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March 4 - June 28, 2020
So our sovereign god is going to be split into martial (or at least violent) aspect and magical aspect (or maybe priestly aspect). The former merging with and subsiding the separate martial prong of our triptych makes it look very much like the idea of the feudal system.
Well, at least we are recognizing some limit on what we can deduce.
Presumably a herder living on the plains of Western Asia, a farmer trying to survive in the relatively dry plateau of Iran and a farmer trying to scratch out a living on the edge of the arctic circle in Scandinavia night see fertility and fertility gods/goddesses differently,
Alright, where are we getting this?
Alright, I get it. Did the original Hydra also have three heads?
In modern Pakistan.
We may, but it is far from proven.
Even by the time of the compilation of the Rig Veda, this is a past so distant that it is remembered primarily as legend.
What’s a “cerebral consonant?” A sound you make with your brain? Please hold:
Apparently this is a term for what is also known as a retroflex consonant which occurs when you curl your tongue all the way to the top of your mouth to create a voiced stop. It can sound like “eh, d’eh.”
Which is often proposed, but would be relatively unique. Only one culture has really placed significant importance in skin color, the fact that we live in it might cause us to see similar divisions where they did not exist.
I thought it was soma that had the religious significance.
By re-enacting a creation myth they re-create that land as their own.
But we’re not popular with a specific audience.
Whose existence, I think, is deduced from linguistic similarities between the name used for sky gods in a large number of Indo-European languages, though I think that all come from European half of the divide.
That’s an interesting fragment. There is no record of anything more definitive?
The god of the sky being replaced by a god which symbolizes not a sphere of the world, or a natural phenomenon, but the concept of rulership or authority.
I think that this war between the gods is surpringly common in not only Indo-European mythology, but also in the myths of the Semitic Near East, and in Egypt.
Where he will eventually become preeminent?
It could very well be a cycle of myths that the Aryans (properly used to refer to the people who migrated into modern India in the 14th Century BC) brought with them from their prior home.
Which need not mirror an actual transition that occurred in the real world. The mythological cycle, in its original form, as very first conceived, could have already included a mythological past which had to be disrupted to create the present.
Fire in the waters? The ancient Aryans conceived of water as containing fire? That’s an odd one. Maybe the deduction is that water is not burned by fire because it already contains fire, and can absorb this additional fire?
It’s a Vedic version of the Tao, or of Ma’at, or maybe even of a Mitzvah.
He dwells in the place where everything is done correctly, and his love is for things to be done correctly. This is a divine concept I can get behind.
Because even if everything fits together now in an orderly pattern, it does so only because the pieces were changed to fit correctly. The primordial chaos could not lead to order without the aid of change. It is a concept of order that requires change.
His change is presumably not demonic, but restorative and creative.
Is this going to be a regular feature of Vedic religion, or of Hinduism, or of both?
Veda means knowledge.
Ahi being demonic, and Ahi being a serpent, Ahi’s ability to shed his skin is the same creative force as the sun “shedding” the night and emerging in the morning and gods shedding mortality and becoming divine. It is a power associated with evil, but wielded by the gods to good end.
This is the priestly ruler, or magical ruler, as opposed to the martial ruler.
Is it odd that the more mystical form of authority is associated with contracts, which seem pretty mundane? Maybe the key is in the fact that humans forge contracts, they do not occur naturally, we enact them through some ritual that we understand as invoking the obligation. Contracts are like spells 🤯
Is this a binomial as in a two-part name that one encounters within Vedic (or Hindu) religious texts, or a binomial as in an equation (presumably metaphorical) which can be used to understand the Vedic view of the world?
He is a god of a particular ethnic group. That seems odd.
For they insure that the people multiply (Aryaman) and that the land brings forth wealth (Bhaga). How their mother (who seems plausibly analogous to an Earth goddess) is associated with freedom seems difficult to understand.
Not entirely unlike Marduk.
Dragon-like
Like Zeus
Like Kronos
It was where this drama unfolded.
His house was built from chaos. That is presumably the safest little piggy.
And without trashing Vastr’s home.
By winning a battle you are re-enacting the creation of order out of chaos.
Like the combat between Tiamat and Marduk.
Have we mentioned that Eliade joined the Romanian Fascist Party as a youth and became one of its intellectual leaders while in university.
The State of being two opposite things in one is a mirror onto the secret nature of the universe.
One would presume that domestic fire was exceptionally significant in the ancient world. That being said, we tend not to put great religious significance into our own inventions, why would our ancient predecessors?
This one still gets me.
I like the two way concept of Agni bringing fire to earth in the form of lightning, and bringing sacrifices back in the opposite direction by consuming them and sending them in the form of smoke.
A prologue to an Ancient Greek poem. Think of the invocation of the muses at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It was fire that impregnated the primordial waters?
Do we all think of fire and flames as clever? We very well might.
