Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
clearly depicts a man sitting in the classic yogic lotus position, the
position used solely for meditation. This discovery provided the
first hard evidence that Vedic spiritual science, and particularly the
meditation techniques that offered direct experience of truth rather
than faith, were certainly far from unknown in the Indus Valley.
The orthodox view, of course, is that the Indus-basin peoples had
some kind of basic and animistic fertility cult going that easily
succumbed to the obvious superiority of the Aryan religion. The
evidence for this gratuitous insult is pitifully flimsy: several images
of a fat female figure, ergo fertility cult. Orthodox anthropologists
suggest that the Aryan religion was appealingly macho, and therefore
easily overwhelmed the intrinsically feminine Mother Goddess cult
- as if the whole of Vedic culture were a metaphor for rape. Hinduism
began to develop out of Vedism around this time, however, the One
fragmenting into many, as the
Rig Veda
warned it would if abandoned.
It was also time for a change. Not for the Aryans, but for all of
humankind. The preceding millennia had seen dynamic leaps in
humankind's understanding of and ability to work with the natural
world.
Cattle had been domesticated; lentils, rice and barley had been
cultivated; the foundations had been laid for the earliest physical
and life sciences, particularly mathematics and astronomy. Even
material progress was as dynamic during this period as it has been in
the twentieth century.
Language made all of this possible. Man was firmly established as
another, superior order of being - not an animal - and his relation to
the natural world was changing. He could control that world, could
create his own world. Or, to put it into Vedic terms, spirit was sinking
farther into matter.
The astrological age of Aries the Ram was beginning, moving
out of the age of Taurus the Bull. The image of the bull in cults all
over the ancient world - Mithras, Montu - was disappearing. The
rams of Amon emerged in Egypt; Moses brought the Decalogue
down from Mount Sinai to find his people still worshipping a golden
calf, the old bull god. Ever since Abraham sacrificed a ram instead of
his son, Isaac, the ram has been an important symbol in the Torah,
and to this day the ram's horn is blown in synagogues.
