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THE RULING RACES OF
PREHISTORIC TIMES
t i'V
• -?
(M^
THE RULING RACES
OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
IN INDIA, SOUTH-WESTERN ASIA
AND SOUTHERN EUROPE
Ay
,lf Fya E W I T T
LATE COMMISSIONER AT CHOTA NAOPORE
4H^
WITH NUMEROUS DIAQRAMS AND MAPS
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS TO THE INDIA OFFICE
14 PARUAMENT STREET, S.W.
»
MDCCCXCIV • ■•
- 2foS/-
S^r *-^ ^ .*
: .* ' I ?4mburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
* « M » • « '
CONTENTS s
. •• •
. * PAGE
PREFACE, . ] , v-lxv
ESSAY I. .
>.
ESSAY II.—
The Primitive Village, its Origin, Growth into the
Province, the City, and the State, and its Methods
of Record, . . .41
ESSAY III.—
The Eariy History of India, South-Western Asia,
Egypt, and Southern Europe, as taught by that
of the worship of the Hindu Soma, the Zend
Haoma, the Assyrian Istar, and the Egyptian
Isis, ...... 134
ESSAY IV.—
Astronomical Mj'ths, showing, on the Evidence of
Early Akkadian Astronomy, how the Hittitos,
Kusliites, and Ku shite-Semites measured tlie
J tfcli • ••••••
330
ESSAY v.—
The History of the Rule of the Kushite-Semite
Races as told in the early forms of tlie Soma
Festival and the worship of tlie Sun-god Ra, . 414
1
d
ii CONTENTS
ESSAY VI.—
PACE
The first coming of the Fire-worshippiog Hera-
cleidae to Greece^ their Conquest of the Dorians
and Semites^ and their Victorious Return as
Worshippers of the Sun-god, 500
INDEX, 573
The Maps are hound in at the end of the volume.
ERRATA
For Maghadas read Maghadas, passim.
For Dbritarashtra, read Dhritarashtra, passim,
/■or Ramayana, read R&mayana, passim,
Elssay I., p. 9, 1. 21^ for Harshesu rettd Horshesu.
„ p. II, 1. iSt/or Puse read Dame.
,, p. 24, 1. I9,ybr Ta'az read Tsi*uz.
» P* 25, 1. i5,y^Damu-zi read DMrnu-zu
Essay li., p. 46, note 3, 1. Z,/or present read personal.
„ p. 80, 1. I2,y!7rfathful taz^/ faithful.
,, p. 122,1. 19, y2?r Barsihadah r^o^ Barhishadah.
Essay III., p. 161, 1. i,/or&(\h read fourih.
,, p. 174, 1. 17, insert Ashvin&u after Gemini.
,, „ 1. 19) siriJ^e out Ashvinau.
p. 180, 1. ii,y^rthese r^^/ their,
p. 190, 1. 30, y^ tuk r^A/tak.
p. 192, 1. 32,y^r Kaoush-aloya read Kaushaloya.
p. 192, 1. ^^for Maka-kosala read Maha-kosala.
,, ,, 1. 30, y^ token rif a/ totem.
„ p. 224, 1. 32, /7r Sakadwipai read Sakadwipa.
„ p. 237, 1. 21j for on read one,
„ p. 246, L 7, for Pegasge read Pagasae.
»» P* 255, 1. 24,y2?r Vivanghvadt r^a</ Vivanghat.
,, p. 262, note I, for Uruash read Urvashi.
,, p. 271, 1. 9t for the read then,
,, „ 1. 10, for the read and,
„ p. 274, 1. 29, for seventh read fourth.
,, p. 276, 1. iStfor Egyptian ri^a^ Assyrian.
,, p. 279, 1. 31, for sacrifice read s&cnficcr,
„ p. 284, 1. 7tfor Malla-rarashtra Ti^a/ Malla-rashtra.
„ p. 286, 1. 16, for who read she,
,, p. 310, 1. 30, yiw conplexity r^a</ complexity.
,, p. 314, 1. 22f for Hor-shehu r^M^ Horshesu.
ft p. 329, 1. 25, y^r communists r^a^ communism.
ft
»t
Hi
iv ERRATA
Essay iv.,p. 340, 1. 2S, /or scsl, the mother goddess read sea. The mother
goddess.
»» p. 361, I. 5,^r son read sun.
„ p. 362, 1. 1 1, y^ with read within.
Essay v., p. 417, 1. l^^for Arayaman read Aryaman.
>f P* 435i !• 24, y^ Yagflas read Yajfias.
>» P* 43^1 1. lit for Paftketi read PaSkti.
„ p. 447, note 7,/tfr Vodha r^^/badha.
,, p. 461, 1. 22,y27r Aitaryea, r^z^ Aitareya.
„ p. 487, note It for on read On.
,, p. 490, note 2, I. 23, strike out that of and read as the God Ram.
Essay vi., p. 506, 1. 6,y^r Vira readVxr^.
If P* 51I1 J' iiy^'' Sarhue r^a</Sarhul.
,, p. 516, 1. '^^ for 9Kipo% read VKipw.
if P* 550* !• 26,y^r Gergon read Geryon.
if P* 554* ^ 23,y27r Vahi^hta Istish r^od^ Vahista Istiah.
»» P' 559> !• 28,yi7r Pasiphae read Pasiphase.
,, p. 561, I. 3i,yi?r Sharvasa fTfoa^ Sharvara*
PREFACE
The Essays in this volume have been written to help those
who, like myself, are trying to trace the paths worn by the
ruling races of the world through the tangled jungles of
past time, and thus to learn the real history of the child-
hood of humanity during the ages when national life began
its troubled journey towards its ultimate and, as yet, unseen
goaL They call especial attention to the chronological
data supplied by social laws and customs, mythic history
and ritual, and prove that these when studied provide
guiding marks from which we can deduce, even in ages
which have been hitherto called prehistoric, the order
in which the leading epoclis of civilisation succeeded one
another. The great discoverers who have distinguished the
Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Ages, and have brought
before our eyes vivid pictures of infant civilised life en-
tombed in the ancient cave dwellings, pile villages, burial-
grounds, and ruined cities of these periods, have already
proved that the history of the past, before national annals
telling of the deeds of individual rulers and leaders of man-
kind began to be written, is not shrouded in impenetrable
darkness. But the local researches for antiquarian remains
have been almost entirely confined to northern countries,
and though they and the history of language tell us a
great deal as to the ethnology, mode of life, progress in
agriculture, handicrafts and trade of these pioneer races.
A
vi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and give us hints as to their religious beliefs and social
organisation, they leave a great deal unexplained, and make
us long for further information, both as to the races whose
relics have been unearthed and as to those Southern people
whose primaeval remains have only been very partially and
incompletely examined. Insight into the facts of early
Southern history is more especially necessary, as most
geologists believe that it is all but certain that the
earliest relics of civilised man will be found in countries
immediately adjoining the Southern Hemisphere. I have
added further proofs in support of this conclusion, for I
have shown that it was in the South that the village com-
munities were first founded, whence provincial and national
government grew. It was immigrants from the South who,
during the Neolithic age, introduced into Europe the agri-
culture they had learnt in these Southern villages, while
North-western Europe was made uninhabitable to tillers of
the soil by the rigorous climate of the Palaeolithic period,
and Southern France was the home of the reindeer, which
can only live in almost perpetual frost and snow.
In looking for the materials available to students of the
history of these founders of society, we must remember that
they were, like their successors, subject to the laws governing
human progress. And these prove that no nation has ever
yet won its spurs e^ a ruler and leader of mankind which
has not demonstrated its right to lead by possessing
social laws binding society together, a national history and
a national religion. The intercourse of human beings as
members of an organised society can only have been made
permanent when it was regulated by the laws laid down by
the representative chieftains who led the people who were
t/> become a united nation out of the wilderness of ignorance
PREFACE vii
and savage licence, when the continuity of social life was
secured by a history of the growth of the nation, and its
disintegration was averted by the sanctions of religion.
Furthermore, all early civilisation which has stood the
test of time was intensely conservative, and it is this
reverence for the past which has ensured the retention
by conquering races of local institutions which have been
shown by the prosperity of their predecessors to be con-
ducive to national welfare. It is to this stubborn conser-
vatism that we owe the conclusive proofs I have brought
forward in these Essays, showing that most of ancient
foundations laid by the first builders of society still survive
in national laws and religion as supports of the more modem
superstructures which have grown out of the rude but stable
edifices of the Past. The primitive antiquity of these sur-
viving relics of vanished races is proved by the study of
their social laws and institutions, religious ritual, and the
mythic tales which formed the earliest history ; and it
is from them that we can, as I show in these Essays,
deduce the proofs which make it certain that the village
communities originated in India, and that this communal
system, together with the matriarchal form of government
instituted by their founders, were brought by the Indian
cultivating races and their allies into Europe.
Following in the footsteps of Mannhardt and other
scholars who have accepted his guidance, I have shown
that the traditional history derived from the earliest forms
of mythic stories and popular tales, and from local customs,
coincides with that deduced from a study of ancient law,
antiquarian remains, philology, historical botany and zoology,
and early astronomy. Also, that these conclusions as to the
£Gu:ts of early history are confirmed by the ritual of the
viii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Akkadians and Egyptians, &s recorded on the tablets and
inscriptions found in Assyria and Egypt, and, as preserved
by later historians, by that of the Hindus and Persians, as
set forth in the Rigveda, Brahmanas, and Zendavesta, and
still retained in their antiquated fomis as popular rites,
and by that of the Semites and Greeks.
But I must here add to what I liave already said on the
subject, in so many places in these Essays, a further defence
of the accuracy of mythological history, for it is upon it
that a very large part of any intimate knowledge of the past
must ultimately be based. And though many inquirers
regard myths when rightly used as valuable guides to the
historian, yet one school of literary critics maintains that
their claims to teach genuine history is not proven, and that
the weiglit of evidence is in favour of the doctrine that these
stories were from the beginning tales framed to amuse a
lotus-eating population of lazy savages, and that they are
only worth notice as specimens of early poetic thought.
When we consider that very many, if not the majority
of these tales, liave been tracked in more or less variant
forms from nation to nation, and found to be cherished
as precious popular possessions almost everywhere through-
out the world, they are at once proved by this wide diffusion
to date from an immeasurably remote period, and it is im-
possible to believe that they could have been preserved
through these countless ages and prized by innumerable
generations of human beings if they were originally merely
stories intended for amusement. The retention of the
original incidents is in itself a proof that they must
once have been guarded by a religious sanction or taboo:>
forbidding their alteration, or else they would, like the
stories told in the game of Russian Scandal, have soon, in
PREFACE IX
passing from mouth to mouth, lost all semblance of their
original form. Furthermore, when we remember that it
was not only idle, unprogressive savages, but the pioneers
of civilisation who showed their appreciation of the value
of these tales by preserving them and adding to their
number, we have only to picture to ourselves the mode
of life of the first founders of civilised existence to see
that they would not have troubled themselves about these
stories, further than as a source of temporary amusement,
if they were devoid of practical value. These men had to
begin their work in the darkness of ignorance and the
infancy of untrained faculties, and had to do tasks which
would have fully occupied the time of practised experts, and
it is therefore clearly impossible to believe that these busy,
earnest, and practical people would have wasted their leisure
time in framing tales merely intended for amusement. Their
physical tasks could have left no time for mere brain-work
unconnected with pressing wants. They had to clear their
fields from forests, to learn the art of tracking, trapping,
snaring, killing, and hunting the game wliich destroyed their
crops, and which, with the fish they caught, added to their
supplies of food ; to make the first rude tools of stone and
wood, to build houses, organise social life in their villages,
unite allied villages into provinces, and provinces into larger
confederations; to learn by experiments the rudiments of
agriculture, how to turn wild grasses, vetches, and jungle
roots, the parents of rice, millets, cereal, and root crops,
into materials for food always available; to ascertain the
times and seasons for sowing, planting, and reaping their
produce, and how to cultivate fruit- trees. They had to
find out the best methods of using the fibres of the fibrous
plants, of which the flax grown in the Neolithic villages is
i
X RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
a specimen ; to invent the art of spinning these vegetable
fibres into thread and weaving them into linen, an art which
marked the union of the pastoral and agricultural races, for
vegetable cloth was an imitation of the woollen materials
made by the pastoral tribes from goat and camel hair
and sheep wooL They had to. find out how to irrigate
the dry soils of Northern India and Central Asia by water
raised from rivers, by water-channels and wells, establish
trade and barter by interchanging the products of agri-
cultural and pastoral tribes, found markets and trade routes,
discover how to build boats, and to use rivers for the rapid
transport of their produce. When all these tasks were done
their labours were added to by the greatly increased activity
of trade caused by the discovery, by the mining tribes of the
North of Asia Minor and Cyprus, of the ores of metals, the
methods of extracting metals from the ores, and of working
them when extractetl.
These people found their relaxation not in telling idle
and amusing stories, except as interludes, such as most
people who are worth their salt delight in, but in hunting,
social intercourse, and dances, which, as I show in the history
of the matriarchal customs, were used as a means of cement-
ing alliances between confederated villages, and in the rudi-
mentary scenic ceremonies connected with the propitiation
of the parent gods of their own villages and the driving
away of the hostile and malignant powers who brought
storms, fires, floods, and pestilences.
Whence then, it will be asked, did these elaborate mythic
tales arise ? The answer, as I show fully in the Essays, will
be clear to those who realise the practical earnestness of
these pioneer races. They meant that the work which had
cost them so much trouble should last and bear fruit in new
PREFACE xi
improvements, and, therefore, they did not content them-
selves with securing present comfort, but provided for the
future prosperity of their children. As the Indian Dravidians
still do, they looked carefully after their education, and
thought that one of the most important tasks they had to
fulfil was that of teaching the knowledge they had acquired
to the young of both sexes. In every village, as I have
shown in Essay ui., the rising generation was trained by
their mothers and maternal uncles, and it was from the
teaching instincts thus developed that the folk-tale, and the
national proverbs, which are as ubiquitous as the folk-tale,
originated. An analysis of the earliest of these stories, which
do not profess to be historical, will show that almost all of
them are connected with the explanation of natural pheno-
mena, and that they generally are the product of the brains
of agricultural or hunting races who had keen mercantile
instincts. For whenever these stories have individuals for
their heroes they almost always turn on the idea that
happiness must follow the possession of riches. Some are
too manifestly nature myths, telling of the course of the
year, a subject of vital importance to the farming tribes for
this ending to appear. One of these is that which tells how
Proserpine, the daughter of the barley-mother Demeter was
carried off in the autumn and detained six months in the
under-world by Hades, and another is its complementary
story which, in the earliest form, relates how the god of
spring who brought the April showers, our St. George, slew
the dragon of winter which froze up the rain. These mani-
festly tell of the two seasons of the early year of the
Southern races after it had been transported to the Northern
Hemisphere, which I have described in Essay ii. This year
was divided into two periods of six months each, marked by
xii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the appearance of the Pleiades above the horizon at sunset
in November, the Southern spring, and their disappearance
beh>w it at the spring-time of the North in April.
Other stories, again, like that which tells how the Sleeping
Beauty, the earth, was kissed into waking life by the spring
prince, the young sun-god, repeat a similar year-story in less
definite language. But tlie meaning of the series of stories,
which apparently form the most numerous group in the
folk fairy tales, those telling of the three brothers, the
three sisters, and the three tasks, of wliich the Cinderella
story and its variants is probably the most widely spread, is
not so immediately evident. It can only be discerned that
these stories depict the work of the three seasons of the
mother-year of the barley-growing races, and the final
victory of the youngest season, the winter, which gives
birth to future life, when the important part assigned in
old mythic history to the year of three seasons which
succeeded that of two is fully understood, and when it is
realised that the barley-growing races who completed their
national education in Asia Minor, invariably traced their
descent from the three mother-goddesses, the three seasons.
They depicted this primaeval Triad in the triangle inscribed
on the earliest altar to the mother-earth, and used it as the
first visible symbol representing the parent god, the author
of all life. Tliis Triad was the ancestor of our dogmas of
the Trinity and of all the Triads worshipped by the Hindus,
Akkadians, Semites, Egyptians, and Greeks. It is this
symbol which, as I show in Essay in., appears not only on
the earth-altars made according to the pattern prescribed in
the Indian Brahmanas, but also in the earliest images of
Apollo Aguieus, the triangular stella? or truncated cones
which appear on Phoenician coins as symbols of the divinity,
PREFACE xiii
and which, we are told by the historian El Masudi, all the
Arabians worshipped,^ and in the similar apsidal towers
erected by the Kabiri at Hadjiarkim in Malta, and the
*Nuraghs' of Sardinia,^ together with the tower of the
Midianites called Pen-u-el, the Face of God, which was
destroyed by Gideon.* This symbol, as I show in Essay in.,
also appears on the images of the mother-goddess found in
the oldest but one of the Trojan cities of the Bronze Age,
and on tombs in Mesopotamia, Cyprus, and the Cyclades.
But earlier still even than the triangle is the sign for woman,
meaning * the great mother,** the three-formed goddess, which
appears in the Akkadian ideograph used at Telloh, and that
in old Chinese t^^ This is still used in India in even a less
developed form as ^ and it is this which is the parent of the
Trisula, the trident of the sea father-god which implants life
in the earth.
But the stories which bring down to us the verbal forms
telling the history of the mother-year, which was afterwards
more obscurely symbolised in the sacred triangle and trisula,
contain, besides the main incidents, a number of accessories,,
such as the animals which help the heroes and heroines,,
the magic dresses and other additions which can only be
explained as giving indications of the close alliance of a
number of originally alien tribes who believed in witch-
craft ; and this points to the age of these additions to the
original stories as that in which the great national con-
* Bent, Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, new edition, chaps, iv. and v. pp.
ii6, 149, 150.
* Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edit., Art. * Malta and Sardinia,' vol. xv.
p. 341, xxi. p. 309.
' Judges viii. 7-9.
* Amiaud et Mechinseau's Tableau Comparh des Etriturcs Babylonienncs
et Assyriennesy No. 163, p. 65.
xiv RULING KACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
federation called the union of the Eushika and the Mashada.
the sons of the tortoise, and the fire-worshippers, was gathered
round the mother-mountain of the East.
It was when village life expanded into this primaeval
empire ruled by the Kushika or Kauravya, the sons of the
tortoise {kush or lcur)y that the village teachers, local priests
and wise women prophetesses, who had been guardians of
the national traditional tales, became the national Asipu,
the diviners, interpreters, and accredited framers of verbal
histories, who were called by the Hindus Prashastri, or teach-
ing priests. They were trained and consecrated to the office,
and were looked on as divinely inspired persons, who not
only retained in their memories records of past events, but
were also augurs or foretellers of the future, who learnt the
meaning of the indications given by the flight when alive,
and by the entrails when dead, of the mother-birds who
brought their spring to the Northern children and the rains
to those of India. They were the ancestors of the special
castes of priestly colleges in India and Egypt, of the Magi
of Persia and Assyria, and of the Augurs of Rome, who,
besides their functions as national historians and di\dners,
were also organisers of the national ritual. This in their
hands, as I show in these Essays, became, like the national
tales, a vehicle of historical information, and it was in con-
nection with this branch of their duties that they began to
ittudy astronomy as a means of teaching them how to ascer-
tain and predict the times when the seasons changed, and to
fix the annual recurrence of the days appointed for the
public A'fitivaU. They were the chief advisers of the kings,
or rather, m'cxind kings themselves, when the office of king
and high priest, wliich Imd been combined in the early
PatcHi or priest-kings of the Euphratean countries, Palestine,
PREFACE XV
and Egypt, was divided, and two kings were appointed, like
the twin kings of the Spartans and the hereditary Rajas,
aided by the hereditary Sena-pati or commanders-in-chief of
the Indian Dravidian races, whose national customs were, as
I show in Essay in., reproduced in Laconia.
The order of the succession of the different families of
priests arising out of the changes caused by the elaboration
of religious doctrine is given in the three lines of the Hindu
priests and the three families of the tribe of Levi in the
Semitic ritual. The earliest of these were the Hindu Bhri-gu
or priests of the mother-goddess, the earth, and the father
fire-god. They stood at the basis of the ritualistic system,
and like the Jewish Merari, whose name means * the bitter
or unhappy,** and who had charge of the posts, boards, and
pillars or foundational supports of the tabernacle.^ They
were the priests of the earliest dawn of ritualistic worship.
This, as I show in Essay iii., originated in prayers for rain,
and the name * bitter"* given to the Merari points to the
Jewish cleansing bunch of hyssop, which I have traced as
the direct descendant of the rain-making magic wand, the
original prastara. They became in Phrygian and Akkadian
ritual the Tagaru or elders of the Sumerians, also called
Kali or * the illustrious,** who were the Galli of Phrygia, the
priests of the fire-god, and these were, both in South-western
Asia and India, eunuch priests. But Indian ritual tells us of
a time when the Neshtri, the successors of the consecrated
maidens of Istar and the village dancers, the priests of the
supreme god Tvashtar were not unsexed, while their associate
the Agnidhra, or priest of the fire-god, was like his brethren
elsewhere, an unmanned priest ; ^ and the sign of duality, tva^
^ Gesenius, Thesaurtts^ s.v. 'Merari;' Numbers iii. 36-38.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 62 note 3, 63 ; Eggeling,
Sat, Brdk, iv. 4, 2, 16 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 367, 368.
i
xvi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
in the name of Tvashtar seems to denote the age of liis
supremacy as that before the worsliip of the fire-god when
time was measured by the Pleiades year of two seasons.
The Bhri-gu were succeeded by the Afigiras or oflferers of
burnt-offerings (anga)^ who were the Adhvaryu, or heads
of the sacrifices in the Hindu ritual of the Brahmanas and
the Makkhu or great ones, the priests of the goddess Maga
in that of the Akkadians. They were the augurs or inter-
preters of the messages sent to her votaries by the wonder-
working mother of fire through the indications of the sacri-
ficial victims, and they were the Gershom of the Hebrew
ritual, the eldest son of Moses, Levi, and Manasseh, whose
name meant the outcasts.^ They had charge of the cover-
ings of the tabernacle,^ showing that they were priests of
the God of Heaven, the god Krishanu, the archer-bearer of
the heavenly bow, the rainbow god of storms and showers.
They were deposed from their supremacy by the sons of
Kohath, the prophet-priests, the sons of Aaron, meaning Hhe
ark or chest,' * the priests of the god of the oracle issuing
from the breast or * ephod ' of the Almighty, the magic
priestly robe of office consecrated to the divine service after
Gideon had destroyed Pen-u-el, the tower of the Face of
God, the triangular symbol of the worship of the anthropo-
morphic gods.* The supremacy of the Kohathites was gained,
as I show in Essays iir. and v., by their alliance with the sons
of Judah and Caleb, the dog (Jcalb) of the fire-worshippei-s.
These Semitic Kohathites, the Armenian Kahanai, were
among the Hindus and Zends, the Atharvans or Athravans,
the priests of the heavenly fire-god, Atar or Atri, the devour-
^ Gesenius, Thesaurus ; Ex. ii. 22, vi. i6 ; Judges xviii. 30.
- Numbers iii. 24-26.
•* Gesenius, Thesaurus^ s.v. * Aaron.* ^ Judges viii. 27, 28.
PREFACE xvii
ing (ad) three (tri), the god of the year of three seasons,
the spirit father-god who became in later theology the Nun
or fish-god of the Akkadians, Jews, and Egyptians, who im-
pregnated the year of three seasons with life. It was they
who were the Ho-tar or pourers (hu) of libations, who were
the reciting priests of the ritual of the Brahmanas, and who
took over the work of reciting and preserving history which
had before been combined with the duties of the Bhri-gu
and Angiras, and became the Asipu of the Akkadians,
the Prashashtri of the Hindus, and the sons of Joseph of
the Jews. It was from the ranks of these three orders that
the Hindu caste of Brahmins and the Hebrew tribe of
Levi were formed.
These priestly historians, who had become the sons of Shem,
the name, when framing nature myths, and changing those
formerly made into national histories, began the custom of
giving names to the mythic heroes, thus showing that they
belonged to the age when the fear of mentioning names,
which might lead to danger to the person named from
private feuds, had passed away. The names, however, in
historical myths, never denoted individuals, but personified
ideas describing epochs, and their meaning, as I show in
Essays i. and ii., give a clew to the purport of the story in
which they appeared. It is names thus formed which are
those of the fathers and mothers named in the primitive
genealogies of the Jews. One of the earliest instances of this
process, to which I have several times called attention in
these Essays, is the transformation of the myth of the three
mother-seasons into one which told of the union of the
Northern and Southern races, under the names of Lamech,
the Akkadian and Hindu father-god Lamga or Linga, and
his two wives, Adah, the Akkadian, Edu, the darkness, the
11
i
xviii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Nortliem winter-mother of the young sun-god, and Zillah,
the Akkadian Tsil-lu or Tsir-lu, the Southern mother of the
snake {tsir) race (lu).
It was from the union of these races that the sons of the
rivers, the people called in Genesis the Hebrew sons of Eber,
the grandson of Arpachsad, meaning Armenia, and in their
original home in Georgia or Armenia, Ibai-erri, the people
(erri) of the rivers {Ibai)^ the Iberian or Basques, were born.
It is in the mythic history of their birth that we find a most
marvellous instance of a widespread historical myth which,
in its earliest form, was a nature myth, dating back to the
beginning of cereal cultivation in the North. Tlie two
mother-goddesses who are called in Genesis Adah and Zillah
were those more universally known as Is-tar and Sar. I
have traced the mythological descent of Is-tar at great length
in Essay in., and have also shown the transformations of the
goddess Sar after she became the cloud-goddess of Armenia.
It is here that I must set forth the stages of her earlier
descents as mother-goddess of the confederated barley-grow-
ing races of Asia Minor. The Iberians, also known as
Basques, meaning the sons of the forest or village {baso)^
are by tliis last name shown to count among their ancestors,
the Indian villagers, the sons of the tree and Southern snake.
'Jliey were, as I show in Essay iii., the first growers of wheat,
Iwirley, and other Northern cereal crops, and they called
wheat Ogai, meaning the material (Jcai) for bread {ogi\ or
(Jari, meaning tlie summer grain ripening in the hot season
iffur)^ anil this last name ' Gari,' is still used by the Aj-me-
' i'lKU. xi. 12-14.
"* Thin and nil other interpretations of Basque names, for which I have
lf/il ifivcn other authorities, are taken from Van £ys' Dictiotittaire Basque-
PREl'ACE xix
nians to denote barley.^ They, like the wheat and barley
growers of India at the present day, lived on bread made
of the grain 'they gi*ew, and hence grain was to them
the staff or bread of life, the father of the race, tlie god
Linga.
But before grain was made into bread, it had to be sepa-
rated from the husk, and this was done by throwing it from
liaskets against the wind, so as to winnow it. These baskets
were the Greek Liknos and the Latin Van n us of the Bacchic
processions, the fan-shaped basket in which were carried the
sacrificial utensils and the Jirst JruitSy the symbol of the
Semitic sacrifice of the eldest son. The mention of them
togetlicr with the hurdles of Arbutus wood in Virgil's list
of the paraphernalia of the festival of the Eleusinian mother,
the barley-goddess, Demeter, shows not only that they had
a mystic meaning, but also gives a clew to their mythic
history. He speaks of the *Arbuteae crates et mystica
vannus lacchi.*" - Here the crates or hurdles are described
as made of Arbutus wood, an evergreen tree, and in its
name we find the same root, ra or ar, denoting the Northern
sun Ra as an artificer, which appears in that of the Sanskrit
Kibhus, the Greek Orpheus, and the Hebrew Arba, meaning
four. In the sacrificial ceremony marked as mystic by the
epithet given to the Vannus or winnowing fan, the grain
was, after it had been trodden out by oxen, winnowed in the
scjuare enclosure railed off from the rest of the threshing-
floor by hurdles of Arbutus, the evergreen tree sacred to the
four makers or artificers, the earthly fire and sun-god of the
year of four seasons. TTie grain stored in this consecrated
^ Transactions of Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, Minas
TcWraz, * Notes sur la Mythologie Armenienne Akhbour,* Sect x., Anthro-
pology and Mythology, iii. vol. ii. p. 824.
* Virgil, Geor, i. 166^
i
XX RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
enclosure was that which had been cleansed of its impurities
and released from its cradle, the husk, and which had thus
become the full-grown son of the barley-mother lacchus,
whose name means the * moving ^-god (Jaksh), the fatlier of
life to the sons of the rivers. But the grain could never
have come to maturity without the protection of the mother-
husk or sheath, and it and the winnowing basket which held^
before their separation, the aged and withered mother-husk
united to her son, were both regarded with reverence. Thus
the basket became the symbol of the mystic mother-husk, the
cradle in which the grain was swung in the breeze during
the process of growing and ripening, and hence it is that in
the Gond Song of Lingaly the god Lingal, the Hebrew
Lamech, was swung by the seven days of the week, the seven
wives of the four original Gonds, tlie season-gods of the year
of four seasons whom he had trained to be growers of rice
and founders of villages.^
This swinging of the infant-god in the winnowing basket,
his cnulle, is still celebrated in India on the 3il of the light
half, or about the 18th of Sravan (July-August),- the month
couKccrated to the serpent-mothers of the matriarchal age.
This reverence for the basket as the cradle whence the
young father-god, the Bread of Life, the husked grain,
stepped forth to be the father of the corn-growing and corn-
eating races, must have come down from the original wheat
and barley growers, the Basques, who spoke an agglutinative
language akin to tliat now spoken by their descendants.
IIcfiicL* it is to Basque we must look for the original name of
the b/isket-mother. Tliis is found in the name Sare or Zare,
' Mislop, Ahoni^^inal Tribes of the Central Provifues^ 'Song of Langal,*
C«nto ii. 338-438.
• !•'. S. Growse, McUhuray A District Memoir, * Festivals at Brindabun,*
P' 247-
PREFACE xxi
meaning a basket, and its root is the same as that of Zarika
or Sarats, meaning * osier,^ which becomes in the Latin Salix,
with the same meaning. It was, tlierefore, from tlie osiers
growing round the sources of the mother-rivers of the
Iberian race of Asia Minor, sons of the twin-gods Day and
Night, born on the Xanthus, or yellow river, whence the
yellow men sprang, that they took the name of the goddess
Sar or Shar or Tzar, the basket-mother of the grain which
was the father of the descendants of the sons of the rivers,
and it was these same people who originated this myth who
made that, telling how the seven Heliadse, or daughters of
the sun, the sisters of Fhaethon, the god of the burning and
destroying summer of the South, were changed into the poplar
trees,^ which belong to the same order of Salicacecc as the
willows, and also line the rivers of Asia Minor, where they
are worshipped as parent-trees by the Armenians.^ It was
this goddess-mother Sar of the Basques of Asia Minor, the
land of copper, who became the goddess - mother of the
Akkadians, called * Sala with the copper hand,"* the wife of
I)umu-zi, the young sun-god at Eridu, the great Eupliratean
port,' and her name also appears in that of the Akkadian
god Serakh, the god of corn, wlio is said to be the spirit of
I-shara, the Home of Bar or Shar.*
In this genealogy of the goddess Sar, the corn-goddess,
daughter of the willow, we see the origin of the symbol of
^ Encyclopadia Britannica, Art. * Phaethon,* vol. xviii. p. 727 ; Hyguras
Fabulay cliv.
* Minas Tchdraz, 'Notes sur la Mythologie Armenienne.' Arbres Sacr^s
says that the parent-trees worshipped by the Armenians are the Sos, the
Silver Poplar, and another poplar called the *Pardi,* Transactions of the
J^inth International Congress of Orientalists^ Sect. x. * Anthropology and
Afythology/ vol. ii. p. 826.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 212.
* Ibid, p. 134 note i.
i
xxii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the reed cradle in which all the fathers and leaders of the
great tortoise or Kushite race were consigned to the guar-
dianship of the rivers.
But, far as we have tracked the myth of the goddess Sar,
we have not yet reached the original seed-bed of the story.
The name Sar, Tzar, or Shar is clearly one which shows
traces of being a Southern sibilant form of an original
Northern syllable containing a guttural, and I have also
shown that the goddess Sar was originally looked on as the
husk or sheath of the seed. This brings us to the English
word * shard,' meaning the wing-case or husk of a beetle,
and the original form of this word * shard' appears in the
Low German skaard, the Icelandic skard^ the High German
scharte^ and they mean, like * sherd ** in our * potsherd,** a
piece of pottery. The trade of the potter originated in tlie
North, and it was by this invention that the Northern races
supplied themselves with the vessels for carrying liquids
which Southern forest races found ready^to their hands in
the gourds and hollow bamboos, to which they added the
goat-skin bags tanned by the bark of the Southern forest
trees. Therefore before the goddess-mother of the grain
became an osier basket, she must have been called in an
earlier age, by the Northern section of the united confederacy
of the sons of the rivers, an earthen jar or vessel. It'^is
these united Northern and Southern races who appear in tlie
Mahabhurata and Brahmanas as the worshippers of the jar
containing originally both the seed-grain and that husked
for bread-making, and this became the Drona-kalasha or
vessel in which the Soma, the seed or sap of life, was mixed.
This is, at the Soma festival, worshipped as the god called in
the ritual in the Brahmanas Prajapati, the lord (pati) of
living beings {prqja\ who makes the seasons, the god Ka^
PREFACE xxiii
that is, the god who infused the soul of life (ka) into the
grain.^ Drona, bom of the jar, becomes in the Mahabharata
the tutor of the young Kauravya or tortoise, and the
Pandava or sun-princes, and he is called the * pot-bom ^ son
of Bharad-vaja, the lark, the bird of heaven bom from the
seed of the gods, the grain placed in an earthen vessel.^
Hence it is perfectly clear that the myth, which arose in
Asia Minor, and made the barley and wheat growing races
sons of the seed-grain stored in earthen jars, was one that
they brought with them to India. Tliis is made still more
certain when we remember that Drona is the father of the
Kauravya leader called Ashvatthaman, the Ash vattlia orFicus
reUgiosa^ the father-tree of the Buddhists, and of the genera-
tions of religious teachers, of whom Gautama Buddha is the
first individual whose existence is a certain fact. Ash vat-
thaman, at the close of the war between the Kauravyas
and Pandavas, killed Drislithadyumna, meaning the * seen *
(driskthd) briglit one {dywntia)^ the miraculously born king
of the Pafichalas or five- (punch) headed Naga race, whom I
have shown in Essay in. to be the sacrificial flame of the
altar of burnt offering, together with his brother or sister,
the bisexual god Shikhandin, the Somakas, idolatrous woi>
shippers of Soma, the seed of life, and all tlie sons of the
Pandava princes,^ except the son of Arjuna, tlie fair {arjtin)
prince called Phalguni, or the young bull-god, the fruit
(phul) of the plougliing race, and, therefore, the grain-god,
and Su-bhadra, meaning the blessed Su, or sap of life. She,
as I show in Essay iv., was the mountain-goddess, the
counterpart of Durga, the twin sister of Krishna, the black
^ Eggcling, So/. Brdh, iv. 3, i, 6; iv. 5, 5, 11 ; iv. 5, 6, 4 ; S.B.E.
vol. xxvi. pp. 318, 408, 410.
* Mahabharata AdI {Sambhava) Parva, Ixxxi. pp. 383-386.
• Ibiii, Sauptika Parva, viii. pp. 24-34.
A
xxiv RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
antelope, and also of the mother of the sons of the cow, the
Phrygian mother-goddess Ida or Ira, whose name appears in
Basque as Iru (three), that is, the mother-year of three seasons,
all of which appear on the mountain, in its snowy summit of
winter, the cool spring half-way down, ending with summer
at its foot. Hence the barley-growing races, whose royal
stock was left by the father-tree of righteousness to rule the
land, were the sons of the year of three seasons, and the
young bull-god reared on the corn preserved in the mother-
jar. It is this myth, which is again exactly reproduced in
that of Ab-ram and Sara, in which the sun-god Ra or Ram,
the son of Terah, the antelope of Nahor, or the Euplirates,
becomes by Sara the withered Imsk which nurses tlie seed
grain in its growth out of the earth, the father of Isaac, the
* laughing'^ corn-stalk crowned with its ripe ear. He is
the blind house-pole father of the generations of barley-
growers born from his twin sons Esau, the goat-god, and liis
Hittite wives, parents of the sons of Edom, or the red earth,
the home of the red race, and from Ya-kob, the sun water-
god la, and his wives Leah, the wild cow, and Rachel, the
ewe, daughters of Laban, the moon-god of Haran. They
were the mothers of the law-abiding plougliing race, the
sons of the bull and wild cow, and the prophet shepherd
sons of the sheep-mother and the ram, the sun-god conse-
crated to Varuna, the god of the rain {var)^ and of the dark
heaven of night. The race thus bom was that of the
Semitic traders which constantly strove to make morality
and religion synonymous terms, and who changed the parent-
tree of the trading races, the Vaishya, from the Udumbara
or Ficus glomerata^ the tree out of which the Amshu Gralia,
or cup representing the Soma plant or tree of life, drunk at
^ Isaac means 'laughter.'
PREFACE XXV
the idolatrous Soma sacrifices was made ^ to the Ashvattha
or Pipul-tree, the Ficus religiosa.
But there is also another mythology in which we find the
husked grain worshipped as the parent of life. This is the
^ Eg}^ptian, which makes the sacred beetle {Jchpr\ the scarab,
the symbol of life protected, like the grain, by its * shard,**
and this is sacred to Osiris, the god who taught men how
to grow wheat, barley, and cereal crops. It is as tlie * shard '
or sheath of the year, the winter season, that in the fairy
tales founded on the three seasons, Cinderella, the guardian
jar of the seed grain, the winter marked by her glass or ice
shoe, becomes the wife of the sun-prince, and mother of the
sun-god of the coming year.
It was among the worshippers and sons of the goddess
Sar that the astronomical computation of time, the stages
of which I have traced in Essays iii. and iv., began. And it
was they who fmmed the myth of the twin children of
Saranyu, the goddess Sar, the twins Day and Night, originally
bom on the osier and poplar-lined river Xanthus, the yellow
river of Asia Minor, the mother-river of the yellow race.
It was they who, in Greece, worshipped the goddess Sar, not
only as the mother of the later Erinnyes, but as the twin
Charites who bear her name (khar^sar)^ the two seasons of
the year of the Pleiades, who were the first supreme local
gods of Sparta. And it was this same race who, when they
-declared themselves to be the sons of the god of thought
and measurement (rwna, inen)^ and called themselves Minyans,
established the capital of the coni-growing I'aces at Orcho-
menos in Bceotia. It was then that thev substituted the
year of three seasons for that of two, and made the three
Charites the three mother-goddesses of the year of the
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brah, iv. 6, I, 3 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 424.
A
xxvi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
barley-growers, whose festivals were celebrated with the
dances which the matriarchal section of the confederacy had
brought with them from India.^ They, as the corn-growing
races, became the great irrigators of the ancient world, who
made in Bceotia the stupendous series of underground
channels by which they regulated the flow of the waters of
Lake Copais.^ It was they who, as the Mina^an Sabaeans in
South-western Arabia, built the gigantic dam which irrigated
the lands of MaVib, their capital, the destruction of which
is spoken of as a great national calamity in the Koran .^
Their presence in Egypt is attested by the great barrage of
the Nile made by the first-named king of Egypt, Mena, who
perpetuates the name of their father-god.* In India they
are the sons of Manu and Ida, lUi, or Ira, who covered the
Central Provinces and Southern India with great irrigating
reservoirs such as the great lake at Nowagaon in the
Khandfira district, which is seventeen miles round,^ and the
age during which tliey established their rule in Greece is
marked by the circular beehive tombs at Orchomenos,^
whicli are forms of the round barrows, the distinguishing
marks of the Bronze AgeJ It was these barley-growing
yellow races who, in India, worshipped the goddess-mother
Sar, as the god Hari, son of Har or Sar, bom on the river
Yamuna, the river of the twins (yama). It was they who,
iLs tlie barley-growing races, formed part of the confederacy
of the Ooraons who, as I show in Essay iii., made the barley-
' Encyclopedia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, vol. xi. Art. * Graces,' p. 26.
'■* Ibid, vol. iii. Art. * Boeotia,* p. 854.
' Ibid, vol. xxiv. Art. 'Yemen,* p. 739; Palmer, Qur'dn, xxxiv. 11;
S.B.E., vol. ix. p. 152.
• Encyclopi€dia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, vol. vii. Art. * Egypt,' p. 73i,
• Hunter, Gazetteer of India^ s.v. ' Bhandara,' vol. ii. p. 361.
• Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Exccevationsy chap. v. pp. 299-303.
^ Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Exlition, chap. v. p. 129.
PREFACE xxvii
sowing festival one of their most important seasonal feasts.
It is these tribes which have perpetuated the name of Sar,
their goddess-mother, in that of the village Sarna, consecrated
to the gods of life, and in the name of the Sal-tree, their
parent-tree. It is also the goddess-mother Sar who has
given her name to the Sanskrit autumn season called
* Shar-ad,' and to the Shraddha or funeral feasts of roasted
barley and barley porridge offered at the autumn Pitri-yajiia
or father"*s sacrifice to the fathers of the corn-growing races.
The earliest of these were the Turanian sons of Danu, the
judge called Tur-vasu, or people whose Bas or Vas, the
creating tree-god, was tlie meridian pole. Tliey were also
the Hittites called Khati by the Assyrians, a name meaning
the* joined** race, which they still preserve in the Punjab,
and in their western kingdom of Kathiawar known to Sanskrit
geographers as Sau-rashtra, the kingdom of the Sus, Saus
or Shus, the descendants of Su-bhadra, the blessed Su or
Shu, who was originally, as I show in this Essay and in
Essay iv., the mother-bird ^khu,**^ which brings the rains,
the mother of the Khati, and also of the Kusliite race. It
was in Sau-rashtra, at the holy hill of Pfilitana, that, as I
show in Essays ii. and in., the Jain religion was founded,
which venerated the Ashvattha or Pipul-tree as the mother-
tree of the holy race, and which discarded all sacrifices save
that of the sacrificer himself, who was to die symbolically
as a sacrificial victim, and to be born again in the baptismal
hath of regeneration prescribed for Soma sacrificers, and
^ The syllable x^ {J(fAu) is also represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics by an
Ibb, the sacred bird which was supposed to destroy snakes, and which was
the form in which the original mother storm-bird, the parent god of the sons
of Kush, the tortoise, who succeeded the guardian snake of the matriarchal
races, was worshipped in Egypt. Encyclopccdia Britannica^ Ninth Edition,
voL xi. Art. * Hieroglyphics,' p. 802.
i
xxviii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
thus to acquire the new nature wliich would prompt him to
obey both in deed and spirit the moral law.
It was these descendants of the mother-goddess Sar who
were also called the sons of Kapila, the yellow Prishi or
antelope, that is, of the female antelope, as opposed to the
male, ' the black antelope/ They were the united agricul-
tural races, tlie sons of the fire-god, the Nun, and the
rain - goddess, the mother-bird, the race who, like the
Akkadians of Girsu, adopted for their symbol of god the
fire-cross ~ placed upon the rain-cross X ^^ form the
eight-pointed star ^1^ wliich, in the earliest Akkadian script,
denotes both god ' Dingir ^ and 'Anu or Esh-shu,'* both of
which words mean an ear of corn.^ It was they who first
cleared the forests of Ayodhya or Oude, the land of the god
Rama, the mother (ma) of Ra, who has the plough for his
weapons (ayudha), and tilled the Gangetic valley. They
are called in tlie Zendavesta * the golden-crowned Hitashpa,^
the Iiorses (ashpa) of the Hittites who killed Ur-vakshaya,
the ancient (Ur) speaker {vdkshaya\ a name of Danu, the
judge, who was the eldest of the sons of Sama or Shem, the
traditional ancestor of the Semitic races.* The deatli of
Ur-vakshaya commemorates the change in the reckoning
of time from that which measured it by the voice of the
thunder-god in the storms which precede the rains, and by
the weeks of gestation to that whicli measured it by the
yearly journey of the sun-god from east to west, and west to
east, round the four points of the compass, described in
Essay iv.
^ 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. 685.
2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yaft, 41 ; Ram Yoft^ 42 ; Mill's
Vasna, ix. 10; S.B.E. vols, xxiii. pp. 296, 255, xxxu pp. 223-224.
PREFACE xxix
The races united, as the Khati or Hittites, were those
called by the Hindus Ashura, or believers in six {ash) gods,
the male and female gods of the year of three seasons, and
with those two united races were joined the Gautuma, or
sons of the bull (gut). These became in the list of Hebrew
tribes the sons of Asher — ^the sea-faring dwellers on the coast
of Tyre, a name which reproduced that of their god Tur,
— and of their primitive settlement in the Persian Gulf,Turos,
and the tribe of Gad, the builders of the stone cities of
Bashan, the land of the bull, and of their god Bash or Vash.
These sons of the bull were the first conquering swarm of
the great building race of the Goths, the Getae of Herodotus
and the Jats of India, whose history I have traced in
Efesay V. pp. 480-485.
But further, most convincing proofs of the great historical
value of the evidence given by mythic tales, ritual, and
linguistic changes, are to be found in the myth and ritual
of the worship of Demeter. In the older form of the Eleu-
sinian myth, the gods worshipped were not the barley-mother
and her son, the nurse-child Demophoon, who became the
young lacchus, and was the baked bread or cakes tried in
the fire,^ but the father and mother of the barley-growing
races and their daughter. The mythic history of the wor-
ship of these three parent-gods gives us, as I shall now show,
a complete account of the union of the three races and of
the establishment of their imperial rule under the guidance
of the Gautuma, Guti or Goths. The three gods of the
united confederacy were Plouton {Pluto\ Demeter, and Kore.
The root of Plouton is pel^ in the word ttcXo), * to turn,^ and
^ Demeter, after the loss of Kore or Persephone, became nurse to the
child Demophoon, son of Celeus, and, to make him immortal, placed him
each night in a bath of fire, Encyclopivdia Briiannicay Ninth Edition, Art.
• Eleusinia,' vol. viii. p. 126.
i
XXX RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
this is also the root of our word pole : thus the turning god
means the revolving meridian pole, the god Tur of the Indian
Tur\'ashu, the twin races, the heavenly fire-drill, generating
heat and life by his revolutions. He is the god of the
Maghada fire-worshippers, otherwise called Ra-hu or the
creator Qiu) of Ra, who was originally the sun-god of the
Lithuanians. He is the sun of the South to whom the
maiden Kore or Persephone descends in the winter when the
seed is in the ground.
The name of Demeter, the barley-mother, contains the
root of the Cretan de-al^ barley, and it was in Crete that she
was worshipped as the mother of Plutus or Plouton, and the
wife of Jasion, the Greek form of the Akkadian water-god
la or Ya. In cfe, the root of dc-ai^ we find the original root
of the Greek zeia or zea^ meaning barley. The form zi
which appears in zela., is also found in the Akkadian zi^ life,
and the Basque zi^ an acorn, the seed of the sacred tree of
life of those races whose priests were the tree- {dru) bom
Druids. That the Akkadian and Basque zi represents the
Northern de or di in Demeter, is shown by comparing the
Basque and Akkadian zu^ thou, with the German du and
the English thou. This zi also appears again in the
Hindu y?, life. Thus barley, called de-ai^ means the plant
of life, and the Greek Zeiis and Theos and the Latin Deus^
all mean that the Supreme God is the Spirit of Life {ze^ the^
or cfc'), or life itself, the life which exists in the seed. This
life is shown by the meaning of * brightness ' given to the
root divy formed from ffe, to be the life of daylight and sun-
light which ripened the barley. But the mother of the light
of life was the mother-earth, who was both mother of the
barley and of the Kuru or sons of the tortoise bom from the
barley seed, the maiden Kore or Koure. She was the child
PREFACE xxxi
of the revolving pole and the mother earth, to whom the
pole gives life-giving heat, and she is also the winter-bride
of her fatlier, hidden out of sight below the earth.
The name Kore or Koure comes from kur or Aror, the
Turanian forms of the root gur^ meaning in all its forms,
* bent or curved/ Thus Kore means something *bent or
cur\'ed.'* But it also means a puppet or doll, and this con-
nects the last of the triad of parent-gods, the curved seed
grain with the last slieaf of the harvest, which is in many
countries dressed as a woman and hung up after the harvest-
home to bless the house of the farmer. Her birth as the
daughter of the barley or corn-mother, is distinctly symbol-
ised in a custom of the commune of Saligne, Canton de
Poiret, Vendee, where the farmer's wife, as the corn-mother, is
placed in a blanket with the last sheaf, and the two are
tossed together to represent the winnowing which is to shake
out from the ears of the last sheaf the seed grain, the mother
of life. In West Prussia, which, like East Prussia, was once
the country of the Lithuanians, who woi-ship the sun-god
Ra, the last sheaf is called Hhe corn baby.*" Thus the
original daughter of the earth-mother and the meridian
pole, the parents of the corn-growing races of Asia Minor,
was the seed grain, the corn-mother of the future year. That
the myth in this form was conceived by a Turanian race
speaking an agglutinative language and believing in the
divinity of pairs, is shown by the worship in Java of the first
and last sheaf, as the rice-bride and bridegroom called Padi-
pen-gunten, where the father-sheaf Padi, the foot (pad) or
the begetter (per), is, as in the Greek myth, the Southern
winter sun, and the mother (the Tamil, pen)^ the woman, is
the mother-earth.^
* Frazer, TAe CoUen Bottgh^ vol. i. pp. 33 ff. , 343.
xxxii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
But before this myth was bom in the corn-fields of Asia
Minor, the Northern races traced their birth to the mother-
mountain whence life issued, and it was this mother-moun-
tain which was the first bent or curved mother-goddess
before the swelling grain. This mountain was the mother
kur^ and one form of this root survives in the Persian kohj
meaning mountain. But that the original form was kur or
gur^ is shown in the name of the Kouretes, the dancing
priests of Demeter, the Korubantes of Phrygia. They
watched the birth of her son in Crete, who was first Plutus^
the revolving pole, and afterwards the young Zeus, the god
of the bright day. Tliey were called rpiKopvde^;^ or men
with the three helmets, the tiara ; and this name shows that
they were the priests of the mother-goddess of the three
seasons. They were in Rome called the Salii, the leaping
priests of the Sabine god Quirinus or Kuirinus, whose name
contains the root kur^ and whose festival was held on the
17th of February, at the same time as the lesser Eleusinia at
Athens, and as the great Magh festival of the Gonds, Santals,.
Ooraons, and Mundas is celebrated in Bengal and Northern
India. In these last feasts the dancers are the village
maidens, and they are the prototypes of the unsexed dancing
priests of Phrygia and the consecrated maidens of Istar, the
mother-mountain goddess. These Salii were also the priests
of Mars,- the Etruscan Mas, the god of increase, the Greek
Ploutos, or wealth. He was called by the Sabines Mar-mar,
In this name we find the root mar^ meaning to destroy by
friction, to grind,^ and this identifies him with Plutus, the
^ Eur, Bacch, 123. This was the peaked * tiara,* the distinctive cap of
the Hiltites, Encyclofkvdia Britanmca, Ninth Edition, vol. xii. p. 26, Art.
• Hittitcs,* by Professor T. K. Cheyne.
2 Encyclopicdia Bntannica^ Ninth Edition, vol. xv., Art. * Mars,' p. 510.
' Max Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Language^ Second Series, pp. 314,
316.
PREFACE xxxiii
revolving pole. But the name Mar-mar is all but an exact
repetition of Mer-mer, the Akkadian name of the Assyrian
Semite god, Ram-anu, the god (ana) Ram. He, as I show
in Essay v., was first the Indian Ra-ma, the mother of Ra,
the sun-god, the mother-earth, which was the socket in
which the god of the pole generated life-giving heat, other-
wise called Ur-vasi, the primaeval (ur) creatrix (vasi)y the
wife of Pururavas, the thunder-god. She became the Kushite
and Semite father-god, the son of Kauslialoya, the house
(aloya) or mother of Kush ; the tortoise, as the father-god,
was the revolving pole, the god of time, the god still called
by the Hindus Ram-ram. The revolution of the pole was
apparently symbolised in the transposition of the consonants
which turned Ram-ram into Mar-mar. But whether this is
the real history of the origin of the name Mar-mar or not, it
is at any rate clear that the Salii in their two functions, and
the Kouretes, were the dancing-priests of the mother-moun-
tain and the revolving pole, which last was descended through
the fire-drill from the parent-tree of the village grove. It is
also clear that these two gods were the parents of the sons
of the last sheaf, the com-baby Kore. In the word * corn "
the root hur also appears, for it is the Gothic Kaur-n, and
from this root the word * kernel,'' the inner seed protected by
the outer shell of the nut, also comes. Thus Kore or Koure
is the seed-grain in the mother-mountain. She is tluis the
correlative of the Sala-gramma of the Hindus, the fire-stone,
the mother of fire placed in the centre of the mother-moun-
tain. This stone has in the Hittite sign for Istar A.
become the triangular seed-gi'ain, the cone worshipped as the
sign of the Divinity by the Phoenicians and Kabiri. The
inner seed-triangle in the mother-mountain is the Phoenician
goddess Ba-hu, the creator (/lu) of existence {ba\ who became
• • •
in
xxxiv RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
in Grenesis Bohu, or the void.^ She is the Shamir or wonder-
stone of the Semitic legend, called by iGIian, in the Greek
form of the myth, Troa, the grass. It is said in the Talmud
to be as small as a barley-corn, but to be able to pierce even
the hardest rocks.* TTius this seed of life is clearly the seed
of the sacrificial Kusha grass, which in the Kushite ritual
supplied the *barhis,' or sacred seats of the barley-eating
fathers, to whom the autumn, the barley season, was dedicated,
the parent of the Hindu Kushika, of which I have spoken at
length in Essay iii. But the original seed in the centre of
the mother-mountain was not barley or grass-seed, but the
tire-stone, and I must now trace the history implied in the
transfer of divine power from the fire-stone to the seed.
The root kur appears in the names of the sons of Kur, the
Kurds of Armenia, and the variations of their name show
Jcur^ Jcal^ gor^ and gar, as variant forms of the root, for they
are the Chaldean race, called by the Assyrians Kar-du, Kal-du,
and Gar-du, while gor appears in the name Gordiani. These
point to an original form of the root beginning with the
Northern g^ and this is found in the Basque gar^ fire, and its
primary form, ghar^ means in Sanskrit *to be warm.^ There-
fore the * curved one,' the mother-mountain, must have been
originally the fire-mountain made pregnant and raised by
fire. This is the volcano Mount Ararat, the burning mother-
1 The goddess Ba-hu is the old Slav god Bo-gu, our Bogie, the distributor,
the Santa Claus of nursery mythology, and the earliest form of the name was
Bhu-ghu. This is shown by the Sanskrit Bha-ga and the Zend Ba-gha,
from whence comes the Hindi Bagh, garden. Bhaga in the Rigveda is the
god of the tree of life, the tree with the edible fruit (Jevons, Schrader, Prehts-
toric Antiquities of Aryans^ p. 24; Tiele, Outlines of the History of Ancient
Religions, • Religion among the Wends,* p. 185). The root bhu in Sanskrit
means * to exist.* This god, the Giver of Life, was worshipped by the Phry-
gians as Zeus Bagaios.
2 See the myth given at length. Essay i., pp. 27-30. ^
PREFACE XXXV
mountain of the Armenian Kurds of Kurdistan, whence their
parent-river Kur descends to the Caspian or Kushite sea.
This was the home of the people called by Herodotus' infor-
mants the Massa, or the Greater Getse, whose ethnology
I have discussed in Essay v. One of their original totems
was apparently the ploughing bull and the milk-giving cow,
and they were a mixed race of nomadic herdsmen and agri-
cultural fanners. It was these latter who, on their union
with the pastoral triljes, the sons of the goat, made the
antelope the totem of the united races, which was afterwards
changed to the buU, and these farming races first, as I shall
show presently, called themselves the sons of the enclosing
snake {ahi or ecM8\ and also the sons of the bird. The
dominant tribe among the Kurd confederacy are the agri-
cultural Gar-ans, who speak an Aryan tongue with no Semitic
intermixture. They are growei*s of wheat and barley,
whose name shows that their god * An ' was Gur, the burn-
ing mountain or the household fire, which gave the name
^ur to the house in Hindi. These people, called by the
Assyrian Semites who succeeded them and the Akkadians
-Gur-du and Kal-du, were called by the Akkadian Finns,
who disliked double consonants, and changed the Northern
d into a ^, the Guti, and from this name they took that of
Gutium, the name given by the Akkadians to Assyria. Thus
these Guti were identical with the race of Chaldean astro-
nomers who preceded the Semitic sons of Assor.^ As the
Guti they were the sons of Gut, the bull, but before they
were the sons of a named father they were, as the Gur, the
«)n8 of the wild cow, Gauri, the mother of the Indian Gonds.
They, when they became the Gautuma, the sons of the bull,
^ Efuy, Brif., 9ih edition, vol. xiv., Art. * Kurdistan,' by Sir H. Rawlinson,
pp. 156-159. Lenormant, Chaldean Magic ^ chaps, xxvi. xxvii. pp. 339, 361.
xxxvi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
made Rohini, the red cow, the star Aldebaran, their goddess-
mother, who was also the goddess-mother of the Arabian
sons of Sheba. It was as the Gaurians that they ruled the
Euphratean Delta under the Patesi, or priest-kings of Gir-su,
who ruled the confederations governed by a central city, of
which I have traced the history in Essay ii. They were the
Gond worshippers of the plough-god, Nagur, who, as we
learn from the Song of Lingal^ formed in India the imperial
race of Kurus or Kauravyas, sons of Kur, by uniting the
Maghad&s or flre-worshippers, sons of Mug-ral, the alligator,
with the sonsof Dame, the tortoise, the earlier dwellers in the
land. But lK*fore this they had in their home in Asia Minor
formed the first confederacy of the Kur, and united together
as the Hittites the three races of the fire- worshipping Bhru-
gas or Phru-gas, the matriarchal Amazons, and the sons of the
bird or cow, the Northern Goths. These confederated races,
as I show in Essays iv. and v., were, before they were the
sons of tlie bull or cow, the sons of the goat and antelope,
who traced their origin to the antelope'*s favourite food, the
Kusha grass {Poa cynosuroides) growing on the river banks.
When they had replaced this grass by cora they became the
sons of com, the mother Gauri or Koure. They then called
in India the wild cow, parent of their ploughing cattle, by
the name of Gauri, in memory of the burning mountain,
while in Europe she became Koure, the last sheaf, the emblem
of the winter season, the mother of the future year.
But in this abstract of the mythic history of the barley-
growing races, as gathered from the worship of the barley-
mother, I have not accounted for the ruling race who traced
their descent to the mother-bird Khu, the maker of the
wind which bore her sons, the Shus, on the voyages whence
they gathered the wealth which made them lords of the
PREFACE XXX vii
world, the mother-bird which, by its messengers, the stork,
the rain-bird, and the swallows, brought th^ winds and the
seasons of the year. It was the earliest section of this great
race which intervened as rulers between the fire-worshippers
and the sons of the antelope and cow. I have in Essay i.
shown that the earliest myth, attesting the supremacy of the
rain-god over the god of the fiery cloud which will not give up
its rain, is that which exhibits Horus,.the god of the revolving
pole, as the hawk-headed warrior who kills the dragon or croco-
dile of drought. It is also as sons of the conquering rain-
bird that the Kauravya, or sons of Kur, are said in Indian
mythology to be born from the egg laid by the goddess-
mother Gran-dhari, for she, as I show in Essay iii., is the
goddess Dharti, the goddess of the springs supplied with
water by the vanquished rain-cloud. She is worshipped by
the Cheroos, Kharwars, Santals, Mundas and Ooraons, and it
is through these tribes that we are able to trace the origin
of the hawk-headed Horus, and to show that this myth, like
that of Ra, the god Ha-hu of the Dosadhs, the Magadha
priests, came from India, whither it had been imported from
Asia Minor, to Egypt. The chief totems of the Cheroos,
who, as I have shown in Essay ii., were the chief rulers of
ancient Magadha, are Besra, the hawk, and Kachchhua, the
tortoise, and these totems are repeated among those of the
Gonds, Kharwars, Lobars, or iron workers, Mundas and
Santals, while the Kandhs or Khonds, the swordsmen
conquerors of Orissa, call one of their Gochis (cow-stalls), or
septs, Besringia, and one of their Klambus, or sub-septs,
Besera.^ These tribes were those who first utilised the
mineral wealth of Chota Nagpore, and it is in Egyptian
* Risley, Tribts and Castes of Bengal^ nrpL li. App. I. pp. 35, 54, 68, 78,
94, 103, 125.
xxxviii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
mythology that we find the connection between them and the
hawk explained. The hawk is the emblem of Hat-hor, the
mother of Horus, to whom all mines are sacred. She was
worshipped in the Sinai tic Peninsula, the great mining
country of Egypt, as * the sublime Hat-hor, queen of heaven
and earth, and the dark depths below,** and it was there
that she was associated with the sparrow-hawk of Sopt, the
lord of the East. Mr. Boscawen, when inspecting ancient
Egyptian quarries, found that the hawk was depicted as a
guardian emblem in most of those of an early period. Thus
we see in this emblem of the mother-hawk, as the guardian
goddess of the mining races, a wonderful instance of primaeval
historical metaphor as a source of totemistic names. For
the sons of the hawk were those tribes who possessed the
hawk^s gift of piercing sight and intuitional observation,
which enabled them to discover the treasures hidden by
nature in the rocks beneath the surface of the ground. It
was probably in Asia Minor, where mining originated, that
they first ac(|uired their totemistic name.^ These tribes all
reverence the goddess Dharti, the mother of the tortoise
riuWf and they represent the cultivating yellow races who
pHfireded the sons of the ass, or the Ooraons, the growers of
Unrlvy. It was they who introduced the earliest form of
plough cultivation in the growth of millets, the crops grown
by i\w (f onds of the second immigration, led by Lingal after
Iw Uml \)iHm carried by the black Bindo bird to the creating
ffiountairi of Mahodeo, whence the rains followed the re-
tisMMt of the (fonds.* It was these tribes who, after the
' 7 III* inforiiMtion l» taken from a letter by Mr. W. St. Chad Boscawen,
l/i/immf lit th« Ifrilinh Museum, on Oriental subjects, to Mr. Theodore
Ikof, ')>i//U'l in an article in the Nineteenth Century Afagazitiet December
''^/^ \*\** <^^i* '/^4» Art. ' On the Origin of the Mashonaland Ruins.'
> ^KK lUMjf fif. p. 223.
PREFACE xxxix
fire-worshippers, ruled Magadha, and this country, which
had, before their arrival, been the land of the fire-god and
the witch-mother M aga, became under them the land of the
god Vasu, and he is called in the Mahabharata the king of
Chedi.^ In this name Chedi we find another form of
Cheroo, for a sept of the Bediyas of Behar, one of the forest
races, whose totem is the squirrel, is called Chirya-mar,
Chedi-mar or Chodi-mar, meaning the bird-killers,^ and
Chiriya, the Hindu word for bird, is as clearly allied to the
Basque Cho-ri, meaning bird, as Vasu, Vasuki, or Basuki is
to the name Basque. Thus Chirya, Chedi and Chodi are
different words for bird, and the land of Chedi means the
land of the bird, and that of Cheroos the sons of the bird,
and that this bird was the hawk I shall now proceed to
show; for it was the hawk which, in the birth legend of
the fish-god in the Mahabharata, carried the seed of life
from the father-god Vasu to the mother of the sacred fish,
Adrika, meaning the rock.^ The hawk was thus the parent
of Adrika^s children, the twin fish-gods Satya-vati, the
mother-fish, and Matsya, the fish-father, and of the hawk-
headed Horus of the Egyptians, who was the son of the
Southern goddess Hat-hor, meaning the house (hat) of Hor.
The dwellers in the bird land of Chedi were also called
Kashu or Kushu, for in the Rigveda the king of the Chedi
is called Kasu.^
In Essay rv. I have shown that among the Egyptians the
vulture or storm-bird ruled the year beginning with the
summer solstice and the rains of northern India, and this
^ Mahabharata Ad! {Adivanfhavaiama) Parva, Ixiii. p. 171.
* Risley, Trihes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. i. p. 206.
* Mahabharata Adi {Adivanskavatarna) Parva, Ixiii. pp. 174, 175.
* Rigveda, viii. $, 37.
xl RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
was the bird which, like the hawk-headed Horus in the
Egyptian bas-relief in the Louvre, brought the rain out of
the cloud to the rock-mother, whence she became the parents
of the fish-god. This year, ushered in by the raih-bird, is
that symbolised in the Mahabharata in ShishupiOa, king of
Chedi, the commander-in-chief of the armies of Jarasandha,
king of Magadha. His name means the nourisher (paJa) of
children {shishu\ and he is the bird-king of the year of the
bird representing the months of gestation, who was deposed
by Kfishna, the black antelope, from his supremacy in the
council of kings, and slain by him with the discus, represent-
ing the ring of the year formed by a series of months.^
But these forms, Chedi, Chero, Chori, Chiriya are shown
by the Tamil form Chera, with its variant Kerala, to come
from an original guttural root, and it is the Cheros or
Keralas who, with the Cholas or Kolas, and the Pandyas or
Pandavas, form the three parent races of India in the Tamil
genealogy. Thus it comprises the sons of the mountain
(ko) Kolas or Cholas, the sons of the bird Cheros or Keralas,*
and the sons of the sun-antelope {pandu\ the Pandyas.*
The root of the name Chero, and its cognate forms, was,
therefore, clearly one in which the ch was ArA, as in the
Akkadian and Egyptian khu^ and this must, from the
presence of r in the Indian forms, have been khur. It was
this which was clianged into the Hor of Horus, meaning
the supreme god, the magic bird who rules the year, and
<lirccts the march of time by the revolutions of the pole.
' Mahabharata Sabha {Shishupdla badha) Parva, xl.-xlv. pp. 112-124.
''' K<^rala is an ancient name for Malabar, hence it was from Malabar, the
wcktcrn coast of India, that the K6ralas, the sons of the bird, the Shus, used
to start for their sea voyage. Wilson, Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Htmis^
London, 1855, p. 401.
* Caldwell, Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages^ P« *5«
PREFACE xli
But, as I have shown in Essay i., these Northern aspirated
gutturals became among the Dravidian races, who formed
the sounds of the Indian Sanskrit, sibilants, and hence khur
became shu^ and the process of the change is shown by the
name Seori and Sauri assumed by the . Orissa Cheroos, and
from tliis analysis we see that the original Kauravyas of
India were Khur-avyas, or sous of the bird Khur; and it
was they who formed the. religion founded on the worship
of 'the mother-bird, the father-pole, and the rain-sun of the
summer solstice, whicli I have analysed in Essay iv.,^ which
was the religion of the Minsean-Saba&ans of Southern Arabia,
and of the mining races of Mashonaland. They were fol-
lowed by the sons of the antelope, the Pandavas, the sons
of the seed-grain worshipped at Eleusis, and both they and
the Kauravyas were descendants of the fish mother-goddess
Satyavati, who, as we have seen, was the daughter of the
hawk. Thus we see how, in both Egyptian and Akkadian,
XrAi^, the bird, becomes kha^ the fish, and t)ie sacred hawk is
changed into the Ibis, or water-bird, which depicts the
sound khu in Egyptian hieroglyphics, while the symbol for
kha is the fish. This name of the fish-god appears in that
of the Kharwars, and of the still more aboriginal Kharias,
who are parent tribes of the Cheroos, and include among
their totems Aind or Indu, an eel. This, in the list of the
totems of the Kharias, appears with an alternative form
Dung-dung, of which Aind or Indu, meaning the son of the
drop (sap or essence). (//iJm), the life-giving water, is ap-
parently a translation, and both Dung-dung and Aind
appear among the totems of the Mundas. The totem Aind
is one common not only to the Kharias, Khan^^ars and
Moondas, but also to the land-holding Rautias, the Asuras,
J Essay iv. pp. 347, 348. .
xlii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
(workers in metal), the cow-keeping Goalas, the Pans (weavers
and basket-makers), and the Santals. Under the form Ainduar
it is a totem of the mountain Korwas, and under that of
Aindwar, a totem of the Behar Goalas, and the Goraits or
boundary guardians. These last also use the alternative
form Induar, which is also that used by the Nageshurs, or
worshippers of the Nag, the cloud-snake, the Turis, or
basket-makers, the Chiks, a branch of the Pans, the Lobars,
or workers in iron, and the Ooraons.^
From this last it is clear that it was the races who fed
their cattle on the mountains, whence the rivers rose, from
which they, as the sons of the hawk, got the metallic ores,
and — as the sons of the mother-cloud, the storm-bird — the
osiers and bamboos to make their baskets, who first called
themselves the sons of the eel, the fish-god of the sons of
the rivulets rising in the mountain springs sacred to the
goddess-mother Dharti. The word eel is the Icelandic off,
the Grerman oaZ, the Finnish ilja^ and it becomes the
Sanskrit ahi^ the encircling snake, the Greek echis^ which, as I
show in Essay in., is the parent-god of the Greek Achaioi.
In the Finnish il-ja the first syllable is the sign of divinity,
and it appears in the name of Il-marinen, the constellation
of the Great Bear, who is one of the triad of gods Vaina-
moinen, Ilmarinen and Ukko in the Kalevala. Ukko, the
thunder-god, whose history I have traced in Essay in., being
the offspring of Vainamoinen, the god of moisture, the rain-
god, and the Bear, or * eternal forger,' Il-marinen,^ and the
//in Il-marinen is the Finnic form of the name of the original
^ Risley, Trihes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 14, 259, 337. Aind,
Ainduar, Aindwir, Dung-dung, Induar. See also the lists of the totems of
the tribes named, vol. ii. App. i.
^ Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, chap. xvi. pp. 246, 247 ; De Gubematis
Die Thiere, German translation, by Hartmann, pp. 113, 114.
PREFACE xliii
mother-goddess of time, Ida, Ila or Ira, the year of the
three (iru) seasons forget! by the revolutions of the Great
Bear, the Greek virgin goddess-mother Artemis, the Bear-
mother, who was, as I have shown in Essay vi., the Great
Bear. It was these Finns who called the eel the son (ja) of
II who apparently introduced the form // or El which is
universally used for the sign of the divinity in Semitic
countries. It was these people who looked on the fish Kha,
or Khar, as the offspring of the bird Khu or Khur, and that
Khar was the original form of the word is shown in the M ord-
ain and Vogul forms kal and khaly meaning fish, used by the
nations who changed r into l,^ But I have already shown
that the form khur^ khu, for bird, becomes in Dravidianised
Sanskrit shu, and in the same way the original khar, the
fish, becomes in the mythology of the Souris of Orissa, who
were Cheroos in Behar, sal, and it is this word which appears
in the Souri totem the Sal-rishi, or fish-antelope (rtshya),
which is, as I have shown in Essay iii., their parent-god.
Tills long analysis shows us that the sons of the burning
mountain (gwr), or household fire {ghur\ the sons of the
bird (A7iMr), and the sons of the fish {khar\ formed the
race of the yellow Ibai-erri, or sons of the rivers, who intro-
duced the cultivation of the Northern cereals, and founded
the ritual of Demeter, the barley-mother, worshipped at
Eleusis in Greece, and by the Kabiri in Thrace and Asia
Minor. They are all bound together by one chain of
historical mythology, which shows how the sons of the
household fire ruled the land, which was made wealthy by
the mining sons of the hawk, and fruitful by the rains
brought by the mother-bird ; and it was these rains which
descended from the mountains as the irrigating streams,
^ Lenonnant, Chaldaan AfagiCf chap. xxii. p. 202.
xliv RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
whose banks and waters were peopled by the sons of tlie
fish-god, who grew millets and cereal crops in the fertile
lands indicated by the father-antelope, who was bom froiO>
the short sweet grass called Kusha, to show the sons of th^
corn-seed the most fertile spots in the lands watered by tlw^
rivers of the fish-god, which were to become the tortoise
earth. It also shows that these ])eople came to India, an^
survive in the races known as the Khati and Jats in th^
Punjab, and Khatiawar in the West, and as the Gautuma^
of Eastern India. They are also represented in their*
unamalgamated form by the tribes who,^ as I show, still
preserve among their totems the bird and the river-fish, the
eel. It was they who became afterwards the Shus, and who
founded the empire of the Kushika, characterised, as I show
in Essay iii.,^ by the fonnation of castes like those of the
Kurmi, cultivators, the Teli, oil-sellei*s, and others, based not
on community of birth, worship, or common residence, but
on community of function.
Having shown clearly the liistorical lessons to be learned
from the variant forms of the three Eleusinian gods, I must
now explain the no less important information to be gathered
from the ritual of the Eleusinian festival in which they
were worshipped. Only those initiated were allowed to
take part either in the Eleusinian mysteries or the Indian
Soma sacrifice, in which the mother-cow and the mother-
plant Soma was adored, and which, like the Eleusinian
festival, was instituted by the yellow trading sons of the
barley-mother, the Hindu Vaishya or Shus. In both, the
ceremonies were strikingly similar. The initiation of the
Mastai, or penitents, at Eleusis began with the confession of
sins, but the first rites of the Indian Soma sacrifice tell of a
^ Essay in. pp. 310, 311.
PREFACE xlv
much earlier age of religious development, forming a transi-
tion link between the worship of the winnowed grain at the
old harvest festival and the Greek confessional. As in the
harvest festival an enclosed place was railed off from the
threshing-floor for the winnowing of the grain, so in the
Soma sacrifice, where the sacrificer was. the victim, symboli-
CfUly offered, he began the sacrifice in an enclosure made of
Onats to the north of the sacrificial area. Into this he,
^ittended by the barber, whose importance in early Kushite
ritual I have shown in Essay iir.,^ entered by a door on the
^ast side, sacred to the sun. He there cut his own nails, and
^hen took up, one after another, two stalks of sacrificial
^usha grass, placing them by the side of one hair on each
^ide of his beard, and dropping the severed grass and hair,
«s he cut them, into the bath in which he was to complete
Tiis purification. The barber then cut off the rest of his
hair and beard, except the crest lock at the top of his head,
still religiously preserved by all men of the yellow race, from
the Chinese to the Indian Mundas, and for this he used a
copper razor, thus marking the ceremony as one of the
Copper Age which preceded that of Bronze.* From the time
when the shaving began till the end of the sacrifice the
sacrificer had to forego all food except fast-milk (vrata\ and
this to make himself one of the brotherhood of the sons of
the cow, the Vratya, or children of the same stock described
in the Laws of Manu,^ who are called in the Mahabharata
the Virata, or worshippers of the father-god as the Viru or
sign of virile energy. Further evidence of the connection
between the cutting of the hair and that of the com or
^ Essay iii. p. 279.
' Eggeling, Saf, Brdh, iii. I, 2, 1-9; ii. 6, 4, 5-7; S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
pp. 5-7 ; xii. p. 450 ; also vol. xii. Introductory Note, pp. 1-2.
' Biihler, Manu^ x. 20; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp. 405, 406.
xlvi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TBIES
mother-grass is given in the Greek Kovpa^ a form of Koure
and Kore, meaning the cutting of grass or hair, and the
thought running through the whole ceremony is evidently
founded on the primaeval worship of the grass or grain-seed
as the god of life, the parent of the grain cut from the
mother-earth as her hair, and consecrated in the baptismal
bath of the dewy atmosphere to the rain-father as the seed
of the future year. It was only when the old crop was off
the ground, and the hair and nails of the sacrificer were cut,
that the cornfield and his body were fit to produce the crop
grown from the consecrated seed ; and the tillage necessary to
fit them for this function was useless till the earth and the
body of the sacrificer were sanctified by the rains and
baptismal bath, and thus endued with the life-giving power
symbolised in the latter. The tillage of the soil, and its
clearance from the old crop and noxious weeds were sym-
bolised in the Soma festival by the confession of sin made
by the sacrificer before he and his wife bathed together at
the close of the sacrifice,^ and by the confession of the
penitent Mastai at the Eleusinian mysteries. This pre-
liminary eradication of evil by the shaving and confession
was in both festivals followed by the bath of regeneration,
called in Sanskrit dlkshu, or the consecration, described
in Essay iii.,* which gave the blessing of the rain father-god
to the sacrificer, and made him his son. But when the ritual
had travelled from India to Greece the seed-grain mother of
the race of corn-growers, and of Soma, the creating (sii)
plant grown on the mother-mountain, had become the earth-
tortoise, resting on the mother-ocean, and hence in Greece
the initiated had to bathe in the sea. In both cases the
^ Eggeling, Saf. Brdh, iv. 4, $, 22, 23 ; S.B.K voL xxvi. p. 385.
2 Essay ill. pp. 309, 310 ; iv. p. 367.
PREFACE xlvii
bath was the prelude to the new birth, called in Greek
Kodapffi^j and the number of immersions required in
Greece to clear away the last traces of the slough of sin
varied with the degree of guilt confessed to by the newly
baptized penitent. Also, as in the Soma sacrifice, the
sacrificer was restricted to milk diet, so in the Eleusinian
mysteries the penitents could only eat the holy food, which
I shall describe presently. The object of this rule was in
both cases to prevent the entry into the body of any
impurities which might make the new birth, and the total
change of nature wrought by the prescribed diet and
consecrating ceremonies, impossible. In Greece, as in India,
the connection of the festival with that of the national
festival of the ploughing race, who called themselves the
sons of the cow, is obvious, for in Greece it was held in the
month consecrated to the ploughing-ox called Boe-dromion,
or the course (dromos) of the ox (Bous), Both at Eleusis
and in the Soma festival the baptismal bath was followed
by sacrifices. In the Soma sacrifice eleven cakes were offered
to Agni- Vishnu, the twin gods of generation, the god of
fire, and of the time of gestation, rice-porridge to Aditya,
the bird-mother of the Kushite race, and heated milk to the
three Upasads, or mother-seasons, the object aimed at in these
sacrifices being to give a new body to the sacrificer.^ These
were followed in the Soma sacrifice by the slaying of the
eleven animal victims offered to the Ashvins, or twin gods
of day and night. In Greece, where the sacrifice had be-
come entirely individual, instead of being, like the Soma
sacrifice, a combined personal and national ceremony, each
penitent had to offer a pig, which, as I show in Essay iii.,^
' Eggeling, Sat. Brdh, iii. i, 3, 1-3; Hi. 4, 4, I ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
pp. 12 note 3, 104 note 3. ' Essay iii. p. 181.
xlviii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
was the animal always offered in Greece by offenders to
cleanse them from guilt, and reconcile them to the mother-
earth, to whom pigs, the totemistic parents of the first fire-
worshippers, were sacred.
In the Soma sacrifice the Soma distilled from the holy
plant was poured in libations, and drunk by the priests, who
ate the offered food, but in Greece the priests gave the
penitents the sacred food and drink. The declaration made
by each penitent at the close of the ceremony explains both
the ritual and its meaning. Each of them had to say : ' I
have fasted, and have drunk the KVK€<li>v^ made of flour
and water, and pounded mint, the bread and water of life
mixed with the sap of the green mother-tree ; ' I have taken
from the Kurrq ' the seed - grain jar ; * after tasting ' the
sacred cakes, the bread of life taken from the kio-ttj^ * I
have placed them in the KoKaOo^^ the basket, that is, the
Ijiknos or Sare, the winnowing basket, *and from the
KoKciOo^ (I have placed them) in the KLarrj,'' ^ From this
it is clear that the sacrificer, having drunk from the cup
the elementary seed of vital power dwelling in the blessed
bread and water, took the young god, the seed of the new
life, the cakes baked in the generating and cleansing fire
from the mother-jar, and partook of his body, thus incor-
porating into himself the divine seed. What was left he
placed in the winnowing basket, to be there cleansed from
any taint it might have received by being touched by him
before he was made holy by eating it, and he returned it,
after its purification, to the mother-jar.-
1 Hatch, Hibbert Lectures for 1888, Lect. x. pp. 287, 288 ; Encyclopedia
Britannicat Ninth Edition, Art. 'Mysteries,' by Professor W. M. Ramsay,
vol. xvii. p. 127 ; Clem. Alex. Protrcp. ii. p. 18.
^ The original belief in bread as the seed of life, and the symbol and Son
of God is perpetuated in the Hebrew custom of breaking and distributing
PREFACE xUx
In this analysis of the myths, and the most significant of
the Greek and Roman ceremonies of the several stages of
the sacramental sacrifice of the corn-growing races, we find a
complete history of the union of the three parent tribes, a
history which would doubtless be much more clear to us
than it is at present if we could see, as the Greek penitents
did, the scenes of the myth of Kore acted before them.
The evidence shows us that the confederated tribes were the
sons of the fire-god, the revolving pole, and his two wives,
his mother and daughter, the mother-earth and the seed-
grain, and we can trace the development of the national
ritual as it passed from India to Phrygia, and from Phrygia
back to India, and from thence when the ritual of the
regenerating sacrifice of the Semite - Kushites had been
evolved, we trace it in an altered form to Greece as the
sacrifice of the Greater Eleusinia celebrated in Boe-dromion,
the month of the course (dromos) of the ox {Bous\ the
month of the autumnal equinox, which succeeded the winter
solstice as the time when the barley-growing races of Syria
b^an their year. But this last importation had been
preceded by the earlier sacrifice of the Dorians, sons of the
Dor or Tur, the pole, and also the sons of the twin gods,
bread at the beginning of every meal. The bread is broken and distributed
by the £iLther of the family, or whoever in his place says the grace or prayec
of consecration before meat. It also appears among the beliefs of Germany,
where the peasant women think it sacrilege to place the naked foot on a loaf.
They tell the story of how a girl who had walked barefoot to market, and
was putting on her stockings before entering the town, placed her naked foot
on one of the loaves she was carrying to prevent it being soiled, and was at
once swallowed up by the earth. The same fate befell a mythical lady,
Bridget, whose story is told to account for the sanctity of a well called
Biittenbronn, near Landeck, on the Kaiserstuhl in Baden. The well is said
to have been found miraculously when Lady Bridget was swallowed up as a
ponishment for having used the loaves she was taking for distribution to the
poor as stepping-stones over a muddy bit of road. (Wolffe, Rambles in the
Bhuk Forest^ Longmans, 1890, chap, xviii. pp. 251, 252.)
iv
1 RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
who were first Day and Night, and afterwards the stars
Castor and Pollux. This was preserved in the mysteries of
February called Anthesterion, or the month of the flower-
goddess, and of the Saturnalia of the Indian Naga races whose
customs were, as I show in Essays in. and vi., brought to
Greece by those who were reputed in mythic history to be
the voyagers in the heavenly ship Argo, and by the overland
traders, who brought by the way of Harran (the road) and
the Euphrates valley Indian commodities and customs to
Europe, and among these last was the ritualistic use of
incense taken from the mother-tree Leda, the incense-tree,
the mother of Castor and Pollux, which was, as I show
in Essay iii.,^ originally the Indian Salai-tree {BoswelUa
thurifera). These trading races, the founders of the worship
of the heavenly twins, and the first astronomical measurers
of time, were the people who believed in the divinity of
pairs, and in the origin of life from the union of the male
principle symbolised by the pole or Tur, the Ashera or
rain-pole of the Jews, with the female represented by the
mother-bird, the Akkadian Khu, and the Hindu Shu,
whence they got their name of Saus. As a result of the
transfer of the origin of life from the mother to the united
pair they made the male and female trees of the date-palm
the Babylonian tree of life their parent-tree instead of the
bisexual fig-tree. This new parent-tree became in mythic
history Tamar, the date-palm, the second wife of Judah,
after Shua, the mother-bird, and Vala-rama, the son of
Rohini, the red cow, the star Aldebaran, whose cognisance
was the date-palm. They also, as I show in Essay iv.,
began their year with the heliacal rising of Sirius at the
summer solstice. Starting from the Indian western port of
^ Essay III. pp. 300, 301.
PREFACE U
Dwaraka, the modem Ila-pura, the city of Ila, Ida or Ira,
the mountain and river-goddess of the three (iru) seasons.
They instituted the world-wide maritime trade of the
PhcBnicians, or red men, the sons of the united races de-
scended from the twin sons of Tamar, Perez and Zerah.
The latter, marked with the red thread,^ was the father of
Dara, the antelope, whose history I have traced in Essay v.,
called Darda, the son of Mahol, or the great god, and
described as one of the wisest of men before Solomon.*
Dara was the ancestor of the great Dardanian race of Troy,
of which Paris, the Sanskrit Pani, the trader, was the
representative, and of the race of the same name placed by
Herodotus ^ on the Gyndes, an Armenian tributary of the
Tigris, who were the barley-growing sons of the antelope
(dara). From Perez, the fire-god, the brother of Zerah,
sprang the royal race of Ram,^ the sons of Ra, the sun-god.
Their first settlements outside India were on the island
called by them, after their father-god, Tur-os, the modem
Bahrein, the headquarters of the pearl fishery of the Persian
Gulf. This was the holy island of Dilmun, where the fish-
god of the Akkadians £n-zag, meaning the first-bom (zoff)
of the almighty {en\ first landed, and taught civilisation to
the Euphratean races.^ He, as I show in Essay iii.,® was in
India the Sal-rishi, or fish-antelope, the god also called by
the Akkadians and Assyrians Sala-manu, the fish, the
prototype of the Jewish Solomon. It was thence that the
sons of Tur made their way to Egypt after establishing, as
I show in Essays iv. and v., their rule in Southern Arabia
* Gen. xxviil 38. ^ I Chron. ii, 6 ; i Kings iv. 3a
* Herod, i. 189. * i Chron. ii. 10,
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect ii. p. 114 note i.
* Essay ill. pp. 285, 286.
J
lii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and in Egypt. There they founded the government of the
Kushite kings, who transmitted to their successors, on the
throne of Southern and Northern Egypt the sign of the
Urseus snake, worn on the king'^s forehead as a sign of his
royal dignity. It was ako from the Persian Gulf that they
went to Ur, and afterwards to Harran on the Euphrates,
meaning Kharran, the road, and there founded the trade
route through South-western Asia, between the Persian
Gulf and the Mediterranean ports, whence Asiatic products
were disseminated through Europe. It was in Harran that
they solved the astronomical and ethical problems which
enabled them to mectsure in the heavens the paths of the
moon and sun, and thus calculate the lunar year of thirteen
months described in Essay iv., and to cement the union of
the two races called the two Ashes (eper), forming the
tribe of Ephraim. This alliance united the Eastern and
Western races together by the binding rite of circumcision,
as described in Essay v. It was this rite which made all the
worshippers of the Nun, or spirit father-god, the father of
Hosh-ia, or Joshua, their leader, members of the Semitic
brotherhood who had been previously united in the East as
the sons of the cow, the star Rohini and the ram-god, by
the regenerating baptismal bath. These Semite traders, by
taking under their protection the whole maritime and land
traffic of South-western Asia, became rulers of the countries
on the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, and thus estab-
lished the universal empire of the confederated Semite tribes,
one branch of the confederacy being descended from Ra, the
sun-god, the father (Ab) Ram, and Sara, the grain-mother,
and the other ^ from the anthropomorphic fire-drill, the pole
Tur, united with the mother-earth.
Their rule, which, like others which have since succeeded
PREFACE liii
it, began with the fairest prospects of creating a heaven on
earth, ended in the grinding and intolerable tyranny which
led to the great Aryan revolt, described in Essay vi., led, as
I have there shown, by the wine-drinking sons of Semele,
the vine-goddess, and the races who substituted the solar for
the lunar-solar year, and who thought free and living life
more divine than ascetic devotion to metaphysical abstrac-
tions and cast-iron rules. This Aryan conquest was, in the
land where the first and most signal victories of the refor-
mers were gained, the parent of Greek poetry and art, and
ultimately of the Greek drama, but the spirit of indi-
viduality, which was the moving power of this new creative
impulse, was the indirect cause of the death, or rather of
the transformation of the old historical myth. The conquest
made by the new rulers differed fundamentally from most of
those which preceded it, for both the Aryan rulers and the
rank and file of their army belonged to those North-western
races who based property on individual and family posses-
sion, and not on the communal system of the Southern
village races. Hence individuals were always much more
important people in the North-west than in the South,
and this national tendency towards individual freedom was
increased by the warlike habits of an age when battles were
chiefly personal combats. The soldiers of a race of warriors
to whom military glory and personal distinction were the
great objects of ambition could not be contented with the
historical methods of the races who looked on history as a
help to national progress, and not as a record of individual
prowess. The Northern conquerors did not care to be
entombed in histories which did not, like the historical
songs of their own clan-bards, record their names, and thus
preserve the memory of each individual chief. These
Uv RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Northern races were also intensely proud of their families,
and in every ruling family, or gens, the ashes, deeds and
names of their ancestors were preserved in the ancestral
home, and in the songs and genealogies compiled by the
family and clan-bards. These bards, called in India the
Maghadas, or sons of the witch-mother, Magha, superseded
in the new age the hereditary Asipu of the Assyrians and the
Prashai§tri, or trading priests of the Kushite ritual ; and it
was they who first, by genealogies and ballads, and after-
wards when syllabic characters were introduced by written
annals, changed history into an account of the deeds done
by the Gentile ancestors called by the names they bore
when alive. It was they who, from the old mythic stories,
framed the first national epics, such as the primitive forms
of the Kalevcda and the Nibelungmi Lkd^ and of the story
of the Akkadian Gilgames, who became the Greek Hercules.
Though the writers of those epics, which, like those of the
Hindus, are based on the national history of the land where
they were written, preserved the means of reproducing the
old stories, either by retaining the original names or by accu-
rately translating into the language of the conquerors the
names given to the heroes of the conquered race, yet this
original meaning was, owing to the altered spirit of the age,
gradually forgotten, and these stories became, not only to the
common people, but to poets, dramatists, and philosophers,
tales told of individuals. When they were thus transmogri-
fied, and when the retailers of mythology told how Kronos,
the god of Time, ate his own children, and (Edipus married
his mother Jocasta, and related what seemed to be the
numerous other evil deeds of the gods and heroes, their
stories were naturally denounced by all moralists from Plato
downwards, as demoralising and absurd. It is only when
PREFACE Iv
they are traced up to their original sources, and when the
real meanings of their authors are discovered, that they are
found to be reliable records of past history, which do not
tell us that our ancestors were fools who believed in stupid
fables as inspired utterances, but that they were earnest and
intelligent workers who transmitted to their posterity in
these stories .the accumulated results of their experience.
One most unfortunate result of this Aryan travesty of ancient
history is to be found in the notions of the origin of the idea
of property to which it has given birth. Thus many writers
start with the assumption that property was originally indi-
vidual, whereas the history of village communities shows that
where society was first founded by the hunting races, land did
not belong to individuals but to the tribe, which occupied
definite areas as their tribal hunting grounds. When hunt-
ing gave place to agriculture, and definite village areas were
formed in the tribal territory, the ownership of these tracts
passed to the village community, subject to the control of
the united council of the confederated villages. Neither
under this form of government nor in that of the hunting
races, was any right to private property recognised, for the
game killed by the tribal hunters was divided among the
whole tribe, and the crops grown were, when gathered, stored
in the village barns, and used to supply the materials for the
village meals, which were all eaten in common. Individual
rights had no protection beyond those given by the village
and federal councils. Those who were out-casted by these
tribunals passed out of the protection of the community
and could obtain neither shelter nor land for tillage, except
as wanderers in the wilderness, unless they were reinstated in
their old confederacy, or obtained entrance into another.
Individual property in land first appeared in Southern coun-
A
Ivi RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tries when the confederacy of the fire and sun worshipping
Maghadas and Gautumas entered India and introduced the
semi-feudal system, which gave to the king and the primaeval
chiefs appointed by him a right to a definite share of land
in each village. Under this form of government the former
joint- village proprietors became, in respect of the royal lands,
serfs of the crown, who were required to till it, sow and reap
the crops, and store the produce in the royal barns, and
also to repair the royal residences. But apart from these
duties, the old village organisation remained intact, and no
man who had not a definite place among the members of the
dominant tribe, from which the national kings and chiefs
were chosen, or who had not secured their special protection,
had any rights against the village and territorial councils.
But imder this constitution, kings, chiefs, and people were
all equally bound to the state, and none of them, as in the
later feudal era, were the vassals or men of an individual
lord. The king who held the central province, and the
chiefs who ruled the boundary districts, only held their
lands for revenue purposes, to enable them to provide for
the defence of the community, and though the chiefs as
officers of the army, and therefore more immediately under
the orders of the king, bore some likeness to the feudal
retainers of later times, yet the absence outside military
exigencies of any conception of individual rule, made the
resemblance very remote. It was under the rule of the
Northern tribes, who were more warlike than those of the
South, that a definite military force sprang up, for, as can
still be seen in the old Tributary States in India, care was
taken that the chiefs and soldiers to whom the frontier pro-
vinces were confided, should always be men who could be
relied on to defend them from outside attacks. Hence in the
PREFACE Ivii
Tributary States in Chota Nagpore, the frontier provinces
were generally assigned to the Kaur caste, that is, to men
who trace their descent to the warlike Eurs. That on the
fEulure of these guardian races to provide adequate security
new tribes were brought in from the outside, is shown clearly
by one instance in the Bonai State, where, within traditional
memory, the old Bhuya guards, who had ceased to command
confidence, were replaced by a clan imported from Palamow,
who received a grant of land as Ghatwals or frontier guards.
But though these frontier guards were a necessary protec-
tion against marauders, it must be remembered that all the
natural instincts of tillers of the soil are opposed to war.
Farmers cannot leave their fields and waste their time in
distant campaigns, for if they did so they would soon find
that, even if successful, they must always remain under arms ;
for if, after invading their neighbours'* lands, they returned to
peaceful pursuits, they would be constantly liable to retalia-
tory attacks. It is quite impossible that agriculture could
ever have passed through the ages of experiment and organ-
ised effort which must have elapsed before it became a settled
industry, which not only provided for the sustenance of the
community, but also laid the foundations of national wealth,
unless the agricultural races had lived during the days of
their national childhood in lands where their foes were not
military robbers, but the yet unsubdued forces of nature. It
was in trade and hunting that the adventurous spirits of
those days, who had not patience to wait for the slow returns
of agricultural effort and experiment, found an outlet for
their energies, and it was under the influence of the trading
races that the personal rights of individuals outside those
accruing to the actual tillers of the soil first began to be
recognised. The recognition of these rights first began in
Iviii RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the maintenance and meals given at the public messes to the
village servants. But as villages grew into cities, and trade
extended beyond the boundaries of the territory of the con-
federated villages and their immediate neighboui*s, the
numbei*s of crafts and craftsmen continually increased. It
was then that, to protect their rights, they formed them-
selves into guilds, which became the Indian and Egyptian
castes, based on community of function, and it was to dis-
tinguish themselves as a separate community that the
members of each guild ate together at a table allotted to the
guild at the town meals, and hence they became a separate
and distinct body, who, like their descendants, the Indian
trade castes, ate together. We see a survival of this old
custom in the common dining-halls of the London guilds.
As these guilds arose in countries in which the original vil-
lage communities had grown into a State, governed on a plan
similar to that of the confederated villages which composed
it, these trade guilds naturally adopted the village constitu-
tion. Each of them had, like the village, its elected head,
its officers, its fixed places and times of meeting, its laws
binding on all its members, and obliging them to decide all
internal disputes by caste councils called in India Panchayats
or councils of five {pafich) appointed within the guild, leav-
ing those with other guilds or persons to be decided by the
Pafichayats which, as I show in Essay ii.,^ were appointed by
every city or state to decide such cases. These Indian trad-
ing castes date, as I show in Essay ii., from the days of
Kushika rule, and the great antiquity of the organisation is
shown by its universality. For it was by these guilds that
trade was carried on in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, also among
the Carthaginians, and as it still is by the Chinese, while the
* Essay ii. p. loo.
PREFACE lix
great Semite confederacy was an alliance, ruled by the
priests, between the trade guilds of the Shus and the warrior
and building tribes, the Northern Gautuma or fire-wor-
shippers, who called themselves the sons of Caleb, the dog,
while the prominent place allotted to the Vaishya in the Soma
sacrifice shows that it was they who founded it when they
were the practical rulers of India. Further approximate
evidence of the date of these institutions is given in the
omission of a guild of iron- workers among the eight guilds
founded, according to Roman tradition, in the days of Numa
Pompilius. Among these there is a guild of goldsmiths and
one of coppersmiths ; the presence of this guild, combined
with the use by the Roman priests of sacred ploughs
made of copper, and copper knives,^ and the use of the
copper razor in the Indian Soma sacrifice, seems to show that
the system was in full vigour in the Copper Age preceding
that of Bronze. As foreign trade increased, guilds of mer-
chants were added to those of handicraftsmen. It was they
who directed and financed all distant maritime and land
trade, and who maintained members of their brotherhood as
representative agents in all countries with which they inter-
changed produce, and ^it was through these agencies that
means of communicating by writing in syllabic characters
first, and afterwards in alphabetical, were invented. By the
control of the sources of national wealth they became a great
power in the State. Their national influence is shown by the
institution of the great annual Soma sacrifice to the gods of
time, which was, as I show in Essay iii.,founded by the Vaishya
or traders. It was they who, as the Shus or Jains, allied
themselves with the warrior clans of the Malli or mountain-
* Mommsen's History of Rome ^ by Dickson. Popular Edition, vol. i. chap.
xiii. pp. 20I, 202.
Ix RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
eers, called first the Sombunsi, or sons of the moon, and after-
wards, when the Northern sons of Pandu, the sun, were added
to their ranks, the Surajbunsi, or sons of the sun, to form the
great ruling race of the Ikshvaku, or sons of the sugar-cane
{iksha). We 'find this alliance recorded in the genealogies
of the Mahabharata, telling of the marriage of Su-hotra,
the grandson of Bharata, the eponymous father of the Bhars,
and of the people who gave to India the name of Bharata-
varsha, or the country (varsha) of the Bharatas, whose
name means the priest (hotar) who pours the libations
(hotra) to Su, the god of life, the father-god of the Shus,
as he married Su-varna, the princess of the race of Su, the
daughter of Ikshvaku.^ Their rule was generally accepted
by the people as a great improvement on the temporary
anarchy produced by the first irruptions of the Northern
warrior races, and thus the Kushite-Semite conquest was
accomplished not only in India, but throughout the whole
of South-western Asia, with only the disturbance of the
national constitution which was necessary, as I showed above,
to provide the supplies required for the maintenance of the
police and military forces intrusted with the protection of
property from internal and external foes. These people were
no less anxious to preserve peace than the agricultural races,
and their conquests were, even when they were accompanied
by temporary destruction of property, most beneficial to the
people of the countries they ruled, and it was through their
agency that the rule of law was extended throughout the
civilised world. It was they also who were the authors
of the legal systems which expanded into the Jewish and
Roman codes, for these could never have grown up unless the
seeds from which they sprang had been sown by the Indian
^ Mahabharata Adi {SamdkazHz) Parva, xciv. xcv.
PREFACE Ixi
Dravidian races, the first founders of international trade.
Neither the Roman law nor the Roman Empire could ever
have existed if the policy of the State had not firom its
infiincy been directed by a people who believed that law, and
not military force, was the most efficient ruler of the nation.
The agricultural Sabines and the trading Etruscans were the
backbone of the Roman government, and it was their con-
servative influence which tempered the disintegrating ten-
dencies of the Aryan Ramnes or sun-worshippers.
These Aryans were the warrior races who, on their conquest
of the Semitic empire, introduced a totally new element into
international politics. For it was they who made war the
customary method of settling disputes between States, and
who preferred wealth acquired by violence to that accumu-
lated by trade. When wars became constant, and individuals
became consequently prominent, the Northern system of
personal and family property in land began to supersede and
to be mixed up with the commercial tenures of the village
races, producing changes such as those which, as I show in
Essay ii., arose when the Aryans became the ruling race.
This change, if it had not been accompanied with an almost
normal state of inter-tribal war, would have ultimately, by
the stimulus given to individual energy, added to the national
prosperity, as it has since done in more peaceful ages. But
when, as in the Euphratean countries and South-western
Asia, Greece, and Rome, it led to constant feuds and military
expeditions, accompanied by the devastation of fields, the
destruction of fruit-trees and buildings, agriculture naturally
declined, and cultivated areas reverted to waste, and recupe-
ration was only made possible by the establishment of power-
ful military despotisms, such as those which ruled in the
Euphratean countries and Egypt, and the government of the
1x11 RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Tyrants in Greece. But the ruling classes in this system of
government looked on all manual work as degrading, and
the recovery of the lands harried by the Aryan invaders, and
reduced to a condition which must have been similar to that
of the Roman Empire after its conquest by the Barbarians,
was only made possible by the institution of slavery. The
chief agents of the slave traffic of the East, which arose out
of the employment of slaves to till the soil, were the Phoeni-
cians of Tyre and the Palestinian coasts, and it was they
who, as we learn from the Odyssey^ ravaged the islands and
mainland of Greece in search of slaves.^
These new Phoenician Semites were the royal race formed
under the rule of the sun-worshipping tribe of Benjamin,
whose king was Shawal or Saul, the Babylonian sun-god, and
it was from the custom of slavery which they introduced that
the slave system of Greece and Rome originated. Before
this, slavery had only been the mild kind of ser\ itude arising
out of the Indian custom by which a man assigned tlie labour
of himself and his family to work out the payment of a debt,
or undertook to serve an employer in order to obtain his
daughter in marriage.
It was the changes introduced by the Northern races, be-
ginning with the substitution of marriage for the matriarchal
customs descrilx^d in Essay iii., and ending in the institution
of national wars and slavery, which caused the true meaning
of mythic and ritualistic history to be forgotten, and their
use as historical records to be discontinued. It is this aban-
donment of ancient methods which has led to all the errors
caused by trying to explain civilisation as a product of
•
^ Odyssey xv. 403-484. This passage tells how Eumscus, the swineherd
of Odusseus, who had been bom as the son of the king of Surie, was carried
off with his nurse, who was a Phoenician woman, into slavery by Phoenician
pirates.
PREFACE Ixiii
Northern initiative, and by thus neglecting the contribu-
tions made by Southern races. When these have once been
allowed their proper place, we can realise the condition of
the world before the customs of the earlier age were tempor-
arily subverted by the Aryan invaders, and can see how the
old spirit of the men who had founded the age of law
emerged again to direct the councils of the State when the
first fury of the assault and conquest had been assuaged by
the growth of later generations bom from the union of the
conquerors and the conquered.
But the history of the amalgamation of these alien races,
as well as that of others who preceded them, has yet to be
written, and this. work can only be done by the help of the
too much neglected evidence to which I have called atten-
tion in this volume. I only hope that these Essays will help
to clear the way for future inquirers, who will add to and
collate the evidence which still remains to be sifted, study
the question by the light of the immense mass of data which
I have left unexamined, correct the mistakes that I and
others have made, and produce such a history of the Past as
will make the teachings of the half-dumb founders of civili-
sation, born before the days of alphabetical history, and
therefore only able to record their messages to posterity in
allegories, parables, organised customs, buildings, imple-
ments, productions, and their manipulation of language,
still more useful guides than they have hitherto been to
the present actors in the drama which is developing, without
pause or intermission, the history of the world.
In conclusion, I have to record my heartiest thanks to
those who have helped me in my work by their personal
assistance and advice, and also to the authors whose writings
have supplied the facts from which a large part of my deduc-
J
Ixiv RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tions have been drawn. First and foremost my especial
acknowledgments are due to Professor Rhys Davids, who
first induced me to put together the scattered notes and
thoughts I had collected in India, and to continue my studies
in ancient history by writing a series of articles on the Early
History of Northern India in the Journal of the Royal A static
Society, It was he who, after these articles were written,
urged me to continue the work I had begun, and to write
this book embodying the final outcome of my researches ; it
is he whom my readers must thank for whatever pleasure or
profit they may gain by perusing it, and it is to him I owe
the many pleasant hours of discovery I have enjoyed while
trying to solve the problems it opened up. I have also to
record my warmest thanks to Mr. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A.,
who has given me special help in writing that part of the
book founded on Akkadian astronomy ; to Baboo Pratapa
Chandra Ray, CLE., whose translation of the Mahabharata,
which I have used in all my quotations from the poem, will
prove an invaluable boon to all students of early Indian and
human history ; to the authors of the series of the Sacred
Books of the East, and Professor F. Max Muller, the editor
and originator, who have enabled those who do not possess
the linguistic knowledge of a Mezzofanti, to read in modem
speech the inmost thoughts of those pioneer races of the
East, who stereotyped their history and their religions and
national aspirations in their ritual and its manuals.
For the evidence as to Akkadian ritual I am chiefly in-
debted to Professor Sayce^s Hibbert Lectures on the Religion
of tfie Ancient BaiylonianSf And I have been greatly helped in
my account of the great historical Soma Sacrifice of India
by Professor Hillebrandf's Vedische Mythohgie,
For most of the full and exact descriptions of the
PREFACE Ixv
customs of the primitive races of India which I have been
able to adduce, my best thanks are due to Mr. H.tH. Risley
of the Bengal Civil Service, the author of the Tribes cmd
Castes of Bengal^ as well as to the Government of Bengal,
who were good enough to send me a copy of the book. I
finally hope that the living authors whom I have quoted,
but have not mentioned in this list, will believe that the
omission of their names is'not due to want of gratitude on
my part, and that they will accept the references to their
works in the notes as expressions of my thanks.
M
ESSAYS
ESSAY I
It was in the year 1868, when I first went to Chota Nagpore
as Deputy Commissioner, that the interest aroused by the
researches of Col. Dalton, the Commissioner of the Province,
who was the first pioneer of aboriginal ethnology in Bengal,
and the exigencies of administrative work prompted me to
begin the inquiries which have led me to the conclusions set
forth in these Essays. I then learned that the village com-
munities of the Ooraons of Lohardugga were organised accord-
ing to rules which I had always before been taught to believe
originated in Europe ; I also found that both these people
and their congeners and fellow-countrymen, the Mundas,
whose village organisation was much more primitive than
that of the Ooraons, belonged to races who had no affinities
with the Northern people who called themselves Aryans, and
who were supposed to have introduced village communities,
together with the Aryan Sanskrit tongue, into India. It
was impossible to believe that the village customs of tlie
Mundas and the Ooraons were derived from races whose
mother speech was of Aryan origin, for they both spoke
languages of the agglutinative type, that of the Mundas
being allied to those spoken by the aborigines of Burma and
South-Extern Asia, and that of the Ooraons to the Tamil
group of Dravidian languages. Furthermore, these people
hated the Aryanised Hindus most intensely, as they looked
on them as interlopers who tried to subvert their customs
and rob them of their lands. On examining the history of
the country I found that this antagonism between the
1
2 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Mundas and Ooraons on one side, and the hated Hindus,
wliom they called Sad lis, on the other, had existed from the
very remote ages when the Rajas of Chota Nagpore first
began to ally themselves by marriage with the Arianised
Rajputs of the Gangetic valley, and had introduced Hindu
adherents, advisers, and clients into the country. The
time when I first went to Chota Nagpore was one of the
periodical periods of unrest, caused by efforts made by the
aboriginal inhabitants to shake off the yoke of the immigrant
Hindus, and to recover possession of the village lands
from which they had been ousted by the new-comers. They
had twice before since the beginning of English rule in
Bengal, once about 1780, and again in 1833, risen in actual
rebellion against their Raja and his Hindu ministers. And
it was after the last rebellion that English officers were
appointed to supersede the rule of the Raja and his un-
popular advisers. But though under the new regime the
encroachments on the rights of the original landholders were
checked, yet the yearning for Home Rule, or the government
of the country, under English supervision, in accordance with
national customs, still survived, and the Ooraons and
Mundas desired above all things to have control of the dis-
tribution of the land, and to obtain the restitution of the
large tracts which had been granted to Hindu Sadhs, or
acquired by them under the forms of alien law. It was in
the hope of enlisting the English rulers on their side that
they, as they have often told me, began to listen eagerly to
the teachings of the German Lutherans, who were the first
missionaries who entered the country, about 1846. But it
was a long time before their distrust of the strangers began
to give way to their hopes of deriving advantage from an
alliance with them, and the beginnings of the movement
towards inquiry as to the lessons to be learnt from them
were checked by the Mutiny in 1857, when the revolted
Ramghur regiment gained temporary possession of Chota
Nagpore. It was only a short time before I first took
ESSAY I 3
cimrge of the Lohardugga district that conversions began
to be made, not by twos and threes, but by thousands
in each year. The Ooraon and Munda inhabitants of whole
villages all became Christians together, and the change of
faith was in many instances followed by the seizure of tlie
lands held by the Hindus. It was in inquiring into these
cases of dispossession that I iirst learned to understand how
impossible it was that Ooraon and Munda village organisa-
tion and customs could ever have originated among an Aryan
people, and my subsequent experience, from tlie end of 1864
till 1869, as settlement officer of the adjoining district of
Chuttisgurh, confirmed these conclusions. For in this old
Gond Kingdom of the Haihaiyas I found village laws differing
from those of the Mundas and Ooraons, but yet sufficiently
jilike to mark these adjoining groups as the offspring of a
national development leading from the simple village com-
munities of the Mundas, through the more complex customs
of the Gonds to the elabonitely organised Ooraon village, and
the evidence showed that it was impossible to doubt that the
whole system was one of indigenous, and not of imported,
growth. But these village communities, holding their lauds
in common but not in individual property, were in organisa-
tion and customs precisely similar to those which formed the
dominant land tenure throughout South-Western Asia and
in all European countries, except the small area in the
North-West of Europe, where the open fields of the village
connnunes are superseded by the hedges and partition marks
which distinguish the English farm and the Bauergut of
North-Western Germany from the Southern Gau or
Gemeinde and the Russian Mir.
From this identity of the indigenous Indian village with the
village communities of Europe, the question arose how and
when did village connnunities, organised according to the
customs originating in India, spread from thence through
all the countries lying between it and North- West Germany.^
And to this, as I soon found, another question was necessarily
i
4 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
added. How is it that the local dialects generally spoken
throughout all Indian districts north of the Godavery are
offshoots of the Aryan Sanskrit tongue, while the whole
organisation of Hindu society is founded not on the Aryan
family, but on the much wider and more diffuse institution
of castes, many of which, such as the Telis, meaning the oil-
sellers ; the Tantis, the weavers ; the Chasa, the cultivators ;
mark by their names that they are not formed by the union
of the reputed descendants of some common ancestor, but
by the amalgamation of peoj)le of possibly heterogeneous
descent who followed the same trade? Furthermore, how
is it that the Sanskrit language, belonging to the inflectional
group of Indo-European tongues which mark the races
among whom property in land was originally vested in
families and individuals, and not in communities as among
the earliest ruling races of India, became the dominant lan-
guage of the tribes highest in the social scale in a country
where the system of communal property originated ?
Thus the problems that presented themselves for solution
were, first, how to explain the diffusion of Indian land-
tenures throughout South-Western Asia and Europe ; and
secondly, to show how languages of the type dominant in
Europe, which differed radically from the original agglutina-
tive tongues of South- Western Asia, were diffused throughout
Persia and Northern India, countries separated from Europe
by the wide territories ruled by the Semitic races ? In con-
sidering the problem in this light, it was clear that as the
same system of communal land-tenure which originated in
India, was found to be equally dominant in countries under
Indian, Semitic, and Indo-European rule, it was therefore pro-
bable that the immigrant races who brought the Indian village
system through Semitic lands into Europe had established
themselves in these countries before the group of Semitic
languages had been formed, and before the people speaking
them had become a dominant confederacy, forming a wedge
between the European and Indian races. This conclusion
ESSAY I 5
was confirmed by considering the great antiquity that must
be assigned to the early European village communities who
founded the pile villages of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages,
the remains of which have been found in all European
countries, while the stone monuments of the races who built
them extend from the Eastern shores of Asia to the coasts
of the Atlantic on the West.
Again, these early villagers, who originally, as I have shown
in Essay ii., probably belonged to the Indian Dravidian races,
must have spoken languages belonging to the same family
as those of Southern India, and we can thus explain how it
was that these people gave to their mother mountain Ida in
Phrygia the name of the Tamil mother goddess, Eda, the
sheep, the mother of the shepherd races, and account for the
great similarity between Tamil, Hebrew, and Latin roots shown
by Dr. Caldwell in his comparative grammar of the Dravidian
languages. We can also through the identity of the races
who founded the village communities of India, South-
western Asia, and Greece, explain how the whole ritual of
the worship of the mother earth in Assyria, Palestine, Asia
Minor, and Greece, the sanctity of the village groves and
the reverence for the mother tree in all Asiatic and European
countries, grew out of the seasonal dances to the gods held
in the Sarna or holy grove of the Indian village, and how
the political organisation of the rule of the Amazons in
Asia Minor and Greece was founded on the matriarchal
customs of Southern India.
In following up the inquiry as to the evidence available
for elucidating the history of these first pioneers of civilisa-
tion and of their successors who ruled before the days when
the discovery and dissemination of alphabetical writing made
annalistic history recording the deeds of individuals possible,
I found that the Indian Brahmanas described the stages of
the evolution of ritual from the days when the first altar was
made and consecrated to the mother earth. Though the
consecration of the first altar constructed according to these
d
6 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TEViES
rules was subsequent to the age of niatriarelial rule, and the
consecration of the village grove, yet its great anticiuity is
proved by the discovery by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of
the Trojan city of the early Bronze Age of a leaden image of
the mother goddess, described by me in Essay iii., bearing
on it the symbols ordered in the Indian ritual to be marked
on the primaeval altar. Following out the clews given in
the Brahmanas and Rigveda I found that the history of the
early ritual of the Hindus can only be explained when it is
compared with that of the Akkadians, and that the identity
of the names ^ and attributes of tlie early gods in Hindu
and Akkadian mythology, show that the religious con-
ceptions of the two people were evolved on nearly identical
lines. They are also both connected by the common link of
Zend ritual, and the reverence paid by all three nations to
the creator of the germ of life, the Akkadian and Egyp-
tian Shu, the fire-god who made the Indian Soma and the
Zend Haoma, the heavenly rain and seed which creates
life on earth. It is the seed of life which was, according to
the belief of all three nations, enshrined in the mother-
mountain of the East, whence Indra the rain-god gets the
rain, the parent of Is-tar the daughter (tar) of the mountain
(is) and of the Indian rain-god Shuk-ra or Suk-ni, who is
called in Akkadian Suk-us or Shuk-us, the wet (suk) god
(flw), the Akkadian name of Istar.
I also found that the Egyptian religious and national his-
tory in the two stages of its growth, first from Southern and
afterwards from Northern influences, can be traced to Indian
and Akkadian sources, and that it was impossible that the
maritime commerce, whence the wealth was earned which
made the Euphratean countries and Egypt rulers of the
ancient world, could have been foinided, except by the Indian
^ Instances of this identity will be found in many passages in these Essays,
and of these I may mention here that of the Hindu Ap-sara, the cloud goddesses,
and the Akkadian Ab-zu, the abyss, also that of the Akkadian god of the West-
wind, Martu, and the Indian goddesses of the south-west wind, the Maruts.
ESSAY I 7
seamen, who alone, r.f the races living in South -Western
Asia, possessed fore^its close to the sea-shore, yielding ship-
building timber.
But though much valuable historical evidence is, as I have
shown in these Essays, deducible from ritualistic history,
antiquarian remains, botany and zoology ; yet the con-
tinuous account of the evolutionary progress of civilisation
which I have tried to trace in these pages could never have
been written without the help of the ancient mythic tales
handed down orally from generation to generation by the
the Asipu, the official diviners, interpreters, and keepers of
nati(mal records. It was they who were first the teachers
of the children of the primoeval villages, who began, as the
instructors of agricultural communities, to record, in the
form of stories, the succession of natural phenomena for the
instruction of their pupils, and who afterwards altered these
stories in the manner shown in Essay ii. in the comparison of
the tale of Nala and Damayanti, and of that of the plot of
the Mahabharata, so as to make them national histories. It
was these ancient historians who became the depositaries
and guardians of the wisdom of the national ancestors and
their predecessors, and the preservers of the historical ex-
perience of past ages which was proved by constant practical
testing of its value to be the best guide for those who
founded, enlarged, and maintained the imperial dominions
of the primaeval Kushite race which germinated from the
alliances of adjoining village communities for purposes of
mutual defence and the promotion of internal trade. It is,
as I have shown in the text, the names of the supposed
heroes of mythical narratives which mark the succession of
epochs in the world''s history ; and it is from this evidence,
combined with that gathered from the other sources to
which I have already referred, from linguistic affinities and
the recorded customs of the tribes forming the nations
dwelling within the area over which my inquiries have
extended, that I have been able to deduce the order in
8 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
which the successive ages marking t*ie growth of human
society followed each other.
These began with the epoch of the primeval village, the
worship of the mother earth, and the prevalence in Southern
lands of matriarchal rule. This was followed by the union
of the patriarchal worshippers of the Northern father-god
with the matriarchal races of the South ; and they, again,
were succeeded by the miners, metal-workers, and artisans of
the early Bronze Age, who looked on fire and the life-giving
heat as the author of life. These were the people who in
Asia Minor became the worshippers of the mother goddess
Magha, the socket-block from which fire was generated by
the fire-drill, and it was they who became the Magi of
Persia and the Maghadas of Indian history. They were
succeeded by the Shepherd races of the Caucasus, who, while
they acknowledged the divinity of fire as represented in the
lightning flash which preceded and made fertile the life-
giving rain, also looked on the rain-god as the parent,
mother, and author of all life on earth. It was they who,
coming southward from the Caucasus, and passing through
the Euphrates valley, formed the great confederacy of the
sons of Kush, the tortoise, grouped round the mother-moun-
tain of the East, to which I have already referred as the
mother-mountain of the Hindus, Akkadians, Semitic As-
syrians and the Zend races of Persia. It is the history of
the worship of the great Naga, the snake or plough of
heaven, the impregnator of the creating rain which I have
traced in Essay in. to theGond worship of the Nagur or plough
at the annual festival of the Akhtuj, held in the beginning
of the Gond year, on a date nearly answering to our 3d of May.
This is, as I have shown in the text, nearly the same time as
the 23d of April, dedicated in our calendar to St. George,
whose Greek name marks him as the worker (ourgos) of the
earth (^e), that is, ' the heavenly plough."*
But as I have since discovered, I have omitted in my
Essay several of the most important links which make it
ESSAY I 9
absolutely cei-tain that the Saint who is now called St.
George, was originally the great Naga, the god who sends
the rain which makes the earth capable of producing life,
and which causes the seed to sprout and grow.
In tracing the descent of the myth, we must go back to the
Egyptian god Horus and the Akkadian Istar. Horus is the
son of Hat-hor, whose name means the house (hat) of Hor,
that is, the temple or mother whence he was bom. She is un-
doubtedly, as Professor Tiele affirms, identical with the goddess
Istar, the daughter (tar) of the mountain (i>), and it is her
sister and counterpart Isis the wife of Osiris the Assyrian
god Asar, who has brought the root Is of her name into
Egyptian mythology. The only son of Istar was Dumu-zi,
meaning the son (dutnu) of life (zi\ bom without a father in
the temple, ' where no man has entered,"' ^ and it is he who
is the Tammuz of the Semites, who, as we are told in the
earliest form of the Akkadian Flood legend, launched his
bark on the waters of the Flood, and thus survived to be the
father of life on earth.' His Egyptian counterpart Hor-us,
the son of Hat-hor, the supreme (hor) god (as) was the god
of the races called the Har-shesu, or followers of Hor-us,
who ruled Egypt before its chronological history began
with the reign of Menes, the Egyptian Mena, about 5000
B.C., and he and his four sons represent, as I have shown in
Essay iii. the rain or meridian pole standing in the midst of
the four stars marking the four quarters of the heavens. He
is, in short, the Ash-era or rain-pole of the Semites, the Ba''al
or husband of the land, and the Tur or meridian pole of the
Akkadians, sacred to the god Nun — the spirit-god dwelling
in and vivifying the mists of the atmosphere, worshipped
both by the Akkadians and Egyptians as the supreme
^ Tiele, Ouiluu of the History of Ancient Religions^ * Religion among the
Egyptians/ p. 58.
* Sayce, Hibbtrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 238 ; line six of the transla-
tion of the bi-Iingual hymn.
' Encyclopadia Britannicay Ninth Edition, Art. Deluge, vol. vii. p. 55.
Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233.
A
10 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
Creator. Mons. Clemiont-Ganncaii, in his paper on Horus
and St. George in the Revue Archiohgique^ has shown that
an Egyptian statue in the Louvre, representing the combat
of Horus with Set is, except that Horus has the head of a
sparrow-hawk, identical with Byzantine pictures of the
combat of St. George with the dragon, for in l)oth the con-
queror is depicted as riding on a horse in military costume,
and thrusting a lance into the neck of a crocodile on
which the horse is trampling.^ In this Egyptian statue
of the bird-headed hero we see also the reminiscence of the
primaeval myth of the storm-bird, which I have descril)ed in
Essay iii., which brings the rains of the Indian rainy season
to the central mountain of tlie East, along the path from
south-west to north-east marl-'d on the Hindu altar as the
path of Indra, the rain-god. And we see in Horus the god
who, like the Indra of the Rigveda, slays the dragon of
drought, Shushna, called under another form Vy-ansa, or
he with the two {vi) shoulders {ansa), Vyansa is said in one
hymn to be the father of Indra, whose mother was like tlie
Egyptian cow-goddess Isis, the cow-mother Aditl, the
mother of life.- This demon of drought, the broad-
shouldered cloud which seems at first to keep back the rain,
the alligator or crocodile, father of the Indian Maghadas,
and the Egyptian worshippers of Set, called Maga, Mug-ral
and Mug-gur by tlic Hindus, and Maga Sebek, or Maga, the
uniter,^ by the Egyptians, is, as we are told in the Rigveda
and Satapatha Brahmana, the god, otherwise called Danu,
the judge of tlie Akkadians born from the Soma or life-
giving water, the divine Su, or begetter, and Agni the
god of fire, the lightning flash.* This same myth is repeated
^ Clermont-Ganneau, * Horus et St. George.' Revue ArchSolo^i^que^ Nouv.
Sen t. xxxii. pp. 388-397.
^ Rigveda, iv. 18, I, 9, 10, Lud wig's translation, vol. ii. p. 590.
^ From Sbk^ to unite.
* Rigveda, i. 32, 5, 9, (Ludwig, vol. ii. p. 596). In this hymn the death of
Danu, called in stanza 5 Vyansa, is described in stanza 9, where he is said,
when slain by Indra 's weapons, to be left lying under his mother, the atmo-
ESSAY I 11
in that of Tishtrya of the Zend Avesta, the rain-star who
fights under the guises of a young man fifteen years old, a
golden-homed bull, and a white horse with the black hoi-se
Ap-aosha, the burner (aosha) of the waters {ap\^ the black
cloud of the Indian summer season, whence the burning
west wind which keeps back the rain issues. It is the spear
or meridian pole 'of the rain-god, which pierces the cloud
and makes it give the rain, and this rain-cloud, depicted as a
crocodile in the Egyptian statue, is the Mug-ral or alligator
of the Gond song of Lingal, who attempts to drown the
Gronds in the flood brought from the south-west by the
Bindo storm-bird. This alligator is conquered by Lingal,
the father-god of the Gond races, the counterpart of Indra,
Horus, and Dumu-zi, who has been borne across the waters
of the flood by Puse, the tortoise. It is this same god
Horus and Dumu-zi the son of Istar-Hathor (the mother
mountain of the land of the tortoise Kush), who is the rain-
god of the Akkadian Flood legend called Nin-igi-a-zag, or
the first bom (zag) of the lady (7iin) of the spirits (jgi) of
water (a), who sends on earth the rains which cause the flood.
These appear in the Indian Flood story, as the baptismal
waters consecrating a new earth, the new-bom mother Ida,
the mother mountain, wherein dwelleth righteousness. She
arose from the heavenly seed of milk, curds, and whey, sown
in the waters by Manu, meaning tlie thinker, to be the cow-
mother of the cultivating race, the holy race of which
Manu was the father. This was the race called in the
Mahabharata, the Iravata, who settled on the rivers which
watered the tortoise earth, the lands of India, the great
irrigating race who are still in India called the Kurmi or
sons of Kur, the tortoise. And it was the worship of the
mother of the waters, whence the rivers rise which was trans-
spheric vault, and this combat is- described in the Satapatha Brahmana, i. 6.
3, 8-14. (S. B. E. vol. xii. pp. 165, 166), where Danava, born Irom Soma and
Agni, b said to be slain by Indra with the help of those who begot him.
^ Darnusteter Zendavesta Tir Yasi, 13, 16, 18. (S. B. E. vol. xxiii. p. 98.)
12 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ferred to the Euphrates valley in the worship of the Baby-
lonian and Zend goddess Anahita, called by Herodotus
17 Ovpavlrjy the heavenly mother, and to Egypt in the wor-
ship of the cow-mother Isis.^
When we turn from the Egyptian, Zend, Akkadian, and
Indian rain-gods to St. George, we find that the latter is
worshipped under the names of Gherghis or El Khudr,
throughout Syria and Palestine, and that in Lydda which
is the centre of his worship, and is called in the Episcopal
lists ''Ay^o ylopyiov TroXi? or the city (ttoXcs) of the holy
(&yLo) George {ytopycov)^ his temple is still pointed out as
the home of Khudr, and his festival is celebrated yearly
on the 23d April, the English St. George''s Day. He is
also called by the Mohammedans, the Hasreti (prophet)
Elias, and it is under this name or that of Zeus Ombrios
or Huetios, the rainy or showery Zeus, that he is wor-
shipped on every high hill and promontory in Greece,
while in time of drought people flock to the churches and
monasteries dedicated to him, to beg for rain.^ It is thus in
this name that we see the god la of the Akkadians trans-
ferred to Palestine and Greece as the god {II or iSZ)-Ia,
the prophet El-i-jah, he whose god (El) is Yah, other-
wise called El-i-as. His temples are scattered everywhere
along the Syrian coast, and Dean Stanley describes one
which he visited, which was quite void of images, like
the temple to the supreme god of the Hor-shesu at
Ghizeh near the statue of the Sphinx, and was only
marked as a temple by the curtain drawn across the recess
sacred to the unseen god.^ Mohammedan tradition, as
recorded by Masudi, tells us how Gherghis was sent by God
during the life of Mohammed to convert the king of Maushil,
^ Tide, Outlifie 0/ the History ofAtuient Religions, * Religion of the Er.m-
ians,' s. 103, p. 171. Lenormant, ChalcUcan Mc^ic^ pp. 234-235. Herod, i. 131.
* Garnet! and Stuart- Glennie, The Women of Turkey attd their Folklore,
chap. iv. p. 125, and chap. v. note on St. George, p. 192.
' Stanley, Sinai ami Palestittty p. 274.
ESSAY I 13
and was by him slain three times, reviving after each martyr-
dom.^ But this legend can be traced in Arabic folk-lore to a
still earlier source, for IbnWahshiyah, who in the tenth century
A,D., translated the Nabathcean Agriculture of the Mandaite
Kuthami into Arabic, while identifying St. Greorge and
Dumu-zi (Tammuz), speaks, with reference to this story, of
another Nabathcean book which he had found, telling how
Tammuz was put to death several times by a king whom he
had summoned to worship the seven planets, and the twelve
signs of the Zodiac.^ Again, Abu Sayid Wahb-ibn-Ibrahim,
in his calendar of the Ssabian festivals of Southern Arabia,
says of the month Tammuz (June-July), ' on the fifteenth of
this month, or about the 1st July,"* is the festival of the
weeping women, which is identical with Ta'uz, a festival held
in honour of the god Ta'uz.^ This festival again brings us
to that of the festival to Juggemath in Chota Nagpore in
India, which takes place about the 8tli July, or just after
the beginning of the rainy season, while the great national
festivcd to Juggemath at Poori takes place in May, during
the hot season, or nearly at the same time when St. Greorge
or El Khudr is worshipped at Lydda, and the Gond Nagur
^od at the festival of the Akhtuj ; and in Khudr, as well as
Gherghis, we see a survival of Greek mythology, for while
Gherghis is the Greek Ge-ourgos, so Khudr is the Greek
Hudor, water. The dates of the festival to the rain-god also
mark, as I show at greater length in Essays ii. and in.,
historical changes, for they hover between the Gond festival
held in April to mark the beginning of the Gond year, de-
pending, as I show in Essay ii., on the movements of the
Pleiades, the Ooraon and Burmese festival to the water-god,
held at the time of the blossoming of the Sal-tree, the
* Masudi, ul^ersetzt von Sprenger, p. 1 20.
* Gamctt and Stuart-Glcnnie, Tfu JVomen of Turkey and their Folklore.
Note on St. George, Horus, and Khudr, p. 191-193. Baring-Gould, Curious
Myths of the Middle Ages, * St. George,' pp. 276 ff.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 239, note i.
14 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
parent tree of the Dravidian races, and that instituted by
the star- worshipping races, to mark the beginning of the
new and the end of the old year, at the time of the
summer solstice, when the star Sirius, the Zend Tish-trya,
rises, and the rains in Northern India begin.
That the myth of St. George, with the accompanying
stories of the martyrdoms and revivals of Tummuz, and the
launching of the bark of the rain-god on the waters of the
flood at the summer solstice, originated in Northern India,
is rendered almost certain by the form in which the story is
told in the Mahabharata. In the history of the descendants of
Nahusha and Yayati, the ancestors of the five royal races of
the Rigveda, Kacha, the tortoise, is said to have been sent
to earth by the gods as the pupil of Shukra, the rain-god,
to learn from him how to make the dead live again. Shukra
was the father of Deva-yanl, the angel (d^va) manifestator
of Ya (tlie Akkadian la) in the female form, who sought to
make Kacha marry her. But his foes were the Danavas,
the sons of Danu slain by Indra as Vyansa, the thundercloud,
wliose king was Vrisha-parya, meaning the season (parva)
of the life-giving rains (Vrisha or Varsha). Kacha was slain
by them three times, and was revived each time by the rain-
god Sluikra. The whole story is one based on the three seasons
of the year, the number which, as I show in Essay ii., were
reckoned by the races who first introduced plough culture
in Asia Minor, and it was tliis reckoning they brought with
them to India. It tells of the revival of the thirsty earth
when at each recurring season it has been repealled from death
by the life-giving rain, and the last revival of Kacha att he
autunni season of the vintage, which marked the close of the
year of tlie barley-growing worshippers of the Ashvins at the
autunnial equinox, after his ashes had been mixed with
tlie wine drunk by Shukra, is made to coincide with the
abandonment by Shukra and the worsliippers of the rain-god
of intoxicating drinks, and is thus connected with the
religious reform, also referred to in the account of the seed
ESSAY I 15
sown ill the waters of the flood by Manu, which made the
libations to the rain-god to consists not of spirituous drinks,
but of pure water, milk, curds, and whey. It was after his
final revival that Kacha went up to heaven and became the
star-god of the sons of Kush, who reckoned five seasons in
the year, marked by the five-rayed star of Egyptian hiero-
glyphics y^ the star of the god Horus. Kacha left
Devavani unwooed and unwed, and she became the bride of
Yayati,and the mother of Yadu andTur-vashu, who were both
the ancestors of the races whose history I trace in Essay iii.,
and also the two seasons added to the three of the earlier
age rej)resented by the three sons of Sharmishta Yayati'^s
other wife, who was the daughter of King Vrisha-])arva.
It was the new races born of Devayani who marked the age
of the plough-god, the god of the horned oxen and the moon
cow and bull, whose horns appear on the Jewish altar, and he
supports the picture of the two cattle, the archer, the Vedic
god Krishanu of the heavenly bow, and the ankh or symbol
of life which form the battle-standard of the Assyrian kings.^
The worship of the plough-god, like the year of three
seasons, takes us back to Asia Minor, where, as I show in
Essay 111., the Iberian race of the Basques or Vasks, the
sons of the Central Asian and Indian god Vasn, began
to grow wheat and barley, and when they migrated to
India on one side, and Europe on the other, and founded in
the latter the Neolithic villages, they took with them, as dis-
tinctive marks of the land whence they came, the common
com blue-bottle {Ceiitaui^ea cyamis) and the Cretan catch -fly
(SUene Crettca\ which, though indigenous in Asia Minor,
Greece, and Italy, are not found wild farther north, though
they appear with wheat and barley in the remains of Neolithic
* See illustration of the Standard in Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria j
p. 323-
16 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
villages in Switzerland.^ It was also from Asia Minor and
Central Asia that these Basque cultivators brought the Neo-
lithic cattle, tlie Celtic shorthorn {Bosjrontosus) the domes-
tic ox {Bos taunts) the lionied sheep, and the goat with the
keeled honis arching backwards, and the ass,^ whose sons, the
Ashvins, or heavenly twins, are said in the Rigveda to have
first sowed barley with the plough. It was also in Asia Minor
that the worship of St. George, the rain-god, who appears
in later legend as bom in Cappadocia, originated, for the
high plateau of Cappadocia, the central table-land of Asia,
dominating the western side of the northern part of the
Euphrates valley has always been, both in ancient and modem
times, the pasture-ground of numerous flocks of sheep,
and it is therefore a country where fertilising rain is most
necessary.3 This central plateau, and the valleys of the
rivers which flow from it, was the great nursery of civilized
man, where, as I have shown in these Essays, the southern
matriarchal races, the north-eastem fire-worshippers, miners
and workers in metal, the northern sons of the bull and the
shepherd races amalgamated, and it was there that the god
who gives the rain was first acknowledged to be the father
of life on earth who maintains his children by making the
crops to grow, and by thus raising food, both for them
and their flocks and herds of sheep, goats, and cattle. It
was here that the rain-god was first deified as the goddess-
mother Sar, the cloud, the Hindu Sara-ma and Saranyu,
the Greek Erinyes, the wolf mother of the twins Ushasa-
nakta, day and night, whose birth is recorded in the
Rigveda, but who was first the Goddess I^ada of the Wends,*
the Greek wolf and fire-mother Leto, who bore on the river
Xanthus or the Yellow River flowing from the Cappadocian
hills, the twins, Apollo the god of day, and Artemis the
^ Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain^ chap. viii. p. 302. Lubbock,
Prehistoric Times^ Second Edition, p. 205.
'^ Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain^ chap. viii. pp. 297-299.
' Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th Edition, vol. v. Art. Cappadocia, p. 75.
* Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions^ chap. iv. § 1 13, p. 185.
ESSAY I 17
goddess of night. The birth of these twin gods of the
yellow race became in Indian mythology the birth of the
god Hari, the storm-god, who took the name of his
mother, Sar, and who was born on the Jumna or Yamuna, or
river of the twins ( Yama), It was these people, the sons
of the rivers, as the first colonisers of the river valleys
called themselves, who became the yellow gardening-race
who made the fig-tree of Asia Minor, the date-palm of
Babylon, and the peach-tree of China their father and
mother trees, and who introduced into agriculture the fruit-
trees found in the Neolithic villages. It was they and their
allies who, as the growers of millets and barley and the
feeders of sheep, became the race who finally formed the con-
federacy of the rulers of the tortoise earth, and who wen?
grouped round the mother-mountain of the East, the
mother of rain, and there formed the union of the four
triangles ^^^/(c^ ^^ national groups designated by the prim-
aeval triangular sign which guarded the fire-god on the
Hindu altar, and it is from this primseval map, as I have
shown in Essay iii., that the figure of the tortoise earth was
formed. But here again we meet with the legend of St.
George, the rain -god, the knight of the cross,^ for it was in
the centre of the tortoise earth that the mountain of the
rain-god stood, and it is from the cross forming the ground-
plan of the tortoise, with the pole or mountain in the centre,
that the Egyptian star JC of Horus was formed. It is
from the history of the symbolism of the meridian-pole stand-
ing in the midst of the cross that the whole legend of the
cross, as sacred to the rain-god, arose. The first cross was that
drawn on the Hindu altar, which I have described in Essay
ni., and one of the lines of this cross marked the path of the
^ Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, * Legend of the Cross,'
pp. 304. 368.
2
i
18 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
rain-god Indra from south-west to north-east, while the
other, from north-west to south-east, showed the path by
which the Maghadas, or worshippers of tlie household fire,
entered India. The cross thus made was that called by us St.
Andrew's Cross ^^ , and it is from it that the Swastika, or
sacred sign of the fire-god, was derived. This I V denoted
^ I
the four triangles formed by placing an upright cross — ^
the sign of the fire-god which marked the four quarters of the
heavens with the meridian-pole indicating the north and
*
south, on the original St. Andrew's cross thus ""^lc"°- This
figure formed the eight-rayed star used as the sign of God
in the oldest Akkadian inscriptions at Girsa. By joining
A and B, C D, E F, G H together, the four triangles, symbol-
ising the four united nations, are completed. The four
triangles became the Greek Cross, a sign sacred to the
Assyrians, as it appears on the breast of an effigy of Tiglath-
Pileser in the British Museum. St. George's Cross, as de-
picted on the funeral urns in the cemetery of the Bronze
Age at Villanova, near Bologna, ^^^^3 is formed by
the junction of four parallelograms, made by placing the
three sides of the triangles of the Greek Cross side by
side, thus \^ and these parallelograms represent the
union of the two sacred triangles which formed the four-
squared figure, the oblong altar sacred to the fire-god,^
which is said in the Rigveda to have conquered the triangles
^ This four-sided altar, formed of the two triangles, was that sacred to the
race of the Ashura who believed in the divinity of pairs, and added three
father>gods to the three primaeval mother-goddesses.
ESSAY I 19
of the earlier mother-goddesses, while the lines of the inner
cross represent the four rivers descending from the centre
Mother Mountain, the Oxus or Gihon, the Indus, Jumna,
and Ganges, which watered the empire of the Kushika rulers
of Northern India, and the five circles represent the four eggs
or triangles of the Greek Cross, the four united races, and the
place of the meridian -pole or mother-mountain where the
worid'^s egg was laid. The great antiquity and wide diffusion
of the whole series of conceptions represented by the diflferent
forms of the cross is proved by the following instances:
St. Greorge'^s Cross is traced on one of two cinerary urns
taken from between two beds of volcanic trap on the Alban
Mount, near Rome, while the other bears the sign of the
Swastika &=:=], thus showing that the cross was a sacred
symbol in the very remote ages, quite forgotten by local
tradition, when the Alban Mount was an active volcano.
St, George's Cross is also found on cinerary urns of the Bronze
Age in the ancient cemeteries of a pile-village at Villanova,
in the Commune of Sta. Maria delle Caselle, near Bologna,
and also in that of Golasecca.^ The cross was also the symbol
of the rain-god Quia-teot among the Mayas, the ancient race
who preceded that of the Toltecs as rulers of Mexico, and
children of both sexes were sacrificed to him to procure rain,
and their flesh devoured by the chiefs, just in the same
way as I have shown in Essays ii. and iii. human sacrifices
were offered everywhere by the yellow race throughout India,
South-Westem Asia, and Greece, and it is from this custom
that man is declared in the Brahmanas to be the first of
sacrificial animals, and the altar on which he was sacrificed
was that made to represent the mother earth, marked and
consecrated by the cross to the rain and fire god. It was
from this god Quia-teot that the Mexican rainy month,
^ Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages : * The Legend of the
Cross/ p. 371.
i
20 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Quia-huitl, received its name ; and the cross was worshipped
as the symbol of water, the generator, at Cibolia, while the
introduction of the sign and ritual of the cross was ascribed
by the Toltecs to their god Quetzalcoatl. The cross at
Palenque, in Yucatan, with the image of the sacred bird
perched on it,^ brings us again back to the Gond legend
of the Bindo-bird that brings the rain. It is through this
bird that we find a complete explanation of the origin
and sanctity of the cross symbol. The earliest cross
was undoubtedly the Tau Cross
This repre-
sented the fire-drill and the socket, and was sacred to the
fire-god as the miraculous producer of life-giving heat. But
among the confederacy who made the mother-mountain of
the East their centre, and depicted the South-West monsoon
as the storm-bird who brings the rain, the messenger
of the Almighty, the mother of life on earth, and the
layer of the world'^s egg, from whence the sons of the
tortoise race were bom, this original symbol of the father
and mother of fire became the ' ankh ** H P sacred to
the Babylonians and Egyptians. This, as I have shown
in Essay iii., is proved by the vignette depicting its adora-
tion and assumption to heaven in the Papyrus of Ani
to represent the infusion of the seed of life by the fire-god
into the worWs egg, whence the men of the red race are
to be bom. It is this pictorial myth which is exactly re-
produced in the legend told in the Mahabharata of the birth
of the blind king, Dhritarashtra, and the laying of the egg
by his wife Gandhari, whence the Kauravya or tortoise race
were born. Vyansa, as I have shown a few pages back, is
said in the Rigveda to be the father of Indra, and he repre-
sents the storm-cloud impregnated by the lightning flash, the
^ Baridg-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages : * The Legend of the
Cross,' p. 371.
ESSAY I 21
heavenly fire-god Agni. He, in the Mahabharata, becomes
Vyasa, meaning, like the name Sebek of the Egyptian Maga
crocodile, the uniter. He is the priest-god of the alligator
race of the Maghadas, worshippers of the household fire, the
son of the Rishi Para-shara, the overhanging (para) cloud
(stiaraX and it is he, described as *the black and terrible
priest,** who is called in by his mother, Satyavatl, the sister
of the fish-god, to be the father of the son of Ambika, the
wife of his deceased and childless half-brother, Vichittra
Virya, meaning the virile energy {viryd) of the two colours
or races {chittra\ the Maghadas and Kushikas, as we are
told in the duplicate story of the same alliance described in
the birth of Jarasandha. The son of the united races was,
in the story I am now telling, called Dhritarashtra, meaning
he who holds the kingdom together and was bom blind ;
that is, he became the fire-drill which impregnated the
world's egg laid by his wife Gandhari, from whence the
Kauravya were bom. Her brother is Shakuna, the kite or
the storm-bird. From this story, when compared with the
Egyptian evidence, the whole history of the sanctity of the
* ankh,** as the sign of life, is clear ; and the meaning and
origin of the myth is made still more manifest when we
consider the meaning of the name Gan-dharl and compare
her with the gods of popular Hindu theology. Her name
means she who wets (dhdri) the sacred enclosure (ffan):
that is, the worWs spring from whence the rivers of the
tortoise earth rise, which gives life to the holy birth-
land of the Kushite race, described in Essay iii., and she is
thus seen to be the goddess Dhar or Dharti, whom I also
show in the same Essay to be universally worshipped through-
out the hill-country of Western Bengal as the goddess of
the springs of living water. We can thus, in this series of
mythic symbols of the rain-god, trace the cross from being the
sign of the fire-father and mother to be that which depicts
the impregnation of the world or tribal egg. This latter,
when history was elaborated by the amalgamation of allied
22 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
races, became the sacred triangle representing the union of
three races, the three seasons of the year and their parent
gods. When the confederation of the sons of the tortoise
became the rulers of the civilised world this primaeval triangle
became the Greek Cross of four triangles, or the four eggs of
the four allied races who united round the sacred mountain^
the home of the rain-god, the blind father king of the sons
of the house of heaven. This conception of the world's egg
originated, like the name and attributes of Istar, from the
theology of the Ugro-Finns, who believe heaven to be made
out of a severed egg, of which the earth is the yolk, the
heavens the upper shell, and the ocean the albumen.^ And
hence we find that some of St. George^s crosses at Villanova
are depicted F^4=H as enclosed in the prima?val egg-shell.
We thus learn that the fire-worshippers, and those who
looked on the primaeval ocean as the home of life, were the
two races who elaborated the theologies of the fire-god and
the water-god. These were first rival doctrines, as is shown
in the story told by Khasisadra, the father of life, who was
saved in the Akkadian Flood legend, to the men of Surippak,
* That Bil-gi, the fire-god, hates me, and that it is to escape
him that I will go to the ancient waters and live with la.**
It was from the belief in the life-giving waters as the
author of life that the cult of the prophet fish-god arose.
This, as I show in Essay in., was first developed in India,
where the conception was naturally engendered by the annual
recurrence of the apparent miracle of the birth of the fish
from the life-giving rain. For it is there that water-tanks
formed by excavations, or by throwing dams across the
hollows between two hills or rising grounds, are, though
dried up every year by the heat of the dry season, found
to be swarming with fish as soon as they are filled by
the rains. These fish, as Sir Emerson Tennant proved
^ Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages : * Shamir,* pp. 386 ff.
ESSAY I 23
by actual experiment in Ceylon, have been hibernating
during the dry season in the mud; but to those who
had not investigated the true cause of the phenomena,
the fish who thus come to life simultaneously with the
advent of the rains, must have appeared as the heaven-sent
offspring of the rain-god sent on earth to teach his children.
This myth was expanded on reaching the foreign settlements
founded by the sons of the fish in their maritime voyages,
and thus the ship drawn by the fish -god in the Indian
legend of the Flood, and in that of the founding of Delphi
by the priests, whose ship was led by Apollo, the Dolphin
(SeX^t?) becfune the sacred vehicle or ark of the gods both
in Assyria and Egj'])t. This ark was the dolphin fish, the
'delphus"* or womb whence the royal and priestly races of the
ancient world were born. She was the goddess mother, called
in the Mahabhurata Satya VatI, she who is possessed of
truth {Satiya\ the twin-sister of Matsya, the fish-god. She
and her brother were the children of the god Vasu oi* Varsu,
the rain-god, miraculously born from the fish into which the
Apsara or cloud-maiden, named Adrika, the rock, was
changed, thus showing how the mountain-mother became
the fish-mother.^ It was she who was the mother of the
Uishi Vyasa, and the grandmother of the ruling races of
the Kauravya or sons of the tortoise, and their rivals,
conquerors, and successors, the Pandavas. She became
the fish-mother, worshipped as Derceto or Tir-gata, in
Syria,^ Aphrodite in Greece, and, according to Herodotus,
as Mylitta in Syria, and Alytta in Arabia.^ In Arabia
her name, as Professor Tiele shows, was AUat,* where she
became the light-moon, or the heavenly ship of light.
This is the same name as that of tlie Assyrian goddess
Allat, meaning the ' unwearied one,** who was queen of the
^ MahabharatS Adi (Adivansavatarna) Parva, Ixiii.
' Lucian, De Dea^ Syria j chap. xiv.
* Herod. I. 131.
* Tide, Otttline of the History of Ancient Keii^^ons : * Primitive Arabian
Religion,' pp. 63, 64.
24 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ghost world, and who was known to the Akkadians as
Nin-lil,* or the lady of magic (Zi/), and who was thus
a developed form of the second great goddess of the
Himyaritic Sabsean Arabs, called El-makah,* who was
originally the mother Mag or Maga, the magic mother, who
gave her name of Mag-ana, or the goddess Mag, to the
Sinaitic Peninsula. But it is in her ritual and in that of
the male fish-god that the process of the evolution of her
worship can be traced, for her priests were the Galli or
Eunuchs, who wore women'^s dresses, while it was w}thin her
temples that, as we are told by Herodotus, every Babylonian
woman was obliged once in her life to prostitute herself. She
was, in short, the goddess mother of the village grove, whose
cult I have described in Essay in., and who can be traced as
the fish-mother to Cyprus and Asia Minor in the mythic
names cited by Dr. Sayce in his lecture on Istar and Tammuz.
Thus the king of the Tauric Chersonesus, who sacrificed
strangers to Artemis, was called Thoas, and he was the
Sabaean Ta''az, whom I have already identified with Tammuz,
and his name, which becomes in the Cyprian legend Kinyras,
shows him again to be the parent of Tammuz, for the name
Kinyras is only a corruption of Gin-giri, the Creatrix, one of
the Akkadian names of Istar. He is, in short, the male
form of Istar, substituted by the patriarchal races for the
mother-goddess. She, in the legend of Thoas and Kinyras,
appears as Myrrha or Smyrna, who is the mother of Adonis,
whose name, derived from the Phoenician Adonic my lord, is
that of the Greek Tammuz. Myrrha or Smyrna is identical
with the bi-sexual Babylonian queen goddess Semiramis, who
was the fish-goddess and god, to whom the dove released by
the son of the fish-god from the ark was sacred.' The fish-
god was the god to whom human sacrifices were offered, and
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887 ; Lect. iii. p. 149.
'^ Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions : *The Sabaeans,'
s. 48, p. 79.
' Sayce, Hihhert Lectures for 1887 ; Lect. iv. pp. 227, 235-6, 271.
ESSAY I 25
he was the fire-god worshipped in Syria as Moloch, meaning
the king, the god of the yellow races, whose priests were women
dressed as men,^ like the Amazonian warrior priestesses of
the Ephesian Artemis. But the myth of the fish-god, the
prophet and teacher of heavenly lore, who, like the
Akkadian la, came clothed in a fish-skin, and borne in a ship
to Eridu, where he taught the lessons of civilisation to the
land visited by the seafaring sons of Kush or Kur, the
tortoise, is not confined to Asia and Europe, but we find it,
like the myth of the rain-god, transferred to Mexico and
North America. There the North-American Indians say they
were brought from Northern Asia by a man-fish, while the
Mexican god Teo-cipactli was a fish-god. His full name is
Huehueton-cateo-acateo-cipactli, meaning the fish -god of
our flesh ; and it was he who, like the Akkadian Damu-zi,
who after^'ards became la, was saved in the bark of cypress
wood, which he launched on the waters of the flood.^ Part
at least of the path by which the emigration of these sons
of the fish from Asia to America was effected can be traced
by the discovery of the absolute identity of a very large
number of the ancient Chinese and Akkadian syllabic signs
which has been made by Mr. Ball, and the absolute identity
of the Akkadian and American mythological traditions, which
I have already cited, make it all but absolutely certain that
the emigrations of the sons of Kur, the tortoise, extended to
America as well as Asia and Europe.
But the historical evidence showing the descent of the
water-mother and father and their offspring is not yet ex-
hausted, for we find, as I have shown in Essay iii., that the
worshippers of the mountain - goat, the god Uz, brought
from the plateau of Asia Minor, became, as they settled in
the plain country watered by the rivers, the worshippers
and sons of Terah, the antelope, wlio became Dara among
the Akkadians, and who was the deer-god, the Ilishya,
' Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages : * Melusina,* p. 496.
- Jl'id. p. 501.
26 THE RULING RACES OE PREHISTORIC TIMES
or antelope, who was the totemistic parent of the Indian
Brahmins. It is the deer-mother called PrishatI, the
heavenly antelope or bearing (peru) mother, who draws in
the Rigveda the chariot of the Maruts or wind-goddesses,^
who bring up the i*ain-bearing south-west (jnartu) wind, and
who are the daughters of Prishnl. It is the antelope-
mother, the Akkadian Dara, who is worshipped in Bengal
as Dharti, the goddess of the springs, and who became Gan-
dhari, or the mother of the Kushite race. She appears in
the Ramayana as Kaush-aloya, the house {aloya) of Kush,
the wife of Dasaratha, the ten (dasa) chariots (ratJia) or
months of gestation, and as the mother of Rama, the
father-god of the Western Shus, whom I have shown to be
the great trading race of Western India and the Euphratean
Delta. It is he who appears in Hebrew mythology as
Ab-ram, the father (ab) Ram, the son of Terah, the ante-
lope, who traced his descent to Ur, in the Euphratean
Delta, the city called Surippak in the Akkadian Flood
story, whence Khasisadra or Dumu-zi started on his voyage
across the waters of the flood. It is he who was worshipped
by the Assyrian Semites as Ram-anu, the god (an) Ram,
the sun-god Hadad or la, the beloved (dad) Rimmon, wliose
annual departure and rebirth as the rain-god, is said bv
Zechariah to have been mourned like that of Tammuz in
the valley of Megiddo,^ in the plain of Jezreel. He is the
Akkadian god Mer-mer, whose reduplicated name is repro-
duced in the Ram-ram of the Hindus, and whose sign
in Cuneiform script • 1 >^T I >- ] proclaims him as the
Creator who creates by reduplicating himself.^ This father-
god Ram was married to the cloud-goddess of the Caucasus,
Sar or Sara, the Sar*'-anyu of the Hindus, and became the
1 Rigveda, v. 55, 6 ; 58, 6.
' Zech. xii. 11.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary ^ No. 281.
ESSAY I 27
father of Isaac, who was like Dhritarashtra, the blind meridian-
pole, the father of the goat-god Uz or Esau, and of Jacob
the supplanter, who married the daughters of Laban, the
moon-god of Harran.^ Ra-ma, or the mother (ma) of Ila,
who became in Semitic patriarchal mythology, the father-god
Ram takes us to the Letto, Slav, or Wend god, Rai, the god
of the bright sky,^ who was brought to India by the
Maghadas, the worshippers of the household fire, and is still
worshipped by the Dosadhs, the priests of the fire-god as
Ra-hu, the creating (hu) Ra, and it was he who became in
Egypt the god Ra, whose worship was introduced together
with that of the Maga alligator-god Sebek.
It is this mythology of the worship of Ra which was the
offspring of the union of all the tribes of the civilised earth
round the meridian pole of the tortoise earth, the mother
mountain of the East. This was accomplished under the
rule of Rama, meaning ' the darkness ^ in Sanskrit and ' the
heights^ in Hebrew, who was otherwise called Varuna, the
god of the rain {var), the cloud, or the dark night, and it
was under his rule that the sons of Shem, meaning the name,
were born. It is this sacred name which appears in the
myth of Shamir the wonder-stone, the Sala-gramma of the
Hindus, which enabled Solomon, or Sal- man u the fish-god
to build the house of God without the use of hewn stone.
In the Bible story of the Septuagint, Solomon is said to
have built the temple at Jerusalem with Xldot^ aKporoiMot^^
or rough unhewn stone,^ but in the Arabic legend, from
which the story arose, he is said to have cut the stones with
Shamir. The story how Shamir was procured takes us back
to the days of historic myths, ages before the date assigned
to Solomon, the king of Judah, in our chronology, to the
days of the birth of Danu the judge, the father of the race
* Sayce, Hibhcrt Lectures for 1887 ; Lect. iv., p. 249, note.
* Tide, Outlines of Ancient Religions : * Religion among the Wends,'
p. 82.
3 Baring-Gould, CuHous Myths of the Middle Ages : * Shamir,' pp. 386 ff.
A
28 THK RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the circumcision, wedded by that ceremony to the mother
earth, and the age of the empire of Kushite race. The
legend tells how Solomon sent Benaiah with a chain on
which was written the magic word, ' Shem hammphorash,**
a fleece of wool and a skin of wine, to find Asmodeus who
knew where Shamir was hidden. Asmodeus was to be found
drinking from a huge cistern he had dug on a distant
mountain. Benaiah undermined the cistern and made a
hole in it. He then let the water off^, and plugged up the
hole with the fleece of wool. He then poured in the wine
in the place of the water. When Asmodeus came, and was
compelled by thirst, although he suspected some guile,
to drink the wine, Benaiah seized him when drunk and
brought him in the magic chain to Solomon. Asmodeus
told Solomon how the Prince of the Sea had given the worm
or snake Shamir to the moor-hen who had taken it to the
tops of the mountains, split the rocks with it, and injected
the seeds of living plants into the soil thus obtained.
Hence she obtained her name of Nugger Tura. Whoever
wants to find Shamir, must find the moor-hen'*s nest, and
cover it with glass. She, to get at her young, would fetch
Shamir to break the glass, and when it was brought Solomon
could then get it. Benaiah went to the mountain, found
the nest, shouted to frighten away the moor-hen and
covered it with glass, when the moor-hen brought Shamir
and placed it on the glass Benaiah took it. According to
a variant of the legend, the name of the demon who told the
secret to Solomon was Sak-kar, and the bird who brought
Shamir to her nest was the raven. Shamir, or the snake
which was brought, is said in the Talmud to be as big as a
barley-corn, to have been created in the six-days of the
Creation, and kept in a box, like the treasure of Pandora in
the Greek legend. ^Elian tells us how the bird called c7ro^,
the hoopoe, knew of a plant called Troa, meaning grass, which
enabled her to split the plaster placed over a hole in the
wall where she had made her nest.
ESSAY I '29
Now in this legend and its variants we have a complete
reproduction of a large part of the mythic history which I
have traced in these essays from the records of past ages.
We have Solomon the fish-god who speaks by the mouth of
his prophet, shown by the fleece of wool to belong to the
race of shepherds, and these learn their secret from the god
called Ash-modeus, the Aeshma-deva of the Iranians, the
Ash-or or fish god of the Assyrians, and of the Hindu Ash-
ura. He is the god of the six (Akkadian Ash) creating
powers, or the six days of Creation, and it is by observing
the processes of creation that he has become the depositary
of all wisdom. He is also the Sak-kar, or rain-god, the
Shuk-ra, Sak-ra, or Sak-ko of the Hindus, the Suk-us of the
Akkadians, represented by the five parents of life, the five
seasons of the Hindu year, the stars guarding the four
quarters of the heavens and the meridian pole, on which was
perched the moor- bird who laid the worWs egg, who knew
the secret of the sacred grass, the Troa of the Greek story,
and theKusha or Kush grass of Indian historical mythology.
This was the bird called Nugger Tura or the meridian
creating pole (iur) of the Naga snake. The Shamir, which
broke the glass or ice placed over her nest, was the power of
the tire sun-god, who broke the ice of winter by his rays ; and
the produce of the eggs of the wonder-bird were the wonder-
working words of the ordainer of the times and seasons,
the Creator who spoke the word which brought light from
darkness, and life and order from chaos and death. In the
story of the beguilement of Ash-modeus we find a repetition
of the ancient belief in the prophetic powers of the intoxi-
cated priest, and in that of the all-powerful snake Shamir a
picture of the growth of the seeds which pierce the ground
under which they are buried and send into the upper air
the shoots, whose roots can split the hardest rocks. The
whole legend is a parable, telling how the true temple of God
is built with the unhewn stones of knowledge, each being
marked with the Shem or name which shows that he who
d
30 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
used them knows their true meaning. It was the sons of
Shem or the name, the offspring of the fish god who were
taught true knowledge by his prophet messengers, and it
was the red man Adam, the first of the composite race, the
youngest but wisest of the sons of men, who learnt from
the accumulated teachings of past ages and his own powers
of observation and assimilation, to select, combine and
classify, to compare and differentiate natural objects and
phenomena, and who thus acquired the art of naming, which
is the foundation of all scientific inquiry. It was these people
who could give names to birds, beasts, and plants, to the
seasons and their changes, who proceeded to inquire further
into the causes which produced life, and who, when they found
the generative theories of its origin which were current in
popular theology insufficient, began to study the heavens,
whence God's best gifts, the life-giving rain and sunlight,
descended, and it was from these studies that the measure-
ment of time was reckoned, first by the observation of the
periods of gestation, and the changes of the moon which
marked them, next by the stars, the recurrence of the
weekly periods of seven days, and the number of lunar
changes which marked the inter\'als between the summer
and winter solstices. The results of these observations
were summed up in the eleven months sacred to the gods
of generation, the history of which 1 have given in Essay iii.
and IV., and in the lunar year of thirteen months, which was
subsequently superseded by the more exact solar year, and
the whole series of changes denoted by the several stages in
the progress of the scientific inquiry thus begun, up to the
adoption of solar chronology, are detailed in the subsequent
essays.
But the evidence proving the order in which this series of
primaeval historical changes succeeded one another proves
also that they were produced by the alliance of originally
alien tribes, who, if they had a common origin, had been
separated for ages before they met in their wanderings over
ESSAY I 31
the face of the earth, and formed confederated alliances. This
conclusion is confirmed by the cerebral differences and marks
of fusion shown by the skulls and skeletons found in the
tombs of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and also by the evi-
dence of linguistic changes. I have shown in Essay iil how the
presence in Vedic Sanskrit of the Dravidian cerebral letters
proves that the people who had made this form of Aryan
speech their mother tongue had before spoken a Dravidian
language, and a similar conclusion can be drawn from the
interchange of letters in European and Asiatic tongues and
from the skeletons of the primaeval races. Ancient
ethnology, as set forth in the Edda and tlie Rigveda, tells us
of the short, dark, noseless or snub-nosed race who tilled the
ground, and who were the Dasyus of the Rigveda, and the
Thyr of the Edda — the later German Dime, the Anglo-
Saxon Thralls.^ It also tells us of their conquerors, who are
described in the Edda as fair-haired, blue-eyed, and tall.
From the skeletons and portraits found in Neolithic tombs,
we learn that the Basque cultivating race, which was then
dominant in Europe, was small in stature, averaging about
5 feet 5 inches high, dark in complexion, with black
hair and eyes, and a long head.^ The cranial capacity of the
Basques or cultivating race of the NeoHtliic Age in Europe,
is shown in De Quatrefages** tables to correspond with that
of the Chinese, the yellow people, and the great gardening
and farming race of Asia. But these people were the
successors of the long-headed race of the Palaeolithic Age,
whose direct descendants are found in the Neolithic dolicho-
cephalic men of the cave Homme Mort in Southern France,
whose skeletons, though still, like those of the Palaeolithic
men, tall, show in the diminution of height, the modifica-
tions of the face and certain osteological characteristics,
* Penka, Origines AriaccCy Chap. i. p. 22.
* Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain^ Chap. ix. *The Neolithic
Inhabitants of Britain of Iberian Race,* pp. 310, 315.
32 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
evidence of intercrossing with a shorter race.i Races of
this dolichocephalic parentage survive in the long-headed
Spanish Basques, while on the other hand the French
Basques of Aquitaine are round-headed and brachycephalic,^
and belong to the race of round-lieaded Slavonic Finns
whose remains are those most frequently found in the round
barrows of the Bronze Age.^ It was these people who were
the fire- worshippers, who with their northern allies of the
bull race introduced the worship of the mother goddess
Maga, whose religion was founded on magic, and who
originated the burnt-offerings to the fire god. It was the
mixed races formed by the union of these eastern round-
headed tribes, with the long-headed agriculturists of the
Indian forest races, and the Palaeolithic hunters of the
north, who first, as the long-headed swarthy Basques of the
Neolithic Age, and afterwards as the round-headed Finns,
the metal workers of the Bronze Age, brought agriculture
and the metallic arts into Europe, and introduced into both
Europe and India the plough, a word formed from a root to
be traced to the languages of the brachycephalic Slavs.*
They also brought to Europe, South-Western Asia, and
India, the crops, domestic animals, and the arts and handi-
crafts which had originally been elaborated in Asia Minor
and Phrygia, and it was these people who were afterwards
succeeded by the tribes who led a second irruption of the fairer
races from the North, the sons of the bull, the people of
inflectional speech, wlio called themselves the Arya or noble
people, and looked down upon the mechanical races wlio
preceded them, and who originally spoke agglutinative
languages.
1 Dc Quatrefages, The Human Species^ Chap. xxx. * Osteological Char-
acters, Cephalic Index,' p. 373. Chap, xxvii, *The Cro-Magnon Race,*
pp. 3^2, 333.
2 Penka, Origities Ariaca, Chap. v. Die Enistchung der Arise/ten Volker^
pp. 104, 105.
3 Lubbock, Prehistoric Times ^ 2nd Edition, p. 129.
* Penka, Origincs Ariacir^ Chap. v. p. 135. Die Entstehung der Arischen
Volker,
ESSAY I. 83
The process of intermixture is fully attested by the lin-
guistic changes which can be traced in the Indo-European
and Ugro-Finnic languages : for these, as Dr. Sayce says,
show that the three stages of language : the monosyllabic or
isolating, the agglutinative, and the inflectional, ^ mark
successive levels of civilisation.'^ Each of these forms of
speech were, according to Topinard's doctrine, the result of
the cerebral organisation of the race who used it,^ and the
three stages marked the rule of the men of monosyllabic or
non-grammatical speech, of tlieir Turanian successors, who
spoke agglutinative tongues, who were succeeded by the
Aryans, who marked grammatical changes of meaning, not
by the copulation of roots, but by changes in the form of
the root-word. Clear evidence of the union of two alien
races, the one speaking inflectional, and the other aggluti-
native languages, is shown in the recurrence in the same
language of some cases of nouns and tenses of verbs formed
by the inflectional change of letters and alteration of the
root, which Penka has shown to be an inlierent characteristic
of the language-system of the northern Aryans,^ and of
others, like the Latin ama-ho and ama-vi^ formed by the
agglutination of two separate roots, which show that these
originally inflectional tongues had been altered by races
whose mother-speecli had belonged to the agglutinative
Turanian and Ugro-Finnic families.
But this evidence of intermixture is not confined to gram-
matical forms, but can also be traced in the intcrcliange
of letters. Thus Penka shows that the northern Aryans
originally used only aspirated tenues A7*, ph, th^ and that the
medial g^ rf, b were also originally Aryan letters.* The
* Sayce, TAd Principles of Comparative Philology ^ chap. iv. * The Theory
of the Three Stages of Development in the History of Language.*
* Penka, Origincs Ariaca^ chap. vii. Morphologischer Charakter dcr
Arischen Grundsprache^ p. 1 73, note I.
* Ibid, pp. 199 flf.
* Ibid. Pkonologischer Charakter der Arischen Gnindsprache, pp. 161
and 169, note 2.
3
A
34 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Finnic languages of the brachycephalic races, on the other
hand, possess no aspirates, and, as Thomsen says, it is with
the greatest difficulty that a Finn can pronounce the media?
gy dy b.^ Thus when we find in the analysis of Ugro-Finnic
languages that the Akkadian uses g*, rf, 6, where their
brethren, who have retained the purer Finnic speech, use
ky ty py B& iii thc Akkadian g^imy and the Vogul kuniy mean-
ing man,2 we can at once see that the advent of the Aryan
race of northern sun- worshippers, who used the medial letters,
was an important factor in Akkadian historical develop-
ment ; and again, when we find in the German tongue the
Aryan gh^ bhy dhy and gy rf, i, become A:, ty /?, we find that,
as Chavee says, ' if the German people had been originally
an Aryan race, they could never have altered the Aryan
language as they have done."** That this alteration of a
language spoken by a people who, like the northern Aryans,
based their national organisation on individual and family
property, was caused by changes made by the conquered but
more numerous communistic Finnic race, is proved by the
existence in South Germany and Switzerland of a great
preponderance of brachycephalic or round-headed people,*
showing that the Finns and Lapps were, like the Dravidian
populations of India, conquered by a Northern race using
inflectional forms of speech and aspirated letters, and
that the descendants of the united conquering and con-
quered races subsequently altered these letters into the
hard .tenues of the original tillers of the soil, just
as the Indian Dravidians altered both the hard tenues
and ajspirated gutturals of their Northern invaders into
sibilants.
^ Penka, Origines Ariaca^ p. 1 66, note 4. Thomsen's iiber den Eittflusz
der Germanischen Sprachen auf die Finnisch-Lappischen^ 24.
' Lenonnant, Chalda^an Magic^ chap, xxiii. p. 315, chap. xxii. p. 302,
' Penka, Origities Ariactr, chap. vi. pp. 164, 165. Chavee, Bull. <U la
Sociiti d Anthropologic de Paris , 2 Ser. ix. p. 621.
* Ihid. chap. v. Entstehung der Arischefi^Vblkcr^ pp. 101-103 ; chap. vi.
p. 170.
ESSAY I. 35
•
The route by which the brachycephaiic races entered
£urope is shown by the prevalence of the brachycephaiic
type of skull among the Slavs and Roumanians,^ and their
wide diffusion is proved by the predominance of tlie brachy-
cephaiic type of round graves throughout the Bronze Age in
Europe, and by the legends universally prevalent which
connect the knowledge of metals with a race of dwarfs who
became the elves of the popular fairy tales. We can every-
where find, in the interchange of letters, proofs similar to
those I have adduced from other sources, that a dolicho-
cephalic race of hunters, belonging to the types represented
by the Esquimaux in the extreme North, and the Australians,
Hottentots, and Bosjesmans in the South,* were superseded
by dolichocephalic, mesocephalic, and brachycephaiic races
of farmers, gardeners, and artisans, and that these mixed
races were again conquered by a Northern race, who spoke
an inflectional form of speech, but whose language was
altered by the influence of the more numerous Southern
stock whom they subdued. Thus these racial influences are
apparent in the changes of the Aryan word ghard^ the heart.
This becomes in Greece and Italy, where the influence of
the Permian Finns of Central Europe, whose national letters
were the tenues Jt, ^, /?, predominated, Kapiia and cor^
cordis. The gh of the root again becomes h in Gothic and
Sanskrit, as in Gothic hairt-o and Skr. hrid^ and the Finnic
rule that a consonant should always be followeil by a breath-
ing, appears in the vowel after A, while the Finnic t supersedes
the original d in halrt-o. This Finnic rule that a breath-
ing, parasitic i or J, or a vowel, should always follow a con-
sonant, appears also in the changes of the Aryan ground -
form kantam, a hundred, which becomes in the Lapp tjnoti\
aiotte, in which the n is dropped as a following consonant,
the Tcheremissian, sjtulo^ the Lat. centum^ the English
* Penka, Origims Ariaca^ chap. v. p. loi.
* De Quatreiages. The Human Species^ chap. xxx. * Osteological Char-
acters, Cephalic Index,' p. 373.
36 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
hundred.^ Hence we learn that the word shata, the Sans-
krit and Zend form of kantam^ is one made by a Northern
stock united with a composite race born from the union of
Southern Dravidians, who altered the Northern roots by
turning gutturals into sibilants, with North-eastern Finns,
who changed them still further by eliding one of two con-
joined consonants. To return again to tlie changes of the
root ghard. We see that the h of the Sanskrit hrid was
originally an aspirated guttural, by the Sanskrit word srad
dadhamiy I believe, which is shown by the Latin credo for
cor-doy to mean, I give to heart. In this Sanskrit word we see
further proof that the originally Northern guttural becomes
among a people with Southern affinities a sibilant, and this
appears not only in the Sanskrit srad^ but also in the Lithu-
anian szudisy'^ and we thus see that the Lithuanian races, whose
ritual is founded on tree and sun worship, were formed by the
union of the Southern agricultural races of the Indian village
with the Northern sun-worshippers. Similar changes and
similar historical information mark the use of the old Aryan
root akh-vaSy a horse. This becomes in the Latin equus^ in
Sanskrit ash-va, and in Zend, while the Sanskrit ash is re-
tained, the V becomes /?, and the name ash-pa becomes that
adopted by a mixed race of Southern Indian villagers and
Turanian Finns, l^he Southern sibilant again appears in
the Lithuanian asz-va. We can here trace the historical
transition of the speech of the Nortlicm races allied to the
horse-eating, long-headed men of the Palaeolithic Age,
through, on the one hand, the Ugro-Finn Voguls, who still
sacrifice horses, to the races who, like the Lithuanian, Zend,
and Sanskrit-speaking peoples, changed the guttural Minto
a sibilant; and, on the other, to the Latin races who, like
^ Penka, Origines Ariaca, chap. v. Enistehung der Arischen Vblkery
pp. 141, 151.
' Ibid.^ chap. v. EntsUhung der Arischen Vblker^ p. 140. Sayce,
Introduction to Science of Lcmguage, chap. vi. * Roots,* vol. ii. pp. 12, 20;
chap. vii. * The Inflectional Families of Speech,* p. 125.
ESSAY I. 37
tlie Permian Finns, changed the guttural kh into the tenuis
k. Again the root-word khund, dog, becomes in Greek kvcov,
/cvi/099 in Latin canis^ in Lithuanian szuns^ Sanskrit shvan,^
Other instances are those shown in the change of the root-
word mathar (our mother) into the Greek firjrrjp^ and the
Latin mater ; of the original ocht^ eight, into the Greek o/cto),
the Latin octo^ the Sanskrit ash-ta ; of the Aryan d into the
sibilant 2 in the Greek and Latin duo^ Lithuanian J?/, the
German zwei.
But one of the most interesting and instructive historical
changes is that shown in the different forms of the root-word
of our English Jire. This appears in the Armenian Pkur^
beginning with an Aryan aspirated p. This becomes in
Greek ttv/o, Umbrian jwr, Oscan /w/r, Old Higli German
Fiur. Greek tradition referred the derivation of the word
TTuf), which we see passed into the Umbrian and Oscan of
Italy, to Phrygian sources, and the same root appears again
in the name of Phrygia, which is shown by the Greek ^Xe^to^
to bum, and the Sanskrit Bhri-gu^ the name of the inventors
of fire, to be a form of the old Aryan root Pkur or Bhur.
This root, which appears in the Sanskrit Bhar-ga and
Bhar-dta^ when it was adopted by the race who brought to
Asia Minor with the Dravidian name /rfa, the Tamil suffix
gu^ which makes verbal nouns from roots, became Bhru-gu^
the Thracian . Bru-gcs^ and Phru-gu the Phrygians, the
humers or sons of fire, the original Phur or Bhur being,
when formed into a verbal noun by the addition of the suffix
gu^ changed into Phru or Bhru. The change from ph and
bhr to p in the Greek, Umbrian, and Oscan, shows that it was
made in accordance with the laws of the Finnic languages,
which forbid the union of two consonants, and do not allow
any Finnisli word to begin with more than one consonant.^
Thus, when this fire-god Bhur or Phur became a national
* Penka, Origems An'acer, chap. v. Entstehungdcr Arischcn Vblker^ p. 139
2 Ibid, chap. vi. Phonologischcr Charakter dcr Arischcn GrundspracAe,
p. 167, note 2.
38 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Finnic god, his name was changed to Piru, the god who
in the Finnic story of the Birth of the Snake, is the god
who gives it eyes.^ This god became the Father God of
the Zend tribe of the Fryano or Phryano, tlie worshippers
of the god (an) Fry, Phry, or Phru, who, as I show in Essay
III., were the Hindu Viru-paksha, or race who worshipped
the Linga called ' Viru ' or Piru, the p being the equivalent
of the Indian v, just as that of the Zend Ash-pa is the equi-
valent of the Sanskrit Ash-va, The form Piru used by the
Finnic race, who turned aspirates into tenues, is reproduced
in pSrum apdnij the Vedic epithet of the creating god,
meaning the sweller or begetter of the waters,* the lightning
flash which gives creative power to the heavenly Soma. It
also appears in the Tamil root peru^ meaning to beget or
bring forth, which is reproduced in the Latin pario^ with
the same meaning, while per or perUy the begetter, pro-
duces the Latin vir, a man.
But this history of the fire-god, the great begetter and
producer, who, starting from the North-west of Europe, gave
his name to Phrygia, and produced the Indian, Finnic, Zend,
and Latin off^shoots I have noted, does not end here, for the
Finnic Pir becomes in Akkadian, which substitutes mediae for
tenues, and changes a proto-medic r into Z,^ Bil, Pil, or Bel.
Bil-gi is the fire-god of Akkadian mythology, the god who
in the Akkadian story of the Flood, is superseded by his own
son, as Vyansa was by Indra, who was the son of the mother-
waters, begotten by the lightning flash, and this Bil-gi
becomes the primaeval Bel of Nipur, whose wife was Bil-at, a
prototype of Allat.* We thus find in the Akkadian fire-god
the same god who, as the Greek Phlegyas, appears as the
king of the Heraclidae, or sons of the fire and sun-god, on
their first entering into, and conquest of Greece from the
^ Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns Folklore^ vol. i. p. 38.
2 Rigveda, x. 36, 8.
^ Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ chap, xxiii. p. 316.
•* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1 887, Lect. iii. p. 149.
ESSAY I. 39
cultivating tribes of the communal village races. For
Phlegyas was, like Bil-gi, deposed, that is, slain, with his
subjects, the Cyclopes, by Apollo, the storm-god, of the
iEolic races. Also, as we find the northern r altered into I
in the Akkadian Bil-gi^ we find a similar change in the
name Phlegyas^ the Greek form of Phre-gu-as^ and we thus
see that the German pjlug and our plough are names taken
from that of the Phrygian fire father-god by a race which,
besides changing the r into an /, clianged the ph into a J3.
This metaphor of the plough, the phru-gu^ jyflu-gu^ pfl^^g'i
plug^ as the fire-drill which creates life-giving heat in the
furrow by friction seems to have been taken from the Turanian
race; for, just as the Gonds of India worshipped the god who
sends the life-giving rain, the cloud impregnated by light-
ning, under the name of the Great Naga, the heavenly nagur
or plough, so did the early-cultivating Finns, who brought
the plough and plough -grown crops from Phrygia, call the
plough by the name of the fire-god, and look on it as im-
pregnating the earth with life, just as the lightning gave
vital and creative power to the heaven-sent rain. These
people, whose ancestors, we are told in the myth of
Europa, came from Phoenicia, the land of the red (<f)oivL^)
under the guidance of the cow, brought with them into
Europe the traditions of law and order preserved in the
names of Europa'^s sons, Minos, the measurer, from Men,
to measure, Rhadamanthus, the diviner {mantha) by the rod
{rhodon\ the judge, and Sarpedon, the cleanser, from sair,
mr, to sweep. They also, under the guidance of Apollo, the
storm-god bom on the Xanthus, introduced the worship
of the ^Eolian Apollo, tlie Apollo Lycaeus, the offspring of
the wolf (hikos) fire-god, tlie god of the fertilising storm
and tempest, whose worsliip superseded that of the Cyclo-
pean fire-god Phlegyas, just as the worship of the rain-gods,
Sak-ra, Indra, la or Yah, and Hor, superseded that of the
fire-gods Viru, Piru, Bil-gi, and Shu, in India, Assyria, and
Egypt.
40 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
We thus see from the instances cited in this Essay, which
might be greatly multiplied, that language and mythic tales
give most valuable historical evidence, not only, as has been
apparently thought by many writers, of the internal growth
of races of homogeneous descent, but also of the union, alli-
ances, and common evolution of thought of alien and hetero-
geneous people. For, as in geological strata the fossils and
the order of superposition tell us of the ancient climates
and the order of succession of the living races inhabiting the
globe, so in language and myths we find proof of the forma-
tion of successive strata of human thought, each of which
can be placed in chronological order, by noting the evidence
furnished by the fossil remains wliich mark linguistic and
mythic changes. This knowledge, with that gained from the
study of the growth of ritual and the other methods of
investigation which I have indicated in these Essays, enables
us to look at the diversified modes of experience and thought
revealed by antiquarian research and the record of existing
traditions, beliefs, superstitions, and national customs, not as
an apparently hopeless puzzle, but to trace in them the
various stages reached by man in his progress towards reduc-
ing the limits of the unknowable and unknown, and to see
that customs and beliefs, which appear at first sight useless
and foolish, really furnish proofs of the wisdom and ingenuity
of our forefatliers. For they tell us how, before they had
obtained the assistance since given by the discoveries of
numerous generations of inventors and thinkers, they un-
ravelled many hidden mysteries of nature and overcame the
difficulties which threatened to foil their efforts to transmit
to future generations the benefit of their experiences.
ESSAY II
THE PRIMITIVE VILLAGE, ITS ORIGIN, GROWTH INTO THE
PROVINCE, THE CITY, AND THE STATE, AND ITS
METHODS OF RECORD
Every one will admit that the primitive village must
have been the parent of the oldest form of the later city
which is invariably built round a centre, the site of the
original market-place and temple, the Capitol of Rome and
the Acropolis of Greece. In seeking for the centre round
which the village was built we find indubitable evidence
as to the country whence it originated. For it is in India
that we find the village of the aboriginal tribes invariably
arranged so that the Sarna, the sacred grove in which the
trees of the primaeval forests are still left standing, as the
home of the local gods, is the central point of the village. It
is here that we find the explanation of the reverence for the
tree, the parent-tree of life of all the early races of India, of
the Northern Finns, the sons of the pine-tree ; and of the
Babylonians, the sons of the palm-tree, and of so many other
races. It is the Sarna which also explains the sanctity of the
groves attached to the temples, and dedicated to the local
gods of all countries of South-western Asia and Southern
Europe, and it is among the customs of the Indian people,
who call themselves the sons of the tree, that we must
look for those of the first founders of village life. But in
doing this we have to fix our initial starting-point in a very
early age of human history, for we find everywhere through-
out Europe, west of Greece, remains of villages of the
41
i
42 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Neolithic Age, which conclusively prove that the people
living in them had reached a fairly advanced stage of
civilisation, as they grew cereals, millets, and flax, owned
cattle, sheep, and goats, and cultivated fruit-trees ; and as
there is no evidence whatever in the history of European
village communities of any sudden break denoting a change
in organisation, it must be assumed that these villages
were all founded on the same system of communistic
property in land, wliich is still the distinguishing form of
land-tenure in all countries of Asia, and in all those of
Europe south of the Lippe, and east of Westphalia, and
we must therefore believe that the dwellers in the pile-
villages in Switzerland and North Italy held their land on
tenures similar to those we find in the pile-villages of
the Naga and river races in Assam and Burma. Also as,
wherever we find these communistic villages, we find the
village religion based on tree- worship, the first villages
must have been organised by a people to whom trees were
the home of the gods. The original system on which these
villages are founded must therefore have been elaborated
by a forest people, and could not therefore have originated
in those countries which were the seat of the best-known
ancient ruling empires, Assyria and Egypt, for in these
treeless and rainless lands no forest races could ever have
founded the network of confederated villages which was to
grow into the later empire ; and the rule of these countries
must necessarily mark a later stage in human progress, for
they owed their prosperity to maritime trade, and acknow-
ledged this and the foreign origin of their supreme gods by
carrying them in ships called arks in all religious processions.
It is also perfectly impossible that the Indian forest abori-
gines could have learned how to organise their villages from
the forest and hunting races of Europe and Asia Minor, for,
till the capacities of India as a wealth-producing country
had been developed by its own agriculturists, there was
nothing to tempt the Northern races to leave their own
ESSAY II 43
lands and cross the mountains and deserts which intervened
between them and India. It is also equally impossible that
the exact identity between tlie village communities of India
and Europe could ever have existed unless they had a
common origin. It therefore follows that agriculture was
first systematically practised on a large scale in the forest
lands of Southern India, and that it was emigrants from
thence who carried the rules of the village communities
with them as they progressed northward. That the govern-
ment of the original communistic village was greatly altered
by contact with other emigrant tribes, I shall show con-
clusively, in the course of this Essay, but the earliest villages
were those founded by the Dravidian races, the dolicho-
cephalic Australioids, who called themselves the sons of
the tree, and are now represented by the Marya, or tree
(tnarom) Gonds, and their Indian cognates, some of whom,
like the Southern races of Australia, still use the 'boomerang/
These people made the village, and not the family, their
national unit, and made it a rule, as I show in the next
Essay, that the mothers and fathers of children born in their
villages should never belong to the same village, and that
the children should be brought up by their mothers and
maternal uncles without the intervention of the father, and
should be regarded as the children of the village and State
in which they were bom. Thus each village was ruled by
the mothers and maternal uncles of the children born in it,
and it was this system of government which they took with
them into Europe, where tliey became the Amazonian races
of Asia Minor and Greece. It was these matriarchal tribes
who were the ancestors on the mother^s side of the dolicho-
cephalic Basques, and the cognate melanchroia, or dark-
skinned races, who were the agriculturists of the Neolithic
Age. It is impossible now to determine accurately whether
the original founders of the first Indian villages were a
homogeneous race or not, for the unity of race was very
little regarded in ancient days. Almost all the lower
44 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
•
castes in Bengal, such as the Bagdis, Bauris, Dosadhs,
Chandels, Eoras, the Chasas, or cultivators of Orissa, and
the Eahars, are ready to admit any one of higher social
standing than themselves into the caste, provided he com-
plies with the customs of the tribe,^ while the well-known
custom of turning into full-blooded Kshatryas low-caste
but wealthy husbands, who are ready to pay large sums
to impecunious Rajputs for their daughters, shows that
the idea of purity of blood is of foreign origin in India, and
that it has never obtained a permanent place among the
institutions of the land. But in spite of the uncertainty as
to race, it seems. probable that the first tribes who laid the
foundations of organised society were at least a community
who had by long inter-association developed a distinct type
of humanity ; and the most distinctive mark of this lower
type seems to lie in the nasal index, for in summing up tiie
results of the exhaustive inquiry into the anthropometry,
customs, and institutions of the castes and tribes of Bengal
made by him under the orders of the Government, Mr.
Risley says : — * If we take a series of castes in Bengal, Bchar,
and the North-western Provinces, and arrange them in the
order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the
finest noses be at the top, and that with the coarsest be at
the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order
substantially corresponds witli the accepted order of social
precedence,' and the casteless tribes — Kols, Korwas. Mundas,
and the like, are at the bottom of the list, and the trading
Khatrfs and land-holdtng Babhans at the top.* But in
spite of this present precedence of the highest castes I shall
show, when I examine the religious and matrimonial customs
of both Brahmins and Babhans in the next Essay, that they
all go back to the matriarchal stage of society organised by
the Dravidians at the bottom of the list. Among these the
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 40, 80, 186, 192, 251,
370, 568.
^ Ibid. vol. i. Preface, pp. 33, 34.
ESSAY II 45
most characteristic tribes are theMarya ortree-Gonds of the
Central Provinces, and those distinguished by Mr. Risley as
peculiar types — the Mdl Paharias of the Rajmehal hills and
the Mundas and Ooraons of the Chota Nagpore plateau ;
and of these, while the Mundas are, as I shall prove, a
mixed race formed by the fusion of the mountaineers of the
North-east with the Gond sons of the tree, together with
the admixture of later elements, the Mdl Paharias and
Ooraons show, as I shall prove presently in this Essay and
in Essay in., strong traces of Northern origin. But in
spite of the fact that their ancestors on one side were
immigrants into India, what the Mundas most strongly
insist upon is, that it is their original fatherland, and they
must therefore be a race who exercised a most important
influence in the early development of its national history.
The form of the heads of these primitive Dravidians is
' usually dolichocephalic, but the nose is thicker and broader
than that of any other races except the negro, the facial
angle is comparatively low, the lips are thick, the face
wide and fleshy, the features coarse and irregular ; the
average stature ranges from 156*2 to 162*1 centimetres ; the
figure is squat and the limbs sturdy, the <:olour of the skin
varies from very dark brown to a shade closely approaching
black."* ^ But when we pass from anthropometrical data to
those given by national character, we find a most striking
difiference between the gregarious, excitable,and light-hearted,
but exceedingly sensitive Mundas, and the silent, self-con-
tained, and indomitably obstinate Turano-Dravidian Bhuyas
and Gonds. It is to the first of these people and their
maternal ancestors, the Dravidian sons of the tree, that we
must look for the origin of the Indian village, which the
Mundas claim as their ancestral heritage, as is shown by the
following definition of their rights given by a Munda before
Babu Rakhal Dass Huldar, the commissioner appointed by
Government to inquire into land-tenures in Chota Nagpore.
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ vol. i. Preface, p. 32.
46 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
' We claim bhunhiari rights (that is, the rights of the
original settlers who first cleared and cultivated the land),
because Chota Nagpore is our fatherland. The bones
of our ancestors lie buried in Chota Nagpore, we are
no colonists from other countries, but derive our race from
Nagpore. There exist in Sutiamba the ruins of our Munda
fort, half a pao east of Pethoria "" (in the north of the Lohar-
dugga district). ' We allowed the Ooraons of Ruhidas ^ to
come into the country. They came peaceably, and we
allowed them to occupy it in peace. I cannot say how
or when the Hindus came.'*^ But these same Mundas, who
called the Damooda, the great river of Chota Nagpore,
Da-Munda, the water (da) of the Mundas, are, as judged by
the test of language and social institutions, of the same
races as the Kasia on the Brahmaputra in Assam, the
Palang and Mon or Peguans on the Irawaddy, the Kambojas
on the Mekong, and the Assamese on the Tonquin, in Burma,
Siam, and Cochin China.^ Also their village system is
identical with that of the Malay Lampoongs of Sumatra.
These people, in short, belong to the great Malay race which
includes the ruling tribes in South-eastern Asia and the
Malay Archipelago. But these Mons or Mais, who claim to
be aborigines in all these countries, show by their names
that they were originally a mountain people, for Munda
and Kol are both derived from the roots Afoji and Ko^
which mean a mountain. They must have begun their
national existence as a race of hunters, living, as some of the
^ Ruhidas is ihe land of the red men, see Essay ii. p. 91.
- I have copied this speech from ihe official report of Babu Rakhal Dass
Huldar, who was appointed Tenure Commissioner in 1869.
^ Dr. Mason (Mason's BurmaA, pp. 130-134) shows that the Mon language
has an indubitable affinity with the Munda tongue of Chota Nagpore for
* the first six numerals, the present pronouns, the words for several members
of the body, and many objects of nature have unquestionably the same
origin.* See the whole subject thus discussed in Fytche's Bnrmak, Past and
Present f vol. i. pp. 324-326; also Daltcm's Ethnology of Bengal^ p. 151,
whence the comparison of the races I have named is taken.
ESSAY II 47
Indian forest tribes now do almost, exclusively on jungle-
roots, berries, and such wild animals as they could kill with
the stone weapons, of which many specimens have been found
in Central India and Madras, for they are all keen sports-
men. It is they who are the cave-men of India, who, like
the similar race in Europe, have left in the caves of Central
India pictures of their hunting scenes. They sought out
for their tribal head-quarters the regions of soft sandstone
and limestone rocks, where caves are naturally formed by
infiltrating water. One of the principal of these natural
nursing-grounds was doubtless that now occupied by the
Korwas, the coal-bearing strata of Rewa, Korea, Sirgoojya
and the southern hills of Mirzapur, which last are formed of
Vindhyan rocks. It is through this country that the Sone
and its western tributaries flow, and here in Sirgoojya is tlie
headquarters of the Korwas, the primitive forest Kols, wlio
still, like their forefathers, live principally by hunting, though
they also grow some crops, the most important of which are
the improved grasses called murwa, the prolific ragffi of
Madras, and a similar crop called ffutidli. It was in the
lower valleys of these mountains tliat they came in contact
with the Dravidian sons of the tree living in the Chuttisghur
plateau, where, as in Southern Madras, they had found and
cultivated the wild rice, the first shoots of wliich, when
they sprout at the beginning of the rains, are still reverently
gathered in Chuttisgurh and Central India, and hung up in
every house at the festival of Gurh-puja, held in August, at
the same time as the Sravana, or snake and barley festival of
the Hindus and Ooraons, described in Essay in. It was these
rice-growers who formed the first permanent village. They
are the Pitarali Somavantah, tlie Fathers possessed of Soma
or the generating power (Su) whence all life is born. They
are the oldest race of Fathers, to whom rice is offered at the
annual festival of the Pitri-Yajiia, or sacrifice to the
Fathers. They were the ancestors of the ruling races of
the land, called originally Bharata-varsha, the land of the
d
48 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Bliaratas, the begetting and conceiving (bhri) race, before it
got the name of Sindhava or land of the Moon {Sin\ whence
India is derived. It was these stone-men of the North-east
who were the first clearers of the sal-forests of the North-
east country, who made the sal-tree (Shorea robusta) their
mother-tree, and who used in their clearances the peculiar
form of shouldered celt common to India and Burma. It
was with these that they stripped off, as their successors do
now, the bark of the trees grown on the banks of the smaller
rivulets they selected as the sites of their rice-fields, and
burned the trees afterwards. These processes of early cultiva-
vation are described in the national Gond Epic, called the
Song GfLhigal, This tells how the four Father Gonds,the
sons of the squirrel, left the mountain Dhawalagiri, a general
name for the Himalayan range, where they were bom, and
came to Central India, and how they were found in the
forests by Lingal, the God of the Linga, who was born of a
flower, and fed on honey from the Banyan, or Bur tree {Ficus
Indica\ which afterwards, as I show in Essay in., became the
mother-tree of the Bliurs or Bharatas. He taught them how
to form fields by cutting down the Anjun-trees (Hardwtchia
hi7iata)^one of the hardest trees known, which line the forest
brooks of Central India. They could not, as they used to do
in the drier air of the mountains, make fire from flint to bum
the trees and clear the ground for the rice crop in these
damp and rainy forests ; so Lingal sent the youngest of the
four brothers, the fire-god, to the village of the giant Rikad
Gowadi, the squirrel (rikkhi) or tree (rukh) father of the
Kolarian village, called by the Mundas Gowa. Rikad was
watching his crops at night by a great fire of logs to guard
them from the deer, j ust as the Kol dwellers in the forest do
now, and the young fire-god of the new race tried to steal a
burning log, but a spark fell on Rikad'^s face and woke him.
He pursued the young Gond, wanting to eat him, but the
latter dropped the log and escaped. The new-comers did
not ally themselves with the aboriginal matriarchal races till
ESSAY II 49
Lingal went himself and made friends of Rikad and his wife
bv playing to them on the musical bow he had made, as the
Koles do now, by fixing a bottle gourd as a sounding-board
on the string of a tightly-strung bow. It was after this that
the seven daughters of Rikad Gowadi went with Lingal, as
the Kol girls of the Kol villages do still, to meet the four
Gronds or Mundas, dance with tliem and become their wives.
It was the union between the patriarchal and matriarchal
races which resulted in the worship of the eleven gods. The
four Gond fathers and the seven matriarchal mothers were,
as I show in Essays iii. and iv., the four seasons of the year,
and the seven days of the week, tlie eleven gods of genera-
tion and measurers of time of the races who grew the wet
crops of the Indian rainy season, and the dry crops of the
autumn. It was they who were the worshippers of the
heavenly twins, day and night, the children of the goddess
Sar, the barley mother, before they became the twin-stars of
the constellation Gemini, the star-gods of the sons of Kush,
the tortoise. These eleven gods of generation were the
eleven keys which, in the Gond Epic, Lingal is said to
have fixed on his musical bow, a metaphor exactly similar
to that which likened the first reckoning of the seven days
of the week as a measurement of time by the sons of Kush,
the tortoise, to the seven strings placed by Hermes, the
fire-god, on the tortoise-shell to turn it into the lyre, an
instrument producing music by the regular succession of
concordant notes.^ The whole story tells us how the sons
of the squirrel came from the north-east into the country
of the matriarchal villagers, who are described as cannibals,
and as acquainted with the art of making fire from wood
by friction, and who had also learned how to grow dry crops
and rice, and to live in villages. It was from them that the
new-comers learnt these arts, and became the rice and murwa-
growing Dravidians, the forest races who are known as the
* Hislop, Aboriginal Tribes of the Central ProvitueSy published by the
Government of the Central Provinces, 1865. Song of Lingal ^ Cantos i. and ii.
4
60 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Bhuyas, Musahars, Kharwars, and Mundas, all of whom
regard the squirrel {Rikhi or Rukhi) as their ancestor, whom
they call Rikhiasan or Rikhmun ;^ and it is from these sons
of the squirrel that the Cheroos, the sons of the Nag, or
water-snake, are descended, for the Kharwars are a branch of
the Cheroos.^ These Cheroos were the great ruling race of
Behar, whose power lasted till the sixteenth century a.d., for
it was then that their chief Muharta was conquered by
Khawas Khan, the general of the Emperor Sher Shah.^ Thus
we find that these forest tribes, who were the first rice-
growers, are those who are at the bottom of the social scale
or ethnological ladder of the Hindu castes, and I show in
Esi»ay III. that the superposition of the successive stages,
each marking a rise in organisation, was the work of many
ages. The great antiquity of the Munda and Dravidian village
system is also shown by the Munda monuments, for every
Munda grave is still marked by the upriglit stone, the
memorial stone of the Khasia hills, and they are total strangers
to the later ' storied monuments' of the men of the Dekhan,
who have covered the country with ' dolmens,** stone-tables,
shrines or altars, ' cromlechs,** stone circles, and * tumuli ** or
burial-mounds, exactly similar to those of the Neolithic Age
in Europe.* The rice-plant itself also shows to what an
early period its cultivation must extend, for it must have
taken ages to develop the two hundred varieties of rice
which are said by Hindu rice-dealers to exist, and that these
numbers are not extravagantly exaggerated I can myself
vouch, for when I was Settlement Officer in Chuttisgurh, I
learned to discriminate in that one district about forty kinds,
which I could distinguish while growing on the ground
before the rice was cut. To this evidence must be added
^ Risley, Tribes aftd Castes of Bengal y vol. i. p. 112, ff. Bhuiyas, vol. ii.
pp. 210-21 1, if., Rikhi, Rikhiasan, Rikmun, Rukhi.
* Ibid. vol. i. pp. 200-201, s.v. Chero.
' Y}X\Q\.\ Supplementary Glossary^ N.W.P., s.v. Cheroo.
•■* Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 2nd edition, chap, v., pp. 129, 120, 121 ;
also p. 104, note.
ESSAY II 51
that taken from the rice export trade, for it was known to
the Greeks as opv^a^ a name derived from the Tamil a/w,
and it must, therefore, as I show in Essay m., liave been
probably exported to Europe in times long before the
publication of the Rigveda and the formation of the present
Prakrit dialects, which were most probably the language
spoken at the western export ports of Baragyza (Broach) and
Surparaka (Surat), in the days of the Kanva bards who
wrote the 8th Mandala of the Rigveda, and were the priests
of the Yadu-Tarvashu, the rulers of Western India. But
whether this conclusion as to the language of Western India
in Vedic times be true or not, the other evidence I have
adduced proves conclusively that rice cultivation flourished
in Central and Southern India in the early Stone Age, count-
less ages before the Veda was written, and that it was the
growing of rice which led to the formation of permanent
villages, first among the matriarchal races descended from
the tree (marom) mothers, and afterwards among the united
races formed by the union of the sons of the squirrel (Rikhi
or Rukhi) with those of the tree (Rukh\ and it was they who
became the sons of the ssL\-tree{Shorea robiista)^the father-tree
of the Dravidian races. This is the characteristic tree of the
forests of Eastern India, and it is groves of these trees which
generally form the Samas of the Munda villages, but in
Chuttisgurh, where the sal-tree is replaced by the saja (TVr-
minalia tomentosa\ it is this latter tree which becomes the
sacred tree of the Gonds.
The earliest matriarchal cultivators did not use cattle in
their culture, but tilled the land by hand labour with
pointed sticks ; and it was not till the arrival of the sons of
the wild cow, the Gaurian race descended from the goddess
Gauri, the mother bison (Bos gaums), that buffaloes and
cattle were tamed. The use of cattle for agricultural pur-
poses would have been impossible in tlie tiger-haunted
forests of the earliest settlers ; and that neither they nor their
allies, the Mons, were a pastoral race is proved by the fact
52 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
that even now the Munda and Ho Kols do not drink milk,
and thus answer the description of the race called Kikatas
in the Rigveda, who are spoken of as . neighbours of the
Kushika and Bharatas, who pour no libations of milk.^
In each of these Kolarian villages, the central place is
allotted to the Sarna and the Akra or dancing-ground,^
shaded by its trees. The spot preferably chosen is one on a
tongue of land rising above two lateral valleys, where the dry
rice crops and those of murwa (Eletmne coracanci) and
goondlt can be grown on the hill-slopes, and the wet rice in
the lands at the bottom of the valley; and it is this cultivated
land, separating the village from the non-productive forest,
which became in the earliest mythologies its guardian and
father, the protecting snake.\JEach village is ruled by a head-
man called Munda, elected by the people, assisted in large
villages by a council of elders, who are chosen as leaders of
the different sections or wards, into which the cultivators
are divided, when the lands are redistril)uted at the periodi-
cal re-divisions, which used till recently to be made in all
the villages of Chuttisgurh, in Central India. At these the
village lands are all divided into a number of separate and
equal lots — generally five or three — the area of each being
calculated according to the number of measures of seed it
took to sow it (the most common form of measurement in
villages where rice is almost the only crop grown), or by the
number of ploughing strips ploughed by the cultivators told
off to form the section, or the number of plough bullocks
owned by each ;^ and these two last methods of measure-
ments are generally used when the upland or plough-culti-
vation, which was introduced much later than the rice, forms
an important part of the cultivated land. Tlie land as-
signed to each lot was carefully discriminated by the head-
^ Rigveda, iii. 53, 11-14.
- Can the Greek Akro in Akro-pohs be derived from the Munda Akra ?
The German Gau is certainly derived from the Munda Gowa,
^ A plough area ploughed by four bullocks is about equal to 22 acres.
ESSAY II 53
man and the heads of sections, or, as we would call them,
the ward's men ; and each section received an exactly equal
portion of every kind of soil existing in the village, so that
their fields were scattered all over its area, and no section
formed a compact lot. Each section is marked by some
chosen symbol, and these symbols are all placed together in
one receptacle ; while in another are those chosen as symbols
by the heads of wards, and the symbol of the ward's man
and that of the land allotted to his party are drawn to-
gether. He then proceeds to divide the lands so assigned
between the cultivators, who form his ward. But the vil-
lages thus governed were not isolated communities, for, as I
said before, the fathers of the children of one matriarchal
vttlage must always be men living in other villages, and
hence the area of the land belonging to each association of
villages must originally, like those occupied by Korwa tribes,
have been very large when compared with the scanty nuni-
bers of the original Kol settlers. These large tribal areas
were a legacy from the hunting races who required a very
much larger space for subsistence than that sufficing for agri-
culturists, and these hunting tribes divided themselves, as
the Korwas do now, into different settlements, each living in
a different part of the tribal territory, and it was from these
that the permanent villages were subsequently formed. It
was by the unions between the men and women of these
different settlements at the hunting gatherings,^ which
answered among the hunting races to the seasonal tribal-
dances among the matriarchal agriculturists that the
alliances between the whole body of allied tribesmen were
cemented. It was from the territories occupied by the
* I remember some thirty years ago when continuous forests stretched from
one end to another of the Lohardugga district of Chota Nagpore, and through
the States bounding Midnapore on the west, that the whole country used
to turn out in the end of March or the beginning of April, and beat through
the whole length of the forests, each village taking its assigned place in the
line of beaters. These hunting parties used to last for weeks till the whole
forest tract was thoroughly beaten out.
54 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
settlements of those who had coalesced into a tribe that tlie
parhas or provinces, into which the Munda confederation
was divided, were formed. Each parha contains about
twelve or more townships, and it was the villages of each
parhu which formed the matrimonial unions I have de-
scribed in Essay iii. Esich parha had its distinguishing
crest or cognisance, which is now shown on the parha flags.
These are always carried at all Munda social gatherings, and
it is quarrels about the precedence or reverence due to each
of these flags which even now give rise frequently to tribal
differences. Each parha is governed by a head-chief called
* Manki,"* who is the Munda of the village, which has ac-
quired hereditary precedence among the associated villages,
and which is probably that which first became populous, and
was consequently able to send out colonies to form tolas
or hamlets in the unoccupied tribal lands, and wliich thus
acquired the privilege of being the residence of the Byga
or tribal-priest and medicine-man^ Tliis privilege must, if re-
tained, have certainly have given the Byga^s village the posi-
tion of tribal capital, for the Korwas cluster about their Byga,
who is also arrow-maker to the tribe, as bees about tlieir
qucen.J When in the years 1882-83, it was necessary to arrest
the leaders of one of the Korwa tribes in Sirgoojya, who liad
with their tribesmen taken to wholesale plundering, I found
it very difficult to do so, owing to the facilities for hiding
furnished by the dense forest in which they lived. But when
the Byga had been secured, the rest of the tribe, except those
who were most guilty, came in almost immediately to
join him. But thougli the Byga has great influence
among the hunting tribes, especially among the Korwas,
it is the Manki who is the real chief of the agricultural
villages ; and it is he who, among the civilised Ho Kols
of Singhbhoom, decides all disputes in the parha^ with
the assistance of the village Mundas ; and it is the
collective council of Mankis and Mundas which is supreme
in the States, which, like that of the Ho Kols, have
ESSAY II 55
preserved their independence as a confederation of allied
parhas. This institution is precisely the same as that found
among the Malay Lampoongs of Sumatra and in the Fiji
Islands. In Sumatra, each village is divided into sections
called sukas^ the tolas or . hamlets of a Kol village, and
while each suka elects its headman, the headship of the
village is hereditary, as is that of the marga or union of
viUages, answering to the Kol parha} In Fiji, each village
has its headman, and each union of villages its chief; the
village headman being called Turunga Nikoro, and the
provincial chief Mballi, who exaictly answers to the Kol
Manki ; while the supreme master of the confederated pro-
vinces or parhas is called Roko. These Fijians also, like
the Marya or tree-Gonds and other forest tribes, who are
descended directly from the matriarchal tree-worshippers,
and not partly from the sons of tlie mountain, like the
Mundas and their congeners, treat the children born from
parents l)elonging to the confederaicy as children of the
village where they are born, and bring up all the boys and
young men together in a building exactly answering to the
Dhumkuria or bachelors hall of the Indian forest races,
while the girls are brought by a village matron. They are
also, like the Dravidians of the Madras and Malabar coasts,
experienced and adventurous seamen, who have, like the
Northern Vikings, learnt without foreign assistance how to
make canoes fit for distant voyages.^
It was under this form of government that the lands of
India were gradually apportioned among villages united into
provinces, and governed by the matriarchal Dravidians from
the south, united with the Mons from the north-east ; and
though tlie cultivation was scanty, and large areas of land
unsuited to the growing of rice, and the other national crops
were left unoccupied, yet the country must, under the rule
^ Forbes, Wanderings of a Naturalist in the Eastern Archipelago,
^ Abercromby, Seas and Skies in many Latitudes^ pp. 192 and 97, loi-
104.
d
56 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the matriarchal races, have attained a stage of civilisation
which not only attracted the cupidity of Northern immi-
grants, but also led to extensive emigration among the tribes
living on the Western coasts. The first outsiders who amal-
gamated with these matriarchal tribes, the first founders of
villages and provinces in Southern India, were the Mons or
four Gonds of the Soixg ofLtngaly of whose coming I have
already spoken. Those tribes, which now trace their descent
directly from these immigrants, do not follow the custom of
separately educating the village male and female children
which distinguishes the forest races. And it is these
Northern sons of the mountain who introduced the form of
marriage called by Morgan, Punuluan, in which a number of
brothers united by blood brotherhood married a number of
sisters, who, as in the Song of Lingal^ belonged to the
matriarchal races, and were, therefore, as being the women
of the same village, all tribally looked on as sisters. Under
these marriages, of whicli only traces exist among the Ho
and Munda Kols, in customs which I have alluded to in
Essay in., the old village relationships of the matriarchal age
were completely changed. By matriarchal custom the
mothers and educating fathers and instructors of the village
children were looked on for matrimonial purposes as
brothers and sisters ; but all the village children called them
mothers and fathers. But under the Punuluan system, the
real fathers of the village children, instead of remaining in
their own villages as educators of their sisters'* children, sent
out their sisters as wives to the men of another village, from
which they themselves took their wives to live in their own
village, and it was under this arrangement that the fathers
educated their own children. It was this custom which was
the origin of that usual among the Ho Kols, which makes
young men and women of different villages go about in
parties to attend the village dances. This change in tribal
rules gave rise to a new system of relationships, which
Morgan has shown to be common to races so distant from,
ESSAY II 57
and so apparently unrelated to each other, as the Iroquois
Indians of North America and the Madras Dravidians of
India. The names given throughout the long and com-
plicated tables of relationship quoted by Morgan, though
linguistically different, have precisely the same meaning
among both these people, and the leading principle on
which the system is based is that a man does not as among
the matriarchal tribes call his sister's son his son, but his
nephew, and similarly a woman, instead of calling the son
whom her brother educates as parent, her son, calls him
her nephew, as being really the son of lier brother by his
wives, who now live with him in his own village ; and on
the children'*s side, the name of father and mother applied
to these relations under matriarchal custom are replaced by
others meaning uncle and aunt.^
These two forms of matriarclial and patriarchal marriage
flourished side by side in India ; the matriarchal system
being generally retained in South-Westem India, the country
of the Nairs who still maintain customs which are
nearly identical with those of the original forest tribes,
while the patriarchal system of the Mundiis is that on which
the Bengal marriage customs are founded.
But it was the matriarchal races who originally gave life
to the social organism, and they were not only a cultivating
but also a maritime race, and it is they who must have
developed in India the early system of navigation which
they had first learnt in the Equatorial islands. It was these
people who, like the stone men of Europe, made use of the
timber growing in the inland forests on the river banks and
on the hills of the Malabar coast to build boats and vessels
in which they could navigate the river reaches, and make
their way along the coast. It was also they who first dis-
covered the great commercial advantages possessed by the
valleys of the Tapti and Nerbudda, and made at the
mouths of these rivers the settlements which grew into the
* See Tabular Statements in Morgan's Aftcient Society ^ pp. 420, 447.
58 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
great exporting harbours of Surparaka (Surat) and Baragyza
(Broach). But the first great emporium of foreign trade
was Dwaraka, tlie mother city of the Western Vishnava, the
ancient Kathi who gave the country its present name of
Kathiawar. This country has always been one of the holiest
lands in India, especially to the trading races, and it is here
that the most sacred shrines of tlie Jain religion, which is
that of the trading classes, are situated. It was the land
known to Sanskrit authors as Vala-bhadra, that is, of the
blessed Vala, the Vala or enclosing snake ^ which Indra slew
in the Rigveda. It was here in his honour that the
great temple of Somnath the lord {nuth) of generation {Soma\
who afterwards became the lord of the moon (*Sbma), was
built. This temple was, as Sir A. Cunningham has shown,
situated in the town called Ila-pura,^ and the image in it was
that of Siva with the crescent moon, and this shows it to have
been a temple dedicated to the ancient bisexual god sym-
bolised by the Linga and Yoni. But the name Ila-pura, or
city of Ila, shows that it was also consecrated to the mother-
mountain goddess Ida, Ila or Irii of the year of three {iru)
seasons reckoned by the Basque barley-growers of Asia Minor.
This was the blessed Vala, the enclosing snake of the barley-
growing races which superseded the earth-snake, the guardian
god of the village called in the Soiig qf'Lingal the great snake
BhourNiig. This was killed here by the regenerated Lingal ;
and his slayer, after the death of Bhour Nag, was borne by
the black Bindo bird, the god of the south-west wind which
brings the rain, to Mahadeo as the rain-god, the chief of
the Creator'^s messengers to men.
The Kathi rulers of Kathiawar, the worshippers of the
rain-god, were, as we know from the history of the wars of
Alexander the Great, a powerful tribe in the Punjab, the
allies of the Oxydracoe and Malli of Multan, occupying
^ Derived from the root z/r/, to enclose. Grassmann, Worterbuch zum
Rigveda^ s.v. Vala.
^ Cunningham's Ancietit Geography of I ndia^ p. 319.
ESSAY II 59
the country between the Ravi and Chenab, where they are
still caUed by their ancient name of Kathi.^ But it was
not the Kathi or Hittites, but their predecessors, the early
matriarchal tribes, whose villages were guarded and en-
circled by the enclosing snake of cultivated land, who first
made Dwaraka, the extreme western point of the Indian
peninsula, their great trading port. It was thence they
started on the coasting voyages which led them along the
shore of the bay which has since that time become the Delta
of the Indus, and it was from Patala, the modern Hyderabad
in Scinde, the port they founded on the Indus, that they
made a fresh starting-point for their voyages, which ulti-
mately led them to the Persian Gulf and the Euphratean
countries, and it was there that they founded the worship
of the earth tree-goddess, which I have described in Essay iii.,
and made the goddess, otherwise called Istar, the goddess
mother of the villages organised on the Indian system. It
was apparently by way of the Euphrates valley that the
Indian village communities made their way into Europe,
for their village system is exactly reproduced in that of
Palestine, where at the present day the lands are every
year distributed among the cultivators exactly in the way I
have described as that usual in India.- It is this system
which ultimately found its way into Germany where the
organisation of the Gemeinde, with its lands divided into
strips, and ruled by tlie elected Burgomeister, is exactly
the same as that of the Indian village, and it is there that
the German Gau^ meaning district, exactly reproduces the
Kolarian Gawa^ the village or district. And a similar iden-
tity of language is found in the Greek Ge^ a contraction for
Gea^ and in the name of Gala^ the earth-mother. It was
these same people who took with them their village system
from India who also took with them their seasonal dances
* Cunningham's Ancient Geography of India ^ pp. 215, 216.
* * Land-tenure in the Village Communities of Palestine,' by Kev. J. Neill.
Transactions 0/ Victoria Institute y No. xcv. vol. xxiv. pp. 155-159.
A
60 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and the other accompanying customs which I have traced in
Essay in. It was in Asia Minor or Northern Palestine ^
where they apparently first found out how to make the
grasses developed into wheat and barley good substitutes
for their Indian grass developed into rice, murwa or raggi,
and gundli, and it was in Asia Minor that they met with
the fire-worshipping race of Phrygia who were worshippers of
the Linga before they worshipped fire. It was these people
who introduced phallic worship into India, and its introduc-
tion is depicted in the last part of Canto ii. of the Song
of Linffal^ which tells how the seven wives of the Gond
brothers tried, when their husbands were away on a hunting
expedition, to make Lingal, who had hitherto been their
teacher and instructor, their common husband, and began
the custom still observed in India of swinging the god of the
Linga. It was after this that Lingal, who had in the poem
refused their advances, was killed by them and their husbands,
a story which is a mytliical way of saying that the original
religion of Lingal which, as I show in the Preface, was the
worship of the seed grain, the father of the ripened corn,
was corrupted by phallic worship. It was these phallic-
worshippers and the fire-worshippers who, as I have shown
in Essay iii., introduced magic and witclicraft, and added the
worsliip of the mother Magha to that of the village mother.
It was they, who are known in Indian history as the
Maghadas, who introduced the growth of millets into India
as upland crops — these, according to the Song of Lingal pre-
ceded the growth of barley — and who first cultivated on a
large scale the wide plains of Upper India, which were not
suited for the growing of rice. They were followed by the
growers of barley, who, as I have shown in Essay iii., are the
race from whom the Ooraons claim to be descended, and it
was they who made the great change in village and state
organisation, which is shown in the Ooraon constitution.
* Perhaps barley cultivation may have been discovered in the Euphralean
valley, but it is a question for botanists to determine.
ESSAY II 61
These Turano-Dravidian people and their congeners, the
Bhuyas and other ruling forest races, are not lively and
excitable like the Kols ; they say little and are very self-
contained, but tliey are patient and laborious, amenable to
discipline and authority, though indomitably obstinate in
everything they undertake. They are also very careful to see
that they get all possible profit out of what they do. They
are keen traders and are so named in the Rigveda, but the
word Pam^ by which they are designated, means ' avaricious,''
as well as a trader ; and this reproach the worse specimens of
tlie race thoroughly deserve. Their silent and undemonstra-
tive demeanour does not denote a want of intellect, but a
determination to see all round a subject, and to know it in
all its phases. And wlien once a Dravidian Bhuya has been
convinced that the course he is advised to take is the best
for him, and when once he has said that he will take it,
he may be trusted to be true to his word, and he is not
liable to the sudden changes of purpose which make the
Munda races so frequently unreliable.
While these people were not at any time fond of war and
adventure in itself, or eager for personal glory and distinc-
tion, they were always ready to fight when it was necessary
to do so, and, except among the Ghoorkas, I do not believe
better material for soldiers exists in India than among the
Bhuyas and Ho Kols of Chota Nagpore. But their wars
were either wars of defence or wars caused by the pressure of
)K)pulation, with the consequent necessity of enlarging their
boundaries, or waged with the object of increasing facilities
for trade. In these they were equally stubborn in defence
and attack, but they never fought for booty or temporary
fame, and were always ready to do what was possible to
conciliate the people of a conquered country, so far as was
consistent with their main purpose. In India the only
reminiscences of wars between these people and the earlier
inhabitants are to be found in the Zend myths and those of
the Northern Punjab, to which I have referred in Essay in..
i
62 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
but even then their entry into the country, as described in
the Song qfLbigal^ was generally peaceful. The agricultural
races who first ruled India have always been a hospitable
and tolerant race, who received strangers as the Mundas of
Chota Nagpore received the Ooraons, and allowed them to
take up unoccupied lands in the country without difficulty.
They also admired these new-comers and were impressed
with their genius for organisation and government, and saw
the advantages arising from their political system. The
great and fundamental difference between this and the
republican government of the Munda village and state was
the Turanian belief that a strong central government ruled
by a king was the best means of securing order and unity,
and enforcing the observance of the Dravidian maxim that
every man and woman must do his or her duty to the State.
They retained the Dravidian association of villages, the first
germ of a State, according to Aristotle ; ^ but they greatly
enlarged the original parha in their provincial divisions,
massing, as the Ooraons did in making their central
province of Kokhra in Lohardugga, many parhas to-
gether to form a province of the new regime, and they
placed the central province under their king and allotted
the outlying provinces to his most trusty subordinates.
Thus their kingdoms were organised on the model of a camp
arranged, like the Roman legion, with the head -quarters in
the centre. It is this organisation which shows that the his-
torical epoch at which it appeared was that of Kushika
rule, the origin of which I have explained in Essay in., when
the confederated tribes gathered round the mountain of the
East, which they looked on as their birthplace, likened the
civilised earth to the tortoise floating on the primaeval
ocean, and depicted in their minds the supreme ruler of the
kingdoms surrounding the central mountain as the mysteri-
ous creator, the great NSga shrouded from mortal ken in the
ark of clouds which wreaths its summit.
^ Aristotle, Politics^ i. 2.
ESSAY II 63
In order to ensure the permanence of their national tradi-
tions, the Kushikas insisted most strongly on the systematic
instruction and education of the young, and they used as
their model the Dravidian arrangements for the training of
the village children of the matriarchal village. By this
systematic method of education the lives of all the younger
members of the community were passed in a course of dis-
cipline, of which the Spartan education, descended from the
tribal ancestors of the Dorians, is the best specimen. I have
shown in Essay iii. how closely the Dorian customs are allied
to those of the Indian Nagas, and the remembrance of these
national training-schools still survives in the schools of the
Brahmans among the Hindus, the Roman and Greek educa-
tion, and in that of the ancient Persians or Parthians. They,
like their brethren, the Parthian cavalry of India, were taught
to ride, shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth. But the
first founders of national education were an agricultural race,
and tlie lessons they had to teach their young pupils were
not the rules of the art of war, or the mysteries of religion,
but those which embodied the results attained by the long
series of experiments which had formed a national science of
agriculture. To enable these lessons to be transmitted from
generation to generation, in a form which secured them
from distortion, they were embodied in mythic tales, which
were carefully repeated by each generation of scholars after
their teacher till they became indelibly impressed on their
memory. Everyone who has listened to Hindu scholars repeat-
ing their lessons after their master will understand how this
was done, and it is to this systematic training of the memory
that we owe the preservation of innumerable works which have
descended to us in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit literature. All
the early Buddhist works are systematically divided into
short paragraphs capable of being learned by heart ; and in
Bralmiinical training, oral teaching has always been preferred
to lessons learned by the pupil from books he read. The form
in which most of these early myths have been transmitted to us
J
64 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
is that of a record of the seasonal changes, as accurate know-
ledge on this subject is necessary for all successful farming,
and perhaps the most significant of these is the myth of
Nala and Damayanti as given in the Mahabharata.^ It is a
tale of Southern India, for Nala, the hero, was the son of
Viru-sena, that is, of the army {sena) of the Viru worshippers,
the name given to the prehistoric races whose god was the
earlier Linga or sign of sex. He was the chief of the Nis-
had has, that is, of the races who were not (im) worshippers
of the fish-god (Jshadha\ who, as I show in Essay iii., was
identical with the god As-s6r of the Assyrians, the la of
the Akkadians, the Ya of the Hindus, and the Yah-veh of
the Jews. His name Nala means a channel, and he is the
god of the ordinary course and channel of nature, the gentle
winds which bring the fertilising showers of spring.
His queen Damayanti, whose name means, 'she who is being
tamed,"* is the earth, which is being gradually brought under
cultivation. She is the daughter of Bhima, whose name
means, ' the terrible one,"* who is worshipped by the Gonds,
Dosadhs, and all the lower Hindu castes as * the thunder-god."*
This was,as I have shown in Essays iii. and iv., the first form in
which the god of heaven was worshipped; and as his daughter,
the earth tilled by the worshippers of the thunder-god, is
the heroine of the story, we are told at its outset that it is
one which tells us the earth"'s history after the thunder-god
was superseded by a later and mightier deity. Bhima was
king of the Vid-arbas, or of the double race ; the eight tribes,
four (arba) aboriginal, and four immigrant, into which, as I
have shown in Essay iii., the Gond race, who were the first
rulers of the Kushika, or people of the tortoise earth, were
divided. The land of the Vidarbas was the country still
called Gondwana, watered by the Nerbudda and Tapti.
Nala, the god of the South, the home of the winter sun,
where lands were first systematically cultivated, loved Dama-
^ Mahabharata Vana {Nolo pakhyana) Parva. The Section {Parva) of the
ripening [^Pakhyana) of Nalo, liL-lxxix. pp. 157-234.
ESSAY II 65
yanti on hearing of her beauty, anil told his love to the
swans or rather the geese (kama), the moon-birds, the lunar
phases which marked the passage of time. When they had
announced the arrival of the fated moment, Nala, who was
chosen by Indra the rain-god and the gods of heaven as their
messenger, entered Damayantrs apartment unperceived.^
She chose Nala as her husband, and two children were born
to them in the spring-time, a son, Indra-scn, and a daughter,
Indra-seni, the fruits of the earth born from the fertilising
rains of Indu, the essence or soul of life in water, carried to
the earth by the soft breezes of the opening year. But all this
time Kali, the black storm-wind, who had been rejected as a
suitor by Damayanti, was nursing his wrath, and at the end
of the twelfth year of marriage he prepared the misfortunes
of the thirteenth year (sacred to the moon and lunar year of
thirteen months) by entering into the mind of Nala as an
evil spirit, and making him gamble with Pushkara. I have
shown in Essay iii. the mythological history of Pushkara, the
maker (hard) of Push, the spirit or soul of life, which makes
plants to grow {pu\ who was the god who ruled the summer
season of the burning west-winds, which temporarily kill
all life in nature. It is the deadening influence of these
blasts, which is described in the myth as the triumph of the
gambler, who beggars Nala and wins from him his kingdom.
Before this final catastrophe, Damayanti fearing the conse-
quences of her husband\s losses, sent Varshneya, the rains
{Varsha) of the rainy season, Nalas charioteer, with her
children to Kundina, her fathers capital, on the west
coast, whence the south-west monsoon comes up to refresh
the country parched by the summer''s heat. Varshneya left
them there, and then came up as the south-west monsoon
to Ayodhya, where he took service with King Ritii-pama,
the roll {pamd) or book of the seasons (ritu), Pushkara,
the god of the storms which usher in the rains, turned out
Nala and Damayanti into the forest. Nala lost his last
* Vana {Na/o Pakhyana) Parva, liv-lv.
5
66 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
garment, his waist-cloth, meaning the last remnant of his
power of control by trying to catch with it, for food for
iiimself and DamayantI, some golden birds (the clouds) who
took it up to heaven, and thus made the clouds the heavenly
symbols of the village lands on earth, the plots enclosed in
the boundaries marked by the girdling snake of cultivated
land, the home of the soul of life on earth residing in the
* Sama** or sacred grove. Thus this part of the myth tells
us how the home of the seeds of life was changed from earth
to heaven.
As, during the storms which begin the rains, an orderly
direction of the course of the wind was impossible, Nala its
ruler deserted DamayantI. The two henceforth went
different ways ; DamayantI, wandering alone, was seized by
a serpent, the snake worshipped in the month of §ravana
(July-August), in the middle of the rains, and was rescued by
a hunter, who killed the serpent. This hunter on soliciting
her was struck dead. This part of the story is reproduced
in the Greek myth of Artemis and Orion, in which Orion,
the hunter constellation, was struck dead by Artemis, the
moon-goddess, or, as Aratus tells us, by the scorpion sent by
Artemis, who made him disappear, that is, begin to sink below
the horizon.* And both stories tell us how, in the ancient
stellar year, the month of the snakes or scorpions was that
in which Orion culminated and began to sink. This month,
in which Orion and Sirius reached the middle of heaven,
was, according to Hesiod,that in which grapes should be
gathered.2 But it is in Egyptian mythology that we find
the complete explanation of these myths, for this month of
the scorpions is that in which the seven scorpions, Teftie,
^ Aratus, Tlie Pkainonuna or Heavenly Display^ translated by R. Brown,
Junr., F.S.A., 635-646, p. 61.
' Hesiod, Works and Days ^ 607-610.
EiVr' Av V Qplup Kcd ^elptot is fii<roy i\$y
OOpavdy, ^ApKTovpop 5* MSrj poSoHicrvXos 'Hcis,
t5 iriparj, t6t€ trdpras dir6Jpeirc oUade p&rpvs.
Aet^at 5* i^Xfy dixa r ^jfiara Kcd dixa vCicras.
ESSAY II 67
Bene, Mastet, Mastetef, Petet, Thetet and Mntct, the seven
days of the week, show Isis the way to the Papyrus marsh,
the country near the crocodile city of Pisui, flooded by the
rise of the Nile caused by the Abyssinian rains, where she
hid herself preparatory to the birth of the young Horus.^
This crocodile city, where the son of Isis, the moon-goddess,
was to be bom, was that sacred to Osiris, the crocodile-god,
called Sel>ek or Maga-Sebek the uniter (sbk\ whose history
I have given in Essay iii. He, as a star-god, was the con-
stellation Orion, called Smati,- and we tlius see that in the
Egyptian myth, as in the Hindu, the flying wife Isis and
Damayanti betakes herself to Orion, who, as I show later
on, was the star who ruled or hunted the lunar months of
the earliest year measured by months of four weeks each,
and in the Egjrptian myth it is under his protection that
her son is born. This is the new earth cleansed from taint
of sin by the regenerating rains of the rainy season, and this
new birth takes place at the time of the autumnal equinox
in the month Bhadra-pada, that is, of the blessed (bhadra)
foot, which like Osiris, who was both the goat and crocodile-
god, was the month sacred to the goat and the alligator,
and the time w^hen the rains cease. This was the month in
which, according to the Rigveda, the Soma Pavamana, the
moon, purified by the sanctifying rains of heaven, again
illumines the earth, and we see in this another instance, in
addition to the numerous others I cite in Essay iii., proving
how the Egyptian mythology arose out of the Indian, and
we can also trace in this myth the route by which the myths
were transferred, for it is in Akkadian astronomy that we
find Agrabu, the scorpion, taking the place of the Hindu
^ravana, or the serpents. It was only the philosophy of the
Kushika, originating in Northern India, which could ever
have conceived the story of the birth of the generating
serpents, who were to be the parents of the Niiga race, during
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten j^gypter^ pp. 402-404.
= Thid. p. 202.
68 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the month of August, the time of the Indian rains, and it
was this original myth, changed into the birth of the purified
earth, which reached Egypt, and became that which tells of
the birth of the young Horus, the moon-god of the later
autumn, under the protection of the scorpions, who have
replaced the serj)ents of the Hindu Naga myth. It was
after the death of the hunter or the disappearance of Orion
that DamayantI met with some religious ascetics, who
prophesied a happy end to her misfortunes, and she then
joined a merchanf^s caravan going to the city of Su-vahu
(the creating (su) wind), but they were attacked and dispersed
by elephants, and DamayantI, with some Brahmins, made her
way rurrthwards to the city of the Chedis. Here we have
a piece of mythic history introduced, which tells us how, as
I show in Essay iii., spiritual religion was first brought to
India by the Vaishya, who became the Semite trading races,
formed by the union of the yellow Turanian Hittites with
the northern sons of the bull, or sun antelope, father of the
Hindu Brahmins. On her arrival at Chedi, Damayantfs
aunt, the mother of the solar race of the north, did not
recognise her, and made her waiting-maid to her daughter,
the sun-maiden.
We have now to turn to the fortunes of Nala, who, when
DamayantI left him, saw part of the forest burning, that is
to say, he found himself in the age when the forest races had
made the fire-god Rahu their supreme god, instead of the
wind and tree-god. He passed safely tlirough the fire, and
found in the midst of the flames the snake Kar-kotaka, the
black {kar) tip {koto) of the fire-drill, who was in Hindu
mythology both the planets Venus and Mercury, the
morning and evening star; and as Mercury, the evening
star, he ruled the last season but one of the six seasons
of two months each into which the year, beginning
with the winter solstice, was divided, that is, the season
when the rains ended. ^ Kar-kotaka, the god who creates
^ Sachau's Alberuni*s India^ vol. ii. chap. Ixi. pp. Il8-I20.
ESSAY II 69
the heat which fosters life, said he had been cursed by
Narada, the god of men {nara)y that is, the anthropomor-
phic god Linga, whose worshippers had made the fire-god
the god of magic, the god of the race of the Maghada, the
worshippers of Uahu and the mother Maga. He asked Nala
to take him up, and this incident tells us how the god of
magic was superseded by the god who ordained that the
natural phenomena which mark the course of time should
succeed one another in regular order, and not by capricious
fits and starts, as they were believed to do when nature was
thought to be ruled by the storm-god and his priests, the
rain-making magicians. Wlien Nala took up Kar-kotaka,
the latter told him to count his footsteps before he put him
down. At the tenth footstep, when the time of the new
birth, the avatar of the new god, had arrived, the snake bit
him, and thus changed his aspect and destroyed his beauty,
made him the god of the determined and predestined order
of nature ; the god of the year of the barley-growing Semites,
beginning with the autumnal equinox, the stern ruler, and
not the chosen husband of the mother earth, and the loving
father of her children. The change, as Kar-kotaka told
Nala, was for his good, and he told him to go to Ritupama
in Ayodhya, as his charioteer Valiuka, the wind (Vahu)
god, and gave him two pieces of celestial cloth, the
twins day and night, whose mythological history I tell in
Essay iii. On the tenth day, that is, in the fulness of
time, Nala came to Rituparna'^s city and was engaged as
charioteer with Varshneya, the autumn rains (Varsha\
that is, the winter and southern sun, and Jivala (the
enclosing or fostering snake (vaJa) of life {ji)% the northern
sun of summer.
All this time Bhima, Damayantfs father, was distressed
at hearing no news of his daughter, and sent out, among
other Brahmins, Su-deva (the god [deva] of good fortune)
to look for her. He came to the city of the Chedis, the
sons of the god (id) Cha, the god Ka of the Brahmanas and
70 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Egyptians,^ was recognised by DamayantI, and he told the
queen-mother who DamayantI was. She told him that she
and Damayantrs mother were daughters of Su-darman, the
creating (Su) breaker or innovator (darman\ king of the
Dashamas, or people of the ten {dasha\ that is, the race who
worshipped the moon-mother of the ten lunar months of
gestation. When her sister married Bhima, she married
Vira-vahu the fructifying ( Vira) wind, which came from the
north. DamayantI was sent home to her father by her aunt,
and thus the earth was allied to the worshippers of the
god Ka. DamayantI on arriving home sent out, among
other Brahmins, Parnada, the record (pania) keeper, to look
for Nala, and thus instituted the age of scientific research, of
the making and recording of observations. Paraada came
to the court of Ritu-pama, whose name is now changed in
the legend to Bhailgasuri, the spirit of life (asura) which
breaks through (bhauga)^ that is, the divine Soma which
descends from heaven, but did not recognise Nala or Vahuka.
He however told DamayantI of a saying of VahukaX that a
woman deserted by her husband should not be angry zoheii
he left her overwhelmed by calamity and deprived by birds of
his garments when trying to obtain food, DamayantI, hear-
ing this, sent Su-deva to Ritu-parna to tell him that on the
day after he heard Damayantfs message, she would choose
another husband. Ritu-parna told Vahuka (Nala) that he
must take him to the Vidarba country, or across India, in a
day. Nala, choosing horses of the Sindhi breed, born in the
land of Sin, the moon, the twins Day and Night, who take
the sun-god in their chariot, harnessed them to the car of
the winds, who, as I show in Essay iii., join with the two
^ Grossmann derives Chedi^ or rather ched its root, from cha^ when, and
id ; this gives cka a meaning almost the same as that of ka^ who.
^ Grassmann interprets Bhallgsl as breaking through, just as the Soma
breaks through the press and the sieve. It only occurs once in the Rigveda.
Rigveda, ix. 6i, 73, where Soma is called Indu, the soul of life, he who
breaks through {Okailgdm) that which is mixed with milk, that is, the Soma
god of the bull race.
ESSAY II 71
twins of Day and Night in making the car and pole of time
revolve : and they then rose in the air. Ritu-parna the son
of Bhangasura, the divine Soma, dropped his garments, the
cloud mantle which no longer covered the sky at the close
of the rainy season, but would not stop to pick it up, and he
stood revealed as the spirit god, the germ of the life whose
birth, growth, decay, evanescence, and reproduction are all
ordained by law. He taught Nala the art of calculation by
reckoning dhe number of leaves and fruits on the Vibhitaka
{Termifiolia belerica)^ that is, the science of foresight ascer-
tained by observation, correct interpretation and memory.
When Nala had learnt how to calculate and control in due
order the times and seasons, the spirit of Kali (the black
lawless tempest) went out of him. When he and Ritu-
parna came to Bhima^s court, DamayantI recognised the
rattle of the car, but on looking for Nala only saw Ritu-
parna and Varshneya. She sent her maid Keshini (she with
the long hair) the Valkyrs of the North, the wind goddess, to
look for him. She, on coming back, told her how Vahuka,
Ritii-parn^^s cook, controlled the elements, how he merely
looked on vessels to fill them with water, that on going
through a low passage, the arch rose to let him pass
through, how he set fire to grass by holding it in the sun,
and how flowers pressed by him grew brighter in colour and
smelt more sweetly than before.^ DamayantI then sent for
Vahuka, and the two recognised one another. They then
went back together to their kingdom, and Nala, by the arts
of calculation and control he had learnt from Ritu-parna,
won back his kingdom from Pushkara, the gambler of
the age of the storm-god, and ruled as the king of the
regenerated race, who looked on law and order as the
^ This tree produces the Myrobolans of commerce, and is called in the
vernacular Aijuna, and Arjuna was the leader of the reforming Pandavas,
and, in a still earlier mythical age the father of Kutsa, the priest-king of the
gpd Ka. Rigveda, viii. i, 2, vii. 19, 2.
' Vana {Nolo Pakhyana) Parva, Ixxiv, Ixxv, pp. 220-224.
n THE RULIxNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
rightful rulers of outward nature and the inward moral
world.
We see in this story an excellent specimen of mythic
history, for it not only tells us, as the earliest myths used to
do, the history of the regular order of the changes of the
Hindu seasons, but also gives us the account of a long epoch
in Hindu history. As a Nature myth, it tells us of the
mild and genial spring, the burning summer, the storms of the
rainy season, the harvests of autumn gathered at the court
of Ritu-parna, the return of the sun to the south-west with
the north-east winds of the later autumn and the gathering
of the winter crops. As a historical myth, it tells us of the
rule of the storm-god in the West, followed by that of the
fire-worshipping Maghadas in the East ; and the founding
of the empire of the Kushika, the race who united the East
and West together under the rule of the sons of the tortoise.
They were the people who, as I show in Essay in., divided
the year first into three, and afterwards into five seasons,
who were led by the twin sons of Vivasvat, who were first
Day and Night, and were afterwards the twin stars of
Gemini, and who reckoned time by the revolution of the
weeks and fortnights of the lunar phases depicted in the
heavens by the turning of the celestial pole and by the
successions of days and nights. It was they who also used
the apparent motions of the stars, such as those of the rising
of Sirius and the culmination of Orion to mark the passage
of time ; Sirius by its rising ushering in the rains, and
Orion by his culmination marking the time when they began
to become less violent.
But when we compare this story with that in the Sanff of
Lingal^ which tells of the settlement in India of the re-
generated Gonds, who ploughed land, built cities, warred
with the Magha or Magral, the alligator, and made them-
selves sons of the tortoise, we find that the Gond poem,
which still survives in its original pre- Aryan tongue, tells us
of an earlier phase of the same age of the Kushika than is
ESSAY II 73
described in the myth of Nala and Danmyanti. The Song
qfLingal in this section of the story, of which I have given
the outline in Essay in., tells how Lingal came up, like
Nala, from the South-west, after killing the snake, who
kept back the rain, another form of the gambler Pushkara,
and how he was borne on the wings of the storm-bird to
Mahadeo. Mahadeo then released from the mother-mountain,
the Gonds, who were to form the tortoise-race, and sent
them into India with Lingal, where they estabh'shed their
rule, and united with the earlier patriarchal and matriarchal
Gonds, whose early history I have told in this Essay. It
was then that they made the god Pharsipen, the goddess
(pen) of the iron-trident (phar&i) or year of three seasons,
inserted into the female bamboo, and consecrecated by
a chain of bells which mark the passage of time ; and
I have shown how this primitive god was finally raised by
the same investigating race to heaven as the god of the
pole, the seven stars of the Great Bear and the star
Canopus, bound round, and made to revolve by the necklace
of fourteen stars of the constellation of the alligator Draco,
representing the lunar phases turned by the stars Gemini
and the winds. Thus, in the Sonff of* Lingal and the story
of Nala and DamayantT, we find a mythical sketch of the
earlier history of India up to the time when the rule of the
Kushika race was thoroughly consolidated, and their stellar
measurement of time completed. It was also they who, as
I have shown, first founded the ritual of the Soma sacri-
fice to the rain-god, and made the rain, the Bhafigasura or
the heavenly Creator, which breaks through the obstacles
raised by the god of the burning summer, who tries to keep
it back, the god who comes to create, bringing with him the
Su, or soul of fresh and regenerated life.
But I have now to proceed in the course of mythic history
to the next phase of the myth of Nala, ruined and l)eggared
by the gambler Pushkara, and this we find in the history of
the Pandavas, which forms the Mahabharata. In the story
74 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of Nala, the victors over evil were the Kushika, or sons of
the tortoise; but in the story of the Mahabharata, it is these
same sons of the tortoise, called the Kauravya from kiir^ the
tortoise, who have become the oppressors and evil-doers, and
the Pandavas are those who deliver the land from their
tyranny. The story opens with the account of how the
hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, the Kauravya king, and the
five Pandavas were brought up together under their tutor
Drona, whose name denotes the Drona-kalasha or trough, on
which the sacrificial Soma was made. It is this Drona-kalasha
which is called in the Brahmanas Praja-pati, the supreme
god.^ When they grew up they disagreed, and the
Kaiu-avyas burnt the house of the Pandavas, and forced
them to leave the country. They fled to the kingdom of
the Gandharva king, Chitra-ratlia, who ruled the land of
Kichaka, or the hill bamlK)o on tlie Ganges, the country of
the Kushika capital in the story of Nala. But Chitra-ratha
was, as I have shown in Essay iii., not like the Ashvins, the
leader of a race who believed in the fixed stars as the main-
tainers of law and order ; but he and his people had learnt
that the wandering stars, the moon and the planets, which
the star-worshippers denounced as rebels, were really better
measurers of time than the stars, and it was thev who drew
the Chitra-ratha or variegated (chitra) chariots {ratha) of
heaven. He introduced them to Dhaumya, the son of smoke
(dhumo) who instructed them in the new ritual of temple-
worship, in which the hidden god was adored in the inner holy
of holies amid clouds of incense, and burnt sacrifices were
offered to him on the fire-altar in the outer court. It was
under the guidance of Chitra-ratha and Dhaumya, whom
they made their family priest, that they won for the bride
of the five brothei-s, DrupadI, the daughter of Drupada^
the king of the Paiichalas, whose name means the sacrificial
stake. She, as I show in Essay iii., was the goddess of the
altar of incense, on which the hidden and mysterious god of
^ Eggeling, Sa/, Brdh.^ iv. 5, 5, ii ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 408.
ESSAY II 75
the year of the five seasons was worshipped, and her brother
Drishta-dyumna, the seen (drishta) bright one {dyumiia\
who wa6, like herself, miraculously born by the sacrifice
offered by the Brahmin Yaja, meaning the sacrificer, was
both the altar of burnt offering, and the leader of the Pan-
(lavas in their war against the Kauravyas. It was affcer this
marriage that the Pandavas began their career of conquest ;
and Bhima^ Arjuna, Sahadeva,and Nakula conquered all India
for their eldest brother Yudishthira. He, who was the son
of the god Dharma, the god of law and order, was acknow-
ledged as supreme ruler by all the Indian princes, including
Dhritarashha and his sons, and he succeeded Jarasandha, the
king of the united Kushikas and Maghadas, who had been
slain by Bhima, the god worshipped as supreme god by the
Eastern Gonds. Yudishthira, whose name means he who has
the most (of the spirit) of Yu, that is, of steadfastness, was
the god of the spring of the new and regenerated age ; and
he, like Nala, ruled his kingdom in peace and righteousness,
till he was ensnared by Shakuna, meaning ' the kite,** the
brother of Gandhari, the egg-laying mother of the Kaur-
iivyas, who was, as I show in Essay in., the storm-bird,
the bird of the burning winds of summer. Yudishthira
lost his kingdom to him at the gambling-table, and the
Pajiijlavas were obliged to go into exile for thirteen years,
the number of months in the lunar year. This time of
gambling was the season of Bhima, the son of Vayu, the
wind, and of the burning west wind of summer. The next
season, which begins with the close of the exile, is that of
Arjuna, who, with the god Krishna as his charioteer, and
Gan^iva, the heavenly bow, as his weapon, is the foremost
fighter in the army of the Pandavas in their final conflict
with the Kauravyas. He is the god of the rainy season, the
son of Indra, the rain-god. The next two seasons — the
autumn and winter — ^are those of the twins Saha-deva and
Nakula, the sons of the Ashvins, and they represent the time
of the thoughtful consolidation of the rule of Yudishthira,
76 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
after the overthrow of the Kauravyas and the death of their
leaders, and of the descent of the throne to the son of
Arjuna and Su-bhadra, the sister of Krishna. Here, even
more unmistakably than in the story of Nala, we find a his-
torical myth under the guise of an account of the sequence
of the seasons, and we are told of the rise to power of the
Western traders and warriors, the Sombunsi or sons of the
moon ; and the trading Su-varna or Ikshvaku, the sons of
the sugar-cane, who, as I show in Essay iii., were the succes-
sors of the growers of barley, the sons of the twin-gods, the
Ashvins, the race who reckoned time by the lunar year.
As I have shown in Essay iii. that the truth of this mythic
history is proved by the Iiistorical traditions of the succes-
sion of races, by the evolution of ritual, and by the deduc-
tions to be made from tribal customs, it must be admitted
that these ancient myths are not mere idle tales invented to
dissipate the tedium of an uneventful existence, or that
their authors were the * idle singers of an empty day.** On
the contrary, they were the pioneers of progress, in the fore-
front of the battle, who kept not only the records of past
history and acquired knowledge, but showed the way to new
victories over ignorance and error. It was by means of these
myths that they recorded and preserved the history of the
past, which, according to Renan''s dictum, every race which
has a right to call itself an individuality among human
species must possess.^ It was these myths which, before the
days of syllabic or alphabetical literature, were made and
preserved by the national priesthood, the territorial Ojhas
or Magas, names given to the Sakadwipi, Maithila, and
Gaura Brahmins,^ of Behar and Bengal, to the exercisers
and chief priests both of the Munda parhas or provinces
of Chota Nagpore, and to the Gond priests consecrated
by Lingal. It was from these that the kings selected
^ Renan, I^ei/ue des Deux Mondes^ 1st Sept. 1873, p. 140. Quoted by
Lenormant, Chaldivan Magic, p. 378.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal j vol. i. p. 159 ; vol. ii. p. 138.
ESSAY II 77
the council of royal priests and advisers, who became
the caste of the Brahmins, for the five classes of the Dravida
Brahmins living south of the Vindhyan range, and the five
classes of Gaura Brahmins living north of it, are all distin-
guished by territorial names denoting ancient kingdoms or
ruling centres. Thus the Dravidas are divided into (1) the
Maharashtras, who belong to the Maratha country ; (2) the
Andhras or Tailangas to the Telugu ; (3) the Dravidas to
the Tamil ; (4) the Kamatas to the Carnatic ; (5) the Gur-
jaras to that of Gurjarashtra, or the country of the Gujarati
language. Similarly the Gaura classes are (1) the Sara-
swatas, from the land of the Sarasvati river ; (2) the Kanya-
kubjas from Kanoj ; (3) the Gauras, from Gaur on the
Lower Ganges ; (4) the Utkalas, of Utkala or Orissa ; and
(5) the Maithilas, from Mithila (Tirhut). ^ It was they
who became the Asipu, the diviners or recorders of the
Akkadians, and who appear in Rome as the College of
Augurs, who take their name from their employment as
diviners of the future by examining omens, especially those
taken from the entrails of the sacrificial birds, which, as I
show in Essay in., is an Eastern cult, taken thither from the
North, and derived from the belief in birds as the angel-
messengers of the unseen god. The first form of mythic
history accompanied by mythic record of natural phenomena
was that which is shown in the establishment of national
festivals to mark the seasons, and it was on the earliest altar
to the mother-earth that, as I show in Essay in., a hiero-
gljrphic picture of national history was drawn. Also in the
festival to the Fathers the great epochs of change were
marked in the offerings of rice to the oldest Fathers, the
Pitarah Somavantah, of parched barley to the Pitaro Baris-
hadah, or the Fathers of the Kushite race, sitting on the
Barhis, or sacred Kusha grass round the altar, who are the
Fathers of the age of the Nala myth, and of porridge made
of parched barley and the milk of a cow suckling an
* Risley, Tribes ami Castes of Bengal ^ vol. i. pp. 143, 144.
78 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
adopted calf, offered to the Pitaro ''Gnishvattah, or those
who burned their dead/ the later Aryans, whose history I
have not yet reached. In these divisions we trace, as I have
already done by tribal traditions, the progress of cultivation,
and the growth of Indian agriculture from the South ; for the
rice offered to the Pitarah Somavantah on six potsherds is an
offering to the six seasons into which the equatorial year of
Southern India is divided, owing to the alternation of
periods of wet and dry weather, each lasting two months.
This, in spite of the official sanction given by the framers of
ritual to the three seasons of the Chatur masiya, the division
of the year of the Northern races, and the five seasons of the
Gonds and of the lunar sacrifices, is recognised in the Brah-
manas as the true division of the vear.^ Also Hindu astrono-
mers divide the year into six r?7w, and it was this number
of six seasons which was the number made sacred to the
Asura, who, as I show in Essay in., derive their name from
the Akkadian Ash (six).
But when national education was looked on, as it was
amongst the Kushites as one of the most important tasks or
internal policy, it was found necessary to improve and dis-
seminate, more widely than had hitherto been done, the
knowledge of the history of the country and of the results
acquired by scientific research, and these were all embodied
in myths framed on the model of the seasonal myths which
formed the folk-tales of the villagers, these being almost all
based on the recurrence of the seasons, the most important
subject of knowledge to a people whose living was gained by
the culture of plants, which could only be properly carried
on when the land was prepared, the seed sown, the fields
weeded, and the crops reaped and stored in the proper
seasons. It is the story of the seasons which is told in the
numerous stories of the three brothers, the youngest of
^ Eggeling*s ^a/. Brah, ii. 6, i, 4-7, S.B.E., vol. xii., p. 421.
* y^iV/., ii. I, I, 13, S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 281 ; iii. 4, 3, 17 ; iv. 2, 2, 7, vol.
xxvi. pp. 1 01 1 289.
ESSAY II 79
whom, the reaper of the han-est, is alone successful in his
quest ; and it is they which appear in the Cinderella myth
and its variants, where the Prince, the young god of the new
year, is won and wedded by Cinderella, the despised winter
scrub, who defeats her gaudier sisters, the spring and
summer, and leaves her glass shoe of winter ice as the sign
by which she is to be found by those who know her worth.
It is this mythical method of recording the movements of
time which appears also in the story of the Briar Rose or
Sleeping Beauty. It is she who is the year-goddess wakened
from her winter sleep by the kiss of spring, and her previous
history shows that it is a story which has travelled from the
South to the North, and has taken with it in its progress a
record of the varying methods used for calculating annual
time. Her fairy god-mothers are thirteen, a number repre-
senting the thirteen months of the lunar year. But one of
the golden plates allotted to them was taken away, and only
twelve remained at her christening to denote the twelve
months of the newer solar year which succeeded the lunar.
Consequently the thirteenth god-mother, the discarded
month, was angry, and came in after the first eleven god-
mothers had given their gifts to deciee that the new-bom
year princess should prick herself with a spindle on her
fifteenth birthday. In these numbers we have a mythical
record of the eleven months of generation sacred to the
worshippers of the Ashvins, which, as I show in Essay iii.,
underlie the whole mythical chronometry of the Rigveda,
and of the ten lunar months of gestation, and the five seasons
which marked the year of the Kushika races.
It is these sacred numbers, the seven days of the week,
the six, five, three seasons, the number eight, sacred to the
fire-god, the gods of earth, and nine sacred to the gods of
heaven ; the ten and eleven months of gestation and genera-
tion, the thirteen months of the lunar, the twelve months of
the solar year, the fourteen days of the lunar phases, and
twenty-eight of the lunar month, the twenty-six lunar
80 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
phases of the hinar yearjand the thirty-tliree lords of the ritual
order of the Zendavesta, Rigveda, and Egyptian mythology,
and other similar numbei*s, which form a most important
part of the teachings of ancient myths. These were the
algebraic signs of calculation and record which were taught
by Ritupama to Nala, and it is these which, in the absence
of significant names, as in the story of the Sleeping Beauty,
frequently show the meaning and history of the mythic
tale. But it is in the names that we find the surest guide
where the story gives them in their original form, or when
we can trace their meaning and origin either by linguistic
laws, or else by the fathful translation of these earlier names
into the tongue of those who have adopted the myth ; and
it is by this means that we can work out most of the mean-
ings of the earlier Dravidian and Turanian myths preserved
by Sanskrit authors, and many of those which have found
their way into Greek mythology. The names in these
stories are never those of individuals, who were of little
account in pre- Aryan days, the naming of individuals being
always thought to be unlucky ; but are always especially
selected as the best means which suggested itself to these
authors of conveying to and impressing on the memory of
those who learnt the myth the meaning of the lessons they
wished to teach. It is tales like these which have always
been from time immemorial the favourite methods of teach-
ing among all the races who have successively ruled India.
It is Sanskrit fairy tales which form the substratum of many
of our European stories ; and no one who has heard, as I have
done, the fairy stories of my youth told by a wild Gond in
the forests of Sehawa, at the sources of the Mahanuddi in
Chuttisgurh, can ever doubt that these stories were originally
conceived by the myth-makers of the most primitive tribes
in the earliest dawn of civilisation. The stories my Gond
guide told me could never have reached his tribe from
Northern infiltration in historic times, for I was probably
the second, if not the first, European he or his people had
ESSAV II 81
ever seen ; for, as far as I could make out, I was the second
European who was ever known to have visited this wild and
remote tract. The stories collected and published from
Southern India by the Misses Frere in Old Deccan Days^
and by Miss Stokes, prove conclusively that the art of
making myths was well known to the Southern Dravidians.
It was apparently these people who first formed the skeleton
foundations on which later stories were founded, and being
a most practical people, they made them in such a way as
to convey valuable instruction in an interesting and easily
retained form. Having — like all nations with strong Malay
affinities, such as the Chinese, Burmese, and Bengalis — vivid
dramatic instincts, and being also, like the Bengalis, great
makers of pithy proverbs, they easily and naturally turned
these into stories which seemed to be tales told of indi-
viduals, and in dramatising these, either in the story or in
mimic action, they made the key-notes of the proverbs the
names of the actors in the plot. When these stories were
transferred from the village-school and the village meetings
in the Akra or dancing-place to the guardianship of the
royal advisers, and were made the groundwork of national
history, they were protected from alteration by the same
tcJboo which forbade all tampering with the national
ritual. They were divinely-inspired tales, which must be
handed down by the rulers of the priestly guilds from
generation to generation, each only adding its own contribu-
tion to the story transmitted by their predecessors. This
task of guarding and adding to the national, historical, and
scientific myths was that which was confided to the priests
called Prashastri, or the teaching priest, a name given to
Agni, the fire-god, in the Rigveda,^ and the title by which
the priests, called in the later ritual Mitra-Varuna, were first
named. They are the special priests of the Udumbara or
house-pole of the Sadas, or house of the gods in the Soma-
sacrifice, for it is close to it that their dhishnya or hearth
* Rigveda, i. 93, 6.
6
82 THE RULING llACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
is placed in the Soma sacrificial ground,^ and it was they
who preserved the remembrance of the ancient meanings, and
of the rules made for the guidance of those who framed the
new myths of each successive generation. It was this
method of making mythic history which held its ground as
that best adapted for popular use to a time long after the
introduction of syllabic writing and alphabets ; and it is
upon the national myths that all the great epic poems of
India, Assyria, and Greece are founded ; and it is these
myths which appear in the history of the birth, education,
and lives of the national gods and reformers, such as Apollo
and Buddha. Though the latter was a living man, and not
a name born from the thought of the myth-maker, yet the
stories of his birth and education, and of many incidents of
his life are altered from the real facts by mythic elements
introduced to do honour to the saint, and taken from myths
first made by the official myth-makers in the days when
myths recorded real history, and when these myths told the
story of national changes. Thus these myths are of quite a
different class from the originals from which they were
taken, and merely represent the reverence felt by the writer,
just as the pictured aureole denotes the feeling inspired by
the divine being it illumines. In interpreting the inspired
myths of the early teachers, it may be laid down as an in-
variable rule that any attempt to treat them, whether they
are historical, religio-historical or naturalistic, as stories told
of individuals, must be utterly wrong, and that no true solu-
tion of a myth can be found till the meaning of the names as
understood by the original myth-maker is unravelled, and
that of the numbers ascertained.
It must also be remembered that these myths were not
merely local tales current only in certain places, but that
they travelled with the tribes who framed them, and thus
give most valuable evidence of their movements and national
growth. An excellent specimen of the travelling myth,
^ See plan of ground in Eggeling's Saf. BrdA., S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
ESSAY II 83
which shows the great antiquity of these national stories is
to be found in that of Ixion and its variants, which ranges
from Asia Minor to Greece on one side, and India on the
other. Ixion and his sister Koronis were the children of
Phlegyas, king of the Phlegyes, the people whose name
appears in that of the Indian Bhrigus, the race who brought
fire to earth. Their original home was in Phrygia, which
means the land of the Phruges, Bruges, by which last name
they were known in Thrace, or Bhrigus. They were origin-
ally called Peru-gu, or the begetters, and were a Finnic
race, whose fire-god was Peru, and whose name means, in
Finnish and Tamil, the begetter. The p became in
Aryan speech M, and the root pri-u became the Aryan
root bhri, to beget.^ Tlie name Ixion, as Kuhn and Breal
have proved, represents an earlier Greek form, I^a-F-oi/,
and this is the same word as the Sanskrit Akshivan, the
driver of the axle (aksha). ^ But Ixion is also, according to
Bopp and Pott, connected with the root /A*, pouring water,
which appears in Ichor (I^^w/j), the blood of the gods, the
water of life. Moreover, the Sanskrit aksha is a word of
which the original is to be found in the Gond akkha, an
axle ; and the cart-axle, as I show in Essay iii., is Avorshipped
by the Gonds at their annual new yearns festival of the
Akh-tuj (which takes place in April, and is a festival to the
rain-god to secure good rains, whence the Soma sacrifice
probably originated). The Gonds belong to the Turanian
race, who are the sons of tlie god (a7Ui) Tur, the pole ; and
the first father-pole was the fire-drill, who, with his consort,
the socket, were the first ])air of twin-gods who appear in
the Hindu ritual of the Soma sacrifice as Puru-ravas and
Urvashi,'^ and whose story I have told in Essay iii. The
Hindu Puru-ravas, before he became the Eastern (piiru)
^ This deduction is, for the reasons stated in Essay i.,p. 37, prol^ably
wrong, as I there show the primarj' fomi was most likely d/in\ and the
derivative pri-u,
* Mannhardt, Wald und Feld Kultur^ vol. ii. chap. iii. p. 84, note i.
* Eggeling's Sat, Brdh, iii. 1. i, 22 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 91.
i
84 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
roarer (ravas)^ and the thunder-god, was the counterpart of
the Greek king Phlegyas, the god of the earthly fire ; and
his children, Ixion and Koronis, are a second pair of twin-
gods, who reproduce their parents under another guise. For
Ixion is the god who on earth wedded Dia, the bright flame,
the daughter of Dioneus, who was enticed by Ixion into a pit
filled with burning fire-brands, and thus slain. Thus Ixion
was the god to whom burnt-sacrifices were oflTered in the
sacrificial pit, the Hindu gurta^ one of which has been
found in the temple of the Kabiroi, in Samothrace,^ and
which was first sacred to the god whose victims were tied by
the neck to the sacrificial stake in the pit and slain, so that
their blood vitalised it and the mother earth. These burnt-
sacrifices of the fire- worshippers were the only sacrifices
offered in the Ismenion at Thebes; and at these, predic-
tions of future events were not given by oracles as at Delphi,
but by omens drawn by the priests from the flames and
ashes of the sacrifice, and they still survived at Delphi in
the ritual, and predictions of the priests called Purkooi
(7rvp-K6oL\ who oflTered sacrifices to the fire-god (Trvp).
By Dia, Ixion was the father of Pirithous, who, like Ayu,
the son of Puru-ravas and Urvashi, was the revolving pole
of time descended from the sacrificial stake. Ixion, when
raised to heaven, was the rain-god who turned one wheel, to
which his hands and feet were fixed by Hermes, the fire-god,
continuously in the air, and this is merely a mythic way of
saying that he was the fire-drill made as the revolving pole
to rotate perpetually, and by being turned to every side
in his winged course ^ to produce life-giving heat, the gene-
rator of rain. This pole was the Great Bear, the father
constellation, as I show in Essay iii., of the Finns, the sons
of the Bear, marking, by its seven stars, the seven days of
the week, the revolutions of the wheel of time. This was the
* Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excavations, p. io8.
* Pindar, Pyth, ii. 40, describes Ixion's wheel as ei) irrepdeirn rpox^ TrdvTa
Kv\ivd6fi€yoy.
ESSAY II 85
constellation of the axle, which was afterwards, in one of its
many transformations, called Charles'*s Wain. Ixion as the
Bear-god, the ruler of the weeks or the revolving-axle, was
by Nephele, the cloud, the father of the Centaurs, who, as I
show in Essay ui., were the time-gods who goaded (xepreco)
the bull who made the pole of time go round. These
mythological conceptions prove that the original axle which
Ixion represented was not the axle of the two-wheeled cart,
but that of the single revolving pole. But to understand
the full meaning and genealogy of the Ixion myth, we must
turn to that of Koronis, his twin-sister. Her name means
the garland, the necklace of flowers which every Hindu
presents to honoured friends on festive occasions, an emblem
of the annual garland of flowers made by those blossoming
in each month of spring, summer, and autumn. She was, by
Is-chus an Arcadian, the mother of iEsculapius, the physi-
cian to the gods ; and the name Is-chus or Ais-chus becomes
in Sanskrit, by the softening of the guttural Ishd^ a beam or
pole, the pole of the axle of the cart ; but this, when attached
to the revolving pole, is the beam or cross-bar which makes
it, like the cross-bar of the fire-drill, go round. I have shown
in Essay in. that in the first age of astronomical mythology
the heavenly pole turning in the cloud-socket, as Ixion''s
wheel revolved in the air was, in the Vayu Purana likened to
the pole or axle of the oil-press turned by the beam which
is fixed to it ; and in the myth of Koronis we find Is-chus,
the beam or moving time, causing the revolutions which
produce the seed whence the physician of the gods was born ;
and that this seed, the oftspring of the flower-mother, pro-
duced by the oil-press, was the oil of life, we see more clearly
in the myth of Athene. She is the flower-mother, whose
name comes from the same root as anthos^ a flower; and
her mother-tree was the olive or oil-tree, born, like the fire-
god, in Asia Minor, and thus we find in these two myths,
two flower-mothers, one whose son'*s father is the beam of the
oil-press, and another whose mother-tree is the olive or oil-
86 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tree. It was the olive-tree of Athene, which, with the pahii,
the Babylonian tree of life, overshadowed Leto at the birth
of the second avatar of Apollo and Artemis at Delos ; and
they were, like Ixion and Koronis, mythological reproduc-
tions, as I show presently, of the fire-drill and the socket.
By this analysis we see that in the myths of Ixion revolving
in Nephele the cloud, and of Ischus, the beam begetting the
physician of the gods from the flower- mother, it is the
pole which is turned, and that the turning instrument is
symbolised in the beam of the oil-press ; for in the myth of
Ixion it is the Ichor or blood of the gods, the life-giving
rain, which he distils from the cloud ; and in that of Koronis
the yearly garland made from the encircling round of flowers
changing with every season, it is the healing medicine of the
divine physician which is the offspring of the heavenly oil-
press. To understand the sanctity and medicinal value
attached to oil we must go to India, where every Hindu
child is anointed with oil almost as soon as it is born ; and
every one, both men and women, anoint themselves with oil
as a medicinal precaution against disease, and it is also used
for ceremonial purposes. The most sacred oil is that pressed
from the Sesamum plant called Til {Sesamum Orientale\
and this, in the ethics of the Teli caste of hereditiiry oil-
pressers, is the only oil which pure Telis can make, and
those who extracted other oils are thought to belong to
what are the less reputable sections of the tribe. The Til
is the oil-plant most universally grown in India, and
generally that sown on newly-cleared uplands possessing a
light soil, as it does not require so rich a soil as the ciistor-
oil plant. The priests of the Behar Telis are the Dosadhs,
the priests of the fire-god ; and an inferior class of Brah-
mins called the Tel-Babhun, and their chief deities are the
five village gods, the Pafich Pir, the five seasons of the
Gonds, and Goraya, the boundary-god, to whom the
Dosadhs sacrifice pigs.^ Their mother- tree, on which the
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ vol. ii. pp. 308-309.
ESSAY II 87
bridegroom sits while the bride is carried round him, is the
Cliumpa-tree {Liiiod^ndron grandiflora or lilifera) and
Chumpa-flowers are those most prizxxl for sacred garlands.
It is these that are reproduced in the name of the Greek
flower-mother Koronis. The Telis form one of the earliest
trade-guilds, which became, under Kushite rule, separate
castes, and many of the wciilthiest traders of India are Telis,
while the Teli or oilman is to be found in almost every
village where there are any Hindu residents. They are
proved by their totems, among which are the Niiga
snake, the tortoise, and the Bar-harua, or fruit of the Harua-
tree,^ to he the yellow sons of the tortoise-worship])ers
of the Niiga-snake, for it is from the galls of the llarua-tree
{Myrabolana chebida) that the most durable yellow dye is
made.* Their descent from the yellow race is confirmed by
the tribal legend that the two first oil-makers were made by
the goddess Bhagavati out of turmeric or yellow paste, and
by the fact that the purest Telis are called the Ekadiis, or
worshippers of the eleven gods of the Ashvins, or fathers of
the yellow race. The Telis are said in the Brahma Vai-
vartta Purana to be eleventh in the list of castes, and to be
boni from the Kumhar or potter, and the builder caste,
Kotak or Gharami, from whom the ideas of the revolving
wheel and the revolving measuring-pole were derived.^
Their descent from the Naga snake and pole is also repro-
duced in the Greek ^Esculapius, who bears a staff round
which a snake is twined, and it was to him that the cock,
the sacred bird of the East, brought to Greece with the
legends of the heavenly twins, the egg-born children, was
sacrificed. He was also one of the avatars of Apollo,
who became Apollo Paian, or the healing Apollo, in whose
honour the Gynmopa»dia, or dance of naked boys accom-
panied by the pjean, was performed, just as theGonds always
^ Kislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. Appendix i. p. 138.
- Clarke's Roxburgh's Flora Indica, p. 381.
3 Rislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. pp. 306-309.
88 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
appeared naked before their supreme Naga-god, Sek Nag.
It is by this transformation that we find that the myth of
Ixion is . exactly parallel with that of Apollo ; for as Ixion
became the rain-god after he had been the fire-god, so did
Apollo become the storm-god, the lord of heaven, bom on
the river Xanthus after he had slain the one-eyed Cyclops,
the fire-god, whose eye is the spark in the fire-drill. It was
to expiate this oflence that he had to do penance for nine
years with Admetus,^ whose name means * the untamed,** and
signifies the hidden fire imprisoned below the earth. It was
on emerging from this imprisonment that he was born as the
god of heaven, whose sacred number is nine. This interpre-
tation is confirmed by the legend of the Titans. In it the
Cyclops or fire-gods were the rulers of heaven, under Gaia
the earth-mother, and they were thrown into Tartarus, that
is, imprisoned below the earth as the volcanic fires by
Ouranos the god of heaven, the Sanskrit Varuna ; and I
have shown in Essay iii. that the twins Artemis and Apollo,
born on the river Xanthus at the first avatar of Apollo as
a twin god, were the Hindu gods Mi tra- Varuna, the moon
and the rain (var) god. It is this mythology which, in
the legends of Ixion and Koronis, and of the Hindu axle
and pole, we identify as identical with that disseminated in
India by the flower-loving yellow race, who, as Ooraons wear
flowers in their hair, and as oil-pressers call themselves Telis
in India, and who became in Greece the children of Koronis
the flower-goddess, and of the oil-press, the father of the
race of physicians, the sons of the Hindu Ashvins or
physicians of the gods. They first used oil as the great
healer and strengthener of the body, and the stand-by of
those who trained combatants for the Greek palaestra. We
find also that the oil-growers were an offshoot of the
Turanian race, who were sons of the pole, and made the
Naga or rain-snake their chief god in place of the fire-god.
It was they who used oil or butter and water for cleansing
^ Smith's Classical Dictionary^ s.v. Admetus.
ESSAY II 89
and sanctifying purposes, in preference to the blood used by
their predecessors, and it was these same people who, when
they had evolved the idea of the god of heaven as the pole
turned by the revolving days and weeks, symbolised it as the
pole of the threshing-floors, round which the kcntauroi or
goaders {icevr) of the ox {ravpo^) drive the ox which treads
out the com, and thus makes the tribes of Gonds, whose
successive races are called in the Song of Lingal ' the
threshing-floor of Gonds.^ We thus see how the same pri-
mitive conceptions accompanied the Turanian race in their
emigrations from Phrygia to Greece and India, and how the
myth expanded with the growth of the nation. But as I
have shown in Essay in. these people, while believing in the
rain-god as the supreme god and father of life, also thought
that drunkenness was divine inspiration ; and while the
Northern Turanians consumed at their festivals quantities
of mead or honey drinks, the Gonds drank darw, a spirit
made from the flowers of the Mahua-tree {Bassia latifblm).
This was thought to contain the essence of life distilled
from the rain into the flowers, and thence in Northern mytho-
logy extracted by the prophetic or inspired bees, and thus
the flower-mother and the bees were the mothers of wisdom
and divine ecstasy, who inspired their priests with a know-
ledge of diseases and the means of curing them ; and it was
these people who added the healing-oil to the pharmacopoeia
of the medicine-men of the fire-worshippers. The descent
from the rain-god of the intoxicating spirit made from the
flowers of the Mahua-tree is symbolised in the ceremonies of
the Vajapeya sacrifice, described in Essay in. For the Soma
priest, the Adhvaryu, consecrates the cups of pure and unin-
toxicating Soma above the axle of the Soma cart at the
same time as the Neshtri priest of Tvashtar consecrates
those of Sura, or spirits, below it, and in this ceremony we
see the reminiscence of the days when the axle was the
upright revolving pole pressing out the heavenly rain which
instilled into the flowers the spirit of life which they repro-
"^•l
t
90 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
duced in the life-giving Sura. This also shows us how it was
that the axle became the sacred part of the Soma cart when the
planets and moon circling the heavens became the measurers
of time in place of the fixed stars, and the revolving pole
became the axle of the car of time, and of the cart of the agri-
cultural Gonds, who worship its axle at the Akh-tuj festival.
It was tliese successively immigrating races from the North
whose mythic history, together with that of the matriarchal
tribes who preceded them, is told in the myths I have cited
in this Essay and in Essay in., and it was they who placed a
king at the head of the confederated provinces, formed from
their confederated villages by the matriarchal tribes. The
first great immigration after that of the North-eastern Mons
or Mundas, was that of the sons of the dog and boar-god,
who formed the race of the Maghadas, represented in Bengal
by the Dosadhs and Rauris, who reverence the dog and pig
and their congeners ; and it was they who made the tribal
medicine-man, the Byga, into the village priest under the
name of Dosadhs, Degharia, Deoris, etc. The confederate
form of these kingdoms is shown in such names as Chuttis-
gurh, wliich means the thirty-six gurhs, or united provinces.
Rut the final consolidated form of the pre-Aryan Indian
village and kingdom was that which was framed by the sons
of the tortoise. It was they, as I have already explained,
who placed the royal province in the centre of the kingdom.
The object aimed at by these statesmen was not to override
popular rights, but to prevent republican liberty from
degenerating into licence, and to ensure universal obedience
to the great law of national duty on which Dravidian ethics
were founded. They therefore held it necessary that the
royal authority sliould not only appear visibly in the rule of
the central province allotted to the king, but that it should
be represented in each village, and it was on these principles
that the government of the Ooraon village of Chota Nagpore
was constructed .^The Ooraon form of village government
is that which has been preserved with less alteration from
ESSAY II 91
'subsequent invaders than that of any other part of India,
for the Ooraons, Mundas, Ho Kols, and Bhuyas have always
been able, under the protection of their mountain-fastnesses,
their political organisation, and their national love of in-
dependence to keep their country free from the interference
of the hated Sadhs, the name by which they call the Hindus.
But these people, who repelled and held themselves aloof
from later invaders, were of no less foreign origin than those
who succeeded them, for they were all formed by the union
with the matriarchal Australioids and patriarchal Mongols
of Finnish and other Northern stocks, most of whom, as I
have shown in Essay iii., were formed into confederated tribes
of artisans and agriculturists in Asia Minor ; and it was from
the southern part of Asia Minor, or Northern Palestine, the
indigenous home of the wild ass, that the Ooraons, who still
call themselves * the sons of the ass,** came. They themselves
say that they came from Western India, from the land of
Ruhidas,^ but this means the land of the red-men, or Syria,
the country whose people are called Rotou by the Egyptians,
arid they were the race who introduced barley and plough-
tillage into India and Chota Nagpore. In each of their
villages a certain proportion of the best land, called Manjhus
land, varying in area according to the size of the village, was
set apart for the service of the king or chief, an arrangement
which is exactly similar to that which assigned land, called
the Lord''s land, to the ruling power in the English manorial
village. This land was cultivated by the tenants to whom
arable land was allotted, and this labour was the rent they
paid for the land they tilled for their own maintenance, and
for government protection. The produce of the Manjhus
land was either stored in the royal granaries, distributed
over the country as supply-centres, wlience provisions could
l)e drawn for the camps accompanying tlie king or cliief in
the frequent progresses through their dominions, whicli these
ancient rulers used to make, or else wlien the village was
^ Ruhidas is the land of the red men, see Essay ii. , p. 46.
92 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
given as pay, or as a maintenance grant, by the Raja or chief
to a subordinate or relation, the yield of the Manjhus crops
was made over to the grantee. The rest of the land was
divided into allotments, called koonts^ which were generally
five in number, though in Chuttisgurh, where I had more
practical experience of village organisation than elsewhere,
I have found villages where more divisions were made. Three
of these were assigned to the families who received the right
to fill the superior village offices. And all these offices, and
not merely that of the Mundci, as among the Kols, were
made hereditary. The cultivators belonging to the families
on whom these hereditary rights were conferred, were called
bhtmhiarSj ' or sons of the soil ** {bhum\ and these families
represented the original settlers. One of these koonts was
set apart for the Munda or headman, but he was no longer
supreme in the village, but divided his authority with the
Pahan, or village priest, and a new officer appointed by the
Naga kings, called the Mahto or accountant, whose especial
business it was to superintend the cultivation of the Manjhus
land. He was a royal steward, but the office was not one to
which an outsider could be appointed, but it must be held by
one of the family, to which the right of supplying the Mahto
was originally assigned. All the land outside that belonging
to these bhunhiari allotments, and the Manjhus land, was
cultivated by descendants of persons admitted into the
village community after the date of its original settlement ;
but these cultivators of the second order were not tenants
without rights of ])roperty in the land, but members of the
village community, who had, except as regards the right of
eligibility to the village offices, the same rights as the bhun-
hiar/t to a share of the arable land of the village, and both,
as I shall show, had their definite duties assigned to them.
The duties of the Pahan were to offer the sacrifices necessary
to propitiate the village gods, and to drive away bhuts or
evil spirits, and the names given to the Pahnai lands assigned
as payment for the Pahan, who answers to the priest of an
ESSAY II 93
English parish, gives most valuable insight into the funda-
mental articles of the creed of the united Dravidian and
Kolarian races. It is divided into four sections called (1)
Dali-ka-tarl, (2) Desauli-bhut-kheU, (3) Gaon-deotl-bhut-
kheta, and (4) Chandi-khet.
The first division, the Dali-ka-tari, the basket (dali) of Ea
the great snake goddess (tarl\^ the rain-mother, whose
dwelling-place was unknown, and who ruled both heaven and
earth, was far the largest of the four, and was held by the
Palian for the worship of the goddess, who was called Lut-
kum-budi, the wise creeper {Luta\ or more usually Jahir
budi, whose spirit was supposed to reside in the Sama, or
village grove. Thrice a year fowls, and a pig every ten or
twelve years, are offered to her to secure good crops. And
these three annual offerings are made to the seasonal gods of
the Northern race, who worshipped Vasu, the god who in the
Mahabharata is said to have set up the rain-pole in the Sakti
mountains, or those of Chota Nagpore. (2) The Desauli-
bhut-kheta is held for the worship of the husband of the
mother-goddess, called Lut-kum-hadam, the staff of the
creeper, the tree round which it twines. Fowls are offered
to him yearly, a ram every five, and a buffalo every ten ; and
we thus find him as a tree-god and also as a sun-god to whom
fowls were sacred, and as the god Varuna, whose victim was the
ram, and who is the father-god of the sons of the wild cow
* TaiiL is the snake-goddess, whose shrine at Hudh-(Jya is mentioned by
Hiouen Tsiang, Bks. viii. and ix. ; Ideal's Records of the Wtstern iror/c/, vol.
iL pp. 103 and 174. Hiouen Tsiang calls her a form of Bcwlhi-satva, or of the
god who has the knowledge of truth. She is still worshippcil in Orissa by the
KhondsasTara Pennu, the female (/V//) Tara, and thus she is a snake and star
goddess, foTiaras, which has become our ' star/ is in Gondi a snake, and thc
Hioduname for heaven was Nug-kshetra, or the field of the Naga snakes.
She was called Ka in the worship of Praja-ixiti, the pre-Aryan father-god, as
I show in Essay ill., but ATi was not originally an interrogative pronoun, but
the name of the earth-goddess, the soul or spirit of life in the soil, which l)e-
cune the Greek Gea and Gaiay the earth, the Kolarian Gowa village, and
^ Finnic A'uu, the moon. I have shown in the Preface the significance of
(be grain basket, which became the Liknos of the Greeks.
94 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIME
(Gauri). (3) The Gaon-deoti-bhut-kheta is the portion as —
signed to the goddess, called Ikir-budi, the god who procures
the general welfare of the village, the god Goraya of the
Dosadhs. It is to her that the Akur (the Eolarian word
for enclosure) or the whole village area, and the Akra, or
dancing ground, are dedicated, and it is in her honour that
the seasonal village dances are held, and she is the vital
spirit animating both the father and mother-gods of genera-
tion in the trees of the Sama. These three gods were the
primaeval triad, which, as I show in Essay in., was composed
of the father-god Linga and his two wives, the mothers of
the Northern patriarchal and Southern matriarchal races
who were originally the three seasons of the year of the
Northern races. The fourth division, the Chandi-khet, or
moon-field, is sacred to the moon-goddess, to wliom a she-
goat, the lunar victim, is offered every four or five years.
This was the goddess who ruled the eleven lunar months,
consecrated first to the ten mothers, and afterwards to the
eleven gods of generation of the growers of barley.^
The first duties of tlie Mahto or accountant, who became
the Patwari of the North-west and the Kulkami of the
Bombay village system were, as I have shown, to superintend
the cultivation of the Manjhus hmd; but when the cultiva-
tors who did not hold service-land were obliged to add per-
sonal contributions in grain, in proportion to the size of
their holdings, to the cultivation of the Manjhus land, the
Mahto had to collect these dues, while tlie cultivators were
compensated for the extra taxes demanded from them by
the assignment to tliem of a plot of land called ' beth-kheta,**
which they held free of revenue. The privileged families in
Chota Nagpore, and, as I shall show afterwards, in the
^ The greater part of this account of the division of the Pahnai lands is
taken from an ofificial report prepared by Babu Rakhal Dass Iluldar, appointed
in 1869 as Special Commissioner to inquire into Chota Nagpore tenures ; my
copy is annotated by General Dalton. The interpretations I have added are
my own, and are derived from the studies which have led me to write these
Essays.
ESSAY II 95
Dekhan, paid, till the Aryan conquest, no taxes in grain ;
but besides the services rendered bv the heads of the clans
chosen to fill the village offices, the other members gave
general suit and service to the Raja and his official repre-
sentatives. They carried their baggage on a journey, sup-
plied them and travellers visiting the village with wood and
grass; thatched and repaired the houses and granaries of
their chief; looked after the village boundaries; and kept
order in the village.
The subordinate village officers, who were paid generally
in grain, but sometimes in land, were (1) the water-carrier,
who was the Pahan's assistant, and who is in every village ;
and besides him, there were others who generally gave their
services to more than one village. These were (2) the black-
smith ; (3) the potter ; (4) the cowherd ; (5) the barber ;
(6) the washerman ; and (7) the watchman or policeman,
and besides these there was, as I have already said, in every
parha or taluka the Ojha, or exorcise r, the survivor of the
tribal Byga.
It was this village, governed by the three chief authorities,
the Munda, assisted by the Pahan and Mahto, which is repro-
duced in the earliest form of the Dravidian State, which we
find in the primitive Bliuya State of Gangpore. There the
Raja rules the Central Provinces through which the Eebe
flows; while his two chief subordinates are (1) the Zemindar
of the Eastern Province of Nuggra, who hfis the title of
Mahapatur or Prime Minister, and represents a village
Pahan; and (2) the chief of the Western Province of
Hingir called the ghuroutia^ or house-manager, tJie State
Mahto, who afterwards developed into the sena-pati or
com mander-in-ch ief .
Considering that the Indian kingdoms, which were finally
consolidated into the great confederacy of the Kushika
federal empire, were formed from provinces of united vil-
lages ; and that the unions of provinces outside those parts
of the country where the Kushite power was strongest, were
96 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
apparently somewhat fluctuating, we cannot be surprised at
the large number of kingdoms and States named in the cata-
logues given in the Mahabharata, Brihat - Saihhita, and
Puranas. But unfortunately we cannot identify all, or any-
thing like all, the States named in the lists, and the repeti-
tions that occur in them show conclusively that their writers
did not examine them critically and ascertain their accuracy
before publishing them, and beyond the certainty that the
States were so small as to make their total number very great,
we can deduce no other definite conclusions from the one
hundred and thirty-three kingdoms named in the Maha-
bharata as conquered by the Pandava ^ princes, or of the two
hundred and thirty-three countries named in the catalogue
of Indian kingdoms given in the same poem in the Bhishma
Parva.^ Judging from the evidence furnished by the state-
ment in the Jaina Sutras, that at the time of the birth of
the Jain prophet Maha-vTra, about 550 b.c., the kingdom of
Videha was divided into eighteen States, nine belonging to
the Mallis, and nine to the Licchavis, and from the areas of
the Chota Nagpore kingdoms which have preserved their
ancient boundaries almost intact, it would seem that the
originally confederated parhas which united themselves into
a kingdom, were in the more cultivated parts of the country
somewhat less than 1100 square miles, the average area of
an English county. Thus the area included in the ancient
kingdom of Videha was that now occupied by the districts
of Ghorakpore, Chumparun, and Muzafferpore, and possibly
also those of Darbhangah on the east, and Busti on the
north-west. It measures about 17,000 square miles, and as
the Terai lands of Busti must have then been waste forest,
the average size of each of the States forming the con-
federacy could not have been so large as an English count}'.
Chota Nagpore, again, covers an area of 46,000 square miles,
and was formerly divided into eleven States forming the
^ ^^hhdi (Digvijaya) Parva, xxvii.-xxxii. pp. 80-94.
^ Bhishma {Jambu-khanda nirmdna) Parva, Ix. pp. 31-34.
ESSAY II 97
whole or outlying portions of five confederacies* These last
were those of ChotaNagpore, Pachete, Sirgoojya, the Cheroo
kingdom of Behar, and the State of Samhulpore. In the
Chota Nagpore confederacy were included (1) the kingdom
of the Chota Nagpore Raja ; (2) of Ramghur, held by his
commander-in-chief; and (3) Porahat. That of Pachete
is the same as the present district of Manbhum, and it was a
dependency of Chota Nagpore. The Sirgoojya confederacy
comprised the present States of Sirgoojya, Jushpore, and
Oodeypore ; and it was a dependency of the great Gond king-
dom, of which Chuttisgurh was the centre, while Gangpore
and Bonai were border States of Sambulpore, and Sambulpore,
again, was a border kingdom of Chuttisgurli. Palamow,
again, was a border State of the Cheroo kingdom, and tlie
eleventh independent State was the confederacy of the Ho
Kols, which was nominally a dependency of Porahat. The
average size of each of these eleven States, which are spread
over a mountainous country, is about 4200 square miles ;
but if the great States of Chota Nagpore and Ramghur,
Palamow and Pachete, each of which is composed of a num-
ber of smaller States, be excluded, there will remain for the
seven smaller States about 21,000 square miles, or 3000
square miles apiece. Thus, even in tlie forest and mountain
country, the average area of each State was small, and the
original provinces or parhas^ which made up the larger pro-
vinces, which were united into a kingdom, could not have
been, on an average, much larger than one parha^ in the
more populous parts of the country. This division of
the country into small definite areas was one that was copied
in the Euphratean States, Palestine, Egypt, Maritime Asia
Minor, Greece, and Maritime Italy ; only that in all these
countries the centre of each union of villages was the city.
But the city was a product of trade ; and tlie fact that
Indian cities never attained the power they reached in all
the other countries of Babylonia, Assyria, Palestine, Egypt,
Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, shows that India, as a
7
98 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
country where prosperity was first founded on the agricul-
tural matriarchal village, had retained its old national
organisation as the basis of social rule, even after it had
become the great trading country of the South, and after
the Indian merchant seamen^ guided, as I have shown in
Essay iii., by the stars of their mother-constellation, the
Pleiades, had taken their fish-god to Eridu, where he became
the god called la or Yah and Assor, the supreme god of
the Semite race. It was there that the commercial pro-
sperity began which enriched the powerful empires of Baby-
lonia, Assyria, and Egypt; and in these countries the
villages of the matriarchal tribes, who were the first immi-
grants, receded into the background ; while the cities, which
were all stages along the trade routes and rivera which tra-
versed the country, and were the motive powers which formed
these kingdoms, became the centres whence the country was
ruled. In India likewise, the trading cities of Pushkalavati,
Multan or Mallitana, the place of the Mallis, and Patala ruled
the commerce of the Indus and the five rivers of the Punjab.
Those of Muttra, Kosambi, and Kashi or Benares, on the
Jumna and Ganges, Ujjen, Baragyza, Surat, and Dwaraka,
the arteries of the land and sea trade of the West, were the
capitals of powerful States ; but none of them, except Kashi
or Benares, ever attained the commanding position held by
Babylon and Nineveh in Babylonia and Assyria. But
though the Turanian king-makers did not make the cities
in India so prominent as in other countries where they
ruled, they yet succeeded thoroughly in making the personal
rule of the village headman, raised to be an imperial ruler, the
national form of government ; and we have no evidence in
India of any contention taking place between the republi-
cans and tyrants, or the personal rulers of the sons of Tur,^
which distinguished Greek and Roman history. In these
last countries, we find that the republican form of govem-
^ The Greek Htpavvoi is almost certainly derived from the Tur ; the form of
government he represented was that of the Turanian races.
ESSAY II 99
menty which is best represented in India by that of the Ho
Kols, in continual contention with that of the Turanian
tyrants; and we see in the finally established form of
government by the Amphictyonic Council a reproduction of
the council of the Kolarian Mankis, brought from India by
the matriarchal races, who were best represented by the
lonians of Asia Minor.
But the true cause of the national disputes in Greece
and Rome as to the merits of republican, aristocratic, and
kingly government is apparently to be found in the invasion
of the later Aryans, who looked to the individual and his
family as the national unit. They succeeded the Semitic
rulers, the Indian Sombunsi or sons of the moon, who, as
well as the Aryans, who inherited from them the institution
of slavery, were much less careless of the personal comfort of
their subordinates than the Dravido-Turanian kings. The
great object of the Semite king was to accumulate wealth,
and that of the Aryan to acquire personal glory, and as
long as they did that, they did not, in many cases, care
how much their subjects suffered ; but under the rule of the
Indian Dravido-Turanian, Chakravarti kings, or lords of
the wheel {ChaJcra\ the personal rule of the Raja could but
rarely degenerate into tyranny as the people were every-
where consulted, and were entirely at one with the Govern-
ment in the objects they sought to attain. Their sole
duties consisted in doing for the Raja the light personal
service required in return for the lands they held, in keeping
the king^s granaries full, and paying the police. The soldiers
were maintained by the contributions collected from the
towns and villages, and were merely used for purposes of
defence and for protecting the trade, which enriched the
people as well as the king ; but, above all, both kings and
people were trained from their earliest infancy to maintain ,■
the national customs handed down by their forefathers, to 1
carry out the orders given in emergencies by the ruling '
authorities, and to seek for redress of grievances from the
100 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
constituted authorities, and not by popular tumult The
working of the constitution and the protection of the artisans
were ensured by an excellent police service and a system of
village and town committees, each of which consisted of five
persons. These are fully described by Strabo, quoting from
Megasthenes,^ and are also spoken of in the Mahabharata,
where it is said ' the five grave and wise men employed in
the five offices of protecting the city, the citadel, the mer-
chants, agriculturists, and in punishing criminals, should
always act in unison ; ^ ^ and this passage, like Strabo^s
longer description, shows that in the Dravidian State there
was a separate board for each department. The Mahabharata
also, in a few lines after tliis last passage, mentions the
police. These boards and the former police system still sur-
vive in the village paJichayats or Councils of Five ; and the
cJiokidars or \illage or rural policemen, which are still found
everywhere throughout India ; and the titles of the Dosadhs,
who, besides being priests of the fire-god, are still hereditary
policemen in Behar, show that this State organisation dates
back to a time even earlier than Kushika or Naga rule, for
they are called chaukidar or watchmen, goraity or guardian of
boundaries ; mahato, or king''s steward in the village council,
nianjhiy or chief.^ To keep each part of the State in con-
stant touch with the central authorities, the kingdoms were,
as I have shown, small, especially in populous parts of the
country. But they were all linked together by a conscious-
ness of mutual dependence, and a knowledge of the neces-
sity of common action for the promotion of trade ; and in
the most prosperous periods they were grouped for purposes
of defence and offence, round a small number of common
rulers, who controlled the foreign and military policy of the
federation, leaving the internal government to the authori-
ties of tlie several States. In States constituted on these
^ Strabo, xv. i. 47-62 ; M*Crindle, Aftcient India, pp. 83-89.
' Sabha {Lokapala Sabhakhyana\ Parva, v. p. 17.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. Appendix i. p. 44.
ESSAY II 101
principles, the people combined with the Governments in
keeping down predatory bands, and fostering trade by every
means in their power ; the inducement being that as long as
they discharged the light duties required by the State, kept
the king^s granaries full, and provided for the support of
the soldiers and police, they retained all the profits they
made. They, therefore, united with the Government in
(Securing the undisturbed collection of tlie gold, jewels, and
other property exported, at the very early period when the
mineral wealth of India had been discovered, and its value
for trading purposes discerned ; in taking care that agricul-
turists, artisans, and traders were allowed to work in peace
and quiet ; in ensuring the safe-conduct'of goods to and from
the ports, and in protecting the possessions of foreign and
native merchants. The commerce thus fostered was free,
hampered by no transit dues and restrictions, and all alike,
lx)th the Government and the people it ruled, shared in the
profits. It was this system of wisely organised trade which
was that which prevailed throughout India, with of course
temporary intervals of disturbance, down to the end of the
rule of the Sombunsi, or sons of the moon, whose history
forms the closing period of that sketched in Essay iii.
This had gradually grown during the long period that had
elapsed since the matriarchal tribes first made their way to
the Persian Gulf by coasting voyages, and since the much
more extensive and regular trade which grew up, as I have
described in Essay in., under the rule of the star-worshippers
had developed into the commerce which made the sons of
Sin (the moon), the early Semites, the great traders of the
world. Up to the close of this period, though the influence
of the semi-Aryan fire-worshippers, and of the Aryan
-builders, and sons of the bull, had greatly changed the
tribal constitutions and racial characteristics of the people,
with whom they had amalgamated to form the Magadha
and Semitic races, yet they had never become the dominant
power in the land. The Indian village community of the
102 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Kushite race bears very slight traces of their individualistic
policy, while the history of the Aryan race and of their
subsequent influence on the Indian village community, proves
conclusively that the village communities in India, South*
western Asia and South-eastern Europe had been fully
developed and their constitutions fixed, before the Aryan
race called in India the Suraj-bunsi, or sons of the Sun, and
the Pitaro''gnisliavattah, or fathers who bunied their dead,
had started from North-western Europe, and overrun both
Europe and South-western Asia, towards the close of the
Bronze Age, when the burning of the dead begins to be
nearly universal.^ The sacrifice offered to the Pitaro'^gnisha-
vattah at the Pitriyajfia is porridge, made of part of the
roasted barley offered to the Pitaro Barishadah, the Nagas
or Kushites, mixed with the milk of a cow suckling an
adopted calf.^ This adopted calf was tlie Aryan race, who
joined their predecessors, the sons of the red cow, RohinI, or
the star Aldebaran,* the leading star in Taurus, the constella*
tion which, under its Hindu name of Pushya, ruled the first
month of the lunar year of their predecessors, the yellow race.
They had become Semites, and buried tlieir dead, whereas the
Aryans always burned them, and tliis mode of burial was, as we
learn from the Song qfBeozvulf\ that which was always prac-
tised by the typical Aryan race, tlie Low German Saxons ; and
it was only stopped by the severe laws forbidding the practice
made by Charlemagne. But what most especially distin-
guished this people from all other European races was their
land tenure, for among tliese Frisians or Saxons, property in
land was vested in the family, and not in the whole village
community. As Tacitus says of them, ' They could not
endure houses close to one another. Scattered and separated,
they settle where attracted by a spring, a pasture, or a grove.
The villages are not arranged, as among us Romans, with
^ Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 2nd ed. pp. 49-50.
' Eggeling, Sat, Brdh. ii. 6. i. 6. ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421.
^ Sachau's Alberuni*s India, vol. ii. chap. iv. p. 66,
ESSAY II 103
united dependent buildings. Each man surrounds his house
with a garth, from fear of fire or from ignorance how to build.
They do not use stones or tiles, but employ a common material
without show or value (kneaded clay) and thatch.** ^ The
Nervii, described by Caesar, who used the hedges which fenced
their fields as a means of defence against their enemies,
belong to this race.* It was among the Westphalian hedges
that Varro''s army was destroyed by Arminius. They were
thus essentially different from the Suevi or Swabians, likewise
described by Caesar and Tacitus, ' who have no private and
separate fields with proper boundaries, but the magistrates
and princes in assembly divide the land annually in propor-
tion,** just in the same way as I have described as customary
in Chuttisgurh, * while the village tenants of the lord,' like
the members of an 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.**' Among the
Aryan Saxons every farmer has his hof^ or house and farm-
yard, and his compact fields. Several scattered farms form a
hauerschqfi^ which generally bears the name of the oldest
and most honourable Ao/J and its proprietor is called
hauptmann, head-man or captain, while it is called the
RechUHqf^ or court of judgment. Here, as in the sabha
o( the Indian Aryans,* the yeomen of the batierschqft
assemble, debate on the affairs of their society, decide on
marriages, patch up quarrels, and strike bargains, and there
they formerly exercised political authority, pronounced
and carried out capital sentences, and it was they who
originated the Holy Vehm,^ and this meeting-place of the
Sabhd^ the property of the ruling member of the bauerschq/t^
is essentially different from the Gemeindc Haas of the
^ Tacitus, De Germanidt 1 6. * Cesar, De Bello Gallico^ ii. 17.
' Gesar, ibid. iv. i.; vi. 2i. Tacitus, De Germanid, 25-26.
* Rigveda, i. 91. 20. Zimmer, Altindesches Lebetty p. 172.
• Baring-Gould, Germany Past and Present ^ Kegan Paul and Co. (1879),
vol. i. chap. iv. p. 107.;
104 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Southern Swabians, the village hall of the Indian Dravidians,
which is found in every Dravidian village in India, and in
those of Burmah, Siam, and Aifnam, either as a common
dancing or meeting-place, or as a building similar to that of
the German village, owned by the community as a place for
public meetings, and for the entertainment of strangers.
The bauerscha/i of the Low German Aryans is the bratsvo
or community of brothers, described by Schrader as existing
among the Southern Slaves. Each hratsvo owns a common
landed estate, in which each family holds a definite and com-
pact portion. The number of men in a bratsvo capable of
bearing arms vary from thirty to eiglit hundred, and occupy
one or more villages. They fight side by side in battle, and
their leader is chosen by the bratsvenici. He is their leader
in war, their political representative in peace, to some
extent the tribal judge, and the leader of public assemblies ;
and in the latter only leaders of households have a right to
sit and vote, and the rest have only the right of acclama-
tion.* The origin whence these brotherhoods sprang must
be sought for in the Celtic Sept, in which each tribesman
and his family have a right to a definite portion of land
within the territory belonging to the Sept. Tlie villages of
those bratsvo communities find their precise counterparts in
those known in the North-west Provinces in India as patti-
dari villages held by Rajput clans, where tlie land is
divided among the householders who are related by blood,
and where each household hiis its own fixed holding. The
chief foes of the Aryans, when they came to India, were the
Asliura or Ashadha, the dominant trading-races who ruled
the land, and hence we are told in the Malulbharata that
the great allies of tlie early Brahmins were the Nishadhas,
or the nice who did not (mi) belong to the Asha^has; and
it was with tliem they intermarried.- The Aryan new-
* Jevons* Schradcr's rrehistoric Antiquiiies of the Aryans^ Part iv. chap,
xii ; sect. iii. p. 397.
' Mahabharatn Adi {Asfika) Parva, xxvii.-xxix. pp. 94-97.
ESSAY II 105
coiners were mucli more like the Kolarians than the silent
and reserved Dravidians; for, like the former, they were
brave and adventurous, and also witty, vivacious, and fond
of talking. But they were much more thoughtful and
thoroughgoing than the Indian Eols, and were a warlike
race, loving personal glory, whose cities were the forts built
for the defence of the property of the bauerschqfi — the peel
towers of the English Border — ^to wliich they retreated when
worsted in the field by invaders. They were very inferior to
the Dravidians in their elaboration of details, and less soli-
citous for the preservation of law and order, of strict
obedience to the rules laid down by the governing authori-
ties, and much less careful in their organisation. But they
much excelled both Kolarians and Dravidians in their
breadth of view. Their leading characteristics were fervid
eloquence, richness of imagination, fertility of resource,
earnestness in the pursuit of the object they wished to
obtain, coupled with a tendency to be not too scrupulous
as to the means used to gain their ends. Their love of
knowledge for its own sake was shown in the extension of
their inquiries far beyond the limits of the visible world and
the requirements of everyday life. They were proud of
their families and kinsfolk, and determined to preserve them
from contamination with those they looked on as inferior
races, and hence they introduced into some countries, but
not into India, the custom of marrying their own sisters,
which was the rule among the Persian and Egyptian kings,
after the control of the government of these countries had
passed into Aryan hands. They were also filled with a
vivid sense of their own superiority and right to rule. In
the higher Aryan minds the force of their imagination was
tempered by a ripe judgment, their eageniess for success by
a strong tenacity of purpose, and their audacity of specula-
tion by religious reverence and moral earnestness. To them
the ruler of heaven Avas the sun which warmed the earth in
their cold northern home, and he was the Dyaus-pitar, the
106 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
father of the bright sky of the Rigveda, the Zeus of the
Greeks, aiid the Jupiter of the Romans, who was also wor-
shipped as Savitar by the Hindus, and as Savul or Sawul by
the Babylonians ; ^ and both these names contain the same
radical syllable saVy formed from the root «/, to beget,
common to both the Akkadian and Indian Dravido-Tur-
anian languages. He took the place of the moon-god
Kronos of the Greeks, armed with the lunar sickle, and of the
Ouranos of the Greeks, the dark Varuna, the heaven of rain
(par) and night of the Hindus ; and his worshippers looked
on the doctrine of the matriarchal tribes, that the earth was
by its own inherent vital force the mother of all things, as a
deadly and debasing heresy.
Though the Aryans were a fighting race, they were also,
when at peace, chiefly a pastoral people ; and it was as a
race of cattle herdsmen that they apparently entered India,
which they found to be a country answering to the ideal Aryan-
land, described in the Institutes of Vishnu as that ' contain-
ing open plains fit for cattle and abounding in grain, and
inhabited by many Vaisyas and Sudras,"*- that is to say, by
agriculturists, and artisans living in villages, and labourers.
These they despised, as they did all who lived by trade and
manual labour ; but were quite ready to profit by them as
obedient subjects and useful servants. Their special aversion
were the trading races, whom they called Panis, and who
are shown to be non-Aryan in speech, by the epithet they
applied to their language, and to that of the great ruling
and city-building race of the Purus, for they called them
Mridhraviic, that is, the people who speak softly,* and this
phra.se describes the impression which was made by the open
sounds of the Tamil or Dravidian dialects on Aryan ears
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, I^ct. i. p. 55.
2 Jolly Institutes of Vishnu y iii. 4, 5 ; S.B.E. vol. vii. p. 14.
' This is Yaska's interpretation of the epithet which is applied to the
speech of the Panis in Rigvcda vii. 6, 3, to that of the Purus in Rigveda,
vii. 18, 13 ; and also to the speech of the native races generally in Rigveda,
i. 174,2; V. 32, 8, X. 23, 5.
ESSAY II 107
accustomed to the hard gutturals, aspirates, and double
letters of their mother-tongue. In the same hymn in which
the Panis are said to be Mridhravac, they are also described
lis men without belief, understanding or education, who give
no offerings, and are identified with the Nahushas or sons of
the Niiga, for tlie writer of the liymn praises Agni for
having, by reducing the Nahushas to be payers of tribute,
made the Aryan women mothers of the dawn {ushas\^ that
is, made them the mothers of the rulers of the Eastern land
of the dawn. These Nahushas were the race called Varsha-
^rus, the possessors of rain {varsha)^ whose priest was
Kutsa,^ the Vedic hero, father of the Purus,* rulers of Eastern
India, and brother of Indra, ^ and whose ritual was that of
the Angiras, or offerers of burnt-offerings.* They stigma-
tised these people as black (Arw/ma), and by this epithet,
and that of anaso or noseless, they marked them as a people
of non- Aryan race, and, therefore, as speakers of a non-Aryan
tongue, and denounced their gods, the Linga and Yoni, as
phallic gods (shishna-deva)J But they did not include
among the gods denounced by this epithet the spiritual god
worshipped by the Asuras, whose supreme god, the Naga or
fish-god, was the emblem of the being dwelling in his shrine
of clouds and mist, which hid from mortal view the great Naga
or soul of life, whose home was the firmament of the waters
of the heavens, made creative by his spirit. It is his wor-
shippers, however, who are rightly described by the epithet
of Asunvant, meaning those who do not press Soma, used to
designate the Panis,® for they who were water-drinkers had
given up the use of the intoxicating Soma made from honey
and the flowers of the Mahua tree by the Dravidian star-
• Rigveda, vii. 6, 3, and 5. - flu'tf. i. 100, 16, 17.
• Idiif, vii. 25, 5. * //n'd. vi. 20, lo ; i. 174, 2.
• Idtd, ii. 19, 6.
• /did, i. 107, 2, See Ludwig, Kigveda^ vol. ill. p. 113.
' Rigveda, x. 27, 19; x. 99, 3 ; vii. 21, 5. Zimmer, Aitittdisches Lehen,
p. 116.
• Rigveda, iv. 25, 7.
108 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
worshippers, and offered instead libations of milk, curds, and
whey, the products of the mother-cow, and pure running
water called dhara^ or the stream of living water, in the
Rigveda. This was the water sanctified by the god Darhi
or Dharti, the god of springs, worshipped as the supreme
god by all Dravidian tribes, and more especially by the
great race of the Cheroos, who are still a powerful tribe in
Behar and Palamow, and who, according to universal native
tradition, once ruled the whole of North-eastern India.
They are also one of the three great Tamil or Dravidian
tribes called Cheroos, Cholas and Pandyas, the Dri-dasya
of the M ahabharata, the sons of the star Agastya (Canopus)
and Lopa-mudra, the northern fox (lopasha\ the precursors
of the dawn,^ the two foxes {liari) who drew the car of
Indra in the Rigveda.* It is these Cheroos who still hold
their great annual festival in Aghan at the time of the
winter solstice, when the lunar year of the moon-worsliippers
began.* This stem and colourless worship, which formed the
ritual of the Puritans of the ancient world, the moon- wor-
shipping Pandyas, the successors of the earlier Cheroos, was
utterly distasteful to the Aryan invaders. These last are
called in the Rigveda Tritsu, that is, the * boring "* (trid)
people, the people who used the rotating fire-drill ; and they
are also called Arna, which means the sons of Arani, the
fire-drill. Apparently the earliest mention of them is in
Rigveda iv. 30, 18, where the Aryan Arna and Chitra-ratha,
that is, as I have shown before in this Essay in describing the
Pandavas, the race who looked on the moon and planets as
the measurers of time, are said to have been defeated on the
Sarayu or Sutlej by the Yadu-turvashu, who still rule that
part of the country as the Yaudheya Rajputs, and who were
the ruling races of the Naga or Nahusha kingdom. These
Tritsus, the allied Arna and Chitra-ratha, were fire-worship-
^ Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha-Yaira) Parva, xcvi-xcviii. pp. 307-314.
* Rigveda, i. 5, 4, 6, 2, and many other places.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 212.
ESSAY II 109
pers, for their king Su-das, the giver (das) of Su or living
energy, is said to be the son of, that is, in mythological
language, the successor of Divodusa, and Divodasa is, as I
show in Essay in., the fire-god who was conquered by Su-
shravas, the emanation or glory of the trading Sus.^ The
priest of the Tritsus was Vashishtha, the most creating (vasu)
fire, the fire called in the Rigveda Narasharnsa, the son
of the first sacrificial fire, Nabha-nedishtha,^ that which is
nearest to the navel {iiabha) ; and in the Zendavesta Nairyo
Sangha, who dwells in the navel of kings,^ the Vahram fire
of the Bundahish, which burns continually in the temples.*
Thus the coming of the Tptsus like the Greek return of the
Heraclidoe meant a return of the fire-worshippers, who had
originally in the dawn of civilisation spread themselves over
the earth as the Phlegyes or Bhrigus, the magicians, the
sons of the mother Maga, who had introduced the religion
of witchcraft, spells, omens, and incantations ; and had thus
laid the foundations of religious ritual in India, South-
western Asia, and Egypt. These people had also, as I show
in Essay in., brought with them the Agni Vaishvanara or
household fire. But when this religion had become a tissue
of baleful superstitions, which peopled space with malicious
spirits, and made every one suspicious that their neighbours
might bewitch them, the sons of Maga revolted against the
rule of the gods, who made their lives burdensome by never-
ceasing fears and terrors — found out that the god of heaven,
the rain-god, was mightier than the evil spirits, and enrolled
themselves as his worshippers. He was the lord of law and
order, who directed the succession of natural phenomena by
unchangeable and enduring laws, the mighty spirit who buried
the lawless fire-gods, the Cyclopes, beneath the earth, and
1 Rigveda, 1. 53, 9, 10.
« Ibid. X. 61 and 62; Haug's Ait. Brah. v. 2, 14; voU ii pp. 34
342.
' Danneshter, Zendavesta Sirozah, i. 9 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 8.
* West, Bundahish, xvii. I ; S.B.E. vol. v. p. 62.
no THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
protected his children against the malice of the wicked spirits.
The twin races, who, as I show in Essay in., inaugurated
this creed in India, were the Yadu-Turvashu, and it was
they who finally, as the Som-bunsi, or sons of the moon, led
by the god called Vishva-mitra, had changed the ancient
ritual of music and dances into the silent worship prescribed
in the Brahmanas as that of Praja-pati, the lord (pati) of
former (pro) generations (Ja) called the great Ka; ^ but this,
though performed with elaborate and significant rites, was,
to those who were not filled with spiritual enthusiasm, tedious
and lifeless. It was against the formalism of this spiritual
religion, and the tyranny of its priests and rulers, that the
national mind in India revolted ; and this revolt, led by the
Tritsus, was the war between the followers of Vishva-mitra
and Vashishtha, called in the Rigveda the war of the ten
kings. They had settled in the land watered by the Indian
Sarasvati and Drishadvati, which henceforth became the
sacred Aryan land ; but they were at first a people of little
political influence, and when the historical legends which
expanded into the Mahabharata were formed, they are
spoken of as the tribes of the Sarasvatas, who fought on the
side of the defeated Kauravyas, and formed part of the
division led by Uluka, the owl, the son of Shakuna, the kite,
the brother of Gandhuri, who laid the egg, whence the
Kauravyas were born. They were defeated by the Pandavas
under Sahadeva and Nakula, the twin sons of the Ashvins, or
heavenly twins.^ But though at first politically insignifi-
cant, their prowess as warriors, diplomatic ability, religious
earnestness, and their poetry and songs, soon made the
Tritsus a power in the land. The first traces of Jainism
had already, as I show in Essay in., begun to manifest them-
selves among the Su-varna traders of the West, and the
1 Eggeling, Sat, BrdA., i, 4, 4» 5 5 i- 4i 5» 12 ; S.B.E. vol. xir. pp. 125-
131.
2 Udyoga ( l^ana sandht) Parva, Ivi. p. 202 ; Shalya {Shalya-badka) Parva,
xxviii. pp. I06-I07.
ESSAY II 111
Indian people generally were interested in religious reform,
and were glad to welcome the Aryan priests, who, as the
Ud-gatris or reciters, made religious ceremonies, accompanied
by their songs and chanted hymns, more generally interest-
ing than the silent services of the Semitic moon- worshippers.
But their best aid in the entire conquest of the land, which
the Aryans ultimately effected, was their political and
trading ability. It was by this that they secured to them-
selves substantial power as advisers to Dravidian princes,
and family influence as trainers of the young. For among
a people who attached, as the Uravidians did, the greatest
importance to education, teachers so able as those whom
the Aryans could supply, were eagerly sought for ; and it
was these teachers who changed the national speech from
Dravidian and Turanian agglutinative languages to in-
flexional Aryan dialects. It was they also wlio changed the
system of trade-guilds and craft-schools formed under the
Kushite government for preser\'ing and adding to the know-
ledge necessary for the continuance and advancement of the
crafts of the country, into family circles, in which every one
remained through life a member of the caste in wliich he was
bom, instead of being, as people were in Kushite times, free
to enter any other caste to whicli their inclinations led
them, if they could, as in the ancient village, secure the con-
sent of the members of the guild to their admittance. Thus
this Aryan family system had its roots in the old customs
of the country, and under it the caste or perpetual league
of families, within which its members could marry, was
substituted for the old tribal confederacy described in Essay
III., to whose members the right of becoming the fathers of
the legally recognised children of the State was restricted ;
and in these caste inter- marriages the old law of exogamy
which forbade a man to be the father of the children of the
women in his own village, was reproduced in the laws of
caste exogamy, forbidding marriage between those who were
nearly related. But thi$ family organisation became, in the
112 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
hands of Aryan administrators, a means of increasing the
royal and priestly power, and of diverting the minds of the
people from disturbing questions of national polity to those
connected with internal social arrangements. Under this
system the priests and warriors were placed at the head of
the social scale ; and the chief adviser and real ruler of the
king was his Purohit, or family priest, who was the conse-
crated form of the old Aryan bard of the clan. It was this
national family priest or clan-bard who is idealised among
the Vedic bards as Vashishtha ; and it is in the poems of
the seventh Mandala of the Rigveda, the authorship of
which is ascribed to him and his family, that we find the
later Aryan recension of the original battle - song of
triumph, in which the Tritsu bard told of the victory of his
tril)e, the sun and fire-worshippers, over Vishva-mitra and
the Bharata, the sons of the moon and worshippers of the
great Naga or water-god. Tlie story of the war, which
ended in this complete victory of the lYitsus, is told in the
Rigveda in three hymns by the Vashishtha bards (Rigveda
vii. 18, 33, 1-6 and 83), and in one of the Vishva-mitra
hymns (Rigveda iii. 33) ; and from these poems, and espe-
cially from the list of the tribes forming the opposing
armies, it is possible to reproduce a picture of the politicid
state of ancient India at the time when the Aryans became
rulers of the land which had hitherto been called Bhai-ata-
varsha, or the land of the Dravidian Bharatas, the five races
descended from the five sons of Yayati, whose history I
have sketched in Essay iii. In the 83rd hymn of the seventh
Mandala, the tribes under the immediate rule of Sudas, the
Tritsu king, are called Pritha-Parshu ; and the Prithus are
the sons of the earth and sun-mother Prithu, who is, in the
Mahabharata, the mother of the Pandavas. They, as I
show in Essay iii., were the people called in the Rigveda
Parthava,^ who, as the Pandavas by their union with Dru-
padi, the daughter of Drupada, king of the Paiichalas, had
* Rigveda, vi. 27, 8.
ESSAY II 113
become the rulers of the country between the Jumna and
Granges, known as the land of the Pailchalas or Srinjayas,
the sons of the sickle (srini). As Drupadl was, as I show
in Essay iii., the altar of incense, these people were also, like
the Aryans, fire- worshippers, and, therefore, the natural allies
of the tribe called in this hymn the Parshu or Parshava or
Persians, the modem Parsis, whose symbol of God is the
ever-burning fire, never extinguished in their temples. It is
these allied tribes called the Pafichulas or the five- (pafich)
clawed (aid) Naga snakes, the worshippers of the year-god
who rules the year of five seasons, who, in the Mahabharata
version of this war, are described as attacking the king Sam-
varana, whose name means the collection {sam) of tribes
{varna\ and driving him and the Bharatas back to the
Indus.^ The northern frontier of the land, ruled before the
war by these united Prithu and Parshu called the Pailchalas,
was the plain country watered by the Saras vatl and
Drishadvatl ; and their neighbours on the North, who lived
on the banks of the Bias and Sutlej, were the Tugra or
Trigarta, who are now known as the Takkas ; and they, as I
show in Essay in., were the Gond tribe called Koi-kopal or cow-
keepers, who were great drinkers of spirits, and belonged to
the circle of the early fire-worshipping tribes. Tlie Bharatas,
the foes of the Pailchalas, were encamped to the north of
the Tugra country, on the Ravi or Parushni, and had there
collected a large army of their confederates with the inten-
tion, as appears from Vishvamitra'^s hymn, of marching
thence to attack the UYitsu in their own land, for he
prays the Vipash (Bias) and Shutudrl (Sutlej) to give an
easy passage to the Bharata forces. But the Tritsu
anticipated them in their policy, and allied themselves
with the Tugra, who are called by Vashishtha the
Shiva, a generic name of all the cattle - herding races,
whose father-god was Shiva, the son of Ushi-nara,
the hero {nara) of the dawn or East {ushi) called in the
^ Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, xciv. p. 280.
8
d
114 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Mahabharata, the king of the Bhojas, a name still applied
to the cattle-herding tribes collectively. The forces that
marched with Sudas through the Shiva country were made
up according to the list given in Vashishtha'^s battle-hymn
(Rigveda, vii. 18) (1) of the Tritsus, otherwise called the
Parsha or Parshava, (2) the Paktha(3) Alinas, (4) Bhalanas, (5)
Vishanin, and (6) Shiva. Of these the Paktha were, as Zimmer
shows, the people called by Herodotus Ila/CTUC?, whose capital
was Kaspapeiros or M ultan, the name having been changed
from that of Malli-tana or place of the Mallis, to Kushya-
pura, the city of Kashyapa, the father of the tortoise
races.^ They were the Parthava, named as the allies of the
Tritsu, in the phrase Prithu-Parshu. The Shiva were, as I
have shown, theTugra ; and the Vishanin must have been the
people of Muttra, the worshippers of Vishnu, the bull-god,
known to the authors of the Mahabharata, to Arrian and
M anu, as the Shura-sena, or army of heroes,'^ whose daughter
TapatI, the blazing flame, Samvarana, the defeated king of
the Bharatas, married after the war.^ Tlie Alinas and
Bhalanas I am unable to identify. Tlie Bharata forces
opposed to the Tritsu army of cattle-herdsmen comprised the
(1) Tui'vashu, or star- worshippers of the Tur or meridian pole,
under their leader Yakshu, which means the shooting star.
(2) The Matsya. the sons of the fish-god {Matsya)^ who was,
as I show in Essay in., the Supreme Deity, called Yah by the
Hindus, la by the Akkadians, Assor by the Assyrians,
Yahveh by the Jews, and Dagan, or the revered one, by the
Phoenicians. (3) The Bhrigu, or worshippers of the earthly
fire, the earliest priests of the fire-god. (4) The Druhyu,or sor-
cerers (druh), (5 and 6) The Vai-karna or two- (vi) horned
(karna) people, whose country, Vikarnika, is identified by
' Zimmer, Altindtschfs Lebtrty p. 434. Cunningham, Ancient Geography
of Indiay p. 232. Sachau*s Alberuni's India^ chap. xxix. vol. i. p. 298.
' Mahabharata Sabha {Raja suyarambha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47. Arrian
Indika, chap. xvii. BUhler's Manu^ ii. 19, vii. 193; S.13.E., vol. xxvw pp.
32, 247.
' Adi {^Sambhava) Parva, xciv, p. 28(X
ESSAY II 115
Hema Chandra with Kashmir, which has been known from
time immemorial cls the land of the snake-gods, tliat is, of
the two snakes, the guardian -snake of the village, the Greek
ex*?, the Sanskrit Ahiy and the rain-snake Naga. Their god
Karna is, as I show in Essay iii., the horned-moon, and they
were thus the moon-worshippers. Their leader Kavasha, the
wise (Kavi\ is named with the Turvashu Yakshu, as the two
generals of the Bharata army. (7) The Anu, or people
who worshipped the village gods {ana), (8) The Purus, the
rulers of the East, descended from Puru, who, though the
youngest of Yayati'^s sons, ruled, according to the Maha-
bharata, all his brethren and their descendants. (9) The
Ajas, or sons of the goat {qja\ and (10) the Chigru, whom I
am unable to identify. They were, in short, the collective
people of the five races who claimed to be descended from
the sons of Yayati, Yadu, Turvashu, Druhyu, Anu, and Puru,
the trading tribes or Panis, the worshippers of the moon
and stars, and of their creator whose symbol was the fish.
But this hymn, like all other ancient historical myths, was
constructed according to the rules of mythic history, and
as the story it tells was the substitution of a new for an old
ruling race, the old race is indicated by the number ten,
the number of the tribes of the Bharata army, or of the lunar
months of gestation, which were to produce the fathers of the
new confederacy of the six tribes which formed the Tritsu
army. These latter thus succeeded their predecessors as
their natural descendants, bom in the fulness of time, and
substituted for the lunar year of five seasons recognised by the
moon-worshippers, the solar year of twelve months, divided,
as it is by Hindu astronomers, into the six ritu or seasons
of two months each, which also appear in the six Zend seasons
of the Yasna, Visparads, and Afri Nagan, called (1) Maidyo-
Zaremaya, the milk-giver ; (2) Maidyo-shema, the pasture-
giver ; (3) Paitishahya, the corn-giver ; (4?) Ayathrima the
breeder or autumn season sacred to the Fathers ; (5) Maidhy-
airya, the cold season ; (6) Hamaspath Maedhaya, the special
116 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
time for ritual deeds ;^ and by this division as well as by the
six offerings made to the oldest class of fathers, called the
Pitarah Somavantalj,^ the eaters of rice, they marked them-
selves as successors in the evolution of time of the first tillers
of the soil who formed organised agricultural communities.
It was against the confederated forces of the kings of the
dying age that Sudas led his forces, and though Vashishtha^s
hymn, giving an account of the battle written in an Aryan
metre and in the Dravidian Sanskrit tongue formed after
the interfusion of the two races, cannot possibly be the
original battle-hymn of the Tritsu bard, it is so vivid in its
details as to make it almost certain that it is a mythic his-
tory, written when the didactic historical tale began to give
place to the personal narrative, and that the bard who wrote
the hymn which has come down to us had before him when
composing it the war-song made by the contemporary poet
who, like Taillefer, the herald-bard, who described the battle
of Hastings in the Roman de Rou, marched before and
with his countrymen as they attacked the enemy. It tells
clearly how Sudas, by Indra'^s help, crossed the rivers lying
between him and the Bhurata forces, and gives a most
graphic description of the surprise caused by their coming;
for it was only a people who were flurried and confused by
the unexpected appearance of the enemy who could have
acted as the Bharata are said to have done, and tried to cross
the river without finding whether it was then fordable or not.
But the Turvashu under Yakshu were too much angered by
the insolence of their foes to think of these precautions, and
plunged into the Parushni, ' thinking, fools as they were,
to cross it as easily as on dry land, but the Lord of the Earth
(Prithivi), the father-god of the Parthavas, ' seized them in
his might, and herds and herdsmen were destroyed/ They
could not, according to Sayana^s interpretation, bring their
^ Mill's Visparady i. 2; Yasna, i. 9; Afrt Nagdn, i. 7-12; S.B.E. vol.
xxxi. pp. 198, 335, 369-370.
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 6, 1,4; S.B.E. voh xii« p^ 421.
ESSAY II 117
horses and chariots into action owing to the violence of the
current, and those who gained the other side landed in con-
fusion, * like herds without a herdsmen.** ^ They were there-
fore easily and completely routed by Sudas, who did not
delay to follow up his success, but crossed the river and
stormed the strongholds of the enemy, took their seven cities
(the use of the number seven being a mythical method of
stating their utter defeat), divided the goods of the Anu
among the Tritsus, conquered the ruling Purus, the men of
soft Dravidian speech {mridhravac\ and made the Turvasus,
Ajas, and Chigrus pay tribute.^ The result of this battle,
in which, according to another hymn of Vashishtha'^s Man-
dala,^ the Tritsus drove the weak Bharata before them as
oxen, is told in the Mahabharata, and illustrates the poli-
tical genius of the Aryans, for after their victory they allied
themselves with Samvarana, the Puru king, who made Vashi-
shtha his spiritual guide, and married Tapati, the burning
flame, or the perpetual fire oh the altar, who is called in one
genealogy the daughter of the Shura-sena, and in another
of Vivasvat, the author of light, and, therefore, the sun-god.
It was then that they restored Agni the fire-god to the place
of the chief-god, which he occupies in the Rigveda, changed
the rain -god ©f the old regime, called Shukra, or the wet-
god {8uk\ or the god of the rainy season, into Indra, the
rain-god of the Indu, meaning the drop or ultimate atom of
life-giving water, impregnated by tlie creating spirit, and
made the national worship, not a series of silent and pomp-
ous sacrifices, but one accompanied by loudly-chanted
hymns of praise and invocation. It was the class who
superintended the ritual, instruction, and policy of the king-
dom, who were placed at the head of the caste-system, but
the formation of the Brahmin caste, and their social ordi-
nances show that, in forming it, the Aryan administrators
had taken care to include in it the descendants of all previ-
1 Rigveda, vu. i8, 6-io. 2 /3,v/. vii. 18, 13-19.
5 Ibid, vii. 33, 1-6.
118 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ous national priesthoods, and, in like manner, all ruling-
warrior tribes were included among the Kshatriyas; and it was
this astute reverence for national tradition and usage which
made them preserve in the ritual the distinct evidence of the
religious supremacy of the trading-races, shown in the rule
which required that the house-pole in the Sadas, or house of
the gods and priests in the sacrificial ground should be made
of Udumbara wood (Fiat^ glomeratd)^ and that the throne
of Soma,2 and the staff given after his baptismal consecration
to the sacrificer, should be made of the same wood.^ For the
Udumbara-tree is, as I show in Essay ni., the sacred father-
tree of the trading race of Shus or Saus, of which the staff'
of the Vaishya student must be made.* They also formed,
both the Sanskrit language by the intermixture of the Dra-
vidian cerebral letters, and the Prakrit and Pali colloquial
dialects, which show by the use of more numerous words of
Turano-Grondian, Dravidian, and Kolarian origin, a much
closer affinity with these tongues than appears in the Vedic
Sanskrit.
But the changes introduced by Aryan influence did not
stop with the manipulation of castes, and the national ritual
and religious belief, but it also extended to all questions con-
nected with property and the distribution of land. As to
the first, it was under their guidance that the native codes,
such as the Mitakshara and Dhyabhaga were framed, which
recognise the family and individual as the distributors and
originators of property, while their influence on landed pro-
perty is shown in their treatment of the Dravidian or Naga
village.
In an Aryan village formed on the model of the batter-*
schqft or bratsvOy there were, besides the hereditary head-
man, no public officers forming part of the community, or no
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iii. 6. I. 2. ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi, p. 141.
^ Ibid, iii. 3. iv. 28., ibid, p. 84. ' Ibid, iii. 2. I. 33., ibid. p. 34.
■* Buhler, Apastamba^ i. i. ii. 38; Manu, ii, 45. ; S.B.E. vol. ii. p. 9 ;
XXV. p. 38.
ESSAY II 119
village servants, as all the duties of the former were dis-
charged by persons chosen from among the brotherhood,
while those which were thought to be menial were done
either by each family for themselves, or by the help of hired
or slave servants, and hence the Sudras of the Aryan caste-
system, to whom these duties were assigned, were regarded as
a people of altogether inferior origin.
When these Aryans took land in a settled Dravidian
village, they were ready to become village headmen, as this
office corresponded with the headship of their own sabhd^
and only bound them to act, like the Kolarian munda^ as
chief ruler and arbitrator in disputes. As they looked on
literary work of all kinds as honourable, they were also ready
to become accountants and collectors of the revenue. Con-
sequently in a village ruled by Aryans, the patel^ or headman,
to whom the royal land was assigned as his appanage, and
the accountant remained the chief village officers, while the
village lands were divided into defined allotments, each of
which was assigned as the property of a cultivating family.
The village priest, if he was retained at all, which was very
seldom, was given a very subordinate position among the
meaner officials. But while the power of the village officers
was diminished, that of the high-caste householders owning
village-lands was increased, as they formed, with the headman,
the village council. But these householders, instead of giving
personal service, or assisting in the cultivation of the royal
land, paid their share of such contributions as the village
was required to give for the public service. A most inter-
esting description of the village communities in the Bombay
Dekhan, by Col. Sykes, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society J shows how the Dravidian and Aryan systems worked
side by side. ^
The leading cultivators in these villages all claimed to
be Aryan Marathas, but the only hereditary offices they
held were those of patel^ or headman, and kul-karni or
^ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ^ vol. ii. p. 208.
120 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIDIES
accountant. Only the headman held land in virtue of his
office, and he had also the right of giving clearance-leases of
waste land, while he and the chief tenants, who were mem-
bers of the village corporation, had the right of disposing of
abandoned lands. The accountant, who was generally a
Brahmin, was sometimes paid in land, but more often in
money and contributions of grain. The office was hereditary
in certain families, each family taking it in turn for one year,
and not by lot or election as among the Dravidians. The
land was divided into allotments called thaU or jathas^
each being assigned to a separate family, and called by its
name. This name remained attached to the land though
the family had left the village, and the land had passed into
other hands.
But besides these Aryan tenure-holders, there were also in
each Dekhan village families of aboriginal descent known as
Mahrs, the original Mais or Mallis, who gave the country
its earliest Aryan name of M alla-rashtra, the kingdom of the
Mais, which afterwards became Maratha. They held lands
on tenures precisely similar to those of the Ooraon bhtm-
hiars^ or families holding village offices. Their former power
had, with the adoption of Aryan rule, passed into other
hands, but they still held their hereditary land at a low
quit-rent ; but in addition they also paid for it, as their
fathers had done, by the same personal services to the com-
munity, which the Aryans thought degrading, but which
they looked on as honourable. They worked gratuitously
for the head officer of the district, supplied wood for fires,
grass for horses, and baggage animals to government officers
and travellers visiting the village, acted as guides, and carried
baggage as porters, as well as government and public mes-
sages. They still remained, as heretofore, guardians of the
village boundaries, and referees in boundary disputes, and
acted as assistants to the headman, bringing the villagers
together to pay their revenue, and carrying it when paid to
the collector of the district
ESSAY II 121
We also find in the Central Provinces a transition stage
in the village community between that described in Chota
Nagpore and the mixed Aryan and Dravidiaii village in
Bombay. There, as elsewhere, the parha or tribal territory,
known locally as the taluka (a name used also in the North-
west Provinces), is the unit of territorial division. In the
wilder and more remote parts the village organisation is
very weak, but in such districts as those in the Nerbudda
valley, where the divisions into townships has existed from
time immemorial, the villages show their antiquity and
permanence by the comparative completeness of their
system of government. In Hoshangabad^ the greater
number of the headmen are Brahmins or Rajputs, and the
accountant {patwari) is generally a Brahmin, but the older
races are not so universally dominated by the Aryans as in
tlie Bombay Dekhan. There is a general feeling that
Hinduism under Brahmin supremacy is a mark of respec-
tability, but the family is not so prominent as in the
villages where the Aryans are absolute masters; and the
village priest, who takes the lead in the ceremonies of the
public worship of Mu-Chundri, the mother-moon, and of
Deo-than, the village earth-god, is so important an officer,
that the accountant, when he was not a Brahmin, some-
times consented to combine the two offices in his own
person. In that case the priest became, like the Ooraon
pahan^ one of the chief powers in the village.
In Hoshangabad, the Kurkoos, a Kolarian tribe included
in the Song of Lingal among the four tribes representing
the predecessors of the sons of Magha, the alligator and the
tortoise, are usually the village watchman and assistants to
tlie headman ; and it may be said that generally throughout
India the village watchmen belong always to one of the
1 Elliot's Settlement Report, pp. 64 and 127-134. This is the best and
most instructive Settlement Report I have ever read, and I have read a great
many. I would advise all students of the Indian village system to examine it
thoroughly. The writer is now Sir C. Elliot, Lieut. -Governor of Bengal.
/
122 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tribes who call themselves aboriginal, or to one of the low-
castes calling themselves Hindus, but following the customs
of their aboriginal forefathers.
In the North-west Provinces, where Aryan influence has
long been more powerful than elsewhere, the special rights
and privileges once enjoyed by Dravidian cultivators seem
to a great extent to have disappeared. But the Dravidian
organisation still survives in the Talukdari estates, which
represent the ancient provinces, and in the villages in which
the cultivators are governed by single proprietors, who
represent the munduy changed into the Kushite- Aryan
patel^ or by joint-proprietors, who take the place of the
ruling Aryans in the Dekhan village. But everywhere
throughout India we find that the village organisation can
be traced back to those founded by the matriarchal tribes,
who formed the oldest class of ancestral fathers — the fathers
who eat rice — and I have shown how this original village
system passed from India to Europe, how it was altered by
the yellow race, the Pitaro Barsihadah, or the founders of the
Kushite State, who were the growers of barley, and how
further changes were made by the later Aryan invaders —
the fathers who burned their dead. It was thev who headed
the national revolt against the abstract beliefs of the
Semitic traders, who, as sons of the moon, had succeeded
to the Kushite empire ; who adapted the Sanskrit language
to the use of Dravidian races, and founded the great
Sanskrit literature and the schools of religion and philosophy,
represented by the Bhagavat Gita, or the Divine Lay of
Krishna, and the systems of the metaphysical inquirers.
It was the contradictions and inextricable entanglement of
the conclusions of these opposing philosophies which made
Sidharta Gautama, the Buddha, discard their teaching as
useless, and substitute for the Brahminical sacrifices and
metaphysical Will-of-the- Wisps the doctrine of self-culture
by the eightfold noble path, which ended not, like Semitic
Jainism, merely in the killing of evil habits and evil
ESSAY II 123
thoughts, but in the growth from a nature prone to sin to
one of sinless purity.
But before closing this Essay, I must describe the method
of reckoning time and fixing the dat^s of the national
festivals used by the earliest matriarchal races, wliich is
much older than that which appears in the story of Nala
and Damayanti, and in the year of five seasons on which the
plot of the Mahabharata is founded. This method, which
uses the Pleiades as measurers of time and the customs born
from it, indubitably proves that the people who brought to
Europe the Indian system of village communities, originally
came eitlier from the southern hemisphere or from countries
near the Equator. The constellation has always been asso-
ciated with agriculture, and Hesiod tells us that corn is to
be cut in May, when the Pleiades rise after disappearing for
forty days,^ and that land is to be ploughed in November,
the Southern spring month. The Dyaks of Borneo regulate
their agriculture by the movements of the Pleiades, cutting
the jungle when they are low in the east before sunrise,
burning what they have cut when the constellation ap-
proaches the zenith, planting when it sinks towards tlie
west, and reaping their crops when it sets in the early even-
ing.2 Over the whole southern hemisphere time has appar-
ently for countless ages been measured by a year of two
seasons, in which the beginning and end of each season is
indicated by the presence or absence of the Pleiades above
the horizon at sunset. AVhen the sun is west of the Pleiades
during the Southern spring and sunmier, from November till
April, the constellation is at sunset above the horizon, and
when it is east of tlie Pleiades during the Southern autumn
and winter, from April to November, tlie Pleiades set before
the sun, and are therefore invisible at sunset. Ellis, in his
* Hesiod, Works and Days, v. 385.
' Blake, Astroftomical Myths , Macmillan, 4to, 1887. Chap. v. *The
Pleiades,' p. 126. This chapter is said by the author to be based on a very
scarce pamphlet, called Neiu Materials for the History of Man ^ by K. G.
Haliburton, F.S.A., which can be seen at the British Museum.
124 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Polynesian Researches^ tells us that the Society and Tonga
islanders call the spring and summer season, beginning the
year in November, Matarii i nia^ meaning the time when the
Pleiades, called the mother stars {mata\ are seen at sunset,
and the autumn and winter, from April to November, when
they are not seen, Matarii i raro. All nations in Polynesia
begin their year in November with a festival to the dead,
and at this season the Tonga islanders, Ceylonese, and
Dyaks of Borneo,^ hold their feast of first-fruits, called
Inachi in Fiji, and Nycapian in Borneo, and this festival
corresponds with that of the first-fruits of winter rice, called
Janthar-puja, kept in November by the Bengal Santals,
who call one of their septs by the name of the Pleiades,
Saren.* The Western Hindus, who trace their descent from
the mother Amba, the chief star of the Pleiades, begin their
year with the month Khartik, sacred to the Pleiades, in
October-November, and hold their great star festival, called
Dibali or DipavalT, the feast of lamps {dipa\ meaning that
of the bright fire-gods {vaU\ in the same month, by illumin-
ating the streets and houses, and this is reproduced in the
feast of lanthorns in Japan.^ The fire-worshipping Sogh-
dians and Chorasmians of Central Asia began their list of
twenty-eight lunar stations, indicating the position of the
moon during each day of the lunar month, with the Pleiades,
called by them Par we, or the begetters (peru)^ and thus
showed that the beginning of their year, regulated by these
months, must once have been reckoned from the position of
the Pleiades.* In America the Mexicans, who, as I have
shown in Essay i., were led to the new continents by the
^ Blake, Astronotnical Myths ^ pp. 1 1 5, 1 19, 12 1, 126.
- Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. ii. 'Santals,' p. 233; Appendix
i. p. 126.
^ Sachau*s Alberunl's Ifidta^ vol. ii. chap. Ixxvi. p. 182 ; Blake's Astro-
nomical Myths, chap. V. *The Pleiades,' p. 126 ; Monier-Williams, Religious
Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. * Hindu Fasts, Festivals, and Holy
Days,' pp. 432, 433.
* Sachau's Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. xL p. 227.
ESSAY II 125
Indian Hsh-god, and who brought with them to their new
home the Indian and Kushite sacred symbol of the rain-
cross, began their cycle of fifty- two years with the culmina*
tion of the Pleiades at midnight in November. Then the
new sacred fire, lit to replace that put out in all houses and
temples, was kindled with the fire-sticks laid on the breast
of the human victim, the most noble of their captives, who
was sacrificed to vitalise with his blood the earth whence
the sons of the new era were to be born.^
Some of the most significant of the rites marking the
beginning of the year of the Pleiades in November arc fur-
nished by the festivals of that month in the Egyptian
ritual. The Egyptians worshipped the Pleiades under the
name of Athur-ai, the stars of the goddess Athyr, which
was one of the names of the mother-goddess Hat-hor, and
also that of the third month of their vear. Hat-hor means
the house or mother (hat) of tlie supreme god (hor) Horus,
who was the meridian pole of Egyptian cosmogony, also
called Amon-ra, and her name thus shows that she was from
the first a time goddess. That she was originally a goddess
of the South is shown by her being the mother-goddess of the
sacred tree of the South, the sycamore or fig-mulberry, called
Neha; and this tree was the Egyptian counterpart of the
Hindu fig-tree, the mother-tree of the Kushite race. Her
Hindu origin is also shown first by her festival of the 5th
Pharmuthi, aXrout the 19th February, a date wliich nearly
corresponds with the great Magh festival of the Santals,
Ooraons, and Mundas, to the fire and witch mother-goddess
Magha, when the Santal year ends. She was then wor-
shipped in Egypt as the goddess Bast, distinguished by
bearing on her head a lunar crescent, with the snake creep-
ing under it.^ And a second proof of her Hindu origin is
given by her being the fish-goddess, to whom the Aten, or
^ Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico^ Sixth Edition, vol. i.
chap. iv. p. io6.
2 H. Bnigsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten yEgypter, pp. 304, 331.
126 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
carp, allied to the Hindu Rohu of the same genus, is sacred,
and also by Ijer being in one of her forms Hat-mehit, tlie
wife of Osiris, the goat-god of Mendes, who bore the fish-
sign on her head.^ The Santal name for the Pleiades, Sar-en,
is also connected with the fish-goddess, for the mother-god-
dess of the Savars, the Sus, the Su-varna or trading races of
the West, is, as I have shown in Essay in., a fish-goddess,
called Sal-rishi, a name which I have traced to the mother
cloud-goddess Sar, and the father antelope (rishya). The
cloud-goddess Sar was, as I have shown, the Vedic Saranyu,
the mother of the twins, day and night, who still retains
her place in Indian mythology as the god Hari, whose first
avatar was a fish. She was the fish-mother, also called
Amba, the mother, the first star in the Pleiades, who led
her sons, the farmers and mariners of Southern India, to
Persia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, in all of
which countries she was worshipped as the fish-mother.
' A four days'* festival was held in Egypt on the 17th
Athyr (September- October), the month sacred to the
Pleiades, about the 4th of October, to celebrate the mourn-
ing of Isis, the name given to Hat-hor, as the cow and
mountain- mother (w), for the death of Osiris, but that the
mourning was prospective, and indicated grief for the closing
year, which is to be replaced by its successor, the new year,
is shown by the date of the festival of the death of Osiris.
This took place on the 26th Choiak, about the 12th
November, four days after the hoeing festival, held on the
22d Choiak, and four days before that of Nahib-ka, the
primaeval snake-god of the tree-worshippers, which was kept
on the 1st Tybi.2 The festival of the 26th Choiak wa*, like
the Hindu Dibali, at the same season, the occasion of a
general illumination,^ and then Osiris was placed in a ship,
1 Encyclopedia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, *Athor,' vol. ii. pp. 13, 14.
H. Bnigsch, Religion mid Mythologie der Alien yEgypter, p. 310.
2 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien ^gypter^ pp. 303, 346.
' Ibid. p. 617.
ESSAY II 127
and launched out to sea. Hence tiie story tells us that
Osiris, the strong (osr) sun-god, the Assyrian Asar, wor-
shipped both in the Euphratean Delta and Egypt as the god
symbolised by the eye, showing him to be the all-seeing eye
of heaven, was another form of the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the
son (dumu) of life (zi), the young sun-god, who, in the
original Deluge story, set forth in his bark at the summer
solstice, when the Indian rains and the later Egyptian year
began, to pursue his course through the seas of time, till the
close of his yearly journey. In the 26th Choiak, the day of
the month chosen for the festival of Osiris, said by Egyp-
tian mythologists to represent ' water,**^ we see proof that
the choice of the day was influenced by the science of
sacred numbers, which, as I have shown above in speak-
ing of the story of Nala and DamayantT, plays such an
important part in ancient mythology. For the number
twenty-six is sacred to a lunar year of thirteen months,
measured by twenty-six lunar phases ; and this proves that
Osiris was a sun-god, ruling the lunar year, his ship being
the crescent moon, and he himself being, like Dumu-zi, the
star Orion, the Akkadian Uru-anna, meaning the foundation
(uru) of heaven, the hunter who, as I show in Essay iv.,
drove before him through its yearly course the crescent
moon, the Indian fox, the chariot horse of India, who after-
wards became the lunar hare, and which was symbolised in
the constellation Lepus. This conclusion is confirmed by
a hymn supposed to be addressed by Isis to Osiris, in which
she says to him —
' Place thy soul in the bark Ma-at '
(the kosmic law of unchanging order),
' In that name which is thine, O moon-god,
Thou who comest to 'us as a child each month/ ^
It is in the myth telling of the death and burial of Osiris
that we can trace exactly how the life-giving sap, which
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mytkologie der Alten ^gypter^ p. 293.
- Records of the Past^ i. p. 121 ff.
128 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
made all plants, and the animals who fed on them, to grow,
became the parent god, the eye of all living things, the god
Piru, or parent god, who, in the Finnish theology, gave eyes
to the snake. He, the god of the discerning eye, who
traversed the world with the ever-recurring phases of the
moon, and thus made grain, fruits, and flowers to spring up
under his footsteps in the lands suited to their growth. In
this story Osiris is the gcid of the corn-growing races, who,
after having diffused through the world plenteous crops of
wheat and barley, grown on fertile arable land, returns at the
end of his year'*s course as the sun, who has done his journey.
When he returned to die as the sun of the old year he was
slain by Set, his brother, whose name means, as I have
shown, * the vanquished "* god, and who was really the black
water-snake Ap-ap-i, and seventy-two ^ others, representing
the form of theology in which the triad of three seasons
ruled by the black water-snake, the constellation Hydra,
which I have described in Essay iv., the seven days of the
week, and the ten lunar months of gestation, were the ruling
gods. They placed his body in a coffin, the ship which had
been his cradle as the infant year, and threw it into the Nile.
Isis searched all over the world for her lost lord, and found
his body on the Syrian coast at Byblus, and on looking for
the coffin, found it enclosed in a pillar formed from an
Erica-tree which had grown round it, been cut down and
used for one of the pillars of the palace of the king of
Byblus. This was the house-pillar, the father pole of the
Northern races, which I have described in Essay m., and it is
this Erica- tree which was the parent tree of the Syrian
races, the original barley-growers. She took the body and
the coffin, the cradle of the new god of the North, who was
to supersede the god of the South, when time-measurements
were based on the movements of the Pleiades and Orion, back
* The seventy-two assistants of Set refer, as I show in Essay iv., to the
Babylonian heavenly circle of 360 degrees, and to the year of five seasons ;
for 72 is the fifth part of 360.
ESSAY II 129
to Egypt. On her arrival she left the body and went to visit
Hor-us, the new god of the Northern house-pole, whose four
sons guarded the four qifarters of the heavens, the meridian
pole of the Kushite race, whose revolutions were to be used
as measurements of time, in place of the rising and setting
of the stars. The year thus introduced was that of four and
five seasons, which I have described in Essay iv. While
Isis was with Hor-us, Set found the body of Osiris, and cut
it up into fourteen pieces, scattering them abroad,^ and
these represent the fourteen days of the lunar phases by
which time was now to be measured, the Hindu constella-
tion of the Shishu mara, meaning the Alligator, the fourteen
stars round the pole, which were turned by tlie twin stars
Gemini, and among these was the star Marlchi, the fire-
spark, the parent star of the Kushite race. These deduc-
tions, which make the year opened by the Pleiades the first
form of the year ruled by Osiris as Orion, are confirmed by
the festival held in the month Athyr, sacred to them, to
celebrate the mourning of Isis, and in the day chosen for
the festival, the 17th of the month, we find the sacred
numbers, seven and ten, representing the seven days of the
week and the ten months of gestation. That this number
was deliberately chosen, is proved by its being repeated in
the Hebrew story of the Deluge. In this Noah, the year-
god, the son of the fish-mother, embarks on his birth-voyage,
or period of conception, on the 17th day of the second
month, the Hebrew Marchesvan, answering about to the
2d of November, and we thus see that his voyage, like that
of Osiris, began in the same month which begins the year
of the Pleiades. The year-goddess, who was bom in this
voyage, was the mother mountain Ida, the cow, and moun-
tain-mother of the ploughing race, the Hindu and Phry-
gian counterpart of the Egyptian Isis, who emerged from
the waters, according to Genesis, on tlie first day of the
tenth month, and, according to the Hindu story of Manu, at
* Frazer's Goldat Bought vol. i. chap, iii, pp. 302, 303.
9
d
180 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the end of the birth-year. It is she who survives in Bengal
as the goddess Durga, the mountain, under the name of
Kali, meaning the time-goddess, and her connection with
the Pleiades year is shown by the celebration of her festival,
the Kali-Puja, on the darkest night of the dark half of
Khartik, the Pleiades month. Her altars are then drenched
with the blood of goats, sheep, and buffaloes, the last being
the plough animals of the Southern races, and their sacrifices
show that her worship dates from the age of totemistic
feasts.^
But we have now to turn to another aspect of the Pleiades
ritual, shown by the festival to the dead, celebrated, when
the year began, in November. This festival to the dead year,
and to the dead who died in past years, is celebrated in the
Society and Tonga Islands by prayers offered at the November
New Year^'s Festival, for the souls of departed relatives, and
its most ancient form appears in the corroboree dances of the
Australian savages. At tlie November midnigiit culmina-
tion of the Pleiades, called by them Mormodellic, when, as we
have seen, the Mexican cycle began, they worship the dead
for three days. The Peruvians also began their year in
November, and called thfe New Year's feast Ayu-Marca,
meaning the carrying (marca) of the corpses {ayu\ and
they then visited the tombs of their ancestors. The Sabaean
fire-worshippers of South-western Asia held the festival,
called by Albiruni the Great Bakht, or day of fate, or the
first day of the month, called Murdadh by the Persians
(October-November), answering to the Hindu Khartik the
Pleiades month, and worship Venus, called Tar-sa, as the fish-
mother, on the 17th of the month, thus reproducing again in
this series the number seventeen. It is sacred to the Angel
of Death, and on it the Festival of the Dead was celebrated.^
^ Monier- Williams, Religious Life and Thought in Indian chap. xvi.
* Hindu Fasts, Festivals, and Holy Days,* p. 431.
^ Sachau's Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations^ chap, xviii., 'Festivals
of the Ancient Magians,' pp. 315-316 ; '^\2k^% Astronomical Myths^ chap. v.
* The Pleiades,* p. 121.
ESSAY II 131
But it is in the ritual of the Druids that we find the most
certain evidence of the advent to Europe of the Southei*n
races, who measured time by the Pleiades. The Druids, or
priests of the tree (drw), were the religious teachers of the
Cymric Celts, who, according to their traditions, were led to
Western Europe by the god Hu. His name, as I shall show in
Essay in., is the Northern form of the root sny to beget, or
conceive, which, again, is a Southern form of the Akkadian
Jehu, the bird, the mother-bird, whose history I give in Essay
HL, and who laid the world'*s egg, which also appeared in their
theology. It was from this root su that the Indian Soma
was formed, and it was in the Soma festival that the sacred
sap was worshipped as the water of life, which, when sent
from heaven as seasonable rain, became the essence of all
plant-life. It was thus the generator and sustainer of all
material existence depending on growth and increase. This
was the god Hu who led tiiem from India, and it was thence
that, together with his worship, they brought the belief in
matriarchal government, shown in the equality of the Druid
nuns with the male priests, and the birth-legend of the
worWs egg laid by the mother-bird, formed of snakes, from
which the hundred Nagas, or rain-snakes, the Kauravya, or
tortoise, sops of the goddess-mother Gan-dhari, were born.^
It was also from India tliat they brought their reverence
for groves and trees and the human sacrifices introduced by
the fire-worshippers. They celebrated the reconstruction
of the world on the 1st November. As a symbol of its
death and resurrection, the Druidess nuns, the priestesses of
the mother-earth goddess, were then obliged to pull down
and rebuild the roof of their temple, and if any one of them,
when bringing materials for the new roof, let her sacred
burden fall, she was set upon and toni in pieces by her com-
panions. All fires, as in Mexico, were then extinguished,
and had to be relighted by the sacred fire kindled by the
Druid priests. During the darkness of the nights after the
^ Encyclopadia Britannica, 9th Edition, vol. vii., * Druidism,' pp. 477-479.
132 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
fires had been put out, tlie dead of the past year were, as
among the Egyptians, thought to pass to the west, whence
they were carried in boats to the judgment-seat of the god
of the dead, before they passed to the Elysian fields, the
gardens called by the Greeks the Hesperides, the home of
the maidens who guarded the three golden apples — the three
seasons of the year. These were brought each year to earth
by the sun of the West and South, Hesperus, the god of
the winter season, in which the young sun -god of the coming
year is bom.
It is this Druid festival and the three days'* corroboree of the
Australian savages which still survive throughout Europe
in the three sacred days of the 31st of October and the
1st and 2nd of November, called All Hallow Eve, All
Saints'" Day, and All Souls'* day. It is on All Hallow Eve
that in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall torches and
bonfires are still lighted and games played, and the Guy
Fawks bonfires of England are only transfers of these New
Year'*s fires to the 5th of the month. It is on All Souls'
Day that the people of France, Belgium, South Germany,
and Russia visit the tombs of their ancestors, hang wreaths
and light candles over their graves.^
But the November festivals of the Pleiades were not the
only important feasts of this early cult, for we find that
those connected with the southern, western, and northern
spring in April and May, assumed, when the village com-
munities had finally settled in the northern hemisphere,
even more importance than the November feasts of the
South. It was then that the Gonds of Central India founded
the Northern spring festival of the Nagar, or plough-god,
answering to the hoeing festival, the spring feast of the
South, celebrated in the Egyptian Choiak (November). The
name of the plough -god has been translated by the Greeks
into Ge-ourgos, the worker of the earth, and the history of
his worship is fully given in Essays i. and iii. It was also in
* Blake, Astronomical Myths ^ chap. v. * The Pleiades,' pp. 124-125.
ESSAY II 133
April that the apparently eariier festival of the Palilia, out
of which that of the plough-god grew, was celebrated. These,
and the annual dances round the Maypole, are relics of the
ancient festivals which celebrated the coming of spring at the
disappearance of the Pleiades in April, and their rising again
in May ; and the Queen of the May is the ancient mother
Amba, the chief star of the Pleiades, who was, according to
Indian tradition, the promised bride of the King of Saubha,
the city of the magicians, and, therefore, the wonder-working
mother Maga, who, from the apparently lifeless egg of
the clouds and revolving moon, which bring the April
showers, has created the living life of summer, and who has
given her name to the month of May. Also, the Maypole
is the Tur, the sacred house and meridian pole, the god of
the Tur-vasu, whose god, the Tur, was the heavenly fire-drill,
which carried the stars round with him in his revolutions.
These people began their year in April with the disappear-
ance of the Pleiades below the horizon at sunset, the time
when the worWs egg, the Easter eggs, were laid, and when the
Northern moon-hare, the Easter-hare of Southern Europe,
started on her annual series of monthly races as the crescent-
moon, which, after becoming full, returns again to its original
form ; the home earth to which the Indian fox, who was, as I
have shown above, the original moon- hare, always comes
back when hunted.
ESSAY III
TIIK KAttliY HISTORY OF INDIA, SOUTH-WESTERN ASIA, EGYPT,
AND MOirrHKRN EUROPE, AS TAUGHT BY THAT OF THE
WOnHlin* OF THE HINDU SOMA, THE ZEND HAOMA, THE
AHHVIIIAN I8TAR, AND THE EGYPTIAN ISIS
No i(t iuioiit of the history of religion and national growth
III IiuliA and Iran can fail to notice the reverence paid to
\\w fiTinontiHl juice of a plant, called the god Soma in the
Higvrdii, and Haoma in the Zendavesta. In the Rigveda,
Siiiiui Ih the father and begetter of the gods ; ^ the Lord of
Ihougltt (manasa^-pati)^ and of speech {vacas-pcUi)? It is
to Hoina tliat all the hymns in one Mandala, the ninth of the
tuii M aijKJalas of the Rigveda, are addressed, and out of the
UWH liyiiniH in these ten Mandalas, 681 are hymns to the
\\\f\H^ chief gods of the Soma sctcrifice, 123 to Soma alone,
HA4 to Indra, and 204 to Agni and their associate gods, while
(ho remainder teem with allusions to and praises of Soma.
Ill tin* great Yasna, or annual sacrifice to the gods of Time,
ill (ht» Zendavesta, the last libations made before prayers
HIH* oHered to the gods are those to Haoma, and in the final
(irtiyt*n* tliose to Haoma follow the invocations to Ahura
^HKda. Haoma is the last of the victorious demi-gods
\vhiMe deeds are celebrated in the Hom Yast, and he is the
ItlHHit' god who destroyed the usurper Kereshani, the Krishanu
\tf \ hi* Rigveda, the footless archer who wished to keep Soma
* Rigveda, ix. 87, 2. 2 Ibid. ix. 99, 6.
' Ibid, ix. 26, 4 ; loi, 6.
■
ESSAY III 136
in heaven, and who said : * No priest who would rob every-
thing of progress shall walk the lands for me.** ^
When we remember that the Rigveda and Zendavesta are
not the religious books of an isolated sect, but the outcome
of the religious records of the successive races who ruled
India and Iran from the first dawn of civilisation, we shall
at once see the great historical value of the history of the
worship of their great god Soma. It is this which we shall
find in the pictures of the progress of religious thought given
in the hymns of the Rigveda, and the ritual and Yasts of
the Zendavesta. These begin with the first guesses at truth
of the founders of national life, and are followed up by the
additions by the various races who succeeded them as rulers
of the land and fosterers of its culture. Though the Aryan
speech of the Vedic and Zend writers was a late importation
into their respective countries, yet the thoughts they re-
corded in it were moulded in ideas bom in pre-Aryan times,
and the union of the two elements is shown by their frequent
use of words spelt with the cerebral linguals, ^, rf, th^ dh^
w, which are not found in any of the European Aryan lan-
guages, but are fundamental letters of the Tamil-Dravidian
dialects of Southern India and the Afghan Pushtu. -
The existence of these letters in Sanskrit proves that the
native language of Northern India, which preceded it, must
have belonged to the Dravidian type. But the interfusion
of these alien races is not marked only in the Indian San-
skrit, but also by the evolution of religious ritual and
thought ; for the Aryans, like all other ancient races, based
their state policy on the belief that no people who had not
the gods of the land on their side, could maintain a stable
government in any country. Therefore every conquering
^ Mill, Ydsrta, ix. 2, 4; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. pp. 237, 238; Rigveda, iv.
27, 8.
• Benfey, Complete Sanskrit Grammar ^ p. 20, thinks it certain * that while
the mute cerebrals have been firmly established in Sanskrit/ they were origin-
ally introduced from the phonetic system of the Indian aborigines.
136 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
race adopted the ritual of their predecessors as part of
their inheritance, and with it they took over the popular
history of national and religious growth, set forth in the his-
torical mjrths depicting its various stages. Thus it was that
the supreme gods of dead beliefs were included in the national
Pantheon, such as the Azi Dahaka of the Zendavesta, * the
fiendish Druj ' overthrown, and superseded by Thraetaona,
and the first two sacred fires of the Yasnas, called Berezi
Savangha and Vohu Fryano.^ The fire of Berezi Savangha,
or of the Eastern (savah) Berezi is the goddess - mother
Magha, of the race of Brisaya, meaning the sorceress,
who are, in the Rigveda, conquered by Agni-Soma, and the
river Sarasvati,^ the mother-river of the Agni worshippers.
The name of the second fire, Vohu Fryano, proves un-
mistakably that it was that of the phallic father-god of
the tribe Fryano, the intimate allies of the Mazdeans, called
in the Gathas * Turanians, who shall further on the settle-
ments of piety with zeal.**^ The Turanians do not use aspir-
ated cerebrals, and, therefore, the name Fryano must represent
a Turanian word, Viru-ano, or a race whose god is the Viru.
These must be the Iranian congeners of the Hindu Virata,
who rule the Mathura country on the Jumna in the Maha-
bharata. These are the same people as the Kurumbas, a
tribe of hunters and shepherds widely distributed over
Southern India. The god of these people is, as we learn
from the Mackenzie Manuscripts, Virubhadra, the blessed
Viru, or the phallic god, and the tribe generally worship the
Sakti, or male and female symbols of generation. They
call themselves Idaiya, or sons of IdfiC^ or Eda, the sheep, and
include a part of the great cultivating caste of the Kurmis,
^ Mill, Vasna, xvii. ; S.6.E. vol. xxxi. p. 258.
* Rigveda, i. 43, 4 ; vi. 61, 3. Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rigveda^ s.v.
* Brisaya.' The root briy from which Brisaya comes, means * to bring forth,'
and is the counterpart of the root mag^ * to make, to create,* from which
Maga is derived.
« Mill, Yasna Gdtha Ustavaiti Yasna^ xlvi. 12 ; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 141.
ESSAY III 137
or Kudumbis.^ They are the Viru-paksha, or tribe of Vim-
worshippers, named in a list of snake-worshipping races in
the ChuUa vagga.2 And they are the people who are de-
stroyed by Indra in the Rig^'eda, who worship the Shisna-
deva, or phallic god.^
Thus both the Kigveda and Zendavesta taught that men
reached truth through error, and by detecting the mistakes
made by successive inquirers into the mysteries of creation and
reproduction, and, therefore, in trying to identify the slowly
evolving links in the chain of reasoning which led those, who
first looked for the origin of life to the wonder-working
mother and the phallic father, to adopt the fermented sap
of a plant as the symbol of the creating spirit, we must
begin with the facts set forth in the ritual of the Soma sacri-
fice in India and Persia in Vedic times, and must in examin-
ing these, remember that the ritual is formed by the accre-
tion of successive forms showing various stages of growth.
The Soma or Haoma there worshipped comes from a moun-
tain plant, growing both in Afghanistan, where it was found
by Dr. Aitchison, and in Karman in Persia, where it was
shown by the Parsis to Mr. A. Houttum Schindler. They
both identified it as a Sarcostermna asclepias^ and named it
Periploca aphylla} The juice was extracted by the Zend
Parsis by pounding the stalks in a mortar, and both by
churning in a mortar {ulukhala)^ and pressing between
pressing-stones (adri, grdvan) by the Vedic Soma wor-
^ Prof. G. Oppert on the Original Inhabitants of Bhdrata Varsha,
Part II. pp. 237.239.
* Rhys Davids and 01denberg*s Vinaya Texts, * ChuUa vagga,' v. 6 ;
S.B.E. vol. XX. p. 76.
' Rigveda, vii. 21, 5 ; x. 99, 3. See also x. 27, 19.
* Eggeling, ^at, Brdh,^ Introduction ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 25.
^ Rigveda, 1. 28, 3, speaks of a woman making Soma in a mortar {ulOk-
hala)y and describes how the pestle is used, not as a pounder, but as a churning
staff, tamed, like the fire-drill, with ' rasmi ' or reins, that is, a string fixed
to the cross-bar at the top of the churning stick. Ilillebrandt, Vedische
Mythologity s.v. 'Ulukhala,' pp. 158-160.
138 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
shippers.^ The juice is greenish-white, and becomes in a few
days a yellowish-brown, sour liquid, like the Soma which the
gods took from the Vritra, or snake-races in the Brahmanas,
which they could not drink till Vayu, the wind-god, blew
through it.* But Soma could also be made from other
plants, for the Bombay Brahmins make it from a plant grow-
ing on the hills near Poona, which has a bitter sap, and
which they showed to Dr. Haug. In the Satapatha Brah-
mana other alternative plants are named* — (1) The red and
brown flowering Phalguna and the Adara. The second and
third of these I cannot identify, but the first is probably the
wild turmeric, Curcuma zedoaria^ called in Sanskrit Shola^
Sholika^ or VunariMa ; it l)ears tufts of red flowers, which
blossom in Phalguna (April). Turmeric was, as I shall
show in the sequel, sacred to the yellow race who were the
first founders of the Soma sacrifice. (2) The Shyena hrita, or
plant brought to earth from heaven with the Soma by the
Shyena bird. This, as we learn from the Brahmanas, was
the Palasha-tree {Buteajrondosa)^ which had in it the essence
of Brahma, the creating god.* This is the tree thought by
the Ho Kols to be sacred to the god Desauli, the guardian
of the village, to whom they offer Palas flowers at the great
national Saturnalia held in Magh (Jan.-Feb.), the month
sacred to the witch-mother Maga ;^ and the Gonds also, as I
shall show, use Palas branches to support the sacrificial hut
built by every cultivator for the autumn sacrifice to Mu-
Chandri, the moon-goddess. (3) Besides these, Dub, or
Kusha grass {Poa cyno»uroides\ the sacred grass of the
Eushika or tortoise race may be used, and also yellow
Kusha plants. The use of these different plants as the
source of the sacred Soma, prove it to be a symbol of
^ Rigveda, vii. 104, 17; x. 36,4; x. 100,8; v. 31, 5. llillebrandt's
Vedische Mythologie die Steinty p. 1 52.
' Eggeling, Sat, Btdh. iv. i, 3, 4-10; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 265-267.
3 Eggeling, iv. 5, 10, 2-4; S.B.E. pp. 421, 422.
* Eggeling, i. 7, i, i, 3, 3, 19; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 89, 90, 183, 184.
* Kisley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 327.
ESSAY III 139
the life-germ which makes plants grow, bud, blossom, fruit,
and reproduce successors by seed, and that it is through
partaking of this divine essence that life is continued to
those who are sanctified by incorporating it into their
frame.
In finding out the chronological order of the various
ideal symbols of the life-germ, which culminated in Soma
worship, I will first examine the history and etymology of
the name, and next the ritual of the Soma and Haoma
sacrifices, making use in the inquiries of the historical myths
and tribal customs which mark the various stages in the
evolution of Soma, Haoma, and Istar worship, all of which
we shall find to be ultimately identical.
Soma and Haoma are different forms of the same word,
derived from a root meaning to beget, which is su in Sanskrit,
and hu in Zend. When we analyse the meanings of the
word Soma and its history, we find that su is certainly the
older of these two forms. Soma, both in the Brahmanas
and Rigveda, means the moon nearly as often as the sap
of the Soma plant. The moon-god when wedded to the
daughter of the sun, in the Rig\'eda, is called Soma, and in
the hymn telling of the marriage. Soma is said to stand in
heaven as the central point of the Nakshatras, or circle of
stars, used by Hindu astronomers to calculate the period of
the five years'* cycle by which they regulate the difference
between solar and lunar time.^ In other hymns Soma, the
moon, is said to clothe himself in sunbeams ^ and to be the
ruler of heaven, to whom the sun and stars belong,* and to
lead the way up the steepest paths of the sky,* while the
whole of the 111 hymns in the ninth Mandala of the
Rigveda to Soma, called Pavaniana, or the cleanser, are,
as Hillebrandt has shown, hymns to the autunm moon,
reappearing after the earth has been cleansed of her im-
purities by the rains of the rainy season, which, when
* Rigveda, x. 85, 1-2. ^ Ibid. ix. 86, 32.
' Ibid, V. 29. * Ibid, i. 91, i.
140 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
strained through the heavenly sieve (pavitra), make it pure
for the coming year.^ The lunar Rajputs call themselves
Som-bunsi, or sons of their parent god Soma, the moon, and
all use the patronymic Singh, meaning both a horn and a
lion. This name Singh, meaning the horned-moon, takes
us to the Vedic name for river, Sindhu, the moon-river, a
name given also to the Indus. This name Sindhu appears
also in Sindhava, the modem Sindh, the name of the country
through which the Indus flows. The conquests of the Som-
bunsi have extended this local name to the whole of India,
which they called Sindhava, the moon-land, or the land of
the sons of the moon. This name Sindhu becomes in Persian
Hindu, and this change is exactly the same as has made tlie
root su into the Zend hu. Therefore Su or Shu, like Sindhu,
must be of Southern origin, and we must look for this
among the people who called the moon Sin. These were* the
Sumerians, the primitive rulers of the Euphratean Delta,
who called themselves the Gaurian race, a name reproduced
in India by the Turanian Gonds, who call themselves sons of
Gauri (Bos ffaurus), the wild cow. Tlie earliest capital of
these people knomi to us is the town now called Telloh,
which was anciently called Lu-gash, and its people, as we
learn from an Akkadian vocabulary, called their country
Shu-gir, or the land of the Shus, a name which also appears
in Gir-su, an alternative name of their capital city.^ Tliis
name afterwards l)ecAme Shushan, the province to the west
of the Persian Gulf, where the people worshipped the great
god Susi-nag, the god of Elam, or the mountain country
of the Akkadians.^ And it is these Shus, who must be the
trading and conquering race called in the Mahabharata and
Rigveda the Shu-varna, or caste of the Shus, who called the
country, now called Sindh, Sindhu-Suvarna, and made Patala,
the modem Hyderabad and capital of Sindh, which was then
1 Hillebrandt, Vcdische Mythologie, pp. 385-388.
- F. Ilommel, Geshichte Bahylonuns und Assy Hens ^ bk. i. p. 316,
' Maspero, Egypt aftd Assyria, chap, xviii. p. 316.
ESSAY III 141
a seaport, their capital As Piitala is now one hundred and
fifteen miles from the sea,^ the days when it stood on the
seashore must l)e many thousand years ago, for, at the same
rate of increase, sixty-six feet yearly, which is computed to
be that of the Tigris and Euphrates, these one hundred and
fifteen miles must have taken more than nine thousand years
to accumulate.' It was these Shus who called the country
of Guzerat Saurashtra, or the country of the Saus, and they
still form the great trading race of India, known everywhere
as the Saus or Sao-kars. It was they who called their moon-
god Shin or Sin. But for the derivation of this name we
must look to that of Shumir, the name by which the
Assyrians called the Euphratean Delta ruled by the Shus,
and first called Shu-gir. Shumir, as Lenormant shows,
through its Hebrew form Shinar, must have originally con-
tained a guttural represented by the ain (y) in the Hebrew
spelling. This guttural is also found in the Arabic form
Sindjhar, and in that of the Singhara mountains, placed by
Ptolemy as stretching from the Tigris across Western Asia.
The original name must, therefore, according to Lenormant,
have been Sin-gir or Shin-gir.^ This name is also connected
with the ancestral descent of these people from the wild
cow by the Hindu patronymic Singh, the horn, and Sin, the
moon, must also be the homed moon. The Akkadian word
for horn, *Ai, has also a form shiff^* and means sky, and to
fill, as well as honi, and is, therefore, connected with the root
«aAr, to be wet, from which Lenormant derives Sin-gir, mean-
ing the wetting horn. The mother city of this wet land
of the Shus, the Euphratean Delta, was Erech, the Akkadian
Unuk, and this name, as Dr. Sayce shows, is the same as that
of Enoch, the son of Cain, the first city builder.^ Istar was
* Cunningham, Ancient Geography of Indian pp. 283-285.
' Sayce, Hibberi Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 185. The actual number
of years given by calculation is 9185.
' Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ pp. 395-402.
* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ No. iiS.
' Sayce, Hibbtrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 185; Gen. iv. 17.
142 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the mother-goddess of this city and supreme goddess of the
land, both under Akkadian and Assyrian rule, and her names
confirm the conclusion that the country was called the
wet land. One of her Akkadian names is Shuk-us. The
ideogram *^) is formed of two elements. The first,
>V, when standing alone, is pronounced sur or jsrwr, and
means rain, and also to arise, and illumination ; while J means
king, or one, so that the name Shuk-us means the raining
one.^ She is also called Tiskhu, and under this name she is
the star-god, who directs the archangels (anuna-ge) of the
earth,^ and it is Anu, the god of heaven, and Tiskhu who
become rulers of the sky when the moon is eclipsed and
made to wane by the seven wicked spirits.' The ideogram
for Tiskhu *-Vi§T*> ®^ pronounced shuk^ begins, like
Shuk-us, with the sign for rain ; while ^, pronounced
ku^ means power, and a mountain peak,^ so that the name
means the power or star-god, whicli brings the rain, or the
raining mountain. To establish the connection between the
star-god who brings the rain, and Istar, we must turn to the
Egyptian Isis, whose name, like that of Istar, comes, as Pro-
fessor Tiele luis shown, from tlie Akkadian root w, meaning
a mountain, which also appears in tlie Akkadian is'iy a cow,
and this is one of the fonns assumed in Eg\^t by Isis, a
transformation which is not followed by her Akkadian pro-
totype Istar. But both are star-goddesses. Isis b^ing Isis
Satit, the star Sirius, and it is this star which must liave
been that called by the Akkadians Tis-khu. It is this star
which brings tlie rain, for its rising at the summer solstice
ushers in the rainy secuson, the South-west monsoon ; and
it is the rising of this star, called in the Zendavesta
Tish-triya, which begins the Zend as well as the Egj^tian
^ Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. loi and 99, 427.
- Lenormant, Ckaldaan Magic^ p. 139,
' Ibid, p. 206.
■* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ No. 100.
« Ibid, No. 462.
ESSAY III 143
year with the time of the rainy season, called the rains of
Tish-triya.^
In tracing the origin of the root is, we must, as Akkadian
is an Ural Altaic language, look to other cognate Finnic
dialects. Is^ as Castren tells us, is the most common name
for god in all these languages. It appears as Esch in
Kamacintzi Es in Yenissei-Ostiak, meaning heaven, in the
Etruscan Aisar, and the CEsar of the Edda, both meaning the
gods. Tar is the Akkadian tar young. The Finnic tor, the
Etruscan Etera^ and the Asiatic Turkish TurUj all mean
^ child,"" and it is the feminine suffix, meaning daughter, used
in tlie Finnic poem of the Kalcvala to show that the deity
named is a goddess. Thus Etele-tar means the daughter of
the south-wind, Il-ma-tar, the daughter of the air, Kaleva-
tar, the daughter of Kaleva.^ Thus Istar means the ' daughter
of the mountain,' who became the * daughter of heaven"* when
the heaven was likened to a mountain overarching the earth,
as the Egyptian goddess of heaven. Nut, bends her body, with
her fingertips touching the ground, over her husband Geb,
meaning * the convex earth,' * But as Shuk-us and Sukh she
is the daughter of the raining or wet {suk) heaven and of the
wet mountain ; and Akkadian mythological geography calls
this mountain, which it makes the cradle of the human race,
Khar-Sak-kurra. This means the wet {sak) entrails (khar) of
the mountain of the East {kurra\^ or the mother earth made
' Darmesteter, Zendavesta 'Fir Vast, 12; Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxiii.
pp. 92, 97.
' R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars,* Proceedings of the
Society of Biblical Arc hccologyy Feby. 1890 ; Note to Star No. v.
' See Illustration in H. Brugsch, Religion und Alythohgie der Alien
j€.gypier^ p. 211.
* Lenormant, Chaldccan Magic, p. 308, gives viscera-entrails as one of the
meanings of this Akkadian root khar. Kurra means the East, as well as a
mountain (Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, p. 169 ; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar
Syllabary ^ No. 399). Khar also means in Akkadian and Ostiak * the ox '
(Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, p. 302), and sak means chief, so that the
ox ' the chief mountain of the East,' is another meaning of Khar-sak-kurra, a
144 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
pregnant by the rains of heaven, and this must have been the
original idea formed of the divine Istar. It is from this
mountain that the god Adar must have got the sacred stone,
the begetter of fire and of life fostered by heat, called in an
Akkadian hymn to Adar, the *shu ' stone, the precious stone,
the strong stone, the snake stone, the mountain stone .^ It is this
stone which is still in Hindu images of the sacred lotus enclosed
within its leaves. These, when folded together as the bud,
depict the mother-mountain as ready to open when quickened
by the life-giving rain poured down from the ark of clouds,
the water-jar which, in these mythical images, is hung above
the lotus. It is this rain which gives to the sacred lotus the
seed, the germ of life on earth, and it is the maker of the rain,
the heavenly seed, which is the divine lotus called Push-kara
the maker {hard) of Push, the black bull, who was first, as we
shall see, the alligator, or the fourteen stars of the constellation
Draco round the pole ; in other words, the god of time, who
marked the lunar phases, who makes the rain-cloud. It is this
bull which, in modem images, bears the lotus on its back and
infuses life into it by the stalk. This pregnant mountain of
the Shu-stone was to the Akkadians the central point of the
earth, shaped like a boat turned upside down,^ the tortoise
earth of the race of the Kushites, the sons of the tortoise
(kush). Below it was its wrw, or root, this was the stalk of
the lotus invoked in the Zendavesta as the golden instrument
of Mount Saokanta, explained by the commentator to mean the
golden tube bringing from the root of the earth to the
mountain-top the dew and rain which the winds are to carry
over the earth .^ Mount Saokanta, whose name contains the
root sak^ is also called Ushi-dhau, the mountain of the East
meaning which shows the same process of mythological transference as made
Is-is the * mother-mountain ' into the * mother-cow.*
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Appendix iv. ; Hymns to the Gods,
i. 27, p. 480.
* Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ p. 151.
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Khorshed Nydyish^ 8; S.B.E., 'vol. xxiii.
p. 352, note 3.
ESSAY III 145
(u^Aa). It is on it, as the Zendavesta tells us, the sacred
river Haetumant rises and flows to the lake of the tortoise
Kasha-va, the modem sea of Zarah. The land watered by
this river and lake was the mother-land of the Kavi Kaush,
the wise {kavi) tortoise (hish) kings, and it was there that
Eavad, the mythic father of the race, was picked up as a child,
when abemdoned like Moses, by Uzava, the goat-god Uz,
called Tumaspa, or the * horse of darkness "* (tum).^ It is called
in the Bundahish Sauka vastan, or the place of the Saokas or
Saukas, the dwellers in the wet (saka) land, it is placed
between Turkestan and Chinistan (China) outside the seven
confederated States of Iran, six of which are grouped round
the central state Khvaniras, the Hvani-ratha of the Zend-
avesta, whence the sons of Aim, the bull, were borne on the
back of the ox Sar-saok ^ over the whole world.^ The king
of Saukavastan was Aghraeratha, half-man and half-bull,
meaning the foremost {aghra) chariot (rcUha)^ the son of Pash-
ang, the black-bull, and he was called also Gopatshah, or king
of the cows.* These sons of the cow came to India as the
Grotamas, or sons of the cow {go\ and the black cloud bull
Pushan is called in the Brahmanas Pasupati, the god and
lord (pati) of cattle (pasu).^ The Gotamas are one of the
priestly castes of the Rigveda, and it is from their traditions
that the Brahmins call the sub-sections of their caste Go-tras,
or cow-pens. They were the earliest professional priests, and
* West, BundaJiish, xxxi. 23. Darmesteter's Zetidavesia Farvardin Vast,
131 ; S.B.E. vol. V. p. 136 ; vol. xxiii. p. 221.
2 The name of the Ox Sar-saok seems to be derived from the northern rain-
god Sar, whose theology is discussed in p. 161, and Sak, the wet-god, the
Southern rain-god.
* West, Bundahish^ xxix. 4, 13; xvii. 4. Darmesteter, Zendavesta^ Intro-
duction, 7, note 4 ; Vendiddd Fargard^ xix. 39 ; S.B.E. vol. v. pp. 116, 120;
lix. 62 ; vol. iv. p. 216.
* West, Bundahishy xxix. 5 ; S.B.E. voL v. p. 117, note 6.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iii. 9, I, 10 ; iii. I, 4, 9 ; i. 7» 3» 8 ; S.B.E. vol.
xxvi pp. 219, 22 ; vol. xii. p. 201. PQshan is named, vol. xxvi. p. 219,
among the eleven other gods headed by Prajapati, the lord {pati) of a former
{pra) race {ja) to whom living victims were offered.
10
146 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
it was, according to the Mahabharata, the Gotama priest,
called the Rishi Chandra (the moon) Kushika (of the
Kushikas), who gave the king of Maghada a miraculously
born son, by giving a mango (am), which fell into his lap
when in a state of ecstatic meditation, to his two queens,
Ambika and Amvalika, daughters of the king of Kashi
(Benares), the Kushika capital. Each queen bore half a child,
and as the two parts were bound together by an old woman
called J dra, old age, the child was named Jara-sandha, or
the junction (sandhi) by old age. This means that the
two united races of Kushikas and Maghadas, over whom he
ruled as king, were united by lapse of time, and this union
made them, like the king Jara-sandha of the Mahabharata,
imperial rulers of India, till they were ousted by the victory
of the Pandavas.^ This land, ruled by the united tribes of
Kushikas, M aghadas, and Gotamas was that called by Hindu
geographers Saka-dvTpa, said in the M atsya Purana, to be
the land of the mountain whence Indra gets the rain,* that
is, of the mountain called Khar-sak-kurra, Ushidhau, and
Saokanta. This mountain stood as the meeting point of the
two confederacies of the patriarchal tribes, the bull races who
trace their descent to the father, and the matriarchal-cow
races who trace their descent to their mother. Each con-
federacy is formed by six kingdoms surrounding a seventh,
or ruling kingdom, in the centre. This in the Iranian or bull
federation is Khavaniras or Hvaniratha, and in India, or the
cow-kingdom, Jambu-dvipa, or the land of the Jambu tree ;
that is to say, central India, the home of the Jambu {Eugenia
jambuland) the fruit tree of the jungle forests. It is the
rains of Saka, or the wet land of Northern India, which come
with the most unvarying regularity, and it was these which
made the parent-mountain of the twin confederacies pregnant.
This was the land of the rain-god Shukra, the earliest name
^ Mahabharata Sabha {kaja suyarambhd) Parva, xvii. pp. 54, 57. Sabha
(Jdrd-sandha-badha) Parva, xxiv.
* Sachau's Alberuni's Ittdia^ vol. i. chap. xxiv. p. 252.
ESSAY III 147
of Indra, used both in the Rigveda ^ and Mahabharata. In
the latter Shukra, called the high priest of the Dunavas and
Ashuras, says, * It is I who pour down rain for the good of
creatures, and also nourish the annual plants which sustain
all living things.' ^ He is also called Ushana, and is the
kavi-ushana of the Rigv'eda.^ The Brahmanas also call the
Soma plant Ushana ; and Soma, the moon, is said to be the
Vritra or enclosing snake (from vri^ to enclose), whose body is
the mountains and rocks on which the Soma plant Ushana
grows.* Ushana, or the god (ana) Ush, reproduces one
of the names of Is-tar, U-sha. Its ideogram ^^ means
^ (tt) the lord of ^ (sha) five,^ or of the five seasons
of the Indian year and of the year of the Persian Gulf;
the rainy season, autumn, winter, spring, and the burning
summer. They are all ruled by the rain-god, whose name
Shuk-ra is a form of the Akkadian Shuk-us or Istar. But
as Istar is a name of Finnic origin, so also is Ush-a or Ush-
ana, for Castren tells us that that Ural Altaic rain and
thunder-god was called Kave-Ukko,® and this name shows us
that the Vedic word kavi, meaning wise, and the root A:i/,
from which it is derived, is of Finnic origin, brought to India
by the Finnic magicians, who became the Maghadas of
Indian history. This name Ukko is shown, by the change
fixjm the guttural into the sibilant, marking Northern words
introduced into Sanskrit^ to be the original whence the
^ Rigveda, viii. 45, 10, and also in other places.
' Mahabharata Adi {Sanibhava) Parva, Ixxx. p. 245.
» Rigveda, i. 83, 5, 51, 1 1.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iii. 4, 3, 13; iv. 2, 5, 15 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp.
100, 314.
* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, Nos. 329, 394, 448.
* Castren, Kleine Schriften, Petersburg, 1862, p. 25. De Gubernatis die
TTiiere, German translation, Leipzig, 1874, p. 113, note.
' Thot^h the change affects words which have become merged in the
popular dialect of the fused races, where the tendency to soften guttural
asperities was most active, it frequently does not affect others, which like kavi,
have been maintained in their original form by the descendants of the Northern
races who first brot^ht them to India.
148 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Akkadian, Zend, and Sanskrit Usha was derived, and the
name Uk-ko must first have been Uk-ku, the great (uk)
placer or begetter (Atm),^ and from this it appears that the
original form of the root sfiu was the Finnic ku^ the name
brought by these Northern settlers among the Australioid
traders of the South, and used by them to denote the father-
god. It is this root which appears in the Finnic ku-ta or
ku-Uj the moon, a name which, like Kave, they brought with
them to India. Kavi Ushana was the father of Devayani,
or the angel {deva) daughter of Ya, who became the wife of
Yayati, the reduplicated Ya or la, and the mother of the
twin mother-tribes of the Yadava, the people whose god is
Ya, and the Tur-vasu, those whose creating and generating
god (vcisu) is Tur. Tur, as I shall show, was first the
house-pole, and afterwards the rain-pole of the hill bamboo
(kichaka) set up by the god Vasu on the Sakti mountains,
which became the rain-pole or Ashera of the Jews. This
god Vasu, the Indian snake-god Vasuki was originally the
Northern spring-god, whose name appears in the Greek
name for spring, Vesar, which became eap, after the elision of
the digamma, and he was apparently the father-god of the
Basque or Vask race. But these deductions of mythic his-
tory, based on the idea of the rain-god as the begetting god,,
are the product of a later and more metaphysical age than
that of the earliest students of Nature, who deduced the
origin of life from physical generation and conception. To
the totemistic shepherd tribes of the dawn of thought
the mountain was their mother, and they thought that the
special qualities which marked them as a separate race, were
infused into and incorporated with their frames, when they
fed on tlieir animal father the totem of the tribe at the
solemn tribal festivals.^ This animal was the Akkadian
* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 173, 462 ; Lenormant's
Chaldctan Afagic, p. 305, root ku, to place.
' Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites^ Lect. vii. p. 229, and the
descriptions of sacrificial feasts ; Amos iv. 4 ; Hosea viii. 13 ; Isaiah
XXX. 29 ; I Sam. ix. 12-25 ; Neh. viii. 10.
ESSAY III 149
Shu-hu, the mountain goat, sacred to Mul-lil, the earth-
god, the lord of sorcery (lil). It is in this name that we
find both of the later forms of the root shii^ to beget.
The sacred goat was also called Zur,i which means also
rain, and Shu-ga,^ or the animal possessed of shu or
generative power. It was the totemistic father of the trad-
ing Shus ; and this descent is a m)rthical record of an in-
dubitable fact, that trade began by the interchange of the
produce of the flocks of the mountain shepherds with the
crops of the tillers of the soil dwelling on the lower moun-
tain slopes and the plain lands. Shu-hu became the goat-
god, Uz, whose name, like that of Usha, seems to be a
softened form of the earlier Uk-ku, who watches the revolu-
tions of the solar disc on Babylonian monuments.^ All
Akkadian priests were clothed in goat-skins as priests of
Uz, and it was another form of the mountain-goat,
the black antelope buck Rishya, which gave to the
Hindu Brahmins their name of Rishi,* and the official dress
of black antelope skins, which all Brahmin students are
ordered to wear in the law books; the Akkadian dress of
goat-skins being assigned to Vaishya, and the skin of
the spotted deer to Kshatriya students.^ It is on a
black antelope skin that Soma is placed in the Soma
cart at the Soma sacrifice, and it is bought by giving
the seller a she-goat, ® and to Vedic writers the antelope,
like the goat in other mythic histories, is the type of
animal lust.^
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1 887, Lect. iv. p. 285, note 3.
* Ibid. p. 286, note 2.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 285.
^ But Rishya, the antelope, is not linguistically related to the mountain-
goat ; Rishya is a name formed from Riksha, the bear, showing that the
antelope race were once sons of the bear.
" Buhler, Gautama^ i. 16; Apostamba^ i. I, 3, 3, 5, and 6; S.B.E.
vol. ii. pp. I74and 10.
• Eggeling, Sat. Brdh, iii. 3, 4, i ; iii. 3, 3, 9 ; S. B. E. \ vol. xxvi. pp.
71. 75.
' Zimmer, Altindisches Leben^ chap. iii. p. 82 ; Atharva-veda, iv. 4, 5, 7.
150 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
But Usha and the goat-god only tell us of the male side of
the bisexual Istar,the pair of gods worshipped by the Northern
shepherds ; one of these was Is-tar of Erech, the Southern
mother-goddess, the virgin-mother of Dumu-zi, the son
(dumu) of life (zi)^ a name contracted from Dumu-zi-apzu,
the son (dumu) of the spirit or life {zi) of the watery abyss
ap'Zu\ who is also called one of the six sons of la.^ This
name was changed by the Semites to Tammuz. A bilingual
hymn, telling of his birth in Eridu, under the tree of life,
transports us to a different atmosphere from that of the
mother-mountain of the North. It is this tree, ' whose seat
is in the centre of the earth,' which was the couch of Zi-kum,
the giver of the breath of life, the primaeval-mother, and it
overshadowed the temple home of the mighty earth-mother,
*into which no man hath entered.'' This was the birthplace
of the son of life, bom of a virgin-mother, without the aid
of a mortal father.^ But Eridu, the place of his birth,
according to this hymn, was the offspring of Erech or
Unuki, as we are told in Genesis that Irad (Eridu) was the
son of Enoch (Umiki).^ Tlie name Eridu is contracted from
Eri-duga, the holy city (Eri or Ir) ; and it is sacred to
la-Khan or la, the fish who was first la, the serpent.* It was
as the fish-god that la came to Eridu in the mother-ship
Ma. But Eridu, the great Euphratean port, founded on
foreign commerce, and the interchange witli other countries
of the surplus products of skilled agriculturists and handi-
craftsmen, must be a city of a much later date than that
which was the birthplace of the first son of life ; and the
sacred grove, where he was bom, according to the Akkadian
legend, must have been one in the country whence la was
brought to Eridu as its founder in the mother-ship, the
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect- iv. p. 232.
* Ibid, p. 238.
^ Lect. iii. p. 185 ; Gen. iv. 17, 18.
* Lenormant, Chaldaan Magics p. 203 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for
1887, Lect. iii. p. 184.
ESSAY III 151
country where the tree-mother was looked on as the mother
of all life ; and this country as I shall prove presently, was
India. The name of Istar, as the mother of Dumu-zi, was
Tsir-du or Shir-du,^ the holy (du or du-ga) snake {tsir)^
and she was also called by the Sumerians Shir-gam, the
encircling {gam) snake (tsir)^ and another of her names as
the goddess-mother was Dav-kina. The two ideograms of
Dav-kina, called in Akkadian Shus, or the mother-Shu
^ and -g-,3 and those for Tsir ^- yfy< and -$J- yyy<*,
conclusively prove that Dav-kina, the mother, was a snake-
goddess of an agricultural race, for the two signs ^ and
^ which begin the ideograms of Dav-kina and Tsir, both
mean seed,* and are pronounced as se^ while to the signs
for Dav-kina, the seed-mother, the ideograms jyy and ^
are added to make the ideogram for Tsir. These mean
three,® and lord,^ and the sacred Tsir means the three
lords or kings (of the three races bom from) the seed-
bearing snake-mother. But Istar, the mother of Erech, was
not only worshipped as the seed-mother, but also as A,
meaning the waters, and as A she was the wife of la. The
name la means the house (/) of the waters (a), so that to
call the mother-goddess A his wife, is merely a mythical way
of saying that the mother of life was the life-giving water,
the encircling ocean, or the Midgard serpent of the Edda,
It was as the ocean -mother that she was called by the
Sumerians Sirri-gam, or Shir-gam, the enclosing snake ; and
it is in this form that she is the goddess Nana (the lady),
one of the names of Istar of Erech, who was the mother of
the ocean called ' the snake or rope of the great god,^ the
river of In-nina the divine {In) lady {nina),^ It is the
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 237.
' Ibid, Lect. iii. p. 178, note.
' Sayce, Assyrian Granwtar Syllabary, No. 321.
* Ibid. No. 324. ^ Ibid, No. 320.
* Ibid. No. 446. " Ibid. No. 329.
® Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, I-^ct. iii. p. 178, note ; Led. ii.
p. 116, note I.
152 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
mother-ocean whicli supplies water to the urn, or root of
the mother-mountain, and it is from it tliat the Hindu
gods, headed by Vasuki, who held the rope, churned the
water of life (amrifa) by Mount Mandara, tlie heavenly
chuming-stafF; and it is on the surface of this mother-ocean
tliat the land, of which the mother-mountain is the centre,
floats.
We thus learn from this review of the chronology of
the various forms of the goddess called Istar or Suk, that
she was the supreme mother- goddess of a composite race
formed from the union of three earlier races. The
first of these called themselves the sons of the mother-
tree, encircled by the girdling snake ; the second, the sons
of the mother-mountain and the father-goat; while the
third were the children of the rain-god, who returns to
the mother-ocean by the rivers, the life-giving waters,
drawn from it by the golden pipe leading from the
root (uru) to the clouds, which wreath its top. These
are the heavenly sieve (pavitra\ which distribute it over
the earth as the rains of the rainy season, the heavenly
Soma.
This series of conceptions must have been born in India,
the land of periodical rains and mountain forests, for the
mother-tree could never have been conceived in the brains
of those dwelling in the treeless lands of Northern and
Central Asia. Those who framed it must have belonged to
the Mongoloid and Australioid tribes of South-eastern
Asia and Southern India, who called themselves by names
which, like those of the Marj'a or tree {marom) Gonds, of the
Mons, or mountain race of the Irawaddy, the Mundas of
Chotii Nagpore, and of the Ooraons, the Orang, or forest-
men of the same country, show that they did not, like the
pastoral tribes, claim descent from totcmistic male ancestors,
but from tlie mountain and forest trees, and many of these
tribes have always been, when near the sea, both skilled and
daring navigators, like the Mughs of Bengal, the Dyaks of
ESSAY III 153
Borneo, and the coast tribes of the Madras and Malabar coasts,
and also willing emigrants to foreign lands. These people, as
is proved by the anthropometric data published in the last
two volumes of Mr. Risley'^s Tribes and Castes ofBengal^ show
much more affinity with the dolichocephalic Australioid races,
whose remains predominate in those of the Palaeolithic Stone
Age in Europe, than with the brachycephalic Mongoloid
tribes of North-eastern Asia ; and it must, as I show in
Essay ii., have been they who introduced organised agricul-
ture into Europe. The marriage-customs of the great
majority of the agricultural races of Bengal, prove that they
have all passed through the stage of civilisation in which the
tree was thought to be their mother, for the lk.gdi and
Bauri tribes are wedded in an arbour made of the branches of
the Sal-tree (Shorea robusta\ after they have been first
married to a Mahua-tree (Bassia lutifolia) ; and this Mahua-
tree is the husband-tree also of Kunni, Lobar, Mahili,
Munda, and Santal brides, while the Bagdis place a pool of
water, their common mother, between the wedded pair.^
Others again, like the Binjhias, Kharwars, and Kautias,
make the Mango-tree the husband-tree.^ But when we
examine the rules for the organisation of the first village
communities founded by the earliest agricultural races in
forest clearings, we find that this custom of marriage to a
tree is one that succeeded to a state of society which did not
know of marriage or the family. The village-makers of this
early Stone Age carved their villages out of the forests, just
aii their successors now do, by stripping the trees of their
bark with their stone celts, and burning the timber when
dried ; for the making of fire by friction was discovered at a
very early age by the dwellers in the damp forests of the
rainy districts of the far East. But in the centre of the
village site, a number of the original forest trees were, and
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ vol. i. pp. 39, 80, 531 ; vol. ii. pp.
23* 40, 102, 229.
^ Ibid, vol i. pp. 136, 201 ; vol. ii. p. 201.
154 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
are, still always left standing as the sarna or grove, sacred to
the gods of life. The grove thus consecrated was the centre
of the village — the Greek, Temenos (from temno to cut),
which became afterwards the Akropolis. This was the holy
shrine cut off from the unproductive forest, tlie abode of
demons and malicious ghosts, by the cultivated land which
surrounds it, the encircling and guarding snake — the proto-
type of the ocean-mother of the seafaring sons of the tree-
mother. Under the shade of this sarna is the akra, or
dancing-ground, where the maidens of the village still dance
the seasonal dances performed to secure good harvests, and
to thank the gods for those gathered in. But in earlier
times these dances were danced by the young men and
maidens of different villages, a custom preserved by the Ho
Kols, among whom the girls of one village always dance
with the men of another,^ while among the hill Bhuiyas,
courtships are always carried on by the young men of the
village uniting to pay visits to, and dance with, the girls of a
neighbouring township ; ^ and the hill Binjhias and Kandlis
only allow marriages l)etween men and women of different
villages.^ Hence the object of the village dances was not
only to secure the aid of the gods of life for the welfare of
the coming crops, but they were also part of the system of
exogamous alliances whicli bound together all the villages of
each province or parha of a federated State by the ties of
a common defensive and offensive union. These villages,
which exactly correspond to our parishes, and the German
gemeinde^ covered a large area, most of which was at first
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. i. p. 328.
- Ibid. vol. i. p. 114.
* Ibid. vol. i. pp. 135, 399, 400. Khand society is constituted on a
patriarchal basis, but this rests on matriarchal foundations existing before
the Khands, whose name means the swordsmen, conquered Orissa. They
altered the original matriarchal customs, which made the village the
unit, to meet theirs, which placed the family as the ground -work of the
tribe. Hence they divided the gochis or villages into klambus^ or joint-
families.
ESSAV III 155
unoccupied woodland. For, like those who now settle villages
in forest tracts, the first founders were obliged to provide
space for hamlets or ofF-shoots from the parent village. In
a prosperous commune all the land that can be conveniently
cultivated from the original centre is soon taken up, and
those who want fresh land near their work must betake
themselves to the village waste, and there found a fresh
centre affiliated to that from which they came. This pro-
cess of internal gro\*i;h could only go on when the village
was at peace with its neighbours, and when all those adjoin-
ing it, and allied with it, could provide for the common
defence a force sufficient to guard them from attacks of
invading enemies. These alliances also must, in order to
secure the continued prosperity of the federated communities,
be lasting, and the means by which they were cemented was
the institution of tlie custom of exogamous unions between
the sexes, and of social gatlierings for the promotion of good
fellowship. But these unions between the sexes were not
like those of the patriarclial age, when the family A\as the
unit — marriages between individuals — but the man ijige of
each village to all its federated allies. The women of each
township were its mothers, who must remain at home, look
after the children, help in farming, and do domestic work,
but to secure the union between the village and its neigli-
bours, and to prevent the isolation that would result if the
fathers of the village children lived in the village, it was
made a rule that they must belong to an outside village,
"^riius the men of every village within each confederacy could
legally become the fathers of the children of the women of
all villages except their own, and this primitive jus connubii
was the bond which retained the members of the confederated
villages in an indissoluble union. For if any of them emi-
grated to neighbouring unions, he was obliged to secure a
formal admission before he could there acquire the privileges
he had relinquished in his maternal state, and such transfers
were not readily granted. It was on these rules of internal
IWJ TlIK RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tniitiu^cMiU'iit tlmt the whole domestic policy of each State
wiM founded, while its foreign policy was based on the juJt
rnrrratura'^ or the concession of rights to attend their mar-
k<'t.H, given to peaceable and well-conducted neighbours.
WitJiin each township the men and women were brothers
iirid Mihters, l)etween whom marriage was impossible; and the
birth of the village children was provided for by inviting the
men of luljoining villages to come to the village dances,
wUcu the unions were consummated in the shades of the
V 11 luge grove. Hence all the children of each village were
the children of the village mother-tree, and the Saturnalia
(felel)rating their procreation, were looked on by the states-
men of matriarchal times, as they are still by Kol Mankis
of the present day, as a safeguard of the national welfare,
which maintained mutual good feeling and fellowship be-
tween all those l)elonging to the allied confederacy. But
this system of lil>erty, restrained by internal laws, was one
which appeared to those who were educated in a different
system of morality to be unregulated and disgraceful licence ;
and it is this which is denounced by the authors of tlie
M ahil bharata in a passage which tells how Sahadeva, the
IVinduva, one of the avatars of the fire-god of the Nortli,
c<mquered Southern India, called the land of Mahish-matl,
thegreat (7/1 aAwA) mother (7Wfl^/), where, it is said, the women
were not obliged to confine themselves to one luLsband.^ In
another passjige, Karna, whom I shall show to he the moon-
god, and who aj)j>ears in the poem as one of the chief
generals of the Kauravyas, denounces the Vahlika women for
acting as Dravidian wcmien do now, and indulging in what
lie calls indiscriminate concubinage, drinking spirits, singing
and dancing in public places, and on the ramparts of the
town, dressed and undressed, and wearing garlands.'^ This
description accurately depicts the village dances, as seen
* Mahabharata Sabha {Di^fi/aya) Parva, xxxi.
* Mahabharata Kar^a Parva, xl. xlv. pp. 138, 158. Muir's Sanskrit
Tixts^ vol. ii. pp. 4S2-4S4 note 2.
ESSAY III 157
by a spectator, who finds in them only what seem to him to
be wipardonable excesses, but fails to see the legality which
underlies the apparently lawless and indiscriminate association
of the sexes which takes place at these tribal dances.
The children bom in these matriarchal villages were, after
the age when they ceased to require a mother**s care, placed
under the guardianship of the village elders, their maternal
uncles, and thus, at the present day, all children bom in the
Nair villages of Madras, those of the Naga races, of the
Ooraons, Marya Gronds, and Juangs are brought up apart
from their parents, the boys under the care of the village
elders, and the girls under that of a village matron. These
guardians teach them their duties as members of the tribe
and village, and instruct them in all the hereditary village
lore, and the village schools, found everywhere in India, were
the products of the matriarchal customs which made the
maternal uncles teachers of their sisters'* children, and it is
also from this source that the higher castes took the idea of
providing gurus or religious teachers for each family. It
was in this age that the rule obser\ed among the Doms,
Haris, Juangs, Pasis, and Tantis of making the sister'^s son
the family priest arose,^ and also that observed among the
Cheroos, when the marriage is blessed by the maternal
uncles of the bride and bridegroom, who pour holy water on
the mango-leaf placed in the mouths of the mothers of the
young couple before the marriage procession leaves the bride-
groom'^s house.^ It was the emigration of these matriarchal
races throughout all the countries of South-western Asia
and Southern Europe which not only made tlie communal
rule of property which governed the Indian village com-
munities the most universally diffused type of land tenure,
and which also made property descend to the female line, as
it does among the Nairs of Madras, among the Lycians,
1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. i. pp. 245, 316 ; vol. ii. pp.
167, 300.
- Ibid. vol. i. p. 201.
158 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Cretans, Dorians, Athenians, Lemnians, Etruscans, Egyptians,
Orchomenians, Loerians, Lesbians, Mantinaeans, and many
Asiatic nations, as has been proved by Morgan and Bachofen.^
The customs of the village dances in the sacred grove
survived in the Babylonian custom mentioned by Herodotus,
which obliged every married woman to prostitute herself in
the temple on her marriage night, in the Saturnalia of Rome,
the Bacchic orgies of Greece, the Corybantian dances of
South-western Asia, which formed part of the festivals held
each year to mourn over the death of Tammuz, the old year,
and to celebrate the birth of the new year which was to
succeed it, and it was these dances which were continued to a
late period of the Roman Empire in the groves sacred to
Venus. The ritual of the worship of the Sumerian goddess
Istar of Erech was also an outcome of these matriarchal
festivals, for she was served, as we are told in the story of
the plague-demon Nerra, ' by a chorus of festival girls and
maidens consecrated to Istar,** representing the village
maidens of India, and ' by emasculated priests carrying
swords, razors, stout dresses, and flint knives,** ^ who reproduce
the brothers of these maidens, who were forbidden to l)e
fathers to their children. It was these matriarchal tribes
who, in their progress westward, founded the Amazonian
kingdoms of Asia Minor and Greece, and who reproduced
everywhere the holy groves consecrated to the gods of
Greece, Rome, Palestine, and Asia Minor, together with
the worship of the Dryads, or spirits of the woods.
Also it was their influence which sanctified the mother-
tree, the tree of life, the palm-tree of Babylonia, tlie
sycamore or fig-mulberry of Egypt, the fig-tree of the
Biblical story of the fall of man, the olive-tree of Greece,
the pine, the mother-tree of the Northern Bear race, whicli
has become the Christmas-tree of Germany, and the tree
^ Morgan, Ancient Society^ Macmillan and Co., 1877, chap. xiv. pp. 343,
351. BsLchofcn, Die Afntfer-recA/, Stuttgart, 186 1.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 184, 185.
ESSAY III 159
which is still planted on the top of every house built in
South Grennany. This tree also plays a prominent part in
the stories of the birth of the Buddha and Apollo. In the
first, Maya, the mother of Buddha, was a native of Kolya,
the Kolarian village forming part of the city of Kapila-vastu,
the city of the Yellow (kapUa) race, to which his father
belonged. The sacred grove of Lumbini was the sartia or
holy grove common to the united towns, and lay between
them. Maya went to this grove when the pains of childbirth
drew near, and sought the protection of the tree-god by
grasping the sacred Sal-tree {Shorea robnsta\ the mother-
tree of the Dravidian races of India, and it was while she was
grasping it that her son was bom,^ This same incident of
the grasping of the mother-tree is reproduced in the story of
the birth of Apollo at Delos, only that tlie tree grasped
by Leto was not the Sal-tree, but the Babylonian palm-
tree, the tree of life, while beside it stood the olive,
sacred to Athene, and the sacred lake,^ the reproduc-
tion of that whence the Kushite race sprang. That
these sons of the mother-tree were the first organisers of
ci\ilised society is proved by the fact that it was out of the
myth of the central mother-tree that that of the mother-
mountain, adopted by their successors, grew, for just as
the mother-tree is the centre of the holy grove and the
middle point of the village, so is the mother-mountain
the centre of the tortoise earth. But though the grove
as the village centre was an original conception of the
Southern matriarchal races, the centre tree and the
mother-mountain were additions made to the primal idea
by the Northern races, who looked on the house, the birth-
place of the family, as their national home, for the central
tree was the central pole of the Northern house which
supports its rafters.
^ Fausboll,yif/iZ^a, vol. i. p. 52. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories,
p. 66.
' Milller, Die Dorier, Book ii. chap. vii. § 3, p. 314.
160 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
This is the god Gumi Gosain, the central pole of tlie
house, round which the Dravidian Males and Mai Paliarias
of the Raj Mehal hills place balls of clay representing their
ancestors, and then pour upon the ground the blood of fowls
and goats sacrificed to tlie sun-god and earth-mother.^ It
was these Malis or Mallis, whose name means the mountain
Mai (people), who gave their names to Malwa, Mallarashtra
or Mahralita land, to Multan or Malli-tana, the place
of the Mallis, the river Malini, on which Sakuntala, the
mother of the Bharata race, was found, and many other
Indian tribe-sites; and it was after they were fused with the
sons of the tree tliat they placed their house-pole in the
village grove as the central tree, and it is there that tlie
Khariiis place the god Gumi, to whom pigs, the animal
sacred to tlie mother earth, are offered.^ But these bloody
sacrifices were, like those offered to tlie house-pole, a Northern
institution of the people who looked on the sacrificial animals
they ate as the source whence they drew their special tribal
qualities ; for the primitive forest races only offered fruits and
flowers to tlie mother-earth, as is proved by the Juang sacri-
fices, in which fowls are offered to the sun, a supreme god
among all the forest races dwelling in the damp forests of the
rainy East, and only fruits to the earth.^ Similarly, the
Behar Amats and the Bhandaris, who are in Orissa priests
of the Pafich Devati, or five seasonal village goddesses, only
offer to them cooked rice, cakes, sweetmeats, and parched
grain ;* while among theRautias, at the Jitia Purob in Assin,
the village women only offer to the twig of the Pepul-tree
and the ear of rice planted as the parent-trees in the court-
yard of the headman of the village, vermilion, rice husked
without boiling, flowers, and sweetmeats.^
These mountain tribes who offered animal sacrifices, were
the second of the three primaeval races. They were a con-
* Rislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. li. pp. 58, 71.
' Ibid. vol. i. p. 468. ' Ibid, vol. i. p. 353.
* Ibid, vol. i. pp. 18, 94. * Ibid, vol. ii. p. 204.
ESSAY III 161
federacy ruled by Ural Altaic Finns who made the mountain
of the East, the frontier-mountain of the dividing chain of
the Himalayas, whence the rivers began to flow westward and
southward, the mother-mountain of the united races of
Northern shepherds and Southern agriculturists, wlio called
the Shu-hu, or mountain goat, their totemistic father.
In the third race, the children of the rain-god, we find a
composite product of two stocks united in the second birth-
land of civilised man, the country of the southern and western
slopes of the Caucasus and of the Phrygian hills. One of
these looked on the fire-god and the other on the water-god
as their parent gods. They claimed to be descended from the
rain-cloud impregnated by the lightning flash, the thunder
and wind-god called Sar. This was the tree and wind-god
of the Gronds, called Maroti (marom^ a tree) or Hanuman,
the great ape. Tlie name of this god Sar, reduplicated as
Sar-sar, is the Sumerian name of the god la, and also of
Istar ; ^ and Shari was the mother-goddess of the rain-cloud
worshipped by the Armenians of Van. It was this god who
became in later theology Assor, the fish-god, whose ideogram
is the same as that of the Akkadian Sar, and who is, as I
show later on, the six {as) Sars. It was the union of the
Southern agricultural races of India, who, by their fusion
with the Ural Altaic shepherds, had become the trading
Shus, with the Northern Turanian, or mixed Finnic tribes,
which formed the confederacy of allied peoples, the rulers
of India and the Euphratean countries, who called them-
selves the sons of the tortoise Kush, and looked on the
mother-mountain of the East, whence the rain-god gets the
rain, as the common centre whence they drew their life, and
as the Akropolis or temple home of the mother-gcddess of
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 265 note I, and Lect. iii.
p. 143, where he shows that Sar-sar is the ideogram, which was also read
as Gingiri, the Sumerian name of Istar, the creatrix. See also Lenormant,
ChoUdaan Magic^ p. 334, note. Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^
Nos. 414, 415.
11
162 THE RULING KACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the world village, the liouse of the Most High God. It was
to this mother-mountain that they ultimately transplanted
the mother-tree of the Indian theology, and thus made the
mountain-plant called Soma Giristha, or Soma, the dweller
{sthd) on the mountains (girr), the plant sacred to the gods
of generation.^ That this plant was also a rain-plant is
shown by the epithets Vrishtivani, the rain-loving, Varshahva,
and Varshabhu, which mean the rain (varshu) plant.^ In
the Rigveda, the season of the year, that is, the rainy season,
is said to be its mother, and when bom from her it goes at
once to the water, in which it thrives.* Again, in other
hymns, Parjanya, the rain-god, is called the father of the
mighty lord Soma, which took its place on tlie mountains
in the middle of the earth,* that is, the mother-mountain of
the East ; and the Soma which inebriates Indra, the rain-god,
and the divine race is said to * come in a stream purified by
the lightning.** s This clearly denotes the coming of Soma
as the time when the rains of Northern India begin at the
summer solstice. Manu says the Soma offerings are to be
made at the end of the year, and that animal sacrifices are
to be offered at the solstices, called Turayana;^ and as
animal sacrifices form part of the Soma ritual, and as the
Soma festival, which opens with an invocation to Indra, the
rain-god, as the god of the sacrifice,^ is a feast to the god
who brings the rain, it must originally, like the present
festival to Juggemath at Puri, which is the most universally
frequented religious feast in India, have been held in the
hot weather, before the rainy season, in order to secure good
rains. That it was one in which rain was prayed for is
1 Rigveda, ix. 85, 10 ; Hillebrandt's Vedische Mythologies pp. 354, 389.
- Tait, Samh, ii. 4, 10, 3 ; Hillebrandt's Vedische Mythologies p. 55.
^ Rigveda, ii. 13, I.
* Ibid, ix. 82, 3.
^ Ibid, ix. 84, 3 ; Eggeling's Sat. Brdh, Introduction ; S. B. E. vol. xxvi.
pp. xxii. xxiii.
® BUhler, Manu. iv. 26; vi. 10; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp. 133, 200.
" Eggeling, Sat, firdh, iii. 3, 4, 18 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 85.
ESSAY III 163
shown by tlic prayer of tlie sacrificcr during the initiation
ceremony (diksha)^ when he asks the gods to * make the
crops full-eared,' ^ and by the advice given, that to secure
good rain, one of the oxen who draw the Soma cart should
\ye black,* It is the Indian year of five seasons to which the
sacrifice is offered, but the first offering made at the recep-
tion of Soma is that of a cake baked on the fire-altar.* This
is said to be the mother-earth, called in the ritual Aditi, or
she who is without (a) a second (dtii) the beginning of all
things, who lived before man was bom, and brought forth
living things to dwell on the earth by her own inherent
vitality. This altar when consecrated becomes Vedi (know-
ledge), and it is directed to be made in the form of a woman ;
to measure a fathom on the west side, and at least three
cubits from west to east, though it may be more. It is to
be constructed in the middle like a woman, and to be nar-
rower on the east than on the west side, and to slope to the
east, the holy quarter whence the rain and the dawn comes.*
ITie altar when made is consecrated by the Adhvaryu, the
ceremonial priest, who sprinkles it with holy water, and
takes the sacred grass which is to cover or thatch it from
the Agnidhra, or fire-priest. This grass, called the 6arAw,
is the Kusha grass (Poa cynosuroides\ said by Hindu tradi-
tion to be given by Kam, the god of darkness (Rdma\ to
his son Kush, the ancestor of the Kushika, or tortoise race,
whose kingdom, stretching on both sides of the central
mother-mountain from the Ganges to the Euphrates, was
symbolized in the mother-altar. Seven sheaves are made
of this grass. Three of these, the three races, arc used
for thatching the altar, three are held by the sacri-
ficer, his i^ife, and the priests; and the most important
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh. iii. 2, I, 3; S.B.E. p. 33.
- Eggeling, .Sla/. Brdh. iii. 4, II ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 78.
' Eggeling, iii. 4, i, 14, 15 ; S.B.E. p. 88.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iii. 2, 3, i, 6, 19; iii. 7> 2, i ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
pp. 47. 49» 5J. 175-
* lading, Sat. Brdh. L 2, 5, 14-17 ; S.B.E, vol. xii, pp. 62, 63,
164 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sheaf is the fifth, the prastara^ or cleansing sheaf,^ the
bunch of hyssop of the Jewish ritual, representing the
tree of life. It is made of three united sheaves, the three
united seasons, and flowering shoots are added to each sheaf.*
It denotes the cleansing and purifying rains, and is used in
prayers for rain ; for the sacrificing priest, when asking for
rain, must hold the prastara in his hand while he repeats
the prayer, *0 heaven and earth, may Mitra and Varuna
favour thee (the sacrificer) with rain/* This use of the
prastara enables us to trace the origin of tribal sacrifices
to those made by the agricultural races to the rain-god, for
the prastara is the baresma of the Zend ritual, which, before
it took its later shape of a bundle of thomless twigs, or a
cleansing besom, was a single twig or magic wand, * as long
as a ploughshare and as thick as a barleycorn,'' usually cut
from a pomegranate, date, or tamarind-tree. This 'the
faithful man ** was to hold in his hand while offering sacri-
fices to ' Ahura Mazda, and the Golden Haomas.** * In the
sacrifice to the New and Full Moon, which is treated in the
Brahmanas as the model sacrifice, the Adhvaryu gives the
prastara to the Brahman or priest of the spiritual father-
god Brahma while he is thatching the altar, takes it back
when it is thatched, and holds it while laying the fire on
the altar.^ He lays round the fire in the centre of the altar
a triangle made of three paridhis or enclosing sticks of
green wood, placing the Western stick first ; the Southern,
sacred to Indra, second ; and the Northern, sacred to Mitra-
Varuna, last.® These, in the New and Full Moon ritual, are
^ Eggeling, So/, Brdh» i. 3, 3, 4 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 84 note 2.
'•* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 5, i, 18; S.B.E. p. 389 note i.
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brdh. i. 8, 3, 12; S.B.E. p. 241.
** Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vettdiddd Fargard^ xix. 19; iii. i; S.B.E.
vol. iv. pp. 22 note i, 209.
^ Eggeling, .9a/. Brdh. i. 3, 3, 5, 12; Kdty, ii. 7, 22; S.B.E. vol. xii.
pp. 86 note i, and 87.
* Eggeling, Sat^ Brdh, i. 3, 4, 2-5 ; S.B.E. pp. 50-91.
ESSAY III 165
ordered to be made of Palasha {Buteajrondosa) wood,^ which,
as I have shown, is the tree sacred to the Desauli, or village
god of the Ho Kols and Gonds, and whose leaf was brought
to earth with the Soma by the Shyena bird.- But the Soma
paridhis must be made of Karshmarya (Gmelina arborea)^^
which is also permitted to be used in tlie moon sacrifices.
This is called in Bengali Gum-bar, and Gum-adi in Tamil,
or the tree of the Gumi or house-pole : it grows on the
mountains, and will never rot in water.* This enclosing
triangle is said to represent the three former supreme gods,
or the mother gods of the three races wlio preceded tliat
which made Agni, the fire-god, tlieir supreme god. They
are said to be placed round him to protect him from the
thunderbolt of Indra, the rain-god, symbolised by the Vashat
call or summons to the sacrifice addressed by the Hotar, or
pourer of libations (Aw), to the old gods after the ydjyds^ or
offering prayers, and just before the offerings are poured on
the fire.* The ritual here depicted is that of a sacrifice to the
rain-god to secure good rains, and tlie Vashat call is really,
as it is said to be in the Brahmanas, the Varshat, or rain
prayer of the people, who called the Soma plant Varsha-blm,
or bom of the rain (varsha)? After the enclosing sticks
have l)een laid round the fire the next process is to kindle
it. In doing this, the Adhvaryu places on the altar the
^ Eggeling, ScU. Brah. i. 3, 3, 20; S.B.E. pp. 89, 90.
- Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. i. p. 327 ; Eggeling, Sai.
Brah, i. 7, I, I ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 183.
' E^eling, Sat, Brdh. iii. 4, i, 16; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 89.
* Clarke's Roxburgh's Flora Indica^ p. 486.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brah, i. 5, I, 16; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 135 note i.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, i. 5, 2, 18; S.B.E. vol. xii. \\ 143. Professor
Eggeling calls this derivation fanciful, p. 143 note 2, and in p. 88 note 2,
he derives it from Vah^ to carry up, and explains it as a call to Agni to carry
up the libations to the gods. This is doubtless an etymolc^y which is scienti-
fically exact for the word Vashat, which is that substituted by the later
ritualistic reformers for the original Varshati. It is this latter word which is
clearly required to fit in with the ritual, which is, as I have shown clearly,
that of a sacrifice to the rain-god.
166 THE' RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
lowest of the two kindling sticks, toucliing with it as he
does so the Western enclosing stick. This kindling stick
is called Ur-vashl, the ancient (ur) fashioner (vcufhi\ tlie
mother of the sacred fire. This is made of Khadira wood
(Acacia catechu), taken from the sacrificial stake, to which
the slain victim is bound.^ He says, ' Thou art the birth-
place of Agni,"* and lays on it, with their tops to the East,
two stalks of Kusha grass, which are called Vrishanau, or
the organs of generation.* The upper stick, which is first
called Ayu, the son of Ur-vashI, he first dips in ffkee, or
clarified butter, and then kindles the sacred fire by twirling
it round, as if churning, in the lower kindling stick, by a
string twisted round the cross-bar placed on its top, calling
it as he does so Puru-ravas, the Eastern Thunderer, or roar-
ing god {ravas\ who was the hasband of Ur-vashi.^ The
Adhvaryu then lays on the altar two stalks of Kusha grass,
called vidhritiSy with their tops to the North, and places the
prastara on them ; but in the Soma sacrifice the vidhritis
are made of sugar-cane, and the prastara not of the succulent
and nourishing Kusha or Durba grass (Poa cynosuroides), but
of the Ashva vala (Sacchantm spontaneuvi), or horse-tail
grass, called in tlie vernacular Kasha. It is a tall, reed-like
grass, sprouting when the rains first fall, and lias round
its flowers a circle of white silvery liairs, which fall down
below them like snowy horse-tails.* Therefore it is a fitting
emblem of the sons of the horse, who came down from
the snowy North and made their guiding stars the Ashvins,
* Eggeling, Sat, Brah, iii. 4, i, 19-22 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 90 note 5,
and 91.
'•* Ibid. iii. 4, 2, 21 ; i. 3, 4, 10; ii. 5, 419; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 90;
vol. xii. pp. 92, 389 note 3.
^ Ibid. ii. 5, I, 19; iii. 4, I, 20-22, voL xii. p. 389 note i ; vol. xxvi.
pp. 90 note 5, and 91 ; also see vol. xii. p. 294 note 3. The fire was pro-
duced by a process like churning. The Arani, or fire-drill, made of Ashvattha
{Ficiis religiosa) wood, being twirled repeatedly round, till the fire is lighted,
by a string fixed in a cross-bar at its top. Tliere arc two specimens of the
orthodox fire-drill and sockets in the Pitt Rivers' Museum at Oxford.
** Ibid, iii. 4, i, 17, 18 ; vol. xxvi. p. 89 note 3.
ESSAY 111 167
or heavenly horsemen (Ashva\ the twin stars of Gemini, wlio
are called the Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests and physicians
of the gods, and tlie leaders of the Soma sacrifice.^ It was
these Ashvins also who made the Khadira tree a sacred tree,
for it yields not only the red catechu dye, which replaced
the blood used to vitalise the altars ; but also the catechu
extract, a most valuable medicinal drug. Similarly the two
vidhriti^ of sugar-cane mark the race of the Iskshvaku, or
sons of the sugar-cane {Iksha\ as one of the races whicli
founded the Soma sacrifice.
While the fire is being kindled, the Hotar recites the
eleven kindling verses, a number which I shall show to be
sacred to the Ashvins, and the Adhvaryu pours silently a
libation of ghee to Praja-pati, the lord (pati) of former {pra)
generations (ja), marking by it a line from the north-west
to the south-east of the fire-triangle, and when the Hotar
proceeds to invite the older gods, the Adhvaryu moves from
the north to the south side of the altar, and marks with
another libation of ghee a second line in the triangle from
the south-west to the nortli-east, crossing the first, and thus
the sacrificer dedicates to Indra, the speaking or thundering
god, saying, ' Om ! for Indra this, not for me,** showing that
the rain-god comes from the south-west with the south-west
monsoon, which brings the rains. The Adlivaryu then lays
on these lines the lower kindling stick from north-west to
south-east, and places across it the fire-drill from south-west
to north-east.^ He thus makes the triangle a picture of the
mother-land of Northern India, stretching from tlie Panjab
in the north-west to Bengal in tlie south-east, macle pregnant
by the rains coming from the south-west. By this series of
ceremonies the altar is completed, and its figure is as shown
in the accompanying diagram.
* Eggcling, Sa/, Brah, i. I, 2, 17 ; iv. i, 5, 8 and 15; S.B.E. vol. xii.
p. 16 ; vol. xxvi. pp. 274, 276.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brah, i. 3, 4, 5 ; i. 4, 4. 2-7 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 91
note I, 124 note I, and 128 note 2.
168 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
South
A, the western Paridhi ; B, the southern, sacred to Indra,
the rain-god ; C, the northern, sacred to Mitra Varuna.
D. E. The line
North
from north-west to
south-east, on which
the mother Urvashi
is placed, who is
shown in the Pre-
face to be the mother
goddess of the year
of three seasons.
F.G. The line from south-west to north-east, by which the
rain and father-god comes.
H I, the two vrishanau of Kusha grass, symbolising the
passage of the people who consecrated the altar from west
to east.
This elaborate ceremonial tells us that the fathers and
mothers of the race who framed the ritual entered India from
the north-west, and settled in the land watered by the rains of
the south-west monsoon, for the western enclosing stick (A) is
the first that is laid down, and it is this which is first touched
by Urv^ashi, the fire-mother of the race, before it is placed
on the altar, while it is the Northern stick which is placed last.
This represents the race which subsequently joined the
Western immigrants, and who worshipped the gods of heaven,
Mitra the moon-god, and Varuna the god of the raining (var)
heaven, and also of the dark nights. The whole tells us how
the worshippers of the fire-god, whom I shall show to be the
Maghadas, entered India from the north-west, prospered
there, cultivated the country, and reckoned the lapse of time
by the inter\'al between one rainy season and another, and
how they were joined afterwards by the Northern race, who
completed the figure of the tortoise-earth, and called themselves
the Kushikas, or sons of Kush, the tortoise, and reckoned time
by the phases of the moon (mitra) and by the stars of Varuna.
But the people whom these two immigrant races replaced were
ESSAY III 169
those who worshipped the older trinity of the three mother
seasons represented hy the triangle ; and the history of the
religious revolution which replaced the worsliip of the three
older gods by that of the thunder-god, who impregnated
the rain by the heavenly fire, the liglitning flash, is told in the
£rahmanas in the story of the consecration of Nabha-nedishtha.
The name means that which is nearest (nedishthd) to the navel
{ndbhd). He complained to his father Manu (the thinker),
called Praja-pati in the lligveda, that his brethren the
Angiras, the offerers of burnt oiFerings {afiga) had deprived
him of his inheritance. His father said that the Angiras,
the priests of the earthly deities, wanted, but did not know
how, to get to heaven. If he told them that they could
attain their wish by reciting the two hynms Rigevda, x. 61,
62, they would on their departure give him his inheritance,
that is, allow him to be the supreme-god iiLstead of their
gods. Of these hymns, Rigveda x. 61 tells us how Nabha-
nedishtha was born from the union of Prajapati witli his
daughter, the earth, and how on l)is birth he claimed to be
supreme god, saying (v. 18, 19), ' This our navel is the
highest. I am his son. Here is my liome. These gods (the
old gods) are mine. I am the first twice bom son of the law **
(of nature). Hymn 62 is addiessed to the Angiras, and calls
on them in the refrain of the first four stanzas ' to receive the
son of Manu,** here called Narasliaihsa. Narashamsa is the
Zend Nairyo Sangha,^ called the Yazad of royal lineage, who
guards the seed of Zarathustra, and intrusts it to the care of
the goddess of the ever-flowing, undefiled spring of water, the
stream of time, Ardvl Sura Anahita, who is to l)etlie mother
of his sons Hushedar, Husliedar-Mali, and Soshyans, the
prophets of the future.^ Narfisliaihsa is the never-dying heat
which makes tlie life-giving water pregnant, and is thus the
1 Haug,*yl//. Brdh. v. 2, 14 ; vol. ii. pp. 341, 342; Tait, Samh, iii. I, 9,
4, 6. Rigveda^ x. 61, 62, Ludwig*s Translation.
- Mill, Yasnas^ xvii. ii ; West, Bundahish, xxxii. 8; S.B.E, vol. xxxi.
p. 258, vol ; V. p. 144.
170 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
father <»f all life, called in the Sirozahs ' the god Naityo
Sangiui who dwells in the navel of kings,' ^ who is also called
' the messenger of the gods.' * The fire and lightriing-god
who came to earth as the miraculously bom sacrificial flanie
Nabhii-nedishtha was, we are told in the Aitareya Brahmana,
the successor of Rudra the red (rud) god of the sacrificial
stake, reddened with the blood of his victims, who was the
father of the Maruts, tlie wjnd -goddesses.^ Rudra claimed
the ])lace allotted by the Aflgiras to Nubhu-nedishtha, but
gave up his claim when the latter allowed that Rudra used to
rule the sacrifice.
Tliis story tells us that a race who made the Maruts or
wind-gcxldesses their gods, placed in tlie
centre of their sacrificial altars, the place
formerly occupied by Rudra, the sacrificial
stake, the fire iwrn of the fire-mother,
Ur-vashi, the wood taken from the sacri-
ficial stake. The central altar-fire was
the god called Agni jatavedas, or Agni,
who knows (vedas) the secret of birth
( jata), whom the Hotar at the fire-sacrificv
a<1dresses in the words of lligveda, iii. 29,
i : ' We place thee, O Jatavetlas, in the
place of Ida (the mountain-daughter of
Matiu) in the navel (nabha) of tlie altar,
to carry our offerings,' Hence the Western
race, whose father-god was Agni, was
one whose mother-goddess was Ida, the
daughter and wife of Manu, as Nabha-
nedishtha was his son. The central fire,
which in their eyes vitalised the altar, formerly reddened by
blood, became in Greek mythology the fire-god Herakles,
married to Omphale, the navel. This god of the navel.
Daimcst.
;ter, Zeiuiaztsta Sirozah, i
i. 9; S.B.E. vol. ^
DarmesH
;ler, VendiJad Fargard, :i
xii. 7! S.B.E. vol.
Kigvedi,
. ii. 33. '-
ESSAY III 171
the son of the primaeval mother, was in Greece the god'
Pytho, the dweller in Delphi, the womb or holy shrine
of the Grecian race, who was the son of the abyss (fiv06^\
from whence his name is derived. This was the fhom of
Genesis, the dark void in which the Spirit of God moved on
the face of the waters, and went up in a mist which watered
the face of the ground,^ and made it capable of bearing
living things. But it is not only echoes of this Indian myth,
but also the ritual which explained and preserved it, which
is found in Greece. It appears in the image of Apollo
Aguieus, which was a triangular block of stone, and still
more conspicuously in the sketch on page 170 of the leaden
figure of the goddess of the earth-altar, found by Dr.
Schliemann in the second city from the bottom of the six
cities, built one over another, on the site of Troy. This
exactly depicts the Hindu altar, made in the form of a
woman, with the Svastika or holy fire, ^ the sun of the
revolving year in the centre of the triangle. Its great
antiquity is proved by the fact that the city in which it
was found was one built near the beginning of the Bronze
Age, as all tlie weapons and instruments in tliat below it,
except a few bronze knife-blades and hair-pins, are all of
stone.2 The myth and ritual appear also in the universal
worship throughout South-western Asia of the triangle as
the sign of the Supreme God, which I have described in the
Preface ; in tlie triangular altar of the Stone Age, depicted
on the Babylonian Uranographic stone, as the altar of Nebo,
or Nabu, the prophet-god, and the planet Mercury ; in the
Hittite sign for Istar, which is a triangle, as shown in the
symbol on p. 172 depicted in the Hittite Hamath inscrip-
.^ tion, representing the moon cow-fish above the triangle
Istar ;^ and in the sign for woman, used both in the
' Gen. i. 2 ; ii. 6.
' Schuchardt*s Schliemann*s Excavations^ fig. 6o, p, 67 ; also pp. 37, 38.
' This information is taken from an address on * The Nature of Hitiitc
Writings,' delivered before the Oriental Congress of 1892, by Mr. T. Tylor.—
/■
in THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
inscriptions of Gir-su {Telloh\^ and by the ancient Chinese.
This triangle r^> repeats not only the sign on the
altar, but also tlie line drawn from west to east by the
two stalks of Kusha grass, and this
agreement marks it as connected with the
Kushite or tortoise myth, and as a symbol
of a race descended from a divine mother.
The ideograms of the Assyrian Nebo or
Nabu, the prophet-god, and his Akkadian
form Nuz-ku, who was the messenger
who tells la of the waning of the
moon,^ give us further evidence of the
order of development of these ideas. That of Nuz-ku jifz ]^
means the sceptre, or dawn, ^jfp. and ]^ seat or prince,^
or the sceptre of tlie prince of the dawn, that is, the king
of the East, whence the rain and morning light come, while
the Akkadian equivalents of the two ideograms of the
Assyrian Nabu, are Sak and Suk, meaning the wet-god.*
We thus see that it was the East, the home of the rain-god
and tlie morning dawn which was made tlie mother of a new
race by the coming from the West of the fire-god, the god of
the life-gi\ing lightning-flash. The Eastern meeting-place of
the tliree races from the south, north, and west, was the
mother-mountain or the Ida, called the centre of the sacri-
fice, and wlio is also the mother-tree ; and it is Ida, Main, or
Bharati, and Sarasvatl, who are the three mothers invoked
in the eiglith stanzas of the sacrificial Apri hymns in the
Rigveda, recited at the animal sacrifices. Tliese three fomi
the mother-triangle, and in the Apri liymn (Rigieda, iii.
Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists^ vol. ii.
Semitic Section, p. 260.
^ Amiaud et Mechinseau, lableaii Comparic des Ecritnres Babyloniennes et
Assyrienues^ No. 163, p. 65.
^ Lenormant, ChalJaan Magic ^ p. 206.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 236, 222, 462.
* Ibid. Nos. 231, 347.
ESSAY III 173
4, 8), Bharati is summoned to the sacrifice with her sons,
Ila and Agni, with men, and Sarasvati with her sons, who
traced their descent to the rivers, bom from the mother-
mountain. Thus Bharati is the mother of the matriarchal
village races. Ida or Ila, of the fire-worshippers, and Saras-
vati of the immigrant agriculturists from the North, who,
quitting the lower hills on which the earlier farmers had
tilled their crops, descended into the river valleys, learned to
control the floods, and to store for irrigation the water which
had been thought to be invincible by their predecessors. It
is their successes which are recorded in the myths telling us
of the conquest of the river gods. As for Ida or Ila, she
appears in the myth of Manu's flood as the purified goddess,
the mother of cattle, generated at the close of a year out of
the life-giving waters by the heavenly seed of clarified butter
{ghee)y sour milk, curds, and whey, whicli Manu threw into
the waters.^ But the name Ida, as is shown by the cerebral
d, is not a primitive Aryan word, but one of which tlie origin
must be looked for in Dravidian roots. The Tamil form of
the word is Eda^ a sheep, and this word appears in Sanskrit as
the Eda or Edaka^ the ewe and ram sacred to Varuna, the
god of the rain {var\ and called in tlie ritual of the Varuna
Praghasah, or summer festival, Varunals victini,^ and in
Egyptian theology we find the transition from the ewe- to
the cow-mother, and from the ram- to the bull-father, ex-
plained in the Hibis hymn, which makes Osiris the goat-ram-
god of Mendes, called the fruitful ram of tribes, tlie fatlier
of the son of the moon-cow Isis.^ It is as the slieep-mother
that Ida supplies the woollen sieve through which the Soma
is strained, called, among other names, Anvani Meshyah, the
sieve of the ram, in which the Tamil word mesham^ a goat,
is reproduced, but made to mean not the goat, but his suc-
^ Eggeling, ScU, Brdh, i. 8 ; i. 7, 20 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 2i8, 223.
^ Eggeling, Sat, Bdahy ii. 5, 2, 15, 16; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 395.
* U. Brugsch, /Religion und Mythologie der Alien /Egypter, p. 309.
174 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
cesser, the ram.^ It was thus as tlie lieavenly sieve that she
l)ecaine the mother-goddess of the rains, the plural Idah, the
Apsara, or cloud-mothers, the mother of the races who are
the sons of the goat, the sheep, and the cow. This is the
central sacrifice to the seasons in the New and Full-Moon
sacrifice, where the sacrifices are oiFered in the following
order : (1) to the Samidhs or kindling sticks, the spring,
the mother Ur-vashi; (2) to the Tanunapat, the self-
created, the wind-god, the god of the burning west winds of
summer ; (3) to the Idah, or rains ; (4) to the Barhis, the
sacrificial grass of the sons of Kush, the autunm ; and (5) to
Rudra or Agni Snshtakrit, the most hallowed {svishta)^
Agni, the winter-god, the god to whom animal victims were
offered.^ These gotls who accepted living victims are Agni-
Soma, Agni-Somau, Indr-Agni, Ashvinau, Vanas-pati, Deva-
Ajyapa, or the gods of the age of twin-gods, which I shall
j)resently describe ; the gods to whom the life-inspiring fire,
Agni-Soma; the life-giving water and fire, Agni-Somau ; the
rain and fire-gods, Indr-Agni ; the twin-stars of Gemini ; the
sacrificial stake, Vanaspati, or lord (pati) of the forest
{vanu) ; and the goat (rtyi)-father, Ashvinau Deva Ajyapa,
are sacred.^
The course of the process which changed the goat to the
ram- and bull-father, and the sheep to the cow-mother, is
also marked by the early marriage customs which, as might
be expected when the persons united belonged to the alien
races of the matriaR»hal Southern women and the patriarchal
Northern men, show most distinct signs of the fusion of
inimical tribes. First, there are everywhere traces of
marriage by capture, but the chief sign that the marriage
was the conclusion of peace between two hostile races is to
l)e found in the custom of blood infusion, or the making
of blood-brotherhood, which is actually practised in the
' Rij^veda, ix. 86, 47 ; I lillcbrandt, Vcdischc Mythologies p. 203.
' Eggeling, Sat B rah. ^ i. 5, 3, 9-13 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 146, 148.
' Haug, Aitareya Brahmana^ vol. ii. pp. 95, 96 note.
ESSAY III 175
Khewut Kurmi and Birhor marriages,^ and whidi is the
origin of the custom of sindurdan^ or marking the parting
of the bride'*8 hair with vermilion, the binding ceremony in
all orthodox Hindu marriages, from that of the Brahmins
downwards, except some of those in which the hands of the
wedded pair are bound together with Kusha grass,* for these
having been already united as sons of the tortoise, require no
fresh introduction into the tribe in which thev are married.
This union of alien races in marriage is also denoted by
the custom observed in Russian Esthonian and ancient
Roman marriages of placing the bride on a sheep'^s skin.
But when this custom filtered down into India the sheep-
mother had become the bull-father, and hence in the mar-
riages of the Grihya Sutras, the bride, on entering her
husband'^s house, is always placed on a red buIFs hide as a
sign that she was received into the tribe and family ^ of her
husband, descended from Rohini, the red cow. It is this
custom of placing the bride on a bull's hide which appears in
the Soma sacrifice, when the pressing-stones, the womb whence
the god Soma is to be born, are placed on a bull'*s hide/
But in order to understand clearly how the sheep-mother,
Ida, became the mother of Agni, the fire-god, as she is called
in the Apri hymns, we must go to the original birthplace
of the fire-myths, the land of Phrygia, the mountain countries
of the Caucasus range, and the snowy heights whence the
Euphrates, the mother-river of the Shus, rises. It was
there that the earliest shepherd races, the sons of the fire-
god, and of Yima, the father shepherd of Zend theology, met
the matriarchal races, the immigrants from the South-east,
* Risley, Trides and Castes of Bengal , vol. i. pp. 138, 456, 532.
* These are the Bhandaris, Chasas, Khandaiis, Kochh, Savars or Souris.
* Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Sdnkhdyana Grihya Sutra/i. 16, l.Asvaldyana,
i. 8, 9. Godhita, ii. 3, 3; S.B.E. vol. xxix. pp. 41, 171; xxx. p. 47 ;
Winternilz, 'Indo-European Marriage Customs,' Papers of International
Folk Lore Congress^ 1891, pp. 273, 274.
* Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologies pp. 181, 183; Rigveda, ix. 79, 4, x.
94,9.
176 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the Hindu village conini unities, wlio are called by the Greeks
tlie Amazons, and are described as the earliest ruling races of
Asia Minor and Greece. They are the Cananites or dwellers
in the low country, and the Hivites or the villagers of the
Bible, and the race of the Acha^ans of Greece. These are the
sons of e;^*?, the serpent, the having or holding (e;^©, to have)
snake, the girdling snake of cultivated land which surrounded
the Temenos or inner shrine, the holy grove of the gods. It
was these people who had brought from India their village
institutions, their holy groves, and seasonal dances. The
Satyrs, or mountain shepherds, whom they met in the valleys
of the Phrygian Ida, were the people who called themselves
the sons of the mountain-goat, and worshipped the goat-god
Pan. It was among these people that the Fmnic mining
races, the inventors of the wonder-working fire, descended.
They were the race called Briges or Bruges in Thrace, and
who also gave their name to Phrygia.^ They are the
Phlegyes of the Greeks, whose father-god the Cyclops, the
one-eyed fire-god, was slain by the Branchian Apollo, called
Hekebolos, tlie fire-darter, the roaring god of storms,- the
Apollo of Mysia and the /Eolian race, and tlie father-god of
Troy. It was in Phrygia that they were mixed with the
Daktuloi, or race of handicraftsmen and artificers, the sons
of the god Dak,^ the showing or teaching god, the Hindu
god Daksha, father of the wives of Kashyapa, the father of
the tortoise (Kiish) race. They were the carpenters and
builders of the Stone Age, and, therefore, the measuring rac4?,
and hence their name of Mygdones, the men of the club, the
Hindu Mugda, the measuring rod, the magic wand, the
original praMara^ and it was their union with sons of fire
that made the father of the united races to be Akmon, the
^ MUller, Die Dorter^ Preface (Einleitung), §§ 6 and 7, pp. 7, 8 and 10
note 2.
- /bid, book ii., chap, vii, § 8, p, 323 ; Branchian is from ^pbrfxpi^ the
throat, and means the roaring-god.
' The root appears in bdKWiu, to show, and the Latin doceo^ to teach.
ESSAY III 177
anvil. They were the great building race of the Stone Age,
who called themselves Iberians or Eber, and their congeners,
the Iberian Basques, still call their knives asztoa, or the little
stone, their axes aitzkora^ or a stone (aiiza) lifted up (ffoj-a^
high), a pick -axe, aitz-urra^ or the stone which tears {una).
It is also these people who call copper urraida, the Akkadian
uritd; but this name, which in its ideogram means the seed
metaV was not the original name given to it by the Finns,
the first workers in metal, which was Vaski.* The root of
this name appears in tlie Greek Feaap^ spring, and in the
Hindu spring-god Vasuki, wlio, as I shall show, was a
foreign importation who replaced the old Gond god Sek-Nag,
the Shesh-Nag of the Mahabhurata ; Shesh-Nag being placed
in the lower regions of the eartli to support the tortoise^
while Vasuki churned the amrita^ or waters of immortality^
from the ocean, by twisting the rope wound round Mount
Mandara, and it was this god Vas-ki who was tlie god of the
Basques or Vasks, the first workers in metal, and the first
farming races in Europe. It was he who made the seasons
by which tliey regulated the cultivation of their crops.
These early builders built the huts witli the pole {gumi) in
the centre, and these reproduced the beeliive huts of Phrygia,
excavated in the hill-sides, and roofed over by rafters cover-
ing it in a conical form.^ They were the sons of tlie father^
pole, the supporters of the house. They were also the
Neolithic farmers of tlie ancient world, whose remains, found
in places so widely separated from each other as the caves of
Wales and Yorkshire and the Neolithic villages of Switzer-
land and Italy, prove that they kept horses, short-honied
^ The sign for urud ^ST reproduces that for/« (the marsh) ^ with the
addition of the two initial signs of the tree ^f and ^ is a variant form of
"y^ =the sign for the god Dav-kina or Shus, the snake-mother of Dumu-zi.
Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 177, 221, 223, 321, 470.
' Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples^ translated by
Jevons, Part iii. chap. vi. p. 187.
' Schuchhardt*s Schliemann's Excavations^ p. 151.
12
f
178 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
oxen, liorned sheep, goats, and pigs ; and grew wheat, barley,
millets, peas, flax, fruit-trees, and vines from stocks which
must first have been grown in Southern Europe and Asia
Minor, for the vine is an indigenous plant in Armenia, and
barley was raised from a grass prototype in the country
between North Palestine and Lydia, the home of the sons of
Yima, the heavenly twins, who, as I shall show, were the first
growers of barley ; and barley is a Basque grain, for Mr.
Crawfurd tells us that the names for wheat, barley, and oats
are purely Basque.^ They were also the first spinners,
weavers, and makers of pottery, and built canoes, and worked
in mines.^ These men covered the whole of Europe and
Southern Asia, especially the lands of Bashan and Moab to
the east of the Jordan, and the Indian Dekhan, with crom-
lechs, or stone circles, which were certainly in some cases
roofed over, dolmens, meaning stone tables, slirines, and
altars, tumuli and memorial stones or pillars, and all of
these, whether found in Western Europe or Southern Asia,
are completely identical in their character.^ These people
had in their migrations established an active and wide-
spread foreign trade, for it is only by this means that we can
explain the presence in the Neolitliic tomb of Carnac in
Brittany of eleven beautiful jade axes, the number sacred,
as I shall show, to the twin races, made of jade brought
from Turkistan in Western China.^ Their name Eber has,
like other ancient racial names, assumed various forms, such
as those of the eldest son of the old Erse father-god. Mil.
He appears as Emer, Eber, Ira, lar, and Ir, and it is
^ Crawfurd, Plants in reference to Ethnology; Trans: Eth. Sor. vol. v.;
Buckland, Anthropological Studies, p. 85. See also Preface.
2 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man of Britain^ pp. 266, 268, 293, 298, 300,-302.
Also an Article by the same author, Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1892 ; * The
Settlement of Wales ; ' Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 2nd Edition, chap. vi.
pp. 166-214 f Von Bradke, Uber Methode tmd Ergebnisse dcr Arischen Alter-
thums Wissenschaft, Part ii. pp. 276, 280.
^ Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 2nd Edition, chap. v. p. 129 ; also p. 104
note. * Ibid, p. 155.
ESSAY III 179
apparently the second of these variant forms which is the
name of the father of the Hebrew race, Eber, while the name
Ir survives in the Hebrew name for city, just as the root bri
of the name of the Thracian Briges in that of Bria or Brea,
the Thracian city. Their migrations and divisions are traced
in Genesis in the genealogy of the Shemites, the dwellers in
Arpachsad or Arpa-chesed, a name which Dr. Sayce shows
to mean the land (arpa) of the conquerors (kasidi).^ It was
in this land of the upper waters of the Euphrates that
Shelah, the son of Arpachsad, whose name means the spear
or fire-drill,* was bom. He was the father of the weavers
and potters, who were afterwards the sons of Judah.* And
also of Eber, the father of the Iberian race, who gave the name
Iberia to the Southern division of the Caucasus, watered by
the river Kur, or the tortoise river, and now called Georgia.
It was his sons who separated into two races, in the days
of his son Peleg, one section going east with Joktan, and
the other proceeding down the Euphrates. It is the story
of this division {PeUg) which is told us in the myth of the
father with two wives, which has come to us from the
Caucasian mountains. The father-god of these people was
the god called by the Akkadians Lam-ga, of which Naga-r
is perhaps a dialectic form ; and by the Hebrews Lamech.*
He is the Hindu god Linga, the god of the sign of sex. His
two wives are called Adah, which is the Assyrian Idu, the
Akkadian Id, and Zillah, the Akkadian Tsil-lu. It is they
who are reproduced in the two daughters of the Zend Yima,
who were first the wives of Azi-Dahaka, of the biting snake
of the land of Bauri or Babylon, and afterwards of his con-
queror Thraetaona, the Trita Aptya or Apam Napat, the
third {Trita) son of the waters (ap) of the Rigveda. They
^ Gen. X. 21-25 ; Sayce, Bypaths of Bible KrwwUdgey ii. * Fresh light from
Ancient Monuments.'
' Gesenins, Thesaurus^ pp. 14, 16, s.v. * Shelah.'
' I Chron. iv. 21, 23.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Led, iii. p. 185 note I, 186.
180 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
are called in the Zendavesta Savangha-vach, or she who speaks
the speech (vach) of the East {savah\ and Erinavach, she who
speaks the speech {vach) of Era or Ira, the Western sheep-
mother. It was their progeny who separated to the East and
West. The sons of Ira or Ida being the shepherd sons of Adah,
and those of Tsil-lu, the mother of the race {lu) of the holy
snake Tsir, are the artisans and handicraftsmen, the sons of
Tubal Cain, the first smith, the Turanian sons of Savangha-
vach, mother of Turan.^ But the history of the Iberian
races, like that of other ancient totemistic tribes, is to be
found in the distribution of the worship of these totems, the
animal eaten by them at their tribal sacrificial feasts. The
totem of the men of the Iberian races, whose qualities they
sought to acquire, was the mighty boar, the untamable and
indomitable king of the forests, who dies facing his foes and
fighting to the last, and that of their women the prolific
sow. It was these aspirations after the courage and fertility
of the pig which made our Iberian ancestors eat of the
board's head at the annual New Yearns festival, and which
originated the festival held by the Egyptians on the 15th
Pachon, answering to the 31st March, in honour of the sun
and moon, or, in other words, of the union of the two great
races of the West, who formed in Egyptian parlance tlie
complete eye of heaven. It was then that both pigs and
antelopes were eaten.^ The antelope was the totem fatlier
of the race of the sons of Nahor, the river Euphrates,
descended from Peleg, for Nahor was the father of Terah, tlie
Akkadian dara^ the antelope,^ which passed to India as the
Rishya, or black antelope of the Brahmanas. Tliis Egyptian
spring festival corresponds to that of Aphrodite, held in
Cyprus on the 2nd April, when swine .were sacrificed ; and
^ Darmesteter, Zendavesta Abdn Yost 54 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 62 note 2 ;
Gen. iv. 20-23.
* H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien yEgypter^ p. 462.
' Gen. xi. 24, 25 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887 ; Lect, iv. p. 280 ;
F. Delitzsch, Assyrische Studien^ p. 51.
ESSAY III 181
swine are the animals offered to her as the great mother-
goddess in Argos, Thessaly and Athens.^ The pig was in
Egypt especially sacred to Set, whose name, the overthrown
(St) god,* was given him when he was vanquished by Horus,
and it was Set, in the form of a pig, that is, as the fire-god,
who is said to have blinded the eyes of his antagonist.^ The
Dosadhs, the Behar priests of the fire-god Rahu, always offer
pigs to him, and eat them afterwards.* Adar the fire-god of
the Babylonians is called Lord of the pig, and the name of the
* pig-god** is given to Rimmon, the god Mermer of the
Akkadians and god of the four winds, when he is worshipped
as Matu or Martu the West-wind.^ Istar herself is also in
one of her avatars a pig-goddess, for as Lady of the Dawn,
she was called Bis-bizi, a reduplicated form of peSy a pig.^
Pigs were the sacrificial animals of the Greek Phlegyes, and
swine were offered to the corn-mothers, Demeter in Greece,
and Ceres in Rome,^ and the reason given for sacrificing the
two pigs oflfered at the Roman Arvalia to secure the fertility
of the soil, proves that it was a sacrifice of the early Bronze
Age ; for it was said that they were slain to cleanse the holy
grove, in which the sacrifice was held, of the impurity caused
bv the iron or metal used to fell the trees.® The use of the
pig as a lustral animal has its origin in Phrygia, the country
whence the Indian fire-worshippers, the Bhrigus, came to
India, and pig^s blood was used as a bath to cleanse the
guilty from sin by the Phrygians, Lycians, and Greeks.®
Lastly, it was pigs who were sacred to Kirke, the sorceress,
* Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites y Lect. viii. p. 273.
' H. Bnigsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten ^gypter^ p. 702. St
means ' to throw down,' ' to throw away. '
' Ibid. pp. 702, 460.
♦ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal , vol. i. p. 255.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 153.
• Ibid, Lect. iv. p. 258 note 2.
' Encyclopadia Britannicay Ninth Edition, Art. * Ceres,* vol. v. p. 345.
8 Ibid Art. * Arval Brothers,* vol. ii. pp. 671, 672.
» IHd, Art. • Phrygia,' vol. xvii. p. 853,
182 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the beautiful witch of the Odyssey, who appears among the
Phcenicians as Asthar No'^ema, the Greek Nemannum, or
Astronome, the Naamah of Genesis, who was sister of Tubal
Cain.^
We thus see that the Iberic race were a united body of
artisans, handicraftsmen, and warriors, who worshipped the
fire-god, and were the inventors of sorcery and magic. Tliey
were the sons of Maga, the witch-mother, whose descent
among, and rapid conquest of, the Southern races, caused
them to be remembered as Kasidi, the conquerors. But they
were also the people who substituted personal marriage
for the matriarchal customs of tribal marriages I have
already described, and made the family the national unit.
It was as the animal consecrating marriage that Etrurian
married couples, as we learn from Varro, sacrificed a pig at
their wedding,'^ and it was they wlio told the history of the
meeting and union of the Northern and Southern races in
the myth of the father, the house-pole, with his two wives,
one of whom, like Tsil-lu or Zillah, belonged to the
Southern snake (7V?>) worshipping races (lu). This house-
father of two united races appears in one hymn in the Rigveda
as Vishnu, the boar who is slain by Indra, the rain-god,
while stealing the food of the gods,^ and in another 6is the
three-headed six-eyed boar slain by Trita,* the Vedic form of
the Zend Thraetaona. Azi Dahaka, the snake-god slain
by Thraetaona, the Zend rain-god, has also three heads and
six eyes, and it is he who has two wives like the Vedic foes
of Indra. For Sushna, the snake of droughts, called also
Ku-yava, or he who gives bad (ku) barley iyava) harvests,
Na-muchi, the non- (no) deliverer {muchi) of rain,* and Ahi-
Shuva the swelling (simva) snake, the storm-cloud which
* Lenormant, * Genealogies between Adam and the Deluge,* Contem'
porary Review^ April 1880, p. 575.
'* Varro, De Re Rustica^ ii. 4 ; De Gtibarnatis Die Thiere^ German
Translation, chap. v. p. 343.
3 Rigveda, i. 61. 7. * Ibid, x. 99, 6.
° Benfcy, Glossary^ s.v. * Na-muchi.'
ESSAY III 183
does not give up its rain, all have two wives. ^ The names of
the wives of Shushna or Kuyava are Anjasi, the nursing
mother, the Ida of the Apri hymns, and Kulishi, the flowing
streams ;* the Sarasvati, whose sons peopled the banks of the
rivers which rose in the mother-mountain in the East. These
wives also, like those of Azi Dahaka, are taken over by the
conquering god Indra, and are known as Vrishakapayi, the
mother of the rain (vrisha) ape {kapi)^ the wind-god, Hanu-
man and the Maruts, and Suchi, the pure Soma, or the life-
giving rain. And these myths, telling of the triumph of the
rain-god, tell us not only of the union of the Northern and
Southern races, but also of the religious revolution which
took place when the Northern fire- worshippers reached the
land of the rain-god, rebelled against the fire-god, and the
thraldom of his priests, the magicians, and found out that
the rain-, and not the fire-god, was the supreme author of
life. But the first rain-god worshipped was the capricious
god of North-western Asia, where rain is scanty, and it was
he who was the rain-god of the early magicians ; the boar-
god of fire, who would only give up his rain when compelled
to do so by magic arts. He is by the Vedic name Shushna,
identified with Shukra, the rain-god of the wet land (Suka),
for Shush-na and Shuk-ra come from the same root, Shuk
or Suk (wet), the northern guttural becoming, according to
the phonetic laws of Sanskrit, the sibilant sh.
I must now, in order to make the history of this religious
revolution clear, trace the course of the fire-worshipping
magicians from the mother-land of Asia Minor to India,
Assyria, and Egypt, and show how the rain-god, whose visits
to earth were, in the rainless lands of Central Asia, precarious
and uncertain, and wlio was, therefore, not looked upon as
a merciful and loving father, became in India the god who
1 Rigveda, v. 30, 9 ; x. 144, 3 ; viii. 66 (77) 1-6, 45, 4 and 5.
» Ibid, i. 104, 3.
' Ibid, X. 86, 13. Grassmann, IVorierbnch zum Rigveda^ s.v. * Vrisha-
kajayi.'
S* THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
K'stowed his benefits freely and with unvarying regularity
iMi the fortunate dwellers in that fertile land. The sons of
"rulwl Tain, the workers in metal, were, as Gresenius shows,
the |HH>plo ctilU*d Tubal and Meshech both in Ezekiel and
on Assyrian monuments, Moschi (Moaxoc) and Tibarenes
(TkiSiififfvoO by Herodotus, the dwellers in the land of
Mf^^>^.* They are called in Genesis the sons of Japhet,
whiVHO name, like that of his Egyptian father-god Ptah,
moans the opener.^ They are the dwellers in the land
calltnl MoKchia by Adrenus, lying between tlie Caspian and
Kuxini* Sea. This was defended from the attacks of the
Northrrn tribes by a wall, still called the wall of Yayuj and
Mavuj, and (iesc^nius connects the name Mag-og with the
Sanskrit root rnah^ meaning the great one, which is only
anoUuT form of the name Maga, or of the mother called
Mahi in the Apri hymns. She again, under the name
llharati, meaning she who conceives (Jjhrt\ is the mother-
gtHl(h*ss of the believers in the village-mother, and the union
of Ihr I wo shows the coalition between the matriarchal earth-
>uM'Nhipping and the patriarchal fire-worshipping races. As
(hi* Mioth(T-Maga slie is the maker or kncader,^ the mother
of Ihr building and constructing races. They were the first
biiilitrrs of towns, where they and the cultivating races
(Miuld live together, and their advent gave greatly in-
iMH'MHrd activity to the trade heretofore carried on between
lilt* liirnicrs and shepherds. Their progress southward can
\\\y I riu'cd through the land of the petroleum springs to the
mini li west of the Caspian Sea, called in the Bundahish Atard
Patiiliiui, the land of fire {Atar\ the Persian province of
Aihir bigfui. This was watered by the Araxes, the Daitya
III' wfond mother-river of the Zendavesta, the DitI or second
• (jisjtnius, Thesaurus^ p. 1498, s.v. 'Tubal;' EzekicI xxxviii. i.
J liibriiiiis, Thesaurus, p. 1 188, s.v. 'Japhet ;* H. Brugsch*s ^^//^Vjw nnd
\i\tholoKie iUr Alien Aigypter, p. 55. They lx)th come from the tooipatah,
* III Illicit,' ^Jcn. X. 2.
•' 1 'uriiuji, Griechische Etymologic^ No. 455, p. 325.
ESSAY III 186
mother of Hindu mythical genealogy, the mother of the
Daitya races, the Maghada sorcerers. This is described in
the Zendavesta as the land of witchcraft, for it was poisoned
by Angra Mainyu, who put in it a serpent, and the Daitya
river 18 said in the Bundahish to be, of all the rivers, the
most full of noxious creatures.^ It was there their priests
took the name of Magi, by which they have ever since been
known, and it was in this land of natural wonders that they
perfected the system of spells, incantations, omens, and
amulets, which had been gradually accumulating for ages, as
the most cherished part of their national knowledge, and
became enslaved to the thraldom of the magicians, sorcerers,
and witches, which pressed so heavily upon the people of the
countries where it was made the national form of religion. It is
tlie spells, charms, and incantations of their priests, the Magi,
which form the principal part of the oldest ritualistic writings
in the world, the oldest forms of the magical hymns of the
Akkadians, of tlie Hindu Atharvaveda, of some magical
poems in the Rigveda, and of the magic songs of the Finns,
who have always been looked on as the great magicians of
the North. In Assyria it was their god Adar, the fire-god,
the Akkadian Mer-Mer, the god of the mid -day sun and
burning west wind, the origin il Bel of Nipur rising from the
shades of night, who was the wild boar who slew Tammuz
or Adonis.* This myth tells us both of the close of the
old and the beginning of a new year with the rainy season,
and also of the religious change which made the miracle-
working father of fire supreme over the sons of the mother-
moimtain Istar and the father-goat Mul-lil. It is a repro-
duction of this same myth which makes the victory of Indra
over Sushna, and Thraetaona over Azi Dahaka, tell us both
of the defeat of the destructive god of the burning summer
by the god of the rains, and also of the revolution which
' West, Bundahish^ xx. 13: Darmesteter, Vendiddd^ i. 3 ; S.B.E. vol. v.
p. 79 ; iv.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 152 note i ; Lcct. ii. p. 103.
186 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
dethroned the conquering fire-god and made the rain-god
the supreme god. It was in Phrygia and Assyria that the
self-mutilating phase of fire-worship assumed most promi-
nence. This custom probably arose at first in the same way
as an analogous custom has arisen among the Australian
tribes, from a wish to restrict the birth of children to the
number for which food could be provided. It was, as
Herodotus tells us, very common among the Scythians,^ and
still survives among some Tartar tribes. It received a special
impetus from the institution of fire-worship in Western Asia^
where the temples of the fire-god were, like those of Istar at
Erech, crowded with priests who had unsexed themselves to
become like the fire-god ; and it was here also that the
harem, with its eunuch guardians, was formed. This last
custom was one that grew out of the changes made by sub-
stituting perpetual union under one roof, or within one circle
of huts dwelt in by the father and his wives, for the matri-
archal system of separation between the father and mother.
The change, which made a woman the forced associate of a
husband whom she shared with others, must have been
peculiarly hateful to those women who had been co-equal
rulers with their brethren in these village homes, and must
have taken a very long time to effect. That it was not
carried out to its ultimate consequences of the complete
subjugation of women in Akkadian times is proved by the
Akkadian laws which have come down to us. For these
make the mother superior to the father in the relations
between parents and children, and reserve to the wife her
separate estate, while among the Finns it is the wife who
takes precedence of the husband in the rites of domestic
worship.- This acknowledgment of female equality and of
female right to reverence is a relic of the first forms of per-
manent union between the sexes which produced the mar-
riages of mutual affection which are tliose most common.
^ Ileroii. i. 105.
* Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ p. 185.
ESSAY III 187
among some Indian aboriginal tribes, such as the Ooraons
and Mundas.
But though the fire- worshippers were the leaders of the
conquering patriarchal races, a scarcely less important share
in the formation of their institutions must be assigned to
the hunters and shepherds. It was to them that the dog
was especially sacred as their chief ally and guardian. They
brought to India the various species of dogs which are still
prized as sporting dogs. The parents of the half-grey-
hound breeds, called Rampore hounds in the North, and
Polygars in the South, and the mastifF-like boar-hounds
which are used by the Bunjaris, or tribes of bullock carriers,
for guarding their convoys and hunting the pig. It was
they who made the dog the messenger of the gods, the
Sanima of the Rigveda,^ the Hermes of Greek mythology,
bearing the caduceus or magic wand, and the four hounds,
or the four winds sacred to Merodach in his earliest form of
the fire-god.* The sacred dog appears in Egypt in Anubis,
and the third of the four sons of Horus, called Tua-mutf, or
he who worships his mother, as the Finns did, and both of
these are jackal-headed gods. That the dog was a sacred
animal to those people, who, like the early fire-worshippers
and agriculturists, deified the seasons, is proved by one of
the hymns describing the division of the seasons by their
guardians the Ribhus, which ends with saying that Basta, the
goat, had appointed the dog to waken them.'^ It was these
tribes of sorcerers, led by the dog, who were the race to
whom the authorship of the second Mandala of the Rigveda
is attributed; for it is called Grt-Samada Bhargava Sau-
naka, and these names, according to Ludwig and Brunn-
hofer, mean the book * belonging to (grt) the collected
(mm) Median race {Medah)^ the sons of Bhrigu {Bhargava\
the fire-god, belonging to the dog {Saunaka\^ and the
^ Rigveda, z. io8 ; i. 62, 3.
« Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 287, 288.
* Rigveda, L 161, 13. * Bninnhofer, Iran tind Turan^ vii. I, p. 152.
188 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
reverence of the fire-worshippers for the guardian-dog is
shown in the custom observed at all Parsi funerals, that the
corpse should be accompanied by an official leading the dog
which is brought to protect the dead person from the
attacks of the Nasus ; the Greek vckv^^ the corpse demons.^
This title of the second Mandala of the Rigveda shows us
how the Thracian Briges came to Media and India as the
sons of Bhrigu, and it is they who are said in the Rigveda
to Miave first found fire by the help of Matarishvan, the
fire-socket,^ and to have brought it to men,^ and placed it in
the navel of the world * or, in other words, placed it in the
mother-mountain of the East, the meeting-place of the sons
of the goat and the village mother, as the sacred Shu stone,
the Salagramma of the Hindus. This generating fire became
the Hindu rain and thunder-god Shukra. The Finnic
god Uk-ko, and the Hindu Ush-ana, who is also called
Bhargava, or the son of Bhrigu. They also sacrificed the
dog as well as the pig to the fire-god ; for though Herodotus
tells us that no Magian will kill a dog,^ yet the prohibition
to kill wantonly does not forbid the sacrifice of the animal,
but rather enjoins it, for the totemistic animal is that which
can only be lawfully killed as part of a ceremonious sacri-
fice. Thus the Rigveda tells us of the sacrifice of Shuna-
shepa, whose name shows him to be the son of a dog
(Shufm)y who was bound to three sacrificial posts (drupadas).^
The Spartans also off^ered dogs to Ares, and the Romans to
Mars, at the Arvalia, besides two goats and a dog to Innuus
at the Lupercalia.^ Dogs were especially sacred to the
Tyrean Melgarth and the Athenian Hercules, for his shrine
* Tide, Outlines of the History of Afuient Religions, * Religion among
the Eranians,* § io6, p. 174.
- Rigveda, x. 46, 2 ; i. 60, I ; iii. 5, 10.
^ /Ifid. i. 58, 6 ; i. 195, 2. * Ibid. i. 143, 4.
^ ncrodotus, C//V7, 140. * Rigveda, i. 24. 13.
Jincyclopicdia Britannica, Ninth Edition, * Ares and Lupercalia,* vol. ii.
p. 485 ; XV. p. 96.
ESSAY 111 189
at Athens was called Cynosarges, or the dog*'s yard.^ It
was as the sons of Caleb, the dog {halb\ who killed the false
gods of Southern Palestine, Shesh-ai, Ahi-man, and Tol-
mai,* and of his brother Ram, the god Rama of the Hindus,
the son of Ab-ram, the father {ah) of the dark heights
{ram\ the mother - mountain, that they descended into
Palestine, and became by their union with the Shus, who
appear in Genesis as Shua, the wife of Judah, the fathers of
the tribe of Judah. His name, meaning * praised,** is the
counterpart of the|^Hindu name of the fire-god Nara shafilsa,
praised {sam-sa) of men {nara\ and as the fourth of the sons
of Jacob he takes the place of the fire-god. It was at the
city of Caleb, called Caleb-Ephratah, that Hezron, the
father of Ram, died, and Caleb, in one of the genealogies in
Chronicles, which calls him the brother of Shuah, is said to
be the ancestor of Ir-nahash, or the city (/r) of the Nags, a
race whose origin 1 will trace presently, and it was from this
confederacy that Shelah, the father of the weavers and
potters, was bom in the land of Arpa-chesed.'
After they had consolidated their power, and organised
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites , Lect. viiL p. 173 note.
' These names have proved an undecipherable crux to Hebrew Lexico-
graphers, and are certainly not Hebrew words ; but Shesh-ai is the same
name as that of the Hindu snake-god Shesha, who supports the tortoise
earth, and who was first Sek-nag, or the wet-god. Ahi-man, again, re-
produces the Sanskrit Ahi, which is the Sanskritised form of £chi-s, the
mother-snake of the Greek Achaeans, the having or holding snake, and Ahi,
the child-snake, is a name of the Egyptian Osiris (H. Brugsch, Religion und
Mythologie der Alten Mgypter^ pp. 288, 413), while Tol-mai contains the
name of the Akkadian Tal-tal or Dddal, meaning * the very wise,' one of the
Akkadian names of la. One of the early mythical kings of Telloh, is called
Tal-tal-kur-gulla, the wisdom {tal-tal) of the great i^ttlla) mountain of the
East {kur) (Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 28, note 2 ; As-
syrian Grammar Syllabaryj No. 16). The names would appear to mean,
Ahi-man, the child-snake, son of the snake Shesha and the wise {tal) mother
{mai), and to be another form of the mythology of the birth of Dumu-zi, the
son of life, from the mother earth, encircled by the girdling snake, and this
interpretation is the more probable, as we know that the early religion of
Palestine cam^ from Babylonia.
* I Chron. ii 10-16, 18, 25; iv. 11, 12, 21-23; ^c"> xxxviii. 2.
190 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
their forces, in the land of fire, the sons of Maga went south-
ward into Assyria, and eastward to the Oxus, subduing the
land as they went, and it was on the banks of the Oxus that
they took the name of Vahlika, from their settlement at
Balkh. It was thence, by way of Herat, on the Harahvaiti,
the original Sarasvati,^ that they came down into India.
Their progress is described in the Zendavesta, where they
are called Keresavazda, or the people of the horned (keresa)
club (vazd(i\ the allies of Frangrasyan, the Turanian king.
They conquered and slew Agraeratha, the king of Sauka-
vastiin, whose name, meaning the leader of the foremost
(offra) chariot, denotes the goat-god who, according to the
Rigveda, drew the chariot of Pushan,^ the god of the black
cloud, called in the Bundahish Pashang, father of Aghrae-
ratha, and destroyed the govenmients set up by Kavi Usha,
another form of the goat-god, and father of the Kushite
kings. They killed Syavarshan, son of Usa, who ruled
Kang-desh or India, for the Northern Punjab is still called
Kangra, and thus made themselves masters of tlie land of
the Five Rivers.^ They were there known not only as the
Vahlika, the sons of Vahlika, brother of king Shan-tanu,
the father of the royal races of India, whose name means
long (tanu) work (Shan) or long-enduring time, but as the
Takkas, Tugras or Trigartas. As tlie Takkas they still
form one of the most powerful and wealthy tribes in the
Punjab, the founders of the great city of Taxila, the Hindu
Takka-sila or rock of the Takkas, taken by Alexander the
Great. Their name of Takkas, or Takshas, meaning the
makers or artificers, which is connected witli the Akkadian
tuk^ a stone, is derived the root tvaks^ from which the
^ This is the birth or the mother-province of the holy land of the Zenda-
vesta. 'DzxuiQsiQitx^ Zendavesia Vettdiddd Fargard^ \. 13; also Introductory
Note, S.B.E. vol. iv. pp. 7, 2.
2 Rijjveda, vi. 55, 6.
' Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yost, xi. 71; xii. 77; Farvardin Yast^
132; \NQSiy Bmtdahish, xxix. 5; xxxi. 25; Bahman Yast, m. 26; S.B.E.
vol. xxiii. pp. 303, 304, 222; also p. 64, note i ; vol. v. pp. 117, 136, 226.
ESSAY III 191
name of Tvashtar the primaeval creating-god of the Rigveda,
is formed. From Takka-sila they came southward to the
country of the Madras, or intoxicated (mcui) people, whose
capital, called Sakala or Sailgala, the city of the united tribes
(&inga\ is situated between the rivers Chenab and Ravi,
on the stream now called Ayak, which is the Apaga of the
Mahabharata, and the Apaya of the Rigveda.^ Their father
king in the Maliabliarata is Shalya, or the son of the Sal-
tree, the parent tree of the Dravidian races. They give us
a distinct clew to their origin in their mythic genealogy, for
they call themselves the sons of the two Nagas, or horned
snake, Takht-nag and Basak-nag (Vasuki), or the sons of
the race of artificers and of the Basque spring-god Vas or
Bas. They worship three gods, Shesh-nag, Takht-nag, and
Basuk-nag, under the symbol of an iron trident or tri-sula, the
homed club, called Keresa-vazda in the Zendavesta. These
are generally from three to six feet long, some being as
much as thirty feet high, having a wooden staff, enclosed in
an iron sheathing.^ But before these Takkas were the sons
of the Nag or water-snake, they, on their first entry into
India as the sons of the witch-mother Maga, called them-
selves the sons of Kaikaia; for it was from her, as the
mother mountain, that the Turanian Gonds, who still call
themselves Koi-tor, or sons of the mountain {ko\ took their
name, which they have left behind them in the Persian Koh.
But the name Koi, when it passed from a tribal surname into
historical legend, became Kai-kaia, and she was the mother
of Bharata, the half-brother of the god Rama, both of them
being the sons of Dasaratha, king of Ayodhya, he of the ten
(dasa) chariots {ratha\ or the ten lunar months of gestation.
He, like the other father-gods of the age of the fire-wor-
shippers, had two wives, Kai-kaia and Kansh-aloya, the
^ Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India^ pp. iSo-i86; Rigveda, iii.
* Oldham, * Serpent Worship in India,* Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society^ July 1891, pp. 361, 362, 387, 388-32a
192 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
mother of Rama, whose name means the house {cUoya) of the
Kushikas ; and the Rama myth, which tells us that, on his
father'*8 death, that is to say, in the fulness of time, Bharata
ruled Ayodhya before Rama, is a legendary statement of
the well-known fact that before North-western India was
called Kosala, or the land of the Kushikas, it was called, as
it frequently is still, Ganda or Gonda, the country of the
Gonds,^ just as Central India, called in Sanskrit Maka-
kosala, is called in common parlance Gondwana. When
Bharata, in the Ramayana, visited his mother-land, he
came to the country whence the five rivers of the Punjab
rise, and this is the land of the five mysterious bowmen,
called in the Mahabharata the Kai-kaia brothers who, in the
wars between the Kauravyas and Pandavas, reduplicate them-
selves, and fight on both sides.* It was from these mother-
mountains of the Indian Gond race that the Gonds, called
the sons of the squirrel, are said, in their national epic of the
Song of' Lingal^ to have been brought by their father-god
Lingal, the god of the Linga, whom I have already shown to
be the Hebrew Lamech. He took them from this land where
the Jumna rises to the Iron-valley of Central India, where they
were united with the forest matriarchal tribes, the growers
of rice, the daughters of Rikad Gowadi, the squirrel {rik) or
tree {ruJc) father-god of tlie village {gozca) races,^ whose
history I have traced in Essay ii. It is these sons of the
squirrel, the first Turanian immigrants, whom we find in the
Bhuyas of Central India, the Khandait Paiks of Orissa and
the Musahars of Behar, all of whom call themselves the
sons of the squirrel Rikhiasan or Rikmun, which is also a
token of the Kharwars, Mundas, and Rautias.^ The god of
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, p. 408.
' Mahabharata Udhyoga Parva, Ivi. p. 202.
3 Ilislop, Aboriginal Tribes of Central India, published by the Govern-
ment of the Central Provinces, where the Song of Lingal is given in full, with
a verbal translation.
* Rislcy, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 112, 113; vol. ii.
Apiicndix i. pp. 79» io7» 123.
ESSAY III 193
the Gonds, as described in the Soiig of Liiigal, is like the god
of the Takkas, the god called Pharsi, meaning the trident.
The rules for its construction, given in the Sovg of lAngal to
the Gonds, who succeeded the first immigrants, show the
origin of the worship. Two men of the drummer tribe
called Dahak-wajas, were sent into the jungle to cut a
female hill-bamboo, and into this was fixed an iron trident
called Pharsi Pot. The socket-bamboo and the trident
Pharsi was tlien consecrated by being bound together by a
chain of bells, the sign of the bell god Gliagara or Gangara,
and this is baptized by pouring a pitcher full of daru
(spirits) over it. It then becomes Pharsi Pen or the female
(pen) trident {Phars\\ the sexless fire-god, with his two
wives, Manko Rayetal and Jango Rayetal. But this god,
which, we are told in the Song ofLingal^ is the god of the
reformed Gonds, is not the original god of tlie first immi-
grants. This god, however, is still worsliipped by the
Gonds in the form of a javelin, the Shelah or spear of the
Jewish genealogy, cased in a female bamboo, and coated
with Kusha grass, like tlie sacrificial stake of the Soma
sacrifice, which was girt with three ropes of this grass at a
level with the sacrificer^s navel,^ while his two wives, as the
trident god, were originally the wives of the tiger-god
Rayetal, who, as Vyaghra, the Sanskrit tiger-god, became
the uniting father of the Vajjian or tiger- race, formed by
the union of the Mallis or mountain tribes with the
Licchavis or trading races, whose capital was Vesiill. It is
this god of the bamboo pole, which is that which is said in
the Mahfibhiirata to have been set up by King V^asu, the
father god of the Takkas on the Sakti mountains. But this
god of the Indian Vasu was, though similar, yet different
from the original Gond god, for Vasu''s pole was a single rod
or pole of the male bamboo, the Ashera or rain-pole of the
Jews, and we see in it evidence of the changed belief which
made the rain-god the father-god in place of the fire-god.
^ Eggcling, Sat, Brdh. iii. 7, I, 19, 20; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 172.
13
lJ)t Tin: lirUNG RACES OF PREHLSTORIC TIMES
Ami it was this reli<^ions change whicli led to the worship of
the Nasra or rain-snake. I have already shown that the
snake-father of the snake races in Greece and Asia Minor,
and of the matriarchal races in India, was the snake Echis,
I he holding snake, the Vritra, or enclosing snake of the
Rigveda, the cultivated land which girdled the Tenienos.
This was I he Sanskrit and Egyptian snake Ahi, and the
(iennan Kcke or Ekkhart,^ the true-hearted knight who sits
«MiUide I he hill of Venus, the matriarchal village, the home
of legalised concubinage, and warns Tannhauser against
ent(*ring il. Hut the Naga snake was not the encircling
Nunke, hut the offspring of the house-})ole, and in this form
it was t'/dled l)v the Jews the husband or Ra^d of the land.
Hut as the heavenly snake it was the old village snake trans-
ferrcd to heaven, called the Nag-kshetra, or field of the Nags,
inid I here it was the girdling air-god who encircled the cloud-
niolhers, the Apsaras, the daughters of the Abyss, the
ANsyrinn Ai)su, and marked their boundaries as the village
MMiike did those of the holy grove on earth. Hut cm earth
(he water-snake was the magical rain-pole, called the god
l)/irli/i,.M't up by the Dravidian j\Irdes in front of every house.-
Ilr and his wife Dharti Mai are worsliipped every year at the
full moon of Magh, the witch-mother/^ I'wo branches of
llir Sid-lrce are placed as their images in the centre of the
Akra or dancing-ground, and the villagers dance round them
hliouting ' Hur, bur** {Pudendum maUchrc\ a cry which means
tivmbolicallv may they have many children. 'J'hese two <jods
ari* worshipped sometimes in the male form and sometimes
ah the female, and sometimes as the god l)es-auli, the village
guardian, called Jahir Hum or Jahir Era by almost all
Dravidian and Kolarian tribes, Bhuyas, Hhumij, Cheroos,
llos, Kharias, ]\Iundas, Ooraons, and Santals.* It is to
' Nfannhardtf Gennauische Mytheu^ pp. 210. 93.
*■' Kisley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. ii. p. 57,
* ////»/. vol. ii. pp. 70, 71.
' il'U. vol. i. pp. 1 15, 124, 202, 327, 468; vol. ii. pp. 103, 104, 146, 147, 232.
ESSAY III 195
Dharti that the Kharias sacrifice pigs, and they are the
guardian gods of springs and watercourses, called dhara.
The name of the god Dhara survives in the Rigveda, wliere
it is constantly used to denote the stream of Soma.^ But in
the hymn to the Ashvins it is specially connected with the
rain-gods, the seven Gandhar\'a Soma guardians, and the
reform consequent on his worship, for it is said the Sapta
vadhri (the seven eunuchs) by their prayers obtained the
dhara of Agni.- Dhara is translated ' sharpness,** but the
connection between the dhdrd and the seven guardians of
Soma, the life-giving rain, clearly shows that the poet means
that Agni, the heavenly fire-god, the god of lightning, sent
down streams of water in answer to their prayers, and in
this passage we find the consummation of the doctrine of the
new theology that the parent gods were Agni -Soma, the
twins, the lightning which, with the cloud -mothers, bring
forth life-creating rain. But we find in Akkadian theology
further evidence of the Northern origin of the god Dhfira, for
dara, meaning the antelope, is a name of the Akkadian
rain-god la. He is called 'the antelope of dara of the
deep,** ' the antelope the creator,** and this antelope, the son
of the rivers, is, according to F. Delitzsch, called in Genesis
Terah, the son of Nahor, the river Euphrates,^ and the
father of Ab-ram, the father (ab) of the heights (ram) of the
race of Eber, collected round the mother-mountain of the
East. It is the same genealogy which is exactly prescr\'ed
in the Hindu legend of Rama, for he is the successor of
Bharata, the son of the witch-mother, the fire- worshippers,
the children of Lamech, and his mother, Kaushaloya, is the
mother house {aloya) of the Kushite race, the Indian
Kushika, who made the mother-mountain of the East the
centre of the tortoise earth, and it was these people who,
like the Egyptians, traced their descent^Jto'the boar-god, the
^ Rigveda, ix. 2, 3, 16, 7, 58, I. ^ IbicU viii. 62, 9.
3 Sayce, Hibhert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 282* F. Delitzsch,
Assyrien Studien^ P> 5I>
196 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
fire-god, and the river antelope. As for the name dara^ it
is iipparently derived from tlie Munda word da, water,
which became the Gond daru^ the fire or creating (n/)
water {da\ the spirits used to consecrate their god. It is
the transition stage from the worsliip of intoxicating spirits
drunk by the wizard priests to the woi*ship of the pure
water of life tliat we have still further to consider, and in
doing this we must trace the progress of sacrificial ritual.
We have already seen that in the female altar in the form oi' a
woman it is based on phallic worship, combined with the wor-
ship of the mother-mountain, reproduced in the raised female
altar made to slope to the East. I have also shown how the
ruling idea of the formation of alliances between stranger
tribes by the interfusion of blood made this the binding tie
between the Northern husband and the alien Southern bride.
It is the same idea of the interfusion of blood which appears
in the custom, almost universally observed by the early
slayers of animal victims, of making its blood flow into
the trench round the altar made by digging out the earth
used to raise the central mound. As the victim slain was
tlie tribal totem, it was held that its blood, when in-
terfused with the earth round and under the mother-altar,
consummated an alliance between the sacrificers and the
land. This custom was observed both by the Arabs and
Phcenicians.^ It appears also in the story of the siicrifice of
Shunah shepa,who was to be slain by his father Ajigarta, mean-
ing the pit or trench {garta\ of the goat {aja) and in the sacri-
ficial pit found by Dr. Schliemann at Tiryns in the centre of
the men''s courtyard, as well as in those found in Asklepieion at
Athens, and in tlie temple of the Kabiroi in Samo-thrace.-
It is also shadowed forth in the rules for the sacrifice of
lludraTriambaka, orlludra with the three wives, a god who
exactly reproduces the Gond god Pharsi Pen, who, as the
male god, the shaft of the trident, has the three wives, the
^ Robertson Smith, /Religion of the Semites, Lect. iv. p. 213.
2 Schuchhardt's Sc\\\icm2iTiTC^ Excavations , fig. loi, pp. 107, 108.
ESSAY III 197
female bamboo, Manko Rayetal and Jango Rayetal. The
Triambika, or sacrifices to the three forms of Amba, the
three mother-daughters of the King of Kashi Amba, Am-
bika and Amvalika, is ordered to be made outside the con-
secrated ground, at the north of the sacrificial area where,
as in the sacrifices to Hecate at Athens, two cross roads meet,
showing that it was a sacrifice of a race who recognised the
four quarters of heaven, meeting as the fire-cross in the centre
of the altar. The offering, which is of rice cakes, the oflTering
made to the old mother-gods of the land before Northern
bloody sacrifices were introduced, is to be placed on a palasha-
leaf, sacred to the god Desauli of the Ho Kols, and buried
in a mole-hill.^ Here we find the mother-mountain fed with
the food of the land, and it was this food which was changed
by the Northern immigrants into the blood which vitalised
the land and made blood-brotherhood between it and the
newcomers. These Northern Takkas seem, before they
entered India, to have passed beyond the early stage of
savagery exhibited by the Arab sacrificers, the sons of the
mountain who used to eat their victims raw and drink their
blood ; - but they certainly retained the sacrificial pit, and
in place of the original single pit of Aji-garta, they made
three pits sacred to these gods of the trident. Hence they
gained the name of Tri-gartas or the people of the three (in)
pits {gartas\ the name by which they are always called in
the Mahabharata. It was in these three pits that the
three drupadas or sacrificial stakes, to which Shunah
shepa was bound, in the Rigveda, were placed ; and it was
under the banner of the sacrificial stake, the Yupa, that
Vahlika, the father of the Takkas and his ten sons joined
the army of the Kauravyas.^ But these sacrificial pits, with
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brdh. ii. 6, 2, 5-10; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 438, 440.
* Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites y Lect. vi. p. 210 ; Lect. ix.
p. 324.
. * Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhiskmavada) Parva, Ixxiv. Ixxv. Ixxx. pp. 273,
27S 293-
198 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the stake in the centre of the liill or mole-hill, placed tliere
as the semblance of the motlier-mountain, belonged essen-
tially to the theology of the father-god, and always remained
apart outside the sacrificial area consecrated to the mother-
earth, just as the sacrificial stakes in the Soma sacrifice were
placed outside to the east of the consecrated area,^ For
the Yupa, or sacrificial stake sacred to Vishnu, the boar-god,
is essentially pliallic, as it is directed to be made eight-sided,
the number sacred to the fire-god, and in the form of a
phallus.- The way in wliicli these three pits were to be
placed is described in the rules given in the Grihya Sutra,
for the sacrifice of the spit or roasted ox offered to Kshetra-
pati, the lord (pati) of the fields {kshetra\ called Rudra or
Hara, the wind and storm-god, the father of snakes.^ The
sacrificer was to prepare two huts to the west of the raised
fire altar, the mother-mountain. The ox which was to be
sacrificed called Ish-ana is to be taken to the southern hut,
his wife, the sacred cow, called the Mldh-usliI or bountiful
goddess to the northern hut, while in the middle towards
the east, the calf called Jayanta, the son, the Egyptian bull.
Apis, the later husband of two wives, is to stand. Rice is
offered to the mother-cow on Palilsha leaves, and the ox
is slain, cooked, and eaten by the uterine relations or relations
on the mother's side of the sacrificer.* The sacrifice was to
be offered in the autumn or the spring, and the animal
sacrificed was to be tied by the neck to the sacrificial post,
which in this case was a branch of the sacred Paliisha tree,
girdled with Kusha grass.'* This sacrifice is a variant form
1 See plan of Sacrificial Ground, Eggeling, Sat, Brak, S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
p. 475-
'^ Eggeling, Sai. Brah. iii. 6, 4, 1,9; iii. 7, I, 28 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p|>.
162, 164, 174; Sachau*s AIbcruni*s India, chap. Iviii. pp. 103, 104*
^ Oldc-nberg, Grihya Sutra Ashvalayaiia^ Grihya Sutra, iv. 8, I, 19, 23,
27, 28 ; S.B.E. vol. xxix. pp. 255-251.
* Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Heranyakesin Grihya Sutra, ii. 3, 8, 9 ;
Apostumba, 7, 20; S.B.E. vol. xxx. pp. 220-224, 290-291.
* Oldenberg, Asvalayana GHhya Sutra, iv. 8, I, 2, 15 ; S.B.E. vol. xxix,
pp. 255.256.
ESSAY III 199
of the Gond sacrifice offered by all Gond house-fathers to
Mu-Chandri, the mother-moon, every year at the end of the
rains. He, attended by his family and servants, builds in
a corner of the family field a hut, about a foot and a half
high, wjtli sods, which he thatches, like the altar of the
Brahmanas, with Kusha grass. The two walls are supported
by branches of the Palasha tree with leaves growing on them.
Inside the hut a fire is lighted and a little milk boiled in
an earthen pot till it boils over, and this, with rice, molasses
(goor)^ and millet (kookoo\ are offered to Mu-Chandri ;
while two small holes are made at each side of the hut for
the two wives, and in these wheat, the grain of the Northern
fanner, is sown.^ In this ritual we have the triangular
arrangements of the three paridkis in the fire altar of the
Brahmanas, the calf to the east forming the apex of the
triangle, and it is this form of sacrifice which is united with
that of the oblong altar when the new ritual was introduced
by the fire- worshippers, and the triangularly arranged pits
and huts became the triangle of the paridliM. But this
triangle also represents another, and to the agricultural
tril>e8 the most important phase of evolutionary national
religion, the definition of the year, which, in this case, is the
Northern year of three seasons. The calf represents the
new year, and it is to secure his inheritance that the old or
father-year is slain, for the benefit of the nation and the
fructification of the soil, or, according the Scandinavian
saying, *for the bettering of the year.** The huts which, in
the ritual I have quoted, were placed on the surface of the
ground, were those which had descended from the Phrygian
becj-hive huts which were excavated on the hillside, and
surrounded by the ditch from which the earth used in their
construction was taken, and this cavity formed the sacrificial
pit. This again, as the altar was always placed in the
village grove in the centre of the village, was looked
upon as the ancestral home of the community, in which the
* Elliot, Hoshiiftffabad Sfttlemeni Re port ^ § 99, p. 12$.
aOO THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sacrificial stake took the place of the house pole ; and it was
only under the shade of the central tree, the village temple,
whose roof was supported by the pole, that the tribal totem
could lawfully be killed and eaten. It is a reminiscence of
this belief wliich survives in the name of tlie Bauris, who
look on themselves as sons of the doi^, an animal which they
will never kill.^ These people, who are known as Bauris in
Bengal, are in Raj pu tana called both Baorias and Mughias,
and derive their former name from Baori or Bauli^ a well,
showing tliat they are descendants of the race who consecrated
the well-shaped sacrificial hut to the father-god of the house-
pole.^ Tins name Mughias or Mughas takes us to that of
the Maglia(his of Behar, the subjects of the mythic king
Jara-sandha, the legend of wliose birth I have have already
given. It is they who were the foremost race whose father-
god was the house-pole, and their mother the household-fire,
to which the mother of the family offered a lilmtion at the
festival of the jotda after the winter solstice.^ I have
already shown how they entered the Pimjab as the Takkas,
and tht'ir progress from the north-west to the south-east,
and their conquest of the whole of Northern India according
to the path marked on the altar for the fire-mother. UrvashT
or the firc-altar is commemorated in the legend in the Sata-
patha Bnlhmana, which tells how Miithava, the god who
produces fire by rubbing {math)^ called the Vi-degha or he
of the two countries (drffha), carried under the guidance of
Gotama Raliu-gana, the priest possessed of (ffafia) Rahu
the life-giving fire, Agni Vaisvfmara the household-fire, from
the Sarasvati to the banks of the Sadanira or Gunduk.* He
there instituted the animal festival to Rilhu, the fire-god, the
ascending node of the moon. This is still celebrated by his
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. i. p. 79.
- Hunter, Gazetteer of India ^ vol. xi. p. 415, s.v. * Rajputana. '
Lenormant, Chatdcean Magic y chap. xvi. pp. 248, 249 ; II. J. Wille,
Beskriveise over Silicjords Prastegield i oi<er Teliemarken i Norge^ p. 243.
■* Eggeling, Sat, Brdk, i. 4, I, 14-17 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 105-106.
ESSAY III 201
priests, tlie Dosadhs. In this god Ra-hu we find the begetter
or father-god, Hu, called Ra, the creator, Ra being the god
called by that name by the Egyptians.^ He is also the
Ra-ma of the Hindus, and the Ram of the Jews, whose
name appears in Abram, and in Ram the father of the
tribe of Judah. The date of the feast varies, but it is
clearly regulated by the different times at which the official
year began, and this shows its great antiquity, for it may
be celebrated in the month of Magh, the witches' month,
when the Ooraon, Munda, and Santal year begins, in that of
Aggahun, the month of the winter solstice, when the lunar
year began, in Phagun, to coincide with the solar year, or
in Baisakh, to agree with the Gond year. Preparations for
it must be made on the fourth or ninth of these months, or
on what was evidently the original date, the day before the
full moon, which was looked on as the great creator, the
creating symbol of the fire-god. A hut, four cubits by four,
similar to, but larger than that of the Gond Mu-Chandri
sacrifice, must be built, with the door facing east, and in
this the sacrificing priest must sleep the night before the
sacrifice, on a bed of Kuslia grass. A bamboo platform,
three feet high, is built in iront of the door of the hut, and
beyond it is dug a trench running east and west, six cubits
long, and a span and a (juarter wide and deep, and fire
places are made at the north of the trench. Thus the hut,
platform, and trench stand thus \h\ [p] | t |. On the full
^ H. Brugsch, Rdigioft und Mythologie der Alien y^gypter^ p. 86, derives
Ra from ra, to give, to cause, to make, and the name thus means * the first
cause.* Thus the fire-god Ra-hu was the successor of the Shu-hu, or the
goat-father, and first cause of life, in the theology of the fire- worshippers, and
this is the belief which lies at the basis of the Egyptian theology, for in the
list of the great creating nine gods descended from Tum, the sun of the dark
night, also called Ra, his first children are Shu, which means he who dries
by heating, and Taf-nit, the effluence (H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie
der Alien Aigypier, p. 31, 573). In the Book of the Dead, xvii. 22, the
first children of Ra, who always attend Tum, are said to be Hu and Su, the
Shu-hu which I have already shown to be the primaeval father (H. Brugsch,
Religion wtd Mythologie der Alien ^Egypter, p. 219).
202 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
moon day the trench is filled with mango wood soaked in
ghee^ and two vessels full of boiling milk are placed close to
the platform. The festival begins with a sacrifice of swine,
a ram, wheaten flour, and rice-milk (khir\ which are eaten
at the close of the feast by the worshippers, and washed
down by enormous quantities of ardent spirits. The Dosadh
priest, before he has eaten and drunk, bathes himself on the
north side of the trench, and puts on a new cloth dyed Avith
turmeric, and, going to the trench, worships Rahu on both
sides of it with mystic formula?. The fire is then kindled,
and the Bhukut, or priest, walks three times round it with
his right side towards it, ending at the east end. He there
meets a Brahmin, who walks through the fire before him,
and the Brahmin, on reaching the west end, stirs the milk
to see that it has been properly cooked. The inspired
Bhukut, after walking through the fire, mounts the platform
filled with the spirit of Rahu, and chants mystic hymns,
distributes tulsi-leaves for the healing of diseases, and
flowers to cure barrenness in women, and this is followed by
the tribal feast, which ends in drunken revelry.^ The gods
worshipped by the Dosadhs are — (1.) The son of Bhim-sen,
a reproduction of the god Rudra, or the red (rnd) god of
the Rig>'eda, for his image among the Gonds is either a
stick covered with vermilion, the sacrificial stake, or two
sticks, the fire-sticks, with a figure in front of them ; (2.)
Goraiya, the god of the village boundaries, who with his
two wives, the goddess Bun-di, the forest {bun) goddess of
the uninhabited waste, and Sokha, the witch goddess, the
mother Maga of the village, form the triad worshipped by
most of the lower castes in Behar, and by the women of the
dominant caste of the Babhans, to which almost all the
territorial cliiefs belong.- These fire and magic worshippers,
^ Rislcy, Tribes attd Castes of Bengal ^ vol, i. pp. 255, 256.
- Ibid, s.v. * Amats,* vol. i. p. 18 ; * Babhans,* p. 33 : * Binds,' p. 133 ;
* Dosadhs,' p. 256 ; * Kandus,* p. 416; *Koiris,' p. 504; *Telis,'vol. ii.
p. 309.
ESSAY III 203
who originally called themselves tlie sons of the mother-
Maga, though an inventive, practical, and persevering race,
were also highly excitable, and the ever-present feeling that
they were surrounded with countless spirits, the ghosts of
forgotten and dead races, and of ancestors and enemies,
who were always ready to avenge fancied injuries, added to
the inherited nervous tension of the race. This made them
look on the attainment of a state of spiritual ecstasy, which
gave them insight into fresh methods of conquering their
spiritual foes, as the highest possible human bliss. Accord-
ing to the Finnic creed, each man had in him from his
birth a part of the divine spirit, and it was by freeing this
spirit from the bonds of sense that he became like the gods.
When, after attaining a state of increasing transcendental
ecstasy (tuUu tntoon\ he passed into the highest stage, his
whole being became identified with the divine soul {tuUa
haltiorhin)^ and he then became supreme over the malefic
forces, and identified with the Fravashis or primaeval mothers
of the Zoroastrian creed.^ They were, in the original creed
of the first magic races, three in number, the three goddesses
of the three seasons of the year, the tliree mothers of the
United races, the ruling mothers of the world village, the
Saranyu or wind-goddesses (sar) of Sanskrit mythology,
^ho are the Noms of the North, and the Erinnyes or aveng-
ing-goddesses of Greece. As time passed on and know-
ledge accumulated, the classes who cultivated these gifts of
transcendental ecstasy became a separate order, who diag-
nosed diseases and were able by the inspiration of the gods to
discern the right remedy, who divined the future and gave
advice to those who sought for guidance in complicated
casesy and who, like the Hindu Devapi, the brother of the
great king Shaihtanu, had received from Brihaspati a rain
winning voice.^ But the belief in the creative power of the
divine ecstasy existed long before the special class of magic
priests arose, and found a most congenial home in India,
* Lenormant, ChaUaan Magic, p. 255. * Rigveda, x. 9. 87.
204 THE RULING KACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
where the seasonal dances of the matriarchal races were
accompanied by an enormous consumption of intoxicating
drink. This drink, called illi by the IIos, is made from
rice fermented after it has been boiled, and the receipt for
its preparation is one that is jealously guarded by the
women, wlio thus, as they have told me, were able to decide
when their husbands should be allowed to be drunk. The
Vahlikas, the people of the sacred fire and the sacrificial
stake, when they made their way into the Punjab, found
in their common love of intoxicating drink a passport to
their union with the village races of India. This union
produced that state of society described in the denunciations
of Karna in the Mahtlbliarata, which I have already quoted,
and it is similar dances to these, and the preparations pre-
ceding them, which arc depicted in two hymns of the
Rigveda, one telling us how Soma was made, and tlie other
giving what seems to be a reproduction of one of the choral
songs sung at these festal meetings. In the first hymn
Indra is called on to drink Soma pressed in the mortar, in
the places where the women have, like the Kol women,
learnt the art of preparing it with a manfha^ that is, with a
twirling or churning rod, and where the Soma mortar is in
every house, in short, when evervthiiiG: is made ready for a
Soma feast.^ It is among villages where every one is pre-
paring for the feast that at the time of the Magh festival
of the Ho Kols, who are sun-worshippers, young men and
women of different townships go round successively from
village to village, for weeks together, drinking and dancing
in each, and singing songs, of which the following Vedic
hymn, written by a bard of the race of Priya-medhiis, the
beloved {priya) of sacrifices {medhas\ is an excellent speci-
^ Rigveda, i. 28, 3, 4, 5. Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologies p. 15S,
translates v. 3 and 5 thus : — * Drink, O Indra, greedily the Soma pressed out
in a mortar {ulukhala), where a woman is employed in churning it,* and
* When thou, O Ulukhalaka (Soma-mortar) art engaged in movement in
every house, then cry aloud like the drum of the conqueror.*
ESSAY III 205
men. The verses in the lilting Gayatri metre run thus : —
* When Indra, the rain-god, and I go to the place of the red
one (RtuJy'a), we live for three weeks with our friends drinking
the madhu (intoxicating spirits). Sing to him, sing to him,
O Priya medhas, cry the children, (to him) who is dauntless
as a tower. The cymbals (gargara) sound. The drums
{godhd) resound. The bow-string {pwga) twangs. The
creating force is revealed in Indra (Indrayu Brahmo-
dyutam).''^ The state of excitement accompanying these
dances was and still is looked on bv the Dravidian tribes
as religious inspiration, and hence Sura, the intoxicating
drink which gave both to men and gods greater mastery
over the powers of nature, was always largely consumed at
all religious festivals. Hence, while the Rigveda denounces
drinking in many passages, as in that which says : ' Indra
finds no friends among the rich who drink Sura;'^ yet in
many others it speaks of the gods, and especially the older
deities, as drinking it. Thus, in a hymn to Indra, Higveda,
X. 131, 4, 5, the poet says to the Ashvins, the twin-stars of
Gemini, ' You, O Ashvins, have drunk Soma mixed with sura
{snramam\ with the Ashura Namuchi (he who keeps back
rain) ; Indra helped you with his deeds, as fathers help the
son : so do ye, O Ashvins, help Indra with your wisdom, as
thou (Indra), the skilled one, hast drunk the mixed Sura
^ Rigveda, viii. 58-(69), 7-9. In translating this passage I have followed
Grassmann's translation in v. 7, as he shows that the hymn refers to festivals
lasting, like the Ho festivals, some weeks. As for the musical instruments,
the names are translated by the commentators as gargara^ harp, godha^ harp,
lute, or bowstrings, and pinga^ the bow. But no one who has ever seen these
dances can believe these renderings to be correct. As for pinga^ it is the
bow, but not the bow of the fiddler, but the one-stringed bow with the
sounding gourd behind it, to give it resonance, which is played by the Hos
at these dances. The godha^ which is derived from gOy cow, and which some-
times means the sinews, cannot mean them here, but must mean the Dravidian
drum, which is always beaten at these dances, while the gargara mean the
cymbals, which arc also used, and are the bells gargara used for consecrating
Pharsi Pen.
" Rigveda, viii. 21, 14.
i
206 THE RULING llACES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
{stiramam)^ the Sarasvati, O Maghavaii, hast healed thee
{abhhnak)} The mention of the Sarasvati with the Ashvins
and Indra, clearly refers to the Sautramani sacrifice to these
same three gods. In the sacrifice the Ashvins are called on,
as physicians to the gods, to heal Indra, who had become
drunk witli Soma on the Sarasvati. They gave him Soma,
made, not from spirits, but from the shoots of young grass
(the Kuslia grass), young ears of com and roasted com.^
This festival, called by Shankayana an Asura festival,
marks the coming into India by the route of the Sarasvati,
the Herat river, of a new race who mixed Sura with
Soma or water, and grew corn. This is again referred
to in another hymn of the Vashishtha Mandala to the
Sarasvati. ' When the Purus overcome the two Soma
plants {andhafit) on thy banks, then be thou as the friend
of the Maruts, good to us (the Vashishthas, or fire-wor
shippers), and bring us the good-will of Maghavan (the
son of Magha).* These two Soma plants {andhaat) are, as
we are told in the Satapatha Brahmana, Soma and Sura,
Soma being truth and light, and Sura falsehood and dark-
ness * ; and the two tells us of the beginning of the age of
religious duality, the contest between the gods of the age of
witchcraft, called Surapii, the drinkers of Sunl, the drink
of men, and the gods of heaven, called Somapii, the drinkers
of Soma, or the purer drink of the water of life ; and Soma
and Sura are called man and wife.^ This is the age de-
scribed in Genesis as that in which ' the sons of God saw the
daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them
wives of all that they chose."* ^ This is the age when mar-
^ Hillebrandt, Vcdische Mythologies pp. 245, 246. His reading of the
passage is clearly one more consonant with historical evidence than that of
Ludwii;. - Ibid. p. 253, 254 ; Sat. Brdh. xii. 8, 2, 3.
* Rigveda, vii. 96, 2 ; Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologies 49, 50.
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brah. v. i, 2, 10; Hillebrandt, Vedisclie Mythologie^
p. 49, 50.
^ Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie^ pp. 246, 254; Tail, Br&h. i. 3, 3, 2.
^ Gen. vi. 2, 3.
•^
ESSAY III 207
riage by capture became common. The union between the
two races is ctmspicuously set forth in tlie Vaja-peya sacri-
fice.^ It was a feast to deceased ancestors, like the Olympian
games of Greece, at which diariot races were run. It opened
with the purchase of 2)nrlsruty meaning ripe fruits ; these
were grass, ears of corn, and roasted com, or the offerings
substituted by the Ashvins at the Sautramani sacrifice for
the Sunl which made Indra drunk. These were bought for
lead by the Neslitri, the priest of Tvashtar, and the female
goddesses,^ the gods of the Takkas, from a long-haired man.
The roasted corn, or j)arclied barley, is the offering made at
the Pitriyajfia or sacrifice to the fathers, to the Pitaro
Barishadah, or the fathers wlio sit on the hiwhls of Kusha
grass, and to their successors, the Pitaro ""GnislivatUih,
meaning tliose who burn their dead. These* offerings were
made after the rice offered to the earliest class of fathers,
thePitaral.i Somavanial.i, l)iul been given.^ It was instituted
by a long-haired race ; the Northern people wlio sold or
transmitted the ritual to their successors. The Neshtri
• • •
brings \}vq pansrut he has bouglit through the west door of
the sacrificial ground, while the Vasa-tivari water for mak-
ing the pure Soma is brouglit through the east, and he cooks
tlie grain and the Sura on the south fire, placing the Sura
cups on the east, while the Adhvaryu makes Soma on the
west of the Havirdhana or Soma slied. Seventeen cups, both
of Soma and Sura, are made and offered together on the axle
of the Soma cart by their respective priests, the Adhvaryu
bolding his cups high over the axle, and the Neshtri his
underneath it, with the words, ' they are bound tofjether.'
Then a madhti-graha^ or cup of mead, was given by the
* Sec the ritual as given in the Katya yana^ xiv. i, i ; and Sat. Brdh, v.
4, I, 2y as translated by Hillehrandt, Vcdischc Mythohgh^ pp. 247-249.
The number seventeen seems to show that this ritual belonged to the age
of the year of Orion, when time was reckoned by the revolution of the polar
axis. See Essay ii. pp. 85, 86.
' Kigveda, i. 15, 3 ; ii. 36, 3; Hillebrandt, I'edische Mytliologicy p. 260, 261.
' Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 6, i, 4-6 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 421.
208 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Adhvaryu, and the sacrificer to a man of the Kshatriya or
Vaishya, the warrior, or the trading caste, who sits on the
north side of the Vedi to receive the Sura cups. The Neshtri
goes to him with the Sura cups and gives them all to him
in exchange for the madhu-graha^ saying, as he takes it from
him, ' I buy from thee the rncullm cup/ This he takes and
gives to the Brahman, the speaking or creating (Jbri)^
priest,^ the maker of mantras^ or pregnant sayings wliich
churn out {vianth) ^ the truth. This ritual, when compared
with that of the Sautramani, tells us of the coming of a race
led by the Ashvins, who made barley their sacred grain,
— Kusha grass, the sign of their descent from the Kushitc
race, who substituted mead as the sacred drink for the Sura
of their predecessors, and who looked upon the bees as
sacred and inspired. It was they who were thought to have
inspired the first prophets, as is shown by the name Deborah,
the speaking bee,* given to the earliest Jewish prophetess, by
that of Me\£o-(7at, or bees, given to the nymphs who nursed
the young Zeus in Crete, and to the priestesses of Demeter,
the barley mother.^ This belief is recorded by Virgil in the
lines :
' Esse apibus ]>ai*tcni divinae mentis et haustiis
^Tlthereos dixere/**
The belief apparently arose from the use of mead by the
Finns, as the intoxicating drink used to inspire the magi-
cians. This race of mead drinkers, who made it the drink of
their speaking priests, the mystic enchanters, were a pastoral
tribe who fed their cattle on the Kusha or Durba grass, the
short grass of the green turf growing, not in the swamps,
^ The root bri means to create.
- Hillebrandt, Vcdi^chc Myihologic^ p. 242 ; Kat. xiv. 4, 15,
^ The root math or vianth^ to twirl or churn.
^ Gesenius, Thei,aurus^ p. 318.
® Mannhardt derives Demeter from a Cretan word deaiy barley ; Frazcr,
The Golden Dou^h^ vol. i. p. 331.
** De Gubernatcs Die ThicrCy German translation, chap. iv. pp. 506-50S ;
Virgil, Georg. iv. 220, 221.
ESSAY III 209
but in well-watered and well-drained land, sloping down to
the river banks.
It was their reverence for the madhu or honey drink
which made them call the fire- and boar-god Vishnu Ma-
dhava, or born of mad/iu, and made them make the Mahua
their sacred tree. It is from this tree that the drink called
mudhu is now distilled, but probably before the days of dis-
tillation they made from its excessively sweet flowers, a
liquor which was very like their Northern mead, and which,
perhaps, was the madhuparkay or lioney drink, ordered by
Manu to be given to kings, priests, sons- and fatliers-in-law,
and maternal uncles paying a visit a full year after their last,
and this is especially connected with sacrifices, for it was not
to be given to a king or priest on their coming if no sacrifice
was offered.^ It is to the Malma tree (Bassia latifolia) that
the husbands are first married among the Bagdis, Bauris,
and Lobars ; * and I have already shown the close connection
between the Bauris, Takkas, and fire- worshippers. Among the
Kurmis, Maliilis, and Raj wars, tlie bride is married to a
Mahua tree, and her liusband to a Mango tree, while the
Santhals marry both bride and bridegroom to a Maliua tree.^
But the most significant part of the marriage to a tree is
that it is contracted by the bride circling the tree, or among
the Bagdis, Bauris, and Lobars, her marriage bower of sal-
branches, seven times, just as in the Brahman wedding, the
bride circles her husband seven times in the ceremony called
Sat-pak,* and these ceremonies all point to the veneration for
the number seven as a cardinal tenet of the race of fire-
worshippers who made their father-god the house-pole, allied
themselves to the sons of the tree, and made the Mahua or
honey-tree their parent-tree. These were, as I have already
shown, a race of cultivators, to whom the correct computa-
tion of the lapse of time and the return of the seasons was a
^ BUhler, Manu^ iii. 119, 120; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp. 96, 97.
- Risley, Tribes and CasUs of Bengal^ vol. i. pp. 39, 80 ; vol. ii. p. 23.
' lind. vol. i. p. 531 ; vol. ii. pp. 40, 193, 229. ^ Ibid, vol. i. p. 150.
14
J
210 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
matter of supreme importance. It is to this race that the
birth of time is distinctly traced by tlie Vedic poets in the
myth wliich tells of the union of Saranyu, the daughter of
Tvashtar, the god of the Takkas with \'ivasvat, who was
Bhrigu, the father of the fire- worshippers, for both are said
to have brought fire to men through Matar-ishvan, the fire-
socket.^ But Saranyu, Vivasvafs bride, had two forms, like
Leda, the Greek mother of the twins, who bore a mortal
son, Kastor, and an immortal Polydeukes. As the immor-
tal mother she bore the twin-gods Yama, and as the mortal
mother the heavenly horsemen, the Ashvins.- The name
Vivasvat also means he who has two (ti) forms {vas)^ and
the whole myth which tells how he married the daughter of
the creating-god Tvashtar, of her disappearance when
brought home to earth, and her reappearance as the mother
of the mortal Ashvins, tells how the god of light, the pro-
ducer of the heavenly fire, came to earth to teach men
heavenly lore. The heavenly twins of Saranyu, called
Ushasa-nakta, the dawn (ushdsd\ and night (iiakta)^ arc said
to form Vivasvat'*s day.^ They are also called the two-
formed (vi-rupa) daughter of the red one (Tvashtar, the fire-
god), one adorned with the stars and the other holding the
sun."* It was these twin-mothers who bore the two pairs of
twin-sons, who destroy the darkness,^ both in earth and
heaven, and who bring both the light of day and the light
of knowledge, and unite the twin-stars, the Ashvins, the
leaders of the stars of night with the daughter of the sun,
who travels with them in the chariot made for them by the
Ilibhus, the guardians of the seasons.® The twins Yama, as
the day and night, are said to have spun the first web in
^ Rigveda, vi. 8, 4 ; i. 60, i. Tvashtar contains the root tva, meaning
duality. Thus the name means the God of two, that is, of the year of two
seasons, the year of the Pleiades described in Essay ii.
- Rigveda, x. 17, 12.
3 Ifitd. vi. 49, 3 ; Ilillebrandt's Vedische Mythologies p. 503 note i.
* Rigveda, iii. 39, 3. ' Ibid, x. 39, 12 ; vi. 63, 5.
• Ibid, vii. 33, 9, 12.
ESSAY III 211
which men clothed themselves,^ the Web of Time ; and
this marks the story of the birth of the gods of time, the
successors of the gods of generation, as first told by the race
which produced the first weavers and artificers. The hymn I
have just quoted gives a further detail as to the growth of
the conception in their minds. For the Vashishtha or most-
creating fire, the heavenly twins, which is the subject of this
hymn, is there said to have been first seen by Mitra-Varuna,
the moon-god, and the god of the dark lieaven of night and
rain (var)^ who in the chronology of the three paridhh^ or en-
circling sticks, were the gods of the Northern race who com-
pleted the figure of the national triangle. Vashishtha was
seen by Mitra-Varuna coming forth from the lightning, *as
Agastya (the star Canopus) brought them from their parent
home,' and they were thus the sons, the stars of heaven, led
by the star Canopus, begotten by Mitra-Varuna, from their
love for Ur-vashl.' ^ This brings us to the story of Pururavas
and Ur-vashl. Pururavas, the Eastern roarer, the thunder-
god, married Ur-vashi on the agreement that she was to leave
him if she saw him naked. When revealed to her by the
lightning-flash sent by the jealous Gandharvas, her former
mates, to whom she had bom two lambs, which they stole,
he lost her. He only found her after long wanderings,
swimming as the swan or wild-goose {haiisa\ the moon-bird
in the lake of the sacred Plaksha-tree {Ficu.9 infectoria)^
which still marks the great place of pilgrimage called Puryag,
at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges. She there first
bore to Pururavas a son called Ayu, meaning the swiftly
moving time, the constant succession of day and night ; but
with til is son Urvashi also gave to Pururavas the sacred
fire, and from this, where he left it in the forest, grew the
Khadira-tree {Acacia catechu)^ and the Ashvattha-tree {Ficu»
* Rigveda, vii. 33, 10, ii.
* See story of Pururavas and Urvashi, by Geldner ; Pischel and Geldner,
Vedische Studien^ Stuttgardt, vol. i. p. 243 ; Sat, Brdh, xi. 5 1 ; Harivamsoy
1363 ; Rigveda, x. 95.
212 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
reliffu)sa\ from whence the sacred fire of the altar was en-
gendered ; ^ and tliis tells us of the institution of the ritual
of burnt-ofterings by tlie two united races, the sons of the
fig-tree and those of the Khadiratree, which yields the
catechu dye of commerce, and was thus the parent-tree of the
weaving and dyeing races. It was they also who added tlie
sciences of astrology and astronomy to the magic lore of
their predecessors, and began systematically to study the
stars.
But before proceeding further with this inquiry, we must
understand clearly tlie meaning of Vivasvat with the two
forms, and of his house, wliere the Ashvins dwell with him.*
This last, as Hillebrandt shows from several passages in the
Rigveda, is the temple, the Sadas, in which the gods as-
semble, and as Indra is said to drink with the Ribhus, the
guardians of the seasons in the sacrificer'*s house,* Vivasvat
was, as the Vedic commentators rightly say, thought to be
the sacrificer of the gods.* In other words, he was the god
of time, wlio offered up to the gods each day and night, as
they passed away, and marked their passage by the course
and changes of the stars, moon, and sun. The two forms
which, his name imply, were originally the creative and re-
ceptive forms, marked in the Greek conception of the
liermaphrodite gods bom of Hermes, tlie universal father,
and Aphrodite, the universal mother ; but tliis materialistic
conception was changed when life was seen to arise from the
union of the goddess of the day and night with the creating
lieat and the design of the creator. The creating fatlier
then became Manu, the Indian thinker, whose earlier form
was the Phrygian god Men, Minos,or Menes,the measurer; and
the mother of his sons was Ida, the sheep, the mother of the
golden fleece, the stars of heaven and of the shepherd race.
She was, in Indian genealogy, the mother of Puru-ravas, the
Eastern thunder-god, wlio by his will produced the fire of
> Rig\-eda, i. 46, 13. ^ 7^/^, i ^^^^ ,^ m ^^ y^ ^ y^^ ,^
' fdui, iii. 60, 5. * Hillebrandt*s Vedische Mythologies pp. 476, 477.
ESSAY III 213
life, tlie lightning flash which gave to the water enclosed in
the clouds its generative force. It was she who, when born
from the thought of Manu, became the mother of the sons
of Ida or Ira, who gave lier name to the Indian rivers, which
water the ancient empire of the Kushika, the Iravati or
Ravi, in the Punjab, the Iravati or Rapti, in Oude, and the
Iravati or Ira-waddi, in Burmah. She was the mother of
the race bom on the rivers, and the sons of the god of
storms ; and this brings us to the story of the birth of the
two ancient storm-twins, the Brancliian or Lycian Apollo,
and his sister Artemis, and to that of the god Hari in
India, whose name means the yellow, and also, like that of
Ravas, the roarer.^ The Har in Har-i, again, is the same
word as the Khnr in the Akkadian Khar-sak-kurra, which
means both entrails and a bull ; and this bull is the god
Pushan, who, after the tranformation which made him, as I
shall show, the alligator, became the bull-god, and both as
the alligator and bull he was the god of the black cloud
who took the place of the boar-god. Leto meaning ' the
hidden,** that is, the disappearing Saranyu of the Rigveda,
was, when near the time of her labour, led by wolves to the
Xanthus, meaning the * yellow ' river, in Lycia, the land of
wolves {\vKo<;\ and there, in the sacred grove of the mother-
tree, sixty stadia from the town of Xanthus, she bore
Apollo, whose name means the protector ; and Artemis, who
became afterward the moon-goddess, but who was, as I show
in Essay vi., the mother-stars of the bear race, the constel-
lation of the Great Bear. They were the twin-parents of
the yellow race ; and as in the Delos form of this legend,
Leto is said to be a wolf, and Apollo was represented as a
wolf, both in Argos and Delphi, in which latter place he
guarded the treasure of the god, they are the children of
the wolf-mother, the day and night.^ It is this same wolf-
^ Curtius, Griechische Etymologie^ p. 592, No. 185, p. 198.
* Miiller, Die Dorter ^ book ii. chap. ii. § 2, p. 218, l>ook ii. chap. vi. § 8,
P^ 305» 306.
214 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
goddess, the mother of light {luk\ whom we find in the
Rigveda calling to her aid the Ashvins, * skilled in cattle,^
to restore the sight of her husband, Rijr-ashva, the upright
{Rijr) horse (ashva)^ or the house-pole, who had been blinded
by his father, the fire-god, and who had in vain sacrificed a
hundred and one rams,^ and it was the Ashvins who saved
Vartika, the quail, the bird of the dawn, from tlie wrath of
the wolf-goddess.- Their Indian counterpart, Hari, the
Indian yellow storm-god, was boni at Mathura, or the river
Yamuna, meaning the binding (j/am) river, the river of the
twins {yama\ wliicli united the Eastern and Western races
of India, whose sacred meeting-place was the birthplace of
Ayu, the son of Ur-vashi, at Puryag, where it joins the
Ganges. We find the place of his birth marked for us, not
only by the universal tradition recorded in the Puranas, but
also in a passage in the Rigveda,^ which tells how Abliya-
vartin Chayamana, the Srinjaya or son of the sickle {srini)^
also called Parthava, or son of Prithu, the mother-earth * of
the Dravidian races, defeated the Vrishivants and Turvashu
7 • • •
at Hari-yuplya, and drowned three thousand of them in the
Yav-yavati, meaning the river of the young dawn-god {ydvati\
and also of the people who sowed the plant of the dawn,
yava or barley.^ Here Hari-yuplya, which means the place
of the sacrificial stakes iyiipa) of Hari must be the town of
Mathura, the shrine of the fire-drill (math), where the god
^ Rigveda, i. Ii6, i6, 117, 17, 18. '-^ //'/</. i. 116, 14; 117, 16.
3 /did, vi. 27, 5-8.
* The root /^r//, from which Prithu as well as the Latin /anV, to conceive,
to bear, is derived, is a Tamil root. It appears in the Kigveda, x. 36, 8, in
the phrase * apam peruh,' a name given to Soma, meaning * the seed or germ
(of life) in the waters.' Peru means, as Pischel and Geldner show, 'swelling
or making to swell,' and thence seed or germ : Pischel and Geldner, Vediscke
Sttidieny vol. i. pp. 81-91. Prithu, whose name comes from a Dravidian
root, and who is the mother of the Pandavas, is the mother of the Dravidian
races.
^ Curtius, Griechische Elymologiey No. 568, p. 378, No. 660, p. 397 ;
also p. 588. The root yah appears in the Greek ?ws, dawn, the Latin
juvenuSi and the Sanskrit jJz/aw, young.
ESSAY III 215
Hari has always been especially worsliipped. It was here
that the yellow race, led by their guiding stars, the Ashvins,
must have made their first capital ; and it was, as I shall
presently show, down the Jumna, that they made their way
into India. But the wolf-myth which they brought with them
must have come from the North, where the wolf-goddess
{XvKTf) was the goddess of light (\vKr}\ whereas the San-
skrit wolf vrika means the destroyer or tearer ; and the two
names show the distinction between the Northern races, who
looked on the light and the sun as the giver of life, and the
races of South-western Asia, to whom the summer sun was
the destroyer and god of death. It was this wolf-race
which first brought barley to India, for it was the Ashvins
who first sowed barley with the plough, called in this
passage Vrika, the wolf.^ But these people who worshipped
the twin-gods Artemis, the moon-goddess, or Mitra, and the
protecting and destroying god Apollo, Hari-Varuna, who
difiiised pestilence or plenty by the arrows or rain-showers
shot from his silver bow, were also those whose tribal totems
were the sheep and the ram, and we can trace the growth of
the whole series of myths I have just cited in the various
forms of the Sanskrit Saranyu, the mother of the twins
Yama. This name is reproduced in that of the Greek
Erinnyes, the three goddesses, with serpents in their hair, who
Wreak vengeance on all who have disobeyed their parents,
were disrespectful to the old, and been guilty of perjury,
murder, inhospitality, and have ill-treated suppliants.^ To
them black sheep and nephalia or honey and water were
offered. These three goddesses are united into one as
Hecate, whose worship I have compared with that of the
Rudra Triambaka, and also with that of the Gond Phai-si
Pen. Hecate was the goddess of witchcraft, with three
bodies and four hands, holding the key of knowledge, the
snake, the torch, and the sacrificial knife, and to her, as to
* Kigvcda, i. 117, 21. The word used is vrikena,
' Smith, Classical Dictionary^ %,v. * Erinnyes.*
216 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the Erinnyes, black female lambs and honey were oflere(J,
with the addition of dogs.^ She was also the attendant of
Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the barley-mother,
who disappears yearly for her winter sleep, and she is thus a
year-goddess, who rules the changes of tlie three seasons
which make up the year of the Ashvins. Both the Erinnyes
and Hecate are goddesses of those sons of the mother Maga,
whose totem was the black slieep sacred to the god of night
and storm, the Greek Ouranos, the Sanskrit Varuna, and in
giving them the name Saranyu or Sarana, which means the
hurrying or swiftly flowing one, the original idea seems to
have been that slie was the rain-mother, or the mother from
whom, as we shall see in the myth of Gandhari and her sons,
tlie hundred (Hekate) children of the holy race were to be born.
But the Sanskrit Sar-ana, or the god (a?ia) Sar, was not the
earliest form of this goddess, for she was the Phrygian god-
dess Shari, worshipped by the Armenians on Lake Van.*
She became to the Akkadians the god Ana-sar or Sar-ana,
the god {ana) of Sar, the upper firmament, the father-goti,
who, uniting with Ana ki-sar, the goddess of the earth,
created the present world. This bisexual deity, the heaven
and the earth made pregnant by the rain, was the god to
whom the great temple of I-sarra, the house (/) of Sar wjis
dedicated ; and their son was Adar, the fire-god, tlie Atar or
Atri of the Rigveda, which latter name is, according to
Grassmann, derived from aJ, to eat, and tri, three, and thus
means ' the devouring three,** the tliree seasons of the years
of time. The ideogram for Sar, a measure, and the god
As-sor -^ and 0< are the same, and so is tliat for Sar,
heaven, and tlie air-god ^ >ff. This last is composed
of two elements, Sar -^ and 4f wing, so that the wind-
god was called ' tlie wings of Sar,*" who thus, like the god
Yah of the Psalmist, *came flying on the wings of the
* Smith, Classical Dictionary y s.v. * Hecate*
- Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 265 note I ; Lect. ii,
p. 125.
ESSAY III 217
wind.** The elements Sar also appears in the ideogram
of Ahi, the divine snake, ^ >-»-y or the god *-^\ of
the measuring heaven ^ } The root word and idea Sar
also appears in Greek and Lycian mythology in the god
Sarpedon, from Sar, the root of aapoto^ to sweep, whose
name means the cleansing god. He was the third in the
divine triad of the sons of Europa, the mother riding on
the bull Minos, the measurer, Rhado-manthus or Rhabdo*
manthus, the judge who judges with the twirling or revolv-
ing {manthu) magic-rod {Rhabdos\ and Sarpedon, the
cleanser. These gods mark the process of evolutionary
idealisation, by which the measuring-god was first wor-
shipped by those people whose god and judge worked
miracles by the rod of the magician, the first prastara or
baresma, and afterwards by a higher race, whose god framed
the unalterable laws of Nature, and established a moral law
for the guidance of his worshippers. These people believed
in the cleansing efficacy of holy water sprinkled on the altar
and the worshippers with the bundle of cleansing grass or
twigs, the second prastara^ as opposed to the blood
sprinklings of the older worship ; and it was they who intro-
duced the old Northern custom of infant baptism, in which
the father acknowledged the child by sprinkling it with
water and giving it a name,^ a custom followed by Leto,
who baptized the young Apollo and Artemis in the holy
river Xanthus;^ and these children who rose to heaven
purified from sin by the cleansing waters of the mother-
river of the yellow race became the Mitra-Varuna of Hindu
mythology, whose children were the stars led by Agastya
(Canopus), the moon-god and the god of heaven, Varuna,
whose victims were the ewes and rams, the totems of his
human children, sacrificed both to him and the mother-
goddess Saranyu, and whose food was the barley
* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 4, 222, 414, 415, 417.
"^ Mannhardt, Germanische Mythen^ 1858, p. 312.
' Miiller, Die Dorier^ book ii., chap. ii. p. 218.
^18 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
which was Varuna'*s com.^ It was the gods of the
sons of Sarasvati, the river issuing from the lake (Saras)
of living or flowing water (*SW), the river of the goddess
Sari, who became the Hindu god Hari. But this abstract
theology could only have been thought out by a leisured
class, whose presence proves a very considerable advance in
civilisation and wealth, a class of thinkers who devoted their
minds to the solution of the problems of the origin of life,
birth, creation, production and reproduction, of the changes
marked by the recurring seasons of the year and the ap-
parently arbitrary outbreaks of storms, floods, pestilences, and
famines, and it was from their teaching that the new theology
arose. In this creed the revealed god was Minos, the mea-
surer, or Manu, the thinker, the inspired teacher who traced
out the laws laid down by the hidden and unseen god, the
creator and giver of life, the Sar who enclosed within himself
the Su, or essence of life which was distributed through the
world by the lightning which made the rain-cloud, the
creating-mother, and the living thoughts of the inspired
thinker. The revelations received by this prophet Apollo
Loxias, or son of the wolf of light, called Ato? irpo^rjTri^
irarpo^^ the expounder (of the will) of the father of the bright
sky, were announced to men by the judge Rhabdo-manthus,
the judge or Danu of the Zendavesta, Rigveda, and Malia-
bharabi, called also, in the Zendavesta, Urvakshaya the
ancient {iir) speaker (vak\sh),^ the father Dan of the Jews,
and of the races called Diinava by the Hindus, and Danaoi
by the Greeks, the Aaron, or chest of the law,^ the Ashi
Vanguhi or encircling snake {Ashi\ another form of Echis
or Ahi, who is also the Chesti and Chesta of the Din, or law
of god of the Zendavesta.* This was the age of the prophets
^ Eggeling, SaL Brdh. ii. 5, 21, 14-16; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 391, 396.
'^ Mill, Yastia, ix. 10; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 234.
•' Gesenius, ThesauntSy p. 147. Aaron is the name for the Ark in Exodus
XXV. 22, xxvi. 33.
"• Darmesteter, Zendavesta Ashi Vasf, 61. Sirozah^ L 24, 25. Mill,
Yastia, iii. 16; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp. 282, 10, 11 ; vol. xxxi. p. 21 1.
ESSAY III 219
aiid prophetesses — Aaron the speaker, Miriam the bold
speaker,^ and Deborah the speaking bee, the Jewish counter-
parts of the prophetesses of the Delphic oracle. It was under
the guidance of the judge Danu and the inspired priests that
they went soutliward from tlie hilly country of Asia Minor,
seeking out in their progress well-draincJ and gently-sloping
valleys suited for their crops of corn, and for the growth of the
nourishing and succulent short grass on which they could
best feed their sheep. It was in these pleasant valleys that
ithey founded permanent villages formed of united house-
holders, where each house was ruled by the house-mother
and house-fatlier, whose father-gods were Varuna and Aslii-
Vanguhi, the god and goddess of conjugal unioUj^the mysteri-
ous and conjoined beings whose home was in the air, and
whose divine power was not confined to the area of the
village or the guardiansliip of the family or tribe, but who
were the parents of the whole human race and of all living
beings. It is the history of this emigration, which ended in
the occupation of the Euphrates valley, which we find in the
name and mythic history of Sar-ganu, or he who is possessed,
(with the spirit) of Sar, the Serug of the Bible, who was the
fatlier of Nahor, the river i'-uplirates, and the grandfather
of Terali or Dara the antelope.^ His name means also the
Sar, or waterer of the enclosure (ganu\ and the story of his
birth is one that has been appropriated by the great §argon,
tlie historical king of Assyria, who ruled at a much later
period, 3750 b.c, and by the mythic heroes who substituted
the worship of the gods of heaven for the gods of earth,
Moses, the Egyptian Horus,* and Kavad, tlie founder of the
Kushite race,^ for, like them, he was born in a secret place
among the reeds on the river bank, where he was found by
' Gesenius, Thesaurus ^ pp. 318, 819; s.v. * Miriam and Deborah.*
* Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. ii. 5. 2. 23. Darmesteter, Zendavesta Ashi Ya^ty
5- 1 5- 54-59; S.B.K. vol. xii. p. 398, vol. xxiii. pp. 271-274, 280-282.
' Gen. xi. 21-23.
* H. Brugsch, Religion und Mylkologie der Alten ^gypter^ p. 392.
* West, Bundahish, xxxi. 24; S.B.E. vol. v. p. 136.
jeaO THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
his future protector, who raised him to greatness, — Sar-ganu
is said to have been found by Akki the irrigator, who made
him his gardener, and called him by the Akkadian name of
Si-Shig-Shig or Si-Shim-shim, he who makes all things green.
He thus became the father-god of the Akkadians, the lover of
Ist«r, the god Sar or Sar-sar,^ the Sar-rabu, or great Sar, of the
Phoenicians.^ He, as the great irrigator, was the father of the
Kurmis, the irrigating and farming races of India, who take
their name from Kur, the tortoise. We thus see in the
advent of this race of shepherds and skilled irrigators to the
onr»f,
The ancient geographers looked on the Euphrates and Oxus as going
through the Caspian Sea.
land of the mother-mountain the final completion of the
figure of the tortoise, to which the ancient cosmographers-
compared the cultivated earth, the figure of which had been
roughly sketched on the fire-altar. But the more elaborate
figure, which represented the completion of the idea, was
formed, not from dividing one triangle into segments, but by
the union of the four triangles representing the South-
eastern and North-western races, who all looked on the
mother-mountain of the East, whence Indra gets the rain, as
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 26 note I, 27 ; Lect. iv^
pp. 247 note I, 265 note i. ^ Ibid, Lect. iii. p. 196 note i.
ESSAY III 221
their national birthplace, where they became united as the
Kushite race, the confederation of civilised man.
The tortoise thus formed and depicted on page 220 repre-
sents the Greek cross and the double dorje or thunderbolt of
Vishnu and Indra, and also a map of the Indian races, the
sons of the Northern Ira or Ida, Maga, Gauri, the Grond cow-
mother and the mother of the Dravidian matriarchal races,
the sons of tree-goddesses, as distributed at the time of the
union. It also forms, with spaces left open for the parent
rivers, the Euphrates, Sindhu or Indus, Yamuna or Jumna,
and Gun-gu or Ganges, which watered the garden of God,
SLn octahedron or eight-sided figure, the figure sacred to
-Agni the fire-god, and the angles of the tribal triangles
form the Svastika •C* while the whole forms the figure
c^f the Yupa or sacrificial stake on which the sacrifice of
^nan, said in the Brahmanas to be the true sacrifice,^ is con-
tinually offered up to the gods, and these human sacrifices
Aiere not, in the theology of the star-woi-shippers, merely
symbolical, but were, as I shall show, actually offered by
"them. This Svastika is the sign of the fire-god placed in
"the image of the mother-altar found at Troy, and the proto-
type of the gamma cross »-J-«, used as the sign of good
fortune and divinity by the Greeks, Etruscans, Latins, Gauls,
Grermans, Bretons, and Scandinavians in Europe, by the
people of Asia Minor, Caucasus, Persia, India, China, and
Japan in Asia, and placed on the breasts of Buddha and
Apollo,* and it is the repetition or reduplication of the
Svastika which forms the figure. The rulers of the tortoise
earth were the sons of Ida or Ira, the sheep-mother, who were
led to empire by the shepherd-god, the Akkadian Sib or
Shiba. The ideogram rif^ f^ denoting this shepherd-god,
who became the god Shiba or Shiva of the Hindus, is com-
1 Eggeling, Sat, Brah, i. 3. 2i, says Man is the sacrifice ; S.B.E. vol. xii.
p. 78. This is repeated, iii. 5. 3. i, vol. xxvi. p. 126.
' La Miration des SymboUsy by Comte Gobert d* Alviella, Revue des Deux
Mondesy ist March 1891, p. 131.
222 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TBIES
posed of two elements ^ meaning wing or sceptre, the goat-
lieaded staff, the emblem of kingly dignity and magic power
borne by the Egyptian Osiris, and JgJ, meaning flocks^
sheep,^ so that he was the shepherd king. He is called, in
the Mahabharata, Shiva the son of Ushi-nara, that is, the
father man (nara) of the East, Ushi, or the father-god Puru-
ravas. The people called Ushi nara are mentioned in the
Rig\'eda ;^ and the Shiva are one of the tribes conquered by
the Tritsu in the battle of the Ten Kings.^ Tliey are the
Seboi, placed by Strabo on the Indus north of the Chinab, the
country of the Kam-bhoj&s ; and they are named among the
princi[)al allies of Jagadratha, king of Sindhu, in the rape of
Drupadi in the Mahabharata.* It was their king, called
Sophy tes or Sopeithes, who gave Alexander the Great a pre-
sent of fighting dogs, and they are the race called by Pliny
the Abhiria, who ruled the land of Kutch, the delta of the
Indus.* They are still known in India as the Ahirs, or sons of
Ahi, the snake, who in Bengal are distinguished both as cattle
herdsmen and as professional fighters with the long bamboo
pole — our quarter-staff. It is in this capacity that they are
much sought after as retainers by those who look for men
who can be trusted to guard their master^ property or to
attack that of his neighbours. The progress through India
of the first detachment of these people, who grew millets, but
had not yet learned to grow barley, is best told in the third,
fourth, and fifth cantos of the Gond Sorig ofLingal, These
tell how Liiigal, after he had been slain by the confederacy
I have already spoken of, formed by the union of the matri-
archal tribes with the first shepherds, the sons of the goat,
and the cultivators of rice, was restored to life by the Amrita,
or water of life, given to him by Kirtao Sabal, the messenger
of the gods. He asked Mahadeo for a new race of Gonds,
J Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 222, 237, 484.
^ Rigveda, x. 59, 10. ^ Ibid, vii. 18, 7.
* Vana {Draupadi harana) Parva, cclxiv. p. 782.
•'' Cunningham, Ancient Geography 0/ India, pp. 157, 158.
ESSAY III 223
1)0 were to bring law and order into the land, but Mahadeo
^'^^fiised to release them from the mother-mountain till he
*^xought him the eggs of the black Bindo bird. He went to
e sea to seek them, but found them watched by the serpent
hour-nag, the snake of the burning sun of summer, who had
Jready killed seven broods. Lingal slew the snake, as
"Jhraetaona slew Azi Dahaka, and cut it in seven pieces,
%!%hich he kept. The mother-bird took him on one of her
"Curings, and her young on the other, and bore them to the
Dhewala-giri mountain at the sources of the Jumna, while
'^he father-bird, flying over them, shaded them with his wings
*om the sun. When Lingal came with the bird of the
south-west monsoon, who brings the rain, and the seven
pieces of the snake, forming the seven days on which the
reckoning of time was based, Mahadeo released the Gonds,
the new-bom sons of the mother-mountain. On the evening
of their release, while they were cooking their pulse of kesari
millet, the rain brought by the Bindo bird began to fall, and
all the Gonds but the four father-Gonds who remained
faithful to Lingal crossed the river while it was low and dis-
appeared for ever. But when Lingal and the four Gonds
wanted to cross the whole country was submerged by the
flood. They were saved from it by Dame, the tortoise
(kaswal), and Puse, the alligator (mugral)^ Lingal being
taken by the tortoise, and the Gonds by the alligator, the
race of the Mugh, or sons of the alligator, Muggur or Mugral.
AVhen the alligator tried to devour them, they were saved by
Lingal and the tortoise. When landed they were taught by
Lingal to build houses {dama\ and a town called Nur-
Bhumi, or the town of the hundred (Nur) lands, and he
gave them bullocks and carts and taught them to grow the
millets^'ozie^aH (Hohus sorghum) and kesari {Lathyrus satixms\
the latter being sown at the end of the rains as a second crop,
among the rice grown on rich lands which are not swampy.
He divided the people into four tribes — (1) the Mana-wajas,
who made the images of the gods ; (2) Daliak-wajas or drum-
i
224 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
bt^aters ; (3) Koilabutal, or the dancers, and Koi-kopal, the
cow-keepers, the ruling tribe. With these he united the
four tribes descended fi-om the Gonds he had brought down
in his first avatar — (1) the Korkus, a Kolarian tribe; (2)
the Bhils, or sons of Bhilla, the bow, the aborigines of
Western India ; (3) the Kolamis, a tribe of the south-west of
the Central Provinces, who marry by simulated capture ; and
(4) the Kototyal, or sons of a log of wood, called the Marya
or tree-Gonds. These formed the eight united races of the
tortoise earth. Lingal placed among them priests called
Ohjas or Pardhans, who married the new-comers to the
daughters of the previous immigrants, taught them how to
make the gods I have already described, to sacrifice to them
goats, cocks, and a calf, and to drink spirits {daru\ and to
dance the religious dances. After giving these instructions
he disappeared, that is to say, became the invisible god of
the new theology of the growers of barley, binding them
before he left * to be true to the tortoise.** This picture of
the tortoise-earth shows the epoch before the growth of
barley, and marks the first stage of the union of the Kush-
ikas and Maghadas, the latter being the race wlio worsliipped
the mother-Maga as the sacred Mug-gur,or alligator, to whom
tanks are still dedicated all over Bengal, but who under the
rule of the rain-god became Push, the black cloud, which
afterwards became the black bull Pushan. This alligator
myth, we find exactly repeated in Egypt, wliere the god
Sebek — the crocodile-god, who afterwards became Osiris, the
father of the bull, Apis and Sebek-ra, the sun, the crocodile
fire-god — is called, in hymns to Shu and Amun, Maga.
This name Sebek means the ' uniter,* from tlie root
sbk^ to join.^ It is as the uniter that he appears in the
Gond legend I have just quoted, and the Sakadwipai Brah-
mins of the present day, who, like the Ashvins, are both
physicians and priests, are known by the name of Maga.
* 1 1. Brugsch, Rclii^ion und Mythologie der Alien ^Egypter^ pp. 105, 587,
718, 722.
ESSAY III 225
They are divided into territorial sections, representing the
priests, of the days when each confederacy of villages, called
the parka or province, had, like those of Chota Nagpore, its
special priests still called by the Gond name of ofhas.
These are the witchfinders, whose chief business it is to
protect the people from pestilences, famines, and malignant
sorcerers. Their name comes from the Northern root od, or
odj, or iorf, to know, which appears in the names of Odin
and Buddha, and the name is still a title of the Maithila
Brahmins in Tirhoot, and of the Babhuns, the powerful
caste of hereditary landowners in Behar.^ It is as Vyasa, or
the uniter, that the father-priest appears in the Mahabha-
rata. He is the son of Satya-vati, she who is possessed of
truth, the sister of Matsya, the fish-god, and of the Rishi
Para-shara, the overhanging cloud (shara)^ that is, of the
god Bar or Shar, and like Sar-ganu, the son of Sar, he was
^gotten in a mist among the river reeds.* He, on the
failure of heirs to ChitraHgada and Vichittra Virya, sons of
Satyavati and the great king Sham-tanu, raised up seed to
^hem by becoming the father of Dhritanlshtra, whose sons
^'ere the Kauravya or sons of Kaur, the tortoise, and of
-t*andu the reputed father of the Pandava the fair (Pandu)
^^ces. This story tells us how the magicians of the age of
Witchcraft became the priests of the new era, called Maga
o^ the Hindus, and Makkhu by the Akkadians,^ the priests
^^f the goddess Magha, called the wife both of Sliiva the
^liepherd god and Soma.* But the crocodile god was not
^^nly the uniter of the two races as the priest, but also as
the reckoner of time, for the Ribhus, the makers of the seasons
in the Rigveda, are the Babylonian Rabu, the great ones, who
in one ideogram are the Babylonian form of the Akkadian
^ Risley, Trida af id Castes of Bengal y vol. i. pp. 159, 160 ; vol. ii. p. 138.
' Mahabharata Adi {Saml»hava) Parva, Iv. p. 318. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures
Jcr 1887, Led. i. p. 26, note I.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 62, 63.
* Petersburgh, Dictioftaryy s.v. * Magha.'
15
226 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Nun, the * soul of life in water,^ out of which the Egyptian
god Sebek-Ra rose, and in another Dannu or the sons of Dan.^
They are also the sons of Rahab the Hebrew for crocodile,
and Rahabu is one of the names of the goddess Istar.^ It was
Rahab, the crocodile, who was the courtesan who in Biblical
history gave to the Hebrews, led by Joshua, the leader of
the sons of Ephraim, meaning the two ashes (eper) or the
two united races, possession of the city of Jericho, the moon,
or the yellow city,* and it was, as I shall show when I trace
the first beginnings of stellarastronomy,the constellation of the
Shi-shu-mara or alligator, now called Draco, which supplied
the fourteen stars, which were, according to the Vishnu
Dharma, placed by God round the pole to drive the stars
round it.* These form the consecrating necklace which, like
that of Pharsi Pen, makes the heavenly pole the creating
god, and which was the Hindu king Chitrangada, or the
variegated (chitra) necklace or bracelet (anffodam) son of
Shaih-tanu. These fourteen stars of the fourteen days
which measure the lunar phases, were the Ribhus of the
Rigvxda. They are the sons of Su-dharvan ^ the god of the
creating (su) bow {dharvan\ the rainbow god, who, as
Krishanu, the heavenly archer, is the seventh of the Soma
Guardians.® It is he who wounds the bird who brings Soma
to earth ; "^ that is to say, who brought about the fulness of
time which made the clouds send down to earth the life-
giving rain. The recurring seasons of seasonable rains and
sunshine brought by the Ribhus are symbolised by the cups
made by them to hold the Soma or water of life. The three
^ Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, Nos. 66 and 425. H. Brugsch,
Religion uttd Mythologie der Alien ^gypler, p. 105.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 258 note i. Gesenius,
Thesaurus, p. 141.
' Ibid., p. 630. Yarah means yellow, and Yareh, moon.
** Sachau*s Alberunl's India, vol. i. chap. xxii. p. 242.
• Rigveda, iv. 35, i, 8.
® Eggeling, SaL Brdh. iii. 3, 3, II ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 72.
7 Rigveda, iv. 27, 3; Eggeling, Sat. Brah, i. 7, 1,1; S.B.E. vol. xii.
183.
ESSAY III 227
Ribhus or seasons are called Vaja (the strong), the artist of
all the gods, Vaishvadeva, the gods of the villages (vi^h)
the name of the gods the spring season in the three annual
festivals of the Chatur-masya.^ Vibh-van (the distinguished)
the artist of Varuna, to whom the summer season, Varuna-
praghasah, is dedicated,^ and Ribhu, the artist of Indra,
the god of the wet season, called the Saka-medha, or sacri-
fice of the rain-gods (suk) in the Chatur-masya.^ They
drank, like the Ashvins, the Erinnyes, Saranyu and Hecate
the intoxicating Soma mixed with honey {SomcL-Madhu) at
the evening pressing consecrated to the Ashvins,* and made
successively two, three, and four seasons or cups out of the
one made by Tvashtar,* and also made the year cow.* The
race who worshipped the Ribhus was that which made the
successive years, reckoned in the computation of time be-
ginning with the year of Tvashtar, extending from one rainy
season to another, and including the years of two seasons^
three, and four, the last being added when the fruits ripen-
ing in the autumn became in the mother fruit-land of Iran
an important crop, and it was they who offered roasted
barley to their fathers, the Pitaro Barishadah, at the Pitri-
yajfia held together with the Saka-medha festival, and this,
marks the age as that which preceded that of the third class
of fathers, called Pitaro-'*Gnishvattah, or the fathers who
burned their dead, to whom was oflfered parts of the barley of
the Pitaro Barishadah, made into porridge with the milk of
a cow suckling an adopted calf, that is, the race of the early
Bronze Age, who adopted the year-cow made by the Ribhus
* Rigveda, iv. 33, 3-1 1, iv. 34, 6, iv. 33 ; Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 5, i, i,
ff. ; S.B.E. voL xii. p. 384 fT.
» Rigveda, iv. 33, 9; Eggeling, Sat Brdh. ii. 5, 2, i ff.; S.B.E. vol. xii.
p. 391 ff.
» Rigveda, iv. 33, 9 ; Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 5, 3, i ff. S.B.E. vol. xiL
p. 408 ff.
* Hillebrandt, Vedischt MythologU Die Drei Savanas^ p. 256 ; Rigveda,
I, 161, 8 ; iv. 33, II, 34, 4, 35, 4, 6, 7, 9.
' Rigveda, iv. 33, 5 ; i. .161, 2-4. « Ibid, iv. 33, 4 ; i. no, 8.
228 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
as their inother,^ and offered the Soma sacrifice of the
Sautra mani, young Kusha grass, young ears of corn, and
roasted barley. These founders of the tortoise earth no
longer, like their forefathers, looked on the local gods as
supreme, but made the father of life the hidden god who
guards and distributes at the appointed seasons the life-
giving rains. His Sadas or holy seat being unknown, he
could only be called by his worshippers the great Ka, or
Who, the name given to Prajapati, the lord of former
generations, in the ritual of the Varuna Praghasal^L or summer
sacrifice, and to the Soma Dronakalasa, or the cask or barrel
in which Soma is made,^ the spirit-world in which the seed
of life lives. This is tlie Ka, or primaeval soul of Egyptian
theology. It is the great Ka who appears in the Rigveda
as the hero Kutsa, called Arjuneya, or the son of the fair or
yellow race, whose name is derived from ku^ where.^ He is
the twin god of Indra, said in one hymn to come with Indra
as the two Ushanas, or rain gods.* It is Kutsa who, by
Indra''s help, slays Shushna, the god of drought,^ and brings
rain from heaven by conquering the Gandharvas or Soma
guardians.® He is called the priest of the Varsha-giras, or
people of the rain (Vrishan) mountain (g?r?y and is the
reputed author of one of the collections of hymns in the
first Mandala of the Rigveda, whose autiiors call them-
selves in one hymn Varshagiras of tlie race of Nahusha or
Nagas, the sons of Naga, the hooded snake.® He is, in short,
the Great Nag or Nahusha, worsliipped as the supreme god
of Elam or Iran, under the name of Susi-nag, down to the
latest days of the Assyrian monarchy,® and wliose image was
borne on the banners of the Parthian warriors. He is the
Naga god of tlie Pandavas, called Parthava or the sons of
^ Eggeling, Saf, Brdh, ii. 6, I, 5, 6 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 421.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdk. ii. 5, 2, 13 ; iv. 5, 6, 4, S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 395 ;
xxvi. p. 41a ^ Rigveda, vii. 19, 2 ; viii. i. 11.
. < Ibid, v. 31, 8. » Ibid. vii. 19, 2. « Ibid. viii. I, II.
^ Ibid, vii. 25, 5. 8 jifij^ j^ iQQ^ 16-18.
• Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria^ p. 316.
ESSAY III 229
Prithu the Dravidian mother, the Shesh Nag worshipped by
the Takkas as a rain god,^ and Sek-Nag the god of the
Raj, or royal race of Gonds, bom (ja) of Ra, that is, the sons
of Ra-hu, the begetting (hu) creating fire-god (/?a), and the
descendants of the barley growers. His festival is held
every seven years, and is attended only by males, who are
bound to secrecy as to its rites. All the worshippers must
appear naked before the god, whose image is a wooden snake
placed under the tree sacred to him, the Saja tree {TerminaJia
icnnentosa\ and seven cocoa-nuts, showing that his rule ex-
tended to the sea,^ seven pieces of betel nut, milk, and flowers
but no animal victims are offered to him.* He is the god
called in the Mahabharata Shesh Nag, the oldest of the
snakes, who was placed under the tortoise earth to support
it ; that is, as I shall show, made the plough god, when
Vasuki took his place as the god who churned the Amrita,
or water of life, from the ocean by the churning staff. Mount
Mandara, and brought down the life-giving rains. This
god, the great Nag, or the soul of life in the rain-cloud,
the heavenly snake, is the second of the two snakes which
face one another in the caduceus of Hermes. The other
being the Ahi or Echis, the snake of earth, the guardian of
the home of the gods in the primaeval village, and his
worshippers were the race who added the rainy season to
the four seasons of summer, autumn, winter, and spring,
which had been the number reckoned by the Ribhus l)efore
India became the chief seat of the Kushika or Naga rule.
Also in the caduceus of Hermes, with its central staff, the
twining snakes, and the wings outstretched at the point
where the snakes begin to form the sacred trident, we see a
complete reproduction of the Gond god Pliarsi Pen, as
* Oldham, * Serpent Worship in lvid.\2iy* Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ,
July 1891, pp. 361, 362, 387, 388.390.
^ Cocoa-nuts will not flourish outside the influence of the sea breeze.
' These details were given to me by the High Priest of the Raj Gonds in
Chutti^urh in the Central Provinces.
S30 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
altered by progressive mythology ; for the hollow bamboo in
which the trident is fixed is replaced by the lower fold of
the snakes, whose heads appear as
the two side prongs of the trident,
were, in the Gond god, the two
wives of the Linga god, and the
wings depicted on the caduceus, aa
well as on the heeb and cap of the
god, are those of the messenger bird
of Naga theology, whose mythic
history I will tell presently. It is
ia the five Gond festivals called Akkhadj, Jivati, Pola,
Dihali, and Shimga that we can best trace the origin and
growth of the worship of the Great Nag the father god
of the ploughing race, the sons of the sheep-motlier I^a,*
1. UtesummerJestivalcalledAklihadi by the Central Province
Gonds and Alchttij in the North-west.
This is the worship of the cart axle or Akkha of the Soma
cart, over and under wliich as I have shown, the Soma and
Sura cups were consecrated at the Vsja-peya festival, and this
Soma cart is tiie Gond plough and the god of the plough,
both being called Nagur or the rain snake, which rules the
season in which the rains are engendered. It is held on the
18th Baisakh (April-May), and new grain is then eaten,
the making of agricultural implements begun ; and in this
we sec the origin of the Roman custom, commemorated by
the following lines of Ovid, which l>oun<l each craftsmen to
work for a short time at his craft on New Year's Day : —
Tempora commisi nasceutia rebus ageudis
TotuB al> auapicio ne foret annus liters
QuiEi]ue suas artes ob^idem delibat agendo,
Nee plus quam solitum testiticatur opus. — Ovid, Fasti i. 170-
and in accordance with this custom, the plough, in spite of
hardness of the ground, is passed lightly over the lands on
' Smith, Classical DUtienary, s.v. ' Hermes.'
ESSAY HI 231
the Akkhadi day, but the sowing of seed is expressly for-
bidden.^
That the festival was one to the rain-god is still more
clearly shown by the rites observed at it by the Ooraons, who
claim to have first introduced the plough into Chota
Nagpore. They call it the Sar-hul, or the festival of the
Sar, and the time of its observance depends upon the flower-
ing of the Sal tree, the Dravidian parent tree. Five fowls
are offered to the tree in the soma or village grove, by the
pahan or village priest, cooked with rice, and eaten by those
present. After partaking of the bird of the dawn, who was
in Greece sacred to iEsculapius, the physician to the gods,
as the Ashvins were in India, they go and gather the sal-
flowers, which they bring into the village. Next day the
pahan^ with some male friends, takes these flowers round in
a basket to every house, and at each the women meet him
with water to wash his feet, and kneel before him respectfully.
He then dances with them, and places some of the sal-flowers
over the door of the house and in the women'*s hair. This is
the sign that the prayers for rain are favourably answered,
and as evidence of their efficacy the women dash their water-
vessels over the pahati, and console him for his ducking by
giving him copious draughts of home-brewed beer.^ It is at
the corresponding festival in Bur mail that both men and
women douse every one they meet witli water ; and the same
custom is observed at the festival of the flowering of the sal-
tree, called Bahu or the Great Puja by the Santals, when
men and women drench each other with water from peculiarly
shaped vessels, and when tlie worshippers partake of the
victims offered in tribal and family sacrifices.' But the
early history and origin of the feast in its Northern home
are most conspicuously shown in the ceremonies of the corre-
^ EUiot, SettUffunt Report on Hoshungabad Settlements^ para. 98, p. 195 ;
Elliot, Supplementary Glossary N, W. Provinces, s.v. * Akhtuj,' p. 13.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. pp. 146, 147.
^ Ibid, vol. ii. p. 233.
232 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
spending Italian festival, called the Palilia, that is, the straw
(pales) festival of the wheat and barley-growing races. It
was held in honour of the plough ing-god, the (Je-orgos, the
worker {ourgos) of the earth {ge)^ who has become the
St. Greorge of our calendar, but who was originally the great
Nagur, or heavenly plough. His festival is on the 23d of
April, and the Italian Palilia was held in all towns and
villages on the 21st of that month, and corresponded to the
Athenian festival of the Mounuchia to Artemis, who, as the
goddess to whom the seven stars of the Great Bear, the
heavenly plough, are sacred, is the mother of the ploughing
race. All who took part in it washed their hands with
freshly fallen dew after they had first lighted the sacred fire
of straw and hay with flint sparks and driven their cattle
through it, praying for their welfare and for good corn and
hay crops during the year. It was when purified with holy
dew and consecrated to the water-god that tlie men sprang
through the fire and thus sacrificed themselves botli with fire
and hallowed water, the two creators of life.^ This custom
of bathing in dew is found in England, Germany, Portugal,
and Egypt, and in these countries it was the custom to bathe
in the evening dew on the May or Maga festival and at that
of the summer solstice.
2. The Jucati — The Rainij Season Feast
This is held in Srabon or August, the Sanskrit Shnlvana
or the lame nionth,^ and is observed tis the Nag Puncliami, or
feast of the five (punch) Nagas, by all Hindus. It is called in
the Grihya-sutras the Sra-vanas, held on the full-moon day of
Sravana, when fried barley is offered to the gods, and tlie snakes
are worshipped. It is the great NSga festival, the festival to
the season introduced by the Naga races. It is called by tlie
Ooraons the Kurnim festival, for the sacred tree worshipped
^ Mannhardt, IVald und FeU A'uliur, vol. ii. pp. 303-315.
- Gra^smann, IVorierbttrh ztim Ki^ieda^ 's.w *Shravana.'
ESSAY III 233
is tie kurma-tree {Nauclea parvifoUa)^ and corresponds
witVi the older festival of Gurh-puja, celebrated when the
rice grown in the seed-beds is first planted out. But the
Kitrruniy which is observed by all Hindus in Chota Nagpore,
is not a rice, but a barley festival. The day before it the
^lage boys and girls, after fasting, go into the forest and
cut a branch of the kurma-tree. It is planted in the Akra,
or village dancing-ground, and a sacrifice is offered to it by
the pahan^ and this is followed by dancing kept up during
the night; and at early dawn the young people of both
sexes, wearing bracelets and necklets of plaited straw, dance
round the tree, and then the daughters of the village head-
man bring into the Akra baskets of young barley taken up
by the roots, which they have cultivated. These have been
grown in moist sandy soil, mixed with turmeric, the sacred
plant of the yellow race, and are consequently primrose
yellow. The girls first prostrate themselves before the
kurma-tree, and offer to it barley shoots. They then give
those that remain among the company, each person getting
a few, which they place in their hair, and thus the union of
the yellow sons of the barley with the earlier rice-growers is
accomplished by transplanting among them the barley
shoots.^
3. The Pola^ or Autuvin Feast.
This is a festival to the ploughing-oxen who plough the
land for the barley and other cold-weather crops: it is
held on the new moon of Bhadon, the date when the Pit-
riyajfia or sacrifice to the Fathers, celebrated in Bengal,
ends. The oxen are then worshipped and get an extra feed.
4. The Dibatiy or Winter Festival,
This is a festival to the star-gods. It is held on the new
moon of Khartik, the month sacred to theKrittakas or Pleiades.
The houses are then all illuminated with lamps to simulate
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. ii. pp. 145, 146.
234 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tlie stars, and tlie oxen are not allowed to sleep. These two
festivals do not correspond with any of those of the Mundas,
OoraonSy or Santals, or other early immigrant tribes into
Eastern India, and the fact that in both the ox is the sacred
animal shows that they were introduced by a people who
deified the ox and the cow in place of the goat and the sheep.
5. T/ie Shim-gu^ or Magh Sprinff Festival.
This answers exactly to the national Saturnalia of the Hos,
Mundas, Ooraons, and Santals, held in January-February
at tlie season when the carnival, the Saturnalia of Southern
Europe, takes place, and to which our St. Valentine'*s day
and the Athenian month Gamelion, or the marrying month,
which have always been connected with love and marriage,
belongs.
We see that in this series of festivals the origin of life is
ascribed to the rain, and it was the rain-worshippers, the
sons of the shepherd-god, who looked on dew, running water,
and rain, as his most sanctifying gifts, who originated in the
confederacy of the mountain of the East the Flood legend,
telling of the baptism and purification of the earth polluted
by the ritual of the magicians, fire, and phallic worshippers.
Tlie Akkadian story, as compared with that of Genesis, tells
us that the Flood was sent by la ; for the forty days'* and
forty nights' rain is the number sacred to la. It also tells of
a revolt against the worship of the fire-god, for Khasisadra,
the experienced man, otherwise called Shama-napistira, the
son of life, saved in the ship he built by Ia'*s advice, says he
embarked in it because Bil-gi, the fire-god, hated him, and
that he had, therefore, made la his god. But this is a
theological recension of the original story, which made the
passenger in the ship of the gods not a son of man, but
Dumu-zi, the son of life, the only son of Istar, called by the
Semites Tammuz of the Flood.^ He, as Manu, the thinker,
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233.
ESSAY III 235
was the father of the sons of Ida, the ewe-mother, the
purified earth, who was engendered by him from the water
at the end of a year by the heavenly seed of clarified butter,
sour milk, curds and whey, which he threw into it ; that is to
say, the earth was sanctified by the god of the year, who
begins his voyage by the baptism of his offspring.^ It is the
•tortoise earth, called in the Song of Lingcd Dame, the
tortoise, on which Lingal, and the Gonds saved by him from
the Flood and the alligator built the houses of the house-
ijdama) building race. This land was the Gan-Edin, the
enclosure (Gan) of the plain {Edin) of the new race of the
sons of Naga, the great rain-god, who called the districts into
which they divided the country by the Akkadian name Nanga,*
the Hindu Nangur, meaning a plough of land. The cities,
the centres and capitals of the united confederacies of villages
<!alled parhas, they called Nagur, and they called themselves
the sons of the plough Nagur, the Nahusha of the Rigveda, or
by that name by which they are also known in the Rigveda
and Mahabharata, the Srifijaya or sons of the sickle («SWm), also
called the Panchala or worsliippers of tlie five (Pafich) Naga
gods, the five seasons of the year. It was they who ruled
the Doab, or land watered by the Jumna and Ganges, and
their sacred fire, produced by Devavata tlie Bharata, is said
in the Rigveda to be the Agni Jatavedas placed in the
centre of the altar.' The five gods of tlie Gond Pantheon
are * — 1. Bhimsen, the Hindu Bhima, the god of the Dosadhs,
the fire- worshippers of the club and the sacrificial stake;
2. Mata, the mother-god of the village ; 3. Mata-mai, the
mother of the united confederacy, the two mothers of the
allied races; 4. The boundary-god Goraya, the Ahi or
sacred snake of earth, who guards the boundaries of the holy
shrines, the villages, provinces, and kingdoms ; 5. The god
Hanuman, the ape-god, also called Maroti, or the tree-god,
^ Eggeling, So/, Brdh,, i. 8. I. 7-9 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 218, 219.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary y No. 432.
• Rigveda, iv. 15, 4 ; iii. 23, 2, 3. * Song 0/ Lingal , Canto v.
J
236 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and Vayu, the wind-god, who is tlie Naga or rain-snake. To
these was added (6) the moon-goddess, called Pandhari, or
Mu-chandri, the reckoner of time, by the sacred period of
seven days, and the last day of this period was consecrated
to the seventh god, the god Saturn, the Kronos of the Greeks,
who is depicted with the lunar sickle in his hand. He was
the god of (7) the deceased ancestors, who are always
reverenced by the Gonds, who bury their dead. It was these
people who founded the national cemeteries or cities of the
dead, like the Akkadian city of Gudua,^ consecrated to
Ner-gal, the strong (7ier) one, the invincible god of the dead.
One of these ancestral burying-places still exists in the
Tamar province of the Lohardugga district of Chota Nagpore,
and the custom of conveying the dead to the ancient
cemetery, from which the Egyptian journey of the mummy
in the ' ship of the dead ** originated, is still observed by the
Ooraons, with additions made after the burning of the dead
became customary. They collect the bones after the corpse
has been burned, and place them in a new earthen vessel,
which is hung on a post in front of the door of the deceased
person'*s house. The bones of those wlio liave died in the
year remain there till December or January, when they are
taken in their cinerary urns to the burial-places of their
respective ancestors, and there placed in the grave made for
each urn, which is covered with a large flat stone. No
weddings can take place in a village wliile any dead remain
in it, hence the time for weddings is that immediately
after the village funerals, and it is apparently in con-
nection with this custom that Magh or February is the
month of the great national Saturnalia, and Phrigun tlie
wedding month. This Akkadian god Ner-gal is the
Phoenician god Sar-rabu, or the Great Sar, who I have
shown to be the Great Naga. His name among the Shuites,
or the worsliippers of Susi-nag on the west of the Euphrates,
is Emu, a name which is letter for letter the same as that of
^ Sayce, Hihbert Lfcturesfor 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 194, 197.
ESSAY III 237
'the national god of the Ammonites, Amun.^ Amun means
the builder or architect, and is, like that of the Egyptian
god, formed from Aman, to sustain.^ He was the god of the
house-pole, who became in Egyptian Thebes Amen-ra, the
hidden, and it was the people who made the house-pole the
symbol of their ancestors, and grouped their images round
it, as the Mai Paharias do,' who brought to Egypt, as well
as to Assyria and India, the custom of having cities for the
dead apart from those for the living. These sons of the
house-pole in India called their tribal mother Amba, and her
legend tells us that she was the daughter of the king of
Kashi, carried oflf by Bhishma, with her two sisters, Ambika
and Amvalika, as wives for Vichittra Virya, who was after-
wards, when released by Bhishma, repudiated on account of
this disgrace by Salwa, the king of Sauba, the capital of the
magicians, to whom she had been previously betrothed. She
afterwards, to revenge herself on Bhishma, was by the grace
of Shiva, the shepherd-god, bom as Shikandin, the bisexual
child of Drupada, the king of Panchala, and in this form she
killed Bhishma, the eighth Dyu, the Northern sun-god, in the
war between the Kauravyas and Pandavas.* She thus became
the national deity Shiva-Uma or Parvati, the god Shiva and
his mountain wife (Parvati). It was her sisters who in on
legend became the mothers of Dhritarashtra and Pandu, the
fathers of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, and in another the
mothers of Jarasandha, after being made pregnant by an
Am or mango. They thus established the am or mango-tree
as the mother-tree of the males of the Kurmi or tortoise race,
to which they are first wedded before being married to their
wives.* But long before they came to India and made the
mango their father fruit-tree, they had in Asia Minor made
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 196 note i.
^ Gesenius, Thesaurus ^ P* i^S*
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol ii. p. 71.
^ Mahabharata Udyoga Parva, clxxi-cxciv.
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, voL i. p. 531,
238 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIiMES
the fig-tree the parent tree of those who added fruit-trees to
the cereal crops grown on the national farms. This fig-tree,
the parent tree of the race of barley-growers, is that which
supplies the house-pole in the Soma sacrifice. For the
house-pole of the Sadas, or consecrated seat of the national
father-god Vivasvat, the house of the priests, is ordered ta
be made of the Udumbara tree {Ficus ghmercUa), and this,
wlien solemnly erected in the Sadas, is watered with water
mixed with barley grains. It is especially worshipped in
the Garhapatya ceremonies at the close of the Soma sacrifice,
when the priests sit round it and toucli it as they invoke
blessings on the house after the Hotar lias muttered the
same hymn of the Queen of the Serpents, Kadru (Rigveda,
X. 119), which is used at tlie Agniyadliana or consecration of
the houseliold fire.^ The throne on which Soma is placed
when taken from the cart is of Udumbara- wood,^ and so is
the staff given by the Adhvaryu to the sacrificer at the
Dikshayana, or initiation ceremony, after he has been re-born
and consecrated to perform tlie Soma ceremony, being
cleansed of his sins by the baptismal bath.* The stafl[ of
Vaishya students is, according to Manu Apastamba and
Vashishtha, to be made of Udumbara wood, and they are,
like the Akkadian priests, to be clothed in goat-skins.^ Pliny
calls the trading race of Saus living in Cutcli, in the delta of
the Indus, Odomboeroe, and Prof. Lassen gives Audombara
as the name used by Hindu geographers to denote this region.^
The fig-tree, the fatlier-tree of the Shus, becomes in the
Maliubharata the mother-tree of the Naga sons of Kashyapa,
* Eggeling, SaL Brah, iii. 6. i. 6-12; S.B.E. vol, xxvi. pp. 142-143.
2 Eggeling, Sat. BnVi., iv. 6, 9, 17, 21, 22 ; ii. I, 4, 28, 29 ; S.B.E. vol.
xxvi. pp. 451, 453, 454 ; vol. xii. p. 301.
' Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iii. 3, 4, 27 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 84.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brah, iii, 2. I. 33 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 34.
8 Biihler, ManUy ii. 45. 41 ; Apastamba y i. 1,2, 38, i. I, 3, 6 ; Vashishtha^
xi. 54, 63 ; Baudhdyanay i. 2, 15 ; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp, 37, 38, ii, pp. 9,
10, xiv. pp. 57, 150.
^ Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 302, 303.
ESSAY III 239
e father of the tortoise race, for they are said to be the
«Dns of his thirteentli wife, Ka-dru, the tree (dpi) of Ka, or
lie God Prajapati,^ and it was she who in the Brahmanas
received the Soma brought from heaven by the sacred bird,
he messenger of the gods.* This was the bisexual tree of
^Adam and Eve, the tree of the Northern Shus, as distin-
.guished from the parent-tree of the Shus, which was the
<late-palm, a male and female tree, which can only fructify
by impregnation. This last was especially the tree of the
sons of the goat, the Vim worshippers, while the bisexual
fig-tree was that sacred to the matriarchal races united with
the shepherd sons of Ida. But though the Udumbara-tree
was for ritualistic purposes, the parent fig-tree of the sons
of the house-pole, it was not the tree adopted as the parent-
tree in the popular historical mythology. To find this we
must turn to the history of Yayati, the son of Nahusha the
Great Naga.^ Like the other fathers of united races, he had
two wives, one Sharmishtha, the daughter of King Vrisha-
parva, meaning the rainy quarter, that is, the West, who had
put Yayati'^s goddess-wife, the daughter of Shukra, the rain-
god, down a well, the sacrificial pit of the early sacrificers,
where she remained for a thousand years, till rescued by
Yayati, who married her. Of these two wives, Sharmishtha
was the daughter of the fire-god, and Devayani of Shukra, the
rain-god, and Sharmishtha was the mother of the Maghada
races, and Devayani of the two twin races from the North who
completed the civilisation begun by those who first founded
the empire of the Eushika. The name Sharmishtha means
' she who is most protecting,' * and as her sons belonged to a
race who made the fig-tree their mother, she must be the Bur
or Banyan tree, the Ficus Indica, which in Buddhist legend
is the sacred tree of Kashyapa,^ the ancestor of the great
^ Mahabharata Adi {Astika) Parva, xx. xxv.-xxxv.
' Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iii. 6. 2. 8-12 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 150, 151.
' Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixxv. to Ixxxv. p. 228-260.
* Fr. Sharmatty * protection.* ' FausbOll, /<f/fl^fl, vol. i. p. 43, §. 245.
240 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
race of the Bharata, or sons of the ruling race of Burs who gave
India its name of Bharata varsha. Her sons were Druhyu
Anu, and Puru. The Druhyu, wliose name means 'the
cunning one,** are the sons of the Druh or Druj, the witch-
craft denounced in the Zendavesta^ the witch-goddess who
appears in the Rigveda as the forerunner of Prishni, the
mother of the Maruts,^ and as the malicious witch Druh,
whom Indra shoots with his arrows.^ Her sons are called
Yatus, or sons of Ya, in the Zendavesta, and these Druhyus
are said in the Mahabharata to represent the modem race of
Bhojas or cattle herdsmen, who generally incline to the Shiva
or Sakti sect of Linga worshippers. The Anu are the people of
the villages called in the Mahabharata Mlecchas, who worship
the village gods, who received the name of Anu, the local
gods, just as the same deities were called the Anats of the
Canaanite villagers the Hivites, who traced their descent to
Anah, the mother of the wife of Esau, the goat-god.^ The
ruling race of thePurus are the sons of Kutsa, called Purukutsa,
the god Ku, the Eastern races who united all the tribes of
India under the rule of the Kushikas. It was the Purus who
supplied the reforming and progressive elements which consoli-
dated the empire, and it was they who first made efforts to
make the moral law the law of life, just as the orderly succession
of phenomena is the law of Nature. It was they who replaced
the Demanos or Bhukuts, the intoxicated priests of the age
of witchcraft, by the Pra-shastri,* the teacher, the remem-
berer of and instructor in the Shastras or records of the
divine law, which was the original title of the priest, after-
wards called Mitra-Varuna. He was the Asipu of the
Akkadians, the divine framer, expounder, and guardian of
the national traditions, the historical myths which were,
before the days of writing, stored in the memory of the
hereditary teachers, who had received them from their fore-
^ Rigveda, x. 73. 2. 2 /^/^ jy 23. 7.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures iox 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 187, 188; Gen. xxxvi.
I- 14* * Rigveda, i. 94. 6, ii. 5. 4.
ESSAY III 241
fathers, who compiled them under a vivid sense of their re-
sponsibility for their correctness, and by rules which were
looked on as inspired. They were the sons of Joseph, whose
name means the Asipu of the Jews, the Gurus or tribal
teachers of the Hindus, and the Exegetae of the Greeks.
Their mother Rachel, the ewe, was loved by Jacob before
Leah, the wild cow,^ and as Zarah, the red, or the father of
the red race, the youngest of the twin sons of Tamar, the
Babylonian palm-tree, ruled those of his elder brother Perez,
the breach* or the cleaving-pole, so Ephraim, the two Aslies
{Eper\ the youngest son of Joseph, ruled the eldest, the
Manassite priests of the phallic- worshipping sons of Dan.*
The age of the Asipu is that which inaugurated tliat of the
twin sons of DevayanI, the lieavenly (deva) Ya, the Yadu-
Turvashu, and it was then that the stars first began to be
systematically studied, and their guiding stars were the twin-
stars of Gemini, the Ashvins, or heavenly horsemen, who live
with Vivasvat,* who were first the day and night, and who,
as I have shown, substituted honey -drink, * Madhu,^ for the
Sura or spirits previously drunk at sacrifices. They are called
in the Brahmanas the Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests of
the gods who laid the foundations of the elaborate ritual of
the Soma sacrifice,^ and it was their worshippers who brought
with them from their home in Asia Minor the three seasons
typified in the three-lipped cup allotted to the Ashvins,^
which were adopted as those of the Chatur masya. It is these
three seasons which also appear in their Soma offerings,
* Gen. xxix. 18-27. * /dt'd. xxxviii. 28-30.
* 3td. xlviii. 14-20; Judges xviii. 30, 31, where Jonathan, the son of
Gershom, is called both the son of Manasses and the son of Moses, but Ger-
sbom is also the eldest son of Levi, and his descendants, the Gershom-
ites, whose name means ' those turned out,' were employed only in menial
offices, and represented the older race of priests, turned out by the sons of
Kohath, the prophet priests; Numb. iv. 21-27; Gesenius, Thesaurus^ s.v.
* Gershom.'
* Rigveda, i. 46, 13.
' Eggeling, Sat. Brah, iv. I, 5, 16; S.6.E. vol. xxvi, p. 276.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iv. I, 5, 19 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 272, note 4, 278.
16
242 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
young kusha-grass, young corn-shoots, as in the Kurrum
festival, and roasted com, also in the Soma-mixtures they
introduced, called Soma-Try-ashira in the Rigveda.^ These
are Gavashir, Dadhyashir, and Yavashir mixings, with milk
(gava\ sour-milk (dadhi), and barley {jjavd)^ and the drink
with which these were mixed was * Madhu ** or mead, for the
Ashvins are called Madhu- vahana and Madhu- varna, the
bearers of Madhu and the men of Madhu^s caste, also
Madhuya, Madhu-pa, Madh-vi, or drinkers of Madhu, and
not Soma-pa, or drinkers of Soma.* They pour out a hundred
casks of Madhu,^ and they are called to come and drink Madhu
from the hand of their Adhvaryu, or priest.^ These Soma
mixings occupied in the Soma ritual of the Ashvins a similar
place to that assigned in the revised service to the Upasads,
or homages to the three seasons, preceded by the Pravargya,
or offering of heated milk.^ These are offered to give the
sacrificer a celestial body, but the idea which underlay the
earlier sacrifices was probably that of sacrifices to the deities
of the seasons sacred to the sons of the cow. Thus the
mixing with milk, Gavashir, was a sacrifice to the spring.
The Dadhyashir, or milk clotted with heat, to the summer,
and tlic Yavashir, or barley mixing, was to the barley or
autumn season. The Soma mixed with milk was only offered
to Mitra-Varuna, the parent-gods of the race, and the Soma
that was used seems to liave been once the juice or dew
pressed from the Kusha grass, and afterwards tlie juice of the
Bur-tree (Ficus Indica)^ for in Katyayana, x. 9, 30, the
priests are forbidden to give a sacrificer of the Kshatriya or
Vaishya caste true Soma, but to substitute for it the juice of
the Bur-tree infused into milk.^ The milk-mixing was, there-
^ Rigveda, v. 27. 5, viii. 2, 7. They are called in these verses Traya
Indrasya Somah Sutasah, the three kinds of Indra*s Soma.
2 Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, p. 209. ^ Ibid, p. 239.
* Rigveda, i. 117, 6. ' Jbid, x. 41, 3.
^ Eggeling, Sat. Brdh, iii. 4. 4. I. ff. ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 104, ff. 104,
note I.
7 Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythohgie, pp. 66, 6t.
ESSAY III 243
fore, that which celebrated the birth of the sons the Bur-tree.
This conclusion is confirmed by the offering of the Dadhi-
gharma, or mixed hot and sour milk, which is offered to the
Maruts in the sacrifices to the seasons of the year of Praja-
pati, the god of the five seasons beginning with the summer
solstice. The Maruts, the wind-goddesses coming from the
West Martu, rule the fourth of these seasons, or that sacred
to the mother Magh, and the Dadhi-gharma is offered to
them close to the Udumbara post, sacred, like the Bur-tree,
to the sons of the fig-tree.^
The Yavashir, or cup mixed with barley, one of those
called Gavashiram, mixed with milk, Manthinam with barley
and pure Soma, wliich Indra is prayed in the Rigveda to-
drink,* is the Manthin cup made with barley meal,* and
offered to the sacred bird that brought the Soma. The
Manthin cup means the creating cup, for the word is formed
from the root math or manth^ to twirl or churn, in the crea-
tion of fire, and it is the cup offered to the messenger of the
god who made barley the heavenly seed. The two cups
drawn after those to Mitra-Varuna, and called the Sukra and
Manthin cups,^ are said to be offered to the gods of the Asli-
uras, called Shanda and Marka.^ Marka is the Mahrka of
the Zendavesta, and means death.^ The rivalry between the
Gridhra or vulture, the bird of death, and the Ashvins, each
striving to drink Soma before the other, is referred to in a
stanza of the Rigveda, which calls on worshippers to honour
first the Ashvins * who come in the morning, may they drink
before the greedy Gridhra.' ^ Thus the Manthin or creating
cup in honour of Marka, is the cup offered to the god whose
* Elggeling, Sat. Brdh, iv. 3. 3, 13 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 336 note 2.
' Rigveda, iii. 32, 2 ; 'Gavashiram manthinam indra piba somam.'
* Eggeling, Sat. Brah, iv. 2, I, 2; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 278.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brah. iv. 1,5, i ff. The Ashvina Graha is placed here not
in the order in which it was offered. S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 272 note 3 ; see iv.
2, 5> 12, p. 312.
' Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iv. 2, I, 1-4 ; S.B.E. pp. 278, 279.
* Hillebrandt, Vedische MythologU^ pp. 224, 225. ^ Rigveda, v. 77, i.
d
244 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
messenger is the bird of death, the devourer of dead time.
But the Manthin, the messenger of Marka or Mahrka, the
god of death, is also, we are told, the moon,^ and the moon
is always called by the Hindus the abode of the dead ; and
hence the vulture, the bird of the dead, is the bird of the
dying or crescent-moon. Shanda is the father-god of the
people called in the Rigveda Shandika, or sons of Shanda,
whose, king called Vrikadvaras, or the door (dvar) of the
wolf {vrika)y was slain by Indra.^ They were thus the ruling
race before the northern wolf-god entered it, and the cerebral
letters in the name prove it to be of Dravidian origin. It
must be the god of one of the races who preceded those led
by the Ashvins, and the connection shown to exist between
Shanda and Mahrka and the sacred bird, is shown also in
the Bahtauli festival of the Ho and Munda Eols. This
festival is that which, among the rice-growing Hos and
Mundas, who drink no milk, corresponds to the Kurrum or
barley festival of the Ooraons, both being celebrated in
Srabon. But at the Bahtauli festival the sacrifice offered is
a fowl slain by each cultivator, who strips off its wings with
mysterious rites, and inserts them in a cleft bamboo, one of
which is set up in his field and the other on his dung-heap.^
It is these same people who count among their totems,
Sandil, meaning the full-moon, and Sandi, a plough,* and
who calls the place of worship of the village headman,
Chandil.^ It was these people who looked on the crescent-
moon as the bird flying to and from the creator, and bringing
with it the full-moon, and thus Marka and Shanda mean
the crescent- and full-moon, which were worshipped as the
gods of time, before the coming of the sons of the barley, the
star-worshippers who made the star Sirius, called the rain-
god, Sukra, the star which begins the year by rising at the
^ Eggeling, Sa^. Brah. iv. 2, I, i ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 278.
* Rigveda, ii. 30, 8.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ vol. i. p. 329; vol. ii. p. 104.
* Ibid, vol. ii. p. 219. ^ Ibid. vol. i. p. 189.
ESSAY III 245
summer solstice, when the rains begin in Eastern India ; and
it is Sukra, the successor of Shanda, who appears in the Rig-
veda under the name of the king of the Shandika Vrika-
dvara:^, for he is the door (dvar) through which the heavenly
wolf, the Naga-god of the plough (also called Vrika), descends
to the earth. But the moon-bird of the earliest worshippers
of the gods of time still remained to them the messenger of
the gods, but she was not the bird reappearing and disappear-
ing every month, but the bird of the West, the storm-bird
which announces the coming of the rains. It was the bird
of the winds which became to the Eushika, who had delocal-
ised the parent-gods, and made Mitra Varuna their supreme
god, the messengers and ambassadors sent to declare to men
the changes of the seasons, and to be the angels of god sent to
the sons of the tortoise. It was the spring bird, the stork, the
Lat. ciconia^ a name which is reproduced in the Sanskrit Sha-
kuna, who told the Northern races of the coming of spring ;
and it was the Vartika, or quail, the bird of the Ashvins, who
comes to Northern India about the time of the winter solstice,
which told them of the birth of the sun-god of the new year.
But though the migrating birds were the bringers of silent
messages, their place as the angels sent to the sons of the
prophet-god by their divine father, was taken by the raven,
or bird of the black thunder-cloud, the prophet-bird of the
Northern Finns, and the bird of Odin, the god of know-
ledge, the northern form of the Hindu Manu, the thinker.
This was the bird of the magician, sacred to the Finnish
god Lempo,^ who with Hi-isi and Piru, formed the triad who
created the primaeval snake, the great Naga. Hi-isi, the
wooded-mountain (m), gave life to it. Eyes were given to it
by spells by Piru, the begetting-god, the Sclavonic Per-kunas,
the thunder-god, whose name appears in the Dravidian root,
peru, * to bear,^ and in one of the Vedic names for Soma,
^ Abercromby, * Magic Songs of the Finns,' Fo/^ Lore, vol. i. No. I. March
1890, p. 33.
246 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Apam perub, the seed or germ of life in the waters.^ Lempo
formed its jaw-bone.^ It was the speaking-bird which be-
came the Varaghna bird, the sacred bird of the Magi, who
inspired the three fathers of Zend mythology, Yima, Thrae-
taona, and Keresaspa;^ and it was the sacred bird of Apollo,
the storm-god, the god of the .^lian race, dwelling in the
grove tenanted by ravens, at Pegasae, in Thessaly.* Tlie
Varaghna bird, whose name means he who smites {aghna\
the rain {var\ is the miracle-working prophet who smites
the mountain rock, and makes the waters gush from them,
and smites the air with his magic wand, the wonder-working
word, and brings the rain from heaven. He is the bird Vach
(speech), which brings Soma to earth.^ It was as the possessor
of the fortunate feather of the raven, the bird called Varen-
jana, or he who was born {jand) in the four-cornered Varena,
the garden of God, that Verethragna, the Zend form of the
Vedic Vritrahan, or slayer of snakes, was able to kill all his
enemies ; ^ and this shows us the double aspect of the rain-
god and his messenger-bird, the raven, for lie is both the
death-dealing god who sends pestilence —
* As wicked dew as ere my mother brushed
With raveu's feather from unwholesome fen/
and also the god who gives life and inspires the truths
spoken by his servants. And it is as the bird of inspiration
that the raven feeds Elijah the prophet, whose God {El) is
JahJ But the sacred bird assumed his primitive aspect as
announcer of the seasons in the Kushite mythology, for he
^ Rigvcda, x. 36, 8 ; Peschel und Gcldner, J'cdiscke StudUn^ pp. TJ^ 81,
89,91.
- Abcrcromby, * Magic Songs of ihc Finns : The Origin of the Snake,'
Folk Lore, vol. i. No. I, March 1890, p. 38.
^ Darmeslcter, Zendavcsta Zamyad Yost, 35-38; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 294,
295.
* MUller, Die Dorier^ Bk. ii. chap. i. §§ 2 and 3, pp. 202-206.
^ Eggeling*s Sat, Brdh. iii. 6, 2, 2 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 149.
* Darmestetcr, Zendavesta Bahrdm Kaj/, 35, 40 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p.
241. ' I Kings xvii. 6.
ESSAY III 247
became the storm-bird, the Lugal-tudda of the Akkadians;
the black Bindo bird of the Song of Lingal, the bird of
the Akkadian west wind, Martu, and the Maruts of the Rig-
veda which brings the rains. Thus he is the bird of the
Fathers who came from the west, the bird of the dead.
And it is in this way that the vulture Gridhra became the
sacred bird. He was the Lugal-tudda of the Akkadians,
and one of the forms of Shakuna in the Rigveda, a bird
who eats dead bodies ; ^ and as the Shakuna spoken of in
this passage is black, and it is also spoken of in another
hymn as a bird who screeches good omens, and a singer of holy
speech,* we see that the biixl who was first, Ciconia, the stork,
became the raven of the magicians. But when the bird of
^eech became the bird who brought the rains, he becomes a
bird whose migrations coincide with their coming. This
bird in the Kushika empire of India is the large carrion eat-
ing bird the adjutant, which always arrives with the first
downfall of rain. He is the Zend Vareshava, the son of
Danu, the judge in the Zendavesta,^ but in the Zend lands
which are outside the sphere of the adjutant'^s migrations,
he becomes the vulture, the Gridhra of the Rigveda. This
is the vulture bird of Thraetaona, called Vafra Navaza, mean-
ing the freshly-fallen snow,* whose melting gave life to the
rivers of Asia Minor, the fatherland of the myth, for it was
this vulture which bore Thraetaona to the Rangha or Tigris
when he went to conquer Azi Dahaka, the king of Bauri or
Babylon, the devouring snake of the burning summer, and
which also carried the chariot of Kavi Usa, the goat-father of
the Kusliite race.^ In the next vei-se of the Bahram Yast to
that telling how the vulture can'ied Thraetaona Verethragna
*Sayce, Bibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 293. Rigveda, x. 16, 6.
Here the Shakuna is called Krishnas, the black bird.
2 Rigveda, ii. 42, I, 3 ; 43, 1-3.
' Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamydd Yofty 41 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 296.
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta AbdnYast^ 61, 63 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp. 68, 69.
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Afrtn Paighambur Zartushty 4 ; Bahram Vasty
39> 40, 41-2 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp. 232, 241, 242, 326.
248 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
is compared to the sacred bird which is here called the Saena
bird, and the big clouds full of water that beat the mountains,
and in the fii-st of his eight avatars he is ^ a strong beautiful
wind/ Thus, we find the Saena bird identified with Thrae-
taona'^s vulture Vafra Navaza, the freshly fallen snow, and
Shyena, the Sanskrit form of Zend Saena, comes from the
root shya^ meaning to curdle, to coagulate, also to cool, to
freeze. Thus as Thraetaona's vulture brought freshly fallen
snow to the mountains where the Tigi'is rises, so the Shyena
bird who brought Soma to earth,^ brought the snows of the
rainy season to the Himalayas. But this bird, before it
came as the rain-wind, came as the burning blasts fi*om the
west, and as the dark copper sky from which they issue and
temporarily kill all life in the summer of North-western
India. It is this brassy sky which is the cloud which will
not give up the rain, the enemies of Indra called Shushna
Na-muchi and Azi Dahaka. It is also this rainless cloud
which appears in Indian historical legends in two forms, as
Push-kara the gambler, the maker {kara) of Push, who in
the story of Nala and DamayantI, wins from Nala his king-
dom at play, and then strips him who is the god of the
ordinary coui*se or channel (nala or nullah) of nature, bare,-
and as Shakuna, who has been changed from the stork to
the rain-bird, and is, in the story of the Mahiibharata, the
brother of the Kauravya tortoise- motlier Gandharl. It is
he wlio causes the ruin and exile of the Pandavas by winning
from Yudishthira, the eldest of the five brother, his wealth
and kingdom at a gambling-match.*^ But while Shakuna,
the gaml)ler, is the destroying bird of summer, his sister
GandliarT is the fructifying bird who laid the world'*s egg,
whence the Kauravya, sons of the tortoise {kaur\ were bom.
She was the wife of Dhritarashtra, the blind king, whose name
means * He who holds the kingdom (together), that is, the
1 Rigveda, iv. 26, 4-7 ; 27, 3, 4.
' Mahabharata Vana [Naio-pakkyana) Parva, lii.-lxxix. pp. 157-234.
* Ibid. Sabha {Anudyiita) Parva, Ixxiv-lxxxi.
ESSAY III 249
house-pole of the house whence the Eushite race was to
issue. Gandharrs egg was laid in the city of Hastinapore,
the city of the eight {asta)j also called Pushkala-vati or the
city of Push-kara on the river Swat, in the land of the
mother-mountain of the East.^ When laid, it was like a
ball of flesh, as hard as iron; the transformed symbol of
the mother mountain. It was two years in her womb, and
was by the orders of the Rishi Vyasa, the uniter, whom I
have shown to be the alligator Maga, sprinkled or sanctified
by the water of life. It then divided into one hundred
parts, like the mother Hekate (the hundred), each about the
size of the thumb, which parts were the Naga snakes, which
formed the Angiiineum ovum^ or snake\s egg worshipped by
the Druids,^ and hung up in the temple of Hercules in Tyre,
encircled by the Agathodaemon, or the good snake that gives
the rain. These snakes were put into clarified butter, the
divine seed of the bull race, and kept carefully covered for
two years, when one hundred sons and a daughter called
Dushala were bom.^ This story tells us how the mother-
bird Grandhari, like the ewe-mother Ida, gave birth to the
snake-bom sons of the bull, and this appears in another form
in the Akkadian myth which tells us how the winged bull
was engendered by the storm-bird, Ungal-turda.* It was
this winged bull which, as the Kerubi, the bright ones,
guarded the gates of Assyrian temples, and became the
Cherubim of the tlews. It is also this same genealogy
which appears in the deification of Push, the son of the
gambler Push-kara, the maker of Push. His name means
he who makes the plants to grow (pus). He appears in
Akkadian as Pu, and the ideogram of Pu, 3[, means the
lord of the watery enclosure {pu\^ that is to say, the rain-
^ Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India^ p. 50.
^ Encyclopadia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, Art. * Druidism,' vol. vii. p. 47 7,
' Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, cxv.-cxvii. pp. 337-342.
* Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ chap, xii, p. 171, note 8. Sayce, Hihbert
Lectures for 1887, App. iv. xviii, p. 9-22, 495.
• Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary y Nos. 223, 470.
250 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
bull Indra, and he and Indra are called in the Rigveda
brothers.^ It is a similar transformation to that of Gand-
hari, the layer of the egg, whence the Eushite race was
born, for Gandharl means she who wets or waters (dhdri)
the Gan or enclosure, that is, the mother-rivers of the race
bom from her, of which the chief is the Gan-gu, from
whom the Gan, the garden of God, was bom. It was
on their banks that the Kushite kings established the
wealthiest kingdoms of their widespread empire, and it was
these sons of barley {yava) who changed the parent gods,
Puse, the alligator, and Maga, the witch-mother, into Pushan,
the bull, and Ida, who was first the sheep and then the
mother-cow, the Egyptian Isis. It was she who was the
year-cow made by the Ribhus, whose son, the year-calf, was,
we are told in the Rigveda, engendered by the thought of
the heavenly spirit which filled her womb with the life-
giving mist, the water of life.^ The connection between
this symbolism and the bird-myth is shown by the Eg3rptian
Nunet, the consort of Nun, the life-giving spirit of the mist,
the supreme god both of the Egyptians and Akkadians, who
is depicted as a vulture.^ It was this mother storm-bird
which brings the rain wlio became the zu-bird, or bird of
wisdom {zii)y of the Akkadians, who revolted against Mul-lil,
lord of sorcery (Zi/),* seized the tablets of destiny and be-
came the ruler of heaven in the mother-mountain of the
East,^ she who was the Sin-amra or moon-falcon, or the
Si-murgh, that is Sin-murgh, the moon-bird, who in later
mythology took the place of the Saena bird and Amru of
the Zendavesta.^ She was the Egyptian Dhu-ti, the god
1 Rigveda, vi. 55, 5. » /did. i. 164, 8.
' H. Brugsch, /Religion uttd Mythologie der Alien ^-Kgyptery p. 1 1 6.
* Say cey If iddgri Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii., iii., iv., pp. 103, 145, 281.
Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary ^ No. 306. Lil means a storm of dust,
demon-ghosts, sorcery.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 297-299.
* Darmesteler, Zendavesta Fravardin Ya§t^ 109; Rasha Yoft, 17; S.B.E.
vol. xxiii. p. 210 note I, p. 173 note i ; S.B.E. vol. iv. p. 54 note 2.
ESSAY III 261
i^ti) Dhu or Zu, the moon-god with the ibis beak who holds
the fortunate feather, the pen with which he records the
events marking the lapse of time. The egg of this bird is
the Egyptian ankh borne by the gods as the sign of life
into which the life-giving spirit is infused by the
fire-drill. This impregnation is distinctly de- /p\
picted on the second vignette of the great papyrus ^^^ cLp
of Ani, illustrating the Book of the Dead, where "1 j
the two mothers Isis, the cow and fire-mother, I
and Nebt-hat the mistress (nebt) of the house
ih(xt% the earth-mother, stand gazing on the Tat, the form
of the ankh represented as the creating spirit, and in it
ivas the fire-drill, furnished with the cross-bar by which it
'was turned when generating the life-giving heat. This is
overshadowed by the arms of the mountain-mother spring-
ing from the egg of the a7iJch, and bearing on her ten finger-
tips the ten lunar months of gestation, the red egg or the
<louble tortoise quickened by the seed of the life-giving fire,
and waiting to bring forth its progeny, the red man, till the
sun, which already warms it with its rays, has fully emerged
from the shades of night. This pictorial simile is verbally
repeated in the genealogy of the nine gods of life bom from
Tum, the sun of night, the creating god of the Akkadians and
Egyptians, the Tamas, or darkness, of the Hindus, which in the
Rigveda overarches the motlier- waters whence the rivers rise.^
His children were Shu, meaning *he who dries (with heat),^*
that is, the engendering fire-god and Tafnit the effluence,^
the conceiving and child-bearing mother. From them were
bom Zeb or Geb the convexity,* the tortoise earth and his
consort Nut, whose names means the flood (iit\ the ocean or
the binding-chain.^ She bears a water-jar on her head, and is
^ Rigveda, i. 54, la
' H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologic der Alien ^gypter, p. 31.
' Ibid, 573, derives Taf-nit from T/n^ effluence.
* Ibid, 576, from gbdy meaning bending or convexity.
* H. Bnigsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien *€.gypier^ pp. 85, 338,
^3, 607, 608.
252 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
called at Thebes Api, the water-goddess, and she also appears
as Nun-et, the vulture, wife of Nun. It is this myth of the
heated air begetting the convex earth, tlie child of rain and
the ocean-mother who lays the world's egg, which appears
in another form in the Hindu deification of Krishanu,.
the god (aria) who draws (karsh) tlie heavenly bow and
guards the Soma, or water of life. It is this bow which
spans the egg in the arikh and encircles it as the Agatho-
dsemon encircled the world egg sacred to the Tynan
Hercules, and it is in Genesis named as the sign of the
rain-father, the great god Yah.^ It was the sons of Greb,
who, as the sons of Kusli, the tortoise, were the Kushite
rulers of the empire whose centre was the mother-mountain
of the East. This is described in the Book of the Dead as
' The emei'ald-mountain of the East,' 2 i\^q home of Sebek,
*the Maga crocodile,"* below which lies the snake called
Am-hah, the ' Shesh-nag of the Hindus,** who stands erect
* and looks at the sun-god."" And it is in the land of this
mountain * reaching on the south to the sea of the Charo-
bird and on the north to that of the Ro-goose, that the
emerald sycamore, whence Ra, the sun-god, spmng, grows.*"
The land of Aron ' begirt with iron walls,"* like the Malabar
coasts of India, ' where com is seven ells long, its ears thret%
and stalks four, reaped by spirits of the Eastern souls,
eight ells long, where is Horus the calf, the god Sothis,
the morning star, Venus."* ^ That is the star called Magha-
bu, or son of Maglia, by the Hindus. It was in this land of
India, the land of barley, where time was reckoned by lunar
periods of fourteen days, tlie aggregates of the lengths of the
ears of com, and divided into the three seasons of the stalk,
ear, and ripened grain, that the com was reaped by the
followers of the Eight, the symbol of the united Swastikas,
^ Gen. ix. 13.
* H. Bnigsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien /Egypter, p. 588 ; Book
of the Deadj pp. 108, ill.
' H. Brugsch, Religion umi Mythologie der Alien ^gypUr, pp. 175, 177 ;.
Book of the Deady chap. 109.
ESSAY III 253
forming the four triangles of the tortoise-earth and the
-eight tribes of united Gonds. It was there, under the
emerald green sycamore, *the Egyptian fig-mulberry, and
the Hindu Banyan tree ^ whence Ra moves through cloud-
land,^ that the mother-bird Naga-ga, meaning the great
cackler, the goose-mother Bes-bes, Seb, or Smenu, laid the
world's egg,* and became the Hindu goose-mother Ur-vashi,
the mother of Ayu, the ages of historical time. It was in
this land that the king or judge, the Danu, who did justice
by the inspiration of God, was added to the ruling powers
of an earlier age, the tribal chief, the village hecidman,
the provincial ruler, and the inspired magician or magic
priest ; and it was then that was formed the conception of
the confederated kingdom formed of six dependent and
allied states surrounding the seventh i-uling state in the
centre. It is this conception which is worked out in the
six kingdoms surrounding the central kingdom of Jambu-
dwipa, into which they divided India, and in the six king-
doms of Iran round Khvaniras or Hvaniratha, the land
ruled by Susi-nag, the original father-god of the model
state. This form of kingdom still survives in those which
form the tributary states of Chota Nagpore, for in all of
these the central province is ruled by the king and those
surrounding it by his subordinate chiefs.
But before proceeding to show how the sons of Dan ex-
tended their rule and influence over countries so wide apart
as India and Egypt, I must first complete the proof of the
birth and growth of the race in its successive stages. I have
shown how the conception of the descent from the father-
bull and the mother-cow grew out of those of the ewe-mother
and the mother-bird, and I must now trace the marks of
evolutionary eridence shown in the origin and historical pro-
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten ^gypter^ p. 173; Book
of the Dead, pp. 109-3, *49"7'
' H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten ^gypter^ p. 172 ; Book
of the Deadf pp. 54, i.
254 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
gress of the sons of the bull. Tliey are called by the Akka-
dians the Lu-gud, or race (lu) of the bull (gud)^ the sons of
Gad of the Jews, who gave to Assyria its earliest name of
Gutium or bull'^s land, and founded in India the race of the
Gautama, the sons of Rohini, the red cow. They were the
i-ed race who succeeded to and worked with, the yellow race.
Their father-god was the wild bull, whose sign on the Telloh
monuments is \y ^ This is the three-eyed bull, the Semi-
ramis or Samirdus of Babylon, a bisexual form of Istar,
described in a legend quoted by Lenormant, as having three
eyes and two horns, who succeeded Nimrod in Babylon, and
invented weights and measures, and the art of silk-weaving.^
This bull-god with the three eyes, or the three seasons of the
year, is the patronymic god of the Gaurian race of Telloh or
Lu-gash, whose god was Gud-Ia, or the bull (/a), and who in
India call Gauri, the wild-cow {bos gauros)^ their mother-
goddess. They made their god Shiva, the shepherd-god, the
three-eyed god,^ and their king Shishupala, meaning the
nourisher of children, the king of Chedi, and chief-general
of Jariisandha, was bom with three eyes and four hands.
It was he who was slain by Krishna with the discus,* the
ring or completed year of five seasons recurring in regular
order, which developed into the limar year of thirteen
months of twenty-eight days each. These sons of the wild-
bull were among the Jews the six sons and one daughter of
Leah, the wild-cow who had tender eyes, a euphuism for
the three eyes of the wild-cow, and it was they who led the
sons of Gad and Ashiir in the paths of knowledge, where they
learned that the laws of Nature were unalterable and unchang-
ing, and made the sons of Levi, the teachers of the law, their
* Amiaud et Mechinscau, Tableau Compark des Ecritures Babylonienues
et AssyriemieSf No. 49, p. 19.
- Lenormant, Chaldiran Magic^ p. 396, note 2.
* Mahabharala Shalya Parva, xlviii. p. 193.
* Ibid. Sabha {Shishupala Badha) Parva, xl-xlv.
ESSAY III 255
national instructors and priests, and the sons of Judah, the
fire-god, their rulers. And the union between Judah and
Levi is marked by the marriage of Aaron, the high-priest
of the tribe of Levi, whose name means the Ark of God,
with the daughter of Amminadab and sister of Nahshon,
prince of Judah.^ These teachers of the law were the suc-
cessors of the earlier Asipu, who were half-magicians and half-
dreamers. But the complete history of the rule of the Kushite
Nagas and their successors can only be worked out in that of the
Turvashu-Yadu, the sons of Yayati and Devayani, the twin-
brethren of the sons of Sharmishtha, the Druhyu Anu, and
Puru. The eldest, but subsequently the subordinate, of the
twin-races, were the Tur-vashu, who made the Tur or pole
their god. But this was not the Gumi, or house-pole, but
the meridian-pole of the earth, which joined the mother-
mountain with the overarching heaven. It was they who
made Varuna, the dark sky of night, the house of Kush, the
heavenly tent lit with the stars which glittered on its walls,
and which were led by the twin-stars, the Ashvins. They, in
the Rigveda, are represented as drawn by stallion asses,^ as
their predecessors were led by the dog. They utterly repudiated
the belief of the fire- and dog-worshippers in the sanctity
of emasculated priests, and in the Vara or Garden of God,
tilled by Yima, the twin- {yam) son of Vivanghvadt, the
Sanskrit Vivasvat, no impotent, lunatic, deformed, or leprous
man was allowed to dwell.^ And their leader in India was
the three-eyed Shishu-pala, the nourisher {paid) of children.
But these asses of the Ashvins are the totemistic fathers of
the Ooraons of Chota Nagpore, the first growers of barley, for
none of them will kill an ass.* And all Ooraons will tell you
that their race comes from Ruhidas,^ the land of the red race,
* Exod. vi. 25 ; Numbers vii. 12, where the prince of Judah is called Nah-
shon, the son of Amminadab. ^ Rigveda, i. 34, 9, 116, 2 ; iii. 57, 5.
' Darmesteter, Ztndavesta VendJddd Fargard, ii. 29, 37 ; S. B. E. vol. iv.
pp. 17, 19. * Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal , vol. ii. p. 148.
^ This statement has often been made to me by Ooraons, and it is usually
thought that it means that they come from Behar, the country of which the
«56 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the people and country of Syria, called Rotou by the Egyp-
tians. It is this ass-bom race that we find in the thirty sons
of Jair of the land of Gilead, the son of Manasseh and judge
of Israel, who rode on thirty asses, the thirty days of the solar
month, and in the other Manassite and Gileadite judges of
Israel, Gideon, and Jephthah.i It was Midas, the father-king
of the land of the Phrygians, whence the first leaders of the
Semite confederacy emigrated, who had asses^ ears. In the
Mahabharata, Ucchaihshravas, meaning the horse with long
ears, that is to say, the ass, is the father of horses, and the
horse of Indra, bom from the churning of the waters of the
ocean, as Amrita, the water of life.^ It was about the coloiu*
of the hairs in this horse's tail that Kadru, the mother of
the Naga snakes, and Vinata, the mother of the two egg-bom
sons of Kashyapa Aruna, the fire-drill, and Gadura, the bull
of light, quarrelled. The story of the birth of this horse as
the bearer of the Amrita, is a mythical description of the
bringing up of the rains from the ocean by the heavenly ass.
It is this divine ass which is called in Bundahish the three-
legged ass, that is, the leader of the year with three seasons,
the great purifier of the water of the ocean, who made all
women pregnant, and was the cliief helper of Tistrya Sirius,
the rain-star, in bringing the water from the ocean to the
eartli.^ It was these dwellers on the borders of the deserts
of Arabia and the Euphrates valley, the home of the wild
ass, who first studied the stars they used as guides through the
pathless deserts they had to cross on their trading journeys,
and who thus found that their apparent motion gave better
means of marking the lapse of time than those given by re-
membering the numl>ers of recurring changes of the moon.
It was this belief which led them to map the heavens, and
principal fortress is Rohtas-gurh, on the Kymore hills, but this again is only
a stage on their journey from Syria, the land of the Rotou or red race, the
home of the wild ass.
^ Judges X. 3-6 ; Numl)ers xxxii. 39-42 ; Judges vi. 15 ; xi. 7.
* Mahabharata Adi {Astika) Parva, xx.-xxiii.
^ West, Bundahish^ xix. i-ii ; S.B.E. vol. v. pp. 67-69.
ESSAY III 257
ivide it into the four quarters, east, west, south, and
Lorth, which had already been observed on earth as those
rhence the winds, called by the fire- worshippers the four
^^Bacred hounds,^ came. The stars of the four quarters were
^"^liose of the Zend cosmogony, (1) Tistrya Sirius, the star of
the East that brings the rain. (2) Vanant, the star Aquila,
)r the Eagle, the divine mother-bird, the star of the West,
'^which has in it the seed of the plants, the star of the sons of
^the fig-tree.^ (3) Satavaesa, the star of the South, the hun-
<lred (said) creators (vaesa) ; that is, the hundred sons of the
tortoise-mother, the constellation Argo, the heavenly ship
Ma, of the Akkadians, which pushes the waters forward or
controls the tides in the Persian Gulf,^ just as its chief star,
Canopus, called Agastiya by the Hindus, drinks up the
waters of the ocean, which were again replenished by Ganga,
the great river.* This star Agastya was the star of the
Indian Dravidian races, the star which, in the Rigveda,
brought the son of Mitra-Varuna and Urvashi, the Vashish-
tha, or most-creating fire forth from the lightning ;^ that is to
say, he made the leader of the stars the supreme god in place
of the storm-god. (4) The Seven Stars of the North, the
Hapto-iringas, the seven bulls, which we call the Great Bear.
But in this selection of the ruling stars, as in all other
ancient systems of teaching, we find a cosmological myth, and
the clew to it is to be found in the Arab doctrine of the Pole.
They, as Abu Rihan (Alberunl) tells us, always called the
North Pole the Great Bear, and the South Pole, Canopus.®
* Sayce, Hibbtrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 288.
' Dannesteter, Zendavesta Tir Yasty 32, 1/ Strozah, i. 13 ; S.B.E. vol.
xxiii. pp. 9, 92, 97. But see Essay iv. p. 332, where I show that in the first
stellar mythology Vanant was the constellation Corvus.
' See description of how Sataves controls the tides in the Sea Vourukasha,
the sea of Oman, V^Qsi^sBundakish, ii. 7; xiii. 12 ; Darmesteter's Zendavesta
Vendidad Fargatd, v. 18, 19; S.B.E. vol. v. pp. 12, 44; iv. p. 54.
•* Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha- Yatra) Parva, ciii.-cix. pp. 324-340.
' Rigveda, vii. 33, 10, 11.
' Sacbau's Alberuni's India, vol. i. chap. xxii. p. 240.
17
A
258 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Thus the seven stars of the Great Bear, the seven bulls, and
the star Canopus, were the eight stars forming the fire-drill,
or the pole which became the father of tlie hundred sons or
stars of Satavaesa, the mother-ship, Argo, the Nagas which
peopled the fields of heaven, called the Nagkslietra, or field
of the Nags. The two stars, the star of the East, Sinus,
Tishtrya, or Sukra ; and the star of the West, Aquila or Van-
ant, were the bringers of the generating rain sent to earth by
Satavaesa, and the points of the cross-bar which turned the
drill-stick of the North round in the Southern socket. The
eight stars of the drill and the two of the cross-bar, were the
ten lunar months of gestation which preceded the birth of
the sons of Satavaesa, the Hindu mother-star, Magha, which
aften%'ards became the planet Venus. It was under this con-
stellation that Yudishthira, the son of Dharma, the fixed
law of natural order, was bom.^ He was the eldest of the
Piindavas, bom under the influence of the moon-goddess, and
the first season of the year of righteousness, the year of five
seasons, the five Pandava brothers. It was the Ashvins, the
stars Gemini, immediately to the east of the Pole, who were
the Adhvaryu, or priests of the gods, who twirled round the
fire-drill of the Northern Pole, while the seven Maruts, or
South-western winds, held the other end of the rope of
destiny, and who thus, as they are said to do, in the Vayu
Puriina, * drive the stars round the pole, which are bound to
it by ties invisible to man. They move round like the beam
in the oil-press, for its bottom is, as it were, standing still,
while its end is moving round.** ^
The ties which bind the stars round the pole, and conse-
crate it as the necklace of the bell-god Gargara, consecrates
the Gond god Pharsi Pen, are, as we are told in the Vishnu
Dharma, the constellation of the Alligator, called by its Vedic
name of 'Shimshumrira,the prototype of that now called Draco.
It is described as consisting of fourteen stars, the fourteen days
^ Sachau's Alberuni's India, vol. i. chap. xlv. pp. 389, 390.
* Ibid, vol. i. chap. xxii. p. 241.
ESSAY III 259
of the lunar periods, which drive the stars round the pole,
and of these fourteen stars, the Ashvins or physicians of the
gods, the stars of Gemini, who were first the twins Ushasa-
nakta, day and night, are the hands ; and Marlchi, which, as I
shall show, is the father-star of the Great Bear, is one of the
tail-stars.^ This cosmogony of the Turanian sons of the Tur,
^which makes the great Nag the creator, the infuser of the
soul of life into the heavenly fire-drill turned by his priests,
is that which is said in the Rigveda to be the work of the
-Ashvins. They made Chyavana, the mountain- or shaking-
^d, the fire-god, imprisoned, like the Cyclops of Greek
in)rthology, beneath the mountain, young again ; ^ and the
fiill meaning of this is made clear by the stories in the
Mahabharata and Brahmanas, which tell how Chyavana,
"the son of Bhrigu, the earthly fire-drill, pierced his eyes
in the forest; that is, became the blind house-pole of
"the forest tribes, and was, like the dead volcano, looked on
with irreverence and pelted with clods ; that is, made the
house-pole of the house built with clods by the cow-herds
and shepherds, sons of Sharyata, the son of Manu, that is,
the god Shar. Chyavana sowed discord among them in
revenge for their insults, and Sharyata, in trying to find
out the cause of strife, discovered that the moss-grown
mother-mountain of former generations was really the fire-
god. He then, to appease his wrath, offered to him his
daughter Su-kanya, the daughter of Shu, the germ of life,
the Shu-stone hidden in the mountain, as his wife. It was
this union which was completed by the Ashvins, who, as the
physicians of the gods, promised to make Chyavana young
again, if Su-kanya got leave for them to drink Soma with
the gods. This leave was granted on the creation of Madhu,
the mead, or honey-drink of the gods, and it was when they
were received into heaven that the Ashvins made the re-
juvenated Chyavana, father of the children of Su-kanya, the
mother of the Shus, or sons of Dan, called in the Bible
' Sachau's Albenini's fttdia, pp. 241, 242. -'Rigveda i. 116, 10 ; 117, 15.
260 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Hushim and Shuham,^ and in the Rigveda Shu-varna, or the
race of the Shus. This story tells us how the inspired
prophets, or medicine-men of the race, who made the stars
Gemini their guiding stars, moved the mother-mountain from
earth to heaven, and made it the heavenly fire-drill I have
just described. In this story, also, Su-kanya, the mother of
the heaven-bom race, is the daughter of the Armenian cloud-
god, Shar, and her marriage with the mountain-god is another
form of the union of the Hebrew father Ab-ram, the father
of the heights, the mountain of the East, with Sar-ai, and
the birth in their old age of Isaac, the blind house-pole, the
Hindu blind king Dhritarashtra, from whom Esau, the
goat-god, and his twin brother Jacob, the father, through the
mess of red pottage, of the red race, the sons of Yah, were
bom. It was the Ashvins who, as physicians to the gods^
healed not only bodily ailments, but also ignorance and
mental blindness; who gave eyes, the dog-star, Sirius, of
the East, and the bird-star, Aquila, of the West, to Rijrashva,
the blind god of the house-pole, and the husband of the
wolf-goddess ; ^ who gave to Vadhri-matI, she who has a
sexless (vadhri) husband, a son, Shyana, the god of the
dark night, called Hiranyahasta, the god with the golden
hand, who was divided into three parts,^ the year of three
seasons, and brought back to life as the New Year by the
Ashvins, who reckoned the movements of the stars the golden
fingers of heaven born of the sexless father, the heavenly
fire-drill. They gave to Shyana, called the Kanva, the priests
and bards of the Yadu-Turvashu, the liushati, the dawns or
dawning-light from the East,* and to the Vish-vaka, the
speakers (vaka) of the tongue of the village (vhh\ the black
race {1crishna\ the god Vishnu (Vishnapu\ the boar-god
who had become the bull-god.^ They gave back eyes, the
stars, to the Kanva, their priests,^ and raised Bhuju, mean-
* Gen. xlvL 23 ; Numbers xxvi. 42.
3 /did. i. 117, 24; X. 65, 12.
* /did, i. 117, 7.
- Rigveda, i. 116, 16 ; 117, 17, 18.
* /did. i. 117,8.
* /did. i, 118, 7.
ESSAY III 261
ing the devourer, the god of the devouring fire, the son of
Tugra, or the Tri-garta, from the waters, the ocean-mother
surrounding the earth and bore him through the air, where
he mounts a ship with a hundred wheels,^ the constellation
Sata-vaesa. It was, in short, these twin races who changed
religion from the worship of the father-gods of earth, to
whom sacrifices were offered in the sacrificial pits {garta\ to
the worship of the heavenly father, the spirit of life dwelling
in the sexless pole, the heavenly fire-drill. This theology is
again repeated in the genealogy of the sons of Kashyapa in
the Mahabharata. They are descended from Brahma, the
creator, who had six sons, Marlchi, Angiras, Atri, Kratu,
Pulaha, and Pulastya. These are in Hindu astronomy the
names of six stars of the Great Bear, the seventh being
Vashistha, the most-creating fire, that is, Brahma himself,
brought by Agastya, the star Canopus, from the lightning.*
The eldest son, Marichi, the tree-god (Gond marom, a tree),
^'hich becomes in Sanskrit an atom of light, is the father of
Kashyapa, the father of the tortoise race. He, in the Rama-
yan€^ entices away Rama, the black bull of darkness, from Sita,
"the earth-furrow, and lures him into the forest in the form
of a deer. When killed by Rama, he is raised to heaven as
"the star Mriga-sirsha, the head of the deer (mriffa).^ This
star rules the last month of the Hindu year, ending with the
\vinter solstice, which is claimed by Krishna (Vishnu) in
the Mahabharata as his special month, for he says, ' I am
Mriga-sirsha."* * This is the star called Marichi in the Great
Bear, and the reason of his being called the head of the deer
is to be found in the Hindu name of the constellation, which
is that of the seven Rishis, or antelopes (Rishya). The
* Rigveda, i. Ii6, 3-5.
2 Sachau's Alberunrs/«^ia, vol. i. chap. xlv. p. 390; Rigveda, vii. 33, 10, ii»
' Ramayana iii. 40 ff; Mahabharata Vana {^Drupadi harana) Parva,
cclxxvi.-ccxci. pp. 811-863. But see Essay iv., where I show that it was
Mriga-siras (Orion), the hunter, who ruled the year, hunted the moon through
her phases, and turned round the pole and the Great Bear, led by Marichi.
* Mahabharata Bhishma {BhagavcU-gitd) Parva, xxxiv. p. 115.
262 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
chronological order of the change is shown in the plot of"'
the Ramayana, for it is when the deer-god, the antelope,
Terah, the Akkadian Dara, is raised to heaven as a star that
Sita is carried off by Ravana, the storm-god, who then cuts
off the wings of Jatajru,^ the vulture, the bird who told the
passage of time by the coming of the storms ushering in the
rains,andSita then becomes,from the earth-furrow, thecrescent
moon, and remains a virgin captive till she is recovered by
Rama, the Nagur, or plough, the bull of light, the full
moon ; and* it is the union of the crescent and full moon
which brings children to the wedded pair. The sexless
nature of the father-god of the early star-worshippers comes
out still more clearly in the story of Pandu, the reputed
father of the Pandavas, and brother of Dhritarashtra, the
father of the Kauravyas, or the tortoise race. Pandu is
made impotent because he killed a deer in the forest, the
Marlchi of the Ramayana, who was really a Brahmin. He,
like other mythical fathers, had two wives. Prithu, the
mother of the Parthian race, the daugliter of the king of
the Kunti-bhojas or Bhojas, who worship the spear {Kunt\\
the Pharsi Pen of the Gonds, and Madri, the daughter of
king Shaleya, the Sal-tree, the king of the race who believed
intoxication by spirits (vicul) to be inspiration. The fathers
of their children were gods. Prithu's children, Yudishthira,
Bhima, and Arjuna, being the sons of Dharma, the god of
law, Vayu, the wind-god, and Indra, tlie rain-god, and
MadrFs Saha-deva, the driving-god,^ or the fire-god, and
Nakula, the mun-goose eater of snakes, being the tAvin sons
of the Ashvins. The chronological order in these stories of
the sexless father is the same as that in Genesis, where the
antelope Terah becomes the father of the sexless or old Abram.
That this theology was worked out in the West of Asia,
where the Phrygian unsexed priests represented the sexless
1 Meaning born (jot) of Ayu, son of Uruash.
^ Curtius, Griechisdu Etymologie^ p. 6i8, compares saha with Gr. ^70^,
and again, in No. 117, derives this from d^w, to drive.
ESSAY III ^63
fire-god, is shown by the Greek names for the twins Kastor
and Polydeukes. The name Kastor means the pole of Ka,
that is, of the delocalised god Varuna ; but the name is one
which is also given to the beaver, which is always called by
ancient writers the castrated animal. Thus Juvenal says : —
' Imitatus castora^ qui se
Eunuchum ipse facit^ cupiens evadere damno
Testiculoruni adeo medicatum intellegit unguen.'^
But the beaver, again, is the building animal of the North,
and his popular connection with the absence of sex arises from
the father of the sexless house-pole succeeding the phallic
father of the Viru worshippers. It was these sons of the
North who made the beaver the symbol of the father, who
also made the stars of the Great Bear their mother-stars ;
for the northern Finns are the sons of the primaeval bear,
who was, like Dumuzi, the son of Istar, bom beneath their
mother-tree, which was the sacred pine-tree. TTiis tree-
mother, again, sprang from a hair of the wolf, the wolf-
Hiother Leto, the mother of the storm-god, the Branchian
-Apollo, whose second twin-child was Artemis, who, as I
sliow in Essay vi., was the Great Bear. This hair was
^(^lanted by Kati in Ukko's, the Hindu Ush-ana, the thunder-
^od'*s black mud, and it was in Metsola that the pine formed
^Dn earth by Maa-tar, the daughter of earth (maa\ the
Xnother-tree of the lioney-eating bear, the father of the
Vioney-drinking Ashvins, grew up ; and it was as the special
tree of the honey-eating bear that the Indian sons of the
Ashvins adored the Mahua-tree {Bassia latifoUa) ; for it is
to these trees that every bear in the neighbourhood comes
during the flowering season to feast on its honey-sweet
flowers.* It was this Northern pine-tree which was borne
^ Juvenal, xii. 35 ; De Guberttatis Die ThierCy German Translation,
chap. viii. p. 401.
* Abercromby, * Magic Songs of the Finns : The Origin of the Bear,'§ a, ^;
* The Origin of Trees,' f^^ — Folk Lore, March and September, 1890, pp. 24-26,
344-346.
264 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
in the processions of the mother-goddess Cybele, in Phrygia,
called there, as by the Northern Finns, the mother, Ma, and
it is this Northern pine-tree which is still the Christmas-tree
of Grermany, the mother-tree of the Northern smi-god, bom
at the winter solstice, and wakened from the sleep of winter
to the life of spring by the seven bears, the measurers of
time reckoned by weeks. The wide-spread idea of the sex-
less star-father, which had its roots in Phrygia and the
Northern Finland, also appears in Egyptian mythology,
where the constellation of the Great Bear is called the
fore-thigh of Set,^ that is, the part of the sacrifice especi-
ally reserved for the priests.^ Set is the god called
Apa-pi, or the water-snake, by the Hyksos, that is, the
Great Naga himself; and he, like the father-god Marlchi,
is one of the stars of the Great Bear, called Mascheti, or
Cheops.^ Thus we see that this constellation passed through
successive stages according with the advance of the myth,
which made it the collection of parent-stars. First its
stars were the seven bears, then the seven antelopes, then
the seven bulls, and it was as the home of the divine essence
which had given life to the ruling bull-race that it became
the Great Naga. Its Hebrew name is Ash, s|>elt with an
«m, and it is derived from the root nahash^ which appears
in the Arabic name of the constellation Nabash, and the
ain in Na ""ash, like the same letter in Shinar, repre-
sents an original g^ so that it was once called Nagash, or
the Great Nag, the Nahusha.* He was the great invisible
god, hidden in his ark of clouds, who reveals himself to men
as the ruler of time and the orderer of the regular sequence
of the phenomena of nature, and who chums in the mortar of
the heavens the life-giving rains into which his divine spirit
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und My t ho logic der Alien Aigypter^ p. 203.
'-* Lev. vii. 32-34 ; i Sam. ix. 24, when the thigh is given to Saul who was,
as Dr. Sayce has shown, the sun-god Sawul, worshipped by the Babylonians.
3 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie dcr Alien /Egypier^ p. 702.
^ Gesenius, Thesaurus, pp. 894-895.
ESSAY III 5^65
is infused, just as Soma was churned on earth by the Soma
makers and fire by the fire-priests. This rain, the first of
the messengers of the Almighty, was the annual flood sent
at the beginning of the rainy season, and called by the
Akkadians Nin-igi-a-zag, the first-born {zag) of the lord or
lady (win) of the spirits {iffi) of the water (a), the eldest
of the six sons of la,^ who sent forth the reproduction of
Wmself, the son of life, Shama Napistim, on the waters of
the flood in the mother-ship as the New Year. Tlie other
five sons of la are the remaining gods of the five seasons,
^nd the moon-god. But the children of the life-giving
'^ins could only be bom after a period of gestation, marked,
*^ I have shown, by the ten stars completing the figure of
**ie heavenly Father, and this period of ten lunar months is
^produced in the ten antediluvian kings of Babylon, begin-
ning with the ram-god Alorus, or Ailuv, the Semitic trans-
action of tlie Akkadian Lu-nit, a male sheep, followed by
^^aporus, 'the bull of the fomidation," from a/a/?, a bull,
^nd Mr, foundation.^ These ten kings again appear in
^ienesis as the ten patriarchs, ending with Noah, whose
^anie means Rest, the Xisuthros of the Babylonian list, and
^*lio was the son of Lamech, tlic god of the Linga, who had
become in this cosmogony the father of men.^ It is these
ten fathers who gave their collective name of Dasaratha, the
ten chariots, to the father of Hiima, the bull-god of dark-
ness. But this primaeval ten, the sacred number of the ram
a.nd bull-race, becomes in the age of the Ashvins eleven, the
eleventh father being the guiding-star, who is tlie appointed
messenger of the father-god, the moon-god. It is to them
that eleven victims were offered at the Soma sacrifice —
eleven kindling verses called Samidhcnl, sung at the lighting
of the fire on the fire altar, eleven stanzas sung in the
Apri hymns, recited at the animal sacrifices, and it is this
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233.
- R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., The Phainomena^ or Heavenly Display^ of
Aratus, App. ii. pp. 79, 80. See Essay I v. ^ Gen. v.
266 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
calculation which makes the Rudras, or father-gods, in the
mythology of the Mahabharata, eleven, one of them being
Sthanu, meaning a place or station, who is their father.^ It
is on this number eleven that the division of the gods
into thirty-three, or three times eleven, is based in the
Rigveda.2 These thirty-three gods of time mean the five
seasons of the Hindu year, and the twenty-eight days of the
lunar month, and they thus comprise the course of the year
divided among the six sons of la, the five seasons, and the
moon-god ; and it is these six as gods of heaven united with
the five seasons of earth which make up the sacred eleven,
and it is these eleven gods multiplied by three, the original
mother seasons of the race, which makes thirty-three. In
the Aitareya Brahmana, the gods who do not drink Soma,
and to whom animal victims are offered, are thirty-three.
Eleven Pray aj as or primaeval (pra) gods, who are invited to
the sacrifice by the Apri hymns ; eleven Anu-yajas or gods of
earth, to whom the victims are offered, and eleven Apa-yajas
or water-gods (ap\ to wliom the supplementary offerings are
made.^ It is these same thirty-tliree gods, headed by Sakko
or Sukra, who are the gods of the Tavatimsa heaven, or
heaven of the thirtv-three of tlie Buddhists,"* and ' the
thirty-three Lords of the ritual order"* fixed by Ahura
Mazda, of the Zendavesta.-'* The eleven gods are called in
the Akkadian account of the comlmt between Merodacli and
Tiamut, the mother (mut) of living things (//V/), her eleven-
fold off>»pring.^ But these eleven gods, like all the gods of
the Aslivin age, lx*came star-gods, and they are the eleven
stars of Joseph''s dream." We can identify these eleven stars
as known to the Egyptians from N'ignette ix. of the Papyrus
1 Mahabharata Adi {Sarnbhava) Parva, Ixvi. p. i88.
2 Rigveda, i. 34, 11, 139, ii, viii. 35, 3, ix. 92, 4.
' liaug, AH. BrAh, vol. ii. p. 1 10.
* Childers, Pali Diet, s.v. *Tavalimsa,* meaning * thirty-lhree.*
* Mill, Yapia^ i. 10 ; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 198.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 382, in hymn telling of the
fight between Bel and Tiamut. " Gen. xxxvii. 9, 10.
ESSAY III 267
of Ani, where they appear as the four sons of Horus, the
four stars of the constellation of the Servant, that is,
Pegasus, which watch the seven stars of the Great Bear ;^ and
this shows different stellar arrangements from that marked
in the first conception of the pole, which I have already
described, and denotes the next age, when the sons of the
horse succeeded those of the bull and ass. In this list of
stars, the first star of the great bear is called Teh-teh, the
Akkadian god Te-te of the two foundations, who gave his
name to the first sign of the Akkadian zodiac. But in
V^ignette viii. of the Papyrus of Ani we have a different
series of names for Horus and his four sons, who here appear
as the five seasons. (1) Horus, or the summer; (2) Hapi, the
Nile god, the god of the rainy season, depicted as an ape ; (3)
Smpta, autumn ; (4) Tuamutf, the winter, he who worships his
mother. The characters denoting the name, the Egyptian
five-rayed star, the vulture and the snake, show that he
is the ruling god of the year of five seasons, ushered in by
the storm- bird, the vulture, and guarded by the snake of
the Kushite or Naga race. He is depicted as a jackal-
headed-god, while the spring, Khebsenuf, he who refreshes
his brethren, is hawk-headed, and denotes the growing sun-
god. That the origin of the conceptions shown in this
and other pictures of the vignette, reproducing Indian
mythology, is to be sought in India, cannot be doubted when
we find in Vignette xxxi., the thirty-three Indian gods of
time sitting in judgment on the soul of Ani in the grand
hall of the Maat, the goddess of law, the regular order of
nature maintained by the stars and the sun.'- But to judge
from the names of the Hindu months, which undoubtedly
go back to the days of stellar chronology, the eleven father-
stars of time worshipped by the Ashvins seem to be quite
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der AUen jEgypter^ pp. 704-712.
^ I am indebted for the translation of these names to Dr. Renouf, who
most kindly helped me when I was studying the Papyrus in the British
Museum. It gives a historical epitome of Egyptian theology.
268 THE RULING RACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
different from those of the Egyptian or Zend ruling stars.
We certainly seem to have got the star Sirius in the Hindu
month Assar, the Sanskrit Ashadha, which reproduces the
Assyrian fish -god As-s6r, and which once, as I have shown,
began the Hindu year with the rising of Sirius at tlie summer
solstice, which now falls in the beginning of Assar ; we also
have the month Asvayujau, or the month of the twins, the
Ashvins, the month coming next after Bhadrapada, the
month in which the autumnal equinox takes place. This pro-
bably, in the days when time was reckoned by lunar periods,
represented two lunar months ; next comes Karttaka, or the
month of the Krittakas or Pleiades, followed by Margas-
sirsha, the month of Orion, Pushya, the month of the constel-
lation Taurus, and Magha that of Argo ; while Bhadrapada,
the month of the autumnal equinox is most certainly that
of the goat-fish Capricomus, which is the zodiacal sign of the
month. It is marked in the Nakshatra division of the
heavens by the Nakshatras Purva Bhadra-pada and Uttara
Bhadra-pada, showing that there were two arrangements of
the ancient Hindu year, one made by the Eastern races
Purva, and the other by the Northern Uttara, such as I
liave already shown to exist in the three seasons of the
Nortliem immigrants and the five seasons of the Naga or
Eastern races. The dominants of these Nakshatras are the
Aja ekapad, the one-footed goat, and the Ahir Budhnya, the
snake, spoken of in the Rigveda ^ as that which lies in the
uttennost depths, that is, the Shesh Nag lying under and
supporting the earth. It is these two which form the month
of the blessed (bhadra) foot (j)ada\ and it is the sign
Capricornus, sacred to this month, which is called by the
Hindu astronomers Makaram ^ or the Alligator, the star
Makkar of the Babylonians.^ This was the month which
* Rigveda, ii. 31, 6, vii. 35, 13.
- Sachau's Alberunl's /fufia, chaps, xviii. xix. and Ixi. ; vol. i. p. 204,
2i9f 220; vol. ii. p. 122.
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars.' Proceedings of
Society of Biblical Archaology, Star xxx. Jany. 1890.
ESSAY III 269
afterwards became sacred to the ox, and was, therefore, called
Prosthapadah, or the ox-footed month, the Boe-dromion or
month of the course (dromos) of the ox of the Athenians, and
it was then that the constellation of the Alligator became that
encircling the pole. It is these two constellations, that of the
goat-fish, Shimshumara, and that of the bull {vrisahha\ which
are said in the Rigveda to draw the chariot of the Ashvins,
which brings them to the house of Divodasa, he of the bright
(div) race or land of the sun.^ Divodasa is the son of Vadhri-
ashva, the sexless (vadhri) horse, the horse of the Ashvins
who is the foe of the Brisaya or witches,^ who is also called
Bhfiu*advaja, or the lark, the priest of the Bharatas.^ In
another hymn the Ashvins are said to drive through the
sea with one of the wheels of their chariot on the bull'^s
head, and the other in heaven ; that is, to drive round the
pole,* and the seasons thus appropriated to the Ashvins are
those beginning with the autumnal equinox, sacred to the
goat-fish and the vernal equinox sacred to the lark, the bird
of spring. It was these sons of the ass who divided the
year into four parts by reckoning the equinoxes and
solstices. These together made up the four seasons of
spring, summer, autumn, and winter made by the Ribhus
or sons of the alligator ;^ and it was by dividing the autumn,
and making it the twin seasons of the rain and barley sow-
ings, that they formed their year of five seasons. This year
b^an, like the Zend year, with the rising of Tishtrya at the
summer solstice, the Hindu As-sar or the fish-god, when the
first rains fall in North-eastern India. This year of the
(1) rainy season, (2) autumn, (3) winter, (4) spring, and (5)
* Rigveda, i. Ii6, i8.
' /did, vi. 6i, I, 3. For dasa dasya, as connected with daqyu^ the land
or province, see Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, chap. iv. pp. no, 112.
* Rigveda, i. 116, 18, vi. 16, 5. The Bharadvaj as claim to be descended
from the lark. Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 161. De
Gubematis Die Thiere, Gennan Translation, Part ii. chap. viii. p. 549.
* Rigveda, i. 30, 18, 19.
» Ibid, iv. 33, 5, i. 161, 4,
270 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
summer, is in the Brahmanas said to be the year of Prajapati,
called Ka.^ It is to this year that libations are poured out
at the third and last of the morning pressings of the Soma
festival.^ The service opens with the summons to Indra, the
rain-god, accompanied by the cry Brihat, Brihat; thereby call-
ing on him to create (bri). The first cup drawn is to Shukra,
the god of the rainy season, the star Sirius ; the second to
Manthin, whom, we have seen, is the god of the barley or
autumn season ; the third to Agrayana, meaning the ban-
ning, the winter, the first season reckoned in the measure-
ment of time by the lunar year ; the fourth to the M aruts, the
mother-goddesses, to whom the Dcidhigharma I have already
spoken of is offered at the Udumbara house-pole, tlie god-
desses of spring, to whose honour the Saturnalia of Magh
are held ; the fifth to the Uk-thya, called in the Brahmanas,
the season of the Dhruva or pole,^ the time of the summer
heats, when nature dies temporarily, or rather sleeps, and
thereby invigorates itself for the work of re-creation which
is to l)egin with the rains. This year is that sacred to the
Naga gods, for the hymns chanted in its honour are those
ascribed to the snake Arbuda, the snake of the four (arba)
ruling stars of the heavens, and to the snake Jarat-karna,
he who makes old, the god of the meridian pole, who is said
in the Mahabliarata to be the father and mother of
Astika, the sacred eight (sbirs)* wliich, as I have shorni,
wei-e the creating fire-drill in the Kushite cosmogony. This
year of Praja-pati is similar to the Zend year of five seasons
ruled by the four Zend goddesses and the sexless father-god,
to whom the ancestral fathers of the race are said in the
Zendavesta to have offered animal sacrifices. This year did
* Eggeling, Sai. Brdh,, iv. 5, 5, 12 ; 5, 6, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 408,
410.
•J Eggeling, Sat, Brdh., p. 116 ; iv. 2, 3, i. 2 ; S.B.E., pp. 331, 332.
' Eggeling, Sat, Brdh,, iv. 2, 3, 3 ; 2, 4, I ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi.
pp. 293, 298.
* Mahabharala Adi (^j/^ta) Parva, xlv.-xlviii. pp. 132-140. A sti mt^ns
Mhe eight.*
ESSAY III 271
not, like the official Zend year, begin with the rising of the
father-star Shukra, but with the goddess-mother of the rainy
season, Ardvi Sura Anahita, the undefiled heavenly spring
descending from the Mount Hukairya, the home of the active
(Jcairya) begetter Qiu)^ the mount of the Hu or Shu-stone,
the heavenly Istar. After her comes Gos, the cow-mother,
to whom the Gond autumn festival, called the Pola, is dedi-
cated, and who is the mother Ida of the race of barley
growers, the Rama Hvastra, the wind-god, the invisible
father, the wintry season, the Ashi Vanguhi, the goddess of
marriage and the spring time; and lastly, Zam-yad, the
mountain, the summer season.^ The Egyptian five, Osiris,
Isis, Horns, Set, Nebt-hat, mark the opposition between the
Northern sun of summer and the Southern sun of winter,
which is so prominently noticed in Egyptian ritualistic astro-
nomy, Osiris and Isis ruling the North, and Set and Nebt-
hat the South ; while Horus, called Hor-khuti, the creator of
the supreme heavens, Khut, the pole-god, rules the East,^
whence Sirius, Isis Satit rises to usher in the Egyptian
year,* beginning with the summer solstice. In the Jewish
five the myth is almost entirely genealogical, and has dis-
carded the references to its seasonal origin, which appear
in the other myths. It merely sets forth Jacob, the son of
the blind father, the house-pole, as the pole of the heavens,
standing in the midst of his four Avives, two of which, the
cow and ewe-mothers, Leah and Rachel, are the daughters
of Laban, the moon-god of Haran,^ while the other two
reproduce the wives of Lamech, Billah, the old being Adah or
^ Darmesteter, ZendavestaAb-anYast^ Introduction; S.B.E. vol.xxiii. p. 52.
^ It is to these gods that animal sacrifices are said, in the Yasts addressed
to them, to have been offered by the fathers of the Zend race.
• H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der AHen yEgypter, p. 451.
** Ibid, p. 203.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 249 note 3; Gen. xxix. 2,5.
Lxthan means the white one, who is called in Assyrian inscriptions the moon-
god of Harran, and in the text quoted by Dr. Sayce, 'the brick foundation
of heaven.'
M
272 THE RUUXG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Ida, and Zilpah, Zillah, or Tsillu, and the only historico-
astronomical feature in this arrangement is that Leah and
Rachel are the wives of the Northern sun, and Billah and
Zilpah the unwedded wives of the matriarchal South. TK«
Hindu five ancestors, who form the year beginning i%ith tl> ^
twin-gods of the rainy season are the sons of Yayati, Yad*-^
Tur\'asu, the twin sons of DevayanI, the daughter of Shukr:^
the rain-god; and Druhyu, Anu, and Puru, the sons
Sharmishtha, the banyan-tree. But the Jewish and Hinc
mvtholofi:v carr\' the mvthic histor>' beyond the days
Kushite rule, and the cult of the year of five seasons ;
Jacob has thirteen children, including Dinali, his on -
daughter, the thirteen months of the lunar year, calculated
from the seven children of Leah, the holy week ; and it i^
these thirteen months, the daughters of Daksha, the visible
teaching-god, the moon-god, who was first the fire-god, who
are the wives of Kashyapa, the father of the tortoise race.^
The succession of the Semite lunar race to that which looked
up to eleven father-gods is told in a number of stories I wiU
now refer to. The first of these is the birth of the egg-
bom children of Vinata, meaning she who is bowed down,
the tenth of the wives of Kashyapa, completing the ten lunar
months of gestation. She is followed in the list of months
by Kapila, meaning the yellow, the father of the yellow race
of barley-growers. Her children are Aruiia, the fire-drill,
who is said to be only half-developed, the god of the rainy
season, the time of pnxrreation, and Gad-ura, the bull of
light, 'the winged -bull, the Soma Pavamana of the Rig\'eda,
the unclouded moon-god of the dry months. These eleven
parent gods and their lunar successors also appear in the
Mahabharata in Vahlika, the father of the Takkas, and his
ten sons, who fight on the side of the Kauravyas. The
eldest of tlu»se is called Somadatta, given by Soma, the water
of life. They, as I have already shown, marched under the
banner of the Yupa, the sacrificial stake. They were
* Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixvi. p. 189.
ESSAY III 273
all slain by Satyaki, meaning the seventh, the grandson of
Shini, the moon-goddess of the Semite Shus, of the race of
Satvata, bom from the sacred seven.^ The death of the
eleven champions of the sacrificial stake foreshadows the
ultimate fate of the Kauravya host, divided into eleven
Akshauhinis or divisions, conquered by the seven divisions of
the Piindavas.^ The change in the reckoning of time intro-
duced by the moon- worshippers is told in the names of the
Pindava lieroes, the five sons of the year of the moon-
pxldess, called Pandhari by the Gonds, for it l)egan with the
^nter solstice and the spring, the season of Yudishthira,
fjom mider the constellation Miigha, and the son of Dharma,
the law, followed by the hot weather, Bhima, the son of
^^3^u, the burning west wind, the rains Arjuna, the son of
I'ldm, and the twins Sahadeva and Nakula, the sons of the
-^shvins, to whom the autumn and winter are sacred. This
^*=^Tiie story of the triumph of the moon-goddess over the
^Ic^Yen fathers is told in the Book of Esther, for Esther is
^■^e Hebrew mother moon-goddess Ashtoreth, who becomes
tt^^ wife of the king of Shushan, the great Susi-Nag, in
l^l«xre of Vashti, goddess of the Tur-vashu, who worshipped
■^^^r as the feminine form of Vas, the father god. Esther,
^^"Sth the help of Mordecai, the Babylonian bull-god Marduk,
^-^led Gudi-bir, bull of light, overcomes and hangs Haman
^Xid his ten sons, the minister of Vashti, and brings in the
emite vear of thirteen lunar months.^ This historical
evolution is spoken of in the Zenda vesta as the victory
Husrava, the offspring of the Hus, over the Turanian
rangrasyan and his colleague Kercsaviizda, he of the homed
^keresa) club {vazda)^ the Takka trident, who had slain
Syavarshan, son of Kavi Usa, and ruled, for two hundred
^ears, Turan and the holy home of the Kushite race,
^ Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhiskmavada) Parva, Ixxiv. Ixxv. Ixxxii. pp. 273,
27S» 293.
'^ Ihid. Udyoga Parva, Ivi. The * Akshauhinis ' denote the monthly revolu-
tions of the Kcavenly axle, the starry chariot called Akkha or Aksa, the axle.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 257 note I.
18
274 THE RULING RACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
watered by the Haetumaiit or Helmend. These Turaniansas
had, during their rule, shown their skill in irrigation, likc5=
the Hindu Kurniis and the Akkadian sons of Akki th^
irrigator, for they had covered tlie country with water —
channels and hrought a thousand springs into Lake Kashava^
the parent lake of the Kushite racc.^ Tlieir conqueror i^
called in the Rigveda Su-shravas, and also Tur-vayana or th
inspirer of the Tur, and he is said to have vanquished Kutsa^
the Puiii, the priest of the god Ka, Atithigva, the coming-
(gva) Atithi {gu€st\ a name of Divodasa, the fire-god, and
Ayu, the son of Puru-ravas, the thunder-god.^ It is the wars
between the Punis, the sons of Kutsa, aided by the god
Piishan, the bull and alligator, and the trading Sus called
Panis, the traders denounced as Asunvants, the people who
do not press Soma,' which are expressly celebrated in the sixth
Mandala of the Rigveda, ascribed to the authorship of the
sons of Bharadvaja, the lark. The Panis are mentioned in
this Mandala twelve times, the same number of times which
they are spoken of in the hymns of the second, third, fourth,
fifth, seventh, and eighth Mandalas taken together.* In this
Mandala Pushan plays a conspicuous part, being called the
brother and twin god of Indra,^ but while Pushan eats barley
porridge {lcaramba\ the food of the Ashvin Tur-vasluis, Indra
drinks Soma, the drink of the sons of Yadu, or the holy Ya.®
The Bharadviijas, the sons of the lark, called by Aristophanes
the king of birds, the priests of Divodasa,the heavenly fire-god,
and their conquerors and successors, the Gotamas, or sons of
the cow, the trading Panis, are the reputed authors of the sixth
and seventh Mandalas of the Rig\'eda, and these two clans are,
as Ludwig has j)roved, the two that form the race of Angiras,
1 Darmestcter, Zeftdavcsta Aban Yastj 41, 49; Cos Yast, 18; Zamyad
Vasty 74, 77; West, Bwtdahish^ xx, 33; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp. 64 note I,
65, 66, 302, 304 ; vol. V. p, 82.
* Rigveda, i. 53, 9, 10.
^"Hillebrandt, Vcdische Mythologies p. 88,
^ Ibid, pp. 83-94. ° Rigveda, vi. 55, 5. * itid. vi. 57, 2.
ESSAY III 275
^i" priests who offered bunit offerings, and who succeeded the
Bhxigus, the priests of the earthly fire-drill, the miracle- work-
^^S god of the wizards. It was also Drona, whose name
Jii^fiins the cask, chum, or mortar in which Soma was churned,
tiif& son of Bharadvaja and Kripa, the son of Gotama, who are
1^ "the Mahabharata the tutors of the young Kauravya and
P^xidava princes. It was Ashvattha, the son of Drona, the
Fi^cus religiosa or Piped-tree, which supplanted the Bur-tree as
tli^ mother-tree of the sons of the fig-tree, who inaugurated
tt^^ rule of the conquering Pandavas, and the bull-god
Vishnu, by killing all the children of the Pandavas and
I^XTipadi, and thus leaving the succession to the kingdom to
^^ son of Aijuna and Subhadra, the blessed Su, the sister of
K^T*ishna or Vishnu, whose name had been changed from
^«^dhuva, or the drinker of Madhu, to Madhu-han, or its
slayer (fian). These offerers of burnt offerings, who came
""oin Western Asia, are the race who first offered human
*^-<^rifices, for the Aral>s only burned human victims and
"^^"Voured their other offerings raw.^ Human sacrifices were
'^^'lional sacrifices among the early Semites, offered, not like
*^^imal victims, periodically, but in times of pestilence,
^^-^^iiine, and national danger, to the gods of earth. It was
**^^n that the vitality of the earth must be restored, and the
*^^lp of the earth goddess secured by the blood of the most
^'^^luable victim the nation could offer. This was the son of
*'*^^ national chief or king, and when his blood was poured
the ground and the flesh consumed with fire, the aid both
the earth-goddess and the fire-god was secured for the
^^fiicted land. Hence Abram was ready to offer his son
*-^^ac to God,2 and Ahaz and Manasseh, kings of Judah,
^^d Mesha, king of Moab, sacrificed their sons,^ and M icah
^^Us us that the eldest son was usually sacrificed.* The
P^"actice was not confined to royal personages, for we are told
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 210.
* Gen. xxii. 10. ' 2 Kings xvi. 3, xxi. 6 ; iii. 27.
"* Micah vi, 7.
i
276 THE IIULLNG RACES OF niEHISTOllIC TIMES
that the men of Sepharvaim burnt their children in the
fire to Adra-melek, the fire-god, and Ana-nielek, the god of
heaven.^ The sacrifice of the son bv fire was one common
both to the Phoenicians, Akkadians, and Egyptians, for
children used to \ye sacrificed by tlie Carthaginians,^ and an
Akkadian text bids the Ab-gal or chief priest to say that
' the father must give the life of his child for the sin of his
soul,' and in the Observations of Bel we are told that * on
high places the son is burnt,' while human sacrifices are
depicted on several early Btibylonian cylinders.^ There are
also indications in Akkadian and Egyptian hymns that the
flesh of human victims was, like that of the totemistic
animal ancestors, eaten at these sacrifices, for a hymn to the
Akkadian god Tu-tu speaks of him as feeding on mankind,
n and a bilingual fi§;ii|at3&li hymn speaks of ' eating the fix)nt
f^"^^ breast of a man,' * but at these feasts the victims eaten were
not the children of the sacrificer, but, like those slain by the
^Vi'abs and Kandhs, prisoners taken in war or kidnapped for
the purpose, and as Kashyapa is called in Hindu mythology
the father of men, it was the totemistic ancestor ' man ' who
was eaten at these feasts, just as the Arabs drank the blood of
their human victims,^ and it was from a dim remembrance of
this practice that man is said to be 'the sacrifice' in the
Brahmanas,^ and also that the sacrificer sacrifices himselfj
The sacrifice of the eldest son is reproduced in the Hindu
story telling how king Soma-ka, by the advice of his priest,
sacrificed his eldest son Jantu, in order to procure otlier
children, and it was when he was slain that Soma-ka's
hundred wives conceived the hundred sons born of Jantifs
^ 2 Kings xvii. 31.
- Porph., Dc Abstinentidf ii. 56 and 57.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 78 note 4.
* Ibid, Lect. i. pp. 83 note i, 84.
® Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites^ Lect. x. pp. 343, 349.
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, i. 3, 2, I ; iii. 5, 3, i; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 78,
XX vi. p. 126.
^ Eggeling, Sat. Brdh, i. 2, 3, 5 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 49 note 3,
ESSxVY III 277
blood.^ The idea that the sacrifice of the first-born led to
increase of offspring gave rise to the Semite custom of sacri-
ficing firetlings at the spring festival of the venial equinox,
a sacrifice enjoined on the Israelites in Exodus, where it is
mentioned in connection with the Paschal lamb.^ Also the
sacrifice of the Passover was, as Wellhausen shows, a sub-
stitute for the former sacrifice of first-bom sons, who were
redeemed by the offering of the lamb, just as Isaac in
Abram'^s sacrifice was redeemed by a ram.'^ And a remark-
able proof that this human sficrifice was a national sacrifice
of the race to whom the ass was especially sacred is given in
the alx)ve quoted passage in Exodus, Avhert* the only other
redemption allowed besides that of the eldest son is that of
the first-born of the ass.* It is these men of the yellow race
who still try in India, unless carefully watched, to revert to
the human sacrifices offered by their fathers. The most con-
spicuous offenders are the Kandhs of Orissa, who used, till
the practice was j)ut down about thirty years ago, regularly to
sacrifice human victims called Merialis. These were purchased
or captured youths who were not children of the tribe, and
thev were, till their death as a national sacrifice was held to be
necessary, treated with every luxury and indulgence. The
victim, before being slain, was smeared with tunneric and
ghee to make him a son of the yellow sons of the bull, and
this paste was tliought to possess sovereign virtues, and was
cjirefully preserved by the women ; Avhile his blood was said
to Ix? offered exj)rc»ssly to produce redness in the tunneric.
Every care was taken to secure the apparent acquiescence of
the victim in his fate, and pieces of his flesh divided among all
the householders were buried by them in their fields.^ These
sacrifices still survive in a sporadic fonn in times of droughts
and epidemics among the Bhuiyas, Bhumijes, and Kharwars,
V
^ Mahabharata Vana Parva, cxxvii, cxxviii, p. 386-389.
' Ex. xiii. 11-16.
•* Wellhausen, ProUgomenay chap. iii. § I. i ; Robertson Smith, Religion
of the Semites y note F. p. 445. * F)x. xiii. 13.
* Kisley, Tribes atid Castes of Bengal ^ * Kandh,' vol. i. pp. 404, 405.
278 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and it used to be common among the Ooraons of Chota
Nagpore, and the Santals admit that they used once to kill
human victims. The use and religious importance of
turmeric as the national plant of the yellow race, whose god
was the Naga snake, the Soma bird, is shown by the offerings
of eggs and turmeric made by the Hos and M undas to the
Naga era or Naga gods,^ and still more conspicuously in the
custom observed at the Brahmin weddings of anointing the
bride and bridegroom with turmeric sent by the bridegroom,
showing that it is one bom in the days when the father was
master of the house,* and this custom is similar to that
recorded in the Gobhila Grihya Sutra, where the bride is
washed with Klitaka, barley and beans, and has her hair
sprinkled with Sura or spirits of the first quality.^ These
spirits were the Mcidhu or honey spirit of the yellow or
barley-growing r€u;e, and that these people who introduced
the marriage of mutual affection called by Manu the
Gandharva marriage, which is still the rule among the
Ooraons, Hos, and M undas, were the race who made marriage
the leading incident in the lives of the parents of the
national children appears from the stress laid upon yellow,
the national colour in the marriages of the Romans, who
were, like the Indian Gandhari, descended from the Avolf-god,
for the Roman bride had to wear yellow boots and a yellow
veil, and to smear wolfs fat on the door-j)osts of her future
home, as she was lifted over the threshokl and taken as a
loved stranger into her husband'^s house. Her hair also Avas
parted by a spear point, just as the Hindu bride''s hair is
parted by her husband with the sacred sitidur or vermilion,
which both marks blood brotherliood, and her acceptance by
the twin race of the red men. It is the care of the hair
^ Risley, Tribes attd Cast fs of Bengal, vol. ii. p. 103. See also Mannhardt,
GerfnanischeMytken,\i^. 1 1 and 1 37, for the egg placed in Alt Mark on May Day
under the threshold of the byre, to protect the cows passing over it from the
witches, and the egg laid on EasterThursday and placed in the first sheaf of corn.
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 149.
2 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Gobhila, ii. 10; S. B.E. vol. xxx. p. 43.
ESSAY III 279
^hich opens a most important chapter in the history of
^civilisation. It will be remembered that in the Vaja-peya
sacrifice the pari&rut or barley was bought from a long-haired
man, and this shows that the early Tur-vasu or barley-growers
wore their hair long like the Danite Nazarites among the
Jews. They thought that the strength resided in the hair,
and its loss was, as it still is among the Sikhs, the descend-
ants of the Takkas, looked upon as a great misfortune, and
it was the hair which was offered to the gods to avert
further misfortune when a near relative died. It was also
thought that the offering of the hair or growing strength of
young men would secure a return of the spiritual strength or
wisdom from heaven, and hence the ritual of hair-cutting,
was introduced by the sons of the fig-tree. It was among
these people, who obliged all males of sufficient age to l>e
solemnly consecrated to God'*s service, to have their hair cut
as part of the ceremony, that the barbers-surgeons, the
priests and physicians of the gods, became most important
ministers of the State. The ceremony, as we learn from the
Sankhayana Grihya Sutra, took place among the Vaishyas,
the sons of the Udumbara-tree, when the child was seven
years old. The water with which the child's head was to be
bathed was mixed with rice, barley, sesamum seeds, and
beans, and of the two razors used, one was copper and the
other of Udumbara wood, showing that the ceremony was
one first introduced by the Vaishya sons of the Udumbara-
tree. In sprinkling the water on the child's head the barber-
priest invoked on the child the blessings of Jamad-agni, the
tAvin-fires of the north and south, of Kashyapa, the father of
the Kushite race, and of Agastya, the star Canopus, the pilot
of the stars.^ It is with the copper razor that the sacrifice
must be shaved before the Soma sacrifice, and before the
bath of initiation.^ The barber-priests who performed these
^ Oldenberg, Grihya Siitra Sdnkh, i. 28, i ff; Gohh, ii. 9, I ff; S.B.E.
vol. xxix. p. 55 ff, vol. XXX. p. 60 ff.
- Eggeling, Sat, Brah, ii. 6, 4, 5, 2 ; iii. i, 2, 7-9 ; S.B.E. vol. xii.
p. 450, vol. xxvi. p. 7.
280 THE KL LING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
oereiiKinie^ were, and are >till, the accredited priests of the
A^h^iiLs or physiciaas to the gods for the Bliandaris,
the barber-priots of (Jfrissa, are the priests of the five
Gram Devatis or \illage goddesses, the five gods and seasons
of the Kunhite year. Further proof that they were priests of
the Ku^hika Is given by the &ct that they, together with the
other castes who claim descent from the tortoise* the Kochh,
the great cultivating caste of Eastern Bengal, whose only
totemL^tic ancestor is Kashyapa, the Chasas, or cultivators of
Orissa, soas of Kashyapa and Sal-rishi, the holy fish, and the
Savar>, sons of Sal-Macchi, the fish, all unite in making the
binding together of the hands of the bride and brid^p'oom
with Kusha grass the sign of marriage, and not the marking
the bride's hair with sindur^ which is almost universal among
the other castes.*
I have now shown how the yellow race of star-worshippers,
starting from Phrgyia, gradually reached India, and there
made the Finnic air-god Wainamiiinen, the Akkadian la,- who
sends celestial fire to men, the father-god of the tortoise race,
the soul of life living in the immortal mist, who creates life
on earth by the pole or fire-drill of the heavens, formed of
the seven stars of the Great Bear and the star Caiiopus, and
consecrated, like the trident of Pharsi Pen, by the necklace of
fourteen stars of the Alligator or bell-god. It is this pole
which, by its continual revolution during the successive periods
of seven and fourteen days, creates the life-giving heat which
chums out the rains to fertilise the earth and feed its rivers.
I have now to show how they disseminated the creed and the
scheme of national life which had changed the Kushites from
a nunil)er of disconnected tribes and imperfectly allied pro-
vinces into a united federal State, and made the sign of the
Xaga snake the emblem of kingly rank in countries so
distant from one another as India and Egjpt. The religion
' Rislcy, Trihes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 93, 192, 463, 497 ; vol. ii.
p. 243 ; App. I. pp. 35, 128.
■ '•* Lcnormaiit, CliaUiu-an Ma^ic, p. 247.
ESSAY III 281
iri^ I ^^ ^^^ tribes congregated round the mountain of the East
t^^ I «>uld never have become dominant in Egypt if it had been
^^^ I brought by small parties of traders travelling painfully by
land across the desert. The religious history of Assyria and
tb^ I ^gypt, moreover, makes it clear that the gods of both
ii^ I countries came there by sea, for all these were carried in
i> g ships at all religious festivals. To the Southern Akkadians
^he Ma or ship was the womb of the gods, and it was this
*iip which bore la, the fish-god, clothed in fish-skins, who
from the port of Eridu spread the knowledge he had gained
^ the lands from which he sailed all over the country. This
^'id must have been India, where the river-god, the alligator,
^^o totem of the Maghadas, bound together the weeks whose
.'^^^^lution made the year of the sons of Kush or Kur. It
^ ^Jiis last name which appears in the Akkadian Kur, mean-
^^ both the mountain land of the East and the land of the
^^•;ix)ise. It was thence that the Akkadians got the cotton
^^^th, called in old Babylonian writings, Sepat Kurri, or cloth
,^^ Kur. This cotton must have been grown, as it still is, by
^:^^« Kurmis living in Kandesh, and on the shores of the Gulf of
^^-^mbay, the country called in the Mahabharata Kar-pasika,^
must have been brought in ships to the port at Eridu.
ut where were the ships that brought it built ? No ship-
\dlding timber grows in the Delta of the Euphrates or any-
nearer it than the hills of Shushan, where there are
The Euphratean boats were round skiffs, called hi/a^
^^Xiade of skins covering a timber framework, and could never
Viave been the model for ocean-traversing ships. No ship-
\)uilding timber whatever grows within easy reacli of the sea
£x>m the Delta of the Indus on the east, to the Gulf of Suez
on the west, and the first shipbuilders must have made their
first experiments in the art with timber ready to their hands.
The only trees of Arabia are the Mimosa nilotica or Gum
Arabic, the Frankincense-tree {Boswellia Carterii), the palm,
* Sabha {Dyuta Parva) li. p. 141 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures/or 1887, Lcct.
iU. p. 138.
282 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the Southern larch or ithel, the sycamore, chestnuts, and
several other soft-wood trees,^ and no ships, except dug-outs
hollowed out of the palm trees, could be built with these
trees, and the same may be said of the trees of Southern
Persia. The very ancient inscriptions at Gir-su or Lugash
written in tlie oldest Akkadian form of cuneiform script, give
lists of the imports into the Euphratean Delta, which con-
firm these conclusions, for timber and stones form the most im-
portant part of the ship cargoes. The countries whence
goods were received were Magana the Sinaitic Peninsula,
Kur-melukha Southern Arabia, Gubi-in-ki, called the Kur,
and Nituk, the island of Dilmun at the mouth of the Persian
Gulf, the modern Bahrein, but no imports are named as
coming from the last j)l€u;e. Those from the West, which
must have come by sea from the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez,
and the Sinaitic Peninsula were cedar trees from Amarrum,
the 'cedar mountain,** which must he Lebanon. VNagul"*
stone, used for the tables and foundations of the Temple of
the Fifty, from Shamalum, the mountains of Minua and
Kazalla. Green diorite (Dag-kal) from the mountains of
Magan (Sinai) and Alabaster (Sh'-gnl) from Ti-danum, the
mountains of the West. The diorite was used for the
statue of Gud-ia, as we are told by an inscription on it,
and this statue, which evidently belongs to the same school
of art as that of King Kephren of Egypt of the fourth
dynasty, must, as is proved by its inferior workmanship,
liave been made in the infancy of Sinaitic art,' for the wealthy
priest-king (Patesi), who imported the stone for the statue,
must liave also brought to the stoneless country of the
Euphratean Delta, wliere stone-cutting was an unknown art,
the best Sinaitic artists available.
Tlie imports from the North, copper {urntd) and tin (anna\
brought from Ki-gal-addaki, the mountains of Kimash,
^ Encyclopicdia Britannicay Ninth Edition, vol. ii., 'Arabia,* p. 236;
Stanley, Sinai and Palestine j p. 18-24.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 32, '^'^,
ESSAY III 283
show that they belong to the Bronze Age. These must liave
come down the Euphrates from the slopes of the Caucasus in
Georgia, for it is only there, and on the northern slopes of
the Himalaya near Bamian, that tin has yet been worked
in Northern Asia.^ Besides these metals, asphalt {garmda)
was imported from Mad-ga, the land of the M edes, from the
river Garruda, the river Araxes, and the petroleum country.
Prom the south-west, that is, from Kur-miluk-ka, came gold-
dust, some of which was brought from the mountain land of
Gha-ghu-um, also Usha-wood, and as this means the wood
of the eight (usha), it must be frankincense to be burned in
the temples, for it was the produce of the tree called Gisli-
kal, the mighty (kal) tree (gish\ which was to the Egyptians
"the most precious product of Southern Arabia, called the
land of Punt. There are other imports coming from places
I cannot identify ; Zabanum and Tu-bulum, from the city of
TJr-saki, and the stone Na-bu-a, brought in great ships from
Sarmi, but unless they are precious stones and valuable
>!«rood, like sandal wood, they must apparently have come
from the West. The only remaining imports are those from
the land of Kur, called Gu-bi-in-ki, the land of the wood
GhdUika^ wliich was used for beams for the temple.- This
country has been identified by Amiaud with Egypt ; but
the arid rock-bound coast of Egypt bordering the Red Sea
could supply no timber for beams, nor is there any reason to
believe that a depot of timber from the mountains of
Abyssinia was ever established on the Red Sea coast. But
the abrupt slopes of the mountain land of the East over-
looking the ancient ports of Prag-jyotisha {Baragyza) on
the Nerbudda, and Surparaka (Surat), on the Tapti were
clothed with forests coming down close to the sea, which
yielded, among other kinds of wood fit for ship-building,
ample supplies of teak, which has edways, owing to its
^ S. Laing, Human Origins ^ p. 1 71.
'■^ F. Hommel, Gesckichte Bai*yloniens und Assyriens, book i, § iii. i,
p. 326.
284 THE RL LING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
resistance to the attacks of nmriiie insects and white
ants, l)een looked on as the best of timber for all kinds of
building, and it is of teak that Arab ships are now built.
Tliis must, it seems to me, have been the Ghalaka wood of
which beams were brought to Telloh. The fertile lands
overlooked bv the hills of Malwa, and of the Xerbudda and
Tapti valleys, were, as the names Malwa and Mallararashtra
tell us, the favourite settlements of the mountain-race of the
Malli, the Tur-vasu of the RigNeda, and it was there that
the cultivating Kurmis, who still form the largest part of
the population, founded the prosperous States of the sons of
the Kur, formed on the Kushika principle of an aggregation
of provinces under a central ruler. It was the ancestors of
these people, the early matriarchal tribes, who first learned
the art of na>'igation in boats made from the forest timber
lining the Indian rivers, who first made coasting voyages,
and took to Eridu and Eg}'pt the Indian system of village
communities, and it was their successors who, trusting to the
guidance of the stars and the lessons learned by their fathers
when tracking their way through the desert, became still
Iwlder navigators and keener traders than the early coasting
races. It was these sons of the alligator, Maga and Puse, who
made their father-god Makara, the dolphin, instead of the
alligator.^ This dolphin was called the horned-fish, from its
two conspicuous scjlhe-shaped fore-fins and its curved back-
fin, and it was the fish that guided Manu over the waters
of the Flood.- But the tribal traditions disclosed by totem-
istic genealogy trace the guiding-fish, which was first,
according to the Bnihmanas, the fish found in the water
brought to Manu to wash his hands,^ to a still earlier period
than that of the Flood legend. I have already sho\\Ti that
of the Kushika tribes which make the ro|K» of Kusha grass
^ Makara is called the dolphin in the Vnja Saneya Samhita^ pp. 24, 25 ;
Tittlrya Samhita, 5, 5, 13, i ; Zimmer, Altindisches Lehen, chap. iii. p. 97.
- De Gtibematis Die Thiere, German Translation, Part iii. chap. i. p. 607.
' Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, i, 8, I, i ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 216.
ESSAY III 285
the bond of marriage, two — the Chasas aiid Savars — claim
descent from the Salrishi and Sal-raaccli, the Sal-priest and
the Sal-fish, and of these the Savars are a peculiariy represent-
ative tribe. They still retain the name of the Sabarae of
Ptolemy, and the Suari of Pliny, who places them next to
the Monedes or Mundas, making them the rulers of Eastern
Bengal and the Gangetic valley, wliile tlie Mundas ruled the
Western hills.^ They are also the Sau-viras of Baudliayana,^
and the Su-varna who ruled the delta of the Indus, and are
consequently the Shus of Shushan, and the Indian Suars or
Souris who still, like the Akkadians of Nipur, call the sun-god
Bel.^ The Sal or fish is also a totem of the Dakshin Rar-hi,
on the Southern Kayasths,* and it is also a totem of the Mun-
das, Ooraons, Khandaits, Koras, Mais, Bhumij, and Lobars,^
vhile the Bauris claim to be the sons of the red-backed
heron.^ I have shown that these tribes were also once the
sons of the Sal-tree, and tlie change of totemistic descent
A'om the Sal- tree to the Sal-fish and the fish-eating bird,
marks the change in creed, which made the soul of life to
<lwell in the life-giving water, and not in the mother- tree,
and made the fish the holy symbol and living casket of
the immortal life-infusing spirit, dwelling in the mother-
ocean. The fish-god, Matsya, and his sister Satyavati, she
who is possessed of truth (satya\ the grandmother of the
Kauravyas and Pandavas, were, as we are told in the Maha-
bharata, miraculously begotten in the Sakti mountains by
the Basque father-god Vasu and the Apsara Adrika, the
rock, the Hindu Salagramma or fire-yielding stone, and
carried in her womb to the river Yamuna, or the twin-river. '^
^ Cunningham, AncietU Geography of India^ pp. 50, 109.
* Biihler, Baiidhdyana, i, I, 13 ; S.B.E. vol. xiv. p. 148.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii. pp. 102, 103. The Sauris of
Chuttisgurh in the Central Provinces all call the sun Bel.
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ vol. ii. p. 917, s.v. SSl.
* Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 217, 218, s.v. * Sal, Sal or Saula, Sal-machh, Sal-rishi.'
* Ibid. vol. i. p. 79.
^ Mahabharata Adi {Adivan Shavatama) Parva, Ixiii. pp. 174-175.
286 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
He was thus the father of the twin races, the sons of the
Tur, and of Yadu or the holy Ya, and it is only in Indian
national legends and genealogies that we can trace the con-
tinuous descent from the sons of the Sal- tree to the sons of
the Sal-fish, the father-god of the Shus of Shushan, who
worshipped the great Susi-Nag. It was this fish-god who
was worshipped by the Sumerians as Sallimannu, the fish,
the god called by the Assyrians * the king of the. gods,' who
was no other than the great la.^ He was the Assyrian god
Assor, the fish-god, the patron-god of Nineveh, of which the
ideogram means fish-town,^ and the god Assur called Dag-on,
or the revered one, on the coasts of Palestine, the patron-god
of Sidon, a name which, like Nineveh, means fish-town. The
fish-mother, the counterpart of the Hindu Adriksi in Egypt,
is Hat-mehit, the wife of Osiris of Mendes, who bears the
fish sign on her head,^ and who is the wife of the goat-ram-
god, who has in him the seed of the bull, and who is also
the crocodiie-god Sebek. The fish-god was the god Posei-
don of the Greeks, who is depicted as the god of the lotus
and of the thunny-fish, and also Apollo, the dolphin, who
led the ship which brought from Knossus in Crete to
Krissii, the port of Delphi, the priest Chrysothemis, tlie
speaker of the golden (%pu<709) judgments (^e/it?), the
singers and prophets {irpo^T^rai)^ who accompanied him to
the holy shrine of the great snake-god Pytho, the god of the
abyss (ySu^o?) of darkness. It was they who made it the
shrine of tlie fish-god, whose image as the dolpliin was
marked on the Delphian coins,"* and it was the ideogram of
the fish-god, the mystic lx^^^9 which was the sacred symbol
divinity among the early Christians. These people who
put to sea under the guidance of the fish-god must have
chosen for their voyages the season of calms following the
^ Sayce, Hibbcrt lectures for 1887, Lect. i. 58.
- Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, No. 1 78.
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien ^-Egypter, p. 310,
•• Miiller, Die Dorier, book ii. chap. vii. § 6, p. 318, chap. i. § 7 and 8,
pp. 211-214.
ESSAY 111 287
raiqs, that sacred to the Pleiades or Krittakas who follow the
Ashvins in the list of Hindu months. The leading star in
the constellation is called by the Hindus Amba, the mother,^
and this is the mother star, of the Kushite race, for their
father Kush-amba, the tortoise (kush) and the mother-star
{ambd)y was the third son of Vasu, who was followed by the
twins Mavellya, the mountain race, called Tur-vashu in the
Ya-yati genealogy and Yadu." Tlieir mother city is Kush-
ambi, guarding the Plaksha lake, the j unction of the Jumna
and Ganges, where Ayu, the son of Ur-vashi, was bom, the
city where Chakra, the eighth king in mythical descent from
Arjuna the Pandava, the god of the Chakra, or wheel of
time, fixed his capital.* The stars of the Pleiades, the
mother-constellation, lay within the head of Taurus (as de-
picted by Ptolemy), which was called by the Hindus Piishya,
or the son of Push, the alligator, and it was these stars
'^rhich were the parent stars of the voyagers in the mother
5$hip Argo, piloted by Agastya, the star Canopus, the
Karbanit of the Assyrian, and Karbana of the Egyptian
^tronomers. He was the ruling star of the city called by
lis name, which was the chief northern port of Egypt before
"the days of Alexandria. The Pleiades, or Hindu Amba, is
<»lled by the Hebrews Kimah, the Assyrian Kimta, a name
derived from the root kamv^ to tie, to bind.* Tliis name
meant the stars of the family, that is, the mother-stars of
the sons of the house-pole, and this coincides with the Santal
name of the Pleiades Sar-en, which reproduces that of their
Northern mother-goddess, Sar. These six stars reproduced in
heaven the six gods the Maga race worshipped as the five
seasons of the Hindu year and Pandhari, the god of the
^ Tail, Sam. iv. 5, I ; Idtd. Brah, iii. I, 4, i ; Max MUller, Preface to
vol. iv. of his edition of the Rigveda, p. 32.
' Mahabrarata Adi {adi van^avatama) Parva, Ixiii. p. 173.
* Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India^ pp. 391-392.
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., *The Tablets of the Thirty Stars,* Proceedings
of the Society of Biblical Archaology, Feb. 1 890, Star iv. ; Delitzsch, The
Hebrew Language in the Light of Assyrian Research^ pp. 69-70.
288 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
fair (pandu) people, the moon and rain god, Mitra-Varuna
and Apollo-Artemis. They were tlie six sons of la and the
six gods of the Turanian Gonds, who divide the Gonds into
worshipj>ers of four, five, six (saha\ and seven (sat) gods.
It was thence that thev derived their name Ashura from the
Akkadian a/fh or a*, six, and made Aslmra-Mazda, the Asura
of the Zendavesta, the supreme god of the star- worshipping
races, substituting for the five-rayed star of the Egyptians
}l^, the six myed Cypriote star, ^ which, with the crescent
moon, has always been borne on the Turkish banners.^
The race descended from the six-star mothers M'as that
formed by tlie union of the cultivating NYigas, whose gods
were the gods of the five seasons, with the trading sons of
the ass, the navigating Shus or Pha»nicians, the red men who
worshipped the ruler of heaven, and they depicted their
descent in astral genealogy by calling the six stars of the
Pleiades and its enclosing constellation Taurus or Piishya (the
moon-bull with the three eyc^s and two horns Vy ), the
stars of the mother-cow, the Akkadian Am, the wild bull
or cow.- They were the mother-stars of the race whose cn>d
was Varuna, the Greek ovpavof;^ the god of conjugal union,'
and hence they were called in Greece the l^eleiades (TreXei-
aSe^;) or doves, a name given to them by Hesiod, Pindar,
and Athena'us.* l^indar tells us that they brought nectar
to the young Zeus in Crete, whence the fish-god came to
Delphi, llius the dove became the sacred bird of the new
faith proclaimed by the fish-god — the belief in a god of in-
flexible righteousness, who ordained and upholds the regular
and unvaiying succession of natural phenomena. It was
^ The Hittilc star has also six points. It denotes the sons of the pole, Tur
and rain-cross, see Essay I., p. iS.
2 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ No. 242, also Nos. 232, 233. The
sign given in the text is that used to denote the wild bull in the Telloh
inscriptions, the sign of the mother Leah, the wild cow, the Akkadian Am,
the Hindu Amba.
•« Eggeling, Sat. Brdh, ii. 5, 3, 23; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 398.
* Hesiod, Frag, 44, x««/^/>ta« ^ivowri ircXeLades ; Pindar, Nem, ii. 17;
Athenxus, xi.
ESSAY III 289
also the sacred bird of Ashtoreth, the moon-goddess, the
heavenly form of Istar.^ It was the dove Yonah,^ the Hebrew
prophet Jonah, brought to Nineveh by the fish-god, who
made the city once sacred to Istar, the city of the divine
fish, the oracle {kiia) of Merodach or Marduk, the bull-god.^
Noah, in the Hebrew Flood legend, which must have formed
part of the national mythical history of a navigating race,
sent forth the dove after the earlier prophet-bird, the raven,
had failed in his mission ; and it was the dove which told
Noah of the birth of the holy land, of the mother Ida, the
cow-mother, which had risen from the waters after the close
of the period of gestation on the first day of the tenth solar
month. The dove also brought the leaf of the olive-tree ^
M^hich became the mother-tree of the Semite confederacy,
vvhich was first formed in Palestine, the land of the olive-
tree. This was the tree sacred to Athene, the goddess of
t:lie flower {av6os;\ who, like the children of Manu, the
thinker, the Hindu father of men, was bom from the brain
cjf Zeus. It was before the rainy season and the beginning
c^f the Hindu month Assar, sacred to the fish-god Assor,
^hat he created the world in the six days sacred to the six
^ods of the Ashura ritual, and rested from his labours on
the seventh day. It was then that Noah, meaning rest^
launched on the annual flood, the ship bearing the only son
^f life, Dumu-zi, who was, as the first year, to be the parent of
the sons of the god of righteousness. It was he who led
the heavenly ship Argo, and who became in Eridu la-Khan,
or la, the fish, and in Babylonia and Assyria, the god Assor,
who, instead of the Sar, or rain-god of the earlier theology,
became the As-sar or six Sars, whose ideogram is formed by
the meeting of six lines 0\.^ It was Gad and Ashur, the
* Saycc, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 271.
'•^ Gesenius, Thesaurus^ p. 587.
^ Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary ^ Nos. 178, 442*
■* Gen. vi. 5-10; viii. 5.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, No. 242.
19
290 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sons of Zilpah, the handmaid of I^ah, the wild cow, Gad
Iwing the seventh and Asliur the eighth of Jacobus sons, who
formed, with the seven children of Leah, the number nine
of the iffiffij the gods of heaven in Akkadian and Hindu
theology.^ The nine were formed by the first pair of the
primaeval gods of heaven, the sacred twins, Day and Night,
who in tlie Ashura cosmogony, begot the seven days of the
week. And it was this descent from the twins and the
wedded pair which based all their theology on pairs, and
made them, as in the controversy cited in the Brahmana^i,
contend for the sanctity of pairs, as opposed to the odd
numbers Mhich Indra held to be divine.^ The coming of
the god Assor, we are told in a Babylonian inscription,
coincided ^^^ith the birth of the land of Assur,^ and Assur
was the capital of the land called Gutium, or tlie land of
Gud, the bull.* Tliis was the land colonised by the sons of
the northern bull, the Hebrew tribe of Gad, who built not
only the cities of Bashan, but also tliose of Assyria, and were
the great builders of the ancient world, just as their later
descendants the Goths, the modem sons of the bull, were
the founders of Gothic architecture and the ancestors of the
English sons of John Bull. They replaced the Tur, the
stone pillar, the Egyptian obelisk, by the temple, the home
and synilwl of the creating god, who had been tlie pillar of
the house. But in their eyes the sign of the father-god was
not the central pillar, but the two door-posts, and hence
they called the temple gates Babel, or the gates (Bab) of god
(el). This gate was guarded by the holy twins, the pillars
Jachin and Boaz of Solomon*'s temple,^ the Gog and Magc^g
of our Guildhall, and the supporters of our coats-of-arms.
They, as the kerubi or winged -bulls, watched the gates of the
Assyrian temples and those of Paradise in Genesis. It is
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, I-»ect. iii. p.141 note I.
- Eggcling, Sat. Brah, i. 5, 4, 6-1 1 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 153-154.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1 887, Lect. iii. p. 166.
* Lenormanl, Chaldisau Magic^ pp. "^^n^ 334. ^ , yj^w^^ vii. 21.
ESSAY III 291
the door-posts, and night and morning, which are invoked in
the fifth and sixth verses of the Apri sacrificial hymns of the
Ashuras in the Rigveda. And in the Genesis genealogy of the
kings of Edom, the land of the red man, we find that the
first king is the inspired priest or prophet of an open-air altar ;
the second the priest of the consecrated temple of the holy
gate; and the third the priest-king of the Hus or Shus.
The first king is Bela, the son of Beor, the priest-prophet
Balaam, the son of Beor in the Book of Numbers, who built
the altars for his worship, and also Bela, the son of Benjamin
dn Chronicles, and the brother of Ash-bel. He was succeeded
T)y Jobab, the gate (bcA) of Yo or Yah, the son of Zerah, the
"father of the red race and the twin son of Tamar, the palm-
tree, and his successor was Husham ^ of the land of Teman-
ites or Southern Arabia.^ Husham is the son of Dan, the
Judge, and the Husrava and Su-shrava of the Zendavesta
and Rigveda. The land of the Temanites is the land of
the men bom of the Akkadian Te, called in the Assyrian
Te-mennu, or the foundation of life, and its ideogram means
'the lord of seed."^ It was tlie land of Arabia, of the
irrigating and building Minseans and star - worshipping
Sabaeans, the land of the Queen of Slieba, or the num-
ber seven {sh€ba\ who made Sin, the moon- mother of the
Shus, their mother-goddess, and Sinai, the mountain of
Sin, their mother-mountain, and who thus established a
fresh confederacy of the Semites grouped round the mother-
mountain of the West, to rival that of the Kushite moun-
tain of the East. It is their theology which is expressed
in the names of the months of the Akkadian year and
zodiac, beginning with those called Te-te, the two founda-
tions, the door-posts, or Khas-sidi, the bull of increase, and
Enga, the making of bricks, or Mas-mas, the pair of bricks,
culminating in the sixth montli Dul-azag, the pleasant hill, or
^ Gen. xxxvi. 32-35, xxxviii. 30; Numb. xxii. 5 ; i Chron. viii. i.
^ Tema is the name of Arabia ; Isa. xxi. 14.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 320, 327, 427.
292 THE RULING llACES OF rilEHISTOHIC TIMES
l^ulkii, the holy altar, and ending in the month Bara-ziggar,
the altar of the creator. It was on this altar that the Old Year,
the year reckoned by the building race, the sons of the bull,
was sacrificed to produce the New Year. It was the settle-
ment of the Hindu navigators in the holy island of Dilmun in
the IVrsian Gulf, and at Eridu, M'hich first brought them in
ccmtiu^t with the Arabian star-gazers and merchants, the sons
of the ass, and it was the union of these races vnth the sons
of the bull in the ancient city of Ur, which first fonned the
Semite nu*e. '^Fhe fundamental conception l>equeathed by the
Dunava, or worshippers of the eleven gods, was, as I have
Hhown, that of the meridian pole, uniting the land of the
HoiiH of Kush, the tortoise, with the gods of heaven ; and it
was this meridian pole, the Tur of the Akkadians, which the
Dravidian traders of India brought with them to Eridu.
Its two ideograms >-yyy< ff and »-yyy< ^] lx)th begin with
Mu» initial sign of Nun, the Great Spirit ^]J]^ followed by
that of divinity »- in the ideogram of Nun, and by ^,
lord, in thosi» of Tur; and these last mean, Hhe Nun, the
lord of the divine enclosure, of the one king or god,"* and
' the Nun, the lord of the divine enclosure of Adar the fire-
god.'* 'i'luis the meridian-pole is the Nun, the god and soul
of life, both to the Akkadians and Egyptians, called in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, 'the prinueval water Nun, the
Hupreim* god, the self-existent/- This is the life-giving
breath of (iod which moved on the face of the waters, the
mist, which in the Higveda entered the womb of the year-
cow, t\s the s])irit of (tod, and gave life to the year-calf.^
'i'his 'i'nr, the j)ole, gave birth to the Greek Tauros (raO/Jo^),
the bull, the son of the Tur, and also to the Chaldaic Tur,
the bull. It was he who plougheil the heavenly fields, and
on earth tmd out, when cut, the yearV corn, placed round
' Sayor, ./.o;rr/iiw Gra*nWiir Syllahaty^ Nos. I. 64. 66, 67, 329, 427.
'-'11. niu^srh, AW^o'i^M toti/ AfythoK\i^'e licr AlUtt ^gypter, pp. 21-25,
ia(»: Hook nf the Dc.iil, chap. xvii.
^ (ion. i. 2 ; Kit*veila, i. 164, 8.
ESSAY III 293
the pole in the centre of the threshing-floor. This simile,
joined to that which made the heaveiily pole revolve with
the passing days and weeks, made the bull, the Chaldaic
Tur, the revolving pole, and the Tor, that which goes round
in a circle. It was this bull, the Hebrew Shur, which was
the wild bull of the mountains, the bull of the rock ; and
the two names appear in that of Tyre and the Arabic Tor or
Tur, a mountain, for the name of Tyre wasTsur or Tsor, the
* being preserved in the names Sarra and Sara, given to it by
£nnius and Plautus, and the name came to mean, as we know
Irom the Greek rvpo^^ both the mountain and the pole Tur,
the tower of god, and the root whence it comes means 'to bind/^
TTie sons of the binding Tur were the Indian Tur-vashu,
the Zend Tur-anians, the mariners of Asia Minor called by
"^he Egyptians Tour-sha,^ the sea-traders of the Mediter-
^»^nean called the Tur-sene of Lydia, the Tur-sena or Tyr-
iwhenians of Lemnos and Etruria, who spoke a language
closely allied to that of the Akkadians. That their god Tur
^was worshipped in Cyprus and Asia Minor is proved by the
i:erra-cotta whorl found in one of the settlements on the site
of Troy, dedicated in Cypriote characters to Patorl Turi,
the father Tur, who gave his name to the Phrygian city of
Turiaion. The great antiquity of the settlement where this
whorl was found is proved by the fact that though some
bronze knives and instruments were found in it, by far the
greater number of the axes, saws, and knives were of stone, and
the pottery, though similar to that at Mycenae, is of a more
archaic type.^ These people, who had adopted the Cypriote
six-rayed star as their national sign, had besides the god Tur
brought with them from India the peacock, sacred to the
Grecian moon-goddess Hera, the Latin Juno and the Etruscan
Uni. This bird is one of the four totems of the great Bhar
* Gcscnius, Thesaurus^ * Tur and Shur,* pp. 1382, 1498, 1499, 1160-1 ;
Stanley, Sinai and Palestine y p. 498.
* Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria, p. 164.
' Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excavations, App. I. pp. 331, 332, 334.
294 THE IIULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tribe, the Bhiirata of Bharata varsha. These are (1) the Bans-
rishi, the bamboo priest, the Immboo pole set up as the sign of
the rain-god by Vasu, in the land called in the Mahabharata
the land of the Kichaka or hill-bamboo; (2) the Bel, the medi-
cinal fruit-tree {JElgle mannelos\ the tree of the physicians,
the fruit of which cures dysentery ; (3) the Kach-hap, the
tortoise ; and (4) the Mayur, the peacock.^ It is in Greek
legend that we find the story which tells us how the peacock
became the totem of the sons of the dog. For when Argus,
the star watch-dog of lo, the dark night, the star Sirius, was
slain or supplanted in the rule of the heavens by the crescent-
moon, the Harpe, or crescent-shaped sword wielded by
Hermes, the fire-god of the double-snake race, whose em-
blems are twined round his caduceus, the watch ing-star,
Argus became the peacock whose tail is studded with the
stars of heaven. The name of the peacock, Mayura, also
takes us back to that of Maia, the mother of Hermes, the
seventh or invisible star of the Pleiades,^ our own May,
and the witch-mother Maga. It was as sons of the witch -
mother that tlie stars became snakes, the Taras of the
Gonds, theTara Pennu, the snake or star-mother, the goddess
of Maghada, and the Greek apyrj^;^ Doric apyaf;^ which means
a snake, and the watching-star ; and it was when the star-
gods were superseded in the rule of heaven that Apollo, the
moon- and sun-god l)ecaine Argeiphontes (\py€L<f>6irr7}(;\ the
slayer of the snake. These watch ing-stars, Argus with the
hundred eyes, were the Uragas, or heavenly- watchers, of the
Hindus, the Pali Urago, called Ashura in the Mahabharata,^
and the Uru-gul, or great watcher of heaven, of the Akka-
dians, the chief priest * who gained the name beaiuse he was
the chief astronomer of the State. Thus we find that the
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. App. I. p. 9. Medical study
l)egan in the age of the Ashvins, the physicians to the gods.
- Aratus, Phaitiomctia, 201-203.
^ Drona {Jagadratha Parva), cxliv. p. 441.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lcct. i. p. 80 note 2.
ESSAY in J295
peacock reached Greece from India under tlie auspices of Salli-
mannu, the fisli-god, some thousands of years before the date
of about 1000 B.C., hitherto assigned to his namesake, Solo-
imon, the Jewish king, and it is this last who, as we are told
in the Book of Kings, imported to Palestine apes, ivory,
peacocks, and almag, or sandal-wood, under names which all
scholars admit to be of Tamil origin. It is impossible to l)e-
lieve that at that date the western coast of India should have
T>een called Ophir, which, as Dr. Sayce has shown, is the
Dravidian Abhira,^ or that Dravidian dialects should have
l)een the ordinary language of commerce used there. The
-eighth Mandala of the Rigveda had long before that date been
written in Sanskrit by the Kanva, the priests of the Yadu-
Turvashu, the great race of the Ikshvaku its rulers, and the
ordinary language of the country must have been a Pali or
Prakrit dialect. That Solomon, the son of David, an inland
king, should have joined with Hiram of Tyre in starting a
trade with India, which disappears immediately after his death,
seems to be equally impossible, but it is quite in accordance
with the rules of ancient mythic history, as used by the
Aryan historians of the narrative age, that the myths origin-
ally framed to tell the story of the triumphant progress of
Sallimannu, the fish-god, whose worshippers built the first
temples, should be transferred to his namesake, the king who
built the great temple at Jerusalem, and this conclusion is
confirmed by the prominence given to the Hindu apes and
peacocks in the religions of Egypt and Europe. These
divine symbols would naturally have been spoken of in the
original myth of Sallimamiu, but could not have attracted
the attention of the court historiographer in the days of
Solomon the king, for by that time neither apes nor peacocks
liad any place in the Hebrew religion, nor was there any
I'eason for importing them. The eight sacred apes under the
Tamil name of Kapi, were the Egyptian prototypes of the
later metaphysical abstractions called the eight creating-gods
* Sayce, * Ophir,' in Queen'' s Printers' Aids to the Student of the Holy Bible.
296 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIxMES
headed by the Nun. Tliey are called ' the soul of the East,
the apes who adore Ra, the rising sun, the eight Chnum,** or
building architects, the gods of the building race, ' who sit
to the right and left of Amon the ram-god,** the god of the
house-pole. Of these eight apes, the eight creating-stars,
four were called Beiitet or Keflenu, that is, the Phoenician
{kepht\ or Northern apes, and four the apes of Uetenu,
meaning the green land, which is to the east of Punt, and
must he India.^ The coming of these sacred apes, the god
whose image was borne on the banner of Arjuna, the leader
of the Pandavas, and the creed they brought with them
must have formed a most important epoch in the history
recorded by the national Asipu. For it was these Tursena,
the army {sena) of Tur, who, by developing the ancient
organisation of the village and province in India, divided all
the countries they occupied into confederacies of cities, such
as we find among the Euphratean nations, the Egyptians,
Canaanites, the people of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. It
was they who were the fathers of Greek and Latin civilisation ;
who made the maintenance of law and order, doing justice
between man and man, and the making of useful laws, the
chief function of government, and based national life on the
Dravidian rule that everv man and woman should do his and
her dutv to the State. These maritime Tursena were inter-
mingled with the matriarchal Amazonian tribes who preceded
them, and who seem to have founded the ancient ports of
Asia Minor and Palestine, especially the Ionian cities of
Smyrna and Ephesus, and that of Askelon, where the god-
dess-mother was worshipped as Myrina, the Aramaic Martha,
the mistress, the Assyrian Martu, the daughter, and the
Hebrew Miriam, the prophetess, who was, like Istar, the
mother of Tannnuz.^ It was they, as the founders of sea-
ports who, like their Indian maritime ancestors, made ships
from the wood on the hills of Asia Minor, near the sea-
^ H. Brugsch, Relif^oti und Mythologie der Allen ^-Egypter, pp. 1 50- 1 59.
- Sayce, Hibhert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 235 note 4.
ESSAY III 297
coast, and founded tlie commerce which brought the cedars
of Amarrum or Lebanon to Lugash, the city of Gudia. The
race formed by the union of these matriarchal tribes with the
sons of the pole was that of Dorians, the race whose protect-
iJ^g god was Apollo. These people have apparently left their
name in the Hebrew land of Dor, the country of the magi-
cians, on the coast south of Sidon, and they were the sons
first of the tree-stem and spear (Sopi;), and afterwards of the
revolving pole, called by the Jews Dor, and also of the Dor,
* generation or epoch,^ the descendants of the revolving ages,
* oijrthical equation similar to that which changed the Akka-
^Q-n god of the dead Ner-gal, the great {gal) strong one
f^^^r^ into the Babylonian Ner or epoch of six hundred years.
^^e names of the Dorian tribes, the Hylleis or woodmen {vXrj)^
^■^e sons of the tree, the Pamphyli or collected tribes {<f>vXal)
^''^o left their name in the province of Pamphylia, and the
"ytnanes or sons of the entering-god (Suco), that is, of the
^^Volving pole or fire-drill of heaven, tell us a great deal
^^^out their history. They were the people formed from the
^^ion of the sons of the tree, the fire-god and the house-pole,
^'Vio brought from Asia Minor into Crete their system of
^Us-sitia, or common meals, at which, as we are told by Aris-
totle, the whole village population, men, women, and children,
ate together the food provided from the common granaries
or store-houses (ex Koivoii)^ and this custom was not peculiar
to the Cretans and Spartans, but was indigenous among the
(Enotrians of Southern Italy, the Arkadians of Phygalia,
and the Argives. It was observed at Megara in the days of
Theognis, and was said to have been introduced into Corinth
by Periander.^ It was in short a general Dorian custom, and
these common meals and the division into messes of the
Spartans and Cretans, are reproduced in the customs of the
unmarried men of the Naga races in India, who all live
Gesenius, Thesaurus , p. 331, s.v. *Dor.'
2 MuUer, Die Dorter, bk. iii. chap. x. p. 199.
^ Ibid, bk. iv. chap. iii. p. 269.
298 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
together as the Spartan youths used to do, while the public
granaries still sur\'ive in those distributed throughout Chota
Nagporefor storing the produce of the Manjhus or royal
land. Among the Spartans and Cretans also, as among the
Naga races in India, the children did not belong to then-
parents but to the State, and every Spartan father was
obliged to bring his children when bom to the Lesche, to be
examined by the elders of the tribe, who determined whether
they were to live or not.i If accepted, they were brought up
like the Indian Naga children, by the State or village, and
the divisions of the Spartan youths into sections called Bouai
and Ilai, ruled by one of the elder lads called Iren,* tells us
that they were sons of the ox Bous, and the mother Ida or
Ila, who obeyed the chief divider or arbitrator, Iren, the son
of Idii or Ira, the centre of the sacrificial altar, and of the three
primaeval mothers. The descent of the Dorians and Spartans
from the races to whom the village grove was the goddess-
mother of their children, is shown in their marriage-customs.
These obliged the husband to consummate his marriage
secretly in the grove called the Numpheutria, to M'hich he
carried his wife by simulated capture. Tliere the brides-
woman met them and received the bride from her husband,
cut off her hair, dressed her in man'*s clothes, and left her in
the dark,^ so that the subsequent union was like the Hindu
marriage by Sindurdan, a completion of blood brotherhood.
The Spartan form of government by the two kings of the
families of the Agida?, or sons of the goat, and the Eurypon-
tidfie or Eurytionidae,* and by the five Ephors, both repro-
duce Dravidian customs, and give historical evidence of the
origin of the race. The five Ephors are the five meml)ers of
the Indian village council called the Panchayat, or council of
five (panch)^ while the two kings are the Dravidian supreme
^ Plutarch's Lycurgtts.
' MUller, Die Dorier, bk. iv. chap. v. §2, p. 297.
=' IHiL bk. iv. chap. iv. § 2, p. 278.
* Pausanias and Strabo call the second race of kings, Eurytionidac. Other
auihorilies call them Eur>'pontid£e.
ESSAY III 299
king, judge and law-giver, and his chief subordinate and
almost co-equal, the Sena-pati, lord (pati) of the army {sena\
the commander-in-chief. In the family names of the Spartan
kings we find the sons of the mountain, or rather of the
storm-goat (a?^),^ the father-god of storms, the Branchian
and iEolian Apollo bom in Lydia and Phrygia, and the
sons of the wide (evpv^) sea (ttoi/to?), or what is still more sig-
nificant of Eur3rtion or Eurytus, the father of the Centaurs.
He was the divine archer, the bearer of the mythic bow
which at last descended to Odusseus,^ the wandering sun-god
whose wife was Penelope, the weaver of the web (tt^i/t;) of
time. The name Eur3rtus represents a form (efe/auTO?), de-
rived from ipvd)^ * to draw,** and he is the exact counterpart of
the Hindu god of the bow, Krishanu, whose name comes from
fcarsh, * to draw,** and the bow which he bears is the rainbow
of the rain-god, the Gandiva, the bow of Arjuna, the bright
One (diva) of the Gan, the rain-god among the Pandavas.
JCrishanu is the leader of the seven Gandharvas, the guardians
of Soma^ that is, of the seven days which make the pole the
^^ven bulls of the Great Bear revolve and bring the season
the rains. But while the Hindus call the seven rulers of
loud-land Gandharvas, or men of the country (ffan) of
^he pole {dhruva\ the Grt^eks call them Ken-tauroi, the
prickers, or goaders (/cei/Tcfl)) of the bull (javpo^;)^ and
'these names mark the interval in the transmission of the
^Mnyth which separated the conception of the week-days as
^^oaders of the bull, who ploughs the field and brings the
Iiarvest home, from that of the guardians of cloud-land, which
make the pole of time revolve. This evidence also shows that
the myth of the Centaurs, or heavenly horsemen, with that
of the dolphin fish-god, who led the priests of Apollo to
Delphi, was brought to Greece by the Dorians, who made
the heavenly twins, the Ashvins of the Hindus, their sex-
less father-gods, Kastor and Polydeukes. They were the
^gg-bom sons of one mother, Leda, by two fathers, Tyn-
^ From atffffia, * to rush.' - Homer, Odyssey, viii. 224 ff.
aOO THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
dareus, the hanimerman, or primaeval sniith,^ and Zeus, and
were like the twin-children of Vivasvat and Saranyu, mortal
and immortal, the mortal Eastor being the son of Tyndareus,
and the immortal Polydeukes, the great wetter (Seuo)), the
rain-god, of Zeus. Kastor was the pole of Ka, the star
called by the Akkadian astronomers tlie star Tur-us of the
supreme temple, the sacred pole of the house of Grod.- They
both fonued part of the crew of the star-ship Argo, which
came from the South into the Grecian seas, where it ceased
to be visible, but where its memory was preserved in the
name of the land of Argos, whose people took for their
cognisance the fish.^ The name of their mother, Leda, tells
us of the route by which the sons of the twin-stars came from
India to Asia Minor, and thence by way of Crete to Greece.
Leda is the feminine form of lAJdon (\tjBov\ the Mastich
shrub (Pistaccia lentiscus\ yielding the incense Ledanon
burnt in the Greek temples. The root Ledon appears in
Hebrew as ht^ incense, whence comes the name of the
patriarch Lot, meaning concealment, and a veil.* He was
by his two daugliters, the twin-wives of the primaeval father-
god, the father of Moab, meaning the water-father, the
Greek Polydeukes, and Amon, the supporter, the house
pole,^ the Greek Kastor; and he was like the Indian fish-
god Matsya, whose name is derived from the root meuU
meaning intoxicating, inspired by drunkenness. The incense^
whence they were l)om, was that which hid the god dwelling
in the holy of holies, the Naos, or innermost recesses of the
temple, built by the sons of the fish ; and tliis conception of
the symbolism of burning incense, hiding the father of life,
as the Rishi Para-shara, the overhanging cloud, was hidden
* Fr. root itid^ to strike ; Curtius, Griechische Etymologic^ No. 248,
pp. 226, 227.
'•* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars,' star x. line 13.
Proceedings of Society of Biblical Archeology, Feb. 1890.
' * Greek Totems,' Quarterly Review^ Jan. 189 1, p. 199.
* Gesenius, Thesaurus ^ s.v. *Lot,* p. 748.
' Ibid, s.v. * Moab,* p. 77$ ; * Ammon,' p. 115.
ESSAY III ^1
when he begot Vyasa, the son of SatyavatI, she who is
possessed of truth (satya)^ is one that arose in India. There,
in the central land of Gondwana, reaching from the realm
of king Vasu, on the Sakti mountains, where the fish-god was
bom, to the Malabar coast, the Salai-tree {BosweUia thuri-
Jerd)^ the original incense- tree, crowns every rocky height,
where nothing else will grow, and is quite as ubiquitous as
the hill bamboo, the Kichaka, which Vasu planted as the
rain-pole. It was in this land of the Kichaka that the
Pandavas, by the advice of the Gandharva king, Chitra-
ratha, the star-god of the many-coloured (chitra) chariot
{r(Uha)\ made Dhaumya, the son of smoke {dhtmio\ their
family priest, and it was under his guidance that they
gained their common bride, Drupadi, in the adjoining land
of the Srinjayas, or Pafichalas. She and her brother,
Dhrishtha-dyumna, were ostensibly the children of king
Drupada, the sacrificial stake, but were really bom from
the sacrificial flame, lighted on the altar of bumt-oftering
by the Brahmin Yaja, meaning the sacrifice, and while
Drupadi was the incense altar, the mother of the children
of the Pandavas, the five seasons of the year, hidden in the
inner Naos, or female apartments of the temple, Dhrishtha-
dyumna, whose name means * the seen bright one,** was the
altar of bumt-ofFering in the outer court ; and both symbol-
ised the ritual of the Afigiras priesthood, the offerers of
burnt-offerings, the Bharadvajas and Gotamas. The custom
of burning incense as the veil of the unseen god, which
began and still survives in India, went thence, through the
Euphratean ports, to Arabia, where a fresh source of incense
was found in the Arabian incense-tree {BosweUia carterti\
and it passed thence through Egypt, Palestine, and Asia
Minor, to Greece. But the incense-mother, Leda, who came
from the land where Gandhari and Urvashi laid the eggs,
whence the Kushite race and Ayu, the son of ages, were
bom, was not the goose-mother of the sons of Kush, but
' Joseph's coat of many colours*
302 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIME-
the KVKvo^^ or Cygnus, a swan. Tliis name is the same a.
that of ^hakuna, the brother of Gandhari, who was first th«
Ciconia, or stork, who told of the end of the Northern winter
but who became in India the bird of the torrid summer sea-
son. But this bird of spring was superseded, in the age ol
astral theology I am now discussing, by the Southern goose
and Northern swan, the moon-birds. It is the swan which
is the moon-boat which bears Lohengrin, the swan-knight,
who keeps in his bosom the holy grail, or secret casket
containing the life-giving water, the blood of the gods, the
heavenly Soma. It was this casket, containing the cups
called Consecration {diksha) and Penance (tapas), which was
given to the goddess-mother Ka-dru, the tree ol
Ka, by the bird Shyena, who took it from the
guardianship of Krishanu, the god of the
heavenly bow.^ It is this boat of the moon-
bird with its central mast, the supporting-pole,
which is the Delphic Trisula, the Greek € in-
scribed over the gate of the temple.
The age on which the world now entered was that of
Semite rule, achieved by the confederacy of the sons of Sin,
led by the tribes of Ephraini, tlie two Ashes (cper)^ or the
united twin-races of the Arabian sons of the iiss, and the
composite race of the builders, artisans, traders, and warriors,
tlie sons of the fire-god. They, led by Josluia, the son of
the Nun, which means in Hebrew ' the fish," and allied with
the sons of Caleb, ' tlie dog,** took Jericho, the moon-city of
the goddess Ashtoretli, or Esther, by the help of Rahab, the
alligator, and Marduk, the bull, and superseded the rule of
the Akkadian-Turanian Finns by that of the Semites, making
the Semites the successors of the Kushites in the rule of
Southern Asia and Egypt, a conquest which enables us to
explain how the rule of the later Sargon extended as far
west as Cyprus, and how, as we leani from the tablets of
' Eggeling, Sa/. Brah, iii. 6, 2, 8-1 1 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 150, 151 ;
Rigvcda, iv. 27, 3.
ESSAY III 803
Tell-El Amarna, in the days of the eighteenth Egyptian
dynasty, or 1800 b.c, the Assyrian cuneiform script was the
written character* used in Palestine. And just as this con-
quest is commemorated in Zend and Hindu mythic history
by the name of the conquering king, Hu-srava and Shu-
shravas, the offspring or glory of the Hus or Shus, so is the
same reminiscence repeated in the original name of Joshua,
the son of Nun, who was first called Hoshea or Hush-ia,^ that
is, the Yah, or supreme god of the Hus. They extended
the eleven months of generation, the parent gods of the sons
of the ass, to the full thirteen lunar months, or 364 days, of
tie lunar year, and these months are the thirteen children
of Jacob and the thirteen wives of Kashyapa, called (1)
Aditi, (2) Deti, (3) Danu, (4) Kala, (5) Danayu, (6) Sinhika,
C7) Krodha, (8) Pradha, (9) Visva, (10) Vinata, (11) Kapila,
CIS) Muni, or Daksha, (13) Kadru. They are the thirteen
^Xionths to which libations are made in the Soma sacrifice,
«^jid are there arranged in pairs, in accordance with the
-Ashura belief in their sanctity. This year, which begins
"Vrith the winter solstice, and the two spring months, Madhu
^md Madhava, is dedicated to the Ashvins, the drinkers of
intoxicating honey mead.^ Valuable evidence as to the
lunar theology of the pre-solar Hindu race is given by the
secret gods of the Santals, called the seven Orak-bongas, or
household gods, and the thirteen Abge-bongas, or secret
gods. Converts have told their names to missionaries, but
no Santal who retains the faith of his fathers will tell to
any one, except his eldest son, the secret names of the
seven days of the week and the thirteen months of the
year, and these are most carefully concealed from their
^ Numbers xiii. 17. Gesenius translates the name Hoshea as * freed by
Jehovah,* but the compilers of the Pentateuch had forgotten the methods of
mythic history and the meaning of Hushim, and the interpretation I suggest
is one confirmed by Zend and Hindu mythology, and is also consonant with
historical facts. Joshua was the son or successor of Nun, and the la or Ya of
the race of the circumcision.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iv. 3, i, 14-20; S.B.E, vol. xxvi. pp. 320-322.
304 THE BULING RACES OF PREHISTOBIC TI]W
wives or female relations. Once a year sacrifices are oSk
to them without the intervention of a priest, and while
whole family may share in the food offered to the Oi
bongas, only men may eat of that of the Abge-bonj
The Santals do not, like the Mundas and Ooraons, k
their aimual Saturnalia in Miigh, the witches' month,
in Pous, at the winter solstice, when the lunar year beg
the time of the Pongol Festival of the Madras Dravidii
But though this lunar year is their religious year, their ofB*
year, like that of the Mund&s and Ooraons, begins in Ma
Tlie change in customs thus marked by the adoption
the lunar year must be attributed to the addition to tl
confederacy of the star-worshipping race, who formed
sub-tribe, tracing their descent to the Sar-ens, or Pleiat
the stars of the goddess-mother Sar, and the mother-si
of the Dravidian races. The peculiar customs of the Sar-
seem to mark them as a separate community, somewi
similar to the tribe of Levi among the Jews. One of th
sub-septs, the Naiki-Khil-Saren, have a separate grove c
priest of their own, and may not enter a house in which i
of the inmates are ceremonially unclean, while the Si
Saren do not use vermilion to make the Sindur-dan mi
at their marriages, and neither they nor the Manjhi-Kl
Saren may be present at a sacrifice when the priest ofl
his own blood.^ Their thirteen lunar months are called
Dhara-sor, or Dhara-sanda, the moon (sanda) of the sprii
(dhara)^ the goddess Dharti of the Mundas and Ooraons,
Ket-kom Kudra, (3) Champa-dena-garh, (4) Garhsinka,
Lila Chandi, the moon {chandi) of sorcery {lila\ (6) Di
ghara, (7) Kudra Chandi, (8) Bahara, (9) Duar-seri, (]
Kud-raj, (11) Gosain Era, (12) Achali, (13) Deswali.2 1
ruling goddess of these thirteen months is the moon-godd
of the seventh month, Kudra-Chandi, called Jyesthha, 1
oldest, in the official list of Hindu months. She holds 1
place assigned to the moon-mother in the cosmological hyi
^ Risley, Tribes anii Castes of Bengal ^ vol. ii. p. 228. ^ Ibid p. 23
ESSAY III 305
of the Rigveda, where she is the seventh self-created goddess,
placed in the centre of the year of thirteen months, who has
six twin singers (rishi% bom from the gods, the six preced-
ing and six following months, on each side of her.^ She is
the goddess Kudra-sini of the fiauris, to whom pigs, fowls,
rice, sugar, and ghee are offered in the Akhra, or village
dancing-place, on Saturdays and Sundays by the tribal priest,
who must fast from fish or flesh the day before he makes the
offering.^ Kudra is also one of the seven spirits worshipped
by the Bhuiyas, called (1) Darha, (2) Kudra, (8) Kudri, (4)
T)ano, (5) Pacheria, (6) Haserwar, (7) Pakahi.' In this name
Xudra, for the moon, we find the Finnish word for moon,
ifrhich appears in the Finnic kuta-ma^ the Esthonian Arw, the
JVf ordvin kua^ the Ostiak Khoda-j^ and also in Kuh% a name
for the waning moon, in the Atharvaveda,^ and in Ku-aVy
the name given to the month Asva-yuja in Western India.
We find the Finnic moon-goddess Kudra united with Sin
or Sini, the moon-god of the Semitic Shus, in the name of
the Bauri goddess Kudra-Sini, and in the Rigveda Sini-valT,
or the strong Sini, called also Gufigu, or mother of the Gan,
is the goddess of the waxing moon, who rules the house ; and
she forms, with Sarasvati or Rahu, the waning moon, the twin-
pair, who together give children to its owners in the tenth
lunar month.* This tenth month is, in the Santal year,
ruled by Kud-raj, the king of the Ku, or lunar series, and
it is as the tenth month of the year that Asva-yuja gets
the name of Ku-ar. The M ahabharata tells us how moon-
worship and the reckoning of lunar time was made the
official religion at Champa, the modem Bhagalpore, or rather
Patharghata,^ the Champa-dena-garh of the Santal lunar
^ Rigveda, i. 164, 15.
" Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 80, 81.
* Ibid. p. 115.
* Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, p. 304.
* Atharvaveda, v. viii. 47 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. iii. p. 189.
* Rigveda, ii. 32, 5, 6, 7 ; x. 184, 2, 3.
' Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India^ p. 477.
20
306 THE RULIxNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
months. This land of extinct volcanoes and hot springs
was the ancient Afiga, or land of burning coals (afiga). It
was there that Karna, king of Afiga, bom on the Asva, or
horse-river, was found by Radha, the arc, or semicircle, wife
of Adiratha, the chief charioteer of the king of the Eushikas.
The name Earna, the son of Ashva, the horse, exactly repro-
duces that of the Zend hero, K^resaspa, the son of Sama, the
Semite who, in the land of Vaekerata, or evil shadows, the
modem Kabul, the original home of the Kushite race, tamed
and wedded the moon, the Pairika Knathaiti, or wandering
star (Pairika) adored (knath) by men.^ The Semite origin
of Keresaspa, the homed (keres) horse {aspa\ who as the
unicorn, or homed fish, became the heavenly charioteer, is
presented in the name Karna, which contains the root of
the Hebrew keren^ a horn; and this Northern name of
the horned-moon is exactly analogous to that of Sinh,
or Singh, the homed -one, given it by the Southern
Sumerians — the difference being in the race totems. The
Sumerians being the sons of the wild bull, or cow, and the
Northern moon-worshippers being the sons of the horse, the
Parthian cavalry, the Hindu Kuntibhojas. Karna, the
horned-moon of the Mahabharata, is the miraculously bom
son of Prithu, the mother of the Parthian race, before she
became the mother of the Pandavas. She was the daughter
of the king of the Kuntibhojas or Bhojas of the spear {kinUi)
the Hindu cavalry answering to the Greek infantry, the
Dorian sons of the spear {iopv). To conceal his birth she
placed Karna in a basket in the river Ashva, whence he
floated down the Jumna and Ganges to Champa, whence
he went to Dhritarashtra'^s court. He grew up to be the com-
panion and chief ally of the Kauravyas, and conquered for
them the wliole of India, while the Pandavas, after losing
their wealth and kingdom to Shakuna the gambler, lay hid
* Darmesteter, 2^ndav€sta Vendtddd Fargardy i. lo, and Introduction,
Fanhirdin Yasty 136; Mill's Yasnay ix. 10 ; S.B.E. vol. iv. p. 7 note 4,
and p. 2 ; vol. xxiii. p. 223 ; xxxi. p. 233.
ESSAY III 307
at Virata. Indra beguiled him of the panoply in which he
was bom, the golden mail and earrings of the homed-moon,
and gave him in exchange a dart which could not be baffled,
the spear or thrown javelin, the national weapon of the
Parthian cavalry, who overpowered their foes with showers
of darts or arrows.^ They were the old Turkish or Ural-
Altaic horsemen, who have always from time immemorial used
a lunar year of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each.^
And the whole story of Karna and Eeresaspa tells how these
Northern moon-worshippers conquered India at the close of
the rule of the Naga kings. When we recollect further that
it was the ancient Minyans of Asia Minor who first called
the moon Men, or the measurer, we see that it was the
ancient Hittites, to whom the first wives of Esau, the goat-
god, and Bathsheba, she of the seven (sheba) measures {bath)^
the mother of Solomon, the fish-god, belonged, who first
calculated the lunar year. They were the Hitaspa, or riding
Hittites, whose leader was, like Karna, golden-crowned, who
killed Urvakhshaya, or Danu the Turanian father of the
Danava, and was afterwards killed by Eeresaspa the Semite.*
Their language, as Major Conder has shown, is allied with
Mongolian and Turkish, and it was their people united with
the Arab riders of the desert, from whom' Esau got his
third wife,^ who entered India as the Pandus, or fair con-
querors from the North, and overran the country, as the
White Huns and early Mohammedans did at a later period.
They were the second twin race, the Ya-devas, or people
whose god {deva) is Yah, and who were the successors of the
Tur-vashu, the sons of the ass, the satyrs of Phrygia, who
have, like their king Midas, asses'* ears. They are apparently
^ Mahabharata Adi {Saffibhava) Parva, cxi. pp, 330, 331 ; Vana {Kandala-
harana) Parva, ccxcix. -cccix,
^ Sayce, Introduction to the Science 0/ LatiguageSy vol. ii. pp. 195, 196.
^ Gen. xxvi. 34, 35 ; 2 Sam. xi. 2 ff, '
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Ram Ya^t^ 28 ; Zamydd Yast^ 41 ; S.B.E. vol.
xxiil pp. 255, 296. * Gen. xxviii. 9, xxxvi. 3.
308 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIME*
the Shambara of the Rig\'eda who carried on a long
chequered warfare with Divodasa, son of Vadhriashva, wl
frequently defeated them before he was finally conquered
their great king Su-shravas. Their name is derived
the casting weapon {shamba\ the dart or javelin of tl "' ^^
Parthians, which Indra is prayed to use to keep his foes at *
distance,^ and it is this same people who are described \0f^
Curtius and Diodorus as the Sambraca? and Sambastse, wh- ^^
ruled the country where the five Panjab rivers join the Indiu^i-* ^
ITiis was, as Sir A. Cunningham shows, that of the Johiy^ ^
or Ya udhya Rajputs, called Johiya-bar or Yaudheya-vai
They are named in the Allahabad inscription of Samudi
Gupta, and the still earlier one of Junagurh, and are said ii
the narratives of Alexander the Great'^s campaigns to
had an army of 60,000 foot, 6000 horse, and 500 chariots.
They are divided into three clans, of which the names
very significant. Tlie Langa-vira, or worshippers of th<
Linga or Vim ; the iVFadho-vira or Madhera, the drinkers oi
the inspiring and intoxicating {madh) honey drink ; and th^
Adam-vira or Admera, the soiis of Adam, the red nian.*^
Tlicse names show them to Ik?, like other ancient conquering"
races, a most composite tribe formed of invading races, who^
after the long stniggles related in the legends of the Rigveda*
and MahSbhiirata, united with their neighbours, who were
like themselves of Northern descent, and formed the formid-
able confederacv of the Yadu-Tarvashu. They became the
Ikshvaku, or sons of the sugar-cane, the flower of whose
forces were the Kuntibhoja cavalry, whose horses are faineil
throughout Indian legend as the swiftest and most enduring
of steeds. They instituted the Soma sacrifice especially
offered to the moon, for it was their totemistic cognisance^
the two vidhritis of sugar-cane, which were laid between the
Kusha-grass thatching the fire-altar and the praMara of
Ashva-vala or horse-tail grass, as the begetting fathers of the
^ Grassmann, Worterhitch Ziim Rigz'eJa, s.v., *Shambara;' Rigveda,
X. 42. - Cunningham, A9tcietit Geography of India, pp. 244, 246.
ESSAY III 309
race succeeding the Kushites.^ They made Shiba or Shiva,
the shepherd-god, ruler of the year, calling him the god of
number (Sankha or Sankhara), that is, of the sacred number
seven, which furnished the two bricks Mas-mas^ or fourteen
days, with which the Akkadian year builders built the second
month of their year, ending with the altar of the creator,
and it was they who consecrated the seventh day, observed
as an especially holy day by the Semite Assyrians, Zends,
and Jews. In the Soma festival of the Ashvins the trydshira^
or three mixtures milk, curds, and barley, but no living
victims, were offered to the rain-gods Mitra, Varuna, Sukra,
and the Maruts,* and mead was drunk in their honour ; but
this ritual was entirely changed by these Northern horsemen.
They were like the Arabs of the Mohammedan conquests, a
sternly religious people, believing firmly in the unity of God,
the great and invisible Yah, who infuses the life-giving
germ, the Su or Soma, throughout all nature by the medium
of the penetrating moist and rain-giving air, and makes the
nioon the ruler of the processes by which the root brings
forth the seed which, in the fulness of time, gives birth to
Xiew life. Like the later Arabs, they abhorred intoxicating
drinks, and looked on indulgence in the country Madhu,
isiacle from the flowers of the Mahua tree {Bassia latifolia\
the country rice-beer or other similar drink, as a disgraceful
<;rinie, and made all the upper classes in India water-drinkers,
«s they have ever since remained. They changed the name
of the god Krishna from Madhava, the name most frequently
\is€k1 in the Maliabharata, to Madhu-han, or slayer of Madhu,
«nd framed the legend telling how he consented to die for the
good of mankind.* Their Soma festival was a water-festival,
in which the use of blood as a cleansing and purifying agent
was abolished, and they allowed none to celebrate it except
those who had consecrated themselves by the Dikshayana or
* Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iii. 4, i, 18 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. 89 note 4, 90.
- Eggeling, 5a/. BrdhM, i, 4, 10; iv. 2, i, 12; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 271,281.
' Mahabharata Vana {Markandya Saniaseya) Parva, cciii. pp. 623, 624.
310 THE RULIxNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
bath of new-birth, from which the sacrificer who enters it as an
embryo or unborn child with the caul on his head emerges
a new-bom and holy man, and this rite they took from the
washing witli sanctifying dew obser\ed by the Northern agri-
cultural tribes. The libations poured out to the gods of
time and drunk by the priests, were made as in the cere-
monial of the Brahmanas with milk, curds, and barley mixed
with the consecrated water drawn from the running streams
sacred to the mother-goddess of the springs, DharT,i and
called the Vasa-tivari or the sharp (ftvra)^ that is, the active
penetrating creator (vasu)^ and into this was infused the
juice pressed by the pressing-stones, or churned in the
mortar from the unfermented sap of the plants they made
the symbol of the national tree of life, and this explains the
use of the Palasha juice, and that of the Fku^ Indica and
Kusha or Dub grass, to which I have already referred. Their
belief in the sanctity of water survived in the elaborate and
repeated washings in holy water which accompanied and still
characterises all ritualistic observances among the Jews,
Parsis, and Hindus, and this belief in water as cleansing the
soul from guilt was transferred by tlie Semites to tlie Greeks,
wlio added expiating ablutions in water to the former baths
of cleansing blood. It wiis under Semite rule that the
formation of society reached a stage beyond tliat which
divided the people into trade guilds, like those of the Kurmis,
or cultivators; the Telis, or oil-pressers ; the Khewuts, or
fishermen ; tlie Lobars, or workers in metal ; the Tantis, or
weavers, which was the work of the Kushite rulers. Trade
had greatly increased wealth, and this, together with the
growing conplexity of affairs arising out of a wide-spread
and active commerce, led to the increase in power and
numbers of the literary class of professional men, represented
among their predecessors by the Asipu, inspired priests, and
^ See the rules for the fetching of the Vasal i-varl water, Sat. Brdh, iii. 9, 2,
1-6; S. \\. E. vol. xxvi. pp. 222, 223. See also Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologies
p. 231-235, s.v. *Tivra.'
ESSAY III 311
medicine men. This class comprised the national priests,
teachers, exorcisers, physicians, astronomers, guardians and
rememberers of past history, the makers of the national
historical and scientific legends, and the government officials.
This class, called by the Jews sons of Joseph, or sons of the
prophets, scribes, Levites, and priests ; by the Akkadians
Asipu ; by the Hindus Kayasths and Brahmins ; by the
Greeks priests, prophets, exegetae, and philosophers, were,
together with the village and city elders, the great . up-
holders of law and order. This literary class added to these
vocations a constant desire to attain greater knowledge and
greater efficiency in everything that concerned the national
weal. It was they who in Assyria, the central land where the
Semite development reached its highest expansion, covered
the country with the square zigurats or towers of observation,
whose sides, like those of the great temple of Bel at Borsippa,
faced the four points of the compass,^ and made the con-
stant record of changes in the heavens watched from these
observatories one of the most important national duties.
It was by these means that they found out that the moon
and planets, stigmatised by the first star-worshippers
as the enemies of law and order, the agents of Angra
Mainyu, the evil spirit, and foes to Tishtrya, who brings the
rains,2 were not, as they are characterised in the Zendavesta,
aimlessly wandering Pairikas and vagabond outcasts, but
much more accurate measurers of time than the apparent
movements of the fixed stars, and consequently they made
the sun, moon, and five planets rulers of heaven instead of
the seven stars of the Great Bear and the star Canopus. It
was to them that the zigurats, built in stages each smaller
than the last, were dedicated, and it was these Assyrian
temples which were the parents of the Egyptian pyramids,
which, as we learn from the plan of the pyramid of Medum,
were originally built in stages, successive coatings being added
^ Sayce, Hihbci-t Lectures far 1887, Lect. i. p. 64.
* Darmesteter, Zettdavesta Tfr Ya/t, 39; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. lOd.
312 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
on to produce the evenly sloping >ides of the final structure.^
The lead among the seven new rulers of the heavens was
taken bv Mercun-, called Nuzku, meaning the ^ prince of the
dawn/ the morning star. He was the ' overseer of the angel
hosts of heaven and earth/ - and ^ the bond of the universe,"
and his name in one of the ideograms denoting it, is con-
nected with the 'writing papvnis,' or *the shaft of a tree,"*
and in the other it means ' the god of running water/^ He
was called Nabu or Nebo, the prophet, and was the patron,
god of the literary class, not only in Assyria and Babylon^
but among the Canaanites and Moabites, whose sacred
mountain was Mount Nebo. He was the first-bom son o
Ba*al, the father-god, called in the holy island of Dilmun
En-zag, the first-bom {zag) of the Lord (en)} His com-
panion planet was Venus, who was identified with Istar
of Erech, who had passed through the various stages of the
village and tree-mother, the mountain-mother, the moon-
mother Ashtoreth, and had probably been like her Egyptian
sister Isis, and the Indian Sukra, the star Sirius. It was as
this star that she, as tlic beginner of the year, gained the
title of Dil1)at, the announcer, a name which was continued
to her as Venas. She was altematelv with Mercurv, the
morning and evening star, and was called * the Andro-
gj'ne," who was a female at sunset and a male at sunrise,*
the Istar-khemosh of the Moabites, the Asliera and Mene
of the Jews," the Magha-bhu, or goddess lx>ni of Magha
of the Hindus, and the sister of Indra, called Maghavan.
She was the Aphrodite of the Greeks, the fish-mother,
bom of the earth -mot her, to whom Fridav, the fish dav,
* Petrie, Ten Years' Di^itt^ in Egypt^ chap. x. Plans Nos. io8, lio,
pp. 138, 142.
a Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii. p. 114.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabaiy^ No. 231.
* Ibid. Xos. I, 87, 476.
'" Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii. p. 1 14 note I, 1 20.
'^ Ibid. l^ct. iv. p. 253.
^ Gesenius, Thesattrus^ pp. 162, 798.
ESSAY III 313
the day of the Northern seed-mother, Frio or Friga, is
sacred. To them was added the planet Jupiter called
Gad,^ the brother of Assur, the fish-god, by the Jews, the
Marduk, or young calf of the Babylonians, the father of the
bull race. He, with the mother goddess, ruled the year led
by the morning and evening stars, the rulers of the twilight
<«md the dawn, the time of the daily contest between darkness
-amd light, and it is these stars of the dawn and the gloaming
ivho appear in ancient mythology as the jackal-headed god
Anubis in Egypt, and the golden foxes (hari) yoked by the
Maruts, which draw the chariot of Indra in the Rig\'eda.*
It is the fox which, in mythic legend, is the arbitrator be-
tween the bull of darkness and the lion of light, and sows
-discord between them.^ Tlie fox Lopasha is the goddess-
mother, called in the Maliabharata and Rigveda, Lopa-
mudra, the wife of Agastya, the star Canopus, and mother
of the Dri-dasyu,* or three Dravidian-Semitic ruling races of
India, the Cheroos, Cholas, and Pandyas. She was the
daughter of the king of the Vid-arbas, or the double four races
of Gonds of Gondwana, in which name, as in Arbuda, the
Semitic ' Arba** appears ; and the story tells of the union of
the star-worshippers with the new races who made the moon
and planets measurers of time, and the sun, the god of day.
They must, as the sons of the fox, have been a Northern
race, and they had once certainly made Lydia their home,
for the earliest coinage of Lydia shows that the Lydians
counted the fox among their mythic ancestors; for the
images stamped on the coins are those of a horse, a flower,
and a fox; and they were thus the sons of the horse, the Zend
Keresaspa, of the flower-goddess, Athene, whose name comes
from the same root as the Greek ai/^09, a flower, and of the
fox of the dawn.^ But all mythology associates the fox with
* Gesenius, Thesaurus^ p. 264 f. '•' Rigveda, i. 5, 4 » 6, 2.
' De Gubernatis Die Thierc^ German Translation, chap. xii. pp. 433, 435.
• '•Rigveda, i. 179; Mahabharata Vana {Tirthd'Yatia) Parva, xcvi.-xcviii
pp. 307-314. * Maspero, Egypt and Assyria^ chap. xvi. p. 291.
314 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIDIES
the lion, and this brings us to the sphinxes and the lion of
astrolog}', and the roval lion of Phrygia,^ worshipped by the
races who called tlie inoon Menes, or the measurer of time.
It was the moon which was worshipped under the form of
the sphinx, as the lion of light — the Singh or lion of the
Hindus — in AssjTia, Asia Minor, Greece, and Egj'pt. In the
first three countries the sphinx was a winged lioness, as is
proved by the ringed sphinxes on Assyrian embroidery, by
those on the tomb of Midas in Phiygia, and the sphin!^
monument near Miletus in Caria,- and the golden sphinxes
found bv Dr. Schliemann at Mvcena?. As these were found,
together with images of the lion-griflin, the first form of th^
winged moon-lion, Ashtoreth and her doves, the Egyptian,
and Indian lotus, and the Scaralxeus, or sacred Eg^'ptian
beetle, with the name Ti, meaning in Akkadian, life upon,
it,' it seems that the original sphinx was, at the dawn of the
worship of Ashtoreth, the moon-goddess of the year, wor-
shipped as the uinged lioness ; a figure which, like the doves
of Ashtoreth, Istar and Aphrodite, marks the close of the age
of the bird myth. For this winged-sphinx was in Egj'pt
suj)erseded by the wingless humaii-headt*d lion at Ghizeh
who was the supreme god of the Hor-shclui, the predecessors
of the historical kings of EgN'pt, whose chronology* dates from
about 5000 b.c. But l^efore the moon was a winged-lion
tliere was a rulin*; lion amoiifj the stars, for when the
Akkadians superseded the seven stars of the Great Bear by
the sun, moon, and five pLanets, they fonned a substitute
for fourteen ruling stars forming the constellation of the
alligator and the necklace of the father-god of the pole of
the Turanians in the seven stars called ' Lu-masi, or sheep
' Prof. Ramsay, fottnial Helhnic Society, i\. 2, p. 371, traces the lion of
Mycenx* as a Phrjgian importation into Greece.
- Smith, Classical Dictionary, .s. v. * Sphinx ; * Maspero, Ancient Egypt and
Assyria, fig. 146, p. 273 ; * Lydia' and * Phrygia,' EncycIofKcdia Britannica,
Ninth Edition.
^ Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excaz'ations, figs. 182, 186, 187, 194, pp.
194, 198, 201, 202, 240, 294.
ESSAY III 315
of the hero,** and the seven other stars called the 'seven
bell-wethers,'' over whom they watched. These watching
stars were led by the star called ' Masu, or the hero who
fights with weapons.** This is the star called Regulus, the
leading star of the constellation of the Lion, the companion
star of the Greek Bootes, the headman or watcher of the cattle,^
that is, of the seven stars of the seven bulls. This star was
called by the Sumerians Gu-barra, the star of fire of the house
of the East, and its ruling gods are Ner-gal and Sin, the
Mfioon-god." Now astronomy shows us that the constellation
ILeo is that lying on a line produced through the pointers
^)f the Great Bear in a contrary direction to that used in
Ending the pole,^ and we thus find that the Masu or Moses,
^he son of the Mas, or building brick of the Akkadians, the
JMaso, or god of fertility among the Etruscans,* was the star
chosen as the guardian of the polar constellation, after its
functions as the pole turned by the Ashvins had been
superseded by a wider stellar generalisation, and it was also
the star which watched over the special lunar constellation
of Taurus, the bull, the Hindu Push, whose month opens
the Hindu lunar year, the constellation in which the chief is
Aldebaran, called in Hindi RohinT, or the red cow, the
mother-goddess of the red or Semite race. It was as the
guardian of the father-stars of the sons of the North, that
the lion or Masu was chosen as the guide and defender of
the sun, moon, and planets, the royal tame lion who used to
run with and guard the chariots of the Egyptian kings when
they went out to battle.^ It was he who led the Semites
under Joshua, the son of the Nun, through the wilderness of
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49.
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Tablets of the Thirty Stars,' star xii, line 15,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology.
' Ball, Story of the Heavens^ fig. 74, p. 383.
^ Leland, * Etrusco- Roman Remains,' Papers of Folklore Congress^ 1891,
p. 189.
' See the tame lion of Rameses 11., Masj^ro, Ancient Egypt and Assyria ^
fig. 104, p. 180.
316 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TDIl^S
^laiiiia, the countn' where manna is still gathered from
grass in the early morning, and eaten, the land of the sta
worshippers of Elam or Northern Persia, to the capture
the moon-eitv, and who died on Mount Nebo.when this mooi
city was taken and the old rule of the fixed stars was supei
seded by that of the sun, moon, and planets. He then
his place among the latter as Ner-gal, the Akkadian plan^^
Mars, and with Sin, the moon-god, ruled the guardian^:^
constellation of the Lion, and was changed from the £tru]^^
can god Maso to the Roman planet -god Mars. It was thi
that the rule of the prophets of Ephraim, the worshippers a
Jahveh, was established under the prophet called in th
history recorded by the national Asipu, Samuel.^ This
the age called in the historical genealogy of the kings of fxlono
in Genesis the age of Hadad, the successor of Husham. H^
was the sun-god Hadad Rimmon, the son of Be-dad or Ben-
dad, the son of the beloved one (dad\ the moon-goddess Dido,
and of Samleh of Masrekah, the prophet of the vine land
{maftrekah\ the Semele of the Greeks, who was mother of the
wine-god Dionysus, and this was the age when the ark of
G(Hi was with Dagon, the fish-god of the Philistines. They
were succet*ded by Saul of Rehoboth by the river (Euphrates),
the squares or public places (Rehoboth) of Nineveh, and Saul
was Saval or Sawal, the sun-god of the Babylonians, who
came to Palestine, the land of the sons of the ass, to find his
fathers asses/- He was the first king of Isniel, and the sun-
god of the solar year, who was crowned by Samuel, the
Sanilah of the genealogj*. It was he overcame Nahash, the
great Nagash or Naga, the Great Bear, the king and supreme
god of the ^Vnunonites,-^ tlie god concealed in his ark of
clouds, the incense, from wliich, as I liave shown, the Am-
monites were descended.
Tlie Indian liistorv of the Singhs, or sons of the moon-
^ I Sam. i. 2.
- Sayce, Hihtert Lectures for 1887, Lcct. I. pp. 54-57 ; Gen. xxxvi. 35-38.
^ I Sam. xi.
ESSAY III 817
ion called also Liccliavis, or sons of tlic Akkadian lion (/?^
or Uk\ the Hebrew Layish, is l)est told in the myths giving
the history of Vishvamitra and his descendants. Vishvamitra,
the friend {mitra) to living men {xnshvd)^ was both the moon
and the sun, as the moon he was the Mithra of the Zenda-
vesta, * the warrior with the silver helm,** who goes all over
the breadth of the earth, after the setting sun touches both
ends of the wide round earth ; ^ and in Hindu mythical
genealogy he was the son of Gadhi,^ the bull and prince of
the Kushikas. As the sun-god, he is in the Rigveda called
Martanda, or the dead egg, the son of AditT, the primaeval
mother, she who is without (a) a second (difi)^ and in the
IMahabharata, he is Dyu, the bright one, or Bhishma, the
son of Graii-ga, or the mother-river. In both myths his seven
larethren, the seven days of the week, return to the gods
directly after their birth, but the bright sun, who does not
pass away like fleeting time, or wax and wane as the moon,
remains alive as the dead egg, which gives life and heat, but
has, like Bhishma, who became the uncle of the Kaura\yas
and Pandavas, no wife or child. It is Dyu in one storj',
and Vishvamitra in another, who steals the sacred cow of
Vashishtha, the year-cow of the fire-god of the sacrificial
altar, for the daughter of King Ushinara, the king of the
Eastern Bhojas, the father of Shiva, the god Sankha of the
sacred number seven. In another story this connection
with the god Shiva is described by saying that Vishvamitra
when attacked by Vashishtha defended himself with Shiva'*s
Weapons. It is as the author of this theft, tliat is, as the
god who changed the year from one ruled by tlie god of
lightning and storms, the god of the rainy season, into one
nded and measured by the phases of the moon and the motions
of the heavenly bodies, that Dyu is condemned to remain on
earth as the sun of day. And Vishvamitra, tlie moon-god,
^ Darmesteter, Zeftdavesia Mihir Vastf xxiv. 93, xxviii. 112; S.B.E. vol.
xxiii. pp. 143, 148. * Biihler, Matui, vii. 42 ; S.B.E. vol. xxv. p. 222.
' Rigf?eda, x. 72, 8, 9.
318 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the successful robber, was chosen as priest by Tri-sankhya, the
Ikslivaku king of the three (tri) numbers {sarikha\ or of the
three united tribes of the Dasyas, the sons of Lopamudra.
Vishvamitra, when Vashislitha refused to serve, as priest
to the outcast races who did not worship the fire-god, offered
the sacrifice which raised Tri-sankhya to heaven, when he
was placed among the stars of the Great Bear or the seven
Rishis.^ It is Vishvamitra, the moon-god, who is, according
to another legend, the father of the sun-god Astika, the
eiglith Vasu {asta\ another form of Bhishma or Dyu. His
mother was Madhavi, the daughter of Madhu, strong drink,
called the daughter of Yayati. She was intrusted by her
father Yayati to Galava, the filtered Soma,* the pure rain,
a former pupil of Vishvamitra, that he might obtain heirs
for him through her, and Galava brought her to Vishva-
mitra, the last of the Soma reformers, as part of the fee
due for Vishvamitra'^s teaching. In the preceding phases
of Soma worship, before she became the mother of Astika,
she had, under the guidsince of Galava, borne Vasu-manas,
the creator (vasit) of ghosts, the phallic father, to Hari-
asliva, king of Ayodhya, tlie storm (Jiarl) god; Pratard-
hana, the first (prat) half {ardha\^ or the earthly fire, to
Divodasa, the king of Kashi, the fire-god ; and Shiva, the
seventh god, to Ushinara, the king of the East, the star
Sirius, the god of the star- worshippers, who first reckoned
time by weeks.* But perhaps the clearest historical account
of the succession of the race of Vishvamitra is that given in
the story of Sakuntalfi. Sakuntala, the little bird, the
Brahmini duck {chuktca\ the type of conjugal union, was
bom on the river Malini, the sacred river of the Northern
sons of the mountain (waZ), the sons of the Tur. She
^ Lassen, vol. i. pp. 721, 725 ; Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixvi.
p. 188 ; Rdmdyafiai i. 60-72.
2 Curtius, GriechUche Etymologic^ p. 637 ; Grassmann, Worterbuck zum
Rigifcda^ s.v. *Gal.'
* •'* Grassmann, IVorterbuck zutn Rigveda^ s.v. * Ardha.'
^ Mahabharata Udyoga (Bhagavatyand) Parva, cv.»cxxii.
ESSAY III 319
svas the daughter of Vishvamitra, the sun-father, and the
Apsara Menaka, the moon-mother, the measurer (men) of
bime, and was brought up by the Rishi Eanva, the father of
bhe Kanva bards, the priests of the Yadu-Tur-vashii, who
wrote the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda, whose name means
the young (kana) bards, and there is, as Brunnhofer has shown,
a diflference between some of the grammatical forms used in
the eighth Mandala from those used in the rest of the work,
and the hymns forming it are ranged in a different order,
without placing all the hymns to Agni and Indra together,
Bs in the other Mandalas, the second, third, fourth, fifth,
sixth, and seventh, the authorship of which is ascribed to
31 special family of bards. Dushmanta, the hard (dush)
"thinker {manta\ the solver of problems, son of Rathant-ara,
^he mother-goddess of the chariot (ratha) or moving time,
-and Dina, the son of Ida or Ila, the king of Kashi, met and
mated with her in the forest. On parting, just as Judah,
under similar circumstances, gave his signet ring to Tamar,
the palm-tree, Dushmanta gave Sakuntala a ring by which
he might recognise her. But when her child Bharata, the
fiither of the race of Bhars, or sons of the fig-tree, was bom,
she had lost the ring, and Dushmanta refused to acknowledge
the child till it was found by a fisherman in a fish he caught,
and recognised as that she had dropped in the river.^ This
ring, preserv'ed by the fish-god, and the discus of Vishnu, are
both symbols of the year of lunar months, forming an ever-
recurring series of circles of annual time, the year which
superseded the four square divisions of time by the four
seasons, with the polar season in the centre, which was the
stellar year of the sons of the tortoise. It was this circle of
recurring months that led astronomers to trace star circles in
the heavens to measure the movements of the moon, planets,
and sun, and among the first of these was the great lunar
circle of the Nakshatras, the twenty-eight star-stations,
* Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xciv. xcv; Kodidasa Sakuntala,
Act. vii.
320 THE lU LING RACES OF PREHISTORIC IIMES
marking, as Pntanjali, Garga, and Madhava, the moff^
ancient Hindu astronomers, tell us, * the (monthly) passage
of the mo<m thn>ugh all the Nakshatras/ ^ But the grea-*
circle of the Babylonian astronomers, from whence the finaJ
calculation of the solar year was made, was that of the tea
stars, or ten antediluvian kings of Babylon, headed by the
stars of the ram, the Akkadian Ai-luv or Lu-nit, called by
the Babylonians Alorus, and Alap-orus, the divine bull (alap)
of the foundation (ur)r This circle superseded, in the lunar
era, the ten fire-drill father-stars of the Ashvins I have
already descril>ed. It was divided into 432,000 seconds, tlie
432,000 years of the reign of these kings, and is reproduced
in Hindu astronomy as marking the duration of the Kali-
yuga, the present age of 432,000 years, and it is on this that
the periods of the preceding ages, as reckoned in the Hindu
wicred books, are founded by a system of arithmetical pro-
gression, the Dvfipara lasting 864,000, the Trita Yuga
1,296,000, and the Krita-yuga 1,728,000 years. The circle
is by this system divided into 360 parts, each containing
1200 seconds, and this unit of 1200 is called by Hindu
astronomers "^rishva,^ the name of the star Sirius. And it is
"^rishya or Sirius who is called on in the Rigveda to come to
the help of the singer in the hynni as one of the protecting
father-gods, with Krishanu, the rainbow god, and Rudra,
the father of the jVIaruts, or wind-goddesses.** It was round
this circle of the Nag-kshetra, or field of the Nags, that the
vear-god drove his chariot, and hence the king of the Gan-
dharvas, or dwellers in the heavenly land {gan) of the pole
(dhruva\ bec^ame Chitra-ratha, the king of the variegated
{chltra) chariot {ratha\ who taught the IVmdavas the inmost
secrets of religious truth, and the worshippers of the driver
* Max Miiller, Preface to vol. iv. of the Rig^'e<la, p. 58.
- R. Brown, Jun., K.S.A., 7^Ag Phainomena or Heavenly Display of
Aratus, App. ii. pp. 79, 80.
•' Sachau's All>eruni's Imiiay vol. i. chap. xlii. p. 372, 373.
* Rigveda, x. 64, 8.
ESSAY III 321
of tie heavenly chariot became the sons of the horse, the
succ^6SSors of the sons of the wild bull, who reckoned time by
the Imiar year of thirteen months. Hence the star Tishtrya
or Sinus, from whom the ancient Zend and Hindu years
wex-<e bom, is described as contending at his rising with the
demon Ap-aosha, the burner (ash) of the waters (op), in the
guise of a youth of fifteen years, the age ascribed to Yima
aad Vivanghat,^ his father — the Hindu Vivasvat, the father
of -fche Ashvins, of a golden-homed bull, the crescent-moon,
ai^d a white horse, the full moon.^ The horse was the totem
of the Parthian cavalry, who created the lunar year; and
ftw^ong them the Ashvamedha, or horse-sacrifice, was the
principal ceremony in the annual autumn festival to the
^^^tliers of the race, and the horse also plays an important
P^irt in the ceremony of the consecration of their household
"'"^^*, called Agniyadhana in the Brahmanas, for the house-
"^^Ider who performs this ceremony is directed to procure a
"•^^Tse or an ox, but preferably a horse, and to lead it up to
^'^^ fire while the priest invokes earth, air, and heaven, and,
*^ he does so, touches the footprints three times with the
"^^xning fire.^ The Ashvamedha sacrifice in India was one
^^^iered to the gods of time, for in the hymn of the Rigveda
"^^^[^ribing it, it is ordered that a many-coloured goat shall
"^"*5^t be offered to Pushan, the bull-god of the star- worshippers;
*'^> J the priest who divides the horse when slain is directed
^^ cut out, * as belonging to the gods,'' thirty -four of its ribs —
^^Xd that a horse has thirty-six ribs is especially noted by the
^^^^mmentators. These thirty-four ribs are, as Ludwig shows,
^'^^ offerings made to the twenty-seven Nakshatras of the
^^indu solar astronomers, the five planets, the moon, and
**^^^Ji, the gods of the sons of the horse ; while the goat with
^ Mill, Vofna, ix. 5; S.B.E. vol. xxxL p. 232.
^ Darmesteter, Zendavesta Ttr Yas/, 13, 16, 18; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp. 97,
' Eggeling, $at, Brdh. iL i, 4, 16, 17, 23-26; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 297,
21
322 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
its twenty-six ribs, or twenty-six phases of the lunar yeft-^f
offered to Pushan,is a distinctly lunar offering.^ These twent V'
seven Nakshatras were not a stellar circle, but a division c^^
the heavenly circle into twenty-seven parts of 13° 20' eacf^^
used by the Hindu astronomers with the five years'* cycle tc^
reconcile the differences of solar and lunar time, and to mak^
the length of the tithi, or lunar days during that period,
agree with that of the solar and sidereal days.* Therefore
this pissage, as well as Rig^-eda i. 133, 6, mentioning twenty-
seven Maruts, proves that the Nakshatra cycle Iiad been
worked out before the Rigveda was published. We leam
from the ceremonies of the Palilia at Rome that this horse-
sacrifice, which is still offered by the Ugro-Finnic Voguls,and
was the chief sacrifice of the Scythian tribes,^ was one especi-
ally connected with the worship of the hearth-goddess, the
Hestia of the Greeks and Vesta of the Romans. It was not
offered on the 21st of April, when the Palilia of the country
villages took place, but on the 10th of the month. A
pregnant cow was then offered at the Capitol, the temple in
tlio centre of the city, which had replaced the earlier village
gn>ve, and at the sacrificial places of the thirty curiap, or the
hcaii-qutirters of the ten curiae, into wliich each of the three
Uoniiui tril)es were divided. The unborn calf of the cow
offert»ti in the Capitol was taken from her Ixxly and burned to
iLshes by the eldest of the vestal virgins, a reproduction of
the earlier sacrifice of the first-bom of men and animals to
the rain-g(xl. These ashes were, in the %'illage festivals,
sc'attered over the fields, just as the Kandhs bury in their
land pieces of the flesh of the Meriah N-ictims ; but in Rome
' Rij^vcila, i. 162, 1-3, 18; Ludwig, Rigi'cda^ iii. p. 186.
'■^ Max MUller, Preface to vol. iv. of Rigveda^ pp. 38, 51 ; Thibaut's
/ \u\iha mihira Patuha siddhantika^ chap. ii. 7; p. 1 1 of Translation ; Sachau's
Allwiunrs ///</m, vol. ii. chap. Ivi. pp. 81, 82. See also the question fully
iliHCUHscvl in my * Notes on the Early Historj- of Northern India/ Parts iv. and
\.^Jourtii\lofthe Royal Asiatic Sociffy, Arts, viii. and x., April and July 1890.
■ 1 IcriKl. iv. 60 ; * Duka, or the Ugor branch of the Ural- Altaic Family of
\A\\^\\^ifftf^%* Jonrnai of the RoycU Asiatic Society^ vol. xxi. p. 623.
ESSAY III 323
they were thrown into the sacred fire, together with the
Wood of the horse, sacrificed on the 15th of the previous
October, on the Field of Mars or Maso, in honour of the
deceased fathers of the ruling race. The blood had been
tept by the vestal virgins in the Penus Vestae.^ We find
ill this sacrifice a fresh confirmation of the succession of
mling races, fix)m the wolf-nurtured sons of the bull, the
corn-cultivators and growers of barley, to the sons of the
'lorse, and we learn further that the succession marked an
lacireased attention to ritual and the elaboration of ceremonies,
^hich is so conspicuously shown in the Soma-sacrifice of the
®**^manas and the great Yasna or annual sacrifice to the
8^>c3s of time in the Zendavesta. That this ritualistic
P*>:igress was also accompanied by an improvement in the
^^Oial standard is shown by the evolution of the idea of a
'^^'^ birth from sin to righteousness, marked by the bath of
^^^^^tosecration, and by the prohibition against drinking spirits
^^* intoxicating drinks. It was this belief in the efficacy of
P^^W^nal effort to improve the moral nature which led to the
ion of the contents of the casket containing the water
blood of life into the two cups. Consecration and
^^ance, one being the sanctification of the new-bom saint,
^Xd the other the sacrifice of his evil nature. The priesthood
^s divided into local schools to give effect to these doctrines,
^^^d to some of these schools is ascribed the authorship of
^;^e collections of poems into which the Rigveda is divided.
"^^ut it is not in the religion of the Rigveda, moulded on the
-■^lyan belief in the divine personality of natural forces, but
^^ the Dravido-Semitic religion of the Jains that we find the
clearest traces of the teachings of these stem Semitic
t^uritans. It is this religion which makes the highest virtue
eonsist in the practice of the severest ascetic self-denial and
almost self-destruction which has always been and is still the
creed of the trading classes of Western India, the races called
the Saos, or Shu-varna, a creed which is essentially opposed
* Mannhardt, Wald unci Feld KuUur^ vol. iL pp. 303-315.
324 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
to the self-mutilatioas and offerings of their own blood,
which marked the ritual of the fire- worshippers. The most
!>acred, and, therefore, the most ancient, sites of Jain worship
are in the districts anciently called Sindhu-Suvama and
m
Saurashtra, which have from the earliest times been ruled by
the Suvama, called also Yavanas or Vonas, a name meaning
the Ijarley (yava) growers, used in the Mahabharata and the
Edict of Asoka to denote the inhabitants of the delta of the
Indus, the land of the Yadu-Tunashu or Yaudheya Rajputs,
lx>unded on the north by the Sutlej ^ and the adjoining
countries of the Western seaports. These were ruled
by the king called in the Mahabharata Bhaga-datta, or
given by Bhaga, the god of edible fruit {hagha) ; the
garden land of the Kunni cultivators, who grew cotton,
indigo, and sugar-cane in the rich soil of Kathiawar and
Guzerat, the ancient Saurashtra. The three chief Jain
shrine7>, named in the order of their sanctity, are (1) the
Satrunjaya hill, overlooking the capital of the State of
Pali tana ; (2) the Gimar hill, near Junagarh or Yonagarh,
the chief fort (gtirh) of the Yonaii, and both these are in
Kathiawar, a country divided into small States, the ancient
j)rovinces of the Kushite organisation; (3) Mont Abu in
Guzerat, fonnerly called by the semi-Semitic name of
Arbuda, meaning the divine four (arba). This was the
country of the Yadu-Tur\'ashu, and of the Kanva, or young
(kand) society of Brahmins, who were their priests and
teachers, the guardians of the children of their wartl
Sakuntala, the Bhurata race. It was thev who succeedtxl
the Bharadviijas and Gotamas as leaders of the priesthood,
and made the sacrifice of libations poured out by the Hotar
the most important part of the religious ceremonies, and
made the root Aw, from which Hotar is formed, mean ' to
^ The Edict of Asoka mentions together the Yona-Kamboja-Gandhara.
Of these the Gandhara are the Northern people of the Swat valley and
Afghanistan, the Kambojas the people occupying the country of the five
rivers, while the Yona are those holding the country south of the Sutlej to
the Indus, the Sindu-Suvama*
ESSAY III 325
pour,** instead of its primitive meaning of * to beget ; ^ but the
libations they poured out were milk, curds, whey — the pro-
ducts of the mother-cow — and pure running water, and hence
they were called in the Rigveda the Asunvunts, or non-
pressers, the Panis who did not press Soma. It was this
sacrifice which is commemorated in the name of Su-medha,
the sacrifice (medha) of the Su, who is in Buddhist history the
hermit who, in the days of Dipankara, the first of the
twenty -four Buddhas, renounced his wealth and betook
himself to a life of poverty, in which he discovered the ten
perfections, or the ten moral precepts of the Buddhist faith.^
Tliese people, called Sombunsis or sons of the moon, the
lunar Rajputs, who gave India the name of Sindhava, or the
country of Sin, the moon, Ikshvakus, Kuntibhojas, Sakyas,
and sons of the moon-lion, called Singhs or Licchavis, made
themselves rulers of all Northern India, and placed the seat
of imperial power in the East, in Ayodhya, and Kashi
(Benares), the former Kushika capital. They formed
throughout the country united confederacies of the Mallis
or Turs, the star-worshippers allied to the races of the moon,
and Licchavis, similar to the eighteen united tribes of the
Vajjians, or sons of the tiger, made up of nine Mallis and
nine Licchavis, who ruled the country of Vi-deha, the two
(vi) people {deh(i\ in the days of the Buddha.'^ Jainism
was at that time, as it had been from a period of most remote
antiquity, the tribal religion of these warlike traders, for it
was there that Mahavira, the great Viru or propagator, was
bom in the sixth century n.c, about the same time as the
Buddha, and he was the last of the twenty-four Jain
prophets called Tirthakaras, or sons of the makers of pil-
grimages. He was of royal race, for his father was a chief
of the Gfiatika tribe of Licchavis, and his mother was sister
of Chetaka, king of Videha. His life shows that the tribe
followed the teachings formulated by Brahminic tradition, for
* Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories^ p. 9.
^ Jacobi, yaiwa SQtra^ Kalpa Sutra, p. 128; S.B.E. vol. xKii. p. 266.
326 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
he observed strictly the Brahman law of life in l>ecoming a
householder and begetting a daughter before he became a
naked wandering ascetic or a religious teacher.^ He did not
pretend to teach any new doctrine, and only preached a
return to what he told his hearers was the original ancestral
creed of the lion race, a belief that it was the duty of every
man before his death to cleanse his soul of sin by ascetic
penances. It was their fathers who had brought this creed
with them from the land of the Shus in the far West, and
had established it as the ruling belief in their first settle-
ments in Western India, and it was they who, on coming to
settle in and rule the East, had made Parisnath the lord
(nuth) of the Paris, that is, of the Paris or traders, what it
still is, the sacred mountain of the Eastern Jains. This
mountain is the Mount Malleus of Pliny, which he calls the
sacred mountain of the Monedes or Mimdas, the rulers of the
Vindyan hills in the West, cuid of the Suari, that is, of the
Su-vira or Su-vama of the Gangetic valley and Eastern
Bengal.^ It stands on the banks of the Burrakar, a tribu-
tary of the Damooda or Da-munda, and divides the land of
the water (da) of the Mundas from that of the Sau-vira,
called Karna Suvarna. It is also the Mount Mandar of the
Mahilbharata, the sacred mountain of the sons of Kashyapa,
whence the water of life, the rains, was churned from the
ocean for twenty-one of the twenty-three Jain Tirtha-karas
before Mahavira arc said to be of the Kashyapa Grotra of the
Ikshvaku race, and two of the Gautama Gotra of the race
of Hari, the storm-god.^ It was under the presidency of
this sacred mountain that the earliest ruling trading races,
the sons of the moon-bull and the ass, the Karna Suvarna
or horned race (varna) of Saus (su) liad made Karna Suvarna
in the East the counterpart of the Western Sindhu-Savarna,
and in both kingdoms the horned-moon, Sin or Singh and
^ Jacobi, yizi/ifl Si/ira, Kalpa Siitra, lio, pp. 256-257 ; Also, * Genealogi-
cal Table,* Preface, p. xv. a Pliny, Hist. Nat. vi. 22, 6.
2 Jacobi,/«wa St'itra^ Kalpa Sutra, i. ; S.B.E. vol. xxii. p. 118.
ESSAY 111 327
Karna, was the supreme god, and these names show that it
was after the Sin, the moon of the Shus had become the
moon-god of the Semites, who called its horns karen^ that
the Ikshvaku conquests of Eastern India took place. It is as
the ruler of the race who worship the moon-bull that the
Maharaja of Chota Nagpore still asserts his hereditary
title of King of Karna Suvarna by wearing as his official
head-dress a turban adorned with the symbolic imitations of
the horns of the moon-bull, the race totem, and the Rajah
of Pachete, the ruler of Manbhum, where the capital of
Karna Suvarna was situated when Hionen Tsiang visited
the country between 600 and 635 a.d., has for his family
cognisance a bull. It was these Jains who insisted a.bove
all things on the sanctity of life, who finally struck out from
their ritual the sacrificial slaughter of victims, and enjoined
as their chief commandments abstinence from (1) destroying
life, (2) lying, (3) taking what was not given, (4) lasci-
vioiisness, and (5) the owning of private property. These
rules show that those who passed them traced their national
history back to the communal property of the primaeval
A'illage, and they mark the steps in national progress from the
limited community of the sexes in matriarchal times
lo the institution of marriage, the growth of reverence
for truth, for verification of what they taught as science,
honest dealing, and the abstinence from the self-muti-
lation of the fire - worshippers, whose self-sacrifice was
the destruction of life, and not that which precedes the
birth of a new spiritual nature. It was these trading races
whose household pole of the Udumbara-tree was that of the
Sadas or sacrificial hall of the gods, who, as I have shown,
were the first reformers of the Soma ritual, who instituted
the Paka sacrifice, or sacrifice of five ingredients, the San-
naya sacrifice to Indra as offered by Manu, of sour and sweet
milk, curds, whey, and clarified butter,^ and the Pakayajfias
^ Kggeling, Sa/, Brak,y i. 6, 4, 8, 9 ; 8, I, 7-9; S.B.E, vol. xii. p. 177,
218, 219.
328 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
or oblations of cooked offerings of the Grihya Sutra. These
were cooked on the household fire, which was first honoured
by the Vaishyas ; for it is from the household fire of a
Vaishya that the religious student who has finished his
studies must kindle that of his own homestead* Tlie de-
velopment of the Semitic worship of the rain-god, wlio is
the preserver ' and not the destroyer of life, appears also in
the Greek worship of Apollo, for to him, as to Indra, no
living victims are offfered, but the produce of the fruits of
the earth, which owe their life to the rain he has sent, and
which, by their continual reproduction, preserve the germ of
life from destruction. The offerings to Apollo at his chief
shrines of Patara in Lycia, where he was worshipped as the
storm-god bom on the Xanthus, were cakes made in the
form of bows, arrows, and a lyre, and these were offfered,
together with incense, at Delphi ; and at Delos the cakes
were made of wheat and barley.^ At the latter place there
were two altars, one called the * honied-altar,** which was the
brazen altar of the Jews, the altar of the sons of the
bull ; and the other called * the altar of the pious," and on
this altar the offerings of AjkjUo were placet!, and in these
oft'erings we trace the progress of ApoUo-worship from the
days when he was first l)orn, as the wind and storm -god of
the ^Eolic Greeks, the guardian god of Troy, to the time
when he became the god of their successors, the Dravidian
Dorians, the god of the yellow race, who were the growers of
barley, and whose god was the Tur or pole. He also, like
the angry god of the Jews and Jains, is the punisher of sin,
whose orders are obeyed by the Erinnyes, or Fiirii*s of Re-
morse, and in this phase of his divnie existence he is the
judge or Danu ; and also Apollo Paian, in whose honour
the dances called gynniopa?dia, danced by naked youths like
the Gond worshippers of Sek-nag, to music played on the
Cretan phorminx, the lyre shaped like the tortoise, were
accompanied by the choruses called Paian {Traidv\ as sacred
' MuUer, Die Doner, hk. 1 1, chap. vi. § I, p. 227.
s
ESSAY III 329
to Apollo, the healer ^ (iraicov). He was thus, like the
Hindu Ashvins, the physician of the gods, and, therefore, he
and his twin-sister Artemis were, like them, the children of
Saranyu, whose name appears in the Greek Erinnyes. It was
the doctrine of the punishments inflicted by these Furies of
Remorse, which was, in the teachings and imaginations of
the Hindu Jains, developed into the Buddhist hell, a con-
ception which has, since it was brought into Western Asia
by Buddhist missionaries, so profoundly altered the earlier
theological conceptions of the other world. But it is to these
Dravido-Semitic races that we also owe the idea of the sanctity
of duty, which first originated among the teachers of the
early village communities, and afterwards developed into the
enlightened patriotism of the Greek races. This idea, among
the Hindu Jains and Buddhists, became the foundation of a
religion which is personal in its insistence on self-culture,
and only altruistic in inculcating the duty of devotion to the
Sadga or brotherhood of the faithful, who have been ad-
mitted within the pale of the Jain, Buddhist, and Jewish
commimities. This Sanga is merely an enlarged conception
of the primaeval village which was founded, not on com-
Hiunity of races, but on the rights accruing to each member
chosen as a fellow-citizen by the united body of cultivators.
It is in this phase of society that we find the picture of the
transition stage in political progress between the communists
of the matriarchal races and the individualism of the Aryans ;
a.nd it was this belief of the Aryan races in the rights of indi-
viduals which led to the great revolt against Jewish formulas,
Avhich will be the subject of my sixth Essay, a revolt which
substituted the man-god, the divinely-inspired prophet, the
visible symbol of the creating-father, the young Apollo of
Greek arts, the god of poetry, song, and joyous life for the
impalpable mystic divinity of the Semites, the god sym-
bolised in the pole and crescent moon, the Delphic Trisula.
^ Donaldson, TTieaire ofthf Greeks y p. i6.
ESSAY IV
ASTKOXOMICAL MYTHS, SHOWING, ON THE EVIDENCE OF EARLY
AKKADIAN ASTRONOMY, HOW THE HrTTITES, KUSHITES, AND
KU8HITE- SEMITES MEASURED THE YEAR.
I HAVE in the Essays forming this volume brought forward
numerous proofs of the historical information given by the
different methods of computing time adopted by the early
ruling races ; but I have barely touched upon that furnished
by the most ancient Akkadian astronomy. This throws
such a wonderful light on the early history of the Kushite-
Seiiiite race, who, as I have shown, were the earliest imperial
rulers of the primaeval world, that I have thought it better
to deal witli it in a separate Essay. I have already proved
that the earliest year used by the first agricultural races was
one of two seasons measured by the Pleiades, beginning with
the festival to the stars and the commemoration of dead
ancestors celebrated in Noveml)er. This, as I have shown,
was followed bv a vear of three seasons, which were looked
on in early mythology as the three primaeval mother-gods,
and it was fii'st used as the official measure of time bv the
barley-growing races of Asia Minor and Syria, who, together
with the people of Macedonia, Sparta, and the Peloponnesus,
have always reckoned their year as beginning with the
autumnal ecjuinox.^ The evidence as to the early history
of time-measurement proves clearly that it was the agricul-
' Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients^ chap. i. § 6, p. 29.
ESSAY IV 331
tural races, to whom a correct prognostication of the times
and seaisons was a matter of primary necessity, who first
tried to search out the laws governing the course of the year,
and it was as a natural consequence of their conviction of
the advantages they would derive from a reliable rule of
time-prediction that they were led to study first the signs of
weather given by the clouds and winds, and afterwards,
when they had learnt from the Southern agriculturists, that
time could be measured by the motions of the stars, to ob-
serve the heavens and map out the stars. It was these
studies which were most eagerly pursued under the clear
skies of Central Asia, when the Kushite confederacy was
formed ; and it was in this country of Elam, where the
Naga rain-snake was first worshipped, that Akkadian astro-
nomy began during the age when the year of three seasons
was the official year. But before I deal with the Akkadian
evidence as to the history of this year, I must first set forth
'Ihe proofs showing, firom the names and positions of the con-
stellations used as indicators of time by the early observers,
"that the reckoning of the year of five seasons which was
added to the list of official years by the Kushite race, who
-called themselves the sons of the pole and of the twin-gods,
was founded on astronomicnl observations. These early
astronomers substituted for the reckoning of time by the
Pleiades one founded on the supposed friction of the
pole, which they thought to be proved by the apparent
motions of the stars round it, and the field within which they
looked for the stars which caused its perpetual revolutions,
and for those which were influenced by the heat generated
by this ever-twirling fire-drill, was that bounded by the four
stars which marked the four quarters of the heavens in the
Zendavesta, the four Loka-palas, or nourishers of the world,
of the Hindus. These were (1) Sirius, the dog-star, the star
of the East, whose lieliacal rising coincided ^ with the begin-
ning of the rains of Northern India at the summer solstice ;
^ See Note A at end of this Essay.
332 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
(2) the seven stars of the Great Bear, called in the Zend-
avesta the seven bulls, marking the North ; (3) Argo, the
Sata-vaesa of the Zendavesta, the South ; and as I shall now
proceed to prove, the constellation Corvus, called Vanant in
the Zendavesta, the West. Tliese constellations all traced
their birth as parent-stars of time to Sirius, called Kak-shi-
sha, the door or creating-mother (kak\ the horn {shi) star
(sha)y^ and the sign which denotes kak in the earliest Akka-
dian script at Gir-su is the triangle ^> drawn on the Hindu
altar to represent tlie mother-year of three seasons. Thus
the year of five seasons, beginning the heliacal rising of
Sirius, was one which was derived from the original mother-
year of three. Sirius was the dog-star of the fire-worship-
pers, tlie Indian Maghadas, the sons of the father fire-god
Ra-hu, the creating (hu) sun (i?fl), and was a fonn of the
mother-goddess Is- tar, called Tish-ku and Suk-us, the wet
(mik) star in Sumerian, and Isis-Satit, the mother of Horus,
the meridian pole, in Egyptian astronomy. She is in the
Rigveda the celestial bitch Sara-ma, tlie Northern mother
(jfia) of Sara, the stonn-cloud, who stole the cows of light
from the Pan is or trading races. These four constellations
formed a cross in the heavens answering to the upright
cross of the fire-god ; and the astronomical use of the
stars within this area as measurers of the time between one
rising of Sirius, the rain-bringer, and the next, was based on
the measurement of the intervening interval by the weeks
during which the seven stars of the Great Bear, symbolisuig
the week-days, revolved round the pole. Within the heavenly
field marked by the four boundary stars, the chief constella-
tions are those shown in the annexed diagram taken from
an astronomical map.
Of these Leo lies due south of the Pointers of the Great
Bear, and below it comes the constellation Krater, the cup
^'•'
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Euphratean Stellar Researches,' Ptocecdhi^
of the Society of Biblical Arclurology^ May 1893, PP* 3^2, 328. Sayct\
Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 4, 1 18, 1 38.
ESSAY IV
333
or bowl, called by the Akkadians Mummu Tiamut, the
chaos of the sea,^ the mother of heaven and earth, and the
child of Tia-mut, the mother (mut) of living things (tia).
This receptacle of the soul of life was thought, according to
a legend of Asia Minor, quoted by Hyginus, to be that in
which human blood was mixed with wine, and this blood
S* •*•
Copied to scale from Gall's People's A tlas of the Stars
was, according to the Euphratean cosmographic legend re-
lated by Berosus, that of the goddess-mother who was cut
asunder by Bel, the fire-god.* It rests on the constellation
Hydra, which I shall show to be the great Naga or water-
snake, the distributor of the rains. The relative position of
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ' Eridanus, River and Constellation,' chap. xxx.
s. iv. Euphratean Constellations and Mythic Personages, p. 72. Sayce,
Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. pp. 384, 386. * Tablet on the Creation
Series.*
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Eridanus, River and Constellation,' chap, vil ;
* Hydra, KratSr, Corviis,' p. 20.
334 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
these two constellations and of Corvus is distinctly shown in
the following lines of Aratus : —
' And opposite another sign is drawn^
The water-snake, they call it. As alive
It crawls far-stretching, for the head extends
'Neath the Crab's midst, the main coil 'neath the Lion,
VVliilst even o'er the Centaur hangs its tail.
On the mid coil is placed the Bowl, the end
Bears a Crow's form, which seems to peck the fold. ' ^
In this description great importance is clearly attached to
the * main or mid-coil ** of the constellation of the water-
snake, for it is said to lie immediately below the. Lion ; and
the constellation Krater is, as in the diagram, placed on it
in the space between Leo and Hydra. These three constel-
lations, the Snake, the Bowl, and the Crow are evidently
connected in one astronomical myth, in which the water-
snake or Naga plays a most important part. In Indian
mythology, as I have shown in several places, the five-headed
Naga denotes the Indian year of five seasons ; and that the
constellation Hydra denoted traditionally, not the year of five
seasons, but the earlier mother-year of three seasons, whose
blood, after being mixed and consecrated in the cup, was dis-
tilled on the earth as rain by the water-snake, is proved by the
illustration in Mr. Brown'*s translation of Aratus depicting the
three constellations. This picture is copied from a Grerman
manuscript of the Greek poem, and in it the snake representing
the constellation Hydra is a three-headed snake forming two
convolutions round the mother-tree, the Hindu tree-mother
Ka-dru, the tree {dm) of Ka, who received the Soma, or water
of life brought from heaven by the sacred prophet-bird.
Tliis tree has in the illustration three branches, answering to
the three heads of the snake. The constellation Krater as
the cup or bowl, the casket holding the Soma, the seed of
life, hangs in the picture on the middle coil of the snake
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, PkaiHomena ; or. The Heavenly Dis-
, 441-449, pp. 48-49-
ESSAY IV 335
below the three heads; and on the tail, which marks the
track by which the snake has reached the tree, the crow is
seated, the constellation Corvus.^ The whole depicts a year
of three seasons ushered in by the crow, the black prophet-
bird, the dark bird of night and winter, who leads the water-
snake to the root of the mother-tree, whence he rises with the
sap in the summer season, and receives from the mother-cup
the soul of life, the life-blood of the mother-year, distilled
from the tree which grows, blossoms, and bears fruit through
each succeeding year, and this is infrised by the rains of the
middle season, the summer solstice. The year ends in the
autumn when the fruits ripen, and the frilfibnent of its work
is shown in the three branches of the tree and the three
heads of the snake.
The relation between these, the earliest sacred stars of the
Northern star-worshippers, to whom the stars were creators
and markers of time and the seasons of the year, and who
used the star as the sign of God, called An by the Hittites,
Cypriotes, and the Akkadians of Gir-su,^ is shown most fully
in the Akkadian names of the three guiding stars, the Crow,
tihe Lion, and the Great Bear.
Corvus is star No. xvii. in the * Tablets of the Thirty
Stars,' where it is called * The Star of the Animal ' of the
land of Kur-ra, the land of the sons of Kur, the tortoise
land of the East.* The sacred animal of the star- worshippers
of this land was the horse of Indra, the rain-god, the long-
eared horse or ass, called Ucchai-shravas, bom from the
churning of the ocean by the snake-god of the spring season,
Vasuki, and his bird-prophet, who impregnated the constella-
tion of Mummu Tiamut, the chaos of the sea. This was the
father-horse, the totem of the Northern tribes, who first
1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, Pkainomena ; or^ The Heavenly Dis-
play y Fig. xli. *The Water-snake, Bowl, and Crow.*
* Major C. Conder, * Notes on Hittite Writing, Hittite Syllabary,' No. 90,
Journal Royal Asiatic Society ^ October 1893.
» R. Brown, jun., F.S.A, 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars,* Part ii. Star xvii.
line 20, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology^ February 1890.
336 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
introduced the sacrifice of the horse into the Roman ritiial.
This was slain at the festival of the Equina on the 15th
October, and its blood was kept in the Penus Vesta? by the
vestal virgins till the 15th of the next April. On that day, at
the festival of the Palilia, the festival to the rain-god, the
Nagur of the Gonds and our St. George, a calf, taken out
of the womb of a pregnant cow which was then sacrificed, was
burnt, and its ashes, mixed with the blood of the father-horse,
were scattered as the seeds of life over the lands of the city
of Rome. It was this father-horse which was sacrificed to
the Northern god Odin, whose sacred bird was the crow or
raven, and annually eaten as a sacramental meal by his wor-
shippers. We find also in the ancient annual horse sacrifice
to the Northern sun-god of India, called the Ashva-medha, a
complete counterpart of the Roman horse sacrifice, and we
can also, as I shall now show, trace in the ritual a connection
with the early year ruled by the Pleiades similar to that given
in the Roman sacrifices, which took place fifteen days before
the first of November and the first of May, the days on which
the seasons of the Pleiades year lx?gan.
In the ritual of the Hindu Ashvamedha, the three seasons
of the mother-year play a conspicuous part. They are called
Amba, who is the leading star of the Pleiades,^ Ambika,
who appears in the Mahabharata as the mother of Dhrita-
rashtra, the blind king, the father of the Kauravyas, or the
sons of Kur (the tortoise), whom I have shown to represent
the house or meridian-pole of the Kushite race, and Amba-
lika, the mother of Pandu, the fair (pandu) prince, the sex-
less young sun-god who was the reputed father of the Pan-
da vas, or the children of the sun. Ambika, called Mahishi,
or chief queen, is the mother of the meridian-pole, and first
the mother-star Sirius and afterwards the moon-goddess, said
in the Rig\'eda to rule the central season of the year.^ She
^ Tail, Sam A. iv. 5, I ; /did. Brah, iii. I, 4, I ; Max Miiller, Preface to
vol. iv. of his edition of the Rigveda, p. 32,
' Rigveda, i. 164, 15 ; x. 85, 2.
ESSAY IV 337
is represented in the Brahmanas as telling her sister queens
*that they would not be the brides of the sun-horse, but
would assign that honour to Subhadra, who dwelt in Kam-
pila.** ^ In this statement we find a complete epitome of the
early history of India as told in the Mahabharata. There
the three mother seasons appear as Amba, the eldest of the
three sisters, betrothed to the king of Saubha, the magic
city of the fire-worshipping magicians Ambika and Amba-
lika, as the two wives of the king Vi-chittra Virya, the two-
(ri) coloured (chittra\ manly strength (inr?/a\ whose history
I have given in Essay iii. The ultimate rule of India, after
"the struggle between the descendants of Ambika and Amba-
lika, falls to the reputed sons of Pandu, the son of the third
cjueen, who, like the youngest sister in the fairy tales of the
"three sisters, secures the most fortunate lot. The fathers of
liis five sons are Dharma, the god of the divine law ; Viiyu,
"the wind ; Indra, the rain-god ; and the Ashvins, or twin
horsemen, the parent-gods of the sons of the sun, horse, and
xnoon-ass, whose chariot is drawn by asses. The descendants
of the five brothers, the five seasons of the new year, all fail
except the son of Arjuna, the son of Indra, the Iwarer of
Crandiva, the rainbow ushering in the rains, and his wife
Su-bhadra, the blessed (bhadra) Su, the sister of Krishna, the
hlaick rain-cloud, and as I shall show, the antelope, and the
mother of the royal races of India, l>om from Su, the soul of
life, the root of the Indian holy Soma. She, in the Ashva-
medha ritual, as described in the Bnlhmanas, is made by the
three earlier mother seasons, Ambii, Ambika, and Ambalika,
^ Tait, Samh, 8, 7, 4, 19, i ; Vajasaneya, 23, 18 ; Saia. Brdh. xiii. 2, 8, 3 ;
Kith. Ashv. 4, 8. I have combined the accounts given in the Vajasaneya
23, 18 with that in Kdth. Afkv, 4, 8, in my interpretation, which is contrary
to that which has hitherto been accepted. Weber, Ind. Siud, i. 183, has, on
the authority of the Satapatha Brahmana, translated the passage so as to
imply an actual physical union between the queen and the horse, but this
cannot be accepted as the original meaning, when it is once understood that
all the personages named are not individuals but mythological ideas. See
Zimmer, AUindischcs Leben^ chap. i. p. 36, for an account of all the texts
on the subject.
22
338 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMEi
the bride of the sun-horse, the parent god of the year of fiv<
seasons, and this marriage is consunnnated in Kanipila, called
in the Mahabharata tlie capital of the land of Pailchala, th«
Gangetic Doab, the kingdom of the corn -growing Srinjayas
or sons of the sickle (.vrm?), which takes its name from th<
worship of the five-headed Naga, the five (j)aruh) seasons o
the new year. The connection here sho>m between tin
twin gods, the Ashvins, or heavenly horsemen, and th<
Pleiades, is preser\'ed in the arrangement of the Hindi
months, when the month Ashvin, SeptemlKT-October, pre
cedes Khartik, the Pleiades month, October-No vemlxT ; an<
the transfer of the rule of the year from the Pleiades, whos-
year l)egan in Kliartik, to the Ashvins, or heavenly horse
men, coincident with the worship of the sun-god, is sho^ni ii
the Bengali festival of the Durga-puja, the most popula
festival of the year throughout Bengal, which takes place o:
the seventh day of the new moon of Ashvin. The goddes
Durga, the mountain {durga) goddess, was bom, lU'cording t
the legend I have (juoted in Essay v., on the same day a
Krishna. She was thus the sister of Krishna, the goddess Su
bhadni of the Mahabharata, the mountain-mother, who gav
birth to the holy Soma plant, the tree of life. Her festivn
in Bengal, beginning on the seventh day of Ashvin, lasts tei
days, and thus almost exactly coincides in date with the thre
great October festivals at Rome, the Mwlitrinalia, or new win
festival, held on the 11th, the Paunalia on the 13th, ant
the Ecjuiria, or horse sacrifices, on the 15th. It is thi
goddess Su-bhadra whose marriage was celebrated in th
Ashva-medha, who is worshipped at Juggernath as the thin
member of tlie sacred triad of llama-Chandra, Bal-bliudei
and Su-bhadra or Sita,and she is tlie wife of Rama-Chandni
the sun-god Riim or Ra, who is also Chandra, the moon
god. This mountain-goddess Durga is the counteqmr
of Istir, whose sign among the Hittites is ^,i th*
' In a lecture on Hittite Writing delivered before the Oriental Congress c
1892, Mr. E. Tylor showed thai on a bilingual seal, with an inscription i
ESSAY IV 339
mountain enclosing the stone of life, which I have shown ^
to be the Hindu picture of the mountain goddess-mother, and
she is also, as Istar, the mother star Sirius. That she was
originally a Hittite mother-goddess is made exceedingly pro-
bable by the fact that her deification in India was coincident
with that of the Ashvins or twin gods; for Major Conder
has shown that the name Kliati, by which the Hittites were
known to the Assyrians, is derived from a Turkish root khat
*to be joined,' and the sign denoting the national Hittite name
Xhat in Hittite writing depicts two persons swearing faith
to one another.^ They were, in short, a nation formed from the
union or blood-brotherhood ^ of the sun and fire w^orshippers
from the north, who worshipped the god of day, the sun-god
Ra, and the dark race from the south, the sons of night ; and
thus their parent stars were the twin gods Day and Night,
the stars Kastor — the support (stor) of Ka, called Tur-us, or
the god of the pole, Tur — and Polu-deukes, the much-raining
god, the god of the dark night of the Southern agriculturists.
It was these Mongolian Hittites who were the yellow race
whom I have sho\vn in Essay in. to be the sons of Kapila,
meaning the yellow, the patron Rishi of Oude, north of the
Ganges, where they joined the Gonds and aboriginal culti-
vating races from the south, and they were the first barley
and fruit growers in India. They are depicted in their own
ideograms and Egyptian monuments as wearing a pigtail.^
This the Mundas of Chota Nagpore still do; the cutting of
the pigtail by those converted to Christianity being the
sign that they have renounced the idolatry of their fathers.
cuneiform writing on one side and Hittite on the other, the sign for Istar in
the phrase * servant of Istar ' on one side is represented by the sign yj^
on the Hittite side. ^ Essay ill. p. 144.
' Major R. Conder, * Notes on the Hittite Writing, Journal Royal Asiatic
Society, Oct. 1893, p. 839. * The Hittite Syllabary,* Sign 106.
'Which I have shown in Essay in. p. 175, to be the sign of Hindu
marriage.
* Major R. Conder, * Notes on the Hittite V^xiimgy* Journal Royal Asiatic
Society f Oct. 1893, p. 824.
340 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
It was these people who foniied the nucleus of the trading'
nices of the Sus or Shus, the Hindu Vaishya who, as I
have sliown in Essay iii., were the first founders of the Soma
ritual, and the race who introduced the baptismal bath,
which gave to those who w^re consecrated in it a ^ new birth *"
from sin to righteousness. But I must now return to the
constellation Corvus and the sacretl horse or ass. This
last was the year of three seasons, called the three-legged
ass in the Bundahish, who helps Tishtrja or Sirius to bring
the rains from the ocean,^ the ass which drew the chariot of
the Ashvins in the Rigveda. This animal is said, in the same
line in which it is called * the animal of the land of Kur-ra,*
to be sacred to the Akkadian mother-goddess Im-dugud-kbu,
the great {dugud) storm {tm) bird {k'hu\ and this storm
mother-bird becomes in the Assyrian paraphrase of the
Akkadian text 'the terrible Ram-anu,"' thus showing the
identity of the original storm-bird who laid the world'*s egg,
whence the Kushite sons of the ass or tortoise were bom, with
Rilma, the son of Kaush-aloya, the house or mother {aloya)
of Kush, the tortoise, the father of the Indian ruling race,
the long-eared horse or ass of the Hittite or twin races, and
the god Ram-anu of the Assyrian Semites, the father Ab-
Ram. This star Im-dugud-khu is said in an Akkadian
tablet to be the ' star of mist and tempest.^ - This storm-
bird goddess is the cloud-goddess Sar, tlie mother of the star
of the foundation, the constellation Aquarius * who took the
road of the sun "* '^ rising from the mists of the chaos of the
sea, the mother-goddess Mununu Tiamut-Sar was, as I have
shown, the Armenian cloud-goddess, and the Greek goddess
Hekate, so called as the mother of the hundred (Jiekaton)
cliildren, the Sata-vaesa, or lumdrod father-creators, the
^ West, Bundahish y xix. ; S.B. E. vol. v. p. 69.
- R. Ikown, jun., F.S.A., 'Remarks on the Tablets of the Thirty Stars,*
Part ii. Star xvii. ; W.A.I. iii. 53, No. I, line 27, Proceedings of the Society
of Biblical ArchcEology, Fcby. 1890.
^ Ibid, Star i. line i, § 375.
ESSAY IV 341
constellation Argo of the Zendavesta, who were boni in
Hindu legend as the offspring of the egg laid by Gan-dharl,
the bird-mother of the Kauravya, sons of Kur. Hekate was
also the mother of the three Erinnyes or Fates, the three
mother-seasons of the year of destiny, whose name is the same
as that of the Sanskrit goddess Sar-anyu, the mother of the
twins Day and Niglit, from whom the twin races, the Khati,
were descended, she was the daughter of Sirius called Sara-ma,
or the mother of Sara, the sacred bitch of the Rigveda, and
the cows which Sara-ma stole were the cows of the sun of the
Panis or trading races, the yellow sons of Su, the begetting
and conceiving parent of the Su-vama, or race (varna) of the
Sus, the dwellers on the western coasts of India and the
Persian Gulf. The theology of which she was made the
:tnotber-goddess was that of the people wlio called them-
selves the Sumerian races. It was these sons of the bisexual
jRre-dog Sirius, tlie Tishtrya of tlie Zendavesta, the star
TTishku of the Akkadians, and of the mother storm-bird,
"%vho placed their mother, the storm-bird, in heaven as
'the constellation which afterwards became that of Corvus ;
-s.nd it was they who assigned to her the function of infusing
spiritual life and living souls into the cliildren of the mother-
star, Mummu Tia-mut, the constellation Krater. This is
■proved by the name Hu, or U-ga-ga, which was tliat given
^ the constellation Corvus by the Babylonians. This name
:ineans the abyss, or conceiving mother {hu\ the purifier, or
^^mbrosia {ga% or in other words, the constellation ' which
sanctifies with the cleansing water of the gods the womb of
i;he universal mother ; ^ ^ and the name Hu, bv which the
' R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., tells me, in a letter I have received from him,
that Corvus is U-ga-ga, wrongly written U-rak-ga, on p. 318 of his ' Euphra-
tean Stellar Researches,* Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology,
May 1893. See Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary ^ Nos. 226-227, for the
interpretation of the signs. In the passage W.A.I. iii. lii. No. 2, quoted by
Mr. Brown, the star U-ga-ga, called the bird, is said to be opposite to Nun-ki,
the star Aquila, and from their appearance it is said ' there is herbage in all
the land. * This shows that they are both creating mother-birds, who portend
342 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
mother is called, identifies her with the goddess-mother,
called Hu-kairya in the Zendavesta; and her name Hu is
the Zend fonn of Su or Shu, denoting the creating-mother
of the South, while Shu, again, is, by the rule which trans-
forms Northern gutturals into Southern sibilants, the Akka-
dian word A7«/, bird ; so that the sons of Shu are the sons of
the bird-mother, tlie mother storm-bird, who brought from
heaven to the Persian Gulf and the Western coast of India^
the liome-land of the Shus, the Soma, or life-giving rain-
The change from the storm-bird, the vulture or kite, t
the crow was made, as I have shown in Essays iii. and v.^
by the Northern sons of Ra, the god of smi and moonb'ght^^
who made the raven or crow the projihet-bird. This wa^
the black Bindo bird of the Sotiff ofLuigal^ the raven oM
Odin and Apollo, who had first been the Shyena bird ©•
the Rig\'eda, the vulture of Thraetaona of the Zendavesta^
who was the Trita Aptya, the water-god of the Rigveda--
the kite, called Shakuna, the brother of Gan-dhari in the:^
Mahtlbharata, and invoked as the holy bird in the Rigveda- —
the Lugultudda, or carrion -eating storm-bird of the Akka —
dians, the adjutant bird {Clcoma argala\ the rain stork--
who announces the coining of tlie rains in Bengal, anct^
through this rain-bird of the Kusliite country of Bengal^-
we arrive at the sacred stork, tlie Kvirinta of the Zenda —
vesta, in whose palace Azi Dahaka, the three-mouthed snake- -^
the vear of three seasons, slain by Thraetaona, dwelt ; ^ an4::J
this was the bird who is still held sacred in North-westernr^
Europe as the herald who tells of the birth of the yomig^
spring -god and the death of the winter -fiend. This^i
stork, transformed into the stonn-bird, was the vulturej^'^
the messenger- bird of Riima, the plougii-god of the Rilma — J
rain in successive mythologies ; Corvus being the mother-star of the raceswhoo J
measurefl time by the seasons and weeks, marked by the polar revolulions,^.^
and Aquila the star of those who measured time by the circuits of the moon»« •
sun, and planets.
^ Darmesteler, Zcmiavesta Ram Yashf, v. 19; S.H.E. vol. xxiii. p. 253, « •
note 3.
ESSAY IV 343
ana, which had its wings cut off by Havana, the storm-god,
irhen Kama or Pandu^ had killed the deer Marichi, the
ather of Kashyapa, the tortoise, and progenitor of the
fushite race. Marichi on his death became the father-
tar in the tail of the Great Bear, while Rama was changed
rem the plough-god, the husband of Sita, the furrow, to
•e the sun-husband of Sita, the crescent moon, the moon-
lother, and the pair became the sun and moon god, to
'horn the crow or raven was sacred. This bird in the
rrangement of the constellations is placed on the tail of
lydra, immediately to the west of the mother-constellation
f Krater, the cup ; and it is the star Vanant, said in the
Jenda vesta to have in it * the seed of the waters, the seed
»f the earth, the seed of the plants.** ^ It is the rain-bird
ir'ho first brought the life-giving rain to fill the cup or
^'omb, whence the mother-sea, the fish-goddess, Tia-mut,
vas bom ; and it was this bird who afterwards became the
)ird which brought the voice of the prophet, the message of
:he Almighty, which infuses the seed of spiritual life, speech,
ind thought into the Krater, which was also the heaveiJy
?onia-cup, receiving through the medium of the fire from
:he constellation liCO the life-giving heat churned by the
»even mother-stars of the Great Bear in their revolutions
•ound the pole. The constellation Leo is called by the
Akkadians Pa-pil-sak, meaning the sceptre (/?«), the great
mk) fire {pil\^ It is described in an Akkadian tablet as
the sceptre (pa) of the wild bull {am\ the sky {gir) honi
jtak),^ Therefore this constellation, the sceptre of the wild
^ Pandu, the sexle<?s sun-god, is represented in the Mahabharata AdI
[Sambha7.'a) Parva, cxviii. pp. 343-345, as killing a sacred deer, the wife of
the Rishi Kimin-dama, a sin for which he was made impotent.
'^ Darmesteter, /.emiavesta Sirozahy i. 13; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 9.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 130, 222, 244.
* R. Brown, jnn., F.S. A., * Euphratean Astronomical Names of the Signs
of the Zodiac,' Proceedittgs of the Society of Biblical Archccology^ March 1891,
p. 265. Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. II7» 1 30, 222, 242;
Sak, No. 130, means both ' horn ' and * great.*
344 THE IIULING HACKS OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
bull, is that which symbolises the sigii of the royal authority
vested in the son of the wild cow, the Gond and Hindu
mother Gauri, the Hebrew mother Leah, whose name is the
Hebrew form of the word Ix», meaning the bulPs head in
Hittite, Cypriote, and ancient Akkadiaji.^ The Lion was
the cognisance of the trilx* of her son Judah, who was called
by his father Jacob, the l)earer of the sceptre and ' the lion's
whelp,** ^ and who married, first, Shua, the daughter of the
Shus,^* the sons of Dan, called Shuham,* and subsequently
Tamar, the Babylonian date-palm, the male and female trees,
whicli, as I show in Essay v., succeeded the fig-tree as the
parent tree wlion the race who l)elieved in the divinity of
pairs became the ruling race, a change which marks the
transfer of power from the rulers of India to the nations of
the Eupliratean delta, and the line of coast between India
and Egypt, wliere the palm-tree has always been the sacred
tree. In the 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars*' both the twelfth
stiir, Regulus, a Leonis, and the thirteenth, B and 6 Leonis,
called respectively Gus-barm, or fire-flame, and the star of
the god Kua, tlie god of the oracle, are called Mes-su, the
lieart (wr.v) of Su, of tlie liousc of tlie land of Kur, and these
names, and the common epitliet applied to both sbirs, prove
tliat they were thouglit to ty[)ifv tlie lioly fire of the goddess
Su, the Egyptian first father-god of tlie creating pairs, the
god Shu, from the root .v//, to dry with heat,'* and marks the
sons of Su OS the offspring of Kur, the tortoise. We also
learn from the names of these stars that they were the
guardian stars of the race who believed in the diAine
oracles as the voice of God, the oracle given by the Ephod
^ Major R. C. Conder, * Notes on the Hittite Writing,' yi7//r/m/ of the
Royal Asiatic Society y October 1893, pp. 833, 834; * Hittite Syllabary,' plate 7,
No. 61.
- (Icn. xlix. 9, 10. ^ Gen. xxxviii. 2. ** Numbers xxvi. 42.
'^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien ^Egypten^ p. 31. Slui is
the consort of Tafnut, the effluence, who are both born from the one parent-
god. Turn, the darkness 'in^ both symbolise the union of fire and water as the
first parents of the race who believed in the divinity of pairs.
ESSAY IV 345
of the Jews, which was syinlx)lised by the high priest Aaron,
whose name means tlic chest or receptacle (whence God'*s
voice issued). Tliis belief marks the advent to power of the
«ons of Kohath, the prophet-priests, commemorated by the
inarriage of Aaron, their reputed father, with the sister of
Nahshon, the prince of Judah.^ The fourteenth star of the
* Tablet of Thirty Stars ** is also a star in Leo Denebola, in
its tail, and it is called the star of the goddess Bahu,^ the
oreating-mother (/m), Ma. Ba is the mother-goddess of the
Semite Phcenicians, the goddess of the deep primaeval abyss.'
She was raised from thence as the mother-mountain, depicted
in the Hittite sign Ba A , the sign of the mother Istar,
-sind it was from the motlier-mountain that the cloud-
^goddess Sar was born. The Hittite sign for Ba and Istar
lecomes in the oldest cuneiform I^,* tlie sign which on
'Ihe Hindu motlier-altar denotes the union of the mother-
goddess of the three seasons with the fire-god. Thus the
"lortoise race, the sons of Ia*o, were both the people to whom
"the prophet-priests declared the oracles, and for whom they
offered bunit-ofterings, and also those who looked on the
mother of tlie waters, the encircling ocean, whence the
"mother- mountain and the mother- cloud goddess rose as
their primaeval mother, and wlio believed that life was
generated by the imion of lieat with water. This heat
was, in the astronomical myth, engendered by the revolu-
tions of the Great Bear and the connection between it, the
vital heat, and creating water is shown in one of its Akkadian
names, Bel-a-sar-sa, whicli means Bel, the fire-god, who mea-
sures (sar) the water (a), yoke (sa)^^ or, in other words, Bel,
' Ex. vi. 23 ; Numbers ii. 4. Nahshon is the (lod Nahash, the Great
Naga, the Great Bear.
■■* R. Brown, jun., F.S. A., * Tablet of the Thirty Stars,* Stars xii., xiii., and
xiv., Procudings of the Society of Biblical Archwology^ Feb. 189a
' Sayce, Hibbert Lccturts for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 262, note 4.
^ Major R.'C. Conclcr, * Notes on the Hittite V^riiing^' Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society f Octolx»r 1893 ; * Hittite Syllabary,' plate 7, No. 50.
* R. Brown, jun., F.S. A., * Remarks on the Tablets of the Thirty Stars,*
346 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the distributor of the water allotted to the earth. It is
from this heavenly cistern and fire-drill — in which Marlchi,
meaning the fire-spark, is hidden — that the water of life
passes into Leo, where it blazes in the sceptre star Regulus,
and thence into the Soma cup of the begetting god, Su, the
constellation Krater, as the blood of life consecrated by the
prophet-bird. It is this lioly seed whicli, when distilled into
the constellation Hydra, the heavenly sowing-plough, or
great Naga snake, falls from tlience into the sea of the
Indian Ocean, ruled by the constellation Argo, the mother-
ship with its crew of a hundred (sata) creating-sons {z'aesa\
the Sata-vaesa of the Zendavesta, where she is said to be the
star Svhich puslies the waters forward'^ and controls the
tides of the sea ploughed by the ships of the sea-faring
sons of Shu or Klui, the storm-bird, the traders of Western
India and the Persian Gulf. It is from this sea that
Sirius brought up the rains, aided by the mother storm-
bird, originally the seven winds of the soutli-west mon-
soon, or the god V^ayu, the wind-god, worshipped by
Takhnia Unipa, the swift {takhma) robber {iirupi\ the fire-
god, twin-brother of Yima, the rain-god, the twin-god
whose rule in Zend historical mythology |)receded that
of Azi Dahfika, tbe tluTe-mouthed snake- of the year of
three seiusons.
It was from tlie rains of the summer solstice thus gener-
ated from the great Niiga-snake tliat tlie IMioenician sons of
Kush were born, wliose kings, like tliose of Egypt, wore the
Urccus snake as a sign of royal authority. Their original
settlement, according to a tradition recorded by Theo-
phrastus, was at Tulos or Tin*os, in the Persian Gulf, the
Star No. xi., Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaolof^'^ Feb. 1890;
Saycc, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 315, 414, 437. The ideographs
denoting the functions of Bel as the constellation of the Great Bear are TJ
water ; -^ Sar^ measure ; and ^Jf Sa^ yoke.
1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Slrozahy i. 13 ; S.B.E. vol. xxii. p. 9.
- Ibid. Zendavesta Ram Yasht^ II, 12, 19; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 252,
note I, 253.
ESSAY IV 347
modem Bahrein,^ celebrated for its pearl fishery. This was
the holy island of Dilvun, called Dilniuii by the Akkadians.
It was here that la was born, or rather made his first ap-
pearance as £n-zag, the first-born {zag) of God (^w), the
son of the waters. He was also worshipped there under the
name of Pati,^ a name which reproduces that of the Hindu
god Praja-pati, the supreme god of the Indian trading race,
the Tur-vasu. Praja-pati is the god who was worshipped in
India as the god Ka, to whom the mother-tree called Ka-dru,
bhe tree {dm) of Ka was sacred ; and to the present day the
rains, who are the great trading race in India, call them-
elves in Northern India and Assam Kiiya,^ or the sons of
fa. Tliis name Ka they must have brought with them to
he holy island of Dilvun, and it was from thence it must
lave travelled to Egypt with the race who established
iushite rule there. It was these people, who, in their
rarlier home in India believed in the divinity of pairs, and
iscribed creation to the union of the male and female prin-
ciple ; they were the sons of Tamar, the date-palm. They
depicted the female principle as the sacred mother-bird of
the Shus, and made the pole of tlie rain-god the emblem of
bhe phallus. Irrefragable proof that these worsliippers of
the mother-bird and the phallus, like tlie Zend and Indian
Kushika, who began their year with the heliacal rising of
Sirius, began theirs also at the summer solstice, is given by
the Phoenician temples recently discovered in Mashonaland.
The most numerous sacred emblems found in these temples
were those representing the circumcised phallus and the
vulture storm -bird, which, as tlie bird which brings the
North-Indian rain at the simimer solstice, when the Hindu
and Egyptian year began, was looked on by the Egyptians,
^ Birdwood, Introduction to The First Letter-Book of the East India Com-
pany, p. XX ix. note 2.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii. p. 114 note i.
' 'General Reports on the Census of India, 1891,' by J. A. Baines,
Census Commissioner, p. 176.
348 THE 1U:LING RAC ES OF PREHLSTOItIC TIMES
according to HorapoUo, as emblematic of a year.^ In
these temples, and especially in tlie great Zambabwe tem-
ples, the entrance, leading through the enclosing walls into
the Temenos or central courtyard, where the two trian-
gular towers dedicated to the gods of creation, the mother-
gods of the year of tliree seasons, stand in front of the
altiir, is so placed that the rays of the sun when rising
at the summer solstice stream through it and fall on the
top of the higliest triangular pillar. In these temples also,
the arrangement of the ' dentelle ' pattern, /w^ rej)roducing
the Egyptian sign for water, to receive the sun*'s rays, and
the position of the east and west gateways placed so as to
admit the rising sim at the summer, and of the setting sun
at the winter solstice point to a religious cult, in which the
solstices were regarded with special veneration.^ It was at
the two solstices that, in the Indian ritual bequeathed by the
Ashuras, who believed in the divinity of pairs, and made the
Ashvins, the heavenly-twins, their parent gods, animal victims
were offered.^ These sacrifices were originally the sacrifice
of the totem animal of the tribe which wjis to be eaten, as
the followers of Odin ate the hoi*se which was sacred to him ;
and these became, us I have shown in Essay iii., the human
sacrifices of the earlier Semites, who believed in the anthro-
j)onu)rphic father-god ; and it was in these sacrifices that the
eldest son of the sacrificer, or of the national king, the father
of his peo])le, was slain as the offering most cerbiin to secure
from the ruling gods prosperity for the nation and family.
It was the blood of this human victim which was drunk by
the earlier Semite Arabs as the sacramcntiil draught which
was to infuse into them the nature of the great father-god.*
It is the myths developing the theology of these early star
^ Bern, J\uincd C/'/iis of Mashoiialatidj New Edition, chap, vi, pp.
lSo-188.
- fhiii. chajx v. pp. 149-161, especially j^p. 151, 164, 166.
•" Biihler, Mami. iv. 26; S.B. E. vol. xxv. p. 173.
■* Robertson Smith, Rcli^i^ion of the Semites^ Lect. x. ]i. 349.
ESSAY IV 849
and sun worshippers which we find depicted in their astro-
logical arrangement of the stellar constellations, and this
tells us of the history of the computation of time, the birth
of thought, life, and speech as conceived by the sons of the
tortoise. Also these pictorial astronomical myths, like the
successive changes in ancient ritual, tell us how the early
makers of mythic national history used old stories and old
observances to fit new beliefs and new series of events. Thus
the story of creation, as told by the Ashura believers in the
divinity of pairs, to whom the father was the author of life,
is one adopted from that told by the matriarchal tribes,
^heir predecessors, who traced their origin to tlie mother-
^arth and the mother-tree. The original story told how
a-dru, the tree (dm) of Ka, the mother of the Naga race —
uccessively the Sal-tree {Shorea robuMa)^ mother of the
ravidians, and the pine-tree, mother of the Northern sons
f the bear — sent the bird-messenger, the cloud-mother Sar,
he storm-bird who brings the rains, to the heavens, the
^ome of the long-eared horse or ass, Ucchaishravas of the
ZMahabharata, the three-legged ass who helps Tishtrya to
l)ring the rains in the Bundahish, the year of the three
seasons, to bring thence to earth Soma, tlie sap or soul of
life, the seasonable rains. The original storm-bird, the
cloud and wind vulture, brought from the seven winds and
the seven Gan-dharva guardians of Soma, the seven stars of
the bear-mother, the seven days of the week, who revolve
round the Dhruva or pole of the sacred garden (gan)^ sancti-
fied as the birthplace of the Kushite race, tlie two cups
symbolised by the constellations Krater and Leo, enclosed
in one casket, the storm-cloud impregnated by the lightning
flash. In these two cups, as w^e are told in the Brahmanas,
were contained the two vital principles, the water of con-
secration and birth {dlkshd) and the fire-seed (tapas)^ the
fire which heats, and the water which liquifies the blood and
creates living life. This life was, according to the passage
* Tapas is derived from the root /«/, to burn.
350 THE HULING UACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
in the Satapatha Bruhinana, which tells this story, born from
the three upasach or seasons, the original mother-year of the
Northern barley-growing races, the three Ribhus of the
RigN'eda, whose functions I have fully described in Essay ni.
The life-blood enshrined in the caskets was that of the god
of time, called by the Akkadians Nin-igi-a-zag, meaning the
first-born (^(iff) of the lady (nhi) of the spirits (iffl) of water
(«), the son of the goddess Sar, the young sun and rain-god
Dumu-zi, the scm (dumu) of life (;:i), called in theBrahmanas
and Rigveda Krishiinu, as the bearer of the heavenly bow,
who was the seventh of the seven Gandharva guardians of
Soma.^ This casket, enshrining the seed of the tree or plant
of life, the original Sang-real or Holy Grail, the life-giving
blood of the son of God was given to Ka-dru, the tree-
mother, who gave it to Indra, the rain-god, and Agni, the
fire-god, who produced life on earth by its magic aid.-
Thus it was from the messenger cloud-bird impregnated
by the seed of life distilled into it by the lightning-flash,
the heavenly fire of the storm-god, and from the rivei-s and
springs she fed with fertilising water that the sons of the
world's egg, the tortoise-eartli, the home of the lumdred
sons of Gan-(lhari, tlie mother-garden (ffan) of tlie streams,
(dhar'f) and of Dharma, the law of the continuity of natural
phenomena, were horn. In both the astronomical picture
and the verbal myth setting forth this story we find the
seven (lavs of tlie week, tlie seven cliildren of the lK?ar-
mother, tlie twofold -casket containing the seed of life, the
constellations K rater and Leo, the mother rain-cloud, the
constellation Ilydni, the Naga or water-snake, dividing the
Northern heaven, the holy grove where tlie seeds of life
were ripeneil, from the Soutiiern seas and lands, the still
dead world, where they were to be sown, just as the culti-
vated land in the matriarchal village, the sacred snake of
^ Eggoling, S'li/. Ih\ih. iii. 3, 3, ii ; S.l^. E. vol. xxvi. p. 72.
- Kj;j;clin^, Sat. Hrah. iii. 6. 2-12 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 149-151.
Maliahharata Adi {Adika) Parva, xx.-xxiii.
ESSAY IV 351
the matriarchal tribes divided the mother-grove, the home
of the gods of life from the world of death outside, and both
stories tell us of the birth from this heavenly seed of the
Kushite traders, warriors, and teachers, who were the men
of the mother-ship of life, the constellation Argo. It was
on this ship that Du-muzi, the son of life, the Akkadian
name for the constellation Orion,^ embarked as the god of
the new j^ear ushered in by the heliacal rising of Sirius, the
the dog-star, who rose before him to greet his coming ; and
Dumuzi, the constellation Orion of the Akkadians, is the
same god as the Egyptian Osiris, who also, as I have shown
in Essay ii., made his annual voyage in the moon-boat, and
he was, as the constellation Orion called Smati, and in this
capacity was worshipped as the leader of tlie stars.^ This
mvth of Orion, his dog, and his voyage, travelled to the
North, where Orwandil, whose toe was Rigel, one of the
stars in Orion,^ was the travelling giant. He became
Odusseus, the wandering sun-god of the Greeks, the pos-
sessor of the bow of Eurytion, the rainbow-god, who leaves
l^ehind him his dog Argus to guard his wife and house, the
dog who dies while welcoming his master^s return* from his
year*'s voyage, and who rises again to introduce tlie new
year. The astronomical form of the myth, in which the con-
stellation Leo plays a principal part, enables us to under-
stand why, in the German myth of the Holy Grail, its
guardiansliip was intrusted to the swan-knight Loher-angrin,
the bearer of the blazing-flame {Lohc\ wlio was both the
constellation Leo and the kniglit of tlie swan-boat, the
crescent-moon. He was the Masu or Moses, who, as the
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Eridanus, River and Constellation,' chap. iv.
•The Signs of the Zodiac, Orion and his Dogs,* p. 9; Lenormant, Les
Origines I, 247 note i.
* II. BrugGch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien jF.gypitr^ pp. 203, 452.
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, Phainomena ; or^ The Heavenly Dis-
play, App. iii. *The Celestial Equator of Aratus,' p. 82; Vigfusson and
Powell, Corpus Poeticum Bonahy ii. 13.
•* Homer, Odyssey, xvii. 326, 327.
352 THE RULING RAC ES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
pillar of cloud and fire, led the star- worshippers to the top
of Mount Nebo, consecrateil to the planet Mercury, the great
Xabi or prophet of the Semites, who worshipped, not the fixed
stars, but the moon and the planets, and who reckoned time,
not by the recurrence of the seiisons, or by the ten lunar
months of gestation and the eleven lunar months sacred to
the gods of generation in the Hindu calendar of the Ashura,
but by the tliirteen months of the lunar year. These, as I
show further on, thev made their standard of measurement
when they took the moon-city Jericho after Moses, the
constellation Ia»o, who died on Mount Nebo, had ceased to
lead the stars ; and when the Semite confederacy took the
name of the sons of Ephraim, Iwrn of the two Ashes (ej)a')y
under tlic lead of Joshua, the son of Nun, meaning in
Hebrew the fish ; and Caleb the dog (kalb)^ the dog-star,
the grandson of Judah and brother of Ram, the sun-god
Ra.i
In the above review of the functions assigned by the
early astronomers to the stars they used to measure time, we
find evidence of two very early star years preceding that of
five seasons. These are tlie year of the first fire-worshippers,
whose god was the fire-god, called Taklnna Urupa in the
Zendavesta. They apjmrently divided tlie year into the
tliree seasons of the Greek vear which came from Asia Minor,
the first, tlie spring, was ruled by the Great Bear, who con-
cealed the father fire-spark, the Hindu god Marichi. As its
seven stars revolved round the pole they generated in the
constellation Leo tlie burning heat of summer, and this heat
brought on the rains of autumn and winter, ruled by the
constellation Hydra, the great water-snake. It was during
this season, at the time siicred to the Pleiades in November,
that the Egyptian god Osiris, the constellation Orion, launched
his year-bark, the crescent-moon, represented by the con-
stellation lA^pus, the moon-hare, lying at his feet, and this
juxtaposition of Orion and the Hare shows that the giant
* 1 Chron. ii. 9-1S.
ESSAY IV 853
sun was first a hunter on earth who meets the crescent-moon,
which begins the year, at dawn, before he became the sea-god,
who is taken on his annual voyage in the moon-boat. This
was followed by the year of the sacred bird, the mother-bird
of the magicians, the first mother-bird of the twin-races.
It is this year I have described when speaking of the con-
stellations Corvus, the Cup, and Hydra. In this year the
magic bird, the spring, worshipped in India as the goddess
Maga, and whose worship survives in Europe in the or-
dinances of St. Valentine's Day, mixed together in the magic
eup the blood and fire which made the god of love the ruler
CDf the spring, and caused all nature to blossom in the summer,
%he middle coil of the snake-mother, and to produce, as the
^»nclusion of its yearly task, the fruits of autumn. This was
:followed by the year of four seasons, ruled, like the Egyptian
year, by the Southern and Northern suns. This was the year
of the races who measured time by the solstices and equinoxes.
This year began with the heliacal rising of Sirius at the
Slimmer solstice, when Duniu-zi, the sun-god, the star Orion,
embarked on his ship, the crescent-moon, to begin his
journey towards the south and west. Half of this was com-
pleted at the autumnal equinox, the end of the Indian rains,
during which, according to Hindu legends, the sun-god is
asleep. At the equinox he awoke, and reached the home of
the magic-bird in the west at the winter solstice. Thence he
made his journey northward to the bear ruling the spring
-equinox, returning to the guardian dog-star at the summer
solstice. But when this year of four seasons became one of
five, the first was divided into the two seasons of the twin-
gods. The rainy season, sacred to Poludeukes, tlie great
Ipolu) wetter {deukes) and the autumn, the season of the
Iwtrley-growers, who began their year, as I have shown, with
the autumal equinox, and this was consecrated to Ka-stor,
the support {stor) of Ka, the Ashera, or pole of the rain-god.
On considering this account of the year s voyage of the
sun-god it will be seen that these early astronomers quite
23
864 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
mistook the real position of the sun in the heavens, for as
they looked on time as measured by the revolutions of the
Pole, they had not yet begun to mark the places through
which the sun passed in his annual course, and only looked on
the sun as going from east to west, and visiting the south
and north on his journey. Thus they made him start from
Sirius in the south-east when he was really in the north, and
brought him to Corvus, the western bird of night, when he
was really in the south. That, in their conception, the sun
was really in Sirius at the summer solstice, and in the
western Corvus at the winter solstice is clearly proved by the
orientation of the temples in Mashonaland, placed so as to
catch the rays of the rising sun at the summer, and those of
the setting sun at the winter solstice, and also by the orienta-
tion of the Egyptian temples to Isis, Hat-hor, as Sirius, who
begins the year. In an inscription in her temple at Denderah
it is said she, Isis Satit (Sirius), shines into her temple on
New Year's Day, and mingles her light with that of her
father Ra, the sun-god, on the horizon ; and the temple of
Hat-hor at Tlicbes is so built that the light of the rising star
Sirius would fall on lier sanctuary.^ In fact, the course of
the sun througliout the year was considered to be similar to
his daily journey, and it was believed that he started at the
summer solstice from the home of life in the East, and
reached in the winter solstice the realms of deatli in the
West. It was to the west that all the dead were carried in
boats, according to the belief of the Druids, as I have shown
in Essay ii., and it was in the west the Odusseus, the wander-
ing sun-god, found the liome of the dead ruled by Haides
^ Norman Lockyer, * Astronomy and Mythology of the Ancient Egj'ptians/
NincUeiith Century^ July 1892, p. 40. The orientation of this temple is
proved by Professor Lockyer in The Dawn of Astronomy^ p. 197, to show
that its date was 700 B.C., but he also shows, p. 200, that Biot has proved
that at Thebes temples were oriented to Sirius as rising at the summer solstice
in 3285 B. c. , but even this date is very much later than that referred to by
me, as I speak of a time before the position of the stars was astronomically
measured, or heavenly star circles framed.
ESSAY IV 355
and Persephoneia.^ But in this summary of early Akkadian
attempts to measure time by tlie stars, I have not yet taken
notice of one very important group of stars in their cosmo-
graphy. This was the group called the * Lumasi.' They
are mentioned in the Fifth Creation Tablet, where the first
two lines in Dr. Sayce'*s translation say —
1. He made excellent the mansions (celestial houses) of the
great gods, [twelve] in number.
2. The stars he placed in them, the * Lumasi ' he fixed.^
These stars were looked on as those who watched the
vrandering rulers of heaven, the sun, moon, and planets,
called * the seven bell-wethers,** and they must, therefore, have
been stars belonging to the older astronomy which made the
fixed stars the preservers of law and order, and looked on
the wandering stars as rebels. They must, therefore, be stars
within the area ruled by the four ruling stars, Sirius, Argo,
Corvus, and the Great Bear, which kept guard over the
sacred field of the Nags, or rain-stars, the first, Nag-Kshetra,
or field of the Nags of the Hindus, the holy-grove of the pole-
stars, delineated in the map on p. 333. The name Lu-ma-si
written in the Akkadian JgQf /u, ET ^^j KT*^ ^> means the
sheep (lu) of the plain (ma) country (^), and this name, as
well as that of * lu-bad,'' the old sheep,^ by which they were
also called, marks them as the parent stars of the race who
* Homer, Odyssey, bk. xi., *The Nekuia.*
* R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., Eridanas, River and Constellation, chap, xxviii.
The constellations according to the Creation Tablets, p. 64. Dr. Sayce has placed
the word * twelve ' in brackets, showing that it does not occur in the original,
and it must be a later gloss introduced by those who measured time by the
solar zodiacal year. The first mansions of the great gods made in heaven were
the twenty-eight moon -stations, showing the monthly course of the moon
through the heavens, and the still earlier mansions of the sun in his passage
through the four stars, marking the solstices and equinoxes, when as is said in
the Rigvcda, the three Ribhus, or seasons, 'slept in the house of Agohia,' mean-
ing ' He who cannot be concealed,* that is, the sun, Rigveda i. 161, 13, or
rather, perhaps, the polar star, which never sets ; and the house that he slept
in was that of the bird of winter, the constellation Corvus.
' This is the spelling of the name Lu-ma-si, both in the Creation Tablet
and in W.A.I, iil 57, No. 6, lines 5, 6, where the names of the constellations
356 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
fed their flocks on the plains watered by the rivere born froui
their mother Gan-dliari, the land (ffan) of streams (dhdrl),
the fertile lands of Northern India and the Euphratean
countries. The people to whom the Lu-ma-si, called also
the Lu-nmsi, or twin sheep,^ were parent stars, which became
in the theology of their successors guardian angels, were the
Northern branch of the sons of Hu or Su, the begetting or
creating gods, who as Hu and Su were in Egyptian mythology
the attendants of Tum, the prima?val god of the southern
sun of night, the steersmen of the sun''s boat on its voyage
from Sirius to the south and west.^ They were the Hittite
sons of Dan or Danu, the judge, whose sons, according to
Hebrew historical genealogy, were the Shuham or Shus,^
and the Hushim,* or Hus. They also called themselves the
Tur-vasu, or people whose creating god (vas^u) was the pole
(tur). It was they who, when united with the traders of the
south, became the mercantile mariners of the Indian Ocean,
who had imposed their rule and traditions both on the lands
of Northern India and on those of the twin rivers, the
Euphrates and Tigris. In India they consecrated the three
great rivers (1) to tlieir twin parent gods, tlie twins Day and
Night, to whom tlic Yamuna (Jumna), the river of the twins
Q/ajn\ was dediaited ; (2) to their mother, the holy Gan, the
goddess of the Gan-ga (Ganges) ; and (3) to the moon-god-
dess of the Indus, or Sind, the river of Sin, the moon-mother.
From India — the only land on the Indian Ocean where they
could build sea-going ships — they extended their trade, forms
of government, and national myths, first to the Euphratean
kingdoms, and afterwards to Egypt and Syria, where they
were known to the Greeks as the Phcenicians,
are given in their official order. This last is cited by Mr. Brown in his
* Euphratean Stellar Researches,* p. 328, Proceediufys of the Society of Biblical
Archtcology^ Mayi893; Sayce, Hihbert Lecttirts for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49 note ;
Sayce, Assyrian Gramtnar Syllabary ^ Nos, 291, 331, 484.
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. note I.
* H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Altcn Aigypter^ pp. 2 1 7-2 19.
' Numbers xxvi. 42. ■* Genesis xlvi. 23.
ESSAY IV 357
The names and official order of the Lu-ma-si, their parent
stars, were i. Su-gi, ii. Ud-gudua, iii. Sib-zi-a-na, iv. Kak-shi-
8ha, V. En-te-na-mas-luv, vi. Ta-khu or Id-khu, vii.Pa-pil-sak.
The name of the first star, Su-gi, said by Dr. Sayce to be
called ' The Star of the Wain,' ^ means the Su, or creating
spirit-reed (g«)> ^^ *^ S*^ ^^ Shu, was originally the northern
khu, meaning bird, ' the reed of tlie bird,** the mother of life.
This, as the most northern constellation of the seven, must
be the Great Bear, consecrated to the goddess of night in
the original Northern myth of tlie twins Day and Night, and
worshipped by tlie Greeks as the bear-mother Artemis.
Su-gi must, therefore, be an additional name for the Bear to
that of * Bel-a-sar-sa,** Bel, the distributor of the waters, which
I have spoken of on p. 345. In both names the metaphor is
the same, for it is from the reeds at the source of the rivers,
their point of distribution, that the rivers are bom, and
of the two names, Su-gi must be the earliest, for the sons of
Kush, who were also the sons of the bird-mother, called
themselves the sons of the rivers, born from their mother-
mountain Ida. The second name, Bel-a-sar-sa, probably
l)ecame that of the Great Bear when the name of Su-gi was
transferred to Libra, which, as Mr. Brown proves, was called
8u-gi.^ They both denoted the star that led the year, and it
was the Great Bear who, as Su-gi, led the earliest year,
opening with the week of creation ; while Su-gi, as Libra,
marked the beginning of the later Semitic lunar year,
reckoned from the autumnal equinox ; and Su-gi, as Libra,
lay outside the earliest field of the creating star-gods. But
the mother- reeds of the primaeval mother-constellation hid
not only the nest of the bird-mother and the infant waters
of the parent rivers, but also the nest-egg, hiding and guard-
ing the spark of life, the infant fire-god Marichi, generated
by the father fire-god. These star-reeds were, according to
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49.
3 R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., *Euphratean Stellar Researches,' pp. 328-330,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology^ May 1893.
358 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
another metaphor, the cradle, the week of seven days, within
wliich the babe Kavad, the ancestor of the Kavi Kush, the
wise (kavi) kings of the tortoise race, was found by Uz-ava,
the goat-god, who watched the revolutions of the solar disc.
The river where the child was found is said in the Zenda-
vesta to be the sacred Haetumant, or Helmend, and the reeds
which hid it were those of the lake Kashava, the marsh
Zarah, into which the Helmend flows. But this birthplace
of the Kushite race was that assigned as its traditional home
by the allied tribes who made the mother-mountain of the
East, whence the Helmend rises, their mother-mountain.
It was not the original mother-land of the sons of the North,
who formed the northern contingent of the confederated sons
of the tortoise. They were the sons of the fire-god, the
husband of the mother-bird of the South, who infused into
the united nation the s{mrk of creating-fire, born of the fire-
stone in the Hindu sacred lotus, which made the men of
the tortoise-land, who became the sons of the rivers, living
and thinking souls, and gave them the gifts of imagination
and invention. These sons of fire traced their descent from
the northern fire-mountain, called in the Zendavesta Hu-
kairya, the active {kaht/a) begetting god (A?/), tlie range of
Mount Ararat, the western ram])arts of the plateau of Asia
Minor, wlierc the worship of the sacred fire, the myth of the
birth of the twins, and the adoration of the fatlier rain-god
originated. It was here, in the home of the fire-worsliippers,
that Mariclii, the spark of light of Hindu mythology, the
father of Kashyapa, and one of tlic tail stars of the Great
Bear, was born ; and it was the people of this land who made
the Great Bear their parent star. The scm of fire, born
from this star, was the Masu, or twin-leader of the fire-
worshipping host, and Masu tlie Assyrian equivalent of the
Hebrew Mosheh,^ our Moses, means the son of the gazelle,
or antelope (nias),^ It was lie who was the child found in
* Saycc, Hihhert lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 46.
- Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ No. 64.
ESSAY IV 369
the reeds symbolised in the name Su-gi, who was, according
to the story in Exodus, watched by his guardian nurse or
, sister.^
It was to this sister of the son of the fire-spark that the
second star of the series, Ud-gudua, was dedicated. She was
the virgin prophetess, the guardian sister of Moses, called
Miriam, meaning she who speaks boldly, the Greek Maria,^
who was in anotlier form of the legend, when her companion
was Barak, the lightning god, the speaking bee, Deborah,
and the nurse of Rebekah,^ and the maker of the mead or
Madhu, tlie inspiring drink of tlie Ashvins in the Rigveda.
As the star Ud-gudua, she was the constellation Virgo, the
mother-star of the Egyptians, consecrated to the goddess
(sailed Min or Khem, who gave her name to the land of
Egypt, called the land of Khem. Her temple at Thebes is
oriented to the rising of the star Spica a Virginis,* and
the name of this star, meaning the ear of corn of Virgo,
marks her as the goddess represented in the constellation
Demeter, the barley-mother ; and in Hindu astronomy this
Constellation is described by Varaha mihira as the virgin
girl (konyd) holding an ear of com in her hand.^ Virgo lies
immediately to the south-west of the tail of Leo, and was
Consecrated by the Akkadian astronomers to * the god of
the great city, the god Nergal,' the god of the great city of
the dead called Gudua, the cemetery of the Akkadian race,
V^here all their fathers were buried.® It was from this city
^hat the constellation took its name of Ud-gudua, or the
^ ^ Exodus ii. 4-8 ; xv. 20-2 1.
* Gesenius, TTiesaurus, s.v. * Miriam/ p. 819. He traces the Hebrew
name to the Greek Mapidfi, Map/a.
• Judges iv. 4 ff ; Gen. xxxv. 8.
* Norman Lockyer, * Astronomy and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians,*
I^ineieenih Century, July 1892, p. 47.
' Sachau*8 Alberuni's India^ vol. i. chap. xix. p. 216.
• R. Brown, jun. , F. S. A. , * Tablet of the Thirty Stars, * Star xv. Proceedings
of the Society of Biblical Archteologyy 1890; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887,
Lect. iii. p. 194 ii.
360 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sun (ud) of Gudua. It was the attendant of the sun of the
south and west, the sun of the dead fathers, the twin
goddess of the primaeval day, as the bear-mother was the
goddess of its night ; she was the mother-day of the races of
the south, the sons of the virgin mother- earth, and occupied,
among these races wlio worshipped the mother, the same
position as that given by the patriarclial tribes to the child-
less sun-god Apollo, whom they substituted for the protect-
ing mother, and called him Apollo, meaning the defender.
The change was similar to that which changed the mother-
goddess Sar, the cloud-mother, into the Hindu male god
Hari. The name Ud-gudua was by the later astronomers,
who used the stars to mark the circuits made by the moon
and sun, transferred to the constellation Sagittarius, the
archer,^ but the original Sagittaria was the hunting moon-
goddess Artemis, the bear and boar-mother, who, when she
accompanied her sons, the barley-growers, in the emigrations
from Asia Minor to south, east, and west, became the
goddess worshipped at Elis and Olympia as Artemis
Elaphia {eka<f>ia\ the deer-goddess/- This land of Elis,
the Greek Peloponnesus, was one of the countries in which
the father-gods were the heavenly twins, the Indian Ashvins,
the twin stars Castor and Polu-deukes {Pollux)^ and it was
also consecrated to the fish-mother, the constellation Argo,
and to Argus, the watch-dog, the star Sirius, de])icted on
Euphratcan boundary stones as standing on its hind legs to
welcome its master.'^ Tliis master is Odusseus, the wander-
ing sun-god, who bore the bow of Eurytion, the rainbow-
god, and who was thus the god called in the Rigveda Napat
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Euphratcan Stellar Researches,* p. 332, Pro*
ctedittgs of the Society of Biblical Ar clue 0 1 o^i^'. May 1 893, where an extract
from a Euphratean Planisphere, in which Ud- Gudua is said to be Sagittarius,
is quoted.
- Encyclopirdia Britaniticay 9th edition, vol. ii. p. 643, Art. * Artemis.'
^ This position proves that it was the heliacal and not the cosmical rising
of Sirius that marked the beginning of the year. It showed that it was well
above the horizon before the sun rose.
ESSAY IV 361
Apain, the son of the waters, the Latin Neptunus, the sun-
god of the sea, who was greeted on his return at the close of
his year'*s wanderings by the faithful watch-dog who had
mourned his departure. It was to greet this return and the
resurrection of the young son and the reborn watch-dog,
that the Olympian games, beginning every fourth year at the
first new moon after the summer solstice, were celebrated.
This deer-goddess of the land ruled by the immigrant sons
of the twins, the Turanian Hittites, who have, as I show in
Essay i;, left unmistakable evidence of their occupation of
the country in the changes made in its language, was the
virgin-mother Demeter or Vesta, the hearth-goddess of the
vestal virgins, who, as we know from the ritual of the Latin
races, who were also sons of the twins, lit and attended the
sacred home-fire of the nation, the vital spark Marichi, just
as the Finn house-mother tended the flame of the joula^ or
house-fire at the annual festival of its birth at the winter
Solstice,^ tbe season consecrated to tlie constellation Virgo.
It was she, the goddess of the winter sun of the South, who
tended the young fire-god, who was to be the sun of the
eoming summer, the deer-god Mariclii, and she, the mother,
the nurse of the national hearth-fire, had, like her Egjrptian
C!Ounterpart Nebt-hat, meaning the mistress (nebt) of the
house {hat\ who also ruled the sun of the south, no children
«f her own. It was she who as the virgin-prophetess of the
Hebrew sons of Dan, watched over the young leader, the
son of fire, the Masu or Moses, the son of the antelope.
And it was the sons of Dan who made Jonathan, the son of
Gei'shom, the son of Moses or Manasseh, the eldest son of
Joseph, the original Asipu, or divine interpreter, their priest.
It was these worshippers of the Ashera, or phallic rain-pole,
the image set up by Jonathan, and that destroyed by Gideon,
another Manassite, who were the sons of Levi, called Ger-
shom, the outcasts, who were the offerers of burnt-offerings,
who preceded the Kohathites, the worshippers of the EphotI,
^ Lenormant, Chahiaan Magic, chap. xvi. p. 249.
im THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
adored after Gideon'^s reformation,^ the priests of the age of
the prophetic oracle.
The third star Sib-zi-a-na, the shepherd (sib) of the h'fe
(zi) of tlie god (an) prince (na\ tlie guardian of the young
sun-god after he has attained manhood, has been identified
by Dr. Sayce and Mr. Brown with Arcturus in Bootes, the
constellation of the Herdsman.- This constellation repre-
sents the guardian god, the Laksh-man, or god of the
boundaries {laksJia\ who in tlie Hindu legend attends Rama
and Situ. He, who became the Arab Lokman, guards the
heavenly field with whicli the mother-stars of the Great
Bear and the star-sheep of which he has charge revolve
round the pole. He is the god Saiv of the Ural Altaic
Finns, meaning the protecting god, an epithet of the deity,
wliich is, according to Castren, common to all the Ural Altaic
tribes.^ He is also tlie Hindu shepherd god Sib or Shiva,
and the father-god of the Semitic race, who called themselves
the sons of Sheva or Sheba, the seven gods. It was his
oracles which were spoken by the Ephod or Aaron, tlie male-
prophet, the receptacle of the voice of god, who conveys to
men the messiiges of the Almighty, and sees that they do
not stray from the heavenly fold. He is the goat-herd god,
the god Uz, who, in Akkadian Jistronomy, watches the solar-
disc, and it is he who, as leader of the flock, bears the royal
sceptre, the goat-headed staff, carried, in Egyptian pictorial
mythology, by Osiris, who was the Mendesian goat before
he was the moon-god, and it is as the god bearing the goat-
headed sceptre that he is depicted in the ancient illustrations
to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which tells of the ordeals
passed through in the other world by Ani, the sacred scribe
^ Judges xviii. 30, 31, vi. 26, viii. 27.
'^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Euphratean Stellar Researches,' pp. 323, 328,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archtcology^ May 1893 ; Sayce, Assyrian
Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 4, 27, 80, 237.
' Castren, quoted by Mr. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Etruscan Inscriptions of
Lemnos,* p. 14, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology, April 1888,
says Saiv is among the Finns an * allgemeines Cotter epithet.*
ESSAY IV 363
of tlie revenues of the gods of Thebes, and Tutu, his wife,
before they reached the Elysian fields.^ These three stars,
as we have now seen, were all guardian gods, watching the
growth of the young sun, which ripens the barley ear carried
by the goddess Virgo, and they must, therefore, represent
the three seasons of the early Hittite year. This conclusion
is confirmed by the position assigned to Virgo, the winter
sun, the virgin-goddess of day, she is the second of the three
gods, and, therefore, the second season of a year beginning
with the autumnal equinox. This arrangement showed that
the barley-growing races of Syria, who began their year at
this season, as the Jews still do, desired, like their Southeni
bretliren, the sons of the tree and the village grove, who had
founded village life in their land, to look on the year at its
birth as sacred to the winter sun of the South, — the sun
which ruled the earlier year beginning with the appearance
above the horizon of the Pleiades in November. They, in
making the sun-god, and not the Pleiades, the ruler of the
year, still divided it into periods of six months, each extend-
ing, not from November to April and April to November, as
in the Pleiades year, but from the autumnal to the vernal
and the vernal to the autumnal equinox, and these they
regarded as formed of three portions allotted to the sowing,
growing, and flowering and reaping of the crops. This was
the year ruled by the Egyptian gods Nebt-hat {nepthys\ the
mistress {nebt) of the house {hat\ who wore the white or
virgin crown of the South, and ruled the six months sacred
to the Southern sun with Set,^ who before he got this name,
which means *the vanquished {st) god,** was the ape-god
Kapi, the wind and tree god of the Dravidian races, who
^ The Ani Papyrus in Ihe British Museum is certainly as old as the i8th
Dynasty or 1800 B.C. , for it was in one of the tombs of that age it was found.
But the Book of the Dead which it illustrates, and which doubtless it preceded,
before Syllabic Hieroglyphics were known, is as old as the oldest monuments
in Egypt. It is quoted in inscriptions under all the dynasties who have left
any.
- H. Brugscb, Religion uttd Mythologie dcr AUen ^Egypter^ p. 462.
864 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
became in Egypt Hapi, tlie Nile-god and tlie bull Apis.
Also these three seasons ruled by the male shepherd-god,
and the two mothers, the bear-mother of the dark Norths
whose child is the fire-spark, and Virgo, the virgin-mother
of the South, the tree-mother of the village grove and the
corn-mother, are another form of the historico-chronological
myth of Lamech or Linga, the father-god, and his two wives,
Edu, the darkness, and Tsil-lu, the motlier of the snake
(tsir) race (lu). It was these three seasons of the year who
watched the growth of the young year of the twin races, the
spark of light, Marichi, who, as we leani from tlie story of
his death in the Ramayana, was slain by Rama as a deer
before he was raised to heaven as a star, and it was when
he became one of the stars of tlie Great Bear that he
became the father-star of the sons of the antelope. It
was the year of the sons of the antelope which was that
watched by the three Ribhus of the Rigveda, who had, in
the progress of evolutionary theology, been changed from
being the fathers and mothers of the year to be its Ribhus
or artificers. It was they who made the cups, indicating the
seasons from which the regenerating Soma, the heavenly
rain, was distilled at the appointed seasons on the earth.
It was the eldest of these heavenly workmen, Vaja, * the
strong craftsman," who said, ' Let us make two" cups, the two
seasons of the year of the Pleiades ; the second, Ribhuksas,
the ruler (kshd) of the Ribhus, the workman of the rain-god^
said, *Let us make three ;** and the third, Vibhvan, the master-
smith, whose skill was manifest {vibhu\ the artist of Varuna^
the god both of the rain {var) and of the starry heaven, said
' We will make four.* ^ The sons of the antelope, for whom
the four season cups were made, were originally born from
the primaeval bear, the mother-stars, which were changed by
the new generation into the seven Rishi or male ante-
lopes {rhhya), of whom Marichi was one. It was they
who made Terah, the antelope, the son of Xahor, the river
1 Rigveda, iv. 33, 5, 9.
ESSAY IV 365
Euphrates, the father of their great ancestor Ab-ram, the
father (ab) Ram. In this name Terah we find the Hittite root
Tar, which means * a goat,' ^ and this brings us again back
to Esau, the goat-god, the Uz-ava of the Zend story of the
origin of the Kushite race, who married, like ancient divine
fathers of mixed races, two Hittite wives,* before he married
an Arab-Semite wife,^ the mother of the fourth season. He
was, in short, the Hittite goat-god, the mountain-goat of
Asia Minor, the father goat-herd, who watches the weekly
revolution of the pole and the solar disc, to count the months
of the gestation of his flocks. It was as the god of the
Euphratean Delta, who married an Arab wife, the daughter
of the date-palm, that he became the god la of the Akkadians,
called Dara, the antelope, who, as the son of the mother
water-spring Dhari, who supplied the water of life to the
world in the seasonal cups, became the god of the house (/)
of the waters (5).
In the interchange of initial letters between the names of
the Hindu mother-goddess of the springs (dhdrl), the Akka-
dian Dara, the Hittite Tar, and the Hebrew Terah, we have
a striking instance of the historical value of philology. For
in this list of allied names, Dhari, beginning with the aspir-
ated d of the Northern sons of the bull, is the oldest ; and
the changes tell us that it was among these pastoral tribes,
who fed their cattle on the lower hills, that the goddess-
mother of the springs was first worshipped as a parent-god.
It was she who, when the barley-growing races descended
into the river plains of Northern India and the Euphratean
countries, became ' Dara, the antelope,' wlio grazed on the
fertile highlands out of the reach of river inundation, which
were those best suited for the growth of corn. But the
antelope father had also another parent than tlie mother-
goddess of the springs, for he was the son of the Hittite
' Major R. C. Conder, * Notes on the Hittite Writing,* y<?«r«<z/ of the
Royal Asiatic Society^ Oct. 1893, P* 835. Syllabary, Plate 8, No. 99.
- Gen. xxvi, 34, ' Gen. xxviii. 9.
366 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
or Turanian goat-god, the god of the race who, as cattle-
breeders, found it necessary to count the weeks and months
of gestation. As the Akkadian Finns changed the original
dh into a (f, so did these Turanian counters of the months,
when they gave the name of the water-mother to the father-
goat, change it into a ^, and in this process of interchange
the original goddess-mother becomes the father-god, and the
whole process shows that the races among whom this theology
grew up were a very mixed stock, uniting the dark Southern
Dravidians or Australioids, the matriarchal tribes, the white
Northera sons of the bull and Finns, and the yellow Mongol
Hittites or Turanians, who looked on the father and mother
as rulei*s of the house. It was these people who made M^u,
the son of the antelope or gazelle {mas\ their leader, who
ate the pig and antelope in Egypt as their parent-gods at
the annual feast held in honour of the father-god of life, the
Mendesian goat, Osiris, on the 15th Pachon,^ answering to
our March-April, and corresponding with the Gond and
Hindu festivals in April to the rain and plough-god, the
Nagur, and with that of our St. George. These sons of the
plough, as they went down the Euphrates valley, learnt from
the antelopes where to find the best corn-growing land,
called in the desert phraseology of Syria Baal, or god^s land ;
and it was these animals whom they found in possession of
this sacred land who became their totemistic fathers. It was
the sons of the antelope-father of the god Ram, son of the
mother Kaushaloya, the house of Kush, the father of Ab-ram,
who, in Northern India, called *the land where the black
antelope naturally roams'* the holy mother-land, the Kuru-
kshethra, the field {kshethra) of the Kurus,- the sons of the
tortoise {kur or hush). They also made the divine ante-
lope, Terah, their parent-god in the land of his father,
Nahor, the river Euphrates. In India he became the father
of the Brahmins, whose sacrificial dress was the skin of the
^ 11. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien .'Kgypter, p. 462.
^ Biihler, Manuy ii. 19-23; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp. 32, 33.
ESSAY IV 367
black antelope, and it was on the skin of the black antelope
that the sacred Soma, the god Su, was laid before he was
placed on the tln*one made of the wood representing in India
the mother fig-tree of Syria, the Udumbara {Ficus glome-
rata).^ It was when clothed in the skin of the black ante-
lope, called the Jarayu, or afterbirth, that the neophyte,
who aspired to oflTer the Soma sacrifice, entered as an unborn
embryo into the bath of regeneration (dlksha)^ which all
who were admitted into the ranks of * twice- born ** sacrificers
were obliged by the ritual to take.^ It was on his emergence
as a new-bom disciple, who was cleansed from his sins and
re-bom to a holy life, that he received from the Adhvaryu,
the chief ceremonial priest, as a sign of his reception into
the * twice-born' fraternity, the staff of Udumbara wood,^
given to students of the Vaishya, or trading castes.*
It was these trading races of South- western Asia who made
AVestem India and the Persian Gulf the maritime head-
<juarters of their trade in the Indian Ocean, who first made
the gods of heaven, the sun, and the stars their parent-gods,
instead of the winds and clouds, the rulers of the earlier
parent-seasons of the North. The story of this religious
reformation is given in the myth of the Mahabharata, which
tells how Pandu, the sexless sun-god of the fair (pandu)
races, became impotent after killing the deer or antelope;
and from this we learn that the sons of the antelope and
tortoise were, with the one exception of the sons of the fish-
god, of whom I will speak presently, the last ruling national
confederacy in the civilised world, who called themselves the
^ Eggeling, Sea, Brah, iii. 3, 4, 26; iii. 3, 3, 4, i; S.B.E. vol. xxvi.
pp. 75» 84.
^ This is the ritual prescribed in the Aitareya Brahmana, translated by
Max MUller, History of Sanskrit LiteraturCy p. 365 ff. The Satapatha
Brahmai^a, in its account of the Dikshanlya, prescribes, besides the bath, a
long series of ceremonies connected with the two skins of the black antelope
on which the neophyte was to seat himself when declaring himself an embryo.
Eggeling, .5V?/. i?rJ^. iii. 1,2, 10-21 ; iii. 2, i, 1-30; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 8-1 1,
25-33- ' Eggeling, Sat, Brah, iii. 2, I, 33; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 34.
* BUhler, Apastamba^ i. i, 2, 3, 8 ; S.B.E. vol. ii. p. 9.
868 THE RULING RACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
sons of totemistic fathers. It was with them that Totemism
died, when Prithu, the wife of Pandu, the conceiving (peru)
mother-earth, the mother-land of the Parthians, the star
and Naga worshippers of Elam and Central Asia, made the
gods of heaven the fathers of her and her co-wife Madrfs
sons. It was tliese Northern races, the cliildren of the sun
(Pandu), who united themselves with the twin races, the
sons of the twin Ashvins, the yellow Hittites. These last
were among the five Pandavas, the twin brothers, Saha-deva,
the driving (saha) god (rftrra), the fire-god, and Nakala, the
ichneumon lizard or mun-goose, the alligator-god, the repre-
sentatives of the fire-worshipping Maghadas, sons of Mug-gur^
the alligator, who was in Indian mythology the killer of th&
matriarchal snake-gods. They appear in stellar myths as
the constellation of the sacred Makara, or Simsu-mara, the
alligator, the fourteen stars encircling the pole, the fourteen
days marking the phases of the moon, which I have described
in Essay iii., which included the twin-stars, Gemini, as the
hands which turned tlie pole. The five united Pandavas
succeeded the Kauravya, the sons of the mother-bird, and
the fire-worshipping sons of the Ashvins and MadrT. She
was the mother inspired by the Northern mead (madhu),
drunk by the Ashvins, in the Rigveda, as the sacred Soma,
and brewed by the gardening Hittites. She was the daughter
of Shaliya, the son of the Sal (shal) tree, whose capital was
Sakala, sacred to the earlier rain-god, Suk-ra. Shaliya was
the king of the land still called Madra-desh, south of the
Chenab, and his subjects, called Kathan by Arrian, are the
tribe now called in the Punjab the Kathi.^ Their name is
precisely the same as that of Khati, the Assyrian name for
the Hittites, and it was these Kathi who gave their name
to Kathi-a-war. The race of the Pandavas, whose father-
gods ruled the lieavens, made the five-rayed star of the
Egyptians, Cypriotes, and Hittites )!(, the sign for God,
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of Indian pp. 185, 216 ; Arrian, Ana-
basis ^ lib. V. 1. 22.
ESSAY IV 869
called by tlie Cypriotes and Hittites I.^ I means the house
or ancestral home, and the god I became the I-a, or house of
the waters (a) of the Akkeuiians, and the god called Ish-ana
by the Hindus. Ish-ana is, in the Hindu ritualistic lists, the
last and most sacred of the names of Rudra, the fire-god, the
fire-drill, sacrificial stake, and tlie red (nid) storm-god, called
the son of Praja-pati.*^ The name Ish-ana, the god (ana)
Ish, shows clearly that the I was originally Ish, and that
Ish-ana was Ish-tar, the daugliter (tar) of Is or Ish, the
mountain, the mother of life in the Northern mythology,
who ivas both a Hittite and Akkadian goddess. Isli-ilna is
thus the mountain-goddess, also called Durga, the mountain,
who was horn on the same day and as the twin-sister of
Krishna, meaning 'the black,^ whose name is used in the
liigveda to denote * the black antelope/ ^ Thus we see that
the Panda va union signified the alliance between the Hittite
ss^oiis of the mountain and the sons of the ' black antelope/
XVora this was formed the race of the Malli, or mountaineers,
"vrhose name, as I show in Essay iii., still survives as a power-
ful ruling tribe throughout the length and breadth of India.
They were the united tribes of the Yadeva, the people whose
Iriglit god (deva) is Ya, and the Tur-vasu, whose healing
^od (vasu) is the Tur, or pole, who together worsliipped the
sexless sun-god Ram.
It was this year ' of the black antelope,** the year of the
* Major R. C. Conder, * Notes on the Hittite Writing,' Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society^ Oct. 1893 ; * Hittite Syllabar)', plate p. 6, No. 3.
- Sat. Brdh, vi. I, 3, 7, quoted in Muir's Original Sanskrit Texts ^ vol. iv.
pp. 339 ff. Oldenberg, Ashval Grihya St',' 7, iv. 8 ; Paras Grihya Sutra y
iii. 8, 6; S.B.E. voL xxix. pp. 255, 352. In the last two quotations these
names of Rudra appear in the ritual, of the sacrifice of the spit, or roasted
ox, a sacrifice of the days of the Afigiras, or sons of charcoal {jangd)^ the
priests who offered the living victims sacrificed to the Ashvins. The Ailgiras
were the Gershom or outcast priests of the Jews, superseded by the Kohathites.
Ish-ana is called in the ScU. Brdh, Aditya, or the beginning [adi) god. In
this list it is in the eighth place, that of the heavenly fire-god ; in the
Ashval Grihya Sutra in the twelfth, that of the sun-god of the solar year ;
and in the Paras Grihya Sutra in the ninth, the place of the gods of heaven.
^ Rigveda, x. 94, 5. See Grassmann, s.v. * Krishna.*
24
370 THE RULING RxVCES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
four cups, made by the Ribhus, which grew up under the
fostering care of the three mother-seasons, represented by
the three first stars of the ' Lumasi/ It showed, as I shall
now go on to prove, by adding a fourth season sacred to the
fire-god of the burning summer, that the united confederacy
had, when the year was calculated, reached the lands of the
Persian Gulf and North-western India, where the rains of the
rainy season were, as they believed, generated by the intense
heat caused by the ceaseless friction of the pole. It was in
this country of torrid summers that the year and the rains
began with the heliacal rising of Sirius.
This was the fourth star of the ' Lumasi,** called Kak-shi-
sha, the creating-mother or door, the horn (shi) star (^Aa),
and, as I have shown in the beginning of this Essay, the
triangular Akkadian sign denoting Kak, ^, proves that
the year beginning with Sirius, the door, was one succeeding
that of the three mother-seasons.
The name of the fifth star, En-te-na-mas-luv, ruling the
second season of the new year, proves most indubitably that
the people who framed the year were the sons ' of the black
antelope,** for it means the divine (ni) foundation (fe) of the
prince (?ia) of the black (liiv) antelope (maJi)} There can
be no doubt that this constellation was, by those who named
it, looked on as the mother-star of the sons of ' the black
antelope.** They were the Naga or ploughing race, sons of the
mother, the cloud-snake, the mother-goddess of the springs
{dhdri\ the goddess Dharti of tlie Dravidian and Kolarian
tribes, who is worshipped by all Hindus at the Niig-panchami,
or festival of the five {punch) Niigs, in August. This con-
stellation governed the autumn season when the severity of
the rains is beginning to relax, and an Akkadian list of names
connected with animals gives further proof that tlie black
antelope and the rains, which made the grass on which it
fed to grow, were closely united in Akkadian mythology.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 27, 64, 96, 327, 374.
ESSAY IV 371
In this list the name Sakh-mas-Iuv means the prince {saJch\
the black (luv) antelope (mas)^ and the ideogram of the word
^aJch begins with the sign of the rain-god, which also began
Suk-us, the Akkadian name of Istar, which means, as I have
shown in Essay in., the wet {suk) goddess. This name, Sakh-
mas-luv, is translated in the Assyrian paraphrase of the
Akkadian text by the word Ap-par-ru-u, meaning the water
{ap) sun (par)y overseeing {ru) the abyss (u or hu)^^ or void,
in which life was born. This translation clearly proves that
* the prince, the black antelope,' and the sun ruling the rainy
season, which gave fresh life to the earth, were identical.
The word Ap-par-ru-u is connected by Delitzsch, with the
Hebrew Opher, meaning a gazelle or antelope.^ We thus
learn that in ancient Akkadian and Assyrian mythology the
sacred black antelope of the Hindus was the symbol of the
Spirit of God, the dawning light created by his word, which
tiioved on the face of the abyss, the primaeval waters of the
story of the creation ; * and the name Opher for the gazelle
Or antelope, gives strong proof that Ophir, the Hebrew name
/or North-western India, meant *the land of the black
«i,ntelope,' a name still given to it by Brahmin geographers.
It was this constellation *of tlie mother of the black ante-
lope' wliich ruled the season of the Indian rains, when
^Krishna the black antelope, and Dur-ga, the mother-moun-
train (Ish-ana or Is-tar), were bom, and it is that called
Hydra, the great water-snake, the star of the great Naga-
mn other.
The sixth star, Ta-khu or Id-khu, the latter meaning the
"Creating (id) mother-bird {khu\ governs the winter season,
in which the mother-bird hatched the world's egg, from
>vhich the young sun-god was born at the winter solstice.
* Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary yl^os. 64, 102, 374.
* Ibid, Nos. 22, 167, 226, 402.
* R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars,*
Star xxi. Proceedings of the Society 0/ Biblical Archceology, Feb. 1890.
* Gen. i. !•
I
372 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
It is identified by Mr. Brown with Aquila, the eagle, also
called Nun-ki, or the seat (ki) of Nun,^ the spirit-father, tlie
fish -god, and as the twenty-ninth star of the circle of
thirty stars marking the course of the moon through the
heavens, which I shall discuss presently.^ There is ap-
parently no doubt that in later astronomy, which deals with
the stars which mark the circuits made by the sun and moon
through the heavens, this identification is correct. But this
method of astronomical calculation and the deification of
the constellation and bird, the sun-eagle, consecrated in the
metaphysical theology of the Nun, belongs to a later age
than the realistic epoch of the conception of the * Lumasi ** or
seven parent stars, which were stationary, except in their
revolutions with the pole. The mother-bird of the Nagas,
who ascribed the origin of life to the darkness and 'the
water-sun ** was, as I have sliown, represented by the con-
stellation Corvus. The seventh star, ' Pa-pil-sak,' meaning
the sceptre (pa), the great (sak) fire (ptl) is, as I have shown
in p. 343, the constellation Leo, representing the spring-
time culminating in the great heat of the hot season, the
generator of the rains. This constellation I^o was the
parent-star of the sons of the wild cow, the Hebrew mother
Leah, the Gautama, or sons of the bull (ffud) in Hindu
mythology, the offspring of the plough-god Ra-ma, the
Northern sun-god Ra, who was first the husband of the storm-
goddess Sar-a, or of Sitii, the furrow, and afterwards of SitH
the crescent- moon and the mother-mountain, who gave birth
to the rivers and their sons, the sons of the tortoise.
It was these sons of the wild bull, the moon-lion of the
united sun and moon-god Ra-ma- Chandra, who realised that
the divine law ruled the world, both morally and physically,
and who placed among the birth constellations and the
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary^ Nos. 73, 301.
-' R. Brown, jun., * Euphratean Stellar Researches,* p. 328 ; * Remarks on
the Tablet of the Thirty Stars,' Part i. § iii. Star xxix. Proceedings of the
Society of Biblical ArcfuToIogyy ]vi.i{. 1 890, May 1893.
ESSAY IV 373
seasons, that especially dedicated to the Cup of Life, wliich
the Ribhus, or divine artificers, made the constellation
Krater. This represented first the Northern spring in the
days when it was the magic cup of the witch-mother Maga,
and afterwards the dry autumn of Northern India following
tlie rains which filled it, and this and the rainy season are, as
I show in Essay iii., the two seasons added by the twin
races. Tiiis last was the season sacred to the barley-growers
which preceded the winter ; and it was in it that the
heavenly Kantharus, or Bacchic cup, turned the creating
water into the wine made from the grapes brought from
Armenia by the Assyrians, who called tlie vine ^ges-din* or
the tree of life. This constellation represented, as I have
shown, the wine or life-blood of the author of life, distilled
on earth as the holy Soma or heavenly sap which reproduces
annually the recurrent miracles of death, birtli, growth,
blossoming, and the ripening of tlie seed.
We thus find that the parent constellations of the race
who traced life to the vine, were eight in number — (1) The
Great Bear, (2) Virgo, (3) Bootes, (4) Canis Major, (6)
Hydra, (6) Corvus, (7) Leo, (8) Krater ; and these constel-
lations, like tlie Hindu ritual, show us that in the final
mythology of the united Kushite race its history was
divided into two epochs, that of the three mother-seasons of
^Vsia Minor, the Upasads of the Soma sacrifice and the
three Ribhus of the Rigveda, and that of the five seasons
of the Hindu year worshipped at the monthly sacrifices to
the moon. These eiglit constellations were apparently the
eight * Anunage' or spirits of earth of the Akkadians, who
were judged by Samas, the sun, the father-judge Danu, and
worshipped by them as the eight lords of the world. ^
They, or rather the seasons they represented, were the eight
fiacrificial Agni of the Hindus, and it is from tliese eight
gods, originally divided into the three and five season-gods,
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 141 note I, and 183
Hole I.
374 THE RULING RACES OP PREHISTORIC TIMES
that the sacred number eight, the number of the fire-god
Agni in the ancient ritual, was derived.
We also learn from this review that the national history
told in these astronomical myths agreed with that given in
the Kushite ritual and pictorial mythology, and that the
two Ashes {eper) which united as the tribe of Ephraim to
worship Nun, the fish-god, and form the great conquering
Semite confederacy which succeeded the Kushites as rulers
of the world were, as I have shown in Essay v., the Western
races who divided the year into three seasons, and called
themselves the sons of the father-goat and antelope; and
the Eastern races who reckoned five seasons in the year, and
made the rain-god, the great Naga, their parent-goA
But in the early astronomy of the worshippers of tlie
fixed stars which circled round the pole, and indicated by
their rising, culminating and setting the seasons of the year,
the planets or wandering stars had no place ; and the sun
was only recognised as the ruling god of day, who travelled
in the year-boat a southerly course, from east to west, and
afterwards a nortlierly course, back again from west to east ;
while the moon measured time by her bi-monthly phases.
The value of the wandering or circling stars was, as I show
in Essay in., not recognised till a literary class arose who
kept a record of astronomical observations, and also found
out that the orbital motions of the moon and sun gave more
accurate measurements of time than could be deduced from
the fixed stars. These new astronomers were, as I show in
Essay v., the race of tlie Yakshas, the sons of Jokshan or
Joktan, in Genesis, the observers of the moving (i/aJcsh)
stars, who called themselves Ya-deva, or the people whose
bright star-god {devd) was Ya, tlie god Riima-Chandra, the
lord both of the sun Ra and the moon Chandra, the god
who ordained the patlis in which the travelling stars, his
angelic messengers, should go. He was by the Hindus
called Pra-dyumna, meaning the ' foremost bright one,' the
son of Krishna, the black antelope, and Rukmini, meaning
ESSAY IV 375
the shining goddess, the moon, that is, the son of the water-
sun and the moon. His cognisance was the Makara,^ the
mammalian dolphin or porpoise of the Ganges. He was the
Nun, meaning the fish in Hebrew, who was the god of the
meridian pole of the Akkadians, the supreme god of the
Akkadians, Egyptians, and Jews; and as the god of life,
whose symbol was the fish, he was, as Alberuni tells, looked
on as the pole of the Hindus as well as the Akkadians,^ and
was thought by the Hindus to revolve once a day. The
conception in which these apparently incongruous ideas of
the especially bright father-god, who ruled the pole and
the fish, were made to meet in harmony, was apparently as
follows: — The pole which by its revolutions produced the
burning heat of the Northern Indian summer must, as it
seemed to these early observers, have a great store of fire
and heat to distribute as the cause of these effects. This
ineffable brightness, which supplied to the pole the heat
which made the seeds of life germinate and grow, was the
father fire-god, whose aspect was so dazzling that no mortal
could look on him and live. Hence he was concealed in the
innermost shrine of the heavens and hidden from sight by
the moist and misty atmosphere, the mother of the waters,
which made even the clearest sky blue. It was there that
the spirit-father lived enshrined in the life-giving water
which had in it the seeds of life, the maternal germs. It
was these which moved in the great Southern ocean as the
spirit of life enclosed in the mammalian fish, the dolphin,
the fish -mother, the original mother of the human race,
who, on leaving the water for the land, became the first
mother of men and thinking beings, and as the mother of
thought she was the mother of the Supreme Thinker, who
was, therefore, her son, the fish-god, who had been trans-
lated to heaven and made the superlatively bright star, the
maker of fire, who was hidden in the inmost Holy of Holies.
^ Mahabharata Anushasana {Anushasinika) Parva, xi. 3, p. 41.
- Sachau's Alberuni's, India^ vol. ii. chap. Ivi. p. 82.
376 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
It was the stars that shone through the curtains of the
heavenly tent that gave men some scintillations of the
great glory of the unseen God ; and it was the travelling
stars, the sun, moon, and planets who reflected his bright-
ness, and were the angel-messengers who revealed to men
his heavenly laws. He was the supremely wise god, wor-
shipped by the Assyrians as Sala-manu, the fish, and as the
god As-s6r, and his mythological descent in India I have
described in Essay iii. Among the Jews he was, in the
theological myth which has been transferred to King Solo-
mon, the son of the Hittite mother Bath-sheba, meaning
the seven {sheba) measures (bath), the god who Iiad been
evolved by thought from the seven days of the week, the
measuring rod, by which men first counted the lapse of
time. It was in remembrance of the fish-motlier that all
who souglit especially for wisdom and sanctity ate fish ;
and it was from the toteniistic idea of obtaining these
virtues by partaking of the flesh of the great mother on the
day sacred to her that fish was eaten on Friday ; and it was
this belief that was the cause of fish appearing among the
elements in the earlv Eucharist.^ The sacred feast on the
fish was precisely analogous to that of the Jewish Passover,
when the father lamb was eaten.-
It was these sons of the fish-god who began, when observing
the paths of the moon and sun, but especially of the moon, to
note the stars which marked the course of their circuits round
the heavens ; and it was by these observations that they fixed
the Nagskhetra or Nag-stars of the field circled by the moon
in her monthly journeys, each of her positions on the twenty-
eight days of her course being indicated by a star which
lay near her place on the day to which it was assigned. It
was in this way they calculated the months of the lunar
year of tlie Semites. But the year of thirteen lunar months,
as finally arranged by the astrononiei-s, was a combined
' Dean Stanley, ChHstiatt Institutions^ chap. iii. *The Fish,' pp. 50-52.
-' Exodus xii. 5.
ESSAY IV 377
lunar and solar year, calculated before the solar year of the
signs of the Zodiac was computed, and the history of this
year gives us most valuable historical information about
these Kushite-Semite astronomers. In measuring it, they
used the circle of the thirty stars; the stars in it have
been identified by Mr. Brown, and the first of them is in
Aquarius, and the thirtieth in Capricomus, which is called
the star of the Akkadian Makhar, or dolphin, the Hindu
Makara, and, therefore, the constellation sacred to the
supreme fish-god. This constellation has always been tradi-
tionally represented by a goat with a fish'^s tail. It repre-
sents tlie. two father-gods of astronomical history, the first
goat- shepherd god who watched the revolutions of the
Great B«ar, the visible sign of the pole in heaven, turned
by the twin-gods Day and Night, the stars Gemini ; and
secondly, the fish-god, the god of the pole of those astro-
nomers who measured the circuits of the travelling stars.
This name, the Makliara, originally meant the alligator
Mug-gur, and the star of the alligator used to be the four-
teen stars circling the pole in the earlier astronomy, the
earliest form of the constellation Draco; but its functions
as the supreme measurer of lunar time, the fourteen days of
her phases, were transferred to Capricomus, the star which
closed the lunar circle, and which, as I shall show presently,
plunged into the regenerating bath filled by Aquarius, the
water-pourer, the sun-god, tis the goat or antelope-god, to
emerge as the * twice-born "* fish-god, just as those of Su-gi
and Ud-gudua were transferred from the Great Bear and
Virgo to Libra and Sagittarius.
The Thirty Stars were, according to Diodorus,^ called in
Akkadian chronography the Divinities of the Council
(iSovXaioi 6eoi\ who watched over the measurement of time,
calculated by the monthly course of the sun through the
signs of the Zodiac. They were assisted by the twenty-four
stars, called by them Dikasts or judges, the Akkadian Danu,
^ DiodoruSf ii. 2a
378 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
twelve Northern and twelve Southern stars, who each rule
halt'-a- month, indicated by the lunar phases. This scheme
of tiine-measui-emeiit is, as Mr. Browii shows in his ' Remarks
on the Tablet of tiie Thirty Stars,' a combination of the two
distinct systems of the lunar and solar year. That the lunar
year preceded the solar is distinctly proved by the statements
made in a bi-lingual Akkadian and Assyrian text. The
Akkadian original says that certain spirits hold their office
' in the watch of the thirty stars,' while in the Assyrian
paraphrase tliey are said to belong 'to the watch of the
signs of tlie Zodiac' * That the stars measured lunar time
is proved by the statement made in lines 54-56 of the Tablet
by the Assyrian copyist and verifier of tlie earlier Akkadian
observations, that by the thirty stars the course of the
moon for three months could be traced. These months
were the Semitic months Kislev, Tebet, and SebeL* These
thirty stars appear also in the Rigveda, where it is said
that ' the spotted bull (the Great Bear) has settled down in
heaven before its father and its mother,' that 'its mother
(the moon -goddess) moves along tlie luminous spheres (the
stars) breathing forth his (the fat I ler-sun's) breath,' while 'he
(the father), the mighty bull (the sun), who has illumined
the sky, rules over the thirty stations, that is, the thirty
stars, " the luminous spheres " of the former line, which
mark the path of the moon.' ^ This hynni is said to have
' R. Brown, jur., ' Remarks on the Taiilet of the Thirty Slats,' /Vw^dfiwi-j
ef Ihe S<Kiily oj Biblifal Ar{k,rolBgy\ January 1890, S '-1 p- 2 of the paper.
' Ibid. February 1890.
^ Rigvcda, X. 189, as translated in Eggeling's ^aJ. Btdk. iL i, 4, 39;
S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 301, 303, In this hymn 'the spotted bull,' the niler of
the stars, is (lilTurent ftum ' the mighty bull who hits illumined the sky,' ajid
who is certainly the sun. The spotted bull must certainly he the Great Beat,
as among its stars are not only Maricht, the father of Kashyapa, the original
spark of light, but also Vashishtha, meaning ihc most creating {pasu\,
(.Sachau'a Albcrunl's India, vol, i. cii. xlv. p. 390), the tepresenlalLye of the
sapteme god Vasu, of the race who worshipped the pole, and who was the
r divine anlelope<fnlher of Sudas, the son of Divodasa, whose place
I historical mythology I have traced in Essay in. The stars of the Great
ESSAY I\ 379
been written by Ka-dru, the mother of the Nagas, or rain
serpents, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa, the father of the
tortoise race, and the thirteenth month of the lunar year.
Her name means, as I have shown, the tree (dru) of Ka, the
sacred name of Praja-pati, the lord (patl) of living beings
(prqjd\ when conceived as the unseen immaterial soul of life
hidden in the misty cloud, the heavenly shrine. Therefore
Ka-dru, though called a tree-goddess, as being the mother of
the sons of the fig-tree, could only be associated with and
made the consort of the spirit-god Ka, as the creating mist
which hides the Nun, the name of Ka, as the fish-god, from
mortal eyes. The mythological name of this mother-goddess,
the spirit-wife of the spirit-father, is Sar, who, as I shall
now show, was the mother of the first star of the thirty
stars.
But in dealing with this question we must first understand
how these ancient astronomers used these stars in measuring
a year, which, as the year of Ka-dru, the thirteenth wife of
Kashyapa, must be a lunar year of thirteen months. The
Jewish months Kislev, Tebet, and Sebet, which the circle
was used to measure, covered, in the ordinary Jewish year,
beginning with Tishri at the autumnal equinox, when the
year of the barley-growers began, the three months from
about the 20th November to the 20th February. Therefore
the year reckoned by these astronomers as beginning with
the star of the foundation, Aquarius, must have been that
ruled by the Pleiades, beginning in November, which I liave
shown in £ssay ii. was the earliest year measured by the
stars, and it must have been the year founded on the union
Bear, the father-stars of the sons of the North, were married, as I have shown
in Essay vi., to the mother-stars of the South, the Krittakas or Pleiades,
and in the Grihya Sutra we are told that Arundhati, who is called in the
Mahabharata the wife of Vashishtha, is also the first star in the Pleiades, and
the wife of the seven Rishis, or stars of the Great Bear. It is the stars of the
Great Bear and the Pleiades, which every wedded couple have to worship on
entering their house before they worship the polar star. — Oldenberg, Grihya
Sutra, Grihya Sutra of Hiranyakeshin, i. 7, 22, 14; S.B.E. vol. xxx. p. 194.
380 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the Northern and Southern tribes marked by the marriage
between the stars of the Great Bear with the Pleiades.
The first star of this year, called the star of the foundation,
the god Sar, is, as Mr. Brown shows, the stars Aquarius,
called Skat, the leg, and Suk-ib, the pourer, or the wet (sttk)
creator (16), and this marks the year which began when
tlie sun was in Aquarius, as one wliicli Ix^gan about a
month before the Babylonian winter rains, which fall about
the winter solstice. These are bmught up by tlie star called
the water-pourer, who finishes his task by making them
descend on the land. This year, reckoned by the Sus of the
Persian Gulf, is the same as that of the Sus of Western
India, where the year still begins in November with the
month Khartik, sacred to the Pleiades. Their national
traditions, whicli still maintain the oldest methods of reckon-
ing time, first used by the Southern agriculturists, are
thoroughly opposed to those ruling in the East of India.
Here the influence of the Northern fire-worshippei"s, the
Magliadas, the sons of the Great Bear, has made Northern
traditions the rule of the land, and it is here, among the
Ooraons and Mundas of Chota Nagpore, that the Northern
forms of witchcraft and the Finnish magic rites still survive,
and that in every parha or confederacy of villages a witch-
finder, called the Ojha, is still appointed by the people.
Hence the country is looked on by all Hindus as the land
of wizards. It is liere, and in Bengal, that the Northern
mother-mountain, the goddess Durga, called by tlie Kols
Marung Burn, or the great hill, is most worshipped, both
by the aboriginal and Hindu tribes. And it is here that the
year begins with the winter solstice, with the month Push,
dedicated to the Vedic god Push-an, who, as I have shown in
Essay III., is the Northern begetting-father, the black bull;
and hence we see why the old astronomers placed the
Pleiades, the mother-stars, in the head of the constellation
Taurus. This lunar-solar year, beginning with Push, is also
the year of the Dravidians of Madras, which begins with the
ESSAY IV (381
orgiastic festival of the Pongol,^ and the month Tai, meaning
the mother (-cow) and not the father-bull. Tliis festival
answers to the Sohrai festival of the Santals ^ and the Satur-
nalia of Rome. This year was founded on the myth of the
birth of the young sun-god at the winter solstice, and thus
its origin was entirely different from that of the year of the
Western races, which began with the embarkation of tlie sun-
god in the year-boat in November, when the rains of the
east coast of Southern India, wliich begin with the north-
east monsoon about tlie end of September,^ and last till
November, end. The year of the bull or ox was, as is shown
by the inclusion of the Pleiades in the head of Taurus, one
which symbolised the union between the Northern sons of
the bull, the plough-god Rama, and their allies, the
Maghada fire- worshippers and the Soutliem sons of the
Pleiades. The Northern sections of the alliance were the
Gautama, or sons of the bull {gud\ and the Maghada
worshippers of the Basque god Vasu, and it was the former
who are said, as I have shown, in Indian legend to have
brought about the marriage between the king of Maghada,
the descendant of Vasu, and the matriarchal races of the
country, called in the legend the daughters of the king of
Kashi, the eldest of whom was Amba, the chief star of the
Pleiades. It was from the union of the Northern patriarchal
Basques or Euskara with the matriarclial tribes of tlie South,
who recognised only the mother as the parent of the child,
that the Basque custom of tlie ' couvade ' originated, for it
was through simulating the sickness caused by the pains of
maternity that the Basque father asserted his right to be
looked on as the parent of his child. The race which w&s
formed from this union were the sons of the wild bull or
cow, the Hindu Gauri, the mountain-cow {Bos gaurus\ the
mother of the Gonds, and the Hittite Le, the Hebrew Leah,
* Monter Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India^ chap. xvi. p. 429.
* Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal^ 'Santals,* vol. iL p. 233.
* Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India ^ voL ix. ; 'Madras, Agriculture,' p. 27.
382 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
whose cognisance was the old Akkadian sign W of Girsu,
meaning the wild bull, and indicating that the year of the
sons of the mountain-bull was one of five seasons, the two
twin seasons of the horns, denoting the sons of fire and the
barley-growing sons of the plough, the twin races, and the
three mother-seasons of the earlier year. This was the year
of the thirty-three lords of the ritual order of the Zend-
avesta, the thirty-three Nagas of the heaven, called Tava-
timsa, or that of the thirty- three recognised as gods of time
by the Buddhists of Eastern India, who represented the five
seasons of the year and the twenty-eight days of the lunar
month. Tlie year-star of this race was the constellation
Taurus or Push, the black bull, which lay outside the field of
the Nags within which the pole revolved, and within which,
as I have shown, the observations of the first systematic
astronomers, who watched the motions of the heavenly
bodies, and began their year with the rising of Sirius at the
summer solstice, were confined.
The year beginning with the passage of the moon through
the thirty stars was the third attempt made after tlie years
of the bull and the year of the polar revolutions, to measure
time accurately by observing the heavens, and that, like the
year of Sirius, it began with a rainy season, is clear from the
selection of Aquarius as its starting point. That this star,
whicli began this year of the Akkadian seaport of Eridu and
of Western India, where rains fall at the winter solstice, was
one which was looked on as the bringer of copious rains is
proved, as Mr. Brown shows, by the fact that this same star,
in which the lunar circuit was begun, was the tenth of the
parent stars, called in Assyrio - Akkadian mythological
astronomy the ten antediluvian kings of Babylon, and that
it was this king who was the one human being saved from
death in the Babylonian Flood-myth. Tlie period assigned
to the reign of these kings is 432,000 years, and the meaning
of these numbers is clear when we find that in Babylonian
notation 432,000 equals 120 periods, called sars^ after the
ESSAY IV 383
name of the mother-goddess, of 3600 years each. Each of
these 120 sars represented three degrees in the measurement
of the circumference of the circle, divided into 360 degrees.
The whole circle was, Ptolemy tells us, divided by the
Chaldseans into ISO divisions, each] containing 10 degrees,
each degree 60 minutes, and each minute 60 seconds. Thus
each division of 10 degrees contained 10x60x60, or 3600
seconds, the number of the years of the 8ar^ and the whole
circle 3600 x 120, or 432,000 seconds, the number of the years
of the reign of the ten kings, and as sar is an Assyrian name
for a king, the ten kings are merely a transfer by the races
who made the father a mother through the ' couvade ' of the
functions of the mother Sar, who ruled the ten lunar months
of gestation to the father of the house. Therefore these kings
symbolically represent the perfect circle, the original annus
or ring of the Romans, the marriage ring, which was, as
Ovid tells us in the following lines of the FaMi^ the original
Roman year : —
' Annus erat, decimum cum luna receperat orbem
Hie numerus mafpio tunc in honore fuit
Seu quia tot digiti per quos numerare solemus.
Seu quia his quino/emina mense parit.* ^
It was this circle which was, as I show in Essay in., that
used by Hindu astronomers who calculated the length of the
Kali Yuga, beginning with Tishya, the star Sirius, that is,
with its rising, as 432,000 years.^
Mr. Brown has proved that this circle was a circle in the
heavens, for he shows that the names of the two first kings,
Alorus and Alaporus, etymologically represent the Akkadian
names of the star Hamal, the Ram in Aries, derived from
the Akkadian Zm, a sheep, and that of Alcyone in Taurus,
called Alap-ur of the bull {aJap^ the Hebrew Alephy the
letter A), of the foundation (wr), while their distance in
degrees represent the ten and three sars, 36,000 and 10,800
1 Ovid, Fas/i\ iii. I2i.
* Sachau's Alberuni's Itidia^ vol. i. chaps, xlii. xliii. pp. 372, 373, 380,
384 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
years assigned to the reigns of these two kings, for as eacli
sar equals three degrees, tlie degrees for each king will be
30 and 9.
Following out this clew, Mr. Brown lias, by astronomical
measurement, identified the ten kings with the star Hamal
in Aries, Alcyone and Aldebaran in Taurus, Pollux in the
Twins, Regulus in Leo, Spica in Virgo, Antares in Scorpio,
Al-gedi and Deneb Al-gedi in Capricomus, and Skat in
Aquarius.^
It is these stars which fonn in the heavens the mother-
circle of the ten months of gestation, and they also clearly
indicate a first attempt at marking the sun'*s path through the
ecliptic, as all the constellations to which these ten stars
belong follow in this circle the same order as that assigned
to them in the signs of the Zodiac. As the sun'*s path in
this circle ends in Aquarius, it is clear that the ten lunar
months of gestation it represents must be one in which the
period of incubation ends with the birth of the new sun-
god, which is to succeed its mother when the sun is in the
same constellation, and this vear must be that which begrins
with the passage of the moon, the nurse of the young sun-
god, through tlie circle of the thirty stars at the same season.
Tlie task of the moon as nursing-mother, wlncli began on the
20th November, ends at the end of three months of thirteen
weeks, when the sun enters Aries, on the 20th February, and
the whole year thus included in the two circles of the thirty
stars, and the ten kings, is one of thirteen lunar months.
Tliis year, as shown in this astronomical notation, distinctly
reproduces that of the story of the Deluge in Genesis, for the
day when Noah, the year-god, entered his ship, was the seven-
teenth day of the second month (Marchcsvan), or about the
7th of November,^ and the number seventeen reproduces its
two factors, seven and ten, those sacred to the lunar year of
1 R. Brown, Jun. , F. S. A. , T/ie Phainomena, or Heavenly Display of Aratus,
p. 8i ; also two letters contributed by him to the Academy^ of June 3 and
July 15, 1893. - Gen. vii. 11.
ESSAY IV 885
gestation. The Hebrew Noah, meaning Rest, is in the list
of the ten kings, Xisuthrus, a name derived by Dr. Sayce
from the Akkadian zi-siisru^ meaning the life {z'i) of heaven.
In the Babylonian story of the Flood Xisuthrus is also called
Shamash-napistim, the son of life, an Assyrian translation of
the Akkadian Dumu, the son of life (jsi). Dumu-zi was, as I
have shown, the star Orion, who began the year by enter-
ing his boat, the constellation Lepus, as the wandering sun-
god, and whose death and re-birth as Tammuz, the old and
new year, was kept as a festival by all nations in South-*
western Asia. In the myth of the lunar year of thirteen
months, as in so many otiiers noticed in this £ssay, the func-
tions of the former star-gods who directed the courses of
time, when it was reckoned by the movements of the fixed
stars, were transferred to a new star, and the son of life, who
had begun the former year as the constellation Orion, became
in lunar-solar chronology the star Skat in Aquarius. This
cx>nclusion is indubitably proved by the following evidence.
JVn Assyrian tablet, quoted by Mr. Brown, says that ' the
star of the Foundation {skat% the road of the sun, took ^ —
or, in other words, * the sun took the road pointed out by the
»tar of the Foundation.^ This road, called the path (kharran)
of the sun {8amst\ is tliat marked out in the city of Kharran
or Haran, meaning * the road,** where, as I show in Essay v.,
the lunar-solar year of thirteen months was first reckoned.
Another tablet tells us that the star Apin {skat) * portends
agcUe^ to be begun,' ^ or, in other words, begins a year in which
the young sun-god entered the moon-boat under the guid-
ance of the star Skat, the stellar equivalent both of the tenth
Babylonian king Xisuthrus, and of Noah, the last of the ten
male patriarchs named in Genesis.* This voyage of the sun-
god in the moon-boat, beginning with the approach of the
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars,* § ii. Proceedings
efthe Society of Biblical Arckceology, Jan. 1890.
» Unci. ; W.A.I. iii. 53, No. i, line 2.
^ • Gen. V. 1-32.
S86 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
winter rains, is a reminiscence of the Hindu legend that the
sun-god sleeps through the rains of the rainy season, and it
was during the time of his slumber, or infant youth, that
time was measured by observing the course of the moon. It
was when he awoke in February, at the end of the Athenian
month Gamelion, meaning that of marriage (ydfAo^)j that
the marriage of the sun-god and the moon-goddess, the
marriage of Zeus with Hera in Greek mythology, took place ;
and it was then that the ten lunar months of the gestation
of the young sun-god, the son of Varuijia, to whom the ram
was sacred, began. The age when this myth took its astro-
nomical form in the circle of the ten kings is clearly shown
by the stars, for as the second and third stars are in Taurus,
the circle must have been calculated when the sun was in
Aries in February, and in Taurus at the vernal equinox. As
the sun entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, about 4700 b.c.,^
and the Egyptians began their solar year with the Second
Dynasty about that time, we have clearly before us, in the
circle of the ten kings, a series of astronomical observations
which were made, about 4700 B.C., or more than 1000
years before it. It is a year corresponding to that of the
ten kings, and placing the conception of the young sun-
god in February, which is that of the Ho-Kols, Ooraons,
and Santals, for all these tribes hold their great annual
Saturnalia in Magh (February), and begin their year with
that month. It is in the festivals of the Santals, one of whose
septs trace their descent to the Pleiades, that we learn to
understand the reason of the differences in the reckonings
of time which made the year of the Babylonians begin
about the 20th of November, and placed the beginning of
the year of the people of Eastern India a month later at
the winter solstice. The Santals celebrate two Saturnalia
in honour of the birth of the young sun-god, one at the
^ Or probably more than looo years before, as the Akkadians reckoned the
rising of their time-stars not as kosmical, but as heliacal risings. See £fuy'-
clopadia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, voL xxiv. p. 791, Art 'Zodiac'
\
ESSAY IV 887
winter solstice, and the other in Magh (February) ; and
these two feasts show that the tribe is composed of two sec-
tions, one of which based their calculation of time on the
marriage of the sun and moon in February, or our St. Valen-
tine^s Day, and the other which placed the marriage at the
vernal equinox, and the birth of the young sun-god at the
winter solstice. In the latter reckoning, the first three
months of the year are those of infancy of the new-born god,
and it is when he reaches manhood at the vernal equinox
that the marriage with the moon and the conception of the
god of the following year takes place. This is celebrated in
the Hindu Huli held at the full moon of Phalgun in March,
and it is this festival which, among the Hindus, corresponds
in identity of conception with the Magh festival of the
Mundas and Ooraons.
But the story of the Deluge of Noah, and that whicli
makes the Egyptian god Osiris, the constellation Orion, enter
the year's ship in November, when in Egypt, as still in West-
em India, the Festival of Lights, indicating the beginning
of the Pleiades year, was held, both point to a time when the
conception and not the birth of the young sun -god began in
November. This was the year of Orion, the Akkadian Du-
muzi. The ship or womb which he enters was that symbol-
ised by the constellation Lepus, the moon-hare, which lies at
his feet, and the constellation Orion with its five brilliant
stars — Betelgueuse at its head, Rigel at its feet, and the three
stars of the belt in the centre, seem to have symbolised the
year of five seasons. The hare, forming the moon-boat, was
almost certainly originally the Indian fox, driven by Indra,
the rain-god, who ruled the year of five seasons, in the Rig-
veda, as his steeds ; for the Indian fox, as every one who has
hunted them knows well, always runs in a circle, starting
from its earth and always coming back to it. It was this
course of the fox which made it symbolical of the moon and
the lunar phases, as these begin with the crescent-moon, cul-
minate in the full moon, the fox^s circle, and return to the
388 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
crescent again. Orion entering into this crescent boat, is the
Man in the Moon of fairy mythology, the embryo infant,
the centre pole or prong of the trisula, and
it is on the first day of the tenth month after
the voyage has been begun that the child
conceived at its beginning is bom. This, in
the story of Noah's and Manu'*s Deluge, is the
mother-earth, the mother-mountain ; and this mother-earth
is, in the Druidical myth of the Anguineum ovum, or the
serpents eggs, the mother of the sons of the primieval snake,
the guardian of the village. It is this snake-mother who is
worshipped about the fifth of August ^ in the Hindu Nag-
pajlchami, as the goddess of the rains.* The tradition of
her birth in the tenth month, which appears in the account
of Noah's Deluge,^ is based on the Hindu story of Manu, in
which the appearance of Ida at the close of the time of ges-
tation was coincident with the subsidence of the waters.
Her birth as the snake-mother in the beginning of August is
followed by that of Krishna, the black antelope, and the true
Northern mother-mountain, Ida, the goddess Durga, at the
new moon of the next month, Bhadon. Here again we find
the same difference between the time assigned for the birth
of the earth- mother and that of the sun-god, which appears
in the years beginning with Aquarius and the winter solstice,
and the reason in both cases is the same. In the one series
of myths the young sun-god is believed to be l)orn in
November and December, and in the otlier the conception of
the new-born earth is fixed in one set of myths in November,
and in the other, in which the young antelope-sun is bom
with the mountain, in December. That in the original myth
November was the month of conception is clear from the fact
that in the North of India, where the sun-god is worshipped,
Krishna and Durga's birth-day is in Bhadon (September),
^ The date is the 8th of the light half of Sravana.
^ Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Sdnkhdyafta Grihya Sutra, iv. 15, 2, where
ihe is addressed as the goddess of the rainy season. * Gen. viii. 5.
ESSAY IV 389
while in Bombay and the South, where the Pleiades have
always begun the year, it is kept on the 8th of the dark half
of Sravana,^ or about the 23d of July. In this series of
myths the god bom is either the son bom directly from the
moon, as the moon-hare, or from the mother without the
intervention of the father, as when Dumu-zi is bom as the
son of Is-tar in the tree-temple, ' where no man hath entered,'
or in that Egyptian myth which tells how Is-is, the Egyptian
Is-tar was, at the command of Dhu-ti, the moon-god, led
by the seven scorpions to the Papyrus Marsh at Buto,
called Khepar, or the beetle, the Egyptian tortoise, where
she became the mother of Horus,^ the god of the pole of
the Kusliites. This myth is clearly one which was framed
in Egypt when the sun was in Scorpio in September, at the
autumnal equinox, a period about coincident with that when
it was in Taurus, at the vernal equinox, and it gives us in
another form the story of the birth of the founder of the
Kushite race among the river reeds. We also see in these
two forms of conception myths the history of the change
from the matriarchal age, when the mother was the only
recognised parent, and when the birth of offspring and their
education were looked on as of supreme national importance,
to the patriarchal age, when the conception of society was
based on the family ruled by a wedded pair, the father and
mother of the house. In testing the historical sequence of
these series of beliefs, it is clear that the earliest are those
which reckon time from the conception of the mother-earth
in November, at the beginning of the Pleiades year, and
from the conception of the sun-god at the winter solstice.
It is this last year which is symbolised in the story of the
birth of Ra-ma, the son of Dasa-ratha, the ten (dasa) chariots
(raiha\ or months of gestation, the Eastern counterpart of the
Western Krishna, the antelope-father. He is called Ra-ma, or
^ Monier* Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India^ chap. xvi. pp.
430, 431-
' H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien yEgypter^ pp. 392, 402.
390 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the mother of Ra, and he was bom at Brinda-bun in Mathura
as Ra-dha, meaning the giver (dhd) of Ra, on the 8th day
after the full moon of Bhadon,^ in the beginning of Septem-
ber, the month of the autumnal equinox ; and Ra-dha was the
wife of Krishna, or Ra-ma, the antelope, or the bull-father,
the son of the moon-mother, who, like Jocasta in the Greek
myth of (Edipus, wedded her son. These were the first
calculations of time which ended in the tracing of the
heavenly circle of the ten father-kings. This original year
measured by months, and beginning, according to primaeval
Southern tradition in November, and to the earliest Northern
birth stories in December, was followed, on the union of the
two races in the confederacy of the mother-mountain by the
year beginning with the summer solstice, when the young
sun-god stepped on board his boat to go from east by south
round the four points of the compass, and survey the realm of
his father Varuna, the god of the starry and rainy heaven.
In this year, the belief in the year of the conception of the
sun-god was still retained, and the beginning of this year of
gestation, ending in his birth, is celebrated in the Hindu
festival of Ku-var, the begetting {ku) Var, the god of the life-
giving rain. This is held on the first new moon of Ashvin,
the month of the Twins (September-October), also called
Ku-var or Kuar, when the sun-god awoke from his sleep
during the rains, and went forth, at the autumnal equinox,
to mate with the Gopis, or cow-maidens. It is then that
the Ras dance, in honour of the sun-god Ra, and his marriage
with Ra-dha, is danced at Mathura,^ and the heir of the
wedded couple, the wandering sun-god of the next year, was
begotten. It is the first stage in the life of this embryo god
which is commemorated in the great festival of the Dasahara,
kept from the 8th to the 10th day after the full moon of
^ Mathuray a District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S. ; Brinddbun
Calendar^ p. 247.
2 Mathura^ a District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., Festivals observed
at Mathura, p. 169 ; see also Brinddbun Calendar ^ p. 248.
ESSAY IV 891
Ashvin,^ or from about the 8th to the 10th of October. At it
Ra-ma^s conquest of Ceylon, called Lanka, the island of the
South Pole, and the origin of the astronomy based on the
revolutions of the pole, is commemorated. It was then that
the year began to be reckoned by the annual voyage of the
sun-god. This year, beginning with the conception of the
sun-god at the autumnal equinox, was that of the barley
growing races of Asia Minor, Syria, Macedonia, and the
Peloponnesus, and it was these people who changed the date
of the festival to the dead from November to the date of the
beginning of the New Year, and hence it is that the festival of
the Pitri-yajfia, or sacrifice to the Fathers, in India, was held
in Bhadon, the month ending with the autumnal equinox,
and called Bhadra-pada, the blessed foot, or Proshthapada^
the ox-foot month ; and at Athens in the succeeding month,
Boe-dromion, the course (dromos) of the ox, corresponding
with the month Ashvin of the Hindus, when the Nekusia, or
feast of the dead, and the festival of the Greater Eleusinia
in honour of De-meter, the barley-mother, and the concep-
tion of the young sun-god, were celebrated.
It was this year which was superseded by the lunar-solar
year of thirteen months beginning, as I have shown, in
November, when the sun was in Aquarius, and in this year
the sun is nursed for the first three months of his life by the
moon-mother, and attains his manhood in February, when
he is in Aries, the Ram, the animal sacred to Varui^ He
then pursues his independent course through the heavens
till he reaches the sign of Aquarius, when he dies in the waters
to rise again as the nursling of the moon in the same sign.
In this conception of the year, the sun-god is immortal, for
he dies only to rise again, and hence the belief in the ten
and eleven months sacred to the gods of generation was dis-
carded. It is this victory of the believers in immortality
and the spirit-god over the followers of the god Vasu, the
^ Mathura^ a District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., FestiTab obserred
at Mathura, p. 169 ; see also Brinddbun CaUmiar, p. 248.
892 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
materialistic maker or creator, which is commemorated in
the story of Esther. She, as Ish-tar, in her transformation
into the moon-goddess Ashtoreth, supersedes Vash-ti, the
goddess {ti) Vash, as the Queen of Heaven, worshipped in
Shushan, the capital of the Shus, whose mother-goddess
hitherto had l)een the Naga snake, the cloud-goddess, the
constellation Hydra. She and her ally or nursling, the
immortal young sun-god Mordecai, the Babylonian Marduk,
the calf, compassed the fall of Haman and his ten sons who,
as I show in Essay in., were the Semitic counterpcirts of
Vahlika, the god of the Bactrians of Balkh, the worshippers
of the fixed stars and his ten sons who were all killed by
Satya-ki, the son of Shini, the moon-goddess in the Maha-
hharata. And from the above analysis of the symbolism of
the year of generation it appears that in the Hindu ritual
of their worship, the original Northern ten lunar months of
gestation, beginning with the winter solstice, were changed
into eleven by the addition of the month of November, when
the Southern new year began.
The beginning of this year of thirteen months is repre-
sented in Greek legend by the flight of Peleus from the court
of Akastus because he was falsely accused of attempting to
violate the queen, and in this story, as well as in the precisely
similar one told of the young prophet Joseph, we find a distinct
mythical reminiscence of the supersession of anthropomorphic
by spiritual conceptions of religion. The queen of Akastus,
the mother-goddess of the old faith, wishes to become the
mother of the sun-god of the lunar-solar year, but the young
sun-god of the prophet races refuses her advances and goes
out into the wilderness alone, that is to say, pursues his path
through heaven without a consort, and forsakes the year-
gods of the old religion. His marriage with Tlietis, the
daughter of the sea, the moon-goddess, who disappears
shortly after the birth of the young sun-god of the solar
year, Achilles, is another reproduction of the astronomical
myth of the year of the ten kings, preceded by the three
ESSAY IV 393
months'* rule of the moon, for Thetis is the goddess who comes
out of the waters ruled by Aquarius, and it is she who, like
the nursing moon of the Thirty Stars, leaves her young
nursling after he has been made immortal by being bathed
in fire and anointed with ambrosia, the water of life, and
enabled by this regenerating baptism to pursue his undying
course through the heavens, and to be reborn immediately
after he disappears at the close of his journey.
That the sun-god who thus died, and was reborn again in
Aquarius, is also the Eastern sun-god Ram, is proved by the
statement in the Assyrian story of the Flood, that the flood
* reached to heaven after Ram-anu had thundered."* ^ It was
the father-god Aquarius, the water-pourer, who l^ecame the
eleventh sign of the Zodiac, which were originally eleven in
number,^ after Saggitarius, Cancer, Virgo, and Libra, which,
Mr. Brown shows, was first the altar, replaced one of the
two stars in Taurus and Capricomus of the Flood Zodiac,
the stars of the Ten Kings. The eleventh sign was added
to the original ten when the worship of the father-god was
added to that of the mother-goddesses.
In the twelfth sign, Pisces, added to the eleven, we find a
most interesting chapter of astronomical history. This sign
was the Akkadian Zib, which is shown by Mr. Brown to
mean the waters, and to correspond with the space called by
Aratus Hudor, or the water which is in his poem placed at
the feet of Aquarius, the water-pourer.^ It is in this that all
the water constellations, Eridanus, the river of life, Ketos,the
^ R- Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Remarks on the Euphratean Astronomical
Names of the Signs of the Zodiac, sign xi. Gu, * the water-pourer,* Aquarius,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical ArchcBology, March 1 89 1, p. 268.
^ CEnopides of Chio, a contemporary of Anaxagoras, living about 500 B.C.,
who introduced the signs of the Zodiac into Greece, only introduced eleven
signs, and only this number were known to Eudoxus, Eratosthenes,^and
Hipparchus. Blake, Astronomical Myths, Macmillan & Co., 1877, p. 103 ;
Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, Art. 'Zodiac,' vol. xxiv. p. 791.
• R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Signs of the Zodiac,* sign xii. Zeby the Fishes,
pp. 269, 270 ; Aratus* Phainomena, or the Heavenly Display^ by the same
author, lines 389, 390, pp. 43, 44 note 4.
394 THE RULING RACES OF PREfflSTORIC TIMES
whale Pisces and Piscis Australis, swam. This became the
home of the pair of fish, corresponding, according to Hyginus^
to Venus, the fish-mother, and Cupid, which indicated the two
months which had to be absorbed into one to change the
lunar thirteen months into the solar twelve. It was this
addition to the first astronomy, based on the heavenly circles
indicating the year of the Thirty Stars and the Ten Kings,
which appears in the worship of the fish-god, who is
regenerated, like the Soma neophyte, to a new life by his
baptismal bath in the waters of life, poured out by the
constellation Aquarius.
Further insight into the mythological history of this con-
ception of the regenerated sun, the holy fish, and of the solar-
lunar year which united the Northern and Southern races
together, is shown in the second star after Aquarius, in the
circle of the Thirty Stars. This is called Lik-barra, the star
of the striped-dog (liJc), the hyaena or tiger, which last is the
mother-goddess of the Gronds, who were, as I have shown,
the rulers of North-eastern India before the Eushikas. It
is the name of the mother-tiger which is reproduced in that
of the great Vajjian confederacy of the eighteen tribes of
Mallis and eighteen tribes of Licchavis, who were, according
to Buddhist literature, the ancient rulers of Eastern India in
the days of the Buddha. The name Vajjian is a Pali
derivative from the Sanskrit Vyaghra, a tiger, and Vara-
hamihira in his map of India, as the tortoise, calls the
people of the East the Vyaghra-mukha, or men with tiger-
faces, while the Malli belong to the great race who called
themselves the sons of Mai, the mountain, and were identical
both with the Tur-vasu of the Rigveda and Mahabharata,
and with the Kushika, for their capital was Kushi-nara or
Kushi-nagura, the city {iiagiir) of the Kushites,^ while the
Licchavis were the sons of Lik or Lig,the Akkadian dog or lion,
the tire- worshipping Maghadas, to whom the dog was sacred.
^ Rhys Davids, Buddhist SutraSy Mahd-Parinibbdna SutrUy v. ; S.B.E.
vol. xi. p. 86.
ESSAY IV 396
The star Lik-barra is in Pegasus/ and this shows that the
year in which this was a guiding star is one calculated by the
sons of the flying-horse. This is the horse of the sea-god, the
water-sun, who went round the points of the compass in his
year-boat, and he took his Greek name as the star rising from
the fountains (in^ai) of the deep, which was in the myth-
ology of this astronomical age filled by Aquarius. He is
the descendant of the storm-bird and the flying-bull. This
presence of the horse as the guide or steed of the lunar
chariot confirms the proofs I have elsewhere brought forward
to show that the year of thirteen lunar months was that of
the Zend Keres-aspa, the homed (keres) horse (aspa\ the son
of Sama or Shem, and of the Semite-Hindu Karna, the horned
{keren) son of the Ashva or horse river. These sons of the
horse were the Arab race, who were the sons of Ram, the Ab-
ram of the Jews, and who were the trading Semites of the
ancient world. They can also be traced in Roman historical
genealogy as the men of the tribe of Ramnes, whence the
trading equites, or riding knights, were descended ; and it
was they who made the great twin-brethren, the Hindu
Ashvins, their father-gods, and annually, on the 15th October,
sacrificed a horse with the rites I have described in the be-
ginning of this Essay. And this sacrifice was, as I have also in
the same place shown, probably coincident both in time and
meaning with the great Hindu sacrifice of the Ashva-medha
or horse sacrifice, which now apparently survives in the festi-
val of the Meghnad Lila and those following it, held at the
end of Ashvin, to celebrate the victory of Rama the sun-
god over Ravana, the storm-giant, and his triumphal return
with Sita to Ayodhya.^
But there is still more valuable information to be gained
from the presence of Pegasus, the flying-horse, as that which
1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars/
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology^ Fcby. 1890, line 2, star ii.
* McUhura, a District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S. 'Festivals ob-
senred in Mathura,' p. 169.
896 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
draws the chariot of the moon-god, an office which explains
the Egyptian name of the constellation, which is called that
of the Servants, and its stars are said to be the four sons of
Horus, the god of the |>ole.^ These four sons of Horus were,
as I have shown, originally the four stars ruling the four quar-
ters of the heavens, and their transfer to Pegasus as guides of
the moon in her journey through the thirty stars is another
instance of the transfer of the functions of the guiding stars
of the old polar astronomy to other constellations lying in
the circuits of the moon and sun. But it is in the solar
myth which made the sun attain regeneration and immortality
by his baptismal bath in the life-giving waters of Aquarius,
that we find the most valuable historical evidence, explaining
the results of the new theology set forth in the Semitic year.
It is from this we can understand what was taught by the
believers in the divinity of the Nun or Spirit-god, whose son
Joshua was the leader of the united Semites who adopted the
new doctrines, and who used the lunar-solar year of thirteen
months. It is the birth-myth, symbolically reproduced in this
year, which we find transferred to the history of the youth
of the great moral teacher of India called Gotama Buddha.
He was not a mythical personage at all, but a living man,
who was, however, the successor of a long line of religious
teachers, who first appeared long before alphabetical writing
was known, and when popular history could only be handed
down in the form of myths. Hence each new chief prophet,
who carried on the work of the preceding guardians of, and
searchers after religious truth, was by the very fact of his
consecration to the supreme office considered worthy to have
his history recorded in the form of the myth of the re-
generated and immortalised sun. In this myth the young
sun-god, the preacher of the new faith of moral earnestness
and striving after perfection, leaves his home with the great
god Kii, called Praja-pati, the lord of living beings,* who
' H. Bru^sch, Religion uttd Mythohgic der Alien JEgypter^ p. 772.
- Called his aunt or mother's sister in the Chullavagga, x. i, 3 ; S.B.E.
ESSAY IV 397
brought up the Buddha at his court in the story, in his
twenty-ninth year, the number indicating the full number of
days in a lunar month. Hence, as in the year of thirteen
months, be begins his journey under the guidance of the moon,
and leaves behind him the companion stars who accompanied
the sun-god in his circuit round the points of the compass in
the year-ship. He takes as his guides in the search after
truth, his servant Channo, meaning the law, and his horse
E^anthaka, the thorny (Kantha) animal, that is, the sun-horse
encircled by the thorny halo of rays, the constellation Pegasus
called the Servant constellation. They accompany him for
thirty Yojanas or days^ journeys,^ that is to say, through the
circuit of the thirty stars to the river Anoma, meaning * the
illustrious'' river, where he dismisses them,* and betakes
himself as a mendicant to find out the truth, or, in other
words, he, as the sun-god, enters on the course marked out
for him by the ten parent stars, which is to lead to his new-
birth as a regenerated teacher of the fresh truths he has
learnt in his year'^s journey. It is when he reaches the con-
stellation Aquarius and finds himself on the banks of the
Holy Sea, ' the abyss, or sea of brass,' of the Semitic temples,
that he seeks for fresh energy and inspiration in the baptismal
bath in the great waters consecrated to the fish-god, into
which he as a son of the antelope race, enters clothed in the
skin of the ' black antelope.' It is from thence that he emerges
as the bull of heaven, who ploughs its fields and raises in
them fresh crops of learning and insight according to the
immutable laws laid down by the God of Righteousness, the
voL XX. p. 322. The moon-goddess was the sister or successor of the fire«
goddess Maga or Maya, Buddha's mother, who died seven days after his
birth (Hardy, A Manual of BuddhUm^ 2d edition, vii. ; Legends of Gotama
Buddha f p. 151 note), that is, when the reign of the stars and the lunar
phases, the heavenly measurers of time by weeks, began.
1 Childers, Pali Dictionary^ s.v. * Yojana.'
2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, 'The Nidana Katha, pp. 81-85,
Rhys Davids and 01denbcrg*s Vinaya Texts, * Chullavagga,'x. i, 3 ; * Of the
duties of Bhlkkun!s,'S.B.£. vol xx. p. 322.
898 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
great fish-father la or Yah, hidden in the inmost recesses of
the house (/) of the waters {a\ who does not allow his mes-
sengers to roam unguided, like the untamed antelope^ but
insists on their obedience to his revealed will.
It is this Dikshaniya, or bath of initiation of the sun-
god, which is described in the Buddhist birth-story of
Sumedha. The name means the sacrifice (medha) of the Shu.
That is the sacrifice of the eldest son, the old self-indulgent
self, who was slain like the sun-god when he entered the bath
of self-efiacement in order to secure his own immortality and
that of the children of the sun, just as in the story of the
sacrifice of Jantu, the son of King Somaka, the moon (Soma)
king in the Mahabharata, the death of Jantu not only procures
his own resurrection, but the birth of a hundred sons to the
king.^ The sons being emblematic of the stores of wisdom
and knowledge, successively garnered for the use of future
generations. Sumedha, in the birth -story which bears his
name,^ is represented as the son of a rich merchant living in
the city of Amara-vati, the city of Indra, the rain-god, the
city possessed of the Amrita or water of immortality, the
constellation Aquarius in the very remote past. He deter-
mined to seek the truth, and betook himself to the Himalayas,
the mountains where Indra, the rain-god, gets the rain, as a
hermit, the sun-god sleeping through the rains. He there
lived in meditation, like the infant sun under the guidance
of the moon, and was not recognised as the sun-god. At
last, when Dlpankara, meaning the nascent light, the con-
stellation of Aries, the Ram of Varuna, had become the first
Buddha, or teacher of heavenly lore, Sumedha arose from
his hermitage as the sun, and came through the air to the
city of Ram-ma, the mother (ma) of Ram, where Dlpankara
had founded a monastery, called Su-dassuna, the manifesta-
tion (dassuna for darshan) of the Su, that is, of the creating
spirit. He laid himself down at Dipankara'^s feet to make
^ Mahabharata Vana Parva, cxxvii-cxxviii. pp. 386-389.
- Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories y * Sumedha and Dlpankara,* p. 2 f.
ESSAY IV 899
a path for him over the swamp which Dipankara had to
cross, or, in other words, became the sun travelling on the
road ordained by the God of heaven, Varuna, who made
the laws of nature, heralded by the * nascent light ^ {Dipan-
kara) of the Ram-star, Varuna'*s symbol. It was when he
had been blessed by Dipankara and received as a neophyte
in the school of self-humiliation and obedience, that Su-
medha, the young sun-god, entered on the course of medita-
tion which led him through the whole circuit of the ten stars,
and revealed to him the ten mother-precepts which combine
to form the character of the perfect man, the new-bom son
of righteousness. These are summed up in the Ten Perfec-
tions of (1) Almsgiving, (S) Moral Practice, (3) Self-abnega-
tion, (4) Wisdom, (6) Exertion, (6) Patience, (7) Truth, (8)
Resolution, (9) Goodwill, (10) Equanimity. It was by making
these the groundwork of his character that Su-medha accom-
plished the sacrifice of Su, the sap of life, by making a striving
after excellence instead of self-indulgence the motive power
which determined all his actions. It was on the completion
of the new birth that Su-medha, the young sun-god, emerged
from his baptismal bath as the leader of the new race who
were to establish on earth the rule of the God of Righteous-
ness. It was this inculcation of ascetic doctrines which, I
have shown in Essay iii., was the essence of the religious
reform which sprung out of the Soma sacrifice of the Su, or
life-giving water, the soul of life, and inaugurated the search
after truth which resulted in the teachings of the great
Buddha, who was born in 557 b.c. ; those of the prophets
of Israel, whose recorded exhortations begin some two hundred
years earlier ; and in those of Confucius in China, who was a
cotemporary of Gotama Buddha. But the spirit which
animated these later teachers glowed with no less intensity
in the breasts of the earlier leaders in the mythical age of
infant religious thought, and it was the work of this life-
giving impulse which is commemorated in the birth-story
of the young sun-god and in the conquests of the Semitic
400 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
leader of the sons of the Holy Spirit, the ^ true knights of
the Holy Ghost/ called Hosh-ea, the son of Nun,^ or he who
has in him the Hu or creating sap of the God of Righteous-
ness, or la, the Yah of the Jews. The story of their long
war, against error and the union of the sons of tlie life-giving
water with the sons of fire, the two Ashes (eper), is briefly
told in the book of Joshua, which relates how after the death
of Moses, the moon-lion of the old theology which made the
gods of generation creators, the united forces of the god of
truth started from Mount Nebo or Nabi, the mount con-
secrated to the syml>ol of the prophet God, the planet
Mercury, and took Jericho, the moon-city, by the help of
Rahab, the star of the alligator, the fourteen stars, which, as
the early constellation Draco, surrounded and directed the
movements of the pole. This contest, which ended in making
the moon, not the mother who ruled the ten months of
gestation, but the nurse of the young sun-god, was waged by
the tribe of Ephraim of the two Ashes (eper) under their
leader Hoshea, the son of the Northern Hus, in alliance with
the tribe of Judah, representing the Southern Shus, led by
Caleb, the dog, the son of the fire-dog-star Sirius, and the
whole host was governed by the priestly race of the Kohath-
ites, or prophet-priests, the Atharvans, or priests of Atar,
the fire-god of Hindu and Zend history, who had inter-
married with the Nahusha, the Nahshon of the Bible, called
the Prince of Judah, the sons of the Naga rain-god.* These
kings were the priest-kings represented by the race of the
rulers of Gir-su, called Gud-ia, or the bulls of la, and by
Melchi-zedek, the king of righteousness, the prophet-priest
king of Jerusalem spoken of in Genesis.* It was this
Semitic rule, which began under such fair auspices, which
ended in the intolerable tyranny which led to the Aryan
revolt, of which I have given the history in Essay vi.
But before ending this Essay, I must show how the chrono-
logical history of the epoch dealt with in it and Essay in. was
^ Numbers xii. 8. ^ Exodus vi. 23. ' Genesis xiv, i8-2i.
ESSAY IV 401
taught in the m3rthology revealed in the national customs of
initiation observed by the Hindu twice-born castes and their
successors, the fire-worshipping Zend races, the Iranian sons
of Ira or Ida. They both included the history of the
methods by which they and their forefathers reckoned time
among the lessons impressed upon the minds of the young
neophytes, both by oral teaching and by the sacred thread
girdle and sacred garment worn by them as a sign of their
consecration, and a perpetual memento of the story of their
race. Their ancestors, as I have already shown, were the
barley-growing people of Asia Minor, who called themselves
both in the Euphratean countries and North-western India,
the * sons of the antelope "^ ; and the antelope was the symbol
of the divine father-god, who had shown their forefathers that
the lands marked by the Kusha grass (Poa cynosuroides\ the
favourite food of the antelope, were those best suited for
com. They had learned from the Southern section of their
confederacy the Indian village races, that the well-being of a
nation depends on the careful training of the young, and had
also learned to measure time by the stars, and to divide the
year into two periods of six months each, marked by the
movements of the Pleiades. But for determining the advent
of the three seasons of the sowing, growth, and maturity of
their wheat and barley crops grown in the temperate climes
of the north, they required a division of the year into the
three seasons of spring, summer, and winter, indicating the
stages of the annual course of the sun. They chose as their
guide in the measurement of this year the constellation
Orion, called by the Akkadians Dumu-zi, or the son {dumu)
of life (zi\ by the Egyptians Osiris-Smati, and by the Hindus
Mrigashiras.^ This last name shows it to be the constella-
tion of the antelope (mriffo),^ In all these mythologies it
^ Bal Gnngadhur Tilok*s * Summary of the Principal Facts and Arguments
in the Orion,' Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists^
vol. L p. 377.
' Mriga, which is generally used to mean the antelope is, as Grassmann
shows in his Worterbuch zum Rigveda^ formed from the root ntrify Zend
36
402 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
was the star of the antelope (Orion), always remaining, as
Pindar tells us,^ near the Pleiades, which marked the begin-
ning of the year ; for the year-myths, both of the Akkadians
and Egyptians, told how Dumu-zi and Smati-Osiris, the
hunter-sun, launched their year-boat on the ocean of time;
and this event is, as I show in Essay ii., fixed, both in Egypt
and Genesis, as happening in the month of November. In
the Hindu chronology, the month Marga-sirsha, or the head
(sirsha) of the antelope (mriga) begins about the 20th
November and ends at the winter solstice, and its alternative
name, Aggahun or Aghun, derived from the Sanskrit agra-
hayani,, meaning ^ the beginning or foregoing ^ time, shows
that in Hindu astronomy Margasirsha used to begin the
year, and this time-reckoning was, as AlberunT tells us, that
once used by the people of Sindh, Multan, and Kanoj, or
the Western trading races of India.^
It was this voyage of the sun-god in his year-boat, the
changing moon hunted during each lunar month, as the
Indian fox by Orion, the hunter, which, as I have shown
above, was symbolised in its final form in the complete
heavenly circle of the ten stars called the ten primaeval kings
of Babylon.
Orion is in astronomical picture mythology the hunting
giant clothed in a skin, wearing a belt of three stars, and hold-
ing a club or sword. The moon which he hunted was that
mh'igh, to circle round. It thus denotes an animal which wanders and
moves round. From it is formed the Zend mh'fgha^ a bird ; the Hindu
murghiy the domestic fowl, the bird sacred to the sun. Hence mriga became
a name for an animal which marks the revolving passage of time, and it is
used once in the Rigveda, i. i8i, 7, to mean the bird which saved Bhujyu,
meaning the devouring one, the fire-god of devouring time, the friend of the
Ashvins, or the twins Day and Night, from the waters where he was drown*
ing, and took him up to heaven ; that is to say, it was the bird which,
like the Bindo bird of The Song of Lingal^ announced the coming of the
drowning rains, and, like the Egyptian vulture, determined the course of
the year, which led men to look to the heavens for the signs of the changes of
the seasons.
^ Nem, ii. 17. * Sachau*s Alberuni's India^ vol. ii. pp. 8, 9,
ESSAY IV 408
which measured the periods of gestation inaugurated by the
Saturnalia celebrated by the barley-growing races at the
winter solstice, and the weeks of this time were measured by
the revolutions of the seven stars of the Great Bear, called
the seven antelopes {rishyd) led by Marlchi, the spark or seed
of fire, the deer star-god raised to heaven by Rama to be-
come the father of Kashyapa, the father of the Kushite race.
It was the lessons learned from this mythology of time which
were taught to the young Hindu students of the twice-born
castes, and to the young fire-worshippers, and it was to
inculcate these lessons that Brahmin students were required
to wear a skin of the doe of the black antelope, the Eshat-
ryas that of the spotted deer, and the Vaishyas that of a goat.^
The club or sword of Orion, the mythological descendant of
the fire-drill, is the student's staff, and the goat-headed
sceptre or staff of the Egyptian Osiris, while in the belt,
which originally symbolised the three seasons binding to-
gether the months of the corn-growing races, we find the
sacred girdle both of the Hindu twice-born castes and of the
Parsis. The investiture vrith the sacred girdle, which was
to be worn henceforth throughout their whole life, is restricted
among the Hindus to males, and the time fixed is for Brah-
mins at eight, Kshatryas at eleven, and Vaishyas at twelve
years after conception. This ceremony marked the beginning
of their religious education, and its use as a means of im~
pressing on the memory the principal facts taught to them
is shown by the teachings of the Parsis, who name the recur-
rence of the seasons in the sacred calendars, among other
truths which I shall enumerate presently, as taught by the
girdle. Thus the rule that the girdle of the Brahmins,
Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas was to be made of three strands
taught that the ceremony was one dating from the days when
only three seasons of the year were reckoned.
But besides this, the girdle taught the national history ; for
^ BUhler, Manu^ vu 41 ; Apastamba^ i. i, 3, 3 ; S.B.E. vol. xxv. p. 37 ;
vol. ii. p. 10.
404 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the Brahmin girdle, made of three strands of Mufija grass
(Saccharum munja\ not only told the young student that
he was descended from the race who traced their parentage
to the sacrificial Kusha grass {Poa cynosuroides\ but that
these sons of the antelope and the grass he fed on, had
made a great step forward in national progress. For the use
of the Muilja grass to form the girdle marks the formation
of the sacerdotal caste as coincident with the institution of
the elaborate form of the Soma sacrifice prescribed in the
Brahmanas, introduced, as I have shown in Essay lu., by the
barley -growing races whose parent-gods were the Ashvins,or
the twin gods, Day and Night. ITiis sacrifice, the descend-
ant of the earlier sacrifice for rain, was that of the confede-
racy of tlie sons of the horse, the worshippers of the
Nortliern sun-god Ra. They made their sacrificial j!?ra<9tora
or bundle of magic grass, denoting the seasons and weeks of
the year, not as their predecessors the moon-worshipping
fathers of the barley-growing races used to do, out of Kusha
or Darbha grass {Poa cynosuroidcs)^ but out of Ashva-viila,
or horse-tail gniss (Saccharum spontaneiun).^ Thus the
Mufija and Ashva-vala grass both belong to the genus *SV/r-
charian, of which the sugar-cane plant {Saccharum officiana-
rum) is a species.'- It was this last, called in Sanskrit Iksha^
which gave the name of Ikshvaku, or sons of the sugar-cane
{iksha) to the great ruling race who were, according to Hin-
du tnulition, the first kings of Patala, the great trading port
on the Indus of the Saus, Su-varna, or Vaishya, who insti-
tuted the Soma sacrifice, and who, starting from Patiila,
extended their rule over the whole of Northern India.
We can thus by the Brahmin girdle trace the date of the
formation of the sacerdotal caste to the age when the sons of
the sugar-cane had formed the sugar-producing variety out
* Eggeling, Sai, Br ah. i. 3. 3. 3 ; iii. 4. I. 17; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 84
note 2 ; vol. xxvi. p. 89.
- Clark, Roxburgh's Flora Indica^ Gen. Saccharum^ Species, 2. 5, and 10,
pp. 79, 82.
ESSAY IV 405
of the wild saccharine grasses, Sacchamm spontaneum and
Saccharum munja, and also learn that these new rulers
were the mythological descendants of the early cultivators
who developed rice and cereals out of the wild grasses of
Southern India and Mesopotamia.
But this discovery of sugar-cane marks a period in national
development considerably later than that of the first adoption
of the year of three seasons, and the consecration of the
sacred girdle ; for we find that among the Eshatriyas, who
preceded the Brahmins as a ruling caste, the girdle was made
of Murva,or the hemp used for making bow-strings (*Sarw^t^era
zeylanica)^ and this must have been the sacred fibre of the
races who worshipped Krishanu, the god of the heavenly bow,
from whom the mother-bird of the Kushite race, the sacred
Shyena bird obtained the heavenly Soma. It was these
people who were the sons of the fig-tree, and, as I have shown
in Essay ni., the first organisers of the Soma sacrifice as the
sacrifice to the rain-god. They, when joined by the sons of
the sun-horse, became, as I have shown, the twin races who
believed in the divinity of pairs, and who consequently
changed their parent-tree from the hermaphrodite fig tree to
the date-palm with its separate male and female trees. It is
this change that is recorded in the sacred girdle of the
Zend fire-worshippers. This, called kosti in the Zendavesta,
and kfisfik in the Bundahish, is used to bind together the
sacred twigs of the baresma or rain {bares) broom, the
Zend form of the Hindu prastara. It is formed of six
thread-like ribbons split out of the leaves of the date palm,
and twisted together; but its descent from the race who
measured time by the three seasons is shown by its being tied
three times round the twigs.^ We thus see how in the theo-
logy of the trading races of Western India and the Persian
Oulf, the year of tliree seasons became one of the double
three or six seasons. For that these six threads symbolised
^ Clark, Roxburgh's F/ora Indica^ pp. 293, 294 ; BUhler's Afanu, ii« 42 ;
f).B.£. vol. XXV. p. 37.
' West, SJkayast La Shqyast, chap. iii. ; S.B.E. vol. v. p. 284 note I.
406 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the six seasons of the Zend year, we learn from the teachings
of Zend theology, in which it is expressly said that the six
threads of the kiisfik or girdle worn by all young Zends,
whether male or female, mean the six seasons of the vear.
These girdles were originally three fingers'*-breadth wide, and
made out of goat or camePs hair,^ but were afterwards, like
those of the Hindu Vaishya, made out of woollen threads.-
But the history told by the girdle of the young fire-
worshippers whose divine parent was Yima, the Zend form of
the Hindu Yama, the twin {yama) son of Vivanghat, the
Vedic Vivasvat, told of a much longer series of national
changes than its Hindu prototype. Every man and woman
among the Zends, and not only the males as among the
Hindus, were, when they were fifteen years old, invested with
the sacred shirt made first of hide with the hair stripped
from it, wool, hair, cotton, dyed silk, or of bark or hemp
cloth, and with the sacred girdle worn over it.^ In this
change from the Hindu custom, we see how the skin garment
of the Hindu student made of the skin of the totemistic
father, was once a garment worn by both sexes, and how it
became the sacred ephod of the Jews, and the muslin under-
garment worn by all Parsis. The Zend girdle, which injts
original form reminded its wearer of the national measure-
ment of annual time, told, as I shall now prove, not only of
the year divided into three seasons, but of the subsequent
advances made in chronological calculation up to the concep-
tion of a perfect circle in the heavens, marking the annual
movements of the sun and moon, a conception which, as I
have shown in Essay iii., lies at the foundation of Hindu
and Babylonian chronology. This circle, calculated by the
sons of the date-palm, was divided into 360 degrees, and one
* West, Shdyast La Shayast^ chap. iv. I. 2 ; S.B.E. vol. v. p. 285, 286.
^ Biihler, Gautama^ i. 15 ; S.B.E. vol. ii. p. 174.
^ Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vciididad Fargardy xviii, 8, and 54 ff ; West^
Shdyast La Shdyast^ iv. 4; S.B.E. vol. iv. pp. 191 note 4, 199; vol. v. p.
286 notes 5 and 6.
ESSAY IV 407
of the star circles in which the conception was embodied was
that formed by the ten stars called the ten kings of Babylon,
which, as I have shown in this Essay, marked the sun's path
from the middle of February till the middle of November,
when the year of Orion used to begin ; while another formed
of thirty stars marked the moon**s course from the middle of
November till the middle of February.
The ancient rule that the girdle was to be made of goafs
or camel's hair shows that the custom, like the Hindu
Vaishya's dress of goat-skin, dated back to the days when
the goat-god, the Hebrew twin-father Esau, was the
measurer of time, while the subsequent change to woollen
threads in the Zend and Vaishya girdles tells of the subse-
quent transfer of the rule of heaven and earth to Varuna, the
god of the dark heaven and rain (var), to whom the ram and
ewe were sacred.
The kusfik of the young Zends contains, like that of the
baresnia, six strands, and it is wound round the waist three
times exactly in the same way as in the baresma ceremony.
Each strand is formed of twelve very fine white woollen
threads, making seventy-two threads in all : near each end the
six strands are braided into three separate string ends of two
strands each, and, therefore, each of these string ends contains
twenty-four threads.^ These numbers, six, twelve, twenty-
four, and seventy-two, are not only all component parts of
the circle of 360 degrees, but are moreover, when treated as
parts of this whole, shown to be historically significant.
Thus six is the sixtieth part of the circle, and symbolises not
only the six seasons, but the Babylonian cycle of sixty years ;
while twelve marks the thirtieth or perfect part of the circle,
the double fifteenth, the union of the divine pair of twins,
* West, Dddistdn-i-dinik, chap, xxxix. ; S.B.E. vol. xviii. p. 122 note I.
The twenty-four ends and the seventy-two threads are said by Parsi theolo-
gians to mean the twenty-four sections of the Visparad and the seventy-two
chapters of the Yasna, but this could not possibly have been the meaning of
the original framers of the ritual of the thread-girdle, who lived long before
the days of the Visparad or Yasna, and before the writing of books.
408 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the primaeval father and mother, each fifteen years old.^
The fifteenth part of the circle is denoted by the twenty-
four ends of the threads, while the seventy-two threads form
the fifth of the circle. The meaning of the sanctity attached
to the fifth is clear when we remember that the Zend
fire- worshippers used in their sacrificial ritual the Vedic time
measurement of the thirty-three gods of time, denoting the
five seasons of the Hindu sacrificial year and the twenty-
eight days of the lunar month, and that they called them
Hhe thirty-three lords of the ritual order/ It was from
these five seasons, which, as I show in Essay ui., were formed
from the original three by the addition of the twin-seasons
of the rains and autumn, and from the original three which
bound them together, that they formed the conception of
fifteen, or three times five as the age of perfection reached by
the twin father-god Yima and his father and twin-brother
Vivanghat, and in the seventy-two threads of the girdle they
completed the consecration of their children of both sexes to
the falher-god, who received their sacrifices and sent the
seasonable rains which made life endure on the earth.^
But ill connection with this number seventy-two we find
* I have not in the course of these Essays dealt with the evidence which
seems to prove that the year measured by the inventors of the perfect circle,
which preceded the lunar solar year of thirteen months calculated by the
Semites of the circumcision, was one of twelve months of thirty days each.
But I believe this can be satisfactorily proved. One of many affirmative
proofs is given by the year of the Ashvins in the Brahmanas, which is made
up of six pairs of months, or twelve months in all. The sacred numbers of
the early Ashuras were three, the year of three seasons, and ten, the lunar
months of generation. The week days both of the Egyptians and Athenians
were *dekads,' that is, ten days.
- Mill, Yastm, ix. 5; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 232. Yima or Yama was
the first priest *who first stretched out the thread of sacrifice,' the
sacred girdle (I)armesteter, Zeudavesta Vcudidad Fargard^ ii. 3 ; S.B.E.
vol. iv. p. 12). The arithmetical deification of fifteen in the perfect square,
counting fifteen each way, is preserved in the primaeval map of the
^ * ^ ' tortoise race, called by the Chinese the Ho map, which is said to
I* \ have been printed * on the back of the tortoise, circles being used
to denote the numbers (Legge, Vikings Introduction, chap. ii. ;
S.B.E. vol. xvi. pp. 17, 18.
ESSAY IV 409
«
still further evidence of its relation to the changes made in
the computation of time, when the Orion year of three
seasons became one of five. It was when the sons of the
tiver and mountain goddess Ida or Ira divided the year into
five seasons that Smati-Osiris (Orion) was slain by Set and
his seventy-two assistants. His body was then, as I have
shown in Essay n., thrown into the Nile, when it was floated
to Byblus, the town of the Papyrus (^vySXo?) and of the
Mediterranean Phoenicians, the record keepers of the ancient
world. This was the chief seat of the Phoenician worship
of Tammuz or Dumu-zi (Orion), and it was the change from
the earliest form of his worship as the year-star Orion to
that of the rain-star Sirius, who ruled the year of five
seasons, beginning with the summer solstice, which was
officially recognised when Isis-Satit, the star Sirius, called by
Homer the dog of Orion,^ brought back the body of Osiris
from Byblus to Egypt, and went, while Set cut it up into
fourteen pieces — the twin-sevens, the number of the days of
the lunar phases — to visit her son Horus, the meridian-pole of
the race whose year was divided into five seasons, symbolised
by the Egyptian five-rayed star of Horus. And the history
of Byblus gives further evidence proving that its people and
their gods were emigrants from the Euphratean Delta, in
addition to the conclusive proof given by the worship of the
Akkadian star and sun-god Du-muzi. The Phoenician name
of the town now called Jebeil was Gebal, and it was
dedicated to Moloch, the fire-god or the king {nieUk),^ This
name Ge-bal reproduces that of the fire-god of the Phoenician
sons of Tur, the revolving pole, the Sumerian trading race
of the Euphratean delta, who is called in the Akkadian
Tablet of the Thirty-Stars Gi-bil, the Sumerian form
of the Akkadian Bil-gi.^ It was after this god that they
* Iliad^ xxii. 29, where Achilles, going towards Troy to attack Hector, is
compared to the star Sirius, the dog of Orion {k6v (bpLufvos),
2 Encyclopedia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, Art. * Jebeil.'
' R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars,' line
9, Star No. vii. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archctology^ Feby. 1890;
Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary , No. 244.
410 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
named their holy city on tiie Mediterranean coast, and its
citizens were the vanguard of the Eastern Semite race,
who subsequently, under the prophet sons of Kohath,
the worshippers of the Ephod or sacred shirt, renounced
their tribal sign of the sacred girdle, reser\'ed baptismal
consecration by holy water and anointing oil to the
priests,^ and joined themselves, as I shall show in the
next Essay, to the Western phallic fire-worshippers, the
offerers of human sacrifices, as the Semite race of the cir-
cumcision.
But tliese people preserved the memorj' of their descent
from the twin races, from the primaeval father and mother
who both ruled in complete equality, and whose children of
both sexes were, like the young Zend neophytes, educated
under similar discipline. It is the remembrance of these
people who also, as worshippers of the Soma, the Zend
Haoma, believed in the sanctifjnng eflicacy of baptism which
is presor\'ed in the numerous ablutions required in the Zend
and Jewish ritual. While the Semites, like the Zend fire-
worshippers, sons of Yima, the twins, call themselves the sons
of the twins Esau, the <^oat-go<l, and Jacob — a family gene-
alogy wliicli was added to the national history when the
woman had become the dependant of man, and had ceased
to be his equal and helpmate, as she was in the matriarchal
age, and in the infancy of the twin races formed by the union
with the matriarchal village races of tlie Northern Finns,
who looked on the mother of the family as the guardian of
the /or/a or household fire.-
It was among: one of the evolutionarv forms assumed by
the twin races that the Spartan ideal of the nation formed
by tlie alliance of both sexes, equally trained and disciplined,
arose ; and it is this Spartan discipline which I have in
Essay iii. traced to the Na<ja race, who called themselves
the sons of Kush, born from the e^jfj laid bv their mother
^ Leviticus viii. 1-12.
- Lenormant, Chaldican Magic, chap. xvi. pp. 248, 249,
ESSAY IV 411
Gandhari. It was these Eastern sons of the bird-mother
and sun-father who joined the Western worshippers of the
human father and the fire-god, in the age when Nabu or
Nebo, the prophet-god, the planet Mercury, to whom Mount
Nebo was sacred, was worshipped as the ruler of the heavens,
when men measured time by tracing the passage of the
moving heavenly bodies through the circles formed by the
fixed stars, and when, as I show in the next Essay, the Semite
confederacy assumed its final form in the alliance of the
Eastern and Western races. This alliance was, as I show,
consummated by the rite of circumcision said to have been
performed by Joshua, the son of Nun, the fish (mm) god,
after the death of Moses on Mount Nebo, and the taking
of Jericho, the moon-city.
NOTE A.
Professor Norman Lockyer quotes Biot {Dawn of Astronomy^ p. 209) to
prove that Sirius rose heliacal ly at the summer solstice in Egypt on about the
same latitude as Kashi (Benares) in India about 3285 B.C. But the evidence I
have adduced throughout these Essays proves conclusively that the rising of
Sirius and the beginning of the rains in India and the Persian Gulf were con-
nected together in mythological astronomy ages before this time. I may here,
while referring to Professor Lockyer's book, point out the almost exact identity
between the order of the development of the processes of astronomical research
arrived at by him and that set forth in this book. In Essay 1 1, pp. 82-90, I
have in the Greek myths of Ixion and Koronis, in the Hindu comparison of the
heavens to a revolving oil-press, and in the ritual of the Vajapeya sacrifice,
traced the dawn of astronomy to the observation of the revolutions of the pole
and the reckoning of the seven days of the week. In p. 330 Professor Lockyer
sums up the order of the use of astronomical processes for time measurement
by saying that the first civilisation in Northern Egypt, as represented by temple
building at Annu or Heliopolis, was one of non-equinoctial solar worship,
combined with the cult of a Northern star. Here the star worshipped was
Capella a Aurigae, the patron star of Babylon, a star apparently connected
with the worship of the Pleiades and Rohini(Aldebaran), the red cow-mother
of the team of plough oxen driven by Auriga, the charioteer, and with the
year of the bull I have spoken of in p. 381. But in p. 327 and 328 he says
that astronomical observation of the temple sites show that at Abydos and
Luxor, which all Egyptologists regard as at least as old as Annu, there
was a still older cult, as the star worshipped at these places was a Lyne or
412 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC
Vega, which was (p. 128) the Polar star from about 8000 to 10,000 B.C. I may
here add to this evidence of the early adoration of Vega as the polar star that
given by the astronomical myths connected with this constellation and those
of Hercules and Cygnus, called in Greece Omis, the Bird, between which it
stands. Greek mythology tells us that Lyra was first called the Tortoise-
shell (Chelus), a name still continued to it by Aratus, who took his astronomy
from very ancient Babylonian sources, but that Hermes, the fire-god, changed
it into the Lyre by adding seven strings to it. This is the myth we see de-
picted in the astronomical representations of these three constellations. Her-
cules is that symbolising the fire-god also called Hermes, but it is called by
Aratus £n$;onasin, or the kneeler, and he reproduces in his Pkaincmena the
myth on which this name is founded ; for he says that the shell or lyra comes
* hard by the left knee of the kneeler.* (Brown, Phaittomena of Aratus, 272,
p. 32). This is a most accurate description of the attitude of the kneeler
and of the position of Lyra as drawn in traditional astronomical pictorial star
maps. These show the hero of the constellation of the kneeler as trailing his
l)ent right leg behind him as one does while running up a slope, while the
bent left knee almost touches Lyra, and the left foot stands on the head of
Draco, the guardian constellation of the worshippers of the pole. This is a
picture of the father fire-god hurrying up the mother-mountain of the tortoise-
race to reach the polar star Vega, the leader of the seven strings of celestial
harmony, on the top, while on the opposite side of Lyra Cygnus is flying to
the mother-mountain of life as the mother-bird of the tortoise-race, to get
from it the Soma or creating-germ («/) of life, which she brought to earth as
the Shyf na bird of the Rigveda and Brahmanas. Here we have a clear case
of scientific and mythological astronomy both proving the early worship of
Vega and Lyra; as the polar star which, as I show (p. 379 note), all wedded
pairs of the Kushika, or tortoise-race, were required to adore together on their
tlrst night in their joint home. This cult of the polar star was, as I have
shown (pp. 370-372, and in the account of the Zend four stars, pp. 257-258),
followed by that of the four equinoctial and solstitial stars marking the
annual course of the sun as observed by the barley-growing races who began
their year with the summer solstice, and the autumnal equinox, and this stage
of progress is descrilxid by Professor Lockyer as that characterising a race
who worshipped a star rising in the East at each equinox (p. 351). These
were the people who, like the ancient Tur-vasu, or worshippers of the creating
pole (Tur), of whom I have spoken, and the ancient Egyptians described by
Professor Lockyer (p. 63), determined the arrival of the solstices and
equinoxes by the use of the Gnomon, their sacred divining pole, the
obelisk worshipped by all the early astronomical races. They, like the
Pyramid builders of Egypt, the builders of the temple to Bel at Babylon, and
those at Jerusalem, Baalbcc and Palmyra, oriented their temples East and
West, and worshipped as their supreme gods la or Yah, the god of the tnie
South, and Bil, the pole of the equator in Babylonian astronomy, with whom
was associated Anu, the ecliptic pole {Dazofi of Astrofiomy^ pp. 359, 364,
366, 367, 380). This school of equinoctial astronomers, called in India the
ESSAY IV 413
Yadu-Turvasu, was, as I have shown, followed by that which measured time
by the passage of the sun and moon through the star-circles I have described
in this Essay, and these were the race of Upper Egypt who are shown by
Professor Lockyer to have worshipped stars rising in the south-east, and
setting in the south-west (pp. 341, 359). It was these people who became in
South-western Asia the united Semitic race, whose history I describe in
Essay v. , who measured time by the lunar year of thirteen months, spoken of
in pp. 384 ff., which was made their official year by the rulers of the united
races, or Ashes (^/^), the tribe of Ephraim, whose headquarters were at
Haran, the city of the moon-god Lallan.
ESSAY V
THE HISTORY OF THE RULE OF THE KUSHITE-SEMITE RACES AS
TOLD IN THE EARLY FORMS OF THE SOMA FESTIVAL AXD
THE WORSHIP OF THE SUX-GOD RA.
In the third Essay of this series I have traced the history
of the worship of the goddess Istar and of the god Soma,
and have shown that both derived their origin from the
worship of the two earth-mothers, the mother-grove of the
Indian village communities and the mother-mountain of the
Northern races, and of tlie thunder- and storm-god as a
father-god, the husband of the land. I also showed that the
history of tlie evolution of religion, culminating in Soma
w^orship, disclosed its absorption into a form of ascetic
doctrine, in which the desire for personal holiness character-
ising Semitic belief in the fatherhood of the God of Right-
eousness predominated. I propose in the present Essay to
examine, more particularly than I did in those preceding it,
the history of the development of Semitic theology from
the worship of the rain-god of Northern India, to trace its
transmigration from India, the home of the Eastern Semites,
the descendants of Keturah, the second wife of Abram,
whose name, as I show later on, is a translation of tlie
Sanskrit Vritra, the enclosing snake, to that of the Western
Semites, the sons of Sar or Sara, the cloud-mother of
Armenian worship, and to point out how the two races
from the East and West formed the confederacy of the
sons of Sin, the moon-god whose mother-mountain was
414
ESSAY V 415
Sinai, the mountain of Sin, also called Hor-ib, or the home
of the supreme {Hor) creator (ti). It is in the history of
this union, beginning with the development of the ritual of
Soma- worship, originating, according to the Brahmanas, with
the Ashvins, or twin stars of day and night, who were the
Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests of the gods,i that we can
detect one channel by which the Dravidian reverence for
law and order, obedience to constituted authority, and
strong sense of duty permeated the Western world, and
became among the Jews the foundation of their belief in the
God of Righteousness, as the Father-God of the Jews first,
and afterwards of the whole human race.
Beginning this inquiry with the history of the worship of
the rain-god, we find that this was the origin of the worship
of a father whose home was in heaven, and it was in trying
to measure the time intervening between one rainy season
and another that the conception first arose of the existence
of a divine power which regulated and measured time. It
was in searching for the evidence of the signs of this creating
god that men first began to observe the regular recurrence
of the phases of the moon and the movements of the stars,
and to note how the latter revolved round the pole. It was
then that they also saw how time was measured by the daily
birth of the twins day and night who were depicted among
the stars as the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, who made the
seven stars of the Great Bear to revolve as the fire-drill of
heaven, the seven days which lighted the spark of life-
giving fire burning in the star Canopus of the southern con-
stellation Argo, and churned out the rains of the rainy season.
It was the people who worked out these conceptions who
called themselves the Ashura, or sons of the six {Ash) gods,
and it is by tracing out the theology of these Ashura, who
believed in the divinity of pairs, that we can find out the
original tenets of the theology of the Kushite race, called in
India the Kushika.
^ Eggeling, Sai, Brah. iv. I, 5, 15 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvL p. 276.
416 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
The god called in the Rigveda *the renowned mightv
enchanter of the Ashura,** who measures the earth with the
sun,^ is Varuna, the god of rain ( Var\ and also the god of
the dark heaven of night, and the gods most constantlv
associated with him are Mitra, the moon-god, and Aryaman,
and they are all three said to dwell in heaven,^ to follow
with their feet the paths marked out for them,^ and to drive
the car of order,* while Mitra-Varuna are said to be the
gods who maintain the invariable succession of the order of
natural phenomena wherever the horses of the sun run,*
and to ride on the heavenly car as tlie guardians of order,
distributing rain rich in honey (viadhu) to all whom they
protect,^ while it is Mitra who fixes the time of the ordained
sacred festivals or feasts.^ The era of the theology which
made Mitra-Varuna the ruling gods is marked in the Soma
ritual of the Satapatha Bnihmana, as that in which milk was
consecrated to Mitra, and Soma, or the live-giving holy water
of heaven, to Varuna, and hence, in the Soma-cup offered to
them. Soma is mixed with milk,® and it is, therefore, the age
in whicli the heavenly motlier, the moon, was worshipped as
the cow of heaven. But in working out the theologv of
this epoch it is necessary to find out which of the heavenly
bodies who mark the passage of time is indicated by Arya-
nian. He is a god who plays a prominent part both in the
mythology of the Rigveda and the Zendavesta, and by his
association with Mitra, the milk-mother, he is shown to
belong to the age when the ruler of the heavens under
Varuna, was the constellation of the seven-bulls, the Hapto-
iriilgas of the Zendavesta. Thougli, as I shall show pre-
sently, he was also a divinity of the earlier age, when the
author of life was the cow-mother moon, and when the
seven bulls were the seven deer or antelope gods. His
1 Rigveda, v. 85, 5. ^ IdiJ. i. 136, 2, 6.
' /did. V. 67, 3. * Ibid, vii. 66, 12.
5 Ibid. V. 62, I. « Ibid. V. 63, I. 7 /^^, iii, ^9^ 9.
* Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. iv. i. 4. 8-9 ; SvB.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 271.
ESSAY V 417
name has come in the evolution of speech to mean in Vedic
language like Mitra, ^ the friend,^ but he is also spoken of
in the Rigveda as the conductor of the bride, the sun-
maiden, married to the moon-god.^ He is thus one of the
' leaders of the regular succession of solar days, and in this
function he is associated with Bhaga, who is said to dwell
with him in heaven.^ And the meaning of this passage is
explained by Hindu astronomy which makes Bhaga the
dominant of the bright half of the month of Phalgun
(February-March) called Purva or Eastern Phalguni and
Aryaman and Pushan, the dominant of the dark half or
Uttara-Phalguni.^ They thus rule the month which pre-
cedes the vernal equinox when the Northern sun awakes
from his winter sleep, and Arayaman is shown to be another
form of Pushan. Pushan I have already shown to be Pash-
ang, the black-bull father-god of the Zendavesta, and I shall
prove presently that he was originally the Lithuanian thunder-
god Per-kunas, who impregnates the black rain-cloud, but
who became, as a star-god, the constellation Taurus, while
Aryaman as a star marks the stellar theology of the era pre-
ceding that when Pushan, the constellation, became that
which marked the beginning of the lunar year at the time
of the winter solstice and the winter rains of Babylon. I
have already suggested that the terms Purva and Uttara
which appear in the names of the Nakshatras of Phalgun and
Bhadrapada (Bfiadon) imply a union of nations possessing
different beliefs, and this hypothesis is confirmed by the
juxtaposition of the two gods Bhaga and Aryaman. Bhaga
means the tree with edible fruits. He is called in the Rig-
veda, Lord of Gifts, and is the Zend god Bhaga whose
name is perpetuated in the Persian Bagh Garden, and the
god who was worshipped by the Phrygians as Zeis Bagaios,*
^ Rigveda, x. 85, 23. ^ /did, i. 136, 6.
' Sachau's Alberunrs /tuiia, chaps, xxxvii. and Ixi. vol. i. p. 358 and ii.
p. 121.
* Jevons' Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of Aryans y pp. 24, 415.
418 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
and he is, therefore, the god who was originally the
cloud-mother who gave birth to the fruits, the heavenly
mother of the gardening race and the barley growers. But
these people were a race formed from the union of the
Eastern gardening races, the sons of the tree-mother, and
the Northern growers of barley, who were again dependant for
their crops on the ploughing-bull, the Naga or plough-god,
who fertilised the rains of heaven by the lightning-flash and
the earth by the plough drawn by the bull, and it is this union
of the two races which is commemorated in the eleven gods
of generation of Ash ura- worship, the five gods of the five
seasons of the Hindu year, and the six gods from which
they derived their name, and whose origin I shall proceed to
prove presently. The god Aryaman, called Airyaman in
the Zendavesta, is the god of the barley-growing races who
worshipped Pushan, the black-bull, and his names contain
the roots ar and a'lr^ or /r, meaning the son of Ir, that is of
Ira, Ida, or 11a, while the first means ' to plough,' and both
forms tell us that the sons of the sheep-mother Ida became
the sons of the ploughing bull, and thus the name Aryaman
or Airy(uiuin, means the ploughing bull-god, or the god who
holds the })lough. I have not found any evidence to prove
that Bhaga, the mother of fruit-trees ever became a star, as
the star-mother who took her place in astronomy was the
mother storm-bird of the Kushite race, but in Hindu
astronomy Aryaman is one of the stars in the constella-
tion rthishunijira, the alligator, and the alligator and bull
are said in the Rigveda to be the heavenly steeds who
brought the Ashvins or twin-parent stars to the house of
Divo-dasa or Divo-dasa, the ten (da^a) bright-gods (divo\ a
Vedic form of Dasaratha,^ the ten {dasa) chariots (ratha\
the father of Rilma and the Kushika race, called also
Bharadvilja, the lark, the father of the Bharatas. He is
said in the Rigveda to be the son of Vadhriashva, the
gelding,^ and, therefore, as I have shown, the fire-god.
* Rigveda, i. Ii6, i8 ; see also vi. i6, 5. - Ibid, vi. 61, I,
ESSAY V 419
Here we find in the union of the alligator and the bull a
further proof of the union of two races at the dawn of
Indian history, for the alligator is, as I have shown, the
Magh-ral of the Song of Lingal, and the Muggur, the
Hindu alligator-god, the father-god of the race of Mughs or
Maghadas. It is these two heavenly father steeds who are
reproduced in an astronomical form in the fourteen stars of
the constellation Shishu-mara, representing the fourteen
days, or the union of two weeks, which produce the full
moon from darkness. These are named in the Vishnu
Dharma, and among these Aryaman is said to be the
Western star, which, with Varuna, forms the two feet of the
Alligator constellation, while Marichi, Mahendra, Kashyapa,
and Agni, one of which Marichi, is a star of the Great Bear,
form its tail.^ The star Aryaman is, therefore, the leader
or drawer of the tail of the alligator, the heavenly plough,
and he must, therefore, be the chief star of the constellation
Bootes, meaning the driver of the oxen, also called Arkto-
phulax,^ or guardian of the bear, while its chief star is called
^ Sachau's Alberuni's India, vol. i. chaps, xxii. and xlv. pp. 242, 390.
^ Aratus, Phainomenay 92. Further consideration has convinced me that
though the mythology of Aryaman contained a reminiscence of the worship
of the shepherd-star Arkturus, yet that this was not the star finally called
Aryaman. I have in Essay iv., pp. 362, 363, shown that Sib-zi-ana (Arkturus)
was the Hindu Siva, the father god and star of the early Phrygian and
Syrian corn-growing races who reckoned three seasons in the year, and in-
voked as their parent-gods the virgin-mother of com, the star Virgo, the
mother of the spark of life {Marichi) the Great Bear, and the shepherd
guardian and faiher-god, the god of the staff-sceptre or fire-drill, Bootes.
Aryaman is a god of the later cult of the ploughing race, and the connection
between him and Pushan shows that Aryaman as a star must be associated
with Taurus and the bull-year of months, solstices, and equinoxes ruled
by Vishnu, the antelope and bull-god, of which I have spoken in Essay iv.
p. 381. As the ploughing-bull, and one of the three gods said to drive the car
of order (Rigveda, vii. 66, 12), he clearly belongs to the series of bull-stars
forming one of the early heavenly circles marking the paths of the moon and
sun. And thus it seems most probable that the star Aryaman was Capella
a Auriga, the charioteer, which lies close to Taurus, and was the patron-
star of Babylon, one of the earliest sites of the astronomical theology of the
sons of the palm-tree, the twin races who worshipped six creating gods, and
420 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Arktouros or Arkturus, the bear ward, and it is thus made
clear how he becomes in the Rigveda the star associated
with Varuna and Mitra, as the drivers of the car of the
orderly succession of natural phenomena. Their relation
to the Great Bear is distinctly shown in the hymn where
they are thus designated, and in which they are described as
the heavenly beings who appear after sunset, who represent
order * are born in order, steadfastly promote order, and hate
useless frivolity,'' who rise in the vault of heaven when ' the
eager divine sons of the deer (etasJia) come into view ** as the
* seven united yellow horses of the sun.** ^ It is these stars
m
of the deer (eta) whose skins are worn by the Maruts or
wind-goddesses* who were in the dawn of astral theology
looked on as the goddesses who turned the pole, the fire-
drill of heaven, and they are also the Prishati, or dripping
steeds of the Maruts, called the steeds with the broad hoofs.^
They must, therefore, be not the antelopes, but the ox-like
Nil-gau (Antilope picta) with broad hoofs and ox horns, who
range the jungles of the lands watered by the Northern
Ganges and Jumna. It was these seven united stars which
in their transformation from the stars of the black antelope
{Rishyd) to the stars of the bull (Airu\ became the stars of
who, in India, worshipped Krishna or Vishnu first as the black antelope, and
afterwards as the bull -lover of the cow-maidens, the Gopis. Capella, called
Dilgan, the god (di/) of the Gan or country-, was, according to Dr. Sayce, the
star which, in Akkadian times, determined by its position in relation to the
new moon of the vernal equinox the commencement of the year, just as I
have shown above Aryaman ruled the dark half of Phalgun, the equinoctial
Hindu month (R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., * Euphratean Stellar Researches,*
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Arclucology, May 1893, P* 324). In
Egyptian astronomy Capella was the star of the god Ptah, whose name means
* the opener ' (Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxxi. p. 318). The
Pleiades in Taurus, the mother-stars of the twin races, were, as Professor
Lockyer has shown, used with Antares a Scorpio as orienting points to indi-
cate the equinoxes in early temples {Dawn of Astronomy y xxxviii. p. 413).
* Rigveda, vii. 66. 12- 15; Ludwig's translation, No. 117, vol. i. p. 127.
'^ Rigveda, i. 166, 10.
^ Ibid. V. 58, 6 ; i. 39. 6 ; Prishati is derived from /r/, meaning * to drip,
to trickle.'
ESSAY V 421
the Nil-gau, the animals sacred to the god Nila, the ruler
of the blue (nil) vault of heaven, who is described in the
Mahabharata as the ruler of the South, the land of which
the capital city is Mahish-mati, the great mother, and who
was conquered by Sahadeva, the Panda va twin, representing
the fire-god.^
It is as the driver of the bull and the plough that Aryaman
appears in the Zendavesta as the great healer of diseases, and,
therefore, one of the gods of the ritual of the Ashvins, or
physicians of the gods, who drives nine furrows, the number
sacred to the gods of heaven, through the earth,^ and he there-
fore belongs to the theology of the worshippers of the rain-god
as the Naga, or plough of heaven, and as the god of the race
who first tried to discover medicinal secrets. It is to him
that the Airyema-Ishyo, one of the oldest of the Yasnas,
the prayer for grace and goodness, is addressed,^ and he is
invoked in the Sirozahs, together with the spirit of goodness,
Asha Vahista, and he thus becomes the Zend form of the
indwelling and life-creating spirit of God.* It is he who, as
the driver of the bulls, makes them turn round the pole in
the centre of the threshing floor and thresh out the year'^s
corn, and he is thus the star-god of the ploughing race, the
race who became in India the Bharata, the sons of the
Banyan fig-tree, the tree which, as the goddess-mother
Sharmishtha, meaning she who is the most protecting, was
the earliest representative of the regal umbrella, or sun-
shade, which has always, since the sons of the North first
became, as the Ashura Kushikas, the rulers of India, been
looked on as the sign of royal dignity. But Aryaman is not
only a member of the ruling triad of Mitra-Varuna- Aryaman,
but also one of the six Aditya, and he, as well as Mitra and
Varuna, are said in the Rigveda to be the children of
' Mahabharata Sabha (Digvtjaya) Parva, xxxi.
2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendiddd Fargard^ xxii ; S.B.E. vol. iv. pp.
229, 235. 8 Mill, Yapta^ liv.; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 293.
* Darmesteter,, Zendavesta Sirozah, i. 3 ; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 4.
422 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Daksha, the visible god, the fire-god of the fire-drill and
Aditi, the original fire-socket, the earth-mother.^ These six
Aditya are named in one hymn as Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga,
Varuna, Daksha, and Ahsha,^ the last meaning ^the in-
heritance,'' that is, the son, and the name is all but the same
as that of Anshu, the stem of the plant whence Soma, the
heavenly seed or begetter (su) of life, was pressed. Of these
Mitra- Varuna- Aryaman are called the chief pure Aditya,^ or,
in other words, they formed the original triad, which through
the belief of the Asura in the divinity of pairs became the
six creating gods, the doubled three, and these pairs are,
therefore, Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, the triad of the plough-
ing-race, and Bhaga, Daksha, and Ansha, the parent-gods of
the race born of the fire-drill, or the phallic father, the
mother-earth, the mother-tree, and the fire-socket, and the
son, the stem Ansha, whence life on earth was to be bom.
This last triad is another form of that of (1) Puru-ravas the
Eastern roarer, the thunder-god Daksha ; (2) Urvashi, the
moon-bird, the goose or swan-mother of the race who wor-
shipped the fig-tree, which has become in the accredited version
of the story, not the Banyan fig-tree (Fiai,s hidka), but the
Pi pal-tree, the (Ficu.s^ rcUgiosa)\ and ('3) Ayu, the son. While
in the mythology of the ])loughing-race we have the children
of the god (1) of the heavenly bow, the Krishfinu of the
Rigveda and the Greek Eurytion, wlio became Varuna, the
god of rain ; and of (2 and S) the twins day and night, who
became Aryaman and Ajjollo, the god of day, who was both
one of the horses and also the driver of the heavenly plough,
and Mitra the moon-god and goddess who beciime the Greek
Artemis, and it was these twins as the sun and the moon-
god who were driven round the heavenly threshing-floor
by Eurytion, the rainbow-god, who became the Kentaur or
Centaur, the goader (Kent) of the bull, called Taurus, or son
of the pole Tur.
* Rigveda, vii. 66, 2 ; viii. 25, 5, 3.
- Il'uL ii. 27, I. ^ Ibid. ii. 27, 2.
ESSAY V 423
But it is in the history of the Soma festival to the rain-
god that we can best trace the place to be assigned in
chronology to the worship of these six gods, the redupli-
cated pair, and the clew to the enigma is to be found
in the ritual of the festival called in the Rigveda the Tri-
kadru-ka ; as this proves that the Soma festival to the rain-
god was one celebrated at the beginning of the rainy season
of Northern India, and that it was one of the Naga festivals
of the Danavas and Ashuras, who believed in the god ruling
the year of five seasons, and in the six creating gods who
made the world in six days. It is mentioned seven times in
the Rigveda,^ and in three hymns it is marked as taking
place at or near the beginning of the rainy season, for it is
spoken of as commemorating the day on which Indra drank
Soma before he went forth to kill the first-born of the
dragons, that is, the god who keeps back the rain.* In one
of these hymns the dragon is spoken of as Danu, who lay
killed below his mother as a cow and its calf, the equivalent
of the Vritra serpent of the Satapatha Brahmana, called
Danava, born from the union of Soma and Agni, or the rain
bom of the lightning and the rain cloud,* and in another
it is called Danu Aumavabha, or the wool {ama) weaver
(vabh), the weaver of the sheep-skin fleece, the wool-strainer
of the Soma festival,* the cloud in which the life-giving
Soma was purified and endued with life by the lightning, the
son of the cloud mother-goddess of the sheep-race, the sons
of Ida, Ira, or Ila, the pastoral people who still, as the
Ilyats of Persia, retain their ancient name and occupation.
The day called the Tri-kadru-ka day is that sacred to the
three {tri) Kadrus, or three mothers of the Naga race, the
* Rigveda, ii. ii, 17 ; ii. 15, I ; ii. 22, I ; x. 14, 16 ; i. 32, 3 ; viii. 13,
18; viii. 81, 21.
2 /did. ii. 15, I ; ii. 22, i ; i. 32. 3.
3 /did. i. 32, 9 ; Eggeling, Sa/. Brdh. i. 3, 6, 8, 9 ; S. B. E. vol. xii. pp.
165, 166.
^ Rigveda, ii. 11, 18. The sheep-skin fleece is called in Rigveda, ix. 86,
47, Anvani Meshyah ; Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologies p. 201.
424 THE RULLNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sons of Danu, for Kadru is called the queen of the serpents ^
in the ritual of the Brahmanas, and is said in the Maha-
bharata to be the thirteenth of the wives of Ka8hyap€^ the
thirteenth month of the lunar year, and the mother of the
Nagas.^ Her name means the tree (dm) of Ka, the name by
which Prajapati is invoked in the Vedic hymn especially
addressed to him as Prajapatya Hiranyagarbha, that is, the
god of the golden {hiranya) womb (garbha).^ Thus the
three Kadrus are the three tree-mothers born from the
golden womb of the light-goddess, the three seasons of the
year. The name Ka-dru subsequently came to mean the
Soma cask, because the three sacred mother-trees were those
which had in them the divine Soma, the sap or soul of life,
the divine Su, or begetting spirit, whose name is the root
whence the word Soma is formed. This festival of the three
tree-mothers, the Tri-kadru-ka festival of the Rigveda,* is
said by Sayana to be one lasting six days, and forming the
section of the Soma festival which is called the Abhi-plava.^
This name means on (ab/ii) the boat (plava\ and ' plava ^ also
means a water-bird.® The gods invoked during the six days
of the feast are Jyotih, the h'ghts, or the stars ; Go, the cow ;
and Ayub, the son of life, to each of whom one of the first
three days is dedicated. They also rule the second three
days, but in a varied order, the fourth day being siicred to
Go, the fifth to Ayul.i, and the sixth to Jyotih. That
Jyotih, to whom the first and sixth days are consecrated, is a
form of the heavenly fire-god, the lightning or the god of
starlight and daylight, is proved by the fact that these days
are said to be an Agnishstoma feast, or one especially sacred
to Agni the fire-god, and the special Agnishstoma ceremony
at the Soma festival is that in which the year is dedicated
* Eggeling, SaL Brah, ii. I, 4, 29 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 301 note.
'-* Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixv. p. 185.
^ Rigveda, x. 121. ** Rigvcda, ii. ii, 17.
^ Ludwig, Der Rigvt'da^ vol. iii.; Mantra Literaiur^ p. 389, s.v. 'Tri-
kadru-ka.'
'^ Zimmer, Altindischts Lehen^ chap. iii. p. 93.
ESSAY V 425
to Prajapati, the creator, as Dhruva, the god of the pole
(dhruva)^ the rain-god, whose creative power is shown by the
production of the year of five seasons, called the year of
Prajapati,^ born of the union of the three father-gods with
the three mother-gods, a conception deduced by the Ashura
theologians from the three seasons of the year, and the union
of the three races of the Maghadas or fire- worshippers, the
sons of Gautuma, the bull-father, and the Kushikas, or sons
of the tortoise, the cultivators of and earliest settlers in the
Indian fatherland.
The myth on which the ritual of the Tri-kadru-ka festival
is founded is that telling of the re-union of Puru-ravas, the
Eastern (puru) roarer {ravas\ the thunder-god, whom I shall
show presently to be the god Ra, with Urvashi the water-
bird, or the sacred goose on the lake of the holy Plaksha
tree (Ficus in/ectoria). It was from this union that Ayu, the
father of historic time, was born. His mother, when the
mother-bird of the tortoise race became the flying bull or
cow, the Kerub of Euphratean mythology, was worshipped
both as the Go, the mother-cow of heaven, the mother of
Indra, and Nanda, the bull, the foster-father of Krishna.
The festival celebrating the day of the summer solstice, on
which Ayu, the counterpart of the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the
son of life, the Semitic Tammuz embarked on the year'^s
boat to sail down the stream of time, was that called the
Tri-kadru-ka, or annual national feast to the rain-god, when
the whole of Northern India was united under the rule of
the Kushika Ashura Naga kings. It united in one festival
the annual tribal festivals to the mother-tree, such as those
celebrating the blossoming of the Sal tree {Shorea robuMa) the
parent tree of the Dravidian races, and the planting of the
Kurrum tree {Nauclea parvifolia) by the barley -growing
yellow race, which I have described in Essay iii. This festival
became, after the introduction of the solar year, the Soma
' Eggeling, Sat Brah,, iv. 2, 4, 10-13 ; iv. 5, 4, 2 ; iv. 5, 5, 12 ; S.B.E.
vol. XX vi. pp. 300, 301, 402 note 4, 408.
426 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
festival of the Brahmanas, which still survives as the great
annual festival to Jugernath at Puri, called the Rath-jatra,
or chariot {rath) progress (jdtra) of the year, which is also
reproduced at every other centre of religious ritual in
Northern India. It was originally, as we learn from its name,
dedicated to the three mother-trees, whose mythic history I
have traced in Essay iii. The Sal-tree, the sacred house-
pole of the Dravidian races, the Fig-tree, and the Am or
Mango-tree, the parent-trees of the Bharatas, and the
united Kushika and Maghada races. These last were the
race whose mother-stars were the Pleiades, of which the
leading star is Amba, called by the Hindus the Krittakas, or
spinners,^ and whose theology and ritual is preserved in the
ceremonies of the sacrifice hallowed by the Vashat call,
which I have described in Essay iii., the connection being
shown by the Vedic name of the call for rain, Vashatkriti,*
or the spinning (krito) of Vash or Varsha, the season of the
rain. The Krittakas, or spinning-stars, are said in the
Satapatha Brahmana to be the wives of the stars of the con-
stellation first called that of the seven bears (riksha), and
afterwards the seven Rishis, or antelopes {rishyd)^ when its
worshippers had in the Euphratean plains made the antelope
or gazelle sacred to Mullil, called in the Bible Terah, the
father of Abram, their father-god, instead of the bear-god
of Phrygia and the North. And this historical deduction is
confirmed by the metaphorical name of the spinners, a
name derived from the vocabulary of the Northern races, who
had learned in Asia Minor and the neighbourhood of the
Caspian Sea to spin thread and weave cloth from the flax of
Asia Minor, and the hemp of the shores of the Caspian Sea,*
and who had taken their knowledge with them when emigrat-
^ From the root krit^ to spin.
- Rigveda, i. 14, 8 ; vii. 14, 3 ; vii. 15, 6.
^ Eggeling, Sat. Brdh. ii. I, 2, 4 ; S.B. E. vol. xii. pp. 282, 283.
"* Encyclopadia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. ix. p. 294, Art. * Flax/
vol. xi. p. 647, Art. * Hemp.*
%
ESSAY V 427
ing to the villages of the Neolithic Age in Europe, and to
the Eushite empire in India, where they divided the people
into guilds or trade unions founded on community of
function, and discovered how to use cotton thread for
weaving. The reverence of the Ashura-Kushika for the
Pleiades, whose mother-star is Amba, also proves them to be
connected with the South- Western Semites, the Himyaritic
Arabs of Southern Arabia, the land of Sheba, meaning the
seven, that is, the seven stars of the constellation of the Great
Bear, called by the Arabs Al-suha,^ who first worshipped
the Pleiades with its six stars, the sacred number of the
Ashura, as their mother-constellation under the name of the
Tur-ayya,* or children of the father-pole (tur) of the Turanian
races, and who also like the Eushite Ashuras in India wor-
shipped the star Aldebaran of the constellation Taurus,
called in India Rohini, or the star of the red cow, the
mother-star of the red race. It was from the worship of
the mango (am) mother, the tree to which the bridegrooms
of the Eurmi caste, the sons of Eur, the tortoise, are wedded,
that the names of Amba, the Vedic mother of Vrisha-kapi,
the rain ( Vrisha) ape (kapi) and of Sarasvati,' the mother
river of the sons of Sar is derived, as also the names of the
mothers of the royal races of the Mahabharata Amba, Am-
bika, and Ambalika. They are, as I have shown from the
legends connected with them, the mothers of the Maghadas
or magicians, the Eauravyas, or sons of the tortoise (Arwr),
and their rivals and successors the Pandavas, or the fair
(pandu) races. It is to them that the festival called in
Brahmanas, the Try-ambika offerings, a very ancient form
of the rain festival is dedicated. It is said to be equal in
efficacy to the great oblation {Mahd-havu) offered to Indra
to celebrate the slaying of Vritra, the enclosing snake, which
1 Sachau's Alberuni's India, vol. i. chap. xlv. p. 389.
^ Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions , * Primitive Arabian
Religion,* pp. 63, 65.
^ Rigveda, x, 86. 7; ii. 41, 16. See Grass mann, Worterlmch zum Rig-
veiia,s,y, *Amba.'
428 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
kept back the rain/ but its sanctity dated from the days of
primaeval theology, for the offerings were made on a spot
outside and to the north of the consecrated area, and on one
intersected by cross-roads, and thus marked by the cross
sacred to the rain-god, which is said to be Rudra's favourite
haunts and the halting place {pad-blsa) of the Agnis.-
Hence the festival is called Rudra-Try-ambika, or that
dedicated to the red {rud) god, the father of the storm
mothers, the Maruts, and his three wives, and he is called
the red god from the spark of fire kindled by him in the
fire-socket when he was the fire-drill, from being reddened
by the blood of the victims slain in his sacrifices, when he
was the sacrificial stake to which the animal victims, whose
blood fertilised the ground, were bound, and this name was
continued to him when he became the red cloud of the
thunder-storm who infused the soul of life into the earth
by pouring on it the life-giving rain, the blood of the creat-
ing god. This sax^rifice to the three mothers of the sons of
the rain-god is an exact facsimile of that offered to the
goddess-mother Hecate in Greece, the mother of the Erinnyes,
the Greek form of tlie Vedic Saranyu, the cloud- {sar) mother
of the heavenly twins, day and night, for it was offered on
cross-roads, and she was called the triple-formed (r/at/iop^o?)
and the three-faced (T/ot7rpo<rct)7ros) goddess, that is, the
mother-vear of three seasons, the mother of the yellow
race who worshipped the Ashvins or heavenly twins, and
adored the rain-god as the great Nagii or plough of heaven,
the Jewish Ashera, or husband of the tilled land, which was
worshipped in India as tlie goddess Sita, the furrow. It
was he who was also known as Varuna, the god of rain (t'flr),
the Greek Ouranos, who, when tiie study of the signs of
heaven led to the deification of the stars, became the god
of the dark night. The identity of the theology of the
^ Egijeling, Sai. BrdJu ii. 6, 2, 1-7; il. 5, 4, I ; S.B.E. vol. xii. pp. 417,
437-439. •
- S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 439 note i ; Tait, Brah, i. 6, 10. 3.
ESSAY V 429
earliest worshippers of Varuna with that of the people who
made the rain-god the husband of the land is proved by the
denunciation of this creed in the Zendavesta as the false
doctrine of the Varenya Devas or gods of Varuna worship.
They are said to be the five angels of the materialistic Aftro
Mainyu, and are called Indra, Sauru, Naunghaithya, Tauru,
and Zairi.^ Of these Indra is the Vedic god of that name,
Sauru is the begetter or child-bearer, the begetting Su, the
son or daughter of Sar, according as Sar is identified with
the lightning-father or the cloud-mother of the heavenly
fire.2 He appears in Indian theology as the god Sharva, said
in the Brahmanas to be the Eastern name of Prajapati,^
and as Sharyata, the M anava, or son of Manu, in the story
of the rejuvenescence of Chyavana, the earthquake-god, the
earthly fire-god of the land of fire, dominated by the volcanic
mountain Ararat, under which he was imprisoned as the
Greek Cyclopes were by the storm-god Apollo. Chyavana,
who had been imprisoned as the mountain fire, and covered
with the moss of age, was married to the daughter of
Sharyata, and made young again by the Ashvins when
he became the rain-god who brings the rain to usher
in the year, and whose coming is announced by the
storms which tell the world that the lightning-god, the
Indra of the Rigveda and Zendavesta, has marched forth
to slay the evil spirits who kept back the rain.* The
Naunghaithya, who are also called in Zend theology the
Na-satya, are by this last name shown to be the counterparts
of the Ashvins of the Rigveda, who are most frequently
described and addressed in its hymns as the Na-satya ' those
^ West, Bundahish, i. 27 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendlddd Fargard^
xix. 43 ; S.B.E. voL v. p. 10, and iv. p. 218 ; Tide, Outlines of the History
of Ancient Religions, * Religion among the Eranians,* § 106, p. 172.
' This name Sauru appears in that of the Sauro-mata, the people whose
mother (mat) is Sauro, by which Herodotus calls the race living in Southern
Russia, bom from the union of the Scythian men with the Amazons.
' Eggeling, Sat. Brah. i. 7, 3, 8 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 201.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brah. iv. i, 5, 2-7 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. pp. 273, 274.
430 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
who do not deceive/ the twins day and night. The whole
myth of these three gods tells of the union of the lightning-
god with the cloud-mother accomplished by the recurring
succession of the twins day and night,^ The remaining two
gods of the five are the children bom of this union, and the
festival held in honour of these children is spoken of in
the Rigveda as that of the son of Sharyata, at which Indra
drank Soma.^ They are called in the Zendavesta Tauru
and Zairi, and these are the Zend forms of the twin sons of
DevayanT and Yayati in Indian legend for Tauru, the son
of the pole, Tur, of the Zendavesta, is equivalent to the
Indian Tur-vasu, he w^iose god (vasu) is the pole Tur, the
meridian house-pole of theKushite race, while Zairi^ is another
form of Yadu, the father of the Ya-devas, or they whose
god (deva) is Ya or la, the rain-god, for the name Zairi is
reproduced in that of Jara, old age, pronounced Ya-ra, who
united the Kushika sons of Ya and the Magliada sons of
* These three gods, Indra, the rain-god, the cloud mother Sauru or
Sarasvati, and the Ashvins, the twins, are the three gods of the Ashura
Sautramani sacrifice. See Essay ill. p. 206. - Rigveda, iii. 51. 7.
^ See Essay VI. p. 550, where I show from the Zend name of Soma Hari-
zairi that Zairi is the Zend form of the Hindu Hari, the father-god of the Yada-
vas. Thus we see that the twin-gods of Varuna worship were the revolving
pole of time, the god of the Turvasu ( 7aunt)y and the * Natur-Geist,* the creat-
ing germ (c^zm) of physical growth, the god of the Yadavas. This soul of life,
which made the plants grow annually green {hari or zairi)^ was supposed to
be infused into the inmost being of the partakers of the Soma cup, which was
originally, as in the Sautramani sacrifice of the Ashuras (Essay in. p. 206),
an infusion of young Kusha-grass, ears of barley, and roasted barley, or of the
mother-tree, the Bur-tree {Ficus indica)^ or the Palas-tree {Butca frondosa)
(ill. pp. 138, 242). This is the cup reproduced in the Kvxeuy of the
Eleusinian mysteries, made of barley meal, mint, and water {Encyc. Brit. Arts.
* Eleusinia' and * Mysteries,' vols. viii. p. 127, and xvii. p. 127). The belief
in the magical virtues of this holy cup became, in the reformed teaching of
Ahura Mazda, faith in Soma or Ilaoma, as an agent of moral growth, and
this aspiration after a new birth to righteousness, which characterised the
creed of the merchant race, the wearers of the Parsi sacred thread described
in Essay iv., developed, as I have shown in Essay in. pp. 323-329, into the
Jain belief in the superior efficacy of ascetic self-discipline as a creator of
indestructible spiritual life.
ESSAY V 431
Tur by joining the two parts of their king Jara-sandha
together when he was bom of the two Mango mothers,
made pregnant by a mango given to them by the Rishi
Chandra Kushika, the moon (Chandra) of the Kushikas. It
was the goddess Zairi or Jara who, by this union, fomided
the long-enduring rule of the tortoise race. The final
disruption of this primaeval confederacy is shown in Zend
historical theology by the rise of the new revelation which
looked on the only life worth living as that marked by
spiritual and mental growth, and made the God of
Righteousness Asura or Ahura Mazda, the lord of wisdom
and goodness, the supreme god. The gods who in the
earlier materialistic faith were looked on as (1) the twin-gods
of day and night, the turners of the pole, whose revolutions
brought the rain-god to earth ; and (2) the mother-goddess
who watched over the lives bom in the successive seasons
brought by her in their allotted order, became, instead of
being the gods of life, the gods of death, Tauru being
denounced as the demon of sickness, and Zairi as that of
decay.^ But as the three mothers and the three-headed
Vishva-rupa were originally the three seasons of the year
of the barley-growers of Phrygia, so these five creating gods
must represent the five seasons of the Hindu Prajapati, the
conquering year ushered in by Indra, the rain-god of the
rainy season of Northern India. This is confirmed by the
analysis of the evolution of the gods of the five seasons, the
year of the Ashvins, which shows that it was computed by
the addition made by the gardening race, who founded the
empire of the Kushites round the mother-mountain of the East,
of the rainy and autumn seasons to the three original seasons
of spring, summer, and winter, reckoned in Asia Minor by the
Basque or Iberian cultivators of barley and cereal crops.
We see in this series of chronological historical myths the
* West, Bundahish^ i. 27 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendtddd Fargard, x.
9-14, xix. 43 ; S.B.E. vol. v. p. 10 note 2 ; Introduction iv. § xxiii. p. xvii.
pp. I35» I36» 218.
432 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
evolution of successive conceptions of the history of the
mystery of creation which originated among an agricultural
race, who, originally in India, depended for their Iian-ests on
the copious falls of rain necessary for the sowing and growth
of rice, and whose one anxiety was that which still yearly
disturbs the minds of the people of Northern and Central
India, as to whether the summer solstice will or will not bring
good rains. When we come to compare the theology of the
five seasons of the rain-god with that which is set forth in
the Zendavesta as succeeding the materialistic faith of Aiiro
Mainyu, we find that the new belief is a natural outgrowth of
the original materialistic creed, and that both races make the
god which directs the year beginning with the summer solstice
their ruling god. For, just as Indra, the rain-god, is the first
of the five gods of the Afiro Mainyu year, so is Tishtrya or
Sirius, which rises when the rains begin at the summer
solstice, the god which brings the rains and opens the year
of Ahura Ma/da. But in this new belief the ruling gods
are not the gods of earth, but the star gods who mark the
passage of time and govern the four quarters of the heavens.
Also, while Tishtrya (Sh'ius) brings the rains born from the
southern constellation of Satavaesa or Argo, and its guiding
star Canopus, the Indian Agastya, the lapse of time inter-
vening between one rainy season and another and the periods
of gestation are recorded, not as in the earlier faith, by
the recurring appearance of the twins day and night, but
by the evolution of periods of seven days, personified in the
seven stars of the constellation Hapto-iriilgas, or the seven
bulls {ini or iring\ a third transformation from the seven
bears and seven antelopes of the earlier mythologies which
were ruled by and consecrated to the supreme creator, the
embodied image of the intelligence and wisdom which made
the work done by the six creating gods of the Ashura faith
perfect. This belief gives, as I point out in Essay in. pp. 263-4,
when tracing the historical meaning of the change which made
the constellation of the Great Bear that of the seven bulls,
ESSAY V 433
evidence of the infiltration of Northern blood among the
ruling races, and tells us that the ruling race of the sons of Ida
or Ira, the sheep-mother, had become the sons of the plough-
ing-buU. It was they who made the Go, or heavenly cow, the
Hyades, or rainy constellation in Taurus, with its attendant
star Aldebaran or Rohini, the red cow, their heavenly mother,
and who were united with the sons of Amba, the Pleiades,
and the twin races, who both grew the cereal crops raised
by the help of the plough-bidl, and also ploughed with
their ships the Southern seas under the guidance of
Agastya, the star Canopus. It was from the worship of
the gods of the five seasons, that the adoration of the five
stars, the five bulls and eagles, which, in the Rigveda, sit in
the midst of heaven and hunt away the wolf of fire * which
destroys the waters,' ^ and keep back the rain, took its rise.
These five bulls were the polar star and the four stars mark-
ing the four quarters of the heaven, and it is by two bulls
that the Hindu bride is directed to be drawn to her home in
the Grihya Sutras,^ it is on a bulFs hide that she is placed
on entering her husband'^s house, and it is the bull or polar
star that she and her husband worship the first night of their
residence in their own home.* It is these five stars which
are said in the M ahabharata to be depicted above the parent
palm-tree, on the banner of Bhishma,* the imcle of the
Kauravyas and Pandavas, and first leader of the Eau-
ravyas in their war with the Pandavas. It is these stars
also which appear to be the earliest Egyptian stellar
representation of Horus as the god of the pole, and his
four sons, who afterwards became, as shown in Essay iv.
p. 396, the four stars of Pegasus, the flying sun-horse, called
^ Rigveda, i. 105, 10, 1 1.
' Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras^ Sankhayana Grihya SUtra^ i. 15, 8 ; S.B.E.
vol. xxix. p. 40.
' Oldenbergy Grihya StUras Sankhayana Grihya Sutra^ i. 16, i, 2, 17, 3,
pp. 41, 42 ; also Asvalayana Grihya Sutra^ i. I7> 21, 22, p. 170.
^ Mahabharata Bhishma {Bhishma Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165.
434 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
by the Egyptians the constellation of the Servant.^ Tlie
chief votaries of this belief in the supremacy of the invisible
creator and his six creating agents were the race who
developed into the Semite confederacy, the sons of Shelm,
the seven (sheba) jmrent gods of the confederated tribes of
the sons of the Pleiades and the sons of the cow mother-star
Aldebaran, whose genealogical mythology is set forth in the
thirteen children of Jaxiob and his four wives, two of whom
were the daughters of the moon-god Laban. This con-
federacy marks the further stage in civilisation reached when
the lunar year of thirteen months was substituted for the
Ashura computation of the eleven lunar months sacred to the
gods of generation, the eleven stars of Joseph'^s dream, and
the eleven original signs of the Zodiac.^ Among these
children of Jacob we find the two children of the goddess-
mother Deva-yani, reproduced in Gad and Ashur, the sons of
Zilpah, she who has the foot (pa) of the snake (tsir)^^ the
handmaid of Leah, the wild cow. Ashur being the Turvasu
or people whose god was the meridian pole (tur) pointing to
the polar star, and Gad was first the bull-star, the constella-
tion Taurus, who, when tiie planets were made gods of time
by the people who reckoned time by the lunar year, became
the planet Jupiter. Gad is one of the forms of the bull-god,
called by the Akkadians Gud or Gut, a name which reappears
in that of the Hindu priestly race of the Gautuma, the sons
Rohini, the red-cow, the race who united the Kushikas and
Magiulhas into the Ashura race, by giving the mango which
made the two queens of the king of Magadha pregnant. The
original Aryan name marked by the Aryan aspirated letters,
^ H. Brugsch, I^eli^on und Mythologie dcr Alien ^Egyptcr^ p. 712.
- R. Brown, junr., F.S.A., * Remarks on the Euphratcan Astronomical
Names of the Signs of the Zodiac,' Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archizology, Star vii. The author states that Servius says positively that the
original Chalda.>an Zodiac consisted of but eleven constellations.
* The name is formed like that of Zillah, the wife of Lamech, which is the
Hebrew form of the Akkadian Tsil-lu, or Tsir-lu, she who is of the race [In]
of the snake (/«>).
J
ESSAY V 436
from which the Southern name Gut or Gud was formed,
survives in the tribal name Goth, by which the building race
were called in their European home, and in that of Gadhi the
prince of the Eushikas, who was the father of the Vishva-
mitra, the moon-god.^ It is in one of the hymns of the
Third, or Vishva-mitra Mandala of the Rigveda, that we find
the bull-god imited with the rain-god in a similar form to
that set forth in Zend theology, where one of the forms
assumed by Tishtrya in his combat with Apaosha is that of
a bull. In this hymn ^ the bull and rain-god are the two
gods to whom joint oblations were offered at the Soma
sacrifice, when it was the most ancient form of the Tri-kadru-
ka feast, when the gods invoked were only one pair, and not
three gods reduplicated to make three pairs. The comparison
of the evidence as to the ritual of the two sacrifices leaves no
doubt that that described in this hymn is older than that
of the corresponding Agnishstoma festival in the Satapatha
Brahmana, which latter represents a time when the original
Soma rain festival of the Ashvins had become the great
annual feast of the racea who measured time by the solar
year. In the Vedic hymn the offerings prescribed as
accompaniments of the three daily Savanas, or libations of
Soma are (1) Roasted or parched barley, such as was offered at
the Pitri-yagnas to the Pitaro Barishadal;!, or fathers of the
Kushika race who sat on the Barhis, or seats strewn with the
sacred Kusha grass,^ the significance of which I have shown in
Essay iii. ; (2) Barley porridge, the offerings made by each of
the members of the sacrificer'^s family to Varuna at the Varuna
praghasah, or summer festival ; * (3) Apupa, or butter cakes ;
(4) Barley or rice cakes (purodds). The apportionments in
this hymn of these offerings to the gods invoked exactly
follows that prescribed in the ritual of the Agnishstoma in
the Satapatha Brahmana, for in both the Purodasa cake is said
^ Biihler, A/anu, vii. 42; S.6. E. vol. xxv. p. 242. ^ Rigveda, iii. 52.
^ F'ggeling, Sat, Brdh. ii. 6, i, 5 ; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 421.
''•Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, ii. 5, 2, 14; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 395.
436 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
to be sacred to Indra, the roasted com to his yellow steeds,
the t^in-father gods of the Ashura race who worshipped the
Ashvins, and the Imrlev porridge {karambha\ which is said
in another hymn to be his favourite food, to Pushan.^ But
to these three offerings to Pushan, the t^in-father gods, and
Indra, two are added in the Satapatha Brahmana, one of
sour curds {dadhi) to Sarasvati, the storm-mother Sar, who
curdles milk and turns it sour, and one of clotted curds
{payasayd) to Mitra-Varuna, and this addition proves that
the offering of the Five Oblations called in the Satapatha
Brahmana the Panketi, or five, was one in which the two
oblations to the rain and storm-gods were added to the earlier
offering to the three gods of the three seasons of the barley-
growing Tsjce. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that
theVishva-mitra hymn only recognises, besides the Soma drink
the slayer of Vritra, or the enclosing snake, the god who kept
back the rain, the offerings to Indra, the twin-gods, his steeds,
and Pushan, the Apupa, or butter cakes to the Maruts or
wind-mother-goddess, while in the Satapatha Brahmana
ritual of the Soma festival this offering of cakes is expanded
into those of ghee (clarified butter) made to the three Upasads,
or three seasons ; and we thus see that the Maruts, or mother-
goddesses, who got their Vedic name of Maruts when they
became the goddesses of the South-west moonson, the
Akkadian Martu, the west, which was named from the Gond
marom^ a tree, were originally the three mother-seasons, the
daughters of the storm-goddess Sar, the Greek mother of the
Erinnyes, and the Sanskrit Saranyu, who were, by the butter
cakes and ffhee^ acknowledged as the offspring of the heavenly
cow-mother of the Gut, or the bull-race, the mother-goddess
Go of the Tri-kadru-ka ritual. Thus the Upasad offering
is a reproduction of the Tri-kadru-ka,^ both being twofold
festivals, in which the libations to the parent-gods are ordered
^ Eggeling, Sa/, Brah, iv. 2, 5, 22; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 315 ; Rigveda, iii.
52, 7, vi. 56, I.
- Eggcling, Sat, Brah, iii. 4, 4, 6, 17; S.B.E. vol. xxvi, pp. 106, loS*
ESSAY V 437
•
to be made twice. Two offerings are substituted in the
Satapatha Brahmana for the fourth offering of the original
festival in order to complete the fiill number of five offerings,
the Pafikti, or Savanlyab Purodasa, consecrated to the five
seasons of the year of Prajapati. This number five marks
the Agnishstoma as an Ashura offering, and this conclusion
is confirmed by the ritual which orders that after the Soma
cup had been drawn in this stage of the festival for the
Ashvins, an animal Wctim should be offered.^ This shows
that the Tri-kadru-ka, or twofold festival to the three seasons,
the Upasads of the Soma sacrifice, and the Paftkti, were in-
stituted in the ritualistic age, which offered at the Soma
sacrifice eleven victims to the eleven months sax^red to the
gods of generation ; and it was by this race, who marked their
union with the cultivating races in India who preceded them
by adding six — the reduplicated or paired three — to the five
sacred to the seasons of the Hindu year, and thus made
eleven their sacred number, that the year sacred to the
thirty-three gods of time, called in the Zendavesta * the
thirty-three lords of the ritual order,** * was calculated. These
thirty-three gods are spoken of four times in the Rigveda as
being * three times eleven "* in number,^ thus showing that
the sacred numbers three and eleven are the basis of the
calculation, while the time indicated is, as I have proved, the
year reckoned as composed of lunar months of twenty-eight
days each, and five seasons.
In Pushan, who holds a prominent place among the gods
of the Pafikti sacrifice, and also in that of the eleven victims,
in which the fourth victim due to the father-god, the fire-
drill, whose saxired number is four, is offered to him,* we trace
a Northern form of Indra, the Vedic rain-god, who is called
his brother.^ For Pushan is the heavenly black-bull Pashang
^ Eggelingy Sat. Brdh, iv. 2, 5, 12-14; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 312.
^ Mill, Yofftay i. 10, and many other places ; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. p. 198.
5 Rigveda, i. 34, li ; i. 139, 11 ; viii. 35, 3 ; ix. 92, 4.
* Eggeling, Sat, Brdh, iii. 9, i, 10 ; S.B.E. vol. xxvl p. 219.
« Rigveda, vi. 55, 5.
A
«8 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC
of the Bundahi.^h, the &ther of Aghaeratha^ the bull-king of
?^'ika'vafltan,^ and for the origin of the oame Pushan we must
turn to Akkadian and Finnic mythology. A^ the god whose
favourite food w&s barley, the guardian of cattle and horseSf
who made cows to calve,- he chiefly belongs to the Northern
god.s brought by the barley growers and cattle herdsmen
from A'^ia Minor, who were in India, as I have shown a few
pages hack, united with the Hittite twin-gods and by the
rain-god Suk or Sak, the Indian Sukra, the earlier form
of Indra, and Pushan, like Sukra or Indra, is also a rain-god.
In Akkadian the sign for /m, which also means a ^ pool" is
y >^, and this is also the sign of the goddess Davkina, the wife
of la, and a form of Lstar. It is formed from the union of
j^ign for com seed ^, with that of divinity ■-,^ so that the
gr>ddess Pu<, the pool, the sacred kmid or tank, the well of the
dfrsert oasis, the importance of which, in Indian mythology^
I shall show presently when I treat of the worship of Ra-dha
and Kriii«hna, containing the life-giving water sent to earth
by the rain-god, is the goddess of seed-corn, that is, the
mothfrr-goddess of the barley-growing races, and it was this
niofcher-wKldess who wa> in later ritual transformetl into the
^M^fi of hra^s" of the Jewish, and the *'abys>es, deeps, or l)i\sins'
of the great gods of the Babylonian temples.* But the
Sanskrit name Pushan given to a northern god shows that it
is derived from a root in which the Finnic A*, which has been
drop[K'd in the Akkadian P//, has lieen replaced in Sanskrit
by the sibilant ^, and the root Pnk', from which the name of
Pushan, denoting the gcnl who made plants to grow, was
derived, appears in the Hindu Puk-ka, and the Sanskrit
Pakti, cooked dishes. But the name Puk-an, the god (an)
Puk, our fairy god Puck, is exactly that which would he
assumed by the Finnish form of the Northern Lithuanian
' Wc-it, Biindahisk^ xxix. 5: S.B.E. vol. v. p. 117.
- Kijivcda, vi. 54, 5, 53, 9.
' Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syilaiiary, Nos. 223, 320, 321, 470.
• Saycc, Hihhert Lecture^ for 1887, Lect. i. p. 63.
ESSAY V 439
Purk-an, for the Finns object to one consonant following
another without the intervention of a vowel, and it is through
Finnic influence that the Lithuanian thunder-god, Per-kunas,
has become the Sclavonic Per-un, and the same reason — their
dislike of the collocation of consonants — which made the Finns
change the name of the northern fire-god, Bhur or Phur,
into Piru, made them change the original root PwrAr, from
which Pushan was derived, into PwAr, and we thus find that
Pushan in his original Lithuanian form was Purk, or Per-
kunas, the thunder-god, who brings the rain which makes
the barley grow. It was the same people who brought this
Lettic-god to Assyria as the barley-mother Puj to Iran as
Pashang, the bull-father, and to India as Pushan, who
brought the Lettic Ogan to India as the god Agni of the
Rigveda.^ This Lithuanian rain-god Purk-un who became
the Fiorgyn of the Edda, and the Fair-guni of the Goths,*
was naturally associated with the release of the sun from the
thraldom of the winter frost giants, his awakening from his
winter sleep with the rains of spring and the birth of the
new year ; and hence, when the ascendency of the Northern
immigrants was secured, and their astronomical studies,
pursued in the Babylonian and Elamite observatories, had
resulted in the adoption of the lunar year of thirteen months,
he became the god who gave his name Push both to the first
month of the Hindu lunar year, beginning with the winter
solstice, and also to the constellation Taurus. It is as the
star-god, who, like Dumu-zi or Tammuz, leads the year, that
Pushan is spoken of in the Rigveda, where he is said to be
drawn by goats, the gods of primaeval time, through the
seas of heaven in a golden ship, to survey everjrthing, and to
be the god who goads the stars in their courses,* and it is
as the star -god who rules the beginning of the year, opening
* Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions, * Religion among
the Wends,* § 113, pp. 184 185.
* Ibid. * Religion among the Germans,* § 116, p. 190.
^ Rigveda, vi. 58, i, 2, 3 ; iii. 62, 9.
440 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
with the birth of the sun that he is also said to be the god
who weds the sim'*s daughter,^ the sun of the new year born
at the winter solstice.
We thus see that an examination of Ashura theology marks
the union in India between a Northern race calling themselves
Ashura, who grew barley, and who l)elieved in the divinity
of pairs, and made the three fathers and three mother seasons
their six parent gods, and an earlier agricultural race, called
in Hindu mythological history, the Danava, whose parent gods
were the five seasons of the Hindu year, and who were the
first Gond growers of Northern crops, who were brought
down the Jumna by Lingal, who grew millets, Jowari (Holais
sorghum) and Eessari (Lathyrus sativa) and Murwa {Eleusine
coracana\ and who again were formed from the union between
the aboriginal growers of rice and an earlier immigrant race
from the north who measured time by the three seasons of
the Northern year. It was these latter people who spread
themselves not only over Asia, but over Africa, as the beer-
drinking rax^es who introduced the Holcus sorghum^ called
Durra by the African natives, and Eleusine corocanay which
they call Telebun, and it is from this latter grain that they,
like the Kols of Chota Nagpore, still brew beer. But a
similar series of mythological evolution produced by the
union of alien races, which made tiie Lithuanian thunder-god
the bull-god, who ploughed the earth and l)ecanie the ruling
god of the lunar year, also appears in Hindu popular
mythology in the myths which reproduce the Lithuanian god
of the bright day, Rai or Roj-us, the Sanskrit Raj ,2 as the
three Ramas. These are Rama, the son of Dasa-ratha,
Parasu-rama, the son of Jamad-Agni, and Vala-rama, the
son of Rohini, the red-cow, the star Aldebaran. Rama,
meaning the darkness, is mentioned once in the Rigveda
together with the gods called Ashura, the Assyrian fish-god,
1 Rigveda, vi. 55, 4, 5, 58, 4.
' Tide, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions^ * Religion among the
Wends,' § in, p. 182, and § 38, p. 58.
ESSAt^ V 441
Assor, and Maghavan, the name of Indra as a son of Magha;^
but the descent of Rama as the son of Dasa-ratha, the ten
{dasa) chariots (ratha) or months of gestation, and of Kaush-
aloya, the house (cdoya) of Eush, the father of the Eushikas,
points to him as being, like Pushan, one of the father-gods of
the ploughing-races who worshipped the gods of generation.
This is confirmed by his first union in the myth from which
the plot of the Ramayana is taken with Sita, the furrow, who
is invoked in the Rigveda as the blessed Sita, the bringer of
crops,* and whose worship is prescribed in the Grihya Sutras.^
When he first leaves home on his pilgrimage with Sita they
are attended by his brother Ldkshman, meaning the maker
or keeper of the boundaries {Wcsh-mi) the god Goraia, wor-
shipped as one of the Behar triad of Bundu, Goraia, and
Sokha. He is the boundary snake who encloses and guards
the land prepared and ploughed by the year-bull, Rama,
who works all the year round, and not intermittently, like
the thunder and rain-bull, for the growth of the com crops
of the barley-growing race who established the Eushite
empire as one of the supreme gods of the Northern people.
We must look for the derivation of his name to Northern
sources, and to the same people who brought to India the
barley-eating god Pushan, and the Vedic fire-god Agni.
This is, as I have shown, the Lithuanian raxie, and we are,
therefore, justified in identifying Ra-ma with the Lithuanian
god of day and night, under whose auspicious care abundant
crops were grown. This god was the father-god of the first
Northern ploughing-races, who called themselves the sons of
the rivers, and gave the name of their father-god to the
river Volga, which, according to Ammianus Marcellinus,
they called Rha.* His name also appears in that of Raros,
the father of Triptolemus, whose name is connected with the
* Rigveda, x. 93, 14. ' Ibid, iv. 57, 6.
' Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras PdraskarUy Grihya SH/ra, ii. 17 ; S.B.E. vol.
xxix. p. 333 ff.
* Am. Marcellinus, 22, 8, 38 ; Liddell and Scott, Greek Lexicon j s.v. ' Ra '
442 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
fire-god through its root trip^ the root of tribo^ to rub,
and who is the mythic originator of the worship of Demeter,
the barley-mother. Ra was a form of the sun fire-god evolved,
according to the mythic theology of the star- worshippers as set
forth in Essay vi., in the account of the deification of Artemis
as Arktos, the great bear-mother, by the revolution of time,
and represented the heat which ripened the grain. The
name of Ra, the heating sun-god, appears again in Rasa,
the Vedic name for the mother-river Oxus, called in the
Rigveda the great mother,^ the Greek and Latin Radix, the
root or branch, and it is the root of the Hindi word Raja,
bom (ja) of Ra, the Latin Rex, Reg-is, and forms one of the
component parts of the name Pe-ra-a, our Pharaoh, by which
the Egyptian kings, the sons or manifestations of Ra,^ were
called. It is to the apotheosis of the king as the earthly
form of Ra that we must trace the persistent belief in the
divine right of kings. The first kings, the sons of Ra, were
the rulers of the Mughada fire-worshippers, whose father-god
was Ra-hu, the fire-god, and it was they who were ancestors
of the royal line of kings of the Kushite empire descended
from the union of the Maghada kings with the daughters of
the Kushika, or tortoise race. It was they who introduced
into tlie village communities the custom of setting apart
Manjhus, or royal land, which was tilled, like the similar
tenure held by the Roman kings, by the burgesses or members
of the village community,^ who stored the produce in the
royal granaries. It is from this form of tenure that the
English manor is descended, and it was these sons of Ra who
disseminated the deification of the kingly office which appears
in the title and functions of the Patesi, or priest-kings of
Telloh in the Euphratean delta, the priest-kings of the
Palestinian confederated cities, the Pharaohs of Egypt and
' Rigveda, v. 41, 15.
- Maspcro, Ancient Ei^ypt and Assyria^ p. 38.
^ Dickson, Monimscn's History of Rome. l)k. ii. chap. i. Popular Edition,
p. 25S.
ESSAY V 443
the kings of Rome,^ all of whom were supreme administrators
of religious rites, and were regarded as the earthly repre-
sentatives of the supreme god Ra. That this white royal
god Rai, who makes plants to grow and rules the bright
sky, was a sun-god worshipped by the ploughing sons of the
Am or Mango mother, born of the Kushite race, is proved
by the worship of Ra-hu, the fire-god, as his priests, the
Dosadhs, still bum in his honour mango-wood soaked in
ghee,^ The first Ra-ma, therefore, was the sun-god Ra, who
ripened fruits and com, and as the sun-god he was looked on
as the child of the night, and the darkness (rdmd) from
which he was bom was called Ra-ma, the mother of Ra, and
this name came, under Hindu matriarchal theology, to mean
the god whose mother is Ra. Ra-ma is therefore a god, who,
like other Hindu gods, was first a mother-goddess, whose
name under Northern patriarchal influences became one of
those given to the son of the parent-god Ra-hu, the creator,
or Ra, the begetter (hu). It is in this latter form that he
became the Egyptian god Ra, the father of Hu,^ while the
Hindu Rama, the son of Kush-aloya, is preserved in the
Hebrew Raamah, the son of Kush and father of Sheba
{seven) in Genesis x. 7, the Assyrian and Syrian supreme
sun and rain-god Ram-anu, the Rimmon of the Bible, and
in Bam, the father of the royal line of Judah, and the
grandfather of Nahshon, the prince of Judah, the Nagash, or
rain, Naga, or plough-god.*
The second Rama is the demi-god Para-su Rama, who is
said in the Mahabharata to be the son of Jamad-agni, the
twin (jama) fires of the Bhrigu race, the earthly and heavenly
fire. It was he who destroyed the Haihayas, or Haio-
bunsi, the sons (bunsi) of Haio, or la, the rain-god, and
^ Dickson, Mommsen's History of Rome ^ bk. ii. chap. i. Popular Edition,
p. 262.
=» Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bettgal, vol. i. * Dosadhs,* p. 253.
' See Essay in. p. 201, note i ; Book of the Deady xvii. 22.
* I Chron. ii. io*ii ; Essay ill. pp. 225, 264.
444 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
killed their king Arjuna, the fair (arjun) prince of the North,
the son of Krita-virya, the doer {krita) of a man'*s or father'*s
work {virya\ the rain-god who begat life on earth as tlie
husband of the tilled land.^ His name Para-su, the Hindu
form of the Greek TreXe/ct;?, the double axe, marks him as
the god of the race who made the recurrent birth of the
twins day and night factors in the reckoning of time, and
who measured it by these and the recurrence of the lunar and
solar phases, the new and full moon, the equinoxes and sol-
stices, instead of by the sequence of the seasons. It was they
who calculated from the lunar phases the periods of gestation
and the eleven months sacred to the Ashvins, the twin-gods
of Day and Night. Parasu-Rama is said in the Mahabharata
to have retired to the Mahendra mountains, overlooking the
shrine of Juggemath at Puri in Orissa, after giving his bow
and arrows, the bow of Krishanu, the rain-bow god of the
Rig^-eda, to the third Rama, who is represented as ruling in
Ayodhya as Vishnu, the god who established the year of con-
secutive months,^ and wielded the discus, the ring which
marked time by the revolution of the thirteen months of
the year. This transfer of the bow of the rain-god to the
sun-god, is exactly parallel to that of the descent of the
bow of Eurytion, the father of the Greek Centaurs, to the
wandering sun-god Odusseus. It is as the introducer of the
lunar year that the third Rama appears in the Ramayana,
as Rama, the moon-god, wedded to Sita, who had been first
the furrow, afterwards the prisoner of Ravana, the storm -
god, and who appeared in her third phase as Sita, the luimr
crescent, the mother of the children of Rama. It was this
union which was followed by the return of Riima and Sita
to Ayodhya as successors to Bharata, the king of the star-
worshippers, and son of Kai-kaia, the mountain-mother of
the Turanian Gonds. It is this third Rilma who is the
Rama-chundra, or moon-Rama, still worshipped as the chief
* Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha Yatra) Parva, cxvi.-cxvii. pp. 358-362.
'^ Ibid., xcix, pp. 315, 317.
ESSAY V 445
god of the triad adored as the collective embodiment of
Juggemath at Puri. The third member of the triad is Su-
bhadra, the blessed or holy {bhadra\ the equivalent of our
modem saint, Su, the bearing-mother, also called Sita ; while
the second is Bal-bhadra, the blessed Bal, or Bel, also called
Bala, or Vala-Rama, the name by which he is worshipped at
Mahabun in Mathura, the birth-place of Krishna. He was
the god Parasu-Rama who retired to the Mahendra mountains
after he gave up his bow to the united sun- and moon-gods,
the Odusseus, and Penelope, weaver of the web {irrjVT}) of
time of Greek mythology. In this god Bal, Bel, Vala, or
Bala, we find the sun and fire-god worshipped by the
Akkadians as Bil-gi, and by the Babylonians as Bel
Merodach, that is, Bel the holy son (marduffga)} His name
Bel still survives in Orissa, and means the sun in the language
of the Souris or Savars,^ who represent in Orissa the Su-
varna of the Rigveda and Mahabharata, the descendants of
the fish-god, Sal-machh, the first avatar of Vishnu. This is
one of the totems from whom the tribe are descended, the
others being Kasibak, the heron, Garga-rishi, the shining
(ffar) antelope (rishya\ and Sandilya, the sons of the full
moon (sandil\ and in this genealogy we see their connection
with the sons of Ram, for Ab-ram, the father Ram, the sun-
god, and therefore Garga, the shiner, was son of Terah, the
antelope, or gazelle.^ The name Bel, Bil, or Bal is, as I
^ Boscawen, Babylonian and Oriental Record^ Oct. 1890, p. 254.
2 In a vocabulary of Souri words taken down by me from one of the tribes,
I find Bel entered as the Souri name for sun.
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bettgal^ vol. ii. appendix i. p. 128. The
totem Garg, or Garga, is very common among Bengal castes. Thus the
Agurwals and Babhuns of Behar have a sept called the Gargs, and this name
appears again in the Rajput sept of Garg-bunsi, the sons {bunsi) of Garg ;
Garga is a name of a sept of Brahmins and of the Sankheris, or workers in
brass, and Gargari is a subsection of the Sandilya Gotra of Rarhi Brahmans
in Bengal, and this name is one connected with moon-worship, for Sandil is
the Munda name of the full-moon (Risley, Tribes and Castes 0/ Bengal, vol. ii.
p. 219), while Garga-rishi is a totemistic name not only of the Savars, but
also of the Napits, or barbers, and of the Tantis, or weavers, and I have
446 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
have shown in Essay i., one of the forms assumed by the
transmutations made by alien races of Bhur or Phur, the
primaeval name for the Northern god of the household fire.
It was when the god of the household fire, the Vedic Vala,
slain by Indra, became the sun-god, that he assumed the
name Bala-rama, the god who rules the day, while his con-
sort Sita, the moon-goddess, rules the night. It w€is the
united sun- and moon-god who were the supreme gods of the
worsliippers of the heavenly twins Day and Night. The land
of Orissa and its sacred hills are traditionally consecrated
to Vala-nlma, and the name Mahendro, the name of its
mountains, is a reproduction of the name Mahendra, given
to Indra in the sacrifice of the Great Oblation (mahd'havis),
offered to celebrate his victory over the Vritra, or enclosing
snake, the theology which deified the ploughing-buU and the
furrow.^
The third Rama, also called, like his predecessor Parasu-
rama, Vala-rama is distinguished from the son of Jamadagni
by being the son of Roliini, the red cow, the star Aldebaran
of the star- worshippers. His chronological and ethnological
position is clearly shown in his description in the Mahabhfi-
rata, ius the hero who bears the banner of the Palmyra or
Toddy palm,- the tree which yields the palm wine, a cog-
nisance similar to that of the Palmyra or Tal palm, sur-
mounted by the five stars,^ which was borne bv the ffreat
shown that the elevation of the barber caste implied in the solar name of
Garga-rishi, the shining antelope, is chronologically coincident with the
introduction of Kushika rule, and the formation of castes founded on com-
munity of function. The root ^ar, from which name Gar-gar is formed, al>o
appears in the name Gar-abing, or big river-snake, a totem of the Mundas of
Garur, a vulture, the storm-bird Garuda, a totem of the Rautias and Mais :
Gari, a monkey, connected with the wind and tree-gods, a totem of the
Mundas and Ooraons ; and Garwe, a stork, a totem of the Ooraons (Rislcy,
vol. i. pp. 271, 274). It seems to denote the shining-snake, or moon-bird.
^ Kjjgeling, Saf, Brah. ii. 5, 4, 9 ; S. B.E. vol. xii. p. 419.
-' Mahabharata Shaleya {Gud-Aytidha) }*arva, §§ xxxiv. and Ix. pp. 135,
•>■»■»
^ /Hd. Bhishma (Bhishma-Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165.
ESSAY V 447
Bhishma, the uncle of the Kauravya and Pandavas, and first
generalissimo of the Kauravya armies, and the appropriation
of this cognisance by the two leaders who were most inti-
mately connected with the two contending parties marks the
age of the Kauravya and Pandava legend as that in which
the sons of the palm tree were the ruling race. Vala-rama
is also described as he who has the plough for his weapon,
and it was with the plough — the cognisance or sign of descent
on the banner of Shaleya, king of the Madras,^ the grand-
father of the twin Pandavas, Sahadeva and Nakula — that
he attacked Bhima for his alleged treachery in slaying by
guile Duryodhana, the eldest son of Dhritarashtra, and
leader of the Kauravyas. His connection with the bull
(gyd) of Ayodhya, the Eastern Gautama, the sons of the
river RohinT,^ the red cow, not the later star, is shown by
the title of the section dedicated to him in the Mahabharata,
called the Gud-Ayudha Parva. This tells how at the close
of the war between the Kauravyas and Pandavas, Vala-
mma came back from pilgrimage to see the last great contest
of the war, the duel between Duryodhana and Bhima. That
he belonged to the gods of the older hierology is shown by
the sympathy he evinced for the Kauravyas, though he
abstained from fighting against the Pandavas. He thus
represents the transition period between the rule of the
Kauravyas or Kushites and the assumption of their empire
by the Pandavas or fair people, and it was after the final
victory of the Pandavas under Arjuna, the bearer of the
heavenly bow Gandeva, the god (deva) of the Gan, or holy
land of the rain-god, and the Ya-deva god Krishna, the
wielder of the discus or year*'s ring of the lunar year, and the
death of Duryodhana, that he retired to Dwaraka. He then
left the direction of the new age to the younger generation
^ Mahabharata Drona {Jyadratha- Vodha) Parva, cv. p. 297.
* The river Rohini, on which Kapila-vastu, the city {vas/u) of the yellow
Tzct (J^apt/a) stood, flows through the. territory still owned by the Gautama
Rajputs.
448 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the Vishnavites headed by Satyaki, the grandson of Shini,
the moon-goddess, who with Bliima, slew Valhika and his ten
sons, the bearers of the Imnner of the Yupa, or sacrificial stake,
and the representatives of the age which sacrificed eleven
animal victims to the gods of generation. It was to the close
of this age, distinguished by those sacrifices which shed the
blood of living victims as the seed of increased life on earth,
that Vala-rama, the son of the &ther and mother palm-tree
and the star Rohini belonged, when the fixed stars which
were worshipped as the maintainers of law and order and
measurers of time were about to be deposed from their pre-
eminence by their successors, the moon and planets, which
the star worshippers regarded as rebels, but who became
under the new regime, the rulers of heaven. Vala-rama as
the son of the palm-tree, the father and mother tree of the
Babylonians and of the Semitic section of the tribe of Judah,
the sons of Tamar, the palm-tree, Judah^s second wife re-
presents the transition from the rule of the Vaishya, sons of
the fig-tree, to that of the Kshatrya, sons of the palm-tree,
from the rule of the Vaishya, or yellow trading race, whost^
clotlies are ordered, in the Hindu law-books, to be dyetl
with turmeric,^ who offered human sacrifices, and were?
descended from the bisexual fig-tree, the mother-tree of the*
potters and weavers and the race of artisan castes founded
on the community of function, the descendants of Shelah, the-
son of Judah'^s first wife Shua,- and the destined husband of
Tamar before her union with her father-in-law, to that of the
sons of Tamar, the palm-tree propagated by the union of
father and mother stocks, and, therefore, the parent-tree of
the race which believed in the divinity of pairs. The sons
of the fig-tree were the maritime and gardening race, the
Su-vama, or caste (varna) of the Sus of Western India and
the Shus of the Euphratean countries to whom Shua, Judah'^s
first wife, Ilush-im or Shuh-am, the sons of Dan, the coii-
* Biihler, Apastamba^ i. 3. 2 ; S.B.E. vol. ii. f. 10.
- I Chron. iv. 21-23.
ESSAY V 449
quering kings Su-shravas of the Rigveda, Hu-shrava of the
Zendavesta, and Husham of the land of Tema or Southern
Arabia, the biblical conqueror of Edom, the home of the red
man, belonged. It was the maritime Shus who instituted
the worship of the Pleiades and Aldebaran in Southern
Arabia, and they were, as I have shown in Essay ii., pp.
106-118, and iii. pp. 284-286, 323-327, the Panis, or trading
warrior races of the Rigveda. It was they who when they
* became allied with the Northern red race, the S[shatryas
or warriors, whose clothes were dyed with madder,^ the
sons of Caleb, the dog, and Terah the antelope, made, in Ur
of the Chaldees, Rama their father-god under the name of
Ab-ram, the father Ram.
But before dealing with the evidence whicli marks the
progress of the worship of Ra, after his sons the maritime
traders of Dwitaksi and the ports of Western India had emi-
grated to the Euphratean delta and lands still farther west, it
is necessary for the elucidation of the history of the creed to
set forth the proofs given by the legends and ritual of Mathura,
the holy district intersected by the Jumna, which had been
consecrated to the gods of the land since the primaeval days
when Lingal and the Gonds first settled on its banks in the
Gangetic Doab, and instituted ritualistic worship by the
appointment of Pradhans or national priests. It was in this
district that both Bala-rama and Krishna, the father-gods of
the Ya-devas, or race of Lunar Rajputs, to which the Jadons,
the ancient Yadus, who still hold extensive estates in this
district, belong,^ are said to have been bom. Mathura is
the centre of the district assigned as the mother-land of the
Shura-sena, the army (send) of the heroes (shvra)y or of the
sons of the bull (shur) by Manu and Arrian, and who are
called in the Mahabharata, the bull Bharata,^ and the district
* BUhler, Apastamba, i. I, 3, 2; S.B.E. vol. ii. p. 10.
' Elliot, 5*11/. Glossary of the North-west Provinces, s.v. * Jadon,' p. 482.
' BUhler, Manu ii. 19; S.B.E. vol. xxv. p. 32 note. The name ShQra-
sena seems certainly to mean the anny {sena) of the sons of the bull {Shur)^
29
450 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
is called Braj-mundal, or the home of the herd (brcy). The
name Mathura, or the place of churning {math\ point to it
as having been, even before the advent of the Grond or
ploughing race, consecrated to the gods of the Maghada fire-
worshippers and workers in metal, whose rule preceded that
of the Gonds, for it was the fire- worshippers who first adored
the god of the twirling or churning fire-drill. But the
names and situation of the holy places of the district and
the ritual of its annual festivals all speak of a time long
anterior both to the advent of the fire-worshippers and the
growth of the legends recording the development of Rama
and Krishna worship. The mother-goddess of the land is
Radha, and her name, according to Sanskrit etymology, is
derived from the root ridh^ to be prosperous, but this abstract
meaning of ' the prosperous goddess ' could not be that of
the name of the mother of the early primaeval races whose
theological nomenclature was founded on materialistic de-
ductions. The name must, it seems to me, be one like the
Sanskrit Tur-vasu which is translated from Tur-an, both
names meaning the race whose god {an or vasu) is Tiir.
Similarly it appears that in the name Radha, the Sanskrit-
speaking races described in an interpreting form the parent
of their father-god Ra. Viewed in this light Radha means
the maker (dha) of Ra, the darkness, or chaotic void from
which the sun, god of light, was bom, and it is thus another
the worship of Krishna is intimately connected with the descent of his sons,
the Yadus or Ya-devas, from the bull and cow, and it is also through the
names Ya and Tur connected with the worship of la and the meridian pole
Tur of the Chaldaic Akkadians. Hence the tribe would naturally be one
with Chaldaic affinities, and, therefore, it seems to me almost certain that
their tribal name was, like all ancient patronymic names of tribes, totemistic ;
and that, therefore, Shura meant the sons of the Hebrew and Semite Shur, the
bull, the followers of Keresaspa, the son of Sama, the Shemite, the people
descended from Shu, the begetter, the root of Soma or Shoma. The correct-
ness of this derivation is made more probable by the fact that the computa-
tion of the lunar year was introduced into India by the Semite sons of the
Babylonian palm-tree, and these, again, were the Shus of the Euphratean
Delta, the race who used the Sanskrit sibilant Sh in preference to the hard
/ or k.
ESSAY V 461
form of Ra-ma, the darkness, the mother of Ra. It is to
her that the hill of Barsana, one of the two sacred hills of
the Bharat-pur range, bounding the district on the west, is
dedicated, and these hills are the mother-mountains of the
Bharata race. The name Bar-sana is, according to the
derivation given by Mr. Growse in his learned and pictur-
esque description of the Mathura district, a corruption, or
rather, as I would say, another form of Brahma-sana, mean-
ing the hill (sand) of Brahma, the creator, when his name
was Var or Bar, the rain-god Varuna. This hill is the
traditional home of Vrisha-bhanu and Kirut, the parents of
Radha.^ The name Vrisha-bhanu. meaning the ray (bfidnu)
of rain ( Vrisha)^ is a wonderful instance of the conservatism
of popular theology, for though it is spelt Vrisha-bhanu it is
always locally pronounced Brikh-ban.* This pronunciation
of the name shows us that the word Vrisha is a dialectic form
of Brikh, while Brikh is clearly a popular form of the original
Bhri-gu,* or fathers of fire, whose home is placed by Sanskrit
geographers in this district, and who were, therefore, the
fathers of the rain-god Vrisha, begotten by the lightning-
flash, and Brikh-ban, therefore, means the ray or light
(bhdnu) of the son of the fire-god. Bhrigu and Brikh are
Hindu equivalents of the Greek l3poxv9 the wetting rain
accompanied by thunder, while Vrisha or Bhrika-bhanu
means the thunder-god. Kirat is, again, a popular form of
the name Kirttida, used in the Pudma Purana,* meaning the
spinners — from the root ferity to spin — and this name marks
the mother-goddess Kirttidda as an Indian form of the
Northern time-goddesses represented by the Greek Penelope,
* Afa/kura, A District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C. S.,' Second Edition,
p. 290.
^ Ibid, p. 71 note.
' The termination gu in Bhri-gu shows us that the name was one invented
by a race who added the Tamil suffix gu^ used to form verbal nouns, to the
root bhriy to beget or bear.
* Mathura^ A District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., Second Edition,
p. 71 note.
452 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the weaver of the web (pene^ ir^vrj) of time, the wife of the
wandering sun-god Odusseus, and by the Norns or spinners of
the rope of destiny of the Edda. The function of Kirttida
as the spinner or maker of time is further shown in the name
Kaluvati, given to her in the Brahma Vaivarta, meaning the
possessor of tlie sixteenth part (kald)^ that is, of the moments
of time. Thus the mythic tale told by the meaning of the
names of Ra-dha and her parents relates how the maker of
Ra, the darkness impregnated by the life-engendering mist,
was bom, like the German sun-god Siegfried in the Gotter-
dammerung, from the father and mother of fire, the life-
giving heat, when the weaving of the rope of destiny
was finished. The consort of Ra-dha is the god to
whom the neighbouring hill of Nand-ganw is sacred. Its
name means the village (game) of pleasure (tiand)^ and it
is a substitute for Nand-ishvar,^ or the god (Ishvar) of
pleasure (naiul\ a name of Shiva, and thus we can connect
the sanctity of this mountain with the German legend of the
Hill of Venus guarded by the faithful Ecke or Eckhardt,
who is, as I have sho^^n, the Greek father-serpent-god Echis,
while the Ilill of V^enus is the Northern form of the mother-
grove of life of the matriarchal Southern races transformed
into the mother-mountain, whence, according to the North-
ern theology of creation, all mankind were bom. And we
also learn from the history of the name of this sacred moun-
tain that before it was dedicated to Krishna, the god con-
cealed in the black {Krhhna) cloud of mist, the husband of
the mother of Ra, was the god of the Linga, the Gond god
Lingal, the father-god of human life. But further evidence
of the origin of this national myth, proving that it dates
back to matriarchal times, before the immigration of the
Northern races, who looked on the family born from united
fathers and mothers as the national unit, is given in the legend
which makes the grove and temple of Ra-dha-Raman, in the
^ Mai/tura, A District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S. Second Edition,
p. 71.
\
ESSAY V 463
village between the two hills called Sanket, meaning 'the
place of assignation,** the place where the two lovers used to
meet.^ This grove is a counterpart of that of Lumbini,
between and common to the town of Kapilavastu, the city
(vastu) of the yellow race (kapila), and the aboriginal village
of Koliya, in which the mother Maya, the goddess Maga,
brought forth the Buddha under the parent Sal-tree, and the
story takes us back to the days when the sons of the Northern
fire-god, on entering the district under the guidance of the
Gond god Lingal, found it peopled with the matriarchal
races whose children were begotten in the village groves, and
were called the offspring of the mother-tree. This conclusion
is confirmed by the ceremonies observed at the Holi or spring
festival of the two villages, which are graphically described
by Mr. Growse in his diary written on the spot.^ He tells
how at the festival held at Bar-sana, on the 22d of February
1877, the women of Bar-sana, the wives of the Gosain
priests of the temple of Larli-ji, meaning * the beloved one,***
were attacked by the men of Nand-ganw, who were armed
with round leather shields and stag*'s horns, while the ladies
defended themselves with long heavy male bamboos. The
combat was next day repeated in a reversed form in the
village of Nand-ganw, when the Bar-sana men attacked the
wives of the Gosains of the Nand-ganw temple, but the
battle here was fought round the yellow pennon of the men
of the yellow races, and was more like a phallic orgy than a
fight. A similar combat formed part of the ceremonies
of the Holi festival of Bathen, in the north of the Mathura
district, held in 1877, on the 2d March, some days after those
of Bar-sana and Nand-ganw. At Bathen, after the red Holi
powder, showing it to be a festival of the red race, had been
thrown, a band of rustics encircling a man bearing a yellow
^ Mathura f A District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, B.C.S. Second EMition^
p. 72. ' Ibid, p. 85.
^ Ibid. p. 291. Larli is, according to Mr. Growse, a local form of the
Sanskrit lalita.
464 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMKS
flag, aiid each carrying a branch of the prickly acacia, came
from tlie neighbouring village of Jau, and marched through
Bathen to the plain outside it. There tliey were met by the
Bathen ladies armed with bamboos, before whom the Jau
men deployed into line, each man confronting a Bathen
woman. In the fight which followed, the women, backed up
by their husbands who stood behind them, but did not strike
or join actively in the fray, tried to force their way to the
yellow flag, an emblem of the god of Love.^ The meaning
of these contests is shown in the marriage-customs of the
Bhondas of Jeypore, where the young men of one village
who wish to marry the young women of another, iifter
obtaining the consent of the parents of their brides, visit
the village, and are all shut up in a chamber dug under
ground, together with an equal number of young women,
and each selects his partner during the time of seclusion.'^
We see in all these ceremonies a complete reproduction of
the seasonal dances of matriarchal times, when the women of
one village met the men of another at the dancing place^
under the shade of the mother-grove of one of the villages in
the same way as is still customary among the Ho Kols, and
we find the Ho custom of prolonging the festal period by
celebrating the Magh festival on different days in the several
villages of each confederacy rej)roduced in the dates fixed for
the Holi festival in the Mathura villages. We also find in
the date of the Holi festival, begun on the 13th or full-moon
day of Phalgun, or about the 2d March, in a normal year
l)eginning with the winter solstice, evidence of the substitu-
tion of a Northern festival to the young sun-god for the
original national Saturnalia held in Magh, sacred to the
mother Magha, and that this latter festival was the original
spring festival of the Mathura is proved by its being still
celebrated under the name of Basanto-savo or spring festival,
' Maihura^ A District Memoir, by V. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 91.
- Indian Ant it^uary, ii. 237; Gomme, * Exogamy and Polyandry, '.-/;Y/y«<»-
lo^cal Rcviiu\ Auj;ust 1888, p. 3S6.
ESSAY V 455
on the 20th of Magh at Brindabun.^ Historical evidence of
the mingling of alien races is also given in the weapons of
the Holi combatants, for the bamboos used by the women
tell of the early days when the Kichaka or sons of the hill-
bamboo (kichaka) ruled the land. Tliis is the age repre-
sented in the M ahabharata by Kichaka, the commander-in-
chief, or in the Indian gradations of rank the second ruler of
the kingdom of the Matsaya or Fishermen, who in the
M ahabharata legend were the supreme lords of the M athura
kingdom in which the Pandavas spent the thirteenth year of
their exile. The story of the conquest of this land by the
fair (pandu) race from the north is told in the M ahabharata
in the account of the attempts made by Kichaka to seduce
Drupadi, the wife of the Pandava brothers, and his death at
the hands of Bhima, otherwise called Vrikodara, the wolfs
beUy.^ It tells how the gods of the fire-worshipping sons
of the. Northern wolf conquered the gods of the earlier
Indian races. But Kichaka, the hill bamboo, who is said in
the Mahabharata to be the son of Kai-kaya, the Gond
mother-goddess and mother of Bharata in the Ramayana
legend, as well as the brother of the queen of the king of the
Matsyas, is both an indigenous plant of Central India, and
a totemistic father of the Bharata race of the Bharat-pur
Mountains, the Bhars of Northern India, for they are
descended from the bamboo (bans) and antelope {rishi\ the
totem Bans-rishi, the bamboo planted as the sign of the rain-
god by Vasu, the Northern spring father-god of the Magha-
das, as well as from the peacock, also an indigenous bird,
called by the Northern name of Mayara^ or Mayura, and
the whole genealogy tells how the Northern invading fire-
worshippers became mingled with the people of the land. It
was these fire-worshippers who were followed by the yellow
or gardening race, the sons of the Bhur totems of the Bel
^ Mathura, A District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 249.
^ Mahabharata Virata Parva, xvi. -xxiii.
^ Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ vol. ii. App. i. p. 9.
4f56 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
(^^Egle marmelos) tree, the medicinal fruit-tree, and parent-
tree of the race who first studied medicine, and Kachhap, the
tortoise; and it was these people who were the invaders de-
picted in the combat at Bar-sana by the leathern shields and
deer'^s horns of the men of Nand-ganw. Tliese take us back
to the story of Ra-ma when he killed the deer Marichi, the
representative of the tree (maroni) god, who, when slain,
became the leading star in the constellation of the Great
Bear or seven deer {rliliya\ and the star in Orion called
Mriga-sirsha, or the deer'^s head, the father-star of the race
of star worshippers, who raised the mother M aga to heaven as
the peacock-mother with her train of stars, the bird sacred to
the Greek mother moon-goddess Hera. These totem names
also tell us of the advent from the north of the father of Ram
Terah, the antelope, the ' dara ' sacred to the Akkadian god
Mul-lil, and the Dhar or god of the water-springs of the Kau-
ravyaor tortoise race bom from Gandliari,the goddess-mother
of the springs (dhdrl) of the land. The male antelope wa^
the totem istic father of the Indian Brahmins, whose sons^
when the earthly deer-god was slain by the yellow gardeninjf
race, became the Bhfirata or sons of the fig-tree, the Bhandii^
tree of the Krishna legend, and it was they who, according"
to the story told in the Holi sports at Batlicn, were sought
as husbands by the women of the land who chose the fathers^
of their children. These men of the yellow race were the
agriculturists of the east bank of the Jumna, the Srinjaya, or
men of the sickle (.s-nni)^ of the Rigveda and Mahabharata, to
which Drupadi, tlie wife of the Pandavas, belonged, and who,
under the lead of the Pandavas, concjuered India in the war
with the Kauravyas, and it is their bull-god, the moon-god
who appears in the Krishna legend as Btila-ram, the son of
Rohini, born at Gokul, on the east bank of the river, and it
was he who crossed the stream to lieconie the consort of
Rii-dhfi at the slirine of Riidhii-Ram-an at Sanket, ' the
place of assignation/
But the ceremonies of the Holi festival at Bar-sana, Nand-
ESSAY V 457
ganw, and Bathen, do not exhaust the evidence to be derived
from its celebration in the Mathura district, for the Holi
religious games at Kosi tell us of an age succeeding that
when the village mothers chose the men of a neighbouring
village as the fathers of their children, for at Kosi only
dwellers in the village join in the festivities.^ These begin
with a sort of war-dance danced by the men and boys in
pairs. They are dressed for the occasion in high-waisted full-
skirted white robes reaching to their ankles, and wear red
turbans or ' pugris,' ornamented with a long tinsel plume
(kalangi)^ said to represent the peacock feathers worn by
Krishna when rambling through the woods, but rather I
should say the crane (Jcalang) or water-bird adored by the sons
of the egg-mother Gan-dhari whom Krishna slew as the crane
Bak-a-sur on the banks of the Jumna.^ Each of the dancers
holds in his left hand a scabbard and in his right a knife or
dagger, with whicli they make a feint of thrusting at the
spectators as they whirl round in the rapid dance. This is
followed by a sham fight, in which the men of the village
stand opposite an equal niunber of the women, who are armed
with bamboo staves ornamented with bands of metal and
gaudy pendants. With these they push back the men as
they advance, singing scurrilous songs* The whole represen-
tation is a picture of the new relations between the Northern
men of the invading races and the women of the land, when
the men chose temporary partners to live with them from
among the women of their village, just as in the Lakhimpur
district in Assam, the young men and young women of the
Meri tribe spend, at one season of the year, * doubtless that of
the Magh festival,' several days and nights together in one
large building, * and during this time each selects his partner
for the year.** ^ A similar custom is described by Pennant as
existing in Eskdale, where those unmarried chose partners at
* Mathura^ A District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 87.
' Ibid, p. 54.
• Hunter, Statistical Account 0/ Assam , i. p. 343.
458 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the annual fair, the partnership lasting till the next fair, and
also at Campbeltown and Canway in Argyllshire, where in
Campbeltown there was an annual solemnity in the church to
which all who wished to change their wives or husbands went
at midnight. They were then blindfolded and sent to run
round the church, and when the word cabbage * seize quickly,"
was pronounced, every man laid hold of the first woman he
met, who was his wife till the next anniversar)\ Again at
Canway every Michaelmas Day every man took up behind
him on his horse a young girl, or his neighbour'^s wife, and if
the two rode together to a certain cross and back again they
were partners for the year.^ The ornamental staves carried
by the women are the hill-bamboos of an earlier time
changed into the counterparts of the Thyrsus of the Greek
and Phrygian Bacchantes, wreathed with vine and ivy leaves,
with the pine cone at the top. These adorned staves mark
the bearers, who as Jat women are reputed to be the tempor-
ary wives of those who succeed in capturing them, as the
descendants of the mother-bear of Phrygia, the Riksha of
India, born under tlie pine-tree of Cybele and Dionysus,
who had become in their progress from Phrygia to India tlie
children of the antelope {rishya)r Another significant cere-
mony is that at Phalen, a corruption of Prahlada-grama,
there the priest of the fire-god wliose shrine is near the holy
pond called Prahlad-kund, passes at the HoH festival through
the fire, j ust as the Dosadli fire-priests of Ra-hu do at his
festivals in Behar or Maghada, and in this last ceremony we
find evidence that the god thus worsliipped was Ra, the
Maghada god, in honour of whom and the mother-goddess
Maga the great Milglia festival was instituted. But besides
tlie evidence to be gathered from these popular forms of
celebrating the spring festival, the Hindu counterpart of
our St. Valentine, the names of tlie slirines also give us much
^ Gommc, Archivological Kevie^u, * Exogamy and Polyandry,* August
1888, pp. 393 note, 394 ; Guthrie, Old Scottish Customs^ p. 168.
- Mathnray A District Memoir, by F. S. Growse. Second Edition, p. 86.
ESSAY V 459
insight into national history. I . have akeady noticed that
furnished by Bar-sana and Nand-ganw, the first sacred to Ra-
dha, the second to Krishna, and also that given by the name
of Mathura, the place of churning (math). But there are
also lessons from the names of Brinda-bun, Ra-val, and Ra-
dha-kund, shrines of Radiia and Maha-bun, sacred to Krishna.
Taking first the two * buns'* or forests, Brinda-bun and
M aha-bun, they both tell of the time when the cultivating
races had to clear land for their villages from the forest, and
while Brinda-bun, the shrine of Ra-dha, on the west bank of
the Jumna, meaning the wood (bun) of the Brinda or Tulsi-
plant (Ocyamum sanctum), the tree of Krishna, tells us of
the days when the supreme goddess was the mother-tree.
Maha-bun, on the east bank, tells us of the coming of the
ploughing race, the sons of Ra, the sons of the Bhandir or
sacred fig-tree, one of the denizens of the forest. One of the
shrines of Ra is that consecrated to Bala-Ram at Gokul,
meaning a herd of cattle, who is said to have been bom
there. And the relation between the sons of the cow and
their guardian races on the west bank is sliown by the name
of the Western shrine Gobardhan, meaning *a keeper of
cattle.' The arrangement of the slirines tells how the plough-
ing race, the sons of Ra from tlie East, joined the wor-
shippers of the earthly fire, the artisan Bhrigu, and the sons
of the mother forest-tree on the west bank, and established
through the land the worship of Ra. It is to this union of
races that the substitution of Ra-dha for Magha as the
mother of the land is to be traced, as also the consecration
of Raval and Radha-kund. Raval, on the west bank of the
^umna, is a contraction of Rajakula* meaning the home (ktda)
of the child (jd) of Ra, and it was there that Sar-bhan,
meaning the ray (hhdn) of light (sdr), the maternal grand-
father of Ra-dha, dwelt, and it was here that the first temple
to Larli-ji,the beloved one, the mother of Ra, was founded.^
^ Mathura, A District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 457 ; Note
on Raval in the list of villages in the Mahabun Pergunnah.
460 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
But it is at Ra-dha-kund, the pool (hund) of Radha, the
next village to Gobardhan, * the keeper of the cattle "* of the
god Ra, tliat we find the full solution of the mythology of
the ploughing god of light. Its sacred tanks tell us that the
worshippers of Ra were a race of irrigating husbandmen, the
growers of garden crops, who looked on the rain-god as the
god who cleared tlie heavens of obscuring clouds, and dis-
closed the sun, the father of life, and who also believed in the
efficacy of water, not only as a fertilising but also as a sancti-
fying power. It was at'Aring or Arishta-Ganw that Krishna,
while sporting with Radha, slew by twisting out its horn the
giant bull Arishta, meaning Hhe unhurt,** and it was in the
sacred pool of Radha-kund adjoining the baptismal sea
of the new faith that he was cleansed of the guilt of the
murder.^ This story tells us of the adoption of water instead
of blood as a purifying and sanctifying agent, and also tells
how the sun -god Ra at the summer solstice twists out the
horn of the cloud-bull which keeps back the rain, and begins
the rainy season by baptizing the new earth restored to fresh
life by tlie reviving waters. It was the apotlieosis of the
rain-god at the summer solstice that introduced the worship
of the supreme Nilga or heavenly plough, tlie snake with five
heads, depicting the year witli five seasons, whose image is
still worshipped on tlie banks of the holy tank at Jait, and
whose tail is said to be rooted in the holy grove at Brinda-
bun seven miles off. It is also in honour of this rain-god
who gave his name Bar or Var to Bar-sana, that an annual
fair called Bar-asi Nagfi-ji Mela, the fair (7wt7a) of the rain
(bar-asl) Naga is held on the 22d September at the village of
Pai-ganw, the village of the milk offerings {payas) given to
propitiate the father of the bull race.'- The days of the rule
of these people, the Gond Turanians, who worshipped the
gods of the five seasons, and began the year with the festival
called Akht-uj, the worship of the plough, are still comme-
* Alathura^ A District Memcir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 59.
- Ihid. pp. 71-72 ; List of villages in the Kosi Pergimnah, p. 348.
ESSAY V 461
morated at Briiida-bun, where the Akht-uj is held on the 18th
Bysakh (on the 3d May), and at this feast a mash of wheat,
barley and chena (Cicer arietinum) mixed with sugar and
ffhee (clarified butter), is offered to the gods of the yellow
race, the sowers of barley, and six days after this the birth of
Sita, the furrow is celebrated. The other Grond festivals are
also still observed at Brinda-bun. (1) The festival of the Ji-
wati to the god possessing life (ji), the creator, is called the
Rathjatra or procession (jdtra) of the rain-god in his
chariot (rath)^ and is held on the 17th Asarh (on the 2d July)
when fruits, mangos and jaman, the fruit of the jambu-
tree (Eugenia jambolafia\ and Chena (Cicer arietinum\ are
offered to the rain-god of the gardening race. (2) The Pola
festival to the cattle held at the beginning of Bhadon, called
Bhadra-pada, the blessed foot or Prostha-pada, the ox-footed
month, has been preserved in the festival of the birth of
Krishna, held on the 8th of this month, the 23d of August,
followed by the festival of the bull-god Nanda on the
9th. There are among the days ruled by the dominant of
the Nakshatra of Purva-bhadrapada, the Eastern (purva)
blessed foot, the Aja Ekapad, mentioned among the father-
gods of the Rigveda, and said in the Aitaryea Brahmana to
mean the household fire,^ while during the second half of the
tnonth when the violence of the rains is decreasing and the
sun Ha is beginning again to reappear, the birthday of
JRadha is celebrated on the 23d Bhadon, the 7th September,
one of the days ruled by the dominant Ahir Budhnya, the
mother-goddess, called in the Rigveda the snake of the abyss,
^who rules the Nakshatra Uttara-bhadrapada, the blessed
foot of the North (uttara), the track of the sun-god.^ The
awakening of the beneficent sun-god of the Northern har-
vests, Ra or Ram-an, the lover of Radha, from his four
months'* sleep during the burning days of the fire-demon of
* Sachau's Alberuni's Iftdia, vol. ii. chap. Ixi. p. 122 ; Rigveda, vii. 35,
13 ; Haug*s Ait. Brdh, iii. 37, vol. ii. p. 224.
^ See the authorities quoted above.
462 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the hot season and the time of the drenching rains, the time
when he is dethroned by the contending gods of killing heat
and drowning rain, is celebrated on the 26th Bhadon, the
10th September, as the festival of the Karwatni. (4) The
Dewali or festival to the stars, the Krittakas or Spinners, is
held on the new moon of Khartik, the month of the Krittakas
or Pleiades (October-November), and (5) the Shimga festival
of the 20th Magh, the 4th of February, called in Brinda-bun
the Basanta-sava is, as I have shown, almost eclipsed by the
Holi held in Phalgun, the next month. ^
The growth of the legends of Krishna and Balaram, as
told in the local mjrths recorded in the Mahabharata, Hari-
vansa, and the Bhagavat, and Vishnu Puranas, must be traced
to this age of the star and moon- worshippers, whose gods were
the five-headed Maga, or rain-god of the year of five seasons,
and the sun-god Ra. The legend ^ begins with the conquest
of the giant Madhu-bun, the priest of Madhu, or the intoxi-
cating honey (madhu) drink, and his son Lavana, meaning the
salt, by Satrughna, the brother of Rama, and founder of the
Bhoja race. In this genealogy we find a' reminiscence of
the rule of the matriarchal races who cleared the forests and
consumed intoxicating drink at their seasonal festivals ; and
of the tortoise race, the drinkers of * madhu,* or mead, the
Soma of the Ashvins, whose home the tortoise earth rested
on, tlie salt sea, the primaeval ocean. It was they who were
the sons of the fig-tree, the Banyan tree (Finis indica)^ repre-
sented in mythic history by Sliarmishtha, the daughter of
king Vrisha-parva, the rain (Vnsha) father-god, and the
earthly wife of Yayati, the son of Nahusha, the great Naga.
Her eldest son was Druhvu, the father of the race of Drubs
or enchanters, whose sons are said in the Mahabharata to be
like those of Satrughna tlie Bhoja race. This dynasty of the
Bhojas, the sons of la or Ya, ended in king Ugra-sena, the
army (send) of the mighty (Ugra\ the Ogres of Northern
* Mathtira, A District Memoir , by Y, S. Growse, B.C.S., pp. 246-249.
« Ibid, pp. 50-63.
ESSAY V 463
legend. His reputed son Kansa was really the son of a
demon Kalanemi, in whose name, meaning the doe {em) of
time (kald\ we find that of * enl/ the female of the black
antelope, whose mythological meaning I have explained.
Kansa is the goose Hansa, the name by which he is called in
the Mahabharata, the German Gans, the Greek Khen-
Khenos (x^i', X^^^^)^ where he is represented as the com-
mander of the armies of Jara-sandha. The rule of Kansa,
who deposed Ugrasena, represents that of the Kauravya, the
sons of the mother-bird Gandhari, the storm bird-goddess of
the springs (dhdri) who brings the rain, and laid the egg
whence the sons of the tortoise race (kaur) were born. The
era of his rule described in the Krishna legend as that in
which priests and cattle were ruthlessly massacred, and the
temples of the gods defiled with blood, is the same epoch as
that spoken of in the Zendavesta as the usurpation of the
Keresani, the Krishanu or rain-god with the heavenly bow of
the Rigveda, who said, * No priests shall walk the lands for
me as a counsellor to prosper them, he would rob everything
of progress.** ^ It was the time when human sacrifices of the
yellow race, attributed in Northern legend to the Ogres, and
animal offerings at the sacrificial stake were oflered to propi-
tiate the red god Rudra of the thunderbolt and storm-wind,
the Lycaean Apollo, when the temples and altars were, as in
the Scandinavian ritual, reddened with blood for the bettering
of the year, and when the Semite sacrifice of the eldest son, re-
'produced in the Hindu story of the sacrifice of the first born
of king Jantu in the Mahabharata, was offered in all lands
between the Mediterranean and the Ganges. It was during
Xhis age, before the ritual had been purified by the hereditary
priesthood, and before the rain-god was worshipped as the
liaptizer of mankind, who cleanses them from their sins that
Vasu-deva the rain (va or var) god (Su), the kinsman of
Kansa and his wife Devaki, a pair corresponding to Yayati,
the son of Nahusha and his wife Devayani, were summoned
^ Mill, Yoftta, ix. 24; S.B.E. vol. xxxi. pp. 237, 238.
464 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
from Gobardhan, the place sacred to the keeper of the cattle
of Ril, and detained by Kansa in Mathura, on the west bank
of the Jumna, in order that the fulfilment of the prophecy
foretelling the birth of the avenger of his evil deeds in
the eighth son of Vasudeva and Devaki might be frus-
trated. In the story of the eight sons of Vasudeva and
Devaki, we find a reproduction of the eight egg- bom sons
of Aditi in the Rigveda, and of the eight sons of Gunga and
Shantanu in the Mahabharata. Of these, the first seven,
the seven days of the week, were returned to the gods by
their mother as soon as they were born, while the eighth
remained on earth as the sun-god, called Alart-anda, or the
dead (tnart) egg (anda) in the Rigveda,^ and as Bhishma or
Dyu, the eunuch sun-god of the Mahabharata, the uncle,
protector and guardian of the Kauravyas and Paiidavas.
Similarly, the first six sons of Vasudeva and Devaki were
killed at their birth by the guards of Kansa, and the embryo
of the seventh was miraculously transferred to the womb of
Rohini, living at Gokul, on the east bank of the Jumna.
It was as the son of Rohini, the star-goddess mother of the
Ashura worshippers of six (ash) gods, that Bala-ram or
Rum, the fire and sun-god (Bel) was born. He was at first
called Sankarsliana, meaning Mie who drains furrows with
the plough,''^ also Halayudha, he wlio has the plough (hal)
for his weapon {ayudha\ Hala-dhara and Hala-blirit, the
holder (dhara) or l)earer (bhrit) of the plougii (Aa/), the
sun-god of the seventh day, who drives the plough, the path
of the moon through the furrows marked by the other six
days of the week, the god called in the Brahmanas Svana,
meaning the crackling fire-god, who is said in the Rigveda
to sound loud in heaven as the god Agni.^ He is the first of
the Gandharva guardians of Soma, while Krishanu, the rain-
bow god, is the seventh, the last of the six hearth-mounds
^ l<ig\'eda, x. 72, 8.
2 Mathuray A District Memoir^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. 52 note.
'•* Rigveda, v. 2, 10.
ESSAY V 465
(dhishnya)^ the burnt-out fires erected in tlie sacrificial
ground of the Soma sacrifice in the consecrated house of
the priests (sudas) to Mitra-Varuna, the moon-god and the
rain-god, or god of the dark heaven of night, in the same
compartment with the house-post of the Udumbara fig-tree,
the significance of which I have explained in Essay iii.^
These seven Gandharva guardians qf Soma, the first seven
sons of Aditi, Gunga, and Devaki, the first week of the light
half of the lunar month are the forgers of the crescent-shaped
sword, the Harpe, or lunar crescent, with which the Baby-
lonian Bel, Bel-merodach, or Bel, the holy son (Mar-dtiffffd)^
killed Tiamut, the dragon-mother (mut) of living things
(iia\ and with which the Greek god Hermes, the Sarameya
of the Rigveda, slew Argus, the constellation Argo, the
watcher of lo, the goddess of the dark night, and the mother
of the Southern rains, churned by the revolutions of the
seven father-stars of the Great Bear. Hera, the moon-
goddess, who then became ruler of heaven, changed Argus
into the peacock sacred to her, who became in India one of
the totemistic fathers of the Bharata race, and the whole
series of correlated mythological conceptions shows the forms
in which the substitution of the lunar reckoning of time by
the lunar months and months of gestation ending in the
adoption of the lunar year of thirteen months was commemo-
rated in the national records of the various nations who suc-
cesively adopted this new method of chronological reckoning.
But to return to the Krishna legend, in Vasudeva we find the
father-god of the Maghada Vasu, the Vesar (Fecrap) or rain
€ind spring-god of the Phrygian Greeks, who made the rain-
pole, the sign of the father-god, and who as the husband of
t;he angel (deva) wife, Devaki, became the god Var-una,^ who
^was the god of the Northern year of three seasons of the
* Eggeling, Sat, Bra A. iii. 3, 3, ii ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 72 ; see also plan
«f consecrated Soma ground at the end of the volume.
' That there was an r in the origrinal forms of both the names Vasu and
Var-una, meaning the rain-god, is clear from the Greek Vesar, the Sanskrit
30
466 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
barley-growing races, as distinguished from the god Bhrigu
or Bhrika, the Southern god of the rains of the summer
solstice, who was first the fire-god of the Maghadas, and
who was the father of Ra-dha, the mother or maker of Ra.
In the first six children of Vasudeva and DevakI, we find the
six gods of the Asuras, the year of five seasons beginning
with the summer solstipe, the polar star with the four stars
marking the four quarters of the heavens, these five creating
powers being the offspring of the sixth, the mother-moon,
measuring in her weekly changes the periods of gestation
consecrated to the eleven father-gods of generation. As the
seventh son born of Rohini, the star Aldebaran in Taurus,
the moon-god is no longer the mother-goddess, the Sanskrit
Sini-vali, the Greek Hera, the Latin Luna, but the father-
god of the Northern nations, the masculine Chandra or
Soma, the German Mond, the Greek Minos, the measurer,
who directs the plough of heaven, and marks, by its path
through the heavens, the lunar year of thirteen months
beginning with that of the constellation Taurus, the Hindu
black-bull god Push. This was calculated by the Babylonian
Kushite-Semite astronomers as beginning with the birth
of the sun-god Ra or Bel at the winter solstice, the
season of the winter rains of the Euphratean delta. This
year of Ra-ma or Ra, the Ramunu or atmospheric god of
the Babylonians, was that on which the whole of Semitic
theology, historical genealogy and chronology was based,
and in the Ra-ma and Krishna legend we find this era of
reformation, marked by the rule of the sons of Sin, the
moon, in the story wliich tells how Bala-ram and Krishna
left the Bliandir fig-tree grove to visit that of the Baby-
lonian father and mother tree, the Tal-palm, and how Bala-
ram slew there the demon Dhenuk, the ass, who was the
guardian of the grove, or, in other words, superseded the
Varsha, and the Hindu Baras. The original name was apparently Vars or
Bars. This became among the Turanian races, who objected to the junction
of consonants, Vesar and Bar-as.
ESSAY V 467
theology of the star-worshippers by that of the sons of the
moon-bull, by killing the ass, the father-god who drew
the chariot of the Ashvins or twin-stars. Similarly Bala-rani
abolished the worship of the fire-god by killing the demon
Pralamba,^ the god to whom the fire-priest at Prahlad-
Kund still yearly walks through the fire, and to whom the
eldest sons of the Semite races were offered up before the
deification of the moon-father-god Abram, who substituted,
as in the sacrifice of Isaac, the ram, sacred to Varuna, the
ram of the Golden Fleece of stars for the eldest son of the
sacrificer.*
It was in the next year or epoch after the birth of Rama,
and during the rule of the race who measured time by the
lunar year, that Krishna was born, and in the story of his
birth we find a reproduction of the Flood-legend telling how
Dumu-zi, the son of la and Istar, embarks on the waters of the
year-flood, for immediately after his birth, on the 8th Bhadon,
the 23d of August, when the violence of the rains is decreas-
ing, Vasudeva, the god of the crops of the approaching dry
season, and of the growers of barley, who had charmed the
guards of Kansa to sleep, carried, like the boat of Dumu-zi,
the infant Krishna through the floods of the Jumna to Gokul,
the home of Kama, on the east bank, and in this journey we
find that Krishna, the black (krishna) cloud-god of the rainy
season, who had become, as I have shown in Essay in., the
god of the incense-worshippers, hidden in clouds of incense,
is another form of Dumu-zi, the son of the house (/), of the
Waters (a), who finds, after the close of the rains, the dry
land on which to sow the barley and autumn crops of the
Northern plough-god Ra, the Phoenician sons of the red-
tuan, who, in the barley-growing country of North Palestine
r'ound Antioch, mourned the death of the old, and rejoiced
over the birth of the new year at the autumnal equinox,^
* MaUAura, A District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., pp. 56, 57.
' Gen. xxii. 13.
• Sayce, Hibhert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 231.
468 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
when the Indian rains have ceased, and the land is nearlv
ready to be ploughed for the wheat and barley autumn
crops.
At Grokul Vasudeva gave his son, the new year-god
sanctified by baptism in the waters of the flood, to Nanda,
the god of pleasure (nand\ the herdsman and father-god of
the bull-race and his wife Jasoda, meaning the ^exhausted'
or * superseded ** goddess, the mother-moon of the Ashuras,
and took from Jasoda her new-born daughter, who was the
goddess Joginidra, the sleep (nidra) of illusion (Joffi), Vasu-
deva placed her in Devakfs bed, and when the guards, hear-
ing the child cry, came to slay her, she rose up to heaven as
the great goddess Durga, meaning * the mountain,** €Uid thus
in the story of the birth of Krishna and Durga we find a re-
production of that which tells how Manu, meaning *the
thinker,' raised from the waters of the flood the mother-
mountain Ida, the sheep-mother, to become the purified
mother of the holy sons of the bull, who succeeded to the
heritage of the sons of Esau, the mountain-goat, and it was
as the ffod of the sons of the mountain that Krishna was
o • • •
proclaimed the successor of Indra, the Sanskrit form of the
Dravidian god Sukra or Sakko, tlie earlier rain-god, under
the name Upendra.^
His adventures during his youth tell, as I have already
shown, of the successive supersession of past beliefs, the
monsters which he slays, and among these is the crane
Bach-hasar, which Krishna rent in twain, the water-bird,
the ^ plava^ to whom the Tri-kadru-ka festival was dedi-
cated, the ancestor of the egg-born sons of the tortoise and
Aditl. The close of the period of the bird-myth is also
marked by the deposition and death of Kansa, the goose,
the great Naga of Egyptian theology. It was after Kansa
had been deposed and slain, and after the death of Jara-
sandha, the king of the united races of Kushikas and
Maghadas, and father of Kansa's two wives, that Krishna
^ Mathura^ A District Memoir ^ by F. S. Growse, B.C.S., p. %%.
ESSAY V 469
became witli the Pandavas, the supreme rulers of India.
But in the interval after the death of Kansa, Jarasandha
had retaken Mathura from Krishna, and Krishna had then
• • • / • • •
established his capital at the port of Dwaraka, and this
story, telling of the removal of the Yadevas to the sea-
shore, is the mythical form assumed by national history
when it told how the inland race of the sons of the tortoise
had settled on the sea-shore, and became a race of mariners.
It was from this port, the headquarters of the race of Ya-
devas, or those who made Ya their god, that the followers
of Vala-rama, the Phoenician-Semite mariners disseminated
over the world the worship of the father Ra. This god, the
Babylonian Ram-anu, is the god worshipped in the Zend-
avesta as Rama Hvastra or Vayu, the wind-god, and also as
Verethragna, the Vedic Indra, called Vritra-han, or slayer
of Vritra. He, in his first avatar, appears as a strong
beautiful wind, and in his second like the Indian Rama, as
a bull-god.^ He is the god of the Bah-ram firej the per-
petual fire, burning on the Parsi altars, and from this name
Bah-ram given to the altar of the creator and the never-
dying fire, consecrating it and making it represent the
parent of life, we find further evidence in addition to that
given by the worship of Ishtar as the Phoenician Ashtoreth,
the moon-goddess, the perpetual washings and purifications
ordained in Zend and Hindu ritual, and the importation of
the Semitic moon. Sin, into India, of the establishment of a
great Semitic empire in succession to that of the Ku shite
kings. For in Bah-ram we find the name of the Phoenician
goddess Baau, the Akkadian Bahu, the Bohu or deep of
Genesis, and the origin of the deeps and abysses, the brazen
seas of the Babylonian and Jewish temples.^ She became in
Semite-Akkadian theology the representative of the Akka-
dian Gurra, the watery deep, the modem Hindi *Gurra,^
* Darmesteter, Zendavesta^ The Ram Yastj i ; Bakrdm Yoft, 2, 7; S.B.E.
vol. xxiii. pp. 232, 233, 249; also vol. iv. Introduction v. and pp. Ixxxix.-xc
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 262-264.
470 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
meaning a water-jar, and her other names were Sala, the
Akkadian form of the Northern Sara, the cloud-mother and
A, the waters, the wife of la, all of them being dialectic
and mythologic forms of the original sanctity attached by the
worshippers of the water and rain-father to the holy well,
the Hebrew Beer, and the holy tank or kund, the Hindu
symbol of the mother Ra-dha, whence the lotus or tree of
life of the moon-worshippers was bom. The name Bah-ram
unites Bahu, the primaeval womb or misty void, with Ram, the
wind, the spirit or breath of God which moves over it, and
infuses into it the life-giving heat which gives birth to the
light, Ra. The epithet Hvastra is the Zend equivalent of
the comparative form of the Vedic Shvas, a word used in the
Rigveda, when the spiritual might of the fire-god is described
to depict the hissing of the fire of life ^ in the watery abyss
of creation. Thus the never-dying fire was the symbol of
the life-giving heat which filled the atmosphere with the
soul of life. Ram, when the altar of the almighty was the
mighty void Bahu. Bahu is thus the equivalent of the Nun
of the Akkadians and Egyptians, and of Nun, meaning the
fish, or fish-god of the Hebrews, and Bahu is said in Egyptian
theology to be the mother of Nun, while the fire of life was
the creating Ram, who is spoken of by the Egyptians as the
god Shu, whose name means the drying god, represented by
the name of Ra.^ Bahu was the supreme goddess of Cutha or
Gudua, the Akkadian city of the dead, and the wife of its
divine king Ner-gal, meaning the great (ffal) Ner or epoch,
the period of 600 years assigned as the duration of the life
of Noali before the Flood in ^ Genesis,^ and she was also the
wife ' of the Southern sun,"** of the winter solstice. She thus
was the mother-goddess of the race who measured time bv
^ Rigveda, i. 65, 5 ; Grassmann, s.v. * Shvas.'
- Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic ^ chap.vii. * The Magic of the Ritual of the
Dead, pp. 103, 104.
^ Gen. vii. 6.
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect, iii. and iv. pp. 194, 195, 262-
264.
ESSAY V 471
the lunar year, and occupied in Akkadian cosmogony the
place given by the Egyptians to Set and Hat-hor, the house
or mother (hcU) of Hor, also called Nebt-hat, the mistress
(iiebt) of the house (?iat), when they made Set, Hathor, and
Osiris, and the ram-goat god of Mendes, the rulers of the
sun of the South.^
The connection between the god Rama of India and the
development of Semitic theology is further shown in the
generations of Abram and of the Hebrew and Kushite races
in Genesis, for the sons of Keturah, Abram's second wife,
are said to have been settled by him in the East, a mythic
mode of saying that Ab-ram himself was the father-god of
the East before he was the father-god of the West The
name Keturah comes from the root katar^ to surround,^ and
it is thus an exact translation of the name Vritra, the sons
of the surrounding or enclosing snake given in the Rigveda
to the aboriginal people of India, who looked on the tilled
land surrounding the mother grove of their natal villages as
their mother land. Jokshan and Shuah, the Shus, are two
of the children of Keturah, and Jokshan is the father of
Sheba and Dedan.^ Jokshan is the same name as Joktan,
just as the two words, the Hebrew Shur and the Chaldaean
Tur both meaning bull, are the same word, and Joktan, the
brother of Eber, the eponymous father of the Hebrew race
whose home is said to lie ' as thou goest toward the Mountain
of the East,** is like Jacob, the father of thirteen children, the
thirteen months of the lunar year, one of these is Sheba,
while among the rest are Havilah and Ophir.* Again,
Sheba and Dedan, who are said in the account of Keturah's
children to be the sons of Jokshan, are, in the genealogy of the
sons of Kush, said to be the children of Raamah.* Thus we
find that Sheba and Dedan are the descendants of a grand-
father called in one place Kush and in another Ab-ram
^ H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alten yEgypter^ p. 451.
' Gesenius, Thesaurus ^ p. 725, s.v. 'Keturah.'
' Gen. XXV. I. •* /bid, x. 28, 29. * Ibid. x. 7.
472 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC IIMES
through fathers called both Jokshan and Raamah. There-
fore, the names Ab-ram and Kush must both denote the
same parent stock, as also must Jokshan and Raamah.
That all the names of Jokshan, Raamah, and their sons,
have a geographical meaning is clear, from the fact that
Ophir, the son of Jokshan or Joktan is the name of the
land watered by the streams of the delta of tlie Indus,
whence Solomon got his gold, while Havilah, in the account
of the Garden of Eden in Genesis, is described as that
through which the river Pishon, or river of the channels,
the river Indus, flows, which descends from the Pishin
valley, the home of the Kushite race, and in this land
* there is gold, bdellium, and the onyx stone,' ^ all of which
are products of North-western India, while Sheba is the
well-known name of Southern Arabia, said by Strabo to
belong to one of the two richest nations on the earth.-
Therefore the pedigrees of Kush, Joktan, and Abram in
Genesis state clearly, in the language of mythic historical
genealogy, that the dwellers in the lands called Sheba and
Decian were emigrants from the country called Kush,
Raamah, or Jokshan, and this land is the liome-land of
the Kushika or Kushite race descended from Rama or Ram,
the son of Kaushaloya, the mother of the house (aloya) of
Kush, wliose son is the father {ab) Ram. Thus tlie two
genealogies of Genesis and Hindu mythology both agree,
for in Genesis, the people of Sheba or Southern Arabia.
Havilah or North-western India, and Raamah, or the home
of Riim in Eastern India,^ are said to be the sons of Kush
or Abram, while Hindu legend calls Rama, the son of
Kaushaloya, and the ruler of Ayodhya or Eastern India,
while the other son of Dasaratha bv Kai-kaia, the mother-
goddess of the land of North-western India, answering to
the Havilah of Genesis, is Bhfirata, the predecessor in
imperial rule of Rfuna, the ruler of the race of Ashura
star-worsliippers, tlie sons of the fig-tree, before the sove-
^ Gen. ii. 13. 2 Stralx), xvi. ^ Gen. x. 7.
ESSAY V 473
reignty descended to Rama, the moon-god, the husband of
Sita, the crescent- moon, and founder of the lunar year of
thirteen months, and the country which he ruled was called
the land of Rama or Raamah.
But if we must look to Indian historical mythology for
the origin of the names Ab-ram and Raamah, it is probable
that we shall also find there the explanation of the name
Jokshan, which contains the Indian sibilant sh^ and Joktan.
Tliey both are connected by Gesenius with the word yakahy
manifest,^ and are derived from the same root as that which
gives birth to the Grerman jogd^ hunting, Ja^r, a hunts-
man, and the name of the Indian tribe of the Jak-shu or
Yak-shu. This name means the people who hunt or follow,
and who are, therefore, * the manifest * race. Again, the fact
that Joktan has thirteen sons shows that the land of the Jak-
shus or Yak-shus, signified by his name, was that in which
time was reckoned by the year of thirteen following lunar
months. This year was deduced from the observation of
the heavens and the tracing of the path traversed and the
time occupied by the annual changes of the positions of
the moon and the sun in the heavenly circle. The method
by which this calculation was made was essentially diflFerent
from that followed by the early reckoners of stellar time
who measured it first by counting the revolution of the
days and weeks, and afterwards by observing the position of
certain stars with reference to the pole, and their rising,
setting, and culmination. The innovators, who substituted
for this method the observation of the paths of the wandering
stars, the Pairikas of the Zendavesta, denounced by the wor-
shippers of the fixed stars as the enemies of law and order,
and who looked upon these constantly moving guides, the
sun, moon, and planets, as the runners who showed the way
in the annual procession or Rath-jatra, the chariot journey
of the god of time through the heavens would naturally be
named the race of hunters or racers, who, under the guidance
^ Gesenius, Thesaurus^ p. 592.
474 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the old German god, the great huntsman, who was origin-
ally the wind-god, measured time by the procession of his
messengers and servants, the angel messengers round the
heavenly circle. It was they who substituted for the seven
Gandharva guardians of Soma, the life-giving rain, led by
Svana, the creating fire-god, the stellar lords of the days of
the week, the sun, moon, and five planets, which have ever
since given their names to the seven days of the week
throughout South-western Asia and Europe. Therefore,
just as the worshippers of the fixed stars were called in
Hebrew mythology, the Gandharva or Gandhara, the
people of the land (gan) of the pole (dhruva) or of the
water-springs (dhara)y so were the reformers classed among
the ruling races, recorded in mythological history as the
Yak-shus or followers of the god whose name Yaks was
changed into Ya, who are said by Manu to be descended
from the Barhishads, or fathers seated on the Barhis, the
consecrated tufts of Kusha grass, the Kushite sons of Atri,
the fire-god,^ whose name means, as Grassmann shows, the
eating or devouriug (ad) three (tri\ the year of three seasons,
the devourer of time according to Northern chronology.
These Yakshus again appear in the Rigveda as one of the
tribes conquered by the Tritsu and Sudas, under Vashishtha;
and these Tritsu and their leaders were, as I have shown
in Essay ir., the race who introduced the solar year, and
the position of the Yakshus as people of the race of the
sons of the pole Tur, and leaders of the army of the
Bharata, the sons of Visva-mitra, the moon-god ruler of the
lunar year, is shown by the tribal name Yakshu being given
to the leader of the Turvasu, or people whose god (i^a^u) is
the pole (tur) in the triumphal poem telling of tlie victory
of Sudas and Vashislitha.-
We can also trace the Yakshu of India in the Greek mvth
of the god lakkhos, for Likkhos (*'Ia/c^o9) is the same word Jis
^ Biihler, A/iifni i'li^ 196; S. B. E. vol. xxv. p. 112.
- Rigveda, vii. 18, 6, 19.
ESSAY V 475
the Indian Yakshu, the only alteration being the commuta-
tion of the kh into the Sanskrit sibilant, and the path by
which the conception travelled is found in the name of Jax-
artes, or the river of the perfect {arta\ Jaksh or Yaksh, that
anciently given to the Aral, the brother-river to the Rasa or
river of the god Ra, called in the Rigveda the Great Mother,^
which was the name of the Oxus before it was called
by that of which Oxus is a coiTuption, the Uiske or
water (uiske)^ the mother-river of the invading Aryan Celts,
lakkhos, in the Eleusinian mysteries, is the avatar of
Dionysus, the son of the tree and the bull-god, when he came
from India drawn by Indian leopards. In one account of
this avatar he is represented as the son of Rhea, the goddess-
mother of the flowing rivers, the river Oxus, the Hindu Ida
or Ira, and in another as the son of Zeus and Semele. In
"this last genealogy we find evidence proving lakkhos to be a
god of the maritime Phoenicians, for Semele is the Phoenician
goddess Samlah or Pen-Samlath, whose name appears in the
list of Semitic ruling races, given in Genesis as Samlah, king
of Masrekah, meaning the vine-lands, whose rule succeeded
that of the sons of Hadad-Rimmon or Ram-an, the god
Ram, and preceded that of Shaul of Rehoboth, the sun-god
of the solar year.^ Hence we find from the comparison of
Greek, Assyrian, Hebrew, and Hindu mythology, evidence of
the existence of a continuous stream of official national tra-
dition bearing every mark of having been handed down from
generation to generation of national historiographers, and
passed from land to land ruled by the Kushite-Semitic race,
and this traditional history tells us that the rule of the Gand-
harva sons of Kush, the tortoise, and of Rama and Bel, the
moon and sun-gods of the ploughing race, was succeeded by
that of the Jakshu or Jokshan, a race allied to the Phoeni-
cians, whose astronomical studies carried on in the observa-
tories of Babylon and of the cities of the Persian Highlands,
^ Rigveda, v. 41, 15. Brunnhofer, Iran and Tttrdn^ iv. i, p. 87.
- Sayce, Hibbeii Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. $4 note i ; Gen. xxxvi. 37.
476 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
resulted in the calculation of the lunar year. This deduction
is confirmed by the evidence which enables us to fix the exact
geographical position and trading relations of the lands
called Raamah, Dedan, and Sheba, for Ezekiel when describ-
ing the trade of the Phoenicians of Tyre, names Raamah and
Sheba as the places whence their merchants imported * spices,"*
the special products of India, together with * all precious
stones and gold,** which were found both in India and Arabia.^
Raamah, the spice land, was, therefore, the country of India,
whose commerce with the West was carried on from the
seaports of the western coasts of India, the principal of these
being Dwaraka, consecrated to Vala-Rama ; and Raamah, as
Gesenius shows, comes from the same root as Raasa, thunder,*
thus making the father-god of this land the god Ra or Rama,
the god of the bright sky, whose face was shown after the
thunder had cleared the heaven of clouds, and who was the
god known also under the name Hari, the yellow storm-god
of the Indian ritual, the son of Har or Sar, the Vedic Saran-
yu, born on the Yamuna or river of the Twins (yarnd),
Sheba, again, is specially connected by Ezekiel with Dedan
as the lands of the people ' who dwell in the navel of the
earth,** and, therefore, have neighbours in the Hindus of the*
East as well as in the Egyptians and Syrians to the West,
and possess cattle and goods. ^ It was from Dedan that tht*
Syrian merchants imported ' precious cloths for riding,* that
is, Persian saddle-bags and carpets ; and Dedan is, therefore,
as Gesenius shows, a name for the islands in the Persian Gulf,'*
and it was from thence that the Syrians, according to Ezekiel,
brought ' honis of ivory and ebony."* ^ The ivory was the
produce of Indian elephants, and the ebony the wood of the
Indian Tendoo or Ebony tree {Diospyros vielanoarulon\
which grows in all the hill valleys in Central and Southern
India, and is especially abundant along the Malabar coast
^ Ezekiel xxvii. 22. * Gesenius, Thesaurus^ p. 1297.
^ Ezekiel xxxviii. 12, 13. ^ Ibid, xxvii. 20.
* Gesenius, Thesaurus^ p. 322. ** Ezekiel xxvii. 15.
ESSAY V 477
and in Ceylon. It is the forests of the Western Ghats that
supply this black wood to the carvers in Bombay. The
traders with the West in the Indian spices, ivory, and ebony,
were the race formed from the union of the Northern land
traders and agriculturists, the sons of Ra, with the maritime
sons of Shu, called the Shu-varna, and they became the
Phoenicians, or sons of the red sun-bird Phoenix, who in-
herited the traffic begun by the sons of the Ashvins or
heavenly twins, who are again the sons of the goddess cloud-
mother Sar. It was the men of the red race, the sons of the
father-god Ra, who substituted the father-fish Nun, the son
of la or Ya, for the mother fish-god Sara or Sal of the first
sea-farers, who traced their genealogy through the cloud-
goddess Sar or Sal, the Akkadian Sala, to the Sal-tree, and
thence to the mother-fish, the Sal, who, when united with the
father-god, the Rishya or antelope, the Hebrew Terah became
the Sal-rishi, the totemistic mother and father of the Su-
varna, the race who also traced their descent first to the fig-
tree and afterwards to the palm-tree, the father and mother
tree. It was the original fish-mother who was worshipped
on the Syrian coast as Derketo Atar-gatis or Atar-gath, the
house of Atar the fire-god, and in Greece as Delphis, the
mother Dolphin, who was tlie mother of the sea-born
Aphrodite, the daughter of the foam (a<f)po<;). It was the
son of the palm tree, the parent tree of male and female
pairs, the fish-god Assor, whose sons were the Ashurim, the
sons of Dedan and great-grandsons of Abram,^ who became
the ruler of heaven in conjunction with Ashteroth, the moon-
goddess, and it was he who was worsliipped under tlie name
of Assor and Sala-mannu, the fish-god. But this supremacy
of the fish-god, the first incarnation of Vishnu, left that of the
sun-god of the Northern Lithuanians, Ra or Rai, still un-
touched, especially in inland countries, and it was as a form
of this sun-god that Hadad-Rimmon or Ram-anu, called by
^ Gen. XXV. 3.
478 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Hesychius'Pa/ia9 o v^toro? ^€09, Ram-as the supreme god,^
was worshipped at Damascus, his solar character and identity
with the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the Semitic Tammuz being
shown by the mourning for the death of Hadad-Rimmon,
which was said by the prophet Zechariah to be yearly cele-
brated in the valley of Megiddo.* It was the sons of Ra,
Rama, Ram-anu or Abram, who, when Terah the antelope
had removed from Ur, the capital of the Euphratefiui delta,
to Haran, meaning the Road (ArAarron), the special city of
the moon-god,^ showed the road through the fields of heaven,
and worshipped not the star-deities of the Asura-Danava
Hindus, and the Himyaritic Arabs, but the white god Ra or
Rai, under the name of Laban, the white, who was looked on
by them as the god who assumed the divine form of the
moon-god, the god Sin of the Semites, and of the sun-god,
the Semitic Ram. Laban is also called ^ the brick founda-
tion of heaven,^ that is to say, the god who, in his two-
fold aspect, is the two pair of bricks, or the two foundations
(te-te) which gave their name to the first month of the
Akkadian year, beginning with the birth of the sun at the
winter solstice, and marking the starry track of the sbiges
of the annual course of the moon through the heavens, as
she completed her twenty-six allotted ph£ises. Laban, the
double-faced god, the sun and moon, was the ancestor of the
seven children of tlie cow and moon-mother Leah, and of
tlie prophet sons of Rachel, the ewe or sheep mother, the
daughter of Ra, the son and the mother of the young sun-
god of the solar year, the Benjamin, or son of my sorrow, a
form of Dumu-zi or Tammuz,* who became the Sawul of
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., * Names of the Signs of the Zodiac,' xi. note.
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archiiology^ March 1 891.
^ Zech. xii. ii.
^ Sayce, Hihbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 249, note 3.
* Benjamin was the son, the young year or new epoch, born when his
mother, the old year, the year of Ra, dies, but he did not become the king of
go<1s and men till his avatar as Sawul, the sun-god of the solar year. He
was first the god who inspired the sons of the prophets, the Asipu.
ESSAY V 479
the Babylonians, and Saul of the Hebrews, who appears in
Hebrew legend as the late born descendant of Benjamin, the
son of Rachel. It was through* Haran, the city of the road
(kharran) that the Phrygian shepherds first came down to the
Euphratean delta, the land of the Shus, and it was through
Haran, the moon city, that the sons of Ram imported the
ritual of incense- worship, which I have shown in Essay ui.
to be connected with Lot, the son of Haran, and nephew
of Ab-ram, and it was there and in Southern Arabia that
they evolved the theology based on the worship of Sin, or
Singh, the horned -moon, and of Sinai, the mother-mountain
of the Semite race, her sons, the rival and successor of the
mountain Khar-sak-kurra, the mother-mountain of the East.
It was they who made the divine spirit, or soul of life, which
they called the Nun, residing in the watery atmosphere, the
embodiment of their belief in one God, the Creator of heaven
and earth, who repudiated the intoxicated inspiration of the
spirit-drinking prophets of the Kushite race, and who became
in India the water-drinking Som-bunsi, or sons {bunsi) of
Sinh, or Soma, who substituted the male god Soma for the
mother-moon Sini-vali, invoked in some hymns of the
Rigveda, made him the god to whom the Soma hymns in
the Rigveda are addressed, gave to India the name of
Sindhava, the country of Sin, the moon, established the lunar
year of thirteen months as that reckoned by the Semite race
and made the Semites the supreme rulers of all the lands
from Eastern India to the Syrian coast, once ruled by the
sons of Kush. It was they who extended the Semite system
of despotic rule, not only over South-western Asia and Egypt
but who also introduced it into Greece. It was these people,
who, as worshippers of the moving sun, moon, and planets,
the measurers of their time, became known as the Yakshus,
or sons of the gods who move onward {ydks\ and they
are also the people who were known as the sons of the moon-
bull, and the pastoral races who drank milk, the pious
Jaxartoe, or worshippers of Jaks, and the Galaktophagoi,
480 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
or milk-driiikers of Ainniianus Marcellinus.^ But thev, like
other pious confederacies who have succeeded them, degen-
erated into rabid tyrants, against whose rule the world
revolted under the lead of the Aryan Celts, who substituted
the anthropomorphic gods of Greek mythologic art, and the
festivals of the wine-god for the abstractions of Semitic
theoloffv and the burdensome ritual of their lifeless cere-
nionials.
But before concludint^ this Essav I must note additional
evidence furnished by the people and agricidture of Muttra,
which supports the views I have advanced as to the
origin of the people who looked on Ra, or Ram, as their
father- god, and must also call attention to the proofs of the
formation of the Jewish race bv a coalition between the
Eastern and Western branches of the Semite familv, which
are to be found in the history of the national sacramental
rite of circumcision.
The two most numerous of the agricultural castes in the
Muttra district, are the Jats, numbering 117,265 persons,
and the Chaniars, 99,110. The crops grown consist almost
entirely of autumn crops, Joar {Holms sorghujn\ Bajra
{Ilolcus spicatu.s\ and cotton, and winter crops wheat, gram
(Cicer ar iet in it tti\ and barley — barley being the crop which is
most grown, while rice croj)s are unknown.^ Hence we see
clearly that the people who first cleared the land of forest
were the race who grew millets, cultivated, according to the
Sonff of Lhiffal^ by the Gonds who were saved from the
Flood and the hostility of the alligator Mug-ral, by the
tortoise, and were followed by the first growers of barley,
who were, as I have shown in Essay iii., immigrants
who had come to India from Asia Minor. Of the two
most numerous agricultural tribes descended from these
early immigrants, tlie Chamars, who are hereditary slayers
* Am. Marcellinus, xxiii. 6.
- Hunter, Gazetteer^ ' Muttra,' vol. x. p. 48 ; Mcithura, A District Memoir^
by F. S. Growsc, ]*.C.S., p. 68.
i
ESSAY V 481
of cattle and dealers in leather, are undoubtedly the descend-
ants of a race of cattle herdsmen, who under Kushite
rule, when the artisans were divided into septs practising
special trades, became tanners and sellers of leather goods.
The Jats, on the other hand, are pure agriculturists, who
boast that they can produce better crops from their lands
than any other race of hereditary farmers. Their chiefs still
hold extensive estates in the district, and it must have been
they who originally cleared, not only the lands of Muttra,
but also those of all the other districts west of the Granges,
in which the Jats hold a similar position as leaders of the
agricultural tribes to that held by the Kurmis in Oude to the
east of the Granges, in Bengal, Central India, and Bombay,
where Jats are unknown. The Jats must, therefore, be the
race known in the Mahabharata and Rigveda as the Srinjaya
or sons of the sickle (srini)y the Panchala rulers of the
Grangetic Doab, who conquered India under the Pandavas,
and they must also have belonged to the tribes who formed
in India the confederacy of the sons of the tortoise, for they
trace their descent to the land of Ghuzni and Kandahar,
watered by the mother-river of the Kushika race, the sacred
Haetumant, or Helmend.^ Their name connects them with
the GretsB of Thrace, and thence with the Guttones, said by
Pytheas to live on the southern shores of the Baltic, the
Guttones placed by Ptolemy and Tacitus on the Vistula in
the country of the Lithuanians,^ and the Goths of Groth-
land in Sweden. This Scandinavian descent is confirmed by
their system of land-tenures, for the chief tenure of the
Muttra district is that called Bhayachara,^ in which the
members of the village brotherhood each hold as their
family property a separate and defined area among the
village lands, according to the custom of the Bratsvos of
the Balkan Provinces and the Hof-Bauers of North-west
* Elliot, Supplementary Glossary ^ North-west Provinces^ s.v. * Jat,' p. 488.
^ Encyclopadia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, vol. x. p. 847, Art. 'Goths.*
' Hunter, Gazetteer, s.v. * Muttra,* vol. x. p. 49.
31
482 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIAIES
Germany, which I have already described in Essay il, and
not the mere right to an allotted portion of the village
lands held in common by the rice-growing matriarchal
village communities. The Geiac of the Balkans are said by
Herodotus to be the bravest and most just of the ThracianSy
who worshipped one god, called Zalmoxis, or Grebeleusen,
the thunder and lightning-god, to whom they send a
messenger every five years, the mission being accomplished
by throwing him on three spears and thus sacrificing him.^
These Thracian Getae must, as a Northern race of individual
proprietors, have held their lands on the tenure existing in
the Jat villages, and these Indian Jats, or Gretae, have not
degenerated from the military prowess of their forefathers,
for those Jats, who have become Sikhs in the Punjab, are
known as some of the best and most reliable Indian soldiers.
Further evidence both of the early history and origin of the
race of Jats, or G^tae, is given by the customs and geographic
cal position of another tribe of the same stock, called the
Massa-getie, or great (rnassa) Getae.* Herodotus describes
them as living on the western shores of the Caspifiui Sea in
the lands watered by the Araxes and its tributary, the Kur.
Thus their home is the same as that of the ancient Iberians,
whose mother-mountain is Ararat, whence the Araxes rises,
which stands almost halfway between the Caspian and Black
Seas, and the names of the former sea and of the river Kur,
preser\'e the roots kits and kur, the two forms of the name
of the father of the tortoise race. It was here, in the land
of Georgia, that the reverence for the rain-god as the father
of life originated, and it was here, as I have shown in dis-
cussing the myth of St. George, that the festival to the
plough-god, the Naga, held in the month of April-May, the
original form of the Palilia of Italy, and Maifeuer of
Germany was first instituted, and it is this festival which is
^ Herod, iv. 93, 94.
* Elliot, SuppUnientary GlossaryyNorth'it^est Provinces y s.v. *Jats,* p. 489
note. Massa means * great ' in Pahlavi.
ESSAY V 483
still observed by the Jats of Muttra and the Gonds of
Central India as the Akht-uj. It also seems probable that
it was here in the fatherland of the Iberian barley-growers,
the Hebrews, or sons of Eber, that the geographiod myth
of the tortoise earth first arose. This first mythic tortoise
being the sacred home-land of the sons of Eber, with Ararat,
the mother-mountain, in the centre of its head, while the
body floated on the surrounding waters of the Black,
Mediterranean, and Caspian Seas, and this myth was subse-
quently transferred by the first immigrant Getae who came
to India, the Turanian Gonds, to the larger confederacy by
the Kushika, formed round the mother-mountain of the
East. As to customs common to the Jats and Massa-getae,
Sir H. Elliot says that the Jats are accused by their neigh-
bours of having a community of wives, an accusation which is
shown by the Holi orgies at Kosi to be probably true, and
this system of transition, through the communal marriage of
all the men and women in the same village, from the matri-
archal custom of intercourse between the men and women of
different villages, to that of husbands and wives living
together for life, like the Ashura sons of the palm-tree, in the
same house, is, according to Herodotus, one of the national
customs of the Massa-getae.^ Also the fact stated by
Herodotus that their only god was the sun-god, and that
they sacrificed horses to him,* shows that these Lithuanian
Massa-getae were identical with the race who brought to
India the worship of the sun- and fire-god Ra, and who
celebrated in his honour the Ashva-medha, or horse-sacrifice
in which, according to the ritual described in the Rigveda,
a goat was offered to the Lithuanian thunder-god Per-kunas,
called Pushan, and Indra, the rain-god, and thirty-four ribs
of the horse to the gods of time, the month of twenty-eight
days, and the five seasons, who were the thirty-three gods of
lunar time, and the thirty-fourth to the sun-god,* This
^ Elliot, Supplementary Glossary^ p. 490 ; Herod, i. 206.
' Herod, i. 216. ' Rigveda, i. 162, 2, 3, 18.
484 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sacrifice of the horse tells of the coming of the race who
calculated time by the luaar year, and who were ruled by the
Zend hero-god Keresaspa, the sun-god, the horned-hone,
who sleeps till the day of judgment in the valley of Fisan
the ancestral home of the Indian Jats. They were the race
who, under the Jat tribal names of the Dhe and Pachade,^
or Comers from the West (porAA), represent the sons of
Sama, the reputed father of Keresaspa, who introduced into
India the lunar year calculated at Babylon, while the older
race of Jats, who are shown to be allied to the later comers
by the epithet of homed in the name Keresaspa, are repre-
sented by those called Hele, or Deshwali Jats, the dwellers
in the country (desh\ who worship the god Ram, who has the
plough (hal) for his weapon, who were regarded as aboriginal
It was these Eastern Jats, who were the race ruled by the
Naga kings, who belong to the great race represented in
Bengal by the tribal confederacy from which the Cheroos,
Kharwars, and Birhors are descended. The connection
between the Jats and these people is shown by the custom
common to the Hele Jats and Cheroos of crowning the bride-
groom ^ith the pat-mauri, or pith helmet, which he transfers
to the bride, while the substitution by the Dhe Jats of the
Sehra, or veil, for the pat-mauri, clearly shows that they
belong to a later stock.- It is also the Hele Jats who keep
up the old custom of the Hebrew sons of Shem (the name)
of preserving family and national history in the form of
mythic genealogy, and who, therefore, unlike the Dhes, who
frequently dispense with his services, retain the jaga, or
family genealogist. Another strange custom of the Massa-
geta? mentioned by Herodotus,^ is also preser\'ed in the
traditions of the Birhors, a branch of the Kharwars and
Cheroos, and it is said by Herodotus to arise from the idea
^ Elliot, Supplementary Glossary^ North-vtest Provinces^ p. 486.
- Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal ^ * Cheroos,' vol. i. p. 201 ; Elliot,
.Supple nuntary Glossary, North-west Provinces, p. 486.
^ Herod, i. 216.
ESSAY V 485
that death without disease is the happiest way of ending
life. Among both tribes, old people who felt that their
work on earth was done, used to invite their relatives to a
feast at which the inviter was eaten. This custom, which
grew out of the totemistic belief that the surest way of
acquiring a desired quality, such as living out one'^s allotted
period of working life without mortal disease, was to feast
upon the possessor of it at a sacramental meal, has long
been discarded by the Birhors ; but they told Col. Dalton,
who related the information to me, that it had been observed
by their forefathers in days which had not yet passed out
of tribal memory. But the Massa-getse, who sacrificed horses,
did not belong, like the cultivating Jats, to the race of the
bull who cultivated land, for Herodotus tells us that they
sowed no crops, but lived on the produce of their flocks
and herds, drinking, like the Galaktophagoi, praised by
Ammianus as most pious people, much milk, hence they
were people allied more to the lunar Rajput races, the Som-
bunsi, sons of the moon, who despised agriculture, than to
the earlier cultivating tribes who tilled their own lands in
North-western Europe and India.
But the whole series of accumulative evidence of the
identity of religious festivals, modes of tenure of land, and
common agricultural and social customs, such as the cultiva-
tion in India and Asia Minor of barley, a grain indigenous
in the latter country, and the observance in both countries
of the feast to the plough-god or Georgos, the worker of the
earth, at nearly the same date, tends strongly to confirm the
conclusion that the chief of the patriarchal races who suc-
ceeded the matriarchal tribes in the rule of India, and who
instituted the custom of marriage by capture, and by the
Sindurdan, or ratification of blood-brotherhood, were the
Northern race called Goths or Getse, who became the tons of
Gad in the land of Bashan, the sons of Gutium or the land
of the bull (ffut) in Assyria, the sons of Gautuma, the bull,
and the cultivating Jats in India. It was they who wor-
486 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
shipped the sun, lightning and rain-god as the Naga or
plough-god, the great Ra or Ram, the husband of Sara,, the
cloud-mother, and these were also the father and mother
gods of the Iberians of Georgia, the Hebrew sons of Eber,
and the Maghada-Kushikas of India, while the ancient con-
nection of the Maghadas with Georgia is shown by their
name being, like that of the Magi, connected with the
mother Maga, and by the Magi being the priest of the fire-
god, whose mother mountain was Ararat, which is still sub-
j ect to volcanic eruptions.^ It was these people who made their
king the earthly representative of Ra, who set apart in everj-
village the royal or king'^s land, called Manjhus in Chota
Nagpore, and who instituted the system of kingly rule
described in Essay il We thus see that in the traditional
genealogy of the races of the sons of Shem, meaning the
name, given in Genesis, and supplemented from Indian and
Zend sources, we can trace the descent of the sons of Ab-ram
and Sara, as the Kushite sons of Rama, bom of the father
god of the Kushite race, called in India Dhritarashtra and
Dasaratha, and in Genesis Isaac, all of whom are forms of
the blind god of the house-pole. It is as the sons of the
irods worshipped in Asia Minor as Ab-ram and Sara, the
father Ram, and Sara or Sala, the storm-mother, the Indian
mother Sal- tree and the mother-fish, and of their son Isaac,
that the twins Esau, the goat-god of the star-worshippers
and Jacob, the father of the race who first reckoned time by
the lunar year in Haran, were born.^ I have shown
throughout these Essays the significance of the birth of
twins in mythic history as showing the successive advances
made in the reckoning of time, and we leani from the whole
history how the worship of the god Ram was brought to Ur,
the capital of the Euphratean Delta, from India, the land
whence the trade to which it owed its wealth and importance
* Encyclopadia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. ii. p. 309, Art. 'Ararat.' An
eruption took place in 1840, and another was seen by Reineggsen in 1785.
'^ Gen. XXV. 21-26.
ESSAY V 487
originated, by the Northern sons of the bull-god, the Lithu-
anian Guttones, the Iberian Getae, who were the great city
builders of the early world, the race who first learned to
build from the custom of providing a house capable of con-
taining each united family as long as they remained under
paternal rule. They were the first race who built houses
-with gables instead of the bee-hive huts and the round
houses supported by a pole in the centre, which were used by
the earlier races, among whom each family lived in its own
house. That these houses with gables were first built by
the sons of the horse is proved by the custom still existing
in the Lithuanian and Gothic lands of Mecklenburg, Pome-
rania, Liineburg, and Holstein of fixing carved wooden horse-
heads to the apex of the principal gable of the house, X
and this custom arose out of the still earlier one of placing
horse-skulls on the apices of the two gable beams, both to
prevent the timbers from rotting and to place the house under
the protection of the totemistic father-gods of the tribe.^
It was the worshippers of Ra, the rain, thunder, and sun
god, who introduced into the ritual of the Hindus, Persians,
Jews, and Greeks the system of ablutions and purifications
which sanctified those baptized into the faith and made sons
of the water-father of life, and who substituted these for the
former system of expiation and purification by the shedding
of blood. It was these sons of the God of heaven who looked
on the fulfilment of duty as the essence of religion, and
proved their belief in the supremacy of the moral law by the
composition and sanctity attributed to the Decalogue and
to the five rules recording the duty of the Hindu Jains.
It was when these people met the Western Semites or
Arabians that the united confederacy of the sons of the
father-god, the sun-hoi*se, and the mother-goddess Sin, the
moon-cow, the sons of Keresaspa, the horned horse of Zend,
and of Karna, the homed (Jcaren) son of Ashva, the horse of
Indian mythology, was formed. But this union was preceded
^ Baring Gould, Strange Survivals and Superstitions on Gables ^ pp. 38-41.
488 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
by the purification, washings, and ceremonial baptisms
which mark all the early religions of South-western Asia,
Greece, and Europe, and it was the baptismal ceremony of the
Hindu Vaishya, called the Dikshayana, which was superseded
on the formation of this new confederacy by the rite of
circumcision, while the purifying ceremonies both of the
new belief in the creative power of water and of the older
belief in that of blood were retained in the national Jewish
ritual. The ceremony which consecrated the new union of
the sons of the circumcision, first cemented in Western Asia,
was one which made blood brotherhood between the immigrant
tribes who had passed through the wilderness and reached
their new country and the father-land of the tribes of the
land of Midian which received them. The union made was
that between the Ashura of India, the Asshurim, whose
descent from Abram is traced through Jokshan in Genesis,
the sons of the cross of the rain-god, the mark consecrating
their totemistic father the Ass of the Ashvins, and the sons
of the crescent-moon, the prototypes of the cross and the
crescent, wliich have since played sucli an important part in
the world's history. This alliance is commemorated in the
account of the circumcision of Gershom, tlie eldest son of
Moses, by his mother Zipporali, in Exodus. She, after the
completion of the rite, declared her Iiusband to be a
' khathan,** that is, a member of tlie family of the circum-
cised,** ^ admitted to be a blood relation of those to whom he
had before been a stranger. The nature of the compact is
shown in the account given in Exodus, where circumcision is
said to be a substitute for the sacrifice of the eldest son, and
the rite was, as Herodotus tells us, a sacrament of initiation
common to the Ethiopians, Egyptians, and the Colchians,*
' Ex. V. 22-26 ; ii. 22. Encyclopadia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, Art. 'Cir-
cumcision,' by Dr. Cheyne, where the word * Khathan' is shown to mean not
*a bridegroom or husban 1 * of blood, as it is translated in the authorised and
revised versions, but * a newly admitted member of the family,' made a blood
relation. - Herod, ii, 104.
ESSAY V 489
the dwellers in the land of tlie magicians, the birthplace of
Medea, the sorceress, the wife of Jason, the leader of the
Greek star-worshippers. The time when the confederated
alliance was ratified is indicated in the story in Exodus,
which makes Moses the newly admitted member of the Arab
family, and Gershom the son who was circumcised. Gershom
is, in the generation of the sons of Levi, the eldest son of the
three brothers, Gershom, Kohath, and Merari,^ and of these
three the name Merari means the sons of the * bitter, the un-
happy,^ * the inferior hewers of wood and drawers of water,
who had charge of the foundations, the boards, the bars, and
the pillars of the tabernacle,^ while the sons of Gershom,
meaning, *the turned out,' had charge of the coverings,
screens, and hangings,^ and the union of the two represented
the union between the worshippers of the gods of earth and
the god of heaven. The Gens of the Levites, by which the
sons of Gershom, the worshippers of the Ashura or six gods,
were turned out of the supremacy of the priesthood, were the
sons of Kohath,^ the prophet-priests of the ephod, or inspir-
ing garments,® consecrated to the fish-god, clothed like the
Akkadian la, in fish-skins. It was to this third Gens that
Aaron, meaning the ark or chest, the garment of flesh, which
retained the voice of the inspiring god, belonged, and the
expulsion of the Ashura priesthood and the consecration of
that of the sons of the prophets is marked in mythical
chnmology by the alliance of Aaron with tlie royal race of
Judah, descended from Ham,^ which I have spoken of in
Essay iii. I have there shown that Moses was the Akkadian
Masu, the liero or god of increase, connected with the
deification of the planet Mercury, as the star of Nebo or
Nabu, the prophet, and that in their astronomy Masu was
* Exod. vi. i6. * Gesenius, s.v. * Merari.' ' Numbers iii. 36.
"* Gesenius, g.v. * Gershom ; ' Numbers iii. 25, 26.
* Gesenius, s.v. 'Gershom.'
^ See I Sam. xxii. 9-12, where David consults the ephod.
' Exod. vi. 23 ; Numbers i. 7 ; I Chron. ii. 10.
490 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TEVIES
the star Regulus in Leo, the chief star of the seven stars
called ' the sheep of the hero/ which were led by ' the seven
bell-wethers/ the sun, moon, and five planets.^ The star
Regulus a Leonis was also called by the Akkadians 6u or
Gus-bara, the red (^/^) fire {bar) of the house (/) of the East
{kur) or of the tortoise land, the star of the red race who
worshipped the fire-god, and came from the land of Kur or
Kush.^ This land was ruled in Akkadian astronomical
mythology by the Wolf, the constellation Lupus, called both
the star of Ur-bat, meaning the star of the old {ur) dead
{f}at\ the dead fathers, or of the foundation (ur) of death
(6a^), and also the god Kusu or Kush. Thus it was the star
of the fire-wolf who is called * the god of the Kur-gal or
Great Kur,* and therefore the father-star of the races who
were sons of Kur, the tortoise, and also the sons of the wolf-
mother goddess, called in the Rigveda the wife of Rijrashva,
* Sayce, liibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49.
^ R. Brown, jun., F.S.A, 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars,' Star xii. Regulus,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology^ February 1890. But this
paper of Mr. Brown's shows that the name Masu, the king, was also given
to the star called by Ptolemy Antares, or equal to Ares or Mars, which is the
centre of three bright stars in Scorpio, called the cor or heart of Scorpio.
This star is, in the Tablet of the Thirty Stars, called the star of the lord
of seed, the month Tisri (September-October), following the month called
in the Hindu calendar Bhadon or Bhadrapada (August-September), conse-
crated to Krishna and Radha, and Tisri, beginning with the autumnal
equinox, is the father-month of the year of the barley-growing races who in
Antioch mourned the death of the old year Tammuz and rejoiced over the birth
of the new one, on the date answering to the ist Tisri. I have shown in
Essay in. the connection between Moses, the Etruscan Mas, and the Latin
Mars, and this star Masu in Scorpio, which is by Ptolemy compared to Mars,
is said in the Tablet of the Thirty Stars to be consecrated to the storm-bird
Lugal-tudda, the mother-goddess of the rains, and it indicates the lime
when, after the rains, she laid the egg from which the world's offspring were
to ht born as the sons of Kush, the tortoise, and of the wolf-god of the dead,
* The god of Kur-gal, the Great Kur,' to whom the next star to the star Girtab
of Scorpio (Star xxvi) was dedicated. This new-born race was nourished by
the crops grown by the barley-growing race whose guiding star was Masu or
Moses. This was also the father-star of the race who, after the birth of
Ra-dha and Ram, brought them, as that of the god Ram, to Western Asia.
' Ibid, Star xxvii.
ESSAY V 491
the upright horse or the meridian pole of the Kushite race,
and also the mother of the Greek twin-gods Apollo and
Artemis. It was on the union of the sons of the rain-god,
who succeeded the fire-god, and was the god who gave life
and hated its destruction, with the Southern Arab star-
worshippers, who sacrificed their eldest sons to the fire-god,
that the latter gave up the practice and agreed instead of
baptizing their children, as the Northern sons of the rain-god
used to do, to sacrifice them symbolically, and initiate them
as blood-brothers of the native land of the new confederacy
by circumcising them on the eighth day after their birth,
when they received the name which made them sons of
Shem, Hhe name.** The fact that this ceremony was
observed by the Colchians, who are named by Herodotus as
one of the originators, shows that it was one of the rites of
the star-worshippers, who brought to Greece the worship of
the stars, the golden fleece of Varuna, to whom the ram was
sacred, and the connection between the introduction of cir-
cumcision and the substitution of the ram as the animal
sacrificed by the sheep race instead of the eldest son, is shown
in the substitution by Abram of the ram for the sacrifice of his
son Isaac. This national adoption of the rite of circumcision,
unknown in India and Eastern Asia, and its connection witli
the worship of Nun, the supreme god of the Akkadians and
Egyptians, the spirit father-god of the misty abyss, is com-
memorated by the circumcision by Joshua, the son of Nun,
of the Jews who, under his guidance as the leader of the tribe
of Ephraim, entered the Holy Land as the sons of the two
Ashes (eper) united by the sacred rite of union after the
death of Moses, who was then admitted as the member and
father-prophet of the Arab family, the planet Mercury, or
messenger announcing the dawn of a new day. The institu-
tion of the rite and tlie alliance between the Eastern and
Western races, is marked as occurring after the sons of Ram
left Haran by the account of the meeting between Jacob, the
father of the sons of the moon-god, and Esau, the father, of
498 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the star-worshippers on the banks of the Jordan, where
Joshua circumcised the Israelites.^ The two stories of Jacobus
sojourn in Haran and return to Canaan, and of its conquest
by Joshua and Caleb, tell of the national time of trial and
education passed in a foreign land and in the homeless wilder-
ness, indicated by Jacob'^s fourteen years of apprentice-
ship answering to the fourteen days required to create
the full moon from darkness, and by the forty* years, or
four times ten, the four births and four periods of gesta-
tion of ten lunar months required to produce the perfect and
holy people, the sons of the fire-god, whose sacred number
is four, who were four times tried, like refined gold, in the
fire. It was when this time of trial was passed, and the two
races from the East and West, descended from Abram and
Sara, were, after devious wanderings, united by the national
rite of circumcision, that the men of Ephraim or the two
Ashes {eper) led by Joshua, establislied themselves at She-
chem, the first settlement occupied by Jacob, who married
his daughter Dinah to the king of the Hivites or village
races. The very early age at which tliis confederacy of
Eastern and Western races took place is shown by the use
of stone knives for the performance of the ceremony by
Joshua and Zipporah, and also by the circumcision of the
Mexican Maya and Nahua, the Maga and Nahusha of
Europe,^ who, as I have shown in Essay i., were led across
the seas to America by the fish-god, one of whose names
is Nun, the fish. It was these people who continued in
their new land the worship of the rain-god to whom, as
their fathers in Central Asia had done before them, they
dedicated the sign of the Cross.
In determining the approximate date of the formation of
this great confederacy of the circumcision we have a guide
provided for us in the narrative of the Book of Joshua.
* Gen. xxxiii. ; Josh. v. 2-9. 2 The number sacred to la.
^ Encyclopedia Britannica^ Ninth Edition, Art. 'Circumcision.' vol. v. p.
790.
ESSAY V 498
This tells us of the events following the supersession by
Nabu or Nebo, the planet Mercury of Masu or Moses, the
star Regulus, the leader of the polar stars, whose revolu-
tions marked the nights, days, and weeks of the years I have
described in Essay iv., those of three and five seasons, and
that of the four solstitial and equinoctial seasons, marking
the path of the sun-god. The followers of Moses, who in
the language of mythic history, married a Kushite wife,^
the worshippers of the fire-fatherjgod, the meridian pole and
its encircling stars, and of the father rain-god, were, as I
have shown, the race who called themselves the sons of Kush,
the tortoise, and of the rivers flowing southward from the
mother-mountains of the East, the holy birth-lands of the
confederated tribes. The parent-rivers of the Kushite race,
who called themselves in India the Iravata, or sons of the
rivers bom from the mother-mountain Ida or Ira, were
(1) the mother-river of India the Gran-gu, the creator or
waterer {ffu) of the holy Gan, the garden of God ; (2) the
Yamuna or Jumna, the river of the twins {yama) ; and (8)
the Sin-dhu, the Indus, the river of the moon {Sin). To
these must be added the parent-rivers of the North-western
twin and building races before they joined the confederacy
of the Turano-Dravidian Indian tribes ; (4) the Euphrates
and Tigris, the first twin rivers, called the Hu-kairya or
active (Jcairya) creators {hu\ parents of the Zend and
Akkadian sons of the land of Ida called Iran and Elam ;
and (6) the Jordan, parent-river of the sons of the bull
(Gud)j the men of Gad ruling the land of Bashan, the land
of the primaeval stone cities, and of their predecessors the
Hivites or Amorites, the cultivating village races dwelling
on the lower hills overlooking the fertile valleys watered by
the Jordan and its tributaries. In the eyes of these people
the god who maintained law and order was he who made
the meridian pole, uniting the tribes and lands of the North
and South, and its attendant stars revolve in their never-
^ Numbers xii. i.
494 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ceasing movements, and who thus generated the changes of
temperature and climate, while the moon and planets, the
wandering stars, were rebels against his rule. But study
of the heavens had, in the days when the theology of the
worship of the Nun was formulated, shown the errors of
this dogma and had proved that the sun, moon, and planets
in their movements through the Nag-kshetra, or field of the
fixed stars, obeyed a law no less authoritative than that
which made the polar stars revolve. Those who worked
out this law learnt that by recording the successive stations
marked by stars denoting the track of the moon and sun
through the heavens time could be measured with much
more accuracy than could be attained by the previous
methods, based on the counting of the weeks and lunar
phases and the observation of the solstices and equinoxes.
This discovery led to the dissolution of the old confederacy
of the mother-mountain of the East, and the foundation of a
new league of the sons of the wandering moon, the wife of
the Zend-Semite Keresaspa, the horned-horse, and the
mother-goddess to whom Sin-ai, the mother-mountain of
the Semite race, was dedicated. Their parent-gods were
not the polar stars and the river and sea-gods of the
Kushite race, but the moon-cow and the sun-horse, the
symbols of the parent-gods of light, who ordained the
paths of the sun and moon through the heavens. Hence
they made the stars of the ecliptic, the representatives of
the Akkadian god Anu,^ lyi"g south of the north pole, the
parent-stars of their year measured by thirteen lunar months
and looked on the path of tlie creating moon and sun-gods
through the heavens, not as that marked by the north and
south line of the pole and its attendant stars, and by the
yearly passage of the sun from south to north and north to
south through the equinoctial west and east, but as one
^ Ana was to the Akkadians the god of the ecliptic pole. Bil, the fire-
god, the earliest sun-god, the god of the equinoctial pole. — Lockyer, Dawn
of Astronomy, chap, xxxiv. p. 364.
ESSAY V 495
which lay between the east and west. Hence, when in their
march westward they had conquered Moab, the father (ab)
of the waters, (mo) the giant year-star Orion, the fire-
hunting god, Og,^ the king of Bashan, and Sihon king of
the Amorites or mountain races, the sons of Esau, the goat-
god, they passed from Mount Nebo, sacred to the planet
Mercury, the herald of the dawn of the new faith, to the
conquest of Jericho, the moon-city of the worshippers of
Rahab, the alligator, or the circumpolar stars. Their route
from east to west led them across the parent-river Jordan.
This, owing to their change of belief, was no longer the
life-giving water-parent of the race who fed their flocks and
grew their com upon its banks, and hence in mythic history
it is said to have become dry when they crossed it* The
remaining incidents of the siege and capture of Jericho
corroborate this explanation, and distinctly mark the story
as an astronomical-historical myth, telling of the beginning
of a new era of national belief. The hosts of the professors
of the new faith were no longer led by the stellar first-bom
son of the revolving pole and the year of recurring seasons,
the Masu, or silent leader of the race of the sons of Dcm, the
judge, and of Manasseh, the eldest son of Joseph,^ the first
Asipu or diviner of the secrets of the Almighty, who first
proclaimed their belief in the unchangeableness of natural
law, but by Hoshea, he who has in him the creating spirit
(Aw) of la or Ya, the father-god of the sons of the speaking
prophets, the god of the generating mist, the house (/) of
the waters (a). Tliis god was the fish-god called Nun, the
father of Hoshea, the author of light, who veils his blinding
brightness from mortal eyes in the inmost recesses of the
atmospheric void, and sends forth as his messenger on earth
the sun-god, who was, as I show in Essay iv., annually
^ The Lettic god Ogan, who became the Sanskrit Agni*
' Joshua iii. 14-17*
' Gershom, the son of Moses, is said in Judges xviiL 30, to be the son
of Manasseh.
496 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sacrificed, regenerated, and made alive again by his baptismal
bath in the waters of immortality, whence he rose again as
the sun of the new year, the living witness and chief agent
of his father who rules the course of nature by the aU-per-
vading power of the laws governing both spiritual and
material life, growth, and decay.
The army of the sun-god which emerged with the dawn
of the year from the shadow of Mount Nebo, crossed the
Jordan at the vernal equinox, and thus marked the
beginning of a new reckoning of time. Its birthday was the
tenth day of Nisan, the month of the vernal equinox,^ the
first month sacred to the conquering sun, the number ten
showing that the period of gestation of the new faith had
ended.^ Its birth and descent from the old faith was pro-
claimed by the setting up of the circle of stones taken from
the parent river Jordan,* each of them carried by a man of
each of the twelve tribes of Israel. As there were thirteen
tribes of Israel and thirteen months in the Semitic lunar-
solar year, the altar of God, the holy circle or year-ring, the
Bara-Ziggar, or completed altar of the Almighty, ending
the year of the Akkadian building race, must in the original
myth have been formed of thirteen stones.
It was after the national year-ring had been made and
consecrated that the covenant of blood-brotherhood between
the new ruling race and the land they came to rule was
made by the performance of the rite of circumcision,* and
when these initial rites were ended, and the new rulers
received into the national brotlierhood, the sacrifice to the
totemistic parents of the sons of the sheep mother, Idii or
Rachel, the ewe, and the ram-father, Varuna, the god of
lieaven, was offered by the members of tlie confederated
* Joshua iv. 19.
- The ten steps taken by Nala when he took up Kar-kotaka, Essay ir.
p. 69.
^ Joshua iv. 3-9, 20, 21. These were the mythological descendants of the
Shu-stone, the stone of life, the stone of the Akkadian fire-god, Adar, the
Hindu Atri. See Essay ill. p. 144.
"* Joshua V. 2-10.
ESSAY V 497
family within the precincts of the consecrated ground. In
this sacrifice the eldest son of the race was slain and eaten
in the form of the Paschal lamb, substituted for the human
sacrifice previously offered by the yellow Hittite or twin
races who ruled Palestine before the Semites. It was after
this sacramental meal that the triumphal march of the
conquering sun-god began with the blowing of the ram^s
horns, symbolising the supremacy of the ram-father star.
The year thus inaugurated by the reforming confederacy
was, as I have shown in Essay iv. pp. 384 ff,, that in which
the manhood of the young sun-god was reached in February,
when the sun was in Aries, the Ram, the first of the ten
kings or ecliptic stars of Babylon. This was the fourth
month of the lunar-solar year, beginning in November, and
hence the final release of the year-sun from the tutelage of
his nurse, the moon, and his subsequent victory over and
subjugation of the powers of winter and darkness, and the
dose of the rule of those to whom the moon was not the
nurse of the sun, but the mother of the ten lunar months of
^ This Passover of the Sons of Ephraim was the tribal sacrifice of the
Samaritans dwelling in the tribal territory, described by Dean Stanley, who
witnessed its celebration {Life and Letters of Dean Stanley^ by R. E«
Prothero, vol. ii. chap, xviii. pp. 83, 84), and not the family sacrifice of
Exodus. Six sheep, the number of the creating parent-gods of the Hittite
twin races, were driven shortly before sunset into the sacred enclosure or
terrace below Mount Gerizim, where all the Samaritans were assembled. As
the sun went down they were slain by the youths who drove them in, and
they then dipped their fingers in the blood and smeared it on the foreheads
and noses of all the tribal children, thus admitting them to blood-brother-
hood. A trench and deep hole were then dug and filled with vines and
thorns, the parent trees of Jotham's parable (Judges ix. 12, 15), which were set
on fire. Two caldrons were placed on the trench, the mother-caldrons of
the twin races, and the water boiled in them was poured over the dead sheep
to take oflf their wool. When this had been done the legs were torn off and
the carcases spitted on long poles (the father-pole), and they were then
hoisted aloft and sunk into the second hole. When roasted, the sheep on
the poles were taken out and laid on mats between the two files of the
Samaritans, who had ropes round their waists, staves in their hands, and
shoes on their feet. They ate the flesh, and then carefully searched for and
burned in the sacred fire all the fragments of th^ sacramental feast,
32
498 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
gestation, were all celebrated by the blowing of the trumpets
of ram^s homs.^ It was the blast of the horns of the Ram-
star, blown by the seven priests, who circled the walls of the
moon-city once a day for six days, and seven times on the
seventh day, which, according to the statement of the astro-
nomical history of Joshua^s conquest, caused tliem to fall
down, and leave the moon free to become the nursing mother
of the new faith. That this faith was a development from
and not a revolutionary destruction of the old belief is
shown by the injunctions given by Joshua for the care of
Rahab, the alligator or circle of fourteen circumpolar stars,
which marked the lunar phases in the old reckoning of time,
and who was shown by the red thread denoting her window -
to be the star mother-goddess of the red race.
The land thus conquered to the Semite faith was that
called in the beginning of Joshua the land of the Hittites,
that is, of the Northern Minyans or measurers {men), and
the Southern Sabaeans or calculators (sheba, seven). This
territory lay west of the whole course of the Euphrates from
its birth in Mount Ararat, and covered the interval between
it and the Mediterranean and Red Seas.^ Thus it com-
prised Armenia, Syria, Assyria, and Arabia, as the heritage
of the Semite race, whose mother-mountain was Sinai, the
realm of Sal-manu or Solomon, another name of Nun, the
fish-father-god la, and of his mother Bath-sheba, she of the
seven {shcba) measures {bath), called in local mythology
Beltis, tlie fish-motlier. Queen of Sheba, that is, of the
Saba^ans, who consecrated the seven days of the lunar week
to their mother-goddess.
It was when the confederated Minyans and Sabaeans,
under the lead of the sons of Ra, had obtained the control
of the moon-city that the conquest of Bethel or Ai, the
house {beth) of God {El), was made, but this was not effected
till the final vestige of the rule of the Hittite yellow and
red twin races was eradicated by the death of Achan, the
> Joshua V. 2-15 ; vi. i-io. ^ Jbid. ii. i8. » Ibid, i. 4.
k
ESSAY V 499
heir of Zerah, the red twin-son of Tamar, the palm-tree, the
representative of the race who measured time by the polar
revolutions, and the fourteen stars of the Alligator.^ It
was then that the Semite sons of Ra, the royal line
descended from Ram, the sun-god, the son of Judah, the
perpetual fire burning on the altar of God, in his world-
temple, the Bahram fire,^ secured control of the land trad-
ing-routes across Asia, as they had previously mastered those
through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, and when they held
in their hands the keys of international commerce they
became the rulers of the ancient w.orld.
^ Joshua vii. viii. ; i ChroD. ii. 7 ; Gen. xxxviii. 30,
' See Essay in. pp. 169, 170, 189.
A
ESSAY VI
THE FIBST COMING OF THE FIRE-W0RSHIPPIX6 HERACLEIOJE
TO GREECE, THEIR CONQUEST OF THE DORIANS AND SEMITES,
AND THEIR VICTORIOUS RETURN AS WORSHIPPERS OF THE
SUN -GOD.
The evidence adduced in the previous Essays of this series
has shown that the myths, ritual, sacred customs, land
tenures, and forms of government of the races which have
successively ruled India, South-western Asia, and Egypt,
since the first dawn of civilisation, disclose, when examined,
proofs that the same tribes, or groups of tribes, have fol-
lowed one another as ruling races in the same regular order
in all these countries. It proves that throughout this area
agriculture, village communities, and permanent national life,
were first established by the matriarchal races, the children of
the mother-earth who first came from Southern India, and
who were aided in their task by the shepherd races, the sons
of the mountain - goat, who were the first traders and
barterers. They were succeeded by the fire- worshippers, the
sons of the mother Maga, the discoverers of magic, mining,
metallurgy, handicrafts — the pioneers of scientific research,
and the first organisers of a ritual of religious festivals held
at fixed periods of the year. They first formed themselves
into a nation of the sons of fire, called Briges, Bhrigu,
Phr}-goi, or Plileyges, in Phrygia, and there they were allied
with the matriarchal agricultural, and patriarchal shepherd-
tribes, the sons of the mother-earth, and the parent or circling
600
ESSAY VI 601
snake,Echis (e^^O the parent of the Greek Achaeansf'A^atot).
It was this union which broke up the national organisation
of the matriarchal tribes, founded on unions between the
sexes which were not followed by marriage, and the educa-
cation of the children thus bom by their mothers and
maternal uncles and aunts, which I have described in Essay
m. These united races made the rain and storm-god, who
infused the soul of life into the rain-cloud by the lightning-
flash, their father-god instead of the wonder-working fire,
and looked on him as the creating-god who made the year of
three seasons. Thence arose the idea of the father-god as a
judge, the Dan or Danu of the Jews, Hindus, Turanians,
and Greeks, who established law and order, and the regular
and unvarying succession of natural phenomena. His woi-
ship led to the study of the heavens, and the establishment by
the yellow race, the sons of the heavenly twins Day and
Night, of star- worship and the year, the annus or ring, the
period of gestation measured by the revolutions of the
heavenly Tur or meridiieui-pole, which they depicted as a fire-
drill in the heavens, formed by the seven stars of the Great
Bear and the star Canopus, which was turned by the seven
winds, the seven days of the week and the fortnightly periods
of the lunar phases. These were the people who first intro-
duced the cultivation of barley, and formed the great con-
federacy of the sons of Kush, who, from the countries on the
Caspian Sea on the north, India on the south, a,nd Elam or
Persia on the north-west, imited in looking on the mother-
mountain of the East, the western peaks of the Himalayas,
as the central and sacred mountain of the sons of Kush or
Kashyapa, the tortoise, whose name survives in that of the
Caspian Sea. This tortoise-earth was the home of the four
semi-aboriginal or earthly, and the four immigrant or heaven-
bom races of the Gond or Dravido-Turanicm cosmogony,
who together made up the sacred eight, the number of the
polar stars hallowed to the father of the earthly and heavenly
fires. It was the yellow race, the founders of the Dravido-
502 THE RULING RACES OF PREfflSTORIC TIMES
Turanian State who, by their organising and administratiTe
talrtit, showed how proxinces and confederacies hitherto
bound to one another by shifting alliances could be united
in a permanent federal union. It was under their rule
that the conception of the prophet-god and the inspired
priest, the expounder of his will, which originated in the
magicians of the fire-worshippers, was made one of the
accepted canons of national belief. And this conception led
to the foundation of ethical research ; and from this source
and the continuance of the astronomical studies begun by
the star-worshippers, the Semite astronomy and creed arose.
The former framed the lunar year of thirteen lunar months,
and made the sun, moon, and planets the heavenly messen-
gers deputed by the supreme and hidden god, Jahveh, to
rule heaven and earth. The conclusions of their ethical
creed led to the belief in the possibility of regenerating the
moral nature of Jahveh'*s sons by self-education, and they
were reminded of their duty by the symbolical washings in
pure water which would make them inwardly and outwardly
clean, like their father-god. This led them to discard tlie
sensational ritual of the intoxicated and inspired priests, and
the national dances of former beliefs. For these joyoas
festivals of the earlier ages they sulistituted a silent and
pompous ceremonial worship, and enforced these clianges on
their subjects by the establishment of a despotic form of
government. Tliis led to the revolt against Semitisra,
headed by the invading Aryans, whose conquest of India I
have descril)ed in Essay ii. In showing how tliese successive
stages of national life followed one another, I have adduced
numerous proofs dra^\'n from Grecian myths and archaeology :
and I propose in the present Essay to show still more clearly
than I have hitherto done, that Greek history followed the
same course as that of the other countries I have spoken of,and
also to prove that the whole of the mythological history of
Greece turns upon the contest between the worshippers of the
gods of heaven, represented by the childless and unwedded
ESSAY VI 608
Apollo, Artemis, and Athene, and the anthropomorphic gods
of the fire-worshipping race called the Heracleidae. It is by
unravelling the tangled skeins of these myths describing the
successive ruling races, their ethnology and beliefs, that we can
trace the early history of the country during the ages before
the days of narrative history, when the names and mjrthic
history of the gods, and the ritual by which they were wor-
shipped, preserved the memory of the stages of national
growth. Though Apollo, whose name means *the protector,**
was a god of foreign origin, and not a national god of the
indigenous Pelasgi,^ yet his successive avatars show that his
worship grew with the earliest beginnings of nationsd life in
Greece, and throughout all the changes he passed through
he remained a god to whom the fruits of the earth were
offered, and in whose honour no living victims were slain.*
The earliest representation of Apollo, in which we see the
first germs of the belief which subsequently made him God,
the judge who punishes sin, is that in which he is called
Apollo Aguieus, the guardian of streets and houses, and it was
as the god guarding the home that he was especially rever-
enced in Sparta and the Peloponnesus, where he was called
Archegetes C Afyxr)y€Trj<;)y the leader, Domatites (Aw/iaTtT?;?),
the god of the household, and Oikistes {olKi<rrr)<;\ the god of
the colony.^ In these two last epithets we find evidence that
his worship began after the country had passed through the
phase when the unit of national life was the village community
or colony, and had reached that which made the family
living in the house (S6/A09), the foundation of the nation,
and it depicts a time when the Southern village communities
and the Northern house families had coalesced into a nation,
and when they both called the oixo^j or settlement, their
home, for the word oIko^ represents an earlier form, Foiko^^
or * vicus,** the village, the Vish of the Sanskrit Vaisya. It
^ MUller, Die Dorter^ bk. ii. chap. i. § I. pp. 201, 202.
' Ibid. bk. ii. chap. ii. 227.
' Ibid, bk. ii. chap. iii. § i. p. 252.
504 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
was as Apollo Aguieus that he was worshipped in the form
of a triangular stone pillar (tcimp /cmvoeiBtf^)^ and the symbol
is found on the coins of ApoUonia in Epirus, Aptera, Crete,
Megara, Byzantium, Orikus in lUyria, and Ambracia.^ This
is the reproduction in stone of the sacred triangle which I
have shown in Essay iii. was placed round the sacred fire in
the centre of the Hindu altar made in the form of a woman ;
and an exact facsimile of this triangle was, as I have shown,
found by Dr. Schliemann in Troy, in the image of a leaden
goddess bearing the triangle with the Svastika in the centre,
which was depicted on the Hindu altar. I have also there
proved that the worship of the triad of gods represented by
the three sides of the triangle, was followed by that of
the fire-god, and it is this same succession that we find in the
avatars of Apollo, for he first appears as a personal god as
Apollo Lykseus or Apollo, of the fire-spark (Xv/co^), the name
by which he was worshipped in Mysia, and we there find the
triad from which he came to be that of the three primaeval
smiths of the Northern Edda, Mimir, Hertrich, and Wieland,
whose Greek synonyms are Lukos (\vtco<s or Xv/ca^), the fire-
spark, Kelniis (/ceX/it?), tlie driver or fire-drill, and Damna-
meneus {Safivafi€V€v<;) or Mulas (/ivXa?), the subdued or the
socket, the nether millstone. Wieland, the master smith,
the driver of the fire-drill, was taken by his father. Wade,
to be taught the art of forging by two dwarfs,- and these two
dwarfs are the fire-drill and the lighted fire. The fire-drill
and its driver became in Greek mythology Hephaistos, called
Amphi-gueeis (*Afi<f>iyvrJ€L^)^ or he who halts on both legs,
and he was as Herodotus tells us, a dwarf.^ He was cast from
heaven by Zeus, and fell on the island of Lemnos, near the
Mysian coast, where he was revived by the Sintians, or sons
of the devouring {<rivTrj(;) fire. It was his wife, the fire-socket,
who was the first form of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. It
^ Miiller, Dt'e Dorter ; SchoL Aristophanes y Vesha^ Rittcr, I3I7.
' Jevons* Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of Aryans y bk. ii. pp. 163,
165. ' Herod, iii. 27.
ESSAY VI 606
was as the god of the fire-spark that Apollo became the god
of the Phlegyes, or sons of burning flame, the ancestors
of the Lapithse, and the early rulers of Thessaly, who intro-
duced at Delphi and at the Ismenion at Thebes, the sacrifices
offered and the predictions made, from the flames of the
sacrifice and the ashes of the victims, by the fire-priests,
called irvpKoot} It is the coming of these Phlegyes, the first
of the Heracleidse, which is told in the story of Kadmus,
whose name means * the adomer,'' * the arranger/ ^ He killed
the great dragon or snake which ruled Boeotia the Echis (e^t^)
or parent-snake of the matriarchal Achaei (*'A;^atot), and
gave life by the introduction of ploughing agriculture to the
new race bom from the teeth of the dragon which he sowed.
As an expiation of his guilt in slaying the earth-bom god
he had to serve as a slave for eight years, the number
sacred to the earthly fire-god.' The next avatar of Apollo
was his birth as the storm-god, and his baptismal conse-
cration in the river Xanthus, which I have already described
in Essay iii.,and it is in this form that he first appears as a
time-god, and as god of the ^Eolian race, who take their
name from ^Eolus, the wind-god.
That the Lycian god bom on the Xanthus is a sequent
form of the Mysian Apollo Lykaeus, is shown by his being
the son of the wolf-mother (Xv/ciy) Leto, the mother of the
Lycian race, who is said to have come from the Hyperboreans
of the far North,and who was first worshipped, as M annhardt
suggests, by the Lithuanians, who take their name from her,
and she is still adored under that name as the goddess of
summer by the Bohemian Czechs.* They were the wolf-race,
the Guelphs of Europe, who first found fire in the wolf-spark
Lukos Q\,vKos:)i *^d united with the Finnish miners to form
^ MUller, Die DorUr, bk. ii. chap. ii. § 12, p. 237.
' Curtins, GrUschische Etymologies No. 25, p. 138. Kad is the Sanskrit
sadf to adorn.
* MUller, Die Dorier, bk. ii. § 12, pp. 237^*38 ; Smith, Classical Die-,
tionary^ s.v. ' Cadmus.
^ yL9jaxihBi^isAntikelValdund Feld Kultur, vol. i. chap. iii. pp. 155, 156.
606 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the race of fire-worshippers, the Bhrigu of India and the
Briges of Thrace. The fact that the fire-worshippers were
first the sons of the wolf is shown most clearly in the Sanskrit
words Vrika, the wolf, and Bhrigu, the finders of fire, for in
these words the Dravidian v of the wolf Vrika, and of the
Dravidian god Vira, has become the aspirated bh of the
Sanskrit Bhrigu, and that the original name of the wolf and
the finder of fire was Dravidian, and apparently Virugu, is
proved by the addition to the root bhri of the Dra\ndian
suffix ffUy most commonly used to form Tamil verbal
nouns. But the complete mythical and ethnological history
of the birth of the twin-gods bom on the Xanthus, must be
sought not only in the ritual of Apollo, but also in that of
his twin-sister, Artemis. The great festival to Apollo and
Artemis was that held in the month Thargelion (May-June),
the month before the summer solstice, in which the present
great Indian festival to the rain-god, the feast of Juggemath,
at Puri, takes place. But this festival is shown by the ritual
of the Thargelia at Athens to have l)een once accompanied
bv human sacrifices, for at it a man and woman crowned
with flowers and fruit, like sacrificial victims, were thrown
from a rock with curses, caught at the bottom and taken
across the frontier.^ This proceedhig is exactly analogous to
the worship of the Czech goddess Leto, who is every summer
clothed with a shirt in the form of a straw doll bearing in
its hands a broom and a scythe. She is taken into the lands
of the next village, just as the goddess is described as having
been hunted over the earth, and is there as the emblem of
death and disease thrown away. But before throwing her
away they take off* her shirt and put it on a young tree, which
is cut in the forest and dragged home as the tree of life for the
ensuing year. As they take it through the village they sing —
' We drag death out of the village ;
We hriiig summer into it.'*
* Mailer, Vie Doner, bk. ii. chap. viii. § 2, p. 329.
* Mannhardt, AnHke IVald uttd Feid Ktiltur, vol. i. chap. iii. pp. 155,156.
ESSAY VI 607
But this mythical representative of the birth of the year,
l)eginning with summer-time, accompanied by the casting
out of the seeds of death and disease, while it agrees with
the Greek festival of Thargelion in the ejection from the
country of the victim offered, does not convey, like the
Athenian ritual, any trace of human sacrifice. For this we
must turn to the Athenian worship of the goddess Artemis,
who was associated in the Thargelion festival with the wolf-
god Apollo. There were two forms of Artemis at Athens,
the Braurian Artemis and the Munychian, and the latter
was a moon-goddess. The Braurian Artemis, whose temple
was in the sacred enclosure of the AkropoHs, was the patron
goddess of women and young girls, and the latter were con-
secrated to her from their fifth to the tenth year, and
during that time wore saffron-coloured clothes, showing that
she was the goddess of the yellow race, and were called her
bears. Her festival, called the Arkteia or the festival of
Arktos, the constellation of the Great Bear, was held
every fifth year, and tradition said a maiden used to be
sacrificed to her till Embaros, whose daughter was selected
as a victim, refused to give her up, hid her, and offered a
goat, sacred to the moon, instead. That is to say, the
change represented the transition of the reckoning of time
by the weeks or the seven stars of the Great Bear, to that
by the lunar phases. But this ancient sacrifice still survived
in the ceremonies of the analogous festival, called the Orthia
at Sparta, where boys were scourged at the altar of Artemis,
till it was besprinkled with their blood. Her function as a
time-goddess, especially connected with parturition, is shown
by brides wearing at their weddings a girdle consecrated by
being placed round her statue, and similar girdles were worn
at childbirth, and during the subsequent recovery of the
mother.^ This distinctly shows that she was the goddess
* F. Boettecher, Di$ AkropoHs von Athen^ Berlin, Julius Sprenger, 1888,
PP- 93> 94 5 Pauly, Encyclopadie der Classichen Aiierthumswissenschaft,
vol. i. p. 1803.
608 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
who marks the weeks of gestation which made up the ten
lunar months, which, as I have shown, formed the ' annus ^
or ring, the year of the star-worshippers. That the bear-
goddess Artemis, in front of whose temple the statue of a
bear, found in the excavations of the Akropolis, used to be
placed, was the constellation of the Great Bear, is proved, not
only by the name of her festival, the Arkteia, but also by the
myth of her Arkadian counterpart Kallisto, who was the
mother of Arkas by Zeus, and was changed into the Great
Bear after having been slain by Artemis at the command of
Hera. That is to say, the goddess-mother of the Arkadian
race was first the constellation of the Great Bear, who pre-
sided over parturition, and when she was superseded in
this duty by the moon-goddess Hera, the mother constella-
tion called 17 apKTO^ became subordinate to the moon, and
it was to this minor moon that a goat, the moon victim, was
sacrificed at Athens. This deification of the Great Bear by
the Arkadians is confirmed by the mjrth of Ixion and Koronis,
which I have given in Essay 11., for there Ixion became the
polar constellation of tlie Great Bear, whicli has in this mvth
become the heavenly pole of tlie meridian, while Ischys the
Arcadian, the Sanskrit Isha, or beam wliich turns this pole
of tlie heavenly oil-pressing mill, is the husband and father
of the children of Koronis, the annual flower-garland strung
by the succession of the yearly flowers, and the mother of
the race of herdsmen who sought the open and flowery
pastures for the nurture of their flocks. These Arkadian
children of the Great-Bear mother were thus descended from
the fire-god, for Ixion and Koronis are the children of
Phlegyas, and the stars of the heavenly constellation w^re
called, as the children of the heavenly fire, the bright ones ;
for Arktos and the Sanskrit Riksha are both derived from
the root arsh^ to shine, and the beautv of this constellation is
further commemorated bv the name of Kallisto, or the most
beautiful, given in the Arkadian myth to the goddess. But she,
as the bear-mother, the Braurian Artemis, is said to have come
ESSAY VI 609
from the Tauric Chersonesus, the Crimea, where human
sacrifices were a national institution, and it was to the Tauric
Artemis, that according to the Greek legend, Iphigeneia, the
daughter of Agamemnon, would have been sacrificed if a hart
had not been substituted for her by the goddess.^ We find
here further proof in addition to that I have already adduced
in Essay iii., that the yellow race, who have from time
immemorial sacrificed human beings in India, were the sons
of the bear who offered human sacrifices in their original
home in Europe, and that they were the first people who
made a calendar based on the succession of weeks, is proved
by their making the Great Bear their parent constella-
tion. This is proved most clearly in the Rigveda and
Satapatha Brahmana. In the Rigveda the Great Bears
Rikshah are named as the special stars of Varuna, the dark
night, which disappear in the day ,2 and in the Satapatha
Brahmana, the seven stars of the constellation of the Rikshah,
the bears, are said to be the husbands of the Krittakas or
Pleiades, the stars sacred to Agni,' which I have shown in
Essay iii. to be the mother stars of the twin Dravidian races.
We see in this genealogy that the name of the seven Rishya,
or antelopes, given to the Great Bear by the Hindus is
really the change made by the phonetic law, which turns a
Northern k into a Sanskrit sibilant. We learn ako by com-
paring this change with the substitution of a hart for a
maiden as the victim of the bear-goddess, that the bears were
changed into the sacred antelopes by the race who deified
Terah or Dara, the antelope, the father of Abram, in the
Euphratean countries, and abolished, as Abram did, human
sacrifices as part of the niual of the worshippers of the
true god. It was in consequence of this change that, when
Marichi, the spark of light, the reputed parent of Kash-
yapa, the father of the tortoise, was killed by Rama, the
^ Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris ; Smith, Classical Dictionary ^ s.v«
« Iphigeneia,* * Rigveda, i. 24, la
' Eggeling, Sai, Brdh, ii. i, 2, 4 ; S.B.E. voL xii. pp. 282, 283.
610 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TDIES
oull of darkncHs, he was raised to heaven as the chief
star in the Great Bear, and called Mriga-sirsha, or the
deerV head. From these deductions it follows that the stoiy
of the birth of the twins Apollo, the wolf-god, and Artemis
the bear-goddess, is a mythical history of the union of tlie
two tril)es whose totems were the wolf and the bear, and
with these were associated the sons of the dog, the Greek
Hennes, the Sanskrit Saramu, who were the fire-worshippers
or Phlegyes, the sons of the burning flame, the father of the
twins ; and it is from them that the mother Sar, the rain-
cloud, whose history I have given in Essay in., was bom.
These twins who were the wolf of day, Apollo, and the bear
of night, Artemis, or the twins Ushiisa-nakta, the dawn and
night of the Ilig\'eda, bom of the goddess-mother Saranyu
and the father Vivasvat,^ he of the two forms, the fire-drill
and the socket ; Saranyu again, is the same word as the Greek
Erinnyes, the wives or counterparts of the three Northern
smiths who made the creating fire ; and Saranyu comes from
the same root as Saramil, the dog, and means she who flows,
that is, flowing time. Thus the twin-races bom of the wolf
and the bear are the sons of the dog-race, bom of the mother
Sar. That is to say, tliey belong to the race of Sar-mati.
bom of tlie motlier (mati) Sar, whom Herodotus descril)es as
living in the Tauric Chersonesus, and who were, he tells us,
tlie descendants of the Amazcms or matriarchal tribes, and
the Scytliians or Sakas,^ tlie W()rshi})pers of the rain or wet
(sak) god. It was these jx»oj)le who, as they went southward,
made the Sarasvati, the river of Herat, descending from the
mother-mount^iin of the East, their mother-river, and spread
themselves over India as the gn»at Niiga race, descended from
Idii or Ira, their slRvj)-mother in their northern home of
Phrygia and jNIysia. In memory of her they called them-
selves Irfivatii, and marked the limits of their dominion by the
river Iravati, the Ravi, in the west, and the Ira-wadi in Bur-
mah. It was they who reproduced the name of their mother
' Rigveda, x. 17, i, 2. * Herod, iv. no- 117.
ESSAY VI 611
in that of the Sar-hue, the festival to Sal-tree, which they made
their mother-tree. And in this deification of the Sal-tree we
find a further piece of mythical history, for the mother-tree of
these people in Phrygia was the pine-tree, which was carried
as the sacred tree in the festivals of Cybele, the earth-god-
dess. But this mother-tree, an inheritance from the tree-
worshippers of the Indian village races, failed them in India,
and they found a substitute for it in the Sal-tree (Shorea
robusta) which, though not visibly or botanically like the
pine, resembles it as being a tree which produces resin, the
dammar resin of commerce, and it was on account of this
similarity that it was made the mother-tree of the Dravidian
races. This ethnical relationship of the sons of the bear, the
wolf, and the pine-tree, and dog, is preserved in the Finnish
legends, where the pine * moist with honey ' is said to have
been bom from a hair of the wolf, planted by Kati, the tree-
mother in Ukko, the thunder-god'*s black mud.^ And in
these same legends the bear was bom from five tufls of wool,
flung by a maiden on the waves, whence she recovered them
and nursed the young bear bom from them in a cradle hung
on a pine tree, under ' five-coverlets, eight sheepskin coverings
in the centre of a golden ring,' and * it was from the silver and
golden boughs of the pine-tree that the bear got its claws
and teeth.*** The dog, to whom they were also related, was
bom from the wind-father, the measurer of time in the oldest
mythology which turned the pole in the heavens, and the
witch-mother Louhiha-tar, the daughter of Taoni, the god of
death, the mistress of Pohga or Pohgala, the north.^ It
was these sons of the father-dog and the mother pine-tree
who were the ancient race of the Iberi, whose history I have
sketched in Essay iii., and the successive stages of the growth
* Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns^ xxiii. (c ) ; Folk Lore^ vol. i.
No. 3, Sept. 1890, p. 344 note 3.
* Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns , iii. (c.) ; FolkLore^ vol i. No. I,
March 1890, pp. 27, 28.
* Abercroml^, Magic Songs of the Finns ^ v. (c.) ; Folk Lore, vol. i. No. i.
March 1890, pp. 26, 30 note 5.
518 THE RUUXG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of their children is marked in the numbers moitioned in the
bear'*s genealogy of the five tufts of wool, and the five
coverlets, or five seasons, and the eight sheepskin coverings, at
the eight stars of the heavenly pole of the sons of the rain,
the eight races of the worshippers of the water and lightning
god ; and also in the golden ring, the annual recurrence of time.
It was their common predecessor, the hunying dog Sar, who
hunts the heavenly wolf and bear, the meridian pole, round
the threshing-floor of time. And it was this dog who was
first the ^-inds, the four hounds of Merodach, who became the
dog-star Sirius, and the stars which he drove in the stellar
cosmogony were the seven stars of the Northern bear-mother
and the star Agastya, the leading star of the constellation
Argo, the southern wolf, whose name reproduces the Sans-
krit and Dravidian patronymic Vrika, originally Viru-gu,
which by the elision of the digamma was changed from Var-
gu into Argo. It is Vrika the wolf-goddess who is in the
Rigveda the wife of Rij rash va, the blind upright or meridian
house-pole of the first astronomical guessers, to whom eyes
were given by the Ashvins,^ and when this metaphor of
the turning pole of the heavenly house, the revolWng weeks
and days was transferred to the vear of five seasons, it
became that which told how Sirius, the dog, who begins
to hunt the sun at the summer solstice to the south, leaves
his quany free to return at the winter solstice, and it was
at these two solstices that, as we leani from Manu, the
animal sacrifices instituted by the Northern races were offered
in India.^ It was these races, who, when they were united
as the sons of the tortoise floating on the primsevcd ocean,
made the sacred Indian pine, the Sal-tree, their figither-god,
as Sal the fish, and made his worship, by the influence they
gained as the great maritime traders and voyagers of the
ancient world, as universal as I have shown it to have been
in Essay iii. We thus see in this long series of changing, but
^ Rigvecla, i. 117, 17, 18.
' BUhler, Manuy iv. 26; S.B.E. vol. xxv. pp. 132, 133.
ESSAY VI 613
inter-related myths, a historical narrative telling us how the
sons of the dog and the mother pine-tree with their progeny,
the sons of the bear of night and the wolf of day, came down
to India, first as the Maghada fire- worshippers, and afterwards
as the sons of the tortoise, and made the Indian resin-yield-
ing tree their parent- tree, and it is this sacred * SfiJ ** tree which
is still the home of the tutelary deity of every Mai Paharia
village, and it is round its branches that they dance when
asking the gods for children at the annual Magh festivsd to
their mother-goddess, the witch-mother Magha, the Finnish
Louhiha-tar.^
We must now, after tracing the wanderings of the twin
gods and their parent and descended races from the far
North to India, return and trace the same races in Greece,
and we first find them settled in the territory of which
Delphi was the centred shrine in the age immediately after
Deucalion'^s flood, which marks in mythic history, as I have
shown in Essay iii., the age when the rain-god, whose coming
was prayed for in the Thargelion festival to Apollo, was
made the father-god of the human race. The name Deucalion
means the wet (Seu) time, and the children bom from him
and Pyrrha, the fire-goddess, were led by the howling of
wolves to the Lykoreia or wolf-grove, on Parnassus.^ Tlius
the shrine of Delphi was established as a temple to the
rain-god who succeeded the fire-god, but the tree of life
sacred to this god must be sought for in a more northern
land, and hence the embassy from Delphi to Tempe to fetch
the sacred branch of laurel which was to be planted before
the god at the Thargelion festival originated. Tliis embassy
was only sent every eighth year, and this period, which corre-
sponds with that of the Ismenian sacrifice to the fire-god,^
shows that it dates from the days of fire-worship when eight
was the divine number sacred to the gods of earth, but the
^ Risley, Tribes and Cosies of Bengal ^ vol. ii. pp. 70, 71.
' MUller, Die Dorier^ bk. ii. chap. vi. § 8, pp. 305, 306.
» Ibid. bk. ii. chap. ii. § 12, p. 237.
33
514 THE RULING RACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
change in the tree of life from the pine-tree to the laurel
marks, like the similar change to the ScJ-tree in India, the
course of ethnical growth in the tree- worshippers. The sub-
stitute which they adopted in Greece, was, like that chosen
in India, significant of a change of climate, and it also marked
a change of status, for when the laurel-tree was made the tree
sacred to the father-god of the Dorian race, the tribal settle-
ments were no longer to be sought on the mountain sides
where the pine-tree grew, but in the warm valleys where they
could grow their crops and tend their cattle, and hence this
change in the sacred tree, marks that the people had been
changed from a mountain tribe to a race who as the sons of
the twin-gods, Day and Night, bom on the banks of the
yellow river Xanthus, the father of the yeUow race became
the sons of the rivers like the sons of Sarasvatl in India, and
made the rivers their home and father-gods. The grove of
Tempe, whence the embassy had to cut the branch of laurel,
was consecrated to Apollo Tempcites, that is, Apollo of the
Temenos, or sacred precinct, the girdling snake of the Achaean
race. It stood on the banks of the river Peneus, the river of
the web {Trrjvrf) of time, and the temple in the grove was
consecrated to the wind-god, ^'Eolus, who directs the ocean
stream Okeanos, who again was the father of Peneus. It is
this vale and temj)le which is overshadowed by the still more
holy Pythion on the top of Mount Olympus, the breaker or
organiser of timc,^ which divided Thessaly from Makedonia,
sacred to the mother Maga. The Pythion was the cloud-
temple, the shrine of the Naga-snake Pytho, the snake of dark-
ness and the ocean depths (I3v0o^\ the Shesh-Nag of the
Hindus, which, as the great time-measurer and year-god, sup-
ported the tortoise earth. He was the oracular god of the
^ From the root of Xvir^w, to vex, Sanskrit lump-am^ to break. This deriva-
tion, which makes the mountain sacred to the worshippers of the time-gods,
the measurer or breaker of time, is much to be preferred to that from Xa^tr,
the root of Xdfiirw, to shine, which is meaningless, and which Curtius marks
with a query. Curtius, Griechischc Etymologic^ No. 339, p. 265.
ESSAY VI 516
iHolic race, who succeeded the fire-worshippers. From Tempe
the ambassador went to Deipnias, called after the meal (deip-
nan) by which he broke the fast which formed part of the
expiatory ceremonies required to cleanse away the guilt of
the murder of the Cyclops. This meal was taken on his exit
from the territories once consecrated to the deposed Cyclopean
fire-god, and on entering the land of the Magnetes. This
was consecrated to the mother Maga, the witch-mother, from
whom their god Pytho received his power, by iSolian emi-
grants from Asia Minor, who came from the mother-city
Magnesia of Sipylus. From Deipnias the ambassador went
to Pherae, near the Pagassean Gulf, at the foot of Mount
Pelion. Pherae was the traditional capital of Admetus,
called Hades Admetos C AtS^y^ aSfirjro^)^ or the untamed god
of the nether world ,^ under whom Apollo served for nine
years to expiate the death of the Cyclops. The port of
Pherae was Pagasos, a name which recalls the holy hill Pagos
(7ra709), known as Mount Pelion, the mother-mountain of
Pherae. This was not made of ordinary earth, but of the
potter'*s clay, Pelos (ttt^Xo?), of the holy land of the Magnetes
celebrated by Plato as the mother of laws,^ and fashioned on
the heavenly turning-wheel of the bear-mother, the goddess
of the polar constellation. At Pagasa was the temple con-
secrated to Apollo Pagasites, where there was a holy grove
tenanted by the ravens,^ sacred to the prophet-god whose
mythological history I have traced in Essay iii., and have
shown that the raven was the sacred bird of the race
which called themselves sons of the twin-gods. It was at
Pagasos that Jason was said to have built the star-ship
Argo, and it was there that the immigrant iSolians from
Lydia, who brought star-worship to Greece, landed. It was
they who substituted for the nymphs or local mother-
^ Mliller, Dig Doner, bk. ii. chap. vii. § 8, p. 323.
* Jowett, PlcUo^s LawSt viii. vol. v. p. 418 ; xi. p. 494 ; xii. 517, 542.
• Miiller, Die Dorier, bk. ii. chap. i. § 2, 3 ; Smith, Classical DicHonaty,
S.V. 'Tempe Peneus.'
516 THE RUI JNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
goddesses of the earlier races, the Dryades, Oreades, and
Napeae, who took their names from trees (Spv% mountains
(Spo^) and glens (i/aTny), the Okeanides, the daughters of the
ocean-snake, on whose waters the tortoise earth floated, and
the Nereids or Naiads, the nymphs of rivers and springs, the
Greek counterparts of the goddess Dharti of the Hindu-Dra-
vidian races. It was these Naiads who were credited with the
gift of prophecy, and hence, in m3rthical language, all seers and
poets were called * lymphatici ** or persons caught and inspired
by the nymphs. They were the female prophets inspired by
the snake Pjrtho of the ocean depths, whence he was bom
after Deucalion'^s flood,^ that is, as I show in Essay lu., after
the year-god started on his annual circuit of the recurring
seasons, at the time of the falling of the creating rains. It
was after leaving Pagasa, on his way to Delphi, that the
ambassador had to pass through Doris, which was before the
advent of the Dorian race, the home of the Dryopes, or sons
of the tree (S/oO), and it was they who became the Hylleis, or
woodmen of the Dorian confederacy, while the third tribe
was that of the Dymanes, the ^olian race who worshipped
the rain-god, as the husband of the cultivated land, the god
entering (Bv/jlc) into it and making it fertile.
We find from this analysis of the mythic lessons taught bv
the journey of the ambassador who brought the laurel-branch
from Tempe for the Thargclion festival, that the god to
whom it was brought was the god of the star- worshipping
races who worshipped the twin gods, and held their festival
at the same time, as the annual Hindu festival to secure
good rains was celebrated. That this festival is connected
with the rains, is shown by the festival to Athene held in
the same month called the Pluntcria, or washing of the
clothes, which was followed by the festival of the summer
solstice to Athene in the month Skirophorion called the
Skiroplioria, or the festival of tlie umbrella (c/ctpo?), a
festival which was evidently founded by a race who expected
^ Smith, Classical Dictionary, s.v. * Pytho.'
ESSAY Vi; 617
rain at the summer solstice, and who did not worship the
sun-god and the god of heat and light like the fire-wor-
shippers and the worshippers of the gods of the bright sky
who instituted the festival of the Diipolia of Zeus held in
the same month, and lighted the bale-fires which are still
burned on St. John's Eve in the West of Ireland.^ The nation
who worshipped Apollo, the Dorian god, were a people who
made their year begin with the rising of Sirius at the summer
solstice, and were the Dorian confederacy of the Spartiates
or Spartans, the sown (aTreipa)) race, who were bom from
the teeth of the serpent sown by Cadmus ; and it was they
who were changed from an agricultural people into the
great conquering warrior tribe, the most warlike of the
Greek races, by the coming of the Cretan and Asiatic races
of Dravidian stock, called the Pamphyli, or union of all
(irav) tribes (<^v\al), the carefully drilled and organised
confederacy of tribes, whose ethnological history I have
analysed in Essay iii. They were led by the fish-god,
whom I have traced from Sal, the holy fish and tree of
the Dravidian Hindus, till he became the Dolphin or
homed fish of Manu'^s flood. It was these people who were
led by the Dolphin, who brought with them the elaborate
ritual of the prophet-god, in which Apollo henceforth be-
came the oracular god, who was the prophet or expounder
{irpo<f)r)Trf^) of the will of the unseen father-god. He was
the god bom of the womb Delphus (AeX^v?) of the
primaeval ocean, the mother-fish who ploughed the waves.
Hence the fish-god was called by the Akkadians ' Kua," ^ or
the oracle of the bull-god Merodach or Marduk, that is, of
the race who first ploughed the land for barley, who were
the great irrigating race of the ancient world, who used the
waters of the rivers of India, Assyria, and Egypt, and of the
* Thus, of the two festivals at the summer solstice the rain-festival is that of
the Southern races in whose eyes the summer sun was a destroyer, and the
fire-festival is that of the Northern tribes, who adored the sun as the slayer of
the winter frost-giants.
' Sayce, Assyrian Gramtuar Syllabary ^ No. 442.
518 THE IIUUXG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
wells in the thirsty land of Asia, to water their fields, and
who began in Greece the system of irrigation which ended in
the construction — by the Minyae, the great conquering race
of Asia Minor, who worshipped the moon as Men (fiijv)j the
monthly measurer — of the underground channels by which
they drained Lake Copais in Boeotia.^ It was these wor-
shippers of the fish-god who placed over the gate of Delphi
the lunar crescent with the sacred Tur or pole, which
became the € of the Greek alphal)et, and it was they who
brought with them the worship of the heavenly twins Castor
and Polydeukes, whose history I have traced in Essay in.
The attainment of supreme power by these sons of the fish,
the heavenly twins, the Tur or pole and the moon, is marked
by the birth at the island of Delos, the manifester (817X09),
which was, according to Pindar, the daughter of the sea-god,*
of the prophet-god Apollo, the l)eautiful youth, who took
the place of the Pytho or Naga snake, and of Artemis, who
was changed from being the mother-goddess of the Great Bear
to l>e the virgin crescent moon. There were present at the
birth, the Titanic goddesses of the yEolic race, (1) Dione, the
goddess of the bright sun of spring, (2) Rhea, the goddess of
the mother rivers of the sons of Sar, (3) Themis, the goddess
of law and order, and the divine secjuence of the laws of
nature, the goddess most worshipped by the Dorian race,
called Dharnia by the Hindus and Ma'at by the Egyptians,
and (4) Amphitrite, the Mediterranean sea-goddess, the sacred
dolphin, the womb of life. They watched Leto during the
time of her labour, which lasted nine days and nine nights,
the numl)er sacred to the gods of heaven.
The mother Leto, daughter of Pha?be, the moon, and Koos,
the cleaving god {kclco^ to cleave), the pole-god of the earth-
quake and storm, lay by the circular lake which reproduced
the Lake Kasha va, tlie mother-home of the Kushite race, and
grasped the sacred palm-tree, the Babylonian tree of life of the
^ MUller, Orchomeiws and the Minya:^ chap, ii. pp. 45, 48.
^ Ibid. Die Doricry bk. ii. chap. vii. § 3, p. 314.
ESSAY VI 619
Semitic Shus. This tree can only be fruitful when the flower
of the female tree is impregnated by that of the male, and it
was, therefore, the sacred tree of the people, who, like all the
descendants of the twin-races, looked on both the father
and mother as the parents and educators of their children.
The mother, Leto, was also overshadowed by the olive-tree,
the sacred oil-tree of Palestine, while she herself was said to
have come as the wolf-goddess from the Hjrperborean North.^
The whole scene, as told in mythic legend, speaks of the
coming from the North of the young prophet-god, who was
bom in a Ifiuid ruled by Semitic trading-races from the far
East. These were the Minyae, whose gods were not the
personified powers of nature of the iEolic races, the anthro-
pomorphic gods of the fire-worshippers, or the local village
gods of the matriarchal races, but symbols of metaphysical
conceptions, the crescent-moon, the heavenly ship with the
Tur, or pole, in which was hidden, as in the heavenly mist the
seed of life, the unseen and mysterious father-god, who was
only known in the life he difiused throughout the world and
his unchanging laws. The worship of this god was conducted
with silence, and with a long series of elaborate ceremonies,
which were meaningless except to those initiated in the
mysterious doctrines of the faith, whose priest -kings and
their satellites tried to make the laws governing the lives of
the people similar, in their unbending regularity, to the laws
of nature. Life from its commencement was trammelled with
rules, and existence was passed in a series of consecrations,
ceremonies, penances, ablutionary cleansings, and expiations,
such as those we find in the Levitical laws, copied from the
priestly recollections of the older Semitic ritual in the Ven-
didad of the Zendavesta and the Brahmanas; and the tyranny
which ruled in matters of religion was extended to every
department of government. Hence it is that the rule of
the Semitic Minyae is marked by the citadels of Mycenae and
Tiryns, and by the two pelasgic walls which fortified the first
^ MUller, Die Doriff, bk. ii. chap. vii. § 2, p. 315.
520 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Akropolis at Athens.^ It was these people who were the
great building-race, ruled by priest-kings, like the Patesi of
Gir-su, whose buildings could, in the absence of mechanical
appliances, only be carried on by an unlimited use of forced
labour, and we find an echo of the detestation with which
their rule was regarded in the Book of Samuel, who was,
as I have shown in Essay in., the first prophet -king,
Samlah of Masrekah, or the vine-land, and whose history
opens with an account of the evil deeds of the sons of Eli,
the priest-king. It was the people who groaned under this
tyranny who gladly rose against their oppressors w^hen the
people who worshipped the young sun and prophet-god of
the Aryans appeared from the North and delivered the agri-
culturists, artisans, and shepherds from the despotic rule of
the Semitic feudal lords, whose wealth and trading instincts
are shown by the rich treasures found in Mycena?, TirjTis, and
Troy. It was these merchant-princes who substituted the rule
of the single king, or tyrant, with his myrmidons, the priestly
caste of the Levites, for the tribal form of confederacy of
the two kings of Sparta, watched by the five Ephors ; and
it was thev who introduced slavery, and made the Phoenician
sea-rovers the suppliers of slaves throughout the Mediter-
ranean countries. Their Asiatic and Semitic origin is shown
by the division in Troy, ^lycena?, and Tiryns of the houses
into male and female apartments, and this separation of the
sexes and the seclusion of married women, which originated
with the Semites, continued to be the rule of home-life at
Athens, while the li])erty and careful education given to
women by the matriarchal races survived in the Hetaine,
wlio were, as Aspasia was to Pericles, the chosen companions
and advisers of the leading men of the country. It was these
Semites who gave the name of place of peace (Sah^m) to
Salamis, and gave to the Greek language its name Chrusos
(^puo-o?) for gold, which is the Hebrew ChHra/.^ The ages
^ F. BcL'ttichcr, Die AkropoUsy pp. 56-61.
2 Jevons' 'SichxzCuix^s Pnhisioric AntiquitUs of the Aryans ^ part iii. chap. iv.
p. 174.
ESSAY VI 621
during which this Semite dominion lasted have left but few
traces in Greek legend, but its end is marked by a most
prolific age of mythical history, which records in varying
versions the birth of the sun-god, who ruled the solar year,
and the progress of the Centaur race, who were the allies of
the returning Heraclidae, or worshippers of the gods of light.
And these myths, as well as Grecian mjrths generally, show
in their form a distinct difference from those which recorded
history in India. In India the mythic history is usually
comprised in the limits of a year of destiny, the seasons
of the year representing the epochs into which the period
of which the history is given is divided, and this form of
historical narrative was that which was naturally used by
the race who first used the old nature-myths recording the
changes of the year and seasons as vehicles for national re-
collections. But in the Grecian age of mythic narrative the
conception of the successive years marking the course of time
has given place to the flowing river, the goddess Khe£^ wife
of Eronos, the time-god, the mother-goddess of the race,
who were sons of the rivers, and to the succession of genera-
tions of thinkers, and thus their mjrths tell us how each new
reformer was bom as the child of his predecessor, or how one
epoch succeeds another in the long series of historic changes
which are depicted as the life of the hero of the myth ; and
the myths of Phlegyas and his descendants are an instance
of the genealogic myth, while that of Peleus belongs to
the second class, and we find also the old nature and year
myths mixed up with, and in some cases incorporated into,
the myths of the newer age. It is in these myths, telling of
the birth of the sun-god, and in those which give the story
of the contest between the Centaurs and the Lapithae and
the history of the heroes engaged in the strife, that we find
the clearest pictures of the course of historic events. The
Lapithae were the subjects of Pirithous, whose name me£Uis
the revolving one, that is, the revolving-pole, and he was the
son of Ixion and Dia, the sacrificial flame, and the grandson
522 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ot Phlegyas, the fire-god. The name Lapithae comes from
the root lap (Xair), which appears in XaZKa^ XaiXa7ro99 a
Rtorm, and in Xairat^to aXaTra^co, to plmider, to destroy, as
well as in the cognate form "Aftirviaiy the Harpies, from the
variant root rhap {pair)^ to break or tear, and it also appears
in the Greek XvTreoi, to vex, and the Sanskrit lumpanij to
break.^ From this it is clear that the Lapitha? were the
sons of the storm-god, who was the Apollo of Homer, the
god who shoots the arrows of storm and pestilence from his
silver bow, and they were the ^Eolian race who brought their
Trojfim god from Mysia and Lycia into Thessaly, where they
succeeded the Phlegyes, or fire-worshippers. The contest
between them and the Centaurs, the sons of Ixion and
Nephele, the cloud, is described in the myths arising out
of the marriage of Pirithous, the revohing-pole, with Hip-
podaniia, the tamer of liorses, the moon-goddess of the lunar
year, who no longer measured the year by the polar revolu-
tions of the weeks €Uid days, but drove her chariot round the
heavens within the thirteen lunar montlis of the lunar year.
The contest told of the strife between the races who looked
to the succession of events on earth, the blossoming of the
flowers and the recurrence of the seasons as the means of
measuring time, and those who determined it by the examina-
tion of the heavenly bodies, the occurrence of the weeks, the
lunar phases, and the movements of the moon and stars, and
thus the Centaurs represented the advance of astronomical
and experimental science. The first of the Centaurs was-
Eurytus or Eurj'tion, whom I have already shown in Essay in.
to be the rainbow-god, and identical with Krishanu of the
lligveda, and Kereshani of the Zendavesta, and it is in the
connection between him and Pelcus, the father of Achilles^
the god of the solar year, that we find the best continuous
account of the progress of the teaching of the Centaurs.*
^ MannharcU, Wald und Fcld Kultury Berlin, 1877, vol. ii. chap. ii. p. 90^
* For the Peleus myth see Mannhardt, Waid und Feld Kultur^ vol. iL
p. 53 note I ; Smith, Classical Dictionary ^ s.v. * Peleus.'
ESSAY VI 528
Feleus was the king of the Myrmidons, and both his name
derived from Pelos (tti/Xo?), the potter''s-clay, and his story
connects him with Mount Pelion in Thessaly. But the sons
of Pelion were not only bom fix)m the potter's-clay, fashioned
by the revolving wheel of time, but were also the sons of the
grove of the tree-mother, the nymph Pelai€^ and of the river
Brychon, the roaring or biting river (^puxdofiai, to roar,
/3pvx^, to bite), which flowed past the walls of the city
Peli€^ at the foot of Mount Pelion. The sons of Pelia were
thus the sons of the tree-mother, to wliom life was given by
the river-god, who tempered the clay of which they were
made. Peleus, as king of the Myrmidons, or swarming races
of the earth, traced his mythic descent to Zeus, in the form
of an ant, and Euru-medusa, the wide-ruling (fMeSova-a)
goddess, who is depicted as bearing on her head twirling
snake-like locks, marking her as the goddess of the Nagas,
or rain-snakes, who made the snake-egg of the Druids, or
tree- worshippers; and the universality of her worship is shown
by the epithet euni, wide. The myth which identifies the
divine ruler of the bright sky with the ant also appears in
the Rigveda, where Indra, the rain-god, is spoken of as
Vamra, the ants who broke down the walls in which the cloud
demons imprisoned the light.^ This genealogy tells us that
the makers of the Peleus myth intended it as a summary of
universal history, and that the hero, Peleus, belonged to the
mythic generation in which the gods of storm and darkness
were giving place to the gods of light. The ostensible
father of Peleus, the son of Euru-medusa, the rain-snake
mother, was Aktor, the leader or driver, the dog-god Sirius,
who drove the stars round the pole of the heavens, and
was the leader of the race of star-worshippers. Peleus'
half-brother, Phokus, the seal or fish-god of the Northern
races, who was also the fish-god of iEgina, and the counter-
part of the Dolphin of Delphi, was the first of the ruling
deities slain by Peleus, and Peleus, by slaying the seal-god,
* Rigveda, i. 151, 9,
524 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
became the king of .Egina, the city which made the tortoise
its totem ;^ and this, like the descent from the Xaga goddess,
marks him as the ruling god of the race which succeeded the
tortoise race. It was to cleanse himself of the guilt of this
murder that he went to Eurvtion, who is also called the son
of Aktor, while Peleus in this form of the myth becomes the
son of ^Eakus, or of the .Eons, or historic ages, the Greek
form of Ayu, the son of Puru-ravas, the storm-god, and
Un'ashi, the moon-mother. This marks Eurvtion as the
god of the race in whom the sense of sin and the necessity
for expiation was first awakened, and who made the God of
Righteousness their supreme god. Peleus went with Eurytion
to the hunt of the Calydonian boar, the boar-god of the
Iberian races, the first fire- worshippers, whose history I
have sketched in Essav in. Here Peleus inadvertentlv killed
Eur}'tion, and lie tlius becomes the god who killed the archer-
god of the rainbow, as well as the fish-god. He thus became
the beautiful youth, the prophet-god, bom at Delos, the
manifester, and in this form he went to Tliessaly to the
court of Akastus, the son of Pelias, and, therefore, like
Peleus, one of the race l)om of the refined or pot ter^s -clay,
the race made divine from their birth, which was tliat from
which the priest-kings sprang. He was cleansed by Akastus
of the guilt of Eurvtion'^s death. In identif\'ing Akastus we
find tliat he was one of the Argonauts, or star-worshippers,
who sailed from Pagasa, the port of Thessaly, with Jason,
in the ship Argo^ whose voyage to Greece I have described
in Essav in. The name of Akastus, like that of Akester
(a/ce(TT7fp\ a healer, is coimected with the root of uKeo/jLai^
to heal. This root also appears in a/co9, a remedy, uKearpa^
a darning-needle, and in a/cTy, meaning both edge and healing.
Akiistus thus means the healing-god, who heals with a knife.
Hut Akastus was not the only healing demigod connected
with Mount Pelion, for on it lived Cheiron the Centaur, who
is said to have brought up Jason, the leader of the Argo-
' * Greek Totems on Gems,* Quarterly Review^ Jan. 1890, p. 198.
ESSAY VI 625
nauts. The name of Cheiron is derived from cheir (x^ip)y
the hand, £md means, as I shall show, the healing-hand ; £md
in the antithesis between the healing point or knife-edge,
symbolised in Akastus, and the healing-hand of Cheiron,
there is most important chronological evidence of the gradual
progress of the healing art. The healer, or barber-surgeon,
of the race of star-worshippers, whose weapon is the edge or
point, is he whose chief means of cure is the use of the knife,
or tlie cautery, or burning of the diseased part, as is still con-
stantly done in India ; whereas he who has the healing-hand
uses salves, and the healing oil of iSsculapius, and prepares
medicinal drugs to be taken internally. That the know-
ledge of healing applications, both internal and external,
was the principal part of the science of Cheiron is shown by
the universal tradition of Greek antiquity which made him
the originator of the science of pharmacy, and the use of the
healing hand, both of which he taught, as Pindar testifies,
to iEsculapius, the god of healing.^ It is also proved by the
fact that the medicinal plant for which Pelion was chiefly
celebrated was called the Kentfirion of Chiron (x^ipdvcov
Kevravpiov), This was renowned as a febrifuge, and is also
said to drive away snakes and cure snake bites.^ Akastus,
the healer, is represented as driving away Jason and Medea,
the sorceress, from lolcus, his kingdom ; and thus he denotes
the class of physicians who substituted amputations, in-
cisions, and burning, for the magical incantations and charms
of the earlier medicine-men, which constitute such a large part
of the Akkadian magical formulae. The whole story marks
the Centaurs and their pupil iEsculapius as the people who
made a still further advance in the arts of medicine by the
use of oil, salves, and drugs, and they are thus shown to
belong to the race of the star-worshippers who called the
* Find. Nem, iii. 5$. ^aOvfirrra Xelpuif Tpd<f>€ Xt^/vy
*Id(rop* (hfSop riyei, koI fTeirev *A<rK\aTi6y,
rhv <f>apfidK(av SLSaJ^e /j^\aK6x€tpa vbfiov,
- Mannhardt, Antike Wald uttd Feld Kultur^ Part ii. chap. ii. pp. 47, 48.
526 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TOIES
twjiiHitars of Gemini the A^hriIls. the physicians of the gods,^
and who in the Zendavesta invoked Ar\'aman. the star of the
bull, the constellation Taurus, as the great healer sent bv
Ahura Mazda to cure the di«tf^sf» wrought br the witch-
craft of Ani!Fa Mainvu.* It was ther who settled in ThesBsalr
and made it the home of the family or clan of the Asclepiads
to which Aristotle belonged, and who, as the first scientific
experimenters in Greece, gradually showed the superiority of
scientific demonstration over philosophic guesses.
It was Akastas who, after he had driven out Jason and
Medea the sorceress, in.^'tituted scientific games in honour of
his father, that is to say, he introduced the Greek custom of
making the festival to the Fathers, established by the
Kuii^hites, the time for national meetings, which tended to
keep the ancient confederacies united, and improved the
national character by exciting emulation in manly sports.
This was an outcome of the system of Dorian training suited
to an age of wealth and extended commerce which mariwed
the close of the rule of the star-worshipper& It was at these
games that Hippolyte, the wife of Aka>tus, fell in love with
Peleu>, and in thi> storj', as in the precisely similar one of
Joseph, we find a remini>cence of the opposition met with by
the young prophet who was to l)econie tlie father of the sun-
gcxl, the ruler of the year. Hippolyte means * slie who is
released or freed by liorses,*' that is, the moon-goddess, who,
when it was discovered that the [3ath of the moon marked a
circle in the heavens, was thought to drive through the
.stages of this circuit marketl in the Nag-kshetra, or field of
the Nags or stars. nip[)ohi:e, the moon-goddess, tried to
bind the young prophet to herself, but he who was to be the
father of the sun-god refused her atlvances, just as Joseph
(lid those of Potiphar^s wife when he was to many the
daughter of the priest of On, the city of the sun-god. On
* Sachau's Alberuni's India, vol. i. cha]). xxii. p. 242.
- Darmcsteler, Zendavesta Vendtdad Fargard^ xxii. 9 and 15; S.B.E.
vol. iv. pp. 232, 233.
ESSAY VI 627
the complaint of Hippolyte, Peleus was sent by Akastus,
who did not like to put to death the youth he had cleansed
of the guilt of Eurytion''8 death,^ to Mount Pelion, to kill or
be killed by the wild beasts, a mission which tells us how the
prophet must go forth into the wilderness and fight with the
hindrances of error and ignorance which stay his advance ;
and it is a similar story which appears in one form or other
in all the mythic tales of the lives of early religious reformers.
It is the same theme which is set forth in the wanderings of
Pururavas, when his wife left him, the exile of Joseph and
Israel in Egypt and in the desert, the imprisonment of
Joseph, and the flight into the wilderness of Elijah. They
all represent different phases of the long ages spent by the
early inquirers into the causes of natural phenomena in un-
ravelling the secrets of nature — their prison-house — and
gaining the control given by knowledge over the wild and
untamed forces which are the wild beasts and dangerous
adventures of these stories.
Peleus set forth on his mission armed with a wonder-
working sword, which, according to one version of the mjrth,
he stole from Akastus when they were hunting together, and
according to another, was given to him by Hephaistos, the
fire-god. Peleus slew with this sword the beasts who attacked
him, and hid their tongues in his hunting-bag. When the
courtiers of Akastus found the dead bodies, and claimed to
have killed them, they laughed at Peleus because he had
come back without killing anything. He silenced them by
showing the tongues, and Akastus determined to have him
destroyed by the Centaurs ; but before this could be done he
must first be deprived of his wonder-working sword, and once
when they had gone out hunting together, Akastus found
the opportunity to steal it when Peleus had fallen asleep.
After stealing it he hid it in a dunghill, and left Peleus
to the mercy of the Centaurs, They at first intended to
^ Mannhardt, JVa/d und Feld ICultur, Part ii. chap. ii. pp. 49, 50 ; Schol,
Arist, Frag. 1063.
528 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
kill him, but Cheiron released liim and helped him to re-
cover his sword, and after this he returned to lolcus, killed
Akastus and his ^ife, and placed lolcus, which had formerly
been subject to the Magnesians, who worshipped the witch-
mother Maga, under the rule of the Thessalians.
The mythical meaning of this part of the story turns on
that of the sword. This was originally the crescent-shaped
sword, the Harpe or crescent-moon, with which Hermes slew
Argos, the star-watcher of lo, the dark night, and Merodach,
or Marduk, the young bull-calf of Babylon, killed Tianiut, the
dragon. It was this sword which passed to Peleus through the
hands of Akastas, and which was originally the magic- wand of
the fire-god,which l)ecame the crescent-moon, the healing-knife
of Akastus, but whicli was in the hands of Peleus the magic
word, not of conjuring magicians, but of the inspired
prophet. It was, as is shown by the tongues of the beasts
the wonder-working power of inspired thought and speech
co-ordinating the results acquired by the study of various
experiments and hy})otheses, which, like the coal from the
altar given to Isaiah,^ made the pr()})het able to overthrow
the f<)L»s of the God of Righteousness, and to bring light into
tlie waste placets of the liunian mind and conscience, darkened
by ignorance and fouled by sin. It was this wonder-working
power which remained awake during the agt»s of scientitic
rt^search, wlien the star and moon-worshippers were supreme
rulers, ])ut which slept when progress was stopper! bv the
deadening tyranny which prevailed at tlie close of tlie lunar
age, to wake again with the coming of the Northern Aryan
invaders, who led the revolt of the human lovers of a joyous
life ajrainst Semitic formalism and idealism, and of tlie de-
pressed and enslaved agriculturi.sts and artisims against the
tyranny of the priest-kings. It was wlien the Northern
nations, who worshipped tlie beautiful youth, the young
pr()i)het and sun-gcxl, were amalgjunated with the thinkers
of an earlier time, and when the period of intellectual
^ Isaiah vi. 6.
ESSAY VI 629
Renaissance began, that Cheiron found the sword • of Peleus,
which had been hidden in the dunghill of a dead and lifeless
faith, and restored it to him. It was then that speech and
voice again re-blossomed in an age of poetry and song, and
it was this new-bom age of the bard and rhapsodist, leading
up to the birth of the sun-god, the ruler of the solar year,
which was ushered in by the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.
This was the marriage of the divine and human father, the
god- man, with the Nereid, the prophet-daughter of the sea.
Thetis is, as Curtius shows, a variant form of Tethys, and
both names are derived from the root tha {Oa\ to milk, to
nourish with milk.^ Thetis was wooed by Poseidon, the
black bull of the sea, the Greek form of the Hindu Pushan,
and she was, therefore, the cow-mother of the bull-race, who
worshipped la, the great water €Uid fish-god, and was the
coimterpart of the Egyptian Isis, the cow-mother of the
young Horus, the black water-bull Apis, sacred to the
worshippers of Dhu-ti, the moon-god. The union between
her and Peleus tells of the marriage of the divine son of man,
who, perfected in thought, speech, and power by the teaching
and thoughts of long past ages, had become tlie goodliest of
the sons of clay, with the heavenly mother, the cow sacred to
the water-god, who, as Thetis, rose out of the sea, as the
morning mist, to become the cloud-mother, who sent down
the heavenly milk a.s rain to nurture life on earth. It was,
in short, the union of Northern life and the childlike delight
in nature of the Northern races with the culture and science
of the Semitic central zone.
At this wedding Cheiron gave Peleus a mighty ashen spear
cut from Mount Pelion, which none of the sons of men
except the young Achilles could wield,^ thus marking the
Peleus, who had awoke from sleep, and recovered his wonder-
working sword as the son of the ash, Yggdrasil, the father-
tree of the Northern sons of Odin, the god of light and
^ Curtius, Griechische Etymologic^ No. 307, pp. 252, 253.
' Homer, //iW, xvi. 140, 144.
84
680 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
knowledge. Thetis lived in silence with her husband,^ and
this silence and the mystery it involves both denotes the
share taken by the Semites in framing the Thetis myth,
and shows her to be the moon-goddess who was, unlike the
Semitic father-god, seen, but was only seen as the moon
making her way silently through the heavenly ocean, and it
is as the moon-goddess that she is called by Homer the silver-
footed Thetis. The marriage between Peleus and Thetis was
thus the union between the Northern sun and the Semitic
moon- worshippers. But the myth does not only depict Thetis
as the silent moon, but also as the goddess of many forms
whose symbols had often changed in the course of the many
ages during which men had sought for the true image of the
parent-god. For when wedded to Peleus she changed herself
successively into the fonns of a lioness, a dragon, fire,and water,
before she would submit to his embraces.* These transforma-
tions show that Thetis was a goddess who traced her descent
from Phrygia, where the myth of the moon-lioness arose, and
from India where the constellation of the dragon, the alligator
Shishu-niiira was made the necklace of the god of the heavenly
pole, and this makes her to belong to the race of the Argo-
nauts, the mariners who steered their course by the Southern
constellation Argo. The four forms speak of the ages of
(1) moon worship, (2) star worship, (3) fire worship, and (4)
water worship. The ages marked by the successive creeds
which, originating with the Magicians, and Manu the
thinker, followed one another after the purifying fire of the
lightning-god and the sanctifying flood of the water-god
had destroyed the wicked worshippers of tlie god of human
* This silence is, as Mannhardt shows, Afitil'e IVald nnd Feld /Cuitur,
Part ii. chap. ii. p. 52, denoted by the ii<f>dbYYOvt ydfiovs, spoken of by Sopho-
klcs in the Troilus^ in the passage telling of the marriage of Peleus with
Thetis of the multiple form —
iyriiiiv ws iyrifiey 6.<f>0&yyovi yd/JLovs
TQ TravTifi6p^<f OirLdiy cvfiTrXaKeis ttotc,
^ Soph. Frag. Brunck, iii. p. 404, rX% ydp /ttc fxoxOos ovk iTlffrarcu \4uv
ApdK(i)PT€f Tvp GSup,
ESSAY VI 631
generation, and the unwedded children of the matriarchal
races. When her son was bom Thetis wanted to make him
like herself immortal, so she put him at night into the fire to
bum out the stains of mortality, £uid by day slie anointed
him with ambrosi£^ the Hindu Amrita, the water of life, and
the Ichor, or blood of the gods. But when Peleus once saw
his son in the fire he cried aloud, £uid thus, like Pururavas,
revealed himself. Upon this Thetis, the heavenly motlier,
disappeared like UrvashI, thus showing that the worship of
the mother-goddess ceases when the supremacy of the father-
god is asserted, as it was by Peleus in his tone of command,
while in the present myth it also means that the moon-god-
dess gave up the rule of heaven to her son, the young sun-
god. His father brought him to Cheiron, the sage learned
in all the wisdom of the age, who thus, like the Hindu Guru,
became his spiritual father, and brought him up by feeding
him on the livers of the boar, the lightning-god, and the lion,
the moon-god, with the marrow of the Northern Bear-
mother, the Rikshah, or constellation of the Great Bear, the
god of the star-worshippers. He also gave him his name,
Achilles, meaning the young snake (e^t?) who, according to
another version of the myth of his nurture, was made im-
mortal in all parts of the body except his heel, by being
dipped by his mother in the river Styx, meaning the 'hateful^
river, the Greek form of the bath of serpenfs blood taken
by Siegfried, the sun-god of the Nibelungen triad. It is the
immortality in all but one part which distinctly marks both
Achilles and Siegfried as the sun-god of the solar year. He
must, like Achilles, run his course, and complete his three
seasons by dragging Hector, the holder or stayer, three times
round the walls of Troy, and, like Siegfried, must leave
Brunnhilda, the goddess of springs {hrunnen\ wed with the
moon-goddess, Gudrun, and die by the stroke delivered by
Hagen, the god of death and winter, in his one vulnerable
point between his shoulders, after the return of Brunnhilda
with the god Gunther of the autumn storms, just as Achilles
532 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
dies after the taking of Troy by the hands of Apollo or
Paris, the god of the races who measure time by the phases
and course of the moon. This god, the last avatar of the
first measurer of time, was the god whom Achilles had dis-
placed, for his first name was ligurion, the sweet-toned,^ an
epithet of the lyre of Apollo, which marked him as the sing-
ing prophet-god of the Northern races, and tlie whole story
show^s that both Achilles and Apollo were sun-gods; but while
Achilles was the sun-god of the solar year, whose course was
traced by the learned astronomers of Babylon, the young and
beautiful Apollo was the Northern sun-god who had beoi
worshipped from time immemorial by the tribes who lived in
the dark cold North, as the god who killed the winter-fiend,
and freed the earth from the tyranny of the frost giants. It
was the young Achilles who, as god of the solar, substituted
for the lunar year, l>ecame the measurer to the race who bore
the revived name of the Achaeans, the sons of the enclosing
serpent, who in the eyes of the new generation did not
encircle only the lands whence the sons of the primaeval
village were born, but those ruled by the united tribes of the
Acha?an race.
But there is another myth whicli traces more clearly than
the Peleus myth tlie deification of Achilles, the god of the
solar year, to the Babylonian astronomers. This is that
which makes Phcenix the Centaur one of the tutors of Achilles.
He was the son of Amyntor, meaning * the defender,'' the
king of the Dolopes, the people ' cunning (86X09) in speech **
{oyjr o7ro9). He was said to have fled to Peleus from the land
of his fathers after he had, by the advice of his mother,
Cleoboule, the lady of good (/cXeo) counsel (/SovXif)^ seduced
his father'^s mistress, just as Reuben the son of Jacob, seduced
his father'^s mistress, Bilhah,^ and in both cases the meaning
is the same. The son, the prophet-god, takes the place of
* Mannhardt, Attiike IVald und Feld Kultur^ Part iL pp. 51, 52; Smith's
Classical Dictionary y s.v. 'Achilles.*
^ Gen. XXXV. 22.
ESSAY VI 538
his father, Phoenix succeeding Amyntor, the defender, who
was another form of Apollo, the Dorian protecting-god,
while Reuben, who saved Joseph, the prophet-god, from his
brethren, brought about the birth of the two last of Leah'^s
sons, Issachar and Zabulon.^ But in the Phoenix story the
new prophet-god had, like Peleus, to leave his fatherland and
go out into the wilderness. And it is this wandering which
takes him to Peleus^ court, where he finds the young sun-god.
The land which Amyntor ruled is shown, by the name of his
son Phoenix, meaning the Phoenician, to be Phoenicia. But
Phoenicia did not only mean the strip of coast on the north
of Palestine, whence the fleets of Tyre explored the Mediter-
ranean and Western seas, but the whole country ruled by the
Semitic WMie, from the Euphratean valley to the Mediter-
ranean sea. This whole country was under Semitic rule
in the days of the great Sargon, 3750 b.c, and was ruled by
the Semitic kings of Assyria up to 2000 b.c. The Tell-el-
amama tablets written in Assyrian Semitic cuneiform, tell
us that the language of Palestine was Semitic in 1600 b.c,
and I have shown in Essay iii. that the Indian evidence
proves conclusively that the great Semitic conquest of
Southern Asia by the Semitic Sombunsi, or sons of the moon,
took place at a time which was very long before even the
earliest of these dates, for it coincided with the adoption of
the lunar year of thirteen months, which was used long be-
fore the solar year began with the entry of the sun into
Taurus at the vernal equinox in 4700 b.c. The story of the
coming of Phoenix to Greece as the herald of the solar year,
and the tutor to Achilles, the young sun-god, is a myth
telling of the arrival in Greece of the news of the discovery
of the annual path of the sun through the ecliptic, which
was made by the Babylonian astronomers, and the story of
the Phoenix, the sacred bird of Arabia, proves even more
clearly than the proofs I have already adduced, that the
message brought by Phoenix was the doctrine that the sun in
^ Gen. xxxvii. 21, 22 ; xxx. 14-20.
5S4 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
liis path through the heaveiis measures the Tear. The
Phoenix was the bird which is said to have arisen to fresh life
out of the &slies of his predecessor. And I have already shown
that the sacred bird of the earlier Semites was the moon-bird,
and that it was the Akkadian and Egyptian moon-god Zu-ti
and Dhu-ti, shown to be originally a bird by his ibis beak,
who measured and recorded the lunar vear of thirteen months.
It was when this was proved to be a reckoning less reliable
than that of the solar year that it was discontinued, or, in
mythic language, burned. But it was from the observations
made and recorded bv the Ass\Tian and Babylonian astro-
nomers of the stellar and lunar ages that the new year was
deduced, and these obser\'ations were the ashes of the Phoenix
myth. This Phcenix or Phoenician bird of the Greeks was
the Benu bird of the Egyptians, the sacred bird of the solar
year, worshipped at Heliopolis, or the city of the sun,^ and it
was the daughter of the priest of On that Joseph, the lunar
prophet-interpreter, married.^ We know from history that the
solar year was introduced into Egypt by Kakau, a king of the
Second Dynasty, about 4000 u.c.^and Sargon, who ruled 3750
B.C., tells us, in his observations of Bel, that the solar year had
then for a long time l)een the official year of Babylon.^
"^riie solar year was known and used by the authors of the
Rigveda, as well as the lunar year, and both appear in the
great cosrnological hymn recording the different methods
of reckoning time.* But not only was the solar and lunar
year known to the Vedic poets, but also the year of the
twenty-seven Nakshatra^ or twenty-seven equal sections of
the ecliptic circle forming a fifth part of the five years'
cycle, used to reconcile the discrepancies lietween solar and
lunar time. Therefore, in the Vedic age the substitution of
^ H. Brugsch, Religion uttd Mythologie der Alien AigypUr^ I^ipzig,
1888, p. 180. > Gen. xli. 50.
' Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 166.
* Rigveda, i. 164.
* They are spoken of as the * twenty-seven Maruts,* Rigveda, i. 133, 6.
Muir, Sanskrit Texts^ vol. v. § ix. p. 147.
ESSAY VI 686
solar for lunar time must have been a matter of long-past
history, and this is proved by the Vedic arrangement of the
section of the hymns ended by the hymn I have just referred
to, which tells of the reckoning of time by the months of
gestation, the lunar and the solar year. The authorship of
this section of twenty-five hymns, from 140 to 164, in the
first Mandala of the Rigveda, is attributed to Dirghatamas,
whose name means the long (dirgha) darkness {tamas\ and
this name, like those of Vashistha and Vishvamitra, to which
I have already frequently referred, must be one with a
mythical meaning, and not a personal name, for he is the
son of Mamata, * selfishness,** that is, of the Semite and
Jainist religion of personal penance, asceticism, and purifica-
tion, as opposed to the collective worship of the chanted
ritual of the Aryans.^ It is the only collection of hymns in
the Rigveda in which an Apri hjrmn of thirteen stanzas
occurs ; * and as I have shown in Essay iii. that each stanza
of the eleven usually found in an Apri hymn, summoned one
of the eleven lunar months sacred to the gods of generation
to the sacrifice, this hymn must be one summoning the
thirteen months of the lunar year. The arrangement of the
hymns also is peculiar, for both this and the hymns themselves
show strong traces of having been written by an author who
wished to accentuate his meaning by marking his standpoint
through the teaching conveyed by the sacred numbers of
astral, lunar, and solar chronology. The section opens with
eleven hymns to Agni, among which the Apri liymn of
thirteen stanzas occurs, showing the hymns to be addressed
to the eleven gods of generation. These are followed by
three to Mitra Varuna, the moon-god and the god of the
dark heaven, and these two sections together make up four-
teen hymns, the number sacred to the lunar phases. After
the hymns to the moon-gods follow three to Vishnu, the
year measured by the months, both of the lunar and solar
^ Rigyeda, i. 147, 3 ; 152, 6. Also, Grassmann, Introduction to the Sec-
tion, Rigveda J vol. ii. p. 149. ' Rigveda, i. 142.
536 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
year, two to the Ashvins or heavenly twins, two to heaven
and earth, and one to the Ribhus or makers of the seasons;
while the section closes with the h\'mn describing the hone
sacrifice, one to the sun-horse, and the final hvmn to all the
gods {llthvaderas) telling of the measurement of time.
This last di^-ision consists, like the first to Agni, of eleven
hymns, all connected with the gods of time ; and the last
hymn of all ^ distinctly shows that the sacred numbers play a
conspicuous part in the arrangement of the collection, for it
contains fifty-two stanzas, or four times thirteen, and that
this number is connected with the lunar year is proved by
the solar year and its twelve months being the theme of the
forty-eighth stanza^ or four times twelve. Four was the num-
ber sacred to the earliest Agni, and the four times twelve and
four times thirteen mean perfection, while the twenty-five
hymns forming the collection make up the number fonned by
adding the twelve months of the solar to the thirteen months
of the lunar vear.- All these deductions from the number
and arrangement of the hymns, and many more I could
point out, if space and the patience of my readers jjermitted
it, distinctly prove that the official measurements of time
ending in the adoption of the solar year, and the cycle of
five vears of the twentv-seven Naksliatra had been settled at
the very opening of the Vt»dic age, at the time when the
Aryans concjuered the Semite-Dravidian uioon-worsliippers,
and it mast \ye the age when the solar year supplanted the
lunar year, which is that marked by the Greek legends of
the youth and bringing up of Achilles.
liut these xVchilles legends are not the only ones which
tell of the birth of solar time and the discomfiture of the
* Kigvcda, i. 164.
' The trammels under which the poet worked by the rules he imposed on
himself, and the necessity of making each phase of his subject cover the num-
ber of stanzas which represent the sacred number, by which it is indicated,
account for the almost impenetrable obscurity, and the apparent absence of
meaning which marks the greater part of the hymn.
ESSAY VI 587
moon-goddess, the goddess Hera, the deadly enemy of
Herakles, the sun-god; and among the most interesting
variations of the theme, the legends of (Edipus find a con-
spicuous place, as they tell, among other things, of the
divinity of speech, the divine mark of the Aryan poet
astronomers. The name (Edipus means * he with the swollen
foot,** and thus, like other solar heroes, he is a variant form of
the lame god of the fire-drill. He was the son of Laius,
king of Thebes, and Jocasta or Jocaste, called by Homer
Epicaste.^ Laius meant the stone-father, from Idas (Xoa?),
a stone or rock. He was the son of the stone-bom race
which peopled the earth after Deucalion's flood, the great
building race, while lo-kaste or Epi-kaste meant either the
* cleansed ' mother ^ or the * cleansed ** lo, the goddess of the
violet (iov) dark sea, and -the dark nights worshipped by
the race, whose father god was the hidden god who cleanses
and sanctifies. The pair, in short, meant the stone-pillar
or obelisk representing the father-god and the mother-
goddess, the lunar crescent, and they thus together formed
the lunar trisula of the Semitic Minyans, placed over the
gate at Delphi. But (Edipus, their son, the fire-drill, was
not the impersonal god of the pole, but the prophetic
guesser of riddles, the successor of the earlier interpreting
prophet, who was, like Joseph, an expounder of dreams.
It was by telling the Sphinx, the lion moon-goddess, the
true meaning of her riddle that he destroyed her power.
He told her that man was the being who goes in the
morning on four legs, at mid-day on two, and on three at
night. But this answer shows at the first glance nothing
which ouglit to have disturbed the rule of the moon-sphinx,
for it appears only to mean that men crawl on four legs as
Smith, Classical Dictionary^ s.v. 'Jocastaand CEdipus.*
' Curtius, Griechische Etyiiiologie^ No. 26, p. 138, shows that the root kcu^
which appears in the name of the 'cleansing' fountain kas-talia^ means
cleansing. It also appears in Greek in the form Kdd-apot, and its cognates
the Sanskrit fhcuih.
588 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
infants, walk upright as men, and arc supported by a staff,
the third leg, in old age. But when we recollect the great
importance assigned to numbers in ancient mythology, it
becomes necessary to consider whether the numbers in this
answer show that it marks the overthrow of the rule of the
moon-sphinx, who is said, when she heard it, to have thrown
herself from the rock ; and if these numbers disclose a
conclusive reason for this suicide, this must be that which is
the real meaning of a myth, which was evidently, by the
conspicuous place assigned to it, and the remaining incidents
of the (Edipus myth in ancient poetry, looked on as one of
the treasured possessions of the Grecian race. Now, in the
first place, it is historically right to say that men in the
childhood of the world went on four legs, for they wor-
shipped the four supreme gods, the ancient triad and the
fire-god. In the middle period their godhead was dual, the
iat)ier rain-god and the mother-earth, which became the
father-pole and the crescent-moon; while in the evening,
the time when the mytli was framed, they looked on the
three seasons of tlie Northern year, manifesting the battles
and victory of the sun-god as the god of time, who created
and reproduced life. But it is in tlie nunil)ers nine, formed
from the union of 4 -}- 2 + 3 that the deadly blow is con-
cealed, which ])ut an end to the rule of the moon-sphinx.
For in lunar chronology man was born into the world after
ten months of gestation ; whereas under the solar reckoning
of time these ten months became nine, and hence the adop-
tion of nine as the sacred solar numl)er marked the supre-
macy of the sun-god, while the answer in its varying
meanings became a crucial instance of the magic power of
the wonder-working sword of speech. It is these nine
months of gestation which appear in the nine Rudras,
spoken of by Yudislithira in the Mahabharata,^ which re-
placed the eleven Rudras, or gods of generation, of tlie
star-worsliippers.
* Virata {Pdndava-Pravisha) Parva, ii. p. 3.
ESSAY VI 689
But the mjrth of (Edipus not only tells of the substitution
of the solar for the lunar year, but also tells how the
swollen-footed fire-god, the solar disc, was wedded to the
moon, his mother locaste ; and tliis is a Greek form of the
story of the marriage of the sun and moon, told in the
Rigveda. But in the Rigveda it is not the male-sun, the
son and husband, who is married to the moon-mother, but
the sun-maiden, brought by the Ashvins or heavenly-twins,
who is wedded to the son of the moon -god. In this
hymn,^ it is said that her first husband was Soma, the soul
of life in the life-giving water ; her next, the Gandharvas,
the seven gods of heavenly time, the Soma guardians, who
wedded the Apsaras or cloud-mothers ; her third was Agni,
the sacrificial fire-god of the age, in which the supreme god
was worshipped in the cloud of incense ; and her fourth, the
son of man, the beautiful youth, the young Apollo of the
Greeks, the young prophet-god of the lunar epoch. Soma,
the rain-god, had given her to the Gandharvas, the first
gods of time, the Gandharvas gave her to the sacrificial fire-
god ; and he gave her to the son of man, bom of the moon-
mother, the moon-struck and inspired prophet. In stanzas
21 and 9.2 of the same hymn, Vishvavasu, the maker (vam)
of the dwellers in the land of the Vish or inhabited villages,
the god of the pole is also addressed as her former husband,
and told to leave her, and this god of the pole is he who is
called I^ius, the stone-pillar, in the Greek myth, who was
the first husband of Jocaste, before the moon-prophet was
bom.
The whole series of stories tells us how the rule of the
moon-prophets was followed by that of the Aryan sun-god.
But here the question arises as to the ethnology of the race
which called itself Aryan, and led the way in the return of
the fire- worshipping Heraclidae. I have already shown in
Essay n. that they were a people who differed fundamentally
from the Southern nations in the distribution of landed
^ Rigveda, x. 85, 8, 9, 41, 42.
640 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
property, for while they divided the land they ruled into
estates owned by individuals and families. Southern lands
were the communal property of village communities. They
were also a people wlio laid the greatest possible stress on
birth, who were ambitious of personal and individual
renown, and were proud of the deeds of their ancestors.
They were thus great genealogists, the genealogy of each
clan being kept by its hereditary bards, who were also poets,
who sang, to the music of their harps, the story of the
prowess of the heroes of the tribe ; and these heroes were,
originally at all events, men wliose memory had survived,
and not the metaphysical abstractions which the solar heroes
became under the influence of Southern mythology. They
had the keenest sense of the l>eauties of metrical and poetic
language, and of all that is beautiful in nature and art,
and they were at the same time impulsive and impatient of
restraint, and endowed with the most intense love of free-
dom. All these characteristics are essentially Celtic, and
it is in the constitution of the Celtic sept, which assigned to
eacli head of a clan family a certain portion of the tribal
land, that we find the origin of the Aryan law of property ;
and it is, therefore, to the Celtic race, formed by a large
admixture of the blood of the Finnic dwarf race of miners
and fire-worship])ers that we must assign the leadership in
the revolt against Semitism, which ended in the birth of the
sun-god, the ruler of the year, from the moon-mother and
prophet-father. It was these people wlio replaced the regu-
larly-appointed interpretei*s and exegetie, the sons of the
prophets who handed down the official myths of ancient
history, by their rhapsodists and Iwirds ; and these did not,
like the exegetae, remain stationary in the temples of their
respective districts, but wandered through all the families
of the clan, singing their national songs. It was they who
saw what admirable material for narrative poetry was fur-
nislied by the liistorical myths, and who formed from them
the later epics. But in these the ideal mythic heroes of
ESSAY VI 641
the Southern mythology became, when painted by the imagi-
nation of the Northern poets, living warriors, l^ingS) and
statesmen ; and it was from these models that they framed
the solar myths, which depicted the conquering career of
the sons of the sun as the victories of the heroes, Achilles
and Siegfried. But these bards, who inherited the carefully-
framed traditions of their predecessors, used them with a
freedom which would have appeared sacrilegious to the
earlier interpreters ; and though the meaning of some myths
remains still fairly clear, yet others, especially when they
are treated by poets who wrote after written narratives
became common, are almost hopelessly confused. The ap-
pearance of these bards is marked by the story of the bard
Tiresias, who, in the myth of (Edipus, separates him from
Jocaste, and who continues to interfere in the quarrels which
occurred between the two sons of (Edipus, Eteocles, and
Polynices, the Greek counterparts of Romulus and Remus,
Eteocles being the sun, and Polynices the moon-prince.
These quarrels ended in the destruction of Thebes and the
intervention of Adrastus, who instituted the solar games at
Nemea, an event which brings us somewhat near the begin-
nings of recorded Greek chronology.
It was these excitable and impulsive sons of the North who
felt themselves sorely chafed and constrained by the trammels
imposed by the despotic government of the alien Semites, who
introduced the republican forms of government, like those
ascribed to Theseus, which associated the whole of the com-
munity, who did not belong to the very numerous body of
slaves, directly in the conduct of all affairs of State.
But the chief influence exercised by the Aryans was not in
affairs of State, but in the constitution and organisation of
social intercourse. It was here that they completely sub-
verted the customs of their serious, grave, and reverend pre-
decessors, which were intolerably dull to a race in whase eyes
a life was only worth living when it was accompanied by
art, beauty, and social enjoyment. To people so constituted,
642 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the elaborate ceremonies of the strictly legal ritual of the
water- worshipping and water-drinking races were dreary and
lifeless, and it was these which they made brighter by the in-
troduction of choric odes, which became the psalms and
hymns of the Assyrian and Indian ritual. Again, they were
not, like the Semite Arabs, water-drinkers, but had continued
the custom of drinking largely, especially on festal occasions,
which were universally obser\'ed before the days of Semite
reform, and it w&s under their rule that the Bacchic orgies
were revived in all countries where they had been discon-
tinued under Semitic influence.
But in tracing the history of the Arjan connection with
Dionysus worship we must first begin with Asia Minor,
where the wine-god had been worshipped from the early days
of the goat-god. This was the country of Samleh of
Masrekah, the vine lands, who, as I have sho^-n in Essay ui.,
was a king of the solar race which succeeded Husrava or
Husham of Arabia, the mythic representative of the Semitic
conquest and epoch in the government of the red race of
Edom. This Samleh of Masrekah was the Semele of the
Greeks, the mother of Dionysus the wine-god. She is
proved by Pha»nician inscriptions to be a Phoenician goddess,
called IVn-Samlath, which Dr. Sayce translates ' the fixce of
Samleh.^ But Pen, which came to mean ' face ' in Phoenician,
is the Tamil or old Dravidian name for woman, and for the
mother-goddess Magha, who is worshipped by the Khonds
in India Jis Tara Pennu,- the mother-snake or star-goddess ;
and as this Dravidian name apparently travelled, like that of
Ida, the sheep-mother, with the Dravidian matriarchal races,
Pen-Samlath would mean the lady-goddess Samlah, and it
mast be remembered that the Tamil Dravidians have always
been a maritime race, and that it was they who, as I have
' Sayce, liihbert lectures for 1 887, Lect. i. p. 54. This name Pen-Samlath
occurs in a Phanician inscription found in 1884 in a bay in Attica, to the
west of the Pinxrus.
' Caldwell, Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Laugua^ts^ p. 507.
ESSAY VI 648
shown in Essay iii., first started maritime commerce in the
Indian Ocean. Be that as it may, the genealogy of the kings of
Edom in Grenesis shows that Samlah of Masrekah succeeded
Hadad, the son of Bedad, whom Dr. Sayce shows to have
been the sun-god, called the beloved one (dad) who became
the supreme god of Phoenicia^ after the Semitic rule of
Husham, and Samleh of Masrekah was succeeded by Saul of
Rehoboth by the river, the Babylonian sun-god Saval or Sawul,
the ruling god of the solar year. This evidently shows that
the rule of Samleh of Masrekah is an episode in the rule of
the sun-worshipping Aryans, and the Greek mythology of
Semele and her son proves that this was accompanied by a
great revival of the old worship of the god who inspired the
early magicians, and that it immediately preceded the in-
troduction of the solar year, and this conclusion is confirmed
by the Hebrew history which makes Samuel the prophet
the successor of Dagon, the fish-god, the ruler during the
revolt that arose against the tyranny of the sons of the
priest-king and the consecration of Saul the sun-god, and that
religious worship in that age was accompanied with feasting
and dancing is proved by the account of the festival at
Aamah, where Samuel received Saul, and of David dancing
before the ark.^ It is in the land of Armenia on the western
shores of the Caspian Sea that the vine grows wild, and it is
firom the Armenian gini that the Phrygian goinos (7041/09),
the Thracian ganos (yavo^)^ and the Greek otj/o?, and the
Latin vinum are derived. It was immigrants from thence
who introduced the cultivation of the vine into Thrace, and
Homer speaks of Nysa, a city which claimed to have been the
nurse of the god Dionysus, as a city of Thrace,^ and it was
Thracian ships that brought wine to the Greeks at Troy.*
* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, L«ct. i. pp. 55-57.
^ I Sam. ix. 22-24; ^ Sam. vi. 14-16.
' Homer, Iliad vi, 130 fF. P. Von Bradke, Uber Methode und Ergebnisse
des arsuhen Alterthunuwissenschaft^ part ii. ; Uber der arische Cultur der
Wein^ pp. 257-264, 275, 296.
^ Homer, Iliad^ ix. 172.
A
644 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Moreover, the wine trade miLst date from a most remote
age, for vines have been fomid in Neolithic pile-^-illages in
Emilia in Northern Italy. But it is in Phrygia that we find
the earliest legends of the SatjTs or Silene, the race with
close, curly hair, goafs horns, ears, and tail, who were the
traditional companions of the wine-god. for it w&s in Phrygia
that Midas, the king of the water-drinking sons of the ass,
mixed wine with the waters of the springs to bring into his
power the SatjTs, who had proclaimed to the world that
his ears, which had thought the music of the goat-god to be
superior to the lyre of Apollo, were those of an ass,^ and this
myth tells how the Semite Dorian race, the sons of the twin-
gods, who caUed themselves the sons of the ass, conquered
the votaries of the goat-god. It was by the Phrj'gian name
of Pappos (-TTaTTTro?), the grandfather, that the Greeks named
the attendant of the wine-god, who was himself the wine-
god of the earlier ages, Pappos or Silenos. It was these
Satyrs, the sons of the goat-god Pan, who were like the tribes
-Egicores, or sons of the wind-goat (ai^ from aitra-a, to rush)
in Athens, and the Dr\opes in Thessalia, the earliest culti-
vating race in Grt^ecc and Asia Minor, fonned by the union
of the mountain shej)herds with the matriarchal tribes who
foundetl the village communities. It was this race of culti-
vators with smooth faces and close curlv locks who introduced
ii-ine into Assyria and Babylonia, where the ^^ne was called
by the Akkadians (Jis-din, the tree of life, and it is a race
ver\' similar to them in Ixxlily development who are depicted
as the Gaurian race of Telloh on the earliest Akkadian
monuments, * with round heads, low but wide straight fore-
heads, slightly prominent clieek -bones, an orthognate profile
with rather fleshy lips, a big nose whicli is not aquiline, and
hair rather curly than wavy.- They were the people who
' Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld KuUury vol. ii. chap. iii. pp. 141, 142.
- G. Berlin, * The Races of the Babylonian Empire,* Journal of the
Anthropological Institute y Nov. 1S89, p. 105. WTien this description is com-
pared with the characteristics of the primitive Dravidian race, Essay ii..
ESSAY VI 645
afterwards, when united with the sons of the ass, called them-
selves Gaurian, or sons of the Gauri, the wild cow-bison, and
who were the Indian Gonds who brought to India the same
love of liquor which they had learned in the Phrygian vine-
land. It was this Satyr race who dedicated to the wine-god
the dances to the village earth and tree-mother, brought by
the matriarchal tribes from India, and accompanied them by
the music of drums and cymbals, the instruments used by
the Indian Kolarian tribes and by the dancers of the Cory-
bantic dances of Phrygia. It was these dances which, under
the leadership of the Aryan warriors, developed into the
dances of the Kuretes, the Cretan priests of Zeus, who saved
him from his father, Kronos, by clashing their weapons in
the war-dance.^ It was these Kuretes who claimed to be
the most ancient people in Acamania and ^Etolia, who are
shown by their name to be the priests of the warrior god of
light, for the root kur appears in Sanskrit, with the k changed
into a sibilant, in the word shdrata, meaning * knightly
courage,** * and this proves the name Kuretes to mean * the
brave valiant people,** a term almost equivalent to that of
the Aryans, meaning * the noble race/
These dances at the festivals to the wine-god developed,
when associated with the sacred dramatic performances over
which Dionysus presided, into the choral dances, called
Hypercheme, which became the chorus of the comic drama,
a name which, by its relation to Kcofirj^ a village, marks the
comic drama as a direct offshoot of the dances of the earliest
Hindu villages. And in the same way tragedy or the
serious historical drama gives by its derivation from the he-
goat (Tpdrfo^)j who draws the car of time, an abbreviated
history of its career and descent. That this development
p. 45, it will be seen that the Gaurian Satyrs derived their coarse features,
large noses, and fleshy lips, from the dolichocephalic Dravidians, while their
round heads came to them from the brachycephalic metal-working Finns.
* Smith, Classical Diciionary^ s.v,, * Curetes.*
' Curtius, Gritchische EiymologU, No. 82, p. 158.
646 THE RULING RACES OF PREHIS1X)RIC TIMES
of the dance and comic satirical local farce into the serious
drama was the work of the Celtic Aryans is proved by the
fact that the music, by which the Satyric chorus was
accompanied, was that of the Celtic Kithara (Ki0dpa% or
harp, and the musician was called Kitharistes {Kidapi{rTfj^\
or the harp-player.^ And it was these same Celtic races who
were the conquering race of the Bronze Age, who burned
their dead and became the youngest race of Indian fathers,
the Pitaro'^gnishvattah, * the fathers consumed with fire.'
These people have certainly left traces of their Celtic origin
in the name of the river Oxus, which reproduces the Celtic
uisce^ the Latin aqua^ water, and I believe also in the name
Phoenix and Phoenicia. The name Phcenix is a name of the
red-race and of the Tyrian purple, but it first meant the red-
wine, or the Fion-uisce, the * fine-water,** which latter mean-
ing still survives in the name of the Phcenix park in Dublin.
To these Northern races, used to the mead and spirits of the
North, the wine of Phrygia and Greece was a new drink of
rare excellence, and it was no wonder that they called the
land whicli produced it the land of the * fine water,** and
introduced this name into Greece. That the ^^nes and
wines of Palestine and Western Asia were looked on with
special wonder and admiration is proved by the account
of the spies of Israel, Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb
the son of Jephunneh, sent to spy out the country
they were about to conquer. Joshua the son of Nun, the
fish-god, the god of the soul of life, called also Hoshea, ^ycin,
the Yah of the races of the Hus or Hushani,^ was, as I
^ Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks^ p. 17.
2 Prof. Vamb^ry, in a letter in The limes of Dec. 6, 1893, derives Oxus
from the Turkish Ogh-ur, meaning great [pgh) water («r), where the Celtic
ogy great, and us^ for uisce^ both appear. Captain Raverty, in the same paper,
gives the older name of the Oxus as Ji-hun, the Gihon of Genesis. This
latter name takes us back to the Akkadian sr, life, and thus the name means
the creator (^//w) of life, {zi ox ji) the parent-god of the star-worshipping sons
of the rivers, the Vahlika of Balkh on the Oxus, whose history I have given
in Essay ill.
' Numbers xiii, 17.
ESSAY VI 647
have shown, the leader of the Ephraimites, the reforming
sons of Joseph, the prophet-god, who introduced the worship
of the divine spirit, the Lord of Righteousness. His com-
panion and fellow-conqueror Caleb, the dog, was in his first
avatar the fire-god, brother of Ram, the mountain, or dark-
ness, but he has in this episode become the son of Jephunneh,
meaning * the beautiful youth,** a reproduction of the birth
of the sun-god Achilles, as the son of Peleus, the beautiful
prophet-youth. It was they who returned to the camp of
the Israelites with a bunch of grapes from Eshcol (meaning
* the bunch of grapes '), as the evidence of the success of their
mission.^
It was also these Celtic worshippers of the wine-god who
introduced into the Eleusinian mysteries the young sun-god,
lakkos, that is to say, fi-Fa/c/co?, the god invoked with the
cry, *Io, or victory .'' They were originally celebrated in
honour of the barley-mother. De-meter, who is represented
in works of art as bearing on her head a garland of ears of
com.* Her worship was brought in by the Cretan Dorians
who called barley Deai, and extends all over Europe in the
honours paid to the last sheaf of com, which is dressed up as
a woman.^ The mysteries celebrated the birth of the next
harvest from the last in the birth of Persephone, the daughter
of Demeter ; and Persephone, the LAtin Proserpina^ is the time-
goddess, the snake creeping forward {pro\ as her name con-
tains the root of serpo^ * to creep,** and serpens^ * the creeping
animal.** * It was at the original spring festival, celebrated in
Anthesterion at the end of February or the beginning of
March, the Magh festival of the Hindus, that the new com was
eaten. It was then that the lesser mysteries were performed,
and it was in the days of the Ashvins, the barley-growers and
worshippers of their ancestors, that the greater festival was
^ Numbers xiii. 6-33.
' Smith, Classical Dictionary f s.v. * Demeter.*
• Frazer, The Golden Bought vol. i. p. 331.
* Curtius, Griechische Etymologies No. 338, p. 265.
548 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
transferred to the autumn month Boedromion, when the
Nekusia, or services to the dead, were also held. It was their
Aryan successors who made Dionysus, who was originally
called Dionysus of the tree, the son of the tree-mother, into
the Aryan father-god. He was first the god of the races who
cultivated fruit-trees, for not only was the vine sacred to
him, but there was a flowery Dionysus in Attica and Patrae
in Achaia, and the pine and ivy, the sacred trees of the
Northern Dravidians, and the fig, the mother-tree of the red
races and the Indian Nagas, were consecrated to him. He
was the Northern spring-god, whose coming is celebrated by
the Lydians in the spring. In short, even before the coming
of the Aryans, he was the father-god of the united races of
Northern and Southern cultivators, who grew fruits in the
middle zone extending from Asia Minor to Persia, and added
autumn, the season in which fruits ripen, to the three seasons
of the earliest sons of the twin-gods, and he was the Greek
counterpart of the Hindu Bhaga, the god of edible fruit.
By these fruit-growing races he was worshipped as a bull,
the horned Dionysus, called cow-bom, bull-shaped, bull-
faced, bull-browed, bull-homed, hom-bearing, two-honied,
and liomed ; but before he was the moon-bull he was the
goat-god, who is represented as drinking raw goat''s blood.
His worship also passed through the phase of human sacri-
fices introduced by the yellow race, for human victims were
torn in pieces at his rites in Chios and Tenedos, and in B(£otia
a child was said to have been formerly sacrificed to him, for -
which a goat was substituted in the days of moon-worship. .
This victim was at Orchomenos supplied by the women -
of a family called Oleije, or the sons of the mother oil-tree-=
of Semitic Palestine. At Tenedos a new-bom calf was sacri —
ficed to him, and the mother-cow was tended like a womaii.^
in child-birth. In this avatar lie was the young year-calf^
the Marduk of the Babylonians, bom of the cow-mother
But the time of his birth as the year-calf was not that of thc^^
coming of the sun-god in the spring, but the autumnal-
ESSAY VI 549
equinox, the year of the Semitic barley-growers who mourned
at Antioch the death of Tammuz, the old year, and the
birth of the new year at the beginning of Tisri or September-
October.^ This is shown by the song sung to him at his
festivals by the women of Elis, who prayed to him to come
with his builds foot. They sang, * Come here, Dionysus, to
the holy temple by the sea, come with thy gr«u;es to the
temple, rushing with thy bull's foot: O goodly bird, O
goodly bird.** ^ Here he is in this song the winged bull-bird
of the Assyrian temples, the qherubim of the Jews, who
began their year in Tisri, September-October. And we see
also in it the explanation of how he came into the Festival
of the Mysteries celebrated from the 15th to the 25th of
Boedromion, the month of the course or foot of the ox,
called Prosthapada, or the ox-footed month, by the Hindus.
He first became the ruling-god of the sacrifice, as the winged
bull who introduced the year of the star-worshipping barley-
growing races, and was afterwards the victorious sun-god
invoked with the cry, lo.
It is the story of the coming of the Aryan Dionysus, the
8on of Semele of the vine lands, which is told in the mjrth of
Hercules and the Centaur Pholos. In the version of this
myth given by Apollodorus and Diodorus,* Pholos received
Hercules, the returning fire-god, the young sun-god, who
was the son of Alk-mene, whose name means * the moon-
1k>w,' * or the lunar-crescent, thus showing that he was the
successor of the lunar race. Pholos was the guardian of the
^ Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 231.
^ Frazer, The Golden Bought vol. i. p. 320-329, whence almost all this
information about Dionysus worship is taken.
• Apollodorus^ ii. 5, 4 ; Diodorus^ iv. 12 ; Meyer, Indo-Germanische Mythen
Gandharva Kentauren, pp. 49, 51.
* Curtius, Griechische Etymologiey No. 152, p. 132, shows that alk^ meaning
'the defender,' is connected with ark, the Latin arcus^ the bow and ark, the
citadel, while the termination tiiene shows that the defending weapon or fort-
ress here meant must be the bow of the moon, which measures the month,
the Greek men^ the Latin mensis.
550 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
sacred cask of the water of life belonging to the Centaurs^
and is thus shown to be a counterpart of the Grandharras
of the Rigveda, who are the guardians of Soma, the divine
drink. But the cask kept by Pholos was not the pure water
of the Soma moon-worshippers, but wine, and he broached it
for Hercules at his urgent request ; that is to say, Hercules,
the sun-god, made wine the sacred drink instead of water.
The Centaurs, whose agent Pholos was, were attracted by the
smell of the wine, and came down armed to oppose the gift
Hercules defeated them, and killed many with his arrows and
firebrands, and thus secured his property. But in the con-
test Pholos, the god of the dead lunar year, was accidentally
killed by a poisoned arrow drawn from the dead body of a
Centaur, which dropped on his foot, the vulnerable place of
the year-god, as shown in the Achilles legend. As Meyer
shows, the Greek Pholos (<f>6\o^) is the iEolic form of j(pKo^
;^Xoo99 meaning the golden green, and this is the exact trsmsla-
tion of the epitliet Hari-Zairi, used in Zend to denote Soma.^
The form Za/n, which is only a reduplication of Aort,
appears in the Zendavesta in the name Zairi-pashna, the
golden-hcelcd, applied to the star-gods, the Gandarewa, guard-
ing the Soma, who were slain by Keresashpa, the founder of
the lunar year.^ Again, the triple flagon (Tpikdyvvov SeVa?),
the cup with the three lips, reser\'ed for the Ashvins at the
Soma sacrifice,^ and given, according to Stersichorus, by Pholos
to Gergon, one of the monsters slain by Hercules, recalls the
cups made to denote the seasons by the Ribhus, or guardians
^ Zairi is connected with the Sanskrit heranya^ golden ; Zend, taranya^
gold ; a root which also appears in the Slav zlato^ gold ; zeUne^ green ; and in
the Phrygian yXovpbs, the ^ being softened in the same way as the Latin e^uus
becomes the Sanskrit as/iva, and in this case the Phrygian y becomes s in
Zend, h in Sanskrit. The same change takes place in the North German
grun-j-u, to be green ; gru-ni, our green ; the Sanskrit hdr-i-s, Zend zairi.
— Curtius, Griechische Etymologic y No. 197, 202, pp. 202, 204.
' ^i^iyavy InJo'Germanische Mytheftf GandJiarva-A^cntauren^^ip. 175, 176;
Darmesteter, Zendavesta Abdn Vasty 38; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. p. 63 note I.
' Eggeling's Sat. Brdk, iv. I, 5, I ; S.B.E. vol. xxvi. p. 272 note 4.
ESSAY VI 661
of the seasons in the Rigveda,^ and thus Pholos was the year-
god who kept the store of life-creating water, which he dealt
out so as to regulate the course of the seasons and the
growth of living things.
The death of Pholos from the wound in his foot means the
close of the epoch which preceded the enthronement of the
sun-god, and this was marked by the reconsecration of the
wine-god at the time when, as Pindar says, the Centaurs
* who learned to know the sparkle of the honey-sweet wine,
pushed the milk fix)ra their tables ; ' * that is to say, when the
libation made and the drinks drimk at sacrificial feasts were
no longer water, and the milk, curds, and whey offered by
the moon-worshippers to Indra at the Sannaya sacrifice,
but wine.
I have already shown that the coming and conquest of
the Heraclidae must, on the ground of solar chronology, which
makes the solar year begin about 4700 b.c, when the sun
entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, be placed about or
before 5000 b.c. But there is also another line of evidence
which shows the great antiquity of the revolution made by
the race who changed the young prophet-god of the Semites
into Apollo of the lyre, and who made Orpheus, whose name
reproduces that of the Rihbus, or the season-gods of the
Rigveda, their tribal bard or minstrel, who regulated the
harmony of the year, and brought back the dead Eurydice,
the old year, from the grave. It was by their treatment of
the dead that the chronology of the Aryan conquest is
marked, for among the numerous dead bodies found by
Dr. Schliemann in Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenae, none were
burned till the age of the third city from the bottom of the
six superimposed cities foimd on the site of Troy. Here
there were a quantity of urns found containing the ashes of
^ Meyer, Indo-Germanische Mytheny Gandharva-Kentauren^ p. 40; Rig-
ve^Ia, i. 161, 2.
' Find. Frag, 147 ; Barckh, iL 637 ; Meyer, Indo^Germanische Mythen^
Gandharva-Kentauren^ p. 41. •
552 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the dead, and the onlv two skeletons of wairiots found were
^ imbedded in the layer of the second city,^ the largest and
richest of the six, which had, like the Troy of Homer, been
destroyed by fire,^ while in Mycenae the dead appear to
have been subject to a process of mummification, like that of
the Egyptians.* The second city, the renowned Troy of
Homer'*8 Iliad^ is a city of the Bronze Age, for all the
weapons, ornaments, and images in it are made of bronze,
gold, silver, lead, or stone, and the evidence derived from the
numerous tombs scattered throughout Europe, show that the
burning of the dead generally became universal about the
close of the Bronze Age. It was when the cremating and
sun-worshipping Aryans came down from the North that the
struggle began between them and the moon-worshippers, and
one of the principal sites of the contest was that marked by
the city of Troy, a name which means * the boundary city/ *
It was protected by Apollo, the god of the silver bow, the
moon-god, and by Artemis, the goddess of the seven stars of
the Grreat Bear, and was the city of the beautiful prophet-
youth, Paris, the Panis of the Rigveda, the god of the
trading races, and was the Asiatic outpost of the empire of
the moon-worshippers. It was in Troy that Paris lived with
tlie l)eautiful dawn-goddess, Helene, the Sarama of the
Rigveda, the twin and immortal sister of Polydeukes, the
raining-god, who l>ecame the goddess most worshipped at the
close of tlie lunar age, the age of the young prophet-god. It
was by the aid of tlie sun-god, Achilles, who was first
detected by Odusseus, the wandering sun-god,* that the dawn-
maiden, Helene, was brought back to Greece as the wife of
Menelaus, when Troy, the capital of the moon- worshipping
Semite-Dorian races, was taken and burned. In the name of
Menelaus, which means he who withstands men, but which
also includes the other meanings of the root men (ji€v\ endur-
^ Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excavations ^ p. 78. ^ y^^^ p^ j^g^
' From /ar, Ur^ see Curtius, Griechische Etymologie^ No. 238, p. 222.
* Smith, Classical Dictionary ^s,s, * Achilles.*
ESSAY VI 558
ance, wisdom, and though^ we find the beginning of a new
age when the individual, and not inexorable fate, became the
arbiter of events, and when the true king was the bom leader
of men chosen to rule by an assembled people. It is in this
king, Menelaus, whose son Megapenthes, meaning the great
high road on the sea,* married the daughter of Alektor,
meaning the cock of the East, the bird of dawn, that we find
the first beginnings of the new age, an age which traced its
birth from the land of the Chalybes, the makers of steel
(^oXir^), in Asia Minor. This age, when the Homeric poems
began to be composed, a time very long before that of the
completed Iliadj is shown to have then completely superseded
the age of bronze, for in it all arms are made of iron. This
transition stage from the later Bronze Age, when the Northern
cremators first ruled Europe and Asia, to the Iron Age, is
shown, by its wealth of myths and the great social changes it
worked out, to have been a time of exceptional intellectual
activity. It was then that both in Greece and in India the
elaborate metres and forms of poetic expression were formed
and adapted to the measured periods befitting ritualistic
solemnities, and the recital of the deeds of ancestors at the
annual funeral games. And as all these metres, especially
those of India, are founded on the sacred numbers of the
preceding age, they could not have been elaborated before
the Aryan conquest was completed, and the national mind
had become wedded to Aryan ideas. This conclusion is irre-
fragably proved by the Indian sacred metres, which are
declared in the Brahmanas to be (1) the Viraj metre, consist-
ing of three lines of ten syllables each, the number sacred to
the race of early star - worshippers, who worshipped the
moon-goddess ruling the ten lunar months of gestation, the
mother-earth and the three seasons. (2) The Trishtubh of
^ Curtius, Griechische Etymologie^ No. 429, p. 311, shows that lUvi^y ' to
abide,' 'to remain,' is connected with the Sanskrit man^ 'to think.'
' Ibid, No. 349, p. 270, shows that xdTOf, irbvTo%y and irMot^ are all con-
nected with the Sanskrit pathic-s^ a road.
554 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIAIES
four lines of eleven syllables each, sacred to the race who
worshipped the god of four seasons, the god Bhaga of the
edible fruit, and the eleven gods of generation. (3) The
Gayatri of three and four lines of eight syllables each, sacred
to the fire-god, and the Jagati of four lines of twelve sylla-
bles each, to the twelve months of the solar year. It is these
metres which are said in the Brahmanas to represent the
three strides of Vishnu, the time-god ruling the year of
months.^ But these metres, while they retain reminiscences
of the previous rule of the star, fire, and earth worshippers^
entirely ignore the immediate predecessors of the Aryans^
the hated Panis or moon- worshippers, but their influence
appears in the metre of the Gathas of the Zendavesta, which
show evident traces of having been framed while the Aryans
were amalgamating with the lunar races. Thus the Trishtubh
metre of the Gatha Ushtavaiti and Spenta Mainyu is not,
like the Vedic stanzas, made up of four, but of five lines each,
the number of seasons reckoned in the limar year by the
moon-worshipping races, while the metre of the fifth Gatha,
the Vohukhsathrem, written in lines of fourteen syllables each,
witli a caesura between them, is a distinctly lunar metre,
sacred to the fourteen days of the lunar phases. And the
metre of the sixth Gatha Valiishta Istish, contains traces of
solar, stellar, and lunar reckoning of time, for in its four-
lined stanzas the first two conbiin eleven or twelve syllables,
while the third and fourth have fourteen syllables with a
half-line of five added to each.^ It is in the formation and use
of these metres, no less than in the process of Arianising the
languages of the nations they conquered, that we find some
of the clearest proofs of the great length of time that
elapsed between the coming of the Aryan Heraclida? and
that in which we find historians giving the history of events
in chronological order.
In tracing out the picture of the Aryan conquest, the-
^ Eggeling, Sat, Brah, i. 9, 3, 10; S.B.E. vol. xii. p. 269.
* Mill, Vaptas ; S.B.E. vol. xxx. p. 91, 145, 165, 187.
ESSAY VI 555
transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age and its results,
still more clearly than I have hitherto done, we must turn
to the series of myths to which I have previously referred
telling of the contests of the Centaurs and the Lapithse and
events which followed that war. The first recorded battle
is that which happened at the wedding of Pirithous, the
king of the Lapithse, the revolving pole, with Hippodameia,
the tamer of horses, the moon-goddess, the heavenly goddess
worshipped by the race who had found out that the wander-
ing moon and planets were not lawless and untamed steeds,
but that they drew the chariot of time along the appointed
paths marked out for them by tlie great creator. The
Centaurs led by Eurytion, the rainbow-god, tried to cany
off Hippodameia, but were defeated in the attempt, and
Eurytion was cast out of doors, and his nose and ears cut
off.^ The full meaning of the myth will appear still more
clearly if we turn to the story of another Hippodameia, the
wife of Pelops.* It was at a chariot race that Pelops won
his wife by taking out the linch-pins of the chariot of his
opponent iEnomaus. iEnomaus was king of Elis, a name
which means * the plain land ** below the hills,^ and it was
also the sacred land of Southern Greece, consecrated to the
ancient gods of the maritime races, who called it Argos, the
land of the fish or the water-snake. These were always gods
of heaven and of the sea, the encircling ocean-snake, and the
name iEnomaus, which means the only (otVo9, Lat. unas)
measurer,* takes us back to the time when the one god of
time was the god of the dark heaven, the Hindu Varuna, the
Greek Ouranos, who distributes the rains and ordains the
course of the seasons. Pelops, his successor, who altered the
measurement of time by taking the linch-pins out of the
^ Homer, Odyssey, xxL 299, 300.
* Smith, Classical Dictionary y s.v. * Pelops.'
• Curtius, Griechische Etymologic ^ No. 530, p. 360.
^ Ibid, Nos. 445, 461, pp. 320, 327, where he shows the Sanskrit md
becomes the Greek m^.
556 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
wheels of the chariot of ^^nomaus, came, like so many other
Greek reformers, from Phrygia, the land of the Minyans, or
moon-worshippers, and it is his coming which tells us of the
conquest of Southern Greece by the Minyans, who built
Tiryns and Mycenae. It was he who brought with him the
moon-goddess Hippodameia, and introduced the lunar year.
It was when this year was introduced that the nose and ears
of Eurytion, the rainbow-god, were cut off. He was no longer
the capricious but persuadable god, of the rain-showers, who
could be propitiated by the sweet savour of sacrifices or
moved by the prayers of his children, but the stem and un-
bending lord of the unchangeable laws of nature. It was
at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodameia, the moon-
goddess, who succeeded the pole as the ruler of the heavens,
that Theseus first appears among the Lapithse, and in him
we find a mythic hero, who, like the three Centaurs, Eurytion,
Cheiron, and Pholos, unites the stories of several succeeding
epochs. These are marked by his genealogy and the exploits
attributed to him. He was the son of iEgeus, the goat-god,
whom he succeeded as king of Attica ; the slayer of the moon-
bull, the Minotaur; the capturer and deserter of Ariadne; the
conqueror who defeated and married Hippoljte or Antiope,
the queen of the Amazons ; the first ravisher of Helene, the
dawn, wlio was conquered by her brothers Castor and Pollux
(Polydeukcs), and was succeeded by Menestheus, whose name,
meaning the abider, involves, like that of Menelaus, the*
ideas of permanence and steady thought. His name Theseus^
means the civiliser, the organiser, and his mother was Aithra^
the air-goddess, so that he was the son of the race who, like
the Lapitha? and .^olians, called the god of the winds their
father-god. But in the names of Theseus, as in those of
Apollo, Minos, Menestheus, and Menelaus, we find evidence
of a new revolution in myth-making, for the names no longer
mark the epochs of revolving or flowing time, but show by
the adoption of the organiser, the defender, the measurer,
the abider, the withstander, as national heroes, an advance in
ESSAY VI 557
thought, marked by the use of abstraxit terms to denote the
authors of events. It was these which replaced the pictorial
names of an earlier age, such as Eurytion, the drawer of the
heavenly bow; the Lykian or Branchian Apollo, the god
of the fire-spark (XiJ/ico?), or of the roaring thunder; the
Lapithse, sons of the storm ; and Amphigueeis, the fire-god,
lame in both legs ; while in Cheiron and Pholus or Cholus,
we find an intermediate and impersonal, though pictoriaJ
form of thought, marking the deification of the healing-hand
and the golden-green (x^^^^) life-giving drink. This is the
thought of the age which conceived Soma, the soul of life in
the pure rain, dew, and running water as a god, and it is that
in which we find the first stirrings of the scientific spirit which
was to lead the thinkers and experimenters of each succeed^
ing age to make further progress in solving the practical
problems which lie at the foundations of ethical and social
science, in marking the course of time and the motions of
the heavenly bodies, and in finally tracing the path of the
sun in the heavens, and introducing the solar year.
It was in the last epochs of mythic history that the myth
became didactic, and told of the events which marked the
course of history as the work of an author who had as * the
organiser or arranger,** ceased to be in the eyes of the myth-
maker an individual with a distinct personality of his own, and
thus Plutarch, in his account of the deeds of Theseus, begins
the history of his reign with the account of the reforms he
effected. He tells us that *he settled the inhabitants of
Attica in Athens, and made them one people in the city,*
that is to say, he attributes to him the work of the age which
made the city the capital of the province, an age which
dates back to the time of the Kushite organisation. He
goes on to say ' that after dissolving the corporations,
councils, and courts in each outlying town, he built one
common Prytaneum and court-hall, where it stands to this
day. The citadel with its dependencies, and the city, or
the old and new town, he united under the common name
568 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of Athens, meaning the « blooming, freshly flowering city,"
and instituted the Panathenaia as a common sacrifice, he
appointed also the Metoikia, or Feast of Migration, and
fixed it on July 16, and so it still continues.'' This is a
description of the introduction, under the supremacy of the
Palestinian goddess-mother, to whom the oil-tree was sacred,
of the Semitic form of government and ritual under which
the whole people were ruled despotically from the central
city, in which alone the national sacrifices were offered ; and
it is this system which was instituted by Joseph, the Hebrew
prophet-god, in Egypt. Plutarch goes on to tell how Theseus
divided the people into castes, like those of Egypt and India,
called noblemen {eupatridos\ husbandmen, and mechanics;
coined money stamped with the sign of the bull, and adding
Megara to Athens, set up a boundary pillar, on the east side
of which was inscribed * This is not Peloponnesus but Ionia,'
and on the west ' This is Peloponnesus not Ionia.** ^ In all
these changes we find the same distinct evidence of Egyptian
and Semitic influence which is noticeable in the remains
found at Mycena* and Tiryns, and in tlie Athenian year, which
began, like that of Egypt, with the summer solstice; and it was
under this influence that Greece was divided into cities with
their outlying territories, eacli like the nonies of Egypt, having
their protecting god, as Athene was the protecting god of
Athens and the Sun of the Egyptian city of On.^ It was these
cities and their territories which were in the Semitic lunar
age in Greece and in Egypt, before the nonies were united
under one common monarch, ruled by the kings, or tyrants,
who lived in the citadels, of which the remains are found
at Mycena?, Tiryns, and Athens ; and the whole system of
government is one of wliich the roots must be sought in
the Kushite age, when the confederated provinces of an
earlier time were united into a larger federation under one
^ Plutarch, Theseus, The Chandos Classics, vol. i. pp. 14, 15.
^ See the list of the nomes of Eg>'pt with the protecting god of each in
Brugsch's Egyptian History,
ESSAY VI 559
imperial ruler. It was this confederation of the Eushite
sons of the mother-mountain of the East which was imitated
by the Semitic confederacy of the sons of Sinai, the moun-
tam of the moon, or Horeb, the mountain of the supreme
(hor) creator (iJ), and this became in Greece, the Amphi-
ctyonic league of the united Dorian, iEolian, and Achsean
tribes under the god called Apollo, the protecting-god, whose
shrine was at Delphi, whence he issued his decrees as the
god of the divine oracle, the god who spoke to the earlier
Semites through the * ephod,^ ^ that is, the ark, or Aaron in
which the divine spirit dwelt, and like the Semitic god, pun-
ished the guilty, healed the sick, and pardoned the sinner
who had washed away his guilt by performing the prescribed
penances.
The chronological position of Theseus as the author of
results accomplished in a long series of ages of mythic his-
tory, is shown in the story of his exploits, for it was he who,
before he became king, destroyed the Marathonian bull in
Attica, and the Minotaur or moon-bull of Crete. That this
marks the close of the age of Semitic lunar rule is shown by
the customary offerings sent to Crete before his victory.
These were seven young men and as many virgins, the human
sacrifices offered by the earlier Semites, whose number repre-
sents the fourteen days of the lunar phases. It was among
these victims that Theseus went, and it was in Crete that he
was assisted by Ariadne, meaning * the highly renowned,** ^ the
daughter of the moon-father Minos, the measurer, and the
moon-mother Pasiphse, she who shines (phai) to all {past).
Ariadne is the constellation of the Crown, who was placed
among the stars by Dionysus, the wine-god,^ and who is thus
shown to be a star-goddess worshipped by the Northern Votaries
of the wine-god, who called the constellation Corona Borealis,
the Northern Crown. This deification of Ariadne as the
^ See I Sam. xxx. 7, where David inquires of the * Ephod.'
' Curtius, Griechische Etytnologit^ p. 706 note ; Preller, Gr, Myth, ii. p. 532.
' Aratus, Phainomena, 71, 72.
660 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
constellation of the Northern Crown, is an event marking a
chronological epoch. In Essay iii. I have shown that the
deification of the star Regulus or Leo, as Masu or Moses,
who fights with weapons, indicated the change made in
astronomical conceptions when the moon replaced the pole
as the measurer of time. It was then that the field of astral
mythology was enlarged, and the moon-constellation Taurus,
the Hindu Piishya was made the constellation sacred to the
limar year, and the star Regulus was placed at the head of
* the seven sheep of the hero Masu to guard both the pole
and the constellation Taurus, in which the star RohinI of the
red cow, which we call Aldebaran, the mother-star of the
Semite or red race, is the chief star. "" ^ But when the solar
year was introduced, though the constellation Taurus still
retained its importance as that into whicli the sun entered
at the vernal equinox, and which thus began the solar as
well as the lunar year, the guardian of the pole was no
longer thought to lx» the southern star Leo, but tlie con-
stellation B()otes, containing the star Arkt-iirus, which means
the watcher or guardian of the pole. It was this constella-
tion wliicli was crowned iis the king of the nortliem heavens
by the stellar crown. Corona Borealis, wliicli lies close to
B<)otes, looking like a regal circ»let which the king had laid
aside. Thus the deification of Ariadne marked the institu-
tion of the solar year, and the renewed worship of the
northern guardian stars of Artemis, the star-mother, which
now became Charles's Wain, or the chariot of the great sun-
god, guarded by the crowned constellation of the herdsman
Bootes. This was the work of the worshippers of Dionysus,
the wine-god, and this conclusion is confirmed by the name
of the children borne by Ariadne to Dionysus or Theseus,
who were called ffinopion, the wine (otvo^) drinker (7ria)p%
and Staphylus, the bunch of grapes {a'Ta(f>v\i]) while the
solar character of Ariadne is shomi by the story told bv
Homer that she was slain by Artemis, the moon-goddess.^
* Sayce, Hibbcrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 46-48; Essay III. p. 315.
* Smitli, Classical Dictionary y s.v. 'Theseus and Ariadne.'
ESSAY VI, 661
It was through the €dd of the solar astrology, furnished by
Ariadne, that Theseus obtained the clew which enabled him
to find his way out of the lab3rrinth of the moon-bull, and
to trace the path in the heavens traversed by the sun in its
annual course.
He thus appears in this stage of his mythic life as a solar
hero ; while as a statesman he is represented as introducing
the Semitic forms of government of the lunar age. But in
the myth connecting him with the Amazons he is placed
in a still earlier period of social development, when the
matriarchal society was replaced by the patriarchal. He is
depicted as the conqueror of Athens, who first fought with,
defeated, and afterwards married the queen of the Amazons,
called Hippol}rte and Antiope. Hippolyte is, as I have shown,
a name of the moon-goddess, and Theseus^ marriage with her
makes the lunar age succeed that of matriarchal rule ; while
the name of Antiope, which means opposed (aprl), insight
(oTT^), indicates the great fundamental differences which
divided the society of the matriarchal from that of the
patriarchal age, and, like that of Theseus, shows that the
myth was made by abstract thinkers who looked on it as an
epitome of philosophical history. In the story which tells
how Theseus carried off Helene, the dai^n, by the help of
Pirithous, and in return aided him in carrying off Persephone,
or Hippodameia, from her father, Aidoneus, when Pirithous
was slain by Kerberos and Theseus imprisoned,^ we see
again an epitome of earlier history which tells how time,
and the dawn, which marked its birth, was first ruled by
the god of the revolving-pole, Pirithous, afterwards by the
moon-goddess, Hippodameia, and the star-dog, Kerberos, the
Sanskrit Shar\'asa, meaning * the spotted dog.** This epoch
came to an end through the revolt of Menestheus, the abider„
the solar hero, wliich occurred during the imprisonment of
Theseus, and it was as a solar hero that he returned to
resume the government for a time from Menestheus, and
^ Plutarch, Theseus y 19, 20.
562 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
it was his children, a race amalgamated from the union of
all the previous ruling races, who continued to govern the
country and carry on the lamp of light in the great contest
between the sun of light and knowledge and the demon of
darkness and ignorance.
It is in this m\'th of Theseus that we almost find a con-
densed epitome of the conclusions I have deduced in this and
the preceding Essays, in which I have shoi^n how civilisation^
knowledge, and religious research have advanced hand in
hand, and how it is possible, from the religious and native
mj-ths of the older faiths, their ritualistic obsen-ances, his-
torical traditions, linguistic affinities, scientific discoveries,
their monuments and architectural remains, and their art
and poetry, to construct a history' showing the gradual stages
of progress reached by the intermingled nations of the North
and South. In doing this, I have traced the origin of organ-
ised society to (1) the Australioid races of the South, whc^
first permanently cultivated land in the village communiti
of Southern India, and made the \'illage ruled by the mothei
and maternal uncles of the children lx)ni in it the parents
of all its sons and daughters, who traced their birth to th^3
gods of life living in the village grove, guarded from th^
power of the gods of death by the sacred snake, the fertilise]^'
of the land cultivated by the villagers. (2) These matri-
archal Australioid trilK*s were united with the Mongoloid-
Malayan races from the mountain regicms of the North-east -^
and became the worshippers of the gods of generation, undeC
whose rule the matriarchal system of regulating the unioi -^
lK»tween the sexes l)ecame changed into ])olyganious mar —
riages, and it was these jwople who worshipped the triad o ^
gods formed of the father and mother god of the patriarcha /
races and the mother-god of the matriarchal Southerners*.
(3) They were succeeded by the Ural-Altaic fire-worshippers,
and workers in metal from Phrygia, who added the fire-goJ
to the triad of the earlier races, and introduced the religion
of witchcraft and the magic or miracle-working priest ; and
ESSAY VI 563
the fire-worshippers were followed by (4) the great race of
the Kushites, whose supreme god was the great Naga, or
cloud-snake, the first of the gods of heaven, who was no
longer a local god, but the god who organised the seasons
and sent rain and sunshine to the earth, each in their
appointed time. It was these people who formed the great
confederacy of the rulers of the tortoise earth grouped round
the mother-mountain of the East. Their rule was developed
by (5) the star-worshippers, the yellow race, who were the
first growers of barley, who continued the obser\'ation of the
heavens begun by the sons of Kush, and called themselves
the sons of the twins Day and Night, and these became as
stars Castor and Pollux, the physicians of tlie gods, the
turners of the revohnng-pole of the recurring weeks, and
thus guided the progress of time. And it was they who
first developed maritime trade on an extensive scale. (6)
Their successors were the great Semite confederacy of moon-
worshippers who completed the proof of the orderly suc-
cession of natural phenomena by showing that the moon
and planets, who were looked on by the star-worshippers
as wandering rebels against law and order, were, like the
days, nights, weeks, and seasons, bound to follow the ap-
pointed course marked out for them from time immemorial
by the great law-giver, the god Yah, whose rules are un-
changeable. It was they who instituted the tyraimous and
despotic form of government which I have tried especially to
depict in this last Essay, and which led to the great revolt
in favour of lil)erty, joyous life, and art and poetry, which
was led by the (7) Northern Aryans, who were the introducers
of sun-worship, the solar year, and the Iron Age.
I have shown that these people, who all lived before the
stage of narrative history and the difiiision of syllabic and
alphabetical literature, used the myth as one of their prin-
cipal vehicles for the transmission of tribal, national, and
racial history, and that these historical myths, made by
nationally appointed myth-makers, were developed out of
ft
664 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
nature-myths, made to teach the succession of the seasons
and the laws of agricultural processes to the cultivating
races; and the continuity of these myths, which show the
same succession of races and customs as following one another
throughout India, Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Alinor,
and Greece, is the best proof that they were looked on for
many thousand years as giving tlie most accurate accounts
of tlie different phases of historic times. When the infor-
mation given by these m^-ths is confirmed by the progress of
ritual, and by the evidence of archteological remains, the
whole proof is very nearly, if not quite, as trustworthy as
that given by the superposition and correlation of geological
strata, and must, as it seems to me, be accepted as an account
of human growth which is very much more reliable than
that given by the isolated and, for the most part, uncon-
nected assortment of traditions which has hitherto lieen
prefixed to national histories, in which the truthful part
of the narrative is thought to begin with the beginning
of chronological history.
But before closing this series of Essays I wish to say a few
words more about the nivth, so as to illustrate its wide and
ra]>id diffusion in the most remote ages, and the changes it
has undergone since it was the sacred depository of national
lore, formed by tlie accruditt.'d national myth-makers from
carefully-preserved recollections, handed do«ni from genera-
tion to generation, and from tribe to tribe, and guarded from
alteration by ignorant transmitters by the 'taboo,' which pro-
nounced thesL' records to be divine inspirations wliich it was
sacrilegious to alter, and which were only accurately known by
the consecrated guardians of the national history. The first
change in the estimation and diffusion of the myths collected
by the Semite myth -makers was made by the Ar^an bards,
who succeeded the earlier makers of history, and it was they
who changed their ancient histories into narratives much more
ike their accounts of living heroes than those of the earlier
lyth-makers, and between the bardic revision and the popular
ESSAY VI 565
return to the original folk-tale they assumed a number of
differing forms. No better illustration of these vicissitudes
can be found than that given by the various forms assumed
by the myth of Peleus, as recorded by Mannhardt. The
whole story recalls one of the most widely-spread forms of
mythic tales in which the young prince or huntsman comes
to the court of a king whose daughter is about to be offered
to a seven-headed dragon, a demon whose descent must
be traced to the alligator-god of the yellow race of star-
worshippers who sacrificed human l)eings. He finds a
magic sword buried in the dragon-hill, or hung up in
a shrine — the sword of thought or speech. He is aided
by three faithful beasts, and a draught of strengthening
wine, the honey-drink of the star-worshipping prophets,
drunk from three full cups, which, with the three faith-
ful beasts, represent the three seasons of the Northern year,
and the three parent-races, whose totems were tlie wolf,
the bear, and the dog or lion. With the magic sword and
the help of these allies, he frees the maiden by killing the
dragon, cuts out its tongues, and carefully wraps them in a
napkin. Tired with the toils of the fight, he, the maiden
whom he has freed, and the three faithful beasts, who have
followed him, fall asleep ; that is, the year is buried in its
winter torpor, and the old epoch, which is to be replaced by
the new, is about to end. The king^s prime minister, the
chief priest of the faith, which the reforming prince will
overthrow, comes and finds him asleep, kills the deliverer,
takes back the maiden to her father, and claims her liand in
marriage as the slayer of the dragcm of ignorance and false
knowledge. But the three faithful beasts, the three seasons,
or the lapse of time, restore the dead prince to life by the
healing root, the Cheiron of the Peleus story, and bring him
back to the wedding, where he proves his right to the bride
by producing the dragon'*s tongues. In the Noni'egian and
Swedish variants of this story, it is three sea-trolls with their
hounds who are slain by the hero with the help of one or
666 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
three faithful dogs, and of a sword which can kill an enemy
at every blow. This he has obtained from an old woman,
the mother-earth, blinded bv the frost-gods of darkness, in
return for her stolen eyes, the light of spring and summer,
which he restores to her. He sleeps in the lap of the maiden
he has saved, the mother of the new year, and the falsehood
of the knight or tailor who claims the maid, and who is the
god dethroned by the god of light, is proved by the produc-
tion of the trolls'* tongues. In another story, the Siegfried
story of Upper Hesse, in Northern Grermany, it is a dwarf
who shows the hero where the three king^'s daughters are
hidden in a cavern by a seven-headed dragon. He finds there
a magic sword and the strengthening drink, kills the
dragon, and when his brothers, the former reckoners of time,
forciblv take the maidens from him and leave him alone in
the cavern, he proves himself to be their true deliverer by
producing the seven tongues, that is, by proving by speech the
superiority of the sun-god. In the Niebelungen Lied, the
dwarf king Engel, the angel prophet-messenger, who had
been fastened to a stone wall by his beard, takes his young
deliverer Siegfried to the mountain, where the giant has im-
prisoned a maiden brought to him by a dragon : Siegfried
conquers both the giant and the dragon, falls as if dead by
the maiden, who is also apparently dead, and both are
restored to life by Engel with a healing root.
In the legend of Sir Tristram it is said that a king of
Ireland offered his daughter Isot in marriage to whoever
killed a dragon who was devastating the country, and in this
case the year-maiden, imprisoned by the dragon of winter,
disappears from the story, showing that it had passed into
the hands of bards who knew nothing of the meaning of the
original myth. Tristram concjuered and slew the dragon
after a long and toilsome fight, cut out his tongue, and con-
cealed it in his bosom. The poison from the dragon''s tongue
all but killed him. The king's minister finds the dragon's
body, adds some wounds to those originally made by Tristram,
ESSAY VI 667
and having sought for him in vain to slay him, he returns
and claims the hand of the princess. Isot and her mother, how-
ever, disbelieve him, and from the place of the combat track
out Tristram, restore him to life and consciousness by a heed-
ing infusion of herbs and honey, and bring him back to
court. On his return he was challenged by the prime
minister, who finally surrenders his claim when his falsehood
was discovered by the production of the dragon'^s tongue.
In a modem Greek and Albanian story, which brings us
back from the North and West to the Grecian home of the
Peleus myth, the young prince and his two brothers appear
as in the Hessian story of the dwarf. The prince kills the
dragon who guards in a cave the three golden maidens, the
three seasons of the solar year. Then being left behind by his
brothers, he kills a twelve-headed snake, who eats a maiden
every week, and is thus shown to be the old year of the moon-
worshippers, who reckoned time by weeks. When the snake
is killed the hero falls asleep in the lap of one of the maidens
he had saved. The victory is claimed by a Moor, whose
falsehood is proved by the production of the dragon''s
tongues.^
In the variants I have quoted, all the incidents of the
Peleus legend, the slaying of the evil beasts, the production
of the tongues, the wonder-working sword, the sleep, the
restoration to life by Cheiron, the defeat of his traducers,
appear, €uid the only difference between the variants and the
earlier legend consists in the ending of that of Peleus, and in
the introduction of the faithful beasts in the Norwegian and
Swedish variants, who became his two brothers in the
Albanian myth, and it is evident that these faithful beasts,
the totems, appeared in the original myth, as they do in most
of the variants of the Cinderella myth, which is another story
telling of the annual succession of the seasons. The whole
series of the myth and its varieuits clearly point to a Northern
native tale, telling of the slaying of the frost giants by the
. ^ Mannhardt, IVaii/ uttd Feld Kultur^ vol. ii. pp. 52-56.
568 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
spring sun, to which historical additions were subsequently
made, showing how the sun-god was finally adopted as the
true measurer of time by the conquest made by the eloquence
of his sons, who proved the falsehood of those who had main-
tained that other modes of computing time than that indicated
by the path of the sun through the heavens were the most
scientifically correct.
Further proof of the historical character of early folk-tales
is also found in the variants of that part of the Peleus legend
which tells of the transformations of Thetis. These corre-
spond to those of the Greek god Proteus and to those of the
hero of the ballad of Tamlane, and it is from the historical
avatars of the earlier myth-makers that those of Verethragna
in the Zendavesta and of the Hindu Vishnu in the Puranas
•
have been framed; but these last have not been taken in
their original historical order, but are arranged so as to give
Verethragna tlie eight avatars necessary to form the creating
fire-god of the Zend ritual, and to Vishnu the ten incarna-
tions, which make him the parent of all life. The transfor-
mations of Proteus, though they show their lunar origin by
being seven in number, are not so artificial as those of
Verethragna and Vishnu, and appear to be based on the
official national traditions of the succession of races, for while
(1) the moon-lion l)egins the series of changes, it is followed
by (2) the spotted leopard of the star-worshippers ; (3) the
dragon or alligator, the necklace of fourteen stars of the pole;
(4) the wild boar, the lightning and storm-god ; (5) water,
the great Niiga cloud-god ; (6) fire, the fire-god ; and (7)
the mother- tree. ^ In the ballad of Tamlane the Earl of
Murray, the hero, when freed from the power of the elves, or
earth -spirits, the local gods of the worshippers of the mother-
earth, turns himself successively into (1) a snake, the race of
snake and earth worshippers ; (2) a salamander, the sun-god,
who is not destroyed by fire ; (3) fire ; and (4) glowing iron,
the sacred metal of the .Vrvans of the Iron Age, and does not
^ Mannhardt, Atitike JVald und Fdd Ktdtnry vol. ii. chap. ii. pp. 6o, 6l.
ESSAY VI 569
resume his human form till he has been thrown first into a
barrel of milk, the life-giving food offered to Indra, the
rain-father of the sons of Ida, the cow-mother, and, secondly,
into the water of life. This clearly shows that the myth
which had come down to the bard who wrote the ballad was
one that traced its origin to that which told of the birth of
the sons of the Kauravyas, or tortoise race, from the egg laid
by Gandhari, for this was first sprinkled or sanctified by the
water of life, which detached the hundred and one embryos
hidden in the egg, and these were only bom after being kept
for two full years in a pot of clarified butter, the divine seed,
which is reproduced in the barrel of milk of the ballad.
After having undergone these forms of Kushite baptism,
Tamlane becomes (1) an eel, the river fish-god,^ who led Manu
to the spot where the mother Ida, the sanctified earth, was to
rise from the waters and become the mother of the bull-race,
bom from the life-giving milk ; then (2) a frog, the animal
sacred to the rain-god ; (3) then the dove, the prophet-bird
of the moon- worshipping monogamistic races ; and lastly (4)
the swan, the moon-bird, who bore the sun, the swan-knight,
the last winner of the Holy Grail, or water and blood of life,
from his Northern home.^
This mythic genealogy, founded on the old national myths,
tracing the childhood of the human race back to the days
when the children were sons of the village snake guard-
ing its boundaries, still survives in modem Greece, where
unbaptized children are called dragons, the boys Bpaxo^;,
BpoKovTa^j male dragons, and the girls by the feminine form
Spaxaivaj SpaKOvXa, BpaKovTiaa-a;^ and it was this same
belief which caused the young sun-god, the son of Thetis, to
be called Achilles, or the little snake.
This belief also appears in the Telugu story, called Dhar-
mangada Cheritra. The queen of Dharmangada, king of
* See Preface, pp. xli. xlii., for the deification of the eel.
* Mannhardt, Antike IVald und Feld Kultur^ vol. ii. chap. ii. p. 63.
^ Ibid* vol. ii. chap. ii. p. 64.
570 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISIXJRIC TIMES
Kanaka-puri, in Kashmir, the countrj' ruled by the snake-
god, Ila or Ila-putra, the son of Ila or Ida, the rain or
Naga snake, was delivered of a snake, but the child was
falsely said to be a son. The king of Sau-rashtra, the
kingdom of the Saus or Shus, oflered his daughter to the
young prince, and Dharmangada accepted the oflTer. When
the maiden came the snake was given to her as her husband.
She took it, tended it, and carried it to sacred shrines, that
is, made it her conception of the divine being. In the last
of these which she visited she was told to put the snake into
water. She did so, and he was changed into a man, the son
of the Naga race, sanctified by the water of life ; and this
story agrees with other birth-stories derived from legends
framed by the worshippers of the moon-god, the god of the
divine mist, in making the holy water the instrument of
effecting the new birth which changes the sinful nature into
that whicli hates sin.^
This myth of the snaken^hild and of the efficacy of baptisni
is one of the many proofs of the universality of the regene—
rating ceremony of the Dikshaniya, or batli of initiation o
the P2astern worshippers of la or Yah, the great water-god -^
which marked the admission of neophytes as sons of Yali ^
at an earlier period than that wlien the sign of adoption wass^
the rite of circumcision, and later than that wlien alier*
tribes were united by the making of blood-brotherhood
with the matriarchal worshippers of the mother earth-
When the belief in the cleansing, regenerating, and forgiv-
ing god, the lord la of the house of the waters, super-
seded that in tlie anthropomorphic gods of generation, those
who ranged themselves under his baimer and became his
sons were obliged, in India at least, to wash away tlieir
sinful nature in the waters of life. And that this belief
was part of the old pagan creed of Europe, before the days
of Christian baj)tism, is proved by the custom which made
batlnng in the morning dew obligatory on all those who
^ Mannhardt, Autikc Waldund Feld Kultur^ vol. ii. chap. ii. p. 66.
ESSAY VI 571
joined in the ancient Palilia, or spring sacrifice, and by that
which obliged all fathers to baptize and name those children
they wished to acknowledge and allowed to live. This con-
clusion is also confirmed by an account of Carinthian beliefs
quoted by Mannhardt from a work of J. W. Valvassor,
written in 1689. He says that it was believed that some-
times a woman was delivered of a snake instead of a child,
an evident survival of the Greek belief in the snake nature
of unbaptized children. These snakes were beaten with
a rod, the magic wand of Aaron, with which he discomfited
the Egyptian sorcerers,^ the baresma^ or sacred twig of Rhab-
dom€uicy in the Zendavesta.* After being beaten, the child
was thrown into a tub of holy water, as in the Indian tale,
till it assumed a human form. He mentions a priest who
was always said to have been bom in the form of a snake,
and also an old woman, whom he had tried to see, but could
not find, who had assisted at such births.^
The snake origin, the Semite belief in the unseen, hidden,
and unnamed god, which I have traced in the story of Puru-
ravas and Ur-vashT, and the bath of initiation of the Hindu
ritual, all appear in the story of Melusine, the wife of Ray-
mond, Count of Aix, of Provence in France. She married
Raymond, as Ur-vashI married Puru-ravas, under the con-
dition that she, and not he, as in the Puru-ravas story,
should never be seen naked. When he saw her in her bath
under the form of the water-mother snake, that is, when the
sinful nature of the worship of the gods of form was made
manifest by the purifying waters, she vanished, that is, she
became the unseen parent of life, the spirit-god, without
name or form. In this story, as in so many others I have
quoted, we have evidence of the fundamental change in re-
ligious belief brought about by the general adoption of the
^ Exod. vii. 8-13.
^ Darmesteter, Zntdavesta Vendiddd Fargard^ xix. 19 and iii. I ; S.B.E.
vol. iv. pp. 22 note 2, 219.
^ Mannhardt, Antike Wald ttnd Feld Kulttir^ pp. 64, 65.
INDEX
[ The Roman numerals refer to the Essay 5.\
A^ water wife of la, iii. 151, 152 ; v.
470
'A.arony the holy ark of the Law,
chest or breast of God, iii. 218,
219, 255 ; iv. 345 ; V. 489
-^bhiria^ the modem Ahir, sons of
Ahi, the snake, iv. 222
•^b'ramy the father (ab) Ram, Preface,
xxiv ; i. 26 ; iii. 189, I9<, 201, 260,
275 ; iv. 395 ; V. 467, 486, 491 ; vi.
509 ; the god Ram-anu, iv. 340 ;
V. 478; identified with Hindu
Rama, v. 471-473; vi. 509
^chaans ( *Axa<oc), sons of the snake
(^tf), ethnological history of, iii.
176; vi. 501, 505
Achilles^ young sun-god of the solar
year, the little snake (^«), myth
of his birth and death, vi. 529-532 ;
his first name Ligurion, vi. 532 ;
his education by Phoenix, vi. 532-
534
Adam^ the red man, i. 30
Adar or Adra^ the fire-god, iii. 144,
216, 276 ; the boar-g<^, lord of the
pig, iii, 181, 185. See Atar
Aahvaryu, Hindu ceremonial priest
who offers pure Soma, ii. 89; iii.
163, 166, 167, 207, 208, 241, 242,
248
Aditif Aditya^ the primaeval mother,
i. 10; iii. 163, 317; iv. 369 note
2 ; the six Aditya of the Rigveda,
v. 421, 422
Admetus, imprisoned volcanic god,
i. 14; vi. 515
Adonis^ Adonai^ Greek and Phoeni-
cian names of Tammuz (Dumu-zi),
i. 24 ; iii. 185
Adrikdf meaning the rock mother of
fish-god, i. 23 ; iii. 285-286. See
Fish-god
^gina, land of the tortoise ruled by
Phokas, the seal, vi. 523, 524
AloHc races, sons of Apollo, the
storm-god, i. 39
/Escuiapius, the divine physician, ii.
85 ; iii. 231 ; vi. 525
Aeshma-deva, Zend god of the Ashura,
i. 29
Agastya, the star Canopus, father of
the Dravidians, ii. 108 ; iii. 257,
261, 287, 313; v. 432; vi. 512
Aghraeratha, he of the foremost
{aghra) chariot {ratha), son of
Pashang, king of Saukavastan, iii.
145, 190 ; V. 438
^S^ii the lightning-god, i. 10, 21 ;
ii. 107, 117; iii. 134; the fire-god
of the altar, iii. 165 ; the Let tic
fod Ogan, v. 439 ; Og, the king of
lashan, v. 495 ; the teacher, ii. 81
Agni Jata-vedaSy the knower {vedas)
of (the secret) of birth, {jata) the
central fire on the altar, iiL 170,
235
Agni Vdtfvdnara, household fire of
the Maghadas, ii. 109 ; history of
its entry into India, iii. 200-201
AgnTdhra, emasculated fire • priest.
Preface, xv ; iii. 163
Agnyddhdna, establishment of house-
hold fires, iii. 238, 321
Ahi, the Hindu village snake-god, ii.
115 ; iii. 194, 217, 229, 235 ; name
of Osiris, iii. 189 note 2
Ahura=^Asura Mazda, the supreme
Zend god, iii. 134, 164, 266; v.
430 note 2, 431
Ainty the bull of Iran, iii. 145
Airyaman, Zend form of Aryaman,
which see
Aja, sons of the goat, a Bharata tribe,
iii. 115, 117
Akastus. See Peleus myth
Akh-tuj, Gond festival of the axle
{akkha) or plough, corresponding to
Mounuchia at Athens and Palilia
673
574 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
at Rome, i. 8, 13 ; ii. 83, 90 ; iii.
230-232
Akkadians, i. 6, 8-12, 22, 25, 26, 29,
34. 38, 39; ii- 67, 78, 127; iii.
140-144, 147-149, 151, 216, 220,
221, 234, 240, 249, 250, 26s, 285,
291
Akkadian astronomy, iv. 330 - 335,
340-346, 355-374» 377 ; burial cus-
toms, iii. 236 ; iv. 359, 360 ; com-
merce, iii. 281-284 ; priests clothed
in goat-skins, iii. 238; year com-
putation, iii. 291, 292
Akra, Akkra, dancing-ground under
the Sama, or sacred grove of
Munda village, ii. 52, 81, 94 ; iii.
233
Akropolis, central citadel and temple,
survival of the village grove, ii. 41,
52 note ; iii. 154, 161
Akshauhini, meaning axles [aksha),
iiL 279
Allat Alytta, Assyrian and Arabian
goddess, i. 23, 28
Alligator or Crocodile, the parent-
totem of the Maghadas or Bre-
worshippers, sons of Maga, called
Muggur or Makaram by the Hindus,
Mugral and Fuse by the Goods,
Makhar by the Babylonians, Maga-
Sebek by the Egyptians, i. 10 ; ii.
121; iii. 213, 223, 224, 250, 268,
2S4, 2S7 ; became the mother-
dolphin, Akkadian Makhar, Hindu
Makara, iii. 284 ; iv. 377 ; Fuse,
the alligator, became Pushan, the
black Imll, iii. 250 ; the cloud
Para-shara, father of Vyasa, i. 21 ;
iii. 225 ; called in the Rigveda
Vyansa, in the Mahabharata Vyasa,
the uniter, and in Egypt, Sebek,
with the same meaning, i. 10, 20,
21, 27 ; iii. 224, 225, 249, 252, 286 ;
Ribhus, makers of the seasons of
the Rigveda, the Rabu of the
Babylonians, Rahabu, a name of
Istar, and Rahab, the alligator of
the Jews, forms of the alligator
myth, Preface, xix ; iii. 187, 225-
227, 302; iv. 364; v. 495, 498;
they denoted the parent alligator
as the constellation Draco, iv. 400 ;
the Shishumara of the Rigveda and
Puranas, ii. 129 ; iii. 144, 258, 259,
269 ; iv. 368 ; this became Makhar,
the constellation Capricornus of later
Akkadian astronomy, iii. 268 ; It.
377 ; the constellation which, with
that of the bull, drew the chariot of
the Ashvins to the bouse of Divo-
dasa, and which contained the star
Marichi, the fire-spark from which
the Ku§hite race was bom, v. 418,
419
Altar, history of, first earth-altar to
the mother earth, iii. 163-175 ; pit-
altar of the Arabs, Phoenicians,
Kabiri, and Indian Takkas, ilL
196-198 ; horned altar of Apollo
and of the Jews, iii. ^28 ; IGibiri
and Hindu Takkas, iii. 196, 197 ;
the earth-altar of the Ku§hika race,
iii. 220, 221 ; incense altar, iii. 300,
301 ; homed altar of Apollo, and
brazen altar of the Jews, i. 15; iii.
328
Am, the mother Mango, iii. 146, 237;
the Akkadian wild bull, iii. 288
Amats, Hindu caste, iii. 160
Amazons, Greek and Asiatic matri-
archal trilies, i. 5, 25 ; ii. 24 ; iii.
1 76 ; vi. 5 10 ; conquered by Theseus,
vi. 561
Ambd, chief star of the Pleiades,
mother-goddess of the Western
Hindus, ii. 124, 126; iii. 2S7 ; iv.
381 ; eldest of the three Hindu
mother-goddesses, Amba, Ambika
and Aml>alika, iii. 197, 237 ; iv.
336, 337 ; V. 427 ; the Mango {am)
mother, ill. 237. See Triambaka
Ambika^ sister of Amba, and mother
of Dhritarashtra, the blind god of
the meridian pole, i. 21 ; iii. 146,
I97> 237 ; chief of the three sisters,
iv. 336. See Amba, Dhritarashtra
Amhdlikd or Amvalika, third sister of
Amba, mother of Pandu, the sun-
antelope, iii. 146, 197, 237. See
Amba, Pamlu
Amon-ra, the god of the meridian
and house-pole, ii. 125 ; iii. 224,
296 ; son of Lot, the incense god,
iii. 300
Amphidyonic council of Greece, ii.
99
Amritd^ the water of life, the rain
churned from Mount Mandara, iii.
152, 229, 256
Andhita, Babylonian and Zend god-
INDEX
576
- dess-mother of the waters, i. 12 ;
iii. 169, 271
AftgOf meaning burning coal, kingdom
of, iii. 306
Afigtras, priests of the Nahushas who
offered burnt {afiga) offerings, ii.
107; iii. 169, 170; name of the
united Bharadvajas and Gotamas,
iii. 274, 301 ; son of Brahma, iii.
261 ; priests of the Ashvins, com-
pared with Hebrew sonsof Gershom,
Preface, xvi; iv. 369 note
Ani^ Papyrus of, illustrating Egyptian
Book of the Dead, its historical
value, i. 20 ; iii. 251, 267 ; iv. 362,
363
Ankhf Egyptian sacred symbol of
life, i. 20; iii. 251, 252
Annus, the year-ring, the heavenly
circle, iv. 383
Antelope, totemistic parent-god of the
sons of the rivers, called Dara by
the Akkadians, Terah by the Jews,
i. 25, 26; iii. 180, 195, 196, 219,
262 ; iv. 401, 403 ; vi. 509 ; names
traced to Hittite Tar -goat and
Hindi Dhar-ti, water-goddess, iv.
365, 366 ; eaten as totems with
pigs, iii. 180; iv. 366; called by
Akkadian Finns Mas, iv. 366 ;
Masu, son of antelope and corn-
mother, iv. 361 ; year of the black
antelope {mas-luv), and the con-
stellation Hydra, iv. 370, 371 ; land
of the black antelope, called by
Hindus Kuru-kshetra, iv. 366;
Ophir or Opher, land of the black
antelope, iv. 37 1 ; Brahmins, called
Rishi, or sons of the antelope
{rifhya), iii. 149 ; wear black
antelope skin, iv. 367 ; Great Bear,
called the seven antelopes, iii. 269 ;
antelope skin, the shrine of Soma
and the garment of the baptized
neophyte, iii. 149 ; iv. 367 note 3 ;
change of Marichi father of Kushites
into an antelope, iii. 261, 262 ; iv.
364 ; Artemis, the bear-mother, as
the deer or antelope-goddess of the
corn-growers, iv. 360 ; marriage of
antelope father-stars of the Great
Bear to the Pleiades, iv. 376
note 3
Anu, a Bharata tribe, ii. 115, 117;
village races, sons of Sharmishtha,
worshipping Anats or local gods,
iii. 240 ; Akkadian god, iii. 142 ;
the god of the ecliptic pole, v. 494
note ; the eight-rayed star, meaning
God and seed. Preface, xxviii
Anubisj Egyptian sacred dog and
third son of Horus, iii. 187, 313
Apaosha, Zend god, he who bums
{ush\ the waters (a/), called Apapi
or black water {ap) snake {set) by
the Egyptian Hyksos, ii. 128; iii.
265, 321 ; black horse or cloud foe
of Zend Ti§htrya (Sirius), i. 11 ; v.
435
Ape, Hindu and Egyptian totemistic
father-god, iii. 161, 183, 235, 267,
295, 296 ; iv. 363, 364 ; the cog-
nisance of Arjuna the Pandava
leader, the rain-god, iii. 296
Aphrodite, i. 23 ; pigs sacred to her,
iii. 180; also doves, iii. 314; the
fish mother-goddess, iii. 312
Apis, the Egyptian bull-god ; see Bull
and Cow-god
Apollo Aguieus, the god whose symbol
is the triangle, iii. 171 ; vi. 503, 504
Apollo, twin-god of day, son of Leto,
the wolf-mother, i. 16 ; ii. 86, 88 ;
god like Hindu Indra, to whom
no living victims were offered, iii.
328 ; a childless and unwedded god,
vi- 503 ; father-god of the wolf race,
and Artemis, mother-god of the
bear race, vi. 510
Apollo of Delosy his last avatar as the
prophet -god, iii. 159; vi. 518
Apollo Ly cents, the storm -god, the
wolf (Xi^xrof) called by iEolians the
Branchian or roaring-god, successor
of Apollo Aguieus, i. 39 ; iii. 1 76,
213, 263 ; vi. 504 ; original Apollo
Lycaeus, the fire-god, afterwards
became the god bom on theXanthus,
vi. 50s
Apollo Paian, the healing god, ii. 87 ;
iii. 328, 329
Apri hymns of Ashura ritual recited
at animal sacrifices, iii. 172, 175,
291 ; hymn of thirteen stanzas
in the Dirghatamas collection in
Rigveda i., vi. 535
April, plough and rain festivals, i. 8,
12. 13; ii. 83, 132, 133; iv. 336, l^
Apsara, cloud or water (a/) mothers,
i. 6 note, 23 ; iii. 194
676 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
AquariuSj constellation of the tenth
of the star-kings of Babylon and of
Noah, iv. 384 ; of the first of the
thirty year-stars, iv. 377, 380
Arabia, i. 23 ; iii. 256 ; trees indi-
genous in, iii. 281, 282 ; land of
Teman, meaning * foundation ' or
'seed,* iii. 291; land of incense,
iii. 283, 301 ; of Minaeans and
Salxeans, Preface, xli
Ararat, the mother-mountain of the
ancient Iberians, the Kurds and the
fire- worshipping Magi, Preface,
xxxiv ; V. 482, 486
Ardm Sura Andhitd. See Anahita
Argeiphotites, slayer of snakes {argas^
ipyo-s), epithet of Apollo as god of
day slaying the stars, iii. 294
Argo, the ship or wolf constellation
Argo, iii. 257, 258, 287, 289 ; vi.
332; vi. 512, 515, 524
Argos, land of Argo, consecrated to
the fish-god, iii. 300
Argtts, star watch -dog and snake
(d/>7af), slain by Hermes with the
harpe or sword of the crescent moon,
iii. 294 ; V. 465 ; watch-dog of
Odusseus the wandering sun-god,
iv. 351
Anadne, meaning the highly renown-
ed, the constellation Corona Borealis,
abandoned by Theseus and placed
among the stars by Dionysus as the
constellation of the conquering sun-
god, vi. 559, 560
AHesy the ram-star, the first of the
ten father-kings of Babylon, iii.
320; iv. 383, 384, 391 ; the star
that led the Israelites under Joshua,
V. 497
Arjiina^ the fair {Arjuu) god Pandava
leader, the rain-god, ii. 71 note, 75,
76; iii. 273, 275, 299; father of
Kutsa, priest-king of the god Ka,
ii. 71 note i ; iii. 228 ; he bore the
ape on his banner, iii. 296
ArJi'y the ship of the gods, i. 23
Anja, a tribe, sons of the fire-drill
(Arutji), i. 23
Arpachsad, the land {arpa) of the con-
querors, {kasidi) name of Armenia
and of the son of Shem, iii. 179,
189
Artemis^ twin-goddess of night, sister
of Apollo, i. 16 ; ii. 86, 88 ; mother-
goddess of Ephesus, i. 25 ; moon-
goddess, the Munychian Artemis,
ii. 66; iii. 215 ; vi. 507 ; the bear-
mother constellation of the Great
Bear, iii. 213, 232, 263; called the
Braurian Artemis at Athens, the
goddess of the yellow race, to whom
human victims used to be offered,
vi. 507 ; worshipped by the Ar-
cadians as goddess of the Great
Bear,and in the Tauric Chersonesus,
vi. 508, 509 ; Artemis, mother god-
dess of the bear-race, and ApK>Ilo,
father-god of the wolf race, vi. 510;
became the deer-mother, iv. 360 ;
slays Orion, ii. 66 ; a childless and
unwedded goddess, vi. 503 ; festival
to her and A{x>lIo as rain-gods in
Thargelion (May-June), vi. 506
Aryaman, a star-god, the ploughiog-
bull, and the physican, Vedic ami
Zend mythology of, v. 416-422 ; \\,
526
Aryans, Preface, liii-lv ; i. 4, 33-37 ;
ii. 78, 99, 101-122; iii. 329; vi.
554-562
Asar, Assyrian and Egyptian god
(Osiris), i. 9 ; ii. 27
Ash, the father-tree of Odin and
Achilles the sun-god, vi. 529
Ashddha, the Hindu fish-god and his
worshippers, ii. 64, 104 ; Hindu
month of the star Sirius, iii. 268
Ashcra^ Semite equivalent of Indian
rain-pole, i. 9 ; iii. 148, 193
Ashi Variguhiy the enclosing-snake,
2^nd goddess of conjugal union,
iii. 218, 219, and of the spring,
iii. 271
Ashtorethy Semitic moon-goddess, iii.
273, 289, 312. See Istar and
Esther, Moon
Ashur, son of Jacob, iii. 289, 290 ;
v., 434; the Ashurim, sons of
Joktan, v. 488 ; the Ashura
Hittite worshippers of six gods,
Preface, xxix
Ashura, A sura, i. 78 ; iii. 147, 291,
303 ; trading non-Aryan races, ii.
104, 107 ; the Hittites, Preface,
xxix ; worshipi:)ers of six (flj^)gods
of creation, the six seasons of the
year, and of Ashura Mazda, the
Zend god, iii. 288, 289 ; v. 422,
423, 425 ; l)elievers in the divinity
INDEX
677
of pairs, iii. 290, 291 ; and sons
of the Ashvins, iii. 303 ; iv. 348,
349 ; worshippers and sons of the
six stars of the Pleiades, v. 427 ;
become the Semite Ashurim, the
sons of Joktan, the tribe of Ashur,
V. 488
Afhva mddha^ horse-sacriBce of the
Hindus, North Germans, Ugro-
Finns, Scythians, and Romans, iii.
321-323; iv. 336-338, 395. See
Horse
Afhvattka-tree {Ficus religiosa), parent
tree of the Ikshvakus. See Fig-
tree
Ashvattha-matif the Ashvattha-tree,
son of Drona, slayer of the Pa^da-
vas, Preface, xxiii ; iii. 275
Ajhvms^ twin sons of the horse
{A§hva)y twin gods of the barley-
growing races, the twin gods Day
and Night ( Uskdsd-Nakta)y born of
the goddess-mother Saranyu, i. 14,
16; ii. 75, 76, no; iv. 395; v.
428, 429 ; fathers of the Pandava,
twin sons of Madri, iii. 262 ; iv.
337> 368; fathers of the yellow
race of Hittites worshipping eleven
gods of generation, and offering
animal victims, ii. 87 ; iii. 167 ;
iv. 348, 368 ; drawn by asses, iii.
255» 256 ; iv. 337, 340 ; drove
round the pole the constellations of
the bull (the Great Bear), and the
alligator (Draco), iii. 269 ; the Ash-
vins, the sun-maiden and her mar-
riage to the moon-god, vi. 539 ; the
twin stars in Gemini which make
the pole revolve, ii. 129 ; iii. 167,
258, 259 ; connection between them
and the Pleiades, and their place
in the Hindu months, iv. 338 ;
physicians of the gods, ii. 88; iii.
231, 259. 260, 329; v. 421; vi.
526 ; brought barley to India, iii.
215; founders ofthe Soma sacrifice,
iii. 167 ; Ashvin festival of the Sau-
tramani, in which Indra was cured
of intoxication, and the Vaja-peya
festival, iii. 206, 208 ; v. 430 notes
1,2; drinkers of mead {Madku and
Surd) whose worshippers thought
intoxication to be a sign of inspir-
ation, iii. 205, 303 ; iv. 359, 368 ;
drinkers of unintoxicating honey-
37
water, iii. 241 ; makers of Soma,
mixed with sweet and sour milk
and barley, iii. 242 ; rivals of the
mother-bird, the vulture, iii. 243 ;
gods of race to whom the quail
{vartika) was sacred, iii. 24^ ; their
three-lipped cup symbolismg the
year of three seasons, iii. 241 ;
called Na-satya, or those who do
not deceive, in Zend theology and
in the Rigveda, v. 429, 430
Asipu, inspired and officially ap-
pointed diviners, interpreters, and
historians, Preface, xvii ; the
Pra-shastri or Gurus of the Hindus,
iii, 240, 255 ; sons of Joseph among
the Jews, iii. 241, 311
AsSt parent totem of barley-growing
races who worshipped the Ashvins,
i. 16; ii. 91; iii. 255, 256, 277,
307 ; iv. 337 ; the three-legged
ass of the Zendavesta, the year
of three seasons, the long-eared
horse or ass, the father of horses of
Indra, iii. 256 ; iv. 335, 340, 349 ;
the animal consecrated by the rain
and fire-cross, v. 488
Assdr or Askor, the supreme fish-god,
i. 29; ii. 64, 114; iii. 161, 268,
269, 286, 289, 313. See Fish -god
Asiika, son of Jarat-Kari^a, the eight
(asti) stars forming the heavenly
fire-drill, iii. 270 ; son of Vishva-
mitra, iii. 318
Astronomical circle^ measurement of,
iii. 320 ; iv. 383.
Asunvanfj epithet of trading races
who do not press Soma, ii. 107 ;
iii. 274
A/ar, Atri, the fire-god, the devour-
ing (ad), three (/n'), the three
seasons of the year. Preface, xvi,
xvii ; iii. 216
Athdrvans, priests of Atar, Preface,
xvi ; iv. 400
Athene, flower mother -goddess of the
sons of the olive-tree, ii. 85 ; iii.
159) 289 ; a childless and un wedded
goddess, vi. 503
Atkuraiy Egyptian name for Pleiades
and Athyr, month sacred to them,
__ii. 125, 126, 129. »S>^ Pleiades
AyUj son of Puru-ravas and Urvashi,
ii. 84; iii. 211, 262 note, 274; v.
422, 425 ; vi. 524 ; father fire-drill
678 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
of the sons of the horse, iii. i66,
253
Azi'Dahdkaj Zend fire-god and god
of burning summer overthrown by
Thraetaona, iii. 136, 182, 183, 185,
247, 248 ; iv. 346 ; his wives, iii.
179, 180 ; Zend counterpart of
Hindu Vishva-rupa and Vishnu,
iii. 182
Ba, Hittite name for Istar, iv. 345
Baal^ husband of the land, the
Ashera, i. 9 ; iii. 194, 311
Bdbhuns, chief territorial caste in
Behar, ii. 44 ; iii. 202, 225
Babylonian marriage customs, i. 24 ;
iii. 158
BagdiSy Hindu tribe, ii. 44 ; marriage
to sal and mahua-trees, iii. 153,
209
Bahtauli festival of the dead bird of
the Ho and Munda Kols, iii. 244
Baku, Akkadian mother-goddess,
Preface, xxxiii ; iv. 345 ; Bahu and
the Bahram fire, v. 469, 470, 499
Banyan, or bur-tree {Ficus Indica),
parent-tree of the Bharata and
Kushika. Sire Fig-tree
Baptismal bath of regeneration at
Soma sacrifice and Eleusinian
mysteries, Preface, xliv-xlviii ; iii.
238, 309, 310 ; iv. 367 ; superseded
among the Semites by circumcision,
V. 488, 491 ; used by the race calling
themselves sons of the rivers, iii.
217 ; baptism with dew and fire,
iii. 232 ; the flood, a baptismal
bath, iii. 235 ; baptism, death, and
resurrection of the sun-god, iv. 391-
394
Baragyza^ now Broach port on the
Nerbudda, ii. 51, 58, 98
Barbers^ historical importance of, in
the Copper Age of the Kushika,
Preface, xlv, xlvi ; iii. 279
Barhisy sacred Kusha-grass thatching
the altar, iii. 163 ; the autumn
season sacred to the fathers, iii.
174. See Pilri Barishadah.
Baresma^ Zend sacred bundle of
cleansing twigs used in the sacrifice
for rain. See Magic Wand. The
girding of the harcsma^ and the
historical evidence thence furnished,
iv. 405
Barley, historical importance of,
Preface, xviii ff ; i. 14, 15, 17 ;
ii. 49, 58, 60, 91, 122, 128 ; iii.
178, 208, 323 ; vi. 501 ; called in
Cretan de-ai, meaning the plant
of life or god. Preface, xxx ; offered
at the Sautramani and Vaja-peva
sacrifices, iii. 206, 207 ; to the
Pitaro Barishadah, and 'Gnish-
vattah, iii. 207, 227 ; v. 435 ; brought
to India by yellow wolf-race wor-
shippers of the Ashvins, iii. 215 ;
barley growers, sons of Ra, iii.
229 ; successors in India of the
millet growers, iii. 222-224 ; liarley
festival of the Hindu and Ooraon
yellow races, iii. 233; the Udum-
bara sacred fig-tree of the barley
growers watered with water mixed
with barley, iii. 238 ; Yava-shir, a
Soma Manthin cup, mixed with
barley {yava) iii. 242, 243, 310 ;
also the sacramental cup {xvKctbr)
of the Eleusinian mystenes, v. 430
note 2 ; India, the Egyptian barley-
land of the Aron, iii. 252 ; four
seasons of the year of the barley
growing races, iii. 269 ; baptismal
shaving water of the Vai§hya trad-
ing race mixed with barley, iii.
279 ; barley cakes offered to Apollo
at Delos, iii. 328 ; constellations
Virgo and Demeter forms of the
barley-mother, iv. 359 ; the mother
of the sons of the antelope, iv. 369 ;
year of the barley growers begun
with the autumnal equinox, iv. 379 ;
barley offered to and eaten by
Pushan, the bull-god, and Varuna,
iii. 274 ; V. 435, 436. See Yavanas
Basque means forest {baso or vaso)
men, first growers of barley and
builders. Preface, xviii ; i. 15 ; ii.
58; iii. 178, 178; Spanish Basques
dolich(x:ephalic, French brachy-
cephalic, i. 31, 32; descended
from matriarchal races, ii. 43 ;
evidence of the * couvade,' iv. 381 ;
worshippers of Vesar, V'arsu, Vas^
orVasu, the spring rain-god, i. 15 ;
iii. 148, 177, 191. See Barley,
Iberians
Basty Egyptian snake and moon-
goddess, a form of Hat-hor, ii.
125
INDEX
679
Baurts, Hindu tribe, ii. 44 ; sons of
the dog, ii. 90 ; iii. 200 ; marriage
to sal and mahua-trees, iii. 153,
209 ; sons of the well, iii. 200 ; of
the red-backed heron, iii. 284 ;
worshippers of Kudra-sini, iii. 305
Bawrit land of, name of Babylon,
iii. 179
Bear, parent totem of Finns and
constellation, ii. 73, 84; iii. 158,
257, 258, 263 ; vi. 501 ; Hindu
names of the stars of the Great
Bear, iii. 261 ; successive names
given to it by E^ptians, Iranians,
and Hindus, iii. 264 ; its seven
stars mean seven days, ii. 84 ; iii.
299; the Great Bear, the con-
stellation of Artemis, iii. 232 ; the
constellation of the Foundations in
Egyptian astronomy, iii. 267 ; rule
of the Great Bear superseded by
that of the sun, moon, and planets,
iii. 311 ; the Great Bear and Leo,
the lion star-god, iii. 315 ; the
Great Bear and MarTchi, the * spark*
of life, iv. 343. 358 ; Akkadian
names of the Great Bear, iv. 345,
357 ; the Great Bear, called in
Rigveda the seven deer (etas ha) ^
V. 420 ; the stars of the Great Bear,
the Sanskrit Rikshah become the
Rishya, or antelopes, when wedded
to the Pleiades, v. 509
Bee^ by its honey, whence mead is
made, the source of prophetic
inspiration to the barley-growing
twin races, iii. 208
Bel of Nipur and Babylon^ Akkadian
iire-god, i. 38 ; iii. 185 ; iv. 333,
445 ; sun-god of Souris in Orissa,
iii. 285 ; V. 445 ; Bela the god
Bel, the son of Beor, the first king
of Edom, the land of the red men,
iii. 291
Berezi Savangha — Sansk. Brisaya, the
Eastern (Savangha) sorcQxtss, iii. 136
Bhddrapatday Bhadon, Boedromion of
the Athenians, month of the goat
and the alligator, ending with the
autumnal equinox, ii. 67 ; iii. 268,
269 ; month of the festival to the
fathers in India and at Athens, iii.
233 ; iv. 391
Bhaga, Vedic g:od, * the tree of the
edible fruit,' iii. 324 ; v. 417, 422
Bhagavatiy mother-goddess of the
Telis or oil -makers, ii. 87
Bhaga-datta^ given by Bhaga, name in
the Mah§bh^rata of the Icing of the
western garden-land of Saurdshtra,
iii. 324
Bhanddrisy Hindu tribe priests in
Orissa of the Palich Devati, the five
seasonal village gods, iii. 160 ;
use Ku^ha-grass as the tribal mar-
riage bond, iii. 175 note 2, 280
BhdradvdjaSy sons of the lark, iii.
274, 301 ; V. 418 ; predecessors
with the Gotamas of the Kanvas ;
iii. 324 ; Bh&radvaja, priest of the
BhSratas, father of Droi^a, the tutor
to the Kauravyas and I^^davas, iii.
269, 274, 275. See Droi^a
Bhdrata-varsha^ country (varsha) of
the Bh&ratas, early name of India,
Preface, Ix ; ii. 112.
Bhdratiy mother-goddess of matri-
archal village races in the Rigveda,
iii. 173
Bhdratasy Bhars, Bhurs, the begetting
(bhri) sons of fire (bhur)^ i. 37 ;
sons of the bhur or banyan-tree
(Ftcus Indica)^ ii. 48 ; iii. 240 ;
Bharatas and Kushikas, ii. 52 ; war
between the Dra vidian Bharata,
and Aryan Tritsus, ii. 112, 117 ;
sacred fire of the Pailchala Bharata,
iii. 235 ; Bharata totems, iii. 293,
294 ; sons of Sakuntali, the little
bird, and Vishvamitra, iii. 319,
324; sons of Divodasa or Dasa-
ratha, v. 418 ; of the bull, v. 449,
450 , of the Bharat-pur mountain
near Mathura, v. 451 ; of Kai-
kaia, the Gond mother, iii. 191 ; v.
444
Bhimay father of Damayant!, god of
the Gonds, ii. 64, 69, 70, 71 ; iii.
235 ; the Pandava, son of Vaya,
the wind-god of the summer
season, ii. 75 ; iii. 273 ; called
Vrikodara, the belly of the wolf-
god ( Vrika\ i.e. the fire-god, the
slayer of Kichaka, the hill -bamboo,
V. 455
Bhim-setty Dosadh god, counterpart
of Bhima and Rudra, a form of
Ra-hu, iii. 202
Bhishtna^ the sexless sun-god, uncle of
the Kaunlvyas and Papdavas, iii.
680 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
237, 317 ; whose banner is the date
palm-tree of the twin races, and
the tive stars of the meridian pole,
and the four quarters of the heavens,
V. 433
Bkojast generic name of cattle herds-
men and of the sons of Druh^u, the
sorcerers (</rw^) {which see) ^m. 114;
iii. 240; sons of Satrughna, brother
of Rama, v. 462
Bhn'gu, Bhar-ga^ Briges^ inventors of
fire {bhur)i in Thrace and India,
and priests of the fire-god in India,
Preface, XV ; i. 37 ; ii. 83, 109, 114;
vi. 500 ; sons of the dog and pig,
iii. 187, 188; Bhrigu, the wolf fire-
god, becomes in Sanskrit Vrika, the
wolf, vi. 506. See Phrygians and
Phlegyes
Bhuiya, sons of the soil (bhum), ii. 45,
61 ; Hindu-Turano-Dravidian tribe,
sons of the squirrel, ii. 50 ; iii. 192;
marriage customs, iii. 154
BhujUf the devouring fire-god, raised
to heaven by the Ashvins as the con-
stellation Argo, iii. 261 ; iv. 402 note
Bhumiji sons of the soil {bhum)^
Hindu-Turano-Dravidian tribe, who
used to offer human sacrifices, iii.
277
Bii-aty wife of Bel of Nipur, the fire-
god, i. 38
Bi7-gi\ fire-god of the Akkadians, i.
22, 38, 39 ; called Gi-bil by the
Sumerians, iv. 409
BUhah^ wife of Jacob, mother of Dan
{which sec), and wife of the Southern
Sun, iii. 272 ; meaning of her con-
nection with Reuben, vi. 532, 533
Bitido-bu'd, the Gond rain-bird, i. 20 ;
ii. 58 ; iii. 247. See Bird-myth
Binjhiasy Hindu-Turano-Dravidian
tribe, marriage customs of, iii. 154;
marry the mango-tree, iii. 153
Bird-mother y myth of, mother of the
Ugro-Finns, who lays the world's
egg, the Angiiineum Ovum of the
Druids, whence the rain-snakes,
the Na^as, the Hindu Kauravya
were born, i. 22 ; iii. 249 ; the Khu-
bird of the Akkadians, the Ku or
begetter of the Finns, parent of the
trading Shus, the Hebrew Shuham
or Hushim, sons of Dan, Preface,
xxxvii-xxxix, ii. 131 ; iv. 342, 346
{see Hu and Shu) ; Bindo bird of
the Gonds, the rain-bringer, i. 20,
21 ; ii. 58 ; iiL 247 ; the Shyena
bird of the Rigveda, the Saena or
Vafra Navaza of the Zendavesta,
the vulture-bird of frost {Shya),
which brings the Soma or life-giving
rains from heaven, iii. 248 ; iv. 342;
Tatayu,the vulture of the R&mayana,
born {jat) of Ayu, son of Urvashl,
killed by Ravana the storm-god,
iii. 262 ; iv. 342, 343 ; Gridhra, the
moon -vulture of the Rigveda, the
crescent moon, iii. 243, 247 ; the
vulture Nunet, wife of Nun, the
god of life, ruling Egyptian and
Phoenician year, iii. 250, 252, 267 ;
iv. 347, 348 ; Gandhari, the rain or
wetting {dhdri) bird, layer of the
egg whence the hundred Kaura\*ya
or Kushika sons Kur or Kush, the
tortoise Khu, the bird or Ku, the
begetter, were born, i. 20, 21 ; ii.
75, 131 ; iii. 248, 249, 250; Lu-gal-
tuddha, Im-du-gud-khu, or bar,
the storm -bird of the Akkadians,
which brings the rains, iii. 247 ; iv.
340 ; the Kvirinta, the stork, sacred
to Azi Dahaka, the Zend fire-god,
iv. 342 ; the stork of spring of the
Northern races, Lat. Ciconia^ Skr.
Shakuna, allied to Vartika the
spring quail, sacred to the Ashvins
in the Rigveda, becomes Shakuna,
brother of Gandhari, the kite, in
the Mahabharata, the gambling bird
of destroying summer, Pushkara of
the story of Nala an<l Damayanii, ii.
65» 75 ; becomes in the Rigveda
the raven of the magicians, iii. 247 ;
the rain-stork or adjutant {Ctco-
Ilia argala) of India becomes in
Zendavesta Var-eshava, the bringer
of rain {var), the son of Danu, iii.
247 ; the rain-bird becomes the
prophet-raven or crow of Noah,
Elijah, Odin, Apollo, the Finnish
god Lempo, the Varaghna or rain
{z'ar) smiling {aghna) bird of the
Zendavesta, iii. 245, 246, 289 ; iv.
342 ; V. 515 ; the constellation
Corvus, iv. 332, 335. 341, 342 ; the
hawk, the bird totem of the primaeval
mining races and of the Egjptian
Horus, Preface, xxxvii-xxxix ; iii.
INDEX
581
267 ; the Sin-murgh (the moon)
hen (mur^g-A) and the Sin-amru or
moon-hawk (amru) of the Zenda-
vesta, iii. 250 ; the Egyptian moon-
goose, the Hindu Hansa, a name of
UrvashI, iii. 211, 253 ; mythological
history of the rule of Kansa, the
goose, the son of the doe (antelope),
and of Ugra-sena, the ogre, the
chief general of Jarasandha at
Mathura, v. 462, 463 ; and the
birth of Krishna, the antelope sun-
god, V. 463, 467-469 ; the moon-
swan, sacred to Apollo, drawing
the moon-boat containing Lohengrin
and the holy Grail, iii. 302 ; the
Akkadian zu-bird of wisdom, the
Egyptian Dhu-ti, the moon-god
( T'A4)fA), with the ibis beak, iii. 250,
251 ; vi. 534 ; the winged bull-bird,
son of the storm-bird, the Kerubi of
the Assyrians, the Cherubim of the
Jews, the bird of the sacred door-
posts of the twin races, sons of the
bull and the ass, iii. 249, 290, 291 ;
Gad-ura, egg-born son of Vinata,
Hindu equivalent of the Assyrian
Gudibir, the bull of light, the
winged bull-god Marduk, iii. 272 ;
the Sphinx, the moon lion-bird,
winged in Assyria, Asia Minor, and
Greece, wingless in Egypt, iii. 314 ;
the moon -griffin of Mycenae, iii.
314 ; the dove of Istar, Semiramis,
the fish-god, and Noah, the bird of
conjugal union, the constellation
Pleiades, i. 24; iii. 288, 289; vi.
569 ; the prophet Yonah (the dove)
or Jonah of the Jews, iii. 289 ; the
flying horse Pegasus, iv. 395-397 ;
the Phccnix sun-bird, the Benu-
bird of Egyptian mythology, vi. 533,
534 .
Bloody ancient belief in its sacrificial
efficacy as infusing into the earth
the seed of life, iii. 196, 197 ; use
for lustral or purifying sacrifices,
blood-brotherhood as uniting alien
races in marriage, iii. 174, 175,
196 ; invading conquerors, with the
land they conquered, iii. 196, 197 ;
blood infusion by drinking as a
sacramental draught the blood of
human and totem animal victims
sacrificed, iii. 197 ; iv. 348
BoaKy the boar god-parent totem of
the Iberians and fire -worshipping
magicians, iii. 180, 182, 183, 213 ;
god of the phallic sacrificial stake,
iii. 198
Brackycephalic races of Neolithic Age
and their union with dolichocephalic
Palaeolithic hunters, i. 31 ; metal
workers of Bronze Age, i. 32 ; lin-
guistic changes made by them, i. 34 ;
Permian Finns, i. 34, 35 ; Mon-
goloid tribes of Eastern Asia, iii.
153
Brahmins y sons of the sun -antelope,
ii. 68 ; iii. 149 ; iv. 367 ; composi-
tion of sacerdotal order and descent
from Dravidian and Gond Ojhas,
iii. 224, 225 ; classes of, ii. 77 ; the
three orders of Vedic Brahmins and
the orderof their succession. Preface,
xv-xvii
Bratsvo and Bauerschafty Aryan foi m
of village community, ii. 104, 118
Brisaya, the sorceress, iii. 136 ; con-
quered by Divodasa, son of Vadhri-
asha, the gelding priest of the
Bharatas, iii. 269. See Berezi-
Savangha
^;w/5tf^^if of fire-worshippers, i. 6, 8,
32 ; the age when cremation began,
ii. 102 ; iii. 227
Buddha y the story of his birth, iii.
159 ; the story of his early life
a form of the myth of the sun-god,
iv. 396, 397 ; Buddhist chronology,
iv. 399
Bull and the cow-god, the mother
Gaurl, of the wild cow of the Gonds,
ii. 51 ; of the Sumerians, iii. 254;
Leah the Hebrew, and Hittite {le)
wild cow, daughter of the moon-god
Laban, and mother of the seven
children of Jacob, representing the
age of law, iii. 254, 271, 272; iv.
344 ; Gos, the cow-mother goddess
of the Zendavesta, iii. 271 ; Go, the
cow-mother of the Gotamas. iii. 145,
274; of the Tri-kadru-ka festival, v.
425 ; Rohini, the red cow, the star
Aldebaran and mother river-goddess
of the red race of the Aryans, the
Gautamas, ii. 102 ; of Sakyas and
the SalKcan Semites, iii. 175, 254,
315; V. 447; mother of Vala-rama,
the hero of the Mahabharata, whose
682 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
cognisance b the date-palm, v. 446 ;
the bull -god Pushan, first Puse, the
alligator in i\it Song of Ungal, ill.
223, 224, 250, 284; the son of
Push-kara, the maker of Push, he
who makes plants to grow (/«j), iii.
249; the barley-eating brother of
Indra, iii. 274 ; the god drawn by
the goat-gods of time called in 2^nd
Pashang, iii. 190 ; he became the
constellation Taurus, ruling the first
month of the Hindu lunar solar
year, ii. 102 ; iii. 268, 287 ; con-
nection of Pushan and Aryaman,
V. 417; name traced to the Lithu-
anian god Perkunas, v. 437-439,
4S3 ; the god who weds the sun's
daughter, v. 439, 440; the bull-star
Alcyone, Akkadian Alap-ur, the
second of the ten star kings of
Babylon, iv. 383, 384 ; the original
form of the Greek Poseidon, vi. 529;
Gud-ia, the bull la, the three-eyed
cod of Telloh {Gir-su) and Babylon,
tather-god of the sons of Gutium
(Assyria), the Hebrew god, Preface,
XXXV, xxxvi ; iiu 254, 290 ; iv. 400 ;
of the Gautumas, iii. 254 ; Tur, the
Chaldaic bull and revolving-pole,
the Greek Taurus, Hebrew Shur,
the wild bull, iii. 293 ; j<f^Turvasu ;
Apis or Hapi, the Egyptian bull-
god, iii. 198, 224 ; originally the
ape, iii. 267 ; iv. 363, 264 ; sacrifice
of the Kshetrapati ox, the father of
the year, iii. 198, 199
Byblus^ city of the Papyrus, ii. 128 ;
iv. 409
Byga^ tribal priest of hunting tribes,
ii. 54, 90, 95
Cadticeus of Hermes, meaning of, iii.
228, 229
Caleb, first avatar, as son of the dog
{kalb\ the dog-star, father-god of
the fire-worshipping sons of Judah,
iii. 189, 302 ; iv. 352, 400 ; v. 449 ;
second, as son of Jephunneh, mean-
ing the beautiful youth, when he
became the companion of Joshua,
vi. 547. See Joshua
CanopHSy chief star in Argo, ii. 73,
108; iii. 257, 258, 280, 287, 311 ;
V. 433 ; vi. 501 ; city of Eg)iDt, iii.
287. See Agastya,
Captlla and Auriga, iv. 411, Note A ;
v. 419 note 2, 420
Cappadocia, land of, where the wor-
ship of the rain-god originated, i.
16
Caspian Sea, of Kashyapa, the father
of the tortoise race, Preface, xxxv ;
V. 482 ; vi. 501
Casie, compared with family, L 4;
growth ot, out of village commoni-
ties not originally homogeneous, iL
43-45 ; Kushika castes, trade guilds
founded on community of function,
Preface, Iviii, lix; ii. 87; iii. 310, 311
Caucasus, parent land of the Basques
or Iberians, i. 8 ; of goddess Sar,
i. 26
Ce/is and Aryan law of individual
property, ii. 104; Cymric Celts and
Druid priests, li. 131 ; leaders of
the Aryan invaders of India, ii. 105-
107 ; called Tritsus, ii. 105, 107 ;
the people who burned their dead,
vi. 546 ; leaders of the Aryan revolt
against Semite tyranny, v. 480 ; vi.
540 ; worshippers of the wine-god,
vi. 546, 547
Cetttaurs, sons of Ixion, the Great
Bear, who goaded (xci^) the stars
round the pole, ii. 85 ; sons of
Eurylus, the rainbow-god, iii. 299 ;
vi. 522, 524, 555 ; drinkers of milk
before they drank wine, vi. 551
Chakra, the wheel {chakra) king of
Kushambi, eighth in descent from
Arjuna, iii. 287. See Kushambi
Chakra-varti, wheel {^chakra) kings,
name for Kushika kings, who
placed their capital in the centre of
their realm, ii. 99
Chandals, Bengal tribe, ii. 44
Charites^ Greek equivalent of the
Indian Hari, the three seasons of
the year worshipped by the Min-
yans of Orchomenus, Preface, xxv.
See Year-reckonings
Chasas, meaning cultivators, Kushika
caste in Orissa, i. 4 ; ii. 44 ; marry
by tying hands of married pair
together with Kusha-grass, iii. 175
note 2, 280
C/tatur vidsiya, year of three
seasons of four {chatur) months
each, ii. 78 ; iii. 227, 241. See
Year-reckonings
INDEX
583
Chedi, ancient kingdom of the Cheroos
of Central India, ii. 68^ 70 ; mean-
ing of the name, Preface, xl ; ii. 70
note I ; ruled by Shisu-pala {which
s€e)i iii. 254.
Cheroos, ruling tribe of Behar, mean-
ing sons of the bird (chera or chiriya),
that is, the hawk, the mother-bird
of the mining races, Preface, xxxix,
xl; ii. 50, 97 ; branch of the Khar-
wars, and history deduced from the
connection, Preface, xxxix, xl ; ii.
50 ; one of the three Tamil races.
Preface, xl ; iii. 108 ; marriage cus-
toms, iii. 157
Chersontsus, Tauric human sacrifices
to Artemis, the bear-mother, in, i. 24
Chigruy Bharata tribe, ii. 115, 117
Chinese and Akkadian syllabic signs
identical, i. 25
Chiron the Centaur, historical signi-
ficance of the name, vi. 525; Chiron
and Peleus, vi. 525-528 ; Chiron
and Jason, 524 ; Chiron and
Achilles, vi. 531
Chitraftgada^ the variegated {chitra),
necklace {aflgcu/a) mythic king, son
of Shantanu, the fourteen stars of
the constellation of the Alligator,
iii. 225, 226. See Alligator
Chitra-ratha, tribe of fire and planet-
worshippers, ii. 108 ; name of king,
the teacher of the Pai^davas, ii. 74 ;
iii. 301, 320
CholaSy one of the three Tamil races.
Preface, xl ; ii. 108
Chota Nagpore, i. I, 2 ; ii. 45, 61, 62,
76, 121 ; village government in, ii.
90-95 ; constitution of States of, ii.
96,97
Chuttis-gurh, the thirty-six (chuttts)
forts {gtirh), Gond and Haihaya
kingdom, in Central India, i. 3 ;
ii. 47, 50, 52, 97, 103 ; historical
significance of name, ii. 90
ChyavanUy myth of the earthquake
{▼od of the volcanic mountain and
his wife Su-kanya, iii. 259, v. 429
Cinderella, meaning of story of,
Preface, xii, xxv ; ii. 79 ; vi. 567
Circumcision, the making of blood-
brotherhood between the Eastern
Semites and their new land of
Palestine, v. 488 ; superseded the
baptismal bath, v. 488; circum-
cision of Gershom, son of Moses,
and its meaning, v. 488, 489 ; ori-
ginally a ceremony of the Colchians
and other Eastern star worshippers,
V. 491 ; circumcision of the Israelites
by Joshua, and the probable ap-
proximate date of the ceremony, v.
491, 492, 496
Cities of the Dead in India, Assyria,
and Egypt, iii. 236 ; iv. 359, 360
Corvus, or the Crow constellation, iv.
332, 334» 335
Creation, six days or gods of, L 29,
iii. 289, V. 423
Crete, land of Minyans or Dorians,
whence priests were brought to
Delphi by the Dolphin, iii. 286;
Donan customs of, iii. 297, 298 ;
meaning of the minotaur legend of
Crete, vi. 559, 560
Cross, history of, the sign sacred to
the rain-god and fire-god, i. 17-20 ;
on Hindu altar, iii. 167, 168 ; the
Kushika national cross, iii. 221
Cups, two sacramental cups of the
holy Grail filled with the blood
and water of life, iii. 302, iv. 349,
350 ; the cups of the seasons made
by the Kibhus, iii. 227, iv. 364 ;
three-lipped cup of the Ashvins
and Geryon, iii. 241, vi. ; con-
stellation of the cup (hrater), iv.
332, 333. 334» 341. 350. 353
Cyclops, Cyclopes, subjects of Phlegyas,
the fire-god, i. 39, ii. 88, 109, iii.
176, vi. 515
Cypriote six-rayed star, meaning of,
iii. 288, 293 ; Cypriote father-god
Tur, iii. 293
Cypfus, land of fish-mother goddess,
i. 24
Dagon or Dagan, the revered {dag)
god, and the fish-god, ii. 114, iii.
316. See Fish-god
Daitya, races of Indian and Zend
history, the second {diti) races, the
Magi or sorcerers, iii. 184, 185
Daksha, the showing or teaching-god
{dcLk or dok), father of the Daktuloi
or handicraftsmen of Phrygia, and
of the thirteen wives of Kashyapa,
iii. 176, 272 ; one of the six Aditya,
v. 422
Dan^ the Hebrew judge, father of the
A
584 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Shus and Hus, the trading races,
iii. 218, 259, 260, 291, iv. 344, 356,
V. 448, vi. 501 ; extension of rule
of the sons of Dan, iii. 253^ ; sons
of Dan phallus- worshippers, iii. 244
Danu, the Akkadian judge, i. 10,
27, iii. 226 ; Danu, father of 2^nd
Turanians, iii. 218, 219, 226 ;
Indian origin of Danu the judge,
iii. 253 ; the third of the wives of
Kashyapa, iii. 303
DdftavaSj Indian sons of Danu the
judge, i. II note 4, 14; iii, 147,
218 ; the race who worshipped the
year of five seasons, v. 423 ; the
first growers of millet crops, v. 440
Danaoiy the Greek sons of Dan, iii.
218
Dances^ seasonal dances of the Dravi-
dian and Kolarian tribes, ii. 49,
iii. 154-158, 194; description of
in the Rigveda, iii. 204, 205 ; Gond
dances, iii. 224 ; the Greek comic
dances, derived from the village
dances, vi. 545 ; of the Kouretes,
Korubantes, and Salii, Preface,
xxxii
Daray the father-antelope of the
Akkadians, the god la, i. 25, 26,
iii. 195, 196, 219, 262, vi. 509.
See Antelope
Vasaratha, he of the ten {dasa)
chariots [ratha)^ or months of gesta-
tion, i. 26, iii. 191, 265, iv. 389.
See Faiher-gods with two wives,
and Moon
Davkina^ the seed mother-goddess,
mother of the Shus, iii. 151
Deborah^ meaning * the speaking bee,'
the first prophetess and nurse of
Rebekah, iii. 208, 219, iv. 359
Delphi^ meaning the womb, i. 23,
first sacred to the fire-god, ii.
84; iii. 286; vi. 513; embassy
from Delphi to Tempe to fetch
the sacred laurel branch, and the
historical lessons to be drawn from
the rules laid down for the ambas-
sadors, vi. 514-516
Dimetcry the barley-mother. Preface,
xi, xxix, xxxii; iii. 181, 208, 216;
goddess to whom pigs were sacri-
ficed, iii. 181 ; the virgin mother
of the household fire, iv. 361
Desauli^ the village god of the Kola-
rian and Dravidian tribes, a form
of Dharti, to whom the Palasha
{^Butea frondosa)y in which Soma
was brought from heaven, is sacred,
ii. 93; iii. 138, 165, 194, 197
Deucalion^ meaning the wet time,
myth of, vi. 513
Devaydnty daughter of Shukra, the
rain-god ; her relations with Kacha
the tortoise, i. 14, 15 ; second wife
of Yayati, and mother of the twins
Yadu, Turvasu, iii. 148, 239, 241
Dharmay Hindu god of law and
order, father of Yudishthira, eldest
of the Pai?davas, the spring season,
ii. 75 ; iii. '273
Dhary Dhara^ or Dhartiy god and
goddess of springs, supreme god-
dess of Dravidian tribes, i. 21, 26;
ii. 108 ; iii. 194, 304 ; Dhara,
name of Soma in the Rig\-eda, iii.
195 J goddess to whom pigs were
sacrificed, iii. 195
Dhaumyay son of smoke {dAumo)y
priest of the incense worship of the
Pandavas, ii. 74 ; iii. 301
Dhritarashtray he who holds {jdhrit)
the kingdom {ardshtra) ; the blind
house-j>ole king of the Kushikas,
and father of the Kauravyas, i. 20,
21, 27 ; ii. 74, 75 ; iii. 248
Dhu-it\ Eg)'ptian moon-god, also
called Thoth, derived from Akka-
dian c//-//, the god {ti) of wisdom
(ctt), iii. 250, 251 ; vi. 529
Di'bdli or Dipavali, Western Hindu
festival of the Pleiades in Octol)er-
November, ii. 124 ; Gond festival,
iii. 233 ; V. 462
Dikshaniydy baptismal bath of re-
generation taken by all who offer the
Soma sacrifice, Preface, xlvi ; iii.
309, 310; iv. 367 note 2; v. 488;
vi. 570, 571. »SV^' Baptismal bath
Dilmun or Dihun, now Bahrein,
holy island in the Persian first
settlement of the Indian Turvasu
as Ph(Tenicians, iii. 282, 292, 312 ;
iv. 346, 347
Dionysusy son of Semele or Pen-
Samlath, the Phoenician goddess,
iii. 316 ; vi. 542 ; god of the land
of Armenia and of the Phrygian
satyrs, vi. 543, 544 ; lakkhos
drawn by Indian leopards, v.
INDEX
585
475 ; successive avatars of Diony-
sus, as the tree-god, as the ^oat-
god to whom human sacrifices
were offered, the bull -god, the year-
calf of the year of the barley-
growers, beginning with the autum-
nal equinox, vi. 548, 549
IHrghatamaSf meaning the long
{dirgha)dL^tViitss(tamas), collection
of hymns (Rigveda), attributed to,
i. 140-164; their historical mean-
ing as illustrating the course of
astronomical history, vi. 535, 536
Divoddsa^ son of Vadhriashva the un-
sexed {imdhri) horse, the fire-god,
father of Su-das, iii. 269 ; con-
quered by Su-shravus, king of the
Shus, ii. 109 ; iii. 274 ; the Bharad-
vajas, his priests, iii. 274 ; the
house of the Ashvins, to which
they were drawn by the alligator
and the bull, the father of RSma,
V. 418
Dog^ the parent totem of the fire-
worshipping Medes, called Sau-
naka, or sons of the dog {skvan)^
and of the sons of Caleb {kalb^ the
dog) of the tribe of Judah, of the
Spartans, Romans, and Syrian Her-
cules, iii. 187-189; the watch-dog
of heaven, Argus, iii. 294 ; the dog
of Orion (Sirius), and of Odusseus
the wanderinjj sun-god, iv. 351,
360 ; the dog of Finnic mythology,
son of the wind-father, vi. 511,
512 ; the Babylonian and Egyptian
wind -gods, iii. 187. See Sara-m§
Doluhocephalicy Aryan races and
Palaeolithic hunters, i. 31, 32 ;
Australians, Bosjesmans, and Hot-
tentots of the South, i. 35 ; Indian,
Dravidian, and mountain tribes,
iii. 152, 155
Dolphin y the horned -fish of Manu,
iii. 284 ; the god Apollo, who led
his priests from Crete to Delphi,
iii. 286. See Fish -god
Domsy Hindu tribe, matriarchal cus-
toms of, iii. 1 57
Doris, originally the home of the
Dryopes, or sons of the tree {dm),
vi. 516
Dorians^ sons of the spear (d6pt;),
or of the revolving pole (Heb. Dor),
ii. 63; iii. 297; vi. 516; history
and institutions of, compared with
Indian Dravidians, iii. 297-299
Dosadhs, priests of Ra-hu, the Mag-
hada sun and fire-god, i. 27 ; ii.
44, 86, 90, 100 ; sacrifice pigs to
Ri-hu and eat them, iii. 181 ; ritual
of the Ra-hu sacrifice, iii. 201,
202 ; Dosadh gods, iii. 202
Dravida- Brahmins^ ii. 77
Dravidians, sons of the tree, ii. 43,
45» 47, 49. 55. 57, 61, 62, 105,
108, 117-122; iii. 135, 159, 173,
205, 221 ; their strong sense of
duty and reverence for Taw, ii. 62 ;
iii. 296 ; V. 425
Drishtha-dyumna, the seen (drishtha)
bright one (dyumna), reputed son
of Drupada, the sacrificial stake,
king of the Parichalas, but really
the altar of burnt-offering. Preface,
xxiii ; ii. 75 ; iii. 301
Drona^ the Soma cask or seed-vessel
containing the germ of life ; tutor
of the Kauravyas and Pa^davas,
Preface, xxii ; ii. 74 ; iii. 275 ;
Drona-kalasha, the Soma cask,
called in the Brahmanas Praja-pati
or the Supreme God, ii. 74; iii. 228
Drtihyu, son of Yayati and Shar-
mishtha the Banyan-tree {Fictis
Indica), the father of the sorcerers
{druk), ii. 114, 115; iii. 240; v.
463. See Bhojas
Drtiuis, priests of the tree [dm) who
worshipped the Zend god Hu, ii.
131, 132; Druid myth of the snake's
tgg, iii. 249
Drupada, the sacrificial stake, king
of the Paflchalas, ii. 74, 112; the
three *drupadas* of the Rigveda,
iii. 197. See Yupa
Drupadi, reputed daughter of Dru-
pada, and sister of Drishtha-dyumna
{which see), wife of the five Parj-
davas, the year of five seasons, the
altar of incense, ii. 74, 1 12, 113;
iii. 222, 301
Dryads, spirits of the woods (dm),
iii. 158; vi. 516
Dumu-zi, the son {dutnu) of life {zi)
Akkadian name of the God of Life,
whence SemiticTammuz was formed
the sun -god of the year, only son of
Istar, the virgin mother, i. 9, ii,
13, 25 ; ii. 127 ; iii. 150, 263, 289 ;
586 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
god of the Flood legend, iii. 234 ;
V. 425, 467, 478 ; the star Orion,
ii. 127 ; iv. 351, 385, 387, 401, 409.
See Osiris. Benjamin a form of
Dumu-zi, V. 478
Durgd, the mountain-goddess, other-
wise called Su-bhadra (which see),
born sister of Krishna, the black
cloud or antelope, Preface, xxiii ;
ii. 130; iv. 338. 369, 371, 388;
account of her birth, v. 468
Dwdraka, Port of the Western Vish-
nava, the Shus, or Saus, ii. 58, 59,
V. 449, 469
Dyaks of Borneo, ii. 123 ; iii. 152
Easter eggs, ii. 133
Eber, father of the Iberians, iii. 177-
179. 195
Edom, the land of the red men, his-
torical value of list of kings of
Edom in Genesis, iii. 291
Eight, sacred numl^r of the heavenly
fire-god ; eight-rayed star formed
by superposition of the fire-cross
over the rain-cross, the sign for God
and seed amone the Akkadians,
Preface, xxviii ; 1. 18 ; eight-sided
figure of the tortoise earth of the
Kushikas, iii. 221 ; of the phallic
Hindu sacrificial stake, iii. 198 ;
eight tribes of the Gonds forming
Kushika confederacy, iii. 223, 224,
252, 253 ; vi. 501 ; eight stars
forming the heavenly fire-drill, the
Great Bear, and Canopus, iii. 257,
258, 280, 311 ; eight parent con-
stellations of the sons of the vine,
and eight Anu nage, or spirits of
earth, of the Akkadians, iv. 373 ;
eight creating apes of the Egyptian
predecessors of eight creating gods
headed by the Nun or fish-god,
iii. 295, 296 ; eight sons of Vasu-
deva and Devaki, of whom the
youngest were Balaram or Valaram
and Krishna, v. 464, 466, 467
ElatHy meaning the mountain {Ely 11^
or Id) country, the Highland home
of the Akkadians, and of the god
Susi-Nag, east of the Tigris, ii.
140 ; iii, 228 ; iv. 368
Eh'usinian mysteries compared with
the Soma sacrifice. Preface, xliv-
xlix ; v. 430
Eleven months, or gods of generation
to whom the yellow races of the
ancient world offered animal vic-
tims, ii. 49, 79, 87, 94 ; iii. 265-
267 ; eleven stars of Pegasus and
the Great Bear, the eleven parent-
stars of the Egyptians, and of
Joseph's dream, iii. 266-267 » ^
434 ; reasons of the use of the num
ber eleven, ii. 49 ; iii. 266 ; v. 418
437 ; Vahlikaand his ten sons 6ght
ing under the banner of the Ytlpa
or sacrificial stake, and Haman and
his ten sons, iii. 272, 273
original signs of the Zodiac,
iv. 393 ; V. 434
Elijah, ne whose god (Et) is Yah,
the prophet to whom the raven was
sacred, iii. 246
Emasculation, cult and custom of^
traced to the fire-worshippers, iii.
186 ; denounced by the Iranian
sons of the bull, iii. 255 ; sexless
father-gods of the Gonds, iii. 193 ;
of the twin races Marichi, the spark
of fire, Pandu, the sun-antelope,
Ab-ram, the sun-god, Kastor and
Pollux, the sons of the beaver, and
the seven stars of the Great Bear,
iii. 261-264
En-te-na-mas-luv, the divine (en)
foundation (te) of the prince (tia) of
the black (luv) antelope (mas), the
constellation Hydra, one of the Lu-
masi, iv. 370-371
Ephod, worship of, by the Jews,
iv. 344, 345, 361, 410; vi. 559;
the Jewish ephod and the sacred
shirt of the Parsis, iv. 406, 410.
Ephraim, the two Ashes (eper)^
youngest of the sons of Joseph, the
Asipu, or divine prophet, history
of the tribe, iii. 226, 241, 302 ;
iv. 352, 400, 413; v. 491, 492;
their passover, v. 497 note i
Erech, city of Istar, iii. I41, 150, 151
Eri'dUy contracted from Eri-duga,
the holy (duga) city, (eri)^ Euphra-
tean port sacred to la, i. 25; iii. 150,
281, 292
Eritiyesy Greek form of Sanskrit
Saranyu, the goddesses of the three
seasons, i. 16 ; iii. 203 ; v. 428 ;
vi. 510 ; drinkers of honey like the
Ashvins to whom sheep were sacri-
INDEX
687
. 215, 217 ; also the furies,
esses of remorse, iii. 328,
; goat - god father of the
or Anah, the village races,
260 ; iv. 407, 410 ; V. 468,
is two and three wives,
xxiv ; iii. 307 ; iv. 365 ;
he Amorites, v. 495. See
jods with two wives
brm of Istar, the Plebrew
:h, the moon-goddess, iii.
le mother-goddess of the
unar year, iv. 392
, the Hu-kairya, or active
creator {hii) of the Zends,
he garden of God, iii. 219,
lied in genealogy of Abram
iis Nahor, iii. 195 ; iv. 364 ;
e Tigris the original twin
. 493
oon-goddess mother of the
Minos, Rhadamanthus and
1, i. 39 ; iii. 217
the Greek rainlxjw god,
g to Vedic K rishanu, iii. 299;
360 ; V. 422, 444 ; vi. 522,
; his nose and ears cut off
Lapitha.', vi. 555 ; the
of the mutilation ex-
556
r with two, three y and four
he three, four, and five
)f the year, and the union
>rthemand Southern races;
)f the fire-drill and his two
!barley-mother,themother-
d her daughter, the seed-
eface, xvii-xxviii, xlix; La-
imga or Linga, and his two
dah or Ida, the sheep and
i-mothcr, and Zillnh, Tsillu
, the mother of the snake
e. Preface xvii, xviii, xix ;
[82, 195 ; two wives of the
i Dahaka, the god of the
summer taken over by his
r, Thraetaona, the rain-
179, 180, 182 ; three
es of Indra, emblems of
i-cloud and their two wives
it by Indra, iii. 182, 183 ;
id his two wive.<, Devayani
rmishtha, iii. 239 ; Dasa-
ratha, father of Kama and his two
wives, iii. 191 ; Gond god Pharsi-
Pen or Pharsi-pot and his two
wives, ii. 73 ; iii. 193, 196, 197 ;
Vichittra Virya, the virile energy
{vitya) of the two (vi) coloured
races, and h\% two wives, iii. 237 ;
king of Maehada and his two wives,
mothers of Jarasandha, iii. 146,
237 ; Goraya or Bhimsen, the Gond
boundary, and falher-god and his
two wives, iii. 202, 235 ; Pa^du,
the sun-antelope, reputed father of
the Papdavas, and his two wives,
Prithu and MadrT, 262 ; Abram and
his two wives, Sara and Keturah,
V. 414 ; Lot and his two daughter-
wives, iii. 300 ; Osiris and Set,
Isis and Nebthat, iii. 271 ; Susi-
nag and his two wives, Vashti and
Esther, iii. 273 ; Kai)sa, the goose
year-god, and his two wives, v. 468;
Esau, the goat-god, and his two
Hittite and third Arab wife, iii. 307;
i^'* 365 * Kudra and his three wives
(tri-ambikd)^ iii. 196, 197 ; v. 428 ;
Jacob and his four wives, iii. 271 ;
V. 434 ; Zend Rama Hvastra and
his four wives, iii. 270, 27 1
Fig-tree, sacred parent-tree of the
gardening races of Syria and India,
the Banyan or Bur-tree {Ficus
Indica), the parent - tree of the
Bharatas, ii. 48 ; iii. 239, 242 ;
v. 426 ; the Udumbara tree {Ficus
glomeraia)y the parent-tree of the
Vaishya^ or trading races, who in-
stituted 'the Soma sacrifice. Preface,
xxiv; ii. 81, 118 ; iii. 238, 239, 243,
270, 279, 327 ; iv. 367 ; Ashvattha-
tree {Ficus religiosd), the Pipal-
tree, son of Drona, the Soma or
seed («/) vessel, Preface, xxiii, xxv ;
iii. t6o, 211, 275; V. 422; the
Plaksha-tree {Ficus infectoria), on
the Jumna, the tree of union of
the Western and Eastern races,
iii. 211 ; the Egyptian fig-mulberry,
ii. 125; iii. 158, 253; the fig-tree
of the garden of Eden, iii. 158
Fiji village communities, ii. 55.
Finns, Ugroand Ural-Altaic, Preface,
XXXV ; authors of the myth of the
world's eg{?,i. 22; workers in metal,
i.22; iii. 176; linguistic changes made
J
588 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
by, i. 33-39 ; sons of the pine-tree,
ii. 41 ; Hi. 263, 264; Finnic- Akka-
dian and Hindu gods, iii. 147-149 ;
Finnic races in the Kushite con-
federacy, iii. 161 ; reverence for
women and the house-mother, iii.
186 ; worshippers of the household
fire {joula)y and Ra-hu, the sun-
god, iii. 200 ; iv. 361 ; drinkers of
mead, iii. 20S ; tendency to reli-
gious excitement, iii. 203
Fish-god, the Supreme Go7i, origin of
belief traced to India, i. 22, 23 ;
belief analysed, iv. 374-377; Indian
legend of the birth of the twin
divine fish Matsya, the intoxicated
{mad) god, and Satyavati, the
mother-6sh, from Adrika, the rock,
i. 23 ; iii. 285, 286, 300 ; birth of
Vyasa {set Alligator), father of the
Indian royal races, son of Satyavati,
iii. 225, 301 ; Naga, fish-god, the
soul of life, ii. 107 ; Aphrodite, the
fish-mother, called also Derceto or
Tir-gata in Syria, Mylitta in Syria,
Alytta in Arabia, Allat in Assyria,
Ninlil by the Akkadians, i. 23, 24 ;
iii. 312 ; V. 477 ; Amba, the lead-
ing star of the Pleiades, the fish-
mother of the Hindus, ii. 126 ;
cow-fish mother of the Hittites,
iii. 171 ; Hat-mehit, the Egyptian
fish-mother, ii. 126 ; iii. 286 ; Tarsa
(Venus Aphrodite), the fish-moiher
of the Saboeans, ii. 130; Venus, the
fish-mother, in Pisces, iv. 394 ; the
fish-mother, the dolphin, the Hindu
Makaram, the horned fish of Manu,
who was once the alligator (iii. 268),
and the Greek Apollo, the dolphin,
iii. 284, 286 ; iv. 375 ; v. 477 ;
vi. 517 ; Semiramis or Samerdus,
the Babylonian bi - sexual fish -
mother and bull -father, i. 24;
iii. 254 ; Poseidon, the thunny-fish
and lolus-mother, iii. 286 ; Aphro-
dite and Hermes, the Hermaphro-
dite, and the Hindu Vivasvat
represent the conceptions of the
universal fish-mother {see aboi'c) and
the fire-drill, the universal father,
iii. 212; Mexican fish-god of the
f'lood legend, i. 25 ; Dag-an, the
revered {dag) god {an) or Dagon,
the fish-god of the Phoenicians and
early Semites, ii. 114; iii. 316;
la, the fish father-god of the Ak-
kadians called Sar • Sar by the
Sumerians, and Kha, or Khar, the
fish. Preface, xli ; i. 25 ; ii. 64 ;
iii. 150, 161, 234, 281, 286, 289;
iv. 398 ; of the Jewish sons of
Kohath, V. 489 ; Assor, Assur,
Ashur, the fish -god of the Assyrians,
Ashadha and Assar of the Hindus,
descendants of the mother-goddess
Sar, meaning the six {as) Sars,
ii. 64, 104 ; iii. 161, 269, 289, 290,
313; iv. 376; Hari, the Hindu
yellow storm -god, a male form of
Sar, a fish-gond, ii. 126 ; Salmanu,
Sallimannu, or Solomon, the fish-
father, i. 25 ; iii. 286, 295 ; son of
Bathsheba, the Hittite, the seven
{sheba) measures {bath\ the seven
days by which the lunar year w^as
reckoned, iii. 307 ; iv. 376 ; v. 498;
Sal-fish with the antelope {rifhf),
the parent -god of the Chasas, the
Kushika cultivating caste of Orissa,
iii. 280; Sal -fish, the parent token
of the Sowars, or Su-varna, of
the Southern Kayasths, Mundas,
Ooraons, Khandaits, Koras, Mais
Bhumijes, and Lobars, ii. 126;
iii. 285 ; the Sal-fish and Sal-tree,
vi. 512 ; Nun, the creating fish-god
of the Akkadians, Egyptians and
Jews, hidden in his ark of clouds,
consort of Nunet, the vulture, his
messenger, the year-bird {see Bird-
mother myth), iii. 250, 252, 292,
296 ; iv. 375 ; father of Joshua or
Hoshea, iii. 303, 315 ; iv. 352 ;
V. 495 ; the goat-fish, the constel-
lation Capricomus, iv. 377 ; the
Egyptian fish year-goddess Bast or
Aten, the carp, the Hindu Rohu,
ii. 126 ; Hindu sun-fish-god, the
Makara or porpoise called Pra-
dyumna, son of the antelope,
Krishna and Rukmini, the moon,
iv. 374» 375 J the sun-god, the
twice-born fish-god recreated in the
baptismal hath of Aquarius, iv. 377;
the sons of the fish, the first builders
of temples with a Naos, or holy of
holies, iii. 295, 300 ; the fish sacred
to the goddess of Friday, the
Northern seed {/no), mother Frio
INDEX
589
or Friga, iii. 312, 313; iv. 376;
the fish as a Christian symbol,
iii. 286; eaten at the original
Christian Eucharistic meal, iv. 376
Flood legend^ Akkadian and Assyrian,
i. 9, II, 12, 26; iii. 234, 265 ;
iv. 393; Hindu, i. 11, 23; iii. 173,
234, 284 ; iv. 388 ; Gond, i. 1 1 ;
iii. 223, 234 ; Mexican, i. 25 ;
Hebrew, ii. 129; iii. 234, 265,
289 ; iv. 384, 385, 388
Frangrasyan^ Turanian king of the
country south of the Oxus, the
birth -land of the Kushites, iii. 190;
a great irrigator conquered by the
king of the,Hus-Hu-shrava,iii. 273,
274
FryanOy Zend Xi'iht = Hindu Viru-ano,
or Virata worshippers of the Viru
or phallus, i. 38 ; iii. 136, 137
Gadura, bull of light, egg-born son,
of Vinata, wifeof Kashyapa, iii. 272.
See Bird-mother myth
Gady Hebrew sons of the bull, the
bull -star, afterwards the planet
Jupiter, the great building race,
iii. 254 ; V. 434, 435. See Goths
and Gotama
GalavGj meaning pure Soma, legend
of, iii, 318
Gandhdriy wife of Dhritarastha and
egg-laying mother of the Kauravyas.
See Bird-mother myth
Gandharva^ sons of the land [gan) of
the pole \dhruva) Gandhari's land,
guardians of Soma, ii. 74 ; iii. 195,
301, 320; V. 474, 475; first hus-
bands of Urvashi, iii. 211
Gan-gu Gun-gu or Ganges^ mother-
river of the gan of the Hindus,
mother of Bhishma, the sun-god, iii.
317 ; V. 493
Gaura Brahmins^ ii. 76, 77
Gaurian race, sons of Gaun't the wild
cow {dos gaums), ii. 51 ; iii. 254 ;
physiognomy between the Gaurian
race of Telloh {Girsu) the Phrygian
Satyrs, and the evidence showing
them to be a mixed race formed
from the union of the brachyceph-
alic Finns with the dolichocephalic
Dravidians, ii. 45 ; vi. 544 note 2,
545 ; Go or Gos, the cow mother-
goddess of the Zendavcsta, iii. 271,
of the Tri-kadru-ka festival of the
Rigveda, v. 424, 425
Gautuma, sons of the bull, v. 425,
447 f 485* See Bull and cow-god
G er shorn y sons of Moses, Manasseh or
Levi, meaning the * outcasts' the
second in order of the Hebrew
priestly classes answering to Hindu
Aiigiras, Preface, xvi ; iii. 241 ;
note; iv. 361, 369 note; worship-
pers of six gods, v. 489
Gir-sUy Akkadian, of the Shus, the
modem Telloh, i. 18 ; iii. 140,
172 ; iv, 400 ; inscriptions at, tell-
ing of local imports ; iii. 282, 283
Goat'god the totemistic father-god
Pan of Phrygian mountain shep-
herds; iii. 176; the goat-god of
time Uzava of the Zendavesta, Uz
of the Akkadians, Esau of the Jews ;
iii. 145, 149, 240, 307; iv. 362,
365 ; name traced to Finnic Uk-ku
the great ( Uk or C/g) begetter (/b/),
iii. 148 ; Shu-hu or Shuga mountain-
goat of the Akkadians, iii. 149,
201 note ; Mesham, the father-goat
of the Dravidian ( Tamil) tribes, and
the £g3rptian Osiris, goatofMendes,
iii. 173 ; the Hindu goat-father Ajf,
iii. 174, 196 ; the Zend goat-god
A(;raeratha drawing the chariot of
PCishan or Pashang, the black bull,
iii. 190 ; the king of the cows, iii.
145 ; the goat-god Tur of the
Hittites, who became Terah, the
antelope, iv. 365 ; the Agida, the
goat-born kings of Sparta, iii.
298. The iEgicores, or sons of the
wind-goat of Athens, vi. 544;
iEgeus, the goat-father of Theseus,
vi. 556 ; Satyrs, sons of the goat-god
seduced to be sons of the ass, vi.
544 ; tragic drama takes its name
from the he-goat rpdyos, vi. 545
Gondsy mixed Turano - Dravidian
Indian Gaurian ploughing race,
sons of Gauri, the wild cow, and
the god Lingal, rulers of Northern
India before the Kushikas, i. 3, 8,
II, 13; ii. 43, 45, 48-51, 56, 72,
73. 75. 78, 80, 83, 89.90, 113, 132 ;
iii. 140, 142, 157 ; iv. 381 ; vi. 545;
Sons of the squirrel, iii. 192 ; sons
of Kai-kaia, mother of Bharata,
iii. 191 ; V. 444 ; cultivators of
590 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
millets, and city builders, iii. 222,
223 ; eight tribes of Gonds and
their priests, iii. 223, 224; Gond
year be^nning in Baisakh (April-
May), iii. 201, 230; five Gond
seasonal festivals, iiu 230-234 ; v.
461, 462 ; Gond gods, iii. 161,
I93» 262
Goihs, Gautuma and Getae, the great
building race of the North, sons of
the bull, the Hindu Gotama, Heb-
rew sons of Gad, Preface, xxix ; iii.
289, 290 ; worshippers of the twin
door-posts, iii. 290; their reckon-
ing of the year, iii. 291, 292
Griahra^ the sacred vulture of the
Rigveda, iii. 243, 247 ; See Bird-
mother myth
Groves^ sacred village, i. 5 ; ii. 41,
52; iii. 153, 154, 159, 181;
brought from India to Palestine,
Asia Minor, and Greece, iii. 175
Gud-iOy the bull (ia) the god and
priest king (patesi) of Girsu, iii.
254. See Bull and cow-god
Gud'uay Akkadian city of the dead,
iii. 236 ; iv. 359, 360 ; city of the
goddess Bahu, v. 470
Guilds^ trade, based on villapre com-
munities. Preface, Iviii ; ii. 87 ; their
existence during the Copper Age,
Preface, lix. See Caste
Gnmi-Gosnin^ the central house-pole
father god of Dravidian Males, Mai
Paharias and Kharias, iii. 160, 165,
^n^ 255
HaihaiyaSy royal Gond race, i. 3 ; v.
443
Hadady the son of Bedad, the sun-god,
fourth of the kings of Edom, the
red land, i. 26; iii. 316; v. 475;
vi. 478
Haltumant. or Helmemi^ mother-river
of the Kushite race, in. 145 ; iv.
358 ; of the Jats, v. 481
Hair^ wearers of lovg^ the Turvasu
or Takkas, the early barley-growers,
iii. 207, 279 ; the pig-tailed Mundas
and Ilittites, iv. 339
Haman and his ten sons, iii. 272-273.
See Eleven months of generation
Hanuinan^ the great ape, the Gond
tree-god. iii. 161, 183, 235. See
Ape father-god
Haomay Zend form of Soma. Su
Soma.
fiapi, the son of Horns an ape-
god, iii. 267. See Ape, and Bull
and cow-gods
Hari or Hara^ a name of Vishnu, male
form of the goddess Sar {which ue),
yellow storm and fish-god of the
twin races, Preface, xxvi; i. 17 ;
ii. 126 ; iii. 198, 213, 214, 215, 218,
326 ; iv. 360 ; the god Rama, v.
476; the foxes (dawn and night),
who draw Indra's chariot, ii. 108
HaroHy meaning the road {harran),
the city on the Euphrates, sacred to
Laban, the moon-god, where the
Semite confederacy was founded.
Preface, xxiv, 1, Hi ; i. 27 ; iii. 271 ;
iv. 385 ; V. 478, 479
Hastinaporey city of the eight [asta
or hasta), the eight tribes of the
Kushika, (see Eight), where Gan-
dhari laid the world's egg, iiL 249
Hat'hoTy mother {hat) of Hor or
Horus, a form of Isis, bird mother-
goddess of the mining races ; Pre-
face, xxxviii ; i. 9 ; ii. 125 ; temple
of at Thebes, iv. 354. See Isis
HekatCy the mother of a hundred
{kKa.rhv) children, Greek equivalent
of the Hindu Gandhari, the bird-
mother of the Vedic Saran-yu, and
the Tri-ambika or goddess-mother
of the three seasons of the races
addicted to witchcraft, iii. 197, 215,
216, 249; iv. 340, 341 ; V. 428 ;
drinker of honey like the Ash\nns,
iii. 215, 227
Hephaistos, the fire-god, lame in both
legs, and his wife Aphrodite, the
fire-socket, vi. 504
Heruy Greek moon-goddess, successor
of Artemis, vi. 508, 537 ; her mar-
riage with Zeus the sun-god, iv.
386 ; she changed Argus mto the
peacock with the tail of stars, v. 465
HeracUidiT^ sons of the fire-go<.l
Hercules first called Bhri-gus, and
Phleg>es, i. 38 ; ii. 109 ; vi. 503,
505 ; the second Heracleidae, led
by Aryan Celts, vi. 539, 540
Herakles, or HercuieSy the fire-god,
married to Omphale, the navel, iii.
171 ; (loi;s sacred to, and sacrificed
to him, iii. 188, 189; Hercules and
INDEX
691
Pholos, myth of, vi. 549, 551 ; as-
tronomical myth of the constella-
tions Hercules, hyrsL, and Cygnus,
iv. 412
JffnmSf the Vedic Sarameya or Sara-
ma, the dog of the gods, the tire-god,
ii. 84 ; iii. 187, 229, 294 ; v. 465 ;
vi. 510; Hermaphrodite gods, born
of Hermes and Aphrodite ; iiL 212 ;
the god who placed the seven strings
of the lyre in the constellation of the
Tortoise ; ii. 49 ; iv. 412
ffi-isi, goddess of the wooded moun-
tain {isi) in the creating triad of
the Finns, iii. 245
HitiiUSy called Kheta and Khali, by
the Assyrians, Kathi by the
Hindus, Preface* xxvii ; ii. 59, 68 ;
iv. 339, 368 ; sons of the goat -god
Tar, iv. 365 ; Hittite wives of Esau
the goat-god. Preface, xxiv;iii. 307 ;
iv. 365; Hittite mother of Sal-manu,
or Solomon the fish-god ; iii. 307 ;
iv. 376; Hittite Hivites, or vil-
lagers of Palestine, and the Hindu
Anu, iii. 240; Hittite horsemen
{Hitdshpd) who killed Urvakhshaya
the eldest son of Sama, Preface,
xxviii ; iii. 307 ; Hittite land con-
quered by Joshua, v. 498 ; wearers
of the peaked tiara, Preface, xxxii
Horse^ the totem father of the Iksh-
vaku, sun-worshippers of the twin
races, iii. 166, 167, 308, 321 ; iv.
336, 337 ; of the sons of Odin,
the Ugro- Finnic Voguls, the Scyth-
ians, Romans, and Getae or Goths,
iii. 322; iv. 336, 348, 395 ; v. 483
Hor-shesu^ followers of Horus, prehis-
toric rulers of Egypt, i. 9, 12
Horusy the supreme god (Hor) of the
Egyptians, son of Hat-hor, the mer-
idian pole, Preface, xxxvii, xxxviii,
xxxix ; i. 9, 10, 15, 17; ii. 67, 68,
125, 129 ; iii. 271 ; iv. 389, 409 ; his
sons first the four winds, the four
quarters of the heavens, i. 9; iii. 187,
267 ; afterwards the constellation
P^asus, iii. 267 ; iv. 396
Nosheuy the Ya or god of the Hus, the
original name of Joshua, the son of
Nun, the fish-god, iii. 303 ; iv. 400 ;
v. 495 ; vi. 546
ffotar, the Soma priest who pours {hu)
libations. Preface, xvii ; iii. 324, 325
Houses, round houses iJid round graves
of the sons of the house-pole, the
metal workers of the Bronze Age,
Preface, xxvi ; iii. 177 ; gabled
houses of the Northern sons of the
horse, v. 487
Huy 2^nd, Druid, and Egyptian name
for the creating gods. Northern
form of the Finnic Khu bird, and
the Southern Shu, the begetter, Pre-
face, XXX ; ii. 131 ; iii. 201 note I ;
229, 278 ; iv. 342, 356 ; Hu-ga-ga,
the mother {hu) purifier, Akkadian
name for the constellation G)rvus,
iv. 341 f 342 ; Hu-Kairya, the active
{kairya) begetter (A«), mountain
whence the Tigris and Euphrates
rise, and the rivers themselves, iii.
271 ; V. 493. See Bird-mother
myth, Su, Shu
Hull festival the Saturnalia of
Phagun (February- March), com-
pared with that of Magh, iv. 387 ;
V. 454, 455 ; at Bar-sana in the
Mathura district, v. 453; at 6a-
then, V. 453, 454, 456; at Kosi,
V. 457
Hushanty son of Hu, of the land of the
Temanites (Arabia), third of the
kings of Edom, iii. 291 ; v. 449
Hushinty sons of Dan, iii. 260 ; iv.
356 ; V. 448
HU'Shravay Zend conquering king of
the Hus, the Vedic Su-shrava,
{which see), iii. 273, 274, 291, 303 ;
v. 448
Hydra, constellation of, iv. 333, 334,
371, 373
la, the house (/) of the waters (a),
the Akkadian fish-god who sent
the flood, i. 12, 14, 25 ; ii. 64, 98,
114; iii. 148, 150, 151, 161, 195,
234,265, 281, 286, 289; iv. 347,
369, 398, 400. See Fish-god
lakkhos, the ripe seed grain, the
god of the Eleusinian mysteries,
Preface, xx ; the father-god of the
planet worshippers, called Yakshu
or Jakshu, v. 475 ; god of the
avatar of Dionysus, drawn by
Indian leopards, v. 475 ; the spring
festival in Anlhesterion (February-
March), to lakkhos and the barley-
mother, vi. 547
692 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Iberiansy or people {erri) of the rivers
(f'^ai), originally the Basques of
Asia Minor, the first growers of
barley, Preface, xviii ; i. 15 ; iii 177-
182 ; sons of the dog and the pine-
tree, vi. 511. See Barley
lifd^ Ild^ Ira, Idahy Idu, Iru, the
sheep mountain and cow-mother,
mother-year of three seasons of the
Iberian Basques and Indian Dravi-
dians. Preface, xxiv, xxvi ; i. 11,
37 ; ii. 58, 129 ; iii. 136, 175, 176,
221, 249, 250, 298, 319; V. 418,
423 ; central mother of the Hindu
earth -altar, daughter, wife and
mother of the sonsof Manu, iii. 170;
one of the three Vedic mothers, iii.
172) 173 ; the season of the Indian
rains, iii. 174; mother of the Ilyats
of Persia, v. 423 ; Ida and the
Iravata, the Indian sons of the
rivers, iii. 212, 213 ; v. 493 ; name
originally Tamil, meaning the sheep,
iii. 174 ; the Northern goddess Ada))
or Idu wife of Lamech, and Erina-
vach, mother of the shepherd sons
of Iran, iii. 179, 180, 271, 272;
See Aries and Varuna as the ram-
father
Id-khuy the creating {id) bird [khu), or
TaJthuy one of the Lumasi, first Cor-
vus, afterwards Aquila, iv. 371, 372
Ikshvdkuy sons of the sugar-cane,
{iksha) rulers of India after the
Kushika, sons of the Kusha-grass,
ii. 76, one of the races who founded
the Soma sacrifice, iii. 167; the
united Yadu-Tur-vasu, iii. 295,
308 ; origin of the race, iv. 404 ;
Il'ja^ the Finnic eel-god, and Ila or
Ira, and the father-god of ihe East,
li or EI, Preface, xlii, xliii
Incense worshipy history of, as told in
the myths of Leda, Lot and
DrupadI, iii. 299-301 ; incense-trees
of Arabia and India, Preface, 1 :
iii. 283, 301
Iftdroy rain-god of the Rigveda, suc-
cessor to Shukra, i. 6, li, 14, 18;
ii. 58, 65, 75, 107, 117 ; iii 146,
167, 168, 204-206, 207; destroyer of
phallic- worshippers, iii. 137 ; Indra
and Pushan, iii. 249, 250 ; the
god who ushers in Prajapati's year
of five seasons, iii. 270 ; deprives
Karna, the moon-god, of his mail,
iii. 307 ; the leading god 0[)emng
the year of the Varenya Devas the
year gods of Varuna or Afigra Main-
yu, in the Zendavesta, v. 429, 432
Induy the soul of life in water, iL 65,
70 note, 117; the eel. Preface, xli
Indusy or Sindh, river of the moon
{5%n)y ii. 98 ; iii. 140, 291 ; iv. 356 ;
V. 493
loniansy descendants of matriarchal
races, ii. 99 ; Theseus and Ionia, vi.
5S8
IrdUy Iranians ^ land and sons of the
bull Aim, the sheep and cow-
mother Ir&, the same as Elam,
{which see)y iii. 135, 145, 146, 228 ;
seven kingdoms of Iran, iii. 253
Ird-vatUy sons of the goddess Ira, and
of the Indian rivers called Iravati, i.
II ; iii. 213; V. 493
Ish'dnay the ox, the old year offered
to Kshetra-pati, lord {pati) of the
fields {ksAetra), to make way for
the new year, the calf Jayanta,
iii. 198 ; Ishana, Istar, Durga and
Rudra, iv. 369
Isisy the Egyptian mountain {is), the
cow {ist)y and star-mother Isis-
Satet, a form of the Akkadian Istar,
and of Hat-hor, i. 10 ; ii. 126-129;
iii. 142, 173, 251, 271 ; iv. 332,
354, 389, 409
/r/ar, also called Shuk-us and Tish-
ku, Akkadian and Finnic mountain
(is) mother of Dumu-zi, the son
{dumu) of life {zi) {ivhich see), also
the star-moiher Sirius, and the
Hittite Ba or Ishkara, the Hebrew
moon and cow-molher, Ashtoreth
or Esther, the Egjptian Isis, the
Hindu Ishana, Preface, xxxiii; i. 6,
II, 22, 24; iii. 142-144, 147, 150-
152, 154, 171, 186, 271, 273;
iv. .^32, 338, 339, 345, 3^9, 37 1 ;
v. 389 ; the Sumerian god and
goddess Sar-sar, iii. 161 {see Sar);
a pig-goddess, iii. 181 ; the snake
{isif) mother {tsirdn) of Dumu-zi,
iii. 151 ; the alligator-mother, Ra-
habu, iii. 226 {see Alligator); the
ocean-mother, and female form of
la, iii. 161
Ixion^ myth of god of the axle (I^t-
F-ov) who pours down on earth the
\
INDEX
693
Ichor, or blood of the gods, the
life-giving rain, and his sister,
Koronis, li. 83, 90 : vi. 508
Jacobs his wives and sons, historical
meaning of, iii. 241, 260, 271, 272 ;
iv. 410
JainSi name assumed by the Saus or
Shus, the Indian trading races,
when they became a separate re-
ligious sect, history of, iii. 323-329;
V. 487 ; called Kaya, or sons of the
god Ka, iv. 347
Jamad-agni, the twin {jama) fires
{agni)f a name of the Hindu god
Parasu • Rama, iii. 279 ; v. 443.
Se£ Rama
Jambu'dvipa^ land of the Jambu
fruit-tree(i?ii^/witf/aw^/a»tf), Cen-
tral India, and central kingdom of
the fruit-growing Kushika, sons of
the mango, iii. 146, 253
Jdra sandha^ junction {saiidhi) by old
age {jdra)f son of the mango {am),
king of united Kushikas, Maghadas
and Gotamas, i. 21 ; ii. 75 ; iii. 146;
V. 431
/dts of India, the ancient Getae or
Goths, Preface, xxix ; v. 480 ; the
Srinjaya Paiichalas of the Gangetic
Doab and the Kushika of Kanda-
har, V. 481 ; the Getae of Thrace,
the Guttones of the Baltic and the
Vistula, and the Goths of Gothland,
V. 481, 485-487 ; the Massa or
greater Getae, v. 482, 483, 485 ;
the Eastern or old, connected
with the Cheroos of Bengal and
the Pachade or Western Jats, v.
484
/a/ayUf bom {/ai) of Ayu {lohich see),
the vulture of the Ramayana, killed
by Rama, iii. 262 ; iv. 342, 343.
See Bird-mother myth
Jaxartoe, or worshippers of Jaks,
drinkers of milk, v. 479
JiixarteSf the Aral, the river of Jaksh,
V. 475
JenchOy the moon, or yellow city of
the yellow race, iii. 226, 302 ;
iv. 352, 400 ; v. 495-498
JiwcUi, the rain festival of the Gonds,
held in August, iii. 232, 233
Jobab, the gate (bob) of Yah, son of
Zerah, and grandson of Tamar, the
38
palm-tree, second king of Edom,
iii. 291
Joktan or Jokshan, father of the thir-
teen tribes of the Eastern or Indo-
Iranian Semites, iii. 179 ; son of
Ab-ram by Keturah, v. 471 ; father
of the (land of) Ophir, v. 472
Jonah, the prophet, meaning the
dove of the fish -god of Nineveh,
iii. 289
Jordan, parent river of the Gaddites,
sons of the bull {Gad), v. 493
Joshua, leader of the Ephraimites,
son of Nun, the fish-god, history of,
iii. 226, w; iv. 352, 396, 411;
v. 493-490. See Hoshea
Juangs, Dravidian tribe, customs of,
iii. 157, 160
Judah, meaning 'praised,' Hebrew
equivalent of the Vedic Nara sham-
sha, praised {fhamsha) of men
{nara), the Zend Nairyo Sangha
{which see), the perpetual fire on
the altar, the fire-god, son of Leah,
the wild cow, and parent of the
sons of Shua, the mother of the
trading Shus, and sister of Caleb,
the dog (ha/b), iii. 179, 189, 201 ;
iv. 352, 400 ; alliance between the
tribes of Judah and Levi, iii. 255 ;
iv* 345« 400; V. 489; also father
of the sons of Tamar, the palm-tree,
the mother-tree of the Babylonians,
and of the Shus of Western India,
iv. 344 ; V. 448
Jumna, Sansk. Yamuna, river of the
twins {yama) sacred to Hari, the
god of the twin races and the fish-
god, i. 17 ; iii. 136, 214, 215, 221,
285, 287 ; v. 493
Ka, name of Prajapati, the lord
{paii) of former generations {pra)y
the supreme god of the Hindu star
and moon worshippers. Preface,
xxii ; ii. 69, 70, 1 10 ; iii. 228, 239,
270 ; iv. 396 ; father-god of the
Jains, iv. 347 ; the mother-earth,
the snake-moiher, ii. 93 note ; the
soul in Egyptian mythology, iii.
228
Kabiroi, ancient race in Thrace,
Greece, and Asia Minor, worship-
ping the *gurta,' or sacrificial pit,
ii. 84 ; iii. 196 ; worshippers of
594 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
the seed -cone or triangular god.
Preface, xiii, xxxiii
Kachaj the tortoise (earth), pupil of
Shukra, the rain-god, i. 14
Kadmus^ the arranger, mythical name
of the plough and fire-god who !
subdued the matriarchal Achseans of
Greece, vi. 505
JCa-drily the tree {dm) of Ka, the
thirteenth of the Hindu lunar
months of the year called the wives
of Kashyapi, father of the tortoise
race, and mother of the Nagas ;
iu. 238, 239, 256, 302; iv. 334,
347» 349» 350 ; V. 424
Kai'kaia^ one of the two wives of
Dasaratha, and mother of Bharata
in the Ramayana, and of the Gond
or mountain races, iii. 191 ; v.
444 ; mother of Kichaka, the
hill-bamboo, v. 455, 472 ; the
five mysterious brothers (the five
seasons of the year), called Kai-
kaia, who fought on both sides in
the Kauravya and Pandava war,
iii. 192
Kali, time goddess of the Pleiades
year in Bengal, ii. 130
Kandhs, sons of the sword {khandhd),
mixed race in Orissa formed from
the union of the yellow race with
the matriarchal aborigines, Pre-
face, xxxvii ; iii. 164 ; their human
sacrifices, iii. 275, 277
Kang-dcsh of the Zendavesta, the
country now called Kangra in the
Punjab, iii. 190
Aanvay the young {/:ana) bards,
writers of the 8th Mandala of the
Rigveda, priests of the Yadu-Tur-
vasu, and guardians of the sons of
Sakuntala, the little bird-mother of
the Bhjirata and Dravidian races,
ii. 51 ; iii. 319, 324
Art//', the Vedic god called Vrisha-
kapi. the rain-ape {kapi), iii. 183 ;
the ?:^gyplian Nile-god Hapi, son
of Horus, iii. 267 ; iv. 363, 364 ;
the Tamil name of the Dravidian
ape-god, denoting the eight creating
apes of Egypt, prototypes of the
eight creating gods headed by the
Nun, iii. 295, 296
Kapila^ father of the yellow [kapila)
race, iii. 272 ; iv. 339 ; the eleventh
of the thirteen months of the Hindu
lunar year, iii. 303
KapUa vasiu, the city (zMisiu) of the
yellow {kapila) race, where the
Buddha was born, iii. 159
JCarna, the horned {keren) son of
Ashva, the horse-river, the moon-
god, one of the chiefs of the
Kauravyas, ii. 115; iii. 204 ; iv.
395 ; V. 487 ; history of his birth,
iiL 306, 307. See Keresashpa
Karna - Suvarna, in Bengal, the
Eastern land of the Jain Su-varna
worshippers of Karna, iii. 326-327
Kdshava, mother-lake of the swns of
Kush, the tortoise, the sea of Zarah
near Kandahar, iii. 145, 274
Kdshi, name of Benares, the capital
of the tortoise or Naga race, ii. 98 ;
iii. 146, 197, 237 ;iv. 325
Kashmir^ kingdom of the Nagas,
ii. 115
JCofhyapa, son of Marlchi, the fire-
spark father of the Kushika Naga
or ploughing race, worshipping the
rain-god, ii. 1 14 ; iii. 276, 279,
280, 326 ; iv. 358, 379 ; his thir-
teen wives, daughters of Daksha,
the manifest or teaching god, the
fire-god, the thirteen lunar months
of the year, iii. 176, 272 ; their
names, iii. 303
Kastor^ the pole {stor) of Ka, one oF
the twin sons of Leda, the Greek
twin gods, iii. 210, 263 ; iv. 353,
360 ; story of his birth, and its
historical meaning, iii. 299, 300 ;
the star Kastor called Tur-us by
the Akkadians, iii. 300 ; iv. 339
Kilthi, the great trading race of
Western India, the Hittites, ii. 58,
59 ; iv. 339. See Hittites.
Kiithiaivar^ country of the Kathi, the
Saurashtra, the modern Guzerat,
Preface, xxvii. ; ii. 58 ; holy land
of the Jain Sindhu-Su-varna, the
Western Shus, Preface, xxvii. ;
iii. 324
Kaur^ the tribe who generally hold
frontier provinces in Chota Nag-
pore, Preface, Ivii
Kauravya^ sons of Kur, the tortoise,
born of the egg laid by Gandhari,
i. 20, 21, 23; ii. 74, 75. 76," 1 10;
iii. 156, 237, 248, 262, 306, 317;
INDEX
595
iv. 368 ; V. 427 ; sons of Khu or
Khur, the bird, Preface, xli ; wor-
shippers of the eleven gods of
generation, iii. 272, 273
Kdushaloya, the house, or mother
(aloya) of Kush, the tortoise-mother
of Rama, Preface xli ; i. 26 ; iii.
191. 195 ; »v. 366
ICavdd, Zend father of the Kushite
race, iii. 145, 219
JCavi ICaushj the parent tortoise
{kufh), kings of the Helmend Val-
ley, iii. 145 ; evidence of Finnic
origin of the race, iii. 147, 148
Agresdskpa, the son of Sama, the
Semite, the horned {J^eres) horse
(ofkpa), Zend counterpart of Hindu
Karria {which see), iii. 306, 307 ;
iv. 395 ; V. 487, 494
Aerudi, the winged Assyrian bulls,
the Jewish Cherubim, iii. 249. Se^
Bird-mother myth
JCeturahy second wife of Abram,
mother of the Eastern Semites,
meaning, like the Sanskrit Vritra,
the enclosing goddess, v. 414,
471
Khadira tree {Acacia calechu), parent
tree of the races of dyers and
weavers, who introduced medicine
and made the Ashvins physicians
of the gods, yielding catechu dve
and drug, also tree from which the
sacriBcial stake and the Soma fire-
socket {urvashT) was made, iii. 166,
167, 214, 215
KhandaitSy tribe in Orissa, one of
the group which uses Kusha-grass
as the marriage bond, iii. 175
note 2, 192 ; sons of the Sal-fish,
iii. 285
JChar-sak-kurra, the mother-moun-
tain of the East of the Akkadians
and Kushite races, iii. 143 note 4,
146, 213 ; V. 479. See Saokanta,
Ushi-dhau
Kharwars^ Dravidian tribe, sons of
the hawk and eel fish, parent tribe
of the Cheroos, Preface, xxxvii ; ii.
50; iii. 153, 192 ; offerers of human
sacrifices, iii. 277
JCherias, Dravidian tribe worshipping
the Gumi or house pole, iii. 160
JChvaniraSy central province of Iranian
confederacy, iii. 146, 233
Kichaka^ land of the hill-bamboo
{kickaka)^ name of the country of
which Kashi (Benares) was the
capital, ii. 74 ; iii. 301 ; hbtorical
evidence arising out of the killing
of Kichaka, son of Kai-kaia {which
see)f mother of Bharata, by Bhima,
V. 455
Kohathites^ Hebrew equivalents of
the Sanskrit Atharvans, Preface,
xvi; iv. 344, 361, 400, 410; V.
489
JCot-kopalt ruling tribe of Gonds, the
cow-keepers, ii. 113; iii. 224
Koi-tor^ sons of the mountain {koh\
name of Gonds, iii. 191. See Kai-
kaia
Koh^ Kolarians^ sons of the mountain
{koh\ a republican race who came
to India from the north-east, foun-
ders of the simplest form of village
community, and organisers of the
Parha or province, ii. 47, 49, 52-
56, 59» 61, 91, 94, 99, 121 ; iii.
156, i59i 165, 197, 204; worship,
pers of the mountain goddess,
called Marang Buru, the great hill,
iv. 380. See Mundas
Kore or Kauris the seed grain, Pre-
face, xxix, xxxi ; the Gothic Kaur-n
the corn-baby. Preface, xxxiii
KorwaSt primitive Kolarian hunting
tribe in Chota Nagpore, Preface,
xlii ; ii. 44, 47, 53, 54
Kosala^ name of Northern India, as
the land of Kush, iii. 192
Koure or Kore in the Eleusinian
mysteries, the pregnant mother of
seed, mother ot the Kurs, Preface,
xxxiii, xxxvi
JCrcUeTy constellation of the Soma
cup, the Akkadian goddess Mummu
Tiamut, iv. 333, 334, 340, 341,
346, 349, 353 ; of the Kantharas or
sacramental wine-cup, iv. 373
JCrishdnUy the rainbow god, the archer
of the heavenly bow, the seventh of
the Gandharva guardians of Soma,
Preface, xvi; i. 15 ; iii. 252, 302;
iv. 350, 405 ; the Greek Eurytus,
iii. 299 ; V. 422, 444 ; called in the
Rigveda Su-dharvan, god of the
creating [su) bow {dharvan), father
of the Ribhus gods of the seasons
{see Alligator), iii. 226 ; the usurp-
696 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ing god called Kereshani in the
Zendavesta, who repudiated the
priests and was destroyed by
Haoma, iii. 134; this age called
that of Kansa the goose in the
Mathura l^ends, v. 463
JCrifkna^ the black antelope, the god
Vishnu, father-god of tlie antelope
race, Preface, xl ; ii. 75, 76 ; iii.
309 ; iv. 337, 371 ; the father of the
Hsh-god, the Makara or Dolphin,
iv. 374, 375 ; twin brother of Durga
or Subhadra, the mountain-goddess,
mother of the Shus, iv. 337, 369,
371 ; historical significance of his
birth legend, iv. 388, 389 ; foster-
son of Nanda, the bull, v. 425 ; the
story of his birth as the antelope
god of the barley growers, v. 467,
468 ; his birth and mythic history
as told in the legends and festivals
of Mathura and firindabun, v. 459-
461, 468
ICshetra-paii, lord of the fields {kshetra)^
Hindu and Gond sacrifice to, iii.
198, 199
Kshatriyas^ or Rajputs, the warrior
race of India, ii. 44, 118; sons of
the spotted deer, iii. 149 ; iv. 403 ;
called Sombunsi, or sons of the
moon, iii. 325 ; sons of the sun,
Suraj-bunsi, ii. 102; the red race
whose clothes were dyed with
madder, v. 449; of the bow-string of
Krishanu the rainbow god, iv. 405
Aw, Finnic and Hindu name for the
moon, iii. 305 ; meaning the placer
or begetter, iii. 148
Kunti-bhojas^ the Bhojas of the spear,
(Kunti) the mother tribe of Prithu,
the goddess-mother of the three
elder Pandavas, the warrior cavalry
of Central India, iii. 262, 308
Kury the river of the tortoise, or of
the burning mountain, the Araxes,
called Daitya in the Zendavesta,
parent river of the tortoise and fire-
worshipping races, Preface, xxxv ;
iii. 179, 184, 185; of the Massagetae,
V. 482
Kurdistan and Kurds^ country of the
sons of Kur, Preface, xxxiv-xxxvi
Kurctes or Koure.teSy dancing priests
of the barley-mother and of Zeus,
Preface, xxxii ; vi. 545
Kur or Kurra, Akkadian name for
India, iii. 281, 283 ; iv. 344
Kurmisy Kurambas^ Kudambis^ the
great irrigating agricultural race of
India, sons of Kur {wAicA s<e), i.
II ; iiL 136, 281, 324 ; v. 427 ; sons
of the Mahua or tree of Madhu
(ardent spirits), and the mango-
tree, iii. 153, 209, 237
Kurruniy or barley festival of the
Ooraons, answering to the Ji-wati
of the Gonds, iii. 233, 242
Kufusy sons of Kur, the tortoise. Pre-
face, xxxvi ; i. 25 ; iv. 366
Kuru-ksAetAra^ field {ksAetAra) of the
Kurus, land of the black antelope,
iv. 366
KufAa grass {Poa cynosurotdes)^ the
totem or parent-grass of the
Ku§hika, Preface, xxxiv, xxxvi,
xlv; i. 29; iii. 138, 163-168, 193,
198, 199, 206, 208, 242 ; iv. 404 ;
v. 474; the Ku^hika marriage
bond, iii. 175, 280; the favourite
food of the antelope, iv. 401
KtqA-ambay son of the god Vasu,
parent of the Kushite race, iii. 287.
KufA-ambiy parent city of Kushite
race, ii. 98 ; iii. 287
Kufhika or A'ushites^ the sons of
Kush, the Kusha grass, and the
tortoise ruling confederacy of North
India, Preface, xxxiv ; i. 8, 15,
19, 21 ; ii. 64, 67, 73-75, 102, 122,
125, 129; iii. 161, 163-168, 192-
195, 252, 272, 279, 280, 281 ; iv.
330. 331, 347, 358, 374; V. 425,
426 ; vi. 501 ; identified with the
Malli, iv. 394 ; their rule followed
by that of the Vakshu, v. 475;
sons of the Finnic Ku, the be-
getter, the rain-god, iii. 138 ; birth
story of the race, iii. 145 ; iv. 358;
earliest form of Kushika kingdom,
"• 95-99; internal policy, ii. too,
loi ; final form of Kushika king-
dom, with king's province in the
centre, ii. 62 ; iii. 145, 146, 253
Kushikay marriage bond of Kusha
grass, iii. 175, 280
K^utsa, a form of the god Ka, god
and priest of the Varsha-giras,
possessors of rain (zarska) of
Northern India, and father-god of
i 213, 217, 263; Leto, goddess of
LNDEX
697
the Purus, rulers of Eastern India,
ii. 71 note, 107 ; iii. 228, 240, 274 ;
brother and charioteer of Indra,
ii. 107
Labatty the sun and moon-god of
Haran, Preface, xxiv; iii. 271 ; v.
434; the god Ra, v. 478. See
Moon
Lake^ or water reservoir, place of
national birth and of purificatory
ablutions, iii. 145, 159 ; bath of the
sun-god in the sea or lake of the
constellation Pisces, iv. 391, 393,
394 ; the sacred reservoir of Rldha-
kund, V. 460 ; use of lake or pond
at Bagdi marriages, iii. 153 ; the
abyss or ' sea of brass ' of Semitic
temples, iv. 397 ; v. 438, 469
Laniechy the god Linga of the Hindus,
Nagu-r or Lamga of the Akkadians
ana Sumerians, and Lingal of the
Gonds, the god of the sign of sex.
Preface, xvii; iii. 179, 192, 195,
265. See Father-gods with two
wives
Lapitha^ sons of the storm-wind, suc-
cessors of the fire-god, war between
them and the Centaurs, vi. 521,
522
Z^, the H ittite, Cypriote and Akkadian
name for the bull's head, iv. 344
Leahy the wild cow, the mother of
the seven children of Jacob, repre-
senting the age of law. Preface,
xxiv; iii. 241, 254, 271, 272; v.
434, 478. See Gaurian race, Gonds
Lebanon^ cedars of, sent to Girsu,
iii. 282, 297
Leduy meaning the incense-mother of
Kast5r and Poludeukes, iii. 210,
299, 300, 301. See Saranyu
Lempoy god of the creating triad of
the Finns who made the jaw-bone
of the primaeval parent-snake, iii.
245, 246
Leoy constellation of, iv. 332, 335,
344-346 ; the prophet Moses, iii.
315, 316; iv. 352
LetOy meaning the concealed one,
first the goddess Lada of the Wends,
the wolf-mother of the twins Apollo
and Artemis, bom on the Xanthus
and at Delos, i. 16 ; ii. 86; iii. 159,
the Guelph or wolf race, ritual of
her worship among the Czechs as
goddess of summer, vi. 505, 506 ;
daughter of Phoebe the moon and
Koos the cleaving pole, and the
circumstances of the birth of Apollo
and Artemis at Delos, vi. 518,
519
Leviy the tribe of sons of the law in
Hebrew mythology ; their union
with the sons of Judah, under the
sons of Kohath, iii. 255 ; v. 489 ;
formation of the tribe, Preface, xv-
xvii ; V. 488, 489
Licchaviy sons of the Akkadian Lig,
the dog or lion, forming with the
Malli or Mountaineers the con-
federacy of the Vajjians, or sons of
the tiger {vydghra)y ii. 96 ; iii. 193,
325 ; iv. 394
Lingaly Song of\ the father or Linga
god of the Gonds; the seed-god,
born of a flower and fed on honey
from the banyan-tree {Ficus Indica);
his first avatar, ii. 48, 49, 56, 60;
his second avatar, conquest of the
Magha, the alligator Mugral, and
founding of the tortoise race, ii. 72,
73 ; iii. 192, 193, 222-224 > equi-
valent of the Hindu god Narada
the man {nara) god, ii. 69
Lohary Dra vidian race of ironworkers,
Preface, xxxvii ; their marriage to a
mahua-tree, iiL 153, 209
Lohengriny the swan knight of the
Holy Grail, iii. 302 ; iv. 351
iMy the incense father-god of the
Semites, father of A-mon the house-
pole, and Moab the water [nio)
father {ab)y iii. 300; v. 479. See
Father-god with two wives
Lumasiy the sheep (/«) of the antelope
or hero {mas) ; the seven creating
stars of early Akkadian astronomy,
iii. 314; their position in the
heavens, and their Akkadian
names and meaning, iv. 355-364
Mdy the Akkadian ship, the constel-
lation Argo, iii. 257, 281
Madhu^ intoxicating [mad) drink dis-
tilled.from the flowers of the mahua-
tree, *iii. 209, 275, 278, 308, 309,
318; iv. 359, 368; unintoxicating
honey drink substituted for the in-
toxicating by the Ashvins, iii. 207,
598 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
208, 241, 242, 259; historical
teachings of the legends of Madhu-
bun in Mathura, v. 462
Madhu-parka^ honey drink ordered
by Manu to be given ^ to kings,
priests, sons, and fathers-in-law,
and maternal uncles, iii. 209
Madras^ name of the Dravidian sons
of the sal tree, the drunken {fncui)
people in the Northern Punjab,
lii. 191
Madrty daughter of Shaliya (the sal-
tree), and second wife of Pandu
the sun-antelope, mother by the
Ashvins of the Pandava twins, iii.
262 ; iv. 368
Afaga, Aldgdf or Maghd, meaning
the maker or kneader, our May,
called Mahl in the Rigveda and
Maia by the Greeks, witch-mother
of the land of the metal workers,
called Magog in the north-east of
Asia Minor, i. 8 ; iii. 184, 224,
225, 250, 287, 294 ; iv, 353, 373 ;
%!. 500 ; Maga or Maya, the mother
of Buddha, the predecessor of the
moon goddess, iv. 397 note ; the
Maga crocodile of Egypt, i. 10;
iii. 224, 252 ; Maga, a name given
to the Sakadwipi, Maithila, and
Gaura Brahmins, ii. 76 ; iii. 224 ;
Maga, the mother of the holy land
of the Greek Magnetes, vi. 515
Magdna^ Akkadian name for the
Sinaitic Peninsula, i. 24 ; iii. 282
Mdghy festival to the mother Magha
and the goddess Dharti of the
Dravidians and Kolarians, begin-
ning the year of the Mundas and
Ooraons, called Shimga by the
Gonds, our St. Valentine, Preface,
xxxii ; ii. 125; iii. 194, 234,236,
304 ; iv. 386 ; V. 457 ; month or
constellation of the birth of Yudish-
thira, the Pandava ruler and god of
spring, iii. 258, 273 ; held about
the same time as the Lesser
Eleusinia at Athens, Preface, xxxii
Mdghadas or Mughs^ the Finnic race
of workers in metal ruling Northern
India before the Kushikas, the sons
of the lightning-cloud, called Mug-
ger, the Alligator, by the Hindus,
Magral by the Gonds, and Maga
by the Egyptians, our magic mother
May, worshippers of the household
fire and the sun-god Ra, whose priests
were the Dosadhs, Preface, xxx; i.8,
10, 18, 21, 27 ; ii. 60, 69 ,75, 90; iii.
146, 147, 168, 224, 281 ; iv. 332,
368, 380, 381 ; V. 419, 425, 426,
427 ; sons of Tubal Cain, iii. 184 ;
stories of their union with the
Kushikas, iii. 146, 223, 224 ; story
of their entry into and conquest of
Northern India as the Takkas of
the Punjab, under Matha>^, the
god who makes 6 re by nibbing
(md/A), and Gotama Rahuguna,
the inspired priest of R^-hu, iii.
200, 201 ; sons of Magha, the
socket whence fire was evolved,
i. 8. See Takkas
Maghavan^ Vedic name of India,
iii. 206, 312 ; V. 441
Magiy the Finnic magicians, sons of
the mother Maga, 2^nd and ]>arent
branch of the Indian Maghadas, i.
8 ; iii. 185, 225 ; the Makkhu of the
Akkadians, Preface, xvi ; iii. 225
Magha-bhuy name of the planet Venus^
iii. 3"
Magic wand of the magician, as
described in the Zendavesta, iii.
164; vi. 571; became the
*prastara' of Hindu and the
*baresma' of Zend ritual, the
cleansing sheaf or besom, the
bunch of hyssop of the Jews held
by the priest while praying for
rain, iii. 164 ; the *prastara' made
of seven sheaves of Kusha grass in
the new and full moon sacrifices,
denoting the seven days of the
week, iii. 163 ; and of Ashva-vala
grass in the Soma sacrifice, iii.
166; this became the crescent-
shaped wand of Hermes and
Merodach, the healing knife of
Akastus, and the magic wand, the
sword of Peleus and the divine
prophets, vi. 528
Mahua-trec {Bassia iati/olia)^ the
tree whence the honey - spirit
(madhu), the drink of the Ashvins
in the Rigveda, was distilled, called
by the Gonds Daru, or the creat-
ing {ru) water {da), the marriage
tree of certain Hindu tribes, iii.
I53» 196, 209, 263
INDEX
599
Mahto^ name of the accountant in
an Ooraon village, ii. 92, 94, 95 ;
called Kulkarni in Western India,
ii. 119, 120
Makaram^ Makhar^ Mugger ^ Hindu
and Babylonian names for the
sacred alligator and the constel-
lation CapricomuSy iii. 268 ; iv.
368 ; Makara became the dolphin,
the homed fish, iii. 284 ; iv. 377.
See Alligator
Malay village organisation y and that
of the Mon or Mai races identical,
H-SS
Males and Mdl Paharias, sons of the
mountain {mal)^ the house-pole,
and the sal-tree, ii. 45 ; iii. 160,
194, 237
Mais or Mons^ the mountain (ma/,
rnott) people, ii. 46, 55, 56 ; iii.
152 ; belong to Malay race, ii. 46 ;
they are the Malli of Indian his-
tory, the predecessors of the
Bharata, ii. 58, 96, 98, 123 ; iii.
160 ; iv. 394 ; the Turvasu of the
Rigveda, iii. 284, 325 ; the sons
of the tiger, iii. 193, 325 ; iv. 394
Manasseh, eldest son of Joseph (the
Asipu)t father of the prophet races,
the race called Gershom or the out-
casts among the Levites, the priests
of the phallus- worshipping Danites,
Preface, xvi; iii. 241 note 3; iv. 361;
V* 495; priests and rulers of the
twin races, sons of the ass, iii. 256
Mandar or Mandara, the sacred
mountain of Kushika mythology,
whence Sek-Nag, the snake of
wetness, and afterwards Vasuki,
the spring god, churned the rains
of the Indian rainy season, iii. 152,
177, 229; the sacred mountain of
the Jains on the Burrakar, called
Paris-nath, or the lord {nath) of the
traders {Paris)^ iii. 326
MangOy the parent-tree of the united
Kushikas and Maghadas, iii. 146,
237 ; marriage'tree of the Bunjhias,
Kharwars, Rautias, Kurmis, Ma-
hilis, and Rajwars, iii. 15^, 209;
sacred to the god Ra-hu, iii. 202 ;
V. 443
AlanjhuSy royal land set apart in
an Ooraon village, ii. 91, 92, 94 ;
iii. 298 ; v. 486
Manki, head chief of a 'parha,' or
provincial union of Kolarian vil-
lages, ii. 54, 55, 59
Mantkint the revolving {math) Soma
year cup, representing the moon
and moon-bird of the barley-grow-
ing ploughing-race, iii. 243, 244 ;
the cup of the autumn season, iii.
270
Manuy meaning the thinker, Indian
father-god, father and husband of
Ida, the mountain and cow-mother
(which see). Preface, xxvi ; i. ii, 15;
ii. 129; iii. 173, 234, 459, 284, 289 ;
Indian equivalent of the Phrygian
god Men, Minos or Menes, the
measurer, iii, 212, 213, 218, 234
Marichiy meaning the fire-spark, father
of Kasbyapa, the father of the
Kushite race, iii. 261 ; iv. 343 ; the
young sun-god of the Lumasi year
of three seasons, iv. 352 : one of the
stars of the Great Bear, ii. 129 ;
iii. 259, 261 ; V. 419 ; vi. 506,
Marotiy Gond tree-god {maroni), iii.
161, 235
Alarriage customs of India (i)
survivals from the matriarchal age,
when permanent marriage was
unknown, iii. 154, 157 ; (2) mar-
riage to a tree, iii. 152, 153, 209;
(3) changes in names of relation-
ships arising from a change in mar-
riage customs, ii. 56, 57 ; (4)
changes in the law of exogamy,
iii. 1 1 1 ; (5) evidence that marriages
in India and elsewhere were first
unions between alien tribes fur-
nished by the universal custom of
simulated capture, and by the
Indian custom of making the
Sindur-dan or sign of blood-
brotherhood the binding ceremony
in the marriage rite, iii. 174, 175,
196, 278 ; v. 485 ; (6) by the
custom of placing the bride on a
sheep*s or bull's hide, iii. 175 ; v.
433 ; (7) evidence that marriage
was an institution introduced by
the yellow gardening races, given
by the gift of turmeric made to
Brahmin brides by the bridegroom,
iii. 278 ; (8) by the marriage of
Kurmi husbands to the mango-
600 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
tree, iii. 209 ; (9) by the use of
yellow as the Roman marriage
colour, and by the Roman cere-
mony of Sindur-dan, iii. 278 ; (10)
Spartan marriage customs traced to
those begun in the Indian village
g^roves, iu. 298 ; (ii) also Babylon-
ian, iii. 158 (12) the peculiar
Kushika marriage custom of unit-
ing the pair by a bond of Kusha
grass, iii. 275, 280 ; marriage
customs connected with the Magh
festival in Assam compared with
those in parts of Argyllshire and
Cumberland, v. 457, 458
Martu (Assyrian, the daughter),
Martu (Akkadian, the west wind),
Martha (Aramaic, the mistress),
Myrina^ Alyrrha^ Smyrfia (mother
foddess of the coasts of Asia
linor), Semiramis {}^t Babylonian
fish-goddess), Miriam (Hebrew,
the speaker), the Greek Maria, all
forms of the name of the tree and
wind mother - goddesses, Gond
Marotiy the tree (maroni) god
(Sanskrit Mantis), who became the
constellation Virgo or mother of
corn of the Turanian races, iii.
296; i. 24, 26; iii. 181, 243; iv, 359
MarutSf goddesses of the south-west
wind (Akkadian Martu), and of
the tree (Gond Maroti, Maroin),
of the race descended from the
mother-tree and the rain-god of
the south-west monsoon, i. 26 ; iii.
183, 206 ; daughters of Rudra, the
red {rud) god of the thunder-cloud
and the sacrificial stake, iii. 170,
320 ; v. 428 ; of Prishni, the
begetting (ptni) mother, iii. 240 ;
spring goddesses of the year of five
•rai
of
holders of the rope of destiny
which turned the revolving pole,
iii. 25S ; they yoke the foxes {hari),
drawing the chariot of Indra in the
Rigveda, iii. 313 ; the twenty-
seven Mariits of the Rigveda, iii.
322 ; the wind -goddesses wearing
deer (^/'<z)-skins and driving the
dripping Prishati or nil - gau
(Antilope picta), the steeds of the
god Nila, V. 420, 421
seasons of Praiapati, iii. 243, 270 ;
the bringers of the rains, iii. 247
Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, the
primitive indigenous matriarchal
Gonds, iii. 43, 55 ; iii, 152, 224
Masu, the antelope (mas) god of the
Akkadians, son of the Mas-mas,
the pair of building bricks, who
became the god Ner-gal, the Maso
of the Etruscans, Moses of the Jews,
and Mars, all names for the god of
fertility, iii. 315, 316; v. 495;
Masu, the constellation Leo, iii.
315; iv. 351, 400; V. 489, 490,
493 J ^^^ father god of the sons of
the rivers found among the river
reeds, symbolised later as the stars
of the Great Bear, Preface, xxxii ;
iii. 219 ; iv. 358 ; also, probably,
the star Antares in Scorpio, v. 490 ;
marriage of Moses to a Kushite wife,
V. 493
Mathura, city of the fire-drill (mcUh),
sacred to Hari, iii. 214 , the holy
land of Ra-dha, Krishna, and Vala
or Balarama, y. 440 ; Jats of
Mathura or Muttra, the Getse, and
Goths, V. 480, 487
Matriarchal Dravidian races of the
south, founders of communistic vil-
lage communities before the Neo-
lithic age. Preface, xx, xxvi, xxxvi :
i. 16, 17 ; then villages, and not the
family, the national unit, ii. 43 ;
characteristic village rules, ii. 43; iii.
154, 157 ; sons of the village grove
and the tree, ii. 41, 42; iii. 152,
153 ; they traced their descent to
their mothers, iii. 146; education
of children, ii. 55; iii. 157, 298;
survivals of matriarchal customs in
marriage ceremonies, iii. 154, 157;
in descent of property in the female
line, iii. 157, 158; in the orgiastic
dances of South-western Asia,
Greece, and Rome, and in Baby-
lonian marriage customs, iii. 1 58 :
their village dances and the objects
aimed at by them, iii. 154, 156,
158, 104, 204, 205; their system
of relationships, ii. 56, 57 ; they
were a maritime race, ii. 57 ; who
introduced village communities in-
to Europe, ii. 41, 52, 59 ; iii. 185 :
the matriarchal races called the
Amazons in Asia Minor, Palestine,
and Greece, iii. 175, 176 ; vi. 510,
INDEX
601
561 ; Greek Hetaine, survivals of
the matriarchal age, vi. 520
Media^ called Mad-ga by the
Akkadians, fatherland of the fire-
worshippers, sons of the dog, iii.
187, 283
AfenelauSy meaning he who withstands
men, husband of Helene, the dawn,
the Vedic Sarama, meaning of the
myth telling of him and his son
Megapenthes the great {mega) road,
v>- 552, 553
Metres t evidence of, the course of
change in ritual and belief given
by the metres of the Rigveda and
Zendavesta, iv. 553, 554
Minyte, Minyans^ or MitueanSt the
race who traced their descent to
the god Minos, the measurer, the
great irrigating race of ancient
times in Orchomenos, Arabia,
India, and Egypt, Preface, xxv.,
xxvi.; iii. 307; vi. 518; rulers
with the Sabseans of the Semitic
territory lying west of the Euph-
rates, iii. 291 ; v. 498 ; successors
of the ^olic races, vi. 519; the
Minyse of Crete and the Minotaur,
vi. 559, 560
Mitra^ the warrior with the silver
helm, the moon god of the Zenda-
vesta, iii. 317 ; said in the Rigveda
to4>e the god who fixes the times
of the ordained festivals, v. 416,
417, 422
Mitra-Varutuiy the united moon
{mitrd) and rain god (z^ar), ii. 88,
iii. 217, 288 ; the givers of rain,
iii. 164, 168 ; parents of Vashishtha,
the most-creating {vasu) fire, iii.
211, 257 ; supreme gods of the
Kushikas, iii. 245 ; milk mixed
with juice of the Kusha grass or
bur-tree {Fiats Indica) or Soma
holy water offered to them at the
Soma sacrifice, but no animal
victims, iii. 242, 243, 309; v. 416;
clotted curds offered to them in the
Pankti sacrifice, v. 436 ; the Vedic
triad of Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman,
V. 416, 417, 420, 422 ; a name of
the teaching priests {Pra-shastri),
the guardian of the sacred house-
pole in the consecrated sacrificial
ground, ii. 81, 82 ; iii. 240
Moon, as father-god of the Northern
races, Men, Min, Minos, Menes,
the measurer {men) of the Minyans
of Asia Minor, Greece, Crete,
Arabia, and Egypt, and Manu, the
thinker, of the Hindus, iii. 212,
213, 218, 307, 314 ; Disaratha, the
ten {dasa) chariots {rcUha) lunar
months) father-god of the Kushika
and of Rama, the sun-god of the
ploughing race, i. 26 ; iii. 191,
265 ; iv. 389 ; Kronos, the father
moon-god of the Greeks, ii. 106 ;
iii. 236 ; Ku Kuhu, the begetting
god of the Finns, Hindus, and of
the races whose totem is the
goat, iii. 148, 140, 240, 305 ;
Kudraj, the moon -god of the
Santals, iii. 304, 305 ; Ra-hu, the
waxing moon of the Dosadh fire-
worshippers, iii. 200 ; the waning
moon of the Rigveda, iii. 305 ;
Soma, the begetting {su) father-
moon of the Hmdus wedded to the
sun -maiden, iii. 139: vi. 539;
Chandra, the moon father-god
uniting the Hindu Maghadas and
Kushikas, iii. 146 ; iv. 338 ;
Minotaur, the constellation Taurus,
moon-bull, and Pasi-phaae, the
moon-mother, vi. 559, 560 ; Mitra,
meaning the friend, the moon-god,
iii> 317 ; V* 416, 417, 422; the moon
as mother-goddess of the Southern
races, the mother Shini, Siniv§l!,
the waxing moon of the Rigveda,
Kudra Sini, god of the Bauds,
mother of S^tyaki, of the race of the
Sat -vat, the holy seven (jo/), iii. 273,
305; V. 479 ; Sarasvati, with RShu,
the waning moon of the Rigveda,
iii* 305 ; Sin, Sinh, or Singh the
horned moon-guddessof the Hindus,
Sumerians, Akkadians, Saba^ns,
and Semites, ii. 48; iii. 141, 291,
306, 325, 326, 327 ; iv. 356 ; v.
479, 487 ; Mu-Chandri or Pandhari,
mother-moon of the Gonds, ii. 121 ;
iii. 138, 199, 236, 273, 287 ; Sita
first the furrow, as wife of R&ma,
the ploughing-god, afterwards the
crescent-moon, as mistress of Ra-
vana, the storm -god, and wife of
Rima-Chandra, the sun and moon-
god, iii. 262 ; iv. 338, 343, 372 ;
608 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
I sis, the horned-moon, attended by
the seven scorpions, ii. 67 ; iii-
173, 251 ; Istar, the homed -cow
fish, iii. 171 ; as the Hebrew
Ashtoreth or Esther, iii. 273, 280,
312 ; Allat, the fish-mother and wax-
ing moon of Arabia, the Akkadian
Nin-lil, i. 23, 24 ; Menaka, moon-
mother of Sakuntala, iii. 319 ; the
moon as Pairika-kfiathaiti, wife of
Keresashpa, iii. 306 ; Hera, the
Greek moon-goddess, also the Latin
Juno, the Etruscan Uni, iii. 293 ; the
moon-goddess as mother-goddess
in Greek myths, Hippolyte, vi.
526 ; Hippodameia, vi. 522, 555 ;
Thetis, iv. 392, 393 ; vi. 529, 531 ;
Jocasta, iv. 390 ; vi. 537 ; the virgin
moon - goddess Artemis, also the
bear-mother, ii. 66, iii. 315 {set
Artemis); the twin moon and rain-
god Mitra-Varuna {which see) ; the
moon-god, united with the sun-
god as the horned sun-horse, the
year-gods of the early Semites,
Keresashpa, the son of Sama, the
horned-horse of the Zendavesta,
iii. 306 ; Karna, the Hindu son of
Ashva, the horse river, iii. 306, 307,
327: Vishva mitra, as the moon-god,
i'i* 317* 3*8 ; Jis the sun-go<l, iii.
319 ; crescent moon as the boat of
the sun and star-god Osiris (Orion)
in E^gyptian, and Dumu-zi (Orion)
in Akkadian mythology, ii. 127,
128; iv. 351, 353, 387, 388; as
boat of the meridian pole in the
Delphic trisula, iii. 302 ; as boat
of the swan-knight of the holy
Grail ; iii. 302 ; iv. 351 ; moon as
nurse of the young sun -god, iv.
384. See under Year- reckonings,
Lunar year of thirteen months,
Eleven months of generation
Mtttida, name of village headman
among the Kols and Ooraons, ii.
52, 54, 92, 95.
Mundas or Kols (see Kols and Mais),
the Mons or mountain people, allied
to the Malays, the hunting tril>es,
who came into India from the
North-cast, ii. 45, 47 ; national
temperament, ii. 45 ; a primitive
race, dating Ixick to the early Stone
Age, i. I : ii. 47, 48 ; antiquity
proved by Munda monumental
stones, ii. 50 ; the Kikatas of the
Rigveda, who do not use cattle or
drink milk, ii. 51, 52 ; provinces
{^rhas) formed by Munda tribes,
ii. 53 ; their provincial flags, ii. 54 ;
identity of Munda and Malay village
organisation, ii. 55 ; system of mar-
riage introduced by them, ii. 56, 57;
evidence of the survival of Munda-
Punuiuan marriage at Kosi, v. 457;
the name Gawa the German Gau,
meaning the village or parish, of
Munda origin, ii. 59 ; marriage to
a mahua-tree, iii. 153 ; Munda
festivals, iii. 234, 244; marriages,
iiL 278 ; rulers of Western Bengal,
iii. 326; they wear a pigtail like
the Hittites, Preface, xlv ; iv. 339
Afyths, historical value of. Preface,
viii-x ; i. 7,8; used for educational
purposes. Preface, xi, xiv ; ii. 63,
64 ; myth of Nala and Damayanti
and its historical meaning, ii. 64-
72 ; of the Kauravyas and Pa^davas
in the Mahabharata, ii. 73-76 ,
Greek myths of Ixion and Koronis,
telling of the origin of the worship
of the Great Bear and the olive-tree,
ii. 83,86; Greek and Hindu mytho-
log>' of the divine medicinal efficacy
of oil, ii. 86, 89 ; myths of Chiron
and Akastus, telling of the progress
of medical science, vi. 524-526,
528 ; mythic history as told in fairy-
tales and sacred numbers. Preface,
xi-xiii; ii. 78-80; historical evi-
dence furnished by myths emlK)died
in national festivals and sacred
numbers, ii. 77-80, 127 ; mythic
heroes never represent indivi-
duals. Preface, xvii ; ii. 80; Min-
yan and Semitic myths founded
on metaphysical abstractions, the
earlier /Eolic myths on personifietl
powers of nature, vi. 519; Indian
mythic history comprised in the
limits of a year of destiny, Grecian
myths in the epochs in the life of a
representative hero, vi. 521 ; changes
in national breadth of view denoted
by the names of mythic heroes, vi.
556' 557 J mythic history altered
by Celtic or Aryan bards. Preface,
liii-lv; vi. 539, 541, 564-567;
INDEX
603
evolution and survival of myths,
ii. 82; vi. 564-571; myths pre-
served by national myth guardians
for national education, Preface, xi,
xiv; ii. 81 ; the sun-myths conse-
crating the successive Buddhas, iv.
396-399; Greek history as told in the
myth of Peleus, Eurytion, Chiron,
and Achilles, vi. 522-532; in that of
Phoenix and Achilles, vi. 532-534 ;
of Pholos, the wine-cask, Hercules,
and the Centaurs, vi. 549-551 ; of
Theseus, vi. 556-562
Adbhd'ttedishthay the story of, name
means nearest (nedishtha) to the
navel {fidbha), the son of Manu,
called Prajapati, the supreme god,
who became Narashaihsa, praised
{fhamsa) of men {nard\ the Nairyo
Sangha of the Zendavesta, the
sacred fire burnt on the altars of
the Afigiras priests, who offered
burnt-offerings, iii. 169, 170; said
in the Rigveda to take the place
of Ida, the daughter and wife of
Manu, or the altar made in the
form of a woman, iii. 170; this
story identical with the Greek mar-
riage of Hercules, the fire-god, and ;
Omphale, the navel, iii. 171 ; Nara-
shamsa, and the Hebrew Judah,
iii. 189; Narashamsa, Vashishtha,
meaning the most-creating {vasu)^
and the Vahram fires of the Parsis
identical, ii. 109.
Ndgas^ Nagur^ Ndga, Nagas sons of
the Nag or rain-snake, symbolised
by the cobra, the Nagur or plough
of heaven, of the Gonds, which be-
came St. George of Asia Minor and
Europe, the rain-god of the united
Kushikas and Maghadas, i. 8, 9-22 ;
ii. 87, 102 ; iii. 235 ; Nagur, the
Gond word for plough and rain-
snake, ii. 132 ; iii. 230; the Hindu
word for city, the place of plough-
ing, and the Hindu Nangar, a
plough, iii. 235 ; the Naga snake-
god, Susi-nag of Elam or Iran, and
of the Parthians, iii. 228 ; the
Shesh-nag of the Takkas and Sek-
nag of the Raj Gonds, iii. 229 ; the
father-god of the ploughing sons of
Ida, the sheep-mother, iii. 230 ; the
Nag or Nagash, the Great Bear, iii.
264 ; eggs and turmeric offered by
the Hos and Mundas to the Naga
gods, iii. 278 ; the Naga snake of
the sons of the house-pole, iii. 194 ;
the Naga sons of Gandhari, the
Kauravya mother, iii. 249 ; of
Ka-dru, the thirteenth wife of
Kashyapa, iii. 256 ; iv. 349 ; Na^a
snake, sign of royal dignity m
India and Egypt, iii. 280 ; iv. 346 ;
similarity of the customs of the
Indian Naga races and those of the
Spartans, ii. 63 ; iii. 297, 298 ; the
five-headed Naga the five seasons
of the Hindu year, iv. 338 ; v. 460,
461 ; the constellation Hydra, the
great Naga snake of the heavens,
iv. 346
Nahashi king of the Ammonites, the
Nagash or constellation of the
Great Bear, iii. 264, 316
Nahor, son of Serug, Assyrian Sar-
ganu, he was bom {ganu) of
the cloud -goddess Sar, the river
Euphrates, father of Terah, the
antelope, iii. 180, 219; iv. 364
Nahushas^ also called Varshagiras,
possessors of rain {varsha), rulers of
Eastern India and trading sons of
the Naga god, ii. 107 ; iii. 228 ;
Nahusha, the great Naga, father of
Yayati, i. 14; iii. 235,239; Nahshon,
the Nahusha father of the sons of
Judah, iv. 400
Nairs of Madras, identity of their
customs with those of the aboriginal
matriarchal forest races, ii. 57 ; iii.
157
Nakshatra or Nag-kskethra^ the field
(kshethra) of the Nags or stars, the
heavens, ii. 93 note ; iii. 194, 320 ;
the division of the heavens into
twenty-seven equal parts, used in
the five years cycle by which
Hindu astronomers reconciled solar
and lunar time, iii. 139 ; evidence
of Northern and Eastern influences
in their names and ritualistic use,
iii. 268, 321.
Nala and DamayantJ^ myth of, i. 7 ;
ii. 64-72, 127 ; iii. 248
Narada^ god of men, the anthropo-
morphic god Linga, ii. 69
Nebo^ Nabu^ or Nabi^ the prophet-
604 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
god of the literary class among the
Assyrians, Moabites, and Canaan-
ites, iii. 312 ; his triangular altar,
iii. 171 ; the planet Mercury, to
which Mount Nebo was consecrated,
iii. 312 ; iv. 352 ; Mount Nebo, the
death of Moses, and the conquest of
Canaan, iv. 352, 400 ; v. 493
Neshtri, priests of Tvashtar, and the
mother goddesses, offerers of Sura,
or intoxicating spirits, ii. 89; iii.
207, 208
Nineveh, city of the fish-god, iii. 286,
289
Nishddhas, aboriginal races of India
who were not (no) Ashadhas or
trading sons of the fish-god Ashadha
or Assar, ii. 104
Noah, meaning rest, the last of the
ten patriarchs of Genesis, answering
to Xisuthros, the last of the ten star-
kings of Babylon, the constellation
Aquarius, the year-god, who enters
his boat when the sun is in Aquarius,
ii. 129; iii. 265, 289; iv. 384,
Numbers, sacred, historical evidence
given by, ii. 79, 80
Nun, the supreme god of the Akka-
dians, Egyptians and Jews, the
spirit or germ of life, dwelling and
hidden in the misty atmosphere,
i. 9 ; iii. 250, 252, 292, 296 ; iv.
375 ; the fish-god and father of
Joshua, iii. 302, 303, 315, 352 ; iv.
396, 400; V.491, 495. See Fish-
god
Nymphs, the earlier nymphs wor-
shipped by the Greeks were the
Dryades, tree-nymphs, Oreadce and
Napex, mountam and glen nymphs,
to these were added by the water
and star - worshippers Naiads,
nymphs of rivers and springs, and
Oceanides or ocean nymphs, vi. 516
Odift^ the god who knows [odh, odj,
bod), the Northern equivalent of
the Hindu Buddha, iii. 225 ; whose
bird messenger was the raven, iii.
245 ; iv. 342 ; father-god of the
sons of the horse, iv. 336, 348
Odusscus, the wandering sun-god,
Greek equivalent of the Northern
Orwandil, the star Orion, iii. 299 ;
»v. 35i» 354» 360; v. 444, 445;
discovers Achilles to be the sun-
god, vi. 552
(Edipus, he with the swollen foot,
son of Jocasta, the lunar crescent,
and Laius, the stone obelisk, mean-
ing of the myth of his killing the
moon - sphinx and marrying his
mother, vi. 537*539
Ojhas, those who know [odk, odj), the
exorcisers or guardian priests ap-
pointed in each Dravidian province,
as successors to the tribal priest
Byga, ii. 95 ; names of Sakadvipa
and Maithila Brahmans and of the
territorial Babhans, ii. 76 ; iii. 225 ;
names of Gond priests, ii. 76 ; iii.
224.
Olive tree, the tree sacred to Athene,
and the parent-tree of the Greek
and Semite race, who believed in the
divine efficacy of oil, whose prophet*
bird was the dove, ii. 85 ; iii. 158,
289 ; the tree overshadowing Leto
at the birth of Apollo at Delos, ii.
86; iii. 159; vi. 519
Olympian games in Greece, celebrated
at the beginning of the official Greek
year of the Olympiads at the first
new moon after the summer solstice,
iv. 361
Ooraons, immigrants from Ruhidas,
the red land, a composite Dravido-
Turanian race of Chota Nagpore,
ii. 45-47 ; founders of government
by kings, ii. 62, 91, 92; a flower-
loving race, ii. 88 ; organisation of
their villages, i. i ; ii. 91-95; sons
of the ass {see Ashvins and Ass),
and first growers of barley, ii. 91 ;
iii. 255 ; their great Magh festival
to Maga, the witch-mother, ii. 125 ;
iii. 234, 236, 304 ; iv. 386 ; Ooraon
or Orang means the 'forest* men,
iii. 152 ; their methods of educa-
tion, iii. 157; their rain festival to
Sar and the sal-tree, iii. 231 ; their
barley festival, iii. 233, 244 ; begin
their year in Magh (January-
February), iii. 304
Ophir, originally Abhfra, a DraWdian
land, iii. 295 ; the land of the
antelope {opher), iv. 371 ; the delia
of the Indus, v. 472 ; the son of
Joktan, V. 471, 472
INDEX
605
Orion, the constellation called by the
Egyptians Smati, a name of Osiris,
guardian of Artemis, Damayanti,
and Isis, meaning of the myth, ii.
66, 67 ; used to measure time, ii.
72 ; year measured by the eml)arka-
tion of Orion, the Egyptian Osiris,
the Akkadian Uruannaand Dumu*zi,
the only son of Istar, in the year-
boat, ii. 127; iv. 351, 385. 387,
407, 409 ; Orion Orwandil, the
Northern giant and Odusseus, iv.
351 ; thestarof theantelope(///n^a),
called Mriga shiras by the Hindus,
ruling the year of three seasons, iv.
401, 402 ; young Brahmins conse-
crated to Orion, iv. 403
Orpheus and Eurydice^ meaning of
myth, vi. 551 ; Orpheus and the
Ribhus, Preface, xix
Osiris^ originally the goat father-god
of the Egyptians, the god of water,
and the Asari or all-seeing eye of the
Assyrians and Egyptians, ii. 126,
127 ; iii. 173 ; iv. 366 ; Osiris, the
star Orion, ruling the year {see
Orion), the crocodile, Maga Sebek,
the uniter {sbk\ iii. 224 (see Alli-
gator); the enclosing or child-snake
Ahi, iii. 189 note 2, 194 ; the year
of Osiris as the moon-god, ii. 128,
129 ; iv. 409 ; the bearer of the
sceptre or G;oat-headed staff, iii.
222 ; god of the Northern sun, iii.
271
Oxus, or Jihun, the river of life (jt),
issuing from the mother-mountain,
i. 19 ; iii. 220 (diagram) ; the
mother-river of the Vahlikas or
Takkas, iii. 190 ; the Ra-sa of the
Rigveda, the river of Ra, v. 442,
475
Pa/ian, the village priest or parson of
the Ooraons, ii. 92, 95 ; iii. 231 ;
historical evidence furnished by the
distinctive divisions of the Pahnai
or glebe land, ii. 93, 94
Paidsha-tree [Butea froftdosa) , Soma
brought from heaven on its leaves
by the Shyena bird {see Bird-mother
myth), iii. 138 ; sacred to the
Ho Kols and Gonds, iii. 138, 199 ;
the sap used as Soma, iii. 138, 310 ;
used to make the sacred triangle on
the mother-altar, iii. 164, 165; used
as the sacrificial stake in the sacri-
fice to Kshetra Pati, in which rice
is offered to the mother-cow on
Palasha leaves, iii. 198
Palestine, home of the wild ass and
of the Rotou, or red men, of the
Egyptians, ii. 92 ; village system
identical with that of the Indian
Dravidians, ii. 59 ; division of the
country into provinces ruled by
cities, ii. 97 ; a Semitic country in
1800 B.C., iii. 303 ; the land of the
sons of the ass, iii. 316
Palilia, in its earliest form, the April
festival of the Italian sons of the
cow to the rain god, answering to
Gond April festival to the plough-
god, the Athenian festival to the
Mounychian Artemis, and that to
St. George, ii. 133; iii. 232;
Palilia at Rome on a different date
from that of the country villages,
and mixed with worship of the
father-horse of the sons of the
houshold-fire, iii. 322, 323 ; iv. 336
Palm-tree, the date-palm of Babylon
and Western India, the Jewish
Tamar, wife of Judah, the male and
female trees, the parent-trees of the
gardening and trading races, the
Shus, who believed in the divinity
of pairs, i. 17; ii. 41; iii. 158, 159,
241 ; iv. 344, 347, 365, 405 ; the
tree borne on the banners of Bhishma,
the sexless sun -god, uncle of the
Kauravyas and Pai;idavas, v. 433 ;
and on that of Vala-rama, the son
of Rohini, the star Aldebaran, the
mother-star of the bull race, v. 446-
448; the parent-tree of the Kshatr}'a
or warrior race, v. 448 ; Bala-ram,
the son of the palm-tree and
RohinT, killed in the palm-tree
grove Dhenuk, the ass father-god
of the Hittite twin-races, v. 466 ;
the tree grasped by Leto at the
birth of Apollo and Artemis at
Delos, iii. 159; vi. 518
Pan. See Goat-god
Paflchdlas, name of the dwellers in
the Gangetic Doab, descended from
the five {paflch) Naga snakes, the
five seasons of the Hindu year, called
also Srinjayas or sons of the sickle
606 THE RULIxNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
ifrini) the corn -growing races, ii.
113; iii. 235. 301 ; iv. 338
PaHchayats^ or councils of five, their
use in Kushika political organisa-
tion, ii. looj reappear in Sparta as
the five Ephors, iii. 298
Paflch-pir or Paflck Devati^ the five
village gods, the five seasons of the
Indian year, worshipped in Hindu
villages, ii. 86; iii. 160, 280
PdniavaSy successors of the Kaur-
avyas {which 5ee\ sons of Pandu the
sexless sun-antelope, and his wives,
Prithu,the conceiving (/<fnO mother,
mother of the Parthians, and Madri
the mother of the drunken {mad)
race, who thought intoxication to
be inspiration, i. 23 ; iii. 237, 248,
285 ; IV. 337, 368 ; V. 427 ; their
mythic history telling of the worship
of the moon, the substitution of the
year of five seasons beginning with
the winter solstice for that beginning
with the summer solstice and the
consecration of incense, ii. 73-76,
108 ; iii. 273, 299, 301 ; taught by
Drona, the Soma cask, meaning of
the myth. Preface, xxiii ; iii. 275 ;
bear the ape as their father-god on
their banner, iii. 296
Pandhari^ the moon-goddess of the
Gonds, iii. 236, 273
Panduy the sexless sun-god of the
antelope race, reputed father of the
Pandavas, iii. 225, 237, 262 ; iv.
343V 367, 368
Pants or traders, the Vedic name for
the Turano-Dravidian races, ii. 61,
106 ; speakers of Dravidian speech
identified with the Nahushas, called 1
Asunvants or non-pressers of Soma,
ii. 107; collective name for the sons I
of Yayati, the god Ya, ii. 118 ; war
between them and the Piirus as told '
in the 6th Mandala of the Rigveda, ,
iii. 274 ; the people to whom Paris- 1
nath, the lord {nath) of the Paris,
is sacred, iii. 326 ; Paris of Troy '
represents the Vedic Panris, vi. 552 |
Pa-pil-saky Akkadian name for the ,
constellation Leo, iv. 343, 372
Para-shara^ the overhanging {para) !
cloud {shard). See Sar
Parha^ Munda name for province,
the Hindu Pergunnah ; history of I
origin of ' parhas ' as founded by
the hunting races, ii. 53-55 ; en-
largement of by Turanians, ii. 62 ;
parhas ruled first by the village of
the Byga or tribal priests, ii. 54,
95 ; afterwards by the central city,
ii. 97 ; alliances between parhas,
iii. 154-156
Parjanya^ the rain-god, father of
Soma, iii. 162
Pdrthava or Prithu-Parsu^ the Par-
thian races, sons of Prithu, the earth
and sun mother, Vedic name for
the Pafichalas and Pandavas, ii.
112, 113, 114, 116; iii. 228
Passover^ originally a national human
sacrifice of the Semites, iii. 277 ;
the Samaritan passover of the sons
of the sheep and that eaten by the
army of Joshua, v. 497 note
Pdidlay trading port of first Indian
matriarchal emigrants, ii. 59 ; the
ruler of the commerce of the Indus
and the Punjab, ii. 98 ; capital of
the Shus called Ikshvakus, iii. 140,
141 ; iv. 404
Peacock and the myth of Argus, mean-
ing of, also a totem of the Hindu
Bhars, iii. 294
Peleus, son of the potter's clay (myX^s),
king of the myrmidons, myth tell-
ing the course of Greek history in
describing his relations with Phokas,
the seal-god of ^^gina, the tortoise
island, with Eurytion, bearer of the
heavenly bow Akaslus, the healer,
and Cheiron the Centaur, the pri-
mceval physicians Thetis and Achil-
les, the young sun-god, vi. 523-532
Pelops ami Hippodameia^ myth of, vi.
555. 556
Penelope^ the weaver of the web (/>^««?)
of time, wife of Odusseus, iii. 299 ;
V. 445
Perez^ son of Tamar, the palm-tree,
the pole-god, father of the royal
race of Ram, Preface, Ii ; iii. 241
Persephone or Proserpine, the winter
season of the year of two seasons,
Preface, xi ; iii. 216; vi. 547
Pharsi-pen, Gond god of the female
{pen) trident {pharsi), first the
javelin, like the Jewish god Shelah
or the Ashera, iii. 193, 262 ; then
the trident-god of the Song^ of
INDEX
607
Lingal and of the Takkas of the
Punjab, iii. 193 ; identical with the
Hindu Rudra Triambika, iii. 196,
197 ; and Hekate, iii. 215 ; god of
the necklace or bells of time, iii.
226, 258, 280 ; the caduceus of
Hermes, iii. 229, 230
Phaniciay the red {phoinix) land, vi.
546 ; sacrifices in, iii. 196 ; Phoe-
nicians came from India and the
Persian Gulf, iv. 346, 347 ; evi-
dence given by Phoenician temples
in Mashonaland, iv. 347, 348 ; land
of Phoenix, tutor to Achilles the
sun -god, vi, 533 ; the lands of the
vines and the red wine, the Celtic
Fionuisce, which became Phoenix,
vi. 546
PhUgyas^ king of the Phlegyes, the
first Greek fire-worshippers or
Heracleidse, ii. 109 ; vi. 505, 522 ;
Greek form of the Phrygian fire-
god Phri-gu or Bhri-gu, i. 39 ; father
of Ixion and Koronis, ii. 83 ; the
fire-god of the earthly fire, ii. 84
Phrygia^ home of the fire-god Bhur
or Phur, ii. 38 ; vi. 500 ; of the
beehive huts and tombs of the
Bronze Age, iii. 177, 199; of
Neolithic arts and agriculture, i. 32,
39 ; land of fire and phallus wor-
ship, ii. 60; union in Phrygia of
the agricultural races of the South
and the Ural-Altaic shepherds, iii.
161, 176; the birth-land of the
mother Ida and the goat-god Pan,
iii. 175-177 ; self-mutilation cus-
tomary in, Preface, xv ; iii. 186 ;
the land ruled by Midas and the
sons of the ass, iii. 256 ; of the
sexless star- father, iii. 264 ; home
of the yellow race of star-worship-
pers, iii. 280 ; the country where
the lion was made a symbol of the
supreme God, iii. 314.
Pig^ the totemistic parent-gods of the
Iberian race, iii. 180; historical
evidence furnished by their sacrifice,
iii. 180, 182
Pine-ireti the parent -tree of the
Northern Finns, ii. 41 ; iii. 263 ;
vi. 51 1 ; of the Phrygian earth-god-
dess Cybele, iii. 264; vi. 511 ; of
the German Teutons, iii. 158, 159,
264 ; how the parent pine • tree
became the parent sal -tree ex-
plained, vi. 511
Piritkons^ son of Ixion, meaning the
revolving pole, ii. 84; vi. 521;
Pirithous, Theseus, Hclene, and
Persephone, vi. 561
/*/m, the Finnic and Tamil begetting
iperu) god who gave eyes to the
snake, a form of the fire-god Bhur
or Phur, and father of the race of
Viru or Piru, worshippers of the
Linga or phallus, i. 38 ; ii. 128 ;
iii. 245 ; one of the primaeval fire-
gods preceding the rain-god, i. 39 ;
the fire-god of the Phrygians, ii. 83 ;
the Slavonic god Per-kunas, the
thunder-god, iii. 245
Pitarah Somavatitah^ the oldest rice-
growing fathers of Indian ritual,
possessed of Soma or Su, the life-
giving germ, to whom rice was
offer^, ii. 77 ; iii. 207 ; a race
living in Equatorial countries where
there are six seasons in the year,
ii. 47, 78
Pitaro Barishadah^ the barley-grow-
ing fathers of the Kushite race,
seated on the Barhis or altar-seats
of Kusha grass, to whom parched
barley was offered, ii. 77, 102, 122 ;
iii. 207, 227 ; V. 435
Pitaro Gnishvaitdh^ the fathers who
burnt their dead, the Aryans of the
Bronze Age, to whom porridge made
of the barley offered to the Pitaro
Barishadah and the milk of a cow
suckling an adopted calf, was
offered, ii. 78, 102 ; iii. 207, 227
Pitri-yajfla^ or annual festival to the
fathers, ii. 47, 102 ; iii. 207 ; its
celebration altered in India and
Athens from the festival to the
dead, celebrated in November (ii.
130-132), to the months before and
after the autumnal equinox, iv.
391
Planets^ called Pairikas or wanderers
in the Zendavesta, and looked on
as the foes of heavenly order, iii.
3"
Pleiades^ year of the Southern Hemi
sphere and Western Hindus, mea-
sured by the Pleiades, Preface, xi,
xii; ii. 123-126 ; iv. 389 ; also Egyp-
tian year, 125, 126; Pleiades year
608 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
traced to Mexico, ii. 125 ; to Peru,
Persia, South - western Asia, and
Europe, ii. 130-133; Gond festival
to, iii. 233 ; V. 462 ; the Hindu
mother-goddessAmba and theSaren
(Pleiades) of the Santals, iii. 287 ;
called Kimah, or the binders, in
Hebrew, Assyrian Kimta, iii. 287 ;
the stars of the doves (Peleiades)
in Greek mythology, iii. 288, 289 ;
the Pleiades mother-seasons, AmtS
and her sisters, and the horse
sacrifice, iv. 336-338 ; the Pleiades
astronomy and that of the barley -
growing races, iv. 363 ; the Pleiades
year of the Ribhus, iv. 364; mar-
riage of the stars of the Great Bear
to the Hindu Krittakas or Pleiades,
and their worship by married
couples, iv. 378, 379 note ; v.
426 ; vi. 509 ; the Hindu month
Khartik, sacred to the Pleiades, iii.
268, 287 ; iv. 380 ; union of the
sons of the Pleiades mother Amba
with the sons of the bull, typified
by the constellations Taurus and
the Pleiades, iii. 287 ; iv. 381 ;
Orion and the Pleiades, iv. 402 ;
Krittakas, the Hindu name of the
Pleiades, means * the spinners,'
V. 426 ; the Pleiades worshipped
by the Saboean Arabs under the
name Turayya, v. 427 ; Amba, the
Hindu mother-star of the Pleiades,
the mother of Vrisha-kapi, the rain
{varsAa) ape {kapi)y v. 427 ; the
Kirttida [krit/akas)^ the spinners,
mother of Ra-dha, v.
Plough means etymologically the fire-
drill, i. 39
PlutOy Ploutoiiy PlutuSy the turning-
god, the pole, Preface, xxix, xxxii
Pola, the autumn Gond festival to the
oxen, iii. 230, 233
Polar star, worshipped by Hindu
married couples, iv. 179 note ;
V. 433 ; Vega, worshipped as the
polar star in Egypt and by the
Hindu Kushika, iv. 411, 412,
Note A
PolluXy PolydeukeSy the much {polu)
wetter {deukes)^ the rain-god as one
of the Greek twins, iii. 210, 299 ;
iv. 339, 353 ; compared with Moab,
the water {mo) father {ab)y iii. 300
Pongol^ festival at Madras beginning
the year with the winter solstice,
iii. 304
Poplar - trees^ parent - trees of the
Armenians, Preface, xxi note 2
PrajdpcUiy the lord {pati) of former
(/^^) generations {ja\ name of
Dravidian supreme god called Ka,
symbolised by the Soma-cask or
tree in which the sap or soul of life
dwelt. Preface, xxii ; ii. 74 ; iii.
228, 239 ; line of libations of melted
butter to Prajapati, forming one
limb of the rain-cross traced on
mother-altar from North-west to
South-east, meaning of, iii. 167 ;
father of Nabhanedi^tha, the sacred
fire on the altar, iii. 168 ; of Rudra,
iv. 369; the god of the golden
womb, V. 424 ; of the year of five
seasons, iii. 270 ; v. 425, 431
Prakrit^ dialects spoken in Western
India in Vedic tmies, ii. 51 ; inter-
mixed with earlier native dialects,
ii. 118
Profhastri, or teaching-priest, the
guardian of the house-pole of the
Sudas or house of the gods in the
consecrated Hindu sacrificial area,
Preface, xvii ; ii. 81 ; priests of the
Purus, iii. 240
Prastaray Hindu sheaf of Kusha or
Ashva-vala grass used in sacrifices
and the prayer for rain, iii. 164,
166. See Magic wand
Prithuy the conceiving {peru) mother,
also called Kunti, the mother of
the lance {kiniti\ mother of the
Pandavas or Parihavas, the Par-
thians, and of the Dravidian races,
ii. 112; iii. 214, 229, 262; mother
of Karna, the moon-god, iii. 306
ProteuSy meaning of his transforma-
tions, vi. 568
Purkooiy fire-priests of Delphi, ii. 82
Piirohity or family priests, political
importance of in Aryan organisa-
tion, ii. 102
Piiru-ravaSy the Eastern [pnit-u) roarer
{ravas)y the ihunder-god of the
Eastern Purus or city builders,
husband of Ur-vashi, the primeval
(«;-) creatrix {vasht) or fire-socket,
ii. 84 ; the fire-drill in the Soma
sacrifice, iii. 166 ; story of Puru-
INDEX
609
ravas and Ur-vashi, iii. 211, 212;
father of Shiva, iiL 222
FttruSf race of Eastern city builders,
speakers of Dravidian speech, sons
of Kutsa, the god Ku (the begetter),
and the youngest sons of Yayati,
ii. 107, 115, 117; iii. 240, 255;
allies of the Ashvins or twin-gods,
iii. 206 ; their war with the Papis,
as told in 6th Mandala of the
Rigveda, iii. 274
Puryag^ place of pilgrimage at the
junction of the Jumna and Ganges,
consecrated by the sacred Plaksha-
tree {Ficus infectoria)^ iii. 211, 214
Pusg^ the alligator, Push-kara^ Pu-
shan. See Alligator and Bull-god
Pushkala-vati or Hastinapore, the city
of the eight {asta)^ on the Swat
river, where Gandhftri laid the
world's egg, iii. 249
Pushtu^ Afghan language, Dravidian
cerebrals in, iii. 135
Pyiho, the Greek god of the abyss
(^v$ot)t dwelling in Delphi, the
womb of the Grecian race, iii. 171 ;
the god of the Pythion on Mount
Olympus, vi. 514
QitetzalcocUi^ Toltec god, i. 20
Quia-teotf Mexican rain-god, i. 19
Qnirinus, the Sabine god, meaning
the begetter {ku)^ Preface, xxxiu
Pa, the Wend god Rai, sun-god of
the bright sky, the Egyptian god
Ra and the god of the Maghada
fire-worshippers ; Ra-hu, the Sans-
krit Raj, the father of kings, i. 27;
V. 440, 441, 442, 443, 477
Raamah^ the son of Kush in Genesis,
V. 443, 471, 472, 473; name of
India in Ezekiel, v. 476 ; the
thunder-god, v. 476
Rabu and Rahab^ the alligator. See
Alligator
Rachel, the ewe or sheep-mother of
the Asipu or prophet sons of Jacob,
Preface, xxiv ; iii. 241 ; v. 478
Rd-dhdf the giver {dhd) of Ra, the
counterpart of Rkma, the mother
{ma) of Ra, and wife of Krishiia,
the black antelope father-god of
the antelope race, daughter of the
fire -god, and the spinners or
39
Pleiades, iv. 390 ; v. 450, 452, 459 ;
the mythology of her hill, Barsana,
and of the adjoining hill Nand-ganw,
V. 452-453 ; of the Radha kund,
the pool (kund) sacred to Ra,
V. 460 ; the birthday of Radha,
the pool of the lotus, v. 461
Ra-hu, the fire-god of the Magadhas
and their priests, the Dosadhs,
Preface, xxx ; i. 27 ; of the forest
races, ii. 68, 69 ; worshipped by
them as the waxing node of the
moon, the god who brought the
household fire, Agni Vaishvanara,
iii. 2CO, 201; Dosadh festival to
Rahu, iii. 201, 202; that at the
Prahlld-kund at Phalen in Mathura,
V. 458 ; Ra-hu, called Pralamba,
killed by Bala-ram, the moon-god,
V. 467 ; the waning moon in the
Rigveda, iii. 305
Rd'ja, born {ja) of Ra, name given
to the Ra, or sun-worshipping
Gonds, iii. 229; to Hindu and
Egyptian kings, v. 442
Ram and sheep, the totem animals
offered to Varupa, the god of the
barley-growing races, iii. 173, 216,
217, 218; Osiris both the goat
and the ram-god, iii. 173; the
victim substituted by Abram for
the human sacrifice of the eldest
son, V. 467 ; became the constella-
tion Aries, iv. 391 ; the star that
led the Israelites under Joshua, the
sons of the sheep and ram, v. 496,
497. See Ida
Raniy the father of the Kushika race,
iii. 163 ; of the royal branch of the
tribe of Judah, iii. 201 ; v. 443,
4S9 ; brother of Caleb, the dog,
vi. 547 ; the supreme god Ram-anu
or Hadad Rimmon, v. 477, 478
Rama, name means the mother {ma)
of Rk, originally the mother-goddess
Ra-dha, meaning the giver {dha) of
Ra, iv. 390 ; name meant the dark-
ness in Sanskrit, and the heights in
Hebrew, i. 27 ; the ploughing
father-god of the Kushikas, son of
Kaushaloya, i. 26 ; iii. 192 ; v. 472 ;
husband of Sita, the furrow, who
placed Marichi, the spark of light,
the primseval Kufhika father, as
one of the stars of the Great Bear,
610 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
iii. 261 ; of Sita, the crescent-
moon and the mother-mountain,
iv. 338, 343» 372; son of the
antelope, iv. 366, 389, 390; the
sun and moon-god Rama-Chandra,
iv. 338, 372 ; the third Kama,
V. 444 ; he was the fish sun-god
Pra-dyumna, iv. 374, 375; husband
and son of Kadha as the sun-god,
iv. 390 ; conquers Lanka (Ceylon),
the island of the south pole, iv. 391;
where he conquers Havana, the
storm-giant, iv. 395 ; the sun-god
Ram born again in Aquarius, iv.393;
father-god of the sons of the sun-
horse, iv. 395 ; the first of the three
Ramas, v. 441 ; Rama, called
Parasu Rama, or Rama of the
double axe {parastt)^ the moon-
god, the second Rima, v. 443,
444 ; Vala rama, or Bala-ram, the
son of RohinI, the star Aldebaran,
and of the date-palm, the third
Rama, v. 444, 446 ; he is the god
Ram, the father-god of the Semite
race, v. 445-448 ; the driver of the
moon-plough, the crackling fire-god
called Svana, v. 464, 465 ; the
male moon-god ruling the year be-
ginning with the wmter solstice,
V. 466 ; is brother to Krishna, the
antelope sun-god, v. 466, 467. See
Krishna
Jiam-diiu^ storm-god of the Assyrians,
successor of the storm-bird, iv. 340 ;
V. 466 ; Raamah, Rimmon and Ram
of the Bible, v. 443 ; the Kama
Ilvastra (the Sanskrit Shvastra,
comparative of Shvas, hissing), the
Vayu, or wind-god, of the Zenda-
vesta, v. 469, 470 ; the rain and
thunder-god of the Assyrian (Se-
mitic) Flood legend, iv. 393 ; the
Akkadian Mer - mer, the Sabine
Marmar, the Hindu Ram-ram, Pre-
face, xxxiii.
/Cih/iti Hvastray the sexless Zend
father-god, the wind-god ruling tlie
winter season, iii. 271
Kibhiis, the Vedic markers of the
seasons of the year. See Alligator
the red cow, the river
Rohini, mother of the Sakyas,
niother-i^odtless of the red race who
placed their brides on a red bull's
A'o'iim^
hide, iii. 175 ; v. 447 ; the star
Aldebaran, mother-star of the red
Semite race, iii. 315 ; v. 427, 433 ;
mother of Vala-rama or Bala rama,
V. 464, 466
Rudra^ the red (r//</)» god of the
sacrificial stake, father of theMaruts,
once placed in the centre of the
sacrificial altar, iii. 170; sacrifice
to Rudra with the three (/n*) wives
called Rudra Triambikil, iii. 196,
197 ; this combination a reproduc-
tion of the Gond god Pharsi-pen,
iii. 196, 197 ; sacrifice to Rudra as
Kshetra-pati, lord {pcUi) of the
fields {kshetra\ iii. 198 ; the god of
intoxicating spirits and dances, iii.
205 ; Rudra, son of Prajapati,
called Ish-ana, the mountain-god,
equivalent of Is-star, iv. 369 ; the
god worshipped as Bhim-sen by the
Gonds, iii. 202 ; the eleven Rudras,
or faiher-gods, iii. 266
Sabttans^ the men of Sheba (seven),
the rulers of Southern Arabia,
allies of the Minyans, Preface, xxvi;
i. 13 ; v. 427, 434, 498
Sacrifices divided into ( I ) the animal
sacrifices of the Northern mountain
races who believed that by sacrific-
ing and eating the totem of their
tribe at an annual sacramental meal
they could infuse into those who
partook of it the virtues of their
parent-god, iii. 160, 161, 197;
(2) the fruits, grain, cakes and
flowers ofl'ered by the forest matri-
archal cultivators of the south to
the mother-earth, iii. 160 ; by the
Greeks to Apollo, iii. 328 ; these
were blended in the Soma sacrifice
in which a cake baked on the fire-
altar was first offered, iii. 163 ; also
eleven cakes to Atrni-Vishnu, the
year-god, barley to the bird-mother,
and healed milk to the three sea-
sons, Preface, xlvii ; while animal
sacrifices were offered to the gotls
of the Tur-vashu who made the
Tur the house or meridian-pole
their god {vasu)^ Preface, xlvii ; iii.
162 ; this god was Gumi or Rudra,
the red (rud) god of the' sacrificial
stake in the centre or navel of the
INDEX
611
altar, iii. i6o, 170 ; also in the centre
of thehouse,and of the village grove,
lii. 160, 2cx>; sacrifice originally
offered to Ida {se^ Ida), the three
mother-seasons of the year, iii. 172;
it was in their honour that the
Kabiroi made one and the Takkas
made three sacrificial pits conse-
crated to the god of the trident,
ii. 84 ; iii. 196, 197 ; sacrifices used
to make blood brotherhood between
the sacrificer and the land on which
the blood was poured, iii. 196, 197 ;
sacrifice to Rudra, called Kshetra-
pati, or lord {patt) of the fields,
with the three huts for the mother,
the calf and the ox, the victim,
iii. 198 ; the ox tied to the sacrifi-
cial post of Palasha wood, and
killed, to make way for the young
calf, the god of the new year,
iii. 198, 199; annual Soma animal
sacrifices offered at the solstices
{/uniya»a) by the races worship-
ping the twin gods, iii. 160, 174 ;
animals sacrificed to the Zend gods
ruling the year of five seasons, be-
ginning at the summer solstice, con-
secrated to the rain- mother, iii. 270,
271 ; totemistic sacramental feasts
of the sons of the antelope and pig
in Egypt, iii. 180 ; pigs sacrificed
and eaten by all races of Iberian
■descent in Asia and Europe, iii.
180-182; dogs sacrificed as totems
by the fire-worshippers, iii. 187-
189 ; horse-sacrifice of the Ugro-
Finnic Voguls and Scythians, iii.
322 ; of the Northern sons of
Odin, iv. 336, 348 ; of the Romans,
iii* 323 ; iv. 336 ; the Ashvamedha
or horse-sacrifice of the Hindus,
iii. 321, 322; iv. 336; of the
Massagetoc, v. 483 ; blood of vic-
tims drunk by Arabs as a sacramen-
tal draught, iii. 197 ; iv. 348 ;
symbolic sacrifice of blood and wine
mixed in the mother-constellation
Krater, iv. 333 ; self-sacrifice of
Krishna, called Madhava, or born
of Madhu (intoxication), to become
MadhiShan, or its slayer {/tan), for
the good of mankind, iii. 309; also
the sacrifice of self in the Dik-
shayana, or bath of consecration,
Preface, xlvi; 309, 310; the Brah-
ma^a doctrine of the sacrificer sa-
crificing himself, i. 10 ; iii. 276 ;
the Jain sacrifices of consecration
{(itJ^sAa), and penance {tapas)^
improving the moral nature as
opposed to the self-mutilation and
sacrifice of their own blood by the
fire- worshippers, iii. 186, 323, 324;
Santal Manjhi-khil-Sarens refuse
to attend a sacrifice where the
priest offers his own blood, iii. 304;
animal totemistic sacrifices of the
sons of the sheep to the year-gods
Hekate, the Erinnyes and Vanina,
iii. 215, 216, 217 ; the Yupa, or
sacrificial stake borne on the banner
of the Takkas, iii. 197 ; a phallic
emblem, iii. 198 ; animal sacrifices
originally accompanied by drunken
orgies denoting that the sacrificers
were inspired by the totem, i. 14 ;
ii. 89 ; iii. 202, 204, 205, 208,
224 ; these drunken revelries super-
seded by the offering to the rain-
god by the Vaishya or trading
Shus of pure running water, mixed
with Soma or the sap of the tribal
mother-plant or tree, milk, curds
and whey, i. 15 ; iii. 310 ; vi. 551 ;
this was drunk by the sacrificer as
a sacramental drink, iii. 242 ; its
supersession by wine told in the
legend of Pholus, vi. 550, 551 ;
mixed young barley ears, Kusha
grass and roasted com sacrificed
and eaten by the barley-growing
races who worshipped the twin-
gods, iii. 206, 207 ; cocoa and
betul-nut5:, milk and flowers offered
to Sek-Nag, the Gond rain-god,
iii. 229 ; survival of the totemistic
belief in the transfusion of the
nature of the totem in the use of
the fish as one of the Eucharistic
elements, iv. 376 ; transference by
the com - growing races of tins
totemistic belief to the sacramental
partaking of the bread or seed of
life. Preface, xix, xx, xlviii, xlix ;
the KVKiiiiv or sacramental cup of
the Eleusinian mysteries and the
Soma cup. Preface, xlviii ; burat-
offerings, instead of those of victims
slain at the stake, introduced into
612 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Egypt, Phoenicia and Assyria by
the Western Semites, who burnt
only human victims, offered only
in times of national emergency,
when the eldest son of the king or
sacriBcer was usually sacrificed,
iii. 275-277 ; iv. 348 ; human sacri-
fices in India traced to the yellow
races, iii. 277 ; man declared in the
Brahmanas to be the true sacrifice,
whence followed the corollary that
the sacrificer sacrifices himself, iii.
276 ; consecration by the sacrifice
of the hair. Preface, xlv, xlvi ;
iii. 279 ; incense sacrifice of the
ritual of the fish -god of the first
temple-builders, iii. 302 ; sacramen-
tal arink of honey or wine, vi. 565
Sodas, house consecrated to the gods
in the Soma sacrificial ground, ii.
81, 118; home of Vivasvat, life
(vasvai) with two {zn) forms, father
of the twins Day and Night, iii. 212 ;
its house-pole of the Udumbara
fig-tree, watered with water mixed
with barley, iii. 238 ; the conse-
crated temple of the trading races,
iii. 327
SaJ^a or Sakadvipa, the wet {sak) land,
name ot Northern India, iii. 146
Sakadwipa Brahmins, priests of the
wet {sak) land, i. 76 ; iii. 224, 225
Saka vicdha, the sacrifice of the wet
{sak) or autumn season, iii. 227
Sakala^ capital of the Madras in N.
Punjab, iii. 191 ; iv. 368
Sakti mountains of Western Bengal,
sacred to the god Vasu, ii. 93, iii.
148, 193, 285, 301
Sakti^ worship of the signs of sex, iii.
Sakuniald^ the little bird-mother of
the Bharatas, legend of, iii. 318,
319 ; connection with the Kanva
Brahmins, iii. 318, 324
SdkyaSy a name of the Ikshvakus or
Kuntibhojas, iii. 325
Sdl-Jish, Sec Fish -god.
Sal-treCy {Shorea robusta), parent-tree
of the Dravidian races, ii. 51 ; iii.
I59» I94» 231 ; vi. 513 ; marriage-
tree of the Bagdis, Bauris and
Lobars, iii. 153, 209 ; tree grasped
as her parent-tree by Maya the
mother of the Buddha, iii. 159;
parent-tree of Shaliya, the parent*
King of the Madras or Takkas, iii
191, 262; iv. 368; Ooraon, Bur-
mese and Santal festivals to the sal-
tree, i. 13 ; iii. 231 ; sons of the sal-
tree become sons of the sil-fbh,
iii. 285; vi. 512; sal -tree made
their parent-tree by the sons of
the pine-tree, iv. 349 : vL 511
Salai tree, {Boswellia thurijera)^ the
sacred incense-tree of India, iii. 300
Salii, dancing priests of the Sabine
god Quirinus, Preface, xxxii.
Samuel, the prophet, called Samlah of
Masrekah (the vine land), in the list
of the kings of Edom, iii. 316 ; vL
520 ; the successor of Dagon the fish-
god, vi. 543
Safitals, their great Migh festival, iu
125 ; iii. 201 ; marriage to the
mahua-tree, iii. 153, 209 ; Santal
sub-tribe descended from Saren, the
Pleiades, ii. 126 ; iii. 287 ; peculiar
Semitic customs of Sarens, iii. 304 ;
Santal festival to the sal-tree, iii
231 ; Santal lunar year beginning
with the winter-solstice, iii. 304, 305
Sar, Shar or Sara, primaeval goddess-
mother of the corn-growing races,
the Basques of Asia Minor, Preface,
xvii ; name traced to the Basque
zare, a basket, zar^ a willow. Pre-
face, XX, xxi ; to the Northern sharoi
sha7'd a piece of pottery and a seed-
husk, Preface, xxii ; to the seed-
basket or jar, the Hindu Drona and
the god Prajapati, Preface, xxiii;
Shard of the Egyptian scarab or
beetle {khpr), and the sheath
of the year. Preface, xxv ; Sara
wife of Ab-ram, the sun-god, the
husk enveloping the seed-grain,
Isaac, Preface, xxiv ; i. 26, 27 ; be-
came the Armenian cloud-goddess
Shar, iii. 260 ; the mystic basket
of the Bacchic processions, the
Greek Liknos, the barley-mother
Demeter, Preface, xix ; the Vedic
Saranyu and Sarama, the Greek,
Lithuanian, Czech Leto, the Wend
Lada wolf and dog, summer-mother
of the twin gods of the barley-grow-
ers and miners. Night and Day, born
on the Xanthus, the yellow river in
Asia Minor, and as the yellow god,.
INDEX
618
Hari or Yamuna on the river of the
twins {jf ama), in ^ India., i. i6, 17;
ii. 49, 126 ; iii. 213-215, 239 ; vi.
506 ; birth of twin sons of Saranyu
daughter of Tvashtar, god of the
year of two seasons, mother of the
sons of Vivasvat, as told in the Rig-
veda, iii. 210, 211 ; Armenian Shari,
Akkadian Istar, both become in
Sumerian Sar-Sar, a name of la, the
rain-god, while As-sar, the fish-god,
is the six Sars, iii. 161 note, 289;
the Vedic and Akkadian Sar-ana
or Saranyu, the Greek Erinnyes and
Hekate all mean the cloud-goddess
of the fire-wolf, the mother of Adar
or Atri, the fire-god of the year of
three seasons, iii. 215, 216 ;
Sar, the enclosing snake, and Sar-
pedon, one of the triad bom of
Europa, iii. 217 ; Sarasvati, the flow-
ing river, the mother Sar-i of the
god Hari, iii. 218 ; Sar and Sar-ganu
the irrigator, parent -god of the
Akkadians, Serug of the Jews, and
Sar-rabu the great {radti) Sar, par-
ent-god of the Phoenicians, iii. 219,
220, 225, 236 ; called by Shuites
of the Euphrates Emu or Amon, the
supporter or house-pole of the Am-
monites and Egyptians, iii. 236,
237 ; Sar or Sharas Para-shara, the
overhanging {para) cloud {sAara^)
father of Vyasa the alligator (see
Alligator), father of the Indian royal
races, i. 21 ; iii. 225, 300, 301 ;
the mother-goddess of the Sanskrit
autumn season Shar-ad, and of the
race who offered Shraddha or funeral
feasts to their ancestors. Preface,
xxvii ; Ooraon festival of Sar as the
sal-tree, ii. 124, 126; iii. 231;
Sar as Shar-yata, bom (j^aia) of
Shar, father of Su-koniya, she who
has the essence of life (su), and her
husband Chyavana,' the earthquake
god, iii. 259, 260 ; Santals call
their parent 'Stars the Pleiades
Sar-en, or the god Sar, iii. 287 ;
Sar, the Akkadian constellation
Aquarius, mother of the sun-god, iv.
340 ; Sar, daughter of the mother-
mountain Istar or Ba, iv. 345 ; Sar,
the mother {maid), the Sarmati or
Sauro-matae, sons of the cloud {sar)
or of the lizard {sauro), sons of the
Scythian fathers and Amazonian
mothers, V. 429; vi. 510; mother
of the dog, wolf and bear races,
vi. 510, 512
Sara-ma, mother {ma) of Sara, the
celestial bitch of the Rigveda, who
opened the year by waking, the
Ribhus, iii. I07 ; vi. 510 ; the star
Sinus, who stole the cows of light
of the Pai[^is or trading races, iv.
332, 341
Sarasvatt, mother river of the Indian
Agni- worshippers, iii. 136 ; in the
Vedic goddess-triad, mother of the
immigrant Northern agriculturists,
who called themselves the sons of
the rivers, iii. 173 ; wife of Shushnd.
the demon of drought {see Suhra),
taken over by Indra, iii. 183 ;
originally the Harahvaiti river of
the Takkas, iii. 190; vi. 510; the
river where Indra got dmnk, iii,
206 ; river of the Purus on which the
pure and intoxicating Soma grows,
iii. 206 ; a form of the goddess Sar
or Sar-i, iii. 218
Sarganu Sargon, {see Sar), name of
the ancestral parent god, son of Sar,
taken by Sargon, the great conquer-
ing king of Assyria, iii. 219, 220
Sama, mother village-grove of the
matriarchal Dravidian races, ii. 41,
52; iii. 154; generally in Western
Bengal of sal-trees, ii. 51 ; formed
of primaeval forest-trees left stand-
ing, iii. 153, 154 ; the Sama, called
Lumbini, where the Buddha was
bora, iii. 159
Satyavatt, the fish-mother, mother of
all the royal races of India, i. 21.
See Fish -god.
Satyrs, sons of the Phrygian goat -god,
Pan, and their affinity with the
Gaurian race, vi. 544 ; they had,
like their king Midas, asses' ears,
iii. 307
Saurdshtra, name of Guzerat, the
kingdom {ardshtra) of the Saus or
Sus, the Indian trading races. Pre-
face, xxvii ; iii. 207, 208
Sautramani, festival at which Indra
was cured of drunkenness, iii. 207,
208
Saviiar, sun-god of the Rigveda, ii. 106
614 THE RUUNG RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Saval or Sauml, the Babylonian san-
god, the Hebrew Saul, iiL 316 ;
both Savit ar and Savul contain root
sav^ from su, to b^et, ii. 106
Sek'ttag^ the rain-god, supreme god of
of the Turanian Gonds who became
the Shei»h-nag of the Mahibharata,
iii« 177, 229 ; of the Takkas of the
Punjab, iiL 191,229; also the god
Shesh-ai of Hebron, killed by
• Caleb the dog, iii. 189 note 2 ;
ritual of his worship, iii. 229; com-
pared with that of the gymnopsedia
to Apollo Paian, iL 87, 88 ; iii. 328,
329 ; the snake Amhah of the
Egyptians, iii. 252 ; the Ahir Budh-
nya of the Rigveda, iii. 268
SemeU^ the mother of Dionysus, the
Phoenician goddess Pen-Samlath,
iii. 316. See Dionysus.
Semites, a composite race, sons of the
mother-goddess Sar, and the sun-
• god Ram, the parent-gods of the
growing grain. Preface, xxiv ; wor-
shipped the sheep-mother Ida as
Iru the Iberian goddess of the three
seasons of the grain, the sacred
triangle, Preface, xiii ; iii. 171 ;
these were the three gods destroyed
by Caleb, iii. 189 note 2 ; as the
sons of Dan, the judge, they wor-
shipped the phallus, iii. 241 ; were
the building-race, the Iberian sons
of EbcT, who first grew barley and
traced their parentage to the father-
boar, the sun-god, who killed the
old year to make way for the new,
and the mother-sow sacred to the
mother-earth, iii. 177-180; when
their component tribes coalesced
into a nation they called themselves
the sons of Shem, the name, son of
the fish-god {see Fish-god), the
classifying and naming race, i. 30 ;
became a nation in Arpachsad
(Armenia), the son of Shem, and
made Shelah, the spear or fire-drill,
Arpachsad's son, their god, iii. 179
193 ; this became the Ashcra or
rain-pole, the Ba'al or husband of
the land worshipped in Syria and
India, iii. 193, 194; Shelah, also
the son of Judah, the fire-god, was
fatherof the first artisans, the weavers
and potters, iii. 179, 180; the rain-
pole, originally the house-pole, iiL
160 ; became the meridian-pole of
the heavens, turned hj the twin
gods Night and Day, the parent-gods
of the Hittites, or twin races, sons
of Esau, the goat-god of the Jems,
and his two Hittite wives, iiL 259,
260, 307 {see Goat -god) ; this race
of shepherd-farmers, worshippers of
the goat-god, were opponents of the
woishippers of the emasculated fire-
drill, and called themselves sons of
the stallion ass, iii. 255 ; their
priests and rulers were the sons of
Manasseh, iii. 256 {see Manasseh) ;
the ass-parent of the Hittite Semites,
shown in Exodus to be especially
sacred to the Semites, who origin-
ally offered human sacrifices, iiL
277 ; the fire-worshipping sons of
the boar-god, and shepherd-sons of
the goat-god, migrated southward
in two divisions which became the
sons of Joktan, or the Elastcrn
Semites, sons of Keturah, the Sans-
krit Vritr§, {see Keturah), and the
other the Euphratean or Western
Semites, iiL 179 ; the Eastern Sem-
ites called the Kasidi, or conquerors
from the land of Arpa-Khesed,
by the Akkadians, iii. 182 ; l>ecame
the Magi among the Persians,
iii. 184, 185 ; the Bhrigus or Medah,
sons of the dog, in India, and sons
of Caleb, the dog, among the Jews,
iii, 187-189; the western division
became the sons of Terah, the
antelope, of the Jews {see Antelope),
of Dara, the antelope, the god la,
of the Akkadians, iii. 180 ; and
of Dharti, the mother-goddess of
springs, in India, iii. 194, 195 ; who
became Gan-dhari, the goddess-
mother-bird of the springs {(//tJra),
who laid the egg whence the Kushite
race was born, iii. 248, 249 {see
Bird-mother myth) ; these sons of
the antelope {rishya), the parents
of the Brahmin Rishis, made
Krishna, the Indian black antelop:*,
their father-god, iii. 149 ; iv. 337 ;
and became in Iran the worship^ ers
of Keresaspa the son of Sama, the
Semite husband of the moon-
goddess, iii. 306; and in India
INDEX
615
the race called Kan;;ia Suvarna,
whose god was Kar^a, the horned
moon, the son of A^hva, the sun-
horse or river, iii. 306, 307, 326 ;
this race of Central Asian horsemen
established the Semite lunar year
of thirteen months, iii. 307 ; Semite
history began with the sons of Dan,
Hushim and Shuham, the Hus
and Shus, iii. 259, 260; and in
that of Judah and his offspring, iii.
189 ; the united Semites were the
descendants of the thirteen children
of Jacob, the thirteen lunar months of
the year, and of his four wives, Leah
the wild cow, and Rachel the ewe,
daughters of I^aban, the moon and
sun-gods of Haran, and of the
transformed wives of Lamech the
god of the Linga, iii. 271, 272;
their history traced in that of the
kings of Edom, iii. 291, 316; of
the sons of Gad and Ashur, iii. 289,
290 ; in the v/orship of Sin the
horned moon-goddess of the Tews,
Hindus, Sumerians, Akkaaians,
Minyans and Sabseans, iii. 141,
291, 306, 325, 327 ; to whom Sinai,
the mother-mountain of the lunar
confederacy, was consecrated as the
sign of Semite supremacy, iii. 291 ;
V. 494-498 their progress as the
Phoenician sons of Tur, iii. 292,
293; iv. 409, 410; date of Salli-
mannu or Solomon, their fish-god,
traced to the age of the first temple-
builders, who worshipped the father-
god, shrouded in the mner naos, iii.
295» 300 ; Semitic history as told in
that of incense- worship, iii. 300-302 :
of the succession of the priestly
orders forming the tribe of Levi,
Preface, xv, xvi ; v. 488, 489 ; of the
victory of Esther or Ashtoreih, the
moon-goddess, iii. 273 ; of the con-
quests of Ephraim under Joshua, the
son of Nun, the fish-god, iii. 226,
241, 302 ; iv. 351, 352 ; v. 488-499 :
of Tamar the palm-tree, the parent-
tree of the Shus of India and the twin
races, iii. 241 ; iv. 344, 347 ; evidence
of Semite rule in Greece, vi, 519,
520, 533 ; evidence of Semite con-
nection with Dionysus worship, vi.
542, 543» 546, 547 ; of thie story of
Troy, vL 552 ; in that of the Minyan
Pelops, vi. 556 ; Semite forms of
government in Athens and in the
Amphictyonic League, vi, 558, 559 :
Semite sacrifices in Crete, vi. 559
Sett Egyptian god, whose name nicans
the vanquished (j/), god of the
worshippers of the Crocodile, i. 10 ;
iv. 363 ; the god who ruled the
Egyptian year before the calculation
ot the lunar year, ii. 128, 129; the
Great Bear, the forethigh of Set in
Egyptian mythology, and he one of
its stars, iii. 264 ; ruled with Nebt-
hat, the Southern sun of winter,
iii. 271
Seven^ the sacred number of the moon-
worshippers, the sacred seven days
of the week, the seven strings placed
by Hermes on the constellation of
the Tortoise-shell to turn it into the
Lyre, ii. 49; iv. 412; seven wives
of the four Gond fathers, ii. 49 ;
seven sacred sheaves of Ku^ha grass,
made at the Soma sacrifice, iii. 163 ;
the seven Gandharva guardians of
Soma, iii. 195, 226, 299 ; iv. 349 ;
the Sat-pak, or seven circles tra-
versed by the bride at Bagdi, Bauri,
Lobar and Brahmin weddings, iii.
209 ; seven pieces into which Lingal
cut the year-snake Bhour-nag, iii.
223 ; the festival of Sek-nag, the
Gond rain-god, held every seven
years, iii. 229 ; seven gods of the
Gonds, iii. 288 ; the seven bears,
antelopes and bulls, with which
the seven stars of the Great Bear
were successively identified, ii. 84 ;
iii. 257, 264 ; the seven Maruts or
winds, iii. 258 ; iv. 346 ; the seven
children of Leah, the wild cow, iii.
290 ; the seven Orak-bongas of the
Santals, and the seven spirits wor-
shipped by the Bhuiyas, iii. 303,
305 ; Bathshclxi or the seven
{sheba) measures {bath)^ mother of
Solomon, the fish-god, iii. 307 ; ihc
seventh day, consecrated by the
Semite Assyrians, Zends and Jews,
iii. 309 ; the seven Lumasi, iii. 314,
315 ; iv. 355-372 ; the number
sacred to all the races who wor-
shipped the shepherd-god called,
Shiva or Sheba, the seven ; the god
616 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Saiv of the Ural-Altaic Finns, Sheba
of the Hindus, and Seb of the
Akkadians, iii. 309, 317 ; iv. 362
Seventeen, its significance as a sacred
number, ii. 129 ; iii. 207 note i ;
iv. 384
Shakuna, the kite, brother of Gan-
dhari, bird-mother of the Kushite
race. See Bird-mother myth
fhamdara of the Rigveda, the
Yaudhya or Johiya Rajputs of the
Punjab, named from the Shamba
or throwing javelin of the Parthians,
the Parthava of the Mahabharata,
and the Kunti-bhojas which they
carried, worshippers of Keresashpa,
son of Sama the Semite, iii. 307,
308 ; their javelin was that given
by Indra to Karna the moon -god,
son of Prithu, the Parthian mother,
for the golden mail and earrings of
the horned moon, iii. 307, See
Keresashpa, Karna
SAan-ZanUf long-enduring {tanu) work
(jhan)f father of the royal races of
India, iii. 190, 225
Sharmishtha, she who is most pro-
tecting {sharman)y the earthly wife
of Yayati who put Devayani, the
heavenly wife, down a well, mother
of the three earlier ruling races,
headed by the sons of Druhyu, the
sorceress (dru/i), goddess of the
banyan-tree {Ficus Jndica)^ iii. 239,
240, 272
Shelahy meaning the spear or fire-
drill, son of Arpachsad (Armenia)
and of Judah, father of the weavers
and potters, iii. 179, 189. See
Semites
Shishu-pala^ the nourisher {paid) of
children {shishu), year god wilh
three eyes and four hands, the three
and four seasons of the earlier year,
slain by Krishna with the discus,
iii. 251 ; the king of the bird
(chedi) land of Chedi, Preface, xl
Shiva^ the tribe so called in the
Rigveda, a generic name for all the
caille-herding races in India, ii.
113, 114; iii. 222; the shepherd-
god of the Hindus, the Akkadian
Sib, iii. 221, 222 ; the god Saiv of
the Ural-Altaic Finns, and father-
god of the sons of Sheva or Sheba
[seven), iv. 362 ; called Sankha or
Sankhara, meaning number, the
number seven, iii. 309, 317 ; hus*
band of the witch-mother Magha,
iii. 225 ; made Amba, the mother-
star of the Pleiades, the bisexual
deity of the twin races, iii. 237 ;
the three-eyed bull-god of the year
of three seasons, iii. 254
$hutia-§hepa, the dog's {^huna) penis
{fhefa), Vedic story of the sacrifice
of, iii. 188, 196, 197
Shura-sena, the army of the bull
{shur), the people of the holy land
of Mathura, v. 449 note 3, 450
Shus, Shu, Su'Varna, Sous, Sacs,
Sauri, called in the north Hus,
name of the Sumerian trading races
of the Euphratean delta and Western
India, who traced their descent to
• Khu,* the mother-bird of the
Akkadians, Egyptians, and Kush-
ites. Preface xxxvi-xl ; iii. 140,
141 ; iv. 342 ; the sons ofShu-hu,
the mountain-goat, the god Uz, iii.
149 ; of the Euphrates, iii. 175 ;
of Shua, wife of Judah, iii. 189;
iv. 344 ; of the Udumbara fig-tree
{Ficus glomerata), iii. 238, 239; of
Dan, the judge, called Hushim, and
Shuham, iii. 259, 260; worship-
pers of the Semite moon-god Sin
or ShinI, iii. 273, 305 ; rulers of
Shushan and worshippers of Susi-
nag, iii. 273 ; sons of the fish-god,
the totem of the Hindu and Sume-
rian Shus, iii. 285, 286 ; became the
navigating Phoenicians, iii. 288;
subjects of tlie conquering king
calletl Husham in Genesis, Hush-
rava in the Zendavesla, and Shush-
rava in the Rigveda, iii. 291,
303 ; the Jain Shus of Sindhu-
Savarna in the West, and of Karna-
Savarna in the East of India, iii.
324, 327 ; men of the yellow race,
iv. 341
S hyena, bird which brought Soma
from heaven. ^ee Bird-mother
myth
Siegfried, the German sun-god, myth
of, vi. 531
Sikhs, descendants of the Takkas,
the race who wore their hair uncut,
iii. 279
INDEX
617
Sin, Stni, Sink, or Singh^ the horned
moon. Se£ Moon>god
Sinaif the mother-mountain sacred to
Sin» the moon consecrated by the
Sabsean- Arabian Shus as the Semite
rival to and successor of the earlier
mother-mountain of the East, iii.
291 ; V. 479, 494, 498
Sindkava, land of the moon {sin),
name given to India b^ the Sume-
rian Semites, ii. 48 ; iii. 140
Sindhu, the moon {sin) river, the
river Indus, iii. 140
Sin-gir, original name of the Euphra-
tean delta, iii. 141
Sirius, the dog-star, ushers in the
rainy season in the Zendavesta,
iii. 142, 143, 257, 258; iv. 332,
346 ; V. 432 ; opens the year of
Praj^pati in India, iii. 270; the
dog of Orion, iv. 409 note i ; one
of the hounds of Merodach, vi. 512 ;
Isis Satet in Egypt, iv. 409. See
Isis, Sarama,Sukra,Tishtrya,Tishku
Sitd, the furrow and moon-goddess.
See Moon -god
Six, the sacred number of the twin
races who believed in the divinity
of pairs, and whose mother-stars
were the six Pleiades, iii. 287 ; the
mother-stars of the Maghadas and
of the South Arabians, v. 426 ;
427 ; the six sons of Brahma,
headed by Marlchi, the spark of
fire, father of the Ku^hite race,
the six gods, sons of Maga of the
Gonds, and six sons of la of the
Akkadians, iii. 150, 287, 288 ; six-
rayed Cypriote and Ilittite star
still borne on the Turkish banners,
iii. 288; the god Assar and the
six Sars, iii. 289, 293 ; six gods or
days of creation, i. 29 ; iii. 289 ;
v. 423 ; six gods of the Hittites,
Preface, xxix ; six gods of the
Ashura, whose god was Ashura, or
Ahura Mazda, iii. 288 ; v. 415 ;
the six Aditya or primaeval gods of
the Rigveda, v. 421, 422 ; their
Tri-kadru-ka, or six days* festival,
V. 424 ; the six Dhishnyas, or burnt-
out hearth-mounds, in the Hindu
sacrificial ground, v. 464, 465 ; the
six seasons of the Zend and South
Indian year, ii. 78, 115; union
between the South Indian races,
who reckoned six, and the North
Indians, who reckoned five seasons
in the year, v. 437
Skirophcria, the festival of the um-
brella {skiron) at Athens, vi. 516
SnaJte, parent god of the earlier
matriarchal races, the ring of culti-
vated land round the mother-grove,
ii. 52 ; Vala-bhadra, the blessed
{dAadra) Vala, or enclosing snake,
slain by Indra, the rain-god of the
barley-growing races, ii. 58 ; the
Vritra or enclosing snakes of the
Rigveda, the aboriginal matriarchal
tribes, iii. 138, 147, 194; the
Greek enclosing snake Echis, the
mother snake of the Achseans, iii.
176, 194 ; vi. 505 ; of Achilles, the
young sun-god, vi. 531 ; the god-
dess Ashi {azi echis) Vanguhi, the
encircling snake of the Zendavesta,
the Chesti and Chista {chest) of the
Din or divine law, iii. 218 ; Echis,
the same word as the Sanskrit and
Egyptian snake Ahi, iii. 194; the
§ravana (the illustrious), rain snakes
of the Hindu Nagas, sons of the
rain-snake and of the Anguineum
ovum or snake's egg of the Druids,
ii. 67, 68, 131 ; iii. 249 ; the two
mother snakes, or the Caduceus of
Hermes, the Ahi or Echis, the
N&ga or rain-snake, iii. 229, 230 ;
the Akkadian snake-mother of seed,
Davkina, called Tsir-du, the holy
{du) snake {tsir), mother of Dumu-
zi, the son {dumu) of life (st), the
year-sun of the barley-growing
races, iii. 151 ; Azi Dahaka the
biting-snake {azi) of Babylon, god
of the burning summer who will
not give rain, iii. 179, 182, 183 ;
the Naga rain-snake, the giiardian
god of the house-pole, iii. 194 ;
the goddess Kadru, the tree {dru)
of Ka, the village grove, the mother-
goddess of the N^as, iii. 238, 239 ;
the Egyptian and Kushite Urseus,
or Naga snake, the sign of rovalty,
iv. 346 ; the Naga rain-snake of
Elam, iv. 331 {see Susi-na^); the
mother-snake of the Finns, iii. 245,
246 ; the stars as snake-mothers in
Gond, Greek, Hindu, and Akka-
618 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
dian mythology, iii. 294 ; the con-
stellation Hydra, the rain-snake, iv.
333-336. Su Naga, Nakshatra
Soma festival, the Haoma of the
Zends, names derived from the
roots Su and Hu^ iii. 139, 140;
originally the great annual rain-
festival of the Dravido-Turanian
Danavas, and Ashuras, the trading
race of Shus, sons of the bird {khu)^
worshippers of the rain-god called
Suk-ra or Shuk-ra in India, Shuk-
us by the Akkadians, Ukko by the
Finns, which became Ushana in
India, Usha in the Euphratean
countries, the name of the rain-god
ruling the year of five seasons in
India and the Persian Gulf, and of
the Soma plant, iii. 147 ; Soma
and Haoma, the supreme god of
Vedic and Zend theology, iii. 134,
135 ; Soma [xfi^^^**) brought from
heaven by the frost or winter-bird
Shyena, iii. 338 {su Bird- mother
myth) ; worshipped in the Rigveda
as the moon, called P^vamana the
cleanser, iii. 139; the original
goddess-mother of seed (j«), wor-
shipped as the seed-mother Dav-
kina, called Shus, mother of Dumu-
zi, the year sun, iii. 151 ; Vedic,
Akkadian, and Finnic theology of
Soma, iii. 139-144; the Soma-
mountain plant of Persia and
Afghanistan {Periploca aphylla)^ iii.
137 ; called Giristha, or the dwell-
er on the mountains {girt), iii.
162 ; Indian Soma plants — Tur-
meric, sacred to the yellow race,
worshipping the twin gods ; the
Palasha tree, to the Mons or Ma's
and Gonds ; Kusha grass, the
mother-plant of the Kushika, sons
of the antelope, iii. 138; festival of
the Kushika confederated races,
grouped round the mother-moun-
tain of the East, still surviving in
that to Juggernath at Puri, iii. 148,
162, 163 ; the original Soma altar
covered with Kusha grass {Poa
cynosuroiiks), iii. 163 ; of which
the Soma *prastara,' originally the
magic rain wand, was made, iii.
164 ; Soma triangle on the altar,
denoting the gods of the year of
three seasons, made first of Palishz
wood, sacred to the Ho Kols and
Gonds, afterwards of the Gum-tree
{Gmelina arborea)^ sacred to the
sons of the house-pole Igumi), iii.
165 {see Gumi gosain) ; the Soma
rain or Vashat call to the rain
{varsAa) gods, iii. 165 ; changes in
the Soma ritual made by the sons
of the horse, iii. 166 ; Soma sacri-
fice instituted by the sons of the
Ass {see Ass), worshippers of the
Ashvins or twin gods, and per-
fected by the Ikshvaku, sons of the
sugar-cane {iksAa), iii. 167 ; history
told in the rain-cross marked oir
the Soma altar, iii. 167, 168; the
rain-cross in Egypt and India, and
the cross of the fire-god, or St.
George's cross, i. 17, 18 ; summary
of the history told by the Soma
ritual, iii. 168-174; intoxicating
drink {surd), originally drunk at the
Soma festival, iii. 204, 205 ; an
infusion of Kusha grass, one of the'
Soma plants (p. 138), young and
roasted com substituted at the'
Sautramani festival of the barley
growers, iii. 206 ; Soma made
from Kusha grass and corn, from
intoxicating drink {s//rd)t and from
honey, drunk at the Vaja-peya festi-
val, iii. 207, 208 ; the Soma festi-
val, one of the Vaishyas, or trading
classes, from whose mot her- tree the
Udumbara {Fiats glomeraia)^ the
pole of the sacrificial Soma hall,
was made, iii. 238 ; the first Soma
year one of three seasons, indicated
by (i) the oblations called the three
Upasads ; (2) by the three-lipped
cup of the Ashvins, and by the
three Soma mixings ( Tryiishira) of
milk, sour milk, and barley of the
corn-growing and cattle-worship-
ping races, iii. 241, 242 ; the Soma
of the Kshatrya warriors and the
Vaishya traders first made from
milk, into which the juice of their
parent-tree, the Bur-tree {Ficus
Indica) {sec Sharmishtha) was in-
fused, iii. 242 ; the barley-meal cup
of the Soma bird of the Shus {khu)^
the Gridhra, or vulture, called
Marka, the cup of the dead {makrka)
INDEX
619
and the cup called the creating
{manthin) cup of the Try^hira
ritual, both offered to the moon-god,
iii. 243, 244; Soma sacrifice to Prajsl-
[>ati, the god Ka ofthe Ashuras,and
the year of five seasons (see Year-
reckonings), iii. 270; the Soma
festival of the Asuras, called Tri-
kadru-ka, that of the three Kadrus
or tree {dru) mothers to three gods
or seasons reduplicated into six,
V. 423-425 ; this traced to the
earlier Triambika festival of Rudra
and his three wives in India, and
of Hekate in Greece, v. 427, 428 ;
the Soma festival charged into a
water festival by the later Sombunsi,
or sons of the moon {Soma or Sin),
iii. 308, 309 ; their sacramental
Soma cups, consecration {dtksha)
and penance, {Tapas) brought by
the Shyena bird to Kadru, the tree
{dru) of Ka from Krishdnu the
rainbow- god, iii. 302 ; they insti-
tuted the Dlkshaniya or initial
bath of baptismal regeneration to
be taken by all Soma sacrificers,
Preface, xliv-xlvi ; iii. 309 ; in
this form of the festival the sacri-
ficer was obliged during its con-
tinuance to drink onlv fast milk
{vrcUa) making him<;elf son of the
cow race. Preface, xlv ; Soma festi-
val of Su commemorated by the
Buddhists in the story of Su-medha,
the sacrifice {medha) of Su, and by
its product the religion of the
trading Jains, the Panis, or traders
of the Rigveda, iii. 323-327
Sombunsi, or sons of the moon, the
lunar Rajputs, descended from the
water-drinking race, who use milk,
curds and whey, and running water
as the ingredients of their Soma
festival, iii. 325; who prohibited the
use of intoxicating drinks, iii. 323 ;
a prohibition still observed by the
upper classes throughout India, iii.
309 ; the Malli allied with the Shus
called Sombunsi, Preface, lix, Ix
Si, George, the Greek Geourgos, the
rain-god, i. 9-15; iii. 232; his
cross the cross of the fire-god, i. 18
Su or Shu, the creating germ of life,
the Akkadian and Egyptian fire-
god, i. 6; iii. 144, 251 ; iv. 344;
name formed from the Akkadian
and Egyptian Khu, the bird, the
Finnic Ku, the begetter of the
sons of the bird who laid the egg
whence the U^o-Finns were born,
Preface, xxxvi-xli ; iii. 148 ; the
root of the Indian sacred Soma,
meaning the sap or essence of life,
ii. 131 ; iii. 139, 309 ; iv. 342, 344;
a Southern form of the original root,
iii. 140 ; the parent-god of the
Shus of Shu-gir, the Euphratean
delta, and of Shushan of the Su-
varna, of the delta of the Indus, and
Sau-rashtra, iii. 140, 141 ; of the
sons of Shu, the begetting-stone,
sacred to the Babylonian fire-god
Adar, iii. 144; the Egyptian gods
the first children of Ra, Su, and
Hu, the sons of Shu-hu, iii. 201
note ; Shu-hu or Shu-ga, the Akka-
dian mountain-goat, sacred to the
Mul-lil, god of sorcery {HI), who
became ihe goat-god Uz, iii. 149,
161 ; the god Su, called Su-koniya,
the daughter {koniya) of Su,
daughter of Sharyata, the cloud-
goddess Shar, iii. 259; Su, the root
of Savetar, Savul, and Sawul, the
Hindu and Babylonian sun-god, ii.
106 ; the god Su-dharvan, the
begetting {su) bow {dharvan), the
rainbow god, guarding Soma, and
father of the Ribhus, the makers of
the seasons {see Alligator) ; the
goddess Su-bhadra, the blessed
{Ithadra) Su, bride of the sun-horse,
called also Durga, the mountain
twin -sister of Krishna, the black
antelope, and wife of Ram a Chandra,
the sun and moon-god, iv. 337, 338;
Su-gi, the creating {su) spirit-reed,
or reed of the bird {su), the con-
stellation of the Great Bear and
Libra, iv. 337
Sukra, Shukra, Sakra^ or Sakko, the
rain-god of the Hindus before Indra,
name derived from an Akkadian
and Indian root suk or shuk, mean-
ing wet, i. 6, 14, 39 ; ii. 117 ; Sak,
kar, the rain-god in the myth of
Shamir, i. 29 ; etymology of Sak-
Shak, iii. 141, 142 ; Shukra, the
rain-god of Saka-dvipa (Northern
680 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
India), iii. 146, 147 ; Sale and Suk,
Akkadian names of Nuz-ku, the
dawn and rain - messenger, the
prophet-god, iii. 172 ; name Shukra
identical with that of the Vedic god
Shushna, slain by Indra, iii. 183 ;
victory of Indra over Shushna, and
that of Thraetaona over Azidaihaka
identical, iii. 185 ; Shukra, the
generating- 6 re, iii. 188 ; the star
Sirius, iii. 244, 245, 258, 312;
which opens the year of five seasons
of Prajapati, iii. 270, 27 1 ; head of
the thirty-three Buddhist gods of
the Tavatimsa heaven, iii. 266
Surparaka, Surat, the early Dravidian
port on the Tapti, ii. 98 ; iii. 283
Susi-nagf the great Nag or rain-snake
of Elam and of the race of the Shus,
whose image was borne on the
Parthian banners, iii. 140, 228, 284;
the king of Shushan, iii. 273
Svastika, origin of the sign, i. 18; iii.
221 ; used in the Bronze Age, when
the Alban Mount was an active
volcano, i. 19; Svastika, or the
Trojan goddess, representing the
mother-altar, iii. 171
Takkas or Tiigras, also called Shiva
[which sgc)y allies of Aryan Trilsus,
ii. 113, 114; called Vahlika, or
f>eopIe of Balkh, on the Oxus, iii.
190 ; still a powerful Punjab tribe,
founders of the city Taxila ( Takka-
sila), the rock {sila) of the Takkas,
iii. 190; race of artificers, whose
name, like that of their Vedic god
Tvashtar, comes from the root tvaks^
to make of two (/?'«), iii. 190, 191 ;
their three gods worshipped as a
trident, iii. 191 ; connection with
the Gonds, iii. 191 -193 ; their three
gods originally moiher-goddesses,
iii. 193, 207 ; called Tri-garta, or
people of the three sacrificial pits
{garta) of the Kabiroi, iii. 196, 197;
their banner the Vupa or phallic
sacrificial stake, iii. 197, 198 ; their
progress through India as the
Maghadas, bearing the household
fire, iii. 200 ; identity with the
Gond worshippers of Sek Nag, iii.
228, 229; fathers of Bhuju, the
devouring-flame, the fire-god, iii.
260, 261 ; conquered by Hu-shrava,
or Su-Shrava, kings of the Shus,
iii. 273, 274; a long-haired race
like the present Sikhs, iii. 279. Set
Maghadas
Takma Urupa^ Zend fire-god, twin-
brother of Yima, predecessor of
Azi Dahaka god of the year of
three seasons, iv. 346, 352
TatnaVy wife of Judah, the Babylonian
male and female palm-tree, sacred
to the twin races in Babylonia and
Western India, iii. 241 ; iv. 344,
347 ; mother -goddess of Achan, heir
of Zerah, her son, v. 499. Su
Palm-tree
Tammuzt Semitic form of Dumu-zi
(ivhich see)
Tara-pennuy snake star-goddess of
Gonds, ii. 93 note
Taurus^ constellation. See Bull
father-god
TemenoSy the Greek, same as the
Indian Sarna, the central place in
the settlement, consecrated to the
gods of life, iii. 154, 194
7If, Tete, Akkadian god of the foun-
dations, iii. 267 ; Teh-teh, a star
of the Great Bear in Egyptian
astronomy, iii. 267 ; Te-man, the
land of Arabia, iii. 291 ; Te-te, the
first month of the Akkadian year,
iii. 291
Teiif the caste of oil-sellers in India,
descended from the yellow race of
builders and potters who worshipped
the eleven gods of generation, ii.
87 ; their connection with theGreeks
through the myth of /Esculapius and
the oil-press and the flower and oil-
mother Athene, ii. 85, Z6, 88
Teo-cipactlif Mexican fish-god, i. 25
Thraetaona of the Zendavesta, the
Trita and Trita Aptya of the
Rigveda, the rain-god, conqueror of
Azi-I)ahaka, the biting snake of the
burning summer, iii. 136, 179, 182,
185, 223 ; one of the three fathers
of Zend mythology, iii. 246 ; his
two wives, iii. 180 ; his vulture,
the snow-bird, iii. 247; iv. 342; is
the Shyena bird of the Rigveda
which brought Soma, iii. 248
Thirty-three^ the thirty-three lords of
the ritual order of the Zendavesta,
INDEX
esi
the twenty-eight days of the lunar
month, and the five seasons of the
year, iii. 266 ; the thirty-three gods
of time of the Rigveda and of the
Buddhists, iii. 266 ; v. 437 ; the
thirty-three Egyptian judges in the
hall of the Ma'at, iii. 267
Tidmut, the mother {mut) of living
things (/trf), the Akkadian sea-
mother goddess of the twin races,
worshipping eleven gods of genera-
tion, lii. 266 ; the constellation
Krater, iv. 333-335 ; mother-goddess
of the race who made Ucchaishravas,
the long-eared horse or ass of Indra,
their father god, iv. 335
Tishfcu^ name of Istar, as the star-
goddess of the rain, probably Sirius,
lii. 142 ; iv. 333
Ti$h'tryaj the star Sirius, opening the
Zend year at the summer solstice,
iii. 142, 143. 257, 258, 269; iv.
341 ; V. 432; his successive mythical
forms, i. II ; iii. 321 ; his alliance
with the three-legged ass, iii. 256 ;
iv. 340
Tishya, Vedic name for Sirius, and
Hindu term for the 360th part of the
circle, iii. 320
Triambikdf the three Hindu mother-
goddesses of the three seasons of the
year, headed bv Amba, the chief
star in the Pleiades, the mythical
history, iii. 197,' 215 ; iv. 336, 338 ;
ritual of their festival, iii. 197 ; the
earliest form of the Soma sacrifice
or rain festival, v. 427, 428
Tri'kadru-kay rain festival of the three
Kadrus or mother-trees, consecrated
to the * boat ' (the moon-boat) or the
water-bird, v. 424, 423-428, 468.
See Soma
Trisula of Delphi, and its meaning,
iii. 302, 329 ; iv. 388
Troy^ the boundary {tar) city of those
who worshipped the moon-god
Apollo,and the GreatBear Artemis,
destroyed by the invading Aryans,
vi. 551, 553
7«r, the meridian pole of the Akka-
dians, i. 9 ; iii. 292 ; which became
the Greek Taurus, the Chaldaic
Tur, the bull, or the revolving-pole,
the Hebrew Shur, the faiher-god of
the Turanians, Preface, xxx ; iiL
293 ; V. 449 note 3, 450 ; the father-
god of the Turvashu and Turanians,
the Phrygian god, to whom, as
Patori Turi, the father Tur, a terra-
cotta whorl, found at Troy, was
dedicated, iii. 293; became the
Hebrew Dor, the revolving-pole,
and Doru, the spear, the father-god
of the Dorians, iii. 297
Turmeruy sacred plant of the yellow
races, who ofiered human sacrifices,
and of the Hindu Telis, ii. 87 ; iii.
138, 233, 277 ; offered to the Naga
gods by Ho Kols, and sent by the
Brahmin bridegroom to his bride,
iu. 278
Tur-us^ Akkadian name for the star
Ka-stor, the support {stor) of Ka,
iii. 300 ; iv. 339
Tur-vasu Turanians ^ the people
whose god {vcuu or an) is the Tur,
the meridian or rain -pole, first
appear as the worshippers of the
the Viru or phallus, called Fryano
in the Zendavesta, Virata and Viru-
paksha in India, the shepherd-sons
of Ida or Eda, the sheep, iii. 136,
137; their Tur was the house-pole
or rain-pole set up in India by their
god Vasu on the Sqikti mountains,
iii. 148; sons of the, goat and deer-
cod Ukko, Uk-ku, Ushana, and
\Jz^ iii. 148, 149; they ofiered in
India animal sacrifices at the sol-
stices called Tur-ayana, iii. 162 ;
these were orimnally to the house-
pole {gumi) their father-god, iii.
160 ; this still survives as the May-
pole, ii. 133 ; they, with the Yadu,
were the sons of Devayani, forming
the twin Vedic confederacy of the
Yadu-Turvashu, iii. 148 ; they ruled
the confederacy of the sons of Kush,
the tortoise, and of their parent
Ku^ha grass, grouped round the
mother-mountain of the East, in
Afghanistan, whence Indra, the
rain-god, gets the rain, sacred to the
Hindus, Akkadians, and Zends, iii.
143, 146 ; were the first makers of
the earth-altar of the rain-mother,
thatched with Ku^ha grass, iiL 163-
168; on which animal sacrifices
were first ofiered, iii. 170 ; their god
Vasuki, by making the pole called
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INDEX
6S3
■ and of Ayu, the father of historic
time, iii. 166^ 168. See Pururavas
Usha^ Ushdna^ names of Istar and of
Sukra, the rain-god, iii. 147, 148.
Set Istar, Ukko
- Ushi'dhauj Zend name for the mother
mountain of the East. See Khar-
suk-kurra
Ushinara, a name of Pururavas,
father of Shiva, and of a tribe
named in the Rigveda, iii, 222 ;
the King of the East, iii. 318
Uz, Akkadian goat-god, name derived
from Finnic Ukko, iii. 149. See
Goat-god, Esau
Vaishya^ the Hindu trading caste
\ who gave the mead cup in exchange
for intoxicating spirits at the
Vajapeya sacrifice, iii. 208 ; sons
of the Udumbara tree {Ficus
glomerata), and founders of the Soma
sacrifice, ii. 118 ; ii. 238 ; iv. 367 ;
sons of the goat, iii. 338 ; iv. 403 ;
of the bur-tree {Ficus Indicd)^ iii.
342 ; the race who instituted cere-
monial shaving, Preface, xliv, xlv ;
iii. 279 ; first worshippers of the
household fire, and founders of the
Pdka sacrifice of sour and sweet
milk, curds, whey, and clarified
butter, iii. 327, 328 ; invested with
the sacred girdle at 12 years after
conception, iv. 403 ; their girdle
made of woollen threads, iv. 406
VajjiattSy sons of the tiger {iydghra\
name of the united Mallis and
Licchavis, iii. 193, 325
Vanant. star of the West in Zend
mythology, Aquila, or. rather
Corvus, iii. 257 note ; iv. 332-336,
343
Vara^hrta bird who smites {aghnd)
the rain, the speaking-bird who in-
spired the fathers of Zend mytho-
logy, iii. 240. See Bird - mother
myth
Varena^ the four-cornered garden of
the Zend rain-god, iii. 246
Varenya Devas of the Zend god
Afiro Mainya, the five seasons of
the year of Varuna or Prajfipati,
v. 429 432
Vareshava^ son of Danu, rain-bird of
the Zcndavesta, iii. 247. See Bird-
mother myth
Varfhdgiras, the people who possess
rain {varsha). See Nahusha
Varuna^ the Greek Ouranos, who im-
prisoned the Cyclopean fire-gods,
li. 88 ; the god of rain {var), who
made barley grow, and to whom
black sheep, ewes, and rams were
offered, iiL 168, 216, 217, 218;
the god of conjugal union, iii. 219,
288 ; the god of tne summer season,
Varuna Praghasah, whose victims
were the ewe and the ram, iii. 173,
227, 228 ; god of the Turvasu, sons
of the Ass, iii. 255 ; the god Ka,
iii. 263 ; the employer of the third
of the Ribhus Vibhvan, the master-
smith, iii. 227 ; iv. 364 ; the father-
god of the Zend Varenya Devas,
the year of five seasons, V. 428, 429
Viasa-twartf the sharp {ftzrra) creator
{vasu), Soma water drawn from
running streams, iii. 207, 310
Vashishtha^ he who is most-creating
{vasi4)t the god of the fire ever burn-
ing on the altar of the Aryan op-
ponents of Vishvamitra, the sun
and moon god of the Bharata, ii.
no, 112, 117; the son of the
lightning and the star Canopus, iiL
257, 261 ; contest with Vishvamitra,
the sun and moon-god, iii. 317,
318; identified with the 'spotted
buir of the Rigveda, the Great
Bear, iv. 378 note 3
Vaski, Finn name for copper, iiL 177
Vasu, Vdsukit the creating (vas) god
of the Vaso or Baso, the forest
races, the spring-god charmer of
the rains, successor of Sukra or
Seknag, iiL 152, 177, 229; called
Basuk Nag l>y the Takkas, iii. 191 ;
father-god of the Takkas ruling the
Sakti mountains, god of the bamboo
rain-pole of the Gonds, iii. 193,
301 ; fish father-god, father of the
fish-mother, iii. S5 ; of the Yadu-
Turvasu, iii. 287
Vdsu-deva^ the god Vasu, father of
Balaram,the moon-god,and Krishna
the sun-antelope, v. 465-468
VdyUy the wind-god, father of the
Panclava Bhima, the god of summer,
ii. 75 ; iiL 273 ; who consecrated
Soma, iiL 138
Verethragna, Zend form of Vedic
624 THE RULING RACES OF PREHISTORIC TIMES
Vritrahan the slaver {Aan) of snakes
(z77/rtf ), owner of the magic mother-
bird, iii. 246
Vidarbaj the double {vid) four (arba)
races, ii. 64 ; iii. 313 ; the Gonds,
iii. 223, 224
Viru^ form of the Finnic Piru, from
Bhur, meaning fire, i. 37, 38 ; the
phallic god of the Linga worship-
pers called Virata, or Viru-paksha,
li. 64; iii. 136, 137. 5V^ Turvasu
Vishnavaf the Western Hindus, ii.
VtshnUf the Vedic boar-god slain by
Indra, counterpart of Zend Uzi-
Dahaka, iii. 182 ; the boar-god
who had become the bull-god, iii.
260. Sec Krishna
• • •
Vishvdmitra, the sun and moon-god
of the Bh&ratas. See Moon -god
Vivofvaty he with the two (w*) forms
or creative powers {vasvcU\ Zend
Vivanghat, author of light, ii. 117,
iii. 321 ; father of the twin-gods
Day and Night {ushdsd-nakta), and
of the Ashvins, ii. 72 ; iii. 210,
241 ; the god of the Sadas, or
sacrificial hall of the gods conse-
crated at the Soma sacrifice, iii.
238
Vyiisa, Vyansa^ father of the royal
races of India, and of Indra, i. 10,
21. St'e Alligator
Wolff totemistic mother of the fire-
worshipping twin races, sons of
Day and Night, i. 16; iii. 213;
vi. 505, 506, 510 ; Luke (light), the
Northern wolf-mother of life and
light, Vrika, the Sanskrit wolf,
meaning the destroyer, the ploujjh
of the barley growers, mother of
darkness and death, iii. 215 ; wolf-
goddess, wife of Rijrashva, the
blind house-pole, iii. 260 ; v. 490 ;
vi. 503 ; mother of the sons of
the pine-tree and the bear-goddess
Artemis, iii. 263 ; nurse of the
sons of the bull race, iii. 323 ; the
constellation Lupus, Akkadian Ur-
bat, star of the dead [bat) mother
of the sons of the Akkadian god
Kusa or Kush, and of the god
Kurgal, the great (^al) Kur, father
of the Kushite race, v. 496 ; chil-
dren of Deucalion and Pyrrha, led by
wolves to the Lukoreia, the wolf-
grove, vL 513
Yadu-Turvasu^ twin races descended
from Yayati and DevayanI, now
the Yandheya Rajputs of the Pun«
jab, ii. 108 ; iiL 307, 308 ; worship-
pers of the rain-god, ii no; ruling
races of the age of the Asipu, iii
241 ; twin gods of the rainy and
autumn seasons, iiL 272 ; the race
to whom the Kanvas guardians of
the Bharatas were priests, iii. 260,
5^5» 3'9; Yadus water-drinkers,
iii. 274, 275 ; sons of Vasu, father
of the fish -god, iii. 287, 285 ; rulers
of Sindhu-Suvania, iii. 324
Yavanas, Yavatiy or Yona^ the people
who sowed barley {yava)^ the barley
growers, iiL 214, 324; who changed
Fuse, the alligator, and Magha, the
witch-mother, into Pushan,the bull,
and Ida, the sheep and cow mother,
iii. 250
Yav-yavatif the barley {yava) river
of the young dawn or of the sons of
barley, a name for the Jumna in
the Rigveda, iii. 214
Yaydtiy son of Nahusha, the Naga
snake, the rain-god, L 14 ; his two
wives and five sons, iii. 239, 240;
father of MadhavT, meaning strong
drink, iii. 318
Year- reckonings y oldest agricultural
year (i.) that of the races of the
Southern hemisphere, Western
India, the Peruvians, Mexicans and
Druids divided into two periods of
six months each marked by the
Pleiades, one beginning in Novem-
ber,when the dead were worshipped,
and the other in April, Preface, xi,
xii; iL 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, iv.
331, 401 ; still survives in European
festivals of All Hallow Eve, All
Saints' and All Souls' Day, ii. 132 ;
Egyptian year of Osiris, Akkadian
year of Dumu-zi, as Orion, began in
November, ii. 127 ; iv. 351, 387,
401, 402 {see Orion) ; the Pleiades
year survives in the Gond festival
to the Nagur, or plough-god, begin-
ning their year in April, iL 132 ;
iii. 201, 230 ; in the European and
Syrian festival of St. George, the
plough -god, L 8, 12 ; in May-day
INDEX
625
and the E^ter eggs of Southern
Europe, ii. 133 ; year of the Santals,
Ooraons, and Mundas begins in
January-February, sacred to the
fire-mother Magha, ii. 125 ; iii. 201,
304 ; survives in European Carnival
and St. Valentine's Day, iiL 234 ;
iv. 387; (II.) these early years
followed by the year of three sea-
sons of the barley-growing races of
Asia Minor, the three golden
apples of the Hesperides, beginning
with the birth of the sun-god at the
winter solstice, iii. 132 ; the seasons
of sowing, flowering and harvest,
the triad or sacred triangle of the
Hindus, Akkadians, Semites, Egyp-
tians, Greeks and Kabiri, Preface,
xii, xiii ; iii. 164, 169, 199 ; the
three primaeval smiths of the Edda,
vL 504 ; the three brothers, sisters
and tasks of popular fairy tales,
Preface, xii. ; ii. 78, 79 ; the three
Charites worshipped by the Minyans
of Orchomenos in the Bronze Age,
Preface, xxv ; the three Ribhus, or
makers of the three seasons of the
Chatur-Mas3ra in the Rigveda, iii.
226, 227 ; the Greek Erinnyes, the
Sanskrit Sar-anyu, and the three
formed Hecate, the Zend Fravashis
the Northern Noms, iii. 203, 215,
216 ; iv. 341 ; V. 428 ; the three-
lipped Soma cup of the Ashvins,
ill. 241 ; and the triple flagon
{rpiKdywovderai) of Pholos, vi. 550 ;
the three Soma mixtures of milk,
Gavashir the spring season, Dadhya-
shir, milk clotted with the heat of
summer, Yavashir or Soma mixed
with barley, the autumn harvest
and the three Soma Upasads or
seasons, iii. 242, 243; the three-
eyed bull-god Samirdus of Babylon
Gud-ia of Telloh, $hiva and Shishu-
I»la in India, god of the year of
three seasons, iii. 254; the three sea-
sons of the three-legged ass of the
Zendavesta, iii. 256 ; iv. 349 ; the
year of three seasons S3nnbolised by
the constellations Corvus, Crater and
Hydra, iv. 332-335 ; the three
mother - goddesses Ambi, Ambik&
and Ambalika, the year of three
seasons preceding that ruled by the
40
bride of the sun-horse Subhadra,
iv. 336, 338; the three seasons of
the three-mouthed snake Azi-Da-
haka, iv. 346 ; the first year of the
Lumasi ruled by the stars of the
Great Bear, Virgo and Arkturos
(Bootes), bq^nning with the autum-
nal equinox, iv. 357, 364 ; this was
the year of the barley-growing
races of Asia Minor and Syria,
Macedonia, Sparta and the Pelopon-
nesus, iv. 330 ; the three seasons of
the year of Orion, of the fire-wor-
shippers, iv. 352 ; the three seasons
marked by the three threads of the
Brahmin sacrificial girdle, and by
those of the Parsis, iv. 403, 405 ;
(III.) the year of four seasons,
including the season of fruits made
by the Ribhus who made the year-
cow, iii. 227 ; this was the year of
the antelope race, iv. 364 ; the year
of the solstices and equinoxes be-
ginning with the autumnal equinox
made by the Ashvins, sons of the
ass, iii. 269 ; the four • squared
division of time, iii. 319; the year
measured by the Gnomon, the
divining-pole of the Turvasu, iv.
412 ; the year of the black antelope
ruled by the four stars of the Lumasi,
Sirius, the mother-star, the rain-
star Hydra, the star of the black
antelope, the autunm and winter
Aquila, the creating mother-bird,
the spring, and Leo, the star of the
burning summer, iv. 369, 372 ;
(IV.) the year of five seasons of the
twin races who offered animal sacri-
fices at the solstices, iii. 174, 162 ;
iv. 348 ; the five seasons of the
Gond year, iii. 230-234 ; of the
Egyptian year, iii. 267, 271 ; iv.
409 ; the year of the Indian supreme
god Prajapati, beginning with the
rainy season and the summer sol-
stice, iii. 269, 270 ; the Zend year
of five seasons of the animal sacri-
ficers ruled by the water-mother,
the rain-goddess, iii. 270, 271 ; the
year of five seasons of the Indian
sons of Yayati, b^iiming with the
rainy season, iii. 272 ; that of their
successors, the P&^davas, beginning
with the winter solstice, ii. 75 ; iii.
i^. I >:
2S4r 519; the
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XTnrJtis jcilt.-w » xa%i t2e vsilicw
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INDEX
627
the wolf's fat smeaxed on the door-
posts, iii. 278 ; they wore their
hair long, iii. 279 ; the pigtails of
the Hittites and Mundas, iv, 339 ;
the yellow Sumerian traders of the
Persian Gulf and Western India,
iv. 341 ; the yellow Hittites, twin
sons of the ass, the nucleus of the
confederacy of the Vai^hya, or
trading castes, iv. 34a See Ash*
vins, Kathi, Vai^hya
Yudishthira, the eldest of the Pa^-
davas, son of Dharma, the god of
law and order, meaning ' he who
has most of the spirit of Yu, or
steadfastness, the god of spring,'
ii. 75 ; iii. 263, 273 ; bom un-
der the constellation M^ha, iiL
258
Yupa^ the phallic sacrificial stake
of the Takkas, sacred to Vishnu,
iii. 197, 198, 272 ; the sacrificial
stake {yiipa) of Hari, Vedic name
of Mathura, iii. 214
Zarathustra wedded to the goddess
Anahita of the water-springs, whose
sons are guarded bv the never-dying
fire on the altar, iii. 169
THE EKD
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