Studies in Indian Art c7.s1.4

c7.s1.4

The gods and goddesses flit across like the sons and daughters of Heaven and Earth, those Eternal Parents. Spirits presiding over forests and trees, brooks and ponds, spring up into existence as symbols of ideas in the animistic consciousness and the earth-bound feeling of the primitive settlers of the soil. These deities crystalised as time elapsed and as later influences and ramifications of thought were captured and cast into forms as gods and goddesses of the Brahmanical pantheon. A figure of Vishnu in the Vedio period is only a thought form, a conglomerate of several ideas not yet cast distinctly. The idea was of the whole world, not yet pinned to a particular form. We find it as a mirror of the myth of the solar god at one place; at another of the human soul passing through birth and death in relation to the physical form in which it is embodied. The germs of the legend of Vishnu assuming a dwarfish form (Vāmana) and later on cosmic one (Virāṭ) are present in the Rigveda. We find it in an honest attempt to give expression to an idea of how the macrocosm (Brahmāṇḍa) and the microcosm (Piṇḍa) are related to each other, the one reflecting the working of its counter-part, and the two being essentially similar in their nature and purpose. It is like the point expanding into its circumference, or the child growing into the stature of its parent, or the human mind outgrowing its petty limitations evolving into the cosmic consciousness, or the seed developing into a mighty tree. The pattern of Vāmana and Vishnu is symbol of thought and suits all the above phenomena, being the motif par excellence of the relationship of the microcosm and macrocosm found in nature.