Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

526 Themis [ch.
gammee is to the right it is swastika, all is well ; when, as much
more rarely, the direction is to the left, P^, it is sauvastika, and
all is evil. The idea is of course not confined to the East. It
lives on to-day in Scotland, as deisul, 'sunwise,' and widershins.
In college Combination Rooms port wine is still passed round
according to the way of the Sun.
The notion of following the course of the sun is world-wide.
Starting no doubt in practical magic, it ended in a vague feeling
of ' luck.' But it is in India and China that the idea most
developed on the moral side, and India and China best help us
to the understanding of Dike as the way of the world and also
as Right and Justice.
The Praying Wheels of the Lamas and of Buddhism generally
have long been the butt of missionaries and of ignorant Anglo-
Indians. But they enshrine a beautiful and deeply religious
thought. When the Lama sets his wheel a-going, it is not merely
that he gets the prayers printed upon it mechanically said. He
finds himself in sympathetic touch with the Wheel of the Uni-
verse ; he performs the act Dharma-chakra-pravartana, ' Justice-
Wheel-Setting in motion.' He dare not turn the wheel contrari-
wise ; that were to upset the whole order of Nature. The wheel
moves along and indeed symbolizes the course of rta. This rta
rules all the periodic events of nature. It is indeed periodicity
incarnate. The Dawn-Maidens shine in harmony with rta. The
sun is called the wheel of rta with twelve spokes, for the year's
course has twelve months. The fire of sacrifice is kindled ' under
the yoking of rta,' which means under the world order 1 .
In man's activity rta is moral law. In things intellectual it is
satya, truth. Untruth, it is instructive to find, though it is some-
times asatya, is more often expressed by anrta. Among the Greeks
too Dike was closely companioned by Aletheia. We remember 2
that, when Epimenides slept his initiation sleep in the cave of
Diktaean Zeus,
he met with the gods, and with divine intercourse, and with Aletheia
and Dike.
1 Maurice Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda, 1908, pp. 126, 127.
2 Supra, p. 53.