The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c19.2

c19.2

Moreover, a religion such as we may expect to encounter amongst the Harappans is more likely than not to be a loosely knit complex of accumulated beliefs and observances, elaborately if implicitly graded, in which the lower grades may in fact have a greater hold upon the popular mentality than the higher. That is so in India to-day, where the crudest animism and demonism still underlie the semi-philosophical and ethical concepts of the educated few; where the symbols of the higher thought are the awesome physical realities of the peasantry. Something of this duality or multiplicity would appear to have been present already to the Harappan society of the third millennium, as it was still present to the more evolved societies of the classical world. In particular the numerous terra-cotta figurines of an almost nude female, which have been supposed to represent a Mother Goddess (above, p. 68), have no clear counterpart in the seals or major sculptures and may more easily be related to a household cult than to a state religion. Such a cult was widespread in time and space; its ultimate embodiment may be recognized in the little pipeclay "Venuses" of Roman Gaul, and its representations go back to an undetermined antiquity in western Asia.¹ Terra-cotta figurines of pregnant women or of women with children may reflect the same preoccupation with fertility. At the other end of the scale a hieratic cult may be represented by the seated male figures of the stone statuary (p. 65), though an absence of surviving emblems makes this uncertain. No uncertainty at least attaches to the divinity of the seated "Śiva" of the seals (p. 79), a figure which, even in these small-scale representations, is replete with the brooding, minatory power of the great god of historic India. Here if anywhere may be recognized one of the pre-Āryan elements which were to survive the Āryan invasions and to play a dominant role in the so-called Āryan culture of the post-Vedic period. Another such element was phallus-worship, a non-Āryan tradition which appears to have obtained amongst the Harappans, if certain polished stones, mostly small but up to 2 ft. or more in height, have been correctly identified with the *liṅga* and other pierced stones with the *yoni*. The likelihood that both Śiva and *liṅga*-worship have been inherited by the Hindus from the Harappans is perhaps reinforced by the prevalence of the bull (the vehicle of Śiva) or of bull-like animals amongst the seal-symbols; although the veneration which, on the same showing, was paid in less degree to the tiger, elephant, rhinoceros and crocodile prevents us from assuming any specific association of the proto-Śiva and the bull as early as Harappan times. Composite, sometimes man-faced, animals and "minotaurs" presumably indicate on the one hand the coalescence of initially separate animal-cults and, on the other other hand, their progress towards anthropomorphism. The representation of the image of a "unicorn" carried in procession (p. 77) might recall the animal-standards which represented the *nomes* of Egypt, but that the widespread occurrence of these signs in the Indus valley seems to militate against their association with particular districts or provinces.¹