Nick Allen, more seer than is realized
(Swarajya, 25 May 2020)
Prof. Nick Allen (1939-2020) was a scholar of
Anthropology and Indo-European (IE) Studies who taught from 1976 until his
retirement in 2001 (and informally, till his death) at Wolfson College, Oxford.
He had done the fieldwork for his doctorate in Nepal, and did research about
the near-extinct Kafir religion of Nuristan. On the IE heritage, he belonged to
the school of Georges Dumézil, perfecting and correcting the latter’s doctrine
of Trifunctionality (an application of the Triguna scheme), and elaborating his
emphasis on the common descent of the various IE mythologies from a common
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) template. I met him a number of times at conferences
in Oxford and in Louvain-la-Neuve. He died on 21 March 2020, fittingly on
Spring Equinox.
Comparative mythology
In Nick Allen’s work, what first drew my
attention was his 1998 paper “The Indo-European prehistory of yoga” (International
Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 2, p. 1-20). It discusses one of the many similarities
between Sanskrit and Greek mythology, apparently inherited from a common PIE
source. Allen zooms in on one of them, analyses it deeper than anyone had
hitherto done, but that far, he only elaborates an instance of a generally
accepted paradigm, viz. that, like the IE languages, the IE mythologies descend
from a common PIE source. But then he adds a momentously new insight, as we
shall see.
For an example of this general paradigm, we find many versions of the
story of a hero obtaining immunity from wounds except in one spot, and later
getting killed through that spot. Thus, Achilles is dipped into a magic potion
at birth, but his mother holds him by the heel, so that is where he is later
shot; Duryodhana appears naked before his mother, whose eyes have acquired
magic power by always being blindfolded, but he wears a loincloth, and there
(prudishly: “in his thigh”) he gets mortally wounded; in Germanic mythology,
similarly, the sun-god Balder acquires immunity from all plants except the
mistletoe, and is shot by an arrow made of mistletoe; and the hero Siegfried bathes
in the blood of the dragon he has slain, but a leaf falls on his shoulder, and
there he later gets shot.
Or to take this example of dragon-slaying: it is widely done by the
thunder-god or his son: Indra, Zeus, Siegfried, Beowulf, and others. Even
outside the IE world (which is only part of an even older and larger family), the
Babylonian god Marduk slays the dragon Tiamat.
Another property of thunder-gods, or gods in general, across the
Indo-European world is the power to take any shape. On this established
understanding of the gods, the poets have the thunder-god, a paragon of
masculinity, take on other shapes useful in seducing a desired women. Thus,
Indra seduces Ahilya by masking as her lawful husband Gautama; Siegfried (son
of the thunder-god Donar/Thor) seduces Brunhild by taking the shape of her
husband Günther; Zeus often takes shapes to seduce his many paramours, e.g. he
becomes a bull to seduce princess Europa. These are perhaps jocular variations
invented by the poets to illustrate this fundamental divine power, but the
deeper essence reveals itself later in the philosophical doctrine of Maya,
which sees the world as a fictional shape taken by the Supreme Being.
A final example from the Indo-European mythologies is
the motif of four world ages of descending quality. The Hindu notion of Kṛtā, Treṭā, Dvāpara and Kali Yuga is not substantially different
from the Greek notion of a Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron age, or the Germanic
notion of a Spear, Sword, Wind and Wolf Age. Even in non-IE cultures as far as
Mexico, variations on this motif appear. So, Hindu civilization is challenged
to come out of its cocoon and realize its specific place within the larger
genealogical tree of mankind’s ideas and myths. That will then emphasize the
differences too, where Hinduism has built on a common heritage but taken it
further. Thus, several mythologies attribute to gods the power to take shape,
but only Hindu civilization has developed it into the Vedantic doctrine of
Maya.
In the case of Homer’s Odyssey, which we are going to discuss, a few
examples of similarities with the Sanskrit hymns are these. While Odysseus is
away from home for 20 years, his wife Penelope is getting increasingly besieged
by suitors; ultimately they number 108, which in Hinduism is the sacred number
par excellence. They are put to a test: drawing Odysseus’ bow. But only Odysseus
(who has just returned to his home island, in disguise) can draw it, just as
only Arjuna can draw the bow during the contest for Draupadi’s hand (and just
like Rama when competing for Sita’s hand). Or for something very different,
when camping on sun god Helios’ island, Odysseus and his men are sworn to
abstain from eating his cows; but his men defy his orders, kill and eat the
cows, and get divinely punished for their cow-slaughter by drowning to death.
It is my observation that, while some mindless Hindus only get elated by
this because “it proves that ancient Hindus conquered the world”, many orthodox
Hindus don’t like these international similarities, neither in mythology nor in
language. For them, it detracts from the unicity of Sanskritic tradition. They
fear that positing any relation at all between things Indian and things
non-Indian, whether through an invasion from a foreign Homeland or even through
an emigration from an Indian Homeland, is a ruse by “the foreign hand” to
belittle Hinduism and deprive it of its greatness and originality. Yet, hold
your horses, because acknowledging these similarities turns out to do great
honour to the Hindu version.
The hard journey to bliss
So, as part of this project of discovering
ancient common motifs that manifest in both Sanskritic and Greek traditions,
Allen discusses the commonalities between Odysseus’ journey from the nymph
Calypso’s island Ogygia to the blissful island of Scheria belonging to the
god-like Phaeacan tribe, and Arjuna’s journey from the Dvaita Forest to the
Himalaya and ultimately to Indra’s heaven. They are no less than 23 in number:
“1. Larger journey. For both heroes, as we know, the transit in
question is part of a much longer round trip. The Pândavas set off from their
royal capital before their exile and will return there. Odysseus sets off from
Ithaca before the Trojan War and will likewise return.
“2. Stasis. Before the transit both heroes are, as it were, becalmed.
The Pândavas have spent thirteen months in Dvaita Forest and show no signs of
moving. Odysseus has spent seven years in Ogygia, and Calypso hopes to keep him
there indefinitely.
“3. Depression. The Pândavas are deeply
depressed and lament their situation at length. Odysseus spends his days
weeping on the shore of Ogygia.
“4. Visitor with instructions. Vyâsa arrives
unexpectedly with instructions for the whole party to move on and for Arjuna
himself to go to heaven (3.37.20). Hermes arrives unexpectedly with Zeus'
instructions for Odysseus to depart (5.77).
“5. Intermediary. Neither visitor speaks
directly to the hero. Vyâsa deals only with Yudhisthira (Arjuna's eldest
brother), Hermes with Calypso.
“6. Female's farewell. Draupadi and Calypso
both make touching good-bye speeches.
“7. Uneventful start. Arjuna goes north to
the Himalayas, traveling alone and fast until he is well into the mountains.
Odysseus sails alone before a favorable wind for seventeen days until he comes
in sight of Scheria.
“8. Unwearied. Arjuna travels night and day
without fatigue. Odysseus does not sleep for the seventeen days.
“9. A complex ordeal (we shall come back to
its detailed structure later). Arjuna undertakes four months of tapas.
Following a change of scene while the sages visit Siva, the story returns to
earth for the fight, after which god and hero are reconciled. As for Odysseus,
his raft is progressively destroyed by the storm. Then comes a lull. The hero's
sufferings resume as he faces the problems of landing, until his final success
at the river mouth.
“10. Emaciation. Though most manuscripts
ignore it, some refer, reasonably enough, to Arjuna's emaciation following the
tapas. The sages worry, but the god reassures them, and they rejoice. During
the lull Odysseus rejoices, and his joy is compared to that of a group of sons
worried about their father. The father has suffered a long emaciating illness,
and when, at last, the gods relent and the father mends, the sons rejoice. This
rapprochement, like some others (e.g., 13), is between the Sanskrit main story
and a Homeric simile.
“11. Divine enemy and supporter. When Siva
comes to earth, he initially treats Arjuna as if he were an enemy. When
Poseidon becomes aware of Odysseus, he treats him as his enemy. However, in
both cases, the divine enemy is balanced by a divine friend, for during his
ordeal Arjuna receives support from Indra disguised as a Brahmana and when
Poseidon has departed Odysseus receives help from Athene.
“12. Painful bodily contact. Arjuna's battle
with Siva starts with an exchange of arrows and progresses to wrestling.
Odysseus is thrown by a wave against a rough rock and clasps hold of it as the
wave rushes past. [Note that this motif of wrestling with a god also appears
in the Bible, where Jacob wrestles with Elohim, thus becoming Israel, “wrestles
with God” (Genesis 32:28).-- KE]
“13. Lump of flesh with injured extremities.
Siva reduces Arjuna to what looks like a lump of organic matter, a pinda,
with damaged limbs. The wave which throws Odysseus against the rock rebounds
from the cliffs and plucks him off again, stripping the skin from his hands. He
is like an octopus dragged from its hole with pebbles adhering to its
tentacles.
“14. Unconscious. Arjuna falls to the ground
unconscious in front of Siva. Odysseus falls to the ground unconscious on
landing.
“15. Prayer. Arjuna revives and prays to
Siva, begging for forgiveness. Just before he lands, Odysseus prays to the
river god, begging for his kindness.
“16. Offering. Arjuna makes a clay image of
Siva and offers to it a garland, which the god takes and puts on. Odysseus
gives to the river god the veil of the goddess Ino, which he has been using as
buoyancy aid. The god returns it to Ino, who duly takes it in her hands.
“17. Restoration. Arjuna is physically
restored by the touch of Siva. Odysseus is physically restored by Athene's
hypnotherapy.
“18. Cardinal points. After his encounter
with Siva, Arjuna meets the four Lokapâlas. During the storm, Odysseus is
buffeted by the four wind gods, Euros, Notos, Zephyr, and Boreus, who are
linked with east, south, west, and north, respectively.
“19. Three-plus-one structure (a point we
shall come back to). The four Lokapâlas include Indra, but the king of the gods
stands apart from the other three in various particulars. Among the four winds,
Boreus, who is 'king of the winds' (Pindar 4.181), stands apart, for when
Athene calms the other three winds she lets Boreus continue blowing until the
lull.
“20. City with park. Indra's heaven contains
a divine city Amarâvati, inhabited by gods, with blossoming trees and a park.
The Scherian city (unnamed) belongs to the Phaeacians, who are near kin to the
gods (agkhitheoi gegaasi; 5.35), and it contains Alcinous' park and his
ever-fruitful trees.
“21. Wheeled vehicle. Arjuna goes to the city
in a chariot belonging to Indra, its king. Odysseus walks to the city behind
the mule-cart that Nausicaa borrowed from her royal father.
“22. Throne. Arjuna shares his divine
father's throne in his palace. Odysseus is seated next to the king on a throne
which has just been vacated by Alcinous' favorite son.
“23. Disappointed nymph. In heaven the
Apsaras Urvasi is misled by Indra into thinking that she will enjoy sex with
Arjuna, which indeed she wants to do. Nausicaa is misled by Athene into
thinking that she will very soon be getting married; and when she meets
Odysseus, she hopes it will be to him.” (Allen 1998:
5-7)
This list gives an idea of what kinds of
similarities are possible here. But more importantly, in the aggregate they get
evidential value: “In parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so
numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in
the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative. For present purposes many questions
about this proto narrative can be left unanswered. Was it told in prose or in
verse or in a mixture of the two? Was it told in the Urheimat or
original homeland (whatever the location and date of that logically necessary
zone of space-time), or did it diffuse somewhat after the dispersal began? It
does not matter. The similarities cannot be explained either by chance, or by
Jungian archetypes, or by diffusion of the Homeric epics from Greece to India;
and if they are as striking as I think then, one way or another, they must be
due to common origin in a proto-narrative.” (Allen 1998:2)
.
Diffusion
One explanation, explored by the Spanish philologist
Fernando Wulff Alonso (The Mahābhārata and Greek Mythology, 2008 in Spanish,
translated 2014), is that the similarities are due to recent borrowing, via the
post-Alexandrine Indo-Greeks. Many things Indian have been attributed to Greek
transmission, e.g. Nyāya logic from Aristotelian logic, the Buddha
statue copying the Apollo statue, astrology (or at least horoscopy) borrowed
from Babylon and immediately passed on to the Hindus, the art of theatre and even
the sari have been claimed as presents from the Greeks. In some cases, this
proposed transmission might even correspond to historical facts, but in the
case of the epics and background of ancient mythology, this is extremely
unlikely.
Such an extensive literary borrowing can hardly have
taken place without leaving a trace, such as the borrowing of words and names. Even
Wulff Alonso cannot pinpoint any unmistakable borrowing. The first Hindu
treatises on astrology have the names of the Zodiac in transcribed Greek, they
were translated only later, and some technical terms passed from Greek into the
normal Sanskrit lexicon, e.g. kentron/kendra; but no such loans can be found in
the epic, except for Yavana, “Ionian, Greek” itself, common in general usage. The
wars around which both the Mahābhārata and the Homeric epics were woven, took
place a thousand years before the Indo-Greeks. Their causes in the respective
epics are very different, as is the cast of protagonists. Whereas a number of
literary motifs are parallel, the historical core is very different, no
imitation there. Finally, even Alexander, by definition earlier than the
Indo-Greeks, had already heard that the Hindus too have “an Iliad”, i.e. a war
epic.
Far more likely is an explanation ultimately developed
by Georges Dumézil and elaborated by Nick Allen: the two have a common source.
The narrative got reapplied to historical events in the -2nd
millennium, but was in outline older, as were the myths at the background. They
belong to a common PIE heritage. So, instead of a diffusion from historical
Greece to historical India, we have a diffusion from the PIE homeland to all
the IE branches, including India and Greece.
Śiva and Poseidōn
What we have come to know in Caesar’s account of the
Gaulish War as the Interpretatio Romana, meaning the understanding of
Celtic gods as corresponding to Roman gods, is in fact quite common in
polytheistic cultures, attested since the Sumerians, and still visible in the
corresponding names of the week days (Dies Jovis = Thursday = Guruvār).
Since Sumerian times, people routinely assumed different pantheons (which,
after all, represent the same universe) to correspond. In the same vein, the
Greeks interpreted Śiva as Dionysos and Indra or Kṛṣṇa as Hēraklēs.
The obvious drawback was that less obvious differences
were overlooked. While acceptable in everyday practice, such inaccuracies were
not good enough in comparative-mythological research. Therefore: “Sir William
Jones in his essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ (1784) already
resisted such identifications”, and he would be immune to the tendency of
“insisting that such a God of India was the Jupiter of Greece; such, the
Apollo; such, the Mercury.” (Stoneman 2019:81) Nonetheless, this purism is a
minority position. We will have to make do for now with the correspondences
that the ancients posited, explicitly or implicitly, and that has gained
citizen’s rights.
We are not aware of any acknowledged correspondence
between Śiva and Poseidōn; but if needed, we will posit one ourselves.
Both are, among other things, gods of the underworld. The historical
differentiation of Greeks and Hindus has had its effect on these two: Śiva
is not particularly associated with the sea, as is Poseidōn. This is probably
due to geography: Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, where the Mahābhārata is
set, is land-locked, whereas seafaring was a way of life for the Greeks. Yet,
both are, among other things, gods of the underworld, and both are depicted
with a trident (an object allotted by the Church to that more recent
underworlder, Satan). Both put our heroes, Arjuṇa c.q. Odysseus, to the
test during their journey.
But there is a difference, as Allen observes: “Arjuna's journey is in several senses a yogic
undertaking: for a start, the hero is explicitly 'yoked to Indra's yoga'. In
ancient Greece one finds hints of yoga-like religiosity, especially in
Pythagoreanism, but there is nothing obviously yogic or Pythagorean about Odysseus'
journey.”
Thus, Odysseus is repeatedly thwarted by Poseidōn because he has
provoked the god’s anger. Arjuṇa, by contrast, has to contend with Śiva
in a yogic challenge, which he meets by ascetic exercises. These include the
weeks-long practice of the oldest described Haṭha Yoga contortion, viz. the Vṛkṣāsana
or Tree Pose. These are completely absent in the Odyssey. Śiva is the ideal
yogi, and is depicted as a typical ascetic, sitting in meditation pose, and
with the fruit of meditation: the enlightened Third Eye. Poseidōn is not,
though Jungian psychologists still associate him with a second-best option:
altered states of consciousness, depth psychology and the subconscious, which
is compared to an ocean full of exotic life forms.
Poseidōn does without a Third Eye, but his son Polyphēmos has one: a
single eye, for that is how people who have forgotten about yoga, distortively
remember this esoteric concept. Once this non-comprehended remnant of a symbol
starts leading its own life, story-tellers weave playful anecdotes around it,
such as Odysseus poking his single eye out. And that is then the rather mundane
reason why father Poseidōn is angry with our hero. So, in India we have a
consistent and lofty symbol, Śiva as the ideal yogi, and in Greece only a
remnant, a similar character with similar symbols (trident, relation to the
Third Eye through his son’s single eye).
Allen comments that: “in parts of their careers,
Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must
be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral
proto-narrative. (…) So, if both stories descend from a proto-narrative, there are two
possibilities. Either the proto-journey was like the Greek and contained
nothing relating to yoga, in which case the yogic aspect of the Sanskrit story
was an innovation that developed in the Indian branch of the tradition. Or the
proto journey was like the Sanskrit and was quasi-yogic or proto-yogic in
character, in which case Greek epic tradition largely or wholly eliminated that
aspect of the story. I shall argue for the second scenario, claiming both that
the proto-narrative shared certain features with yoga and that the telling of
such a story makes it likely that there already existed ritual practices
ancestral to yoga as we know it. (…) I argue that
some significant and fairly precisely identifiable features of yoga go back to
the culture of those who told the proto-narrative, who (…) may well have been
proto-Indo-European speakers.”
Implications for the Homeland debate
A suspicion arises that needs to be verified further,
viz. that after comparison, the myths indicate the anteriority or greater
authenticity of the Indian version. Nick Allen has repeatedly shown that in
many parallel motifs in the Mahābhārata
and in Homer’s epics, the Indian version contains a spiritual element lacking
in the European version. So, yoga existed in the Indo-European Homeland, but the Greeks lost it.
The logical explanation, which stares him in the face
but which he as an invasionist fails to draw, is that this dimension was lost
in the rough and tumble of the trek to their historical habitat. The most precious elements are
the ones that get lost most easily, such as in a corpse, where the brain starts
disintegrating at once whereas the skeleton can last for centuries. Similarly,
the twists in the story were more or less preserved but the subtle yoga teachings
in it were gradually forgotten, with only a remnant like the Single Eye reminding
of it.
In that case, India was their common Homeland, but
only the stay-behind Indians had the comfort of a stable situation where they
could preserve the most subtle layer of their stories.
The invasionist explanation would be that the Aryan
barbarians did not have this profound layer to their narratives, but
reinterpreted these once they interiorized the native Indian tradition of yoga.
This is not impossible, but in that case they would not so much have added a
new content to their old stories, but adopted the appropriate aboriginal
stories that transmitted the yoga doctrines.
This promising first impression needs to be verified
in closer research, informed by a knowledge of Indian spirituality. At any
rate, we must thank Nick Allen for this extremely important paper.
////////////////////////////////////
Creatively applying Nick Allen’s method
By focusing on Comparative Mythology, Prof. Nick Allen from Oxford
showed that yoga dates back to the Proto-Indo-European phase and to the
language family’s Homeland. Unintentionally, as an inertial believer in the
prevalent invasionist paradigm, he thereby added an argument for the case of
India as the Homeland. Further, he showed in passing that the idea of yoga is
Vedic and in fact even pre-Vedic.
The problem with Comparative Mythology
The main hurdles for warming Hindu students to
Comparative Mythology are these two. Firstly, it receives very meagre attention
in Indian university programmes, and unknown makes unloved. This is ostensibly
because earlier generations of education policy-makers deemed it unimportant.
And indeed, it is in itself not that important (though it can temporarily help
in the current debate over the Indo-European Homeland), India has more urgent
needs to take care of.
But it so happens that Western Orientalists, by
contrast, are normally equipped with the basic references because before
studying India with its wealth of mythological material, they had already
acquainted themselves with Greco-Roman mythology in their secondary schooling,
and being mostly people with this kind of interest, also with their own
people’s (Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Finnish etc.) mythical lore. So before even
purposely studying Comparatism, they can’t help linking Achilles’ non-immune
heel with Siegfried’s non-immune shoulder and then, upon discovery of the
Indian stories, extending this motif to Duryodhana’s non-immune pudic zone. Due
to historical circumstances, Hindu students don’t have this stepping-stone
towards studying Comparative Mythology.
The second, more ideological reason is that many Hindus
perceive highlighting these links with foreign traditions as threatening to
belittle Hindu tradition. They fear it is only a ruse by the Foreign Hand. The
reason for this is that it shows how the Vedic and other Hindu traditions are
only late versions of an older component of pan-IE or even pre-IE tradition,
with sisters or cousins in other branches. As Michael Witzel has tried to show,
all myths of the different ethnic sections of mankind can be placed on a
genealogical tree, with roots many thousands of years into the past.
This posits a very fundamental problem having to do
with Hindu self-perception and self-definition. Very briefly, quite a few
Hindus adhere to the non-Vedic doctrine that the Vedas are eternal, of
supernatural origin, “revealed” to the Rishis (like the eternal Quran with
Allah addressing Mohammed, or Jahweh addressing Moses and the Israelite nation
in the Ten Commandments), and the source of everything Dharmic. The Vedic hymns
themselves, by contrast, are always in the form of man addressing a god, and
refer to earlier, pre-Vedic Rishis already from hymn 1.1 onwards. They locate
themselves squarely in history, specifically in Bronze-Age North India. The
supernatural origin of the Vedas is a post-Vedic invention, probably within the
second generation of the Mimansa school of philosophy, and the devotional
spirit of the masses easily picked it up. As the Vedic hymns receded into the
past all while becoming socially ever more prestigious, they were extolled into
the stratosphere and divinized. But this invented tradition about the
non-historical nature of the Vedas has become the orthodox view, and many get
angry if you dare to question it.
Comparative research militates against this rosy
belief. It finds that Vedic Sanskrit has sisters in Proto-Slavic,
Proto-Germanic etc. (and nieces in Russian, English etc.), meaning that they
have a common mother, Proto-Indo-European, by definition older than its
daughters, including Vedic Sanskrit. And this proto-language is itself a later
evolute of Nostratic or some such ancestral language, which itself was a sister
of the Proto-Australian, Proto-Amerind and Proto-Khoisan (Hottentot-Bushman)
languages; so no, Sanskrit is not the oldest language nor the mother of all
languages. Contrary to what invasionists think, a rejection of the Aryan
Invasion Theory does not automatically entail the espousal of an Out-of-India
Theory: the vast majority of AIT rejecters don’t know or care about an
Out-of-India scenario. They feel freed from any link (“concocted by
colonialists”) to outsiders by proving the invasion scenario wrong and don’t
feel like reintroducing this link through an emigrationist scenario.
And what is true for languages, also counts for
mythology: it is much against the liking of Hindu traditionalists that we find
the Sanskritic myths to be cognate with
Greek, Germanic or other foreign myths. Yet, this kinship with foreign myths
can have its uses in Hinduism’s struggle for survival.
The Puruṣa Sūkta in comparative perspective
For example, enemies of Hinduism such as the Christian
missionaries and the neo-Ambedkarites routinely highlight the Puruṣa Sūkta,
a famous hymn from the youngest part of the Rg-Veda. They allege it underpins
the caste system and is uniquely Hindu, thus stamping Hinduism as uniquely
anti-egalitarian and oppressive. Their case is strengthened by the at least
2000-year-old habit of Hindu traditionalists to claim the same Puruṣa Sūkta
as a divine justification for caste, setting the superior layered civilization
of the Hindus apart from the chaotic societies of the Mlecchas. But the anti-
and pro-Hindu discourse both show a very narrow, Indocentric viewpoint, which
would make way for a more relaxed interpretation if the horizon is widened.
In reality, while the hymn does teach the division of
society in four functions, it completely lacks the two defining elements of
caste: endogamy and hereditary profession. It could apply to any advanced
society. And, to bring Comparative Mythology into the equation, it is not
unique at all.
The central doctrine of the Puruṣa Sūkta is
called corporatism, i.e. “body-like view”, “body metaphor”; both societal
corporatism and cosmic corporatism. This means that it likens the little whole
of the human body with the larger wholes of society and of the universe. In
society, it likens the head, upper body, lower body and legs with the priestly,
martial, business and productive functions. In the universe, it makes the
heavenly vault metaphorically into a skull, sun and moon into the two eyes, the
mountains into the bones, etc. This originates as part of a myth of primeval
twin-brothers, Manu and Yemo (> Sanskrit Yama, Germanic Ymir, “the
twin”): Manu sacrifices Yemo to create the world and assigns his victim’s body
parts to become the parts of the larger whole.
We find variations on this myth in various branches of
the Indo-European world and far beyond. The giant Ymir is a very literal
application of this cosmic corporatism: his body parts become the elements of
the universe. In China, the giant Pangu is similarly divided into the
constituent parts of the universe, with the added detail that the flees on the
giant’s skin become the human beings on the surface of the earth. In Rome, this
creation of the world becomes the founding of the city, by Romulus and Remus
(< Yemo, with the initial consonant assimilated to “Romulus”), during which
Remus dies. In Central America among the Mayas, a jocular variation has two
twins make a living as entertainers, with one splitting up the other and then reuniting
the pieces and reviving the reconstituted body. The gods whom the twins hate
for having murdered their parents, ignorantly ask them to do it to them
(splitting up, then reassembling and reviving), so they happily cut the gods in
pieces, then leave it at that. That is why ever since, “God is dead”.
The doctrine of corporatism outgrew its mythical
origin in the explanation of societal inequality by the republican statesman
Menenius Agrippa. In -494, to revolting lower-class people, he argued that the
classes are like body parts: mutually interdependent. (As part of the
reconciliation, he conceded to them the office of popular tribune.) The same
simile was used by Socrates’ disciple Xenophon, by Cicero, and by Saint Paul in
his Letter to the Corinthians. From the latter, the Catholic Church actualized
it in 1892 in the Social Teachings of the Church, as laid down in the Papal
Encyclical Rerum Novarum. This provided the harmony model of the
relation between the classes, the Catholic answer to the upcoming Socialist
model of Class Struggle, and became central to the Christian-Democratic
movement.
In their turn, the Socialists criticized it as a
hypocritical way of covering up the natural conflict of interest between the
labour class and the capitalist class. This is the same critique formulated by
the Indian Left against the Puruṣa Sūkta with its implied harmony model
and the coexistence of the different societal classes. This is very useful to
know if you need to defend Hinduism with its Puruṣa Sūkta against its
enemies with their casteist rhetoric. See? It can serve Hindu interests to use
the findings of comparative studies.
Indo-European yet non-Vedic elements in Hinduism
Another problematic insight is that many elements of
Hindu thought and religion are identifiably of Indo-European origin yet are not
found in the Vedas. Thus, many elements of the Mahabharata are in common with
Greek etc. stories, yet are not to be found in the Vedic tradition. This is a
large subject; for now we will only point to an example already given:
Duryodhana who, like Achilles and Siegfried, narrowly misses his chance to
become wholly immune from injury, with
fatal consequences.
This seriously reduces the importance of the Vedas
even within Hinduism. As a whole, Hinduism unites in itself different
traditions: goddess cults, most in evidence in the Northeast, but present in
every village; worship of trees, animals and other features of nature,
occasionally highlighted by e.g. the Govardhan episode extolling mountain
worship; idol worship in temples, most articulate in the Peninsula; asceticism
and renunciation, concentrated in the Himalayan foothills and Bihar; and the
Vedic tradition of hymn recitation and fire sacrifice, from Haryana and
surroundings. This Vedic tradition has exceptional merits, spawning or
gathering around it disciplines like grammar, mathematics and astronomy, with
India’s main claims to fame in the global history of science.
Yet, that does not make the Vedas into the source of
all of Hinduism, of which they are only a part. And it does not even make them
into the whole of the Indo-European part of Hinduism. Both in linguistics and
in mythology, we find elements identifiable as Indo-European and linked with
Roman, Slavic or other branches, yet not with the Vedas. This state of affairs
has been well explained by Shrikant Talageri, suffice it to say here that his
identification of the Vedas with the Paurava tribe leaves the non-Vedic northwestern
tribes of the Druhyus and Anavas to emigrate and spawn all the foreign branches
of Indo-European; and the southeastern Iksvakus, Yadavas and other Indo-Aryan
yet non-Vedic branches to populate other parts of India.
Nick Allen writes that later Hindu lore, like the Mahābhārata, “must have already been
current in some form (…) as many have realized, the Vedic texts relate only a
small part of the culture of the Vedic period. But it is much less recognized
how much comparison can do to fill out the picture, and identify the material
that bypassed the Vedas.” (Allen: “Why the Telemachy? Vyasa’s answer”, Nouvelle
Mythologie Comparée, 2016)
Where these motifs turn up in the common IE heritage
but not in the Vedas, we can indeed speak of a “bypassing” of the Vedas. This
“bypassing” may be resented by Veda fundamentalists who fail to understand the
historicity of the Vedas, i.e. their being inscribed in a larger history older
than themselves. This ideological distrust of comparative studies transcending
India’s boundaries is one of the reasons why anti-AIT scholars rarely bring up
the comparative perspective in the Aryan debate, or even resent it when others
do so. As the Quran says: to them their religion; to us, ours.
Woden the batman
We will give one more instance
of a comparison between Indian and foreign motifs which confirms the central
role of India as the homeland, and the antiquity of yoga and Śiva worship. In the Germanic branch of Indo-European, split off
from the Indian branches more than 5000 years ago (and too far removed to
explain any similarities through a late transmission by the Indo-Greeks), we
know of a deity called Woden, possibly better known in the Norse form Odin.
Woden is one-eyed, just as Polyphemos in the Odyssey,
already discussed. Polyphemos was the son of the trident-wielding sea god
Poseidon, and shares in his Śivaite symbolism. Though in
the Odyssey, his single eye only appears as a freaky detail, made fun of in the
episode where Odysseus pokes this eye out, we think we can trace it to another
well-known Śaiva symbol: the Third Eye.
Polyphemos’ eye is located on the forehead between the eyebrows, the place of
the Third Eye. Also, when Polyphemos asks for Odysseus’ identity, the latter
famously answers: “My name is Nobody.” This may be irony, but now that we get
to see the story through Śivaite lenses, it may be a jocularly
reapplied yogic expression: I am Nirguṇa (without properties), I am Emptiness.
In the case of Woden, the rough and tumble of a long
migration from India has eroded the symbolism of the Third Eye too, but still
preserved more. Thus, the Third Eye becomes a single eye, but it remains
associated with a higher consciousness: the poets’ story becomes that he has
plucked one eye out as a sacrifice in order to obtain wisdom. This is a
distortion, but one that still links the single eye to the yogic achievement of
wisdom, which in yoga is imagined as the Third Eye.
In order to achieve this boon of wisdom, Woden hangs
in a tree for 9 days and nights. This number 9 is a sacred number throughout
much of Eurasia, in Hinduism associated mostly with Durgā; and the
number of the magic square. It reappears in Woden’s symbol, the Valknut
(“knot of the fallen”, but unlike the symbol itself, this name is only recent),
which consists of 3 intertwined triangles. These three correspond to an
Indo-European tripolar scheme, known in Sanskrit as Triguṇa, “the three
qualities”: one above (like Sattva, the lightest of the 3 poles,
transparency), one below (the dark, inertial Tamas pole), and one to the
side (the red dynamic Rajas pole: handed/partisan, i.e. either left or
right; creating a circular movement, counterclockwise c.q. clockwise). That
way, the element 3 of Śiva’s trident is also present, though the trident
is not. Just as the three eyes have become one eye, the three-pronged spear or
trident has become a one-pointed spear.
But the really remarkable aspect about this
tree-hanging is that this is a form of penance or self-disciplining, something
gods rarely do outside the yogic context. This hanging upside down from a tree is
one of the earliest Haṭha Yoga postures: the bat pose. (Another early
one, practised for a month by Arjuna to please Śiva, happens to
be the vṛkṣāsana or tree pose.)
Inspired
Woden is etymologically cognate to Latin vates,
“inspired poet” (wherefrom Collis Vaticanus, “poets’ hill”, which became
the Vatican), and with the Dutch word woeden, “to rage”: for in the
primitive shamanic stage he was associated with stormy excited states of
consciousness. As Mircea Eliade and many others have opined, yoga or the
achievement of silent “enstasy” is an evolute of the widespread shamanic forms
of spirituality, achieving an uproarious “ecstasy”. This history may well be
summarized in the evolution from the stormy unpredictable Rudra to the
dignified yogi Śiva.
A left-over in Śiva’s imagery of this shamanic
stage is the drum he carries: playing the drum induces a trance state and is
there called “the shaman’s horse”. For the same reason, he is associated with
psychedelia and sometimes depicted as a cilam-smoking renunciate. Later
the Buddha would include abstention from all narcotics as one of his five basic
rules, but in the distant past, there was a grey area between this yogic
sobriety and the earlier shamanic reliance on mind-altering substances.
The name Woden is also related to Sanskrit Vāṭa,
“wind”, one of the Vedic atmospheric gods. (The number of Vedic gods is most
often put at 33. Their names can vary, but their number is more important:
Heaven and Earth are 2; the heavenly gods or Adityas are 12, the Zodiacal
number; the atmospheric gods or Rudras are 11, a number impossible to construct
as an equal division of the circle, unseizable like the wind; and the earthy
gods are 8, the cubic number.) These are collectively called Rudras, and
one of them individually is also called Rudra, “the screamer”, “the
frenzied one”, incidentally a description of Woden’s companions, the Berserkrs
(origin of the English expression “to go beserk”).
Woden is depicted as accompanied by a band of young
warriors, the Wild Horde, who correspond to Rudra’s unruly martial
companions, the Maruts; and in real Indian life, to the wrestler-monks.
These Berserkrs got themselves into a trance by using the fly agaric, which
made them feel big and perceive the battlefield enemy as inconsequential (a
property to which a mushroom-eating scene in Alice in Wonderland
alludes). This fly agaric is one of the candidates for the identity of the
Vedic Soma brew, after whom Śiva is named Somanātha, “lord
of the moon” but also “lord of the brew”.
Woden brings the atmospheric imagery along, for he is
depicted on an 8-footed flying horse. In comic-strips, doubling or tripling
someone’s legs means that he is running, and here too it may indicate fast
movement, like the wind. This symbolism has made it through Christianization and
the Christian age, in the form of a saint much venerated in the low countries, Sinterklaas
(Saint Nicholas, in America transformed into Santa Claus). It is a matter of
consensus that he is Woden in disguise. He is dressed in red and rides a white
horse through the sky, and his black companions (Zwarte Piet, Black
Pete) dole out toys through the chimneys. They can also punish you with their
rod and take you away in their bag, a symbolism that is often read as referring
to the age when the Moors ruled Spain and hunted for slaves farther north, but
that arguably goes back much farther, to the Berserkrs/Maruts.
Because Rudra is understood as terrifying, he
is flattered with an apotropaeic nickname: Śiva, “the good one”. He is
surrounded by 4 or more animals, and as such is called Śiva Paśupati,
“lord of the animals”. In Woden’s case, limited by the greater animal monotony
of Northern Europe, these are 2 wolves and 2 ravens.
He is the lord of the fallen. His symbol is the “knot
of the fallen”, and on the battlefield, the souls of the fallen are collected
and brought to the Valhalla, the “hall of the fallen”, by his daughters, the Valkyrie
maidens or “choosers of the fallen”. Likewise, in the Hindu trinity, Śiva
is (after creation/Brahmā and maintenance/Viṣṇu) the pole of
dissolution and destruction. On the sunny side, destruction concerns the ties
which cease to bind us, but that dimension has become less obvious in his younger
incarnation as Woden.
So, Woden is not identical to Śiva, but arguably an evolved and
roughened form of Śiva. What counts here is the same as what Nick Allen
wrote about the kinship between Odysseus and Arjuna: “The similarities
are best explained by postulating a common origin within the
Indo-European-speaking world.”
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