Emmeline M. Plunket

“ But in India winter is distinctly the dry season. Midsummer is the all-important season of the rains. Indra’s conquest over Vritra, or the arrival of solstitial rains, marked by the disappearance of the constellation Hydra from the sky, was mythologically in the Vedas described as Indra’s conquest over the demon of drought, but still traditionally—for the power of tradition is great—even in India Indra retained the attributes of the conqueror over the demon of darkness. ”

“ Here there can be little doubt is a mythic description of the temporary disaster of eclipse overtaking the full moon of the summer solstice in the celestial waters of Aquarius or Pisces. The circular covering can be nothing else than the circular shadow of the earth covering the disc of the full [178] moon, and Trita’s triumph may well remind us of the serene victoriousness of the moon when it has emerged from eclipse and rides unharmed along the sky. ”

“ But it is when we turn our thoughts not only to Ahura Mazda but to his Assyrian representative Assur, that the parallelism between him and Rudra becomes more marked.
Rudra is not only a wise and great Asura, he is above everything else celebrated in the Rig Veda as an archer. He has “the sure arrow, the strong bow.” [82] He is “the divine Rudra armed with the strong bow and fast flying arrows.” ”

“ It is true that some great scholars claim on linguistic grounds a solar origin for much Vedic imagery and nomenclature; yet when the hymns are examined in translations, and the notes and commentaries which accompany these translations are studied, the impression left on the mind of any reader unacquainted with Sanscrit must be that very little attention or honour is given to sun, moon, or stars, in comparison to that so freely lavished on the elements of fire, air and water, and on the mysterious properties of the juice of the Soma plant. ”

“ Les poils de la nuque et du dos, de l’épaule, des fanons, et des flancs sont réunis en masses d’un ferme contour, auquelles la frisure des boucles dont elles se composent donne un relief plus vigoureux; en même temps le collier qui pend au col, orné de rosaces et d’un riche fleuron qui tombe sur la poitrine, écarte toute idée de réalité; ce sont là des êtres sacrés et presque divins, que l’imagination de l’artiste a comme créés à nouveau et modelés à son gré pour les adapter à la fonction qu’elle leur donnait à remplir. ”

“ In our enquiry into the astronomy of the ancients we need not at all turn our minds to the difficult subject of the causes, or indeed even to the fact, of this slow movement of the earth’s axis, further than to realize fully that its effects have been to produce a slow but continuous change in the apparent position of the fixed stars, a change not in their position relatively to each other, but in their distances from the heavenly equator and its poles. ”

“ But now turning our thoughts to the constellation Pegasus, a difficulty confronts us at every date from 6000 B.C. downwards even to this present A.D. 1903: Pegasus as depicted on the globe has held and still holds a reversed position in the heavens. The very fact that for all the other ancient constellations which represent living beings, it has been possible to find some season and some date at which they could have been observed upright in the sky, makes it a more imperative need to seek for some explanation of the anomalous treatment meted out by astronomers of old to the winged steed. ”

“ I think that the position held by the star Spica in Chinese ancient astronomical tradition may be claimed as telling strongly in favour of an originally solstitial as opposed to an originally equinoctial beginning of the sidereal years of the Accadian, Hindu, and Chinese nations, for never has the claim been made that the Chinese years were counted from the vernal equinox; but on the contrary the opinion has been very generally held and expressed by Chinese scholars that at some remote date the new year’s festival was held in China at the season of the winter solstice. ”

“ It would seem then that there are indications in the mythology and in the history of the Egyptians, of honour paid to the constellation Aries, and as we further study the records of antiquity, now within our reach, it will, I believe, become evident that not only the Egyptians, but also all the great civilized nations of the East, had traditions of a year beginning when the sun and moon entered the constellation Aries—such a year as that in use amongst the Babylonians during their long existence as a nation, and such as that which is used by the Hindus in India to this present day. ”

“ In the early ages, when Median and Egyptian mythologies took their rise, Taurus was at the spring [235] equinox in conjunction with the sun, and was, therefore, slain by its overwhelming brightness; but at the autumn equinox that same constellation, in opposition, rose when the sun set, and all night long was visible. In Median art, it is the Bull immolated by the sun in springtime that is represented. In Egyptian symbolism, it is to the Bull triumphantly traversing the sky by night, in the autumn season, that attention is directed. ”

“ Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India, and China, have each been claimed as “the cradle” of the science. Some few writers (and prominent amongst them Jean Silvain Bailly, a brilliant scholar and an eminent astronomer) have contended for the view that not by any one nation were the chief advances in astronomy made, but that before the great races of mankind separated from the parent stock, and spread themselves over the globe, the phenomena of astronomy had been closely observed, and scientific methods for measuring time had been adopted. ”

“ In Plate XIX., fig. 1, it is the constellation known in the Grecian sphere as Hercules that claims our attention. At the date and latitude above named, this constellation, if then it had already been imagined, culminated gloriously on the northern meridian at midnight of the spring equinox. The head of the hero, or demi-god, touched the very zenith, and with his club brandished aloft he must have seemed well fitted to triumph over, not only the dragon coiled beneath his feet, but over every opposing power. ”

“ A solar eclipse can only take place at the time of new moon. It is a little puzzling to find Atri, if Atri personifies the new moon, saving the sun from eclipse instead of being the cause of the disaster; but as in the Rig Veda Atri always appears as a friend, not an enemy, of the gods of light—Agni, Indra, and the Aswins—we may suppose that the Vedic bard chose to represent him as being present at, rather than causing the sun’s eclipse. ”

“ For a nation dwelling as far to the north as the Medians are supposed to have done, Fomalhaut (when the winter solstice was in Aquarius very far to the south of the equator) would have been rarely visible. The choice by a Median astronomer and symbolic artist in search of a very brilliant star mark for the solstice would therefore have been restricted to the constellation of the Eagle, containing the conspicuous Altair, a star of the first magnitude. ”

“ A very brilliant star glitters on the head of each twin. These stars are of almost equal lustre and well deserve the name of twin stars; and so we can easily suppose how it was that the imaginative astronomers who, at the early date in question, mapped out the figures of the Zodiac, noticing that the equinoctial colure passed between these two bright stars, should have elected to represent them as marking the heads of twin figures, which they determined should symbolize the equal day and night of the season over which they presided. ”

“ Is the demon of the solstitial Indra personified as only a snake-like cloud? It is impossible to think so. The astronomic interpretation of the myth I would propose is that—a snake-like constellation, not a snake-like cloud, is the representation of the demon Vritra.
On the celestial sphere many serpents and dragons are represented, but the far-reaching constellation Hydra exceeds all the others in its enormous length from head to tail. No very brilliant stars mark the asterism, nor in the grouping of its stars is there anything especially snake-like. ”

“ Next to Indra, Agni, and Soma, the twin deities named the Aśvins are the most prominent in the Rig Veda, judged by the frequency with which they are invoked. They are celebrated [139] in more than fifty entire hymns and in parts of several others, while their name occurs more than 400 times. Though they hold a distinct position among the deities of light and their appellation is Indian, their connexion with any definite phenomenon of light is so obscure, that their original nature has been a puzzle to Vedic interpreters from the earliest times. ”

“ Again, in Grecian mythology the Eagle is sent by Zeus to carry Ganymede up to heaven, and in Grecian astronomy Ganymede is placed in the constellation Aquarius. It does not therefore seem unreasonable to suppose that the Eagle associated in the Persepolitan bas-reliefs with the Lion, the Bull, and the Scorpion (as at Plate IV.) , is the constellational Eagle, symbolizing the winter solstice, and that the compound animal is emblematic of the four seasons of the year, and also, it may be, of the four quarters of the world. ”

“ At the time when Sargon, either by peaceful or warlike arts, was established as ruler over the Accadians, they were already a very highly civilized people. They possessed a literature of their own, which embraced a wide variety of subjects. The learning of the Accadians was highly esteemed, and translations into the Semitic language were made of important religious and scientific Accadian works. These works, down to the latest days of Babylonian power, were preserved and venerated, and many copies of them were made and preserved in public libraries in Babylonia and Assyria. ”

“ Etymologists are, I believe, divided in opinion as to what language the rather un-Grecian names, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, were derived from. Some writers have suggested for their origin the Sanscrit names Capuja and Cassyape: and if, as I have already urged, the Aries-year was followed in ancient Vedic times in India, the Sanscrit derivation suggested will seem not an unlikely one. Nor under these suppositions would it be difficult to propose a possible Sanscrit origin for the name Andromeda, though for this purpose we should have to deprive the legend of all its classic and romantic charm. ”

“ In allegorical language we speak often of the even scales of Justice, and in art the goddess is always represented with the Balance in her hand. In Egyptian symbolism and art, I think the two feathers represented the equal weights of the scales of Justice. In the great judgment hall of Osiris, the souls of men were weighed in the balance. The soul, or heart, of the dead Egyptian was placed in one scale, while a feather—or the figure of the goddess Mait, wearing on her head a single plume or feather—occupied the other. ”

“ The sun at the winter solstice, may be, and often is, described as pale, weak, sick and old; but at the beginning of a calendrical year, a month and a half after the solstice, the sun no longer could have been thought of as requiring the miraculous protection of the heralding Aswins.
[78] If the Hindu year were now counted from the new moon following instead of that preceding the sun’s arrival at the initial point of the Zodiac, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the year would begin at earliest twenty-one days after the spring equinox. ”

“ Cassyape, in Sanscrit story, is not the name of a gloriously beautiful queen, but of a “sage,” and it might be that the constellation Andromeda also, for ancient Indian astronomers, represented merely a human sacrifice, not that [244] of the beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother. Though in the Rig Veda there is no legend of the sacrifice of a woman, yet in it we meet with seven consecutive hymns referring to the sacrifice, real or symbolical, of Sunahśepas, the son of a rishi or sage, who, according to the commentators, had consented to yield his son up to this cruel fate. ”

“ The very interesting question as to what southern people first depicted the Ethiopic king and queen on the sphere cannot be answered on astronomic grounds. We know that the latitude in which these figures were imagined must have been tropical, if the date of their imagining was as early as 3500 B.C. But we cannot learn from the celestial globe what was the longitude of the land in which they were so imagined. Ethiopia proper, and parts of Arabia and India, lie within the tropics, and the term Ethiopia, in classic writings, embraces all these countries. ”

“ In The Median Calendar and the Constellation Taurus I have put forward considerations drawn from Median and Assyrian sources, which seemed to me to lead to the conclusion that at about the date 4000 B.C. very close attention was given to the position of the colures amongst the fixed stars, and that at that date very special honour was given by the ancestors of the Medes to the constellation Sagittarius—the constellation which at the spring equinox was in opposition to the sun, and therefore visible all through the night. ”

“ The opinion that the symbol of Ahura Mazda, and of Assur, was of ancient Aryan origin, naturally suggested the further thought that the name Assur, so closely resembling the earlier Indo-Iranian form Asura, of the Iranian Ahura, had, together with the emblem of the god, been borrowed from the Aryan ancestors of the Medo-Persians by the Semitic settlers who, early in the second millennium B.C., established themselves to the north of Babylonia. It may here be pointed out that no very certain Semitic derivation at present holds the field which the proposed Aryan derivation would occupy. ”

“ In modern works we find the terms “useless,” “fanciful,” and “inconvenient,” applied to the Zodiac and its constellations; and for regulating a tropical year the constellations are “useless” and “inconvenient,” but the theory that the reckoning of the year and all its religious festivals depended on the observance of the Zodiacal star-groups, would help to account for the widely spread veneration in which they were held throughout so many ages and by so many nations. ”