Shiva

Shiva is not born. The oldest hymns that announce him do not speak of him but of Rudra, the fierce god of the Rigveda: lord of beasts, archer of the mountains and the storm, invoked in fear and called, in the same breath, «the best of physicians». Between Rudra and Shiva lie centuries and a change of tone: what in the Veda is a fearsome power to be appeased becomes, in the Puranas, the god to whom everything is asked.

The Shiva Purana does not tell of his birth, because he has none; it tells of a test. Brahma and Vishnu were arguing over which of them was superior when a pillar of fire rose between them, without beginning or end. They agreed to settle the dispute by finding its ends: Vishnu went down as a boar to seek the base, Brahma flew up as a swan towards the summit, and neither reached it. The pillar was Shiva, and that faceless form is the lingam; the scene is called Lingodbhava.

The Trimurti that pairs him with Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver is a later systematisation and, seen from Shaivism, an insufficient one: for his devotees Shiva is not a third of the cycle but the whole of it. His dwelling is in no shared heaven, but on Kailasa, the mountain of the north.

Shiva's skin is white with ash, not blue: he smears his body with the vibhuti of the cremation ground as a reminder of how everything ends. What is blue is his throat, and there is a story to it. When gods and asuras churned the ocean of milk to draw out the nectar of immortality, the first thing to surface was not the nectar but the halahala, a poison capable of dissolving the three worlds. Shiva drank it and held it in his neck without swallowing; hence Nilakantha, «the blue-throated one».

In his matted ascetic's hair he carries the crescent moon and the Ganges, which came down from the sky with force enough to split the earth until he caught it in his hair and released it gently. Around his neck, the cobra. On his forehead, the third eye, which is no ornament: with it he burned Kama, the god of desire, to ashes for interrupting his meditation.

He bears the trishula trident and the damaru, a small hourglass-shaped drum whose beat marks the pulse of creation, and he holds a deer, which is the restless mind caught by the antlers. He sits on a tiger skin and rides the bull Nandi. In his Nataraja form he dances inside a ring of flames, treading on the dwarf Apasmara, who is ignorance.

Shaivism seeks liberation through meditation, yoga and bhakti devotion, and its greatest night is Maha Shivaratri, kept as a vigil. Its twelve jyotirlingas are the shrines where that pillar of fire is held to be manifest, and they are places of pilgrimage. The offerings are austere and always the same: bilva leaves, milk poured over the linga, sacred ash, and the mantra Om Namah Shivaya. In tantra, Shiva is the motionless principle and Shakti the energy that moves him; without her, the texts say, he is a corpse.

A common confusion should be undone here. Shiva did not have four wives: he had one, the Goddess, who appears under different names because the myth makes her die and return. Sati throws herself into the fire of her father Daksha's sacrifice, at which her husband had been slighted; she is reborn as Parvati and marries him again. Durga and Kali are forms she takes to fight what the gods cannot. From that marriage are born Ganesha and Kartikeya.

His most visible devotees are the sadhus, who cover themselves in ash, renounce caste and property and live in the cremation grounds, not out of contempt for life but because that is where their god lives.