The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c14.23

v1.c14.23

It is of importance for Vedic mythology that the knowledge of the heavenly bodies displayed is the most meagre possible. The sun and the moon are of course known, but there is no proof of the worship of any other constellation in the Rigveda, and the rudimentary knowledge of even the divisions of time is seen in the fact that a year of 360 days and 12 months is, apart from the occasional mention of a 10-month year of gestation, the only year clearly known to the whole of the Vedic literature prior to the later Sūtras. That the year of 12 months, which seems to have been a rough adaptation to the solar year of the synodic month of between 29 and 30 days, was not a perfect year seems, however, to have been recognized, for the Rigveda already contains the mention of a thirteenth supplementary month which must, we may assume, have been intercalated periodically, but there is no evidence worth serious consideration for the view that the Vedic period knew a period of five years as a unit for intercalation.⁴ The planets are not known to the Rigveda, nor apparently to any Vedic text which can claim to be early: the identification of Bṛhaspati with the planet Jupiter which has been accepted for the Rigveda by so high an authority as Thibaut⁵ is clearly untenable, and in the absence of the slightest evidence that the planets were known, it is wholly inadmissible to seek to interpret the number 34 which occurs in a Rigvedic riddle⁶ as denoting the sun and moon, the five planets, and the twenty-seven Nakṣatras. The Nakṣatras themselves are recognized in the Yajurveda Saṁhitās and in a late passage of the Atharvaveda as 27 or 28, but, as we have seen, they seem wholly unknown at any rate in the main body of the Rigveda, the only clear references occurring in a very late hymn.⁷ They mark the nightly stations of the periodic month, and reference has already been made to the uncertainty of their origin and the possibility that they are borrowed from some Semitic source. A similar hypothesis is, of course, as has already been pointed out, possible as regards the Vedic year, which is of the same length as that of Babylon, but for this suggestion there seems no solid ground whatever: traces of a sexagesimal form of reckoning which have been seen in Gothic and more faintly in Latin and Greek and assigned to a Babylonian origin cannot be found in India.¹ Moreover, if Babylon has been able to influence early India in any effective degree, it would have been natural that some trace of astral mythology should have been discoverable in India, and this is certainly not the case.