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368
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1895.
savants; that agruháyana itself designates the asterism Mrigasiras, and so profes it to have been first asterism of a series beginning and ending with the year, is by no means to be credited, in the absence of any passages exhibiting such use, and against the evidence of all the analogies of asterismal nomenclature.
In the following chapter, the Antelope's Head," we come to the very centre of our author's position. By the name antelope's or deer's head (mrigasiras) has been generally understood the little group of inconspicuous stars in the head of Orion, constituting one of the series of asterisms, while the brilliant star a in his right shoulder constitutes another, called Årdra ('wet'): the whole constellation of Orion has been viewed as the antelope (mriga); and, correspondingly, the neighbouring Sirius is named mrigavyddha deer-hunter,' while the three stars of Orion's belt, which point jast in the direction of Sirius, are the "three-jointed arrow" (ishus trikandá) shot by the hunter. Mrigasiras, as so understood, is in itself an insignificant group, and we have some reason for wondering why the bright y, Orion's left shoulder, was not selected instead; but the general constellation is so conspicuous that anything standing in a cleårly definable relation to it might well be regarded as sufficiently marked; and, at any rate, the identity of this group as the asterism is established beyond all reasonable question by the circumstance that it is accepted as such in the two other systems, the Chinese and the Arab. Mr. Tilak, however under what inducement, it seems difficult to understand desires to change all this, and to turn the entire constellation of Orion into a head, with what we call the "belt" running across the forehead at the base of the horns. By so doing he cuts loose altogether from the traditional asterismal systems, makes up an unacceptable constellation with some of the brightest stars omitted, regards the deer as shot through the top of the skull with the arrow, as if this had been rifle-ballet. All this, though our author values it so highly as to make his frontispice of it, is to be summarily rejected. If the Hindus of the Brahmana period saw, as they plainly did, & deer (mriga) in Orion, it should be enough for us that the asterismal system adopts its head as one member; the establishment of the deer itself might be as much older as there is evidence to prove it. Mr. Tilak tries to find something relating to it in the Rig Veda, by pointing out that the dragon slain by Indra is more than once spoken of there as a “wild beast" (mriga : this is the original, and in ancient times the only, meaning of the word); and that, as he claims, Indra cuts off the head of his foe the . dragon; but here, as nearly everywhere that he appeals to the Rig-Véda, his exegesis is faulty; two of his three passages speak of "splitting " (bhid) the head, and the other of " crushing" (sam-pish) it; no cutting off is alluded to; and all attempts to find in the earliest Veda a severed head of a mriga, in whatever sense of the word, are vain. If, as he asserts, there are Hindus at the present time who point out the belt of Orion as the asterism Mrigasiras, that can be nothing more than a popular error, substituting for one group of three stars another and brighter one in its vicinity, and easily explainable of a people who have long been notoriously careless as to the real identity of their asterisms.
Then the author goes on to find in the the Milky Way, near by, the river that separates this and the other world, and in Canis Major and Canis Minor the two dogs that guard it on either side, and the two dogs of Yama, and the dog of the Avesta, and Sara mà, and Cerberus, and the dog whom (R.-V. i. 161, 13: see below) the he-goat accused of waking up the Ribhus - all very ingenious and entertaining, but of a nature only to adorn and illustrate a thesis already proved by evidence possessing & quite other degree of preciseness and cogency. We are taught to regard the deer, the hunter, and the dogs as originally Indo-European, the dogs having been later lost (from the sky) by Hindu tradition, and the hunter (as distinguished from the deer) by Greek tradition. Throughout the discussion, the treatment and application of Rig Veda passages is far from being such as Western scholarship can approve; and the same is the case with the final conclusion of the chapter, that "the three principal deities in the Hindu mythology can be traced to and located in this part of the heavens" - the trio being Visbņu, Rudra, and Prajapati.
