War and peace

The iconography associated with Vishnu is quite fascinating. Typically he is shown reclining on the snake god Adi Sesha and riding on his vahana Garuda, the bird god.

As is well known, the serpent and the eagle are arch enemies. In the animal kingdom, the eagle preys on the snake and the snake, on the eagle's young. This relationship has been explored in great detail in folklore and myth -- the birth of Garuda and his subsequent journey to free his mother is a famous case in point.

However the enmity motif becomes inconsequential in the depiction of Vishnu. Both Adi Sesha (serpent) and Garuda (eagle) are his devotees and I haven't yet come across any stories that bring out their mutual antagonism in this role. Clearly though the two never meet -- Vishnu is unlikely to recline and fly at the same time and perhaps that is the reason why there are no idols that have Vishnu, Adi Sesha and Garuda in the same frame. Most Vishnu temples have sculptures of both but they are never shown together. If there is one, and if any of you have come across such a temple or painting or sculpture, please write in.

But to come back to the serpent-eagle relationship, how and when did things change?

Was it under the unifying influence of the Vedic pantheon? Or was it the outcome of the assimilating power of an old religion such as Hinduism? Or was it, the bulldozer effect -- where a majority sucks in minority faiths to make one composite whole, often assigning a deferential role to their gods?

It would be impossible to answer any of the above with authority. But, whatever be the reasons and the reasoning, the iconography records a turning point in the serpent-eagle relationship in the kingdom of myth. It represents an understanding that natural enemies can co-exist without one knocking out the other.

Finally, this is not the only explanation of the iconography. There are many more theories that are extremely relevant and perhaps far more popular and I would love to collect them all. My search has just begun but as and when the explanations pour in, will publish them on the blog.

First men

For many of us, it seems almost impossible to believe that the world we live in was shaped out of a single mass of matter – not always carved up, as it is today, into compartments of nationality, religion, colour and language.

How do I know that? Well as far as scientific evidence goes, I go with that unearthed by the genographic project of National Geographic which has traced the origin of all humanity to Africa. But for those who do not always depend upon the physical sciences to validate their beliefs, even a cursory sip of the sloshing brew of world mythology would have pointed to the same.

The similarities, the shared motifs and imagery and the common fascination with events beyond our ken point to a people united in flesh and spirit. This story from African mythology, mentioned by Joseph Campbell in his book, Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The way of the animal powers is a lovely example.

Called Forbidden Fruit-A Bassari Legend (page 14 of the book), it is about a being called Unumbotte who created the first human and called him Man. He then created antelope and called him Antelope and then made a snake and called him, well what else, Snake. At the time that the three creatures came into existence, the world had no trees except for one: the palm tree. Nor had the earth been pounded smooth. It was rough and scrabbly, much like the insides of a dead volcano (perhaps).

The three, Man, Antelope and Snake, lived off the land and forged a strong bond. One day as they sat quietly staring into the distance, Unumbotte came to them. He said, “The earth has not yet been pounded. You must do that.” He then handed out a variety of seeds and asked them to go plant them.

Some time later Unumbotte came back to earth only to find that the ground had not been beaten smooth but, the seeds had been sown. And one of the seeds had even sprouted a tree that rose tall and high and bore a red fruit. Unumbotte said nothing.

From that day on however, every seven days, Unumbotte would return to earth and pluck one of the fruits off the tree and take it back with him. One day, Snake said to the tohers, “We too are hungry. Why don’t we pluck one of the fruits and eat it?” Man and wife (we don’t know how wife came to be, the story does not go into the details) agreed but Antelope said, how can we eat it when we don’t know anything about it. So he ate the wild grass instead.

When Unumbotte came for his weekly fruit gathering ritual, he asked his flock, “Who asked you to eat the fruit?” When they said that it was Snake, he then asked, “Do you feel hungry?” When they said yes, he said that from then on man would eat fruit, antelope grass but snake was given poison and asked to use it at his discretion.

Campbell says that the story was orally collected, the tribe that told the story had not had any contact with civilisation or Christian missionaries and they said that this story had been handed down to them by their elders.