By Sharon St Joan
Inside a stone structure near the temple, langur monkeys played in the rays of the late afternoon sun.
Like nearly all Hindu temples, the Virupaksha Temple at Hampi began as just a small shrine; it is thought to go back to around the seventh century CE.
Virupaksha is the God Shiva, and this is a living temple, which means that people still go there to worship so many centuries later.
Over time many rulers contributed to its growth. Around 1000 CE, the temple was expanded. In 1510 CE, on the occasion of his coronation, King Krishnadevaraya, the iconic emperor of the Vijayanagara Empire, added a complex comprised of the inner eastern entrance, or gopuram, a pillared hall, and many more shrines.
Near the temple entrance are several graceful statues of Nandi, the sacred bull who is the vehicle of Shiva; he gives permission to each devotee to enter the temple. One of the Nandis has three heads. There’s nothing mysterious about this, the sculptor simply gave him three heads, but normally Nandi has only one head.
Quite far away, perhaps a tenth of a mile up high in a structure of pillars built by the side of a mountain, near where the monkeys were playing, the original Nandi looks out towards the temple – a very imposing figure carved out of a giant black boulder.
It is said that it was Nandi who taught Shiva to dance. The dance of Shiva is an important one since Shiva is the God of destruction, and one of his two dances is the tandava, the dance which brings the world to its end. The other is a gentle dance during which the world begins anew.
The destructive aspect of Shiva is not in any way unkind or malevolent. It is essential; without destruction there can be no renewal. It is the essence of how the cosmos works, causing the wheel of life and death to turn. There are many worlds, many levels, both seen and unseen, and many Gods, yet they are all One, the ultimate Brahman.
To be separated and cut off from the truer levels of being is to live in a world of turmoil and unrest. To be in touch with the deeper levels of reality and with the Gods, is to know peace and truth.
Many thousands of years ago, during the time when the Rig Veda, the oldest book in the world, was written, there existed another, earlier, magnificent phase of Indian civilization. The ruins of over a thousand cities which existed along the banks of the Saraswathi River, in India, and spread out encompassing a far wider area, have been found, along with other already well-known ancient cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Harrappa, now in Pakistan, which were all part of the same civilization. The artwork found there shows clear evidence of continuity between the customs and worship of Indian people then and today.
The Rig Veda describes the Saraswathi River as being vast and energetic, a huge, dynamic river. Eventually, the Saraswati River dried up and most of it went underground, which is how it remains today. Archeologists and geologists have noted that the last time the Saraswati River was flowing in full force as a huge beautiful river was around 5,000 BCE. This has led to their being able to date the time when the Rig Veda must have been composed as no later than 5,000 BCE – which means that the history of India goes back at least seven thousand years, and possibly much, much farther. Many more fascinating confirmations of this very ancient antiquity are described in an article in the IndiaFacts newsletter – please see below for the link to this and also for the link to Michel Danino’s book, Land of Seven Rivers.
One of the most intriguing pieces of artwork found in the Indus-Saraswati Civilization is the depiction of a God believed to be Shiva. Portrayed as a yogi, he is surrounded by animals and is shown as the God of the natural world. Shiva is a sacred being, the beginning and the ending of all existence, of the entire cosmos. His living beings — the animals, the plants, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, and all of nature, are sacred too, and they are to be cared for and worshipped.
Within the Virupaksha Temple, in the late afternoon, one can feel an age-old connection with levels beyond; an ancient continuity that is only evident when there is still a link with the past – when we are not lost in a present that is chaotic like a boat cast adrift without moorings. Like the temple trees whose roots provide a grounding strength, the centuries and centuries that go back into the mists are rooted in an ancient truth that is always there, a light shining through the forests of time.
© Sharon St Joan, text and photos, 2017
Photos: Sharon St Joan
Top photo: A part of the Virupaksha Temple that goes back to around 1000 CE.
Second photo: A giant Nandi overlooking the temple.
Four: Nearby boulders.
Five: One of the temple gopurams.
Aryan Invasion Myth How 21st Century Science Debunks 19thCentury Indology – the IndiaFacts newsletter http://indiafacts.org/aryan-invasion-myth-21st-century-science-debunks-19th-century-indology/
Lost River: On the trail of the Sarasvati by Michel Danino https://www.amazon.com/Lost-River-Sarasvati-Michel-Danino/dp/0143068644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498344116&sr=8-1&keywords=Michel+Danino
A little history of the earth, starting with bulls
Lascaux painting of aurochs bulls
The paintings in the Lascaux Cave in the south of France, in the department of Dordogne, are believed to date back 17, 300 years. Inside the cave, in the Hall of the Bulls are many equines; among them paintings of aurochs, a species of cow now extinct, ancestor to the varieties of modern cows.
The painting of one of the bulls is 17 feet long and is the longest cave art animal anywhere. The paintings in the cave, because of the presence of visitors (the visitors’ breath has affected the air) have been damaged by fungi, and in 1983 a different cave was constructed for visitors with replicas of two of the cave halls.
The earliest cave paintings in Europe go back around 35,000 years.
Reverence for bulls was widespread in the ancient world – in Paleolithic times and on into Neolithic times – and up to today as well.
In the book of Exodus, in the Bible, is told the story of the Hebrews returning to the practice of worshiping the Golden Calf while Moses was up on the mountain collecting the ten commandments. Moses wasn’t pleased to see the image of the Golden Calf when he got back, and he smashed the ten commandments in anger when he saw it.
Still, worship of the bull cropped up again and again, both before and after the time of Moses.
The Babylonian god Marduk is called the Bull of Utu. In the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the heroes are often referred to as “bulls”.
An Indian calf
In Mesopotamian mythology, Gugalanna was the Bull of Heaven. The word “gu” meant bull and was of the same origin as the Sanskrit word ”go” or “gau” meaning “cow”. “Cow” comes from these earlier words. The bull Gugulanna was associated with the constellation Taurus (the Bull), which from 3,200 BC held the place where the Spring Equinox occurred in the northern hemisphere.
The myth tells us that the bull Gugulanna was killed by Gilgamesh (the Sumerian Noah). Gilgamesh was linked to the light of the sun, and when the streams of sunlight rose at the Spring Equinox, they overcame the starlight of the constellation of Gugulanna, which then became invisible, thus “killing” Gugulanna.
The bull, whose horns are shaped like a crescent moon, has been associated with the moon.
Bull-leaping in a Minoan fresco
When I visited the Minoan ruins in Crete in the summer of 1969, I recall looking at a stone block, one of many there with carved bulls’ horns, and noticing for the first time the unique importance of the bull to ancient cultures. The bulls’ horns were everywhere.
The aurochs, the ancestor of today’s cattle, both western and eastern, became extinct when the last of the aurochs, a female, died in 1627, in the Jaktorow Forest in Poland. Authorities at the Paleontologisk Museum, University of Oslo, believe that the aurocks first appeared in India two million years ago, and from there spread throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
It is thought that South Asian, including Indian, cattle descended from a sub-species of aurochs who lived at the edge of the Thar Desert which lies across Rajasthan and Pakistan. These Indian cows have a hump and have a very elegant, distinctive look.
Western cows do not have a hump and are known as taurine cattle. Aurochs were much larger than all modern cows; the males were black, and the females reddish.
A copy of a fifteenth century painting of an aurocks
Aurochs also spread to North Africa, and the cattle of the ancient Egyptians may have descended from them.
Throughout the centuries, the bull has been both worshipped and mistreated.
One might wonder whether the human race has a propensity for killing what it worships – from the sacred bull to the life and death of Jesus. To be fair, it may not only be humans who behave that way. Among all mammal species, males engage in battle with each other. And any male who seems to stand above the others becomes a target—to be feared or to be attacked in order to take his place. (Having the top place seems to be a pretty essential goal, which can supplant any inclination towards reverence or worship.) Females are not immune from an impulse towards violence, and they also attack when they are defending their young.
Throughout the ancient world the bull was worshipped as a divine being, yet today, one finds in various places extremely cruel rituals that seem designed for young men to prove their dominance over the bull. These ritual “games” seem to have degenerated over time into greater and greater levels of barbarism.
The cruelest of these are festivals put on by the Catholic Church, on feast days of saints, held in Mexico and Spain, in which the bulls are tortured and killed. There are also, of course, the bullfights in Spain, introduced here and there in other countries in Africa, Europe, and Asia. In the western U.S. there are rodeos, also cruel, also exported to other countries. There are attempts taking place now, to introduce rodeos into China.
The slaughter of bulls and cows for food happens all over the world, more in the U.S. than anywhere else, where around 33 million cattle are killed every year. Brazil and China are fast catching up. The pursuit of cattle for food is destroying the planet through climate change and destroying vast tracts of land, as well as native animals like the bison and the wild horse, thousands of whom are being killed by the U.S. government to make way for cattle grazing.
Worship of the bull has tended to devolve over time into torment of the bull.
In the Greek legend, the Minotaur, who is half-man, half-bull, dwells in a labyrinth, and is killed by the hero Theseus.
The Egyptian god Apis, (or Hape, which is closer to the original Egyptian word), was worshipped, and the bulls were mummified and interred in great underground complexes. It is assumed that they were killed.
Bulls and cows are very highly revered in India. I’ll only mention them briefly for now. The fascinating book “Sacred Animals of India” by Dr. Nanditha Krishna, has a great deal of information about them.
Nandi at the Brihadeshwara Temple, Tamil Nadu
In India, the bull Nandi is the beloved vehicle and gatekeeper for the God Shiva. In every Shiva temple throughout south India, there is a figure of the bull Nandi. Nandi is also the leading disciple of Shiva.
At the Brihadeswara Temple, Nandi is immense, majestic, and charming, with a very innocent, rather playful face. The devotee pays his or her respects to Nandi before going into the temple. Nandi is a much loved and revered figure, who would never be harmed.
In a strange contrast, however, there is also in south India, in Tamil Nadu, the cruel practice of jallikattu, in which crowds of young men torment and pursue bulls, often leading to injury to the bulls and to themselves in the process.
What begins as honor, worship, and devotion, can degenerate over the centuries into persecution and killing. Indeed, things tend to take that route.
These observations have taken a gloomy turn, but are not meant to be gloomy. The same fate is befalling all of nature—as we humans, who once worshipped the forests, the trees, and the divine beings who lived in them, have destroyed nearly the whole earth now to make way for ourselves. But of course we cannot live without the earth. Going to live in a colony on Mars or the moon doesn’t really seem like the best option—not for us, and certainly not for Mars and the moon.
Enlightening our fellow human beings and encouraging kindness to animals and to the planet is absolutely well worth doing. It may be the only thing well worth doing, and it will go a long way towards lessoning the immensity of the suffering of many people and many animals.
But as for affecting the fateful course of events and the downward-spiraling destiny of the earth, something else, an approach on a more cosmic scale, seems to be needed to turn the tide or to bring about a new tide—a tide that may go back to the beginning before the origin of cruelty.
Photos:
Top photo: Prof saxx / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license / Lascaux painting
Second photo: Lea Maimone / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license / Indian calf
Third photo: Wikimedia Commons / in the Public Domain in the U.S. /
Minoan fresco from the palace of Knossos / Bull-leaping
Fourth photo: Wikimedia Commons / In the Public Domain / A copy of a painting of an aurochs, the original may have been done in the Fifteenth century.
Fifth photo: Sharon St Joan / Nandi at the Brihadeswarer Temple, Tamil Nadu