Mircea Eliade YOGA IMMORTALITY AND ... - Brihaspati.net

of the stupa and representatives in the same attitudes of devotion
to the Buddha than men. This cult of yaks and-the
yaksini was also assimilated by Jainism: lbs was found,
in fact, represented as guardians of the temples, actually
mind. All this proves the strength of the aboriginal religion: any
elaborate religious way above the popular strata-budis -
mo, Jainism, shares must eventually take into account the
worship (puja) and the mystical devotion (bhakti) which constituted the very structure of
the religious experience of the pre-Aryan India.
Another example will put still more evidence of the solidarity between the Great Goddess
(Durga), fertility cults and popular yoga. We refer to the pitha or places of pilgrimage in
honor of the Great Goddess (whatever his name Sakti Devi, Durga, Kali, etc.).. The
Tantra, the Purana, talk of four pitha, among which, as expected, contained Kamarupa.
By representing each pitha the real presence of the Great Goddess, quaternary symbolism
expresses the victory of the Sakti cult in the whole of India (for the pitha are distributed
in the four cardinal points). But soon multiplied the number of pitha and start-^ observed
in some variants are known lists seven, eight, forty and fifty, and even one hundred and
eight pitha (related to percent) cho names Goddess). A myth of origin Vedic and Brahma
& nico, but only in the Mahabharata gives details in the sense that interests us
(Mahabharata, XII, 282-283) explains the multiplicity of pitha: Sati, Shiva's wife, dies or
commits suicide for being ill-treated by his father, Prajapati. The Tantra and Purana myth
developed rum: Siva dance wandering through the world, leading the men-ber the corpse
of his wife. To put a stop to their madness, the gods decide to split into pieces the corpse:
there are two variants of this operation: the first (Devibhagavata, VII, chap. 30; Kalika
Purana, ch. 18, etc.).. Brahma, Vishnu and Sani penetrate the cadaver by Yoga and divide
it into small pieces, the places where these fall become so many pitha. In the second
alternative, Vishnu and Shiva chases part of Sati's body with its flex-chas (DC Sirkar,
The Sakta pitha, p. 5 ff.).
The myth of the dismemberment of the Goddess, although latecomers to the Indian texts
is extremely archaic, under vari-ous forms, is found in Southeast Asia, Oceania in the two
Americas, and always in relation with the myth of self -inmolaci6n of Divinity in order to
create plants comestibles.32 The symbolism of dismemberment is in the midst of
different contexts, in the lunar mythology and shamanism. In the case of pitha we are
facing a fertility Aboriginal myth that is part of Tantrism: Do not forget that the sites
were peregrination pitha usual cos the Tantric and sakta. However, and this seems
important, pitha, considered as members of the Great Goddess, were simultaneously
aniconic altars, sacred sites converted by the fact that ascetics and yogis had meditated
there and had obtained some siddhi: in other words, pitha were similar, in a matter of
holiness, the samadha, where he had buried the yogis. Consequently, both pitha could be
the place where festers-lock any member of the Goddess (mainly the yoni) as the place
where any ascetic had obtained his "perfection yogi" (siddhapitha). Sarvanandatarangini
mentions Mehara (in the dis-trict Tippera) as a pitha-Stahl, because with-cysts there
Sarvananda their tantric siddhi (CD Sirkar, p. 3, n. 1). We have here a shining example of
the multiple coalescences and summary
"2 AW Macdonald, A propos de Prajapati (Journal Asiatique, 1952, ps. 323-338), Mircea
Eliade. Mereet La Terre-hierofiamies them Cosmiques (Era-us-Jahrbuch, XXII, 1953, ps.