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Twisted Khakhara leaves,
symbolizing bride and bridegroom, Tribal, Gujarat |
Marriage,
procreation and birth is a universally recognised passage of life. In all
the cultures of the world marriage is regarded to be a uniting link in the
rhythm of life. Just as a human being as a microcosm is a centre of the
world, so also the ritual of marriage is the centre which preconditions
the life-style of person. The ritual empower sacred meaning, sacralize the
ceremony, thereon, the relationship between male and female is looked upon
as a sacred bond. Its supreme purpose is to build human networks and
create conditions, social and cultural for the perpetuity of the human
race. Thus
the rites of marriage and its emphasis on the continuity of human race
provides a counter-measure against the loss of mortality. Certain African
societies believe that humans were bestowed the gift of immortality and
eternal youth but these gifts were lost to man. As a result, death crept
into their lives. While death demolishes life, marriage preserves and
continues it. Even though human body perishes at death, life does not end.
It survives to conquer death. For this reason alone, it is obligatory to
tie the knot of marriage, where gods and ancestors are beckoned to witness
the occasion and bless the couple.
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All
cultures of the world have myths and legends centered on the primordial
pair,
man
and woman, who are responsible for the human race. Man and woman as a
basic unit of life often appear together, sometimes as a pair, or as
twins, to show the inseparable dependence of the male and female
principles. The idea of the union of complementary principles is deeply
rooted in the primal understanding of the genetic make-up of life.
Human-life cannot survive mortality without procreation which depends on
the union of two opposing but complementary forces of life. It is for this
reason that the fertility of the cosmos in the archaic world was portrayed
through the image of the androgynous god/goddess, male and female in one
body. In later history we witness an emergence of a common symbolism of
the generative power of the Sky father and the receptive fecundity of the
Earth-mother, repeated with infinite variations, through the world
religions. In the Rig Veda, compiled two millennium ago, the Human as
father represents the generative power of the sky, symbolized by the bull,
which fructifies the far spreading earth, the womb, with the warmth of the
sun and moisture of the fertilizing rain. The rain, the life giving
male-seed, falling from the clear skies gives birth to plants and grains.
Similarly, in Mesopotamia there is Arm and Ishtar; in Greece Zeus and Hera;
in Scandinavia Frey and Freya; in Egypt the pattern is reversed, for here
the sky is symbolized by the goddess Nut. All these pairs to a lesser or
greater degree are identified with the generation and fecundity of the
universal parents of the world. The first human male and female unite in
the act of
procreation. The overarching symbolism of the fertility of the gods is
derived directly from the act itself. The male Gods were invariably
depicted in ityphallic figures and evidence of phallic worship is found
throughout in the civilizations of antiquity starting from the ancient
Indus Valley site of Mohenjo-Daro (2500 BC) through the ancient
civilizations of the middle east, Crete, Greece, pre-Christian Scandivania
sites and Celtic culture of Europe. Similarly, the image of the goddess as
a Life-and-Birth giver, renewer of life and creatrix of the whole cosmos
is perennial.
The
most predominant feature of goddess symbology all over the world are the
fertility and pregnancy symbols ranging from the parts of the female body
- vulva, breasts, belly, uterus, to animal and plant motifs. These images
frequently in bird-shaped pottery, linear diliniations of triangles,
spirals, winding and interacting snakes, crescents, curls, streams and
acquatic signs such as of fish. All these embody the pulsations of
earth-fertility, of death and regeneration of life. A more realistic image
of fecundity is the figure of the mother and child. While the figure has
undergone many changes in response to the doctrine and theology, it
embodies in all cases, the primal symbolism of the divine
fecundity
of the woman as mother nourishing her child from her own body.
While
in mother goddess symbolism earth replicates the woman, conversely, the
symbolism of a woman regarded as earth/ the ploughed field and the male
organ as plough is also common. The notion that the woman symbolically
incarnates the earth is all pervasive. The natural productivity cycles of
the earth, its courses through the seasons, the periods of seeding,
growth, harvest and back to seed state were seen as being incurred in the
natural cycles of woman. A woman’s womb was regarded as a potential
vessel, a seed-field, kshetra, likened to the fertile soil brimming with
the ‘milk of vegetation’. The fertilized egg in the embryo, growing
day by day as the waxing moon, is equated with the first sprouting of
vegetation. The birth of a child was equated to the blessing of a harvest.
With these identities a woman’s body became a perfect landscape of the
physical processes of nature. Conversely, the earth was endowed with
bodily functions of a woman -procreating in each season and delivering her
bounties as a human mother delivers her child.
It
is for this reason that traditional cultures often locate female sacrality
in biological and imagenative fecundity which extends to the domestic
sphere: "Within nature too [woman] transform matter into elemental
energy, handling water and fire, cooking and baking, bearing and healing,
tending and gathering, making from earth’s materials”. In this way the
whole of feminine existence is inseparably connected to the metamorphoses
of nature.
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Primal
pair, N.E.India |
I
am He, you are She,
I
am Song, you are Verse,
I
am Heaven, you are Earth.
We
two shall here together dwell,
becoming
parents of children.
Athrva
Veda XIV. 2.64:71
Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth
fosters what heavens lets fall.
When Earth lacks heat, Heaven sends it;
when she has lost her freshness and moisture, Heaven restores it.
Jalal-al-Din-Rumi |
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FERTILITY
Both
woman and nature are the vehicles that carry the procreative energies.
Fertility cycles are expressed in the growth of crops, the mating habits
of animals and the menstrual flow of women. The annual return of fertility
is revered as a primal act of creations.
Just
as the growth of plant requires the ideal ritu season for sowing, seed (bija),
and nutrient fluids in the soil and the environment (amba), so the best
type of human being occurs by the coordination of the ideal conditions of
ritu, womb 9kshetra), parent or seeds (bija), and nutritive fluids from
the mother's body
Sushruta
Samhita 2,23
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