FROM BHARATA TO INDIA

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

21. The Rise of Dogmatic Religions.....................................122. The Harsha Empire..................................................11623. Rajput Decadence...................................................12124. Bharata under the Muslim Yoke......................................13825. The Rise of the Marathas...........................................18726. The Abandoned Waif Called Europe...................................19027. European Miasma Decimates the World................................28328. The Rise and Demise of the Aryan Invasion Cult.....................34329. God and America: A Special Relationship............................38530. The Freedom Struggle...............................................40931. The Egocentric Dictatorship of Gandhi..............................43832. Neocolonialism under the Dynasty of Despots........................45933. Belated Reforms and Reversals......................................50834. When the Mother Goes a Whoring.....................................51935. Tale Telling Tells.................................................531Bibliography...........................................................539Index..................................................................563

Chapter One

ANCIENT PAGANISM

Human beings are spiritual animals who devised the idea of God to justify their own helplessness. God could be pampered during the age of plenty and approached for help during incertitude and penury. The Mother Goddess, during the agricultural Paleolithic, expressed fertility and was depicted all over Europe, The Middle East and Bharata, as a naked pregnant woman She was known as Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylonia, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt, and Aphrodite in Greece. Sumer around 3000 BC was a collection of walled city-states in a land called Kengir whose denizens spoke Emegir, and referred to themselves as Sag-giga or "the black-headed ones". Their gods had life giving and death wielding powers: Anu, Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag (sky, air, water, earth, respectively); Nanna (Sin) bore a son Utu (sun god) and a daughter Inanna. Anu (sky) had some fifty children (all gods) while a less significant group is called Igigi. These hundreds of gods had human attributes but death could never claim them. Each city had a patron god who communicated through omens, dreams and oracles; illness was caused by demons. Their hero Gilgamesh went off in search of immortality around 2600 BC as Sumerians lived in constant fear of their gods and accepted serfdom. There was no free will as all was ordained by gods and man appeased them by daily offerings of animals, vegetables, food, wine, beer and water.

The myth of Marduk and Timat inspired the myth of Baal (storm god who makes the earth fertile) and Yam (hostile aspect of seas and rivers); both lived with El, the High God of Canaan. El's wife was Asherah and he married his three sisters one of whom was Astarte who presided over war and fertility. Baal defeated Yam and slayed the seven-headed dragon Lotan but Baal died and descended to the world of Mot (god of death and sterility). Anat, Baal's lover and sister, slew Mot and Baal was revived, as in the stories of Inana, Ishtar and Isis, to fertilize the cattle with rain. An annual feast of ritual sex in Canaan celebrated fertility by imitating the gods, in a manner somewhat similar to the way in which they were imitated in the Devadasi tradition in ancient Bharata. Phallus, too, was worshipped as the male symbol of fertility. Fertility worship in Canaan extended to everyday life and the dead of the family were offered water, wine, oil, animal blood and flesh; El (static, unapproachable) and Baal (dynamic, active, actual) were later replaced by Yahweh (YHWH or Jehovah).

Gods were placed in inaccessible hills to underline the toil needed to approach such a Father figure e.g. Hill Zion in Jerusalem, Athenian Acropolis, Diamond Head in Hawaii, Mount Kailasha, Badrinath, Amarnath etc. in Bharata. Babylon itself was supposed to be an image of heaven where the New Year festival recited the epic poem of Emma Elish to celebrate the victory of the gods over chaos. Three important gods were Apsu (sweet water of the river), his wife Tiamat (the salty sea) and Mummu (the womb of the chaos. Thereafter, the gods emerged in pairs from a watery, formless raw material that had existed from all eternity: Lahmu and Lahman (water and earth), Ansher and Kishar (sky and sea), Anu and Ea (heavens and earth). Ea gave birth to Marduk the Sun God who slew Tiamat because she was giving birth to monsters, and devised the laws to govern the sacred Babylon, the center of the new earth, where a great ziggernaut was built to honor him. Marduk created man by mixing blood from the body of Kingu, the consort of Tiamat, with dust such that humanity and divinity shared the same nature. Pindar expressed this as follows: Yet we can in the greatness of mind or body be like the Immortals.

The Egyptian goddess Isis was conceived by the God of the Earth and the Goddess of the Sky. Isis and her twin brother Osiris were married and ruled over the Egyptian cosmos, according to the Pyramid texts dated 2600 BC. Greeks developed the myths of Demeter and Persephone from the Egyptian Isis and her sister Nephthys; Demeter and Persephone were transformed into Sophia before the rise of Christianity and she was later on taken by the Gnostics. In the Eleusinian mysteries, Persephone is the fallen psyche and her mother Demeter is the pure psyche. The abduction of Persephone by Hades represents incarnation and she was rescued by Hermes to be united with her Mother in an enlightened state. Hades had given pomegranate seeds (seeds of future lives) to Persephone and because she ate them she had to return to the underworld for a third of every year.

Sometime around 2000 BC, a history of kingship was attempted and eight kings were said to rule five cities for 241,000 years but a devastating flood then ravaged the land, as per a Sumerian tablet. After the flood, kingship got started in Kush around 2900 BC, then inhabited by the Acadians, and all of Sumer was conquered by Saragon (meaning the true king), the son of a gardener, around 2300 BC who ruled for 56 years. Soon after his birth, his mother put him adrift on a reed boat; he was found and raised by a drawer. He won the love of Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna) and had himself declared god of Akkad. Sumer and Akkad were finally conquered by Hammurabi, the Amorite king of Babylon, whose empire lasted 1800 to 1600 BC. During the Axial Age (800-200 BC) power was shifting from the king, priest and temple to the marketplace and witnessed the birth of beliefs that were irreversibly linked to the destiny of Bharata. It produced Aristotle and Plato in Greece, Confucius in China, Buddha and Jain in Bharata, Zarathustra in Persia, and Hebrew prophets in Judah and Samaria.

Manes (Egypt), Minos (Greece), Manu (Bharata), and Moses (Hebrews) all instituted a theocratic, priestly society along an archetypal pattern. Thus, Moses is not the originator of Monotheism already prominent in Rigveda, the Nordic Edda, and Zarathustra; the nameless one in Egypt was called Nuk Pu Nuk, I am who I am. Epiphanies (experiences of a god in human form) were frequent as human and divine were considered to be formed of the same substance, in contrast to the dualistic view held in latter day Christianity; The Iliad is full of epiphanies. Paganism was tolerant as there was always room for a new god. Idolatry became bad only if the image was confused with the ineffable reality to which it refers. Naassene Gnostics at the time of Hadrian (110-140 CE) believed in the divinity of the serpent and held mystery rites dedicated to the Great Mother.

To the Greeks, unwillingness to compromise in religious matters was impious and seditious but for the Jews and Christians it was the Way. Whereas the Greek God could be discovered by Reason, the God of Bible was utterly incomprehensible and made himself known only by Revelation. For the ancients the male principle was indivisible consciousness whereas the female principle was the multitude of appearances and experiences. Zeus was consciousness and his daughter Aphrodite was psyche. This duality recalls Vedic Shakta and Shakti such that Wisdom (Sophia) is the One Consciousness. Wisdom was the master plan of God and the book Wisdom of Solomon warned Jews to resist the Hellenic culture. Jewish intransigence was irritating to Rome and repulsive to Greeks. One of the favorite synonyms for God was Shekinah (to dwell with or to pitch one's tent) and God was identified with the self (Atman). In Genesis, Adam represents Consciousness and Eve represents psyche. Mary Magdalene was the sister-lover Sophia who entered an empty tomb (Gnostic term for the body) where we exist as spiritually dead and Resurrected. Paul was to replace this duality by a single male principle as Christ the King.

SEMITISM AND YAHWEH

The Jews were among the first to rewrite history by reducing the legends of the neighboring countries into the Jerusalem Talmud (4th century BC) and the Babylonian Talmud (5th century BC). The Old Testament was initially written down in Babylon such that Sumerian and Mesopotamian stories like Eden, Tower of Babel, the Flood, were grafted onto the early Jewish tradition but also had their counterparts in Greece, Egypt, Abyssinia, Sumeria, and Syria. The Old Testament, consisting of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles, was apparently in existence by 287 BC in the form of songs and prophetic writings, some based on old Egyptian texts, Chaldean theology and Babylonian legends. The five books or the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) form the Jewish Torah whose authorship has been attributed to Moses but modern linguistic research has shown that they were composed by four authors during three different periods viz. 722 BC, 620 BC, and 444 BC (Dr. Knappert cited in Knapp); the sixth and the seventh books of Moses speak of spells, sorcery, magic, and esoteric doctrines of various backgrounds. French priest Alfred Loisy (1857-1940 CE) observed:

"The Pentateuch, in its present form cannot be the work of Moses. The first chapters of Genesis do not contain an exact and reliable account of the beginnings of mankind.... All the historical books of the Bible, including those of the New Testament, were composed in a looser manner than modern historical writing, and a certain freedom of interpretation follows.... We have to concede a real development in the religious doctrine contained in Scripture".

` The earliest surviving written version of the first books of the Old Testament dates back to 200 BC, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A Greek translation of the Pentateuch was available in the 3rd century BC in Egypt, prepared by 72 elders of Israel for the library of Alexandria and used until 200 CE by Christians when Origen organized them into the Hexapla. The translation of these texts into Latin rendered different meanings to the word Eden and even questioned its existence. Some authors, particularly Philo, favored an allegorical interpretation where the events in Genesis were referred to as processes taking place in the soul; Origen also favored a spiritual meaning of Biblical texts. However, the early Christian Church of Antioch stressed the importance of a literal reading of Genesis to influence the simple folk.

Genesis was derived from Phoenician legends, written by impoverished people who used the idea of god to aggrandize their own territories by any and all means. Adam and Eve initially had two sons: Cain and Abel; at the age of 130 Adam sired Seth, and died eventually at the age of 930; all subsequent generations stem from this original family (Genesis 5.3-5). The heathen Semites abounded in demons but the demons were rejected by Israel; the Catholic Church was to reinvent devil as an instrument for conversion. In the primitive religions, magic was repeated every year to simulate the original creative process and magic also dominates Christian rituals which are rendered incomprehensible to the believer. Yahweh is a partial and murderous god who sends the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all Egyptians while sparing those of the Hebrew slaves, who sends fearful plagues on the people of Egypt, and who turns Nile red. Yahweh is really the warrior god of the volcanoes in Midian (now Jordan) but Moses convinced the Israelites that he was the one and the same as El; only Moses had the right to get the Law by a covenant made around 1200 BC on Mount Sinai. The Ten Commandments take the existence of other gods for granted but Yahweh was not yet a fertility god so people turned to El, represented as a bull.

Genesis states that the world was created ex nihilo (out of nothingness) by an active will of God in six days, followed a by a day of rest. For Bede, the creation started on a Sunday 18 March, dry land appeared on 19 March, plants on 20 March, sun, moon and stars on 21 March (spring equinox) and animals on 22 March. On 23 March Eve was created form the rib of Adam and the Church, the bride of the Lord, was born from the wounds of Christ on 23 March. According to a widespread tradition, Adam and Eve remained in Eden for no more than seven hours. Bede was convinced that Adam arrived in Eden at 7 AM on 25 March, ate the forbidden fruit at noon and sinned at the same moment (noon); Jesus (Adam II) was crucified many centuries later on the same day to atone for the sin of Adam I. Others wrote that Adam arrived in Eden at 9 AM on 25 March, not 7 AM. Eusebius dated the Expulsion to 5,198 years before the birth of Jesus. Irenaeus, a second century Bishop of Lyons, believed that Adam had definitely been created on a Friday, ate the forbidden fruit on a Friday and died on a Friday and to save the mankind from the consequences of the original sin Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Thus, 25 March was later on fixed for the fundamental events of Creation of the universe, Annunciation and Crucifixion. In the Protestant tradition, Creation began on 21 August 4004 BC. These contradictory tenets of Christianity find no basis in science, geology or archaeology.

Jewish people approached Yahweh for land that they did not possess as Palestine was not large enough to satisfy the land greed of every tribe. Genesis mentions three waves of Hebrew settlements in Canaan (now Israel). Abraham, born around 1800 BC in Ur in southern Mesopotamia was related to Shem, son of Noah, who was the progenitor of Semites. In the first wave, Abraham left the family in Ur to enter Canaan where Abraham was told by Yahweh:

To your descendants I will give this land" (Genesis 12:7) ..." "All the land you see I will give to you and your descendants forever" (Genesis 13:15).

"To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River (Euphrates)" (Genesis 15:18).

"I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession, and I will be their God" (Genesis 17:8).

Ur, home to the Chaldeans, who lived on the right bank of Euphrates, was the capital city of the Sumerians but it was inundated by waters even though the Biblical Flood has not been demonstrated archaeologically. However, the wreckage of a ship has been reported on the south flank of Mount Ararat where the Euphrates originates. Upon God's advice, the Jews went to live in Egypt but returned 400 years later to Canaan.

God given right in Deuteronomy (20.10-18) stipulated that non-Jewish people could either be enslaved or killed, their property confiscated, and their women and children enslaved. Abraham and Sarah undertook a 600 mile route along river and finally entered the Land of Pharaohs. However, the actual historicity of Abraham has been questioned by scholars. As Sarah was barren, she gave her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham; a son Ishmael was born. Although Sarah was past menopause, she gave birth to Isaac who sired Jacob and Esau. Jacob was renamed Israel whose twelve sons formed the twelve tribes. God said to Abraham: "I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go". He was told to leave Haran (now eastern Turkey) so he settled in Hebron after the death of his wife Sarah. A small town just a few kilometers from Srinagar is called Haran where Christian era walls have been excavated.

A second wave of immigration is linked to Jacob who was renamed Israel and who settled in Schechem (now Nabulus on the West Bank); however the transition from Jacob to Israel is unclear. Jacob went to Bethel where God renewed the covenant. They left Bethel and on the way to Bethlehem Rachel gave birth to Benjamin and Joseph; the latter entered Egypt in the 15th century BC and was apparently appointed Chief Minister to Tuthmosis (1413-1405 BC) whose son married first his own sister Sitamun and then Tiye (Joseph's daughter). It is difficult to imagine how Joseph could rise so high under the Hyksos, Semitic tribes from Canaan and Syria, who were known for their cruelty and who had ended the 1300 year old rule of the dynasties in 1730 BC.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from FROM BHARATA TO INDIAby M. K. AGARWAL Copyright © 2012 by Manjul K. Agarwal. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.