Jachin and Boaz before the temple at Jerusalem.
The city fell before the blast of the trumpets of rams’ horns ushering in the cycle-year, which also proclaimed its fall, and the birth of the sun successor of its interloping follower, the eleven-months year of the horse’s head. This conquest was effected after the erection of Gilgal, the circle of year-stones, the pillar - girdle of Hir-men-sol, the sun-god of the great stone {men).
The seven trumpets of rams’ horns which overthrew the walls of the moon-city were the seven stars of the Bear- mother of the ram-sun, born, as we shall see in Chapter VII., of the Bear thigh. It was encompassed six times on the first six days of the siege, the six days of the Hittite week, and on the seventh day it was encompassed seven times. The number thirteen refers to the thirteen months of the year, the thirteen children of Jacob, to be described in Chapter VIII.
The ancient date of this change of ritual from Pole Star and moon worship to that of the sun-god is shown by the rite of circumcision which Hoshea required all the Israelites to undergo. By this rite the sun-worshippers united themselves to the land of their adoption by mingling their blood with its soil, and its antiquity is indicated by the stone or flint knives used by Joshua, which, according to the Septuagint version of the account of his burial, were buried with him 3.
1 Joshua ii.—vi.
- Matthew i. 6.
Joshua v. 2 ; xxiv. 30.
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The place of this revolution in Hebrew traditional history is shown in the historical genealogy of the kings of Edom, to which I have referred previously. Boaz of the golden pillar, the husband of Rahab, was the counterpart of Samlah of Masrekah, the vine-land, the Phoenician Pen Samlah, or the face of the God of the Name (Shem), the prophet pillar Samuel, the son of Hannah, the fig-tree from which the phalli of Dionysus were madez. He is otherwise called Penuel, the face of God. This was the gnomon image of the young Dionysus, son of Semele or Samlath, the god of the conical towers of Penuel which Gideon destroyed. His successor was Shaul of Re’noboth by the river Euphrates, the squares and suburbs of Babylon, where Shaul or Shawul was the sun-god 1 2 3
Shaul was the Saul of Hebrew history consecrated by Samuel, who inaugurated his rule as god of the year by setting up as his monument the symbol of the hand of the five-day weeks 3. He is the pillar-chief of the prophet- priests of the Ephod, who was succeeded by the sun-god of the eight-rayed star-father of the later year-kings, the sun-god who drove his year chariot through the heavens, independently of the Pole Star, following the path marked out for him by the Zodiacal Stars. This was the sun-god Dod or Dodo, the beloved-one, the eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is called Baal Hanan in Gen. xxxvi. 38, and in 2 Samuel xxi. 19, xxiii. 24, El- hanan, the son of Dodo of Bethlehem, who slew the great Goliath, the chief of the Rephaim, or sons of the giant (Refiha), the star Canopus. In Genesis xxxvi. 38, he is called the son of Achbor, the mouse, that is of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse, and his name Baal Hanan means the merciful or pitying-god, the sun-physician, the Phceni-
1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 24, 25.
- Gen. xxxvi. 37, 3S ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect i. pp. 54, 55.
3   I Samuel xv. 12. The word monument in our version, the Hebrew jadh, means, as noted in the margin, a hand.
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cian Eshmun, the Greek healing-god ^Esculapius, the son of the Indian snake and sun-cock sacrificed to him. This god, who introduced the new form of solar worship, will form the subject of the next chapter.

[Prometheus]

BOOK III.
SOLAR WORSHIP.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FIFTEEN - MONTHS YEAR OF THE SUN-GOD OF THE
EIGHT-RAYED STAR AND THE EIGHT-DAYS WEEK.
THE period now arrived at in this review of the history of human progress and national education 'is one which discloses to us the completion of the stage of development occupying the epoch of lunar solar worship of the three- - years cycle and of the eleven-months years measured by weeks of nine and eleven days. The social organisation of this age of transition was still, as in the days of the Pleiades year, based on the system of village and provincial governments, which gave each village and province the control of its own affairs, provided they did not injure those of their neighbours. The diffusion of this underlying principle of public policy studded during this period the whole of India, the coast-lands on the North of the Indian Ocean, the villages of the Euphrates and Tigris, Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Asia Minor, with provinces formed by the union of village communities. In the most prosperous of these regions, those watered by the Indus, Nerbudda, Jumna and Ganges in India, and the Euphrates and Tigris in Mesopotamia, the groups of allied provinces, which had become incorporated as separate confederacies, were controlled by imperial princes who, as national law-givers, ruled the province forming the centre of each confederated association of united states. The city which was the headquarters of the central ruler became, like Kashi and Babylon, the parent-village of the confederacy, the site of the national
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High Place or Akropolis, and its most sacred shrine the altar of the great mother. Of this centralising theocracy Delphi, the womb (8e\<f>vs) of the Dorians, and Jerusalem, the holy mountain of the Semites, are the most conspicuous survivals. Under the control of these princes and their counsellors society was, in the ages through which it reached the stage at which we have now arrived, ruled by the village and provincial elders who, besides doing the every-day duties of government, superintended the education of each fresh generation of young men and women who were born as children of their respective villages. These were trained as successors to those who brought them up, and taught to continue their inherited policy of conservative veneration for the past and of careful and slow advance to new progressive improvements.
The original village organisation was, to a certain extent, succeeded by that of the commercial guilds which ' superintended all handicrafts and productive trades, and watched over and developed the internal interchange of local products conducted in the weekly markets and annual fairs held at selected sites distributed over the country. This supervision of internal commerce developed, as wealth and enterprise increased, into that of the foreign and maritime trade which followed the river and valley highways, and the ocean coasts. Under the guidance of these guilds the traders of India, known as the Tur-vasu, had penetrated into Persia, the Euphratean countries, Arabia, Egypt and Syria, and joined the descendants of the earlier Indian emigrants who had settled as farmers on the coasts of the Mediterranean. Thence they had passed through Greece and Italy to the extremities of Europe. In their advance they founded the village communities of the Neolithic Age which grew into inland cities and trading centres, such as Kashi and Takka-sila in the interior, and Tamra-lipti, Baragyza, Dwarika and Patala on the coasts of India; Eridu, Girsu and Haran or Kharran in Mesopotamia ; on the coasts of the Mediterranean Ashkelon, Jebail Gi-bil or Bil-gi,
3^4
History and ,Chro7iology
consecrated to the Akkadian fire-god Bil-gi, called by the Greeks Byb-los, apparently the earliest Phoenician port in Syria, Smyrna and Troy. In Greece Orchomenus, Tiryns, and the prehistoric Akropolis of Athens, Gnossos, the capital of Minos in Crete ; and in Italy the Umbrian port of Caere or Agylla, and the Tyrrhenian Tarquinium, the sacred city of Tarchon Tages or Terie’gh, the child who rose from the furrow as the son of the European form of the Indian year-mother Sita, the disseminator of the astronomy of his father Rama, and who was the child of the original snake constellation of Draco. These pioneers of maritime trade had also passed through Gades, the city of the apples of the Hesperides, and the Gates of Hercules to Britany, where their sepulchral mounds, menhirs, sun-circles and stone calendars show indubitable traces of their occupation of the coasts of the French Cornouaille, which were a stepping- stone to the tin lands of Cornwall, the ancient Kassiterides or tin islands.
Throughout the long series of ages fresh breeds and types of character had been formed by the intermingling of different stocks of emigrant races, but the process of growth had been generally peaceful till the arrival of the Northern sons of the sun-horse, who had taken possession as conquerors of the lands into which they introduced their new beliefs. They had by their arbitrary dealings with the people they subjugated prepared, during the age of the eleven- months year, the way for the revolution which was to end in the worship of the sun-god as the successor to the Pole Star.
It was to these military conquerors that the world owes the development of individual character begun among the North-western Goths or sons of the bull (gut or got), the race of cattle herdsmen who based their national organisation on family property, and divided their land not into village communities but into tracts owned by the families united to form tribal territories, as the village communities formed provinces.
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These men were the Teutonic Frisians and Saxons, described by Tacitus, who says of them1: “They cannot “ endure houses close to one another; scattered and separated “ they settle where attracted by a spring, a pasture, or a “grove. Their villages are not arranged as among us “Romans with united dependent buildings. Each man “ surrounds his house with an open courtyard, from fear of “ fire or ignorance how to build. They do not use stones “ or tiles, but employ a common material (kneaded clay), “without show or value.”
These people are essentially different from the Southern Suevi or Swabians, who, as Tacitus says2, “ have no private “ or separate fields with proper boundaries, and the magistrate and princes divide the land annually in proportion, “while the village tenants of the lord,” like the members of the Indian village community who do not belong to the official families, “ each occupies his own house, and pays “ a tribute of corn, cattle, and flax.”
Tacitus here describes a community like those of the Central and Southern Indian villages, which has reached the stage of cultivating common lands, for which rent is paid in kind, as described in Chapters IV. and V.
In the North-west provinces of India we find that the most common tenures are those of the Jat villages, in which each farmer cultivates with his family his own hof or house and farm garden and his compact fields, all forming one separate farm, and not intermixed with the holdings of their neighbours as in the communal village lands. In the lands of North-west Europe, where the prototype of these holdings has existed from time immemorial, several scattered farms form a Bauerschaft, which generally bears the name of the oldest and most honoured Hof. Its proprietor is called Hauptman, Headman, or Captain, and his house is the Recht Hof or Court of Judgment, the meeting-place of the tribe, analogous to, but differing from, the Gemeinde Haus
1 Tacitus, Germania, 16.   2 Ibid., 25, 26.
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of the communal village, which is common and not individual property. This Bauerschaft of the Low Germans is similar to the Bratsvo or community of brothers of the Southern Slavs, as described by Schrader x.
Each Bratsvo owns a landed estate, of which each family owns a definite and compact portion. The number of men capable of bearing arms in a Bratsvo vary from about thirty to eight hundred, and the families to which they belong occupy one or more villages like the Uchelwyr and Bonne- digion, the corresponding class among the Goidelic Celts. They fight side by side in battle, and their leader is chosen by the Bratsvenici.
These people, the Goths of Gothland, the Getae of the Balkan country and Asia Minor, became in India the Jats or Cheroos who hold Pattidari villages divided into different shares of land held by each family forming the village community. They, like the Getae of Armenia, described by Herodotus i. 216, worshipped the sun-god, to whom they offered horses. The Jats in India are divided into the Dhe Jats, called the Pachades or comers from the West (pack), and the Hele or Deshwali Jats, dwellers in the country {desk), who worship the god Ram, who has the plough for his weapon. They, like the ancient Hebrew sons of Shem, the Name, preserve the family and national history in the form of a mythic genealogy, prepared by bards called Jagas or Bhats. It was originally a history framed on principles similar to the recited chronicles of the priestly successors or assistants to the village elders, the priests called Prashastri or keepers of records which were verbal and not written. These became, as the careful preparation and remembrance of the original divine poems died out, under the rule of the Dhe Jats, the Brythonic followers of the Goidels, the family histories of distinguished individuals claimed as ancestors by the Brython tribes. It was these bards who took the place first assigned 1
1 Jevon, Schrader’s Prehistoric Antiquities of Aryans, Part iv., chap, xii., sect. iii. p. 397.
   
33;
in the primitive constitutions to the teaching village elders. ^ The original or Hele Jats are also called Bhatti, or men of the bards, and Malwa Jats. They are the descendants of the latest immigrant Malli tribes, who gave their name to Malwa and Multan or Malli-thana, the place of the Mallis. It was while besieging this town in his war with the Malli and Kathaei or Kathi that Alexander the Great was woundedI. It was a great centre of sun-worship, and it was hither that, according to the Bhavishya Purana Samba, son of Krishna, which may be a representative name denoting the Shambara or Parthian men of the javelin, brought Magi from Saka- dwipa, or the land of Seistan, to officiate in the temple of the sun at Multan 2 3 4.
The present chief representatives of these Malwa Jats in the Punjab are the Rajas of Putiala, Nabha and Jind, all of whom trace their descent to the Jat confederacy originally settled at Mahraj in the Ferozepur district. Their institutions were thoroughly republican, somewhat like those of the Spartans, for when they came under British protection they were not governed by Rajas but by a Panchayat Council of elders, like the Spartan Ephors chosen by the 6,728 Jat free-holders 3. These are the ruling officers said in the Mahabharata to be provincial governors. “ The five brave and wise men employed in the five offices of protecting the city, the citadel, the merchants and agriculturists, and punishing criminals 4.” Confederacies such as these were so careful of their independence that, like the people of Khytul belonging to the Mahraj group of states, they would not admit a tax-collector into their city, but paid their land revenue or rent over the wall ; and they were most particular in isolating themselves from their neighbours. Thus the Jat village of
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Multan, p. 23S.
1 A. Weber, India a?id the West in Old Days, p. 20 ; Hewitt, Early History of Northern India, Tart ii. J.R.A.S., 1SS9, pp. 226, 250.
3 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 42 ; Hunter, Gazetteer, Mahraj, vol. ix. p. 184.
4   Mahabharata Sabha (Lokapdlasabhd-hhyana) Parva, v. p. 17,
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Jagraon in the Ludhiana district was divided into eight Pattis or wards, Jagraon being in the centre ; and it and the seven circumjacent Pattis were all carefully fortified against each other1. These precautions recall the days when similar rivalry and isolation separated the dwellers on the seven hills of Rome, and when, as we have seen, the men of the quarter of the Palatine Via Sacra fought with those of the Suburra for the possession of the head of the horse sacrificed as the old year’s horse at the Equiria. These customs, though they are permeated with the spirit of Northern isolation, yet show that those who lived under them had so far lost their original dread of contact with neighbours, who were possible foes, the “ hostes ” who were in Latin speech both enemies and strangers, as to live in walled towns and to borrow the Dravidian village institutions, which entrusted the rule of the community to the village elders.
Hence we see that though the Finno-Celts established their supremacy in the lands in which they settled by war and violence, and by trying to trample underfoot the customs of the aboriginal inhabitants, yet they gradually amalgamated with them and instituted the habit of intermarriages, which were first preceded by the forcible capture of the daughters of the land. In these marriages the union between the old and new settlers was made binding by intermingling the blood of the alien married partners. In the societies which grew up from this interfusion of races, the various modifications of the year-reckoning and the national ritual set forth in previous Chapters were evolved; but in all these, as we have seen, the primaeval beliefs held a conspicuous place; and the national histories represented the gods of the new ritual as directly descended from the first parents of the village races ; and everywhere the cloud- mother-bird Khu and the father-tree-ape were looked on as the ancestors of the new sun-god. In pursuance of this system we shall now see that the sun-god born as the ruler 1 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 52.
of the Myth-Making Agt»
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of this epoch was the son of the Thigh of the ape-father begotten from the cloud-bird-mother, who, as mother of the sun-physician yEsculapius, was as Koronis, first the raven-mother and afterwards the annual garland of flowers born from the successive months of the year.
A. The birth of the Sun-god born of the Thigh.
The origin of this year of the son of the Thigh, adopted by these amalgamated Northern and Southern races after the year of eleven months, is distinctly explained in the Brahmanas in the instructions for lighting the fire on the year-altar. The first sacrificial fire kindled was that on the altar made in the form of a woman, and during its ignition eleven Samidheni or kindling stanzas were recited to the eleven gods ruling the eleven months of the year, those invoked in the eleven stanzas of the Apr! hymns. But the ritual marking the supersession of the eleven- months year of the head of the sun-horse of night by that dedicated to the sun-god of day tells us in the only signification that can be given to the words of the Brahmanas, that the change of year-reckonings was one from Pole Star to sun-worship, and that this was a natural evolution of the new from the old year.
This is the obvious meaning of the new rule introduced by the innovators, that in kindling the sacrificial fires of this year the eleven Samidheni stanzas were to be recited as in the old ritual, but the first and last were each to be repeated thrice to make fifteen the number of months in the new year. These stanzas were to be in the GayatrT metre of eight syllables in the line, and each of the fifteen contained three of these lines or twenty-four syllables. Hence the Samidheni hymn of fifteen stanzas was an epitomised description of this year of fifteen months, pach of twenty-four days, and three eight-day weeksl. Thus this year contained only 24 x 15, or three hundred and sixty
1   Eggeling, Sal. Brahi. 3, 5, 4—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 97 note.
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days instead of the three hundred and sixty-three days of the eleven-months year.
In order to realise the causes of this change, which was a reversal from the more correct year of Dadhiank to the Orion year of three hundred and sixty days, we must trace out the history of the revolution, and this we shall find in that of the parentage of the sun-god. He was called in all the mythologies of that age the son of the Thigh, that is of the Thigh of Set, the constellation of the Great Bear, the parent constellation of the Kushika who invaded India from the North, and which they called the seven Rishis or antelopes. This constellation ruled both the three-years cycle and the eleven-months year, and in the latter it was associated with Pegasus, the four stars of Pegasus being united with the seven stars of the Great Bear to symbolise its eleven months.
But in the present year the sun-god, the Phoenician Esh- mun or eighth god, the Hindu Ashtaka, with the same meaning were substituted for the four stars of Pegasus, the four sons of Horus, and these eight gods ruled the eight- days week of this year, as the eleven stars of Pegasus and the Great Bear had ruled the eleven-days week of the previous year. This new god, the Phoenician Eshmun, the Akkadian Eshshu, was worshipped in Cyprus and Rhodes as Paian the healer, the sun-physician, and in the latter island his shrine on Mount Atabyrios was called that of Zeus Paian. This mountain is a reproduction of the Phoenician Mount Tabor 1 near the Sea of Galilee, on which hill of the oak-tree, the parent-tree of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, Saul prophesied after he had found the asses of his father; the ass-sun-gods which drew the car of the Ashvins and Ravana of the cycle-year, and had been received by Samuel, as sun-king of the age of Ephod worship, at Ram ah, the High-place consecrated to Ram, the sun-god. It was at Ramah that he was declared to be the son of the Thigh, that
1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 226, 26, Appius, xii. 27.
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of the victim put on his plate as the thigh of the god of the dead yearz. But this was the right thigh of the sun-father- god given to the Jewish prophet-priests of the house of Kohath 2 and not the left, sacred to the Pole Star god, given, as we have seen in Chapter VI. pp. 332, 333, to the father-god, rider on the sun-horse, after the birth of the “child of the majesty of Indra.” To trace the history of the god born of the Thigh we must go back to the' Mahabharata, where this god called Aurva, the son of the Thigh (uru), is said to be the son of Chyavana. Chyavana, whose name means “the moving one,” was the personified fire-drill whose wife is called in the Mahabharata the daughter of Manu Arushi, the red one, the glowing fire-socket kindled by the fire-drill 3. In the Satapatha Brahmana she is called Su-konya, the daughter (konya) of Su, the mother-bird. Her father is Sharyata, the Manava or son of Manu, the god of the arrow (sharya), that is of the year-god Orion, who, as Krishanu the drawer of the bow, slew at the winter solstice the Shyena or frost {shya) bird, the year-mother-bird from whom the sun-god of Orion’s year of the Palasha-tree was to be bom. In short, Su-konya is a reproduction of the Shyena or bird- mother of Orion’s year.
Her marriage to Chyavana was the work of the Ashvins, the twin-stars Gemini, who made Chyavana, the aged kindler of the fires of Orion’s year, young again by bathing him in the Pool of Regeneration, that is by causing him to be reborn from the living waters of the mother-ocean as the sun-god of the year they ruled. This is the pool symbolised in the story of the birth of the Lycian sun-god Apollo, born of Leto the tree-trunk by the yellow-river Xanthus, in which his mother bathed him at his birth. He thus became the sun-god of the race of the united North and South twins, the Kathi or Hittites, the Indian Yadava and Turvasu. It was on accomplishing this marriage of the rejuvenated sun- 1
1 I Samuel ix., x. 1—13.   = 1 Samuel ix. 24 ; Levit. vii. 32.
3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191.
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father that the Ashvins were, according to the Satapatha Brahmana, allowed to drink Soma with the gods, and the Soma they drank was the honey-drink of which the mystery was taught them by Baahiank, the god of the year of the horse’s head *.
At the sacrifice inaugurating the year of their reception the Bahish-pavamana stotra is recited. This is the chant of the outside (bullish) drizzling or pure Soma, the heavensent rain. It is to this Soma Pavamana that all the hymns of the Ninth Mandala of the Rigveda are addressed, and he is called (ix. 107, 15) the god-king who with his waves takes the holy offerings across the sea. In other words, he is primarily the wind-god, driver of the clouds, who clears the air for the path of the sun-god.
But the ritual gives us better insight into the inner meaning of this chant than we can gain from the interpretation of its title, for it was with this chant that the gods summoned the Ashvins2, and therefore it had a special historical significance. It consists of nine lines in the Gayatri eight%yllabled metre consecrated, as we have seen, to this year, and therefore of 72 syllables. That is to say, it is a year-hymn telling of the union in the year of the Gayatri eight-days week of the nine-days week of the cycle-year with the 72 five-day weeks of the Pleiades and Orion’s year 3.
Thus we find in this ritualistic cryptogram, as well as in the kindling hymn, most striking proofs that the authors of this chanted ritual, written in the lilting Gayatri eight- syllabled metre, that employed by the earliest Vedic writers, used it, which has been reproduced in the Greek Anacreontic metre, as a memoria technica for the preservation of the memory of the epochs of the world’s history ear-marked by the successive methods of reckoning annual time.
But this is not all the historical information given by the ritual of the Bahishpavamana hymn, which summoned the
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. i, 5, 1 — iS; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 272—277.
2   Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 13; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 275.
3   Ibid., iv. 2, 5, 10; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 310, note 1.
   
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stars Gemini to the assembly of the gods who ruled time at the New Year’s feast of the marriage of the rejuvenated year-father to the mother-year-bird.
This hymn of invitation, which recognised the twin ruling- stars of the eleven-months year as the agents who introduced the new sun-year of the eight-days week, was recited at the Chatvala pit, whence the earth for the Uttaravedi or northern altar was taken. This is outside the limits of the consecrated Soma ground at its north-east corner, the rising point of the sun at the summer solstice *. The altar for which the earth was taken from the pit was the square* earth-altar of Varuna, which was, as we have seen, first covered with sheaves of Kusha grass, and afterwards, when used in the ritual of the animal sacrifices, with branches of the Plaksha-tree {ficus infectoria).
This latter covering was placed on the altar when the omentum and heart of the living victims slain were roasted at it, after they had been slain outside the consecrated Soma ground close to the Chatvala pit. It was on this altar, reconsecrated for animal sacrifices by the Plaksha branches, that the triangle, made of Pitadaru wood (Pinns deodard), was substituted for the triangle made of Palasha twigs {Butea frondosa) placed round the navel of this symbol of the divine mother of life.
The Chatvala pit was especially associated with the ritual which looked on the year as a recurring series of ceremonial sacrifices marking its progress; and it was into this pit that at the Samishtayajus ceremonies at the end of the annual Soma sacrifices there were thrown the throne {,asatidi) of the Soma year-king, the Udumbaii {Fiats glomerata) supporting pillar of the house (.sadas) of the year-gods, the Dronakalasa or hollowed tree-trunk in which the Soma sap of the year-tree was stored. These were afterwards transferred to the mother-water or temple-pool. Together with these the sacrificer threw into the pit his
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., iv. 2, 5,9, iii. 5, I, 26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 309, 116, notes 1 and 3.
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year-girdle of three strands, signifying the three seasons of the year, and the black deer’s horn he wore at the end of his sacrificial surplice as a reminiscence of the original year of the black antelope x. The ceremonies performed at the Chatvala recognised the beginning and end of a year opening with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice, that is the year of the Northern god of the rising, not the Southern god of the setting sun; and this year was, as we have seen, that of three seasons and six-day weeks described in Chapter IV. Hence the New Year sacrifice which deified the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, who brought the sun-maiden or Pole Star bird as bride to the moon-god, and worshipped them as the twin door-posts of the House of God, included that year as well as the earlier years recalled in the Bahish-pavamana chant. In the ritual of the year’s cups assigned to the ruling deities of the months of this new year the tenth cup was allotted to the Ashvins as the gods of the three-years cycle 2.
To bring the ritualistic historical record down to the Gayatrl year another chant of eleven verses was added to the Bahish-pavamana. The first of these stanzas is called Shiras, the head, and the second Grivah, the neck, thus showing it to be a year-hymn of the eleven-months year of the horse’s neck. This chant is called the head of the sacrifice offered by Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head, that is to say, it proclaimed the sacrifice to be one to the ruling-god of the eleven-months years, the year ruled by the Thigh constellation of the Great Bear. Plence this lengthy analysis of the ritual of this most significant marriage of the year-gods Chyavana and Su-konya, brought about by the Ashvins, shows that its initial ceremonies conveyed to the initiated a complete history of time records, as disclosed
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., iv. 4, 5, 2, iii. 2, 1, 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 379, notes 2 and 3, 29, 30.
2 Ibid.,iv. 1, 5, 16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 278.
3 Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 15, xiv. I, 1, 18—24 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276, note I, xliv. pp. 444, 445.
   

[Prometheus]

 
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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.
39^
   
(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.
of the Myth-Making Age,
39 7
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.
398
Histoiy and Chronology
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.
400
   
 
   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.
of the MytJi-Making Age.
401
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.
D d
402
   
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.
   
403
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.
l)d 2
404
   
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.
405
   
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.
40 6
   
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.
   
407
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.