The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c14.46

c14.46

H. H. Wilson and Monier Williams, have been puzzled to account for the Saivaites using a symbol associated with the licentious orgies of Western paganism; for not only, as Monier Williams observed, is the relation between the sexes in India regarded as a sacred mystery and never held to be suggestive of indecent ideas, but Saivism is one of the most austere cults of all India and preaches asceticism as a religion. I believe the explanation is this: the original symbols of Saivism in ancient India were the bull and the stûpa—life, death and sacrifice. But the ideas connected with symbols are always interchanging, especially in the case of those which, like the bull and the stûpa, represent pairs of opposites. The oldest Saivaite lingams yet discovered¹ (apart from the stûpa itself) have no phallic suggestions of any kind. They consist of four carved heads, arranged crossways on a short pillar which is fixed in the centre of a square lustration salver, and evidently correspond to the Mahâyânist Brahmâ symbol of a stûpa with four shrines facing the four cardinal points (fig. 54). This was the first step in the transference of the Brahmâ, or procreative, attributes of the bull to the Saiva or tâmasic attributes of the stûpa—or rather, their combination in one and the same symbol. When it is considered that the low-caste priests who attend Saiva temples are generally illiterate, and on that account held in great contempt by the learned Brahman pandits who expound the philosophy of the Saiva cult, it is easy to understand how vulgar phallic notions became associated with the symbol. The influx of Scythian tribes into India probably tended towards the corruption of the popular aspects of Hinduism; but it was not until Muhammadan times, and as a concession to the hatred of Islam for anthropomorphic symbolism, that the lingam in its present form was substituted for the four-headed Brahmâ image, like the splendid sculpture at Elephanta (Pl. LIV and fig. 55).