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THE ASTRONOMICAL AND MORAL ALLUSION OF THE CALCI- 



AVATAR. 



The above fanciful relation and decorative imagery is evidently 

 in great part, for, I am far from thinking it wholly, the result of the 

 astronomical calculations of the ancients, and the general persuasion 

 that prevailed throughout the philosophical schools of Asia, concern- 

 ing the AiroxatTas'airis, or final restitution of all things after a certain 

 stated period ; viz. when the fixed stars had completed their long 

 revolution eastward. This period is asserted by modern astronomy 

 to be twenty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty years, and is well 

 known to arise from the multiplication of three hundred and sixty 

 into seventy-two, being the number of years in which a fixed star 

 appears to move through a degree of a great circle. The ancient 

 Hindoo astronomers believed it to be completed in twenty-four 

 thousand years ; while the philosophers of the Egyptian and Greek 

 schools thought it would not be accomplished under the protracted 

 period of thirty-six thousand years; conceiving the precession of the 

 equinox to be after the rate of one degree in one hundred years, 

 and, consequently, if 1 : 100? : : 360 : 36,000?. That the more 

 early race of Indian astronomers were also of the same opinion with 

 those of Egypt and Greece, can scarcely admit of a doubt, when it 

 is considered, that, according to the assertion of the great astrono- 

 mer, Mr. Reuben Burrow*, given in the former volume, the life of 

 Brahma himself consists of 36,000 of his days (cycles) ; that is, in 

 fact, the presumed period of the long revolution of the heavenly 

 bodies, the ANNUS MAGNUS of antiquity. This imagined RESTI- 



* See vol. i. p. 302, where the reasons, which induced the Brahmins to fix on the exact pe- 

 riod of 432,000 years for the duration of the Cali age, are ably unfolded and learnedly discus- 

 sed. That Essay is extremely valuable, having been transmitted to me from India, iu manu- 

 script, by a friend of Mr. Burrow, and was never before published. 



