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PILGRIMAGE
PLACES & PACKAGES IN INDIA
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| India
is a vast country, peopled with diverse and ancient civilizations,
and its religious geography is highly complex. To grasp the complexity
of the situation, it is important to consider two aspects of Indian
life: its characteristic of being an ethnic and cultural mosaic, and
the ancient rural foundations of many of its religious and cultural
patterns. The process of racial and cultural mixture that began in India more than 5000 years ago has been continuous into historical times. Although isolated from the rest of Asia by oceans on three sides and impassable mountain ranges to the north, India has experienced a near-constant influx of differing cultural influences, coming mostly by way of the far northwest. India in the third millennium BC was inhabited in the tropical south by a people called the Dravidians, in the central and northeastern regions by aboriginal hill and forest tribes, and in the northwest by the highly advanced Indus Valley civilization known as the Harappan culture. The religion of the city-building Harappan peoples seems to have been a fertility cult centered on the Great Mother, while the rural Dravidians and the various tribal cultures worshipped a wide variety of nature spirits, both benevolent and demonic. Around 1800 BC a nomadic people from the steppes of Central Asia entered northwest India. Known as the Aryans, they brought with them a sophisticated religion called Vedism, or Brahmanism, which worshipped such powerful gods as Indra, the god of rain; Agni, the god of fire; and Surya, the sun god. Continuing waves of Aryan invaders entered northwest India until about 600 BC. During this time the religion of Vedism developed an increasingly complex form with esoteric rituals and magical Sanskrit chants codified in the sacred texts known as the Vedas. The various mythological personality characteristics of the deities in pilgrimage shrines may be interpreted as metaphors for the way in which the spirit of the place has always affected human beings. The spirit of place is not just a myth or a fanciful story, it is an actuality, an energy, a presence that touches human beings and affects them profoundly. Why are certain places said to be the dwelling place of a feminine deity and others the dwelling place of a masculine deity? Is it not because some ancient rural people, deeply in touch with the earth as a living entity, sensed either a feminine or masculine presence at a place and spoke about it in anthropomorphic terms? These terms were then given representational form by the artistic rendering of a statue or image. Looking deeper into this matter, let us then ask why there are not simply male and female deities but, more precisely, why there are different kinds of male and female deities? Conventional explanations refer to such things as the fanciful human imagination, the rich and varied proto-religious inputs into formative Hinduism, and prehistoric deification of charismatic human figures into legendary archetypes. While all these things did occur, they are not the only explanations. The central premise of my theory is that the various personality characteristics of the deities derive from the various characteristics of the Earth spirit as it manifest at different geographical locations. To understand the quality or character or power of a place, we need only study the nature of the deity enshrined there. Encoded in the deity's mythological form is a clear message telling us how the sacred site will effect us. |
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Suggested Itineraries |
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| The
Southern Heritage(10 Nts 11 Days) Temple Tryst (4 Nts/ 5 Days) |
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