Indo-European Mythology and Religion

by Alexander Jacob

  phallic support of our universe represents the rejuvenation

  of the fallen Heaven (Osiris/Varuna) and is the instrument

  of the birth of the sun, it too has to be overcome spiritual y.

  The baneful aspect of the material manifestation of

  the universe (which is the central focus of the Zoroastrian

  reform of the Vedic religion) is to be found in the

  Dravidian version of the Skanda Purāna, Kantapurānam.

  Here, the mango tree situated in the midst of the

  ocean is the second form taken by the demonic Asura,

  Sūrapadman, who is concealed in a mountain (exactly

  as Asakku is in Lugal-e or Vrtra in the Vedas).528 The first form assumed by Sūrapadman is a monstrous multiform

  525 H. Zimmern, ‘Religion und Sprache’ in E. Schrader, Die

  Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1903, p.448; p.555.

  526 By the end of the second century B.C., Zeus comes to be identified quite commonly with Adad as Zeus Adados (see A.B. Cook, op.cit. , I:549).

  527 See A.B. Cook, op.cit., I:604ff.; cf. H. Zimmern, op.cit., p.448.

  528 See D. Handelman, “Myths of Murugan: Asymmetry and

  Hierarchy in a South Indian Puranic Cosmology”, History of Religions, 27, no.2, p.143.

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  mockery of the Purusha characterised by a thousand arms

  and legs.

  The son of Shiva born especial y for the martial

  purpose of defeating the Asura Sūrapadman is Muruga

  (Skanda). Like Ninurta and Marduk in Mesopotamia, and

  Indra in the Vedas, Muruga is the god in the Underworld

  who has to combat the asura that represents the forces

  blocking the emergence of the sun into our universe.

  Muruga destroys Sūrapadman’s first form by revealing his

  own true, and eternal, form as the Purusha. Sūrapadman’s

  second form, that of the “mango” tree, is also cloven into

  two by Muruga when he casts his Maya-destroying lance

  (“vel”) against it.529 The tree is then transformed into a

  cock and peacock, which are symbols of death and the

  Underworld.

  In Babylon, just as Muruga in the Dravidian version

  of the myth is said to have cloven the “mango” tree,530

  Marduk is also said, in the Poem of Erra, I,148, to have

  ‘altered’ the position of the tree.531 We note that Muruga

  and Marduk are final y involved in an effort to master the

  universal Tree/Phal us represented by Indra.

  The cult of Dionysus too was, like the Indian Murugan,532

  a deeply philosophical one since it aimed ultimately at

  guarding men from the cycle of reincarnation. This is

  evident in the Orphic account of Dionysus’ effort, after his

  529 Muruga is always iconographical y represented with this

  characteristic weapon, his ‘Vel’. This, unlike the ‘Vajra’ of Indra, is not particularly a phallic symbol, unless perhaps it represents a ‘spiritual lingam’ such as described in the Linga Purāna (see below).

  530 See D. Shulman, “Murukan, the Mango and Ekambaresvara-Siva

  Fragments of a Tamil Creation Myth”, Indo-Iranian Journal 21 (1979), p.32.

  531 See L. Cagni, The Poem of Erra, Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1977, p.32.

  532 See p.245.

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  resurrection, to save men from rebirth with the aid of his

  mother Kore/Persephone.533

  III. The Dionysiac Religion

  If we now consider the spiritual importance of the deities

  within the cosmological structure studied above, we note

  that the principal god of the Yogic religion of the proto-

  Dravidians is Shiva since he is the same as the Divine

  Self or Soul, Ātman. In his wind-like form of Vāyu/Enlil/

  Wotan Shiva seems to have been the major deity even

  in the ancient Near East. For there are references in the

  Sumerian epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 141-6, to a time when all the peoples of the region “in unison/

  To Enlil in one tongue [gave praise].”534 Charvat has

  also recently noted the emergence of the first “universal

  religion of Mesopotamia” already in the Chalcolithic

  cultures of Tel el Halaf and Ubaid.535

  As for the original Āryan religion of which the

  Mitanni and the Indo-Āryans represent the western and

  eastern branches we note that the Mitanni reference to

  Mitra-Varuna, Indra and the Nāsatyas suggests worship of

  the forces that created the sun. For, Mitra is the Heaven/

  Ouranos that was felled by Chronos/Kāla/Shiva and lies

  sunk in the Underworld as Varuna/Osiris, Indra is the

  revived phal us of Ouranos, and the Nāsatyas are twin

  deities associated with the sun.

  533 See M.L. West, Orphic Poems, p.74; cf. p.95. Kore is the mistress of Zeus.

  534 See S. N. Kramer, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Philadelphia: University Museum, 1952, p.15.

  535 See P. Charvat, Mesopotamia Before History, p.236.

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  The Near Eastern and Greek religious cults of Dionysus

  are similarly focused on the reviving solar force in the

  Underworld. In the archaic Greek cultures stemming

  from Anatolia in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., we

  find cults related both to Zeus—the chief of the children

  of Chronos, and leader of the Olympian gods—and to the

  children of Zeus. Of the latter, Dionysus seems to have

  been one of the most important since his religion is the

  most widely spread. The religion of Dionysus may have

  developed in Lydia or Phrygia in Anatolia, as Euripides’

  tragedy The Bacchae makes clear:

  I have left the wealthy lands of the Lydians and

  Phrygians, the sun-parched plains of the Persians,

  and the Bactrian wal s, and have passed over the

  wintry land of the Medes, and blessed Arabia and all

  of Asia which lies along the coast of the salt sea with

  its beautiful y-towered cities full of Hellenes and

  barbarians mingled together; and I have come to this

  Hellene city first, having already set those other lands

  to dance and established my mysteries there, so that I

  might be a deity manifest among men.536

  Although the details of the Dionysiac religion as a ‘mystery’

  religion involving initiation are mostly lost, we may infer

  from literary evidence that the devotees indulged in orgies

  of wine-drinking537 in order to achieve an elevation of the

  mind to a state in which it could be filled by the god, or

  ‘enthused’. The participants of the Dionysiac rituals, which

  included ecstatic dancing, included female votives called

  ‘maenads’ and men representing satyrs that bore the

  phal us and thyrsus symbolic of the deity.

  536 Translated by T.A. Buckley.

  537 For Dionysus’ discovery of the vine see Apollodorus, Bibliotheca III.4.5; cf. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica III,62ff, IV.1.6, IV.2.5.

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  Omophagia, or the eating of raw meat, along with the

  consumption of wine, seems to have been an important

  part of the Dionysiac celebrations since it recalled the

  devouring of Dionysus by the Titans. A.B. Cook has

/>   pointed to the significance of these Dionysiac sacrifices:

  In Crete, the ritual of Dionysos, the re-born Zeus,

  included a yearly drama, at which the worshippers

  performed all that the boy had done or suffered at

  his death. The Titans’ cannibal feast was represented

  by a bovine omophagy, and those who took part in

  this sacrament thereby renewed their own vitality.

  For ipso facto, they became one with their god and he

  with them. The true mystic was ‘éntheos’ in a twofold

  sense: he was in the god, and the god was in him …

  Dionysos was at once the god of the Mysteries and the

  mystic … the bull eaten and the bull-eater.538

  Nevertheless, in Euripides’ The Bacchae we find that purity of life is a condition of a Bacchant:

  Blessed is he who, being fortunate and knowing the

  rites of the gods, keeps his life pure and has his soul

  initiated into the Bacchic revels, dancing in inspired

  frenzy over the mountains with holy purifications, and

  who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele,

  brandishing the thyrsus, garlanded with ivy, serves

  Dionysus.539

  Also, from Porphyry’s reference in De Abstinentia to

  Euripides’ now fragmentary play The Cretans, we may

  infer that the ultimate aim of the Dionysiac religion was

  asceticism:

  538 A.B. Cook, Zeus p.673; see also p.673ff.

  539 Translated by T.A. Buckley. 241

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  In the mystic rites

  Initiated, life's best delights

  I place in chastity alone,

  Midst Night's dread orgies wont to rove,

  The priest of Zagreus and of Jove;

  Feasts of crude flesh I now decline540

  Plutarch too points, albeit disdainful y, to the philosophical

  significance of the Dionysiac cult in his essay ‘On the E at

  Delphi’:

  And as for his turning into winds and water, earth

  and stars, and into the generations of plants and

  animals, and his adoption of such guises, they

  speak in a deceptive way of what he undergoes in

  his transformation as a tearing apart, as it were,

  and a dismemberment. They give him the names of

  Dionysus, Zagreus, Nyctelius, and Isodaetes; they

  construct destructions and disappearances, followed

  by returns to life and regenerations—riddles and

  fabulous tales quite in keeping with the aforesaid

  transformations.541

  We may assume also that the Dionysiac rituals were

  informed by the same concentration on the spiritual

  significance of the divine phal us and its solar seed that

  we will find in the Purānic literature related to Shiva and

  Skanda in India.542 The mystery aspect and orgiastic/

  ascetic tendencies of the Dionysiac cult may thus have

  involved a quasi-Tantric understanding of the need to

  control the magical power of sexuality in the microcosm

  as well as macrocosm.

  540 Porphyry,

  On Abstinence from Animal Food, tr. Thomas Taylor,

  IV:19.

  541 Translated by F.C. Babbit.

  542 See p.246.

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  The Dionysus cult is continued by the traditions of

  Orphism that appear around the 6th century B.C. The

  survival of crucial details of the Zeus story in the Orphic

  papyrus discovered recently in Derveni543 points to

  Orphism as a major resource of the Dionysiac mythology

  and mysteries. Orphism was principal y located in Thrace

  (Macedonia and the Balkans).544 And A.B. Cook stated that

  he inferred, ‘that the Orphic poem took shape somewhere

  in Asia Minor as the result of early Ionian speculation

  brought to bear on primitive Thracian-Phrygian beliefs.’545

  The Orphic mysteries also had a definite relation to

  Greek philosophical inquiries of the 6th c. B.C. on the

  nature of the soul, and especial y to Pythagoreanism,

  which influenced the Idealistic philosophy of Plato in the

  5th c. B.C. as wel .546 The revivification of Dionysus may

  have been considered in Orphism as representative of a

  rebirth of the soul and even of metempsychosis, as Plato’s

  reference to ‘an ancient theory’ in Phaedo 70c suggests.

  The Cretan Dionysiac rituals, which were based

  on a mystic communion of the celebrants with the god,

  may also have been the origin of the Attic drama of the

  6th century B.C. Attic tragedy may have evolved from the

  543 Derveni, near Thessaloniki, was part of the Macedonian kingdom of Philip II (382-336 B.C.), from which period the Derveni papyrus dates.

  544 Thrace is where, according to the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Wotan first travelled to in his migration from Anatolia to central and northern Europe (cf. A. Jacob, ‘On the Germanic Gods Wotan and

  Thor’ in this journal).

  545 A.B. Cook, Zeus, II, ii, p.1021.

  546 Platonism in turn was crystallised in the 3rd century A.D. by Plotinus in a way that returned to Greek thought its original mystical insights. Among the Ideal or ‘intelligible’ hypostases of Neoplatonism we find that the ‘One’ is the counterpart of the original Self/Soul of the Upanishadic philosophy, the ‘Mind’ is that of the Divine Light and Consciousness of Brahman, and the ‘Soul’ that of the Prakriti (Māya) of the macrocosmic Purusha.

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  ritual recreations of the passion of Dionysus. And, as G.

  Murray suggested, the comedy too may have developed

  from the satyr-play which ‘coming at the end of the

  [tragic] tetralogy represented the joyous arrival of the

  Reliving Dionysus and his rout of attendant daimones at

  the end of the sacer ludus [sacred play].547

  The Dionysiac religion that is centred on the concept

  of the revival of the battered Light of Heaven in the

  Underworld also bears a close resemblance to the Christ

  story, and the spread of the latter in the first centuries

  A.D. through the Christian religion must have derived

  sustenance from the Dionysiac traditions of the peoples of

  the Mediterranean.

  Murugan Worship

  As we have noted above in Megasthenes’ account of

  the ancient Indians, the Dionysiac cult may have been

  influential in the formation of the religious traditions of

  the Indic peoples as wel . In India, there are not many

  references to the counterpart of Dionysus, Skanda/

  Muruga, in the Vedas. Only a few passages such as RV

  V,2,1 refer to ‘Kumāra’, a name of Skanda/Muruga. The

  Chandogya Upanishad, however, refers to Sanāta Kumāra

  (the Eternal Son) as being identical to Skanda, who is

  represented as imparting the doctrine of the soul to the

  sage Nārada. And in the Shiva Purāna it is again Skanda

  who imparts the Shaivite cosmology and rituals to the sage

  Sūta. Muruga is also said to be the one who revealed the

  doctrines of the Shaiva Siddhānta school of philosophy,

  which, though it may have original y been widespread

  throughout India, is now best preserved, after the Muslim

  invasions, in South India.548 This major branch of Indian

  547 Quoted in A.B. Cook, Zeus, I, p.
695f.

  548 See G, Flood, The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu 244

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  philosophy has as its goal the liberation of the individual

  soul, through initiation, into a state approximating that of

  the god Shiva.

  The Kushan Empire of the 1st to the 4th c. A.D. shows

  some evidence of the worship of Kārtikeya (son of the

  Krittikas/Pleaiades). In the following period, the worship

  of this deity becomes common both in the Gupta Empire

  and in the South Indian Pal ava kingdom. The earliest

  textual references to Muruga from the Dravidian literature

  of the first three or four centuries A.D. bear witness to

  a Dionysiac god who is capable of infusing women with

  love-sickness and possessing his devotees in a frenzy.549 In

  this context, we may also note that Muruga’s mother is

  Shiva’s consort Parvathi in her form as “Korravai”. The

  adjective ‘kuravanji’ (nowadays translated as “gypsy”) is

  cognate with the Greek ‘korybantes’ (associated with the

  birth of Zeus) and refers original y to the deities of the

  mountain (which in Sumerian is called “kur”).

  Muruga is worshipped by the Tamils especial y during

  the festival called ‘Thāipūsam’, which commemorates

  the granting of the spear (vel) to Muruga by his mother

  Pārvathi. During this festival, the devotees of Muruga

  are committed to abstinence, self-flagel ation and the

  bearing of a burden in the form of (phallic) mountains

  symbolising the transcendence of the physical universe.550

  Some of the participants also dance a typical Murugan

  dance (kāvadi) with representations of these mountains

  on their shoulders.551

  Religion, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005, p.34.

  549 See K. Zvelebil, Tamil Traditions on Subrahmanya-Murugan, Madras: Institute of Asian Studies, 1991, p.78.

  550 Self-flagel ation, especial y during Lent, is also an ancient tradition in the Christian religion related to the passion of the Christ on the Cross.

  551 The Murugan rituals, like the Indian Tantric rites, were open to people of all classes of society. Indeed, even the classical choreographic 245

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  We note that the rituals associated with Murugan

  worship as preserved today in South India are ultimately as

  ascetic as the Dionysiac rituals since Muruga’s father Shiva

  is indeed the source of Yogic wisdom. The Linga Purāna

  also makes clear that there are two types of phal uses, an