Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac PDF

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Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac Subhash Kak Chapman University ABSTRACT The cult of the goddess with the lion was connected to certain conceptions about the cosmos as expressed through the orientation of the temple and the nature of the worship. Goddess Nanā was the presiding deity in temples and citi...

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Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac Subhash Kak Chapman University

ABSTRACT

The cult of the goddess with the lion was connected to certain conceptions about the cosmos as expressed through the orientation of the temple and the nature of the worship. Goddess Nanā was the presiding deity in temples and cities across Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia from third millennium BCE onwards, and she was also the main goddess of the Kushan emperors in Bactria and Northwest India. Her cult, in which she takes many forms, is believed to have emerged in Mesopotamia and traveled eastward from there. In this article we provide reference from the Ṛgveda mentioning her name and present the Devīsūkta hymn of the Ṛgveda that includes qualities like that of the Mesopotamian Nanā, and we present evidence of the westward movement from India of the worship of the goddess both prior to the Kushans and thereafter, and this indubitable westward movement complicates the story of her origins. We also consider the astral aspect of the worship of Durgā, which is the union of the zodiac Leo sign with Virgo, and present evidence from the Ṛgveda that supports this conception; this evidence is consistent with the statement in Ṛgveda 1.164 that divides the ecliptic into twelve parts.

Keywords: Nanā, Durgā, Zodiacal astronomy, Leo-Virgo conjunction

INTRODUCTION Scholars have argued that the study of goddess worship can contribute to a better understanding of the ancients’ perception of the cosmos and the role of astronomy in its development (Boutsikas and Ruggles, 2011). Specifically, the investigation of the orientations of the altar and temples of Artemis Orthia in Sparta indicate that in addition to sunrise the directivity to the Pleiades and Orion may have been a part of the cult. We begin with this motivation to look at the origins of the Mesopotamian goddess Nanā who later assimilated Artemis in the Hellenized West Asia. The goddess with the lion is an image that extends across time for more than 6,000 years and across a wide geographic region as far as Minoan Crete to the west, Anatolia (Turkey) to the north, Egypt, Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylon, modern Iraq), and India. Included in the Mesopotamian pantheon is the Sumerian Inana who later became Ištar in Akkad; she was the preeminent goddess of love and war. In her astral aspect, Inana/Ištar is the planet Venus, the morning and the evening

Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

star; she is also shown with a lion and the Sun (Figure 1). In Sumerian history, an enactment of a sacred marriage ceremony between Inana (represented by her high priestess) and Dumuzi (represented by the ruler) was celebrated during the New Year's festival to ensure prosperity and abundance (Szarzyńska, 2000). In a famous Sumero-Akkadian hymn, the Mesopotamian goddess Nanā proclaims how she has different forms in different cities and temples, that range from her manifestation as Inana, daughter of Sin and Ur, sister of Šamaš, slave in Uruk, lady with heavy breasts in Daduni, and one with a beard in Babylon; and she is the queen of Ur (Reiner, 1975). She was elevated to the supreme goddess in another Old Babylonian hymn and elsewhere she combined the qualities of Inana with that of Ištar. In an Old Babylonian hymn, Nanā’s father An, is said to have elevated her to the position of a supreme goddess.

Figure 1. Goddess Inana/ Ištar on an Akkadian seal (notice her weapons and the lion at her foot)

The Mesopotamian story, with its many goddesses that are sometimes equated to one single goddess, is widely known. The worship of Nanā together with the Greek Artemis is seen later in the Hellenized world and Iran. In Susa, the worship of Artemis-Nanā continued until the seventh century. Nanā's Iranian counterpart was the Avestan Spenta Armaiti, also the Vedic Aramati, who was seen later as the daughter of the sky god Ahura (for further connections, see Kak, 2003). Scholars are generally agreed that the worship of Nanā spread eastward from Mesopotamia to Bactria and Transoxiana where the goddess came to occupy a leading position in the pantheon (Azarpay, 1976). For related goddesses in lands further off, note Nane (Armenian: Նանե, Nanė) is an Armenian mother goddess who is also the goddess of war and wisdom. She was depicted as a young beautiful woman dressed as warrior, with spear and shield in hand. This is quite like the Greek Athena, with whom she identified in the 2

Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

Hellenic period. Babylonian Nanā and Sumerian Nanai were most likely the same goddess. An attempt was made by Mukherjee (1969) to see connections between Nanā and Durgā, the Indian goddess with the lion, and this has been further added to in a recent study (Ghose, 2006), but the focus of these studies were the Kushan and pre-Kushan periods. In the present paper, we wish to examine the parallels between the Vedic goddess who proclaims her powers boldly in the Devīsūkta and that of the Mesopotamian Nanā/Inana who is also supposed to be all powerful and source of all knowledge. This article has two objectives. First, it considers the astral aspect of the worship of Durgā, which is the union of the zodiac Leo sign with Virgo, and present evidence from the Ṛgveda that supports this conception; this evidence is consistent with the statement in Ṛgveda 1.164 that divides the ecliptic into twelve parts. Second, it shows that the conception of Goddess Nanā of Bactria owed not only to Goddess Nanā/Inana of Babylonia as has generally been accepted but also to Goddess Nanā/Durgā of India and for this we present evidence of transmission of various cultural concepts from India to Central Asia. THE VEDIC GODDESS It is not widely known that Nanā, which in Sanskrit stands for the goddess speech (Vāc), mother, daughter, brother’s wife, also finds mention in the Ṛgveda, and this fact represents an unknown angle to the goddess story. We argue below that the identity of the name is more than a coincidence, and there are functions of the goddess described in the Ṛgveda that correspond to the powers of Nanā. The goddess in the Vedas has many names that include Ambikā or just Ambā (Mother), Aramati (Devotion), Durgā (Unassailability), Sarasvatī (Knowledge), Lakṣmī (Success), and many others that represent different roles of embodiment she plays in the world, and Nanā as Mother quite fits into it. Ṛgveda 9.112.3, says kārurahaṃ tato bhiṣagupalaprakṣiṇī nanā का�रहं ततो िभषगुपलप्रि�णी नना, “A poet am I, my dad's a physician, Nanā scatters jewels.” Literally, it means that Nanā does upalaprakṣiṇī, that is grinds with the millstones or scatters jewels (“upala” means both stone and jewels, and “prakṣ” means both grind and scatter). Since the immediately preceding mention is of the poet, and father as physician, it is more likely that the goddess who dispenses fortune is meant. We propose that statement has an astronomical basis and by father (bhiṣag) is meant the nakṣatra Śatabhiṣaj which is opposite to the meeting of Maghā (मघा) and Pūrva Phālgunī (पू व� फा�ु नी), which correspond to Leo and Virgo, respectively. The identification of nakṣatras as well as an implicit 12-way rāśi in RV 9.112 is not surprising since such a division is explicitly stated in RV 1.164 (Kak, 2005). It has been persuasively argued by Achar (2003) that the nakṣatras are listed in the Ṛgveda; they are also listed in the Taittirīya Saṃhitā and in the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa (Sastry, 1985). 3

Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

The Śrī Sūkta gives several other names of the goddess including Ārdrā (“of the waters” in ŚS 13), and she is compared to the moon illumined by the sun. Indeed, it is the light (the illuminating self behind the observation) that makes her auspicious (ŚS 8). The Ārdrā reference is to creation emerging out of the womb of the primal waters. Another hymn in the Ṛgveda 10.125 (Devīsūkta) has the goddess proclaim that she is the sovereign queen of all existence, the ultimate object of all worship, and she issues out forms to all the created worlds. I go with the Rudras, with the Vasus, with the Ādityas and the Viśvedevas; I support both Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra and Agni, and the two Aśvins. 1 I support the foe-destroying Tvaśtṛ, Pūṣan and Bhaga; I bestow wealth upon the institutor of the rite offering the oblation - (who is) pouring forth the libation and deserving of careful protection. 2 I am the sovereign queen, the collector of treasures, all-knowing, the chief object of worship; the gods have put me in many places, abiding in manifold conditions, entering into numerous forms. 3 He who eats food (eats) through me; he who sees, who breathes, who hears what is spoken, does so through me; those who are ignorant of me, perish; listen all who can hear, I tell you that which is deserving of belief. 4 I myself declare this which is approved of by both gods and men; whomsoever I choose, I render him an exalted one, make him a rishi, make him brahman or make him highly intelligent. 5 I bend the bow for Rudra, to slay the tormenting, brahman-hating enemy. I wage war against men; I pervade heaven and earth. 6 I bring forth the departed ones upon the crown of (this Supreme Being); my genesis is from the waters from where I pervade through all beings and touch the heaven with my body. 7 I truly myself breathe forth like the wind, issuing out form to all the created worlds; beyond the heaven, beyond the world - so vast am I in my greatness. 8

This breathtaking hymn, of soaring imagination, should convince us that the Vedic rishis were quite clear in their understanding that the path of the goddess was the path of power. Of these goddesses, it is Durgā who rides a lion (Figure 2). She represents both the free-wheeling Nature, which evolves by natural law (ṛta), as well as the control of it by higher agency. In the domain of human life, Nature is the complex of the instincts that is epitomized by the freedom of the mount. Yet, the Goddess assimilating the power of the spirit, quite like the dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi of Vedanta in which consciousness controls the physical world, commands the beast and make it do what she wants. The symbolism is thus informed by deep Vedic insights (Kak, 2008-9).

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Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

Figure 2. Goddess Durgā panel (7th Century) at Mahābalipuram (photograph by the author)

The astral aspect of the worship of Durgā is the union of the zodiac Leo with Virgo. Now, after taking into account the precessional shifting of the zodiac, in the month of Bhādrapada, the Sun is in Leo, and in the month of Āśvin, when Durgā is worshipped, it enters Virgo (this conjunction of the Sun and the Lion is also seen in the seal of Figure 1). The first nine nights of Āśvin are Navarātri, the great festival of the worship of the goddess. The day of worship of Durgā is Friday, the day of the planet Venus, which shows its continuity with Nanā of West Asia. INDIA AND CENTRAL ASIA The representation of Nanā in Central Asia is taken to be a syncretism of the conceptions from the west and the east. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that the Mitanni of West Asia worshiped Vedic divinities (e.g. Kak, 2007) and there is considerable evidence that Central Asia was the conduit through which many cultural elements of India diffused to the Slavic world (Kak, 2020). Indeed, it is logical to presume that the westward movement from India goes back to the second millennium BCE and earlier. Here’s a brief summary of India’s knowledge of this region which in the Mahābhārata is called Uttarakuru and Uttaramadra, which provides a context for how Indian ideas could have reached there. The Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (6th century BCE according to Keith (1920) but perhaps older), says (in 8.14) that the kings of Uttarakuru and Uttaramadra, in regions beyond the Himalayas in the north, had Vedic consecration. We know that the regions of Kuru and Madra were roughly in the GangaYamuna doab and West Punjab, respectively. One may then infer that during the

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Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

period of the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, Uttarakuru was the Tarim Basin and Uttaramadra the region beyond Bactria (Bāhlīka). Megasthenes and Strabo both mention the Uttarakuru as a land associated with the Indians. Ptolemy (100 CE) spells Uttarakuru as Ottorokorrhas and describes it to be in the mountains in Central Asia, but erroneously locates it further to the east. Since the Greeks don’t mention Uttaramadra, it appears that by the time of Classical Greece the entire region right up to Caspian Sea was called Uttarakuru (with the name Uttaramadra absorbed into it). The Mahābhārata and the Dīgha Nikāya describe some social customs of Uttarakuru, and these are similar to the descriptions by the Greeks. India’s knowledge of the northern latitudes of the lands of Uttarakuru is in Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa (Crit. Ed. 42.57) in which Sugrīva tells his followers: “Don’t venture beyond Uttara Kuru. The region beyond, where unending night broods, is unknown to us.” This indicates knowledge of the unending night of the Siberian winter. The people that lived in Uttarakuru and Uttaramadra were the Śaka (Greek: Σάκαι, Sákai) (Shaka, Scythians) and this is the name in Sanskrit for the nomads speaking various Aryan languages. According to Herodotus, the Achaemenid Empire called all of Scythians as “Saka”. They most definitely were composed of many groups (just as the term Indian means different languages and ethnicities) and they were to be found from Tarim Basin to the Danube in Europe. An inscription dated to the reign of Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BC) has them coupled with the Dahae (Dāsa) people of Central Asia. For more specificity within the Śaka, the Tocharians lived in the Tarim Basin to the northeast of Kashmir. They spoke an Indo-European language and they are believed to be the “Yuezhi” (Chinese 月氏) of Chinese texts. The region of the Tocharians constituted the Buddhist missionary highway from India to China, and over 7000 texts in Indian-style oblong poṭhī leaves of Buddhist material dating from 400 to 1200 CE have been found there. Linguists have determined that the language of the Śaka in the Kingdom of Khotan in the Tarim Basin has many borrowings from the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit. Elements of Tocharian culture survived until the 7th century, but they were later absorbed by Turkic people and have become the modern-day Uyghur ethnic group, and the word Uyghur itself may be derived from Uttarakuru. Two thousand years ago, we find the Kushans in Bactria and it is believed they had moved there from the Tarim Basin. The genealogy of the Kushans until the time of Emperor Kanishka is provided by the Rabatak inscription, made on a rock in the Bactrian language, which was discovered in 1993 in Afghanistan. In this inscription, Kanishka calls the language of the Kushans to be Arya. The Hunas (or the Hephthalites or Ebodalo ηβοδαλο) who lived in the same region and became prominent sometime later also spoke an Arya language (Mukherjee, 1995). Herodotus (1.201, 1.204.1.) says that one tribe of the Śaka was Massagetae and it was settled somewhere in the great plains to the east of the Caspian Sea. 6

Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

Ptolemy’s Geography 6.10.2 sees them much further south near Kashmir. The Sanskrit form of Massagetae appears to be Mahājaṭa, and related tribes are the Getae (Jat, Skt.: Jaṭa) and Thyssagetae (Skt. Tiṣyajaṭa). The 9th century Frankish Benedictine monk, Rabanus Maurus, stated: “The Massagetae are in origin from the tribe of the Scythians, and are called Massagetae, as if heavy, that is, strong Getae.” (Dhillon, 1994) During Alexander’s campaign in western India in 329/28 BCE there were rebellions of the Sogdians, Bactrians, and Massagetae. From this it may be concluded that they were to the south of the Bactrians and thus situated squarely in Punjab. They are also seen as neighbors of the Aśvakas, which is apparently the early form of the name Avagānā for the Afghans used by the Indian astronomer Varāhamihira. When Arabs entered Sindh in the seventh century, the Jats were the chief tribe they met and they called them Zatt. This shows that the Jats were spread all the way from Sindh to Afghanistan and beyond. The most famous Massagetae of ancient history is Queen Tomyris (with Sanskrit cognate Tahmirih, a daughter of Dakṣa). She defeated and killed Emperor Cyrus in 530 BCE. Herodotus describes the great victory of Tomyris thus (Herodotus, 2018). In Europe, the Getae were considered similar or equivalent to Thracians, who, not surprisingly, worshiped Dionysus (who many see as the Greek name for Śiva) and the goddess Bendis (= Artemis = Nanā) who is seen as equivalent to Durgā. NANᾹ IN SOGDIA AND IRAN For a specific area in Central Asia, we consider Sogdia’s religious history for evidence of Indian influence (Marshak and Negmatov, 1996; Arzhantseva and Inevatkina, 2006). Until the end of the first millennium CE, the religions of the region included the dualistic Zurvanite Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism along with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Nestorian Christianity. The currency of Hinduism is seen in the worship of Brahmā, Indra, Mahādeva (Śiva), Nārāyaṇa and Vaiśravaṇa (Kubera). It is remarkable that Sogdian Buddhist and Manichaean texts mimic the Vedic trinity and use Hindu symbols. Zurvan (who symbolizes Time, Avestan zruuan from Sanskrit śravaṇa) is depicted in the form of Brahmā, Adbag (Ādibhaga, the first god) is in the form of Indra (Śakra), and Veśparkar (Vāyu) in the form of Śiva (Mahādeva). This use of Hindu symbols by competing religions shows the influence of Hinduism in Central Asia during that period. Since the Sogdian state was not strong, it became possible for the folk religion to gain expression in uniquely new ways. Hindu images indicate that the religion was popular in the general population, even when the ruling class patronized others. The worship of the goddess is a central aspect of lived Hinduism, because to reach the heart of awareness, one’s true self, one must use the “shadows” of it in the inner sky of our mind. The false associations (represented by the buffalo demon) are destroyed by the power and 7

Nanā Devi Ambā and the Zodiac

light of Durgā, and so the goddess symbolizes the path of active search for knowledge that transcends sectarian worship. Anāhitā is the Old Persian form of the name of a goddess who was earlier known as Aredvi Sura (Ārdrāvī Śūrā), of the waters and mighty (Boyce, 2001). Anāhitā, immaculate, is an appellation quite identical in meaning to Nirañjanā. Goddess Anāhitā remained popular in Iran until her worship was suppressed by an iconoclastic movement under the Sasanians (who ruled 224–651 CE). This indicates the influence of Devī Ambā in lands further south and southwest of Sogdia. In the very first line of the Rabatak Inscription, the Kushan emperor Kanishka proclaims about himself: “the great deliverer, the righteous, the just, the autocrat, the god, worthy of worship, who has obtained the kingship from Nanā and from all the gods, who has laid down the year one as the gods pleased.” (Mukherjee, 1995) Nanā is attested by name on a coin of Sapadbizes, a first-century BCE king of Bactria. She also appears on the coins and seals of the Kushans. A four-armed Goddess Nanā with lion as her vāhana (mount) is seen painted in a palace in Panjikent near Samarkand (Marshak, 2002). Indeed, the complete Sogdian name of Nanā in the Sogdian script rendered in modern Latinized form is nnδβ’mbn nǝnǝ-δβāmbǝn: Nanā-debi-amban or Nanā-Devī-Ambā, नना दे वी अ�ा, Nanā– Goddess–Mother.

Figure 3. Four-armed Goddess Nanā from Panjikent in Sogdia, holding Sun and Moon (Seventh Century, after Whitfield, 1999)

Since Ambā (Universal Mother) is the original name and Durgā just an appellation, it may be concluded that Nanā Devī Ambā is indeed the same as Durgā. It is significant that Durgā is called Nani in shrines as far as Balochistan and Naina Devi in Himachal Pradesh. The latter variant means “Goddess with [Beautiful] eyes” which stresses the “command from seeing aspect” of the deeper intuition. Goddess Mīnākṣī, मीना�ी, “fish-eyed one”, also stresses the same insight. 8

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