The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.76

c8.76

Interpreting this story is a delicate matter. The notion of the union of the Moon-god seems to be attested right from the verse of the Ṛgveda “... and Soma is established in the bosom of these nakṣatras”.¹ This is one of those rare passages where Soma is already, as is regularly the case in more recent mythology, identified with the Moon (cf., Bergaigne, Rel. ved., I, 158). The hymn where he figures is an epithalamium of Soma and Sūryā, the daughter of the Sun, or the Sun in a feminine form, but the word upastha, which denotes “bosom, lap” in a vague sense, had soon taken the sense of “female genital organs” which it has right from the Yajurveda (Vājas., XIX, 92). It has, therefore, been possible from a very early date to interpret the Vedic hymn as signifying that Soma, solemnly married to Sūryā, was also the husband of the nakṣatras. Now in the XIIIth book of the Atharvaveda, (1, 22, 23), appears a cow Rohiṇī, wife of the Sun-bull, Rohita. An assimilation has, therefore, taken place between Sūryā and Rohiṇī, the two feminine Suns. As regards the nakṣatras, they are the constellations. In the classical literature it is commonplace to proclaim that Soma is their king, (his bulk confers this rank on him) and to say that he “shines”, rājati, and to call him in addition rājā, “king”, by a play of words.² But the nakṣatras are also, in a more special sense, the twenty-seven or the twenty-eight constellations which lie along the monthly course of the Moon and Rohiṇī is one among them right from the Atharvaveda (XIX, 2) and the Yajurveda (Taitt., IV, 4, 10). Although the Taittirīya-saṃhitā says that the daughters of Prajāpati were thirty-three in number, they have to be identified with the nakṣatras marking the stages of the Moon as the other saṃhitās affirm that these daughters are the nakṣatras.