The terrible prevalence of human sacrifices in ancient times, and at the solstices especially, may make us almost fear that the representation of a chained human victim had its place in the sphere at the earlier (solstitial) date.
The chains which bind Andromeda’s arms are fastened by staples to the sky. They appear (at [fig. 1]) at 6000 B.C. as though driven into two important astronomic lines—i.e., one of them into the line of the equator, the other into that of the solstitial colure. This may, of course, be a mere coincidence, and should not be allowed to weigh at all heavily in the almost evenly adjusted balance of probabilities regarding the date of the origin of the constellation Andromeda. Her story is so interwoven, not only with that of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, but also with that of the sea-monster Cetus, that we should not hastily attempt to dissociate the members of this group.
The very interesting question as to what southern people first depicted the Ethiopic king and queen on the sphere cannot be answered on astronomic grounds. We know that the latitude in which these figures were imagined must have been tropical, if the date of their imagining was as early as 3500 B.C. But we cannot learn from the celestial globe what was the longitude of the land in which they were so imagined. Ethiopia proper, and parts of Arabia and India, lie within the tropics, and the term Ethiopia, in classic writings, embraces all these countries.
Etymologists are, I believe, divided in opinion as to what language the rather un-Grecian names, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, were derived from. Some writers have suggested for their origin the Sanscrit names Capuja and Cassyape: and if, as I have already urged, the Aries-year was followed in ancient Vedic times in India, the Sanscrit derivation suggested will seem not an unlikely one. Nor under these suppositions would it be difficult to propose a possible Sanscrit origin for the name Andromeda, though for this purpose we should have to deprive the legend of all its classic and romantic charm. Cassyape, in Sanscrit story, is not the name of a gloriously beautiful queen, but of a “sage,” and it might be that the constellation Andromeda also, for ancient Indian astronomers, represented merely a human sacrifice, not that of the beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother. Though in the Rig Veda there is no legend of the sacrifice of a woman, yet in it we meet with seven consecutive hymns referring to the sacrifice, real or symbolical, of Sunahśepas, the son of a rishi or sage, who, according to the commentators, had consented to yield his son up to this cruel fate. The prayers of the victim, addressed to many gods, at last result in his deliverance.
Two other hymns in the Rig Veda relate to the great ceremony of the sacrifice, real or symbolical, of a horse. I give at [p. 252] some of the considerations which have convinced me that the praises of the winged steed—i.e., of the constellation Pegasus, and not merely the praises of an earthly horse, are the subject of these two hymns. The ceremony in question bore the name of Aswamedha, literally Horse-Sacrifice.
In reading and comparing these two series of sacrificial hymns, some points of contact present themselves, and, observing this, it occurred to me that some Sanscrit word ending in Medha—i.e., sacrifice, and conveying the meaning of human sacrifice, might by ancient Indian astronomers have been attached to the constellation, which for us represents the hapless Andromeda: for if we suppose that the constellations Cassiopeia and Cepheus were imagined in India, but adopted with an appropriate legend into the Grecian sphere—the names of the personages in the legend at the same time suffering a Grecian change—it would be easy further to suppose that the Indian name of the constellation near to them, transformed and misunderstood, came to represent in Grecian story not merely a human sacrifice, but that of the much-to-be-pitied daughter of the proud Cassiopeia.
Whether these fanciful speculations concerning the names of the actors in the ancient legend be adopted or not need not affect our judgment as to the reasonableness, or otherwise, of the date, 3500 B.C., and of Lat. 23° N. for the origin of the constellational group here discussed.
PLATE XXIII.[124]
[124] The figures in this plate have been drawn from the globe adjusted to the following dates and latitudes. [Figs. 1] and [2], 3589 B.C., Lat. 35° N. [Fig. 3], 3050 B.C., Lat. 35° N. [Fig. 4], 1443 B.C., Lat. 40° N.
The probable dates for the first imagining of four constellations are here given—namely, for the Centaur, Ophiuchus, Auriga, and Perseus.