Dr. Nanda casts the net of guilt for the Oslo slaughter as wide as possible: “Even though Anders Breivik alone pulled the trigger, the massacre in Norway was by no means the work of Breivik alone. He is a product of years of immersion in a worldwide web of anti-Islamic ideas espoused by cultural purists and nationalists of all stripes.”
What triggered Breivik?
Actually, if we are to believe the sincerity of his manifesto (and Dr. Nanda, who bases her argument on it, clearly does), Breivik the mass-murderer was the “product” of something more elementary. He testifies that he embarked on his crusading mission against Islam in 1999, well before reading up on any “anti-Islamic ideas”. A number of Islam critics profusely cited by Breivik, such as American scholars Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and the websites www.gatesofvienna.org, www.jihadwatch.org and www.brusselsjournal.com, only became active on the Islam front in the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Likewise, Bat Ye’or had written important studies on Islamic history earlier, but her crucial thesis on “Eurabia” only appeared in 2005. The late Oriana Fallaci only turned from left-wing writing to Islam criticism years after Breivik had made up his mind. No, according to his own testimony, he conceived a hatred of Islam as a consequence of bitter personal experience rather than of reading.
This experience included a number of physical batterings he and his friends endured from Muslim gangs, as well as the estrangement from a Pakistani school friend who evolved from a well-integrated Norwegian with Paki roots to an Islamic fanatic living in a Paki ghetto and reportedly involved in a gang-rape of a Norwegian girl. And speaking of rape: a wave of Muslim-on-Kafir rapes in Norway (and likewise France and other places), later documented in detail by the Norwegian Arabist Peder Jensen writing under the pen name Fjordman, was apparently the foremost factor of his budding hate. Empathy with rape victims is a logical source of hate, for who would deny rape victims the right to hate their rapists?
That intellectuals and political parties critical of Islam were not the inspiration for his crime, is explained in so many words by Breivik himself. He chides them for being all talk and no action, being more concerned about their own respectability than for the tough measures required. (p.764) But he realizes, knowing the vileness and meanness of most caviar-leftist intellectuals, that the Islam critics will nonetheless all be smeared by association with him. And he welcomes this prospect. He wants them to be discredited, for that way alone will the common people come to see that talking in seminars and parliaments cannot be the solution. From the Islam-criticizing parties he borrows some rhetoric but emphatically rejects the solutions. Taking the example of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), of which he himself had been a member years ago, he expects it to suffer seriously by association with himself and applauds this as a way to make the population shed the illusion of countering Islamization by democratic means and choose the revolutionary path instead. (p.1401)
This violent alternative has nothing to do with anything written by the Islam critics quoted elsewhere in his manifesto. It taps into a different and well-known source of inspiration: the Far Left. From the 19th-century anarchists to the German Rote Armee Fraktion and the Italian Brigate Rosse of the 1970s and the Maoists of today’s India, left-wing terrorists have always believed that their actions would serve as an ignition mechanism for the revolutionary uprising of the masses. Although their terror never led to the revolution intended (and Lenin, who did succeed in making a revolution, firmly denounced their counterproductive “childhood disease of Communism”), at least it didn’t damage the standing of their ideology of class struggle. The same rhetoric used by left-wing terrorists simply continued to be repeated in the respectable media by Marxist commentators. These handled the question of moral responsibility adroitly by passing the buck on to the “root causes”.
The example of Islam itself is even more inspiring for the Breiviks of this world. After 9/11 all politicians and opinion-makers closed ranks around Islam to shield it from criticism. While the perpetrators themselves were absolutely clear about Islam as their motivation, and while they were applauded as brave Islamic martyrs by Muslims the world over, the media claims of Islam being the religion of peace were never louder. Numerous dignitaries including President G.W. Bush paid visits to mosques and Islamic centres to reassure the Muslims that nobody in his right mind would ever think of connecting the attacks with Islam. Whoever drew the logical conclusions from the Islamic motivation invoked by the perpetrators themselves was denounded as a criminal guilty of “racism”, or as a psychiatric case suffering from a new disease called “Islamophobia”. Never did Islam get a better press than after this murder of three thousand innocent people. If anyone convinced Breivik that blind violence pays, if anyone “created the climate” for his jump from a political conviction to an act of terror, it must be those who so crassly rewarded Islam for 9/11.
Incidentally, neither me nor most of the others who have argued the scholarly case against Islam, have ever espoused “cultural purism” or “nationalism”. While everyone is welcome to cite and borrow our arguments, including even cultural purists and nationalists, there is nothing particularly nationalistic or cultural-puristic to stating the historical and doctrinal facts concerning Islam. Nor will those facts change as a consequence of being mentioned by a disturbed personality, now officially diagnosed by Norway’s court psychiatrists as a “paranoid schizophrenic”.
[to be continued]
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Friday, March 16, 2012
Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (1) Anders Breivik's faith sister
When corpses lie about after a massacre, vultures descend to feast on them. After Anders Behring Breivik’s bomb-attack in downtown Oslo and shoot-out on the nearby island of Utøya, journalists and academics espousing the dominant ideology have indulged their ill-concealed euphoria at this unexpected occasion to smear a school of thought mentioned with partial approval in Breivik’s manifesto, viz. the critics of Islam. Among these exploiters of the massacre, we notice a number of secularists and other anti-Hindu polemicists from India. The most eloquent of these is probably Meera Nanda, fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Institute of Advanced Study, Delhi, who contributed an article to Open Magazine (4 August 2011), titled “Spiritual bedfellows. The Norway massacre and the Indian connection”.
Anders Breivik and Meera Nanda as Crusaders
Dr. Nanda starts with a brief description of the event: “On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, set off bombs in the heart of Oslo. He then went on a shooting spree on a nearby island where young members of the Labor Party were holding a summer camp. All told, he killed 77 people that day, many in their teens. He targetted Labor Party youth because he saw them as part of a multicultural left-wing cabal that was allowing a Muslim takeover of Norway. In his view, they were ‘category A traitors’ who had to be eliminated to save Europe from Islam.”
The first thing to note in Prof. Meera Nanda’s opinion piece on the Oslo massacre is a tiny but telling detail, viz. her spelling “Labor Party”. In British and also in Indian English, as normally used in Open Magazine, the first word would have been spelled “Labour”. But her orthography betrays the American roots of her ideological orientation. In 2005-2007 she was in the employ of the John Templeton Foundation, an American Christian lobby-group that claims science as compatible with and even a product of Christianity. In that position and ever since, “Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite”, as Rajiv Malhotra points out. [Breaking India, Amaryllis, Delhi 2011, p.262]
It is not clear whether Meera Nanda has actually converted to Christianity or is merely one of those secularists who, after the fall and discrediting of Communism, have found new patronage in the US-centred Christian network. But fact is that she champions the Christian cause in India. And it explains the most remarkable oddity about her article on Anders Breivik’s massacre: she conceals from her Indian readership that the killer explicitly defines himself as a Christian. It was impossible to omit mentioning that he modeled himself on the Crusaders, but since the word “Crusade” has passed into general usage without necessary religious connotation, it needed explicitating that he goes out of his way to describe his own religious position as Christian. Not just a Christian by baptism, like myself, but a conscious Christian who, breaking with his secular family background, sought and received baptism in Norway’s Reformed (= Lutheran) Church at age 15.
As a self-styled warrior, he doesn’t lose much time on elaborate pieties, anymore than his Crusader and Templar role models did, but that doesn’t make him any less Christian. Indeed, he does take some time in his manifesto to discuss theology, e.g. to argue (as did many before him during the Romantic period) that the Protestant Churches ought to seek rapprochement with their Catholic mother Church. The Regular-Masonic Lodge of which he was a member required in its charter all members to be believing Christians. In spite of the attempts by American Christians to deny it (e.g. by Timothy Dalrymple http://www.patheos.com/community/philosophicalfragments/2011/07/25/was-anders-breivik-really-a-christian/ and by John Shore http://johnshore.com/2011/07/26/is-breiviks-blood-on-us/) and even to slanderously mislabel him as a “neopagan” (by Roland Shirk http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/who-benefits-whos-behind-it.html), Breivik was very much a Christian. If you’re looking for his counterparts in India, forget about the usual Hindutva bogeys and look for cross-bearers. Think of Swami Lakshmananda’s Maoist-trained Christian murderers, think of Sonia Gandhi, of John Dayal, of Father Dominic Emmanuel, and perhaps of Meera Nanda herself.
The apparent difference in attitude to Islam between neo-Crusaders in Europe and Christian activists in India stems from different circumstances. In Europe, Islam is emerging as the biggest threat to Christianity, bigger than secularism and even bigger than the persecution by the late Communist regimes. Whereas the soft secularism of European liberals (like that of the Nazis) has left Christians free to practise their religion even after losing their grip on the state; and whereas the hard secularism of the Communists had only offered a negative alternative, a void that Christianity has been able partly to fill up again; Islam offers a positive replacement for Christianity, one that can strike far deeper roots than secularism, one that can consign Christianity to the history books the way it did in North Africa ca. 700 CE or in Turkey more recently.
Short-sighted Christians welcome Islam as an ally against secularism, e.g. after the murder of Islam-critical filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004) and the Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis (2006), the left-leaning Christian fundamentalist party Christen Unie in the Netherlands tried to use the high tide of Islamic activism against “blasphemy” to reactivate the country’s dormant anti-blasphemy law. But those Christians who can read demographic data and who are in touch with the persecuted fellow-Christians in Muslim countries, are alarmed at the rising presence of Islam in their midst.
In India, by contrast, the threat of lslam to Christianity is not that imminent. Locally, it is felt acutely and is provoking reactions similar to what Breivik dreamed of for Europe. Thus, in Nagaland, the Christian-dominated National Socialist Council of Nagalim has decreed the death penalty for Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants marrying native girls. In Kerala, after the 2001 census showed a decline in Christian (and Hindu) percentage in favour of the fast-growing Muslim community, some bishops have called on their flock to suspend their cooperation with the Government’s birth-control policy and have at least four children per couple. But in the well-to-do places frequented by JNU professors, the malodorous presence of idolatrous Hinduism is a more immediate concern. There, Islam is a welcome ally in a common minorities’ front against Hinduism. As long as both Islam and Christianity have Hindu society to prey upon, the latter acts as a buffer between the two. That is why a Templeton Foundation agent on a mission to demonize Hindu resistance seizes on this opportunity to criminalize criticism of Islam by associating it with Breivik.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Anders Breivik and Meera Nanda as Crusaders
Dr. Nanda starts with a brief description of the event: “On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, set off bombs in the heart of Oslo. He then went on a shooting spree on a nearby island where young members of the Labor Party were holding a summer camp. All told, he killed 77 people that day, many in their teens. He targetted Labor Party youth because he saw them as part of a multicultural left-wing cabal that was allowing a Muslim takeover of Norway. In his view, they were ‘category A traitors’ who had to be eliminated to save Europe from Islam.”
The first thing to note in Prof. Meera Nanda’s opinion piece on the Oslo massacre is a tiny but telling detail, viz. her spelling “Labor Party”. In British and also in Indian English, as normally used in Open Magazine, the first word would have been spelled “Labour”. But her orthography betrays the American roots of her ideological orientation. In 2005-2007 she was in the employ of the John Templeton Foundation, an American Christian lobby-group that claims science as compatible with and even a product of Christianity. In that position and ever since, “Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite”, as Rajiv Malhotra points out. [Breaking India, Amaryllis, Delhi 2011, p.262]
It is not clear whether Meera Nanda has actually converted to Christianity or is merely one of those secularists who, after the fall and discrediting of Communism, have found new patronage in the US-centred Christian network. But fact is that she champions the Christian cause in India. And it explains the most remarkable oddity about her article on Anders Breivik’s massacre: she conceals from her Indian readership that the killer explicitly defines himself as a Christian. It was impossible to omit mentioning that he modeled himself on the Crusaders, but since the word “Crusade” has passed into general usage without necessary religious connotation, it needed explicitating that he goes out of his way to describe his own religious position as Christian. Not just a Christian by baptism, like myself, but a conscious Christian who, breaking with his secular family background, sought and received baptism in Norway’s Reformed (= Lutheran) Church at age 15.
As a self-styled warrior, he doesn’t lose much time on elaborate pieties, anymore than his Crusader and Templar role models did, but that doesn’t make him any less Christian. Indeed, he does take some time in his manifesto to discuss theology, e.g. to argue (as did many before him during the Romantic period) that the Protestant Churches ought to seek rapprochement with their Catholic mother Church. The Regular-Masonic Lodge of which he was a member required in its charter all members to be believing Christians. In spite of the attempts by American Christians to deny it (e.g. by Timothy Dalrymple http://www.patheos.com/community/philosophicalfragments/2011/07/25/was-anders-breivik-really-a-christian/ and by John Shore http://johnshore.com/2011/07/26/is-breiviks-blood-on-us/) and even to slanderously mislabel him as a “neopagan” (by Roland Shirk http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/who-benefits-whos-behind-it.html), Breivik was very much a Christian. If you’re looking for his counterparts in India, forget about the usual Hindutva bogeys and look for cross-bearers. Think of Swami Lakshmananda’s Maoist-trained Christian murderers, think of Sonia Gandhi, of John Dayal, of Father Dominic Emmanuel, and perhaps of Meera Nanda herself.
The apparent difference in attitude to Islam between neo-Crusaders in Europe and Christian activists in India stems from different circumstances. In Europe, Islam is emerging as the biggest threat to Christianity, bigger than secularism and even bigger than the persecution by the late Communist regimes. Whereas the soft secularism of European liberals (like that of the Nazis) has left Christians free to practise their religion even after losing their grip on the state; and whereas the hard secularism of the Communists had only offered a negative alternative, a void that Christianity has been able partly to fill up again; Islam offers a positive replacement for Christianity, one that can strike far deeper roots than secularism, one that can consign Christianity to the history books the way it did in North Africa ca. 700 CE or in Turkey more recently.
Short-sighted Christians welcome Islam as an ally against secularism, e.g. after the murder of Islam-critical filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004) and the Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis (2006), the left-leaning Christian fundamentalist party Christen Unie in the Netherlands tried to use the high tide of Islamic activism against “blasphemy” to reactivate the country’s dormant anti-blasphemy law. But those Christians who can read demographic data and who are in touch with the persecuted fellow-Christians in Muslim countries, are alarmed at the rising presence of Islam in their midst.
In India, by contrast, the threat of lslam to Christianity is not that imminent. Locally, it is felt acutely and is provoking reactions similar to what Breivik dreamed of for Europe. Thus, in Nagaland, the Christian-dominated National Socialist Council of Nagalim has decreed the death penalty for Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants marrying native girls. In Kerala, after the 2001 census showed a decline in Christian (and Hindu) percentage in favour of the fast-growing Muslim community, some bishops have called on their flock to suspend their cooperation with the Government’s birth-control policy and have at least four children per couple. But in the well-to-do places frequented by JNU professors, the malodorous presence of idolatrous Hinduism is a more immediate concern. There, Islam is a welcome ally in a common minorities’ front against Hinduism. As long as both Islam and Christianity have Hindu society to prey upon, the latter acts as a buffer between the two. That is why a Templeton Foundation agent on a mission to demonize Hindu resistance seizes on this opportunity to criminalize criticism of Islam by associating it with Breivik.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Saturday, March 10, 2012
History of Hindu India for everyman
Nowadays, multiculturalist state authorities in Western countries encourage the newer and more exotic religious denominations to produce textbooks explaining in simple language their own traditions and doctrines. While formally serving as textbooks for the religion’s own followers and their children, their interest for the authorities lies in the religion’s self-presentation to society at large. This way they know what gestures to make and what gaffes to avoid, and what holidays to acknowledge in the official calendar. An additional benefit is that it streamlines the religions’ self-understanding in a multiculturalism-friendly sense: even religions with a record of intolerance find they cannot get away with a straightforward restatement of their monopolistic claims on truth, and end up teaching pluralism to their children in spite of their inherited dogmas.
This latter consideration is really quite unnecessary in the case of Hinduism, because the Hindus never needed any prodding from outside to take a pluralistic view of religion. Hinduism itself is already a commonwealth of communities, doctrines and practices, so it is thoroughly comfortable with peaceful co-existence in spite of differences. The Dutch, British and American textbooks of Hinduism that we have seen are simply being authentic when they declare unisono that Hinduism has a hoary tradition of heartfelt pluralism. Thus also the latest Hinduism textbook, under review here, The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times, by the editors of Hinduism Today magazine (Kauai, Hawaii) and Prof. em. Shiva Bajpai. It says: “Hinduism does not dictate one way as the only way. Hindus believe ‘truth is one, paths are many’” (p.6), and: “Hindus accept the spiritual efficacy of other paths and never proselytize” (p.107) So, no chest-thumping let alone the sound of war-drums in this pleasantly shaped Social Studies “textbook for all ages”.
General appreciation
The internal plurality of Hinduism is at once a major challenge for those who cherish an ambition to present the religion to the world in a not-too-bulky textbook. In comparing Dutch and British textbooks published by the Arya Samaj, Vivekananda Centre, Vishva Hindu Parishad, ISKCON and other Hindu groups, we could not help noticing a certain bias in favour of the publishers’ own sectarian assumptions in spite of a serious over-all effort to make the presentation inclusive of all strands of Hinduism.
Thus, the ISKCON textbook speaks of the Devas (normally translated as “gods” or “deities”) as “the demigods”, in keeping with the quasi-monotheistic ISKCON view that only Krishna is God, all while recognizing the other gods as lesser but nonetheless divine beings. The edits proposed by the Vedic Foundation in the California textbook affair included the systematic replacement of “the gods” by “God” or “the manifestations of God”, obviously from an internalized Anglo-modernist bias (borrowed from Christianity) against polytheism. What such organizations should keep in mind during their editing is whether every Hindu can recognize his own religion in the description they give of it. We don’t believe that the Vedic seers thought of Indra as merely a “demi-god”, or that today’s ordinary Hindu devotee thinks of Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati, the three deities he worships on Diwali, as lacking in distinct identities.
The great step forward made in this book is that it is consistent in its attempt to represent Hinduism rather than just one of its sects. While some textbooks try to confine Hinduism to the Vedic tradition, here we read that by 600 BCE, “the social, religious and philosophical ideas and practices central to Hinduism are fully evident. These are in continuity with the religion of the Indus-Sarasvati culture, the teachings of the Vedas, Dravidian culture and elements of the tribal religions.” (p.4) If any bias was to be expected here, given the affiliation of the Hinduism Today editors, it would be to Tamil Shaiva bhakti, embodied in the tradition of the Nayanar poets. These get hardly half a page (p.33), and after having been ignored in so many introductions to Hinduism, it was about time they got their due. (For the same reason, it is commendable that Tiruvalluvar, recently honoured with a giant statue on India’s southern tip, is highlighted, p.77-78.)
The general structure of the book is chronological, from the Vedic poets and Harappan cities down to modern Indian democracy and its state religion, “secularism”. These chapters are interspersed as appropriate with cultural intermezzos on dress, food, the arts, rituals, pilgrimage cycles, etc. As a didactic device, every chapter opens with a challenge about what you would do in a thorny situation in which Hindus have found themselves, and ends with a list of exam-type questions. Where would you go if you lived in a Harappan village and you found the river on your doorstep, the Saraswati, was drying up? If in the present age, you are given the chance to go to college, would you abandon your family of blacksmiths back in the village? If after growing up in the West with a resolve to be independent, you meet the prospective groom your country-born parents have sought out for you, what would you do?
The hard part
And when faced with the back-breaking toleration tax and numerous discriminations imposed by the Delhi Sultans and Aurangzeb, would you convert to Islam? For indeed, this book doesn’t avoid the unpleasant issues of Islamic persecution and “British rule’s mixed blessings” (p.62). We can only commend the spirit in which the authors go about this challenge: “We now enter what historians call a ‘difficult period’ of Indian history. (…) Muslim historians recount in detail the destruction of cities, sacking of temples, slaughter of noncombatants and enslavement of captives. British accounts reveal the mismanagement and greed that led to famines that killed tens of millions of people and ruined the local industry during their rule. (…) It is difficult to study such unpleasant pasts in a way that leads to understanding, not hatred. (…) True reconciliation comes when people honestly face the past, forgive misdeeds, learn to truly respect each other’s religious beliefs and traditions and promise to move forward in peace.” (p.42)
Very briefly, the canard is laid to rest that Hindus lost to Muslims because of the caste system, a claim heard from both anti-Hindu missionaries and Hindu reformists. In fact, many castes participated in warfare together. As any strategist could have told the moralizing caste-mongers, victory was by virtue of “superior military organization, strategy, training, weapons, horses and mobility”, which the natives had neglected. (p.45) Conversely, “the caste system was a main obstacle to conversion. It guaranteed to Hindus a secure identity and place in their community, which they would lose by converting.” (p.49) In their revolt against Muslim rule, Hindus observed a certain morality of warfare: “While Shivaji was not above sacking an enemy’s city if he needed the money, he did not kill noncombatants, take slaves or damage Muslim holy sites.” (p.48)
Far from fostering resentment, these chapters breathe a spirit of positive thinking. As illustrated by the title of chapter 3, “Hinduism endures: 1100 to 1850”, it emphasizes Hinduism’s capacity for survival over its losses. In the time of Muslim and then British domination, “the country remained overwhelmingly Hindu despite foreign domination and religious oppression”. (p.41) Since all is well that ends well, this makes it easier for Hindus to take a cool view of these painful episodes than for, say, the Zoroastrians or the Australian Aboriginals.
If anything, this book errs on the side of being over-diplomatic in describing inter-religious conflict. Consider this: “India’s transition to freedom brought with it a terrible tragedy. Pakistan was partitioned from India on the basis of religion. A huge migration followed as 7.5 m Muslims moved to Pakistan from India and an equal number of Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan.” (p.65) The first two sentences keep the active agent of Partition out of view, as if it was impersonal destiny overcoming India, when in fact it was the Muslim League’s violent agitation that forced both the British and Congress into compliance. The last sentence suggests a symmetry between the Muslim and Hindu-Sikh “migrations”. In fact, Hindus and Sikhs were terrorized into fleeing their ancestral homes which they had wanted to stay inside multicultural India, whereas the Muslims simply moved to the promised land they had carved out for themselves (with the seeming exception of East Panjab where the Muslims were put to flight, but only after millions of hapless Hindu-Sikh refugees from their own new state started streaming in with their horror stories).
Historicity
On the whole, this book respects the findings of modern scholarship, rather than sweepingly committing its allegiance to either the traditionalist or the secularist position. Thus, rather than speaking out prematurely, it acknowledges uncertainty where appropriate: “The relationship between the people of the Indus-Saravati civilization and those who composed the Vedas is not clearly understood.” (p.3) Rather than triumphantly dismissing the Aryan Invasion Theory as a well-refuted colonial conspiracy, it soberly observes: “Many scholars now dispute this theory because all the evidence for it is questionable.” (p.4)
Another nod to prevailing scholarly custom is the periodization implicit in this chapter title: “Hindu India: 300 to 1100 CE” (p.21), for indeed, the Orientalists divided Indian history into a Vedic, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and British period. Concerning the authorship of the Vedas, the existing belief is noted: “Hindus regard them as spoken by God” (p.3), only to return to the realistic assumption of human authorship: “the holy texts had to be composed well before 2000 BCE” (because by that time the mighty Saraswati had shriveled, p.3), and “a few [women] even composed several of the holy Vedic hymns” (p.5).So, clearly the Vedic hymns were the handiwork of human poets.
On the other hand, introducing the epic’s hero Krishna as “the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu” (p.9), without quote marks, detracts from the book’s purpose of teaching “history”. Let alone the secularist deconstruction, even in the epic itself he is a down-to-earth war consultant and womanizer suffering an all too human fate, with most of the Bharata clan killed in the fraternal war in which he guides them, all his own relatives killing each other while drunk, and he himself dying in a silly hunting accident. It is only in later interpolations like the Bhagavad Gita that he gets deified.
Fault-finding
In a book review, it is only proper to indulge in some fault-finding, if only by way of useful suggestion to the publishers for well-deserved future editions. So, please bear with the pedantry that follows.
There are extremely few spelling errors in this book, but I found a few on the maps, where Tapti is rendered as “Tapi” (p.112), and Mizoram as “Mizeram” (p.87). The river-name Satlej is given the sloppy British-colonial transcription Sutluj, following the same confusing pattern as Panjab/”Punjab”, Pashtu/”Pushtu”, Pandit/”Pundit”. No big deal, but considering the importance the Vedic seers accorded to correct pronunciation, why not just do our best? And speaking of maps, the map of pilgrimage sites (p.87) should have covered the Islam-occupied parts of the subcontinent along with the Republic of remainder-India, so as to include places like Hinglaj and Nankana Sahib.
The epic’s name Mahâbhârata does not mean “Great India” (p.9). Rather, it means “great [epic of Vedic king] Bharata’s clan”, just as Bhâratanatyam, discussed on p.55, refers not to Bhârat/India but to the dance style conceived or at least described by an ancient choreographer named Bharata.
Likewise, it is admittedly traditional but by scholarly standards not acceptable to analyze the word guru thus: “gu means darkness and ru means remover.” (p.14) Well, guru is cognate with Latin gravis, whence English gravity, and means “heavy”. Anyone is free to fantasize meanings into words, but a textbook should aspire to higher standards.
The history of the caste system is complicated and the authors have wisely chosen to treat it only briefly. Still, they could have done better than this: “Later on, the varnas divided into hundreds of sub-sections called jatis (castes).” (p.4) Varna and jâti are two distinct systems that ended up combining, and if at all one preceded the other, certainly jati came first. Varna is the layeredness of complex societies, characteristic of late-Vedic society when it started expanding from the Saraswati-Yamuna region to the rest of India; jati means “tribe” and was the social formation prevailing in most of India. As these tribes integrated into the wider Hindu society, they retained their identity through endogamy and became castes. In most of India they received or grabbed a place in the varna hierarchy, but that was mainly a ritual label immaterial to their internal self-organization. Varna is late-Vedic, jati is pre-Vedic.
Finally, in our opinion it was not a good idea to include a section on the chakras (p.94-95). Kundalini yoga and the chakra system are medieval innovations, i.e. fairly recent by Indian standards, and have remained very marginal before becoming fads in the 20th century. Of all pre-Independence Hindus, 99% never heard of them. Writing their exact history is a job that largely remains to be done, and an introductory textbook is not the place to do it.
That said, among social studies textbooks this book is now the best introduction to Hinduism.
Shiva Bajpai & editors of Hinduism Today magazine, 2011: The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times. A Textbook for All Ages (a Social Studies textbook), Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa (Hawaii), 119 pp., US $ 19.95, ISBN 978-1-934145-38-8, also available as e-book.
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This latter consideration is really quite unnecessary in the case of Hinduism, because the Hindus never needed any prodding from outside to take a pluralistic view of religion. Hinduism itself is already a commonwealth of communities, doctrines and practices, so it is thoroughly comfortable with peaceful co-existence in spite of differences. The Dutch, British and American textbooks of Hinduism that we have seen are simply being authentic when they declare unisono that Hinduism has a hoary tradition of heartfelt pluralism. Thus also the latest Hinduism textbook, under review here, The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times, by the editors of Hinduism Today magazine (Kauai, Hawaii) and Prof. em. Shiva Bajpai. It says: “Hinduism does not dictate one way as the only way. Hindus believe ‘truth is one, paths are many’” (p.6), and: “Hindus accept the spiritual efficacy of other paths and never proselytize” (p.107) So, no chest-thumping let alone the sound of war-drums in this pleasantly shaped Social Studies “textbook for all ages”.
General appreciation
The internal plurality of Hinduism is at once a major challenge for those who cherish an ambition to present the religion to the world in a not-too-bulky textbook. In comparing Dutch and British textbooks published by the Arya Samaj, Vivekananda Centre, Vishva Hindu Parishad, ISKCON and other Hindu groups, we could not help noticing a certain bias in favour of the publishers’ own sectarian assumptions in spite of a serious over-all effort to make the presentation inclusive of all strands of Hinduism.
Thus, the ISKCON textbook speaks of the Devas (normally translated as “gods” or “deities”) as “the demigods”, in keeping with the quasi-monotheistic ISKCON view that only Krishna is God, all while recognizing the other gods as lesser but nonetheless divine beings. The edits proposed by the Vedic Foundation in the California textbook affair included the systematic replacement of “the gods” by “God” or “the manifestations of God”, obviously from an internalized Anglo-modernist bias (borrowed from Christianity) against polytheism. What such organizations should keep in mind during their editing is whether every Hindu can recognize his own religion in the description they give of it. We don’t believe that the Vedic seers thought of Indra as merely a “demi-god”, or that today’s ordinary Hindu devotee thinks of Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati, the three deities he worships on Diwali, as lacking in distinct identities.
The great step forward made in this book is that it is consistent in its attempt to represent Hinduism rather than just one of its sects. While some textbooks try to confine Hinduism to the Vedic tradition, here we read that by 600 BCE, “the social, religious and philosophical ideas and practices central to Hinduism are fully evident. These are in continuity with the religion of the Indus-Sarasvati culture, the teachings of the Vedas, Dravidian culture and elements of the tribal religions.” (p.4) If any bias was to be expected here, given the affiliation of the Hinduism Today editors, it would be to Tamil Shaiva bhakti, embodied in the tradition of the Nayanar poets. These get hardly half a page (p.33), and after having been ignored in so many introductions to Hinduism, it was about time they got their due. (For the same reason, it is commendable that Tiruvalluvar, recently honoured with a giant statue on India’s southern tip, is highlighted, p.77-78.)
The general structure of the book is chronological, from the Vedic poets and Harappan cities down to modern Indian democracy and its state religion, “secularism”. These chapters are interspersed as appropriate with cultural intermezzos on dress, food, the arts, rituals, pilgrimage cycles, etc. As a didactic device, every chapter opens with a challenge about what you would do in a thorny situation in which Hindus have found themselves, and ends with a list of exam-type questions. Where would you go if you lived in a Harappan village and you found the river on your doorstep, the Saraswati, was drying up? If in the present age, you are given the chance to go to college, would you abandon your family of blacksmiths back in the village? If after growing up in the West with a resolve to be independent, you meet the prospective groom your country-born parents have sought out for you, what would you do?
The hard part
And when faced with the back-breaking toleration tax and numerous discriminations imposed by the Delhi Sultans and Aurangzeb, would you convert to Islam? For indeed, this book doesn’t avoid the unpleasant issues of Islamic persecution and “British rule’s mixed blessings” (p.62). We can only commend the spirit in which the authors go about this challenge: “We now enter what historians call a ‘difficult period’ of Indian history. (…) Muslim historians recount in detail the destruction of cities, sacking of temples, slaughter of noncombatants and enslavement of captives. British accounts reveal the mismanagement and greed that led to famines that killed tens of millions of people and ruined the local industry during their rule. (…) It is difficult to study such unpleasant pasts in a way that leads to understanding, not hatred. (…) True reconciliation comes when people honestly face the past, forgive misdeeds, learn to truly respect each other’s religious beliefs and traditions and promise to move forward in peace.” (p.42)
Very briefly, the canard is laid to rest that Hindus lost to Muslims because of the caste system, a claim heard from both anti-Hindu missionaries and Hindu reformists. In fact, many castes participated in warfare together. As any strategist could have told the moralizing caste-mongers, victory was by virtue of “superior military organization, strategy, training, weapons, horses and mobility”, which the natives had neglected. (p.45) Conversely, “the caste system was a main obstacle to conversion. It guaranteed to Hindus a secure identity and place in their community, which they would lose by converting.” (p.49) In their revolt against Muslim rule, Hindus observed a certain morality of warfare: “While Shivaji was not above sacking an enemy’s city if he needed the money, he did not kill noncombatants, take slaves or damage Muslim holy sites.” (p.48)
Far from fostering resentment, these chapters breathe a spirit of positive thinking. As illustrated by the title of chapter 3, “Hinduism endures: 1100 to 1850”, it emphasizes Hinduism’s capacity for survival over its losses. In the time of Muslim and then British domination, “the country remained overwhelmingly Hindu despite foreign domination and religious oppression”. (p.41) Since all is well that ends well, this makes it easier for Hindus to take a cool view of these painful episodes than for, say, the Zoroastrians or the Australian Aboriginals.
If anything, this book errs on the side of being over-diplomatic in describing inter-religious conflict. Consider this: “India’s transition to freedom brought with it a terrible tragedy. Pakistan was partitioned from India on the basis of religion. A huge migration followed as 7.5 m Muslims moved to Pakistan from India and an equal number of Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan.” (p.65) The first two sentences keep the active agent of Partition out of view, as if it was impersonal destiny overcoming India, when in fact it was the Muslim League’s violent agitation that forced both the British and Congress into compliance. The last sentence suggests a symmetry between the Muslim and Hindu-Sikh “migrations”. In fact, Hindus and Sikhs were terrorized into fleeing their ancestral homes which they had wanted to stay inside multicultural India, whereas the Muslims simply moved to the promised land they had carved out for themselves (with the seeming exception of East Panjab where the Muslims were put to flight, but only after millions of hapless Hindu-Sikh refugees from their own new state started streaming in with their horror stories).
Historicity
On the whole, this book respects the findings of modern scholarship, rather than sweepingly committing its allegiance to either the traditionalist or the secularist position. Thus, rather than speaking out prematurely, it acknowledges uncertainty where appropriate: “The relationship between the people of the Indus-Saravati civilization and those who composed the Vedas is not clearly understood.” (p.3) Rather than triumphantly dismissing the Aryan Invasion Theory as a well-refuted colonial conspiracy, it soberly observes: “Many scholars now dispute this theory because all the evidence for it is questionable.” (p.4)
Another nod to prevailing scholarly custom is the periodization implicit in this chapter title: “Hindu India: 300 to 1100 CE” (p.21), for indeed, the Orientalists divided Indian history into a Vedic, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and British period. Concerning the authorship of the Vedas, the existing belief is noted: “Hindus regard them as spoken by God” (p.3), only to return to the realistic assumption of human authorship: “the holy texts had to be composed well before 2000 BCE” (because by that time the mighty Saraswati had shriveled, p.3), and “a few [women] even composed several of the holy Vedic hymns” (p.5).So, clearly the Vedic hymns were the handiwork of human poets.
On the other hand, introducing the epic’s hero Krishna as “the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu” (p.9), without quote marks, detracts from the book’s purpose of teaching “history”. Let alone the secularist deconstruction, even in the epic itself he is a down-to-earth war consultant and womanizer suffering an all too human fate, with most of the Bharata clan killed in the fraternal war in which he guides them, all his own relatives killing each other while drunk, and he himself dying in a silly hunting accident. It is only in later interpolations like the Bhagavad Gita that he gets deified.
Fault-finding
In a book review, it is only proper to indulge in some fault-finding, if only by way of useful suggestion to the publishers for well-deserved future editions. So, please bear with the pedantry that follows.
There are extremely few spelling errors in this book, but I found a few on the maps, where Tapti is rendered as “Tapi” (p.112), and Mizoram as “Mizeram” (p.87). The river-name Satlej is given the sloppy British-colonial transcription Sutluj, following the same confusing pattern as Panjab/”Punjab”, Pashtu/”Pushtu”, Pandit/”Pundit”. No big deal, but considering the importance the Vedic seers accorded to correct pronunciation, why not just do our best? And speaking of maps, the map of pilgrimage sites (p.87) should have covered the Islam-occupied parts of the subcontinent along with the Republic of remainder-India, so as to include places like Hinglaj and Nankana Sahib.
The epic’s name Mahâbhârata does not mean “Great India” (p.9). Rather, it means “great [epic of Vedic king] Bharata’s clan”, just as Bhâratanatyam, discussed on p.55, refers not to Bhârat/India but to the dance style conceived or at least described by an ancient choreographer named Bharata.
Likewise, it is admittedly traditional but by scholarly standards not acceptable to analyze the word guru thus: “gu means darkness and ru means remover.” (p.14) Well, guru is cognate with Latin gravis, whence English gravity, and means “heavy”. Anyone is free to fantasize meanings into words, but a textbook should aspire to higher standards.
The history of the caste system is complicated and the authors have wisely chosen to treat it only briefly. Still, they could have done better than this: “Later on, the varnas divided into hundreds of sub-sections called jatis (castes).” (p.4) Varna and jâti are two distinct systems that ended up combining, and if at all one preceded the other, certainly jati came first. Varna is the layeredness of complex societies, characteristic of late-Vedic society when it started expanding from the Saraswati-Yamuna region to the rest of India; jati means “tribe” and was the social formation prevailing in most of India. As these tribes integrated into the wider Hindu society, they retained their identity through endogamy and became castes. In most of India they received or grabbed a place in the varna hierarchy, but that was mainly a ritual label immaterial to their internal self-organization. Varna is late-Vedic, jati is pre-Vedic.
Finally, in our opinion it was not a good idea to include a section on the chakras (p.94-95). Kundalini yoga and the chakra system are medieval innovations, i.e. fairly recent by Indian standards, and have remained very marginal before becoming fads in the 20th century. Of all pre-Independence Hindus, 99% never heard of them. Writing their exact history is a job that largely remains to be done, and an introductory textbook is not the place to do it.
That said, among social studies textbooks this book is now the best introduction to Hinduism.
Shiva Bajpai & editors of Hinduism Today magazine, 2011: The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times. A Textbook for All Ages (a Social Studies textbook), Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa (Hawaii), 119 pp., US $ 19.95, ISBN 978-1-934145-38-8, also available as e-book.
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Vedic Monotheism? 2. Discovering monotheism underneath polytheism
Christian and post-Christian scholars have often attempted to recast other religions in the monotheistic mould. This endeavour was usually motivated by one of two contradictory motives, both of them presupposing a superiority for monotheism. Either its intention was sympathetic, in the case of liberal-Christian or post-Christians students of other religions: they tried to upgrade them from the general Pagan polytheistic category so as to make them more respectable. This was mostly the background of 19th-century descriptions of Buddhism or Zoroastrianism as monotheistic. Alternatively, it was a missionary stratagem to wean populations earmarked for conversion away from their polytheistic roots in their past or in the larger society to which they belonged. In particular, Catholic missionaries in India have tried to prove that tribal religions are basically monotheistic, hence ”not Hindu”, and at any rate typologically closer to Christianity than to Hinduism.
2.1. Monotheistic Buddhism?
When the study of Buddhism was first taken up by European Orientalists, even basic data about the religion were unknown or misunderstood. Thus, it took a while before scholars realized that the Buddha had been Indian rather than Chinese. After all, there were no Buddhists in India then, while they were omnipresent in China and her cultural satellites: Korea, Japan, Vietnam. And when the scholars started exploring Buddhism’s Indian genesis, they tended at first to project European and Christian experiences onto the Buddhist account.
As a towering figure who launched a distinct system of philosophy and practice within an existing Brahminism-dominated religious landscape, the Buddha has been likened to Moses challenging the idolaters, to Jesus challenging the Pharisees and the Temple establishment, and to Martin Luther challenging the Papacy. Whether his role was similarly revolutionary is another discussion (we don’t believe it), but at any rate, even if it was, this doesn’t imply that his doctrine was similar to that of the said Abrahamic figures. Yet, one conclusion briefly drawn from this purported likeness was that just like Moses and later Mohammed, the Buddha threw a monotheistic challenge into a polytheistic environment.
This idea was only a brief blip in the development of Buddhist studies, swiftly refuted by the Orientalists. It was too obviously untenable, for the word “God” or some credible equivalent is simply absent from the Buddhist canon. Yes, gods in the plural play an auxiliary role, as when Brahma and Indra are witnesses to the Buddha’s Awakening. In later devotional Buddhism, the Buddha is worshipped, but in various personae such as the Amitabha Buddha, and along with the Bodhisattvas Maitreya, Avalokiteshvara, Guanyin and others. Much of the Hindu pantheon was represented in Buddhist temples and taken along during Buddhist expansion abroad, so that Saraswati or Ganesha can be found venerated in Japan. However, these gods play no role in the original Buddhist method of Liberation, and the Buddha is never presented as their spokesman. The message he teaches is of his own yogic discovery, not a divine revelation. In that respect, Buddhism is atheistic. So, polytheistic on the one hand and atheistic on the other, Buddhism is anything but monotheistic.
Wherever the gods are acknowledged, Buddhism makes no fuss about their number. It never cares to replace the many with the One. So, it fails both tests for qualifying as monotheistic: it doesn’t worship a single God, and it doesn’t denounce or oppose the worship of the many gods.
It goes without saying that Buddhism never militated against so-called idolatry (mūrti-pūjā) either. First of all, the use of sculpted idols was probably rare in the India of the Buddha’s day. There simply were no idols to smash. Secondly, once the Buddhists came in touch with the Indo-Greek tradition of religious sculpture, they adopted it to create what was to become the world’s most popular sculpture: the Buddha statue. Later, Muslims in the area would name the generic phenomenon of idols after this proliferating Buddhist idol: būt. In Persian, būt-parast became the standard term for idol-worshipper.
However, this much is true that the Buddha himself is said to have forbidden his disciples to make images of him. If historical (and why not?), that injunction was not a stricture against the use of idols but rather against his own deification. He reasoned that if people were going to extol him above themselves, they would see his yogic method as likewise belonging to a level above their own, and would consequently fail to practise it.
2.2. The one and only Ahura Mazda?
The first translators of the Asian religious source texts were children of their time and religious background. They projected themes from Jewish and Christian history onto Zarathustra, the Buddha, Confucius and other Oriental "prophets". Among these was the struggle against polytheism and idolatry. They credited Zarathustra with being a pioneer of monotheism. Unlike in the case of the Buddha, the monotheistic tag has stuck to Zarathustra. In non-specialist circles, the received wisdom nowadays is that he was a kind of Iranian Moses and that his religion may also have influenced the Israelites in a pro-monotheistic sense.
The Mazdean or Zoroastrian religion, like ancient Vedicism and most ancient Indo-European religions, was aniconic, i.e. it didn't use "idols" or representations of the gods. Iranian Muslims label Zoroastrians as ātiš-parast, "fire-worshippers", distinct from the idol-worship practised by the Pharaonic Egyptians and by ancient Semites such as the Ugaritics, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, pre-Moses Israelites and the pre-Islamic Arabs. When the Muslim conquerors of Central Asia encountered the Buddhists with their elaborate sculpture art depicting the Buddha, they termed them būt-parast, "worshippers of Buddha statues", then retro-actively generalized this term to all "idol-worshippers". But they did not apply it to the Mazdeans.
It is possible, but not attested in so many words in the Bible, that the Israelites had a higher opinion of the Mazdean religion than of the idolatry of the Semites in Canaan and Babylon. As an aniconic form of worship, it may have seemed pleasantly familiar to the Israelites, who were recent converts to aniconism. They were at any rate grateful to the Persian emperor Cyrus for liberating them from Babylonian captivity in 539 BC. The Bible editors even have their god Yahweh call Cyrus his anointed and his shepherd (Isaiah 45:1-13; 44:28; 2 Chronicles 36:22,23; Ezra 1:1-11). He and his successor Darius organized the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem by Zerubbabel and the codification of the Bible by Ezra (Ezra 5:13-17; 6:1-16). A certain Jewish-Persian friendship resulted, lastly in the form of active Iranian cooperation with Israel under the Shah; as late as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Iraqi Arabs chided their Persian enemies for being friends of the Jews. However, neither from the common aniconism nor from this historical alliance can we deduce that the Mazdeans shared the monotheism of the Jews.
There are other elements in common between the two religions, probably borrowed by Judaism from Zoroastrianism. Thus, the belief in a future saviour already existed in the Avesta, where the Saošyant, “benefactor”, virgin-born from among Zarathustra’s own progeny, is awaited to set all injustices right. Some Bible scholars think that the Jewish notion of the awaited Messiah (Mašiah, “anointed one”, i.e. heir to King David’s throne) came about as an adaptation of this Mazdean concept. Likewise, the replacement of the belief in the afterlife as a mere shadowland with the notion of a final judgment showing the deceased the way to either heaven or hell, has been attributed to Mazdean influence (after having earlier been repudiated by the Israelites as a characteristic part of the Pagan Egyptian religion). Finally, the concept of angels and demons is said to be Mazdean in origin.
However, none of these modern interpretations of the Avestan and Biblical data, much less the Bible text itself, attests or proves the idea of Ahura Mazdā, “Lord Wisdom”, as the one and only god of the Mazdeans, to the exclusion of all others. Given the Bible’s focus on monotheism, it would have been logical if they had highlighted the discovery of a ready-made monotheism among a second and friendly nation.
On the contrary, some Bible commentators see an allusion to the ancient faith of the Persians as utterly Pagan in Ezechiel 8:16, which describes people bowing to the rising sun, an act of sun-worship comparable to the Hindu Sūrya-namaskār, which it next denounces as an “abomination”. Since Ezechiel predated the Persian conquest of Babylon, this would require a later interpolation; which is common enough in the Bible but unnecessary here, because no doubt other West-Asian peoples also practised sun-worship. However, Christian sources later confirm the same about the Iranian “Magians”, that they were sun-worshippers. Hence also the Magians’ enthusiasm for astrology after their conquest of Babylon (it is as astrologers who had “seen His star in the East”, that the three Magoi visit the newborn Jesus), and their purely solar calendar centred on Spring Equinox or Newroz.
The Norwegian scholar Prods Oktor Skjaervo has recently argued [“Zarathustra and monotheism”, in Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ed.: Rethinking Revolutionary Monotheism, Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns 2011] definitively that Zarathustra’s writings were not monotheistic at all. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the primary texts and Persian religious history suggests to us that Mazdeism was polytheistic. Beside Ahura Mazda are well-known: Anāhitā, goddess of the heavenly waters; Zam, the earth; Mithra, the sun (though Greek sources also interpret him as Venus, the morning star who clears the path for the sun), Sraoša, “willingness to listen”, and his female companion Ašī, = Mithra’s charioteer; Airyaman, the divine healer; Tištriya, the brightest fixed star in the sky, Sirius; and the psychedelic plant brew Haoma. Though the rejection of the Vedic storm-god Indra is central to the Avesta, we find that even he lives on in the Iranian pantheon under his epithet Verethraghna, “Vrtra-killer” or “dragon-slayer”. Zarathustra himself was also worshipped as a deity, a typical instance of the Pagan procedure of apotheosis (Greek: “elevation to divine status”) or širk (Semitic: “association” of a mortal with a god or with the pantheon). Achaemenid and Sasanian inscriptions confirm the worship of many gods.
If Ahura Mazda (Middle Persian: Ohrmazd) enjoyed an emphatic pride of place and was in some texts and rituals the only god worshipped, this is an instance of henotheism, lacking the condemnation of other gods beside him, a defining trait of monotheism. Sasanian highpriest Kerdir, ca. 240 CE, calls himself “in the services of Ohrmazd and the gods”. In the Younger Avesta , the generic term for a (male) god is a yazata, “worshipped with sacrifices”, “someone worthy of sacrifice”. This shows the same semantic development as the Germanic word god, equivalent to Sanskrit hūta, “worshipped with libations”. In the Old Avesta, this term is used only once, viz. for Ahura Mazda.
One of the most popular Mazdean deities was the sun-god Mithra. The latter was adopted into Mithraism, a kind of Freemasonic tradition popular among the Roman soldiers, which gave pride of place to the Zodiac as the twelve-stage road traversed by the Invincible Sun, Mithras. Because Ahura Mazdā probably originated as a form of address for the Indo-Iranian sky-god Varuna, the cult of Mithra along with Ahura Mazda can be seen as continuous with the Vedic cult of Mitra-Varuna, the twin deities of the day sky and night sky.
Under the impact of the monotheism espoused by foreign rulers (Arabs in Persia, Turks and Afghans and then Britons in India), the Zoroastrians have gradually reinterpreted their gods as aspects of the One God, just as some modern Hindus have tried to twist their polytheism into a kind of monotheism. As Skjaervo writes: “The pantheon was never eliminated, and Zoroastrianism, in some sense at least, remained a polytheistic religion throughout its history, although today the many deities have lost their individual divine character and are not worshipped for themselves but have been reinterpreted as allegories or symbols.”
Thus, the Ameša Spentā-s, “life-giving immortals” (viz. Best Order, Good Thought, Well-Deserved Command, Life-Giving Humility, Wholeness and Immortality), were conceived of as divine persons in the Older Avesta; in the Younger Avesta, they become Ahura Mazda’s first creations; and more recently, they have been understood as his own virtues. Or as “angels”, i.e. celestial persons with their own intelligence but not with a will of their own, totally integrated in the single God’s functioning. But this is an innovation, not reflecting the ancient situation where distinct divine personalities were acknowledged. So, far from being a pioneer of monotheism, Mazdeism, even to the extent that its contemporary form can be described as monotheistic, is a polytheistic religion that has only undergone the influence of Christianity and Islam later on.
If ancient sources, both internal and external, are lacking in testimonies of Mazdeism denouncing god-pluralism, whence then has the notion arisen that Zarathustra was a kind of Moses smashing the false gods? This hypothesis was deduced from the well-attested rejection by Zarathustra and his followers of a particular class of Indo-European and Vedic gods, the Daeva-s (= Sanskrit Deva). Not only had he abolished their worship, he had at once turned them into demons. Daemon est deus inversus, “a demon is a god turned upside down”. In particular they demonized the champion of the gods, the thunder-god Indra, renaming him as Angra Mainyu, “destructive spirit”. (Given the naïve fascination of our ancestors with the traps of language and the consequent abundance of puns in their religious texts, we may surmise an allusion here to Angiras, name of the Devas- and Indra-worshipping Vedic priestly clan.) This process of inverting a god into a demon greatly resembled the Judeo-Christian rejection of the Pagan gods and the transformation of the Horned God (Ba’al, Shiva, Cernunnos) into the Devil.
However, this rejection of particular Indo-Iranian gods was not a rejection of god-pluralism per se. In many Indo-European pantheons, we find several distinct categories of divine beings, e.g. the Gods and the Titans in Greece; the Aesir, Vanir and giants in the Germanic world; the Deva-s and Asura-s in the younger parts of the Veda-s. In the oldest Vedic phase, the terms seem to have been interchangeable. The term Asura had no negative or demonic connotation yet, nor was there a notion of a Devāsurasangram, a “conflagration of gods and demons”.
But then a conflict arose between the Vedic Indians and the Iranian tribes. Two highlights are decribed in the Rg-Veda: the Battle of the Ten Kings (7:5 and 7:18), named after the western alliance facing the Saraswati-based Vedic king Sudās, and a few generations later the Vārsāgira Battle (4:15 and 1:122:13), named after the patronymic of its commanders on the Vedic side. In the latter battle, one of the enemy (and allegedly defeated) kings is called Istāśva, the Sanskrit equivalent of Vištāspa, the royal patron of Zarathustra. It is highly plausible that the emerging opposition between Devas and Asuras, with the former worshipped and the latter demonized by the Indians and the latter worshipped but the former demonized by the Iranians, finds its origin in this war. Thus, we can imagine that both sides invoked the storm-god Indra before the battle, but that he awarded victory to only the Indian side. The Iranian side, instead of looking for an explanation for their defeat in their own ritual or ethical shortcomings (as religious people tend to do), squarely blamed Indra and broke off their relationship with him. This way, a mundane event led to a whole theological construction of an enmity between two classes of gods, and ultimately to the dualism of cosmic good and evil that has been deemed distinctive of Mazdeism for most of its history.
To sum up, it has been the received wisdom for over a century now that Mazdeism started as a monotheistic revolt against polytheism. This impression sprang from the spirit of the times, with the fledgling science of comparative religion working from the assumption of monotheism’s superiority and generously trying to find as much of it as possible in exotic religions. The number of competent scholars who could critically rethink this common opinion was just too small, so misconceptions once accepted took long to get abandoned. Today, however, there is no excuse anymore for inertially holding on to this distorted understanding of Mazdeism. Ahura Mazda clearly had a supreme status, but among a crowd of other gods.
2.3. The one and only Sing Bonga?
For about a century and a half, the Mundari-speaking tribes in what is now Jharkhand have been the favoured hunting-ground for soul-hungry Jesuit missionaries from my homeland, the Flemish part of Belgium. They codified the native languages, devised a script for them and the first-ever school textbooks. Count on Flemish Jesuits to do a thorough job; if one of these languages, Santal, is now an official language of the Indian Republic and not an extinction-bound wilderness dialect, it is largely thanks to their efforts. They also made themselves useful by providing legal assistance to the tribals in their struggle against landholders, moneylenders and even the colonial authorities. This way, they won the confidence of the natives to the extent that quite a few of them converted.
The Jesuit study of the native religion set a template from which later students found it hard to free themselves, all the more so because many of them, esp. the so-called secularists, shared the anti-Hindu animus of the Jesuits. Non-specialist reports on the Indian tribals in Western and Indian-English media commonly claim that their religions are completely different from Hinduism. For Western secularists, wary of Christian claims of doctrinal superiority, the specific theological differences are not that important (in contrast with the supposed greater egalitarianism of the tribal cultures), but Christian news channels regularly push the claim that unlike polytheistic Hinduism, “Aboriginal” religion is monotheistic.
However, already a first acquaintance (even through first-hand descriptions of actual religious practice by Jesuit missionaries) will make clear that tribal religion In Jharkhand is polytheistic. Consider this recent media report on a festival of the Ho tribe: “Maghe Porob was celebrated in honor the Sing Bonga, the mythological God as creator of universe and his amazing creation of nature by 'Ho' community, at Ashura, Jharkhand.” (19 March 2011, http://www.demotix.com/news/645129/maghe-porob-ancient-festival-ho-community-jharkhand )
The term “creator of the universe“ is a bit suspect, it may well be a Christian transposition of a Biblical notion. Then again, astrophysics and geology have taught us that the whole solar system, including all the substances and biomass on earth and in the atmosphere, have all originated as solar dust, the gradually condensed remnants of clouds emanating from the sun during its formation. Since Sing Bonga is the sun god (quite literally “Sun God”), it makes sense to say that he is the origin of at least the relevant part of the universe, the solar system; as long as we acknowledge that this doesn’t make him the only entity fit to be worshipped.
Now, let us listen to some details: “‘Maghe’ was being celebrated in honor of Sing Bonga, and his incarnations like Singi (the sun), Chandu (the moon), Deshauli (sacred groove of trees), Nage-Bindi era (A deity of river, pond and spring etc), Marang Bonga (a deity as protector of the village), Pauri Bonga (a deity as guide to marriage life) and Bagia Bonga (a deity as protector of cattle)”, and “Densari Bonga (the deity of craft)”. Bonga means “god”, and in a mere newspaper report, we already meet eight of them. Further, we know that the tribals worship their ancestors, the spirits of trees and wells, and other sources of sacrality. So, Sing Bonga may be a supreme deity, but is definitely one among a number of deities. He is the pinnacle of a prolific pantheon. The acceptance of one god as higher in rank than others doesn’t constitute monotheism, or else the Church would not have condemned the ancient religions of Zeus, Jupiter, Woden, etc. as polytheistic.
Even if Sing Bonga were the only god of the Mundari tribes, there is no record of their condemning or trying to suppress the worship of other gods, a key condition for monotheism. And at any rate, their worship of the sun as sole deity without a second would not save them in Christian eyes. To Christians, the sun is a false god, usurping the place of the one true God who was incarnated as Jesus Christ. The sun- worshipping Inca Athahualpa was killed by the Spanish Christians because he remained true to his sun worship: “Your god died on the cross, but mine rises every morning.” So this whole Christian game of reinterpreting the tribal religions as somehow more monotheistic than Hinduism is not going to save them, it is only a tactic to isolate them from the Hindu mainstream all the faster to destroy them.
2.4. Conclusion
The obsession with curtailing the existing pluriformity of religious expression is a fairly rare phenomenon in human history. The Buddhists didn’t have it, neither the profound philosophers who went without worship of any gods nor the lay folk who continued the existing worship of the Hindu (and Chinese, Japanese etc.) traditional gods. Instead, they only added the Buddha and related Buddhist figures to the pantheon, making it even more densely populated.
The Zoroastrians, at least the early ones who still had an acquaintance with the worship of the Daeva category of gods, had a peculiar hostility to these Daevas, esp. Indra or Angra Mainyu, but they (and their descendents, to whom “Daeva” had become an empty word) nevertheless continued the worship of other gods beside their mascotte god Ahura Mazda. In spite of numerous contacts with monotheists, friendly with the Jews and hostile with the Christians and Muslims, they were never recognized as monotheists.
Of preliterate tribals, no case is known of the imposition of the worship of a single god at the expense of all others. Everywhere, they have venerated the ancestors, the Mother Earth, the Father Sun, the heavenly host of moon and stars, the spirits inhabiting mountains and rivers. This is also true of the Indian tribals whom the Christian missionaries have tried to isolate from their Hindu neighbours by reinterpreting their religion as monotheistic and thus an exceptionally worthy preparation for the ultimate monotheism of Christianity.
[to be continued]
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2.1. Monotheistic Buddhism?
When the study of Buddhism was first taken up by European Orientalists, even basic data about the religion were unknown or misunderstood. Thus, it took a while before scholars realized that the Buddha had been Indian rather than Chinese. After all, there were no Buddhists in India then, while they were omnipresent in China and her cultural satellites: Korea, Japan, Vietnam. And when the scholars started exploring Buddhism’s Indian genesis, they tended at first to project European and Christian experiences onto the Buddhist account.
As a towering figure who launched a distinct system of philosophy and practice within an existing Brahminism-dominated religious landscape, the Buddha has been likened to Moses challenging the idolaters, to Jesus challenging the Pharisees and the Temple establishment, and to Martin Luther challenging the Papacy. Whether his role was similarly revolutionary is another discussion (we don’t believe it), but at any rate, even if it was, this doesn’t imply that his doctrine was similar to that of the said Abrahamic figures. Yet, one conclusion briefly drawn from this purported likeness was that just like Moses and later Mohammed, the Buddha threw a monotheistic challenge into a polytheistic environment.
This idea was only a brief blip in the development of Buddhist studies, swiftly refuted by the Orientalists. It was too obviously untenable, for the word “God” or some credible equivalent is simply absent from the Buddhist canon. Yes, gods in the plural play an auxiliary role, as when Brahma and Indra are witnesses to the Buddha’s Awakening. In later devotional Buddhism, the Buddha is worshipped, but in various personae such as the Amitabha Buddha, and along with the Bodhisattvas Maitreya, Avalokiteshvara, Guanyin and others. Much of the Hindu pantheon was represented in Buddhist temples and taken along during Buddhist expansion abroad, so that Saraswati or Ganesha can be found venerated in Japan. However, these gods play no role in the original Buddhist method of Liberation, and the Buddha is never presented as their spokesman. The message he teaches is of his own yogic discovery, not a divine revelation. In that respect, Buddhism is atheistic. So, polytheistic on the one hand and atheistic on the other, Buddhism is anything but monotheistic.
Wherever the gods are acknowledged, Buddhism makes no fuss about their number. It never cares to replace the many with the One. So, it fails both tests for qualifying as monotheistic: it doesn’t worship a single God, and it doesn’t denounce or oppose the worship of the many gods.
It goes without saying that Buddhism never militated against so-called idolatry (mūrti-pūjā) either. First of all, the use of sculpted idols was probably rare in the India of the Buddha’s day. There simply were no idols to smash. Secondly, once the Buddhists came in touch with the Indo-Greek tradition of religious sculpture, they adopted it to create what was to become the world’s most popular sculpture: the Buddha statue. Later, Muslims in the area would name the generic phenomenon of idols after this proliferating Buddhist idol: būt. In Persian, būt-parast became the standard term for idol-worshipper.
However, this much is true that the Buddha himself is said to have forbidden his disciples to make images of him. If historical (and why not?), that injunction was not a stricture against the use of idols but rather against his own deification. He reasoned that if people were going to extol him above themselves, they would see his yogic method as likewise belonging to a level above their own, and would consequently fail to practise it.
2.2. The one and only Ahura Mazda?
The first translators of the Asian religious source texts were children of their time and religious background. They projected themes from Jewish and Christian history onto Zarathustra, the Buddha, Confucius and other Oriental "prophets". Among these was the struggle against polytheism and idolatry. They credited Zarathustra with being a pioneer of monotheism. Unlike in the case of the Buddha, the monotheistic tag has stuck to Zarathustra. In non-specialist circles, the received wisdom nowadays is that he was a kind of Iranian Moses and that his religion may also have influenced the Israelites in a pro-monotheistic sense.
The Mazdean or Zoroastrian religion, like ancient Vedicism and most ancient Indo-European religions, was aniconic, i.e. it didn't use "idols" or representations of the gods. Iranian Muslims label Zoroastrians as ātiš-parast, "fire-worshippers", distinct from the idol-worship practised by the Pharaonic Egyptians and by ancient Semites such as the Ugaritics, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, pre-Moses Israelites and the pre-Islamic Arabs. When the Muslim conquerors of Central Asia encountered the Buddhists with their elaborate sculpture art depicting the Buddha, they termed them būt-parast, "worshippers of Buddha statues", then retro-actively generalized this term to all "idol-worshippers". But they did not apply it to the Mazdeans.
It is possible, but not attested in so many words in the Bible, that the Israelites had a higher opinion of the Mazdean religion than of the idolatry of the Semites in Canaan and Babylon. As an aniconic form of worship, it may have seemed pleasantly familiar to the Israelites, who were recent converts to aniconism. They were at any rate grateful to the Persian emperor Cyrus for liberating them from Babylonian captivity in 539 BC. The Bible editors even have their god Yahweh call Cyrus his anointed and his shepherd (Isaiah 45:1-13; 44:28; 2 Chronicles 36:22,23; Ezra 1:1-11). He and his successor Darius organized the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem by Zerubbabel and the codification of the Bible by Ezra (Ezra 5:13-17; 6:1-16). A certain Jewish-Persian friendship resulted, lastly in the form of active Iranian cooperation with Israel under the Shah; as late as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Iraqi Arabs chided their Persian enemies for being friends of the Jews. However, neither from the common aniconism nor from this historical alliance can we deduce that the Mazdeans shared the monotheism of the Jews.
There are other elements in common between the two religions, probably borrowed by Judaism from Zoroastrianism. Thus, the belief in a future saviour already existed in the Avesta, where the Saošyant, “benefactor”, virgin-born from among Zarathustra’s own progeny, is awaited to set all injustices right. Some Bible scholars think that the Jewish notion of the awaited Messiah (Mašiah, “anointed one”, i.e. heir to King David’s throne) came about as an adaptation of this Mazdean concept. Likewise, the replacement of the belief in the afterlife as a mere shadowland with the notion of a final judgment showing the deceased the way to either heaven or hell, has been attributed to Mazdean influence (after having earlier been repudiated by the Israelites as a characteristic part of the Pagan Egyptian religion). Finally, the concept of angels and demons is said to be Mazdean in origin.
However, none of these modern interpretations of the Avestan and Biblical data, much less the Bible text itself, attests or proves the idea of Ahura Mazdā, “Lord Wisdom”, as the one and only god of the Mazdeans, to the exclusion of all others. Given the Bible’s focus on monotheism, it would have been logical if they had highlighted the discovery of a ready-made monotheism among a second and friendly nation.
On the contrary, some Bible commentators see an allusion to the ancient faith of the Persians as utterly Pagan in Ezechiel 8:16, which describes people bowing to the rising sun, an act of sun-worship comparable to the Hindu Sūrya-namaskār, which it next denounces as an “abomination”. Since Ezechiel predated the Persian conquest of Babylon, this would require a later interpolation; which is common enough in the Bible but unnecessary here, because no doubt other West-Asian peoples also practised sun-worship. However, Christian sources later confirm the same about the Iranian “Magians”, that they were sun-worshippers. Hence also the Magians’ enthusiasm for astrology after their conquest of Babylon (it is as astrologers who had “seen His star in the East”, that the three Magoi visit the newborn Jesus), and their purely solar calendar centred on Spring Equinox or Newroz.
The Norwegian scholar Prods Oktor Skjaervo has recently argued [“Zarathustra and monotheism”, in Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ed.: Rethinking Revolutionary Monotheism, Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns 2011] definitively that Zarathustra’s writings were not monotheistic at all. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the primary texts and Persian religious history suggests to us that Mazdeism was polytheistic. Beside Ahura Mazda are well-known: Anāhitā, goddess of the heavenly waters; Zam, the earth; Mithra, the sun (though Greek sources also interpret him as Venus, the morning star who clears the path for the sun), Sraoša, “willingness to listen”, and his female companion Ašī, = Mithra’s charioteer; Airyaman, the divine healer; Tištriya, the brightest fixed star in the sky, Sirius; and the psychedelic plant brew Haoma. Though the rejection of the Vedic storm-god Indra is central to the Avesta, we find that even he lives on in the Iranian pantheon under his epithet Verethraghna, “Vrtra-killer” or “dragon-slayer”. Zarathustra himself was also worshipped as a deity, a typical instance of the Pagan procedure of apotheosis (Greek: “elevation to divine status”) or širk (Semitic: “association” of a mortal with a god or with the pantheon). Achaemenid and Sasanian inscriptions confirm the worship of many gods.
If Ahura Mazda (Middle Persian: Ohrmazd) enjoyed an emphatic pride of place and was in some texts and rituals the only god worshipped, this is an instance of henotheism, lacking the condemnation of other gods beside him, a defining trait of monotheism. Sasanian highpriest Kerdir, ca. 240 CE, calls himself “in the services of Ohrmazd and the gods”. In the Younger Avesta , the generic term for a (male) god is a yazata, “worshipped with sacrifices”, “someone worthy of sacrifice”. This shows the same semantic development as the Germanic word god, equivalent to Sanskrit hūta, “worshipped with libations”. In the Old Avesta, this term is used only once, viz. for Ahura Mazda.
One of the most popular Mazdean deities was the sun-god Mithra. The latter was adopted into Mithraism, a kind of Freemasonic tradition popular among the Roman soldiers, which gave pride of place to the Zodiac as the twelve-stage road traversed by the Invincible Sun, Mithras. Because Ahura Mazdā probably originated as a form of address for the Indo-Iranian sky-god Varuna, the cult of Mithra along with Ahura Mazda can be seen as continuous with the Vedic cult of Mitra-Varuna, the twin deities of the day sky and night sky.
Under the impact of the monotheism espoused by foreign rulers (Arabs in Persia, Turks and Afghans and then Britons in India), the Zoroastrians have gradually reinterpreted their gods as aspects of the One God, just as some modern Hindus have tried to twist their polytheism into a kind of monotheism. As Skjaervo writes: “The pantheon was never eliminated, and Zoroastrianism, in some sense at least, remained a polytheistic religion throughout its history, although today the many deities have lost their individual divine character and are not worshipped for themselves but have been reinterpreted as allegories or symbols.”
Thus, the Ameša Spentā-s, “life-giving immortals” (viz. Best Order, Good Thought, Well-Deserved Command, Life-Giving Humility, Wholeness and Immortality), were conceived of as divine persons in the Older Avesta; in the Younger Avesta, they become Ahura Mazda’s first creations; and more recently, they have been understood as his own virtues. Or as “angels”, i.e. celestial persons with their own intelligence but not with a will of their own, totally integrated in the single God’s functioning. But this is an innovation, not reflecting the ancient situation where distinct divine personalities were acknowledged. So, far from being a pioneer of monotheism, Mazdeism, even to the extent that its contemporary form can be described as monotheistic, is a polytheistic religion that has only undergone the influence of Christianity and Islam later on.
If ancient sources, both internal and external, are lacking in testimonies of Mazdeism denouncing god-pluralism, whence then has the notion arisen that Zarathustra was a kind of Moses smashing the false gods? This hypothesis was deduced from the well-attested rejection by Zarathustra and his followers of a particular class of Indo-European and Vedic gods, the Daeva-s (= Sanskrit Deva). Not only had he abolished their worship, he had at once turned them into demons. Daemon est deus inversus, “a demon is a god turned upside down”. In particular they demonized the champion of the gods, the thunder-god Indra, renaming him as Angra Mainyu, “destructive spirit”. (Given the naïve fascination of our ancestors with the traps of language and the consequent abundance of puns in their religious texts, we may surmise an allusion here to Angiras, name of the Devas- and Indra-worshipping Vedic priestly clan.) This process of inverting a god into a demon greatly resembled the Judeo-Christian rejection of the Pagan gods and the transformation of the Horned God (Ba’al, Shiva, Cernunnos) into the Devil.
However, this rejection of particular Indo-Iranian gods was not a rejection of god-pluralism per se. In many Indo-European pantheons, we find several distinct categories of divine beings, e.g. the Gods and the Titans in Greece; the Aesir, Vanir and giants in the Germanic world; the Deva-s and Asura-s in the younger parts of the Veda-s. In the oldest Vedic phase, the terms seem to have been interchangeable. The term Asura had no negative or demonic connotation yet, nor was there a notion of a Devāsurasangram, a “conflagration of gods and demons”.
But then a conflict arose between the Vedic Indians and the Iranian tribes. Two highlights are decribed in the Rg-Veda: the Battle of the Ten Kings (7:5 and 7:18), named after the western alliance facing the Saraswati-based Vedic king Sudās, and a few generations later the Vārsāgira Battle (4:15 and 1:122:13), named after the patronymic of its commanders on the Vedic side. In the latter battle, one of the enemy (and allegedly defeated) kings is called Istāśva, the Sanskrit equivalent of Vištāspa, the royal patron of Zarathustra. It is highly plausible that the emerging opposition between Devas and Asuras, with the former worshipped and the latter demonized by the Indians and the latter worshipped but the former demonized by the Iranians, finds its origin in this war. Thus, we can imagine that both sides invoked the storm-god Indra before the battle, but that he awarded victory to only the Indian side. The Iranian side, instead of looking for an explanation for their defeat in their own ritual or ethical shortcomings (as religious people tend to do), squarely blamed Indra and broke off their relationship with him. This way, a mundane event led to a whole theological construction of an enmity between two classes of gods, and ultimately to the dualism of cosmic good and evil that has been deemed distinctive of Mazdeism for most of its history.
To sum up, it has been the received wisdom for over a century now that Mazdeism started as a monotheistic revolt against polytheism. This impression sprang from the spirit of the times, with the fledgling science of comparative religion working from the assumption of monotheism’s superiority and generously trying to find as much of it as possible in exotic religions. The number of competent scholars who could critically rethink this common opinion was just too small, so misconceptions once accepted took long to get abandoned. Today, however, there is no excuse anymore for inertially holding on to this distorted understanding of Mazdeism. Ahura Mazda clearly had a supreme status, but among a crowd of other gods.
2.3. The one and only Sing Bonga?
For about a century and a half, the Mundari-speaking tribes in what is now Jharkhand have been the favoured hunting-ground for soul-hungry Jesuit missionaries from my homeland, the Flemish part of Belgium. They codified the native languages, devised a script for them and the first-ever school textbooks. Count on Flemish Jesuits to do a thorough job; if one of these languages, Santal, is now an official language of the Indian Republic and not an extinction-bound wilderness dialect, it is largely thanks to their efforts. They also made themselves useful by providing legal assistance to the tribals in their struggle against landholders, moneylenders and even the colonial authorities. This way, they won the confidence of the natives to the extent that quite a few of them converted.
The Jesuit study of the native religion set a template from which later students found it hard to free themselves, all the more so because many of them, esp. the so-called secularists, shared the anti-Hindu animus of the Jesuits. Non-specialist reports on the Indian tribals in Western and Indian-English media commonly claim that their religions are completely different from Hinduism. For Western secularists, wary of Christian claims of doctrinal superiority, the specific theological differences are not that important (in contrast with the supposed greater egalitarianism of the tribal cultures), but Christian news channels regularly push the claim that unlike polytheistic Hinduism, “Aboriginal” religion is monotheistic.
However, already a first acquaintance (even through first-hand descriptions of actual religious practice by Jesuit missionaries) will make clear that tribal religion In Jharkhand is polytheistic. Consider this recent media report on a festival of the Ho tribe: “Maghe Porob was celebrated in honor the Sing Bonga, the mythological God as creator of universe and his amazing creation of nature by 'Ho' community, at Ashura, Jharkhand.” (19 March 2011, http://www.demotix.com/news/645129/maghe-porob-ancient-festival-ho-community-jharkhand )
The term “creator of the universe“ is a bit suspect, it may well be a Christian transposition of a Biblical notion. Then again, astrophysics and geology have taught us that the whole solar system, including all the substances and biomass on earth and in the atmosphere, have all originated as solar dust, the gradually condensed remnants of clouds emanating from the sun during its formation. Since Sing Bonga is the sun god (quite literally “Sun God”), it makes sense to say that he is the origin of at least the relevant part of the universe, the solar system; as long as we acknowledge that this doesn’t make him the only entity fit to be worshipped.
Now, let us listen to some details: “‘Maghe’ was being celebrated in honor of Sing Bonga, and his incarnations like Singi (the sun), Chandu (the moon), Deshauli (sacred groove of trees), Nage-Bindi era (A deity of river, pond and spring etc), Marang Bonga (a deity as protector of the village), Pauri Bonga (a deity as guide to marriage life) and Bagia Bonga (a deity as protector of cattle)”, and “Densari Bonga (the deity of craft)”. Bonga means “god”, and in a mere newspaper report, we already meet eight of them. Further, we know that the tribals worship their ancestors, the spirits of trees and wells, and other sources of sacrality. So, Sing Bonga may be a supreme deity, but is definitely one among a number of deities. He is the pinnacle of a prolific pantheon. The acceptance of one god as higher in rank than others doesn’t constitute monotheism, or else the Church would not have condemned the ancient religions of Zeus, Jupiter, Woden, etc. as polytheistic.
Even if Sing Bonga were the only god of the Mundari tribes, there is no record of their condemning or trying to suppress the worship of other gods, a key condition for monotheism. And at any rate, their worship of the sun as sole deity without a second would not save them in Christian eyes. To Christians, the sun is a false god, usurping the place of the one true God who was incarnated as Jesus Christ. The sun- worshipping Inca Athahualpa was killed by the Spanish Christians because he remained true to his sun worship: “Your god died on the cross, but mine rises every morning.” So this whole Christian game of reinterpreting the tribal religions as somehow more monotheistic than Hinduism is not going to save them, it is only a tactic to isolate them from the Hindu mainstream all the faster to destroy them.
2.4. Conclusion
The obsession with curtailing the existing pluriformity of religious expression is a fairly rare phenomenon in human history. The Buddhists didn’t have it, neither the profound philosophers who went without worship of any gods nor the lay folk who continued the existing worship of the Hindu (and Chinese, Japanese etc.) traditional gods. Instead, they only added the Buddha and related Buddhist figures to the pantheon, making it even more densely populated.
The Zoroastrians, at least the early ones who still had an acquaintance with the worship of the Daeva category of gods, had a peculiar hostility to these Daevas, esp. Indra or Angra Mainyu, but they (and their descendents, to whom “Daeva” had become an empty word) nevertheless continued the worship of other gods beside their mascotte god Ahura Mazda. In spite of numerous contacts with monotheists, friendly with the Jews and hostile with the Christians and Muslims, they were never recognized as monotheists.
Of preliterate tribals, no case is known of the imposition of the worship of a single god at the expense of all others. Everywhere, they have venerated the ancestors, the Mother Earth, the Father Sun, the heavenly host of moon and stars, the spirits inhabiting mountains and rivers. This is also true of the Indian tribals whom the Christian missionaries have tried to isolate from their Hindu neighbours by reinterpreting their religion as monotheistic and thus an exceptionally worthy preparation for the ultimate monotheism of Christianity.
[to be continued]
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Vedic monotheism? 1. The dawn of monotheism
Monotheism is not merely the cult of a single god, which would be called henotheism, but also implies the active rejection of all other gods. The recipient of monotheistic worship is not Heis Theos, “one god”, but Ho Monos Theos, “the only god”. Thus, Hindus worshipping an ishta devata, “chosen deity”, selected from among many, are henotheists but not monotheists. A Hindu who never worships any god except Shiva, but doesn’t object to his neighbour’s worshipping Krishna or Durga, fails the test of monotheism.
1.1. Akhenaten’s solar monotheism
At the present state of knowledge, the first recorded monotheist was Pharaoh Akhenaten or Ekhnaton (r. 1351-1334 BC). He not only worshipped a single god, the solar disc Aten, but also tried to terminate the worship of other gods, starting with the removal of Amon from his own original name Amenhotep ("Amon is satisfied"), which he replaced with Akhen-Aten ("Living spirit of Aten"). Later, his son would make the reverse movement, changing his own name from Tut-ankh-Aten ("Living image of Aten") to Tut-ankh-Amon. Akhenaten's monotheism didn't survive him for long because it went against the grain of Egyptian culture and sensibilities.
Perhaps he could have made people accept his religion sincerely if he had at least combined it with political successes and prosperity. In his own new capital Akhet-Aten ("Horizon of the Aten", Amarna) he concentrated a community of followers that enjoyed privileges provided for from the state treasury, which means the rest of the people had to subsidize his socio-religious experiment. His foreign policy was a disaster, he neglected diplomacy and military fortifications and thus greatly weakened his empire. After his death, the Egyptians tried to quickly forget him.
Akhenaten’s present popularity, attested by his enormous overrepresentation in textbooks on ancient Egypt, is a consequence of the plentiful and innovative artworks depicting him, his chief wife Nefertiti and his Aten cult; and mostly of his monotheism, deemed uniquely meritorious. Since Moses, the founder of Israelite monotheism, lived in Egypt about a generation after Akhenaten, it is widely assumed the Pharaoh influenced the Prophet.
1.2. Moses’ monotheism
Moses found his One God when he was living in the desert as a guest of Jethro, the priest of the Beduins of Midian (Exodus 2:15 ff.), a region in the northwestern corner of Arabia where he had fled to as a fugitive from Egyptian criminal justice, wanted for manslaughter. He experienced an audio-visual sensation while looking into a burning bush, a desert plant from which an ethereal oil evaporates that catches fire in the noontime heat. A voice told him to take off his shoes as he was standing on hallowed ground, i.e. in the presence of a divine being. The god, when asked by Moses for his name, introduced himself as "I am that I am" (eheyeh asher eheyeh). Biblically, this is understood as a hint at the name Yahweh, interpreted through approximative folk etymology as "the Being One", "the One Who Is"; or by later exegetes with airs of profundity, as "the One Whose Essence is Being".
In fact, as the great Orientalist Julius Wellhausen has shown, the name Yahweh is Arabic (its root is attested in the Quran) and means "the Blower", apparently the Beduin god of wind and storm. Egypt's Nile Valley has an extremely stable climate with endless sunshine, but the desert is subjected to sand storms, hence the logic of Moses' replacing the Pharaoh's sun god with a storm god.
After having fallen from grace in Egypt, Moses fashioned himself a new career as the national leader of the Semitic immigrant population in Egypt, which he led away to Palestine. Along the way, in the wilderness of Sinai, he staged a show with smoke and trumpets and had the gullible people believe that he had seen God on the mountain and received the Ten Commandments from Him. These consist of two unrelated parts. The second part is age-old general morality of the “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery” type. Of course people don’t need a divine revelation to know that societies couldn’t function for long without such a set of basic rules. Other nations didn’t bring God in and called these rules the mos maiorum, “the ancestral customs”, tried and tested by ages of practice. In this case, however, they were tagged on as a second half to the first set of commandments, which by contrast went completely against the tradition. Rendered more acceptable by the coupling with indisputable rules of morality, this first part was quite revolutionary, viz. Moses’ new theology. This included a prohibition on using God’s name lightly (a taboo also found in other religions), on making images of God, and most of all, on offering worship to any god beside Yahweh.
The first thing Moses did when he came down from the Sinai mountain with his rock-hewn Ten Commandments was to slaughter 3000 religious dissenters. These were enthusiasts of Ba’al, “Lord”, originally a generic term of address for kings and gods, later used specifically for the Northwest-Semitic fertility god Hadad. He is known from Semitic royal names like Jeze-bel, Bel-shazzar, Hanni-bal and Bal-thazar. This traditional fertility god was typically depicted as a bull. For the purposes of worship, the devotees in the Sinai had fashioned a statue (what Hindus call a mûrti) of the bull god from their own jewelry: the “Golden Calf”.
Nowadays this term is used as shorthand for crass materialism and greed, as if this moral vice were needed to justify the devotees’ mass slaughter by Moses. In fact, they were anything but greedy, they donated their wealth in exchange for the joy of having a focus for their religious exercise of worshipping Ba’al. It was not because of a moral vice that they were put to death, but only because they worshipped another god than Yahweh. The latter could not tolerate this since he was, in his own words (as reported from Mount Sinai by Moses), “a jealous god”.
Moses did not live to see the conquest of the Promised Land, of which he only caught a glimpse from afar. His successor Joshua devised a clever strategy of keeping the non-combatants concentrated outside the war zone and attacking the cities one by one. Citing orders from God, he eliminated the native fellow-Semitic population, the Canaanites. This he justified with a promise which he claimed Yahweh had made long before (scholars’ estimate: 4 to 5 centuries) to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Note that the natives were not asked for their theological opinions. They were not killed because of their polytheism, and it seems unlikely that they could have saved themselves by quickly converting. At that time, Yahweh was still the god of a nation, not of a community of like-minded believers.
1.3. Henotheistic origins
It is widely assumed among scholars that the Yahweh cult was initially henotheistic rather than monotheistic. Yahweh insisted that his followers worship only him and no other gods, but this did not immediately imply that other gods were deemed non-existent and illusory. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, the first of the Ten Commandments, can be read as a husband’s claim on the absolute loyalty of his wife. By no means does such a husband deny the existence of other men, he merely demands that his wife disregard all other men and devote herself exclusively to him. In the initial phase, Yahweh’s religion makes no truth claim about the non-existence of other gods, rather it sees them as dangerous seducers who have to be kept at bay. From the 13th to the 7th century BC, Israelite monotheism was in a formative stage of a henotheism increasingly hyperfocused on the chosen One God, leading to the ultimate black-out of the other gods. From seductive rivals to Yahweh, they shrivel to become illusory projections of the human mind.
This evolution is summarily acted out in the evolution of the Biblical god’s other name, Elohim. In Northwest-Semitic (Canaanite, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew), this is a masculine plural form, meaning “gods”. The Semites had a god El, whose name lives on in personal names like Gabr-i-el, “my strength is God”, Mi-cha-el, “who is like God?”. In cuneiform, this name was rendered with the sumerogram Dingir, showing a star. That indeed is the original West-Asian concept of the gods: they were stars, collectively “the heavenly host”. One of the oldest epithets of Yahweh is “Lord of Hosts”, i.e. the supergod presiding over the army of gods in their daily march across the sky (which again presupposes that the other gods were real, though lesser in stature). The contrast between polytheism and the first monotheism was quite literally that between the numerous stars in the night sky and the lone star of the day sky.
A noun derived from El is the feminine abstractive noun Eloha, “a god”, “deity”, better known in its Arabic form Ilâha. This countable noun referred to any of the numerous gods worshipped by the Pagan Arabs. With the South-Semitic definite article al-, this becomes Al-Ilâha, “the god”, better known in its contracted form Allâh. Both in Hebrew Elohim and in Arabic Allâh, we see how the conception of the One and Only God, to judge from his name, is rooted in the polytheistic conception of “god” as a countable noun, “one of the gods”. As if a single star was selected, looked at ever more closely until it outshone and rendered invisible all other stars, and was then reinterpreted as the only star in existence.
This rootedness in polytheism is found in most languages where the concept of a single God was introduced. To the pre-existing Greek and Latin generic terms theos and deus, “a god”, the emerging Christian Church assigned the new monotheistic meaning “God”. In Germanic, the word god seems to have been a uncountable noun since pre-Christian times, but of neutral (rather than of masculine) gender, i.e. impersonal: “the numinous”, “the divine”. Its Sanskrit etymological equivalent is hutam, “(that which is) honoured with libations/sacrifices”, “(that which is) worshipped”. Here too, the Christian monotheistic term is borrowed from a pre-Christian non-monotheistic conception, viz. of the divine as a numinous essence present in an undefined number of gods and perfectly thinkable apart from a single personal God. In Chinese, Protestant missionaries have chosen the old term Shangdi as their translation of the Biblical names for “God”. They may not have realized that in Chinese, which doesn’t morphologically distinguish plural from singular, this ancient term had been conceived as plural: “the powers on high”, “the gods above”.
In the 19th century, the idea of an Urmonotheismus, a primeval monotheism, gained ground. It meant that the historically attested polytheistic religions had come into being as aberrations from an older monotheistic religion. Islam had pioneered this idea with its claim that Adam had been the first Muslim and that the Kaaba, built by Adam, had later been usurped by the Pagans for the polytheistic worship which Mohammed found (and destroyed) there. But in the actual history of early monotheism, we find its cradle was polytheistic, with no trace of a reference to an earlier, primeval monotheism.
1.4. The jealous God
In polytheistic pantheons, gods with a specific character are typically counterbalanced by gods with the opposite character, e.g. war-like Ares or Mars with harmony-seeking Aphrodite or Venus. No doubt the Arab Beduin storm-god Yahweh had brothers and sisters in the pantheon who represented less stormy traits to keep the whole in balance. If the idea of a single god had been thought up in the abstract, one could have expected him to be neutral, elevated far above all those pairs of opposition. Later thinkers working within a monotheistic framework will indeed try to understand their god in this manner: as a coincidentia oppositorum, “unity of opposites” (thus German philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus, 15th cent.). Instead of a war-god held in check by a peace goddess, you would logically get a single god transcending the war/peace opposition.
However, that is not how monotheism originally came about. When all other gods were outlawed, Yahweh nonetheless retained his character of tribal storm god, but no longer counterbalanced by more pleasant fellow-deities. Though not as sexually playful as the Indo-European storm-gods Indra, Zeus, Jupiter, Perkunas, Perun or Donar (unless you include his begetting Jesus upon the Virgin Mary, and even that fling on the side he outsourced to the Holy Ghost), Yahweh resembles and outdoes them in choleric flare-ups and violent discharges of anger. Thus, his initiative to destroy mankind by means of the Flood was motivated by anger at the disappointing performance of his own human creatures.
Let Yahweh’s short temper be his privilege and that of his followers, the one thing truly objectionable about him from the viewpoint of the non-believers is only his effort to destroy alternative gods and their religions. Pre-Christian Israelite history is punctuated by episodes of slaughter against non-Yahwists. Thus, the prophet Elijah challenged a group of Ba’al priests to have their god produce a miracle and set fire to a sacrificial animal. Of course miracles don’t exist, so nothing happened; and when Elijah had Yahweh set alight his own sacrifice after he had sprinkled “water” on it, the gullible were taken in, but he had obviously used a trick (petrol?). At any rate, the next thing we know is that he had the 450 Ba’al priests put to death. His own disciple Elisha organized a coup against the Ba’al-worshipping queen Jezebel and killed her and 70 of her relatives.
However, until the expansion of Christianity, this campaign of destruction was limited to the Israelites or such foreigners as lived among the Israelites and had an influence on them. It did not interfere with the religion of "the nations". To be sure, there was plenty of slaughter of non-Israelites during the conquest of the Promised Land. But this was simply to make way for the Chosen People, to create living space, not to make them change their religion. On the contrary, it was taken for granted that “the nations” (ha-goyim) had other religions than that of Yahweh: “And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars -- all the heavenly array -- do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the Lord your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.” (Deuteronomy 4:19)
You’ve read that right: the heavenly hosts as the gods forbidden to the Israelites, have been “apportioned to all the nations” by Yahweh, who consequently didn’t want them to worship him instead of the gods given to them. This again testifies to the fact that Yahweh was originally conceived as a tribal god, entitled to the loyalty of his own tribe but without universal pretentions (just as a husband is entitled to his wife’s loyalty but not to that of all women).
The first dim apparition of Yahweh’s universal ambition is perhaps Prophet Isaiah’s fantasy of an end-time in which all nations come to pay tribute to the Israelites and their god in Jerusalem. But it is only later, in the multicultural and universalizing climate of the Hellenistic states (4th-1st cent. BC) and the Roman Empire, that some Israelites start conceiving of their God as universally valid. This didn’t make them embark on massive missionary campaigns, but on a small scale they did start to attract converts or “proselytes”. Jewish thinkers like Philo of Alexandria briefly tried to incorporate notions from Greek philosophy, such as Plato’s “idea of the Good” or Aristotle’s “unmoved mover”, into their conception of God.
It fell to Christianity to complete this job of incorporating the universalist Greek concepts of the Absolute into the monotheistic construction of God. Because Christianity had universal rather than national ambitions, it made the destruction of everyone else’s "false gods" its chief mission. This same mission was later interiorized and amplified by Mohammed. To the surviving non-monotheistic traditions, monotheism became an all-devouring predator and a self-declared enemy.
[to be continued]
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1.1. Akhenaten’s solar monotheism
At the present state of knowledge, the first recorded monotheist was Pharaoh Akhenaten or Ekhnaton (r. 1351-1334 BC). He not only worshipped a single god, the solar disc Aten, but also tried to terminate the worship of other gods, starting with the removal of Amon from his own original name Amenhotep ("Amon is satisfied"), which he replaced with Akhen-Aten ("Living spirit of Aten"). Later, his son would make the reverse movement, changing his own name from Tut-ankh-Aten ("Living image of Aten") to Tut-ankh-Amon. Akhenaten's monotheism didn't survive him for long because it went against the grain of Egyptian culture and sensibilities.
Perhaps he could have made people accept his religion sincerely if he had at least combined it with political successes and prosperity. In his own new capital Akhet-Aten ("Horizon of the Aten", Amarna) he concentrated a community of followers that enjoyed privileges provided for from the state treasury, which means the rest of the people had to subsidize his socio-religious experiment. His foreign policy was a disaster, he neglected diplomacy and military fortifications and thus greatly weakened his empire. After his death, the Egyptians tried to quickly forget him.
Akhenaten’s present popularity, attested by his enormous overrepresentation in textbooks on ancient Egypt, is a consequence of the plentiful and innovative artworks depicting him, his chief wife Nefertiti and his Aten cult; and mostly of his monotheism, deemed uniquely meritorious. Since Moses, the founder of Israelite monotheism, lived in Egypt about a generation after Akhenaten, it is widely assumed the Pharaoh influenced the Prophet.
1.2. Moses’ monotheism
Moses found his One God when he was living in the desert as a guest of Jethro, the priest of the Beduins of Midian (Exodus 2:15 ff.), a region in the northwestern corner of Arabia where he had fled to as a fugitive from Egyptian criminal justice, wanted for manslaughter. He experienced an audio-visual sensation while looking into a burning bush, a desert plant from which an ethereal oil evaporates that catches fire in the noontime heat. A voice told him to take off his shoes as he was standing on hallowed ground, i.e. in the presence of a divine being. The god, when asked by Moses for his name, introduced himself as "I am that I am" (eheyeh asher eheyeh). Biblically, this is understood as a hint at the name Yahweh, interpreted through approximative folk etymology as "the Being One", "the One Who Is"; or by later exegetes with airs of profundity, as "the One Whose Essence is Being".
In fact, as the great Orientalist Julius Wellhausen has shown, the name Yahweh is Arabic (its root is attested in the Quran) and means "the Blower", apparently the Beduin god of wind and storm. Egypt's Nile Valley has an extremely stable climate with endless sunshine, but the desert is subjected to sand storms, hence the logic of Moses' replacing the Pharaoh's sun god with a storm god.
After having fallen from grace in Egypt, Moses fashioned himself a new career as the national leader of the Semitic immigrant population in Egypt, which he led away to Palestine. Along the way, in the wilderness of Sinai, he staged a show with smoke and trumpets and had the gullible people believe that he had seen God on the mountain and received the Ten Commandments from Him. These consist of two unrelated parts. The second part is age-old general morality of the “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery” type. Of course people don’t need a divine revelation to know that societies couldn’t function for long without such a set of basic rules. Other nations didn’t bring God in and called these rules the mos maiorum, “the ancestral customs”, tried and tested by ages of practice. In this case, however, they were tagged on as a second half to the first set of commandments, which by contrast went completely against the tradition. Rendered more acceptable by the coupling with indisputable rules of morality, this first part was quite revolutionary, viz. Moses’ new theology. This included a prohibition on using God’s name lightly (a taboo also found in other religions), on making images of God, and most of all, on offering worship to any god beside Yahweh.
The first thing Moses did when he came down from the Sinai mountain with his rock-hewn Ten Commandments was to slaughter 3000 religious dissenters. These were enthusiasts of Ba’al, “Lord”, originally a generic term of address for kings and gods, later used specifically for the Northwest-Semitic fertility god Hadad. He is known from Semitic royal names like Jeze-bel, Bel-shazzar, Hanni-bal and Bal-thazar. This traditional fertility god was typically depicted as a bull. For the purposes of worship, the devotees in the Sinai had fashioned a statue (what Hindus call a mûrti) of the bull god from their own jewelry: the “Golden Calf”.
Nowadays this term is used as shorthand for crass materialism and greed, as if this moral vice were needed to justify the devotees’ mass slaughter by Moses. In fact, they were anything but greedy, they donated their wealth in exchange for the joy of having a focus for their religious exercise of worshipping Ba’al. It was not because of a moral vice that they were put to death, but only because they worshipped another god than Yahweh. The latter could not tolerate this since he was, in his own words (as reported from Mount Sinai by Moses), “a jealous god”.
Moses did not live to see the conquest of the Promised Land, of which he only caught a glimpse from afar. His successor Joshua devised a clever strategy of keeping the non-combatants concentrated outside the war zone and attacking the cities one by one. Citing orders from God, he eliminated the native fellow-Semitic population, the Canaanites. This he justified with a promise which he claimed Yahweh had made long before (scholars’ estimate: 4 to 5 centuries) to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Note that the natives were not asked for their theological opinions. They were not killed because of their polytheism, and it seems unlikely that they could have saved themselves by quickly converting. At that time, Yahweh was still the god of a nation, not of a community of like-minded believers.
1.3. Henotheistic origins
It is widely assumed among scholars that the Yahweh cult was initially henotheistic rather than monotheistic. Yahweh insisted that his followers worship only him and no other gods, but this did not immediately imply that other gods were deemed non-existent and illusory. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, the first of the Ten Commandments, can be read as a husband’s claim on the absolute loyalty of his wife. By no means does such a husband deny the existence of other men, he merely demands that his wife disregard all other men and devote herself exclusively to him. In the initial phase, Yahweh’s religion makes no truth claim about the non-existence of other gods, rather it sees them as dangerous seducers who have to be kept at bay. From the 13th to the 7th century BC, Israelite monotheism was in a formative stage of a henotheism increasingly hyperfocused on the chosen One God, leading to the ultimate black-out of the other gods. From seductive rivals to Yahweh, they shrivel to become illusory projections of the human mind.
This evolution is summarily acted out in the evolution of the Biblical god’s other name, Elohim. In Northwest-Semitic (Canaanite, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew), this is a masculine plural form, meaning “gods”. The Semites had a god El, whose name lives on in personal names like Gabr-i-el, “my strength is God”, Mi-cha-el, “who is like God?”. In cuneiform, this name was rendered with the sumerogram Dingir, showing a star. That indeed is the original West-Asian concept of the gods: they were stars, collectively “the heavenly host”. One of the oldest epithets of Yahweh is “Lord of Hosts”, i.e. the supergod presiding over the army of gods in their daily march across the sky (which again presupposes that the other gods were real, though lesser in stature). The contrast between polytheism and the first monotheism was quite literally that between the numerous stars in the night sky and the lone star of the day sky.
A noun derived from El is the feminine abstractive noun Eloha, “a god”, “deity”, better known in its Arabic form Ilâha. This countable noun referred to any of the numerous gods worshipped by the Pagan Arabs. With the South-Semitic definite article al-, this becomes Al-Ilâha, “the god”, better known in its contracted form Allâh. Both in Hebrew Elohim and in Arabic Allâh, we see how the conception of the One and Only God, to judge from his name, is rooted in the polytheistic conception of “god” as a countable noun, “one of the gods”. As if a single star was selected, looked at ever more closely until it outshone and rendered invisible all other stars, and was then reinterpreted as the only star in existence.
This rootedness in polytheism is found in most languages where the concept of a single God was introduced. To the pre-existing Greek and Latin generic terms theos and deus, “a god”, the emerging Christian Church assigned the new monotheistic meaning “God”. In Germanic, the word god seems to have been a uncountable noun since pre-Christian times, but of neutral (rather than of masculine) gender, i.e. impersonal: “the numinous”, “the divine”. Its Sanskrit etymological equivalent is hutam, “(that which is) honoured with libations/sacrifices”, “(that which is) worshipped”. Here too, the Christian monotheistic term is borrowed from a pre-Christian non-monotheistic conception, viz. of the divine as a numinous essence present in an undefined number of gods and perfectly thinkable apart from a single personal God. In Chinese, Protestant missionaries have chosen the old term Shangdi as their translation of the Biblical names for “God”. They may not have realized that in Chinese, which doesn’t morphologically distinguish plural from singular, this ancient term had been conceived as plural: “the powers on high”, “the gods above”.
In the 19th century, the idea of an Urmonotheismus, a primeval monotheism, gained ground. It meant that the historically attested polytheistic religions had come into being as aberrations from an older monotheistic religion. Islam had pioneered this idea with its claim that Adam had been the first Muslim and that the Kaaba, built by Adam, had later been usurped by the Pagans for the polytheistic worship which Mohammed found (and destroyed) there. But in the actual history of early monotheism, we find its cradle was polytheistic, with no trace of a reference to an earlier, primeval monotheism.
1.4. The jealous God
In polytheistic pantheons, gods with a specific character are typically counterbalanced by gods with the opposite character, e.g. war-like Ares or Mars with harmony-seeking Aphrodite or Venus. No doubt the Arab Beduin storm-god Yahweh had brothers and sisters in the pantheon who represented less stormy traits to keep the whole in balance. If the idea of a single god had been thought up in the abstract, one could have expected him to be neutral, elevated far above all those pairs of opposition. Later thinkers working within a monotheistic framework will indeed try to understand their god in this manner: as a coincidentia oppositorum, “unity of opposites” (thus German philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus, 15th cent.). Instead of a war-god held in check by a peace goddess, you would logically get a single god transcending the war/peace opposition.
However, that is not how monotheism originally came about. When all other gods were outlawed, Yahweh nonetheless retained his character of tribal storm god, but no longer counterbalanced by more pleasant fellow-deities. Though not as sexually playful as the Indo-European storm-gods Indra, Zeus, Jupiter, Perkunas, Perun or Donar (unless you include his begetting Jesus upon the Virgin Mary, and even that fling on the side he outsourced to the Holy Ghost), Yahweh resembles and outdoes them in choleric flare-ups and violent discharges of anger. Thus, his initiative to destroy mankind by means of the Flood was motivated by anger at the disappointing performance of his own human creatures.
Let Yahweh’s short temper be his privilege and that of his followers, the one thing truly objectionable about him from the viewpoint of the non-believers is only his effort to destroy alternative gods and their religions. Pre-Christian Israelite history is punctuated by episodes of slaughter against non-Yahwists. Thus, the prophet Elijah challenged a group of Ba’al priests to have their god produce a miracle and set fire to a sacrificial animal. Of course miracles don’t exist, so nothing happened; and when Elijah had Yahweh set alight his own sacrifice after he had sprinkled “water” on it, the gullible were taken in, but he had obviously used a trick (petrol?). At any rate, the next thing we know is that he had the 450 Ba’al priests put to death. His own disciple Elisha organized a coup against the Ba’al-worshipping queen Jezebel and killed her and 70 of her relatives.
However, until the expansion of Christianity, this campaign of destruction was limited to the Israelites or such foreigners as lived among the Israelites and had an influence on them. It did not interfere with the religion of "the nations". To be sure, there was plenty of slaughter of non-Israelites during the conquest of the Promised Land. But this was simply to make way for the Chosen People, to create living space, not to make them change their religion. On the contrary, it was taken for granted that “the nations” (ha-goyim) had other religions than that of Yahweh: “And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars -- all the heavenly array -- do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the Lord your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.” (Deuteronomy 4:19)
You’ve read that right: the heavenly hosts as the gods forbidden to the Israelites, have been “apportioned to all the nations” by Yahweh, who consequently didn’t want them to worship him instead of the gods given to them. This again testifies to the fact that Yahweh was originally conceived as a tribal god, entitled to the loyalty of his own tribe but without universal pretentions (just as a husband is entitled to his wife’s loyalty but not to that of all women).
The first dim apparition of Yahweh’s universal ambition is perhaps Prophet Isaiah’s fantasy of an end-time in which all nations come to pay tribute to the Israelites and their god in Jerusalem. But it is only later, in the multicultural and universalizing climate of the Hellenistic states (4th-1st cent. BC) and the Roman Empire, that some Israelites start conceiving of their God as universally valid. This didn’t make them embark on massive missionary campaigns, but on a small scale they did start to attract converts or “proselytes”. Jewish thinkers like Philo of Alexandria briefly tried to incorporate notions from Greek philosophy, such as Plato’s “idea of the Good” or Aristotle’s “unmoved mover”, into their conception of God.
It fell to Christianity to complete this job of incorporating the universalist Greek concepts of the Absolute into the monotheistic construction of God. Because Christianity had universal rather than national ambitions, it made the destruction of everyone else’s "false gods" its chief mission. This same mission was later interiorized and amplified by Mohammed. To the surviving non-monotheistic traditions, monotheism became an all-devouring predator and a self-declared enemy.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Is there a Vedic monotheism? Introduction: the Arya Samaj and monotheism
The occasion for this paper on monotheism and its presence or absence in Hinduism is an upsurge in the Arya Samaj’s long-standing campaign to convince Hindus of the superiority and Vedic basis of monotheism.
Founded in 1875, the Ârya Samâj, in effect "Society of Vedicists", was a trail-blazer of Hindu revivalism and anti-colonial nationalism until Independence. It worked bravely for the reconversion of Indian Muslims, the only humane solution to India's communal problem. Some of its spokesmen gave their lives for speaking out on Islam, most notably Pandit Lekhram in 1897 and Swami Shraddahananda (co-founder of the Hindu Mahasabha) in 1926. The Arya Samaj also led the way in the abolition of caste discrimination and the acceptance of widow remarriage, both as a matter of Vedic principle and in order to free Hindu society of its weaknesses which its enemies were exploiting to their advantage.
Unfortunately, in its opposition to the predatory religions of Islam and Christianity, it interiorized some of their beliefs and attitudes. Foremost among these was the assumption that monotheism, the belief in a single God annex the condemnation of all worship offered to any being but Him, is the supreme form of religion. Hence, the Arya Samaj decreed that the Vedic religion had always been monotheistic, so that Islamic and Christian missionaries had nothing to teach the Vedicists about the true religion of the One God. If Hinduism now seemed like the polytheistic religion par excellence, this was partly due to post-Vedic degenerative developments and partly to textual misinterpretation of the seemingly numerous god-names in the Vedas. In reality, or so the Arya Samaj claimed, these many gods were only different faces of the One God.
Until Independence (completed by the struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad for Hyderabad's accesion to the Indian Union in 1948, in which the later Arya Samaj president Vandematharam Ramachandra Rao took a leadership role), this monotheistic reinterpretation of the Vedas could be excused as a tactical device useful in the Arya Samaj's main struggle, viz. against the predatory monotheistic religions. Ever since, however, and especially in the recentmost decades, the Arya Samaj seems to have forgotten its original mission, and is now turning the bulk of its polemics against fellow Hindus who have not embraced this monotheistic reading of the Vedas. In effect, the Arya Samaj has become Christianity's and Islam's first line of attack against Hindu polytheism.
As an organization, the Arya Samaj is no longer very powerful or important, but its message has spread far and wide in educated Hindu society. The same is even more true of a similar movement, the Brahmo Samaj (°1825), a flagbearer of the Bengal Renaissance which tried to translate Hinduism into rational-sounding concepts acceptable to the British colonizers and the first circles of anglicized Hindus. Whereas the Arya Samaj embraced a Christian-like religious theism, the Brahmo Samaj tended more towards a modern Enlightenment-inspired deism, i.e. the philosophical acceptance of a distant cosmic intelligence rather than a personal God biddable by human imprecations and sacrifices. But like the Aryas, the Brahmos rejected Hindu polytheism as a degenerate aberration from the true Vedic spirit.
In the course of the 20th century, the Arya and Brahmo views of Hindu tradition have become mainstream among English-speaking Hindus. Many introductory textbooks on Hinduism used in India, and most of those used in NRI-PIO circles, deny Hindu polytheism and insist that the many Hindu gods are merely faces of the One God. Thus, among the textbook edits proposed by two Hindu foundations that triggered the California textbook controversy of 2005-2009, a prominent one was the replacement of “gods” with “God”.
Before entering the specifics of the monotheism argument, let us say beforehand that we don't believe the contents of this argument have been decisive in the Arya Samaj's prioritizing the struggle against polytheism nor in its abandonment of its original alertness against Islamic and Christian aggression. On both issues, the organization is simply riding with the tide. Now that Nehruvian "secularism" has become the norm, it is just not done to criticize Christianity or Islam (except by the brave) or to describe their conversion offensive as a problem. The Arya Samaj has abandoned its own raison d'être. We may not be able to counter anyone’s opportunistic reasons for being on the safe side of an existing trend; but we are in a position to refute the theological justification which the Arya Samaj proclaims for its adoption of “Vedic monotheism”.
In this article series, we will consider (1) the genesis of monotheism; (2) Christian and post-Christian attempts to discover monotheism in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and tribal religions; (3) Hindu or Arya attempts to discover monotheism behind “apparent” Hindu polytheism; (4) the related issue of ”idolatry” and the Arya campaign to extirpate it from Hinduism; (5) the logical ways for Hindus to deal with the monotheistic challenge. We may take up questions (welcome at koenraadelst@hotmail.com or at the present forum) in a final article.
Read more!
Founded in 1875, the Ârya Samâj, in effect "Society of Vedicists", was a trail-blazer of Hindu revivalism and anti-colonial nationalism until Independence. It worked bravely for the reconversion of Indian Muslims, the only humane solution to India's communal problem. Some of its spokesmen gave their lives for speaking out on Islam, most notably Pandit Lekhram in 1897 and Swami Shraddahananda (co-founder of the Hindu Mahasabha) in 1926. The Arya Samaj also led the way in the abolition of caste discrimination and the acceptance of widow remarriage, both as a matter of Vedic principle and in order to free Hindu society of its weaknesses which its enemies were exploiting to their advantage.
Unfortunately, in its opposition to the predatory religions of Islam and Christianity, it interiorized some of their beliefs and attitudes. Foremost among these was the assumption that monotheism, the belief in a single God annex the condemnation of all worship offered to any being but Him, is the supreme form of religion. Hence, the Arya Samaj decreed that the Vedic religion had always been monotheistic, so that Islamic and Christian missionaries had nothing to teach the Vedicists about the true religion of the One God. If Hinduism now seemed like the polytheistic religion par excellence, this was partly due to post-Vedic degenerative developments and partly to textual misinterpretation of the seemingly numerous god-names in the Vedas. In reality, or so the Arya Samaj claimed, these many gods were only different faces of the One God.
Until Independence (completed by the struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad for Hyderabad's accesion to the Indian Union in 1948, in which the later Arya Samaj president Vandematharam Ramachandra Rao took a leadership role), this monotheistic reinterpretation of the Vedas could be excused as a tactical device useful in the Arya Samaj's main struggle, viz. against the predatory monotheistic religions. Ever since, however, and especially in the recentmost decades, the Arya Samaj seems to have forgotten its original mission, and is now turning the bulk of its polemics against fellow Hindus who have not embraced this monotheistic reading of the Vedas. In effect, the Arya Samaj has become Christianity's and Islam's first line of attack against Hindu polytheism.
As an organization, the Arya Samaj is no longer very powerful or important, but its message has spread far and wide in educated Hindu society. The same is even more true of a similar movement, the Brahmo Samaj (°1825), a flagbearer of the Bengal Renaissance which tried to translate Hinduism into rational-sounding concepts acceptable to the British colonizers and the first circles of anglicized Hindus. Whereas the Arya Samaj embraced a Christian-like religious theism, the Brahmo Samaj tended more towards a modern Enlightenment-inspired deism, i.e. the philosophical acceptance of a distant cosmic intelligence rather than a personal God biddable by human imprecations and sacrifices. But like the Aryas, the Brahmos rejected Hindu polytheism as a degenerate aberration from the true Vedic spirit.
In the course of the 20th century, the Arya and Brahmo views of Hindu tradition have become mainstream among English-speaking Hindus. Many introductory textbooks on Hinduism used in India, and most of those used in NRI-PIO circles, deny Hindu polytheism and insist that the many Hindu gods are merely faces of the One God. Thus, among the textbook edits proposed by two Hindu foundations that triggered the California textbook controversy of 2005-2009, a prominent one was the replacement of “gods” with “God”.
Before entering the specifics of the monotheism argument, let us say beforehand that we don't believe the contents of this argument have been decisive in the Arya Samaj's prioritizing the struggle against polytheism nor in its abandonment of its original alertness against Islamic and Christian aggression. On both issues, the organization is simply riding with the tide. Now that Nehruvian "secularism" has become the norm, it is just not done to criticize Christianity or Islam (except by the brave) or to describe their conversion offensive as a problem. The Arya Samaj has abandoned its own raison d'être. We may not be able to counter anyone’s opportunistic reasons for being on the safe side of an existing trend; but we are in a position to refute the theological justification which the Arya Samaj proclaims for its adoption of “Vedic monotheism”.
In this article series, we will consider (1) the genesis of monotheism; (2) Christian and post-Christian attempts to discover monotheism in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and tribal religions; (3) Hindu or Arya attempts to discover monotheism behind “apparent” Hindu polytheism; (4) the related issue of ”idolatry” and the Arya campaign to extirpate it from Hinduism; (5) the logical ways for Hindus to deal with the monotheistic challenge. We may take up questions (welcome at koenraadelst@hotmail.com or at the present forum) in a final article.
Read more!
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
India Charming Chaos
In October 2011, I wrote this foreword to the book India Charming Chaos by Johnny Fincioen. It is a general presentation of first impressions of India by an unprepared traveller who just followed his nose, or his intuition. Fincioen (1952) and his wife are a successful Flemish-American entrepreneurial couple who in midlife decided to take it more slowly with the IT business. Like for so many others, an exploration of all that life has to offer soon turned out to include the mystical wonderland India. I read the report of their discovery and contributed
Why go to India? Johnny Fincioen, Flemish-American businessman, has found out for himself simply by giving it a try. What he found is a fascinating country going through a cascade of changes. After the Indomania waves of the 19th century and the 1960s and 70s, India is hot once more.
In Antiquity, India was a fabulous land in the distance, reputedly home to unicorns and gold-digging giant ants. The Arabs considered her the center of wealth and knowledge, source of the rakmu’l-Hindi, “Indian numerals”, which we have mis-termed “Arabic”. Places of wealth and luxury tend to come into use as girl’s names, thus in English the name of the South-African diamond mine Kimberley, and the Arabs did likewise with Hind, name of the homeland of gemstone culture, India (e.g. Prophet Mohammed’s principal enemy, Mecca’s first lady Hind bint Utba). When the trade routes to the riches of India were made difficult and expensive by hostilities with the Muslim world, Europeans sought detours to India, discovering America along the way and calling its natives “Indians”. At the dawn of India’s absorption into the colonial system, the subcontinent accounted for 24% of world trade, surpassed only by China with 31%, but way ahead of the European powers.
The first modern peak in India’s popularity in the West coincided with her economic decline, when the country was being plundered by the British East India Company, its technology used in the industrial revolution but its native production capacity dismantled, its native education system dissolved, its ruling class reduced to a colorful parody of its former glory, its working class impoverished. But in those days, the type of people who cared to leave us their impressions of India and Indian civilization in writing were typically more interested in her cultural dimensions, whether the gory anecdotes about snake charmers and widow self-immolation or the profounder philosophical insights that inspired Arthur Schopenhauer and the American Transcendentalists.
The second peak coincided with India’s postcolonial stagnation, when its people’s dynamism and creativity was stifled by Nehruvian socialism. Entreprise was made very difficult and people taking business initiatives were practically treated as criminals. The country’s name had become a byword for extreme poverty and hopelessness. Westerners who took the hippie trail to India accepted as normal that India had very poor hygiene and underdeveloped communications, with begging lepers on every street corner. To add insult to injury, the international public routinely lauded the controversial Mother Teresa as the only hope for India’s poor, thrown into the gutter by India’s callous upper classes.
The Cambridge-trained socialists who had imposed their detrimental policies on India rationalized the resulting stagnation by labeling it “the Hindu rate of growth”, as if economic underperformance and inertia were intrinsic characteristics of the native civilization. The received wisdom as conveyed in the ethnic jokes India’s neighbors tell about Indians always told a different story: they may be depicted as greedy, hung up on bizarre purity taboos, manipulative and other less commendable traits, but nobody ever doubted their business acumen. A reality check was provided by those Indians who had escaped the Nehruvian experiment: migrating to Africa or the Anglo-Saxon countries, taking much of their traditional culture along, they amazed their host societies by their successful entrepreneurship. Margaret Thatcher called them the “model minority”. They also took a leadership role in brain-intensive endeavors like specialist medicine and innovative technologies.
In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh (PM at the time of this writing) made a fairly clean break with Nehruvian socialism. As a result, India started emancipating itself from sloth and poverty. The success story of the diaspora is now reproducing itself in the old country. Like in the precolonial age, India is now a land of budding wealth and opportunity.
At the same time, some old and enduring problems refuse to go away, or are even getting worse. Divisions along religious, linguistic and caste lines are eagerly played up by interested parties. And these are not always the ones identified as trouble-makers in the mainstream media. Thus, many self-styled human-rights watchdogs and do-gooder NGOs, both native and foreign, are more part of the problem than of the solution. Often they are agents of social strife and promoters of artificial resentment, sometimes also conduits of foreign interference. Economic progress has its trickle-down effects to many poorer communities, but also has its left-behinds, such as the farmers who see no way out of their accumulating debts except suicide. Just as the end of Communism didn’t bring the predicted “end of history” at the geopolitical level, the demise of Nehruvian socialism doesn’t mean that the history of India’s struggle with itself has ended.
Meanwhile, for foreign travelers, India has become far more comfortable than the hippie trail of yore. Cleaner, safer (if you stay out of the guerrilla-infested areas), more orderly, far easier to get around, fully up-to-date on ICT. Fortunately or unfortunately, the country has also become less foreign, less Oriental, less exotic: Western cultural models are penetrating the country along with material culture, English is more dominant than ever to the detriment of the status of the vernaculars, and on the Western side, Indian cuisine and music have become familiar even to those who never took a particular interest in India, while many have made acquaintance with Indian-born neighbors and colleagues. The country has also become less hostile to “the foreign hand”, the bogey that used to be invoked to ban foreign participation in India’s industry, markets, media and research facilities. So, while still different enough to be worth seeing, it has become much easier to feel at home there. There are no excuses anymore for postponing your trip to India.
Read more!
Why go to India? Johnny Fincioen, Flemish-American businessman, has found out for himself simply by giving it a try. What he found is a fascinating country going through a cascade of changes. After the Indomania waves of the 19th century and the 1960s and 70s, India is hot once more.
In Antiquity, India was a fabulous land in the distance, reputedly home to unicorns and gold-digging giant ants. The Arabs considered her the center of wealth and knowledge, source of the rakmu’l-Hindi, “Indian numerals”, which we have mis-termed “Arabic”. Places of wealth and luxury tend to come into use as girl’s names, thus in English the name of the South-African diamond mine Kimberley, and the Arabs did likewise with Hind, name of the homeland of gemstone culture, India (e.g. Prophet Mohammed’s principal enemy, Mecca’s first lady Hind bint Utba). When the trade routes to the riches of India were made difficult and expensive by hostilities with the Muslim world, Europeans sought detours to India, discovering America along the way and calling its natives “Indians”. At the dawn of India’s absorption into the colonial system, the subcontinent accounted for 24% of world trade, surpassed only by China with 31%, but way ahead of the European powers.
The first modern peak in India’s popularity in the West coincided with her economic decline, when the country was being plundered by the British East India Company, its technology used in the industrial revolution but its native production capacity dismantled, its native education system dissolved, its ruling class reduced to a colorful parody of its former glory, its working class impoverished. But in those days, the type of people who cared to leave us their impressions of India and Indian civilization in writing were typically more interested in her cultural dimensions, whether the gory anecdotes about snake charmers and widow self-immolation or the profounder philosophical insights that inspired Arthur Schopenhauer and the American Transcendentalists.
The second peak coincided with India’s postcolonial stagnation, when its people’s dynamism and creativity was stifled by Nehruvian socialism. Entreprise was made very difficult and people taking business initiatives were practically treated as criminals. The country’s name had become a byword for extreme poverty and hopelessness. Westerners who took the hippie trail to India accepted as normal that India had very poor hygiene and underdeveloped communications, with begging lepers on every street corner. To add insult to injury, the international public routinely lauded the controversial Mother Teresa as the only hope for India’s poor, thrown into the gutter by India’s callous upper classes.
The Cambridge-trained socialists who had imposed their detrimental policies on India rationalized the resulting stagnation by labeling it “the Hindu rate of growth”, as if economic underperformance and inertia were intrinsic characteristics of the native civilization. The received wisdom as conveyed in the ethnic jokes India’s neighbors tell about Indians always told a different story: they may be depicted as greedy, hung up on bizarre purity taboos, manipulative and other less commendable traits, but nobody ever doubted their business acumen. A reality check was provided by those Indians who had escaped the Nehruvian experiment: migrating to Africa or the Anglo-Saxon countries, taking much of their traditional culture along, they amazed their host societies by their successful entrepreneurship. Margaret Thatcher called them the “model minority”. They also took a leadership role in brain-intensive endeavors like specialist medicine and innovative technologies.
In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh (PM at the time of this writing) made a fairly clean break with Nehruvian socialism. As a result, India started emancipating itself from sloth and poverty. The success story of the diaspora is now reproducing itself in the old country. Like in the precolonial age, India is now a land of budding wealth and opportunity.
At the same time, some old and enduring problems refuse to go away, or are even getting worse. Divisions along religious, linguistic and caste lines are eagerly played up by interested parties. And these are not always the ones identified as trouble-makers in the mainstream media. Thus, many self-styled human-rights watchdogs and do-gooder NGOs, both native and foreign, are more part of the problem than of the solution. Often they are agents of social strife and promoters of artificial resentment, sometimes also conduits of foreign interference. Economic progress has its trickle-down effects to many poorer communities, but also has its left-behinds, such as the farmers who see no way out of their accumulating debts except suicide. Just as the end of Communism didn’t bring the predicted “end of history” at the geopolitical level, the demise of Nehruvian socialism doesn’t mean that the history of India’s struggle with itself has ended.
Meanwhile, for foreign travelers, India has become far more comfortable than the hippie trail of yore. Cleaner, safer (if you stay out of the guerrilla-infested areas), more orderly, far easier to get around, fully up-to-date on ICT. Fortunately or unfortunately, the country has also become less foreign, less Oriental, less exotic: Western cultural models are penetrating the country along with material culture, English is more dominant than ever to the detriment of the status of the vernaculars, and on the Western side, Indian cuisine and music have become familiar even to those who never took a particular interest in India, while many have made acquaintance with Indian-born neighbors and colleagues. The country has also become less hostile to “the foreign hand”, the bogey that used to be invoked to ban foreign participation in India’s industry, markets, media and research facilities. So, while still different enough to be worth seeing, it has become much easier to feel at home there. There are no excuses anymore for postponing your trip to India.
Read more!
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