Herodotus says the Getae were theists,[[38]] and held the tenets of the soul’s immortality; so with the Buddhists.
Before, however, touching on points of religious resemblance between the Asii, Getae, or Jut of Scandinavia (who gave his name to the Cimbric Chersonese) and the Getae of Scythia and India, let us make a few remarks on the Asii or Aswa.
The Aswa.
The Aswas were chiefly of the Indu race; yet a branch of the Suryas also bore this designation. It appears to indicate their celebrity as horsemen.[[43]] All of them worshipped the horse, which they sacrificed to the sun. This grand rite, the Asvamedha, on the festival of the winter solstice, would alone go far to exemplify their common Scythic origin with the Getic Saka, authorising the inference of Pinkerton, “that a grand Scythic nation extended from the Caspian to the Ganges.”
The Asvamedha.
The Getic Asii carried this veneration for the steed, symbolic of their chief deity the sun, into Scandinavia: equally so of all the early German tribes, the Su, Suevi, Chatti, Sucimbri, Getae, in the forests of Germany, and on the banks of the Elbe and Weser. The milk-white steed was supposed to be the organ of the gods, from whose neighing they calculated future events; notions possessed also by the Aswa, sons of Budha (Woden), on the Yamuna and Ganges, when the rocks of Scandinavia and the shores of the Baltic were yet untrod by man. It was this omen which gave Darius Hystaspes[[44]] (hinsna, ‘to neigh,’ aspa, ‘a horse’) a crown. The bard Chand makes it the omen of death to his principal heroes. The steed of the Scandinavian god of battle was kept in the temple of Upsala, and always “found foaming and sweating after battle.” “Money,” says Tacitus, “was only acceptable to the German when bearing the effigies of the horse.”[[45]]
In the Edda we are informed that the Getae, or Jats, who entered Scandinavia, were termed Asi, and their first settlement As-gard.[[46]]
Pinkerton rejects the authority of the Edda and follows Torfaeus, who “from Icelandic chronicles and genealogies concludes Odin to have come into Scandinavia in the time of Darius Hystaspes, five hundred years before Christ.”
This is the period of the last Buddha, or Mahavira, whose era is four hundred and seventy-seven years before Vikrama, or five hundred and thirty-three before Christ.
The successor of Odin in Scandinavia was Gotama; and Gautama was the successor of the last Buddha, Mahavira,[[47]] who as Gotama, or Gaudama, is still adored from the Straits of Malacca to the Caspian Sea.