the body, the earth

http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/india/uda2.html


The most ancient (recorded) Indian hymns (c. 1200-900 BC) personify the earth as a goddess. Even before this, however, the earth itself is born from a goddess:

1. Let us now speak with wonder of the births of the gods - so that some one may see them when the hymns are chanted in a later age.

2. The lord of sacred speech, like a smith, fanned them together. In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence. 

3. In the first age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence. After this the quarters of the sky were born from her who crouched with legs spread.

4. The earth was born from her who crouched with legs spread, and from the earth the quarters of the sky were born...


6. When you gods took your places there in the water with your hands joined together, a thick cloud of mist arose from you like dust from dancers.

7. When you gods like magicians caused the worlds to swell, you drew forth the sun that was hidden in the ocean.

(from The Rig Veda, translated by Wendy O'Flaherty, 1981

Note on 'legs spread': a position associated both with yoga and with a woman giving birth

The goddess of the earth at this stage is Pritvi, who has hymns written about her. David Kinsley suggests that ideas about Pritvi suggest 'the awesome stability of the earth itself and (it's)... apparently inexhaustible fecundity'.  Pritivi is a goddess, but also the earth in a literal sense.

According to Kinsley, 'an underlying implication of perceiving the earth as a great and powerful goddess is that the world as a whole, the cosmos itself, is to be understood as a great, living being, a cosmic organism'. James Lovelock 's concept of Gaia was not the first!  This makes me think of Native American writers, who also express the idea of the earth as a living body/being; seeing mining, for example, as desecration.

Later Hinduism continues with the idea of the earth as a goddess, in the form of Bhu. According to Kinsley, however, the earth as Bhu is no longer seen as a stable support for all creatures and a source of fertility, but is portrayed mythologically as being oppressed by demons and evil forces. In both of the images here she is being rescued by an incarnation of Vishnu:

From  Harle, 1986

There are other later goddesses who maintain the idea of support and fertility, but the goddess of the earth itself becomes oppressed. That's interesting. And, for me, not just an obscure fact about the history of a distant religion.  Here is our earth, in all her beauty and fecundity, in need of rescue. What's ancient about that as an idea?

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time travel

Why, I imagine someone saying, are you doing these endless drawings of obscure bronze sculptures and carved stone? Do I ask myself that question? Only slightly. I'm wondering how this is different to drawing landscape or figures or making abstracts. It certainly isn't about practising technique (as you might 'practise' drawing real-world objects) and the aim isn't to produce something that will sell, or please others.

Drawing and painting these figures is an exploration. Just as trying to draw the human face reveals details and wonders that would have normally been overlooked, drawing or painting here pulls me in to the image, its form, its texture. But then there's more. I'm absorbed into the effect of time on the surface of the metal, or of wind and rain on stone. I notice that the figure I'm drawing is only half completed, its hands and feet still unformed planes, making it almost abstract. I can almost feel the chisel in the hand of the sculptor, feel the hunger in his belly, wonder if he has khol around his eyes. How many of his descendents have woken again and again to a Indian dawn, washed at the communal pump, and set of for a day's work chiselling stone in the intervening 1000 years? The panel is attached to a huge stone edifice that no-one fully understands, at the centre of which there's a small tight passage covered in paintings of dancers, that was clearly not meant for ordinary worshippers. So many mysteries of art and behaviour, leaving only these tantalising trails in the material world of 2012.

This image, which at first seemed to be a yogic goddess, seated in meditation, with attendants and a royal parasol, turned out to be a version of Shiva that I had never heard of - an emanation of the female principle, giving him the breasts and belly of a woman....