Page 48 (part 6)

Thus the latter, pushing off the Dragon, or spiritual , Divine Wisdom, with the Tau , or Cross -- which is esoterically "the foundation and framework of all construction" -- would have an entirely phallic , physiological meaning, had it not still another significance unknown to our Biblical scholars and symbologists. At any rate, it shows no special reference to the Verbum of St. John, except, perhaps, in a general sense. The taurus (which, by the way, is no lamb , but a bull) was sacred in every Cosmogony, with the Hindus as with the Zoroastrians, with the Chaldees as with the Egyptians. So much, every schoolboy knows. It may perhaps help to refresh the memory of our Theosophists by referring them to what was said of the Virgin and the Dragon, and the universality of periodical births and re-births of World-Saviours -- solar gods -- in Isis , II. , 490, with reference to certain passages in Revelations. In 1853, the savant known as Erard-Mollien read before the Institute of France a paper tending to prove the antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in the signs of which were found the root and philosophy of all the most important religious festivals of that country, the origin of which religious ceremonies goes back into the night of time at least 3,000 B.C ., as the lecturer tried to demonstrate. The Zodiac of the Hindus, he thought, was far anterior to the Zodiac of the Greeks, and differed from it in some particulars vastly. In it one sees the Dragon on a tree, at the foot of which the "Virgin," Kanya - Durga , one of the most ancient goddesses, is placed on a lion dragging after him the solar car. "This is the reason why," he added, "this Virgin Durga is not the simple memento of [[Vol. 1, Page]] 658 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. an astronomical fact, but verily the most ancient divinity of the Indian Olympus. She is evidently the same of whom all the Sibylline books spoke, those works that have been the source of the inspiration of Virgil; the virgin whose return was prophesied as a sign of universal renovation. . . . . And why," he added, "when we see to this day, the months named after the deity-names of this solar Zodiac by the Malayalim-speaking people of southern India -- why should that people have abandoned their ancestral Zodiac to burden themselves with that of the Greeks? Everything proves, on the contrary, that these zodiacal figures have been transmitted to the Greeks by the Chaldees, who got them from the Brahmans." ( See Recueil de l ' Academie des Inscriptions , 1853 . ) But all this is very poor testimony. Let us remember, however, also that which was said and accepted by the contemporaries of Volney, who, in his "Ruins of Empires," p. 360, remarks that as Aries was in its fifteenth degree 1447 B.C ., it follows that the first degree of "Libra" could not have coincided with the Vernal equinox more lately than 15,194 years B.C ., to which, if you add 1,790 years since Christ, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac. Dr. Schlegel, moreover, in his Uranographie Chinoise assigns to the Chinese Astronomical Sphere an antiquity of 18,000 years. ( Vide pp. 54, 196, et seq. ) Nevertheless, as opinions quoted without adequate proofs are of little avail, it may be more useful to turn to scientific evidence. M. Bailly, the famous French astronomer of the last century, Member of the Academy, etc., etc., asserts that the Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from them the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived their knowledge. In support of these views he says -- "The astronomers who preceded the epoch 1,491 are, first, the Alexandrian Greeks; Hipparchus, who flourished 125 years before our era, and Ptolemy, 260 years after Hipparchus. Following these were the Arabs, who revived the study of astronomy in the ninth century. These were succeeded by the Persians and the Tartars, to whom we owe the tables of Massireddin in 1269, and those of Ulug-beg in 1437. Such is the succession of events in Asia as known prior to the Indian epoch 1491. What, then, is an epoch? It is the observation of the longitude of a star at a given moment, the place in the sky where it was seen , and which serves as a point of reference, a starting-point from which to calculate both the past and future positions of the star from its observed motion. But an epoch is useless unless the motion of the star has been determined. A people, new to science and obliged to borrow a foreign astronomy, finds no difficulty in fixing an epoch, since [[Vol. 1, Page]] 659 BAILLY'S CONCLUSIONS. the only observation needed is one which can be made at any moment. But what it needs above all, what it is obliged to borrow, are those elements which depend on accurate determination, and which require continuous observation; above all, those motions which depend on time, and which can only be accurately determined by centuries of observation. These motions, then, must be borrowed from a nation which has made such observations, and has behind it the labours of centuries. We conclude, therefore, that a new people will not borrow the epochs of an ancient one, without also borrowing from them the 'average motions.' Starting from this principle we shall find that the Hindu epochs 1491 and 3102 could not have been derived from those of either Ptolemy or Ulug-beg." There remains the supposition that the Hindus, comparing their observations in 1491 with those previously made by Ulug-beg and Ptolemy, used the intervals between these observations to determine the "average motions." The date of Ulug-beg is too recent for such a determination; while those of Ptolemy and Hipparchus were barely remote enough. But if the Hindu motions had been determined from these comparisons, the epochs would be connected together. Starting from the epochs of Ulug-beg and Ptolemy we should arrive at all those of the Hindus. But this is not the case. Hence foreign epochs were either unknown or useless to the Hindus.* We may add to this another important consideration. When a nation is obliged to borrow from its neighbours the methods or the average motions of its astronomical tables, it has even greater need to borrow, besides these, the knowledge of the inequalities of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the motions of the apogee, of the nodes, and of the inclination of the ecliptic; in short, all those elements the determination of which requires the art of observing, some instrumental appliances, and great industry.