constructed of stone, some of them upwards of twenty feet in height," which he saw in the antient observatory of Benares, as well as the discovery which Mr Call* reports, in the same book, he himself made of the signs of the zodiac on the cielings of many of the more antient choulteries of the Peninsula, strongly incline us to think that the science of astronomy was, in antient India, carried to the utmost height of perfection, attainable in those periods and by those instruments; and, at the same time, it was, undoubtedly, attended with all those degra ding superstitions, such as divination, incantation, and judicial astrology, which were its inseparable concomitants in that early æra. It is a most singular circumstance, that the days of the week, in India, are arranged, as in Egypt and Greece, according to the number of the planets, and are distinguished by similar appellations, and, for my own part, I have not a a doubt but that the various spheres, or boobuns, of purification, through which the doctrine of the Metempsychosis, as explained by Mr Halhed, has doomed the

See page 46 of his Preface to the Gentoo Code, quarto edition, and page 41 of the same Preface, where the Sanscreet

names

1

the soul to pass in its progress to consummate happiness and perfection, have a direct allusion to the planets. But I am launching into a vast ocean, in which it was not at present my intention to venture my small bark.

To those bright and conspicuous mansions of the sky, as I have observed, the servile adulation of the antient nations of the earth exalted the departed spirits of illustrious kings and legislators; while the partial fondness and blind zeal of individuals wafted to the same happy regions the souls of their deceased progenitors who were venerable for religion and virtue. A variety of passages in the antient poets may be adduced in proof of this assertion, but particularly one in Virgil, who, in a strain of unmanly flattery to Augustus, while yet living, asks him among which of the constellations he will choose to take up his future residence.

Anne novum sidus tardis te mensibus addas

Qua locus ERIGONEN inter CHELASQUE sequentes
Panditur? Ipse tibi jam brachia contrahit ardens
SCORPIUS, et cœli justa plus parte reliquit.

Georg. i. 33.

These lines are also quoted by that ingenious astronomer, Mr Costard, but for another

pur

names of the days of the week are enumerated in their proper order, as they also are in the Ayeen Akbery, p. 12.

* See Costard's Astronomy, p. 19.

VOL. II.

H

pose,

pose, the elucidation of an astronomical remark; and it would appear from that remark that the accuracy of the poet's descrip tion does him greater honour than the fulsome compliment contained in them did Augustus. The contagion of sidereal worship, in conscquence of the stars being regarded as animated intelligences, or as inhabited by divinities, spread rapidly and universally among all the nations of the Eastern world, except among that favoured people to whom the Almighty thought proper to reveal the glorious doctrines of the true religion. For, thus, in the most antient and most sublime drama which the human intellect ever produced, the devout Joв makes protestation of his innocence as to the crime of this prevailing idolatry:* If I beheld the SUN when it shined or the MOON walking in brightness, and my heart hath been secretly enticed or my mouth hath kissed my hand, this, also, were an iniquity to be punished by the Judge; for, I should then have denied the God that is above! The planets, in time, became distinguished by the names of the most renowned personages in fabulous antiquity, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Diana : but, these orbs, from their rising and setting, being fre

Job, c. xxxi. v. 26.

quently

quently concealed from the view of the enthusiastic adorer, invention supplied their place by forming representative images of those fancied deities to whom, after solemnly consecrating them, they paid their devotion with as much fervour as to the real planet. In this practice, as Dr Prideaux* has judiciously observed, we trace the first origin of the Subian superstition, or worship of idols, in which abomination. the antient pagan world were so deeply immersed; and, from this period, Saturn, Jupiter, and the other sidereal divinities, continued to be holden in the most sacred veneration through all the periods of the Assyrian, Greek, and Roman, empires. Before these figures, which they invoked by the several names their blind bigotry has assigned them, in deep caverns and woody recesses, the first temples of the world, they performed their mysterious rites; they kindled the sacred fire, of which their glowing spheres seemed to be formed, and they offered oblations to them of the noblest beasts of the field and the choicest productions of the earth. In the wild delirium of

*See Prideaux's Connections, vol. i, p. 178, and, likewise, those of Dr Shuckford, vol. ii. p. 388, who, notwithstanding the severe attacks of Warburton, on this subject of the origin of the varjous species of pagan idolatry, has displayed erudition little inferior to that of the haughty critic.

their zeal, and under the impulses of a sacred fury, they shouted aloud the lofty pæans of praise and triumph; they mingled in the circular dance, which was intended to imitate that of the planets; and they tried the most potent spells and uttered the most tremendous incantations, in full confidence of drawing down, into those symbolic figures, the same powerful spirits which were supposed to roll them through the æther, and the same bland or baleful influences which they were believed to dispense from on high.

That a considerable portion of the hieroglyphic sculptures and paintings, in the temples of Hindostan, have an astronomical allusion, has never been doubted by those who have accurately surveyed and attentively considered them; though their latent meaning and intricate history have never been completely developed. The blaze of glory streaming from the radiated crowns of the heads of all the AVATARS, whose figures are engraved in the Asiatic Researches, speak their descent from the regions of light and glory; the emblematical ornaments of serpents that deck the venerated statues of the GOD-RAJAHS, who frown on the walls of the various cavern-pagodas; the figures of sacred and sidereal animals sculptured near them; the sacerdotal vases for oblation;