The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.72

v1.c9.72

It is not for me to plead in favor of Indian mythology, nor am I its apologist; but very few intelligent persons will venture to maintain that Greek mythology was ever much superior to it. There exists a family likeness between the two which has induced several to attribute to them a common origin. If so, and the professor’s major be right, it would follow that the influence of religion on the fine arts should be alike in India and Greece. Moreover, plastic and pictorial representation of mythological allegories must give rise to forms which are unnatural, distorted, and monstrous, and nations which look upon such mythology as sacred, do not hesitate to recognise the divine in such forms. It remains, however, to be shown that this [ 53 ] recognition of divinity in forms which to Europeans of the present day appear monstrous, necessarily destroys, or overpowers, the aesthetic faculty, and that those who do so, are, as a matter of course, incapable of appreciating the beautiful. No nation of ancient or modern times has evinced a higher sense of the beautiful in art than the Grecians. The beau ideal of perfection in the human figure was conceived and developed by them, and them only, and yet the same Grecians recognized in Triton, the “upper part of whose body was human, and the lower part like that of a fish, with a tail turned in a lunar form”, a god, and the son of their great god Neptune. They had also a god, Pan, “who had the body of a man, a red face with a flat nose, horns upon his head, and the legs, thighs, tail, and feet of a goat”. Another of their gods, Typhoeus, son of Earth by Tartaros, was hundred-headed, and three sons of their great god Uranos, namely, Cottos, Briareos, and Gyés, had each a hundred hands (*eka togkheires*). These were certainly more monstrous than the elaphocephalous Gaṇeśa, the four-headed Brahmā, and the ten-handed Dūrgā of the Indian mythology. As to the four hands of Viṣṇu, it would not be amiss to observe that aesthetically two pairs of hands for a single human figure are not more unnatural than a pair of hands and a pair of wings on the same figure, such as the Greeks and the Romans clapped on even their handsomest Cupids. Viṣṇu with a lion's head has his counterpart in Oceanos who, according to Euripidés, was "bull-headed" (*tanrohkranos*). Then for Rāvaṇa, whom Professor Lübke takes to be a god, but who is an avowed monster, and other Indian abnormal representations, the Grecians had their Sirens who, whatever their original forms, were by their artists "furnished with the feathers, feet, wings and tails of birds", and are so described by Apollonios (IV. 898);—their Gorgons, whom Aeschylus calls "the three sisters of the Graeae, winged, serpent-fleeced, hateful to man, whom no one can look on and retain his breath; i.e. live".—(Prom. 800 *et seq.*);—their Graeae, "the three long-lived maids, swan-formed, having one tooth and one eye in common, on whom neither the sun with his beams nor the night moon ever looks"; (*op. cit.*);—their Harpies, "odious, offensive monsters with female faces, and the bodies, wings, and claws of birds;—their Satyrs and Tatyrs and Centaurs: these are beings which certainly inspire no very lofty sense of the ideal of beauty in the issues of Grecian gods and supernatural beings; but they at the same time afford unmistakable evidences "of attempts to produce effect by the quaint combinations of animal and human bodies", which, in connexion with the Hindus, Professor Lübke so emphatically condemns.