Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (48 page)

Brahma, the Creator
One of the three manifestations of Brahman, Brahma is called “lord and father of all creatures” and is regarded as the greatest of all sages as well as the first god. Born in one Creation account from a golden egg that floated in the primeval waters, Brahma is said in another version of the Creation to be the welling up of the Brahman’s primeval essence. In yet another Creation account, Brahma emerges from a lotus that grows from a seed in the navel of the god Vishnu. The image of the lotus, a beautiful flower that floats above swampy waters, represents the Hindu ideal of living in the world without being corrupted by it. Brahma is said to have thought up the world while meditating, and is the father of both gods and men.
When Brahma is born, he has only one head, but he grows five faces so that he is always able to gaze on the beautiful Sarasvati. (In a later legend, one of these five faces is destroyed, still leaving him with the four he is usually depicted as having.) An ancient agricultural fertility goddess, Sarasvati—which is also the name of another of India’s most sacred rivers—is born from Brahma’s side and is also goddess of the creative arts, poetry, music, science, and language. Not only does she get credit for inventing Sanskrit, she gives birth to the first man, Manu, who is sired by Brahma.
In one legend, Brahma and fellow god Vishnu argue about which of them created the universe. As they debate, a great lingam—the word for “phallus” in Hindu terminology—appears, rising out of the ocean, crowned with flame. Staring into its vastness, Brahma and Vishnu see a cave deep within this creative phallus in which the god Shiva resides. Awed by his sight, they concede that Shiva is the ultimate creator.
Finally, a word about Brahma, the cosmic clock-keeper. If you think that time spent waiting at the doctor’s office or in a supermarket checkout line is long, consider the awesome mystery of what might be called “Brahma-time.” In the incredibly complex mathematics of the Hindu universe, a day in the life of Brahma—called a
kalpa
—lasts the equivalent of 4,320 million earth years. A “night of Brahma” is the same length. Divided into constant, smaller cycles, each of these
kalpas
ultimately ends as the world is consumed by fire and the universe is destroyed and recreated. According to Hindu thought, the current age is called the Kali-Yuga, the final act of a
kalpa
begun eons ago, a dark age that is approaching its end, after which the world will be destroyed once more and prepared for another cycle of creation.
In
Midnight’s Children
, his prizewinning mythical novel of modern India, Salman Rushdie captures a sense of the vastness of this Indian concept of time and its impact on people:

As Indian myth evolves, Brahma gradually recedes from the picture, and is overshadowed by two more active gods in the Hindu trinity—Shiva and Vishnu—along with a powerful mother goddess, Devi.

Devi
The great mother goddess of Hindu myth, Devi is thought to be derived from the original Mother Earth goddess probably worshipped in the Indus Valley before the Aryans arrived. Devi, or Mahadevi (“the great goddess”), is the creative force, but also demands sacrifices. Like the male deities, she has many avatars, some of whom became wives and consorts—or Shakti—of the three gods. Many of the countless goddesses of Hinduism are considered aspects of this great goddess.

Durga
The goddess Durga, which means “inaccessible” or “unapproachable,” is a dark avatar of the mother goddess Devi. Emerging from the flames shot from the mouths of the male gods Vishnu and Shiva when they are battling a powerful buffalo-demon named Mahisha, Durga is fierce and physically imposing, with yellow-tinged skin and vampirelike teeth. Riding a lion while carrying a club, a noose, a sword, and a trident in her four hands, she seduces the buffalo-demon, captures it with a noose, and beheads it.
As Shiva’s consort, Durga combats evil, rids the world of demons, and destroys ignorance. But in spite of her fearsome, violent, and combative origin and nature, Durga is also a goddess of sleep and creativity, and in that spirit is credited with introducing yoga to mankind.
Durga may not be aware of what she has wrought. A quick Internet search under “yoga” produces about 20 million results! There are probably few health clubs left that don’t offer some form of yoga exercise, making this ancient Hindu form of discipline one of the most widely shared aspects of Hindu tradition in the world today. Essentially an Indian secret until the eighteenth century, yoga may predate the Aryan arrival in the Indus Valley, according to archaeological evidence. In essence, all forms of yoga are disciplines designed to link the physical body and mind with the unconscious soul, stilling the mind to allow a glimpse of enlightenment. The ancient Sanskrit root of “yoga” is the same for the English word “yoke,” as in animals yoked together to work as one. While there are several types of yoga, the one most familiar to Westerners is hatha yoga, the series of breathing techniques and stretching exercises developed as a way to liberate the spirit by channeling energy through the spinal column to the rest of the body. It was originally intended as a preparation for the intensive meditation that is part of raja yoga (“royal yoga”), one of the four main forms of traditional yoga. Other popular derivations of yoga techniques are Transcendental Meditation, a form of yoga using the constant repetition of a divine name (mantra), and bhakti yoga, which involves the dedication of all actions and thoughts to a chosen god. Perhaps the best-known practitioners are members of the Krishna Consciousness movement, who constantly chant the name of Lord Krishna to achieve an ecstatic state.

Ganesha
(
Ganesh
) A short, potbellied man who rides around on the back of a rat (or a mouse, in some traditions) and removes obstacles to success, the elephant-headed Ganesha is the god of wisdom, literature, and good fortune. The child of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesha is told by his mother to guard the door as she bathes. When Ganesha refuses to allow his father, Shiva, to enter the bath, Shiva angrily decapitates Ganesha. To calm his angry wife, Shiva then replaces his son’s head with the first one he finds—that of an elephant.
By invoking Ganesha’s name at the beginning of any activity, a devotee opens the door to material success and spiritual growth.

Ganga
Ganga is the water goddess of purification, divinely manifested in the Ganges River. Married to the ocean, Ganga must be careful not to descend to earth too swiftly from the sky—an obvious allusion to the threat of flooding—or she will wash away the earth. In legend, Shiva protects the earth from this threat when his matted hair breaks Ganga’s fall to earth. Shiva then divides Ganga into seven rivers (the Ganges and its tributaries).

Kali
When Indiana Jones has to confront the bad guys in
The Temple of Doom
, he is up against a very evil deity who demands the heart of sacrificial victims. This bloodthirsty Kali is not the product of the fertile imaginations of Hollywood’s Spielberg and Lucas. The goddess Kali, who is known as “the black one,” is the offspring of Durga and another dark avatar of the great goddess Devi.
Kali may be the most horrific of all goddesses—not just in India, but in all world mythology. Born from the forehead of Durga while she is fighting another demon, Raktavija, Kali springs forth to win the battle, destroy the demon, and then drink all of his blood so that it doesn’t fall to earth and produce more demons. (In another version of Kali’s birth, she is said to be the result of Shiva’s teasing his wife Parvati about her dark complexion. In contemplation, Parvati sheds the dark skin, which becomes Kali.)
A goddess of destruction, usually portrayed with a fearsome and grotesque collection of accessories—a necklace of skulls and a belt of severed arms or snakes—Kali is connected to human sacrifice and is often depicted as dancing on Shiva’s sexually aroused corpse. But even in this image of pleasure and pain, there is regeneration. And in the Hindu vision, destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin. When she dances on Shiva’s corpse, Kali actually reanimates him.
Kali also is responsible for a colorful word in English—thug. For centuries, bands of professional assassins in India were known as Thugs—the term derives from the Hindustani word “thag,” meaning a thief—a criminal society in India, whose members committed murder and robbery in honor of Kali.

Krishna
An avatar of Vishnu, the dark-blue-skinned Krishna is also worshipped as a god in his own right, and is one of the most popular Hindu gods, a Hindu Heracles. Krishna is often shown with a flute in his hand and his consort, the milkmaid
Radha
—a manifestation of Vishnu’s wife,
Lakshmi
—standing at his side.
Krishna is born, in one account, from a single black hair that Vishnu plucks from his head and places in a woman’s womb. Created to rid the world of evil, Krishna battles with a bull-demon, a horse-demon, and Kansa, his uncle, the evil king, who has been told by an oracle that he will be murdered by one of his sister’s children. Kansa decides to kill the children before they harm him, but through an incredibly complex series of events, Krishna and all of the children are saved by the other gods. Still trying to do away with Krishna, King Kansa sends the demon Putana to nurse the newborn with poison milk, but even as a baby, Krishna is unusual. He kills the demon Putana by sucking all the life from her body as he nurses.
As a young man, Krishna is known for his irresistible good looks and virility. In a story that is often depicted in Indian art, he steals the clothes of a group of milkmaids as they are bathing. The women come before him, naked, and bow, and Krishna returns their clothes to them.
The legend of Krishna’s death echoes that of the Greek hero Achilles. As Krishna sits in meditation, a hunter pursuing an antelope sees the soles of the god’s feet and thinks they are an animal’s ears. When the hunter shoots an arrow into Krishna’s foot, he hits a vulnerable spot and kills him—so an Achilles’ heel could also be called a Krishna’s sole.

Lakshmi
Wife of Vishnu, Lakshmi is the goddess of good fortune and bestower of wealth. Goddess of perfect beauty, she is born fully formed from the froth of the ocean—just as Aphrodite, the Greek’s ideal beauty, was. Symbolized by the lotus flower—which represents the female principle: the womb, fertility, and life-giving waters—Lakshmi is the personification of maternal benevolence. In very ancient traditions, Indian rulers underwent a symbolic marriage to Lakshmi, just as Mesopotamian kings married Inanna in a rite to ensure the bounty of the earth.

Parvati
Another avatar of the divine mother Devi, Parvati (“mountain”) is the reincarnation of Shiva’s first wife, Sati, and becomes his second wife. Daughter of the sacred Himalayas, Parvati is also the affectionate mother of Ganesha, and a recipient of Shiva’s tremendous spiritual and sexual energy, which she releases to the world. In one myth, Shiva initially rejects Parvati because of her dark skin, but he changes his mind when she makes her body glow. This suggests that Parvati may have originated as a pre-Aryan aboriginal goddess who was absorbed into the Hindu pantheon.

Sati
The daughter of an ancient god called
Daksha
, Sati marries Shiva over her father’s objections. This leads to an argument over inviting in-laws to dinner—talk about archetypes!—and a bloody feud when Daksha summons all of the other gods to a special sacrifice, but snubs his son-in-law. Enraged, Sati throws herself onto the sacrificial fire. Learning of this tragedy, Shiva kills many of the guests at the feast and decapitates Daksha, replacing his head with that of a goat. Daksha repents and becomes a loyal attendant to Shiva, who performs a dance of destruction after which Sati is reincarnated as Shiva’s second wife, Parvati.
Are you dizzy yet?
The legend of the dutiful, loyal Sati lives on in an unfortunate reality. In the traditional Indian practice known as suttee, Indian widows throw themselves on their dead husband’s funeral pyre in suicidal self-immolation. Known in other ancient cultures, the practice of suttee may have been introduced into India as late as the first century of the Common Era, and became a fairly widespread practice after that. Banned by British colonial authorities in the nineteenth century, the tradition continued sporadically. A recent criminal case in India involved the prosecution of eleven people who were accused—but later acquitted by a special court—of encouraging a widow to commit suttee in 1988.

Shiva, the Destroyer
The all-knowing punisher of the wicked, Shiva is the four-armed god of great power known as the Destroyer because he periodically destroys the world so it can be re-created. Shiva possesses a “third eye,” from which comes the fire that destroys the Creation.
Often depicted dancing, Shiva haunts graveyards and lives with demons and other supernatural beings. But Shiva is beyond simple distinctions of good and evil, and his followers consider him a merciful god, despite his fearsome characteristics. In Hindu philosophy, Shiva avoids taking an active part in human affairs, and Hindu art often shows him in solitary meditation on a mountain.