Note 2 — Tale II. (continued 4)

The month Pushja. Before the time of Vikramâditja astronomy was not studied in India as a science; the course of the heavenly bodies was observed, but only for the sake of determining the times and seasons of feasts and sacrifices. The moon was the chief subject of observation and of the more correct results of the same. Her path was divided into twenty-eight “houses” or “mansions” called naxatra. This division was invented by the Chinese, and India received it from them about 1100 B.C. The naxatravidjâ or the knowledge of the moon-mansions, is set down in one of the oldest Upanishad as a special kind of knowledge. In the oldest enumeration extant of the moon-mansions only twenty-seven are mentioned, and the first of them is called Krittikâ, and Abhigit, which is the 20th, according to the latest enumeration, is wanting; other lists have other discrepancies. It is worthy of notice that Kandramas, the earliest name by which the moon is invoked in the Vêda, is composed of kandra, “shining,” and mas, “to measure,” because the moon measured time, and the various names of the moon in all the so-called Indo-European languages are supposed to come from this last word. There were also four moon-divinities invoked, as Kuhû, Sinivali, Râkâ, and Anumati, in the Rig Vêda hymns; these are all feminine deities. Soma, the later moon-divinity, however, was masculine, and had twenty-seven of the fifty daughters of Daxa for his wives. Kandramas was also a male divinity. The worship of the four goddesses I have named was afterwards superseded by four (also feminine) deifications of the phases of the moon. There seems a little difficulty, however, about fitting their names to them. Pushja, with which we are more particularly concerned, would properly imply “waxing,” but she presided nevertheless over the last quarter; Krita, meaning the “finished” course, over the new moon; the appellations of the others fit better. Drapura (derived from dva, two) designated the second quarter, and Khârvâ, “the beginning to wane,” the full moon. In the list given by Amarasinha of the moon-mansions, Pushja is the name of the eighth, in the Mahâ Bhârata it stands for the sixth.