Siva

“ Siva holds in his back hands the axe and the trident. In his right fore-arm is the arrow Pāsupata, the left fore-arm resting freely on the waist. To the left of Siva stands the goddess Pārvati with two hands, holding a lotus flower in her right. In front of both, is Arjuna in the modest posture of receiving with both hands the divine gift offered him. A pigmy figure standing between Siva and Arjuna in the illustration may be one of the attendants of Siva. The Kāranāgama gives the same description but makes Siva wear both the arrow and the bow and hold the antelope instead of the trident. ”

“ If the worship of Siva, despite the purport of his chief symbol, seems on the whole less liable to produce these undesirable effects than that of the rival deity, it is doubtless due partly to the real nature of that emblem being little realized by the common people, and partly to the somewhat repellent character of the “great god,” more favourable to evoking feelings of awe and terror than a spirit of fervid devotion. ”

“ Of one like Siva, perfect, infinite!
'Tis ever thus, the Mighty and the Just
Are scorned by souls that grovel in the dust;
Their lofty goodness and their motives wise
Shine all in vain before such blinded eyes;
Say who is greater, he who strives for power,
Or he who succours in misfortune's hour?
Refuge of Worlds, how should Siva deign
To look on men enslaved to paltry gain?
The spring of wealth himself, he careth nought
For the vile treasures that mankind have sought ”

“ To restore the peace of the world, Siva, her husband, threw himself amongst the dead bodies at her feet. She continued her dancing, and trampled upon him. When she discovered her husband, she stood still, horror-struck and ashamed, and threw out her tongue to an uncommon length; by this means Siva stopped her frantic dancing, and saved the universe. “The Philistine cursed David by his gods.” A Hindū sometimes in a fit of anger, says to his enemy, “The goddess Kalī shall devour thee; may Dūrga destroy thee!” ”

“ As the wind is invisible even in its act of vacillations, and the heat is unseen even in its act of burning; so the intellect is imperceptible notwithstanding its acting, and is therefore called Siva—the calm and quiet. ”

“ Siva bids him ask any boon and it should be granted. The royal ascetic desires to have a son. Then says Siva: "For thy long penance we grant thy request. Choose then—a son who shall always be with thee till death, but shall be the greatest fool in the whole world, or four daughters who shall live with thee for a short time, then leave thee and return before thy death, but who shall be the incarnation of learning. To thee is left to choose which thou wilt have," and so saying, the deity gives him a mango fruit for his wife to eat, and then disappears. ”

“ Siva has at all times been the favourite god of the Brahmans, [5] and his worship is accordingly more widely extended than that of his rival, especially in southern India. Indeed there is hardly a village in India which cannot boast of a shrine dedicated to Siva, and containing the emblem of his reproductive power; for almost the only form in which the “Great God” is adored is the Linga, consisting usually of an upright cylindrical block of marble or other stone, mostly resting on a circular perforated slab. ”

“ Vain every hope, and every effort vain;
E'en as life fled, a keen but flowery dart
Young Love, the Archer, aimed at Siva's heart;
The God in anger hurled the shaft away,
But deep in Uma's tender soul it lay;
Alas, poor Maid! she knows no comfort now.
Her soul's on fire—her wild locks hide her brow;
She quits her father's halls, and frenzied roves
The icy mountain and the lonely groves;
⁠Oft as the Maidens of the Minstrel throng
To hymn great Siva's praises raised the song,
The lovelorn Lady's sobs and deep-drawn sighs
Drew tears of pity from their gentle eyes. ”

“ Saiva, Shaiva, Sivite Sect.—The name given to Hindus who venerate Siva as their special god. Siva, whose name signifies ‘The Propitious,’ is held to have succeeded to the Vedic god Rudra, apparently a storm-god. Siva is a highly composite deity, having the double attributes of destroyer and creator of new life. His heaven, Kailās, is in the Himalayas according to popular belief. ”

“ But when I shall descend from the sky to the earth, the force of my fall will be difficult to sustain, O protector of men! In the three worlds there exists none who is able to sustain the same, excepting Siva, the most praiseworthy of gods, the great Lord with the throat of sable blue. O (prince) of a powerful arm! Obtain the favour, by practising austerities, of that same Siva—giver of boons. That same god will sustain my descent upon his head. Thy desire he will fulfill, the desire, namely, to be of service to thy fathers, O king! ”

“ SIVA, in Hindu mythology, a god who forms the supreme trinity with Brahma and Vishnu. As Brahma is the creator and Vishnu the preserver, so Siva is the destroyer. His name does not occur in the Vedas, but in later Hinduism he is an important divinity. Though Siva's personal appearance is fully described in the Puranas, it is in the form of the linga (phallic emblem) that he is almost universally worshipped. Death being a transition to a new form of life, the destroyer is really a re-creator, and thus Siva is styled the Bright or Happy One. ”

“ Few poor or unenlightened or wicked persons were to be found in the country. But the great and good king had not a son. This was an intense sorrow to him—the one dark cloud that now and again overshadowed his otherwise happy and glorious life. Every day he prayed earnestly to Siva to grant him an heir to sit upon the throne after him. One day Siva appeared to him in the garb of a yogi,401 and bade him ask a boon and it should be granted. "Take these four fruits," said Siva, "and give them to your wife to eat on such a day before sunrise. ”

“ I will just give the outline of the Hindu religion. Like all mythology, it is infinitely complex, but two great divisions are distinguished, in the followers of Siva and the followers of Vishnu. Under various names, and in varied forms, these are the two gods most worshipped.
Siva is at once the Destroyer and the Reproducer, the emblem of life and death—the god of sound philosophical doctrine. In a more terrible aspect he is worshipped as the Roarer, the Dread One. He is represented with a human head with five faces, and a body with four arms, with a club and necklace of skulls. ”

“ We need not, therefore, be surprised that with this god are connected images of terror, such as nothing but a tropical imagination could conceive. Siva is represented to the Indian mind as a hideous being, encircled by a girdle of snakes, with a human skull in his hand, and wearing a necklace composed of human bones. ”

“ Siva was however considered the greatest of the four gods, and his temples were the most stately and august of the public edifices. Kâli was held to be a form of Pârvati, the consort of Siva. Indra, the king of the celestials, Kâma, the god of love, and celestial bodies, such as Surya the sun and Soma the moon had temples dedicated to them. With a view to impress upon the minds of the people, the distinctions of caste, the Brahmins introduced also the worship of four Bhootas or gigantic idols, which represented the four castes. ”

“ Siva, as before stated, was the apotheosis of the Brahman ascetic, whose attempts to penetrate into the secrets of the Universe are summed up in the Upanishads. As the supreme deity of the Saivas and the incontrovertible exponent of the jnāna-marga, the way of knowledge, Siva was associated with the Vedic sacrificial cult of Sūrya and Agni, the sun and fire Spirits. When a Brahman artist wished to create an image of the sun-dance, which he witnessed every day at the time of worship, he naturally personified the sun as the Great Ascetic in his mystic universal dance. ”

“ The Aryans in course of time came to adopt this form of cult. There are many passages in the Mahábhárata showing that Siva was already venerated under the emblem of the phallus when that epic was composed." [5]
Tantric rites prevalent in the seventh century.By the VIIth century A. D., we find Siva's worship well established in India. In the life of King Harsa by Vána there is a graphic description of a weird ceremony performed by a Saiva saint named Bhairavácháryya. ”

“ Siva, the destroyer, he of the bright blue neck, the dweller, as Kāma tauntingly says, among graves and dead men's ashes; Siva, mighty in penance, is father of Rathi. In the play itself, he is not even a muta persona; he does not appear at all. What he does is only adumbrated by the action or song of the other characters. The legend strikingly illustrates the Hindu view of penance. Briefly stated, it is that anyone who performs any penance for a sufficiently long time acquires such a store of power and virtue, that the very gods themselves cannot stand against it. ”

“ In this shape the god wears the makuta (crown) with skull and crescent, has a third eye in his forehead and a cobra strung round his left shoulder and breast; his body, decked with a tiger’s skin, rests against the prabha, his aureole; one of his left hands holds his fly-flap, one of his right hands his string of beads; of his trident only the stick remains.
Siva, the one of dreadful charm, is everywhere, either personified or in his attributes: he dominates the external decoration of the Vishnu and the Brahma temples too, in the latter case as guru, even to the exclusion of all other gods ”

“ Thirdly, Siva is a snake-god, and the sudden death dealt out by the poisonous snake has always excited the greatest awe among primitive people. The cobra is widely revered in India, and it is probably this snake which is associated with the god. In addition the lightning, a swift, death-dealing power, is ascribed to Siva, and this may have been one of his earliest attributes, as it was probably associated with his Vedic prototype Rudra. ”

“ A story related in the Tamil Periyapurānam about Chandēsa makes him a fervent devotee of Siva, who in his height of devotion, cut off the legs of his own father, because he wantonly spilt the milk-pots which Chandēsa had secured as loving offerings to Siva. Sankarāchārya, who lived perhaps in the early part of the eighth century A.D., refers to this Saiva devotee Chandēsa as pitridrōhin, " the sinner against (his) father," evidently with reference to the story related in the Periyapurānam. The form of Siva known as Chandēsānugrahamūrti, described above, is entirely based on this anecdote. ”

“ Sudâma had contracted a friendship with Siva, whom he had excelled as a student, and when at the close of their studentship he found Siva to be the lord of the three worlds, while he had neither wealth nor power, he retired in disgust to this cave. ”

“ In the sixteenth month you will get good boons from lord Siva and his wife. O Kr$na, why should not the lord grant you the boons ?
6. O Visnu, thanks to your good qualities, you deserve worship of the gods. You are always praiseworthy. I shall explain a mantra if you have faith enough.
7. By the virtue of that mantra yon will see Siva. You will acquire a son, equal in strength to you, by the favour of lord Siva.
8. O Krsna, perform the Japa of this most efficacious mantra viz. “Om Namah Sivaya.” It yields all desires. It is divine. It bestows worldly pleasures and salvation.” ”

“ We have already stated that Siva is usually deemed the third person of the Hindu triad, that he represents the destructive energy, and that he appears in such a variety of forms, and on so many occasions, that scarcely a step can be taken in any department whatever of eastern science, art, or subject of literature, without encountering him in some of his varied characters. The whole race of Hindoos, it seems, is divided into two classes, denoting the worship of Siva, or of Vishnu; Brahma, the first or creative power, having no worshippers or temples. ”

“ It is more particularly with the god Siva we shall have to do in stating facts which illustrate the subject of Phallic worship, for the Lingam or Phallus was the emblem under which he was specially worshipped. It certainly does seem remarkable, as Mr. Sellon remarked, that of the host of divinities above mentioned, Siva should be the god whom the Hindus have delighted to honour. “As the Destroyer, and one who revels in cruelty and bloodshed, this terrible deity, who has not inaptly been compared to the Moloch of Scripture, of all their divinities, suggests most our idea of the devil. ”

“ Parvati also arrived there, and failed to recognise Siva. Thereon the skull laughed, and fell to the ground. The bhūthas were so delighted that they put various kinds of herbs into a big vessel, and made of them a sweet liquor, by drinking which Siva was absolved from his crime. For this reason arrack is offered to him at the festival. A very similar rite is carried out at Walajapet. A huge figure, representing the goddess, is made at the burning-ground out of the ashes of burnt bodies mixed with water, the eyes being made of hen's eggs painted black in the centre to represent the pupils. ”

“ Do you not know the proverb, 'Even a poisonous tree should stand uninjured by him who planted it'? But as I look into the future, I see that when Siva marries the Princess Uma—and he can wed no other—he will become the father of a son who shall lead the armies of heaven to victory. Do what you can, therefore, to hasten the marriage. You are thereby bringing nearer the Birth of the Divine War-Lord."
The thunder-like voice of the Creator died away in space, and the gods consulted as to what could be done. In the end, Indra, chief of the lesser gods, went to visit Modon, the Indian God of Love. ”