The zombie obeys: a note on host manipulation by parasites and its ecological...
In 1858-59, as AR Wallace, one of the founders of the modern evolutionary theory, was exploring the Sulawesi Islands, he collected an ant, Polyrachis merops, that he sent over to England. Years later,...
View ArticleTwo simple stotra-s, sectarian competition, and the Varāha episode from the...
The Ur-Skandapurāṇa (SkP) or the “archaic” Skandapurāṇa ( the Bhaṭṭārāi edition known as the Ambikā-khaṇḍa) is a Śaiva text with affinities to the Pāśupata branch of that tradition. Though it is aware...
View ArticleOrigins of the serpent cult and Bhāguri’s snake installation from the...
Mathuran Nāga installations From the few centuries preceding it down to the first few centuries of the Common Era we see numerous installations of snake deities, i.e., Nāga-s, at various archaeological...
View ArticleBhāskara-II’s polygons and an algebraic approximation for sines of pi by x
Unlike the Greeks, the Hindus were not particularly obsessed with constructions involving just a compass and a straightedge. Nevertheless, their pre-modern architecture and yantra-s from the tāntrika...
View ArticleThe Vyomavyāpin in the Pāśupata-tantra and a discursion on nine-fold...
The Pāśupata-tantra is a poorly understood śaiva text that is believed to be affiliated with the Pāśupata tradition of Lakulīśa. While the colophons of some manuscripts present it as...
View ArticleComet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
The dispiriting cloud cover lifted briefly on two nights (Wed 8/2/2023 and Fri 10/2/2023) finally giving us an opportunity to catch the latest Agni-putra-ketu in the welkin, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). On...
View ArticleSome ruminations on asteroids and meteoritic falls
Recently, we received the news of a Russian spacecraft meant to bring some astronauts back to earth being hit by a meteorite. In early February we saw an obscure news item of the sighting of a meteoric...
View ArticleThe dreadful apport
Vrishchika had just finished her work on the diagnosis and possible treatment plan for a pediatric neurological patient on whom she was consulted. She had inferred that the child’s condition arose from...
View ArticleYantrasiddhi
The March 24 version of ChatGPT’s attempt at drawing the flag of India. It made an error in the color specification of “NavyBlue” in the xcolor package. We corrected that in order to let it compile....
View ArticleTricakra
The Sintashta-Petrovka cultures (today Southern Urals, core Russia, and Kazakhstan) provide the first uncontested evidence for chariot technology. They are believed to have started around 2100 BCE and...
View ArticleThe rise of yajña and Kauśika exceptionalism
The extant Vedic ritual is bifurcated into two domains the gṛhya (the household rites and rites of passage) and the śrauta (large-scale/grand rituals). First, in operational terms, they are...
View ArticleThe rise of the psychopath oligarchy
There are certain things in (geo)politics that are largely unsurprising to us because we had seen their seeds over a decade or two ago. In part, we were able to infer several things correctly in...
View ArticleKhitans and Mongols: A story of deep and persistent connections-1
While the Chingizid Mongols have long been the focus of students of medieval steppe history, studies over the past 50 years have been steadily contributing to the picture that they were heirs of a...
View ArticleLooking back at the goroga attacks and forward at geopolitical developments
An acquaintance recently asked us if we remembered the famous goroga attacks in the mahāmleccha lands. We had to confess that they were hardly the top thing on our mind, though we had repeatedly...
View ArticleTurks, Khitans and Mongols: the ethnographic journeys of P.T. 1283
An introduction to P.T. 1283 and its historical context This may be seen as an appendix to the previous exposition on early Mongolic and Para-Mongolic history. There we briefly alluded to the famous...
View ArticleThe gods in triples
It is clear that every civilization has its own unique manifest characteristics coming from the depths of its people. One such distinguishing characteristic of the Hindu civilization is the love for...
View ArticleOnes, twos, threes … hundreds and thousands in the Ṛgveda
In the previous note, we looked at some special numbers relating to the count of the gods in the Veda and the influence of the Proto-Indo-European tripartition on them. Here we more generally look at...
View ArticleA short note on an ancient Vedic poetic formula and an obscure word
A couple of ṛk-s, respectively from maṇḍala-s 6 and 7 of the Ṛgveda, are rather striking for their parallel structure: You are the bull of Heaven, the bull of Earth, the bull of the rivers, the bull of...
View ArticleGabhavāda in the dark age ushered by Piṇḍaka’s regime
As we have remarked before, the placing of Vṛddha-piṇḍaka on the rājāsandī was accompanied by the triumph of the navyonmatta-s. Watching the action of the navyonmatta-s gives one a ringside view of how...
View ArticleA meandering through Mongol epic-historic narratives: fraternal conflict and...
The Mongolic and Turkic peoples have a rather rich tradition of oral epics that have not yet been comprehensively analyzed from a comparative mythological perspective. Some of these extant epics...
View ArticleThe ghost of the man named Lilavinodan
This is the second of the Charuchitra series: Even if the story narrated were to resemble real-life incidents, all characters in it are fictitious. With the exam behind him, Somakhya relapsed into his...
View ArticleThe counting square and divisor functions
Leonhard Euler’s discovery of the zeta function in the course of solving the Basel problem was one of those momentous “unifications” in mathematics with deep philosophical implications that eventually...
View ArticleA Geopolitical meandering, October 2023
Sir Francis Drake, buccaneer bold and bloody, Sailed the seas in a gold-grabbing spree, With the Golden Hind, he circled the Earth wide – A murdering marauder on the swelling tide. Slaving in West...
View ArticleA prayoga of the Hiraṇyakeśin-s
To our knowledge, the Hiraṇyakeśin branch of the Taittirīyaka-s is today only found in pockets in Mahārāṣṭra and the Drāviḍa states. While they follow the Taittirīya-śruti like other Taittirīyaka-s,...
View ArticleTheology and AI
A key feature of most polytheistic religions, typically natural religions, is the importance of a multiplicity of visualizations of deities. This visualization might be solely mental/textual or...
View ArticleSome historico-linguistic considerations on Indo-Aryan
Over the past decade, the “Black” Kalasha people from the Chitral (<Skt. Kṣetra) region of the Islamic state in Northwestern India have been under increasing pressure from the Tehrik-e Taliban...
View ArticleNotes on the Vaiṣṇava retinue deities-1
The śaiva pattern of worship, which is especially emphasized in the Iśāna-srotas (siddhānta), features the Nirmālya-devatā, Caṇḍeśvara with roots in the older Pāśupata atimārga. This deity receives...
View ArticleSome snippets from early Indo-Sinitic probabilistic prognostication texts
The below is the barest sketch of a topic that has already been treated in multiple book-length works by learned scholars of the Orient. However, none of these works were entirely familiar with the...
View ArticleThe Dalāl who became a poltergeist
Lootika had returned from a scientific competition, which had been held in the dreadful city of Mahāvisphoṭaka, like the victorious Roman army after sacking the towns of West Asian...
View ArticleSome relationships involving the triangle incenter and circumcenter
While triangle centers (e.g., incenter, centroid circumcenter) are captivating to the amateur and mathematician alike, their serious investigation is a relatively modern pursuit. A major push in their...
View ArticleSome further notes on the Mongol religion-3
The core of the material discussed in this note is based on the publications of the Hungarian-Mongolian Joint Expedition studying folk traditions in Mongolia and the masterly work of Igor de Rachewiltz...
View ArticleThe crossover with Dabba Seṭṭhīputta
It was a Śivarātrī. Vidrum accompanied his friends Somakhya and Lootika to visit the small shrine of Rudra in the cemetery beside his house. It was one of the rare days when the normally deserted...
View ArticleThe visitation on the knoll
It was the time Somakhya and Indrasena were by themselves — without their companions — for that is close to the ultimate test of a man. At that point, they were working on the mysterious three-gene...
View ArticleIndian elections 2024
The ways of the fierce gods are not easy for men to comprehend with their finite lives. A course of five years might seem like nothing in historical time, but the dice rolled by the gods in that window...
View ArticleThe sixteen-fold Puruṣa
The Puruṣa-sūkta, or the chant of Puruṣa-Nārāyaṇa, is a late Vedic composition with multiple variants that occupies a focal position in the history of the Indo-Aryan strand of the Indo-European...
View ArticleGiordano Bruno: science in the midst of magic and spirits
We had originally wished to write a piece or two about the system of thought of the great Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno, but, as ever, the attempt to be comprehensive came in the way of producing...
View ArticleThrough the rear-view mirror
A trail of memories, both victorious and unkind, In the rear-view mirror’s gaze, I find. Through the dusty glass, I see my past, A journey in Indian dust marked by shadows cast. Yet in the mirror’s...
View ArticleAnalyzing Vedic texts using word embeddings
Word2Vec is a natural language processing technique developed by Mikolov and colleagues that generates word embeddings, i.e., dense vector representations of words in a text, which capture their...
View ArticleThe tangled pantheon: Shinto, Indian, Cīna and Koreanic in the Japonic...
While heavily influenced by the Sinitic transmissions, Japan retained its own unique traditions throughout the historical period. While the curtain of history lifts up late in Japan compared to the...
View ArticleElephant-speak
Proboscideans are mammals with a deep evolutionary history of sociality and high intelligence (not immediately apparent from encephalization alone) that made them potential rivals as well as candidates...
View ArticleThe Aurora Borealis and Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS
dhūmaketum bhāṛjīkaṃ vyuṣṭiṣu yajñānām adhvaraśriyam ॥[We elect Agni…] the comet, with smoky radiance, at the break of the dawns, the opulence of the ceremonies of the sacrifice.-A cometary metaphor...
View ArticleA geopolitical round-up: Vijayavijaya and related issues
In earlier accounts, we have detailed how the Mahāmleccha Deep State had engineered the uccāṭana of Vijaya-nāma-vyāpārin. In a dramatic reversal of fate, the Picchilaka made a comeback against all odds...
View ArticleSome notes on the Mantra-brāhmaṇa of the Sāmaveda with a focus on Virūpākṣa...
Of the Sāmavedic schools, the Kauthuma-s follow the śrautasūtra of Lāṭyāyana and the gṛhyasūtra of Gobhila. The Rāṇāyanīya-s follow the śrautasūtra of Drāhyāyaṇa and the gṛhyasūtra of Khādira (also...
View ArticleAn attractor generating the projection of a 3D torus on a plane
The attractor in consideration was probably rediscovered by multiple explorers of chaotic maps in the early days of the computational exploration of such objects. We first discovered it in our 14th or...
View ArticleThe Dvādaśa-śloka of the Paścimāmnāya
Rudraśakti While the four core āmnāya-s of the kaula tradition are presented by its texts (e.g., Ciñciṇīmata-sāra-samuccaya) as directional lodges, they also have an evolutionary relationship between...
View ArticleSome notes on the Haṃsa in mantra traditions crisscrossing the Smārta-Śaiva...
The haṃsa (the divine swan/gander) is identified across Hindu mantra traditions with the breath cycle. While this mantra is vocalized as so.ahaṃ haṃsaḥ । (the haṃsa mantra), it is also identified with...
View ArticleThe Uttarāmnāya and the Trailokya-mohana-kavaca
A “depiction’’ of the deity of the Uttarāmnāya manifesting in viyat-pada during the 17-fold meditation yugapad yānti yatra+āśu sāmarasyaṃ viyatpade । nistaraṅge nirābhāse pare saptadaśābhidhe ॥...
View ArticleThe accidental yogin
The results of the senior college admission exams were finally out. For Vidrum, it felt like the Marahaṭṭa-s reaching Delhi after having overcome the 26-year Jihad and many other a threat to their very...
View ArticlePrakīrṇā vicārāḥ
When the Egyptian religion came to an end at the hands of the second Abrahamism around 550 CE (following the closure of the temple of Philae around 537 CE by Justinian I), the tradition was already a...
View ArticleThe out of Africa tale of the domestic cat
The cat is a lion when catching a mouse, but it is a mouse when on the battlefield of the leopard -translation into English of a verse of some poet from Islamic Iran Molecular divergence estimates...
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