Who Is Shiva? The Destroyer Who Is Also the Dancer

The iconography is consistent and every element carries a reading:

• •Matted hair piled on the head, the mark of an ascetic, from which the river Ganges flows, since he caught her fall from heaven in his hair to stop the impact destroying the earth
• •A crescent moon in the hair, marking cycles and time
• •A third eye in the forehead, which sees beyond the ordinary and which incinerates what it opens upon, most famously the god of desire
• •A blue throat, from swallowing the poison produced when gods and demons churned the cosmic ocean, holding it in his throat to save the world without swallowing it
• •A snake around the neck, representing mastery over death and over the coiled energy of the body
• •The trident, variously read as the three qualities of nature, the three times, or the three functions of creation, preservation and dissolution
• •The damaru, a small hourglass drum whose beat is the sound from which creation proceeds
• •Ash smeared on the body, from cremation grounds, which is where he is said to meditate and which marks his indifference to the categories of pure and impure

The standard Western summary assigns creation to Brahma, preservation to Vishnu and destruction to Shiva, which is a real framework in the tradition and is misleading if read as a job description. Destruction in this scheme is dissolution at the end of a cosmic cycle, which is the necessary precondition of the next creation, so the function is renewal rather than annihilation; the same word is used for the destruction of ignorance and of ego, which is what a practitioner is actually asking for. Beyond that, Shaivism, the tradition that takes him as supreme rather than as one of three, regards him as performing all the functions himself: creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment and grace, the last two being the hiding of reality from ordinary perception and the lifting of that veil. Under that reading the trio is a subordinate arrangement within a larger one, and the apparent division of labour is a matter of emphasis rather than of theology.

The image of Nataraja, the lord of the dance, is among the most analysed in Indian art and every part of it is doctrine in bronze. He dances inside a ring of flame representing the cosmos. One foot crushes a dwarf figure representing ignorance and inattention. One hand holds the drum whose beat begins creation, another holds fire, which dissolves it, a third makes the gesture of fearlessness, and the fourth points to the raised foot, indicating release. The hair flies outward with the force of the movement. The dance is simultaneously the creation, sustaining and dissolution of the universe and the destruction of illusion in an individual, performed without effort or attachment. The form was developed under the Chola dynasty in southern India from around the tenth century, and the bronzes produced then are regarded as among the finest sculptures made anywhere; a cast of one stands outside the particle physics laboratory at CERN, presented by the Indian government, with an inscription connecting the dance to the dance of subatomic particles.

The narrative material complicates any tidy reading. His consort appears under many names and forms, as Parvati, the mountain daughter who wins him through austerity after his first wife Sati immolates herself at her father's insult, and as the fierce Durga and Kali, who are understood in several traditions as aspects of the same goddess and as the active power without which he is inert. Their sons are Ganesha, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, whose head Shiva himself struck off before replacing it, and Kartikeya, a war god particularly important in Tamil tradition. The stories repeatedly show him granting extravagant boons to demons who perform sufficient austerity, creating problems that other gods must then solve, which is a recurring comic and theological device: he responds to devotion and effort without regard to whether the devotee is good, which is either a flaw or the whole point depending on the telling. He is worshipped most widely not in human form but as the lingam, an abstract column, usually set in a circular base representing the goddess, which is understood within the tradition as a mark or sign of the formless rather than as a depiction of anything.

Shaivism is one of the major divisions of Hinduism, with hundreds of millions of adherents, and its practices range widely. Mainstream temple worship involves offerings of water, milk and bilva leaves poured over the lingam. Mahashivaratri, the great night of Shiva in late winter, is observed with fasting and night-long vigil. The syllables of the five-syllable mantra addressed to him are among the most recited in India. At the other end, ascetic orders including the Naga sadhus renounce clothing, smear themselves with ash and live at cremation grounds in deliberate imitation, and the Aghori take the identification further by using practices at the extreme edge of what other Hindus accept. Kashmir Shaivism is a sophisticated non-dualist philosophical school. Mount Kailash in Tibet is regarded as his abode and is circumambulated by pilgrims from four religions, and remains unclimbed by agreement. The range from abstract philosophy through mass temple devotion to cremation-ground asceticism is unusually wide even by the standards of a tradition that tolerates a great deal of variation.

Shiva holds together roles that look contradictory, as ascetic and householder, destroyer and creator, terrifying and easily pleased, and the tradition treats the combination as deliberate. His destruction means dissolution at the end of a cosmic cycle and the destruction of ignorance, and the tradition that takes him as supreme assigns him all five functions including concealment and grace. The dancing Nataraja form encodes creation, dissolution and release in a single image, and he is most widely worshipped as an abstract column rather than in human form.