Pleiades year, means the month of two (vi) branches (sakha), thus recording the original bifurcation of the year in the middle of this month.

A. Birth of life from the Mother Tree.

But the division of time into periods measured by months was only made comprehensible to the popular intellect after a long period of national education, and the first time-unit used as a fraction of the year was that which marked the weeks. The first week was one of five days, or rather five nights, for the equatorial day of the Pleiades year began at sunset at six o'clock in the evening, and the reason for the adoption of this time-unit is to be found. in the fundamental assumptions of their infant astronomy. They based all their calculations of time measurement on their adoption of the conclusion that the setting, rising, and culmination of the stars, the sun, and the moon, proved that they all described a daily circle in the heavens round a central point marked by the North Pole Star. The reason which they gave to account for this revolution of the heavenly bodies is most clearly set forth in a story preserved by the Australian aborigines 1. It tells how Gneeangger, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, found a grub in a tree, that is in the magic tree of the sacred part of the forest set apart for the national ceremonies performed by the tribal priest, and near the corroboree dancing ground, answering to the Akra, placed in the Hindu village under the shade of the Sarna or central grove. This grub, the chrysalis of the raven parent god of the tribe, she took out and it became the giant raven star Canopus, who ran away with her, that is to say dragged her, her attendant stars the Pleiades, and the rest of the starry host round the Pole.

This raven star of this Australian story became, in the Hindu mythology, Agastya, the star Canopus, whose name

means the singer (gā), the leader of the harmony of the spheres. He appears in his raven form in Rg. ii. 43, 1, 2, where the holy raven (Shakuni) is said to sing the divine songs of the ritual in the sacred metres which, as we shall see, represent in the varying numbers of their syllables the successive changes in the measurements of ritualistic time. It is this life-giving raven gifted with the amrita or water of life, which in the historical Gond poem of the Song of the Lingal restores Lingal, the rain - father god, to life after he had been slain by the first race of Gonds, the race from the North-east, whom he had settled on the land. The conception of the raven star was based on the black rain - cloud which brought up the rains of the Southwest and North-east monsoons, and it was the wind which preceded these annual rains which was first believed to drive the stars round the Pole.

But side by side with and anterior in time to this conception there grew up another, founded on the belief in the origin of life from the central mother-tree of the South in which the Canopus grub was found. As there was no Pole Star visible in the Southern heavens, the region of the South was looked on as a dark waste of waters within which dwelt the unseen South Pole goddess, the awful and mysterious mother of living things. She was adored by the Akkadians as Bahu, the Baau of the Phoenicians, the Bohu or waste void of Genesis i. 2. She was called "the mother who has begotten the black-headed Akkadians, the sons of the father Ia, the god of the house (I), of the waters (a), whose home is in the North Pole Star." Also as Gula, the Great One, she is called "the wife of the Southern Sun." In another form of her mythic history she is the great serpent goddess of the deep called Tiamat, the mother of living things (tia), the goddess who surrounded and guarded the mother-tree of the Southern world, as the holy boundary-snake is believed in Hindu

I

Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 262-264.

mythology to guard the village with the Sarna in its centre. She was in this form the winged snake goddess destroyed by Marduk, or Bel Merodach, the sun calf (marduk), when the sun-god of day became the ruler of the year instead of the stars of night in the lunar solar epoch succeeding the sidereal Pole Star age. And this mother abyss of waters was symbolised in the latest Semitic ritual in the brazen seas or abysses (absu), which were first pools of water and afterwards brazen basins, which were placed in the southern outer courts of the Babylonian temples, and reproduced in Jewish ritual 1.

The tree mother born from this abyss of waters is in the Zend historical mythology the Gao-kerena, Gōkard or White Hom tree, growing according to the Dinkard, the epitome of the lost Nasks, in "deep mud of the wideformed ocean," the sea Vouru-kasha, or the Indian Ocean 2. This tree, with its roots in the Southern sea, grew up on earth on the banks of the river Daitya, the river of the serpents or parent snakes. This was the river Kur or Araxes, rising in Mt. Ararat and falling into the Caspian sea. On this tree was the nest of the Hom birds 3. These are the mother ravens, the birds of the night and the day, who, in Rg. i. 164, 20-22, "sit on this tree whence all things grow and which knows no father, the day bird eating its fruits and the night bird guarding it in silence." They are the birds who watch over the Zend Haoma, the Hindu Soma, the sap of life. Haoma and Soma are derived from the roots Hu and Su, both of which are dialectic forms of Khu,

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i., p. 63; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 188, 189, with plan of Sabæan temple; I Kings vii. 39; 2 Chron. iv. 10, where the brazen sea is placed to the South-east.

2 West, Dinkard, vii. 29; West, Bundahish, xviii. 1; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, xx. 4; S.B.E., xlvii. p. 25; vol. v. p. 65; iv. p. 221; Introduction, iv. 28; Ixiv.

3 Dinkard, vii. 26—36; Bundahish, xx. 13; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendīdād Fargard, i. 3; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 24-26; v. p. 79, note 1; iv. p. 5, notes 2 and 3.

the mother-bird of the Akkadians and Egyptians, who was originally the bird of the raven-star nest Argo. It was from "the water and vegetation" supplied by this tree that the great Zend prophet, Zarathustra, was born as the sun-hawk, Karshipta, who spoke the Avesta in the language of birds 1.

In the Hindu form of the mythological history of this tree of life it had its roots in the ocean, and grew up on earth in the centre of the holy land of Kurukshetra, the land (Kshethra) of the Kurus, the sons of the river Kur of the Zend legend, who had come to India from Atārō Pātakan, the modern Adarbaijan, the mother land of the fire-worshippers traversed by the Kur. The line of its growth passed, as Alberuni tells us, through the course of the river Yamuna or Jumna, instead of the Zend Euphrates leading to the river Kur. Thence to the plain of Taneshur 2, that is of the god (eshwar) Tan, the father of the primæval Hindu race called the Danava, the sons of Danu, whom Indra slew. This, with its 360 shrines representing the 360 days of the year 3, was the traditional birth-place of the Kurus or Kaurs, the Kauravya of the Mahabharata born in India from this world's mother-tree, the great Banyan tree (Ficus Indica), the Sanskrit Nigrodha tree, the tree of their father Kashyapa or Kassapa 4. This tree stood on the banks of the central lake, reproducing the southern mother sea traversed by the mother ship constellation Argo. This was the lake called in Rg. i. 84, 13, 14, Sharyanavan, the ship (navan) of the year arrow (sharya) or the mother reed (sharya), whence the Kushika or Kurus were born as the sons of the rivers. It was on this lake lying below the Himalaya mountains, the home of the North Pole Star, that

'West, Dinkard, vii. 36; West, Bundahish, xxiv. 11; xix. 16; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidād Fargard, ii. 42, 43; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. p. 26; v. pp. 89, 70; iv. p. 21.

Sachau, Alberuni's India, chap. xxxi. vol. i. p. 316.

3 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, p. 332.

Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories; The Nidānakathā, p. 51.

Indra found the head of the sun-horse Dadhyank, which, as we shall see in Chapter VI., was the ruler of the eleven months year.

The Danava predecessors of the Kurus, sons of Dan or Tan, were the equivalents of the Hebrew Tannim, the Arabic Tinnim, called in the Bible the dragons or snakes of the deep, the Greek Ti-tans 2, or sons of the mud (tan, Arab tin) of life (ti), who were called by the Greeks children of Uranos and Gaia, heaven and earth. This is an accurate reproduction of the primitive genealogy, for Uranos is the Greek form of the Sanskrit Varuna, from the root vri, to cover, and hence Varuna is the god of the covering raincloud, the var reproduced in the Sanskrit Varsha, the Hindu Barsah, and the Zend Bares, all meaning rain, that is the productive seed of the original supreme god of the first villagers, the rain-god, which impregnated the earth with life. In the description of the four heavenly regions ruled by the gods called Lokapālas, or guardians of space, Varuna is the third Lokapāla ruling the north heaven, whose palace is built in the waters whence all the rivers of India descend to fill the Southern Ocean 3. It is this rain descending in the rivers from the home of this god of the north which is the father of the children of men and animals produced from the nourishing fruit of the mothertree, the offspring of the southern impregnated earth or mud, which conveys the life derived from the productive rain to all who sustain life by the fruit of the tree its daughter. This mud mother, Tan or Tin, of the Greek Titans is the primitive form of the goddess Thetis, whose name is derived from the Phoenician Thith, the mud 4. It was she who with Euronyme, the guardian goddess of the North, the Phoenician Astro Noema, first the Pole Star and afterwards

• Ps. cxlviii. 7.

2 Bérard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 230, 231.

3 Mahābhārata Sabha (Lokapāla Sabhakhyāna) Parva, ix. pp. 4 Bérard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 212.

28-30.