THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
This is Part 7 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and the Release From Suffering
Extracting the Myth of Immortality From Its Cyclical Roots
The Embrace of Personal Immortality in the East
The transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cultures affected not only Western religious tradition, but also the Asian countries in which Eastern religious culture was gestated. Prior to 2000 BCE, the Indian subcontinent was populated by a matriarchal, “vegetal-lunar rhythmic” (Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, p. 179) culture known as the Harappa (Willard Oxtoby, World Religions: Eastern Traditions, pp. 17-20), where goddess worship predominated along with reverence for the ongoing cycle of life and death. Of the goddess/mother who presided over this culture, Campbell writes, “All life, all moments terminate in her insatiable maw; yet in the frightening return there is ultimately rapture for the one who in trust, can give himself – like the perfect king: the son and yet the bull of his cosmic mother” (Oriental Mythology, p. 179). As frightening as death was to the soul in danger of annihilation in it, death also represented an ecstatic completion of the soul’s journey for those who could surrender their clinging to life.
From 2000-1500 BCE, there was a mass migration from central Asia intro the midst of this culture by Aryan invaders. Some scholars suggest that the migration occurred much earlier, either from within India itself or from the geographical area known today as Turkey (Willard Oxtoby, World Religions: Eastern Traditions, pp. 20-21), and was relatively peaceful. In any event, the migration/invasion precipitated a mingling of matriarchal and patriarchal cultures, which in turn gave rise to a gradual shift in prevailing attitudes toward the soul and its potential immortality. To the Harrapa, the patriarchal Aryans, or Indo-Europeans as they were also called, brought with them new unfamiliar sky gods, who transcended the cycle of life and death, and “a confidence in the capacity of aggressive fire to make way everywhere for its own victory over darkness” (Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, p. 180).
This Aryan attitude of triumph over death through ritual and sacrifice permeated the Vedas, the earliest surviving sacred texts from Indo-European culture, composed between 1500 BCE and 600 BCE. The Vedas contain hymns to the gods and goddesses of the Aryan pantheon, primarily Indra, a storm god and the bringer of rain; Agni, the god of fire; and Varuna, an all-pervasive creator god. The Vedas also include ritual treatises describing how to conduct sacrifices to the gods and goddesses, and other ceremonial instructions that later became the province of the brahminic or priestly caste. Among these are instructions for the preparation and use of soma, a psychotropic brew through which the Aryans sought immortality. “We have drunk Soma and become immortal,” says the Rig Veda, “we have attained the light, the Gods discovered. Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us?” (Hymn XLVIII:3).
Despite the ceremonial use of soma to attain immortality, there is little reference to an afterlife in Vedic scripture. Nor is there mention of reincarnation. Instead, the primary focus of most hymns is to attain benevolent intervention of the gods in this life, through the appropriate ritual sacrifices, and an identification with the invincible power of the immortal gods while still in the body. Immortality was not so much a triumph over death as it was a conquest of the fear of death through identification, while living, with gods who were themselves beyond death.
The idea that the cycle of life and death was a curse to be transcended, common to most Eastern religions, appears only later, around 600 BCE, as the scriptural authority of the Vedas gave way to the more modern Upanishads, which reinterpreted original Vedic concepts in more cyclical terms. During the intervening millennium, as the patriarchal Aryans intermingled with the matriarchal Harappa, in all probability there was a synthesis of perspectives. Over time, conquest came to be understood as triumph over the cycle in which life and death alternated with rhythmic predictability. Although the ritual use of soma had disappeared by the time the Upanishads were written, “the revelation of a full and beatific existence, in communion with the gods, continued to haunt Indian spirituality long after the disappearance of the original drink. Hence the attempt was made to attain such an existence by the help of other means: asceticism or orgiastic excesses, meditation, the techniques of Yoga, mystical devotion” (Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1, p. 212). It is likely this integration of matriarchal elements into an essentially patriarchal religion gave birth to the modern tradition of Hinduism.
With its doctrine of karma, reincarnation, and the desirability of liberation from the necessity for reincarnation, Hinduism subsequently spread with missionary zeal throughout Asia, Indochina, Sumatra, Java, and Bali during the next millennium (between the 6th century BCE to the 6th century CE). Although it was modified in each local culture into which it was assimilated, the religious drive toward a transcendence of the cycle of life and death that permeated post-Vedic Indian thought had an important developmental influence on Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and other Eastern religious systems. As Eliade sums up this influence, “After the period of the Upanishads, all methods and soteriologies share a common categorical framework. The sequence avidyã-karman-samsãra, the equation existence = suffering, the interpretation of ignorance as sleep, dream, intoxication, captivity – this constellation of concepts, symbols, and images was unanimously accepted” (A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2. p. 49).