Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [153]
Consider that scene. One of the most significant moments in human history has just occurred. and it is marked not by a passage from the Bible, or a Greek philosopher, or Shakespeare, but by an obscure reference from an ancient mythic tradition. To many Westerners accustomed to Judeo-Christian doctrines and the rationalism that began in Greece and flowered in Europe’s Enlightenment, India’s mythic legacy remains inscrutable. It is a magical mystery tour of the exotic and wondrous. A blue-tinged god with surplus arms. An elephant-headed deity who rides around on the back of a rat. A terrifying goddess adorned with severed body parts. A monkey king who would be at home in The Wizard of Oz. An awesome divinity who dances the world into destruction. And a thousand-year-old temple adorned with a host of X-rated figures in bewildering contortions.
It is the unfurling of millions of yoga mats in gyms around the world, turning a three-thousand-year-old path to enlightenment into the latest fitness craze. It is “Instant Karma” and the Kama Sutra combined, a picture muddled for many Westerners by saffron-robed groups hustling spare change at the airport as they chant “Hare Krishna.”
And what is the story with those “sacred cows”?
Occupying a triangular peninsula about the size of continental Europe that juts down from Asia’s landmass into the Indian Ocean, India is a place of enormous physical contrasts—extraordinary mountains, a great desert, broad plains, winding rivers, tropical lowlands, and lush rain forests watered by life-giving but sometimes destructive monsoons. Part of this diverse country’s fortunes in ancient times lay in the fact that it was largely set apart by its physical boundaries—the Arabian Sea and a large desert, the Thar, to the west; the Bay of Bengal to the east; and to the north, the towering, snowcapped Himalayas that separated India from China.
Yet remote, obscure India beckoned to the West for centuries. First for its silks and spices. Then, later, for its approach to contemplating the “Big Questions”—eternity, good, evil, and the meaning of life. With a cosmic view completely at odds with traditional Western thought, India has long been interested in the transcendent and the immortal, the idea that creation and destruction are an endless cycle, that the soul is an essence searching for perfection through reincarnation. These ideas found expression in what mythologist Arthur Cotterell has called “a range of myth and legend which is unrivaled anywhere else in the world.”
The roots of those Indian myths are also very old, stretching back more than 4,500 years to the broad plains of the Indus River Valley. Once centered in what is now the border region between northwestern India and southern Pakistan, the ancient Indus Valley civilization flourished for a thousand years. Most likely, it was anchored by a very ancient, fertility-based, goddess worship, as well as the worship of cows deemed sacred for the milk they provided and the dung that helped fertilize their crops. This civilization lasted until a group of warlike nomads swept in around 1500 BCE. Speaking a language called “Sanskrit,” which is at the root of all other Indo-European languages, these new arrivals probably originated near the Caucasus Mountains in central Asia. They called themselves arya (meaning “kinsmen” or “noble ones”), and eventually came to be known as Aryans.* Just as the people later called “Mycenaeans” had barreled into Greece bringing some of their own gods with them and absorbing some of the local deities they found, the Aryans conquered the remnants of the Indus civilization and imposed their “alpha male” pantheon of gods on the locals. That is, at least, the prevailing view; another school of thinking holds that this was a kinder, gentler Aryan migration.
Once settled, the Aryans