The Days
Will Become Longer And Will Consist Of Twenty Hours And Forty-Eight
Minutes, And The Nights Of Thirteen Hours And Twelve Minutes, That
Is To Say, Instead Of Twenty-Four Hours We Shall Have Exactly
Thirty-Four Hours And One Minute.
The first day of Satya-Yug will
be very important for us, because it is then that will appear to
us our new King with white face and golden hair, who will come from
the far North.
He will become the autonomous Lord of India. The
Maya of human unbelief, with all the heresies over which it presides,
will be thrown down to Patala" (sig-nifying at once hell and the
antipodes), "and the Maya of the righteous and pious will abide
with them, and will help them to enjoy life in Mretinloka" (our earth).
"Let it also be known to everyone that, for the dissemination of
this divine document, every separate copy of it will be rewarded
by the forgiveness of as many sins as are generally forgiven when
a pious man sacrifices to a Brahman one hundred cows. As for the
disbelievers and the indifferent, they will be sent to Naraka" (hell).
"Copied out and given, by the slave of Vishnu, Malau Shriram, on
Saturday, the 7th day of the first half of Shravan" (the fifth month
of the Hindu year), "1801, of Shalivalian's era" (that is, 26th
July, 1879).
The further career of this ignorant and cunning epistle is not
known to me. Probably the police put a stop to its distribution;
this only concerns the wise administrators. But it splendidly
illustrates, from one side, the credulity of the populace, drowned
in superstition, and from the other the unscrupulousness of the Brahmans.
Concerning the word Patala, which literally means the opposite side,
a recent discovery of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, whom I have already
mentioned in the preceding letters, is interesting, especially if
this discovery can be accepted by philologists, as the facts seem
to promise. Dayanand tries to show that the ancient Aryans knew,
and even visited, America, which in ancient MSS. is called Patala,
and out of which popular fancy constructed, in the course of time,
something like the Greek Hades. He supports his theory by many
quotations from the oldest MSS., especially from the legends about
Krishna and his favourite disciple Arjuna. In the history of the
latter it is mentioned that Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas,
descendants of the moon dynasty, visited Patala on his travels,
and there married the widowed daughter of King Nagual, called Illupl.
Comparing the names of father and daughter we reach the following
considerations, which speak strongly in favour of Dayanand's supposition.
(1) Nagual is the name by which the sorcerers of Mexico, Indians
and aborigines of America, are still designated. Like the Assyrian
and Chaldean Nargals, chiefs of the Magi, the Mexican Nagual unites
in his person the functions of priest and of sorcerer, being served
in the latter capacity by a demon in the shape of some animal,
generally a snake or a crocodile. These Naguals are thought to
be the descendants of Nagua, the king of the snakes. Abbe Brasseur
de Bourbourg devotes a considerable amount of space to them in his
book about Mexico, and says that the Naguals are servants of the
evil one, who, in his turn, renders them but a temporary service.
In Sanskrit, likewise, snake is Naga, and the "King of the Nagas"
plays an important part in the history of Buddha; and in the Puranas
there exists a tradition that it was Arjuna who introduced snake
worship into Patala. The coincidence, and the identity of the
names are so striking that our scientists really ought to pay some
attention to them.
(2) The Name of Arjuna's wife Illupl is purely old Mexican, and
if we reject the hypothesis of Swami Daya-nand it will be perfectly
impossible to explain the actual existence of this name in Sanskrit
manuscripts long before the Christian era. Of all ancient dialects
and languages it is only in those of the American aborigines that
you constantly meet with such combinations of consonants as pl, tl,
etc. They are abundant especially in the language of the Toltecs,
or Nahuatl, whereas, neither in Sanskrit nor in ancient Greek are
they ever found at the end of a word. Even the words Atlas and
Atlantis seem to be foreign to the etymology of the European languages.
Wherever Plato may have found them, it was not he who invented them.
In the Toltec language we find the root atl, which means water and
war, and directly after America was discovered Columbus found a
town called Atlan, at the entrance of the Bay of Uraga. It is now
a poor fishing village called Aclo. Only in America does one find
such names as Itzcoatl, Zempoaltecatl, and Popocatepetl. To attempt
to explain such coincidences by the theory of blind chance would
be too much, consequently, as long as science does not seek to
deny Dayanand's hypothesis, which, as yet, it is unable to do,
we think it reasonable to adopt it, be it only in order to follow
out the axiom "one hypothesis is equal to another." Amongst other
things Dayanand points out that the route that led Arjuna to America
five thousand years ago was by Siberia and Behring's Straits.
It was long past midnight, but we still sat listening to this
legend and others of a similar kind. At length the innkeeper sent
a servant to warn us of the dangers that threatened us if we
lingered too long on the verandah on a moonlit night. The programme
of these dangers was divided into three sections - snakes, beasts
of prey, and dacoits. Besides the cobra and the "rock-snake," the
surrounding mountains are full of a kind of very small mountain
snake, called furzen, the most dangerous of all. Their poison
kills with the swiftness of lightning. The moonlight attracts them,
and whole parties of these uninvited guests crawl up to the verandahs
of houses, in order to warm themselves.
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