A long time ago, in a magical time in ancient India, Rishis created amazing stories, cleverly embedding wisdom — moral, observational, or practical — within entertaining stories.
The human mind craves entertainment, a fact that was not lost to the wise Rishis. They knew that dry facts would be forgotten soon, but stories that entertain would have a life of its own. And so we have stories. Thousands of them, which have survived thousands of years to present times.
Unlocking the wisdom in stories requires knowing the key to understanding the metaphors used. Gurus would usually decode the wisdom of the stories for their disciples. If one did not have access to the insight of a Guru, one could still strive to search for meanings, based on their level of “self-awareness”. We unfortunately often encounter shallow readings of the stories, whose readers see them as meaningless “myths” with fantastical stories of supernatural events.
Can the prism of today’s science be used to understand the metaphors used in some of the ancient stories? Oftentimes, when we do see such metaphors, we are at a loss to explain how the Rishis would have access to such scientific knowledge. Our best answer is that Rishis who spent significant time in meditation in the solitude of caves, probably reasoned and understood physical phenomena from first principles, and sought to capture such wisdom in the metaphors used in the stories. This is not unlike modern day scientists who contemplate hard problems for days and weeks and sometimes years, eventually receiving insight in flashes of intuition, and capturing them in mathematical equations.
One such story from Markendeya Purana has Chandra, the Moon, born to Rishi Atri and his spouse Anasuya. Ancient Greeks had close contact with Ancient India, and it is not surprising that there is commonality in the stories of the two cultures, attesting to the global reach of ancient Indian stories, perhaps carried back by land and sea bound travelers and traders visiting India from Greece.
In the Greek tradition, the goddess Theia and a Titan are the parents of Moon. It was not therefore surprising that in the year 2000, the name Theia was proposed for a planetary collision object.
In the early 2000s, scientists proposed that a Mars-sized object had collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, termed “Giant Impact Hypothesis”. The debris from that collision is hypothesized to have formed Moon, while the core portion of the colliding body was proposed to have merged with Earth’s molten core.
A recent study reported in the Science, and summarized here, revealed a large anomaly in the Pacific ocean.
Using readings of thousands of seismographs, a machine learning algorithm surmised that there was a large region causing ultra low velocity waves in comparison with the neighboring regions, leading to the inference of a huge dense object in Earth’s core.
This discovery perhaps lends credence to the creation of the Moon by the Giant Impact hypothesis, if the anomaly discovered is indeed the remnant of Theia.
The Purana story of Moon’s creation is seen to have surprising analogies that can be relatable to the Giant Impact hypothesis.
Atri and his descendants were the authors of several verses for Agni in the Rg Veda. His spouse Anasuya meets with Sita of Ramayana, who is the daughter of Earth, and possesses yogic powers to seed Earth with river water, greenery and forests. The Rishi couple are thus associated with fire and earth. The symbolic union of fire and earth — made anthropomorphic using the Rishi couple — creates the Moon, encapsulating the reality of the collision of Theia (fire) with Earth creating the Moon.
As is usual in complex, multi-layered renderings of ancient Indian stories, we have a Shaivism tradition where Agni is associated with Rudra (Shiva) and his spouse with Uma. Agni is the guardian of the southeast direction, while his spouse is the guardian of the northeast direction. An astute observer of moon-rise directions over a course of a synodic month will observe a +/- 28 degrees traversal of the moon from southeast to northeast, from whom emanates the moon-rise (birth) each day. We also have the crescent moon adorning Shiva’s head (see the story linked below).
Time and again, we see that the metaphor used in ancient stories encode surprisingly relevant scientific information. When a preponderance of stories can be decoded thus, we should be open to the possibility that such correspondences are not mere coincidences, but a deliberate encoding of information.
See also my talk, “Some Stories, Some Science”, and this TEDx talk, where I provide more instances of ancient stories that encode some science even if that be simple observational wisdom of the skies.