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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(DECEMBER, 1895.
Western scholars would be far from endorsing. The investigation is carried on in an excellent spirit, with much and various learning, and with commendable ingenuity; it assembles many interesting facts, and makes some curious and attractive combinations ; but, as appears to me, its arguments are in general strained, its premises questionable, and its conclusions lacking in solidity. A book larger than his own would be needed to discuss fully all that the author brings forward ; nothing more can be attempted here than to excerpt and comment upon leading points, in such a way as to give a fair impression of his strength and his weakness.
Mr. Tilak's main object is, as already intimated, to establish that the asterism Mrigasiras (lit. deer's head') with its surroundings, or the constellation Orion with its neighbours, was a great centre of observation and myth-making in the earliest time, even back to the period of Indo-European or Aryan unity - and this, not only because of its conspicuons beauty as a constellation, but also, and principally, for its position close to the vernal equinox in the fifth millennium before Christ : somewhat, it may be added, as the equal or superior prominence of the Great Bear is due in part to its character as a constellation, and in part to its place near the pole.
To this central point of the value of Orion we are conducted by a well-managed succession of stages. After a general introductory chapter, on which we need not dwell, the second is entitled "Sacrifice alias the Year;" and in it begin to appear the misapprehensions to which reference has been made above. That there is a close relation between natural periods of time and the sacrifices is a matter of course : the morning and evening oblations depend upon the day; the new-moon and fall-moon ceremonies, upon the natural month; the four-month or seasonal sacrifices, upon the recognized seasons; and so, when the round of the year had made itself plain, there were established rites to mark its recurrence. But Mr. Tilak appears to hold that the year was fixed and maintained by and for the sake of the great sattra (session') or protracted sacrifice that lasts a whole year. Unmindful of the fact that every ceremony of more than twelve days is called a sattra, and so that there are sattras of a great variety of lengths, even year-sattras for variously measured years, and (at least theoretically) for series of two or more years; failing also to see that they are, all of them, the very superfetation of a highly elaborated sacrificial system, implying orders of priests, accumulated wealth, and, one may even say, regulated city life - he views (pp. 13-14) the year-sattra as a primitive IndoEuropean institution, the necessary auxiliary to a calendar. "Without a yearly sattra regularly kept up, a Vedic Rishi could hardly have been able to ascertain and measure the time in the way he did. ... The idea of a sacrifice extending over the whole year may be safely supposed to have originated in the oldest days of the history of the Aryan race." Then, in order to trace back into the Rig Veda a recognition of the two ayanas courses') or halves of the year, the northern and the southern - those, namely, in which the sun moves respectively northward and southward, from solstice to solstice, or else (for the word has both varieties of application) on the north and on the south of the equator from equinox to equinox - he determines that meaning to belong to the Vedic terms devayana and pitriyána : and this is and utter and palpable mistake; the words have no such valne; devayána occurs a dozen times, usually as adjective with some noun meaning 'roads,' and never signifies anything but the paths that go to the gods, or that the gods go upon, between their heaven and this world, to which they come in order to enjoy the offerings of their worshippers; and pitsiyaņa, occurring only once, designates in like manner the road travelled by the Fathers or manes, to arrive at their abode. There is, in fact, nothing yet brought to light in the Rig Veda to indicate, or even intimate, that in its time such things as ayanas and equinoxes and solstices, regarded as distances and points in the heavens, had ever been thought of ; everything of the kind that the author of Orion thinks to find there is projected into the oldest Veda out of the records of a much later period. And these two fundamental errors are enough of themselves to vitiate his whole argument.
