The yellow robed god

Vishnu is the yellow robed god or Pitambari. But how he became one is an interesting aside in the larger mythic play.

To begin at the very beginning, Prajapati the creator god had just finished creating and was sitting back, satiated, on a lotus leaf. The myths (in the Vedic hymns) tell us that he made all beings that inhabit this universe from the heat generated from his own body or his 'tapas'. The heat led him to perspire and from his perspiration, came the world.  This is a motif that many creation myths follow where the creation process is usually faciliated by a liquid -- it could be spit, sweat, rain, the foam on the waves in the sea and even sweetened milk. But that's not the point of this story.

As Prajapati watched his world go past, he called out to the tortoise. "You have been created from my body," he told him. But the tortoise was disdainful and perhaps, a tad dismissive.  "I have been here long before you", it said. The myths leave it there, capturing our society's collective inability, at that time, to verify the truth of who came first. That too is not the point of the story but, the tortoise is.

From being identified as a timeless creature, it moves on to becoming a symbol of the sun in later myths. According to folklore, once upon a time, very long ago, the sun grew afraid of his own lustre. He ran away from himself and sought refuge in the tortoise. He did go back as the world had stopped without him but, he left behind his heart in the tortoise. Thus an entire tribe of sun worshippers also became tortoise worshippers. The tortoise and the sun were now looped in a link and preserved as collective memory. Interestingly the tortoise family is among those animals that aestivate -- or monitor their metabolic levels by going dormant during dry periods where they conserve their energies by staying out of the sun.  






Vishnu on a tortoise, Thrissur Pooram procession

 Vishnu, the preserver god of the trinity, rests on water, lies on a snake and flies on an eagle. He is closely associated with the tortoise which is one of his avatars and a permanent fixture in all his temples. Given the association between tortoise and the sun, Vishnu also became a solar god. The disc in his hand and his yellow robes, the direct symbols of an indirect relationship with the Sun God.

(Photograph: Rajrishi Singhal)

keepers of myth

Myths across the world use an assortment of images, symbols and visual references to build lasting metaphors. Their power lies not only in the thought, the philosophy or the event that resides in them but also in the tools deployed to get the point across. Like the breadcrumbs used by Hansel in the well known German fairy tale or like the ball of string that Theseus used to find the minotaur, myths are a map of the real and the imaginary worlds that our ancestors built.

Myth speaks in a common tongue to a diverse audience. It reflects an innocent and yet complex engagement with the world around us and the world within us. It is metaphoric in form and structure; its meaning is layered in spirals that could take us an entire lifetime to climb but, it is so direct in its intent that a child can grasp at the colour and iconography that it dresses itself up in.

Poet and a great believer in the Vedas, W B Yeats once said: “I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist”(W B Yeats in an essay called Magic in Essays and Introduction, Macmillan.) Yeats believed that the artist, the writer and the musician were inheritors of the legacy of magic and hence understood the potency of the symbols used in magic. His use of the word magic is similar to that of Frazer who describes the different kinds of magic that led to the development of religion. And it is this language of symbols and icons that myths have inherited or as some would believe, even created.

The language of myth is independent of religion and hence it appeals across faiths. It aims to challenge the human mind and is meant to evoke awe and shock and provoke further explorations of thought and philosophy. At the same time, it is deliberately wrapped in religious iconography and explicit imagery so that the stories and their messages leave a lasting imprint on the human mind.

As we leave behind a year riddled in bullets, we need to let this language speak to us. We need to understand the many tongues that roll in many different ways to speak the same truths and denounce the same lies. From the eye of Hathor to the third eye of Shiv, from the rage of Sekhmet to the rampage of Kali and from the ark of Noah to the boat of Manu -- we need to understand the signs and symbols that speak to us through the ages.

Image: A sculpture outside the monastery at Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement in Karnataka India
Picture by Rajrishi Singhal

time and tortoise

Myths do a great job of marrying the verbal and visual in our imagination.

I found this one in a dictionary of myth describing Kasyapa from Indian mythology. (ref: Myths and Legends of the world, Kenneth Mcleish)Kasyapa was husband to the 13 daughters of Daksha (also believed to be the 13 months of the lunar calendar) and father to every living creature according to Mcleish's classification.

In some myths, Kasyapa is husband of Diti, father of the Daityas that include Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu and the 49 Maruts.

In Sanskrit, Kasyapa also means tortoise and is sometimes depicted as time creeping across the sky.

It must have been quite a fascinating journey for the mythmakers to convert concept to word and word to image or was it the other way around?

Art: Mekhala Singhal