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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
DECEMBER, 1895.
history. And this, in one of the two alternative methods, or in both combined, is what our two authors attempt to demonstrate.
Professor Jacobi sets out by finding in the Rig Veda the beginning of the year to be determined by that of the rainy season. And first he quotes a verse from the humorous hymn to the frogs, R. V. vii, 103, 9, usually rendered thus : "they keep the divine ordering of the twelve-fold one (i. e., of the year); those fellows do not infringe the season, when in the year the early rain has come": that is to say, the wise frogs, after reposing through the long dry season, begin their activity again as regularly as the rains come. Jacobi objects that dvadasa, rendered "twelve-fold," means strictly “twelfth," and ought to be taken here in this its more natural sense; and he translates : "they keep the divine ordinance; those fellows do not infringe the season of the twelfth [month];" inferring that then the downright rains mark the first month of the new year. But doadaéá does not in fact mean "twelfth "any more naturally than "twelve-fold;" its ordinal value, though commoner, especially in later time, is not one whit more original and proper than the other, or than yet others; and the proposed change, partly as agreeing less with the metrical division of the verse, is, in my opinion, no improvement, but rather the contrary; and no conclusion as to the beginning of the year can be drawn from it with any fair degree of confidence. This first datum, then, is too indefinite and doubtful to be worth anything.
Next our attention is directed to a verse (13) in the doubtless very late stryd-hymn in the tenth book (x, 85), where, for the sole and only time in the Rig Veda, mention appears to be made of two out of the series of asterisms, the Atharva-Veda being brought in to help establish the fact. The subject is the wedding of the sun-bride, and the verse reads thas: "The bridal-car (vahatu) of Surya hath gone forth, which Savitar sent off ; in the Magha's (R.-V. Agha's) are slain the kine (i. e., apparently for the wedding-feast); in the Phalguni's (R.-V. Arjuni's) is the carrying-off (R. V. carrying-about: viváha 'carrying-off' is the regular name for wedding)." The Maghå's and the Phalgani's are successive asterisms, in Leo, Maghå being the Sickle, with a Leonis, Regulus, as principal star; and the Phalguni's (reckoned as two asterisms," former" and " latter" Phalguni's) are the square in the Lion's tail, or p, 4, 8, and 93 Leonis. Now, as Prof. Jacobi points out, the transfer of the sun-bride to a new home would seem plausibly interpretable as the change of the sun from the old year to a new one; and hence the beginning of the rainy season, nearly determined as it is by the summer solstice, would be with the sun in the Phalguni's ; and this would imply the vernal equinox at Mrigasiras (Orion), and the period 4000 B. C. or earlier,
There is evidently a certain degree of plausibility in this argument. But it is also beset with many difficulties. The whole myth in question is a strange and problematic one. That the moon should be viewed as the husband of the asterisms, whom he (all the names for “moon" are masculine) visits in soccession on his round of the sky, is natural enough; but that the infinitely superior sun, made feminine for the nonce (stryd instead of súrya), while always masculine else, should be the moon's bride, is very startling; nor indeed, is it anywhere distinctly stated that the moon (soma) is the bridegroom, though this is inferable with tolerable confidence from intimations given. Surya is repeatedly said to go (vs. 7d) or go forth (vs. 120) to her husband (and only vs. 38 to be carried about:" but for Agni, not Soma), or to go (vs. 10d) to her house ; while any people who had gone so far in observation of the heavens as to establish a system of asterisms, and to determine the position of the sun in it at a given time (no easy matter, but one requiring great skill in observing and inferring), must have seen that it is the moon who "goes forth" in the zodiac to the sun. The astronomical pazzle-headedness involved in the myth is hardly reconcilable with the accuracy which should make its details reliable data for important and far-reaching conclusions. The kine for the feast, too, it would seem, must be killed where the bride is, or when the sun is in Magbê; then if the wedding-train starts when sun and moon are together in the Phalgupis, which would be ten to fifteen days later, how do we know that they do not go and settle down in some other asterism,
