but if so it is surely the Milky Way conceived as a celestial river. The Milky
Way was a conspicuous feature of pre-industrial skies, and its irregular course
across the firmament, with some side-channels and dividing as if to flow
round islands, might well suggest a river. In Vedic cosmology it was the bright
ocean of heaven, the reservoir of celestial waters, the source of the rivers that
flow down from the Himalaya.^38 If such a concept goes back to Graeco-Aryan
times, the obscure Homeric formula finds a possible elucidation.
Moon and starsThe common Indo-European word for the moon is reconstructed as
meh 1 n(e)s- (Vedic ma ̄ ́s-,ma ̄ ́sa-, Avestan ma ̄h-, Greek με, all meaning
‘moon, month’, Latin me ̄ns-is, Old Irish mí‘month’, etc.).^39 It is related to the
verbal root meh 1 ‘measure’, and it is a masculine, implying an active role as
‘the measurer (of time)’. The sense ‘month’ tended to become dominant,
while other formations, often feminine, came into use in different areas
for ‘moon’: Greek μ νη and σελ νη (selas-na ̄, ‘mistress of radiance’), Old
High German ma ̄nı ̄n; Latin lu ̄na, Old Irish luan, Church Slavonic luna (all
from louks-na ̄, ‘mistress of light’), etc. These suggest a personifiedfigure
Moon, though she, unlike Sun and Dawn, seems to have had no significant
role in Indo-European mythology.
The ancestral word for ‘star’ was *h 2 ster-, giving Hittite h
̆
aster-, Vedic stár-,
Greek qστ ρ, Armenian astł, etc. It was a masculine, perhaps originally
meaning ‘burner’, with a collective form h 2 st(e)ra ̄, as represented by Greek
Eστρα, proto-Celtic stera ̄ (Middle Cornish steyr, Welsh ser, etc.).^40
It can be assumed that the study of astronomy was not much developed
among the Indo-Europeans, and probably only a few individual stars and
star-groups had established names. One that we can trace back to Graeco-
Aryan is ‘the Bears’ or ‘the Bear’ for Ursa Major. In Sanskrit this prominent
northern constellation is usually called the Seven Rishis; probably so already
in RV 10. 82. 2. But according to the S ́atapatha Bra ̄hman
̇
a (2. 1. 2. 4) it was
formerly known as r ́
̇
ks
̇a ̄h
̇, ‘the Bears’ (masculine plural), and the stellar r ́
̇ks
̇a ̄h
̇of
RV 1. 24. 10 and Taittirı ̄ya A ̄ran
̇
yaka 1. 11. 2 are presumably to be so under-
stood. In Greek it is a single she-bear, ] Αn ρκτο. The variants can be
(^38) M. Witzel, Bulletin d’Études Indiennes 2 (1984), 213–79; P. Olivelle, Upanis
̇
ads (Oxford
1996), xlvi.
(^39) On the forms see Scherer (1953), 61–73; id. in Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 190; R. S. P. Beekes,
JIES 10 (1982), 53–7; id. in EIEC 385.
(^40) Scherer (1953), 18–29; C. Watkins, Die Sprache 20 (1974), 10–14; A. Pârvulescu, ZVS 91
(1977), 41–50; EIEC 543.
- Cosmos and Canon 351