Love is, as Castle’s Kate Beckett put it, "when the songs make sense". Songs of life, songs of country, songs of work, or indeed ‘songs of love and songs of death, and songs to set men free’, as Jim Morrison put it in the Doors' evocative sailors’ shanty Land Ho!. The graceful old man in the song, who smokes a briar pipe and walks four country miles, suffers the same pining for "foreign sands" that Indian freedom fighter V. D. Savarkar felt for his motherland when he accosted the sea, in full awareness of the Cnutian futility of the task, for keeping him at a distanced relationship with the land he considered his mother, or in a विवास नाते, as Savarkar put it. It is the bent of their own identity, one a sailor and one who quite literally once escaped from ship to shore, not from want of courage but for want of freedom, that determined who wanted what.
Part 1: Love, Life, and Land: How the Protoindoeuropeans Saw the Whole of Kama, or Desire
The Germanically derived English word ‘love’ comes from a heritage of life, belonging, desire, wanting, and country or territory, as seen from its etymological neighborhood, i.e. the words that ‘live closest to it’, so to speak, as well as the words that are ‘related’ to it, comprising its ‘family’.
Wanting and Desire: How the Shadripus Define the Human Personality
The English word ‘love’ comes ultimately from the protoindoeuropean root form *leubh, which – no prizes for guessing – also developed into the Sanskrit word ‘lobha’, meaning the desire to want something (or someone) close to yourself, more intimately related to yourself – specifically to want something closer that you do not as yet possess. It is one of the shadripu – the six frenemies of yogic science, integral and antagonistic as they are to personal development – that makes love into a central crux of the human psyche, affecting and motivating individuals on pretty deep levels, as levels go. It was the thin line between lobha and love that separated Ravana from Rama, with Rama and Seeta’s reciprocal love triumphing over Ravana’s unilateral desire to possess what was not his.
The shadripus of yogic science are not enemies to defeat, per se, but constant rivals, immovable obstacles to overcome, competitors vying for control over the same individual deha, or bodymind. It is not in extinguishing them, but in forming proper relationships with each of them that the path to liberation, moksha, lies. It is thus that the phrase ‘loving yourself’ – often abused beyond all recognition in self-help philosophies – must be understood. It is with awareness of the frenemies of yogic science, which form the basic framework of your personality – ‘the act of being a person’, that oneself is to be loved. Self-love that is ignorant of its own framework is not self-love at all, but hankering behind the ego, plain and simple.
It is in proper understanding of our own psychic framework, which the shadripus help define, that our own path to progress lies. Love of life, which grants the lover the ability to truly love other people, comes from truly loving oneself, with an understanding of our own framework of personality, which allows us to truly become of the world, as a ‘person’ – which incidentally was the Latin word for the masks the actors wore in their plays, once again indicating the alignment of the Latinates with the Indics, who saw their highest gods – Shiva and Krishna, i.e. Vishnu – as नटराज and नटवर, meaning ‘the lord of actors’ and ‘the highest among actors’ respectively.
Love and Life: How Overcoming Adversity Made – and Unmade – Humanity
Another of love’s linguistic neighbors – or ‘lieben’ as the Germans call love – is life itself, or ‘leben’ for the Germanics.
Arising from the same love of life that drove Indic philosophy, worldview, and action, this psycholinguistic proximity of the word for life with the one for love among the animistic ancients – which can be easy to miss for the uninitiated reader in the words’ modern English form – indicates a quasi-equivalence of or at least an intimately close association between the act of living and the act of loving.
The protoindoeuropeans knew with the certainty that comes from experience that loving without life or living without love are both unadvisable, leading as they do to all the ‘-ppressions’ that modern feminists love to go on about, which, of course, are linguistically connected to words such as ‘pressure’ and ‘pressing (down)’, indicating bondage, lack of freedom, lack of space to grow into. Love is that which gives individuals space to grow into, that which unlocks, that which sets free. From this peculiar vantage point, it is easy to see the connection between the modern plague of psychological conditions and the lack of a love of life among what should be today’s reigning generation, which consequently leads to a lack of interpersonal and intrapersonal love, and a general spinelessness, which altogether comprise the defeatist modern zeitgeist.
The modern materialistic abundance has not hurt humanity by feeding it well and keeping it safer from the world, as some among the older generations like to think, but indirectly by taking away the love of life that came with the need for it in times before plenty and abandon had become our norm rather than starvation and struggle just to make ends meet. Modern man has finally fulfilled Alexander the Great’s dream for humanity by conquering what amounts to about 0.29% of the planet we call our home - 0.3% to be generous to the great man - and Alexander was a great man; so were they all, all great men!! Thanks to the great leaps forward of modern technologically oriented science, there is no distance too far for humanity, and no time too small. Everyone – broadly speaking – is well fed, well sheltered, well watered, and well clothed. War, so often seen as the historical bane of Man the creature, had mostly been kept quiet until the very recent past, with movements in the Middle East and Baltic region in the last decade still reverberating in global ‘geopolitics’ – a word, incidentally, that literally means the confluence of the land with the power structures of those who inhabit it – keep that in mind for later.
Hence come the modern social media warriors who speak of oppression into their top of the line iPhones, activists who arrive at their next venues in sailboats using dangerously eco-friendly carbon fiber and diesel fuel, politicians who fight either to unite a dormant native majority or to sow even more discord in order to make power gains, and individuals garbed in sympathy and kindness trying futilely to hide their nudity, their egotism, their selfishness, which, far from being something undesirable, is the will to power that Nietzsche spoke of – begging to be acknowledged, to be understood, to be experienced. Nietzsche knew what 'hunted thought quickened' the modern man’s step, and why he 'looked upon the garish day with such a wistful eye', to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s wildly evocative Ballad of Reading Gaol, for the modern man had killed the thing he loved most, the thing that gave his life meaning and purpose – adversity.
Love and Belonging: How the Collective Identity of Humans Seeped into Our Understanding of Love
The modern Latinate words for love, all derivatives of the Latin amor, have a close connection to a specific group of Sanskrit-derived Indic words that hints at how the Germanic, the Latin, and the Indic connected love with life and life with country, or territory, altogether comprising their culture, i.e. the mixing of the land with a fertile, successful people. The fourth powerful arm of this Indoeuropean sociocultural heritage, the ancient Greeks, called love ‘eros’, among other things, a sentiment later refined by the Romans into Cupid, their appropriation of Eros, the Greek God of love, who was – not incidentally – the child of Mars the god of war and Venus the goddess of beauty and attractiveness, and whom they also called … Amor. The word ‘Eros’, incidentally, is also not that far from ‘Amor’ linguistically, and also hints at a connection between love and immortality in the ancients’ mind, with the word ‘Amor’ going astonishingly close to the Sanskrit word for ‘immortal’, ‘amar’. It was perhaps in this sense that love was said, by the Latinates, to conquer time.
The linguistic roots of the modern Latinate words for ‘love’ can be seen to be directly corresponding with a pretty important and meaningful set of words in the Sanskrit-derived Indic lexicon. I am referring, among others, to the Bengali ‘আমি’, the Gujarati ‘અમે’, the Odia ‘ଆମେ’, the Hindi ‘हम’, and the Marathi ‘आम्ही’ – the Indic words for we, us and ourself.
What to the Latins was an intimation of their worldview as it concerned the world outside, was to the Indians an intimation of their worldview as it concerned the world inside. It is perhaps in this psycholinguistic split that the roots of the divergence of Latin culture from Greco-Indian culture can be found. The reason I include Greece along with the Indics, rather than with the Latins, is the curious conjugation of the Greek word for the self – ego – including as εμείς (emeis) when referring to the first person plural, είμαστε (eimaste) for ‘we are’, and είμαι (eimai) as ‘I am’, indicating an alignment with the Indic way of looking at the world in the psycholinguistic sense rather than with the Latin way, which saw love as a discrete emotion rather than as the core of one’s being; one’s very selfhood. It was thus that the Greeks and the Indics saw the world and its beholder as one and the same, while the Romans laid the foundation of the modern mindset that would see the world as eternally without oneself, beyond oneself, outside oneself.
Love and Friendship: A Very Latin Way of Seeing the World
This divergence, though, was never complete, and shades of the Greco-Indian meaning of the root word are still seen in Latinate languages, coming out in ways that only the Mediterranean mind, bronzed by the sun and amply supplied with seashores and fertility, could come up with.
The Latin root form ‘amor’, which is most closely mirrored in the modern French ‘amour’ and the modern Italian ‘amore’, can also be seen in words such as amicus: Latin for 'friend' or ‘partner’, amicable: English for 'easy to be friendly with', and amicizia - Italian for 'friendship'.
It is thus that the Mediterranean people of Europe - who are still often seen as 'strange' by the stoic Northern Europeans for their apparently too-open social behavior and looser restrictions upon one's personal conduct - connected love to the brightest light of the human psyche: friendship. It is this basic psycholinguistic turn that – allied to or influenced by the hotter weather of Mediterranean Europe as compared to the northern half – makes the French and the Italians more gregarious and effulgent than the British and the Germans, who shine with a more subdued, more differentiated, more discrete glow.
Northern Europeans, battling much tougher weather and less reliability of agriculture than southerners, relied more on social customs, a collective spirit, and institutional protocols to stabilize and drive their respective societies, while southern Europeans – right from the days of ancient Greece, through the entirety of the history of Rome, through the rise of the Franks, through Crusades and the rise of empires, through the loss and subsequent reconquest of Iberia by the Christian kings of Spain, through the French revolution, through the Napoleonic administration, through the unification of Italy, through the Ottoman conquest and subsequent liberation of Greece, through the foreign debt situation of Greece in the current millennium, right down to modern-day stereotypes of the ‘lazy’, work-shy, relaxed southern European in contrast to the more reserved, hardworking, and tightly coiled northerner – have always relied on individual sovereignty rather than collective identity to drive their cultures forward.
For all the (accurate) reputation of Rome as a war machine, it must be noted that it was the hard-hitting philosophical foundations of the right to self-determination - the very same line of thinking that made Lokamanya Tilak proclaim swarajya, meaning self-rule, to be the birthright of India and Indians during their independence struggle against the British - the divine duty of the individual to realize his true potential, and the inevitability of death and thus the importance of facing it head-on, that drove its culture. The culture of Rome was geared not towards war, but living according to the Gods, according to the Ideals that sustained the culture, according to the Heroes of old who expanded the culture. War, for Rome, was the most effective way of thriving in the hotly contested world it found itself in, not the obsession of bloodthirsty mindless brutes who couldn't resist the feel of a sword in their hand. And for all its reputation as a bloodthirsty patriarchal war machine, it thrived in spite of constant warfare, in spite of logistical limitations, going beyond technological as well as philosophical barriers with the nimble, self-assured step of an explorer, of a lover of life itself, rather than anything particular in it.
The intricate, multifaceted, multidimensional interconnectivity in the GLIG culture – my self-coined name for the common ancestor of Germanic, Latin, Indic, and Greek societies – hints at an idea that for the GLIG culture, love was more than interpersonal, or even intrapersonal. Love was, to them, closely related to how they lived in their land, how they interacted with her, how they made her fruitful and bountiful and how she in return made their societies and cultures bountiful in terms of material prosperity and prosperous in terms of intellectual and moral wisdom that continues to shape the lives of individuals across the word to this day. It was deep, fundamental cognizance of this relationship and its importance to survival and prospering of man that could well have led to the first conception of the ideological Vishnu – Bhudevi relationship.
Part 2: The Vishnu – Bhudevi Relationship: How Indic Thought Built Upon the GLIG Worldview
The Vishnu – Bhudevi relationship represents a unique idealization that sets the Indo-Greeks apart in the GLIG group (as far as I have been able to ascertain; contrary opinions are of course welcome – this is not an area about which we, as humans, know a lot for certain). The importance of Vishnu and Bhudevi in the old legends of Hinduism corresponds directly with the primordial Greek gods Ouranos (Uranus, or also Varun – you can literally take your pick here) and Gaia, the earth goddess from whom came the start of everything that comprises the foundational part of the Greek mythos. Even more curious is the fact that this correspondence is absent in the Germanics and the Latins, who increasingly stopped worshipping the mother goddess of the land in their pursuit of material glory and power, suggesting that it was the Germanics and the Latins that diverged from the GLIG culture first, with the Indo-Greeks going on to have a further collaborative period of religious ideation and idealization, with cracks in the two appearing much later.
It unfortunately also hints at the previously mentioned idea that for the Germanics and the Latins, who became not only increasingly war-hungry but also increasingly materialistic throughout written history, the earth, the land, became not a goddess, but rather their mistress – the one to exploit, not the one to cultivate, again and again. It was quite possibly the lineage of this deviation in thought, which split the ancient Latins and the ancient Germanics from their GLIG origins, that led to imperialism, colonialism, materialism, practically all the wars of Europe, misogyny and the belittling of women's capabilities as individuals and as a social class in human society, and today’s rampantly invasive consumerism. The ancient Greeks, facing the hurdles of geography as well as the concurrently growing power of rivals such as Rome, Persia, and Egypt – three of the greatest empires of the time – didn’t manage to make their worldview last the test of time, at least not in its original Greek form, not in the form of a society built upon the worldview of the ancient Greeks. The Indics, who had the luxury of not having any of those three right on their doorstep, went on to cultivate and conserve the line of thought that held the land to be the goddess, the mother, not a mistress, not a plaything, for a much longer period – so much longer that it hasn’t ended yet.
Vishnu as Iterative Improvement upon Naturistic Animism
It is with the arrival of the animal-incarnated Vishnu as the ruling all-powerful deity in place of the sky god that the Indics diverge from the Greeks. This represents an iterative improvement upon ideas from those who considered the gods invincible, who were tied to their mercies and whims, and who had no real power to affect their behavior in the slightest. Krishna’s opposition to Indra, who symbolically represents the old order of the world in his role as the king and thus the ideal representative of the old pantheon of gods based upon the constancy of nature, in the famous episode of the lifting of the Govardhan Parvati, could well be read as the start, in Indic tradition and chronology, of Man beginning to dominate nature, of man resisting nature, of man beginning to understand nature for its materiality rather than as an indomitable constant in the form of the ‘natural order’, as the ancients to the ancients saw it. The fact that it is Krishna’s death that sparks the start of the Kaliyuga in Hindu chronology is extremely significant in this regard, with the loss of the yugapurusha (the way of the time) in the symbolic, representational form of Krishna leading to loss of animistic principles and the slow severing of humanity’s organic connection to nature (which will come up later – look out for it), leading to selfishness, amorality, and baselessness becoming the norm, or normal, in the conduct of the world. In the Kaliyuga, man has become “the only creature that refuses to be what he is” as Albert Camus summed it up quite nicely, resisting and hiding from one’s own nature even as he resists, struggles, and fights with nature without.
Krishna’s lifting of the Govardhan Parvat may be a popular subject for painters and poets, but the mythological significance behind the event is rarely given a second look. We must remember that it is a yadnya to Indra – the Indic depiction of the GLIG culture’s common sky god – that Krishna stops, instead asking the people of Vrindavan to worship their actual benefactor, Govardhan. It is this refusal, this denial, that angers the ruling god of thunder and lighting enough to send torrential rains and floods to the land that Krishna personifies, to the land with which Krishna has challenged Indra, leading to the divine cowherd sheltering the population – his population – under Govardhan, held upon the tip of his little finger, an immensely significant detail whose meaning I have so far not been able to decipher completely. This represents a complete break from the relationship between Vishnu and Indra ‘so far’, mythologically speaking, with Vishnu already having sent the mighty and merciful daitya king Bali to the underworld upon Indra’s behest, along with several other instances of Indra helplessly running to Vishnu whenever an asura, daitya, rakshas, or even rishi starts to become too hot for him to handle.
This ‘break from tradition’, if you will, makes most sense when seen in the meta sense, as the writers of the texts describing the world that they saw, where human divinity – human excellence as the guiding light - rather than the constancy of the principles of nature, was becoming stronger as a way of life than the naturistic animism of the Indo-Greeks and later the ancient Greeks. While Krishna is roughly analogous to the ‘heroes’ of Greek myth as a literary character, their difference lies particularly in the fact that the former is not subject to the Indian iterations of the Olympians, who represent the order of nature itself in Greek thought. While the Heroes were celebrated and even worshipped in ancient Greece, their worship never superseded that of the Olympians, central as they remained to the Greek worldview right up till Rome gobbled it up and made it theirs like the big bad bullies that they were. The Indics, on the other hand, left behind the old nature gods of Indra, Varun, Mitra, Agni, and Vayu, improving upon them iteratively without letting go of them, when human divinity, human excellence presented itself as an alternative instead.
Indra, these days, is usually known as the guy who helplessly asks for Lord Vishnu’s help when he gets himself in a bind, rather than as the primal hero who ended the terror of Vritrasura, who … hello hello … dried up all the rivers and parched the land. Considering that Indra’s heroic deeds almost exactly mirror those of the Vishnu figure who came after, who replaced him in the social consciousness as the peak deity, this is almost definitely the work of a line of thought, which culture then and now seems to have enthusiastically supported for good reason, that it is divinity in humans that is more appealing to humans rather than the divinity of the order of nature, even when beneficial to ourselves or to the ‘land’, seen as an ineliminable extension of who we are, at our core.
The incarnations of Vishnu, the instances when the divine maintainer took on a body – of which ten are most well-known – represent leaps of understanding, not just among humans, but also among fishes, testudines, and the suids, as well as in and through the short man, and the horse, and the eagle, and the lion, and the monkey. They represent leaps of understanding, a levelling up, if you will, for all that lives. It is a reorganization of the purusha, a shedding of the skin for the whole of being, that is referred to in the incarnations of Vishnu – the sustainer of life, the upholder of dharma, and the destroyer of evil. This sentiment in Indic thought is quite excellently contained in the Sanskrit word प्रभू, which literally translates as ‘the world improving’ / ‘existence improving’, and thus nominatively as ‘the one who improves all that exists’. It is in this sense that Rama becomes Prabhu Rama – not just a human ideal but a model for improvement for the entire world, for being itself.
Incidentally, it is this insistence on iterative improvement as a basic way of life for their society that cross-connects the Indic with the Latin within the GLIG group. While the Indians connected iterative improvement to their highest deity, the lord of awareness, cognition, and understanding, Ganesha, the Latin Romans remained the big daddy of the whole Mediterranean for close to a full millennium based on not much more than their shameless adoption of good ideas, ideas that worked, regardless of where they came from. It was their ability to copy Carthage’s navy that allowed them to beat the old masters of the Mediterranean at their own game, while copying Greek mythology was the first of many ideological evolutions Roman society undertook, aiming to remain not just at the top of the curve but ahead of it, in any way they could.
A Twinning Echoes through All of Hinduism: How Vishnu Keeps Saving Bhudevi, Again and Again
Of the GLIG group, only the Indics seem to have symbolized the land they lived in as anything but a plaything, anything but a dead, idle property to be utilized, for any sustained period in civilizational terms. It seems to be only the Indics who formed the idea of Vishnu as the ideal man to cultivate land and life, and of Bhudevi as the land and life that is ideal for cultivation, that helps stabilize the society that Vishnu, as its purusha, which means ‘the way a society is organized, particularly in behavioral terms’, can develop sustainably – can develop to last. Indic myth refers again and again to the theme of the purusha rescuing bhudevi, i.e. land and life itself, from demons, famines, and darkness, i.e. from what constitute the many faces of organic, inevitable adversity.
The reference to Vishnu’s symbiosis with the land, Bhudevi, is made constantly in Hindu literature, though indirectly in Vishnu’s first avatar: Matsya, the sea creature or fish. Vishnu as the sea creature sustains life, i.e. the wealth of the land – of Bhudevi, through torrential downpours that threaten to drown the whole world and all life in it. The next great leap in vital awareness, which is the seat of the purusha, comes with the Koorma or testudine avatar, who holds the mountain Mandara on his back as the gods and the demons fight for immortality by churning the eternal ocean of milk, with Krishna also referring extensively to the testudine in the bhagawadgeeta in terms of its peculiar animality, particularly its behavior of withdrawing into itself, which is described as the distinguishing behavior of the jnani, the one with knowledge, when interacting with world and worldview, i.e. samsara.
Then comes Varaha, the land-dwelling suid, the boar, or the first even-toed ungulate, it could be said, talking as we are about times and characters that are already myth and legend for the characters of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are estimated to have happened around 15000 and 7500 years before present, respectively. This means that we may need to think in terms of evolutionary or geological time rather than relying on our own day-to-day conceptions of the words that the myths of Hinduism use to describe what they want to convey. What we today call a ‘boar’ could well represent only a lineage of 'varaha', not total verisimilitude, and a hippopotamus, a boar, and a bison might well equally qualify as the candidate for the varaha moolpurush (original form), all three being even-toed ungulates and thus descendants of the same common ancestor, evolutionarily speaking.
As the narrative goes, Varaha, a word whose literal meaning mirrors the requirements of the man among men and goes something like ‘the one who wishes to grow, the one who wishes to become eligible, the one who wishes to become big’, descends into the depths of the ocean to save Bhudevi, meaning life itself in all its gore and glory, from the clutches of the golden-eyed one, Hiranyaksha. Now, can anyone recall an even-toed ungulate that went from the land into the sea and became big … like really really big … like the biggest animal in the history of the earth big? Also, yes, this also does mean in a very literal sense that men among men are in fact pigs, and we should be kept that way. Oh wait, the ancient Greeks also had this same exact thought, didn’t they? Can anyone Circe what I am alluding to? Several allusions in literature to the behavioral trait of powerful, high-agency men acting like pigs, including but not limited to George Orwell’s excellent depiction in Animal Farm, seem to echo a collective understanding among humans that on some level, man does have a similarity with the suids (and the cetaceans, and the bovids). The Nobel Prize-winning literateur and scourge of the empire Sir Winston Churchill's opinion upon pigs is also well worth a mention in this context, intimately familiar with the suidae as he would have been in his time and place of being - his spacetime, i.e. his 'period' or 'era'. Sir Winston commended the pig, in between faminously sanctioning the transfer of Indian grain to other parts of the empire, of course, for looking not up at you like a dog, nor down at you like a cat, but straight in your eye as your equal, unconsciously echoing the sentiment first formed by the very civilization whose unbroken lineage and heritage he kept trampling upon throughout his time as essentially the Chancellor of Great Britain in 10 Downing Street.
Coming back to the point, next comes Nrusinha, the man-lion, who represents the switch in the Indic consciousness from Bhudevi to Lakshmi, from land to wealth, and the sense of justice and ferocious, frightening power necessary to keep hold of it. Incidentally, why is it we believe that Nrusinha tears not the head, not the heart, not the limbs, but specifically the guts of the golden-haired one, or even quite literally the golden turtle, Hiranyakashyapu? Makes one think, no? After Vamana, who asks alms of three steps of land from King Bali and restores the ‘rightful order of the day’ by restoring Indra to swargaloka, comes Parshurama, who apart from killing all the kshatriyas of the earth seven times over, as well as his mother – though just the one time in her case, forms new land on the Indian subcontinent – the patch today known as Kokan and the Malabar coast – India’s western coast. Vishnu was, at this time, not just a protector of land, but a creator of land, a progenitor of land and the wealth and prestige that came with it.
Then comes Rama.
A reiteration and redoubling of the Varaha avatar at its core, and intensifying the literal meaning of the third avatar’s name, Rama, as Vishnu, and Seeta, as Bhudevi, represent the peak of the human desire to grow, the human desire to triumph, the human desire to fight the good battle together.
The connection between the land and the society that inhabits that land, which is made up of socios (Spanish from Latin, meaning partner), the connection hence formed between purush and prakruti, is so deeply ingrained into the Rama story that its ignorance, even among Hindus, beggars belief. As the narrative of the Ramayana goes, Rama encounters the sage Gautama’s ashram en route to Mithila to test himself out for the hand of Janaka’s daughter-of-the-plough Seeta, which is itself a direct reference to Seeta’s role in the Vishnu narrative as not just Lakshmi but as an offshoot of Bhudevi – of the land itself. Ahalya or Ahilya, whose name in several sources is translated as ‘one who hasn’t yet been ploughed’, which refers both to the fertility of the land and to the crude way in which college jocks refer to sex, has been waiting for his arrival to be freed from Gautama’s curse. Popularly depicted as a rock, which is but compacted or inanimate land, it is Rama’s touch that allows Ahalya to walk again and talk again, i.e. to regain her agency. Having freed the unploughed rock from its bondage, Rama then impresses the daughter of the land herself by breaking Shiva’s bow when others can barely lift it up, let alone string it. Rama’s eventual victory over Ravan and his reconquest of Seeta means that he woos, loves, and rescues not only the daughter of the land, but also rescues, by reanimating, the one who had never been ploughed, doubling his importance to the land as the role model of societal behavior as compared to the previous iteration of Varaha.
It is quite possibly the central importance of man’s connection to nature when it comes to living a good life that the Ramayana wants to portray when talking about the all-knowing, stable-minded (स्थितप्रज्ञ) Rama’s loss of Seeta to the egotistically driven yet capable Ravana, and her subsequent recovery aided by monkeys, bears, and, in a clear indication that Ramayana comes from before the time when man had begun to resist nature, the sea god himself, showing Rama’s reliance on the organic nature of the world, rather than the egotistic drive to nurture or conquer, to be the force that prevails in the end, mirroring the through-line of Hindu lore, myth, and thought, which is that the good, which is true, must always prevail over evil, i.e. untruth in the end. Though nurturing may sound antagonistic to conquering, they are two sides of the same coin, and it is in nature that we must trust so that we may grow up well, live well, and make the world a better place by the time we depart it. If the protoindoeuropean roots of the word ‘love’ have a message, it is that believing in what’s yours, working with what’s yours, improving what’s yours, is the basis of life and love. Theft and covetousness has been considered among the highest of crimes right from ancient times, from times even before humanity, continuing on in the sociology of animals we still see around us today, representing the deep, timeless conviction, perhaps within the spirit of animality itself, that trying to possess what is not yours, is the wrong thing to do, in the most general sense, for yourself, for your clan, for your worldview, and for the society built around it. It is in preserving, maintaining, and vivifying what is yours – the literal definition of the Vishnu figure from the Hindu Trimurti – that the essence of true love lies, not in coveting what isn’t yours, which – no prizes for guessing – is a defining feature of the ten faces of the ego, i.e. Ravan.
Part 3: Divine Twins, A Mysterious Birth, and Echoes Through Time: Why Apollo and Artemis Matter Way More Than You Think
Apollo and Artemis, the lawgiver and the lawless of the ancient Greek world, the city and the wild, the day and the night, the Him and the Her, are more than incidentally related to concepts that were as central to the conjugal pairings of gods and goddesses in the Indo-Greek lore as they still remain to relationships hustling and bustling their way through hardships or smooth sailing alike, all around the world, right now.
I really do not have the space to write all about Apollo and Artemis in this piece, but I am going to enumerate the aspects of their lore and legend that pertain to the topic at hand: Love, and particularly how the nature of Apollo and Artemis relates to our own inter- as well as intrapersonal relationships.
A very concise story of the Birth of Zeus and Leto’s Divine Twins
Apollo and Artemis are the twins of Leto, a minor ‘mother goddess’ born to the titans Coeus and Phoebe, whose names, with Coeus being linguistically related to the same kva sound of questioning that the previous WWotW piece, ‘Science’, focused on, mean ‘the one with the inquisitive mind’ and ‘the one who is radiant / radiance itself’, respectively. It is important to note above all else that symbolism in religious or mythological texts is never arbitrary. Characters’ names pulling a double load by describing how the characters use their agency within the narrative, i.e. how they behave, is a literary device as old as time itself, amply seen in the tale of Rama, who represents a ‘just-right’ balancing of the human personality. Leto is the mother born of the curious and the bright – it is, really, no wonder that Zeus, representing both the literary character of Zeus and everyone who embodies his behavior, some better than others – the highest of rulers, the heavenly father, the leader, the instructor and pathfinder, and the highest of warriors – fell in love with her the instant he saw her. The name-word Phoebe, incidentally, is related to all the words for light and light-related things in modern English, such as photon, photograph, and photometry, indicating her relevance to brightness, shining, radiance itself rather than as a humanoid figure born to humanoid sky daddies and earth mamas.
Enraged by Zeus’s betrayal, Hera, the goddess of – let’s not forget – families, marriage and marital duties, and in particular the womanhood of married women, instructs the land of the world to deny Leto entry to give birth to Zeus’s divine twins.
Leto, impregnated and helped by Zeus, the ruling god of thunder and lightning, and possibly aided by Poseidon, god of the seas and in many ways assimilated into the Indic conception of Varun or Ouranos, makes her way amid great difficulty to the lonely, unmoored island of Delos, where she gives birth, first to Artemis, who, as the goddess of birth, midwifery, and the fertility of women, and also of darkness, wildernesses, and the mysterious and the unknown, aids Leto in giving birth to Apollo, the god of harmony, of order, of sustenance, of beauty, and of metricity, and also of the sun, the day, the city, and the known, understood, and integrated. Just as it was darkness that helped birth the light for the ancient Greeks, so it was for the Indics, whose famous beseeching to the total, the absolute, the ultimate, was to take them ‘from darkness to light, from untruth to truth, from death to life’, and whose deities always seem to be painted a deep dark black or blue for some reason, with one even named after the Sanskrit word for ‘black’.
Krishna and Adimaya: How Indic Civilization Pursued Human Divinity over Submission to Nature
It takes an incredibly small step – an unbelievably small step – to move between the world of Apollo and Artemis and the world of Shankara, Shakti, Lakshmi, and Vishnu – the ideals for not just human behavior but for relationships in particular in the long-estranged sibling of the ancient Greek way of life – the ancient Hindu / Indic way of life.
Apollo, in his role as the sun god, the lawgiver, defender, and protecter, the upholder of city and civilization, the embodiment and ideal of metricity, harmony, and balance on the cosmic scale, immediately reminds – should immediately remind – a cognisant Hindu of Vishnu, the one who doesn’t create, nor destroy, but sustains the world. He is the principle of life, the principle of harmony, achievement, and thriving, and of balance, forever resting as he does atop the serpent Shesha, which means that which remains [nevertheless], and sustains civilization, town planning, and sustainable civilizational growth in his role as Purandhar – the … wait for it … upholder of the city.
It is Vishnu’s Krishna form that particularly speaks to the close ties between how the Greeks and the Indics saw the one who upholds dharma, the one who maintains order. Krishna, like Apollo, happens to be the highest among musicians, warriors, and logicians alike, being as he is the ideal of harmony, rhyme, and order itself, i.e. of beauty and art itself. Like Apollo, Krishna is a protector of the people, their shield and sword against the untamed wilds of chaos, which to him are his twin sister and not an enemy at all, be it in Vrindavan, Mathura, Dwaraka, or Kurukshetra, the place where possibly the first battle to end all battles in the history of mankind took place. Krishna’s depiction in black or blue, however, is more than slightly reminiscent of Artemis, the goddess of the night, the moon, darkness, madness, and magic. Like I said, symbolism in religious or mythological texts is never arbitrary.
Artemis, as the moon goddess, the embodiment of the night, darkness, and uncertainty, the many-headed, many-faced goddess of the hunt, and the midwife who helps birth her brother the light, should easily be recognizable to the Indian mind as Shakti, Adishakti, or Adimaya, the one mother goddess (or OMG for humor purposes) of Hinduism. The ultimate expression of powerful femininity, Artemis is the untouched, unsullied, knowing yet virgin goddess of the hunt whose naked form no mortal may look upon, goddess of the night, of birth and natality, of the thrill of the hunt, of the fearless pursuit of quality, of excitement and of broken boundaries, mother chaos herself, adopted as the open-mouthed, fire-breathing fierce mother goddess by the Hindus and in a slightly subordinate role as one of the Pantheon by the Greeks.
Now let’s remind ourselves of how Krishna is said to have been born, and more specifically, who is said to have died in his place so that he may escape to Gokul, thus assisting in his birth in an essential, unignorable way – it is, of course, the goddess Adimaya, who takes on the form of Nanda’s newborn daughter and reminds Kansa that his slayer yet lives. It is thus that Krishna, the Purandhar, the god of beauty, love, and harmony, and the upholder of the way, of dharma, is assisted by the Hindu iteration of the Greek Artemis in being born to a union opposed by the powers that be to such an extent that Krishna’s parents are imprisoned and watched by the evil king Kansa, i.e. denied free land to give birth. Krishna having to grant Arjuna the divine vision required to see his unlimited, uncoiled, unbound vishwaroop – his world form – during the dialogue of the Bhagawadgeeta now gets imbibed with even more meaning with the integration of the Artemis myth of no mortal being able to ‘look upon her naked form’, which is to say her true form, which is Adishakti or Adimaya herself. Krishna's choice to reveal this knowledge - with great discretion - to his great friend, brother, and student Arjuna is but one representation in Hindu lore of the ties of humanity with which the Indics slowly, sustainably contained the Greek idea of the uncontrollable naturalness of the divine, while Krishna's association with both the infinite and the nothing, the anant and the shoonya as Hindu philosophy put it, is also a clear mark of a deep connection and association with the myth of Artemis the limitless, the unbound.
In fact, the emphasis upon the illicit nature of the twins’ birth, the comparative lack of exploration and elaboration in Greek thought that Hinduism or Indic thought later gave to the Apollo and Artemis characters, as well as their worship as part of the Pantheon rather than as foundational deities themselves, is indicative of a larger, sociocultural split – the last of the GLIG group, between the Greeks and the Indics. It was the significance of human consciousness itself, described in detail in the Apollo – Artemis myth, which contrasted and complemented each other just like – in fact exactly like – the yin and yang of the Daoists, that the Indics carried forward, rather than dependence upon and helplessness before fickle and unconquerable gods. It was the pursuit of animal divinity over natural constancy as the highest principle for a society that may well have led the Indics to break from the last stand of the animistic GLIG tribe and dive into a life of their own, guided by the divinity within humanity rather than by the divinity within the way things had always been, the divinity within the natural order.
Part 4: Two Coins and Four Sides: Why Indic Thought Matched Shakti with Shankar and Vishnu with Lakshmi
While Apollo and Artemis were elevated to the Greek Pantheon, a decision rather begrudgingly accepted by Hera, interestingly enough, they were elevated to the same level as the constancy of nature, the ‘natural order’ that the Greeks had already venerated in their worship and the philosophy that led to it. They were, at best, equal to the likes of Zeus and Poseidon, or Indra and Varun in the Indic pantheon, never greater than them, never more important as basis for the sociocultural identity of the group than them.
The true brilliance of Hinduism lies in its further development of the Apollo and Artemis characters in its mythos and ethos, further refining them as not extrahuman phenomena at all, but as the basis for human behavior, in human societies, according to the human way of culturing human land.
The first significant step of this psychosocial process, whose importance to the Indic way of life is still exhibited by modern Indian aunts and mothers to a stunning – really, quite fascinating – degree of verisimilitude, was to marry the kids off, i.e. coming up with philosophically and behaviorally backed romantic twins, pair bonding partners for the original twins in their capacity as the role model for those who came after and from them, who, as siblings, couldn’t pair bond with each other to propagate culture forth. Apollo and Artemis, forever complementary, forever contrasting and never matching, can never pair bond, and thus can never propagate culture on their own – Not as behaviorally acted out role models for a society, rather than as individuals. One is a sweet homely couch potato, one is a wild intrepid adventurer. One is all smooth strings, soft melody, and sweet harmony, the other is all heavy metal, distortion, and screeching. One is awake all night, the other is awake all day. It just wouldn’t work. For Apollo and Artemis to become the foundations of a culture that would not only succeed, but succeed over generations, their sociocultural instruction, their ‘religion’, if we must call it that, would have to be pair bonded as well, each in their own way. It was crucial to get this pairing right, as the success of the culture it would spawn would be – was supposed to be – heavily dependent on it.
Lakshmi as Vishnu’s Ideal Socio, and Shiva as Shakti’s Ideal Loco Loner
The first of the twin peaks of this brilliance comes in the form of the aforementioned development of Bhudevi into Lakshmi, who became - chose to become according to the narrative of the Samudra Manthan - Vishnu’s – the ideal man’s – wife, companion, and partner, hand in hand with the sociocultural and psycholinguistic progression of women from ‘the soil to fertilize’ to ‘the person to adore, admire, love, and support’ on top of their previous role as the ‘ideal soil to fertilize’. This also led, for causes that Shakta tradition may be able to best explain, to the Artemis and the Bhudevi-Lakshmi of Indic thought merging into a singularity of female divinity, the Durga, the Kali, the Parvati, the Saraswati / Sharada, the Lakshmi, along with other nomenclatures, coalescing into one mother goddess at the core that still reigns supreme all over India. However, Lakshmi always remains at the side of Vishnu, as Seeta, Rukmini, Satyabhama, etc., while Parvati is always identified with Shiva as the world-facing form of Adishakti, the root goddess, mother chaos herself, Artemis in her full capacity.
Along with Lakshmi as the perfect consort for Vishnu, Indic thought also discovered the principle of Shiva, Shankar, the ‘one who doesn’t exist’ and ‘the one whose actions are auspicious’, respectively, he who lives in cremation grounds, and on Mt. Kailash, who is the lord of the strange and the weird and the abnormal, the one who goes beyond death, the master of animals, or perhaps master of animality itself, as Adiyogi Pashupatinath, the wild being of the forest as the kirata who troubled Arjuna, the one who has nothing and everything, and who, with his damaru (which, incidentally, comes from the same onomatopoeic roots that the word 'drum' comes from) and with his instinctive, organic tandav, sets the pace for the whole of creation, tying it into order, function, and progression.
It is with such sociocultural and psycholinguistic manoeuvring that the Indics found the other coin to match the two sides of their foundational notion of humanity itself: the divine twins Apollo and Artemis, i.e. Vishnu and Shakti.
Shiva and Shakti, and Vishnu and Lakshmi, are not opposites at all. They are one and the same principle, depicted in two different bodily forms, with their lore and symbolism describing the ideal behavior for seekers of that same principle of both genders in human society, a shining demonstration of equality in the last place, as the saying goes, where the moderns will look. It is to the egotistic resistance to Jungian integration of the shadow that that phrase refers to, rather than the momentary act of forgetting the proper place for something. The famous Stoic maxim "the obstacle is the way" also alludes to the same sentiment, with the consideration of the obstacle as the way itself being the most difficult step for the unwilling.
Vishnu and Shakti, generally speaking, are both active, causative agents, as the sun and the moon, and are two sides of the same coin. Shiva and Lakshmi-Bhudevi, on the other hand, are more ideative, more abstracted, passive rather than active as characters in the lore; rather than being the creative, causative agents of the evolution of the world, they are the साक्षी – the witnesses, भोक्ते – the experiencers, according to Hindu philosophy. Shiva and Lakshmi, just like Vishnu and Shakti, are two sides of the same coin.
It is essential to match a Lakshmi with a Vishnu, and a Shakti with a Shiva, because the other permutations don’t work, not as a role model to be emulated by those who come after and from the individual, which defines good behavior. This, when seen in continuity with the "religious" description of the four characters as an ideal for individual behavior in the first place, comprises the moolapurush of Indian culture, the original way Indic culture was organized, based on possibly historic figures but also, and more importantly, descriptions of ideal human behavior in symbolic form, including how they relate to each other. This particular relational matrix describing how humans bond has been present in this culture possibly as its very source, or at least the node at which the culture broke off from its last ancestor, and as emulated ideals within the culture as long as it persists.
It is for this reason that Vishnu and Lakshmi, the ’normal couple’ of the two, to put it mildly, remain the ideal for Hindu pair bonds, i.e. marriages. It is Vishnu’s winning habit, perfect self-awareness, and immense creative potential that a Hindu husband is supposed to emulate, while the ideal Hindu wife should, before anything else, truly understand what ‘value’ means, in order to keep her family flourishing, embodiment as she is of the wealth of the house, in every sense of the word. Shiva and Parvati remain the odd couple, the Gomez and Morticia Addams of the Hindu worldview, if you will. Shiva and Parvati really do love each other intensely and in an extremely healthy manner, and also contribute to ‘the world’ at large when the time comes, but they are not the ideal couple to use as the recommended ideological basis for couples per se in a society, due to their proclivity towards not reproducing rather than reproducing, their tendency to break the limits of normality, and their love of solitude rather than socialization. While they still remain highly venerated, as gods and as ideals for individual and familial behavioral patterns, it is the sociable, worldly Vishnu and Lakshmi, who tend to maintain the limits of normality as the general rule, who are held as the role models for actual couples in actual society to emulate.
A Very Dangerous Game: It Is Never Dissimilarity That Attracts
The pairing of Vishnu with Lakshmi and of Shiva with Shakti, on the background of Vishnu and Shakti’s role as possibly the original pairing – as a pair of twins born to a mother goddess, who is the daughter of the bright and the curious, with the king of the gods – that started the culture off on its own path, away from GLIG culture, shows the basic rules Hindu thought sets forth for attraction, mutual admiration, and respect, within as well as among sexes.
The relational code of Hinduism makes it plainly clear for all to see that it is always the likeness between a pairing that attracts and holds them to each other, not the unlikeness. This should be obvious; there is a very dangerous game being played in modern times in selling the idea that it is ‘opposites that attract’, that it is the dissonance of contradiction that bonds two individuals, birthed from the malformed ideals of perverted, ego-driven individualism that sees personal freedom as an absolute and fundamental birthright without the first clue of what true personal freedom is or even looks like. Arjuna's tilt towards forethought, which is an indicator of an understanding of true freedom, rather than impulsivity, towards harmonious self-awareness rather than egotistic self-forgetfulness, is highlighted when he has the humility to ask Krishna what the stable-mind, the स्थितप्रज्ञ, looks like, how he behaves, how he speaks, how he presents himself, and how he acts when no one is looking. It is with the benefit of hindsight, having seen the obstinate perversion of the meaning of words like individualism and freedom across and beyond my own lifetime, that such small details in great events gleam with great meaning, revealing what they prevented rather than what they achieved in situ.
It is never the dissonance that unites a healthy couple, but the unison (literally meaning ‘one sound’) or harmony of that which is common between the two. Even in seeming opposites who attract, it is not the contrast but the likeness that attracts and sustains them to, with each other. It is the common link, the harmony of that commonality, that sustains them, in spite of the differences. The kind of relationships the ‘opposites attract’ mindset promotes are those where the participants do get a kick out of conflict - those where disharmony, rather than harmony, is the goal, the freely chosen goal of two free individuals.
Interestingly in the context of this piece, Apollo and Artemis have the traditional masculine and feminine societal roles, but with the genders reversed, with Apollo playing the role of the city, the home, the beautiful, the musical, and the harmonic, while Artemis represents the wilderness, the hunt, the precision and mastery of archery, anger, thrill, and madness, and expanding the boundaries of what is known.
However, it is essential to note that it is on top of his role as lawgiver protecter and righteous destroyer that Apollo embodies harmony and poetry and music, all that is metered, a sentiment echoed almost verbatim in the Sanskrit term ‘मित’, which stands for ‘appropriately measured’. Artemis is not just the goddess of the wild, not just of the night and the forests, not just of the unseen and unmeasurable, but first of all the midwife that helped birth her brother the light that came from the darkness – the goddess of femininity, natality and everything that comes with it. This alludes to an idea within the Greco-Indian worldview that the male and female can only be truly well-rounded when they imbibe good behaviors regardless of gender expectations, but only as an addition, as a supplement, to an already fulfilled, satisfied, capable demonstration of the traits and behaviors that are expected of their own gender. Artemis is the sword on top of her role as the shield, while Apollo is the inverse, the shield on top of his role as the sword.
Part 5: Black and White, Heard and Trusted, Seen and Unseen: How the Daoists and the Indians Linked Love with Peace
Hindu veneration of Shiva and Shakti's Ardhanarinateshwar form, as well as the consideration of Vishnu's Seetaram and Radhakrishna forms as the full flowering of the male and the female within those pairings, is to this day a nod to their roots in the cross-linked properties of Apollo Vishnu, Artemis Shakti, Shankar Shiva, and Bhudevi Lakshmi, and the Indic awareness of the complementary and the supplementary in human nature.
In today’s gender politics, where selfish gains show us the way rather than the collective good, and individual sovereignty, in whatever form it is understood, remains the baseline principle to determine all disputes that come after, it is important to note the evolutionary biological journey that has brought humanity to where we are, a journey accomplished not by willing into existence a nonexistent equality, but by appreciating each for who they were, men for men, women for women, and at least in the case of the hijras of India, bigendered people for blessing newly married couples that they may imbibe the best of each other, and together present the Chaturbhuj – four handed – gods of the Hindu faith to the world, in the hope that proper emulation of the mulapurusha of Hinduism by that individual couple will lead to mimicry among others as the simplest form of flattery, behavior leading to behavior, sustaining the true meaning of the culture in the process. The question of why Hindu gods – like Ganapati, Shankar, Vishnu, Krishna, but not the celibate Hanuman – are depicted with four hands has puzzled me for a while. There is more than one reason to depict the ideals of Hindu faith with multiple arms, of course – various types of agencies, multiple roles, multiple capabilities, the list goes on, but the most simple, particularly within the context of the gods’ role as guidelines for society, seems to be that the four-handed gods of Hinduism depict not an individual, but a married, i.e. pair-bonded couple, who can together take on everything in the world that is worth taking on, in creation, as with Vishnu and Lakshmi-Bhudevi, or in destruction, as with Shakti and Shiva. The world-facing man, historically the protector and first defender of human families, backed up by the invisible power of the feminine, the caring hand watching over the flame that drives the best out of man the creature, protecting the world-facing representation of the best of humanity, comprises the basic structure of the four-armed Hindu gods, when seen as models for behavior on an individual and, more importantly, marital and social scale in Hindu, or Indic society.
I’ll end this piece by pointing out the unexpected but stunningly summatory similarity between the relational matrix of behavioral Hinduism, as described in the previous chapter, and the famous Yin-Yang symbol of the Daoists, closely associated as the Indics remained with the land beyond the Himalayas throughout their time in the Indian subcontinent. While Vishnu and Lakshmi-Bhudevi form the light part of the Daoist circle, representing all that is known and integrated, all that is structured, all that is maintained, the normal, the civil, and the ordered, the dark part of the circle is made up by Shakti and Shiva, who with their inherent, progenitative darkness represent all that is unclear, all that is entropic, all that is crumbling, all that is abnormal, and all that is chaotic. While the white part of the Daoist circle represents the world-facing outward projection of the psyche, the dark half stands for the inner darkness that comes before, that must come before her brother the light, whom she herself must help birth. From the spacetime of Apollo and Artemis to that of Vedic India, to that of Daoist China, right down to that of modern times, it is the principle of sociality, of participatory progression, of fighting the good battle, and sustaining the consequent peace and harmony with iterative improvement that has united man the creature. Coming from literal times immemorial, the longevity of these principles as good guidelines for moral behavior, the sustained success of the societies and cultures based upon these principles, and, above all else, the untainted functionality of these principles into present times demonstrates the true genius of those who came before – those who never sought to separate nature from man, who never sought to possess what was not theirs, and who never sought to let go of what was theirs. The reason that life lessons from these geopolitical, sociocultural, and psycholinguistic founders and pioneers still work flawlessly is simple: These people knew how to live, and as a consequence, they knew how to love.
Fin.
© Tanmay Viraj Tikekar
19/06/2025
tikekar.tanmay@gmail.com
