The Cosmic Age of Rama in the Ramayana

Ancient mythology is first and foremost cosmology. Cosmology is not just a body of knowledge about the universe, nor is it modern ideas about astrology. To the ancients, cosmology was the creation of sacred space. The ancient altars and temples were an embodiment of this space: a fixed point of orientation representative of creation from which revelation and individualization took place; the altars and temples were the nexus between heaven and earth where individuals could transport between these planes and become part of the sacred universe (Eliade 30). These holy places, however, were not in and of themselves the fixed point of orientation; they were the symbol of that point. The true point of orientation which created an entire body of world myth was the solar orb which brought light and life to the earth. Mythic deities were personifications of the sun. Specifically, and as the etymologies and history of the root rama will show, the Hindu Rama was the personification of the sun, the husband and father of the earth succoring it out of winter, and the axis-mundi as represented in the sky at the vernal sun rising in the constellation Aires–the ram.

In the Hindu epic Ramayana, Rama is a new incarnation of Vishnu. Rama, with his three brothers, are born to Dasaratha, the aging king. A holy sage comes to the king and requests that Rama accompany him in an initiation. Rama is to defeat demons, creatures, and dark powers so that the beneficial powers of the world will be strengthened. The king consents and Rama, with his brother Lakshmana, goes forth through a series of adventures and dark trials. Along the way he marries a most beautiful virgin, Sita, who becomes his faithful wife and devoted companion. Later, Rama’s wife is kidnaped by Ravanna, a dreadful demon, and Rama, Lakshmana, and a host of monkeys must do terrible battle to regain Sita and finally rid the world of these dark powers.

The epic itself is not easily identifiable as a cosmology, especially in the modern world where cosmology has been deemed outmoded and useless. This story is a myth, and according to Campbell, mythology “is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology” (Campbell 256). It is easy to wrought out of story psychological meaning because compelling story is always structured in plot to contain adversarial obstacles which must be overcome as well as natural images which add grandeur and contrast to the background and trials of the characters. These obstacles and images, in every story, innately lend themselves to psychological interpretation as archetypes and symbols of the psyche.

Yet, from the very beginning, a sense of cosmological principle is implied. Rama, who is actually Vishnu, the Creator of the World, is reborn for the express purpose of creating a new world–not literally, but cosmologically. We are told that Vishnu has been reborn numerous times in many different forms to recreate the world (Zimmer 77-79). Such a recreation includes the overthrowing of dark powers and bringing back into balance the world as it should be. The principle theme of cosmology is creation and everywhere in the ancient world festivals were celebrated on the days of creation, i.e. the days of the sun’s equinox risings. In many ancient nations the new year was celebrated on the spring equinox, for then a new world had emerged out of the darkness of winter. There is in fact a sacred holiday which bears Rama’s name--the Islamic feast known as Ramadan. The word Ramadan is a cognate of Ramazan, or san rama, meaning Holy Sun (Bayley 345). While Ramadan is officially a lunar holiday, it’s etymology shows its meaning, and its time of celebration just after the fall equinox makes a conclusive connection to its solar origin. Ramadan is celebrated on the first new moon after the fall equinox when the fertile earth (fertilized by the sun) has been harvested and its bounty will succor the people’s journey into winter.

While in broad principle a cosmological theme is seen, it is in fact in history, biography, and philology that the cosmological doors of the Ramayana burst open, regardless of what Campbell may have to say about it. In Schoeber’s historical treatise on Asia, she identifies the Laotian Buddha as a reincarnation of Rama, who “is reborn, near the beginning of the present cosmic age” and establishes, “at the site of the present Laotian capital–the dynasty that was ruling there at the time that the text [i.e. Ramayana] was written” (Schober 24). Thus Rama is the first of the Gotama lineage and ruling nobility of Laos. He is also identified as the first father of the new cosmic age. In this instance, Rama is both historical and cosmological.

There are also other Rama dynasties in history, namely the Egyptian Rameses II who was the son of Seti I of the nineteenth dynasty. Rameses was one of Egypt’s greatest rulers. The name Rameses is considered to mean “son of the sun” and the linguistic root of his name is clearly connected with Rama. Likewise, there are other Rama gods, such as the Babylonian Rammanu, who was the god of the sky, the thunderer, the god of justice. Here, Rama is both biographical and cosmological.

While etymology is an inexact science, clear connections with the root rama and ra are made between the name of Rama and his role in the text of the Ramayana. In Sanscrit rama means the sun (Bayley 54). The Egyptian god Ra is a solar deity, and like Rama, is a creator and father of a cosmic age. Rama’s role in the Ramayana is exactly this: a creator and father of an age. Rama goes through many adventures in which he dispels every dark power that would inflict the earth. He is the earth’s protector. Thus, in the climax of the Ramayana, when Sita must be rescued from the underworld or realm of Ravana, Rama, who is the sun, must save Sita, who is the earth, from the darkness in which she has descended. It is his relationship with Sita that further reveals his solar identity and stewardship over a cosmic age.

In the language of India ram or rama signifies a husband. The Gaulic rom signifies the same thing (Bayley 55). A husband is not just a man, but one who oversees, who protects, who enables, and who can sire. Rama is just such a figure in the Ramayana. His wife Sita is his ever faithful and devoted companion. She follows Rama anywhere, no matter the danger. He in turn protects her, no matter the cost. When Sita is kidnaped by Ravana, Rama gathers a mighty and awesome host to do battle with the demon hoard. The battle is apocalyptic. But it does not matter. Rama can do nothing other than bring Sita out of darkness, just as the vernal sun must bring the earth out of winter.

Much literary criticism has been written about Sita as the doting and devoted wife. Feminists hate the trials Sita is subjected to in the Ramayana. First and foremost of their complaints is regarding the trial of fire, in which Rama, after saving Sita from the demon lord Ravana, doubts that her chastity is still intact. To test her chastity she is commanded to leap into a fire; her innocence will spare her, her guilt (i.e. loss of virtue) will cause the flames to consumer her. Unbeknownst to Rama is Sita’s single eyed devotion to her husband while in the clutches of Ravana. Sita, through faith and courage alone, withstands mighty powers and temptations by Ravana. All this just so she can leap into a fire? This really gets feminists red hot under the collar. And who can blame them?

Of course the etymology of Sita is just as important as that of Rama. Sita comes from the root sîtâ, and according to Pike this etymological root refers to a furrow (Pike 305). A furrow is a tract of earth that has been plowed and prepared for planting, growing, and harvesting. Indeed, like the Sumerian goddess Inanna who ritualistically requests that her vulva (her furrow) be plowed, and who also descends into the underworld and must be rescued by the gods; or the Greek Gaia who is the Mother of the World, or in fact the world herself; Sita is nobody’s trophy wife. She is a cosmological image of the earth. Her field is barren and all life is in jeopardy until her furrow is plowed and fecundated by her solar lord and husband. Her roll as consort and devoted wife is analogous to the gravitational link between sun and earth. Sita is the earth that is an integral part of the new cosmic age, she is the field upon which the age takes place. She descends into hell and darkness as the earth descends into winter, or, on a wider cosmological scale, into the kali-yuga. Many ancient traditions note that the earth had once been cleansed by water and in the future would be cleansed by fire. Such is Sita’s cleansing in the ritualistic flames she leaps into. The flame is not a punishment, but an allegorical image of the earth ascending out of winter and on a larger cosmological scale the earth ascending out of the kali-yuga and into a new golden age. In either case, the world is again brought back into harmony and light.

There is one final etymology for the root rama. In Hebrew ram means high, and ramah means a lofty place (Bayley 55). Ramah is mentioned as a place name 26 times in the Old Testament; it is a supposed city some 20 miles north of Jerusalem built atop Mount Er Ram. As an interesting side note, in the Book of Mormon, the high mount or hill which is the staging point for the final destruction of the Jaredite civilization is called Ramah. The succeeding civilization calls the same hill Cumorah, which linguistically may be linked to the meaning “arise” or “shine” and connotes its true importance as the hill which contains all the sacred records of the nation. In either case, ramah is a mount or hill, sacred or principal in nature. In Hindu mythology the place of creation is the sacred mountain and was named Mount Meru. In Genesis this is the first dry land to appear. And to the Greeks, this is Mount Olympus, the realm of the gods. Again, these places and names are not meant to be taken literally, nor psychologically, but cosmologically. Just as Rama is the sun that oversees a new age, Ramah is the mountain, or axis-mundi, or sacred space from which that age flows.

The high mountain is a real place, however. A place that every mortal could see in their life time, indeed, yearly, at the rising of the vernal sun. In our industrial and modern world we forget just how connected the ancients were to the sky and to the nighttime stars which blazed with wonder, clarity, and majesty. In our urban landscape most of the night sky is veiled beneath a thick shroud of smog or the counterfeit luminance of light pollution. We take the sun, moon, and stars for granted, just as we take our produce and bounty for granted. In an ancient agrarian culture, however, their sustenance was based entirely on the seasons and the lights in the heavens which foretold them. The ancient high priests, bards, and shamans were the astronomers, they were also the story tellers, and they combined both astronomy and story to make myth.

The axis-mundi of an age was where the spring-equinox sun rose on the horizon, and specifically the constellation of the zodiac that the vernal sun rose into. The vernal sun announced a new year, a new life, and a new harvest. Over a larger span of time, the vernal sun was seen as the father and husband over an entire cosmic age. Thus Rama is both the sun that fertilizes Sita every year, but also the image of the constellation that rules the vernal rising for over 2000 years. Rama exists in the sky; he is the ram in the sky, or the constellation Aires.

William Olcott notes in his Star Lore of All Ages that Aries was known as the “Prince of the Zodiac” and “Leader of the Host of the Zodiac” (53). Olcott writes:

Curiously enough Aries is the leading sign in all the systems of astrology which have come down to us through the Greeks, and it figures as the leading sign in most explanations of the constellation figures which are on record....Plunket informs us that in the Egyptian calendars no reference is made to Aries, but in Egyptian mythology the importance of the ram is revealed. Amen or Amon, the great god of the Theban triad, is sometimes represented as ram headed. The great temple to him in conjunction with the sun, i.e., to Amen-Ra, is approached through an avenue of gigantic ram headed sphinxes. At the season of all the year when Aries specially dominated the ecliptic, the statue of the god Amen was carried in procession to the Nekropolis, from which place the constellation Aries was fully visible.... Not only the Egyptians, but all the great civilized nations of the East, had traditions of a year beginning when the sun and moon entered the constellation Aries (Olcott 53-57; See Appendix Figure 3).

The fact that this constellation is referred to everywhere in ancient myth but that the constellation itself is a minor one in the sky and has but two prominent stars is interesting. It is these two stars which produce such a rich collection of mythological lore. Again Olcott writes:

In the Rig-Veda, the first lunar station in the Indian series is named “Aswini.” The two chief stars in the station are the twin stars [of Aries]...called...Arietis. Joyous hymns were addressed to the twin heroes, the Aswins, which may properly be called New Year’s hymns, composed in honor of these stars, whose appearance before sunrise heralded the approach of the great festival day of the Hindu New Year. Next to Agni and Soma, the twin deities named the Aswins are the most prominent in the Rig-Veda. They are celebrated in more than fifty entire hymns, while their name occurs more than four hundred times. These twin heroes of Hindu mythology correspond to the famous twins of Grecian mythology, Castor and Pollux (Ibid).

Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu, is therefore an image that was real and seen by millions of people worldwide in the northern hemisphere as the constellation Aires emerging from below the horizon with its two prominent stars holding the vernal-rising sun during the period in which the Ramayana was written (See Appendix, Figure 1). When the sun rises from the horizon every morning ancient astronomers noted into which zodiacal constellation the sun rose into. The sun’s cardinal points, the solstices and equinoxes, and the constellations housing them were written into myth. Due to precession of the equinoxes, the rising vernal sun is held (that is rises into) a different constellation approximately every 2,160 years. Precession is caused by a wobble in the earth’s axis. Not only does the earth rotate around its own axis, once every 24 hours, but the axis itself makes a complete circle every 26,000 years. This wobble can be seen on earth, but only over the course of centuries. Indeed, slowly, over the course of a few millennia, and again due to precession, the sun rises into new constellations during the equinox and solstice days. Prior to Aries “holding” the vernal-equinox sun the constellation Taurus, the bull, received the sun rising from the horizon. It is no coincidence that numerous myths recount stories of a bull as a central element. The Greek hero Theseus must travel to Crete where the king of Crete, Minos (whose name means bull), will sacrifice him to the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Curiously, Theseus is the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and Aegeus’ name means goat or ram. Clearly a cosmological connection is made between the transition of one cosmic age, that of Taurus, to another cosmic age, that of Aries, in this myth.

In the Old Testament, Moses must destroy a golden calf made by his people so that the new image of the Hebrew god could be brought forth. This image is of course that of the ram, or lamb, whom Abraham caught in a thicket and sacrificed to Jehovah instead of his son Isaac. In Mosaic law, the scapegoat was let loose every seven years and the ram was sacrificed as part of ritual. Later, and still recorded in myth via Plutarch’s dialogues, we learn that Pan, the Greek goat-god is dead. Thamus, the Egyptian sailor is made to shout, “Great Pan is dead.” As Plutarch writes, “even before he had finished [declaring Pan’s death] there was a great cry of lamentation... mingled with exclamations of amazement” (Santillana 276). This is recorded not at the end of the age of Taurus, but of course, at the end of the age of Aries. A new world order, a new incarnation of Vishnu, a new holy sun and a new holy mountain, had arisen to reclaim the world.

All these stories, rituals, myths, are cosmologically connected and deal with the sun rising in its vernal constellation. This is no psychology. Campbell, Jung, and Freud, all the while looking within, have forgotten to look up and find the original tablets from which myth was made.

There is yet one more connection too interesting to dismiss. This is recorded in Richard Thompson’s Mysteries of the Sacred Universe, the Cosmology of the Bhagavata Purana. Thompson, a mathematician and a practicing follower of Hindu religion, suggests that the primacy of Rama as the image of the sun does not allude to the precessional age of Aries, which began approximately in 2,400 B.C., but rather alludes to an earlier time when Lord Krishna departed from the earth, the closing date of the main events of the Mahabharata, and the beginning of the Kali-yuga, which has been determined to have taken place in 3102 B.C. (Thompson 212-218). Thompson, whose research is massive, cites numerous dating calculations by Indologists as well as other older traditions which point Noah’s flood to the same date. What Thompson adds to the picture, which no one had shown before, is that in the Spring of 3102 B.C., a very rare astronomical conjunction occurred which would have held enormous significance to ancient astronomers. That is to say, all the planets, including the inner planets which can be seen with the naked eye, as well as the outer planets which cannot be seen without a telescope or visual aid, as well as the sun and moon, all gathered in the sky in and around the constellation Aries (Ibid; See Appendix Figure 2). The beginning of a new age is thus marked by a grand and awesome display in the sky as Aries, the ram, or Rama, held all the moving luminaries in the ecliptic for a very brief time.

Whatever the true cosmological significance Rama has in store, one thing is certain, the significance is cosmological. Rama is the sun held during the spring equinox in the constellation Aries. Rama is the hill or mountain from which sacred space and time is measured. Rama is the husband of Sita, the earth, who must be plowed and fecundated so that her furrow may bring forth fruit, but also must be saved from the dark powers of cosmos which only the sun can bring. Rama is Vishnu, the creator, the high tower and father of a new age. So it is that the Ramayana, in all its splendor and epic, is an allegorical unfolding of a cosmological world age.

APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS OF RAMA IN THE SKY & IN ANCIENT SYMBOL

FIGURE 1: VERNAL EQUINOX SUN RISING IN ARIES
This graphic is produced in Planetarium Gold, an astronomy program. The longitude and latitude is set for New Deli, India, and the time frame is set at 1500 B.C., the approximate writing date of the Ramayana. The day of viewing is March 21st. In short, this is an image of the sky actually seen by peoples in India in 1500 B.C. on the morning of the Spring Equinox. Notice that the sun rises into the constellation of the Ram, Aries. The vernal sun will rise in this constellation for 2,160 years or so, and due to the precession of the equinoxes, the constellations the sun rises into will slowly change. Rama, the new incarnation of Vishnu, or the Holy Sun, is a symbol of the sun rising in Aires in Spring.

FIGURE 2: PLANETARY CONJUNCTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE KALI-YUGA
This graphic is produced in Planetarium Gold, an astronomy program. The longitude and latitude is set for New Deli, India, and the time is set for February 17, 3102 B.C., which according to Richard Thompson’s research, is the day of the beginning of the Kali-Yuga. Thompson showed that on this day, by coincidence, all the planets, sun, and moon were together in the same band of sky in and near the constellation Aires. Like a shepherd leading a flock, Aires is seen here as the holder of the sun and all the luminaries of the ecliptic at the start of a new cosmological age.

FIGURE 3: RAM HEADED SPHINXES AT THE KARNAK TEMPLE IN EGYPT
While the Egyptians did not have a ram image for the constellation Aries, they did model their god Amun as a ram headed god. Amun signifies a ram and was the creator deity during the cosmic age of Aires. In fact, many pharos had in their name the title of Amun, i.e. Tut-Ankh-Amun. The picture above is of the temple of Karnak. A processional alley is lined with a series of ram headed sphinxes leading to the temple. Karnak was was erected by none other than Ramesses II of the 19th Dynasty, whose name also signifies a ram. During the reign of Ramesses II, the vernal equinox sun rose in the constellation Aires and the procession of ram sphinxes are aligned towards this vernal rising. (Photo copied from Richard Wilkinson’s The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.)

WORKS CITED

Bayley, Harold. Lost Language of Symbolism, Volumes 1 and 2. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1912.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

De Santillana, Girogia, and Hertha Von Dechend. Hamlet’s Mill, An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher Inc., 1968.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane, The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

Olcott, William. Star Lore of All Ages. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1911.

Pike, Albert. Indo-Aryan Deities and Worship as Contained in the Rig-Veda. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1872.

Shoeber, Juliane (Editor). Sacred Biography in the Budhist Traditions of South & Southeast Asia. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Thompson, Richard. Mysteries of the Sacred Universe: The Cosmology of the Bhagavata Puranna. Alachua, Florida: Govardhan Hill Publishing, 2000.

Wilkinson, Richard. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Posted by john at March 3, 2005 04:45 PM