Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c8.27

v1.c8.27

soul to the “villagers’ custom” (pleasures of love); and there is no doubt but that flesh arises out of the seed (çl. 9 ff.).¹ Çiva and his wife are the ideal figures, carried beyond all bounds, even to grotesqueness, of the Indian power of imagination, in this respect, that they can immeasurably lengthen the embraces of love. When under the mountains this god had wedded the daughter of the prince, he set himself with his wife to sporting in bed. But a long thousand years of the gods went by,² and the heaven-dwellers grew anxious lest the fruit of so endless a begetting should be far too mighty for the world to tolerate. They went therefore to the tireless pair, and begged Çiva that for the weal of all beings he would put a check on his manly powers. He graciously consented, but asked who should catch up the seed already aroused. The earth was chosen for this, but it filled up altogether with it, and so the god of fire was called in to help; he penetrated this flood, and so there arose the mountain Çvetaparvata, and the heavenly cane-forest, where from the god’s procreative fluid the war-god Kārtikeya or Kumāra came into being (Rām., i, 36.5 ff.).³