The Wandering Gods

When and how did the ancient humans decide to create the sacred spots where their Gods or prophets will live? With time, they decided to create elaborate homes for their Gods but sometimes, the Gods were left out in the open or travelled around with wandering holy-men and sometimes with the holy-women or were carried out of their homes periodically, in processions. I call these the wandering Gods.

This post focuses on some of the my experiences about the wandering Gods.

Most of my experiences of such events are linked with my travels in different parts of the world, especially in India. (Click on the images for bigger pictures)

Sacred Spots for Ancient Humans 

I think that ancient humans chose at least two different kinds of sacred spots.

(1) Some of those sacred spots were along the ancient pathways, for the travellers. At these spots, usually they did not build elaborate structures. Often, these were simple stone-towers or coloured clothes tied on or around trees. Sometimes these sites were close to the water sources.

For example, in Mongolia I saw the stone put together, often accompanied by flower trees and colourful scarfs, along the important pathways, criss-crossing its land. I was told that each stone in that place is sacred and you are prohibited from taking away even a single stone from those places.

 

I think that many persons have started believing in building such stone-towers. I saw them in a forest in Arizona (USA), as well as, in the river bed behind our home in Schio (Italy).

Similar to those stone-towers in Mongolia, are the tree shrines, that are so common in India. There was a small Hindu temple in central part of Mozambique, where I had seen a beautiful tree shrine around a huge Peeple tree. The image below has a tree shrine from a rural area in Madhya Pradesh (India).

 

(2) Other, more important sacred spots were places where the hunter-gatherers came together for big clan meetings. Often these were near rivers and streams or on the top of mountains. Prehistoric caves where rock art has been discovered were also chosen as sacred sites. These became sites of seasonal or periodic fairs and pilgrimages.

For example, the vast area around the confluence (Sangam) of Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Prayagraj (India) is visited by millions of persons during the 6 or 12 yearly Kumbh fair.

 

Specific Energy Fields For the Sacred Spots 

There is another aspect of the selection of sacred spots, about which my knowledge is limited - areas with auspicious or positive energy fields.

I have read that many ancient temples were built in areas that had a special kind of energy and thus, many of the more recent churches were built in their places when the old pagan religions were abandoned.

For example, I had read that the beautiful Santo Stefano church in Bologna (Italy) was built at the site of an older temple dedicated to Venus. People talk of the positive energy of this church. 

Some years ago, while on a walk in the forest behind the Bashistha temple in Guwahati (India) in India, I had met a Sadhu (ascetic) who had told me about the special energy that comes out of the ground and the rocks. I had put my hand on that spot but I was unable to feel any energy, which was there according to that Sadhu.

Perhaps, ancient humans, shamans and mystics are more open psychologically to such experiences of energy-fields and thus, chose specific sites for their prayer places. Or as the Sadhu had told me, "You have to learn to quieten your mind, then you can feel it." 

Gods Come Out of Their Abodes for a Procession

There is another sacred tradition that continues from old times - that of the Gods in procession. Sometimes, the icons and symbols of Gods are brought out of their temples or churches and are carried out in processions.

For example, when I lived in Bologna (Italy), I remember the annual procession in the evening, when the Madonna statue was taken out of the Bertalia church and carried out in a procession along the streets and parks.

 

Another example is from Delhi (India), where floats carrying statues and persons dressed as Gods travelled on floats for the annual Ram Lila in which the story of Ramayana was enacted.

 

I remember a more complex example of such procession in Cidade Alta in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), where the descendents of the slaves brought from Africa, who were forced to convert to Christianity, had merged their African Orisha Gods with the Christian saints.

 

In Himachal Pradesh (India), in the mountains around the town of Kullu, each mountain village has its own deity in a temple, many of whom come from older folk-traditions. Around the festival of Dusshera every year, all of them are carried out in procession to Kullu, where they live in temporary temples along with all the other deities.

In Karnataka (India), they have a tradition of men carrying in annual processions the Gods in their temples on their heads without holding it with their hands, while persons dressed as warriors carrying swords accompany them for protection.

 

Finally, in another example from Kerala (India) I remember the tradition of Theyyam in which there were men dressed as Gods, who invoked the Gods to descend in their bodies, to give benedictions and to answer questions.

Herders Moving Their Homes And Temples   

As hunter-gatherers were replaced by people owning cattle, they usually shifted their homes with the seasons, looking for grasslands and fodder for their cattle. They also took their Gods when they moved homes. 

I saw a group of herders in Mongolia, who had travelled from their villages to an area next to a lake, where they were setting up their home-tents and their temple.

 

Wandering Triptychs & Tripitaks

Travelling story-tellers, ascetics and mystics, was another group of people who carried sacred icons with them to the different communities. For the wandering Gods, sometimes, their sacred images were depicted on scrolls or portable temples, which could be folded and carried easily.  

The term Triptych (literally 3 tablets) comes from Latin and Greek, it is used frequently in conjunction with Christian sacred images. A triptych has 3 panels, one bigger central panel with two side panels which are attached to the central part like a door. Thus, the panels can be closed and it becomes a box, which can be carried around easily, similar to the idea of the wandering Gods.

The foldable Catholic Triptych in the image below is from Victoria & Albert Museum in London (UK). 

 

There is a similar term, Tripitak (3 boxes), used in Buddhism. It comes from Pali language, one of the languages of ancient India, which was used by Buddha for his preaching. It denotes an ancient Buddhist book containing all the  discourses of Gautam Buddha, which is divided into three main parts - Vinaypitak, Sutpitak and Dhammapitak, and was perhaps carried around by monks.

Conclusions

The idea of writing this post came from my musings on the similarities between the words "Triptych" and "Tripitak". I hope that you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Growing up in India, it is easy to get used to the idea of "God is every where" because in our daily life we can see people praying to cows, trees, mountains, rivers, all the time. At the same time, we can see the wandering Gods - men leading cows bedecked with flowers around the cities, children & adults dressed up as Gods asking for alms, people carrying sacred images or symbols in bowls and buckets to ask for alms on specific days of the weeks at red lights.

I want to mention 2 books that I had read in the 1980s, that have influenced my ideas about religions and gods - Jean M. Auel's series of books (Children of Earth series), starting with the "Clan of the Cave Bear" about the life in a Neanderthal community. Another book that helped me to understand how religions start and grow is "The Source" by James A. Michener in which he looks at different layers of history around a water-spring somewhere in Israel.

Not just about the origins of religions and ideas of Gods, these are great books and if you have not read them, try them.

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Vishnu and Darwin

Some time I ago I had written about references to Other human species in the Indic mythology, arguing that the Indic myths and sacred stories represent the oral traditions and could be the keepers of ancient knowledge from prehistoric times.

 

This post is is a continuation of that thinking, provoked by a sculpture in a temple in Guwahati (Assam, India), shown in the image above. The sculpture is a statue of an avatar of Vishnu.

ORAL TRADITIONS AND PREHISTORIC HUMANS

The first ancestors of the modern man, Homo sapiens, appeared on earth around 70,000 years ago while our knowledge about human history goes back to about 5-6,000 years. This in-between period about which we have no written records is called prehistoric period.

Human beings probably started to speak and developed languages, even before the appearance of modern man. Thus for a very long time, humans only had speech and art to express themselves. This led to different oral traditions in the communities and the memories of most important events were saved as stories and songs and passed along the generations.

These stories changed over time, as they passed from one generation to another and as groups of people broke away from their parent groups and moved to new lands, with people adding new details and new explanations to the old words. When human-groups invented writing, they usually codified these stories as part of their sacred books.

Jayakrishnan Nair in his post "Preserving Long Term Memories" has given a nice overview of oral traditions in safeguarding ancient knowledge across countries and cultures:

Memories are preserved when societies have the ability to retell stories across generations and remain unaffected by military, religious and cultural assaults. Indigenous traditions have foundational ways — through stories, art, ritual — to preserve knowledge. Textual studies won’t reveal the secrets; these have to be experienced.

STORIES ABOUT AVATARS OF VISHNU

Hinduism has many stories about Avatars of God coming down to the earth. For example, in chapter 4 of Bhagwat Gita, verse 7 (Yada, yada hi dharmasaya glani bharwati bharat ...) is about God coming down to earth whenever there is a decline in Dharma.

Stories of different avatars of Vishnu are part of the Indic sacred literature. For example, Bhagwat Puran mentions 24 avatars of Vishnu. Other stories have ten such avatars (Dasavatar). In all these stories, the first four avatars of Vishnu show him as an animal – Mataysa (Fish), Kurma (Tortoise), Varaha (Boar) and Narsimha (half man and half animal).

While visiting Shukreshwar temple in Guwahati, I saw a sculpture of the Matasya (Fish) avatar of Vishnu on one of the walls of a temple (shown in the image above). 

Different authors have linked these stories about Vishnu's avatars to the Darwin's theory of evolution of species. In 19th century, Darwin had proposed that over a period of millions of years, life had evolved from single cells and through natural selection, gradually created more complex organisms. Life had started in oceans, it moved to the land, passing through fishes, amphibians and then birds and animals, till humans evolved from the apes.

People have remarked on how the first 4 avatars of Vishnu seem to reflect the evolution of life in the ocean (Matsya/Fish), its progression in creatures that lived partly in water and partly on land (Kurma/Tortoise), the arrival of mammals (Varaha/Boar) and the birth of humans from their animal progenitors (Narsimha/Half human, half animal). The image below shows a statue of Narsimha avatar from a street in old Delhi.

According to the Dasavatar stories, the fifth avatar of Vishnu was Vamana (Dwarf). This story reminds me of another human species, Homo floresiensis, also called "hobbits", the short humans who lived in Flores island of Indonesia.

These stories do not talk specifically about development of humans from the apes. However Indic sacred literature has many figures such as that of Vanars/Apes (Sugriv, Bali, Hanuman) and other beings such as Asurs, Danavs, Rakshas, etc. These other figures share certain similarities with humans and could be seen as references to other human species during prehistoric times.

If Indic myths speculated on the origins and evolution of life and some times came up with answers similar to those given by the science today, it means that those persons had significant capacities of observation and logical deduction. They did not have the scientific tools to test and confirm their ideas and thus, came up with stories of Vishnu's avatars to explain their observations.

At the same time, the Dasavatar story includes a prophecy about future - the tenth avatar of Vishnu who is supposed to come at the end of Kaliyug. This future avatar is called Kalki and is shown as a man with a sword on a white horse. This myth implies that there was some understanding that there will be other forms of life and that humans are not the end-point of evolution of life. This idea is also consonant with the present view of evolution of species, though the future life-evolution is not likely to be about white horses or swords, rather it might be linked to artificial intelligence and other technological innovations.

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MYTHS

As explained above, the roots of the myths go back to the oral traditions of prehistorical times, before writing was invented and before we had the formal religions.

Emergence of religions like Christianity and Islam, with their specific books such as Bible and Koran, influenced attitudes towards the knowledge contained in ancient myths. Some ancient myths were incorporated in these books and came to be accepted as part of their religious dogmas. Other ancient myths, not included in these books, came to be seen as superstitions or false stories.

Therefore, the common use of the word Myth came to imply that these stories provide wrong and unreliable knowledge and thus, should not be taken seriously.

Most Indic myths are part of Vedic literature, especially of the Puranas. "Mithak", the Sanskrit word used for myths, sounds very similar to the Greek word Mythos. The Sanskrit word "Mithya", derived from Mithak, is also commonly understood as a synonym of lies or untruth. Thus, it would seem that even in Indic traditions, myths are seen as unreliable or wrong knowledge. So I was wondering, if our myths and sacred stories are part of our oral traditions, why and when did we start to consider them as lies?

The word "Mithya" appears in only one Upanishad, the Muktikopanishad, which is considered as the last Upanishad, written relatively recently (probably in seventeenth century). Its use in that Upanishad seems to suggest its meaning was somewhat similar to that of Maya (illusion). Thus is it possible that the negative connotation given to ancient stories or the myths in the Indic traditions was a more recent phenomenon? Certainly, traditional Indian scholars did not consider the Purana stories to be a bunch of lies.

Another explanation can be that in Indic traditions, Purana stories were seen as Itihasa (history) and they had used the word "mithak" to refer to some other stories, while today we have started to club together all our sacred stories as myths because that is how Western scholars have described them over the past couple of centuries?

CONCLUSIONS

Reconstructing the ancient history gives a lot of importance to written documents, skeletons, cultural artifacts and images such as the cave paintings, while the oral history traditions are not given similar importance. This is natural since stories of the oral traditions must have undergone many changes as they were passed from one generation to another, and thus are not as reliable as written texts and pictorial testaments of the prehistoric humans.

Over the last couple of decades technical advances in molecular biology and informatics have also started adding to our knowledge about prehistorical period, for example through reconstruction of genome.

On the other hand, cultures with strong oral traditions that have unbroken links with their prehistoric past through their mythologies and sacred stories, are fast disappearing. Except for some tribal communities, such cultures have survived only in India and in certain parts of Asia, especially where there are significant numbers of Hindus and Buddhists.

At the same time, looking at and understanding this ancient knowledge is becoming increasingly difficult as we tend to look at the myths and ancient stories through the lens of rational approaches, ignoring the original cultural contexts and philosophies that guided their meanings.

However, I feel that speculations about the seeds of historical events and ancient knowledge hidden inside the myths are also important. Looking at myths and sacred stories can be another way of knowing our past, though at present it may not be possible to have objective proofs of such knowledge.

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