the Star Virgo, the mother of corn, received Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill of heaven, the smith-producer of fire, when thrown from heaven by Zeus. This southern mudmother-goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the northern god of the potter's clay (nλós), became mother of the sun-god Achilles, whom she placed in the southern fire, the home of the earth's heat, after his birth, just as Pūrūshaspā, Zarathustra's father, placed his newly-born son, begotten from the mother-tree and the southern mud, in the same fire, whence he was removed at dawn by his mother and arose as the sun-god, to bring heat and light to the earth 2. Achilles was the sun-god of the race of the Myrmidons or ants, the sons of the red earth, the Adamite race who succeeded the sons of the southern mother-tree, and who believed that man was formed from the dust of the earth moulded by the Divine Potter, the Pole Star god, who turned the potter's wheel of the revolving earth. In this later conception the earth was the revolving plain turning on its axis 3, whereas in the earlier historical imagery it was the earth which stood still while the heavens, drawn by the hand of the ape-god Canopus, revolved.

This southern mother-tree was the origin of the trees which have been looked on as parent trees by so many primitive people. The Sal-tree (Shorea robusta) of the Indian Mons or Mundas, the oak tree of the Druids and of Dodona, the central parent tree of the Volsungs in the Niblunga Saga, the race of woodlanders (volr) from whom was born the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of victory

Homer, Iliad, xviii., 394-411; Bérard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 97, 151, 183.

2 West, Dinkard, vii. 8-10; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 36, 37.

3 This is the conception of the earth entertained by the Malays who believe that "the world is of an oval shape revolving on its own axis four times in the space of one year." They also believe in the tree-mother of life, the world's tree, Pauh Janggi, growing in the mud of the Southern Ocean, and produced from the seed Kun created by God and conveyed in the rain. Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 5, 6, 8—10, 4.

(sig), the sun gnomon stone 1. The fig-trees of the Syrians and the Indian Kauravya or Kushika, the almond or nuttree of the Jews, the budding almond-rod of Aaron 2, the date-palm-tree of Babylonia and of the Indian sun-god Bhishma and the moon-god Valarāma 3, the peach-tree of China, the pine-tree of Germany and Asia Minor, the ashtree, the Ygg-drasil of the Edda, and the cypress-tree of the Phoenicians. It was this last tree which was especially connected with the worship of the god Tan, who from being the mother mud of the South became, when the father succeeded the mother as the recognised parent, the god Tan or Danu of the North Pole.

It is in this form that he appeared as the Cretan Zeus, called I-tan-os or the god Tan, a name which survives in Znvós, Doric Závos, the Genitive of the Greek Zeus, for d, t, and z are interchangeable letters, as we see in the various names of the god of life, Zi, di, and ti. It is in the CretoPhoenician cult of the god I-tan-os, the reproduction of the Akkadian I-tan-a, the house of Tan, that we find the worship of Brito-martis the virgin (martis) cypresstree (berut), who became mother of the sun-god the Phonician Adonis or the master (adon), the Hebrew Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dumu) of life (≈2), who is represented as born from the cypress-tree on the Palmyrene altar at Rome 4. The Akkadian story of the birth of Dumu-zi from the mother-tree is told in a bilingual hymn quoted by Dr. Sayce. This represents the mothertree as growing in the "centre of the earth," in the "holy place" or village grove of Eridu or Eriduga, the holy (duga) city (eri), the most ancient port at the mouth of the Euphrates, where the God Ia disembarked from the con

'Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. III. * Numbers xvii. 9.

3 Mahābhārata Bhishma (Bhishma-Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165; Shaleya (Gud-Ayudha), Parva, xxxiv., lx. pp. 135, 233.

Bérard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 281, 300; D'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 142.

stellation ship Mā or Argo. In its "foliage was the couch of Zi-kum," the mother of life (zi), the nest of the mother bird, and into the heart of "its holy house no man hath entered." "In the midst of it was Dumuzi," the son (dumu) of life (z), born like his counterpart the sun-hawk Zarathustra from the water and vegetation supplied to this world's tree from the Southern mother Ocean. This story of the birth of the sun-god from the tree is also reproduced, as Professor Douglas informs me, in the Chinese characters, which were originally derived, as Mr. Ball has proved, from Akkadian originals 2. The Chinese character for the sun is This is formed of the two elements

tree, and

東

sun, while the triangle forming the base of

the character for tree

is the sign for woman, used in the oldest form of the Akkadian script, that on the monuments at Girsu. So that the Chinese in their written speech say as plainly as possible that the sun is born from the mother-roots of the tree, that is the tree of life. It is from these three roots that the Yggdrasil of the Edda springs, and it draws its life-giving sap from the sources whence the roots spring, the giant's well Mimir, the Urdar fountain of Niflheim, the home of mist, the under-world, and the dwelling of the Æsir, the home of the soul and essence of life 3. This birth of the Akkadian Dumuzi from the parent tree, is reproduced in India in the account of the birth of the sun-god, the Buddha, which I will deal with more fully afterwards in Chapter VII. Here I will only point out that the Buddha was conceived under the Great Sal tree on the Crimson plain of the dawning sun in the Himalayas. That there the god Gan-isha with the elephant's trunk, the god of the rain-cloud, entered on her

The

Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists. Akkadian Affinities of Chinese, by the Rev. C. J. Ball, M.A., § viii.; China, Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 677, ff.

3 Mallet, Northern Antiquities: The Prose Edda, p. 411.

right side the womb of his mother Maya, the witch mother Māghā bearing the divine rod of power, the rain-compelling branch of the mother-tree. He was born from his

mother when she stood and grasped the Sal tree in the village grove between Kapilavastu and Koliya, the village of the Munda or Kol race to which his mother belonged, that is to say he was like Dumu-zi, the son of the Sal tree', and a rain-shower fell at his birth 1.

All these origin tree-mothers find their prototype in the Dravidian mother - tree goddess Mari-amma, the mother (amma), Mari the tree (marom). She is the only goddess in the Hindu pantheon whose image is always made of wood. It is she who, in the story telling of the founding of the great temple of Jagahnath in Orissa, was the mother goddess of the primeval temple, a yojana beneath the surface of the earth. This was shown to the founder of the later temple, King Indramena, the god Indra, by the mother crow or raven who had grown white with age. It was from these submerged foundations of the early ritual, the depths of the Southern Sea, that the earliest form of the year god, Krishna or Vishnu, was sent by divine power as a log on the sea-shore, and this log, the timber of the virgin mother-tree, is now the image of the year-god in the temple of the Lord (nath) of Space (Jagah) 2.

This is the goddess of the Palladium or guardian wooden image kept in the treasure-house of ancient cities. The classical prototype of this image is the Palladium of Troy, made of the mother wild fig-tree of the Trojan race growing in the tomb of Ilos, the founder of the city 3. This goddess, called Pallas, became the tree-mother of the Ionian race, the goddess Athene, the tree-mother of the olive-tree and earlier sacred oil plant, the Sesame (Sesamum orientale), the mother of the Indian Telis, or oil dealers, of whom

2

• Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidānakathā, pp. 62, 63, 66, 67. Beauchamp, Dubois' Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, vol. ii. p. 589, App. v. pp. 714-719.

3 Homer, Iliad, xi. 167.

I shall give a full account in Chapter VI., when describing the eleven months year. She, as the mother-tree of the primæval year, was the earthly representative of the stellar year-mother the Pleiades, and it is to this constellation as her heavenly counterpart that her earliest temple at Athens was oriented 1. She, who was born from the head of Zeus, who was, as I have shown, the mother mud goddess Tan, and who was therefore the counterpart of her parent, appears in the form of the goddess Tan in the historical genealogy of the Boeotians, the chief agricultural people in ancient Greece. Their legendary history tells us that they arrived in Greece as emigrants from Asia Minor under Kadmus, the man of the East (Kedem), the introducer of the plough. He killed the snake parent of the original dwellers in the land, and from the land ploughed by him, and sown with the snake's teeth, there were born the five Spartos, or sown (σreípw) men, the five days of the week, who became ancestors of all the Boeotians. In other words, this story tells how a tribe of agriculturists from Asia Minor, who measured time by five-day weeks, came to Boeotia and occupied the country, allying themselves with the primitive villagers, the Achaioi, or sons of the snake Echis, the Ahi of the Rigveda, the Indian sons of the village tree. At the place where Kadmus rested on his journey from Delphi to Thebes, just outside the Ogygian gate of the city 2, he set up an image of Athene, called by what Pausanias tells us was the Phoenician name of Onga 3. This name means, according to Mövers, the burning or heated goddess 4. That is to say, she was originally the goddess of the heated south, the underground fire of the earth, the mud-mothergoddess Tan, and in this form she was worshipped as the

I Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 419. fically the Orientation of temple sites to stars to begun much earlier.

2

Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 48.

3 Ibid., ix. 12, 2, vol. i. p. 459, vol. v. p. 48.

4 Mövers, Die Phonizier, i. p. 643.

He, p. 312, traces speci 6400 B.C. It may have