Shivishna

Over the summer I looked more deeply into Hinduism.  In particular, I wanted to try to understand the god Shiva better.  His origins are obscure.  The fierce, deadly storm-god Rudra from the early, Indo-Aryan Rig-Veda had fed into Shiva, and Pashupati, Lord of the Animals, who may have come from the Pre-Aryan Indus Valley civilization-- all we have to suggest this is a small seal with the image of a god presumably, very much like that of 'Cernunnos' on the Gundestrup cauldron, but the Lord of the Animals is common in world mythology.  It's possible that non-aryan tribal gods also fed into Shiva, who eventually became extremely multifarious, contradictory, and vast, with a very prominent cult.  He is part of the Hindu 'trinity', the Trimurti, as the god of destruction and reproduction (death and sex), along with Vishnu the preserver and Brahma the creator, and became one of the three major 'Gods' of devotional Hinduism, along with Vishnu and the Goddess.  I had investigated Shiva before, but principally as Pashupati and Rudra, but I now wanted to get my head around the dark,creepy side of Shiva, because I thought I might find a way thus to reconcile myself somewhat to the horror of biological existence in which killing and devouring of animals by other animals is evolutionarily inevitable.  I think that most people find 'Nature' repellent, a threat, for this reason, and generally experience 'Mother Nature' as the archetype of the Evil Mother-- indifferent, and cruelly destructive, which hampers the struggle to rescue the Biosphere from human destruction.

But Shiva actually means something like 'Kindly One', or 'Giver of  Blessings', which maybe is what you would call a fearsome god you wanted to stay on the good side of, like with the 'Fair Folk', the rather dangerous Faeries.  Rudra might mean 'Roarer', 'Howler'-- appropriate for a wild, deadly storm god.  The two gods were combined as Rudra-Shiva, which suggests a god both terrible and kindly.  Eventually, 'Rudra' and 'Shiva' were used interchangeably.  But let's just use Shiva here.

Shiva has a vast mythology and cultus accreted over millennia.  He's a god of opposites.  For Shaivites, his devotees, he's 'God'-- God of Everything-- and so must contain everything, all contraries, at once.  So he has various aspects, like many heads, or in epithets like Bhairava or Mahadeva or Rudra-Shiva.  Despite this complexity, though, his devotees must manage to carry around some kind of complex conception of who he is, that hangs together vaguely.  By contrast, Vishnu is mainly worshipped as one of his successive avatars, Rama and Krishna being by far the foremost, and these entities are more like human persons than the awesomely vast Shiva, and easier for many to worship as a personal savior.  The Goddess is conceived as particular entities such as Devi, Shakti, Kali, Durga, some of whom are more person-like and others more vast-- in Hinduism, you have the person-ish gods of mythology and epic coupled with their abstract, philosophical version, or as forms of a God (with a hyphenated name).

Vishnu seems to mean 'Pervader'.  His origins are obscure.  He's almost opposite to Shiva in most ways, which made me think of the Twayne, Wildiar and Bilwit, of the Shaggy Mythos, though the fit is better for Wildiar and Shiva than for Bilwit and Vishnu.  Vishnu, conceived apart from his avatars, is seen as a very grand ruler, upholding the good and the right, who fights terrible demons that threaten the world, who is surrounded by opulent finery and grandeur.  But he is, like Shiva, much more complex than the descriptions you find.

Because of the analogy I made between Shiva-and-Vishnu and Wildiar-and-Bilwit, I wondered why the former grouping hadn't been teamed or combined in a syncresis.  Their cults were in competition, each one asserting their own god as 'the God', but in India, unlike in Europe, it didn't quite come down to 'Your god is really the Devil! You must renounce him and swear fealty to the One True God!', with resulting savagery-- not quite, I think.  But Shiva can easily seem very like Satan to Westerners.  I eventually found that Shiva and Vishnu had been combined, as Hari-hara.  I had thought of Shivishna as a name for this syncresis.  But Hindus know him as Hari-hara (Vishnu-Shiva) or Shankara-narayana (Shiva-Vishnu), though this was really a philosophic concept rather than a personal god of devotion, I think.  Taken to be the Supreme God, it probably seemed a bit less like the unimaginable abstract deus otiosus of Brahman the Absolute, though neither of them had cults and temples, it seems, or mythology, and never really caught-on as a way to harmonize the conflict in the mythology and cultus between the two Gods, and their cults.  Then there's the Goddess-- she's left out here-- or is She?-- these Gods did have their consorts, often seen as the female aspect of their nature.  For all of Hindu philosophizing, there's still an inherent monism that permits a coexistence of entities in the tradition despite their apparent contradiction and a lack of a really tight conceptual structure to put them all in (nonrational is OK).

Well, similarly, the Twayne aren't One, they remain distinct persons (of a certain vagueness, granted), and aren't even gods, but folkish wights, I suppose.  I'll go more into their relation to Shiva and Vishnu later, as well as that of other Shaggy Mythos entities with those of Hindu and other pagan traditions.

p.s.-- I found Wolf-Dieter Storl's Shiva: the Wild God of Power and Ecstasy (pbk, 2004) to be a rich source on Shiva, Shaivism, and associated culture.