1. Biska: as a solar festival.

One of our questions is whether cyclical events that are "outside" the annual festival cycle affect that cycle. With the exception of the minor event Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10] and the minor observances of the first days of each solar month, "the events of the solar cycle" (as this chapter is entitled) really means the Biska: cycle. Biska: has, of course, some direct "solar" references. It takes place at the vernal equinox and begin a new year at the moment of the

balance between daylight and dark. The raising and lowering of the yasi(n) to mark the transition to the new year in an east-west direction has, perhaps, some now forgotten connection with the sun's direction. Otherwise, there is no evident direct reference to the sun and the seasons. In Biska:'s contrast with the lunar and agricultural Mohani sequence there is, however, an intriguing, if perhaps fortuitous, contrast, which relates Biska: to the modes of astral religious action, whose presiding figure is the deified sun. Biska:'s central narrative (although not all of its subsidiary legends) reflects the kinds of passive and self-adjustive relations that worshipers have with the astral deities and the transcendent macrocosm, rather than the active and manipulative interactions they have in some other annual events with the realms represented by the dangerous and ordinary civic deities. Thus, in Mohani the king and his Guru-Purohit actively participate in the struggle of the Goddess against forces of disorder, but in Biska: both king and deities are passive, moved by the forces of convention, affected only by a ripple of urban disorder, a thesis of disorder that tends to clarify the subsequent resolution of order. The king and his entourage and the god Bhairava are moved by immemorial ritual order, as the sun moves through the year. Even the tug of war that threatens to disrupt the movement of the chariot and that determines which half of the city it will move to first is in the realm of luck and chance, the neutral non-moral realm of the astral deities.

There are also marked contrasts in the emphases of Swanti, the lunar New Year's sequence, and Biska:. However, to anticipate chapter 16, the contrasts are internal to the entire annual cycle, and not in any obvious way semantically urged by the contrasts of the solar and lunar cycles, except perhaps in a contrast in personal effort in Swanti and passive witness in Biska:. Swanti's emphasis is on the affirmation of the family in the household, Biska:'s is on the integration of the city as a whole and in its relation to annual time.