Aryan and Dravidic Influences on Western Religions
The redefining of Shiva in India as a deity to be avoided and placated occurred when the Aryan invaders of 2000 b.c.e. swept down from Central Asia and commenced a fifteen-hundred-year encroachment into the Indus. There were a number of different Aryan tribes—Hittites, Levites, Luvites, and Vedics, to name a few of the more familiar ones—and the tribes attacking the Indus Valley cities were the Vedics, whose name relates to “fire altars.” The Supreme Beings of the conquered Dravidians were changed by the Aryan Vedics through a series of myths intended to diminish their power in the minds of the conquered. This attempt failed and instead, through the succession of myths and Dravidian-inspired counter-myths, the Dravidic deities became recognized in the Vedic pantheon, displacing from the Vedic trinity the warrior god Indra in the process. The great Goddess tagged along as Shiva’s wife, but she is the only female in the Vedic Hindu pantheon honored for her power and independence. The Dravidians were able to incorporate their God and Goddess into the conquering religion in this manner. Today, they are still Goddess-centered in their religious practices and matriarchal in their social structure.
The migrations of Aryan peoples during the volatile years beginning four thousand years ago has left an imprint that affects society today. Before the Aryan invasions there was a thriving commerce between the sailors of the Indus and their colony in Sumeria, and there was a movement of Dravidic people and ideas based more on trade than on war. The Bronze Age Dravidic culture meeting head-on with the Iron Age weapons of the Aryans resulted in the Green elements of the Indus culture being integrated with the authoritarian and political deities of the Aryan culture, and created Hinduism. This led to an Aryan backlash to eliminate the Green altogether, giving birth to a Judeo-Christian heritage that looks back to an “Age of Miracles” that never was and forward to an apotheosis of a few “Chosen People” that will never be.
I know of a history teacher who teaches biblical miracles as real-time, historical facts. Imagine the confusion resulting in the minds of young people trying to understand scientific concepts of space and physics paired with people parting the sea, walking on water, and being miraculously assumed into heaven. Yet public schools are often required to present religion integrated into education to satisfy the community leaders and their church pastors. I read a grief-filled school essay from a girl who looked forward to the “Second Coming” of Jesus, but was devastated by the vision of her family and friends perishing after the “Rapture” (when select Christians are taken from the earth prior to the horrors leading up to Armageddon) because they were not born-again Christians like herself. It is traumas like this that compel me to write.
Today’s distancing of the people from their God, the subordination of the Goddess into a meek vessel of the God, and the need for an authoritarian priesthood to explain it all and intercede on behalf of the masses reflect more than the early Aryan need for expansion of territory and livestock (the Aryan word for “war” translates as “get more cattle”). Levite Aryanism rejects the Green level that had been accepted by Northern Aryanism (and continued to be so until the birth of the Protestant movement which codified some of the “Aryan heresies” into Christian faith). For the practicing Catholic the distancing is even greater because while the litany states that people can only be “saved” by the body and blood of Christ, only the priest actually partakes of both elements of the Eucharist. The power of the priesthood is reinforced throughout the text of the Mass. He gives out one blessing and receives many—one from each member of the congregation verbally blessing him in unison. He gives out the body of Christ and receives himself both the body and the blood of Christ. He calls the congregation sinners, and places the Pope and the clergy (including himself) in the company of saints and angels. In this way the people are kept at arm’s length from the true comfort of unity with the Divine.
There may be some people who object to this view of the remoteness of God, saying that they pray daily and expect miracles to happen, but this is not the same as the events of Biblical mythology where deities (both “good” and “evil”) are portrayed as taking an active interest in the mundane affairs of humanity. But since archaeology has shown, as an example, that the Jews were never enslaved in Egypt, that the pyramids were built by Egyptians as a religious expression, that Moses was derived from the Assyrian Mises, and that any references to a Passover or Exodus are fictitious (John Romer and Neil Silberman have presented this information in the television programs Testament and Archaeology respectively), the so-called miracles of the Old Testament can be seen as simple mythology, no different from Zeus turning himself into a swan to impregnate Leda with twins (a very popular European art subject from pre-Christian through Renaissance times). Indeed, many of the Bible tales of both the Old and New Testaments came from earlier Egyptian and Babylonian literature. Unless you understand how and when the Bible was constructed, you could be easily misled into thinking it unique and authoritative. The purpose of such Bible stories was to give an identity and sense of exclusiveness to a group of people no different from their neighbors, but ruled by Levite Aryans from Anatolia (see Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman).
The fact is that anyone can expect results that can be interpreted as miracles because when you pray or perform a magical ritual (of which prayer is merely one form), you are engaging in a Green activity by personally tapping into the universal energy to accomplish what you desire. Time, and the events therein, can be altered or manipulated through this energy connection. Modern expression of this is found when people are said to be in control of their own destiny or take responsibility for their own actions. These concepts take power away from an incomprehensible god whose actions are interpreted by an elite clergy, and places it into the hands of individual people. This is why mainstream religious leaders find Humanism, with its premise that humans can be the architects of their own destiny, such a threat. It is more to their advantage to have people believe their lives are pre-ordained (or pre-destined) by a god, and only the anointed representative of this god can intervene on the individual’s behalf.
It is all a matter of power and dominance concentrated in the hands of a clergy threatened by independent thinking and personal liberty. That is why the Constitution is so amazingly insistent on personal freedom. The Founding Fathers were Humanists, Deists, and Masons, not radically right-wing in their thinking. Even Thomas Jefferson took scissors to the New Testament of the Bible and cut it down to what he felt was representative of the true message of Jesus—and Jefferson’s Bible, which can be purchased these days in some bookstores, is a very thin version of the recognized New Testament. Those are the kind of people who founded America, and we need to recognize and give them the admiration they deserve for independent thinking. We need to reclaim the heroes of the nation’s past for the real people they were and reject the mythos surrounding them.
Divination, rejected by mainstream religion as demonic, is not a telling of what will happen, but of how things could occur unless the person involved takes action to direct the future. It offers warnings so the person can take preventative or psychic action. This use of divination negates the predestination aspect of Christianity, which has itself becomes a philosophical quagmire (if God is All Knowing, then he already knows who will go to heaven and who will go to hell, so there is nothing you can do to avoid the latter if you are so fated because the Bible teaches that good works alone are useless and you are only saved by God’s grace—hence, life ultimately has no purpose and no direction because although you may frantically seek God’s grace, no one really knows who wins in this divine lottery until Judgement Day). The difference with Wicca is that one meets and communicates with the Deities directly and as a result, there is no “belief” required and no “orthodox” dogma. Witchcraft, then, is not a religion of faith so much as a unification with the Divine (without the loss of the person’s individuality) and the practice of a craft.
Among Christians, many who pray for miracles would rather address the Goddess as Mother of God and the lesser gods and goddesses (aspects of the God and the Goddess) as saints, or approach the remote “God Almighty” in the name of a more benevolent aspect, the Son of God—the European Oak King of winter solstice and spring rather than the Holly King of autumn and winter (why else was Jesus nailed to an oak cross—how many oaks do you think grow in the Near East?). While some people object to Virgin Mary being called the Goddess, the historical reality is that all the accolades, pageantries, shrines, holy places (and this includes Lourdes), and titles once associated with the goddesses of pre-Christianized Greece and Europe have been appropriated for Mary over the centuries. All aspects of the Goddess, from giving birth to a God who has impregnated her with himself to being undying (Mary was “assumed” into heaven and then crowned as Queen of Heaven and Queen of the Universe—both are ancient Pagan titles for the Goddess) were given to Mary. She is the Goddess, but in a Christianized form.
My favorite depiction of the Virgin Mary (one which is seen in old churches all over Europe) is as the Queen of the Universe. Long, brown, wavy hair flowing unbound around her, garbed in robes of white and blue, standing with her foot between the horns of the crescent moon and surrounded by stars (and occasionally in the company of a snake). This is the familiar Great Goddess of Paganism taking the position of the blue and white levels of the Northern system. She becomes visually the Law and the Creatrix, with her horned moon symbol (and snakes) making her identity clear to any who can understand it. The artisans of the Church were not divorced from their Pagan heritage, and this union with the prehistoric past is something that is often missing in the religious heritage of a colonial nation like the United States of America.
In the practice of the Green Level, there is no need for intermediaries of any sort—one can go directly to the Goddess and the God. It was the establishment of a priesthood, enforced by warriors under a ruler through civil and church (or temple, in the case of the Jews) laws and punishments for non-compliance that forced most people from the basic path of Green Witchcraft. The surviving Green elements were either adapted into the newer religious forms or discarded and used as a means of identifying non-conformists for punitive action.
Among the many mainstream and Pagan traditions of today there are a number of Green elements which have been adapted to become mainstream ritualized ceremonies, such as the Eucharist and solar holidays. Yet these traditions that are commonly considered Christian come from the symbology adapted by Paul and by later Church Councils many centuries after Christianity began. Ideally, to be unique and true, the Christian faith should have no observations of the Pagan holidays, no venerated saints, and no expansive tales of miraculous exploits by human beings. Recognition of this historical background has resulted in a very strict application of Christian ideals by such recently formed fundamentalist and self-exclusive sects as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate holidays or even birthdays. The sacred Pagan days were usurped into mainstream Christianity under new names, and numerous early saints appear superhuman simply because they have been given the legends of the older gods and goddesses. Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend discusses this phenomenon.
Since such traditional aspects of mainstream Christianity are in fact Pagan in origin, then why should any aspect of this “new” religion be accepted at face value? The tradition of deceit is already established. In point of fact, there is nothing “new” in the new faith—not the miraculous birth, not the crucifixion, and not the resurrection. These were all well-known Pagan themes relating to the agrarian/seasonal cycles, and even the name Jesus is merely the Greek pronunciation of the Aramaic Isha, which is the Hindu name “Lord” applied only to Shiva. We have come full circle, and the miracles and stories of Greek Hercules and of Dionysus, the pre-Hellenic deity of Indian origin that even the ancient Greek historians identified with the Indus Shiva, were given to Jesus by the Greek writers of the New Testament Gospels over the first two-and-a-half centuries of the formation of Christianity (Durant, Danielou and Kersten, to name only a few sources).
The only purpose of the new religion, then, was to gain power and authority over people and territory for the clergy. This is the history of Constantine using Christians to secure his position as Roman Emperor against Pagan rivals, and this is the history of Popes involved in wars of conquest and aggression against secular kings. The churches of Europe are filled with the evidence of this power struggle as display cases are filled with the looted jewels and gold of both the European and American Pagan past, melted and re-set into useless chalices and reliquaries, to be seen only by those travelers who bother to investigate the hoarded wealth of the Catholic Church. The only real blessing is that some of the clerical authorities had a sufficient sense of history to preserve some of the Pagan works of art, and thus one may be startled to find unaltered Pagan gold images and items in Christian monasteries and churches.