The Days
Will Become Longer And Will Consist Of Twenty Hours And Forty-Eight
Minutes, And The Nights Of Thirteen Hours And Twelve Minutes, That
Is To Say, Instead Of Twenty-Four Hours We Shall Have Exactly
Thirty-Four Hours And One Minute.
The first day of Satya-Yug will
be very important for us, because it is then that will appear to
us our new King with white face and golden hair, who will come from
the far North.
He will become the autonomous Lord of India. The
Maya of human unbelief, with all the heresies over which it presides,
will be thrown down to Patala" (sig-nifying at once hell and the
antipodes), "and the Maya of the righteous and pious will abide
with them, and will help them to enjoy life in Mretinloka" (our earth).
"Let it also be known to everyone that, for the dissemination of
this divine document, every separate copy of it will be rewarded
by the forgiveness of as many sins as are generally forgiven when
a pious man sacrifices to a Brahman one hundred cows. As for the
disbelievers and the indifferent, they will be sent to Naraka" (hell).
"Copied out and given, by the slave of Vishnu, Malau Shriram, on
Saturday, the 7th day of the first half of Shravan" (the fifth month
of the Hindu year), "1801, of Shalivalian's era" (that is, 26th
July, 1879).
The further career of this ignorant and cunning epistle is not
known to me. Probably the police put a stop to its distribution;
this only concerns the wise administrators. But it splendidly
illustrates, from one side, the credulity of the populace, drowned
in superstition, and from the other the unscrupulousness of the Brahmans.
Concerning the word Patala, which literally means the opposite side,
a recent discovery of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, whom I have already
mentioned in the preceding letters, is interesting, especially if
this discovery can be accepted by philologists, as the facts seem
to promise. Dayanand tries to show that the ancient Aryans knew,
and even visited, America, which in ancient MSS. is called Patala,
and out of which popular fancy constructed, in the course of time,
something like the Greek Hades. He supports his theory by many
quotations from the oldest MSS., especially from the legends about
Krishna and his favourite disciple Arjuna. In the history of the
latter it is mentioned that Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas,
descendants of the moon dynasty, visited Patala on his travels,
and there married the widowed daughter of King Nagual, called Illupl.
Comparing the names of father and daughter we reach the following
considerations, which speak strongly in favour of Dayanand's supposition.
(1) Nagual is the name by which the sorcerers of Mexico, Indians
and aborigines of America, are still designated. Like the Assyrian
and Chaldean Nargals, chiefs of the Magi, the Mexican Nagual unites
in his person the functions of priest and of sorcerer, being served
in the latter capacity by a demon in the shape of some animal,
generally a snake or a crocodile.
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