CHAPTER TWO:
--- --- ---
“Who of us nowadays has any idea of what a Bach fugue really meant at the time in which it was composed?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
quoted by C.O. Drury in “Conversations with Wittgenstein”
--- --- ---
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it…”
Oscar Wilde
--- --- ---
A Very Brief Consideration of the General Nature of Ritual and an Attempt to Explain the Present Ritual in This Light; Reflections and Further Program Notes postpone the Narrative.
Does Konrad Lorentz’s observation that ritual is as necessary to the animal as any other instinctive act apply also to mankind? If, indeed, man’s need for ritual is as constant and real as animals’, the forms then, which man’s rituals take must be like the forms of human language; proportionally varied and the product of a generative grammar.
As ritual was originally understood in Aryavarta; as it is presented in the Vedas; as it is pieced together from the clay tablets of Sumer; and as it was apparently practiced throughout the ancient world, it is the enactment of received commands from the gods, a set of directions for how to best approach, please and serve them. But, over a broad portion of the world, at the time during which this story takes place, the source of ritual began to change. Old rituals began to be reinterpreted and man began, more and more, to create his own rituals
Carl Jung’s understanding was that though ritual may become collective, initially its discovery must occur individually. Jung takes the position that, psychologically understood, authentic ritual, can’t be fabricated or imposed on purpose by rational planning: it can only be discovered as it arises, dream-like, from unconscious depth, its aims pointing to conscious enactments of archetypal drives.
This is the model through which the reader should understand the RITUAL OF TEMPTATION, the extemporized drama created by Kama Mara and his daughters that is about to be performed for a small group of forest hermits. Evolved through a series of spontaneous discoveries and inspired inventions, it will employ traditional Aryavartan mudra and hasta (elaborate learned patterns of facial and manual expression).
Like the use of the chorus in the nearly contemporary Greek drama, Kama Mara’s employment of his daughters creates a living barrier, cuts off contact with the prevailing outside world of reality, and preserves an ideal domain of poetical freedom. The ‘temptation’ will demand something raised high above the normal path, the scaffolding of a fictitious natural state and in its place, fictitious beings.
Outside the prevailing clan and caste systems altogether, and possessing genuinely superior natural spirituality as well as superior physical beauty, Kama Mara ‘s daughters are so remotely different from those among whom they are traveling, that many, in effect, cannot see them at all. Only among the Saddhus, the Renuniciates (who typically see them as demon goddesses) can their ritual find context and meaning.
Beyond its formalized, more obvious aspects of temptation, importantly, their ritual expresses a conflict. A positive valuation of life is compared to world negation. But a further and less obvious purpose propels it: a search to discover and communicate with a particular individual. Kama Mara has long ago selected and prepared an ‘initiate’; one potentially capable of receiving, encompassing, and transmitting the wisdom of the remote past.
Before I was able to discover and fully comprehend this last and crucial point, it was again necessary to sift through a significant amount of historical material, some of it quite esoteric, broadening considerably the scope of my previous research. I offer the reader a second set of program notes. These are more important than the last set to the development of the story. Yet a reader, if impatient, may pass over them for now.
PROGRAM NOTES: second set
--- --- ---
“Marooned on the temporariness of our assumed anchorage,
we feverishly eschew the festered encrustations of the past.”
Dennis Sandole
--- --- ---
Ice ages / climate shifts: One hundred thousand years ago, for still not understood reasons, a global phenomenon… an ice age, began. This ice age—which some see as still present has been characterized by periodic advances and retreats. It appears as if there have been five or six consecutive significant displacements, with the highest rates of accumulation occurring during what is known as the Tanzanell Advance when, at around 15,000 B.C., glaciations reached what is referred to as a ‘global maximum’. Great areas of Europe and of North America even in today’s moderate latitudes became covered with thick ice. Perpetual glaciers lay not only on the slopes of high mountains, but loaded themselves in heavy masses upon and across continents. Then, both suddenly and gradually, millions of square miles of the ice melted. Ocean levels rose significantly and the earth was flooded.
The earliest written explanation we have for this phenomenon is from Plato, who citing the authority of Egyptian sages, ascribed one such Deluge to the action of a celestial body that, changing its path, passed close to the earth. For whatever reason, by about 8,000–9,000 B.C. it appears that the ice had withdrawn almost totally to its present configuration.
The Indus Valley Civilization: Prior to the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the 1920’s the earliest secure date in the history of India and Pakistan was the spring of 326 BC when Alexander made his raid into the northwestern provinces of the continent. Next, Herodotus, in the second century BC, gave out the word that “there are many Indian nations, none speaking the same language.” (book II, 98)
The archaeological efforts of the last century have made it possible to begin to consider the origins of the Indus civilization. Evidence suggests that settled life in the northwestern sector of Southern Asia can be documented near the beginnings of the Holocene, following the retreat of the last great continental glaciers. An urban civilization developed in the area now India and Pakistan, with the Indus River and its tributaries as a focal point.
According to Gregory Possehl, the best modern scholar of the subject, at one point this civilization covered all of modern Pakistan except for the northern most mountainous areas, as well as southern Afghanistan. On the Indian side it encompassed virtually all of Gujarat and the western fringe of southern and central Rajasthan. In northern Rajasthan it includes the old drainage of the Sarasvati and Drishadvata Rivers; the Punjab, Haryana, and the northern Gange-famuna Doab in Uttar Pradesh.
There is, at present, no satisfying chronology for the Indus Civilization. To estimate 7000 to 8000 BC as a beginning time seems realistic. This is coincident with the domestication of plants and animals and the beginning of farming and herding societies.
Many thousand years pass before the next event of any chronological certainty when, at some point close to the middle of the second millennium BC, an apparently quite vast urban civilization appeared on the plains of the Indus Valley and surrounding mountains! First discovered at the two principal cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, this civilization is now known from over one hundred settlements covering over one million square kilometers. It is larger by far than the combined size of all the Near Eastern archaic states that would have been contemporary.
The evidence of a consistent style of town planning, of sophisticated engineering technology, and the intriguing absence of temples, palaces, or of any monumental architecture, testifies to a unique and unified culture which functioned in a manner that remains unknown.
The implications of the geographical and architectural layouts suggest a social organization, which doesn’t seem to fit that of a political state. It is the opinion of one of the most important archaeologists of the region, Mortimer Wheeler, that, “Behind so vast a uniformity must lie an administrative and economic discipline, however exercised, of an impressive kind.”
The VEDAS: Veda (in Sanskrit) means knowledge (gnosis), deriving from the root vid -(Indo-European) meaning to see/know, but the term has come to signify, for the E
nglish speaking world, ‘the Hindu Bible’. The Vedas—at once religion and philosophy were not intended to be esoteric, they were meant for and open to all. The Vedic hymns are quite early, if indeed they are not the first, expressions of the discovery (or suspicion) that behind this visible, perishable world there must be something invisible, imperishable, eternal, or divine.
The particular Vedas we have and their assumed dates :
Rig 1400–1100 B.C.
Sama & Rajur 1200–1000 B.C.
Tharva 1000–900 B.C.
Brahamanas 900–600 B.C.
Aranyakas 700–500 B.C.
Upanishads 600–400 B.C.
Mahabaratha 350 B.C.–350 A.D.
Ramayana 250 B.C.–200 A.D.
Puranas 200–1500 A.D.
These are the generally accepted dates but it is also generally accepted that all of the Vedas lived within an oral tradition before they were committed to writing. Max Muller, the pioneering European scholar, wrote his opinion that, “if we grant that they (the older Vedas) belonged to the 2nd millennium before our era we are probably on safe ground, though we should not forget that this is a constructive date only, and that such a date does not become positive by mere repetition… whatever may be the date of the early Vedic hymns whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C.” Today, about one hundred years later, modern opinion remains divided between Muller’s hypothetical dates.
UPANISHAD: Means ‘sitting near a person’ and may refer to forest gatherings under mighty trees where sages and disciples met together. The Upanishads are a dividing line within the Vedic system. Within and after them the ancient ritual and sacrificial systems are ignored, reinterpreted, or rejected and the ancient gods are either seen in a new light or are no longer recognized.
YOGA: The meaning of the word includes ‘unity’ or ‘union’ in the sense of subjugation, corresponding to our word ‘yoked’ (from the sanskrit ‘yug’). Another of the meanings of the word is ‘right action’. The ancient Vedic understanding of human nature (the tradition inherited by Kama Mara) was that man was not complete, and contained a multitude of latent powers. It was believed that these dormant powers of man in all spheres and provinces of his activity could be greatly increased by means of ‘right action’; a certain way of life, by employing certain exercises, and by a certain work on oneself. Yoga was a method for development of extraordinary powers and capacities
Yoga was not a philosophy to guide man, rather it was simply a way, accustoming man to control his mind, body, attention, and will, of increasing his powers in any of the directions of his activity. The same system (in the tradition inherited by Gotama Siddhartha), followed all the way to its end, led to samadhi that ecstasy or state of enlightenment in which, alone, reality or ‘truth’ may be understood.
MANU: In the Vedas—that superb religious literature with no known parent (“passed down from the time of the Gods”) we are given a description of how Manu (the Indo-European root ‘man’) with warning from a fish whose life he had saved (a small fish which grew and grew and is interpreted as Vishnu in disguise) escaped the global deluge and became the great patriarch of the Vedic people, perpetuating not only life, but passing on the knowledge and wisdom of the antediluvian world.
MAYA: The manifold world of fact and events; ordinarily understood as an illusion veiling the underlying reality of brahman. Maya consists of terms of measurement, classifications, abstractions. Within maya all is process. The world is not an illusion in the sense of a mirage. Maya is human categories.
ATMAN: ‘the soul of man’, also JIVATMAN; ‘the living self’. The etymology of the word is difficult, and this very difficulty shows that this term and also the word Brahman are very ancient, and from the point of view of historical sanskrit, belong to a pre historic layer. The sense is of an inner essence of an individual, a secret and most profound reality—usually covered over by ego bound identifications on the surface of our being; a veil of ignorance.
BRAHMAN: Sanskrit; ‘to swell/ grow/ enlarge’; the eternal unchanging infinite immanent transcendent reality; the ground of all matter, energy, time, and space; the only thing that exists. ‘Enlightenment’ (the goal of Vedanta) implies a lasting realization of identity with Brahman.
THE SEVEN RISHIS: Surviving along with Manu were a certain group of seven Rishis (wise men). A parallel account survives from ancient Mesopotamia. There, we read in Gilgamesh, that the survivor of the catastrophic flood was called Utnapishtim. Cuneiform writings upon clay tablets refer to a very similar set of seven individuals along with him, called there the ‘Seven Sages’. In both traditions India and Sumer—the seven perform the same functions and in the same context; preserving and then helping mankind to prosper, and re-presenting ‘civilization’.
Sometimes, in the Vedas, a rishi may be pictured as shunning all worldly fame and fortune, even courting dishonor and provoking contempt, but a benevolent involvement in the affairs of mankind is always a part of the picture. Elevated through an esoteric knowledge, they set the example of ascetic spiritual practice, serving as organizers, visionaries, master builders, navigators, magicians, scientists, king-makers or advisers to kings. (Internal evidence suggests a possible date of about 6000–7000 B.C. For this period.)
KAMA MARA: kama—in Sanskrit = erotic desire mara = death
The character who tempts the buddha in some of the early tales seems to be a devilish construct of at least two legendary deities, but I want the reader to imagine my fictional character, Kama Mara, as an Aryan (as the ‘nobles’ or ‘pure ones’ called themselves in the Vedas), capable of tracing his lineage back to Manu’s time, a Master in the continuous line of disciples of those original Seven Rishis, a possessor of supernatural powers and profound ideas; highly initiated, and a chosen recipient of the most ancient lore, persevering in the mission, which was always the guidance and benefit of humanity.
The reader must also be aware of Kama Mara’s perception that the current period (6th century BC) is a time of significant change. Slowly, it became apparent, and finally, easy, for me to imagine that, having realized the necessity, Kama Mara searched out the most opportune circumstances for the birth and preparation of such a being, who would be a new model for humanity. This is the motivating factor responsible for Kama Mara’s and his daughter’s leaving their ancestral home and journeying the thousands of miles across mountains and jungles.
Kama Mara uttered the fateful prophecy before Gotama Siddhartha’s birth—(that he would become either a world emperor or a great religious teacher) which set the psychological stage for the development of this exceptional personality.
Further, I began to understand that it was Kama Mara who, at each critical juncture in Gotama’s life, ensured that events unfolded in such a way—the only possible way as to lead to his birth as a Buddha.