In The Great God's Hair

Book Summary

This translation of an original Sanskrit script in the Vedic / Sanskrit religion-philosophic tradition tells the tale of the Great God, Shiwa, whose matted hair catches and conducts the descent of the river or life in its passage from Heaven to Earth. IN THE REAT GODS MAIM TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT BY F. W. BAIN SEVENTH EDITION METHUEN CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W. C. LONDON Originally Published by Messrs. James Parker C . o p fidi m 4 First Published by Methuen Co. Ltd. Sixth Edition . Seventh Edition, June jrgio r January 7977 . March 79 2 December 19tf IQ2Q DEDICATED TO HUSBANDS AND WIVES. PREFACE. THE name of the little Indian fable, here presented to the lover of curiosities in an English dress, is am biguous, We may translate it indifferently, either t The new moon in the hair of the God of Gods or else Sht that reduces the pride of Gods, demons and all the rest of creation that is, the Goddess of Beauty and Fortune, To those unfamiliar with the peculiar genius of the Sanskrit language, it might seem singular, that two such different ideas should be expressible by the one and the same word. But it is just in this power of dexterous ambiguity that the beauty of that language lies. As there are butterflies and beetles wings, of which we find it impossible to say, that they are positively this colour or thatfor according to the light in which we view them they change and turn, now dusky red, now peacock-blue, now it may be dark purple or old gold so a well formed Sanskrit compound word will subtly shoot and coruscate with meaning, as do those won drous wings with colour and this studied double, treble, manifold signification of its words lends to the classic tongue a sort of verbal sheen, a perpetual undercurrent of indirect suggestion, a by-play of allusion, a prismatic viii PREFACE. beauty, of which no other language can convey the least idea. For translation must split up what in the original is a unity 1 . And so, our title, according to the value which we choose to assign to its component elements, can be taken to denote, either the hair-jewel of the moon-crested god, or the universal pre-eminence of woild-wildenng Aphrodite And at the risk of incurring the charge of mysticism, I would venture the opinion that our author, in wavering thus between two meanings, two notions at first sight utterly distinct and different, has instinctively seized a subtle analogy, difficult to analyse, and more obvious perhaps in the clear and silent Indian atmosphere than in our own thick and foggy clime one, however, to which all ancient mythologies bear witness, by invari ably connecting their Great Goddesses with the Moon. Night after night, when the fierce fury of the merciless intolerable Indian sun has spent its energy there are days in the hot weather, when the very last ray from his disappearing rim seems to bore like a red-hot nail into your skull and drain away your life like a great blood leech when at last the enemy has gone, and the blue mild lustrous Dark with its healing, soothing, balmy peace has fallen over the fainting world, I have a And it has often occuired to me that western theologians suffer from want of acquaintance with Sanskrit, for nothing could furnish so apt an illustration of an indecomposable trinity in unity as a compound Sanskrit word. PREFACE, ix watched the inexhaustible Beauty of the Moon and then it Is, that there seems as it were to glide into the soul, like a nurse into a sick room, some thing, some presence, vast, infinite, and feminine. The pale and shadowy Holda passes over the dusky dome, with the stars in her violet hair, or is it rather the Blessed Virgin, the ancienthorned I sis, stretching colossal over the blue, with the Moon beneath hei feet Mere fancy, says the reader, and yet I do not know. Something there seems to be in common, something that all the ancient nations felt, between the beauty of an eastern night with the Moon in its forehead, and the strange consolatory cosmic magnetism that Woman and her mystic Beauty b exert over her everlasting patient, Man Take away her sympathy, and his life would resemble nothing so much as the thirsty earth, parching under an Indian Noon, for ever without a Night...

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