Shiva and Dionysus: Two sides of the same coin?

Richard Seaford, professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter, England addressed a small group in Mumbai last week to talk about his ongoing research on two figures -- one from ancient Greece and another from ancient India -- Dionysus and Shiva. Both he said were part of henotheistic cultures. Most of us are familiar with monotheism where there is one Divine and polytheism where there are many gods. Henotheism lies between the two extremes. It describes a civilisation where people don't deny the existence of many deities but believe that one is more important than the other. Ancient India was probably a sum of many henotheistic tribes where some believed Shiva was the supreme deity, others felt it was Vishnu or one of his 'avataras' and so on. 

Shiva and Dionysus represent the unity of opposites which leads to a dissolution of boundaries between binaries such as male-female (Ardhanarishwara), human-animal (Shiva and Dionysus are mentioned as having taken the form of a bull in the ancient texts) and life-death. Shiva is creator-destroyer, an imagery we are familiar with and Dionysus, Professor Seaford said, has been compared with Hades (the Greek god of the underworld) in the ancient texts. 

Binaries according to Claude Levi Strauss convey how the human mind operates. A recent course that I did with University of Pennsylvania (via www.coursera.org) had some excellent lectures on the subject where Peter Struck, Associate Professor of Classical Studies with University of Pennsylvania said Strauss showed us how the human mind is structured in pairs of opposites. "All the other more complex forms of understanding that we have are the result of extra binaries layered on top of binaries. So for example, some folks will say, well not everything is black and white. There are lots of shades of grey. But every single shade of grey is made up of certain amounts of black and certain amounts of white." Binary language he said can code a lot of information. 

Binaries help us partially decode the thought and understand the culture which spawned the myth. Let us for a moment stick with the human-animal binary. Dionysus also known as Bacchus was originally a Thracian god. According to Bertrand Russel (A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russel: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984) Thracians were agriculturists and they had fertility cults and a god who promoted fertility who was known as Bacchus. Bacchus had the shape of a man or a bull -- it was never clear if it was one or either or both.  

It gets more interesting. Russel says: "When they (Thracians) discovered how to make beer, they thought intoxication divine and gave honour to Bacchus." Sounds familiar? Apart from the similarities between Shiva and Dionysus-Bacchus, the significance of intoxication and therefore an intoxicant is an intersection point between the Greeks and Indians. 'Soma' was the divine drink and its preparation was elaborate and ritualistic in ancient India where, like the Greeks, the spirit was accorded the status of the divine. Also devotees of Shiva and Dionysus had rituals which involved drunken revelry -- beer and then wine for the Greeks and various forms of weed and bhang in India. I must make it clear here that we are not talking of who influenced whom or whether they were influenced by another source but simply tracing the common thread that runs through civilisations.

To get back to the Shiva-Dionysus comparison, there are many other similarities -- the phallic symbol is important in the worship of both and so is their attraction to women devotees -- which I shall try and list on this blog (soon, I promise) but both represent a period of human development that was exploring the various facets of divinity.

Many cultures, one story...

My piece on death and immortality in Business Standard Weekend today:

Many cultures, one story?

Myths across cultures and continents reveal a preoccupation with similar themes - death, immortality, evil and virtue. Evidently, we are more alike than we are different

Arundhuti Dasgupta /  January 19, 2013, 0:49 IST

Here is a hypothetical exercise. Suppose we are tasked with mapping mythologies of the world on an atlas. Can you guess the outcome? The picture emerging finally is expected to be far more complicated than expected. We would end up with a criss-cross of arrows coursing through multiple continents. It would be as difficult to assign a nationality to these stories as it would be to date their origins. But, what this map could possibly establish without doubt is that the world was a global village way before Google or Facebook tried to stitch it together

Myths bind us in a web of big ideas, common themes and universal truths. Almost every culture, for instance, has stories about death and immortality. In some myths, death has to be vanquished and the heroes are on a quest for immortality. They seek the ultimate elixir, the plant or the root or the drink that will banish death from the land of the living. The theme of immortality is also central to the Kumbh Mela, the grand spectacle that is currently playing out on the banks of the Ganges in Allahabad.

The Economist, which recently reviewed a book on immortality (Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilisation; by Stephen Cave, Crown, 320 pages), had this to say: “…Stephen Cave, a British philosopher, argues that man's various tales of immortality can be boiled down into four basic ‘narratives’. The first is the simplest, in theory at least: do what the medieval alchemists never managed and discover an elixir to simply avoid dying. The second concerns resurrection, or coming back to life after dying, a belief found in all three of the Abrahamic religions. The idea of an immaterial soul that can persist through death dates back, in a formal form, at least to Plato, and forms Mr Cave's third narrative. His fourth narrative deals with immortality through achievement, by becoming so famous that one's name lives on through the ages.”*

The quest of many an Occidental hero, shaped by the philosophy and myths of these cultures, was born out of a need for understanding why we die. In the Orient too, there are similar heroic quests. Garuda, a theriomorph (deities represented in animal form), seeks amrita to free his mother. Gayatri, a popular mantra today but once a metre to which prayers were set to and also a bird, sought an elusive elixir (some myths speak of this as soma and some as amrita) for the gods. Similarly, the story of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh (believed to be the oldest story ever told) describes his search for the plant of immortality. The plant is in the possession of an ageless man called Utnapishtim, the only survivor of the great flood that engulfed the world — remember Noah? — yet another myth that is common to all cultures.

Gilgamesh and Garuda have a lot in common. Garuda obtained the jar ofamrita for the “nagas” but tricked them out of immortality by giving them a set of contrived instructions. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, manages to get the plant but is tricked out of immortality by fate or by the gods because he fails to follow the instructions. The theme of immortality is also central to the story ofamrita manthan, which is the underlying myth of the Kumbh Mela that promises salvation and immortality of the soul.

But the narrative takes an interesting twist at this point. While the older myths record the quest for immortality, later ones tell a different story. Heroes in the Indian epics, for example, don’t seek immortality; they are avatars of the gods who are immortal. They look for deliverance of humanity at large and the defeat of evil (as they see it) in the hands of good. Arjun, Ram, Krishna, Indra, Yudhisthira and Karna are all heroes, all on a quest but not for everlasting life. Similar is the story with Homeric heroes Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon and others — none of them was in the hunt for immortality.

As philosophies across the world engaged with and analysed the concept of death, it was not seen as an end of life but as the means to begin a new one. Or, as a sceptic might say, death became a lost cause. The quest was therefore redefined. Like death, so it is with different aspects of life. The common thread that ties all the stories together creates a complicated, yet human and universal, tapestry. Myths are interesting as much for the fantastical worlds they describe as for what they reveal about humanity: that we are more alike than we are different. Or, at least we all love the same stories.