Lakshmi-Hari in Ancient Denmark

[Guest guest]

Lakshmi-Hari Worship in Ancient Denmark

 

 

One of the things you have mentioned is the Gundestrup Cauldron

(Scientific American, March 1992), something that was unearthed in a

peat bog in Denmark. Apparently it shows strong evidence -- including

goddess-images similar to Lakshmi and Hariti and a god-image similar

to Vishnu -- of cross-cultural connections between Indic

civilizations and those of far northern Europe. You have also noted

the apparent connections between Celtic/Druidic pre-Christian

cultures of Europe and Hindu practices. Is this merely circumstantial

evidence or does it prove conclusively that there was a migration of

peoples westward from India, rather than eastwards into India (the

Aryan Invasion Theory)?

 

There is whole host of evidence that proves that Indian ideas, if not

people (that is apart from the Gypsies), travelled from India to

Europe. Indic people were apparently present in Palestine, Turkey,

Babylon in the 2nd millennium BCE. The names of the ruling dynasties

of these places and some Sanskritic inscriptions tell us this. The

father of the beautiful Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, was a king of the

Near East named Tusharatha or Dasharatha.

 

The Puranas also say an Indian tribe called the Druhyus emigrated

West. Whether they emigrated all the way to Europe, we cannot say.

What is likely to have happened is that an Indic element became the

political and religious aristocracy in many countries, all the way up

to Europe. This may also explain the parallels between Indian and

European mythology.

 

What are the parallels between Indian and European mythology?

 

We have these parallels at many levels: in names and in the grammar

of the myths. Let's begin with names. There are two Rigvedic skygods,

Varuna and Dyaus; the corresponding Greek skygods are Ouranos and

Zeus. Similar to Agni and Bhaga we have the Slavic Ogun and Bogu. For

Aryaman and Indra we have the Celtic Eremon and Andrasta; Ribhu and

Ushas are the Greek Orpheus and Eos. The list goes on and on, and the

most interesting thing is that the Vedic list is comprehensive and we

see parts of it remembered in different parts of Europe suggesting

that the Vedic is the original.

 

The Vedic gods belong to three categories: the terrestrial, the

atmospheric, and the celestial, if we see them superficially, as the

Indologists of the 19th century saw them. In reality, they represent

categories in the spiritual firmament: they are shadows of the One.

The Europeans also saw their mythology in similar terms which is why

when the Greeks came to India they declared that Shiva and Krishna

were like their own Dionysius and Herakles.

 

There are still deeper connections, and these have been examined by

the scholar Georges Dumézil in a series of fascinating books. In

Rome, the raj-brahmin dichotomy of India was paralleled by the rex-

flamen division. The injunctions to the flamen -- the keeper of the

flame -- are very similar to those to the brahmin. The gandharvas in

India had a shadowy role related to music and fecundity; in Rome this

was assigned to centaurs. Dumézil found enough parallels to fill five

or six books. Joseph Campbell also wrote about these connections in

his books, as have many others.

 

After the Old Religion of Europe was extinguished, Indian myths

continued to influence Europe. From the lives of Krishna and Buddha a

nascent Christianity adopted the stories of miraculous conception and

birth, the star over the birthplace, the twelve disciples, and the

various miracles. Parables such as that of the pious disciple whose

faith makes it possible to walk on water, or the story where the

master feeds his numerous disciples with a single cake or bread were

borrowed. Medieval Christianity took some Indian Jataka tales and

transformed them into accounts of Christian saints. The most famous

of such instances is how a Buddha legend from the Lalitavistara

became the story of Barlaam and Josaphat!

 

If there were was no Aryan Invasion, then what exactly happened to

the Indus-Sarasvati civilization? A major civilization that spread

some thousands of square miles and was apparently quite sophisticated

cannot simply vanish.

 

It never vanished. There was a shift of population after the economy

around the Sarasvati river collapsed due to the drying up of the

river. People moved to the east and to the northwest and to the

south. There was no break in the cultural tradition. The same ceramic

styles continued. Only the level of prosperity went down. The Vedic

books also speak of a period when the rishis went to the forests, the

age of the Aranyakas. The Puranic books speak of a catastrophe in

1924 BCE.

 

Your work in archaeo-astronomy suggests unambiguously that the Max

Mueller chronology of the Vedas must be rejected and that the Rig

Veda must be dated not to ca. 1500 BCE, but to ca. 3000 BCE. What is

the impact of this?

 

Well if not 3000 BCE, certainly prior to 2000 BCE. Max Mueller was

absolutely wrong. What is the impact of the new dates? It changes the

history of ancient India and that of the rest of the ancient world.

It gives a centrality to India in world history.

 

Your recent book with Georg Feuerstein and David Frawley, In Search

of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest Books, Indian edition to be

published by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi), suggests that in fact India

was the site of the very first civilization, not Sumer in Iraq. If

this is true, then India has not only the oldest continuous and

surviving civilization, but in fact it is the birthplace of

civilization. Could you elaborate on this?

 

Look, India has had cultural continuity for at least 10,000 years.

Before that we had a rock-art tradition which, according to some

estimates, goes back to 40,000 BCE. Not only are we one of the most

ancient civilizations, we have found in India the record of the

earliest astronomy, geometry, mathematics, and medicine. Artistic,

philosophical and religious impulses, central to the history of

mankind, arose first in India.

 

You have done considerable research on the structure of the fire

altars in Scriptural ritual (The Astronomical Code of the Rigveda,

Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi), and you have demonstrated that there

was a very formal and mathematical basis to the construction of

these. Could you explain?

 

Vedic Indians were scientific. They believed in laws of nature. They

represented their astronomy in terms of the altar constructions. One

problem they considered was that of the synchronization of the lunar

and the solar years: the lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the

solar year and if we add a round number of days every few years to

make up for the discrepancy, we find we cannot do it elegantly unless

we have a correction cycle of 95 years or its multiples. This 95-year

cycle is described in the earliest Vedic prose books.

 

The altars were to be built to slightly larger dimensions each year

of the cycle to represent the corrections. There were other symbolic

constructions. Like building a square altar (representing the sky)

with the same area as a circular altar (representing the earth),

which is the problem of squaring the circle. This led to the

discovery of the earliest geometry. They were aware that the sun and

the moon were at 108 times their own diameters from the earth.

 

These fire altars are at this time obsolete, right? Nobody uses them

any more, or is that not so? The only time I have heard of them

before reading your work was when I read of an impoverished Nambudiri

(Kerala brahmin) family whose illam or house was being sold, and they

had fire altars in the shape of a falcon, and the old head of the

household said this 5,000-year-old tradition was dying because they

couldn't afford the rituals any more.

 

It is a great pity that we are letting our cultural and

civilizational treasures die right before our eyes. We must do

whatever we can to preserve and celebrate this heritage.

 

You have mentioned a connection, apparently evident in the Vedas,

between internal and external things -- for instance between the

rhythms in the human body and astronomical cycles. Could you

elaborate?

 

A central Vedic belief was that there are connections between the

outer and the inner. The rishis declared that it was due to these

connections that we are enabled to know the world. One dramatic

aspect of these connections are the biological cycles which run the

same periods as various astronomical cycles. For example, the Purusha

Hymn of the Rigveda says that the mind is born of the moon. Just

recently, by research on volunteers, who stayed in underground caves

for months without any watches or other cues about time, it was found

that the natural cycle for the mind is 24 hours and 50 minutes. The

period of the moon is also 24 hours and 50 minutes. Our clock is

reset every day by daylight!

 

The connections between the outer and the inner were also represented

by other symbols. The 108 sun diameters from the earth of the sun

were paralleled by the 108 beads of the rosary for a symbolic

spiritual journey from the normal state to one of illumination.

 

I have read the book edited by you and Dr TRN Rao (Computing Science

in Ancient India, University of Southwestern Louisiana Press) on some

surprising mathematics: pi to many decimal places, Sayana's accurate

calculation of the speed of light, hashing algorithms, the binary

number system of Sanskrit meters -- are these mere coincidences or is

there conclusive evidence of advanced mathematics?

 

The binary number system, hashing, various codes, mathematical logic

(Navya Nyaya), or a formal framework that is equivalent to

programming all arose in ancient India. This is all well known and it

is acknowledged by scholars all over the world. I shouldn't forget to

tell you that a most advanced calculus, math and astronomy arose in

Kerala several centuries before Newton.

 

In particular, I am amazed, as a layman, by the evidence that Sayana,

circa 1300 CE, who was prime minister at the court of the Vijayanagar

Emperor Bukka I, calculated the speed of light to be 2,202 yojanas in

half a nimesha, which does come to 186,536 miles per second.

 

Truly mind-boggling! The speed of light was first measured in the

West only in the late 17th century. So how could the Indians have

known it? If you are a sceptic, then you will say it is a coincidence

that somehow dropped out of the assumptions regarding the solar

system. If you are a believer in the powers of the mind, you would

say that it is possible to intuit (in terms of categories that you

have experienced before) outer knowledge. This latter view is the old

Indian knowledge paradigm. If it were generally accepted it would

mean an evolution in science much greater than the revolution of

modern physics.

 

It is also well-known that the Vedic or Puranic idea of the age of

the universe is some 8 billion years, which is of the order of

magnitude of what has been estimated by modern astrophysicists. Is

this also a mere coincidence?

 

Again, either a coincidence, or the rishis were capable of

supernormal wisdom. Don't forget that the Indian texts also speak

about things that no other civilization thought of until this

century. I am speaking of air and space travel, embryo

transplantation, multiple births from the same embryo, weapons of

mass destruction (all in the Mahabharata), travel through domains

where time is slowed, other galaxies and universes, potentials very

much like quantum potential (Puranas). If nothing else, we must

salute the rishis for the most astonishing and uncanny imagination.

 

You also suggest that that the modern computer science term for

context-free languages, the Backus-Naur Form, should more accurately

be called the Panini-Backus Form, since Sanskrit grammarian Panini

invented the notion of completely and unambiguously defined grammars

(and devised one such for Sanskrit) as early as about 500 BCE.

 

Oh yes, all this is well established and well known, as also the

Indian development of mathematical logic.

 

How has the reaction been in scholarly circles to some of these

discoveries and conjectures of yours, which do turn conventional

wisdom on its head? In India, you are aware, some of your views would

have you branded as "reactionary", "Hindu fundamentalist", etc.

 

My work has been received most enthusiastically in scholarly circles

both in the West and India. I have written several scores of

scholarly articles and reviews and am in the process of writing major

essays for leading encyclopaedias. School texts in California and

other American states have been rewritten. Likewise, new college

texts in the US speak of these new findings. We are talking here of

hard scientific facts, they can neither be "fundamentalist''

nor "reactionary''. But I am aware that some ignorant ideologues in

India may actually pin pejorative labels on this work. This only

creates opportunities to bring facts to the attention of such people.

I am ever hopeful of converting more and more people!

 

How has your work in the history of science affected your research in

computing science?

 

Surprisingly, it has strengthened my technical work. It has provided

me a focus and a perspective. It has also given me the courage to

work on fundamental problems.

 

What do you attribute this to? Is this because it is a matter of self-

image? Indians have always been self-effacing, and perhaps not

believing in themselves much?

 

Self-image is a central factor in our development. We eventually

become what we want to become. We need faith in ourselves. That is

why a cultural focus is so crucial. I think our current self-

effacement is a result of the negative stereotyping we have

experienced for generations. Our school books talk about Socrates,

Plato and Aristotle -- and rightly so -- but they don't mention

Yajnavalkya, Panini and Patanjali, which is a grave omission. Our

grand boulevards in Delhi and other cities are named after

Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, but there are no memorials to

Aryabhata, Bhaskara, Madhava and Nilakantha!

 

Is self-image, then, sufficient reason for us to explore the past?

 

It could be a sufficient reason for some. For others, it is one of

the many impulses that guides them in their personal journeys.

 

Is there something that your Web readers can do to take some of this

research forward? Any references or other suggestions?

 

There is so much to be done to spread the knowledge of Indian

history. For at least 50 years, Indian intellectual life was stifled

by a Stalinist attitude. And before that, for two centuries,

colonialist historians appropriated Indian past for their own

purposes. What they left for us was a mutilated version of our past.

We are barely emerging from that hell. We need more people to

actively carry forward this research. We also need institutions --

private foundations, perhaps --that ensure that our historiography

will remain vital, critical and devoted to truth.

 

Any messages from you for your diasporic readers?

 

Pay attention to Indian and world history, there is much to be

learned from the past. Also go to the springwells of Indian

tradition, you'll find great treasure. Indian ideas provided central

themes to the American transcendentalists in the early 19th century

which led to American culture as we know it. I believe even more

vital Indian ideas will transform world culture in the coming

decades, and if you choose to be the interpreters of these ideas to

the modern world you would have participated in the most wondrous

drama of our times!