On the Banks of the Ganges
A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Human Religion
The other day I was sitting on the banks of the Ganges watching the waters flow when a realisation came to me.
Okay, so I know that sounds like a rather hackneyed thing, but it’s true. I was sitting on the Gai Ghat at Varanasi and I realised consciously something that, subconsciously, I’ve been thinking about for quite some time.
And it has enabled me to look at the world’s religions through a new lens.
Following the completion of my series of interfaith essays, I have continued with my explorations of the world’s faiths and, in particular, I have been focussing on Hinduism. The reason for that is simple: it has always been the tradition that I have understood least. Add to that the fact that I’d booked myself flights to India to watch England play in the test series there, then it was inevitable. As if the gods had arranged it, my country’s cricket team were playing the fourth test near to the mouth of the Ganges and the fifth close to its source in the Himalayas. So, a trip along the holy river it was to be, Ganga, considered to be an actual goddess in the Hindu pantheon. Add in some visits to Buddhist and Sikh sites on the way and my interfaith pilgrimage was entering its next stage.
Travel is my passion in life for a variety of reasons. The connection with the alien, chance meetings with strangers and an opportunity to visit all those places that one has always dreamed about are all factors in the mix, but another is the realisation that, when travelling across the miles one can also, in a fashion, travel back through the centuries. For example, when I was in the harbour of Batavia, Indonesia, full of sailing ships being loaded with cargo, I realised that I was almost in Portsmouth in the 18th century, whilst my visit to Chongjin in North Korea was like being transported back to Cultural Revolution China. One doesn’t just connect with a different present, but also one’s own past.
So it was in 2018 when I went to Lebanon and visited the ruins of the city of Byblos, one of the oldest human habitations on the planet. The tour began in a Crusader castle which was built atop Byzantine walls, themselves built upon Roman ruins and beneath those Greek and so on. There was an Egyptian-style temple with obelisks but that had actually been moved by the archaeologists because underneath it was another, much older place of worship. This L-shaped temple was so ancient that we do not even know which gods were worshiped there. All we know is that they were, because burnt offerings have been found. The only thing older in the city was the very source of its foundation: a freshwater spring, essential for life.
What blew my mind in Byblos was how all the layers of human history were laid out to see in one place. There I experienced a direct connection with the dawn of mankind as a civilised species. It was phenomenal.
And yet it was not quite the time travel experience that I wanted. Yes, there was evidence of all those ancient epochs and traditions, but Byblos today lies in ruins, the abode only of insects, birds, and archaeologists. It was like visiting a Soviet Era building in modern Russia. Interesting, but not a trip to the USSR.
When I arrived in Varanasi, fresh from exploring Bodhgaya where the Buddha is reputed to have achieved enlightenment, I checked into my hotel and then made my way through the twisting and confusing alleyways of the old city with their countless temples and shrines, to the ghats. I descended the steep steps to the waters’ edge and there I saw a strange ceremony being performed. Young men offered incense and then fire to the river as the sun set. It was mesmerising but, more than that, I felt that it was also something else:
Ancient.
The ceremony that I witnessed was the Ganga Aarti, a daily offering to the goddess Ganga performed at various ghats and in various locations along her route. It evokes her and asks for her blessings and mercy. Following the ceremony, I walked slowly along the ghats towards the centre of the city. In numerous places I saw statues of bulls, in addition to witnessing actual live cows standing around as is common in India.
A year earlier in Pakistan I’d visited Mohenjo-Daro, the foremost city of the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of the oldest on the planet along with the earliest Mesopotamian and Chinese civilisations. Little is known of the religious life of the Indus Valley people, beyond the fact that water was seen as very sacred to them — their cities were all by rivers and in the heart of Mohenjo-Daro was a huge sacred bath or pool — and that they revered a god who manifested as a bull. I recall reading whilst I was there how this is considered to be where Hinduism began.
The bull is Nandi, and it is the guardian deity of the abodes of Shiva. Varanasi is the city of Shiva. As I gazed upon the bull and the flowing waters, I realised that what I was experiencing was a glimpse back to the very beginnings of agricultural man’s religious life. In short, Hinduism is primaeval; it offers us a taste of the dawn of time.
The feeling had been building. I’d been to a Kali temple in Kolkata and the ancientness of it all had struck me. Not actual antiquity mind you; the temple buildings are reckoned to be 18th century but built on something far earlier. No, by ancientness, I mean echoing back to the very beginnings. Kali is a dark deity who needs to be appeased. Worshippers clambered and pressed towards her, offering flowers and perfume in hope of her favour whilst the Brahmin priests supervised the affair, took the flowers, and bestowed the goddess’s blessings. The primitive nature of it all yet the earthy power struck me. What is more, leaving the temple, I noticed it was surrounded by a compound with walls and great gates. Again, these were not old, but the design and the concept reminded me of the gates of Mohenjo-Daro, Ur, Babylon and Byblos. They looked just like the drawings of the original Temple in Jerusalem which was itself based on Phoenician designs.
What was on show there and in Varanasi was a worship towards the very fundamentals of life: water, fire, the animals that feed us and the elements of light and dark themselves. The Ganga Aarti ritual may or may not be what was practised millennia ago, but the ancients would have recognised it and its purpose. The words said by the Brahmin and the offerings made by the devotees of Kali may not have been what was said and offered in the L-shaped temple in Byblos 5,000 years ago, but the people there would have been familiar with the sentiment, purpose and methodology, and would have had their own priestly caste to supervise proceedings.
But this primaeval connection to man’s roots does not carry across all faiths. Quite the opposite. What I realised on the Ganges was just how very modern many of today’s faith are and, as I did, I gained a new way to see faith: through a Primaeval-Modern spectrum.
At one end we have Vedic Hinduism (Bhakhti practices are more modern in their outlook) and at the other we have traditions like Salafist Islam and Evangelical Christianity. They might claim to go back to the sources of Islam and Christianity (I would dispute this), but even if they do, both are young faiths. The elements they share are striking:
· They are generally conducted indoors or in manmade environments, away from nature’s filth and disorder
· Scripture is central
· Decoration is minimal
· Cleanliness is next to godliness
· They are binary
· They stress their rationality
All of these are the opposite of Vedic Hinduism. Yes, Hindus have scripture, but the Vedas do not assume the role that the Bible has in Christianity or the Quran in Islam, and the teachings are not binary. They are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Hindu temples are deliciously ornate and chaotic. Disorder is welcomed in and celebrated. No one tries to rationalise things; they just are. It is experiential, not rational.
Hinduism is a rare survivor from the earliest times. Indeed, it could be argued to be the only survivor (I would say that Shinto in Japan is another though). It is not a pure survivor mind you; it probably would have been subsumed like many other “paganisms” had it been. The Aryan invasions and development of scripture and doctrine gave it the tools that it needed to fend off the monotheistic invaders. But even so, much of Hindu practice is an echo of the dawn of the agricultural age when man transformed himself from a nomadic hunter-gatherer into a pastoralist.
Some might raise a point here though as to the world’s other ancient faith: Judaism. I would argue though, that Judaism, despite being old, is also very modern. Several thousand years ago, when the Phoenicians ruled in Byblos, the Judaeans in the hills probably practised a very similar faith. Their god Yahweh was one of a pantheon — he had a wife called Asherah it is believed, whose statue once blessed the Temple — and the worship places were, as I have already stated, modelled on those of their neighbours. But the exile to Assyria and then, later, to Babylon, changed all that. What we now called Judaism had to adapt to survive, shorn as it was of the landscape and framework that gave birth to it. The priests instead clung to the Law for meaning and developed that Law. The number of gods was reduced to one and the sufferings of their people rationalised as being about their sin. It was, perhaps, the greatest religious revolution of all time for it transformed that faith but also, in time, gave birth to Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions on earth.
Interestingly, in recent centuries, for the first time since Christ, there has been a reaction against that monotheistic project. Even in the West, people have begun exploring their paganisms, looking to nature and other factors for meaning. Several months ago, I revisited Glastonbury with a Sikh friend of mine. We prayed in the goddess temple and at holy wells and experienced a native-grown faith where women again have a prominent role.
British Paganism is modern, a 19th and 20th century attempt to recreate ancient customs for the post-modern world. And, doubtless, they have got a lot wrong. But I do feel that, whilst much would raise eyebrows, the ancients of these islands would understand the kneeling before an image of the goddess, offering her corn and fruits of the harvest, and going to holy wells for blessings.
But what does this mean for us, the modern-day spiritual seekers? Well, I guess my call to you is to think about it. The tradition that you follow, how much of it is modern and how much primaeval? Which elements do you connect with and why? For it is not always clear-cut. Think of Catholicism with its cult of saints and the Virgin Mary, or some of the ancient harvest and fertility elements represented in faiths like Orthodoxy where decorated eggs and loaves of bread are distributed to the faithful during festivals. And what of pilgrimage, the Camino itself, said to follow a pre-Christian Pagan path, the ultimate example of religion in the landscape? Does Camino feel right for you because, unlike the standard religion you received back home, it connects with your primaeval self?
That, in my opinion, whoever we are, matters. I believe that there is a basic human need to connect with our ancestors and to the source of life itself, be that sun, water, fire, or wind. I can never be a Hindu. The culture and geography will never be mine although I can enjoy them both as a transitory pilgrim. But I can learn from them and use their approaches to help find God in my own landscape, on those lonely Welsh hills, windswept Scottish islands and in the rolling hills of my native England with its oak, ash, and thorn trees.
Modern religion, I believe, has got something wrong. It has retreated indoors, scared of the dirt, disorder, and chaos of the world. It tries to rationalise and sanitise, intellectualise, and categorise. That can have its advantages, but it also makes it brittle and vulnerable to historical investigation. If you claim that a book was revealed by God and that it has been preserved perfectly and so must be followed literally, then what do you do when archaeological investigations find earlier, different versions of the same text? Hinduism, on the other hand, which revels in its chaos and irrationality, is impossible to debunk because it never makes such claims in the first place. It does not ask you to understand, instead it calls upon you to dive in and just experience. Breath in the incense, immerse yourself in the water, revel in the fire and feel alive.
But remember, even if you can’t do that completely yourself, no matter which tradition you follow, the primaeval has never been completely banished. Take our contented Salafi for example. He may be clean and rational, secure in his belief that Pagan superstition has been banished. But the circling of the Kaaba is an ancient fertility ritual and the crescent moon atop his mosque? Well, that is derived, historians tell us, from the shape of the horns of the bull that people once bowed down before in ancient Mohenjo-Daro when man was still finding his feet on this planet.
Written 13/03/2024, Manama Airport, Bahrain
Copyright © 2024, Matthew E. Pointon