Beneath are extracts from Book 2 (“Euterpe”) from The History” by 5th Century BCE Greek historian Herodotus.
“The male kine, therefore, if clean, and the male
calves, are used for sacrifice by the Egyptians universally; but the females they are not allowed
to sacrifice, since they are sacred to Isis.
The statue of this goddess has the form of a woman but
with horns like a cow, resembling thus the Greek representations of Io;
and the Egyptians, one and all,
venerate cows much more highly than any other animal.
(This certainly reminds me of the
beliefs of the Ancient Vedic Indians.
Bulls could be sacrificed or eaten,
but the cow was sacrosanct.
I know these claims are hotly disputed
nowadays.
I beg to disagree with the Hindutva crowd:
it makes perfect sense that once upon a time, our forefathers ate all sorts of meat.
It’s normal, it’s healthy.
It was the natural
thing to do before the advent of agriculture & city-life.
There is nothing wrong in eating beef: billions of people who eat beef are not inferior
– morally, spiritually, intellectually, or physically – to cow-worshiping Hindus.
Vegetarianism is a later development.
The extreme virulence, with which extremist Hindus
abuse & attack others on this point, is evidence of their own mental instability.
They have to be militant, because they’re
being blatantly stupid.
Since you can’t give a rational argument,
you have to threaten to break, thrash & kill.
So they created a furor, trying to stop Ranbir Kapoor & Alia Bhatt from entering the Mahakaal Temple at Ujjain: but then both “big-beef” eater Ranbir, & Alia, were invited to the Rām Mandir inauguration by the big champions of Rām Rājya!
And this is how the Hindutva crowd makes
a colossal fool of itself.
That said, I do respect the cow – it’s a beautiful, gentle & docile creature which deserves our love & gratitude – and I would never touch its meat.
The beef that ancient Indians ate might have been bull meat, like the Egyptians, not cow meat.
AND FOR ALL THAT, HOW IS IT THAT I DO NOT FIND ANY SIGNIFICANT COW SYMBOLISM IN ANY OF THE EXTANT HINDU TEMPLES?
HOW IS IT THAT WE DO NOT HAVE ANY COW-GODDESS?
HOW IS IT THAT THE LION, ELEPHANT, YĀLI, MAKARA, SERPENT, BOAR, MONKEY & DEER ARE THE MOST COMMONLY DEPICTED ANIMALS ON HINDU TEMPLES (THE BULL BEING VERY COMMON IN SOUTH INDIA), BUT THERE IS SUCH A NOTICEABLE PAUCITY OF COWS?
I THINK THERE ARE MORE CAMELS THAN COWS, IN INDIAN TEMPLES!
IF INDIANS WORSHIPPED THE COW SO ARDENTLY, I WOULD EXPECT IT TO BE DEPICTED ALL OVER THE PLACE.
TRUTH IS, IT IS HARDLY SEEN ANYWHERE.)
...
“Such Egyptians as possess a temple of the Theban Jove,
or live in the Thebaic canton, offer no sheep in sacrifice, but only goats; for
the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, excepting Isis and Osiris, the
latter of whom they say is the Grecian Bacchus.
Those, on the contrary, who possess a temple dedicated
to Mendes, or belong to the Mendesian canton, abstain from offering goats, and
sacrifice sheep instead.
The Thebans, and such as imitate them in their
practice, give the following account of the origin of the custom: “Hercules,” they say, “wished of all things to see Jove, but Jove did not choose to be seen of him. At
length, when Hercules persisted, Jove hit on a device — to flay a ram, and,
cutting off his head, hold the head before him, and cover
himself with the fleece.
In this guise he showed himself to Hercules.”
Therefore the
Egyptians give their statues of Jupiter
the face of a ram: and from them the practice has passed to the Ammonians, who are a joint
colony of Egyptians
and Ethiopians, speaking a language between the two;
hence also, in my opinion, the latter people took their name of Ammonians,
since the Egyptian name for Jupiter
is Amun.
Such, then, is the reason why the Thebans do not
sacrifice rams, but consider them sacred animals.
Upon one day in the year, however, at the festival of Jupiter,
they slay a single ram, and stripping off the fleece, cover with it the statue
of that god, as he once covered himself, and then bring up to the statue of Jove
an image of Hercules.
When this has been done, the whole assembly beat their
breasts in mourning for the ram, and afterwards bury him in a holy sepulchre.
(Herakles with Minerva and Juno (Hera).
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
This is the link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculaneum_Collegio_degli_Augustali_Ercole_sull%27Olimpo.jpg
Yes, so Roman frescoes & all, with
a few exceptions, have all dark-skinned men, and all fair-skinned women and children.
I have noted this point earlier.
I have also wondered if the White Man would
ever portray himself as being dark-skinned.
It’s highly unlikely.
Please
allow me to clarify that I do not hate
the White race, and have no inimical feelings
towards them.
But it’s a simple psychological fact: would
a White-skinned man ever paint his White-skinned Hero or God as a Dark-Brown skinned
man?
I don’t think so.
Dark-reddish brown, as anyone can see.
But why are the women fair?
And the children?
To that, I have no convincing answer: it seems to me that fair women were considered more desirable – or it was an artistic license sort of thing – or an artistic convention, like a certain body type (very muscular bodies, for instance, hardly found in Hindu-Jain-Buddhist Indian art).
I have other thoughts, but I don’t want to articulate them, right now.)
(The myth of Hercules
& Jove reminds me of the episode from the
Book of Exodus, in which Moses expresses his desire to see the face of God (Exodus 33):
“18 And Moses
said, Lord, show thou thy glory to me.
19 God answered, I shall show all (my) good(ness) to thee, and I shall call in the name of the Lord before thee, and I shall do mercy to whom I will, and I shall be merciful, either goodly, on whom it pleaseth me.
20 And again God
said, Thou mayest not see
my face, for a man shall not see me, and live.
(And then God
said, But thou cannot see my face, for no one can see me, and live.)
21 And again God
said, A place is with me, and thou shalt stand upon a stone;
(And God said, Here is a place
beside me, and thou shalt stand on a rock)
22 and when my glory shall
pass (by), I shall set thee in the hole of the stone, and I shall cover thee
with my right hand, till that I pass (by);
23 and (then) I shall take
away mine hand, and thou shalt
see mine hinder parts, forsooth thou mayest not see my face.”
The infinite, inexhaustible, limitless
Supreme Being of the “Monotheistic” Bible has
a “right hand” and a backside too!
Such are the beliefs of those who accuse
“Gentiles” of “idolatry”!)
“The account which I received of this Hercules makes him one of the twelve gods.
Of the other Hercules, with whom the Greeks are familiar, I
could hear nothing in any part of Egypt.
That
the Greeks, however (those I mean who gave the son of Amphitryon that name), took the name from
the Egyptians, and not the Egyptians from the Greeks, is I think clearly
proved, among other arguments, by the fact that both the parents of Hercules, Amphitryon as well as Alcmena, were of Egyptian origin.
Again, the Egyptians disclaim all knowledge of the
names of Neptune and the Dioscuri, and do not include them in the number of
their gods; but had they adopted the name of any god from the Greeks, these
would have been the likeliest to obtain notice, since the Egyptians, as I am
well convinced, practised navigation at that time, and the Greeks also were
some of them mariners; so that they would have been more likely to know the
names of these gods than that of Hercules.
But the Egyptian Hercules is one of their ancient gods.
17,000 years before the reign of Amasis,
the 12 gods were, they affirm, produced from the 8: and of these 12, Hercules is one.
“In the wish to get the best information that I could on these matters, I made a voyage
to Tyre in Phoenicia, hearing there was a temple of Hercules at that place, very highly venerated.
I visited the temple, and found it richly adorned with
a number of offerings, among which were two pillars, one of
pure gold, the other
of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night.
In a conversation which I held with the priests, I
inquired how long their temple had been built, and found by their answer that they,
too, differed from the Greeks.
They said that the temple was built at the same time
that the city was founded, and that the foundation of the city took place 2,300
years ago.
In Tyre I remarked another temple where the same god
was worshipped as the Thasian Hercules.
So I went on to Thasos, where I found a temple of Hercules which had been built by the Phoenicians who colonised that island when
they sailed in search of Europa.
Even this was five generations earlier than the time
when Hercules, son of Amphitryon, was born in Greece.
These
researches show plainly that there is an ancient god Hercules;
and my own opinion is, that those Greeks act most wisely who build and maintain
two temples of Hercules,
in the one of which the Hercules
worshipped is known by the name of Olympian, and has sacrifice offered to him
as an immortal, while in the other the honours paid are such as are due to a hero.”
(Hercules
with Omphale.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
This is the link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eracle_e_onfale,_da_scavo_del_principe_di_montenegro,_pompei,_9000.JPG
Here, Hercules
actually looks like an African.
There is NO QUESTION of his being Caucasian.
He would pass for a dark-skinned Asian from Dravidian India (as if there are no dark-skinned people in Maharashtra or U.P. or Punjab!) or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, but it’s obvious that African is a better candidate for an image made in Pompeii.
And here, Hercules is BLACK.)
...
“To Bacchus, on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian
sacrifices a hog before the door
of his house, which is then given back to the swineherd
by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away.
In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly
as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral
dances.
They also use, instead of phalli, another invention, consisting
of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages.
A piper goes in front; and the women follow, singing hymns
in honour of Bacchus.
They give a religious reason for the peculiarities of the image.
...
Melampus, the son of Amytheon, cannot (I think) have been ignorant of
this ceremony — ay, he must, I should conceive, have been well acquainted with it.
He it was who introduced into Greece the name
of Bacchus, the ceremonial of his worship, and the
procession of the phallus.
He did not, however, so completely apprehend the whole
doctrine as to be able to communicate it entirely; but various sages since his time
have carried out his teaching to greater perfection.
Still it is certain that Melampus introduced the phallus,
and that the Greeks learnt from him the ceremonies which they now practise.
I therefore maintain
that Melampus, who was a wise man,
and had acquired the art of divination, having
become acquainted with the worship of Bacchus through knowledge derived from Egypt, introduced
it into Greece, with a few slight changes, at the same time that he brought in various
other practices.
For I can by no means allow that it is by mere coincidence
that the Bacchic ceremonies in Greece are so nearly the same as the Egyptian—they
would then have been more Greek in their character, and less recent in their
origin.
Much less can I admit that the Egyptians borrowed these
customs, or any other, from the Greeks.
My belief is that Melampus got
his knowledge of them from Cadmus the Tyrian,
and the followers whom he brought from Phoenicia into
the country
which is now called Boeotia.”
(A dark-reddish brown beardless, youthful (almost boyish) Herakles in the Garden
of Hesperides.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
I think this is the link:
The image is uncannily similar to that of the Serpent of Eden on the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil – as both are, to many similar images from the Ancient Middle East, with a serpent wrapped around a tree.
Mind you, this is a 4th century CE image.
There’s tremendous consistency in the projection of Greco-Roman heroes as dark skinned over centuries.)
“Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt.
My inquiries prove that
they were all derived from a foreign source; and my opinion is that Egypt furnished the greater number.
For with the exception of Neptune and the Dioscuri, whom I mentioned above, and Juno,
Vesta, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids,
the other gods
have been known from time immemorial in Egypt.
This I assert on the authority of the Egyptians themselves.”
(Juno
is undoubtedly related to the Sanskrit yoni – the
source, the origin, the womb – place of birth, spring, fountain – place of rest, repository,
receptacle, seat, abode, home, lair, nest, stable.
But “Juno”
is not the Greek name – the translator means to say Hera or Here.
Quite contrary to all opinion, I think
the Greek “Hera/Here” may be related to the
Sanskrit Hari or Hara
– in turn, related to the Egyptian Horus, i.e.
Har or Heru.
In India, “Hari”
is a name applied to several important gods.
The Sanskrit hīra (pronounced heer) – interestingly means a diamond, a thunderbolt, a lion, & a serpent.
Hīra is also
a name of Shiva.
Hīrā is a name of Lakṣmī.
The word Rhea
– name of the consort of Kronos-Saturn — Mother of the Olympians – is either an anagram
of Hera, or maybe derived from the Sanskrit ṛ – a name for Aditi,
the mother of the Devas.
It may also derivable from the Sanskrit
sṛ – “to run, flow, speed, glide, move, go”.
Again, by Vesta
he probably means Hestia, and by Neptune he means Poseidon.
The translator is egregiously misleading, using the later Roman names for the original
Greek ones!
I have
a suspicion that Themis is derived from Dharma,
like the Pali Dhamma.
But the genesis of all these names is likely
to be way more obscure & complicated.)
“The gods, with whose names they profess themselves
unacquainted, the Greeks received, I believe, from the Pelasgi, except Neptune.
Of him they got
their knowledge from the Libyans, by whom he has been always honoured, and who were anciently
the only people that had a god of the name.
The Egyptians differ from the Greeks also in paying no
divine honours to heroes.
...
“Besides those which have been here mentioned, there
are many other practices whereof I shall speak hereafter, which the Greeks have
borrowed fom Egypt.
The peculiarity, however,
which they observe in the statues of Mercury they
did not derive from the Egyptians, but from the Pelasgi; from them the Athenians first adopted it, and afterwards
it passed from the Athenians to the other Greeks.
For just at the time when the
Athenians were entering into the Hellenic body, the Pelasgi came to live with them in their country, whence
it was that the latter came first to be regarded as Greeks.
Whoever has been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri
will understand what I mean.
The Samothracians received these mysteries from the
Pelasgi, who, before they went to live in Attica, were dwellers in Samothrace, and
imparted their religious ceremonies to the inhabitants.
The Athenians, then, who were the first of all the Greeks
to make their statues of Mercury in this way, learnt the practice from the
Pelasgians; and by this people a religious account of the matter is given, which
is explained in the Samothracian mysteries.”
(Another very dark-brown
Herakles-Hercules.
The Wikimedia Common links are:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hercules-and-telephus.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculaneum_-_Augusteum_-_Hercules_and_Telephos_-_Detail_2.jpg
Hercules doesn’t have any
Caucasian features whatsoever.
Again, he looks African.
Yes, he might also pass for a dark-skinned South-East Asian, but it’s more likely he was an African, because Italy is much closer to Egypt than to India, and this image is from 1st century CE Herculaneum!
Anybody reading these posts should decide
for himself/herself, if I’m missing something!
I’m going exactly by what I can see.
And all these inputs merely reinforce whatever Herodotus says.)
(P.S.
Regarding the beef issue, or generally the meat-eating issue .... Conservative Indians
think that Hinduism was absolutely perfected & fixed something like 5,000
or 10,000 or 50,000 years ago, and has remained perfectly unchanged &
static, for all that time.
On the other hand, Liberal Indians demolish Hinduism
by attributing everything to some or
the other “influence”.... like the gutter view that Hindus “copied”
vegetarianism from Buddhism.
That is utter nonsense.
Buddhists were, and still are, non-vegetarians, though
there might have been dietary restrictions for monks – different restrictions
in different eras & regions.
I prefer seeing Hinduism as something that constantly
& dynamically grew, learnt, readjusted, adapted, evolved and transformed
itself in response to various new & different experiences and developments
in its own history, in the course of its own existence.
There is some evidence to think that Brāhmaṇas have been vegetarians for about 2,000 years – but it’s highly unlikely they were, at the beginning.
“O Rāghava, five kinds of five-nailed animals,
śalyaka (porcupine or hedgehog),
śvāvidha (also a type of porcupine?
maybe a kind of boar),
godhā (iguana),
śaśa (hare or rabbit) and fifth,
kūrma (the turtle)
are edible for Brāhmaṇas and Kṣatriyas”.
So says Vālī to Rāma, after being shot by the latter, in the Rāmāyaṇa.
The evidence is overwhelming.
It’s ridiculous to call it all misinterpretation or interpolation.)
“You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked. Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defence whose opponent does not know what to attack. O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
– Chapter 6, The Art of War by Sun Tzu
