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How did 84 lead cubes with Devanagari inscriptions end up at the bottom of a river in England?

Updated - June 14, 2020 09:32 am IST

The fishing out of the nearly 8 kilos of lead cubes from the River Sowe has sparked intrigue

Like all treasure stories, the story of this treasure, found at the bottom of an old English river, is made up of at least three stories. There’s the quest, the story of how the treasure was found; then there’s its history, the story of how the treasure ended up where it did; and in a few delicious cases, there’s the enigma, the story of just what exactly has been found. This story has all three elements. Let’s begin with the easiest part, the quest.

On May 8, Will Read, 38, set off with his sons, Jackson and Benjamin, for Baginton Bridge over the River Sowe to do some magnet fishing. Regular fishing, regardless of its pugnacious fans, is an unpleasant business. Not only are you at the mercy of the fish, and not only are fish dim-witted and uncooperative, and not only do you have to wait for the fish to find you, you reliably snag plenty of non-fish. Magnet fishing, which involves using a metal detector, solves all these problems. It redefines what counts as fish (anything with metal) and puts you squarely back in charge. It’s not as heroic, perhaps, but it’s certainly less likely to drive you to drink.

Read and his two explorers were novice mudlarkers — as some magnet fishermen call themselves. They’d been at it for just two weeks and had chosen Baginton Bridge for much the same reason Willie Sutton had robbed banks — it makes sense to go look where things are expected to be found. People often use bridges to chuck stuff into rivers, and mudlarkers use them as starting points.

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In all, Will Read and his sons found 84 lead-alloy cubes, more than a dozen punctured pennies, and a Durga coin.

Baginton Bridge is just a few miles from a much more famous bridge, the Stoneleigh Bridge over the River Avon, commissioned by the Rev. Thomas Leigh, owner of Stoneleigh Abbey. Leigh was Jane Austen’s first cousin and the Abbey was the architectural inspiration for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park . Coventry is Austen country and Shakespeare country. It’s more English than England.

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Toubled waters

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The mudlarkers didn’t have to look for long. At first, Read thought he’d snagged metal junk, but then as his senior assistant explorer Benjamin, 7, and junior assistant explorer Jackson, 5, took a closer look, they realised they’d found something quite peculiar. Will Read told me over the phone that their haul eventually consisted of 64 lead (or lead-alloy) cubes. Each of the six faces was inscribed with strange rune-like markings arranged in a 3-by-3 table, captioned by an inscription.

Forty-seven of the cubes weighed approximately 125 gm each and were 2 cm in length. They could be picked up by a forefinger and thumb. The remaining 13 cubes were smaller and seemed more crudely made. Read and the boys also found about a dozen pennies, all punctured with a square hole at the centre, and a coin with the goddess Durga inscribed on one side and ‘Shri’ on the other.

Most of the cubes weigh approximately 125 gm each and are 2 cm in length. They can be picked up by a forefinger and thumb. Will Read (above).

Read had been livestreaming the mudlark expedition on Facebook, and a friend helped him post the images on Reddit’s /r/whatisthisthing. It soon generated 600-plus comments, until member u/hermit-the-frog decisively settled the issue. The 3-by-3 table on each cube face was an ankh-yantra , specifically the Rahu yantra in Devanagari script. In Roman, it reads:

15 08 13

10 12 14

11 16 09

Om Rahave Namah

The sum of the numbers in each row adds up to 36, as do the numbers in each column and the numbers in the main diagonals. In mathematics, such an arrangement of numbers is called a magic square. A yantra is a magic square presumed to have tantric effects. At the bottom of an English river, Read and his team had found tantric India.

The Rahu yantra isn’t depicted the way it is depicted on the lead cubes. Based on every book I’ve had a chance to consult, the Rahu yantra is depicted this way:

13 08 15

14 12 10

09 16 11

Om Rahave Namah

That is, the yantra on the lead cubes is the reverse of the Rahu yantra . This isn’t analogous to inverting the swastika or worshipping an upside-down cross. I think it is a fallout of lead printing. Lead is very easy to inscribe; any sharp iron tool will do. But I don’t think these were inscribed with a sharp tool. Normally, yantras are drawn on 2D surfaces, like a lead plate or coin. Unlike the ancient Greeks, who associated the planets with 3D objects like spheres and tetrahedrons and cubes, the ancient South Asians associated the planets with 2D objects like lines and triangles and squares.

What I think happened is that the lead cubes were heat-softened and each of their faces imprinted using a coin with a Rahu yantra . Such coins are easily purchased. The result is an inversion of the columns of the table, the kind of image reversal that happens in reverse-glass painting. The process would have been fast, inexpensive, but it resulted, alas, in an incorrectly oriented yantra .

Cry me a river

In any case, what were these cubes doing at the bottom of the river in England? In all likelihood, they were meant as remedial measures, votive offerings, intended to offset ‘Rahu dosha ’, the malefic influence of Lord Rahu in a horoscope. Such offerings are found in other rivers as well. Lara Maiklem mentions in her book Mudlarking (2019) that “…by far the most common religious objects found in the river are Hindu. For the Hindu community, the Thames has become a substitute for the Ganges… I’ve found strings of prayer beads, small flat metal yantras to ward off evil, and lots of coconuts… Just this year, a friend found one that had been cracked open and filled with rice, into which was pressed a small statue of Ganesh made from 1.9 ounces of solid gold…”

The use of flat-metal ankh-yantras as remedial measures goes back at least to the age of classical India, and was practised in other civilisations, including China and post-12th-century Europe. In more recent times, especially in North India, the locus classicus for all these remedies is the Lal Kitab , the Red Book, a collection of five volumes in Urdu, allegedly written by Pandit Roop Chand Joshi between 1939 and 1952.

The book has a red cover, which symbolises its intent to be an account book of a person’s life. It combines a radically simplified astrology with the South Asian schools of body reading (palmistry, face reading, and so on), and provides remedies ( upaya ) for various doshas in your astrological chart.

Compared with more secular placebos, the remedies are cheaper and probably just as effective. Half the problem with many of life’s problems is the feeling of helplessness. Remedial astrology reduces this sense of helplessness. People who believe in astrology aren’t any more fatalistic than people who rely on pandemic models are.

These people just want to do something about their futures. The underlying assumption is that to control the future, we need to be able to predict it. And prediction in hand, one can consult the Lal Kitab for remedies. From the astrologer’s point of view, it’s a win-win. If the predicted event does not come to pass, the remedy worked. If the predicted event comes to pass, the prediction worked. Like government policies and literary criticism, it is refutation-proof.

What sort of affliction prompts this remedy? In Indian astrology, Rahu’s “associated” metal is lead. In the Lal Kitab , people with an afflicted Rahu in the 1st house are advised to drop lead in some form or the other in flowing water for a certain number of days, in unbroken sequence. There’s uncertainty about the exact amount of lead needed and the exact number of days. The Lal Kitab seems to require a period of 43 days, but older Hindu remedies — such as the chanting of mantras — are often only for a period of 21 days.

A few days after Read and I had talked over the phone, he emailed to say he’d found 20 more lead cubes in the river, as well as “a lot more coins with holes in them.” As of writing, he and the boys have found 84 cubes, with a total weight of about 7,463 gm. He isn’t sure if he has found all there was to find. I suspect he is right. There might be a few more. Some books call for 4 kg of lead to be dropped over the remedial period. Read has found close to 8 kg of lead, suggesting that they were dropped over two remedial periods. In any case, it is a lot of lead.

Who did it?

What can we infer about the person or persons who dropped all these lead cubes into the water? First of all, the lead cubes are inscribed in Devanagari. The numbers 5 and 8 are written in what is known as the ‘Calcutta’ variant, common in North India, but not other areas. The use of Devanagari tells us they can’t be any older than the 11th or 12th century AD. Since there weren’t too many Indians wandering around Coventry during the Black Plague centuries, we can move the date another 300 or 400 years ahead.

Then there’s the location. The Baginton Bridge is a sandstone ashlar bridge with three semi-circular arches and rectangular piers at each end. A version of the bridge was around in the 1460s, but the current version originates from the 1930s. No bridge, no person on the bridge.

Then there’s the matter of the dozen punctured pennies also recovered from the Sowe. Some of these pennies are 2p coins minted in 1981. Pennies can be older than when they were thrown, but they can’t be later. Whoever threw these coins from the bridge, threw them in after 1981. Feng Shui coins have square holes at the centre, and the practice of Feng Shui really took hold in Britain only in the 1990s.

A coin with the image of the goddess Durga inscribed on one side and the word ‘Shri’ on the other was among Read’s finds.

In short, the cubes were most likely dropped by a North Indian Hindu, probably a middle-aged, first-generation British resident, sometime between 1981 and 2000. Why middle-aged? Because these remedies cannot be done on another’s behalf, and elderly parents of immigrants are not only more reconciled with life but also less mobile. Why pre-2000? Because people, even Indians, have become a lot more conscious of what they chuck into waterbodies. In the UK, the campaign against the use of lead in pipes and paint started in the 1980s. And a lot of lead — almost 8 kg — was dropped into the Sowe. It must have happened in the last century.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the whole affair is that yantra cubes were found and not yantra plates or coins. On account of the weight (over 6 kg), it’s unlikely the cubes were brought over from India. From a Tantric point of view, it is overkill — there are far simpler measures. Whoever dropped these items from the Baginton Bridge must have felt themselves to be in real trouble.

If detectives act as clearinghouses for secrets, then bridges act as accumulators. As mentioned, Stoneleigh bridge over the River Avon is within walking distance of Baginton Bridge. Recently, Judy Stowe, an academic affiliated with the University of New South Wales, Australia, trawled old British court records and discovered that labour conflicts during the bridge’s construction may have led Chandos Leigh, who’d inherited Stoneleigh Abbey, to murder two local workers, Billinges and Forbes, and have them buried in the bridge’s foundations.

Lord Leigh was a schoolmate of Lord Byron’s and Austen’s relative, her junior by 15 years. Byron lived a life of scandal, but it’s hard to believe that the life of one of the most composed of English authors was touched by so melodramatic an event. But just as yantras are supposed to channel strange energies, bridges channel coincidences, until events self-cascade into rigid facts and a seemingly impossible connection is spanned between nations, ages and people.

Read’s good fortune was partly the consequence of someone attempting to end their misfortune. When I spoke with Read, he said his friends had joked that he’d probably never find anything this interesting again. I’m not so sure. There are plenty more bridges.

The writer’s novel, Half of What I Say , was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Prize.

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