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

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god when the Pole Star entered Hercules, the sun constellation, about 8000 E.C.
We have now to complete the review of this phase of history, as told in the various forms of the Tobit story, to return to that telling of the exploits of Jack the Giant-killer, the builder of Jack’s house. He, as we have seen, first built the house of the year of the nine-day weeks, and after that, in the Talmud story, the house of the eight-day weeks of the present year. In his wars against the giants of the eleven-months year he met with the son of Arthur, the Celtic ploughing- god Echaid Airem, the ploughman or farmer who sowed the seed whence the malt seed of life of the year of the eight-days week was to growx. This prince, the counterpart of Tobit, released and buried a corpse arrested on account of the dead man’s debts, the corpse of the dead year of the rule of the Great Bear, the Thigh-god, as the reckoner of the year. He spent all his money in paying the creditors of the dead year, and it was after paying the last penny that he and Jack, whom he had met after the burial of the corpse, set out on their travels like Raphael and Tobias. On their way Jack procured from a threeheaded giant, the giant of the year of the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion), the god of the year of three seasons, the coat of darkness, the cap of knowledge, the sword of sharpness, and the shoes of swiftness, the outfit of the sun-gods Perseus and Sigurd. Provided with these, the equivalents of the heart, liver and gall of the alligator fish in the Tobit story, he and the prince arrive at the house of the lady the prince sought to marry, the Sara with seven husbands. The marriage was agreed to, provided the prince was able to bring her handkerchief, which she placed before him in her bosom, and to guess whose lips she kissed the last thing at night. She gave the handkerchief to Asmodeus, here called Lucifer, and kissed his lips ; but Jack followed her in the sun’s night disguise, took the handkerchief, and 1
1   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, ii., Arthur and Airem, pp. 25 ff.
   
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cut off the horned head of Asmodeus, which he gave to the " princess, who is shown by her two-year tasks to be originally the mother-bird of the solstitial sun-year of two seasons. It was after the death of the horned stone (ashma) god that she recovered her beauty and became the bride of the prince. For the transformation scene we must go back to the German version of the story, in which the bride when plunged into water by her lover becomes successively a raven and a dove? before she became a maiden. These changes we may compare with the raven and the dove sent forth from Noah’s ark, the raven bird-mother of the matriarchal races who disappeared like the evil spirits which disfigured the princess? and the dove who returned as the marrying-bird of the patriarchal races with the olive leaf of the tree-mother Athene in her beak, the leaf sacred to the mother-goddess of Asia Minor. These changes are similar to those made by Thetis, the mud (thith) goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay, before she became the mother of the sun-god Achilles. She became successively a lioness, a dragon, fire and water. Also the seal-god Proteus, called in the Odyssey the Egyptian god assistant of Poseidon, the ape-god of the river Nile, became, when caught by Menelaus, a lion, a dragon or serpent, a leopard, a boar, water, and a lofty tree1. These various forms depict the successive changes in the symbolic representations of the god who measured time in the images I have recorded in the previous pages of this book.
The altar or house of the sun-god ruling the year of eight- day weeks, which was built by Jack the Giant-killer, appears again in the altar built by David on the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the Jewish counterpart of the Hindu year-altar of the Brahmanas. It was built on the mountain of Jerusalem, which became the site of the later temple. This is now surmounted by an octagonal dome with its entrance gate at the North-west, the setting-point
1 Homer, Odyssey, iv. 383, 386, 456—459.
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of the sun of the summer solsticeJ. David’s altar was built to stay the plague among the people, that is, the plague brought, as we have seen, by the Angel of Death on the day of the ninth brick. This plague was sent, according to the Rabbinical commentator, when the conquering sun-god, the butcher, had overcome all his enemies1 2. Similarly, the plague stayed by the building of David’s altar came at the close of his career after he had conquered all his opponents. Among these the chief were, Hanan the merciful, the son of Nahash, king of the Ammonites 3, that is himself as Baal Hanan, who had caused Uriah the Hittite, whose name means Light is god, to be slain as a deceased year-god, and he was the twenty-ninth of his captains 4, the last day of the month in the year of Orion of twelve months of twenty-nine days each. After his death he married his wife Bath-sheba, she of the seven (sheba) measures, the seven wine-bearing stars of the Great Bear, and became the father of Solomon, the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun-god, who built the temple of the year. He had also defeated the conspiracies of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, daughter of Nahash, the Great Bear god, who sought to dethrone him and set up Absalom, the brother of Tamar, the date-palm-tree.
This consecration of the sun-rock at Jerusalem, dedicated to the god of the eight-rayed star and the eight-days week, as the navel of the Semite earth marks an equally decisive period in the Hebrew history of the year as that marked in Hindu history by the sacrifice of Ashtaka.
C. The Hindu gods of the eight-days week.
This god, whose name means the eighth, was, as we have seen, the son of the two Jarat-karus, the heavenly fire-drill
1   O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., The Number Eight, p. 167, The North, P- 443-
2   2 Samuel xxiv. 19—25 ; Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, Second Edition, The Talmud and the Targums, p. 143.
s 2 Samuel x. 1 ff.   * 1 Chron. xi. 40.
   
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and socket turned by the axle-star of the Great Bear, to which Ixion or Akshivan was bound as the turning-god. Ashtaka officiated as the chief-priest at the sacrifice at which Janamejaya, after conquering Takka-sila (Taxila), the stronghold of the Naga power, destroyed all the Naga snake- gods, except the three year-gods of the Takkas, Shesh Nag, Vasuk Nag, and Taksh Nag. Shesh Nag, the god of the spring season, had been made by Vasuki the ocean-snake encircling the mother-mountain, and he did not appear at the sacrifice. Vasuk Nag, the god of summer, was Ashtaka’s maternal uncle, and he likewise did not appear. Taksh Nag, the god of winter, who had slain Parikshit, one of the gods of this epoch, whose history I will tell later on, was saved at the special intercession of Ashtaka x.
The altar on which this sacrifice was offered was that of the eight-rayed star of which the image was drawn on the ground consecrated for the building of the later brick altar of the year-sun-bird rising in the East, the altar measuring in the number of its bricks and stages the whole year. This altar, of which I have given a short description in Chapter V. pp. 269, 270, as depicted on the Breton Linga altar2, is ordered in the ritual of the building of the bird-altar to be marked on the consecrated ground by the sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree drawn by oxen attached to the plough by traces of Munja grass, of which are made the three-strand girdles of the Brahmins, denoting the three seasons of the year. The sides of this square altar face the cardinal points, and the first lines marking it are begun at the Southwest corner, the setting point of the sun-bird of the year beginning at the winter solstice. The first line traced is from the South-west to the South-east corner, the second from the South-west to the North-west, the third from the North-west to the North-east, and the fourth from the Northeast to the South-east completes the square marking the 1
1 Mahabharata Adi (Faushya) Parva, iii. p. 45.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, lvi.—lviii. pp. 154—159.
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year circuit of the’sun-bird. .The first cross line drawn is that of the Pole Star, due South and North from the centre of the line from the South-west to the South-east to mark the year measured by the Pleiades and Canopus in their annual course round the Pole. Then a line is drawn from the South - west to the North-east to mark the year of the solstitial flying-bird beginning with the setting of the sun at the winter solstice in the South-west. Then the line drawn due West and East from the centre of the West line to mark the equinoctial year included in the three-years cycle, and lastly the line from the North-west to the Southeast to denote the year of the eight-rayed star as measured from the setting sun of the summer solstice, the year of
E Under this arrangement the
SE
the six-days week I. w|-^ sw
altar is divided into eight divisions, representing the eight points of the compass and the eight days of the week, and it represents all the primitive ruling years. The Hindu sun-god of this year was the sexless sun-god Bhishma, also called Dyu, light. He was the son of Shantanu, the healer, the great-grandfather of the Kauravyas and Pandavas and of Gunga, the river-mother who identified him, as we are told in the Mahabharata 1 2, with the god Dyu who stole Nandini the year-cow of Vashishtha, the chief star in the Great Bear and the god of the perpetual fire on the altar, for the daughter of Ushlnara, who was, as we have seen, the wife of Kakshivat, the god of the eleven-months year. Bhishma was the eighth son. She threw into the river, to which she gave her name, her first seven sons as soon as they were born, that is to say, killed them like the seven husbands of Sara, and left her husband and her home on earth directly her eighth son was born, just as Jarat-karu quitted his wife when he had done his duty as the departing sun-god and given life
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 326—330,
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcviii., xeix. pp. 293—297.
   
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to his newly born son Ashtaka. Gunga took her child also, called Devavrata, or the law (vrata) of God, and sent him back to earth, when he was grown up, to remain there for a time as the god ruling the year. He was thus like the sun who was nursed for the first three months of his life by the thirty stars.
His genealogy, as told in Rg. x. 72, declares that he was created by Brahmanas-pati, the Pole Star god who from the non-existent brought forth the parent of the existent, Uttanapad, the god with the out-stretched legs, the roots of the mother-tree, the original female symbol f \ of the two productive thighs. From this was born Aditi, the beginning without (a) a second (diti), and Daksha, the showing god of the open hand and the five fingers of the five- days week. They begot the gods of time who brought the sun-god Su-rya from the sea (with the rains of the summer solstice). To Aditi were born seven sons, which she took away with her, leaving on earth the eighth, the Mart-anda or dead egg (anda), the sexless sun-god.
Thus this god, as Bhishma Dyu or Mart-anda, is as clearly born from the seven thigh stars of the Great Bear as the other national sun-gods of this epoch. On his rising on earth he became the king of the land of Jambu-dwipa, the country of the Jambu-tree or North India, the home of the Bharata race lying South of Sakadwipa, the Northern land of the Kushika T. He ruled during the reigns of Chitr-angada and Vichitra Virya, sons of Shantanu by Satyavati, the fish-mother-goddess, and during the infancy of the Kauravya and Pandava, grandsons of Vichitra Virya. He also led the Kauravya army during the first ten days of their eighteen days’ battle with Pandavas. He bore on his banner the date- palm-tree, the mother-tree of the eleven-months year, surmounted with the five stars, called in the Rigveda “ five bulls or eagles ” which sit in the midst of heaven and hold back the “ devouring wolf,” who tries to enter the watery home 1
1 Mahabharata Bhishma (Jamvu-khanda Nirmana) Parva, ix.—xi. pp. 29—39.
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of their realm, the treasure-house of the rain*god I. These stars are the Pole Star and the four stars said in the Zenda- vesta to rule the four quarters of the heavens : 1. Tishtrya or Sirius, ruling the East; 2. The seven stars of the Great Bear, the Haptoiringas or seven bulls, the North ; 3. Vanant or Corvus, the West; and, 4. Satavaesa or Argo, the South. These are also the four Loka-palas of the Hindus 2 3 4. Of these the constellation Hasta, the hand or Corvus, that of the five-day weeks of the hand of Daksha, is the ruling constellation of the Pandavas, who are compared to its five stars as they stood round Drona their tutor, the god of the tree-trunk 3. It was to the centre god of these five ruling bulls that the Pandavas betook themselves after their first victory won by Arjuna, who alone, except Kama, the horned lunar-solar god of the three-years cycle, could string the bow of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, provided for those who entered the contest for the hand of Drupadi. Drupadi refused to accept Kama as a suitor. Arjuna after stringing the bow in Pushya (December—January), the month of the winter solstice, when the wedding took place, and on the 16th, or full-moon day, shot through the central mark in the sky, the palace of the Pole Star, five arrows, the five seasons of the year of the five Pandava brethren, of which I shall give the full account in Chapters VIII. and IX. He thus repeated the feat of Krishanu and won the hand of Drupadi for the five Pandava brethren. It was when the bride was won that they went to the house of the Potter, the master Pole Star, where the marriage was consummated 4.
It was at the end of the Magh year, the end of December —January, that the Pandava wedding took place. This was the year of Bhishma, who died, as we are expressly told in the Mahabharata, at the end of his year on the first of
1   Rg. i. 105, 10, II.
s Hewitt, Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 331, 332.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxvii. p. 403.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Swayam-vara) Parva, clxxxvii., clxxxix., cxc., cxcii. pp. 524, 526, 530, 532, 538, 558.
   
427
Magh (January—February), when the sun had begun its Northward course1.
The Hindu god who was the counterpart of Bhishma and the charioteer of Arjuna the Pandava leader, as Bhishma was generalissimo of the Kauravyas, was Krishna. He who was like David the youngest of eight sons was born, according to the popular mythology of,Mathura his birthplace, on the eighth of Bhadon or Bhadra-pada, or at the end of the first week of the second six months, the second stage of this year in its second form dating from 8200 B.C., beginning in Phalgun (February—March) 2. His father was Vasu- deva, the son of the creating-god Vasu, and his mother Devakl. They were brought from Goburdhan on the Jumna, the place sacred to the keeper of the cattle of Ra-hu, to Mathura, sacred to the god of the fire-drill (math), by Kansa, the goose-king of the eleven-months year, in order that he might prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy that the eighth son of Vasudeva and Devakl would kill him. He killed successively their first six sons, but to avoid the slaughter of the seventh the embryo from which he was to be born was transferred from the womb of Devakl to that of Jasoda, meaning the exhausted or superseded goddess, wife of Nanda of Go-kul, the cow-pen, the male god of the Nand-gaon hill. Nanda was, in the local legend of the birth of the Bharata, husband of Ra-dha, the maker (dha) of Ra, the sun-god, whose sacred hill was Barsana, divided from Nandgaon by the valley of the grove of Sanket or the “ place of assignation ” where the lovers met, as the matriarchal village- mothers met their lovers from the next village in the village grove. Barsana and Nandgaon are the two sacred hills of the Bharatpur range, the mother-hills of the Bharatas3. Nanda’s wife Jasoda is also called in local legend RohinI, the star Aldebaran, who was, as we have seen, called, like Ra-dha, the mother of the sun-god, and she as wife of Nanda
1   Mahabharata Anushasana (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, clxvii. pp. 776.
a Mathura, a District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, pp. 50—63.
3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 450—453.
428
   
was the Nandini, the year-cow of Vashistha stolen by Dyu, the eighth god of the Bhishma series of sun-gods.
The son born from this transferred embryo, a process which appears in the birth stories of all Jain Tirthakaras x, was Valarama, the seventh son of Vasudeva and Devaki, called Halayudha, he who has the plough (kal) for his weapon. His banner was the date-palm-tree, but not surmounted by the five stars crowning the palm-tree of Bhishma2. He who stood aloof from the contest between the Kauravyas and Pandavas was thus the leading star in the Plough and Bear constellations. This was the plough borne on the banner of Shalya, god of the arrow-year 3. He was king of the Madras, who led the Kauravya army at their final defeat, and was father of Madri, the intoxicated (mad) mother of the two youngest Pandavas, whose fathers were the Ashvins 4.
The birth of Valarama from the six mother Pleiades, his deceased brethren, signified the marriage of RohinI their queen with the seven Rishis or antelopes of the Great Bear, a marriage succeeding her first union with Orion. It was to celebrate this union that the year of the god of the antelope’s head (mriga - sirsha) was made the national year beginning in Mriga-sirsha (November—December) 5, that is to say when the sun was in Taurus in that month about 12,200 B.c., a year of the age of the eleven-months year.
It was from the union of the Pleiades and Aldebaran with the stars of the Thigh that the god Krishna was born. Though the local legend of Mathura fixes his birthday on the eighth day of the light half of Bhadon, yet in Bombay and the South of India it is celebrated on the eighth day 1 2 3 4 5
1   Jacobi, faina Sfitras, Kalpa Sutra, Lives of the Jainas, 30; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 229.
2   Mahabharata Shalya (Gul-Aytidha) Parva, xxiv. and lx. pp. 135, 233.
3   Mahabharata Drona (Jayad-ratha-badha) Parva, cv. p. 297.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxiv. pp. 364, 365.
5   Eggeling, Sal. Brah., ii. 1, 2, 6—8 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 283, 284.
   
429
of the dark half of Shravana (July—August), or about the 8th of August; and it is stated in the Harivansa LVII. to have taken place on the eighth day of the dark half of Bhadon (Bhadrapada), about the 8th of September, and this is the date at which the festival is generally celebrated throughout Northern IndiaT.
The Harivansa tells us it took place like that of the Kauravyas and Pandavas under Abhijit the Star Vega, that is between 10,000 and 8000 B.C., and as the date varied from July—August to' August—September it marked the middle of a year beginning when the sun was in Gemini in January—February and in February—March.
Krishna when born was carried by his father, who eluded the guards of Kansa, across the Jumna to Gokul, on the east bank of the river, and there consigned to Nanda and Jasoda. From the latter Vasudeva took away her newly- born daughter, the twin-sister of Krishna, and placed her in the bed of DevakI, the bed of the year-god and goddess. When the guards of Kansa came to slay the newly-born eighth son she rose up to heaven as the mountain-goddess Durga or Su-bhadra, the blessed Su-bird, the goddess to be borne in the chariot of the Ashvins, as the star Capella in the chariot constellation Auriga, to her wedding as the virgin Suria or Su-konya with Soma the moon-god. She is called in the Harivansa LVIII. the goddess of the sun and moon, and is described as Kushika, the goddess of the Kushika, bearing the trident of the year of three seasons and the lance of Kuntl, the lance-mother of the Pandavas, the lance that pierces the rain-clouds and lights the year’s fires. Her dress was black with a yellow upper garment, and she wore a collar of pearls round her neck and the pearl earrings of the moon-goddess. Her banner was a peacock’s tail, that is of the Greek Here married to Zeus in Gamelion (January—February), and of the Mayura kings 1
1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, Hindoo Fasts, Festivals, and Holidays, pp. 430, 431.
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of the Bharata. She is called the goddess of the ninth day of the dark end of the eleventh day of the light half of the month, that is of the years of nine and eleven-day weeks, who was worshipped as the goddess Kail, to whom human and animal sacrifices were offered during those epochs. Her birthday, the 8th of September, is the day consecrated as the birthday of the Virgin Mother in the Roman Church, which took place nine months after the festival of the Immaculate Conception on the 8th of December, that is in the dark half of the Hindu month Mrigasirsha (November —December). Both the Indian and Christian goddess- mother are called with equal reverence The Blessed One. Krishna, the son and brother of the virgin-mother-goddess, the star Aldebaran who had become in astronomical evolution Capella, was born on the same day as his twin-sister. One of their birthdays, that on the 8th of Bhadon, the 23rd of August, is also the birthday of the Pythian Apollo, called Paian or the healing-god, the sun-physician. He was born on the 7th of Metageitnion (August—September), called Boukatios at Delphir, that is to say the 22nd of August; but this number seven became sacred as the week of Apollo in the year of the next epoch, the seventeen months of seven days each, and was doubtless derived from the seven stars of the Great Bear, his father’s constellation. It was on his birthday that the Pythian games began, which were originally held every eighth year in memory of the eight-days week, and they opened with hymns sung in honour of Apollo Paian, who slew with his arrows the Python snake who had inspired the oracles of Delphi during the age of the eleven-months year when the Ephod was worshipped1 2 3.
This snake was the Dragon of the oracle which Pausanias says Apollo slew at his birth 3. Its name Python is the Greek form of Budhnya in the name of the Vedic god Ahi Budhnya, the snake of the depths, the Greek Buthos, called
1   Hesiod, Works and Days, 771 sq. ; Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp 244,245.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 242.
3   Ibid., X. 7, 3, vol. i. p. 507.
   
431
also Ahi Shuva, or the swelling snake, which Indra slew when accompanied by the Maruts I. These Maruts, the daughters of the tree (marom) ape-god Maroti, are said in the sacrifice offered to celebrate the great victory of Indra, Apollo or Krishna to be seven in number, who danced round Indra as he killed the Vritra or enclosing snake2, that is to say, they were the mother-goddesses of the young sun- god, son of the Thigh with its seven stars. In the next hymn to that describing the victory of Indra and the Maruts, Indra’s mother, called Shavasi, the strong one, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 350, the Polar mother-tree from whose side he was born, calls her dead foe Ahi-shuva Aurna- vabha 3, the son of the weaver of wool, that is of the spinning mother Pleiades who bore the ram-sun of the cycle - year. This slain snake is invoked in another hymn as Ahi-budhnya, who is called on to bestow health as a healing god, and to come accompanied by the children of the waters, who bring the stallion swift as thought, the god Dadhiank of the horse’s head 4. This year of the slaying of the snake by the new-born sun-god, told in this series of national year histories, is the year of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, and Valarama, the parent-plough star-god of the year of fifteen months. It was, as we have seen, the year of the first victory of the Pandavas in which they won the tree-mother-goddess DrupadI, and in which Arjuna married Su-bhadra on the Raivataka hill, on which Arishtanemi, the sun-god of the eleven-months year, attained perfection on the 6th day of the light half of Shravana (July—August), about the 20th of July 5. This Raivataka hill is consecrated to Revati £ Piscium, the 27th Nakshatra, that is, to the star marking the close of the year of one epoch and the beginning of
1   Rg. viii. 65, 1—3.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416.
3   Rg. viii. 66, 1, 2.   * Rg. i. 186, 5.
5   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra,, Life of Arishtanemi, 173; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 277. We have seen on p. 428, that according to the mythology of Bombay and the South of India Krishna was born on the Sth day of the dark half of Shravana.
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another. Hence the change of state attained by Arishtanemi on this hill marked the close of his year of eleven months, and the opening of that ruled by Arjuna and Su- bhadra, the nominees of Krishna, who, with Rama, worshipped Arishtanemi on his renunciation of the rule of the year in favour of the new gods of the fifteen-months year. He was followed on his retirement by Raji-mati or Rai-mati, the mother of Ra, the sun-god, a variant form of Ra-dha, wife of Nanda. She who was in the Jain birth story daughter of Vasu-deva, the Bhoja king by his wife RohinT, the star Aldebaran, had been chosen by Krishna as the bride of Arishtanemi, and she on his abdication became, like him, a naked ascetic T, that is, they were stripped of the panoply of the year-god and numbered among the dead years.
D. The year of the Makommedan Twins.
We have seen that this year is ruled by the constellation Gemini, and valuable historical evidence as to the relations between this year and the constellation can be gained from the year of the Mahommedan Arabs as arranged in Mahom- medan ritual. It began with the 15th of July, the first of Mohurrum, when Mahommed went from Mecca to Medina, and this year is closely connected with the twins A1 Hasain and A1 Hosein, who are called in Mahommedan history the sons of Ali and grandsons of Mahommed. But to these have been attached attributes which were originally those of the twin year-gods who had been worshipped in Southwestern Asia for thousands of years before Mahommed. We have seen that this year of fifteen months is one with two beginnings, one in January—Februaiy and the other February—March, marking the times when the sun was in Gemini in those two months. We find a similar change in the Arab year beginning with the birth of the Arabian twins. Their first birth is said to be on the 3rd Sha’ban, 1
1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, Lect. xxii. I—32; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 112—116.
   

 
395
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,
   
399
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.

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
         383
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.
385
   
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.
C c
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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.
   
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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,
C C 2
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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.
   

   
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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
   
36.3
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.
   

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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.
   
337
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.
7
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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.
   
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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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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