Italy as the Minyan race, sons of the owl-goddess, whom they called Mena, Menfra or Minerva, and who was both a phallic-serpent and a winged-goddess, the moon-bird of night, the protectress of brides, and the measuring (men) mother the Egyptian goddess Min, the star, and Virgo.

G. Plant worship.

The creed of these Hittite descendants of the Indian Turvasu and the owl-mother-goddess of the Minyans is depicted in the historical bas-relief of Iasili Kaïa in Cilicia. This represents the Hittite father-god wearing the Hittite peaked tiara, and their shoes with turned-up toes, descending from the mountain, and bearing in his right hand the polar sceptre, his magic rain-wand of office, surmounted with the earth globe. In his left hand is the symbol of the pollen-bearing flower with the seed-vessel rising out of the calix, and the sacred antelope, wearing the Hittite cap, runs by his side. He, in the copy of the bas-relief drawn by Puchstein 2, which is reproduced on the plate annexed, meets, after he has come down to the plain and mounted on the shoulders of his Hittite priests, the mother-goddess Rhea, the mother of the sons of the rivers. She also wears the Hittite shoes and the tower head-dress of the goddess of the revolving-year, stands on a leopard, and bears in her right hand the symbol of the blossomed flower with its petals springing from the calix, and bearing the seed-vessel already swelling from the infusion of the seed of the male flower. This represents the marriage of the plant-parents of life at the four wedding festivals of the cycle-year, and behind them, standing like his mother on a leopard, the sacred animal of Dionysus, son of Semele or Shemiramot, is the son born of their union. Between the mother and her full-grown

'Deecke, Etruria, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 637; Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Mena, p. 132.

2

This, according to Signor Milani, is more carefully drawn than that given by Perrot, iv. fig. 321.

son is the walking seed-vessel, the infant who has not yet assumed his final human form. In his form of the man-god he bears in his right hand the staff on which he leans, and in his left the double axe of the Carian and Hittite Zeus, while behind him is bound the pickaxe or mattock, headed by the lunar crescent 1.

It is the birth of this sun-plant-god which is represented in the story of the combat between Horus the son of Hat-hor, the Pole Star goddess, and Set the pig-god, told in Chapters XVII. and CXII. of the Book of the Dead 2. Horus is the sun of this cycle-year born from the tree crowned by the Pole Star, and Set or Suti was, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 75, the god who was changed in his Northern avatar from Canopus the ape-god of the South, into the Pig Pole Star god in the constellation Kepheus. This pig-god is said to have blinded Horus by throwing filth, that is earth, in his eyes, thus making him the blind-tree-father and mother of life born from the earth. Horus, or rather Thoth, that is Dhu-ti the bird (dhu) of life, the moon emasculated Set, that is to say, they made him like the emasculated Phrygian god Attys, the father-god only visible in the sexless pine-tree, the fire-drill. The whole parable tells us that the theology of the plant-god of the cycle-year succeeded the worship of the Pole Star and the solstitial sun-bird.

This son of the parent-plants, born of the virgin flowermother, is the exact representation of the Etrurian god Sethlans the heavenly smith, and he is in the Indian theogony the god called Parasu Rāma, or Rama of the double-axe, who appeared to the Pandavas clad in a deerskin on the fourteenth day of the moon, thus marking himself as the lunar god of the stellar lunar month of twentyseven days, and who also showed himself on the eighth, that is on the eve of the ninth day of his week. He was

Milani, Studi Di Archæologia, i., Part i., Nota Esegetica Sulla Stele di Amrit., pp. 35, note 5, 37, figs. 2, 3; Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien, Taf. x. Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chapters xvii. 67-70, cxii. 2—9, pp. 52, 177.

2

the great grandson of Bhrigu the fire-god, and son of Jamadagni the twin (jama) fires engendered by Richika the fire-spark in the mother-trees, the Banyan fig-tree (Ficus Indica) of the Kushikas and the Pipal-tree (Ficus Religiosa) sacred to the sun-god. This twin-born god, the seed of life, married Reņukā the flower-pollen (reņu), and her fifth son was Parasu-Rāma, that is the son born from the union of the parent-plants like the Hittite son of the mother-flower who became the Etrurian Sethlans.

He recovered the year-calf begotten in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda from the year-cow after ten months of gestation, which had been stolen by Arjuna the fair (arjuna) Haihaya king, the sun-god with the thousand arms, and slew the stealer, that is to say, became ruler of the year of the united moon-cow and sun-calf. The brothers of Arjuna, the star sons of Kārtavirya, or Krituvirya, the male (virya) star-parent, the warrior-star Orion, slew Jamadagni, Rāma's father, in revenge, and were all slain by Rāma with his double axe Parasu, in the field of Tan-eshur, the home of the mud-god Tan, the centre of Kuru-kshethra, the land of the Kurus, where he filled the five adjoining (samanta) lakes called Samanta-Panchaka with their blood, that is to say, he became ruler of their year with its fiveday weeks 2.

H. Emigration of the men of this age as told by their

monuments.

These Turano-Semitic seafaring races were the founders of the earliest Cyclopean architecture of the one-eyed (Cyclops) sons of the Pole. In this the walls were built of polygonal stones, accurately fitted together without mortar, as in the oldest parts of the prehistoric buildings of Tiryns, Mycenæ, Orchomenos. They were also the builders of the earliest type of stone dwelling-house, modelled on the earth and wattle heehive huts of Phrygia, of which specimens are

Rg. i. 164, 1-10.

⚫ Mahābhārata Vana (Tirtha- Yātrā) Parva, cxv.-cxvii. pp. 354-362.

found in the Picts' houses of Scotland and Ireland burrowed under earth mounds. The sacrificial pits which were, as we have seen, a distinguishing feature of their ritual in India, are reproduced in those in the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenæ, in the temple of the Kabiri in Samothrace, and in that of the Great Kabir near Thebes, while near the sacrificial pit at Mycenae is a wall-painting representing a procession of ass-headed figures wearing gay garments, who are apparently votaries of the ass-riding Hindu Ashvins. This architecture also survives in that of the Nuraghs or circular towers of Sardinia, the zigurrats or sacred observatories of the ancient astronomers of the age of the tower of the Garden of God, the Hebrew Pen-u-el of the face (pen) of God, the Midianite tower of Zibah and Zalmana, which, with the booths (sakut) of Succoth, the place of booths, were destroyed by Gideon, who cut down the Asherah, or divine pillars, and overthrew the altar of Baal, that of this cycle age, and substituted the worship of the Ephod 2. This was the garment of the prophetic priest of the spoken oracle, who was inspired by the Bhang or Hashish (Cannabis Indica) which succeeded the intoxicating drink of this epoch, and which is said in the Zendavesta to have taught the divine law to Hvōgvi or Shu-gvi, the coming-bird (Shu), the wife of Zarathustra, and to his priests, who wore the Chista or ephod 3. These Nuraghs were built by the Turano-Semites from the East, who settled in Sardinia, under the lead of Sardis, called on Sardinian coins Sard Pater. His name, which was also that of the capital of Lydia, the home of the Tursena, is said by Xanthus to mean "a year," and it is allied to the Sanskrit Sharad, the autumnal equinox, the Armenian Sard, the Persian Sal, a year 4.

2

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 121, 223, v. 136, 137.

Judges, vi. 25-32, viii. 1-29.

3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 15, 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp.

267, 268.

4 Rawlinson, Herodotus, vol. i. p. 1-50, note 7.

This year-god of the autumnal equinox was the son of Makaris, Baal Makar, the god of the lunar sickle, the Phoenician Melkarth, or Herakles, and he was the Herakles Sandan of the unsexed male and female priests 1. He was assisted by Iolaus, the Phoenician Baal Iol, the charioteer of Herakles, who was the first of the five Dactyls or finger-gods, the first victors of the Olympian games of Elis, who, with Iasius, Kastor, Poludeukes and Herakles, won all the contests at the first festival: Iolaus winning the chariot-race as the leader of the year; Iasius the horse-race; Kastor the foot-race; Poludeukes the boxing match; and Herakles, the cycle-sun-god, the wrestling and pancratium. They were originally the five Idæan Dactyls of the early five-days week who guarded the infant Zeus Itanos, the son of Rhea, at Iḍā in Crete. They are called by Pausanias Herakles, Pæonæus (the healer Paion), Epimedes, Iasius, and Idas 2.

These ancient builders who measured their year by the cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and led this emigration from East to West, were those who set their cities on a hill, and made the Akropolis on its summit the centre of the city, as in the cities of Orchomenos, Tiryns, Mycena and Athens. This Phoenician Greek type is that which was transferred by these emigrants to Etruria, where Fiesole (Fasula), Arezzo (Arretium), Cortona, Chiusi (Clusium), Volterra and Perugia all stand on hills, and are surrounded by walls of Cyclopean architecture. Each of these also marks its independent origin as the ruler of the province of which it is the centre by the ceremony of lighting the year's fires at the national city feast held on their New Year's Day. This is at Volterra, as I learnt by inquiry in the town, the 20th of September, or the day of the autumnal equinox. In most of these cities the rocks

1 Fraser, Pausanias, x. 17, 1-4, vol. i. p. 523, v. pp. 320, 322; Mövers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. pp. 417-421.

Ibid., v. 7, 4, 8, 1, x. 17, 4, vol. i. pp. 245, 247, 523, vol. v. p. 323; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 435.