The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c17.s1.264

v2.c17.s1.264

The quotation above given entirely upsets the tradition about the images having been left unfinished on account of an accident. Some Uriyas informed Mr. Stirling that 'the images are shapeless because the Vedas have declared that the deity has no particular form; and that they have received their present grotesque and hideous countenances with the view to terrify men into being good'⁵⁷. But for this statement, too, there is no scriptural authority. It is obvious that the images are not only ugly but that they were not originally designed to represent the image of a man. Even in the most primitive times absolutely untutored men would not have shaped the blocks as they are for human figures. The small stump below could not have been designed for human legs; the narrow waist is not human; and the merging of the head and chest into one piece without any demarcation for the neck is not what our experience of primitive art would lead us to expect. The insertion of the arms in a line with the upper lip is also a kind of error to which even primitive men were not liable to. We must, therefore, look for the genesis of the figures in some other cause. Mr. Paterson was the first to suggest that they were monograms and he supposed them to represent the mystic syllable *Om*. The hypothesis, however, was not tenable, as no similitude could be traced between the images and the mystic *Om* in any of the different characters in which it is written.