Arrival at Kailasa

Imagine that you have come, on foot, to the foot of the mountain at the centre of the world.

You have been told what waits at the top. Kailasa, the silver peak, the still axis around which everything turns, and on it, seated in unbroken meditation, the great ascetic god — Shiva, the lord of yogis, motionless, his eyes half closed, absolute stillness at the summit of a silent world. You have climbed a long way toward that silence, and you expect, at the end, to find him alone.

You do not. Long before you reach the seat of the god, the slopes begin to fill with sound and movement, and the closer you come the stranger and more crowded it grows. There is drumming somewhere, and laughter that is not quite human. There are ascetics smeared with ash, so still they might be dead, and beside them creatures who cannot hold still at all — dwarfish, pot-bellied, some with the faces of animals, capering and quarrelling. There are pale shapes that flicker at the edge of sight, the ghosts and the hungry dead. There are beautiful beings making music you have never heard, and terrible black-bodied guardians with weapons who watch you pass. There is a great white bull, calm as the mountain itself. There are serpents, thick as a man’s arm, coiled and watching with jewelled eyes. And only when you have walked through all of this — the whole teeming, laughing, frightening, singing population of the mountain — do you come, at last, to the god. And you understand something that the pictures never told you.

Shiva is not alone. Shiva is never alone. The stillness at the centre is real, but it is surrounded, held, made possible by a court.

Why the divine is never solitary

This scene, drawn from the way the Puranas and the temple sculptors imagined Kailasa, is the doorway into the whole subject of this treatise, because what is true of Shiva is true across the Hindu cosmos. The great gods almost never stand alone. Each is the centre of a retinue — a court, a host, a community of lesser divine beings ranked and named around him. Shiva has his ganas and his Bhairavas, his yoginis and mothers, his bull and his ghosts. Vishnu reclines attended by his eternal companions, his eagle Garuda and his commander Vishvaksena. The Goddess rides to war at the head of an army of her own emanations. Kubera the lord of wealth commands the treasure-guarding yakshas; Indra holds court among celestial musicians; Yama, the lord of the dead, has his messengers and his fierce accountant. Behind every famous face stands a population.

The first question this treatise asks is the obvious one, and it is more revealing than it looks. Why? Why did a tradition capable of the most austere monism ever conceived — the teaching that there is, in the end, only one reality without a second — also imagine the divine as a swarming, hierarchical, densely populated society? The answer is not a single thing but a braid of several, and each strand tells us something about how Hindus pictured reality itself.

The first strand is kingship. Across the ancient world, and nowhere more than in India, the natural model for a great power was a king, and a king is unthinkable without a court. A raja does not sit alone; he is surrounded by ministers, warriors, priests, doorkeepers, entertainers, guards, the whole apparatus of a royal household. When the tradition imagined its gods as sovereigns — and it did, constantly, calling them deva and isha and raja, seating them on thrones, giving them capitals and armies — the retinue came with the crown. Already in the Vedas the gods meet in assembly, the sabha of the devas, exactly as a tribal king met his council. A god with no court would have seemed, to the ancient imagination, not exalted but incomplete, a king without a kingdom.

The second strand is administration. A cosmos, like a kingdom, has to be run. Someone must guard the eight directions; someone must carry the dead to judgement; someone must guard the buried treasure and the water and the crossroads; someone must move the planets and keep the seasons turning. The Hindu universe is not ruled by a lone despot issuing decrees into a void; it is administered, by a vast civil service of divine functionaries, each with a portfolio. The guardians of the directions, the officers we will meet as the lokapalas, the planetary powers, the sages who keep the order of the ages — these are the ministries of a governed world. To populate the cosmos with attendant beings was to say that reality is orderly, lawful, and staffed, all the way down.

The third strand is the deepest, and it is psychological and theological at once. Very often the attendant beings are not separate persons at all, but the god’s own energies given separate form. Shiva’s terrible guardian Bhairava is Shiva’s own wrath and time-power, personified and set at the door. The Goddess’s army of mothers, the matrikas, spring from the bodies of the gods as their externalised strengths, fight the demon, and are reabsorbed when the work is done. On this way of seeing, the retinue is a kind of anatomy: the single divine reality analysed into its powers and functions, each named and worshipped, so that a devotee can approach not only the whole but the part — the god’s mercy, the god’s terror, the god’s wealth, the god’s wisdom — each wearing its own face. The many attendants are the one deity, spelled out.

And there is a fourth strand, quieter than the others but essential: place. Much of Hindu religion is intensely local, tied to this hill, this river-bend, this crossroads, this tree. And the beings who hold those places — the guardian of the field, the spirit of the tree, the serpent of the well, the ghost of the burning ground — are the retinue at its most grounded. Before a great temple can be built on a spot, the tradition holds, the local powers already there must be acknowledged and enrolled into the new sacred order. The cosmic court reaches all the way down to the guardian of the doorstep.

The god as the centre of a court

Put these strands together and a picture emerges that will organise everything that follows. Around any great Hindu deity you can draw a diagram of concentric belonging. At the centre is the god. Immediately around him is his intimate household — his vehicle, his weapon personified, his closest attendants and gatekeepers. Beyond them, his hosts and armies. Beyond those, the wider classes of being who serve, guard, entertain, and sometimes threaten: the powers of the earth and water, the artists of the sky, the spirits of the dark, the officers of the cosmos. It is not a flat list. It is a living order, ranked and related, and every being in it is defined less by what it is in isolation than by where it stands in relation to the centre.

This is why the language of “pantheon” fails Hinduism so badly. A pantheon is a catalogue — a shelf of separate gods, the way one might list the Olympians. But the Hindu divine is not a shelf; it is an ecosystem. In an ecosystem no creature is understood on its own. The predator implies the prey, the tree implies the soil and the beetle and the bird, and the whole is a web of relationships in which each thing is what it is by virtue of its place among the rest. That is exactly how the beings of this treatise work. The gana means nothing except as Shiva’s follower; the Bhairava is his guardianship; the yogini is the Goddess’s power in flight; the yaksha is the wealth of the buried earth; the direction-guardian is one wall of the house of the world. Pull any one of them out and it loses half its meaning. Leave them in place and you begin to see something no list could show you: the shape of the cosmos as the tradition imagined it, whole.

That shape is what these twelve chapters set out to map. We will begin where the crowded slopes of Kailasa begin, with the strangest and most intimate of Shiva’s followers — the dwarfish, deformed, laughing host that gave a whole class of divine beings its name, and gave Shiva one of his own great titles: the Lord of the Hosts. To understand the ganas is to hold the first thread of the entire web.

But hold, first, the thing the mountain taught you on the way up. You came expecting a solitary god and a great silence. You found a court, and a great sound. In Hinduism the two are not opposites. The stillness at the centre and the teeming life around it are the same reality, seen from the middle and from the edge. The god is the silence. The retinue is the sound the silence makes.