India, Cont.

The gods of the Aryans were lion hearted, sun-delighting, manly fellows who appreciated all nature for what it was - the exquisite setting for adventure. They had little taste for the blood of their devotees, being propitiated more by the sacrifices of individual valor than by the easy rituals of multitudes. A mere few dozen of them were able to provide all that moving warriors required: good weather, plump women and grass, beer and victory. There was Indra, warrior god whose weapon was the thunderbolt. There was Agni, god of fire who imbibed Soma, their divine intoxicant; and Savitri, god who excited and inspired. There was Rudra, the wild god of storms, poisons and medicines. And over all there was Varuna, who, as god of gods permeated all space, decreed the natural order (rita) of things, and marked the unremarkable extent of the Aryans' excursion into metaphysical arenas. The Aryan religion was not a vehicle for salvation. The gods were regarded as powerful parents, brothers or friends. They made the world the wonderful place that it was and surely would have been insulted to think that anyone sought to be saved from it. And no one, mortal or divine, countenanced such nonsense as reincarnation. When the Aryans killed a man, they expected him to stay dead.

But the Dasas farmers were sedentary folk who did not crave a warpath's endless sunny days. Laboring long hours under a broiling sun, they found their meaning in moonlight. This was the kind time, the time for joy and rest. Bound to the land in rhythmic embrace, they understood little beyond the references of animal husbandry. They saw the feminine earth and the masculine moon as the divine couple, the Cow and the Bull, the power and the law the power obeyed: Shakti and Shakta, Kali and Shiva. And so, for learning the sacred order to which their Mother Earth conformed, they looked not to the sun but to the sanctuarial moon. As many farmers still do, they numbered their days and marked their seasons by a lunar calendar and even took a lunar cue for determining the proper times to plant seeds into their beloved Mother Earth. They knew that the moon directed the tides of the earth to ebb and flow and that their women menstruated in unison (as still occurs today in small, close communities) according to lunar phase and were fertile, therefore, according to the same directive. And from the time of conception until the time of birth their offspring (as does everyone else's) required exactly ten lunar cycles to gestate. But they also saw, as any fool could see, that semen was the color of the moon and menstrual blood - that mysterious female product - was, especially when seen by moonlight, the color of earth. Further, they believed that the moon's attraction for the earth was as sexual as their attraction for their women; and, seeing the hopeless distance between the lovers, saw themselves as lunar stand-ins, clay agents of the argent moon. Though it was they who placed the seeds in the earth, it was the moon who inseminated their Great Mother Earth and caused the crops to grow. And just as the moon contained a mysterious inner force which caused it to wax and wane, die and three days later be resurrected, they, via that same interior force, would be reborn from the womb of their Holy Mother Earth. Everything... their crops, their present and future lives, depended upon the union and the issue of the Moon Sire and the Earth Dam. Photosynthesis they took for granted.

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