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Updated: June 1, 2025
In theory they reverence the Vedas but practically the two Purâṇas mentioned are their sacred books. They are strict vegetarians and teetotallers: they do not insist on child marriages nor object to the remarriage of widows. Their only object of worship is Śiva in the form of a lingam and they always carry one suspended round the neck or arm.
In Benares, the sacred city, "everywhere, in the temples, in the little shrines in the street, the emblem of the Creator is phallic." Symbols of the male and female sexual organs, the Lingam and the Yoni, have been objects of worship in India from the earliest times. With the Sakti ceremonies, Hindu religion dispenses with symbols, and devotion is paid to a naked woman selected for the occasion.
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.
The vivifying powers of the heavens are concentrated in the sun, and the earth, eternally fixed in the place which it occupies, receives the emanations from the sun, through the medium of the moon, which sheds upon the earth the germs which the sun had deposited in its fertile bosom. The Lingam is at once the symbol and the mystery of this religious idea.
Imagine a festival night with these dimly lighted courts crowded with worshipers, the fierce and lustful images, the glorification of the lingam, the secret places of assignation! And this is the acme of Hindu religion! There are better things than this to be seen in Madura.
It is even a justifiable economy to leave Brahma, the chiefest god of all, out of your studies, for he seems to cut no great figure in India. The vast bulk of the national worship is lavished upon Shiva and Vishnu and their families. Shiva's symbol the "lingam" with which Vishnu began the Creation is worshiped by everybody, apparently. It is the commonest object in Benares.
But the Mogul Empire is with the snows of yesteryear and the wonder has passed from the Moslems into the keeping of the Hindus once more, and the Lingam of Shiva, crowned with flowers, is the symbol in the little shrine by the entrance. Surely in India, the gods are one and have no jealousies among them so swiftly do their glories merge the one into the other.
"The worshippers of Vishnu have on their foreheads a red or yellowish painted sign of the Jani; the Shiva worshippers, the sign of the Lingam, or an obelisk, triangle, or the sun. "333,000,000 subordinate deities are recognised. They control the elements, natural phenomena, the passions, acts, diseases, etc. They are represented in different forms and having all kinds of attributes.
The Phallus, therefore, as the symbol of the male generative principle, was very universally venerated among the ancients, and that too as a religious rite, without the slightest reference to any impure or lascivious application. Among the eastern nations of India the same symbol was prevalent, under the name of "Lingam." But the Phallus or Lingam was a representation of the male principle only.
The whole hierograph thus combines, in an extremely simple and instructive unity, the symbolisation of Apis, Osiris, Uphon, and Isis, Phallos, Pater Æther, and Mater Terra, Lingam and Yoni, Vishnu, Brama, and Sarsaswete, with their Saktes, Yang and Yiri, Padwadevi, Viltzli-pultzli, Baal, Dhanandarah, Sulivahna and Mumbo Jumbo."
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