Cousins Across Cultures

We have walked the whole of the Hindu cosmos from the inside — from the still god at the centre out to the beings of the dark, and up again to the officers who govern space and time, and finally into the temple where the whole thing stands assembled in stone. One task remains, and it is the task of stepping outside. Because the best way to see what is distinctive about a thing is to set it beside its cousins, and the Hindu retinues have cousins all over the world.

The same human intuition, in many tongues

Almost every religious culture has felt the need to people the vast space between an ordinary human being and the ultimate reality — to fill the gap between the person praying and the infinite being prayed to with intermediate powers of every kind. The ancient Greeks had their daimones, the intermediary spirits (Socrates famously heard one) that Plato described as carrying messages between gods and men; each Roman had a genius, a guardian spirit of the self and the family line. The Abrahamic faiths have their angels — the mala’ika of Islam, the ranked hosts of Judaism and Christianity — messengers and guardians and warriors arrayed around the throne of God. The Norse had the valkyries, choosers of the slain. Japanese Shinto counts its kami in a phrase that means “eight million” — a countless host of divine presences in every waterfall and old tree and ancestor. Tibetan Buddhism has its dharmapālas, the fierce protectors of the teaching. Chinese religion imagined the other world as a vast celestial bureaucracy, a heavenly civil service of graded officials mirroring the earthly one. Wherever you look, the human imagination has refused to leave the space between itself and the ultimate empty. It fills that space with retinues.

Set the Hindu beings in that company and the resemblances are real and worth honouring. The dikpālas guarding the directions and the angels guarding the quarters of heaven; the fierce Bhairava and the fierce dharmapāla; the apsará and the valkyrie; the kami in the old tree and the yakṣa in the sacred grove; the Chinese celestial bureaucracy and the Hindu government of navagrahas and lokapālas we met in the last chapter but one — these are genuine family resemblances, and in some cases more than resemblances. When Buddhism carried Indian religion across Asia, it took the yakshas and the nagas with it, and they turn up as guardian-spirits in the art and story of every Buddhist land from Sri Lanka to Japan; many Tibetan dharmapālas are quite literally Indian retinue-beings in Himalayan dress. The kinship is sometimes shared blood, not just shared instinct.

Where the likeness ends

But a good comparison respects differences as much as likenesses, and this treatise’s method demands that we name where the Hindu vision parts company from its cousins — not to rank it above them, but to see it clearly. The sharpest contrast is with the Abrahamic angels, precisely because the surface likeness is so strong. An angel, in the classical Abrahamic understanding, is a created being — a member of a distinct order brought into existence by God, categorically separate both from God above and from humanity below. An angel does not become God; a human does not become an angel; the ranks are fixed and the boundaries are firm. This is a vision of the divine order as a hierarchy of distinct kinds.

The Hindu retinues, at their most characteristic, do not work this way, and the whole of this treatise has been quietly showing why. The Hindu beings tend to sit on a single continuum with humans and gods rather than in permanently separate kinds. Recall what we have seen. The Mātṛkās are not a separate order of angel-beings; they are the gods’ own energies, poured out and drawn back in. Bhairava is not a created servant of the supreme; in the Trika he is the supreme, wearing his fiercest face. The preta is not a fixed species of ghost; it is a human being in transition, who will become an ancestor. The saptarṣis were, in many tellings, sages — humans of immense attainment — raised to the stars. A yakṣa can turn out to be Brahman itself, or one’s own divine father, in disguise. Across the whole population runs a single conviction that the Abrahamic scheme does not share: that the difference between a human, an attendant being, a god, and the Absolute is very often a difference of degree and of state, not of fundamental kind — a matter of where a being stands on one continuous ladder of divine life, up and down which souls and powers and even the deities themselves are always moving.

That is the distinctively Hindu note. The retinues are not a separate creation ranged around the divine. They are the divine — its energies, its graded souls, its personified powers, its faces — spread out across a single unbroken continuum from the guardian at the doorstep to the boundless consciousness at the centre.

What they are not

Because these beings are so easily misfiled, it is worth stating plainly what the tradition does not mean by them, gathering the corrections this treatise has made along the way. They are not simply demons: the great majority are benevolent or divine, and even the feared classes have a divine lord and a road to redemption. They are not merely monsters or grotesques: their strangeness of form is a language — the deformity of the gana, the ferocity of the Bhairava, the animal head of the yoginī all mean something precise about the sacred’s relation to the wild and the marginal. They are not primitive superstition to be outgrown: they encode a sophisticated theology of how the one becomes many and the many return to the one. They are not, on the other hand, simply gods in the full sense: most occupy a deliberate middle ground, and to flatten them into “gods” is to lose exactly the ranked, related, ecosystemic quality that is the point. And they are not “merely symbolic” in the dismissive modern sense: they are worshipped as real, propitiated with real fear and real love, and the traditions genuinely differ on their ontological status — the Advaitin, the Kashmiri Tantric, the Shaiva Siddhāntin and the village devotee each read them differently, and this treatise has tried throughout to keep those readings distinct rather than dissolving them into one tidy answer.

The ecosystem, not the pantheon

Which returns us, at the end, to where we began. We opened this treatise by climbing toward a mountain, expecting a solitary god and a great silence, and finding instead a crowded court and a great sound. We proposed then that the word “pantheon” fails Hinduism — that a pantheon is a list of gods, a shelf of separate deities, and that the Hindu divine is nothing so flat. Twelve chapters later, having walked the whole population — the host and the guardians, the flying and mothering powers, the spirits of earth and water, the artists of the sky, the beings of the dark, the officers of the cosmos, and the temple that gathers them all — we can say with full weight what we could only assert at the start: Hindu cosmology is not a pantheon but an ecosystem.

An ecosystem is a web of relationships in which no creature is understood on its own — in which the predator implies the prey, the tree implies the soil and the beetle and the bird, and the whole is a single living order in which each thing is what it is by virtue of its place among the rest. That is exactly what we have found. The gaṇa means nothing except as Śiva’s follower; the Bhairava is his guardianship become a name of God; the yoginī is the Goddess’s power in flight; the Mātṛkā is a deity turned inside out; the yakṣa is the wealth of the buried earth; the preta is a human on the road to becoming an ancestor; the dikpāla is one wall of the house of the world. Pull any one of them out and it loses half its meaning. Leave them all in place, ranked and related around their centres, and you see at last what no list of gods could ever show you: the shape of reality as the tradition itself imagined it — governed, populated, interconnected, alive from the buried treasure to the boundless sky, and, at every centre, still.

You came expecting a solitary god. You found a living cosmos. That was never a confusion to be cleared up. It was the teaching all along. (Return, if you like, to where the climb began, in Arrival at Kailasa — the mountain reads differently now that you know who lives on it.)