Spring 2018 Indian Epics

Squirrel Helping in Bridge Building Between India and Sri Lanka Image Source:  Hindu Gallery Everyone likes a good conspiracy theory. I always get a nice chuckle out of videos and posts regarding a flat earth, faked moon landings, or especially chemical trails. These ideas, while laughable, are undeniably in keeping with the tradition of our species to give stories and life to that which cannot be immediately explained or understood. Our relatively recent advances in science and technology are but the tiniest layer atop millennia spent ascribing divinity, legend, and myth to all we see. The Storyteller, Josephine Wall Image Source: Pinterest Mythology showcases the absolute creativity of the human race. We imagine unique explanations for everything around us. Mountains were the bones of the giant Ymir's body. The sun was pulled by a chariot across the sky. The stars were thrown into the sky as quartz chips by an ancient trickster coyote. So many physical, tangi...

Vishnu rests on the serpent Ananta while Brahma appears within a lotus flower emitting from Vishnu's navel Image Source: Wikimedia Commons I like starting things at the beginning. Anything with more than one episode or book I refuse to begin unless I can start where the story does. The wild array of characters, gods, goddesses, demons, people and places found in Hindu mythology was bewildering, and so I chose to try starting at the beginning. That did not work as well as I had hoped, but I learned quite a bit more than I intended. Creation and Recreation I quickly discovered that the Hindu origins of our world were every bit as complex and detailed as the rest of Hindu mythology. Rather, the world as we know it belongs to a cyclic existence and has been created and destroyed many times over, each cycle referred to as a Kalpa, or aeon, and lasting 4.32 billion years in length. In each Kalpa there is a new creation, which is why there are so many creation stories present ...