A further examination of Celtic Mythology gives still more striking evidence of the close connection between it and Indian historical astronomy. In the Indian and Australian history of the Pleiades year, the bird that drags the Pleiades round the pole is the crow or raven-star Canopus, who appears in the mythology of the Cymri as Bran the raven. He is the god who voyaged in his star-ship to the “ Islajid_jof the Blest,” in Southern Mag-Findargat, the White Silver Plain. This was the island in which
grows flyCJ c?
“ An ancient tree with blossoms,
On which birds call to the hour?
In harmony. It is their wont To call together every hour1.’’
This is the world’s tree of Rg. I. 164, 20—22, on which the two ravens sit as guardians of this time record. And the story told in the Welsh Triads, III. 4, of the origin of the Cymri, proves that the raven-star-god and his followers ?/ were emigrants from the islands in the Southern Ocean, where the world’s tree of the mud-goddess Tan grew.
It is there said that they were led by Hu the mighty, \ that is by the cloud-bird Khu, to Wales from Diffrobani. This is explained in the text as Constantinople, but Professor Rhys has shown that Diffrobani is the Welsh form of Taprobane, the Latin name of Ceylon2. This was the island of Agastya, the star-god Canopus, who was the son of the tree grown from the mud of Bahu, the ocean bird of the Southern Hemisphere. Bran’s father was Llyr, the god of the sea, and hence the Eastern and Western raven-star were both children of the parent ocean.
Llyr’s chief temple in England was at Caer Llyn, the city Leir-cestre or Leicester. This temple, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a cavern hollowed in the earth beneath the river Soar.   He was there
worshipped as the year-god of the Cymri, who began their year on the 1st of November. This New Year’s
1 Meyer and Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Stanza 7, vol. i. p. 6.
2   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, pp. 334, 345*
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History and Chronology
festival was attended by all the artisans who worked before the god for a short time at their respective trades x. This was a custom observed at Rome and also in India, 1 where at the Gond festival of the Akkadi held at the beginning of their year, on the 18th of Baisakh (Vi sakha) or the 3rd of May, the Indian May Day, every cultivator drives his plough over the land in observance of this ancient custom, though the earth is baked as hard as a brick, and quite unfit for ploughing.
Again the raven-star Canopus, son of the tree of Bahu, was a god of the astronomical theology of Tan or Danu, the Akkadian and Indian parent Pole Star god. His Celtic equivalent Bran was the chief god of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes born of the goddess Danu2, that is of the world’s tree grown from the mud (tin or tan) of the f Southern Ocean. He was also the god who guarded the P “Cauldron of Life” in C-aer-Sidi, meaning “The Turning ’ Castle” of the Pole Star god. This was in India the Castle of Agastya, called in the Ramayana the Labyrinthine Castle of Ravana, the ten-headed god, the ten lunar months of gestation of the mother-ship or tower of Life described in Chapter V.
This Cauldron of Life in the Head of Hades was in another form the vessel of the Holy Grail guarded by Bran, and this, like the seed in the rice-husk in the Annamite story of Cinderella, had an unlimited capacity for supplying nourishment, for it multiplied like the growing corn a hundred fold or more every food placed in it 3.
Bran, the god who guarded this mother-tree and her seed, was the god with the Wonderful Head (Uther-Ben), the year gnomon-stone 4, and his year’s voyage to the southern land of the mother-tree is a variant form of that of Orwandil, the star giant of the north, whose toe was the star Rigel in 1 2 * 4
1   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap. vi. p. 131.
2   Ibid., Hihbert Lectures for 1886, p. 89.
4 Ibid., The Arthurian Legend pp. 305—315.
4 Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 97.
   
65
Orionz. He went in 72 ships, the 72 weeks of Bran’s year, to seek his bride, Bridget, the daughter of the god Dagda, and he was in short the year-prince of the story of the year of two seasons. The year-maiden he sought, St. Bride or St, Bridget, was, as her name, derived from Brig, pre-eminent power, tells us, the renowned goddess of knowledge, skilled in smith work 1 2 3 4, and hence the maker of the year and its products. Her father, Dagda or Dago-devos, is the ruler of heaven, deposed, like the Greek turannos, by his son Mac Oc, the god of a new year 3, and as the first god of the Tuatha De Danann he is clearly an equivalent of the year-god of the Indian Danava.
This is the Indian god Daksha, whose name is like that of the Irish Dago, formed from the root Dag or Dak, meaning to show; hence he is the pointing god who marks by the Pole Star the point round which the heavens revolve. He is the god who has the showing hand, the hand of power with its five fingers which takes the stars round the Pole and marks the course of the year’s circuit. He is named in Rg. ii. 27, 1, as the fifth of the six Adityas or beginning gods, that is to say, he was the god completing the five-days week before the introduction of the later six-days week.
In the historical genealogies of the Mahabharata his wife is said to have been born from the left toe of Brahma, the primal creator, the ape-god of the early speculators, and his fifty daughters all represent sections of time in different measures of year-time. Among these are the twenty-seven wives of Chandra the moon-god, the twenty-seven stars marking the monthly course of the moon through the heavens in the three years cycle year described in Chapter V. In the words of the poet “they are all employed in indicating time and assisting the courses of the world 4.”
1   Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ii. 13; Ker, Notes on Orendel and other Stories, Folklore for 1897, pp. 290 ff.
2   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 18S6, Lect. i. pp. 75, 76.
3   Ibid., Lect. ii. p. 154, vi. p. 644.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixv., Ixvi. pp. 185, 186, 189.
F
66
History and Chronology
One of these daughters is Danu, the third month in the year of thirteen months, the subject of Chapter VIII.; and she, the mother of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, is also the mother of the Indian Danava, and also of forty sons, the forty months of the three years cycle year.
Bridget or Brigit, the daughter of the Irish Daksha called Dago, was one of three sisters all of the same name, the three seasons of the year, which were originally, as we have seen, only two ; and it was these two who were distinguished among the Brigits, one being a physician, a wise medicine- woman, and the other a smith, and there are no special characteristics assigned to the third x. But in seeking for the original source of the name and the mythology of these goddesses we must turn to the Vedic prototype of Brigit, the goddess Brihati with the same name, in which the h has taken the place of the guttural g. She is called in Rg. i. 52, 13, the goddess of the highest heaven and of the Brihati metre of thirty-six syllables.
This and the other Vedic metres, the Gayatrl with lines of eight syllables, the Tristubh of eleven, and the Jagatl of twelve, were invented by the Vedic poets as methods of perpetuating the remembrance of various systems of measuring time by weeks of eight days and by years of eleven and twelve months, which I shall describe in their chronological order. And we shall see, when I describe in Chapter VII. the fifteen-months year with its weeks of eight and its months of twenty-four days, that the authors of the Satapatha Brdhmana distinctly state that the kindling hymn of this year with its fifteen Gayatrl stanzas of three lines of eight syllables each is meant to describe this year of fifteen months, each of twenty-four days and three eight-day weeks. The fundamental rule laid down in the Brahmanas to govern the ritualistic arrangements of each year is that “the year is the sacrifice1 2,’’ that is to say, that in the course of each year there is a stated
f
i1

1 Rhys, Hilbert Lectures for 1S8Q, p. 75.
2 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 2, 5, 7—13; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 60—62.
   
67
1 order of sacrificial observances beginning, continuing and ending the year. This rule is further interpreted by the statement' made in connection with the erection and consecration of the first official altar, that of earth in the form of a woman, that Vishnu the year-god and his altar are enclosed by the metres, that is by the poetical record in the | ritualistic metres of the successive historical changes in time measurement which they indicate.
I This BrihatT metre or stanza of two lines of eight syllables each, one of twelve and one of eight, making thirty-six in all, is therefore a historical summary of an ancient time measurement. The Brahmanas tell us that the measurement j indicated by the BrihatT metre is that of the easterly line of the thirty-six steps of Vishnu passing from West to East over the length of the Soma sacrificial ground symbolising the earth x. In other words, the BrihatT metre is an algebraic form of the statement that the sun-year-god who begins his journey from the West at sunset, according to the rule of time measurement adopted in the first sidereal year, makes the half of his annual year’s journey round the Pole in thirty-six steps or weeks. This journey, owing to the obliquity of the ecliptic, is never like the altar-line of thirty- six steps, exactly from West to East, except at the equinoxes ; and therefore this line only measures the sun’s course in a year reckoned by the equinoxes, a measurement used, as we shall see, in the age of the three years cycle year, when the orthodox Soma sacrificial ground was con- 1
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 5, 1, 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 112, 113. This rule, requiring the length of the consecrated Soma ground to measure 36 feet from West to East, which was first promulgated by the authors of the pre- Sanskrit Ikshvahu ritual, wras continued when the latest brick altar of the year of seven-days wfeeks, the Agnichayana, was made the orthodox altar of the Vedic ritual; for in laying out the ground for the building of that altar it is ordered, <!the builder should measure a plot thirty-six steps long from West, to East, thirty steps broad at the West, and twenty-four at the East end, so that its whole circumference should measure ninety steps, the fourth part of the 360, making the year.”—Eggeling, Sat. Brcih., x. 2, 3,4; S.B.E.,
68
History and Chronology
secrated. The original solar year was one measured by the L solstices, and in this year the path of the solstitial setting I sun is from South-west to North-east at the winter, and I North-west to South-east at the summer solstice. This was the original path indicated by the BrihatT metre, and the memory of this is preserved in Hindu ritual in the sign of the eight-rayed star, marked by the sacred plough under the foundations of the East and most orthodox year-altar, that of the brick Agnichayana altar of the sun-bird rising in the East at the Vernal equinox. On this historical tablet the year-path of the sun-bird of the two series of thirty-six weeks, making a year of seventy-two weeks,
is marked by the St. Andrew’s Cross of the Flying Bird FW FE
X f°r ft is from the South-west corner that the plough
Sw SE
begins its course in tracing the sacred sign. Therefore the original BrihatT measurement of thirty-six weeks or steps for the half-year represented a year beginning at the winter solstice with the setting in the South-west of the BrihatT sun, which was thought to go round the Pole as a star in an annual course of seventy-two and a half-yearly course of thirty-six weeks.
This metre is, as we are told, consecrated to Brihaspati, called in the Brahman* the High Priest of the gods, the god of the upper region, round which lies the path of Aryaman, the Star Arcturus in Bootes I. It is to him that the central place is given in the Panchabila, or five-fold sacrifice offered at the end of the Dashapeya on a square altar with its sides facing the points of the compass. The offering to Brihaspati is placed in the centre, those to the other four gods ruling the year being placed at the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 3, 1, 2; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 59; Aryaman is, according to Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i., chap, xxii., p. 242, one of the fourteen stars in the constellation Shimshumara, which drives the other stars round the Pole, and represents the West foot of the constellation. See Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. Essay v. pp. 416—421, for the functions of Arcturus as a star leader.
   
69
side dedicated to each god*. Thus the Brihatl metre is that dedicated to the Pole Star god Brihaspati, and it is also said in Rg. x. 181, 2, to have been brought from Vishnu, the year-god, whose steps measure the year by Bharadvaja the lark, that is to say, it represents the circuit of the year-sun-bird round the pole. This interpretation is confirmed by the rules for the recitation of the Brihat Saman. This is a recitation of the two first stanzas of Rg. vi. 46, a hymn attributed to Bharadvaja embodying a prayer to Indra, the rain-god for rain. In stanza 7 of this hymn this god, who as the god Suk-ra, the Vedic form of the original Akkadian rain-mother Suk-us, a name of Istar2, is implored to protect especially the five nations of the sons of the Nahusha, the great snake, that is to the original dwellers in India who adored the snake as guardian of the village. It is directed in the rules for the consecration of the brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East that these verses in the Brihatl metre are to be recited at the left or North wing of the sun-bird 3. This altar was built, as we shall see, at a much later period than the original earth altar in the form of a woman, and its successor the square altar, and they all represent in a symbolical form the course of the year.
In this year’s history the representation of the sun and stars as flying year-birds is older than all sacrificial altars, and it is to this primaeval epoch, when the year’s course of the sun-bird and of the raven-star Canopus was measured by two periods of thirty-six weeks each, that the historical legend of the two Bridgets, daughters of Dagda or Daksha the Pole Star god, belongs. The first Bridget represented the sun starting from South to North at the winter solstice, and the second the Northern sun of the summer solstice returning to its winter home in the South.
This latter episode of the Brihati Saman legend was 1 2 3
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 5, 1, I ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 120.
2   Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary Sign 101.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ix. I, 2, 37 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 179.

22   History and Chronology
ca’ted to and named after the Pleiades, called the Krittakas or Spinners.
Besides this year there was another year brought to India by the Mundas, the earliest emigrants from the North-east. They came from the mountains of South China, a colder and much more rainy region than South India ; and they, instead of dreading the sun as an enemy, looked on the winter sun as a kindly mother, whose fiery rays dried and warmed the soil chilled and sodden by the constant rains of summer and autumn. It was the sun which made their land fit for the sowing of the seeds of their winter and spring crops, which were originally chiefly millets, the grain called Murwa in Bengal, and Raggi in Madras (Eleusine Coracana), and another allied species called Gundli in Chutia Nagpore. They deified the sun as their national god, and worship him under the name of Sri Bonga. This god. was symbolised on earth by the sun-bird, the wild jungle-fowl, the parent of our domestic poultry. In their belief it began its annual course round the heavens and the central Pole when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. Thence it went northward, reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice, whence it came southwards to its winter home. This is the year still regarded as the orthodox year of Hindu Brahminical ritual. It is divided like that of the Pleiades into two periods of six months each: the first six months from the winter to the summer solstice being called Devayana or times (ayana) of the gods, and the six months of the returning sun ending with the winter solstice are the Pitri-yana or times (aydna) of the fathers. This is the year ruled by the Vedic god Tvashtar, the creator, the most ancient god in the Hindu Pantheon, who shows in his name beginning with the superlative form of tva, two (tvash), that he is the ruling god of the most holy of the two years measured by two seasons. The existence of the first year, that of the Pleiades, is, however, recognised in the Hindu system of months, for the name of the month Vi-sakha (April—May), which is the mid month of the
       23
Pleiades year, means the month of two (yi) branches (sakha), thus recording the original bifurcation of the year in the middle of this month.
A.   Birth of life from the Mother Tree.
But the division of time into periods measured by months was only made comprehensible to the popular intellect after a long period of national education, and the first time-unit used as a fraction of the year was that which marked the weeks. The first week was one of five days, or rather five nights, for the equatorial day of the Pleiades year began at sunset at six o’clock in the evening, and the reason for the adoption of this time-unit is to be found in the fundamental assumptions of their infant astronomy. They based all their calculations of time measurement on their adoption of the conclusion that the setting, rising, and culmination of the stars, the sun, and the moon, proved that they all described a daily circle in the heavens round a central point marked by the North Pole Star. The reason which they gave to account for this revolution of the heavenly bodies is most clearly set forth in a story preserved by the Australian aborigines I. It tells how Gneeang- ger, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, found a grub in a tree, that is in the magic tree of the sacred part of the forest set apart for the national ceremonies performed by the tribal priest, and near the corroboree dancing ground, answering to the Akra, placed in the Hindu village under the shade of the Sarna or central grove. This grub, the chrysalis of the raven parent god of the tribe, she took out and it became the giant raven star Canopus, who ran away with her, that is to say dragged her, her attendant stars the Pleiades, and the rest of the starry host round the Pole.
This raven star of this Australian story became, in the Hindu mythology, Agastya, the star Canopus, whose name
1   Elwortliy, The Evil Eye, Appendix iii. p. 438.
24
History and Chronology
means the singer (gd), the leader of the harmony of the spheres. He appears in his raven form in Rg. ii. 43, 1, 2, where the holy raven (Shakuni) is said to sing the divine songs of the ritual in the sacred metres which, as we shall see, represent in the varying numbers of their syllables the successive changes' in the measurements of ritualistic time. It is this lif^-giving raven gifted with the amrita or water of life, which in the historical Gond poem of the Song of the Lingal restores Lingal, the rain - father god, to life after he had been slain by the first race of Gonds, the race from the North-east, whom he had settled on the land. The conception of the raven star was based on the black rain -cloud which brought up the rains of the South-west and North-east monsoons, and it was the wind which preceded these annual rains which was first believed to drive the stars round the Pole.
But side by side with and anterior in time to this conception there grew up another, founded on the belief in the origin of life from the central mother-tree of the South in which the Canopus grub was found. As there was no Pole Star visible in the Southern heavens, the region of the South was looked on as a dark waste of waters within which dwelt the unseen South Pole goddess, the awful and mysterious mother of living things. She was adored by the Akkadians as Bahu, the Baau of the Phoenicians, the Bohu or waste void of Genesis i. 2. She was called “ the mother who has begotten the black-headed Akkadians x, the sons of the father la, the god of the house (/), of the waters (a), whose home is in the North Pole Star.5’ Also as Gula, the Great One, she is called “ the wife of the Southern Sun.” In another form of her mythic history she is the great serpent goddess of the deep called Tiamat, the mother of living things (tia), the goddess who surrounded and guarded the mother-tree of the Southern world, as the holy boundary-snake is believed in Hindu 1
1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 262—264.
   
25
mythology to guard the village with the Sarna in its centre. She was in this form the winged snake goddess destroyed by Marduk, or Bel Merodach, the sun calf (marduk), when the sun-god of day became the ruler of the year instead of the stars of night in the lunar solar epoch succeeding the sidereal Pole Star age. And this mother abyss of waters was symbolised in the latest Semitic .ritual in the brazen seas or abysses (absu), which were first pools of water and afterwards brazen basins, which were placed in the southern outer courts of the Babylonian temples, and reproduced in Jewish ritualJ.
The tree mother born from this abyss of waters is in the Zend historical mythology the Gao-kerena, Gokard or White Horn tree, growing according to the Dlnkard, the epitome of the lost Nasks, in “deep mud of the wide- formed ocean,” the sea Vouru-kasha, or the Indian Ocean 2. This tree, with its roots in the Southern sea, grew up on earth on the banks of the river Daitya, the river of the serpents or parent snakes. This was the river Kur or Araxes, rising in Mt. Ararat and falling into the Caspian sea. On this tree was the nest of the Horn birds 3. These are the mother ravens, the birds of the night and the day, who, in Rg. i. 164, 20-22, “sit on this tree whence all things grow and which knows no father, the day bird eating its fruits and the night bird guarding it in silence.” They are the birds who watch over the Zend Haoma, the Hindu Soma, the sap of life. Haoma and Soma are derived from the roots Hu and Su, both of which are dialectic forms of Khu,
1   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i., p. 63 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 188, 189, with plan of Sabsean temple; 1 Kings vii. 39; 2 Chron. iv. 10, where the brazen sea is placed to the South-east.
2   West, Dlnkard, vii. 29; West, Bundahish, xviii. 1 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, xx. 4; S.B.E., xlvii. p. 25; vol. v. p. 65; iv. p. 221 ; Introduction, iv. 2S; lxiv.
3   Dlnkard, vii. 26—36 ; Bundahish, xx. 13 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, i. 3; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 24—26; v. p. 79, note I ; iv. p. 5, notes 2 and 3.
26
History and Chronology
the mother-bird of the Akkadians and Egyptians, who was originally the bird of the raven-star nest Argo. It was from “ the water and vegetation ” supplied by this tree that the great 'Zend prophet, Zarathustra, was born as the sun-hawk, Karshipta, who spoke the Avesta in the language of birds r.
In the Hindu form of the mythological history of this tree of life it had its roots in the ocean, and grew up on earth in the centre of the holy land of Kurukshetra, the land (Kshethra) of the Kurus, the sons of the river Kur of the Zend legend, who had come to India from Atar5 Patakan, the modern Adarbaijan, the mother land of the fire-worshippers traversed by the Kur. The line of its growth passed, as Alberuni tells us, through the course of the river Yamuna or Jumna, instead of the Zend Euphrates leading to the river Kur. Thence to the plain of Taneshur2, that is of the god (eshwar) Tan, the father of the primaeval Hindu race called the Danava, the sons of Danu, whom Indra slew. This, with its 360 shrines representing the 360 days of the year 3, was the traditional birth-place of the Kurus or Kaurs, the Kauravya of the Mahabharata born in India from this world’s mother-tree, the great Banyan tree (Ficus Indica), the Sanskrit Nigrodha tree, the tree of their father Kashyapa or Kassapa4. This tree stood on the banks of the central lake, reproducing the southern mother sea traversed by the mother ship constellation Argo. This was the lake called in Rg. i. 84, 13, 14, Sharyanavan, the ship (ndvan) of the year arrow (sharya) or the mother reed (sharya), whence the Kushika or Kurus were born as the sons of the rivers. It was on this lake lying below the Himalaya mountains, the home of the North Pole Star, that
1   West, Dinkard, vii. 36; West, Bundahish, xxiv. 11; xix. 16; Dar- mesteter, Zendavcsta Vendtdad Fargard, ii. 42, 43; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. p. 26; v. pp. 89, 70 ; iv. p. 21.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, chap. xxxi. vol. i. p. 316.
3   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, p. 332.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories; The Niddnakathd, p. 51.
   
27
Indra found the head of the sun-horse Dadhyank, which, as we shall see in Chapter VI., was the ruler of the eleven months year.
The Danava predecessors of the Kurus, sons of Dan or Tan, were the equivalents of the Hebrew Tannlm, the Arabic Tinnim, called in the Bible the dragons or snakes of the deep J, the Greek Ti-tans 2, or sons of the mud {tan, Arab tin) of life {ti), who were called by the Greeks children of Uranos and Gaia, heaven and earth. This is an accurate reproduction of the primitive genealogy, for Uranos is the Greek form of the Sanskrit Varuna, from the root vri, to cover, and hence Varuna is the god of the covering rain- cloud, the var reproduced in the Sanskrit Varsha, the Hindu Barsah, and the Zend Bares, all meaning rain, that is the productive seed of the original supreme god of the first villagers, the rain-god, which impregnated the earth with life. In the description of the four heavenly regions ruled by the gods called Lokapalas, or guardians of space, Varuna is the third Lokapala ruling the north heaven, whose palace is built in the waters whence all the rivers of India descend to fill the Southern Ocean 3. It is this rain descending in the rivers from the home of this god of the north which is the father of the children of men and animals produced from the nourishing fruit of the mother- tree, the offspring of the southern impregnated earth or mud, which conveys the life derived from the productive rain to all who sustain life by the fruit of the tree its daughter. This mud mother, Tan or Tin, of the Greek Titans is the primitive form of the goddess Thetis, whose name is derived from the Phoenician Thith, the mud 4. It was she who with Euronyme, the guardian goddess of the North, the Phoenician Astro Noema, first the Pole Star and afterwards
1   Ps. cxlviii. 7.
2   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 230, 231.
3   Mahabharata Sabha {Lokapala Sabhakhydna) Parva, ix. pp. 28—30.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 212.
28
History and Chronology
the Star Virgo, the mother of corn, received Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill of heaven, the smith-producer of fire, when thrown from heaven by Zeus J. This southern mud- mother-goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the northern god of the potter’s clay (7rrjXoi), became mother of the sun-god Achilles, whom she placed in the southern fire, the home of the earth’s heat, after his birth, just as Purushaspa, Za- rathustra’s father, placed his newly-born son, begotten from the mother-tree and the southern mud, in the same fire, whence he was removed at dawn by his mother and arose as the sun-god, to bring heat and light to the earth1 2 3. Achilles was the sun-god of the race of the Myrmidons or ants, the sons of the red earth, the Adamite race who succeeded the sons of the southern mother-tree, and who believed that man was formed from the dust of the earth moulded by the Divine Potter, the Pole Star god, who turned the potter’s wheel of the revolving earth. In this later conception the earth was the revolving plain turning on its axis 3, whereas in the earlier historical imagery it was the earth which stood still while the heavens, drawn by the hand of the ape-god Canopus, revolved.
This southern mother-tree was the origin of the trees which have been looked on as parent trees by so many primitive people. The Sal-tree (Shorea robusta) of the Indian Mons or Mundas, the oak tree of the Druids and of Dodona, the central parent tree of the Volsungs in the Niblunga Saga, the race of woodlanders (voir) from whom was born the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of victory
1 Homer, Iliad, xviii., 394—411; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens,
pp. 97, 151,183.
z West, Dlnkardvii. S—10; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 36, 37.
3 This is the conception of the earth entertained by the Malays who believe that “the world is of an oval shape revolving on its own axis four times in the space of one year.” They also believe in the tree-mother of life, the world’s tree, Pauh Janggi, growing in the mud of the Southern Ocean, and produced from the seed Kun created by God and conveyed in the rain. Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 5, 6, 8—10, 4.
   
29
(sig), the sun gnomon stone 1. The fig-trees of the Syrians and the Indian Kauravya or Kushika, the almond or nut- tree of the Jews, the budding almond-rod of Aaron 2 3 4, the date-palm-tree of Babylonia and of the Indian sun-god Bhishma and the moon-god Valarama 3, the peach-tree of China, the pine-tree of Germany and Asia Minor, the ash- tree, the Ygg-drasil of the Edda, and the cypress-tree of the Phoenicians. It was this last tree which was especially connected with the worship of the god Tan, who from being the mother mud of the South became, when the father succeeded the mother as the recognised parent, the god Tan or Danu of the North Pole.
It is in this form that he appeared as the Cretan Zeus, called I-tan-os or the god Tan, a name which survives in Zrjvos, Doric Zdvos, the Genitive of the Greek Zeus, for d, t, and z are interchangeable letters, as we see in the various names of the god of life, Zi, di, and ti. It is in the Creto- Phcenician cult of the god I - tan - os, the reproduction of the Akkadian I-tan-a, the house of Tan, that we find the worship of Brito-martis the virgin (martis) cypress- tree (berut), who became mother of the sun-god the Phoenician Adonis or the master (adon), the Hebrew Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dumti) of life (zi), who is represented as born from the cypress-tree on the Palmyrene altar at Rome 4. The Akkadian story of the birth of Dumu-zi from the mother - tree is told in a bilingual hymn quoted by Dr. Sayce. This represents the mother- tree as growing in the “ centre of the earth,” in the “ holy place ” or village grove of Eridu or Eriduga, the holy (duga) city (eri), the most ancient port at the mouth of the Euphrates, where the God la disembarked from the con-
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 111.
2   Numbers xvii. 9.
3   Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhishma- Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165; Shaleya {Gttd-Ayudka), Parva, xxxiv., lx. pp. 135, 233.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 281, 300; D’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 142.
30
History and Chronology
stellation ship Ma or Argo. In its “ foliage was the couch of Zi-kum,” the mother of life (zi), the nest of the mother bird, and into the heart of “ its holy house no man hath entered.” “ In the midst of it was Dumuzi,” the son (dumii) of life {zi), born like his counterpart the sun-hawk Zarathus- tra from the water and vegetation supplied to this world’s tree from the Southern mother Ocean I. This story of the birth of the sun-god from the tree is also reproduced, as Professor Douglas informs me, in the Chinese characters, which were originally derived, as Mr. Ball has proved, from Akkadian originals2. The Chinese character for
the character for tree /|\ is the sign for woman, used in the oldest form of the Akkadian script, that on the monuments at Girsu. So that the Chinese in their written speech say as plainly as possible that the sun is born from the mother-roots of the tree, that is the tree of life. It is from these three roots that the Yggdrasil of the Edda springs, and it draws its life-giving sap from the sources whence the roots spring, the giant’s well Mimir, the Urdar fountain of Niflheim, the home of mist, the under-world, and the dwelling of the Aisir, the home of the soul and essence of life 3. This birth of the Akkadian Dumuzi from the parent tree, is reproduced in India in the account of the birth of the sun-god, the Buddha, which I will deal with more fully afterwards in Chapter VII. Here I will only point out that the Buddha was conceived under the Great Sal tree on the Crimson plain of the dawning sun in the Himalayas. That there the god Gan-isha with the elephant’s trunk, the god of the rain-cloud, entered on her
1   Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for i SS7, Lect. iv., p. 238.
* Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists. The Akkadian Affinities of Chinese, by the Rev. C. J. Ball, M.A., § viii. ; China, Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 677, ff.
3 Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, p. 411.
This is formed of the two elements ^ tree, and 13 sun, while the triangle forming the base of
 
   
3i
right side the womb of his mother Maya, the witch mother Magha bearing the divine rod of power, the rain-compelling branch of the mother-tree. He was born from his mother when she stood and grasped the Sal tree in the village grove between Kapilavastu and Koliya, the village of the Munda or Ivol race to which his mother belonged, that is to say he was like Dumu-zi, the son of the Sal tree r, and a rain-shower fell at his birth x.
All these origin tree-mothers find their prototype in the Dravidian mother-tree goddess Mari-amma, the mother (amma), Mari the tree {maroni). She is the only goddess in the Hindu pantheon whose image is always made of wood. It is she who, in the story telling of the founding of the great temple of Jagahnath in Orissa, was the mother goddess of the primaeval temple, a yojana beneath the surface of the earth. This was shown to the founder of the later temple, King Indramena, the god Indra, by the mother crow or raven who had grown white with age. It was from these submerged foundations of the early ritual, the depths of the Southern Sea, that the earliest form of the year god, Krishna or Vishnu, was sent by divine power as a log on the sea-shore, and this log, the timber of the virgin mother-tree, is now the image of the year-god in the temple of the Lord (nath) of Space (Jagah) 2.
This is the goddess of the Palladium or guardian wooden image kept in the treasure-house of ancient cities. The classical prototype of this image is the Palladium of Troy, made of the mother wild fig-tree of the Trojan race growing in the tomb of Ilos, the founder of the city 3. This goddess, called Pallas, became the tree-mother of the Ionian race, the goddess Athene, the tree-mother of the olive-tree and earlier sacred oil plant, the Sesame (Sesamum orientate), the mother of the Indian Telis, or oil dealers, of whom 1 2 3
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Niddnakatha, pp. 62, 63, 66, 67.
2 Beauchamp, Dubois’ Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremoflies, vol. ii, p. 589, App. v. pp. 714—719.
3   Homer, Iliad, xi. 167.
32
History and Chronology
I shall give a full account in Chapter VI., when describing the eleven months year. She, as the mother-tree of the primaeval year, was the earthly representative of the stellar year-mother the Pleiades, and it is to this constellation as her heavenly counterpart that her earliest temple at Athens was orientedr. She, who was born from the head of Zeus, who was, as I have shown, the mother mud goddess Tan, and who was therefore the counterpart of her parent, appears in the form of the goddess Tan in the historical genealogy of the Boeotians, the chief agricultural people in ancient Greece. Their legendary history tells us that they arrived in Greece as emigrants from Asia Minor under Kadmus, the man of the East (Kedem), the introducer of the plough. He killed the snake parent of the original dwellers in the land, and from the land ploughed by him, and sown with the snake’s teeth, there were born the five Spartos, or sown {cnreipw) men, the five days of the week, who became ancestors of all the Boeotians. In other words, this story tells how a tribe of agriculturists from Asia Minor, who measured time by five-day weeks, came to Boeotia and occupied the country, allying themselves with the primitive villagers, the Achaioi, or sons of the snake Echis, the Ahi of the Rigveda, the Indian sons of the village tree. At the place where Kadmus rested on his journey from Delphi to Thebes, just outside the Ogygian gate of the city1 2 3 4, he set up an image of Athene, called by what Pausanias tells us was the Phoenician name of Onga 3. This name means, according to Movers, the burning or heated goddess 4. That is to say, she was originally the goddess of the heated south, the underground fire of the earth, the mud-mother- goddess Tan, and in this form she was worshipped as the
1   Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 419. He, p. 312, traces specifically the Orientation of temple sites to stars to 6400 B.C. It may have begun much earlier.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 48.
3   Ibid., ix. 12, 2, vol. i. p. 459, vol. v. p. 48:
4   Movers, Die Phonizier, i. p. 643,
   
33
goddess called by Pausanias the Itonian Athene. She was the goddess to whom was consecrated the land near Coronea, where the Boeotians held their annual national year festival, and the name is, as Pausanias tells us T, derived from Itonus, who was the husband of Melanippe, the black (melan) horse (>hippe) mother of night, a name of Demeter, who was, as we shall see, the mother-goddess of the Pleiades year beginning in November. Their son was Boeotus, from whom the Boeotians got their name of the people of the ploughing ox (fiovs). Thus the Boeotians were the sons of the dark mother of night, the goddess of the southern abyss of waters and of Itonus. Itonus is a variant form of I-tan-os, and a very frequent type among the ancient coins of Crete represents the god Itanos on one side with a fish’s tail, holding the trident, and on the other side he appears as the great ocean fish Tan with his wife, who is also a fish1 2 3 4. She is the fish goddess of Syria, called Derceto, or Atergatis, names shown by Movers to be variant forms of Tirhatha, meaning the abyss 3, the mud- goddess Tan under the form of the mud-born fish. These fish born from the mud are those so frequently seen in India, who appear in the tanks which had been dry mud in summer as soon as they are filled by the rains. They hybernate in the mud, and hence they are regarded as the mud-born mothers of life, and the representative of these fish, the carp, Rohu, is worshipped in India as the sun-fish, and guarded and fed in the sacred tanks.
At Coronea the statue of the Itonian Athene is accompanied by that of the god called by Pausanias ix. 34, i, Zeus, but who is said by Strabo to be Hades, the god of the Southern Ocean, the abysmal home of the winter sun 4. It was at the shrine consecrated to the god Tan
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, 1, vol. i. p. 486.
2   R. Brown, jun., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. chap. v. p. 188.
3   Lucien, De Dell Syrid, 14; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 98; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p, 594.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, vol, v. p. 169.
D
34
History and Chronology
that the Boeotians celebrated the beginning of their year at a festival held in September—October, the tenth month of the year beginning at the winter solstice. Thus their year began, like that of the Jews, with the autumnal equinox x. But this year and the present year of the Sabaeans beginning at the same time is one which, like the similar year of the Indian Pitaro Barishadah, the Kushika ancestors, has been changed, as I have shown in Chapters IV. and V., from a year which originally began in November with a feast to the dead, which has been transferred to the autumnal equinox.
This tree-goddess of the mud, Tan, also appears in the Roman Diana, the female Janus, the Etruscan Tana. She, the mother of witchcraft, is the goddess of the groves, the most celebrated of those sacred to her being the grove of Aricia, that on the Aventine, and in the Vicus Patricius at Rome, into the last of which no man might enter. Her festival and that of her male counterpart, called Virbius in Aricia and Vertumnus or the turner (verto') of the year at Rome, was held on the Ides the 13th of August, and like the Panathenaia at Athens, held on the 15th of August, it denoted the mid-day of a year beginning in January— February, the year of the sun-god Lug, which will be described in Chapter VII. But the year which was sacred to Diana as the moon-goddess, to whom cakes of meal, wine, salt and honey, shaped like a crescent-moon, were offered, was a reproduction of the original year of the tree-mother, beginning in November with its mid-year feast on the 1st of May. In this year she was the returning tree-goddess Persephone, the unwed goddess of the tree and food-bearing plants impregnated with life by the father rain-god below the earth. At these mid-year May feasts she was worshipped by votaries as naked as the first of human beings, and these are the feasts to Tana or Diana as described 1
1   Fraser. Pausanias. vol. v. p. 169.
   
35
in the gospel of the witches, which Mr. Leland has unearthed in Tuscany. The materials of the feast were cakes of meal salt, honey and water, and in preparing them the meal was invoked in a hymn which embodies in its first lines the ancient creed of the birth of all life from the seed of the mother plant. The lines are as follows :—
Scongiuro te, O farina,
Che sei il corpo nostro — senza di te
Non si potrebbe vivere—tu che Prima di devenire la farina Sei stata sotto terra dove tutti Sono nascosti tutti in segreti.
Translation.
I conjure thee, O meal, who art our body. Without thee we could not live. Thou who before becoming meal wert placed (as the seed) below the earth, whence all things are born in secret.
The feasts on these cakes were accompanied by large draughts of wine, and the orgies of these festivals of the dancing witches and wizards are shown by the instructions in Mr. Leland’s manual to have exactly resembled the matriarchal seasonal festivals of the primitive Indian races. They are bidden “ to sit down to supper, all naked, men and women, and the feast over they shall sing, dance, make music, and then love in the darkness with all the lights extinguished I.”
In the Hindu form of the myth of the mother-tree, reaching from the Southern Ocean to the North Pole Star, the tenant of the tree and its first-born son is the Gond ape-god Maroti, the tree (marom) ape. He, in his original form, was the female mother-ape, called in Rg. x. 86, Vrisha-kapi, the rain (vrisha) ape wife of Indra the rain-god, the ape mother impregnated with the seed of life by the heaven-sent rain. She is the ape rock ogress of the Thibetan Muni kabum, who became in the form of an ape the mother of the six sons of the ape-father-god Bodhisatva, king of the monkeys, who was the offspring of Shenrazig
1   Leland, Arcadia, or the Gospel of Witches, chap, ii., The Sabbat, pp. 8—14 ; Diana, Encyclopcedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. p. 167 ; W. Warde Fowler., The Roman Festivals ; Mcnsis Sextilis, pp. 198 ff,
D 2
History and Chronology
 
Wungch’yuk, the visible light, the Pole Star god, and the goddess Drolma, born of the tears of his right eye, the mother rain-cloud x. The ape-mother-goddess became in the evolution of belief from south to north the Finn Pole Star goddess Taara, the Tari Pennu or female {pen) Tara worshipped in Eastern India by the Kandhs of Oressa and all the superior agricultural tribes of Bengal and Behar. She represents the Finn immigration, which made its way into India after the Mundas or mountaineers. They were people of the same stock as the Ugro Finn Akkadians, who ruled the Euphratean countries before the Semites, and who introduced both into Mesopotamia and India the same system of magic and witchcraft which they still practise in their original homes in the north. It was this Finn element which has made Central India, and especially Chutia Nagpore, the country still looked on as the home of wizardry and of dealings with evil spirits.
B.   Date of the belief in the Pole Star parent-god.
Hiouen Tsiang describes the statue of Tara at Tiladaka in Maghada as one of a triad with the Buddha in the centre. She stood on his left, and their offspring Avalokitesvara, meaning the visible {avalokita) Buddha, on his right 1 2 3. She, in the story of Rama and Sita, is the Pole Star goddess, first the wife of Vali the circling {vri) god, the leading star- god going round the Pole, and after his death, when slain by Rama, she was wedded to Su-griva, the ape with the neck (griva) of Su the bird, the bird-headed ape who had his nest in the Pole Star tree 3. It was he and his brother Hanuman, the son of Pavana the wind, who were the year gods who built the bridge of 360,000 apes, or 360 days
1   Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, app. vi. pp. 355 ff., 326 ft. ; Mttni Kabtun, Bk. ii.
2   Beal, ‘ Records of the Western World,' Hiouen Tsiang’s Travels, bk. viii., vol. ii. p. 103.
3   Mahabharata Vana (Dravpadi-harana) Parva, cclxxix. pp. 822 ft.
   
37
of the year, by which Rama reached the island of Lanka (Ceylon), the home of the southern sun, where Sita was confined by her ravisher the ten-headed Ravana, the god of the cycle year of three years described in Chapter V. This story of the wedding of the Pole Star ape-mother to the bird-headed ape Su-griva gives us a reliable date for an early stage of this legendary history. The assignment of the nest of the bird-headed ape as the dwelling-place of the Pole marks the age of the origin of the tale as that when the Pole Star was in the constellation of the tree-ape. This is the constellation Kepheus, a Greek form of the Indian Kapi, the Greek Kepos, the Latin Cebus, all meaning the ape. This name of the constellation has been derived by Mr. R. Brown from 'the Phoenician Keph, a stone, the Cephas of the Bible, the divine stone Baitulos (Sem. Beth-el) of Sanchoniathon, brother of Atlas or Atel, darkness x. He shows, on the authority of Achilleus Tatius2, that it was not under that name a Babylonian or Egyptian constellation, but quotes Lenormant, Les Origines I. 573, 574, to prove that this constellation of the Divine Stone was that consecrated to the Phoenician god Baal of Katsia on the Promontory that is Mount Kasios, on which stood the temple of Baal Tsephon, the god of the north, that is the Pole Star god called Zeus Kasios on bronze coins of Seleukia, on which he is depicted as a conical stone. This Zeus, called Kassia in Aramaic inscriptions, according to Pherecydes slew Typhdn, Tsephon or Zaphon, that is to say supplanted his rule and appropriated his shrine. Thus the ousted god Tsephon is the Greek Typhon, our typhoon, the god of the storm wind, that is to say he is the god of the death-dealing hot south-west winds which blow from the middle of June, the beginning of the Syriac month Cherizon, meaning the pig (June—July), 1
1 R. Brown, jun,, F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 30; ‘The Origin of Ancient Northern Constellation Figures.’ Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1897, pp. 217—219.
* Achilles, Tatius Eisagoge, xxxix.
38
History and Chronology
to the middle of September1. When we consider this evidence and that I will now adduce from Egyptian sources, it will be clear that Mr. Brown’s proofs of the worship of Kepheus as the constellation of the stone of light are really consistent with the fact that the god of the stone was first the ape-god. He was a Phoenician god, and the Egyptian name of Phoenicia was Keft, and in an inscription in the temple of Edfu the eight apes who sing the praises of Ra are four Keftenu or Phoenician and four Uetenu or apes from the green {net) land of India, the only country on the shores of the Indian Ocean where the coasts are green1 2 3 4. The Keftenu appear in Syrian history as the Kaphtorim or Philistines, said in i Samuel vi. 17 to be ruled by five lords or axles (serdnim) the five days of their week. They are called in Genesis x. 14 sons of Misraim, a dual name indicating the northern and southern races of Egypt, sons of the ape Hapi or Kapi, the star Canopus, and of the barley-god of the North, Osiris or Orion. They are said in Amos ix. 7 to have come from the land of Kaphtor, called in Jeremiah xlvii. 4 the isles of Kaphtor, and in Deuteronomy
ii.   23 they are said to have come to Syria from Kaphtor after the Avvim who dwelt in villages, the first communal villages on the Indian model founded by the Rephaim, who were, as I show in Chapter III., p. 77, the sons of Repha, the star Canopus. This land of Kaphtor is clearly the southern land of Kapi the ape, whence, as I shall show, the Phoenician Tursena, the Indian Turvasu, came from the island of Turos in the Persian Gulf 3. The Egyptian Pole Star god is the ape-god Seb or Hapi, a form of Kapi, who sits on the top of the world’s tree with his Thigh, the name of the Great Bear in Egyptian astronomy 43 pointing to the Pole Star his head, and thence he turns the stars round the Pole.
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p. 224.
2   Brugsch, Religion nnd Mythologie der Alten rEgypter, p. 152.
3   Smith, ‘Philistines,’ Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. xviii. pp. 755— 757'
4   Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xeix. p. 158, where the Great Bear is called the Thigh of Hapi.
   
39
Hence his head is called Keph, the Greek Kephale, the Latin caput, as the head of the ape Kapi. These conclusions are corroborated in Akkadian and Arabian astronomy. In the former Kepheus was called Ua-lu-zun, the numerous flock1, and in the latter A1 Aghnan, the sheep led by 7 Kepheus the Pole Star in 19,000 B.C., called Ar-rai, the shepherd2. This shepherd was the guardian ape, the Pole Star god. The whole evidence proves conclusively that the Pole Star was watched in India from 21,000 B.C., when it was first a star in Kepheus, and that a record of the changing Pole Stars was kept and registered by all the nations living round the Indian Ocean, and in Syria and Egypt, and that it was this national record which preserved to later ages the memory of the remote time when a and 7 Kepheus were the Pole Star head of the ape, the watcher of the heavenly flock. It is as a member of this flock intimately connected with Kepheus, that Kassiopaea, his Greek wife, is called in Welsh Lys Don, the Court of Don, or the Pole Star goddess Danu, mother of the Celtic Tuatha de Danann, the tribes of the goddess Danu 3.
The primaeval history of the marriage of the Pole Star with the bird-headed ape passed from India to Egypt, where it was reproduced in the account of the birth of Horus, the bird-headed sun-god. He, whose second son is Hapi the ape, is depicted on the walls of the temple of the Virgin Mother Hat-hor, the house (hat) of Hor, as issuing from her womb 4. And she is shown by the orientation of the temple to be the star goddess Dubha a in the Great Bear, which was about 5000 B.c. the nearest rising and setting star to the North Pole, the home of the Pole Star goddess to whom *
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. p. 20.
2   Hyde, Hist. Rel.,Pers. Edition, 1760, pp. 128, 129 ; Smith, Celestial Cycle, ii. p. 500.
3   Professor Rhys’ Address to the Mythological Section of the Folklore Congress of 1891. Papers and Transactions of the Congress, p. 14S.
4   Marsham Adams, The Books of the Master, chap, vi., The Temple of the Virgin Mother, pp. 67—72.
40
History and Chronology
the temple was dedicated. The original foundation of her temple at Denderah, which was rebuilt by Pepi the second about 3400 B.C., dates, according to an inscription by Thothmes III., from the time of the Hor-shesu, or sons of Hor, before 5000 B.C., as the plan of Pepi’s temple was drawn on “ a leathern roll of their era found by Pepi in a brick wall on the south side of the temple I.”
In this historical year drama in which the wind-driven rain-cloud became the raven-star Canopus, called also the wind-ape Hanuman or Agastiya, the Pleiades and her attendant stars were thought to be dragged round the Pole Star in their daily and annual circuits by the five fingers of the mighty hand of the raven-headed ape-god, the five days of the week. This year leader, Agastiya or Hanuman, has been looked on by all the natives of Southern India from time immemorial as the traditional father of the three Dasyas, or country (desk) born tribes, who have successively ruled the land2 3. These are (1) the Cholas or Kolas, the Munda, Mon or Malli mountaineers from the North-east, united with the primitive forest Dravidians ; (2) the Cheroos or Northern sons of the bird (c/tir, chirya), the Ugro Finn races allied to the Akkadians of the Euphrates valley; and (3) the Pandyas or fair (pandu) men, the later corngrowing sons of the Syrian fig - tree. Their father-star Canopus controls the tides in Hindu astronomy by drinking up the waters of the ocean, a function assigned in the Zen- davesta to the constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or the hundred (sata) creators, in which Canopus is the chief star 3.
1   Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xx., The Date of the Temple, pp. 204—207.
2   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha Ydtrd) Parva, xcix. p. 314.
3   West, Bundahish, ii. 7, xiii. 12; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Far- gard, v. 18, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 12, 44, iv. p. 54; Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha-Yatra) Parva, ccii.—ccix. pp. 324—340; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. p. 257.
   
4i
C.   The original week of five days.
As the star leaders of the primitive year were always setting not rising stars, the weeks measured by the five fingers of the ape father-star were measured by nights and not by days. This reckoning by nights was that used, as Tacitus tells us, by the Germans who, he says, counted by nights, and this ancient custom survives in our term of sennight, or seven nights, meaning a week. The five-days week is that still used by the Shans of Burmah, the men tof the mother country of the Mundas. It is also that of Zend chronology, which divides the month into two periods, each of fourteen and a half days, allotting the fifteenth night to the first half of the month and the day to the last, so that the first half contains fifteen nights, and the second fifteen days, and the whole month twenty-nine nights and days. The divisions of the first half of the month, that of the waxing moon, are called the Panchak Fartum, the new-moon week, Panchak Datigar, the week of the growing moon, and Panchak Sitigar, the full-moon week2. This month of five-night weeks is also that of the Hindu Karanas of twenty-nine days divided into two periods of fourteen days each, with a fifteenth day and night called the Purnoma Panchayi, the completed five (panch) in the centre apportioned to both periods. It is the exact parallel of the Zend month, as its light half contains fifteen nights, and its dark half fifteen days 3.
This week gave to the earlier cultivating races of North India, called in the Mahabharata and Rigveda the Srin~ jayas, or men of the sickle (srini), their other name of the Panchalas, or men of the five {panch) claws or fingers {alas), and the memory of the sacred five days survives in the Panchayats or councils of five elders, who still retain *
* Tacitus, Germania, ii. 2.
s Darmesteter, Zendavesta Mah Yasht, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 90, note 3 Sachau, AlberunI’s India, chap. Lxxviii. vol. ii. p. 197.
42   History and Chronology
%
their primitive function of rulers of the village, its members being the village head-man and his four assistants. This week is also that of the Scandinavians, called by them the Fimt. This five-days week also survives in the five Agnis or parent fire-germs, of which the names are recorded in the Zendavesta and Atharva-veda. The list of these fires as given in the Gathas, with their Sanskrit equivalents, is as follows: I. The Berezi Savangha, the eastern (sa- vangha) fire in stones, the Sanskrit Ashmas or Ashman, a stone, the meteoric stone used to light the national fires of the North. It was believed that this stone brought from heaven the spark which in the firmament appeared as the lightning in the clouds, causing them to give up their rain ; hence the fire is called Berezi, or the fire of rain (bares) magically produced by the rain - wand, the Baresma. II. The Vohu Fryano, Sanskrit Jathara, the womb fire creator of animal life. The Zend Vohu is the equivalent of the Sanskrit Vasu, the creator, and Fryano of Viru-ano, the god of the Viru or generator of animal life, the Norse Frio, the seed. III. The Ur-vazista, in Sanskrit Aushadha, the fire in medicinal plants, the healing and most creating (vasu) fire. IV. The Vazista, the fire in the waters of the earth, called both in Zend and Sanskrit, Apam Napat, the son of the waters. This is the Sanskrit god and Rishi Vashishtha said in the Rigveda to be the son of the twin supreme gods Mitra-Varanau “as a drop spilt by heavenly favour and received in the folds of a lotus blossom”1 sacred to the water-god. Thus it was the fire brought from heaven to earth by Varuna, whom we have seen to be the rain-god of the North. He was its joint parent with Mitra, the friend, originally the Pole Star mother. This was the fire called in Zend Spenishta, the most bountiful. V. Naryo Sangha, Sanskrit Naroshaipsa, praised of men, the Yazad of royal lineage. It was ori- nally, according to Rg. x. 61, called Vastospati, the lord
1 Rg. vii. 33, II.
       43
(pati) of the house (vastos), the household fire on the central hearth of the house, born from the union of Prajapati (Orion) (who, as we shall see, succeeded Canopus as leader of the stars) with RohinI, the" star Aldebaran, the Queen of the Pleiades x. This became the fire called Nabhanedishtha, nearest to the navel (nabha), the central fire on the first earth altar, made, as we shall see, in the form of a woman. It was in the popular belief born from lightning clouds. These fires are in Atharva-veda iii. 21, 1, called: I. Those of the Earth (IV.) ; II. The Clouds (V.) ; III. The Man (II.) ; IV. Stones (I.) ; V. Plants (III.)2.
We find also a survival of the five - days week in the five supreme mothers of the Annamese cult of the primitive belief represented by the village priestesses called Ba-dong, or those inspired by the three mother-goddesses Bd-Duc-chua, whose wooden images represent the one tree-mother-goddess in the form of the three seasons of the year, described in Chapter III. The five goddess ministrants are all variant forms of one original Ba-chua, and the whole cult is based on the still surviving belief in the mother goddess of the ocean abyss Bahu. Their names are:—
1.   Thay Tinh Cong Chua, or the star of the waters. That of the star mother ship Argo.
2.   Quinh-Hoa Cong Chua, or the Hortensia flower.
3.   Que Hoa, or the Cinnamon flower.
4.   Bach Hoa, or the White flower.
5.   Hoang Hoa, or the Yellow flower.

https://archive.org/details/historyandchron00hewigoog

THE Myth-making Age, the history of which I have sketched in this book, comprises the whole period from the first dawn of civilisation, and the initial efforts made in organising self-governing communities of human beings, down to the time when the sun entered Taurus at the Vernal Equinox between 4000 and 5000 B.c. In fixing the dates I have calculated from the recorded position of the sun at the different seasons of the year from which time was measured, I have treated this event as occurring about 4200 B.C. This I have generally used as the pivot date from which I have deduced all* others similarly calculated. But I have not in any of the authors I have consulted been able to find any exact year fixed on trustworthy astronomical authority for this event, and I have found that some writers place it tentatively at 4700 B.C. It is a date which I am quite unable to determine, and one which if it is exactly soluble can only be fixed by astronomers. But it seems to be certainly assumed by all who have dealt with the subject, that this closing event of the Myth-making Age certainly fell between 4000 and 5000 B.C. It was then, as I show in Chapter IX., that it ceased to be a universally observed national custom to reco73 history in the form of historic myths, and that national history began to pass out of the mythic stage into that of annalistic chronicles recording the events of the reigns of kings and the deeds of individual heroes, statesmen, and law-givers. These latter histories were, when formed into national historical records, always prefaced by a summary of the previous mythic narratives which were more often than not manipulated and distorted from their original form by the authors of what may be called the Individualist School of
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History. These legends were, down to the days of Niebuhr and the introduction of the study of Comparative Philology and Mythology, generally believed to be based, as averred by those who cited them, on the biographies of individuals. Since this new school of investigators has proved that the heroes of the Mythic Age were not living men like the leading actors in modern histories, it has come to be an almost universally accepted article of faith among those who try to portray the history of the remote past that the primitive myths of what is called the Prehistoric Age must be looked on as inventions of later times mixed with small fragments of genuine ancient tradition. Though no one explains why men should have wasted time in their manufacture if they were useless lies, or how, if they were made up by modern authors to suit the appetite for local history in each place, they should everywhere show traces of being derived from some central and often far-distant source.
The real truth is that these myths in their original form are surviving relics of the genuine ancient history of the earliest ages of human culture. One of my principal aims in writing this book and my previous work, the Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, is to show that the opinion as to the recent origin and unreliability of Mythic History is erroneous, and to prove that our wise forefathers, whose initiative ability, perseverance, and foresight laid the foundations of our civilisation and knowledge, framed these tales with the object of handing down to their successors a true account of the national progress of the nations they ruled. I also hope to prove that we have misunderstood the true meaning of the histories they have bequeathed to us, and that our failure to comprehend the purport of the information they meant to convey arises from our ignorance of the true method of interpreting their utterances, which were all prepared under rules which I have tried to set forth in my analysis of their contents, but which were ignored and forgotten by the writers of Individualistic History.
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The rules of interpretation, which give a clue to the true meaning of these histories, were during the Myth-making Age carefully taught to each rising generation by the national teachers, and the oblivion into which they fell is one of the great misfortunes inflicted on posterity'by the Gotho-Celtic invaders from the North, who are now called Aryans. They, whose chroniclers were the family and tribal bards who celebrated the prowess of their foremost soldiers, broke up, as I show in Chapter IX., the organisation of the communities of agriculturists, artisans* mariners and traders, who ruled Southern Asia and Europe, and introduced the epoch of military conquests made by nations whose leaders were ambitious warriors, who sought to substitute their own despotic personal rule and that of their heirs for that of the previous kings, who governed as the heads of the hierarchy of the national councils of provinces, towns and villages confederated under the constitutional customs I have here Sketched.
In beginning the elucidation of the historical riddles of civilisation, and the translation into forms intelligible to modern minds of the actual thoughts of the primitive races, we must first go down to the root-germ whence national life began to grow, and start our survey from the primary sources indicated by the laws of human progress. These tell us that the first birth process in the creation of national life is the formation of associated groups of human beings united as the members of a permanent village community, a family, or a tribe. It was in the South, as I have shown in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Timer, and as I prove more fully in the following pages, that the first village communities and the provincial governments originating from them were founded by the forest races of Southern India and the Indian Archipelago, and it was in the North that   '
the family expanded into the tribe. Neither the village communities of the South nor the tribes of the North were able to exist as permanent units holding a definite place of their own, or to work their way forward on the paths of
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social advance till they had framed laws binding society together, a history of their past career, and a national religion. The two first preserved them from internal dissensions and showed the pitfalls to be avoided by those who would reach the goal as winners, while the third in its initial stages was in the belief of its expounders the animating soul of patriotic life, which alone saved the land whence they drew their subsistence from being withered and depopulated by drought, famine and pestilence. For it taught that the primary “ religio ” or binding duty of each community was to secure the favour and protection of the unseen powers who ordained the succession of night and day, seed time and harvest, and of the recurring seasons of the year, and who punished the neglect or infraction of their laws by disease, social ruin, and death.
Hence one of the first tasks undertaken by each associated community was that of ascertaining the order and approximate dates when the seasons followed each other, so that they might be able to begin each season with the ordained propitiatory ceremonies. Consequently thejiupreme national God of the earliest organisers of society was the Maker and Measurer of time, the God who imparted the knowledge of its sequence to the animals pursued by the hunting races, who gave life, with its accompanying seasonal changes, to the trees and plants, and fitted the earth to receive the seeds sown, and to grow and ripen the crops reaped by the tillers of the soil. He was the Being by whose ordeirs the sun, moon and stars rose and set, and went daily round the Pole; and the rules of the ritual of the worship of this Creator of time, and the life to which it gave birth, were preserved together with their other distinctive national customs as the most precious of their protecting observances by every section of the original social units, which emigrated to other lands as offshoots from the parent stems.
The Pole Star in the North and the central starless void in the South, round which the heavenly bodies revolved, were in the eyes of these primitive pioneers the dwelling-
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places of the parent-creating power, the soul of the ever- engendering germ of life, the Tao or creating year-path of the Chinese, as conceived in the creed of the theology sketched in Chapter VII. p. 479. This is the year-god called in Greek mythology, as will be shown in the course of this work, Odusseus, the God of the Path (oSos) of Time, whose wife was the weaver of its web ('mjvr)), the goddess Penelo.per»-who was in heaven the goddess of the Pleiades, called in India the Krittakas or Spinners, and her husband was the year-star Orion, who, as I show in Chapter III., succeeded in primitive astronomy Canopus as the leader of the stars, headed by the Pleiades, round the Pole. He was the Orwandil or Orendel of the Northern historical legends, whose toe was the star Rigel in Orion, and the story of whose voyage in seventy-two ships, the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year, to find his bride Brigit, the Sanskrit goddess Brihati, is told in Chapter II. pp. 64, 65. The seed germ engendered by this dual but united heavenly and sexless parent-god, who was the mother and father of life, came down to earth in the rain and engendered the mother-tree, which grew, according to the belief I have described in_ Chapter II., in the mud of the Southern Ocean. The rain- germ ascended through its trunk and branches as the creating- sap whence the seed of life was born, and this seed in the indigenous Southern worship of the rice as the plant or tree of life was the rice soul which, as explained in Chapter IV. p. 139, note 3, was believed to impart its life to its consumers.
The God who disseminated the life-giving rain at the fitting times was the being whose favour was to be propitiated at the festivals held at the beginning of each recurring season of the year, which was, as I show, reckoned by different rules in different parts of the world, and at different successive periods of time. It is the history of the various and consecutive series of year-reckonings calculated by the dominant races, who ruled the growing world, in their attempts to learn the laws of time measurement, which is the principal subject dealt with in this book.
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The first of these years was that measured by the founders of permanent villages, who began their year when the Pleiades first set after the sun on the 1st of November. This was chosen by them as their New Year’s Day, because it marked the beginning of Spring in that region of the Southern and Northern hemispheres which lay close to the Equator, and of which Ceylon, called Lanka, was the centre. This central island was in Hindu mythological astronomy the land ruled by Agastya, the star Canopus, which, as the brightest of the revolving stars near the Pole of the Southern heavens, was looked on as‘the king of antarctic polar space. It was believed to lead the Pleiades and the starry host, their attendant followers, round the Pole ; and in this daily and annual circuit the Pleiades set before the sun during the six months from the ist of May till the 31st of October, and began on the ist of November to set for the next six months after the sun.
The year thus measured was not reckoned by months, which were as yet unknown, but by nights and weeks of five days, the number of the fingers of the creating hand. Thirty-six weeks covered each of the periods between November and May, and May and November, so that the whole year was one of seventy-two weeks or three hundred and sixty days. This year, which was that reckoned by the Celtic Druids, as well as by the earliest founders of Indian villages, began with a three days’ feast to the dead, which survives in our All Hallow Eve, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, also with the election of village officers, a custom still preserved in the election on the ist of November of English Mayors and Aldermen. It was, as I show in Chapter II., once the official year throughout South-western Asia and Europe, and became in Ireland the year of Bran, meaning the Raven, who had been in the South the raven-star Canopus, and of the two Brigits, daughters of Dagda, the Indian Daksha, the god of the showing {dak) hand, the Celtic forms of the Sanskrit Brihati, who is, in the ritual of the Indian Brahmanas, the goddess of the thirty-six five-day weeks of each of the two halves of the Pleiades year.
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The revolution of the heavenly bodies by which our forefathers measured this and the other years they reckoned, was thought to be caused by the winds, and their visible leader was the black-cloud, the “^rd^Khui of the Akkadians and Egyptians, which became the divine raven. This bird, the bearer of the creating rain, was in the early genealogies, which traced the national descent to the seed of life it brought, the parent of the Indian trading races, who used sibilants as representing Northern gutturals. Perhaps the interchange was one made by both races, the Northern changing an original Southern sibilant into a guttural, and calling the Southern cloud-bird Shu, Khu, or the Southerners may have reversed the order and changed the Northern Khu into Shu. At any rate it was as the reputed sons of the cloud-bird that the Indian traders called themselves Saus or sons of Shu. This name was changed by the Sumerians of the Euphratean Delta into Zu, the storm-bird, who stole the “ tablets of Bel 2,” and he became, in Egypt, Dhu-ti, the bird [dim) of life (tz), the god we call Thoth, who had a bird’s head and a bird’s feather, the recording pen of the time chronicler, in his hand.
The time-measuring winds of early astronomy were those of the South-west and North-east Monsoons, which bring the regularly recurring periodical rains to the tropical equatorial lands at the ordained seasons. They drove Agastya, the star Canopus, the pilot of the constellation Argo, the mother-ship of heaven, the Akkadian Ma and the Pleiades, with their following stars, round the Pole, and distributed the seasonal rains over that region of the earth on the shores of the Indian Ocean which was the cradle of infant civilised humanity.
During the first period of of Pole Star worship, the eartl

1   Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, Sign 73. Khu is the Egyptian word represented by the hieroglyph of the bird.
2   Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lect. iv. p. 297.
my historical survey, the age rwas thought to be a station-


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a/tfr
ary oval plain, resting on the mud of the Southern Ocean,
y

whence the world’s mother-tree was born from the seed brought by the rain-cloud-bird, the offspring of the Cauldron of Life, the creating-waters stored by the Pole Star god as the Holy Grail or Blood of God, and guarded by his raven vice-gerent, the god whose Celtic name is Bran, in the watch-tower called the Caer Sidi or Turning Tower of the heavens I.
The Tree of Life grew up from its roots fixed in the Southern mud through the superincumbent soil, and appeared on earth as the central tree of the village grove growing vin the centre of the world’s central village, just as the group of forest-trees left standing in the centre of the cleared land ? was the midmost home of the parent-tree-gods of all villages founded by the Indian forest.-races. ^ f
In the next age of Lunar-Solar worship a different cosmogony was developed. In this the world was looked on as an egg laid by the great cloud-bird, which had"~been the monsoon raven-bfrcl, which was now believed to dwell in the Pole Star. This was the bird called by the Arabs thej'-fZ Rukh, the bird of the breath (;makh) of God, the Persian Simurgh or Sin-murgh, the moon {sin) bird (;murgli), the Garutmat of the Rigveda, which dwells in the highest heavens, its Pole Star home, and begets the sun 2. This egg became in Hindu historical mythology, as told in Chapter VI. p. 310, that laid by Gan-dharl, the Star Vega in Lyra, the Pole Star from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C., from which were born the hundred Kauravyas, sons of the world’s tortoise {kitr), the oval earth, and this was a reproduction of an earlier birth- story, telling of the birth of the Satavaesa, or hundred {sata) creators (•vaesa) of the Zendavesta, from the mother constellation Argo, the Akkadian Ma, meaning also the ship.
This egg was, in popular belief, divided into a Northern

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

145. Carpenter, 156.

145. Catholic and other Christian apologists contend that these &#8213;brothers&#8214; (and sisters) are either Jesus‘s cousins or the children of Joseph by Mary.

145. Murdock, RZC, 17.

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Devaki suckling Krishna	Virgin Mary suckling Christ
(Moor, Hindu Pantheon, pl. 59)	15th century
	(Defendente Ferrari)

“Star in the East”: Although it is not specifically termed a &#8213;star in the east,&#8214; in the Indian text the Bhagavata Purana (10.3:1), a constellation called &#8213;Rohini&#8214; or &#8213;his stars&#8214; is present at Krishna‘s birth. As professor of Hinduism at Rutgers University Dr. Edwin F. Bryant remarks:

At the time of [Krishna‘s] birth, all the constellations and stars were benevolent. The constellation was Rohini, which is presided over by Brahma.¹⁴⁸

Regarding this stellar motif, J.M. Robertson states:

Now, it is a general rule in ancient mythology that the birthdays of God were astrological; and the simple fact that the Purana gives an astronomical moment for Krishna‘s birth is a sufficient proof that at the time of writing they had a fixed date for it. The star Rohini under which he was born, it will be remembered, has the name given in one variation of the Krishna legend to a wife of Vasudeva who bore to him Rama, as Devaki...bore Krishna. Here we are in the thick of ancient astrological myth. Rohini (our Aldebaran) is &#8213;the red,&#8214; &#8213;a mythical name also applied now to Aurora, now to a star.&#8214;¹⁴⁹

The point here is that a celestial portent is common at the birth of great gods, legends, heroes and patriarchs, as can be found in other stories and myths, including the Persian lawgiver Zoroaster, whose very name means &#8213;star of splendor,&#8214;¹⁵⁰ and Buddha, as the &#8213;immortals of the Tushita-heaven decide that Buddha shall be born when the &#8215;flower-star‘ makes its first appearance in the East.&#8214;¹⁵¹ Hence, the story about the star in the east at Christ‘s birth is an unoriginal and patently mythical motif.

Performed Miracles: Quoting Murdock:

Krishna‘s performance of miracles, in front of his disciples, is legendary, including many in the Mahabharata, in which he reveals mysteries to his disciple Arjuna (John?).

Krishna does likewise in the Bhagavad Gita, in which he describes himself as the &#8213;Lord of all beings,&#8214; among many epithets similar to those found within Christianity. In this

148. Bryant, KS, 119.

148. Robertson, 177.

148. Zoroaster or Zarathustra has been credited with &#8213;prophesying&#8214; the appearance of the &#8213;star in the east&#8214; over the place of the coming savior, as in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Saviour (10). (Roberts,

ANF, VIII, 406.) This &#8213;prophecy&#8214; is also considered to be the prediction of his own rebirth.

148. The star at Buddha‘s birth is said to be the &#8213;Pushya Nakshatra&#8214; (Prasad, G., 25.) This episode of the star Pushya at Buddha's birth is found in the Buddhist texts the Mah&#257;vastu and the Lalita Vistara. (Edmunds, 123.)

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same regard, Krishna says: &#8213;I am the origin of all that exists, and everything emanates from Me.&#8214;¹⁵²

Death & Resurrection: Concerning Krishna‘s death and ascension, in The Oxford Companion

to World Mythology, Dr. Leeming states:

Just after the war, Krishna dies, as he had predicted he would, when, in a position of meditation, he is struck in the heel by a hunter‘s arrow. His apotheosis occurs when he ascends in death to the heavens and is greeted by the gods.¹⁵³

Regarding the resurrection/ascension, the Mahabharata (4) says that Krishna or &#8213;Keshava,&#8214; as he is also traditionally called, immediately returns to life after being killed and speaks only to the hunter, forgiving him of his actions:

…he [the hunter] touched the feet of [Krishna]. The high-souled one comforted him and then ascended upwards, filling the entire welkin [sky/heaven] with splendour...

[Krishna] reached his own inconceivable region.¹⁵⁴

Concerning Krishna‘s death, Murdock remarks:

Although it is not specifically stated that Krishna &#8213;resurrects&#8214; upon his death—when he is killed under a tree—he does ascend into heaven, alive again, since he is considered to be the eternal God of the cosmos. Krishna‘s death is recounted in the Mahabharata and Vishnu Purana, both claiming he was killed by a hunter while sitting under a tree, the arrow penetrating his foot, much like Christ having a nail driven through his feet. In this regard, there have been found in India strange images of figures in cruciform with nail holes in their hands and feet, one of which was identified by an Indian priest as possibly the god Wittoba, who is an incarnation of Krishna.¹⁵⁵

The impression of a resurrection is evident from the depiction of Krishna comforting his killer just after death, before he has ascended into heaven. The point is that the god was once dead, but now he is alive again, whether in this world or the afterlife. This type of detail does not suffice to undermine the fact of the resurrection or raising up from death being a mythical motif in the first place, applicable both to Christ as well as many other gods and legendary figures.¹⁵⁶

21. Dionysus of Greece, born of a virgin on December 25^th, was a traveling teacher who performed miracles such as turning water into wine, he was referred to as the “King of Kings,” “God’s Only Begotten Son,” “The Alpha and Omega,” and many others, and upon his death, he was resurrected.

It is wise at this point to recall that in the ancient world many gods were confounded and compounded, deliberately or otherwise. Some were even considered interchangeable, such as Osiris, Horus and Ra. In this regard, Plutarch (35, 364E) states, &#8213;Osiris is identical with Dionysus.&#8214;¹⁵⁷ Thus, Zeus‘s son Dionysus or Bacchus was considered the Greek rendition of Osiris:

Dionysus became the universal savior-god of the ancient world. And there has never been another like unto him: the first to whom his attributes were accredited, we call Osiris: with the death of paganism, his central characteristics were assumed by Jesus Christ.¹⁵⁸

152. Murdock, RZC, 17.

152. Leeming, OCWM, 232.

152. R&#257;ya, 12.

152. Murdock, RZC, 17.

152. For more information on the mythical motif of the resurrection, see Murdock, CIE, 402-420.

152. Plutarch/Babbitt, 85.

152. Larson, 82.

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Dionysus is likewise identified with the god Aion and also referred to as &#8213;Zeus Sabazius&#8214; in other traditions.¹⁵⁹ Hence, we would expect him to share in at least some of all these gods‘ attributes.

111. Lane, 39-40.

111. Price, T., 203. For a scholarly analysis of the divine birth and virgin mother in ancient Greece, see The Cult of the Divine Birth by Dr. Marguerite Rigoglioso.

112. Murdock, CIE, 147.

111. Leeming, MVH, 25.

111. Leeming, MVH, 18.

111. Leeming, MVH, 39.

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Medallion of Cybele in chariot, under the sun, moon and star 2^nd cent. BCE

Ai Khanoum, Afghanistan (Singh, 94)

December 25^th: The &#8213;December 25^th&#8214; or winter-solstice birth of the sun god is a common theme in several cultures around the world over the past millennia, including the Egyptian, as already demonstrated. As it is for Mithra, Horus and Jesus, this date has likewise been claimed for Attis‘s nativity as well. For example, Barbara G. Walker writes:

Attis‘s passion was celebrated on the 25^th of March, exactly nine months before the solstitial festival of his birth, the 25^th of December. The time of his death was also the time of his conception, or re-conception.¹¹⁷

In this same regard, Shirley Toulson remarks:

In the secret rites of this Great Mother the young god Attis figured as her acolyte and consort.... Each year he was born at the winter solstice, and each year as the days shortened, he died.¹¹⁸

The reasoning behind this contention of the vegetative and solar god Attis‘s birth at the winter solstice is sound enough, in that it echoes natural cycles, with the god‘s death at the vernal equinox also representing the time when he is conceived again, to be born nine months later. As an example of scholarly extrapolation of this date, in discussing the winter-solstice orientation of a tomb in the Roman necropolis at Carmona, Spain, which possessed an image of Attis,¹¹⁹ archaeologist Dr. Manuel Bendala evinced the birth of the god at that time:

...the peculiar orientation of a chamber, into which the first rays of the morning sun would directly penetrate on the day of the winter solstice, led [Bendala] to deduce that this would be a kind of sanctum sanctorum of the sanctuary, where the devotees of Attis celebrated the Natalis Invicti...¹²⁰

The Natalis Invicti is the &#8213;Birth of the Unconquered One,&#8214; referring to the sun. This contention is reasonable when one considers that Attis himself was evidently a sun god, as related by Brandeis University professor of Classical Studies Dr. Patricia A. Johnston:

G. Thomas...traces the development of the idea of resurrection with regard to Attis, [which] seems to be firmly established approximately by the time of Firmicus Maternus and the Neo-Platonists, i.e., the fourth century A.D. By this time, &#8213;Attis is now

117. Walker, B., WEMS, 77.

117. Toulson, 34.

117. Vermaseren, CCCA, 62.

117. Vermaseren, CARC, 408.

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conceived of as a higher cosmic god, even the Sun-god.... At the solstice...symbolically Cybele is seen to have paled before the ascendant Attis...&#8214;¹²¹

Moreover, at times the young Attis was merged with Mithra,¹²² whose birthday was traditionally held on December 25^th and with whom he shared the same Phrygian capped attire. As we have seen, the Natalis Invicti was traditionally the birth of Mithra and Sol Invictus.

In this regard, as Dr. Fear relates:

Allegorical readings of metroac mythology allowed the cult to be integrated into the popular cult of Sol Invictus. Attis became emblematic of the sun god, and Cybele of the mother earth.¹²³

To summarize, as Sol Invictus or the Unconquered Sun—again, who is likewise identified with Mithra—Attis too would have been depicted as having been born on December 25^th or the winter solstice, the time of the Natalis Invicti.¹²⁴

Marble bust of Attis wearing Phrygian cap	Mithra in a Phrygian cap
2nd cent. AD/CE	2nd cent. AD/CE
(Paris)	Rome, Italy
	(British Museum, London)

Crucified: The myths of Attis‘s death include him being killed by a boar or by castrating himself under a tree, as well as being hung on a tree or &#8213;crucified.&#8214; Indeed, he has been called the &#8213;castrated and crucified Attis.&#8214;¹²⁵ Again, it should be noted that the use of the term &#8213;crucified&#8214; in ZG1.1 and elsewhere, such as concerns gods like Horus and Attis, does not connote that he or they were thrown to the ground and nailed to a cross, as we commonly think of crucifixion, based on the Christian tale. As we have seen, there

have been plenty of ancient figures who appeared in cruciform, some of whose myths specifically have them punished or killed through crucifixion, such as Prometheus.

The crucifixion in solar mythology represents the circle of the year with a cross in the center, symbolizing the solstices and equinoxes. Hence, as a sun god, Attis would logically have been said to be &#8213;crucified,&#8214; as have been his solar counterparts in the esoterica of the solar cultus. As a nature god as well, he would be said to be hung on a cross at the

121. Vermaseren, CARC, 108.

121. Vermaseren, CARC, 108.

121. Vermaseren, CARC, 43.

121. Halsberghe, 159.

121. Harari, 131.

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vernal equinox, when the days and nights are equal, until he rises to bring back the resurrection of the spring from the death of winter, as well as the day triumphing over the night as it increases in length.

Moreover, Attis is said to have been &#8213;crucified&#8214; to a pine tree,¹²⁶ while Christ too was related as being both crucified and hung on a tree (Acts 5:30; 10:39). As stated by La Trobe University professor Dr. David John Tacey:

Especially significant for us is the fact that the Phrygian Attis was crucified upon the tree...¹²⁷

In antiquity, these two concepts were obviously similar enough to be interchangeable in understanding.

As we know from rituals that have continued into relatively recent times, such as among the Khonds of India, when the sacred-king victims of their human-sacrifice rituals are hung on a tree, the sacrifice was often done with their arms extended onto branches on either side, or in cruciform.¹²⁸ Indeed, some of these cults/tribes use movable crossbars, such that it can very accurately be stated that they hang their victims on a tree that is also a cross—a cross-shaped tree, in fact. Hence, the two are essentially the same. The wood upon which a crucified victim is hung need not be a hewn cross but can be a tree, and Attis‘s hanging upon a tree has very much been considered a &#8213;crucifixion&#8214;: &#8213;It was an ancient custom to use trees as gibbets for crucifixion, or, if artificial, to call the cross a tree.&#8214;¹²⁹

In fact, in the biblical book of Deuteronomy (21:22), the writer speaks of hanging criminals upon a tree, as though it were a general custom:

And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged [is] accursed of God;)…

Furthermore, Paul of Tarsus seems to refer to the above Deuteronomy quote in the correct context when he says: &#8213;Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written, &#8215;Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.‘&#8214; (Galatians 3:13)

Again, in the Book of Acts, Christ is specifically said to have been hung on a tree:

The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. (Acts 5:30)

And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree… (Acts 10:39)

Concerning Attis‘s death, Doane remarks:

Attys, who was called the &#8213;Only Begotten Son&#8214; and &#8213;Saviour,&#8214; was worshipped by the Phrygians…. He was represented by them as a man tied to a tree, at the foot of which was a lamb, and, without doubt, also as a man nailed to the tree, or stake, for we find Lactantius making this Apollo of Miletus…say that:

&#8213;He was a mortal according to the flesh; wise in miraculous works; but, being arrested by an armed force by command of the Chaldean judges, he suffered a death made bitter with nails and stakes.&#8214;¹³⁰

In his book Divine Institutes (4.11), Christian writer Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320) relates that, according to his oracle, the sun god Apollo of Miletus was &#8213;mortal in the flesh, wise in miraculous deeds, but he was made prisoner by the Chaldean lawgivers and nailed to stakes,

126. Price, R., 87.

126. Tacey, 110.

126. Acharya, SOG, 281.

126. Higgins, I, 499.

126. Doane, 190-191.

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and came to a painful death.&#8214;¹³¹ If the oracle really had recounted a genuinely ancient account of Apollo‘s passion, then we have a pre-Christian mythical precedent for that of Jesus. Moreover, the identification of Attis with Apollo is apt, since both were taken in antiquity to be sun gods and discussed together, such as by Macrobius and the Emperor Julian &#8213;the Apostate&#8214;

(331/332-363 AD/CE), the latter of whom said that both Apollo and Attis were &#8213;closely linked with Helios,&#8214;¹³² the older Greek sun god.

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Horus resurrecting Osiris using the cross of eternal life (Lundy, Monumental Christianity, 403)

17.   Horus was known by many gestural names such as The Truth, The Light,

God’s Anointed Son, The Good Shepherd, The Lamb of God, and many others.

Many Egyptian gods and goddesses held &#8213;sacred titles&#8214; of one sort or another. For example, in chapter/spell 125 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the deceased addresses Osiris as the

&#8213;Lord of Truth,&#8214; and it is also easy to understand why solar gods would be deemed &#8213;The Light.&#8214; Following is a compilation of epithets taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as applied to various deities, including Osiris, Isis, Horus, Re, Anubis, Thoth and Seb:

Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Lord of Truth, Savior, the Divine, All-Powerful, the Unknowable, Great God, Lord of All, Inviolate God, God of Justice, Lord of Justice, Lord of Right, Lord of Prayer... Son of the Great One...Lord of Light... The Giver of Light, Lord of the Horizon, Lord of Daylight, Lord of the Sunbeams, Soul of his father, Lord of Years, Lord of the Great Mansion...⁸⁰

Concerning the Egyptian &#8213;savior,&#8214; Murdock states:

…according to the hymns some 1,400 years before the purported advent of Christ, the sun is the &#8213;unique shepherd, who protects his flock,&#8214; also serving as a &#8213;savior.&#8214; In the Coffin Texts appears another mention of the Egyptian god as &#8213;savior,&#8214; as in CT Sp. 155, in which the speaker specifically defines himself as a god and also says, &#8213;Open to me, for I am a saviour…&#8214; In CT Sp. 847, the deceased—who at times is Osiris and/or Horus—is the &#8213;Saviour-god.&#8214;…⁸¹

Regarding Horus‘s other epithets, William R. Cooper relates:

The very first of the chief epithets applied to Horus in this, his third great office, has a startlingly Christian sound; it is the &#8213;Sole begotten son of the Father,&#8214; to which, in other texts, is added, &#8213;Horus the Holy Child,&#8214; the &#8213;Beloved son of his father.&#8214; The Lord of Life, the Giver of Life [are also] both very usual epithets...the &#8213;Justifier of the Righteous,&#8214; the &#8213;Eternal King&#8214; and the &#8213;Word of the Father Osiris.&#8214;…

...very many of the essential names and attributes of Horus were attributed to Ra, Tum, and the other deities also, they were alike &#8213;self-created,&#8214; &#8213;born of a Virgin,&#8214; &#8213;deliverers of mankind,&#8214; &#8213;only begotten sons&#8214;...⁸²

   

80. See    Murdock, CIE,    329-320.

   

80. Murdock,    CIE,    310.

   

80. Cooper,    22, 76-77.

                           

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The epithet of &#8213;God’s Anointed Son&#8214; is a combination of Horus being called &#8213;Anointed&#8214; and &#8213;Beloved son&#8214; of his father, Osiris, this latter epithet being very common in the Pyramid Texts.⁸³ As an example of Horus‘s anointed or christed state, Pyramid text W 51/PT 77:52a-b says:

Ointment, ointment, where should you be? You on Horus‘s forehead, where should you be? You were on Horus‘s forehead...⁸⁴

Concerning the god as &#8213;Good Shepherd,&#8214; Murdock also remarks:

In BD [Book of the Dead spell] 142 appears a long &#8213;List of the Forms and Shrines of Osiris,&#8214; with over 140 epithets for the god, including the &#8213;Protector&#8214; or &#8213;Shepherd&#8214;— Asar-Saa. The sun god Re too was the &#8213;good shepherd,&#8214; and Horus‘s &#8213;Good Shepherd&#8214; role is made clear in the Pyramid Texts as well, for example, at PT 690:2106a-b/N 524: &#8213;O King, stand up for Horus, that he may make you a spirit and guide you when you ascend to the sky.&#8214;

&#8213;Horus,&#8214; in other words, the king, is called &#8213;the good shepherd&#8214; also in the third inscription at the Temple of &#8213;Redesiyeh&#8214; or El-Radesia at Wady Abad, near Edfu in Upper Egypt. As Lundy says, &#8213;The royal Good Shepherd is the antitype of Horus...&#8214; The idea of the Horus-king as the &#8213;good shepherd,&#8214; in fact, was so important that it constituted a major shift in perception and public policy, representing the general mentality of the 11^th and 12^th Dynasties (c. 2050-1800 BCE). As remarked upon by Egyptologist Dr. John A. Wilson, a director of the Oriental Institute at the University of

Chicago, &#8213;The concept of the good shepherd rather than the distant and lordly owner of the flocks shifted the idea of kingship from possession as a right to responsibility as a duty.&#8214;⁸⁵

Regarding the &#8213;Lamb of God&#8214; epithet, Massey explains:

...In the text Horus is addressed as the &#8213;Sheep, son of a sheep; Lamb, son of a lamb,&#8214; and invoked in this character as the protector and saviour of souls...Horus is the lamb of God the father, and is addresses by the name of the lamb who is the protector of savior of the dead in the earth and Amenti.⁸⁶

18. After being “betrayed” by Typhon, Horus was “crucified,” buried for three days, and thus, resurrected.

It needs to be reiterated here that the ancient texts did not necessarily spell out the myths in a linear fashion, resembling a story following a certain timeframe. Mythical motifs found disparately in the ancient Egyptian texts are combined in this paragraph, as they are in modern encyclopedia entries. While some might be critical of this manner of unfolding in the movie, it should be understood that the premise of the entire section (&#8213;Zeitgeist,&#8214; Part 1) concerns how symbolic characteristics were taken from the Egyptian religion and infused into Christianity, as a natural flow of religious evolution across various seemingly independent doctrines. Hence, the linear nature of such points becomes less important than the symbols they represent—especially when all the evidence and the context of astrotheology are taken into consideration.

Also, it is important to remember the &#8213;hybrid&#8214; nature of the Egyptian gods and how multiple names are given to the same entity (i.e., Horus/Osiris hybrid). As Murdock explains:

As we explore the original Egyptian mythos and ritual upon which much of Christianity was evidently founded, it needs to be kept in mind that the gods Osiris and Horus in

⁸³ Faulkner, EBD, pl. 33, 110; Allen, J., AEPT, 36. (E.g., PT 20:11a; PT 219:179b; PT 369:644c; PT 510:1130c; PT 540:1331b; W 152)

   

84. Allen,    J., AEPT,    22.

   

84. Murdock,    CIE,    312.

   

84. Massey,    NG,    II, 471,

                           

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particular were frequently interchangeable and combined, as in &#8213;I and the Father are one.&#8214; (Jn 10:30)⁸⁷

Along the same lines, Egyptologist Dr. Samuel C. Sharpe remarks:

The long list of gods...again further increased in two ways. The priests sometimes made a new god by uniting two or three or four into one, and at other times by dividing one into two or three, or more. Thus out of Horus and Ra they made Horus-Ra, called by the Greeks Aroeris. Out of Osiris and Apis the bull of Memphis, the priests of Memphis made Osiri-Apis or Serapis. He carries the two sceptres of Osiris, and has a bull‘s head... Out of Amun-Ra and Ehe the bull of Heliopolis, the priests of the East of the Delta made Amun-Ra-Ehe. To this again they added a fourth character, that of Chem, and made a god Amun-Ra-Ehe-Chem. Out of Kneph the Spirit, and Ra the Sun, they made Kneph-Ra. Out of Sebek and Ra, they made Sebek-Ra. In this way the Egyptians worshipped a plurality in unity.⁸⁸

Betrayed by Typhon: The Typhon figure is also known as Set/Seth, the god of desert and darkness who betrays his brother, Osiris, and who is depicted in the Pyramid Texts as battling with Horus, who avenges his father. In later texts, Seth is said to have sent a snake or scorpion to sting and kill Horus, as on the Metternich Stela⁸⁹ (c. 380-342 BCE) and other such &#8213;cippi&#8214; or magical stele.

Recounting another myth in which Horus is drowned, Diodorus (Antiquities of Egypt, 1.25.6) describes the god‘s raising or resurrection by Isis, using the same term, anastasis, later employed to describe Jesus‘s resurrection:

Isis also discovered the elixir of immortality, and when her son Horus fell victim to the plots of the Titans and was found dead beneath the waves, she not only raised him from the dead and restored his soul, but also gave him eternal life.⁹⁰

The similarity of the Osiris-Set conflict with that of the Jesus-Satan battle is highlighted by historian Dr. Philip Van Ness Myers:

The god Seth, called Typhon by the Greek writers, was the Satan of later Egyptian mythology. He was the personification of the evil in the world, just as Osiris was the personification of the good.⁹¹

For more on the contention between Horus and Set, see Christ in Egypt, pp. 67-78.

Horus Crucified: The &#8213;crucifixion&#8214; of Horus is misunderstood because many erroneously assume that the term denotes a direct resemblance to the crucifixion narrative of Jesus Christ. Hence, it is critical to point out that we are dealing with metaphors here, not &#8213;history,&#8214; as the

&#8213;crucifixions&#8214; of both Horus and Jesus are improvable events historically.

The issue at hand is not a man being thrown to the ground and nailed to a cross, as Jesus is depicted to have been, but the portrayal of gods and goddesses in “cruciform,” whereby the divine figure appears with arms outstretched in a symbolic context. The word &#8213;crucify&#8214; comes from the Latin crucifigere, composed of cruci/crux and affigere/figere, meaning &#8213;cross&#8214; and &#8213;to fix/affix,&#8214; respectively. Thus, it does not necessarily mean to throw a living person to the ground and nail him or her to a cross, but could signify any image affixed to a cross-shape or in cruciform. This symbolic imagery of a person on a cross or in cross-shape was fairly common in the Pagan world, concerning many gods, goddesses and other figures.

First of all, the cross was a very ancient pre-Christian symbol that often designated the sun. Regarding the cross, the Catholic Encyclopedia (&#8213;Cross and the Crucifix&#8214;) states:

   

87. Murdock,    CIE,    67-68.

   

87. Sharpe,    12.

   

87. See,    e.g., te Velde, 37-38.

   

87. Diodorus/Murphy,    31. See also Murdock, CIE,    388.

   

87. Van    Ness Myers, 38.

                           

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The sign of the cross, represented in its simplest form by a crossing of two lines at right angles, greatly antedates, in both the East and the West, the introduction of Christianity. It goes back to a very remote period of human civilization....

...It is also...a symbol of the sun...and seems to denote its daily rotation.... Cruciform objects have been found in Assyria. Shari people in Egypt wearing crucifixes around their necks. The statutes of Kings Asurnazirpal and Sansirauman, now in the British Museum, have cruciform jewels about the neck.... Cruciform earrings were found by Father Delattre in Punic tombs at Carthage.

Another symbol which has been connected with the cross is the ansated cross (ankh or crux ansata) of the ancient Egyptians.... From the earliest times also it appears among the hieroglyphic signs symbolic of life or of the living... perhaps it was originally, like the swastika, an astronomical sign. The ansated cross is found on many and various monuments of Egypt.... In later times the Egyptian Christians (Copts), attracted by its form, and perhaps by its symbolism, adopted it as the emblem of the cross...⁹²

Fortunately, many ancient artifacts survive that demonstrate the antiquity not only of the cross but also of a human figure in the shape of a cross or in cruciform.

   

   

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

   

   

   

   Human    in cruciform with cross around neck

   

   Chalcolithic,    3900-2500 BCE

       

   

   Cyprus,    Greece (www.limassollink.com/history.php)

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

   

   

   

Shari    in Egypt wearing crosses, possibly Assyrians c. 15^th    cent. BCE.    (Wilkinson, I, 365, 375ff)

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

   

   

   

   Crosses    on the bottoms of ossuary

   

   c.    6^th-5^th    cent. BCE?    Golasecca, Italy (Seymour, 25)

   

Original    Coptic cross

                           

The           Greatest Story Ever Sold

29

For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that any earthly being was able, to be believed God…. Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods. For your very standards, as well as your banners, and flags of your camp, what else are they but crosses gilded and adorned? Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it.⁹⁴

Since these passionate defenders of Christianity themselves have made the comparison between Christ on the cross and Pagan figures in cruciform or affixed to crosses, we would be remiss in not following their lead.

Counted among these &#8213;sons of Jupiter&#8214; depicted in cruciform may be the Greek god Prometheus, who was portrayed both in ancient writings and in pre-Christian artifacts as being bound to a cross or in cruciform. As related by the Catholic Encyclopedia:

...On an ancient vase we see Prometheus bound to a beam which serves the purpose of a cross.... In the same way the rock to which Andromeda was fastened is called crux, or cross....⁹⁵

   

                                                                                                                                                           

Prometheus             crucified using chains	Andromeda             crucified using chains
c.             350 BCE	c.             79 AD/CE
Greek             vase	Wall             painting, Pompeii
(www.theoi.com/Gallery/T21.4.html)	(www.uwm.edu/Course/mythology/0800/underworld.htm)

Regarding the Egyptian god in cruciform, Thomas W. Doane relates:

Osiris, the Egyptian Saviour, was crucified in the heavens. To the Egyptian the cross was the symbol of immortality, an emblem of the Sun, and the god himself was crucified to the tree, which denoted his fructifying power.

Horus was also crucified in the heavens. He was represented, like... Christ Jesus, with outstretched arms in the vault of heaven.⁹⁶