Strange God

The ancient Hindu god Shiva, or perhaps more properly Rudra-Shiva, is a very strange god indeed to those of us to the west of Bharata (India) where our traditional god is essentially a sky-father good-god.  Rudra-Shiva, as one of the chief gods of Bharata, is rivalled there only by Vishnu's avatars Rama and Krishna.  But unlike them, he is so vast and various a synthetic god that he boggles the mind.  In fact, he is not so much a polytheist god as he is the God for his worshippers in the various cults, schools, and religions surrounding him.  He is the god beyond all things and the god of all things, who combines all the opposites-- 'he reconciles the irreconcilables'.  He is fierce (Rudra) and benevolent (Shiva), a Lord Protector of the Animals and a hunter of animals (and men), creator and destroyer, healer and killer, Lord of the World and withdrawn forest-yogin, erotic master and ascetic, very much male and also androgynous, a mighty magician and a deep meditator.  He is worshipped as specific forms or aspects, and he also has a female consort to which the same applies.

The Rudra-Shiva traditions have agglomerated gradually from many influences over thousands of years, a mixture of Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and foreign.  And being Hindu, they seem a huge mosh of confusion, to a large extent.  But he is unique, and could hardly be more different a major world deity to the west-of-Khyber  'God' (as Ahura Mazda, Yahweh, the Christian God, or Allah).  Unlike them, however, his origins are lost in the mistiest prehistoric pagan primitivism, and he is perhaps then the oldest God still widely worshipped.

I am not a 'Shaivite', but I do find Rudra-Shiva fascinating and baffling (I can't get a sense of a single entity).  If I had grown up in a Shaivite family, I have no idea how I might envision him.  All I can say is that for me there's a strange mana about him that I don't get from other gods-- there's more 'there' there-- other gods don't come close.

Still, not being a 'believer' by nature, and being a long-time Deep Ecologist looking for religion to foster and fit ecological civilization, I have quested after forms of ecological numinosity that, if they work for me, perhaps might work for others of similar bent, and I would have to say that Rudra-Shiva has had little obvious influence on the evolution of the ecological Mythos, but at present, he seems to fit it, more-or-less, at quite a few points, though I've never read of him being linked to ecology or as a possible ecological god.  In a way, the Shaggy Mythos continues the syncretic evolution of Rudra-Shiva, albeit as a partial presence in an extra-Hindu synthetic biospheric 'religion'.  Very strange.