BY JANICE LINGLEY
The phrase ‘Red Flower’ is first established as a periphrasis, or metaphor, for fire in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ (1894). Bagheera the panther urges the wolf-child’s acquisition of the element as a defence in the imminent confrontation with Shere Khan at the Council Rock, and the periphrasis recurs briefly in ‘Letting in the Jungle (1894).’1 In the last of the Mowgli tales, ‘The Spring Running’ (1895), the ‘Red Flower’ is adapted to refer to a star in the night sky. Recalling the strength he acquired following his achievement of Shere Khan’s nemesis as a child, Mowgli, in young manhood, is now possessed by a sense of inexplicable unhappiness, and fears he has lost this former power (298). Setting off, nevertheless, on his joyous ‘spring running’ through the Jungle, he reaches the Marshes. His misery returns, but after pausing to affront and tease Mysa the Bull, he gains comfort and reassurance from gazing on a star:
‘There is a star sitting low yonder.’ He looked at it steadily between half-shut hands. ‘By the Bull that bought me, it is the Red Flower – the Red Flower that I lay beside before – before I came even to the first Seeonee Pack! Now that I have seen, I will finish the running.’ (302–3)
The glimmer of the Red Flower across a broad plain draws Mowgli forward ‘as if it had been new game’ (303).
Which star, or planet, was Kipling alluding to here? Pondering this question, I decided to approach the British Astronomical Association: a registered charity founded in 1890, which provides support and a forum for amateur astronomers, and whose members have made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the universe. On 17th March 2025, heading my email, ‘An astronomical allusion in Rudyard Kipling’, I wrote to the BAA as follows:
I hope this literary query will not seem an imposition. I should be grateful if you would kindly identify a star or planet referred to in Kipling’s Jungle Book story ‘The Spring Running’, published in 1895, and written in Vermont. The character Mowgli is sprinting through his jungle home, which is situated in the location of Seonee in India’s Central Provinces. It is spring, and he sees a star low on the horizon which is gleaming red. He refers to it as ‘the Red Flower’, a jungle name for fire, and thinks of the bull that was killed to allow his adoption into the Seonee wolf pack when he was a small child: ‘By the Bull that bought me, it is the Red Flower.’ I wonder if there is a play on the word ‘Bull’ here, referring to the constellation of Taurus, and if the star is Aldebaran. Kipling usually ensured that the technical details of his stories were accurate, hence this query.
This email was duly picked up and relayed for response to one of their members, Dr. Richard Miles, who is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.2 Emailing his reply the same day, 17th March 2025, he requested further information:
I have a few questions. I agree it sounds like Aldebaran and Taurus via a play on words. We can check this but we first need to clarify what month of the year is the ‘Indian Spring’? Can you guesstimate this?
As to a possible planet, only Mars appears to gleam a reddish colour, so if we know the month, I can check whether Mars was suitably placed in, say, the years 1892, 1893, 1894 and 1895. It would have to be not too far from opposition3 to be sufficiently bright when seen near the horizon.
I replied to Dr. Miles on 18th March:
Thanks to you, and the BAA staff, for your kind response. I had to look up the Indian seasons because I have never been to India, but I found information on this topic online. The winter season is from January to February, and the spring season is from February to March. I also had another look at Kipling’s text, and in fact he gives a fairly precise notion of the time of the year. We learn that: it is ‘the end of the cold weather’; ‘the year turns’; Bagheera the panther is ‘just casting his winter coat’; a bird is just beginning the ‘first few notes of his spring song; and it is the time of the New Moon.’ So I think it is reasonable to assume the month is February, and it is early in the month rather than later.
Dr. Miles’s email, by return on 18th March, adroitly resolved the issue:
I have been looking at the night sky as it was during 1892 to 1895 from that location in India, which in my planetarium program is named Seoni Malwa. My conclusion is that it was the planet Jupiter, low down near the horizon in the late evening sky. Jupiter was located in Taurus in both 1894 and 1895.
1894 looks definitely a better fit as the planet was near the Pleiades, a bit further from Aldebaran, but it was more than ten times brighter than Aldebaran, and if seen low in the sky was reddish in colour for that reason, just like a red sun at sunset. Smoke high in the atmosphere from wood fires in the evening would contribute to this effect.4
So the time of night was shortly after four hours past sunset with the better fit for early March, not February. New Moon was on 8th March 1894, which date would have Jupiter low on the horizon about four hours, 40 minutes, after sunset.
Mars was not well placed during the Spring as it was only bright in a few months either side of opposition, which was on 20th October in 1894.
In a further email on 19th March 2025, I queried Kipling’s possible source(s) of information, bearing in mind that he had never been to Seonee. In his reply Dr. Miles pointed out that Kipling had only to look at the Vermont night sky:
Seonee is at a latitude of 22.5 degrees North, whereas Brattleboro, Vermont, is at latitude 42.5 degrees. That is only 20 degrees difference, so Kipling would have seen Jupiter low on his western horizon about five hours after sunset.
I then checked for precise information as to when and where the final Jungle Book story was written, and found Carrie Kipling’s diary for the year 1895 helpful. From 26 February to 6 April the Kiplings were visiting Washington DC, and Carrie’s diary entry for 15-17 March reads: Starting the ‘Spring Running.’’ 5 The story must have been completed within a few days, for by 20 March Kipling was beginning work on something else. So the story had not, like most of the Mowgli tales, actually been written in Vermont, as I had assumed when first writing to the BAA.
If the original inspiration for Jupiter in the story was Kipling’s observation of the Vermont night sky, he could have had expert astronomical advice re the Indian skyscape, at a time compliant with the requirements of his narrative, during his Washington visit. On 8th March 1895, Carrie’s diary very briefly notes: ‘Prof. Langley’, referring to Samuel Pierpoint Langley (1834–1906), the American astronomer, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, and founder of the Institute’s Astrophysical Observatory. Kipling’s posthumously published memoir Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (1937), confirms that he met Langley in Washington and that he also visited the Institute.6 We know from Kipling’s correspondence that Langley provided background information for the Jungle Book story ‘Quiquern’ (1895),7 so it is tempting to speculate that Langley may also have assisted with the writing of ‘The Spring Running’.
After writing the above and going through the proofs of the article I discovered an error in my initial email of enquiry to the BAA. I had stated that in Kipling’s tale, it was the time of the New Moon but on checking the text again, what he actually wrote was: ‘all the voices of the Jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon―the full moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through the million leaves.’ (299). This is when Mowgli begins his spring running, and it is early in the evening. Towards the end of the running, the moon is setting (300), but the reader is not told exactly how long the running takes. I alerted Dr. Miles and asked if this correction made any difference to his conclusions. He promptly replied (on 28 May 2025) as follows:
Given we know the text was drafted in Washington DC around March 1895 and that he met the famous astronomer Langley on the 8th March, Kipling may have been inspired by discussions with Langley who would have known the technical details of celestial objects visible from Seonee. Looking at the configuration of the sun, moon and planets on that very evening of their meeting, they fit the literary account to a tee! Specifically, if Mowgli began running during the evening, say two hours after sunset, the moon would have been almost full (91% illuminated) and high in the sky (50° elevation) on 8 March 1895. The very bright moon would have served Mowgli well, lighting his path through the jungle throughout his run. Three hours into it, he would have witnessed Taurus and its brightest star Aldebaran, sinking almost vertically as they set in the west. Then, almost two hours later, the much brighter planet Jupiter would have followed suit and been visible low on the western horizon. Bright planets do not twinkle like stars and seen low on the horizon it would indeed have seemed to shine like a fire or Red Flower. The timeline indicates that Mowgli’s run would have lasted almost eight hours before moonset and his arrival in the middle of the Marshes. That meeting between Kipling and Langley may indeed have enabled the author to put his story on a sound astronomical footing!
The revelatory image of the planet Jupiter, informing Mowgli’s approach to the end of his wildwood career and the poignant farewell to his Jungle friends, can be understood as a reference to the great Roman sky deity who was not only the god of thunder and lightning and the world’s weather, but who also presided over law and order. This classical allusion thus anticipates the theme of East and West which is to inform the adult Mowgli’s collaboration with ‘Gisborne of the Woods and Forests’. Moreover, in this final Jungle Book tale, when Mowgli steps once more into the kindly welcome of Messua’s hearth and home, the macrocosmic image of Jupiter is revealed as a precursor to the microcosm of the corresponding red glow of Messua’s oil lamp. By this light, Messua sees before her someone who is no longer her putative son but ‘a Godling of the Woods’, or a being ‘who might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend’ (304).
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to the British Astronomical Association and to Dr. Richard Miles for their assistance and for permission to quote Dr. Miles’s email communications.
WORKS CONSULTED
Kipling, Rudyard. The Light That Failed, London, Macmillan, 1891.
Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself, for My Friends Known and Unknown, London, Macmillan, 1937.
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books (1894, 1895), edited by Kaori Nagai, London, Penguin Classics, 2013.
Pinney, Thomas, editor. Letters of Rudyard Kipling Volume 2, 1890–99, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1990.
Wilson, Alastair. ‘The Rees and Carrington Extracts from Caroline Kipling’s Diaries’, The Kipling Society website, www.kiplingsociety.co.uk.
NOTES
1 Kipling, The Jungle Books, ed. Nagai, pp. 16-17, 192. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
2 Dr. Richard Miles is currently working on a book in which planetarium tools are used to go back through the Dark Age, Iron Age, and Bronze Age, to the time of Stonehenge.
3 ‘The apparent position of two celestial objects when they differ in ecliptic longitude by 180°’ (OED).
4 ‘A smoky atmosphere’: c.f, the epigraph poem titled ‘In Seonee’ of Ch. 4 of Kipling’s early novel, The Light That Failed (1891): ‘The wolf-cub at even lay hid in the corn, / When the smoke of the cooking hung grey’ (ll. 1–2); and ‘But the moon swept the smoke-wreaths away.’ (l. 5).
5 Carrie Kipling’s Diaries: quoted from the Rees and Carrington Extracts, ed. Wilson.
6 Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 123.
7 Kipling, ed. Pinney, Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol . 2, pp. 193–4.