‘It Is Not My Fire That Burn You Here’ - Empire of the Soul - page 367

Veda, Yajur Veda , several Brahamanas , the Upanishads , and the
Mahabharata epic - texts traditionally thought to date back to the first
millennium BC - show a calendar that places the vernal equinox in
Taurus (specifically the Pleiades). This corresponds to a date of
around 2500 BC . Georg Feuerstein and a few other scholars have
also found references to the vernal equinox in Gemini and Cancer,
suggesting 4000 to 6000 BC .
Last, and most significant, is the more recent discovery that the
majority of the ruins of Indus civilisation are aligned not along the
Indus River, but, as Georg Feuerstein writes,
to the east on the now dry banks of a river that flowed roughly
parallel to the Indus. The ancient river system on which this giant
civilisation was located has been called the Ghaggar, after the
modern name of a small remnant of it, or the Sarasvati, after the
traditional Hindu name for the river . . . The Sarasvati is the most
prominent river in the Vedas, where it is mentioned dozens of
times and in greater detail than any other river. In fact, it is regarded
as the very personification of the Divine Mother of the Veda
herself. Subsequently, the Hindu Goddess of Wisdom and
Inspiration was named Sarasvati . . . The Sarasvati River was
over five miles wide . . . If the Vedic people had not inhabited
India while the Sarasvati was still a vital river, they could not
possibly have referred to it with such intimacy in their scriptures.
Thus, it follows that the people who gave us the Rig-Veda must
have already been living in India many centuries, if not millennia,
before the Sarasvati went dry around 1900 BC . . . The Rig-Veda , or
at least portions of it, reflects a world that belongs not to 1500 BC ,
as widely thought, but possibly to an age several thousand years
earlier.
David Frawley of the American Institute of Vedic Studies sees in
the Rig Veda the spiritual origin of humankind. His book Gods, Sages
and Kings proposes a 'spiritual model' of history, which posits that
politicians or secular rulers did not found civilisation; visionaries,
sages and mystics did. He also believes that the Sanskrit-speaking
Aryans, the composers of the Rig Veda , hailed from the Himalayas,