Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c12.5

c12.5

From the aforesaid country the Hindoo religion probably spread over the whole earth: there are signs of it in every northern country, and in almost every system of worship: in England it is obvious; Stonehenge is evidently one of the temples of Boodh; and the Arithmetic, the Astrology, the Holidays, Games, names of the Stars and figures of the Constellations; the ancient Monuments, Laws, and even the languages of the different nations have the strongest marks of the same original. The worship of the sun and fire; human and animal sacrifices, & c. have apparently once been universal: the religious ceremonies of the papists seem in many parts to be a mere servile copy of those of the Goseigns and Fakeers; the Christian Ascetics were very little different from their filthy original the Byraggys, & c.; even the hell of the northern nations is not at all like the hell of the scripture, except in some few particulars; but it is so striking a likeness of the hell of the Hindoos that I should not at all be surprised if the story of the soldier that saw it in Saint Patrick’s purgatory, described in Matthew Paris’s history, should hereafter turn out to be merely a translation from the Sanscrit with the names changed. The different tenets of Popery and Deism have a great similarity to the two doctrines of Brahma and Boodh, and as the Bramins were the authors of the Ptolemaic system, so the Boodhists appear to have been the inventors of the ancient Philolaic or Copernican, as well as of the doctrine of attraction; and probably too the established religion of the Greeks and the Eleusinian mysteries may only be varieties of the two different sects. That the Druids of Britain were Bramins is beyond the least shadow of a doubt; but that they were all murdered and their sciences lost, is out of the bounds of probability; it is is much more likely that they turned school-masters and freemasons and fortune tellers, and in this way part of their sciences might easily descend posterity, as we find they have done; an old paper said to have been found by Locke bears a considerable degree of internal evidence both of its own antiquity and of this idea; and on this hypotheses it will be easy to account for many difficult matters that perhaps cannot so clearly be done on any other, and particularly of the great similarity between the Hindoo sciences and ours; a comparison between our oldest scientific writers and those of the Hindoos will set the matter beyond dispute, and fortunately the works of Bede carry us twelve hundred years back, which is near enough to the times of the Druids to give hopes of finding there some of their remains: I should have made the comparison myself but Bede is not an author to be met within this country; however, I compared an Astrolabe in the Nagry character (brought by Dr Mackinnon from Jynagur) with Chaucer’s description, and found them to agree most minutely, even the centre pin which Chaucer calls ‘the horse’ has a horse’s head upon it in the instrument; therefore if Chaucer’s description should happen to be a translation from Bede it will be a strong argument in favour of the hypothesis, for we then could have nothing from the Arabians: what Bungey and Swisset may contain, will also deserve enquiry, and that the comparison may be the readier made, where the books are procurable, I mean very shortly to publish translations of the Lilavati and Beej Ganeta, or the Arithmetic and Algebra of the Hindoos.