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

[Prometheus]

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

1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, xiii., ‘The Origin of the Holy Grail,’ pp. 300—314
B Rg. i. 164, 46, x. 149, 3.
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and Southern half, the large and small ends of the egg surrounded in the centre by the ocean-snake, on whose waters it rested. In the centre of the Northern or large half of Gan-dhari’s egg, ruled by her Kauravya sons, was their Indian land called Kuru-kshetra, or field {kshetra) of the Kurus, where the world’s tree, the parent Banyan fig- tree [Ficus Indica), emerged. It had its roots in the Southern mud, as explained in Chapter II. p. 26, and on its top sat the parent-ape, whose thigh was the constellation of the Great Bear. This ape, in the first conception entertained of his functions, performed the part assigned to the winds in the first cosmogony, and turned the stars round the Pole with his mighty five-fingered hand, the five days of the week. But in a further development of the belief in the ape as the God crowned by the Pole Star, whose thigh was the Great Bear, he was thought to turn the tree and the star-flowers on its branches by the pressure of the Thigh Stars.
The Southern small end of the egg penetrated below the waters guarded by the encircling ocean-snake to the mud whence the mother-tree grew, and the men of the Southern mountain-land, emerging from the ocean, were in ancient belief the race called by the Celts Fo-mori, or men beneath (fo) the sea (uiuir), the dwellers in the land lighted by the Southern sun of winter, the sea-born race of the primitive historical mythology preserved in the Arabian Nights.
This cosmogony was developed by the mixed races formed by the union in Euphratean lands of the emigrating descendants of the first founders of Indian villages with the Northern Ugro-Finn races. These Finns traced their descent to the egg laid by Ukko, the storm-bird, who became in Indian history Kansa, the moon-goose (>kans), son of Ugra-sena, the king of the army (send) of the Ugras or Ogres, the Ugur- Finns whose story is told in Chapter VI. In this cosmogony of the floating egg the regularity of the annual course of the moon and sun through the stars was thought to be preserved by the watching-god, the boundary (laksh) snake-god, the Gond Goraya, and the god Lakshman of the story of Rama,
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as told on p. 208. He determined the direction in which the stars should be turned by the ape, so as to make the track of Sita, the furrow Rama’s plough driven with the ecliptic path of the moon and sun, uniform in all the revolutions of the heavens round the egg.
It was during this age that the reckoning of time by the presence of the sun in the zodiacal stars of the Nag-kshetra, or field of the Naga snakes, first began. The evidence I have been able to collect as to its date seems, as I have pointed out in Chapter V. Section A., On the Birth of the Sun-god dated by Zodiacal stars, pp. 205 ff., to show that the first year thus reckoned was one of which the beginning was fixed by the entry of the sun into Aries at the Autumnal Equinox. According to other recorded positions of the sun in that year it was in Cancer at the winter solstice when Rama was installed as ruler of the Indian year of the three- years cycle.
This three-years cycle-year was begun in Syria at the Autumnal Equinox with the entry of the sun into Aries, and this New Year’s Day still survives in that of the Jews, who open it with blasts on ram-horn trumpets. This was, as I show in note 1, p. 208, probably that reckoned by the early Zend fire-worshippers who founded the rule of the Kushika kings. The Indian evidence on the other hand, as I show on pp. 207, 208, and the Malay traditions referred to in note 3, p. 207, date back to a time when the year of Rama began, when the sun was in Cancer at the winter solstice. But the framers of this year, with true Indian conservatism, preserved the memory of the reckoning of Orion’s year, and also that of the sun-bird beginning at the winter solstice, as shown on p. 22, for in preparing their list of zodiacal Nag-kshetra stars of the year beginning with the Autumnal Equinox, they placed /3 Arietis as the first star in it. The list closes with Revati £ Piscium, the star marking the close of the month Bhadrapada (August—September). It then, as I show on p. 209, ushered in the New Year of the sun-ram of the Autumnal Equinox. He was the god born from the tree
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of the fish-mother-star, worshipped throughout South-western Asia as the Akkadian goddess Nana, the Syrian Atergatis, Derceto, and Tirhatha, whose memory is preserved in the constellations Pisces, the Dolphin, and, as I show in Appendix C., of Cetus the Whale. She was, as I prove on pp. 230, 231, the traditional mother of Shem-i-ramot, the bisexual goddess of the three-years cycle-year. The year thus reckoned is one which is shown by the position of the sun in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox (September— October), in Cancer at the winter solstice (December— January), and in Pisces (August—September), to date from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.c. The evidence as to its use proves that it was the year reckoned by the priestly astronomers who determined the dates of the annual festivals throughout India, the Malayan countries and South-western Asia, whence it was carried to Western Europe, as is shown by the Breton stone calendars described in pp. 266—269. The zodiacal reckoning of time thus begun, was, as I show from the recorded dates, determined by the position of the sun in zodiacal stars, regularly continued throughout the whole of the remaining epochs of the Myth-making Age, including those of the years of eleven and fifteen months, and the subsequent year-reckonings up to the time when the sun was in Taurus at the Vernal Equinox.
The conception of the earth as a stationary floating-egg was followed by one which pictured it as turning on its axis, and thus reversed the doctrine of the revolving heavenly bodies. This change originated in the brains of the Northern worshippers of the household-fire, and was developed when built houses began to supersede the caves, rock-shelters, and rude huts made of branches of trees stuck in the ground, which were the dwelling-places of the primitive agricultural and hunting races. These human beavers, sons of the Twins Night and Day, called by the Greeks Castor, the unsexed beaver, and Polu-deukes, the much {poht) wetting (detikes) god, were the first users of moistened earth for building, and their descendants the first makers of sun-dried bricks, and
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of pottery made on the potter’s wheel. These latter changed the polar ape who turned the stars with his hand, and the Thigh stars of the Great Bear into the Great Potter, the wise-ape Kabir, the Northern form of the Dravidian ape Kapi. In the first form of the theology of the turning-tree, which engendered the heat whence life was born as the fire- drill breeds fire, the stars turned with it as it was driven round, according to Greek belief by Ixion, the Sanskrit Akshivan, the man of the axle (aksha), who was bound by Hermes, the god of the time-recording gnomon-pillar, to the stars of the Great Bear. But in its subsequent development the stars were, as in the first belief, detached from the tree in which the Potter ape sat. They then became the stationary lights of heaven, visible through the web of the overarching heavens’ tent.
This tent was first the Peplos or bridal-veil given to Harmonia as a wedding gift by her husband Kadmus, the man of the East (kedeni), and the arranger {kad, root of fcdfa, to arrange).   She was the goddess called in Syriac or
Aramaic Kharmano, the Chaldaic Kharman, meaning the snake which encircled as its guardian mother-ring of tilled land the primaeval village grove, and hence the dialectic forms of her name Harmonia and Sarmo-bel were formed. Sarmo-bel is the distinctive name of the Agathodaemon, the good snake depicted under the sacred Phoenician sign ^). It indicated the path of the sun-bird round the boundary of the heavenly village, called in Hindu astronomical mythology the Nag- kshetra or field of the Naga race. The boundary stars marked the track of the sun-bird of the first solar year of the Indian Mundas described in Chapter II. p. 22, which began when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. This sun-goddess of the flying-snake was the goddess Taut, the Phoenician form of the Egyptian Dhu-ti or Thoth, the bird (dhu) of life (ti), who was originally the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dtimu) of life (si), the star Orion, which succeeded Canopus as the leader of the stars round the Pole when the latter Southern star became invisible to the
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Indian emigrant farmers who had reached Asia Minor as the Rephaim or sons of the Giant (repha) star Canopus.
This name Tut also appears in that of the Roman god Tut-anus, in the title Tuticus, meaning supreme, given to the Oscan chief-magistrate Meddix-tuticus, and also in the Tut-ulus or conically dressed hair worn by the Roman Flamines or fire-priests, as a type of the heavenly veil concealing the hidden creating thought in the divine brain.
This veil was, according to Pherecydes of Syros, who wrote about 600 B.C., thrown by Zeus over the winged oak, the revolving-world’s tree, the parent-oak of the Lapps, Esthonians, and Druids1. On this veil were depicted the stars, or rather they were seen through it. Zeus also gave it to Europa, the goddess of the West (ereb), the sister of Kadmus, and she is represented on the coins of Gortyna in Crete as sitting in the branches of the parent-oak-tree with the veil over her head 2 3.
This goddess of the veil was also called Khusartis, from Khurs, a circle, and was personified in her male form, that of her husband Kadmus, the arranger, as the dwarf Kabir, Chrysor, or Khrusor, the circle-maker and ordainer, who, as the creating-wise-ape, the smith, put all things in circular order. She was also named Thuroh the Law, the Hebrew Thorah, of which Doto, named by Horn. II. lxviii. 43, among the Nereids, is an Aramaic form ; and the bridal-veil of Harmonia, as the goddess Doto, is said by Pausanias II. 1, 7, to be preserved at Gabala, a Syrian seaport bearing the name of Gi-bil or Bil-gi, the Akkadian fire-god who produced the creating-fire by the revolving fire-drill, the world’s tree 3.
In the house or tent roofed by the over-arching veil of the firmament the mother-goddess, looked on in one aspect as the guardian-snake, and in another as the flying sun-bird
1   O’Neill, Night of the Gods, Wearing the Veil, vol. ii. p. 877.
2   Ibid., Axis Myths, vol. i. p. 308; Lenormant, Origine de VHistoire, i. pp. 9Si 568, 569, 573 ; Goblet d’Alviella, Migration of Symbols, p. 168 note.
3   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xiii. pp. 504—507, chap. iii. p. 103, chap. xiii. p. 658 ; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, Polar Myths, vol. i. p. 316
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measuring the year, was, like the Finn house-mother, the guardian of the Joula or never-extinguished fire of the house kindled by the revolving-stem of the world’s tree. Also it was under this roof that her mate, the fabricating Master Smith and the Master Potter of the turning Great Bear Constellation, pursued his creating trade.
In the evolution of belief the trunk of the world’s tree, with its three roots penetrating, like those of the parent-ash-tree the Ygg-drasil of the Edda T, to the Urdar fountain of the circling waters of the South, became the Trident or Trisula worshipped by the Takkas of India, as described in Chapter IV. p. 175. This, which symbolised successively the three seasons of Orion’s year and the three years of the cycle-year, was the creating-weapon of the Greek god Poseidon and of the Japanese twin-creators, Izanagi and Izanami, by which they raised the land from the sea as butter is raised from the churned milk.
It was by the revolutions of this trident of Creating Time that the Indian creator Vasuki raised the Indian land of the Kushikas with its central mountain Mandara, meaning the Revolving {maud) hill which emerged from the surrounding ocean as the clay cone rising from the potter’s wheel, and brought up with it the Tortoise-land, the Indian continental area, the appanage of the Kauravyas or Kushikas, the sons of Kur and Kush the tortoise, and of Kaus the bow.
This mother-mountain raised under the heavenly veil is, in another form of the myth, the central mountain of the Himalayas, the crowning summit ofThe Pamir plateau, the Hindu Mount Meru. In the primitive form of the Akkadian and Kushika birth story it was the Western peak of this plateau, called by the Akkadians Khar-sak-kurra, meaning “ the wet (sak) entrails (khar) of the mountain of the East ” (-hurra), or “the chief (sak) ox (khar) of the East (kurra) 2.” 1
1 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, Bohn’s Edition, The Prose Edda, 15, 16, pp. 410-413.
Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i.„ Essay iii., p. 143, note 4;
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It was from this mountain that the parent-river of the Kushikas, the Haetumant of the Zendavesta, the modern Helmend, descended to the Lake Kashava or Zarah in Seistan ; and, in the reeds of this lake, Kavad, the infant- parent of the Kavi or Kabir Kush kings, was found by Uzava, the goat-god Uz, called Tum-aspa, the horse of darkness. He was, as I show in Chapter IV. pp. 141, 142, the Pole Star goat ruling the year of three seasons I.
But this mother-mountain of the Akkadians and Kuskikas was not the first of the national parent-mountains worshipped by the Gonds of India and the Kurd sons of Mount Ararat, for all these legends can be traced back to the pregnant mother-mountain of the Northern Finns, round which the hunter-star drove the reindeer-sun-god, who, as described in Chapter III. p. 89, was slain at the close of his year at the winter solstice.
In the form of this historical legend telling of the rising of Mount Mandara, we are told in the Mahabharata that there rose with it and its fringe of continental land the sun- ass, or horse, who] took the place of the reindeer sun-god of the North and of both the Southern cloud-bird Khu and the sun-hen flying round the heavens. All these, instead of remaining stationary like the stars seen through the veil, within which Mount Mandara revolved, circled it, and the revolving world it took round with it like the rain-shedding cloud, which, in the original form of the myth of the sun- year, drew the cloud chariot of the female and male Twins Night and Day in which they bore the sun-maiden. This horse, called in the Mahabharata Ucchaishravas, the ass with the long ears, is that called in the Rigveda Trikshi and Tarkshya, the horse of the Nahusha sons of the Ocean- snake and of the revolving Great-Bear constellation (Nagur
Lenormant, Chaldoean Magic, pp. 302, 30S, 169 ; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, No. 399.
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p 145 ; Dar- mesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, x. 66, Farvardin Yasht, 131 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 302, 221 ; West, Bundahish, xxxi. 23; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136.
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Nahur). This horse, under the name Tarkshya, meaning the son of Trikshi, is called Arishta-nemi, the ass of the unbroken (<arishta) wheel (nemi), in Rg. x. 178, 1, the name given, as I show in Chapter VI. p. 316, to the horse’s head, the year- god of the eleven-months year1. This last god, whose genealogy shows him to be the son or successor of the ass sun-god of the three-years cycle, was born, as I there show, under the star Spica a Virgo, the mother of corn, the Eygptian Min, the mother-star of the Minyan race. The birth took place when the sun was in Virgo at the Vernal Equinox, that is between 13,000 and 12,000 B.C., or about 2000 years after the age of the long-eared sun-ass when the sun was in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox.
This primaeval ass, the Vedic year-god Trikshi, who is said in Rg. viii. 22, 7 to traverse the holy road of the divine order, or the path of the god of annual time, was the god of the boring (tri) people, the bee-inspired race of Chapter IV. p. 169, and hence the year-god of the Greek Telchines of Rhodes and Lycia, whose name substituting / for r, and a guttural for a sibilant, reproduces that of the Vedic god Trikshi whose sons they were. They, like their Indian prototypes, the Takkas, were deft artificers, the first workers in metal, who introduced bronze and made the lunar sickle of Kronos, that of the Indian Srinjaya or men of the sickle (srini), the sons of the corn-mother Virgo, and the creating trident of Poseidon. This latter god was nurtured by them with a nymph, the daughter of ocean Kapheira, the Semitic Kabirah, the Arabic Khabar, the goddess-mother of the Kabiri and another form of Har- monia, mother of the sons of the smith of heaven. She was also the black Demeter of Phigalia, the goddess with the horse’s head 2, who was violated by Poseidon, who was, as I show in Chapter IV. p. 143, originally the snake parent-god Erectheus or Ericthonius, from whose three thousand mares the North-wind god.Boreas begot, accord-
1   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xvii. p. 78 ; Rg. viii. 22, 7, vi. 46, 7, 8, 9.
2   Frazer, Pausauias, viii. 42, l—3, vol. i. p. 428.
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ing to Horn. II. xx. 220—225, the twelve horses of the year. Hence Poseidon, the god nurtured by the Telchines, was the snake-father of the horses of the sun, two of which he gave to Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay {ytt]\os), the Great Potter and the father of Achilles1; and the Telchines his votaries, who were first sons of the sun-ass Trikshi, became by their union with the northern sons of the sun-horse the ruling artisan race of the year of eleven months of the god called Tarkshya, the son of Trikshi, and also Arishta-nemi or the god of the unbroken wheel.
We can thus by their genealogy trace their traditional^ <? ^ history from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C., to between "13,000 and 12,000 B.C. These priests were the Kuretes whose religious dances were circular gyrations like those of the heavenly bodies round the pole 2.
In these cosmogonies we see specimens of the scientific r and historical myths of the men of the primitive age of civilization. They were originally evolved from the dramatic nature-myths, framed for the instruction of the village children by the elders of the first village communities, such as the story of Nala and Damayanti, telling of the wooing and marriage of Nala, meaning the channel {nala) of the ' seasonal rains, the god of the two monsoons with the earth that is to be tamed {damayanti). This same use of dramatic metaphor which characterised these primitive stories, was t continued, when histories telling of events spread over long ages of time were added to the catalogue of national literature. Hence, as I show in Chapter I. p. 10, Chapter V. pp. 217, 218, and in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,
Vol. I., Essay II., pp. 64—76, the story of Nala and Damayanti was expanded into a much more extensive history than that contemplated by the first framers of the myth, for it became the Epic history of the Mahabharata or
1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 277, 278.
a Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. iii. p. 987, s.v., Telchines; O’Neill Night of the Gods, vol. ii. p. 847 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 104—109, 183.
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Preface.
Great Bharatas, the race - begetters (bliri), the people formed from the amalgamation of the races who successively- ruled India down to the close of the Myth-making Age, and who called it Bharata-varsha, the land of the Bharatas. This covers the whole period reviewed in this work, beginning even before the first date I have recorded, 21,000 B.C., when a Kepheus was the Pole Star.
During the whole of the three ages of Pole Star, Lunar- solar and Sun-worship comprised in this Myth-making epoch all ancient histories were framed on similar ground- plans to those used by the successive authors of the Mahab- harata legends, and were recited to the people at the national New Years’ festivals, as I show in Chapter VI. pp. 297, 298. By the rules of their construction, they only furnish exact information as to the course of the national changes they describe when they are interpreted in the sense intended by their authors to be conveyed to those for whose use they were intended. These men lived in an age when the object of the national historians was to record the progress of the .nation or tribe for whose benefit they worked, and thus to furnish guide-marks to the descendants of each generation, which thus by these did bequeath its experiences to its children. For this purpose the record of the names of the national leaders was in their eyes useless. Hence they substituted for the living actors symbolically named persons whose names gave a key to the inner meaning of these narratives, and these, when they had completed the tasks attributed to them in the historic dramas prepared by the national historiographers the Prashastri, or teaching and recording priests of the Hindus, the Zend Frashaostra who became the Jewish scribes and the Greek Exegetse, only lived as guides to memory, or were like the heroes of the Mahab- harata transferred to heaven as stars. They thus took their place in the historical nomenclature of the Constellations, which, as will be seen in the course of this work, tell in their names the history of the world.
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Seeing that the narrators of these officially prepared ancient histories, which were believed to be divinely inspired utterances painting in pictorial language the national results achieved in the course of ages, always used the names of the actors they spoke of as keys to their meaning, it is a fatal mistake to regard these embodied symbolical sign-marks of the primitive form of history as indicating individuals. In these narratives the actual leaders who had been honoured, loved and followed during the lifetime they had devoted to the service of their country, were only remembered after death in the records of the victories they had gained over the obstacles raised by ignorance and lawless licence, over human foes and climatic impediments. This memorial, furnished by the benefits secured by their deeds, was the only remembrance they wished and sought for, as the end for which they toiled was not so much personal aggrandisement as the continued stability and improvement of the state fabric they and their fathers had reared. This was in their eyes a far more noble monument than that of personal praise, and one which best repaid their constant devotion to what they had learnt to be their highest duty.
Under this system of oral historical record, in which each generation handed down its experiences to its descendants, each successive leader became the reproduction of those who preceded him in the task of nation-building, or, in the words of the Mahabharata, the son was the father reborn from the mother-sheath. Thus in religious evolution, as will be shown hereafter, each newly deified manifestation of divine power became the successor under different names and attributes of the original creating Spirit-God. This conception appears in its most fully developed form in the sequence of the births of the Buddha, recorded in the Jatakas or Birth- Stories, and partly told in Chapter VII. Section G. In these his first embodiment as a God of Time is said by himself in Jataka 465 I, to be his birth as the king Sal-tree 1 Rouse and Francis, The Jatakas, vol. iv. pp. 96—98.
xxviii   Preface.
[Shorea robusta), the mother-tree, from which he was afterwards born as the sun-god. This tree was the pillar which supported the palace of king Brahmadatta, the ruler, given (datta) by the Creator [Brahma). This palace was the heavenly vault lit with stars, which I have described above as the dome sustained by the world’s tree with its roots fixed in the mud of the Southern Ocean and its top crowned by the Pole Star.
A variant form of this tree was the Erica-tree supporting the palace of the king of Byblos, the modern Ji-bail, the Phoenician Gi-bal, the city of the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil or Bil-gi, where, as we have seen above, the Peplos of Harmonia was kept. In this tree Isis found the coffin of Osiris, the year-god, containing his body, which on her arrival in Egypt was cut into fourteen pieces by Set and his seventy-two assistants, who changed the year-god of the growing tree who had measured the year by seventy-two five-day weeks into that of the lunar-solar god who measured his year by the fourteen days of the lunar phases 1.
This doctrine of re-birth survived among the poet-bards of the Gotho-Celtic Northern sun-worshippers, who initiated the new history succeeding that of the Myth-making Age, and told of the deeds of individual heroes who were actually living men. It was under this influence that they mingled with their biographies of famous warrior-kings, such as Cyrus, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, legends taken from earlier records, which assigned to them birth-stories told originally of their mythic predecessors. Thus they made Cyrus the son of the daughter of Astyages, that is Azi Dahaka, the biting snake, the Indian Vritra, slain by Trita and Thraetaona and other conquering heroes of the Rigveda and Zendavesta. Alexander the Great became the descendant of Peleus, the Potter-god of the Potter’s Clay (7797X05), and of Achilles, the sun-god. And they associated
1 Frazer, Golden Bough, First Edition, vol. i., chap. iii. pp. 302, 303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 128, 129.
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Charlemagne with the sun-charioteer, the Wain of Karl, the Great Bear, and the sun hero Roland. These bards reproduced the old traditional histories in the Sagas of the North, and in those on which the Iliad, Odyssey and ^Eneid are founded ; and all these, like the later Shah Nameh of Persia, the much earlier Mahabharata, and the still more primitive Gond Song of Lingal, make the sun, moon, star and atmospheric heroes of the earliest national legends actors in historic dramas, which, while purporting to represent comparatively recent historical events, really tell those of a very remote past. It was the conquering races, whose historians were their tribal bards, who, on their amalgamation with their foes, instituted the last year dealt with in these Chapters, the year of twelve months of thirty days each, divided into ten-day weeks, and who built the brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East. The composite theology of this new year is described in Chapter IX.
The histories of the Myth-making Age were, as will be seen in the sequel of this work, told in three forms, (i) The verbal histories prepared by the official historians of each governing state. (2) The pictorial histories told in the engraved bas-reliefs and picture Papyri of Egypt, and of the Turano-Hittite trading races who drew the rock-picture of Iasilikaia, copied on p. 259. This is only one specimen form of a large number of similar pictographs; and this pictorial history is told also in symbols, such as those on the Breton form of the Hindu Linga altar, described in Chapter V. pp. 269—272.   (3) The histories handed down in the forms
of the national ritual, such as that told in Chapter V. p. 205 ffi, which recorded by the sacrifice of a ram at the autumnal equinox the first measurement of the year beginning when the sun entered Aries on the day after the evening sacrifice of the ram, the sun-god of the dying year; also that told in the epitome of national history recorded, as is related in Chapter IX., in the ritual of the building of the brick altar of the year sun-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox, the crowning manifesto of Indian theology.
XXX
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
XXX11
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.
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mythology, who became the red-capped Leprichaun, the dwarf guardian-god of treasure in Ireland and Germany J. Picus was the father of Faunus, the Italian deer-sun-god, and grandfather of Latinus. He is the god of the Indian Lat, our Lath, the wooden sun - gnomon - pillar on which Garuda is placed in the circle of Lats round the Indian temples. Garuda or Gadura is the sacred bird of Krishna the sun-antelope-god, who sits in his chariot and is represented in the Mahabharata as the egg-born son of Vinata, the tenth wife of Kashyapa, and the tenth month of gestation of the Hindu lunar year of thirteen months. He was created, like Astika or Ashtaka, to devour the Naga snakes, the offspring of Ka-dru, the tree (dru) of Ka, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa, and the thirteenth month of the year 2.

[Prometheus]

Thus the Latin triad : Picus the woodpecker; Faunus, the deer-sun-god ; and Latinus, the sun-god of the tree of the woodpecker, is exactly equivalent to that of the Indian bird Gadura, the antelope-sun-god Krishna, and the Ka- dru Lat or tree-stem on which the bird sits. Furthermore the woodpecker Picus was the sacred bird of Mars, the god Martius of the Eugubine Tables, whose priests, as I show in Chapter V., Section F., p. 257, wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder and made their ritualistic circuits contrary to the course of the sun, thus following the ritual of the Indian Pi taro Barishadah of the Lunar-Solar Age, who sat on seats (barhis) of Kusha-grass. This god Martius was the male form of the Indian Maruts or tree (marom) mothers, the goddesses of the Akkadian Southwest wind Martu.
Thus at both ends of the chain of Suastikas surrounding the world from America to Italy, we find proof that the original sun-bird of the forest races, who were the first founders of villages, was the red-headed woodpecker, the
1   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Red Cap, pp. 162—164. 3 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xvi. pp. 77 flf.
Preface.
typical bird of the Indian agriculturists whose harvests depended on the monsoons. And the memory of this bird survives in the reddened heads of the stake-gods, now worshipped as Bhim-sen, the tree-ape-god, the Bhima of the Mahabharata, whose father was Maroti, the tree-ape, and who became the Rudra or red god of the Rigveda.
The interest of the history thus told in the images of the sun and storm-bird is much increased when we observe that there is no indigenous Su-astika found in Arabia or Egypt, for the only Su-astika found in the latter country is, as Mr. Wilson shows, imported by Greek colonists. The lesson thus taught us is that the sun-god of these countries was not the sun-bird of the primaeval theology of the Mundas, but the Northern sun and fire-god Ra, Rai, or Ragh, the god of the gnomon-stone-pillar of the builders of Neolithic sun-circles, and that the worship of this god was so firmly implanted in Arabian and Egyptian ritual as to obliterate the worship of the earlier sun-bird, who was relegated to the Pole Star as the Pole Stars in Cygnus, the bird constellation, and as Vega, the Arabic El Nasr, the Egyptian Ma’at, and the Gan-dhari in the constellation of the Vulture, which was also called the Tortoise, and has since become our Lyra. It was the Kushika sons of the Tortoise who substituted the sun-god Ra, the Indian Raghu or Ra-hu, the father of Rama, whose mother was Kushaloya the house (aloya) of the Kushites for the Munda sun-bird.
The whole history thus told proves that the trading authors of these year symbols, established over the whole world to which their commerce extended a connected series of governments, who formed their institutions on the Dravidian and Kushika models I have sketched in this work.
The dissemination by emigrants of the new cult originating with each change of the year-reckoning which marked the history of the Myth-making Age, was continued uninterruptedly from the early ages of the Pleiades year down to the close of the mythic period. Instances proving this
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are well-known to all who study Folklore as a historical record, and among these I may quote two showing the advent to England, and the incorporation into English traditions, of very early rituals. In Chapter V. I have shown that the first worship of the upright equilateral cross of St. George, as a symbol of the creating year-god, dates from the inauguration in Asia Minor and Syria of the year measured by the equinoxes, in addition to the original solar seasons of the solstices. This year began with the autumnal equinox, and the festival of the finding of the Cross on the 14th September, seven days before the autumnal equinox, is still, as I have shown on p. 223, celebrated in the Lebanon. This survives in Yorkshire in the custom of placing witch-wood, cut from the rowan or mountain-ash-trees, on the lintels of doors to preserve the house from witchcraft. This must be cut on St. Helen’s Day, the 14th of September, from a tree which the person who collects the wood has never seen before, and the wood must not be cut with a household knife. The original Helen of this custom is not the wife of Constantine, who is said to have found the true Cross, but the much earlier Helen of Greece, the immortal daughter of Leda, and twin- sister of Polu-deukes, the rain-twin, who was worshipped as Helene Dendritis, the tree-mother Helene, the primaeval tree-mother of the South.
The memory of the age of the introduction of the equinoctial cult of the three-years cycle-year is also preserved in Yorkshire in a medicinal charm handed down by the pastoral races, who introduced this year in which time was measured by the four series, each of ten months of gestation, into which the three years were divided. In this prescription the sick animal is to be bled, and some hair of its mane, tail, and four quarters is to be placed in the flowing blood, together with three spoonfuls of salt taken from the mother- sea. The cure is to be completed by the concoction of a charm amulet made of the heart of a sheep, which, as the ram sacrificed at its commencement, was the sacred animal
xlii
Preface.
of the cycle-year. In this were to be stuck nine new pins, nine new needles, nine small nails, indicating the twenty- seven days and three nine-day weeks of the cycle-month. This heart was then rolled in the blood, the consecrating Phrygian bath of Chapter IV. p. 188, before the days of the baptismal water of the sons of the rivers ; and at twelve o’clock at night the heart was to be put on a clear fire of elder, rowan, or ash, all trees which gave protection against witchcraft. If the charm is not successful it is to be repeated at the new and full-moon till the animal is cured or dead L
The twenty-seven days and three nine-day weeks of the month of the age ruled by the dealers in white or healing magic also survive in Lettish charms, which describe tthe march of time as “ thrice nine waggons passing along the street, thrice nine Perkoni emerging from the sea, thrice nine balls of string in the basket of the woman sitting at the foot of the hill, and the three servants (the three years of the cycle) with thrice nine arrows which issue from the sea 1 2.” In these observances we find a union of the tree-worship of the South with the Northern worship of the sun-ram, which succeeded the earlier sun-deer. Also they give evidence of the belief in the mother-tree as a protest against the spells of the wizards and witches of the Northern Finn mythology, and of the Southern witchcraft brought from Africa by the sons of the bow.
I must here also note the existing evidence of the ancient evolution which transformed the worship of the Great Bear as the Thigh of the Ape into that of the sun born of the Thigh, the sun-god of the fifteen-months year of Chapter VII. This is to be found in the measurement of the Chinese year. According to Professor Douglas, “ The months and seasons are determined by the revolutions of Ursa Major (the Chinese name for which is Pek-tao, the Seven Directors). The tail
1   Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, pp. 99, 104—124.
2   Abercromby, The Pre and Proto-Historic Finns, Lettish Charms, 42, 52, 58, vol. ii. pp. 26—28.
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of the constellation, pointing to the East at nightfall, announces the arrival of spring ; pointing to the South, the arrival of summer; pointing to the West, the arrival of autumn ; and pointing to the North, the arrival of winter. This means of calculating the seasons becomes more intelligible when it is remembered that in ancient times the Bear was much nearer the North Pole than now, and revolved round it like the hand of a clock.’5 Also the Chinese Zodiac is represented with, the Pole Star and circumpolar constellations in the centre L Hence arose the belief that the Great Bear took the sun, its offspring, sunwards round the Pole.
The growth of this myth, and the history it tells, are still further illustrated by the astronomy of the Micmac Indians of America, who believed that the seasonal changes were indicated by the Great Bear. They say that in mid-spring the Bear-mother climbs out of her den, the Corona Borealis. In mid-summer she runs along the Northern horizon ; soon after she assumes an erect position, and then topples on her back as the dying bear of autumn. In mid-winter she lies dead on her back, but then her den, the Corona Borealis, has reappeared with the Bear of the New Year invisible within. This comes forth again in spring to be again slain by the autumn hunters, and to complete a fresh yearly circuit of the Pole 1 2 3.
A further historical variant of this primaeval myth of the year Bear succeeding the sun-reindeer, which dropped its horns in autumn, is to be found in the myth of Theseus, who found his way to the centre of the Labyrinth in which he slew the Minotaur of Crete by the clue furnished to him by Ariadne, who was raised to heaven as the Corona Borealis,
1 Douglas, China, London, 1S87, p. 41S ; Medhurst, ‘Astronomy of the
Chinese,’ Ancient China, Shanghai, 1846.
3   Stansbury Hagar, ‘The Celestial Bear,’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. xiii., no. xlix. July, 1900 ; Zelia Nuttall, ‘ Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisations,’ pp. 510, note 1, 511. Tapers of Peabody Museum, Harvard University, vol. ii. 1901.
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after she had borne to Dionysos, the wine-god, the two autumn sons CEnopion, the wine ioivof) drinker (7Titov), and Staphylus, the bunch of grapes (aracfjvXrj). She was the daughter of Minos, the measurer, and Pasiphaae, she who shines (<pacv) to all (iraaC), the moon-goddess, who was also the concubine of the Minotaur, the bull of the Labyrinth, who is, as we shall now see, the Great Bear Constellation of the Seven BullsI.
This Labyrinth is the den of the god of the Labrus, the Carian name for the double-axe, the symbol used at Gnossus, now being excavated by Mr. Evans, to denote -the supreme God 2, the Greek 7TeXercvs, the divine weapon of the year-god lost, as I show in Appendix C. p. 631, by Odusseus, when he was wrecked on his voyage from Ogygia, the island of Calypso, to the Phoenician land of Alkinoos. He was obliged to throw into the sea the double-axe and the rest of his solar panoply by Ino, who saved him in the form of a sea-gull, and gave him the kredemnon or ribbon of the zodiacal stars, on which he was brought to land as the naked god of the new year of seventeen-months of twenty-one days each, described in Chapter VIII. This Pelekus is the Greek form of the Indian Parasu, the double-axe of the two lunar crescents of Parasu Rama, the son of Jamadagni, the twin {jama) fires engendered in the mother-trees, the Banyan {Ficus Indicci) and the Pipal {Ficus religiosa) by his grandfather Richika, the divine fire-spark. He was the god, son of the bisexual plant, kindled into life by the lightning of the rain-storm. His mother was Renuka, the flower-pollen, and he, as I show in Chapter V. pp. 260, 261, recovered the year-calf, born of the year-cow after ten lunar-months of gestation. This had been stolen by Arjuna, the son of Karta-virya, the star-god Orion, the son of the Krittakas or spinning {kart) Pleiades, who slew Jamadagni. Rama, in revenge, slew with his Parasu or double-lunar-axe Arjuna
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Ti?nes, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 559, 560.
2   Evans, ‘Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult.’ Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xxi. Part i., 1901, pp. 109, IIO.
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and all the Haihaias, the men of the Pole Star age, and established the ritual of the eleven-months year.
In this story the secret is disclosed of the year of the Minotaur, the bull, which, as the- Zend Haptoiringas, the seven bulls, replaced the Bear as the title of the constellation Ursa Major. The bull successor of the bear was the god of the Labyrinth of the Labrus or double-lunar-axe, the god whose year was measured by the movements of the Great Bear and Ariadne Corona Borealis. She was described as the year-star when the year of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, and the Olenian Poseidon, the constellation of Auriga, the Charioteer, and the Little Goat Capella, described in Chapter VI. Section F. pp. 338—341, was introduced as that which measured time by the passage of the sun, watched by the guardian charioteer, through the stars of the Zodiac.
We find similar relics of the old beliefs of the Myth-making Age preserved in local customs, rituals and stories all over the world. Wherever we go we find that it is among the villagers, the Latin Pagani, the men of the village (pagus), that the conservative instinct, derived from the first founders of village communities and tribes, has led them to preserve in their festivals, games, and social ceremonies, the rites of the dead or altered faiths of the past.
As a surviving instance of the universal history told in the symbols of the Myth-making Age, I will here cite the arrangement of the hierarchy of the Dervishes 'attached to the Ka’bah, or Mosque of Mecca containing the Holy Black Stone, the original Northern mother of fire to the race who traced their descent from the volcanic fire-mountain Ararat. These Dervishes are arranged in groups representing the supporting-pillars and minarets of the Holy Temple of Heaven, symbolised in the vaulted dome, the most sacred form of building in the eyes of Mahommedan architects. The top and central pillar is the Head Dervish, called the Kutb, or Pillar of the Pole Star God, the keystone of the vault. To his right and left are the two Umena or faithful
xlvi   Preface.
ones, representing the two seasons of spring and winter, standing on both sides of the central summer, and also the first and third years of the cycle-year. Below these are the four Ev-tads, meaning the tent-pegs, the four divisions each of ten lunar months of gestation making up the cycle- year. Next to them come the five En-var or lights, the five-day weeks of the first Pleiades and Solar years. Next the seven Akhyar or Good, the seven days of the week of the seventeen and thirteen-months year, who are followed by the eight Nukeba or deputies, the eight-days week of the fifteen- months year. Below all these are the forty who complete the number of the rijal-i-ghaib, the unseen, the forty lunar- months of the cycle-year. At the base of the Mount of the Congregation thus formed by the sixty-seven ministering priests, who claim descent from the rain prophet-god Elias or Eliun, are the seventy Budela or assistants k These seventy, with the three head Dervishes, make up the seventy- three slayers of the barley-year-god Osiris (Orion), that is to say they are the equivalents of Set or Hapi, the ape-god, and his seventy-two assistants, the seventy-three five-day weeks of the year of 365 days. The number seventy may also, as I show in Appendix C. p. 636, probably represent the seventy weeks of five days of a year of 350+ 10 days. The seventy representing the 350 days, while the last ten are the two weeks which make up the seventy-two weeks of the year of 360 days, they being reckoned as a time of rest endihg a year of ten months of thirty-five days.
In conclusion, I have to record my best thanks to all living authors whose works have helped me in my researches; especially to Mr. R. Brown, Jun., F.S.A.; Professor Rhys, Principal of Jesus College ; and Mr. Warde-Fowler, Sub- Rector of Lincoln College ; from whom I have learnt the greater part of the knowledge I have acquired of Akkadian Astronomy, Celtic Historical Mythology and Folklore, and of Roman Ritual as preserved in the Calendar of Festivals.
1 O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., ‘ The Heavens, Palace, and ils [Pillar,’ p. 229.

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And above all others to Professor Eggeling of Edinburgh University, whose translation of the Satapatha Brdhmana in the Series of Sacred books of the East, has made the whole history of Brahmanic ritual accessible to all students. This includes not only Vedic ritual, but also ceremonies dating back to the most ancient observances of the first pioneers of civilisation, who formed the years measured by the five-days weeks of the goddess Brihati, and it may therefore be looked on as a ritualistic history of Indian theology in all its phases. I have also to especially thank Mr. J. A. Frazer for the great assistance I have found in his admirable edition of Pausanias, who has described the historical monuments and ritual of Greece as they existed in the days of Greek and Roman supremacy.
I may also here note that all references to the Mahabharata in this volume are to the admirable English translation of Kesari Mohun Ganguli, edited by the late Protap Chandra Rai, C.I.E.
Readers of this work who have also read or consulted my Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times will find that I have in several instances given interpretations of ancient legend differing from those in the latter work. These are the result of further study of the subject, which has enabled me to replace doubtful interpretations based on apparent probabilities by the far sounder conclusions disclosed by the actual facts learnt from a more thorough examination of the successive forms of ritual. This has enabled me to determine accurately the sequence of the methods of measuring the week, the first unit in historical chronology, and the order and chronology of the different forms of year-reckoning following one another with the accompaniment of fundamental changes in the national rituals. I had not, when I wrote the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, been able to discriminate these so fully and certainly as I can now.


BOOK I.
THE AGE OF POLE STAR WORSHIP.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
ONE of the objects most anxiously sought for by those who try to discover the foundations of civilisation must be a field of research in which the relics of the past have been carefully preserved in their original form from the earliest dawn of ancient national life, and in which we can examine not only the earliest strata but also those which followed them successively, and find each effectually discriminated from those which came before and after it. It is only from observations made on such a site that we can gain a clear idea of the first aspects of social life, and learn what manner of men the pioneers of the advance of humanity were- It is only there that we can accurately learn their mode of thinking, recover their first conceptions of the causes of natural phenomena and the rules by which primitive society was governed ; and thus trace the steps by which they advanced from a state of infancy to one of confident manhood. It is only by a studious examination of the facts revealed by this quest that we can transport ourselves to the primitive point of view, and learn to think the thoughts and see with the eyes of those who began their task of organisation in the midst of the tangled jungles of untamed nature. The primitive relics necessary to enable us to reconstruct in a living picture the phases of primaeval life arc to be found more abundantly than elsewhere in the history of ritual and of the local customs of the earliest villages. And the stages indicating the progress
B
2
History and Chronology
made by these infant communities and their descendants are . especially marked by the successive methods used to mea- I sure annual time and to fix the dates for the religious national [ festivals. The history of time measurement is the leading subject of this work, and each change in the reckoning of the year will be treated of in separate chapters, which will review shortly the social changes accompanying the alteration in the calculation of the national year. The first villages were founded by men whose chief object was to join together the present and the past by a bond of customary observances which required each succeeding | generation to follow exactly the customs which had been : proved to promote the prosperity of the community.
These villages, out of which, as will be seen in the sequel, provincial and national governments have grown, were the rude settlements of the nomad agriculturists of the forests j of Southern India and the Indian Archipelago. They apparently began their agricultural work on plans similar to those still followed by the wandering cultivating tribes of the Indian and Australian forests. The country traversed by them was, as the number of its occupants increased, divided among a number of communities, to each of which a fixed area of territory was assigned by the local custom still prevailing in the wilder districts of India and in Australia. The boundaries of these areas are carefully defined, and each tribe pursues its avocations within its own limits. The men employ their time chiefly in hunting animals for food, while the women search for vegetable food such as roots, fruits and edible grass seeds.
It was among these women that agriculture first originated in India, for it was they who first secured yearly crops by sowing the seeds of the wild rice and the coarse local millets such as Murwa, the Raggi of Madras, the African Dhurra (Eleusine Coracana). Evidence of the preservation in the national memory of this origin of rice cultivation is given by the bundles of wild rice which every peasant in the east of Central India still hangs up in his house in August
   
3
as a thank-offering when the young rice begins to sprout. Also by the figures of the seasonal buffalo dance of the rice-growing season still danced in every village in Chutia Nagpore. In these, all the operations of the preparation of the soil and the sowing of the crop are performed, symbolically, by the women dancers.
It was when this custom of sowing seeds had been established that the first attempt to change the encampment into a permanent village was undertaken. Huts, which were practically mere bush shelters, were made of a few tree boughs stuck in the ground and so placed as to give shelter against the prevailing winds, and each settlement was only occupied as long as the fertility of the soil lasted. In India they were generally placed on the higher slopes of the hills, where open spaces were more frequent and the forests were not so thick and tangled as on the banks of the streams and rivers. Fire, kindled by the friction of two pieces of wood, was probably used from the earliest times by the southern forest folk, and it was with the help of fire that, as they still do, they cleared the under-growth from the soil and used the ashes as’ fertilising manure. The first weapon used in South India and Australia for killing game was apparently the boomerang, shaped by flint implements, This is still used for killing hares and small animals by the Kullars of Paducottah in the Madura district of the Madras Presidency J, and its returning properties were not discovered till a later period. This and the digging-stick were the only weapons except stones which they could use for warlike purposes. But they were naturally a most peaceful race, who like their descendants thought agriculture to be their true business, and did not waste their time in invading the territory of their neighbours, which yielded nothing which they could not find at home. Quarrels of course arose from time to time, but these, even in cases of boundary disputes, were very short
1 Sewell, Some Points of Archaology in South Tndia, p. 12. Read before the Oriental Congress at Paris, 1S97.
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4
History and Chronology
and ended in a peaceful adjustment of differences, and , sometimes in a re-arrangement of boundaries or an amalgamation of two adjacent areas when one tribe wanted, | owing to its increase in numbers, an addition of territory j which the other could spare.
In the earliest times little or no regard was paid to descent, and every one admitted into a community at once obtained I1 all the rights belonging to the older members, provided [ they obeyed all the rules and regulations laid down by } the tribal leaders. And the memory of these primitive f times still survived in the later age, when most rigid rules ! regulating tribal customs of descent and initiation into the 1 national secret rites were enacted; for even then provision ,] was made to enable members of neighbouring tribes to ) change from one to another. Regulations for this purpose Ij still exist in the Central Australian tribes. Thus the ;j Matthurie, who reckon descent by the mother’s side, and the Arunta, who observe the rule of paternal descent, and who were therefore, as will be shown in the sequel, originally f ethnologically distinct races, allow individuals, under rules made for the purpose, to pass freely from one tribe to the otherx. Also in India very many if not the larger number of castes are ready to admit aliens to all caste [ privileges, provided they become members of the caste. | And these castes have grown out of the original village ! organisation.
In the early struggle for existence and for the conquest f of the obstacles to progress offered by natural forces, the f most successful communities were those who had acquired f| the dogged determination engendered by a strict observance | of ordained custom, and who had added to' this a wise discrimination which made them ready to adopt improve- merits conceived by those members of the association who j- were endowed with inventive intellects. But in order f to imprint these qualities on the national character, and
1 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, chap. ii. ;|
pp. 68, 69.
   
5
to make all the information possessed and acquired by any | community permanently useful, it was above all things j necessary that the younger generations should be carefully instructed in all the knowledge known to their parents. Hence those who founded permanent villages were men who insisted on the maintenance of communal education in the widest sense of sympathy with the past in all its tasks, both practical and theoretical. This they looked on as the first primary necessity for securing the continuance and healthy growth of the community. This and the requisition of absolute obedience from their associates and the young of both sexes to all rules passed by the ruling elders were the key-notes of their policy.
It was by a rigid adherence to these fundamental principles that the character of the Dravidian people of Southern India, who call themselves the sons of the village tree, was developed. Like their congeners the Chinese they are exceptionally persevering, and also exceptionally obstinate. They are perfectly obedient to all recognised authority, except when compliance with the orders they receive involves the transgression of any of their cherished national customs. When such a collision occurs obedience is not necessarily openly refused, but the order is certain to be evaded by every possible device, and ultimately the new rule will inevitably become a dead letter, unless the legislator who has convinced himself of its ultimate utility has sufficient tact and perseverance to prove to the recalcitrant people that it is a step in advance, which when made will be a public benefit. The difficulty of securing the acceptance of anything that savours of novelty among a Dravidian population can only be fully appreciated by those who have lived among them and governed them. But one thing the innovator can be certain of is, that if lie gains hearty acquiescence to his reforms from these people the consent given will not be readily withdrawn, for they arc entirely destitute of the fickleness of character which makes the laughter-loving Mundas of the East so much
6
History and Chronology
more unreliable, and so much more liable to paroxysms of popular excitement than the silent and self-contained | Dravidians of the South-west.
These two races were, when united together in India, the founders of the Hindoo national ritual with its accompanying rules for the measurement of annual time. These they took with them all over Asia, North Africa, and Europe, together with their village institutions, and in this dissemination of the Indian village organisation the   j
Dravidian element was the dominant factor. In the ritual jj they founded every festival was performed on the date fixed by the national authority, according to the successive ! measurements of annual time. These measurements, as I shall prove in the course of this work, enable us to j establish a chronological succession of ritualistic changes j introduced by the recurring amalgamations of new national elements. But throughout all these changes the original spirit of intense inborn conservatism, and of the desire for the preservation of the memory of the nation’s past history, as recorded in its national ritual, always prevailed. In the rituals of India, South-western Asia, and Europe, founded under Dravidian influence, every prescribed gesture, motion j and word had its own peculiar meaning, and was intended to impress some truth on the national mind ; and in order that these ceremonies should preserve unchanged the especial meaning meant to be inculcated by those who prescribed them, it was necessary that even when altered • ] by authority the original teachings should find a place J in the new arrangement, and that no change should be j| made except by the central ruling power. Hence the very j! smallest iota of ritual, even the tones and modulations ,J of the voice, became as soon as they were prescribed of ! equal importance with the most impressive rites. It therefore became a fundamental rule that the slightest mistake |* in any part of a religious ceremony rendered it null and i| voidx.
H
1 Maine, Ancient Law, p. 276; Mommsen, History of Rome, translated by
   
7
As an instance of the practical working out of changes in these conservative rituals, the history of the rain-wand, the magic staff of office of the rain-priest, is most instructive. The holder of this wand, which became as the last of its transformations the royal sceptre, was the priest of the earliest god worshipped as the national deity by both the hunting and the agricultural races. For his recognised existence as the god who ordained and effected the seasonable advent of the life-giving rain was, as we are told in the Brahmanas, the first conception formed of a supreme divine beingx. The rain-wand, which was believed to possess magical power over the elements, was originally cut from the tribal parent-tree, which gave it its effective force, and the history of this divine mother-tree reaches back to the most primitive ages of national life. This magic rod became among the Zends the Baresma or rain (bares) bundle of sticks cut from a thornless tree, the pomegranate, date-palm, or tamarind tree, of which the two former trees marked, as we shall see, epochs in national history2. In Hindu ritual it was the Prastara. In the rules laid down for the earliest elaborate sacrifice prescribed in the Indian Brahmanas, the New and Full Moon offerings made on the earth altar shaped in the form of a woman, the Prastara is ordered to be made of three sheaves of Kusha grass (Poa cynosuroides), the parent-grass of the race of the Kushikas or Kushites, who ruled India when the sacrifice was instituted, the people led from Syria to India by the sun-antelope whose favourite food was this grass. To these sheaves flowering shoots were added, and the whole represented the three seasons of the year, and also the three years
W. P. Dickson, vol. i. p. xSl, where he shows that ceremonies in Roman ritual were repeated even as often as seven times in succession till perfect correctness was attained. The same scrupulous accuracy in every detail was required, as Maine shews, in primitive legal proceedings.
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 2, 6, 14 ; S. 13. E., vol xliv. p. 315.
2   Darmesteter, Zendavesia Fargard, iii. ij xix. iS, 19; S. B. E., vol. iv. pp. 22, note 2, 209.
History and Chronology
forming the cycle year described in Chapter V.1 But when the rule of these Kushika emigrants from Syria to India was succeeded by that of the Ikshvaku kings, the sons of the sugar-cane (iksha), who called themselves also the sons of the sun-horse, the Prastara used in their Soma sacramental sacrifice was no longer made of Kusha but of Ashvavala or horse-tail {ashva) grass (saccharum spon- taneum), a species of grass allied to the parent sugar-cane 2 3.
These changes in the ritual of the invocation of the rain recorded a series of religious revolutions extending, as we shall see, over thousands of years, beginning with the time when the priest was the national magician, the representative on earth of the mother-goddess of the worshippers of the Pole Star and the rain-cloud or bird circulating round it with the setting and rising stars, the rain-bird invoked in the prayer for rain 3. The next change in the evolution of belief in the divine ruler of time was that which ascribed the rule of the times and seasons to the moon-god or goddess to whom the New and Full Moon sacrifices were offered in the age of the Prastara of Kusha grass. This began somewhat before 10,000 B.C., when Vega in the Constellation of the Vulture or Lyra became Pole Star, and was followed by the epoch of the worship of the sun-horse, which began while Vega was the Pole Star before 8000 B.c. We find in the changing rituals of the long historical drama most striking evidence of the continuity of ritualistic tradition maintained in different countries by their successive inhabitants, who though ethnologically altered by their union with alien immigrant stocks, yet still remembered and observed the traditional ritual of their various ancestors. Throughout this whole period the original basic elements of belief in the mother-tree, the ape or raven parent of life
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 3, n—14; ii. 5, i, 18 ; S.B. E., vol. xii. pp. 240, 242, 388, 389, note 1.
2   Ibid., iii. 4, 1, 17, 18 ; S. B. E., vol. xxvi. p. 89, note 3.
3   Ibid., i., 8, 3, 14; S. B. E., vol. xii. p. 242.
   
9
and ruler of the year measured by the revolution of the stars and sun round the Pole, remained radically the same though the outward form was changed. Thus the original mother-tree of the village grove, after passing through various phases which will be set forth in their respective order, became first the mother rice of the primitive villagers ; then the parent-grass of the Kushikas, the favourite food of the antelope sun-god whom they worshipped ; and after that the horse-tail sugar-grass of the irrigating Dravido- Turanian farmers who watered their lands from the river- channels made by their engineering skill, and thus cultivated and improved the sugar-grass into the sugar-cane of commerce. It was these sons of Danu, the Pole Star god, who afterwards adored the white sun-horse, the star Sirius, whose history will occupy a very conspicuous place in this historical survey. Throughout all the countries to which the Indian village system has penetrated, the most strenuous maintainers of law and order have been those who have kept up the strict discipline first inculcated by their Dravidian ancestors. It is owing to the rule insisted upon by the first village rulers that the village elders and matrons should train the young of both sexes in all the practical and theoretical knowledge possessed by the community that the education of civilised man has been carried on. Oral instruction was given in the form of stories which had to be learnt by heart from the dictation of the teacher, like the lessons still given to Brahmin pupils and those which were taught in the Buddhist curriculum and in the village Patshalas or schools. But these stories were not dry statements of facts or metaphysical precepts like those in Brahmanic and Buddhistic literature, but tales which interested their young hearers, in which first nature myths and subsequently national history were depicted as the work of the authors of natural phenomena. An excellent example of these stories is that of Nala and Damayanti in the Mahabharata, which contained, as I have shown elsewhere, the first plan of the plot of this great national history in verse
16
History and Chronology
combined with meteorological teaching1. This first draft of the later Epic poem gives us a detailed account of the evolution of the seasons, and tells how Nala, the appointed channel of the year’s course, is wedded at the winter solstice to Damayanti, the earth, which is to be tamed and made < fruitful. They lived happily together till the burning hot season, called the gambler Pushkara, the maker of Push, the moisture concealed in the black rain-cloud, comes to interfere with their felicity. He strips Nala of his wealth, that is to say dries up the surface of the earth, and drives both him and Damayanti into the forests. Thence Nala passes up to Ayodhya as the charioteer of the South West Monsoon bringing the life-giving rain. As the ruler of the Monsoon rains he takes service with King Rltu-parna, the wing (parna) or guide of the customary (ritn) course of the seasons, and returns with him at the end of the rainy season with the North East Monsoon, to be reunited to Damayanti and to recover his kingdom from the gambling conqueror Pushkara.
In these stories, as will be seen in the numerous specimens I shall quote in the course of this work, the names of the actors are never names of individuals but symbolic signs, showing clearly, in all cases in which the story can be traced to its original source, the meaning of the tale.
The teaching thus given, and the manual work insisted on, implanted in the minds of each generation habits of industry and a stock of information and acquired practice, which enabled them to continue the work of their predecessors, and add to it fresh materials contributed by their own brains and experience. It still survives in the Patshalas or schools found in every village in India, and also in the customs still existing among the Nairs, the representative Dravidians of Madras, the Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, the Ooraons of Chutia Nagpore and the Nagas of Assam. In all the villages peopled by these
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 64—76.
   
II
races, the young of both sexes are taken from their mothers as soon as they can dispense with her care, and lodged in separate establishments provided for each sex. That for boys, called by the Ooraons the Dhumkuria or boys’ hall, is superintended by the village elders, that for girls by the matrons; and in these they are carefully trained in their respective duties as members of the village community. This hall originally appropriated to the young men and boys was also, as it still is in Burmah, the place where strangers were entertained and waited on by the young pupils. This custom exists among the Fijisz, and also in the Melanesian and Caroline Islands2, and it is a survival of the organisation of the earliest permanent villages, in which originally all the villagers ate together as members of one family. In Europe it was maintained by the Cretans and Spartans, who looked upon all children born as the children of their native village, and educated the boys and girls apart under State guardianship. This custom, which survived in Crete and Sparta, was apparently one originally observed by all the Dorian races of Asia Minor and Greece, and by the .Enotrians and Sikels of South Italy and Sicily, the Arcadians of Phigalia, the Argives, Megarians and ancient Corinthians, all of whom ate together in the fashion described by Aristotle, their food being provided by the public granaries where the harvests of each village were stored 3. The duty of public education was one recognised by the carefully taught Babylonians and Egyptians, both of which nations obtained their civilisation and their earliest agricultural population from India. Also by all the nations of the Mediterranean race whose descent can be traced back to the Turvasu or Turano Dravidians of India, and *
* Abercromby, Seas and Skies in many Latitudes, pp. 19c—197, ioi—104.
2   Codrington, The Melanesians: their Anthropology and Folklore, chap. V. pp. 74—77. The information about the Caroline Islands was given to me verbally by Mr. F. W. Christian who knows them well.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay iii., p. 297.
ll   History and Chronology
who are shown by their sculls to have formed a distinct human family I.
This national education and the custom of common meals was universal throughout South Western Asia and Europe wherever the village grove and the village halls existed. This is proved by the fact that even in those lands where the later institution of marriage and the substitution of household for village life had caused the discontinuance of common meals, they survived everywhere throughout the ancient world in the national religious festivals, for in these the people of every township feasted together on local feast-days on the flesh of the animals sacrificed. The Gemeinde Haus of Germany, the Gemeente Haus of Flanders, and the Hotel de Ville in France, still maintain in every village the remembrance of the days when the Dravidian village system extended over the civilised world, and when, according to Greek and Syrian traditions the coast lands of the Mediterranean Archipelago were ruled by the Amazons, the Rephaim of the Bible, or children of the giant (repha) star Argo. The villages founded by the Dravido Mundas on these conservatively progressive lines were arranged in groups of ten or twelve villages, each group forming a Parha or province. This had been the original territory of the earlier races who combined agriculture with hunting, and this primitive state of things still survives in full vigour in the volcanic plateaux or Pats of Chutia Nagpore occupied by the Korwas. Each of their tribes has a certain area of plateau reserved to itself by primaeval custom, and within the large limits thus marked out they have always pursued their original avocations as hunters, and have added to the produce of the chase the food grown on the cultivated clearings which are almost entirely tilled by the women. The number of residents in each clearing is small, and the different settlements are separated by *
* G. Sergi, Origine e Dijfusione della Stirpe Mediterranea Induzioni Anthro• pologiche.
   
13
large expanses of forest and waste, within which they choose new camping-grounds when the soil round their present residences is exhausted. While each settlement has its chief, the union of each tribal section is preserved by the Byga or priest who makes and consecrates the tribal arrows. He on the Lahsun Pat belonging to the group of Korwas I have most thoroughly studied, lived in the central clearing of the tribal territory.
Property among these people is absolutely communal, and the produce both of the land and the chase is divided among all the members of the tribe living in each associated unit. The only permanent superior among them is the Byga, who superintends the festivals in which the weather gods of the recurring seasons of the year are propitiated. They are almost literally dwellers in trees, as their huts are made   of a few branches   of   trees stuck in
the ground with their   tops meeting so as   to   form a   sort of
roof ridge. The only permanent village in this territory of united provinces, covering an area of about 600 square miles in Jushpore and Sirgoojya, is that of the chief of the allied tribes who lives in the south-west corner of the country on the slopes of the valley of the river Maini in Jushpore.
The next step upward from these rude institutions, marking the first efforts to form a nation of communities living in permanent   settlements, is to   be   found   in the
villages of the Kols   or Mundas and those   of the   Marya
or tree (marom) Gonds. The Mundas speak a language allied to that of the Korwas and also to that of the Mons or Peguans, and the Kambhojas of Burmah and Siam, and to that of some of the tribes in Assam. This marks them as immigrants from the North-cast into India, where they now dwell as a separate race in the eastern lands of the Chutia Nagpore plateau, the mountain boundary of the Gangetic valley on the west. But they were formerly distributed all over India as the Mallis or mountain races who were with the Dravidians the original founders of the national institutions and the first cultivators of the
14
History and Chronology
soil. The Dravidian element is represented in Central India by the Marya or tree Gonds.
In villages founded by these pioneer races the central plot is occupied by the village grove, called by the Mundas Sarna. In it a number of the forest trees have been left standing when the cultivated lands were cleared of timber. These are the parent trees of the village, the home of the gods of life. The tree looked on by the Mundas as that ensuring the best luck to the future community is the Sal tree (Shorea robusta), yielding a most valuable timber. It also furnishes a resin similar to that of the pine trees of the northern forests, their original home. The Indian Mundas, whom I shall trace later on to China, say that their home is the land of the Sal tree, and hence in founding a village they prefer to place it in a Sal forest. In that case the only trees in the village grove are Sal trees, for no other tree grows naturally in the land they occupy, and thus the boundaries of the Sal forests are always clearly marked off from those on which various kinds of timber flourish. I remember noticing this especially in the forest tracts of Seehawa, in the South-east of Chuttisgurh, in the Central Provinces where the Mahanadi rises. The whole province, when I surveyed it in 1867, was an expanse of woodland interspersed with very few villages, and to the north of the infant river the forests contained trees of many different species. To the south of this tract was a narrow belt of cleared land not more than a few hundred yards wide, and on the other side of this was the Sal forest tract, in which nothing but Sal trees grew. Round the Central Sarna is the ring of cultivated land separating the grove hallowed as the home of the mother gods of the newly founded village from the world of death outside. Under its shade is the Akra, or dancing ground, where the village dances are held at each recurring season of the year. The dances of one season are distinguished from those of another by a distinct step and figure, and it is only with reluctance, and as a special favour, that the Kol
   
15
dancers will dance all the steps and figures together, or any set of them out of their own season.
These villages are ruled by a head man called the Munda, elected by the community, and though the succession to the office is now generally hereditary, yet this rule was certainly unknown in primitive times, when descent in families was non-existent, and it is now often disregarded when the Munda’s heirs prove incompetent. That these villages grouped themselves within the area of the uncleared hunting province or Parha is proved by their retention of the Byga, who performs for the ten or twelve villages into which it is divided the customary sacrifices, including those of the fowls offered to the sun and earth gods. Each Parha is ruled by a Manki, who is generally Munda of the central or chief village, and this is sometimes the parent village of the group whence the dwellers in the other villages have emigrated to form Tolas or hamlets in the uncleared forest. These swarmings took place like those of bees, when the population increased too much to allow the rising generation to find land easily accessible from the dwellings under the shade of the parent Sarna. To judge from the tribal customs of the Korwas, who have no village grove, the rule of leaving the Sarna standing was one derived from the Dravidians of Southern India. It was taught to the Mundas when they intermingled with the dwellers in the land on their first arrival in India by the Marya, or tree (marom) Gonds. They are the aboriginal or southern section of the Naga race of Central India, the Nagpore country, whose ruling tribes are of northern Turanian origin. It was these Naga, or Raj Gonds, who succeeded the confederacy of Dravidians and Mundas, or Mallis, in the rule of Northern and Central India, which was anciently known first as Ahikshetra l, the land of the Ahi, or Nag, the snake parent,
1   This is the name given to Northern Panchala in the Mahabharala Acli (Sambhava) Parva, clx. p. 413. It was the land ruled by Drona, meaning the tree-trunk, the parent - tree, the receptacle of the Soma or sap of life,
16
History and Chronology
and secondly, as Gaudia or Gondwana, the name still used in popular speech which was given to it before it was called Kosala, the land of the Kushikas.
These Marya sons of the tree called “ marom ” in Gondi, were the first race who in Southern India carved their villages out of the forests. Their father-god was the tree-ape- god Maroti, and the guardian who protected them from outside ills was the snake, the ring of cultivated land round the Sarna. This is still called by the Gonds the holy snake, the land consecrated to the boundary snake-god Goraya, whose priests the Goraits are wardens of the boundary in all Gond villages.
The original founders of villages did not limit their political outlook to securing the permanency of the villages by the careful training of the young, and the establishment of strong internal government, but they also made the maintenance of friendly relations among those dwelling in each village, and between all the villages of the confederacy, a principal part of their policy. One of the most effective group of laws enacted for this purpose were those regulating the relations between the sexes. These allowed any man in the confederacy to become the father of the child of any woman in the Parha except of those of his own village. And hence, as it was impossible that under this rule any woman could live with the fathers of her children, it was necessary to secure the birth of legally begotten offspring in each village by arranging for meetings between the men and women of neighbouring villages. These were permitted at the seasonal dances held in the Akra of each village, and it was only at these dances, regulated by the women, that children were allowed to be begotten. They used to invite the men of the adjoining village to attend these dances, as the Ho-Kol and Bhuya women of Chutia Nagpore still do, and the children then begotten under
called in the Satapatha Brahmana, iv. 5, 6, 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 410, the supreme year god Prajapati.
       17
the shade of the village grove became the children of the village tree.
These were trained by the village elders and matrons, who were to one another as brothers and sisters, and hence arose the great influence accorded in ancient communities to the maternal uncle. He is in India the family priest of such widely distributed castes as the Doms or basket-makers, the Dravidian rulers of Oudh1; the Haris or scavengers ; the Kurmis, the leading agricultural caste ; the Pasis, guardians of the date palm, whence the palm wine is made ; and the Tantis, the weavers2 3. And it was owing to the acknowledgement in matriarchal times of parentage through the mother and not through the father, that property, when it came to belong to the family and not to the community, descended in the female line, as it does among the Nairs of Madras. And this line of descent was that observed by the Lycians, Cretans, Dorians, Athenians, Lemnians, Etruscans, Egyptians, Orchomenians, Locrians, Lesbians, Mantineans, Babylonians, and many Asiatic nations, as has been proved by Morgan and Bachofen 3.
The principle lessons taught in the oral instruction of the village children were those which told them, from a farmer’s point of view, of the course of the year and the sequence of the seasons. These are the themes of almost all the earliest relics of ancient thought which have come down to us in folk-tales, such as the stories of the two or three brothers or sisters, in which the youngest, the winter child, was successful, and of the year tasks done by the final conqueror. Most of these refer to the year of three seasons, but the earlier year of two seasons appears also among them. Also the history of the year and the changes in its reckoning
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Doms, p. 240.
2   Ibid., pp. 245, 316, 532 ; vol. ii. pp. 167, 300.
3   Morgan, Ancient Society, chap. xiv. pp. 343, 351 ; Bachofen, Die Mutterrecht; Sayce, Babylonians and Assyrians, chap. ii. p. 13, ff., where he shows that in Sumerian times the woman was the head of the family.
C
History and Chronology
are the themes forming the plot of all the ancient historical epics of India, Persia, and Greece, in which the heroes were, in the original forms of the story, astronomical abstractions indicating the successive methods of year measurement, which in primitive history accompanied each change in the ruling race. But the primitive year legend has been in Greece transmogrified by the later poets, who had forgotten the old mythology. In Persia and India the primitive form is much more easily' recognised. Each race, like each village, carried its gods with it in its emigrations, and the primitive gods were all gods of time who ruled the course of the year. It was the farmers of the first settled villages, who depended on their crops for their means of subsistence, who first impressed on the public mind the absolute necessity of an accurate measure of time, and in doing this they only intensified a desire which must always have been present among the hunting races, who had to consider the changes in the seasons which brought about changes in the habits of the animals they hunted.
These forest Dravidians who laid the foundations of civil government, and who, as will be explained in Chapter II., first measured time by noting the evidence of its movements given by the changing position of the stars, were also the first people who traversed the sea in boats, for it was only on their coasts that ship-building timber grew near the shore in the whole circuit of the Indian Ocean. And that the people of the earliest stone age in the Southern seas could make navigable boats is proved by those used by the now extinct Tasmanians,whose flint implements continued down to their recent extermination to be of the most primitive type I.
The sea coasts of North Africa, Arabia, Egypt and Persia were totally unwooded, and no good timber grew near the sea in any of these countries. It was only the forests of


1 Professor Tylor, The Stone Age in Tasmania: a Paper read in the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Sept. 6, 1900.
   
19
the islands of the Indian Archipelago and of the Malabar coast of Western India which were able to furnish timber whence boats could be made, and it is with Indian teak that the Arabs still build their ships. It was the dwellers in these sea-side forests and on the wooded banks of the rivers of Western India who first made navigable canoes, which they built without the use of metal, as the Polynesian islanders and the Dyaks of Borneo still do ; and they must have made them as strong and sea-worthy as those now constructed with the same rude stone implements they used. It must have been very soon after the first canoes hollowed out of a single tree had been launched on the ocean that they were used as transports by those who wished to find new land for tillage. The damp equatorial forests, through which pioneers who did not travel by water had to cut their way, were so thick and so encumbered with huge creepers that water carriage must have been used almost as soon as boats were invented. It was in these that they made their way along the coasts of the Indian Ocean till they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, where the memory of their arrival has been preserved in the legendary history, which tells how civilisation and the arts of building and government were brought to the Euphratean Delta by the god la, the god of the house (/), of the waters (a), who was clothed in fish skins and piloted the mother-ship Ma, the constellation Argo; that is to say, that these early mariners steered their course by the stars among which Canopus in the constellation Argo was their mother star. It is the progress and growth of the societies formed by these primitive discoverers of social laws, national religion, the art of navigation and the rudiments of astronomy that I propose to describe in the present work. And in tracing out this history, I will also show that we possess in the changes of the Pole Star in the Polar Circle, and in the stars of the ecleptic, chronological evidence enabling us to fix approximately the date of the period when each change in the year's reckoning took place, and by this means to
C 2
2C History and Chronology     
determine the time when each of the successive races who introduced these changes became the rulers first of India, Babylonia, Arabia and Egypt, and afterwards of the Mediterranean territories and the more distant lands of continental Europe.
CHAPTER II.
THE YEARS OF TWO SEASONS AND FIVE-DAY WEEKS
MEASURED BY THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PLEIADES
AND THE SOLSTITIAL SUN.
HOUGH the year measured by the Solstices was one
of the earliest years used by the founders of social life, yet it was not that which was first adopted by the Dravidian makers of villages. These dwellers in equatorial countries hated the sun which burnt up and destroyed their crops, unless the evils wrought by its assaults were averted by the frequent rains needed by the rice crops which supplied their food. To them the star rulers of the night were the messengers of a kindlier god than the destroying sun, and it was among them that they sought a sign to mark the beginning of the equatorial spring of the Southern Hemisphere. This they found in the Pleiades, which, as they noted, set immediately after the sun on the 1st November, when the spring began. They continued to set after it at more distant intervals each evening, till in April their setting was no longer visible at night. They reappeared again as evening stars in May, when they set before the sun, and this they continued to do till the end of October. Thus the primaeval year was one of two seasons of six months each, from November till the end of April, and May till the end of October.
This was the year observed in Southern and Western India, and still used by the majority of the dwellers in the Southern Hemisphere and by the traders of West India. Among the latter every merchant closes his year's books on the 26th of October and begins his year with the full moon of Khartik (October—November), the month dedi-
 

[Prometheus]

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.
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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.

[Prometheus]

Thus while the first manifestation of the great mother- goddess tells of her as the Southern mother-star, the last four represent her as the seed-bearing flower of the tree
Haug, Aitareya Brahmana, III. 33 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. I, 2, 8, 9; S.B.E.,vol. xii. p. 284, note 1.
2   Mill, Zendavesta, part ill. ; Yastra, xvii. ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 258; Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. p. 785.
44   History and Chronology
of life grown from her ocean abyss T. That this belief in the tree-mother goddess of the Pleiades year, and the five “days of its week, is a survival of the original theology of the Dravidian founders of villages, is rendered still more certain by the fact that it is stated in a Siamese manuscript giving an account of the astronomy of the country, and brought to Europe by M. de la Loubere, the Ambassador to Siam from Louis XIV. of France, in 1687,. that the civil year of Siam began with the Hindu month Khartik (October—November), the month of the Pleiades 2.
Throughout this account of the two primitive years of two seasons each I have spoken of these as being six months in duration, but it must be recollected that this was not a description intelligible to the primitive man. Their first idea of time measurement was to divide the year into two parts, the productive and unproductive seasons, and the length of these seasons, of which the beginnings were marked by the setting of the Pleiades, after or before the sun, and by the positions'of the solstitial sun at mid-winter and midsummer was measured only by the five-day weeks. These numbered 72 in the year of 360 and 73 in that of 365 days, and the Egyptian year story, which tells how Osiris the year god was slain by Set and 72 assistants, seems to show that the reckoning of 73 weeks forming a year circle of 365 days was adopted at a very early period. Set is the god ruling the Southern sun 3, that is to say, he is the ruling god of a year beginning at the winter .solstice. His original name was Hapi, the Egyptian form of the Dravidian Kapi, and as the ape-god he was the ruler of the Nile. This year, beginning at the winter solstice, is the successor of another year, when the sun-god of the previous year is *
* M. G. Dumoutier, ‘Etudes d’Ethnographie Religeuse Annamite Le Ba Dong. Actes du,1 Onzieme Congris des Orientalistes Section d’Extrime Orient, pp. 297 ff.
2   ‘Notes on Hindu Astronomy,’ by J. Burgess, C.I.E. Journal Royal
Asiatic Society, 1893, art. xviii. p. 723.   ,
3   Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien AEgypter, p. 451.
   
45
killed at the time when his successor begins his reign. The sun-god thus slain in this story was Osiris, whose year’s rule ended at the close of his 73 weeks. His body was then put into a coffin and thrown into the Nile. Isis set out to search for it, and at length she found the coffin enclosed in a pillar of the palace of the King of Byblos or Gi-bal, the modern Ji-bail, a Phoenician city near Beyrut dedicated to the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil. This pillar was made of an erica tree which had grown round the coffin. She took the coffin and its contents, the tree-trunk into which the dead sun-god had entered as the vital sap whence the seed of life was to be born, to Egypt, but left it to seek Horus. Then Set and his assistants broke open the coffin and cut up the body into 14 pieces, representing the measurement of time by lunar phases. On examining the facts it is clear that the age indicated in this ancient astronomical tale is most remote, and that it represents the changes in the year reckoning which took place when the old Pleiades and solstitial years of weeks of five days each were superseded by one which measured by lunar phases the year ruled by Horus the son of the Pole Star goddess ; and it probably represented the supersession of the year of three seasons described in Chapter III. by that of the three years cycle of Chapter V.
The recollection of the early division of the year into 72 weeks survived in other ancient theologies besides that of Egypt. Thus it is perpetuated in the sacred girdle or kusti worn by all Parsi fire worshippers of both sexes. This girdle, with which every young man and woman is invested when they are fifteen, is made to commemorate and impress on the wearer’s mind, after the fashion of ancient instructors, the calculation of the year and its component parts. It is formed of six strands, indicating the six seasons of the orthodox Zend year, and each of them is made of 12 threads, or 72 in all, the number of five- day weeks in the Parsi year of 360 days1. This sacred
1   For further information on this subject and for the proof that the girdle
46
History cmd Chronology
number 72 survived also in the magic square of 16 squares each marked with one of the numbers from 1 to 8 and 28 to 35. These two series of eight numbers are arranged in the square as follows :—
28   35   2   7
6   3 *   32   3i
34   29   8   1
4   5   30   33
and by this arrangement the numbers in every row of four squares, either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, make up, when added together, 72. This square has from time immemorial been looked on as most holy by all dealers in witchcraft, who believe it to be a protection against the evil eye. Other instances of the ancient veneration of this number 72 are shown in the 72 books into which the Zend Yasna is divided, and the remote descent of this number of the sacred weeks of the sidereal year appears in the division into 72 books of the great astronomical work of the Babylonian astronomers called the Illuminations of Bel. It was written for the library of Sargon of Akkad, who reigned 3800 B.C.1
In this year of 72 weeks each period of six months contained 36 weeks, and this became the number most frequently occurring in Hindu ritual. These 36 weeks were called by the Hindus the 36 steps of Vishnu, the year god of the people of the village (Vish), and these appear in the arrangement of the ground consecrated for the Soma sacri-
both in Hindu and Zend ritual represented the year looked upon as orthodox when each girdle pattern was prescribed, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv. pp. 402—410, but it must be remembered in reading these remarks that I had not when I wrote the Essay I refer to realised the great historical importance of the five-days week.
1   Sayce, Babylonians and Assyrians, chaps, i. and iii. pp. 5, 60.
   
4 7
fice which is said to represent the whole earthI. The priest in measuring it is directed to make it-36 steps long from West to East2, and in this direction we see that these 36 steps or weeks of the year god mark one half of the daily or yearly journey of the sun, who passes from West to East and back East to West every day of his yearly course, thus completing 72 steps in the day and year.
D.   The diffusion through the world of the five-days week.
Having now traced the history of the origin of the two national years of the sons of the mother-tree whose mother stars were the Pleiades, and of the Mundas of the North-east who measured their year by the flight of the sun-bird round the Pole, and also of the five-days weeks by which they reckoned its duration ; and having further shown the wide diffusion of this primitive measure of time, I must now proceed to show that it is on these two years that all national reckonings of annual time in India, South-western Asia and Europe are based, and that the conservative Indian emigrants who cherished their national customs as their most precious possessions took these years with them on their change of abode, as well as the distinctive institutions of matriarchal village government which I have described in Chapter I. These characteristic marks were the central village grove, the communal division of land, the seasonal dances and common meals, the marriage unions between villages instead of between individuals, and the careful education of the young, whose oral teaching was in the form of tales taught to them by the village elders and committed to memory as the most binding links between the present and the past.
The first western land after the valley of the Indus reached by the early emigrants from India who were seeking new sites for cultivation was the shores of the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., iii. 7, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 175.
2   Ibid., iii. 5, 1, 4 ; S.B.E., vol, xxvi. p. IT2.
48
History and Chronology
Persian Gulf, and the Delta of the Euphrates and Tigris. It was here that they landed from their ships guided by Canopus, the Pilot of the mother-ship Argo, as “ the blackheaded sons of la,” born of the Southern Ocean mother- tree, and founded in this new land-settled government.and well-tilled communal villages. They were a people addicted to the study of astronomy, who measured their year by observing the setting and rising of the stars, and the changes in position of the stars and sun. They became the Sumerians or dwellers in the low-lying lands of the Euphra- tean Delta, the land of Shinar, Genesis x. io1. They built there the first city of which the foundation is recorded, of the city of Erech, called originally Unuk, meaning the “ place of settlement,” the Enoch of Genesis, iv. 17 2 3 4. Its seaport was Eridu or Eriduga, the holy (dttga) city, and it was in its sacred grove that the year-god Dumu-zi was born. They became afterwards known as the Kalda or Chaldaeans, the dwellers in the marshes of the Euphratean Delta, who, according to local tradition, ruled the country from the earliest times, and studded it with towns. Berosus, who was priest of Bel, and who based his history of Babylon on the most ancient cuniform records, states that the first Babylonian dynasty after the primaeval deluge, a reminiscence of the southern waste of waters, was one of 86 Chaldaean kings who reigned 34,080 years 3. The modern representatives of these first settlers in the Euphrates valley are the Sabaeans, or Mandaites, the sons -of the word of God (Manda), the trading population of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, who begin their lunar zodiac with which they measure their months and years with the Parwe, the conceiving {par) mothers the Pleiades 4. They worship the Pole Star as the visible sign of the one father-god, and I have given elsewhere a full abstract of the ritual
1   Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, Appendix, pp. 393—397.
2   Sayce, Hiblert Lectures for 1887, p. 185.
3   Ibid., ‘ Babylonia,’ Encyc. Brit., vol. iii. p. 184.
4   Sachau, AlberunI’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. xi. p. 227.
   
49
of their celebration of his worship on their New Year’s Day at the autumnal equinoxx. But this was not the date of their original New Year’s Day, for AlberunI tells us that they used to celebrate the Feast of Tents or Booths, with which all people in South-western Asia used to begin their year, from the 4th to the 18th of Hilal Tishrln II. (October— November) 2. It was then that they worshipped the goddess Tarsa, whom AlberunI calls Venus. That is to say, she was the Southern mother-tree-god and goddess, the Sanskrit Vena invoked with Rama 3, whose name comes from the root van, meaning a tree, and who is thus identical with Vanaspati, the lord (J>ati) of the wood {vanas), the central tree of the village grove, the god addressed in stanza 10 of the Apr! hymns addressed to the national gods, as the mother of life, the mother-tree crowned with the Pole Star 4.
It was during this New Year’s Feast that they dwelt in booths made of tree boughs, to commemorate their ancient origin as the forest children of the village grove. Hilal Ayyar (April—May), the mid-month of the Pleiades year, was also a great festival month among these people. In it from the 7th to the 10th they celebrated the festival of the blind god Dahdak, the blind gnomon May Pole who had once been the Azi Dahaka, or biting snake of the Zendavesta, the snake guarding the world’s tree in the waters of the mother Bahu, who is the unseen and therefore blind Pole Star of the South, the ruler of the southern regions, as the Pole Star of the North with the seeing eye rules the north. He, as the tree measurer of the year, afterwards became the Azi Dahaka slain by Thraetaona, the three-headed six-eyed god, of the age of the year of three seasons, described in Chapter III. It is in this month that Barkhushya, the lightning-god, is worshipped. He, the god of the summer lightning, is another form of the 1 2 3 4
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii. pp. 156—165.
2   Sachau, Alberunfs Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xviii. p. 316.
3   Rg- x. 93, 14.
4   Rg. iii. 4, 10, v. 5, 10, vii. 2, 10.
E
50
History and Chronology
god Azaf, the son of Barkhya, who was Wazir to Solomon the Akkadian Salli-mannu, the fish-sun-god. It was he who arrested and confined in chains Sakhr, who had stolen the year ring of Salli-mannu, that is to say, had made himself the ruler of the first six months of the year, from the winter to the summer solstice, when the conquering sun - god resumed the throne he had abandoned during the winter seasonI. This Sakhr is the Akkadian ram-god Sakh or Sukh, the mother of the sun-god called Suk-us2 3, the Akkadian for I star, the mother of Dumu-zi, who was born from the mother-tree at the winter solstice. The annual victory of the summer sun is in the reckoning of the Pleiades year represented by the return to the upper world of the May Queen, who has been buried in the under-world abyss of the Southern sun during the winter months.
These Sabaeans were not in ancient times as they are now, merely the artisans and traders of the Euphrates valley. They were formerly the rulers of Southern Arabia called Seba’, and their capital was the great city of Mareb, celebrated for its irrigation works and its vast water reservoir. Its destruction is spoken of in the Koran as a great national calamity 3. They are the people called in Gen. x. 7, Sheba, the sons of Raamah or Raghma, the Indian god, father of Rama, called in the Mahabharata Raghu, the name by which he is still worshipped in Kumaon. He is the Northern sun-god of the Pole Star age, when the sun was looked on as a day star circling the Pole. These sons of Raamah were the leaders of the great national confederacy of the sons of Kush, sprung from Rama, whose mother in . Hindu historical genealogy is called Kush-aloya, the house (aloya) or mother of the Kushites. They are cele
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘ The Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,’ vol. i, p. 38, note 6.
2   Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, Syllabary Signs, ioo, IOI.
3   Palmer, Qur'an, The Chapter of Seba, xxxiv. io ; S.B.E., vol. ix. pp.
I51—I53*
   
51
brated by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekial as the richest traders in the East1, and the Assyrian inscriptions speak of them as paying tribute in gold, silver, and incense to Tiglath Pilesor II. and Sargon, B.C. 733—715, after they had been conquered by the Assyrians. The ruling tribe in the Sabaean confederacy were the Banu Kahtan, the Arabic form of the Hebrew Joktan, whose thirteen sons named in Gen. x. 26—30, are geographical names indicating the territories ruled by these early Kushite kings, which extended from Arabia to the Mountain of the East. This is the parent mountain called by the Akkadians Khar-Sak- Kurra, the mountain of the ox (khar), of the rain (sak), in the East (knrra)2 3. This was the spur of the Himalayas, whence the Haetumant, the modern Helmund, rose to descend to the lake of Kashava or Zarah, where Kavad, the first of the Kushika kings, was found as a babe in the reeds by the goat-god Uzava3, the Phoenician Uzof, called Tumaspa, the horse of darkness. Thus the territory ruled by the Sabaean Kushika extended from the home of the Kushites on the East to the land of the Arabian Saba or Sh4ba, a son of Joktan. Another son is Dedan, which is shown by Gesenius to represent the islands in the Persian Gulf, whence, according to Ezekiel xxvii. 20, 15, the Syrian merchants imported “ precious cloths for riding,” that is, Persian saddle-bags and carpets, and also “horns of ivory and ebony,” the tusks of Indian elephants and the wood of the Indian Tendoo or Ebony-tree (Diospyros melanoxulon), whence the carved black furniture of Bombay and the Malabar coast is made. Sheba and Dedan are also in another account of their genealogy the sons of Jokshan, who was the son of Abram’s wife Keturah, who, as we
1   Is. lx. 6 ; Jer. vi. 20 ; Ezekiel xxvii. 22.
2   Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, pp. 30S, 169 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races oj Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. pp. 142—145, This was the Zend parent ox Sar-saok ; West, Bundahish, -xv. 27, xvii. 4; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 58, 62.
3   West, Bundahish, xxxi. 23; Darmesteter, Zeudavesta FarvardTn Yasht, 131 ; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136, xxiii. p. 221.
E 2
52
History and Chronology
are told, lived in the EastThe name Keturah is derived, according to Gesenius, from the root katar, to enclose, hence it is an exact translation of the Indian Vritra, the enclosing snake; and the name also means incense, which was originally an Indian product yielded, as it still is, by the Indian incense-tree, the Salai (Boswellia thurifera), which grows on every rocky hill in Central India, where nothing else will flourish. Therefore the children of Abram, the father Ram and the enclosing snake are clearly an Indian- born race, a conclusion further confirmed by the inclusion of Havilah and Ophir among the sons of Joktan. The land of Havilah is said in Gen. ii. n, to be that watered by |he Pishon or river of irrigating channels, the river Indus, and Ophir is the land whence Solomon brought apes, ivory, peacocks, and almug or sandal wood2, all called in the Hebrew narrative by names shown by Gesenius to be of Indian - Dravidian origin. It was these people who took with them from India to the Persian Gulf their god Rama, who became the Babylonian storm-god Ram-anu, the Rama Hvashtra of the Zendavesta, to whom the Ram Yasht is dedicated, and the god worshipped at Damascus as Hadad Rimmon, called by Hesychios Pa/xa9 6 V^TLCTTOS 0eo$, the supreme god Ram.
These Indian Sabaean sons of Rama were the great traders of the Indian Ocean, who took with them for exportation to foreign lands Indian gold and silver, as well as spices and incense. It is from this last industry that they acquired the name of Atjub, or men of incense (til), and this was the name which, according to Dr. Glaser, became the Greek Hithiops or the Ethiopian 3. This trade in incense, which was originally exclusively Indian, was transferred by these Turano-Dravidian Kushite merchants to Arabia, when they finally settled there and extracted incense from the Boswellia Carteria, an indigenous 1
1 Gen. xxv. 1.   2 1 Kings x. 11, 22, 23 ; 2 Chron. ix. 21.
3   Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arctbien imd Africa, p. 27.
       53
Arabian tree allied to the Indian Salai, the Boswellia thurifera.
From Arabia they passed to Abyssinia, whose kings of Kushite descent called themselves the kings of El-Habasat, that is of the country of the Hbsti, the collectors of incense and aromatic spicesT. It was by way of Abyssinia that they passed into Egypt when they established the rule of the Egyptian Kushite kings, whose kingly dignity was marked by the sign of the Uroeus snake depicted on their foreheads ; and this was the signal also painted on the foreheads of their parents in India, the Naga or Kushika kings, known as the Nagbunsi or sons (bunsi) of the Naga snake.
The ruling tribe among the Banu Kahtan, or sons of Joktan, were the Ya-arubah2, who traced their descent to a female demon 3, that is to say to the goddess of the Southern abyss of water Ba-hu, the mother of all living things, called also by the Akkadians Nin-lil, the lady (nin) of the South-west world of ghosts or dust (HI), the ocean abyss where the South-west monsoon comes. She was the Assyrian goddess Allat, the unwearied one who rules over the subterranean world of the dead, the goddess called by Herodotus III. 8, Alilat, the chief goddess of the Arabians, the goddess called Tursa in Alberuni’s account of the Sabaean year, the goddess of the Pleiades, called by the Arabians Tur-ayya4.
This mother-goddess of the Pleiades year ruled that of the primitive Arabians as well as that of the later Sabaean merchant princes. The celebration of the commencement of this early year is recorded by AlberunI in his account of the great annual fairs held in Hadhramaut and El Nejd, the Southern and Northern provinces of 1 2 3 4
1   Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien und Africa, p. 27.
2   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘The Story of Gharib and his brother Ajib,* vol. v. p. 166.
3   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. ii. p. 50.
4   Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions: Primitive Arabian Religion, p. 63.
54
History and Chronology
the ancient Sabaean kingdom, divided from each other by the Arabian desert. The New Year’s Fair of the year of the Turayya or Pleiades began on the 14th of Dhu- alka’da (October—November), that is on the 1st of November, and lasted for the rest of the month, during which time universal peace was observed1. It was the annual New Year’s gathering of all the principal Arabian tribes. This fair festival is still kept by the Bedouin descendants of the ancient Himyarites, who resort yearly in November to the fair held at the tomb of their ancestral parent Salah, the Shelah of Gen. x. 24, and the giant father of Eber. It was their children who peopled the Hadhra- maut, the Himyarite land of Southern Arabia, the name Hadhramaut being a form of the Hebrew Hazarmaveth, which is named as a province of the Sabaean kingdom in the Genesis list of the thirteen sons of Joktan 2. The month Dhu-alka’da is called Zu-l-ka’da in the Arabian Nights historical tale of Kamar-al-Zaman, the moon of the age, and Badur the full moon. It was on Friday, the fifth of this month, that is at the end of the first five-days week of the year, that the crescent and full moon were united 3, and this shows that the original year of the Arabian Sabasans coincided with that of the same people on the Euphrates, for each of these months begins with the new moon Hi-lal.
Hence it is completely proved by the Sabaean and Arabian measurements of time that the first month of the year throughout South-western Asia was the Pleiades month of October—November, and that it began with a great annual fair gathering of the people of each township or province in booths made of tree branches to commemorate their original descent from the central village grove. It must also be remembered that this original year festival 1 * 3
1 Sachau, AlberunI’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. xx. p. 332.
E Beni, Southern Arabia, chap. xi. pp. 130—134.
3   Burton, Arabian Nights, 1 Tale of Kuraar-al-Zaman and Badur,’ vol. iii. P- 36.
   
55
was instituted when time was measured not by months but by five-day weeks, as in the story of the Kamar-al Zaman and Badur. This was before the age of the Arab and Indian measurements of time by the lunar zodiac of twenty- seven stars, which will form the subject of Chapter V. The Arabic name of this month beginning with Dhu or Zu shows it to be derived from the Akkadian Zu bird, the bird of wisdom who “stole the tablets of Mul-lil,” the lord of the dust {lit), the wind god *, and became the ruler of the year, who developed in Egyptian mythology into the Egypt god Dhu-ti, the bird of life [li), whom we call Thoth, and who carried the recording feather in her hand. The name Dhu or Zu is a form of Khu, which is also the name of the Akkadian and Egyptian water-cloud bird which brings up the south-west monsoon. This name Khu became in Southern India “shu,” as the Greek 8e/ca, ten, became the Sanskrit dashan. It was the sons of this bird called Shu, Su, or Sau, who were the western trading race of India, who measure time by the Pleiades year, and are still called Sau-kars, or men who do the business (kar) of the Sao. They became the rulers of the coastland of Guzerat, called in Sanskrit Sau-rashtra, or the kingdom \rdshtra) of the Saus, and of the delta of the Indus, where they were called the Su-varna, or men of the tribe {varna) of the Su race, who founded the Greek port of Patala on the site of what is now the Sind city of Hyderabad. It is about 115 miles from the sea, and the time when it was the exporting seaport of the Indus valley, as measured by the present rate of river deposits, may be placed about 9000 years ago, or about 7000 B.C.3 Thus in the years before that date it was the rival of Eridu, the port on the Euphrates, which is now, like Patala, far from the sea, but it was formerly the port of the Sumerian emigrants and traders from India to the Euphratean Delta. It was they who named their 1 2
1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lect. iv. p. 297.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. pp. 140, 141.
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History and Chronology
inland capital, now called Telloh Gir su, or the lightning (gir) bird, and Gir is apparently the root of the Hindu Giri, a hill. It was they who gave its name of Shushan, or the land of the Shus, to the province to the east of the Persian Gulf, the home of the worshippers of the great god Susi-nag, the snake-parent of the Shus who dwells in the sacred wood, the village grove1, and whose image was depicted on the Parthian banners.
The Indian emigrants who took with them to the Persian Gulf, Mesopotomia, and Arabia, their year measured by the Pleiades and their communal villages with their groves, also took with them their seasonal dances, their matriarchal customs regulating the intercourse between the sexes and the birth of the village children. These customs survived in the dances to Istar and her successor, the Babylonian goddess Mylitta. For the village mothers who took part in these dances in the matriarchal age became in later times “ the consecrated maidens of Istar,” and the Kedesha or temple women of the Jews and Egyptians2. Also all Babylonian wives were obliged to begin their marriage by submitting to union with a stranger in the temple of Mylitta.
When in their progress up the Euphrates they reached Asia Minor the dances were consecrated to the worship of Cybele, meaning the cave. She was the Phrygian mountain goddess, whose grove was that of the village placed at the foot of the hill. These dances became in course of time those of the worship of Aphrodite, Dionysus and Venus. The village grove attached to every village in Syria and Asia Minor became in Greece the Temenos, the Latin Templum, the sacred land set apart for the parent-god of the village. This was placed on the Akro- *
* Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria, chap. xvii. p. 316.
1 Strabo, xviii. 1, p. 463, says that the Theban priestesses were obliged to be Kedesha till they married ; also Herod., ii. 46, tells us how the women who served in the temple of the Mendesian goat used to prostitute themselves. Movers, Die Phonizier, i. p. 42.
   
57
polis or Capitol, the mother hill in the centre of the village or township area. This was consecrated to the Echis, snake-parent of the Achaeans, its sons. This snake was worshipped in Athens as the snake Erectheus or Ericthonius, which lived in the Erectheum, and on whose altar no living victim was allowed to be offered, only cakes, as in the sacrifices of the southern founders of villagesl. The original three days feast of firstfruits inaugurating the November year survived in Asia Minor and Greece in the festival of the Thesmophoria. This, according to Herodotus ii. 171, was originally a Pelas- gian festival introduced by the sons of Danaus, the Indian Danava, and he says, vi. 16, that it was held in a cavern at night at Ephesus, one of the cities founded by the matriarchal Amazons. This shows that it was a festival of the southern races who, as the Jews still do, began their day at six o’clock in the evening, when the equinoctial sun and the Pleiades set together, at the beginning of the Pleiades year. It was a festival in which only the women of each demos or village took part, and was held on the nth, 12th and 13th of Puanepsion (October—November), answering to the 24th, 25th and 26th of October, and was accompanied by dances. Also during its continuance the women lodged by twos in tents or huts made of branches within the precincts of the Thesmophorium, as in the Feast of Booths in South-western Asia. During the festival pigs were thrown down the vaults consecrated to the serpents, and this sacrifice was apparently a duplicate of that of the pigs offered by the Dosadhs of Maghada to the northern sun-god Ra-hu. It was a northern addition to the southern ritual, which forbade the offering of any living victims, and allowed only the offering of the firstfruits of the earth. The festival, as far as the women were concerned, was carefully divested of any traces of solar worship, for they were forbidden while it lasted to eat pomegranates, the fruit especially consecrated to the sun-god, and from which the
1 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 26, 5 ; vol. i. p. 38; ii. pp. 168, 169.
History and Chronology
58
god Ram of Damascus got the name of Hadad Rimmon, the hastening pomegranate l.
This feast was followed by the Chalkeia held on the 19th Puanepsion, the 1st of November. This was dedicated to Athene, the tree-mother, and to Hephaistos, the Sanskrit Yavishtha 2 3, the most binding (ya) god, the god of the barley (yava) bound in sheaves, who united heaven and earth as the male form of generation which kindles the fire in the southern female fire-block, the source whence life is born. He was the god lame in both legs (afi^tyv^ets), that is to say, he was the one-legged fire-drill of heaven, the kindler of the year fires of the earth-mother-goddess, from whence the household fires of the fire-worshippers who succeeded the matriarchal communities were lighted. His mythological history shows that the conception of his divinity was a blending of the northern smith-god bearing the fire- cooking hammer, and the father-god of the fire-worshippers who bore the staff of authority, the rain-wand, which was . j believed to be shrouded in heaven in the mists of the upper air, and to revolve at the impulse of the Pole Star god in the fire-block of the southern mother-tree.
Between these two festivals the village feast of the Apa- turia was held, and at it the Phratria or brotherhood of each village met and revised the annual lists of the members of the village community, elected village officers for the next year, and received new members entering the community.
At this feast the year’s fires in each household were lighted from the central fire of the village, kindled on the hearth dedicated to the Greek goddess Hestia, the Roman Vesta 3.
Thus we see that the ritual of these Greek festivals of October—November proves clearly that they are survivals | of the New Year’s festival of the Southern Pleiades year, beginning on the 1st of November with a three days’ feast to |
1 Frazer, ‘ Tliesmophoria,’ Encyc. Brit., vol. xxiii. pp. 296—298.
" Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. pp. Sorts-
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, pp. 517, 518.
59
   
the dead, and also with a feast of firstfruits 1 which is exactly reproduced in the Thesmophoria, in which one of the three days of the feast was a day of mourning. This mourning of the women was made part of the ritual of the feast to commemorate the mourning of Demeter for the loss of her daughter Persephone, who was carried away at its commencement by the god of the realms below the earth, that is, the king of the Southern abyss of waters on which the earth floated. This is exactly parallel with the mourning of the women for Tarnmuz or Dumu-zi, who in his year’s festival in Syria at the autumnal equinox, died before it began and returned to life on the eighth day of the feast in the barley, wheat and fennel, sown beforehand by the mourning women in the earthenware pots called the gardens of Adonis, which were found on that day with the buried seeds springing to fresh life from the earth. This parallel proves that the mourning for Persephone is the original form of that in Syria, lamenting the close of the dying year of the later phase of year-reckoning described in Chapter V., which is to revive in its reanimated successor.
It will be made clear by an examination of some of the popular folk - tales of the Cinderella series, that this is a true interpretation of the story of the Thesmophoria, and that it is like that of the plants in the gardens of Adonis, a northern importation of the festival marking the close of the year in the south, and its revival in the first-fruits then consumed. The oldest of these tell the story of the year of two seasons in that of two sisters, who were originally the goddesses ruling the two divisions of the year. In these the youngest despised sister who was made the kitchen wench, and located in the realms of the dead,
1   The combined feast of firstfruits and the festival to the Dead are held in the beginning of November in the Tonga Islands, Ceylon, and by the Dyaks of Borneo. It is called Inachi in Fiji, and Nicapian in Borneo. A similar festival called the Janthur Puja is observed by the Sautals of Bengal in the beginning of November. Blake, Astronomical Mytho., pp. 115—119, 121, 126 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Sautals, p. 233.
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History and Chronology
is transformed by her guardian fairy into the beautiful maiden clothed in gorgeous apparel, who drops her glass or ice shoe by which the sun-prince tracks her, and is wedded to him after he has vowed that he will only marry the maiden whom the shoe will fit. In one of the simplest of these stories, No. io in Miss Roalfe Cox’s collection of Cinderella variants T, the guardian and aider of the future mother of the sun-god is her dead mother, the dead year, who gave her a cloth with food in it, which would never be empty, and would enable her to feed herself in the hut to which she escaped from the cruelty of her stepmother and her daughter. This food store-chest becomes in another story, 59, p. 282, a red bull, which is placed under her charge, and who supplies her with food from his right ear, an incident which is repeated in the Georgian Cinderella story of Conkiajgharuna, which does not appear in Miss Cox’s volume, and in which the heroine is fed by a cow1 2, a survival of the Hindoo red - cow - star RohinI or Aldebaran. It is in the Annamite story of Cinderella that we find what is clearly the original form of the incident of the food stored for the buried mother of the sun-god. In this story the two rival seasons of the year are the despised kitchen wench called Ka’i Ta’m, Rice-husk, and her step-sister Ka’i Ka'm, or Rice-grain. The helper of the persecuted maiden is the little fish Bo’ng, who was at first thrown aside as worthless by the step-mother of Ka’i Ta’m and her daughter, but who was eaten by them when they saw that Rice-husk had made it fat and large by feeding it. His spirit appeared after his death, and told Rice-husk to bury his bones in four jars to be placed under her bed, the seed sown in the jars called the Gardens of Adonis. When the day came when she wished to go to the national festival of the opening year, to which her step-mother and sister were going, it was the spirit of the fish, embodying the soul of life dwelling
1 Cox, Cinderella Variants, No. 10, p. 144, published by the Folklore Society.
2 Wardrop, Georgian Folk Tales, xi. p. 63 ff.
   
61
in the Southern Ocean, which enabled her to perform the task set her by her step-mother, and it was from the jars containing his bones that she took out the horse that was to carry her to the festival and the dress in which she was to captivate the prince. She dropped her shoe as she was mounting the horse when she was leaving the feast, and when her lover came to search for the owner of the shoe and found her, she promised to be his bride. But her stepmother substituted her daughter Rice-grain at the wedding, and the prince did not find out the deception till after the marriage, when Rice-husk, who had drowned herself in a well, returned to life as an oriole and revealed herself to her lover, first in this form and afterwards in her true shape J.
The truths herein hidden, when translated from metaphor into the actual facts, which the village elder who framed the story tried to impress upon the memory of the children he taught, told them that the true mother of life was the plant, and that the germ of future life which the plant concealed within itself could only be transmitted to those whom its products nourish in the seed when protected by its capsule or husk. Without this protection it would decay uselessly, and therefore the true mother of life is this protecting covering and not the seed which it protects. When the seed and its protecting mother are buried in the earth, and thus sent for a season into the land ruled by the underground mother-ocean, the home of the fish, the soul of life, it is nourished by the store of food it takes with it and emerges, through the strength imbibed from this meat, into the upper air. There it becomes the growing plant, clothed in the summer array provided from its secret store. It is in this guise embraced by the sun-god, who follows the traces of its flying footsteps in the opening foliage, and who is deceived in his search by the false spring maiden, who pretends to be
1 M. G. Dumoutier, Etudes d’Ethnographic Religieuse Annamite, Actes du Onzieme Congres des Orientalises, sect, ii., D’extreme Orient, pp. 374— 376.
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History and Chronology
the fruitful bride of summer. The true summer goddess,, when found and caressed by the sun, covers herself with flowers, which again reproduce their mother in the seed they bring forth.
We can see in this story how the folk-tale grew up from the poetical statements of natural facts, and can understand the method of its production, and see how it was very frequently the expansion of the pithy proverbs which abound in the speech of all Dravidian people, and of those whose culture has been derived from Dravidian sources. It was these proverbs which preserved the memory of the story in the   )
minds of those who had learnt both together, and to whom   j
the recollection of the proverbs recalled the story.
Thus the story of Demeter and Persephone, embodied in j the ritual of the Thesmophoria of October—November, is ji one which was originally told in the Southern Hemisphere of the rice seed, which was to become the mother of life to the people born of the village grove who began their year in November. It is the seed-husk buried with its enclosed seed in November which becomes the May Queen of the next year, the maiden 1 mother adored throughout {• Europe in the dances round the May Pole, which reproduce those of the stars round the Pole Star. Thus the May- pole is a survival of the mother - tree, and of Southern Pleiades year of two seasons.
This year was that observed by the Druids throughout Western Europe. They lighted their year’s fires on the ist of November, and the New Year’s festival lasted for M three days before and three days after that date; this week was called the Samhain T. This festival still survives everywhere throughout Europe in the feasts of All Hallows la Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Day, and the annual ji meeting of the village assembly on the ist of November | is reproduced in every municipality in England, for it is on this day that the mayor and municipal officers for the 1 year are elected.
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 518.
i|
I
6s

[Prometheus]

   
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.

[Prometheus]

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History and Chronology
called in Vedic ritual that indicated by the Rathamtara or Ratha-tur (Grassmaun) Saman z, that celebrating the revolution or returning (tur) of the sun chariot iratha) from North to South, a metaphor reproduced in the Irish Caer Sidi or Turning tower. These are two verses in the Brihatl metre, Rg. vii. 22 and 23. They embody another prayer to Indra for rain, and this Rathamtara Saman is said in Rg. x. 181, 1, to have been brought from Vishnu by Vashishtha, the reputed author of this hymn, who is, as I have shown on p. 42, the perpetual fire burning on the altar of the god of the summer solstice in the North and of the winter solstice in the South, when her fire is the subterranean home of fire whence the sun gets its light and heat. It is these second Brihatl stanzas which are recited at the brick-altar consecration at the right or South wing of the sun-bird starting on her southern journey2. And that this meaning of the two forms of the Brihatl metre was that actually present in the minds of the authors of the ritual is indubitably proved by the statement in the Satapatha Brdhmana that the year of sacrifice “ amounts to a Brihatl,” that is to say, that the year is measured by the Brihatl metre 3. The Bridget of the South Queen of the winter solstice and goddess of the first six months season of the Pleiades year is in the southern form of her story the ruler of the year and of the southern birth-land of life. It is she, the Akkadian goddess Ninlil, the lady of the dust, the Sabaean queen Beltis, the lady of Sheba, who goes northward to become the May Queen in the North, where she is to meet the Northern father-god, her partner in the star dance. He in the Irish legendary history is Bres, the war {bres) king of the Fomori, or men born under {fo) the sea {muir4), that is the king of the Southern people whose day was our night, those who lived on the 1 2 3 4
!
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 7, 2, 17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 196, note 2,
2   Ibid., ix. 1, 2, 36, vol. xliii. p. 179.
3   Ibid., xii. 2, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 155, 156.
4   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 591—593.
       Ji
under or south side of the tortoise earth with its Northern mother-mountain topped by the Pole Star in the centre. They were the men of the land of the mud whence the world’s tree grew, to whose country the sun and moon gave light after they sunk at their setting into the sea. They are the sea-people of the Arabian Nights Tale of Badr Basim, the smiling Full Moon {badr), son of Julnar, the pomegranate (jul), the sea-maiden whose mother was Fara’shah, the night moth. He, as the son of an earth-born father, king of Khorasan, succeeded to this kingdom on his father’s death, and thus was ruler of the lands bordering the Persian Gulf, those civilised by la, the god clothed in fish-skins, who arose from the sea. Badr Basim, the Full Moon, was wedded, like his father, to a daughter of the sea, Jauharah (the jewel), child of Al-Shamandal, the Salamander, who dwelt under the ocean in the fiery land which heated the Cauldron of Life in the Southern waters whence the sun drew its heatL She was the counterpart of the Vedic sun-maiden Savitrl, who was wedded (Rg.
x.   85) to Soma, the moon-god, and who was brought to the wedding on the year-car of the Ashvins, as the bride of the ruling god of the lunar-solar year, which I shall describe in Chapter VII.
The wife of the thunder-god Bres, king of the Fomori, is Brig or Brigit, daughter of Dagda. Their son is Ruadan. meaning the red one (ruad) or the roarer (rud2), the Vedic Rudra, who was slain by Goibniu, the smith-god of the Tuatha De Danann, whom he tried to kill. The story is one which marks in its conception of the union between the year-star and sun-goddesses, and the men who dwelt beneath the sea, its origin in the legends of a Dravidian maritime race who were born from the union of parents who habitually lived apart from one another in separate villages, like the fathers and mothers of Dravidian children. 1 2
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, Library Edition, vol. vi. pp. 54—95.
2   Rhys, Hibberl Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. v. pp. 388, 3S9, note 2.
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History and Chronoiogy
The year of Bran, the raven who ran away on the first of November with the Pleiades’ mother, the Greek Persephone, the Celtic Bridget, who was to be the May Queen of the second season of the year, reappears again in that rich mine of ancient year-history, the Arthurian Legend.
The captive queen was the lady Gwenhwyvar, the white (gwen) spirit or ghost (hwyvar). She, like Bridget, was the third of three ladies of the same name who were all wives of Arthur or Airem, the plough-god r. Her father, the / giant Ogyrvan, was the god said in the Taliessin poems to make cauldrons boil without the aid of fire, that is to say, he was the Salamander god of the story of Julnar and Badr ji Basim, the god of the fire drill, who heated the Southern Cauldron of Life.
He was the reputed inventor of the Welsh Ogam letters composed of the elements represented in the primitive Celtic sign of the parent of knowledge /|\1 2 3 4* It is the equivalent
of the caste mark of the Hindu Vishnu worshippers LU with its red centre and yellow lateral lines, also of the earliest Akkadian sign for woman on the monuments
of Girsu 3. And of the Cypriote sign of the arrow of life (ti) the Akkadian Zi /j\ 4. It represents the converging
two seasons of the original year-meeting at the summer centre, whence the seed of future life was to be born.
The Gwenhwyvar daughter of this parent of wisdom, the white ghost of winter, was captured by Medrod the Judge or Archer (medr-u), the counterpart of the Pole Star god Danu, and the god of the year-arrow, in which, accor
1   Rhys, 'The Arthurian Legend, chap. ii. pp. 34—39.
2   Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 18S6, Lect. iii. pp. 267, 268.
3   Amiand et Mechanseau, Tableau Compares des Ecritures Babylonienncs et Assyriennes, No. 163, p. 65.
4   Conder, The Hittites and'their Language: Syllabary Sign 78. This was the sign originally placed on women’s carriages in India when railways were first started. I do not know if it is still used.
   
73
ding to the Brahmanas, the point represents the winter1. He was also Melwas, the hero {mat) king of the winter region, that is of the heat-giving south. In the story of Gwenhwy- var’s capture it is represented as taking place in the month of May, and her original releaser was Gawain, a form of the original Gwalchmei, the hawk of May. Thus the story clearly tells of two year-kings, the king of winter, Medrod or Melvas, who seizes the May Queen at the beginning of her year in November, and carries her to his southern realm. He takes her back with him in his northern progress till he is obliged to give her up to her true husband, the sun-prince of summer 2. But this hawk of May belongs to the second form of the two early years of two seasons. He was in his original form the sun-bird, the hen of the Mundas, who starts on her yearly course at the winter solstice, and thus pursues a different path through the stars than that marked out for the raven- bird Canopus in Argo. The course of the sun-bird began at the South-west under the control of the directing ape-god, the giant form of Canopus. In this phase of ancient belief he was called by the Arabians Repha, the giant, and the course of the sun he directed was watched by his brethren the two dog-stars, Sirius and Procyon. The former of these stars is that called in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgames, the sun-giant, Lig la the dog (lig) of la, who embarked with Gilgames on the ship Ma, the constellation Argo, to cross the sea of Samas, the sun stream flowing down the Milky Way. The western side of the crossing was guarded by Procyon, called Pallika, the crossing of the water-dog 3.
It was from the crossing place guarded by these two dog- stars that the sun was believed by the primitive astronomers to start on her yearly journey from South to North at the winter solstice, and thence to cross the heavens by the
1   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap. ii. pp. 38, 39; Eggeling, Sat. Brail., ii. 4, 4, 14—17; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 108.
2   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, iii., Gwenhwyvar and her Captors, pp.49 ff.
3   R. Brown, jun., Eridanus River and Constellation, p. 13 ; Primitive Constellations, p. 279.
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History and Chronology
Bridge of the Gods, the Milky Way, the road of the cows of light. This mythic route of the primitive sun-bird is symbolically marked out every day by all Indian Brahmins. Each of them before his daily meal draws a circle on the ground, into which he places a portion of his food, as an offering to the Vaishva-deva, the tree and star-gods of life protecting the circle round the village grove. Outside the circle at the North-west corner he places an offering to the dog Shabala, and at the South-west corner to the dog Shyama z. These two dogs are the Sanskrit Sharvara, the spotted dog Sirius, and Saramaya, the yellow dog Procyon also called Shvan the dog, and Prashvan the fore-dog. In the Zendavesta they are the yellow dogs who guard the Chinvat Bridge, the dogs of Sarama their mother, who, with Yama, the twins night and day, the two .birds on the world’s tree guard the sun’s path in the Rigveda 2. Their mother Sarama, the bitch of the gods who seeks the cows of light is apparently from her connection with the two dog-stars, the constellation Argo, just as this constellation is in Arabian astronomy their brother. It was these two dogs who as Procyon from the South-west, and Sirius from the North-west, guarded the sun as he started from the Southwest on his northern journey at the winter solstice, and also his return from the North-west, where he set his face homewards at the summer solstice.
The sun-myth thus conceived was originally that taught by the Dravido-Mundas, the sons of Canopus, the giant ape, called by the Arabians Repha the giant. They became the Rephaim of Syria, whose history and astronomy will be told in the next Chapter, which tells the story of the introduction into Europe of the communal villages of the Neolithic age organised after the original Dravidian pattern. But these sons of Repha, the giant star Canopus, before or almost simultaneously with their settlement in Syria, 1
1 Bal Gungadhur Tilak Orion.
3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, viii. 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 97 ; Introduction, v. 4, pp. Ixxvii., Ixxviii. ; Rg. x. 14, 10, 11.
   
75
came to Egypt as the first founders of communal villages and organisers of the nomes or provinces into which it was divided. In the Egyptian astronomy the two gods who ruled the South were Set and Nebt-hat, the mistress (nebt) of the house (hat), the counterpart of Hat-hor, the Pole Star mother or house (hat) of Hor or Horns the Supreme god, and hence the mother-tree or house-pole with its top in the Pole Star. With them was their father Turn, meaning the end or completion, bearing the sceptre, the creating magic wand1. He is the male form of Bahu, the creating bird, while Nebt-hat is the mother-tree growing from the mud of Bahu, and Set the ape-god on it. He is called in the Book of the Dead, Chapter xcix., Hapi the ape, and in the story of his fight with Horus2 3he becomes Suti the black pig. As Suti he is Sutekh, the god of the Hyksos or leaders (itak) of the Sos or Shasus, the Syrian herdsmen, the Rephaini of Palestine. A temple built to him as Khons at Thebes is oriented to Canopus 3. He, as Sutekh, had a temple at Memphis 4, and the port of the Nile Delta before the foundation of Alexandria was called the port of Canopus, the ape-star-father of the ape-gods of Egypt. It was when the star Canopus could no longer be seen by his votaries who had settled in northern lands where he was no longer visible, that they looked to the North Pole Star as the centre-star of heaven which replaced their Southern father. This Pole Star was the star in Kepheus, the constellation of the ape whose Thigh extended to the Great Bear. It
1   Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien ALpyptcr, p. 451.
2   Budge, Book of the Dead, lxii. 6, p. 177.
3   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xviii. p. 1S4; Temple, 1. pp. 1S6, 1S7* There are also two other temples at Thebes oriented to Canopus. Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 189. These temples were oriented to the setting of Canopus (Dawn of Astronomy, pp. 223, 224), and we have seen in the history of the Pleiades year, beginning with the setting of the Pleiades, that its authors observed the setting and not the rising of the stars. Hence Canopus is marked as one of the year-stars of the primaeval age.
* Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des peuples de VOrient, Troisieme Edition, P- 175-
76 History and Chronology     
ruled both the North and South when Osiris, who was afterwards the rival of the ape Pole Star god, was the star Orion ruling the year of three seasons of Chapter III. Osiris, as god of Orion’s year, the god with the two eyes of the Northern and Southern sun, was slain on the date of his death festival held on the 26th of Choiak (September— October), four days before that of the snake-god Nahib-ka on the 1st Tybi (October—November), the first month of the Pleiades year1. His slayer was Set or Hapi, with his seventy-two assistants, the seventy-two weeks of the year, and it was to avenge his death that Horus, son of the mother Pole Star, fought Suti, who assumed in the contest the form of a pig. We find the explanation of this transformation in the history of the constellation Kepheus, which became the Phoenician constellation Baal Tzephon or Zaphon, the Baal of the North, worshipped, according to Maspero, at Memphis. He was the Typhon of the Greeks, the god of the deadly storm, whose name survives in our word Typhoon. This wind of Baal Zephong whose temple was on Mount Kasios on the coast of Syria, was the South-west hot wind blowing from the borders of Egypt over Syria from the month of June— July, called in Syriac Cheziron or the month of the Pig, till the middle of September2. This wind of the boar-god was that which slew Adonis at Antioch at the autumnal equinox, and the god who sent the wind was the ape-god of the Pole Star constellation Kepheus. He, when he ruled his southern votaries as the giant-star Repha Canopus, was the guider of the mother-ship Ma, the constellation Argo, through the southern heavens, who brought up the South west monsoon with the rains of the summer solstice which fertilised India, and this same South-west wind was that which burnt up Syria in the North and became the destroying pig-god.
1   Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten rEgypter, pp. 346, 303, 304. The relation of the Egyptian months to those of our calendar here assumed is that given on the oldest calendars of the pyramid builders, recording the names of the months and the three seasons to each of which four months Were allotted. Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xxiii. p. 233.
2   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 228; Movers, Die Phonizier Vol. i. p. 224.
CHAPTER III.
THE YEAR OF THREE SEASONS AND FIVE-DAY WEEKS RULED BY ORION THE DEER-SUN-GOD.
HE Arabian story of the giant - star Canopus, called
Repha, and of his two brothers Sirius and Procyon, of which I told the beginning in the last Chapter, goes on to tell of the marriage of Repha to Orion called El Schauza 1, who here becomes a female, and of the breaking of the necks of her husband’s two brothers by the bride. This denouement, which means the abandonment of the astronomical belief in the Milky Way as a 'bridge over which the sun made his annual journeys from South to North and back again, shows that the Rephaim of Syria, sons of Canopus and Orion, changed the previous methods of time-measurement. But in order to understand this fully it is necessary to consider the information available as to the progress of the Munda-Dravidians in their new settlements in Southwestern Asia. They, when they left India, had made such progress in civilisation and the arts of government as to have established the province or associated confederacy of adjoining or related villages as the tribal unit.
A. Progress of the Northern emigration of the India7i founders of villages.
These emigrants, who landed originally at Eridu, distributed themselves over the Euphratean Delta in Parhas or provinces, each ruled by its central village, but we possess no data supplying us with the means of determining the
1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vo], i., chap, viii., pp. 289, 292, chap. x. p. 406.
 
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History and Chronology
time thus occupied. Its duration was regulated by the numbers of the emigrants, and the more or less rapid addition to their ranks made by the advent of new swarms, the increase arising from births and from alliances with the previous inhabitants if any existed.
Each province had its own gods, those dwelling in the village groves, and each had its own annual series of provincial and village seasonal festivals, regulated by the village Munda and the provincial Mankis, assisted by the provincial priest. This system of national growth prevailed over the Euphratean Delta, Babylonia and Mesopotamia, it divided the land of Egypt into Nomes, each ruled by its central city, and these Parhas or provinces became in Syria those described in the Book of Joshua, where, in the account of the conquest of the Jews, they are grouped under the names of the ruling cities with their associated villages r. The area of these Syrian provinces must, like the original Parhas of the Kolhan still existing in India, have been very small, for in the territory of the tribe of Judah there are one hundred and six cities mentioned, excluding those of the Philistines, and thus the average territory of each of these provinces, scattered over an area of about
1,200   square miles, was only about eleven square miles.
The sandy soil on the shores of the Persian Gulf, where the new immigrants first landed, was not so well adapted to the growth of rice as India, and hence one of their first tasks was to find a substitute better suited to the soil and climate. This they found in barley and wheat, which were originally wild Mesopotamian grasses changed by the Indian farmers into profitable crops by methods similar to those used by their forefathers, who had made the endless varieties of Indian rice out of the wild rice-grass, which every peasant in Central India still hangs up in his house in August when the young rice sprouts, as a memorial of the early tasks of the first pioneers of agriculture, and as a means of obtain- 1
1   Joshua xv. 21—62,
   
79
ing from the parent-gods of both plant and animal life prosperity during the future year.
They also turned their attention to the domestication of farm cattle, and these formed the breeds of pigs, shorthorn cattle, sheep and goats, which were introduced by their descendants into Europe in the Neolithic age, and which were originally inhabitants of Central Asia I.
Their principal assistants in these tasks appear to have been the Finrf races, who, as the Akkadians or mountaineers, came in contact with the Indian immigrants at a yery early period. The latter were apparently diggers who cultivated the soil with the digging-stick, and the Finn people were pre-eminently a pastoral race, who learnt, in the icy regions of the North and the cold of the glacial age further South, to domesticate the rein-deer. It was they who introduced among the Southern races the belief in magic and witchcraft which is indigenous among all Finns, and was communicated by them to the Mundas and Gonds in India, who are renowned wizards. They brought with them the Shamanist priest and his magic drum, which still survives among the Lapps, who ornament it with symbolic figures 2 3 4; and this is the musical instrument still most prominent in the seasonal dances of the Turano-Dravidian races. The population formed from their northern and southern elements were the people described in the Zendavesta as the wizard Yatus, who were created in the land of the Haetumant 3 or Helmend, rising in Khar-sak-karra, the mother mountain of the Akkadians. They are called Yatudhana in the Rigveda 4, and in the Zendavesta the sons of Danu, the Danava of the Rigveda. They were the worshippers of the goddess Maga, the mother of magical arts, who gave to Sinai the Akkadian name of Mag-ana, who, in her male form, was A1 Makah, the god
1   Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 300.
2   Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, English Translation, p. 2S8.
3   Darmesteter, Zendavesta VendTdad Far gard, i. 14; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 8.
4   Rg. viii. 104, 15—25.
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History and Chronology
of the Himyarite Sabaean Arabs x. She was the goddess of the land of Magog in the North-east of Asia Minor, the land to which the Rephaim ruled by Og, the king of Bashan, traced their origin. She was the virgin (magd, maid) mother-tree of the wizard races, the pine-tree.
These wizard Finns brought with them the belief in to- temism, as they called themselves the sons of birds and animals, and looked on the mountains shrouded in mists and clouds as their mother-goddess, named by4 them Is-tar, the daughter (tar) of heaven (is), the sky-mountain. These two races who thus met in the Euphrates valley were eth- nologically far apart. The Dravidians were a fairly tall doliko-kephalic race, with noses thicker and broader than those of any other human family except the negro, a low facial angle, thick lips, wide and fleshy faces, coarse irregular features, and little beard. Their figures were broad and their limbs sturdy, and their colour dark brown approaching to black 2. They were the Himyarites or black race of Southern Arabia.
The Finns, on the other hand, were a brachy-kephalic yellow or brownish race, with round heads, low foreheads, prominent cheek-bones, with thick lips, short and flat nose, black hair and scanty beard 3.
It was from the union of these two tribes that the Gaurian race of Girsu was produced. They, as described from their features depicted on the monuments, had “ round heads, low, straight and wide foreheads, slightly prominent cheekbones, an orthognate profile, with fleshy lips, a big but not aquiline nose, and hair like that of the Dravidians, rather curly than wavy 4. They thus resembled the primitive Satyrs of Asia Minor, having the same smooth faces and generally short stature, but their hair was more curly than that of the 1 * 3 4
1   Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions: The Sabceans, § 48, p. 79.
3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. Preface, p. 32.
3   J. S. Keltie, ‘ Finland,’ Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. ix. p. 219.
4   G. Bert, in 6 The Races of the Babylonian Empire.’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Nov., 1889, p. 106,
   
81
Dravidians. They got their coarse features, large noses, fleshy lips and curly hair from the doliko-kephalic Dravidians, and their round heads and short bodies from the brachy-kephalic Finns.
These Gaurian races of the Euphrates valley adopted this name in India as the Gond descendants of the goddess Gauri, the wild bison (Bos Gaunts), who is not only the mother-goddess of the Gonds, but a goddess popularly worshipped throughout Western India. But among the early founders of organised national life in Mesopotamia there also appear a third race, that of the archers, who use the bow which became the national weapon of the Persians. These appear in Western India as the Bhils, or men of the bow (billa), who were certainly not an indigenous Indian tribe. The purest specimens of the race are generally tall with regular features and wavy hair, and they are intensely devoted to the dog,' their hunting companion ; and no Bhil will dare to break an oath made when his hand is placed on the head of his dog1. These men of the bow early obtained a commanding position in Assyria, for the tall, bearded archer standing between the sun’s rays, shooting upwards from the two oxen beneath his feet, is the topmost figure in the Assyrian standard 2.
B. The men of the bow.
Neither this arrow-shooting race, who intermixed with the Mundas and taught them the use of the bow, nor their national weapon, were of Indian origin. The original Dra- vidian weapon was the boomerang, while that of the Mundas, who are called in the Mahabharata the sons of the hill-bamboo Kichaka, was probably the male bamboo club, the lathi, which in the competent hands of the Indian lathyals and
1   Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Bhil Tribes, vol. ii. pp. 389, 390.
2   Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria. Assyrian Standard, Fig. 153, p. 326.
G

82   History and Chronology
of the old English proficients in the use of the quarter-staff, [ is one of the most formidable of weapons. This was the l': weapon of Duryodhana, the eldest Kauravya prince and leader of their army, and therefore that of the Kaur tribes, j who are the warriors of Chutia Nagpur and Chuttisgurh, and also that of the Pandava Bhima, the son of Maroti, the Gond ape-god, also called in the Mahabharata, brother of Hanuman, the striker (fianu), the Hindu name of Maroti. Bhima, who is the Gond father-god, and the god popularly • worshipped throughout Eastern India, was in the Pandava j war waged for the conquest of India, the conqueror of the » East, the home of the Munda or Malli races F. The bow, j| which is useless without its string, could only have been invented in a forest country where fibrous grasses fit for j bow-strings abounded, for they must have preceded animal jj cat-gut, which has since been sometimes used. That the string of the Indian bow was originally made of grass fibre is proved by the fact that the girdle with which Indian kshatryas or warriors are invested at eleven years old as ji a sign of manhood, is made of Murva (Sanseviera Zeylanica), ( the hemp used for making bow-strings, and it is composed of three strands to represent the three seasons of the year, j; of which the history is told in this Chapter 2. The race who j| invented the bow must have been a hunting people, ac- | customed to kill quadrupedal game such as deer. They | could never have thought out the structure and use of this L weapon in the treeless plains of Central Asia, where the |j necessary grasses did not abound, and it was only in a damp j tropical climate that these could be found ready to hand, and j. exhibiting their tenacity to all who tried to force their way ! through the tangled thickets of the forests. But if the bow ! was not invented in tropical Asia, the only other tropical !
?!
1 Mahabharata Shalya (Gadaytidha) Parva, lv.— lviii. pp. 211—228. Adi 1 (,Satnbhava) Parva, xcv. p. 286. Vana (Tirtha Yatra) Parva, cxlv. p. 439. Sabha (Digvijaya) Parva, xxix., xxx. pp. 84—87.
2   Biihler, Manu, ii.. 42; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 37; Hewitt,, Ruling Races i, of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. p. 405.
   
83
forest country within the purview of ancient geography whence it could have come is Central Africa. There the bow has always been the indigenous weapon from time immemorial, and it is among the Bantu pastoral tribes of Africa and in India that we find the one-stringed musical bow, the earliest musical instrument known ; that still played by the Mundas of Chutia Nagpur at their national dances, called Pinga in Rigveda viii. 58 (69), 7-9 s, and that called in the Hindu ritualistic mythology the Pinaka or sacred bow of Shiva2. This is the three-eyed trident-bearing aboriginal god, who in the scene in the Mahabharata which describes Arjuna’s visit to heaven to obtain the weapons of Indra, appears before him in the form of a Kirata, or hunter, accompanied by Uma (flax), the mother of the weaving races, and crowds of women dancing to the music of his bow, with which his Gond representative, Lingal, had taught the aboriginal man of the forest, Rikad Gowadi, and his wife to dance 3. This god approached Arjuna as he was contending with the boar-god of winter (the boar who ends the year of three seasons by slaying Adonis the year-sun), and it was slain by the simultaneously launched arrows of Shiva and of Arjuna, who is among the Pandava brethren the god of the rainy season beginning at the summer solstice 4.
This trident-bearing three-eyed god, who is represented as riding on a bull, and who is the only Hindu god always depicted with a white face 5, is the Hindu equivalent of the wild-bull, father of the Gaurian race of Girsu, whose
sign on the monuments is ^6, and who is called Gud-Ia,
1 Hewitt, Rilling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. p. 205, note I.
3   H. Balfour, The Natural History of the Musical Bow, pp. 5—36, 54, 64, 65.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 48,49.
4   Mahabharata Vana (Arjunabhigamana) Parva, xxxvii. p. 117. Vana (.Kairata) Parva, xxxix. pp. 120, 121.
5   Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, chap, xv., vol. i. p. 126.
6   Amiand et Mechinseau, Tableau Comparee des Ecriiures Babyloniennes et Assyriennes, no. 49, p. 19.
G 2
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History and Chronology
or the bull la. He is the father-god of the red race, the sons of RohinI, the star Aldebaran, the red cow, who was first, as we shall see, the doe-mother who gave to Assyria its earliest name of Gutium, the land of the bull {gut), and who was the father of the Hindu Gautama, the sons of the cow (go), who were first sons of Gauri, the wild - cow. This is the three-eyed bull, the Semiramis or Samirus of Babylon, a bisexual form of Istar, described in a legend quoted by Lenormant as having three eyes and two horns, who succeeded Nimrod or Ninus, the hunting - star Orion, in Babylon, invented weights and measures, and the art of weaving silk *, which was first made from the tusser cocoons of the Indian forests.
This weaving-god of the year of three seasons, whose wife is Uma {flax), is the god of the Hindu tribe called Shiva, who were the allies of the pre-Aryan Bharata, and were conquered at the battle of the ten kings described in the Rigveda by the Tritsu or fire-rubbers (trit)2, whose high priest was Vashishtha, the fire-god of the perpetual fire burning on the altar of the later worshippers of the sun-god as an independent god ruling the year and marking his own annual path round the heavens instead of being dragged as a day- star round the Pole. They are the people called Seboi by Strabo, who lived on the Indus north of the Chlnab, and it was their king Sopeithes who gave Alexander the Great a present of fighting dogs 3. In India their father-god Shiva is called the son of Ushlnara, or man {nara) of the East, a name both of the parent-god and of the people called by this name in the Rigveda 4; and that he was the father-god of a fair Northern race who brought to India the flax of Asia Minor is proved by the epithet Sveta, or the white one, applied to him in the Brahmanas 5.
1   Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic and Sorcery, Appendix, p. 396, note 2.
2   Rg. vii. 18, 7.
3   Cunningham, Ancient Geography oj India, pp. 157, 158.
^ Rg. x. 59, 18.
5 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chap. iv. p. 80, note 2,
35
   
The Indian god Shiva or Shiba, father of the Sebo , appears in the Ural-Altaic astronomy of the Akkadians as the third star in their seven Lumasi or parent-stars, the star Sib-zi-ana, Arcturus, the shepherd (sib) of the life (zi) of the god (ana), that is of the young sun-god cradled in the first of these parent constellations, Su-gi, the Star of the Wain or the Great Bear, and tended by the second Lumasi Ud-gudua, the sun (ud) of Gudua, the city of the dead, the Akkadian national cemetery. This is the constellation Virgo1, the mother of corn, depicted in Akkadian astronomical imagery as holding an ear of corn in her hand, and as crowned by a snake whose tail hangs down her back2 3. These three creating stars are: The shepherd-star Arcturus in Bootes and his virgin-wife the tree-mother of corn, the constellation Virgo, and the sun-god born of this tree- mother and concealed in the constellation of the Wain called Su-gi, or, the reed (gi) of the bird (sn or khu). In this birth story the myth of Demeter and Persephone is transferred to the North. The waste ocean void of the Southern goddess Bahu, into which Persephone is conveyed for her winter sleep, becomes here the reed-cradle of the Great Bear in the lake filled by the river Haetumant or Helmend, rising in the Akkadian mother-mountain, Khar-sak-kurra, whence Kavad, the parent of the Kushika race, was born. The lamenting Demeter becomes the watching and guarding star Virgo, while the ravisher of the summer sun becomes the guardian star Arcturus, the finder of the young sun-god • under the guise of the goat Uzava, who found Kavad 3.
This shepherd star-god who finds the lost lamb of his flock is called In the Rigveda, Aryaman, the Zend Airya- man. This star is said in the description in the Vishnu Dharma of the constellation Shlmshu mara, or the alligator
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 359—362.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Remarks on the Constellation Virgo,’ reprinted from the Yorkshire ArchccologicalJournal, Figs. vi. and vii. p. 14, representing Istar-Virgo.
3   West, Bundahish, xxxi. 24 ; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136.
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History and Chronology
which turns the stars round the Pole, to be the western foot of the constellation I. It is the star of the ploughing (dr) race of the growers of corn, the Mesopotamian barley and wheat grown by the Euphratean farmer pupils of the Indian emigrants. This male father-star, called Sib by the Akkadians and Shiva or Shiba by their conquerors in India, is the father Saiv, worshipped, as Castren tells us, by all the Ural-Altaic tribes as their supreme god 2 3. The ruling section of this Akkadian Sumerian confederacy formed by the alliance of the Indian farmers, the Finn wizard races and the hunters of the North, were the archers, the sons of Shiva or Saiv, the god of the musical bow. It was these hunting warriors who became the sons of Kush, the father of Nimrod or Orion, the hunting-star-god, and then- genealogy is told in the name of the Kushite or Kushika race. For their subsequent parent Kush the tortoise was originally the Arabic kaus, the bow, the Assyrian kastu, ’the Hebrew kausitu, and they were thus the sons of the bow. They can be traced back in prehistoric ethnology to the tall race called the men of Cro-Magnon, of whom the earliest skeletons yet discovered were found at Cro-Magnon on the Vezere, in the Department of Dordogne in France 3. Their remains date back to an early period in the Palaeolithic Age, and they represent the first people who systematically shot flint arrows from their bows, though arrows pointed with ivory were used by the still earlier men of the Spy Onoz cave in Belgium. But bows and arrows were unknown to the later Mesato-Kephalic races of Furfooz belonging to the rein-deer age, as no traces of them have been found, according to M. Dupont, in their caves on the Liesse.
1   Sachau, AlberunT’s India, vol. i. chap. ii. p. 242.
2   Castren, as quoted by R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Etruscan Inscriptions of Lemnos,’ p. 14, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, April, 1888, says Saiv is among the Finns an ‘£ Allgemeines Gotter epithet.”
3   De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap, xxvii., The Cro-Magnon Race, PP- 3I4> 3IS-
   
87
This tall race of bowmen, with fine open foreheads and large, narrow, aquiline noses, are shown by their skulls to be intimately allied to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, the Kabyles of the Beni Masser and Djurjura, and the long-headed Basques of North Spainr. It was they apparently who founded the widely-spread Bantu stock of Africa, and who made their way through Europe to Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. The aquiline nose introduced by them has become the aquiline nose of the Semites, which is owing to their Dravidian parentage, not like the Cro-Magnon nose, thin and narrow, but thick and broad.
These confederated tribes, the growers of barley and wheat, and the possessors of cattle, sheep and goats bred from Central Asian wild stocks, distributed themselves over Elam or Persia and the Euphratean countries, forming provincial groups of allied villages depending on their central capital. Some of these were peopled by purer races, and some by those who were more or less mixed, and each of these provincial divisions had its own ritual and its own measurements of annual time based upon the ancestral teachings of the dominant tribe, with variations introduced by the influence of the aliens received into the territory of the group.
C.   Substitution of Orion for Canopus as the leading star-god.
As they advanced northwards up the Euphrates valley the Dravidian farmers lost sight of their parent-star Canopus, which disappeared from the night sky in the latitude of the Northern Egyptian coast, and it was the disappearance of Canopus which led to the substitution of Orion for Canopus as the leader of the stars, an event alluded to in the story of the marriage of Canopus and Orion quoted at the beginning of this Chapter. In the belief framed 1
1 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap, xxvii., The Cro-Magnon Race, P- 335-
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History and Chronology
on this change of the star-leader it was Orion who hunted j the Pleiades and their attendant stars round the Pole, { instead of dragging them round as Canopus was believed jt to do.
The image of the hunting-god, originally the great storm- god who drove the stars round the Pole, is one which originated among the hunting races of the North, whom the Southern farmers met in Asia Minor. These were the cave men of the Palaeolithic age, the mixed descendants of the doliko-kephalic Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon races, and the brachy-kephalic men of Furfooz on the Liesse in Belgium. They had during the Palaeolithic age domesticated the rein-deer, which furnished them with food, clothes and implements, and they had made the rein-deer sun-god the ruler of their year. The dropping of his horns in autumn told them of the approach of winter, and their re-growth in spring heralded the coming summer. The prophet-god who spoke by these signs became the Celtic sun-god Cer- nunnos, whose forehead is adorned with deer’s horns in the images of him engraved on his altars found at Paris, Rheims, Sountes and Vendceuvres en Brennex. That these horns were originally rein-deer horns is to be inferred from the great antiquity of the myth of this god, who was originally the English Herne the Hunter, and also from local ritual. For at his festival, which took place at the winter solstice, rein-deer horns are at least in one place in England, Abbot’s Bromley in Staffordshire, used to decorate the head of the representative of the sun-god 1 2 3.
This horned deer-god was the god Frey ot the Edda, who fights with his deer horns, and is said in the Edda to have been with his father Njord, the North Pole god, and his twin sister Freya, the sun-hawk, taken from Asia Minor to the North in exchange for Hcenir the sun-horse 3.
|
|’;i
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lecturesjor 1886, Lcct. i. pp. 78, 79.
2   Miss Burnes, ‘Staffordshire Folk and their Lore,’ Folklore, vol. vii., for F 1896, p. 383.
3   Mallet, Northern Antiquities. The Prose Edda, pp, 418—420, 460.
   
89
The annual festival of the end and beginning of the year of this deer-sun-god is celebrated at the winter solstice, and in those parts of Scandinavia and North Germany where the primitive year festivals still survive, it begins twelve days before that date, and ends with a drama acted on the afternoon before the solstice which begins at six o’clock *. Before the fatal hour which ends the year of the sun-god, he is disguised as a deer, and courts a woman disguised as a doe. They sing ribald songs together till the last moments of the year arrive, and then the sun-god seizes the doe, and as he attacks her he was shot formerly by the arrow, but now by the ball of the Wild Hunter.
The variant forms of this story which originated in the North prove that it has been carried all over the world by the descendants of the Archer race, who believed in the deer-sun-god. It appears in India in the tale told in the Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 33. This relates that Prajapati the lord (fiati) of cultivators (prajd), the star Orion in the form of a deer, pursued his daughter RohinT, the star Aldebaran (who was, it will be remembered, the Queen of the Pleiades) in the form of a doe. This was at the end of Mriga-sirslia (November—December), the month of the deer’s (inriga) head (.sirsha), ending with the winter solstice. He violated her, and as he did so he was shot with the “ three-knotted ” arrow of Rudra, the three stars in Orion’s belt, and both these stars and the arrow indicate the three seasons of the year, the feather the spring, the shaft the summer, and the barb the winter 2. From this union there was born, according to Rigveda x. 61, 7, Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house (vastos), the household fire, the god of the Finn Tartar races, who all worship the household fire, of which the house-mother is the priestess. It was she who offered a yearly libation to the household fire
! ‘Letter from Professor Ivuhn to Dr. Rajenehalal Mitra,’ Indo-Aryans, vol. ii. pp. 300—302.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. i, 2, 8, 9, iii. 4, 4, 14—17; .S.B.E., vol. xii.p. 284, note 1, xxvi. p. 108, note 2.
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History and Chronology
11
at the festival of the jonla held at the winter solstice r. The god of the household fire, the sun-god born to replace the I dead deer-sun as the ruler of the next year, became, according to Stanzas 17, 18 of the hymn recording his birth, NabhT-nedishtha, the nearest {nedishtha) to the navel (;nabhi), the central fire on the altar 2. The story of the pursuit by Orion of the Queen of the Pleiades appears algo in the Boeotian tale of his pursuit of the seven daughters of Pleione, who were changed into the Peleiades, the Pleiades 1 doves.
It is told also in an Australian version, related by the Kamilaroi, a marrying tribe. Their complicated system of inter-marriage between a constantly changing circle of related groups, marks it as a form modified from the original matriarchal marriage of villages. In the Kamilaroi system the I confederated clans take the place of the matriarchal village groups, in which the men of one village begot the children of another village to which the children’s mothers belonged 3. Their story of Orion, whom they call Berri-berri, tells how he pursued the Miai-miai, the Pleiades. They took refuge in a tree, the mother-tree, where they became white and yellow parroquets. Berri-berri climbed after them, but they I were protected from his violence by Turum-bulum, the one- ij legged and one-eyed Pole Star god, who here takes the place of the Wild Hunter and Rudra in the Scandinavian cj and Indian variants 4.
This is the one-footed, one-eyed Annamite god called D’oc s Cu’o’c, who slew the fox of Cu’ong nam, the destroyer of 1 men, the constellation of the fox or hare Lepus at the foot • of Orion ; that is to say, he slew Orion when his year’s term, measured by the moon-fox, and its phases was ended. |l D’oc Cu’o’c is the god who gives rain to the earth, and to whom two cocks are sacrificed, the cocks sacrificed to the
1   Lenormant, Ckaldcean Magic, chap. xvi. p. 249.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 169, 170.
3   The system is described by Elie Reclus, Le Primitif d'Australie, pp.
159 ff.   4 ibid., pp. 304, 305, 320.

[Prometheus]

   
9i
sun-god of the solstitial sun by the Indian Mundas whose original home was in the mountains of South China, north of the Annamite country
Another version of the shooting of the deer-year-god with the arrow, which is told in the Sama Jataka, clears up several difficult points in the history of this widely distributed story2. It tells how the Buddha sun-god was born in a former existence as the sun-deer Sama of the race of the Nishadhas, that is of the race who did not adore the sun- god Ashadha of the year beginning with the month of that name at the summer solstice, the history of which will be told in Chapter IV. The year of the deer-sun began at the winter solstice, and during it he lived with his blind father and mother on the banks of the river Mriga-sammata, that is of the united (yam) deer (mriga).
His father and mother were ascetics who had taken the vow of chastity, that is to say belonged to that evolution of the Northern doctrine of fire-worship which laid stress on the merit of absolute chastity, as an imitator of the sexless fire drill and socket, the gods creating the holy fire. Their son was begotten by the father passing his hand over the navel of the mother, an idea derived from the supposed birth of life from the central navel of the world, the Southern mother-tree or fire-block, made pregnant by the rotation of the heavenly fire drill. This deer-sun-god born of the blind Northern father and Southern mother was shot, among his attendant deer, as the herd came down to drink the water of the deer-river, by an arrow from the bow of a hunter called Piliyakkha. This Piliyakkha, who takes the part of Rudra and the Wild Hunter, is described as a king of Kashi (Benares), but his name gives a clue to the origin of this form of the story of the death of the sun-deer. Piliyakko means in Pali, the Plaksha or Pakar tree (Ficus
1   M. G. Dumoutier, Etudes d’Ethnographie Religieuse Annamite Le Genie au Pied unique, Actes du Onzieme Congres des Orientalistes, sect. Extreme Orient B., vol. ii. pp. 275, 276, 278, 280.
2   A. St. John, ‘The Savanna Sama Jataka,’ or the Birth Story of Sama of the race (vanna) of the Sus. /.R.A.S., 1894, pp. 213 ff.
92   History and Chronology
infectoria), the sacred fig-tree which consecrates the place of pilgrimage and sacrifice called Puryag at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges. The branches of this tree were laid as a covering of the altar roofed with sheaves of Kusha grass, when animal sacrifices were offered on itL The place of pilgrimage consecrated to this mother-tree of the sacrifices of animal victims was the meeting-place where the Turanian Gonds, who killed animals in sacrifice, and who came down the Jumna, consummated their union with the previously united Munda-Dravido people, and formed the confederacy of the Kushika Naga race, whose capital was Kashi {Benares').
Sama was, at the prayer of his slayer Piliyakkha, recalled to life as the sun-god of the new year by the goddess Bahu- sundari, the beautiful Bahu, the Akkadian mother-goddess of the Southern abyss of waters, the cauldron of life, and she came down to bring back the sun-god to the rule of the year from the mountain, the mother-mountain of the Turanian races, born from the Cave-Cybele, whom they worshipped as their mother.
This story is evidently a Hindu variant of the European legend of St.;Hubert converted by the deer with the cross between its horns, which he was about to shoot, of which another variant is told, in which the repentant slayer of the deer is called St. Placidus, commander in Asia Minor of the armies of the Emperor Trajan1 2. And the proof of the relation between the two stories is given in the annexed picture of the story of St. Hubert by Albert Durer. Here we see the hunter Piliyakkha, St. Hubert, on one side of the stream of the Mriga-Sammata; on the other side stands the deer he slew, and above is the mountain castle of the goddess Bahu-Sundari, who resuscitated the dead deer-sun. I will now show the origin of the legend. Though this Asia Minor version, and the
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 3, 3, 10—12; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 202, 203.
3   Gaster, ‘TheNigrodha Miga Jataka and the Life of St. Placidus,’ /.R.A.S., 1894. P- 336.
PLATE I.
To face p. 92.
 
From the Picture by Albert Durer.
THE CONVERSION OF ST. HUBERT, CALLED IN THE SAMA JATAKA PlLIVAKKHA.
%
 
F
t
!'
n
i
   
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part taken in the Jataka story by the cave-mountain goddess would seem to point to Asia Minor, whence the god Frey was said in the Edda to go northward, as the place whence the legend originated, yet this is not a conclusion borne out by facts. The original national deer-god was most certainly the Celtic god Cernunnos, whose home was in Northern France and North-western Europe, and more especially in the Belgian country of the Ardennes. It is on the Meuse, about twelve miles to the west of the shrine of St. Hubert, the highest point of the elevated Ardennes region, called the Hautes Fagnes, that we find the shrine of the Eddie god in the cave of Frey, containing palaeolithic remains. Also the day consecrated to St. Hubert points to an ancient connection between the cult of the converted slayer of the year-deer and the original year of the Pleiades, for St. Hubert’s Day is the 3rd of November, the day succeeding the three days’ festival beginning the November year of the Pleiades. The origin of all these stories of the deer-sun-god Cernunnos is clearly traced to a Northern source, whence they travelled southward to Asia Minor, by the story of Thoas, which shows how this originally Northern tale was thus dovetailed into the Southern story of the birth of the sun-god from the mother-tree. The name of Thoas, called the king of the Tauric Chersonnesus, has been shown by Dr. Sayce to be a form of the Arabic Ta’uz, which is a corruption of the Hebrew Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-ziI, the star Orion. He, in whose country strangers were sacrificed on the altars of Artemis, lay twelve nights with his daughter, Myrrha Myrina, or Smyrna, without knowing who she was. When he recognised her he pursued her, who was in the Indian story Rohinl, the star Alde- baran, Queen of the Pleiades, with his sword or club of Orion, with which he hunts the stars round the Pole ; and she to escape him changes herself into a cypress - tree,
Sayce, Hibberl Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 235, note 3, p. 239, note 1.
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History and Chronology
whence in ten lunar months the young sun-god Adonis was born. This story, which traces Orion to the Tauric ! Chersonnesus, where human sacrifices were offered to Artemis, furnishes further proof of the Northern origin of the Orion cult, and marks Asia Minor as the country where the Northern hunters were united with the Southern sons of the tree, who shed no blood in their sacrifices.
When we turn from the national mythology of Northwest Europe to the geological history of the Hautes Fagnes, we find further proof of the correctness of these deductions. It is clear that the progress to Asia Minor and the amalgamation in that country of the alien tribes, who united to form the population of the European villages 1 founded in the beginning of the Neolithic age, must have occupied a long portion of the latter part of the Palaeo- 1 lithic age of Northern Europe. I have already shown that there are strong reasons for believing that the deer- sun myth originated in the worship of the reindeer by I the dwellers in the caves of the Ardennes country and Northern France, who had domesticated it during the Glacial epoch; and hence it is in the geological history 1 of this country, whence the emigrants to Asia Minor set forth, that we must search for information elucidating the history of the movement.
The geological survey of the alluvial quaternary deposits of Belgium, lately completed under the superintendance of M. Rutot, gives us what appears to be a most satisfactory   j1
explanation of the causes which led to the establishment   1
of the most revered shrine of the deer-sun-god in the jj barren and arid region forming the summit of the Ardennes |j country. M. Rutot tells us how, during the epoch he calls n Hesbeyenne, the third of those into which he divides the f quaternary age, there occurred a period characterised by an f extraordinary downfall of rain caused by the rapid melting of the sinking glaciers formed in the Glacial epoch, when the land was elevated. This universal thaw was the result of the subsidence of the country, which sunk from 450 to

   
95
600 feet, so that large tracts of land which were high above the sea during the Glacial period of terrestrial ele^ vation, sank below the sea level. These were therefore overwhelmed by the sea, which completely covered the valleys of the Meuse, Sambre, Scheldt, and their tributaries, and the only dry land left in Southern Belgium was the high country of the Hautes Fagnes These inundations drove into this elevated and previously ice-bound tract the whole human population which had covered the country during the previous Moseene and Campinian epochs, when the Spy Onoz men, their predecessors, and those who joined their confederacy, made their flint implements of the Mes- vinien and Mousterien types. Thus this high country became the head-quarters of national activity, and the home of those who were saved from the flood. It seems very probable that it was this wide-spread catastrophe which originated the numerous stories of a universal deluge, and the consequent escape to the mountains of the saved remnant of humanity, current in Babylonia, India, China, Greece and other lands whither the descendants of the Ardennes, sons of the sun-deer, had emigrated.
It was these people who originated the story of the year- arrow which slew the sun-deer, and of the resurrection of the slain god as the sun-god of a new year. And this story, in its progress Southward, appears in another variant form told in Rigveda iv. 27, and in the Brahmanas. The archer in this version is Krishanu, the rainbow-god, the drawer (karsh) of the bow, a reminiscence of the flood age, but his mark is not the year-deer but the Shyena bird, the bird of frost (s/iya), the sun-bird of the winter solstice. He shot her as she was flying through the sky carrying the sacred Soma, the sap of life, that is as the rain-cloud, and one of her feathers and her blood fell to the earth and grew up into the Palasha-tree (Butea frondosa), the sacred tree of the Mundas, and the first tree which was 1
1 A. Rutot, Les Origines du Quaternaire de la Belgique, pp. 121 —124.
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History and Chronology
worshipped as that which, supplied in its sap, partaken as a sacramental drink called Soma or the life-sap of Su, the bird (the root of the word Soma), the germ of an ever-reviving life x. This tree, which began its growth at the winter solstice, flowers in Central India at the time of the summer solstice, and as it grows there as a gigantic creeper spreading from tree to tree over the area where it implants itself, it covers large areas of the forest with glowing sheets of brilliant crimson flowers.
In order to see the full historical meaning of this story we must compare it with another variant form told in the ritual of the festival of the Rudra Triambika, or that of Rudra with the three wives, of which Ambika was the chief. This is a very ancient festival held at the winter solstice1 2, and the offerings presented at it are made, as the Brahmanas tell us, to Rudra’s arrow 3, that is, to the arrow of Rudra, the thunder-god form of the Pole Star god, with which he first shot at the god of the winter solstice, the year-deer. This deer becomes in this festival the year Shyena or frost (shya) bird, the bearer of the circumpolar supply of the moisture of life, the rain, which was to nourish and keep alive the living things on the earth during the coming year. The bird in this form of the story is called Ambika, the chief of the three queens of heaven, ruling the three seasons of the year. This name shows that this group of the three wives of the rain-giving god have the same names as the three daughters of the king of Kashi, who was, as we have seen in the Sama Jataka, one of the shooters of the year-arrow and the king of the Kushite capital. These three, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, were won by Bhishma, who, as we shall see hereafter, was a sexless sun-god of the age
1   Eggeling, Sat.Brah., i. 7, i, I ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 183, note 2, iv. 6,1, 3, xxvi. p. 422, where the Palasha is called the Shyena-hrila tree.
2   Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. p. 228, where he quotes Prof. Oldenberg’s description of the feast.
Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 2, 3—17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 438—442.
:

   
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of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, from the assembled princes of India to be the wives of his nephew Vi-chitra Virya, the two (i>z) coloured (cJiitrd) embodiment of male strength (Vir). Amba, the eldest of the three, is a star in the Pleiades. She was allowed to decline the royal marriage because of her previous engagement to the king of the magicians, the king of Saubha. She is thus marked as the star-mother-goddess of the primitive age of the Pleiades. Hence it is antecedently probable that her two sisters, who became the mothers of the royal races of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, from whom all subsequent Indian kings claimed descent, were also stars marking epochs of time.
This probability becomes all but a certainty when we examine the story of the birth of their children, and find that the father who begot them after the death of his childless half-brother Vi chitra Virya was Vyasa, the constellation Draco ; and also that, as I shall further prove in Chapter VI., the daughter-in-law of Ambika, called Gan-dharl, who married her blind son Dhritarashtra, was the Pole Star Vega in the constellation of the Vulture from 10,000 to 8000 B.c. That is to say, she was the Pole Star of an epoch of religious belief which made the vulture-bird-star the midqueen of a heaven supported by the blind gnomon-stone, marking the daily and yearly motions of the sun called Dhrita-rashtra, or the upholder (dhrita) of the kingdom (rashtra). This Pole Star queen of heaven, the waterer (dhari) of the land (gan organh), was the successor of Tara, the Pole Star who wedded Su-griva, the bird-headed ape, in the age of the Pleiades year, and hence Ambika who intervened between the two as the queen of heaven was also a Pole Star. Thus she was the Pole Star in the constellation Cygnus, called originally the Bird, that is to say, she was the Shyena bird-bearer of the circumpolar rain-store shot by Krishanu and Rudra, the successor of Tara, the Pole Star in Kepheus from 21,000 to 19,000 B.C. Ambika, as the Pole Star in Cygnus, was the Pole Star from 17,000 to 15,000 B.c.
H
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The third wife of Rudra was Ambalika, the mother of the impotent Pandu, who became sexless when he slew a Rishi who had assumed the form of a deer1. This Rishi slain as the year-deer was, in the variant form of the story Marlchi, the fire-spark, whence the Kushika race was born, slain as a deer by Rama, and at once transported to heaven as a star in constellation of the Great Bear or the seven antelopes (Rishya), which was, as we have seen in Akkadian astronomy, the cradle of the year-god. His mother was the bear-mother constellation, of which I shall tell the history presently, when I show its connection with this year of Orion.
The Rudra Tri ambika festival of the death and re-birth of the year-god of the year of three seasons was held at the meeting of four cross-roads to the North of the sacrificial ground. There was a mound in the centre of the meeting- place to represent the mother-mountain of the Turano-Finn race of magicians. The offerings were cakes made of rice ground on millstones placed on the skin of a black antelope, Mriga, meaning that which goes round (meregli), and applied to the animal which goes round the year-circle as the sun- bird or as the sun-deer. The black antelope was the descendant of the sun-deer. The two rice cakes offered to represent the two original seasons of the year were, according to the instructions given in the Satapatha Brahmana, thrown into the air, caught again, and hung at the end of a beam, after they had been offered to Rudra’s arrow on a Palasha leaf {Butea frondosd). This ceremonial proves that the story of Rudra’s arrow is a variant form of that of Krishanu, which brought the sacred Palasha tree to life. The priests in this sacrifice make two circular circumambu- lations of the altar. They first go three times round it contrary to the course of the summer sun, the direction represented by the female Suastika which depicts the sun’s path when it begins its yearly journey by going North
T
f
r
f
R
:
i
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcv., cxviii. pp. 286, 343—345.
   
99
at the winter solstice. In this circuit the priests are followed by the village maidens, the matriarchal village mothers.
In the second circuit, which is made sun-wards to mark the path of the sun of the male Suastika tfi. going Southward at the summer solstice, only the male sacrificer and the priests officiate.
Further proof of the correctness of the historical deduction, proving that Ambika and the Shyena or frost {shya) bird slain by Krishanu and Rudra was the Pole Star in Cygnus, is given in the ritual of the Ashva medha or sacrifice {medha) of the sun-horse (ashva), which was the New Year’s sacrifice of the year succeeding those measured by the stars and moon. In this sacrifice, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika are invoked as the three heavenly mothers, who are to lead to heaven the horse slaughtered as the sun- god of the dead year. Ambika, called the Mahishi or chief queen, addresses her two sister stars, telling them that she “ renounces the right to be the bride of the sun-horse, and resigns that honour to Su-bhadr r.” Su-bhadra, as we shall see, is the mountain-goddess Durga, the twin sister of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, whose year preceded that of the sun-horse.
In this long analysis of the year stories of the sun-deer and the year Pole Star bird, I have shown that the ruler of the year designated in them was the archer-god of heaven, called Krishanu or Rudra. He appears again in this character as Su-dharvan, the father of the three Vedic Ribhus 2, the fillers of the three cups denoting the seasons, for Su-dharvan means the bow (dharvan) of Su (khu), that is the bow of the year-bird. They are the gods called by the Babylonians Ribu, the great divine Akkadian princes, An-nun-gal 3. They form the Polar year-circle guarded 1 2 3
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 2,8,3; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 321 ; Tait. Samh., vii. 4, 19, 1; Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, chap. i. pp. 36, 37 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 336, 337, note 1.
2   Rg. iv. 35, 1.
3   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lcct. iii. p. 141, note 1.
II 2
Lof C.
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by the constellation Draco the alligator, the Akkadian Istar in her form of Rahabu, who was the Hebrew and Phoenician Rahab worshipped at Carthage and all the ancient Semite shrines as one of the chief ruling gods1. This alligator-god is the god Maga or Muggar, worshipped everywhere in Bengal and Northern India ; the god called in the Gond Song of Lingal, Puse or Mug-ral the alligator, who first saved the Gonds born from the caves at the sources of the Jumna from the flood which threatened to overwhelm them till they were taken by Lingal on board his ship, that of Dame the tortoise, the confederacy of the Kushite sons of the tortoise (kush) 2 He was the crocodile-god of Egypt, called Maga-Sebek, Maga the uniter (shk), a form of the year-god Osiris, who as Sahu was the star Orion, and as Sebek-Ra the sun-god 3.
This uniting-god of the Northern and Southern races is the Vyasa of the Mahabharata, meaning the uniter, and called the priest “ with the grim visage and the strong odour.” He was the son of Satyavatl, the fish-mother of the Matsya or royal fish (;matsya) born race, and Parashara, the overhanging {para) cloud {shard) begotten in a mist, who became, as we have seen, the father of the children of his half-brother Vi-chitra Virya, the king of two united races 4. He is the god called in one hymn in the Rigveda the father of Indra5? and in another the Vritra, the circling-snake Vyansa with the two (vi) shoulders {an sa), whom Indra slew, and who becomes in another stanza of the same hymn the god Danu, the Pole Star father of the Danava 1 * 3 4 5 6.
The three Ribhus, the three seasons or forms of the encircling year-god^ are called in Rigveda iv. 33, 4,5,9, the makers of
1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 258, note i, Gesenius, Thesaurus Rahab.
- Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 223, 224.
3   H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien /Egyfter, pp. 105, 587.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cv., cvi., pp. 317—323.
5   Rg- iv- 18, 1, 9, 10, Ludwig’s translation, Hymn 959, vol. ii. p. 590.
0 Rg. i. 32, 5, 9.
       IOI
the year-cow and her calf, and are named, (i) Vaja, the active or cunning god, the workman of the Vaishvadeva or national village {visit) gods; (2) Vibhvan, the distinguished god, the workman of Varuna ; and (3) Ribhu-ksha, the master (>ksha)z, Ribhu, the workman of Indra. This apportionment of their duties marks them as the three gods of the Chatur Masya year of three seasons of four {chatur) months each. These are dedicated in the Brahmana ritual to the (1) Vaishvadeva, the gods of the spring season ; (2) Varuna, father of the eaters (ghas) of barley, Varuna’s corn, the god of the summer called Varuna praghasah, dedicated to the barley-eaters; and to (3) Indra, god of the rainy and winter season of the Saka-medhah2 or sacrifices to the Saka or wet-god, worshipped as Sek Nag by the Gonds 3, whom we have seen (pp. 50,69) to have been the original ruling-god of India, the Arabian Sakhr, and the Akkadian Sakh or Sukh, mother of Suk-us the sun-god. This year, according to the ritual of the years measured by months as inculcated in the Brahmanas, began with the full moon of Phalguna (February —March), but as the year of the Ribhus, as it is called in the Rigveda, is that measured by seasons, it began at the winter solstice, for it was at the end of this year that the Ribhus slept for twelve days in the house of Agohya, the Pole Star, meaning “ that which cannot be concealed 4.” This twelve days sleep conclusively marks this year as that of three seasons which I am now describing, which closed with the twelve days revel before the winter solstice ending with the death of the deer-sun-god, the twelve'nights 1 * 3 4
1 The word ksha, meaning “master,” is derived by Grassmann from kshi, to rule. This is a Bactrian word whence is derived the Bactrian khsaya, powerful. The root appears in the language of the Zirian Finns as khsi, a lady, the Osetan akshi, and in the Scythian royal titles of Leipo-xais and Arpo-xais preserved by Herodotus. It appears in India in the name of ksha- trya or warrior (ksha) tribe, who are thus shown to be of Finn-Bactrian descent. Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, vol. i., Iranian Period, p. 233.
= Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 3, 1, ii. 5, 4; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 383—420.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 229.
4   Rg. iv. 33, 7.
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during which Thoas slept with his daughter the Pole Star, mother of the sun-god born of the world’s tree. There is a still further instance of this twelve days sleep to be added to the list, the twelve days and nights during which Ar-chal, the Phoenician sun-god, slept on the funeral pyre before he was recalled to life as the sun-god of the new year on the 2nd of Peritius, the 25th of December. It was the quails who woke him from the sleep of death, and it was in commemoration of this resurrection that quails were offered to the Greek Herakles J. These quails, called in theRigveda Vartika, the turners (vart) of the year, are sacred to the Ashvins or twin-gods of night and day, who release them from captivity and from the rage of the devouring wolf of time2; that is to say, restore them to life to be the heralds of the new year when they arrive in Northern India, as they usually do about the winter solstice. This story of the quails and the end of the year of Orion is repeated again in the Greek myth, which tells how Orion the hunter was placed among the stars after he had been slain on Ortygia, the island of the quails (oprvyes Foprvyes), by Artemis, the goddess of the constellation of the Great Bear. The twelve days’ sleep of Archal is also recorded in the Akkadian epic of Gilgames, which tells how Iabani, the comrade of Gilgames, was wounded by Istar, and how he died after lingering for twelve days, and how Gilgames implored the gods of the lower world to restore him to life. He rose again as the sun of the new year in the twelfth book of the poem 3, to be the antelope or gazelle sun-god 4, the Assyrian form of the Hindu black antelope-god Krishanu. This year of three seasons of Orion, the deer-hunting sun and star-god, and of the three Ribhus, is one of twelve months of twenty- nine days each, the Zend year and that of the Hindu 1 2 3 4
1   Movers, Die Phomzier, vol. i. chap. x. p. 386 ; A thence us, ix. 45.
2   Rg. i. 112, 8, 116, 14, 117, 16, x. 39, 13.
3   Frazer, ‘The Saturnalia and Kindred Festivals,’ Fortnightly Review, Nov., 1900, p. 832.
4   Sayce, Hibbcrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 282—284.
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KaranaB as explained on p. 41 ; that in which each month was divided into six weeks of five days or nights. But this reckoning only gave 348 days to the year, and the twelve more days required to complete the sun-circle of 360 days were these twelve days, which I have now shown to have been added to this year in Scandinavia, Germany, Asia Minor, Greece, Syria, and India.
The myths which I have quoted to illustrate the history of this year, show that it dates from a very remote period of human history; but remote as this period was, apparently about 17,000 B.C., when the Pole Star was in Cygnus, it was, as we see from the year - measurements, subsequent to the division of the sun-circle into 360 degrees. This is a division which arose naturally out of the measurements of the year by 72 weeks of 5 days each, a division which, as I have shown, originated among the Dravidians. The duodecimal scale on which it is based is essentially of Dravidian origin, for it arose out of the custom of counting everything by Gundas or fours, a custom which is almost instinctively used by all Indians even down to the lowest coolie. This division of the year’s time accompanies that of the day into thirty muhurtas of forty-eight and sixty ghatis or hours of twenty-four minutes each, which is universally used throughout India. It dates back to the earliest period when the fractional parts of, the year of 360 days began to be reckoned by the astronomical priests, for it appears in the instructions for building the brick altars of the sun-bird, the altar of the Agni-chayana ceremony used in the final form of Vedic ritual, instituted at the very beginning of the age of the rule of the Sanskrit speaking sun-worshippers. In the rules for building this altar, given in the Satapatha Brahmana, 10,800 bricks, called Lokam prini or bricks filling the world (loka:), are ordered to be used in building the Garhapatya and Aha- vaniya altars, and the eight Dhishnya hearths in the consecrated sacrificial ground ; and this number, equal to 360 X 30, is said to represent the number of Muhurtas, thirty
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to each day in the year, of the sacrificial altarx. This h division of the fractions of time, as Alberuni shows in his exhaustive treatise on the Hindu system of measuring time \ for astronomical purposes, underlies the whole system of \ Hindu chronology, and must undoubtedly be very much older than the oldest of the Vedic poems. In the Bud- 4 dhist Nidanakatha its origin is referred back to the days i of Kashyapa, son of Marlchi, the deer-star, in the constella- :j tion of the Great Bear, who made the Banyan tree {Ficus \ Indica) his parent-tree ; and this I have shown, in p. 26,   '
to be the national tree of Kuru-kshetra, and of the very h ancient race of the Kauravyas. The Nidanakatha says that j:i the archangel Ghati-kara, the maker of Ghatis, who gave the s Buddha the eight requisites of a mendicant saint, was the i! attendant angel of Kashyapa1 2. Among these was his | earthenware begging bowl, the symbol of the seed-bearing j earth-born tree-trunk of the early mythology. This disappeared while he Avas waiting for his initiation as the sun- jt god under the Nigrodha or Banyan tree, sacred to his forerunner Kashyapa, and it was not till after his last and final consecration as the sun-god, marching on his yearly path through the stars, that he received the eight boAvls, four j made of sapphire and four of jet, those of the round of day and night brought by the four Lokapalas or angel- regents of the four quarters of the heavens. These were made into one bowl, the vault of heaven, consecrated to the sun-god.
D.   The sun-circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. \
This measurement of the sun-circle of 360 degrees dates back also in Europe to a period of very remote antiquity, for it is undoubtedly that used by the builders of the very ancient stone circles at Solwaster in Belgium, about seven miles from Spa. There are a number of stone circles r
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., x. 4, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 360.
2 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Nidanakatha, pp. 51, 85, 86, 93,110.

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on this very high table-land, which completely dominates the surrounding country, and these have all been examined and surveyed with scientific instruments by M. Harroy, the Principal of the Government Normal School at Venders. They are all sun-circles, and in the centre of each is the Hir-men-sol, or great stone of the sun. At a distance of thirty metres from this stone is an astronomically arranged circle of stones of 360 degrees ; a stone being placed to mark each ten degrees of the circle, as tested by M. Harroy’s measurement. Thus there were originally thirty- six stones in each circle, but none of them are now quite complete. Also the stones indicating the rising points of the equinoctial and solstitial suns are larger than the others. Thus the North-east and South-west arcs of these circles form, as M. Harroy says, a great stone sextant.
Apart from these circles is the dolmen, or sacrificial stone altar, raised on four supporting stones, on which animal victims were offered. It was also used elsewhere as a burial-place, but not at Solwaster. Its longer axis points due North and South, and it is marked with the image of the ancient plough common on the dolmens of Britanny *.
Besides these Solwaster circles of 36 stones, there is also the remarkable jnner circle of 36 syenite stones at Stonehenge. This is placed inside the great circle of thirty sarsen stones denoting the thirty days of the month, and it is probably these later builders who have added the four sarsen local stones to the circle of thirty-six syenite stones brought from Dartmoor 2. These Stonehenge stones are not like those of Solwaster, so placed as to mark the degree points of the circle, and it is probable that they represent the original thirty-six Brihatl weeks of the sun’s half-yearly course. 1
1 M. Harroy, Cromlechs et Dolmens de Belgique Le Dolmen et Cromlechs de Solwaster, pp. 8—35.
Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 138—140.

[Prometheus]

io6   History and Chronology
There is also a noteworthy assemblage of thirty-six stones at Kursunno in Britanny near a dolmen, which has been I used as a burying-place. These stones are not arranged [ in a circle but placed round the sides of a square. There , are ten stones on each side, and thus the two sides uniting the two opposite sides of ten stones only contain eight stones each, so that the whole number of stones is io X io \ x 8 x 8 = 36. There was no monolith in the centre, and the square field formed by these stones was apparently a reproduction of the primitive augur field of Roman ritual. The stone circles, with the Hir-men-sols in the centre, within which no living victims were offered, were clearly erected for the adoration of the rising sun of day, and not ] of the setting sun of night of the Southern races. But these circles were certainly much later in date than the solitary j) Hir-men-sols or Menhirs, such as that at Tournai.in Belgium, and the gigantic stone menhir at St. Renan in 1 Britanny, which abound everywhere in Europe where j megalithic stones are found. These show that the original 1! cult of the sun in the stone age in North Europe was an indigenous worship introduced into southern countries by the worshippers of the deer-sun. It was these worshippers of the sun - gnomon - stone who introduced the custom of setting it up in villages as the village god. This became the Perron or sign of municipal liberty still found : in so many German and Flemish towns and depicted on ] their arms. That these were sun-stones is clear from the
I
Pyr of Augsburg, which is a fir-cone, still borne on the arms of the town, but on a Roman monument called the altar of the “ duumviri,” now in the town museum, it is placed on the top of a pillar. This pine-cone, like that on the top of the “ Thyrsus ” of Bacchus, consecrated the pillar to the sun. This rude stone menhir, which was the image of the sun-god in the early age of Orion’s year, was “ the holy white stone of the sun,” by which it is said J in the Saga of Gudrun that all Scandinavians swore I.
1   Goblet d’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, pp. 103—no; Godrunar Saga. 1

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] E. The southward emigration of the Neolithic builders of stone monuments, and of the men of the Palceolithic age, and the history of Pottery.
] These menhirs became the Beth-els of the Jews and the \ Betuli of the Arabians, and they and the dolmens and sun-
I   circles, which were not generally sun sextants as at Solwaster,
II   mark the track southward of the men of the Neolithic age.
!j They in every country through which they passed in Europe,
I Asia Minor, Syria, and the land of the stone cities of Bashan
and India, have left these megalithic monuments as evi- | dence of their rule of these lands, where they pitched | their camps. In Moab these monuments seem to be ar- | ranged in districts, as, according to Dr. Tristram, the stone circles of Callirrhoe are not associated with dolmens as they are to the North and in Ataroth, consecrated to Atar, the god of fire ; there are dolmens without circles r.
The whole system, when thoroughly examined over tracts where these megalithic monuments abound, shows a continually changing theology of sun-worship, varying, as will be seen in the sequel, with the measurements of annual time. This culminates in the two columns at the entrance of all Phoenician temples, and the sacred obelisks of Egypt and Arabia dedicated to the Vulture Pole Star goddess Vega, the Egyptian Ma’at, the Arabian El Nasr, the vulture, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.c. These builders of megalithic monuments were among the earliest emigrants ‘ from Europe and Asia Minor to India, and they are represented now by the most primitive of the caste-races, whose marriage ceremony is completed by the bridegroom’s marking the forehead and parting of the bride’s hair with red sindur. This symbolises, as is proved by the actual interfusion of blood enjoined in some caste rituals, the formation of blood
Strophe 47. The ancient pillars of cut stone set up in the centre of the village as successors to the primaeval menhirs still exist in the villages of Garsington and Cuddesdon near Oxford. In the latter place the original pillar has become the shaft of a cross.
1 Tristram, Land of Moab, chap. xiv. p. 269, xvi. p. 3008".
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brotherhood between the alien races of the bridegroom and | bride, and as almost all these marriages are accompanied by a simulated capture of the bride, the ceremony proves i that this almost universal form of marriage was introduced by a conquering race.
The tribe to which the origin of these customs is assigned is that called in the Gond traditions of the Song of ; Lingal the Kolamis who captured tfieir brides, and these formed one of the four divisions of the Gond race called in , the poem the primitive Gonds. These divisions are, (i) The ? Korkus or Mundas; (2) The Bhils or men of the bow (billa), ; whose immigration I have already accounted for ; (3) The j, j Kototyul or sons of a log of wood, the aboriginal Dravidians; j and (4) The Kolamis,
These' last are the people who introduced into India the ! family organisation of exogamous marriages, instead of that of the matriarchal village, and of the inter-tribal community of women common among the non-marrying Northern races. These marrying conquerors are represented in Bengal and ? Central India by the Males and Mai Paharias of the hills 1 of South Behar and the Kharias and Kharwars of Chutia I Nagpur, who ultimately became the Chiroos or sons of the ; bird (Chir), who are one of the three Dasyu or country If {desk) born races descended from Agastya, the star Canopus. : These people all worship the god Gumi Gosain, the god 1 of the wooden pillar ((gumo), which supports the house-roof, and against which the family hearth is placed. This pillar l is called in the theology of the Mahabharata the blind king Dhritarashtra, he who upholds {dhrita) the kingdom (rdshtra). Round the central pillar are placed balls of hardened clay, representing the ancestors of the family, and on these ! the firstfruits of the earth are offered, and the blood of fowls \- and goats poured over them. This ritual shows that theyB introduced the goat as a sacrificial animal in addition to the fowls of the Mundas. They are all sun-worshippers, and f- a pole consecrated to the sun as the god Dharma Gosain, j “ the prophet of law,” is set up in front of each house, but j
   
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j they also imitate the Mundas in worshipping the god of the Sal tree in the village grove. These Males, Mai Paharias and Kharias are still in the stone age, for they manufacture >j no metalT.
The first Indian immigrants of these races began by worshipping the Menhir or sun-gnomon-stone, still erected f by the Kossias and by the Mundas, which latter use it as i| a memorial of their dead. This became, after their union 1 with the sons of the tree, the wooden pillars of the Males \ worshipped by the Jews as the Asherah, and the gnomon- | stones and wooden tree pillars of the northern Eberones, | or sons of the boar (eber), the name assumed by the earliest I confederacy who ruled in the Ardennes. These latter people I were believers in magic, who claimed the bear as their 5 mother totem, and worshipped the stars of the Great Bear, i the mother-stars of the sons of the third Hindu queen of ! heaven Ambalika; and they were the Pandya or fair (pandu) race, who formed the third of the three Dasyu - descendants of Agastya, the Kolas or Cholas, Chiroos and i Pandyas.
These sons of the bear seem to belong to a distinctly : Northern race, whose original home was in North Europe.
In the Magic Songs of the Finns the birth of the bear is , traced to the sky-maiden who walked along the navel of heaven, the centre Polar circle, with a wool box in her hand,
I whence she threw five tufts of spinning-wool on the waves | of the sea. These were picked up by the forest-mother Mielikki, who placed the wool in her bosom, whence the [ bear was born, and she rocked the babe in a cradle of the mother-pine-tree1 2. In other words, the bear-mother was the daughter of the spinning Pleiades who went round the Pole Star navel of the sky in the year of five-day weeks, and
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Males, p. 57 ff., Mai Paharias, pp. 69—71, vol. i. Kharias, pp. 468—471.
2   Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, iii., The Origin of the Bear, Folklore, 1890, pp. 26, 27.
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of the mother-fir-tree. She was Besla, the bear-mother of Odin, who was also the son of Bor the tree I.
But we have in geology and comparative ethnology a still ; more certain guide than that given by tradition to the great i antiquity of the bear race sons of Artemis, called Arktos . the Great Bear. These people who were traditionally ruled \ by Thoas or Dumu-zi, the star Orion, king of the Tauric Chersonnesus and Asia Minor, can be traced back to the race which has furnished the earliest human skulls and skeletons yet found in the North, a race far older than that of the Furfooz men of the Hesbeyenne deluge, who wor- shipped, as we have seen, the reindeer. They are called by Quatrefages, the men of Cannstadt, whose skulls are of the type called Neanderthal. The oldest skeletons of J this group, those of the Spy Onoz man and woman, are far I? older than those of the other dominant race of the Palaeolithic age, the Cro-Magnon or archer-men, whom I have already f described. These were found eight metres outside the cave | of Spy Onoz on the Ormian, a tributary of the Sambre I; to the North-west of Namur. They lay at a depth of about four metres from the surface in the lowest of four successive ' undisturbed layers of (i) brown, (2) yellow, (3) red, and [i (4) yellow clay, the last of which was stained with burnt I charcoal2. The skulls were ten and nine millimetres, or j nearly half-an-inch thick, long and narrow, with a very < receding forehead, so that the cranial vault was very low. t The cranial capacity of the male skull was 70, and that • of the female 75, about that of the modern Australians, J Hottentots, and Peruvian Indians. One of the most remarkable features in these skulls is the great pent-house formed i| above the eyes by the eye-brow ridges, like that found among the Ainos in Japan, and the Todas in South India, si both of which races have abnormally hairy bodies. The .
1   Prose Edda, chap. vi. ; Mallet, Northern Antiquities, p. 403.
2   Proces Verbal, signed by MM. I. Braconnier, De Puydt, Fraipont,and Lehest, attached to a report of the investigations made at Spy by MM. De Puydt and , Lehest, the latter of whom is Geological Professor at the University of Liege. I
   
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eye-orbits are round and very large, and the nasal bones I prominent with large nasal orifices. The jaws are large,
1 heavy and prognathous in their upper part, and the teeth | very large, the last molars being of equal size with the rest,
] and thus differing from those of modern human jaws. The | face was almost without chin, and the skulls much resembled i those of one of the Australian tribes near Victoria *.
Though this form of skull and face is like that of a gorilla, i| yet the kephalic index is not less than that of the Indian I Brahmins, Dravidians and Persians, stated by M. Pruner
SBey to be 72 ; and this peculiarly shaped skull is, as M.
de Quatrefages shows, consistent with the possessor of great I ability, for it is reproduced not only in those of two gentle- c] men of great intellectual attainments, whose names he gives, but also in that of Robert Bruce, the Scottish king, who • had, as he says, a perfect Neanderthal skull 2.
; According to M. Fraipont, Professor of Palaeontology | at Liege, the Spy Onoz skeletons prove that the race to which they belonged was short and squat, that they usually walked i in a bowed position with bent knees, and their tibia were ' of the platy-knemic type, found also among the Ainos.
) But however unprepossessing in their appearance this 1 low-browed, dwarfish race may have been, the contents [i of the cavern in which they lived and stored their goods,
? and of the deposits found above and round their bones, con- i clusively prove that they were a really active and powerful t breed of men, who more than maintained their own in their *? life contest with the animal monarchs of the forest, who \ possessed inventive ability, and had organised a system of tribal government which marked them as people who lived in permanent settlements and not as mere wandering no- ' mads. For they made expeditions to distant lands, whence ? they brought back property, which they stored in their cave homes. Their flint implements, weapons, and ornaments
1 Topinard, Anthropology, p. 504; De Quatrefages, The Human Species,
• chap. xxvi. g. 307.
2 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap. xxvi. pp. 309, 310.
112
History and Chronology
give proof of their advance in invention, and of their wide- spread trade connection. The first are of the Mousterien type used by the earliest men of the Cro-Magnon race, and are not like those of the earlier Mesvinien and Acheu- lean epoch made of local flint, but of flint from Champagne in France, the nearest source whence this special kind of flint could be procured. The obsidian, chalcedony and opal found among these remains must have come from the volcanic formations in the eastern Eiffel and the Black Forest country. These importations tell us of a trade with these lands, and of a manufactory of flint implements in Champagne, where more care was bestowed on the manufacture of weapons such as the arrows of the Cro-Magnon men, and the spear-points of the Neanderthal hunters, than on the ruder Mesvinien flints. The excellence reached by these manufacturers shows a great advance in culture, for the form, weight, and angle of the Cro-Magnon arrows were varied for use at different distances of flight, and for the pursuit of various kinds of game h Also the importation of stones from the Eiffel and Black Forest shows the existence of a mining industry in their localities, and similar evidence of widely distributed commercial intercourse is given by the pierced shells of Pilonculos Pilosus, found in the layer above the Spy Onoz bodies, which must, according to M. Rutot, have been imported from the shell marls in Touraine. Also the ivory arrow and dart-points found in the cave deposits show that these Neanderthal folk were able to make implements of their own, and that they were acquainted with the use of the bow, though they do not seem, like the Cro-Magnon men, to have used arrows for killing large game.
The animal deposits found in the layer containing the skeletons, and those immediately above, show the very great antiquity of this race. There were bones of the woolly rhinocerus tichorinus, the horse, ox (Bos primigenius), Mam-
1 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap, xxvii., The Cro-Magnon Race, PP- 316, 317-
   
113
moth, and cave hyaena. Those of the pig, dog, bear, cave- lion and stag were less common, and there were very few bones of the reindeer. The time when these deposits were formed was therefore that before the first glacial epoch, when the animals dwelling in the forests and prairies of the country watered by the Sambre and Meuse were the woolly-rhinoceros, mammoth, primaeval ox and horse, which could better stand the cold, indicated by the presence of the reindeer, than the hippopotamus and big-nosed rhinoceros, who had dwelt there in the warmer epoch which was fast departing. The age was that following the time when the cave bears were more numerous than the cave hyaenas, and preceded that when the reindeer and bison had supplanted the animals of the warm temperate climate of the early Quaternary period. That these Neanderthal people hunted the mammoth and reindeer is proved by the seven mammoth tusks found in the corner of the cave, and the heap of reindeer horns in another. These were manifestly used for making ornaments, weapons, such as the ivory arrow-heads, dart-points, and necklaces, also found with domestic utensils made of the same materials.
But the crowning proof of the inventive ability of these men of the Spy Onoz and Neanderthal group is given by their invention of pottery. For it was they who must have made the four pieces of pottery found in the red layer above the Spy Onoz specimens. This was, according to the proces verbal, drawn up by M. Fraipont, M. de Puydt, and the members of the excavating committee, quite undisturbed, and the pottery found in it must have been buried at the same time as the bones of the early Quaternary animals which were in the same layer. That pottery was invented by the Neanderthal race, probably at the time when the advance of the glacial epoch was changing the climate, seems to me to be also clearly proved .from an examination of the evidence given by its existing use in other parts of the globe. Before the Southern Hemisphere was discovered by Europeans, pottery was entirely unknown to
I
History and Chronology
114
all Australian and Polynesian nations, except the Fijians, the Tongas of the Friendly Isles, and the people of Easter Island, where there are the only written inscriptions found in any island of the Pacific L The Fijians and their conquerors in the Friendly Isles derived their village institutions, as I have shown in Chapter I., from the Indian Naga races, formed by a union of the matriarchal people of the South with the patriarchal totem races of the North. In Fiji and Tonga all pottery is made by hand by the women, while the present Indian Kumhars, who make the Naga pottery, divide the work by making the necks of the jars on the potter’s wheel of northern invention, while the rounded parts are made by the women ; and these Kumhars claim to have been specially created by Shiva, the shepherd god of the bow Pinaka, at his marriage1 2 3 4 with Uma {flax), the mother of the weavers, and they were thus one of the earliest northern immigrants into India.
In Africa the Hottentots had no pottery before they met with Europeans, and cooked their victuals in leathern jars filled with water heated by hot stones 3. Similarly neither the Esquimaux nor the aboriginal tribes of Siberia know how to make pottery ; the former use vessels with clay sides and stone bottoms, and those of Siberia leathern or wooden vessels, like the Siberian wallet, made of birch- bark, or wooden vessels lined with stone 4. Pottery was also unknown to the Cro-Magnon men who lived in the caves of Dordogne, and it is only in three palaeolithic caves of the reindeer epoch on the Liesse that any pottery of that age is found in Belgium, except that found at Spy Onoz. These caves are the Trou des Nutons, or the Hole of the Dwarfs, the Trou de Chaleux, and the burial cave Trou de Frontal. There are only broken fragments of
1   Ratsel, History of Mankind, translated by A. J. Butler, vol. i. pp. 78, 79.
2   Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 445 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Kumhars, vol. i. pp. 518, 524.
3   Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 420.
4   Ibid., pp. 482, 483 ; De Quatrefages, The Human Species, p. 319.
   
ii5
pottery found in the first two caves, but in the Trou de Frontal there was a complete jar similar in shape to those found in neolithic graves. The skeletons buried in the Trou de Frontal are of a mesato-kephalic race, occupying a middle position between the brachy-kephalic dwarf Finn race who introduced magic and the doliko-kephalic race of Spy Onoz. It is in its flattened receding forehead and large superciliary ridges nearly allied to the Neanderthal raceJ, and as neither they nor the men of the Trou de Chaleux or Nutons used the bow, they did not derive their civilisation from the Cro-Magnon men of the South.
It is almost impossible that pottery could ever have been invented for common use in a southern forest country, where hollow bamboos and gourds were always available as water- vessels; and for their cooking the Southerners probably, long before they boiled their rice, used the hot stones on which the Kurumbas of Madras used formerly to parch it 1 2, and thus make the dry rice still sold in Indian bazaars.
The art of making pottery must have originated in an inland country with a clay soil, and one where the winter climate was so cold as to make a fire almost necessary for the preservation of life. Its inventors must have been tribes who did not live near the sea, and who could not therefore turn themselves, like the Esquimaux, into walking ovens by eating enormous quantities of whale and seal blubber. As the inland Neanderthal race could not warm themselves with this heating diet, and as the Belgian climate in the beginning of the elevation of the first glacial epoch made artificial heat necessary for those who had hitherto lived in the genial Pleiocene warmth, it is clear that their minds must have dwelt upon the consideration of methods for combating the effects of the increasing cold. Hence we see how an inventive genius among these dwellers in the river forests of Belgium, who found the clay of the soil was
1   De Quatrefages, The Htitncin Species, Races of Furfooz, chap, xxviii. P- 338.
2   Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 224.
I 2
History and Chronology
II 6
hardened by the fires lit on it, first hit on the germs of the idea of making clay fire-proof vessels. He first made platters, like those of which the Spy Onoz specimens are fragments, and then proceeded to make the jars of which the broken bits are found in the Belgian palseolithic caves of the rein* deer age.
I have not been able to find any evidence showing how the Belgian pottery was disseminated in Europe during the Palaeolithic age, but it must have been brought southward by the Neanderthal people in their wanderings, and also by their allied neighbours of Furfooz, who emigrated to Asia Minor in the reindeer age, and established there the worship of the deer-sun-god, and of the pine-mother of the bear race, the cave-mother Cybele. It was in these emigrations through countries peopled with alien races that the pure Spy Onoz group became absorbed in those it encountered in its travels. Thus mixed races were formed, partaking of the racial peculiarities of the Spy Onoz, Furfooz and Cro-Magnon stocks. It is on the North-eastern coasts of Asia that we find in the hairy Ainos of Saghalin, the most northern island of Japan, a people who apparently reproduce in their osteology the original Spy Onoz type but slightly changed by foreign inter-mixture. Their skulls show that they were descended from doliko-kephalic and brachy- kephalic ancestors, but their receding foreheads and prominent ridges over their eyes show that the Neanderthal race was one of the stocks from which they were descended. Their hairy bodies and platy-knemic tibias also point to the same conclusion. They were like all the primitive northern races, eaters of flesh, and were once cannibals, and then apparently they were fierce and warlike conquerors, and not peaceable like their present representatives. Topinard, who connects them with the European races, tells us that according to their native traditions they came from the West, accompanied by the dog, the animal sacred to the Bhil bowmen, and which w^s one of those found at Spy Onoz,
       117
where it was probably the only domestic animal kept by the tribeI.
The Ainos of the present day do not make pottery, but it is found in the old hut dwellings of the people called by the Ainos Koro-pok-guru, the dwarf dwellers underground, whom they say they conquered, and who are apparently of the same race as the dwarf men of the Liesse, and the ancient pigmy races of Scotland, who lived in the underground Piets’ houses. Pottery is also found in the shell heaps along the coast2 3.
The Ainos are a patriarchal people who acknowledge paternal descent and supremacy, for a man brings his wife to his father’s house; and they also show signs of*.affinity with the forest races of Africa, for they make cloth from the fibrous bark of the mountain-elm (Ulmus montana) 3.
Their belief in their bear descent is one of the most remarkable of their national characteristics. The bear is their parent-god, sacrificed and eaten raw by the Ainos, and roasted by the Gilyaks every year at their national year- feast in the autumn 4. The young bear who is to be eaten at each yearly sacrifice is caught as a cub and suckled by the wife of the captor. When the day of its decease comes offerings are made to it, and the women of the tribe dance before it. Its skull is worshipped after death. They shoot the bear with poisoned arrows, like those used by the dwarf races of Central Africa, and they hang up the quiver, which is looked on as holy, on the hedge surrounding the sacrificial ground. They thus show their affinity to the sons of the bow and the tree, and these ethnological relationships are also asserted in the following national birth story. A young Aino, pursuing a bear, followed it into
1   Topinard, Anthropology, pp. 350, 431, 445, 476, 505; Hitchcock, ‘The Ainos of Yezo,’ Report of the National Smithsonian Museum, 1890, p. 456.
2   Ibid., pp. 419, 421, 422, 435-
3   Ibid., pp. 465, 451.
* The feast described by Mr. Hitchcock took place on the 10th of August in 1880.
nS
History and Chronology
a cave, where he found himself in another world. He ate the fruit he found there while pursuing the bear, and was changed into a snake. He crawled back to the mouth of the cavern, where he fell asleep at the foot of a great pine-tree. The goddess of the pine-tree, a variant of Cybele, woke him and told him to climb up the tree and throw himself down from it. On doing this he found himself in his human shape, standing by the body of a serpent ripped open. Here we find evidence of descent both from the mother-tree and the circling snake, and these Indian characteristics are also repeated in the Aino worship of the fox, the foxes driven by Indra and the constellation of the fox, our Lepus, at the feet of Orion J.
Though these Ainos show Indian and African affinities, yet they seem to be ethnologically most nearly allied to the dwarf wizard races of the North, and more especially to the primitive men of Spy Onoz, a race with hunting and warlike proclivities, who called themselves the sons of the bear, and looked to the constellation of the Great Bear as their patron stars. A similar annual bear festival to that observed by the Ainos used to take place in Norway1 2, and it is apparently to North Europe that we must look for the original deification of the Bear in the bear-goddess Artemis, worshipped in Athens as the mother of all young girls, who were called her bears, and of the human sacrifices offered at her festivals, which were reminiscences of former cannibal feasts.
The early arrival in India of the bear-descended race is shown by the part they take in the story of Rama and Sita. Rama is, as we shall see, the ploughing ox, the god of the Kushikas, and his wife was Sita the furrow. He was the son of Raghu, the Northern sun-god Rai or Ra, and the expedition made by Rama to the South to recover Sita, who
1   R. Hitchcock, ‘The Ainos of Yezo,’ Report of the National Smithsonidn Museum, pp. 476, 473, 480, 485, 472.
2   Lydekker, Royal Natural History, vol. ii. p. 23.

[Prometheus]

   
119
was carried off by the ten-headed Ravana, is a reminiscence of the stories I have quoted in Chapter II., which tell how the summer sun is seized and imprisoned by the winter god of darkness dwelling in the South. Rama’s chief assistants in his quest were the ape-kings> the bird-headed ape Sugriva, and Hanuman, whom I have identified with the constellations Kepheus and Argo; but to these is added in the account of the muster of the host Jamvavan, king of the bears, with a hundred thousand bear warriors, who all have the Tiloka or bear mark of descent on their foreheads*. This king of the bear race is the constellation of the Great Bear, in which their race parents, Marlchi the fire-spark, and Kashyapa the father tortoise (hush), are chief stars. His name Jamvavan means the Jambu tree (van) (Eugenia jambolana), the sacred fruit-tree of the sun-god in the forests of Central India. This was the tree under which the Buddha, the infant sun-god, was seated on his first appearance in public at the ploughing match of the furrow (Sitd), which began the year of the ploughing Kushikas. While the Buddha was seated under this tree its shadow never moved 1 2.
This bear race in their progress southward through Eastern Asia seems to have been merged in the great confederacy of the Miao Ts’u tribes of Central China, who traced their descent to the mother Sha-yh, the grain of river sand, who was made pregnant by a floating log, the mother-tree, which became a dragon, the constellation Draco, the Northern constellation which ruled time during the age of Orion’s year, before it was succeeded by the bear constellation of the Ainos. Topinard connects the Miao Ts’u, the Ainos and the Lolos with the Samoyeas, who are not hairy like the Ainos ; and their connection with the Lolos points to a union in Eastern China of the Northern Wizard races, the worshippers of fire, with the Indian matriarchal
1   Mahabharata Vana (Draitpadi-harana) Parva, cclxxxii. p. 836.
2   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakathd, p. 75.
120   History and Chronology
Dravidians. Hence arose the Amazonian Lolo custom of | the rule of women, and the government by queens. It was from them that the Lolos of Thibet are descended x.
The route by which the hairy bear race reached India seems to have passed not through China but Asia Minor, and thence down the Euphrates. They seem to be the dwarf race called in Manx the Fenodyree, meaning those who have hair for hose, the Satyrs described in Isaiah xxxiv. 14, as “ the satyr who shall cry to his fellow,” where satyr is translated in the Vulgate pilosus, the hairy one; the attendants in Asia Minor on the goat-god Pan, who 1 is, as I shall show in Chapter IV., p. 141, the Pole Star god ; the people represented by the goblin Loblic by the Fire who, as described by Milton, basks at the fire his hairy strength 2 3 4. They are the hairy race with aquiline noses de- }, picted on the oldest seal-cylinders of Girsu, the race connected by Topinard with the Ainos, Tasmanians and the Todas of the Indian Nilgiris 3. They were the followers of the parent god Gud-ia, the bull (gud), la, who called Gutium the land of the bull. It was they and their earlier congeners the menhir builders, who built the megalithic stone monuments covering the lands in which they dwelt during their journey Southwards. They had united themselves in Asia Minor with the Indian Dravidians, and had there formed the confederacy of the sons of the sun-deer and the moon-bull, the male moon of Northern mythology. In India they became the Gautama, or sons of the bull-father, called in the Mahabharata Chandra-Kushika, the moon of the Kushikas 4. They were the earliest representatives of the
1   Terrien de la Couperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese, chap, xii. sects. 97—100; xviii. sects. 152—154, pp. 56, 57, 88, 89; Topinard, Anthropology, pp. 475, 476; Terrien de la Couperie, ‘Thibet,’ Encyc. Brit., vol. xxiii. p. 344.
2   Rhys, Celtic Folklore, chap. iv. vol. i. p. 288.
3   Topinard, Anthropology, The Pilous System, p. 350; F. Hommel, All- getneine Geschichte, Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 292.
4   Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuyd-rambha) Parva, xvii. p. 55.
       121
Brahmins who divide their caste into septs called Gotras or cow-stalls.
The primitive form of this ancient priesthood is to be found among the Todas of the Nilgiris. They are a tall form of the dwarf mesato-kephalic race of Furfooz, whom they resemble in their receding foreheads, protuberant eyebrows, and hairy bodies, traits derived from the Spy Onoz race, but their noses are not concave, like those of the Furfooz men, but aquiline *, like the Cro-Magnon and Assyrian noses. It is from these latter that they seem to have acquired their height and martial appearance. They take in India the place occupied in the ethnography of Asia Minor by the primitive Jewish warlike herdsmen of Ararat and the uplands of Cappadocia. They had features like those of the Todas, and were born from a cross with the hairy Satyr races with round heads, the ancestors of the worshippers of the goat-god Pan in Asia Minor, Arcadia1 2 and Italy, who was also the parent-god of the Indian Maids of the Kushika race, and of the Fauns of Italian mythology, the sons of the sun-deer. He was a god of the caves which were his temples, and he is a male form of Cybele, to whom oak trees were sacred.
It is in the ritual of the Todas that we find the clearest proofs of their descent from the pastoral tribes of Asia Minor, the Getae, called by Herod, i. 216, the Massa Getae or Greater Getae, who lived on the banks of the Araxes or Kur. Their principal food, like that of the Todas, was milk, and they are called by Ammianus the holiest of men. These Todas worship the sun and the Pole Star ruling and lighting their northern maternal country Am-nor, the mother (am) land. They live in round houses like those built by the Phrygians of Asia Minor, and the Finn races who trace their descent to the bear, and who also adore the household fire. They are proved to be a Northern race by their endogamous
1   Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Nilgiri Hills, vol. x. p. 309; Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 212.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 54, 5 ; vol. i. pp. 443, 444; ii. 360 ff.
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History and Chronology
marriage customs which are quite opposed to Southern exogamy, and also by their custom of polyandry, in which one wife is married to a community of brothers, a custom originating in the old Finnish national law, which made the wife the priestess of the household fire. These Todas were the priests of the latest immigration of the Northern pastoral races, the men who buried their dead in the monumental earth burial - mounds of the Scandinavian type which cover the Toda country, and adored the trident of Shiva, the shepherd-god, still worshipped by the Badagas, the agricultural section of the Toda tribes 1.
The Toda chief is the high-priest called the Palal or great I milkman, an officer answering to that of the Patesi or priest-   t
kings of the Gaurians of Girsu. He is elected to the office,   f
and after his election he is consecrated at the end of a long   r
period of fasting and meditation. He lives alone in the   il
forest for a week on the banks of the national parent-stream,   I1
and for the first three days and two nights he is perfectly   >
naked and has no fire. On the third night he may light a fire by the sacred process of twirling a wooden fire-drill in a wooden socket. Each evening his Vicar, the Kavi-lal, brings him a bowl of milk, his only nourishment. He cuts with a sacred flint-knife the branches of the national parent- 1 tree, the nut-tree called Tude (Millingtonia Symplicifolia) 2, strips off the bark, and after bathing in the sacred stream, rubs   n
his body three times a day, morning, noon and evening, with   |'j
the holy sap, which he also mixes with water and drinks. At   ij
the end of the consecration his birth as a reborn divine being is completed, and he becomes the child of the sap of the nut- k tree, born from the seed vivified by the rain, the germ of life, f which made it grow and filled its veins, the almond-tree of the Jews. This child of the nut-tree and the heaven-sent rain, the blood of God, has been nurtured in holiness by the milk of the divine mother-cow. This is the fast milk (vrata), the only food allowed during its continuance to the par-
1 Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 275.
- Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Indie a, p. 35.
123
   
>
takers of the Soma sacrament1. In this latter, the sacramental cup in the later Vedic ritual is not, as among the Todas, the nut-sap and running water, but the sap of barley, the seed of life, of the later ploughing races, mixed with river water, curds and milk, the Vedic ingredients of the latest form of Soma, called the Tri-ashira or three mixings2 3 4 5.
The baptism and consecration of the Palal, answering to the baptism of the Soma communicant, follows this week of fasting. The girdle and head-dress of each new Palal is made of the remnants of his predecessor’s robe of office. He is bathed and rubbed with the sap of seven different sacred trees, and swallows some drops of each kind of sap. After his consecration he enters on his duties as guardian of the national herd of sacred cows, whom he alone can milk morning and evening. He also bears, as the national god, the divine sceptre, the Jewish almond-rod of Aaron, the rod of the parent-tree which leads the sacred kine out to their daily pasture 3.
The sacred cattle of the sun-god recall the 350 sun-oxen of the ploughing Sikels of the Odyssey, xii. 129, the dwellers in Trinacria of the three (tri) headlands, the Triangular island of the god of the year of three seasons. Also the cows of light, which Sarama, the constellation Argo, was to deliver from their nocturnal captors 4. The great antiquity of this consecration ritual is marked by the flint - knife used by the Palal.
The sacred wand or sceptre of the divine leader of the sun- cattle was the original Baresma or rain {bares) wand, cut from the parent sun-tree, the pomegranate, date or tamarind 5, which succeeded the nut-tree, as it followed the pine-tree of
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., iii. 1,2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 6.
2   Rg. v. 27, 5 ; viii. 2, 7 ; Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 242.
3   Elie Reclus, Les Priviitifs, Monticoles des Nilgheris, pp. 260—262.
4   Rg. x. io8»
5   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendiddd Fargard, xix. 19 ; S.B.E. vol. iv. pp. 209—22, note 1.
124 History and Chronology     
the North. This, as we have seen (pp. 7, , became the Hindu | Prastara, first of Kusha (Poa cynosuroides), and afterwards | of Ashva-vala or horse-tail grass (saccharum spontanewn). The Zend high-priest, bearer of this sacred wand of office, was like the Toda Palal, “the guardian of the sacred kine,” and it is to Ahura Mazda, the breath (asn or ahu) of knowledge, called “the creator of the kine,” that the earliest 1 Gathas of the Zendavesta, the holy hymns and prayers of Zarathustra, the first high-priest, are addressed. They were j the religious hymns of the sons of the land of Gutium con- , secrated to the bull-father of the people, who were originally ' the Scandinavian Goths, the sons of Got, our God. The Zend 0 country was the land of Assyria and Northern Persia, where y the aborigines are now the shepherd Uyats. Their father- |, god became Iru, the bull-god of the Zends, who called the i[ Great Bear their parent constellation the Hapto-iringas or ; seven-bulls, a name translated by the Romans into the • Septem-triones or seven oxen who draw Charles’s Wain. , This name was given to the constellation which was first that of the hairy sons of 'the bear, when these Northern hunters were united with the farmers of the South and 1 the pastoral races of the North-west, the pastoral shep- jj herd subjects of the priest-kings, “ the guardians of the kine,” called, in reminiscence of their descent from the cavern- j haunting bears, the mountain their mother - goddess, and j named her Ida, Ila, or Ira. She was the Phrygian mother j Ida, the sheep-mother, a name surviving in the Tamil Eda, If a sheep, and in the 350 sun-sheep, which in the Odyssey pas- p tured with the sun-oxen and the sheep fed by Polyphemus, |] the Cyclops, the one-eyed Pole Star god. It was to this l race born of the mother Ida, enthroned in the Pole Star, j* resting on the central earth mountain, that the ancestors j; of the Todas and the Indian Gautama belonged; and p they, as priest-kings, ruled the Kurumbas or united shep- t herds and farmers, whose chief clan is that of the cultivating Kurmis.
CHAPTER IV.
THE YEAR OF THREE SEASONS OF SIX-DAY WEEKS RULED
BY THE EEL-GOD, THE PARENT-FISH OF THE SONS OF THE RIVERS.
I HAVE now in this historical inquiry reached a stage whence I must begin to trace the racial progress of the amalgamated tribes of farmers, hunters and shepherds, which were congregated together in Asia Minor at the close of the Palaeolithic Age. These people had, as we have seen, two original lines of ancestry, marking their southern and northern descent. As the sons of the South, they were the sons of the cloud-bird Khu and the mother-tree, and as the sons of the North, the children of the deer-sun-god and of the mother-mountain, fertilised by the rain-mist enshrouding its top, and descending to its base in the parent- rivers which water the earth with the seed of life.
A.   The sons of the rivers.
The central mother-river of these mixed northern and southern races was the holy Euphrates, called in Genesis
xi.   22, the river of Nahor, the Nahr or channel of the land, called Naharaina by the Egyptians in the inscriptions telling of the conquests of Thothmes III. This mother- river-goddess, who became afterwards the male father-god Nahor of the patriarchal Hebrews, was the Greek Anaitis, the Zend Ardvi Sura Anahita, the pure; holy, undefiled mother of life rising from the home and nest of the bird, the Zend Hu-kairya, the creating {kairya) Hu-bird r, another 1
1 Hu is the Zend form of Khu, the bird; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, Introduction; S.B.E,, vol. xxiii. p. 52.
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name of Ahura Mazda. These sons of the mountain and the bird belonged to a different stock from that of the woodland sons of the sun-deer, but as dwellers in the North they worshipped the sun as the giver of light and heat, and looked upon the sun-god as the measurer of their year.
But his annual course was not told to them in the shedding and re-growth of the reindeer horns, but in the migrations of the eel, which leaves the mother-rivers in autumn and returns in spring. Their southern ancestral history had 1 told them of the fish-mother of life dwelling in the abyss 1 of the Southern Ocean, and this prophetic mother became to the Finn race, who inherited her teaching, the eel-goddess ! Il-ja, the Icelandic all, the German aal, who became the Sanskrit Ahi, the Greek Echis. This eel-parent-god has jj become in the later Finn patriarchal theology, the air-god h Il-ma, which became Il-mar, meaning who {mar) is II, a name like that of Kutsa the where [ku], given to the j' prophet-god of the Indian Nahusha, called Varshagiras ^ the praisers (giras) of rain. The name Il-mar is that of the weather-god x, who became Il-marinen, the god of the Great Bear, the second god of the Finn triad of Vainamoinen, the rain-god, Il-marinen, and Ukko the Pole Star bird, who, as Taivahan napanen, the navel of heaven, dwells in Tahtela the home of the Pole Star, the Hindu Ushana, who causes rain to fall on the earth 2. It is this eel-smith who is the eternal forger, the arranger of the creating weather. It was as his messengers that the 'prophet-eels left and returned to the mountain-rivers.
It was apparently these Finns who introduced the god- name II or El, which is used as the sign of the divinity j in all Semitic countries. This was the god Eliun, called by Josephus, A7itiq. xi. 8, the Supreme god of the Phoenicians and Samaritans, the god still worshipped in Syria as El Khudr,
1   Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, ‘The Heroic Myth,’ pp. 238—240.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixxviii. p. 243; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Titties, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 155.
   
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the divine {el) water mkudr, Gr. v8a>p), also called the prophet {hasriti) Elias. His temples are scattered everywhere along the Syrian coast, and Dean Stanley describes one which he visited, which was devoid of images, and was only marked as a temple by the curtain drawn across the recess sacred to the Unseen God 1. His festival is celebrated throughout Syria on St. George’s Day, the 23rd of April, and Lydda, the centre of his worship, is called in the episcopal lists, ayto yeopyiov 7TO\LS, the city of the Holy George, whose temple is called the house of Khudr2 3.
Thus the eel-god is the ploughing-god, the worker (ovpyos) of the earth (yrj), the rain-god who marks his furrows in the earth by the trail of the tiny rain-streams he ploughs on the surface, which grow into the river-parents of life. He is thus the god of the channel {nahr), the Gond Nagur, the plough-god and the god of the plough constellation of the Great Bear.
This eel-ploughing prophet-god became in India the Vedic Indra, whose name is derived from the root Indu. This root appears as Aind or Indu, the eel totem of the Kharias, a semi-aboriginal tribe of Chutia Nagpur, who also have the sheep for their totem, as they may not eat mutton or even use a woollen rug. They are almost in the stone age, as they live in huts made of Sal branches stuck in the ground, and though they are able to mend their iron- pointed digging sticks {kuntis) at forges worked with most primitive bellows, they never manufacture but always buy iron. They worship Dorho Dubo, known to the Ooraons, Santals, Kharwars, and other tribes higher in the social scale, as Dharti, the god of springs, as well as Giring Dubo, the sun, and Gumi, the pole {gumo) god, who is the chief deity in their Sarnas or sacred groves 3.
1   Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 274.
2   Garnett and Stuart Glennie, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, chap, iv. p. 125; chap. v. Note on St. George, p. 192.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Kharias, vol. i., pp. 468—471 ; vol. ii., App. i., Kharia totems.
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These Kharias are the parent-tribe of the Kharwars who once ruled Chutia Nagpur, and it is to this tribe that the Raja of Ramghur in Hazaribugh belongs. He holds his estate of Ramghur as a fief vested in the holder of his hereditary office of Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Chutia Nagpur Raja. The Kharwars include the eel-god Aind among their totems, as do the Mundas, the land-holding Rautias, a branch of the Kaurs or Kauravyas, the Asuras workers in metal, the cow-keeping Gualas, the Pans weavers and basket-makers, and the Santals. The eel, under the form Amduar, is a totem of the mountain Korwas, the parent-tribe of the Mundas, and of the Behar Gualas, and the Goraits or boundary guardians. These also use the j alternative form Induar, which is also that used by the Nageshars, or worshippers of the Naga. snake, the Turis   j
or basket-makers, the Chiks a branch of the Pans, the Lohars or smiths, and the Ooraons1. In short almost all the primitive manufacturing, mining and pastoral tribes are sons of the eel. This parent-eel was worshipped, as we are told in Herod, ii. 72, by the Egyptians, and it is in India the totem-god of almost all the tribes who practise the magic and witchcraft learnt from their Finn ancestors. The sacrifice of the Copaic eel, crowned with garlands and sprinkled with meal, was an annual sacrifice of the Boeotians 2, descended from the first agricultural immigrants who, under Kadmus, the man of the East (<kedem), entered Europe from Asia Minor at the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
When we turn from tribal totem genealogy and ritual J to the evidence given in folk-stories of the belief in the )j ancestral eel-god, we find that in two Italian stories quoted |j by Count Angelo de Gubernatis the eel appears as the   ij
parent of the year of Orion, of the gods of time, Night and Day, and of the reed-thicket whence the Kushika race was born. In the first, a fisherman caught an eel with two heads
Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Appendix, List of tribal totems.
Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 132. Agatharchides referred to by Athenseus, vii. p. 297.
   
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and two tails, the two seasons of the year. The eel directed the fisherman to plant the tails in his garden, to give his entrails to his bitch and the two heads to his wife to eat. Two swords, the sword of Orion, were born from the two tails ; two dogs, Sirius and Procyon, from the entrails ; and two sons, Night and Day, from the two heads.
In the second story a maiden in a tree, the tree-mother, was entreated to come down from it by a servant of the priest, who was washing in a spring at its foot, the spring at the root of the ash-tree Yggdrasil. When she came down she was thrown by the priest’s washerwoman into the spring, where she was devoured by the parent-eel. It was caught by a fisherman, who was slain by the witch washerwoman as he was taking it to the king. She threw the eel into a bed of reeds, and it became a reed, which was opened when it was taken to the king, and from it the sun-mother-daughter of the tree was born. In a third story the year-maiden pursued by a witch becomes, in her last changes, a water-spring and an eelr.
Thus we see that the eel was the prophet and parent-fish of the sons of the mother-mountain, who traced their descent to the springs welling from its sides, which ultimately became the parent-rivers of the Iberian Basques of Asia Minor. The name Iberian is derived from the Basque Ibai-erri, the people (erri) of the rivers (ibai), who first brought wheat and barley into Europe and India. They replaced the matriarchal system of village unions by individual marriages, and with marriage they brought in the custom of the Couvade, which we are told by Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 1010, was indigenous among the Tibareni, the people of the Basque country of Iberia. The new system of patriarchal descent, which was to replace that from the mother, was introduced by the Basque fathers in the simulated sickness in which they asserted their rights as parents of their wives’ new-born child. This custom was taken by 1
1   De Gubernatis, Die Thiere, pp. 600—602, German Translation.
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them to Spain, where it still survives among the Spanish Iberian Basques, or men of- the forest (baso). They introduced it into Ulster, where it became known as “ cess noinden Ulad,” the Ulster men’s nine days and nights week of sickness, and this week, which contained four days and five nights, is a reminiscence of the old five-nights week of the Indian Danava, the Irish Tuatha De Danann. These latter were succeeded in Ireland by the Milesians, who came from Spain, and their name, meaning the sons of Mile or Bile, is interpreted by Professor Windisch as derived from the Irish Bile, a tree growing over a holy well or fort, in a word, the mother-tree shadowing the spring whence the Ibai-erri, the sons of the rivers, were born 1 as the children of Cybele, the cave-mother of Phrygia..
The emigration from Asia Minor to India of these patri- j archal Basque sons of the river, the river-reed, and the eel, who were, on one side of their descent, of Indian origin,   |
can be traced by several lines of evidence. First, by the   j
traditions of the worshippers of the household fire, introduced by them into India ; secondly, by the Indian sacrificial ritual of Orion’s and the Ribhus’ year of three seasons, which became the year of the sun-antelope ; and, thirdly, by the history told in the Gond song of Lingal and the Maha- bharata of the establishment of the rule of the Kushika kings as the supreme rulers of the confederated states of India. The history of the worshippers of the household fire, always kept alight by the house-mistress, its priestess, which became ultimately the perpetual fire maintained throughout the year on the centre of the altar of the national and village temples, begins with the Greek traditions of the Phlegyes, the Greek form of Phrygians, whose name was derived from j the root Bhur or Phur, meaning fire. They claimed descent from the Bru-ges of Thrace, and the original root of their j name was Bhri, meaning to bear or carry, to bear children. Hence they were by race the begetters and the founders
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 603, vi. p. 588, Appendix, p. 678.
   
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of the phallic worship associated with the original worship of the household fire in Asia Minor. The aspirate in their name became under Finnic influences a tennis, and thus the father-god of the begetting pair of creators became in Finnic mythology Piru, who gave eyes to the parent Finn snake 1 ; and the sons of the same father-god of the Phrygians became the Turano-Zend tribe of the Fryano sons of the god Phur or Phru, who were the intimate allies of the Zend followers of Zarathustra’s worship of the “ Creator of the kine 2 3 4,” who are called in the Gathas “ Turanians, who shall further on the settlements of piety with zeal 3.”
The union of the race of the begetters and of the worshippers of the household fire is commemorated in the first two of the five sacred fires of Zend ritual, the fires of their earliest week. These are (1) the fire of Berezi Savangha, or of the eastern (Savangha) Berezi, the mother of the race bom of ,the Brisaya or sorcerers of the Rigveda 4, the mother Maga of the Akkadian and northern dealers in witchcraft, and of the fire in stones (p. 42), whence the northern fire worshippers kindled ‘their fire before they learnt the southern art of making fire from wood.. (2) The fire. Vohu fryano, that of the Vasu or creating sons of Phur, the father fire-drill; and it was as a result of the worship of the revolving fire - drill that the mother of fire became the wooden socket in which it revolved.
The name Fryano is the Zend form of the Turanian Viru- ano, the sons of the god Viru, the Virata of the Mahabharata who ruled the country of the Matsya or fish-born people, whose parent-gods were, as we shall see, the mountain eel Matsya and his twin-sister Satyavati. They dwelt on the Jumna, where Mathura, the rubbing or twirling {manth,
1   Abercromby, ‘ Magic Songs of the Finns,’ Folklore, vol. i. p. 3S.
2   Mill, Zendavesla, Part iii., The Gathas Yasna, xxxi. 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 44.
3   Ibid., Part iii., The Gathas Gatha Ustavaiti Yasna, xlvi. 12; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 141.
4   Rg- i- 43, 4 J vi. 61, 3.
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math) city of the national central fire, was their capital. These are the same people as the shepherd tribes of Southern India, the Kurumbas, sons of the mother (amba) Kur, who are followers of the trident-carrying shepherd god, Shiva, of the Pinaka or musical bow, who came to India before the introduction of pottery into that country, as they, as I have shown on p. 115, dried their rice on a heated stone, the original Northern fire-mother. Their god, as we learn from the Mackenzie Manuscripts, is the Viru-bhadra, the blessed Viru, the phallic god, and they generally worship the Sakti, or male and female symbols of generation. They call themselves Idaiya, or sons Ida or Eda, the sheep, and include in their ranks many of the great cultivating caste of the Kurmis or Kudumbis T. They are the Virupaksha or tribe of Viru worshippers, named in a list of snake races in the Chullavagga 1 2 3, who were in the Rigveda destroyed by Indra, in his avatar of the bull-god, as the worshippers of the Shishna-deva 3, or phallic god, that is of Indra as the eel-god.
This name Viru becomes in Zend Piru, by the change in letters, which makes the Sanskrit Ashva, the horse, Aspa in Zend, and this god Piru appears in the Veda as Perum apam, the begetter or sweller of the waters, the rain-god who gives creative power to the heavenly Soma 4, an image which shows that the earliest belief in the rain-god as the father of life still maintained its supremacy in India, and did not succumb to the materialistic worship of the phallus.
In the further changes of the name of the fire-father, the Finnic Pir became in Akkadian, which replaces a proto- Median r by an 1, Pil or Bel 5. Hence the Akkadian fire- god is Bil-gi, the spirit (gi) of fire, who became the later Bel, and it is due to Ugro-Finn influence that the father-god
1 Prof. G. Oppert, Original Inhabitants of Bharata varsha, part. ii. pp. 237—239.
s Rhys David’s and Oldenberg’s Viraya Texts, Chullavagga, v. 6; S.B.E., vol. xx. p. 79.
3   Rg. vii. 21, 5 • x. 99, 3.   4 ibid. x. 36, 8.
5 Lenormant, Chaldee an Magic and Sorcery, chap, xxiii. p. 316.
   
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of the Greek worshippers of the household fires became the king Phlegyas, who ruled the Cyclopes, or men with one eye, the votaries of the Pole Star god. Greek tradition, as recorded by Pausanias, speaks of the Phlegyans as a warlike race, whose stronghold in Greece was Orchomenos, at the head of the Copaic lake where the eel was worshipped, which they occupied before the Minyans k Their king, the Northern conqueror, had two children, Kordnis and Ixion. Koronis is the crow or raven goddess to whom birds were sacrificed and whose image was of wood 1 2.
Pausanias, who mentions this image of Koronis, does not say of what wood it was made, but in one passage where he says that all the oldest images of the gods were wooden, he names ebony as first in the list of woods used for making them, and therefore, perhaps, as the wood' of the oldest images 3. Elsewhere he says that the old ebony images were brought from Egypt, where it was believed to be dug up by the ^Ethiopians 4, and that the statue of Artemis, near Tegea, which was worshipped as the Lady of the Lake, was of ebony 5. The image of Artemis at Ephesus was popularly believed to be of ebony, but, according to Pliny, the Consul Mucianus, who examined it, found it to be of vine-wood 6.
All these facts taken together seem to me to prove almost indubitably that the wooden images which were the first models of Greek sculpture were originally images of the Indian tree-mother Mari-amma, growing in the ocean mud, hence she was Artemis, the Lady of the Lake, that is the mother-tree sprung from the Southern Ocean lake. This was undoubtedly the idea present in the mind of the first sculptors of the image of Artemis at Ephesus, a city founded by the matriarchal Amazons, and the original image was the tree trunk, the form under which Artemis was represented as Artemis Orthia, and which, as we have seen (p. 31), was the
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 36, 1—3 ; vol. i. pp. 488, 489.
2   Ibid., ii. Ii,7; vol. i. p. 88.   3 * Ibid., viii. 17, 2 ; vol. i. p. 395.
4   Ibid., i. 42, 6 ; vol. i. p. 64.   5 Ibid., viii. 53, II ; vol. i. p. 443.
6 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 246.
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miraculously found image of Mari-amma as Jagahnath the ruler of the world set up in the great temple at Poori.
Ebony is the Indian wood of the] Tendoo (Diospyros Melanoxulon), growing in all the forests of Southern India, and especially plentiful on the Malabar hills, whence it has always been one of the chief exports. The .Ethiopians who sent it to Greece were, as I have shown (p. 52), the incense collectors of Southern Arabia and India, and it was undoubtedly an Indian sacred tree. From its connection with Artemis the Bear goddess and Koronis the raven, whose brother was Ixion, the Great Bear or Draco, it seems to have been especially sacred to the fire worshippers who succeeded the sons of the Sal tree, and I can, from my own experience, bring forward one very good reason for the consecration of this tree to the fire-god. While I was Settlement Officer in Chuttisgurh I noticed that ebony trees only grew on rich soil, and that when trees of other descriptions growing on soil suited to the ebony tree were burnt down in a forest fire, they were always succeeded after the fire by ebony trees, though none had grown there before. Hence the wood was especially appropriate as the symbol of the mother of fire.
Further proof that the tree-bear-goddess and her raven predecessor Korbnis, the bird-mother of life, was originally the black-goddess-mother, the raven constellation Argo, is given by the black virgin mothers worshipped in Greece. The first of these is the black Demeter called Deo, whose temple is a cave in Mount Elaios in Arcadia, that is to say she is the cave-goddess-mother of the sons of II or El, the eel-god of the parent-river. Pausanias tells us that her first wooden image was burnt in prehistoric times, but the epithet black attached to her and the black tunic in which her later image was clothed seem to show that it was one imported in matriarchal times, and made of Indian ebony. Her name Deo shows her Akkadian origin as the goddess of life (zi or di\ and I have already (p. 57) shown that the ritual of her festival, the Thesmophoria, proves her
   
135
to be the goddess-mother of the original Pleiades year, in which the mother-raven constellation Argo led the stars round the Pole. This festival, Pausanias tells us, was held in the grove of oaks round her cave, and he says that the rites were performed by a priestess assisted by the youngest of the three sacrifices. Thus this festival, in which men and women took part, was a later form of the women’s festival of the Thesmophoria, and the number of sacrifices, three, answering to the three Drupadas or sacrificial stakes of the Vedic ritual1, and the three pits (gartas) of the Trigartas of the Mahabharata, show that it was a .festival of the patriarchal year of three seasons. But at this festival of Deo no living victims were offered, only the ancient firstfruits of grapes 'and other fruits, honeycombs and unspun wool on which oil was poured 2 3 4 5. Pausanias also mentions a black Aphrodite who had temples near Mantinea in Arcadia, at Corinth, and at Thespiae in Boeotia3. She was the goddess of Paphos, whose image was a triangular black stone, the equivalent of the Phoenician goddess Ba or Baau depicted in the Hittite sign Ba ^ as the goddess of the double triangle 4. This sign is the Hittite form of the Akkadian sign for woman, ^ and for the same goddess-mother.
This black mother-goddess, whose Grecian images were made of Indian ebony, appears in India as the black virgin- mother of Krishna, the god of the black (krishna) antelope, the Indian form of the deer-sun-god of the North, worshipped by the Kushite race, and the father-god of all the Indian Brahmins descended from the Bhrigus, or sons of fire. They all on the day of their initiation wear a black antelope skin, the baptismal dress of the partakers of the sacramental Soma or tree-sap s, and tie their girdles of three strands
1   Rg. i. 24, 13.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 5, 5, 42, l—5 ; vol. i. pp. 379, 428—430.
3   Ibid., viii. 6, 5, ii. 2, 4, ix. 27, 5 ; vol. i. p. 380, 73, 477.
4   Conder, The Hittites and their Language, app. iv., Sign 6, p. 237.
5   Biihler, Manu, ii. 41, 42, Apastamba, i. 1, 3, 5 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brak., iil. 21, I—18; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 37, ii. p. 10 ; xxvi. pp. 25—30.
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in
of Munja grass (Saccharum Munja) round their waists with |> three knots to denote the three stars in Orion’s beltT, and   t
the three seasons of his year. This three-knotted girdle   1!
called the Kamberiah is worn by all the sects of the [l Dervishes of South-western Asia 2, who represent the ancient Kouretes and Dactuloi, the dancing priests who succeeded the matriarchal women dancers and danced round the Pole or gnomon-stone of the year-god of Orion’s year to represent the stars dancing round the Pole.   :
This black mother-goddess, in her form of Koronis, daughter of Phlegyas, was the wife of the Akkadian Ischus,   i>
the Sanskrit Ishu, a beam or pole, the revolving fire-drill   I
of heaven, so that she who was originally the ocean-mother of rain, the leader of the stars in their daily and yearly   j'l
round, became in the new fire mythology the fire-socket   k
in which the ever-turning Pole revolves. Throughout   I:
Europe she appears as the virgin-mother-fire-tree of night,   |
the black ebony-tree, and her temple on Mount Elaios is now   ji
the shrine of the Black Virgin'3. She is the Black Madonna   j[
of La Trouche near Grenoble, whose image, originally of black wood, is now one of black stone 4, and her festival   j;
is a May festival held on Whit-Monday. This was the   p
festival of the black English goddess Godiva 5, also held in May. There is also the stone statue of the mother- goddess at Quinapilly near Baud in Britanny, called locally the Black Virgin, and the black wooden Madonna of Bally- vourney in the County of Cork in Ireland, and that of   1
St. Molaise at Innismurray. Also the Egyptian virgin-   J
mother, called in the Golden Legend, Maria Egyptica, and   !
described as “ all black all over her body of the grate heat   !
and brennynge of the sun6.” This black-goddess, in her
1 Bal Gangadhur Tilak, Orion, chap. v. pp. 145—50.   i
2   O’Neill, The Nights of the Gods, Bethels, vol. i. p. 127.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iv. pp. 406, 407.
4   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 103.
3 Hartland, Science of Fairy Tales, p. 85.
6 Fosbroke, Cyclopedia of Antiquities, p. 102, quotes Golden Legend, fol i-J lxxii.; Crooke, The Legends of Krishna, Folklore, vol. xi., 1900, pp. 30, 31.

   
13 ;
double form as Demeter and Persephone, the November and May goddess, was originally the mother of the Pleiades year. The southward march of these sons of the phallus and fire-drill can be clearly traced in the history of the Bible, the Zendavesta, and local geography. In the Bible they are the sons of Shem, the name of God, the Great Potter, at whose command the potter’s wheel of the earth revolved when driven by the constellation Rahab or Draco, and created life by its revolutions. The son of the creating name was Arpachsad or Arpa-chasad, the land (arpa) of the conquerors (kasidi)1, the potter’s wheel of the race. This was the country of the mother-mountain Ararat, whence the parent-river-channel \{nahor) the Euphrates rose. In this land Shelah the spear, the son of the soil, was born as the potter-father of the weavers and potters 2 3 4 5. The Shelah was the Celtic Gai, the Latin Gaesum, used in kindling Hre, the Gaibolga or weapon of Cuchulainn, the sun-god 3. His weaver and potter sons were afterwards called the sons of Judah, meaning the praised, who was the Hebrew equivalent of the Hindu altar fire first called Nabha-nedishtha, nearest to the navel (nabha), and afterwards Narashamsa, praised of men, the Narya Sangha or Yazad of royal lineage of the Zendavesta 4. This spear was the sacred spear or fire-drill of the army of the conquering sons of fire, borne before them on their marches, as the American Indian warrior tribes, whose close connection with the Indian Turano Dravidians I have shown elsewhere, and will show further in the sequel of this work, still carry this holy symbol of the creating-god, which rests at night in its sacred tent 5.
The son of Shelah, the fire-spear, was Eber, the father
1 Gen. x. 21—25 ; Sayce, Bypaths of Bible Knowledge, ii., Fresh Light from Ancient Monuments.
2   1 Chron. iv. 21—23.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 381 ; Lect. v. p. 441.
4   Rg. x. 64, 3, x. 62; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 169, 179, 189.
5   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii. Essay ix., pp. 236—239.
History and Chronology
i|8
of the Basque Iberians, and his sons were Peleg and Joktan. \ Joktan’s children were the Banu Kahtan (p. 31), the rulers of the coasts of the Indian Ocean from Arabia to India, « and of the Indian gold-bearing lands of Ophir and Havilah. * Peleg, meaning the stream, the river descending to the ocean, was the father of the sons of the rivers and the river-antelope. | His name occurs in the history of Kadmus as Pelagon, who \ gave Kadmus the cow which guided him to Boeotia, marked on its flanks with the full moon. In other words, he was { the father of the races who measured time by lunar periods, called in Greece and Italy the Pelasgix, descended from Pelasgus, king of Arcadia, the grower of acorns, whose u daughter was Kallisto, the constellation of the Great Bear, 'j He was the ancestor of the race represented in the earliest f pile villages of Umbria on the lake of Fimon near Vicenza, [ containing no cereals but only hazel nuts, water-chestnuts |j and acorns, which they roasted. These people seemingly j belonged to the short brachy-kephalic and black-haired Iberian race of the Ligurians and the Celts of Auvergne j and Central France1 2 3 4 5. The offspring of the Bear-star-mother, • the sons of the rivers, traced their descent from the grandson of Peleg Serug, who, as Dr. Sayce has shown, is the father-king and god of the Akkado-Babylonians called Sar-gani, born of Sar3. His mother was a princess, the goddess Shar, the mother of corn, called by the Akkadians I-shara, the house (/) of Shara4, the temple of the sun-god Adar or Atar, the sun-god of the fire worshippers. She was also the Akkadian goddess of grass, Shar 5, that is, of the j grass whence the sacred barley and wheat was born, and as the mother of grass and corn she was the withered husk, the rice husk, which I have shown in Chapter II., p. 60,
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 12, I, viii. i, 2, 3; vol. i. pp. 459, 373—376; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 245—248.
2   Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, pp. 89, ill.
3   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 26, note I, 28, note 1.
4   Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 134, note 1, 166, note 1.
5   Ibid., Lect. iv. p. 245, note 6.
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?
in the analysis of the story of Demeter and Persephone, to be the mother of life in the oldest mythology of the South. She was the Sara of Hebrew history, who at ninety years old bore Isaac, meaning laughter, the laughing grain, which marks the outcome of the year’s labours; and this grain of wheat is, according to Professor Douglas, the earliest Chinese character for the yearJ. The sun-god of the Chinese year was the sun born from the tree, represented in the Chinese character for sun ^ , as the trident of the year of three seasons of Orion.
The mother Shar, the year-goddess of the sons of Eber, was the Basque goddess-mother Sare or Zare, meaning a basket, and its root is the same as that of Sarika or Sarats, meaning osier, which becomes in Latin Salix. It was from the osiers growing as reeds round the sources of the mother- rivers of the Iberian race in Asia Minor that Sargani, who, like Dumu-zi {Orion), knew not his father, was placed in the basket of reeds, to which his mother consigned him, in the Akkadian hymn telling of his birth. It was down the parent- river Euphrates that he went in his reed-boat, the constellation of the Great Bear, to rule the black-headed race of the South, and to till the gardens of Akki the irrigator3.
This osier basket-mother of the young sun-god, the mother of the bread of life, became the “ mystica vannus Iacchi 3,” in 1 2 3
1   China, by R. K. Douglas, p. 231.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 26, note i| 27.
3   This sacred basket containing the soul of the sun-god born from the parent- grain, appears in Malay ritual as the basket in which the first seven heads cut from the mother-sheaf are placed as the soul of the rice-child. This basket contains, before the rice-child is placed in it, a hen’s egg, showing that the rite is derived from the worship of the sun-hen goddess of the Malays or Mundas ; a nut, showing their descent from the parent-nut-tree ; and a cockleshell, showing their maritime origin, also a fire-stone. This basket is carried by the chief of the five Penjawats or female (pen) bearers representing the five days of the week, and three of the others carry the three baskets, the three seasons of the year, which were filled from the first rice cut after that of the mother-sheaf. The ears of the rice-soul are mixed with those of the last sheaf cut and taken back to the house as the mother-sheaf. It is then threshed out
I
140   History and Chronology
which the firstfruits were carried at the Eleusinian mysteries, [ and her name, Shar or Zare, proves her right to a still more [' ancient origin ; for as the goddess of the husk Sar she was the shard, the wing-case or husk of the beetle, the sacred : Egyptian scarab, who created the earth by rolling it as the ? beetle rolls a pellet of dung. The original form of the word shard is to be found in the Low German Skaard, the Ice- 1 landic Skard, the High German Scharte, meaning like \ sherd in pot-sherd, a piece of pottery, that is to say, she : was the mother*- goddess of the potter sons of Shelah, f descended from the first potters, the Spy Onoz men of the r' first Glacial epoch. This name “ sherd ” for pottery comes *• from the same root as scaur, the mountain-rock, so the E mother-star was not only the goddess of the sons of the ^ Great Potter, but also of those born from the mountain-rock, f whence the springs which gave life to the eel-fish-mother welled forth.
It was from this son of Sar, the sun-god born from the 1 reeds, that Nahor, the river Euphrates, was born, and his son [! was Terah the antelope, the Akkadian Dara, a name of la, whose ship representing the original ship of the gods, the 1 Ma or mother-constellation Argo, was called “ the ship of [ the divine antelope of the deep I.” This name of the antelope is apparently a variant form of the Hittite Tar, the goat 5 which also meant a deer2, and the Hittites were on one side 1 of their descent the Iberian Basques, whose sacred mountain in the Pyrenees is Aker-larre, now called Aque-larre, the ’ pasture {larre) of Aker the goat, the Sanskrit Aja. He is j1 the god presiding at the witches’ sabbath, held by tradition |‘ on Saturday, and in the Basque tale of Izar, the star, and \[ Lanoa, the mist, it was this god, the grey he-goat, who was 1 seen on the mountain as Luzbel, the great (Luz) crow {bel\ | the king of the wizards, where Izar was hidden as an 1
and the grain mixed with the rice-soul, and a part of this is mixed with the ij next year’s seed. Skeat, Malay Magic, The Reaping Ceremony, pp. 235—249.
1   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 280.
* Conder, The Hittites and their Language, Sign 141, pp. 231, 156.
   
141
onlooker in a hollow tree watched by his guardian-angel. It was thence he descended to heal the wise sun-maiden, Sophia, daughter of the king of Parma, who was being slain as the dying year-god by the witchcraft of the witches of the goat-god, and in this guise he was the May star of the Pleiades year heralding the return of the May Oueen from the land of winter darkness. It was this same goat-god who appeared to Izar’s brother Lanoa, the mist, when he entered the hollow mother-tree as the god of the burning mountain vomiting fire, who cast down Lanoa at the close of the Pleiades year in October into the pit of darkness r. It is this name of the parent-goat which survives in the national name of Aquitani, or those belonging to (itani) the goat Aker or Aque, given to the Basques of Southern France, the land of Aquitaine.
Thus the union of the two animals, the goat and the antelope, in the symbolical name of the national father-god of the sons of the Euphrates, marks the union of the primitive Basques, sons of the Phrygian goat-god Pan, from whom the Indian Mal£s, who sacrifice goats, are descended with the sons of the sun-deer. That the horned-goat, sacred to the Akkadian god Mul-lil, lord of the dust (/zY), and Azuga-Suga, his supreme goat, was the primitive parent- totem is proved by the goat-skin dress of the Akkadian priests, which is that of the Indian-Vaishya or villagers who worshipped the household fire, and by the Akkadian goat- god Uz, who is depicted as watching the revolutions of the sun’s disk2. This parent-goat was the Pole Star god, called Azaga-siqqa, “ the highest and horned one,” and also Uz- makh, or the mighty goat of Mullil. This god, who sits on high in the Pole Star, and watches the movements of the sun, became the great god of Gudua or Kutha, the city of the dead. He was called Nergal, whose Akkadian name 1
1   Monteiro, Legends of the Basque People, pp. 18 ff. ; Eys, Dictionnaire Basque-Franfais.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 2S5, 286; Biihler, Mann, ii. 46, Apastamba, i. 1, 3, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 37 ; vol. ii. p. 10,
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is translated by the Assyrian scribes as “ the great bright one/’ that is, the Pole Star god. The temple of Borsippa near Babylon, the temple of the Holy Mount, with its sides facing the four points of the compass, was the temple of the god of the North, called Du-azagga, the temple of the goat- god x. This was the goat round which the witches and wizards danced, and that called Aja-eka-pad or the one-footed goat (aja) by the Hindus, which was the dominant star of the Parva bhadrapada, the first half of the month Bhadra- pada, the month of the blessed foot (August—September) 1 2 3. The name of Aja-eka-pad, the one-footed goat, is given in Rg. x. 64, 4, to Brihaspati, the creator, whom I have shown to be the Pole Star god in Chapter II., p. 68.
It was this goat-god who became the Hebrew Esau, the Phoenician Usof, the eldest of the twin' sons of Isaac the corn-god. This was the scapegoat Aziz Azazel, the god of the winter season, according to Jewish theology, in which the two goats offered at the Feast of Atonement on the 10th of Tisri, or about the 1st of October, were dedicated, one to Jahveh and the other to Azazel. The goat offered to Jahveh was sacrificed on the altar. The goat of Azazel, the strong iaziz) god (el), answering to Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, the evil spirit of the Ze?idavesta, was let go into the wilderness carrying the sun of the people on its head. The whole ceremony was apparently-a survival of the rape of Proserpine by the god of the nether world, for She was, according to Suidas, called Azesia 3.
B.   The Antelope race, the phallus worshippers and house
builders.
The sons of the antelope Dara, who superseded the goat- father on the addition of the sons of the sun-deer to the
1   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. chap. xiv. pp. 183, 184, 189; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 195 > 166.
2   Sachau, Alberunl’s India, vol. ii., chap. Ixi. p. 122.
3   Levit. xvi. 9, 10, 29; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p. 367.
I
of the Myth-Making Age,
143
Satyr confederacy, were the great Dardanian race of Troy, descended from Dardanus, the son of the Pole Star god Zeus, and his son Ericthonius, the very fertile (ept) earth the snake parent-god Erecthcus, who was fed in the Erec- theum of Athens as the snake of the tree-mother Pallas Athene, whose image was the Palladium of Troy1. Erec- theus, who was identified at Athens with Poseidon, the same priest officiating for both2 3 * *, was, according to Homer, the first keeper of the twelve horses of the year 3, that of the twelve months of Orion’s year, begotten by Boreas, the north-wind of the Pole Star god. It was this god who, as Poseidon, gave to Peleus, the god of the potter’s clay (UJJXO?), the father of Achilles, his two sun-horses, Xanthus and Balios, the yellow and the dappled horse 4, of whom the latter was the spotted star Sirius, the Sanskrit Sharvara. They thus show a later line of descent than the horses of the Indian Krishna, the black antelope-god of the Sharnga or horn-bow, whose horses were Shaivya, the son of the hill-god Shiva, the constellation Taurus, in which Rohini a Aldebaran, the mother by Orion of Vastospati, the household fire, is the chief star, and Su-griva, the bird-headed ape, the Pole Star constellation Kepheus 5.
The grandson of Erectheus was Ilos, the god II, eel-parent god of the corn-growing sons of the wild fig-tree, his parent- tree shadowing his tomb 6, and he, with his two brothers Assarakos and Ganymedes, made up the three seasons of the Dardanian year. The Assyrian origin of the story of descent is affirmed most positively by Lenormant 7, who says that their names show Ilos and Assarakos to be the well- known gods of the Ninivite pantheon Ilu and Asurraku, the
1   Frazer, Patisanias, vol. ii. pp. 168, 169.
2   Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 339, 340.
3   Homer, Iliad, xx. 225.   * Ibid., xxiii. 277, 278, xvi. 148.
5   Mahabharata Sabha (Sabhakriya) Parva, ii. p. 4.
6   Homer, Iliad, xi. 167.
7   Lenormant, Note in Gazette Archeologique, 5 (1879), p. 239 ; Frazer, Pausanias, iii. pp. 202, 203.

144   History ana Chronology
latter a name of Assur, who was in India the god Ashadha, the god of the month June—July, beginning at the summer solstice. Ilos, the god of the wild fig-tree growing over his tomb at Troy1, was, like the primitive Soma tree-god, the Palasha {Bntea frondosa), the god of Spring. Assarakos was the god of Summer, and his Assyrian name Asurraku, a bed, derived from the Akkadian Asurra with the same meaning 2 3 4, marks him as the god of the bed of the summer sun in the South, the bed of Odusseus, the god of the year Path (0805), the star Orion, made by him of the olive mother- tree Athene, whence the summer sun was born.
This bed was, according to the description given of ' his work by Odusseus 3, placed round the parent-olive-tree, \p whose trunk remained as a pillar in the centre. This was the stand whence the year-god turned the world’s tree jj round as the clay rising from the potter’s wheel. It was U the forerunner of the later oil-press in which the Chakra- [! varti or wheel (chakra) turning (1varti) kings of India were | #supposed to sit. Their seat was the board surrounding jj the beam of the oil-press made to revolve by the oxen L driven round by the royal drivers. This is the oil-press to 1 which the constellation Simshumara or Draco is compared 0 in the Vishna Dharma. This, with the stars that follow it, jj is said to be driven round by the wind just as the oil-press ] is driven round by the revolving oxen 4. That this revolving j( bed was the bed of the year-god who dwells inside the |; centre of the canopy of heaven in the tree reaching to the jil Pole Star, is rendered still more certain by the dimensions j, of two other celebrated royal beds, those of Og, king of Bashan, the parent of the Rephaim or sons of Repha (Cano-   ,1
pus), and of Bel in the astronomical temple of Borsippa , at Babylon. Both of these measured 9 by 4 cubits, or 36   !
square cubits ; and that this number is connected with
1   Homer, Iliad, xi. 166, 167.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectttres for 18S7, Lect. iii. p. 183, note 3.
3   Homer, Odyssey, xxiii. 190 ff.
4   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, chap. xxii. vol. i. p. 241.
   
145
the year of 72 weeks is further proved by the 70 priests of Bel, the seventy being in the age when the seven-days week began to be reckoned, being frequently substituted for the original 72 r. Again the substance of the bed of Og, the ruler of Bashan, the land of the underground stone cities, marks its very early age and its original use as a revolving measure of time ; for it was made of 4313 brezel, meaning iron-stone or dio'rite. In other words, it was a revolving stone of the age of the logan stones, a stone supposed, like the black caaba stone at Mecca, to occupy the centre of the revolving earth 2.
The third or winter sun of the three Dardanian ancestors was Ganymedes, taken to heaven to be cup-bearer to Zeus, that is to say, appointed to fulfil the office of the Hindu Ribhus, of filling the cups denoting the year’s seasons. But this god, otherwise called Ilebe, was originally the goddess Ganymeda, whose images are crowned with ivy- leaves, and who was worshipped at Phlius and Sicyon 3 as Dia, that is a form of Demeter, the goddess of life (di). Her festival at Phlius, called the Omphalos or navel of the Peloponnesus, was, according to Pausanias, that of the ivy cutters 4. He does not give the date of the festival, but it was doubtless connected with that of Heracles, the Phoenician Ar-chal, wedded to Omphale, which occurred, as we have seen, at the winter solstice on the 25th of December. Hebe, the youthful maiden, a form of Omphale, was, according to Homer, the wife of Heracles s, and as the god’s cup-bearer was the regulator of the seasons. In the sanctuaries of Heracles cocks, and in those of Hebe hens, were kept, and a running stream divided the sexes, marking the ritual as that of the sons of the rivers 6. Hence this
1   Also see as to the significance of the seventy, Appendix C.
2   Deut. iii. io, 11 ; Halevy, Rev. des Etudes fumes, xxi. 218, 222, Bel and the Dragon, 10 ; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i. pp. 151, 152.
3   Strabo, viii. p. 382.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 13, 3—7; vol. i. pp. 90, 91.
5   Homer, Odyssey, xi. 603.
6   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 79.
B

[Prometheus]

146   History and Chronology
winter mother was Ahalya, the hen, the wife of Gautama, and afterwards of Indra, and she answered to the Roman j Bona Dea, to whom, and to the Fauns or sons of the deer, \ the beginning of December was dedicated. In the ritual of the Indian Ho-Mundas, worshippers of the sun-hen, her festival is that of the Kalam Bonga, when the rice is removed from the threshing-floors and the straw is stacked.
A fowl is then offered,- and this festival of the winter solstice represents the death of the old and the birth of a new year. This solstitial winter month was in the creed of the patriarchal sons of the rivers dedicated to the mother and father of life and their offspring, the young sun-god J.
It was from Assarakos, the god of the bed, the summer \ father of the year, that /Eneas and the Etrurian builders j, of underground tombs cut out of the rock like the stone- cities of Bashan, were descended. It was Anchises, the father of /Eneas, who stole six of the twelve year-horses of Laomedon, which were given to Tros by Zeus in , exchange for his son Ganymedes, who was, as we have seen, the sun-hen of the winter1 2. This exchange is parallel to that in the Edda, where Hcenir, the sun-horse of the North, - is given in exchange for Frey, the deer-sun-god, and his 1 twin-sister Freya, the sun-falcon, which was adopted by the Basques and Indian Chiroos, sons of the bird (Chir), as the sun-bird in place of the sun-hen. The story, in its variant forms, tells of the introduction of the worship of the sun- horse of the North, and of the division of the year into six , male and six female months ; for Anchises when taking the j six horses of Laomedon substituted for them six mares, thus : dividing the twelve year-horses into six stallions and six '! mares. This is the division of the year spoken of in Rigveda i. 164, 15, 16, where the two sections, the six if. female months of night, that is of the sun going northwards, 1 are separated by the seventh or mid-month, the oldest
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. p. 79 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Ho, vol, i. p. 329.
2   Homer, Iliad, v. 265—273.
   
147
month Jaistha (May—June), from the six male months of day, and both are called the RishisL Thus while the year-herd of Anchises consisted of six mares and six stallions, that of the Veda contained six doe and six buck antelopes (risky a), and the age in which the conception originated is marked as that of the rule of the antelope-god Dardanus.
This theology of the creating pair was that of the Kabiri, current in Lemnos Imbros and all the towns of the Troad. It was the theology of the age of phallic worship. In this belief the three creating Kabiri, the original three seasons of Orion’s year, were duplicated by three female counterparts, or rather the three male creating-gods were added to the original three mothers1 2 3. These six year-gods, who were, as we shall see, the six days of the week of the new Chronometry, were the offspring of a male and female pair, the original twins of the Zodiac, called the Mithuna in India, and represented as a boy and girl 3. They were the
1   This mid-month was probably not originally a month but a summer resting- place in the bed of the summer-god, answering to the twelve days winter rest in the earlier year of Orion in the house of the Pole Star at the summer solstice. It appears in the year astronomy of China as the season of the centre, that is of the summer solstice, and none of the twelve months are allotted to it. It is the season of the sacrifice in the middle court when the Emperor occupies the grand apartments in the Grand Fane or Hall of Distinction. It takes place according to the Ll-chi when the sun is in Gemini and Virgo. Legge, Lt-Cht, Book iv„ Supplement, sect, iii., also Part ii. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp. 252, note 1, 280, 281, 271 ; xxviii. p. 28. If the Vedic year was one like that in the Li-chi [dependent on a star, the star was Antares a Scorpio called Jaistha. One year in which the mid-month was ruled by Jaistha, Antares was the next year described in Chapter V. the cycle year of three years, beginning with the autumnal equinox. Antares a Scorpio is called in the * Tablet of the Thirty Stars,’ the Lord of Seed of the month Tisri, beginning with the autumnal equinox. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., PrUnitive Constellations, ‘The Tablet of the Thirty Stars,’ Star xxiii., vol. ii. p. 88. The sun was in Antares (Scorpio) in the month Jaistha (May—June) called after it between 14,000 B.C. and 13,000 B.C., and Antares continued to rule this and the next succeeding solstitial month Asarh (June—July), up to about 10,000 B.c.
2   Pherecydes, quoted by Strabo, x. 472; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. ii. p. 828.
3   Sachau, AlberunI’s India, vol. i., chap. xix. p. 219.
L 2
148
History and Chronology
Kami of Japan, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, f created to “ make, consolidate and give birth to ” the land of Japan, and for this purpose they were provided with j a churning spear, the Hebrew Shelah, which they made to j rotate in the ocean till the island rose from the sea. This 1 spear was in Grecian mythology the trident of Poseidon with which he made Delos to rise from the sea, and with 1 it rose the mother Lato, worshipped as a tree trunk, which [' gave birth to the twin creating-gods Apollo, who was worshipped in the Troad as Apollo Smintheus, the mouse, j the burrower in the earth, and Artemis, the goddess of the ( Great BearT.
The original parent-pair of Kabiri, who were, according n to Epimenedes of Crete, male and female, were in Greece j Hephaistos, the Sanskrit Yavishtha, the most binding (yu) | god, the one-legged Pole god, the churning spear of heaven, I* and his spouse Aphrodite, the mother-earth born from the ' ocean foam (a$pos) he raised from the sea: she was the mother-goddess of the year of the triangle, the Phoenician mother Ba. In the Trojan history of these prim?eval years, : Anchises, who first divided the year into male and female pairs, became the husband of the 'year-mother Aphrodite, 1 and takes the place of the lame, one-legged Pole Star god L as the potter turning the creating-spear. Two of the year- | horses he replaced by mares were taken from his son Aineas ; by Diomedes, son of Tydeus, the hammering (tud) god, the primaeval smith, who became the creating-potter ; and it was j with these horses that Diomedes won the chariot-race run * at the funeral of Patroclus 2, which inaugurated, as we shall |j see in Chapter VIII., the first year of the independent sun- ! god steering his course through the heavens, the year of j seventeen months of Prajapati divided into seven-day weeks. (
In considering the ethnology of this Dardanian or antelope- race who believed in their descent from the male and female ,
1
1 O’Neill, Night of the Gods, Axis Myths, vol. i. 31, 32 ; Homer, Iliad, *? 35—39-
p Homer, Iliad, v. 3*0—327 \ xxiii. 290—292, 498—513.
of ihe Myth-Making Age.
149
creator, we must not forget that in this creed the father-god was the god of the North, while the mother was the Southern goddess Ba, the Akkadian Bahu. Hence they were a mixed race formed by the union of the men of the North with the women of the South, and these people were the Pelasgi, the sons of Peleg the stream, the sons of the rivers, who, according to Herodotus ii. 51, were the founders of the Kabirian belief. These were the people who had based their system of governments on the village and provincial organisation they brought from India, and who had when they first settled in Asia Minor and Greece measured time by the Pleiades year, and who had made the first year of Orion merely a modification of the Munda year of the sun-bird. They were essentially conservative, and these conservative instincts clung to them after they had introduced the Northern custom of marriage, and accepted the system of patriarchal rule introduced by the sons of the sun-deer, who looked on the creating-god as the god of the hammer, the divine smith who produced the living spark of life, the god Marlchi, the fire spark of the Kushika, by striking with the stone hammer the anvil stone whence it was to be born. This god with the hammer was the Greek dwarf-god Hephaistos, who was, according to Herodotus iii. 37, the equivalent of the Egyptian Ptah, meaning the opener (patah), and his weapon was the hammer, Heb. Pattish. The gods of the Kabiri were the dwarf hammer-gods of the Phoenicians, called Patalkoi or the strikers, which they used to place in the front of their vessels, and the prophet-bard of this confederacy was Orpheus, whose name is the Grecian form of the Sanskrit Ribhus. The smithy of this smith- creator, before he was cast down from heaven by Zeus to become an earthly father-god, was in the mists, where the Pole Star god kept the creating rain-seed. Here was his anvil, the Greek atc/Amv, the Sanskrit Ashman, the stone which was the parent of Eurutos the Centaur, on which the fire spark in the lightning flash was struck from this meteoric stone. Eurutos was, as his name shows, the drawer
I
150
History and Chronology
(Spued) of the heavenly bow, the Sanskrit Krishanu, the slayer I of the Shyena bird of the winter solstice. The father-smith, whose son was the lightning god, the spark of creating fire, 1 was the father-god of the matriarchal theology who was i looked on in the patriarchal age as the creator of the mother- race, and we have seen that in the primaeval creed this father-god was the great ape. This ape, the Egyptian Hapi who became the god Set, was the god who sits on the world’s tree, and turns it by the pressure of his Thigh, the stars of the Great Bear, and thus makes the stars which move with it turn round the pole, the stars being attached to the tree j) as its leaves. As the god of the constellation of the Great I Bear he became the god of the potter sons of Shelah and ;i Peleg, descended from the divine potter, the turner of the i
Potter’s wheel, the Earth. He was represented in Egyptian
mythology as Ptah, the potter, and Khnum, the architect, 1 and both are portrayed as working the potter’s wheel, t Plence this dwarf-creating potter was a second birth of the 1! original ape-father-god, and he thus acquired his name of the Great Kabir, which is a northern form of the Dravidian Kapi, the ape. Proof of this deduction is given in Egyptian i picture mythology, where the god Hai, meaning the “shining one,” is depicted as an ape with an ape’s tail, and he who I is represented as.adoring the light, is followed by Bes in the J illustration given by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson. Bes, who has | a lion’s head and lion’s tail, holds in each of his hands a curved sacrificial knife, denoting the lunar crescents, and I is crowned with the crown of five feathers, denoting the five f days of the weekI. That these two gods represent gods j of the year is proved by the Book of the Dead, where in Chapter XL.2 3, under the Vignette in which Ani, when slaying a serpent who has sprung upon an ass whose neck ? it is biting, addresses the god, who here appears in serpent '
1   Gardiner Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. p. 148 ; O’Neill, Night of the Gods, the Kabeiroi, vol. ii. p. 813, Axis Myths, The Tat of Ptah,
vol. i. p. 214.
3 Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, pp. 91, 253.
       151
form as “ the abomination of Osiris,” and “ the eater of the ass,” who, as we shall see in Chapter V., ruled the cycle year of three years, and in Chapter CXLV. 85, the boat of Hal is spoken of, showing him to be a year-god with a year-ship of his year. This ape and snake-god, whose year preceded that of Osiris, is succeeded by the god called Bes, meaning fire, also called S'eb, meaning a star and fire, and depicted as the goose Bes-bes who lays the egg of life I. His image as the god with the lion’s skin and tail, following or succeeding the ape-god, is an Egyptian reproduction of the transformation of the ape-god on the banner of the Pandava rain-god Arjuna into the ape with the lion’s tail, a cognizance which Arjuna assumed when he, as the unsexed sun-god of the year of Chapter VII., set forth in the chariot of king Virata driven by Uttara the North, the Northern Great Bear constellation of the wagon of the Pole Star god, set forth to fight the army of Kauravyas under Duryodhana, the chief who fights with the club 2.
The original ape-god Hai, perhaps the god of the Indian Haihayas, born like the Egyptian Ra in the theology of Kushite emigrants from India to Egypt, became the god Ptah, who is depicted as the one-legged fire drill and the tree-ape-father. He became the prophet Kabir of the Indian Kurmis, Koiris, Sikhs, and other tribes who are strict monotheists. The Kurmis and Koiris, and the members of the other agricultural castes who follow their creed, call themselves Kabir-pantis, and their god Kabir was the Pappos or grandfather of the Phrygians, the god Attis.
The Kabirian Dards, sons of the revolving pillar-bed of their ape-father-god, turning round with its central mother- tree, were as the descendants of the antelope sun-god born of this mother-tree ; and this revolving tree became the stem of the first form of the cross the Tau cross of St. Anthony, which represented the union of the father with *
*   Brugsch, Religion and Mythologie der Alien sEgypter, pp. 172, 577.
*   Mahabharata Virata (Go-harana) Parva, xlvi. p. 109.
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History and Chronology
the mother-earth. This symbol was the hammer Mjolnir of Thor, the god of the Edda, whose chariot was drawn by goats. It was the phallic phase of this belief in the union of heaven and earth which especially appeared in the creed of the sons of the antelope. Their widespread historical and religious influence is proved by the position accorded to Dardanus, Darda, or Dara, in ancient traditional history. It was as the heir and representative of Dardanos, “ the best beloved of all the sons of Zeus 1,” that ZEneas was rescued from Achilles by Poseidon, who was his ancestor Erectheus. Darda, called the son of Mahol, that is, according to Gesenius, of the Supreme God, is named, 2 Kings iv. 31, as one of the wisest of the men who preceded Solomon, or Sallimanu, the fish-sun-god of the Akkadians. Plis father is named in 1 Chron. ii. 6, as the fifth son of Zerah, the red twin-son of Judah and Tamar, the date-palm- tree, and the ethnological difference between the sons of the antelope and the deer-sun and the sons of Rai or Ragh, the Hindu Rama, the Hebrew Ram, is shown in the same genealogy which makes Ram the son of Perez, the breach or cleft, who was the twin-brother of Zerah. Both lines traced their descent from the date-palm-tree, the tree with the male and female stocks, which will only bear fruit when the female flower is impregnated by pollen from the flower of the male tree; and its great historical importance will be seen in ChapterVII., where I tell the history of the year of the sexless sun-god Bhishma, whose cognizance was the date-palm-tree. Of the two lines descended from this phallic parent-tree, the red sons of the antelope Dara were the men of the family denounced as accursed in Joshua vii. 16-26, by the crime of Achan, and they were in India the fighting Chiroos or Kauravya, vanquished by the Pandavas, while the sons of Ram, the ploughing-god, became the peaceable rulers of the country.
The evidence which I have adduced marks Asia Minor
1 Iliad, xx. 304.
   
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as the meeting-place of the parent-stems of the composite Dardanian race, which was formed by the union of the sons of the rivers and the eel-god with the very composite race of the deer-sun-god united with the sons of the bear-stars of the Great Bear. Their original parent-river was, as we have seen, the Kur, rising in Mount Ararat, the river Daitya of the Zendavesta, and their progress thence through the . land of Elam to the East of the Tigris is shown by the statement of Herodotus i. 189, who speaks of the Dardanoi as dwelling in Kurdistan on the banks of the Gyndes, a northern tributary of the Tigris, and it is their descendants who are now the Dards of Dardistan in Northern India. They belong to the country of the Hanza-Nagar of Chitral, and are wearers of the Dard cap. It was they who with their allies came down to India as the Naga race, and their headdress is there represented by the pith helmet of the Chiroos, who succeeded the Kharwars as rulers of Magadha. This helmet is given by every Chiroo bridegroom to his bride at their marriage. This gift of the helmet also takes place at the weddings of the Hele Jats, the oldest tribe of the cultivating Jats, worshippers of Rama, the plough-godx. This hat is the survival of the Tartar hat worn by the clay images of the mound-building races of the Toda country, still found in their graves 2.
This line of march of the Basque fire-worshippers and potters, who brought into India, through the passes of the North-west, the crops of Asia Minor and the patriarchal customs of marriage, is confirmed by the local geography of their route and by the history of the Zendavesta. This tells us that their first settlement in the South-west of Asia Minor was the petroleum yielding land of Baku, through which the Kur river flows, called Ataro Patakan, the land of Atar, the fire-god. Thence they passed into the Median 1
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Chiroos, vol. i. p. 201 ; Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, N. IV. Provinces, Jats, p. 486.
8 Hunter, Gazetteer of India, vol. x. p. 322.
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History and Chronology
country of Ragha, “ of the three races I.” This was the land of the sun-god Ragha, whose name became in Akkadian cosmological history Lakh-mu, who, with his female counterpart Lakha-mu, were the male and female creators, born of Apsu, the deep, or Mum-mu Tiamat, the chaos of the sea 2 3 4, the goddess Ba-hu. It was to this pair of two gods -forming one bi-sexual creator that Beth-lehem, the shrine of the sun-god of Palestine, was dedicated. Its name means, as Dr. Sayce has shown, the house (beth) of Lakhmu, and it was there that, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, the annual death and rebirth of Tammuz or Dumu-zi was celebrated. From Ragha and Elam the fire-worshippers went Eastward to the Oxus or Ji-hun, the river of life (ji), and entered the land of Sauka-vastan, the modern Seistan, the home of the Saka or wet race, sons of the Akkadian god Sak, dominated by the Akkadian mother-mountain of Khar-sak-kurra. Thence they entered India, and for the records of their progress there, and the order in which the invading bands followed each other, we must turn to Indian sources of information.
The earliest Indian account of this immigration is that given in the Gond Song of Lingal. Lingal, the Gond creating god, is the Indian form of the Akkadian Langa, of which Nagar, a workman, the Gond Nagar, the plough, 1 is a dialectic form 3. This god is the Semitic Lamech, whose two wives, Adah and Zillah, the reproductions of the two tiger wives or outer prongs (p. 160) of the Pharsi Pen trident, are the Assyrian Edu or Idu, darkness or shade, and Tsillu- Tsir-lu, the race (In) of the snake (tsir). The former was mother of those who have cattle, the pastoral Gautama f and Todas, and the latter of the artificers the potters and weavers, and of Naamah the beautiful, a name answering \ to Kallisto, the most beautiful Great Bear goddess 4. These wives of the father phallic god, the god of the pillar-bed, J:
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, i. 16 ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 8.
2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lect. vi. pp. 384—38S ; Lect. ii. pp. m.
3   Ibid., Lect. iii. pp. 185, note 3, 186.
4   Gen. iv. 19—23 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 135.
   
155
are in the Zemiavesta, Savangha-vach, the speaker of the speech (vach) of the East, and Erina-vach, the speaker of the speech of Ira or Iran. They were the daughters of Yima, the great shepherd, the twin, the bi-sexual parent- god, the maker of the garden of God I, who wore the gold year-ring of Ahura Mazda. This garden was the well tilled fields of the mixed pastoral and agricultural people. They were first wives of Azi-Dahaka, the biting snake with three heads 2 the god of the three seasons of Orion’s year represented as the triad trident, the husband father, the summer- god of the pillar-bed, between his two wives spring and winter. Savangha-vach, the spring, is the equivalent of Tsir-lu, the goddess-mother of the fire in stones, Berezi- Savangha, the witch-mother of the sorcerers, from whom, in the genealogy of the Shah-Namah Tura, the Turanian father is descended; while Erina-vach, the mother of Airyu, the bull, is the equivalent of Edu or Idu, the mother of Jabal or Abel, the shepherd, is the winter-mother of the pastoral sons of the river and the eel. The Song of Lingal gives us the genealogical history of the Turano- Dravidian sons of the witch-mother of the artificers or builders, the men of the megalithic monuments of the Neolithic age, who came from Asia Minor, and amalgamated with the former dwellers in the land described in the previous chapters. Their history is told in the third, fourth and fifth cantos of the Song of Lingal, which tells of the birth of the second race of Gonds brought to life by the regenerated Lingal, who, after he had been slain by the first Gonds he had established in the land and taught to grow rice, was revived by the Amrita or water of immortality given to him by Kirtao Sabal, the crow or raven messenger of the gods. On his resurrection he asked Mahadeo, the creator, the Pole Star god, for a new race of Gonds, but
1 Darmesteter, Zendavesla Vendldad Fargard, ii, 2—19; S.B.E., vol. iv. pp. 10—15.
2   Darmesteter, Zcndavesta Aban Yasht, 34; S. B. E., vol. xxiii. pp. 61, 62, note 2.
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their release from the mother-mountain was refused till \ he brought the eggs of the black Bindo-bird, the original I cloud-bird, Khu. Lingal went to the Western seashore to j seek for them, but found them watched by Bhour-nag, the fire-snake, the burning sun of summer, the guardian village-snake, who had already killed seven broods of the young rain-birds. He killed the snake and was brought by the mother-eloud-bird, together with her offspring, to the Devala-giri mountain, whence the Yamuna or Jumna, the river of the twins (Yama), rises. He came there as the god of the South-west monsoon, who brings up the rains of the summer solstice. Hence he is the central summer-god.
On his arrival the new race of Gonds were born, who proceeded to show their origin by cooking their meal of the foreign millet brought from the North called Kesari j (lathyrus sativd). While they were cooking it the monsoon rains began to fall and flooded the whole country. Lingal and the four parent Gonds of the new race were saved by Dame, the tortoise (Kaswal), and Puse, the alligator, called also Muggar or Mugral; Lingal by the tortoise, and the. four Gonds by the alligator, the constellation Draco of the   1
Ribhus. Their saviour tried to devour them, and they were finally brought across the flooded country and down the river of the Twins by the tortoise. When landed at the junction of the Jumna with the Ganges, Lingal taught them to build houses (>damn), the family houses of Dame, the parent of the Kushite or tortoise race, and a town called Nur-bhumi, that of the hundred (nur) lands, the central capital of India, which became afterwards Kusambi, the mother-city (amba) of the Kushites J. He also gave them bullocks and carts, taught them to grow millets, Jowari (Holcns sorghum) and Kesari (lathyrus sativa), the latter of which is sown at the end of the rains as a second crop, mixed with the rice grown on rich upland soil. He divided the people into four tribes, (i) the Mana-wajas, who made the images of
1 This is situated close to the junction of the Jumna and Ganges. Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 391 ff.
   
15 7
the gods ; (2) Dahak-wajas or drum-beaters; (3) Koila- butal or dancers, and (4) Koi-kopal, the cow-keepers, who were the ruling tribe. With these he united the four Gond tribes he had brought in his first avatar as Sib, the shep-' herd-god, whose ethnology I have already described, p. 108 : (1) the Kolarian Korkus or Mundas ; (2) the Bhils, sons of the bow (billa) ; (3) the Kolamis, who marry by simulated capture, and (4) the Koto-tyul, or sons of the log of wood, the Marya, or tree Gonds. These formed the eight united races who peopled the Indian tortoise earth.
The central kingdom of this tortoise earth, the bed of the pillar-king, was the country called in Sanskrit Maha- Kosala, or the great Kushite land also known as Gondwana. It is named Jambu-dwipa, the land of the Jambu tree, and called in the Mahabharata the land of the Vid-arbas or double four (arba). This is the land ruled by Rukmi, king of the Bhojas, that is of the race now known as the artisans and mercantile carriers of India, who were the sons of Druhyu, the sorcerer Drah. He was king of the sons of the tree (rnkh)x, and the wielder of the bow of India called the Vi-jaya, or double thunderbolt, the
double trident,
the weapon with which the Assyrian god
Merodach or Marduk, the calf-god, is armed in the bas-relief depicting his combat with the bird-mother Tiamat1 2 3, the
Dorje of the Northern Buddhists. His sister Rukmini,
that is his female duplicate, was wife of the black antelope god Krishna 3.
This is the land wherein the Ner-budda or Nur-mada and the Sone rise from the central hill or navel of the primaeval gods Umur-kuntak, and flow west and east
1   The Hindi word for tree, our Rook in chess.
2   Goblet d’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 97, fig. 44.
3   Mahabharata Udyoga (Sainya Niryana) Parva, clviii. pp. 458, 459) Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260.
i5«
History and Chronology
as the mother-rivers of the united worshippers of the tree- sun and Pole Star gods. It is here that the sacred lotus- flower of Indra in India, and Ra in Egypt, is indigenous, and to this mother country every Brahmin must devote the sixth of the nineteen meditations of his Sun-kalpa or daily service. It is there called the land of the Jambu-tree (Eugenia jambolana), through which the Nurbudda flows from east to west, and the sun-god of this central home of the gods is said in the third subject of meditation to be the white hog of Vishnu
Lingal placed among the confederated Gonds of Jambu- dwipa priests called Pradhans or Ojhas, who married the new comers to the daughters of the earlier immigrants, taught them how to make the gods of wood and stone, the gnomon-pillar and year-gods, to sacrifice to them goats, cocks, and a calf, to drink spirits (darn), and to dance the religious dances. After giving them his final instructions he vanished, bidding them as his farewell precept to be cf true to the Tortoise1 2 3.” The tribes or castes of these milletgrowing Kushikas were, as we see by their names, bound together, not like the Southern village sons of the tree or the Northern sons of animal totems by an assumed community of descent, but their bond of union, like that of trade- guilds, was community of function, a change which marked an advance in civilisation, and the beginning of active trade.
It is in the gods made by these makers of symbols of the form of the creator that we find one of the most certain clues to their national history. The earliest god image was that of the wooden snake Sek Nag, the Akkadian god Sak, who ruled the Indian Ocean and the South-west monsoon, which fertilised the land. He is the god called Bhour Nag in the song of Lingal, and his true name Sek and his ritual are now at all events hidden as profound secrets only known
1 Beauchamp, Dubois’ Hindoo Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, vol. i.
chap. xiii. p. 147.
3   Hewitt, Ruluig Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 223.
   

[Prometheus]

 
159
to the initiated. He is worshipped only once in every seven years, and then only by males, who must appear before him naked, showing that the ritual dated from a time before clothes were worn. His shrine is under a Saja tree (terminalia tomentosa), and seven cocoa-nuts, which only flourish under sea breezes, and show that his rule extended to the sea, seven pieces of betul nut, milk, and flowers are offered to him, but no animal victims. In short he is the father-snake-god of the sons of the tree \
The successor of the aboriginal deity of the Dravidian Marya Gonds, and the first Ugro-Finn immigrants, was the bisexual god still worshipped by the Gonds at their ordinary festivals, represented by the male bamboo javelin, the Shelah or Spear of the Hebrew Kushites, cased in a hollow or female bamboo, and coated with Kusha grass like the Yupa sacrificial stake of the Soma sacrifice. This Yupa, the descendant of the GondVpear-god, was girt with three ropes of Kusha grass, denoting the three seasons of the year, at a level with the sacrificer’s navel 2.
The god which was adopted as the national deity by the millet-growing Gonds who swore to be true to the tortoise, was the Pharsi-pen, meaning the female {pen) trident (pharsi). The rules for its construction given in the Song of Lingal are as follows. The Dahak-wajas of the drummer tribe were sent into the jungle to cut a female bamboo, and into this an iron trident called Pharsi pot was fixed. The socket bamboo and the trident Pharsi were then bound together
1   The ritual of the worship and secret names of this god were told to me by the High Priest of the Raj Gonds in Chnttisgurh in the Central Provinces. I shall never forget the day when he came to tell me this secret, of which I had not the most remote previous conception. He had been for nearly a month in the habit of coming almost every day to my tent, and I had many long conversations with him as to Gond manners, customs, and creeds, but on this day he came to me trembling in every limb, with the sweat pouring down his face, and when I asked him if he was ill, he said, “No, I am quite well, but we have talked together so much over our customs that I feel I must tell you this secret, which I am bound not to reveal to any one, and for divulging it I should be killed if I was discovered.’’ He then told me the whole ritual.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 7, I, 19, 20; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 172.
History and Chronology
160
by a chain of bells, the sign of the bell-god Ghagara or Gangara, and consecrated by pouring a jar of spirits (darn) over it.
This trident-god, of which the prongs were originally of wood, was first the god of the typical tree ^ representing,
like the Caduceus of Hermes
 
called by Homer
rpi73-6T?;Xo9, or the three-leaved sign, the three parent shoots of the two cotyledons, and the plumule issuing from the three roots described on p. 30. These united ^ form the original sign of the dorje or double thunderbolt, the six- rayed star which surmounted by the crescent is the crest on the Turkish banners and the sign for star in the Cypriote syllabic alphabet. It shows by its name, the female trident, that it was originally the trident of the three mother- goddesses. These were in stellar astronomy the Pleiades Bahu, the abyss, and the raven constellation Ma or Argo. In the mythology of these first builders of houses (darna) they became the parent-goddesses of the years measured by the Pleiades and the solstitial sun, united by the Pole Star mother. Hence in the trident of Pharsi Pen, these spring and winter goddesses, its two outer prongs, became, as the Song of Lingal tells us, the two tiger wives of the central prong-god. They are there called Manko Rayetal and Jungo Rayetal, that is to say, they were the mothers of the sons of the tiger. These are the people known in Buddhist history as the Vajjians, the sons of the tiger (Pali Vyaggho, Sanskrit Vidghra), whose united confederacy of eighteen tribes ruled North-eastern India and Kashi (Benares'), called Videha, the land of the two (Vi) races x, and also like Central India Kosala. Th%se, who were a later confederacy than that of the original eight tribes of the Kushika, were the nine tribes of the Mallis or Mundas, the mountain people answering to the four primitive tribes 1


1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Kalpa Siitra, s. 12S; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 266.
1
   
161
of the Gonds, and the nine tribes of the Licchavis, the sons of the dog (Akk. Lig), the warlike traders who worshipped the fire-mother, called in the Rigveda Matarisvan, the mother of the dog (.svan), answering to the four tribes of the artisan Gonds. The earliest nucleus of this confederacy was the alliance of the first Gonds introduced by Lingal with the aboriginal founders of villages, the daughters of Rikad Gowadi, the village (gowa) son of the squirrel (Rik) x.
The northern partners of the daughters of Rikad Gowadi were the Mundas or Mons who came from China. They were the people of the Tsu or united states of the southern side of the valley of the Yang-tsi-kiang or Yellow River, and were, as we have seen on p. 119, intermixed with the hairy sons of the bear in the confederacy of the Lolos. According to a legend quoted by Terrien de la Couperie, they were born of a child suckled by a tiger, and were divided into the Pan-hu or Pan-ngao, the Indian forest (bun) Nagas, sons of the squirrel, and the Miao or cat tribes 1 2 3 These last were the race of the Eastern wizards, sons of the hawk- mother-goddess Freya, whose car was drawn by two cats. These were the two seasons of the solstitial year, as in Egypt the cat-mothcr-goddess Bast, a form of Hat-hor, the mother of Horus the sun-god, bears on her forehead the year-circle or disk with a snake creeping under it, and is associated with another goddess, Sochit, the village goddess of the high and low land, the goddess of the summer heat 3.
C.   The KusJtika Faun house-builders in Greece and Italy.
It was these two tiger or cat-mothers who became the mother-goddesses of the sons of Dame the tortoise, the j Kushika house (,dama) builders. They survive in the caste j of Dorns, once rulers of Oude and Behar, who have left
1   Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 192, 193; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 112, 113.
2   Terrien de la Couperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese, pp. 19, 38—42, 61, 70, 105.
3   H. Brugsch, Religion zmd Mythologie den alien PEgypter, pp. 333, 649.
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History and Chronology
traces of their former power in the names of the forts of Domdiha and Domangurh. They formerly ruled the country on the Rohini, the river named after the star Aldebaran, on which Kapila-vastu, the birth-place of the Buddha, is situated, •; for Ramgurh and Suhankot on this river are Dom forts. - They thus protected the Gautama, the clan of the Buddha, who are still the chief landowners in the Rohini country. , They are represented among the Babhans, the caste to which most of the ruling Rajas of Behar belong, by the sub-section of Dom-Katar, the men of the peculiar curved L knife {katari) of the Dorns, the knife of the crescent moon. \ They are basket-makers by profession, and the Chaparia |> sub-caste builds the bamboo frame-work supporting the f thatched roof of a house. Their connection with the j Kushikas is shown by their marriage ceremonies, in which jj a thread soaked in turmeric and oil, and knotted with blades of darvfi or Kusha grass, is tied round the right wrist of the bridegroom and the left of the bridex. The name of their j building-mother, Dame, marks their relationship with the 1 worshippers of the two goddesses, Damia and Auxesia, or Azesia in Greece and Damia in Italy, of whom Azesia is, as we have seen, stated by Suidas to be Persephone. They ji originally came from Crete, the maritime centre whence h Indian cults were introduced into Greece, and the ritual i of their sacrifices is, according to Pausanias, the same as that of the worship of Demeter at Eleusis. The name r. Damia, according to Hesychius, means, like the Gond Dame, the “building goddess,” and their worship was especially r. conspicuous in the ritual of Epidaurus, the city consecrated [ to Aisculapius, the divine physician, son of Kordnis, the raven- I mother, to whom cocks, the sun-birds of the Indian sons of L Dame, were offered. Damia and Auxesia were also local j. gods of Trcezen, the city whose coins are marked by the i trident, and of PEgina. The people of the island stole them *
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Babhan, vol. i. p. 31, Dom, vol. i. pp. [ 240—251, ii. Appendix, i. pi 41 ; Sir H. Elliot, Memoirs of the Races of the ' North-west Provinces of India, Dom, vol. i. p. 84.
   
163
from Epidaurus, which had received from Attica the olive wood of which their images were made, and in requital of this gift sent yearly offerings to Athens to Athene, the olive tree-mother-goddess, and Erectheus Poseidon, the snake- god of the trident. The Aiginetans, according to Herodotus, set up a special shrine for them at Oia in the centre of the island, thus distinguishing them as the goddesses of the central Hir-men-sol or sun-gnomon pillar. There they were worshipped by two choruses of dancing-women, who, by abusing one another, marked their patrons as goddesses of rival seasons. They were appointed by the ten superintendent priests assigned to each goddess. These dancing- women were clearly the Indian village women who danced at the seasonal festivals, and these dances were accompanied by the throwing of stones *.
It is in Italy that we can trace the ritual of this Creto- Grecian festival and the history of the gods worshipped in its rites most perfectly to their original source. Damia was worshipped at Rome under the name of the Bona Dea, who was, as we have seen on p. 146, the Indian Ahalya, the hen, the Greek hen Hebe, filler of the cups of the seasons, and the winter goddess. But she was originally the May goddess Persephone, and hence her festival was on the Kalends of May, that is, on our May Day. She was invoked as Damia in Tarentum and Southern Italy, and her priestess was called Damiatrix 1 2. Hence she was a Dorian goddess of the races who adopted the Dorian custom of common meals. She, like Aisculapius, was a healing deity, in whose temple healing herbs and the snakes carried by yEsculapius were kept, and a sow was offered to her at her festival. It, like the Thes- mophoria, was a festival of women from which men were excluded ; and it was said to have been held while Hercules was driving away the cattle of Cacus, whom he had slain,
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 30, 5, 6, 32,2 ; vol. i. pp. 117, 118, 121 ; iii. pp. 266, 267 ; v. p. 192 ; Herod, v. 82—87.
2   Paulus, 68; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, pp. 105, sect. 5, note 5, 104, sect 4.
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I
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and the women refused to give him water, that is to say, treated him as an alien usurper. As M. Breal has proved that Cacus, called by Dionysius Halicarnassus Ka/ctos, is a form of the Greek naiKias, the name, according to Aristotle, of a wind that brings up the rains, that is originally of the South-west Monsoon1, it is clear (1) that this May Day festival of the goddess Damia was one of the two seasonal festivals of the Pleiades year, of which the other was the Thesmophoria of October—November; (2) that both were brought from India to Greece and Italy in matriarchal times, when the village women danced at the seasonal festivals; and (3) that it was a festival praying for good rains to the rain- god of the Monsoon, who was afterwards vanquished and deprived of the cows of light by Hercules. He, in Italian mythology, was not the Phoenician Archal, the Greek Herakles, the god of the solstitial sun, but a seed-god, one of the Semones, and guardian of the household enclosure2 3, in other words, the guardian-snake. In some forms of the Cacus legend he is called Sancus, and he was thus the Sabine god Semo Sancus. Sancus, derived from the root sac or sag, is a form of the Akkadian wet-god Sak, the god of the “ sagmen,” or sacred branch of grass, which in Rome was held by those who took solemn oaths, and borne as their credentials by Roman Fetiales or priestly ambassadors. In short, he was the god of the sons of the sacred Kusha grass, the Naga Kushikas, worshippers of the ploughing and guarding Naga snake, the plough-god of the constellation of the Great Bear, and of the national Ara Maxima, sacred to Sancus, which succeeded the village and provincial grove- altars of the earlier faith 3.
This May Day festival of Azesia Damia, the earlier goddess of the second season of the Pleiades year, became in the Gond ritual the Akkhadi or ploughing festival held on the
i1
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, p. 102, sect. 1 ; Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, p. 6, Formation de la Fable, p. in.
2   The god of the Hercus, the Greek epKos, meaning an enclosed plot.
3   M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, pp. 51—58.
]
 
       165
18th of Baisakh (April—May), the New Year’s festival of the Gond year, and probably that inaugurated in the original version of the story of Hercules and Cacus with the death and dethronement of the latter. It is then that the new millet used as food for horses, called gram, is eaten, as at the feast of firstfruits at the beginning of the Pleiades year in November, the making of agricultural implements begun, and the plough, though in India at that season the earth is as hard as a brick, passed lightly over the land. The year thus initiated is that of a confederacy of craftsmen, which each workman, according to the custom observed at Rome, and also among the Cymri of Britain, began by working for a short time at his trade I.
D.   The gods of the six-days week.
It was apparently contemporaneously with the institution of this new year with its inauguration festival that Lingal, before his departure as the god of the old faith, established the worship of the six Gond gods, and thus doubled the number of the three trident gods. These gods are : (1) Bhim- sen, the Hindu Bhima, the god of the fire - worshipping Dosadhs of Magadha, the priests of Rahu. He was the Pandava Bhima of the Mahabharata, son of Maroti the tree (marom) ape-god, called the brother of Hanuman, the god of the club or lathi, his weapon in war, that is to say, of the male-bamboo or fire-drill 2 3; (2) Mata the mother, the Bun-di or forest {bun) mother of the Dosadhs, the goddess of the village grove; (3) Mata Mai, the second mother, the Sokha or witch-mother of the Dosadhs. These three form the prongs of the trident ; (4) Goraya, the boundary- god, the encircling snake ; (5) The ape-god called Hanuman the smiter, or Maroti the tree-ape ; (6) Pandahrl or Mu- ChandrI the moon-goddess 3. These last three gods are the
1   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, N. IV. Provinces, Akhteej, p. 13.
2 Vana (Tirtha-Yatra) Parva, cxlv. p. 439, Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcv. p. 286.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 235, 202.
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166
three roots of the national tree, and the whole six represent the six days of the week which was now substituted for the original five-days week.
The New Year’s festival of the year reckoned by six-day weeks, the Hittite week of creation, was apparently that called in the Rigveda the Tri-kadru-ka, of that of three \ trees (dru) of Kadru, the mother-goddess of the Naga or serpent race. It is said to be begun on the day when Indra drank the Soma brewed from barley, before he went j forth to kill the dragon who imprisoned the maiden of the   '
year, the May Queen of the New Year1. It lasted for six   s
days, and was called also the Abhi-plava, or that of the   j:
boat or water-bird (plava), that is of the moon-boat or ji bird. The gods invoked in the orthodox Soma ritual are   ¥
Jyotih the stars, Go the cow, and Ayuh the son of life,   J
that is to say the Pleiades mothers and the antelope or j, ox fathers of the Great Bear, the two parent constellations j of the Naga race2, and the son of life, Ayuh, born from   |:;
them under the auspices of the moon-cow. The first three   j
days arc dedicated to each of these in the order I have named. They are also worshipped on the last three days, but in a varied order, Go the cow being worshipped on the fourth, Ayuh on the fifth, and Jyotih on the sixth day ; and that this six-days feast belonged to a method of time   jj1
reckoning which assigned six days to the week is proved by the statement of Sayana, quoted by Ludwig, that there were five periods of six days in the month of thirty days 3.
Also that this festival called the Abhi-plava was one in which the gods ruling the coming year were especially invoked is shown by the ritual regulating it, which required the Bri-hat and Rathantara Samans, those celebrating, as I have 11 shown on pp. 69, 70, the seventy-two weeks of the year, to ji be chanted at mid-day on alternate days for the six days j,|
I
1   Rg- ii- i5> 1, 7, 8 ; ii. 22, 1.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. I, 2, i ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 282, 283.
3   Ludwig, Der Rigveda, vol. iii., Mantra Literatur, p. 3S9, s.v., TrL
kadru-ka.   |:
»
   
167
of the feastI. The three tree-mothers worshipped in this festival were the Sal-tree-mother of the Dravido-Mundas, the Fig-tree-mother of the ploughing immigrants from Syria, and first the Mahua and then the Am or Mango tree, the parent-trees of the Kurmis, the first of the lower agricultural castes, and thus the latest immigrants from the North, who irrigated their lands and grew corn and the sugar-cane, from which the Ikshvaku kings, sons of the sugar-cane (iksha), took their name. For this tree the phallic worshippers substituted the date-palm-tree, the tree of male and female stocks, which was in the Mahabharata the cognizance of Bhishma the sexless sun-god, and of Vala- rama the plough-god, called Halayudha, or he who has the plough (hal) for his weapon 2 3 4.
The Akkadian counterpart of this festival was the six- days feast held at the summer solstice to celebrate the death, rebirth and marriage of Dumu-zi, the son (dumu) of life (zi), the Star Orion. This New Year’s Day coincides with that of the Zends, and adds a further proof to those I shall produce later on, to show that the year of the six- days week was one beginning with the summer solstice 3. This festival was like all those of the Gond ritual originally accompanied with the consumption of intoxicating drinks, the barley Soma which Indra drank on this day, but for this was substituted in later ritual the Soma of Indra’s three mixings made of milk, sour milk and barley mixed with running waters A similar change seems to have taken place in Rome in the ritual of the Damia festival, for the temple of the goddess was not allowed to be defiled with wine, though this, according to Macrobius, was permitted
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xii. 2, 2, 1, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 152, 153, 148, note x.
z Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhishma-Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165, Shalya (Gud-Ayiuiha) Parva, xxxiv., lx. pp. 135, 233.
3   Lenormant, The Myth of Adonis Tammuz according to Cuneiform Documents, pp. 164, 165; C. Boscawen, The Academy, 27th July, 1878, p. 91.
4   Iiillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, p. 239 ; Rg. v. xxvii. 5 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 242.
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History and Chronology
to be surreptitiously brought in under the name of milk and in a vessel called the Mellarium or honey-vase. This points to a connection between this festival and the cult of the dwarfs of the Edda, who made mead for the gods from the milk of the goat Heid-run, who feeds on the leaves of the mead-tree Laerath. Hence her milk became the mead drunk every day at the banquet of the gods who feast on the flesh of the boar Soehrimnir. But in the Roman ritual milk was the only libation allowed to be offered to the rural gods Pales, Silvanus, and Ceres, the last the Roman form of Demeter h
This evidence marks the libations of milk as belonging to a ritual earlier than that of the meacl-drinkers, and a form of worship introduced at a time when the pastoral races, the Todas of India and the Massagctm of Herodotus, drank nothing but milk. These people were the successors of the Mundas, who, to the present day, like the Kikatas of the Rigveda, never milk their cattle1 2, and were allied to the Cyclopes, or one-eyed Pole Star worshippers, whose chief, Polyphemus, had never tasted intoxicating drink till it was given him by Odusseus. There are thus apparently in Indian history three stages marked by the national drink customs. The first, that of the Dravido-Mundas, who, from time immemorial, drank the rice-beer, which their women still brew for the seasonal dances. Next, that of the milkdrinking Gautamas and Todas, and the third, that of the mead-drinkers of the North, who belonged to the race of the sons of the potter, who became in India the Kushika Gonds. Mead was apparently the first intoxicating drink brewed in the North, and for its history we must turn to the theology of the Mordvinian Ugro-Finns, now dwelling in the upper streams of the Volga north of Astrakhan. Their chief god is Chkai, the creating potter of the phallic wor-
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, p. 103, sect. 2; Mallet, Northern Antiquities: The Prose Edda, 38, 39, pp. 429—431.
2   Rg. iii. 53, 14.
   
169
shippers, who made men from potter’s clayl. He is thus a counterpart of the Greek Peleus, son of the potter’s clay, to whom Erectheus Poseidon gave the first two horses of the sun.
He was the father of the six national deities, three male and three female, the three father and mother gods of the six-days week. The female goddesses representing the three original mothers are : (1) Nechkendi Tevter, the spring-goddess of the bees, and mother of Ponquine Paz, the lightning god. She is apparently an equivalent of the Hebrew prophetess Deborah, the bee, the nurse of Rebekah, wife of Isaac, the corn-god, and the partner of Barak, the lightning, who was buried under the oak of Bethel, where she was worshipped, for it is called “the oak of weeping,” that is to say, the oak-mother of the dying and re-rising sun-god of the Druid’s year 2.   (2) The second goddess is
the queen of summer, who is by her brother, Nouziaron Paz, the mother' of Martyr Paz, giver of fertility, whose home is guarded by dogs, the dog-stars Sirius and Procyon. (3) The third goddess, the winter - mother Venai Patiai, was goddess of fruits and mother of Varma Paz, god of the winds.
The male equivalents and partners of these three year- mothers are : (1) Inechke Paz, called also Chi-Paz, the god of fire (Chi), the fire-drill of the human beehive of four stories of which he, as the father of all the hives, rules the highest, the place of the Pole Star god. (2) The second, the spring- father, is Vernechke Velen Paz, god of the world’s hive. (3) The third, the summer-father, is Nouziaron Paz, god of night and sleep, and also the moon-god, Odh-kotiozais, who receives the souls of the dead. He is the twin partner of his summer sister, mother of Martyr Paz, and the two represent the Fravashis or bi-sexual parents of the Zends 1 who are worshipped at the annual feast to the dead, held at the summer solstice when the Zend year begins. (4)
1   Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. p. 252.
2   Gen. xxxv. 8 ; Judges v.
170   History and Chronology
The fourth or winter-god is Ouet-ze Paz, god of flocks and herdsr.
This hierarchy of the worshippers of the prophet bee, the mother of the mead which inspired the national priests, is that of the votaries of the first of the three Zend sacred fires, that of the age described in the Zendavesta as that when “ the glory went from Yima,” the twin father of Sa- vangha-vach and Erena-vach, the two wives of Azi-Dahaka, in the shape of a Varaghna-bird, that is, of the rain (var) cloud, the Gond Binao-bird1 2 3. This is the fire Frd-bak, that of the Turanian Fryano, the men of the Viru or phallus, established according to the Bundahish in Khvarizem, the Hvairizem of the Yashts, the country of Seistan, south of the Oxus, the land of Herat, watered by the Harahvaiti, the original Sarasvati, and the tenth of the lands created by Ahura Mazda 3. This birth-land of the Kushikas is that occupied by the fire-worshippers before they entered India to make their descent down the Jumna, and before they made their mother-land Kuru - kshetra, the field (kshetra) of the Kurus, watered by the Vedic mother Sarasvati, the daughter-river of the Harahvaiti of Herat.
This fire Frobak was the fire of Frashaostra, the first of the three assistants of Zarathustra, who was the Hindu Prashastrl or teaching priest, whose name is the Sanskrit form of the Zend Frashaostra, the Ojha or man of knowledge (odjh) appointed by Lingal. This Ojha, inspired by the god of knowledge, the Odin of the Edda, is the priest still elected in Chutia Nagpur as the High-Priest of every Parha, whose duty it is to superintend the professors of witchcraft and magic, to see that their work is lawful and beneficial, and to judge and punish those who practise the black magic of the makers of pestilences and the causers
1   Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. pp. 235 ff.
2   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, 35; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 294.
3 West, Bundahish, xvii. 5 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Mihir Yasht, 14; Vendtdad Fargard, i. 13; S.B.E., vol. v. p. 635 xxiii. p. 123, note 4, iv. p. 7.
       iji
of national and domestic calamities. This Frashaostra was the father of Hvogvi *, the Zend form of the Sanskrit Shu-gvi, the coming (gvi) Shu - bird, the Khu cloud-bird, the Varaghna-bird, who bore to earth the glory from Yima, and she was the wife of Zarathustra. She was also the prophet priestess, who was originally inspired by the mead made of bees’ honey, the leader of the Melissai or bee nymphs, who nursed the young Zeus in Crete, and who were the priestesses of Demeter, the year-mother, and of Damia. It was she who got from Zarathustra the better and more holy inspiration than that of mead given by his unintoxicating but enlightening prophet drug Bangha (Cannabis Indica), the Hashish by which the Zoroastrian priests were inspired1 2 3. It was the reverence for the honey-drink which made the Hindu sons of the tortoise call the fire and boar year-god Vishnu Madhava, or the god of Madhu mead, and which made them make the Mahua {Bassia Latif'olio) their sacred tree. It is from the flowers of this tree that the drink now called Madhu or Daru is distilled, but before the days of distillation the Northern immigrants made from the fermentation of its excessively sweet flowers, much sought after by the jungle bears, a liquor like their Northern mead. This is the Madhu parka or honey-drink ordered by Manu to be given to kings, priests, sons and fathers-in-law, and maternal uncles, paying a visit a full year after their last coming 3. It is thus a new year’s drink, and one especially connected with the seasonal sacrifices, for it was not to be given to a king or priest unless a sacrifice was offered when they came. This Madhu made of Mahua flowers was the national drink in the age of the Kauravyas and Pandavas of the Mahabharata, consumed, as the poem tells us, at their religious festivals and marriages, both by men and women, and by the goddesses DrupadI and Subhadra,
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, 98 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 77, note 1.
2   Ibid., Zendavesta Din Yasht, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 267, note 3.
3   Biihler, Manu, iii. 119, 120; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp. 96, 97.

[Prometheus]

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History and Chronology
and also drunk by the gods Krishna and Valarama, who were apparently looked on, like the gods of the Edda, as seeking inspiration in drink J. It is to a Mahua tree that husbands are first married in their own homes among the Bagdis, Lohars, and Bauris, the last of whom look on the dog as sacred, and are thus marked as belonging to the worshippers of the household fire, and as connected with the Bhil hunters, who set a similar value on their dogs. After this marriage they are united to their brides in the marriage arbour made of Sal branches (Shorea robusta), the Munda parent-tree, round which the bride walks seven times after she enters in it before she sits opposite to or beside the bridegroom. It is also to a Mahua-tree that Kurmi, Lohar, Munda and Santal brides are married, and the Bagdis show their descent from the spring whence the mother-river of the sons of the river rises, by placing a pool of water in the marriage arbour between the bride and bridegroom. There is no ceremony of circumambulating the fire in these marriages, but the bride and bridegroom go round the tree to which they are married seven or nine times. Most of these marriages are accompanied by a simulated capture of the bride, and the binding ceremony uniting husband and wife is the tying of the clothes of the couple together, and that called Sindurdan or the marking by the bridegroom of the parting of the bride’s hair with Sindur or vermilion.
The Bauris bury their dead with the head to the north 1 2, like till Mundas and Mallis of Ayodha or Oude, among whom the Buddha died with his head to the north between the two Sal trees in the Upavattana or village grove of Sal trees of the Malli city of Kusinara, the town of the

1   Mahabharata Adi (Sabkadrd-Havana) Parva, ccxxi. pp. 604, 606, Adi (Khandava-daha) Parva, ccxxiv. pp. 615, 616, Virata (Vaivahika) Parva, lxxii. pp. 183, 184, Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. pp. 226, 227, Mausala Parva, i. 29, iii. 15, 16, pp. 3, 7.
2   Risley, Uribes and Castes of Bengal., vol. i. pp. 39, 80, Si, 531 ; vol. ii. pp. 23, 229, 102.
   
173
KushikasI. The Bagdis burn their dead and throw the ashes into a stream, and hence show an affinity with the men of the Bronze Age, while the Bauris still remain in the Neolithic Age when the dead were buried2 3 4. It is to this last age that the institution of the Ojhas or priests of knowledge {odj) must be assigned, for it was when he appointed these accredited teachers and judges, and consecrated the trident of Pharsi Pot, that Linga vanished from the earth. This trident god of the Gonds, whose prongs denote the three seasons of the year, is worshipped also by the Badagas of the Nilgiris, who boast their descent from the Northern Himalayas, and who are the cultivating caste subordinate to the milk-drinking Todas, and also worshippers of the tiger 3.
E.   Immigration of the sons of the raven and the antelope into India.
I must now, after having traced the history of the Gond immigration in India, return to the fire-worshipping races ,whose progress I have tracked from Asia Minor to Seistan, and relate from the Zendavesta and Hindu records the history of the successors of these Gond millet-growing immigrants who came into India as the second or barleygrowing race. The Zendavesta tells how the first band of the phallus and fire-worshippers established themselves in Seistan as the Turanian subjects of the great irrigating King Frangrasyan, who covered the country with water channels leading into the Kyansih or Kashava sea, the lake Zarah into which the Helmend flows 4. Frangrasyan, the king of the Fryano or sons of the Viru, with his brothers Aghraeratha, he of the foremost chariot (ratha), and Kere- savazda, he of the horned (keresa) club (vazda), were the
1   Rhys David, Mahapari-nibbana Sutta, v. I—3 ; S.B.E., vol. xi. p. 85.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 42.
3   Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, pp. 225, 275, 276.
4   West, Bundahish, xx. 34; S.B.E., vol. v. 82.
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History and Chronology
sons of Pashang, whose brother was Vaisakh, that is the ; Indian mid-month (April—May) of the Pleiades year1. Aghraeratha, the eldest of the three brethren is called ' Go-patshah the king (badshah) of the cows of light, the ruler of the year of two seasons of Pashang and Vaisakh, that is to say he of the foremost chariot was the leading < star, and his ally was Syavarshan, son of Kavi Kush, who / is said to be the creator of the land of Kang-desh or India, ! the country now called Kangra in the Punjab2. Thus Aghraeratha was the ruling god of the year of three seasons I of the tortoise race in India, founded upon that of the l| Pleiades. He, the star Canopus, was deposed and slain | as the ruling star by Frangrasyan when Orion was substituted for Canopus as the ruler of the year.
But both Aghraeratha and Frangrasyan were sons of Pashang the Vedic Pushan, the barley-god eater of Karam- bha, rice and barley porridge, who makes cows to calve, { whose car is drawn by goats, and who married the daughter of the sun 3. His name comes from the root Push, the || growth of plant life, and is connected with the Akkadian Pu, - a pool or marsh. As the sibilant sh represents an original k, he is the eastern form of our fairy King Puck, who. was once the Lithuanian Purk or Perkunas, the thunder- | god 4. He is also the god who leads the Hindu year, jj beginning at the winter solstice with the month Push \ (December—January), and became in stellar astronomy the constellation Cancer, called by the Arabs Alnathra. This 5 in the Malayan cosmogony is the constellation of the great I Crab which dwells in the cavern of the Navel of the seas \ at the roots of the world’s tree, that is in the winter resting-place of the Southern sun at the winter solstices, i
1   West, Bmtdahish, xxix. 5, xxxi. 15, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 117, 135.
2   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, 77, Abdn Yas/it, 41; S.B.E.,   1
vol. xxiii. pp. 304, 64, note 1 ; West, Bahman Yasht, 24; S.B.E., vol. v.
p. 224.
3   Rg. iii. 52, 7, vi. S3, 9, vi. 58, 4, vi. 55, 3, 4.
4   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 437—439.
3   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, chap, lvi, p. 84; Ibid., Chronology of Ancient
;l
       175
In short he represents the union of the Southern black- cloud-bird Khu with the Northern thunder-god Thor of the Edda, whose car, like that of Pushan, is drawn by goats. It was his Northern sons Frangrasyan and Keresavazda that j came down to India to conquer the matriarchal races ruled I by Syavarshan. Keresavazda’s name the horned club shows him to be the god of the worshippers of the male as distinguished from the original female trident of Pharsi Pen. These people are the Takkas or artisans, still known j as a wealthy and powerful tribe in Kashmir and the Punjab.
Their god is the trident or trisula, representing the three | seasons of the year in its three prongs called Shesh Nag, the spring, Vasak or Basak Nag the summer, and Takt or Taksh-Nag the winter1. They founded the great city of Taxila or Taksha-sila, the rock (silo) of the Takkas, so celebrated in Buddhist history, and in that of Alexander the Great’s Indian campaigns. This capital of the early Naga faith was taken by Janamejaya, son of Parikshit the circling sun, after he instituted the great snake sacrifice which substituted sun-worship for that of „ the earlier star and moon-gods, and avenged the death of his father, who was slain by Taksh Nag the winter-god, as the last sun-god of the Pole Star era of time-measurement, when the sun was looked on as a day-star going round the heavens and subordinate to the Pole Star2. Janamejaya, i the god victorious (jay a) over birth (janam), is represented i in the Mahabharata as the successor of Paushya or Push, who, as well as himself, was the pupil of the sacrificial priest Dhaumya, the god of the smoke (dhumo) of burnt-offerings, called also Gautama, whose wife was Ahalya the year-
Nations, chap. xxi. of the Lunar Stations, p. 352 ; Skeat, Malay Magic, P- 7-
1   Oldham, ‘ Serpent Worship in India,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1891, pp. 361, 362, 387—391.
2 Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, p. 45, Adi (Astika), Farva, 1.—lviii. pp. 143—160.
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History and Chronology
hen 1, who was, as we have seen on p. 163, the winter-wife 5 of the sun-god Ar-chal, and the goddess Damia or Dame, ! the Gond tortoise-mother worshipped as the goddess of the house-building races of Greece and Italy.
Near Taksha-Sila, according to Hiouen Tsiang, was the shrine and sacred tank of the Naga father-god of the Takkas Ua-putra, the son {putra) of Ila, whose body stretched from thence to Kashi {Benares), and who was the god worshipped at the great Hindu national temple at Somnath or Ila-pura, on the coast of Kathiawar, where his image was a Linga with a lunar crescent on its head. This proves him to be the jij Gond god Lingal, who had become on his disappearance jij from earth the sixth Gond god, the Crescent-moon goddess Pandhari or Mu-chandri. Hence these Takkas were both sons of the eel-god Ila, and worshippers of the trident and   |r
also sons of the rivers, whence the parent-eel was born,   I
and they extended their rule all over India, and have left records of their sovereignty in the names they gave to   1
the rivers they called Iravati, and adopted as their parent streams in the countries they ruled in their progress from the North-west to the South-east. These are the Ravi of Punjab, the Rapti of Oude, and the Irawadi of Burmah,   ;
all forms of the original river name Iravati. They were   j
the sons of Iran or Erenavach, and she was the mother-   |
mountain Ida, Ila or Ira, mother of the eel race whom   (
Manu raised from the sea after the flood which followed,   1
as we have seen in the Lingal Gond story the arrival of these immigrants. She in her new avatar was bora from the four-fold sacrifice of butter, sour-milk, whey and curds.
This made her, who had originally been the little fish, I the infant eel, in Manu’s water-jar or water-pool, become the horned fish, the dolphin, which led Manu and his moon - boat to the mother-mountain, where she became the mother of the sons of the cow, the Gond Koi-kopal or dairy farmers 2.
1 Mahabliarata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. ppl 45—51, Ashvamedha (Anugita)   jll Parva, lvi. pp. 145—148.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 1, 1—15 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 216—218.
   
177
The dolphin-mother became in Syria and Greece the goddess Derceto or Tirhatha, meaning the deft or rock- pool, and the dolphin Apollo. In the Euphratean countries | she was the goddess Nana, whose leaden image with the triangle   round the   navel, as   in the Hindu   altar in   the
j   form of   a woman,   was found in the   city   on the   site
of Troy, dating back to the earliest period of the Bronze Age, the second from the bottom of the six cities there j superimposed on one another. The image is of Indian lead, the produce of the Indian Galena silver mines of 1   Saurashtra, for the   mines of   Laurium   or Attica, which
supplied   lead in a   later age,   were not   yet   opened,   and
! there was no lead found in any mines of that age near 1 the coast, except those of India. This leaden image was found in a separate hoard, chiefly of gold ornaments, hidden in the city wall, and all these were of Indian patterns I. Similar figures in terra-cotta have been found in Mesopotamia, Cyprus and the Cyclades, and in Maeonia i [Lydia), the land of the Tursena, the Mediterranean representatives of the Indian Turvasu, an image of the Akkadian goddess Nana has been found engraved on syenite, with the Babylonian god Bel standing by her side 2 3 4.
In India the dolphin-goddess was the river-fish of the national religious history, the porpoise of the Ganges called Makara, the cognizance of Pradyumna, the foremost (fra) i bright one (dynmnd), the eldest sun-god, born of the year- god Krishna 3. This succeeded, in religious ritual, the alligator of the Gonds, Muggar, Mugral or Fuse, and became the star called in Tamil Makaram, and by the Akkadians Makkhar 4, the constellation Capricornus, which has always
1   Schluchhardt, Schliemann’s Excavations, pp. 6, 7, fig. Co; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 170.
2   Wilson, ‘ The Swastika.’ Reports of the American Smithsonian Institution, p. 829.
3   Mahabharata Anushasana (Anushdsinika) Parva, xi. 3, p. 41.
4   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars.’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical A rchceology, Jan., 1890, iv. pp. 13—16.
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History and Chronology
been represented as a goat with a fish’s tailx. This con- || stellation was deified as the parent constellation of the ;j Pitaro Barhishadah, who sat on sheaves (bar his) of Ivusha J grass at the feast of the dead held at the autumnal If equinox, and were the successors of the sons of Muggar f the alligator of the age of Orion’s year.
These Talckas of the mead-drinking age of Europe, on | entering Kangra or Kang-desh in India, found themselves I in the land of the Madrikas or drinkers of intoxicating i drinks (mad), the national rice and murwa (millet) beer. They were the subjects of the king Shalya, who in the Mahabharata is the father of MadrT, the second wife of Pandu, the sexless god of the Great Bear, as the constella- j| tion of the seven Rishyas or antelopes. This father-god Shalya is the god of the point of the arrow (Shalya), that , is to say, he was in the theology of the arrow year of three seasons the winter season answering to the god | Taksh Nag, and in the account of the alliance between the Takkas and the Madrikas in the Mahabharata the former 5M are called Vahlikas or the men of Balkh. They came from j| Balkh on the Oxus, under the lead of Vahlika, the third i god of the triad of Shan-tanu, Devapi and Vahlika. Shan- tanu, whose name means the healing-god, and Devapi, his il rain-priest, are described in Rg. x. 98 as the sons of Rishti- sena, the god of the fire-spear (rishti), and are represented 1 as invoking Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, for rain. They ;| were thus the spring and summer seasons of the year, and ;f| Shan-tanu is, as we shall see by his marriage with the |a mother-river Gunga and Satyavatl, the sister of Matsya, the k fish-god, the eel-father of the royal races of India, the sons fi of the Kauravya and Pandava kings. The Vahlikas, led by !. Somadatta, son of Vahlika, and Somadatta’s son, Bhuri- i shravas, marched under the banner of the Yupa or sacrificial stake, the Takka trident, and joined the Kauravyas in 1
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. jj 375—377-
   
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their war with the Pandavas. They were both slain by Satyaki, son of Shini, the moon - goddess, the father of ten sons slain by Bhurishravas, and these ten sons and their father represent the year of eleven months, of which the history will be given in Chapter VI.1
These Vahlikas, Madrikas and Rakshasas or sons of a tree {rnkh), are all denounced by Kama in the Mahabharata as sacrifices of living victims, which they ate, who indulged in intoxicating drink. He describes their dancing seasonal festivals, at which the women, eaters of beef and pork, and bearing on their foreheads the red arsenic or Sindur mark of marriage, danced while drunken, and says that at Shakala or Sangula, Shalya’s capital, one of these was held on every fourteenth day of the dark half of each month, when the dying moon about to reappear as the new moon of the next month was worshipped at a festal dance, in which a Rak- shasa woman beat the drum 2 3. This BH clearly a monthly festival, held on the twenty-ninth of each month of Orion’s year of the Karanas.
These fire-worshipping warriors, who sacrificed living victims, bound them to the three-headed sacrificial stake by their necks, according to the custom attributed in the Brahmanas to the Fathers who succeeded those who killed their victims by a blow on the forehead which broke their skulls 3. Their necks were so tied that the blood flowing from the jugular artery when severed fell on the sacrificial stake, and thence on the consecrated ground in which it was fixed ; and it was by this mingling of the blood of their totem victims with the soil of each new land they occupied that they completed the formation of blood brotherland between them and the hitherto alien land, just as they
1   Mahabharata Udyoga (Amvnpakyana) Parva, cxcvii. p. 55S, Bbishma (Bhishmavad/ia) Parva, Ixxiv. pp. 272—274, Drona ( Jay a drath a-badha) Parva, cxlii.—cxliv. pp. 428—441, Drona (Gha tot kacha - badha) Parva, clxii. pp. 523-525-
2   Mahabharata Kama Parva, xliv. 8—29, pp. 152—154.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. S, 1, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 1S9.
N 2
i8o
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united themselves to its daughters by the symbolical infusion of blood typified in their marriage customs. This blood was probably, as it was in ancient Scandinavian sacrifices, smeared over the altars for the bettering of the year ; and that the sacrifice was one of the Pole Star age of worship is proved by the rule that the Agnidhra or firekindling priest should go round the fire on which the victim was to be cooked three times against the course of the sun x.
The geography of the Mahabharata marks the progress of these Takkas through India by placing them as the Tri-gartas, or people of the three (tri) pits (gartas), in which were fixed the sacrificial stakes to which the victims were tied, in the country south of the Sutlej, on the borders of Kuru-kshetra. These were the Gond tribe called Koi- kopal or cow-keepers, the sons of Kai-kaia, mother of Bharata; and they are described in the Virata Parva of the Mahabharata as the chief allies of Duryodhana, the Kauravya chief, when he invaded the country of the Viratas, or men of the Viru, also called Matsya, the sons of the eel-fish, and tried to steal their cattle.
In the Rigveda they are called the Tugra, who were conquered by Indra with the Vetasu, the sons of the reed (?vetasd) 1 2 *, who are said to be possessed of tenfold magic power 3. In another hymn Indra is said to drink the drink of the Tugras4, that is to be the god of the drinkers of strong drink in the first stage of his mythology as the eel-god of the early fire-worshippers. In Rg. x. 49, 4, Indra is said to have entrusted these magicians, the Tugra and Vetasu, to the charge of Kutsa, his yoke-fellow ; and the beginning of his metamorphosis as the god of the water- drinkers is shown when Indra, as one of the twin-pair Indra- Kutsa, is asked to separate himself from Kutsa 5.
Kutsa is called Arjuneya, or the son of a fair (arjuna) mother6, and also Puru-Kutsa, or Kutsa the Puru, whom
ij»
,
 
r
l
!
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 8, 1, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 1S7, note 1.
2   Rg. vi. 26, 4.   3 Ibid., vi. 20, 8.   4 Ibid., viii. 32, 20.
5   Ibid., v. 29, 9, x. 38, 5.   6 Ibid., iv. 26, 1.

       181
Indra aided by breaking down the seven towers of the enemy, and it was for the beautiful young Kutsa that he j slew Shushna, the demon of drought "
These Purus, descended from Puru, the son of Yayati and Sharmishtha, the most protecting (sharmaii) tree, the Kushika Banyan fig-tree, succeeded Yayati, son of Nahusha, the great snake of the Naga race, as rulers of India ; and their rule preceded that of the Yadu-Turvasu, sons of DevayanT, the sun-maiden of the six Devayana months from the winter to the summer solstice2. These last were, according to the Mahabharata, the Yavanas or growers of barley (yava), whose I rule began after the age of Orion’s year.
I The Purus or Pauravas were a brother-tribe to the Druhyus or Bhojas, the offspring of Druhyu, the eldest son of Sharmishtha, and both are said in the Rigveda to belong to the Nahusha or Naga races 3. They, as the sons of Druh the sorceress, the Druj of the Zendavesta, were sorcerers and magicians, and both were opponents of the Tritsu, or worshippers of the perpetual altar-fire, whose priest was Vashishtha, for they were overthrown in the battle of the ten kings, when Indra gave the land of their brethren, the Anu, to the Tritsu4. The Purus are in this passage called Mridhravac, an epithet which, according to Zimmer 5, marks them as speaking a non-Aryan language. Its meaning is uncertain, but whether it means speaking softly, that is, using the soft sounds of the Dravidian and Pali languages instead of the Sanskrit gutturals, or speaking imperiously as enemies of the Aryan Tritsus, it distinctly shows them to belong to the Pre-Sanskrit population of India. This is also clear from their connection with the Anus, descended from Anu, the second son of Sharmishtha, who are called ! Mlecchas or outcasts in the Mahabharata. Kutsa, the j young and fair leader of the Pre-Sanskrit Purus, is the
i
1   Rg- i- 63, 7, 3.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. pp. 25S —260.
3   Rg. vi. 46, 7, 8.   4 Ibid., vii. 18, 13.
5 Zimmer, Altindisckes Leben, chap. iv. pp. 114, 115.
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reputed author of twenty-one hymns in the first Mandala || of the Rigveda, in which he describes himself as the priest of the Varsha giras, the praisers (giras) of rain, who belong to the Naga race of the NahushaK That this confederacy included the Takkas or Tugras, and the | Turanian races of the early Gond stock, is clear from the l history of the Zendavesta. For in it Frangrasyan and Keresavazda are said to have been finally conquered and I slain by Hu-shrava, the glory of the FIus, the successor of the Kavi-kush kings, whose sacrament was the holy ' Haoma or Soma, and who is said to have united the Aryans into one kingdom, and killed the Takka Tugra leaders 1 Frangrasyan and Keresavazda behind the Chaechasta lake, |: the modern Urumiah in Ataro-patakan 2. That this campaign extended to India is shown by the account given j- of it in the Rigveda, where Su-shravas, the Sanskrit form 11 of the Zend Hu-shrava, the king of the barley-growing 1 Turvayana or Turvasu, is said to have overcome Kutsa, Atithigva, the coming (gva) guest (atithi), that is Divodasa, the king of the ten (daslta) gods or months of the three j’l years’ cycle described in Chapter V., and Ayu, the son of UrvashI the fire-socket 3. This evidence clearly shows | that the Takkas, Tugras or Trigartas, the men of the sacri- ^ ficial trident-stake, joined themselves to the Eastern or rl Puru Naga confederacy, of which Kutsa was the divine i. high-priest, that of the Vetasu or sons of the river-reed, who worshipped the rain-snake-god and the sun-god born of the tree, and were thus united with the Eastern Malli or moun- ?' tain-races. The name of Kutsa, their high-priest, derived ; from Ku [where), is a divine epithet of the unseen god allied >[• to that of Ka [who), given to Prajapati [Orion) as god of the sacred Drona or tree-trunk, the hollow wooden jar containing the sacred Soma or divine sap 4.
1   Kg. i. 100,16, 17.
2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Alan Yas/it, 40, Gos Yasht, x7, iS, 21, 22, Zunyad Yasht, 74—77 5 S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 66, note 2, 114, 115, 303, 304.
3   Rg. i. S3, 10.
4   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 5, 5, 11, iv. 5, 6, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 408,410. fjl
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These early fire-worshippers, bearers of the sacrificial | tridents, whom I have thus traced as conquering, and ruling j races from Asia Minor to the junction of the Jumna and j Ganges, were the people to whom the authorship of the | Second Mandala of the Rigveda is described. Its title is I Grit Samada Bhargava Saunaka, interpreted by Ludwig and Brunnhofer to mean the book belonging to {grit) the collected {sail?) Median race (Mada), the sons of Bhrigu ('bhargava) the fire-god Bhur, belonging to the dog {saunaka). This tells us that the Thracian Bru-ges, the Phrygians of Asia Minor, the Phlegyans of Greece, who worshipped the god Bhur, came to India through Media as the followers j of the fire-dog.
This is the dog which always follows all Parsi funerals, the holy dog of the Bauris and Bhils, and especially sacred to the sons of Bhrigu, who are said in the Rigveda to have first found the concealed household fire by the help of Matar-i-shvan, the mother {matar) of the dog {shvau) J, and to have brought it to men2 and placed it on the navel of the world 3. This holy dog, born of the wooden fire- socket, that is as the son of the mother-tree, became in ritualistic astronomy the dog-star Sirius, the dog of Orion, the god Tishtrya, or he of the thirtieth {tishtrya) day of the month of the Zendavesta, who defeats the demons of drought and brings up the sun of the summer solstices
This totem-dog of the fire-worshippers, which according to Herod, i. 140 no Magian will kill, was the dog who woke the Ribhus from their twelve days’ sleep at the winter solstice 5. That is to say, it was the herald of a new year then begun, and it was as the year-dog that it was like other totem year animals sacrificed at the end of its term, as the god of the dying year, to make way for his successor. It is to this sacrifice that allusion is probably made in Rigveda
1 Rg. x. 46, 2, 9, i. 60, 1, iii. 5, 10.   3 Ibid., i. 58, 6.
3   Ibid., i. 143, 4-
4   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Ttr Yasht, vi. 10—34; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp,
96—104.   '   3 Rg. i. 161, 13.
I
184   History and Chronology
iv. 18, 13, where Indra tells how after killing Vyansa, the alligator-year-god of the Ribhus, he ate dog’s entrails together with the Soma brought to him by the Shyena or frost (Shya) bird of the winter solstice. The sacrifice succeeding that which began the year at the winter solstice with the sacrifice of the dog was that of the dog of the summer solstice, probably that referred to in the story of Shuna-shepa, the dog’s penis, or the male dog. He was the second son of Aji-garta, the pit (garta) of the goat, that is of the priest of the Tri-gartas or three sacrificial pits. j His eldest brother was Shuna-puccha, the dog’s tail, and the i youngest Shuna-langala, the dog’s plough or head. They were the three seasons of the dog’s year of Orion. Shuna- shepa, the dog-god of the summer season, was sold by his father for sacrifice in place of Rohita the red god, the fire- M drill son of Hari-chandra, the moon (chandra), of Hari the 3 name of Vishnu the year-god as the son of the mother Shar J.
The sacrifice of the middle god of the trident, the god of the summer solstice, as the god of the dying year, marks jj a change in the year reckoning coincident with the abandonment of the five and the adoption of the six-days week   :
of the phallus worshippers, and this change appears in the   d
ritual of the three seasons of the Chatur-masya. The : offerings to the Vaishvadeva gods of the spring season and the Saka-mcdha offerings to Indra as Saka, god of winter, consist of baked cakes, boiled rice and curds, and the same ) ingredients are offered to Varuna as god of the summer solstice ; but to these are added in the ritual of his sacrifice H a ram and a ewe made of barley-meal, but which doubtless j represent living victims once offered, which were originally j goats and human beings1 2 3. This offering is made on the northern altar, especially erected for the sacrifice of the ram to Varuna and thatched with branches of the Plaksha tree 3
1   Haug, Aitareya Brahmana, vol. ii. pp. 462—469.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. 5, 2, 15, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 395.
3   This Plaksha or Pakur tree is that consecrating the meeting-place of
   
rS5
(Ficus infectoria) placed on the altar on which animal victims were to be offered. The southern altar is dedicated to the Maruts or tree-ape (marom) goddesses, the Egyptian apes who sing the praises of Ra in the language of Uetenu, the green {nek) land of India I, and it is they who are invoked as leading goddesses in all the three seasonal festivals2.
This change in ritual, consequent on the introduction of the worship of the sun of the summer solstice, is also marked in the Zend year reckonings. For they began their year at the summer solstice with the feast of the dead Fravashis or mothers, the Maruts of the Hindu ritual. It also appears in the Celtic custom of lighting the year’s fires on St.John’s Day instead of in November, and at the'winter solstice, as in the years of the Pleiades and deer-sun.
In this summer year sacrifice of Shuna-shepa, as described in Rg. i. 24, 13, the dog is said to have been bound to three sacrificial posts (drnpadas), at each of which probably a separate dog for each season was sacrificed. These posts were in the ritual of the Trigartas placed in three pits, into which the blood of the slain victims was collected. This blood was in the Arab ritual of these sacrifices drunk and the flesh eaten raw by the sacrificers3, and this custom of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the victims in the days of early sun-worship appears in the Scandinavian ritual, where the year-god Hadding, the hairy {had) sun-god, in alliance with Lysir, the one-eyed Pole Star god, slays the fire-wolf Loki, drinks his blood and eats his hearth Also Sigurd, the sun-god of the pillar (nrd-r) of victory {sig), when he slew Fafnir, the snake-god of the
the Northern and Southern races at Puryag at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges.
1 Brugsch, Religion nnd Mythologie tier Alien sEgypter, pp. 152, 153.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., ii. 5, 2, 5—10, iii. 8, 3, 10; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 392, note 1—394, xxvi. p. 202.
3   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect vi. p. 210, Lcct. ix. pp. 324, 327.
4   Powell and Elton, Saxo-Grammaticus, Introduction, p. 119, Book i. pp. 28, 29.
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earlier ritual, when standing in a pit over which the year- snake passed as Sigurd stabbed him, and Regin, the rain- god, Sigurd’s guardian and Fafnir’s brother, drank the blood of the slain year-god I.
In the earliest Hindu ritual these three posts, each in its pit, represented the three seasons of the year, just as in the later Soma ritual the eleven posts for living victims slain at the Soma sacrifices represented the eleven months of the year of the sun-horse, to be described in Chapter VI.; and the sacrificial year-dog was as the rising sun of the new year called back to life by the six Aditya, the six days of the new week of the Tri-kadru-ka year, .Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuna, Daksha and Anslia2 3. This early sacrifice of the year-dog by the mead-drinkers is reproduced in Greece in the sacrifice of black dogs and honey and water (nephalia\ to Hecate, the dogs offered to Herakles and Ares at Sparta, also those sacred to yEsculapius, son of Koronis, and kept in his temple, and whose flesh was given to patients as a medicine, a custom derived from the Thracians, who, according to Sextus Empiricus, used to eat, and therefore to sacrifice, dogs 3, a custom continued by their descendants the Indian Bhrigu.
A furtherNaccount of the coming to India of the introducers of the household fire is told in the Brahmana story of Mathava. He, the god who produces fire by rubbing (math), is called the Vi-degha, or king of the two (vi) countries (degha desha), the North and the South. He carried into India Agni Vaishvanara, the fire of the village (visit), and the household fire of the village grove (vatiani), under the guidance of Gotama the cow-born (go) father of the Indian Brahmins, called Rahugana, or he possessed with the spirit of Rahu. Rahu, in the orthodox Vcdic literature, is the god of the cresent new moon, that is the
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 120,121.
2   Rg. ii. 27, 1 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 421, 422.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, iii. 250.
   
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god in whose honour the Takka women danced, as we have seen (p. 179), religious dances at the beginning of each month. But this new-moon-god was one which marked the yearly j circles of the sun-god, and it is as the combined moon- j and sun-god that he was worshipped as the god Raghu in : Media. He is still the god Raghu in Kuinaon worshipped as Rahu by the Dosadhs or fire-priests of Magadha, and he was the father of the Indian ploughing-god Rama. It was the Gotama priest of this god who, with Mathava, brought the sacred fire from the Sarasvati, that is from the Harahvaiti of Herat to the banks of the Sudanira or Gunduk 1 in Magadha. He there instituted the yearly j animal sacrifice to Rahu which is still celebrated by the Dosadhs.
The date of this festival of Rahu’s year varies according to the local customs of year reckoning, and it may be held at the various dates current throughout India for beginning the year, except those of the November year of the Pleiades, when no animal sacrifices can be offered, the year of the three years’ cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and the year of the summer solstice. It must be held on the fourth or ninth of the month, or on the day before the full moon, and the months in which it may take place are those (1) of the winter solstice, when the year of ; the sun-hen and Orion begins with the Pongol festival of 1 the Madras Dravidians, and the Sohrai of the Santals ; (2) i.Phagun (February—March)! the month ending with the 1 vernal equinox, and that beginning the popular Hindu I year with the new year’s Hub festival held on the full moon of Phagun ; (3) Magh (January—February), when the Ooraon Munda and Santal year begins; (4) Baisakh (April—May), as the New Year’s feast of the Gond year.
At it pigs, a ram, wheaten flour, and rice milk (khir) are offered, and intoxicating drinks are consumed by the worshippers. After the sacrifice, the Bhukut or priest who
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 4, i, 14—17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 105—106.
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has been consecrated by sleeping the night before the festival on a bed of Kusha grass (Poa cynosnroides), walks fasting, after worshipping Rahu, through the sacred fire, and then mounts a platform, from which he distributes Tulsi leaves to heal diseases, and flowers to cure barrenness in women. It is after this that the orgies of the feast begin J.
The gods of these Dosadhs, the triune embodiment of Rahu, otherwise called Bhim-Sen, are (i) Goraya, the boundary-god, and his two wives, Bundi the forest (bun) mother, and Sokha the witch-mother, the Akkadian wet- god Sakh, the first form of Istar ; and this triad of the year trident is worshipped by almost all the lower castes in Maghada {Behar), and by the women of the dominant tribe of the Babhans, to which almost all the great territorial chiefs belong 3.
There are no images in the shrines of these gods who manifest the various aspects of the creator shown in the changing seasons of the year ruled by the supreme maker of time, who in Asia Minor divided the year into the three seasons of the sowing, growing, and ripening mother- goddesses.
It was the worshippers of this god Ra or Raghu who made the pig the sacred animal of Asia Minor and ancient Greece, whose blood was used as a baptismal bath to cleanse the guilty from sin. He was worshipped in Babylonia and India as Atar, the god of the Vedic Atharvans, the Zend Athravans, and was called in Babylonia “ the lord of the pig.” He is the white pig Vishnu worshipped by all Brahmins in the third of their daily meditations (p. 158), and the name of the pig-god was also given to the Assyrian Ramanu, the god 1 2
1   See the Ritual described in full in Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Dosadhs, vol. i., pp. 255, 256 ; also Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 201, 203.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. Amats, p. 18, Babhans, p. 33, Binds, p. 133, Dosadhs, p. 256, Kandus, p. 416, Korris, p. 504, vol. ii., Teles, p. 309.
   
189
, (anu) Ram, the Indian Rama, the Akkadian Mermer, also worshipped as Matu or Martu, the god of the West Monsoon windx. It was to this same god of increase, the Latin Mars (Martis), the Sabine Mar-mar, the Etrurian Maso, that two pigs were offered at the Roman Arvalia to secure the fertility of the soil, and it was to this totem god of the marrying races that a pig was offered at Etrurian weddings2.
, Istar, in one of her avatars, was a pig-goddess, being called as Lady of the Dawn Bis-bizi, a reduplication of bis or
?   pes, a pig 3. Pigs were offered to the corn-mothers Demeter , in Greece and Ceres at Rome, and the Phoenicians, Syrians,
,, Egyptians, and Cyprians, who refused to eat swine’s flesh i as every-day food, ate it at the annual sacrifices to the ' father and mother of swine. The Cyprians fed the swine . sacred to Aphrodite with figs, the sacred fruit of the phallus
worshippers before the annual sacrifice 4; and in Isaiah
? lxv, 4 and Ixvi. 3, 17, we read how the Jews used to eat ; swine’s flesh and the mouse, the mouse-god {a/julvOos) of Troy,
, Apollo Smintheus, at their religious festivals. In India
the boar-god was the first Avatar of Krishna or Vishnu, and we are told in the Rigveda how this three-headed six-eyed boar of the year of three seasons was slain by TritaS, the god of the three years’ cycle, described in Chapter V. In the Harivamsa the first enemy slain by the young Krishna, born as the sun-god, the eighth son of Vasudeva and DevakI, is the boar. This year-boar was the Calydonian boar of Greece slain by Meleager, and it was the parent-boar of the North whose head was eaten at their annual Yule feasts at the winter solstice.
The year of the phallus worshippers, who changed the : week, the unit of their year, from five into six days, was 1 2 3 4
1   Sayce, Ilibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect. iii. p. 153.
2   Encyc. Brit., Arval Brothers, Ninth Edition, vol. ii. pp. 67 r, 672; Varro, De Re Rustica, ii. 4.
3   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 258, note 2.
4   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. vii. p. 122.
3   Rg. x. 99, 6.
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that which immediately succeeded the Gond year, beginning I'] with the month of May. This was the year of the central || prong of the trident worshipped by the Takkas as Basuk or Vasuk Nag. His year, beginning with the summer 0 solstice and the rains it brings, was that ruled by the god- \ king, called in the Mahabharata Uparichara, he who moves ' above, and Vasu, of the race of the Purus, king of Chedh ij the land of the birds (Chid or Chir). This is the country ; of the tribe of the Chiroos, who succeeded the Kushika Gonds as rulers of Central India, and whose descendants 0 ruled Magadha till the last independent Chiroo chief, () Muhurta, was conquered in the sixteenth century A.D. by ji Khuwas Khan, general of the emperor Sher Shah. His q descendant, representing this ancient royal race, still sur- a vived as a local chieftain living at Chainpur in the Kymore L hills, when I had charge of the Sasseram district in 1862. | It was on these hills, called the Sakti mountains, forming 1 the boundary of   the Gangetic   valley, south   of Kashi   j
(Benares), that the national Chiroo god, Vasu, ruling the summer solstice, planted the bamboo pole as the sign of Ji the national rain god, the Asherah of the Jews, and sur- li mounted it with the lotus-garland of Shukra (Indra), the jf wet (sak) god who   brings up the   rains, and who   gave Vasu   jlj
a crystal car, the   moon-chariot   of the year-god circling   ij
the heavens z. This was the lotus growing in Central India |; in pools, whence the Narmada’ (Nerbudda) and Sone rise. ; This sacred lotus   was transported from India   to Egypt
with the worship of the sun-god Ra, and there the lotus- garland was the crown of the feather-headed staff borne by the measuring (men or min) goddess Min, the star Virgo. : Min, with her staff and her lotus-garland, is portrayed in | her oldest prehistoric statues found by Mr. Petrie in the lowest stage of the successive series of temples built one j upon another on the ancient site of Coptos, lying on the ji route from Northern Egypt to the Red Sea 2.
f
1   Mahabharata Adi (Adivanshavatarcina) Parva, lxiii. pp. 171—173.
2   Petrie, History of Egypt, Prehistoric Egypt, vol. i. pp. 13, 14.
t
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It was on the Sakti mountain at the source of the river , Shuktimati, the Sanskrit Tamas, or the darkness, that Vasu f became by the sun-hawk his second wife, one of the outer ?j prongs of his trident, called Adrika, the rock, the father of tj the fish-born royal race of India, the descendants of her twin j children the mountain-eels, called Matsya, the fish-father, "1 and Satyavati the fish-mother. The latter was, as we have j| seen, the mother of Vyasa, the alligator constellation, and
I the second wife of Shantanu, the ancestress of the Kauravya and Pandava kings x, and both came to life in the Yamuna or river of the twins (Yama), the Jumna, of which the ( Tamas or Tons is a tributary. Matsya, the fish-father, :j ruled the land of the Virata or sons of the Viru god 1 2 3 4, and it j was in his land that the Pandavas were concealed during f the thirteenth year of their exile from power before their ? final contest with the Kauravyas. Uttara, the god of the f North {uttara), the son of king Viru, was charioteer of Arjuna, the god of the rains of the summer solstice, when he went forth single-handed to conquer the Kauravyas,
: who came to steal the Matsya cattle or cows of light 3.
? Also king Viru’s daughter Uttara, the North Pole Star » goddess, became the wife of Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna i and Su-bhadra, the mountain-goddess, also called Durga,
; whose name means the sainted {bhadret) Su-bird 4. Uttara : was the mother of the sun-god Parikshit, meaning the ‘ circling sun, slain by Taksh Nag, the winter-god of the : Takka trident, the history of whose birth as the son of i the blade of Kusha-grass will be told in Chapter VII.
' The kings of the early dynasty were descended from : the eel, born from the sun-hawk, the goddess Friga of the ' Edda and Asia Minor, the Egyptian hawk-headed god-- dess Hathor, depicted on the walls of the temple of the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Adivanshavatdrana) Parva, Ixiii. pp. 174, 175.
2   Biihler, Mann, vii. 193; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 247, note 3; Mahabharata Virata {Pandava-pravesha) Parva, vii., viii. pp. iS, 19.
3   Mahabharata Virata (Goharatia) Parva, xlvi. ff. pp. 109 ff.
4   Mahabharata Virata ( Vaivahika) Parva, lxxii. pp. 182 ff.
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Virgin - mother at Denderah as the Pole Star goddess, giving birth at Midsummer to the hawk-headed sun-god Horus1. She was the Greek goddess Kirke, the hawk (Kipms), who concealed Odusseus, the sun and star-god Orion, in her island Aiaia, and changed his followers into the swine sacred to the phallus worshippers.
This fish-born royal line were the kings who led the Northern immigrants, who had introduced into India Northern crops, the custom of marriage and the worship of the household fire, and had amalgamated themselves with the people who ruled the land before their arrival, and had divided it into organised villages, provinces and groups of allied and confederated provinces.
These grouped provinces were ruled by hereditary chiefs, and under the first organisation framed by the Northern conquerors, who preceded the sons of the eel, and their indigenous allies, the state seems to have been divided into three divisions, such as those still existing in the tributary Bhuya State of Gangpore. The central province, Avatered by the Eebe, is the appanage of the king, while the Eastern province of Nuggra is held by his hereditary prime-minister and high-priest, the Mahapatur, and the Western province, Hingir, by the Gharoutea or house- manager, who afterwards became the Sena-pati or commander-in-chief of the army (.sena).   These three chiefs
represent the hereditary leaders of the Bhuya or earth (b/mm) clan, formed by a union of the Northern immigrants with their Southern predecessors. This model is that followed in all the states of the ancient kingdom of Jambu-dvTpa, for in Chutia Nagpur, Pachete, Sirgoojya, Chuttisgurh, and the ancient kingdom of Magadha, the central province is always held by the king, and those surrounding it by his subordinate chieftains, and the nationality of these chieftains gives us a most reliable clue to the ancient history of India.
1 Marsham Adams, The Book of the Master, chap, vi., The Temple of the Virgin-Mother, pp. 67—71.
   
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Thus, if we take as illustrative instances of national history thus told, the kingdoms of Chutia Nagpur, Sirgoojya and Chuttisgurh, we find that in the first the village and provincial organisation is that of the Ooraons, but with them are intermixed their predecessors the Mundas, whose villages are interspersed among those of the Ooraons in the royal central province of Kokhra, which has been formed by amalgamating a large number of Munda Parhas, which still survive in local geography, and each of which retains its distinctive flag. The border provinces to the North and East are held chiefly by Munda chiefs, but there are some governed by Rautia Kaurs, while the Ramgurh or Hazari- bagh district to the North, the hereditary appanage of the Commander-in-chief, is ruled by a Kharwar Raja.
In Sirgoojya and Jushpore, which once formed part of Sirgoojya, the primitive element is supplied by the Korwas, of the Munda stock, and next above them in the social scale are the Gonds. The hereditary prime minister holding the central province of Pilka is a Gond, and so is the chief of Ramkola, the Northern province, the appanage of the Commander - in - chief. The Southern frontier province of Oodeypore belonged to the Kaurs before it came into the hands of a younger branch of the family of the Sirgoojya Raja, and the Kaurs also hold frontier provinces in Jushpore, and the family of the present Raja, though they now call themselves Rajputs, were originally Kaurs, for they obtained possession of the governments on the marriage of the ancestor of the present Raja with the daughter of the Kaur Raja, whose ancestors had taken the place of the original Gond chief.
Chuttisgurh, like Sirgoojya adjoining it, was originally a Gond kingdom, but the primitive inhabitants were not Korwas but Marya Gonds intermixed with Mons to form the race of Souris, Suari or Sus, the original sons of the bird Khu, with primitive Finn elements. They have left the traces of their presence in the name of the province of Belaspore, which is called after the god Bel, the sun and
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fire-god of the Souris1, a name which marks their Akkadian descent. Raipur, the second capital of Chuttisgurh, and once the central royal province, points to the rule of the Raj Gonds, worshippers of Rai or Ragh, and marks the connection of the Gond-Kaur dynasty of the Haihaya or Haiobunsi kings of Central India with the sun-god Rahu or Raghu. In the vestiges of the ancient records of these kings preserved in the family of their hereditary Prime Ministers we find that the dominions of the Haihaya, who were finally dethroned by the Mahrathas in 1750 A.D., extended in 1560 A.D. over a large expanse of country. In the lists of the royal revenues of Luchmun Sen, who was then ruler of Chuttisgurh, his kingdom included not only Chuttisgurh but also the adjoining territories of Sirgoojya, Chutia Nagpur, Sumbulpore, Kharond and Bustar2, covering a greater area than the whole of France, and this was then stated to be much less than the Haihayas originally ruled as Lords paramount, not only of Jambu-dwipa or Central, but also of Northern India. That the Hai-hayas became ultimately Kaurs through the marriage of a Kaur prince with a Raj Gond princess is proved by the great influence exercised by the Kaurs in Chuttisgurh, and the large estates held by them ; among these are the frontier estates to the North and East of the province.
We can, in the ruling tribes of this extensive tract, trace the history of the country from the primitive times when it was peopled by the Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, the earliest Dravidian founders of villages, and the Korwas, the aboriginal Mons from the North-east. They were succeeded by the Ugro-Finn tribes, who introduced sorcery and witchcraft, and by the Bhils or men of the bow. Their union formed the Souris, Bhuyas, Mundas and Gonds. The last covered the country with villages, each ruled by its head
1   The Souris call the sun Bel.
2   See list of ancient Haihaibunsi provinces and their revenues in Hewitt, Report of the Land Revenue Settlements of the Chuttisgurh Division, ss. 55, 56, pp. 16, 17.
   
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man and his four assistants, making the village Panchayut or council of five, and separated from its neighbours by the boundaries guarded by the boundary-snake-god Goraya and his priests the Goraits. They were succeeded by the Khar- wars or sons of the eel-god, and they again by the Kaurs or Kauravyas, who extended their rule over the whole country, and who, by their pre-eminent agricultural aptitude, made it populous and prosperous. They made water reservoirs in almost every village in the plateau of Chuttisgurh, and everywhere where the Kaurs have been left in undisturbed possession of their ancestral lands you find the people more thriving and well-to-do than in any of the neighbouring properties, except those peopled by their very near congeners the Kurmis. Both the Kaurs and Kurmis call themselves the sons of the mango-tree, for in both clans husbands are first married to a mango tree x.
This descent from the mango-tree marks their identity with the race of the Magadha kings, represented by Jara- sandha, the grandson of Vasu, the central prong of the divine trident. He was son of Vrihadratha, who married the twin daughters of the King of Kashi, and as the story is clearly a variant of the marriage of Vichitra Virya, the reputed father of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, they were the two national mothers Ambika and Ambalika, who were, as we have seen, the Pole Star in Cygnus, and the stars of the Great Bear. They, in the Jarasandha form of the story, had only one son between them, who was conceived from the mango given to the two queens by the national priest Chandra-Kushika, the moon-god (Chandra) of the Kushikas. Each queen bore half a son, and the two parts were united together by an old woman, Jara, old age, to form the king Jarasandha, the union (sandhii) by lapse of time {Java) 2. Plence he was the uniter of the Northern and
T Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Rautias, vol. ii. p. 201, Kurmis, vol. i. p. 504.
2   Mahabharata Sabha {Rajasnya-rambha) Parva, xvii. pp. 54, 55-
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Southern stocks forming the confederacy of the Kushikas or Kauravyas. He was a worshipper of the three-eyed tridentbearing-god Shiva, to whom he offered human sacrifices; and he and his generals, Kansa or Hansa, the moon-goose (kans or halts), also called Kushika and Dimvaka, he of the two tongues (vaka), also called Chitrasena, or he of the army (send) of divers colours (chitra), had conquered all Northern India before he was slain by the Pandava Bhima and KrishnaI,
This story tells of the age when the whole of Northern and Central India was ruled by Kaur or Haihaya kings, who were said in the Vishnu Purana to have formerly ruled Ayodhya (Oude), and the relics of this ruling race still survive in Ghazipur, where the Raja of Huldi is a Haiobunsi. The remembrance of their rule is recorded in the ancient name Ahi-kshetra, the land of the Ahis or snakes, given to Northern Panchala in the Mahabharata before the consecration of the later sacred land of Kuru-kshetra, between the Sarasvati and Drishadvati2. This was the land ruled by Drona, the tree-trunk, the original mother-tree of the primitive races, and this name of the land of the snake given to the original Plaihaya territory extending from the Himalayas to the Godaveri, survives in the original vernacular form, of which Ahikshetra is a Sanskrit translation, in the Gond names of Nagpur and Chutia Nagpur given to the land of Central India, ruled by the Nag-bunsi or Haihaya kings. It was the Kaur immigrants from the North who changed the name of the land of the Naga snakes into that of the Kaurs or Kurus, and the Kaurs of Central India who retain the old customs and ritual of their fathers are still like their ancestors in the neolithic age, for they bury their dead, perform their religious ceremonies by their own tribal priests ; eat beef, pork and fowls without any scruple; and drink fermented and spirituous liquors. They '
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Rdjasuya-rambha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47, xix. p. 60, Sabha (Jardsaytdha-badha) Parva, xxii. p. 68.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, clx. p. 413.
   
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show their Northern descent by their reverence for the Great Bear constellation, which they call that of the Seven Sisters, to whom a shrine is erected in every village near that of Goraya, the boundary-god T.
The very great antiquity of the legendary history of their rule, and that of their king Jarasandha, is marked by the date of the latter’s death. He was killed as the year-god of a dying epoch, and the year which he ruled was one reckoned, not like the years ruled by Orion and the sun- bird, by the solstices, but on the basis of the oldest Pleiades year beginning in November. For the contest between Bhima, the son of Maroti, the tree-ape-god, and Jarasandha began with the first lunar day, that is, with the new moon of Khartik (October—November), and lasted through the whole of the light fortnight of the month, as it was not till the night of the 14th, that is on the fifteenth night of the month, that Jarasandha was slain as the year-god of the year of the Karanas, divided into twelve months of twenty- nine days each 1 2 3. It was not till the death of Jarasandha, the year-god of the year of the mango-tree-mother, that Krishna, the new year-god of the antelope race, and his year-sun-bird Gadura, the flying-bull (gitd) of light, the Hebrew and Assyrian Kerub, the flying-bull, took possession of his chariot. This was the crystal year-car of Vasu or Vasukis, the god of the summer solstice, who had planted upon the Sakti mountains the bamboo-pole surmounted with the lotus-garland as the sign of the national rain-pole, the Asherah of the Northern immigrants who worshipped the household fire. They had become the Kauravya or Kaur sons of the tortoise {kur), and had established all over Northern India the rule of the Kaur or Kurmi dynasty, which is still remembered in local Central Indian tradition as
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Rautias, p. 204, _vol. i., Kaurs, pp. 435, 436; Hewitt, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of Chuttisgurh, Kaurs, s. 115, 116, p.35.
2   Mahabharata Sabha ( farasandha-badha) Parva, xxiii., xxiv. pp. 72, 73.
3   Ibid., xxiv. pp. 75, 76.

[Prometheus]

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the original imperial power, and the remains of their mountain capital still survive in the hill jungles of Southern Sirgoojya.
These Kaur-kurmi kings were followers, like their present descendants, of Kabir, originally the great ape-god, and were descended from this god in his avatar of the Great Potter, who made the earth revolve as the potter’s wheel. Their year is that commemorated in the legend of the churning of Vasuki, with the revolving Mount Mandara as the dasher of his churn. This, the mother-mountain of the Indian Kushikas, is the hill Parisnath, lord (nath) of the traders [Paris), on the Burrakur in the east of Chutia Nagpur. It is the sacred Eastern mountain of the Jains, whose first Tlrthakara was Rishabha, the bull of Koshala or of the Kushikas, born in the dark fortnight of Ashadha (June— July), that is at the summer solstice. He was the son of Maru-devi, the tree-mountain-goddess, and of Nabhi, the navel, the central turner of the earth x. In this birth-story as told in the Mahabharata, the god churned from the ocean by the potter Vasuki is not the bull, but Ucchai-shravas, the horse with long ears, that is, the ass, and the mother who bore him was the snake-god Shesh Nag or Ananta, the Gond Sek Nag, who had been deposed by Vasuki, and placed below the earth as the ocean-snake guarding the foundations of the mother-mountain 1 2 3 This ass-son of the ocean-mother is the three-legged ass of the Bundahish with six eyes and nine mouths, the six and nine days of the week of this and the succeeding cycle epoch, and one horn, the gnomon pillar. It made all women pregnant, and was the chief assistant of Tishtrya (Sirius) in bringing up the rains of the summer solstice from the ocean 3. It was born as the ruler of the next epoch of time measurement, when it was divided into cycles of three years. In this age India was
1   Jacobi, Jainci Sutras Kalpa Sutra ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 281.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Aslika) Parva, xvii., xviii., xxxv., xxxvi. pp. 78—81, 113—116.
3   West, Bundahish, xix. 1, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 67—69.
   
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divided, according to the early geography of the country sketched in the Mahabharata, into a number of federated states forming larger aggregates, called the kingdoms of Anga (Magadha and the North-east), Vanga (Bengal and Orissa), Kalinga (the Dravidia of the South), Pundra (the North Centre and South-west), and Shamba (the North-west), the land of the Kurus, sons of the javelin (Shamba), the Gond symbol of the phallic-god, encased in the female bamboo and coated with Kusha grass, which had been the Shelah or spear of the Jews.
These five divisions of ancient India are called in the Mahabharata the sons of the blind-god Dirghatamas, the long (dirgJta) darkness (tamas), the sun-gnomon stone, and the river Tamas, mother of the eel-born Haihaya kings ; and their mother was Su-deshna, the mother of the land (desk)' of the bird (Su), wife of Vali, the revolving (vri) earth*, the Pole Star mother Tara, who married, as we have seen in the Rama story, Su-griva the ape, after the death of Vali.
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, civ. p. 316.
BOOK II.
THE AGE OF LUNAR-SOLAR WORSHIP.
CHAPTER V.
THE EPOCH OF THE THREE-YEARS CYCLE AND OF
THE NINE-DAYS WEEK.
HE birth of the three-legged ass as ruler of time opens
the history of a totally new conception of time measurement. The years of the Pleiades, the sun-bird, Canopus and Orion, and the deer-sun, those reckoned by the primitive agricultural and hunting races, were in this epoch superseded by a division of time devised by the pastoral cattle breeders, who became the ruling powers in those regions bordering on the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which had hitherto been governed by the matriarchal farmers and the Basque patriarchists, who were born from the union of the matriarchal Dravidians with the hunting races of the North. These feeders of flocks and herds were more interested in computing the periods of gestation of the animals which they tended than in the succession of the seasons of the sowing, growing and ripening of crops. The leading herdsmen were the tribes called in India Koi-kopal or mountain shepherds, who were, as we are told in the Song of Lingal, the directors of the Kushika and Trigarta Confederacies. They had now come down from the mountains, and grazed their cattle in the river valleys, and called the cow and bull their totem parents. Their year was that measured by ten lunar months, the period of gestation of the cow-mother, but as this period did not cover the circle of the seasons according to which the national agricultural festivals were arranged,
 
History and Chronology      201
they were obliged, in order to prevent the confusion that would ensue from the clashing of their tribal calendar with that of the confederacy they ruled, to devise a system of time reckoning which would provide for the harmonious working of the two systems.
But in order to understand their method of year measurement thoroughly it is necessary to examine their national history. They, as worshippers of the household fire, the descendants of the Bru-ges of Thrace, who became the Indian Bhri-gu, were originally the people called in Asia Minor by the Turanian Finns, who changed the Aryan bh into ph, the Phrygians or sons of fire (phur), born of the union of the Indian farmers with the Northern hunters and the North-eastern Finns. Their legendary father-king was Midas, which was apparently a name assumed on their succession by all the kings of Phrygia, just as all Egyptian kings were called Pharaoh. Each king, as he succeeded to power, became the reputed son of the cave-goddess Cybele and of her High-Priest, that is of the fire-gods, the fire-mother, the diorite stone which represented the goddess in her most sacred shrine at Pessinus, and the god of the hammer, who drew fire from it, the Northern smith, the Thor of the Edda, the wielder of Mjolnir, whose car was drawn by goats. This father-king, continually reproduced in his successive descendants, was reputed to have had asses ears, and his subjects, the Satyrs, were said to have goat’s or asses ears and goat’s or asses feet and tails. In short, they were the sons of the mountain-goat, who subsequently became the sons of the wild ass of Syria, on which Silenus, their god, descended from the ape-father of India, rode.
This historical story of the year-king with asses or horse’s ears, belonging apparently to Asia Minor, the land of the ass, is repeated in the Welsh and Irish stories of March ab Meirchion and Labraid Lore with the swift hand or the sword. March is the Brythonic horse who was in Goidelic the ass, and the king of Galatia, the Celtic province of Asia
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Minor. Both killed every barber who shaved them and found out the secret of their cars. This horse or ass-king was the Indian Ashva, the horse or ass of Indra, the rain- god called Ucchai-shravas with the long ears, and was in Celtic mythology that given by Midir, the king of the lower world, to Rib, and by Mac Oc to Eochaid, the sun-god, when they had killed the horses of Rib and Eochaid after they escaped with their father’s second wife, Ebliu, who was in love with Eochaid. This horse was the sun-horse who made with his hoofs a well, over which Eochaid built a house, which was submerged by the water of the well which filled Lough Neagh when the woman-priestess in charge of the holy well forgot to cover it. We shall see the importance of this story when I treat of the well of Hippo- crene, made by the hoofs of Pegasus, the horse of Belle- rophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician. March was king of the Fomori, or men beneath (fo) the sea (piuir), and his swine, the holy animals of the Phrygians or Bhrigu, were guarded by Drystan, the Pictic Drostan, who seems to be a tree-god of the Druid sons of a tree {dm). He was induced to swear fealty to Arthur, or Airem, the ploughing (dr) sun-god, by Gwalch-mei, the Hawk of May. In the spot where March buried those who shaved him reeds grew, and when a bard cut a pipe from these reeds the only music they could play was “ March has horse’s ears.”
A similar incident is recorded in the story of Labraid Lore, who was leader of the Fir Domnann and Gailioin, the men of the Gai or sun-spear, the Dubgaill or Black Strangers, who were allies of the Fomori, and came to aid them in battle. Liban, the Welsh Llion, called Muirgen the seaborn, was his wife, and he persuaded Cuchulainn the sun- god, to live for a month with Fand Liban’s sister, who shared with her the rule of the year, and also to aid the Fomori as the king of the Southern sun beneath the sea. Labraid was shaved by a widow’s son, whom he did not slay, but who fell ill from the possession of the secret of his ears. A druid cured him by telling him to turn sun-wise and tell
   
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his secret to the first tree on the right-hand side. This was a willow, the parent-tree of the Iberian sons of the rivers, and the harps made from it would only play “ Labraid has horse’s earsI.” The wide diffusion of this story with the accompanying changes of Midir’s, Midas’s and Tishtrya’s ass 2 into the sun-horse of Eochaid and Indra, the sun-gods, show it to be a relic of ancient history universally accepted as recording the substitution of the sun-ass for the sun-bird, and the sun-horse for the sun-ass.
These sons of the sun-ass were the Minyan or measuring (min) race, equally skilled as agriculturists and herdsmen, who in Greece made the subterranean channels draining the lake Copais of its superfluous waters. In Arabia they built the great Minyan reservoir of Ma’arib, and in India made the village tanks and the large lake reservoirs of Central and Southern India, which survive as relics of Kurmi rule, such as that of Nowagaon in the Bhundara district of the Central Provinces, seventeen miles round. As sons of the mother-tree and of the Indian agricultural races, they began their day and year in the evening, and reckoned their day and night from the time of the setting of the equatorial sun of their Dravidian ancestors. In northern countries this could only be made to coincide with actual sunset at the equinoxes, and hence they made their year begin with the autumnal equinox. This gave them the sunset time they sought for at a period of the year very near the beginning of the original Pleiades year, opening with the Thesmophoria of October—November. From this starting-point they devised a time unit reconciling in a three-years cyle of forty sidereal months, divided into four periods each of ten months, the gestational and seasonal measures of the year.
1   Rhys, Celtic Folklore, vol. i. pp. 231, 233, vol. ii. pp. 435—437, 4S0, 499, 572—574; Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, pp- 356, 357, 378—380; Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lecl. v. p. 460—463, Lect. vi. p. 589, note 1, 591.
2   In the Bundahish the bringer up of the rains of Tishtrya at the summer solstice is the same ass who was in India Ucchai-shravas, the long-eared horse of India. West, Bundahish, xix. 1—11 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 67—69.
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The autumnal equinox was celebrated as the birthday of the sun-god conceived at the winter solstice, when the deer-sun-year began. The infant sun of Syria, where the conception apparently first received official sanction, was the sun-god born of the cypress-tree, the Adonis Tammuz or Dumu-zi of Antioch, whose birth was there celebrated at the autumnal equinox by the finding of the Gardens of Adonis (’ASCOVLSOS /crjiroi), the boxes or square jars of fennel, lettuce, wheat and barley, which had been sown and hidden by the women who mourned the death of the year-god, and brought his new-born successor to life in the sprouting crops produced when the first week measuring the year was ended. These boxes were the. Drona, the hollowed tree-trunk, from which the divine seed sprouted in the Indian land of Ahi- kshetra, the Sanskrit form of the Gond Nagpur or country of the Nagas, in which Drona was king, the Drona, which in the Soma ritual was worshipped as the Supreme god Prajapati (Orion), called in the Brahmanas Ka Who? and invoked in Rg. x. 121, under that name, as the “Creator of heaven and earth and all living things, who is born from the Golden Womb I.” This land of the holy tree-trunk was the Northern Indian land of the Gangetic Doab, the country of the people first called Panchalas, or men of the five-days week, and who afterwards took the name of Srinjaya or men of the sickle (srini), when their union with immigrants from Asia Minor had made them members of the confederacy of the corn-growing races who introduced millets, barley and wheat. This sickle was the instrument with which they cut their corn crops, and also the symbol of the crescent-moon, the father-god of the cycle-year, the Harpe of the Greek year-god Kronos, and that with which the Assyrian god Bel Merodach or Marduk, the calf, slew Tiamut, the mother- goddess of the former era.
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 5, 5, 11 iv. 5, 6, 4; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 408, 410.
   
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A. Birth of the sun-god dated by Zodiacal stars.
They began their cycle with the birth of the sun-god at the first new moon following the autumnal equinox, and the young sun-god then born was the Ram-sun, the Hermes Kriophoros, the ram (tcpios) bearer of the Greeks, the sun- gnomon pillar (ep/ia) represented on the Palmyrene altar in Rome, and on many coins and bas-reliefs as rising out of the mother-tree with the ram on his shoulders T. This ram, which, as we have seen, was sacred to Varuna, god of the barley, Varuna’s corn1 2 3, became the totem parent of the sons of Ila, the eel-goddess, in her avatar as the sheep-mother Eda of the Madras Kurumbas, and who finally became the cow-mother of the sons of Ida raised from the flood by Manu by the offering of cferified butter, sour milk, whey and curds, and who was claimed at her birth by Mitra- Varuna, in whose theology she as the sheep-mother had been a mother-goddess. But in her new birth she refused their claim, and acknowledged Manu, the measurer, as her father 3.
This sun, born at the autumnal equinox, when the Jewish year opened with blasts from ram’s horns also began, begot at his birth the sun of the divine seed, who was to be born at the summer solstice ending the ten lunar months of gestation. The sun of this new birth then begot the sun-god to be born at the vernal equinox, who was the parent of the sun-god of the winter solstice, whose offspring closed the three-years cycle at his birth at the autumnal equinox. The parent- father of this cyclic succession of equinoctial and solstitial sun-gods was the crescent-moon, and the months were not those of Orion’s year of twenty-nine days each, but were measured by the sidereal star circle, represented by the twenty-seven Hindu Nakshatra or Nagkshetra, the fields (kshethra) of the Nags or beacon stars, at which the moon
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 87—91 ; Goblet d’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 142.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 391.
3   Ibid., i. 8, 1, 7—9J S.B.E., vol, xii. pp. 218, 219.
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History and Chronology
rested during his monthly circuit of the heavens; and the first of these star-stations in the list given by Brahma Gupta was that of the Ashvins or twin horsemen in the star /3 Arietis in the constellation of the Ram T. These, we are told in the Vishnu Dharma, represented the 27 days of the sidereal month 2, that is to say the sidereal month was so calculated that the forty months of the cycle of 27 days each measured 27 x 40 or 1,080 days, the same number as that making up the cycle of three years of 360 days each, or 3 x 360, 1,080 days.
This division of time, while recognising the circuit of the equinoctial and solstitial sun-star round the Pole, introduced a new element in time measurement by marking the monthly track of the moon through the stars. And, together with the certain^proof thus given of the introduction of the lunar zodiac into the measurement of the year, it seems probable that the beginning of a solar zodiac was made at the same period. For its commencement with the birth of the ram-sun at the autumnal equinox and the adoption of /3 Arietis in the Ram constellation as the first of the lunar stations, seems to show that the sun was in conjunction with the new moon in Aries at the autumnal equinox when this cycle-year was introduced. This being the case, we can make a very near approximation to the date when the cycle-year began. Sir N. Lockyer3 states that the period of the revolution of the equinox forming the circle of the changing Pole Stars is 24,450 years. During this time the sun going through the twelve signs of the Zodiac moves forward one sign in about 2,037 years. It was in /3 Arietis, at the vernal equinox, about 2000 B. C., and hence the period during which it had moved forward
1   J. Burgess, C.I.E., ‘Hindu Astronomy.’ Journal Royal Asiatic Society, Oct., 1893, P- 756- This is in Akkadian Astronomy the constellation Gam, the curved, that of the sickle, a /8 7, Arietis, with which Kronos emasculated Ouranos and introduced the sexless gods of this epoch. J. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, The Tablet of the Thirty Stars, vol. ii. pp. 71, 72.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chap, xxxvi. p. 354.
3   Lockyer, Elementary Lessons on Astronomy, 1888, s. 547.
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from its position in the same constellation at the autumnal equinox was 6 x 2,037, or about 12,200 years before 2000 B.C., or 14,200 B.c.
This was apparently a time when no Pole Star was visible, for neither ancient tradition nor the star globe tells of any star sufficiently conspicuous to be marked as a Pole Star, between S Cygnus, the Pole Star about 15,000 B.C., and Vega in Lyra, worshipped as the Pole Star 10,000 B.C. 1 This was the age when the ruling god of time was no longer the Pole Star bird in Cygnus, but the Great Ape, who had become the Master Potter, who made the stars revolve as he turned the central wheel of the universe. This turning god was the Greek Ixion or IxiFon, the Sanskrit Akshi- van, the axle (aksha) god. The Northern constellation in which this directing god lived was the Great Bear, called by the Egyptians the Thigh of Set or Hapi, the ape-god, the rudder of the heavenly ship Ma^ent, the bringer {via) or mother of progressive time2. Hence they looked to the Great Bear as the ruling constellation of the North.
The correctness of this deduction is confirmed by the Hindu astronomical tradition, which makes their year of months begin with Push (December—January), at the winter solstice. This is the month of the constellation Pushya Cancer, and it was in this month and under this constellation that Rama, the son of Kush-aloya, the house (aloya) of the Kushites, was proclaimed the ruler of India by his father Raghu, the sun-god 3. That is to say, the year of Rama as sun-god began, like the original Hindu year of months when the sun was in Cancer, at the winter solstice, that is about 14,200 B.C., or the same date as when it was in Aries at the autumnal equinox.
1   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 128.
2   Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chap. xeix. 11, p. 158.
3   Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxvi. p. Si2. It was also in Cancer, the Great Crab, that the sun is supposed by the Malays to rest at the winter solstice, as I have shown on p. 174. Hence the primaeval Malay tradition dates itself as starting from about 14,200 B.C., when the sun was in this constellation at the winter solstice.
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This monumental date in Hindu astronomical history is again referred to in the Vedic tradition that Rushan, the god of the constellation Cancer, married the sun-maiden at the winter solstice E
This sun-maiden has another form, that of Sita, first the furrow and afterwards the moon-goddess, the wife of Rama. They by their union inaugurated the cycle - year of the Ashvins, beginning with the birth of the sun-god conceived at the winter solstice and born at the autumnal equinox, a year measured by the lunar phases of Sita, the moon- goddess. Again the name of Sita, the furrow ploughed through the sky by Rama, the sun-bull, shows that the givers of this name knew of a zodiacal path, or furrow, through the stars which he traversed in his yearly course. This was the yearly path of the sun and the monthly path of the moon, marked by the 27 stars called the Nak-shatra or Nag-kshethra, the fields (kshethra) of the Nags or star- snakes. This path was marked by Lakshman, the god of boundaries (lahsh), the constant companion of Rama in his search for Sita, in the track he traced for him and the wife he sought for, the moon-goddess of the furrow. That this star track was the path of Rama is proved by his history. He was installed at the winter solstice as king of the year of the ten-headed Ravana, or ten lunar months of gestation, from whom he was to deliver Sita. The sun was then in Cancer, and his ten months’ journey would be completed under the constellation marking the close of the sun’s circuit through a yearly path beginning in /3 Arietis at the autumnal equinox. This constellation is that of the 27th Nakshatra called Revati, said by Brahmagupta to be
1   Rg. vi. 58, 4. The Shah-nameh of Firdousi, which is the Persian form of the Indian Mahabharata, but one in which the historical legends have reached a much later stage of decomposition than those of the Indian Epic, is founded on the much earlier histories of the Zendavesta and Bundahish. It begins with the reign of Ka'ioumors, the Persian Rama, who is said to have come to the throne when the sun entered Aries, but it does not state the time of the year when this happened. J. Mohl, Le Livre des Rois, p. iS,
   
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the star £ Piscium, which was then the fish-star-mother, the Akkadian fish-goddess Nana, the Phoenician Tirhatha, who was delivered of her son, the Ram-sun-god, at the autumnal equinox. Hence this year beginning with the sun in Aries ended with the sun passing from Pisces into Aries at the autumnal equinox. This is confirmed by the Nakshatras, for the 25th and 26th Nakshatras are Purva and Uttara Bhadrapada, those of the month Bhadrapada (August—Sepember) closing with the autumnal equinox- That this constellation Revati marked the close of the Hindu Nakshatra year is also conclusively proved by the Vedic hymn x. 19 i addressed to Revat. In Stanzas 1 and 2 she is called on to be still, and not carry away further the cows of light, but to allow them to return ; and in Stanzas 6 and 8 she is called the Nivartana or star which makes the cows return, that is, which makes them, when they have ended their annual circuit, begin again their appointed round along the path of the Nakshatra stars, still used by all Hindus as lunar and solar Zodiacs.
This new reckoning of time, starting from the place of the sun at the autumnal equinox and winter solstice, ignored the old Pole Star worship of the days when the Pole Stars in Kepheus and Cygnus were visible* and introduced the conception of the sun-mother, enclosed in the tower of the three- years cycle, the labyrinthine castle of the ten-headed Ra- vana in Ceylon, in which Sita was confined, and Perseus and the Celtic sun-god Lug were born. The history of Perseus and his marriage with Andromeda, the Phoenician Adamath, the red-earth daughter of Kassiopaea, Kassia- peaer (the beautiful, Heb. peaer), wife of Zeus Kasios, and the equivalent of Eurynome (Sem. Erebh-noema), the beautiful West (ereb), points to a history based on the worship of the Pole Star Kepheus, husband of Kassiopaea, transformed to a worship of the sun-star, and its attendant constellations Kassiopaea, Perseus and Andromeda, outside the Polar circle.
1   Ludwig, Rigveda, No. 1S5, vol. i. pp. 191, 192.
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History and Chronology
Each of the forty months of 27 days, forming the cycle- year of this epoch, was divided into three weeks of nine days, which appear in Vedic .mythology as the Navagva Angiras, the nine priests of the burnt (anga) offering, and who are represented in Rg. x. 61, 10, ri, as guarding the seed whence the god engendered by the union of Prajapati with his daughter RohinI was to be born. This mother- goddess was first the doe-mother, the star Aldebaran, and afterwards became the red dawn-cow of Rg. viii. go, 13, the mother of the Kushikas. Her son was, as we have seen on p. 90, the god called in Rg. x. 61, 18, Nabhi- nedeshtha, the nearest to the navel, and the central fire on the altar. These nine Angiras were the guardians of the cows of light kept by the Panis or traders when Sarama, the bitch of the gods, was sent to find them x. Also their intimate connection as reckoners of time with the year . measurements of the cycle-year of gestation is distinctly proved in Rg. v. 45, 7, 8, where they are said to have sung for ten months when Sarama found the Tows they guarded, while the necessity of their guidance to those who would traverse the wilds of time to find the cows of light is proved in Rg. iii. 39, 4, where Indra is said to have taken the Navagvas to show him the way to thhse cows who lay in darkness.
This year with its nine-day weeks also seems to be referred to in Rg. x. 49,6, where Indra relates among his other exploits his destruction of Brihad-ratha, the year-god, with the chariot (ratha) of Brihati, with its nine (navd) dwellings vastva). Brihati was, as I have shown on pp. 69,70, the goddess of the original year measured by five-day weeks, who with Rathan- tara ruled the seventy-two weeks of the year. In this passage she still remains the goddess of the year-weeks, which had become weeks of nine days or dwellings, and not of five days. This ancient week of nine days still survives in the Great Bengal Festival of the Durga-puja, called also Nava-ratra, the nine nights, celebrating the 1
1   Rg. x. 108, S, 10,
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victory of Durga the mountain-goddess over the buffalo- god Mahishasur. It is to all Bengalis practically the New Year’s Feast of the year, and is held during the first nine days of Ashva-yujau or Assin (September—October), that is at the autumnal equinox T.
The forty months of this year are mentioned as a measure of time in Rg. ii. 12, 11, where Indra is said to have found and slain the dragon Shambara called Danu, or the son of Danu the Pole Star god, in the fortieth (month of) autumn, and also in Rg. i. 126, 4, where Kakshivan, who, as we shall see in Chapter VI., is the year-god of the next epoch of the eleven-months year, is said to have in his possession the forty flame-coloured horses or months of Dasaratha, that is of the ten (dasa) chariots (ratha), or months of gestation of the sun-god, also called Raghu the father of Rama.
The description of this forty-months year as that of Shambara gives us a further clue to its place in Hindu Chronological history, for the name means the holder of the Shamba or lance. The year-god of the lance is in the historical record of the Mahabharata Kama, the horned ikeren) god, the first son of the mother of the Pandavas called Kunti, the lance, or Prithi, the begetting mother of the Parthas, a name of the Pandavas in the poem. They were the Parthavas or Parthians, the horsemen of Central Asia who fought with the lance, and bore on their banners the image of their parent-god Susi-Nag, the snake of the sons of the Shu-bird. They appear in Rg. vi. 27, 5—8, as the tribe to which Abhyavartin Chayamana belonged, who led the Srinjaya against the Vrishivans and Turvasu, and slew three hundred of them at the Hariyupiya or sacrificial stakes (yupa) of Hari, that is at Mathura, the sacred shrine of Hari, the Hindu form of the goddess Shar, on the Yayavati or Jumna, called here the river of the Yavya or barley (yava) granaries. 1
1   Monier Williams, Religious Thotighl and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431.
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Karna was miraculously begotten by the sun-god when he touched the navel of his virgin mother1, that is, lit the fire on the centre of the mother altar made in the form of a woman, which was made the altar of burnt-offering during this epoch. He was born with an impenetrable coat of golden mail, marking the invulnerability of the sun-god during the term of his rule as the measurer of year time, and with semi-circular earrings, which marked him as the sun-god with the horns of the lunar crescent.
He was born, as we are told in the Mahabharata, on the first day of the tenth month of the year beginning at the winter solstice, that is at the autumnal equinox, and was at his birth placed by his mother in a basket boat, the osier- moon-boat of the Basque sons of the rivers, and launched on the Ashva or Horse-river, whence the boat descended to the Ganges. At Champa, near the modern Bhagalpur and the village of Karnagurh, called after him, Radha, the month Vaisakha (April—May), the mid-month of the Pleiades year, found the infant sun in the moon-boat, and took him to her husband, Adhiratha, the charioteer of the year’s chariot, who was king of Anga, the burning (anga) volcanic land of Monghyr and Bhagalpore, and of the Angiras priesthood1 2 3. Thence he ruled North-eastern India, the land of the central mountain of Mandara or Parisnath, not far to the west of Champa. It was Indra who beguiled this horned son of the Horse or Ass-river {ashva) 3 of his
1 Mahabharata Vana (Kundala-harana) Parva, cccvi.—cccix. pp. 908—912.
2 Ibid., cccvii. p. 907; Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 177, 178; Beal’s Buddhist Records of the Western World, vol. ii. p. 191. In p. 187 the Karna legend as told by Hiouen Tsiang is given. His feet were covered with golden hair, and he is called in the Buddhist traditions of the Mahavagga Sona (the golden) Kolivira and Sona Kutikanna. The latter epithet means “ He with the pointed ears,” that is to say, he was the golden sun-god with the asses ears of the crescent moon. Rhys David and Oldenberg’s Vinaya Texts, Mahavagga, v. 1, iff., v. 13, iff.; S.B.E., vol. xvii. pp. iff. 32, note 3.
3   Our word ass, the Latin asinus, comes from the Sanskrit ashva, which meant originally an ass, the long-eared horse Ucchai-shravas of India.
   
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impenetrable golden armour and earrings when Indra became, as the Pandava-god Arjuna, his son, the ruler of the year, who began it by bringing up the rains at the summer solstice. He gave Karija in exchange the lance called Vasavi, the bamboo lance of the god Vasu, whence the tribe of the Shambara took its name, and the weapon of the god ruling the three years’ cycle, with which he pierced the rain-clouds. It was with this throwing lance or arrow that Karna was armed when he was made king of Anga by Duryodhanaz, the generalissimo of the Kauravyas, and when he was the third of the five leaders Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Shalya and Duryodhana, who successively led the Kauravyas against the Pandavas. With it he struck off the golden crest of Arjuna before the latter slew him with the more powerful weapon of the new sun-god, called Anjalika2. This was the weapon of the joined hands (afijali), that of the diving-fish sun-god, who joins his hands like a diver when plunging at the sun-set of the summer solstice into the waters of the Southern Ocean, which are to lead him to his winter goal. The death of Karna marked the beginning of the next epoch, described in Chapter VI., when the year began in one of its phases at the summer solstice.
The Zend counterpart of Karna, the horned-god of the Horse or Ass-river, appears, if we judge by the name, to be Keresaspa, the horned (keres) horse (aspd), who is said in the Yasnas to be son of Thrita the third, the Vedic Trita, elsewhere called Thraetaona, the conqueror of the threeheaded six-eyed god Azi Dahaka, who ruled the year measured by six-day weeks, described in Chapter IV. But when we compare the mythological history of Thraetaona and his son and successor Keresaspa, as told in the Zenda- vesta, it seems certain that it was Thraetaona who was god of the cycle-year. He is called the Sama or Semite 3, 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxviii. p. 406.
2   Mahabharata Karna Parva, xc. pp. 352—364.
3   Mill, Zendavesta, Part, iii., Yasna, ix. 10 ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. pp. 233, 234-
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and was therefore the first ruler of this especially Semite- year, which was that instituted by the Hittites, called in India Khati, the Khita of the Egyptians and Assyrians,
This third god of the three united years, the conqueror of the year of six-day weeks, was accompanied on his march to the Rangha or Tigris, where he killed Azi Dahaka, by the mother-mountain-bird, called in the Aban Yasht Vafra Navaza, the freshly-fallen snow I. This snow-bird, the bird Hu Kairya, dwelling on the top of Ararat, whence the mother rivers of the sons of the rivers the Euphrates and Tigris descend to water the earth, was the bird which Thraetaona is said to have thrown up in the air as a vulture. It then flew to the Pole Star mountain, and brought down the mother-goddess Ardvi Sura Anahita from her mountain heights, as the spring-goddess of the year, the goddess who caused the yearly rise of the Euphrates at the vernal equinox when the snows melt. The bird of the freshly-fallen snow of the autumnal equinox was the Pole Star bird in Cygnus, who ruled the Northern receptacle for the waters which are to fall on the earth in rain.
The age of Trita, the god of the triple year, was that of the nine sons of Pathana, the nine days of the cycle- week, and also of Hitaspa, the Plittite horse, and of Snavid- haka, the stone-handed-god of the gnomon-stone, who made the earth a wheel and made the shining sun of Garo- nmana, the home of light and the spirit of darkness, that is the day and night, carry his year chariot. That is to say, made the sun the god ruling the march of time. It was also that of the earth-tortoise fish on which Keresaspa cooked his food, and which ran away with him, carrying him round the heavens in the course of the three-years’ cycle-year to become the god of the head of the sun-horse in the next epoch 2.
1   Darmesteler, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, 61—64; S.B.E., vol. xxiii, pp. 68, note 3, 69.
2   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zayad Yasht, 40—44; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp 293—297.