Hindu Mythology

Alone among the eleven, this one was never interrupted. The Vedic hymns are recited today; the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are performed, filmed and argued over; the Puranas are read as scripture rather than as evidence. Writing about it in the past tense would be a mistake.

The corpus is enormous and stratified. The Rig Veda’s gods are Indra, Agni, Varuna, Soma — storm, fire, oath and the pressed drink. By the time of the epics and the Puranas the centre has shifted to Vishnu, Shiva and the Devi, and the earlier gods are still there but subordinate. The same figure appears under a dozen names and in a dozen incompatible genealogies, and the tradition regards this as depth rather than error.

Time is cyclical and vast. Yugas fall into decline and are renewed, kalpas open and close, and the universe has been made and unmade more times than the texts trouble to count.