Great Beasts of Legend: Man-Lions

[Music] good evening my name is Steve tinny and I'm the deputy director of the Penn Museum as always many thanks all of you for coming to tonight's installment of the Penn museums and your great lectures this year of course our thing is great beasts of legend and the next and last lecture in our series will be on June 7th and will feature Adam Smith assistant curator in the Asian section talking about during guardians the story of the Chinese winged lions in the Penn Museum as usual after our speakers presentation there will be some time for QA and if you'd like to ask a question just request the please come to one of the microphones in the aisle there are actually microphones in both aisles so that we can all hear it and so the device speaker who will begin us on our trajectory estimates dr. devon patel is associate professor of south asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a PhD from University of California Berkeley writer that he did a BA in comparative literature and Asian languages and cultures so he's a very textual basis to his research but you'll see use a lot of iconography his research fuses the study of texts in various South Asian languages especially Sanskrit with the development of the region's literary and visual cultures through time he has published and South Asian literary cultures in history on South Asian aesthetics and their relationship to other philosophical traditions and allow the convergence of the literary individual in early India other research interests include translation studies comparative literature philosophy critical theory religions of Asia especially Buddhism a lot you can see his most recent book is texts to tradition then ie should be a cholita and literary community in South Asia if a region developer blurb for this volume you will see that just as we emphasize contextualization here in the pen museum governor's approach seeks to contextualize a specific literary work this body I'm quoting introduces readers to the poems author his reading communities the modes through which the poem has been read and used the contexts through which is it became Chronicle its literary f spring which refers a great pieces time and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it I suspect the drug broach orders well this evening's presentation so please join me in welcoming professor Darren Patel who will no doubt give us lots of context to eliminate his intriguing title man lions blood seed demons and wish-fulfilling cows [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you very much that's a quick introduction so is my microphone on everybody can hear okay it's not okay there it is I think now it's on okay so one of the courses I teach at Penn for undergraduates is a on Indian mythology and even within 15 weeks some forty five hours in the classroom we barely scratch the surface on any of the topics that we cover in that course if I were to do a lecture on beasts fully I'm just preparing this this presentation I realized that even this in 45 minutes I can barely scratch the surface the assortment I use the word assortment here because I didn't know if I should focus on a singular Beast a set of beasts or just try to give you a as much as I can and I went by the last one I like I like big general talks so the other thing is that as Steve mentioned I work with texts mostly I'm a philologist not only an archaeologist or an anthropologist or not historian and therefore and in fact early India and sort of this civilization that I'll be speaking about mostly which is the quote-unquote Vedic civilization is comes to us mostly through text there there is still of course lots of material but a material culture that hasn't really been hasn't been able to be discovered yet underneath places where people still live is the living tradition also so that the other kind of thing which is perhaps a little bit different from some of the other cultures that you've seen in the other lectures here in the other series or the other lectures in this series many of these beats that I speak of are are part of the psychic religious social worlds of living people's still so that complicates things that also open things up and so I will just go through a series of visuals tell a lot of stories and attempt to make a few kind of points that we can bring into a conversation after the fact and hopefully we'll be able to see what this term means in this particular tradition so the first slide that I have here is the takes us back all the way to the past the ancient Vedic civilization which comes after this so-called Indus Valley Civilisation which where we have lots of material culture to work with but we can't read their script yet still that still people are still working on that and there's not that much we can say about that particular culture this the early Vedic culture is has connections with Central Asia and by extension in a much more sort of proto store prehistoric era with other quote-unquote indo-european cultures Sanskrit was their language and therefore because they are linguistically connected with other cultures as far west as do ancient Celtic Scandinavian cultures and as far east as the early South Asian cultures this Vedic civilization they would they have connections not only linguistically but also in terms of their mythology their social worlds their religions etc so that's that's what the traditions that I'm going to be taking you through today with some of these things and perhaps no more primeval myth is there none of the kind of circuit dragon that you may know about this Beowulf Grendel and various other kinds of beasts of the ancient in the Europeans the serpent dragon bit flower in West Asia we have this term vertical guna which is the sort of the destroyer of the Prophet this is this is a great story of the Vedic God kinda strong divinity and his great act in the ancient text designator which is perhaps the earliest of the remake of the indo-european a sort of a literature of indo-european culture that we have for literature the the great act of this great God inda is to defeat the demon with the beasts often either presented as a cloud cloud demon that hoards the waters that keeps keeps the rains from falling and eating drought but also often shown to be kind of like a serpent or dragon which holds hold the waters in and the great defeat of this demon is what establishes in the great king and so this is just water Joseph and the serpent you'll see this is a Javanese presentation and it's the pictures I'm showing you this sort of cultural world that expands is not only South Asia but also in many can many whale of connections with West Asia Central Asia as well as Southeast Asia and through various contexts East Asia so this is a large world that and many of these beasts and many of these these beings have a certain kind of relationship with this is a Javanese representation of the so called undable de santé pub which is the serpent of the end of time and this is somehow related here so the first thing I'm going to do is just kind of take you through some of the I understand that one of the big themes that you've probably been exposed to in this kind of court in this kind of seminar series is hybridity and bestiality is somehow linked with hybrid beings animals humans different kinds of animals put together that you've never seen beasts on the verge of humanity and humans on the verge of bestiality these kind of transformations all kinds of interesting powerful motifs and beams well one of the places where we see this and I'm skipping ahead historically the ancient Vedic peoples didn't really build temples these were people who whose primary mode of religious and social being was to rely on creating a temporary altar space where they offered sacrifices on the terrestrial realm which according to them would be carried up through the atmospheric realms up to the heavenly sky realms and they thought of this tripartite universe as having an being on some level ordered preorder this tradition doesn't this early tradition didn't think of the world as essentially chaos it thought a bit of a centrally ordered and that it disintegrated into chaos and the sacrificial ritual would bring the world back into order and the idea was that each of these three realms were interconnected by certain correspondences and that through the sacrifice one actually gained power through recognizing the correspondences so that civilization created these temporary altered states that they had public rituals that private rituals and everything was built around restoring order and you know as nomadic peoples they they moved when things settled and you have the development of what later becomes what we call Hinduism which is which never really loses its sort of Vedic roots on some level also new things form one of them was this kind of giant temple structures and the instructors also reflect kind of a kind of universe of sorts a universe where all these three realms the terrestrial the atmospheric and the vault of the sky are populated with beings of all sorts and also the fourth the underworld and even with divinities you know within below here we have the so called the sort of sky divinity right the Davos these are the divinities of the sky and side by side you had divinities of the earth and under the earth so-called cathodic divinity asuras so these are all kinds of beings which populate these worlds so this is a temple from there's so many of these temples in central and southern India northern India this is a quite famous one called kau tahu in central india multiplication I just want to show you some of the kind of hybrid beasts that you might see on the relief on the sides of these well before I do that I'm going to speak of a very famous and in this I put here in the presentation just by way of kind of introducing the fact that when we think of beasts in this tradition I don't want to you know because this is a you know one of the few traditions that I bet we can speak of that haven't really completely been supplanted by other traditions from the ancient world these are still living traditions and Ganesha of course as many of you might know is who's the big witches in many parts of the world now is a half elephant and half human you can see the economically and any vehicle this is actually from the ten museum both of these pieces are here this the the mouse there there is this vehicle although all these divinities have vehicles so the elephant in the mouse the human and this is a fascinating story behind Ganesha and off anybody everybody the nose story but I'll tell anyway by way of kind of drawing the transition of some of the values of this kind of Vedic world that get transported in the later period in the history of Indian religiosity so Ganesha is actually initially born party no genetically from his mother's skin and or by various other narratives as a human as a human boy without his father's knowledge and his father who it becomes his father not biological father but his father because the child is born from his wife doesn't and Panero recognizes who this boy is so the father is the great god Shiva at the later period and we'll look at she will see Shiva again soon and the mother is the Great Goddess the daughter of the mountain Parvati and while she is bathing Ganesha this human boy is standing guard to her bath house Parvati and the sooner Shiva comes he wants entry into his home and Ganesha refuses not knowing that this is his father and what ensues of course is this great edible battle if you will between the father and the son don't know each other and Shiva finally you know the powerful being this Ganesha kills the boy and chops his head off and bottom of the goddess comes out it's not happy just chop my little boys head off fix this so Shiva immediately goes off and they find the first animal that he sees which is an elephant chopped his head off and installed it on Ganesh's and restoring him back to life so what does this being represent mean in compensation one of the great sort of motifs or the themes of the Vedic value system is that when you are deprived of a particular asset you are compensated by the universe with something else so in compensation for his this sort of ghastly result Shiva grants Ganesha a sort of rulership over his various minions and should I as a God who is low narrative which we can't cover in this presentation here but Shiva is withdrawn from the world and he lives among the mountains and cremation grounds and he is constantly the great yogi constantly meditating and preserving the world through with meditation and he had these variant beast known as goddess ganas are this kind of lords of troops of various sorts of goblins and ghouls and he places Ganesha as its as its as these as visa goblins ghouls leader that's his name Ganesha Ganesha or Ganapathy the Lord of these ganas so that's his compensation now why the elephant head and why the mouse this is a question which I I went around to a lot of people in India after them I couldn't really find with explanations in the text the most compelling answer that I got was that you know one of the values of that we see constantly being played out in Vedic texts is one of how to through the ritual or how or through various other mechanisms right the ritual itself is the great mechanism of economic exchange between humans and gods and although all the malevolent forces that exist in the universe had a path to find them but also how to reap the benevolent forces from the universe so that ritual is usually just as exchange mechanism that kind of works but it gets carried over into some of these beings these beasts if you will that same ethos so here we we think of the elephant now the elephant in India is of course has a very kind of ambivalent it's a kind of a hybrid if you will uh significance on the one hand they're greatly honored that the elephant is something which is a very patient and calm and Noble regal - war elephant they're beasts of burden a source but they're also can be very destructive they can destroy uproot whole villages similarly the mouse which is the vehicle is often the have often associated not only with the destruction of wealth because they can get into the granary and eat everything up but their very presence near granary suggests prosperity well-being you see so you can see that even in this particular image of Ganesha you have the kind of the harmonization of various forces where benevolent forces and malevolent forces are kind of coexisting but largely as a kind of principle of harmonizing malevolent forces so this is a very interesting kind of whom this is one amongst many narratives the one thing that you learn when you study these to know these texts in these worlds that there are hundreds of explanations they over determine that the culture has a tendency to over determine with narratives things which are mysterious that produce anxieties that are difficult to process and assimilate very easily and as texts proliferate to such a great extent we have so much to work with and mostess materials are in sanskrit we can discuss that some other at some later point so now take me now to these various hybrid beings in this in these temple complexes so one of these beings is fortunately the formatting didn't quite come out well but this is the so-called viana or the bud these are such there's hundreds of these and they're on all of these medieval Indian temples these Hindu temples so you see they have all kinds of hybrid forms so they have forms of parrots head in a lion's body or here's some from this book that I got so there's the lion head donor blood all the various kinds of sort of sculptural forms you have the cat my vendors that your five the the worst you have the dog on the left and [Music] the bear here on the right so many different beings here the elephant Gaja voila you have scorpions and LA Rams so it goes on and on horses so these various beings are serpent our iniquities and many of them you know most of these we have to understand they're not purely of Indic origin these represented in many ways a kind of assimilation of things that you may have already heard of from the West right so if you think of Central Asian and West Asian the Centaurs the Chimera sphinxes ibex all these various beings they are also and and some of them are very in big especially some of the aquatic creatures and some of the other things so there's people have been studying these sculptures and they're kind of you know people who are experts in the of the Hindu temple new architectural styles recognize the kind of hybridity even of their beasts across the ancient world and all these being some of these you probably you know recognize and I you know these are these are very specifically in the skin Nettie's which are like these kind of human headed but various hybrid forms and different bodies so some of them even the scholars can't figure out is the indeterminable galas where you don't even know what kind of Beast is being presented and shown a parrot headed vulture so and these are couple pieces from temple doors in Kerala which are also a pen Museum here and I'm not really sure what function they serve people studied these you know gargoyles things of that sort but you can see that this kind of hybrid hybrid being is a sort of in so many contexts will will emerge and the Hindu temple you can see them whenever you go visit one even one dinner in the United States now run in Robbinsville there in Pittsburgh where you'll see these beings kind of emanating from the the walls these are some pieces from Cambodia and Java and Kathmandu this one on the right here is from Kathmandu the first one on the right hand side and these are similar to them to the viola but these are more aquatic beings known as Makana but you often get translated in modern languages at the crocodile and things of that sort but they're actually sea beasts of various sorts the Aquatic team we also have this I couldn't find any kind of visual of this but sort of the sort of the rainbow fish because again the different scales of a fish kind of representative of these different elements the earth water Wind and Fire sort of along with various colors so this is these these also populate the mythology all kinds of beasts which have certain kind of physics and philosophical physical and philosophical and import additionally and I'm getting these out of the way to get to the real stories that I put in the title but I really want to talk to you about but I want to give you a range of the kinds of things Indian astronomy and astrology also have incorporate various kinds of beasts that we see elsewhere this is a very interesting story of Rahu and Ketu these are the sort of sending lunar node and the descending lunar nodes which are often thought to be responsible for eclipses and the story of a bead being which are both hybrid one has the head is just a head nobody and one of them is a body usually of a serpent and no hand and the narrative and of course the one with the no head is the defending ruler no the southern node of the you know in movement and the offending or the northern mode is the node is the just a handed and the story and these are also very important that I will get to in an astrology in terms of different effects that you know that these planetary effects on human human life and they're used to connected to determine this and the story behind this is that during this kind of primeval churning of the ocean this cosmic churning of the ocean where the divine and demonic beings were kind of churning the ocean serpent in this mountain turned upside down to bring forth all these things from the ocean one of the things that came up which was very significant was ambrosia nectar and of course the gods immediately in her it wanted to keep that for themselves so as to gain this is their explanation how they gained immortality he sees the sky beings and one of the demons was aimed at all and he quickly what he did was when the great gods for Jonathan in different context was distributing the nectar to all of the different being who all different gods visit on who the demon god of line kept his mouth open you know to get the get to share as soon as it got to his throat was realized that uh he had snuck him and so immediately his head was chopped off and Bishnu chopped his head off so his head became immortal but he had no body Lucy so in revenge she periodically comes to block out the vision of his right eye which is the Sun his left eye as the moon and this is the explanation for the Eclipse you see and get through similarly you can see that he's usually dragged by eight horses and this is what a visitation of it just ahead and gave the word the comet and this is the kind of a comet which kind of tails just just the Serpent's body or here a fish's body and no head so this is another demon that was also involved with this I guess said well this is the other half of him right this is the other half that didn't make it so we'll come back in the story of my Tivo which is a fearful form of Shiva I also wanted to bring out that all of these sort of divine imaginary in among you know Hindus but also by extension you know these are beings which populate even on a new kind of consciousnesses in India the divine beings are often also hybrid and this is where I guess the kind of psychic interpretations or approaches can really kind of become very insightful you have both beautiful and extravagantly benevolent forces sort of commingling and living within the same kind of form and you have in the narratives you have emanations sort of second and third-order emanations from certain divinities which are either they're comparable sort of bloody form or the frightful four more they're extravagantly benevolent form so the height of our vida but there are two of these kinds of frightening fearful forms of of the great divinity Shiva the great sort of static inwardly looking sort of meditation minded yogi divinity who works and there's many narratives of by Nava which again you see the kind of a right on the verge of being be deal I just kind of I think that kind of edge the edge around which we kind of draw the line between human and beast gets played out very interestingly not only when it comes to thinking about the divine but also as we'll see when we think about the human to how close they get to being beasts and there's a long long-standing kind of conversation about this in an English version about transformations how does one become liberated from their bestiality how does one become enslaved by their beast eale nature so these are all the different kinds of narratives they're kind of get played out and you can see the visual and the economic in the narrative so now I'm going to tell some stories before we kind of add have draw it all together and these are very famous narratives the first one I want to talk to you about is a the beast is often an instigator for some kind of divine action divine benevolence so the origin of the Great Goddess you know if for those of you not familiar when we think about you know Hinduism and it's actual ritual practice and it's contemporary lived world's the three major divinities and/or the Divine imaginaries around which human beings gravitate our other two forms of male divinities one is Shiva who as I've already explained presents this kind of inward almost not active male force and then you have fishing who is the kind of social you know God visualizes King not God as aesthetic as a Shiva's case and both of them have their own very interesting manifestations in in the world the female goddess of the female is the third of the great sort of Lib tradition the creative divinity Brahma doesn't really have a place only one temple of India left to him in a place called bushka and make sense you know once he's created the world there's really no more use for him he doesn't really take part much in the world anymore see but these other three are heavily involved in the in the liberation and in the well-being of human beings so the story of the goddess was that there was this terrible demon the buffalo demon and we see it right on the bottom here and demons periodically emerged these beasts this is the sort of and and and and many of these demons are actually humans who have attained great power and then manifest as beasts so this is one of the kind of ways in which you have this kind of hybrid human animal beast which comes out and this buffalo demon was so powerful that none of the male divinities could defeat him so the logic was was that they infused all of their power into the female and so the goddess that emerged was actually the amalgamation of all the powers of the universe the book male and female and so she now engages and the various forms of her Murugan BA engages with the destruction of this knuckle of demon and as buffalo demon is very interestingly also the kind of attention because he of course doesn't take her seriously right and in fact he comes on to her right he sort of attempts to sort of you know sexually Dominator and patronize her and this is a big battle and she defeats this demon and stabbed the reestablishment of us but you can see that even when all the iconography of this particular goddess the great goddess Buddha you you never really see you always see a planted face she's always visualized is still beautiful even though fierce she has all the weapons all our arms represent all the different weapons of the gods that she can on male gods that she carries in addition to her own and this is sort of the standard first order emanation of female power and strength and to being the demon the story of that I had in the title right the blood speed demon this story is this beast which again instigates another emanation of divinity in this case the Beast is particularly nasty every time that Booga the goddess who defeated the Buffalo demon killed this particular beast whose name is the rock Tomita which means blood feed every time he kills him she kills him his droplets of Bloods gone new product of Aegis and this really makes her angry because she's she's getting frustrated she can't kill it all these and her forehead turns black with rage and from this forehead emerges a a ghastly violent form of her and this is the goddess Kali's to create black goddess and this is of course the the great nightmarish figure for the normative kind of sort of social world of the kind of bloody mother and she's has garland of skulls and she had a jagged saucer weapon and you know very very ghastly and she's sort of painted as a hag as you'll see in these pictures right this is from the Peter from the pen Museum right here of cotton and what she does is she had a big rolling tongue and that tongue is what then swallows up all of these droplets of blood so her protective her protection comes from her radically in absolute Kulish powers and periodically these these the beasts which emerge from the imagination are often linked again with this kind of sort of you know the universe's power gone wrong so now that creates disturbances in the universe which then have to be remedied by new forms of if you will divine beasts that have to be formed to counteract them and restore that kind of order which we've seen in the early the Vedic forms and this is the kind of that a popular one is a horrible image which was horrific which is a kind of a more contemporary poster art kind of thing and I recently learned I thought it was my idea but it apparently wasn't that this would be a great video game to have this blood demon was a sieve demon supposedly but if you think it's already done and here that demon is made female this is this is active Aegis um this some game or some series which I found on the internet very interesting so a more fierce or a more benevolent form of this kind of same idea of this beast emerging as a counter force the counter force against some some some some demonic entry into the world is this man lion very important avatar hahaha Vishnu right Vishnu is the one divinity that actually manifests in different forms on the earth throughout the periodic dissolution and creation of the world ages so every in every age of the new demon and every age Vishnu has to come down to to deal with that demonic energy demonic force this one is a particularly interesting one this is a story with this particular demon whose name translates something like goldeneye or something even yoga Shifu who meditates and acquires through his ascetic our satanic powers give you power in the universe whether you're a good person or a bad person this is not this this world things of things so this demonic is a this particular King acquires these great powers and he's given a wish as compensation for his asceticism his wish is that I wish not to be killed by the God a human an animal Gandhara whose divine musicians the citta is divine scholar I go to the whole inventory of beings so I don't want to be killed by any of them because you can't ask for immortality so wonder you can't ask for they can't give you that so he's trying like a good lawyer just to go through all the stipulations to get everything right so now Vishnu has to come as something else and this is a great story where the son of this demon is kind of a bad kid because he worships Vishnu he worships his father's enemy and everything tried to kill him every time and it keeps getting saved by Bishop and finally he's on the the other condition that he asked for was I don't want to be killed at during the day or during the night I don't want to be killed inside or out of my house that you kiki you've had to cover all the best and so he's you know kind of killed his kid you can't kill him and he volleying says to them their stairs outside he's like so where's your Vishnu I can't see him to be in this little pillar and you kick this pillar and out emerges this man lion not often and this is very interesting even in the Sanskrit language you see the hybridity and the new sort of a new lamination so this is a special kind of EXO centric compound known as the Bali where you have man nutta sim a lion but it's not a lion with a man is not not it is not met if man lion in its form but it actually refers to something outside of the members of the compound so it's the one that is a Vishnu who is takes the form of a man lion so you see that even this kind of hybridity often speaks to something new a new creation which is neither which is more than the sum of its elements and sometimes you see you long names right so there's a very kind of the you can proliferate and create all kinds of interesting beings through the language itself and I was I was visualized so this another thing about pops out of this pillar and he tears open this demons innards his claws and how are you doing well he's neither human nor God so that so he covered that bed he kills him on the porch of the portico right but right in that space that is not inside or outside of the house he does it at dusk at that very moment when it is not day nor night so all the conditions are met and and these are two images which are not a theme how which are at the I believe these are also at our Museum but they might be able to laughing using the word but um okay so associated with this story another thing another thing that the beast that the production of beasts emanates from is a you know a kind of a sectarian rivalry you know whatever you have divinities and divine imaginaries which are complex and which kind of speak to people you also have rivalries and that gets very much represented in the literature in the text so you'll have you know devotees who are full fight who's more powerful Vishnu or Shiva or the goddess sometimes you'll it'll be kind of compounded harmonious where all of the divinities all the ways of imagining divinity gets harmonized then you see that and sometimes there are kind of sectarian rivalries so with this mettlesome hunt this man lion emanation each of these avatars have to also find an end so Vishnu traditionally has ten avatars ready come to the fish a tortoise a boar a man lion a little person domina has a violent human who murders who was given over to anger and then the two great ones around on Krishna we may have heard of the great sort of human emblems of different they have they all have their own different qualities and then even the Buddha and he's been assimilated into Buddhism has been assimilated in the Hindu in in do thought and finally the tenth which was which is yet to come meet an amillennialist Vishnu of the next age will come to defeat the the next brand of demon emerges in the universe but you see that that each of these avatars canonic coexist except for one which is the immortal avatar of that angry human Parasurama but many of them they did they disappear after an age is over and this story is very interesting because you have a kind of conglomeration of the end how are the men of Chima avatar that a to be completed well what happens is you see the the sectarians of this kind of comes together so Shiva comes as this particular beast if you will which is this called the shuttle box which is which has gone from the head of a bird the body of a lion sometimes eight legs its represented very differently in different contexts and he now battles the two-headed bird which is another second or emanation of metasoma and this committed bird and the shut about a battle by there's a shut up of the lion body and the head of a bird and the deer has wing and that two-headed bird is called Gunda balloon de and it's still very important in in the southern state of karnataka this is their state emblem this battle between shutterbug and gun de belem de now under bedroom de is vishnu and shut up by a shiva and they battle and they're different narratives about how they basically destroy each other and that kind of ends that particular avatar right so there's always it a narrative that are over determined how beasts fight beats in order to kind of you know how the flow continued have a world before so this isn't this is a representation of the that gun debate will go as well here's another individual during shadowbot okay so the final bit i'll be speaking about our sort of the you know this middle part that i've talked about has come from these so-called texts noted the piranha this is the ancient lore of the hindus which basically in tell stories of vishnu shiva the goddess pilgrimage networks the jihadist sacred geography is sort of the great lower that in some ways was probably composed and lived side by side with the development of the ancient Vedic tradition sacrificial traditions that I started with but represent a distinct transition moment then there is another set of texts which are very important as and produced some beautifully important beast representations and that is and those are the great Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and Ramayana both of more extremely long Mahabharata in fact has the claim of being the oldest or the longest poem in the world it comes in at two hundred thousand lines of Sanskrit verse give you an idea is the basically the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together times eight how big it is to see the sub as encyclopedic and it basically tells the story of the world's first dysfunctional family this sort of two sets of cousins that kill each other in the whole everybody dies at the end but that's one of that's a great epic but I also speak to that Ithaca that epic is full of complex humans also a lot of beats in fact the origins the first book of that epic other making books actually has a narrative of the Origin of Species and the origin of species in actually hybrid animals and humans come from similar lineages serpents and humans are born from similar kind of human and serpent ancestors very interesting narratives but these are all complex for the truth character that I will focus on a come from the second epic Ramayana but a Mayas were the great that may be the most important text from the point of view of being an acculturating text at a text that's known of all of ancient Asia the stories extend all the way from Central Asia all the way to East Asia including South and Southeast Asia and the Ramayana of course focuses on the great Bishop of avatar of Vishnu noted errata whereas the model that has Krishna so this was a bug of Akita everything comes in that a lot of the text which many of you might know but the Ramayana has two very important figures and that a mile in some ways and the kind of a fairy tale motif you have a human realm and then you have a kind of beast realm the monkeys and then you have this kind of demonic realm and the demonic realm is full of these human beings almost human and beast eale but there are congenitally evil or something about them they don't have that even though they're complex but in many ways they're understood in the kind of structure of this narrative that they are evil humans are representing and of normative way of being in the world and the beat and the monkey Kingdom interestingly is a kind of in-between space so this is the way the epic explore social political moral being in terms of many narrow and many animal tails the famous fables Panchatantra and open Asia ASAP grim often used animal characters to represent human human society but Carlotta the great monkey divinity was also of course very important he's a great friend and devotee of Rama you know Vishnu on earth and many devotional cultures are built Renan might be the most popular divinity in all of India there's more temples and more sculptures of animals and even almost anybody else so it's very important I can't go into them we're running out of time I see that's why the kind of reference shows you this is the last thing I wonder or among the laughter I want to show you and this is the Great and headed demon karana with the enemy of Rama and this is very interesting because this you get that sense of the human verging on to the be steal from Allah mana is initially the son of a of a human seer sage now you learn it and he performs ascetic practices and you have understood to have ten heads the one of his name is the ten headed one the Shah Donna this is from our pen Museum also and he his lap gap to gain immortality again or to do what that man lion the man Lions enemy had done he starts severing each one of his heads and offering and Shiva finally offers him what do you want and he mentioned all that all the creatures he doesn't want to be killed by he doesn't mention humans as human they're like tasty snacks for him and he doesn't care about the humans and of course this is the the impetus of the rama coming to kill him but you see that being his ten heads see this is a kind of a sci-fi contemporary representation of this problem this is every year they have a nominee that's where they enact the story of Rama it is I want to convey the living tradition where the kind of demonic being is where is represented age after age after age in different forms and in fact every year when they when they kind of burn the effigy of this demonic being they kind of often in different contexts they might place the who they might think of as a real demon like a demon of that age in the particular context and so look at this on the left so some years back right Osama bin Laden was presented as a and somehow a demonic being I mean this is not a daily something which is that much thought has put into it but they basically take topical things happening in the world and sort of the beast eale demonism is inserted into whatever is happening in the world this is a child's rendering which I found also very interesting so in ending I just also wanted to kind of re can sort of you know bring back the idea that many of these beasts share of course very close connections with beasts would be find in other parts and maybe already heard if you've been attending early lectures you know different I mentioned already the violas those those temples beings which are definitely have links with West Asia earlier Iranian Persian and even further west perhaps and also you have things like the mermaid this is a particular story from the Cambodian traditions of Hanuman the monkey divinity and the mermaid is a kind of a seductive relationship and this is a particular so this is somebody agency and the file they all end with is since I put it in the title is the famous comedy the great wish-fulfilling cow who was also this is with images from the Batu Caves in Malaysia and this is a being where also when the ocean was churned and the nectar came out which led to the comet and the ascending and descending lunar nodes also from that ocean everything came right so the great horse and the elephant Lakshmi was the became the wife of Vishnu came the Sun the moon which became Vishnu induction which making visualize and even the toxic poison of the sort of halala with shiva drank it his compassion and arrested in his throat this is why definitely images of Shiva but also what came was this wish-fulfilling cow which everybody wanted and had been so many wars fought over this wish-fulfilling cow in the mythology read these narratives there everybody wants to abduct this cow whoever has it and it can produce anything and you can see again the sort of benevolent beasts these are these are there's a kind of range is incredible we often think of beasts as monsters and that sort of thing and I kind of do an exercise with my students and I try to think about the beast and what we think about what the Beast we think about violence or Strasse tea how ready to see different forms that form on a beast but also you know there's because we can add some a certain kind of benevolence that's also possible as we've seen in these kinds of hybrid beings and various forms of humanity and bestiality kind of converging and we learn a lot about through the beast about you know how does one become free from their bestiality and this is something which also you see represented in these narratives is often these demons in the Ramayana for example or even certain beasts who have a certain form to acquire through various you know in various way when they are killed they actually are liberated or their bestiality if they're killed by by God or by what some form of God and they enter into and they kind of or their form is restored so there's a lot of interesting narratives about not only how you become a beast but how you get liberated from being a beast and this is very interesting of the narrative and the visualization and though I can obviously kind of expand and explore this particular kind of you know psychic aspect of what does it mean to be a beast that's something which I which I think that is very fascinating about a lot of these things and you know what it's or else's peel the layers below the surface of just a kind of monstrous visual you know or that I mean each one of the men has a narrative and they all have a certain kind of their trigger points to you know periodically has assigned this symbols of delving into deeper kind of psychic social ethical moral realities which cultures are attempting to struggle with and deal with so I think I've gone 50 minutes and so I'll end here and I would like to I can stay as long as anybody as long as they keep the lights open and take questions [Applause] so um yes freak talk I uh many different questions I could ask just naked blossom to make it just to feed it more you know but just for fun now you talked about the beast in the human being and the many many lessons in the text and in the art that represent ways liberate yourself from the beast and then also warn against becoming one and coming a peace but God just for fun I know from seeing in certain tempest there seems to be a third way where and I'm not talking about the left-hand path but let me just drop that because it relates to what I'm going to say sure there's ways of getting into the beast and giving Beauty to the Beast because you see these gorgeous pictures of men and women ah in arousal in the acts of lovemaking and it's a something that is completely alien to me as a know where I was for sure well that's a very interesting point you make and there's two things actually you know one thing you know one of the narratives and the Mahabharata which I didn't mention here with that also some of these sages you know one of the things about being a beast is that or it's often associated with a kind of demonic aspect or a monstrous aspect of Beast hood is that it can shape-shift the allow these demon can transform themselves into you know beautiful things you know all kinds of visually no surface things with but it doesn't eliminate their essential you know bestiality ABI and also sages fears powerful beings who require great spiritual powers can also transform themselves and you have various narratives of stages turning into deer and making love you know in kind of the forest this kind of and so that's one point that's the idea of that is a very good point you make about about the kind of the fluid movement between the two but the other point you make is they're also very interesting that there are of course ritual and religious cultures within these larger traditions that are attempt to create a third path as you say you know now the left-handed tab you can speak of these kinds of traditions which are kind of attempting to through through superficially going exploring counter normative behaviors but in in search of a kind of deeper reality and significant we've been outside of that the iconography of the visualization and the and the kind of broader logic of that is also that just as you know you can harmonize the level and benevolent forces in a singular beast like with Ganesha that that in fact that that's really a third kind of path is to not think of beasts as either malevolent or benevolent but as kind of harmonizations of the bulb the - yeah I think we are would you show various pictures of people gods or figures on the edge of between human and beasts I think what aesthetically nothing means anything to me without tension and so these pictures are beautiful because they carry that tension so it's one thing to have harmony and another thing to have harmony was a really dramatic intention with a little bit of risk yes you know it keep insides on Harmon yes yeah we're just beautiful that's the staff of shock and all a little bit you know in that way yes my idea of the comedy know is that it's a kind of equal opportunity benevolent magnificent to creature is that correct yes hilarious yes because every no equal opportunity and in fact villains confiscated and you know normative normatively virtuous people get it back stages kings everybody wants it so it's it's true it's a it's sort of the thing in the universe which is just benevolent and is giving but from a sectarian point of view also as well right in what way well I thought I spotted shiva linga underneath the utter of the common payment oh well I think that image I gave you perhaps was not the comedy no achiever is associated with the great bull maybe I didn't give and sometimes they also conflate the two so you're right Shiva is associated with his vehicle of the bowl fish news is the is a great vulture Garuda but yes so there is a linkage between sort of the bovine and Shiva that's true comedy who as the wish-fulfilling cow which appears vigorously in the in the literature however often you know we don't see it as actually belong it's a product of the ocean out of which the creation came and therefore is the is is not really the provenance of Vishnu or Shiva but you're right that's a bull and the often is often associated with Shiva so is that a Shiva Linga that is a Shiva Linga okay that is and this is that very interesting that this is a this is when the cave it's okay from the buccal caves and I haven't been there myself but I found that image from there yes when the illustration of Durga slaying the Buffalo that you showed us yes there is a little boy Ruthie this one right yeah you know I don't know I don't know all of these narratives have you know as it been they a creek they grow you have a very basic narrative but in different tradition like that none of Seema when I showed you with the two headed bird and eight-legged sort of bird lion those are narratives which are which kind of emerge and all are often very local they're not and so I'm not clear what function this may be a yeah I can't and there's also a dog you see on the right here that sort of biting so I'm not I'm not clear I'm not clear who these movies huh Ally is right um that's a good question I also find out do you have a theory so the animal yeah well this goddess has no offspring the double-headed bird yes No and reminded me so much of the Hapsburg evil with the two-headed Eagle I leave it there Wow so okay after afterwards oh yeah you can go up there if you like or you can speak in all I can repeat your question so along the same lines on the previous slide with the sea dragon ah there's very cool flying elephant what what can you tell us about flying elephants here ah Indra in the churning of the ocean one of the products is Arabica this is the divine elephant and in detection also the divine horse comes up who chased us we take him to everybody take all the good stuff only the poisons left is led to Shiva because nobody wants it so he swallows it out of his compassion and the erectus and the universe lived in his belly so he keeps it here because of his yogic powers to arrest the movement of fluids and that's but the hope the flying elephant is belongs to Indra and in fact in the speaking of flying elephants is even in sentient beings or beastial in this tradition so for example you have the mountains the mountains used to have wings the Mount is used to fly and Indra in an act of compassion in the way that cut the wings off and that's why there they stated they're fixed but because they were you know they were crashing into everything so its interest is this kind of flying being are but the elephant yeah this is a flying elephant that's true and I forgot that reply thank you yeah yes please there was a creator that drama or prajapathi but bhrama of course in the although sorry the question was the other three divinity that I mentioned I mentioned Vishnu Shiva and I mentioned the goddess Durga Amba but you know oftentimes in this kind of creation of some kind of Trinity of some sort Brahma the Great created divinity is mentioned and while that's true in the war the created divinity does have a place lot of narratives about drama but in the kind of devotional cultures that develop out of this drama and you know losses there's no particular connection because he's not involved with great so the watchmaker divinity was that's the world in motion but then have no further role in it change often the question is the figure of the of the three headed lion ah this is very interesting about this is something which I can't speak to with as much expertise as one of my colleagues here at Penn professor Michel Meister who wrote about the who's in who's you know one of the great experts on the Hindu temple and the architecture is an architectural historian but the the three-headed lion and this kind of pillar you often see this on the pillars of Ashoka and there was one a great king and this probably has linkages with ancient Persia Persepolis it's a reliant motif this is something which many people are connected up with the kind of shared the shared visual world of the ancient we ancient of ancient people but certainly that a three-headed lion seems to be that kind of connection yes because the Ashokan pillars see these are the most are the oldest forms of writing we have in that extent are these series of these rock faces pillars inscriptions all over the country and they were tributed to king ashoka there in the ma who basically sort of India's first ancient empire and he also was somehow consolidating different sectarian communities regional communities so there's a certain kind of special place for him and his kind of so that's why you often see that integrated into the iconography of modern India yes I feel as though my brain just doesn't work this way and I'm just wondering I mean I guess I have a very Western world brain but I don't have this imagination and I'm wondering the ancient world just seems to had a closer association either with their dream world or with alternative states that I'm just too far away from I mean I'm fascinated by it but it just feels to me I mean I love this series because it's introducing me to mind-blowing stuff like I feel like I've been on high listening to all of these imaginary things but I don't have that and I'm just wondering what that is I mean I wonder if the brains were different you know years ago I was in a course with Professor Carr over at Columbia on Native American literature's and you know we were discussing this you know the kind of rich imagination of ancient peoples in terms of representing their psychic and you know the reality their anxieties their want social world of the physical world of history through this kind of mythic imagination if you will and you know one of the things that he responded to and this questions this problem was that we have like you know that we don't think mythically anymore and that it's a very interesting thing you know and in some ways you know I think complex and subtle thoughts sometimes require you to tap into imagine you know sort of the sort of a deeper layer of imagination to certain things we can't really express through our kind of given language we need to create new beings to express whatever is going on and that's a very interesting point you make I mean and I mean I'm sure everybody here has something to offer on that if they've thought about that question because there is something remarkable about this any stories even what I tell them every time I tell them in their depth and I get more details of course when I have more time and we'd have a conversation they reveal so much you know you know the symbolism and the sign and the potential increases and you can it leave the far more subtle fault far more subtle understandings of the world a kind of therapy also to figure out what's what sort of traumatically happening I mean people do this with dreams as well I guess they interpret dreams which are which have their own kind of structure you know and but yeah these narratives what's remarkable about this particular tradition is that these are still alive I mean you know on some level meaning that they still are known they're represented they're kind of in common language they're kind of bandied about you know people or they kind of think through them still a little bit of course with every passing generation it's becoming more and more diminished and even in many areas but you know you still have these are still kind of trigger points and ways of entering deeper into some problem or conversation which is an interesting point okay well I can repeat whatever is ready hope you can hear you okay oh yeah crap I mean you know many of these things are both I mean of course we know literacy and this is a new kind of trend in thinking about what literacy might mean in the ancient world or in the medieval world in different cultures is what they call Archer all literature I mean the oral is add much literate or you know what we think or we associate literacy so there is something about storytelling and I agree with you that that maybe there's something about the oil and the oil you know like listening and hearing which kind of allows for stories to not only emerge but also to change with every telling you have new versions sort of like a folklore of sorts you know and that this is all linked in that world and maybe the maybe when it gets textual eyes it becomes more kind of standard and actually the the richness maybe diminishes that's the way I want to think about that in terms of the more the less and less we share stories that they become maybe less interesting at the dark note I had done but well you

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 6,811

Rating: 4.7052631 out of 5

Keywords: Demons, India, Indian, Deven Patel, South Asia, mythology, beasts, hybrid

Id: G6AGY8gw_FI

Length: 75min 27sec (4527 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017