Feb 27, 2004, 12.00am IST
Marja Ludwika Jarocka.
When we run for cover as the sky opens up and the rain comes thundering down to the accompaniment of a million kettle-drums; when in the middle of the night, our bed dances across the floor of our room in the arms of a mighty earthquake, we exclaim: "Please, God, help me out of this!" — no matter in what language we've muttered the words, no matter what age we are living in, or where. Then there is one God, the protector of all humanity.
Why don't we remember this reaction at other times — when we ride a high horse, expounding on comparative religion, all the while defending our side and attacking the other's? We fail to realise that every one of us — whe- ther Catholics, Vaishnavas, Buddhists or Jews — are members of the same species, homo sapiens.
Ever since we first burned our fingers or smelled the ozone in the air produced by a too-near bolt of lightning, we have been invoking someone, usually of our own invention, asking to be rescued from fear and trouble. We must remember that neither our forefathers nor those of others were different from us.
In ancient Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City) an Aztec facing floods muttered: "Oh Tlaloc (God) get me out of this". And somewhere in Saptasindhu, when an elderly man had to run for his life from a gathering storm, in all likelihood he invoked the grace of Varuna, the God of Rta, the master of the waters.
Similarly, when a woman in the ancient Aztec world was faced with that brush with death which is hidden in every life-giving birth, her thoughts turned to old, serpent-headed Coatlicue, with her necklace of human hands and hearts, at the centre of which there were two skulls with eyes in their sockets. And why not turn to mother Kali, with her necklace of skulls, when one is in trouble, desperately ill, perhaps, or even at death's door, and one happens to live, any time, anywhere, on the blessed earth of India?
What have been described here are normal human reactions in times of trouble. And trouble, as we know all too well, comes to all of us no matter what language we speak or where we live. And when it does, most of us turn to someone above for help. Primordial and modern man are decidedly in the same boat.
But some scholars of comparative religion, filled with ideas of belonging to a superior civilisation, argue that their God is the answer to the problems of all people. They were apt to believe that the Aztec was incapable of inventing his own deity: It had to be transmitted to him by someone else, from across the sea if possible.
Women, too, were thought to be incapable of communion with their favourite deity or goddess — they had to wait for a ‘supe-rior' gender to show them the way, to help them focus on a higher being to which they could pray for help.
However, diffusionism is definitely out, except among some people who believe themselves to be torch- bearers of all culture and civilisation. There are those who, remembering France's many contributions to the lexicon of the world, would call them chauvinistic. Many gods were carried hither and thither, all over the world, by traders and missionaries and adventurers and conquerors. But many gods were also born all over the world independently of each other. For God's sake, let people be the authors of their own consolation!
(The writer is a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.)
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