The lighting of “sacred fire,” by means of the wooden fire-drill and the
wooden socket block, appears as the most ancient and widespread
ritualistic performance.
To begin with, the reader is requested to read carefully the following
detached extracts from Hewitt’s work:
“In the Rig-Veda the Aryan invaders of Lydia are called the Tritsu, ‘the
boring people,’ who used the fire-drill; also Arna, ‘sons of Arani,’ the
fire-drill, whose sacred number is four”.... “In India, from time
immemorial, by a process like churning, fire has been produced by the
Arani, made of the Ashvattha (_Ficus religiosa_) wood, being twirled
repeatedly round till the fire is lighted, by a string fixed in the
cross-bar at its top,” a method, I may add, which is a later development
of the more primitive mode of twirling the fire-drill by hand. “The
Kushites ... believed that life was generated by the union of heat with
water ... and that heat was, in the astronomical myth, engendered by the
revolution of the Great Bear and the connection between it, the vital heat
and the creating water is shown in one of its Akkadian names, Bel-a-sar-a,
which means ‘the fire god who measures the water yoke’ (R. Brown and
Sayce), or, in other words, Bel, the distributor of the water allotted to
the earth. From this heavenly cistern and fire-drill, in which marichi,
the fire-spark, is hidden, the water of life is distributed.”
Compare the preceding with the following statements: “According to the
Arab doctrine of the pole, the seven stars of the Great Bear and the star
Canopus [?] formed the fire-drill.” According to Hewitt “... It was the
Ashvins, ... the twin brothers of day and night, ... identified with the
twin stars in Gemini, who twirled round the fire drill of the northern
pole ... or, according to a later hymn, drove through the seas with one of
the wheels of their chariot in Ursa Major and one in heaven,—that is, to
drive around the pole.” A deeper comprehension seems to be afforded by
this association of the Ashvins with the axis, of the significance of the
two figures (of a god and his consort) who, in the Sippar tablet, appear
to be directing the wheel of Shamash—the world-axis and symbol of
quadruplicate terrestrial government (see p. 365). Reference should also
be repeated here, to Al-kuth and Al-fass, the Arabian names for Polaris,
respectively signifying the axle and the hole of the axle, also to the
pole star of Northern India—Grahadhara,—the “pivot of heaven,” and to the
significant fact that in Egyptian hieratic script the word an=the Akkadian
and Sumerian word for heaven, and Babylonian-Assyrian word for god, is
found rendered by a man “turning around,” an action expressing the verb
an.
It is interesting to collate these statements with the descriptions of
Dhruva (see p. 448, note 1), the personification of centrifugal power,
who, as he turns, causes the heaven to revolve around the fixed centre on
which he stands, resting on one foot only, and to note how the two
distinct ideas of central stability and rotation influenced the making of
pagan divinities. The idea of stability was perpetuated in the house-pole
which sustained Aman, the roof of primitive dwellings in the column an,
which supported the temple roof and in time was transformed into a hermes,
or, in Egypt, into a statue of Amen-ra, and in the mythical mountain of
the North, Sama, which supported the heaven (Sama). Dhruva’s turning round
on one foot, which implies the use of the other, reappears in the
Hephaistos of Greek mythology, who was, as Hewitt tells us (p. 504), “the
fire-drill and its driver, and was called Amphi-Guēeis, or he who halts on
both legs, ... was cast from heaven by Zeus, and was the husband of the
fire-socket, the first form of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.”
For information regarding the cult of the fire-socket, the construction of
the Hindu fire-altars in the form of a woman, representing “mother-earth”
or “the primæval mother,” Aditi, I refer the reader to Hewitt’s work, and
also to p. 323 of the present publication, where the description of the
Jiddah sanctuary proves the existence of the same ancient form of cult in
Arabia. Hewitt relates on page 170 that, on the fire-altar, the central
fire called Agni jatavedas is kindled when the officiating priest
addresses in the words of Rig-Veda III, 29, 4: “We place thee, O
Jatavedas, in the place of Ida (the mountain daughter of Manu) in the
navel (nabha) of the altar, to carry our offerings.” In Rig-Veda, X, 61,
we are also told how Nabha-Nedishtha (that which is nearest to the navel)
was born from the union of celestial lightning flash with the earth, and
how, on his birth, he claimed to be the supreme god, saying: “This, our
navel, is the highest. I am his son.... I am the twice-born son of the law
(of nature)....” Hewitt (p. 171) regards, moreover, the image of the
goddess of the earth altar found by Schliemann in the second city from the
bottom of the six cities, built one over another on the site of Troy, a
counterpart of the Hindu fire-altar. It is significant that the Trojan
image exhibits a triangle surrounded by seven disks, and containing the
swastika, which Hewitt designates as “the holy fire, the sun of the
revolving year,” a view curiously, though indistinctly, analogous and
parallel to that I have formulated in the present research.
“In the Brahmanas the Try-Ambika offering, a very ancient form of the rain
festival, is described.... Its sanctity dated from the days of primeval
theology, for the offerings were made on a spot outside and _to the north_
of the consecrated area, and on one intersected by cross-roads, and thus
marked by the cross sacred to the rain-god, which is said to be Rudra’s
favorite haunts, and the halting place of the Agnis.... Hence the festival
is dedicated to Rud-ra, the red (rud) god, the father of the seven Marut
stars.... He is called the red god from the spark of fire kindled by him
in the fire socket when he was the fire-drill, and from being reddened by
the blood of the victim slain in his sacrifices when he was the
sacrificial stake to which the annual victims, whose blood fertilized the
ground, were bound, and this name was continued to him when he became the
red cloud of the thunderstorm which infused the soil of life into the
earth by pouring on it the life-giving rain, the blood of the creating
god....”
In the Rig-Veda the rain-god is termed Ushana, the “lord of fire,” who is
made to exclaim: “It is I who pour down rain for the good of creatures.”
It was he who was also known as Varuna, the Greek Ourauos, who ... became
the god of the dark night.... The union [in India] of the patriarchal
worshippers of the Northern father-god, with the matriarchal races of the
south was followed by the miners, metal-workers and artisans of the early
bronze age, who looked on fire and the life-giving heat as the author of
life. These were the people (of Finnic origin) who employed the word ku
for god, in Asia Minor became the worshippers of the mother goddess Magha,
the socket block from which fire was generated by the fire-drill, and it
was they, “the Sons of Magha” that became the Maghi of Persia and the
Maghadas of Indian history.
In connection with the union of a northern patriarchal and a southern
matriarchal race, an astronomical myth deserves particular attention, as
it commemorates the combination of a feminine cult of the Pleiades, the
“spinning stars,” with a masculine cult of Ursa Major. According to this
myth, related by Hewitt, the “Spinners”=Krittakas (from krit, to spin)
were “the mother-stars of the earth,” who were married to the seven stars
of the Great “Bear, the father-stars of the North.”(145) Remarking how
curiously the assignment of the north to the male and the south to the
female element coincides with what has been noted in Egypt, I note here
the interesting detail recorded by Hewitt (p. 379) that to this day the
Hindu bride and bridegroom respectively pay reverence to the Pleiades and
Ursa Major, before worshipping the pole-star, “the spotted bull,” on
entering their house. It would seem as though the fulfilment of this
ritual might limit the Hindu marriage season to some particular time of
the year, marked by the position of the Pleiades; in which connection it
is interesting to remember that, in Mexico, the culmination of the
Pleiades at midnight marked the New Year festival, when sacred fire was
rekindled and the union of Heaven and Earth took place. On pp. 130-132 of
Hewitt’s work, vol. I, the reader will find instructive data regarding
Pleiades festivals.
The preceding details appear to show that whereas a northern patriarchal
race would naturally symbolize axial rotation by the fire-drill, a
southern matriarchal race would adopt the spindle for the same purpose.
Such a ritualistic use of the spindle would undoubtedly afford a very
simple explanation for the presence of cross-symbols and swastikas and
other designs of religious significance upon the terra-cotta spinning
whorls found in such quantities in Troy, for instance, and the cited
allusion on one of these, to the pole-star god, Tur, corroborates this
view.(146)
It is instructive to trace how, amongst primitive agricultural races, the
art of spinning, the employment of beasts of burden, the invention of the
oil-press which “was used in Asia Minor as it has been used for time
immemorial in India to extract the oil of the sesame seeds,” and of the
wheel and cart, influenced their respective adoption of symbols of axial
rotation. In turn, these symbols suggested and created divergent forms of
ritual and religious cult. “The Turanians ... when they had evolved the
idea of the god of heaven as the pole turned by the revolving days and
weeks symbolized it as the pole of the threshing floors around which the
oxen were driven.” The reader is referred here to the passages from the
Bhagavata-purana quoted in the present work (note 1, p. 448), in which
axial rotation is compared to “oxen turning around their stakes,” to which
must be added the Vedic “one-wheeled car to which one horse named seven
was yoked” (see p. 452, note 1), and the revolving wheel and the revolving
measuring pole of the potter and builder castes, which united formed the
Telis caste.
In the Vaya Purana, “the seven Maruts drive the stars which are bound to
it by ties invisible to man, round the pole. They move round like the beam
in the oil-press, for its bottom is, as it were, standing still, while its
end moves round”.... In the ritual “the Sanscrit Isha or the beam which
turns this pole of heavenly oil-pressing mill, is the husband and father.”
A diverging view, which developed and combined the ideas of fixity and
circular motion with the kindling of the vital spark by the wooden
fire-drill, caused the living tree to become the emblem of the tribal
father or mother. The custom, still in use among some primitive people, of
drilling for fire in the dry, inflammable bark of dead trees of a
particular species, may have forcibly directed the choice of tribal trees.
At all events, in India, we find the mango or Am tree, which recurs in
Egyptian script (see fig. 63, 22), the fig-tree, the udumbara, the
date-palm and other trees established as the parent trees of different
tribes, who made their respective house-poles and presumably their
fire-drills and sockets, from their wood. The curious ritual of marrying
men and women to their respective mother or father tribal trees, before
they are wedded to their respective husbands and wives is mentioned by
Hewitt on p. 237, etc. This close bond between some special kind of tree
and a tribe is a point which I particularly emphasize on account of its
analogy to ancient Mexican, Maya and Peruvian tribal trees.
Returning to a study of the pole and the beam of the oil-press we find
that, in Essay II, Hewitt traces the Greek myths of Ixion and Koronis to
the Hindu comparison of the heavens to a revolving oil-press and, in the
ritual of the Vajapeya sacrifice, refers the dawn of astronomy to the
observation of the revolutions of the pole and the reckoning of the seven
days of the week.... “Ixion, when raised to heaven, was the rain-god, who
turned one wheel, to which his hands and feet were fixed by Hermes, the
fire-god, continuously in the air, and this is merely a mythic way of
saying that he was the fire-drill, made as the revolving pole to rotate
perpetually, and by being turned to every side in his winged course, to
produce life-giving heat, the generator of rain.... The Greek Ixion is the
same word as the Sanscrit Akshivan, the driver of the axle (aksha)....
Ixion is also, according to Bopp and Pott, connected with the root ik,
pouring water, which appears in ichor, ‘the blood of the gods,’ the water
of life.”
“Moreover, the Sanscrit aksha is a word of which the original is found in
the Gond akkha, an axle. In the summer festival of the agricultural Gonds,
called Akkhadi or Akhtuj, the worship of the cart axle or Akkha takes
place and is associated with Nagur, the rain snake.... In the Vajapeya
sacrifice ... the Soma priest consecrates two cups of the sacred drink
Soma above the axle, at the same time as the Neskti priest consecrates two
cups of Sura below it. In this ceremony we see a reminiscence of the days
when the axle was the upright revolving pole pressing out the heavenly
rain.... It also shows us how it was that the axle became the sacred part
of the Soma cart ... and the revolving pole became the axle of the car of
time and of the cart of the agricultural Gonds....”
It seems easy to trace from the rude one-wheeled cart, the evolution of
the two-wheeled chariot, the prerogative of royalty in India and Assyria,
employed simultaneously with the regal umbrella, which, when twirled,
symbolized celestial axial rotation and suggested the idea of a protective
deity. The transition from the “one-wheeled car” of the oldest Veda, to
which “one horse named seven was yoked” to the chariot of Apollo=“Seven,”
whose lyre, with seven chords, struck the divine heptachord of the
Pythagoreans, and who drove seven horses, coincides with that of the
umbrella which, in Greece, was borne at the period of the summer solstice
in the Skirophoria or “festival of the umbrella,” in honor of Athene.
It is particularly gratifying to me, as it so forcibly substantiates the
views I have been enlarging upon in this investigation, to refer here to
Hewitt’s quotations (p. 7, vol. II) from the Rig-Veda, in which the
wheeled chariot, closely identified with the year, is said to be drawn by
the father-horse, with seven names, the seven days of the week, etc.
Hewitt likewise cites passages of the Rig-Veda containing the conception
of year wheels, the varying number of whose spokes agree with different
divisions of the year. Thus one year-wheel exhibits twelve spokes,
denoting months, another five spokes denoting five seasons. A chariot,
with seven wheels with six spokes, is explained as meaning the seven days
of the week and the six seasons of the southern year. “All living beings
rest on the five-spoked wheel, ... the horses draw the never-aging wheel
through space, whence the eye of the sun on which all life depends, looks
down. The seventh of those born together they call ‘that born alone’: this
is the self-created thirteenth or central month; the six twinned months
are said to be those begotten of the gods. They are arranged in their
order, six on each side of the central month, by the leader who dwells
above.” A striking analogy to the ideas I detected, as associated with
central rulership, in ancient America, is set forth in Hewitt’s statement
that, it was to the one wheel year “that the Hindus likened their
universal monarch, the Chakravarta or king, who sits, like the Kushite
monarch, as the father of his subject tribes, in the central province of
his dominions, and directs his satellites, the rulers of the seasons, who
became the ruling stars of the frontier provinces—the Nakshatra stars—to
turn the wheel (chakra) of time in its yearly round” (_op. cit._ p. 31,
vol. II, see also p. 314.)(147)
The single wheel, without any indication of an utilitarian employment, is
found directly associated with the pole-star in Japan, where, as in China,
the use of the wheel has been known from earliest times. It will be for
Scandinavian archaeologists to enlighten us as to the earliest traces of
the use, by northern races, not only of the wheeled chariot, familiar to
those who named Ursa Major, Thor’s wagon, but also that of the mill-stone.
The employment of the latter in the description of the “revolving world
mill-stone through which the waters of the Universe fountain flowed,” is a
proof that the Eddas were written by an agricultural people, possessing
advanced methods of grinding or of extracting oil or juice from food
stuffs. The association of the Norse mill-stone with the distribution of
liquid, appearing to indicate that, like the oil-press of ancient India,
the stone-mill of Scandinavia had been employed to extract fluids,
challenges investigation as to the original home of the mill-stone and
chariot of the Eddas.
Personally I am inclined to regard the term “world mill-stone” as a
modernized transcription of the term “axle,” and the whole as a rendering
of the archaic idea that “heat was engendered by the revolution of the
Great Bear” and that the axle of heaven was the distribution of vital heat
and vivifying water. I shall await enlightenment as to the relationship of
the Norse tree of the pole and Thor, with the creating fire-drill of Tur,
the father-god; and the connection of the Norse “mill-stone” and fountain,
to the fire-socket and celestial cistern of the Kushites, said to be the
“sons of the Finnic Ku, the begetter and rain-god,” who, having migrated
to India and united with other races, founded a mighty confederacy, the
plan of which is figured in Hewitt’s work (p. 220), by “the union of four
triangles, representing the southeastern and northwestern races, ... with
spaces left open for the parent rivers,” which flow towards the cardinal
points (see figure 73, _c_).
If we now revert to the first stages of the mental evolution, the outcome
of which we have been reviewing, we cannot but recognize the curious, but
perfectly natural chain of reasoning which led early man to explain
natural phenomena in different ways by the results of his own immediate
observation and experience. He had discovered that the rotation of the
fire-drill generated fire; consequently the rotation of the circumpolar
constellations must generate life-giving heat. The churning or twirling of
liquid in a vessel, by means of the drill, caused an overflow;
consequently the action of the fire-drill also caused an external flow of
life-giving waters, which, after the invention of the oil or grape press,
was compared to the flow of precious oil or wine from the receptacle.
High mountains attracted lightning-clouds and when these collected around
their summits whence rivers constantly flowed, life-giving rain descended;
consequently the tops of cloud-capped mountains must reach to the axle of
the heaven where fire, heat and rain were being generated and distributed
by the rotation of celestial bodies. As Polaris the axle, pivot or fire
socket, was immovable it could most appropriately be figured by a wooden
or stone socket, from which fire and water flowed towards the four
quarters. Such an image would also figure a year, and, by extension, time,
since it marked the four annual positions of circumpolar star-groups. The
adoption of a stone socket as an image of the “revolving heaven” could
thus have long antedated, but have suggested the invention of the wheel,
which was at first a religious and then became a royal symbol.
I venture to express the view that the archaic image of Shamash (fig. 73,
_a_), the homonym of Heaven and the North, which was “an ancient model” at
the time of Nabupaliddin (879-855 B.C.), could only have been invented by
a race of pole-star worshippers who had long been acquainted with the uses
of the fire drill and the oil-press. At the same time I point out how
remarkably the combination of four rays and four streams in the image of
Shamash (Shame=heaven) coincides with the explanation given by Hewitt (p.
9, vol. II) of the Akkadian eight-rayed star of Anu (heaven), which, he
asserts, is formed by the superposition of the fire-cross and rain cross.
It is a most remarkable and undeniable fact that there is a striking
analogy between the Anu sign as explained by Hewitt and the Shamash image.
The eight-rayed or “spoked wheel” of Ishtar, which figures on the same
tablet, also gains significance for the same reason, and particularly when
collated with the hymn cited in note 1, p. 448, in which she is clearly
designated as the “axis of the heavens,” _i. e._ the female Polaris.
Having indicated how the origin of the image of Shamash can be traced to
conceptions arising from the use of the fire-drill and some primitive mode
of extracting oil or of preparing a highly valued drink from seeds and
plants, by centrifugal action, invented by a primitive agricultural
people, I advance the suggestion that the celestial tree of the Norsemen
and Semites, associated with the fountain and the four rivers of life,
appears as a closely related symbol which, however, mainly expressed the
idea of stability. In the Eddas the tree occurs as a complement to the
world axle, the first as the emblem of stability and of a central power
which dispensed shade and life-giving fruits in all directions; the second
as the image of centrifugal power which caused the star-groups to assume
opposite positions and which impartially distributed heat and water. It is
curious to note how readily from the fire-drill and beam of the oil press
as a starting point, not only all forms of tree and pole worship and the
Chinese assignment of element wood to the Middle, but also all symbols of
centrifugal motion, such as the axle, the pivot and the wheel, could have
evolved on closely parallel lines.
Let us now transport ourselves to a land where, to this day, the Indian
women grind maize on a flat stone, by means of a pestle, where the
oil-press and the mill-stone, the pole of the threshing-floor, the
potter’s wheel and the cart wheel were unknown before the date of the
Spanish Conquest and rotatory motion was associated with the fire-drill
and spinning whorl only.