Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c11.174

v2.c11.174

"Now love itself springs from the idea (saṃkalpāt, xii, 163.8 ; cp. e.g. Manu, ii, 3), and sexual excitement (harsha) is born of the idea (saṃkalpa), and is born from sound, and is born, too, from taste, and is born, too, from form" (xiv, 24.5).¹ As an explanation of the concept, iii, 33.30, 37, 38 gives the following : kāma, this wishful conception of the mind (cittasaṃkalpa), is the joy that arises at the union by touch with material things (dravyārthasaṃsparça), when the five senses, the mind (manas), and the heart are taken up with an object of the senses. Finally it must be mentioned further that we find no trace in the Epic of the exact classifications of lovers and their counterparts among women, such as appear in the erotic and rhetorical treatises. The man who is called to high things and to good fortune has a thin, short member, a smooth glans, and hanging testicles (Rām., v, 35.17 ff.). Cp. xii, 335.11 ; 343.36, 46-50.² he has a great, upstanding, pleasing linga; he is head warden of the phallus, and appears in the penis, as being his origin (medhraja); the all-shaped god is in the linga, and through all the ages of the world he has been worshipped by the other gods, by the spirits, and the seers, in the linga; the phallus-worshipper wins the highest happiness and Çiva’s whole approval. Because his linga stands up, he is called the “standing stump” (Sthāṇu) in vii, 201.92,93, 96; 202.124, 133, 140; xii, 166.48; xiii, 17.46,60,77, 128; 161.11-18. See, too, xiii, 14.161, 227-235. We may look on x, 17.8 ff. as a kind of history of the origin of linga-worship: Brahma begs Çiva to make the beings of the world, and he consents. But he then gives himself up to an endless tapas in the water. Brahma finds it too wearisome; he leaves him to it as useless, and has the creation seen to by seven Prajāpatis. Çiva gets into such a fury about this that he literally “pulls out his own tail”, and throws it away; the member drives into the earth, and sticks in it (in çl. 23 read utpātya for utpādya). This tale is worthy of note; for in the phallic cults and phallic myths of the world emasculation (castration) plays a great part, but above all self-castration. See Dr. W. Schwartz, “Der (rothe) Sonnenphallos d. Urzeit,” *Zeitschr. f. Ethnol.*, vi, p. 172 ff. (his sun and thunder theories may, indeed, be left to look after themselves). Castration, although not the probably more primitive self-castration, offers also another legend of the origin of the linga-worship, which is given us in a simpler and certainly older form by the Saurapurāṇa (lxix, çl. 35-55), and then, following Sonnerat, by Schmidt, *Liebe u. Ehe in Indien*, p. 23 ff.; and in weak colours it seems to glimmer through still in the myth which Dubois, ed. Beauchamp³, p. 629 ff., repeats after the Liṅgapurāṇa. In this last form Çiva and Pārvatī die in the midst of their love embrace, and come to life again in Liṅga and Yoni. On this tale and the origin of the linga-cult cp. Jahn, “Die Legende vom Devadāruvana,” ZDMG, 69, p. 529 ff.; 70, p. 301 ff.; 71, p. 167 ff., and also Deussen, 71, p. 119 f. In the end, however, this dying is itself the older element, and the emasculation or castration, both of the god of procreation himself and of his priests, denotes only a kind of death; for the death and coming back to life of the genii of fruitfulness is a very widespread conception. Thus it appears as quite natural in the case, too, of these two Indian godheads of the sexual life. Furthermore I of course hold the passages in the Epic where phallus-worship is referred to be late. This worship itself is likewise in India of very great antiquity.