No. 24. — 1881.] ANCIENT KALAH, ETC. 81 



star form the spokes of the wheel. May we not recognise in the 

 wheel formed by the star on a round gem of asteria, the sacred 

 symbol of the wheel, which accounts for the present belief among 

 some Oriental races that there is a god in the asteria, although they 

 have forgotten the reason for their superstition, and substitute the 

 god for the symbol ? 



6. — Mo-lo-kia-li—ag&te, 



7 . — Po-mo-lo-kia (padmaraga) =ruby. 



We must here notice this ancient origin of the still existing Ceylon 

 superstition, that the finest rubies lie in the head of cobras. This 

 extraordinary myth seems to have been an accepted matter when the 

 Chinese authors wrote. 



May we not now translate this myth as simply the exaggerated 

 form that arose when the Indo-AVyan races began to confuse the 

 Nagas (ophid cult) and Yakkhos (perhaps an early form of Saivites) 

 with actual snakes and demons, in which secondary sense the original 

 name of the races evidently came after a time to be used by the 

 A'ryan invaders ?* It might then simply mean, the Nagas with whom 

 rubies are found in a secret and jealously guarded place, instead of 

 the rubies hidden in the head of the cobras and jealously guarded, as 

 we have recently been too literally iuterpreting it. 



Second Series. 



1 — Po-/o-5o=(prabala) coral. Here I ask your attention to 

 the Chinese account, that it was found on an Island to the S.W. [of 

 the Gangetic countries or ? of China] and dredged by iron nets from 

 submerged rocks [evidently at a great depth, or divers would have 



* " Naglok (snake land) was at an early period a Hindu name for hell. 

 But the Nagas were not real snakes— in that case they might have fared 

 better— but an aboriginal tribe in Ceylon, believed by the Hindus to be of 

 serpent origin, — Ndga bein«i an epithet for ' native,' The term is now used 

 very vaguely. Mr. Talboys Wheeler, speaking of the ' Scythic Nagas' 

 (History of Lidia, Vol. I. p. 147), says : - 1 In process of time these Nagas 

 became identified with serpents, and the result has been a strange confusion 

 between serpents and human beinus.' In the * Padma Purana' Ave read of 

 'serpent-like men.' The dreaded powers were from another tribe desig- 

 nated Yakkhos ' demons "'—Conway, " Demonology and Devil-lore," 

 Vol.1., p. 151.— Hon. Sec. 



