The Divine Retinues

Before the treatise begins

Ask most people what Hinduism is, and they will say: a religion of many gods. It is a natural answer, and it is not wrong. But it is badly incomplete, and the incompleteness hides the most interesting thing about how Hindus have imagined the divine.

For the gods of India are almost never alone. Shiva is never merely Shiva. He is surrounded — by a rowdy host of dwarfish, animal-faced attendants called the ganas; by fierce black guardians, the Bhairavas; by the sixty-four flying yoginis and the mother-goddesses, the matrikas; by his bull Nandin and the strange three-legged sage Bhringi; by the ghosts and goblins of the cremation ground, the bhutas and pretas and pisachas. And what is true of Shiva is true of them all. Vishnu has his eternal companions, Durga her army of shaktis, Kubera his treasure-guarding yakshas, Indra his court of celestial musicians, Yama his messengers, the directions their guardians. Behind the famous faces stands a teeming population of divine beings, ranked and named and worshipped, in their hundreds of classes.

This treatise is about that population — the retinues, the courts, the hosts. And its argument is simple to state and, once seen, hard to unsee: Hindu cosmology is not a pantheon but an ecosystem. A pantheon is a list of gods. An ecosystem is a web of relationships, a whole living order in which the great deities are the visible peaks and the countless attendant beings are the slopes and valleys and rivers that make them what they are. To understand the ganas and the yoginis and the yakshas is not to collect mythological curiosities. It is to see the structure of reality as the tradition itself imagined it: governed, populated, interconnected, alive from top to bottom.

A word on method, because it governs every chapter. These beings did not arrive all at once. Some are as old as the Rigveda; some were born in the great epics; some crystallised in the Puranas; some belong to the ritual world of the Agamas, or to the esoteric world of the Tantras, or to living village worship that no text fully contains. The layers do not always agree, and this treatise does not force them to. Where the Vedic yaksha and the Tantric yogini and the folk bhuta tell different stories, it keeps the stories apart and names the seam. Where scholars dispute — and on beings this old and this various they dispute a great deal — it says so rather than choosing a tidy answer.

Fourteen chapters, in four movements. The first walks into the court of Shiva. The second meets the fierce and the feminine — the Bhairavas, the yoginis, the mothers. The third crosses to the ordered court of Vishnu and then opens onto the wider world of spirits, from the yakshas of the earth to the ghosts of the burning ground. The last stands back to see the architecture whole — the tradition’s own classes of the gods, the guardians of the cosmos, the temple wall that is a map of it, and how the whole strange population compares with the angels and daimones and spirits of other faiths. Begin, as every pilgrim to Shiva must, by climbing toward a mountain and discovering that the silence you expected is full of sound.