The Tradition

Each autumn the Vedic calendar keeps a fortnight for the dead of one's own line. The five rites by their real names, what the oldest texts say, and the ceremony we perform on Sarva Pitru Amavasya, 10 October.

Monday is the Moon's day in English and Somvar, the Moon's day, in Sanskrit. The week you already keep is the same week, named for the same seven planets in the same order. Which deity today belongs to, and the arithmetic that put the days in that order.

The age we are living in is 432,000 years long, every other age is a multiple of it, and a single day of Brahma is 4,320,000,000 years. Also, honestly, what to make of the 432 hertz claim.

Every rosary in the tradition has 108 beads, and one more that is never counted. Why that number: the 108 padas of the nakshatras, the names of God, and the astronomical ratios that are a coincidence worth telling honestly.

All twenty-seven nakshatras with their symbols and deities, why Vedic astrology reads the Moon rather than the Sun, and the twenty-eighth that is usually left out of the count.

The declaration that opens every Vedic ceremony: who offers, for whom, where, when and why. Its formula, counted from the life of Brahma down to the day, and why the tradition speaks a name aloud.

Why the yagya is built around a flame. Agni, the first word of the Rigveda: the messenger who carries offerings to the gods and to the ancestors, the three fires of the Vedic rite, and what is offered with svaha.