Hinduism is known for having gods with multiple body parts, but there was an ancient Russian
(ie., east Slav-Baltic) deity with three heads and seven arms. The question is, did anybody think that such beings actually existed or did they think the statues of them were mnemonics? I mean four arms: one to hold the conch shell that blows worshippers to come and worship; another to hold a discus for protection or whatever the discus was for; another to hold something else, and so on; or even larger number of arms to symbolize the god will help out (I think Avalokiteshvara has a hundred arms so he can help out), etc. Did or do people take these deity statues as literal representations of their gods or do they understand them as memory devices that sum up various stories and powers of the god?
2) And what about the ancient Egyptians?
Did they think their gods had animal heads or did they not?
Well, put your questions into modern terms and you’ll have your answer.
I don’t know about “memory devices” – I think they were meant to represent the many capabilities and attributes of the gods. See Alice Getty’s wonderful book The Gods of Northern Buddhism for details.
Of course, I suspect that, after a while, the undereducated saw these statues and believed that they really did represent the gods. (It’s not their fault – education was hard to come by then). In much the same way, St. Agatha became the patroness of bell-founders, because the images of her in the cathedrals (carrying her breasts on a plate – they had been torn off in her martyrdom) looked like bells. Or the was Saint Erasmus/Elmo became the patron saint of marimers because the symbol of his maryrdom – the windlass (on which his intestines were supposedly unrolled) – looks like ship’s wheel.
Cal, I think you are right about interpeting the art to represent the attributes of the various gods, etc. rather than being literal representations of them.
But in some cases --and I don’t know enough about all the various gods of the various religions past and present to list them all-- the represntations are intended to be literal. For instance, (and correct me if I am wrong) Krishna really is supposed to be blue colored (I don’t recall why).
I suppose we then get into the discussion of whether the visual representation of any god of any literal importance, because if they’re gods then we mere mortals rarely if ever actually see them at all.
I’ve always been amused that there’s a direct correlation between the number of arms/surreality of the god’s representation and the spiciness of the local food. 
Seriously, I’ve eaten some salsa from down south that had me seeing Quetzalcoatl, too…
Krishna is supposed to be dark skinned, which is represented in Hindu art as dark blue.
Hey… I’m a devotee of Krishna myself and…
Yes, we do believe that many incarnations of god (or God, whatever) such as Lord Nrsimhadeva, the man with a lion’s head who has ten arms I think it was, do actually have that many arms. Look up beings such as Kali, learn more. Sorry I don’t really have any sites for you, not much of a Krishna-net man.
If you think it’s weird to believe that someone can believe in a god having multiple arms, think about an all powerful god. Could he, she, or it, not assume any form he, she, or it, wanted? I’m sure that with each religion there is a completely different way of looking at gods, and the world.
Oooo, also acsenray…
There are many different religions that are balled into “Hinduism” because many people just don’t care to get the details right. Krishna (again, form the devotee point of view) does in fact have the lightish blue skin he is depicted with in art. Also he has pink (like lotus petals) palms and bottoms of his feet. His hair is supposed to be dark, usually thought to be black, although a small percentage have said it is a midnight blue of some sort… I’m sure this seems all too strange to you Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else… Enjoy!:rolleyes:
Sorry about writing so many times… I just wanted to let Milton De La Warre and the rest of you know that I’m pretty sure there’s no reason for Krishna being blue. It’s like there was a reason for Jesus having a beard (If he really did… Yeah, topic for another thread)
If I can remember what my dad told me, Krishna was only blue because he felt like it…
IIRC
He’s cyanotic due to cobra venom. Seriously. The blue color means that he has been bitten by the cobra and survived its poison. This is symbolic of Krishna transcending death.
I have seen depictions of Kali with black or dark brown skin. If somebody wanted to show that Krishna had dark brown skin, they’d have painted him dark brown.
Since I am a youngin’ I had to ask my dad about the last one. Ding, ding, ding! You’re a winner! Seriously though seems right, thanks!
Sorry, I’m posting again, but… I can’t remember things, and I’m very embarassed to have forgetten the last one…:rolleyes:
But, Doc… I’ve seen just as many representations of Kali with blue skin as I have with “realistically” dark skin. The Blue=Dark(er) skin thing seems plausible to me, though I don’t have any special knowledge on the subject.
Howdy Don! (Waves all 6 arms) 
I realised that the OP relates somewhat to Daoism as well.
A large belly is an obvious symbol of abundance. However, it also signifies IIRC inner peace. The gods with pot bellies, Hotei for example, have bellies because they derive spiritual nourishment from within.
The Daoist god of wisdom has a bulbous forhead fit for an episode of Outer Limits or Star Trek. It has to be big to contain his great mind.
Further each god (there are 7 Daoist gods of happiness) is usually reprented with objects or animals associated with that gods area. The god of long life holds a peach and is attended by a stork. I've got a text file on this around here somewhere.Why do the gods hold one hand up in their representations? I’ve always been curious about that. I’ve been assuming that it’s to indicate their divine status, but since I know precious little about the ins and outs of Hinduism, I refrain from holding that as if it were true.
IIRC the hands do not indicate divinity, but specific attributes or even events. A hand may be raised in greeting, to ward off evil, etc. One bas relief had four scenes from the life of Buddha. No scenery, just Buddha and his hands. But, if you know what to look for you can see which scene is him taming a charging elephant and which is him ascending into heaven to preach to the dead.
The LDS ad that features a single hand in different positions to show different events of Jesus' life is the same concept.The description of Krsna’s skin color I read (I think in the Srimadbhagavatam Purana) was the color of a “cloud.” So what color is a cloud? Clouds can be white, gray, charcoal, black, bluish, purplish, red, yellow, orange … an amazing variety of colors depending on atmospheric and light conditions.
But I think they probably had a rainy storm cloud in mind. Considering that Krsna is an erotic god, a divine lover boy, and in India the monsoon rains are a powerfully erotic symbol. The association set up in the Indian mind by comparing Krsna to a rain cloud brings erotic love, heaven, and the forces of nature to mind all together.
Kali means ‘black’, the word originally comes from a Dravidian loanword meaning ‘black’, and She is originally a Dravidian pre-Aryan goddess. Black skin color is an attribute of the indigenous Dravidian peoples of India, who were there before the white Aryans arrived. The dark color of many Hindu gods may be one survival of prehistoric Dravidian religion.
When I was in third grade in Catholic school back in 1968, the nuns had us singing:
What color is God’s skin?
What color is God’s skin?
I said, it’s black, brown, it’s yellow,
It is red and it’s white;
Every man’s the same in the Good Lord’s sight.
Yes. There is a sanskrit phrase which characterises Krishna as “Neela Megha Syama”. Neela means blue, megha- cloud and syama black. I dont think I can translate the whole phrase into english. That is all. If you start reading Sanskrit scriptures, you would find enormous amount of metaphors, which are misunderstood and misinterpreted routinely by western scholars.
Please do us a favour by restraining your imagination and posting your own translations here.
Wendy Doniger and her great schlarship seems to have had an effect definitely atleast in western society.
The Aryan Invasion theory is a myth. Google can help you provide links and articles on this.
“…do us a favor and…post…your own translations here?” What does that mean? Also, is one of the mistaken western metaphors that Krishna is blue instead of gray or something? If so, is it another mistaken western metaphor that puts those highly saturated colors in Hindu god pictures in books? Would these pictures one sees now, as in the Hare Krishna book but also in regular Hinduism books, be like ancient pictures in color, style, and so forth?
Also, as there is no pope of Hinduism or Cardinal College, who decides whether a god has four arms or eight, for instance? Isn’t it just a historical development by an artist and/or philosopher, to add or subtract a body part here and there and come up with a new symbol for some old or new concept? And the same would go for anybody coming up with any thought that related to Hinduism back in history and it got added to the religion. Hinduism is said to have three major denominations in the explanation books and six diffferent philosophies on top of that. These must have developed over the years. Another example: Indra used to have more fuss made over him than he does now; Brahma has only two temples to him but there used to be more. So if all this is more or less the case, then where do you draw the line? If western scholars and interpreters regularly misinterpret things and lead the understanding of the religion astray, so did those in its past in India. In Christianity many saints get what they are the saint of by a “misinterpretation” of something in their symbology. Then for centuries people are praying to Hector the Patron Saint of Horses even though he never knew any in real life, but somebody put him on a horse in a picture once and it was such a nice looking horse that many other artisans copied it and Hector now takes care of horses.
People often try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to save “important” religious “ideas,” but more often than not, it is hard to tell the baby FROM the bathwater. This is especially true in the case of Ganesha, who was made from the rubbings Parvati made off her skin to clean herself. Whatever this was supposed to be a symbol of, it might as well, when added to the Western saying about the baby and the bathwater, be conceived as a symbol of not taking things literally or even too seriously.
Although scholars like to think they can find psychological and historical and environmental explanations for mythology, they are doing so possibly only because they studeied psychology and sociology and so they have these as biases. Their findings have great interest for those like them.
The same goes for all literature including children’s literature and other experience. I read a book once (that I can’t cite) that looked into whether children really absorb the point of fairy tales. It concluded that they stay at the level of the story and don’t get the point. The story to them is not what it is to people who have psychological and sociological theories in their minds.