IV. CURIOSITIES OF RELIGION
Superstitions—Astrology—Phallic worship—Ritual—Sacrifice—Purification—The sacred waters
Amid all this theology of fear and suffering, superstition—first aid from the supernatural for the minor ills of life—flourished with rank fertility. Oblations, charms, exorcisms, astrology, oracles, incantations, vows, palmistry, divination, 2,728,812 priests, a million fortune-tellers, a hundred thousand snake-charmers, a million fakirs, yogis and other holy men—this is one part of the historic picture of India. For twelve hundred years the Hindus have had a great number of Tantras (manuals) expounding mysticism, witchcraft, divination and magic, and formulating the holymantras (spells) by which almost any purpose might be magically attained. The Brahmans looked with silent contempt upon this religion of magic; they tolerated it partly because they feared that superstition among the people might be essential to their own power, partly, perhaps, because they believed that superstition is indestructible, dying in one form only to be reborn in another. No man of sense, they felt, would quarrel with a force capable of so many reincarnations.
The simple Hindu, like many cultured Americans,* accepted astrology, and took it for granted that every star exercised a special influence over those born under its ascendancy.50 Menstruating women, like Ophelia, were to keep out of the sunshine, for this might make them pregnant.51 The secret of material prosperity, said the Kaushitaki Upanishad, is the regular adoration of the new moon. Sorcerers, necromancers and soothsayers, for a pittance, expounded the past and the future by studying palms, ordure, dreams, signs in the sky, or holes eaten into cloth by mice. Chanting the charms which only they knew how to recite, they laid ghosts, bemused cobras, enthralled birds, and forced the gods themselves to come to the aid of the contributor. Magicians, for the proper fee, introduced a demon into one’s enemy, or expelled it from one’s self; they caused the enemy’s sudden death, or brought him down with an incurable disease. Even a Brahman, when he yawned, snapped his fingers to right and left to frighten away the evil spirits that might enter his mouth,† At all times the Hindu, like many European peasants, was on his guard against the evil eye; at any time he might be visited with misfortune, or death, magically brought upon him by his enemies. Above all, the magician could restore sexual vitality, or inspire love in any one for any one, or give children to barren women.52
There was nothing, not even Nirvana, that the Hindu desired so intensely as children. Hence, in part, his longing for sexual power, and his ritual adoration of the symbols of reproduction and fertility. Phallic worship, which has prevailed in most countries at one time or another, has persisted in India from ancient times to the twentieth century. Shiva was its deity, the phallus was its ikon, the Tantras were its Talmud. The Shakti, or energizing power, of Shiva was conceived sometimes as his consort Kali, sometimes as a female element in Shiva’s nature, which included both male and female powers; and these two powers were represented by idols called linga or yoni, representing respectively the male or the female organs of generation.53 Everywhere in India one sees signs of this worship of sex: in the phallic figures on the Nepalese and other temples in Benares; in the gigantic lingas that adorn or surround the Shivaite temples of the south; in phallic processions and ceremonies, and in the phallic images worn on the arm or about the neck. Linga stones may be seen on the highways; Hindus break upon them the cocoanuts which they are about to offer in sacrifice.54 At the Rameshvaram Temple the linga stone is daily washed with Ganges water, which is afterwards sold to the pious,55 as holy water or mesmerized water has been sold in Europe. Usually the phallic ritual is simple and becoming; it consists in anointing the stone with consecrated water or oil, and decorating it with leaves.56
Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement from phallic processions;57 but for the most part the people appear to find no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing the power of Shiva.58Perhaps the difference between the European and the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frustrated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained. The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats—the most Puritanic sect in India.59 “It has remained for our Western visitors,” says Gandhi, “to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learned that Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all.”60
The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day; indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays. But the people rejoiced in the many feasts that marked the ecclesiastical year and brought them in great processions or pilgrimages to their ancient shrines. They could not understand the service there, for it was conducted in Sanskrit, but they could understand the idol. They decked it with ornaments, covered it with paint, and encrusted it with jewels; sometimes they treated it as a human being—awakened it, bathed it, dressed it, fed it, scolded it, and put it to bed at the close of the day.61
The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death.62 When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes.63* As morals improved, the gods had to content themselves with animals, of which great numbers were offered them. The goat was especially favored for these ceremonies. Buddhism, Jainism and ahimsa put an end to animal sacrifice in Hindustan,67 but the replacement of Buddhism with Hinduism restored the custom, which survived, in diminishing extent, to our own time. It is to the credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that involved the shedding of blood.68
Purification rites took many an hour of Hindu life, for fears of pollution were as frequent in Indian religion as in modern hygiene. At any moment the Hindu might be made unclean—by improper food, by offal, by the touch of a Shudra, an Outcaste, a corpse, a menstruating woman, or in ahundred other ways. The woman herself, of course, was defiled by menstruation or childbirth; Brahmanical law required isolation in such cases, and complex hygienic precautions.69 After all such pollutions—or, as we should say, possible infections—the Hindu had to undergo ritual purification: in minor cases by such simple ceremonies as being sprinkled with holy water;70 in major cases by more complicated methods, culminating in the terrible Panchagavia. This purification was decreed as punishment for violating important caste laws (e.g., for leaving India), and consisted in drinking a mixture of “five substances” from the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine and dung.71*
A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a semitropical climate, was clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. “Sacred” pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul. Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every morning;73 from that century to ours those waters have never seen the sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently, “Om, Om, Om.” Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn, and smelled with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats, and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the same silent deities. The unresponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her desolation.