Shiva as Kala

In a comment on Sunday’s post “The hand of Shiva,” I noted that Kala usually refers to Shiva but that the famous line from the Gita is an exception:

Bill’s post discusses the etymology of cool and notes that it is related to the Old Norse kala. In Hinduism, Kala is the personification of time and death and is often considered an avatar of Shiva, though Krishna also becomes Kala in the Gita, in the line famously quoted by Oppenheimer in connection with the atomic bomb.

The next day, Monday, I found this in the weekly meme post at a well-known hate speech site:

I don’t know where this is from, but it looks to be taken from a comic book or something. It’s clearly supposed to be translation of Gita 11:32, the very text I mentioned as not referring to Shiva, but mangled so that it does refer to Shiva. The original says, “Kala [Death or Time] am I, the great destroyer of the worlds,” to which the meme adds the gloss “Shiva, the Destroyer.” In its original context, these are unambiguously the words of Krishna, who is an avatar of Vishnu and is obviously not claiming to be Shiva. I don’t believe any Hindu would ever consider translating Kala as Shiva here. The confusion probably comes from the popular Western understanding of a “Hindu trinity” in which the role of Destroyer belongs exclusively to Shiva. I don’t see any hint of that in the Gita, which views Vishnu/Krishna not as one-third of the Trimurti but as the Supreme Being plain and simple. That’s how I read it, anyway, but my knowledge of the Gita is superficial, and I am open to correction.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to argue about the theology of an alien religion but simply to note the remarkable coincidence of running into that particular (mis)interpretation of that particular verse just a day after  presenting the opposite interpretation myself. Finding it in a collection of right-wing memes was particularly improbable.

Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies

On Saturday night (November 30), I finished reading The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Rob and Trish MacGregor. The cover of the book prominently features a blue butterfly against a plain white background:

The next day (Sunday, December 1), I went on a truly-random walk through Taichung, the endpoint of which turned out to be a gigantic metal sculpture of a butterfly outside the National Museum on Natural Science. En route I had passed a closed coffee shop called Café Vanessa, reinforcing the butterfly theme.

Since the museum is not far from a used bookstore I frequently visit, I decided to go there next. On the shelves there, I saw a book with the intriguing title Why Beauty Is Truth on its spine. When I took it off the shelf to look at it, I discovered a cover design strikingly similar to that of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

I am open to correction from readers more entomologically literate than myself, but as far as my untrained eye can judge, the two book covers even feature the very same species of butterfly: the Menelaus blue morpho (Morpho menelaus).

Why Beauty Is Truth is by the mathematician Ian Stewart and has the subtitle A History of Symmetry. Symmetry, from the Greek for "together-measure" is akin to synchronicity, from the Greek for "together-time." Stewart and MacGregor are both Scottish names. (Random thought, not unrelated to the concept of symmetry: If I were a writer named Rob MacGregor, I would find it irresistible to publish under the pseudonym Roger G. Cambor.)

From the Menelaus blue morpho butterfly, my mind turned to the similarly named blue Mormon butterfly (Papilio polymnestor). Besides their shared blueness and the phonetic similarity of Mormon to morpho, both butterflies take their species names from legendary characters associated with the Trojan War. The blue Mormon happens to be an official symbol of the Indian state of Maharashtra, which is home to the Elephanta Caves I mentioned in my last post ("The hand of Shiva").

Late Sunday night, following a link from Adam Boyle, I discovered the relatively new YouTube channel Real Mormonism and listened to their first episode, which advocates the embrace of the term Mormon despite its rejection by current leadership of the Great and Unabbreviable Church.

Near the end of the video, they give a few unwitting shout-outs to a particular Indian butterfly, when they talk about "this idea of being a True Blue Mormon, versus being just a true blue member of our church, or of any church that we belong to."

The hand of Shiva

Last night I was doing some housework and listening to music, letting the algorithm do its thing. “Yellow Light” by Of Monsters and Men came on.

“Just grab a hold of my hand” — the moment Nanna sang that line, my eyes were drawn to a picture of Shiva holding up one hand, with the syllable Om written on his palm.

I’m writing this post the next day, in a coffee shop. Just as I typed the bit above about the holy syllable on Shiva’s palm, I happened to glance up at the television across the room, which had a Formula One race on. There on the screen was a closeup of Nico Hülkenberg’s car, with “Palm Angels” written on it. I had just enough time to snap a photo before the scene changed.

Going back to last night, after being drawn to the hand of Shiva, I looked up at his face and saw behind him a halo of yellow light — “Yellow Light” being the name of the song I was listening to.

A hand and a yellow light — not the most impressive of syncs in objective terms, but it hit me with a powerful sense of the numinous.

I bought that portrait of Shiva in India in 2008. My wife and I had gone there to see a particular statue of that god, in Bangalore, which turned out to be rather underwhelming in person. Much more memorable was an encounter with Shiva in the Elephanta Caves near Bombay, in “the thick darkness where God was.” I was an atheist at the time and had no real way of processing the experience. I still don’t, I suppose. Anyway, last night’s Shiva sync brought it powerfully back to my mind.

Later that night, I finished reading The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Rob and Trish MacGregor. Near the end of the book, I was astonished to read this:

Leah Southey, a writer and editor, has a guardian angel, Shiva, who helps her whenever she’s in a tough spot. In March 2007, she and her husband, Neil, visited Jenolan Caves in Australia, where they celebrated their wedding anniversary. They were on a day tour of the caves when her husband realized his keys were missing. They didn’t know how they would get home again. Leah asked Neil if he wanted to find the keys himself or if he wanted someone to hand them to him.

She goes on to ask “Shiva” for help — not Mahadev himself, apparently, but “a guardian angel” by that name — and in the end a stranger hands her husband the missing keys. The Shiva reference alone would have been a sync, but beyond that the story emphasizes Shiva’s working through a hand, and the setting is a cave. Even the characterization of Shiva as an “angel” foreshadows today’s “Palm Angels” sync.

Despite my affinity for Shiva iconography, I really know relatively little about that god. My engagement with Hindu thought has been pretty much limited to the Upanishads and the Gita, which are more focused on Indra and Vishnu, respectively. Following last night’s syncs, I did a bit of reading online, and a trail of links led me to a 2013 article called “Shiva, the god of cool things.” I specially noticed the publication date because of a strange error: The article was supposedly published on April 22 and updated on April 15 of the same year — i.e., a week before it was originally published.

This morning, I checked Bill’s blog and found the latest post was called “Keeping things ‘Cool’: Refrigeration as a clue?” My original intention was simply to note the “cool” motif, but when I revisited the post just now to get the link, I found that two comments had been added. In the second of these, Bill

writes, “The date is interesting. My dream of the Being and the Refrigerator happened on April 22.” The dream is discussed in the body of the post, but no date is given. Bill says he thinks the Being in the dream, who is caught sneaking food out of a refrigerator, represents me.

Update: Just 22 minutes after I published this post, my truly-random peregrinations through the city led me to an Indian restaurant of whose existence I had been entirely unaware. It was closed, but the front door was open, revealing a large Om on the inside wall.