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THE WAR OF THE GODS.
45I
showing that Saturn, the Father of the Gods, has been transformed
from Kternal Duration into a limited period. Cronus with his scythe
cuts down even the longest and, to us, seemingly endless cycles, which,
for all that, are limited in Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys
the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time!
Praise the God or Gods, or flout one or both, that scythe will not
tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending
course.
The Titans of Hesiod's Thcogony were copied in Greece from the
Suras and Asuras of India. These Hesiodic Titans, the Uranides,
which were once upon a time numbered as only six, have been recently
discovered, in an old fragment relating to the Greek myth, to
be seven,
the seventh being called Phoreg. Thus their identity with the Seven
Rectors is fully demonstrated. The origin of the War in Heaven and
the Fall has, in our mind, to be traced unavoidably to India, and
perhaps far earlier than the Puranic accounts thereof. For the Tarakamaya
was in a later age, and there are accounts of three distinct Wars
to be traced in almost every Cosmogony.
The first War happened in the night of time, between the Gods and
(A)-suras, and lasted for the period of one Divine Year.* On this occasion
the Deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership of
Hrada. But afterwards, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the
conquered Gods applied for help, the latter defeated the Asuras. In
the Vishnu Purana no interval is found between the two Wars. In the
Esoteric Doctrine, however, one War takes place before the building of
the Solar System; another, on Earth, at the "creation" of man; and a
' One Day of Brahma lasts 4,320,000,000 years—multiply this by 360 ! The A-suras (No-gods, or
Demons) are here still Suras, Gods higher in hierarchj' than such secondary Gods as are not even
mentioned in the Vedas. The duration of the War shows its significance, and also shows that the
combatants are only the personified Cosmic Powers. It is e\'ideutly for sectarian purposes and out
of odium iheologicum that the illusive form Mayamoha, assumed by Vishnu, was attributed in later
reairangements of old texts to Buddha and the Daityas, as in the Vishnu Puicina, unless it was a
fancy of Wilson himself. He also fancied he found an allusion to Buddhism in the Bkas:avadgitd,
whereas, as proved by K. T. Tclang, he had only confused the Buddhists and the older Charvaka
materialists. The version exists nowhere in other Piodnas if the inference does, as Trofessor Wilson
claims, in the Visknu Purana; the translation of which, especially of Book III. cli. xviii, where the
reverend Orientalist arbitrarily introduces Buddha, and shows him teaching Buddhism to Daityas,
led to another "grreat war" between himself and Col. Vans Kennedy. The latter charged him
publicly with wilfully distorting Turanic texts. "I affirm." wrote the Colonel at Bombaj', in 1840,
"that the Ptirdnas do not contain what Professor Wilson has stated is contained in them; ....
until such passages are produced I may be allowed to repeat my former conclusions that Professor
Wilson's opinion, that the I^rdnas as now extant are compilations made between the eighth and
seventeenth centuries [A.D. !], rests solely on gratuitous assumptions and unfounded assertions, and
that his reasoning in support of it is either futile, fallacious, contradictory, or improbable." (See
Visknu Purana, trans, by Wilson, edit, by Fitzedward Hall, Vol. V, Appendix.)