Caucasus, Parnassus, Tomaros

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Francis Wilford · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 8 pages

From Captain Francis Wilford's essay “On Mount Caucasus,” in Asiatick Researches, Calcutta, 1801, Vol. VI (xii), pages 455–69, with annotation from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The frontispiece, Caucasus, is by Ruzanna Teterina; a further illustration shows the Himalayas, Pamir, Karakoram, Tian Shan and Hindu Kush from an altitude of about 750 kilometres, rendered from the gigapixel Views of the Earth of 2007.

The essay is laid out as a table of names and derivations rather than as continuous prose, and works backwards from the familiar form. Casus or Cas is given as the real name; Cau or Coh as the Persian for mountain, so that Coh-cas becomes Cas-giri in Sanskrit, and C'hasa-giri, the mountain of the C'hasas, is offered as the true Sanskrit name. The C'hasas themselves are described as a most ancient and powerful tribe who inhabited the whole range from the eastern limits of India to the confines of Persia, and probably as far as the Euxine and Mediterranean, their original country being the region of Cashgar to the north-east of Kabul; their descendants are called C'hasyas and Cossais, they belonged to the warrior class of Cshettris, and Ptolemy called their country Cassia. From this the entries branch outwards to the classical world — Jupiter Cassius, worshipped in the mountains of Syria and on the borders of Egypt as Jupiter Peninus was in the Alps — and the same method is then applied to Parnassus and Tomaros, so that three mountain names are treated as variants of one.

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