Thousands of years ago, a story took root in ancient India. Surya (Sun) was brilliant — so radiant and hot that his wife Sanjna could not take the heat. She left her shadow Chayya in her place, and fled to the cooler regions. Surya discovered this deception and searched for her everywhere, and eventually found Sanjna in the cooler regions in the form of a mare. The Ashvini twins were then born. Sanjna agreed to return with Surya, on the condition that her father — the divine architect Vishwakarma can reduce Surya’s brilliance. The story ends thus in happier circumstances with a less brilliant Surya, recounted in Markandeya Purana and other works.
Why did the ancients make up such a story? Was this merely a flight of fantasy and entertainment? Does this story encode a phenomenon? How ancient is this story? We can ask these questions and more to get to the root of the story.
Balagangadhar Tilak and Prof. Abhayankar both proposed that this story encodes the Ashvini Nakshatra in the Winter Solstice position. When the Sun is in the northern hemisphere, it is cooler in the southern hemisphere. From the perspective of a resident in the northern hemisphere, Sanjna flees to the south to escape Surya’s heat. Surya going to the south in search of Sanjna is an allegory for Dakshinayana, the six month southern traversal of Sun. Both taking the form of horses and giving birth to the Ashvinikumara twins is marked by the Ashvini Nakshatra at the Winter Solstice (when the Sun is in the southern most point), as observed from the northern hemisphere. Of particular relevance are verses mentioning the appearance of Ashvini at dawn for their “share of the sacrifice”, pointing to a heliacal rising of Ashvini.
With these clues, Tilak & Abhayankar used the phenomenon of Precession to estimate Ashvini at the Winter Solstice position and heliacal rising in 7200 BCE (plus or minus about 80 years).
Ancient Indians encoded knowledge using metaphors in stories, as I have shown in several talks. To understand what a story intends to communicate, one must know the key — the metaphors used — from which the encoding in the stories become clear — be it a moral aphorism, or astronomical wisdom, or some rule for life. Failure to appreciate the metaphors keeps one’s understanding at a base level, where it is easy to discard the wisdom of ages as “silly mythologies”. Today such ignorance is widespread thanks to deracination and misplaced arrogance that the past was primitive and worthless.
While we have used the clues in the story to date it to 7200 BCE, we haven’t yet explained what the story intends to communicate.
I read a research article today that described a violent solar storm, 9125 years ago, or in 7176 BCE. This provided the aha moment that could explain an extraordinary event that might have been observed by the ancients, and encoded in this story.
The sun has an 11-year cycle where sunspot activity increases for 5.5 years, then decreases for 5.5 years. Solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) have been observed to increase during increased sunspot activity and reduce during the minima periods.
Sometimes powerful CMEs can reach Earth, if so oriented. These powerful charged particles slam into Earth’s magnetic field which in turn deflects them to the poles. In the Polar Regions, these high energy particles (protons and electrons) collide with the upper atmosphere in the Ionosphere, releasing several radioactive particles that rain down on earth, forming colorful displays called Northern and Southern lights. Normal events are estimated to have power in the terawatt scale, restricting the aurora displays to a few degrees latitude of the north and south poles.
One of the biggest CME events in recent times is the Carrington Event of Sept 1859, when telegraph operators could work without power connections, and intense ionized storms ignited fires, presumably via lightning. The intense geomagnetic storm caused aurora that was remarkably visible even in the lower latitudes, including the Caribbean, Hawaii, and China.
The radioactive particles released in such geomagnetic storms rain down on earth, and can be used to estimate the strength of the corresponding CME events, if we could get samples that are chronologically separated. Luckily, such a chronological separation record exists frozen (sic) in the glaciers of the north and south. We have a record of radioactivity preserved in the ice which can be sampled by drilling ice-cores in Greenland and Antarctica.
Using such ice-cores from Greenland and Antarctica, the scientists measured the levels of isotopes of Carbon, Chlorine and Beryllium which are released by the violent interaction of the CME particles and Earth’s atmosphere in the Ionosphere, and determined this massive solar event to have taken place in 7176 BCE.
The event is estimated to be two orders of magnitude larger than any CME event ever recorded on Earth. With this estimate, we can imagine the 7176 BCE event to have been so strong that it resulted in brilliant worldwide aurora, heavily ionized atmosphere with spontaneous lightning that set off fires in forests. Perhaps people would have sensed electric shocks when handling the copper artifacts of that early chalcolithic era. Being rated at two magnitudes higher than even the Carrington Event, with the amount of impacting matter, there must have been intense luminosity of the Ionosphere in whichever direction one looked, even in the daytime, with the appearance of the Sun being uncomfortably super-bright. Such an extraordinary event would be remembered by ancient people, who would have also noted the return to normalcy after a period of time, recording this observational wisdom for posterity in a story of Surya and Sanjna, and how marital bliss returned after Surya’s brilliance was reduced by Sanjna’s father, Viswakarma.
One last point to note is that the story also recounts that Yama, one of Surya’s children, experienced ill-health, losing function of his legs (as a result of a curse). Could this be an encoding of health hazards that followed intense periods of health-impacting radioactivity, making people weak? Beryllium is carcinogenic and prolonged exposure impairs lung functionality. It is note-worthy that Yama identified with death is in the story, in a younger form, with impairment of his legs. These are perhaps grim metaphors that remember death accompanying this event, especially younger people who were bedridden, losing mobility.
Admittedly, we cannot know for sure if this is indeed the event encoded in this story. But if there is a smoking gun for the Surya-Sanjna-Chayya-Ashvini-Yama story, it is this super Solar-event of 7176 BCE with measurable strong impact on Earth, which correlates perfectly with the independently derived archaeo-astronomical date of the story to 7200 BCE +/- 80 years.
Fact or fiction? Yet another coincidental reading of ancient Indian stories in the prism of today’s science? You decide!
Edit: 10th Jan 2024
I published the above on Jan 29th, 2022.
After my talk on The Ranveer Show two more points became apparent that startlingly add to the authenticity of this interpretation.
Sanjna’s name is associated variously with “Storm Clouds, Twilight”. See this description for example (from Wikipedia):
The story maintains that Sanjna went away from the Sun, which can be interpreted that there was no cloud cover/twilight or relief during this exceptionally hot time of Surya’s brilliance.
Chayya’s name which implies “Shadow” is also significant. Sunspots indeed look like dark shadows on the sun. See the photograph I made of the sunspots on 27th Dec 2023. They can be seen as dark patches on the Sun. CME events typically take place during periods of high sunspot activity. Chayya’s name is therefore significant in this story, as a harbinger of the greatest proton storm known so far. Surya must have been very angry at the deception!
What do we make of these additional insights offered by the contextually meaningful names of Surya’s wives? Should we consider these too as mere coincidences, or should we be open to the fact that these are deliberately encoded information with several clues to help understand the phenomenon?
The story of Surya provides a glimpse into the antiquity of the Indian civilization. We have established that this story is 9000 years old.
Some might be skeptical about the date, but should note that radio-carbon dating at Bhiranna and Rakhigarh have revealed settlements 9000 years old.
Some might be skeptical that the rich Puranas where the Surya story appears are relatively recent literature, but should note that a whole corpus of rich stories cannot appear in a short span of time in a vacuum, but are the accumulation of thousands of years of oral traditions.
The Surya story has been passed down over many thousands of years and is perhaps the oldest remembered story in the world.