It is instructive to trace how, amongst primitive agricultural races, the art of spinning, the employment of beasts of burden, the invention of the oil-press which “was used in Asia Minor as it has been used for time immemorial in India to extract the oil of the sesame seeds,” and of the wheel and cart, influenced their respective adoption of symbols of axial rotation. In turn, these symbols suggested and created divergent forms of ritual and religious cult. “The Turanians ... when they had evolved the idea of the god [pg 499] of heaven as the pole turned by the revolving days and weeks symbolized it as the pole of the threshing floors around which the oxen were driven.” The reader is referred here to the passages from the Bhagavata-purana quoted in the present work (note 1, p. [448]), in which axial rotation is compared to “oxen turning around their stakes,” to which must be added the Vedic “one-wheeled car to which one horse named seven was yoked” (see p. [452], note 1), and the revolving wheel and the revolving measuring pole of the potter and builder castes, which united formed the Telis caste.
In the Vaya Purana, “the seven Maruts drive the stars which are bound to it by ties invisible to man, round the pole. They move round like the beam in the oil-press, for its bottom is, as it were, standing still, while its end moves round”.... In the ritual “the Sanscrit Isha or the beam which turns this pole of heavenly oil-pressing mill, is the husband and father.” A diverging view, which developed and combined the ideas of fixity and circular motion with the kindling of the vital spark by the wooden fire-drill, caused the living tree to become the emblem of the tribal father or mother. The custom, still in use among some primitive people, of drilling for fire in the dry, inflammable bark of dead trees of a particular species, may have forcibly directed the choice of tribal trees. At all events, in India, we find the mango or Am tree, which recurs in Egyptian script (see fig. [63], [22]), the fig-tree, the udumbara, the date-palm and other trees established as the parent trees of different tribes, who made their respective house-poles and presumably their fire-drills and sockets, from their wood. The curious ritual of marrying men and women to their respective mother or father tribal trees, before they are wedded to their respective husbands and wives is mentioned by Hewitt on p. 237, etc. This close bond between some special kind of tree and a tribe is a point which I particularly emphasize on account of its analogy to ancient Mexican, Maya and Peruvian tribal trees.
Returning to a study of the pole and the beam of the oil-press we find that, in Essay ii, Hewitt traces the Greek myths of Ixion and Koronis to the Hindu comparison of the heavens to a revolving oil-press and, in the ritual of the Vajapeya sacrifice, refers the dawn of astronomy to the observation of the revolutions of the pole and the reckoning of the seven days of the week.... “Ixion, when raised to heaven, was the rain-god, who turned one wheel, to which his [pg 500] hands and feet were fixed by Hermes, the fire-god, continuously in the air, and this is merely a mythic way of saying that he was the fire-drill, made as the revolving pole to rotate perpetually, and by being turned to every side in his winged course, to produce life-giving heat, the generator of rain.... The Greek Ixion is the same word as the Sanscrit Akshivan, the driver of the axle (aksha).... Ixion is also, according to Bopp and Pott, connected with the root ik, pouring water, which appears in ichor, ‘the blood of the gods,’ the water of life.”
“Moreover, the Sanscrit aksha is a word of which the original is found in the Gond akkha, an axle. In the summer festival of the agricultural Gonds, called Akkhadi or Akhtuj, the worship of the cart axle or Akkha takes place and is associated with Nagur, the rain snake.... In the Vajapeya sacrifice ... the Soma priest consecrates two cups of the sacred drink Soma above the axle, at the same time as the Neskti priest consecrates two cups of Sura below it. In this ceremony we see a reminiscence of the days when the axle was the upright revolving pole pressing out the heavenly rain.... It also shows us how it was that the axle became the sacred part of the Soma cart ... and the revolving pole became the axle of the car of time and of the cart of the agricultural Gonds....”
It seems easy to trace from the rude one-wheeled cart, the evolution of the two-wheeled chariot, the prerogative of royalty in India and Assyria, employed simultaneously with the regal umbrella, which, when twirled, symbolized celestial axial rotation and suggested the idea of a protective deity. The transition from the “one-wheeled car” of the oldest Veda, to which “one horse named seven was yoked” to the chariot of Apollo=“Seven,” whose lyre, with seven chords, struck the divine heptachord of the Pythagoreans, and who drove seven horses, coincides with that of the umbrella which, in Greece, was borne at the period of the summer solstice in the Skirophoria or “festival of the umbrella,” in honor of Athene.
It is particularly gratifying to me, as it so forcibly substantiates the views I have been enlarging upon in this investigation, to refer here to Hewitt's quotations (p. 7, vol. ii) from the Rig-Veda, in which the wheeled chariot, closely identified with the year, is said to be drawn by the father-horse, with seven names, the seven days of the week, etc. Hewitt likewise cites passages of the Rig-Veda containing the conception of year wheels, the varying number of [pg 501] whose spokes agree with different divisions of the year. Thus one year-wheel exhibits twelve spokes, denoting months, another five spokes denoting five seasons. A chariot, with seven wheels with six spokes, is explained as meaning the seven days of the week and the six seasons of the southern year. “All living beings rest on the five-spoked wheel, ... the horses draw the never-aging wheel through space, whence the eye of the sun on which all life depends, looks down. The seventh of those born together they call ‘that born alone’: this is the self-created thirteenth or central month; the six twinned months are said to be those begotten of the gods. They are arranged in their order, six on each side of the central month, by the leader who dwells above.” A striking analogy to the ideas I detected, as associated with central rulership, in ancient America, is set forth in Hewitt's statement that, it was to the one wheel year “that the Hindus likened their universal monarch, the Chakravarta or king, who sits, like the Kushite monarch, as the father of his subject tribes, in the central province of his dominions, and directs his satellites, the rulers of the seasons, who became the ruling stars of the frontier provinces—the Nakshatra stars—to turn the wheel (chakra) of time in its yearly round” (op. cit. p. 31, vol. ii, see also p. 314.)[147]
The single wheel, without any indication of an utilitarian employment, is found directly associated with the pole-star in Japan, where, as in China, the use of the wheel has been known from earliest [pg 502] times. It will be for Scandinavian archaeologists to enlighten us as to the earliest traces of the use, by northern races, not only of the wheeled chariot, familiar to those who named Ursa Major, Thor's wagon, but also that of the mill-stone. The employment of the latter in the description of the “revolving world mill-stone through which the waters of the Universe fountain flowed,” is a proof that the Eddas were written by an agricultural people, possessing advanced methods of grinding or of extracting oil or juice from food stuffs. The association of the Norse mill-stone with the distribution of liquid, appearing to indicate that, like the oil-press of ancient India, the stone-mill of Scandinavia had been employed to extract fluids, challenges investigation as to the original home of the mill-stone and chariot of the Eddas.
Personally I am inclined to regard the term “world mill-stone” as a modernized transcription of the term “axle,” and the whole as a rendering of the archaic idea that “heat was engendered by the revolution of the Great Bear” and that the axle of heaven was the distribution of vital heat and vivifying water. I shall await enlightenment as to the relationship of the Norse tree of the pole and Thor, with the creating fire-drill of Tur, the father-god; and the connection of the Norse “mill-stone” and fountain, to the fire-socket and celestial cistern of the Kushites, said to be the “sons of the Finnic Ku, the begetter and rain-god,” who, having migrated to India and united with other races, founded a mighty confederacy, the plan of which is figured in Hewitt's work (p. 220), by “the union of four triangles, representing the southeastern and northwestern races, ... with spaces left open for the parent rivers,” which flow towards the cardinal points (see figure [73], c).
If we now revert to the first stages of the mental evolution, the outcome of which we have been reviewing, we cannot but recognize the curious, but perfectly natural chain of reasoning which led early man to explain natural phenomena in different ways by the results of his own immediate observation and experience. He had discovered that the rotation of the fire-drill generated fire; consequently the rotation of the circumpolar constellations must generate life-giving heat. The churning or twirling of liquid in a vessel, by means of the drill, caused an overflow; consequently the action of the fire-drill also caused an external flow of life-giving waters, which, after the invention of the oil or grape press, was compared to the flow of precious oil or wine from the receptacle.
High mountains attracted lightning-clouds and when these collected around their summits whence rivers constantly flowed, life-giving rain descended; consequently the tops of cloud-capped mountains must reach to the axle of the heaven where fire, heat and rain were being generated and distributed by the rotation of celestial bodies. As Polaris the axle, pivot or fire socket, was immovable it could most appropriately be figured by a wooden or stone socket, from which fire and water flowed towards the four quarters. Such an image would also figure a year, and, by extension, time, since it marked the four annual positions of circumpolar star-groups. The adoption of a stone socket as an image of the “revolving heaven” could thus have long antedated, but have suggested the invention of the wheel, which was at first a religious and then became a royal symbol.