India and the Hindu deities

CAVEAT: What follows is merely a brief and cursory overview of ancient India. Those interested in a deeper investigation of early Indian civilisation should follow the links that they find after they have clicked on the links provided here.

NON-APOLOGY: I am fully aware that some of the most important of the archaeological sites described below (e.g. Mohenjo-Daro) are now in Pakistan. They were not, however, in Pakistan, in the 4th millennium BCE, and so I have chosen to retain the [also-incorrect] generic term "India".

A pre-Aryan society in the Indus Valley is now known from excavations at Mohenjo-Daro, Chanhu-daro and Harappa in the Punjab. The neolithic base goes back to the 4th millennium BCE, with evidence of domestication: a humped, long-horned, Indian bull, and a shorter horned bull, as well as pig, buffalo, dog, horse, sheep and elephant; spinning and weaving; gold, silver, copper, tin and lead; metal tools, stone axes and maces - i.e. the neolithic has not really passed.

4 stages are detectable:

1) Pre-Harappan (Dravidian): simple villages in the late 4th millennium; clearly derived by way of Persia from Mesopotamia, but more primitive: they include triangular designs, as well as zigzag, meander, checker, lozenge and double-ax motifs, with crude female statuettes associated with the bull, and some evidence of human sacrifice.

Note that "Dravidian" is most likely the etymological source of Derwid, which we today mispronounce as Druid. Many websites exist where you can follow this most surprising connection; I recommend here as one of the more qualified of the scholars to expostulate on the subject; but also because his portrait of ancient India will help explain why TheBibleNet feels it is imperative to include ancient India, and rejects all attempts to "discredit" Jones' work in establishing the concept of a "Common Source".

2) The Harappan stage of the three great cities, 2500-1000 BCE: archaeological finds include symbols that would later become Siva and Vishnu and the rest of the Hindu pantheon, but this is still pre-Hindu, because pre-Aryan. The Yogi is the key figure: functioning as the equivalent of the High Priest. Harappa was in the Punjab on the river Ravi; Mohenjo-Daro was in Sind, on the Indus, of which the Ravi is a tributary.

3) The Aryans arrived in the middle of the 2nd milennium. They were second cousins of the Homeric Greeks, who were themselves close relations of the Canaanite Pelasgians and the Hittite Phoenicians; the same people were entering the Balkans at the same time, and the same myths are spread widely: the Vedic and Olympian hymns and pantheons are virtually identical, and Yisra-Eli works such as the Psalms likewise. The Vedic was the Indian heroic age; from 1500 to 500 BCE; but archaeology has found no architecture or writing from this period, because there was none. The Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads were communicated entirely orally until the 3rd century BCE (by coincidence, so were most of the Yisra-Eli myths and songs).

4) 500 BCE to 500 CE; combining the Aryan, Vedic and Dravidian to make Hinduism, and later Buddhism.


One final observation. The principal Hindu god is named Brahma, and he functioned as the head of the Trimurti with Vishnu and Siva, in exactly the same way that Ouranos, Chronos and Zeus did in the Greek equivalent, and Av-Raham, Yitschak and Ya'akov in the Yisra-Eli: the founder-creator, followed by the mere sustainer, followed by the regenerator. The meaning of his name is much disputed, but "Great Father" is one of the options; Av-Ram and Av-Raham likewise mean "Great Father", as does Jupiter in Latin and Phádraig (Patrick) in the Goidelic - another argument in favour of the "Common Source". 

ॐ

The space-marker above, for those who don't recognise it, is the Aum, or Om, in the Devanagari or ancient Brāhmī script. The space-marker below, for those who think they do recognise it, is the Hindu form of the Aryan fire-wheel, known from Genesis 3:24 as "the flaming sword", in which capacity it guarded the way to the World Tree (Tree of Life), which is also the Bodhi Tree of Enlightenment (Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil).

The Hindu Gods

The Hindu name for a god is bhagawan; sun = surya narayan; moon = chand (poonam). Note that Brahma means "Great Father" - is this from the same "common source" as Av-Raham?

Classic picture of Vishnu: sleeping on the coils of the cosmic serpent, floating on the cosmic sea, dreaming the lotus-dream of the universe. A kind of Oceanos as Creator! Or is he simply reflecting those other cosmic beasts, Tiamat and Behemot? Seven-headed too, just like Liv-Yatan.

The Hindu version of the Milky Way has Vishnu and Siva churning it for its butter (see illustration), with the World Mountain as a churning stick and the world serpent as a twirling rope. Milk in Greek is Galaktos, whence the Galaxy.

The four goals of Man are love and pleasure (kama), power and success (artha), lawful order and moral virtue (dharma) and release from delusion (moksa). Dharma is roughly equivalent to Tao ("the path") - for which the Hindu symbol below could easily be renamed Yin and Yang - and Halachah ("the way").

There are reckoned to be about 300 million gods and goddeses (or a mere 33 million, but that sacred number 3 is definitely a part of the final tally) so do not expect a full and complete list here. The sacred three are the Trimurti of Brahma (Creator), Vishnu (Sustainer) and Siva (Destroyer - and pronounced Shiva, so you might want to wonder if there is a Hittite source connection between the Hindu Death and the Jewish mourning rituals...)

The "major" deities are (far too many for me to list):

but click here

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