Re: divya-katha- some comments about Shiva
Posted by Catherine Cartwright Jones on November 30, 1999 at 16:11:10:
In Reply to: Re: divya-katha- some comments about Shiva posted by leela on November 30, 1999 at 15:47:22:
No offense taken at all....I just never can be 100% certain of my
sources....so I try to have as many as possible. I was just wondering
if several books that I'd read had it wrong. I'm always grateful
if people catch mistakes I'm making.
The perimeters of a deity's identity is one for specialists in
comparitive religion to scramble over. There are so many very similar
or nearly identical deities by different names, that I really no
opinion about whether they represent the same concept or not .... so I
tend to take the narrow definition ... of .... it's Shiva when you
call him Shiva. In that line of reasoning, all the male deities in all
the Indo-European religions may have a single root. So at what point
to we all revere the same deity, and at what point do we all revere
different ones? I have no clue.
My point, generally, was that henna useage by regular happy people
probably predated it's incorporation into religion. That, and I'm not
sure the "mostly for women" attitide towards henna in India much
predates c. 800. It certainly doesn't look that way in the artifacts.
I wish I could find some group of artifacts or literature that would
place henna back farther in time in India. C. 400 seems awfully late
to me. And then, the Indian use of henna as portrayed in the 5th
century doesn't seem to be terribly important and it's certainly not
gender specific in the numerous examples from that time. I keep
looking through the old stuff and I just can't find henna in neolithic
or bronze age India, which is when Pashupathi would have been around.