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Many were the members of royal families, and even kings, who personally took part in these labors. On the right hand side of the temple there is a corner stone, a lingam of Shiva in his character of Fructifying Force, which is sheltered by a small square chapel with four doors. Round this chapel are many colossal human figures.
And there also you will see a very uncommon thing an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in the firm that has three.
Parker's compact and lucid Guide to Benares, I find that the site of the town was the beginning-place of the Creation. It was merely an upright "lingam," at first, no larger than a stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean. This was the work of the God Vishnu. Later he spread the lingam out till its surface was ten miles across.
He is Shiva, under a new alias, and he abides in the bottom of that cistern, in the form of a stone lingam. You pour Ganges water over him, and in return for this homage you get the promised benefits. If there is any delay about the rain, you must pour water in until the cistern is full; the rain will then be sure to come. Fever.
All this, of course, is nothing more nor less than the phallus and cteis, or lingam and yoni, under a different form. Here the same mystical application is supplied as in the Egyptian figure, namely, that the union of the male and female, or active and passive principles of nature, has produced the world.
It is the image of the lingam, or phallus, gigantic in size, and carven out of solid stone, in the innermost shrine, where it is the object of hysterical or lustful worship. Every year, on an appointed feast-day, three or four thousand people throng to this shrine, some to pray for offspring, others to seek license for illicit pleasure.
Male and female attributes are often combined on coins for purposes of sexual symbolism. R. P. Knight explains these symbols as follows: "It appears therefore that the asterisk, bull, or minotaur, in the centre of a square or labyrinth equally mean the same as the Indian lingam, that is the male personification of the productive attribute placed in the female, or heat acting upon humidity.
There is scarcely a temple in India which has not its lingam, and in numerous instances this symbol is the only form under which the god Siva is worshipped."
But, on the other hand, the worshippers of Shiva, who possess the temple nowadays, assert that this low building is nothing but a lingam of Shiva. Besides, the carvings of gods and goddesses cut out of the rock forbid one to think that the temple is the production of the Buddhists. Fergusson writes, "What is this monument of antiquity? Does it belong to the Hindus, or to the Buddhists?
Kalingur, which was taken by the British after a long siege in 1812, stands on a rock towering "upwards of 850 feet above the plain below, and probably about 3000 feet above the level of the sea;" but its strength as a fortress is as nothing in comparison to its sanctity, which entitles every one, who resides there only as long as it takes to milk a cow, to especial beatitude the object of veneration being a lingam of black stone enshrined in a temple, the guardianship of which is jointly vested in five resident families of Bramins.
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