ASTRONOMICAL LORE: by a Student
AMONG the exhibits in the Science Section at the Coronation Exhibition in London, was a Chinese planisphere from the Royal Scottish Museum, which records observations that must have been made some thousands of years before the Christian era and handed down to the time of the maker.
Ancient Hindû astronomy is a standing puzzle to modern astronomers, for its records have preserved from the remotest antiquity accurate calculations of the revolution periods of the heavenly bodies, their nodes, apsides, etc.; and the ordinary theories respecting the evolution of human knowledge are flatly contradicted thereby. The Sûrya-Siddhânta gives the number of revolutions performed by each planet in a period of 4,320,000 years; and the quotients obtained by dividing the period by the number of revolutions give in each case figures agreeing with our own to a nicety. How were these results obtained?
Moreover there are in some of these ancient treatises calculations that go beyond anything our astronomy has yet accepted, dealing as they do with those larger cycles concerned with apparent displacements of the fixed stars. The celebrated French astronomer Bailly made a careful study of these. Despite certain limitations due to a natural reluctance to concede superiority to an ancient Oriental people, and confessedly poor translations, he arrived at the conclusion that this people had attained profound knowledge in astronomy, and drew the general inference that civilization is extremely old, and that this earth has witnessed its rise and fall many times. Some of Bailly's conclusions are considered at length by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, where they are used, together with those of other later well-known writers, to show the consensus of evidence in support of this branch of the teachings she outlines.
Was this knowledge obtained by observations or deductively? In both ways, probably. We know that ancient civilizations lasted for long ages, and we known that indelible records in stone were kept. Modern astronomers have discovered that one object at least of Stonehenge and similar monuments was to fix epochs depending on the precessional movement. But there is also a strong presumption that the ancient calculators possessed numerical keys. In this case their method would have been partly observation and partly deduction from general principles; a method we all apply, whether intentionally or not.
The existence of such mathematical clues—applicable to the measurement both of time and of space—has often been suspected; and in our own times isolated workers have labored in this field of speculation, discovering sundry fragments. Their efforts being usually solitary, however, and unsupported (when not actually opposed) by the generality of workers, have not achieved recognized success. Some of such speculations are considered in The Secret Doctrine, where it is shown that not infrequently these so-called "cranks" arrived at results commensurate with what we learn about the ancient science from other sources. Among these isolated workers may be mentioned Ralston Skinner and even Piazzi Smyth in connexion with the measurements of the Great Pyramid and certain integral approximations to the ratio π.
Doubtless mankind in bygone times, having brains and other faculties, as we have, but having studied for far longer periods than our civilization has yet had time to study, reached results which for us are still in prospect. It is conceivable too that their faculties may have been superior to ours in some respects—less materialistic, perhaps; and they may have been more united among themselves. Ancient astronomy is certainly a hard nut to crack for conventionalists.