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The truth shall set you free => Religion => Religion => History of religion => Topic started by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:34:47 PM

Title: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:34:47 PM: 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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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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Great Bharatas, the race - begetters (bliri), the people formed from the amalgamation of the races who successively- ruled India down to the close of the Myth-making Age, and who called it Bharata-varsha, the land of the Bharatas. This covers the whole period reviewed in this work, beginning even before the first date I have recorded, 21,000 B.C., when a Kepheus was the Pole Star.
During the whole of the three ages of Pole Star, Lunar- solar and Sun-worship comprised in this Myth-making epoch all ancient histories were framed on similar ground- plans to those used by the successive authors of the Mahab- harata legends, and were recited to the people at the national New Years’ festivals, as I show in Chapter VI. pp. 297, 298. By the rules of their construction, they only furnish exact information as to the course of the national changes they describe when they are interpreted in the sense intended by their authors to be conveyed to those for whose use they were intended. These men lived in an age when the object of the national historians was to record the progress of the .nation or tribe for whose benefit they worked, and thus to furnish guide-marks to the descendants of each generation, which thus by these did bequeath its experiences to its children. For this purpose the record of the names of the national leaders was in their eyes useless. Hence they substituted for the living actors symbolically named persons whose names gave a key to the inner meaning of these narratives, and these, when they had completed the tasks attributed to them in the historic dramas prepared by the national historiographers the Prashastri, or teaching and recording priests of the Hindus, the Zend Frashaostra who became the Jewish scribes and the Greek Exegetse, only lived as guides to memory, or were like the heroes of the Mahab- harata transferred to heaven as stars. They thus took their place in the historical nomenclature of the Constellations, which, as will be seen in the course of this work, tell in their names the history of the world.
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Seeing that the narrators of these officially prepared ancient histories, which were believed to be divinely inspired utterances painting in pictorial language the national results achieved in the course of ages, always used the names of the actors they spoke of as keys to their meaning, it is a fatal mistake to regard these embodied symbolical sign-marks of the primitive form of history as indicating individuals. In these narratives the actual leaders who had been honoured, loved and followed during the lifetime they had devoted to the service of their country, were only remembered after death in the records of the victories they had gained over the obstacles raised by ignorance and lawless licence, over human foes and climatic impediments. This memorial, furnished by the benefits secured by their deeds, was the only remembrance they wished and sought for, as the end for which they toiled was not so much personal aggrandisement as the continued stability and improvement of the state fabric they and their fathers had reared. This was in their eyes a far more noble monument than that of personal praise, and one which best repaid their constant devotion to what they had learnt to be their highest duty.
Under this system of oral historical record, in which each generation handed down its experiences to its descendants, each successive leader became the reproduction of those who preceded him in the task of nation-building, or, in the words of the Mahabharata, the son was the father reborn from the mother-sheath. Thus in religious evolution, as will be shown hereafter, each newly deified manifestation of divine power became the successor under different names and attributes of the original creating Spirit-God. This conception appears in its most fully developed form in the sequence of the births of the Buddha, recorded in the Jatakas or Birth- Stories, and partly told in Chapter VII. Section G. In these his first embodiment as a God of Time is said by himself in Jataka 465 I, to be his birth as the king Sal-tree 1 Rouse and Francis, The Jatakas, vol. iv. pp. 96—98.
xxviii   Preface.
[Shorea robusta), the mother-tree, from which he was afterwards born as the sun-god. This tree was the pillar which supported the palace of king Brahmadatta, the ruler, given (datta) by the Creator [Brahma). This palace was the heavenly vault lit with stars, which I have described above as the dome sustained by the world’s tree with its roots fixed in the mud of the Southern Ocean and its top crowned by the Pole Star.
A variant form of this tree was the Erica-tree supporting the palace of the king of Byblos, the modern Ji-bail, the Phoenician Gi-bal, the city of the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil or Bil-gi, where, as we have seen above, the Peplos of Harmonia was kept. In this tree Isis found the coffin of Osiris, the year-god, containing his body, which on her arrival in Egypt was cut into fourteen pieces by Set and his seventy-two assistants, who changed the year-god of the growing tree who had measured the year by seventy-two five-day weeks into that of the lunar-solar god who measured his year by the fourteen days of the lunar phases 1.
This doctrine of re-birth survived among the poet-bards of the Gotho-Celtic Northern sun-worshippers, who initiated the new history succeeding that of the Myth-making Age, and told of the deeds of individual heroes who were actually living men. It was under this influence that they mingled with their biographies of famous warrior-kings, such as Cyrus, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, legends taken from earlier records, which assigned to them birth-stories told originally of their mythic predecessors. Thus they made Cyrus the son of the daughter of Astyages, that is Azi Dahaka, the biting snake, the Indian Vritra, slain by Trita and Thraetaona and other conquering heroes of the Rigveda and Zendavesta. Alexander the Great became the descendant of Peleus, the Potter-god of the Potter’s Clay (7797X05), and of Achilles, the sun-god. And they associated
1 Frazer, Golden Bough, First Edition, vol. i., chap. iii. pp. 302, 303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 128, 129.
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Charlemagne with the sun-charioteer, the Wain of Karl, the Great Bear, and the sun hero Roland. These bards reproduced the old traditional histories in the Sagas of the North, and in those on which the Iliad, Odyssey and ^Eneid are founded ; and all these, like the later Shah Nameh of Persia, the much earlier Mahabharata, and the still more primitive Gond Song of Lingal, make the sun, moon, star and atmospheric heroes of the earliest national legends actors in historic dramas, which, while purporting to represent comparatively recent historical events, really tell those of a very remote past. It was the conquering races, whose historians were their tribal bards, who, on their amalgamation with their foes, instituted the last year dealt with in these Chapters, the year of twelve months of thirty days each, divided into ten-day weeks, and who built the brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East. The composite theology of this new year is described in Chapter IX.
The histories of the Myth-making Age were, as will be seen in the sequel of this work, told in three forms, (i) The verbal histories prepared by the official historians of each governing state. (2) The pictorial histories told in the engraved bas-reliefs and picture Papyri of Egypt, and of the Turano-Hittite trading races who drew the rock-picture of Iasilikaia, copied on p. 259. This is only one specimen form of a large number of similar pictographs; and this pictorial history is told also in symbols, such as those on the Breton form of the Hindu Linga altar, described in Chapter V. pp. 269—272.   (3) The histories handed down in the forms
of the national ritual, such as that told in Chapter V. p. 205 ffi, which recorded by the sacrifice of a ram at the autumnal equinox the first measurement of the year beginning when the sun entered Aries on the day after the evening sacrifice of the ram, the sun-god of the dying year; also that told in the epitome of national history recorded, as is related in Chapter IX., in the ritual of the building of the brick altar of the year sun-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox, the crowning manifesto of Indian theology.
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Preface.
In estimating the value of the historical deductions to be drawn from these surviving customs, time-reckonings, rituals, histories and religious beliefs, we must never forget that they must be looked on as signs proving each race who adopted them to be distinct from its neighbours, whose customs differed from theirs. Each stock which became a separate nation had its own special customs, traditions and religion, and these were the birth-marks and national treasures which each emigrating section took with them to other lands from their parent home.
I have traced the course of some of these emigrations, beginning with the most historically important of them all, that in which the descendants of the first founders of Indian villages made their way in canoes hollowed out of forest trees, grown on the wooded coasts of Western India, to the then barren shores of the Persian Gulf on which no shipbuilding timber has ever grown. In these lands, and others to which they subsequently penetrated, the early wanderers found large tracts of vacant space wherever they settled, and thus all countries in which they found unoccupied territories possessing favourable soil and climate, were studded with groups of settlers, each^jdiffering from its neighbours in customs, history, the symbolism of religious belief and ritual, and each measuring time after its own fashion. Each group carried with it It's own religion for the personal use of its members, and looked on the abandonment of its tenets, or the attempt to bring over proselytes from other groups, as gross impieties. Even the conception of apostacy of this kind never entered into the minds of the first founders of society, who looked on the religion professed by each group as one which must inevitably be that of every affiliated member. Hence any one passing through the territories thus peopled in the early ages, before tribal wars had promoted distrust, and caused the national customs to be concealed from strangers under a veil of secrecy, would on moving from one group to another find himself to be traversing a series of states varying from each other like the different
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patterns of a kaleidescope, but possessing fundamental similarities under their apparent differences. These customs were all most carefully preserved under the influence of the intense national conservatism which is the most marked characteristic of the human race. It is owing to this that even now, after the lapse of thousands of years disseminating their obliterating influences, there are still, as in the primitive era, affinities to be found between those who have travelled over and settled in regions of the earth’s surface very distant from each other, and disparities between those who live near together.
Hence under these distributions of the population the numerous tribes recorded by ancient writers as dwelling in each of the countries of South-eastern Asia and Europe must be looked on as grouping together, under each tribal name, persons and families whose ancestors had formed their separate unions in a very remote past, while many, if not most, of the groups traced their descent from a distant centre of origin. It is this persistent preservation of the tribal ritual and history which explains the close likeness between Celtic mythology and that of Southern India, which I have shown to be revealed to us by the study of the year-reckonings, and the ritual of the Druids. These latter were the priests of the Fomori or men beneath {fo) the sea (muir) and the Tuatha de Danann, sons of the goddess Danu, the descendants of emigrants who had, in the course of ages, made their way from the Southern’Iands~of the Indian Archipelago, thoSe'~cTf the Southern end of the world’s egg, of which the Kauravya plain of Northern India was the top. They preserved in Ireland, Britain and Gaul the ancient beliefs of the Indian Danava, sons of Danu, the mother-goddess worshipped by the Druids,
Each of these national units believed it to be its chief duty to maintain intact the historical customs and religion of their forefathers, and to measure time as they did ; but though they occasionally naturalised members of other groups, yet the naturalised man had to abandon all links of association
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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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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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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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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:51:03 PM: 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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

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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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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.

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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
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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

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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.

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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.
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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-
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:52:35 PM: 22   History and Chronology
ca’ted to and named after the Pleiades, called the Krittakas or Spinners.
Besides this year there was another year brought to India by the Mundas, the earliest emigrants from the North-east. They came from the mountains of South China, a colder and much more rainy region than South India ; and they, instead of dreading the sun as an enemy, looked on the winter sun as a kindly mother, whose fiery rays dried and warmed the soil chilled and sodden by the constant rains of summer and autumn. It was the sun which made their land fit for the sowing of the seeds of their winter and spring crops, which were originally chiefly millets, the grain called Murwa in Bengal, and Raggi in Madras (Eleusine Coracana), and another allied species called Gundli in Chutia Nagpore. They deified the sun as their national god, and worship him under the name of Sri Bonga. This god. was symbolised on earth by the sun-bird, the wild jungle-fowl, the parent of our domestic poultry. In their belief it began its annual course round the heavens and the central Pole when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. Thence it went northward, reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice, whence it came southwards to its winter home. This is the year still regarded as the orthodox year of Hindu Brahminical ritual. It is divided like that of the Pleiades into two periods of six months each: the first six months from the winter to the summer solstice being called Devayana or times (ayana) of the gods, and the six months of the returning sun ending with the winter solstice are the Pitri-yana or times (aydna) of the fathers. This is the year ruled by the Vedic god Tvashtar, the creator, the most ancient god in the Hindu Pantheon, who shows in his name beginning with the superlative form of tva, two (tvash), that he is the ruling god of the most holy of the two years measured by two seasons. The existence of the first year, that of the Pleiades, is, however, recognised in the Hindu system of months, for the name of the month Vi-sakha (April—May), which is the mid month of the
   23
Pleiades year, means the month of two (yi) branches (sakha), thus recording the original bifurcation of the year in the middle of this month.
A.   Birth of life from the Mother Tree.
But the division of time into periods measured by months was only made comprehensible to the popular intellect after a long period of national education, and the first time-unit used as a fraction of the year was that which marked the weeks. The first week was one of five days, or rather five nights, for the equatorial day of the Pleiades year began at sunset at six o’clock in the evening, and the reason for the adoption of this time-unit is to be found in the fundamental assumptions of their infant astronomy. They based all their calculations of time measurement on their adoption of the conclusion that the setting, rising, and culmination of the stars, the sun, and the moon, proved that they all described a daily circle in the heavens round a central point marked by the North Pole Star. The reason which they gave to account for this revolution of the heavenly bodies is most clearly set forth in a story preserved by the Australian aborigines I. It tells how Gneeang- ger, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, found a grub in a tree, that is in the magic tree of the sacred part of the forest set apart for the national ceremonies performed by the tribal priest, and near the corroboree dancing ground, answering to the Akra, placed in the Hindu village under the shade of the Sarna or central grove. This grub, the chrysalis of the raven parent god of the tribe, she took out and it became the giant raven star Canopus, who ran away with her, that is to say dragged her, her attendant stars the Pleiades, and the rest of the starry host round the Pole.
This raven star of this Australian story became, in the Hindu mythology, Agastya, the star Canopus, whose name
1   Elwortliy, The Evil Eye, Appendix iii. p. 438.
24
History and Chronology
means the singer (gd), the leader of the harmony of the spheres. He appears in his raven form in Rg. ii. 43, 1, 2, where the holy raven (Shakuni) is said to sing the divine songs of the ritual in the sacred metres which, as we shall see, represent in the varying numbers of their syllables the successive changes' in the measurements of ritualistic time. It is this lif^-giving raven gifted with the amrita or water of life, which in the historical Gond poem of the Song of the Lingal restores Lingal, the rain - father god, to life after he had been slain by the first race of Gonds, the race from the North-east, whom he had settled on the land. The conception of the raven star was based on the black rain -cloud which brought up the rains of the South-west and North-east monsoons, and it was the wind which preceded these annual rains which was first believed to drive the stars round the Pole.
But side by side with and anterior in time to this conception there grew up another, founded on the belief in the origin of life from the central mother-tree of the South in which the Canopus grub was found. As there was no Pole Star visible in the Southern heavens, the region of the South was looked on as a dark waste of waters within which dwelt the unseen South Pole goddess, the awful and mysterious mother of living things. She was adored by the Akkadians as Bahu, the Baau of the Phoenicians, the Bohu or waste void of Genesis i. 2. She was called “ the mother who has begotten the black-headed Akkadians x, the sons of the father la, the god of the house (/), of the waters (a), whose home is in the North Pole Star.5’ Also as Gula, the Great One, she is called “ the wife of the Southern Sun.” In another form of her mythic history she is the great serpent goddess of the deep called Tiamat, the mother of living things (tia), the goddess who surrounded and guarded the mother-tree of the Southern world, as the holy boundary-snake is believed in Hindu 1
1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 262—264.

25
mythology to guard the village with the Sarna in its centre. She was in this form the winged snake goddess destroyed by Marduk, or Bel Merodach, the sun calf (marduk), when the sun-god of day became the ruler of the year instead of the stars of night in the lunar solar epoch succeeding the sidereal Pole Star age. And this mother abyss of waters was symbolised in the latest Semitic .ritual in the brazen seas or abysses (absu), which were first pools of water and afterwards brazen basins, which were placed in the southern outer courts of the Babylonian temples, and reproduced in Jewish ritualJ.
The tree mother born from this abyss of waters is in the Zend historical mythology the Gao-kerena, Gokard or White Horn tree, growing according to the Dlnkard, the epitome of the lost Nasks, in “deep mud of the wide- formed ocean,” the sea Vouru-kasha, or the Indian Ocean 2. This tree, with its roots in the Southern sea, grew up on earth on the banks of the river Daitya, the river of the serpents or parent snakes. This was the river Kur or Araxes, rising in Mt. Ararat and falling into the Caspian sea. On this tree was the nest of the Horn birds 3. These are the mother ravens, the birds of the night and the day, who, in Rg. i. 164, 20-22, “sit on this tree whence all things grow and which knows no father, the day bird eating its fruits and the night bird guarding it in silence.” They are the birds who watch over the Zend Haoma, the Hindu Soma, the sap of life. Haoma and Soma are derived from the roots Hu and Su, both of which are dialectic forms of Khu,
1   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i., p. 63 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 188, 189, with plan of Sabsean temple; 1 Kings vii. 39; 2 Chron. iv. 10, where the brazen sea is placed to the South-east.
2   West, Dlnkard, vii. 29; West, Bundahish, xviii. 1 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, xx. 4; S.B.E., xlvii. p. 25; vol. v. p. 65; iv. p. 221 ; Introduction, iv. 2S; lxiv.
3   Dlnkard, vii. 26—36 ; Bundahish, xx. 13 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, i. 3; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 24—26; v. p. 79, note I ; iv. p. 5, notes 2 and 3.
26
History and Chronology
the mother-bird of the Akkadians and Egyptians, who was originally the bird of the raven-star nest Argo. It was from “ the water and vegetation ” supplied by this tree that the great 'Zend prophet, Zarathustra, was born as the sun-hawk, Karshipta, who spoke the Avesta in the language of birds r.
In the Hindu form of the mythological history of this tree of life it had its roots in the ocean, and grew up on earth in the centre of the holy land of Kurukshetra, the land (Kshethra) of the Kurus, the sons of the river Kur of the Zend legend, who had come to India from Atar5 Patakan, the modern Adarbaijan, the mother land of the fire-worshippers traversed by the Kur. The line of its growth passed, as Alberuni tells us, through the course of the river Yamuna or Jumna, instead of the Zend Euphrates leading to the river Kur. Thence to the plain of Taneshur2, that is of the god (eshwar) Tan, the father of the primaeval Hindu race called the Danava, the sons of Danu, whom Indra slew. This, with its 360 shrines representing the 360 days of the year 3, was the traditional birth-place of the Kurus or Kaurs, the Kauravya of the Mahabharata born in India from this world’s mother-tree, the great Banyan tree (Ficus Indica), the Sanskrit Nigrodha tree, the tree of their father Kashyapa or Kassapa4. This tree stood on the banks of the central lake, reproducing the southern mother sea traversed by the mother ship constellation Argo. This was the lake called in Rg. i. 84, 13, 14, Sharyanavan, the ship (ndvan) of the year arrow (sharya) or the mother reed (sharya), whence the Kushika or Kurus were born as the sons of the rivers. It was on this lake lying below the Himalaya mountains, the home of the North Pole Star, that
1   West, Dinkard, vii. 36; West, Bundahish, xxiv. 11; xix. 16; Dar- mesteter, Zendavcsta Vendtdad Fargard, ii. 42, 43; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. p. 26; v. pp. 89, 70 ; iv. p. 21.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, chap. xxxi. vol. i. p. 316.
3   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, p. 332.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories; The Niddnakathd, p. 51.

27
Indra found the head of the sun-horse Dadhyank, which, as we shall see in Chapter VI., was the ruler of the eleven months year.
The Danava predecessors of the Kurus, sons of Dan or Tan, were the equivalents of the Hebrew Tannlm, the Arabic Tinnim, called in the Bible the dragons or snakes of the deep J, the Greek Ti-tans 2, or sons of the mud {tan, Arab tin) of life {ti), who were called by the Greeks children of Uranos and Gaia, heaven and earth. This is an accurate reproduction of the primitive genealogy, for Uranos is the Greek form of the Sanskrit Varuna, from the root vri, to cover, and hence Varuna is the god of the covering rain- cloud, the var reproduced in the Sanskrit Varsha, the Hindu Barsah, and the Zend Bares, all meaning rain, that is the productive seed of the original supreme god of the first villagers, the rain-god, which impregnated the earth with life. In the description of the four heavenly regions ruled by the gods called Lokapalas, or guardians of space, Varuna is the third Lokapala ruling the north heaven, whose palace is built in the waters whence all the rivers of India descend to fill the Southern Ocean 3. It is this rain descending in the rivers from the home of this god of the north which is the father of the children of men and animals produced from the nourishing fruit of the mother- tree, the offspring of the southern impregnated earth or mud, which conveys the life derived from the productive rain to all who sustain life by the fruit of the tree its daughter. This mud mother, Tan or Tin, of the Greek Titans is the primitive form of the goddess Thetis, whose name is derived from the Phoenician Thith, the mud 4. It was she who with Euronyme, the guardian goddess of the North, the Phoenician Astro Noema, first the Pole Star and afterwards
1   Ps. cxlviii. 7.
2   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 230, 231.
3   Mahabharata Sabha {Lokapala Sabhakhydna) Parva, ix. pp. 28—30.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 212.
28
History and Chronology
the Star Virgo, the mother of corn, received Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill of heaven, the smith-producer of fire, when thrown from heaven by Zeus J. This southern mud- mother-goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the northern god of the potter’s clay (7rrjXoi), became mother of the sun-god Achilles, whom she placed in the southern fire, the home of the earth’s heat, after his birth, just as Purushaspa, Za- rathustra’s father, placed his newly-born son, begotten from the mother-tree and the southern mud, in the same fire, whence he was removed at dawn by his mother and arose as the sun-god, to bring heat and light to the earth1 2 3. Achilles was the sun-god of the race of the Myrmidons or ants, the sons of the red earth, the Adamite race who succeeded the sons of the southern mother-tree, and who believed that man was formed from the dust of the earth moulded by the Divine Potter, the Pole Star god, who turned the potter’s wheel of the revolving earth. In this later conception the earth was the revolving plain turning on its axis 3, whereas in the earlier historical imagery it was the earth which stood still while the heavens, drawn by the hand of the ape-god Canopus, revolved.
This southern mother-tree was the origin of the trees which have been looked on as parent trees by so many primitive people. The Sal-tree (Shorea robusta) of the Indian Mons or Mundas, the oak tree of the Druids and of Dodona, the central parent tree of the Volsungs in the Niblunga Saga, the race of woodlanders (voir) from whom was born the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of victory
1 Homer, Iliad, xviii., 394—411; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens,
pp. 97, 151,183.
z West, Dlnkardvii. S—10; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 36, 37.
3 This is the conception of the earth entertained by the Malays who believe that “the world is of an oval shape revolving on its own axis four times in the space of one year.” They also believe in the tree-mother of life, the world’s tree, Pauh Janggi, growing in the mud of the Southern Ocean, and produced from the seed Kun created by God and conveyed in the rain. Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 5, 6, 8—10, 4.

29
(sig), the sun gnomon stone 1. The fig-trees of the Syrians and the Indian Kauravya or Kushika, the almond or nut- tree of the Jews, the budding almond-rod of Aaron 2 3 4, the date-palm-tree of Babylonia and of the Indian sun-god Bhishma and the moon-god Valarama 3, the peach-tree of China, the pine-tree of Germany and Asia Minor, the ash- tree, the Ygg-drasil of the Edda, and the cypress-tree of the Phoenicians. It was this last tree which was especially connected with the worship of the god Tan, who from being the mother mud of the South became, when the father succeeded the mother as the recognised parent, the god Tan or Danu of the North Pole.
It is in this form that he appeared as the Cretan Zeus, called I-tan-os or the god Tan, a name which survives in Zrjvos, Doric Zdvos, the Genitive of the Greek Zeus, for d, t, and z are interchangeable letters, as we see in the various names of the god of life, Zi, di, and ti. It is in the Creto- Phcenician cult of the god I - tan - os, the reproduction of the Akkadian I-tan-a, the house of Tan, that we find the worship of Brito-martis the virgin (martis) cypress- tree (berut), who became mother of the sun-god the Phoenician Adonis or the master (adon), the Hebrew Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dumti) of life (zi), who is represented as born from the cypress-tree on the Palmyrene altar at Rome 4. The Akkadian story of the birth of Dumu-zi from the mother - tree is told in a bilingual hymn quoted by Dr. Sayce. This represents the mother- tree as growing in the “ centre of the earth,” in the “ holy place ” or village grove of Eridu or Eriduga, the holy (duga) city (eri), the most ancient port at the mouth of the Euphrates, where the God la disembarked from the con-
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 111.
2   Numbers xvii. 9.
3   Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhishma- Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165; Shaleya {Gttd-Ayudka), Parva, xxxiv., lx. pp. 135, 233.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 281, 300; D’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 142.
30
History and Chronology
stellation ship Ma or Argo. In its “ foliage was the couch of Zi-kum,” the mother of life (zi), the nest of the mother bird, and into the heart of “ its holy house no man hath entered.” “ In the midst of it was Dumuzi,” the son (dumii) of life {zi), born like his counterpart the sun-hawk Zarathus- tra from the water and vegetation supplied to this world’s tree from the Southern mother Ocean I. This story of the birth of the sun-god from the tree is also reproduced, as Professor Douglas informs me, in the Chinese characters, which were originally derived, as Mr. Ball has proved, from Akkadian originals2. The Chinese character for
the character for tree /|\ is the sign for woman, used in the oldest form of the Akkadian script, that on the monuments at Girsu. So that the Chinese in their written speech say as plainly as possible that the sun is born from the mother-roots of the tree, that is the tree of life. It is from these three roots that the Yggdrasil of the Edda springs, and it draws its life-giving sap from the sources whence the roots spring, the giant’s well Mimir, the Urdar fountain of Niflheim, the home of mist, the under-world, and the dwelling of the Aisir, the home of the soul and essence of life 3. This birth of the Akkadian Dumuzi from the parent tree, is reproduced in India in the account of the birth of the sun-god, the Buddha, which I will deal with more fully afterwards in Chapter VII. Here I will only point out that the Buddha was conceived under the Great Sal tree on the Crimson plain of the dawning sun in the Himalayas. That there the god Gan-isha with the elephant’s trunk, the god of the rain-cloud, entered on her
1   Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for i SS7, Lect. iv., p. 238.
* Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists. The Akkadian Affinities of Chinese, by the Rev. C. J. Ball, M.A., § viii. ; China, Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 677, ff.
3 Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, p. 411.
This is formed of the two elements ^ tree, and 13 sun, while the triangle forming the base of

3i
right side the womb of his mother Maya, the witch mother Magha bearing the divine rod of power, the rain-compelling branch of the mother-tree. He was born from his mother when she stood and grasped the Sal tree in the village grove between Kapilavastu and Koliya, the village of the Munda or Ivol race to which his mother belonged, that is to say he was like Dumu-zi, the son of the Sal tree r, and a rain-shower fell at his birth x.
All these origin tree-mothers find their prototype in the Dravidian mother-tree goddess Mari-amma, the mother (amma), Mari the tree {maroni). She is the only goddess in the Hindu pantheon whose image is always made of wood. It is she who, in the story telling of the founding of the great temple of Jagahnath in Orissa, was the mother goddess of the primaeval temple, a yojana beneath the surface of the earth. This was shown to the founder of the later temple, King Indramena, the god Indra, by the mother crow or raven who had grown white with age. It was from these submerged foundations of the early ritual, the depths of the Southern Sea, that the earliest form of the year god, Krishna or Vishnu, was sent by divine power as a log on the sea-shore, and this log, the timber of the virgin mother-tree, is now the image of the year-god in the temple of the Lord (nath) of Space (Jagah) 2.
This is the goddess of the Palladium or guardian wooden image kept in the treasure-house of ancient cities. The classical prototype of this image is the Palladium of Troy, made of the mother wild fig-tree of the Trojan race growing in the tomb of Ilos, the founder of the city 3. This goddess, called Pallas, became the tree-mother of the Ionian race, the goddess Athene, the tree-mother of the olive-tree and earlier sacred oil plant, the Sesame (Sesamum orientate), the mother of the Indian Telis, or oil dealers, of whom 1 2 3
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Niddnakatha, pp. 62, 63, 66, 67.
2 Beauchamp, Dubois’ Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremoflies, vol. ii, p. 589, App. v. pp. 714—719.
3   Homer, Iliad, xi. 167.
32
History and Chronology
I shall give a full account in Chapter VI., when describing the eleven months year. She, as the mother-tree of the primaeval year, was the earthly representative of the stellar year-mother the Pleiades, and it is to this constellation as her heavenly counterpart that her earliest temple at Athens was orientedr. She, who was born from the head of Zeus, who was, as I have shown, the mother mud goddess Tan, and who was therefore the counterpart of her parent, appears in the form of the goddess Tan in the historical genealogy of the Boeotians, the chief agricultural people in ancient Greece. Their legendary history tells us that they arrived in Greece as emigrants from Asia Minor under Kadmus, the man of the East (Kedem), the introducer of the plough. He killed the snake parent of the original dwellers in the land, and from the land ploughed by him, and sown with the snake’s teeth, there were born the five Spartos, or sown {cnreipw) men, the five days of the week, who became ancestors of all the Boeotians. In other words, this story tells how a tribe of agriculturists from Asia Minor, who measured time by five-day weeks, came to Boeotia and occupied the country, allying themselves with the primitive villagers, the Achaioi, or sons of the snake Echis, the Ahi of the Rigveda, the Indian sons of the village tree. At the place where Kadmus rested on his journey from Delphi to Thebes, just outside the Ogygian gate of the city1 2 3 4, he set up an image of Athene, called by what Pausanias tells us was the Phoenician name of Onga 3. This name means, according to Movers, the burning or heated goddess 4. That is to say, she was originally the goddess of the heated south, the underground fire of the earth, the mud-mother- goddess Tan, and in this form she was worshipped as the
1   Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 419. He, p. 312, traces specifically the Orientation of temple sites to stars to 6400 B.C. It may have begun much earlier.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 48.
3   Ibid., ix. 12, 2, vol. i. p. 459, vol. v. p. 48:
4   Movers, Die Phonizier, i. p. 643,

33
goddess called by Pausanias the Itonian Athene. She was the goddess to whom was consecrated the land near Coronea, where the Boeotians held their annual national year festival, and the name is, as Pausanias tells us T, derived from Itonus, who was the husband of Melanippe, the black (melan) horse (>hippe) mother of night, a name of Demeter, who was, as we shall see, the mother-goddess of the Pleiades year beginning in November. Their son was Boeotus, from whom the Boeotians got their name of the people of the ploughing ox (fiovs). Thus the Boeotians were the sons of the dark mother of night, the goddess of the southern abyss of waters and of Itonus. Itonus is a variant form of I-tan-os, and a very frequent type among the ancient coins of Crete represents the god Itanos on one side with a fish’s tail, holding the trident, and on the other side he appears as the great ocean fish Tan with his wife, who is also a fish1 2 3 4. She is the fish goddess of Syria, called Derceto, or Atergatis, names shown by Movers to be variant forms of Tirhatha, meaning the abyss 3, the mud- goddess Tan under the form of the mud-born fish. These fish born from the mud are those so frequently seen in India, who appear in the tanks which had been dry mud in summer as soon as they are filled by the rains. They hybernate in the mud, and hence they are regarded as the mud-born mothers of life, and the representative of these fish, the carp, Rohu, is worshipped in India as the sun-fish, and guarded and fed in the sacred tanks.
At Coronea the statue of the Itonian Athene is accompanied by that of the god called by Pausanias ix. 34, i, Zeus, but who is said by Strabo to be Hades, the god of the Southern Ocean, the abysmal home of the winter sun 4. It was at the shrine consecrated to the god Tan
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, 1, vol. i. p. 486.
2   R. Brown, jun., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. chap. v. p. 188.
3   Lucien, De Dell Syrid, 14; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 98; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p, 594.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, vol, v. p. 169.
D
34
History and Chronology
that the Boeotians celebrated the beginning of their year at a festival held in September—October, the tenth month of the year beginning at the winter solstice. Thus their year began, like that of the Jews, with the autumnal equinox x. But this year and the present year of the Sabaeans beginning at the same time is one which, like the similar year of the Indian Pitaro Barishadah, the Kushika ancestors, has been changed, as I have shown in Chapters IV. and V., from a year which originally began in November with a feast to the dead, which has been transferred to the autumnal equinox.
This tree-goddess of the mud, Tan, also appears in the Roman Diana, the female Janus, the Etruscan Tana. She, the mother of witchcraft, is the goddess of the groves, the most celebrated of those sacred to her being the grove of Aricia, that on the Aventine, and in the Vicus Patricius at Rome, into the last of which no man might enter. Her festival and that of her male counterpart, called Virbius in Aricia and Vertumnus or the turner (verto') of the year at Rome, was held on the Ides the 13th of August, and like the Panathenaia at Athens, held on the 15th of August, it denoted the mid-day of a year beginning in January— February, the year of the sun-god Lug, which will be described in Chapter VII. But the year which was sacred to Diana as the moon-goddess, to whom cakes of meal, wine, salt and honey, shaped like a crescent-moon, were offered, was a reproduction of the original year of the tree-mother, beginning in November with its mid-year feast on the 1st of May. In this year she was the returning tree-goddess Persephone, the unwed goddess of the tree and food-bearing plants impregnated with life by the father rain-god below the earth. At these mid-year May feasts she was worshipped by votaries as naked as the first of human beings, and these are the feasts to Tana or Diana as described 1
1   Fraser. Pausanias. vol. v. p. 169.

35
in the gospel of the witches, which Mr. Leland has unearthed in Tuscany. The materials of the feast were cakes of meal salt, honey and water, and in preparing them the meal was invoked in a hymn which embodies in its first lines the ancient creed of the birth of all life from the seed of the mother plant. The lines are as follows :—
Scongiuro te, O farina,
Che sei il corpo nostro — senza di te
Non si potrebbe vivere—tu che Prima di devenire la farina Sei stata sotto terra dove tutti Sono nascosti tutti in segreti.
Translation.
I conjure thee, O meal, who art our body. Without thee we could not live. Thou who before becoming meal wert placed (as the seed) below the earth, whence all things are born in secret.
The feasts on these cakes were accompanied by large draughts of wine, and the orgies of these festivals of the dancing witches and wizards are shown by the instructions in Mr. Leland’s manual to have exactly resembled the matriarchal seasonal festivals of the primitive Indian races. They are bidden “ to sit down to supper, all naked, men and women, and the feast over they shall sing, dance, make music, and then love in the darkness with all the lights extinguished I.”
In the Hindu form of the myth of the mother-tree, reaching from the Southern Ocean to the North Pole Star, the tenant of the tree and its first-born son is the Gond ape-god Maroti, the tree (marom) ape. He, in his original form, was the female mother-ape, called in Rg. x. 86, Vrisha-kapi, the rain (vrisha) ape wife of Indra the rain-god, the ape mother impregnated with the seed of life by the heaven-sent rain. She is the ape rock ogress of the Thibetan Muni kabum, who became in the form of an ape the mother of the six sons of the ape-father-god Bodhisatva, king of the monkeys, who was the offspring of Shenrazig
1   Leland, Arcadia, or the Gospel of Witches, chap, ii., The Sabbat, pp. 8—14 ; Diana, Encyclopcedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. p. 167 ; W. Warde Fowler., The Roman Festivals ; Mcnsis Sextilis, pp. 198 ff,
D 2
History and Chronology

Wungch’yuk, the visible light, the Pole Star god, and the goddess Drolma, born of the tears of his right eye, the mother rain-cloud x. The ape-mother-goddess became in the evolution of belief from south to north the Finn Pole Star goddess Taara, the Tari Pennu or female {pen) Tara worshipped in Eastern India by the Kandhs of Oressa and all the superior agricultural tribes of Bengal and Behar. She represents the Finn immigration, which made its way into India after the Mundas or mountaineers. They were people of the same stock as the Ugro Finn Akkadians, who ruled the Euphratean countries before the Semites, and who introduced both into Mesopotamia and India the same system of magic and witchcraft which they still practise in their original homes in the north. It was this Finn element which has made Central India, and especially Chutia Nagpore, the country still looked on as the home of wizardry and of dealings with evil spirits.
B.   Date of the belief in the Pole Star parent-god.
Hiouen Tsiang describes the statue of Tara at Tiladaka in Maghada as one of a triad with the Buddha in the centre. She stood on his left, and their offspring Avalokitesvara, meaning the visible {avalokita) Buddha, on his right 1 2 3. She, in the story of Rama and Sita, is the Pole Star goddess, first the wife of Vali the circling {vri) god, the leading star- god going round the Pole, and after his death, when slain by Rama, she was wedded to Su-griva, the ape with the neck (griva) of Su the bird, the bird-headed ape who had his nest in the Pole Star tree 3. It was he and his brother Hanuman, the son of Pavana the wind, who were the year gods who built the bridge of 360,000 apes, or 360 days
1   Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, app. vi. pp. 355 ff., 326 ft. ; Mttni Kabtun, Bk. ii.
2   Beal, ‘ Records of the Western World,' Hiouen Tsiang’s Travels, bk. viii., vol. ii. p. 103.
3   Mahabharata Vana (Dravpadi-harana) Parva, cclxxix. pp. 822 ft.

37
of the year, by which Rama reached the island of Lanka (Ceylon), the home of the southern sun, where Sita was confined by her ravisher the ten-headed Ravana, the god of the cycle year of three years described in Chapter V. This story of the wedding of the Pole Star ape-mother to the bird-headed ape Su-griva gives us a reliable date for an early stage of this legendary history. The assignment of the nest of the bird-headed ape as the dwelling-place of the Pole marks the age of the origin of the tale as that when the Pole Star was in the constellation of the tree-ape. This is the constellation Kepheus, a Greek form of the Indian Kapi, the Greek Kepos, the Latin Cebus, all meaning the ape. This name of the constellation has been derived by Mr. R. Brown from 'the Phoenician Keph, a stone, the Cephas of the Bible, the divine stone Baitulos (Sem. Beth-el) of Sanchoniathon, brother of Atlas or Atel, darkness x. He shows, on the authority of Achilleus Tatius2, that it was not under that name a Babylonian or Egyptian constellation, but quotes Lenormant, Les Origines I. 573, 574, to prove that this constellation of the Divine Stone was that consecrated to the Phoenician god Baal of Katsia on the Promontory that is Mount Kasios, on which stood the temple of Baal Tsephon, the god of the north, that is the Pole Star god called Zeus Kasios on bronze coins of Seleukia, on which he is depicted as a conical stone. This Zeus, called Kassia in Aramaic inscriptions, according to Pherecydes slew Typhdn, Tsephon or Zaphon, that is to say supplanted his rule and appropriated his shrine. Thus the ousted god Tsephon is the Greek Typhon, our typhoon, the god of the storm wind, that is to say he is the god of the death-dealing hot south-west winds which blow from the middle of June, the beginning of the Syriac month Cherizon, meaning the pig (June—July), 1
1 R. Brown, jun,, F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 30; ‘The Origin of Ancient Northern Constellation Figures.’ Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1897, pp. 217—219.
* Achilles, Tatius Eisagoge, xxxix.
38
History and Chronology
to the middle of September1. When we consider this evidence and that I will now adduce from Egyptian sources, it will be clear that Mr. Brown’s proofs of the worship of Kepheus as the constellation of the stone of light are really consistent with the fact that the god of the stone was first the ape-god. He was a Phoenician god, and the Egyptian name of Phoenicia was Keft, and in an inscription in the temple of Edfu the eight apes who sing the praises of Ra are four Keftenu or Phoenician and four Uetenu or apes from the green {net) land of India, the only country on the shores of the Indian Ocean where the coasts are green1 2 3 4. The Keftenu appear in Syrian history as the Kaphtorim or Philistines, said in i Samuel vi. 17 to be ruled by five lords or axles (serdnim) the five days of their week. They are called in Genesis x. 14 sons of Misraim, a dual name indicating the northern and southern races of Egypt, sons of the ape Hapi or Kapi, the star Canopus, and of the barley-god of the North, Osiris or Orion. They are said in Amos ix. 7 to have come from the land of Kaphtor, called in Jeremiah xlvii. 4 the isles of Kaphtor, and in Deuteronomy
ii.   23 they are said to have come to Syria from Kaphtor after the Avvim who dwelt in villages, the first communal villages on the Indian model founded by the Rephaim, who were, as I show in Chapter III., p. 77, the sons of Repha, the star Canopus. This land of Kaphtor is clearly the southern land of Kapi the ape, whence, as I shall show, the Phoenician Tursena, the Indian Turvasu, came from the island of Turos in the Persian Gulf 3. The Egyptian Pole Star god is the ape-god Seb or Hapi, a form of Kapi, who sits on the top of the world’s tree with his Thigh, the name of the Great Bear in Egyptian astronomy 43 pointing to the Pole Star his head, and thence he turns the stars round the Pole.
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p. 224.
2   Brugsch, Religion nnd Mythologie der Alten rEgypter, p. 152.
3   Smith, ‘Philistines,’ Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. xviii. pp. 755— 757'
4   Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xeix. p. 158, where the Great Bear is called the Thigh of Hapi.

39
Hence his head is called Keph, the Greek Kephale, the Latin caput, as the head of the ape Kapi. These conclusions are corroborated in Akkadian and Arabian astronomy. In the former Kepheus was called Ua-lu-zun, the numerous flock1, and in the latter A1 Aghnan, the sheep led by 7 Kepheus the Pole Star in 19,000 B.C., called Ar-rai, the shepherd2. This shepherd was the guardian ape, the Pole Star god. The whole evidence proves conclusively that the Pole Star was watched in India from 21,000 B.C., when it was first a star in Kepheus, and that a record of the changing Pole Stars was kept and registered by all the nations living round the Indian Ocean, and in Syria and Egypt, and that it was this national record which preserved to later ages the memory of the remote time when a and 7 Kepheus were the Pole Star head of the ape, the watcher of the heavenly flock. It is as a member of this flock intimately connected with Kepheus, that Kassiopaea, his Greek wife, is called in Welsh Lys Don, the Court of Don, or the Pole Star goddess Danu, mother of the Celtic Tuatha de Danann, the tribes of the goddess Danu 3.
The primaeval history of the marriage of the Pole Star with the bird-headed ape passed from India to Egypt, where it was reproduced in the account of the birth of Horus, the bird-headed sun-god. He, whose second son is Hapi the ape, is depicted on the walls of the temple of the Virgin Mother Hat-hor, the house (hat) of Hor, as issuing from her womb 4. And she is shown by the orientation of the temple to be the star goddess Dubha a in the Great Bear, which was about 5000 B.c. the nearest rising and setting star to the North Pole, the home of the Pole Star goddess to whom *
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. p. 20.
2   Hyde, Hist. Rel.,Pers. Edition, 1760, pp. 128, 129 ; Smith, Celestial Cycle, ii. p. 500.
3   Professor Rhys’ Address to the Mythological Section of the Folklore Congress of 1891. Papers and Transactions of the Congress, p. 14S.
4   Marsham Adams, The Books of the Master, chap, vi., The Temple of the Virgin Mother, pp. 67—72.
40
History and Chronology
the temple was dedicated. The original foundation of her temple at Denderah, which was rebuilt by Pepi the second about 3400 B.C., dates, according to an inscription by Thothmes III., from the time of the Hor-shesu, or sons of Hor, before 5000 B.C., as the plan of Pepi’s temple was drawn on “ a leathern roll of their era found by Pepi in a brick wall on the south side of the temple I.”
In this historical year drama in which the wind-driven rain-cloud became the raven-star Canopus, called also the wind-ape Hanuman or Agastiya, the Pleiades and her attendant stars were thought to be dragged round the Pole Star in their daily and annual circuits by the five fingers of the mighty hand of the raven-headed ape-god, the five days of the week. This year leader, Agastiya or Hanuman, has been looked on by all the natives of Southern India from time immemorial as the traditional father of the three Dasyas, or country (desk) born tribes, who have successively ruled the land2 3. These are (1) the Cholas or Kolas, the Munda, Mon or Malli mountaineers from the North-east, united with the primitive forest Dravidians ; (2) the Cheroos or Northern sons of the bird (c/tir, chirya), the Ugro Finn races allied to the Akkadians of the Euphrates valley; and (3) the Pandyas or fair (pandu) men, the later corngrowing sons of the Syrian fig - tree. Their father-star Canopus controls the tides in Hindu astronomy by drinking up the waters of the ocean, a function assigned in the Zen- davesta to the constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or the hundred (sata) creators, in which Canopus is the chief star 3.
1   Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xx., The Date of the Temple, pp. 204—207.
2   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha Ydtrd) Parva, xcix. p. 314.
3   West, Bundahish, ii. 7, xiii. 12; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Far- gard, v. 18, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 12, 44, iv. p. 54; Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha-Yatra) Parva, ccii.—ccix. pp. 324—340; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. p. 257.

4i
C.   The original week of five days.
As the star leaders of the primitive year were always setting not rising stars, the weeks measured by the five fingers of the ape father-star were measured by nights and not by days. This reckoning by nights was that used, as Tacitus tells us, by the Germans who, he says, counted by nights, and this ancient custom survives in our term of sennight, or seven nights, meaning a week. The five-days week is that still used by the Shans of Burmah, the men tof the mother country of the Mundas. It is also that of Zend chronology, which divides the month into two periods, each of fourteen and a half days, allotting the fifteenth night to the first half of the month and the day to the last, so that the first half contains fifteen nights, and the second fifteen days, and the whole month twenty-nine nights and days. The divisions of the first half of the month, that of the waxing moon, are called the Panchak Fartum, the new-moon week, Panchak Datigar, the week of the growing moon, and Panchak Sitigar, the full-moon week2. This month of five-night weeks is also that of the Hindu Karanas of twenty-nine days divided into two periods of fourteen days each, with a fifteenth day and night called the Purnoma Panchayi, the completed five (panch) in the centre apportioned to both periods. It is the exact parallel of the Zend month, as its light half contains fifteen nights, and its dark half fifteen days 3.
This week gave to the earlier cultivating races of North India, called in the Mahabharata and Rigveda the Srin~ jayas, or men of the sickle (srini), their other name of the Panchalas, or men of the five {panch) claws or fingers {alas), and the memory of the sacred five days survives in the Panchayats or councils of five elders, who still retain *
* Tacitus, Germania, ii. 2.
s Darmesteter, Zendavesta Mah Yasht, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 90, note 3 Sachau, AlberunI’s India, chap. Lxxviii. vol. ii. p. 197.
42   History and Chronology
%
their primitive function of rulers of the village, its members being the village head-man and his four assistants. This week is also that of the Scandinavians, called by them the Fimt. This five-days week also survives in the five Agnis or parent fire-germs, of which the names are recorded in the Zendavesta and Atharva-veda. The list of these fires as given in the Gathas, with their Sanskrit equivalents, is as follows: I. The Berezi Savangha, the eastern (sa- vangha) fire in stones, the Sanskrit Ashmas or Ashman, a stone, the meteoric stone used to light the national fires of the North. It was believed that this stone brought from heaven the spark which in the firmament appeared as the lightning in the clouds, causing them to give up their rain ; hence the fire is called Berezi, or the fire of rain (bares) magically produced by the rain - wand, the Baresma. II. The Vohu Fryano, Sanskrit Jathara, the womb fire creator of animal life. The Zend Vohu is the equivalent of the Sanskrit Vasu, the creator, and Fryano of Viru-ano, the god of the Viru or generator of animal life, the Norse Frio, the seed. III. The Ur-vazista, in Sanskrit Aushadha, the fire in medicinal plants, the healing and most creating (vasu) fire. IV. The Vazista, the fire in the waters of the earth, called both in Zend and Sanskrit, Apam Napat, the son of the waters. This is the Sanskrit god and Rishi Vashishtha said in the Rigveda to be the son of the twin supreme gods Mitra-Varanau “as a drop spilt by heavenly favour and received in the folds of a lotus blossom”1 sacred to the water-god. Thus it was the fire brought from heaven to earth by Varuna, whom we have seen to be the rain-god of the North. He was its joint parent with Mitra, the friend, originally the Pole Star mother. This was the fire called in Zend Spenishta, the most bountiful. V. Naryo Sangha, Sanskrit Naroshaipsa, praised of men, the Yazad of royal lineage. It was ori- nally, according to Rg. x. 61, called Vastospati, the lord
1 Rg. vii. 33, II.
   43
(pati) of the house (vastos), the household fire on the central hearth of the house, born from the union of Prajapati (Orion) (who, as we shall see, succeeded Canopus as leader of the stars) with RohinI, the" star Aldebaran, the Queen of the Pleiades x. This became the fire called Nabhanedishtha, nearest to the navel (nabha), the central fire on the first earth altar, made, as we shall see, in the form of a woman. It was in the popular belief born from lightning clouds. These fires are in Atharva-veda iii. 21, 1, called: I. Those of the Earth (IV.) ; II. The Clouds (V.) ; III. The Man (II.) ; IV. Stones (I.) ; V. Plants (III.)2.
We find also a survival of the five - days week in the five supreme mothers of the Annamese cult of the primitive belief represented by the village priestesses called Ba-dong, or those inspired by the three mother-goddesses Bd-Duc-chua, whose wooden images represent the one tree-mother-goddess in the form of the three seasons of the year, described in Chapter III. The five goddess ministrants are all variant forms of one original Ba-chua, and the whole cult is based on the still surviving belief in the mother goddess of the ocean abyss Bahu. Their names are:—
1.   Thay Tinh Cong Chua, or the star of the waters. That of the star mother ship Argo.
2.   Quinh-Hoa Cong Chua, or the Hortensia flower.
3.   Que Hoa, or the Cinnamon flower.
4.   Bach Hoa, or the White flower.
5.   Hoang Hoa, or the Yellow flower.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:54:10 PM: 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
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:55:07 PM: 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
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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.,
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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:56:01 PM: 70
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.

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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.

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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,

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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,

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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-

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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 20, 2016, 11:57:03 PM: 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.
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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.
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n
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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

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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.

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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.
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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:29:42 PM: 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
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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:31:07 PM: 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, 8), 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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History and Chronology
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.

127
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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Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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History and Chronology
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

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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.
   139
?
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.

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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,
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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
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:33:46 PM: 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.

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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
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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.
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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
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(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.
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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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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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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.

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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.
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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:35:12 PM: 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.
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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.
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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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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.

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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.
M 2
I
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History and Chronology
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.
]

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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:36:22 PM: 172
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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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.
N
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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-

179
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
   183
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.
History and Chronology
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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
O
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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:39:13 PM: 198
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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,

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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
d
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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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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.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:41:37 PM: 215

B. The Khati or Hittites.
The Shambara or Parthian riders and throwers of the javelin, who measured time by the cycle-year of forty months, were, and are still, a powerful tribe called the Yohihas or Yaudheyas, who owned the country at the junction of the five Punjab rivers and the ancient capital of Multan, a form of Malli-sthana, or the place of the Mallis. They are called Yaudheyas in the list of tribes said, in the Mahabharata, to have brought tribute to Yudishthira, the eldest Pandava, when he celebrated the Rajasuya sacrifice as ruler of India x. They are divided into three clans, which show by their names of Langa-vira, the worshippers of the Linga or Viru ; Madho-vira or Madhua, the drinkers of the inspiring and intoxicating honey (madh) drink; and Adam- vira, the sons of Adam the red man, that they belong to the oldest races of the Northern invaders, the warrior tribes who marched under the banner of the Naga snake2. By their name Yaudheya they show their connection with the Yadu- Turvasu named in Rg. ix. 61, 2 as allies of the Shambara. These Yadu-Turvasu, who became, according to the Mahabharata 3, Yadavas or worshippers of the full moon, the Hittite Ya45 and Yavanas or barley (yava) growers, are the descendants of the twin-sons of DevayanI, the second wife of Yayati, the son of Nahusha, the Naga snake-god, who succeeded Sharmishtha, the most protecting (shannon), the Banyan fig-tree mother of the Druhyus, Anus and Purus of the year of three seasons of Chapters III. and IV. DevayanI is said in the Mahabharata to have been hidden in a well by Sharmishtha, the daughter of the Asura king Vrisha-parvan, the god of the rainy (vrisha) quarter (parva), that is to say she was the sun-mother hidden in the tower of the three-years cycle. Her father, called Kavi *
* Mahabharata Sabha (Dyula) Parva, Hi. p. 145.
2   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 244—246.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixxxv. p. 260.
4   Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv., Sign 24, p. 21S.
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Ushana or Shukra, the son of Bhrigu, was the rain-god of the Asuras, the sons of Diti, the second mother, and conquerors of the Danavas. He said, “ It is I who pour rain for the good of creatures and his names, Shukra and Ushana, the god Ush, show him not only to be the Wet-god, Sak or Shak, but also the rain-bird of the Finn ancestors of the Kushika Kabirpuntis. Ush is the Hindu form of the Finn-creating bird-god Uk-ko, “the great (uk) begetter,” who dwells in the Pole Star TahtI, in the navel of heaven1 2 3. He is the chief god in the Finnish triad of Vai’namoi'nen, Ilmarinen and Ukko, and the epithet Kavi given to him in the Rigveda and Mahabharata, is the Zend and Sanskrit form of the north-god Kabir, and the Dravidian Kapi, the ape, applied to the Kushite kings, who are all called Kavi Kush. It is as the storm-bird, the slayer of the year, that he appears in Rg. v. 34, 2, where he is said to have given to Indra the weapon called, in Rg. i. 121, 12, the thunderbolt, with which he slew the deer-sun (inriga) year-god Orion, and this marks him as a year-god of the cycle-year following Orion’s year of three seasons. He is also said to have made Agni, the fire-god, the Hotri, or pourer of libations of sacrifice 3, that is to say, he instituted the ritual of burnt-offerings which were first offered on the national altars in this epoch. His daughter, Devayani, mother of the Yadu-Turvasu, is the goddess ruling the six Devayani months beginning with the winter solstice, and hence her two sons then begotten were the gods of the cycle-year beginning at the autumnal equinox. The names Yayati and Yadu mark them as the sons of Ya, the full-moon-god of the Cypriotes and Hittites, that is of the Minyans or measurers of Asia Minor 4, who became the sons of Manu
1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191, Ixxviii. pp. 241, 243, lxxxiii. p. 253.
s Kirby, Hero of Estkonia, Introduction, p. xxvii. ; Schcefer Castren, Finnish Mythology, pp. 32, 33.
3   Rg. viii. 23, 17.
A Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv. p. 21S, Symbol 24.

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in India. These names show them to be parent-gods of the joined races called Kathi in India, Khatti or Khita in Assyria and Egypt, and Hittites by the Jews, whose national symbol is that of the two brothers joining hands T.
They are represented on the Egyptian monuments as a beardless race, a characteristic which distinguishes them from the hairy sons of the bull. They also wear the peaked tiara, the Chiroo cap, and shoes turned up at the toes. This last sign, combined with the fact that they habitually wore leather shoes, connects them with the very ancient immigrant race of India, the beardless Chamars, who work in leather and tan hides, one of the earliest occupations followed by the pastoral races. They use for this process myrobolans, the name of the fruit of the Arjuna tree (Terminalia Belerica), which is one of the most important modern exports from India to Europe, and was doubtless also exported thence by the ancient trading Turvasu. The important part assigned to this tree, its products, and the tanners who used them in ancient traditional history, is proved by the historical story of Nala and DamayantI, on which the plot of the Mahabharata is founded. Nala, the god of the channel (inala), the ordinary course of nature, was wedded to Daina- yanti, meaning “she who is being tamed,” the earth subdued under the civilising influences of agriculture and industry. They lived happily together during the spring months of their marriage, but with the hot weather, Pushkara the gambler, the scorching west winds, came and stripped the earth of its verdure and fruits, and drove Nala and Dama- yanti into the forests, where they wandered during the rainy season. Nala escaped to the North-east to Ayodhya, where he became charioteer to the king Ritu-parna, the recorder of the seasons (ritu), the god of the North-east Monsoon. He drove Ritu-parna back to the South-west with the Northeast Monsoon in a chariot drawn by horses of the Sindliu or moon (Sin) breed, those measuring time in this lunar 1
1 Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv. p. 233, Symbol 161.
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epoch, to be again re-united with Damayantl. On the way Ritu-parna taught Nala the science of calculation and foresight, of determining the times of the seasons and the means of using their influences in the orderly developments of the valuable products yielded by the earth-mother of growing life. This lesson was imparted by instructing him how to reckon the leaves and fruits on the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica) tree, the fruits of the industry of the trading community, who used this tree as one of the most valuable aids to their commerce. This tree is the representative in this graphic historical story of the Arjuna (the fair) god of the North parent of Kutsa*, the charioteer of Indra, whose history as High-Priest of the Varshagiras or praisers of rain, and the ruling Purus, I have told in Chapter IV., p. 182. Also of the Arjuna of the Mahabharata, the son of Indra, the god of the rainy season in the Pandava year, who restored to power the Pandavas, beggared and driven into exile, like Nala, by the gambler Shakuni, the storm-bird, who here takes the place of Pushkara in Nala’s story1 2. In this story we read a history told in ancient cryptogramic language, of the great advance made in the important knowledge of the rules of time measurement by the trading races and the workers in leather, who devised the intricate rules for measuring the cycle-year and for providing for an accurate determination of the immutable laws governing the order by succession of the days, months and seasons of the year measured by the solstices and equinoxes. And if we could recover the ancient sources of history, the national birth-stories of these primitive races, we would find that the origin of the story of Arjuna, as told in the Mahabharata, and of Kutsa in the Rigveda, was told in the birth-tale of the Arjuna from the Myrobolan tanning-tree, as that of the birth of the Buddha sun-god is told in those of the birth of the sun from the cypress and Sal-tree sun-mother.
1   Rg. iv. 26, 1, vii. 19, 2.
2   For the full details and interpretation of the story of Nala and Damayantl, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 64—72.
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Further proof of the great early influence of the Chamars, and of the important place they occupied among the rulers of India, is furnished by the history of their religious creed. They call themselves the descendants of Rai Das, that is of the sun-god Rai or Raghu, and their Northern descent is marked in Chuttisgurh, where I know them best, by their fair skins and the beauty of their women. Their connection with the religious ceremonies of child-birth, which distinguished the ritual of the cycle-year, is shown by the custom which has made the Chamar women the most sought-for midwives in India, whose presence at a birth brings luck to the family. They also in their tribal ritual show that their original year was the cycle-year of the nine-days week, by celebrating their Dasahara or autumn festival on the 9th of Assin (Ashva-yujau, September—October), that is nine days after the autumnal equinox, or a day before it is ended by other castes, who begin it on the 1st of Assin (September— October), the day when the Jewish year begins, and'continue the feast to the 10th of the month1. At this New Year’s feast they sacrifice pigs, goats, and drink spirits. It is also in this month that they celebrate their new year’s feast to their dead, who are buried and not burnt.
That these people, who are cultivators as well as workers in leather, belong to the group of invading barley-growers and traders headed by the Kaurs and Kurmis is shown by their marriage ceremonies, in which the wrists of the wedded pair are bound with mango leaves, the marriage-tree of the Kurmis and Kaurs ; and they also, like the Kaurs, worship the seven sisters, the seven stars of the Great Bear. That they are the sons of the red-cow-star RohinI Aldebaran, and of the growers of cotton, is indicated by the custom of washing the feet of the bride and bridegroom with cotton steeped in red-lac dye. This is done by the barber who officiates as marriage-priest2.
In Chuttisgurh, the home of ancient faiths and customs,
1   Monier Williams, Religions Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431.
2   Risley, Tribes an4 Castes of Bengal, Chamars, vol. i. pp. 176—1S1.
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the Chamars occupy a very peculiar position arising out of their religious tenets. They are the leaders of the Sat Nam sect of worshippers of the one god, the True {sat) Name (nam), a sect which is the rival of that of the Kabirpuntis. But the Sat-Nam belief is united with phallic practices from which the religion of the Kabirpuntis is free x, and in Eastern Bengal the greater number of the Chamars are followers of Sri Narayan, the woman-man-god, one of the forms of Vishnu.
Their name for the Supreme and only god Sat Nam, the True Name, shows them to belong to the Semite confederacy of the sons of Shem, the Name, who adored the Name of God as that of the phallic potter, the pole-turning father, and not the God of the Creating Word, and they represent the earliest phallic form of fire-worship, not the later cult of the sexless fire-god represented by the unsexed male and female priests, the Galli of South-western Asia.
C. The worship of sexless and bisexual gods.
It is this latter form of worship which appears to be the special product of this cycle epoch. As it is the year of the sun-ass, the year chariot of the god ruling it is drawn by asses, and they draw the car of the Ashvins, the twin riders on horses, or rather asses (ashva), that with three wheels, the three years of the cycle. They are called the Nasatya, that is the Na-a-satya, those who are not (na) untruthful (asatya), that is, who are reliable trustworthy recorders of time1 2 3 4. They are called in the Brahmanas the first Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests of the gods 3, and it is to them that the cup of the tenth month, that concluding the four divisions of the cycle-year, is offered at the Soma sacrifice 4. Also the cycle - year began in India with the
1   Hewitt, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of the Chuttisgurh District, s. no—113, 130—136, pp. 33, 34, 47, 48.
2   Rg- i- 34= 9 ; i. 116, 2 ; viii. 74, 7.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. i, 2, 17; S.B.E.,vol. xii. p. 16.
4   Ibid., iv. i, 5, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276.

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month consecrated to them, Ashva-yujau (September— October).. The original twins of the creed of the Kabiri were, as we have seen on p. 147, male and female, the fire- drill and fire-socket, when the fire-drill-god became the Great Potter. They were the male and female creators, the days and nights, who made the potter’s wheel of the earth revolve by turning the tridents of the three seasons of the year, and raising the earth from the ocean. This symbolism remained dominant during the present epoch. In it the Ashvin twins were the hands of the gods in the fourteen star constellation of the Simshumara or Alligator. These hands were the stars Kastor and Pollux in Geminir, represented in astronomical notation by the square which succeeded the circle of the year measured by seasons. This square is guarded by these twin Stars, its door-posts, called in Akkadian Masu-Mahru, the Western twin (.Kastor), and Masu-arku, the Eastern twin (Pollux)1 2. The door they guarded as the West and East stars was that looking Southward, like the doors of the Sabaean temples and Mahommedan mosques, and leading to the Northern realm of the Pole Star god. This was represented in the Zenda- vesta as the garden of God, called the Vara-Jam-kard, the rain (var) garden made by the twins Yima. It is the garden symbolised as circled by the sun-bird in the four equal divisions of his three years’ flight round the heavens, and is described as an exact square, two hathras, or about two miles long on every side. In it was built a house of kneaded clay (the brick age had not yet arrived) with fires, the home of the household-fire of the earth, and it was stocked with the human products of the seeds of the most thoroughbred men and women, the flower of the red race, the Yaudheya Adam-vira, and with the best breeds of cattle, sheep, dogs, and birds, also with the best fruit and timber trees, and
1   Sachau, AlberunT’s India, vol. i., chap. xxii. p. 242.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Researches into the Origin of Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 359, note on p. 338,
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no permanently diseased or impotent persons were admitted into it. It was to be divided into three districts, the three years of the cycle, the largest containing nine, the middle six, and the third three streets, the nine and six-day weeks, and the three years of the cycle, a division tracing the gradual growth of this conception of time measurement from the year of three seasons. It was to be sealed up with a golden ring, the ring of the cycle, and to be entered by the door to which the ring was attached x, the door with the stars Gemini for its door-posts. The number forty, the forty months of the cycle, was to be its sacred number, for every fortieth year each male and female couple were to have a male and female child. These children of the two sexes were born from the one-stemmed Rivas plant, the mother-tree, out of which they grew as one bisexual being which was to be the parent of future life2. They were thus the symbols of the bisexual creating sun-god born in the fortieth month of the cycle. The gate of this garden of life, the successor of the consecrated village grove, was called in Greece the Dokana, of which the two side-posts were the brother twins Kastor the pole (stor) of Ka the unsexed beaver, the house-builder, and Polu-deukes, the much (7TOXV) wetting (8evco), the rain-father-god who brought the seed of life to earth.
This square garden entered by the holy gate became the Templum of the Roman Augurs, the field of the parent- rain-bird, divided into four equal parts by the lines drawn North and South, and East and West from the centres of its four sides, to- form the Greek equilateral cross of St. George, the cross on the back of the cycle-ass. It was this cross of the ploughing-god, called also in Syria El Khudr, the rain-god, the Greek Elias, which represented the four equal divisions of the cycle-year, beginning with the autumnal equinox. The day of the finding this cross, and its adop-
1 D&rmesteter, Zendavesia VendJddd Fargard, ii. 25—41 ; S.B.E., vol. iv, pp. 16—20.
** West, Bundahish, xv. 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. v. p. 53.
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tion as the national sign for God, as the new year’s day of the cycle, is recognised in the popular mythology of the Lebanon, where the feast of the Invention of the Cross, ’Id El Saib, is still celebrated every year on the 14th September, the first day of the week, at the end of which the new sun-god is to be born T.
It was in this age of the three-years cycle ruled by the Angiras priests of the burnt - offerings that the offering of roasted totem victims, afterwards consumed by the assembled tribes-folk, first began. Originally the victims were eaten raw, and their blood drunk, according to the Arab custom of eating all but human victims raw2, a custom still observed in Southern India in the worship of Potraj. He is the male counterpart of the stone-mother- goddess of fire, whose stone image is covered with vermilion, and who is the Indian form of the Phrygian cave-goddess Cybele, whose image is a fire-stone.
The Potraj festival is a festival of the pre-Sanskrit population, at which Pariah priests officiate, and in which the Mangs, or workers in leather, play a principal part. The sacrifice lasts for five days, showing that it originally dated from the age of the five-days week, and the first animal slain at it is the sacred buffalo, who had been turned loose as a calf and allowed to roam in freedom through the village fields, till the day of the Dasahara festival held, as we have seen, by the Chamars of Bengal on the 9th of Assin (September—October).   It is killed on the second day of
the feast, and its head struck off, according to the universal Dasahara practice, with one blow. Round its body are placed vessels containing the cereals grown in the village, and close to it a heap of mixed grains with a drill-plough in the centre showing the festival to be one to the plough-god. The carcase is then cut up into little pieces, one being given to each cultivator to bury in his field. The blood and offal are collected in a large basket, over which some pots of
1   Burton and Tyrrwhitt Drake, Unexplored Syria, vol. ii. p. S9.
2   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 2x0.
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cooked food had previously been broken, and a live kid is hewn in pieces and scattered over the whole by the Pot raj priest. A Mang then takes the basket on his head and throws its contents right and left as an offering to the evil spirits, as he, followed by the other Pariahs, runs round the village boundaries. On the fifth day the whole community marches to the temple, and a lamb, concealed close by and found by the priest, is placed by him on the Potraj altar. He makes this victim, the Ram sun of the dying year, insensible by striking it with his wand of office, and after his hands have been tied behind his back, he rushes at it, tears open its throat with his teeth and eats the flesh. When it is dead he is lifted up, and he buries his face in a dish of the buffalo meat-offering given to him. This, with remains of the lamb, is buried beside the altar, and the slaughtering priest fliesz. This buffalo autumnal sacrifice is one celebrated by the male Todas, who then eat a young male buffalo, though they will not touch the flesh at other times1 2, and this sacrifice is probably a variant of the bear feast of their Aino congeners, described on p. 117. We see in this festival the transition from the ritual of the Bhrigus, who ate the animals they sacrificed raw, to that of the Angiras, who cooked their victims, and mixed this cooked meat with the raw buffalo offal and blood. This is the festival of the autumnal equinox celebrated all over Central and Southern India at the Dasahara New Year’s feast, held on the 10th of Assin (September—October), at which a buffalo is slain, and it answers to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles held on the 15th of Tisri (September—October).
The radical change in the national customs accompanying the introduction of this new measurement of time is marked by the change in the date of the annual feast to the dead. The original feast was that which began the Pleiades year
1 G. L. Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, chap. ii. pp. 22—25 ; Sir W. Elliot, Journal Ethnological Society, N.S., i. 97—100.
2   Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vii. p. 281,

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with three days’ mourning, of the 31st of October and the 1st and 2nd of November. This was first altered, as we have seen on p. 169, by the Iranian sons of Ida, who worshipped the Fravashis, or souls of their ancestors, at the summer solstice, during the epoch of the year of three seasons and the six-days week. But this local ritual was not accepted in India when the pastoral barley - growing tribes united the Indian 'people in the confederacy of the Kushika. It was to celebrate the formation of this national union, beginning with the autumnal equinox, that the last fortnight of Bhadrapada (August—September), called the Pitri-paksha, was dedicated to the fathers *. This is the month of the blessed (bhadra) step, consecrated to the Pole Star goat - god, which became the month of the sons of the ox, when it received the name translated in Sanskrit as Prosthapada, the ox-footed month. The latter half of this month was the season of Sraddhas, or memorial celebrations of the sons of the cloud-goddess Shar, to whom the autumn called Sharad was dedicated. It was to the next month (September—October), called Boedromiori, the course of the ox, a reproduction of the Indian name of the previous month, that the Nekusia, or feast to the dead, was celebrated in Athens. The ordinary Pitriyajna or sacrifice was offered once a month at the New Moon, showing it to be a sacrifice of a year beginning with the New Moon, but, as in the beginning of the cycle-year, the New Moon of Ashva-yujau (September—October) was consecrated to the sun-god of the New Year. It was the last days of tthe departed year which were dedicated to the dead fathers and called the days of the Maha-pitri-yajna, or sacrifice to the Great Fathers.
The fathers to whom this festival was especially consecrated were the worshippers of the Pole Star, who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder and bent their left knee in their circumambulations of the altar, which were
1   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. ii. chap, lxxxvi. p. 180; Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chaps, xi., xvi. pp. 308, 431.
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always made contrary to the course of the sun, from right to left1. They are called the Pitaro Barishadah, or the fathers who sat on the sheaves (barhis) of Kusha grass (Poa cyno- suroides). They, as we are told in the Brahmanas, were the first fathers to whom cooked sacrificial food was offered. They were men of the Neolithic stone age, who buried their dead, and preceded the last series of fathers recognised in the Brahmanas as commemorated at this Festival. These were the Pitaro’ Gnishvattah, those “ consumed by fire,” a name proving them to belong to the Bronze Age, when the dead were burnt as in the Vedic ritual, and that now followed by all high-caste Hindus 2 3.
The predecessors of these two classes of barley-eating fathers were the Pitarah Somavantah, or fathers possessed of Soma, that is, the sons of the tree and its life- giving sap (soma). These first fathers were fed -at this festival with rice on six platters, the six days of their week. This rice was brought by the sacrificing priest to the north of the Garhapatya or circular household (Gnrh) fire-altar, whence he took it southward and threshed it at the north of the Dakshina or southern fire, shaped like a crescent moon 3. After threshing the rice he ground it between two millstones placed on the skin, sloping to the south, of the black antelope, the successor of the deer-sun and the year-god of the Kushika, sons of the Kusha grass, the antelope’s favourite food. He placed the cakes made of this ground rice, divided into six portions or platters, to the south of the Garhapatya 4 altar, after it had been mixed, in the ceremony presided over by the Aptya or water (ap) gods (the Trita Aptya of this epoch), with water brought by the unsexed Agnldhra or fire-priest, who also buttered the dough before it was baked by the Adhvaryu or ceremonial-priest 5.
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 2, ii. 6, I, 8, ii. 6, 2 n.; S.B.E., vol. xii.
pp. 361, 421, 441.   2 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421.
3   Ibid., The Agniyadhana, or Establishment of the Sacred Fires; S.B.E.,
vol. xii. p. 275.   4 5 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 4, 8, 9; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 421, 422.
5 Ibid., i. 2, 2, 1—18 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42—47.

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The Adhvaryu, after preparing the sacrifice for the riceeating fathers, began to prepare that for those- born of the Kusha grass. For them he prepared a new altar, differing from the circular Garhapatya and the semi-circular or crescent-shaped Dakshina altar of the earlier races. For this altar he built a four-sided shed south of the Dakshina fire, the tower of the three-years cycle, with its door to the north, instead of being on the south side, like the door of the garden of the Twins. Inside this he built the national sacrificial fire-altar of earth, made in the form of the woman enclosed in the tower, who was to be the mother of the sun-god born of the cycle-year1. The altar was placed with its sides facing the cardinal points, like the early sun- altar at Borsippa, near Babylon, and it was to measure a fathom on the west and three or more cubits from west to east. Also the east side was to be shorter than the west. The breadth was to be contracted in the middle to resemble a woman’s waist, and it was to slope towards the east2. This altar, called the Vedi or altar of knowledge, was sprinkled with water by the Adhvaryu before he thatched it with Kusha grass. Seven sheaves or Barhis were made of this grass in the later ritual of the seven-days week, but only four for this earlier festival. With three of these the altar was thatched by the Adhvaryu, as the Barhis on which the Pitaro Barishadah sat. For this ceremony he in the later ritual shifted the sacrificial cord to the left shoulder, and laid the grass in three circuits of the altar made sunwise 3. The fourth was the Prastara or rain-wand, the Zend Baresma, made of three united sheaves, the three years of the cycle, flowering shoots denoting the flowers of each of the three years being added to each sheaf 4.
After the altar was thatched the priest placed the fire removed from the crescent moon-shaped Dakshina altar to the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah.,u. 6, 1, 10; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 422, notes.
3 Ibid., i. 2, 5, 14—17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 62—64.
3 Ibid., i. 3, 3» 3 J 6, I, I 4 *4-I5 1 vo1- xii- PP- 84, note 2, 424, 425.
4   Ibid., ii. 5, 1, 18 ; voi. xii. p. 389, note 1.
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Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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centre of the new altar, calling the fire-wood “ the black deer living in a den,” the fire of generation hidden in the womb of the black-antelope-altar T. He encircled the fire with the Paridhis, the enclosing mother-triangle of the cycle- year, made of three sticks of Palasha wood (Butea frondosa), with its apex towards the south, and laid the northern stick, denoting the northern origin of the fathers, first2. Thus the figure of the altar was as follows—
with the sacred triangle, the womb, impregnated with the fire-seed in the centre. This fire was the Agni Jatavedas, the Agni who knows (vedas) the secrets of birth (fata), which was thus invoked by the Hotri or libation-priest in the words of the Vedic ritual 3: “We place thee, O Jatavedas, in the place of Ida (the mountain-daughter of Manu and the sheep (eda) mother of the ram-sun), in the navel of the altar to carry our offeringsThis fire was the sacred fire, NabhI-nedeshtha, nearest to the navel (nabhi), born as Vastospati, the lord (pati) of the house, the household fire, from the union of Prajapati (Orion) with his daughter RohinI Aldebaran, and transferred from this Garhapatya altar to the new altar, made in the form of a woman, when RohinI became the red cow and the god born from the fire of the altar became the husband of his mother, kindling the fire in the navel of the altar, and the begetter of the successive children born of the cycle, who were finally to produce the perfect sun-god, rising from the fire to the sky.
The offering made on this altar to the fathers who buried their dead was barley-grain, parched on the fire but not ground. This was the same food as that of the Piets, which
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, i, n, i. 3, 3, 1; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, note 3, 84.
2   Ibid., i. 3, 3, 13, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pd. 87, 89, 90.
3   Rg. iii. 29, 4.

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they buried for their year’s consumption in subterranean chambers, such as those still made by ryots in Chutia Nagpur. It was these Piets who traced descent in the female line, like the Nairs of Madras, the Lycians, Cretans, Dorians, Athenians, Lemnians, Etrurians, Egyptians, Orchomenians, Locrians, Lesbians, Mantinaeansx, and all the races comprised under the names of Tursena, Tursha and Tyrrhenians, the rulers of the Minyan empire. They are called in Irish Cruithni, and in Welsh Priten or Pryden, meaning men of the “ form or shape ” of the animal-parents, from whom they claimed descent. They in Europe tattooed their tribal marks on their foreheads, and covered their bodies, according to Herodian, “ with the figures of animals of all kinds,” that is with those of their totem-parents. It was these men who gave to our islands the Welsh name of Yuys Pridain, the Piets’ island, called by Strabo and Diodorus the IIperaviKaL NijaoL, whence the name of Britain arose1 2. It was apparently their congeners who came to India as the fathers who ate parched barley, tattooed their bodies as the Ooraons still do, and painted on their foreheads the sign or Tiloka of the Naga snake, and of the trident of Vishnu, their sacrificial stake, a mark still worn by all Vishnuites, the tribal mark which the sons of Jamvavan, the bear, were said to bear in the Mahabharata (p. 119).
It was this race of barley-growing sons of the cross of St. George, the worker (ovp<yo<?) in the earth (7fj), the plough- god of the three-years cycle, born from the navel-fire of the altar, who became in European traditional history the parents of the second race of the sons of the rivers, the first cultivators who tilled land with the plough. They were bom from the god-kings of Lydia, Herakles, the star Orion, wor
1   Morgan, Ancient Society, Macmillan and Co., 1877, chap. xiv. pp. 343, 351 ; Bachofen, Die Mutterrecht, passim; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. ii., The Pictish Question, pp. 36—74.
2   Sir H. Maxwell, A Duke of Britain, pp. 31, 393 ; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, pp. 76, 79, note 2, 80 ; Professor Rhys, Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Sept. 6, 1900.
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shipped as the sun-god1, and Omphale, the navel, who succeeded the sons of Attis the Phrygian of the Bhrigu race, the ape-grandfather-god Pappos2 3 4. They were the Hindu Asura, who succeeded the Danava, the Danaoi of the Greeks, the Turanian sons of Danu of the Zendavesta, the sons of Dan of the Jews. These latter were in Jewish history the sons of Billah, the old Pole Star mother, and Dan’s sons were the race called Hushim and Shuham3, the Hus and the Shus, the subjects of the Zend and Vedic kings Hu-shrava and Su-shrava, the glory of the Hus and Shus, the king called in the Biblical historical genealogy of Edom (the land of the red men), preserved in Genesis, Husham, king of the Temanites or Southern Arabia. He was the son of Jo-bab, the gate (bah) of God (Jo), the constellation Gemini, and grandson of Zerah, the red son of Tamar, the palm-tree mother and predecessor of Hadad Rimmon, the hastening (hadad) pomegranate, the sun-god 4.
This widely-spread race of the Kushite Asura, the ploughers of the earth and the growers of corn, were the people who worshipped the bisexual mother-goddess, called by the Phoenicians Shemi-ram-ot, meaning She of the exalted (ram) name (Shem), a name by which one of the classes of officiating Levites is called in I Chron. xv. 18, 20. She was a goddess whose statues at Ashkelon on the Mediterranean and Mabug (Hierapolis) on the Euphrates are described by Diodorus Halicarnassus and Lucian. At Ashkelon, Diodorus ii. 4 says that in her temple outside the city she was portrayed with the crescent-moon over her head, a spear in her left, and a dove, the bird of marriage, on her right hand. Her foot was placed on the head of her fish-mother, the goddess Derketo. Lucian, De Dea Syria, 33, says that her image at Mabug stood between that of Chiun, the pillar- god, the gnomon-stone, and Tirhatha, meaning the cleft,
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 472.
2   Herod, i. 7.
3   Gen. xlvi. 23 ; Numb. xxvi. 42.
4   Gen. xxxvi. 33—35.

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the Phoenician form of the name of the fish-mother-goddess, changed by the Greeks into Derketo and Atergatis.
She had a dove on her head, and was represented as a Hermaphrodite, half-man and half-woman, with the male and female attributes of the other two gods of the triad. She was called Semeion or Semi, and the story of her birth was that she was the daughter of Hadad, the sun-god of Damascus, who sent her to the sea to get water from thence to drive away the evil spirits from the springs. Her mother was Tirhatha, the fish-mother-goddess, depicted at Mabug as bearing a sceptre in one hand and a spindle, the sign of the spinning Pleiades, in the other. A tower-crown of the year-goddess, like that of Kybele and Isis, was on her head, which was surrounded with a halo. She wore the girdle of the ruling year-goddess round her waist, and she was a sea-goddess into whose temple-cleft or pool sea water was brought twice a year in sealed jars. She abandoned her daughter Shemiramot on the mountains, and she was brought up by the doves, the Pleiades, the Greek Peleiades. They got milk for her from the shepherds, and the shepherd Simmas gave her the name Shemiramot when she was a year old x. Thus she was a goddess born from the central mountain, the earth-altar encircled by the salt sea, the ocean- snake surrounding the mother-mountain, and she, like her mother, measured time.
Her festival fairs at Mabug were held in spring and autumn at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and they were accompanied by orgiastic rites requiring the temple Kedesha to prostitute themselves to strangers paying the fixed fee into the treasury of the goddess1 2 *. She, the goddess of the doves, is called by Herodotus i. 105, Aphrodite Ourania, and is said to have sent the female disease upon the Scythians who plundered her temple at Ascalon. That
1   Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 46S; chap. xvii. pp. 5SS, 59S, 631, 632, 634.
2   Ibid., vol. iii., Das Phoenische Altertlium, chap. vii. pp. 136, 137, vol. i.
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is to say that the establishment of her worship caused the ritual requiring the performance of the divine ceremonies by unsexed male and female priests to become universal throughout South-western Asia. But in India, where the earlier cult of the Bhrigu priests was established, this phase of worship only produced the one unsexed priest, the Agnidhra. It was he, the helper of the cooking-priest, who brought water and butter for making the sacrificial cake for the Pitarah Somavantah in the festival of the dead fathers described above, and who in the preparations for the offerings made to the Pitaro Barishadah wiped the dust from the three lines drawn by the Adhvaryu, either East or West or North and South across the altar, and laid the fire-logs and sacrificial sheaves by the altar with their tops to the South *.
The ritual of the Galli or unsexed priests of Cybele, Istar, Mylitta, and all other forms of the cycle-mother-goddess, was that of Herakles Sandon, a form of the god Moloch, the master (malik). He is described in his Grecian legendary history as exchanging the beast skin he wore as the deer or lion sun-god for the flesh-coloured, transparent garment of his paramour Omphale, the navel. His male priests wore the women’s garments depicted as those of Herakles on Lydian coins, and the women marched to the sacrifice armed with swords, lances and the sickle-shaped knife, the implement used for killing the victims of Moloch worship, among whom they sacrificed eldest sons. This son was in Jewish ritual redeemed at the Passover by the lamb substituted for him as the sacrificed Ram-sun, but in the early Semitic worship these sacrifices were universally offered by all Semites. The lamb might be substituted for the ass, the sun-ass of this cycle-year, but for no other animal was a substitute allowed, and their necks must be broken 1 2.
The high places on which these rites were performed were
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, r, 12; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, note 3, 423, note 3.
2   Ex. xiii. 11—16 ; Jer. xxxii. 35.

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the consecrated hills of hilly lands, symbolising the central mother-mountain, and to supply these in plain countries artificial hills were raised, which were called in South-western Asia the hills of Shemiramot*. The most universally celebrated of these artificial hills is that of Borsippa near Babylon. The name of this city is in Akkadian Ka-dingira, the gate of the Creators, translated by the Semites into Bab-ili, the gate of II the god. This name, which represented the theology of the cycle epoch of the Gate Stars Gemini, was substituted for the earlier title of Tintir-ki, the place of the tree of life, the mother-grove 1 2 3 4 5. The hill of Borsippa, called by the Akkadians Tilu eilu, the illustrious mound 3, is that to which the seventh month of their later year, called Tul-ku, the holy mound or altar (September—October), was dedicated. This was the first month of the cycle-year, the Jewish Tisri, the Indian Ashva-yujau, the Attic Boedromion; and it was in the previous month, Ki-Gingir-na (August— September), that of the circuit of Istar the creatrix (Gingir), that Istar descended to the realms of Allah, the goddess of the Southern world, to recover the dead sun-god Dumu-zi, and bring him back to earth as the ram-sun-god born at the autumnal equinox on the top of the Holy Hill. On entering the abode of the sun-goddess of the South, Istar had to divest herself of the ornaments marking her as a lunar year- goddess, including the year-girdle of the Syrian Tirhatha and the lunar earrings of the Hindu Kama 4.
It was on these hills that the New Year’s festival of the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles was held. This began according to the Levitical Jewish law on the 15th of Tisri at the full moon 5, but in the epoch we are now dealing with, it was the New Moon feast of the cycle-year. We have
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 480, 483, chap. xiv. p. 674.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i., chap. viii. p. 314.
3   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 405.
4   Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 221—227; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. p. 13.
5   Levit. xxiii. 34.
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History and Chronology
seen in Chapter II. p. 49, that this was originally the New Year’s festival of the Sabsean sons of the tree, held on the 1st of November to commemorate their descent from the mother-village grove, and like their feast to the dead in India, it was changed by the corn-growing races to the autumnal equinox. The festival is called by Hesychius Sakara, the feast of the Saka, or sons of the wet-god Sak, and it was in India the Saka-medha, or sacrifice of the Sakas. The corresponding festival held to celebrate the beginning of Orion’s year at the winter solstice was, as we have seen in Chapter III. p, 96, the Rudra-Tri-ambika. The sun-god then conceived when the Pole Star was in Cygnus, from 17,000 to 15,000 B.C., was the sun-god brought up from the nether world in August—September, to be born as the ruler of the cycle-year at the autumnal equinox. But this New Year’s Hindu festival of the corn-growing races was also like that of the Arabians originally held in October— November, and this original date was retained in the Vedic ritual of the Brahmanas, which gives the full moon of Khartik (October—November) as the date of the Saka- medha I. But this, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 197, in the account of the slaying of Jarasandha, the god of the year of three seasons and six-day weeks, by Bhima, was originally held on the new moon of Khartik2. To judge by the date of the Shraddha feast to the dead held at the autumnal equinox to replace one originally celebrated in October—November, there can be but little doubt that when this festival received the Akkado-Semitic name of the Saka sacrifice, it was held with the feast to the dead as the New Year’s festival of the barley-eating fathers.
It was called by the Phoenicians Sakut, meaning the booths, the Hebrew Succoth. It was at the place called by this name that Jacob built his first house, and made
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., Chaturmasiyani, or Seasonal Sacrifices, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 383.
2   Mahabharata Sabha (/arasandha-badha) Parva, xxiii. p. 72.

235
booths for his cattle after he crossed the parent Semite river Jordan ", the Greek Iardanos, the river-god to whom, according to Herod, i. 7, Omphale the Navel, the female form of the bisexual Herakles, was a slave. This description marks the New Year’s feast of Jacob’s house-warming at which he lit his household fires for the year, as that of the house-building Kushika or Hittite Khati, who built the three-years tower of God.
In India it was the Bengal Durga-Puja, or Nava-ratra, held on the 10th day of the light half of Assin (September— October), the festival of the mountain-goddess Su-bhadra, described in the Mahabharata as that held on the Raivataka hill, whence Arjuna eloped with Su-bhadra1 2 3. This, as we have seen on p. 209, was the festival of Revati, the closing and opening festival of the year. She was the hill-eel-goddess, the blessed bird (Su) who, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 96, succeeded the Tri-ambika mothers, and this mountain- goddess was, as Strabo tells us, xi. 8, pp. 431,432, the Persian goddess Anahita, the Greek Anaitis, the Ardvi Sura Anahita of the Zendavesta, the mother-river Euphrates, sent down to water the earth of the sons of the Gate of God by the creating (kairya) bird Hu-kairya, the Zend form of Su-bhadra. She was the goddess Tanais of Carthage, a form of Danu, the Phoenician Thenet, who was, as Berosus tells us, also the national god of the Saka 3. The worship of this mountain-goddess extended from the East in India to the West of Europe, for we have in the hill of Avebury in Gloucestershire an example of the artificial hills erected in her honour. In this cycle-year the two festivals of the solstitial year held at intervals of six months in each year were incorporated, and to these two festivals the equinoctial festivals were added, and each of these festivals was the beginning of a fresh year of ten lunar months of gestation.
1   Gen. xxxiii. 17 ; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. vi. pp. 4S0—483.
2   Adi (Subhadrd-Harana) Parva, sects, ccxxi.. ccxxii. pp. 603—607.
3   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xvii. p. 620.
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History and Chronology
Consequently the New Year's feast of the autumnal equinox was repeated at the summer and winter solstices and the vernal equinox.
D.   The festivals of the three-years cycle.
The feast beginning the ten-months year following that opening at the autumnal equinox was that of the summer solstice. This feast at Babylon was the Saka Feast of Booths, commemorating the marriage of Shemiramot to Ninus or Nimrod, the hunter-star Orion of the year of three seasons. It was held on the hill of the Illustrious Mound, and took place, according to Berosus, on the 16th of Loos (June—July), and the date of the festival coincides with that of the setting of Orion at sunset, who was said to have been put in the sky by Ninus, that is to say, the Wild Hunter Ninus became the year-star Orion x.
The festival lasted for five days, and was ruled by the bisexual-goddess Shemiramot, represented by a male slave. He sat on a throne with his face painted white and red, wore chains, lunar earrings and a red robe, and held the cup of the seasons in one hand and a double axe, symbolising the two monthly lunar crescents, in the other. He was surrounded by women, and during the feast he, like the Satnam Guru of the Chuttisgurh Chamars and the ruling priests of the Maharaja Vishnu sect in Western India, had rights over all the women in the camp. During the first day there was a general feast. On the second Ninus, the setting Orion, was imprisoned underground, and placed in charge of the springs then being filled by the rains of the rainy season. On the removal of Ninus, homage was done to his hermaphrodite double, Shemiramot, as queen. On the last of the five days the slave who represented her was burnt as the sacrifice of the dying sun-god2, a rite marking an earlier *
* Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 472, 480, 497 ; Chron. Paseh vol. i. p. 64; Codremus, vol. i. p. 27 ; Athenceus, xiv. p. 639.
2   Ibid., vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 491, 492 ; Curtius, v. 1.
of the Myth-Making- Age.
23 7
form of the sacrifice on the fifth day of the lamb slain at the Potraj festival in South India.
This festival of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus (Orion), with the interchange of male and female clothes, characterising the age of lunar-solar worship, beginning with the cycle-year, was celebrated all over South-western Asia, and in Tarsus a dog, the dog-star Sirius, was burnt as the south-going sun-god I.
This same festival is celebrated in India as the Rath-jatra, or chariot wedding procession of Krishna or Rama, the antelope sun-god Orion, or the ploughing ox, with his twin- sister Durga or Su-bhadra, the mountain-goddess. It is held at Mathura, the holy shrine of Krishna, sacred to the “turner of the earth” (math), on the 17th of Ashadha, the modern Asarh (June—July), that is at the beginning of July. This festival is also held in Chutia Nagpur at the same time, so that they agree exactly in date with that of Shemiramot at Babylon.
The year-bride in the story of Rama, son of Kushaloya, the house or mother of the Kushite race, was Sita, who was, as we have seen on p. 208, united’to him as king of the cycle- year. She was first the furrow ploughed in the sky by Rama, the ox, in his monthly circuit round the heavens of the Nag-kshetra stars ; and afterwards the crescent-moon, which made the same circuit. She was freed from the clutches of Ravana, the ten-headed giant of the cycle-year, ruling its ten months of gestation, and of his three generals, the three years of its duration2: Prahasta, the foremost hand (hasta), the stars Gemini, the hands of the gods ; Kumbha-karna, the maker (karna) of the year water-jars (kumbha), the Great Potter ; and Indrajit, the maker of the
1   Movers, Die Phonhier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 457, 497.
2   In the variant form of the story of Rama and Sita told in the Buddhist Jataka, book xi. no. 461, Rama is said to have returned from his wanderings, that is, from his circuit of the sky as a year-god after three years’ absence, thus shewing that he was a year-god of the three-years cycle. Rouse, Jataka, vol. iv. book xi. no. 461, p. 82.
23B
History and Chronology
year-net of the cycle time measurement, in which Rama and his brother Lakshman, the guider of the plougher of the furrow, were all but suffocated, till they were revived by the water of life. Of these rulers of the cycle-year, Prahasta was slain by Vibhishana, the brother of Ravana the year-god, who conducted Rama’s army to Ravana’s southern stronghold, in Ceylon, over the year-bridge of 360,000 monkeys (360 days), Kumbha-karna and Indrajit by Lakshman r. It was Rama himself, the god of the new- year of the sun-horse, to be described in the next Chapter, who slew Ravana from the year-car of Indra, into which he was conducted by Vibhishana, the year-god 1 2 3 4.
After this victory, the June—July wedding procession of Rama and Sita from Ceylon began and ended with the installation of Rama as king of Ayodhya in the North-east, in the beginning of Sravana (July—x^.ugust)3, as described in the Mahabharata. This midsummer festival to the year- god of the mother-mountain, crowned with the lunar- crescent, is also that of the Devil Dancers, held yearly in Dardistan, the traditional birth-place of the Indian Dar- danian sons of the antelope. It is held on the slopes of the central Pamir table-land, the Hindu Mount Meru, which became in the later days of sun-worship the successor of Mount Mandara, the first central mountain of the Indian Kushikas 4.
The third feast of the cycle-year was that of the vernal equinox, beginning the third year of ten lunar months, extending from the vernal equinox to the winter solstice. This division of the cycle-year is that marked in the Latin year reckoning by the name of December the tenth {decern) month given to that which concludes it. The best historical evidence as to this festival, and its connection with the
1   Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxxii., cclxxxv.—cclxxxviii. pp. 839, 844—853.
2   Ibid., cclxxxix. pp. 855—857.
3   Ibid., ccxc. p. 862.
4   Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, Third Edition, chap. xiii. pp. 200—223.
i
of the MytJi-Making Age.
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measurement of time, is that given by the Roman festivals of—(1) The twenty-three days’ procession of the fully-armed twelve Quirinal and twelve Palatine Salii, or dancing priests, carrying the twelve Ancilia, or year-shields, through the twenty - four Argei, or stations marking the boundaries of the ancient city, and ending with the Tubilustrium, or Purification of the Trumpets (tuba), with which the opening of the year was announced, and the sacrifice of a lamb representing, as in the other cycle festivals I have noticed, the Ram-sun; (2) The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th of March ; and of (3) Anna Perenna on the 15th full-moon day of the" month.
The Sabine Mamurius is the male god of this connected series of New Year religious ceremonies. He is the equivalent of Quirinus, the god of the revolving or running year (>kur), whose priests, the Salii, danced in circles round the Pole, the central god of the rotating earth, like the dancing dervishes of the East, wearing the three-knotted girdle of the three seasons of Orion’s year. He was the god of Increase or growth, the Etrurian Maso, and a form of the Sabine god called Semo Sancus, who, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 164, is the god of the sacred grain (sagmen). Hence he was the god of the sons of the Kusha grass who made the spring grass to grow.
This series of March festivals is in the Roman Calendar entirely based on the New and Full Moons, by which the months of the cycle-year were measured. They begin with the new moon of the 1st of March, when the year fires of Rome were lighted, and the first especially sacred day after this New Year’s Day is the 9th of March, when the Calendar tells usjthat they (i.e. the Salii) move the Ancilia. No extant authorities tell us what this ceremony actually was, but the fact that it took place on the ninth day, the last day of the cycle-week, marks it as connected with the epoch. The next special ceremony connected with the circuit of the Salii is that of the Feriae Marti on the 19th, when the shields of the Salii were purified; and this seems
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History and Chronology
to be connected with the second nine-days week, ending on the 18th of March, after which the purifying ceremony was performed at the beginning of the third and last week of the month. The last special ceremony of the Salii procession was that of the Tubilustrium on the twenty-third. This took place fourteen days after the 9th, a number which may perhaps be the result of the reformation made in the calendar, and the adoption of the seven-days week.
The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th, and of Anna Perenna on the 15th of March, when taken together as parts of one series of ceremonies, show a close approximation between these spring equinoctial celebrations and those of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus at the summer solstice. On the 14th of March Mamurius Veturius, clad in skins, the old {veins) year-god of the deer-year, was beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. This expulsion of the old year-god of increase at the close of his year is an exact parallel to the underground imprisonment of Ninus {Orion) on the day after his marriage1. This expulsion of the male side of the combined male and female figures of the bisexual year-god, the warrior-god represented in the military array of the Salii, is followed by the license of the New Year’s festival of the female Shemiramot Anna Perenna, installed as year-queen, and mother of the sun-god, on the deposition of her male counterpart, thrown out of the hive like a drone bee. During this festival the Roman people lived in booths in the Campus Martius on the banks of the Tiber, the mother-river 2 3, and it was therefore one of the ancient series of New Year’s Feasts of Booths or Tents. The following lines of Ovid describing it show clearly that these feasts were a* reproduction of the dancing seasonal festivals of the sons of the village tree:—
1 W. Waule Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martius, pp. 48, note 2,
49 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 208.
3   Ibid., pp. 50 ff.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:44:26 PM: 241
“ I dibus est Annas festum generate Perennae,
Haud procul a ripis, advena Tibre, tuis.
Plebs venit, et virides passim disjecta per herbas Potat, et accumbit cam pare quisque sua.
Sub love pars durat: pauci tentoria ponunt:
Sub quibus e ramis frondea facta casa est.
Pars ibi pro rigidis calamos statuere columnis :
Desuper extentas deposuere togas.
Sole tamen vinoque calent: annosque precantur,
Ouot sumunt cyathos ; ad numerumque bibunt.
Illic et cantant, quod didicere theatris ;
Et ducunt posito duras cratere choreas,
Nunc mihi cur cantant superest obscsena puellas Dicere, nam coeunt certaque proba canunt.” ;
Ovid, Fasti III. 38qff.
When we consider the great strength of the evidence proving that very many of the rituals of Europe, and especially those of the Southern maritime countries, were imported from the East, there can be little doubt that this Anna, the Roman goddess of the vernal equinox, is the Carthaginian virgin-goddess Anna, sister and predecessor of Dido, the beloved one (dod), the sun-goddess, also called Elissa, a reproduction of the Phoenician El Hazeh, the strong one. She and her male double are apparently spring parallels of the two goats of the autumnal scape-goat sacrifices, survivals of a year of two seasons of the goat-god, measured by the equinoxes. In these, as described on p. 142, the scape-goat Aziz or Azazel was driven into the wilderness like Mamurius, the male form of Anna, and either Dido, with the arms and clothes of her male counterpart ./Eneas, or, according to Varro, Anna, was burnt as the god sacrificed in this age of burnt-offerings in the March sacrifice to Anna Perenna mentioned by Macrobius E
This Phoenician and Roman Anna is therefore the Anath or village goddess of Palestine called Anah, the name of the 1
1   Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap, xviil pp. 612—616; Firg. Ain., iv. 495—507 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martins, p. 51 ; Macrobius, Sal., i. 126.
R
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History and Chronology
mother of Aholibama, the Hittite wife of Esau, the goat- god T, the goddess of the tent (Ahol) festivals, denounced by Ezekiel xxiii. 36—46, as carried on by the worshippers of Aholah and Aholibah1 2 3 4. She was the Akkadian and Hindu goddess Anu, and as the primaeval mother-goddess she was the mother-tree. It is in her Indian festivals as the goddess of the Sal-tree-mother of the sun-god, the Munda-Dravido tree-mother, that we find the earliest form of the annual dances of the sons of the rivers at the vernal equinox, which survives in the European carnival. This festival is called that of the Sar-hul, or the blossoming of the Sal-tree, or Bahu Puja, the festival of the goddess Bahu, and is one of the chief festivals of the Mundas, Ooraons and Santals. The two former celebrate it at the beginning of the month of Cheit (March — April), that is at the New Moon after the vernal equinox, the original date at which it was held, while among the Santals it takes place during the previous month, Phalgun or Arjuna (February—March) 3, that is at the date of the Roman festival of the procession of the Salii, a retrogression caused by the subsequent changes in year reckonings, which will be told in future chapters. This was the tree clasped by the mother of the Buddha at his birth, that is the tree from which the sun-god was born 4, and his birth was, greeted by a shower of rain. This is still commemorated by the throwing of water by the women over their male friends, from a peculiarly shaped bottle made for this festival by the Santals. It is also universally observed in Burmah, and among the Ooraons it begins with the worship of the Sarna Burhi, or tree-mother of the Sarna village grove, to whom five fowls, in commemoration of the original five-days week, are offered.
1   Gen. xxxvi. i.
2   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 492; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect. iii. p. 18S.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Munda, p. 104, Ooraon, p. 146, Santal, p. 233.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Nidanakatha, p. 66.

243
The general water-battle begins with the drenching of the Pahan or priest with water by the women of each house, to whom he presents sal flowers.
It is the Munda date of this festival which survives in Greece in the Greater Dionysia, held in Elaphebohon (March —April), the month of the sprouting of the deer’s (eXafos) horns, a name commemorating the spring festival of the deer-sun-god. This god was Dionusos, son of Scmele, the Phoenician goddess Samlath, a form of Shemiramot.
The fourth festival of the cycle-year was that of the winter solstice, at which the sun-god, the offspring of its four periods of gestation, was to be conceived so as to be born at the autumnal equinox. This was a reproduction of the old feast of the death and birth rof the deer-sun-god, and it was in India a festival of the harvest-home, when the rice crops were stored, called Pongol by the Madras Dravidians, and Sohrai by the Santals.
In Italy this harvest festival of the South was reproduced in the Consualia of the 15th December. This was in the Roman ritual a subordinate festival to that of the Consualia of August 21st. That is to say, the earlier December festival was superseded in sanctity by the later August feast, which was, as we shall see later on, a mid-year feast of the year of fifteen months, to be described in Chapter VII. The god Consus, the god of the storing (condere) of the crops, was a god worshipped in an underground temple like that of Llyr at Leicester, described on p. 63. His priest was the Flamen Ouirinalis, that is the priest of the god Ouirinus of this cycle-yearT. The festival of the December harvest-god was followed by the seven days of the Saturnalia, beginning on the 17th of December, the New-Moon feast of the ten-months year, beginning with the Hindu month of Push (December—January), the month of the barley-god Push-an. The corresponding Greek fes- 1
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis December, pp. 267, 268, Mensis Sextilis, pp. 206-20S.
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History and Chronology
tival was that of the Lesser Dionysia held in Poseidon (December—January) in honour of Dionysius Nuktelios, the Arcadian god of the lower world, the home of the winter- sun. He was worshipped at Megara at the winter solstice, his feast celebrating his descent into the lower world to seek Semele, the daughter of Kadmus, whose sister Ino was the wife of Athamas, Ionic Tammas, the Akkadian Dumu-zi, and the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician sun- god Melkarth, lord (malik) of the city {kartJi). This Dionysius Nuktelios, husband of Semele Samlath, or Shemiramot, was the male god who was to bring her to the North as the summer sun, and make her mother of the sun-god born at the autumnal equinox. This Megara festival of the marriage of Dionysius Nuktelios with Shemiramot at the winter solstice was accompanied by the same orgiastic dances which marked the other festivals of the cycle-year*. This winter descent of the sun-god into the subterranean regions of the South was also celebrated at the festival held in Argolis on the Alcyonian Lake, near Lerna, and at Cynaethae in Arcadia, when a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called to come up out of the lake as the young bull-god of Spring I, the father of the god to be born at the autumnal equinox 1 2, the night sun (Helios) god of winter.
The ruling gods of this cycle of three years, with its four successive festivals, separated by equal intervals of ten lunar months, were the mother-goddess, originally the mother-tree, and her spouse the rain-god, who made his way into her enclosing tower of the three revolving years. This was the marriage-chariot of Krishna and Su-bhadra of Shemiramot and Ninus. But before their incarceration in this tower of the Garden of God, watered by the life-giving rain, they were separate male and female deities. The male deity was the father-god whose sacrifice, in that of his counterpart, his eldest son, fertilised the earth, into which the blood, the
1   Frazer, Pansanias, i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 6i, ii. 525.
2   Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. pp. 302, 303.

245
divine seed, flowed, and made it bear a numerous offspring. This god was in the Mahabharata the king Somaka with a hundred wives, but only one son, Jantu, born after long years of expectation. The sacrifice of the son was followed by the pregnancy of all the hundred wives, who each bore a son, and among these Jantu was re-born as the second son of his motherI.
E.   Human Sacrifices.
The history of this rite of human sacrifice with its attendant ritual is told most clearly in that of the worship of Zeus Lykaios, of Arcadia, and the Semite mountain- father-god. The altar of this god, said in Arcadian tradition to have been erected by Lycaon, the wolf (Xv/cof), god of light and son of Pelasgus, the Hebrew Peleg, for the sacrifice of his new-born son, was a mound of earth2 3 4. It was placed, as described by Pausanias, on the highest summit of the central Lycsean mountain, and before it, when he saw it, were two pillars nearly facing the East, on which two gilt eagles were engraved 3. But to ascertain the full meaning of this altar, and the ritual of the human sacrifices offered on it, we must turn to another example of it, in which its inner meaning has been told by the rules of construction enjoined by the priestly guardians and transmitters of the national traditions. This altar of a mound of earth, made in the form of a woman, appears with its explanatory adjuncts in the national altar of the Chinese Empire placed on the top of the round hillock near Pekin, under the triple-roofed circular temple, recalling in its three roofs the three years of this cycle. This is oriented to the sun of the winter solstice 4, the time when Orion’s year and that of the solstitial sun-bird began, and dedicated to Shang-ti, the Pole Star god. The traditions of this altar, on which
1   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha- Yatra) Parva, cxxvii., cxxviii. pp. 386, 3S9.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 2, 1, vol. i. p. 374.
3   Ibid., viii. 38, 7, vol. i. 424.
4   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. ix. pp. 88, 89.
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History and Chronology
the Emperor offers yearly, while facing the North, a firstborn male animal as a whole-burnt sacrifice, clearly points to the cycle epoch of the nine-days week, and the year divided into months of twenty-seven days each. These last are commemorated by the twenty-seven steps to the top of the platform on which the altar stands, and the nine-days week by the nine circles of marble slabs round the circular stone forming the altar. The innermost of these circles is one of nine slabs, and each circle increases its slabs in multiples of nine up to the ninth circle of 9x9=81 *. Thus the mound-altar was the altar of the ritual of the cycle-year 2.
The two pillars before the altar of Zeus Lykaios, described by Pausanias, were those said by Herodotus ii. 44 to stand before the temple of Herakles at Tyre, and which were set up in front of all Phoenician and Egyptian temples. Of these one was dedicated to the god Chiun, the pillar which became Solomon’s pillar Jachin, its hiphil form. This was the pillar of Usof the hunter, the Hebrew Esau, called Khamraam or Hammam, the green pillar, the pillar of the god of the summer solstice ; and the other was that of Usof’s brother Hypsuranius, the golden pillar, the Boaz or moving pillar of the winter solstice 3. The eagles on these two pillars were the mother-cloud-bird, the Zend Hu Kairiya. This altar of Zeus Lykaios was exactly similar to that of Saturn Balcaranensis in Africa 4.
This primitive altar with the two pillars in front of it was placed under the open sky, and had no temple attached to it, but when the pastoral shepherd races began to leave the mountain heights and descend to the river villages
1   Professor Douglas, Confucianism and Taoism, pp. 82—87.
2   The Irish ritual of the sacrifice of eldest sons to Crom Croich, the god of the central pillar of the sun circle, proves that these victims were offered to the sun-god. Meyer and Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Ritual Sacrifice in
? Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 149, 150.
3   Movers, Die Phouizier, vol. i. chap. vii. p. 292 , chap. viii. pp. 343, 346.
4   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, ii., Le Culte de Zeus Lycaios, pp. 72, 73-

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to feed their herds, a change of ritual followed their descent. This appears in the cult of the Lycaean Zeus, in the Temenos or sacred enclosure’ dedicated to this god on the lower slopes of the mountain, and that of Saturn Balcaranensis. This Temenos was a survival of the village grove of the primaeval faiths, and it was to judge from the copy of it made at Megalopolis, and described by Pausanias, surrounded by stones, like the sun circles at Solwaster. In its centre was the stone temple of Zeus Lykaios, open in front with two altars before it and two tables along the side walls, above each of which was an eagle with outspread wings extending to the length of the tables I. But this enclosure, copied apparently from the stone circles of the North, was not like the village grove, open to all comers, and especially to the dancers at the festivals. Entrance to it was forbidden under pain of death. This prohibition marks the temple, to the precincts of which it was applied, as a product of the age of the worship of the virgin-mother and unsexed father, of the creed of the worshippers of the central mountain revolving in the surrounding ocean. It was as a reproduction of this conception of the abode of the creating gods that Phoenician temples, like that of Am al Hayat, described by Renan, and that at Mabug by Lucian, were placed in the centre of a natural or artificial lake2, that made by Elijah round the altar he built on Carmel 3. This temple was reproduced in Egypt in the lake-temple at Buto dedicated to , Latona, goddess of the tree-trunk, and her son Apollo, as described in Herodotus ii. 156.
These were the temples of the Turanian king Frangrasyan} built in the Chaechasta lake, the modern Urumiah in Adar- baijan, whom Hushrava slew 4. This was a salt-water lake representing the salt sea whence the goddess Shemiramot was born. The building of these lake temples, which could
1   Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 38, 6, 30, 2, vol. i.jjpp. 424, 463 ; Berard, Origine ties Cultcs Arcadiens, pp. 72, 73, 87, 88.
2   Renan, Phenicie, pp. 63—67 ; Lucian, De Ded Syria, pp. 45, 46.
3   I Kings xviii. 30 ff.
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Gos Yasht, iv. ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 114.
24 8
History and Chronology
only be approached by boats provided by the priests, marks the growth of sacerdotal influence, and it was from these shrines, which human feet could not reach without help, that the idea arose of the sanctity of the temple precincts, and the prohibition of entering them with shodden feet.
The tables within them were the altar of incense and the table of shew-bread in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish tabernacle and temple, the latter being that on which the firstfruits were offered. It was on this table that the Athenian Cecrops, son of Erectheus the snake-god, offered the Pelanoi or cakes of honey, barley, meal, and oil which he presented as the earlier firstfruits’ offering instead of the later eldest son offered by Lycaon on the altar of sacrifice *. This table and the temple sanctuary in which it stood were placed in the sun-circle surrounded with the gnomon-stones, within which, according to primaeval custom, no blood could be shed, while the altar of sacrifice on the top of the mountain answered to the dolmen or stone of sacrifice of the Palaeolithic age of the northern totemistic clans.
E.   Incense worship and i)iternational trade.
The second table in the sanctuary, the incense altar, gives us a complete clue to the history of this epoch. The incense there burnt was a substitute, conceived in the lowlands, for the clouds which wreathed the mountain tops where the earliest altars were made. This ritual of burnt sacrifice accompanied by incense was that of the priest-god Dhaumya of the Mahabharata, the priest of smoke ('dhnmo) of the Pandava brethren. The incense whence the sacred fumes arose was that extracted from the Indian incense tree, the Salai (Boswellia thurifcra\ which grows on the top of every rocky hill in Central India where nothing else will grow. This frankincense with the Indian gold washed from the sand of the rivers of Chutia Nagpur, the Sone, the river of gold {sona), the Subonrika or Suvarnariksha, the river of the tribe 1
1 Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 2, I, vol. i. p. 374.
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(varna) of the Sus with its golden sand, and those of the brooks of Sona-pet, the golden womb, the ancient treasure- houses of Indian wealth, and the spiees of the South, was the most valuable merchandise exported to foreign lands by the descendants of the Indian twin-gods Yadru-Turvasu. These Hittite sons of the Full Moon ( Ya), whose god (vasu) was the revolving Pole [tur) Star god, the dweller in the Caer Sidi or Turning castle where the Holy Grail, the seed of life, was preserved in the mother-tree of the Southern Ocean, were the founders of the three most ancient ports in Western India:—the Yadava port of Dwarika, the door (dwar) of Khatlawar, the holy land of the Khati or joined twins, that of Pragjyotisha or Baragyza, the modern Broach, called in the Mahabharata Prabhasa, at the mouth of the Nerbudda, and Surparaka, the modern Surat, at the mouth of the Payoshni, now called Tapti, built according to the Mahabharata by a Vidarba, that is by a Gond or Haihaya king who used the Semite word “arba” to denote four1. The name Pragjyotisha, the star (jyotis) of the East, shows the importance attached to it as the port of the mother-river of the Haihaya kings who were the earliest imperial rulers of North India. This and Surparaka were the two ports of the king called in the Mahabharata Bhagadatta, the offspring of the tree of edible fruit (bhaga), the fig and mango tree. Pie is called the King of the Yavanas, or growers of barley (yava), who were, as we are told elsewhere, the Turvasu, the king who bore on his head the most wonderful jewel on earth, the light of the Western sun, the Pole Star. He was subordinate to Jarasandha2, and though he was the maternal uncle of the Pandavas, brother of KuntI, or Prithi their mother, and that of Karna, he fought in the final battle between the Kauravyas and Pandavas on the side of the former, and was slain by
1   Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha- Yalrct) Parva, cxviii., cxix., cxx. pp. 363, 364, 365, 371*
2   Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuyarambha) Parva, xv. p. 45, Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260.
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History and Chronology
Arjuna, as Krishna had formerly slain Naraka, the man (nara) god, the bisexual god of this epoch L
It was from these ports that the Turvasu or Yavana ships carried the wealth of India to the foreign lands on the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Their first foreign station was the island in the Persian Gulf, whence, according to Theophrastus, the Phoenicians said they originally came. This, the modern Bahrein, celebrated for its pearl fishery, they called Turos. It was the holy Akkadian island Dilmun, the Isle of God (dil), where la first appeared to human eyes as En-zag, the first-born (sag) son of god (e/t), the fish-born son of the waters. He was worshipped as Pati, the lord which identifies him with the Hindu Praja-pati3. It was thence they began their career as the roving merchants of South-western Asia, whose ships made their way along the coasts of Arabia to the country called by the Akkadians Magana, the jewel mines of Sinai, or the Mountain of Sin, the moon, a name they brought with them fr,om the Indian land of Sindhu. This name Sin was originally, according to Lenormant, Singh or Sik, and was given first to the land of the Sumerians, the Euphratean Delta. This is called Shinar in the Bible, Singara by the Greeks, Sindjar by the Arabian geographers, and was that ruled by the three-eyed and two-horned wild-bull-god Samir-us or Shemiramot, who ruled Babylon, as we have seen, after Nimrod or Ninus (Orion).
He was the bisexual-god, the male form of Shemiramot, who invented weights and measures and the art of silkweaving 3. This was the three-eyed-god Shiva of the Hindus, whose wife or female counterpart was the weaving Uma, the flax (uma) goddess, the goddess-mother of the flax weavers of Asia Minor, who became the Egyptian goddess Neith, meaning the weaver ; the goddess who supplied the mummy cloths of the dead in Egypt, all of which are made 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Drona (Samsaptika-badha) Parva, xxix. pp. 95—98.
2   Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for 18S7, Lect. ii. p. 114, note 1.
3   Lenormant, Chaldccan Magict pp. 395, 396, note 2, 402.

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of flax, and from this flax were made the most sacred dresses of the Egyptian and those of the Jewish priests R The silks woven by their worshippers were those called by Hiouen Tsiang Kauseya or Kushite cloth, made from the cocoons of the jungle tusser moth, which supplied the yellow robes worn by the early Buddhist mendicants called Kasayam, and which were, he tells us, the common garments of the people of the Northern and Southern Punjab3. They also wore garments of kshauma or hemp, the modern jute, the flax of Uma, as well as of cotton, and wove fine goat’s- liair blankets, Kambala, which now appear as Rampore Chudders, whence the Kambhojas of the Northern Punjab and the men of Kambojia, in the north of the Malay Peninsula, got their names.
The cotton garments of these sons of the weavers and potters were originally made of the cotton of the Simul (Bombax heptaphylla), or red-cotton tree, the Sanskrit Shil- mili. It was from the wood of this tree and that of the Kimshuka, the Palasha {Butea frondosa) tree, that the car was made in which the Ashvins drove the sun-maiden when they brought her to be married to Soma, the male moon- god 3. This cotton-tree is the sacred tree of the offerers of human sacrifices, which was always planted with appropriate rites above the sacrificial stone where the Meriah victims were to be slain whenever a new village was founded by the Kandhs of Orissa, who call themselves Kui-loka, the people of the Gond mother-goddess Koi, and who retained the rite of human sacrifice longer than any other race in India 4.
But on the coming of the Kurmis or Kaurs the cotton of this tree was superseded by the cotton Karpasi (gossy- 1 2 3 4
1   Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, Tin Ancient Egyptians, vol. ii. chap. lx. p. 15S. The flax plant in India is not now used for weaving but only for its oil-seeds.
2   Beal, Records of the Western llorld, vol. i. pp. 75, 165, 16S.
3   Rg. X. 85, 20.
4   Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 145; Rislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kandhs, p. 297.
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History and Chronology
pitim herbaceum), which they sowed yearly, and whence the Western land of Saurashtra, the kingdom (rashtra) of the Saus, the inland part of Khatlawar, got the name of Karpasika, the cotton land, by which it is called in the Mahabharata L It was the cloth woven from this which was called in the earliest Babylonian documents Sipat Kuri, or the cloth of the land of Kur, and also Sindhu, from the land of Sin or Singh, the horned-moon-god, the sadln of the Old Testament and the sindon (aivSeov) of the Greeks2.
It was these merchants who also imported into Arabia and Europe the cinnamon of Ceylon, mentioned by Herodotus
iii.   HI as one of the products brought by the Phoenician traders. Their generic name, when they settled in Arabia, was, as I have told in Chapter II., that of Atjub, or collectors of-incense {tib\ the original form of the Greek name of ^Ethiopian 3; and they were the Midianites of the Bible, who organised the land caravans which brought Eastern produce overland along the course of the Euphrates, and thence to the Mediterranean through the city of Haran, the road (,kharram). This was the city of Laban, meaning “ the white-god,” called in Assyrian inscriptions “ the builder of the brick foundation of heaven 4,” the tower of the Garden of God of this epoch, whose image was a stone surmounted by a star.
This city of the moon-god of the tower is the father of Lot and son of Terah, the antelope, who was also father of the Hebrew Ab-ram, the father-ram, the Hindu Rama. Lot means concealment and a veil, and the root meaning of the word is “incenses.” Thus in Lot we find the incense- god of the men of Haran, the city of .the white-moon-god “ of the brick foundation of heaven,” the god of the three- years cycle; and we also learn from this historical genealogy 1 2 3 4
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Dyuta) Parva, li. p. 141.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lecturesfor 1887, Lect. i., iii. p. 138.
3   Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien und Africa, p. 10.
4   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 18S7, Lect. iv. p. 249, note 3. s Gesenius, Thesaurus, s.v. Lot, p. 748; Gen. xi. 27, 28.

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that this incense ritual concealing the hidden god from profane eyes was that of the sons of the antelope and of the god Ram, whose eastern wife was Keturah, meaning the “ incense ” mother T.
The sons of Lot, the incense-god, were Ammon, the supporter, and Moab, the father (ah) of the waters, begotten of his two daughters, the two wives of the trident father-god, when he was inspired by the wine consumed by the creating gods of this epoch, and when he dwelt in the mother-cave of the Turanian races2. Of these Ammon, the supporter, was the earlier Egyptian god of Thebes, Amon, the Hidden, called in the Book of the Dead “prince of the gods of the East, lord of the two horns, the divine bull-scarab 3,” the roller or turner of the earth ball. In Chapters CLXV. and CLXIII. he is depicted as an ithyphallic man-beetle, with plumes on his head, standing in front of a man with a ram’s head on each shoulder, and as a horned serpent with legs and a lunar disk on his head. He is thus the turner of the pole of the revolving earth, hidden in the clouds of incense which filled the Egyptian temples, the god descended from the original parent-bird and snake who had become ruler of the cycle-year.
For the history of Moab, the father (ah) of the waters, we must turn to that of the contemporaneous twin gods of the Greek incense mythology, Kastor and Poludeukes, who became the twin stars Gemini, the door-posts of heaven. They were the sons of Leda, the feminine form of Ledon (XrjSov), the mastich-shrub (Pistaccia lentiscus) yielding the incense Ledanon burnt in the Greek temples. This was, according to Herodotus iii. ill, originally used in religious sacrifices by the Arabians, and was, as we now see, brought from India to Arabia by the Turvasu traders, who carried it, with the other mercantile contents of their caravans, to Haran on the Euphrates, whence the incense ritual passed 1
1 Gen. xxv. 6.   s Gen. xix. 26—3S.
3   Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chaps, clxv., clxiii. pp. 295, 292.
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History and Chronology
through Syria to the shores of the Mediterranean and thence to Greece. There the twin gods, sons of the incense- mother, became the patron gods of the Dorian immigrants from Asia Minor and of Sparta, the country in which the Indian Dravidian customs of common meals and the state education of children were more deeply rooted than in any other Grecian territory. They were the reputed sons of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, the hammer (tiid, tund') god of the North, the divine smith of the Kabiri. But Tyndareus was the father only of Kastor, the pole (stor) of Ka, the sexless beaver, the house-builder of the Northern races. Poludeukes, the wetting (Sevco) rain-god, the Semitic Moab, father (ad) of the waters, was the son of Zeus, the Pole Star god, and the mother-cloud-bird. They belonged to the crew of the original star-ship Argo, the mother constellation of the dwellers on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was the merchant traders of India, worshippers of these twin star-gods, guardians of the gate of heaven, who brought the cycle-year to Europe, where they set up its calendar, which i'l shall describe presently, in the ten rows of stones at Kermario, near Carnac in Britany, and placed in them the two index - stones marking the sunrise at the solstices and equinoxes l. It was they who made the year beginning with the autumnal equinox that of Syria, Asia Minor, and Southern Greece. They brought with them a fresh influx of Indian traditional history, ritual and local customs, in addition to the Indian teachings of the Amazonian races. The Dravidian mariners, who had learnt the arts of navigation in the Indian Ocean, and established the sea-faring trade of India with the Euphratean countries, Arabia and Egypt, now, on the shores of the Mediterranean, joined the matriarchal races, and the Basque population descended from them. These amalgamated Dravido - Turano Dorian tribes descended from the spear Dor, became the subjects of Minos, and among these the Dravidian seafarers were
1 Gaillard, L'Astronomic Prehistorique, vii. p. 73.

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the Carian seamen who, according to Herodotus i. 171, made the Minyans rulers of the islands of the ZEgean sea and of Greece. They, according to Aristotle, cited by Strabo viii. p. 374, occupied Epidaurus in Argolis, the sacred city where ./Esculapius, the divine physician, was said to have been born, and his Indian origin is marked by the snake twisted round his left arm, and the cocks sacrificed to him.
The Carians, also like the Indian Pitaro Barishadah, buried their dead, and their supreme god Zeus was depicted as bearing the double axe of the two lunar crescents measuring the cycle-year1. Herodotus, in describing them, attributes to them the origin of three special customs, (1) of wearing cock’s combs on their helmets, (2) of painting scutcheons on their "shields, and (3) of holding their shields by a wooden handle. The two first of these are clearly derived from the Indian people who worshipped Ahalya, the hen-bird, as the sun-bird circling the heavens, the wife of the lunar bull-god Gautama, and sacrificed cocks, the Munda sun-offerings, and painted their caste totem marks on their foreheads. He also says that the Carian women never pronounced their husband’s name, a thoroughly Indian and Munda custom2 3.
The introduction into Greece of the Munda jungle fowl must date from the epoch when, as we have seen, cocks and hens were the sacred birds of Herakles, the sun-god, and his wife Hebe, a reproduction of the Indian Ahalya. They were also, according to Plutarch, sacrificed to Ares, the ploughing (ar) god in Sparta, and were the sacred birds ^ of the Roman Mars, thus marking him as originally the Indian Maroti, the ape-god of the South-west Monsoon 3. The Carians also placed the figure of a cock at the end of their lances. The cock was the bird sacred to Minos and the Minyans, for a cock was the crest painted on the shield
1   Frazer, Pansam'as, vol. iii. pp. 154, 155.
2   Herodotus, i. 171, 146.
3   De Gubernatis, Die Thieve (German Translation), p. 561.
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of the statue of Idomeneus, the leader of the Minyan Cretans in the Trojan war, placed among the offerings of the Sicilian Agrigentines in Elis, and there was a figure of a cock on the helmet of the statue of Athene, the Ionian tree-mother, in the Akropolis of Elis1. Cocks and hens were the birds used for augury by the augur priests, who sacrificed them and examined the signs shown by their entrails in the sacred square, the Roman Templum, divided into four equal parts by the cross of St. George. This field was that called in the Rigveda and Zendavesta the four-cornered field of Varuna, the barley and ram sun-god of this epoch, which is said to have conquered the triangle of the year of three seasons 2 3 4. This land of the conquering square is said to have been the fourteenth of the lands created by Ahura Mazda, and that in which Thraetaona, the Vedic Trita, who was, as we have seen, the ruling god of the cyle-year, was born.
The ritual founded on the prophetic signs given by the Indian cocks and hens, the sun-birds, was taken to Rome with the worship of the Twin Brethren, and those who diffused the cult were the seafaring Minyans, called Tursena by the Lydians, Tursha by the Egyptians, and Tyrrhenians by the Romans and Greeks, the worshippers of the supreme god of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, who is called Pator Tur, the father Tur, in the inscription in Cypriote letters on a whorl dedicated to him, and found in the sixth settlement from the bottom of the buried cities of Troy. It was he who gave his name to the Phrygian city of Turiaion 3, and who was originally the Pole Star mother-goddess, the counterpart of the Indian and Finnic Tara, the Etrurian mother-goddess Tur-an. It was she who in the Etrurian * folk-tale quoted by Leland4 gave the father of the future
1   Frazer, Pctusanias, v. 25, 4, vi. 26, 4, vol. i. pp. 277, 324 ; Homer, Iliad, ii. p. 643.
2   Rg. i. 152, 2 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Fargard, i. 18, Introduction, iv. 12 ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 9, lxiii.
3   Schluchhardt, Schliemann’s Excavations, Appendix i. p. 334.
4   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Tur-anna, pp. 39—41.

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sun-god, the ragged peasant, the despised sun, the basket of nuts, the fruit of the World’s tree, which was to make the king’s daughter, the tree-sun-mother, pregnant, and who was looked on as the Pole Star mother of light and life. These Tursena were, as Herodotus i. 57 tells us, a different race from the Pelasgians who emigrated from Lydia to Umbria in Italy. From the Eugubine tables describing the ritual of Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the capital of Umbria, we learn that the Umbrian priests, who divined by the birds, wore, like the Pitaro Barishadah of India and the Dervish priests of South-western Asia, sacrificial girdles; and that both the Umbrian priests and the Pitaro Barishadah were directed in their official sacrifices to wear this girdle-cord over the right shoulder. It was also on this shoulder that the Umbrian priests were to carry the fire-brazier. They were also to pray for protection to the owl (parra) L This was the bird sacred to Athene, the tree-mother-goddess of the Ionian race, descended from matriarchal mothers. The owl is in India a bird form of Indra, who is called Uluka, the owl-god, and the sacred owl of Athene was, according to the birth-legend told of her origin, the night-bird-mother of the sun-god, the horned moon. She was Ethiope, that is, she was a daughter of the Atyub or incense men, the daughter of Nykteus, king of the matriarchal island of Lesbos> or according to other authorities, of .Ethiopia, that is of the Indian incense collectors. She lay by her father, as Myrrha, or Shemiramot, lay by her father Thoas, whom we have seen to be a form of Dumu-zi and to be the year-star Orion, and was pursued by him with his sword, but was saved by Athene, who changed her into an owl, as Myrrha was changed into a cypress-tree to become the mother of the sun-god Adonis 1 2. Thus we see that the owl was, according to Greek history, the sacred bird of the age of incense worship, that
1   Breal, Les Tables Eitgubines, v. pp. xliv., xlv. ; Bower, Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, Appendix, Translation of the Ancient Lustration of the Iguvine People, p. 132.
2   De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vi. p. 52S.
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258   History and Chronology
is of the three-years cycle. And in the genealogy of the Mahabharata, Uluka is the son of Shakuni the raven, the early sacred storm-bird. The sons of the owl, the Ulukas, are in the Mahabharata described as a powerful tribe in the North-west, living near the fire-worshipping dwellers in the Sarasvatl, who were conquered by Arjuna. They joined the army of the Kauravyas with the men of the Sarasvati, and both fought under the command of Shakuni, the raven. Uluka, his son, was sent as an ambassador to the Pandavas by Duryodhana, the Kauravya leader, before the war, and he insulted Arjuna in the course of his embassy, while his father Shakuni had, like Pushkara in the story of Nala, ruined them by winning their wealth in gambling. Both he and his father Shakuni were slain by Sahadeva, the fire- god among the Pandavas, ruling the autumn season beginning at the autumnal equinox, and their forces were the last remnant of the Kauravya army, whose defeat and destruction left the Pandavas the victorious rulers of India *.
Hence in this ritual of the Umbrian divining priests who worshipped the moon-owl of night we see evidence of the migration to Italy of the men of the cycle-year, who made the owl their mother-bird instead of the earlier raven, and made it the sacred bird of their tree-mother-goddess Athene. This was the Athene called the Itonian, who was the protecting goddess of the Pan-Boeotian confederacy, whose sanctuary containing her image, and that of her male counterpart the Zeus of the lower world, called Itanos, the god of the South, was the national Boeotian temple at Coronea, where the festival of the united gods was held yearly at the autumnal equinox when the Boeotian year began 1 2. It was under the protection of this goddess, to whom the owl was sacred, that the Boeotians under Kadmus entered Europe from the East, and thence they made their way to
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Digmjaya) Parva, xxvii. pp. So, Si, Udyoga (Yana- sandhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Udyoga (Sainya-Niryana) Parva, clx.—clxiv. pp. 462 —485, Shalya {Hf-ada-Pravesha) Parva, xxviii., xxix. pp. 105—no.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, 1, vol. i. p. 4S6, vol. v. p. 169.

PLATE II,
To face/. 259.

From Iasilikaia in Cilicia.

259
Italy as the Minyan race, sons of the owl-goddess, whom they called Mena, Menfra or Minerva, and who was both a phallic-serpent and a winged-goddess, the moon-bird of night, the protectress of brides I, and the measuring {men) mother the Egyptian goddess Min, the star, and Virgo.
G. Plant worship.
The creed of these Hittite descendants of the Indian Turvasu and the owl-mother-goddess of the Minyans is depicted in the historical bas-relief of Iasili Kai'a in Cilicia. This represents the Hittite father-god wearing the Hittite peaked tiara, and their shoes with turned-up toes, descending from the mountain, and bearing in his right hand the polar sceptre, his magic rain-wand of office, surmounted with the earth globe. In his left hand is the symbol of the pollen-bearing flower with the seed-vessel rising out of the calix, and the sacred antelope, wearing the Hittite cap, runs by his side. He, in the copy of the bas-relief drawn by Puchstein2, which is reproduced 011 the plate annexed, meets, after he has come down to the plain and mounted on the shoulders of his Hittite priests, the mother-goddess Rhea, the mother of the sons of the rivers. She also wears the Hittite shoes and the tower head-dress of the goddess of the revolving-year, stands on a leopard, and bears in her right hand the symbol of the blossomed flower with its petals springing from the calix, and bearing the seed-vessel already swelling from the infusion of the seed of the male flower. This represents the marriage of the plant-parents of life at the four wedding festivals of the cycle-year, and behind them, standing like his mother on a leopard, the sacred animal of Dionysus, son of Semelc or Shemiramot, is the son born of their union. Between1 the mother and her full-grown
1   Deecke, Etruria, ^Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 637 ; Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Mena, p. 132.
2   This, according to Signor Milani, is more carefully drawn than that given by Perrot, iv. fig. 321.
S 2
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:52:28 PM: 26O

son is the walking seed-vessel, the infant who has not yet assumed his final human form. In his form of the man-god he bears in his right hand the staff on which he leans, and in his left the double axe of the Carian and Hittite Zeus, while behind him is bound the pickaxe or mattock, headed by the lunar crescentx.
It is the birth of this sun-plant-god which is represented in the story of the combat between Horus the son of Hat-hor, the Pole Star goddess, and Set the pig-god, told in Chapters XVII. and CXII. of the Book of the Dead1 2. Horus is the sun of this cycle-year born from the tree crowned by the Pole Star, and Set or Suti was, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 75, the god who was changed in his Northern avatar from Canopus the ape-god of the South, into the Pig Pole Star god in the constellation Kepheus. This pig-god is said to have blinded Horus by throwing filth, that is earth, in his eyes, thus making him the blind-tree-father and mother of life born from the earth. Horus, or rather Thoth, that is Dhu-ti the bird (d/m) of life, the moon emasculated Set, that is to say, they made him like the emasculated Phrygian god Attys, the father-god only visible in the sexless pine-tree, the fire-drill. The whole parable tells us that the theology of the plant-god of the cycle-year succeeded the worship of the Pole Star and the solstitial sun-bird.
This son of the parent-plants, born of the virgin flower- mother, is the exact representation of the Etrurian god Sethlans the heavenly smith, and he is in the Indian theogony the god called Parasu Rama, or Rama of the double-axe, who appeared to the Pandavas clad in a deerskin on the fourteenth day of the moon, thus marking himself as the lunar god of the stellar lunar month of twenty- seven days, and who also showed himself on the eighth, that is on the eve of the ninth day of his week. He was
1   Milani, Studi Di Archceologia, i., Part i., Nota Esegetica Sulla Stele di Amrit., pp. 35, note 5, 37, figs. 2, 3 ; Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien, Taf. x.
2   Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chapters xvii. 67—70, cxii. 2—9, PP- 52> 177-

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the great grandson of Bhrigu the fire-god, and son of Jamadagni the twin {jama) fires engendered by Richika the fire-spark in the mother-trees, the Banyan fig-tree {Ficus Indica) of the Kushikas and the Pipal-tree {Ficus Religiosa) sacred to the sun-god. This twin-born god, the seed of life, married Renuka the flower-pollen {rout), and her fifth son was Parasu-Rama, that is the son born from the union of the parent-plants like the Hittite son of the mother-flower who became the Etrurian Sethlans.
He recovered the year-calf begotten in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda from the year-cow after ten months of gestation J, which had been stolen by Arjuna the fair {arjuna) Haihaya king, the sun-god with the thousand arms, and slew the stealer, that is to say, became ruler of the year of the united moon-cow and sun-calf. The brothers of Arjuna, the star sons of Kartavirya, or Krituvirya, the male (?virya) star-parent, the warrior-star Orion, slew Jamadagni, Rama’s father, in revenge, and were all slain by Rama with his double axe Parasu, in the field of Tan-eshur, the home of the mud-god Tan, the centre of Kuru-kshethra, the land of the Kurus, where he filled the five adjoining {sa- mantd) lakes called Samanta-Panchaka with their blood, that is to say, he became ruler of their year with its five- day weeks 2.
H. Emigration of the men of this age as told by their
monuments.
These Turano-Semitic seafaring races were the founders of the earliest Cyclopean architecture of the one-eyed {Cyclops') sons of the Pole. In this the walls were built of polygonal stones, accurately fitted together without mortar, as in the oldest parts of the prehistoric buildings of Tiryns, Mycenre, Orchomenos. They were also the builders of the earliest type of stone dwelling-house, modelled on the earth and wattle heehive huts of Phrygia, of which specimens are
1   Rg. i. 164, 1—10.
2   Mahabharata Vana {Tirt/ia-Yatra) Parva, cxv.—cxvii. pp. 354—362.
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found in the Piets’ houses of Scotland and Ireland burrowed under earth mounds. The sacrificial pits which were, as we have seen, a distinguishing feature of their ritual in India, are reproduced in those in the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae, in the temple of the Kabiri in Samothrace, and in that of the Great Kabir near Thebes, while near the sacrificial pit at Mycenae is a wall-painting representing a procession of ass-headed figures wearing gay garments, who arc apparently votaries of the ass-riding Hindu Ash- vins T. This architecture also survives in that of the Nuraghs or circular towers of Sardinia, the zigurrats or sacred observatories of the ancient astronomers of the age of the tower of the Garden of God, the Plebrew Pen-u-el of the face {pen) of God, the Midianite tower of Zibah and Zal- mana, which, with the booths (sakut) of Succoth, the place of booths, were destroyed by Gideon, who cut down the Asherah, or divine pillars, and overthrew the altar of Baal, that of this cycle age, and substituted the worship of the Ephod1 2 3 4. This was the garment of the prophetic priest of the spoken oracle, who was inspired by the Bhang or Hashish {Cannabis Indica) which succeeded the intoxicating drink of this epoch, and which is said in the Zenda- vesta to have taught the divine law to Plvdgvi or Shu-gvi, the coming-bird {Shu), the wife of Zarathustra, and to his priests, who wore the Chista or ephod 3. These Nuraghs were built by the Turano-Semites from the East, who settled in Sardinia, under the lead of Sardis, called on Sardinian coins Sard Pater. His name, which was also that of the capital of Lydia, the home of the Tursena, is said by Xanthus to mean “ a year,” and it is allied to the Sanskrit Sharad, the autumnal equinox, the Armenian Sard, the Persian Sal, a year 4.
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 121, 223, v. 136, 137.
2   Judges, vi. 25—32, viii. 1—29.
3   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 15, 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 267, 26S.
4   Rawlinson, Herodotus, vol. i. p. 150, note 7.
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This year-god of the autumnal equinox was the son of Makaris, Baal Makar, the god of the lunar sickle, the Phoenician Melkarth, or Herakles, and he was the Herakles Sandan of the unsexed male and female priestsJ. He was assisted by Iolaus, the Phoenician Baal Iol, the charioteer of Herakles, who was the first of the five Dactyls or finger-gods, the first victors of the Olympian games of Elis, who, with Iasius, Kastor, Poludeukes and Herakles, won all the contests at the first festival : Iolaus winning the chariot-race as the leader of the year; Iasius the horse-race ; Kastor the foot-race; Poludeukes the boxing match ; and Herakles, the cycle-sun-god, the wrestling and pancratium. They were originally the five Idaean Dactyls of the early five-days week who guarded the infant Zeus Itanos, the son of Rhea, at Ida in Crete. They are called by Pausanias Herakles, Paeonaeus (the healer Paion), Epimedcs, Iasius, and Idas 1 2.
These ancient builders who measured their year by the cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and led this emigration from East to West, were those who set their cities on a hill, and made the Akropolis on its summit the centre of the city, as in the cities of Orchomenos, Tiryns, Mycenae and Athens. This Phoenician Greek type is that which was transferred by these emigrants to Etruria, where Fiesole (Fcesulce), Arezzo (Arretium), Cortona, Chiusi (Clusium), Volterra and Perugia all stand on hills, and are surrounded by walls of Cyclopean architecture. Each of these also marks its independent origin as the ruler of the province of which it is the centre by the ceremony of lighting the year’s fires at the national city feast held on their New Year’s Day. This is at Volterra, as I learnt by inquiry in the town, the 20th of September, or the day of the autumnal equinox. In most of these cities the rocks
1   Fraser, Pausanias, x. 17, 1—4, vol. i. p. 523, v. pp. 320, 322; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. pp. 417—421.
2   Ibid., v. 7, 4, S, 1, x. 17, 4, vol. i. pp. 245, 247, 523, vol. v. p. 323; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 435.
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forming the hills on which they are built supplied materials for the walls, but the hill of Perugia, rising 1,700 feet above the sea, is a gravel deposit from the neighbouring Tiber, and the stones for its walls, some of which are of enormous size, must have been brought from quarries at a distance and carried up the hill.
These immigrants also introduced into Etruria the chambered tombs which reproduce those of Bahrein on the Persian Gulf, called the Mounds of Ali, where one of these mound- tombs, thirty-five feet high, seventy-six feet in diameter, and one hundred and fifty-two paces in circumference, was opened by Mr. BentL It contained in one chamber the bones of a horse, and in that below it unburnt human bones. The builders of these tombs took the pattern to Asia Minor, where it appears in the tomb of Midas and those adjoining it, one of which is an exact representation of a Phrygian peasant’s cottage. There are similar tombs also at Dorylaum in Phrygia, on the Sangarius, and others pierced in the rocks of the Taurus range in Cilicia1 2. It is with tombs like these that the hills on which Chiusi stands and those in its immediate neighbourhood are honeycombed, the tombs in one hill, the Poggio Gajella, rising in successive stories from the bottom to the top. One of the most remarkable of the tombs at Chiusi is that called the Deposito della Scimia, or the tomb of the Ape. It is a collection of chambers hollowed in the tufa of which the hill is made, and closed by a tufa door. Each chamber is provided with three stone beds, each with its stone pillow, on which the dead were laid in their last sleep, the burial taking place before the introduction of the custom of burning the dead in the Bronze Age. Above each of these is a picture painted in outlines of red antimony. The most interesting of these is that which gives its name to the tomb, and which represents th£ dead man taking leave of his relatives on earth and
1   Bent, Southern Arabia, chap, i. pp. 24—28.
2 Leake, Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, pp. 20 ff., 106, 107.

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riding on the horse of death to the underworld. There he meets the king of the dead, behind whom is the ape-god, the god Kapi of India, the wise ape who is his inspiring genius. These same people also brought with them from the East the Dardanian Apollo, the god of Troy and of Larissa in the Troad, called by Homer the capital of the Trojan Pelasgi h These Pelasgi Dardanians were allied to the men of the same race in Thessaly, where there is another Larissa, meaning perhaps the city of the Lares or ancestral spirits. Their Apollo was, as Plato tells us in the Cratylus, the god 'Airkm1 2 3, that is the Etrurian Aplu, the Semitic Abel or Ablu the son. But this Apollo of the Troad was, according to Homer 3, Apollo Smintheus, or Apollo the mouse (cr/xivOo?), which was, according to Isaiah, eaten at their annual festivals by the ancient Semites 4 as the devouring-god of time. It is this god which we find holding a conspicuous place as a year-god in one of the most remarkable historical monuments of Etruria. This is the sacred ship found in the tomb of a warrior High-Priest of Vetulonia, whose ashes were, like those of Hector in the Iliad, enclosed in a golden urn covered with purple cloths 5. The ship is a Phoenician barque, and is evidently a religious ark, the ship in which the national gods were carried in all religious processions in South-western Asia and Egypt. Its contents tell us of the course of the evolution of religious belief in the creating year-god from a period beginning with the year of the deer- sun-god Orion.
On its prow-deck is an image of the dwarf guardian-god, the Patoikos, who is depicted as a flower like that of the lotus springing from between two snakes coiled on a substructure of four pillars, which seem to represent the four divisions of the cycle-year. At the end of the prow is the head of the deer-sun-god with horns of nine points, the nine
1   Homer, Iliad, ii. 840—843.
2   Jowett, Plata, Cratylus, vol. ii. p. 228.
3   Homer, Iliad, i. 38.   4 js. lxVi. 17.
s Homer, Iliad, xxiv. 794, 795.
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days of the cycle-week, and on the topmost point of the horns two parent-snakes are seated. This head of the year- god is bound to this representative of the star-ship Argo by ropes, the year-days, which the mouse-god is gnawing from below, while on the top of the ropes the sun-lizard, worshipped by all Dravidians as the sun-god of marriage 1 2 3, is lying. He, as we shall see presently, is the sun-god born of the Finn mother-goddess Kesari-tar, the daughter {tar) of the cauldron of life {kcsari), after three years’ pregnancy. Upon its head another mouse is sitting.
In the centre-deck of the ship are two yoked oxen with wooden balls at the end of their horns, an ass or calf, a wild sow with two young pigs, a gelt pig, a ram or ewe, and a dog, the domestic animals of the age when the pig was a sacred animal3. It represents the Argo or mother-ship, the constellation which brought the twin-gods Gemini to Argos, the land consecrated to the holy fish, and which was carried as a sacred talisman by the emigrants who went still further westward to Etruria.
From Etruria we can trace these Turano-Semite traders to Gades (Cadiz), where Heraldes, their Ar-chal, slew the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion) 3. P'rom thence they made their way by sea to Britany, where we find similar chambered tombs to those of Etruria and Asia Minor. There they have left in the megalithic, flat-sided stones, near Carnac, a series of stone calendars giving a history of their successive measurements of annual time.
There are three of these stone calendars close to Carnac. One at Kermario, in which the stones are ranged in ten rows, while in that at Menec there are eleven, and at Kerlescan thirteen rows of stones. That these may be justly called calendars has been proved by M. Gaillard of Plouharnel,
1 Beauchamp, Dubois’ Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, vol. i. part ii. p. 218.
2   Milani, Aluseo Topografico Dell Etruria Vetulonia, pp. 28—.33.
3   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 437.

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who has observed and studied them for forty years. He found that all the stone-lines run from South-west to Northeast, and that the narrow ends of the stones point in this direction. At the South-west end of each series there. is an oval enclosure fenced in by stones, in which there was one stone used as a point of observation. Corresponding with this he found in each series a second stone standing among the aligned stones, but at right angles to them. By constant observations made with scientific instruments, M. Gaillard found that these two related gnomon-stones were so placed as to mark for an observer standing at the Southwest stone in the oval the day when the rising sun sent its rays over the second stone so as to fall exactly on the line between the two stones. The days thus indicated were in the Kermario series of ten stones, the summer solstice and the equinoxes, in the eleven rows of Menec the summer solstice, and in the thirteen rows of Kerlescan the autumnal equinox *. He also found that all the other surviving ranges of stones in Britany, similar to but much more imperfect than those of Carnac, were erected on the same plan.
Also the examination of the entrance passages of the chambered dolmens used as burial-places showed that by far the greater number of these were directed towards the Southeast, where the sun rose at the winter solstice, and in a detailed summary of the directions of the entrances of the 156 dolmens in Morbihan,he states that 54 point either to the rising of the sun at the summer or winter solstice, and 98 to the rising or setting sun of the winter solstice 1 2. These dolmens are all situated under a mound raised over them, like the artificial hills of Shemiramot, to represent the mother-mountain, and the greater number belong to the Neolithic age in which
1   Gaillarcl, VAslronomie Prehistoriquc, ire Partic, Lea Alignments des Menhirs dans le Morbihan Revue Mensuelle d’Aslronomie de Meleorologic cl dcs Sciences d’Observation pour 1S97, PP- 1—39, 73-
2   Ibid., Partie II., Les Dolmens ct coffrcs de Pierre, pp. 125, 126.
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the dead were buried lying on their sides, with their legs bent and their knees raised to their breasts, and their arms similarly raised *. This is exactly the position of a foetus in the womb, which the partaker of the Soma sacrifice is directed to assume at his baptism in the Brahmanas2; and it was one which would naturally suggest itself to the people of the cycle age of gestation, which was based on the year of the growing foetus of ten lunar months. This is the same position as that in which the dead are found in prehistoric tombs in Egypt, and also in those of the Neolithic age throughout Europe 3. Also in Britany some of the skeletons have been exposed to the air before burial so as to clean the flesh off the bones 4, as is the custom among the Ooraons of Chutia Nagpur s ; and both animals and human beings were sacrificed at the funerals.
All these facts prove that in Britany in the Neolithic age of the dolmens with internal chambers under hills or artificial mounds, these tombs were placed with reference to the rising or setting of the sun at the solstices, and that in Morbihan, of which Carnac is the religious capital, the greater number of the dolmens are oriented to the position of the rising or setting sun at the winter solstice, and a large number to the South-west setting points of the same sun, which marked the beginning of the earliest Indian year measured by the solstices.
The stone calendars must have been arranged on similar principles, and they all have their observatories situated at the South-west, the home of the mother-bird of the years of the Pleiades and Orion, which began with the setting of the sun in the South-west. It is also clear that the 1 2 3 4 5
1   Gaillard, HAstronomie Prehistorique, Partie ii. p. 112.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdk., iii. 2, 1, 5—16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 26—29 J Max Muller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, pp. 395—398.
3   Petrie, History of Egypt, vol. i., Addenda, p. xix. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 148.
4   Gaillard, VAstronomie Prehistorique, Partie ii. p. no.
5   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 236.

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arrangements of the stone avenues must, like the orientation of the dolmens, and the positions of the index-stones and observatories attached to them, have some connection with the reckoning of the year. We find in the Hindu ritual of the Soma sacrifice that eleven sacrificial stakes were placed outside the East side of the consecrated Soma ground, to which were tied the eleven victims offered to the gods of the eleven months of the year, which forms the subject of Chapter VIT. It is therefore probable that the rows of stones of Britany, which mark in other particulars their descent from Indian year reckonings, denote, like the Hindu sacrificial stakes, years of ten, eleven and thirteen months.
This probability is raised almost to a certainty by the Linga stone altar In the collection of M. du Chatellier at Kernuz, near Pont L’Abbe, Finist£re. Its form follows the rules laid down in the Hindu religious books for the making of a sacrificial Linga or stake. When I examined in M. du Chatellier’s house this stone, which is nearly three feet high, and is of Breton granite, I saw at once from the designs engraved on its top and four sides that those who made it must have learnt the theology expressed in the engravings in India.
On the top there was drawn the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solstitial sun, the sign of the flying year-bird beginning its flight at the winter solstice. On one side was a pattern of interlaced female Su-astikas ^f-», representing the annual
course of the sun, beginning its journey round the heavens by going northward at the winter solstice. On the side
N
next to this was the square of the eight-rayed star v

E
s
representing the union of the St. Andrew’s Cross of the 1
1   See Plan of Sacrificial Ground, Eggeling, Sat. Brah. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi.
P- 475-
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Solstitial ^ with the St. George’s Cross of the Equinoctial sun +• This square with the eight-rayed star inscribed in it was that directed to be marked inside the circling stones of the Soma sacrificial ground by the plough made of the sacred fig-tree, the Udumbara ('Ficus glomerata), to which the oxen were yoked by traces made of three strands of Munja grass (Saccharum Munja), of which the Brahmin year girdles, denoting the three seasons of the year, were made. The guider of the plough in making this square was directed to begin at the South-west corner, where the sun of the winter solstice sets, and to mark from this point the two South and West sides of the square first. In drawing the transverse lines the Polar line from South to North was ploughed first, as’that round which the sun and stars revolve, that from the South-west to the North-east, marking the year of the flying sun-bird, second, the equinoctial West and East line third, and the North-west and South-east line lastI.
This sacred symbol told the history of the sun-year including that of the solstitial and equinoctial three-years cycle which preceded the year of the Ikshvaku kings, sons of the sugarcane (;iksha), which is the year described in Chapter VII. Upon this square the later brick altar of the sun-bird rising in the East, the successor of the sun setting in the West, was ordered to be built. This eight-rayed star of the solstitial and equinoctial year was called by the earliest Akkadians of Girsu Dingir the Creator, and Anu or Esh-shu, meaning god, and an ear of corn 1 2. It was in Hindu mythology the symbol of the two united female and male Su-astikas, the solstitial star denoting the course of the sun going from South to North at the winter and from North to South at the summer solstice. The name embodies that of the god Astika, or rather, as he is also called in the Mahabharata,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., val. xli. pp. 326—330.
* 2 Ball, ‘ Akkadian Affinities of Chinese.’ Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, § viii., China, Central Asia, and the East, p. 685.

2/1
Ashtaka the eighth I. He was, according to one account, grandson of Yayati, and to another, son of the father ascetic of the Yayavara or full-moon {Yd) sect, and of his wife, the sister of Vasuki the snake-god of the summer solstice. Both his father and mother were called Jarat-karu, or makers of time (jarat), that is to say the two seasons of the year, and their son, the eight-rayed star, was the high-priest of King Janam-e-jaya, the conquerer {jayd) of birth (janavi) in the sacrifice of the fire-altar, in which all the snake-gods except Takshaka, god of the winter, and Vasuki, god of the summer solstice were destroyed2 3. It is this history and that of the Su or Khu year-bird which explains the meaning and historical importance of the name Su-ashtaka, denoting the yearly course round the eight (ashta) points of the heavens of the sun-bird.
On the third side of this conical linga altar was a pattern
of four leaves   exactly the shape of Palasha leaves,
arranged in the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross; and these leaves denote the Palasha leaves grown from the feather of the Shyena or frost {shya), which fell to earth when the year-bird of the winter solstice was wounded by the arrow of Kushanu the rain-bow-god, drawer (>karsh) of the heavenly bow 3. On the fourth side, engraved in the form of a St. George’s Cross, is the Palasha tree with its flowers and fruit, from which the leaves denoting the solstitial year fell.
Round the top of these designs there runs a scroll of female Suastikas, and at the bottom one of snakes coiled in the form of the cross-bar of the male Su-astika This stone, sculptured in Britany, was found by M. du Chatellier at the end of an avenue marked by two rows of uncut stones, and it stood with the side marked by the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixxxix.—xcii. pp. 265—272.
2 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) l’arva, xlv.—xlviii., lv.—lviii. pp. 132—140, I53—I59-
3   Rg. iv. 27, 3; Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., i. 7, 1,1; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 1 S3, note 2.
2^2

female Su-astika looking eastwards, about a hundred yards to the west of a dolmen under a mound, which contained calcined bones but only flint implements, and it was therefore a grave of the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age, when bodies were burnt before they were buried.
According to the rules for making a stone linga, given by Varahamihira in the Brihat-samhita, lviii. 8, the maker is ordered to choose a stone of the length he wishes, and to divide it into three parts. The top part is to be rounded like the top of a phallus, and the bottom to be square, exactly like the Breton stone, but Varahamihira says the middle part should be eight-sided I. This last is the figure made by changing the eight-rayed star in a square into a figure in which the bases of the eight triangles it forms are the sides of an eight-sided figure. It is this eight-sided figure which is that prescribed for the Yupa or sacrificial stake in the Satapatha Brahmana. As for its length, the Satapatha Brahmana says it may be five or six cubits long if the worshipper measures the year by five or six seasons, eleven cubits long if he measures the year-thunderbolt by eleven months, twelve if he measures it by twelve months, and so on through the series of recorded year measurements, showing clearly that the altar was one erected to the god ruling the year 2. It was doubtless to this god of time that the earliest stone-altar or sun-gnomon-stone was erected, and similarly the original tree Yupa, the tree-trunk, denoted the god who measured time by the changes of the plant with its three seasons of winter bareness, summer leaves and flowers, and autumn fruit. The designs engraved on this stone-altar, when interpreted by the Indian ritual from which they were derived, say as clearly as written words could do, “ This is the altar of the God of Time, who sent the sun-bird of the winter solstice to fly its annual course from South
1   Sachau, Alberunl’s India, chap, lviii. vol. ii. pp. 103, 104.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 4, 17—27; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 126, 127.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 02:54:32 PM: 273
to North and North to South round the Pole, and to supply the light and heat which nourish the tree-mother of life on earth, and enable it to bring forth its flowers and seed, the parents of future generations.”
The theology of which the creed is stated in the pictured writing on the Linga has in Britany examples of the still earlier phases of this belief when the altar was the sun- gnomon-stone, the solitary menhirs which abound in the country.' The whole evidence proves that the maritime people who lived in Britany in the Neolithic Age, and erected there the menhirs, dolmens and stone calendars, were descended from the Indian Dravidian races mixed in their long journey from East to West with other stocks ; that they brought with them their national creed and social institutions as expressed in the ritual and customs of the successive worshippers of menhirs, the builders of sacrificial and burial dolmens, and of the people who buried their dead in the elaborate chambered tombs of the later age of this form of burial on the Persian Gulf and Asia Minor, Etruria and Britany.
A conspicuous place among the component members of this Turano-Semitic maritime confederacy must be assigned to the two races of Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, the first of whom apparently belonged to the Gothic sons of the bull and wolf. They seem to have been the leaders of society in the palaeolithic stone age of menhirs, who looked up to the wise woman inspired by the bee and its mead as the divine prophetess, and believed in the river and tree-goddess-mother, Anahita and Rhea, as the queen of wisdom, from whom she derived her lore. These were the people living under the Amazonian rule of the queens of the Ionian races, who introduced into Greece the name yvvrj for woman, meaning the mother, the Gothic gind, the Saxon quena, our queen, which became in Sanskrit Jani. They were succeeded as ruling powers by Celts of Brythonic origin, whose language is spoken in Britany, and who changed the name of the mother, the queen, into the
T
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Brythonic Pen T, and who called the Pole Star mother in India Tarl Pennu, the mother-star. They gave the name of Pen-Samlath, the mother or face of Samlath or Semele, to the daughter of Kadmus, the man of the East (kedem), who became the mother of Dionysus, and who was both the bisexual Phoenician mother Shemiramot, and the Samleh of Masrekah, the Vine-land1 2 3, of the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 35, 36. This bisexual ruler succeeded Hadad, the sun-god of the pomegranate Rimmon, who was her father, and he was the conqueror of the Mi- dianites, and was thus the counterpart of Gideon, the founder of the worship of the Ephod, the sacred woven garment worn by the priests of these trading merchant mariners.
The flow of this stream of Eastern immigration to the trading regions of the West can be traced still further in the Celtic mythology of Wales and Ireland, and especially in that of the latter country. A blurred outline of the history of the successive arrivals of the differing races of eastern invaders is to be found in the story of the never dying father-god of Erin Tuan, the son of Starn, the Pole Star, told by him to Finnen (the Finn) of Maige Bile, the plains of the hill of the holy-tree (bile) 3.- First he came to Ireland with Panthalon, evidently a name substituted for the original title of the divine leader by a later editor of the history. He was the son of Sera, who may be the Wesh Ser, a star, and was accompanied by four and twenty couples, probably the four and twenty lunar phases of the earlier lunar year of Orion. Tuan was the only survivor of this first immigration, which may represent the first matriarchal races who came with Hu, the Mighty, from Deffrobani, Ceylon, and introduced the worship of Bran, the raven. Secondly, he became the stag-god, that is, the
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. i. pp. 2, 7.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 54, note 2.
3 Meyer and Nutt, Voyage of Bran, vol. ii., Appendix A, pp. 285 ff.

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deer-sun Orion, of the sons of Nemed, the grove (nemeton)I, the Basque races of Asia Minor, born from the union of the Indian sons of the village grove with the Northern hunting-races. Thirdly, when these sons of Nemed died he became the wild boar sun-god, the boar of the age of the six-days week, whose slaughter was the first of the exploits of Krishna, the antelope sun-god, and of Arjuna, the Pandava god of the summer solstice. This was the boar who slew Adonis, the sun-god, born of the cypress-tree, and who in Celtic mythic history was killed on the last day of the year by Diarmait, the ruling year-god, husband of Grainne, the goddess of light, the female form of the Gaelic sun-god Grannos 2 3 4 *, and therefore the equivalent of Suria, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was brought in the car of the Ashvins, made of Palasha and Shilmali cotton-tree wood, to wed Soma, the moon-god 3. Diarmait, like the Semitic'Ram, was the son of one of two twins, whose mother was Duben. Their father was her brother Cairbre Muse, called the cat-headed Cairbre. Core, meaning the cropped, the father of Diarmait, got his name from his cropped ears, which were bitten off before his birth by Cormac his brothers This incident bears a close resemblance to the attempted supersession of Perez, ancestor of Ram, the sun-god, by his twin brother Zerah, before they were born as the children of the incestuous union of Tamar, the palm-tree, with her father-in-law Judah 5.
The ruling men of this age of the boar-sun-god are called in Tuan’s story the Gailioin, or men of the spear Gai, who were noted magicians 6, the Fir Domnann, or sons of the goddess of the deep, Domnu, the Syrian goddess Derketo, and the Fir Bolg, the men of the Bag or womb, born after
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. i. pp. 100—102.
2   Ibid., Lect. i. p. 22, Lect. v. pp. 506—511.
3   Rg. x. 85, 9—20.
4   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 18S6, Lect. iv. pp. 308, 309, 313.
s Gen. xxxviii. 27—30.
6 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 598—600.
T 2
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ten lunar months of gestation 1. These last claimed as their father Semion, the son of Stariath, the great sorceror Simon Drui, who made the revolving wheel of Fal, or of the paddles which enabled him to fly through the air. He is the II Vecchio Simeone Santo, the king of Wizards, of Italian popular mythology, who must be invoked by a Novena prayer to the wise gods, the nine-days week of the cycle- year 2 3 4. He, as the turner of the heavenly time-wheel, was the counterpart of Ixion or Akshivan, the driver of that wheel, who was bound to it, and by its revolutions made the earth turn round ; and both the Greek Ixion, twin brother of Koronis, and the Irish wheel-magician Simon were the male forms of the bisexual goddess of this cycle-epoch, Semi or Shemiramot3. Therefore these Fir Bolg, the bag-born sons of the wheel-god or goddess, were the men of the epoch of this cycle-year of three years, with its recurring periods of ten lunar months of gestation. Thjese Fir Bolg are described by McFirbis, in his “ Book of Genealogies,” as having dark hair and eyes, slender limbs like those of the Hindu races, and short stature ; and Skene classes them with the Basque Silures4,the Aquitanian sons of the goat, the mixed race formed by the union of the short Finns with the Indian Dravidian farmers and the northern hunters. They are said by McFirbis to have lived in under-ground houses burrowed under mounds, like the neolithic long- barrow tombs 4. During the fourth avatar of Tuan he was the sun-hawk of the Tuatha De Danann, the sons of the goddess Danu and of the sons of Beothach, son of the prophet Iarbonel, that is to say he was the sun-hawk Adrika of the Mahabharata, the mother of the holy eels, the fish- parents of the sons of the rivers, the hawk-goddess Freya of the Edda, Hathor the hawk Pole Star mother of the hawk-headed Horus, the sun-god of the Egyptian H01-
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 596—598.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 243—247.
3   Rhys, Hibbert lectures for 1SS6, Lect. vi. pp. 210—214.
4   Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, p. 78.

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shesu and Zarathustra in his form of Karshipta, the hawk who knew the language of birds and divined by bird augury. They are described by McFirbis as tall, with golden or red hair, fair skin, blue or grey eyes ; and as the builders of houses they lived in huts or pit dwellings L The battle in which these sons of the goddess Danu and the bird- prophet overcame the Fir Bolg, called also Fo-mori or the men beneath (fo) the sea (muif), the men of the South and the Fir Domnann, is said to have been fought on the last day of October, that is at the end of the Pleiades year, and in it the Tuatha De Danann were led by Nuada of the Silver-hand, the god of the lunar-crescent measuring the cycle-year, who was slain in the battle by Balor, leader of the Fir Bolg, and succeeded by Bres, meaning war1 2 3, who was the son of Brigit, the goddess Brihati of Chapter II. p. 71, and whose father Elatha came out of the sea and left a ring, the year-ring, with her at his departures. So that the birth of Bres was similar to that of the Indian Bharatha, the son of Sakuntala, who was, as we shall see presently, the sun-god born of the three-years cycle. Also this victory of the sun-hawk-god of the Tuatha De Danann introduced, as we shall see, the age of the sun-god Lug.
In his fifth avatar Tuan became the sun-fish, the river- salmon who made the Queen of Erin pregnant, the god of the Milesian sons of Mile or Bile, who conquered the Tuatha De Danann, and who were the Brythonic Basques from Spain. They defeated at Tailltin in Meath, on the Boyne, these sons of Danu, called the men of the fairy mounds, the mound-builders of the Neolithic Age, who “ had always three trees bearing fruit, one pig always alive and one ready to be cooked, and a vessel always full of excellent ale.” Mile or Bile, the parent of these conquering Brythons, was, according to Professor Windisch, “ a tree growing over a holy
1 Isaac Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 78.
a Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 5S6, 5S7.
3   Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 275, Lect. iv. p. 478, note 3.
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well or in a fort,” or, in other words, the mother-tree of the sons of the river-pool or the mountain-fort1. The sun-fish-god of these sons of the mother-tree and holy well was “the two undying fish which swim in Bowscale Tarn” of Cumberland mythology, the Akkadian fish-god Salli- mannu, the Hebrew Solomon, son of Bath-sheba of the seven measures, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Makara or river-porpoise, the form assumed by Pra-dyumna, the especially {pro) bright (dyumna) god, son of Krishna, the year-antelope, the Irish sun-god Lug, born, as we shall see, in the three-years tower, and saved from the sea2 3 4 5, the Greek sun-god Perseus, who was an Assyrian god, according to Herodotus vi. 53, whose name means a fish3, and who was drawn from the sea in a chest by a fisherman named Dictys, a net.
I. Story of the tower of the three-years cycle.
It is the story of the birth of this sun-fish-god from the tower of the three-years cycle, as told in popular mythology, that I have now to tell to complete the history of this epoch. Its earliest form is that of the Finn story which tells of the three years’ pregnancy of Kasari-tar, the daughter of the kettle (kasari) 4. This was the Celtic Southern cauldron of regeneration of the god Dagda, the year-god^father of Brigit, the Sanskrit Daksha, represented as a ram, the ram-sun of this epoch, and called Mendh Ishwara, the ram-god of boundaries (menr), the Gond god Goraya, who was the father of the twenty-seven Nakshatra, the twenty-seven wives of Chandra the moon-god, the twenty-seven days of the month of the cycle-year 5. He was the Greek god Hermes of the pillar
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. p. 588, Lect. i. pp. 90, 91, Lect. ii. pp. 147—149, Additions and Corrections, p. 67S.
2   Ibid., Lect. iv. p. 316.
3   Ailian, N. A., 3, 28.
4   Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, Part ii. ; Folklore, vol. i. p. 331.
5   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, s.v., Menr, a boundary, p. 249; Ma- habharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, Ixvi. p. 189.
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(epfxa), the Hermes Kriophoros who bore the ram-sun on his shoulders. This cauldron was the treasure of the Tuatha De Danann and it was made pregnant by the heated froth of the boiling sea of the South, churned by the revolving pole. At the end of the three-years period she gave birth to the sun-lizard, who comes forth to greet the sun in spring, and who was thus the symbol of the sun to the worshippers of the gnomon menhir with its recording shadows. It is called by the Finns “ the eye of Hiisi,” the wooded mother-mountain. The race who adopted this story of the birth of the Southern sun of winter from the cauldron of regeneration of the South were the sons of the volcanic Mount Ararat, raised from the waves of the Caspian and Black Sea by the churning pole of the trident god of the year of three seasons to be the original home of the Kushite sons of Kur, the Kurds of Kurdistan, the Kauravya of India, born of the Kur or Araxes river, the Daitya or second mother-river of the Zendavesta.
This story becomes in India that which tells of the birth of Bharata, who was, as we have seen, one of the triad gods Rama, Lakshman (the boundary laksJi), and Bharata, who were sons of the sun-god Raghu, called Dasaratha, or the god of the ten chariots (ratha), or months of gestation. Bharata, who was the ruling god during the exile of Rama, son of Kushaloya the Kushite mother, was the son of Kai-kaia the Gond mountain (koi) mother. But in the form of the story which describes Bharata as the parent god whence the Kauravyas and Pandavas were descended, he was the son of Sakuntaia the bird (Shakuna) mother, the crow who was born of Menaka the white-robed moon, the measuring (men) goddess, the first of the six Apsaras, or dwellers in the watery (ap) abyss, the six days of the week 2. Her father was Visvamitra, the friend (:mitra) of the village races (vishva)y the prophet-god of the Bharatas, who raised Tri-sankhya, the 1
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii. pp. 256, 257. s Maha bharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxii., lxxiv. pp. 213, 223.
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Ikshvaku king of the three (tri) numbers (sankha), to heaven as the triangle of the three weaving sisters, the three stars in the constellation of the Vulture now called Lyra, which are looked upon by the Chinese as the measurers of time. One of them is Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C.1.
Menaka was brought to Vishvamitra by Maroti the tree- ape-god, and she gave birth to her daughter Sakuntala on the banks of the Malini, the mother-river of the Malli, the mountain races of North-east India. Dushmanta, he of the hard mush) sayings (manta), King of Ayodhya, in the age of the cycle-year met Sakuntala in the forest dwelling of Kanva, the bard of the new (kana) age of the lunar solar reckoning of time, whose disciples are the reputed authors of the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda, and she, after three years’ pregnancy2 3 4, bore him a son called Bharata., Dushmanta had left on his departure from Kanva’s asylum a ring with Sakuntala, to ensure her future identification as the mother of his son, but she lost her ring in the river, and she and her son were disowned by Dushmanta, when she took him to his father. But when the ring was found in a fish brought by a fisherman to the King, Bharata was acknowledged as the royal heir 3,
Bharata is the father-god of the begetting (bhri) races, who looked on the father as the true parent and the son as the reproduction of the father born from the mother sheath 4. His children became the ruling race of Bhars, who as the wheat-growing building races succeeded the first milletgrowing Gond Kushikas. It was they who were the traditional rulers of all India, who built the city of Pampapura, of which the ruins remain in the Mirzapur district. Their totemistic descent is from (1) the Bans-rishi, the bamboo of the antelope (;rishya) race, that of Vasu the rain-god of the
1   Legge, The Shik King Decade, V., Ode 9; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363,
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxiv. p. 223.
3   Ibid., lxxi.— lxxiv. pp. 211—228; Kalidasa, Sakuntala, Act vii.
4   Ibid., lxxiv. p. 226.

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summer solstice ; (2) the Bel or ^gle Marmelos, the tree, as we shall see, sacred to the sun Physician ; (3) the tortoise ; and (4) the Mayura or peacock. This is the form which, as we are told in the Jatakas, was that assumed by the sun-god in the heaven of the thirty-three archangels, the rulers of the year described in Chapter VI., with its eleven months of thirty-three days each *. This golden peacock is the Indian bird into which Argus, the hundred-eyed .South Pole god Argo, was transformed by Here when Hermes slew him with the Harpe or lunar crescent, thus introducing the cycle-year of the god of the gnomon-pillar (ep/ia) ruled by the lunar crescent. This transformation, accompanied by the introduction of the Indian peacock into Greek mythology, marked, like the introduction of the worship of the Indian sun-cock and hen, a fresh migration of Indians into Greece. In India the sons of the peacock were the race ruled by the dynasty of the Maurya or peacock kings, among whom the great Asoka was the celebrated ruler in days long after the remote period with which I am now dealing. He marked his traditional descent from the ruling races of the cycle-age of the ass-drawn Ashvins by adopting the ass as his cognizance. For it is this ancestral ass which he placed as a representation of his sign-manual on the top of the pillar he erected about 240 B.C. on the traditional site of the Buddha’s birth in the Lumbini village grove. The ass has disappeared, but its presence is recorded in the inscription on the base of the pillar describing it as Vi-gada- bhi with the ass (,gada) on it3.
It was from these ruling Bhars that India took its ancient vernacular name of Bharatavarsha, the land of the Bharatas, and that its traditional historical poem was called the Maha*- bharata or History of the Great Bharatas.
These children of the cycle-year of the birth of Bharata were the race who disseminated the story of the birth of the 1 2
1   Rouse, The Jalaka, vol. ii. No. 159, p. 25.
2   V. A. Smith, ‘The Birth Place of Gautama Buddha.’ J.R.A.S.., 1897, pp. 618, 619.
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sun-god born from the river-eel in the tower of the three- years cycle in the Garden of God. This came from India to Greece by way of Assyria in the story of the birth of Perseus, the fish, from Danae, the Pole Star goddess, the female form of the god Danu, who was shut up in a brazen tower by her father Akrisius, the god of the mountain-top (iaicpov), and made pregnant by Zeus in the form of the golden #rain. This is reproduced in the Celtic story of Ethnea and her son Lug. Ethnea was the daughter of Balor, the giant-leader of the Fir Bolg, or men of the Bag, who measured time by the cycle-year. He had two eyes, one before and one behind his head, the morning and evening star, and represented the sun-gnomon-stone, the Celtic form of Kastor, the Pole (stor) of Ka. Balor’s Druid, the bird augur or djvining-priest, told him his grandson would slay him. To make the birth of a grandson impossible he, like Akrisius, shut up his only child, his daughter Ethnea, in an almost inaccessible tower, called Tor More, at the eastern end of Tory Island, the island of the Tur, and set twelve matrons, the year-months, to guard her. Balor made himself ruler of the year by stealing the year-cow of Mackinealy, meaning the son of the Wolfs head, that is of the wolf of light, the sun-god of day. Mackinealy’s Druid told him that the cow could not be recovered till Balor was killed by his grandson. Mackinealy was then conveyed to the tower of Ethnea by the fairy Biroge of the mountain as a woman hunted by a cruel tyrant, or in other words, entered it as the rain-cloud hunted by the storm, the golden-rain of the Perseus story. He made Ethnea the mother of three boys, the three years of the cycle. Balor put them in a boat, as Akrisius treated Perseus and Danae, and launched them on the sea to be drowned in a whirlpool, the revolving-cycle. In this two of the sons were drowned, but before the boat reached it the eldest of the three fell out of it and was saved by its fairy godmother, who took it to Mackinealy, who gave it to his brother Gavida, the smith, to nurse. Balor, thinking that all his grandchildren were dead, caught Mackinealy and cut
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off his head on a large white stone, the sacred stone-altar of the Scandinavians L
The sun-god thus saved was the god Lug, the god of light (lux-lucis), whose name is connected with that of Loki, the fire-god of the Edda, and with that of the Lycian Apollo, the wolf (\VKOS) of light born of the wolf-mother on the yellow river Xanthus in Lycia, the sun-god of Western Europe and father-god of the Guelph or wolf race, one of whose chief shrines is Lug-dunum, Lyons, the fort {dun] of Lug2.
In another story of his birth we find the three-years period of the cycle more distinctly shown than in that of Ethnea or Danae. In this he is the son of Dech-tere or Daeg-ter, the day-goddess, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was driven in the chariot of the Ashvins, and who drove that of Conchobar, the year-god, as his charioteer. She at the head of fifty maidens disappeared from Emain, the capital of Conchobar, and returned every year for three years as wild birds who destroyed the crops. Conchobar and some of his nobles set out Southwards towards the end of the three years to find the birds, and came to a place where he was entertained by an old man and woman living in a cottage, Orion and the Pleiades mother. Bricriu, the Ulster genius of mischief, who was with Conchobar, going put at night saw a magnificent mansion which had been invisible by day, the night sky lit up by stars. He was met at the door of the palace of the stars Gemini by Dech-tere, who sent a purple mantle, the clouds of sunset, to Conchobar, and came to his bed, where she was delivered of the young sun-god Lug. For the original form of this god Lug, born from the three-years tower, we must turn to his Welsh counterpart Llew, the son of Arianrhod, the moon-goddess of the Silver Wheel, and Gwydion, the parallels of Dech-tere *
* Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 314—318.
2 Ibid., Lect. v. p. 496, note 1, 497, 501, 502; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 213; Muller, Die Dorter, Book ii., chap, ii., § 2, p. 21S, Book ii., chap, vi., § S, pp. 305, 306.
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and Conchobar. Llew was disowned by his mother Arian- rhod, who after having by various means retarded his recognition as the young sun-god, declared that no living woman should marry him. A wife Blodeued, meaning the flower, was made for him from flowers, the Greek goddess Kordnis in her form of the flower-mother, but she was unfaithful to Llew, and attempted to murder him by the aid of her paramour. But the arrow with which he was hit, the year-arrow shot by Krishanu at the Pole Star mother-bird, only changed him into an eagle, which flew into Gwydion’s lap, and he brought him back to his former shape. Llew then slew the murdering archer with his sun- spear, and Blodeued was changed into the owl-mother-bird of this epoch. It is as a variant form of this avatar of the sun-eagle that Llew is represented as having been changed in the same place where he became the sun-eagle into the Aurwrychyn, or the beast “with the golden bristles,” that is to say, he became the Ram with the Golden Fleece, the ram-sun-god of the cycle-year L There are two accounts of the death of Balor slain by Lug: one that Lug slew him at the close of the battle in which he led the Tuatha De Danann, after Balor had killed their king Nuada with the Silver Hand ; and in this battle the Fir Bolg led by Balor, and the Fir Domnann under Indech, were the opponents of the Tuatha De Danann. In the other accounts Lue killed Balor in the forge of his guardian uncle, Gavida the smith 2.
This sun-god Lug or Llew, born as the sun-god of the cycle-year of the Hittites who wore the peculiar Hittite shoes, was also an excellent shoemaker, for it was by making leather shoes for his mother Arianrhod, the moon-goddess, that he first secured her recognition 3. He was also the patron-god of the Lugoves or shoemakers, mentioned in a *
* Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii, pp. 239—241, v. pp. 404, 405, 423, 434-
2   Ibid., Lect. vi. p. 587, v. pp. 396—398, iv. pp. 316, 317.
3   Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 237.

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Latin inscription found in the Celtic Uxama, the modern Osma, a town in Spain. He and his father Gwydion were two of the three golden shoemakers, the makers of the shoes of the sun of the three-years cycle*. This mythic occupation of the sun-god marks him as the god of the Hittite race, who became in India the Chamar workers in leather, whose tribal history, as we have seen, dates back to this cycle epoch.
Another variant form of this age of the three years’ imprisonment of the virgin sun-mother is that given in the historical story of Kamar-al-Zaman, the moon of the age, the son of the king of the Islands of the West, the Canary Islands, the crescent-moon-god of the races who began their day and year with the setting sun, and Budur, the full-moon daughter of the Eastern emperor of China. Her father built for her seven palaces, in which she dwelt till he, on her refusal to marry, imprisoned her in a separate building, where, like Ethnea, she was guarded by ten matrons, the ten months of the year of gestation. Kamar-al-Zaman, who also, like Budur, refused to marry the mate chosen for him by his father, was imprisoned for fifteen days, the length of a phase of the crescent-moon, on the same day as Budur. They were brought together in Kamar-al-Zaman’s prison by two Ifrits, spirits of the dust {afar), male and female, the gods of day and night, who carried Budur thither. The night of their meeting was Friday, called in Arabic Juma, the day of meeting, or of the twins, the day sacred to the Northern mother- goddess Friga, the mother of seed (frio), followed by that of Saturday, the day of the seed {satur) father-god. The story says that this night was the first of Zu’l-kadah or Dhu’l-kadah, the month of the bird Zu or Dhu, and it is stated to have been a time of hard frosty weather. I have, in Chapter II. p. 54, shown reason to believe that this month at one time coincided with that of the first month of the Pleiades year, October — November, which would 1
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. pp. 424, 425, 541.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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not answer this’description. But from the story of Kamar- al-Zaman, which states that the first of Zu’l-kadah was a great state festival, apparently that of the marriage of the sun-god, which Kamar-al-Zaman refused to celebrate *, it would seem that in the age before the cycle-year the month beginning the life of the year-bird was transferred from its original place at the beginning of the Pleiades year to the winter solstice, when the national year-festival beginning Orion’s year was held as a festival, which was continued during the cycle-year. This was also one of the dates beginning the Jewish year, before they finally adopted the year beginning with the autumnal equinox. It is still kept as the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, held at the winter solstice, the temple being the star-clad vault of heaven of Orion’s year, the temple of the Hindu god Varuna. It was on the new year’s day of the new cycle age when the sun-god to be born at the autumnal equinox was to be begotten by the sexless parent-gods of this epoch, that the moon-gods who were to rule the new era were brought into the prison of the Garden of God, where they exchanged the ring of marriage of the ten-months year of gestation, but as each was asleep when the other took the ring they had no conversation together. In the morning Budur was taken back to her prison in China, and remained there for three years, till Kamar-al-Zaman was brought to her by her foster-brother Marzawan, the warden of the marches or boundaries, the boundary-star-god of heaven, the counterpart of Lakshman in the story of Rama. He, at Budur’s request, went by sea to the Canary Islands to seek Kamar-al-Zaman, but he brought him back to China by land, thus completing the course assigned for the Southern star-ship Argo in the original legend of its voyage, commented on by Hecataeus. This makes the Argo sail from Aia in the East of the Black Sea, and to come down, how
1 Burton, Arabian Nights, Tale of Kamar-al-Zaman, vol. iii. pp. 17—30, 36, 43» 47—51

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it is not said, to the Indian Ocean, whereas the Argo of this story, steered by Marzawan, the star Canopus, starts from a port in China, in the Pacific, which was originally in the Indian version one in Ceylon, the island of Agas- tya Canopus. From this Indian Ocean the Greek Argo went to the lake Tritonis, in West Africa, in the South-west, where Athene, the tree-mother-goddess, was born. There it rested for twelve days, showing that the story was one describing the course of the year of the Phoenician Archal, and the three Indian Ribhus, as described in Chapter III. pp. 101, 102. This lake Tritonis was, in the story of Marza- wan’s voyage, the Canary Islands, where he was shipwrecked and taken up, like Agastya, who drank up the tides “with his belly full of water.” After his twelve days’ rest at the court of Kamar - al - Zaman’s father, the two escaped by land to China, where Budur broke the chain, which had confined her for three years, and married Kamar-al- Zaman under the condition that she, as the circling moon- goddess, was to return once a year to her father.
J.   The Indian and European land tenures of this age.
It is apparently to this age that we must refer the origin of the peculiar system of land tenure still existing in the Ooraon Lohardugga district, the especial property of the Chutia Nagpur Raja, held by him as lord paramount of the group of ancient kingdoms included in the area of the Chutia Nagpur Commissionership. During the growth of the Kushika rule, the civilised world surrounding the Indian Ocean was divided, as we have seen, into allied groups of provinces, formed from the union of the villages within the area of each province. It was the Kushikas or Haihayas who united the provincial confederacies into larger unions, ruled by the king of the central group of the union. The States formed on this system do not seem to have possessed any standing army, except the internal police, the still surviving village Chokidars or watchmen, and the men
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of the villages in the frontier provinces, who were bound by their tenures to defend the country against any invading enemy. But when the Pre-Celtic races, who painted their tribal marks on their foreheads, and whose food was the parched barley of the North, overcame the Haiheyas, a more distinctly military rule was introduced, and the government was divided between the king, who was law-giver, judge and high-priest, and his principal subordinate, the Sena-pati or lord of the army {send), the Commander-in-chief, to whom the largest and most important of the frontier provinces was assigned. This in the Chutia Nagpur confederacy was Ram-gurh, now called Hazaribagh. It was under this semimilitary constitution that the peculiar Ooraon land tenures, which bear so strong a resemblance to those of the Cymri in Wales, grew up.
Among the Ooraons, as among the Goidelic Welsh, society was divided into four classes, (i) The royal class, including the families of the central king and his subordinate hereditary rulers of provinces. These had, as we shall see, special land rights, and the younger members of their families were entitled to grants of land for their maintenance. (2) The class called among the Ooraons Bhun- hiars, the Celtic Uchelwyr, from whose families, among the Ooraons, were chosen the holders of the offices of the Munda or head-man, the Pahan or priest, and the Mahto or steward of the villages, in which they held ancestral rights. (3) The class of tenants who were members of the village community ruled by the three hereditary officials, who were the Vaishya of the later Hindu organisation, and resembled in their hereditary rights to the village lands the Celtic bonedegion. (4) The hereditary village servants, who developed under Kushika rule into the classes of artisans and tradesmen, and who were under Cymri rule, the taeogion or edition, the un-free persons*.
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. Ancient Laws and Customs, p. 191,

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The king in each village of the central royal province of Chutia Nagpur, and the provincial governor in each of those on the frontier into which the Ooraon property law was introduced, was entitled to a large share of the land which was cultivated for him by the tenants who were not Bhunhiars, under the superintendence of the Mahto, and in payment for this service a special area of land called Beth-kheta is assigned to them as common property. This royal land is called Manjhus, and the crops gathered from it were stored in the granaries distributed over the province to supply food for the maintenance of the king and his followers during the constant progresses through their dominions, which they, as well as the Cymric kings, were obliged by custom to make. This royal land in the Cymric system was the king’s Maerdref, under the superintendence of the land Maer, the Ooraon Munda. This consisted not of land in every village but of two trefyd or areas, each of 256 erwan or acres, that is of 512 erwan in every cymwd or province, the Hindu Parha. This was cultivated by the eitttion or taeoghs, the non-Cymric holders of the land, in each village, called Tyr Cyfrif or registered land, which was all held in common, and partitioned for cultivation among all the males of the village above the age of fourteenx. The register of this land was kept by the Canghellor or Chancellor, the Ooraon Mahto, who has become the Pat- wari or village accountant of Northern India, and the Kul- karni of Bombay and the Dekhan. These alien cultivators, who had occupied the country before the Celts, held in Wales the position assigned among the Ooraons to the tenant members of the village community who were not Bhunhiars, and both among the Celts and Ooraons they were required, as a service-rent for their land, to repair the king’s houses, to erect temporary dwellings for him and for his retinue when they visited the cymwd during the 1
1 Seebohm, The Tribal Systesn in Wales, p. 18; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 218—220, chap. ix. p. 400.
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royal progresses. Among the Cymri the rule was that the king’s sojourn in each cymwd was to be limited to nine days, the nine-days week of this cycle-year ; and during this time he was fed by the Uchelwyr, an obligation which does not entirely fall upon the Ooraon Bhunhiars, as they have only to supply firewood and such articles of consumption as were not furnished by the royal granaries I.
Under the land system set forth in the Welsh Codes, the old village organisation which forms the basis of the Ooraon land- laws appears to have been replaced by one in which the cymwd or province was the unit instead of the village. Within the cymwd was the king’s demesne and his waste land, and in it the Maer and Canghellor had the land attached to their offices, while the remaining area was divided into villages, some of which were occupied by the Uchelwyr, or free-tribes- men holding Tir-gwelyawg or family land, and others by the alien edition or teaoghs holding lands in common tenancy. Thus the Cymric cymwd with its king’s land, the lands of the Maer and Canghellor, the villages of the free-tribesmen and those of the alien tenants, was an exact enlargement of the Ooraon village with the king’s Manjhus land, the lands of the Bhunhiar families filling the offices of Munda, Pahan, and Mahto, with those of the tenant members of the community. But this Ooraon organisation, which included glebe land for the priest in every village, was also recognised in some of the Cymric villages where the priest occupied a position intermediate between that of a village servant and a free tenant. In the former capacity he had a contribution from each plough of land in the district in which he was an authorised teacher, like the Hindu Prashastri or teaching-priest and the Ooraon Ojha, and as a free tenant the land attached to his office in his village 1 2. That this glebe land was, in the Celtic villages where the pre-Cymric
1   Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, pp. 157, 15S ; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 220, note 2, 224.
2   Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, p. 67.

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organisation of the Piets was preserved, mixed with the land of the other tenants, like those of the Ooraon Pahan, is proved by the map of Iiitchin in Hertfordshire, in Mr. Seebohm’s “ English Village Community,” where the plots of glebe land are scattered over the cultivated area just as they were allotted under the original system of periodical redistributions of the land which was formerly customary throughout England, and survives in the yearly allotments of common grazing lands existing in many villages. In India, where the tenant’s rights, under the customs of Chutia Nagpur and Chut- tisgurh, did not entitle him to the continued holding of the same fields from year to year, he obtained at the village distributions a certain defined area of each kind of soil cultivated in the village, proportionate to the number of his plough cattle. Thus the owner of four plough-oxen got twice the area given to the tenant with only two. The whole system was based on the accurate discrimination of the different kinds of land in the village, and the measurements of the areas of each class of land. This has been from time immemorial most carefully determined in India. But the oldest measurements there are not made, as among the Cymri, by linear measurements of areas'divided into plough- strips, but by an estimate of the quantity of seed that would be sown in each plot. The whole cultivated area is measured by the number of maunds (2 lbs.) that would be required to sow it, a different area being calculated for the rice lands and for those sown with dry crops; and the results thus obtained, as I have frequently found by comparing the seed areas with those given by linear measurements, are surprisingly accurate. The existence of a similarly exact calculation of land areas among the Cymri is proved by the measurement of the cymwd, as defined in the Venedotian Code. The unit was the erw or acre of about 4,320 square yards, somewhat less than the acre of 4,840 square yards, and this was probably originally measured by the seed sown in it. There were four erwan in every tydyn {homestead). Four tydenan or 16 erwan in every Rhandir {land-
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share). Four Rhandiroed or 64 erwan in every Gafael {holding). Four Gafaelion or 256 erwan in every tref (itown-ship). Four trefyd or 1,024 erwan in every maenol. Twelve maenolyd and two trefyd for the king, or 4,608 erwan in every cymwd.
Here the tref or maenol, the latter having the average area of an Indian village in Chuttisgurh, is the original foundation on which the subsequent provincial organisation is laid ; and the maenol or maenaur, the English manor or the area surrounded by stones (maen), is the original Gond village with its carefully preserved boundaries, marked in Babylonia by stone boundary-marks *.
The original pre-Celtic village system in England was apparently similar to that of the Ooraons, for there was originally in every village an area of land called the Thane’s inland or demesne, which was cultivated for him by the tenants in the same way as the Ooraon tenants cultivated the “ manjhus ” land ; and in the village of Chippenham, in Wilts, we find a most interesting instance of the 16 carucates of this demesne land belonging not to the over-lord but to the village community as a whole. This corresponds exactly to the Gond custom of allotting one share of the village land to the head-man. Thus in Chuttisgurh,.where the village lands are divided into five or more koonts or sections, one koont always belongs to the head-man. Another custom which shows the close affinity between the Ooraon and pre-Celtic English village is the custom of recognising the village servants as hereditary members of the community. These in Chutia Nagpur and Chuttisgurh sometimes have distinct allotments of land, but are more frequently paid by contributions of grain; and in England, as in the village of Aston in Oxfordshire, we find frequently distinct fields set apart as those belonging to the village servants 2. This village system was superseded by
1   Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. p. 218, notes 1 and 2, 219.
2   Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 135 ; Gomme, The Village Com- munity, chap. viii. pp. 174—176, 163.

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the Cymwd organisation, in which the villages held by the Uchelwyr or free-tribesmen were separated from those of the Pict-tenants, who were aliens to the Goidel conquerors ; and we see this separation of tenures still subsisting in India in the divisions of villages into sections, one inhabited by the superior and the other by the inferior or original tenants ; and also in the conversion, almost universal in some districts of the North-west Provinces, of the original communal villages into those held on the Jat system of Puttidari, in which the villages are divided into puttis or shares, belonging to the families descended from the founding-brotherhood, which exactly answers to the Uchelwyr villages of the Cymri. Again in the Dekhan we find villages in which the part of the lands seized by the invading Jat and Cheroo conquerors is partitioned into fields, called by the family name of the original appropriators, and held in hereditary descent by their successors, while the rest of the lands are held on the old communal system by the Mahrs, who represent the earlier tenants r. 1
1   The whole system of the Munda, Ooraon, and Jat land tenures is explained at length in Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Tinies, vol. i., Essay ii. PP- 90_9S) 118—123.
CHAPTER VI.
THE YEAR OF THE HORSE’S HEAD OF ELEVEN MONTHS
AND ELEVEN-DAY WEEKS.
THE period I have now reached in this historical survey of primaeval history is that represented in Indian mythological history by the worship of the horse’s head, called in the Rigveda Dadhiank. This is the horse’s head which was originally placed on the roofs of all houses in Gothic lands, after the sacrifice to Odin of the horse to which the head belonged. This is still carved in wood and affixed to the principal gables of houses in the Lithuanian and Gothic provinces of Mecklenburgh, Pomerania, Ltineberg and Holstein L This horse-sacrifice was also pffered by the Mordvinian Ugro Finns of the Volga, the conquering races who succeeded the sons of the ass of the cycle-year, and first brought the horse to South-western Asia to supersede the wild ass, which, as we have seen, drew the year-car of the Ashvins, and which drew the chariots of the early Assyrian kings 1 2 3. At the Mordvinian horse-sacrifice, according to a description of it by an eye-witness at the end of the 16th century, the Italian traveller Barbaro, the horse was tied by the neck to the sacrificial stake in the sacrificial pit, a survival of the ritual of the Pitaro Barishadah of the age of the Trigarta sacrifices, and killed with arrows. Its skin was then torn off and the flesh eaten. The skin, stuffed with straw, was lifted to the top of the sacred tree of the sacrificial ground, and adorned with rags and ribbons 3. The
1 Baring Gould, Strange Survivals and Superstitions on Gables, pp. 38—41.
3 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, Egypt and Chaldsea, p. 770.
3 Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. p. 469.
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head of this year-horse sacrificed at the beginning of the year symbolised its course, and was replaced at the end of the year by that of the horse sacrificed to consecrate the next year. This was the head found, according to the Rigveda i. 84, 13, 14, by Indra in the Sharyanavan, the ship (nava) of the arrow (sjiarya), the arrow of the year of three seasons, marked by its feathers, shaft and barb. It was this new conception of the year, a revival of the arrow-year of Orion, which superseded and destroyed the cycle-year; and it was with the bones of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank, called in the Tait. Brah. i. 5, 8, the ten-head breaking (Shiro-bhida) spells (mantrah) of Atharva, Dadhiank’s father, the sun-god of the Atharvans or sun-priests, that Indra slew the Vritra or worshippers of the encircling-snake, called the ninety-nine1. This number proves clearly that the year-god slain was the god of the three-years cycle, for the new year of the head of the sun-horse was, as we shall see, one of eleven months of thirty-three days each, and especially consecrated to the thirty-three gods ; hence the ninety-nine false year-gods overthrown by Dadhiank’s bones are those of three years measured by the year-reckoning of the thirty-three gods of the new ritual order, that is the gods of the three years of the cycle-year. The field of battle was the centre of the land of Kuru Kshetra, where, as I have shown in Chapter II. p. 26, the world’s tree grew up from the southern-mud (tan) to be the Pole Star tree of the Kurus, the mid-tree of the world’s village grove. It was here where Parasu Rama, the god of the double-axe of the three-years cycle, had slain the Haihayas; that Indra, according to the scholiast on the Veda, found the conquering horse’s head near the sacred lake of Tan-eshur, that of the god Tan 2. It was then consecrated to Staneshvara, the gnomon-pole of Sthanu, the leader, after Bhrigu their father, of the eleven Rudras, the gods ruling this year 3.
1   Rg. vi. 16, 14, i. 84, 13 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. v. p. 27.
2   Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Staneshvara, p. 335.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 18S.
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The Atharvans, priests of the sun-god of the horse’s head, are the successors in the priestly genealogy of the Angiras and Navagvas, the priests of the nine-days week, and their genealogical line of descent from Bhrigu, the first of the Budras, is given in the Rigveda as that of the Bhrigus, Angiras, Navagvas, AtharvansI. That is to say, the first in the sacerdotal genealogy were the Bhrigus, worshippers of the household fire; secondly, the Angiras or officers of burnt-offerings in the age of the six-days week; thirdly, the Navagva priests of the cycle-year with its nine-day weeks ; and lastly, the Atharvans, the priests of the sun-horse, the fire-god Athar (Zend A tar), also known as Atri,the devouring (ad) three (tri) 2 This name marks the year as descended from the early year of three seasons, which had been* that of the sun-deer.
A. The genealogy of the sun-god with the horse's head and the ritual of his worship.
We find this line of descent expressly declared in the story of the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of Victory (Sig), for it was from Hinda-fjall, the hill of the deer (hinda), that Sigurd started to run his annual course through the heavens on his sun-horse Grani, given to him by Grip, the seizing dog, the star Sirius ruling the year of the six-days week beginning at the summer solstice. His year’s journey began after he had killed Fafnir, the snake-god of the three-years cycle, and gained possession of his treasures and the insignia of the sun-god of the year:
(1)   The helm of aweing, the night-cap of invisibility given to Perseus, born in the tower of the three-years cycle;
(2)   the golden impenetrable mail worn by Kama and Achilles; and (3) the golden year-ring, that given by Dush- manta to Sakuntala, and with which Sigurd wedded Brun- hilda, the Valkyr or bird-mistress of the springs (<briinnen),
1   Rg. x. 14, 6.
2   Grassmann, Worlerbuch sum Rigveda, s.v. Atri.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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when he found her asleep on the top of the hill whence he was to set forth on his year’s circuit of the heavens z.
The Atharva priests of the sun-god, the third in succession of the Indian priestly lines of the Bhrigus, Angiras and Atharvans, were the counterparts in Indian ritualistic history of the Jewish Kohathites or prophet-priests headed by Aaron, meaning the Chest, who was appointed to be the speaking-prophet to Moses, as the wearer of the priestly ephod which revealed the counsels of God1 2 3 4. Their predecessors were, as I have shown elsewhere, the sons of Gershom, answering to the Angiras, and those of Merari, answering to the Bhrigus 3.
These, called Athravans by the Zends, were the itinerant preaching-priests said, in the Din Yasht, to have been sent forth to preach the law of the holy Chest, the inspired teachings revealed to them by the Bhang or Hashish, of which I have spoken in Chapter IV. p. 171 4. These teachers became the national official historians, for, as we are told in the Upanishads, the Atharvas and Angiras were the authors of the Itihasa Purana or national histories surviving in the Mahabharata, Harivansa, Ramayana, the Shah Nameh, the poems combined to form the Kalevala, the Greek and Roman historical myths, the mythological Sagas of Scandinavia and Iceland, and the endless series of local historical legends. We are told in Buddhist records that the knowledge of these national histories was an essential part of the instruction instilled into the mind of every Brahmin, and they were also known by every Druids. They were recited at the annual festivals marking the changes of the year, and especially
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 117—124.
2   Ex. vii. 1.
3   Hewitt, Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Preface, pp. xv.—xvii.
4   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 17; Aban Yasht, 86; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 268-74.
3   Rhys David, ‘ Dialogues of the Buddha from the Nikayas,’ iv., Sonadanda Sutta, 114, where it is said that it was necessary for every perfect Brahmin to be a repeater of the legends, that is to know them by heart. Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. ii. p. 146.
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at the New Year’s Festival, a custom which survives in the recitation of the Jewish Thora at the New Year’s Feast in the beginning of Tisri (September — October)1. In the Brahmanas this recitation was ordered to be made by the Hotri, the pourer {Jut) of the libations 2, who was the Zend Zaotar, the chanter of the hymns, the speaking-priest 3. The root Hu, whence the name is derived, shows the connection of the office with the cloud-rain-bird Khu. He was the priest of the bird Karshipta, the sun-hawk, who brought the law of Mazda into the Garden of God, and taught the priests who divined by bird-augury to speak the language of birds 4.
The year of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank is said in the Rigveda to have been imported with the horse’s head by the Ashvins, who taught in it the secrets of Tvashtar, the framer of the solstitial year of two seasons. The gods of this year were thirty-three, or three elevens, who accompany the Ashvins to drink madhu or mead s. Thus it was a year of eleven months, each of thirty-three days, divided into three weeks of eleven days, a combination of the five and six-day weeks of the years of two and three seasons, so that there were the same number of weeks in the year as there were days in the month. It was the year of the second, in point of time, of the Buddhist historical heavens, called the Tavatimsa, or that of the thirty-three gods ruled by Sakko, the rain {sale) god. They succeeded the gods of the first heaven, the Shatum Maharajika Devaloko, or the hundred angels born from the constellation Argo, the Shata- vaesa or hundred creators.
This year became the Zend ritualistic year ruled by the “ thirty-three gods of the ritual order, who are round about
1   Max Miiller, Chandogga Upaniskad, iii. 4, 1, 2; S.B.E., vol. i. pp. 39, note 1, 40.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., xiii. 4, 3, 2—15 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 361—371.
3   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendtdad Fargard, v. 58; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 64, note 1.
4   Ibid., ii. 42; West, Bundahish, xix. 16; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 21, vol. v.
p. 70.   s Rg. i. 117, 22, i. 34, 11.
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the Havani,” the mortar in which the holy Haoma or Soma, the water of life, is mixed; that is to say, the gods of the year regulating the storage of the life-giving rain in the mother-Soma-tree or plantr, the mortar of the earth’s Soma or sap of life.
We find further evidence of the existence of this year of eleven months in the eleven sacrificial stakes erected outside the east end of the Soma consecrated ground, to which the eleven victims sacrificed to the gods ruling the months of this year were tied; the last of the eleven gods who ruled the close of the year was Varuna, and the first Agni 1 2, the god of the national fires. These eleven gods are also invoked in the eleven stanzas of eight out of the ten Apr! hymns in the Rigveda, recited at the animal sacrifices, and the twelve and thirteen stanzas of the other two hymns are addressed to the gods ruling the twelve and thirteen-months year. The first four stanzas of these hymns summon to the sacrifice the four seasons of the year: (1) Agni, the god of the sacrificial flame lit by the Samidhs or kindling sticks of the spring. (2) The wind-god of the burning West winds of the Indian summer called Tanu-napat, the son (napdt) of his own body, the self-produced or Nara Shamsa, praised of men, the fire •burning on the altar. (3) The Id or Idah, the mother- goddess of the rains of autumn. (4) The Barhis or sacrificial seats of Kusha grass allotted to the Kushika fathers of the winter season. ^The fifth stanza invokes the gates of the sacrificial enclosure, the two door-posts, and the two pillars in front of the Phoenician temples, the Semitic Bab-el or Jo-bab, the gates of God, the stars Gemini. The sixth, the twins Night and Day. The seventh, the two Hotars, the singers and speakers of truth, the two original seasons of the year, the pourers of libations and distributors of rain.
1   Mill, Yasna, i. 10; Darmesleler, Zeudavesia Vendldad Far gard, iii. 1) S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 198, vol. iv. p. 23, note 1.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 9, I, 4—23 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 21S—221.
3oo

The eighth, the three mother-goddesses Bharati or Mahl, Ida, Sarasvatl, the three seasons of Orion’s year. The ninth, Tvashtar, the creator of time measured by days, nights, weeks and years. The tenth, Vanaspati, the lord (patz) of the wood (vanas), the primaeval mother-tree. The eleventh summons all the gods who obey the cry of Svaha or Hail, and who were not invoked in the previous stanzas. The god left behind is said, in the Satapatha Brahmana, to be the god of cattle, Rudra, called Svishta-krit, meaning he who offers a right sacrifice. He is the god of the Northern immigrants, called the god who “ rose in the North with his raised weapon,” that is the god of the gnomon-stonex, the ithyphallic Hermes, which I have seen set up as a boundary - mark in Chuttisgurh, the facsimile of the phallic Hermae of Greece. This, the only god of those named in the hymns to whom animal sacrifices were offered, was the god in whose honour these hymns were composed, the sun-god of the Northern Asuras for whom the dolmen altars were built, and whose blood-stained offerings were not admitted into the sun-circle of the earlier parent-gods.
These stanzas set before us a record of the past religious history of the country, beginning with the worship of the mother-tree, whence, in the ritual of this eleven-months year, the sacrificial stake was made 2. This is followed by the worship of Tvashtar, the Pole Star god of the stellar-year, who sent the Pleiades Argo and the sun-bird round the Pole as the heralds of the years of two seasons. After the mother- tree and the primitive gods of time and of the year of two seasons, came the three mother-goddesses of the three-seasons- year, the rain-guardians : the two Hotars, the twins Night and Day, and the door-posts of the gate of the Gardens of God, whence the four seasons of the cycle-year of Agni,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 5, 4, 1—5, i. 7, 3, 1—9; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 152, 153, 199, 200, note 2—202.
E This is the Khadira tree (Acacia catechu) of which the fire socket and sacrificial stake were made. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 161 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 4, 1, 19, 22, iii. 6, 2, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 90, note 5, 91, 151.

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the god of the household fire, and the fathers of the Kushika race issue. The seasons of the Ribhus, the makers of the year-cow, were, as I have shown in Chapter III., three: spring, summer and winter ; but these were, according to the Rigveda, increased to four by Ribhuksha, the third Ribhu of Indra, the rain-god, who said “ let us make four,” thus adding to the original Vedic year the fourth, the autumn rainy season x.
The sacrifice offered at the recitation of these Apr! hymns is, according to the Aitareya Brahmana, one to the thirty- three gods who do not drink pure Soma but the intoxicating drink the Sura, offered at the Sautramani sacrifice1 2 3, which is, as we shall see later on, a part of the ritual of the New Year’s Festival of this year. In the orthodox Soma animal sacrifice the offerings of the eleven slain animals are divided into thirty-three parts, called fore-offerings, after-offerings, and by-offerings. The by-offerings are the hind-quarters of the victims divided into eleven parts for the eleven gods 3. These offerings were made on the Uttara Vedi altar at the east end of the sacrificial ground. This was erected for this sacrifice, offered at the Varuna Praghasah, the festival of the summer solstice, and especially dedicated to Varuna, to whom, as we have seen, the last of the victims was offered. This special altar is placed on the top of the original Northern altar, covered with the Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass of the Kushikas. It is roofed with branches of the Plaksha-tree (Ficus infectoria), the tree consecrated at Puryag, the junction of the Jumna and Ganges, the meeting- place of the Northern millet and barley-growing Gonds coming down the Jumna and the earlier dwellers in the land. On this altar the enclosing triangle surrounding the sacred fire on the navel is made, not as on the Kushika altar in the form of a woman, of Palasha twigs (Bntea fron-
1   Rg- iv. 33. 3. 4, 5. 9-
2   Haug, Ait. Briih., ii. 2, iS, vol. ii. p. no.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. S, 4, I, II —18, iii. S, 5, I—4; S.B.E.,vol. xxvi. pp. 210—212, note 2, 213, 214.
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dosa), but of Pitudaru wood (Pinns Deodara), sacred to the sons of the Northern mother Cybele and the pine-tree of Phrygia. Also the omentum, the membrane enclosing the entrails of the animals offered, is roasted at the Northern fire on spits made of the Karshmarya (Gmelina arborea) wood1. The ritual of the animal sacrifice as performed by the orthodox Vedic priests is admitted, in the Satapatha Brahmana, to differ from the orginal ritual of the Asuras, who instituted it and divided the whole sacrifice into portions, one for each of the year-gods, whereas only specified portions were divided in the later ritual 2 3. There can be little doubt that, in the original sacrifice, thirty-three portions divided into three elevens were offered to the gods of the thirty-three days of the month and the eleven days of the week.
The whole ritual tells us that those who instituted it were a Northern race who originally worshipped the pine-tree of Cybele, the mother-cave and tree, and looked on the god ruling the year as the sun-ram, born of the tree nurtured by the rains of Varuna. But in this sacrifice the original ram had become, under the influence of the ritual of the three- years cycle of the sexless gods, a wether. Hence a tuft of wether’s hair with bdellium and fragrant reed-grass was placed on the altar, with pine-tree twigs forming the triangle. The Karshmarya-tree (Gmelina arborea) supplying the roasting. spits is also significant. It is the tree called Gumi, furnishing the sacred house-pole, Gumi Gosain, of the Northern Males and their later congeners the Cheroos and Kaurs. Its wood will never rot in water, and hence it was valuable as ship-building timber 3.
The eleven months of this year are also commemorated in the eleven stanzas of the Samidheni hymn sung' at the kindling of the year’s fires, and also in the Tristubh metre of the three (tri) praises (stubh), in which each line contains
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brahii. 5, 2, 5, iii. 5, 2, 14, 18, iii. 8, 2, 16—28 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 392, note 1, 393, xxvi. pp. 125, 194, note iff.
1 Ibid., iii. S, 3, 29; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 207.
3   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Indie a, p. 4S6.

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eleven syllables1. These months are spoken of in the Akkadian hymn describing the combat between Tiamat and Merodach or Marduk, the Assyrian form of the son of la Silik-mulu-khi, meaning he who gives good to men, the household-fire-god, the Agni of the Rigveda, and king of the grove of Tin-tir, the Sarna of Babylon 2 3 4. They are there called the eleven-fold offspring of Tiamat, the bird and dragon-mother (mat) of living things (tia), the original rain- cloud. And it was on the eighth and eleventh day of the New Year Festival at Babylon, the last day of the eight-days week of the year of fifteen months, described in Chapter VII., and the last day of the eleven-days week of this year, that Bel, the fire and sun-god, was said to sit on his throne as king of heaven and earth 3.
The victory of Bel Merodach over the el even-fold offspring of Tiamat is also told, under another form, in the Book of Esther. Esther is the Akkadian goddess Istar, who, in the Semitic ritual, has become, according to Dr. Sayce, the evening-star, the sun-maiden wedded to the horned- moon-god, the Ashtoreth Karnaim, that is of the double- horn^ She who is, in the Bible version of the story, niece of Mordecai, the god Merodach or Marduk, the calf of the double-horn, becomes the wife of the king of Shushan, the great Susi-nag, in place of Vashti, the female form of Vash- ishtha, the burning fire on the altar. It is she and Mordecai, the female and male form of- the conquering sun and moon- god, who overcame Haman or Baal Khamman s, the green pillar of Uzof, the goat-god, and his ten sons, the eleven months of the year, and crucified Haman, as the deposed year-god of an abandoned epoch, on the equinoctial cross
1   Eggeling, Sal. Brdh., i. 3, 5, 5, i. 4, 1, 7—39; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 102, note 1—113.
2   Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, chap. xiii. pp. 190—195.
3   Sayce, Hibbcrt Lectures for 1887, Lcct. vi. p. 3823 Ibid., Babylonians and Assyrians, chap, xi., Religion, p. 247.
4   Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 256, 257, note 1.
s Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 394—396.
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of the year-god of St, George’s CrossT. Thus they brought in the year of the sun-god, heralded by the morning and evening stars, in his daily progress through the heavens on the cloud-sun-horse.
The eleven months of this year became, according to the custom of ancient historical astronomy, star-gods, the eleven stars of the dream of Joseph who wore the coat of the many- coloured stars1 2 3 4. Joseph, whose name is a form of the Assyrian Asipu, or interpreter, was the eleventh son of Jacob, described in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17 (New Version) as having the horns of the wild ox, the horns of Leah, the wild cow, those of the god of the year measured by lunar- crescents. He went down into Egypt, where these eleven stars are depicted in Vignette ix. of the Egyptian Papyrus of Ani. They there appear as the four sons of Horus, the four stars of the constellation Pegasus and the seven stars of the Great Bear, which, as we have seen, ruled the cycle- year. This year of Pegasus is ? that of the Akkadian constellation of Lik-barra or the striped-dog 3, the tiger-father of the Indian Mallis and Licchavis, the Vajjian sons of the tiger (vidghra), the rulers of India consecrated on a tiger- skin 4. As the year of the sun-horse it is the year of the fountain (7^7777) or well, that of Hippocrene, opened by the horse of Bellerophon, the Phoenician god Baal Raphon, meaning the god of healings. He was the slayer of the triple-monster the Chimsera—with its fore-part like a lion, its middle-part with the head of a goat, and its hinder-part like a serpent—the god of the three-years cycle. The flying- horse which secured him the victory was the sun-horse, who by striking the earth with his hoof made the fountain of Hippocrene to swell forth as the first of the holy wells of healing distributed as objects of worship throughout
1   Sachau, Alberunl’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, p. 274.
2   Gen. xxxvii. 9, 10.
3   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. pp. 68, 69.
4   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 3, 5, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 81.
3   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, p. 116.

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Europe and Asia, the holy well near which the Irish Milesians made their settlements.
B.   The Sun-physician.
We see in this healing-god, the rider on the sun-horse, the prototype of Cheiron, the Centaur, half-man and half-horse, the king of the race of sun-worshippers who succeeded the Lapithae, the sons of the storm (\air \ai\ayf), whose goddesses were the three Harpies, one of the emblems of the three years of the cycle-year. They were the gods of time who buffeted and pecked at Phineus, the sea-eagle or (f>r}vr)), whenever he attempted to eat, and half-starved him, that is, interrupted his annual series of religious festivals. These troublers of the mother-cloud-bird and disturbers of the yearly measurement of time were driven from their usurped office of time-rulers by Zetes and Kalais, the sons of Boreas, the North, the North-east and Northwest winds, the winds of the sun of the summer solstice rising in the North-east. They sailed on the Argo with Jason the healer (MS), a form of the Hindu Vivasvan, the god of the two (vi) lights night and day. The Harpies were sent to the Strophades or turning islands, those marking the solstitial changes of the sunJ, This god, the sea-eagle Phineus, was competitor with Perseus, the sun-god born from the cycle-year, for the hand of Andromeda, the Phoenician Adamath, the star-mother of the red (Adam) race. He interrupted their wedding, and was changed by Perseus from the storm-bird of the South-west Monsoon into a stone- god, the gnomon-stone 1 2.
It was Cheiron, called by Pindar the teacher with the gentle hand   and the tutor of Jason and vCsculapius,
the sun-physician, who taught the use of drugs, oil and salves, and the practise of massage so extensively used in
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 190, 199.
2   Ibid., vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 213; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 49; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, vol. i. p. 3.
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India1. The Centaur race introduced into Greece the use. of the medical febrifuge, called the Kentaurion of Cheiron (xeipooviov /cevravpiov), for which Pelion, the mountain on which Cheiron dwelt, was famous 2 3 4.
Cheiron gave to Peleus, the god of the potter’s clay (7rrjXos), on his marriage as the Great Potter with Thetis, the Southern mother-goddess of the mud (,thith), the mighty ashen-spear, the creating fire-drill and supporter of the heavens, the centre-pole of the world-house cut from the top of Pelion, which no other Greek, not even Patroclus who wore his armour, could wield 3. This spear was the stem of the world’s ash-tree of the Edda, the ash Yggdrasil; and the evidence thus furnished as to the origin of the story of the spear-bearing sun-god riding on the horse Pegasus of the fountains and wells proves that it was the Northern worshippers of the sun-horse who first brought to the South the knowledge of natural plant remedies, and of the use of the oil of Asia Minor as medical remedies preferable to the magical incantations and the system of cautery which formed the ground-work of medical practice in the age of sorcery and witchcraft. These Northern warriors were wielders of the spear of Cheiron, the Shelah of the Jews, the fire-drill of the revolving world’s-tree which superseded the arrow of the first Centaur Eurytos, the drawer (epvco) of the heavenly bow, .the rain-bow-god, the Indian Krishanu, whose bow descended to Odusseus or Orion 4. Eurytos was the god who led the Centaurs in their battle with the Lapithae at the wedding of Pirithous, the revolving-one, the Pole Star god, son of Ixion, with Hippodameia, the moon-goddess tamer of horses. It was
1   Pinch, Nem., iii. 55 : —
PaOvpifjTa Xelpaiv Tp&tpe AiOivtp *\acrov evfiov rlyei Kal eiremv >AcrK\r\m6v rbv <papp.(XKv SlSajje juaAafcoxetpa. vofiov.
Hewitt, Rilling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 521—526.
2   Mannhardt, Antihe Wald ttnd Feld Kultur, Part ii. chap. ii. pp. 47, 48.
3   Horn. Iliad, xvi. 139—144; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 526—530.
4   Homer, Odyssey, viii. 224 ff,

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then that the nose and ears of Eurytus were cut off, and he was changed, like Phineus, into the gnomon-stone-god of the cycle-yearx.
The introducers into India of this new medical knowledge were the founders of the caste of the Telis or oil-men, who are called the Ekadas or worshippers of eleven gods. They brought from Asia Minor to India the holy oil called Til, extracted from the Sesamum plant (Sesamum Orientate). It is with this oil that every Hindu child is anointed after birth, and everyone, both men and women, anoint themselves with oil as a medical precaution against disease. In the marriage ceremonies of the Kayasth or writer, and the Kshatriya or warrior castes, both of which arrange their marriages by the help of the barber, who is, as we shall see, the priest of this age, the bridegroom and bride are smeared with oil1 2 3 4. But this use of oil does not occur in the marriage ceremonies of the Brahmins, nor is oil used in any of the ritualistic ceremonies enjoined in the Satapatha Brahmana, not even in those of the king’s coronation, called the Raja-suya sacrifice. In this the king is anointed with holy water rubbed over him with the horn of a black antelope, and not with oil; and this water, mixed with Kusha grass, fried rice and black Kesari millet, was poured on the king’s head in the oldest references to the coronation ceremony of Rama given in the Mahabharata 3. The use of oil is ascribed to the ten-headed Ravana of the cycle-age and his co-adjutors 4, and the holy ointment in the orthodox ritual is ghi or clarified butter. Thejanly oil which pure Telis can make is that extracted from the Sesamum, and the antiquity of the caste is proved
1   Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295—303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 555, 521.
2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kayasth, pp. 447, 448, Vol. ii., Rajput, p. 188.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., Abhishechanlya, or Consecration Ceremony, v. 4, 2, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 94—96 ; Mahabharata Vana (Dranpadi-karana) Parva, cclxxviii. pp. 820, 821.
4   Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxix. pp. 826, S27.
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by their worship of the eleven gods, and the Panch Pirs or five gods of the primaeval week, and the boundary-god Goraya, to whom the Dosadhs, their priests, offer pigs. Their mother-tree is the Chumpa-tree (Liriodendron grandiflora), on which the bridegroom sits as the bride is carried round it, and the Chumpa flowers are those most prized for sacred garlands. These flower garlands are worn by the Hindus at all religious ceremonies, and are reminiscences of the ancient flower-mother of the year, who marked the year’s circle by a perpetual succession of fresh blossoms, the crown- circlet or coronet of flowers of the Greek Crow-goddess Kordnis, the sister of Ixion or Akshi-van, the turner of the heavenly axle, and the mother of Aisculapius, the sun- physician. She was a variant form of the tree-mother- goddess Athene, whose name is derived from the same root as avOos, a flower1. The Teli legendary history tells how the first two Telis were made by the goddess Bhagavati, the tree with the edible fruit (bhaga), the nut or acorn-tree of Baal Bahai, spelt with an ain, implying the former gh of the god {el) Bagh, the Persian garden. She made them out of turmeric or yellow paste, the plant sacred to the Hindu Vaishya or yellow race, which is used to anoint Brahmin bridegrooms and brides2 3; and it is mixed with oil and ghi or clarified butter in anointing those of the Kayasth and Rajput castes. The Telis arc said in the Brahma Vaivartha Purana to be the eleventh in the lists of castes, and to be descended from the Kumhar or potters and the Ghorami or builders; that is to say, they belonged to the races who looked on themselves as descended from the Great Potter, and who were the first builders of houses 3.
The eleven gods of the Telis were also the eleven local gods of the Kandhs of Orissa, the conquering race of the Kui-loka or mountain-people, who trace their descent from
1   Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, No. 304.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Brahmans, vol. i. p. 149.
3   Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 306—309; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Tunes, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 85—87,
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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the sword, and who sacrifice human victims to ensure good harvests, especially of turmeric, their most valuable export. They anoint this victim, after cutting his hair, with oil- turmeric and ghi, with which Rajput brides and bridegrooms are anointed, and they thus celebrate his marriage with the Pole Star goddess Tari Pennu, to whose home in the other world he is to be transferred 1 ; and this marriage is analogous to that of Peleus, the god of the ashen-spear- tree Yggdrasil, of which the roots reach to the Southern Ocean, the fountains of life, with the goddess Thetis of the Southern mud (thith). The age during which this year was the official year in India is that marked by the rule of the Kauravyas, who, in the war of the Mahabharata, led eleven akshauhinis, or monthly revolutions of the axle, against the seven akshauhinis of the2 3 Pandavas, who measured time by the seven-days week of the seventeen-months year of Prajapati, and their thirteen-months lunar-year of exile, the subjects of Chapter VIII., who were also sons of Ambalika, the seven stars of the Great Bear. The rulers of the eleven-months year were, according to the Mahabharata, the eleven great Maharathas or chariot drivers of the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, headed by Duryod- hana the Kauravya leader 3. Their mother was Gandh.ari, the vulture, the daughter of Suvala, the circling (vala) bird (Su), sister of Shakuni, the raven. She was the wetter (dhari) of the land (gan), the goddess Dharti worshipped by the Cheroos and higher semi-aboriginal castes. She is the star Vega in the constellation of the Vulture, now Lyra, which was the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and was wedded to the blind Dhritarashtra, the world’s pole and spear, the central tree, meaning he who upholds (dhrita) the kingdom (rdshtrci), son of Ambika, who was, as I have shown in Chapter III. p. 97, the Pole Star in Cygnus. In the
1   Dalton and Macpherson, quoted by Elie Rectus, Les Primitifs, pp. 355, 356 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Kandh, vol. i. pp. 397, 39s, 404, 405.
2   Mahabharata Udyoga (Sanjayayana) Parva, pp. 43, 44.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Adivanshdva tarna) Parva, lxiii. p. 1S0.
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Northern land of Gandhara, the wet (dhara) land, the parent- home of the Kushite race, she gave birth to a hundred sons, the hundred Kauravyas. Their birth-place is the modern Kandahar on the Kushite mother-river the Helmund, the country of the accumulated waters, which descend to fertilise the plains of India in the Indus and the five rivers of the Punjab.
They were born from an egg which lay two years in her womb. When produced the egg was, by the orders of Vyasa, the uniter, the constellation Draco, father of Dhrita- rashtra, sprinkled with the water of life. It then divided into one-hundred parts, each about the size of the thumb- the hundred Naga snakes. They were, according to the original form of the myth, the hundred children of the constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or that of the hundred {shata) creators, the Greek goddess Hekate, meaning a hundred. They were the snakes forming the Anguineum Ovum of the Druids, the tree (dru) priests of the Piets, the snake’s egg hung up in the temple of Herakles at Tyre I. They were each put into a jar of clarified butter, and thus became the children of the cow-mother. They were kept covered up for two years, at the end of which time they came to life as a hundred sons and a daughter Dushala. The eldest of the sons was Duryodhana, who brayed like an ass at his birth, thus showing him to be the son of the cycle-year of the three-legged ass2 3, the four divisions of which, each of ten lunar months of gestation, marked the four years of the parturition of the Kauravyas, the two years during which they were in their mother’s womb, and the two in the jars of clarified butter. The travelling car of Duryodhana was, as we learn afterwards, drawn by mules, thus showing him to belong to the race born from the union of the sun-horse and ass 3.
The eleven ruling months of this year in India appear
1 Macdonald, Druidism, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. vii. p. 477.
3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cx., cxv. pp. 328, 329, 337—339.
3 Mahabharata Adi ( fatugriha) Parva, cxlvi. pp. 430, 431.

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also in the eleven sons of the blind Dirghatamas, the long age (clirghd) of darkness {tamas), when the stars and moon were worshipped as the rulers of time. The mother of his eleven sons was Ushlnarl, sister of Shiva, the three-eyed god of the three-years cycle, and the eldest of these was Kakshivat, the socket (kaksha) of the revolving-pole of the earth, also called the son of Gautama, the father of the bull- race. He is said to be the father of Chandra-Kaushika, the moon of the KushikasT. In the Rigveda the Ashvins are said to have made for Kakshivan a hundred vessels of Sura (spirits) to flow from the well opened by the hoof of the sun- horse 2. In other words, he was the counterpart of the Greek Bellerophon, the Phoenician Baal Raphon.
A further history of this age is given in the Mahabharata, in the story of king Kalmashapada with the spotted {kalma- sha) feet, the ruling god of the starry heaven, son of Su-dasa He is called, in the variant forms of his story, Saudasa, the son of the ten (dashan) birds (su), and Paushya, the god Pushan, who wedded the sun’s daughter when the sun was in Cancer {Pushyd) at the winter solstice, as we have seen on p. 207, and became the god Push of the first month of the Hindu year. He ruled in the age of Vashishtha, the god of the altar-flame, and his hundred sons, the equivalents of the hundred sons of Gandharl. The eldest of these was Shaktri, the wet (Shuk) god of rain, called also Shakra, Shukra or Sakko, who, at the close of the Buddhist age of the hundred Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, became the ruling god of the thirty-three Tavatimsa gods. The star-king, Kalmashapada, the Pole Star god, became mad when he was cursed by Shaktri and deserted by Vishvamitra, the moon-god, who had ruled the cycle-year. That is to say, he became invisible as the Pole Star during the interval between the Pole Star in Cygnus in 15,000 B. c. and the Pole Star Vega in the Vulture, B.C. 10,000, when no Pole 1
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, civ, p. 316, Sabha (Jarasandha• badha) Parva, xxi. p. 63, Udyoga Parva, cxvii. p. 345, Sabha (Rujasuya• ratnbJta) Parva, xvii. p. 55.   2 Rg. i. 116, 7.
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Star was seen during this age of the year of the head of the sun-horse. It was in this period that the wandering Pole Star god devoured Shaktri and all the hundred sons of Vashishtha, and offered human sacrifices. Vashishtha, the god of the sacred-fire, then fled to the river Shata-dru (Sutlej) of the hundred springs, and only returned after twelve years, when Kalmashapada’s wife gave birth to a son, Ashmaka, the god of the gnomon-stone (ashma), who was begotten by Vashishthax, and born after twelve years’ pregnancy. With this son was born the son of Adrishyanti, the rock (adrika) wife of Shaktri, called Parashara, the overhanging {para) cloud, and Aurva, the son of the thigh {uni)' the seven stars of the Great Bear, the thigh of Set, the ape, from which he was born. He was the god, as we shall see, of the next year of the eight-days week, the subject of Chapter VII 1 2 3 4.
The inner meaning of this mythic history appears in the story of Utanka, the weaver {ut a part, of Vd, to weave), the maker of the web of time. The first part of it is told in the beginning of the Mahabharata, and the last in the Ash- vamedha Parva, after the Pandava victory and before the birth of Parikshit, the circling-sun, the later development of the sun-god with the horse’s head. Utanka was in his last avatar made by Krishna the god of the Utanka rain-clouds, which gathered before the birth of Parikshit, and were sup- plied with water by the hunter-star Orion 3.
He first began his career as a year - god as one of the three disciples of Gautama, also called Veda 4 or Know
1   Mahabharata Adi (Chltra-ratha) Parva, clxxviii., clxxix. pp. 504, 511, clxxxiv. p. 519—521.
2   Mahabharata Adi [ChUra-ratha) Parva, clxxx.—clxxxii., pp. 512-517. The identity of Aurva and Parashara, which is obscure in parts of the story where two mothers appear to be spoken of, is clearly shown in the end of clxxxii., where the fire cast by Aurva, also called Parashara, into the sea to destroy the world is said to have become the head of the sun-horse.
3   Mahabharata Aslivamedha {Anugita) Parva, Iv. p. 145.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. pp. 51—59, Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lvi.—lviii. pp. 145—155.
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ledge, when he was the god of the year of three seasons. But he became decrepit and lost his vigour during the cycle- year, and did not regain his youthful strength till he was wedded to the daughter of Gautama and his wife Ahalya, the hen, that is to the sun-maiden, who was wedded in the Rigveda first to Pushan, that is to Kalmashapada or Paushya, and afterwards to Soma, the moon-god r, here called Utanka. He agreed to‘ bring as a present to his mother-in-law the ear-rings of Madayanti, the wife of Saudasa, also called Paushya and Kalmashapada. That these ear-rings were the lunar crescents marking the course of the months is proved indubitably by their description, for they are said “ to shine brightly at night, attracting the rays of the stars and constellations1 2 3.” Utanka, when he went to fetch the ear-rings, was met by a giant god riding on a bull to the house of Paushya, the, devourer of human beings and offerer of human sacrifices, ruling the first month of the Hindu year, beginning at the winter solstice. The giant on the moon-bull, the three-eyed Shiva of the cycle-year, made Utanka' eat its dung and drink its urine to sanctify him as the leader of the New Year of the moon-bull. Paushya, when his wife had given the ear-rings to Utanka, became blind, like Dhritarashtra and Dirghatamas, the ruling gods of the eleven-months year 3. Utanka, when he got the ear-rings, wrapped them up in the black antelope- skin of the antelope-sun-god. While he was eating the fruits of the Vilva or Arjuna-tree (Tenninalia bclericd) (whence Nala, in the story of Nala and DamayantI, obtained the powers of calculation, making him the god of a year of months) the package fell to the ground, and was picked up by the snake-god Takshaka, who took it underground as the sun of the winter solstice. Utanka went beneath the earth to recover the sign-marks of his year, as Orpheus, the Greek form of the Ribhus, Avent to Hades to recover his
1   Rg. vi. 58, 4, x. S5, 9.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lvii. 25, p. 150.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva iii. pp. 54, 55.
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bride Eurydice, who, as the year-goddess, the sun-maiden, had been killed by the snake which bit her heel. He reached the nether earth, the underground mansions of the Southern Naga year-gods, by the help of Indra’s thunderbolts aiding the revolutions of his staff, the fire-drill of the revolving-pole. On arriving there he was helped, according to one account, by a man with a horse, the god Indra, and according to another by a black horse with a white tail l, who suffocated the Nagas with smoke, the smoke of the incense offered to the god of the cycle-year of the ass, and that of the eleven- months year of the horse’s head, and made them restore the ear-rings to Utanka. He, when he reached the upper earth, mounted the black horse to take the ear-rings to Ahalya. These became the ear-rings of Utanka’s bride when he became the moon-god riding the black sun-horse, whose head was the Dadhiank of the Rigveda. That the whole story has a mythological meaning, giving the history of the reckoning of the year, is further proved by the sights seen by Utanka in the nether world, while waiting for the ear-rings. He there saw two women, the nights and days, weaving the cloth of time with its black and white threads, and the wheel of time turned by six boys, said in the poem to be the six seasons of the year, but who were originally the six days of the week, the six Aditya or beginning-gods of the Rigveda.
C.   The New Year's Day of the eleven-months year.
Having thus shown, by this long chain of evidence, that the epoch of the eleven-months year of the black horse’s head was that succeeding the cycle-year of three years, I must now proceed to show in what part of the year’s circle the New Year’s Day of this year of 363 days was fixed.
The evidence as to the date fixed for the beginning of the
1 Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. p. 57, Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lviii. p. 154.

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Roman year of the horse’s head is most conclusive x. It began on the Ides, the 15th of October, sacred to the god Fons, of the fountains, that is of the springs brought to the surface by the hoofs of the sun-horse of this epoch. On this day there was a horse race of two-horsed chariots in the Campus Martius, and the near-horse of the winning pair was killed, according to Timseus1 2 3. The tail of the horse was carried to the Regia, the ancient royal palace, which could only be entered by the Vestal Virgins guarding the fire on the national hearth of Vesta, in its central hall 3. This was the temple of the god Consus, the storing-god, the guardian of the harvested grain, and represented the central national house, the village hall of the Munda head-man, in which was the village fire tended by his daughters, who became the Vestal Virgins of Rome.
The blood from the tail was allowed to drip on the hearth, and carefully kept by the Vestals for future use. The head was cut off and decked with cakes, like the head of the Mordvinian sacrificed horse, and a contest for it took place between the men of the Via Sacra on the Palatine, who placed it, if they won, on the Regia as the gable-horse ; and by the men of the lower and older region of the Suburra, it was placed on the Turris Manilia, the representative of the Caer Sidi, or Turning-castle of the Pole Star age.
This New Year’s Festival of the 15th of October corresponded with the Greek festivals of the Pyanepsion of Apollo and the Oscaphoria, or bringing home of the grape or vine bunches (ocr/eos), of Dionysos, a festival still celebrated in the Roman Campagna. They were held in the beginning of Pyanepsion (October—November), on the 15th of October. It also answers exactly to the Hindu New Year’s Day of the Dlpa-vali, the circling ivali) lamps, the stars, which begins two days before the end of Ashvin or Assin (September—
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis October, pp. 240—250.
2   Polyb., De Bello Fitnico, 12, 46.
3   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Sextilis, pp. 212—214.
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October), and the New Year’s six-days festival lasts till the 4th of Khartik (October—November)I.
The god who began his year at this season is an altered form of the Dionusos Nuktelios, who went below the earth to seek for Semele (Persephone) at the winter solstice, and the year thus begun was totally unconnected with the solstices or equinoxes which had marked the course of the sun in Orion’s year and that of the three-years cycle. Hence we can understand how the god of this year, in which the Northern human sacrifices of the cycle-year were continued, was looked on as a mad god who despised and dishonoured the former gods of time.
The age in which this year was the official year is called in Jain chronology that of Arishtanemi, the unbroken (arishta) wheel (nemi). For he, the son of Ugrasena, king of the Bhojas, was, under his other name of Kansa, the goose deposed and slain by Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- deva, the ruler of the year of the next epoch, described in Chapter VII. The year of Arishtanemi was, according to the phraseology of the Jain Sutras, that in which the moon was in conjunction with Chitra, that is with the star Virgo, the Egyptian Min, the mother of corn and mother- star of the Minyan race. It was in Chitra (March—April) that this year-god was born2. That is to say, this year dates from the time when the sun was in Virgo at the vernal equinox, about 12,200 B.c., or about 2,000 years after the cycle-year, during which, as we have seen on pp. 207, 208, the sun was in Aries at the autumnal equinox and in Cancer at the winter solstice ; and this year continued to be the official year till about 10,000 B.C., when Vega became the Pole Star, and when the Pole Star, circled by the sun, again ruled time. Arishtanemi, the god of this year, is called in the Rigveda Tarkshya, the sun-horse, “who has begotten
1   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 432.
2   Jacobi, faiua Sutras, Life of Arishtanemi, s. 170, 149; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 276, 271. The remaining incidents of Arishtanemi’s life are taken from this Jain history.

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from the water the five lands,” the five provinces into which India was divided, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 199 L He is mentioned in another hymn as a year-god with Indra, Pushan and Brihaspati, the Pole Star god2. His year’s history is told in that of the twenty-second of the Jain Tlrthakaras, his place being a multiple of eleven, and denoting the half-months 3 in his year. He was the son of Ugra- sena, king of the Bhojas, the army {send) of the mighty (Ugra), the traditional cannibals who have become our ogres. He is called in the Rigveda Ugra-deva, the god Ugra, and invoked as a companion of the Yadu-Turvasu 4 of the cycle- era. His mother was Shiva, who here becomes a female goddess, and he is thus marked as a year-god descended from the cycle-year of the three-eyed god. He took the form of a living embryo in the womb of his mother Shiva, that is, was quickened five months before his birth. He was
1   Rg. x. 178, 1—3.   2 Ibid., i. 89, 6.
3   He was the duplicate of the eleventh Chakravartin or universal monarch, Jaya Victory. Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Ultaradhyayana, xvii. 43 ; S.B.E., vol. xlv. p. 86.
4   Rg. i. 36, 18. The name Ugra, as that of the national god, seems to mark these invaders as the Akkadian Finns, allied to the races who still call themselves sons of Ugur, and are known as the Ugro or Uigar Finns. These people, according to Dr. Sayce (Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lecture iii. p. 196), called Nergal, the god of the South, the king Nerra, and “the mighty sovereign of the deep,” and also Ugur, the falchion or sickle-shaped knife, the Kherpe or Harpe with which Merodach slew Tiamat and Hermes Argos, and which was the weapon of Kronos. It was the lunar-crescent with which the father-god Ugur measured the year, and it is with this knife, the Ghurka-kukri, that the year-buffalo is always slain in India at the Dasahara festival. It has been the sacrificial knife since the days of Parasu - Rama, and this is the sword from which the Khands of Orissa, the human sacrificers, claim to be descended, and which I have seen set up as a god on a hill-shrine in Burwah in the Lohardugga District of Chutia Nagpur. These sons of the sword-knife are sons of the lunar-crescent or sickle. Thus these Ugro Finns of the Bronze Age called themselves sons of Ugur, or the crescent-shaped moon-knife. This, their father- god, was, as Dr. Sayce shows, the Phoenician god Sar-rabu, the great king, and he was worshipped by the Shuites on the western banks of the Euphrates as Emu, a name which is “letter for letter the same as Ammi, the national god of the Ammonites” (Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 196, note 1).
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begotten on the twelfth day of the dark half of Khartik (October—November), two days before the Bengal Kali Puja, the year-festival of this time-goddess, held on the last day of Khartik, when she is worshipped as the cannibal goddess, to whom goats, sheep and buffaloes are then offered I. His history, which has already stated that he was born in Chitra (Cheit) (March—April), then goes on to say that he was born on the 5th day of Shravana (July—August), a statement which must mean that he was then begotten.
This is the date of the Nag-Panchami, the annual festival to the five snake-mothers. He installed himself as the year- god on the 6th of Shravana (July—August), that is the day after his conception, and probably that following the birth of the Naga goddess, his mother, who, like the early year- gods, conceived at her birth. His immaculate conception is probably referred to in the story of his virgin-wife RajT- mati, who vowed virginity with him on Mount Raivataka 2 3, and who was almost certainly in the original year-story also his virgin-mother. This installation took place on the sacred Jain hill of Girnar, about ten miles to the East of Juna or Yona-gurh in Kathiawar, the birth-city of the Yonas or Yavanas, the growers of barley (yava). This is the Raivataka hill near Dwaraka, consecrated to Su-bhadra or Durga, the mountain-goddess, when she was at this Nag-Panchami festival carried off and married by the Pandava Arjuna, the rain-god 3. He was there worshipped by Rama, the god Halayudha, who has a plough \Jial) for his weapon (ayudha), and Krishna, called Keshava, the hairy-god. And it is this hill; which was sacred to Revati, the constellation Pisces, from which the year-sun-god was to be born.
It was on the last day of Ashvin or Assin (September— October), that is on the 15th of October, the day of the Roman sacrifice of the sun-horse, that he attained perfection
1   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, pp. 430, 431.
2 Jacobi, fain a Sutras Uttarddhyayana, xxii. 28—48 ; S.B.E., vol. xlv. pp. 115—119.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sabhadrd-harana) Parva, ccxxi., ccxxii. pp. 603—607.

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under the Vetasa or Banyan-tree {Ficus Inclica). Thus we see in this history of Arishtanemi, called the black-god with the belly of a fish, born from the fish constellation, that he was clearly the equivalent of the Roman October horse and the year-god of the Ugro-Finn conquerors of India. This sun-god riding on the black horse of night circled the heavens as the sun-star of day, going round his circuit in an unbroken ring of eleven months, divided into four seasons ruled by the four seasonal-gods invoked in the first four stanzas of the AprI hymns. And we find in the history of this year-god, reverenced as one of the founders of the Jain creed, most interesting historical testimony as to the fundamental changes in religious belief made by the founders of the year. The Jains in their ritual and religious organisation stand quite apart from the holders of the earlier creeds, who looked on the gods of time, the Pole Star, Pleiades, Orion and the Creating-rain-god, as the gods of villages, provinces or local national confederacies, who gave good crops, health and national prosperity to the localities they ruled—provided that they were propitiated by sacrifices and religious dances correctly performed in strict accordance with the ritual prescribed by the national elders and priests. In this religion the personal morality of the worshippers had no place, except as regarding the strict obedience required to the local rules of social organisation. But among the Jains, as among the early Hebrews, we find the first traces of the germs of the conception of personal religion and of the formation of a character by efforts in moral improvement. These appear in the belief that they could by asceticism and imitation of the lives of the saints of the community become individually holy, and attain to such a sensitiveness of conscience as to make it impossible for them to sin; an ideal infinitely higher than the conception of an unvarying obedience to imperious commands required from the slaves of a hard task-master. In contradistinction to this narrow view, which looked on fear of punishment as the only preventive of sin, the Jains believed that the lapses in
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moral progress, caused by yielding to temptations, could be atoned for and made less frequent in future by increased earnestness in ascetic discipline. But intermixed with this system of improving self-training there was the old trail of the notion of sacrifice, for the penances became, as they are among many of the Hindu devotees, a temporary or permanent sacrifice to God of the devotee undertaking a limited or unlimited life-task, such as that, common among pilgrims, of journeying to the shrine to be visited by prostrations, in which the devotee lies down flat on the ground and begins his next prostration by placing his feet where his head was in the last. The belief in the possibility of selfregeneration was held in unison with the custom of national sacrifices, the most effectual of these being those in which human victims were offered. In these the primal belief in the creative power of the rain imbued with the germs of life, which was that of the first founders of villages, the sons of the mother-tree, had been changed into the creed which ascribed the origin of life not to the pure rain which ripened the seed and made it grow, but to the rain which had become the blood of the father-god. It was this blood transfused into the veins of the animal-father which became the vital seed making the father the transmitter to his offspring of the life-giving blood. This blood shed in human and animal sacrifices fertilised the earth and made it produce food, and hence arose the custom, followed in the Meriah human sacrifices of the Kandhs, and in New Year animal sacrifices throughout India, of giving to each cultivator in the village where the sacrifice was offered a piece of the victim to bury in his field. It was these practices, and the alterations made in the dates of the local festivals by these sons of the sun- horse, that caused them to be regarded with horror by the votaries of the old faiths. Hence, in the Krishna legend the rule of the Bhoja king Ugrasena and that of his son Kansa, the Jain Arishtanemi, whose mothor was Kalanemi, the wife of Shiva, the goddess Kali, was spoken of as that in which priests and cattle were ruthlessly massacred, and
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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the temples of the gods defiled with blood. It is the age called in the Zendavesta that of the usurpation of Keresani, the Krishanu of the Rigveda, the archer-god of the North, who said, "No priest shall walk the lands for me as a counsellor to prosper them, he would rob everything of progress I.” It was the rule of these ruthless Northern conquerors, followers of the Patesi, the bearded priest-kings of the Akkadians of Girsu and their prophet-priests, the preachers of personal religion, which was put an end to by the victory of the true and holy Haoma, the Soma god, who was worshipped, not with blood and libations of the intoxicating drinks consumed by his worshippers, but by the pure sacrifice of the Tri-ashira, or three mixings of Indra, the sacramental cup made of Gavashir milk, Dadhyashir sour milk, Yavashir barley. This was, as we are told in the Rigveda viii. 2, 11, 12, first mixed with Sura (spirits), but afterwards, according to the ritual of the Brahmanas, with water from a running stream2 3. In this mixture the Dadhyashir, typifying the summer, is the ingredient of Varuna and of Dadhiank or Dadhikra3, the god of the horse’s head.
We find the religious history of this age of transition depicted in the ritual of the Sautramani, the New Year’s Soma sacrifice of this epoch. It is said to be offered for the healing of Indra, the rain-god, whose divine power had left him at the end of the rainy season, during which he had completed his victory over Na-muchi, the antelope-god of summer, the Asura who does not (net) set free (much) the rain 4. He is said in this Satapatha Brahmana and Rigveda to have killed the god of drought by the foam of the waters, the wet wind of the South-west Monsoon 5. He
1   Mill, Yasna, ix. 24; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. pp. 237, 23S ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 462, 463.
2   Eg. v. 27, 5, viii. 2, 7; Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 9, 3, 15 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 232, note 2 —23S.
3   Rg. iv. 38, 2.   4 Benfey, Glossary, s.v., Na-muchi.
5   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., xii. 7, 3, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 222, 223; Rg. viii. 13, 14.
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was healed, that is his power of bringing the rain-showers drained by the heavy falls of his rainy season contest with Na-muchi was restored to him, as we are told in the Satapatha Brahmana, by the thirty-three gods of this year *. Therefore it is clear that this sacrifice took place after the rains, like the New Year’s sacrifice of the Roman horse, offered on the 15th of October, or about the first of the Indian month Khartik (October—November), the day of the national Dlbali festival, beginning in India the year of the Krittakas or Pleiades, and that on which Arishtanemi attained perfection. The Satapatha Brahmana does not give any exact date for the sacrifice which formed part of the Rajasuya or Coronation ceremonies1 2. It evidently became in later times one shifting, like the New Year’s sacrifice to Rahu, described on p. 187, with the New Year’s Day of the sacrificer’s year, but it must be begun three days before the New or Full Moon; and undoubtedly when originally instituted by the Asuras these three days were those before the New Moon beginning their year; that is probably three days before the 1st of Khartik, when Arishtanemi or Indra, by his victory over the evil spirits who kept back the rain, became the conquering god of the year, so that it is a counterpart of the Roman Equiria held on the same date.
During the first three days the annual offerings of a grey he-goat to the Ashvins, a ram to SarasvatT, the mother-river of the Kurus, and sons of the ram-sun, and a bull to Indra are made; and the Sura or spirituous liquor to be drunk at the sacrifice and poured out in libations is prepared. It is made of stalks of Kush a grass and fruits of the different species of Baer shrub (Zizyphus Jujuba), which grows profusely over the sandy plains of Northern India, where it feeds, when placed upon these shrubs, the lakh insects producing the red lakh dye and the tusser silk-worms who spin the silk which was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 251,
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brahxii. 7, I, 14; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 216, 217.
2   Ibid., v. 5, 4, 1—35; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129—138.
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so much worn in ancient times by the people of the Punjab T. With these are mixed spices, parched rice, malted barley, and millets, the food of the Kusha grass fathers, and the first immigrant Gonds. Into the mixture thus made is poured the milk of one cow on each of the three days during which it is fermenting 1 2 3 4. On the fourth day thirty-three libations of fat gravy, obtained from the cooking of the victims, were offered in bull’s hoofs used as cups, and three cups of milk were offered on the Northern and three cups of Sura on the Southern altar to the gods of the six days of the week, and a fourth animal, a bull, was offered to Indra as god of the fourth season, together with a cake on eleven potsherds 3.
Thus we see that this New Year’s sacrifice of the eleven- months year of the sun-horse was accompanied by the same drunken orgies which marked the earlier religious festivals. Though the year appears in its Indian form to have been one of four seasons, it seems probable that it was originally like the Pleiades or Solstitial years, one measured by two seasons, with a sacrifice in the middle, the Vishuvan or midyear sacrifice of the Brahmanas, answering to the April sacrifice at Rome of the unborn calf mixed with the blood of the October horse slain on the 15th of October, the day on which this Indian year began. This was held in Rome on the 15th of April, exactly six months after the October Equiria. At the festival called the Fordicidia 4 thirty pregnant cows were offered, one for each of the thirty Curias, the villages or parishes into which the Latin State was divided, and the unborn calves were torn from their wombs, and burnt by the Vestal Virgins. These ashes were kept, and
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., v. 5, 4, 22; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129—138, xii. 7, 1, 2 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 214, note 3.
2   Ibid., xii. 7, 2, 9, xii. 7, 3, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, 223, note 2, 224.
3   Ibid., xii. 7, 1, 1, xii. 7, 2, iS, xii. 7, 3, 13, 14 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, note 2, 220, 221, 225, note 1, 227, 228.
4   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Aprilis Fordicidia, p. 71, Parilia, pp. 79 ff.
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were at the Parilia or Palilia on the 21st of April mixed with the blood of the October horse and thrown upon the heaps of burning bean-straw, laurel and olive wood, from which the national fires were lighted on this New Year’s Day.
This new opening of the year, transferred from the 15th of October, marks a later chronological date for this year than that given by the traditional birth of Arishtanemi on the 5th of Cheit (March—April), and makes this New Year, which was still under the influence of Virgo, as one dating from the time when the sun was in Virgo, in April — May, the Hindu month VTsakha. This was the month in which Parsva, the Jain Tlrthakara succeeding Arishtanemi, was born from the embryo quickened in Push at the winter solstice 1 2 3 4 ; also that in which the Syrian year, opening with St. George’s Day on the 23rd of April, begun ; as well as the Gond year beginning with the Akkhadi, or ploughing festival, on the 18th of Visakha (Baisakh). This was the official year beginning about 2,000 years after that of Arishtanemi, or between 10,000 and 11,000 B.C., a year under the influence of Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and the apex of the triangle of the three stars in the constellation of the Vulture or Lyra, called by the Chinese the three weaving sisters, who are said to measure time by “ passing on a day through the seven stages of the sky 3.”
This New Year’s Festival, described by Ovid 3, was originally the rustic feast of the shepherds, held in honour of the bisexual-god Pales, the god of the chaff or husk (palea) of the seed-grain, answering to the rice-mother husk described in the Annamite version of the Cinderella story given in Chapter II. pp. 60, 61 4. This god of the double-husk is the
1   Jacobi, Jain a Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Parsva; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 271, 272.
2   Legge, The Shih King, Decade v., Ode 9 ; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363.
3   Ovid, Fasti, 721—782.
4   Pal in Akkadian   No. 6, Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary,
Assyrian Palu, means a year, or the Pudenda Muliebria. It is perhaps this word which became in Latin Pales, the grain-husk, and in Hindi Bar, Bar-as,

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god of the two brothers Palici, worshipped in Southern Italy as the sons of Jupiter and Thalia1, the tree-mother, the twin cotyledon leaves of the parent-grass sacred to the god Sancus in Italy, and the Kusha grass of the Asiatic Kushites. The sheep-fold, sacred to the sun-ram, and its gates, the doorposts of the Apr! hymns, were decorated with green boughs and garlands. The sheep and the fold were sprinkled with water and purified by the shepherds at earliest dawn ; and the sheep were driven through the fire of bean-straw, laurel and olive wood to consecrate them to the creating-fire of the olive-goddess, the Greek Pallas, the Roman Minerva, the Egyptian goddess Min, the star Virgo. The shepherds then offered millet and millet cakes, milk and food offerings, to the wooden image of Pales, who is apparently the god of the Palladium, or wooden image of the goddess Pallas, a form of Pales. A prayer was then recited by the shepherds, with their faces to the East, asking Pales to bless them with good crops of grain and wool, and the increase of their flocks by the birth of healthy lambs. While saying this prayer they washed their hands in the morning dew and sprinkled themselves with dew from »a laurel branch. A wooden bowl of ancient form was then brought filled with heated wine, and after drinking this both men and women leaped three times through the mother-fire, exactly as the Dosadh priests do in their New Year’s sacrifice to Ra-hu, the sun-god.
In this festival we see the first beginnings of the belief in the baptismal virtues of holy water as more sanctifying than the blood-baths of the Phrygian ritual ; and also the worship of the rising-sun of day instead of the setting-sun and stars of night. It was followed by the Vinalia of the 23rd of April, the day of St. George in Europe and Syria, called in Rome the festival of Venus Erycina. This was the
the year, the Tamil Var-usliam. Pal is a Finnic equivalent for bar orvar,as the Akkadian Bil is an equivalent for Phur fire. Hence the goddess called Pallas was originally the mother-goddess of the year, and a goddess brought from the Euphratean countries to Troy, like Assaracus, the god of the bed Asurra.
1   Virg. s£n., ix. 585 ; Macrobius, s.v., 19.
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Greek Erigone, priestess of Dionysos, who gave the first wine known to mortals to Ikarios her father. He was slain by the peasants with whom he shared it, as they thought themselves poisoned. Erigone was led to the corpse of her father by Maira, her dog, and hung herself on a tree. Thus the father and daughter, the bisexual-year-goddess Shemi- ramot of the three-years cycle, in which Dionysos Nuk- telios was born from the imprisoned sun-mother, were slain at the end of their year, and went up to heaven with their dog as the constellations Virgo, Bootes, and the dog-star SiriusI. This virgin-star-goddess is the Phoenician Erek- hayim of length (erek) of days, the goddess of health, who ruled both this year of eleven months and that of Arishta- nemi preceding it, which was also an eleven-months year. These two year epochs were those falling between the days of the Pole Star in Cygnus and those of Vega in the Vulture constellation, that is the period from about 15,000 to 10,000 B.c.
The sacrifice of the sun-horse, which began this year in Rome on the 15th of October, was in India, according to the Mahabharata, offered on the Full Moon of Cheit, that is about the 1st of April2, as the initiation sacrifice of the coronation of Yudhishthira ; but as the New Year’s sacrifice of this year, ruled by the crescent-moon, it must have originally taken place at the New Moon, and it was transferred to the Full Moon as a preliminary sacrifice to the dying year-god of the year ending at the close of Cheit and beginning at the New Moon of Visakha (Baisakh). This sacrifice as an offering preceding the new year beginning in Visakha, under the constellation Virgo, about the 15th of April, would therefore date from about 10,200 B.c. It was certainly one to the thirty-three gods of this eleven- months year, for we are expressly told that the horse was
1   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, Les Deesses, pp. 148—150, Les Couples Divins. pp. 179, 180, Eratosph., Ccitast, Edition Robert, pp. 39 ff. ; Roscher, Lexicon, Art. Ikarios.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxxii. p. 181.

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cut into pieces according to the directions of the Veda, that is into thirty-four pieces, and that the horse to be sacrificed was placed under the guardianship of Drupadl, the mother- goddess, daughter of the tree (dm) wife of the Pandavas *, who was thus, like Subhadra, the mountain-mother-goddess, made the bride of the sun-horse. She is thus marked as the star-mother-goddess Virgo, wedded to the Pandavas after they left the kingdom of Chaitra-ratha, the chariot (ratha) of Chitra Virgo, under the guidance of the incense-priest (dhnmo) Dhaumya2.
The ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse in the Mahabharata is, as we shall see later on, compounded of various forms adapted to the fifteen, seventeen and eighteen-months years, described in Chapters VII., VIII. and IX., but the observation of the fundamental rule of the Vedic ritual that the horse was to be cut into thirty-four pieces, each containing one of its ribs 3, shows that it was originally a sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of this year and the sun-god. In the first form of the ritual of the sacrifice given in the Satapatha Brahfnana, the horse, when led up, is addressed in a hymn of eleven stanzas sacred to this year, but the horse is not slaughtered according to the ritual requiring its jugular vein to be cut and the blood shed into the sacrificial pit, but strangled, and it is said that the verse 18 of Rigveda i. 162, directing it to be cut into thirty- four pieces, may be left out, but the queen was placed, like Drupadl, lying down near the horse 4.
The horse sacrifice of the Mahabharata was accompanied, like the Sautramani and Palilia festival, with much drinking, for we are told that both men and women were drunk at it 5. Hence it was offered before the days when high-caste Hindus 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Ashvaraedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. 2, 3, p. 224.
2   Mahabharata (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxxv. pp. 520, 521.
3   Rg. i. 162, iS.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 5, 1, 16—18, xiii. 5, 2, 2; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 3S4, 3S5, 386.
s Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. 41, p. 227.
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became what they now are, strict teetotallers, who think it disgraceful to drink intoxicating liquor. It was not, as we shall see in the sequel, till the death of Krishna and the year-gods of the early ages of time reckoning that abstinence from drink became universal among the upper-classes, and was enjoined on all Buddhists, but not on Jains or Brahmin ascetics, unless we are to include this as one of the prohibitions covered by the rule that Brahmins were obliged to observe purity in eating l. Abstinence from intoxicating drink must also in Vedic times have been enjoined as a religious duty on all partakers of the orthodox Soma sacrament of the Brahmanas, in which the ingredients were mixed with water and not with the Sura or spirits of the Sautra- mani sacrifice. We shall see later on, in Chapter VIII., that this reformation dates after the seventeen-months year of Prajapati, inaugurated by the Vajapeya sacrifice of the chariot-horse race.
D.   The horses of the sun-chariot.
An important question arising out of the year of the sun-horse is that connected with the k belief, originating at this epoch, that the chariot of the sun was drawn by horses, and with the number attached to the sun’s car. We have seen that in the cycle-year the car of the year-god was drawn by asses, and the change of the ass into the horse was one made by the Parthian cavalry, who introduced into Asia Minor, Syria and Southern Arabia the horses of the Ugrian Finn tribes of the Volga, who have always sacrificed horses. These became the horses of the Pandava sons of Pritha, mother of the Parthava or Partha, a name given in the Mahabharata to the Pandavas, and she was also called Kunti, the lance or javelin of the horse-riding Shambara. The horses which drew the chariot of Krishna were two, Saivya and Su-griva. The first is the horse of
1   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. xxii.; Bidder, Baitdhayana, ii. io, 18, 2; S.B.E., vol. xiv. p. 279.

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Shiva, the three-eyed god of the cycle-year, the year-bull ; the second, the bird-headed ape, who married Tara, the Pole Star goddess in Kepheus *. These correspond to Vrishabha, the bull, and Shimshumara, the alligator, the constellation Draco, who drew the Ashvins’ car bearing the sun’s daughter to the house of Divo-dasa, the ten (,dashan) months of the cycle-year2. Similarly Achilles’ horses were originally two, Xanthus, the yellow, and Balios, the dappled star-horse, sons of the West wind, given to his father Peleus, god of the potter’s clay, the Great Potter, by Poseidon, who was originally Erectheus or Ericthonius, the snake-god of the very fertile (ipi) earth (%0a>v), who first owned the three thousand mares, the mother - stars, from whom twelve horses were begotten by Boreas, the North wind 3. The two original sun-horses, or star-season gods, became the three horses of Krishna driven by Daruka, the god of strong-drink (dam), given by Krishna to Satyaki, the son of Shini, the moon-goddess, who, with his ten sons slain by Bhurishravas, the bearer of the Yupa or sacrificial stake 4, represented, like Haman and his ten sons, the eleven months of this year. This chariot was given to Satyaki before he encountered Kama, the horned-god of the three- years cycle, and the third horse is called Meghapushpa Valahaka, the cloud (megha) flower, the circler (vala) S. This was a horse belonging to the car of Uttara, the North-god answering to the Greek Boreas, who was son of the king of Virata, and drove the car of Arjuna when he encountered the Kauravyas as a sexless warrior under the banner of the ape with the lion’s tail; but in the description of Uttara’s car the horse Meghapushpa Valahaka becomes two, giving his car a yoke of four horses, the four seasons of this year 6. This third horse in the chariot of Achilles is the mortal
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Sabha-krigii) Parva, ii. p. 4.
2   Rg. i. 116, 17, 18.
3   Homer, Iliad, xvi. 149, xx. 219—225, xxiii. 277, 278.
4   Mahabharata Bhishma (.Bhishma-vadha) Parva, lxxiv. 20—23, P- 273.
s Mahabharata Drona (Jayadratha-badha) Parva, cxlvii. 45—48, p. 461.
6 Mahabharata Virata {Goharana) Parva, xlv., xlvi. pp. 107, 109.
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horse Pedasus, taken by him from Heetion, the father of Andromache, wife of Hector, together with the golden lyre of the sun-god z. Thus the third sun-horse of Satyaki and Achilles is the horse born of the cycle-year with its ten months of human generation.
E.   The Thibetan year of eleven months.
I have already shown that this year of eleven months of thirty-three days each was probably the official year of the original Telis, Kandhs and Kaurs, and that it was the ritualistic year of the Northern Yavanas or barley-growers during the age of the worship of the year-god, symbolised in the head of the sun-horse. Further conclusive evidence on this point is given by the ancient Thibetan religion and the ritual of the Mossoos living to the South-east of Thibet, between it and Yunnan. They are called by Marco Polo Mossooman, and according to Chinese history they, under the leadership of Mong Tsu, invaded China from Thibet, and founded the Mossoo kingdom with its capital Li-kiang. It was reconquered by China in the 8th century A.D.; but after the conquest the Chinese at first retained the royal dynasty as rulers under the supervision of a Chinese resident, and since they were deprived of their administrative powers they have been allowed to live in their ancient capital as Mandarins of the third degree.
These people, though nominally Buddhists, still retain their old religion and their priests, whom they call Tong-pa, according to M. Bonin, and Bonbo by Mr. Rockhill. They worship the Buddha Shen-rab, to whom they offer living animals, and especially fowls. They make their circuits round their sacred buildings, answering to the circuits of the' altar in the ritual of the Brahmanas, from right to left, against the course of the sun, instead of using the prescribed Buddhist Padakkhino, the sun-circle from left to right, with which every disciple was required to salute the orthodox 1
1   Homer, Iliad, xvi. 153, 154, ix. 186—iSS.

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BuddhaL M. Bonin, the French Vice-President in Indo- China, visited their country on an official mission in 1895, and acquired a peculiarly intimate knowledge of their customs from one of their priests, who gave him a copy of their ritual written in Mossoo characters, with a translation in Chinese of the first six pages, giving the Chinese equivalent for each Mossoo hieroglyphic. These latter are strictly pictographic ; thus the sign of the family is a house with a man and woman in it, that of prayer an altar, similar symbolisms being used for other abstract ideas ; but there are no characters denoting verbs. It therefore represents the earliest form of pictorial writing. In this ritual the ruling-goddess is the female Buddha, Kouei Ying, with the conch-shell of the year-god Vishnu, to whom rice and incense are offered. She is the goddess of the mother-tree, and her consort the male Buddha, her son, the sun-god, is represented with a halo round his head. Besides these gods, the sacred spear or fire-drill, the two birds of day and night, the original cloud Khu birds, the chief of the evil Genii, the god of the under-world, are represented, the last wearing the robes of a Thibet Lama. M. Bonin, in a paper read before the Oriental Congress at Paris in 1897, translated thirty stanzas of this ritual 1 2 3. They apparently describe the course of the year opening with a blast from the conch of the year- goddess. It begins under the constellation of the Tiger and the protection of the rising sun and moon. The Tiger, as one of the Chinese signs of the Zodiac, is, as Professor Douglas informs me, the constellation Wei, containing e, fju, £, r], 6, t, K, v, Scorpio, and this is the constellation said in the Li-chi to culminate at dawn at the beginning of their year in January—February, when the sun is in Shih a Pegasus 3. This later constellation seems to have been that of the Tiger in Akkadian astronomy, for it is there called
1   Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 217.
2   M. Bonin, Note sur nn Manuscrit Mossoo Actes du Onzieme Congres Lnter- national des Orientalistes Paris, 1897, sect. ii. pp. I—10.
3   Legge, Li-chi, Bk. iv., The Yiieh Ling; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 249.
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Lik-barra, or the Striped-dog, by the Akkadians. It is the second in the Tablet of the Thirty Stars, beginning with Skat in Aquarius, called the Star of the Foundation1. These stars represent the course of the moon through the first three months of a lunar solar-year, beginning with Kislev (November—December), and in Chinese astronomy this month begins when the constellation Pi 7 Pegasus and a Andromeda culminates at dusk2 3 4. They appear in Rg. x. 189, where they are called “the thirty stations ruled over by the mighty bull,” the moon-god. In the Grihya Sutra they are the thirty sisters ruling the three Ashtakas or monthly festivals following the AgrahayanT full moon of November—December, that is exactly the same three months as those covered by the course of the Thirty Stars in the Akkadian Tablet. It was at the third festival called the Ekashtaka, or wife of the year, held on the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January—February), that the sun-moon-child, the “ child of the majesty of Indra,” was born 3. This child was, as we shall see in Chapter VII., the sun-god of the year beginning in Magh (January— February), the sun-physician who started on his career as the healing-sun-god on his horse Kanthaka, the sun-horse Pegasus, seven days after his son Rahulo, the little Rahu or sun-god, was born on the full moon of Magh 4. This sun, born as the rider on Pegasus, was, like Horus, whose sons are the four stars in Pegasus, the sun born of the Thigh, the constellation of the Great Bear, the Thigh of Set, the Ape-
1   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars,’ vol. ii. pp. 67—70.
2   Legge, IA-chi, Book iv., The Ytieh Ling ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 301.
3   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, a—k ; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 341—343.
4   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, pp. 82—84. The date here given for the departure of the Buddha on Kanthaka is the full moon of Asalhi (Asarh), June—July. But that was the date of the Glorification of the Perfect Buddha, the sun-god of the summer solstice, not of the birth of the first Buddha, the sun-physician, which is that stated in the Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5 c.

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god. It was as an offering to this father-thigh-god that on the day following each of the Ashtakas a cow was sacrificed, and the left thigh and ribs presented to the presiding deity of the Fathers. Strong drink and garlands, the flower garlands of the Teli mother-goddess, were also offered to the Mothers L
The tiger and his tiger wives were, as we have seen, the parents of the Mons or Mallis, who, with the Licchavis or sons of the Akkadian dog (Lig), formed the confederacy of the Vajjians orsons of the tiger (Vyaghra), who ruled the country on the borders of Nepal which intervened between it and Thibet. This Tiger country was that in which the Buddha was born, and it was the year of the tiger and the Tiger-star Pegasus, which made its way into China, as is shown by the Chinese Calendar in the Ll- chi, in which the year beginning in January—February, the year of the birth of the Ekashtaka sun-god, is said to begin, when the sun is in Shih or Pegasus1 2 3 4. The year-sun born of the Tiger mother, the Mossoo goddess Kouei Ying, is the sun-god called Kwan-tsz’tsan, the self- existing sun-god also called Kwan Yin 3, or the male form of his mother the Buddhist Avalbkatesvara, the visible (avalokita) god, the sun of the Buddhist year of three seasons, who, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 36, was represented in the statues seen by Hiouen Tsiang atTiladaka in Magadha as born from Tara, the Pole Star, and the Buddha. He is represented as sitting on his mother’s lap in one of the Chinese statues in the Musee Guimet in Paris 4.
This Mossoo year begins with the birth of the Tiger-sun, and in stanza 14 of M. Bonin’s translation of the ritual
1 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 8—n, Sankha- yana Grihya Sutra, iii. 14, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 344, 105.
2   Legge, Li-cht, Bk. iv., The Yiieh Ling, i. 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 249.
3   Beale Buddhist Records of the Western World, Hiouen Tsiang, vol. i. pp. 60, note 210, 127, note 28, 12S.
4   Guide au Muste Guimet Vitrine, 20, pi 135.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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the thirty-three days of the months of this year are called the thirty-three genii of heaven, while its twenty-two halfmonths are called the twenty-two genii of earth. It closes with the constellation of the Pig. This in Thibetan astronomy is the constellation of the Great Bear ruled by the goddess Marlchi, the spouse of Haya-griva, the god of the horse’s (haya) neck (griva) or head, the ruling god of this eleven-months year, the sun-god born at its commencement. He is driven away by the Buddhist priests, as the most powerful of evil spirits, at the beginning of the sacramental service of three pills of flour, sugar and butter, partaken with beer, at the annual national festival, beginning their year in Magh (January—February) q which is thus the same as the Mossoo year. This god, called in Thibetan Tam-ding, is" also married to Tara, the Pole Star. Hence Tara, the Pole Star, married to Su-griva, the bird-headed-ape, and Marlchi to Haya-griva, the horse-headed god, are equivalents. Marlchi means the fire-spark, and is feminine in Sanskrit. She is called in Rg. x. 58, 6 the goddess in the light heights of heaven, to whom the dead go. In the Mahabharata she becomes the male Marlchi, the father of Kashyapa1 2 3 4 5, the father of the Kushika, and one of the six sons of Brahma. In Hindu astronomy he is represented as one of the stars of the Great Bear, and with his son Kashyapa, he is one of the tail stars in the constellation Simshumara, the alligator 3. It is as a star, to which the Great Bear points, that Marlchi is represented in Thibetan theology. Then she is the goddess called also Vajra Varahi, the sow (varahi) of the thunderbolt, who has three faces, the left being that of a sow, and sits upon a lotus throne, driving the seven pigs, the seven stars of the Great Bear 4. She also appears in Japan as the war-god seated on a boar s, and we see
1   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 361, 446, 44S, 502, 503.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxv. p. 185.
3   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chap. xlv. p. 390, xxii. p. 242.
4   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, p. 361.
5   Guide an Mnsee Guimet Vitrinc, 7 Classe des Tens, pp. 20S, 209.

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in him the boar-god who was once the Poie Star sow, the god who slew at the end of his year’s course, in the constellation of the seven pigs, Adonis, the sun-god born of the Cypress tree, who was originally the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion. This boar-god is the equivalent of the Akkadian god Mer-mer or Martu, the West wind, called the pig-god, and in his female form of Istar called Biz-bizi, the pig (pes) motherT.
It seems probable that the constellation of the Great Bear was called that of the Seven Pigs in Akkadian as well as in Thibetan astronomy, for the planet Saturn is called Kakkab Ila Ninpes, the star of the god of the Lord of the Boar or pig 1 2. But in the early astronomy, as we know from the Zendavesta, the planets were looked upon as rebels, or wandering stars not belonging to the divine -host of the ruling fixed stars. But this planet of the pig is, as its Roman name Saturnus shows, the planet of sowing (satur), that is the planetary analogue of the stars of the Plough, the Septemtriones, or seven oxen of the Great Bear. These in the ploughing age of the sun-ox Rama, were the successors of and substitutes for the early Phrygian parent-stars of the pigs, the flock led by the year-boar of heaven, the boar and deer-sun-star Orion.
We find also in Celtic mythology most important evidence confirming the conclusion that the Great Bear stars were once called, throughout Europe and Asia, the seven pigs. This is furnished by the story telling of the hunting by Arthur of Twrch Trwyth, meaning the king’s boar and his seven swine-children, which proves that the Thibetan mythology of the seven pigs was that of the early pre-Celtic Piets. This boar-god, Twrch Trwyth, carried between his ears a comb, a razor and pair of shears, the mythical weapons for arranging the hair of the year-god in this age, when the cult of the hair was a dominant part of the national
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 1S1.
2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii., chap. xv. pp. 215, 216.
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ritual. It was to get these weapons of the year-god that Arthur or Airem, the sun - ploughman, pursued Twrch Trwyth and slew him and his seven sons, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the eight ruling powers before the age of the sun-god of the eight-rayed star of Chapter VII. These ruling gods were those of the primitive Pictish population, called in Britain Prydain, or sons of the form (pryd), the people who tatooed their totems on their persons- The swine of heaven, the stars, were herded by the three stout swineherds of the Isle of Prydain. (i) Pryderi, the man of the form {pryd), son of Pwyll or Arawn, the' god of the Southern Hades, from whom he got his swine, as the stars of the South; (2) Drystan, son of Tallwch; and (3) CoH, son of Coilfrewi, the three seasons of the year of March, the god of the horse’s ears, whose ears were, as we have seen in Chapter V., first the ears of the ass-god Midas. Another form of Drystan is Drostan, the Druid who brought back the foes of Bran to life by a bath of new milk. He is apparently the summer-tree {dm) god. The story of the victory of Arthur over Twrch Trwyth and his seven pig-sons tells of the end of the rule of the Pole Star god and of the conversion of his worshippers to the service of the sun-god, for we find in the Mabinogion a dramatic version of the dialogue, in which Gwalch-mei, the Hawk of May, brought Drystan to leave the service of the ass- god March and to swear fealty to Arthur 1.
To return to the year of the Mossoos, who worship the seven stars of the Great Bear as the Seven Pigs. It is one began under the constellation of the Tiger or Horse Pegasus, and concluding under that of the Great Bear. It is thus the exact equivalent of the year of Horus in Egypt, ruled by the eleven stars of these constellations. Thus both years were years of eleven months of thirty-three days, each containing 363 days; and that this was the year of Horus in Egypt is made still more probable by the
1   Rhys, Celtic Folklore, chap. ix. pp. 509,510, 509—519,521 ; The Arthurian Legend, chap. i. p. 12, chap. xii. pp. 281—-284, chap. xvi. pp. 37S—380.

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statement in the Egyptain official myth of Horus, analysed by M. Naville, that Horus started with his son for Egypt to conquer Set in the three hundred and sixty- third year of his reign U
This year was also that of the Swabian goddess Ursula, the Little Bear, the German Horsel, who went cruising for three years, those of the cycle, with ten companions in eleven galleys, to free herself from the marriage proposals of a heathen king. As the price of her freedom she was to collect 11,000 virgins, and these were brought to the shrine of the gods of the three-years cycle, the Three Kings of Cologne, where, at the end of their three years’ task, they were all slaughtered by the Haus 2.
These Mossoos, or Mon-su, were the sons of the mountain (mon) and the bird (su), the two mother-birds they worshipped. They, who ruled India before the Kauravya Ku~ shikas, came up thence and conquered the Thibetans, the Kout-song and the Min-kia, who are the aboriginal inhabitants of Yunnan, and are both named in the Mossoo ritual. They were worshippers of Hayagriva, the horse (haya) headed god, represented with three heads and four arms, one pair holding and shooting the bow of heaven 3; he is thus a Thibetan Eurytus, the Centaur. This is the Indian black- barley mare, Yavadiya, the mother of the horse of Guga, one of the five Pirs or gods of the old five-days week, headed by Ram-deo, the god Ram 4. The Mossoos are described by M. Bonin as entirely matriarchal in their sexual relations, for the women did not marry but united themselves to temporary partners, a practice the Chinese have sought to stop by fining heavily all fathers of families who do not provide legitimate husbands for their daughters. 1 2 3 4
1   Naville, My the d’ Horns ; Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxvi. p. 390.
2   Baring Gould, ‘Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,’ Ursula, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 13.
3   Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 364, 444—446.
4   Crooke, Introduction to the Popular Religions and Folklore of Northern India, pp. 130—132.
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F.   The connection between this year and ceremonial haircutting.
The Mossoos, like the Chinese, wear pig-tails, and this is also a characteristic mark of the Mundas. It was they and the Bhils, the men of the bow, who introduced into India the custom of hair-cutting. This was originally an offering to the river-parent-gods of a lock of hair, in which the strength of the body dwelt, according to the belief of the Jewish Nazarites, as set forth in the story of Samson. We see in the Creation story of the Edda how the sacrifice originated. It is there said the Ymin, the roarer, the thundercloud-god, made grass and trees of his hair. This hair thus offered was the firstfruits, which it was the duty of all men and women to offer to the creating rain-god-parent of the rivers. Thus Achilles sent a lock of his hair by the hand of his dead friend Patroclus to his parent-river Sper- cheios T. This custom of cutting off the front hair as an offering made at puberty apparently began in this epoch. It was a distinctive tribal mark of the Abantes of Euboea, whose weapons were the ashen spears of the sons of the northern ash-tree, Yggdrasil, sacred to the sun-horse2. This tonsure offering, ascribed to the Celts under the name Celtic tonsure, was that made by all young Athenians as a preliminary observance necessary before they could claim, at the age of eighteen, their share in the village land and admission into the Phratria. It was originally required both from women and men, for Pausanias tells us that the women of Trcezen used to offer a lock of their hair to Hippolytus, the constellation Auriga 3, called by the Akkadians Askar, the goat.
This constellation is also called by Aratus4 the goat. The goat-star is one on the left shoulder, and the kids two 1
1 Iliad, xxiii. 141—146.   2 Ibid., ii. 535—544.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 32, vol. i. p. 121.
4   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., The Phainomena, or Heavenly Display of Aratus, IS5, 166, 679—682.

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stars on the left hand of the Driver or Charioteer. This driver is Poseidon or the ocean-snake-god Ericthonius, king of the realms below the ocean on which the earth floats, who is called the Olenian1 or Taraxippos, the frightener of horses. This epithet of Olenian, also given to the goats which he bears on his left shoulder, is derived from the Greek Olene (d>\ev7)), arm, and marks this driving-god as he who bears the goat of the Pole Star on his arm, an epithet exactly similar to that which calls Hermes, Krio- phorus, the Ram-bearer. Both epithets indicate that these year-gods are sons of the mother-tree growing on the very fertile (epixddov) earth, from which the snake-god took his name. Thus he was the ruler of the cycle-year of the goat, and he, as we have seen, gave the sun-horses of this year to Achilles. He is also thus equated with Thor and Pushan, from the latter of whom he may have taken his name of Poseidon, the god with the form (etSo?) of Push, as they were both gods whose year-chariot was drawn by goats 1 2; and we have seen that Pushan was the year-god who wedded the sun-maiden when the sun was in Cancer at the winter solstice, about 14,200 B.C., that is in the cycle-year. This god of the year-car, also called Hippolytus, is in this form the son of Theseus, meaning the Organiser or Civiliser, who learnt from the star-goddess Ariadne (Corona Borealis) to measure the course of the sun through the year by the stars. She thus furnished him with the clue by which he reached the centre of the labyrinth of the Minotaur, the year-god of the early Pole Star age, which he slew. The mother of Hippolytus was Hippolyte, daughter of Mars, the god of the South-west wind Martu, the tree-mother of the South; and he, like Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, who saw in his dream the eleven stars of this year, was accused of attempting to violate the second wife of Theseus Phcedra, the moon- goddess of the myrtle-tree, and torn to death by his own
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 20, 8, vol. i. pp. 315, 316.
2   Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, 21, p. 417 ; Rg. vi. 55, 6.
Z 2
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horses at the end of this year, during which he drove the year-chariot1. He was restored to life by Aisculapius, the god of Trcezen2 3 4, where hair offerings were made, and he then became Virbius, who, as we have seen, was the male- god of the Grove of Aricia, ruled by Diana or Tana, the tree- goddess of the Southern mud (tan), p. 34. This constellation of the god who drove the year-chariot of the goat became the guardian constellation of the Babylonians, the star- messenger of the Pole Star goat. They called the star Capella a Auriga, the little goat on the left wrist of the driver Dilgan, the god (dil) of the land (gan), and it was by the position of this star in relation to the new moon of the vernal equinox that the Akkadians, according to Dr. Sayce, determined the beginning of the year 3. It was also used as a year-star by the prehistoric Hor-shesu in Egypt, for Sir N. Lockyer tells us of three temples at Karnak, Memphis and Annu oriented to Capella as a setting-star, at dates varying from 5500 B.C. to 3050 B.C.4 These were
1   A similar accusation was made against Bellerophon, Baal Raphon, the rider on Pegasus, and Peleus, father of Achilles, both gods of this year of transition from Pole Star worship to that of the zodiacal sun, who was not the ploughing-sun Rama, guided by Lakhsman, but the sun making his own path through the appointed stars. Bellerophon was accused by Anteia, the backward {ante) goer, the moon-goddess of the stars going widershins round the Pole. She was wife of Prcetus, king of Tiryns, the oldest city of Argos, the land of the Southern sons of the constellation Argo. Peleus’ accuser was Hippolyte, a female form of Hippolytus, he who was loosed by horses who circled the heaven as a night-star, in the path of the solar lunar zodiac. Her husband was Akastos, king of Thessay, and his name connected with &Ke<nns, a healer, and aicrj, a knife, as well as the cn^ccra Avypd, or dreadful signs, carried by Bellerophon as his death warrant (Homer, Iliad, vi. 178, 179), traced on a tablet {irivaKi), tell of this age of incipient sun-worship as the Brouze Age in which the barber-surgeons began to use the knife and written pictographic characters were first employed. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., p. 523—532.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 31.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 419, note 2, 420; Sayce, Herodotus, p. 402 ; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘ Euphratean Stellar Researches.’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, May, 1893, p. 324.
4   Lockyer, Dawn of Astrono?ny, chap. xxxi. pp. 316, 318, chap. xxx. p. 312.

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temples to Ptah, the opening (patah) god, who was, as we have seen, the Southern creating-ape of the worshippers of the evening stars. Annu also is On, the city of the sun-god, whose high-priest gave his daughter Asenath as wife to Joseph z, the interpreter (asipu) god of this year, who wore the star-coat of many colours, and ended his year as the star-god, the eleventh son of Jacob, in the pit dug for lions2, that is under the constellation Leo, ruling the year of the ape with the lion’s tail. This year of Babylon ruled by Capella, beginning at the vernal equinox, was one equivalent to this eleven-months year in India, which was, as we have seen, measured by the constellation Chitra or Virgo ruling the month March—April, and it thus furnishes us with valuable evidence as to the chronology of the year of the hair-offerers.
But to return after this digression to the historical evidence given' by the customs of cutting the hair, we learn from Pausanias that offerings of hair were made before marriage by the girls of Megara and Delos 3 ? and that the hair of the children of the Dorian city of Corinth was cut in remembrance of the children of Medea 4, who was the counsellor of Jason, the healer (ias), in the year-voyage of the Argo, the mother-constellation of the South, and of the Turano- Dravidian races who brought to Greece the Dravidian and Dorian customs of communal village holdings, communal education of the village children and common meals.
Hence the custom of the ceremonial cutting of the children’s hair was one* apparently brought from India. The ritual of the ceremony, which was performed on girls as well as boys, is described in the Grihya Sutra 5. It requires that the hair of all children should be cut off in the 1
1 Gen. xli. 50.   2 Ibid, xxxvii. 20—24.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 43, 4, vol. i. p. 66.   4 Ibid., ii. 3, 6, vol. i. p. 75.
5   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra, Shankayana Grihya Sutra, i. 2S, 1—24 ; Ashval- ayana Grihya Sutra, i. 17, 1—19, Paraskara Grihya Siitra, ii. 1, 1—17, Grihya Sutra of Gobhila, ii. 9, 1—29 ; S.B.E., vol. Icxix. pp. 55—57, 1S4—186, 301— 303, vol. xxx. pp. 60—63.
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first or third year, or according to family custom, and this rule prevails among the Bhils, who do not acknowledge Hindu ritual, but who shave their children’s hair when they are three or five years old. The custom is also observed by the Malays, who in India are the Mallis or Mons, the men of Malabar. They cut the hair in the first week after birth or a few days after the child is named, and in some cases leave the central lock, the top-knot of the. Mundas, Mossoos and Chinese, but generally shave all the hair off1. But this custom of shaving, which involves the use of a sharp razor, belongs to a later age than that with which we are now dealing. It would be impossible for the barber-priest of the Grihya-Sutras, who performs the religious ceremony of the Hindu tonsure with a copper razor and one of Udumbara {Ficas glomerata) wood, to shave the heads on which he operated.
It is most probable that the ceremony was originally performed at the age of puberty, and in the case of women before marriage, and that then only a few locks were cut off. Mr. Skeat saw seven cut from the head of the Malay bride at whose tonsure he officiated 2. These locks with the water in which they were placed were buried at the foot of a barren fig-tree in hopes of making it bear fruit, a ceremony repeating the belief of the Edda that trees and grass were the hair of the creator Ymin. That the Hindu ceremony of the ceremonial clipping of the hair, succeeding that of the ceremonial offering of hair to the river-gods made by the Greek youths and maidens,,was one dating from the age of this year is rendered probable by the ritual and the evidence as the institution of the barber’s trade.
The barbers of Bengal are divided into the three castes of Bhandaris, Hajams and Napits. Their caste customs prove that they were originally associations of Kushika priests, who belonged to the age of the worship of the Panch Pirs, or five village gods of the Telis, who, as we
1   Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. vi. p. 341.
3 Ibid., chap, vi, pp. 353—355-

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have seen, trace their descent from the gods of the eleven- months year. Thus the Bhandaris, the barbers of Orissa, still in some villages are the priests of these gods, and hold land rent free in payment for their services. Hence in Orissa, one of the birth-places of Indian ritual, the country of the great temple of Jagahnath at Poori, and of the Mahendra mountain sacred to Parasu-Rama, who was, as we have seen, a god of the cycle-era, the institution of barber-priests dates back to the days when grants of land were set apart for the village servants, and when the Mahto or superintendent of the Manjhus land allotted to the king was one of the village rulers, for the Mahto still exists in all Orissa villages. There also the rules as to the tenure of land are similar to those of the Ooraons, which I have shown in Chapter V. to be like those of the Pre-Celtic Welsh. The Bhandaris are marked as a Kushika caste by their marriage rites, for among them the bride and bridegroom are united not by the earlier Sindurdan ceremony of marking the partings of the bride’s hair with red, as a symbol of making blood brotherhood, but by tying the hands of the wedded pair together with a wisp of Kusha grass I.
The Hajams, the barber-surgeons of Behar or Magadha, the Chiroo country of the sun-god Ra-hu, marry by the rite of Sindurdan, but worship the five Pirs. They are the universal match-makers, the assistants of the Brahmin priest in the marriages of the higher and the marriage-priest of the lower castes. They also like the Bhandaris are village servants, getting a stipulated payment in grain in Behar, and an allotment of land in Chutia Nagpur and Manbhum. Their wives act as nurse-tenders to women during the last six days of their confinement, succeeding the Chamar or Dhanuk nurse who acts during the first six days. The Dhanuks, who are allied to the Chamars or workers in leather, are the sons of the bow (dhanu), who are the personal servants and
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Bhandari, vol. i. pp. 92—94.
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watchmen in the higher caste households of the old Maghada kingdom of Behar and of the North-west provinces. They are connected with the leading agricultural caste of the Kurmis, one of whose seven sub-divisions is called Dhanuk.
They as a caste are divided into two sections, called Naga and Kashyapa. That is to say, they are the survivals of the old Naga Kushika, sons of Kashyapa, who, as I have shown in Chapter III. p. 86, were originally like the Dhanuks, sons of the bow (.Kaus)x.
In Bengal the barber-surgeon is called Napit, and gets an allotment of land as a village servant. He is the marriage agent and the marriage priest. In the Napit marriage, after the bridegroom has been anointed with mustard oil and turmeric as a member of the yellow race, he and the bride are both dressed in the sacred red tusser Kausya silk, and are united by the bride placing her hands palms downward on the palms of the bridegroom. The Napit barber, who officiates as priest, dictates the mantras the wedded pair are to repeat, and finishes the ceremony by instructing them in their duties in the words of the Gaur-vachana, or discourse telling of the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, the mountain- goddess, in her form of Gauri, the wild cow or Indian bison1 2 3.
The ceremonies of the Hindu tonsure, called Chula- karman or arrangement of the hair, confirm the conclusions as to the great antiquity of their craft drawn from the caste usages of the barbers. They prove that the hair was originally only clipped as a firstfruits’ offering of the growing products of the body, answering to the crops grown from the earth. Both were in primitive creeds the offspring of the rain, and hence arose the Malay rule forbidding coverings to be worn on the head 3. This must be left open, like the crops, to the life-giving air and rain, and most of the Indian lower castes, including the Ooraons, who tend their hair carefully, keep their heads bare. It was from the belief in
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Hajam, Dhanuk, vol. i. pp. 306—
309, 220.   2 Ibid., vol. ii. Napit, pp. 125—129.
3   Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. ii. p. 43 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 189.

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the sanctifying efficacy of water that each lock of hair was moistened before it was cut, and this was a repetition of the bathing of the child which preceded the hair-clipping. It was an early form of the baptismal rite common to all the yellow sons of the rivers who worshipped the wolf-sun-god, the Lycian Apollo, born on the yellow river Xanthus, in which he was bathed by his mother; and in this ceremony the child was believed to be impregnated with the seed of life stored by the rain-god of heaven in the waters of the parent-river. The barber used mixed hot and cold water to moisten the head, and placed next each lock before he cut it a bunch of Kusha grass which he cut with the hair. He first wet the head three times from left to right, in the direction of the sun, with water, fresh butter and curds, but in cutting the hair he took the right-hand side first, and thence cut three or four locks. He then cut from the left side two or three locks, making the whole number of locks five or seven, answering to the five and seven days of the week. The Gobhila Grihya Sutra directs that seven locks are to be cut, beginning with the right side, whence the barber proceeds to cut seven locks first from the back and then-from the left side, thus going round the head contrary to the course of the sun. The twenty-one locks thus cut answer to the twenty-one days of the month in the seventeen-months year of Chapter VIII. In this last ceremony it is clear that the cutting leaves three single tufts to be arranged, one on each side and one at the back of the head. These answer to the three locks worn by the Dakota or joined Indians I, the American representatives of the Hindu Khati. They have, as I have shown in the “ Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,” reproduced in America the ceremony of the self-torturing Churuk or swinging Puja, a relic of this ascetic Hindu age. It is celebrated in Bengal about the beginning of Baisakh (April—May), a month which, as we
1   Mallory, ‘Picture Writing of the American Indians.’ Publications of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, vol. x. p. 433. Fig. 55S.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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have seen, began the year of this epoch opening with the Roman Palilia and its associated festivals. Also they associated with this festival the Ooraon rites of cutting down the sacred Kurum or almond-tree and the buffalo dance I. The hair when cut by the Indian barber is to be placed on Kusha grass, bull’s dung or Shami leaves, and, according to the Shankayana Sutra, to be buried in a garden, like the hair of the Malays. The Kusha grass, like that cut with the hair by the barber, shows that the ceremony dates from the age of the Kushika, while the leaves of the Sham! (Prosopis spicigera), the hundred-branched (shata-valsha) tree, show that the ritual of the Ashvalayana Grihya Sutra, in which it and twenty-one bunches of Kusha grass are used, belonged to the later age of the Pandavas and of the seventeen-months year. This Shami tree is that in which the Pandavas hid their bows during their seclusion in Virata in the thirteenth year of their exile from power. It was from this tree that Arjuna took his bow when he went forth with Uttara, the North-god, as his charioteer to fight the Kauravyas, under the banner of the ape-god with the lion’s tail, who ruled this year. His bow was the Gandiva, the god {diva) of the land {gan), the rain-bow of the rain-god, which was, we are told, successively the bow of Sakra, the wet {sak) god, of Soma, the mother-tree-god, and of Varuna, the ram- rain (var) god of heaven, the rain-sun-god 2.
The barber’s fee for this baptismal ceremony was rice, barley, sesamum seeds, and beans or millet, thus showing that it belongs to the age when barley and millets had been brought from Asia Minor to India with the sacred oil {sesamum orientale) of the Telis.
The custom of ceremonial hair-cutting, of which I have now sketched the first beginnings was apparently exported from India to all the countries on the Persian Gulf and
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix. pp. 291—293.
2   Mahabharata Virata (Pandava-f raves ha) Parva, v. pp. 12, 13, Virata (Go- harana) Parra, xli., xlii. pp. 100, 101 ; Zimmer, Alt indisches Leben, chap, iii. pp. 59, 60.

34 ;
Southern Arabia, for Jeremiah xxv. 20—23, speaks of the people of Dedan in the Persian Gulf and of Tema, or Southern Arabia, as “ having the corners of their hair polled.” This expression apparently refers to a ceremonial cutting of the side locks like that prescribed in the Indian ritual. But the cutting of the side locks seems in Southern Arabia, according to Herodotus iii. 8, to have become a shaving of the temples and a cutting of the hair in front, after the fashion of Dionysus. He, whose car was drawn by Indian leopards, was originally the Indian god Shiva: the .god of dancing accompanied by the consumption of ardent drinks, who was transported to Arabia, whence he brought to Greece the cult of Dionysus. He was, as I have shown in Chapter V. pp. 243, 244, the son of the Phoenician goddess Semele or Samlath, whose images were-worshipped under the Brythonic Celtic name of Pen or Pen Samlath, the lady {Pen) Samlath or Shemiramot; and this name of the Celtic queen of heaven was given to the mother of the wine»-god by the Indian Turvasu, who called the Pole Star Tar! Pennu. This shaving of the front of the head instead of only the side locks is the Celtic tonsure. It became in the later days of sun-worship, when men began to worship the rising-sun of the East instead of the setting- sun of the West, the tonsure which left only the scalp-lock on the top of the head uncut. This was the rite prescribed for all those who offered the sacrifices of the year of three seasons at the Vaishvadeva, Varuna Praghasah and Saka- medha festivals. The hair was to be cut for these festivals, and before partaking of the later Soma sacrament, with a copper razor, as in the ceremonies of the Grihya Sutra ritual J. It was this all-round tonsure, or clipping of all hair except the scalp-lock, which produced the pigtail of the Mossoos, Chinese, Mundas, and all high-caste Hindus. 1
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 4, 5—7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 450.
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G.   The Bronze Age in India.
This evidence of the early history of ceremonial haircutting proves that it originated in the Copper Age preceding that of Bronze. This last is called in the Rigveda and Brahmanas the epoch of the third-class of Fathers, the Agnishvattah, or fathers who burnt their dead. They are the race whose remains are found with bronze metal vessels and spear-points in the circular mound-tombs in the Nilgiris, answering in their form to the round burrows of the Bronze Age in Europe. The people who made these graves are depicted^ in the clay figures found in them as wearing high hatsl. Native tradition says that these tombs are those of the Pandyan kings, the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, and assigns them to the Kurumbas, the mixed shepherd and cultivating race, of whom the Kurmis, the Madras Kadumbis, are the leading members. These Kurmis are, according to the traditions of Central India, the rulers of the country who succeeded the Gonds, and who still survive also in the Kaurs, whom I have described in Chapter IV. pp. 195, 196. The hat shows them to belong to the race of the Chiroos, or sons of the bird (Chir), the ancient kings of Magadha, the Chiroos of Madras, and to the Dard sons of the antelope. That is to say, they are a branch of the Hittites, who are depicted on ancient monuments as wearing a high-peaked cap and shoes with turned-up toes, like those made by the Chamars in some parts of India. Offerings are made to these Fathers of the Bronze Age at the Pitriyajna, held at the autumnal equinox, and they are also invoked in the Vedic hymn summoning the fathers to this sacrifice2 3. To them, as to the Pitaro Barishadah, parched barley is offered, but the half-share allotted to them is ground and made into a porridge with the milk of a cow suckling an adopted calf 3. This is the Karambha, or barley -
1   Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Nilgiri Hills, vol. x. p. 322.
2   Rg. x. 15, 11.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 1,6; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421.

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porridge offered to Pushanx, the year - god of the winter solstice, and husband of the sun-maiden, by whom he became the father of the sun-god born at the autumnal equinox.
The stipulation that this porridge should be made of the milk of a cow suckling an adopted calf conveys most important historical information, for it tells us of a time when the cow-mother-goddess of Indian ritual nursed a foreign calf, which was to supersede her. It tells in short of the supersession of the old worship of the buffalo, the animal always sacrificed in Central and Southern India at the Dasahara on the tenth of Sshvina (Assin) (September —October), that is on the tenth day after the new moon of the autumnal equinox. In this festival the first nine days of the week of the cycle - year celebrate the victory of Durga or Subhadra, the mountain-goddess of the North, over a female buffalo Mahishasur 2. It was for this primaeval buffalo that the bull, cow and calf were substituted as sacrificial animals, and it is only these which are offered in the ritual of the Brahmanas and Grihya Sutras.
But this sacred buffalo appears in the Rigveda as Indra himself. In the account of his birth 3 he is called the buffalo (inahisa) son of the cow who had only once calved (grsti) 4, and his father is called Vyansa, that is, as we have seen, the constellation Draco which ruled the year measured by seasons. He is said in another hymn to have killed this father as the Vritra or enclosing snake after drinking Soma at the six-days Tri-ka-dru-ka festival of the summer solstice, and he is there called Danu or son of the Pole Star 5. It was the Pole Star god of Orion’s year that Indra, the buffalo, slew, and after his death, and the warning he received from his mother that the year-god had forsaken him, he called Vishnu the year-god of months, the antelope-god Krishna, to his aid, 1 2 3 4 5
1   Rg. vi. 5*6, i, iii. 52, 7.
2   Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431.
3   Rg. iv. 18, 10—13.
4   Grassmann, Worterbuch sum Rigveda, s.v. grsti.
5   Rg- i- 32. 3—9-
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Vishnu asked him how he can hope to be trusted when he had killed his father, and Indra replied that (it was true) that he had once eaten dog’s entrails ; that is, accepted the sacrifice of the dog offered, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 184, at the summer solstice, and become god of that dead year, the Vritra he slew, but that he was now converted, and would partake of the Soma of the Shyena or frost (shya) bird of the winter solstice I. That is, he would become the son of the mother of the sun-god begotten at the winter solstice and born at the autumnal equinox. That he was born in this hymn as the rain-god of a new era is shown by his saying before his birth 2 that he would be born from his mother’s side as the sun-god, the branch of the mother-tree, begotten by the rain-cloud who entered his mother’s womb, from the right side, as Gan-isha, the elephant-cloud-god, entered the right side of the Buddha’s mother 3. He then promised that when thus born as the sun-god of a new era of years measured by months instead of those measured by seasons and weeks, he would betake himself to Vishnu.
That this buffalo-god born of a buffalo-cow was a year- god is proved by Rg. ix. 113, 1—3, where the sun’s daughters are said to have brought him, impregnated by Parjanya, the rain-god, to Sharyanavan, the ship (ndva) of the arrow, that is of the arrow-year of three seasons, when he as Indra shall drink Soma as the slayer of Vritra. These sun-maidens were the ten maidens or lunar months of gestation of the cycle-year, whose singing makes the Soma flow for Indra and Vishnu, in their new alliance as year-gods of this year measured by lunar months4.
The buffalo is the sacred animal of the Malays, which they believe to support the earth as it floats on the ocean. It is the animal always offered and eaten at their sacrificial feasts, and is thus the counterpart of the Indian Dasahara buffalo. But this totem buffalo is not the sacred buffalo of the Malay
1   Rg. iv. 18, 11 —13.   2 Ibid., iv. 18, I, 2.
3   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, p. 63.
4   Rg- ix. 56, 3, 4-
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tin miners, who trace their origin to the Bronze Age. They sacrifice a white buffalo, which is thus the sun-buffalo of the sun-god born as the buffalo Indra of this year succeeding the three-years cycle. It is never killed in the mine, where, as in the Indian sacrificial ground sacred to the sun-god, no blood may be shed, but portions of every part of its carcase are deposited inside the spirits’ audience-chamber outside the mine, and they invoke the god they summon to the sacrifice as the White Sheikh, king of the virgin jungle. But the flesh of this white buffalo, the Indra allied with Vishnu, is never eaten *.
This was the buffalo-calf of the fathers burnt after death, and adopted as the son of the mother-cow of the Todas and Gautamas. That this age of the worship of the white sun-buffalo and of the white pig Vishnu of the Brahmins’ daily meditations 1 2 3 * on the history of time-reckoning, was one in which the heavenly bodies were believed to go round the Pole as stars of night and day, is proved in the ritual of the Brahmanas. In the Pitriyajna the priests make six circuits of the altar, the first three contrary to the course of the sun, from right to left, and the other three from left to right, sunwise. They wore the cord on the right shoulder, according to the rules of primitive Pole Star worship, except when they are kindling the fire, and then they shift it to the left shoulder, and become sacrificially invested as sun-worshippers. When the cakes and porridge are presented to the Fathers the sacrificer with the cord on his right shoulder walks round the altar, sprinkling it from right to left 3. And thus in the ritual of these ancestral gods the ruler of Pole Star moon and sun-worship are intermingled, marking the sacrifice as one of the age of transition from the
1   Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 56, 189, 190, 268, 269.
2   Dubois and Beauchamp, Hindu Manners and Customs, chap, xiii., The Sam-kalpa, 3, vol. i. p. 147.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. 4, 2, 9, ii. 6, 1, 12—34; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp.
363. 423. 424» note 2, 428—433.
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primaeval star and moon worship to that of the adoration of the sun.
It was these sons of the buffalo totem parent of the Malay rice-growing' races who were joined in India by the Northern worshippers of the horse’s head, the god Dadhiank, the Atharvan, or son of the fire-god Atar, and he, according to the Brahmanas, imparted to the aboriginal Indians the mystery of honey, the inspiring mead I. The history of this union, which marked the beginning of the Copper and Bronze Ages in India, is given in the ethnology of the castes of the miners and workers in metal, who formed, according to the custom introduced by the Naga Kushikas, trade guilds united by community not of descent but of function.
The only mining castes of Bengal and Central India, who are smelters of ore, are the Asuras and Lohars of Chutia Nagpur. The Asuras are the survivals of the Vedic Asuras, who traced their descent to the primaeval man-ape, the great KapJ or Kabir, and offered human sacrifices to the fire and sun-god. He was, in the ritual of the Finns, not the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, but a male deity, the Thoas Tammuz, or Dumu-zi, king of the Tauric Chersonesus, the sun-god Orion, the Jewish Moloch, and the Northern sun-god Sigurd, the rider on - the sun-horse Grani, who cooked and ate the heart of Fafnir, the snake-god, his predecessor as ruler of the year, and who was the Northern form of the Indian Vritra slain by Indra, after which feat he ate the dog’s entrails, or the heart of the fire-dog, the creator of fire2 3. These sacrifices to the male sun-gods, which were first human sacrifices, were the only burnt- offerings of the Eastern Finns, who transmitted the same custom to the Arabs 3. They were also the burnt-offerings
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iv. i, 5, 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 277.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 121 ; Rg. iv. 18, 13.
3   Abercromby, Pre and Protohistoric Finns, vol. i. chap. iv. p. 167 ; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 210.

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of the Angiras priesthood of the age of the cycle-year preceding the eleven-months year of the Atharvans, and this marks their Finnish descent.
The Asuras, retaining the name of the Angiras priests, call themselves Aguryas, or Angurias, the men of charcoal {angarci), who prepare the charcoal for ore smelting, and this name, together with that of the land of Anga, the volcanic Behar country ruled by Kama, the horned (keren) moon-god of the cycle-year, point to their descent from Phrygian Asia Minor, whence, as we have seen, the Itonian Athene of Boeotia got the name of Onka, which appears in India as Anga. This was the birth-land of the Hittite sons of the goat, whose year was the cycle-year of ten months of gestation, and the ancient name of ten as the number of the months of the heating and smelting of the sun-god of the workers in metal, born in the tenth month of gestation, survives in the word Agoor, ten, in the dialect of the Hindu Kasbhara, or workers in bell-metalI. This word Agur, ten, is also found in the name of Agurnath, the reputed ancestor of the caste of Agurwalas, the wealthy guild of jewellers, bankers and usurers who trace their descent from the Vaishya Rajas of Agroha, on the borders of Raj- putana. It is to this caste that many of the wealthiest merchants of Behar and the North-west provinces belong. The god-king from whom they were descended was Guga, or Goga, Pir, the fifth of the five Pirs, the snake or Naga kings of Agroha; and, as we have seen on p. 337, he was the rider on the black sun-horse, born of Yavadiya, the barley- mare, and he and his horse together formed the Centaur- god of the Thibetan Buddhists and Mossoos, Haya-griva. Thus he was the Indian form of the Northern sun-god Sig-urd, the pillar (urdr) of victory (sig) gnomon-stone. His festival is on the ninth day of the dark half of Bhadon (August—September), or about the 9th of September 2, and
1   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, vol. i. p. 161, § v. Kasbhara.
2   Ibid., Goga Pir, vol. i. p. 257.
A a
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he is associated with a duplicate of himself, Ghazi Miyan I, whose festival takes place in Jaistha (Jeth) May—June, as the god with bushy-hair2, the full-grown hair offered as the firstfruits of the summer solstice. Hence as the god of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks he is the god Orion, the god of the Rathjatra of Krishna and Subhadra, wedded at the summer solstice as Ninus and Shemiramot at Babylon. He is said, as Agurnath, to have instituted eighteen sacrifices of the eighteen gotras, or sections of the Agurwalas, to Lakshmi, the goddess of the boundary-pillar (laksh), the female form of the pillar-sun-god Sigurd, half of which only, nine sacrifices 3, were accomplished, and hence he is the god of the fourth part of the year of seventy-two weeks into which the cycle-year, as that of the five Pirs or five- day weeks, was divided. These were weeks of five nights and four days, whence the conception of the nine-days week arose. As the Agurwalas trace descent in the male line 4, his clan came from the north, and he, as Goga or Gog, was apparently the god of the bed of thirty-six cubits, the Og of the Bible, the god of the people called, in Ezekiel xxxviii., xxxix., Gog and Magog, who lived in the land of Rosh, the sun-god Ragh, Meshech and Tubal. This was the country of the Moschoi and Tiberinoi, who are described by Herodotus iii. 94, vii. 78, as wearing wooden helmets. It is called Meschia by Cedrenus. Gesenius identifies it with North Georgia or Iberia, and mentions the wall between the Caspian and Euxine seas, called the wall of the Ya-yuj and Mayuj, which was built as a defence against northern invaders. It was from these people that Hermes, the god of the pillar, got the Phoenician name of Moschophorus, or calf-bearer 5, the god who, as
1   Miyan is the 27th division of the Persian Lunar Zodiac representing the stars y Pegasi a Andromedae, so that his constellation is that of the horse Pegasus. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Euphratean Stellar Researches, p. 10.
2   Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, Ghazi Miyan, vol. i. pp. 251, 252.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5.
4   Ibid.
5   Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 299.

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the sun-gnomon-pillar, produced the sun-calf, the calf-born Indra. This was the sun-god of the Sakya Kunti-bhojas, the Bhojas of the lance (kunti) of the race of the Bhoja king Ugrasena, who founded Kosambi at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges, and called the country round it Vatsa- bhumi, the land of the calf (vatsa), the ancient name of Bundelkund. They belonged to the army of the Iberian Finn miners, worhippers of Ya, the full moon, who came to India from Colchis, another name of the Gog and Magog country, whence, according to Herodotus, circumcision was first introduced. This country, called also Tubal after the father of the workers in metal, was a land of great mineral wealth. These dealers in minerals, who called Agur- nath, the lord of ten (Agzir), their ancestral god, were apparently the introducers of the Northern decimal system of notation, differing from the Southern duodecimal system of counting by “ gundas ” or fours, and they united the Northern and Southern races in India. For their father- god Agurnath or Goga (the equivalent of Dasaratha, he of the ten chariots or lunar months, the father of Rama) married the daughters of two Naga Rajas, and he stipulated that the children of one of the two princesses should bear their father’s name, while those of the other wife should trace their descent from the mother, according to the custom of the Naga races1. They were thus the successors of the Naga Kushika, and as Agurwalas they are strict monogamists like the Finns. Their native land in Asia Minor is called, in Ezekiel xxxix. n, 12, Hamon Gog, which is apparently the land of Baal Khamman, the pillar-god. It was from this god of the lunar months that the eighteen tribes of the Bhojas, or sons of Druhyu, the sorcerer-god, originated2. They are the sons of Gog, who are called in the Recueil des Histoires de Troye, of the Middle Ages, sons of a race of giants, the Rephaim descended from the
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5.
2   Mahabharata Sabha (Rujasttya-rambha) Parva, xiv. p. 46, Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260.
A a 2
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thirty-three daughters of Diocletian, the thirty-three days of the months of this year. They are also descendants of the twin door-posts of the Garden of God, the Stars Gemini, who as Gog and Magog stand at the door of the Guildhall in London.
The Lohars, congeners of the Agurias or Asuras, were first workers in copper (loha), a name that means the red, “ roh,” metal, and this change of r into 1 marks them as allied to the Finn races, who in Greece changed the name of the Phrugyes, or sons of fire (fkur), into Phlegyes. Their caste institutions prove them to be a mixed race, who were first sons of the mother-mountain, which they worship as Mohangiri, the Marang Buru of the Mundas, and in Chutia Nagpur their priests are the village Pahan and the provincial Ojha, but the sub-caste of Sad-Loharsg immigrants from the Hindu (Sad) districts, employ the village barber as their marriage priest. They are most closely allied with the Bagdis, who were originally a caste of hill fishermen, sons of the tiger and the sun-cock, one of whose totems is the Sal-machh, or fish of the Sal-tree z.
Both Lohar and Bagdi bridegrooms begin their wedding ceremonies by marrying the Mahua tree (Bassia latifolid). This tree, through the use of its honey-sweet flowers in making intoxicating drink, has become the honey-tree of India, which gave honey to the Ashvins and the sons of Dadhiank, the horse’s head. This mahua mead replaced the rice and murwa beer of the Mundas and Thibetan Buddhists. Both the Lohars and Bagdis worship the wise snake-goddess Manasa, the female form of Manu, to whom rice, sweetmeats, fruit and flowers are offered as the mother-snake-goddess of the early village founders. But to these are added, at her festivals held on the fifth and twentieth of the four rainy months from the middle of June to the middle of October, 1
1   Their totems are :—Ardi the fish, Bagh-rishi the tiger, Kachchap the tortoise, Kasbak the heron, Pak-basanta the bird, Pat-rishi the bean, Ponk-rishi the jungle-cock, Sal-rishi or Sal-machh the Sal-fish. Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Bagdi, vol. ii. Appendix i. p. 5.

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the moon-goat and sun-ram of the Northern immigrants. Both these castes, as well as all those of the barbers and workers in metal, burn their dead, and thus trace their origin to the Bronze Age. The connection between them and the men of the eleven-months year is shown in their custom of performing the shradh or funeral ceremony on the eleventh day after death, or at the end of a week of that year1. This custom is 'also observed by the Kamis, the Nepal branch of the Kamars or metal workers of Bengal, and the Bhan- daris, the barbers of Orissa 2 3 4.
Their goddess Manasa is the sister of Vasuki, the snake- god of the summer solstice, and mother of the sun-god Ashtaka. She is the Hindu counterpart of the snake Erectheus at Athens, fed with monthly honey-cakes, who occupied the western end of the Erictheum, the eastern being the temple of Athene Polias 3, the tree-mother-goddess Onka or Anga of the mining races. They, in India, are the sons of the Sal-tree, whence the best charcoal is made, and this as a resin-bearing-tree is the Hindu equivalent of the resinous pine-tree of the Finn country, the pine-tree of the cave-mother Cybele. Manasa is also the female form of the snake Fafnir of the story of Sigurd, the year-god slain by this rider on the sun-horse, who guarded the year-treasures of Andvari, the wary (vari) dwarf. These dwarf-gods were the parents of the dwarf Finn races, the Ugrian-Finns, the first workers in metal who lived in the country between the Volga and the Ural mountains, where copper has been smelted from time immemorial, and where gold is also found. It was the Ostiak and Mordvin Finns who introduced into India the horse-sacrifices which they still offer, as well as the use of horses in preference to buffaloes and bullocks 4, and they
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Lohars, vol. ii. pp. 22, 23, Bagdis, vol. i. pp. 37—43-
2   Ibid., Bhandaris-Kamis, voi. i. pp. 94, 395.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, Erichthonius Erictheum, vol. ii. pp. 168, 169, 3301!'.
4   Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap. iv., Their Prehistoric Civilisation, vol. i. p. 217.
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brought also their acquaintance with mining. They were of the race of the dwarfs who made the honey (Mordvin, med) mead, drunk by the gods of the Edda, who ate the flesh of the boar Soehrimnir. They, who were gold-washers in the Volga country, became in Chutia Nagpur the Jharas, or gold-washers, who extracted gold from the river sands of the Sona-pet or womb of gold in the Munda country, and who took gold from the sands of all the rivers watering the South of the Chutia Nagpur plateau from East to West. Their name for gold is embodied in that of the Sone, meaning the “ golden ” river. It was on the banks of the Niranjara or Phagun river, which was once the main stream of the Sone 1, that the Buddha obtained enlightenment, when sitting under the Nigrodha or Indian Banyan tree of the Kushika races. The word for gold, whence the river-name was derived, is in Pali Sopnam, spelt with the Dravidian cerebral n, which is a substitute for an original r preceding it, as the Sanskrit Suvarna becomes in Pali Suvanno. Hence the original name for gold is Sornar, its Tamil name, and this is reproduced in the Mordvinian Sirna, the Votiak Zarni, Ostiak Sarni, which became the Zend Zar2, the primitive root of the Sanskrit hiranya. The Finnic worker in gold has become the Hindu Sonar, the banker and gold merchant.
These Sonars of the East are the wealthy representatives of the Western Saus, sons of Su, the bird who came from Saurashtra, the Western kingdom (rdshtra) of the Saus, to settle in the eastern land of Anga. They traced their descent to Marudevi, the mountain (piaru) goddess, wife of Nabhl, the navel, the central fire on the altar, who were parents of the first Jain .Tirthakara Rishabha, the bull of the Kashyapa clan, born in the land of the Ikshvakus on the eighth day
1   The Sone has like the Kusi and Gunduk on the north bank of the Ganges moved in the course of ages from East to West, so that the present course is very far removed from that it followed in the ages of this epoch.
2 Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap. v., The Iranian Period, p. 232.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:01:54 PM: 359
of the dark-fortnight, that is on the twenty-second of Cheit (March—April), when the sun was in the constellation Uttarashadha Sagittarius, that is about 15,000 B.c. or the beginning of the cycler-year L He was the predecessor of Arishtanemi, who was, as we have seen, the Jain ruler of this eleven-months year. It was apparently at this epoch, when the Bronze Age began, that the Jain merchants ruling the Naga confederacy came from the West to the East. They made Parisnath on the Barrakur in Chutia Nagpur, formerly the sacred mountain of the Mundas, the holy High Place of the Jain Panris or Paris, the trading (pani) races, and fixed their headquarters in Chutia Nagpur, the mother country {chut) of the Nagas, and in the plains of Anga and Magadha forming the Western side of the Gangetic valley.
By the help of the Finn miners who accompanied them they obtained large and constant supplies of gold from the sands of the rivers, diamonds from the diamond fields, and opened up the copper mines at Baragunda on the Northern slopes of Parisnath, and at Lando in Seraikela in Singh- bhum. These were worked throughout the long period intervening between the opening of the mines and the establishment of Mussulman rule in Bengal, and hence the immense supplies of ore contained in these vast deposits have now been almost exhausted. But no one who has visited them can fail to be impressed with the magnitude of the works and the great trading energy of the race who superintended them. They made their capital at Dalmi on one of the gold-bearing rivers, the Subon-rikha or Suvarna- riksha, the channel (riks/ia) of the race (varna) of the Sus. And the ruins of the city they founded still exist on its banks, and from thence they ruled the whole of Bengal and Behar2. Their seaport was Tamluk, at the mouth of the
' Jacobi, Jaina Sulras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Rishabha ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 281, 2S2.
2   Tamluk in Orissa was the ancient seaport not only of Chutia Nagpur, but of Behar, the country of Anga in the West of the Gangetic valley, and Kashi Benares. It was commercial goods from Orissa and the port of Tamralipti
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Hooghly and Rupnarain. Its Sanskrit name, of which the modern Tamluk is a corruption, is Tamra-lipti, the copper {tamra) port; and it was, according to tradition, the capital of the Peacock (mayura) kings of the Bhars or Bharatas, whose descendants still rule the adjoining semi-independent state of Moharbhunj. The original Mayura dynasty was succeeded, as maritime trade developed, by the Kaivarta or Kewut kings, a caste of fishermen and merchants, who make marriages by mingling the blood of the bride and bridegroom, in addition to the ordinary Sindurdan ceremony. That the country was originally ruled by races in touch with the Ooraon rulers of Chutia Nagpur is proved by the fact that the Kadamba almond-tree of the Ooraons is the sacred tree in the precincts of the ancient Tamluk temple of Kali, dedicated to Vishnu, the year-god of the peacock race, whose deification has been discussed in Chapter V. p. 281 L The name of this seaport shows first that the founders were of Dravidian origin like the Ooraons, whose native language is a Dravidian dialect, for the Sanskrit Tamra is a form of the Tamil Thambiram ; and secondly, it stamps the city as the seaport of the copper merchants of the Bronze Age, and proves that they must have been great exporters of that metal. This was originally used without alloy, as we learn from the copper razors of the barbers, the copper axes belonging to Colonel Samuells found near Baragunda, and the copper knives found by Dr. Schliemann in the oldest but one of the six superimposed Trojan cities. But it must have very soon been mixed with alloys of zinc and tin. These metals, and also copper, are found near together in Udaipur in Rajputana2; and it was there probably in the
that Tapassu and Bhalluka were bringing to Kushi in five hundred carts when they met the Buddha at his final transformation into the sun-god, Lord of Heaven, when the four bowls of sapphire and four of jet, the skies of day and night, brought by the four Loka Palu angels, ruling the four quarters of the heavens, became the one bowl or canopy of the sun-god, the universal ruler. Rhys D.avid, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, p. no.
1   Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Tamluk, vol. xiii. pp. 172—173.
2   Ibid., Udaipur, vol. xiii. p. 401.
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adjoining country of Khatiawar, sacred to the year-god Krishna or Vishnu, that Indian brass and bronze were first made, and the ancestors of the Kassara or Kasbhara hereditary braziers probably accompanied the Jain Khati kings of the Peacock dynasty to Chutia Nagpur, where they established the brass trade of Manbhum, the district in which Dalmi is situated.
It was these trading kings who fought their way through India who founded the great merchant caste of Bengal, the Subarna or Suvarna Baniks, the Suvarna traders, the Bengal Shus. It is to this caste who boast their descent from the Kushika father-gods, Kasyapa, Gautama and Vyasa, and which is celebrated for the beauty of its women, that the great merchant families of the Pals, who gave the dynasty of the Pal kings to Bengal, Lahas, Des, Chandras, Sinhas or Sils, belong, and they show equal ability in literature and in commerceR Barbers occupy a prominent position among them as priests at their weddings.
It was apparently during the rule of the barber-priests and merchant-kings that Tamra-lipti was made the principal trading port between Bengal and Malacca, the great tin- producing country; and it was hence that tin was procurable much more easily than from Eastern India, for the only tin deposit in Chutia Nagpur is so poor in quality that it has never been worked. It was the exchange of the copper of Tamluk with the tin of the Malay miners, brethren of the Mallis of India, which made bronze the metal of India and inaugurated the Bronze Age of the Pandava kings.
The historical retrospect thus traced from the trade traditions, ritual and caste customs of the men of the Copper and Bronze Age, who burnt their dead, coincides exactly with that deduced from the Mahabharata and Harivansa. It tells us how the Suvarna, the race of Sus dwelling on the banks of the Indus, and in Saurashtra and Khatiawar founded in the West, the empire of the Yadu-Turvasu or
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Subarnabanik, vol. ii. pp. 261—266.
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Yavanas, the sons of the barley (yava), who became the Ikshvaku kings of Patala, and afterwards of Patali-putra, the son of Patala {Patna). These Khati or Hittite Nagas founded from the artisan classes of village servants and cultivators the trading guilds or castes united by community of function. They under the guidance of the Finn mining races first established the Yavana or Yona rule from their capital of Yonagurh near the Girnar hill of Arishtanemi, the year-god of this epoch. He was, as we have seen, the ruling deity of the Ugra-sena or Ugro Finns, and of their King Kansa, the moon-goose, who, as king of the lunar dynasty, ruled the West of India as far East as Magadha, where Jarasandha, whose subordinate he was, reigned as central emperor, the Chakravarti or wheel-turning king.
He was the son of the mango, born, as we have seen, of the two Kushi or Kushite queens Ambika, and Ambalika, the Pole Star in Cygnus, and the Great Bear mother.
The rule of these ruthless conquerors was overthrown by Krishna, and the Pandava Bhima, who killed Kansa and Jarasandha, and made Krishna or Vishnu the year-god instead of Jarasandha’s god, the three-eyed Shiva of the three- years cycle, to whom he offered human sacrifices. It was after this victory that the Jain community of merchant- warriors established the rule of the Su-varna in Eastern India, and made the sons of Rishabha, the bull, supreme rulers of the land. It is as a survival of the imperial rule of the sons of Indra, the eel-god, who became the buffalo- bull, that the Rajas of Chutia Nagpur wear on the day of their coronation a turban twisted into a peculiar shape to represent the ancestral bull’s horns, and the maker of this turban holds a village granted to his ancestors free of all payments except the discharge of his duty of providing the official head-dress of the Raja.
It was from this amalgamation of the alien and indigenous races that the Bharata confederacy was formed under the rule of the Mayura or Peacock kings. Their leaders were the Licchavis, the sons of the Akkadian dog {lig), who joined

36.3
the tiger-born Mallis to form the confederacy of the eighteen tribes of the Vajjians, sons of the tiger (vyaghrd), who ruled the country to the North-east of the Gangetic yalley. Their chief clan was that of the warrior Gnatikas J, or sons of the mother gfia, the Greek 7wrj, called the fire-mother in Rg.
iv.   9, 4. She is the “ even ” or queen mother of the Goidelic Celts who always burnt their dead, and who were thus the Pitaro Agnishvattah of this new confederacy. They were the dwarf Celtic race of miners, who, in Europe, became the Celts of Auvergne and Central France. In India they were the dwarf Asuras and Lohars, among whom the average male height is only about 163 centimetres, or 5 ft. 4 in., and their Cephalic index 75 1 2 3 4. It was they who introduced into India the Ooraon land tenures, giving an area of royal land in each village to the king, which, as I have shown in Chapter V. p. 287 ff, were very similar to those of the Goidelic Celts in Wales, both being founded on the earlier tenures of the Piets, the painted Pitaro Barishadah, to whom parched barley was offered.
This race of the fathers who burnt their dead was allied with the sons of the mother-fire-goddess, called in the Rigveda Matar-i-shvan, the mother of the dog (shvan), who came to India, according to the title of the Second Mandala of the Rigveda, as the Median collected race, the Saunaka, or sons of the dog-mother, and of Bhrigu the fire-father. These were the yellow Finns, who, as the race of Hari the mother-goddess Shar, furnished twenty-two of the twenty- four Jain Tirthakaras 3. These were the men of the new or young (kana) race represented by the Kanva priests, the reputed authors of the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda. Their representative parent Kanva was the nominal father of Sakuntala, mother of Bharata, bom on the Malli river Malini 4.
1   Jacobi, Jaina Sfitrus, Kalpa Sutra, 110 ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 256.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Anthropometric Data, vol. i. pp. viii., xxxiv,
3   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 21S.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxi. p. 218.
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These Kanvas were priests of the Yadu-Turvasu and of the mountain-god Arbuda, whose shrine is the sacred Jain mountain Arbuda or Abu in Sirohi in Rajputana. This is the god called in the Rigveda the son of the Ahi Urna-vabha, the weaver of wool, the goddess-mother of the Ram-sun 1 who was slain by Indra, and who is named six times in the second and eighth Mandalas out of the seven times he is mentioned in the Rigveda. On his sacred mountain near the copper mines of Sirohi and the, tin and copper mines of Udaipur are two of the finest existing Jain temples. One of Adi-nath or Rishabha, the first Tlrthakara, and one of Nemi-nath or Arishta-nemi, the twenty-second Tlrthakara and ruler of this year 2 3 4. They are the upper and nether mill-stones of Jain theology, and it is under this symbol that the snake Jarat-karna and his counterpart Arbuda are worshipped in the Vedic ritual. They are the two pressing or grinding-stones which extract the sap of the sacrificial Soma, and in the ritual of the Soma sacrifice they are invoked in four Vedic verses : two to Savitar, the sun-bird Su, which is the root of Savitar, and two to Indra 3. After these are recited fourteen stanzas of the hymn Rg. x. 94, ascribed to the Rishl-Arbuda. In this hymn (stanzas 6, 7, 8) the pressing-stones are invoked as drawn by ten horses furnished with bridles and harnessed to ten poles, the ten sacrificial stakes indicating the ten lunar months of the cycle-year. Before the last stanza of this hymn, Rg. x. 76, ascribed to Jarat-karna, and x. 175, ascribed to Arbuda, are recited, and they are both addressed to the gravanah or pressing-stones, pierced with the holes through which the bar uniting them is inserted 4. In the titles of these hymns Jarat-karna is called the Airavata or elephant-bull, and Arbuda Urddhvagrava, the pressing-stone lifted up to
1   Rg. viii. 32, 26.
2   Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Abu, vol. i. pp. 8, 9.
3   Rg. i. 24, 3, v. 81, 1, viii. 81, 1, viii. 1, 1.
4   Ibid., x. 94, 11.

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heaven, and both are said to belong to the serpent (Sarpa) race of NagasT, Arbuda being the son or counterpart of Kadru the mother-tree (<dru) of the Nagas, the goddess Ka or Who ? This ceremony forms part of the ritual of the mid-day pressing sacred to the meridian-sun, to which Indra is summmoned as the chief god.
These father and mother-stones, the revolving heaven- drill which presses out on the nether mother-stone the life- giving sap of the Soma plants placed between them, are the pair called in the Mahabharata Jarat-karu, they who make old {Java). The male belongs to the sect of the Yaya-vara, the wandering mendicants, who were the early Jains, whose god was Yayati, the full-moon-god (Ya), father of the Yadu-Turvasu. The female was the sister of Vasuki, the snake-god ruling the summer solstice. The male Jarat- karu, as the dying sun-god who has fulfilled his yearly task of begetting his successor, leaves his mate when Ashtaka is begotten as the god of the eight (ashta), the sun-god of the true Soma of Chapter VII 1 2 3. He is the god of the eight-rayed star of day worshipped by the Akkadians as Din-gir and Esh-shu, words meaning both god and an ear of corn 3. They are, in short, the fire-drill and socket which gave birth to the sun-god born from the altar flame kindled by the wood of the mother-tree.
H.   The story of the two thieves who robbed the treasure- house of heaven.
The name Arbuda given to the tree-mother-god means also the god of the Semitic Arba or four, the Hittite name which, as we have seen, appears in that of the Naga Gond kingdom, called Vidarba, or the double (vid) four {arba),
1   Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. ii., Hymns 785, 786, 7S7, pp. 412—415 ; Eggeling. Sat. Brah., iv. 3, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 331, note I, 332.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xlv.—xlvii. pp. 132—139.
3   Ball, ‘Akkadian Affinities of Chinese.’ Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, § China, Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 685 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. Preface, p. xxviii.
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the eight Gond tribes. The Hebrew history of this epoch of the deification of the four ruling gods, the four seasons of this year of eleven months, is to be found in the history of Caleb, the dog (kalb), the star Sirius. He was brother of Ram, the sun-god and grandson of Perez, the cleft, the male form of the Phoenician goddess Tirhatha, with the same meaning, who was, as we have seen, the fish-mother-goddess of the Phoenicians, mother of Shemiramot. He and his brother Ram were both descended from Tamar, the date- palm-tree. In the historical genealogies of the Chronicles various lines of descent are assigned to him. As the great- grandson of Tamar his father is Hezron, brother of Hamal, the star /3 Arietis, from which the sun was born in the cycle-year. Hezron died in Caleb-Ephratah, the city of ashes (ephra) of Caleb, which marks him as god of the city of the sun-god, in the year ruled by Sirius. In another genealogy he is the brother of Shuhah, Judah’s first wife, the bird (Shu) goddess, who preceded Tamar, and the ancestor of Ir-Nahash, the city (ir) of the Nagas, and the son of Jephunneh, the beautiful youth T. In short, he is the star Sirius, which was first the dog-star guarding the sun’s path along the Milky Way, then the young man, fifteen years old, who became afterwards the Zend Tishtrya (Sirius), the white horse of the sun, the Zend form of Indra, as the white buffalo, who made the black cloud, the horse’s head, give up the rains of the rainy season at the summer solstice2. He is in his second Avatar as a star-god ruling this year Tishtrya, the bull with golden horns, who intervened between Tishtrya, the bright youth, fifteen years old, Caleb’s father, Jephunneh, and Tishtrya, the white sun-horse.
It was he who killed the old trinity of Southern Palestine, the gods Shesh-ai, Ahiman, and Tol-mai. These words, as all Hebrew- scholars admit, are not Hebrew. They seem to me to be god-names imported into Hebrew theology
1   I Chron. ii. io—16, 18, 19, 24, iv. 11, 12, 15 ; Gen. xxxviii. 2.
2 Darmesteter, Zemtavesta Tir Yasht, vi. 10—24; S. B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 96—102,

by the Turvasu, who brought the gods and national customs of India to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coasts. Thus Shesh-ai is the wet-god Shesh or Sek Nag, the spring-god of the Takka triad. Ahiman, the Egyptian Ahi, a name of Osiris and the Sanskrit form of Echis, the holding- snake, the European Vritra, the encloser, and the equivalent of the Takka Vasuk, or Basuk Nag, the snake-god Vasuki, while Talmai is the mother Tal, the female form of the Akkadian Tal-tal, the very wise one of the name of la z. He is the counter-part of the Takka Takshaka, or Taksh Nag, the biting-snake of winter. It was to these three seasons that Caleb, as the god of this year, added the fourth season of this year, and commemorated the institution of this new measure of time by calling Hebron the capital of the tribe of Judah, the parent-altar-fire of Caleb, Kiriath- Arba,the city of the four 1 2 3 4 5. This was the year ruled by four Akkadian stars of the seven Lu-masi 3 : (1) Kakshisha, the horn (shi) star (shal the door {kak) Sirius, the star of summer. (2) En-te-na-mas-luv Hydra, the divine (en) foundation (te) of the prince (na) of the black (luv) antelope {mas), the star of the rainy autumn. (3) Ta-khu or Id-khu, the creating {id) mother-bird (Mu), the winter-star. (4) Papil- sak, the sceptre {pa), the wet or great (sak) fire {pit), the star of spring 4. In the theology of this year Masu. the Hebrew Moses, the leader of Caleb and the Israelites, was the star Regulus sC~This was the year of the ape with the lion’s taiTdepicted on the banner of Arjuna when he defeated the Kauravyas, rulers of this year with Uttara, the North-god of the summer solstice, as his charioteer. This year was led by the dog of the Pandavas, the last surviving com-
1   Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, Syllabary No. 16.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 189, note 2.
3   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘ Euphratean Stellar Researches,’ ii., Tablets YV, A, I, iii., lvii., No. 6, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, May,
1893, p. 328.
4   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 370—372.;
5   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49.
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panion of Yudishthira when he went up to heaven at the close of his career to join his brethren, its dead seasons. His faithful dog was changed into the star Sirius, the chief minister of the god Dharma, the Pole Star god1, author of law and order (dharm), and of the unvarying sequence of national phenomena, the Egyptain goddess Ma’at, the Pole Star Vega in Lyra from 10,000 to 8000 B.c.
But in order to understand fully the story of Caleb and to realise his connection with this year, we must turn to the historical chronicles compiled for oral recitation and transmitted by the national reciters of the countries in which the trading Turvasu or Yavanas of India became the ruling powers. They brought with them their eleven-months year, which they established as the official year of all lands where they ruled, the sea-coasts from India to Britany. And in this last country we have seen that this year is commemorated in the calendar of the eleven rows of stones at Menec, near Carnac, in Britany, in which the year-gnomon- stone was oriented to the rising sun of the summer solstice. One of the historical stories in which they recorded the history of this year and its foundation on the substructure of the three-years cycle with its forty months, is the widely disseminated tale of the Two Thieves who stole the king’s treasure. Variants of this story, which is told in Herodotus ii. 121, of the robbery of the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt, are found in India, in story No. 2 in the Katha Sarit Sagara, and No. 11 of Lai Behari Dey’s Folk Tales of Bengal2. But the two forms of this story, which was intended to portray graphically the history of the great revolution in time-reckoning wrought by the Indian and Phoenician trading guilds when they substituted the year of eleven-months for the three-years cycle, are those of Tropho- nius and Agamedes, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Trophonius and Agamedes were sons of Erginus, king of the
1   Mahabharata Mahaprashthanika Parva, iii. 17, p. 8.
2   For other variants see list in Frazers’ Patisanias, vol. v. pp. 176—179.

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Minyans, a form of the snake-god Ericthonius, the god Poseidon. They were noted builders, who built the sanctuary of their father Poseidon near Mantinaea, and the bridal chamber of Alkmene, the goddess of the moon-bow (alk, arc) mother, the sun-god Herakles I. But the building which indicates most clearly their historical position as star-year- gods of a year measured by nights, who marked the stages in heaven through which the sun-god was to run his annual course, is the treasury of King Hyrieus at Delphi, of which they were the architects. In this, like the pyramid thieves of the story of Rhampsinitus, they contrived that one of the stones could be removed from the outside so that they might enter and pilfer the hoard every night. This treasure was that of the god of the bee - hive or vault of heaven, called Hyrieus (vplevs from vpov, a hive, vpiov, honey-comb). This was the Pole Star god ruling the bee-hive of Mordvin theology, described in Chapter IV. p. 169. In this world’s temple of the bees, the star-gods of heaven, the priests and priestesses who uttered the commands and counsel of the father-god in oracles were the working-bees. These were the Greek Melissai, the bees, the official name of the priestesses of the mother-goddess of Ephesus, of Demeter and Persephone. The Semite prophet priestesses are commemorated under the name of Deborah, the bee of the date-palm-tree, the nurse of Rebekah, the mother of Isaac (laughter\ the blind god of the laughing corn of harvest, who ruled Israel with Barak, the lightning-god, the Centaur-god of the heavenly bow. She was buried at Bethel under the Oak of Weeping (A//on - bacuth)2, after Jacob, the supplanter sun-god, had destroyed the idols and false gods of the Pole Star god, his predecessor. Thus she was the mother-year-goddess, the queen bee, whose annual death was lamented at her year’s end, like that of Dumuzi. It was the prophet star-bees, the measurers of
1   Frazer, Patisanias, ix. 37, 4, 5, viii. 10, 2, ix. ir, i, vol. i.
2   Ibid., vol. iv. pp. 223, 224; Gen. xxxv. 1—8 ; Judges iv. 4!!. v.
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the year, who nursed the young Zeus in Crete as the son of Rhea, the tree-mother of the sons of the rivers. The hive of these holy bees, the over-arching heavens, was the tower of the three-year cycle, and it was in the age of the cycle-year that the article of the national creed was made requiring belief in the world as a bee-hive, whence honey was taken for the preparation of the inspiring mead and for generating physical and mental life on earth.
This conclusion will be made still more clear by examining the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The latter, whose number is the same as that of the months of the cycle- year, had buried their treasure in a cave, the dark amphitheatre of the night sky, the cave of Cybele. Ali Baba, who found it, was a poor wood-cutter with three asses, those which drew the car of the Ashvins, the three seasons of the year of the three-legged ass of the Zendavesta. His brother, Kasim, whose name means the collector of tribute in kind I, was wealthy and prosperous:   They signify the two seasons of
the equinoctial year of the cycle, the despised season of winter, beginning at the autumnal and the wealthy season of spring, and summer beginning at the vernal equinox. It was at the autumnal equinox that the treasure was discovered. When Ali Baba came Upon the thieves he watched them from a hiding-place, and learnt that they opened the door of the treasure-house by saying Open Sesame, and shut it by saying Shut Sesame. Thus this discoverer is the ruling twin of the eleven-months year of the oil growers whose sacred plant was the Sesamum Orientale. When Ali Baba’s brother Kasim discovered his brother’s good fortune, and was told the secret of the pass-word, he took ten mules, the ten sexless months of gestation of the cycle-year, to the cave, which he opened by calling out Open Sesame, and shut it by saying Shut Sesame. But when after taking ten muleloads of treasure he wanted to return, he forgot the password, and called out Open Barley, showing that he was the
? Burton, Arabian Nights, vol, xii. p. 13, note 2.

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summer and autumn god of the barley - growers whose revenue he collected. He was found in the cave, and slain as the autumn harvest-god by the forty thieves of the cycle-year, and they divided his body into two parts, which they hung up on each side of the cave door as the twin door-posts of the holy temple of the Garden of God opening at the autumnal equinox, when the cycle- year began.
Ali Baba, the ruling twin of the eleven-months year, removed these gate-posts of the cycle-age, and was sought after by the thieves as the unknown destroyer of their carefully constructed clock of time. They were baffled and finally slain by Marjanah, the maid-servant of Kasim, whose name means red-coral. She, who was the slayer of the forty cycle-months or thieves, was the fish-sun-mother of the sun- god conceived at its close, who married Ali Baba’s son, the sun-god of the winter solstice *. She was the sea-mother- goddess, the counterpart of Thetis, the ocean-mud (thith), who, as the Black Demeter of Phigalia in Arcadia, with the horse’s head of the black-horse-god Dadhiank, bore the sun-god of this eleven-months year1 2 to Poseidon, the god who gave the sun-horses to Peleus.
When we return to the story of Trophonius and Agamedes, sons of Erectheus Poseidon, the Greek Ali Baba and Kasim, we find still further evidence connecting the robbery of the treasure with the substitution of the eleven-months year of the sun-god, with the horse’s head for the cycle-year. These twin robbers of the treasury they built were the counterparts of the Hindu Ashvins, the stars Gemini who ruled both the cycle and the eleven-months year, the two door-posts of the House of God. Agamedes, like Kasim, was caught in a snare, from which he could not be freed, and slain by his brother, who cut off his head to escape detection, as Ali Baba carried
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ vol. x. pp. 209 ff.3 216, note i, 234.
2   Berard, Origine dcs Cnltcs Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, pp. 104—109; Frazer, Pausanias, viii., xlii. pp. 428, 429.
B b 2
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away his brother’s body. According to Pausanias, as Trophonius carried away his brother’s head the earth opened and received Trophonius in the sacrificial pit consecrated to Agamedes, the Hindu Pole Star goat (aja), in which a black ram was offered to him as the ram-sun-god of the cycle-year slain at its close I.
As for Trophonius, he is the god worshipped at Lebadea in Bceotia as Zeus Trophonius, the Phoenician Baal Tropha, the healing-god 2 3 4 *. His cave and grove, which were frequented by worshippers who sought advice from his oracles, and who wore at his shrine shoes made of the skins of animals sacrificed to him 3, were on the river Hercyna, that of the goddess Erycina, the Phoenician Erek Hayim, the preserving goddess, the star Virgo. She, according to the legend told by Pausanias, was the goddess holding the goose, the Hindi? Kansa, the goose-king of this epoch which fled from her to Persephone, who, as the autumn mother of the goose-god born from the sun-god, hid it under a stone 4.
This goose layer of the sun-egg was the Egyptian god or goddess who laid the egg of Nekekur the Great Cackler under the great sycamore-tree, in the sacred sun-city of On. She is called also the star (seb) god Seb, who laid the egg in the growth of which Osiris lives s. This egg laid by the star-god is the egg of the god Bes, a form of Seb, whose ancient name is Bes-bes the goose 6 7. He or she is called in the Book of the Dead the being within the sixteenth Pylon, or gate of the gods through which the soul of Ani passes, the Lady of Victory who burneth with flames of fire (Bes), creator of the mysteries of the earth 7. That is to say, she
1   Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 37, 2, 3, 39, 4, vol. i. pp. 490, 491, 493, 494, vol. V. p. 201.
2   Ibid., vol. v. p. 197 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 293, 294.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 202, 203.
4   Ibid., ix. 39, 1, 2, vol. i. pp. 492, 493.
s Budge, Book of the Dead, chaps, liv., lix. pp. 105, 108, 109.
6   Brugsch, Religion tend Mythologie der Alten AEgypter, pp. 172, 173, 576, 577-
7   Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. cxlv. 56, Translation, p. 250, Text, p. 344.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:04:42 PM: 373
is the goddess of the South, the fire-mother who heats into life the egg she is to lay, that of the Southern ape or raven- god of the mother constellation Argo. This god Bes is, as we have seen, the god in the form of the ape with the lion’s tail, who follows and succeeds the ape-god Hi, the Southern god 1. He bears a sacrificial knife in each hand, representing the lunar phases of the months of this year. He is the counterpart of the ape with the lion’s tail on the banner of the sexless Arjuna, ruling the year of the four Akkadian stars: i. Kakshisha, Sirius; 2. Entenamasluv, Hydra; 3. Takhu or Id-khu, Aquila; 4. Pa-pil-sak, Leo; the year of the prince [no) of the black (lav) antelope (mas), the god of the rains of Hydra the water-snake, that of the black antelope-god Krishna, Arj ana’s charioteer in the final contest with the Kauravyas, the god of the year in which the world’s egg was laid.
This year in Hindu history is that in which Gandhari, the vulture-mother of the Kauravyas, laid the egg from which her hundred sons, the rulers of the world, were born. She is the Pole Star mother, the star Vega a Lyrae. This egg, we are told in the Mahabharata, remained for two years in Gandharl’s womb, and its offspring remained two more years in holy water and clarified butter before they came to life. Hence the children born of the egg were the offspring of the four divisions, each of ten lunar months, of gestation of the cycle-year. It was laid simultaneously with the birth of Yudishthira, the eldest Pandava son of Kunti or Prithi, the lance or conceiving (pent) mother of the Parthavas and Dharma, the Pole Star god. Yudishthira was born on the fifth day of Khartik (October—November), about the 20th of October, under the constellation Jaistha Scorpio, and the star Antares a Scorpio at the Muhurta or hour sacred to the star Abhijit ( Vega) 2.
1   Gardiner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. pp. 148, 150, Fig. 535-
- Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv., cxxiii. pp. 338, 359. There is a difficulty here about dates. We have seen in the history of the birth of
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Hence the beginning of the year when the world’s egg was laid coincided with the year opening with the sacrifice of the Roman horse on the 15th of October, and it began twenty-one days earlier than the birth of Arishtanemi or in the lunar phase preceding it. He was the goose (Kansa) son of Ugrasena, who was born on the 12th day of the dark fortnight of Khartik (October—November), or about the 13th of November; and who like Duryodhana, the eldest Kauravya, was a ruling-god of this eleven-months year. This was also the month sacred to Trophonius, the robber of the treasury, who as the god of the river of Erycina or Erek-hayim, the goose-mother, the son of the egg, which in another form was that from which Castor and Poludeukes, the sons of Leda, were born.
But this star-mother Erek-hayim was, as we have seen, the star Virgo, which, as the sun-star, ruled the mid-month of this year, beginning on the 15th of October and commencing its second period of six months at the Roman festival of the Fordicidia on the 15th of April. This was the Hindu year beginning on the 1st of Baisakh (April— May), and that succeeding the year mentioned in the alternative account of Arishtanemi’s birth, which fixed it at the vernal equinox when the sun was in Virgo. The year when the sun was in Virgo at the 15th of April was about 10,200 B.C., or about the time when Vega began to be the Pole Star, under which Yudishthira and the Kauravyas were born. It was also a year consecrated to Antares a Scorpio, called
Arishta-nemi, pp. 316—318, that he was quickened in Khartik and born in Cheit (March—April), when the sun was in Virgo, about 12,200 B.c. If we apply similar reasoning to the date of the birth of the Kauravyas and Yudishthira in order that they should be born under Scorpio in 12,200, they must be born in May—June, the month Jaistha, in which the sun was in that constellation. They might, when born at the end of this month, the summer solstice, be conceived at the beginning of Khartik (October—November). The difficulty cannot be cleared up without a full examination of the texts, but in spite of this difficulty the connection between the births of the Pandava, Yudishthira, and Arishta-nemi is clear. Both were born about 12,200 B.C., and Yudishthira apparently in Jaistha, May—June, at the summer solstice.

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in the Akkadian Tablet of the Thirty Stars the Lord of Seed of the month Tisri (September—October), that is, the Lord of its offspring, the star of the storm, Zu bird, Lugal- tuddax, the layer of the autumnal egg.
This star heralding the season of the autumnal equinox in India and Babylonia also fulfilled a similar function in Egypt and Greece, where temples erected for the worship of a year-god whose year, like that of the three-years cycle, began at this date. It was regarded in Egypt as an equinoctial star, marking the setting of the sun at the vernal and its rising at the autumnal equinox 1 2 3 4 It was to this star that the great temple of Here, the Herceum, at Argos was oriented 3. Also as marking the connection of this year of Trophonius with the star Spica a Virgo, I may notice that in Egypt this star, called Min or Khim, was also looked on as that of a mummy-goddess who ruled the years beginning with setting stars, and Sir Norman Lockyer concludes from the orientation of the temples dedicated to this star that they celebrated the worship of a god whose year began on the ist May 4. This was the year of Persephone, the year of the Pleiades epoch, who appears, as we have seen, in the Trophonius legend. We thus see in this long analysis of ancient mythologies and astronomical legends that the age of the three-years cycle was that of the primaeval beehive robbed and conquered by the twin-gods of the eleven- months year which succeeded it. Also that this year is that ruled by the Pole Star Vega of the Vulture constellation, who ushered in this new year about 10,000 B.C. by hatching the world’s egg, from whence the Kauravyas who were to rule it were born. That this date of the birth of the Kauravyas coincided with that of Yudishthira, the Pandava ruler, and with the New Year’s Day of this year beginning with the
1   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars/ vol. ii., Antares, xxiv. pp. SS, S9.
2   Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxx. p. 314.
3   Ibid., pp. 289, 308, 360, 3S8, 419.
4   Ibid., chap. xxxi. pp. 31S, 319.
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sacrifice of the sun-horse at the Roman Equiria on the 15th of October. This was also the year of the ape with the lion’s tail, borne by the sexless god Arjuna, the chief warrior of the Pandavas.
As the year of the ape with the lion’s tail was that begun under the auspices of the star Sirius, the star of Caleb, the conquering dog (kalb) star of the tribe of Judah, it was that in which he and Joshua or Hoshea, the Ya or Yahveh of the Hus or Hushim, the Danava sons of Dan, after wandering for forty years in the wilderness (the forty months of the cycle-year) broke into and conquered the treasure-house of the bees ruled by Deborah, the queen-bee. This land flowing with milk and honey was that discovered by these two spies or thieves who had dwelt in it for forty daysE This conquest was made after the death of Moses or Masu, the star Regulus in Leo which ruled the last season of this year. This is the constellation which lies due south of the pointer-stars of the Great Bear, that called by the Akkadians Su-gi, the spirit-reed {gi) of the Su bird, the reed-cradle in which he, with his Kushite wife Zipporah, the little bird, was guarded in his infancy by his virgin-sister Miriam, the Greek Mariam, the Hindu Mari-amma, the prophet-star Virgo which precedes Leo in the zodiacal list of stars 1 2. The birth-story of Moses is parallel with that of Kavad, the ancestor of the Kushite kings, who was found as an infant in the reeds of the lake Kushava or Zarah by Uzava, the goat Pole Star god. The constellation Leo, as ruler of the year, died on Mount Nebo, sacred to the prophet-god of that name, the planet Mercury, which was to herald the birth of the sun-god of Chapter VII., the
1   Numbers xiii. 33, 34.
2   Ibid. xii. 1 ; Exodus ii. 2—4, 21 ; Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 819, derives the Hebrew Miriam from the Greek Mariam, and the last is certainly the same word as the Hindu Tamil Mariamma, the mother (amma), Mari, the tree (marom) mother. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 357—362, where the history of the constellations of the Great Bear and Virgo is discussed at length.

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god of the eight-rayed star. These invaders acquired the lands ruled by Og, the king of the Rephaim of Bashan, who was, as we have seen, the god of the revolving year-bed of the heavens or beehive-house of God. Their leader was Hoshea, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim x, or the two ashes {ephra), the united sons of Jacob, the supplanting sun-god of the pillar of Bethel and husband of Leah, the wild (le) cow-mother with the weak eyes, the three-eyed mother Gauri, wife of Shiva, and of Joseph or Asipu, the son of Rachel the ewe, the ram-sun-god. Nun, the father of Hoshea, was the chief god of the four creating male and female pairs of the lunar-solar Egyptian mythology who were led and inspired by Thoth or Dhu-ti, the moon- bird {dim) of life (ti), and formed by Chnum the artificer, the Great Potter, the soul of Shu, the fire-god. They were called Nun, Nunet, Heh, Hehet, Kek, Keket, Gorh, Gorhet, the spirits of the air and the earth. They are the embodiment of the theology of the Mehueret cow, the year-cow of the year of three seasons made by the Ribhus, manifested in Nunet, the vulture-wife of Nun, the water or cloud-god2. They were the metaphysical form of the earliest eight gods of the fire-worshippers: (i) Shu, the heat; (2) Tefnut, the effluence or flame ; (3) Seb, the star or egg ; (4) Nut, the over-arching heaven; (5) Osiris, Orion; (6) Isis, the mountain (zs) goddess ; (7) Set, the ape-star Canopus first, and afterwards the Pole Star in Kepheus; and (8) Nebh-hat, the mistress of the house, the tender of the sacred fire and the Pole Star mother-goddess, wife of Set.
It was from these eight parent-gods that Horus the young sun-god was born, the god depicted on the square zodiac at Denderah as ruling the equinoctial points North, South, East and West of the planisphere or eight-partitioned plan of the heavens drawn on the panther’s hide, the sacred garment of the Egyptian priests. In this the stars are
1   Numbers xiii. S.
2   Brugsch, Religion und Mylhologie dcr Alien sEgyplcr, pp. 116, 123, 124, 444, 469-
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placed in their respective quarters in the sky, and the mother of Horus Hathor or Nebt-hat rule the intermediate Northeast, South-west, South-east, North-west points, those marking the St. Andrew’s Cross indicating the yearly circuit of the sun-bird. Thus Horus, who is represented on the walls of the temple as born from the womb of the Pole Star goddess, is the son of the eight-rayed star1.
The Hebrew Hoshea is thus, as the son of Nun and the eight, the counterpart of the Egyptian Horus born of the Pole Star, and his mother was Nunet, the Vulture Pole Star Vega, while his father Nun was the ocean-god Num of the Finn Samoyedes, who divided the rule of the world between Jumala, the heaven god, and Num, the water god2. He was also a god of the Ugro-Finn Akkadians of Elam, the land of the great Naga snake Susi-Nag, for Elam, the South-eastern land of Akkadian geography, is called Mat Num-maki, the land of the lady (mak) Nun 3. The name of the god or goddess of the sun of the winter solstice rising in the South-east is indicated by the cuneiform symbol >-m>- meaning the three gods the Assyrian Rabu, the Hebrew Rabbi, the Hindu Ribhus. This parent of the sun-god was in Hebrew belief the fish-mother-goddess, for Nun means a fish in Hebrew. In other words, she was the goddess Tirhatha, or the cleft, the pool who was originally the mother Iiahu who gave birth to the sun-god born from the mother-tree grown in her ocean mud.
It was under the two robber leaders, the dog-star Sirius and the young sun-god succeeding the lion-star, the ape with the lion’s tail, that Jericho, the moon or yellow (Yarah Yareh) city, was betrayed by Rahab, the crocodile-mother, the constellation Draco, who admitted the two spies or *
* Marsham Adams, The Book of the Master of the Secret House, chap, vi., The Temple of the Virgin-Mother, pp. 71—73.
2   Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology „ vol. i. p. 261.
3   R. Brown, pun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. chap. xiv. pp. 163—165; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary Sign 361,498.
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thieves sent by Hoshea 1 to rob the Treasury of the heavens, of which this constellation was the crown and keystone. It was the Hindu Shunshu-mara of which the stars Gemini were the hands, the alligator, the constellation Vyasa, the parents of the fathers of the Kauravyas and Pandavas Dritarashtra and Pandu. Rahab, the crocodile constellation which, like Trophonius, connived at the robbery of the treasure-house she built, was converted into a mother-star of the new solar worship, and became the mother of Boaz 2, the sun-pillar of the twin-pillars Jachin and Boaz before the temple at Jerusalem.
The city fell before the blast of the trumpets of rams’ horns ushering in the cycle-year, which also proclaimed its fall, and the birth of the sun successor of its interloping follower, the eleven-months year of the horse’s head. This conquest was effected after the erection of Gilgal, the circle of year-stones, the pillar - girdle of Hir-men-sol, the sun-god of the great stone {men).
The seven trumpets of rams’ horns which overthrew the walls of the moon-city were the seven stars of the Bear- mother of the ram-sun, born, as we shall see in Chapter VII., of the Bear thigh. It was encompassed six times on the first six days of the siege, the six days of the Hittite week, and on the seventh day it was encompassed seven times. The number thirteen refers to the thirteen months of the year, the thirteen children of Jacob, to be described in Chapter VIII.
The ancient date of this change of ritual from Pole Star and moon worship to that of the sun-god is shown by the rite of circumcision which Hoshea required all the Israelites to undergo. By this rite the sun-worshippers united themselves to the land of their adoption by mingling their blood with its soil, and its antiquity is indicated by the stone or flint knives used by Joshua, which, according to the Septuagint version of the account of his burial, were buried with him 3.
1 Joshua ii.—vi.
- Matthew i. 6.
Joshua v. 2 ; xxiv. 30.
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The place of this revolution in Hebrew traditional history is shown in the historical genealogy of the kings of Edom, to which I have referred previously. Boaz of the golden pillar, the husband of Rahab, was the counterpart of Samlah of Masrekah, the vine-land, the Phoenician Pen Samlah, or the face of the God of the Name (Shem), the prophet pillar Samuel, the son of Hannah, the fig-tree from which the phalli of Dionysus were madez. He is otherwise called Penuel, the face of God. This was the gnomon image of the young Dionysus, son of Semele or Samlath, the god of the conical towers of Penuel which Gideon destroyed. His successor was Shaul of Re’noboth by the river Euphrates, the squares and suburbs of Babylon, where Shaul or Shawul was the sun-god 1 2 3
Shaul was the Saul of Hebrew history consecrated by Samuel, who inaugurated his rule as god of the year by setting up as his monument the symbol of the hand of the five-day weeks 3. He is the pillar-chief of the prophet- priests of the Ephod, who was succeeded by the sun-god of the eight-rayed star-father of the later year-kings, the sun-god who drove his year chariot through the heavens, independently of the Pole Star, following the path marked out for him by the Zodiacal Stars. This was the sun-god Dod or Dodo, the beloved-one, the eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is called Baal Hanan in Gen. xxxvi. 38, and in 2 Samuel xxi. 19, xxiii. 24, El- hanan, the son of Dodo of Bethlehem, who slew the great Goliath, the chief of the Rephaim, or sons of the giant (Refiha), the star Canopus. In Genesis xxxvi. 38, he is called the son of Achbor, the mouse, that is of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse, and his name Baal Hanan means the merciful or pitying-god, the sun-physician, the Phceni-
1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 24, 25.
- Gen. xxxvi. 37, 3S ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect i. pp. 54, 55.
3   I Samuel xv. 12. The word monument in our version, the Hebrew jadh, means, as noted in the margin, a hand.
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cian Eshmun, the Greek healing-god ^Esculapius, the son of the Indian snake and sun-cock sacrificed to him. This god, who introduced the new form of solar worship, will form the subject of the next chapter.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:05:36 PM: BOOK III.
SOLAR WORSHIP.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FIFTEEN - MONTHS YEAR OF THE SUN-GOD OF THE
EIGHT-RAYED STAR AND THE EIGHT-DAYS WEEK.
THE period now arrived at in this review of the history of human progress and national education 'is one which discloses to us the completion of the stage of development occupying the epoch of lunar solar worship of the three- - years cycle and of the eleven-months years measured by weeks of nine and eleven days. The social organisation of this age of transition was still, as in the days of the Pleiades year, based on the system of village and provincial governments, which gave each village and province the control of its own affairs, provided they did not injure those of their neighbours. The diffusion of this underlying principle of public policy studded during this period the whole of India, the coast-lands on the North of the Indian Ocean, the villages of the Euphrates and Tigris, Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Asia Minor, with provinces formed by the union of village communities. In the most prosperous of these regions, those watered by the Indus, Nerbudda, Jumna and Ganges in India, and the Euphrates and Tigris in Mesopotamia, the groups of allied provinces, which had become incorporated as separate confederacies, were controlled by imperial princes who, as national law-givers, ruled the province forming the centre of each confederated association of united states. The city which was the headquarters of the central ruler became, like Kashi and Babylon, the parent-village of the confederacy, the site of the national
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High Place or Akropolis, and its most sacred shrine the altar of the great mother. Of this centralising theocracy Delphi, the womb (8e\<f>vs) of the Dorians, and Jerusalem, the holy mountain of the Semites, are the most conspicuous survivals. Under the control of these princes and their counsellors society was, in the ages through which it reached the stage at which we have now arrived, ruled by the village and provincial elders who, besides doing the every-day duties of government, superintended the education of each fresh generation of young men and women who were born as children of their respective villages. These were trained as successors to those who brought them up, and taught to continue their inherited policy of conservative veneration for the past and of careful and slow advance to new progressive improvements.
The original village organisation was, to a certain extent, succeeded by that of the commercial guilds which ' superintended all handicrafts and productive trades, and watched over and developed the internal interchange of local products conducted in the weekly markets and annual fairs held at selected sites distributed over the country. This supervision of internal commerce developed, as wealth and enterprise increased, into that of the foreign and maritime trade which followed the river and valley highways, and the ocean coasts. Under the guidance of these guilds the traders of India, known as the Tur-vasu, had penetrated into Persia, the Euphratean countries, Arabia, Egypt and Syria, and joined the descendants of the earlier Indian emigrants who had settled as farmers on the coasts of the Mediterranean. Thence they had passed through Greece and Italy to the extremities of Europe. In their advance they founded the village communities of the Neolithic Age which grew into inland cities and trading centres, such as Kashi and Takka-sila in the interior, and Tamra-lipti, Baragyza, Dwarika and Patala on the coasts of India; Eridu, Girsu and Haran or Kharran in Mesopotamia ; on the coasts of the Mediterranean Ashkelon, Jebail Gi-bil or Bil-gi,
3^4
History and ,Chro7iology
consecrated to the Akkadian fire-god Bil-gi, called by the Greeks Byb-los, apparently the earliest Phoenician port in Syria, Smyrna and Troy. In Greece Orchomenus, Tiryns, and the prehistoric Akropolis of Athens, Gnossos, the capital of Minos in Crete ; and in Italy the Umbrian port of Caere or Agylla, and the Tyrrhenian Tarquinium, the sacred city of Tarchon Tages or Terie’gh, the child who rose from the furrow as the son of the European form of the Indian year-mother Sita, the disseminator of the astronomy of his father Rama, and who was the child of the original snake constellation of Draco. These pioneers of maritime trade had also passed through Gades, the city of the apples of the Hesperides, and the Gates of Hercules to Britany, where their sepulchral mounds, menhirs, sun-circles and stone calendars show indubitable traces of their occupation of the coasts of the French Cornouaille, which were a stepping- stone to the tin lands of Cornwall, the ancient Kassiterides or tin islands.
Throughout the long series of ages fresh breeds and types of character had been formed by the intermingling of different stocks of emigrant races, but the process of growth had been generally peaceful till the arrival of the Northern sons of the sun-horse, who had taken possession as conquerors of the lands into which they introduced their new beliefs. They had by their arbitrary dealings with the people they subjugated prepared, during the age of the eleven- months year, the way for the revolution which was to end in the worship of the sun-god as the successor to the Pole Star.
It was to these military conquerors that the world owes the development of individual character begun among the North-western Goths or sons of the bull (gut or got), the race of cattle herdsmen who based their national organisation on family property, and divided their land not into village communities but into tracts owned by the families united to form tribal territories, as the village communities formed provinces.
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These men were the Teutonic Frisians and Saxons, described by Tacitus, who says of them1: “They cannot “ endure houses close to one another; scattered and separated “ they settle where attracted by a spring, a pasture, or a “grove. Their villages are not arranged as among us “Romans with united dependent buildings. Each man “ surrounds his house with an open courtyard, from fear of “ fire or ignorance how to build. They do not use stones “ or tiles, but employ a common material (kneaded clay), “without show or value.”
These people are essentially different from the Southern Suevi or Swabians, who, as Tacitus says2, “ have no private “ or separate fields with proper boundaries, and the magistrate and princes divide the land annually in proportion, “while the village tenants of the lord,” like the members of the Indian village community who do not belong to the official families, “ each occupies his own house, and pays “ a tribute of corn, cattle, and flax.”
Tacitus here describes a community like those of the Central and Southern Indian villages, which has reached the stage of cultivating common lands, for which rent is paid in kind, as described in Chapters IV. and V.
In the North-west provinces of India we find that the most common tenures are those of the Jat villages, in which each farmer cultivates with his family his own hof or house and farm garden and his compact fields, all forming one separate farm, and not intermixed with the holdings of their neighbours as in the communal village lands. In the lands of North-west Europe, where the prototype of these holdings has existed from time immemorial, several scattered farms form a Bauerschaft, which generally bears the name of the oldest and most honoured Hof. Its proprietor is called Hauptman, Headman, or Captain, and his house is the Recht Hof or Court of Judgment, the meeting-place of the tribe, analogous to, but differing from, the Gemeinde Haus
1 Tacitus, Germania, 16.   2 Ibid., 25, 26.
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of the communal village, which is common and not individual property. This Bauerschaft of the Low Germans is similar to the Bratsvo or community of brothers of the Southern Slavs, as described by Schrader x.
Each Bratsvo owns a landed estate, of which each family owns a definite and compact portion. The number of men capable of bearing arms in a Bratsvo vary from about thirty to eight hundred, and the families to which they belong occupy one or more villages like the Uchelwyr and Bonne- digion, the corresponding class among the Goidelic Celts. They fight side by side in battle, and their leader is chosen by the Bratsvenici.
These people, the Goths of Gothland, the Getae of the Balkan country and Asia Minor, became in India the Jats or Cheroos who hold Pattidari villages divided into different shares of land held by each family forming the village community. They, like the Getae of Armenia, described by Herodotus i. 216, worshipped the sun-god, to whom they offered horses. The Jats in India are divided into the Dhe Jats, called the Pachades or comers from the West (pack), and the Hele or Deshwali Jats, dwellers in the country {desk), who worship the god Ram, who has the plough for his weapon. They, like the ancient Hebrew sons of Shem, the Name, preserve the family and national history in the form of a mythic genealogy, prepared by bards called Jagas or Bhats. It was originally a history framed on principles similar to the recited chronicles of the priestly successors or assistants to the village elders, the priests called Prashastri or keepers of records which were verbal and not written. These became, as the careful preparation and remembrance of the original divine poems died out, under the rule of the Dhe Jats, the Brythonic followers of the Goidels, the family histories of distinguished individuals claimed as ancestors by the Brython tribes. It was these bards who took the place first assigned 1
1 Jevon, Schrader’s Prehistoric Antiquities of Aryans, Part iv., chap, xii., sect. iii. p. 397.

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in the primitive constitutions to the teaching village elders. ^ The original or Hele Jats are also called Bhatti, or men of the bards, and Malwa Jats. They are the descendants of the latest immigrant Malli tribes, who gave their name to Malwa and Multan or Malli-thana, the place of the Mallis. It was while besieging this town in his war with the Malli and Kathaei or Kathi that Alexander the Great was woundedI. It was a great centre of sun-worship, and it was hither that, according to the Bhavishya Purana Samba, son of Krishna, which may be a representative name denoting the Shambara or Parthian men of the javelin, brought Magi from Saka- dwipa, or the land of Seistan, to officiate in the temple of the sun at Multan 2 3 4.
The present chief representatives of these Malwa Jats in the Punjab are the Rajas of Putiala, Nabha and Jind, all of whom trace their descent to the Jat confederacy originally settled at Mahraj in the Ferozepur district. Their institutions were thoroughly republican, somewhat like those of the Spartans, for when they came under British protection they were not governed by Rajas but by a Panchayat Council of elders, like the Spartan Ephors chosen by the 6,728 Jat free-holders 3. These are the ruling officers said in the Mahabharata to be provincial governors. “ The five brave and wise men employed in the five offices of protecting the city, the citadel, the merchants and agriculturists, and punishing criminals 4.” Confederacies such as these were so careful of their independence that, like the people of Khytul belonging to the Mahraj group of states, they would not admit a tax-collector into their city, but paid their land revenue or rent over the wall ; and they were most particular in isolating themselves from their neighbours. Thus the Jat village of
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Multan, p. 23S.
1 A. Weber, India a?id the West in Old Days, p. 20 ; Hewitt, Early History of Northern India, Tart ii. J.R.A.S., 1SS9, pp. 226, 250.
3 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 42 ; Hunter, Gazetteer, Mahraj, vol. ix. p. 184.
4   Mahabharata Sabha (Lokapdlasabhd-hhyana) Parva, v. p. 17,
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Jagraon in the Ludhiana district was divided into eight Pattis or wards, Jagraon being in the centre ; and it and the seven circumjacent Pattis were all carefully fortified against each other1. These precautions recall the days when similar rivalry and isolation separated the dwellers on the seven hills of Rome, and when, as we have seen, the men of the quarter of the Palatine Via Sacra fought with those of the Suburra for the possession of the head of the horse sacrificed as the old year’s horse at the Equiria. These customs, though they are permeated with the spirit of Northern isolation, yet show that those who lived under them had so far lost their original dread of contact with neighbours, who were possible foes, the “ hostes ” who were in Latin speech both enemies and strangers, as to live in walled towns and to borrow the Dravidian village institutions, which entrusted the rule of the community to the village elders.
Hence we see that though the Finno-Celts established their supremacy in the lands in which they settled by war and violence, and by trying to trample underfoot the customs of the aboriginal inhabitants, yet they gradually amalgamated with them and instituted the habit of intermarriages, which were first preceded by the forcible capture of the daughters of the land. In these marriages the union between the old and new settlers was made binding by intermingling the blood of the alien married partners. In the societies which grew up from this interfusion of races, the various modifications of the year-reckoning and the national ritual set forth in previous Chapters were evolved; but in all these, as we have seen, the primaeval beliefs held a conspicuous place; and the national histories represented the gods of the new ritual as directly descended from the first parents of the village races ; and everywhere the cloud- mother-bird Khu and the father-tree-ape were looked on as the ancestors of the new sun-god. In pursuance of this system we shall now see that the sun-god born as the ruler 1 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 52.
of the Myth-Making Agt»
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of this epoch was the son of the Thigh of the ape-father begotten from the cloud-bird-mother, who, as mother of the sun-physician yEsculapius, was as Koronis, first the raven-mother and afterwards the annual garland of flowers born from the successive months of the year.
A. The birth of the Sun-god born of the Thigh.
The origin of this year of the son of the Thigh, adopted by these amalgamated Northern and Southern races after the year of eleven months, is distinctly explained in the Brahmanas in the instructions for lighting the fire on the year-altar. The first sacrificial fire kindled was that on the altar made in the form of a woman, and during its ignition eleven Samidheni or kindling stanzas were recited to the eleven gods ruling the eleven months of the year, those invoked in the eleven stanzas of the Apr! hymns. But the ritual marking the supersession of the eleven- months year of the head of the sun-horse of night by that dedicated to the sun-god of day tells us in the only signification that can be given to the words of the Brahmanas, that the change of year-reckonings was one from Pole Star to sun-worship, and that this was a natural evolution of the new from the old year.
This is the obvious meaning of the new rule introduced by the innovators, that in kindling the sacrificial fires of this year the eleven Samidheni stanzas were to be recited as in the old ritual, but the first and last were each to be repeated thrice to make fifteen the number of months in the new year. These stanzas were to be in the GayatrT metre of eight syllables in the line, and each of the fifteen contained three of these lines or twenty-four syllables. Hence the Samidheni hymn of fifteen stanzas was an epitomised description of this year of fifteen months, pach of twenty-four days, and three eight-day weeksl. Thus this year contained only 24 x 15, or three hundred and sixty
1   Eggeling, Sal. Brahi. 3, 5, 4—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 97 note.
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days instead of the three hundred and sixty-three days of the eleven-months year.
In order to realise the causes of this change, which was a reversal from the more correct year of Dadhiank to the Orion year of three hundred and sixty days, we must trace out the history of the revolution, and this we shall find in that of the parentage of the sun-god. He was called in all the mythologies of that age the son of the Thigh, that is of the Thigh of Set, the constellation of the Great Bear, the parent constellation of the Kushika who invaded India from the North, and which they called the seven Rishis or antelopes. This constellation ruled both the three-years cycle and the eleven-months year, and in the latter it was associated with Pegasus, the four stars of Pegasus being united with the seven stars of the Great Bear to symbolise its eleven months.
But in the present year the sun-god, the Phoenician Esh- mun or eighth god, the Hindu Ashtaka, with the same meaning were substituted for the four stars of Pegasus, the four sons of Horus, and these eight gods ruled the eight- days week of this year, as the eleven stars of Pegasus and the Great Bear had ruled the eleven-days week of the previous year. This new god, the Phoenician Eshmun, the Akkadian Eshshu, was worshipped in Cyprus and Rhodes as Paian the healer, the sun-physician, and in the latter island his shrine on Mount Atabyrios was called that of Zeus Paian. This mountain is a reproduction of the Phoenician Mount Tabor 1 near the Sea of Galilee, on which hill of the oak-tree, the parent-tree of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, Saul prophesied after he had found the asses of his father; the ass-sun-gods which drew the car of the Ashvins and Ravana of the cycle-year, and had been received by Samuel, as sun-king of the age of Ephod worship, at Ram ah, the High-place consecrated to Ram, the sun-god. It was at Ramah that he was declared to be the son of the Thigh, that
1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 226, 26, Appius, xii. 27.
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of the victim put on his plate as the thigh of the god of the dead yearz. But this was the right thigh of the sun-father- god given to the Jewish prophet-priests of the house of Kohath 2 and not the left, sacred to the Pole Star god, given, as we have seen in Chapter VI. pp. 332, 333, to the father-god, rider on the sun-horse, after the birth of the “child of the majesty of Indra.” To trace the history of the god born of the Thigh we must go back to the' Mahabharata, where this god called Aurva, the son of the Thigh (uru), is said to be the son of Chyavana. Chyavana, whose name means “the moving one,” was the personified fire-drill whose wife is called in the Mahabharata the daughter of Manu Arushi, the red one, the glowing fire-socket kindled by the fire-drill 3. In the Satapatha Brahmana she is called Su-konya, the daughter (konya) of Su, the mother-bird. Her father is Sharyata, the Manava or son of Manu, the god of the arrow (sharya), that is of the year-god Orion, who, as Krishanu the drawer of the bow, slew at the winter solstice the Shyena or frost {shya) bird, the year-mother-bird from whom the sun-god of Orion’s year of the Palasha-tree was to be bom. In short, Su-konya is a reproduction of the Shyena or bird- mother of Orion’s year.
Her marriage to Chyavana was the work of the Ashvins, the twin-stars Gemini, who made Chyavana, the aged kindler of the fires of Orion’s year, young again by bathing him in the Pool of Regeneration, that is by causing him to be reborn from the living waters of the mother-ocean as the sun-god of the year they ruled. This is the pool symbolised in the story of the birth of the Lycian sun-god Apollo, born of Leto the tree-trunk by the yellow-river Xanthus, in which his mother bathed him at his birth. He thus became the sun-god of the race of the united North and South twins, the Kathi or Hittites, the Indian Yadava and Turvasu. It was on accomplishing this marriage of the rejuvenated sun- 1
1 I Samuel ix., x. 1—13.   = 1 Samuel ix. 24 ; Levit. vii. 32.
3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191.
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father that the Ashvins were, according to the Satapatha Brahmana, allowed to drink Soma with the gods, and the Soma they drank was the honey-drink of which the mystery was taught them by Baahiank, the god of the year of the horse’s head *.
At the sacrifice inaugurating the year of their reception the Bahish-pavamana stotra is recited. This is the chant of the outside (bullish) drizzling or pure Soma, the heavensent rain. It is to this Soma Pavamana that all the hymns of the Ninth Mandala of the Rigveda are addressed, and he is called (ix. 107, 15) the god-king who with his waves takes the holy offerings across the sea. In other words, he is primarily the wind-god, driver of the clouds, who clears the air for the path of the sun-god.
But the ritual gives us better insight into the inner meaning of this chant than we can gain from the interpretation of its title, for it was with this chant that the gods summoned the Ashvins2, and therefore it had a special historical significance. It consists of nine lines in the Gayatri eight%yllabled metre consecrated, as we have seen, to this year, and therefore of 72 syllables. That is to say, it is a year-hymn telling of the union in the year of the Gayatri eight-days week of the nine-days week of the cycle-year with the 72 five-day weeks of the Pleiades and Orion’s year 3.
Thus we find in this ritualistic cryptogram, as well as in the kindling hymn, most striking proofs that the authors of this chanted ritual, written in the lilting Gayatri eight- syllabled metre, that employed by the earliest Vedic writers, used it, which has been reproduced in the Greek Anacreontic metre, as a memoria technica for the preservation of the memory of the epochs of the world’s history ear-marked by the successive methods of reckoning annual time.
But this is not all the historical information given by the ritual of the Bahishpavamana hymn, which summoned the
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. i, 5, 1 — iS; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 272—277.
2   Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 13; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 275.
3   Ibid., iv. 2, 5, 10; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 310, note 1.

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stars Gemini to the assembly of the gods who ruled time at the New Year’s feast of the marriage of the rejuvenated year-father to the mother-year-bird.
This hymn of invitation, which recognised the twin ruling- stars of the eleven-months year as the agents who introduced the new sun-year of the eight-days week, was recited at the Chatvala pit, whence the earth for the Uttaravedi or northern altar was taken. This is outside the limits of the consecrated Soma ground at its north-east corner, the rising point of the sun at the summer solstice *. The altar for which the earth was taken from the pit was the square* earth-altar of Varuna, which was, as we have seen, first covered with sheaves of Kusha grass, and afterwards, when used in the ritual of the animal sacrifices, with branches of the Plaksha-tree {ficus infectoria).
This latter covering was placed on the altar when the omentum and heart of the living victims slain were roasted at it, after they had been slain outside the consecrated Soma ground close to the Chatvala pit. It was on this altar, reconsecrated for animal sacrifices by the Plaksha branches, that the triangle, made of Pitadaru wood (Pinns deodard), was substituted for the triangle made of Palasha twigs {Butea frondosa) placed round the navel of this symbol of the divine mother of life.
The Chatvala pit was especially associated with the ritual which looked on the year as a recurring series of ceremonial sacrifices marking its progress; and it was into this pit that at the Samishtayajus ceremonies at the end of the annual Soma sacrifices there were thrown the throne {,asatidi) of the Soma year-king, the Udumbaii {Fiats glomerata) supporting pillar of the house (.sadas) of the year-gods, the Dronakalasa or hollowed tree-trunk in which the Soma sap of the year-tree was stored. These were afterwards transferred to the mother-water or temple-pool. Together with these the sacrificer threw into the pit his
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brail., iv. 2, 5,9, iii. 5, I, 26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 309, 116, notes 1 and 3.
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year-girdle of three strands, signifying the three seasons of the year, and the black deer’s horn he wore at the end of his sacrificial surplice as a reminiscence of the original year of the black antelope x. The ceremonies performed at the Chatvala recognised the beginning and end of a year opening with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice, that is the year of the Northern god of the rising, not the Southern god of the setting sun; and this year was, as we have seen, that of three seasons and six-day weeks described in Chapter IV. Hence the New Year sacrifice which deified the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, who brought the sun-maiden or Pole Star bird as bride to the moon-god, and worshipped them as the twin door-posts of the House of God, included that year as well as the earlier years recalled in the Bahish-pavamana chant. In the ritual of the year’s cups assigned to the ruling deities of the months of this new year the tenth cup was allotted to the Ashvins as the gods of the three-years cycle 2.
To bring the ritualistic historical record down to the Gayatrl year another chant of eleven verses was added to the Bahish-pavamana. The first of these stanzas is called Shiras, the head, and the second Grivah, the neck, thus showing it to be a year-hymn of the eleven-months year of the horse’s neck. This chant is called the head of the sacrifice offered by Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head, that is to say, it proclaimed the sacrifice to be one to the ruling-god of the eleven-months years, the year ruled by the Thigh constellation of the Great Bear. Plence this lengthy analysis of the ritual of this most significant marriage of the year-gods Chyavana and Su-konya, brought about by the Ashvins, shows that its initial ceremonies conveyed to the initiated a complete history of time records, as disclosed
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., iv. 4, 5, 2, iii. 2, 1, 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 379, notes 2 and 3, 29, 30.
2 Ibid.,iv. 1, 5, 16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 278.
3 Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 15, xiv. I, 1, 18—24 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276, note I, xliv. pp. 444, 445.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:06:12 PM: 395
by the various official years measured up to the close of the eleven-months year, including the year of the Pleiades Orion and the three-years cycle.
The year that was now begun was that which forms the subject of this Chapter, and we shall see that in its history the opening month of the year was always that Til which the sun was in Gemini.
In addition to the history of the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya given in the Brahmanas, there is another variant form in the Rigveda marriage - hymn telling of the union of Suria, the sun-maiden, born of the bird'Su to the moon- god Soma, the rejuvenated Chyavana. In this poem the wedding oxen were slain in Magh (January—February), when, as we shall see, the year began, and the marriage was consummated in Arjuna or Phalgun (February—March) ending with the vernal equinox. That is to say, the ritualistic record of the year extends from about 10,200 B.C., when the sun entered Gemini in January—February, to 8200 B.C., and after this to the time when the sun was in Gemini in February—March, about 6200 B.C. The Ash- vins brought the bride to this wedding in their threewheeled car made of Palasha (.Kimshuka, Butea frondosa) and Shalmali wood of the cotton-tree (Bombax Heptaph- ylla) *. After the wedding the bridegroom assumes his wife’s clothes (v. 30), showing that it is a marriage of the sexless moon-god with the maiden of the central fire of heaven, the year-bird tending the fire of the never setting or dying Pole Star as the mistress of the House of God, the vault of heaven. She was the Vestal priestess of the navel-fire on the altar, that of Hercules Sandon and Omphale. The united pair who are to give birth to the sexless sun-god of this year, who was, as we have seen, Aurva, the son of the Thigh, are compared in the hymn to the months of the eleven-months year, the ten sons she is to bear to her sexless lord, and he himself as the eleventh 1
1 Kg. x. 85, 8—20.
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(v. 45). These are the months symbolised by the seven stars of the Thigh and the four stars in Pegasus.
We must now return to the story of Aurva, the offspring of this union, as told in the Mahabharata. In the Chaitra- ratha Parva neither his mother or father are named, but she is said to be one of the Bhrigus who were being ruthlessly slaughtered by the Kshatriyas just before the birth of her son. They were the savage conquerors of the age of the eleven-months year, which is further identified as that in which Aurva was conceived by the statement that the nascent god cast the fire of his wrath into the ocean, where it became the head of the sun-horse called Vadavamukha, he who speaks with the left (ivama), that is with the distorted mouth of the Pole Star messenger whose circuits of the heavens are left-handed, the god of the year reckoned by methods different from those used by the ancestors of the indigenous dwellers on the land.
It was at the birth of Aurva that his counterpart Para- shara, the overhanging cloud, son of Shaktri, the god Sakko, son of Vashishtha, who ruled the thirty-three gods of the eleven-months year, became the sun-god of day and performed the great sacrifice in which the gods of the stellar lunar era of Pole Star worship were destroyed, and his father Shaktri sent up to heaven as a star-god *.
He then became, as we learn from the astronomy of the Manvantara, one of the stars of the Great Bear, called Ur-ja, born (ja) of the Thigh (Uru), his full name being Urja- Stambha, the pillar (stambha) of the thigh-born sun-god, the golden pillar Boaz of the Phoenician temples. This list of the fourteen star-parents, headed by Urja-Stambha, is a second edition of the first Manvantara or period of Manu, the astronomical reckoner. In this original list the first of the fourteen parent-stars marking the period of the creating lunar phases is the Svayambhara, the self-begotten1 2, the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxx.—clxxxii., pp. 512-519.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chaps, xliv., xlv. pp. 387, 394.
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Pole Star god, who was originally, as we have seen, Kepheus or Kapi, the ape-god who is worshipped by the Sabaeans as “ the ancient light, the divinely self-created r.”
This sun-god, born of the thigh of the Pole Star ape-god, is, in Greek mythology, Dionysos, son of Semele, the Phoenician goddess Pen-Samlath, the face (gen) of the Name (Shem) of God, the Samlah of Masrekah, the wine-land in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 36, 37. His father was Zeus in his form of the ape-god of the mud (tan), the Cretan Tan, the Carthaginian and Phoenician Tanais or Tanit, the female, and therefore the earliest form of this male parent-god. She is called by Strabo the equivalent of the Zend mother-goddess Anahita, the parent- cloud, the springs whence the Euphrates rose, the Zend form of the Vedic goddess Vrisha-kapT, the rain-ape, wife of Indra1 2 3 4. He was born prematurely, but was taken up by his father and sewn in his thigh, that is to say, he was first, as in the Hindu mythology of the Mahabharata, the son of the Thigh of the mother-ape, the stars of the Great Bear.
When born he passed through two stages. First he was the sun-maiden, a girl brought up by Athamas, or Dumu-zi, Tammuz the star Orion, and Ino the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician Melkarth, the sun-god-master of the city (Karth) 3, the god Ar-chal or Herakles. When Athamas and Ino were made mad by Here, the goddess of stellar lunar time, the Greek form of the madness of Kalmashapada, the god of the eleven-months year of Chapter VI., this maiden- goddess was changed into the sun-ram of the ship Argo, and brought up by the nymphs of Nysa, who became the Hyades4, the companion stars to the Pleiades, the third in the list of the Hindu Nakshatra. That is to say, he was
1   Ilewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,v ol. ii., Essay viii., p. 161.
2 Movers, Die Plionizicr, vol. i. pp. 617, 61S, Strabo, xi. p. 432 ; Kg. x. S6.
3 It is to be noted that this Phoenician Karth, the Hebrew Kiriath, is the same word as the Celtic Caer, for city ; the name is therefore one pointing to the Celtic elements in the population of Semitic cities.
4   Smith, Classical Dictionary, Dionysos, p. 226.
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Histoiy and Chronology
in the second form of his birth the sun-goddess of the age of the supremacy of the- mother-goddesses, when Semele, the counterpart of Artemis, called Arktos, the goddess of the Great Bear, was ruler of heaven. He was the Dionysos Nuktelios, the night-sun, the Arcadian god of the lower world, the realm ruled by the Southern sun of the winter solstice, the god bom when the sun was in the Hyades, that is in Taurus, in the midst of which they stand at the winter solstice, that is about 10,200 B.C., at the same time when the sun was in Gemini in January—February.
It was at the winter solstice that he was worshipped in the festivals of the lesser Dionysos in Poseidon (December— January). These were held to celebrate the return of Dionysos from the lower world, whither he had gone to bring back the sun-mother Semele, and at Pellene his return was acclaimed by a feast of torches, like that offered to the Pleiades mother Demeter in October—November.   This
Dionysos festival was held in the grove of Artemis Soteira, the Great Bear goddess, the healing female physician x.
At Megara this festival was held in the Akropolis consecrated to Car, the Carian Zeus of the double axe, the two lunar crescents1 2 3 4. At these Dionysiac festivals held in Argolis on the Alcyonian lake, and at Cynethaea in Arcadia, r a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called on to rise up out of .the lake as the bull sun-god of spring3.
It was to him as the spring-god that the festival of the Lenaea or wine-press was held in Gamelion (January— February), the month of the marriage (ya/io?) of Here and Zeus, the beginning of this year. This Pausanias tells us was held at Migonium in Laconia, on a mountain called Larysium, sacred to Dionysos 4, and it, like the slaying of the Magh (January—February) wedding oxen in the Vedic marriage of Suria and Soma, was followed by the Anthesteria
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 27, 1, vol. i. p. 371.
2   Ibid., i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 61, vol. ii. p. 525.
3   Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. 302, 303.
4   Ibid., iii. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 170,

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of the 12th of Anthesterion (February—March), the Hindu Arjuna or Phalgun, when the marriage was consummated T.
In another Greek story of the bull of Dionysos he is said to have been the son of Persephone, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, when she was violated by Zeus. This is the exact reproduction of the Hindu story which tells of the birth of Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house (?vastos), the god of the household fire, from this star called RohinT, when she was violated by her father Prajapati Orion. This first form of Dionysos was called Zagreus, born as a hunter with a bull’s head. This god, under the two names of Dionysos and Zagreus, was slain by the Titans, and was eaten by them as the totem bull man-god at the human and animal sacrifices of the rituals of the cycle-year and that of eleven months. His remains were buried under the Omphalos or navel of the tripod altar of the cycle-year 2.
This god born of the Thigh was the sun-god, the <f child of the Majesty of Indra,” born at the Ekashtaka or marriage day, the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January —February), which I have already described in Chapter VI. p. 332, at whose birth the left thigh was offered 3.
He was also the Greek ploughing and sowing-god Triptolemus. He and his brother Zeus Eubouleus, Zeus of good counsel, are said by Pausanias to be traditionally the sons of Celeus or Coeleus, the hollow heaven, or of a brother of Celeus Dysaules. This latter name, as Mr. Frazer has shown, is properly Disaules, he who ploughs
1   The Anthesteria or Festival of Recall (aradeotraodai) was a three days New Year’s Feast beginning with the Pitiioigia, when the souls of the dead issued from the sacred cleft called Pithoi or casks, the Indian Drona or hollowed tree-trunk of the mother-tree. They were greeted on the second day with Choai libations. It was a reproduction in a new year-reckoning of the Hindu New Year’s Festival of the autumnal equinox, when the Pitaro Barishadah were called to sit on the Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass. Harrison, Pandora's Box; Verrall, The Name Anthesteria, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. 1900, pp. 102—no, 116.
2   Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. ii., Orphica, p. 302 ; Frazer, Pan- sanias, vol. iv, p. 143.
3   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Paraskara, Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, 1—10; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 342, 344.
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   Brihaspati
Vishva- devah
Indra
twice, a name ‘like that of Trisaules, he who ploughs thrice I.
In the Satapatha Brahmana we find a complete explanation of the assignment of this name to the year-god. In the ritual of the Rajasuya, the coronation rite of the Indian kings, the last of the ceremonies is the series of observances which begin with the oblation of the Dasapeya or ten cups offered to the gods of the year of the months of gestation, the year ending with the tenth cup, which, as we have seen on p. 394, was offered to the Ashvins. The second sacrifice of this series is that called the Panchabila, an offering presented on a square platter with five divi-   N
sions, as in this diagram. In the East or North-east division there is a cake on eight potsherds for Agni, the god of this W year of the eight-day weeks. In the South or South-east division a cake on eleven potsherds for Indra, the god of   S
the eleven-months year and eleven-days week. A bowl of rice gruel for the Vishvadevah is placed in the Southwest division consecrated to the sun-bird, beginning the year with the setting sun of the winter solstice; and a dish of curds, the curdled milk of the hot summer season, is' placed in the Northern or North-west division sacred to Mitra Varuna, the twin-gods ruling the summer solstice when the rainy season (var) begins. In the central division is placed a bowl of rice gruel for Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, and with this is mixed part of the offerings to the other four year-gods. This centre-god is called “ the white-backed bullock,” the Pole Star ruling the path of Aryaman, the star Capella in the charioteer constellation Auriga, which, as we shall see, drove the year-car of the sun-god of this year 2.
These ceremonies close with the oblation of teams, the twelve cups offered to the twelve months of Orion’s year at the ploughing festival. This took place among the Kuru-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, 2, ii. 14, 3, viii. 15, 4, vol. i. pp. 20,91, 303, iii. p. 81.
2 Eggeling, Sat, Brah., v. 5, x, 1—12 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 120—123.
of the MytJi-Making Age.
401
Panchalas, the Kurus or Kauravyas united with the Panchala men of the five (panch1) days week. It was held in this year in the early spring or dewy season, that is at the New Moon of Magh (January—February), when the dews which cease in the hot season are still plentiful. It was originally a festival of the winter solstice beginning at the New Moon of Push (December—January), when Pushan was wedded to the sun’s daughter, but in the age of the birth of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, about 10,000 B.C., the year began when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, that is in January—February, and hence the annual ploughing beginning the year was transferred to that month. The plough was driven by the king, who is directed to plough a line forward or northward to represent the Northern course of the sun reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice when the rains begin, and he is to return again southwards when he ploughs the second furrow, representing the sun returning again to the South at the end of six monthsI. In the ploughing of the Magh (January—February) year the first six-months furrow was that ending in July—August.
Hence Triptolemus, the plougher of the two furrows, was originally the ploughing-god of the two seasons of the solstitial sun, who was also called, as the year-god of Orion’s year of three seasons, Trisaules, or the god Qf three plough - ings. In this form he is represented in ancient Greek monuments as standing between Demeter, the barley-mother, originally representing the first six months of the year beginning in November or December, and Persephone, the six months beginning in May or June. When the year was divided into three seasons, each of four months or twenty- four five-day weeks, the centre season or summer, when the sun was in the North, was assigned to him. Hence he received from Demeter the gift of a car, the seven-starred northern chariot of the Great Bear, drawn by dragons, the stars of the constellation Draco2. This god of the dragon-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bruh., v. 5, 2, 1—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 123, 124.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, I, vol. i. p. 20, ii. p. 11S, iv. p. 142.
D d
402

car, the thigh of the ape-god, taught Eumelus, the builder of the ploughing (ar) city of Aroe, to sow grain, and instructed Areas, the son of Kallisto the Great Bear mother, in the cultivation of corn, the baking of bread, the weaving of garments, and the spinning of woolI.
It was as the sowing-god who sowed the furrow of heaven, the Indian goddess STta, that Triptolemus became the Etruscan god Tages or Terie’gh, the wise child who was ploughed from the earth in the city of Tarchon (Tarquinii), who civilised the people of Etruria as he had civilised those of Arcadia. His Etruscan images represent him as a legless and armless god, with a lozenge-shaped body terminating in a point, and above this a second face is depicted, so that he has, like the sun-god, a Northern and Southern face. He wears on his breast the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solstitial sun 2.
His counterpart, Zeus Eubuleus, was, like Triptolemus, a partner of Demeter and Persephone in a triad of pig-gods. A sow pregnant for the first time was offered to Demeter, an uncut boar to Persephone, and a sucking-pig to Eubuleus. Thus he was the son of the two year-mothers, the young boar-god, the sun of the winter solstice, as Triptolemus was the sun of summer. It was to these three pig-gods that pigs were thrown into the serpents’ pit at the Thesmophoria festival beginning the Pleiades year 3. We find another phase of the history of the worship of the sun-god born of the Thigh in the story of Jacob. He came to the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, after he left Harran or Kharran, the half-way city of the road (kharran) from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, where the god was Laban, the white god “ of the brick foundations of heaven,” the god of the lunar-solar-gods of the year of the bee-hive palace of the three-years cycle. He had with him, as we are expressly told in Genesis xxxii. 22, his four wives: (1) Leah, the wild cow (le) with the tender eyes, the counter-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 18, 2, viii. 4, 1, vol. i. pp. 354, 376.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 96, 98.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. pp. 118, 119, v. p. 29.

403
part of the three-eyed Samirus of Babylon and the Hindu Shiva, the mother of six sons and a daughter, the seven children of the Great Bear mother of the cow-born race ; (2) Rachel, the ewe, the mother of Joseph, or Asipu, the interpreter-god of the eleven-months year, who is to become the mother of the sun-ram ; (3) Billah, the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god-mother of the Danava sons of Danu; and (4) Zilpah, the foot of the snake (tsir), a form of Zillah or Tsir-lu, wife of Lamech or Lingal. She was the mother of the fish-sun-god Ashur, who was Assur, the supreme god of the Assyrians, the Hindu Ashadha ruling the summer solstice. Besides these four wives, the four seasons of the eleven-months year, he had with him these eleven months in the eleven children spoken of in this narrative of his contest with the god of the Thigh.
Before crossing the Jabbok, he passed the night at Penuel, the place of the face (pen) of God, the female image of the mother-goddess, the Indian Pennu, the Great Bear, queen of Heaven of the Brythonic Celts. She appeared to him at night, and he wrestled with this goddess of the Thigh till the sun rose, and he found himself transformed into the sun-god, born from the left thigh of the Pole Star ape, who was conceived during the age when the priests who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder bent the left knee to the moon-goddess ruling the yearT, and not the right knee, bent when the sacrificial cord was worn on the left shoulder. Henceforth the sinew of his left thigh was dried up as the virtue had gone out of it, and the right thigh became the offering given to the priests of the sun-god of Benjamin, the son of the ewe-mother of the sun- ram, and the father or ancestor of Saul or Shawul, to whom the right thigh was given at his consecration festival1 2. It was after this transformation that Jacob met his brother Esau, the goat-god of the green pillar, and became his ^colleague as
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 1,2; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 361.
2   Gen. xxxii. 22—32 ; Levit. vii. 32; 1 Samuel ix. 24.
l)d 2
404

the golden pillar of the sun-god. After this meeting1 Jacob passed over Jordan and came to Succoth, the place of booths, where the tent-festival of Tabernacles inaugurating the New Year was held.
His passing over Jordan is, as I have shown in Chapter V. pp. 229, 230, significant, for it tells us that he became the son, not of the Euphrates, the Nahr or channel-river of the Pole Star, but of the yellow (yareh) moon-river, the river-mother of Omphale, daughter of Iardanus 2, the navel-fire of the altar and the goddess of the phallic worship of the sexless god Herakles Sandon who wore her clothes. Her father was the river looked on as the national parent-stream of the Phoenician Minyans, the archers of Kudon in the west of Crete, who were most noted bowmen, the picked archers of the Kushika sons of the bow and the antelope. They were the sons of Teucer, son of the mountain and sheep- mother Ida, whose daughter became wife to Dardanus, who was, as we have seen, the antelope sun-god of Troy, and it was Teucer who brought the worship of Apollo-Smintheus, the mouse-god, from Crete to Troy 3. These sons of Iardanus were, according to Pausanias vi. 21, 5, sons of the Idaean Herakles of the Dactyli or priests of the five-days week, and their goddess-mother was the Cydonian Athene, that is of the original tree-mother whose history has been traced in previous chapters 4. They took the name of their sacred river to Elis in Greece, where it was an ancient name of the river on which Phaea, called after the sow Phaea, destroyed by Theseus, stood. Its name meant the shining- moon-city, and it was taken by Nestor 5. The river Iardanus was, in the time of Pausanias, called the Acidas 6. It was as the son of this moon-river that Jacob became god of the eleven-months year while he dwelt in Shechcm, the then
1   Genesis xxxiii. 17.   2 Herod, i. 7.
3   Homer, Od., iii. 292; Hor., Carm. iv. 9, 17 ; Smith, Classical Dictionary, Cydonia, p. 200, Teucer, p. 754.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 21, 5, vol. i. p. 317.
s Homer, Iliad, vii. 135 ; Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. p. 70.
£ Frazer, Pausanias, v. 5, 5, vol. i. p. 243.
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capital of the lands of Ephraim, the men of the two ashes (ephra), the united Northern and Sonthern races, sons of Joseph. It was at Shechem that the Hivite villagers, the Rephaim first settlers in the land, were circumcised. This ceremony was apparently a variant form of the circumcision of the united races performed by Hoshea, the leader of the Ephraimites, sons of Joseph, when he joined Caleb, the dog- star, in robbing the treasury of the bees, and established the eleven-months year.
Prom Shechem Jacob went to Luz, the place of the almond {luz) tree, the nut-tree of the Toda sons of the bull, and parent-tree of the Kohathite priests, and also, as we shall see, of the sun-god of this year. At Luz, which he called Bethel, the place of the pillar of God, Jacob buried the idols of the night-gods of his former worship. From thence he passed on to Bethlehem, where the sun-god of this year, Benjamin, the god of the right hand, was born simultaneously with the death of his mother, Rachel, the ewe-mother of Joseph, the god of the eleven-months year, who wore the star coat of many colours I.
The son of the right hand was born as the sun-god of the worshippers of the Pole Star of the North, now represented by the Sabsean Mandaites, who in worshipping the Pole Star turn their faces to the North, and who have thus the rising sun of the East on their right hand and not on their left, like the Harranites, who face southwards while worshipping2. This is the position of the Roman augurs, whose parent-god was the mother-tree of the South. The Sabsean Mandaites in their annual service inaugurating their year, fix the hour by referring to the position of the Great Bear and the Pole Star, and mark their connection with the age of the sexless gods by substituting a wether for the earlier ram offered on New Year’s Day 3.
1   Genesis xxxiii. 16—xxxv., xxxvii. 3, 4.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xix., Festivals of the Moslems, p. 329.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Sabsean New Year’s Ritual, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 159—164.
40 6

The birth-place of the sun-god, son of the right hand, was Bethlehem, also called Ephrata, the place of the ashes or shrine of the dead faiths of the past. It was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 154, the house of Lehem, the Akkadian twin gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu, the offspring of Lakh, the Akkadian form of the Median and Hindu Ragh the sun-god. It was there, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, that the annual festival of the death and rebirth of Tam muz or Dumu-zi, the year-god Orion, was held.
It was at this ancient shrine of Boaz, the golden pillar, that the new sun-god, rising on the right hand in the East, was born as the son of the left thigh, and he who was first Saul or Shawul, the heirless sun-god of the tribe of Benjamin, who had lost the asses that used to draw his father’s car, was succeeded by David or Dodo the Beloved, who is named as the national god on the Moabite stone, who was the eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is the eighth son of the Thigh, but of the right not the left thigh, the god born not of the sexless gods of the lunar era of the bisexual parent fig-tree, but of the male and female pair, the two trees of the mother Tamar, the date- palm-tree which only bears fruit when the flower of the female-tree has been fertilised by the pollen of the flower of the male tree. As parent of the son of the Thigh, Ishai is also called Nahash, the plough-snake (nahur), the god of the constellation of the Great Bear, the Arabic Nagash, the Indian Nahusha, the Gond Nagur. As Nahush he is the father of Zeruiah the Cleft, the goddess Tirhatha and Abigail, she whose father (ah) is Exaltation, the daughter of the inspired prophet of the gnomon-stone r. He is also called Dodo of Bethlehem, father of El Hanan the merciful, which is, as we have seen on p. 380, the name of David in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi., so that Dodo the son of the Thigh was son of himself, the self-begotten- god2. It was this El Hanan who slew Goliath, son of
1 x Chron. ii. 16, 17 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 25.
2 1 Chron. xi. 26; 2 Sam. xxiii. 24.

407
Rapha, the giant god of the Rephaim, and his brother Lahmi, a form of Lakhmu, to whom Beth - Lehem was dedicated I. He slew them with five stones out of the brook, their parent river-god, the five days of their week, the last of their rule as year-gods 2.
The sun-god who drew his strength from the left thigh, whence he was born, was, as we have seen, the god of the ten and eleven-months year, and it was at the close of this epoch, when his power as the ruling sun-god was departing, that his left thigh was broken or withered like that of Jacob in the contest at Penuel. This is what happened to the Celtic sun-god Cuchulainn, the hound of Cu, before he was slain by Lugaid, and the story of his end reproduces in a most striking form the history of the supersession of the god of the eleven-months year by the god of the year of eight-day weeks. Lugaid, his slayer, was the son of Fergus Fairge, that is Fergus the Ocean-god of the Southern waste of waters. It was into the lap of Fergus that the brooch with which Maine used to fasten her cloak fell, and Maine was, as we shall see presently, the goddess of the eight-days week of the eight Maine, the links of the chain that bound together this year of fifteen months 3. Lugaid is also called the son of the three Curoi hounds, said to be Cu-chulainn, Conall Cernach, slayer of Lugaid and Curoi, keeper of the cows of light, husband of Blathnat the flower-goddess, the Celtic form of the Greek Korbnis, mother of vEsculapius the sun physician 4. These Curoi were also the Corr or Cranes whence Lugaid got his name of Corr the Crane. They were the three Cranes of Mider, the god of the lower world, of the Southern sun of winter, the* three baleful birds answering to the Greek Harpies or vultures, who tried, in the story of Jason, to kill Phineus the sea-eagle, by taking away his food, and pecking him when he tried to eat. These birds
1 1 Chron. xx. 5 ; 2 Samuel xxi. 19.   * 1 Samuel xvii. 23 ff.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 328.
4   Ibid., Lect. v. p. 472, note 1—474, 552, 676.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:07:25 PM: 395
by the various official years measured up to the close of the eleven-months year, including the year of the Pleiades Orion and the three-years cycle.
The year that was now begun was that which forms the subject of this Chapter, and we shall see that in its history the opening month of the year was always that Til which the sun was in Gemini.
In addition to the history of the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya given in the Brahmanas, there is another variant form in the Rigveda marriage - hymn telling of the union of Suria, the sun-maiden, born of the bird'Su to the moon- god Soma, the rejuvenated Chyavana. In this poem the wedding oxen were slain in Magh (January—February), when, as we shall see, the year began, and the marriage was consummated in Arjuna or Phalgun (February—March) ending with the vernal equinox. That is to say, the ritualistic record of the year extends from about 10,200 B.C., when the sun entered Gemini in January—February, to 8200 B.C., and after this to the time when the sun was in Gemini in February—March, about 6200 B.C. The Ash- vins brought the bride to this wedding in their threewheeled car made of Palasha (.Kimshuka, Butea frondosa) and Shalmali wood of the cotton-tree (Bombax Heptaph- ylla) *. After the wedding the bridegroom assumes his wife’s clothes (v. 30), showing that it is a marriage of the sexless moon-god with the maiden of the central fire of heaven, the year-bird tending the fire of the never setting or dying Pole Star as the mistress of the House of God, the vault of heaven. She was the Vestal priestess of the navel-fire on the altar, that of Hercules Sandon and Omphale. The united pair who are to give birth to the sexless sun-god of this year, who was, as we have seen, Aurva, the son of the Thigh, are compared in the hymn to the months of the eleven-months year, the ten sons she is to bear to her sexless lord, and he himself as the eleventh 1
1 Kg. x. 85, 8—20.
39^

(v. 45). These are the months symbolised by the seven stars of the Thigh and the four stars in Pegasus.
We must now return to the story of Aurva, the offspring of this union, as told in the Mahabharata. In the Chaitra- ratha Parva neither his mother or father are named, but she is said to be one of the Bhrigus who were being ruthlessly slaughtered by the Kshatriyas just before the birth of her son. They were the savage conquerors of the age of the eleven-months year, which is further identified as that in which Aurva was conceived by the statement that the nascent god cast the fire of his wrath into the ocean, where it became the head of the sun-horse called Vadavamukha, he who speaks with the left (ivama), that is with the distorted mouth of the Pole Star messenger whose circuits of the heavens are left-handed, the god of the year reckoned by methods different from those used by the ancestors of the indigenous dwellers on the land.
It was at the birth of Aurva that his counterpart Para- shara, the overhanging cloud, son of Shaktri, the god Sakko, son of Vashishtha, who ruled the thirty-three gods of the eleven-months year, became the sun-god of day and performed the great sacrifice in which the gods of the stellar lunar era of Pole Star worship were destroyed, and his father Shaktri sent up to heaven as a star-god *.
He then became, as we learn from the astronomy of the Manvantara, one of the stars of the Great Bear, called Ur-ja, born (ja) of the Thigh (Uru), his full name being Urja- Stambha, the pillar (stambha) of the thigh-born sun-god, the golden pillar Boaz of the Phoenician temples. This list of the fourteen star-parents, headed by Urja-Stambha, is a second edition of the first Manvantara or period of Manu, the astronomical reckoner. In this original list the first of the fourteen parent-stars marking the period of the creating lunar phases is the Svayambhara, the self-begotten1 2, the
1   Mahabharata Adi (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxx.—clxxxii., pp. 512-519.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s India, vol. i. chaps, xliv., xlv. pp. 387, 394.
of the Myth-Making Age,
39 7
Pole Star god, who was originally, as we have seen, Kepheus or Kapi, the ape-god who is worshipped by the Sabaeans as “ the ancient light, the divinely self-created r.”
This sun-god, born of the thigh of the Pole Star ape-god, is, in Greek mythology, Dionysos, son of Semele, the Phoenician goddess Pen-Samlath, the face (gen) of the Name (Shem) of God, the Samlah of Masrekah, the wine-land in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 36, 37. His father was Zeus in his form of the ape-god of the mud (tan), the Cretan Tan, the Carthaginian and Phoenician Tanais or Tanit, the female, and therefore the earliest form of this male parent-god. She is called by Strabo the equivalent of the Zend mother-goddess Anahita, the parent- cloud, the springs whence the Euphrates rose, the Zend form of the Vedic goddess Vrisha-kapT, the rain-ape, wife of Indra1 2 3 4. He was born prematurely, but was taken up by his father and sewn in his thigh, that is to say, he was first, as in the Hindu mythology of the Mahabharata, the son of the Thigh of the mother-ape, the stars of the Great Bear.
When born he passed through two stages. First he was the sun-maiden, a girl brought up by Athamas, or Dumu-zi, Tammuz the star Orion, and Ino the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician Melkarth, the sun-god-master of the city (Karth) 3, the god Ar-chal or Herakles. When Athamas and Ino were made mad by Here, the goddess of stellar lunar time, the Greek form of the madness of Kalmashapada, the god of the eleven-months year of Chapter VI., this maiden- goddess was changed into the sun-ram of the ship Argo, and brought up by the nymphs of Nysa, who became the Hyades4, the companion stars to the Pleiades, the third in the list of the Hindu Nakshatra. That is to say, he was
1   Ilewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times,v ol. ii., Essay viii., p. 161.
2 Movers, Die Plionizicr, vol. i. pp. 617, 61S, Strabo, xi. p. 432 ; Kg. x. S6.
3 It is to be noted that this Phoenician Karth, the Hebrew Kiriath, is the same word as the Celtic Caer, for city ; the name is therefore one pointing to the Celtic elements in the population of Semitic cities.
4   Smith, Classical Dictionary, Dionysos, p. 226.
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Histoiy and Chronology
in the second form of his birth the sun-goddess of the age of the supremacy of the- mother-goddesses, when Semele, the counterpart of Artemis, called Arktos, the goddess of the Great Bear, was ruler of heaven. He was the Dionysos Nuktelios, the night-sun, the Arcadian god of the lower world, the realm ruled by the Southern sun of the winter solstice, the god bom when the sun was in the Hyades, that is in Taurus, in the midst of which they stand at the winter solstice, that is about 10,200 B.C., at the same time when the sun was in Gemini in January—February.
It was at the winter solstice that he was worshipped in the festivals of the lesser Dionysos in Poseidon (December— January). These were held to celebrate the return of Dionysos from the lower world, whither he had gone to bring back the sun-mother Semele, and at Pellene his return was acclaimed by a feast of torches, like that offered to the Pleiades mother Demeter in October—November.   This
Dionysos festival was held in the grove of Artemis Soteira, the Great Bear goddess, the healing female physician x.
At Megara this festival was held in the Akropolis consecrated to Car, the Carian Zeus of the double axe, the two lunar crescents1 2 3 4. At these Dionysiac festivals held in Argolis on the Alcyonian lake, and at Cynethaea in Arcadia, r a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called on to rise up out of .the lake as the bull sun-god of spring3.
It was to him as the spring-god that the festival of the Lenaea or wine-press was held in Gamelion (January— February), the month of the marriage (ya/io?) of Here and Zeus, the beginning of this year. This Pausanias tells us was held at Migonium in Laconia, on a mountain called Larysium, sacred to Dionysos 4, and it, like the slaying of the Magh (January—February) wedding oxen in the Vedic marriage of Suria and Soma, was followed by the Anthesteria
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 27, 1, vol. i. p. 371.
2   Ibid., i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 61, vol. ii. p. 525.
3   Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. 302, 303.
4   Ibid., iii. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 170,

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of the 12th of Anthesterion (February—March), the Hindu Arjuna or Phalgun, when the marriage was consummated T.
In another Greek story of the bull of Dionysos he is said to have been the son of Persephone, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, when she was violated by Zeus. This is the exact reproduction of the Hindu story which tells of the birth of Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house (?vastos), the god of the household fire, from this star called RohinT, when she was violated by her father Prajapati Orion. This first form of Dionysos was called Zagreus, born as a hunter with a bull’s head. This god, under the two names of Dionysos and Zagreus, was slain by the Titans, and was eaten by them as the totem bull man-god at the human and animal sacrifices of the rituals of the cycle-year and that of eleven months. His remains were buried under the Omphalos or navel of the tripod altar of the cycle-year 2.
This god born of the Thigh was the sun-god, the <f child of the Majesty of Indra,” born at the Ekashtaka or marriage day, the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January —February), which I have already described in Chapter VI. p. 332, at whose birth the left thigh was offered 3.
He was also the Greek ploughing and sowing-god Triptolemus. He and his brother Zeus Eubouleus, Zeus of good counsel, are said by Pausanias to be traditionally the sons of Celeus or Coeleus, the hollow heaven, or of a brother of Celeus Dysaules. This latter name, as Mr. Frazer has shown, is properly Disaules, he who ploughs
1   The Anthesteria or Festival of Recall (aradeotraodai) was a three days New Year’s Feast beginning with the Pitiioigia, when the souls of the dead issued from the sacred cleft called Pithoi or casks, the Indian Drona or hollowed tree-trunk of the mother-tree. They were greeted on the second day with Choai libations. It was a reproduction in a new year-reckoning of the Hindu New Year’s Festival of the autumnal equinox, when the Pitaro Barishadah were called to sit on the Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass. Harrison, Pandora's Box; Verrall, The Name Anthesteria, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. 1900, pp. 102—no, 116.
2   Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. ii., Orphica, p. 302 ; Frazer, Pan- sanias, vol. iv, p. 143.
3   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Paraskara, Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, 1—10; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 342, 344.
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   Brihaspati
Vishva- devah
Indra
twice, a name ‘like that of Trisaules, he who ploughs thrice I.
In the Satapatha Brahmana we find a complete explanation of the assignment of this name to the year-god. In the ritual of the Rajasuya, the coronation rite of the Indian kings, the last of the ceremonies is the series of observances which begin with the oblation of the Dasapeya or ten cups offered to the gods of the year of the months of gestation, the year ending with the tenth cup, which, as we have seen on p. 394, was offered to the Ashvins. The second sacrifice of this series is that called the Panchabila, an offering presented on a square platter with five divi-   N
sions, as in this diagram. In the East or North-east division there is a cake on eight potsherds for Agni, the god of this W year of the eight-day weeks. In the South or South-east division a cake on eleven potsherds for Indra, the god of   S
the eleven-months year and eleven-days week. A bowl of rice gruel for the Vishvadevah is placed in the Southwest division consecrated to the sun-bird, beginning the year with the setting sun of the winter solstice; and a dish of curds, the curdled milk of the hot summer season, is' placed in the Northern or North-west division sacred to Mitra Varuna, the twin-gods ruling the summer solstice when the rainy season (var) begins. In the central division is placed a bowl of rice gruel for Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, and with this is mixed part of the offerings to the other four year-gods. This centre-god is called “ the white-backed bullock,” the Pole Star ruling the path of Aryaman, the star Capella in the charioteer constellation Auriga, which, as we shall see, drove the year-car of the sun-god of this year 2.
These ceremonies close with the oblation of teams, the twelve cups offered to the twelve months of Orion’s year at the ploughing festival. This took place among the Kuru-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, 2, ii. 14, 3, viii. 15, 4, vol. i. pp. 20,91, 303, iii. p. 81.
2 Eggeling, Sat, Brah., v. 5, x, 1—12 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 120—123.
of the MytJi-Making Age.
401
Panchalas, the Kurus or Kauravyas united with the Panchala men of the five (panch1) days week. It was held in this year in the early spring or dewy season, that is at the New Moon of Magh (January—February), when the dews which cease in the hot season are still plentiful. It was originally a festival of the winter solstice beginning at the New Moon of Push (December—January), when Pushan was wedded to the sun’s daughter, but in the age of the birth of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, about 10,000 B.C., the year began when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, that is in January—February, and hence the annual ploughing beginning the year was transferred to that month. The plough was driven by the king, who is directed to plough a line forward or northward to represent the Northern course of the sun reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice when the rains begin, and he is to return again southwards when he ploughs the second furrow, representing the sun returning again to the South at the end of six monthsI. In the ploughing of the Magh (January—February) year the first six-months furrow was that ending in July—August.
Hence Triptolemus, the plougher of the two furrows, was originally the ploughing-god of the two seasons of the solstitial sun, who was also called, as the year-god of Orion’s year of three seasons, Trisaules, or the god Qf three plough - ings. In this form he is represented in ancient Greek monuments as standing between Demeter, the barley-mother, originally representing the first six months of the year beginning in November or December, and Persephone, the six months beginning in May or June. When the year was divided into three seasons, each of four months or twenty- four five-day weeks, the centre season or summer, when the sun was in the North, was assigned to him. Hence he received from Demeter the gift of a car, the seven-starred northern chariot of the Great Bear, drawn by dragons, the stars of the constellation Draco2. This god of the dragon-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bruh., v. 5, 2, 1—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 123, 124.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, I, vol. i. p. 20, ii. p. 11S, iv. p. 142.
D d
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car, the thigh of the ape-god, taught Eumelus, the builder of the ploughing (ar) city of Aroe, to sow grain, and instructed Areas, the son of Kallisto the Great Bear mother, in the cultivation of corn, the baking of bread, the weaving of garments, and the spinning of woolI.
It was as the sowing-god who sowed the furrow of heaven, the Indian goddess STta, that Triptolemus became the Etruscan god Tages or Terie’gh, the wise child who was ploughed from the earth in the city of Tarchon (Tarquinii), who civilised the people of Etruria as he had civilised those of Arcadia. His Etruscan images represent him as a legless and armless god, with a lozenge-shaped body terminating in a point, and above this a second face is depicted, so that he has, like the sun-god, a Northern and Southern face. He wears on his breast the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solstitial sun 2.
His counterpart, Zeus Eubuleus, was, like Triptolemus, a partner of Demeter and Persephone in a triad of pig-gods. A sow pregnant for the first time was offered to Demeter, an uncut boar to Persephone, and a sucking-pig to Eubuleus. Thus he was the son of the two year-mothers, the young boar-god, the sun of the winter solstice, as Triptolemus was the sun of summer. It was to these three pig-gods that pigs were thrown into the serpents’ pit at the Thesmophoria festival beginning the Pleiades year 3. We find another phase of the history of the worship of the sun-god born of the Thigh in the story of Jacob. He came to the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, after he left Harran or Kharran, the half-way city of the road (kharran) from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, where the god was Laban, the white god “ of the brick foundations of heaven,” the god of the lunar-solar-gods of the year of the bee-hive palace of the three-years cycle. He had with him, as we are expressly told in Genesis xxxii. 22, his four wives: (1) Leah, the wild cow (le) with the tender eyes, the counter-
1   Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 18, 2, viii. 4, 1, vol. i. pp. 354, 376.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 96, 98.
3   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. pp. 118, 119, v. p. 29.

403
part of the three-eyed Samirus of Babylon and the Hindu Shiva, the mother of six sons and a daughter, the seven children of the Great Bear mother of the cow-born race ; (2) Rachel, the ewe, the mother of Joseph, or Asipu, the interpreter-god of the eleven-months year, who is to become the mother of the sun-ram ; (3) Billah, the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god-mother of the Danava sons of Danu; and (4) Zilpah, the foot of the snake (tsir), a form of Zillah or Tsir-lu, wife of Lamech or Lingal. She was the mother of the fish-sun-god Ashur, who was Assur, the supreme god of the Assyrians, the Hindu Ashadha ruling the summer solstice. Besides these four wives, the four seasons of the eleven-months year, he had with him these eleven months in the eleven children spoken of in this narrative of his contest with the god of the Thigh.
Before crossing the Jabbok, he passed the night at Penuel, the place of the face (pen) of God, the female image of the mother-goddess, the Indian Pennu, the Great Bear, queen of Heaven of the Brythonic Celts. She appeared to him at night, and he wrestled with this goddess of the Thigh till the sun rose, and he found himself transformed into the sun-god, born from the left thigh of the Pole Star ape, who was conceived during the age when the priests who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder bent the left knee to the moon-goddess ruling the yearT, and not the right knee, bent when the sacrificial cord was worn on the left shoulder. Henceforth the sinew of his left thigh was dried up as the virtue had gone out of it, and the right thigh became the offering given to the priests of the sun-god of Benjamin, the son of the ewe-mother of the sun- ram, and the father or ancestor of Saul or Shawul, to whom the right thigh was given at his consecration festival1 2. It was after this transformation that Jacob met his brother Esau, the goat-god of the green pillar, and became his ^colleague as
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 1,2; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 361.
2   Gen. xxxii. 22—32 ; Levit. vii. 32; 1 Samuel ix. 24.
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the golden pillar of the sun-god. After this meeting1 Jacob passed over Jordan and came to Succoth, the place of booths, where the tent-festival of Tabernacles inaugurating the New Year was held.
His passing over Jordan is, as I have shown in Chapter V. pp. 229, 230, significant, for it tells us that he became the son, not of the Euphrates, the Nahr or channel-river of the Pole Star, but of the yellow (yareh) moon-river, the river-mother of Omphale, daughter of Iardanus 2, the navel-fire of the altar and the goddess of the phallic worship of the sexless god Herakles Sandon who wore her clothes. Her father was the river looked on as the national parent-stream of the Phoenician Minyans, the archers of Kudon in the west of Crete, who were most noted bowmen, the picked archers of the Kushika sons of the bow and the antelope. They were the sons of Teucer, son of the mountain and sheep- mother Ida, whose daughter became wife to Dardanus, who was, as we have seen, the antelope sun-god of Troy, and it was Teucer who brought the worship of Apollo-Smintheus, the mouse-god, from Crete to Troy 3. These sons of Iardanus were, according to Pausanias vi. 21, 5, sons of the Idaean Herakles of the Dactyli or priests of the five-days week, and their goddess-mother was the Cydonian Athene, that is of the original tree-mother whose history has been traced in previous chapters 4. They took the name of their sacred river to Elis in Greece, where it was an ancient name of the river on which Phaea, called after the sow Phaea, destroyed by Theseus, stood. Its name meant the shining- moon-city, and it was taken by Nestor 5. The river Iardanus was, in the time of Pausanias, called the Acidas 6. It was as the son of this moon-river that Jacob became god of the eleven-months year while he dwelt in Shechcm, the then
1   Genesis xxxiii. 17.   2 Herod, i. 7.
3   Homer, Od., iii. 292; Hor., Carm. iv. 9, 17 ; Smith, Classical Dictionary, Cydonia, p. 200, Teucer, p. 754.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 21, 5, vol. i. p. 317.
s Homer, Iliad, vii. 135 ; Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. p. 70.
£ Frazer, Pausanias, v. 5, 5, vol. i. p. 243.
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capital of the lands of Ephraim, the men of the two ashes (ephra), the united Northern and Sonthern races, sons of Joseph. It was at Shechem that the Hivite villagers, the Rephaim first settlers in the land, were circumcised. This ceremony was apparently a variant form of the circumcision of the united races performed by Hoshea, the leader of the Ephraimites, sons of Joseph, when he joined Caleb, the dog- star, in robbing the treasury of the bees, and established the eleven-months year.
Prom Shechem Jacob went to Luz, the place of the almond {luz) tree, the nut-tree of the Toda sons of the bull, and parent-tree of the Kohathite priests, and also, as we shall see, of the sun-god of this year. At Luz, which he called Bethel, the place of the pillar of God, Jacob buried the idols of the night-gods of his former worship. From thence he passed on to Bethlehem, where the sun-god of this year, Benjamin, the god of the right hand, was born simultaneously with the death of his mother, Rachel, the ewe-mother of Joseph, the god of the eleven-months year, who wore the star coat of many colours I.
The son of the right hand was born as the sun-god of the worshippers of the Pole Star of the North, now represented by the Sabsean Mandaites, who in worshipping the Pole Star turn their faces to the North, and who have thus the rising sun of the East on their right hand and not on their left, like the Harranites, who face southwards while worshipping2. This is the position of the Roman augurs, whose parent-god was the mother-tree of the South. The Sabsean Mandaites in their annual service inaugurating their year, fix the hour by referring to the position of the Great Bear and the Pole Star, and mark their connection with the age of the sexless gods by substituting a wether for the earlier ram offered on New Year’s Day 3.
1   Genesis xxxiii. 16—xxxv., xxxvii. 3, 4.
2   Sachau, Alberuni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xix., Festivals of the Moslems, p. 329.
3   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Sabsean New Year’s Ritual, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 159—164.
40 6

The birth-place of the sun-god, son of the right hand, was Bethlehem, also called Ephrata, the place of the ashes or shrine of the dead faiths of the past. It was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 154, the house of Lehem, the Akkadian twin gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu, the offspring of Lakh, the Akkadian form of the Median and Hindu Ragh the sun-god. It was there, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, that the annual festival of the death and rebirth of Tam muz or Dumu-zi, the year-god Orion, was held.
It was at this ancient shrine of Boaz, the golden pillar, that the new sun-god, rising on the right hand in the East, was born as the son of the left thigh, and he who was first Saul or Shawul, the heirless sun-god of the tribe of Benjamin, who had lost the asses that used to draw his father’s car, was succeeded by David or Dodo the Beloved, who is named as the national god on the Moabite stone, who was the eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is the eighth son of the Thigh, but of the right not the left thigh, the god born not of the sexless gods of the lunar era of the bisexual parent fig-tree, but of the male and female pair, the two trees of the mother Tamar, the date- palm-tree which only bears fruit when the flower of the female-tree has been fertilised by the pollen of the flower of the male tree. As parent of the son of the Thigh, Ishai is also called Nahash, the plough-snake (nahur), the god of the constellation of the Great Bear, the Arabic Nagash, the Indian Nahusha, the Gond Nagur. As Nahush he is the father of Zeruiah the Cleft, the goddess Tirhatha and Abigail, she whose father (ah) is Exaltation, the daughter of the inspired prophet of the gnomon-stone r. He is also called Dodo of Bethlehem, father of El Hanan the merciful, which is, as we have seen on p. 380, the name of David in the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi., so that Dodo the son of the Thigh was son of himself, the self-begotten- god2. It was this El Hanan who slew Goliath, son of
1 x Chron. ii. 16, 17 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 25.
2 1 Chron. xi. 26; 2 Sam. xxiii. 24.

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Rapha, the giant god of the Rephaim, and his brother Lahmi, a form of Lakhmu, to whom Beth - Lehem was dedicated I. He slew them with five stones out of the brook, their parent river-god, the five days of their week, the last of their rule as year-gods 2.
The sun-god who drew his strength from the left thigh, whence he was born, was, as we have seen, the god of the ten and eleven-months year, and it was at the close of this epoch, when his power as the ruling sun-god was departing, that his left thigh was broken or withered like that of Jacob in the contest at Penuel. This is what happened to the Celtic sun-god Cuchulainn, the hound of Cu, before he was slain by Lugaid, and the story of his end reproduces in a most striking form the history of the supersession of the god of the eleven-months year by the god of the year of eight-day weeks. Lugaid, his slayer, was the son of Fergus Fairge, that is Fergus the Ocean-god of the Southern waste of waters. It was into the lap of Fergus that the brooch with which Maine used to fasten her cloak fell, and Maine was, as we shall see presently, the goddess of the eight-days week of the eight Maine, the links of the chain that bound together this year of fifteen months 3. Lugaid is also called the son of the three Curoi hounds, said to be Cu-chulainn, Conall Cernach, slayer of Lugaid and Curoi, keeper of the cows of light, husband of Blathnat the flower-goddess, the Celtic form of the Greek Korbnis, mother of vEsculapius the sun physician 4. These Curoi were also the Corr or Cranes whence Lugaid got his name of Corr the Crane. They were the three Cranes of Mider, the god of the lower world, of the Southern sun of winter, the* three baleful birds answering to the Greek Harpies or vultures, who tried, in the story of Jason, to kill Phineus the sea-eagle, by taking away his food, and pecking him when he tried to eat. These birds
1 1 Chron. xx. 5 ; 2 Samuel xxi. 19.   * 1 Samuel xvii. 23 ff.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 328.
4   Ibid., Lect. v. p. 472, note 1—474, 552, 676.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:08:16 PM: 408
were driven by Zetes and Kalais, sons of Boreas, the Northeast and North-west winds in the Strophades, or turning islands, marking the winter turning-points of the solstitial sun, and became the three weaving sisters in the constellation of the Vulture I. It was these three Cranes in the form of three old women blind of the left eye, the one-eyed Graise whose eye Perseus carried off, who met Cuchulainn on his way to fight Lugaid, and persuaded him to eat the shoulder- blade of the hound, whence he took his name, the year-dog Argus, the constellation Argo. They gave it to him with the left hand, and it was from his left,hand that Cuchulainn ate it, and he put the bone under his left thigh. Thereupon the strength of his left thigh departed, and he was slain by Lugaid 2 3 4. That is to say, the sun-god of the left thigh was slain by the son of the three Cranes of the South land of Fergus Fairge, who gave to Lugaid the brooch of the eight- days week of Maine, and Lugaid, god of the winter solstice, was in his turn slain by Conall, god of the summer solstice, whose horse, the dog-star Sirius, had a dog’s head 3.
B. The story of Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer, builder of the altar of the eight and nine-day weeks.
The sun-god born of the Thigh appears again in the story of Tobit and his son Tobias, who was married by Raphael, one of the seven angels of God, the seven stars of the Great Bear 4, to Sara, who had had seven husbands who all died on their wedding-day. She was the daughter of Raguel, the god fel) Raghu of the Median land of Rages or Ragha, the birth-place of the Zend sun-god worshipped by the Akkadians and in Bethlehem as Lakh. But before dealing with the facts of this story as told in the Apocrypha, I must
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 331—334, 676, 677; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 198, 199.
2   Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, Cuchulainn’s Death, pp. 254—263.
3   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. p. 472.
4   Tobit. chapter xii. 15.
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first show by comparing some of its numerous variants the fundamental features of this historical narrative. In a number of these collected by Mr. Groome, the agent of the final marriage with which the story ends is a dead man, who is one of the previous husbands of the sun-mother the bride, and who has been buried by the future father of the sun-god, who is in Tobit the eighth husband of the bride. The dead and buried husband rises from the dead to aid his benefactor, and in the Russian story he descends from heaven as the angel of God. In all except one of Jack the Giant Killer, which I will discuss after I compare the other variants with the Tobit tale, the girl whom the successful wooer is to marry has had several husbands who died or were either strangled or beheaded by her on their wedding night. There are five husbands in the Armenian story, six in the Russian, and nine in the German version. In the Gypsey and Armenian two dragons and two serpents come out of the mouth of the bride on her wedding night, and in the Russian story one dragon flies into the bridal- chamber to kill the husband, and one comes out of the inside of the bride after she had been sawn in half, and these are slain by the assistant angel. In the German version the saviour of the dead man is supplied by him with a feather shirt, a rod and a sword, and with these he flies after the princess as she, in the guise of the year-bird, makes her way at night through the air to her demon lover of the Pole Star Age. He is thus enabled to answer the three questions as to what she was thinking of which she asks him to answer at his successive daily visits. In the last answer he tells her she is thinking of her lover’s head, the head of the god of the dead-year, which he produces. In the Gypsey and Armenian story the guardian-angel claims half the bride, a reminiscence of the two seasons making the one year, but gives up his claim when the second evil beast, the second season, comes out of her. In the Russian version she is sawn in half by the assistant who restores her to life as the mother of the sun-god of the regenerated year, when the
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dragons leave her. In the German version the bride changes on the wedding night, when dipped in water by the bridegroom, first into a raven, then into a dove, and last into a maiden. These changes mark previous epochs of the life of the year-mother-bird, and we have in all these stories of the resurrection of the slain man, the dead sun returned to life as the Time-spirit or German Zeit-geist, who destroys the evil spirits which in previous ages deformed the year- mother who slew in her successive changes her husbands. And the Time-spirit finally transforms the changing reckoner of the year by wedding her to the sun-god J.
When we turn from these variant versions to the story of Tobit in the Apocrypha, we find that the burier of the strangled man who was, as we shall see presently, one of the husbands of the bride, is Tobit himself, who became blind the night he buried him. On that night Anna his wife got a kid as wages, and was told by Tobit that she stole it, on which she reproached him for his hypocrisy. On this same night Sara, the daughter of Raguel, prayed that she might be provided with a husband whom Asmoaeus would not strangle 1 2 3.
Tobit, the blind-god, husband of Anna, dwelt in Nineveh, the town of the fish-mother-goddess Nana, for the cuneiform ideogram of its name means the city of the fish, and the name for fish, Kha, also means the oracle, the teaching-fish. Hence it was the city of the fish-god first called la. He is called by Berdsus Oannes, which is a form, as Lenormant has shown, of la Khan, la the fish 3 who became the god Assur, the supreme god of Nineveh. Tobit was thus the blind oracle of the fish-mother-goddess, the gnomon-stone. He was uncle to Achiacharus, son of Ana-el, the god Anu, who was cup-bearer to the king, that is the filler of the cups
1   F. H. Groome, ‘Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer,’ Folklore, vol. ix., 1898,
pp. 226 ff.   2 Tobit i. 17—19, ii. 3—14.
3 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary, 178,442; Lenormant, Chaldman Magic and Sorcery, chap. xiii. App. I. p. 203.

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of the seasonsI. Hence he, Anna and Achiacharus formed a triad like that of Ilos, Assarakos and Ganymede, that is of Ilos, the father-river or eel-god of the Trojan fig-tree. Assarakos, the god of the bed, and Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods, and the offspring of this triad born in the year-bed of the mother-tree described in Chapter IV. pp. 143, 144, was Tobit, the Jewish Asherah or gnomon-tree pillar, the double of Dhritarashtra, the blind gnomon-stone husband of GandharT, the Pole Star Vega. Anna and Anael, father of Achiacharus, are the bisexual female and male form of the goddess Anna Perennis of Roman ritual, and the goddess of Carthage, sister of Dido or Dodo the beloved sun-goddess.
Tobit belongs to the tribe of Naphtali, the son of Billah, the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god, who sacrificed to the heifer Baal, that is to the mother-cow RohinI Alde- baran, and not to the moon-bull. He alone of his tribesmen went up to Jerusalem to pray, and he was the grandson of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, and therefore a father-god of the age of the three-years cycle, the beehive and tower of God2. It was also to this age that Sara belonged as the daughter of the sun-god Raghu, the father of Rama, who ploughed with the seven stars of the Great Bear, her husbands. She was the cloud-goddess Shar, also called I-shara, the house (/) of Shar, the mother of corn, that is to say, she was the husk-mother of the seed-grain which she, as in the Siamese Cinderella story, fostered and fed. She was the guardian-encloser of the sun-god who was to be born from her as the sun of the corn, the seed of life. Isaac, the laughing-grain born from the ninety-year old withered husk-mother Sara, wife of Abram, the father Ram son of Raghu and brother of Sara. Thus Tobit was the blind tree-trunk, and Sara his wife the mother of the grain- born sun-god. They were both to be rejuvenated, like Chyavana, by the leading angel-star of the Great Bear,
* Tobit i. 21, 22,
2 Ibid. i. 5, 6, S.
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Raphael, the god of the giants \rapha), and both were gods of the Southern faiths which looked to the mother-heifer-star Aldebaran as the parent of life and not to the Northern moon-father.
The regeneration of Tobit and Sara as parents of the god of the right Thigh was to be accomplished by Raphael, the leading star of the Thigh constellation, who had been buried with the dead gods of the age of Pole Star rule of the left Thigh, when fathers offered their eldest sons, the slain Raphael in sacrifice1. Raphael, eight years after Tobit became blind, that is at the end of the year-week of eight days2, led Tobias, the rejuvenated Tobit, the young sun-god born of the old gnomon pillar, to the Northern land of Raghu, the birth-place of the sun-god of day. On their way they caught in the Tigris, the river of the sun-god going South, the Zend Rangha, a fish which tried to devour Tobias, that is the river-fish or alligator constellation Draco. Raphael took from it its heart, liver and gall 3, the seats of the vital essence in primitive physiology. From the heart and liver, when burnt by Tobias at Raphael’s command, rose the fumes which drove away to the South, his home, the evil spirit Asmodeus4, who, as the god of the offerers of human sacrifices representing the dead sun-god of the past year, was the god who killed the former husband of Sara, and of the brides of the variant tales.
He was the god Ashma-deva, the god of the stone-gnomon- pillar (ashman), the Greek Akmon, the anvil of the heavenly smith, the thunder-god of the South, whose year began when the sun was in the South at the winter solstice. Fourteen days after the consummation of the marriage and the regeneration of Sara as the sun-mother, they returned at the summer solstice, after the defeat of the winter-god of the South, to Nineveh. It was then that Tobias, instructed by Raphael, restored to Tobit his eyesight by rubbing his eyes with the fish gall, and made him once more the seeing Pole
4 Ibid. viii. 3.
1 Tobit v. 13.
2 Ibid. xiv. 2.
3 Ibid. vi. 1—5.

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Star god of the age of Orion’s year. Tobit, before his approaching death, foretold the erection of a new temple of the sun-god of day, the vault of heaven consecrated, as we shall see, to the fully regenerated Buddha to replace the beehive palace of the gods of nightI.
The age of this history is made capable of identification by the gift of the kid to Anna. This was the constellation Auriga, that of the two kids on the wrist of the driver of this year-car, which was to replace the plough and waggon constellation of the Great Bear. This, as I have shown in Chapter VI. pp. 338—340, was the constellation ruling the year of the zodiacal sun in the Babylonian astronomy. The chief star in this constellation a Aurigae is the star Aryaman 01 Hindu and Zend astronomy, which is, as we shall see, the star of the sun-physician. I have now before completing the review of the historical teaching of the story of Tobit to examine the variant form of Jack the Giant Killer. In identifying him we must remember the nursery rhyme of the House that Jack built, which we shall see was an ancient historical tale. We have seen that the original Akkadian teaching-fish was Iakhan, who became the Oannes of Berosus, the Greek Iohannes, our John, who has also resumed his original Akkadian name of Ia-kh or Jack. He, on St. John’s Day, the 24th of June, still rules the summer solstice. The House that Jack built is depicted for us in the Talmud form of our nursery rhyme. It is founded on the “ kid which my father bought for two pieces of money.” This takes the place of “ the Rat which ate the Malt ” in our version.
Considering the number of the actors in this primitive relic of folklore, there being in the Talmud version ten and in ours nine actors, and the certainty that it can be traced to the god Iakhan, the fish, who, as we have seen, taught the early Akkadians the astronomy of the first stellar year measured by weeks, there is a very strong probability that the actors in this old rhyme represent the bricks or days
1 Tobit viii. 19, xi. 4—13, xiv. 5.

forming the weeks which built up this year edifice. This was the beehive palace of the gods of time, beginning with the Laban “brick foundation of heaven,” and the names of the bricks forming its foundation-week were probably, according to the custom of stellar worship, stars connected with the course of the year, and possibly with the zodiacal stations of the moon and sun.
In Chinese astronomy, one of the oldest in the world, there are two Zodiacs in which the signs are the same, but the first denotes the hours of the day beginning at midnight, and the second the zodiacal path of the sun. But the great antiquity of this representation of the sun’s yearly course is shown by the fact that the signs are retrograde and mark the course of the sun going from right to left, according to the rule of the Pole Star Age, and not from left to right as in the solar era. The first of these signs is the Rat, which represents in the annual zodiac Aquarius ; and the second, the ox, is not Pisces, but Capricornus, so that the first sign represents the last month of the year. The signs are : i. The Rat, 2. The Ox, 3. The Tiger, 4. The Hare, 5. The Dragon or Crocodile, 6. The Serpent, 7. The Horse, 8. The Ram,
9.   The Ape, 10. The Cock, 11. The Hog, 12. The Fox1 2. Among the Mongols the signs are: 1. Mouse, 2.Ox, 3.Leopard, 4. Hare, 5. Crocodile, 6. Serpent, 7. Horse, 8. Sheep, 9. Ape,
10. Plen, 11. Dog, 12. Hog, so that with the exceptions of signs 1, 11, and 12, they are the same as the Chinese3. These signs only concern the present discussion in the first sign or brick of the year-house. This is the Rat or Mouse, the Rat that ate the Malt that lay in the house built by Jack. The Rat in Chinese represents Aquarius, and is used as a sign for water. The Babylonian zodiacal year of the ten kings of Babylon ended with Xisuthros, the star Skat S
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, vol. xi. p. 219, note 1. The list in the article Zodiac, Encyc. Brit.. Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 793, substitutes Dog and Pig for the nth and 12th signs.
2   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. iii., Appendix, Part i., Origin of Mexican
Civilisation, p. 521, note.

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Aquarius. He was, according to Berosus, the god saved from the Flood, who in the Akkadian form of the Flood Legend was Dumu-zi (Orion), called Dumu-zi of the Flood, and it was he who rose again as the sun of the New Year measured by the ten zodiacal stars, when he entered the constellation Aries in the star Hamal, represented by Alorus, the first of these kings. Thence he passed through eight stars in Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Scorpio, and Capricornus, to return by the path of our zodiacal sun to Skat in Aquarius.
This Babylonian zodiac represented, as I have shown elsewhere, a celestial circle of 360 degrees divided into minutes and seconds. The 432,000 years of the kings or seconds of the circle were the 432,000 years of the Hindu Kali Yuga on which their chronology is based. Hence these two coincident systems of year reckoning mark an important period in the history of the two countriesx. As the year in which this zodiac became the official measure of time is said by the Babylonian historians to have been that in which the traditional flood occurred, and as it began with the Babylonian rainy season, it is most probable that their Hebrew successors, who took their materials from Babylonish sources, took thence the date of this flood-year, which they made to begin on the 17th of Marchesvan (October—November), when the sun was in Aquarius; it would thus be in Aries in December—January; and this zodiacal position marks the date of this year as about
8,200   B.C., and fixes this as the time when this zodiac was first used as the almanac of the official year, and this was the date when the sun was in Gemini in February—March, that beginning the year of which the history is told in this Chapter; or if we take Aries, according the Babylonian Zodiac, as the sign following Aquarius and representing November—December, the year will begin with the sun in 1
1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars.5 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, January, 1890 ; Sayce, Hilbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 382—384 ; Gen. vi. 6.
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Aries in November—December, and in Gemini in January— February, or about 10,200 B.c. This latter date is that of the year of Dionysos Nuktelios, as shown in p. 398.
Hence we see that in ancient tradition the Water-rat was the founder of the zodiacal year based on the worship of the rain-god, the rain and cloud bird Khu, who brought good crops. This Water-rat became in the evolution of theological astronomy the Mouse-god Apollo Smintheus, the god of the primaeval Semites, whose worship was, as we have seen, brought by Teucer, the archer-god, from Crete to Troy. Having thus shown the coincidence between the Chinese and Mongol zodiacal signs of the Rat and Mouse, their correspondence with the primitive Babylonian zodiac, and their probable reproduction in the Rat of the House that Jack built, I will now proceed to compare the English and Talmud bricks of this house. They are as follows : English—1. Rat, 2. Cat, 3. Dog, 4. Cow, 5. Maiden, 6. Man, 7. Priest, 8. Cock, 9. Farmer. Talmud—1. Kid, 2. Cab 3. Dog, 4. Staff, 5. Fire, 6. Water, 7. Ox, 8. Butcher, 9. Angel of Death. It would require a special treatise to show the full meaning of each of these signs, and I certainly could not write it with my present knowledge, but I will remark that the last two signs, the Sowing Farmer and the Angel of Death, corroborate the belief that it is an old nursery poem made to teach children the history of time, beginning its first annual revolutions with the death of the old year and the sowing of seed in the Pleiades month of the Southern spring, October—November. Also the secpnd sign, the Cat, is significant. She is the cat that drew the year-car of Freya, the sun-hawk, and the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast, mother of the mummied cats, who bears on her head horns and the moon-disk with the serpent under it. This shows that the cat-goddess of the second day is a moon-goddess. Her other name is Sochit, under which she is depicted as a scorpion with horns and disk. This is the scorpion banner- sign of Dan, the Hebrew son of Danu or Billah, the Pole Star goddess. This scorpion is called in Genesis xlix. 17

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a serpent. This banner guarded the Israelite camp of the North, containing the tribes of Dan, Asher, and NaphtaliT. The name Sochit of this scorpion or serpent-goddess is connected with the Coptic Sochi, a field, and means in the record of a grant of land at Edfu an area both of high and low land, that is, a village area, so that she is a village- goddess ; and as a star she is symbolised by Antares a Scorpio, the star of the month Tisri (September—October), and also by 7 Draconis, so that her worship goes back to the days of lunar-solar worship of the age of the cycle-year and its equinoxes 2.
If this list represented the primaeval conception of the bricks that make the house of time it must symbolize the week, and as the year of the beehive house of heaven was that of the cycle-year, the number nine is that of the nine days of the week of this year measured by the lunar crescents, the horns of the cat-goddess. But the Talmudic interpretation of this ancient school poem, which in their version contains ten verses, of which the last tells of the final victory of the sun-god born from the ten months of gestation, throws still further light upon the history it accords. In these ten verses, when compared with the English version, we see that, in the original school lesson, the butcher of the eighth verse of the Talmud variant was the sun-cock. The substitution of the butcher for the cock is explained by the Talmud commentators to mean the victory gained by the men of Israel, sons of Edom, over the armies of Gog and Magog, Kush and Pul, that is the conquering progress of the victorious king of Edom, Baal Hanan or David, the eighth son of the Thigh, the sun-god of this epoch 3. Also the nine bricks when accumulated in weeks made up the ten lunar months of gestation from 1 2 3
1   Number ii. 25—31.
2   Brugsch, Religion mid Mythologie der Alien AEgypter, pp. 333, 649 ; Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxix. pp. 289, 290, xxxii. p. 329.
3   Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, The Talmud and the Targums, viii. ; The House that Jack Built, pp. 141—144.
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which the barley - sun was born, to become the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and the ninth of these in the Talmud version is the Angel of Death, the day of the decease of the conquering sun who has butchered his enemies, and who dies when he has done his work to rise again as the sun of the age of solar worship
This interpretation of the connection between the Talmud version of the poem originally describing the year of nine - day weeks and ten lunar months of gestation, and this year of eight-day weeks, is confirmed by the substitution of the kid for the rat as the first brick.
This kid and that given to Anna in the story of Tobit is the constellation of Auriga, the charioteer with two kids upon his wrists, called by the Akkadians Askur the goat. This is the constellation which ruled the year in Babylon when that of the Great Bear pointing to the Pole Star was discarded as an indicator of time. It was believed to watch over the course of the sun through the zodiacal stars 2, and mark the star constellation into which the sun entered when the year begun. This was in the final Babylonian year the constellation Taurus, in which the sun was at the vernal equinox, about 4200 B.C., but its functions began long before that epoch. In this constellation the chief star a Auriga was Capella, the little goat, which replaced the old Pole Star goat as the warder of time. It is called in the Rigveda and Zendavesta Aryaman and Airyaman, the ploughing constellation, the Celtic Airem, the ploughman. This star-god is called in thQ Zendavesta the great healer of diseases who drives away the pestilences 1 *
1   See Appendix B, where the English and Talmud versions of The House that Jack Built are given in full as well as the Basque version. This, as I there point out, throws much fresh light on the origin of this primaeval nursery lesson, and conclusively proves that in one of its earliest, if not its earliest, forms it dates from the age of the cycle-year ruled by the Pole Star goat.
* The god Uz, the goat, is depicted on Babylonian monuments as sitting on a throne watching the revolution of the solar disk. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 285.

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brought by Angra Mainyu, the Southern god of the Pole Star era of the worship of the Southern sun, the god summoned by Nairyo-Sangha, the perpetual fire burning on the altar of the sun-god. In the Rigveda he is one of the six Aditya belonging to the father triad of Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman x.
This star as the star of the sun-physician is intimately connected with the stars Gemini, the Ashvins, who were in Hindu mythology the physicians of the gods who rejuvenated and married Chyavana. It was these stars which Aryaman Capella was employed especially to watch as those of the Gate of God through which the sun entered the year. This was the triumphal entry of the sun-god at his marriage in Greece with Here, the moon, in the month Gamelion (January—February), and that of the Vedic marriage of Soma, the male moon-god, and Chyavana with Su-konya, the sun-maiden, in the same month. This was the Hindu Magh (January—February), and the sun was in the constellation or car of the Ashvins in this month, about 10,200 B.C. This was the date when the Babylonian zodiacal year of the ten kings began, when the sun was in Aries in November— December. It was also the date of the first year of the Thigh, the conquering year of the eight-days week, the year of the contest which ended with the final victory of the sun-god and the consummation of the marriage of Su-konya or Suria and Soma, which took place in Arjuna of Phalgun (February —March), the month assigned to it in the Rigveda. That is to say the astronomical war between the two rival systems of lunar-solar Pole Star worship and that of the independent sun-god lasted till the sun was in Gemini in February— March, about 8200 B.C., that is, it occupied the whole period when Vega was the Pole Star from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and ceased with the final victory of the zodiacal sun- 1
1 Darmesteter, Zejidavesta Vcndidad Fargard, xxii. pp. 229, 235; Rg. vii. 66, 3, 4; Hewitt, Rulmg Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 416—422, where the question as to the stellar position of Aryaman is fully discussed.
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Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:09:08 PM: 420

god when the Pole Star entered Hercules, the sun constellation, about 8000 E.C.
We have now to complete the review of this phase of history, as told in the various forms of the Tobit story, to return to that telling of the exploits of Jack the Giant-killer, the builder of Jack’s house. He, as we have seen, first built the house of the year of the nine-day weeks, and after that, in the Talmud story, the house of the eight-day weeks of the present year. In his wars against the giants of the eleven-months year he met with the son of Arthur, the Celtic ploughing- god Echaid Airem, the ploughman or farmer who sowed the seed whence the malt seed of life of the year of the eight-days week was to growx. This prince, the counterpart of Tobit, released and buried a corpse arrested on account of the dead man’s debts, the corpse of the dead year of the rule of the Great Bear, the Thigh-god, as the reckoner of the year. He spent all his money in paying the creditors of the dead year, and it was after paying the last penny that he and Jack, whom he had met after the burial of the corpse, set out on their travels like Raphael and Tobias. On their way Jack procured from a threeheaded giant, the giant of the year of the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion), the god of the year of three seasons, the coat of darkness, the cap of knowledge, the sword of sharpness, and the shoes of swiftness, the outfit of the sun-gods Perseus and Sigurd. Provided with these, the equivalents of the heart, liver and gall of the alligator fish in the Tobit story, he and the prince arrive at the house of the lady the prince sought to marry, the Sara with seven husbands. The marriage was agreed to, provided the prince was able to bring her handkerchief, which she placed before him in her bosom, and to guess whose lips she kissed the last thing at night. She gave the handkerchief to Asmodeus, here called Lucifer, and kissed his lips ; but Jack followed her in the sun’s night disguise, took the handkerchief, and 1
1   Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, ii., Arthur and Airem, pp. 25 ff.

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cut off the horned head of Asmodeus, which he gave to the " princess, who is shown by her two-year tasks to be originally the mother-bird of the solstitial sun-year of two seasons. It was after the death of the horned stone (ashma) god that she recovered her beauty and became the bride of the prince. For the transformation scene we must go back to the German version of the story, in which the bride when plunged into water by her lover becomes successively a raven and a dove? before she became a maiden. These changes we may compare with the raven and the dove sent forth from Noah’s ark, the raven bird-mother of the matriarchal races who disappeared like the evil spirits which disfigured the princess? and the dove who returned as the marrying-bird of the patriarchal races with the olive leaf of the tree-mother Athene in her beak, the leaf sacred to the mother-goddess of Asia Minor. These changes are similar to those made by Thetis, the mud (thith) goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay, before she became the mother of the sun-god Achilles. She became successively a lioness, a dragon, fire and water. Also the seal-god Proteus, called in the Odyssey the Egyptian god assistant of Poseidon, the ape-god of the river Nile, became, when caught by Menelaus, a lion, a dragon or serpent, a leopard, a boar, water, and a lofty tree1. These various forms depict the successive changes in the symbolic representations of the god who measured time in the images I have recorded in the previous pages of this book.
The altar or house of the sun-god ruling the year of eight- day weeks, which was built by Jack the Giant-killer, appears again in the altar built by David on the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the Jewish counterpart of the Hindu year-altar of the Brahmanas. It was built on the mountain of Jerusalem, which became the site of the later temple. This is now surmounted by an octagonal dome with its entrance gate at the North-west, the setting-point
1 Homer, Odyssey, iv. 383, 386, 456—459.
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of the sun of the summer solsticeJ. David’s altar was built to stay the plague among the people, that is, the plague brought, as we have seen, by the Angel of Death on the day of the ninth brick. This plague was sent, according to the Rabbinical commentator, when the conquering sun-god, the butcher, had overcome all his enemies1 2. Similarly, the plague stayed by the building of David’s altar came at the close of his career after he had conquered all his opponents. Among these the chief were, Hanan the merciful, the son of Nahash, king of the Ammonites 3, that is himself as Baal Hanan, who had caused Uriah the Hittite, whose name means Light is god, to be slain as a deceased year-god, and he was the twenty-ninth of his captains 4, the last day of the month in the year of Orion of twelve months of twenty-nine days each. After his death he married his wife Bath-sheba, she of the seven (sheba) measures, the seven wine-bearing stars of the Great Bear, and became the father of Solomon, the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun-god, who built the temple of the year. He had also defeated the conspiracies of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, daughter of Nahash, the Great Bear god, who sought to dethrone him and set up Absalom, the brother of Tamar, the date-palm-tree.
This consecration of the sun-rock at Jerusalem, dedicated to the god of the eight-rayed star and the eight-days week, as the navel of the Semite earth marks an equally decisive period in the Hebrew history of the year as that marked in Hindu history by the sacrifice of Ashtaka.
C. The Hindu gods of the eight-days week.
This god, whose name means the eighth, was, as we have seen, the son of the two Jarat-karus, the heavenly fire-drill
1   O’Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., The Number Eight, p. 167, The North, P- 443-
2   2 Samuel xxiv. 19—25 ; Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, Second Edition, The Talmud and the Targums, p. 143.
s 2 Samuel x. 1 ff.   * 1 Chron. xi. 40.

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and socket turned by the axle-star of the Great Bear, to which Ixion or Akshivan was bound as the turning-god. Ashtaka officiated as the chief-priest at the sacrifice at which Janamejaya, after conquering Takka-sila (Taxila), the stronghold of the Naga power, destroyed all the Naga snake- gods, except the three year-gods of the Takkas, Shesh Nag, Vasuk Nag, and Taksh Nag. Shesh Nag, the god of the spring season, had been made by Vasuki the ocean-snake encircling the mother-mountain, and he did not appear at the sacrifice. Vasuk Nag, the god of summer, was Ashtaka’s maternal uncle, and he likewise did not appear. Taksh Nag, the god of winter, who had slain Parikshit, one of the gods of this epoch, whose history I will tell later on, was saved at the special intercession of Ashtaka x.
The altar on which this sacrifice was offered was that of the eight-rayed star of which the image was drawn on the ground consecrated for the building of the later brick altar of the year-sun-bird rising in the East, the altar measuring in the number of its bricks and stages the whole year. This altar, of which I have given a short description in Chapter V. pp. 269, 270, as depicted on the Breton Linga altar2, is ordered in the ritual of the building of the bird-altar to be marked on the consecrated ground by the sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree drawn by oxen attached to the plough by traces of Munja grass, of which are made the three-strand girdles of the Brahmins, denoting the three seasons of the year. The sides of this square altar face the cardinal points, and the first lines marking it are begun at the Southwest corner, the setting point of the sun-bird of the year beginning at the winter solstice. The first line traced is from the South-west to the South-east corner, the second from the South-west to the North-west, the third from the North-west to the North-east, and the fourth from the Northeast to the South-east completes the square marking the 1
1 Mahabharata Adi (Faushya) Parva, iii. p. 45.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, lvi.—lviii. pp. 154—159.
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year circuit of the’sun-bird. .The first cross line drawn is that of the Pole Star, due South and North from the centre of the line from the South-west to the South-east to mark the year measured by the Pleiades and Canopus in their annual course round the Pole. Then a line is drawn from the South - west to the North-east to mark the year of the solstitial flying-bird beginning with the setting of the sun at the winter solstice in the South-west. Then the line drawn due West and East from the centre of the West line to mark the equinoctial year included in the three-years cycle, and lastly the line from the North-west to the Southeast to denote the year of the eight-rayed star as measured from the setting sun of the summer solstice, the year of
E Under this arrangement the
SE
the six-days week I. w|-^ sw
altar is divided into eight divisions, representing the eight points of the compass and the eight days of the week, and it represents all the primitive ruling years. The Hindu sun-god of this year was the sexless sun-god Bhishma, also called Dyu, light. He was the son of Shantanu, the healer, the great-grandfather of the Kauravyas and Pandavas and of Gunga, the river-mother who identified him, as we are told in the Mahabharata 1 2, with the god Dyu who stole Nandini the year-cow of Vashishtha, the chief star in the Great Bear and the god of the perpetual fire on the altar, for the daughter of Ushlnara, who was, as we have seen, the wife of Kakshivat, the god of the eleven-months year. Bhishma was the eighth son. She threw into the river, to which she gave her name, her first seven sons as soon as they were born, that is to say, killed them like the seven husbands of Sara, and left her husband and her home on earth directly her eighth son was born, just as Jarat-karu quitted his wife when he had done his duty as the departing sun-god and given life
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 326—330,
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcviii., xeix. pp. 293—297.

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to his newly born son Ashtaka. Gunga took her child also, called Devavrata, or the law (vrata) of God, and sent him back to earth, when he was grown up, to remain there for a time as the god ruling the year. He was thus like the sun who was nursed for the first three months of his life by the thirty stars.
His genealogy, as told in Rg. x. 72, declares that he was created by Brahmanas-pati, the Pole Star god who from the non-existent brought forth the parent of the existent, Uttanapad, the god with the out-stretched legs, the roots of the mother-tree, the original female symbol f \ of the two productive thighs. From this was born Aditi, the beginning without (a) a second (diti), and Daksha, the showing god of the open hand and the five fingers of the five- days week. They begot the gods of time who brought the sun-god Su-rya from the sea (with the rains of the summer solstice). To Aditi were born seven sons, which she took away with her, leaving on earth the eighth, the Mart-anda or dead egg (anda), the sexless sun-god.
Thus this god, as Bhishma Dyu or Mart-anda, is as clearly born from the seven thigh stars of the Great Bear as the other national sun-gods of this epoch. On his rising on earth he became the king of the land of Jambu-dwipa, the country of the Jambu-tree or North India, the home of the Bharata race lying South of Sakadwipa, the Northern land of the Kushika T. He ruled during the reigns of Chitr-angada and Vichitra Virya, sons of Shantanu by Satyavati, the fish-mother-goddess, and during the infancy of the Kauravya and Pandava, grandsons of Vichitra Virya. He also led the Kauravya army during the first ten days of their eighteen days’ battle with Pandavas. He bore on his banner the date- palm-tree, the mother-tree of the eleven-months year, surmounted with the five stars, called in the Rigveda “ five bulls or eagles ” which sit in the midst of heaven and hold back the “ devouring wolf,” who tries to enter the watery home 1
1 Mahabharata Bhishma (Jamvu-khanda Nirmana) Parva, ix.—xi. pp. 29—39.
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of their realm, the treasure-house of the rain*god I. These stars are the Pole Star and the four stars said in the Zenda- vesta to rule the four quarters of the heavens : 1. Tishtrya or Sirius, ruling the East; 2. The seven stars of the Great Bear, the Haptoiringas or seven bulls, the North ; 3. Vanant or Corvus, the West; and, 4. Satavaesa or Argo, the South. These are also the four Loka-palas of the Hindus 2 3 4. Of these the constellation Hasta, the hand or Corvus, that of the five-day weeks of the hand of Daksha, is the ruling constellation of the Pandavas, who are compared to its five stars as they stood round Drona their tutor, the god of the tree-trunk 3. It was to the centre god of these five ruling bulls that the Pandavas betook themselves after their first victory won by Arjuna, who alone, except Kama, the horned lunar-solar god of the three-years cycle, could string the bow of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, provided for those who entered the contest for the hand of Drupadi. Drupadi refused to accept Kama as a suitor. Arjuna after stringing the bow in Pushya (December—January), the month of the winter solstice, when the wedding took place, and on the 16th, or full-moon day, shot through the central mark in the sky, the palace of the Pole Star, five arrows, the five seasons of the year of the five Pandava brethren, of which I shall give the full account in Chapters VIII. and IX. He thus repeated the feat of Krishanu and won the hand of Drupadi for the five Pandava brethren. It was when the bride was won that they went to the house of the Potter, the master Pole Star, where the marriage was consummated 4.
It was at the end of the Magh year, the end of December —January, that the Pandava wedding took place. This was the year of Bhishma, who died, as we are expressly told in the Mahabharata, at the end of his year on the first of
1   Rg. i. 105, 10, II.
s Hewitt, Rtiling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 331, 332.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxvii. p. 403.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Swayam-vara) Parva, clxxxvii., clxxxix., cxc., cxcii. pp. 524, 526, 530, 532, 538, 558.

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Magh (January—February), when the sun had begun its Northward course1.
The Hindu god who was the counterpart of Bhishma and the charioteer of Arjuna the Pandava leader, as Bhishma was generalissimo of the Kauravyas, was Krishna. He who was like David the youngest of eight sons was born, according to the popular mythology of,Mathura his birthplace, on the eighth of Bhadon or Bhadra-pada, or at the end of the first week of the second six months, the second stage of this year in its second form dating from 8200 B.C., beginning in Phalgun (February—March) 2. His father was Vasu- deva, the son of the creating-god Vasu, and his mother Devakl. They were brought from Goburdhan on the Jumna, the place sacred to the keeper of the cattle of Ra-hu, to Mathura, sacred to the god of the fire-drill (math), by Kansa, the goose-king of the eleven-months year, in order that he might prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy that the eighth son of Vasudeva and Devakl would kill him. He killed successively their first six sons, but to avoid the slaughter of the seventh the embryo from which he was to be born was transferred from the womb of Devakl to that of Jasoda, meaning the exhausted or superseded goddess, wife of Nanda of Go-kul, the cow-pen, the male god of the Nand-gaon hill. Nanda was, in the local legend of the birth of the Bharata, husband of Ra-dha, the maker (dha) of Ra, the sun-god, whose sacred hill was Barsana, divided from Nandgaon by the valley of the grove of Sanket or the “ place of assignation ” where the lovers met, as the matriarchal village- mothers met their lovers from the next village in the village grove. Barsana and Nandgaon are the two sacred hills of the Bharatpur range, the mother-hills of the Bharatas3. Nanda’s wife Jasoda is also called in local legend RohinI, the star Aldebaran, who was, as we have seen, called, like Ra-dha, the mother of the sun-god, and she as wife of Nanda
1   Mahabharata Anushasana (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, clxvii. pp. 776.
a Mathura, a District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, pp. 50—63.
3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 450—453.
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was the Nandini, the year-cow of Vashistha stolen by Dyu, the eighth god of the Bhishma series of sun-gods.
The son born from this transferred embryo, a process which appears in the birth stories of all Jain Tirthakaras x, was Valarama, the seventh son of Vasudeva and Devaki, called Halayudha, he who has the plough (kal) for his weapon. His banner was the date-palm-tree, but not surmounted by the five stars crowning the palm-tree of Bhishma2. He who stood aloof from the contest between the Kauravyas and Pandavas was thus the leading star in the Plough and Bear constellations. This was the plough borne on the banner of Shalya, god of the arrow-year 3. He was king of the Madras, who led the Kauravya army at their final defeat, and was father of Madri, the intoxicated (mad) mother of the two youngest Pandavas, whose fathers were the Ashvins 4.
The birth of Valarama from the six mother Pleiades, his deceased brethren, signified the marriage of RohinI their queen with the seven Rishis or antelopes of the Great Bear, a marriage succeeding her first union with Orion. It was to celebrate this union that the year of the god of the antelope’s head (mriga - sirsha) was made the national year beginning in Mriga-sirsha (November—December) 5, that is to say when the sun was in Taurus in that month about 12,200 B.c., a year of the age of the eleven-months year.
It was from the union of the Pleiades and Aldebaran with the stars of the Thigh that the god Krishna was born. Though the local legend of Mathura fixes his birthday on the eighth day of the light half of Bhadon, yet in Bombay and the South of India it is celebrated on the eighth day 1 2 3 4 5
1   Jacobi, faina Sfitras, Kalpa Sutra, Lives of the Jainas, 30; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 229.
2   Mahabharata Shalya (Gul-Aytidha) Parva, xxiv. and lx. pp. 135, 233.
3   Mahabharata Drona (Jayad-ratha-badha) Parva, cv. p. 297.
4   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxiv. pp. 364, 365.
5   Eggeling, Sal. Brah., ii. 1, 2, 6—8 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 283, 284.

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of the dark half of Shravana (July—August), or about the 8th of August; and it is stated in the Harivansa LVII. to have taken place on the eighth day of the dark half of Bhadon (Bhadrapada), about the 8th of September, and this is the date at which the festival is generally celebrated throughout Northern IndiaT.
The Harivansa tells us it took place like that of the Kauravyas and Pandavas under Abhijit the Star Vega, that is between 10,000 and 8000 B.C., and as the date varied from July—August to' August—September it marked the middle of a year beginning when the sun was in Gemini in January—February and in February—March.
Krishna when born was carried by his father, who eluded the guards of Kansa, across the Jumna to Gokul, on the east bank of the river, and there consigned to Nanda and Jasoda. From the latter Vasudeva took away her newly- born daughter, the twin-sister of Krishna, and placed her in the bed of DevakI, the bed of the year-god and goddess. When the guards of Kansa came to slay the newly-born eighth son she rose up to heaven as the mountain-goddess Durga or Su-bhadra, the blessed Su-bird, the goddess to be borne in the chariot of the Ashvins, as the star Capella in the chariot constellation Auriga, to her wedding as the virgin Suria or Su-konya with Soma the moon-god. She is called in the Harivansa LVIII. the goddess of the sun and moon, and is described as Kushika, the goddess of the Kushika, bearing the trident of the year of three seasons and the lance of Kuntl, the lance-mother of the Pandavas, the lance that pierces the rain-clouds and lights the year’s fires. Her dress was black with a yellow upper garment, and she wore a collar of pearls round her neck and the pearl earrings of the moon-goddess. Her banner was a peacock’s tail, that is of the Greek Here married to Zeus in Gamelion (January—February), and of the Mayura kings 1
1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, Hindoo Fasts, Festivals, and Holidays, pp. 430, 431.
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of the Bharata. She is called the goddess of the ninth day of the dark end of the eleventh day of the light half of the month, that is of the years of nine and eleven-day weeks, who was worshipped as the goddess Kail, to whom human and animal sacrifices were offered during those epochs. Her birthday, the 8th of September, is the day consecrated as the birthday of the Virgin Mother in the Roman Church, which took place nine months after the festival of the Immaculate Conception on the 8th of December, that is in the dark half of the Hindu month Mrigasirsha (November —December). Both the Indian and Christian goddess- mother are called with equal reverence The Blessed One. Krishna, the son and brother of the virgin-mother-goddess, the star Aldebaran who had become in astronomical evolution Capella, was born on the same day as his twin-sister. One of their birthdays, that on the 8th of Bhadon, the 23rd of August, is also the birthday of the Pythian Apollo, called Paian or the healing-god, the sun-physician. He was born on the 7th of Metageitnion (August—September), called Boukatios at Delphir, that is to say the 22nd of August; but this number seven became sacred as the week of Apollo in the year of the next epoch, the seventeen months of seven days each, and was doubtless derived from the seven stars of the Great Bear, his father’s constellation. It was on his birthday that the Pythian games began, which were originally held every eighth year in memory of the eight-days week, and they opened with hymns sung in honour of Apollo Paian, who slew with his arrows the Python snake who had inspired the oracles of Delphi during the age of the eleven-months year when the Ephod was worshipped1 2 3.
This snake was the Dragon of the oracle which Pausanias says Apollo slew at his birth 3. Its name Python is the Greek form of Budhnya in the name of the Vedic god Ahi Budhnya, the snake of the depths, the Greek Buthos, called
1   Hesiod, Works and Days, 771 sq. ; Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp 244,245.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 242.
3   Ibid., X. 7, 3, vol. i. p. 507.

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also Ahi Shuva, or the swelling snake, which Indra slew when accompanied by the Maruts I. These Maruts, the daughters of the tree (marom) ape-god Maroti, are said in the sacrifice offered to celebrate the great victory of Indra, Apollo or Krishna to be seven in number, who danced round Indra as he killed the Vritra or enclosing snake2, that is to say, they were the mother-goddesses of the young sun- god, son of the Thigh with its seven stars. In the next hymn to that describing the victory of Indra and the Maruts, Indra’s mother, called Shavasi, the strong one, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 350, the Polar mother-tree from whose side he was born, calls her dead foe Ahi-shuva Aurna- vabha 3, the son of the weaver of wool, that is of the spinning mother Pleiades who bore the ram-sun of the cycle - year. This slain snake is invoked in another hymn as Ahi-budhnya, who is called on to bestow health as a healing god, and to come accompanied by the children of the waters, who bring the stallion swift as thought, the god Dadhiank of the horse’s head 4. This year of the slaying of the snake by the new-born sun-god, told in this series of national year histories, is the year of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, and Valarama, the parent-plough star-god of the year of fifteen months. It was, as we have seen, the year of the first victory of the Pandavas in which they won the tree-mother-goddess DrupadI, and in which Arjuna married Su-bhadra on the Raivataka hill, on which Arishtanemi, the sun-god of the eleven-months year, attained perfection on the 6th day of the light half of Shravana (July—August), about the 20th of July 5. This Raivataka hill is consecrated to Revati £ Piscium, the 27th Nakshatra, that is, to the star marking the close of the year of one epoch and the beginning of
1   Rg. viii. 65, 1—3.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416.
3   Rg. viii. 66, 1, 2.   * Rg. i. 186, 5.
5   Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra,, Life of Arishtanemi, 173; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 277. We have seen on p. 428, that according to the mythology of Bombay and the South of India Krishna was born on the Sth day of the dark half of Shravana.
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another. Hence the change of state attained by Arishtanemi on this hill marked the close of his year of eleven months, and the opening of that ruled by Arjuna and Su- bhadra, the nominees of Krishna, who, with Rama, worshipped Arishtanemi on his renunciation of the rule of the year in favour of the new gods of the fifteen-months year. He was followed on his retirement by Raji-mati or Rai-mati, the mother of Ra, the sun-god, a variant form of Ra-dha, wife of Nanda. She who was in the Jain birth story daughter of Vasu-deva, the Bhoja king by his wife RohinT, the star Aldebaran, had been chosen by Krishna as the bride of Arishtanemi, and she on his abdication became, like him, a naked ascetic T, that is, they were stripped of the panoply of the year-god and numbered among the dead years.
D. The year of the Makommedan Twins.
We have seen that this year is ruled by the constellation Gemini, and valuable historical evidence as to the relations between this year and the constellation can be gained from the year of the Mahommedan Arabs as arranged in Mahom- medan ritual. It began with the 15th of July, the first of Mohurrum, when Mahommed went from Mecca to Medina, and this year is closely connected with the twins A1 Hasain and A1 Hosein, who are called in Mahommedan history the sons of Ali and grandsons of Mahommed. But to these have been attached attributes which were originally those of the twin year-gods who had been worshipped in Southwestern Asia for thousands of years before Mahommed. We have seen that this year of fifteen months is one with two beginnings, one in January—Februaiy and the other February—March, marking the times when the sun was in Gemini in those two months. We find a similar change in the Arab year beginning with the birth of the Arabian twins. Their first birth is said to be on the 3rd Sha’ban, 1
1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, Lect. xxii. I—32; S.B.E., vol. xxii. pp. 112—116.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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February—March, when Jerusalem ceased to be the Kebla and Mecca was substituted for it. Jerusalem was the site of the Sabsean worship in which men prayed turning to the North, the religious attitude succeeding that of the Harranites, worshippers of Laban, who, as AlberunI tells us, turned, like the Roman augurs, to the South. The second date of the birth was the 6th of Ramadan (March—April), inaugurating the New Year beginning at the vernal equinox. That these births marked the beginning of a year divided into two periods of six months each is shown by the reputed death of the twins. This is celebrated by the Shias of Persia on the ioth of Moharrum (July—August), or six months after their birth in February—March, and the news of the death of A1 Hasan was brought to Damascus on the 1st of Safar (August—September), six months after the second birth x.
E.   The Roman gods of the year of eight-day zveeks and the year of Lug.
The history of the earlier Twin year-gods, beginning their year when the sun was in Gemini in January—February, can be further illustrated from the Roman ritual chiefly derived from Umbria and Etruria, that is, from Tyrrhenian sources which go back to India. The first of January at Rome was dedicated to a god called Aesculapius Vediovis, the island Vediovis worshipped at Rome and Bovillae. At Rome he had two temples, one between the Arx and the Capitol hill, and one on the Tiber island. He was represented as a young god holding arrows like Arjuna or Apollo; a goat stood beside him and was sacrificed to him1 2. He thus resembles the Pre-Mahommedan god Hobal at Mecca, with seven arrows in his hand, the seven stars of the Great Bear, in whose temple there were 360 gods, the days of the
1   Sachau, AlberunI’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xx., The Festivals of the Moslems, pp. 326, 32S—330.
2   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Januarius I, p. 277, Maius, 21, p. 121, Martius Non, 7, p. 43.
F f
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year1. He is one of three gods worshipped at Mecca as three stones, Hobal, Lata, and Uzza2. They are mentioned in the Koran as the old Arab deities, Allat, A1 ’Huzza, and Manat. Allat is the god called by Herodotus iii. 8, Alilat, a female form of Dionysos called Orotal, the Akkadian goddess of the nether world with the same name, a form of the Southern mother Bahu, worshipped as the light moon. A1 ’Huzza or Uzza was the bisexual god and goddess of the two moons united, the full-moon goddess worshipped as an acacia-tree, the tree-mother of the sun-god Manat, the dark moon worshipped as a huge sacrificial stone 3.
Thus this god Vediovis, like Hobal, was the male form of the bisexual lunar deities of the cycle-year, and, as the god of the temple between two groves, he is the Latin form of the Hindu Nanda and Radha parents of the Bharata race, who used to meet at Sanket, the “place of assignation” between the two hills dedicated to them. As he was originally a god of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks, his festival took place on the 9th of January. He is then called a god of the Agon, that is of the Collis Agonis, another name for the Quirinal hill of the Sabines, which was outside the Palatine city of Romulus 4. On this day the Rex Sacrorum, priest of the Regia, where the vestal fire was, sacrificed a ram to the god of the hill called Janus Geminus, the twin (Geminus), instead of the goat offered to him as Vediovis, the god of the Pole Star age. As the name Janus comes from the same root as Janua, the doors, he is clearly a god strictly analogous to the Egyptian and Phoenician Ptah, the opener, the beginner of the year, and a Latin counterpart of the Hindu Varuna, the Lokapala of the North, whose victim was the ram. The gate called after him Janus was
1   Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 86, 263.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 408.
3   Palmer, The Quran, chap. liii. v. 19, 20; S.B.E., vol. ix. p. 252, vol. vi. Introduction, p. xii. ; Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, p. 67.
4   Mommsen, History of Rome, Translated by Dickson, Popular Edition, vol. i. p. 86,

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the North-east gate of Rome, that of the rising sun of the summer solstice, and his images on coins show him as a god with two heads, that is, as a god of the year of two seasons of the solstitial sun who originally began his year at sunset at the winter solstice, the god of the South-west and Northeast line on the altar of the eight-rayed star. But as the god of the gate, the oldest Roman god, whose priest was the Rex Sacrorum, ruling the opening of the year, the month and the day, he has become the two door-posts, the constellation Gemini guarding the gate of the Garden of God, the constellation in which the sun was on the 9th of January about 12,200 B.c., or the beginning of the age of the eleven- months yearJ. Following this festival of the firstborn of the Twin gods, the bisexual twins who were originally male and female gods, the Mithuna of the Hindu zodiac, we have the Carmentalia of the nth and 15th of January, and on the former day the fountain of Juturna, that of the sun-horse, was worshipped.
Carmenta was, as Ovid tells us, a prophet-goddess who told the fortunes of children, and had apparently two forms called Porrima and Postverta. She was a goddess of the South, to whom no animal victims were offered, for no leather or anything dead was allowed near her temple. She was probably a form of the solstitial year-bird, as a prophetess whose festival had been instituted in the age when the sun was in Gemini in December—January, as the year-festival of the year-bird originally born at the winter solstice. Her mid-year festival was the Lucaria of the 19th and 21st of July, divided like the January festival into two parts, separated in January by four and in July by three days. The Lucaria was a festival of the goddess of groves (lucar, Incus), and was apparently a tribal festival of the Luceres, as that of Janus was of the Sabine Titienses1 2. The Luceres were
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius, pp. 280—2S2, 286—2S9.
2   Ibid., Mensis Januarius, Carmentalia, pp. 290—293, Mensis Quinctilis Lucaria, pp. 182—185.
F f 2
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not only sons of the grove but of the wolf-sun-god, the Greek Lukos, who had come to Italy with the Umbrians, who brought, as we have seen, the priests who introduced into Italy the Indian ritual of the Pole Star age, and who wore, like the priests of the Hindu Pitaro Barishadah, the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder.
The next January festival was the Feriae Sementivae, or the Paganalia of the three days from the 24th to the 26th of January. This was the Roman ploughing festival of the year, when the plough oxen were decorated with garlands and cakes, and a pregnant sow was offered I. This festival is one clearly allied to the great Magh (January—February) festival of the Indian Mundas, and other cognate tribes, with which they begin their year. Also to the January ploughing festival observed in most countries in the world, which I will discuss in full later on when I come to the ploughing festival of the Buddha.
The last of the Roman festivals of January is that of the 27th of the month, the dedication at Praeneste of the temple of Castor and Pollux, the Great Twin Brethren who bathed their steeds, after the battle of the Lake Rcgillus, in the Juturna fountain, worshipped on the nth of January. They were the twins who, as we have seen, ruled all the feasts of the month 2 3.
In the February half of the month of Magh three festivals intimately connected took place almost simultaneously :— The Fornicaria, which closed on the 17th of February, but we are not told when it began ; the Parentalia lasted for eight days, the week of the year, from the 13th to the 21st of •February, and the Lupercalia was celebrated on the 15th 3. They all appear with the festivals of the end of January to form part of one great national festival inaugurating the beginning of the year, and consecrating the whole month of
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius Feriae Sementivae Paganalia, pp. 294—296.
2   Ibid., Mensis Januarius, y£des Castoris et Pollucis dedicata, pp. 296, 297.
3   Ibid., Mensis Februarius, pp. 302—324.

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January—February to festivity, as the Mundas in India consecrate the whole of Magh to dancing and revelry.
The Fornicaria was a feast of grain roasted like the grain of the Piets and Indian Pitaro Barishadah, and made into cakes. These were eaten at a common meal held in each of the Curise, or thirty villages, communities into which the Latins were divided ; and the festival of the Quirinalia on the 17th February, which ended it, was a meeting of all the Curiae, at which every man who had failed to celebrate the feast in his own Curia might attend and remedy his omission. It was, in short, a festival beginning the year with a 'recognition and assertion of national brotherhood. It was held in the temple of Ouirinus on the Palatine hill. The two myrtles in front of it were survivors of the two Phoenician pillars.
The Parentalia was the national feast to the dead of the Vestal Virgins (Virgo Vestalis Parentalia), that is, of the race who introduced the sexless gods of the cycle-year, and the cult of the household fire tended by the virgin daughters of the national king. While it lasted all temples were closed and no marriages allowed. This custom accords with the Ooraon rule that no marriages can take place till the bones of the dead of the past year, who have been burnt after their death, are collected from the poles in front of each house where they have been placed, and buried in the burying-place of the family of the deceased. The custom of burying-the dead of each family in the village where their ancestors first settled is a survival of the city of the dead in which all Akkadians and Mundas used to be buried. That of the Mundas is in the province of Tamar, in the ' Lohardugga district. The common funerals of the Ooraons take place in December—January, before the month of Magh. The offerings made at the tombs of the dead during the Parentalia were water, wine, milk, honey, and the blood of black victims. In each household, as Ovid tells us, a family festival, called the Caristia, was held on the 22nd of Feb
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ruary, the ninth day of the Parentalia, when all the family ate together. On the night before this festival, called the Feralia, an old woman, an accredited sorceress, performed rites to the goddess Tacita or Dea Muta, the silent-goddess, the survival of Bahu, the mother-goddess of the Abyss, the female pair of the Hindu Prajapati (Orion), who was worshipped in whispers I. With three fingers she placed three bits of incense at the entrance of a mouse-hole, that of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse-god of death, to keep him aloof from the house. Muttering a spell, she wove white woollen threads in a dark coloured web, the mingled shades of day and night, and kept, while she was weaving, seven black beans in her mouth, sacred to the seven stars of the Great Bear. She then took a fish, the moena, the wonderworking fish of the Tobit story, smeared its head with pitch, sewed its mouth up, dropped wine on it and roasted it before the fire, as Tobias roasted the entrails of the fish to drive away Asmodeus. The rest of the wine she drank with the girls of the house who assisted at the service 2
The Lupercalia was held on the 15th of February, one of the days of the Parentalia. It took place at the cave called Lupercal, in the South-western corner of the Palatine hill, where the Tiber had deposited the wolf-nurtured twins, Romulus and Remus, under the sacred fig-tree. Hence it was a festival of the Ramnes, sons of the wolf, and the mother-tree Silvia, the wood (silva) goddess, who had, as Leto, the tree-trunk, borne Apollo, the wolf, and Artemis, the Great Bear goddess, on the yellow river Xanthus in Lycia.
The festival began with the sacrifice of a goat and a dog, the mother of fire, the Hindu Matari-shvan, the mother of the dog. They were sacrificed by the two Luperci. Cakes were also offered, made by the Vestals from the first ears of last year’s harvest, some of which had been already used at
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra//, i. 4, 5, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 131.
3   Ovid, Fasti, 2, 571 ff. ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Fcbruarius, pp. 308, 309.

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the Vestalia on the 9th of June and the 9th of September, the first offering of the ears being more than eight and the second more than five months before this last, which seems to be the birth-festival of the wolf-sun born of the last year’s corn and quickened in September. After the sacrifices the race of the Luperci began. The runners were divided into two companies, each headed by one of the noble Luperci youths, one of whom belonged to the Collegia of the Fabii of the Quirinal, and the other to that of the Quinctii of the Palatine hill. Their foreheads were smeared with the knife dyed with the blood of the victims they had slain, and were then wiped with wool dipped in milk, which as a bath of purification cleansed them of the guilt of the slaughter. They were then obliged to laugh as children of the goat and dog, who rejoiced over their new birth as offspring of the sun-cow born from the sun-ram. They who had been naked hitherto girt themselves with the skins of the goats, the dress of the Akkadian priests and of the Hindu Vaishya at their initiation, and after feasting ran round the base, or part of the base, of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows with strips of skin of the hides of the victims which were supposed to produce fertility.
The course round the Palatine hill is described by Tacitus as starting from the Lupercal and passing by the shrine of the Lares and the Forum. This ran from South-west to North-east, the course of the original sun-bird, and the sunward course of the Roman augurs who turned their faces to the South with the West to their right hand, so that the West was the lucky side from which the runners were to start Northwards by West to East. But it is improbable that both the bands went in the same direction, for we shall see in Chapter VIII., when I describe the similar race round the town boundaries of the Umbrian Gubbio on Whit- Monday, that the party bearing the three Ceri representing the god of the year of three seasons ran with the course of the sun, while the priestly procession went against it,
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and both parties met at the South-east point of the course, the rising-place of the sun of the winter solstice.
The festival is certainly one denoting the close of one year and the beginning of another consecrated to the sun- god, son of the dog Sirius, who as the dog-star rules the mid-months of the year; and the two bands of runners, one taking the pre-solar and the other the solar direction, marked the union of the worshippers of the wolf sun-god of the Palatine with the Sabines of the Quirinal worshippers of the Phoenician cave-mother, before whose temple the twin- pillars were placed.
It marks a year beginning about the 15th of February, or on the 1st of February—March, the Hindu month Arjuna or Phalgun, that of the consummation of the wedding of the sun-maiden Suria, beginning when the sun was in February —March, that is about 8000 B.C. The year thus begun corresponds to that of our popular mythology beginning with St. Valentine’s Day, when the birds pair.
The inauguration of the year by a religious ceremony designed to make the women fertile seems to show clearly that this year was originally begun, like the Magh year of the Ho Kols, by a general pairing of the population at the dances introducing it. At these the men and women of adjoining villages met as the people of the Palatine and Quirinal did at the Lupercal, and their meeting on this authorised day of union was followed at the end of the period of gestation by the birth of the children then begotten. Similar tribal birthdays must have followed other authorised festivals of meeting, at which alone women could legally conceive. Hence we understand how in the history of Cuchulainn he and his father Lug were alone able to defend their Ulster possessions against the Fir Bolg as all the other men were laid up with the sickness of the couvade J, the simulated lying-in of the father when his wife was confined. This story clearly points to a time when all the Ulster ladies were brought to bed at the same time.
1 Rhys, Hilbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 627, 628.
of the Alyth-Making Age.
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The beginning of this year was apparently celebrated by a second sacrifice on the 24th of February, at the end of the first nine-days week of this year. It is not certain whether the victim was a goat or an ox, but Plutarch says that it was offered in the Agora or central market-place of the city, and that the Rex Sacrorum after killing the victim ran away. The flight after this expiatory sacrifice, offered to drive out malevolent wizard-gods, is exactly similar to the flight of the Indian priest after killing the lamb offered at the autumnal equinox at the opening festival of the cycle-year described in Chapter V. p. 224. Also to that of the sacrifice of a bull-calf to Dionysos at Tenedos, when the priest fled away ; and this may have been the spring sacrifice to Dionysos said by Hesychius to have taken place in Anthesterion (February—March), that is at the beginning of the Lupercalia year L The flight apparently represented the disappearance of the year-father of the new year, when he quits his functions at the end of his year and leaves the rule of the coming year to his son.
The Mid-year Festival of this year in the Roman ritual was that of the 12th of August to Hcrculi-invicto, the unconquered Plercules who ruled this year. It is the first of a series of festivals lasting to the close of the month. That to Diana of the Aventine and other gods on the 13th, the Portunalia on the 17th, the Vinalia on the 19th, the Consualia on the 21st, the Mundus Patet on the 24th, the Opiconsivia on the 25th.
The first of these is clearly the festival celebrating the victory of Hercules over Cacus, called Kakios by Diodorus, who has been proved by M. Breal to represent the god of the South-west wind Kaikias, said by Aristotle to bring up the rain 1 2. He dwelt in a cave on the Aventine to the South-west of the Palatine, and Hercules is said in Virgil’s
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Februarius Regifugium, P- 327.
2   M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap. ii., La Legende Latine, pp. 6l, 62, chap, vi., Formation de la Fable, p. in.
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graphic description of the contest to have fought him after he had slain the three-headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion or Orion, the god of the year of three seasonsI. Cacus is described by Virgil as a half-human Centaur, that is a god of the eleven-months year, who belonged to the three-headed brood. The Porta Trigemina commemorates the victory of Hercules over this three-headed antagonist.
At the approach of his vanquisher Cacus retreated into his cave, which he closed behind him, taking with him four bulls and four heifers, the eight days of the week. He drew them inside by their tails, an incident denoting the retrograde path of the zodiac, from right to left, followed by the astronomers of the eleven-months year and still preserved by the Chinese2 3. But the Latin god Hercules, who advanced directly to meet his foe, who retreated with backward steps, is not the Herakles of the Greeks, the Phoenician Ar-chal, but the guardian-god of the demarcated family properties of the ploughing race, the god of the enclosing fence, the Greek Herkos (epnos), the Hindu Lakshman, the boundary-god who kept the sun in his ordained course through the stars. He was the Sabine sowing-god Semo Sancus, who is also said to have conquered Cacus, that is, the sower of the sacred grass (sagmen), that carried as a sign of their mission by all Roman ambassadors3, and the Sabine Salii officiated at the memorial sacrifice of the victory on the Ara Maxima.
The other name of the conquering-god, Recaranus, clearly explains the meaning of the story. It denotes the Re-creator {kar, ker), the second creator, called by Varro with reference to Janus Duonus Cerus es, duonus Janus: Thou art the
1   Virgil, sEn., viii. 201.
2   Ibid., viii. 207—211 :—
Quatuor a stabilis prsestanti corpore tauros Avertit, tolidem forma superante juvencas.
Atque hos, ne qua forent ledibus vestigia rectis,
Cauda in speluncam tractos, versisque viarum Indiciis raptos, saxo occultabat opaco.
3   M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et Csecius, pp. 55, 56 note.

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second creator, the second Janus; that is to to say, he and Cacus were two heavenly ploughmen ploughing the year- strips, which were metaphorically ploughed by the Indian Kuru-Panchala kings at the beginning of this year. Cacus, the retrograde plougher of the Pole Star age, ploughed the first strip during the six months when the sun went from South to North, and Hercules, who met him on the furrow as the forward plougher at the turning point of the goal, the cave of Cacus, proceeded alone to plough the returning strip from the North to the South of the heavenly field. Servius tells us that Cacus’ sister pointed out to Hercules the path her brother had gone L She was Diana of the South-west Aventine hill, whose festival was held on the next day, August 13th. She, who was the goddess of the sacred groves, especially that of Aricia, had been originally the mother-tree-goddess of the mud {tana), who had become in the age of lunar-solar time the moon-goddess measuring the year. It is also clear from this story that the original contest between Hercules and Cacus was at the summer solstice, when the sun begins its returning course, and when Indra, the rain-god of the original story, killed Ahi-shuva, the god of drought, who became the Greek oracular snake Pytho at the summer solstice when the rains began in North India.
That the sacrifice offered at the Ara Maxima to celebrate this victory was a national ceremony of the ploughing worshippers of the sun is proved by the rule that only free men were allowed to take part in it. This rule is precisely the same as that laid down by the Raj Gonds of Chuttisghur, sons of the god Ra, who only allow free males, members of the tribe, to join in the sacrifice to their supreme god, Sck Nag, who, as the snake of rain, is the Gond equivalent of the Vedic Ahi-shuva. Those present at the ceremony attended it with bare heads crowned with laurels sacred to the sun- god ; and similarly all Gonds when sacrificing to Sek Nag 1
1 M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancu et Crecius, pp. 59—61.
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must be naked. Also the rule excluding women from the ceremony conclusively proves it to be later than the rites of the Pole Star and Lunar Solar ages, at which both men and women assisted ; and if any sex was excluded from any of the national ceremonies it was the men, who left, the solemnisation of the New Year’s Feast of the Pleiades year, the Thesmophoria, to the women, the only recognised parents of the village races.
The sacrifice was followed by a feast on the flesh of the animals sacrificed, in which all present joined ; but of the two priestly families who with the Praetor presided at it only the Potitii could eat everything offered ; the Pinarii were not allowed to eat the entrails ; and this prohibition, together with the custom of dividing the officiating Salii into two parties, seems to show that it indicated a union between two tribes hitherto opposed to one another.
Another proof of the alliance is derived from the tithes of the booty given by Hercules. This shows that the union was one between allies among whom each kept the produce of its own lands, and only devoted a part to the public benefit, instead of placing the whole in the common granaries according to the custom of the first village communities. Under this new arrangement each family maintained itself on the lands which had become its hereditary property. A modified form of the old common meals was maintained in the sacrificial feasts provided from the tithes, such as that at which Samuel entertained Saul.
The whole ceremony tells of the formation of a new stock born from the joined Southern and Northern races, the Hindu and Jewish Kathi, similar to that formed by the union with the previous population of the Gonds, who brought from Asia Minor to India millets, sesame oil, and the art of building houses, an alliance producing the confederacy of the Vid-arba or double-four, the eight tribes of the Gonds.
The consummation of this alliance between the ploughing immigrants and their predecessors was celebrated at the
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
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banquet of Hercules by draughts from the loving cup, the immense wooden goblet given by the conquering god, that of the united Ribhus, indicating, not the division of the year into seasons, but the union of its compotent parts into the complete year of the circling sun-god.
The antiquity of the ritual of the Ara Maxima consecrated to this new ploughing sun-god is proved by its situation in the open air, like the primitive Hindu Greek and Phoenician altars, and by its use as the place where the most sacred contracts were made by men with bare heads, and the flint knife in their hand. It was to Roman ritual the great white stone of the Scandinavians on which the most solemn oaths were sworn I.
The characteristics of the festival of the 13th of August following that of the day of the victorious battle of Hercules, completely confirms these conclusions. It was a festival of the South-west Aventine, in the temples of Diana and Vertumnus, the turning (verto) gods of the year, on that hill, and also of Hercules at the Porta Trigemina. It was a feast of the Plebs and slaves, not of the aristocratic worshippers at the Ara Maxima, and indicated the earliest stage of those national autumnal rejoicings at the end of the first six months of the year, that of the days when the ruling year-god was not the male sun-god, but the sun-maiden, the doe brought by the Ashvins or Twins, whose feast was held on this day in the Flaminia lucus, to wed the deer-sun-god of the North, the plougher Vertumnus, who turned the direction of his furrow when the feast was first instituted at the summer solstice. The temple was especially dedicated to Diana the protectress of deer, the doe-goddess of Orion’s year. The festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers, was also held on this day at the Circus Maximus 2. But I will deal with this festival and its historical meaning presently, when
1   M. Breal, Hercuh et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et Crecius, pp. 44—48.
2   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Scxtilis, August 13th, pp. 198—202,
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I have completed the survey of the Roman Festivals of August.
The next of these festivals to be reviewed are those of the Portunalia on the 17th of August, the Vinalia on the 19th, and the Consualia on the 21st. They all seem to be festivals of a race who came into Italy before the sun-worshippers of the eight-days week, and whose gods were those of the retrograde year of Cacus. The Portunalia, called also Tiberinalia, was the festival of the river-god, the father and mother Tiber, and he, as Portunus, was a god who presided at the opening of the year, for according to Verrius he had a key in his hand, and on this day Janus was worshipped at the Theatrum Marcelli. He was apparently the Etruscan god Portumnus, who has been identified by Signors Correra and Milani with the Greek god Palaemon, called both Portunus and Palsemon in Southern Italy, his mother being named Mater Matuta, Eileitheia and Leukothea, as well as Inox. Ino was wife of Atha,mus Tammuz or Dumu-zi Orion. Of her two sons, Learchus and Melicertes, Learchus was killed by his father as the offered victim of his madness, answering to the madness of Kalmashapada or Pausya recorded in Chapter VI. Ino escaped with her son Melicertes as Arusha, the mother of Aurva, the thigh (urn) born god, fled from the slaughterers of her people. Ino threw herself with her son into the sea from the Molurian rock in Megara, and Melicertes was saved by a dolphin, and changed into Palaimon, the god who was landed as the son of the mother-fish on the Isthmus of Corinth, where he was found under a pine-tree 1 2.
This god Melicertes is the Phoenician Melquarth, the lord (malik) of cities (karth), worshipped as the sun-god in all Phoenician towns. His festival was held at Tyre on the 2nd of Peritius, the 25th of December, and his death as
1   Milani, Studi e Materiali di Archeologia t Numismatica, Part i., Correra, Sul Culto di Leucothea a Napoli, pp. 73—79 ; Milani, Ino Leucothea Imagine dell’ Acque e dell’ Aria, pp. 80—86.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, i. 44, 10, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. pp. 68, 71,

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a log, the yule log, and his resurrection were celebrated in the annual festival then begun. He was recalled to life by Iolaus x, who was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 263, Baal Iol, charioteer to Baal Makar or Melquarth. He was a form of Lakshman, the boundary-god of the story of Rama, who kept the sun-god in his right place in the sky furrow. It was after the twelve days intervening between this and the 5th of January, of which we have seen the meaning in Chapter III. pp. 101, 102, that this god awoke as the first representative of the sun-god, in the form of Palaimon or Baal Yam, the sea (yam) god, the counterpart of the first birth of the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun- god, the Hebrew Solomon, born under a pine-tree on the 6th of January 1 2 3.
He was thus the sun-god of the year of the twins Learchus and Melquarth, the stars Gemini of the age when the sun was in Gemini, in December—January, about 12,200 B.C., and in the progress of time he became god of the year when the sun was in Gemini, in January—February and February—March, that is from 12,200 to about 8000 B.C., the present age. It was to him as the god whose year began on St. Valentine’s day, the 14th of February, with the Roman festival of the Parentalia on the 15th, that his midyear festival took place on the 17th of August. In his first birth as year-god of the year beginning in January—February he is the god in whose honour the Isthmian games of Corinth were held. They, as we learn from Thucydides, took place in the early spring, for he tells us it was immediately after these games that the Spartan fleet under Alkimenes, which had been waiting for spring weather, sailed from Kenchreae to Chios to attack the Athenians 3. The prize of the Victor in these games was a wreath of pine leaves of the tree under which the infant god was found.
The Vinalia festival of the 19th of August was the mid
1 Berard, Originc dcst Cidles Arcadiens, iv., Le Dieu Fils des Phoeniciens,
p. 254.   2 Ibid.
3   Thucydides viii. 6—10.
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year festival of the Vine-god Dionysos, whose year began with the Anthesteria of the beginning of Anthesterion (February—March). The Consualia held on the Aventine on the 2 ist of August was, as Tertullian tells us, held in a subterranean temple. The god worshipped was the guardian of the stored (condere) grain, and at it horses and asses had, according to Plutarch, a holiday, and were decked with flowers. This is the sun-god, the equivalent of the Celtic sea- god Llyr, who had, as we have seen, p. 63, an underground temple under the Soar at Leicester, and thus the male form of the Southern mother-goddess Bahu, who had become the dolphin-mother who brought Palaimon or Baal Yam to land. This mid-year festival of Consus was also connected with the Opiconsivia held at the Regia at the hearth of the Vestal Virgins on the 25th of August, or three days after the Consualia. It was probably a festival of the blessing of the fires at the half-year.
The whole meaning of these August mid-year festivals is set forth in the ceremony of opening on the 24th of August the Mundus or round pit on the Palatine in the centre of the city. This was sacred to Dis and Proserpine, the two goddesses of the year divided into two seasons of six months each, the pit by which they were supposed to reach the lower world of the South. It was usually closed by a lapis manalis, a stone of fate. This was taken off for three days at the turning of the year, when the sun having reversed its course reached the brink of the Southern pit.
For a full understanding of this system of half-yearly festivals, which seems to have formed part of the ritual of this year of eight-day weeks, we must turn to the history of the Celtic sun-god Lug. He was, as we have seen, the son of Mackinealy, that is of the Wolfs Head. He was thus the Celtic form of the Lycean Apollo, the son of the wolf of light (lukos lux). He was also the successor of 1
1   W. Warcle Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis* Scxtilis, pp. 202, 207, 211—214.

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Nuada of the Silver-Hand, god of the cycle-year of the lunar crescents, who was killed by Balor, the Pole Star father of Lug’s mother, with an eye before and behind his head. Balor in his turn was killed by Lug, who was on his victory made king of the Tuatha De Danann x. Lug’s year of rule must have begun in January—February, for his mid-year festival in honour of his nurse Taill-tiu, the goddess of flowers, began on the 15th of July and continued till the 14th of August, the middle-day of the feast being the 1st of August, our Lammas 1 2 3. Hence his year is the same as the Magh year of Bhishma and of Hindu Mundas and Ooraons, and its mid-year festival is paralleled by the great Kurum festival of India held by the Ooraons and Mundas on the bright half of Shravana (July—August), corresponding with the Hindu Naga Panchami festival of the five (_panch) Naga snake-mothers held on the 5th of Shravana. This festival is followed by the harvest festival of the gora or upland rice, which takes place about the middle of August. The Kurum festival, like that of the birthday of Krishna, takes place at various dates, owing, as I have shown, to tribal astronomical reasons for changing the New Year’s Day. Among the Kharwars of Shahabad it begins in the early part of Bhadon (August—September), and lasts for fifteen days, and the Bhumijes of Bankura celebrate it in the dark and not the light half of Bhadon 3.
This most significant festival is held in honour of the Kurum-tree (Nauclea parvifolia), a wild almond-tree answering to the almond-tree at Luz and the almond-rod of Aaron. The tree sacred to this festival is cut in the forest by youths and maidens who fast till they have completed their task, and is brought in solemnly with dances and planted in the middle of the Akra or dancing-ground. On the chief
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 611, 612.
* Ibid., Lect. v. p. 414.
3   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Bhumij, p. 125, Ho, p. 329, vol. ii., Ooraon, pp. 145, 146; Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, pp. 245, 246.
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night of the festival, before the dance round the Kurum-tree begins, the daughters of the head-man of the village bring into the Akra young plants of barley which they have grown in special beds like the pots of the gardens of Adonis. The seed has been sown in sand from the mother-river mixed with turmeric, the holy plant of the yellow race. When they bring the yellow shoots thus grown into the Akra, they first worship the Kurum-tree and lay some of the plants before it; they then distribute the remainder among the dancers, who wear them on their heads during the dance, which lasts all night.
A very remarkable piece of national history is told in connection with the change from the worship of the Kurum- tree of Magh (January—February), in which the birth of the barley-sun-god is celebrated, to that of the next god ruling the month of Phalgun (February—March), the second month of the wedding of Suria or Sukonya to Soma, the month sacred to the Pandava Arjuna.
The sacred river of the Kharwars, the parent-tribe of the Cheroos, rulers of Maghada, is the Kurumnasa, which divides the province of Maghada or Behar from that of Benares. Its name means the destruction (nasa) of the Kurum-tree, and its historical significance is shown by the horror with which it is looked on by all orthodox Hindus. None of them will touch the water or wet their feet in it, and hence at the fords or roads crossing the river, before the present bridge over the Grand Trunk Road was built, the Kharwars and other dwellers on its banks who looked on it as sacred used to make a great deal of money by carrying pilgrims across it. The ritual which superseded that of the Magha Kurum and removed the river from the list of holy streams was that of the Pandavas, the ancestors of the more distinctly Northern or fair {panda) Hindus, who began their year not with the Magh festival but with that called the Pluli, beginning in the bright half of Phalgun (February—March) and ending on the full-moon day. This festival is the Hindu parallel of the European carnival beginning originally, before

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it varied with Lent, on the 14th of February, St. Valentine’s Day ; and at the Huli the Hindu women throw red powder at their lovers as confetti are thrown at the Carnival. It marks in Hindu history the victory of the Pandavas over the Kauravyas, who measured time by the eleven-months year.
This great national birthday of February — March is commemorated in Hebrew history by the festival of Purim, which plays the same part in the Jewish national story as that of the Huli does in that of the Hindus. Both celebrate the victory of the men of the red race over the yellow sons of the almond-tree. The Purim victory is that of Mordecai, the god Marduk, the bull-calf of Babylon, and Esther, or Istar, the morning-star, over Haman and his ten sons, the gods of the eleven-months year, who were slain, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 303. This was the final victory of Marduk, or Merodach, over Tiamut and her eleven-fold offspring. It is held on the 14th and 15th of Adar (February—March), that is to say, at the full and not the new moon of the month, and it, like the Roman New Year’s Day of the 1st of March, tells of an age still later than that which began the year with the 14th of February, when the sun entered Gemini on that date, about 8200 B.C. At the beginning of this epoch the old reckoning by new moons was that used, but this was followed by the substitution of full moons for the crescent moons, as we see in the Mahabha- rata, that Bhishma’s year began with the new moon of Magh (January—February), and that of Parikshit the sun- god succeeding Bhishma with the full moon of Cheit (March—April), when he began to run his year’s race, followed and guided by Arjuna of Phalgun, the Marduk of Esther’s story, the young bull-god driving the white sun- horses of the sun of February—March.
We must now return to Lug and the year beginning in January—February, the year of the Greek month Gamelion, the month of the marriage of Zeus and Here, and originally that of Esther and the sun-king of Shushan. The
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Greek mid-year festival of this year is the Panathenaia of Athens held every fifth year in the last days of Hekatom- baion (July—August). Its great day was the 28th of the month, answering to the 13th of August, the festival of the goddess Flora and of Diana of the Aventine at Rome, and exactly coinciding with the second stage of the Lug festival of July—August.
But before closing the account of the parallelisms connected with the year of Lug, I must turn to another account of the birth of a sun-god, the equivalent of Lug and the Lycian Apollo. In Franche Comte, near the great French shrine of Lug at Lug-dunum or Lyons, the Yule-log, called La Tronche, was almost in every house in the province, about thirty or forty years ago, taken off the fire on Christmas Eve almost as soon as it had been placed on it. When it had thus been baptized with fire it was taken apart and covered with a cloth. Then the childen came in and 'beat it with sticks to make it bring forth {pour la faire accoucher). Nothing came of this first beating, so they were removed to repent of those sins of the past year which prevented the mother from being good to them. After a time they were brought back, and when the cloth was removed after, they beat it their Christmas presents were disclosed 1.
Here we see an unmistakeable survival of the birth of Melquarth or Archal, the sun-god, from the funeral pyre on the 2nd of Peritius, or the 25th of December, of Apollo from Leto, worshipped as a tree-trunk, and Krishna from the mother-tree, the black virgin Mari-amma. She is the Czech goddess Leto, who, as a doll made of straw, the withered sun-mother of corn, is clothed every year in summer with a shirt, and she and the broom and the scythe she bears in her hands are thrown into the next village 2. This goddess-mother of the tree-trunk was the Yule-log lit on the New Year’s festival in the national palace of the bee-taught
1   C. Beauquier, Les Mois en Franche Comti, p. 137.
2   Mannhardtl Antike Wald und Feld Knltur, vol. i. chap. iii. pp. 155, 156.

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race, for the bees are called to in their hives every Christmas Eve in Franche Comte.
But besides the tree-trunk-mother who gives the year gifts, there is, in some parts of Franche Comte, another called Tante Arie, who comes riding on an ass and places the presents on the Christmas pine-tree, the mother-tree of Germany, and this mother is Su-koniya, the year-mother of the ass-riding Ashvins r.
Another most remarkable survival of ancient year mythology is found in the drama of La Creche, or the cradle, which begins at Besangon in December and lasts at intervals till the end of January, so that it is a theatrical representation of the opening of the year in December—January and January—February.
The three actors in the drama are those who are in Germany the Three Kings of Cologne, headed by the black king Melchior, who came to worship the young child on the 6th of January. But in Franche Comte they are the old wine-grower Barbizier, his wife Naitoure, whom he constantly beats, and Verly, who tries to keep the peace between them 2. In these three persons we see unmistakeable survivals of Rama, Sita and Lakshman, for in their journey to find the young sun-god in his cradle in the plough-furrow of the year-stars, they go and ask counsel of the old hermit or astrologer, the stars of the Great Bear with its guiding pointers, who will show the star under which the child is to be found. The story tells how Rama, the god who ploughs his year-path through heaven in the furrow Sita, whom he drives before him, finds Sita as the year-child of the crescent moon in the labyrinthine Southern castle of the ten-headed Ravana in Lanka (Ceylon), after reaching his journey’s end by the road in which he has been kept by Lakshman, the guardian of the boundary stars of the zodiac in which the sun-god is born, and through which he passes in his yearly circuit. The star sought for in the cradle-drama is
1   C. Beauquier, Les Mois en Franche Comte, pp. 136—13S.
2   Ibid., pp. 149—152.
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that in which the sun-child of Naitoure, the bearing (native) mother, is to be born as the Etruscan Tages was born, from the furrow. It is a perpetually recurring drama of the history of time told by the passage of the sun through the Zodiacal stars, and the successive changes of these stars marking the monthly resting-places, and especially those of the solstitial and equinoctial guiding points. In this year of the eight-days week, though the first birth of the young sun-god takes place at the winter solstice, yet the second is in January—February, and the mid-year star of this second, birth is that in which the sun is found on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin on August the 15th, when Athene receives her year Peplos at the Pana- thenaia. This story of the circular year-track of the sun followed by Rama, Sita and Lakshman, is also preserved in that of the universally known Punch, who beats his wife Judy, and is always quarrelling with the policeman, the guardian Lakshman. He proves his Indian origin by his name, which is that of the Indian five (patich) days week, the five Nag-Panchami mothers. The birth-star of this cradle drama is that in which the sun was to be found on the 6th of January, twelve days after the winter solstice, and these twelve days added to the twelve before the solstice during which Archal lay on the funeral pyre make up twenty-four days or a month of this fifteen-months year.
That this year of Lug which we find depicted in these various forms in ancient year-history was a year measured by eight-day weeks is proved by the Celtic week of the eight Maini. They, as the seven Great Bear stars parents of the eighth god, the sun-god of this year, were originally the Secht or seven Maini. As the eight Maini they are called : i. Maine Mathremail, M like his mother; 2. Maine Athremail, M like his father; 3. Maine Morgor, M very dutiful ; 4. Maine Mingor, M little dutiful ; 5. Maine mo Epert, M greater than is said; 6. Maine Milscothach, M of honey-bloom ; 7. Maine Andoe (meaning unknown) ; 8. Maine

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cotageib Ule, M that contains them all, that is the sun-god the eighth. They are the eight rings dropped every ninth night by Odin’s ring Draupnir. This week of eight days and nine nights is that of Lug’s eight warders placed to guard him after he became king of the Tuatha de Danann, and the eight warders of the court of Arthur, the ploughing-god Airem, who divided the year between them, and of whom the eighth was the white horse of the sun, Glewlwyd Gavael- vaur, Brave Grey with the Great Grip 1.
F.   The year of Odusseus as god of the Thigh.
In the survey of the sun-gods of the year born of the Thigh who rule this year of eight-day weeks, I have now to return to a sun-god whom I have mentioned several times before. This is Odusseus, the victor, like Arjuna, in a shooting contest for the goddess of the year. He was originally the Northern wandering-god Orwandil of the North, whose great toe was the star Rigel in Orion. He was married to Penelope, daughter of Ikarios, whom he won in a foot-race as leader of the stars going round the Pole. His wife, as weaver of the web (Trrjv77), was originally the Pleiades or spinning-mother, but as the daughter of Ikarios, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 326, changed into the constellation Bootes, she became, as the goddess- mother of the corn-growing races, the constellation Virgo, one of the zodiacal stations of the sun ; and perhaps she was also the leader of the three weaving sisters, the Pole Star Vega, who was, as Gandharl, a child-bearing mother like Penelope. Odusseus was, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 144, the god of the year-bed of the olive mother-tree- goddess Athene, and his connection with the year is further shown by the catalogue of his swine kept by his Phoenician swineherd Eumseus. He owned six hundred sows, lodged in twelve pig-sties, and he had also six hundred boars who
1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. iv. pp. 364—372, Lect. vi. pp. 617, 618.
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lived outside, but whose numbers had been reduced to three hundred and sixty by the suitors of Penelope, who killed them as food. They were guarded by four dogs, the four Lokapala stars Sirius, the Great Bear, Corvus and Argo.
Their numbers show that they were the year-pigs of the twelve-months year of the boar-god, and in this reckoning fifty sows were allotted to each month T. These fifty answer to the fifty great gods of the Akkadians, and the fifty daughters of the Hindu god of time, Daksha1 2 3, the fifty daughters of Endymion by Selene, the moon, the fifty sons of Priam, the fifty daughters of Danaus, and the fifty servant- wives left behind in Ithaca by Odusseus when he went to Troy, of whom twelve had become mistresses to the suitors. They were the year-goddesses of old year reckonings, who were to be replaced by the newly-recovered Penelope, whose hand'he has to win in his contest with the suitors 3.
These fifty children of the year-god and the fifty mother- sows apparently mean fifty days, so that the whole year of twelve months would contain six hundred days, and six hundred is the number of the Babylonian cycle of the Great Ner of 600 years. But if this year of twelve months of Nergal, the Great {gal) Ner, contained six hundred days, the term day must have a different meaning from that we attach to it, and if the Odusseus year of six hundred days equalled in length, as it must have done, that of the three hundred and sixty boars of the suitors and the year of three hundred and sixty days, each day must have been made up of fractional parts differing from those which make up our day.
An explanation of this difficulty may be found in the Hindu Tithis or lunar days, which differ in length from the civil days. In the list of the Tithi days of the lunar month given by AlberunI, the eight Vishtis or changes into which it is divided contain thirty Tithis or lunar days, and the first
1   Homer, Odyssey, xiv. 5—22.
2   Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 1S3 ; Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 189.
3   Homer, Odyssey, xxii. 419—429.
of the JSIyth-Making Age.
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of these Vishtis is called Vadavamukha, the distorted month, the name of the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year of p. 396 F. But AlberunI does not tell us how this year of Tithis is made up apart from their use in the year of the Karanas, which, as we have seen, was measured by the same days as we use. But we find, perhaps, a clue to the measurement of this year of Odusseus as Vadavamukha, the god of the eleven-months year, in the constantly repeated statement that he returned after his wanderings to Ithaca, and resumed his power in the twentieth year since his departure, when his year-dog Argus, the constellation Argo, fell dead at his feet from joy at his return 2. This number in the account of his vagabond career as an unattached sun-god of the lunar-solar epoch apparently marks the number of lunar months in his year, which was measured, as we shall see presently, by twenty-four lunar phases. This year of twenty months, each containing thirty, or of twelve months each of fifty, Tithi days, would be one of 600 days ; and if every Tithi day contained twenty hours equalling our twenty-four, each month of thirty days would contain 600 hours instead of the 720 of our month, and each year would contain 7,200 hours instead of the 8,640 hours of the year of three hundred and sixty of our days. Such a measurement of time as this is quite practical, and it may have been used by the national .astronomers who measured in the Southern observatories the year of the horse’s head framed in the North as the eleven- months year. These astronomers of Northern descent, before they united with the Southern races and formed our mixed decimal and duodecimal system of reckoning, did all their reckoning in decimals, and this is the reckoning followed in this year I have sketched above. Our mixed system is based on the Dravidian duodecimal measurement of time, which divides the day into sixty Ghatis or hours of twenty-four minutes each, an order reversed by the Baby- *
* Sachau, Alberunl’s India, vol. ii. chap, lxviii. pp. 201—203 ; Mahabharata Adi (Chailra-ratha) Parva, clxxxii. p. 517.
2 Homer, Odyssey, xrii. 327.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:14:30 PM: 458

lonians, from whom we took our calendar. As the Dravidian system provided a most elaborate division of time into seconds and more minute fractions, it was much more useful for astronomers than the rougher calendar of the North ; hence the latter was superseded for practical use, and only survived in such historical tales of old Northern life as the original story of Odusseus Orwandil.
The correctness of this hypothesis has no bearing whatever on the main argument of this explanation of the Odusseus story, for which it is only necessary to prove him to be a year-god of the primaeval methods of reckoning time. The twelve pigsties for his sows and the three hundred and sixty boars left alive prove this, and further complete proof that he was a god of the Thigh year is given by the mark on his thigh by the gash made by the boar of Parnassus which he slew while hunting with the sons of Auto- lycus, the self {auto) shining (lukos) god, the independent sun-god of that mountain sacred to Bellerophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician, and his horse Pegasus, who made the fountain Hippocrene at its foot. This wound was above his knee (yovvos virep), and immediately after receiving it Odusseus struck the boar on the right shoulder and slew it1. The poet’s description of the fight is thrillingly graphic. The boar charged past Odusseus from his left side, and as he passed gashed with his tusk the spearman’s left thigh, which was in advance of his right leg. He kept straight on his course after delivering his stroke, and Odusseus struck him on the right shoulder as he went by him. The spear went home, and the fighting monarch of the forest fell in the dust with the dying grunt of defiance {hrecrev ev KOVITJO-C fxaicMv), with which he told his foe that he would die fighting to the last. This story is one which could only have been told by a poet who had hunted and slain the undaunted king of the forest who dies fighting to his last gasp.
This mark imprinted on his thigh before he left Ithaca
1 Homer, Odyssey, xix. 449—453.

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on his twenty years of wandering was one by which he was known to all his friends, and in his insistance on this point the poet practically tells us that he was looked on as the god whose left thigh was torn. It was by this mark that his nurse Eurykleia, also called Euronyme, recognised him as she washed his feet, and she was the Phoenician Astro Noema, the star Virgo, guardian of the sun-god of the eleven-months yearI. It was by this that he made himself known to Eumaios the swineherd and Philoitios the herdsman of the oxen, who apparently represents Aryaman, the sun-physician, in his first form of Arcturus, the chief star in Bootes, the guardian constellation of the ox (/Sous) 2. They were his two chief assistants in his contest with the suitors. It was also by this sign that he revealed himself to his father Laertes 3. Thus as the god with the wounded and withered left thigh, he was the parallel of Jacob, who had, as we have seen, his left thigh withered in his contest with the god whom he conquered, as Odusseus conquered the boar-sun-god 4.
The final battle of Odusseus with the suitors is an exact parallel with that fought by Arjuna with the wooers of Drupadl. The rules of the contest were that the victor should bend and string the bow of Eurytus, given by his son Iphitus to Odusseus, and shoot an arrow right through the twelve double axes (7re\e/eu?) or twenty-four crescent- moons of the twelve months of the year of the twelve pigsties 5. Whoever should succeed in performing this feat, requiring the supernatural strength and skill of the supreme god, should become the husband of Penelope. Odusseus alone was able to bend the bow and shoot the arrow through the lunar crescents6, and his bow was the self-same bow as that with which Arjuna won Drupadl, for Arjuna’s bow was that of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, drawer (harsh) of the bow, and Krishanu’s name is exactly translated by that
1 Homer, Odyssey, xix.#3SS—393, xx. 5.   2 Ibid., xxi. 216—220.
3 Ibid., xxiv. 330—332.   4 Gen. xxxii. 28.
5 Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 10—32, 68—76.   6 Ibid., xxi. 404—423.
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of Eurytus or Eurutos, the drawer (iplxo). The difference between the mark aimed at in the two contests is most noticeable. Arjuna aimed at the Pole Star bird encircled by the guardian constellation Draco, while the arrow of Odusseus was shot through the twelve double axes, the stations of the twelve zodiacal stars, which were twenty- seven in the furrow of Rama, and became twelve in our zodiac. In these the sun rests while the twenty-four lunar crescents mark his monthly stay in each star.
The fight with and slaughter of the suitors which succeeded the victory of Odusseus was preceded by the capture of Melanthios, the goatherd, the Pole Star goat who went to get arms for the suitors from the bedchamber of Odusseus, containing the heaven’s bed. He was caught in the act of robbing the treasury of heaven and bound, thus succumbing to Philoitios as the star Aryaman, the cattle herdsman. Melanthios had been cup-bearer to the suitors, the filler of the cups of the seasons, and had always derided Odusseus when he returned from his wanderings disguised as a beggar- man, the despised sun-god, who was only recognised by his faithful dog Argus, the constellation Argo, who died to make way for the new year rulerz. The doors of the central hall of the heaven’s palace were closed by Eurycleia and Philoitios, the two guardian-stars Virgo and Arcturus2; and Odusseus then slew all the imprisoned suitors, the false gods of the ages of the worship of the gods of night, those buried by Jacob under the oak tree at Bethel. At the end of the slaughter Melanthios, the goat-god, was brought out, his nose, ears, hands and feet were cut off, and he was emasculated, that is changed from the ape-god of the Thigh to be a sexless gnomon-pillar 3.
The sun-god went after his victory to visit his father Laertes, the gardener of the Garden of God of the Zendavesta. In this he had dwelt with his wife Antikleia, the backward (anti) key, the year-goddess of the retrograde Pole Star
1 Homer, Odyssey, wii. 212—216, 300—327, 369 ff., xx. 172—184, 255.
2   Ibid., xxi. 376—391-   3 Ibid., xxii. 135—193, 474—477.

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years wedded to the gnomon tree-trunk, the Indian Lat, the vernacular name for the Sanskrit Yupa, the sacrificial stake, the'Etruscan Larth, or eldest son, the Pelasgian Lar, or national father. He was the Greek form of the Roman Latinus, the father of the Latins, son of Faunas, the deer-sun-god, and Marica, the sea or marsh-mother of the tree-ape, the Hindu Maroti, the Latin Mars Mart-is. He was the god of the sacrificial stakes which first marked the seasons, and became those denoting the months. These Lats surrounded the Hindu Temples, built on the plans of this age, such as that at Sando-paya in Burmah, where the central temple is encircled by Chaityas or shrines, between which are posts, with the Garuda eagle cloud-bird of Vishnu on the top. These Chaityas and Garuda posts are said in the Mahabharata to have been erected by Bhishma, the god of this year, round all Indian temples, and their meaning as calendrical signs is shown by the thirty stone pillars surrounding the sun-circle at Stonehenge, denoting the thirty days of the month x.
Thus Odusseus as the conquering god of the right thigh •is the son of the fruit-bearing tree-pillar, the earthly emblem of the creating fire-drill which begot the sun-god as the sun of the nut-tree. This nut-tree, the fruit of which was scattered before the bridal pair at Roman weddings, is believed by the Jews to have been planted in the Garden of Eden. It became the almond-tree of the Indian Ooraons and Kharwars, and the sacred walnut-tree of the Italian witches. This holy tree grew at Beneventum, and the son of one of the peasants who sold its fruit was one day gathering them. As he opened the fruits to eat their contents a fairy came out of each, and they surrounded him and danced with him, as the stars danced round the beggar sun-god Odusseus. When the dance was over they gave him three nuts, told him to open two, to keep the third for the king’s daughter, 1
1 Simpson, ‘ The Pillars of the Thiiparama and Lankarama Dagabas in Ceylon.’ J.R.A.S., 1896, p. 361; Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cix. 13, *4> P- 327; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 138 ff.
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and to take a basketful of nuts, which they gave him, to the king. From the first of his three nuts there issued so much gold as to make him the richest man in the world, and from the second a splendid summer suit of clothes. He then went to the king and asked for the hand of his daughter, but was refused, as her father said she was promised to another husband, the moon-god. But he was allowed to give the third nut to the princess, telling her not to open it till she went to bed, and then he himself came out of it, and remained with her as her secretly wedded husband. But the Indian custom of the Swayamvara, or self-choice of the year-bride, had penetrated to the Italy of this age, and when the day came when the princess had, like DrupadI and Penelope, to choose her mate among contending suitors summoned by the king, she chose the youth of the walnut-tree, who had resumed his peasant’s garb. In contending with the suitors who exclaimed against her choice, the beggar-sun-god, like Arjuna and Odusseus, vanquished all competitors, and became the father of the sun-god born of the walnut-tree T.
We see in this story a resume of the numerous variant forms of the historical tale told in this Chapter, and trace it with its Indian original features to Italy. We also see how the walnut-tree-trunk became, through its fruit, the mother of the sun-god raised from earth to heaven. This is the tree-trunk which1 was beaten as the lying-in mother in Franche Comte, that is ploughed and stricken like the laboured earth to make it yield its fruits, and we find in this series of symbols the historical origin of the old rhyme,
“A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they’ll be,”
G.   The year of the birth of the Buddha and Parikshit as sun-gods.
I have now in this survey of the history of the sun-god of the year of eight-day weeks the sun-physician to deal
1 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 193, 194.

4^3
with, the most graphic of all the birth-stories of this god, the Buddha, the Indian sun-god, who was, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 31, born of the Sal-tree. His mother Maya, a form of Magha, the goddess ruling this year, was otherwise Marlchi or Tara, the Thibetan Pole Star goddess driving the Great Bear constellation of the seven pigs. But this god, who was, as we shall see, born as the sun- physician, according to the original tradition in Magha (January—February), was in the orthodox account of his birth born at the vernal equinox. That is to say he was in the third of his births born when the sun entered Gemini at the vernal equinox, about 6200 B.c., after he had entered the Tusita heaven of wealth in his Vessantara birth, when the sun was in Gemini, in February—March, about 8200 B.C., and the Yamaloka heaven of the Twin (Yama) gods in his Mah-osadha birth as the great medicine (Osadha) god when the sun was 1 in Gemini, in January—February, about 10,200 B.C.
In his history, as told in the Nidanakatha, he was in his earliest existence as the first of the twenty-seven Buddhas, the twenty-seven days of the month of the .cycle-year who preceded him, Dipankara meaning the nascent light, the birth-star Aries, the first of the twenty-seven Nakshatra stars, the sun-god born in Aries, at the autumnal equinox, in the city of Ram-ma, the mother of the ploughing-god Ram, who follows the furrow Sita round the heavens 2. In short he was the sun-god beginning the three-years cycle.
The successor of this sun-god born at the autumnal equinox was the god conceived at the summer solstice, after ten lunar months of gestation. And it is the 'story of this conception at the summer solstice which is told in the Nidanakatha. His mother Maya was then borne in spirit to the Great Sal-tree of the Himalayas standing in the Mano-Sila-tal plain (tai) of the rock (sita) of calculation (inano), the world’s
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories:   The Nidauakatha, Birth of the
Buddha, pp. 67, 78.
2   Ibid., Sumedha and Dipankara, pp. 2 ff.
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gnomon-tree. She was brought thither by the four Lokapala angels, the four stars ruling the four quarters of the heavens. They bathed her in the Anototta, the “ not-heated ” lake, the cool pool of pure water, whence the mother rivers rise. They laid her after her bath with her head to the East, and the young sun-god appeared before her as the elephant cloud-god Gan-isha, who came from the North-east, and entered her right side r. The sun-god thus conceived was born in the Sal grove Lumbini, the village grove common to Kapila- vastu, the city of Suddho-dana, the pure (suddho) seed, and Koliya the town of Maya, who was of the race of the Mallis. This grove Lumbini is the counterpart of Sanket, the place of assignation, where Radha and Na nda, the parents of the Bharatas, met.
The sun-child when born was received by the four Lokapala angels in a net, the star-net of the zodiacal stars. He thence stepped out on the antelope skin of the god Krishna, the black antelope, and took seven strides under the white umbrella held over him by Su-yama, the twins (ydma) of Su, the stars Gemini, under which constellation he was born. His first birth, according to the Nidanakatha, was the Mahosadha birth, followed by the other two births named above. All his births, like those of the Jain Tlr- thakaras, were accompanied by the same historical phenomena, and all took place under the guardianship of Su-yama, the stars Gemini.
In his Mahosadha birth as the sun-physician he came into the world with a branch of Sandal Chandanasaro wood in his hand, that is the tree (saro) of the moon (,chando); that is to say he was the sun-god born of the moon-tree, the Suria wedded in the Vedic hymn to Soma. He told his mother this was medicine, hence he was called Osadha- darika, Medicine-child1 2. This medicine-plant was planted
1   Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, Maha Maya’s Dream, pp. 62, 63.
2   Ibid., Birth of the Buddha, pp. 66—68.
of the. Myth-Making Age.
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in an earthenware pot, his first begging-bowl, of which we shall see the meaning presently.
His first appearance in public was at the Ploughing Festival of Jambu-dwipa. This, as we have seen, took place among the Kuru-Panchalas at the beginning of Magh (January—February), and it answered to our plough festival, commemorated in the name Plough Monday given to the first Monday after the Epiphany. It was the ploughing of Hercules, the forward plougher, ending with the death of Cacus, and still celebrated in the Chinese festival held on the first day of the year beginning in January—February, when the sun and moon are in the same constellation. The Chinese Emperor then ploughs three furrows, each of the three dukes or governors of frontier provinces five, and his nine other ministers nine each1. At the ploughing of Suddho-dana he ploughed two furrows, one forward and the other backward, with a golden plough ; and his ministers, of whom there were one hundred and seven, nine each. Thus the Chinese year is one of three and the Hindu of two seasons of five-day weeks commemorated in the Chinese ritual, while the nine-days week is recalled in the nine times twelve Hindu ploughs and in the nine Chinese ministers and the nine ministerial furrows ploughed in both countries.
The Buddha at this ploughing was seated under the Jambu- tree, the central parent-tree of the royal village, which like the royal province was the centre point of Jambu-dwipa. His shadow is said to have remained stationary as representing the central steadfast point, the earthly embodiment of the motionless Pole Star2. This description of the Ploughing Festival is clearly taken from an original birth- legend of the Kuru-Panchalas of Central India, brought by the Mallis to Kapila-vastu, the shrine of the ancient Kapila, their yellow (kapila) divine parent. There apparently
1 Legge, Li-chi, The Yiieh Ling, First month, 13; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp.
254, 255.
2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: Festival, pp. 74, 75.
H h
The Nidcinakatha, The Ploughing
4 66

the individual Siddharta Gotama, the preacher, teacher and founder of the great religious organisation the Buddhistic Church, was born about 550 B.C. This is the date given by the Chinese for the birth of their great moral teacher Confucius, and it was this same period that produced the Hebrew prophets. These men, who enthusiastically devoted themselves to the task of awakening the national conscience, were the leaders of a wave of religious aspiration after mental and practical perfection which passed over the whole of Southern Asia. The awakening spirit of this new revival was born from discontent with the metaphysical philosophy which had succeeded the formal ritualism in which the early faiths ended. The first period of the belief in the Chinese Tao or path, the yearly recurring round of the imperishable germ of life, had passed away. The Northern sense of individuality and desire for personal success had made the belief in the Tao, and in its yearly task of silently creating life and promoting the physical and moral progress of the nations who remained true to the teachings of its ritual, become unsatisfying to the intellects of those who wished for more activity and less somnolent contentment with the present. To these reformers dutiful submission and unquestioning obedience were no longer the chief virtues. Hence the nations inspired by them desired as a leader a divine son of man who would be followed as an example by the soldiers who joined his banner in the war against apathy and mental stagnation, and this conception and aspiration caused the older belief in the state as a unit bound together by strict routine to disappear, and as it faded away the older form of history based on abstractions which were clear to the initiated but dark to the multitude became changed into tales in which the names which had been first symbols of the departed dead became living heroes who had each lived their lives on earth as men. When the older forms of history were thus distorted and their true meanings forgotten or disregarded, schools of philosophy arose which tried to substitute for traditional history answers to the

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riddles of existence spun from thought. It was on the Vedanta and Sankhya systems of philosophy disseminated in the teachings of the Indian Upanishads and the similar questionings of Chinese metaphysicians that both Confucius and Siddharta Gotama founded their systems of ethical religion, which simply taught that man’s chief task on earth was “to make his moral being his prime care.” According to the teaching of the Indian reformer, he was to dismiss from his thoughts all metaphysical speculations as to ultimate causes as unprofitable and useless, and in the system of self-education to which he was to devote himself, he was to abandon the ritualism which enjoined the needless and sinful offering of living victims, to eschew asceticism and valueless mortification of the flesh, and follow the eight-fold noble path of (t) Right views, (2) High aims, (3) Right speech, (4) Upright conduct, (5) Harmless livelihood, (6) Perseverance in well-doing, (7) Intellectual activity, (8) Earnest thought. By this discipline men and women were to try to reach a stage of existence in which sin was impossible, and in which all who had attained to or were strenuously striving to reach this state of perfection became members of the Sanga or community of the faithful, the reunited body who had, while attaining the benefits of individual exertion, purged themselves of its temptations.
It was as the leader in this return to a re-glorified past of national righteousness recovered by those received as citizens of the village community of the City of God, that their teacher was installed by his disciples as the Buddha or god *of knowledge ; and though he was actually born as the son of the Headman of the Sakya Gautama village of Kapila-vastu, who was probably also a Manki or provincial chief of the Sakya clan territory, they also invested him with the attributes of the previous national gods of time, which described their birth, life and death in the historical myths. In doing this they merely, as we have seen in the previous chapters of this book, followed the examples of their predecessors, who gave the same birth-history to each
H h 2
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successive manifester of the changing forms of the god who measures time. Consequently in the picture of his life handed down to posterity Siddharta Gotama, who was a teacher imbued with religious zeal, an ardent desire to discover truth and a rare sympathy with the mental difficulties of others, was born and died as the year-god who passed through the ecliptic path of the stars in his yearly round of birth, growth, extinction, and re-birth.
It was as the young sun-god that he took the lead in the symbolic ploughing of the New Year. When once started on his career his first task was to beget a successor. This young sun-god was born as Rahulo, the little sun Rahu, whose mother, unnamed in the Nidanakatha, was Bhudda Kaccani, the eleventh of the Buddhist Theris, or year-mothers, preceded by GotamT Maha Pajapati, the sister of his mother Magha, who had brought him up when his mother died seven days after his birth. She was the female form of Prajapati Orion, and was, as we shall see in Chapter VIII., the goddess ruling the first month of the year of thirteen lunar months.
Rahulo’s mother, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint, or Yasodhara, the renowned (yaso) stream (dhard) J, was the mother-river of the sons of this goddess of the eleven-months year. It was seven days after Rahulo’s birth that the Buddha started on his career as the historical sun-god, whose history is told in a story conceived when the myth of the birth and life, the sun-physician, was first made the most important chapter in national history telling of the revolution in popular theology.
He left his father’s capital on his horse Kanth;ka, the star-horse Pegasus of the year of eleven months, accompanied by his groom Channo, the concealed one, the counterpart of Lakshman in the story of Rama, the hidden power which kept the sun in its right course through the furrow of heaven. They took him thirty yojanas through the heavenly circle of the thirty stars to the banks of the river called Anoma the 1
1 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 155.
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illustrious, consecrated to Anoma-dassin, the sixth Buddha to whom the Arjuna-tree (Terminalia belericci) was sacred. This, as we have seen in the story of Nala and DamayantI, was the tree of Calculation, which instructed Nala, the year god, in the true history of annual time R
It was when he reached the epoch of astronomical calculation that the birth of the sun-god as the sun-physician took place. He then began his career as the sun-god of the horse’s head, and polled his hair, as stated in the Nidanakatha, according to the custom recorded in Chapter VI. pp. 338 ff. He received from the Archangel Ghati-kara, who measured time by the Dravidian method, which divided the day into sixty Ghatis of twenty-four minutes each, the eight requisites of the beggar sun-god. These were the three robes, the leaves, flowers and fruit of the three seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and the winter alms-bowl of earth, that in which healing plant of the sun-physician was planted as a seedling to grow into the year-tree of the next year. To these four were added (1) the razor, the pruning-knife, which gave to the parent-god of the river-born race the firstfruits of the produce grown in the year symbolized in the clipped and offered hair; (2) the threading-needle, which united all the days of the year together ; and (3) the girdle of the circling sun, which bound days, nights, weeks and seasons in the perfect whole. The eighth requisite commemorating the eighth day of the week was the water-strainer, the clouds which sent to earth the rain, the parent of the life disseminated in the earth by the sowing-god, the Latin Semo Sancus 1 2.
It was in this mendicant garb that the sun-god of this year of the eight-day weeks proceeded to the scene of his birth. He began his journey after the death of Kanthikal the star-horse Pegasus, who passed into the Tavatimsa
1   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 79, 82, 85, 40; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 71—82, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 73, 82.
2   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, pp. S6—SS.
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heaven of the thirty-three gods of his eleven-months year as a star-angel, the son of god {deva-putto)x. He rested on his way under the Pandava rock, the year-rock of the year of Bhishma and of the acquisition by the Pandavas of the year-mother-tree Drupadi, won by Arjuna’s victory as the archer-god of this year.
The final destination of this sun-god about to be born was the land of Uruvela, that is of extended (uru) time {vela). There the birth village was that called Senani, the clustered army {send) of the stars ruled by the Headman, the general Senani, the Pole Star god whose daughter was Su-jata, the sun-mother born (jatd) of the mother-cloud-bird Su or Khu, the bird in the nest of the Pole Star. Her tree-mother was the Nigrodha tree {Ficus Indica), the Banyan fig-tree-mother of the Kushika and of the Buddha’s predecessor, the twenty- seventh Buddha Kassapo or Kashyapa. As an offering to her tree-mother Su-jata took on May Day the full-moon of Vaisakha (April—May), the milk of eight cows selected out of the thousand cows of light which fed in her father’s fields, the Nag-kshatra or fields of the Nag or ploughing stars. These eight selected stars were the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the eighth the sun-god. To heat this milk and make with it rice gruel, the food of the ripened seed of life, the rice-mother-plant of the first founders of villages, a fire was lit by Sakko, the wet {sak) god, the leader of the thirty-three gods of the month in the calendar of the eleven-months year. He and the other three Loka- pala star-gods and the Pole Star god Brahma, the five stars crowning the tree of Bhishma, infused into this rice gruel the madhu or honey-sweet wine of the Mahua {Bassia latifolia), the Sap of life of the races born from the marriage union with this tree in quantities sufficient “to support all the men and angels of the four continents and two thousand islands of the world1 2.” In short the food
1 Fausboll, futaka, vol. i. p. S5.
3 Ibid., vol. i. p. 68; Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidana- kathd, p. 90.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:15:04 PM: PLATE III.
To face p. 471.

From a photograph of the cast given by Mr. A. Maudslay to the South Kensington Museum.
THE YI'CATAN GOD OF COPAN CUM-AHAU, LORD OF THE BOWL, DEPICTED AS THE INDIAN ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD GAN-ISHA, LORD OF THE LAND,
SEATED ON THE DOUBLE SU-ASTIKA.
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offering was the concentrated essence of the divine creative force.
When it was prepared the bird-mother, the May Queen, sent her servant Punna Completion to the Nigrodha tree, under which she saw the Buddha sitting as the rising-sun born from the tree. She ran back to tell her mistress, who on hearing her report placed the oblation to the rising-sun of the eight-rayed star in a golden bowl and herself gave it to Buddha ; it replaced the earthen bowl of Ghati-kara, which then disappeared.
I must here turn aside from the narrative of the Buddha’s birth as sun-god of the eight-rayed star to call attention to the annexed representation of the Buddha in the act of taking this creating bowl, which points to a much earlier form of the birth-legend than that which has come down to us in the Nidanakatha. This picture appears in one of the sculptures of the great Mexican temple at Copan. This, as shown in the photograph taken on the spot by Mr. Maudsley1, a copy of which is here reproduced, depicts the god holding in his right hand the steaming bowl of rice not as the man Siddharta Gotama but as the elephantheaded cloud-god Gan-isha, and in this portrait, his earliest form of divine existence as the cloud-bird is also recognised, for the bird’s tail protrudes from the back of his head. He is seated on the two Suastikas, the female Su-astika rj-J representing the sun going northward at the winter solstice, and the male Su-astika * denoting the southern path of the sun after the summer solstice. These are combined to form a square, and within this the sun and rain-god is seated with his legs crossed in the form of the St. Andrew’s Cross the sign of the solstitial sun. The seed-vessel in front of the god is also most noteworthy. It answers to the embryo plant-god in the bas-relief of Isilikaia standing between the seed-bearing-mother and her son, the god with the double-
1 Godman and Salvin, Biologia Cenlrale Americana ; Maudsley, Archaeology, Copan, Part I., Plate 9.
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axe, answering to the Etruscan god Sethlans, p. 259. The embryo seed-vessel of this illustration represents the cloud- god Gan-isha ready, as a seed made fertile by the rain, to enter the womb of his mother, the mother-tree. And that Gan-isha is the rain-god, is proved by the trunk whence the elephant emits the water he has drawn up with it to wash himself. In this illustration the water is spouting from the trunk on to the three balls, the three apples of the year of life of the three seasons, to fertilise them as the heaven-sent rain.
To return to the birth-story of the sun-god, when he had received the sun-bowl of the Sap of life he rose from his seat and went sunwise round the Nigrodha tree, with the vessel in his hand, to the banks of the river called Niranjara. This is the water ('niram) of age (jam) or the Phalgu, the river of February—March, in which he was to begin his year. It was the river of the ecliptic stream of time in which, as is said in the Nidanakatha, so many thousand previous Buddhas had begun their year’s reign as sun-gods. He entered the river at the Supathita or firmly-established ferry, the Star into which the sun was to enter on his New Year’s Day. Having bathed he sat down with his face to the East, whence he was to rise, and divided the rice into forty-nine portions, which he ate as the food which was to support him, the god born in his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox on the 20th of March, for forty-nine days, till he rose on the fiftieth day, the 10th of May, as the newly-born emancipated sun-god, whose birth-history is told in the Nidanakatha. These forty-nine food portions answer to the forty-nine oblations offered after the sun-horse of the Ashva-medha sacrifice, the horse who takes the sun-god round the heavens on his annual course, had been started on his year-race, and after the national history told at this yearly spring festival of the New Year had been recited I.
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 1,2, 1, xiii. I, 3, 5, xiii. 4, 3, 2, 4; S.B.E., YOI. xliv. pp. 276, 2S2, notes I, 2, 361, 363.

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When the rising-sun-god had eaten this meal he threw his golden bowl into the river, which bore it to the realm of the Kala Naga Raja, the snake-god of time, and took its place as the lowest of the bowls of the three previous year-gods of epochs, the gods of the three Buddhist heavens of the Sha- tum (hundred) Maharajaka Devaloko, the Tavatimsa heaven of the thirty-three gods ruled by Sakko and the Yama- devaloko, when the year was ruled by the sun after its entrance into the twin (Yamd) constellation Gemini at his first birth in Magh (January—February) as the sun- physician.
He then in his Vessantara birth in the fourth Tusita heaven of wealth (tuso), entered a grove of Sal-trees (Shorea robusta), his birth-trees, and spent the day there. He there received from Sotthya, the god of health (sotthi), the father of the sun-physician, eight bundles of Kusha grass. He took these to the Bo Pipal or Asvattha {Ficus religiosd) tree, the mother-tree succeeding the Kushika Banyan-tree. This was on a rising ground sacred to Durga, the mountain- goddess, the twin sister of Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- deva, and the counterpart of the Buddha as the son of the eight bundles of Kusha grass. He stood under the Bo-tree, facing the North, as the sun going northward. Thence he went round to the West, taking the left-hand path of the female Su-astika, whence he returned to the North looking southward, and came back to the West looking to the East, whence he was to rise at the equinox. He then scattered the grass on the East so as to form a seat fourteen cubits long, or the length of the lunar period intervening between him and his rising.
These eight bundles of Kusha grass were, in the orginal story, the eight rays of the eight-rayed star. In the birth- legend of the caste or guild of the Baidyas or physicians, the men of knowledge (<hudh:), they appear as the bunch of Kusha grass, which Galava placed in the lap of the mother of the race Bir-bhadra, the sainted (bhadra) wood, the central tree of the village grove. From this her son Dhanv-antari,
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the internal (antari) flowing stream (dhanv), the ever-moving river of intellectual thought, was born as the first physician, the counterpart of the Buddha J. His father Galava, meaning in the Rigveda the pure Soma or Sap, is in Pali the tree Symplocus racemosa, called Lodh in Bengal. The bark when mixed with that of Hari-taka (.Terminalia chebula), a myrobolan tree allied to the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica), A1 (:morinda tinctovid) flowers of Dhowra (Grislea to- mentosa) and Munjlt {madder), forms the Ahur or red powder2 thrown by women on their lovers at the Huli festival, which ends at the full moon of Phalgun (February—March). Thus this bundle of Kusha grass, the eight-rayed star, is the traditional parent of the sun-god, begetting his successor in the month ending at the vernal equinox.
When the sun-god had seated himself on his eastern throne of the eight-rayed star he was attacked by Mara, the Pole Star tree (marom) ape, coming against him from the North, and stopping his Northward progress, heralded by the Vijayanuttara trumpet, that of the double (vi) victory (jaya) of the North (uttara), blown by Sakko, the wet-god of the South. Mara wished to make the new sun-god of the ecliptic year-circle the god of the vernal equinox of the age of the three-years cycle. He launched at him nine storms of (i) wind, (2) rain, (3) rocks, (4) lightnings, (5) charcoal, (6) ashes, (7) sand, (8) mud, (9) darkness; the nine days of the cycle-year week. He then threw at him his sceptre-javelin, with “a barb like a wheel,” the spear of the god of the year of the wheel revolving like the fire-drill of the heavenly oil-press of the Chukra-varti, or wheelturning kings. This became the flower-garland of the goddess-mother of spring, which over canopied the new-born sun-god as he entered his Vessantara birth in the month of the vernal equinox as the year-god of the Tusita heaven of wealth, the god of the trading merchant kings, whose primitive villages had become ruling cities. This god, who
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal] Baidya, vol. i. pp. 46, 47.
2   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Indica, pp. 415, 416.

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puts to flight the armies of Mara, celebrated his birth by- making the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and by healing all diseases as the sun-physician z.
He began his year in Cheit (March—April) with the vernal equinox, to become, as we shall see in the account of his birth as Parikshit, the circling-sun of the Mahabha- rata, the white horse of the sun which entered Gemini at the vernal equinox about 6200 B.C. This was the year sacred to the twin children of the Vessantara god Jali, the net, and Kanha or Krishna Jina 1 2, that is, the conquering black (Kanhd, Krishna) goddess, the goddess Durga of the year of thirteen lunar months, the Pandavas year of Chapter VIII. This year, not measured by the sun, was that which the sun-god, spent on the Vanka-giri, or crooked mountain, and renounced his wife Maddi, the honey-queen, the sun- maiden Suria, to whom he had been married as Soma, the moon-god.
During the first seven days of his new year as the Vessantara god he sat under the Pipal-tree, and on the morning of the eighth day he went to the North-east, whence the sun rises at the summer solstice. He spent seven days standing steadfastly on this spot, and then between this and the Pipal-trec he made the walk running from South-west to North-east, known as the Path of Nineteen Steps of the Buddha. This is close to the Vajrasun or thunder-bolt (vajra) throne of the Buddha at Budh Gaya, the place of the holy Pipal-trec. Underneath the Vajrasun there were found a number of relics in gold, silver and precious stones. There arc nineteen gold relics and seventy-six, or 19 x 4, disks. In a small stupa, near the end of the Buddha’s walk, two small trays of relics were found, among which were nineteen lapis-lazuli beads and nineteen other precious stones 3.
1   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanahatha, pp. 96—104.
2   She is called Krishna Jina in llie form of ihc Buddhist birth-story given in Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism, pp. 180, 181.
J F. Tincott, ‘ The Vajrasun or Thunderbolt seal of the Mahabodhi Temple. ’
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That these nineteen steps and the series of nineteen sacred objects were connected with the measurement of a year more alien in its forms to the solar years measured by zodiacal stars than the lunar year of thirteen months, seems to be proved by the year used by the Babis of Persia and by other evidence, which I will now record. The Babis are a new sect which arose in Persia in 1843 A.D., who claim to be recipients of special divine enlightenment and a new revelation. But they are clearly connected with and are probably a revival of the mystic schools of the Shia Mahommedans of Persia, whose year was, as we have seen, ruled by the twins Hasain and Hosain, the stars Gemini. The prophet who introduced this new faith called himself first the Bab or the Gate, that is the Gate of the Twin Stars, and afterwards Nukta or fount of inspiration, and with him were eighteen disciples, a number probably connected with the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., a year of 360 days. It began in the history of the Buddha, as we have seen, at the vernal equinox. Among the Babis the months are not divided into weeks, but there are in the year nineteen months of nineteen days each, and 361 days in all, one day more than the year of 360 days. The Babis cite the Koran as authorising their year, as in the sentence of the invocation beginning each chapter Bis- mi’llahi’r Rahmani’r Rahim there are nineteen letters, counting the r’s as one letter, and the total numbers of Chapters is 114= 19x6 *1
The nineteen days of the month of this year are represented in the astronomical temple of the British goddess Epona, the White Horse of the sun at Stonehenge. This is oriented to the North-east rising point of the sun of the summer solstice marked by the gnomon-stone called the Friar’s Heel. The shadow thrown by the sun rising behind this stone falls on the line intervening between it and the
Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, 1892, vol. i. pp. 247, 248.
1   E. G. Browne, ‘ The Babis of Persia.’ J.R.A.S., 1S89, pp. 921—923.

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sun-circle. It is on this line that the sacrificial stone for the sacrifice of animal victims is placed. The sun-circle is formed by thirty lofty Sarsen stones, the produce of local quarries, joined in pairs to represent the thirty days of the month. Inside this is an older circle of thirty-six syenite stones brought from Dartmoor T, to indicate probably the thirty-six half-months of the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., which was, as we shall see, a year of the white sun-horse, and one of five-day weeks, like the first Pleiades and solstitial years and the year of Orion. To this have been added four Sarsen pillars to increase the number to forty, the forty months of the three-years cycle. To the South-west of the sun-altar of micaceous sandstone from Derbyshire, which is in the centre of the circle, is a semi-circle or horse-shoe of nineteen diorite stones, and behind them is the outer horse-shoe of fourteen Sarsen stones, each pair united by a lintel stone at the top. These represent the horse-shoes of the White Horse of the sun, drawn on so many of the chalk hills in the neighbourhood, the god worshipped with the bloodless rites of the earlier sun-god of Orion’s year.
These two horse-shoes clearly, like the other arrangements of the stones, indicate year measurements; the horse-shoes of fourteen paired stones must denote the fourteen days of the lunar phases of the year of thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days each, which preceded the year of twelve months of thirty days and denoted by the thirty stones of the outer circle, and the only year measurements belonging to the earlier age of the sun-horse of the diorite stones in which nineteen occurs is this year of the nineteen steps of the Buddha 1 2.
The correctness of this hypothesis as to the meaning of the nineteen diorite stones of Stonehenge is corroborated
1   Or perhaps by water up the Avon from the sacred diorite rocks of Britany.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Essay viii., pp. 138—144. When I wrote this description of Stonehenge, though I saw that the temple was connected with the worship of the Buddha, I had not yet grasped the fact of the connection between it and the Buddha’s nineteen steps.
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by the stone circles of Cornwall, whence the diorite stones were brought, for there, near Boscawen and its neighbourhood in Cornwall, are four hundred circles, each of nineteen stones, which must apparently mean the months of the year of nineteen months of nineteen days eachI.
The third week of the birth of the Buddha as the sun-god, the last of the three seven-day weeks making the twenty-one- days month of the seventeen-months year of Chapter VIII., was spent in walking up and down the path of the nineteen steps. The fourth week he passed in a house built by the angels of the seven sacred jewels to the North-west of the Bo-tree, where he thought out the seven books of the Abid- hamma Pitaka, that is to say, organised the next year in this series, the first year of the seven-days week.
This fourth week was the last of the month of the lunar year of thirteen months, and at its end he left the Bo or Pipal-tree and went back to the Nigrodha or Banyan-tree, where he spent the fifth week in completing his task of thinking out the fundamental principles of his system of ethical religion.
He was there tempted by the three daughters of the evil angel Mara, originally the god of the winter season like the Zend Ahriman. They are called Tanha, Craving, AratT, Discontent, and Raga, Lust, and are parallel with the creating principles of the Sankhya philosophy, Tamas, Darkness, or the void ; Rajas, Desire ; and Sattwa, Completion 2. These creating-gods of the metaphysicians were the algebraic form of enunciating the proposition on which their system was based, that is to say, they believed, like Hegel, that nonexistence was stirred into activity by desire of a change, and that from the union of the two being was evolved. That is to say, in their views thought was the origin and measure of all things, and they ignored as inconceivable the underlying self or germ of the Vedantists, or rather they
1   Thurnam, on Megalithic Circles, Decade iv. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and edition, chap. v. p. 117.
2   Ballantyne, Sankhya Aphorisms of Kapil a, Book i., Aphorism 61, p. 71.

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interpreted this self as aspiration. But to the Vedantists this germ was the sole reality, the Tao of the Chinese, the indwelling and ruling will, the Nameless Simplicity, which does nothing itself but drives round on the ordained path, Tao, the whole annually recurring succession of natural phenomena ; it is the inherent electric spark which makes life differ from death. In the words of the Chinese poet, the Tao or path charged with vital electricity is
Simplicity without a name Is free from all external aim,
With no desire, at rest and still All things go right as of their willz.
It was this driving-germ which was brought to earth by the rain, which generated in the mother-tree the fruit which was to rise to heaven as the sun emanating from the elephant- cloud-bird Gan-isha, and in analysis there seems to be no difference between the Sankhya Desire and the Vedantist Self.
It was these metaphysical cobwebs which were the temptations offered to the meditating Buddha, and he cast them aside as vain and frivolous, forbade his followers to enquire into the mysteries of philosophy, and bid them accept the fact that each of them existed, and was able by cultivating his moral being to make his existence on earth a blessing to all whom he or she influenced directly or indirectly during their lifetime, and to return the germ to the other world so consecrated as to be incapable of being defiled by sin in a future existence.
At the end of this fifth week of wrestling with philosophical tempters, he left the Banyan-tree and went to the first mother-tree of edible fruit before the consecration of the Syrian fig-tree. This was the Mucalinda-tree (Barring- tonia Acutangnla), the Ijul or Indian oak, flowering at the beginning of the rainy season, which had been the sacred oak of the Zends and Cymric Druids, the nut-tree of the Todas and Jews, and the walnut-tree of the witch-mothers. It was 1
1   Legge, The Texts of Taoism, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxxix. p. 26.
4 Bo

under this that he spent his sixth week. The seventh week completing the forty-nine days of his sustenance on the creating rice of the eight-rayed star-god and his period of Pentecostal preparation he passed under a Raja-yatana-tree (.Buchanonia latifolia), the Pyar or Chironji-tree, bearing a fruit like small almonds, eaten by all the forest-people of Central India. On the forty-ninth day he was fed by Sakko with the fruit of the Haritaka or Myrobolan-tree of Calculation, which was, as we have seen, one of the ingredients of the Huli red powder, sacred to the sun-god of the vernal equinox. He also received from Sakko as a tooth- cleaner and digestive the thorn of the Nagalata or Piper Betul, the Betul creeper, of which the nut is eaten as a digestive by all rice-eating Hindus.
When the sun-god had thus gained complete knowledge, mastered the arts of the astronomical calculation of time and the underlying principles which make spiritual perfection possible and attainable by every human being, he was visited under the Pyar almond-tree by two travelling merchants from the South, who were going North-west to the middle kingdom, Jambu-dwipa, who brought him a rice- cake and a honey-cake. Their names, Tapassu and Bhalluka, show them to represent the eight rays of the eight-rayed star; Tapassu represents the heated and heating-sun [tap). He is a form of Tapatl, the burning-one, the sun-maiden- mother of the Kurus, who was given by Vashishtha, the god of the altar-flame, as a wife to Samvarana, the king of the Bharatas, after Vashishtha had enabled him to overcome the ten Akshauhinis of the PanchalasT. Bhalluka is a form of the bear Bhalla, the Hindi Baluk, and represents the seven stars of the Great Bear, in short, they represent the eight gods of the eight-rayed star, of which the sun is the eighth. They are the two caskets called Tapas, Penance, and Diksha, Consecration, in which, according to the Brahmanas, the Soma or year-sap of the Gayatri metre of the year of the
1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xciv. pp. 280, 281. This is a variant form of the story of Kalmashapada the mad king, told in Chapter VI.

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eight-days week was brought by the Shyena frost (Shy a) bird, called Su-parna or the feather of Su, from Krishanu, the rainbow-god, and given to Kadru, the tree (dm) of Ka, the tree-mother of the Nagas I.
It was these gods of the eight-rayed star who consecrated the sun-god as the ruler and teacher of the united races of Hindus, born of Northern and Southern parents, as sons of the rice-motlicr-cake inspired by the honey of the Northern prophets.
To receive this heavenly food of the rice-mother-sun, the Munda sun-bird, and the honey-eating bear of the North, the sun-god required a new bowl to replace the earthenware and golden bowls he had thrown away. To supply this the Loka-pala angels brought four day bowls of sapphire from the blue sky and four of the jet of night, and from these they made one bowl, said by Hiouen Tsiang to be of a deep blue colour and translucent2. From this bowl, the vault of heaven, the sun-god ate his Pentecostal meal on the eve of the fiftieth day after his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox, or about the 10th of May, when, as we shall see, his next year began, that described in Chapter VIII., the year following the year of the almond-tree.
He now in this last transformation ceased to be the man- god, for he tore all his human hair from his head and became the independent ruler of heaven and earth, whose unerring will was the law of all things.
But in order to fully understand the history of the installation of sun-worship as told in the birth of the Buddha, we must turn to that of his duplicate the circling-sun Parikshit of the Mahabharata. His father was Abhimanyu, the foremost (abhi) mind (;manyii), son of Arjuna and Su- bhadra, the mountain goddess Durga, twin-sister of Krishna. Abhimanyu became, as we are told in the Mahabharata, the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 2, 7—11 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 150, 151
2   Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birtii Stories: The Nidduahatha, The Last Epoch, pp. 105—no; Beale, Buddhist Records of the Western World, The Travels of Hiouen Tsiang, vol. ii. p. 130.
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moon-god when all the heroes of this historical poem became starsI. He was slain on the twelfth day of the final battle of eighteen days fought between the Kauravyas and Pan- davas, and his slayer was the son of Dusshasana2 3 4 *.
Dusshasana was a son of Dhritarashtra and brother of Duryodhana, who was, as we have seen, the ruling god of the eleven-months year. In the list of the eleven sons of Dhritarashtra, who ruled the months of this year, Dussha- sana’s name comes second after that of Duryodhana 3. Its four seasons were ruled by Duryodhana, Kama, Shakuni, the raven, and Dusshasana, the ill-omened (dus) son of the moon-hare (shasa), who ruled the autumn rainy season and counselled Drupadi to choose another husband^ when the Pandavas had lost their wealth in gambling with Shakuni, the summer raven of the hot season. This husband was to be Duryodhana, who sought to seduce her by showing his left thigh 5. As the god of the eleven-months year he was the god of the left thigh, and it was as the god of the two parent-thighs that he was slain in single combat by Bhima, the son of Maroti, the tree-ape, when he as selected champion of the Pandavas accepted the challenge of Duryodhana to decide finally by a duel to the death of one or other combatant, the contest in which the Kauravya army had been annihilated. In his challenge Duryodhana claimed to be the ruling god of the year, for he said, “ Like the year which gradually meets with all the seasons I shall meet with all of you in fight6.” The Pandavas represented the five seasons of the year, and Bhima was the god of the summer season ending with the summer solstice. It was this conquering god of summer who ended the war between the gods of the eleven-months and those of the solar-year by breaking
1   Mahabharata (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, iv. 19, p. 12.
2   Mahabharata Drona (Abhimanyu-badha) Parva, xlix. 13, 14, p. 147.
3   Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshavatarana) Parva, lxiii. p. 180.
4   Mahabharata Sabha (Anadyuta), Parva, lxxvi. pp. 202, 204.
s Mahabharata Sabha {Anadyuta) Parva, lxxi. p. 191.
6 Mahabharata Shalya (Gud-Ayudha) Parva, xxxii. 17, p. 127.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:16:05 PM:    48 3
both the thighs of Duryodhana and thus killing the leader of the age when time was reckoned by the fixed stars.
The wife of Abhimanyu, the moon-god, was Uttara, the North Pole Star sister of Uttara, the Polar constellation of the Great Bear, who was charioteer to Arjuna. After the final defeat of the Kauravyas and the death of Duryodhana, Ashvatthaman, the son of Drona, the tree-trunk, the god of the Ashvattha tree (Ficus religiosa) under which the Buddha defeated Mara and entered on his Vessantara birth, entered the camp of the Pandavas by night and slew all the sons of DrupadT, leaving the Pandavas without living heirs, as Abhimanyu had also been slain. Ashvatthaman when arrested by the Pandavas prepared a weapon for their final destruction in the creating blade of Kusha grass, which he threw into the wombs of the Pandava women as Galava threw the Kusha grass into the lap of Bir-bhadra, the mother of the sun-physician. This engendering grass begetting the sun-god liable to yearly death by the winter withering of nature was intended to cause the offspring of Uttara to belong to this class of dying gods, but Krishna frustrated this intention by declaring that he would raise again to life the dying child who would 'rule the world for a cycle of sixty years as Parikshit, the circling sun.
The contest between Ashvatthaman, the last year-god of the age of the mother-tree, and the Pandavas ended in his release on condition of his resigning to them the gem which made him ruler of heaven and earth1 2. This gem was the creative force residing in the year-god, who became henceforth the undying sun-god who made his yearly way round the heavens in the path of the ecliptic stars.'
Thus we see that the father and mother of Parikshit, the sun-god, were Soma, the moon-god, and the sun-maiden, the Pole Star goddess-bird, who was in the Vedic marriage hymn brought to the wedding by the Ashvins, the stars Gemini. The wedding in the Mahabharata is described
1   Mahabharata Shalya (Gut-Aytidha) Parva, lviii. p. 227.
2 Mahabharata Sauptika Parva, xiii. iS—22, xv. 27—35, xvi- 1—16, pp. 48, 52, 53-
I 1 2
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as an alliance between the phallus-worshipping Matsyas, the sons of the river-fish, the eel-god, and the Bharatas, sons of the mother-sun-bird Saljuntala, and it took place after Arjuna, guided by Uttara his charioteer, had, under the banner of the ape with the lion’s tail, the meaning of which I have described in Chapter IV. p. 151, and VI. p. 329 *, recovered the cows of light from the Kauravyas. That the birth of the sun-god Parikshit born of this marriage was parallel with the Vessantara birth of the Buddha in the Tusita heaven of wealth is proved by the Mahabharata narrative. Before the birth took place the Pandava parent-gods of the coming year set forth to the South, the realm of Marutta, the ape-tree-god, under the constellation Dhruva pointing to the Pole, explained as that of Taurus in which RohinI Aldebaran was. Their camp was laid out with six roads and nine divisions, exactly on the model of the Chinese Central Sun Palace called the Hall of Distinction, representing the year which the Emperor opens by the Ploughing Festival2.
w
N
Tenth month Eleventh month Twelfth month
Tenth month '5
' ? S3
; I
5
•S
H   Eleventh month   Twelfth month
3
a
O
a

Sixth month   Fifth month   Fourth month
Fourth month
1   Mahabharata Virata (Vaivahika) Parva, lxxi., lxxii. pp. 181—185.
2   Legge, Li-chi, The Yueh Ling, Book iv., sect, i., part i. 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp. 251, note 1, 252.
df the Myth-Making Age.
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In this historical diagram the corner squares each represent two, and the centre squares forming the equinoctial St. George’s cross, one of the twelve months, and the centre square the thirteenth month, to be described in Chapter VIII.
On their arrival at the south, that is at the winter solstice, when the sun was in Taurus, about 10,200 B.C., they offered sacrifices to the gods^of the Pole Star age, on an altar thatched with Kush a grass, including the three-eyed Shiva of the cycle-year. They there obtained the gold of the heaven of wealth they sought for in the gold-mines ot Southern India, which now appear to have been first worked, all the former gold being supplied by the river sands of Chutia Nagpur, and the hill streams of the Pamir Himalayas. They returned northwards by short inarches g arriving at the Kauravya city Hastinapur, the city of the Hasta or Pandava constellation Corvus, the modern Delhi, a month after the birth of Parikshit, that is at the end of Phalgun (February—March) at the vernal equinox1 2 3 4.
When Parikshit was first born as the child in the cradle of the Twins, he was lifeless, but was recalled to life by Krishna, the god of the year beginning January—February, and began his life in Phalgun (February—March) 3, when the Buddha was born under the Ashvattha-tree, that is when the sun was in Gemini in that month, about 8200 B.C. It was a week before the full-moon of Phalgun, when, according to the Brahmanas, preparations for the festival of the annual circuit of the heavens by the sun-horse were made 4, and according to the Mahabharata the horse Parikshit started on his course at the full-moon of Cheit (March—April), or about the 1st of April. But the race was begun in Phalgun (February—March), for Phalguna or Arjuna was appointed
1   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxiii., lxiv. pp. 164—171.
2   MahabhSrata Ashvamedha (Anugi(a) Parva, Ixx. 13, 14, p. 178.
3   Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxvi.—lxx., pp. 170—179.
4   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 4, 1, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 34S.
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to attend Parikshit *. Parikshit is not named in the poem as the horse, but is spoken of as a man, but the horse that represented him is said to have had a head like a black antelope, and he was followed by Arjuna in a chariot drawn by white horses 1 2 3 4.   *
The course of the white sun-horse, as described in the
Mahabharata, was first to the North-west, the land of the
*
Trigartas, the place of the summer solstice, from thence it went to the South-west, through the country of Central India ruled by Bhagadatta, the god of the tree with edible fruit (bhaga). From the South it turned to the North-east to Manipur, in Assam, the land of the Naga races, which it reached as the Equinoctial states of the Eastern sun. It was here that Arjuna, who, as protector of the horse, had to meet and vanquish the rulers of the solstices and equinoxes whom he had to pass, was all but slain by his son Vabhru- vahana, son of Chitrangada, daughter of Chitra-vahana, King of Manipur, that is the offspring of the eleven-months year ruled by the star Chitra Virgo 3.
This contest, in which the Naga rulers of heaven tried to bring back the sun under the rule of the cycle-year, is exactly parallel with the Buddha’s fight with Mara at the same period of his year’s course. From the East the sun-horse went to Magadha, whence it returned to Hastinapur, where the sacrifice of the sun-horse took place at the full-moon of Cheit 4. The preparations for the sacrifice of the returning sun-horse, who began his year with the full-moon, and not with the new-moon of Bhishma, began to be made on the full-moon of Magh (January—February), or two months before the sacrifice. This took place fifteen days before the Fordicidia at Rome, when the blood of the October horse was offered. It is noteworthy that the circuit made by the horse as
1   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, Ixxxii., Ixxxiii. pp. 1S1—185.
2   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Amigita) Parva, Ixxxii. 7, p. 184.
3   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, Ixxix., Ixxx. pp. 197—204, Adi (Arjuna-vanavasa) Parva, ccxvi., ccxvii. pp. 593—598.
4   Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Amigita) Parva, lxxiv.—lxxxiv. pp. 185—213.
of the. Myth-Making Age.   487
described in the Mahabharata is not made sunwise, but contrary to the course of the sun of the summer solstice. This circuit of the horse of the eight-rayed star was therefore not that of the sun-god finally accepted as the fully emancipated ruler. This last circuit is that of the complete Buddha whose final installation I have described, and who ended his forty-nine days of sustenance on the rice of the golden bowl, about the 10th of May. He then became the sun-god described in the Buddhist birth-stories, who received his birth-offering from Su-jata at the full*moon of Vaisakha (April—May), or about May Day, and who began his year on the 15th of April, as the St. George of our national mythology, the sun-god born from the Easter egg when the sun was in Gemini at that date, or about 4200 B.C., the same epoch as when it was in Taurus at the vernal equinox. But before we reach that date there are other variant forms of the year to be described, and one of these, the year of eighteen months, introduced at the Horse sacrifice of Parikshit, will be the subject of Chapter IX.
In the history of the births of these sun-gods, the Buddha and Parikshit, we have a panoramic picture of the march of time from the age when the year began with the birth of the sun-god in the constellation Gemini at the winter solstice. This was about 12,200 B.c. But in tracing the stages of the successive births we must begin our retrospect before the Mahosadha birth of the Buddha as the sun-physician, which took place, as we have seen, about
10,200   B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in January— February, in the year he appeared at the New Year’s ploughing ceremony, and also before his Vessantara birth, coinciding with that of Parikshit, which took place about 8200 B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in the beginning of February—March. The original form assumed by this conception of the series of consecutive births was apparently, as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 332, the calendar reckoned by both Akkadian and Indian astronomers, which began the
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year with the three months’ concealment of the sun- god, during which the infant sun was guarded by the moon-goddess, called by the Buddhists Gotann Mahapaja- pati, the first of the thirteen Theris ruling the thirteen months of the year, and the female form of Prajapati Orion. During these three months, reckoned in the Akkadian calendar as beginning in Kislev (November—December) and ending at the close of Sebet (January — February), time was measured by the track of the moon through the thirty stars. These three months were also those of the Hindu Ashtakas ending in the last fortnight of Magha (January — February) with the Ekashtaka, when the revealed sun-god, released from his dependance on his moon- nurse, was born “as the son of the majesty of Indra,” and started on his divine mission as the revealer of truth on his horse Kanthika, the star Pegasus, the second of the thirty stars. The three months which in this reckoning began the year of the thirteen Theris ignore the earlier phase of the history of this three months’ seclusion of the infant sun-god as they take no account of his Mahosadha birth in January—February, and place the Vessantara birth of the released sun-god at the close of February—March, or in the phase of the moon succeeding the birth of Parik- shit. The sun-god who emerged from obscurity at the New Year’s ploughing ceremony of January — February, must have begun his three months’ seclusion in October— November with the Deothan, or lifting up of Krishna on the nth of the bright half of Khartik (October—November)1. This is about the date assumed as the beginning of the three months’ trance of Cu-chulainn, who was, as we have seen, a sun-god whose strength lay in his left thigh, and who therefore in his first avatar was a god of the eleven-months year, who began his career by wedding, on the ist of November, Emer, the daughter of Forgall of the Gardens of Lugh, the home of the Southern sun, and who gained his bride
1 Elliot, Memoirs oj the Races of the North-Western Provinces of India, vol. i., Supplementary Glossary, Part il., Dithwan, pp. 245—247.

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by killing twenty-four of her twenty-seven warders, the twenty-seven days of the month of the cycle-year. Three of them, Scibur, Ibur and Cat, Emer’s brethren, he allowed to escape. The contest, in which the sun-god appeared after his three months’ trance as the warrior sun-god, seventeen years old, was that waged for the possession of the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, hidden in Glenn Samaisce, the Heifer’s Glen in Slieve Gullion in North-east Ulster. Ailill, the Welsh Ellyll, the dwarf, and Medb or Meave, who ruled Connaught and the Western home of the setting sun, wished to add this eighth solar animal, the bull of the rising sun of the summer solstice, to the seven they already possessed : the two sun-rams, two sun-horses, two sun-boars owned by them both, and the white horned-bull of Ailill born from Meave’s cows. Daire Mac Fachtna, the guardian of the brown bull, refused to lend it to Mcavc, and she and Ailill determined to take it by force. She summoned to her aid, among others, her sons, the seven Maine, of whom, though seven are mentioned, six only are named in the Ta’in Bo’ Cuailgne, Maithrcmail, Aithremail, Cotageib Ule, Mingor, Morgor and Conda or Maine, Mo’-epert, leaving out Milscotliach or Honey Bloom, and Andoe, which appear in the list of the Maine of the eight-days week. The war was for the possession of the eighth Maine, the Brown Bull, rising in the North-east.
The chief opponent of the advance of the armies of the setting sun was Cu-chulainn, who contended single-handed against them. It was during this contest that his three months’ seclusion took place, after he had been nearly slain by the arts of the Morrigu, the sea (mnir) mother, the goddess Bahu, who appeared, while he fought with Loch More, as a white red-eared heifer, the star RohinI (Alde- baran) of Orion’s year, an eel, the mother of the sons of the rivers of the year of six-day weeks; and the wolf sun- mother-goddess. The wounds she got in this combat were healed by the three draughts of milk Cu-chulainn took- from her, and it was after this reconcilement with the
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Southern mother of life and of the sun of the winter solstice that Cu-chulainn’s trance of regeneration began. He was put to sleep by a man-god in a green mantle, coming from the North-east, and his sleep lasted “ from the Monday before Samhain, the 31st of October, to the Wednesday after the feast of St. Bridget,” the 1st of February, or during the months of October—November, November—December, December—January. It was during this time that his corps of boy-warriors, the companions of the old sun-god of the Pole Star age, were destroyed by the hosts of the West. After awaking from his trance he mounted his scythed chariot, threw off his mantle of invisibility, and appeared as the warrior sun-god clothed in a deer-skin garment, the Hindu sacred skin of the black antelope-god Krishna, the eighth son ofVasudeva. As the revived sun- god he slew the twenty-seven sons of Calatin, the twenty- seven days of the months of the cycle-year. We are told that after Cu-chulainn’s victories, and the death of Ailill’s white horned-bull, slain by the brown bull of the rising sun, Ailill and Meave sent messengers to the astrologers of Alba (East Europe) and Babylon to learn the magical arts by which they could destroy Cu-chulainn, a tradition which adds further evidence to that furnished by the mythology of the Irish and Welsh Celts in proof of the continual emigration to Western Europe of Indian and Eastern theology and astronomical methods of measuring time *.
H.   Patroclus as a year-god of this year.
Before closing the list of sun-physicians the gods of this year, I must call attention to the historical evidence furnished by the story of Patroclus. He was one of the sun-physicians, for it was he who tended and cured Eurupulos, when besought by him as one skilled in medicine to heal his wound inflicted
1   Hull, The Cucliitllin Saga, pp. 60, S3, 114, 115, 119, 157, 164—168, 170— 174, 1S2, 236 ; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. ii. pp. 137, 138, iv. pp. 366, 367.

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by the arrow of Paris, which afterwards slew the sun-god Achilles, by piercing his heel, his only vulnerable part1. Eurupulos, whose name means the wide gate, is said to have been the son of Poseidon, married to Sterope, the daughter of Helios the sun, so he is one of the husbands of the sun- maiden. He was a creating-god of this year, for he gave a clod of earth to Euphemus, who threw it into the sea, where it became the island Kallisto, the most beautiful, that of the Great Bear goddess of the same name, also his connection with the gate marks him as one of the Twins. Patroclus took the arms of Achilles when the sun-god of the Naga worshippers of the serpent Echis, from which Achilles derived his name, was obscured by the mule race of lunar- solar gods. As the sun-god of that epoch, the equivalent of the sun-gods Kama, Perseus, Sigurd, he wore the impenetrable coat of mail, and the helm of awning, the cap of invisibility. These were the arms given to Achilles by Cheiron, the Centaur, but he could not wield the ashen spear which Cheiron gave Peleus, the god of the potter's clay. This was the world’s ash-tree Ygg-drasil, the supporting pole of the heavens, and the fire-drill turned by the Master Potter, the ape-father-god of the Thigh. Instead of this he bore two spears, the two lunar crescents2.
He was slain by Apollo, the Mouse-god, who came behind him in a mist, struck him between the shoulders, and knocked his sun-helmet, the kuncc (/ewer)) or helmet of the dog-star Sirius, which ruled his year with its mid-day in the dog-days. This was assumed by Plector his successor 3. His death is precisely similar to that of Sigurd, who wore, like Patroclus, armour impenetrable in front but vulnerable behind. Sigurd was killed, like Patroclus, by a blow dealt by Hagen, the god of winter, from behind between his shoulders. The most noteworthy part of the story of Patroclus is the establishment of the races and games which were held at his funeral. These funeral games were, according to tradition,
* llunicr, Iliad, xi. 821—S48. 3 I’bid., xvi. 790—800
* Ibid., xvi. IJ5—144.
492 oj the Myth-Making Age.
instituted by Acastus, the husband of Hippolyte. Her name, meaning she who is released from horses, describes her as the moon-goddess ruling the year, and making her own way through heaven without being drawn by the star-horses which drew the chariots of the sun-gods, the stars of day, Krishna and Achilles. She falsely accused Peleus, the father of Achilles, of attempting to violate her, an accusation which, as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 340, note 1, was made against other ruling-gods of the eleven-months year. Acastus, by his name, shows his affinity with the physicians, for it means he who cuts with the knife (a/e?;), that is, with the crescentshaped knife of the male moon-god, the god of the crescent new-moon, who was husband of the full-moon, who before the lunar age had been the year-sun-bird of the Pole Star god.
I shall prove in the next Chapter that it was at this epoch of the close of the year of eight-day weeks that the national chariot races inaugurating the year of the independent sun- god were instituted.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE YEARS OF SEVEN-DAY WEEKS AND SEVENTEEN AND
THIRTEEN MONTHS.
HE year of seventeen months succeeded, as we are told
in the Brahmanas, the fifteen-months year. It is one of five seasons, in which both new and full-moon sacrifices were offered, and the year-fires lighted at its commencement must be kindled not with fifteen, as in the fifteen-months year, but with seventeen or twenty-one kindling verses K In the ritual of this year sacrifices were offered in libations, and its duration of seventeen months is first ritualistically attested in the invocations to the five seasons made at the opening sacrifice of the year. The summonses to the season- gods called to these sacrifices contain, as the Brahmanas point out, seventeen syllables, for Prajapati, the year-god, “is seventeen fold/’ and they end with the vashat or varshat call for rain (var) ; so that it is a year-offering with a festival of which the presiding deity is the rain-god 1 2. The number seventeen is also brought prominently forward in the chants of the ritual of the Vajapeya festival with which the year opens. The first ceremony performed outside the sacrificial ground was that summoning the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, by the Bahish-pavamana Stotra. This, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 392, consisted of three Gayatrl triplets, each of twenty-four syllables, so that the whole contained seventy- two syllables, the number of five-day weeks in the year. To the nine lines of this invocation eight are added at the

1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 3, 5, io, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 97, 98.
2   Ibid., i. 5, 2, 16—20; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 142—144 ; Ilewitt, Kitting Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 165, note 6.
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Vajapeya festival, so as to make the whole hymn contain seventeen lines. Similarly the midday chant Madhyandina- pavamana is increased from fifteen to seventeen verses, and the Arbhava-pavamana, the special chant of this festival, is one of seventeen versesB Also the last chant at the Vajapeya evening sacrifice, called the Brihat-stotra or hymn of Brihati, the goddess of the five-days week, has the same number of verses 1 2 3. Similarly the SamidhenI stanzas of the kindling hymn used at the animal sacrifices of this year are increased from eleven, the number of the stanzas of the Apr! hymns of the original animal burnt-offering, to seventeen by adding nine tristubh verses of eleven syllables each to the original eleven Gayatri stanzas of twenty-four syllables each 3. The two hundred and sixty-four syllables in the hymn of eleven Gayatri stanzas, when added to the ninety-nine tristubh syllables, make up a total of three hundred and sixty-three syllables, the number of days in the eleven-months year. Hence, though this year follows in time the fifteen-months year, we see that it was looked on as a ritualistic descendant of the eleven months, both being years of the sun-horse.
It is a year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each, divided into three seven-day weeks, making a total of three hundred and fifty-seven days, and, by adding a week to this, the three hundred and sixty-four days of the lunar-year of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each was completed, and this year, as we shall see, existed simultaneously with the ritualistic year of Prajapati. That the month of this year was one of twenty-one days is proved by the twenty- one verses of the morning hymn sung at the Keshava-panlya or ceremonial hair-cutting of the king, performed as part of the ceremonies of this year on the full-moon of Jaistha
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, n ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 8, note i.
2 Ibid., v. i, 2, 19; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. n, note I.
3 Ibid., i. 4, 1, 7—39, vi. 2, 1, 22—24; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 102, note I— 113, vol. xli. p. 167, note 1.
1*
   495
(May—June), about the first of June, a year after his coronation 1.
This hymn, called the Uktha-stotra of twenty - one Ukthyas2 3 4, is that addressed to the rising or shining (ukh) sun, symbolised in the gold plate with twenty-one knobs, which the sacrificer puts on when he, as the charioteer of the sun who watches its course round the heavens, carries during his initiation (Diksha) as the symbolic sun, the fire in the firepan, round the sacrificial ground from the North-east point of the rising sun of the summer solstice to the South-east, where the sun rises at the winter solstice 3.
A. The ritual of the making of the fire-pan (Ukha) and the birth from it of the sun-god.
The whole of the ritual of the making and consecration of the fire-pan {Ukha) is significant, as it tells by ritualistic reproductions of past beliefs a great deal of the history of this year. The preparations for making the fire-pan begin with the full-moon of Phalgun (February—March), the full-moon beginning the year about the 1st of March. Then a white hornless goat is offered to Prajapati with a silent service, and the fire for the sacrifice is lighted with seventeen or, as is said further on, twenty-one kindling verses. On the eighth day after the full-moon, about the 8th of March, the sacrificer begins to collect the earth for making the fire-pan which is to be consecrated at the new-moon, that is at the beginning of Cheit (March— April) 4. The sacrificer contemplated in this ritual is almost certainly the Patesi or priest-king of this epoch, who was, as at Girsu and in Egypt, the national High-Priest. But he, like all primitive rulers, was, unless he had exceptional
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 5, 3, 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 126, note 2 —127.
2   Ibid., xii. 2, 2, 6 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 150, 151.
3   Ibid., v. 1, 7, 3, 1,9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 277, 2S0.
4   Ibid., vi. 2, 2,7, S, 18—22, 23—27, 30; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 174, 179, 180, 181, 182.
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Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:17:06 PM: 496

force of character, scarcely a free agent. He was bound in the fetters of ritual and custom, and could only act in strict accordance with precedent and rule, being most carefully watched by his counsellors, who, like the Spartan ephors, kept the king in the straight course marked out for him. The lump of clay of which the fire-pan is to be made is dug with a spade made of the hollow female bamboo, the supposed wife of the Ahavamya or libation-fire, to the north of which it is placed at a cubit’s distance before being used. The clay is sought for by the help of the three animals who had been symbolic rulers of time: the sun- horse, the ass of Pushan and the Ashvins, and the Pole Star he-goat. They are led eastward from the Ahavaniya when in search of the clay. They find it on the eastern side of an ant-hill, the emblem of the mother-mountain, and the horse is made to step on it1. The sacrificer digs up this lump and puts it on a lotus leaf, sacred to Indra as the growing water-plant, a plant-parent of the sons of the rivers. This is placed on a black antelope skin and addressed in three Gayatrl stanzas of seventy-two syllables2 3 4, as consecrated by the Atharvans as their son, the sun-priest Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year, and Pathya, the sun-bull, who makes his annual journey (pathi) through the ecliptic star-path of the sun 3. He takes the clay in the black antelope skin to the fire, where he moistens it with the resin of the Palasha-tree (Butea frondosa), and mixes it with goat’s hair, thus consecrating it to the parent- tree and star-gods of the Pole Star age 4. He dedicates the clay which is to make the bottom of the pan to Makha, the fighting god of the head of the sun-horse, and makes it four square. The fire-pan thus made is consecrated at the new-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vi. 3, i, 25—30, vi. 3, 2, 1—10, vi. 3, 3, I—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 197—200, 203—206, 207.
2   Rg. vi. 16, 13, 14, 15.
3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vi. 4, 2, 1—5, vi. 5, 1, 1—4 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 217, 218, 229, 230.
4   Ibid., vi. 5, 2-i ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 233 ff.
of the Myth-M,aking Age.
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moon of Cheit (March—April). Inside it is placed a layer of powdered hemp (Cannabis Indica), the inspiring bhang or hashish used by the Athravans or fire-priests of the Zendavesta, which is covered with a layer of powdered Munja or sugar-cane grass, of which the Brahmins’ year- girdles are made. He puts it on a fire lit with thirteen kindling sticks, the thirteen months of the alternative measurement of this yearx.
When the fire-pan is ready, the sacrificer sews the gold plate with twenty-one knobs into a black antelope skin, and hangs it round his neck with a triple hempen cord so that it hangs over his navel. He then places the fire inside the fire-pan on a throne (asandz) made of Udumbara wood (Ficus glomerata) covered with treble cords of reed grass and smeared over with clay, and carries the pan in a net, the star net of the zodiacal year. And this throne, with its four feet and four sides, the netting and sling of the gold plate, the pan-fire and the gold plate itself signify, as the author of Brahmana expressly tells us, the thirteen months of this year 1 2 3 4. The sacrificer first stands with his face to the North-east and afterwards to the South-east, where the sun rose at the summer and winter solstices, and invokes the gods of the two solstitial seasons 3.
The sun thus born is the. sun Hiranya-garbha, he of the golden (hzrauya) womb (garbha), born of fhe twenty- one and seventeen kindling verses of this year’s new-year fires 4. He represents a different aspect of the Deity from that conveyed by the name Hiranyahasta, the god of the golden hand [hasta), the sun-god of the five-day weeks, born of the bounteous giver (Puramdhi), the Soma cloud- bird, and the sexless father of the Pole Star age 5. This
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bru/i., vi. 6, i, 23, 24, vi. 6, 3, 7, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 251, 252, note 1, 25S—260.
2   Ibid., vi. 7, 1 —19, 2S ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 265—269, 272.
3   Ibid., vi. 7, 2, 1, 9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 272, 2S0.
4   Ibid., vi. 2, 2, 3—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 172.
s Rg. i. 116, 13, iv. 27, 2, 3.
Iv k
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sun-god Hiranya-garbha is also the son of Prajapati, called Kumara, the ninth of his forms T, the sun-god of the fire- altar, symbolised in the year-plan of nine divisions, illustrating, as explained in Chapter VII. p. 484, the thirteen-months year of India and China.
The eighth of these successive forms, of which Kumara is the ninth, is Ishana, that is to say the son of the god Isha or Gan-isha, who, as we have seen, entered the womb of the mother of the Buddha when he was conceived as the sun- physician. This eighth god is thus the son of Gan-isha, and his predecessor, the seventh form of the creator of time, was Mahan Deva, the moon-god, the male crescent moon Soma, Hence in this descent Kumara, the boy, is the equivalent of Rahulo, the little Rahu, the son of the Buddha as the sun- physician, and of the eleventh Then, the mother-goddess of the eleven-months year, called Bhudda Kaccana, the golden saint, that is the mother with the golden womb.
This young sun-god of the nine forms is the god of the year of Solomon’s seal of nine divisions formed by the union of two triangles enclosed in a circle. This was stolen from him by Sakhr, the wet (sak) god, king of the White Jinn dwelling in the North and owning the sun-mare, the equivalent of Sigurd’s Grani. This god of the North came Southward to fight the black Jinn of the South, the sun-fish Salli-manu or Solomon, and to slay him in his winter house. He found the sun-god, the young sun born at the winter solstice, absent, and his kingdom was ruled by Aminah, the faithful, the moon-nurse of the young sun- god, during his journey through the thirty stars. While Sakhr, who stole the year-ring from Aminah, usurped his throne, Solomon, the young sun-god, wandered as a beggar, like the outcast sun Odusseus, and became cook to the king of Ammon, who was, as we have seen, Nahash the Great Bear constellation. He eloped with Na’uzah, the king’s daughter, the morning-star, and when boiling a fish found 1

1   Eggeling, Sat. Brahvi. 1, 3, 8—20; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 159, 160.

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inside it his year-ring, which Sakhr had thrown into the sea and which the fish had swallowed r. This year-ring of the fish-sun-god rising from the constellation Pisces has become the Fisherman’s ring of marriage placed on the finger of each Pope at his consecration and broken at his death. The magic sign of nine depicted on it is the topmost keystone of the vaulted temple of eight sides, the Pantheon of the ruling god of time, the heaven’s vault, symbolised on the last begging bowl of the Buddha who had become immortal and omnipotent as the never-dying sun who pursues his course through the heavens without resting or delegating his powers to a succcessor reborn from him each year. The sign of the interlocked triangles of Solomon’s seal is a sacred symbol on monuments of the Bronze Age1 2 3, and must date from the epoch of this year, which began, as we have seen, with the ncw-moon of Cheit (March—April) at the vernal equinox, when the sun was in Gemini, the ruling constellation of this age, that is about 6200 B.C. This is the ' Masonic sign of the Royal Arch.
B. The Vajapcya sacrifice of this year.
The Vajapeya sacrifice, which gives us the fullest account of the history of this year, is said in the Brahmanas to be that offered by the supreme centre ruler of a circle of subordinate kings 3. Hence it is one instituted at a late period of national development, when confederacies of small states, formed by the union of united provinces and villages governed by the iron discipline of their hereditary rules and customs, were controlled by a supreme lawgiver who maintained peace and regulated trade over a large area, such as those of the seven united kingdoms of India with Jambu-dwipa in the
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘ The Adventures of Balukeya,’ p. 263; ‘The Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,’ vol. i. p. 3S, note 6, ‘Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,’ vol. x. p. 49, note 2 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., p. 295 ff.
2   Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. x. p. 378.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 1, 2, 13, 14; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 4.
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centre and the seven of Tran with the centre in Elam Shu- shan, called in the Zendavesta Hvaniratha, the land of light or KhvanlrasJ. The conception of these seven kingdoms 1 is one belonging to this age, when seven first became the time unit.
According to the account of the installation of the conquering sun-god, the universal ruler as given in the Brahmanas, the control of this year was retained by Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, who appointed Savitri, the sun-god, as his working representative, the supreme impeller (pra-savitri) 2 3 4 5 of this year of Prajapati {Orion'). The first special ceremony inaugurating the birth of this imperial year was the drawing of the five Vajapeya cups for its five seasons. These are the | five cups of the evening libation. At it was chanted the ! Arbhava pavamana Stotra of seventeen verses in the five j metres, Gayatrl, Kakubh, Ushnih, Anushtubh, and Jagati, all of which, as we have seen, represent time measurements. Thus this year was conceived to be one uniting and making use of all previous epochs 3 under the rule of Indra the eel- god parent of the sons of the rivers.
These five cups or seasons are called in the ritual of the Madhyandlna or Mid-day Soma feast, the Shukra, Manthin, Agrayana, Marutvatlya, and Ukthya. They are specially connected with Indra, who is summoned first to the sacrifice. The Shukra cup is called after him as the cup of the god Sak, and it and the Manthin cup are said in the Brahmanas to be offered to the gods Shanda and Marka 4. These, as I have shown elsewhere, mean the crescent and full-moon 5, the moons sacred to this year, and the course of the year signified by these five cups is marked by the third cup, the Agrayana, which is that of the firstfruits offered at the end
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendtdad Fargard, xix. 39; Farvardin Yasht, xxviii. ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 216, notes 1 and 6, xxiii. p. 220, note 1.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brak., v. 1, 1, 4, 15, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 2, 5.
3 Ibid., iv. 3, 3, 2, iv. 2, 5, 21, 22; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 315, note 2, 332.
4 Ibid., iv. 2, 1, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 278, 279.
5   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 243, 244.

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of the rainy season, and the cup of the autumn season ending with the winter solstice on the last day of the month Agrahan (November—December).   Thus these five cups
denote a year of five seasons, beginning with the Shukra or hot season, followed by the Manthin the rains, Agrayana the autumn, Marutvatiya the winter, and the cup of the shining (nktha) sun the spring. The New Year’s cups of this year celebrate the victory of Indra or Shukra over the Vritra or enclosing snake in the contest with the Ahishuva or swelling cloud-serpent described in Chapter VII, p. 431. In this battle he was accompanied by the seven Maruts, the seven star-mothers of the Great Bear to whom the Marut- vatTya cup of winter is offered in the services, and it was after his victory that the cup of the victorious spring-sun, called the Mahendra cup of the Great Indra, was offered 1.
It is after the offering of these five cups to the gods of the seasons of the year that the most distinctive part of the Vaja- peya ceremonies begins. Two mounds were raised in the Soma consecrated ground, one at the West and the other at the East end of the Soma cart placed in the centre of the space thirty-six steps long, from East to West between the Sadas, the priest’s house and the Uttara-vedi. The Adh- varyu, the ceremonial priest, places himself between the cart and the West mound looking westward, and the Neshtri priest of Tvashtar god of the year of two seasons, and of the female mother-goddesses between the cart and the East mound looking eastwards. The Neshtri is directed to buy Parisrut, apparently the rice-beer usually drunk by the Mundas and other aboriginal and semi-aboriginal races, for a piece of lead from a long-haired man of the primitive tribes who had not cut his hair according to the orthodox Soma tonsure, which required all the hair except the top- knot or pig-tail to be shaved. He and the Adhvaryu offer together one after the other seventeen cups, the Adhvaryu offering cups of the orthodox Tryashira mixture of Indra,
Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 3, 3, 1—19 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp 331—340.
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made of milk, sour milk, barley and running water, and the Neshtri cups of Parisrut or Sura. The Soma cups are offered above and the Sura below the axle, and the cups after being offered are placed on the West and East mounds. The whole number of thirty-four cups is said to be a sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of the months of the eleven-months year, and to Prajapati, the god of this year, the thirty-fourth god 1 of the sun-horse, whose thirty-four ribs were offered, as we shall see directly, at the Ashvamedha sacrifice 2 3.
Thus the ritual of the Vajapeya and of this seventeen- months year is clearly deduced from the previous year of eleven months, and it is intended as a means of consolidating a reconcilement between the unorthodox worshippers of the gods of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers of the year of fifteen months. That this union between the Ivathi or Hittites of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers of that of fifteen months was accomplished by the men of this epoch, is proved by the initial sacrifices in the orthodox ritual of the4 Soma sacrifice to the sun-god, the crowning sacrifice of Hindu theology. These are a cake on eleven potsherds for Agni and Vishnu, and rice gruel for Aditi and her eight sons, including the eighth, the Martanda, or dead egg, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 425, the sexless sun-god Bhishma 3. These are offered with the seventeen kindling verses appropriate to this year, and they are uttered in the low whisper with which Prajapati was addressed before the chants of the later ritual were introduced.
The horse-sacrifice, described in the Rigveda is the same as that offered at the Vajapeya festival opening this year. In the hymn depicting it we are told that thirty-four ribs are to be cut from the horse answering to the thirty-four
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, io—iS ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 8—n ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric limes, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 242.
2   Rg. i. 162, 18.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. I, 3, 1—6 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 12, 13.

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cups of Soma and Sura offered in the Vajapeya ritual. Also the Vedic horse-sacrifice begins with the offering of a goat to Indra and Pushan, the latter being the god called Praja- pati in the Brahmana ritual. Also the sacrifices are conducted by seven priests and there arc seven gods invoked in the Vedic hymn,t the gods of the seven days of the week of this year. These gods Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, Ayu, Ribhuksan and the Maruts, are the counterparts of the Brahmana gods to whom the Arbhava Pavamana is chanted. These are Indra, his two horses, Pushan, Sarasvati, Mitra, Varuna1. Also the Vedic ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse is further proved to be especially connected with this year for the hymn describing it, Rg. i. 162, is one of the series of twenty- four hymns, Rg. i. 140—164, the twenty-four days of the months of the fifteen-months year, ascribed to Dirgha-tamas, the long darkness (.tamas), father of Kakshlvat, the year-god of the eleven-months year, and the Apr! hymn in this collection is of thirteen instead of the eleven stanzas of the other Apn hymns.
After the offering of the thirty-four cups at the Vajapeya sacrifice, the Adhvaryu draws a cup, called the Madhu-graha or honey-cup, in a golden vessel, the golden bowl given to the Buddha by Sujata, and places it among the Soma cups, and then he offers the Ukthya and Dhruva cups. These are the cups of the shining sun (;uktha) and the steadfast Pole Star 2 3. These cups in the full Soma sacrifice to the sun-god of the twelve-months years are the eighth and ninth 3 of the ten cups offered, of which the tenth and last is that offered to the Ashvins, the stars Gemini. They, as we have seen in Chapter VII. pp. 391, 392, were first made partakers of Soma at the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya, and their cup is called the Madhu-graha, or honey-cup
1 Rg. i. 162, 1—3, 5—iS; Eggeling, Sat. Brcih., iv. 2, 5, 22; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 315.
- Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. i, 2, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. II.
3 Ibid., iv. 2, 3, 1—18, iv. 2, 4, 1—24; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 292—305.
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of which they got the secret from Dadhiank, the god of the horse’s head of the eleven-months year T.
There is a further and very significant ceremony connected with this honey-cup of the Ashvins. The Adhvaryu and sacrifice^ took it out and gave it to one of the chariot drivers in the chariot-race that followed the sacri- fice, either a Vaishya or trader or a Rajanya or warrior. As soon as he received it the Ncshtri stepped round from the East of the Soma cart and gave him all the seventeen Sura cups in exchange for it, and then took it back to the Adhvaryu. This ceremony shows the consummation of the union between the earlier aboriginal and semi- aboriginal races and the northern worshippers of the white horse of the sun 2.
In the ritual of the sacrifice the offering of victims follows that of the libation cups. These are a he-goat to Agni, with a chant of twelve stanzas. Two he-goats to the Ukthya god Indra-Agni, with fifteen stanzas, and two he-goats and a ram, with sixteen chants to Indra, and these included a record of earlier time reckonings in the twelve stanzas for the twelve months of Orion’s year, and the fifteen and sixteen recall the year of fifteen-months and eight-day weeks.
To these six victims, the gods of the early six-days week, is added the seventh, the special Vajapeya victim, a goat offered to Sarasvati, the river-mother-goddess with the Vajapeya hymn of seventeen stanzas. The last victim offered in this series of sacrifices is ^a spotted barren cow offered to the victorious Maruts, the seven Maruts, the mother-stars of the Great Bear, who rejoiced over the victory of their son, the newly-installed sun-god, whose victory extinguished their rule 3. Finally, seventeen grey he-goats are offered to Praja- pati 4. The year-god Prajapati, to whom these victims are offered, is, as we are specially told in the Brahmanas, the god
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. i, 5, 16—18 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 276, 277,
2   Ibid., v. 1, 5, 28 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 29.
3   Ibid., v. I, 3, 1—3, iv. 4, 2, 17, iv. 5, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 11—13, xxvi. p. 36S, note 2—370, 397, note 2, 398.
4   Ibid., v. 1, 3, 7—12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 14—16.

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called Ka or Who. This is the name given to Prajapati, the creator of all things, in each of the ten stanzas of Rg. x. 121, the Vedic hymn showing the deepest sense of the mystery of creation and of its unknown author. It is repeated in the offering and initiatory formulae of the ritual of the worship of this father-god of the young sun Hiranya- garbha, born of the golden womb z. The inner meaning of the name given in this later ritual to the god who was once the sun-deer Orion is explained in a parable telling us that the key to the mystery is given in the Arka or Shining (ark) plant (Calotropis gigantea). The teacher explains that in this plant is the hidden soul of life from which all things are born conveyed to it by the wind and the rain. This is the germ of life which, though unseen, invisible and intangible, is the unknown power whence the living-fire Agni is produced to create plants, animals and men. This divine being is known by the name of Ka who, and it is to him as Vayu Niyutvat, the shut-in wind, the bearer of the Ka, that the white goats are sacrificed in this ritual 1 2 3. The victims offered are bound to an eight-sided sacrificial post seventeen cubits long, showing that it represents a year of seventeen months ; for, according to the Brahmana, the length of the stake and of the sacrificer’s year should coincide, and a thirteen-cubits stake is prescribed for the thirteen-months year, and fifteen for that of fifteen-months 3. It has a head-piece of a cake made of wheaten dough. The sacrificer and his wife, who is robed by the Neshtri in a skirt made of Kusha grass, ascend the post by a ladder, and proclaim from the top that they have become Prajapati’s children through their union with the sacred creating-wheat 011 the top of the post. The sacrificer then receives seventeen bags of salt wrapped in the leaves of the Ashvattha-tree (Ficus religiosa). He then descends and sits, while the sacrifice is being offered, on an
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah.> vi. 2, 2, 5, 12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 173, 176.
2   Ibid., X. 3,4, 2—5; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 333—336-
3   Ibid., iii. 6, 4, 24—26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 166, 167.
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Udumbara [Ficus glomerata) throne, over which a goat-skin is spread J.
C.   The Chariot-races of the sun-god of this year.
After the sacrifice of the victims the chariot-race is run. The sacrificer yokes to the chariot first two horses, yoking the right-hand horse first; to these he adds a third beside the right-hand horse and a fourth in front as leader, and offers seventeen platters of gruel made of wild rice to Brihaspati, the Pole Star god 1 2 3.
In the ritual for the consecration of the race-course it is ordered that seventeen drums are to be placed along the edge of the altar, and that an archer of the Rajaniya or warrior caste is to shoot seventeen arrow ranges from the Northern edge of the Uttara Vedi or Northern altar between the Utkara, the mound formed by the earth dug out in constructing the altar and the Chatvala pit, whence the Ashvins were invited to drink Soma with the gods. These are both to the North-east of the consecrated Soma ground, and hence the race-course was to lie to the North-east of the pillar, which, like that at Stonehenge, marks the rising point of the sun of the summer solstice, and this is exactly the position of the old race-course at Stonehenge. At the end of the range of the seventeenth arrow the archer planted a branch of the Udumbara-tree [Ficus glomerata), of which   the sacred plough and the house-pole   of the Sadas
or house   of the gods in the Soma ground   were made.   It
was round this goal that the sacrificer’s chariot and the sixteen four-horse chariots accompanying it were to race. While the race was being run a Brahmin was to stand on a cart-wheel placed on a post as high as his navel near the altar, and to chant the prescribed hymn while the wheel was made to revolve sunwise 3. Thus the race was to represent
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 2, X, I—25 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 29—36.
Ibid., v.   1, 4, 1—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 19—22.
3 Ibid., v.   1, 5, 1—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 22, note 1,   23,   note I, 24,   note
I, 25, note 1.

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the contest between the months of the year marking the annual course of the sun going from the South-west to the t North-east between the winter and summer solstice, and returning from the North-east position of the summer solstitial sun to its winter home.
A complete parallel to this race, but one in which the year is measured by seasons and not by months, is to be found in the chariot-race at the games instituted by Achilles at the funeral of Patroclus. Patroclus, as I have shown in Chapter VII. p. 490, was the sun-physician, and he was followed at his death by the sun-god of the new year and epoch which was to succeed him. It is the contest for precedence as the ruler of the opening season of this year of five seasons which is depicted in the chariot-race described by Homer1. There are five champions contending each for his own season among the season cups, and these seasons are not the European seasons of Greece, but those of India, whence this as well as so much more of the Greek mythology was derived. These were: I. Eumelus, son of Admetus, called Hades Admetos (atSys a8grjTos), the untamed god of the lower world, whose wife Alkestis, the sun-maiden, went down like Istar to the realms of death to save his life as the dying sun, whence she was brought back by Herakles, the sun-god of the age when the Pole Star was in the constellation Hercules. He was the year-god of the rainy season, the god who sought his home in the South. II. Diomedes, the counsellor (gf]Sos) of Zeus, son of Tydeus, the hammering {tud) god, the Northern smith, the conquering-god of summer, the Indra who slew Vritra at the summer solstice. He drove the two horses he had taken from ZEneas, which were two of the six which Anclnses stole from Laomcdon, substituting mares for the horses he took, so that of the twelve year-horses which Zeus gave to Tros in exchange for Ganymede, who was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 145, the cupbearer of the gods and god of the winter season, six were mortal
1 Ilunicr, Iliad, xxiii. 2S7—53S.
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mares and six immortal steeds. Two of these immortal sun-horses had become the property of Diomede, who took them from Aineas, son of Anchises, who was the grandson of Assarakos, the god of the bed and brother of Ganymede *. III. Menelaus, husband of the immortal Helen, sister of Polydeukes, the rain-twin and the tree-mother (SevSpins) of the Dorians of Rhodes. He drove the pair of steeds of the original Twin-gods, the mare ^Ethiope belonging to Agamemnon, husband of the other female twin, Clytem- nestra, sister of Kastor, the pole of Ka, and his own horse Podargus. He was the god of the autumn season, originally sacred to the Twins. IV. Antilochus, son of Nestor of Pylos, the city of the gates (7rv\at) of the Garden of God, the god of spring. V. Merione, born of the thigh (gripla), the son of Molos (war), half-brother of Idomeneus, the leader of the Cretan archers1 2, the god of the bow, whence the winter-arrow was shot that pierced the mother-cloud- bird, the god of winter, said by Homer to be the equal of the warrior Ares, the god of war Enyo. He was the representative of the Thigh-born sun-god of the fifteen-months year.
The course was guarded by Phoenix, the year-bird of the date-palm-tree (<polvti-), which rises yearly from its own ashes as the ever-living sun-bird. He is called the servant of Peleus, the god of the Potter’s clay, father of Achilles, and was the counterpart of Achilles himself, the independent sun-god who steered his own course through the heavens without being led by the moon-god or watched by the guardian-star of the boundaries, the steerer of the sun-ship Argo. The contest bears a close analogy to that of the Kauravyas and Pandavas; in both the victorious season among the five into which the year was divided was the god of the summer season ending at the summer solstice. This was the season of the Pandava Bhima, the son of Maroti,
1   Homer, Iliad, v. 265—279, 323—327, Xx. 232—240, xxiii. 291, 292.
2   Ibid., ii. 651.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:18:10 PM: 509
the trec-ape-god, who fought with the striking-club or tree- hammer, whence the father of Diomedes took his name ; and the Kauravya leader Duryodhana, whom he finally vanquished and slew, and both of whose thighs he broke, was the thigh-god of the eleven-months year, who appears in this horse-race as Eumelus, whose chariot was overthrown and he himself maimed, but who subsequently was, like his Pandava prototype, Arjuna, god of the rainy season during the Kauravya war, judged to be in merit next to the sun- god. Arjuna from being the god of the rainy season became the god of the month Phalgun (February—March) ending at the vernal equinox, when this seventeen-months year began, and the god who drove the white horses of the sun- chariot behind Parikshit, the sun-horse who started on his course on the rst of Cheit (March—April). As a recognition of the changed position of the once ruling rain-god, the Mahendra, the Great Indra, Eumelus received from Achilles a brazen corslet surrounded by a band of glittering tin, which had belonged to the Paeonian Asteropaios, the star {aster} chief, son of Pelagon, the stream {Peleg) god, the parent river, the Thracian Axios and leader of the Thracian Paeonians, whose god was the sun-physician (7raiav), and who, as we shall see presently, measured time by the thirteen-months year, the predecessor and equivalent of this seventeen-months year J. In other words he was proclaimed as the sun-physician, the guardian of the young sun-god of this year of the chariot-race, who, as Rahulo in the form of Parikshit, had superseded his father.
The course over which the race was run, as described by Nestor in his advice to his son Antilochus, was one round a withered oak or pine trunk a fathom high, marking the tomb of an ancient chief, which was almost certainly in races run at Troy the tomb and altar, that is the dolmen of Ilos, marked by the parent wild fig-tree of Troy1 2, the
1 Ilomer, Iliad, xxiii. 558—562, xxi. 135—199.
* Ibid., xi. 166, 167.
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Udumbara-tree of the Indian race-course, and described by Homer as standing in the middle of the plain x. This decaying tree-pillar, the image of the mother-goddess of the tree-trunk, the Indian Drona or Mari-amma. It stood between two white stones, the two pillars placed in front of all Phoenician temples, the pillars of the two solstices; and between the pillars and the goal there was space enough for the chariots to turn as they rounded the latter in their returning course, going sunwise from left to right.
In the beginning of the race Antilochus, the driver of the horses of the gates, was first, showing that it began in spring under the guidance of the gate-stars Gemini ; next was Eumelus, the rainy season ; next after him came Menelaus, the autumn, followed by Meriones, the winter god of the bow; and last Diomedes the final victor. But he caught up the three in front of him, while Eumelus passed Antilochus ; and in the returning course, after passing the goal he was immediately behind Eumelus, when Apollo Smintheus, the mouse Apollo of Troy, caused him to lose his whip, and thus cease to gain on Eumelus as he could no longer urge on his steeds. But Athene, the tree-mother, the goddess Pallas of the seed-husk {Pales'), restored it to him and secured him the victory by overturning the chariot of Eumelus. In the final order of the competition Diomedes was first, Antilochus second, Menelaus third, Meriones fourth, and Eumelus, who was ultimately judged to be second, as I have already explained, last; and he received the prize given to the follower and guardian of the sun-god.
The other prizes are also significant. The winner received a female slave, the sun-maiden of the eleven-months year, bearing a cauldron holding twenty-two measures, its halfmonths. The second a mare with a mule foal, also a reminiscence of the lunar-solar year of the male crescent moon and the sun descended from the sun-ass. The third a 1
1 Ilomer, Iliad, xi. 166, 167.

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cauldron holding four measures, the four seasons of the eleven-months year. The fourth two talents of gold ; and the fifth a double cup, marking him as the year cup-bearer and guardian of the seasons of the solstitial-year. This was given to Nestor, the ancient warder of the Gates, father of Antilochus, the god of spring, recipient of the mule foal, which he handed to Noemon, the gnomon-stone I.
In the succeeding contests, Odusseus won the foot-race, beating the Locrian Ajax Oileus, the swiftest runner of the Greeks, and Antilochus. But the victory of Odusseus, like that of Diomede, was gained by the aid of Athene, who caused Ajax to stumble and thus win only the moon-ox, the second prize.
The cup which Odusseus won was that of the ruling sun- god of the three contending seasons, the cup of Thoas, the king of the Tauric Chersonesus, who was, as we have seen (p. 93) the Phoenician Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion, in short Odusseus himself in his first form as a year-ruler. He now won this cup of the leading season as the ruling sun-god of this new sun-year, that of seventeen and thirteen lunar months 1 2«
These two winning year-gods who won the races of the sun-year had a special connection with this thirteen-months year. Both were favourites of Athene, the tree-mother of the South, and uniter of the Northern and Southern races, and the tent of Odusseus, as that of the centre star Orion was in the centre of the Grecian camp 3. The thirteen-months year was that of the Northern Thracians, and it was Dio- medes and Odusseus who, under the guidance of the deceitful spy Dolon, sent by Plector, found the year-king Rhesus sleeping in the centre of his guard of twelve surrounding months. These thirteen were slain by Diomede, and the horses of their 3^ear-chariot were taken b}^ Odusseus 4.
1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 262—270, 612—617.   Ibid., xxiii. 739—7S2.
3   Ibicb, xi. 5, 6.   4 Ibid., x. 471—501.
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D.   Odusseus and other Greek year-gods rulers of the seventeen and thirteen-months year.
It was as a god born of the year of thirteen lunar months that Odusseus appeared in Ithaca as the returning pauper sun-god, for he came from the land of the Phaeacians, that is, of the dusky (cpair)) land of night, ruled by twelve kings, whose over-lord was Alkinoos the thirteenth, and it was they who sent him to Ithaca in their year - ship with fifty- two oarsmen, the fifty-two weeks of the year I. The story of his arrival at Scheria, the Phaeacian country, clearly shows him to be a risen sun-god, the ruler of the year. He came from Ogygia, the island of Calypso, the hidden (KakvirTao) goddess, where he had remained eight years2. He was sent from thence to Scheria at the command of Hermes, the god of the sun-gnomon-pillar, where he was to arrive on the twentieth day 3, and whence he was to be sent to Ithaca. He thus came as the sexless son-god, hidden in the era of the sun-god of the eight-days week. Poseidon, the snake-god of the trident-year and owner of the horses of the sun, was, on his return from the Southern land of the .Ethiopians, aware of the coming of this new sun-god armed with the cap of darkness (tcdKvTTTpi]), the golden year-girdle, and silver white (apyvfaos) tunic of the conquering sun of the eight-days week measured by the two lunar crescents of the double axe (7re'Ae/eu?) of the Carian Zeus which he carried. These arms, marking him as the sun-god, he had got from Calypso. Poseidon fearing this new usurper of the rule of heaven raised a tempest which wrecked the raft of Odusseus, the raft of the transition period of the year of the eight-days week, immediately after he, on the eighteenth day of his voyage, had arrived in sight of Phseacia 4. He was saved by Ino, the daughter of Kadmus, in the likeness of a sea-gull. She was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 397, the mother of Melicertes, the sun-god Melquarth, with
1 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 390, 391, 35, 36, 48.   * Ibid., vii. 253-263.
3 Ibid., v. 34 38.   4 ibid., v. 229—236, 277—318.

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whom she leaped into the sea, whence he was conveyed by his mother as the dolphin-mother-goddess Tirhatha to the mother - pine - tree, whence he was to be born as the sun-god son of the virgin fir-tree. She gave to Odusseus the magic sail, the kredemnon J, like the upright fin of the dolphin, which gave it, in the Hindu flood story of Manu, the name of the horned fish. This wing of the sea-bird and sea-dolphin, he put on after he had taken off the dress of the conquering sun-god,given him by Calypso, and thus after two days’ tossing in the sea, which was finally calmed by Athene, it brought the naked sun-god Odusseus to the Phaeacian coast, where he made himself a bed under the two parent olive-trees of the sun-mother Athene, the olive- tree-mother, whose tree, as we have seen, made his olive-tree bed of the sun-god in Ithaca. These trees were the wild olive-tree   and the cultivated olive (eXaia), and it
was under these trees that he awoke as the new sun-god of this year on the twenty-first day of its first month passed in the voyage from Ogygia. Here he was met by Nausicaa, the sun-maiden, who re-robed him and brought him to the palace of her father Alkinoos and her mother Arete 2.
. In this story we see clearly that the new sun-god of this year, the victor in the chariot and foot races at the funeral games, belonged to a different race from that in which he was born, in what the Buddha of the Jataka, or birth stories, would call his former births. For it was not till Odusseus had lost the garments of the sun-god of the year of the eight-days week, who was slain by the trident of Poseidon at the end of the epoch of his rule, the impenetrable tunic, the cup of darkness and the double axe, that he became the naked sun-god of the new era, the sun-god who rose from the salt-waters of regeneration to be the sun-god born of the olive-tree, the immortal ruler of time.
1   For further evidence as to the history of the year-god Odusseus, god of the path (680s) of Time, told in the mythology of Ino and the kredemnon, see Appendix C.
2 Homer, Odyssey, v. 333—35°> 372. 373, 382—3SS, 459, 460, 476—493-
L 1
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It is to this age, when Poseidon was the enemy of the sun- god of the post-lunar age, and ruler of time during the lunar- solar epoch when he owned the horses of the sun, that the thirteen-months year of Otus and Ephialtes must be referred. They were the reputed sons of Aloeus, the god of the salt sea, the son of Poseidon, who was also the father of his twin sons, the god of the thirteen-months year. Their description in Homer marks them as dating, like their counterparts the twin stars Gemini, from the age of the cycle-year. For when they were nine years old they were nine cubits broad across the shoulders, and three fathoms, three times nine, or twenty-seven cubits high. They rebelled against the gods, declaring they would make a path to heaven by piling mountains on mountains, that is to say, they changed in their thirteen-months year the course of the year path which led to heaven, and made it no longer the path of the sun, but that marked by the new and full-moons. Thus in this year they bound Ares, the ploughing {ar) god of increase, in chains for thirteen months, but they were slain before they attained manhood by Apollo, that is to say their system of year-measurement was ^rejected. Ares was released from his captivity by Hermes, the god of the* gnomon-pillar, who was warned of his captivity by the step-mother of Ares, Eeriboia, the mist or cloud-goddess I.
This captivity of Ares, brought about by the two giant twins born of the salt sea, forms of the constellation Gemini, which was, in this age, the guiding station of the sun’s entry on his yearly circuit of the heavens, appears in a variant form in the ballad recited by Demodokos, at the banquet in which Alkinoos proclaimed himself the thirteenth and chief ruler of Phaeacia, the supreme centre month among his twelve subordinate chiefs. Demodokos told how the sun warned Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill, that Aphrodite, the fire-socket, the earth-goddess, had deserted him for Ares, the ploughing-god of the plough constellation of the
1   l-Iomer, Odyssey, xi. 305—320; Iliad, v. 386—391.

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Great Bear. He accordingly prepared a web to catch this warrior sun-god, described as the fastest runner of the gods, and his paramour from which they could not free themselves, and summoned the gods to behold them in the year-net he had made for them. Hermes and Apollo came together with Poseidon, but the sun-god and the god of the gnomon- pillar made, in this version of the story, no effort to free this sun-dog, to whom dogs were offered as the year-god Sirius, and it was at the intercession of Poseidon, who, through his twin sons was the creator of the thirteen-months year, that Ares was released. The web in which Hephaistos bound the warrior year-sun and his paramour, the Aminah of the story of Sakhr and Solomon’s ring, was clearly the year-circle of the lunar phases, which kept the sun from its Northern and Southern solstitial paths; and that this is the correct solution is made most probable by Homer’s statement that Ares, when released, went North to Thrace, and Aphrodite, who, like Aminah, ruled the South, went to Paphos in Cyprus, where the three Charites, the year mother- goddesses of the year of three seasons bathed her in the regenerating waters of the Southern sea, and re-robed her as the sun-mother of the released and ruling-sun T.
We find also a picture of the sun-god of this era in the stories of the marriage of Plippodameia to Pelops, and of the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapithae, which took place when Hippodameia was wedded to Pirithoos. This year-goddess Hippodameia, the tamer of horses, daughter of CEnomaus, the only (otVo?, Lat. anus) measurer, the Pole Star god, is another form of the goddess Hippolyte, she who is released by horses, wife of Acastus. She is the independent moon-goddess, the Plere or mistress who is wedded to the sun-god, and her wedding is thus clearly distinguished from the wedding of the parent-gods of the year of eight-day weeks, when the moon-father-god was married to Suria, the sun-maiden. In the chronology of the present year the 1
1 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 265—366. L 1 2
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moon has become the female goddess of the Southern nations, and is no longer the male moon of the North, while on the other hand the sun has become the ruling king of the North born of the Thigh and not the sun-bird of the South.
In the story of the wedding of Pelops to Hippodameia, she is won from her father (Enomaus in a race of chariots drawn by four horses, like those on the Indian racecourse. Pelops won the race by bribing Myrtilus, the charioteer of (Enomaus, to take out the linch-pins of his master’s chariot, and thus he escaped the fate of his thirteen predecessors, who were slain by the conquering (Enomaus. In the present, race (Enomaus was killed by falling from his broken chariot, as Eumelus his counterpart in the race with Diomede was also disabled. In the frieze at Olympia depicting the preparations for the contest, there are thirteen figures, that of Zeus in the centre with six figures on each side of him, those of Pelops and his friends on one side, and those of (Enomaus and his supporters on the otherr. Thus these thirteen months are exactly arranged like those in the Vedic cosmological hymn, I. 164, 15, with the supreme month in the centre, and the six paired months on the two sides. In this hymn the central seventh month alone is self-created, the others are said to be born by divine ordinance, and each discharges the functions alloted to it by the Creator. This central month occupies the position assigned to Jaistha (May—June) in the ceremonies of this year, for it was on its full moon, about the 1st June, that the twenty-one and seventeen versed hymns are chanted at the morning and mid-day services of the Keshava - panlya or ceremonial shaving of the king, who offers the New Year sacrifices.
This is the month called Krodha in the list of the thirteen months of this year, called in the Mahabharata the thirteen wives of Kashyapa, father of the Kushite race. They are:
I.   Aditi, 2. Diti, 3. Danu, 4. Kala, 5. Danayu, 6. Sinhika,
1 Frazer, Patisanias, v. 10, 2, vol. i. p. 250 ; vol. iii. p. 505.

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7. Krodha, 8. Pradha, 9. Vishva, 10. Vinata, 11. Kapila> 12. Muni, 13. Kadru. That Krodha, the central month of this year, is one close to the summer solstice is proved by the fact that Pradha, the eighth month, is said to be the mother of the thirteen Apsarus or water-goddesses, that is of the month in which the rains beginning at the summer solstice are most violentT.
The frieze at Elis illustrating the fights between the Centaurs and the long-haired Lapithse at the wedding of Hippodameia with Pirithous also apparently refers to the traditional history of this year. It contains twenty-one figures, of which the central is Apollo. He must certainly be Apollo Paean, the sun-god of this epoch, the sun-physician of the Pseo'nians, who, as we have seen, measured time by the thirteen-months year. On the right of Apollo is a group in which Pirithous, the runner (thous) round {peri) the circling-sun, the Greek equivalent of the Hindu Parikshit, who was king of the Lapithee, defends Hippodameia from a Centaur; and on his left is another group, in which Theseus rescues from a Centaur a woman, apparently Hip- podameia»s mother2.
In this battle in which the Centaurs were defeated we see a picture of the struggle between the long-haired race of the Lapithre, the men from whom the Sura was bought at the Vajapeya sacrifice, and the Centaurs, sons of the sun-horse, who polled their hair and drank milk till Pholos, the guardian of the national cask of the waters of life, the sacred tree- trunk Drona containing the Soma, opened it for Hcraklcs when the water came forth as wine. It was when the vine of Dionysos and the Gis-kin or palm-tree, whence Dumuzi was born 3, became the parent-trees in the days of Samlah of Masrekah, the vine lands that, according to Pindar, the Centaurs “ learnt the sparkle of the honey-sweet wine and 1 2 3
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv. pp. 185, 1S7.
2   Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 516—522.
3   Sayce, Jlibbcrt Lectures for 1 SS>7, Led. iv. p. 23S, note 2.
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pushed the milk from their tablesJ.” The stories of this series are shown to refer to the question of the sacramental drink consumed at the seasonal festivals by the name of Pholus. It is the ZEolic form of %d\os ykoos, meaning the golden-green, and is an exact translation of the epithet Hari-Zairi, used in the Zendavesta to denote Soma. Also Pholus is proved to be the Soma-god filling the cups of the seasons by the triple flagon (?TpCka^vvov 8eiras>), the three- cupped cup of the three seasons, which he gave to Geryon, the Phoenician Charion, the star Orion ruling the year of three seasons 2. The Centaurs were apparently of the same race as the milk-drinking Massagetae. who, according to Herodotus, worshipped only the sun-god, to whom they offered horses 3. They on reaching the country of the Lapithae, whose name means the Plunderers or Destroyers (lap, Xa7rd£ft>, to plunder), the fierce long-haired men of the Ugro-Finn race, the Ugrosena of the eleven-months year, attacked them, and the war ended in a union between the two races, in which the Northern sons of the sun-horse took the leading place. Their union is marked in the Vajapeya sacrifice by the addition of the pure Soma to the intoxicating Sura of the long-haired race. But in the contest there was developed a belief in a more refined symbolism than that of the realistic representations of the gods of the Lapithae phallus-worshippers, the linga-worshippers of India, called in the Rigveda Sisna-deva, or those whose god is the phallus. Hence after the defeat of the Centaurs by the Lapithae, when the year of Hippodameia with its seven-day weeks was introduced, the Centaur archer-god Eurytion, the rainbow-god, was thrown out of doors and his nose and ears were cut off4. That is to say, he was made like Melanthios, the goat-herd-god of the suitors whom 1 2 3 4
1   Pindar, Frag. 147, Boeckli, ii. 637; Meyer, Indo Germainsche Mythen Gandharva Kentauria, p. 41.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 549—551 •
3   Herodotus, i. 216
4   Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295—303.

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Odusseus treated in the same way, the featureless sun-gnomon pillar, the Hir-men-sul, the great sun-stone of the North ; and the pillar-worship of the Phoenicians replaced the idol- worship of the lunar solar-era.
E. The thirteen-months year of the Santals, the thirteen wives of Kashyapa and the thirteen Buddhist Theres.
This year of thirteen months is the sacred year of the Santals, and its adoption by them throws a most vivid light on its history. They are physically nearly a pure Dravidian race, of very dark complexions, with flat noses, large mouths, thick lips, black somewhat curly hair and doliko-kephallic skulls; and their traditional history shows that on the father’s side they were descended from Northern ancestors. They call themselves the sons of the wild-goose (hdsduk), and their original settlement in India was, they say, at Champa on the Ganges, which was, as we have seen, the capital of Kama, king of Anga, and the Angiras priesthood. Their chief god is Marung Burn, the great mountain (maruug), the equivalent of the mother-mountain-goddess Su-bhadra and the Gond mountain-mother Koi or Koh (kai-kaia). They trace their descent on the father’s side from the god Morcko, the peacock (mor) god, one of five brothers, the five Pandava brethren called the Bharatas, born of the peacock (mayura Hindi mohr), the totem-god of the Bhars and the Maurya or Peacock kings. Their maternal ancestors are the two sisters of these brethren, Jair Era, goddess of the village-grove (jahir) and Gosain Era, the saintly (gosain) goddess. Thus they say that their separate nationality dates from the age when the peacock with its starry tail became the sacred bird of Here, the moon- goddess, and when men began to measure the year by the track of the moon and sun through the zodiacal stars. They used to sacrifice human victims, and the story of their descent shows that they belong to the race ol Kansa, the goose-son of Ugra-sena, the Bhoja king ; that is to say that
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:18:58 PM: 520

their Northern ancestors on the father’s side were the Ugro- Altaic Finns, who have, as Dr. Sayce tells us, from time immemorial used a year of thirteen lunar months, which they apparently derived from the Turkic tribes, and who introduced the seven-days week among the AkkadiansT. They brought into Southern Asia their knowledge of metals and ores, and their handicrafts as workers in gold and silver, leather, fibres and wood.
The Finn ancestors of the Santals who came to India with this influx of artisan immigrants are shown, by the Santal customs, to be nearly allied to the patriarchal ancestors of the Kandhs of Orissa, as in both tribes property descends in the male line. The matriarchal side of Santal descent is shown in their marriage ceremonies, in which both bride and bridegroom are separately married to a mahua-tree (Bctssia latifolia:), [the tree whence the honey drink of the age of the Ashvins was brewed, and in the orgiastic festivals with which they celebrate the changes of the seasons, especially those of the Sohrai at the winter solstice and the Magh festival of January—February. Also one of their principal septs is that of the Sarens or descendants of the Pleiades, and among the Saren clan the Naiki-Khil Sarens are a sect of incipient Levites who are so careful to preserve their purity that they will not enter a house where any of the inmates are ceremonially unclean, and have a special village grove and priest of their own.
All the Santals, both women and men, worship as family- gods the seven Orakbonga, called i. Baspahar, 2. Deswali, 3. Sas, 4. Goraya, 5. Barpahar, 6. Sarchawdi, 7. Thunta- tursa. These seven days of the week are embodiments of the mountain (pahar) goddess, the goddess of the village grove (des-wali) and the boundary-god (goraya), and most probably were originally the seven stars of the Great Bear, worshipped as the Seven Sisters by their congeners the Rautias2, and they are certainly parallel deities to the seven
1   Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii. pp. 195, 196.
2   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Rautia, vol. ii. p. 204.

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communal ghosts worshipped by the Bhulyas, called Darha, Kudra, Kudri, Dano, Pacheria, Haserwar, Pakahi T. Here Darha or Dharti, the goddess of the springs, is the Kushika mother Gandhari, the Pole Star Vega ; Ivudra, is the moon- goddess ruling our Monday, and Dano is the Pole Star judge, the earlier form of Odin, the god of wisdom ruling our Wednesday.
But though these gods of the seven days are generally worshipped openly by both sexes in each family as a survival from the days when they represented the seven stars of the Great Bear, the ritual of the worship of the thirteen months of the year called Abge-bongas is preserved as a profound secret among the male Santals, their names being only known to the head of each family and his eldest son. They can only, like Sek Nag, the secret god of the Ivaj Gonds, be worshipped by males, but not like Sek Nag by the males of the tribe assembled together, but by the males of each family separately, who partake together of the offerings made. Their names are 1. Dhara-sor or Dhara-sanda, 2. Ketkomkudra, 3. Champa-dena-gurh, 4. Gurhsinka, 5. Lila- chandi, 6. Dhanghara, 7. Kudra Chandi, 8. Bahara, 9. Duar- seri, 10. Kudraj, 11. Gosain Era, 12. Achali, 13. Deswali. Here the thirteenth goddess is the queen of the village grove, the mother-tree, the equivalent of Kadru, mother of the Na- gas, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. But the predominant god in the list is the moon-god, especially the centre seventh moon-goddess, Kudra-Chandi. In her name we find both the Hindu word for moon Chandi and the Finnish Ku, which appears in the Finnic Ivuta-ma, the Esthonian Ku, Mordvin Kua, Ostiak Khoda-j, and in Kuhu, a name for the waning moon in the Atharvaveda 1 2, also in Ku-ar, the name of the month Ashvayujau (September—October) in Western India. It is also noticeable that the names of the two months of generation, the tenth Kudraj and the eleventh Gosain Era,
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes oj Bengal, Bhuiyasl vol. i. p. 115.
2   Lenormant, Chaldican Magic, p. 304, Atharvaveda, v. S, 47 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. iii. p. 1S9.
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are masculine and feminine, and denote the marriage of the male moon - god, the Soma of the Vedic marriage, to the saintly (gosain) goddess of the mother-tree, sister of Jair Era, goddess of the village grove. The name of this goddess-mother is the equivalent of the eleventh Buddhist Then, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saintr.
The comparison between the Santal names of these thirteen year-gods and those of the thirteen wives of Kashyapa is most interesting, for it shows the hatred with which the later Hindus, who had learnt to read and write, regarded the year reckoning brought in by the artisan races, who, like the Peruvians and ancient Chinese, kept their records by the Santal method of knotted cords, the Peruvian Quipas1 2. This feeling is shown by the name Krodha anger, and Krura the cruel one, given to the central-goddess of the Kushite year, and marks how deeply the memory of their ruthless conquest was impressed on the minds of the people, a memory which has extended far beyond India, and has caused the number thirteen to be looked on as unlucky all over Europe.
The evidence as to this thirteen-months year given by its adoption as the Santal year and its incorporation into Buddhist theology as the year of the thirteen Theris, headed by Malta GotamI Pajapati, the sister of the Buddha’s mother and his nurse, seems to show that this year with its week of seven days was first brought to India by the Northern artisan races, who settled in the country as conquerors in the beginning of the Bronze Age; and that the seventeen- months year, into which the seven-days week was incorporated, was one framed by the ritualistic priesthood, who tried to unite the two races of the Northern conquerors and their Southern predecessors, and to combine the conservative tendencies of the races who wished to retain the orgiastic festivals and the sacrifices of the earlier epochs with those
1   Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Santals, vol. ii. pp. 225—233.
2   Prescott, History of Peru, vol. i. p. 112; Legge, Texts of Taoism ; S.B.E., vol. xxxix. p. 122.

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of the moral reformers who set their faces against indulgence in strong drink and the licence of the national festivals, and who, under the influence of the Hittite Jain teachers, insisted on moral self-discipline. It was these reformers who banished strong drink from the Soma sacrifice, and changed the Soma cup from the Sautramani cup, described in Chapter VI. pp. 322, 323, made of Kusha grass, fruits, malted barley, rice, and millets, mixed with spirits and milk into the pure cup of Indra, made of sweet and sour milk, barley, and running water. We find a similar change in the composition of the Greek sacramental cup of Demeter. This called the Kukeon (tcvtcecov) is said in the Iliad to be made of barley-meal, grated cheese, and Pramnion wine, and to this Circe added honey and magical drugs r. But in the hymn to Ceres the wine is left out, and it is made of barley-meal (aXcfitTa), water, and mint, and this was the cup drunk at the Eleusinian mysteries2. This change was brought about by the sons of the date-palm-tree, the Tamar of the Jews, the water-drinking race of horsemen of the desert who made the cult of the date-palm the national creed of the Babylonians, who in their bas-reliefs represent their priest-kings or demi-gods as impregnating the mother-palm-tree with the pollen of the male tree. The leaders in this belief in the virtues of temperance in drink were the tribe called the Banu Hanlfa, meaning they who do what is right, to which Abram is said in the Koran to have belonged. They called a mixture of dates, butter, and dry curds, named Hals, their god, and said that they lived by eating him 3. In short, they believed that the life-giving spirit of the living God was incorporated into their inmost nature by this sacramental meal which made them sons of God. It was these water-drinkers, who took the name
1   Homer, Iliad, xi. 624, 641; Ibid., Odyssey, x. 234, 316.
2   Ibid., Cer., 20S ; Ilewitl, Ruling Races of Prehistoric 'Rimes, vol. i., Preface, p. xlviii.
3   Palmer, Qur'an, chap. ii. 129; S.li. IV, vol. vi. p. 19, note i ; Sachau, Alberuni’s Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. viii. p. 193 ; Burton, Arabian Nights, ‘ Story of Gharib and his brother Ajib,’ vol. v. pp. 215, 216.
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of the Hanifa or the Righteous, who made Bhishma and Valarama, and the ruling races of India represented by these mythic sun and moon-gods, sons of the date-palm ; and it was the union between these reformers, who introduced among the upper class in India the belief in the duty of abstinence from strong drink, and the earlier and more savage invaders of the age of the eleven-months year, which was commemorated in the ritual of the Vajapeya and Raja- suya consecration sacrifices. In the latter of these the king, newly consecrated on a tiger-skin as the son of the tiger, runs a chariot race in a chariot drawn by four horses, and as he ascends the chariot claims to be an avatar of the Mahabharata god Arjuna1.
F.   The years of seventeen and thirteen months in the Mahabharata chronology.
To obtain further insight into the history of this year we must turn to the Mahabharata. There we find its origin mythically attributed to the fifth year of the Pandavas’ exile- of thirteen years. It was at the end of the fourth year that they went Northward, as the gods of the year they began in the South, on their tour of pilgrimage of the sacred shrines described in the Tirtha-yatra sections of the Vana or Forest Canto. They reached the Northern point of their year’s journey in the Himalayas on the seventeenth day of their departure from the South, and remained for seven days, the first week of this year, at the Gandha-madana, the grove of intoxicating odours, near the mount Mainaka, born of Meneka, the moon-goddess who measures {men) time2. It was there that they were joined by Arjuna, the god of the rainy season of the summer solstice, who then returned to earth from his five years’ sojourn in Indra’s heaven.
The traditional history of this year is told in the story of Skanda, the sun-lizard, the god who was, as we have seen
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah. v. 4, 3, 1 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 98 ff.
2   Mahabharata Vana (Yaks ha- Yttd/ia) Parva, clvii., clxiv. pp. 467, 468, 497,

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in Chapter V. p. 279, born from the kettle of Kesari-tar. In the Mahabharata story he is the son of Svaha, the daughter of Prajapati disguised as one of the Pleiades and of Agni, in other words, the god born of the union of the matriarchal and patriarchal races, sons of the household fire, the sun-god born of the fire-flame. He was born in the land of Chaitra- ratha, that is, in the land ruled by the star Virgo (Chitrd), which ruled the year of eleven months, and was called Kartikeya, the son of the Krittakas or Pleiades. He was a god of six faces, looking North, South East, and West, to the zenith and the nadir, who worshipped the sun-cock, that is to whom cocks, the offerings to the sun-physician, were sacrificed. This god, also called Guha, the concealed one, whose sixth face was that of the Pole Star goat, was attacked by Indra. From the blow of the thunderbolt of the god of the rainy season the second Skanda, the god Visakha, was born as the ruler of the month March—April, called after him, the first of the two months preceding the rainy season, and the mid-month of the Pleiades year. It was after the birth of Visakha on the fifth day of the bright half of Visakha that the son of Skanda and seven mothers, the seven stars of the Great Bear called Sisu, the child of the eight-rayed star, was born as the ninth god Kumara, whom I have described in p. 498 as the god of this yearI.
Skanda was married to Devasena, known by the eight names of Shashti, Lakshmi, Asa, Sukhaprada, Sinivali, Kuhu, Satvritti and Aparajata, that is to the goddess of the eight-rayed star-mother of the child Sisu, the eighth ruling god of a year measured by the waxing moon Sinivali and the waning moon Kuhu, the year of new and full-moon sacrifices. After his marriage he went out to lead the seventh army corps of heaven in its search for a ruler of time to replace Abhijit, that is the star Vega, who had ceased to be the Pole Star, showing that the rule of Skanda was after
1 Mahabharata Vana (Markandeya^Samdsyd) Parva, ccxxxii.—ccxxxvii. pp. 679—691,
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8000 B.C. and during the age when the Pole Star was in Hercules. It was then that, according to the Mahabharata story, the Krittakas or Pleiades were made the rulers of heaven succeeding Abhijit (Vega). Under their rule the thirteen wives of Kashypa, the thirteen months of this year, were made mothers of heaven ; and of them Vinata the tenth, Aditi, Diti, the mother of the Asuras and Kadru, the mother of the Nagas, are named, and they are said to be worshipped as Kadamba or almond-trees, the sacred tree of the Ooraons and Kharwars. It was after the installation of this new age that Skanda and Visakha (April—May) destroyed the Danava sons of the Pole Star god and their leader Mahisha, the buffalo, who was, as we have seen (p. 349), ’once the god Indra ; and Skanda became after his victory the god with the fifty-one names recorded in the Mahabharata, that is the ruling god of this year of seventeen months and fifty-one weeks of seven days each 1.
This year of Skanda appears also in the history of the Pandavas in the account of the attempted rape of DrupadI by Jayadratha, which took place at the end of the eleventh year of the Pandava exile, and after Durvasa the ill-omened (dur) emissary of Duryodhana, Dusshasana, Kama and Shakuni, the gods of the four seasons of the eleven-months year, had fled from Krishna, who was on his arrival especially summoned by DrupadI to replenish, as the creator of time, her “sun-vessel,” the beggar-bowl of the Buddha, “which till then always remained full after she had eaten.” She besought Krishna to refill the exhausted bowl so as to enable her to give a meal to Durvasa and his attendants, which they would not stay to eat 2. The revolution in timereckoning, fore-shadowed in this refilling of the exhausted sun-bowl, was that caused by the arrival of Jayadratha, who arrived close to the Pandavas camp after the reinstal
1   Mahabharata Vana (Matskandeya-Samasya) Parva, ccxxviii., ccxxix., ccxxx., pp. 695—710.
2   Mahabharata Vana (G/iosha-ydtru) Parva, cclvii., cclxi. pp. 763, 777—779.
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lation of Dritpadi by Krishna. He was king of the moon {siii) kingdom of Sin-dhu, who drove in his chariot horses of the Saindhava or moon-breed, which were in the story of Nila and DamayantT driven by Nila and Rituparna, the ruler of the seasons (ritu), when Nala learnt the art of time- calculation under the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica) tree. Jayadratha ruled the Sau-viras, the sons of the mother-bird Su, and as leader of this year of thirteen months he was followed by twelve Sau-vira princes named Angarika, Kunjara, Guptaka, Satrunjaya, Srinjaya, Suprabiddha {buddha ?), Prabhankara, Bhramara, Ravi, Sura, Pratapa, Kuhana. He whose banner was the silver boar1, the moon- year-god, was the son of Vriddha-kshatra, the old (vriddha) field (kshetra), and the husband of Dus-shala, the hundred' and first child and only daughter born from the egg. laid by GandharT, the Pole Star Vega, wife of Dhritarashtra2. She was the Hindu counterpart of Dinah, the female form of Dan, the Pole Star judge, and the thirteenth child and only daughter of Jacob.
Jayadratha, the moon-god, the silver-boar, when he attempted to carry off Drupadi was seeking for a bride to replace Dus-shala, the goddess of the Kauravya year of eleven months ; and he passed the Pandava camp while the Pandava princes were out hunting, each of them as year-gods ruling the seasons of the year having gone, as we are told in the poem, to a different point on the horizon. Yudishthira, the god of .spring, the sun rising in the East between the winter solstice and vernal equinox, was in the East ; Bhima, the god of summer, the sun coming from the South to reach the summer solstice in the North from his starting-point in the South, was in the South ; Arjuna, the god of the rainy season beginning at the summer solstice, was in the West ; and the twin-brethren Sahadeva and Nakula, the gods of autumn and winter, were
1   malulbharata Drona (.Abhimanyu-badha) I’arva, xliii, 3, p. 134.
2   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxvii. p. 342.
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to the North, the point from which they started for their Southern home.
When Jayadratha, who boasted his descent from the seventeen high clans, the seventeen months of his year, saw Drupadi leaning on a Kadamba-almond-tree as the tree-mother of the race born of the Kurum almond, the parent-tree of the Ooraons and the Jewish prophet-priests, the Kohathites, and of the thirteen year-mothers of the year of Skanda and the Kushika, he sent an emissary to try and persuade her to elope with him. When she refused he came himself with six followers, as the year-god of the year of seven-day weeks, to where she was standing. And when she declined to accompany him he carried her off forcibly and placed her in his chariot.
This was the rape of the goddess of the Kurum-almond- tree whose sacred river was the Kurumnasa, which heralded the fall of the ancient faith in the goddess of the mother- tree and the introduction of the new worship of the rising white horse, the sun of the East, who succeeded the Pole Star as the ruler of heaven (p. 450).
Jayadratha was followed by the Pandavas on their return, and they released Drupadi and forced Jayadratha to declare himself the^ slave of the Pandavas and the god of their year of five seasons. When he escaped from his captors he implored Shiva, the three-eyed-god, for aid to revenge his defeat, but all Shiva would grant him was immunity from death at the hands of any of the Pandavas, except Arjuna, and one victory over his four brethren1. As for Arjuna, Shiva declared that he was the counterpart of Vishnu, the embodiment of the primitive water, the rain impregnated with the soul of life which came down from heaven to earth to people it with living forms. In this rhapsodical panegyric we have apparently a historical guide mark, showing that in. this year the fifth or rainy season was added to the four
1 Mahabharata Vana (Dranpadi-harana) Parva, cccxiii.—cclxxi. pp. 780 —801.

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seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter of the eleven- months year; and we find in this further proof, in addition to those already given, of the intimate connection between this year and that of the year of eleven months.
The promise of the short career of victory given to Jayadratha by Shiva was fulfilled in the eighteen-days battle between the Kauravyas and Pandavas. When Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Su-bhadra, was on the day of his death overthrowing all the foes he met, Jayadratha checked his career, and defeated in single combat Yudishthira and Bhima, as well as the five sons of Drupadi and the Panchala chief Dhrishthadyumna, the seen (drishthd) bright one (dyumna). But he met his doom on the next day after Abhimanyu’s death, the fourteenth day of the contest, when he was slain by Arjuna. Arjuna cut off his head with a magical shaft, which bore the head to the lap of Vriddha-kshatra, the Pole Star god, and thence it fell to earth, and as it fell the head of the Pole Star god broke into pieces, and his career as the world's ruler was ended z. In the story of the death of Jayadratha and Vriddha- kshatra, and the miraculous loss of the head of the former, we have a parallel to the disfigurement of Melanthios and Eurytion. Like them Jayadratha, the god with earrings ruling the year of the new and full-moon sacrifices, was when his career was ended changed from a god depicted in human form to be the sun-pillar god.
We have already seen in the history of the thirteen-months year, as told in Santal ritual, that it came to India during the age of the rule of Kansa, the goose-god of the Ugro- Altaic Finns, and this conclusion is corroborated in the history of the thirteen Buddhist Theris. In this, as recorded in the Manoratha PuranI of Buddhaghosha, we are told that they were all born in Hamsa-vati, the city of the moon- goose Hamsa or Kamsa, when Padumuttara, the Northern 1
1 Mahabharata Drona (Abhimanyu-badha) Taiva, xliii. pp. 133, 134, (fiyad- ratha-bad/ia) Parva, cxlvi. pp. 456, 457.
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(iuttara) lotus (paduma), was Buddha1. He was the thirteenth Buddha, that is to say, the god of the lunar-year of thirteen months, whose capital was Hamsa-vati, the son of Ananda, the moon-bull-god Nanda, and of Su-jata, the goddess who consecrated the new-born Buddha under the Nigrodha-tree (Ficus Indicd), the parent-tree of the Kushikas and of Kashyapa, whose wives were the thirteen months of this year. Su-jata gave this sun-god of the Banyan fig- tree the bowl of rice cooked with the milk of the eight cow-stars of the year of the eight-days week. The sacred tree of this Northern lotus-god was the Sal-tree (Shorea- robusta), which gave birth, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 464, to the Buddha who entered his mother’s womb as the elephant-headed rain-cloud, the god Gan-isha 2.
This year brought into Southern Asia by the Ugro-Altaic Finns became the year of the thirteen children of Jacob, of which the thirteenth was first Dinah, the female form of Dan, and the equivalent, as we have seen, of Dusshala, Jayadratha's first wife, as well as of Kadru, the tree (dru) mother of the Nagas, and the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. In the patriarchal form of the year history Dinah, wife of the king of Shechem, the capital of Ephraim, became Ephraim or the two ashes (ephra), the second son of Joseph, who is represented in the tribal lists by his eldest son Manasseh.
G.   The seventeen and thirteen-months year in Egypt.
This year appears in Egyptian mythology in Chapters CXLIV.—CXLVII. of the Book of the Dead, describing the journey after death of the souls of Ani, called Ani- Osiris, and his wife Thuthu through the Arits and Pylons
Bode, ‘Women Leaders of the Buddhist Reformation.’ J.R.A.S., 1893, p. 522 IT. This statement as to the birth of Maha Pajapati GotamI is repeated in the life story of each successive Theri. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 69—S3.
2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, The Distant Epoch, 231, p. 42.
of the. Myth-Making Age.
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of Sekhet Aanre to the house of Osiris Nu, the god of the monthly and half-monthly festivals of the new and full- moons. Sekhet is the goddess depicted with a lion’s head and also as a scorpion with horns and a disk. She is symbolised in astronomy as the star Antares a Scorpio ruling the autumnal equinox, and the temples at Thebes dedicated to her as Mat, the mother, are oriented to y Draconis, when it was the nearest rising and setting star to the Pole Starr. It was the seven scorpions sacred to this lunar-goddess, called Tefne, Bene, Mastet, Mastetef, Petet, Thetet and Matet, which showed Isis the way to the Papyrus Marsh, near the crocodile city of Pisni sacred to Osiris. She was there to be delivered of the second Horus, the sun-god, the older Plorus being, as we have seen, the son of Hat-hor, the earlier form of Isis as Nebt-hat, the mistress of the house (hat) dwelling in the Pole Star1 2.
The souls of Ani and his wife pass through the seven Arits and Pylons, depicted in the Papyrus of Ani, illustrating the Book of the Dead, as stages in the series of historical pictures seen by the souls of the departed on their way to the Elysian fields. In these are portrayed the ritual and symbolic forms of the successive gods, measurers of time, who succeeded the original tree and ape-gods of the matriarchal age, and had been worshipped as rulers of time by the Egyptian worshippers of the household fire, the sacrifice to which forms the subject of the first Vignette of the series.
The first and second Arits, the first two days of the week of this year, are guarded by Sekhet, and the remainder by other gods, and at the entrance to the first Arit, a hare, the moon-hare, a serpent, and crocodile are sitting, and at the second, a lion, a man, and a dog, who also guard the seventh Arit. In the Vignette of the Pylons instead of twenty-one there are fourteen shrines, though in the text twenty-one Pylons are described, thus apparently proving that the
1   Lockyer, Daivn of Astronomy, chap. xxix. pp. 2S9, 290.
2   Brugsch, Religion und Mythologic dcr Alton Aigypter, pp. 402—404.
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pictured story dates from the earlier age of the thirteen- months year, while the verbal text was composed during the time when the year of seventeen months had been made the national ritualistic year; and it seems to be all but absolutely certain that the seven Arits and fourteen and twenty-one Pylons represent the weeks, half-months, and months of this year *.
The year of the sun-god of this and of the year of eiglit- day-weeks is apparently that called in Egyptian mythology the year of the Khepera, the beetle whose oval body (Q) represents the union of two crescent moons, that is to say, it depicts a year in which, as in the thirteen-months year, the months began with the new moon. The birth of the sun- god of this year called Ra, the Kheper, is described in the account given by Brugsch of the picture and inscription at Erment telling of his birth ; this represents it as taking place in Pharmuthi (January—February). His mother is in the pains of labour supported by the midwife Renpit, the year, and Nit or Neith, the vulture-weaving {neith) goddess, the constellation Vega, and also the female form of Kheper, the beetle. The child when born is given to a waiting-woman Menat, meaning the breast, that is to a wet nurse, who gives it to Khnumet, the female form of the architect-god Khnum; and Amen-Ra, god of the South, and Rechebt, the Northern goddess, were witnesses of the birth. The seven Hat-hors from Upper and seven from Lower Egypt fly round as birds to protect the place of birth. They were the seven Khus, the masters of knowledge, raised from the primaeval water by the eight gods of creation to be the directors of the Meh-urt cow, the cow-goddess {urt) of the Flood (melt), that of the era of the year of the Ten Kings of Babylon of Chapter VII., the last of whom, Xisuthros, was saved from the flood. The Meh-urt cow was also the goddess Nit. The Khus rose on earth out of the pupil of the eye of the rising sun,
1 Bulge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chaps, cxliv.—cxlviii. pp. 240—261.
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and ruled the world with the god Thoth or Dhu-ti, the moon-bird. They were the seven sparrow-hawks, the sun- birds, and the seven days of the week of this year of the beetle x.
The story of the birth of this sun-beetle is also told in Chapter XVII. of the Book of the Dead, where he is said to be Ra, who gave birth to himself, and rose in the city of Sutenhenen, that is of the king (suten) of advancing time (henen\ as the god Tern, the sun-god of day, moving from East to West. He came forth from the pool of Maat, that is in the age when Vega (Maat) was the Pole Star in the boat in which Tern goes to Sekhet Aaru, the realm of the goddess Sekhet of the seven scorpions. He passed through the gates of Shu, the fire-god, called Tchesert, meaning the gates of holy things, the ttwo door-posts of heaven, the stars Gemini, and was borne in the arms of the gods Hu and Su, who attend upon Ra. They are described as the two drops of blood falling from the phallus of Ra when he mutilated himself, that is became the sexless sun-pillar-god. Their names are the dialectic forms of the primaeval cloud-bird Khu, the two birds of Night and Day, who in Rg. I. 164, 20, sit on the top of the world’s tree. The day of his birth is that when Horus fought with Set, and when Thoth (Dhuti) emasculated Set and brought forth and healed the right eye of Ra. This god of the rising sun was born from the Meh - urt cow, the vulture - goddess Nit, represented in Vignette VIII. of the Papyrus of Ani, with disk and horns. His eye (utchat) was filled by Osiris Ani, after it had been blinded by the filth cast by Set at Horus. The gods of the train of Horus, who were summoned by Ra, are the four sons of Horus, the four stars of tfie constellation Pegasus, whom he addressed as followers of the goddess Hetep- sekhus, that is of the sun at rest (>hetep), the setting sun which began the solstitial year of the Pole Star age, and they became four of the seven Khus who attended on 1
1 Brugsch, Religion tend Mythologie der Allen sEgypter, pp. 164, 116, 521.
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Ra when he declared himself to be the divine soul dwelling between the two Tchafi, the Northern and Southern sun, and also the divine cat who fought by the Persea- tree when the foes of Neb-er-tcher, the lord of the boundaries (icher), were destroyed. He is finally declared to be the god who goes round heaven robed in the flame of his mouth, who commands Hapi, the ape-god of the Nile. He is Nemu, the reporter of Osiris, Horus, Thoth (Dhu-ti) and Anubis rolled into one, and he as Kheper is watched over by the mothers Isis and Nebt-hat, who are called in line 125 of this chapter the ape-goddesses1.
Thus this conquering sun-god of the year of the beetle, born in January—February, when he came from the pool of the Pole Star Vega through the gates (tdiesert) of the Twins, the stars Gemini, is the rising sun, son of the sun-god of the eight-rayed star, the eight creating-gods, who was born when the sun was in Gemini in January—February and when Vega was the Pole Star, that is about 10,200 B.C., as the first of the series of sun-gods whose evolution has been traced in this Chapter and Chapter VII. He was the god of the year of the moon-cat, who ruled the second day of the week of Jack the Giant-killer, and his year was controlled by Thoth (Dhu-ti), the moon-god.
The sun-god of this year of thirteen months also appears in Vignette III. of the Papyrus of Ani as Anubis, the Jackal of the constellation of the Little Bear, who tests the tongue of the Balance in which the soul of Ani is to be weighed and judged by the testing-god and his twelve colleagues, who are depicted as setting behind the weighing scales. Their judgement is to be delivered after receiving the report of the weighing given by Thoth (Dhu-ti), who stands ready to prepare it with the scroll in his left and the pen feather in his right hand.
The representation of the central god of this year as Anubis, the jackal, shows that this thirteen-months year belongs to the second stage of the Horus myth. In the first
1 Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xvii. pp. 47—58.

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he is the bird-headed sun-god, born- of Hat-hor, and his assumption of the head of the jackal marks the age of the lunar cult, of which this thirteen-months year is the most unequivocal expression. The transition from the birdheaded to the jackal-headed Horus is shown in the figure found in Egyptian temples depicting him with the heads of the bird and the J ackalx.
The connection of the jackal-god with this year is also preserved in the Buddhist cosmogony of the thirteen Theris, in which he is the son of the thirteenth Theri Sigala-Mata, the mother of the jackal. The Egyptian biography of Ra also shows that his year of thirteen months was made the official year long before its priestly developement of the year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each was introduced.
This year of thirteen months, in which the year-god was delivered by the midwife-goddess Nit or Neith, furnishes in its birth-story further evidence of the connection I have already noted between it and the year of eleven months. Neith, the weaver, is the Egyptian Athene, the goddess of the weaving races of Lybyans who wove the flax whence the sacred garments both of the Egyptian and Jewish priests were made. I have already, in Chapter VI. p. 308, shown that the Indian Telis or oil-sellers, who worshipped the eleven gods of the year are the sons of the Sesame flax-plant, which also yields oil, and that they brought it to India from Asia Minor. It must have been from the same quarter, and probably by way of India, that both the years of eleven and thirteen months were brought to Egypt by the Kushite merchant kings.
H.   The thirteen-months year of the Nooktas of British Columbia.
This year is that used by the Nooktas of British Columbia, who show, both in their physique and their mode of life, strong affinities with the Polynesians and the seafaring
* Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 149.
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Dravidians of India. That have flat noses, thick lips and broad Dravidian features, and both long and short heads are found among them. They clothe themselves in bark dresses and wear a cap in the shape of a truncated cone, somewhat like the Hittite cap. They wear their hair either hanging loose or divided into tufts, and the only Columbian Indians who cut their hair are the Haidas. They tatoo themselves like the Ooraons and Burmese, and pluck out the beard. They live in large houses capable of holding all the living generations of a family, and build their houses on piles, both of which are Polynesian customs, and, like the Dravidian Males, they place totem poles in front of their houses. They use the bow and are also great fishermen, and build large flat canoes without the outrigger of the Polynesians and Malays, and which are, from their description, very like the large flat boats of Madras. They make fire by twirling a stick of cedar in a socket of softer wood, and cover the outside of their houses with painted designs, like those I have often seen on the houses of Santals in Bengal, and the Santals are the only forest tribes on whose houses I have seen these designsJ. In short, the people are very like maritime Santals and the Turano Dravidian coast races. They trace their descent in a curious way. The family descends through the wife, who brings her father’s position and privileges to her husband, but he avails himself of them only as her deputy, the real possessor being her son, but she on her marriage goes and lives in her husband’s village, and certain privileges descend in the paternal line. The family crest, representing the totem ancestor and conferring the privileges of noble, free or slave origin, descends through the mother. The members of each village community are, as among the Khands in Orissa, thought to be descended from a common ancestor. The strange mixture of patriarchal and matriarchal customs making up their very intricate system of tribal law clearly marks them as a mixed race 1
1   Ratsel, History of Mankind, Translated by A. J. Butler, vol. ii. pp. 19, 91—100.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:19:37 PM: 5 37

descended, like the Indian Dravidians, from matriarchal and patriarchal ancestors 1.
I.   The May perambulations of boundaries dating from this year.
Before I conclude the history of this year I must show by its connection with ancient perambulations of boundaries in May how widely its use was extended over Europe. We have seen in the history of the births of the Buddha that in his progress through the Mahosadha birth as the sun- physician, the Vessantara birth in the Tusita heaven of wealth, and his final birth as the deified sun-god who had left earth for heaven, he was born first at the beginning of Magh (January—February), that his Vessantara birth took place about the end of Phagun (February—March) at the vernal equinox, and that it was fifty days after this that he became the sun-god, the supreme ruler of heaven, who circled the sky on the path he had marked out for himself among the zodiacal stars, and had ceased to yield obedience to the Pole Star god or to the crescent and full- moon-gods of the lunar era, as the Pole Star god’s head was broken when that of Jayadratha with its lunar-earrings was cut off.
We have also seen that the son of Skanda, the new sun- god of this year succeeding that of Jayadratha, was born on the 5th of Visakha (April—May), a date nearly answering to St. George’s Day, and this month is prominently represented in the lives of the Buddhist Theris, for both the third Theri Padumavati and the ninth Bhudda Kundalakesha, the curly-headed saint, also called Su-bhadda or Su-bhadra, the
1 Boas, The Social Organisation and the Secret Societies of the Kiuatiutl Indians, pp. 334—338. The Noolka are a branch of the KwatiutI Indians, p. 632. They used to sacrifice human beings, the sacrifice taking place during the great annual festival lasting from the middle of November to the middle of January, showing that like the Santnls they kept the festival of the winter solstice, p. 636.
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mountain-goddess, were in the course of their transformations daughters of Visakha, and the fifth Dhammadinna was once his wife; that is to say, they all three belonged to years beginning in Visakha (April—May)I.
The sun-horse Parikshit was offered at the full-moon of Cheit (March—April), when his successor began his rule, so that the beginning of the year of this changing sun-god varied like our Easter from the vernal equinox to the 23rd of April. And with this variation in the starting date there was a similar variation in the date of the birth of the ascended and immortal sun-god, which fell fifty days after that of his mortal predecessors, the sun-horse and its rider. Judging by the persistent endeavours of the ancient ritualists to introduce history into their rites by the very recondite methods I have noted in previous chapters, it seems probable that these fifty days were connected with this year of fifty- one weeks or of some lunar mode of reckoning by months of fifty Tithi or lunar days, measured by a different scale of hours from that which we use, such as I have suggested in Chapter VII. p. 457, and in this latter case the fifty days would represent one month of the year, which was to be completed b)*- those intervening between his ascent into heaven and the end of his year. But whatever the explanation solving the difficulty may be, there can apparently be no doubt that the assumption of an interval of fifty days between the Easter birth of the sun-god and his ascent into heaven originated in this epoch, and arose out of the history of this'year of seventeen and thirteen months; and that it was then that the birth of the sun-child Sisu, son of Devasena, the moon-bird-goddess of the eight names, was celebrated by the Easter-eggs and the adoration of the moon-hare, which still survive in the symbolic Easter confectionery of Germany.
The history of these successive rebirths of the sun-god, beginning at Christmas and ending at Pentecost, is, as we
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii-, pp. 74—77> 8°*
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have seen, depicted in the life of the Buddha, and the universal diffusion of this dramatic panorama of the scenes of the moving scroll of time is proved by the reproduction of the Eastern pictorial series in the life of the Western king Arthur. The story of Arthur or Airem, the ploughman, son of Uther, that is Uther Bran of the wonderful head, the gnomon-stone I, who was originally the ploughing- sun-god, a Western form of the Eastern Rama, has been brought in its modern forms into accordance with Christian theology; but it was originally a history of pre-Christian faiths culminating in the worship of the white horse or mare of the sun. Her temple, that of the British goddess Epona, is close to Amesbury, whither Guinivere, his queen, who was originally Gwen-hwyvar, the white (given) spirit (,hwyvar), one of the three-year wives of the ploughing-god with the same name 2 3 4, betook herself, after Arthur had met his death at the hands of his son Modred, the archer and the winter- king 3. It is in the story of the coronation of Arthur that we find the record of his successive rebirths from the time when he as the sun-god entered Gemini in December— January, about 12,000 B.C., to his Easter birth in Gemini at the vernal^ equinox, about 6ooo B.C., and his final consecration at the end of fifty days at Whitsuntide. His birth as the sun-god was manifested by his drawing from the sun-gnomon-stone the sun-sword, a feat, like that of the stringing of the year-bow of Arjuna and Odusseus, only to be accomplished by the ruling year-god. Arthur proved that he alone could take the sun-sword from the stone in five repeated trials, which were wholly unnecessary to prove his power, for which one trial was enough. These were at Christmas, Twelfth Night, Candlemas, Easter and Whitsuntide, at which last festival he was finally crowned king 4. Thus
1   Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 97.
2 Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, chap. ii., pp. 25, 35, 36.
3 Ibid., chap. ii. pp. 38, 39; Malory, Morle d'Arthur, Globe Edition, Book i. chaps, xvii., xviii., xxv. pp. 42—44, 48, 49, Book xxi. chap. vii.
4   Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Book i. chaps, iii., iv., v., pp. 28, 31.
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this story, when repeated in its pre-Christian form, tells us that in the progress of ages he showed his right to rule first, as the sun-god awoke, like the Phoenician Archal, from his twelve-days sleep at Christmas; secondly, as the sun- child born on Twelfth Night; thirdly, as the ploughing- sun-god of the year beginning in January—February; fourthly, as the god of the Easter year of the vernal equinox; and fifthly, as the ruler of the universe born and crowned in heaven at Whitsuntide.
In the interval between the Easter birth and the ascension and rebirth at Pentecost there are held, almost everywhere throughout Europe, New Year’s festivals, in which the boundaries of each village and parish are circumambulated. It is in the Roman ritual that we find most satisfactory evidence of the ritualistic teaching conveyed in these ceremonies. There are two of these festivals in May, one on the 15th and the other on the 29th, in which processions went round the city boundaries as the representative sun-god of this year went round in his chariot the race-course, symbolising his zodiacal circuit.
The festival of the 15th of May is called that of the Argei, and is dedicated in the Fasti to Jupiter and to Mercurius of the Circus Maximus, the god of boundaries. The procession on this day ended at the Pons Sublicius, the ancient bridge over the Tiber, in the construction of which no iron was used. It was led by all the Pontifices or priests, by the Flaminica Dialis or female priestess of Jupiter in mourning, and by the Vestal Virgins carrying twenty-four Argei or puppets, made of rushes to resemble men bound hand and foot, and they threw these into the Tiber from the bridge. The name Argei given to these rush dolls shows that they were connected with the twenty-four shrines, the Sacella Argcorum, which marked the boundaries of the Servian city of Rome, and round which the Salii carried the year-shields in the March festivals beginning the year, which I have described in Chapter V. p. 239. No one who has read the account, which I will give presently, of the ancient procession

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of the 15th May, held at Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the capital of Umbria, will be it seems to me able to doubt that the procession of the twenty-four Argei went round the boundary shrines of the city before reaching the bridge, and that each of the shrines contributed a slain victim for the final sacrifice to the river-parent-god. Thus the whole ceremony denoted a national mourning for the death of the old year of fifteen months of twenty-four days each, or of the twenty-four lunar phases of the year of twelve months, a mourning marked by the dress of the Flaminica Dialis representing the mother of the dead sun-god.
That this sacrifice of the puppets, the dead remains of the old year, was a survival from a more ancient human sacrifice offered throughout Europe and Asia at the end of the year is indubitably proved by the evidence of national rituals. In the festival of Thargelion (May—June) at Athens to Artemis and Apollo, corresponding to the Roman festival of the 15 th of May, a man and a woman crowned with flowers and fruit, like sacrificial victims, were thrown from a rock with curses and led over the frontierr. Similarly, in Bavaria at Whitsuntide a boy in some places, a puppet in others, is decorated and carried round the fields, and thrown from a bridge into the river; and there is a similar Whitsuntide sacrifice at Halle of a straw doll called Der Alte or the old man, which is strictly analogous to the Roman festival, in which the victims were traditionally old men, as is shown by the saying “ Sexagenarios de pontc ”—The old men from the bridge. The observance of this custom, almost universal throughout Germany, was forbidden at Erfurt by a law of 1551 prohibiting the ducking of people at Easter and Whitsuntide2. This sacrifice was also simulated in the Indian ritual of the making of the fire-pan, in which a sham man was carried about with the gold plate and twenty-one knobs ; and in the consecration service 1
1 Muller, Die Dorter, Hook ii. chap. viii. § 2, p. 329.
* Mannhnnlt, Baumkultus, pp. 331, 359, 420 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Maius, 111 —121,
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beginning the building at the new year of the brick Aha- vanlya altar of the year-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox a human sacrifice was actually offered, and the head of the victim buried, as I shall show in Chapter IX., at the East end of the altar.
The second sacrifice in May, accompanied by a circuit of boundaries, is the Ambarvalia or solemn perambulation of the fields. Its date, as given in the calendars, is the 29th of May. Three animals, a bull, a sheep and a pig, were driven three times round the limits of each estate and municipality by a crowd crowned with garlands and carrying olive branches in their hands, and the animals were sacrificed when "the third round was completedI. An exactly similar sacrifice was held every year at Athens on the 6th of Thargelion (May—June), when the same animals were sacrificed 1 2.
J.   The perambulations of boundaries in Gnbbio and Echternach.
We have fortunately in the Eugubine Tables fuller information about this sacrifice and its early ritual than is extant for any other religious rite of ancient worship in any country, except those described in the Indian Brahmanas. In these we find a minute description of the annual circumambulation of Gubbio, the Umbrian capital Iguvium, and we can, as I shall show presently, supplement and illustrate these old official instructions by the observances of the modern successor of the ancient rite which takes place every year at Gubbio on the 15th of May, the same date as that of the procession round the Servian walls of Rome.
The tables give the rules for two different official circuits of the boundaries of Iguvium, dominated by the sacred hill Ingino, a name which irresistibly connects the city, its worship of the household fire, and the mother-mountain,
1   W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Men sis Mains, pp. 124—128.
2   Diogenes Laertius Socrates, c. 23 ; Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite Antique, pp. 186, 187.

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with the ancient German Ing, Inguina, the Ingaevones of Tacitus, who describes them as the eldest sons of Mannus, son of Tuisco, dwelling nearest the ocean1. They are the men of the household-hearth and the ingle-nook, and it was to these ancient parent-gods that the Umbrian city and confederacy were dedicated.
In both the circuits described 2, the priests had before the ceremony to take the auspices from the birds, and if they were favourable, the priest called the Adfertor or arranger (answering to the Hindhu Adhvaryu, the advancer on the road (<adhvan)), and his two assistants, had to be invested with the praetexta or official robe with purple stripes, and to place the sacrificial cord on his right shoulder, according to the pre-solar custom of the Hindu Pitaro-Barishadah of the Pole Star Age. He was then to pray to the sacred owl (parra), and again to take the auspices at the augur’s chair in the sacred augural templum or enclosure, which was with the temple of Vista in the centre of the city, whence the four roads leading to the four points of the compass branched off. He must then make the circuit of the city, driving before him the victims for the sacrifice, the pigs, sheep and bulls, and must on reaching the boundary expel any aliens who have settled in the city without becoming naturalised Umbrians. At the end of each of the three circuits silent prayers must be said to Cerfus Martius, Praestita Cerfia and Tursa Cerfia of Cerfus Martius.
In this ritual it is perfectly clear that we have a very close approximation to that observed in the old pre-Vedic sacrifices in India. The rules as to the wearing of the sacrificial cord and the bearing of the fire on the right shoulder, as well as the injunction to pray silently, are identical with those of the worship of Prajapati; also the three circuits of the walls must like the three Hindu circuits
1   Tacitus, Germania, 2.
2   Bovver, The Ceri at Gnbbio. Published by the Folklore Society, 1S97. Appendix, Lustration of the Iguvine People, Eugubine Tables vi. and vii. pp. 132—140.

round the altar in the Pole Star age, have been left-handed against the course of the sun, the direction in which as will be seen presently the priests make their circuit in the modern procession. Furthermore the triad to whom prayers are addressed is a reproduction of the gods of the Gond trident of Pharsi-pen and of the three tree-gods of the Tri-kadru-ka sacrifice. Both Br6al and Biicheler, the editors and interpreters of the Eugubine Tables, agree in thinking that Cerrus is the Latin equivalent of the Umbrian Cerfus, and they derive it from the root Cer or Ker, to create, which is also the root of the name Ceri, given to the three pedestals carried in the modern procession at Gubbio. Cerrus is used by Pliny, Hist. Nat. xvi. 6, as the name of a species of oak, the Quercus Cerrus of Linnaeus, which grows in the Apennines and Piedmont. Hence these three Cerfi would be the three oaks, the Drei-eich or three oak mothers of Germany, of Grimm, and the Tri-kadru-ka of India. The three stems of the three parent mother-trees, the goddess Mari-amma or the tree-mother of India, the Sanskrit Drona or hollowed tree-stem holding the sacred Soma, and the Greek mother-goddesses Leto and Artemis Orthia, worshipped as tree-trunks. The Asherah or tree-pillars of the Jews, which became among the Northern races who worshipped the Hir-mensul or great gnomon-stone of the sun, the Perrons of Germany, the village sun-stones, surmounted as in the Perron of Augsberg, with the pine cone as the sign of the tree-mother. It was this stem of the parent- tree which was the Thyrsus of Bacchus, with the pine cone on the top. The names of the gods of this triad also give further proof of their close connection with the Gond and Takka triads, for they are identical with the gods of the Gond triad of Pharsipot, in the fact that they represent the central father-god, the middle prong of the trident and his two wives, who in the Gond trident are the two tigen-mothers Manko and Janko Rayetal (p. 160). These last are here called Praestita, or the protecting, and Tursa, or the towered Cerfia, the latter being the goddess wearing the tower of

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Cybele and Isis, and she is, as we shall see presently, the ‘goddess with a temple consecrated to herself, to whom heifers are offered, and not the boars and sows sacrificed to Cerfus Martius and Praestita Cerfia. That these three gods were represented like the Indian Jugahnath by consecrated logs or tree-stems is also proved by the modern Ceri. These are made of stout wooden poles, of which the outward shape, when they are carried in procession, is that of hour-glasses, as their upper and lower halves form a cage-shaped protuberance, so that each Cero is shaped similarly to the Hindu altar in the form of a woman, broad at the ends and contracted at the waistx. The modern Ceri are doubtless imitations of those of the three mother-tree-goddesses carried in the old lustral procession, preserved by the conservative instinct which is so strong a characteristic of the Umbrian and Tuscan people.
The Eugubine Table VII. gives the ritual of a procession round the boundary shrines of Gubbio, which is clearly part of the series of services of which the procession of Table VI. is the opening service. It tells us where and how the sacrifices offered during the circuits were to be made. Three of these were offered apparently at the three gates which formed the entrances to Iguvium as to other Etrurian towns 1 2. The first sacrifice was at Fontuli, where three boars, red or black, were offered to Cerfus Martius with silent prayers and wavings of incense censors, as in the Indian worship of the age of the Pandavas, whose priest was Dhaumya or the son of the incense smoke (dJmmo). Corn, sour wine and spelt meal, the parched meal of the Pitaro Barishadah, were also offered. At Rubinia three sows, red or black, were offered to Praestita Cerfia with drink offerings of sour wine, corn, and cakes. This was followed by libations and silent prayers over the black vessels consecrated to Praestita Cerfia, which were succeeded
1   See Plate V. ; Bower, The Ceri at Gubbio, p. 50.
2   Bower, The Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, p. in, note 1.
N 11
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by those over the white vessels dedicated to her, and the four vessels, two white and two black, were placed, as the ritual expressly says, crosswise, that is in the form of the St. Andrew’s Cross, representing the solstitial sun, so that Praestita Cerfia was the sun-hen, the Indian goddess Ahalya, or Vrisha-kapi, the rain-ape with the lunar earrings given to Utanka (p. 313). She was wife of Gautuma or Indra, in the days when he was the rain-ape-god Maroti, the god of the tree (marovi), and the West wind Martu, whence he came to Italy as Martius.
After the libations to the goddess of the solstitial seasonal vessels a cake and spelt meal were offered to Fisovius Sancius, the Iguvine form of the sowing-god Semo Sancus, the god born of the sacred grass, who slew Cacus (p. 442). He was the god of the Fisian hill, now called Ingino, the god of the cleft (fissns), perhaps the male form of the Syrian Tirhatha, the cleft, and of the river issuing from the cleft to form the town brook. He clearly is a god belonging to the ritual of the Southern mothers, to whom only first-fruits and no living victims were offered. The third sacrifice was offered after the third circuit beyond Sata, and after the Adfertur and his two assistants, wearing the lustral prsetexta, had prayed in silence in the temple of Cerfia Tursa, called Tursa Jovia, whence it appears that this goddess was worshipped in a shrine consecrated to her instead of in the open air, like the two other gods. She was tjie goddess of the later age following that when men worshipped on the mountain tops or on artificial hills. It was from her temple that the three heifer-calves to be sacrificed to her were driven to the decurional or centre forum. After they were caught in a sham hunt they were taken to Aquilonia, and there sacrificed to Tursa Jovia with drink-offerings, corn and a cake. At each of the sacrifices pieces were to be given, these were doubtless, as in Indian ritual, the pieces of the victims given to the townspeople to bury in their fields to secure good crops. We see in this ritual that it is female animals that are sacrificed to female goddesses, and the heifers offered

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to Tursa are like the Jewish heifer-offerings and the sacrifice of a cow on the Indian Ashtaka, and belong apparently to an older ritual than those in which the oxen of the age of the sexless gods and bulls were offered.
The whole of the ritual of Iguvium was under the control of the twelve Attidian brethren, who, whether they were priests of the Phrygian god Attis or not, were clearly a branch of the same order of dancing priests originating in Asia Minor, to which the Roman Salii, the priests ot Mars, belonged, and who succeeded, in South-western Asia, the female dancers of the Indian matriarchal villages, the offspring of the mother-tree and the tree-ape-god Maroti, the prototype of the Umbrian Martius, who became the Etruscan Maso, the god of increase.
There is no mention in the ritual of the Iguvine circuit processions of the sacrifice of a sheep, which was apparently an addition to the earlier ritual in which pigs first and afterwards heifers were offered. But the ritual of a sheep sacrifice is given in the Eugubine Tables, and it apparently belonged to the series of those offered at the birth and ascension to heaven of the Easter sun-god. The object of the ritual of this sheep sacrifice is the sanctification of the temple spring, the fountain welling forth from the prints of the hoof of the sun-horse. For this a special priest was appointed from the Collegia of the Attidian brethren. He chooses a sheep for the sacrifice, which is brought in from the country with the sacred fire. The sheep is carried on a litter divided into two, an upper and lower compartment, like those of the Ceri. The sacrifice is offered after the priest enters the temple, apparently that of Tursa, to various deities, among whom arc Jupiter, Pumunus Publicus and Tursa, and wine and corn arc offered with it. But the fact that it is a sacrifice in which the priest turns to the right, shows that it was an offering of the solar age, belonging to the creed of the worshippers of the male Su-astika, the sun who begins his annual journey by going South at the summer solstice. The sheep sacrificed is the Easter lamb eaten by
N n 2
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the Jews at the Passover, the lamb of the year beginning with the feast of Purim, that sacrificed by the Bulgarians to St. George on his day, and that eaten on Easter day in almost every house in Greece. It was the substitute for the animal sacrifice of the eldest son, the child eaten by the Sabaean Haranites, who pray turning not to the North, like the Mandaite Sabseans, but to the South, and who were the followers of the White God Laban in the age of the eleven-months year. In the Mandaite New Year’s sacrifice at the autumnal equinox, a wether and not a lamb is slain T.
We have now, in seeking further illustrations of the inner meaning and historical significance of the ceremonies beginning the Umbrian New Year of the Easter sun-god, to turn to the festival celebrated every year at Gubbio on the 15th of May, of which Mr. Bower, in his account of the procession, has given us a picture in which the smallest details are artistically recorded. He begins with a description of the three Ceri. The first of these is now dedicated to St. Ubaldo, but formerly it was that of St. Francisco, and originally the Cero of Ingino, the mountain-mother. The other two are called those of St. George and St. Anthony, a dedication marking the festival, in which they appear as principal actors, as one to the year-gods of the year of three seasons, originally that of Orion, but beginning, when it was dedicated to St. George, at the autumnal equinox. This was, as we have seen in Chapter V., the season sacred to St. George as the ploughing- god, who was originally born at the autumnal equinox as god of the upright four-armed cross with equal arms, called after him, but who became in the course of the evolution of religious belief I have described in this and the previous
1 Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. 114, 115 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Preface, p. xvi., Essay vii., pp. 55, 56; Essay viii., p. 164; Chwolsohn, Ssabier tend der Sabiismus, ii., Excursus to chap. ix. PP- 3*9, 364; Garnett and Stuart Glennie, Women of Turkey, chap. xii. PP- 332, 333-

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chapters, the god of the Easter sun. St. Anthony, who carries a fire-ball in his hand z, is, in Italian popular mythology, the god of the household fire-place, and the especial protector of pigs 2. In considering the history of these three survivals of ancient creeds, we must not forget that St. Ubaldo’s body is believed to be imperishable, that he is reclothed every year before his festival, and that one of his titles to the supremacy among the three Cero saints is that he conquered eleven cities for the Iguvians 3. In these attributes he is clearly declared to be the never-dying sun-god of this epoch, who yearly reclothes himself in the green leaves and flowers of summer, and who, as the conqueror of the god Dadhiank of the horse’s head ruling the eleven-months year, has become the supreme ruler of heaven and earth. These properties and victories of the conquering sun-god, set forth in the original ritualistic history, have been transferred to St. Ubaldo in the modern transformation of the old birth-story.
The bearers who carry these Ceri in the procession wear a uniform, of which the most noticeable articles are the red cap with its long strings and tassel, and the white or red shirt. The red colour marks the wearers as members of the rqd race of Adam, the red earth, but the cap is the most significant part of the dress. It is the cap of the red-capped goblin, the Leprechaun of Ireland, who is believed to guard treasure, and who is the parent-god of the dwarf mining races; and his red head is an inheritance from his bird- parents, the red-headed wood-pecker. This wood-pecker, the wood-king Picus, was beloved by the witch-goddess Circe, the hawk (kirke) ruler of time in the West, the land of the setting sun. He refused her advances, and was changed by her into a wood-pecker 4. He was the father of Faunus, the deer or antelope sun-god, and the grandfather of Latinus. He is, in short, the bird-parent of the forest miners, whose 1 2 3 4
1   Bower, Procession of the Ceri, p. 114.
2   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 23S—240, 252.
3   Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. 13, 17, 22, 30, 123.
4   Virgil, sEucid, vii. iSy—191.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:20:33 PM: 550

emigration I have traced from the Ural mountains through Europe and Asia, where their memory has been preserved in the traditional history of every country where they have settled. They were all sun-worshippers, and their red-capped goblin-parent, son of the red-headed wood-pecker, is believed to be a guardian of mineral wealth by the Algonquin Indians, as well as by the Italian, Irish, and German peasants1. It was the believers in this bird as the messenger and embodiment of the god of wealth, who made the female Su-astikas found in old Indian tombs in Mississipi and Tennessee, in which the beak and head of this wood-pecker form the arms of the Su-astika 2. This was the bird-guardian of the treasure of the dwarfs, who is said by Pliny to have the power of opening any mountain or closed place by the virtue of a plant it gathers at the night season of the moon, and he calls it Picus Martius, or the bird sacred to the god Martius of Gubbio, the divine wood-pecker. He is said by Suidas to be worshipped in Crete as Pekos Zeus (mjKos Zeus), and to foretell rain; and is apparently identical with the sacred bird of St. Martin, the Saint of November, who ruled the original year of the Pleiades, the ice-bird of Aristotle who sits on her eggs in winters It was this bird, whose history shows it to have been looked on as a bird ruling time in the earliest year-reckonings, who led the Finn miners to India, where they disseminated their belief in the Southern god of the winter solstice as the god of wealth, and as the god who brings from the South the rich gifts of spring at the vernal equinox. It was under the banner of this god that the Pandavas came back to the sacrifice of the sun- horse with the wealth they had taken from the Southern mines; and it was from the Tusita heaven of this god of 1 2 3
1   Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 162—165.
2   See Figures 263, 264, 269, Wilson on the Suastika, pp. 906, 907. Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, United States National Museum, 1896.
3   De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vii. pp. 543, 346; Pliny, 10, 18, 20; Aristotle, De Gen. Animalium, v.

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wealth {tuso) that the Buddha was born in his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox.
These red - capped Ceraioli wearing the livery of this treasure-guardian are divided into three bodies. The first, who bear the Cero of St. Ubaldo, belong to the Society of the Muratori or Masons. Their leader is the First Captain or chief director of the festival, who entertains the principal guests present at the feast celebrating the day. He is elected by lot on St. Ubaldo’s day, the 16th of May, from among the Society of Masons, but he must be of noble birth. He holds office for twelve months, and in the days when Gubbio was the capital of a republic he was the national Presidentr. The Ceraioli of St. George belong to the Guild of Traders, and those of St. Anthony are Contadini or countrymen ; so that the three saints are the patron-gods of the Nobles, the Traders, and Cultivators, answering to the Indian castes of the Kshatrya or warriors, Vaishya, village {visit) artisans, and Sudras or farmers.
The day of the procession is the eve of St. Ubaldo’s day, and therefore a fast. Hence the principal dish at the feast held before the procession is one of boiled peas and cuttlefish, the millets and river-fish of the sons of the rivers. This is followed by a number of fish courses, the sacramental dishes of the fish-sun-god Salli-manu] or Solomon, who died yearly in the constellation Pisces, or the fish, the last Nakshatra Revati, and rose again in the constellation Aries of the sun-rain as the bearer of the Seal of Solomon,—the mystic marriage ring of the Pope, with its nine divisions, which was to be the topmost stone of the vaulted roof of the heavenly palace of the immortal sun-god built by the Masons of the holy craft, who first began the year-palace by arranging the bricks of the days of the weeks by which time was measured. It is they who rule this Gubbio festival, and who, as the widely-disseminated association of Free Masons, have adopted the seal of the two interlocked triangles enclosed 1
1 Bower, The Procession of the Cert, pp. 6, 7, 65, 66.
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in a circle as the signet of the Royal Arch, their highest grade.
This meal is washed down with large draughts of wine, which is also, as we shall see, consumed during the procession, which takes place in the evening, thus marking it as a survival of the early orgiastic festivals to the seasonal gods of the setting stars and sun.
While the Cero of St. Ubaldo is being raised, and before the procession starts, water is thrown on it, thus showing that the original festival was a national prayer for rain, like the water-throwing festivals of the Sal-tree, held at the end of March or the beginning of April in India and Burmah. The cortege is arranged at noon, and is led by the Captain with a drawn sword and a man in a red shirt carrying an axe covered with a white cloth, the survival of the doubleheaded axe of Parasu Rama and the Carian Zeus, which had cut down the mother-trees carried at the ancient procession, when the trees were, like the Kurum or almond-tree of Chutia Nagpur, solemnly cut by fasting villagers, who went into the forest to seek it. These two march in front of St. Ubaldo’s Cero, which leads the way, but before starting the Cero is turned violently round three times against the course of the sun. At first the bearers of the Ceri visit, one after another, the houses of a number of prominent citizens, and opposite each house the Cero is turned three times as at starting. During these visits each Cero takes its own independent course, and after them they all meet for the final procession at the Piazza Signorina, the town market-place. There they have the third meal of the day, the second being taken at the various houses they visit. These are the three meals of the sun-god of the early mythology of the North, breakfast, dinner and supper.
After Vespers, the final procession begins with the Cero of St. Ubaldo in front, followed by St. George the summer and autumn saint, next, and by St. Anthony the winter saint, last; and the great bell only rung five times in the year announces the time of departure. The Ceri are carried by

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the bearers at a rapid rate, and they start on a sunward course round the town till they meet near the South-east gate with the episcopal procession. This is led by men in white garments with black mourning capes, like the mourning worn by the Flaminica Dialis in the Roman procession of the 15th of May. They are the attendants of the dead, and the death they mourn is that of the departing year. They are followed by the members of the Society of Santa Croce wearing blue capes, the garments of the day-sun of the new year, and after them more mourners in black. The last in the procession was the Bishop, who was preceded by the Canons of the Cathedral walking behind the picture of St. Ubaldo. They began their tour of the town by going first Northward, then Westward, and thence by the South to the East, so that their course was contrary to that of the sun, a course prescribed in Canonical rules for Penitential processions x. When they reached the South-east point of the circuit at the end of the Via Dante, they were met by the Ceri and their bearers, who dash at full pace Southwards till the Bishop stops their career by holding up the Host, answering to the ancient emblem of the rising sun.
After acknowledging the holy symbol the bearers with the Ceri rush past the clergy till they arrive at the first halting-place ; which is, when we consider the extraordinary conservatism of ritual, almost indubitably cither the actual spot where the first sacrifices were offered in the procession described in the Eugubine Tables, or a substitute for it. It is at the Palazzo Ferranti, the South-west point of the circuit, and therefore the setting place of the sun of the winter solstice which rose in the South-east, where the Ceri met the clergy. It is on the banks of the stream flowing through the city. Here they halt for a draught of wine, and the First Captain, mounted on horseback and attended by a tiumpeter, takes command of the whole bod)', and under him is the Second Captain with two axe-bearers.
1 Bower, The Procession of (he Ceri, p. 125.
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They, followed by the Ceri, go North and then East to the Great Piazza. There a second halt for rest and wine is made, after the Ceri have gone several times round the Piazza against the course of the sun. They start thence for their final halt and a draught of wine at the Porta Ingino, leading up to Mount Ingino. They then take the Ceri up the hill, and carry them three times round the court of the Monastery. The ceremonies end with the lighting of the year’s fires and, like other ancient New Year festivals, with a two days’ fair.
I have now, before closing the account of these May Pentecostal processions celebrating the New Year of the sun-god enthroned in heaven, to turn to another similar festival to that of Gubbio. This is the dancing procession at Echternach in Luxemburg, held yearly on Whit Monday. Echternach is dedicated to St. Willibrod, who died there in a monastery he founded after he had converted the people of Echternach and its neighbourhood to Christianity. He was an English monk who took the vows in the monastery at Ripon in Yorkshire, and it was he who first converted the Frisians. He came to Trier, the seat of the Roman provincial government near Echternach in 698 A.D., and died in 739 A.D. Echternach, on the right bank of the Sauer, had been probably for ages before Willibrod came there, the site of a holy well: one of those welling forth under the hoofs of the sun-horse, to whom the well and the small conical hill rising above it was dedicated. It was a typical Celtic site, hallowed by a hill sacred to the mountain-mother, and a well near the village grove at the foot of the hill. It is in the country of the Eburones, whose territory extended from the Eiffel country on the North as far South as Lake Neufchatel, of which the Roman name is Lacus Eburodunensis, the Lake of the fort (dun) of the Eburi, and they ruled the whole of the country of the Ardennes. They probably take their name from the boar Eber, the sun-boar of Orion’s year, and the Wild Boar of the Ardennes.

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When Willibrod came to Echternach as a missionary, he found, as we are told in his life, that an annual dancing festival was held there every year in honour of the sun- physician, who gave healing properties to its waters, and to whom the conical hill on which the parish church now stands was dedicated. The people danced there for three days and three nights together, just as they do at the Munda seasonal festivals ; and this sun-festival was attended, as it is now, by people from a considerable distance, so that it must have originated in very ancient times. It was held like that at Gubbio at about the same time when the present Christian festival takes place ; that is to say, it was a May festival of the consecration of the boundaries of holy sites hallowed by the healing-sun-god. When the people were won to Christianity by St. Willibrod’s preaching they agreed to change their dancing festival into a Christian procession, but the change was really merely nominal, and they substituted the name of St. Willibrod in their prayers for health and prosperity for that of the heathen sun-god l. Both here and at Gubbio, the clerical teachers, who taught the people to call themselves Christians and tried to train them in the practice and love of Christian virtues, followed the advice given by Gregory the First to St. Augustine and the missionaries he was taking to England, and did not alter the festivals of the people beyond bringing them, as far as they found it possible to do so, to renounce practices denounced as sinful by Christian ethics.
Hence the dance which distinguished the ancient heathen procession was still performed at Echternach, with its remarkable step of three paces forward and two backwards, and its own special music2. It is apparently a survival of the ancient Tripudium or measured step of the Dionysian Choric
1   Die Spring prozession und der Wallfahrt znm Grade des hciligcn Willibrod in Echternach, von J. Bern; Krier, Religions Ichrcr am Progymnasium zu Echternach, pp. 66 ff.
2   Purior, Echternach St. Willibrod ct la Procession dansantc, p. 13 ; Krier, Die Spring prozession, p. 113.
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dances, and its five steps point to a connection with the Celtic five-days week. It is with this step that the Echter- nach processionists now make the circuit of their town, and a similar step was probably used at Gubbio, which has now degenerated into the running pace of the Ceraioli bearers' of the Ceri.
We have a minute account of the procession recorded by Brower in 1617 A.D., in his Metropolis Ecclesia Treviritz and A/males Trevirenses, which shows that it then differed in some respects from that of the present day. It began, as now, at the linden-tree of St. Willibrod on the left bank of the Sauer, the mother-tree of Echternach, and a linden is the sacred tree of almost all villages in Belgium and the Eiffel country. There they danced three times round the cross of St. Willibrod under the tree facing the crossing of the Sauer leading to the town. At Echternach, as at Gubbio, there were three special stages in the procession, which went sunwise round the town, and this circumambu- lation of the cross was the first of the three. The triple circuit round St. Willibrod’s was repeated in that round the interior of the Abbey Church and round the cross outside the Parish Church1. In the Abbey Church they danced under the great chandelier in the centre dedicated to the twelve Apostles, and fitted for seventy-two lights, to represent, as we are told, the seventy-two disciples sent out by our Lord to preach the gospel2. This certainly looks very much like a survival of the ancient tradition of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year, which were still remembered by the very conservative people who have kept intact so many old beliefs and customs in Gubbio
1   Krier, Der Springprozession, pp. 158, 63, 68.
2   Luke x. 1—17. Our version speaks only of seventy disciples, but many ancient manuscripts give the number as seventy-two, and this was certainly the number recognised by the makers of the Echternach chandelier, unless indeed they had the Celtic number of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year in their mind. The original dancing festival was certainly one which had descended from the ancient Pre-Celtic Piets and the earlier sons of Dagda and Brigit to the Goidelic and Brythonic Celts.

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and Echternach, and, as we have seen in so many instances recorded in this work, in all the countries peopled by the successive ruling races of the ancient world.
The arrangement of the procession is most interesting and instructive. No one who has seen it can fail to see in the demeanour of the processionists that it is looked on by all who take part in it as a most solemn religious ceremony. In the Middle Ages it was divided into two separate services, and the second of these was reserved for the creeping penitents, who, like the priests at Gubbio, made their way slowly round the circuit, beginning their journey by creeping through a hole in a holy stone near St. Willibrod’s cross, which, like the similar holy stone at Anderlecht near Brussels, was supposed to possess healing virtues. Sick human beings and Easter lambs used to be passed through the Anderlecht stone. The Echternach stone was originally about two feet high, and it was raised a foot higher by Paschasius, who was abbot from 1657 to 1667 A.D.
The pilgrims who attend the festival come from considerable distances, and the first place in the dancing procession immediately after the walking priests, headed by the Dean, is reserved for the people of Priim, the capital of the Eiffel, about sixty miles from Echternach. For some days before Whit Monday pilgrims begin to come in, and it is almost more interesting to watch their arrival than to see the procession itself. All the pilgrims from each village, men, women, boys, girls, and children, come in together in one troop accompanied by their village band, and they spend their time on the journey in reciting the Litanies of St. Willibrod. Certainly all that I met near the town were thus engaged, though whether they continually recited the services throughout the long journey on foot, that some of them had to take, I cannot say.
The procession begins with a sermon, and in it each village takes its allotted place. The men, women, boys, and girls, in separate rows for each sex and age, dance in
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step behind their village band, and take with them their village flag. It is a surviving likeness of the processions of matriarchal communal villages, each having, like those in Chutia Nagpur, their own flag and village musicians ; and I am certain that in the days when the pilgrimage was made to the healing well of the sun-physician, the pilgrims looked on their journey and the ritual of the services as an equally holy duty as that their modern descendants now perform in the hope of obtaining the intercession of St. Willibrod. Any one in those remote ages staying in Echternach for some days before the festival would have met the villagers coming to the town in groups,, reciting prayers to the sun-physician, who, as the Buddha of the Vessantara birth, healed the diseases of all those whom he was pleased to help.
The festival ends, like that of Gubbio, with a fair, and though no bonfires are lighted at it, yet from the close similarity between the two feasts it is certain that those who introduced it among the Eburoncs brought it from some town centre, inhabited by a section of amalgamated tribes who had formed themselves into the nationality of the sons of the Easter lamb, and adopted a new sun-year for their national use. By these it was regarded as a New Year’s feast, but when incorporated into the ritual of the Celts, who retained their old November year of the Pleiades, it was looked on as a holy festival which would bring blessings to the country, and accepted without any alteration of their previous annual reckonings. ' These latter, in the conservative countries of primaeval times, could only be changed by an immigration of the men of the new year large enough to make the new comers much more numerous and powerful than their predecessors; and even then the change in any of the town-centres, whence all innovations started, was first made by the assignment of a special quarter to the new comers, wherein, as in the separate divisions of the seven hills of Rome, they could follow their own ritual. It was only after a long series of quarrels, recon

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ciliations, and general amalgamation of the alien sections with each other by intermarriage, that the composite ritual of the primitive mythologies which have come down to us were made into one national round of annual festivals, embodying those of the component tribes united as one state. It is as one of these incorporated festivals that the New Year processions and verification of boundaries, which began the year of the Easter-born sun-god raised to heaven at the Pentecost, survive in all countries of Europe, and are retained in England in the circuits made round parish boundaries in Rogation week.
To complete the account of this year and to show its position in the history of human developement, marked by the successive measurements of annual time, I must close this Chapter with a description of the altar of the Garhapatya hearth dedicated to this year, and designed in India at this epoch as the first of the two brick altars embodying the final record of the history of the year told in Hindu ritual.
K.   The ritual of the building of the Garhapatya altar of this thirteen-months year.
The space for the altar was swept by a Palasha (Butea frondosa) branch, and was sprinkled with the river sand, whence the sons of the rivers were born, mixed with salt, so as to consecrate it, in the language of the Brahmanas, to those united races, sons of the river and sea-mothers, who trace their descent from the inner membrane (amnion) of the womb of the flax (uma) mother, the oil-bearing flax- plant, the Sesamum orientaleT. The ground for the altar was enclosed with twenty-one enclosing stones, the twenty- one days of the month of this year, and in placing them
1 Eggeling, Sal. ffrah., vii. I, i, i—7, vi. 6, 1, 24: S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 29S, 299, 252.
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a sunwise direction was to be followed. The bricks were then to be laid down in the order stated in the accompanying diagram, representing the altar inside the circle of twenty-one stones. The first four bricks are to be laid down from North to South to represent the body and arms of the sun-god going Southward at the summer solstice. After these the builder, proceeding sunwise, is to place the two Western bricks to represent the two thighs, placing the Southern brick first. He then goes round and places the Eastern bricks to represent the head, placing the North bricks first, so that the first eight bricks form a cross, representing the effigy of the father of fire lying on his back with outstretched arms and his head to the East. To complete the year-square, represented by the altar, four more bricks are added, the ninth brick in the South-east being divided into two parts, so that the whole makes the square of the thirteen months of this year, measuring one fathom in diameter, placed inside the circle of twenty-one stones T. This altar or hearth, is to be built of one layer as the womb of life 2, that of the birth-year of the worship of the sun, who was to rise to heaven as the sun-bird born from this year of seventeen and thirteen months, the bird of the Ahavaniya brick altar, to be described in the next chapter. This sun-bird was to be born from this hearth of national generation as the offspring of the fire kindled on it, combined
with that of the fire-pan which was transferred to it.
1
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 1, x—12, 37; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 301—309.
2   Ibid., vii. 1, 2, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 315.
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Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:21:28 PM: CHAPTER IX.
THE YEARS OF EIGHTEEN AND TWELVE MONTHS, AND
OF FIVE AND TEN-DAY WEEKS.
A. The Hindu year of eighteen months and that of the Mayas of Mexico.
WE have seen in the last chapter that the seventeen- months year closing the exile of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, ended before the sacrifice of the sun-horse at the full moon of Cheit (March—April), and it was at this sacrifice, as vve learn from its ritual described in the poem, that the eighteen-months year began. These months were represented by the eighteen sacrificial stakes set up for the victims to be sacrificed to the gods of this year, instead of the eleven stakes set up for the gods of the eleven- months year of the Aprf hymns. Six of these were of Bilva or Bel-wood {HSgle marmelos), the sacred tree of the sun-physician, and one of the totems of the Bhars. Six of Khadira-wood (Acacia catechu), the tree of Kadru, mother of the Nagas, of which the eleven stakes of the ritual of the eleven and thirteen-months year were made, and the wood of the sacred fire-socket or mother of fire T. Six of Sarvavarnin or Palasha-wood, the mother-tree of the Soma sacrifice of the sun-bird. Besides these, two stakes were made of Devadaru (Pinus deodara) wood, of which the triangle enclosing the fire on the altar of animal sacrifices was made, and one of Cleshmataka (Cordia latifolia), the fruit of which is eaten medicinally and for food. It furnishes the drug called by Roxburgh Sepistan or Sebes-
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 4, I, 20, iii. 6, 2, 12; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. go, note 5, 151.
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tena I. These three stakes were probably added to make the numbers of the stakes twenty, or the number of days in the month of the eighteen-months year, and twenty-one or the number of days in that of seventeen months. A brick altar was also built on the sacrificial ground, said to be made of golden bricks, and called the Agni Chayana, or altar of heaped-up fire. It was ten cubits long and eight cubits broad, and was thus an altar of the year of 8 + 10, that is, of eighteen months. It was made of four rows or layers of bricks and not of five, which, as we shall see, was the orthodox number in the great Ahavanlya altar of the Brah- manas, and was surmounted by a golden bird in the shape of a triangle, to represent the Garuda or Gadura, the sun- bull (gud) and sacred bird of Krishna. This Gadura was the second son of Vinata, the tenth wife of Kashyapa, born from an egg, and the devourer of the Nagas 2. This is the earlier sun-bird of Indian ritual, which was originally the sun-hen, and differs from the cloud-bird of the brick altar of the Brahmanas, which, as we shall see, was depicted on its lowest layer.
This year of eighteen months of twenty days each, divided into four five-day weeks, marks the culmination of the ritualistic eras, of which the history is given in the Mahabharata. It marks a return to the earlier year of three hundred and sixty days and seventy-two weeks, and was the outcome of the final victory of the Pandavas fighting under Arjuna’s banner of the ape-father-god. It denoted the birth of a union of originally alien people, comprising in the one nationality of the Great Bharata all the different alien races of Southern and Northern origin which made up the population of India. It is their history which is told in the eighteen cantos of the poem. This was the year which was taken from India to Mexico in the Bronze Age, which lasted in America till after the Spanish conquest. For
1   Clarke, Roxburgh’s Flora Zndica, pp. 198, 199.
2   Mahabharata Ashvanredha (Anugila) Parva, Ixxxviii. pp. 222, 223 ; Adi (Astika) Parva, xvi. p. 77.

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when the Spaniards came to Mexico the highly civilised, learned, and accomplished natives of the country were ignorant of the use of iron, though iron-stone of the purest quality abounds all over the Mexican territoryx. Hence all Indian computations of time and of the ritual of the worship of Indian year-gods brought thither must have left India before the use of iron was known in that country, for if the emigrants had left India in the Iron Age they would have brought the knowledge of iron-work, now known to all metal-working castes.
This eighteen - months year is that of the Mayas or Toltecs, meaning the architects, and also of four other Mexican tribes, the Tzental, Quiche-Cakchiquel, Zapotcc, and Nahuatl, who also used a sacred year of thirteen months. These tribes used hieroglyphic characters no longer intelligible to their descendants, and unfortunately no one has succeeded in finding such an exact clue to their interpretation as will enable them to be read easily. Each of the twenty days of the month has a name, and the first and eleventh days are named after the alligator and monkey-god, both of whom held, as we have seen, a prominent position in Indian Chronography2.
In Mexico the Toltecs, who came from the North, ruled the country long before it was conquered by the cannibal Aztecs, who governed it when the Spaniards came. But these Aztecs, though they became rulers of the land after the Toltecs, were probably the descendants of earlier immigrants into America, who belonged, like the Carib cannibals of the West Indian islands, to the Neolithic Stone Age, and had not, like the Toltecs, learnt the art of making bronze. The level of the civilisation of these men of the Bronze Age far exceeded that of other Indian tribes, and they never sacrificed human beings, but only animal victims on their altar. The cannibal tribes offered human sacrifices,
1   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. p. 117.
2   Ibid., chap. iv. p. 92 ; Thomas, ‘Day Symbols of the Maya Year,’ vol. 16, Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 206, 212, 243.
O O 2
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:22:04 PM: 5^4

especially of children, to Tlaloc, the rain-god, and they also offered special victims, generally captives, who were, like those sacrificed by the Khands of Orissa in India, chosen for the sacrifice a year before the festival of fTezcatlipoca, the creating-godrat which it took place. During this period the victim, like the Meriah victims of Orissa, lived in the midst of every luxury and indulgence. The god to whom this victim was offered was represented as a handsome young man, whose image was made of black stone, garnished with gold plates and ornaments. His most characteristic ornament was a shield polished like a mirror, in which he could see the doings of the world reflected1. He is represented also as the one-footed Pole Star god, bound like Ixion, to the wheel of Time, the Great Bear2 3.
His description reads very much like that of the ninth form of Prajapati, the Kumara or young sun-god, with his gold plate, to whom, as we shall see, a human victim, whose mouth, nostrils, and ears were stuffed with gold chips, was offered at the building of the brick altar of the year-bird. These Mexicans also in their chronometry showed a further approach to that of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, for they divided time into cycles of fifty-two years, divided into four periods of thirteen years, each answering to the thirteen years’ exile of the Pandavas. At the close of this cycle, which ended with the culmination of the Pleiades at midnight in November, the month sacred to the Pleiades in India, all fires were put out, and were only re-lighted from the fire kindled on the breast of a slaughtered human victim taken by the priests to the top of a mountain and there slain and burnt on a funeral pyre, lit with the fire kindled on his breast at the auspicious moment; and from this fire all the fires in the country were lighted 3. This sacrifice probably took place about the new moon of Agrahayani or
1   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. pp. 9, 10, 62, 63, 70, vol. ii. p. 128.
2   Zelia Nuttall, Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisation, pp. 9, 10, Papers of Peabody Museum, Harvard University, vol. ii. 1901.
3   Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. pp. 105—107.
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Mriga-sirsha (November—December), the month which, as dedicated to Orion of the deer’s (inriga) head (sirsha), was intimately connected with that of the Pleiades or Krittakas (October—November), and their queen-star RohinI (Alde- haran), for Manu says that all Brahmins should offer the Ishti, that is, the new and full-moon sacrifices of new grain in Agrahayani, together with an animal sacrifice, and this is to be offered at the solstices called Turayana. Hence the normal winter animal sacrifice was offered at the end of Mriga-sirsha, which closed the night before the winter solstice with, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 89, the death of the year-deerx. This special cycle sacrifice, if it was derived by the Mexicans from India, was probably offered at the meeting-point of the solstitial month Mriga-sirsha (November— December), and the Pleiades month Khartik (October— November), as that on which the union between Orion and RohinI took place, from which Vastospati, the god of the household fire, was born.
In the cosmogony of the Sias, a tribe of artistic potters occupying in Mexico a position similar to that of the sons of the Great Potter in early European and Asiatic history, their descent and that of other Mexican tribes is traced to Sus-sistinnako, the Spider. He is the exact counterpart of the Hindu Krittikas, the goddess Klrat or Krittida, the Spinner, the Pleiades constellation which appears in the Vedic birth story of Vastospati, and in the Mexican firelighting sacrifice at the end of the cycle as the mother of the year’s fires. Sus-sistinnako, in creating life on earth, sat in the South-west quarter of the sun-circle, divided into four equal parts by the meal cross of the ploughing-corn-god St. George, that is to say, at the point where the sun set at the opening of the year of the winter solstice. He there sang into life the two seeds he had placed in the North-west and North-east quarters. From these were born Now-ut’sct, the buffalo-mother of the West, and of those who lighted their fire with the West stick used to light the fire on the
1 Biihler, Maun, iv. 26, 27, vi. 10; S.LJ.E,, vol. xxv. pp. 133, 200.
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Hindu altar; and Ut’set, the mother of corn and of the race born of the deer-sun rising in the East, who lighted their fire with the East stick of the four laid in the form of St. George’s Cross as the kindling-sticks of the tribal fires1. Among the tribes born from these mothers, two, the Maya and Nahuatl, to whom the Aztecs belonged, had brought with them to Mexico the custom of circumcision practised by the Col- chians, ancient Egyptians, and some races of Asia Minor and Syria, but not by all Semites ; for it was unknown among the Phoenicians and Philistines 2, who, as Kaphtorim or sons of the ape Pole Star god, were the Keftenu or Phoenicians of Egyptian theology. These Mayas and Nahuatl, both of whom use the eighteen-months year, have names very like those of the Hindu maritime Maghas or Mughs, the Hindu mother Magha, Maya, the mother of the Buddha, and of the Nahusha, sons of the Naga snake, whose worship survives in Mexico in the snake-dance. This takes place at the great August festival, one of those founded by the sons of the united buffalo and deer-born races, who inhabited Mexico when the Spaniards conquered it.
B. The antelope and snake-dances of Mexico.
It corresponds in its ritual with the Hindu consecration of July—August to the Naga snake-gods, whose festival, called the Naga-panchami or the feast of the five snake-mothers, is held on the fifth of Shravana (July—August); a month also dedicated in Celtic chronometry to the marriage of Lug. The whole of a Mexican month of twenty days is devoted to this festival, which, in its Celtic form of that of Lug’s marriage month, lasts from the fifteenth of July to the fifteenth of August. The reports of the three village celebrations seen by Mr. Fewkes, who visited them as the delegate of the American Bureau of Ethnology 3, show that they do not
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 248 ff., 237.
3   Ibicl., vol. i., Essay v., p. 492; Cheyne, ‘Circumcision,’ Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. v. p. 790; Bancroft, Native Races of America, vol. iii.
3 Fewkes, ‘Tusayan Snake Ceremonies,’ Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1894—1895, vol. xvi. pp. 274—308.

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begin exactly on the same day everywhere, but that the nine ceremonial days of the festival must fall some time in August. The dates when these nine days begin, as given by Mr. Fewkes, are : Oraibi, nth; Cipaulovi, 15th; Cunopavi, 16th of August; and he says that the exact date is determined sixteen days before it actually takes place. The first seven of the twenty days allotted to it are spent in preparations by the priests of the antelope-god. The next nine days, each of which has its special name, are devoted to the secret ceremonies of antelope and snake-worship, ending with the dances held on the last two or last of these days. The remaining four days of the month are days of purification or general rejoicing, answering to the Hindu orgiastic feasts.
The directors of the proceedings are the antelope and snake-priests, chosen in the village from the members of the priestly clan, answering to that of the Pahans or priests of the Ooraon villages of Chutia Nagpur. These are the descendants of families who have handed down to their sons from generation to generation the knowledge of the ritual of the national festivals observed in each township, together with the words and music of the songs to be sung at them, and who thus maintained the unbroken continuity of the form of worship established in each village.
Among the village gods the Mexican antelope-god, answering to the Hindu Krishna, the black antelope, occupies a very important place. In the Sia cosmogony, of which I have given a full abstract in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, the antelope-god ruled the zenith from the top of the mountain where he dwelt. He was the last of the old false gods of the land killed by the twins Uyunyewc and Ma’ascwc, sent by their father with bows and arrows and three rabbit sticks, the three seasons of the years of the Mexican cycles beginning with the year of the Rabbit *, to banish idolatrous worship from the land. These twins successively killed the Wolf of the East, the Cougar or Tiger of the North, the Bear 1
1 l’l cscotl, History of Mexico, vol. i. p. 97.
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of the West, the father and mother Eagle of the South with their offspring, and the Fire-mother of the Nadir, the fire- socket, whom they burnt in her own fire. They next attacked the Antelope of the Zenith, described as the eater of children, the god to whom children were offered. They were led up his mountain by the mole, who made an underground way enabling them to approach him unseen. Through this hole Ma’asewe shot the antelope, who was looking westward from below I. He thus killed the antelope-sun-god of the setting sun in the same way as Sigurd killed Fafnir, the snake-ruler of time, by digging a hole in the path traversed by him in his yearly circuit of the heavens, in which he hid himself and shot him from below; as Krishanu, the rainbow-god, shot the Shyena-bird in the Pole Star circle at the winter solstice.
These twins play in Mexican historical chronology the same part as that assigned to the stars Gemini in the zodiacal records of past years. They, as I have shown in Chapters VII. and VIII., guarded the gates or months through which the sun entered on his yearly course, and thus marked the dates of the successive changes in the yearreckoning, ritual and doctrines of sun-worship, beginning with the birth of the young sun-god at the winter solstice. Consequently the death of the antelope in Mexican history corresponds with the death, which I shall describe presently, of Krishna, and all the Mahabharata gods of the age which worshipped the sun as the star of light going round the Pole, born as the year-god at the beginning of his year's course and dying at its end to make way for his son and successor.
This form of worship of the age of the Mexican twins ended with the revels, at which they celebrated their victories in feasts, where honey-drink, the Hindu Madhu of the age of the Ashvins, was consumed. After this they went up the
1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 266— 272 ; Stevenson, ‘ The Sia,’ Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, vol. ii. pp. 52, 53.

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rainbow bridge to their father, the Pole Star god, and were succeeded as rulers of time by the sun-god Poshai-yanne, born of a virgin-mother made pregnant by eating two nuts of the Pinon-tree, the tree reaching up to heaven, down which the twins had come from the nest of the Eagle of the South. This god born of the nut-tree, the sacred almond tree of India and of the Jews, began his career, like the beggar sun-god Odusseus, as servant to the Ti'amoni, or priest-king, the Patesi of the Akkadians; and won from him, by his skill at games, the rule of the regions of the North, South, East, West, Nadir and Zenith. He is, as I have shown in the complete account I have given of his history, the reproduction of the Buddha sun-god of India in his final transformation as the immortal and unchanging ruler of time; and his name as completely reproduces that of the Chinese Im-sho, meaning the Buddha, as the Mexican year reproduces the Rabbit year of China. That the Indian Buddhist birth-stories of the Indian double of the Mexican Poshai-yanne were conveyed to Mexico, and received there as sacred legends, is proved by the picture of the Buddha found, as I have shown in Chapter VII. pp. 471, 472, among the bas- reliefs of Copan, representing him as Gan-isha sitting on the double Suastika, marking the year sun-god, *and holding in his hand the steaming bowl of rice-gruel he received from Su-jata as his pentecostal food for the fifty days spent in preparing for his ascent into heaven.
To return to the antelope and snake dance which reproduce the revels of the conquering twins, who ruled time before Poshai-yanne. The August festival at which they take place is held almost at the same time as the birthday of Apollo Paian, the sun - physician. At it both the antelope and snake-priests have “ kivas,” or closed circular shrines, erected for this festival, in which their secret rites are carried on. Only the antelope-priests have altars, which are made during the first days of the festival according to elaborate patterns prescribed by ancient custom. The antelope Kiva is placed at the East and the snake Kiva at the

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West of the road entering the town where the feast is celebrated. The altar is not built of earth or brick but is made of sand strewn on the ground, like that scattered on the ground where the Garhapatya hearth was built, and the oblong figure of sand is adorned with symbolic figures, representing horned males and hornless females, and also with cloud and lightning symbols. It is bordered with bands of sand of different colours. At Oraibi there are two antelope-heads placed at the North-east and South-west corners of the altar. The antelope-priest is also distinguished from the snake-priest by carrying during the ceremonies a tiponi or idol. This is called by the Sia Ya’ya, a name similar to the Hittite Ya, meaning the full moon, which appears in India in the names of the god Yayati and his son Yadu, the twin brother of Turvasu, who, as sons of the goddess Devayani, rule the Devayana and Pitriyana, the two seasons of the solstitial year in the Brahmanic ritual. The Ya’ya is said to be an image of Ut’set, the corn-mother, and is an ear of maize, the Indian corn, placed in a basket woven with cotton-wool and crowned by eagles’ and parrots’ feathers, which completely conceal it. It is renewed at the end of every four years, that is, at the end of each of the thirteen divisions into which the fifty-two-years cycle is divided. This seems to me to be derived from the “ Rice- child ” of the Malays, which it exactly resembles, and to be a form of the corn-baby cut as the last sheaf, which is common all over the world, and which was almost certainly adopted from the Malay Malli, as a symbol of the virgin- grain-mother, by the Indian Panchala Srinjayas, or men of the sickle (sriui), with which they cut their corn. This image of the virgin-mother of corn is placed near the Northeast corner of the antelope altar, the point whence the sun rose at the summer solstice.
The dances all took place at sunset in front of the “ kisi,” or shrine built of the sacred cotton wood, the Vedic Shalmali- tree {Bombax heptaphylla), of which the car of the Indian Gemini, the Ashvins, was made. This was placed in the

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South of the piazza or market-place, and in the centre of this piazza there was the Pahoki or principal shrine.
The only public ceremony occurring at sunrise at this festival was the snake-race, a reproduction of the Greek year- race in which Atalanta was defeated, and won as his bride Uz, the victor sun-god, who delayed her steps by throwing before her the three golden apples, the M three seasons of the year. This was run on the morning after the antelope- dance, and on- the same day on which the snake-dance was danced in the evening. All the circuits made during the performances both by the antelope and snake-priests, each performance beginning with four circuits, were made to the left against the course of the sun. Also the antelope- priests at Oraibi wore, like the Hindu and Umbrian priests, the sacrificial cord over their right shoulder and a band of wool round the left knee, but no cord was worn by the snake- priests. The antelope-chief-priest carried the tiponi or corn idol over his left arm, and he also carried in one hand a bow with red horsehair attached to the string. This bow of the rainbow-god, which became the weapon of the Mexican twin-gods, was also carried by the snake-priests, who had no idol.
At the snake-dance, after the four circuits to the left had been made, the priests were divided into parties of three ; one of each party knelt before the kisi or shrine and there received a snake, which he took up and placed in his mouth with its head to the left. He then carried it round the piazza accompanied by the second priest with his hand on his shoulder. When he had reached the end of his circuit he took the snake out of his mouth and put it on the ground, when it was picked up by the third man of the group, who threw it into a ring circled with sacred meal and divided into four parts by the cross of St. George, formed by meal lines drawn to each of the four points of the compass. This is an exact .reproduction of the creating- circle of Sus-sistinnako in the Sia cosmogony. When all the snakes had been carried round the priests rushed into
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the snake-ring, and each took up as many as he could get hold of and threw them outside to the cardinal points as marked for them in the meal cross.
At the antelope-dance the antelope-priest carried in his mouth instead of a snake a bundle of corn and vine stalks round the ground, just as the snake-priests carried the snakes, and he was accompanied by the snake-priest who kept his hand on his shoulder.
In these ceremonies, the evening dances, the left-hand circuits, the wearing of the cord on the right shoulder, and the binding of the left knee are exact copies of the Hindu ritual of the barley-eating fathers. Also the corn-god is a reproduction of the Malay rice-child, the first and best bunch of seven female ears wrapped up in a white cloth like babies’ swaddling-clothes, and tied with a cord of “ terap ” bark, which is placed in a small basket and preserved as the soul of the rice to be mixed with the grain thrashed from the last sheaf cut at the next harvest *. The deity worshipped in these Mexican ceremonies as well as the Malay rice-god, and the firstfruits of the corn borne in Bacchic processions in the basket called the mystic winnowing basket of Iacchus, the young sun-god, is the germ of life infused into the national food by the rain from heaven, which a disseminates the indwelling god, giving life to all who partake of the rain-born food.
In these Mexican dances the dancers are the men of the village, and not the women dancers, who among the Indian Mundas and other cognate tribes keep up the custom of seasonal dances; and therefore they are much more like those of the Salii, Dactyli-Kouretes, and other associations of dancing-priests of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, than those of the matriarchal races. These latter succeeded the matriarchal dances when the family became the national unit instead of the village, and it is this stage which has been reached by the Mexican tribes, who all live in long houses
1 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 225, 226, 249.

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large enough to contain several generations of a family ; and their ritual also seems to date from the Kushika age when the priests formed guilds, which, after passing through the stages indicated by the barber-priests and the Ooraon Pahans or village-priest clan, developed into the Indian caste of the Brahmins. But these patriarchal tribes retained, in their mixed ritual, the ancient seasonal festivals with their dances and offerings of fruit and flowers without the sacrifice of living victims; and it was the transition stages of the ancient rites which were reproduced in this Mexican August festival, answering to that of the Panathenaia at Athens, where Athene, the mother-goddess of weavers, received the peplos, her woven year-garment. The corresponding Hindu age of this festival was that of the Kushika trade guilds, the barber-priests of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, and the Ooraon Pahan clans; and the Mexican ceremonies point to a ritual derived from the Indian and Malay worshippers of the grain-soul and the Naga snake. These latter are called in the Rigveda Varshagiras, or praisers of rain as the parent of life, and Nahusha, or sons of the ploughing-snake \Nagur), whose name seems, as I have already suggested, to be reproduced in America in that of the Mexican Nahuatl.
It was the age of the worship of the Great Bear constellation, which was, as we have seen, as the Thigh of the ape-god, the parent of the sun-god ; and that this was the • traditional epoch of the Mexican immigration is shown by the story of the escape of Ut’set, the corn-mother, from the lower world to the upper corn land, whither she was led to save her and her people from the floods, which, like those which nearly drowned the newly-born millet-growing Gonds at the sources of the Jumna river of the twins, made her ancient home uninhabitable. She made her way up to this Mexican reproduction of the Gangetic Doab, enclosed between the Ganges and Jumna, by the river reed. The way into the corn plateau was opened for her first by the locust, and then by the badger. After her came the demand buffalo and the beetle carrying the star bag, which may
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indicate the epoch of the immigration as that of the thirteen- months year of the Egyptian Kheper-Ra, the beetle-sun-god, of which I have given the history in Chapter VIII. The last comer into the new land was the turkey T. The beetle had allowed all the stars to escape except the Pleiades, the three stars of Orion’s belt, and the seven stars of the Great Bear. These last Ut’set placed in the sky as the parent-stars of the nation.
It was thus, according to national tradition, in the age of the rule of the Great Bear constellation that these ante- lope-born sons of the corn and snake came to Mexico, bringing with them the worship of these parent-stars. And with the worship of the three stars of Orion’s belt they brought with them, in a variant form, the Indian story of the birth of the Palasha-tree, bringing to earth the sap of life sent down from heaven in the blood of the Shyena Soma bird of frost (shyct), the Pole Star bird of the winter solstice. This story of Krishanu, the rainbow-archer-god, the rainbow-father of the Mexican twins, is depicted on the cross at Palenque, as is shown in the annexed illustration. The stem of the cross is shaped as the feathered arrow, the traditional arrow of the three stars of Orion’s belt, the three seasons of the year. It shoots the turkey seated on the top of the cross. On each side of the cross stands a priest, and the left-hand priest who is cutting up the slain turkey, to consult the augural signs. He wears a cap crowned with a sheaf of corn and a fleur-de-lys, a reproduction of the trident- god, a pig-tail, and a girdle, which is probably tied with the three knots of Orion’s stars, tying the girdles of Brahmins and Asiatic dervishes.
That the Mexicans were emigrants from a country where the ruling races were of mixed Southern and Northern nationality is proved by their parent-stars, the Pleiades mother of the Southern Indian forest races, Orion parent
1 Stevenson, ‘ The Sia,’ Publications of the American. Bureati of Ethnology, I 35—37-

Drawn from the Photograph of a Plaster Cast given by Mr. A. Mauds- lay to the South Kensington Museum.
CKOSS AT TALENQUE,
REPRESENTING   T1IE
BIRD SLAIN EY TI1E ARROW, ITS SHAFT, AND DISSECTED UY THE
AUGUR PRIESI ON THE LEFT. A variant form of the story of Rigveda IV. 27, of Shyena, tlie Pole Star bird shot by Krishami, the Rainbow archer-god.

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1
of the Northern sons of the sun-deer, and the Great Bear parent of the wizard races of the West, who adored the bear-mother Artemis and sacrificed human victims to her. The Naga Kushikas who ruled India in the epoch of Great Bear worship, worshipped, like the Mexicans, the moon as a goddess, the Gond Pandhari or Mu-chundri, the Greek Here or Selene, the Latin Luna; and the sun as a male god, the sun-lizard Skanda, the Greek Helios, the Latin Sol. Consequently their theology differed from that of the early Kushikas, who worshipped the sun as Ahalya, the hen, who was wife to Gautama, the moon-bull, and from that of the Vedic hymn, in which Soma, the moon-god, was married to Suria, the sun-maiden. The date of the first worship of the male sun-god seems to go back to Orion’s year, in which the sun-god was the male deer of the herd of deer-stars, who became the rider on the sun-horse. This was followed by the first worship of the male moon-god as the crescent-moon bearing the Harpe and beginning the months. But this method of measuring time apparently did not penetrate to Mexico, and the ruling god of their thirteen-months lunar year was the moon-goddess, answering to the Greek Here, who in Greek mythology was the ruling goddess before the birth of Herakles, the young sun-god, whom she hated ; and the stage of belief indicated in the Sia cosmogony as that which was the national faith when the Toltecs established their rule in Mexico seems to be that which prevailed in India during the seventeen-months year, when Skanda was the sun-god. And it was at the close of this period that they took the eighteen-months year of the Pandavas with them to America, which they apparently reached by Behring’s Straits, whence they made their way along the coast to Mexico, though perhaps some adventurous navigators of those days may have made their way across the open sea to a more Southern part of the American coast than that of Behring’s Straits.
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C. Indian history of the epoch following the eighteen-months year as told in the Mahdbhdrata.
To return to the history of India after the introduction of the eighteen-months year. The horse-sacrifice which inaugurated it was the last of the orgiastic festivals in which animals were sacrificed and spirits drunk as sacramental drink by the orthodox Hindu priesthood. It was after this sacrifice, according to the Mahabharata, that the revisor of the ritual appeared in Nakula the mun-goose, one of the two Pandava twins, sons of the Ashvins and of MadrI, the intoxicated {mad) prophetess, the second wife of Pandu. He was engaged as the trainer of the horses of the king Virata during the thirteenth year of the Pandavas’ exile, which they spent among the Matsyas as the hidden sun- gods, that is to say, during the age when time was measured by the thirteen lunar months. He as the fifth Pandava was the god of the winter season of the year, who trains the sun’s horses for their yearly circuit round the heavens T.
He as the sacrificial reformer preached the doctrine that “ the destruction of living creatures can never be said to be an act of righteousness,” and that sacrifices should be “ offerings of seeds and liquids, not of animals 1 2.” This was one of the cardinal doctrines taught by the Jain priests, and was in accordance with the rule governing the earliest sacrifices of the primitive village races, at which flowers and fruit were offered. This primitive sacrifice, with the addition of the sacramental Soma or mingled milk, sour milk, barley, and water, poured forth as libations to the gods, and drunk by the worshippers joining in the sacrifice, was finally accepted as the orthodox sacrifice of Indian ritual. At the sacrifices held after the new rule was made the law of the land, the only drink allowed to those who took part in the sacrifice was the vrata or fast milk, which was their only sustenance
1   Mahabharata Virata (Pandava-pravesha) Parva, sect. xii. pp. 26, 27.
2   Mahabharata Ashvaniedha (Anugita) Parva, xci. 14, 20, p. 239.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:22:51 PM: 577
during its continuance1. At the sacrifice itself the sacramental cup was the mixture of milk, sour milk, barley, and running water mixed with the sap of the Soma plant I; and it was these ingredients which were offered in all libations, except that to Mitra-varuna, in which the libation was of Soma and milk2. No intoxicating liquid was allowed to be used in any part of the sacrifice. Also it was at this time that all high-caste Hindus became, like the Arab sons of the date-palm-tree, total abstainers, who thought it disgraceful to drink any spirituous liquids, even the palm wine made of the fermented sap of the date-palm-tree, a favourite drink in North-western India, being forbidden.
The inauguration of this new age is described in the Mausala Parva, the seventeenth canto of the Mahabharata. It is traced to the iron bolt conceived by the hermaphrodite Camba, child of the lance (Shctmbci), and said to be heir to Vasu-deva, the father of Krishna, the god Vasu, who set up on the Sakti mountains, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 190, the bamboo pole of Vasu, the Asherah of the Jews. This iron bolt apparently denotes the beginning of the Iron Age. In order to avert any evil portended by the iron thunderbolt, it was ordained that the Vrishnis, Andhakas and Bhojas should cease to make intoxicating drinks. But this decree did not avert the portents nor prevent the onward march of epoch-making time, which showed by the disappearance of the four sun-horses of Krishna’s car that the yearly-dying sun, the charioteer of heaven, should rule the year no more ; and with the sun-horses Krishna’s standard of the Garuda or sun-bird and Valarama’s banner of the date-palm- tree also vanished. The doomed heroes betook themselves to Prabhasa, that is to the port of Baragyza or Pragjyotisha, the modern Broach, at the mouth of the Ncrbudda. There they indulged in one last orgy, which ended in a mutual fight, in which all the Yadava demi-gods slew one another, and
1 Eggeling, Sat. Bn\h., iii. 1, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 5. 0.
3   Ibid., iv. 1, 4, S ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 271.
I> p
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Krishna joined in the slaughter. When they had all been slain, Krishna, sending Daruka, his charioteer, to fetch Arjuna as his successor, went to Valarama, whom he found under a tree, and watched his death, accompanied by his transformation into a Naga snake. After the disappearance of Rama among the gods of the past, Krishna laid himself down to die, and was slain by an arrow shot from the bow of Jara, old age, which entered his heel, which was like that of the sun-god Achilles, the only vulnerable part of his body.
Arjuna, on his arrival at Dwaraka, collected all the Vrishni and Andhaka wives who had lost their husbands, and having seen Vasu-deva, father of Krishna, the creating- god of the bamboo sun-pole, the tree Asherah, die, he left Dwaraka, which was swallowed up by the sea on his departure. He took the Yadava wives to Indraprastha {Delhi), though many of them were taken away by the Abhirya tribes, the modern Ahirs or cattle-herdsmen, on the march, an incident indicating the amalgamation of alien races, which marked the change in religious belief.
When this duty was done, all the Pandava princes, the rulers of the transition age, decided to leave their kingdom, resign their sovereignty to their sun-worshipping successors, and betake themselves to a life of penance in the woods. Yudishthira accordingly gave up his throne to Yuyutsu, son of Dhrita-rashtra by a Vaishya wife of the village ('vish) races, and therefore born of the mixed Northern and Southern stocks, who now became the united Plindu nation. Yuyutsu, their new king, was the god of the eleventh month of the eleven-months year of the Kauravyas, ruled by Du- ryodhanaI. That is to say, he was the equivalent in the national genealogical history of Rahulo, the young sun-god Rahu, son of the Buddha, and the eleventh Then Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint.
1 Mahiibharata (Mahaprasthanika) Parva, pp. i—io, Adi (Adivanshava- tarna) Parva, Ixiii. p. 1S0,

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The five brethren, accompanied by Drupadi, were followed by the dog of Yudishthira, the dog-star Sirius, which had ruled the year of the white horse of the sun, that of the Zen- davesta, in which Tishtrya (Sirius), as a white horse pierced and slew the black horse, the black rain-cloud of the summer solstice x. He was the dog-star to whom the dog-day festivals of July and August were dedicated. After Arjuna had cast into the sea his bow Gandiva, whence the year-arrows of the time-god of the old faith were shot, and his two inexhaustible quivers of year-arrows, indicating the two seasons of the solstitial year, they made the year circuit of the earth on a sunwise course. They went first Southward with the sun of the summer solstice, and afterwards Westward.
As they marched onward on their yearly course the god of each season died as his season was ended. Drupadi died first, as the goddess of the rainy season. Her name, meaning the foot (pada) or root of the tree (dru), marks her as the tree and corn-goddess of the ploughing Kuru-Panchalas, called Srinjaya, or men of the sickle. She is the goddess answering, in the cosmogony of the eighteen-months year of the dying Pandavas, to the Mexican corn-mother Ut’set of the Maya year of eighteen months, who was superseded as ruler by Poshai-yanne, the sun-god born of the nut-tree. She was the corn-goddess of the August antelope festival, and the Ka- damba or almond-nut-tree-mother of the barley-growing Kharwars and Ooraons, who celebrate her festival as the goddess of the Kurum almond-tree in July—August. She was the tree-goddess who received the Pcplos of Athene in August. Sahadeva, the fire-god, god of the autumn, died next, and he was followed by Nakula, the winter-god. After him Arjuna, the spring-god, died, who had followed the sun- horse Parikshit in his circuit; and the last of the seasonal gods to die was Bhima, the summer-god.
Yudishthira, as the leader of the year-star Sirius, went on 1
1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta TJr Yasht, 12—34; S.15.K.. vol. xxiii. pp. 97—102.

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alone, and was taken up to heaven in the car of Shukra, the rain-god. But at first his dog was not allowed to accompany him ; Shukra saying that he was looked on by the Krodha-vashas as unclean, that is to say, he was looked on as an unclean animal by the Semite moon-worshippers, who measured time by the thirteen-months year, and called the mid-ruling month of their year Krodha. The dog was finally received as the god Dharma, the ruler of law and order, the director of the year’s course beginning at the summer solstice, when the season of Sirius began.
Yudishthira, when he arrived in heaven, found all those whom he had known as rulers on earth and all the heroes of the Mahabharata transformed into stars or directing powers of nature, as Vyasa, the alligator encircling the Pole as Draco, had previously told him would be the case J.
These closing scenes add further proof of the correctness of the conclusion conveyed by every part of the poem, that it is an allegorical history of India during the ages which intervened between the first entry into the country in the Neolithic Age of the Northern tribes, who brought in the oil, millet and corn crops of Asia Minor, and the close of the Bronze Age. The period comprised in the original nucleus of the poem, which has been translated from its original language and edited and re-edited by many generations of Sanskrit-speaking bardic poets, was that of the eleven, fifteen, thirteen and seventeen-months years. The object aimed at by the original author, who grouped together the picture of the events which made the history of these ages of progress of vital importance to the nation, was apparently to paint, in his panoramic narrative, a vivid and consecutive story in dramatic form. The successive acts were represented as following one another in an ideal year of eighteen months or cantos, culminating in the rule of a new and righteous race who had been moulded into a nation in India,
1 Mahabharata (Acramavasika) Parva, xxxi. pp. 69—71-

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and who were to give to it the government which the Pan- davas had tried to introduce under Yudishthira, but which was overthrown in the epoch of the thirteen-months year by the revolt of the Kauravyas. It was then that the rule of India fell into the hands of a mixed race, whose theology was founded on the worship of the sun-god of the North as the god of light and the ruler of annual time. They substituted a system of education based on individual self- improvement for the communal ethics of the earlier ages. And the votaries of the various forms of this new creed grouped themselves into associations, which separated themselves in a greater or less degree from the castes or unions founded on supposed community of birth or on community of function. The religious movement following the introduction of sun-worship originated, as it has done among the Jains, some entirely new castes or communal associations, and left certain of the old associations apart, such as the Kurmis and Koiris, who were the Unitarian believers in Kabir, the Pole Star ape-god, whose image was on the banner of Arjuna.
This individualism engendered by the new creed replaced in a great measure the teachings of the earlier ages, in which all were trained to follow the rules of conduct laid down by the heads of their village, their tribe, or their family. And the revolution thus caused was the result arising out of the increase of wealth which followed the continual extension of land and maritime trade brought about by the trade guilds ruled by the sons of the date-palm-tree.
They in their trading voyages settled members of the guilds as agents in Western Europe, for it was only a resident population who could have set up the calendar stones of Carnac in Britany, or made there the multitudes of oriented chambered tombs on patterns brought from Asia Minor ; and it is Indian and Phoenician theology, derived from India, which is, as we have seen, a dominant factor in Greek and Roman ritual and belief. And this same people also went in large numbers to America, and thus
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included in their sphere of influence the whole of the then civilised world. The prosperity engendered by this worldwide trade caused the growth on the shores of the Indian Ocean of a population which had become like that depicted in that most vivid description of Oriental life, the Arabian Nights. There all classes of the community, including the kings and their ministers, are engaged in trade; and when a prince or man of high birth falls into misfortune and finds himself an unacknowledged outcast in a foreign country, he becomes a trader, just as Prince Zan-al-Makan in the story of Omar-bin-al Nu’uman and his sons becomes assistant to the man who lighted the fires in the public baths of Damascus, and Badr-al-Din Hasan, the son of the Wazir Nur-al-Din Ali, became a cook and confectioner in the same city I. There is little or no indication in these stories of the existence of settled landowners holding large estates, or of a division of ranks based on birth; and the marriages to the king’s daughter of Abdullah the fisherman, and Ala-ed-din, the son of a poor widow, when they were enriched by the gifts of Abdullah the Merman, and of the slaves of the wonderful lamp and ring, are spoken of as quite consonant with propriety2. All people seem to be equal in birth, and to move up or down the scale of rank according to their good fortune, their industry or their talents; and they seem to live in the midst of settled communities, whose relations were generally peaceable, for war is scarcely ever spoken of in this whole collection of stories telling the national history as handed down by the successors of official framers of historical tales, and depicting the characters of the people. In the whole twelve volumes of Burton’s Arabian Nights there are only two stories, those of Omar-bin-al Nu’uman and his sons, and of Gharib and his brother Ajib, in which the chief actors are soldiers 3.
1   Burton, Arabian Nights, 4 Story of Badr-al-Din Ali and his son Badr-al- Din Hasan,’ vol. i. pp. 179 ff.
s Ibid., ‘Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman,’ vol. vii. p. 237 If., 4 Ala-ed-din and the Wonderful Lamp,’ vol. x. p. 33 ff.
3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 306'—310.
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It was only in an age of peace, when the kings and their principal advisers were merchants like Anatha Pindika, the chief adviser of the king of Sravasti in Buddhist history, and the Kewat or fishermen kings of Tamralipti and Southwest Bengal, that the commerce of the Turvasu-Yadavas, sons of the date-palm-tree, with China and the islands of the Malay Archipelago on one side, and Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, could be kept up. But the ruling chiefs of these trading states were not Turano Dravidians, but belonged, like the Beni Hanifa, the Arab sons of the date-palm-tree, to races of much purer Northern descent. For the evidence of their marriage customs proves that under their rule the endogamous marriages of the Northern Gothic races superseded among the trading population of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Western India, the exogamic unions of the Turano-Dravidians. Almost all the heroes and heroines of the stories in the Arabian Nights are endogamous, and entirely ignore the exogamous restrictions of India caste rules; the marriage most sought after was that of first cousins, and the Persian kings, like Abram of the Beni Hanifa, used to marry sisters. In India similar disregard of the earlier laws which made endogamous marriages of near relations or of members of the same gotra or village unlawful is shown by some of the castes, who prove their Kushika descent by binding the hands of the bride and bridegroom together with Kusha grass as the sign of marriage. The Kooch Rajbunsi, who are all children of Kashyapa, and who are not divided into septs, profess to disallow marriages between relations nearer to one another than seven generations on the father’s and three on the mother’s side, but they are very lax in the observance of this rule, and prefer to marry a daughter of a neighbour, even when nearly related to them, to leaving home to seek a wife 1. But from the evidence of the Satapatha Brahmana we learn that in the West of India, among the fYadu-Turvasu races,
r Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kooch, p. 494.
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who offered the new and full-moon sacrifices of the year of seventeen months and five seasons, the marriage laws were nearly, if not quite, as lax as to the marriages of near relations as those of the people described in the Arabian Nights. It says that both husband and wife may, among the observers of this ritual, be no more distant from one another than the third generation from the common father. And Harisvamin, the commentator on this passage, says that the Kanvas allow intermarriages frvom the third generation, the Sau-rashitras or trading Saus from the fourth, and that the Dakshinatyas, that is the people of the Malabar coasts, permit marriage between first cousins either on the father’s or mother’s side*. The Kanvas here mentioned are the men of the new {kana) race of priests, who are the reputed authors of the Eighth Mandala of the Rigveda and the priests of the Yadu-Turvasu, the trading races of the Hittite land of Khatlawar.
A similar state of society to that existing in the lands ruled by these peace-loving merchant-princes seems to have prevailed among the Mexican Toltecs, whose historical mythology is so similar to that of the Antelope and Naga races of India, and who measured time by the Pandava year of eighteen months. Among them, as among the Kushikas, each trade had its own guild, a special quarter of the city was appropriated to it as in Indian bazaars, and each guild was ruled by its chief, and worshipped its own tutelar deity at the festivals held as enjoined in the guild ritual. * The profession of artisan was looked upon as especially honourable, and the merchants held the highest rank in the state. Those who traded to foreign countries travelled in caravans guarded against attack by an armed escort, which was sometimes so large as to amount to an army, as in the case where a trading caravan stood a siege of four years in Ayotlan and finally were left in undisturbed possession of the town. These traders assumed insignia and devices of their 1
1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 3, 6j S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 238, note 1, 239.

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own, like the banners of the Yadu-Turvasu chiefs, and in Tezcuco they controlled by a council of finance the expenditure of the State. They were called “ Uncle” by the king, and held their own courts both for civil and criminal casesg and they were, in short, the chief rulers of the land.
The supremacy in India of the merchant traders seems to have originated in the age of the fifteen-months year, when the Northern sun-worshippers reorganised the country after the disturbed age of that of eleven months, and it was under their rule that standing armies for defensive purposes begun to be entertained. These were, as I have shown, organised by the chiefs of the border provinces of each state, and were only clansmen trained in military exercises, who appeared at musters, but, when not summoned for duty, were ordinary husbandmen engaged in the cultivation of their lands ; and there is no evidence that the trade of soldier was looked upon in those days as a separate profession ; the people were all Vaishya or men of the villages.
D. The conquest of the Bhdrata merchant-kings by the Sanskrit-speaking sun-worshippers.
The rule of these peace-loving merchant-kings of the age of Sallimanu or Solomon, the fish-sun-god, was that of the epoch when the year began with the entry of the sun into Gemini at the vernal equinox, that is between 6000 and 7000 B.C., when the Pole Star was in Hercules. It was apparently at the close of this age, when the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, about 4000 B.C., that the iron bolt introducing the Iron Age descended in the irruption of the poor but warlike races of the North, who coveted the wealth of the prosperous traders. An invasion ending in a dislocation ol the allied confederacy of the trade guilds and the separation of the united links of the chain of alliances which bound 1
1 Prescott, I I is lor v of Mexico, vol. i. chap. v. pp. 1.24- 120.
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together the merchant states into alien kingdoms, each of which looked on its neighbours not as friends, but as foes meditating projects of conquest. The history of this war which made the Sanskrit-speaking races, who called themselves Arya, or the noble people, the rulers of India, is told but very cursorily in the Rigveda and the national chronicles. In the history of the war between the Kauravyas and Pan- davas they appear on the side of the Kauravyas as the Sarasvatas, led by Uluka, the owl, the son of Shakuni, the raven-mother-bird. They formed the last remnant of the Kauravya army destroyed on the eighteenth day of the battle by Sahadeva, the fire-god, and Nakula, the mun-goose, the two Pandava twins 1. Their name shows that they had then become settlers in the holy land of the Kuru-kshethra, between the Sarasvatl and Drishadvatl. They appear in the Rigveda as the Arya, who, with their allies the Arna or men of the Aruna or fire-drill, and the Chitra-ratha, or sons of the star Virgo (Chitra), the mother of corn, were defeated by the Yadu-Turvasu on the Sarayu or Sutlej, and this war shows them to be the enemies of the trading Hittite races, who ruled the country as the merchant kings 2.
But it is in the story of the battle of Sudas and the Tritsu, the people who make fire by rubbing (trit), with the ten kings of the Bharatas, that we find the most satisfactory account of the war. Sudas, the king of the Tritsu, is called the son of Divo-dasa, that is, of the ten (dasha) months of gestation, and Divodasa is called the son of Vadhri-ashva, the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year and of the river-mother Sarasvatl 2 This king is the son-god, the giver (das) of Su, the sun-bird, descendant of the river-mother, whose name as the goddess Shar was brought to India by the fire-worshippers of Asia Minor, who first adored her as the tribal river-goddess of the Harah-vaiti
* Mahabharata Udyoga (Yana-sandhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Shalya (Slialya* badhd) Parva, xxviii. pp. 106, 107.
2   Rg. iv. 30, 17, iS.
3 Ibid. vii. 18, 25, vi. 61, I.

5 87
of Herat in Kandahar, the tenth of the good lands, created by Ahura Mazda 1. Hence he was the sun-god of the Bactrian races of Ragha, the Asiatic home of the worshippers of the sun-god Ra, the speakers of the inflexional languages of North-western Europe.
His prophet-priest was Vashishtha, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 396, the god of the sacrificial flame on the altar, and the father of the sun-god Aurva, born of the Thigh-stars of the Great Bear.
The Bharatas, foes of the Tritsu, were the followers and sons of Vishvamitra, the god of lunar time, and opponents of Vashishtha, priest of the sun-god, whose cows of light he stole. He was the father of Sakuntala, the bird-mother of the Bharata, the offspring, as we have seen, of the three- years cycle.
Hence the two armies which were to contend for the rule of India were those of the fire and sun-worshippers, the invaders from the North, and those of the lunar-solar race of the Bharatas and Kushika Khati or Hittites, who entered India in the epochs of the three-years cycle, and the eleven-months year, and who had amalgamated themselves with the previous dwellers in the land, and established the lunar-year of thirteen, and the lunar-solar year of seventeen months together, with the government of the merchant kings of the Ikshvaku and Yadava races.
The list of the tribes on each side is given in the graphic account of the decisive action of the war told in the battle hymn, Rg. vii. 18, attributed to Vashishtha. There the leading tribe of the sun-worshippers is called Tritsu, but in Rg. vii. 33, 1—6, and vii. 83, 1, these Aryan conquerors of the Bharatas are called Pritha-Parshu. This name shows them to belong to a mixed tribe formed from the union of the Parthians with the Persians or Parsis, the fire-worshippers. These Pritha are the sons of Pritha, the Pandava begetting {pent) mother, also called KuntI, the lance, and
Darmcstelei, Zcmiavesla Vcndidad Airraid, i. 13; S.K.K., vol. iv. p. 7.
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throughout the Mahabharata the Pandavas, and especially Arjuna, are called Partha or Parthians. They, the sons of the begetting (pern) mother, born, like the sons of Pritha, the virgin made pregnant by the gods without the intervention of a human father, were originally the sons of the mother-tree. Their name of Parthava the Parthian is given in the Rigveda to Abhyavartin Cayamana, who, as leader of the Srin-jayas or Panchalas, conquered the Vrishivans or Yadavas and the Turvasu at Hariyuplya, the sacrificial stakes (yupa) of Hari or Shari, that is Mathura *. Also in the Periplus Minnagora, the port on the Indus which succeeded Patala, is said to be ruled by the Parthians 1 2 3. In the Rigveda Parshu is used as the name of a tribe in the passage where Tirindira is called the Parshu 3, and in the feminine form Parshu, whose name means also the ribs or a crescentshaped knife, is said to be with Manavi, the daughter of Manu the measurer, the mother of twenty sons, which may be the twenty days of the month of the eighteen-months year 4. These Parthians and Persians are clearly the men of Central Asia, also called Scythians or Sakyas, the name of the clan in which Siddartha Gautama, the real living Buddha, was born. They were the fire-worshippers of the Zoroastrian birth-land of Ragha or Media, who had invaded India and established themselves on the Sarasvati as Sanskrit-speaking immigrants into the country of the Turano- Dravidians.
The allies of the Tritsu, named in Rg. vii. 18, are: (i) The Paktha, (2) Alinas, (3) Bhalanas, (4) Vishanin, and (5) Shiva. The Paktha are clearly the people called by Herodotus Paktues, who, he says, wear goat-skin tunics, and are armed with bows and daggers. He describes them as Bactrians, whose native home was near Armenia, but who had settled in India, and occupied the city of Kaspaturos, that is Multan, or the place of the Malli, which they called the city of
1   Rg. vi. 27, 5, 7, S.
2   Periplus, 38; Zimmer, Alt Indisches Leben, p. 433.
3   Rg. viii. 6, 46.   4 Ibid., x. 86, 23.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:23:23 PM: 589
Kashyapa, said by Hecataeus to belong to the Ghandftri, the native tribes of Kandahar1. They arc, in short, the Afghan Pathans or mountaineers, who speak Pushtu, that is the Paktian or Pushtian language. It belongs to the Indo- European family of inflectional languages, but, like that of their Sanskrit and Zend-speaking allies, it uses the Dravidian cerebral letters, thus showing that they, who when they invaded India married Dravidian wives, had children who learnt to speak their Northern tongue with a Dravidian accent.
These Afghans, with the Parthians and Persians, were the leaders of the invading armies of Sudas, who brought into India the iron-bolt which destroyed the confederacy of the Yadavas and Bhojas, and dethroned their year-god Krishna. For the Bhavishya Purana tells us that Shamba, the son of Krishna, brought Magian priests from Saka-dwipa to officiate in the temple of the Sun at Multan2. This Shamba, the throwing spear or javelin of the Sakyas and Homeric heroes, was the tribal symbol carried in front of their armies as the united fire-drill and socket of the American warrior Indians, and it in its female form as the fire-socket was the Shamba who brought forth the iron-bolt which destroyed the empire of the Vishnuite merchant-kings of the Western sea-board.
The whole story, when translated from allegorical language to a plain statement of facts, tells how the worship of the old gods was overthrown by the fire-worshippers from Saka- dwipa, the land of the Sakyas, who substituted temples to the sun for the shrines dedicated to the creating-god, who descended from the mountain-tops wreathed with mist to bring to earth the rain-water which was to fill the rivers and fertilise the soil with the germs of life, and who as the Pole Star father-god, the creating goat, ruled time and
1 Herodotus, iii. 93, 102, vil 67 ; A. Weber, India and lhe HeU in Ola Days, p. 6; Ilcwitt, ‘Early History of Northern India, I’arl ii. /.A'.st.S., 1889, p. 224.
1 A Weber, India and the lVest in Old Days, p. 20.
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made the moon and sun measure the year by moving round the heavens in the star-marked path he bade them tread.
Thus this historical tale tells us of the Aryan invasion as an irruption led by the nomad warlike tribes of Scythia, the early Persian races, who were taught to ride, shoot with the bow, and speak the truth, and of whose language the Vedic, Sanskrit, Zend and Pushtu are dialectic forms.
These Northern invaders as they settled in the country found allies in the Alinas, Bhalanas, Vishanin, and Shiva. The two first I am unable to identify, but the Vishanin seem certainly to be connected with the god Vishnu, and the votaries of Vishnu, who allied themselves with the sun- worshippers, must be those who worshipped him as the sun-god of the eight-rayed star, the eighth son of Vasudeva, the year-god of the fifteen-months year who was born in Mathura. They were the tribe also called the Shura-sena or army of heroes, who are named in the Mahabharata and Manu as adherents of Krishna, who lived near Mathura1. They were the class of Rajputs called the Agni-kulas or men of the fire family. They are called in the Vaya and Matsya Puranas the Saisa-nagas, and belong to the Gaur Tagas, a mixed race allied to the Gonds and the Jat Takkas, who were supporters of the Buddhist doctrines 2, and whose parent- king Sisu-nag was the first of the traditional Chiroo kings of Magadha.
The Shiva are undoubtedly the shepherds and cattle- herdsmen whose god was the white (svetd) Shiva, the threeeyed bearer of the trident, and the Pinaka bow-husband of the weaving-goddess Uma (flax). He was the son of UshT- nara, the man-god (nard) of the East, and the shepherd- god of the pastoral races who had been the earliest invaders of India from the North, and who were the Takkus or Tri-gartas who marched under the banner of the Yupa,
1   Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuya-rambha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47 ; Biihler, Manu, ii. 19, vii. 193; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp, 32, 247.
2   Beames, Elliot’s Memoirs of the Races of the North- Western Provinces of India, vol. i., Gaur Taga, pp. 108, 109, vol. ii. p. 77.
of the Myth-Making Aye.
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or sacrificial stake borne by Bhuri-shravas, the grandson of Vahlika, their leader and brother of Shantanu. His name, meaning the man of Balkh on the Oxus, shows his Bactrian origin. They are named in the Rigveda, x. 59, 10, the Ushinara, and are said in the Aitarcya Bvdhmana to live in the middle country, the Gangetic Doab, with the Kuru- PanchalasJ. They are called the Seboi in the history of the Indian campaign of Alexander the Great, and Strabo places them near Multan, between the Indus and Acesincs (Chitiab)1 2. They are thus the early worshippers of the household fire Agni Valshvanara, the fire of the men (nara) of the villages (visit), the Northern cultivators who now allied themselves with the new comers who had added the worship of the sun-god to that of the holy fire.
The invading Aryan forces therefore included the Par- thians, Persians, and Pathan hill tribes, led by the Scythians of Medea and North Persia, who had allied themselves in India with the cattle-herdsmen and corn-growers of the central country of the Gangetic Doab, the Shiva or Tugra, and the Srinjaya Panchalas.
Their opponents were the Bharata followers of Vishva- mitra, the father of Bharata’s mother Sakuntala, and the protecting god of the mad-star king Kalmasha-pada, lie of the spotted (kalmasha) feet, whose epoch was, as we have seen in Chapter VI., that of the eleven-months year. These Bharatas are called in Rg. vii., 18, 18, 19, the Bheda, that is sons of the cleft (bheda), the female symbol, the yoni of the linga. Hence they were the Linga worshippers, the followers of the bisexual parent gods, whose goddess-mother in Syria was Tirhatha, the cleft.
The ten tribes led by their ten kings, the ten lunar months of gestation, were : (1) The Turvasu, whose leader is called Puro-dasa, the sacrificial rice-cake offered at the New and Full Moon sacrifices of the seventeen-months year to Piishan,
1   Act. Brdh., S, 14; Zimmer, All fmiischcs Lcbcn, pi 130.
2   Diodorus, 17, 19 ; Strabo, xv. S.
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the hands of Savitri, that is to Push, the first month of the year1. This cake is called in Rg. vii. i8, 19, the Yakshu, that is the firstfruits offering of the year of the moving or hunting (yaksh) sun-star going round the Pole Tur. Hence Puro-dasa, the leader of the Turvasu, seems to be the leading god of their year, the god of its first month. (2) The Matsya sons of the eel-fish-god born of Adrika, the sun-hawk in the river Tamas, the darkness, whence their eel-parents Matsya and Satyavati passed, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 191, into the Yamuna or Jumna, where Satyavati, as wife of Shan- tanu, became the mother of the Kauravyas and Pandavas. (3) The Bhrigu, the original fire-worshippers, who also adored the linga. (4) The Druhyu or sorcerers, sons of theVedic witch-goddess Druh, the Druj of the Zendavesta.   (5) The
Vaikarna or two (vi) horned (karna) people, whose country Vi-karnika is identified by Hema-chandra with Kashmir. They were the Naga races, worshippers of the two-horned sun-god Karna. Their twenty-one warriors are said in Rg. vii. 18, 11, to have been slain by Su-das, who thus, as the sun-god of the new era, slew the twenty-one days of the month of the seventeen-months year. (6) The Anu. (7) The Purus. These two tribes and the Druhyu were the descendants of the three sons of Yayati and Sharmishtha, the mother-banyan-fig-tree of the lunar races, speakers of non- Aryan languages, as shown by the epithet mridha-vac applied to the Purus in Rg. vii. 18, 13, meaning the speakers of the soft Dravidian speech. (8) The Ajas or sons of the goat, the Pole Star goat-god of the cycle-year. (9) The Shigru, whom I am unable to identify. (10) The Yakshus. These are certainly identical with the very ancient race who in Greece called the young sun-god born at the Eleusinian mysteries Iakkhos, which is the same word as Yak-shu. The name of this parent-god (hz/cyos) also appears in that of the Akkadian Ia-khan, the fish-god, that is the sun-god who at the close of his annual circuit through the heavens marked
1   Eggeling, Sat. Bra/it i. 2, 2, 1—4, i. 6, 2, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42, 43, 162.

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by the stars of the Hindu Nakshatra emerged as the sun-fish from the constellation Revati Pisces to become the sun-god of the new year in Aries. This god, the ever-living fish, was the sun-god of the cycle formed by the procession of the equinoxes, beginning with the entry of the sun into Aries at the autumnal equinox. In this cycle, after each of the other zodiacal stars have in their turn become the star in which the sun enters at the autumnal equinox, the sun returns to the original Aries, which opened the original cycle-year 24,400 years before. The name of the father-god of these Yakshu, who measured the year by the passage of the moon and sun through the zodiacal stars of the Nakshatra, is in Genesis Joktan or Jokshan, the mover or advancer (yak), who in one account of his birth was the son of the Iberian father Eber, and the brother of Peleg, the stream, in whose time the earth was divided into the lands of the sons of the rivers, and of the worshippers of the moon and sun, who measured their year by their passage through the stars. In another genealogy Jokshan is the son of Keturah, the encircling (ketur) or incense-mother, the eastern wife of Abram l. His thirteen sons are called the children of Shem, the name of God, that is of the bisexual mother Shemi-ramot, and their Eastern boundary was the mountain of the East, the Akkadian Khur-sak-kurra, and the Kushika mother-mountain. Two of their thirteen sons were Havilah and Ophir, representing the Indian lands watered by the Indus, the Sindhu, and the Yavana of the Mahabharata. These Yakshus thus belong to the tribes of South-western Asia, who as the astronomical Indian tribes and the Chaldmans of Babylon, whose Indian origin I have shown in Chapter II. p. 48, were careful observers of the stars. The)* founded the Babylonian Zigurats or towers of observation. They mapped the annual and monthly paths of the sun and moon in the Hindu Nakshatra, and the Arabian and Sabaean lists of Lunar mansions. Their year-god was the antelope-sun-god Krishna, the bearer of the discus or year-circle of zodiacal stars, and
1 Gen. x. 25—31, xxv. 2.
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History and Mythology
they were thus the Yadavas, who measured their year by thirteen lunar-months ; a year-measurement which, as we have seen in Chapter VIII., was very ancient, and which became in the solar-lunar chronometry of the worshippers of the sun of the eight-rayed star, the seventeen-months year.
Hence we see that the army of the Bharata was composed of the pre-Sanskrit races of the Turvasu - Yadavas, the Druhyu, Anu and Puru, that is of the five tribes descended from Yayati, DevayanI and Sharmishtha, who were the Kushika, ruled by the Khati or Hittites, the founders of the mercantile dynasties, together with the Bhrigu, worshippers of the fire and the linga, the Vaikarna Nagas, worshippers of the horned sun-horse, and the Ajas, worshippers of the Pole Star goat. These tribes, representing the rich trading population who ruled the rivers and sea- coasts of India, united to overthrow the Northern sun-worshipping invaders, whose indigenous allies were the corngrowing farmers of the country villages and the shepherd and pastoral races. It was a war of the rude inland population against the traders and artisans, who had founded the commerce of the country.
The most graphic account of the combat is that given in the war-song of the Vashishtha party, Rg. vii. 18, a poem which re-echoes the battle paeans telling the victorious sun- worshippers of the glorious deeds of the hero-soldiers of the sun. It, with the two other Vashishtha poems telling of the war, Rg. vii. 33 and 83, and the Vishvamitra hymn, Rg. iii. 33, sums up in one battle, in which Su-das overthrew the ten kings, the story of what was doubtless a contest prolonged for many years. The Bharata kings, the rulers of the land, led the army they collected to drive out the Sanskrit-speaking intruders who had settled on the Saras- vati, whence they could command the navigation of the Jumna, and paralyse the trade both of the Jumna and Ganges, by seizing Kosambi at the junction of the two rivers, which became the capital of the Sakya kings r. The
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 391 ff.
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importance attached to the Jumna by both parties is proved in Stanza 19 of Rg. vii. 18, where Indra is said to have helped the Yamuna and Tritsu.
It was to oust the invaders from the land between the Sarasvatl and DrishadvatT, whence they commanded the very important strategic post of Indra-prastha, or Delhi, on the Jumna, that the Bharata attacked the Tritsu from the North-west, and collected their forces in the country assigned by Arrian to the Kathi or HittitesJ, between the Purushni or Ravi and Chinat. The Tritsu and their allies were assembled south of the Beas or Vepash, and the Sutlej or Shatudri, and it is to these two rivers that Vishvamitra, in Rg. iii. 33, prays to give an easy passage to the Bharata forces. But the Tritsu would not await the attack of their antagonists, and determined to be themselves the attacking party. Hence they marched through the country of their allies the Trigartas or Shivas, lying between the Beas and Sutlej, the modern districts of Jalandhur and Hoshiarpur, and found the Bharata encamped on the north bank of the Purushni or Ravi. They were surprised and confused at the appearance of their enemies, and rashly determined to cross the river and destroy them. But in their hurry they failed to find a practicable ford, and rushed into the rapidly flowing stream, “thinking,” according to the picturesque language of the warrior bard, “ fools as they were, to cross it as easily as on dry land; but the lord of the earth, Prithivi,” the parent-god of the Parthians, “seized them in his might, and herds and herdsmen were destroyed.” They were thus easily and completely routed by Su-das, who followed up his victory by crossing the river and taking their seven cities. Here the narrative ceases to be the dramatic tale of an eye-witness and becomes the historical story of the conquest of the Bharata year-god by a god introducing another epoch. Hence the seven cities were the seven days of the week of the thirteen and seventeen-months year, just
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 215 ff.
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as the twenty-one Vai-karna champions slain by Su-das were the twenty-one days of the month of the latter year. Su-das established himself as the year-god who divided the goods of the Anu and Druhyu among the Tritsu, conquered the Purus, and made the Ajas, Shigrus, and Yakshus pay horses’ heads as tributeT.
But to understand the history of this momentous war clearly we must turn to the account given of it in the Mahabharata, where the Vedic Su-das, the giver of Su, the sap of life, the year-god, descended from the Sarasvati and Vadhri-ashva, the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year, is called Samvarana. This name means the Place of Sacrifice, the ground consecrated as the site of the national altar of the year, said in the Brahmanas to represent the whole earth1 2. The creating spirit-god, Samvarana, whose earthly dwelling-place is the central national altar, is the giver of the Su or germ of life. Samvarana is mentioned once as an individual in Rg. v. 33, 10, where he is called the Rishi, the antelope-god, "who gathers wealth by his might, to whose stalls the cows (of light) come,” that is to say, he is the sun-god. This will appear still more clearly when we examine his genealogy, the history of his reign, and the story of his marriage to Tapatl. In the Mahabharata he appears as the ruler who was summoned by Vashishtha to reign as the supreme king of the Bharatas, and as the father of Kuru, in whose name the holy land, watered by the Sarasvati and Drish- advati, was consecrated as Kuru-kshetra, the field of the Kurus. This was, as we have seen, the land of Taneshur, where the mother-tree, born of the southern mud (tan), emerged on earth as the mothcr-banyan-fig-tree, the tree of Sharmishtha, the wife of Yayati. But to bring out fully the meaning of the history we must look to the ancestry of Samvarana.
1   Rg. vii. 18, 19.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 7, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 175.

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He is directly descended from Bharata, son of Dushmanta and Sakuntala, who was, as we have seen, p. 280, born as the son of the three-years cycle, that is as the god of the eleven- months year. Hence his reign, according to the genealogist, was a time of confusion. He begat nine sons, the nine days of the week of the cycle-year, but slew them, and remained childless till, by the help of Bharadvaja, the sun-lark, the father of Drona, the holy Soma tree-trunk, he became the father of Bhumanyu, the son of the soil {bhuman), who ruled in the epoch of the eleven-months year the united races of the Kurus, the Northern conquerors and the previous dwellers in the land. Bhumanyu’s son was Su-hotra, the pourer {hotra) of Su, a name equivalent to that of Su-das, the giver of Su, and his son was Aja-midha, the warring {midha) goat {aja), who is said in Rg. i. 67, 5, to sustain the earth. The word aja {goat) also means creator, and in Rg. v. 82, 6, he is said to be the creating germ taken by Visvakarman, the maker [karman) of living things (visva) from the waters whence all the gods were born. He found himself alone in the navel of the unborn where all life is hidden. In other words, this creating father-goat is the germ of life, the Chinese Tao, dwelling in the navel of the heavens, the Pole Star, surrounded by the mists of the mother waters. This Pole Star creating-god married DhuminI, the daughter of smoke {dhumo), the sacrificial flame on the Southern altar of burnt-offering, which disseminated life-giving heat through the world. From her was born Riksha, the constellation of the Great Bear, who, as we have seen, begot as the Thigh of the ape-god, united with the Pole Star goat, the sexless sun-god of the year of fifteen months, the god of the sons of the date-palin-tree. This was the god Samvarana, who was in his first Avatar the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year. He, according to the genealogist, was attacked by the Panchalas with ten Akshauhinis of troops, those of the ten months of gestation of the cycle-year, and driven to the forests at the foot of the Himalayas on the banks of the Sindhu or
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Indus. There he remained childless and in exile for a thousand years, during the rule of the mercantile kings of the seventeen and thirteen - months year, till he was brought forth by Vashishtha, who set him on the throne as the ruling sun-god of a new era I. His return to power as the conquering sun-god who was to unite the new sun- worshippers with the Bharata is told in the story of his marriage to Tapatl, the heating {tap) mother. She was the daughter of Vivasvat, the god of the two lights called Surya, the sun, and was the younger sister of Savitrl the sun-maiden. She was the mother-goddess of the South, the home of the Southern sun, whence it brings heat to the earth. Samvarana, who as the rising sun of the coming era awaited his hour of enthronement in the forests of the South, died there for love of this goddess, and lay insensible for twelve days, till he was recalled to life by Vashishtha, as the Ribhus, makers of the seasons, were awoke by the dog sent by the Pole Star goat, after sleeping twelve days in the house of Agoya, the Pole Star2 3. Vashishtha united the reborn sun-god to Tapatl, the sun- goddess of the winter solstice, and thus made him a year sun-god, who reproduced the year of Orion in which the sun-god slept for the last twelve days of his year 3.
E.   The twelve-months year of the sun-worshippers.
The year of this sun-god was like that of Orion, one of twelve months and three hundred and sixty days, but it was not, like Orion’s year, divided into months of twenty- nine days, but into thirty-day months, and it was not measured by seventy-two five-day weeks, but by thirty- six weeks of ten days, the decades of the Egyptians and Athenians. These were the weeks of the two hands ex-
1   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, icciv. pp. 279—2S1.
2   Rg. i. 161, 13.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxiii.—clxxv. pp. 492—500.

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hibiting the completeness of the power of the sun-god ; the weeks of the Anjalika weapon of the joined hands with their palms placed together with which Arjuna slew the year-god Kama, after he had overturned his car with the iron arrow, the thunderbolt of this era which destroyed all the old-year gods1. The year thus measured was one which could be easily manipulated by the priests, who had exactly learnt the length of the year, and could always add an intercalary month of thirty days every sixth year to maintain the average length of three hundred and sixty- five days for the year, and the error still left uncorrected by this process was repaired in a system of cycles like the fifty-two-years cycle of Mexico, in which the intercalary days necessary to make the calendar exactly correct were added. We shall see in the sequel that in the instructions for building the year-altar the Hindu priests actually, according to the Brahmanas, added thirty-five or thirty-six intercalary days every sixth year, which was more than enough. It was a year in which constant astronomical observations could be dispensed with, and was therefore one suited to the unastronomical warriors of the North.
The sun-god who ruled this year, which began, as we have seen in discussing the fifty days reckoned for his resurrection interval in April—May and May—June, was under this change of time-reckoning released from the yoke of the stars Gemini, and it was no longer neccessary to begin the year when the sun entered that constellation. The last year apparently measured by this constellation was that beginning when the sun was in Gemini at the vernal equinox. This year calculation lasted till the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, and it is from this epoch, about 4200 B.C., that modern zodiacal observations have been held to date.
This change in the year-reckoning accompanying the victory of the sun-worshippers of the rising sun of day,
1 Mahabliarata Kama Parva, xc. So—S4, xci. 39—49? PP- 359> 3^5? 3^6-
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and the total discomfiture of the votaries of the moon-god and those who began their year with the setting sun and stars, seems to furnish an explanation of the Bible story of the disruption of society consequent on the fall of the Tower of Babel. The Tower of the Gate (hah) of God (el) is a metaphorical name for those successive measurements of annual time which were ruled by the stars Gemini, the guardians of the gate of the divine garden, the field of heaven circuited by the sun in its annual journey through the zodiacal stars which bounded it.
We have seen that in the reckonings of the zodiacal year from the epoch of the year of fifteen months annual time was measured by the entry of the sun into Gemini, a mode of reckoning beginning when the sun entered Gemini at the winter solstice, between 12,000 and 13,000 B.C. There was also long before this a persistent deification of the Ashvin twin stars, for in the Hindu constellation of Shimshu-mara, the alligator, which, with its fourteen stars, drove the stars round the Pole, the twin stars Gemini were its hands and the divine physicians. It was the new deification of the sun-god as a god independent of the Pole Star governing the tower of the Garden of God, which overthrew this tower, overturned the trading governments of the merchant-kings, which united all the maritime people in a confederacy of allied states and replaced the age of national brotherhood and friendly trade rivalry by one of international suspicion and jealousy, in which every state feared its neighbours as possible robbers who were scheming to appropriate their lands. Hence every national tribe used only its own language, and the knowledge of the common language of commercial intercourse disappeared from the earth. This revolution apparently dates from the time when the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox. It was then that the Kirubi or flying bulls of Assyria, the Hebrew Cherubim, replaced the twin stars, the giants Gog and Magog, as guardians of the Gate of God, and as warders of the doors of the temples. It was as a consequence of this revolution and the disruption of
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:23:55 PM: 601
society it caused, that Adam, the red man, who had been beguiled by the serpent, ruler of the Garden of Eden, was sent forth from the peaceful settlements of the trading age to till the waste earth, which was henceforth to be disturbed by the wars of conquest and spoliation waged by the united tree and sun-worshippers against the money-making progeny of the Naga snake. On his departure from the land of the mother-tree, the tree of life, the Eastern gates of his former home were guarded by the two Cherubim or flying bulls x. In this story the triumph of the son of the sun-god and the enmity between the old and new beliefs is told in the sentence of punishment passed on the serpent.
F.   History as told in the ritual of the building of the brick altar of the sun-bird of the twelve-months year.
It was for the worship of this new sun-god introducing Orion’s year of twelve months, who rose from the East as the sun-bird, that the new brick Ahavanlya altar of libations was built in India as the culminating embodiment of the theology of the Brahmanas. It was devoted to the celebration of the ritual in which living victims were no longer to be offered, but the sacrifices were to consist of libations of milk, sour milk, barley, running water, and the sap of the Soma plant, poured on the altar and consumed by the worshippers as sacramental food which incorporated into their frames the spirit of the living god.
This altar was not a brand new creation of a revolutionary sect whose object was to entirely obliterate the old faiths, but of one which sought to retain the recollection of and reverence for the ancient creeds while they substituted for their errors, improvements taught by the advance of knowledge and experience. It was intended to unite the new comers with the ancient population in a bond of national union, and this intention is manifested in every stage of the ritual of the building ceremonies.
1 Gen. iii. 22—24.
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These begin with the foundation of the altar. The land
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on which it was to be built was ploughed with the sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree {Ficus glovierata). To this the oxen were yoked with traces of the Munja sugar-grass {Sacchanmi Munja) of which the Brahmins’ year-girdles of three strands are made. In yoking the oxen, aGayatri, or eight-syllabled, and a Tristubh, or eleven- syllabled verse, were recited, so that they were dedicated to the god of the years of eleven and eight-day weeks. In this ploughing, as I have said in Chapter VII. pp. 423, 424, the first furrow was ploughed from the South-west to the Southeast, according to the diagram there drawn ; the second from the South-west corner to the North-west, then from Northwest to North-east, and from North-east to South-east, so as to form a square representing the annual course of the sun-bird beginning its year at sunset at the winter solstice, and going round the four quarters of the heavens to return to its Southwest home at the next winter solstice. This South-west quarter from which the sun starts is called in the Brahmanas the Nirriti or unorthodox quarter
After finishing the year-square the cross-lines are ploughed to form the eight-rayed star of the fifteen-months year enclosed in it. The first line is the North and South line going from the middle of the South-west to South-east line, to the North-west and North-east line. This is the line of the Pole Star and of the year measured by the circuit round it of the stars led by the Pleiades and Canopus first and the Pleiades and Orion afterwards, when the year was changed from the two-seasons year of the Pleiades to Orion’s year of three seasons. After this the line from South-west to North-east, indicating the course of the solstitial year- bird round the ploughed square, was drawn. Then the line from West to East, indicating the year measured by the equinoxes as well as by the solstices, beginning with the cycle-year of three years opening at the autumnal equinox, the age in which the zodiacal path of the moon and sun
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 1, S ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 320.

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began to be measured. The last line, from North-west to South-east, was the line of the white sun-horse of the healing fountains and wells, or white bull of the year of the eight-days week, who began his year at sunset at the summer solstice E
The next process is the consecration of the altar site on which the sacred sign of the eight-rayed star in the sun- square has been ploughed. First a bunch of Kusha grass (Poet cynosuroides) was placed in the centre of the star, and five libations of ghi or clarified butter are poured on it as offerings to the gods of the five-days week and the five seasons of the year, and then the priest consecrated the ground to the year-god by thirteen sentences, indicating, as we are told, the thirteen months of the year. These set forth the inner meaning of the five layers of bricks of which the altar was built, and declare that it was built to the year- god of a year measured by lunar phases and the rising sun bringing forth the cows of light. It is said to be the altar of the year of the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the sun-god and sun-horse, of the household-fire and the mother- mountain Ida, mother of the cows of light, and of the creat- ing-god invoked at it 2.
Then twelve jars of water, denoting the twelve months of the year which was to be henceforth the national year, were poured over the ploughed ground, and three additional jars over the whole site of the consecrated area, making fifteen jars poured over the whole area, indicating the twelve months and three seasons of Orion’s year, the model of that now instituted. Then seeds of corn and healing herbs were sown on the whole consecrated area from a jar of Udumbara-wood {Ficus glome rat a). While sowing this seed fifteen Gayatrl stanzas were recited of Rg. x. 97, attributed to Bhishak Atharvana, the healing fire- priest, and called Osadhastuti, the praiscr of medicine, twelve stanzas during the sowing of the ploughed area, and three
1 Eggcling, Sat. finl/i., vii. 2, 2, 1—14; S.K.E., w|» xxi. pp. 325- 330.
- Ibid., vii. 2, 3, 1—9 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 332—335.
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during the sowing of that unploughed. This hymn of the sun-physician traces the healing virtues of the plants whose effects it extols to the holy trees, the Ashvattha {Ficus religiosa) and the Parna or Palasha {Butea frondo so), the two Soma trees, and ascribes their growth to Brihaspati, the Pole Star god. It dedicates the seed sown while reciting them to the god of the fifteen-months year. In the thirteenth of these stanzas Yakshman {fever) is called on to fly forth with the jay *, and we learn from the lives of the Buddhist Theris that the blue jay was the sacred bird during the age of the year of thirteen months and seven-day weeks. Padumavati, the third Theri, was born as one of the seven sisters, the seven days of the week, in the palace of Kiki, the blue jay, king of Kashi, and in the birth after this she was born as a village maiden, who gathered the mother-lotus of five hundred seeds, which gave her in her next birth her child, the eldest son of the king, called Mahapadumo the great lotus, and sons to each of the other four hundred and ninety-nine kings’ wives 2.
It is the leaf of this lotus that was placed in the centre of the site of the Ahavanlya altar, but before it was laid down sand was scattered over it, and the whole area, measuring about forty feet each side, was made level with the square mound, the Uttaravedi, measuring seven feet on each side, which was its centre. The sand was scattered with a six-versed hymn, and these six stanzas, with the four bricks placed on the boundary lines and two verses sung to make the seed grow, make up, we are told, the twelve months of the year, that is of the Brahmins’ year divided into two seasons of six months each, the Devayana season, i in which the sun goes North, and the Pitriyana, in which it goes South 3.
The next ceremony is that of the Pravargya, or the offering of the large pot and the Upasads. The ritual of 1 2 3
1 Eggeling, Sat. Bruk., vii. 2, 4, 1—30; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 335—342.
2   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 74—77.
3   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 3, 1, 1—47; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 342—355.

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the Pravargya is somewhat complicated, but it may shortly be described as representing the birth of the twelve-months year of the altar from the thirteen-months year and those preceding it The earth for the Pravargya pot is dug with a spade made of Udumbara wood, and it is made of five materials, the five days of the week : (1) potter’s clay, (2) clay from ant-hills, (3) clay from earth torn up by the year boar, (4) Adari or Soma plants, and (5) goats’ milk. Three pots, two milking-bowls, and two platters consecrated to RohinI, the red cow Aldebaran, are made, and goats’ milk is poured on these seven representatives of the seven-days week. When the materials are ready, the great pot Mahavira is placed on the fire, surrounded with thirteen pieces of Vikuntula (Flacourtia sapida) wood, to denote the thirteen months of the year, and a gold plate is placed on its top. The milk heated in it is that of the cow RohinI, who is accompanied by her calf, the young sun-god. She is milked into the pot, goats’ milk being afterwards mixed with her milk. On the fire are burnt successively three bundles of fire faggots. During the burning of the first and second the AgnTdhra or fire-priest stands up, while the last is being burnt he sits down like a woman being delivered of a child. These three faggots denote the three-years cycle of the year of the goat from which the sun-god was born, and before the milk is boiled the twelve gods of the new year are invoked. The whole ceremony closes with the offering of thirteen libations to the thirteen gods of the months, among whom Surya, the sun-god, is given the seventh or central place. These arc offered after the heated milk has been drunk by those taking part in the sacrifice1. This sacrifice, and that of the Upasads to the three seasons of Prajapati’s (Orion s) year of the arrow, cover in their ritual the whole history of the solstitial sun-year 2
After these ceremonies a red-ox skin is placed in front 1 2
1   Eggeling, Saf. I'rii/i., xiv. i, i, I — xiv. 3, 2, 31; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 441—510.
2   Ibid., iii. 4, 4, 14—17; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 10S.
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of the Garhapatya altar with its neck to the East. It is consecrated to RohinI, and it is on a similar skin that Hindu brides are seated after their marriage I, and before its consummation. The bricks for the first layer are placed on it, and sprinkled with a bunch of Kusha grass dipped in ghi or clarified butter, and then a white horse is led up to the bricks at sun-set2 3 4 5. In laying down the first layer of bricks a gold plate with twenty-one knobs on it was placed over the lotus leaf laid in the centre of the raised altar mound. On the plate there was put the gold image of a man lying on his back with his head to the East. Over him the first five stanzas of Rg. iv. 4 were repeated, calling upon Agni to drive away the wicked fiends. Beside the man were laid two offering spoons, one of Karshmarya (Gmelina arborea) wood of which the enclosing triangle was made on the Soma Uttaravedi altar 3, succeeding that in the form of a woman with its triangle of Palasha twigs ; the other offering spoon was made of Udumbara (Ficus glomerata) 4. Then a Svayam-atrinna, a self-perforated brick made with a hole in it, was placed on the man, and there are three of these in the altar in the centre of the first, third and fifth layers, so as to leave an open passage through the altar. This aperture is that for the stalk of the lotus called in the Zendavesta the golden tube of Saokanta, the mountain of the wet (sak) god. It is through this that the life-giving water generated in the lotus growing beneath the mother- mountain represented in the altar goes up to its top as the mist which descends to the earth in rain and dew 5. This self-pierced brick is called Drirva, or that born of the firm
1   Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Grihya Sutra of Hiranyakeshin, i. 7, 22, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xxx. p. 193.
2   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 3, 2, 1—19; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp, 355—362.
3   Ibid., iii. 4, 1, 16; S. B.E., vol. xxvi. p. S9.
4   Ibid., vii. 4, 1, 1—45; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 362—376.
5 Ibid., vii. 4, 2, 1—9, viii. 1, 1, 1; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 377—379, xliii. pp. 1, note I, 2; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Khorshed Nyayis, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 352, note 3 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 144.

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(dhruva) Pole Star, and on it is laid a plant of Durva or Dub grass (Panicum dactylon), the creeping grass growing near the banks of rivers and watercourses, which always remains green during the hottest and driest weather. Next to this central brick on its East side a brick called Dvi-yajus, or the double-worship, was placed, and then five more bricks with different names, representing the generating Agni and the spring season, were laid in the same direction leading up to the most important brick of all, the eighth brick from the centre Polar brick. This is called the Ashadha brick, sacred to the month of that name (June—July), which begins the year opening with the rains of the summer solstice. This eighth centre-brick is the beak of the year-bird of the altar I.
South of this Ashadha brick, representing the beak of the sun-bird rising in the North-east at the summer solstice, and which rises in the East at the vernal equinox, the live tortoise of Kashyapa, the father-god of the Kushikas, was buried with its head to the West, and anointed with curds, honey and ghi. It was placed between two rows of Avaka (Blyxa octandra) plants, growing like the lotus on marshy lands. To the North of the Ashadha brick a pestle and mortar of Udumbara wood for the pounding of Soma was buried, and on the top of this Northern effigy of the generating Pole Star revolving-god was placed the fire-pan (ukhd), the making of which I have described in Chapter VIII. pp. 495 ffi, and it, which conveyed the heat which begot life in the sons of the rivers and th£ cow, was filled with sand and milk 2.
The heads of the five victims slain at this sacrifice of consecration were then placed in the fire-pan. Those of the horse and the ram on the North side, the bull’s and goat’s heads on the South, and the man’s head in the centre on the
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., vii. 4, 2, 10—40; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 379~3% ! also see the plan of the first layer of bricks, Eggeling, Sal. Brdh., S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 17.
2   Ibid., vii. 5, 1, 1—34, vii. I, 1, 40—44; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 3S9—399. 310, 3IX.
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sanded milk, after putting chips of gold in their mouths, nostrils, eyes, and ears.
Then the building of the altar was proceeded with. Five bricks called Ahasya or water-bricks, reminiscences of the mother-sea surrounding the mother-mountain, were laid at the West, South, and East ends of the cross, inside the circle forming the skeleton of the body of the altar bird, and five more bricks called Chandrasyah or metrical bricks dedicated to the five metres, Gayatri, Tristubh, Jagatl, Anushtubh and Pankti, representing, as we are told, the five seasons of the year, that is of a year beginning when the sun was in the North, the place of the metres. The Gayatri represented the spring, Tristubh the summer, JagatT, the rainy season, Anushtubh the autumn, Pankti the winter f.
Thus we see that the history of the year is wrapped up in the rules for laying this first layer which represents the spring season. I shall not give the details of the building of each of the other layers with the same minuteness as I have described the first, as to do so would be merely to repeat for each layer the year history I have given for the first, for each layer illustrates a separate section of the successive sequence of years I have depicted in the previous chapters of this book.
Each layer represents a season of the year, the first layer the spring, the second summer, the third the rainy season, the fourth autumn, the fifth winter.
The second layer, begun by laying down five Ashvini bricks to the five seasons of the year, is especially dedicated to the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the ritual of the laying of the bricks closes with an invocation in fifteen stanzas to the gods of the fifteen-months year, beginning with the goat and ending with the four-year-old bull1 2. The third layer is by the first eleven bricks laid down dedicated to the eleven-
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 5, 2, 1—62, v. 4, 1, 3—7; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 401—417, 9i-
2 Ibid., viii. 2, 1, 1—9, 16, viii. 2, 4, 1—15; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 22—27, 29, 37—39-

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months year, preceding that of fifteen months1. In the fourth layer of the autumn season the first eighteen bricks are dedicated to the eighteen months of the year or the eighteen-fold Prajapati, and the latter part of the layer to the seventeen-months year of the seventeen-fold Prajapati, with a hymn of praise to the thirty-three gods of the year of eleven months of thirty-three days2. The fifth or top layer of the winter season represents the vault of heaven encircling and overarching the altar, and it rests on the outside twenty-nine Stomabhaga bricks, called Nakasads or bricks of the firmaments, the twenty-nine days of the months of Orion's year of the Karanas 3. Inside this fifth layer a new Garhapatya hearth is inserted. It is dedicated, like the hearth described in Chapter VIII. pp. 559, 560, to the year of thirteen months. It is built of eighteen bricks, two rows of eight bricks, the first called Chiti, and the second placed on it Punashchiti, and on these are placed two Ritavya or seasonal bricks, the whole representing the eighteen-months year, and on the top are placed two Vis- vajyotis or living star bricks, to make up the twenty days of the months of the year 4.
The altar thus built was, as the Brahmana tells us, encircled * with three hundred and sixty enclosing stones distributed as follows round the altars : twenty-one round the Garhapatya hearth, seventy-eight round the eight Dhishnya hearths appropriated to the priests, and two hundred and sixty-one round the Ahavnniya altar. These represent the three hundred and sixty nights of the year. The days are represented by the three hundred and sixty Yajush-mati bricks laid down with formulas, and the hours arc represented by the ten thousand eight hundred Lokamprini or space-filling bricks denoting the Mohurtas of forty-eight minutes each, of which there are thirty in a day, and ten thousand eight
1   Eggeling, Sat. Brci/t., viii. 3, 4, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 57.
2   Ibid., viii. 4, 1, 27, 28, viii. 4, 3, 1—20; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 6S, 71 —77.
3   Ibid., viii. 5, 3, 1—8, viii. 6, 1, 1, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 92—94, 97, note I, 98.
4   Ibid,, viii. 6, 3, 1, viii. 7, 1, 24 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 117—131.
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hundred in a year of 360 days. But in the verbal instructions for laying the bricks on each layer, three hundred and ninety-five are ordered to be laid I. The extra thirty-five, with an additional day added for the earth used in the altar, represent the thirty-six days intercalated every six years to make the year-reckoning correspond with actual time. But this lumber or that of thirty-five days for the intercalary month would make the six-years cycle too long. It would seem that the number thirty-six appears in the calculations as a reminiscence of the thirty-six stones which originally, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 105, surrounded in the Neolithic Age the sun-circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. The official explanation of the intercalary month given in the Brahmana is that stated in the commentary on the sixty-six stanzas of the Shata-rudriya hymn of the hundred (.shata) Rudras, the hundred gods of the oldest Buddhist heaven of the Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, recited on the Mahavrata day when the altar was consecrated. This hymn contains, according to the Brahmana, three hundred and sixty invocations representing the three hundred and sixty days of the year, thirty representing the thirty days of each of its twelve months, and thirty-five for the intercalary days added at the end of every six years 2.
The Dhishnya or priests’ hearths are built with Lokam- prini bricks laid without formulas, thus showing them to represent the years before that of the building of the altar of the risen sun ; and the rules for their construction, like that of the chief altar, reproduce a record of the history of time. Thus the Hotri’s hearth contains twenty-one bricks, the days of the month of the seventeen-months year of libations. The hearth of the Bnihmanacchamsin or Indra contains eleven bricks, the eleven days of the week and months of the year of the rain-god of the South-west wind, the Indra who brought up the rains of the summer solstice with the help
1   Eggelrng, Sat. Brdh., x. 4, 2, 1—27, x. 4, 3, 8—21, ix. 4, 3, 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 349—354, note 2, 357—360, 244, 245, note 1.
2   Ibid., ix. 1, 1, 43, 44; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 167, 16S, 150—155.

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of the seven Maruts, the seven stars of the Great Bear, as
1   have shown in Chapter VII. p. 4311. The Margaliya altar of the antelope (1mriga) is built of six bricks, the six days of the week of the first antelope-year, in which the circling {mriga) antelope was the sun-bird. The other five altars are each made of eight bricks, the eight days of the week of the fifteen-months year 2.
The reproduction of the ancient time measurements is further shown in the use of the ten-days week, which besides its meaning of the double hands or of the sacrifice of the whole man, also commended itself to these Northern ritualists by measuring the year in decimals. The altar was especially consecrated to the thirty-six weeks of this year by the recitation of the Brihat-Saman, sacred to the goddess Brihati of the thirty-six syllabled metre, who is said to make the year. This was chanted at the consecration of the altar at its North-east corner, the rising place of the sun-bird 3. These weeks are called in the Rigveda the Dashagva or the ten. They are said to be descended from the nine Angiras, the nine-days week of the three-years cycle 4, and to be their best representatives ; also to be, as directors of the course of the independent sun, irresistible and uncontrollable 5. They help Indra in bringing forth the cows of light and find them in the darkness, that is at dawn6. These decades were therefore the weeks of the rising and not of the setting sun, the course of which was measured by the five-day weeks.
This record of national history told in the ritual and rules for building the brick altar of the sun-bird is the crowning achievement of the Indian historiographers who drew the pictures of the past in symbols, the meaning of which was thoroughly understood by the educated people of the age in which they lived. These had all been instructed in the
' liggcling, Sat. Bruit., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416.
2 Ibid., ix. 4, 3, 9, iv. 6, 6, 1—5 ; S.B. li., vol. xliii. p. 245, note 1, xxvi. pp. 433, 434.
3   Ibid., ix. I, 2, 37, vi. 4, 2, 10: S.B. li., vol. xliii. p. 179, vol. xli. p. 220.
4   Rg. x. 62, 6.   5 Ibid. viii. 12, 2.   0 Ibid. i. 62, iii. 39, 5.
R r 2
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:25:28 PM: 612

national schools in the rules laid down for their interpretation by the priests and expounders of the meaning of the mythological stories and ritual. In this age the priests and teachers of the people were in India distributed over the country as members of the local schools of Brahmanic learning, who wrote, as ritualistic hymns, the poems of the Rig- veda. These are divided into Mandalas or sections, each of which contains the selected poems of the guild named in its title. Thus the second Mandala is the work of the Bhargavas or sons of Bhrigu, the Median priests, the third of the Vishvamitra Kushikas, the fourth of the Gotamas, the fifth of the Atriyas, the sixth of the Bharadvajas, the seventh of the Vashishthas, and the eighth of the Kansa priests of the Yadu Turvasu, The first and tenth Mandalas are made up of grouped contributions from separate schools, the works of each being placed in its own section, and the authors of the hymns of the ninth Mandala are the priests of the Soma moon-god, called Soma Pavamana, the god of the rain-bringing wind (pavana). The gods invoked in the 1,028 hymns preserved in this collection are all year-gods, measurers of time, and the intensity of the conservative belief in and reverence for the oldest national creating gods, the rain and tree-gods, is shown in the very large proportion of the hymns addressed to them. Six hundred and eighty- one hymns are invocations to the three chief gods of the Soma sacrifice. In one hundred and twenty-three of these the god invoked is Soma, the creating sap of the mother-tree brought by the cloud-bird Su or Khu, called the father and begetter of the gods I, the lord of thought (manasas- pati) 2 and of speech (vacas-pati) 3. Three hundred and fifty- four are hymns to India, the rain-god, father of life, and the especial parent of the sons of the rivers and of the river eel; and two hundred and four to Agni, the god of the household and altar fire, and their associate gods. There are also thirty-five hymns to the Maruts or wind-bringing goddesses,
1 Rg. ix. 87, 2.   2 Ibid. ix. 99, 6.   3 Ibid. ix. 26, 4, 101,6,
   613
daughters of the tree-ape-god Maroti. Sixty to the Ashvins or the stars Gemini, which were, as we have seen, gods who take a most prominent place in the history of this year, and there are eleven hymns to the Ribhus or makers of the seasons. In short the whole ritual of the Indian Church as expounded in the Rigveda and the Brahmanas or ritualistic manuals, is that of the worship of the gods who measure time, and it was the successive phases of their worship marked in the changing computations of the year which formed the epochs of the national chronology. It was these records which were preserved by the schools of the prophets among the Jews, by the Collegia or Leagues of Dervishes or ceremonial priests of Asia Minor, South-western Asia and Egypt, who also organised the national rituals in Greece, Italy and all other countries where the trading merchants of the Indian Ocean and their Mediterranean brethren settled.
But the memory of the methods of these ancient historians' decayed under the rule of the Northern sun-worshippers, who apparently introduced into the countries they conquered a long period of confusion and anarchy, similar to that which marked the later ages of the Roman empire when Roman law and order was trampled under foot by the Northern invaders. During this period the priestly historians were replaced by the genealogical bards, who, instead of making the personified nation or tribe the heroes of their narratives, and telling the history of the nation’s fortunes, filled their songs with recitals of the deeds of individuals. Thus they were the records of personal prowess, and in their genealogies all the persons named were conceived as individuals who were once actually existing, ancestors of the kings and warriors whose praises they sang. It was also owing to the growth of individualism that state astronomy became judicial astrology, employed in the making of horoscopes predicting the good or evil fortunes of the persons at whose birth were drawn those prophetic pictures of the positions then occupied by the stars which, according to astrological belief, then dealt out the
614

changes and chances allotted by them to each human life. Another cause of the gradual disuse of the methods and forgetfulness of the meanings of the ancient histories, was the introduction of annals in which the national scribes recorded the events of successive years, characterising each year by some remarkable event occurring in it, or by its place in the years of the reigns of their kings. These annals formed the groundwork of the national chronicles of the Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians, and to make their records complete imaginary figures, which sometimes, like those *of the Ten Kings of Babylon, reproduced astronomical computations, were assigned to the reigns of pre-annalistic rulers, whose names had been symbols in the pre-solar histories. This introduction of annalistic chronicles separates the age when history was told in symbolic stories depicting the institutions, customs and daily lives of the people "who framed them, from that of modern history, which gives us detailed biographies of individuals, kings, warriors and lawgivers, but which, until recently, almost ignored the social movements they directed and the influence they exercised over the progress of the people whom they ruled. Under these influences the old system of recording the lapse of past time by the apparent movements of the stars, sun, and moon round the Pole, the changes in the Pole Stars and the month by stations of the sun and moon in the zodiacal circle, were discarded and almost forgotten in popular ritual.
The stories of the old gods recording the sequence of natural phenomena, the conclusions of primitive science, and the history of the past as told in the astronomical succession of different methods of reckoning the year, became in the new literature narratives of somewhat superhuman magnified men and women. They were thus so distorted that when their original forms and meanings were forgotten, they seemed to describe the gods of our forefathers as monsters of iniquity. Hence the divine origin of this mythology was disbelieved by the philosophical teachers of the new spiritual religion based on the study of the mental and moral
ft
   615
faculties and the standard of duty they taught. And they like Plato denounced the ancient myths as blasphemous lies invented by the poets, and banished the works in which they were used as dramatic plots from the curriculum of their ideal schools 1.
It is only by a study of the old rituals, tribal and local customs and institutions, religious and historical myths, the stages of advance in the knowledge and practice of methods of government, agriculture, fruit-growing, pharmacy, architecture and mechanical arts, and the development of international trade by land and sea, that we can correct these erroneous interpretations of ancient mythology, and reproduce a correct picture of life in the ancient world. In doing this we interpret the old national histories in the sense in which they were composed by the national historiographers, the Pra-shastri or teaching- priests of the Hindus, the Asipu or interpreters of the Akkadians, who became the Semitic Rabbi, the Exegetae of the Greeks, and the Druid bard-priests of the Celts. These were prepared with careful deliberation and enquiry and with scrupulous regard to the truths as believed in by their authors, and they were handed down to their successors as divinely inspired lessons teaching them the methods by which national prosperity was secured and the faults by which it was lost. We must no longer look on these old mythologies as unintelligible records of a time when, as some assert, men deliberately cultivated the mythopaeic art of compiling national stories as a means of amusement, answering to the most frivolous of our modern novels, but as the solemnly recorded teachings of ancestors who bequeathed these symbolic histories to their descendants for their instruction and guidance.
I have tried in this work to set forth their true meaning as far as they record the methods of computing time, and the attempts made in the past to find out the real nature of the creating powers who ordained natural and moral laws, and
1 Jowctt, Plato, The Republic, Book ii. vol. iii. bp. 249—257.
616
I only hope that I may have succeeded in stimulating others to work in this field of research, in which innumerable discoveries can yet be made by those who read, interpret and edit the numerous works which were once the sources whence ancient sages drew their lore, but which now only exist as almost neglected manuscripts. It is not only from these that additional knowledge is to be gained, but also from the buried relics of the ancient and unexplored cities of India, of the countries on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and between the Mediterranean on the West and the Caspian Sea and the Euphrates Valley on the East. There, and also in Europe, are many sites which will, when thoroughly excavated, furnish harvests of relics no less valuable than those which have revealed to us so much of the previously obliterated history of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt. It is in India that we shall find in the ruins of such cities as those of Pushkala-vasti, or Hastinapore in the Swat valley, in Taxila or Takshasila, Kapila-vastu, Mathura and many others, authentic records of the rule of the Kushika, Khati or Hittite merchant-kings, and probably recover pre-Sanskrit tablets in the ancient Hittite syllabic alphabet. This must certainly have been used in the country in combination with the indigenous methods of preserving and transmitting oral records committed to memory by successive generations of pupils and teachers.
Title: Re: The age of mythmaking: from dawn to Taurus 4200 BC
Post by: Prometheus on September 21, 2016, 03:26:27 PM: APPENDIX A.
LIST OF THE HINDU NAKSHATRA STARS BY BRAHMA
GUPTA.
1.   Ashvini or Ashvayujau.
2.   Bharani or Apa Bharani.
3.   Krittaka or Krittakas.
4.   RohinI (Aldebaran).
5.   Mrigasirsha, Andhaka, Aryika,
Invika or Ilvala.
6.   Ardra or Bahu.
7.   Punarvasu.
8.   Pushya, Tishya, or Sidhya.
9.   Ashlesha, Asresha, or Ashleshas.
10.   Magha or Maghas.
11.   Purva, Phalguni or Arjuni.
12.   Uttara Phalguni.
13.   Hasta.
14.   Chitra.
15.   Svati or Nishtya.
16.   Visakha or Visakhi.
17.   Anuradha.
18.   Jyeshtha.
19.   Mula or Vichritau,
20.   Purva, Ashadha or Apya.
21.   Uttara, Ashadha or Vaishoa.
22.   Abhijit, meaning now (abhi) con
quered {jit). This sign was omitted after Vega ceased to be the ruling Pole Star, that is, after 8000 B.C.
23.   Shravana, Shrona, or Ashvattha.
24.   Shravishtha or Dlianistha
25.   Sata bhisaj.
26.   Purva Bliadrapada, Proshthapada
or Pratishana.
/3 Arietis. a Muscce.
23 Tauri (Pleiades).
« Tauri.
A Orionis. a Orionis (?).
/3 Geminorum.
5 Caneri. e Hydras.
Regulus a Leonis.
5   Leonis.
6   Leonis Alsarfa.
7   or 5 Corvi.
Spica a Virginis. Arcturus.
i Librae.
5 Scorpionis.
Antares a Scorpionis. A Scorpionis.
5 Sagittarii. o- Sagittarii.
Vega a Lyras A1 nasr alwaqi. a Aquila^, A1 nasr altair.
P Delphini.
A Aquarii.
a Pegasi.
6iS
Appendix A.
27.   Uttara Bhadrapada.   7 Pegasi or a Andromedse.
28J. Revati (this after the elision of Vega Abhijit) was the 27th Nakshatra, and probably was the original 27th star before Vega became the Pole Star when it was first included in the list as the ruler of the stars.   ? Piscium.
1 J. Burgess, C.I.E., ‘Hindu Astronomy J J.R.A.S., Oct., 1893, p. 756.
APPENDIX B.
   4
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.
English Version.
1.   This is the Malt that lay
In the House that Jack built.
2.   This is the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
3.   This is the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
4.   This is the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt
That lay in the House that Jack built.
5.   This is the Cow with the crum
pled horn
That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
6.   This is the Maiden all forlorn That milked the Cow with the
crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
Version of ilie Talmud.
1.   A Kid, a Kid, my father bought For two pieces of money.
2.   Then came the Cat and ate the
Kid
That my father bought For two pieces of money.
3.   Then came the Dog and bit the
Cat
That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
4.   Then came the Stick and beat
the Dog
That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
5.   Then came the Fire and burnt the Stick
That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
620
Appendix B.
7.   This is the Man all tattered and
torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
8.   This is the Priest all shaven and
shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
9.   This is the Cock that crowed in
the morn
That waked the Priest all shaven and shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
6.   Then came the Water and quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
7.   Then came the Ox and drank the Water
That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
8.   Then came the Butcher and slew the Ox
That drank the Water That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
Appendix B.
621
10.   This is the Farmer that sowed the corn
That fed the Cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the Priest all shaven and shorn
That married the Man all tattered and torn
That kissed the Maiden all forlorn
That milked the Cow with the crumpled horn That tossed the Dog That worried the Cat That killed the Rat That ate the Malt That lay in the House that Jack built.
Basque Version.
1.   Akherra hor heldu da Arthoaren yatera Akherrak arthoa
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! Arthoa gurea zen.
2.   Otsoa hor heldu da Akherraren yatera Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! Arthoa gurea zen.
9.   Then came the Angel of Death and killed the Butcher That slew the Ox That drank the Water That quenched the Fire That burnt the Stick That beat the Dog That bit the Cat That ate the Kid That my father bought For two pieces of money.
10.   Then came the Holy One, blessed be He,
And killed the Angel of Death
That killed the Butcher
That slew the Ox
That drank the Water
That quenched the Fire
That burnt the Stick
That beat the Dog
That bit the Cat
That ate the Kid
That my father bought
For two pieces of money.
Translation.
The Goat has come there To eat the Corn (maize)
The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
The Wolf has come there To eat the Goat The Wolf (eats) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
622
Appendix B.
3. Chakurra hor heldu da Otsoaren yatera Chakurrak otsoa,
Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! knen ! Arthoa gurea zen.   The Dog has come there To eat the Wolf The Dog (eats) the Wolf The Wolf (eats) the Goat The Goat feats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
4. Makhila hor heldu da Chakurrareh hiltzera Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The stick has come there To kill the Dog The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
5. Sua hor heldu da Makhilaren erret zera Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The Fire has come there To bum the Stick The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
6. Ura hor heldu da Suaren hilt zera Urak sua Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen 1 khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.   The Water has come there To quench the Fire The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
7. Idia hor heldu da Uraren edatera Idiak ura Urak sua Suak makhila Makhilak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa   The Ox has come there To drink the Water The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf
Appendix B.
623
Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.
8.   Buchera hor heldu da Idiaren hiltzera Bucherak idia
Idiak ura Urak sua Suak makhela Makhelak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen.
9.   Herioa hor heldu da Bucheraren hiltzera Herioak buchera Bucherak idia Idiak ura
Urak sua Suak makhela Makhelak chakurra Chakurrak otsoa Otsoak akherra Akherrak arthoa Akherra khen ! khen ! khen Arthoa gurea zen h
The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
The Butcher has come there To kill the Ox The Butcher (kills) the Ox The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours
Death has come there To kill the Butcher Death (kills) the Butcher The Butcher (kills) the Ox The Ox (drinks) the Water The Water (quenches) the Fire The Fire (burns) the Stick The Stick (kills) the Dog The Dog (kills) the Wolf The Wolf (kills) the Goat The Goat (eats) the Corn Drive away the Goat The Corn was ours.
On comparing the stones of this House of the Year-weeks in these three versions, we find them arranged in the following order :—
I   2   3   4   5   6   7
English—Rat   Cat   Dog   Cow   Maiden   Man   Priest
Talmud—Kid   Cat   Dog   Stick   Fire   Water   Ox
Basque — Goat   Wolf Dog   Stick   Fire   Water   Ox
1 J. Vinson, Folklore du Pays Basque, Canlilenes et Fonmilettes, Les Litteratures Populaires, Tome XV., p. 216, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris.
624
Appendix B.
8   9   10
English —Cock   Farmer   Malt
Talmud—Butcher   Death   God
Basque — Butcher   Death   Corn
Here we have in all three versions the re-risen sun-god who was to return to life after being slain by the evolution of the nine days of the cycle-week embodied in the conception of the Barley-Malt, the maker of the Water of Life, the Corn and the Creating gods. This is the revealed form of the Being who has implanted in the barley, maize and the creating week of time his innermost essence, the life which is God-born and re-born from his temporary death. We also see in the Basque version the oldest form of the brick house, that built by the Pole Star Goat, who precedes the Kid star, the constellation Auriga, and the Rat, the Chinese Aquarius. Also in this Basque version we find the Wolf of Light, the mother of Apollo in Greece, and of the Vedic Golden-handed sun Hiranyahasta, born of the blind sexless father Rijrashva, the upright horse, the gnomon-stone, and his wolf consort*, who is the predecessor of the cat- goddess of the Egyptians and the witches of the fully developed science of sorcery. We also find in the Basque and Talmud versions an epitome of the creed of the fire- worshippers, who worshipped the fire-dog, the star Sirius, the dog which still attends all Parsi funerals, and who sends on earth the seed of fire transmitted through the Stick, the fire-drill, which generates fire in the fire-socket, the mother of fire, the fifth of these algebraic signs. It was this fire in the form of the lightning - charged cloud which produced the rain, the water of life drunk by the Ox, the sexless parent of the offspring born from the ten months of gestation of mother-moon-cow of the cycle-year. From this ox and the life-giving water there was generated the change of state of the embryo born to the birth of death, followed
1 Rg. i. 116, 13, 17, 18, 117, 17, 18, 24.
Appendix B.
625
by emergence into the new life opening out at the end of the ten months of gestation signified by the tenth sign.
In the English version the creation creed symbolised in signs 5 to 9 differs from the spiritualistic belief of the fire-worshippers in sexless generation. In this Northern creed, the heavenly parents of life are the dog-star Sirius, and the moon-cow, from whom are born the parent Twins, the Hindu Mithuna, the mother-night and the sun-father of day. They, united by the sexless fire-priest, the Hindu Agnldhra, the guardian of the fire on the altar of the sun- cock, give birth to the ploughing-farmer Rama, who sows the corn, whence the sons of the barley and its life-giving malt are to be born.
What is most certainly proved by these three versions, to which further research would probably add others, is that this ancient school-lesson was disseminated from Asia to Europe by the worshippers of the Pole Star Goat, who afterwards in Babylon substituted for the Pole Star the Kid constellation Auriga as the director of the year. Also that the original version was altered into a variant form by the believers ‘in the anthropomorphic parent-gods of the eleven-months year, who began their year when the sun was in the Rat constellation Aquarius, that of the last of the ten star-kings of Babylon. These believers in the bisexual creating parent-gods were the second race of fire-worshippers, described in Chapter V. Section C., whose priests were the Hindu Angiras, who offered human sacrifices and dedicated their children to the Fire-god. They substituted for the sexless fire-drill and socket the Stick and Fire of the Talmud and Basque versions, the Moon-cow Maiden and Man. These last the Hindu male and female Twins Mithuna were the parents of the race born in the Zend Garden of God, laid out, planted and tended by Yima the Twin. This was the Garden of the cycle-year described in the Zendavesta, the gates of which were guarded by the twins Gemini, its doorposts, and on the gate was the Tower where the sun-god of the three-years cycle was born. It was built of kneaded
S s
626
Appendix B.
clay “ with a window self-shining within ” (the generating moon and sun) “ and a door sealed up with the golden ring ” of the ten months of gestation. In this garden were sown the   |
seeds whence were born the offspring of the Sun-Cock, the   |
Sun-physician iEsculapius, to whom cocks were sacred. Their i produce yielded the best and finest trees and plants, and the best bred sheep and oxen, and none of the human children of the seed sown by the Twins was to be hump-backed or deformed, insane, impotent, or leprous. They were all to be men and women endowed with full strength bodily and mental, who were to become the parents of the perfect human race, the Sons of God of the fifteen-months year T.
1   Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendlddd Fargard, li. 27, 28. 29, 30, 31 ; S.B.E., vol. iv. pp. 17, 18.

APPENDIX C.
HISTORY AS TOLD IN THE VARIANT FORMS OF THE
LEGEND OF INO, THE MOTHER OF MELICERTES, OR
MELQUARTH, THE TYRIAN HERAKLES, THE GODDESS
OF THE KREDEMNON OR ZODIACAL RIBBON.
INO was the daughter of Kadmus and Harmonia, the latter being, as I have shown in the Preface, the goddess- mother crowned with the bridal veil of the starry heavens, within which Kadmus, 'the creator or arranger, carried on his creating trade. They both drove the ploughing oxen of light, the sun and moon, round the heavens in their appointed path through the zodiacal stars. Ino was the sister of Scmele or Samlah, the vine mother, the birth-tree of the creating wine-god Dionysus. Semele died after the conception of her son, and the embryo was born from the Thigh of his father Zeus, and thus she was the mother of the sun-god, son of the seven Thigh stars of the Great Bear, the god of the year of fifteen-months and eight-day weeks. This god born of the Thigh, whose mother died at his conception, is the equivalent of the Indian sun-god, the Buddha, whose mother Maya died seven days after his birth, and who was brought up by her sister Maha Gotami Pajapati, the female form of the star- god Prajapati Orion, and the star and moon mother-leader of the thirteen Theris, the thirteen months of the year in which Rahulo, the young sun-god, son of the Buddha, was born in the eleventh month. In the story of Semele the part of Maha Gotami Pajapati fell to Ino, for she nursed the young Dionysos in the sea-shore cave at Brasiae, the womb of the pregnant mother-mountain rising from the
S s 2
628
Appendix C.
sea on the site, as Pausanias tells us, of the Garden of God*. She also, like Gotami, was the double of the Star Orion, for she was, as the successor of Nephele the cloud, the second wife of Athamas, the Ionic Tammas, the Hebrew Tammuz, and the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion. She was originally the goddess of the age of human sacrifices, when, according to Semite custom, the eldest son was offered. The eldest children of Athamas, born of Nephele, the mother-cloud- bird of early mythology, were Phrixus, the roasted or parched (^plyoo) barley grain, and Helle its husk. They were to be sacrificed by their father to the Laphystian Zeus, whose image was, as Pausanias tells us, set up at Coronea next to that of the Itonian Athene. Both images were in her temple, where the perpetually burning national fire was preserved upon her altar, thus showing her to be the housemother of the nation. The Zeus, her male counterpart, was the Cretan god Itanos2, and therefore the Akkadian god Danu or Tanu 3, the Pole Star god of the world’s tree, with its roots in the creating-mud {tan) of the South.
The festival at which this sacrifice, instituted by Athamas, was to be offered was that of the Pan-Bceotian New Year’s Day, that of the autumnal equinox beginning their year. At that festival, according to the author of the Minos, the eldest sons of the family which claimed descent from Athamas used to be sacrificed down to the 4th century B.c. This sacrifice is also spoken of by Herodotus vii. 197, and according to him it was instigated by Ino 4. But as the legends tell us not only of the sacrifice of Phrixus, but also of that of Learchus, Ino’s son, her share in their institution is merely a form of the statement that human sacrifices of the eldest son began to be offered when she was first worshipped as the goddess-mother of life.
Learchus is said to have been slain by Athamas when
1   Fraser, Pausanias, iii. 24, 3, vol. i. pp. 173, 174.
2   Ibid., ix. 34, 1—5, vol. i. pp. 4S6, 4S7.
3   Lenormant, La Langue Primitive tie la Chaldee, pp. 99, 100.
4   Frazer, Pausanias, v. pp. 169—172.
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629
mad, and this phase of the story shows it to be one which told how Athamas became in the course of his avatars a mad star-god, who instituted human sacrifices, and who was thus the counterpart of the Hindu mad king Kalmashapada, he of the spotted or starry feet, the Pole Star god who first introduced human sacrifices. The pairs of victims in the story, Phrixus and Helle, born of Nephele, and Learchus and Melicertes, sons of Ino, are the two seasons of the solstitial sun whose annual course was ruled by Harmonia, mother of Ino.
These sacrifices of the eldest son mark the beginning of the rule of the Northern races, who worshipped the creator as the god of generation and looked on blood and not on water as the source of life. In accordance with this belief the land was each year to be fertilised by the blood of the eldest son of its ruler or by some specially selected human victim, representing the sun of the old year as dying at his year’s end and fertilising with his dying blood the land to be ruled during the next year by his successor.
The identification of Athamas with Kalmashapada shows him to be in one phase of his history the god of the eleven- months year, this being that of the sacrifice of Learchus. But in that of Phrixus preceding it, Athamas is the god of the cycle-year of three years, beginning, like the Boeotian and Jewish year, with the autumnal equinox, when the sun was in Aries, the star of the Ram with the Golden Fleece which carried off Phrixus and Helle. This, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 207, fixes the date of the legend as between 14,000 and 15,000 B.c. It was after this that Ino escaped from her mad husband with her son Melicertes, the Phoenician Melquarth, the sun-god, and leaped with him into the sea, whence he was saved by the dolphin which landed him by the mother-pine-tree of Cybele ; and it was in honour of this god that the Isthmian games were held at the winter solstice, in which the prize of the victor was a pine wreath. The leap into the sea of the goddess-mother of the year-sun betokens the descent into the constellation Pisces and the
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yearly journey to the Southern stars of winter of the goddess who traced the appointed path of the sun through the starry heavens. And it is as a star-goddess of the South that Ino, mother of the sun born at the winter solstice, was depicted in the original form of her legend, when she was regarded, as she was in Southern Italy, as the Mater Matuta, the mother of life, who was, as we have seen, the goddess Bahu ruling the Southern abyss. As the Queen of the Stars of the South she is represented as riding on a marine monster called in Latin Pistrix, which is the name given by Cicero to the constellation Cetus, the Whale It is on this monster that she rides in two of her statues at Florence and in one at Naples, and it is depicted in the Middle Age traditional illustrations of Aratus as a dragon, identical in form with that of the Florence and Naples statues, with stars on its tail2. As the rider on the star Whale she is not accompanied by her son, but in these illustrations she holds in her hands the two ends of a ribbon, called in Greek the Kredemnon, which forms an arch over her head ; and that this arch is the zodiacal line marking the annual path of the sun through the heavens is proved by its appearance on a coin of M. Aurelius, where its ends are held by the Twins, the stars Gemini, who ushered in the years of fifteen and thirteen months 3.
Further proof that the Kredemnon indicates the sun’s path through the stars, which was first thought to be marked by the Milky Way, the original Kredemnon, is given in the story of Odusseus. He, when he left Ogygia, the island of Kalypso, the hiding {Kakvirru}) goddess, after being detained by her for seven years, was arrayed in the panoply of the sun-god she gave him, the impenetrable coat of mail,
j
1   Cicero, A rati, 152.
2   Milani, Studi c Materiali di Archceologia c Numismatica, vol. i., Pantala L pp. 77—80; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, or the Heavenly Display, 398, p. 44.
3   Milani, Studie e Materiali di Archceologia e Numismatica, vol. i., Pantala i.
Fig. 16, p. 48
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631
the silver-white mantle or veil (apyvfeov (frapos) worn by Kronos, the year girdle, the covering helmet of invisibility (,fcaXvTTTpr}) and the double axe (prekeKvs) of the Carian Zeus, the Cretan Itanos x. His voyage from Ogygia to Scheria, the land of Alkinoos, the god of the thirteen-months year, was one of twenty-one days 1 2, the month of the seventeen- months year, the temporary year which finally became that of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each. On the eighteenth day his raft was wrecked by the storm sent by Poseidon on his return from the ^Ethiopian realms of the Southern sun of winter, and he was saved by Ino or Lencothea in the shape of a seagull, who told him to divest himself of his solar garments and to trust to the Kredemnon she gave him for safety 3. After two days and two nights in the water, during which he was supported by the Kredemnon 4, he reached the Phaeacian coast on the twentieth day, and slept, after throwing the Kredemnon into the sea, on a bed made of the leaves of the wild (<pv\ii7) and cultured olive 5, before, on the twenty-first day, he was found as the sun of the zodiacal chain of stars rising from Pisces, to be the sun of the thirteen-months year saved from the sea by Nausicaa, the sun-maiden. Ino in this story appears in her original form of the cloud-bird bringing the storms from the South, the home of the Southern constellation of Cetus, the Whale, the storms which were driving the sun Northward. It is in her other form of the goddess Scylla that we find the classical story of Ino as the goddess of the South dwelling in the constellation of the Whale. In this phase of her history she appears again in the Odyssey as connected with Odusseus in his adventures as a year-god before he reached the island of Ogygia, wherein he dwelt as the concealed sun-god of the cycle and eleven-months year. Ino as Scylla is depicted in the Odyssey as a monstrous whale (K7]TOS?) barking like a dog, who dwells in a
1 Homer, Odyssey, v. 228—236.   2 Ibid., v. 34.   3 Ibid., v. 279—376.
4 Ibid., v. 388.   5 Ibid., v. 477.
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cave in the straits between Italy and Sicily. She is said to have twelve feet and six heads, each furnished with three rows of teeth, and her name Scylla means the tearer. She exacts a toll of six men, whom she devours, from each ship that approaches her cave while passing through the StraitsJ, and she took this number of victims from the ship of Odus- seus immediately before it reached the land of Trinacria 2. This was the island of the triangle where the three hundred and fifty oxen and three hundred and fifty sheep of the sun were pastured by the nymphs 3. The comrades of Odusseus, after they had consumed the provisions on their ship, killed as sacrifices and ate for seven days these oxen, in spite of his prohibitions. Consequently when they put to sea again the ship was sunk by a storm sent by the gods from the West, and Odusseus alone was saved by lashing himself to the mast and ship’s keel with a rope of ox-hide. This saving girdle and gnomon-tree of the sexless gods of the cycle-year brought him again to the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis, and took him to the rock of the latter goddess, on which grew the world’s tree of the Kushika and Dardanian race, the great wild fig-tree (ipiveos), the tree of Troy, under which lay Charybdis. He clung to the branches of this tree, and thus saved himself from being swallowed up by her when she first drank up the waters of the sea and all they contained three times daily and then vomited them up. He waited there holding on to the branches like a bat (zw/cTepk) till the mast and ship’s keel she had swallowed appeared again, and when they came bound together by the ox-hide rope he dropped on this raft, and using his hands as oars arrived on the tenth day at Ogygia, the world’s navel, the island of Calypso 4.
Here we have clearly a year-story of Odusseus as the year-god before he became the sun-god of the seventeen and thirteen-months year, and the beggar-sun-god who bent the bow of Eurytus, and vanquished the suitors who competed
1 Homer, Odyssey, xii. 84—100. 3 Ibid., xii. 101—136.
2 Ibid., xii. 246.
4 Ibid., 303—452.
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6.33
with him for the rule of the year and the hand of Penelope, who was first the goddess Rohini, queen of the spinning Pleiades, and afterwards the Star Vega, the weaving-sister who wove the web (7rr\vri) of Time. The present episode was subsequent to that in which he became the year-god of the right thigh, whose left had been disabled by the gash of the tooth of the year-boar.
This story of the year-god saved from death by the world’s fig-tree which he grasped, is one evidently concocted, not in the lands and islands of the tideless Mediterranean, but in those washed by the ocean where the tide ebbs and flows daily like the water swallowed by Charybdis and by the Hindu Agastya, the controller of the tides, the star Canopus.
The story of the year-god saved from death by clinging to the branches of the world’s tree appears in its Indian form in that of Bhujyu, the Tugra, the son of the Tugras or Tir- gartas, the men of the three (tri) pits ((garta), who worshipped the Takka trident as the Yiipa or sacrificial stake. This was the weapon of Poseidon, who raised the storm in which Odusseus was saved by Ino. Bhujyu, whose name means either he who bends, the god of the circle of time or the enjoyer or devourer, is, like Odusseus, a time-god of the theology of the year of three seasons and the cycle-year. His story in the Veda is told in several fragments which have to be pieced together. It tells how he was three days and nights in the ocean, and was being carried away by the floods, its swiftly moving tides, when he saved himself by clinging to a tree standing, that of Charybdis, in the midst of the roaring flood of the rushing waters she swallowed. He was taken thence by the circling-bird (.Mriga, Zend Meregh, Hindi Murghi), the year-bird who takes the sun yearly round the Pole. It was sent to his aid by the Ashvins, who were first the Twins Day and Night (Ushasa- nakta), and afterwards the stars Gemini. This bird bore him aloft to heaven as the year-god, and becomes in the variant forms of the story, one ship with a hundred oars, four ships, three waggons with six horses having a hundred
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feet, also winged brown horses, and the special team of the Ashvins, which was, as we have seen, the asses which drew their year’s car h
We have seen that the Twins Day and Night, and the stars Gemini, play a most important part in astronomical time reckonings from the days of the cycle-year downwards, and doubtless, if we had the myth of Bhujyu before us in the same detail as that in which the transformations of Odusseus, the year-god, are told, we should find him spoken of as the year-god or bird drawn by the hundred-oared ship, the constellation Argo, called Satavaesa or that of the hundred creators or rowers, by the four year-ships or four sections of the cycle-year, and by the asses and horses of the sun- god’s chariot, where he would be the counterpart of the bird Garuda, sitting at the back of that of Krishna. We have no indications in the story of Bhujyu to show us the exact date when he first became the year sun-god, who sank at his setting into the roaring waters of the Southern sky ocean, those of the constellation Pisces. But in that section of the story of Odusseus, which is a variant of that of Bhujyu, we ought to be able by the numbers of the oxen and sheep of the sun to locate the age in the history of annual time in which it must be placed.
The three hundred and fifty oxen, and the like number of sheep, making up seven hundred in all, recall the seven hundred and twenty days and nights into which the 360 days of the year-sun-calf born of the moon-cow are divided in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda i. 164, n. Thus the story seems to be one of a year-measurement, like that of the Hindu Karanas, in which there were twelve months of twenty-nine days each, making up a year of 348 days, or twelve days short of the 360 days of the Vedic year. These twelve days were, as we have seen, added to the year by the twelve days’ rest, revel or sleep, of the sun-god, who awoke or rose from the dead to be the sun-god of the new 1
1 Rg. i. 182, 5—7, i. 116, 3—6, i. 117, 14, i. 11S, 6, i. 119, 4.
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635
year born at the winter solstice. The ten days of the year of Odusseus still left uncompleted at the end of the time when he quitted the fields of the 350 slain day oxen, appear to be those which he passed in reaching the world’s tree and the island of Calypso, to which he came on the tenth day*.
Thus the story seems to be a variant of that of the year of the sun-deer, and in this Odusseus’ year the Northern decimal ten was the unit instead of the Southern duodecimal of the deer year. We have already seen that the division of the sun-circle of 360 degrees into tenths was a very ancient custom observed by the Neolithic erectors of the sun-circles of Solwaster in Belgium, and the ancient custom was recalled again to life by the Athenians and Egyptians, who divided their year into thirty-six decades of ten days each. If these decades were grouped into months of thirty-six days each we should have a reproduction of the old Romulean ten- months year of the Roman kings 1 2 3. This is the same year as that called in the Mahabharata the year of the ten daughters of Daksha, named Kirti, Lakshmi, Dhriti, Medha, Pushti, Cradha, Kria, Buddhi, Lajja, and Mati3. They are the wives of Dharma, the god of law and order, the months of the year of the showing-god Daksha, denoting his ten fingers and the tenMivisions of his sun-circle, beginning with the October—November month of the Kirats or Pleiades, and ordered by the boundary-god Lakshman, who marked the course of the year of Rama.
This year, when adapted to the Northern custom of leaving a number of days at the end of the year which were not included in the monthly measurement, would be one of ten months each of thirty-five days divided into seven five-day weeks, followed by the two five-day weeks during which Odusseus went to the island of Ivalypso. These answer to
1   Homer, Odyssey, xii. 447.
2   See for the Romulean Year, Hewitt, ‘ Early History of Northern India,’ Part V. /.R.A.S., 1890, pp. 569, 570.
3   Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Farva, cxvi. p. 189.
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the Vedic days of rest of the sun-god after he had reached the house of Agohya, the Pole Star, at the top of the world’s tree. This was the resting-place of the Ribhus, the makers of the seasonsI, where they lay twelve days among its branches, where Zikum and Europa, the Akkadian and Western mothers, dwelt under the starry veil which covered it, as explained in the Preface, p. xxi.
These ten days made up the three hundred and sixty days, and the division of the year into fives enabled the year regulators to add an extra five-days week to make up the 365 days of the year, an addition which was made in very early times by the Egyptians, as we learn from the story of the killing of Osiris by Set and his seventy-two assistants, that is by the seventy-three weeks of the year.
This reckoning of seventy instead of seventy-two five-day weeks as the number completing the year of months enables us to account for the frequent substitution of seventy for seventy-two as the number of sacred messengers, such as the seventy ruling elders of Israel appointed by Moses 2, who, as in the story of Set, are increased, in Exodus xxiv., to seventy- three by the addition of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu. Similarly the seventy Budela or assistants under-propping the hierarchy of Dervishes, as explained in the Preface, p. xlvi., are increased to seventy-three by the addition of the three head Dervishes, the Kutb, or Pole Star Pillar, and his two Umena or faithful ones.
This year of ten months of thirty-six days each was apparently that of the Ten Star-kings of Babylon, for the 432,000 years of their reign are the number of seconds in the circle of 360 degrees ; and this number is also that of the Hindu Kali-Yuga on which the whole of their calendar is based. It began when the sun was in Hamal a Arietis, the star of the first king Alorus, the king of the Akkadian sheep (In), the sheep of the sun of Odusseus’ year, and the last star of the ten, the star of Xisuthrus, the king of the
1 Eg- iv. 33, 12.
2 Numbers xi. 16.
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63 7
Flood, is Skat in Aquarius T. This is the first star of the thirty stars marking the track of the moon through the first three months of the Akkadian year, beginning in Kislev (November—December), with the entry of the moon into the star Skat in Aquarius. Thence it, during the months of Kislev, Tebet and Sebet, from November—December to January—February, took, according to the words of the Akkadian tablet describing the year, “ the road of the sun,” and this star is also said to be “ a gate to be begun,” in short, the gate through which the young sun-god, nursed by the moon, entered the year 1 2 3.
Thus according to the combined history of the year beginning with the passage of the moon through the thirty stars, which it enters from the star Skat in Aquarius, in November—December, and the year of ten months of the ten kings, beginning when the sun passed from Skat in Aquarius to Aries in November—December, the year was one which began about 10,000 B.C., when the sun entered Aries in November—December. This entry into Aries followed the flood of Marchesvan (October—November), the month of the Flood of Noah, the tenth of the patriarchal kings of Genesis. This began on the seventeenth day of Marchesvan in the six hundredth year of Noah, when he had completed his Ner or Babylonian epoch of 600 years 3. It was at the close of the Flood season, when the sun entered Aries in November—December, that the dove sent forth after the disappearance of the primaeval mother-bird, the raven, announced the birth of the new earth of the olive-tree mother Athene by returning with the olive-leaf in its beak 4. This flood, which thus ushered in the year of the Itonian goddess of the tree of which the year-bed of Odusseus, described in Chapter IV. p. 144, was made, appears to be
1   Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 3S3, 384, 385.
2   R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ‘Tablet of the Thirty Stars.’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, January, 1890.
3   Gen. vi. 11.   « Ibid. viii. 11.
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the same traditional catastrophe as that in which Bhujyu and Odusseus were all but overwhelmed, when Bhujyu was saved by the Ashvin stars Gemini, who sent him a year-car and brought him forth as the risen sun-god who entered Gemini in January—February, after being in Aries in November—December. Similarly Odusseus was finally saved from the Flood by Tno in the form of a seagull, the bird which appears in the Bhujyu legend as the Mriga, or circling year-bird.
The year thus introduced, about 10,000 B.C., began when Vega, the Egyptian goddess Maat, meaning The Truth, was the Pole Star, and this star sacred to the goddess of law and order, was depicted on the jewel-locket worn round the neck of the Egyptian judges 1, answering to the breastplate of the Jewish High-priest. It appeared in Indian historical mythology as the star of the god Dharma, the god of right and justice (dharm), and the husband of the ten daughters of Daksha, the ten months of the year which I have just sketched. This was apparently the year of Ino, and the original form of the thirteen-months year of the thirteen Buddhist Theris, led by Maha Gotami Pajapati, the female form of Prajapati or Orion, the husband of Ino, who was the sister of Semele, mother of Dionysos, son of the Thigh, and the counterpart, as we have seen, of Maga, the mother of the Buddha, the sun-physician.
Ino, as the goddess-mother of the year, the year bird who saved Bhujyu and rescued Odusseus with the zodiacal Kre- demnon, was also the goddess Scylla, represented in the ancient statues I have named as riding on the marine monster or Pistrix, which depicted in primitive pictorial astronomy the Southern constellation Cetis. It is in the form of the goddess with the body of the whale that she appears in the Aineid, where Scylla is described as having a human face, woman’s breasts, the body of a whale (pistrix), the tail of a dolphin, the dolphin mother of Melicertes or Melquarth, and the womb
1 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgypter, pp. 477, 47S.
Appendix C.
^39
of a wolfT, the wolf-mother of the sun-god. But the most significant appearance of the goddess Scylla and her companion whale Pistrix in the /Eneid is that given in the accounts of the race between the Trojan ships. The story of the Alneid is, like those of the Odyssey and Iliad, founded on old historical legends, and among these latter, as I have shown in Chapter VIII. Section C., the chariot-race won by Diomedes at the burial of Patroclus tells a most remarkable history of changes in the year’s reckoning. The year horses which won this race were, as we have there seen, two of those horses of the sun taken by Anchises, the father of tineas, when he substituted six mares for the six horses he stole2, and thus made a year which replaced that of the twelve horses of the sun of Orion’s year by one measured by six paired months, six male and six female, with the thirteenth month described in Rg. i. 164, 15, in the centre. The year games described in the ^Eneid, which correspond to those at the burial of the year-god Patroclus, whom we have seen in Chapter VII. Section H. p. 490, to be a counterpart of the sun-physician, are those which took place on the ninth and last day of the festival held to inaugurate the year of Anchises, the founder of this 3'ear reckoning. It was held at the port in Sicily of Acestes, son of the river Crimisus, who was clothed in the skin of a she-bear 3. This was the first port touched at by the Trojan fleet after it had sailed northward from Africa, leaving the sun-maiden Dido burning on her funeral pyre as the dead-year-goddess, and it was here that the New Year was ushered in, measured by the sun-god of the sons of the rivers and the Great Bear mother constellation, a year beginning with a nine-days festival, reproducing the nine-days week of the cycle-year. The race which, like the chariot-race of Diomedes, began the year games held on this ninth day was that of the four picked ships of the Trojan fleet. These, which were all emblems of successive year 1
1 Virgil, Amid, iii. 424—428.   2 Homer, Iliad, v. 26S— 270
3 Virgil, Amid, v. 1—65.
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reckonings, were (1) The Chimaera, the ship of the cycle- year, the monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon, slain by Bellerophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician of the eleven-months year ; (2) The'Centaur, the Vedic Dadhiank, with the head of a horse and the body of a man, who was in Greece Chiron the Centaur, with the horse’s body and man’s head, and thus both these were personations of the mythology of the eleven- months year ; (3) Pistrix the whale ; and (4) Scylla its head- piece, to which the honours of the race were to fall, and they represented the thirteen-months year of Ino and GotamT Pajapati.
The race, like the Trojan chariot contest, was run on a course representing that of the sun round the zodiac. The solstitial turning-point, which was in the race at Troy the pine or fig-tree of Ilos, was a rock rising from the sea at some distance from the shore. In rounding this rock the Centaur struck on it, broke its oars and was disabled, while the Pistrix passed her and almost caught the Scylla, which won the race, being brought to the winning goal by the hand of Portunus, the god who, as we shall now see, was the son of Ino, who secured the victory of the year-reckoning of his mother, the goddess riding on the back of the whale constellation of the South, the ruler of the mid-month of the thirteen which measured the yearT.
The god Portunus who gained the race for his mother as Athene by confounding the machinations of Apollo Smintheus, the mouse-god, gained the Trojan chariot-race for Diomedes, was originally the god Melicertcs or Mel- quarth, the sun-master (malik) of the city (kctrth), who was awoke from his twelve days’ sleep at the close of his year by the quails who arrived at the winter solstice. He was changed into the god Palaimon or Baal Yam, meaning the god of the seas2, by the descent of his mother into the Southern Ocean, whence the sun rose from the constellation
1   Virgil, sEneid, iv. 104—243.
2   Berard, Origine des Culles Arcadiens, p. 234.
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Pisces to tread the circle of the zodiacal stars. It was as the god of the seas born of the dolphin or womb (Se\(f>v$) mother, the dolphin Apollo, that he became the Etruscan god Portunus, god of the ports depicted as holding the keys of the gates of time. His festival was held at Rome on the 17th of August, almost simultaneously with that of his counterpart the god Vertumnus, ruling the turning (verto) of the year held on the Aventine or the 13th of August1 2. He was the tutelary god of the Etruscan seaport Populonia or Papluna, the city of Papluna or Fufluns, the Etruscan Dionysos, who was identical with the Greek Dionysos, the Roman and Etruscan god Vertumnus, and the god Janus or Dianus with the double-axe of the Carian Zeus, and all were later male forms of the Etruscan mother Voltumna, at whose shrine the annual national councils of Etruria were held 2.
This male god was the sun-god originally born from the mother-tree growing in the Southern mud, and now reborn from the whale or dolphin-mother, the goddess of the Southern Ocean, whose son started on his annual journey from the constellation Pisces. His year coincided with that of Portunus, and their mid-year festival was in August,, answering to that of Lug and Tailltiu, the flower-goddess, to whom the month July—August was dedicated. Hence it began, like that of Lug in February—March, with the entry of the sun into Gemini in that month between 8000 and 9000 B.C., and it is apparently this year which is symbolised in the installation of Odusseus as the year-god rising from the sea by the help of the Kredemnon.
As the outcome of this analysis of these connected myths we see that the drownings of Bhujyu and Odusseus, the god of the year of the sun-horse with the impenetrable armour, before they rose from the sea as sun-gods pursuing their
1   Fowler, The Roman Festivals, pp. 201, 202, 203.
2   Milani, Museo Topografico dell' Etruria, pp. 31, 43—46, 143—145, notes 39,41, 47; Deecke, Etruria, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 634—636; Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, p. 70.
T t
642
Appendix C.
paths through the stars, the myth stories of Ino, Melicertes, Palaimon and Portunus, and the victory of the year-ships of Ino as Scylla, the year-mother riding on the whale, which are told' in the dramatic narratives I have quoted, were intended by their original authors to tell of the contest lasting for thousands of years between the year-gods of the Pole Star and lunar solar-age and the sun-god of the solar epoch. This contest ended in the final victory of the sun-god of the seventeen and thirteen-months year.