Origins of the Indian Religious Systems Page 11
Christian Churches of God
No. B7_6
Mysticism Chapter 6
Origins of the Indian Religious Systems
(Edition 1.0 19900830-20001214)
This chapter takes the Indian system from its commencement on the Indus basin with the movements east from the Assyro-Babylonian system to the subsequent Aryan conquests and religious developments.
Christian Churches of God
PO Box 369, WODEN ACT 2606, AUSTRALIA
Email:
(Copyright ã 1990, 2000 Wade Cox)
This paper may be freely copied and distributed provided it is copied in total with no alterations or deletions. The publisher’s name and address and the copyright notice must be included. No charge may be levied on recipients of distributed copies. Brief quotations may be embodied in critical articles and reviews without breaching copyright.
This paper is available from the World Wide Web page:
http://www.logon.org and http://www.ccg.org
Origins of the Indian Religious Systems
Origins of the Indian Religious Systems Page 11
Excavations north of Quetta in the Zhob River basin have revealed evidence that the early civilisations of India were based on the Mother Goddess figure akin to the Babylonian.
Mother Goddess figurines from these excavations though undated, suggest that India’s most popular form of contemporary worship was possibly its oldest religious cult as well. Humped Bulls made of terracotta have also been unearthed in the Valley of the Zhob (Stanley Wolpert - A New History of India, 2nd Edition, Oxford, 1982, p.10).
The Bull cult was a feature of the Babylonian system. In India the Bull became identified with Shiva and deified as Nandi bearer of the God. The stone phallus was also found. This was to be later associated with Shiva and is present in more later carvings, even of Buddhist derivation.
The great Indus civilisation appears to have developed contemporaneously with that of the Tigris Euphrates (and the Nile). The Eastern Yumuna-Ganga plain of Sal forest was not able to be cultivated until iron ploughs drawn by oxen were developed, well after 1000 BCE (ibid., p.12).
The Doab region between these great rivers has revealed only traces of the wanderings of the tribal peoples. The excavations at Hastinapura near Delhi do not appear to be dateable earlier than 1000 BCE.
This may have been the first great city of Aryan occupation in India (ibid.).
Indus civilisation appears to precede the Aryans by at least 1000 years at the cities of Harappa (derived from Hara, one of Shiva’s names) and Mohenjo-daro (Mound of the Dead). The pre Aryan dasas (a name given them by the Aryans meaning slaves) were dark skinned and, contrary to popular history, have been revealed as more advanced than the fairer Aryans, who conquered them through some superior weaponry and the use of harnessed horses. The city of Harappa dates from between 2300-1750 BCE and was contemporaneous with Sumer, with evidence of trade with Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279 BCE) (ibid., p.19). Evidence exists of the mighty hunter deity particularly at Mohenjo-daro. The three horned deity emerging from a tree has been found. It is well known that the Babylonian Triune God, whose symbol is a trident, was also found in the trident bearing, multi-faced Shiva, who appears to be a derivative of Nimrod or associated with him, as the three horned cap was also a sacred symbol in Assyria. According to Hislop, this became also the symbol of Vishnu in his avatar of the fish. This has also been applied by Sir William Jones to Agni (Asiatic Researches, vol., Plate 80) (A. Hislop, The Two Babylons, pp. 36-37). (Although Hislop's work is not popular, it is valuable if used with care.)
The Bull and the Unicorn were symbolic figures associated with this system, as were the spring cults (Wolpert, p. 18).
This superior civilisation was destroyed by a flood sometime after 1750 BCE, caused by tectonic earth movements (ibid., p. 22). The Aryans invaded India after the cataclysm and superimposed the nomadic tribal Shamanism over the sedentary Harappan system, adopting a syncretic form with variations of the Babylonian sedentary system. The Harappan Pipal leaf was to survive into the iconography of Buddhism.
These barbaric Aryan hordes superimposed themselves on the more civilised pre Aryan slaves and fused a religious system. This system enshrined the civil and ecclesiastical power in a class (Varna) system, with religious power in the hands of the Brahmans and civil power in the hands of the Kshatriyas, who headed a feudal system over the other two groups of Vaishyas and Shudras, who are farmers and servants respectively.
With iron-age Western Indo-Aryan technology, they cleared earlier forests by slash and burn techniques (Agni).
Early Aryan Religion
According to Stanley Wolpert:
the religion of the early Aryans centered around the worship of a pantheon of nature Gods to whom sacrificial offerings were periodically made for the good things of life and for repose thereafter. No one deity ruled over the pantheon, which included some thirty three divinities named in the Rig Veda (A New History of India, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1986 p. 32).
The few major Gods were Indra, Varuna, Agni and Soma. Wolpert considers that Indra may have been the first great leader of the Aryan conquest. Indra was the God who defeated "the demon Vritra, whose limbless body enclosed all creation" (ibid., p33). Indra with his "mighty and fatal" weapon the thunderbolt pierced the dark demon’s covering and released the dawn. He is thus equated with Mithras (or Apollo), the Chaldean deity being introduced from the steppes into India by these Aryans. It cannot be dismissed that the Aryans brought with them the Genesis account as it involved their tribes and deified the personalities in a form of ancestor worship. We have seen that Wolpert’s view regarding Indra compares in India with the similarities between the deities and the Genesis accounts of their ancestors. For example, Seri Nu is the god of wealth and money, whereas Nu is the Chaldean and eastern Aramaic or Arabic name for Noah. Shiva is a form of Sheba brother with Dedan and son of Raamah, brother of Nimrod, Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, and Sabtecha, who were all sons of Cush from the sons of Ham (Gen. 10:6-8). The Raksasas are the giants of the Hindu myths that are equivalent to the Nephilim of the Genesis account. The Aryans invaded from Scythia. We know that this was the area inhabited by the Scottish Celts at the same time as the invasion took place (cf. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi, Norton, NY & London 1999). We also know that David had expeditions into Scythia from the Psalms. Brahma might be identified with Abraham and certainly linguistically.
Virtra was also the symbol of pre-Aryan power, the "warder" of the "dasa lord". So there may be historic as well as cosmogonic significance conveying the essence of the Aryan victory (ibid.).
Once Indra's victory was achieved, however, Varuna, the King of Universal Order (initially rita and later dharma) stepped forward to take the central position of Aryan religious authority (ibid.).
As divine judge, he was closely connected with the Sun God Surya and with one of his lesser manifestations in the Rig Veda, Vishnu who with Mitra, incarnated the Sun system. Vishnu and Shiva were to share "virtual” monotheistic dominance over Hinduism (ibid.). Agni, the Fire God, was the mirror of the sun, being another aspect of its manifestation. Soma was the God of Immortality, the spirit which granted 'freedom' and invigorated the 'spirit' prolonging life, symbolically, as a beverage. "Among the lesser personified powers of nature worshipped by the Vedic Aryans, the loveliest was Ushas, the dawn, "rosy-fingered" daughter of the sky" (ibid., p. 34).
Wolpert concludes that "the seeming simplicity of the Aryan nature worshipping religion was soon obscured by the Vedic quest for an understanding of Cosmic origins and control over cosmic forces" (ibid.).
Correct functioning of the universe depended on both Gods and men performing their individual duties in accord with rita, the true order. "Demons of falsehood were always trying to destroy that perfect balance, starting floods, bringing drought or famine" (ibid.). They appeared as mad or dangerous animals, insects and pestilence. Locked in a struggle, a tenuous balance was maintained by ritual sacrifice, exhorting the good deities to overcome the demons.
Truth (rita) could always be subverted by falsehood (an-rita), just as the "real" (sat) or existent world might always be disguised by imagined or "unreal" (asat) illusions, fantasies, and nonexistent fears and terrors. The word sat, which originally meant "existent" came thus to be equated with cosmic reality and its underlying ethical principle, truth. To Vedic man the universe was divided between earth's fair surface and the heavenly dome above it, the realm in which sat prevailed, and the demon darkness beneath this world, where unreality and falsehood dominated all (ibid., pp. 34-35).
This cosmology is obviously Chaldean in origin and (like the early Chaldean animistic system) was to develop further, during the creation of the Rig Veda, to the creation of a number of superdeities, "whose all embracing qualities and impersonal characteristics more nearly resembled monotheistic than pantheistic gods" (ibid.). Prajapati (Lord of Creatures) emerged more comprehensive than Indra, as did Visvarkamon, "the Maker of All", and Bahmanaspati, "Lord of the Sacred Utterance", which was to reflect the growing power of the Brahman priests. They deified speech itself as the Goddess Vac, a female form, perhaps derived from the female aspect of wisdom, but not to be confused with the concept of the Word of God as Messiah in biblical tradition.
“The evolution of a monistic principle of creation, however, came only at the very end of the Rig Veda (Book X, hymn 129), when we find a neuter pronoun and numeral, Tad Ekam, "That One," cited as the source of all creation anticipating differentiation of any sort and all deities, self existent, self generating, unique. "There was not then either the nonexistent (asat) or the existent (sat). There was no sky nor heavenly vault beyond it. What covered all? Where? What was its protection? Was there a fathomless depth of the waters?"* begins this most remarkable and precocious of all Vedic hymns. It continues:
"There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was the sheen neither of day nor of night.
That one (Tad Ekam) breathed (came to life), though uninspired by breath, by its own potentiality. Besides it nothing existed. There was darkness hidden by darkness at the beginning. This all was an unillumined flood. The first (with power of evolution) which was hidden by a shell, That One, was born through the power of its own (creative incubating) heat."
(* Quote from W. Norman Brown, Man in the Universe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966, pp. 29-30.))
From this concept of heat or tapas, came the concept of tapas used in yogic contemplation. The desire or karma, source of "That One’s" stirrings, the source behind the creation, came to mean love. The pre-Aryan Yogis from Mohenjo-daro had refused the early mother Goddess system, back onto the simplified nomadic animistic shamanism of the Aryans. Early Chaldean theology had re-emerged within a monistic system, somewhat different to the western Mithras Anahita or Easter (Astarte) Mother Goddess system.
Aryan expansion eastward gave rise to the epics of the Mahabharata, which reflects the endless warfare and the bloodlusts of inter-necine warfare. It records the transition from pastoral nomadism to territorial kingdoms and the developing concepts of kingship, which reflected in the struggles, the incoherent polytheistic concepts of good and evil, which contain the elements of rigid racism. The later Vedic periods saw the combinations of the Varna class system and the endogamous "birth" related jati system. The classic threefold Indo-European division of priests, warriors and commons, had quickly become inadequate within the Indian conquests and the Aryans were forced to adapt (see Wolpert, p. 41 for comment).
The conflicts were ritualised in the Vedas and assumed the form of battles between gods and demons. These histories became enshrined in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The entire Ramayana may be read as an allegory of Aryan and pre Aryan conflict culminating in the Aryan "conquest" of the south (ibid., p.40).
As Aryan conquest added more peoples, a fifth class, the outcasts (panchamas) were added.
The jati system is pre Aryan and more complex to unravel.
The traditions of India were stabilised into the Aryan "Great" or Sanskritic traditions and the "little" pre-Aryan tradition. The Aryan traditions and law were superimposed on the more extensive native traditions, which absorbed and syncretised them with their customs. The peasant mass developed their native Animistic religion with further Shamamistic adaption with Mysticism, regardless of the Sanskrit and other tradition.
The upanishadic revolt against Brahmanism, which emerged in the Eastern Gangetic plain in the eighth century BCE, was led by Gurus predominantly of the Kshatrya class with cela or student disciples in forest seminars. This revolt against orthodoxy became a Kshatriya-Brahmin struggle for Varna primacy. This struggle developed a different method of obtaining release or liberation (Moksha), which hereafter became the ultimate goal of Vedic meditation.
The concept of Atman had developed in this period, from that of the original meaning in the Rig Veda of "Breath" (similar to the Hebrew Nephesh). The Epic of Gilgamesh relates the original concept of breath and that man was dust, but introduces the concept of the spirit of Enkidu coming out of the ground (see Wallis Budge, pp. 86-97).