Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

Hinduism 117
not mean that South Asians conceived of their
hells as being any less grotesque. Instead, by the
time of the Puranas, Hindus had posited baroque
hell realms rivaling Dante’s Inferno. This is
reflected in the names of some of these realms:
Forest of Sword-Blades, Diarrhea, Burning Vat,
Thorny, Saw-Toothed, Dog-Eating, Red Hot Iron
Balls, Worm-Eating, and Blood- and Pus-Eating.
And the descriptions provided in the Puranas are
as vivid as the names of the hell worlds; for
example, “Those haughty people who treat their
mothers, fathers and teachers with contempt go to
hell where they lie with their faces downward in
pus, feces and urine....Crows rip out the intestines
through the anus of men who urinate in
front of cows, brahmins [priests], the sun or
fire....”(Dimmitt and van Buitenen 1978, 51).
Yama, the Hindu god of death, is in charge of
overseeing the enforcement of these activities.
Reflecting the individual samsaric process, the
cosmos itself undergoes periodic dissolutions and
recreations. As recorded in the Puranas, the principal
mythological texts of classical Hinduism,
these macrocosmic cycles take place across vast
expanses of time—a spectacle of eternity that
seems aimed more at boggling the mind than
anything else. The basic building blocks of the
Hindu temporal schema are the four yugas—
Krita, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali—which roughly
correspond with the four ages of the classical
Greco-Roman world—the ages of Gold, Silver,
Brass, and Iron. Like the Mediterranean ages, the
series of Hindu ages reflects a successive degeneration
in the moral order.
One complete cycle of four yugas, referred to as
a mahayuga, is 4,320,000 human years in duration.
One thousand mahayugas, in turn, constitute
a kalpa of 4,320,000,000 human years. The end of
each kalpa—also referred to as a day of Brahma—
culminates in the dissolution of the cosmos and its
return to a state of chaos. This state, referred to as
pralaya, is symbolically represented by the image
of a primordial ocean. Pralaya—the night of
Brahma during which the creator is said to sleep—
lasts as long as a day of Brahma, or another
4,320,000,000 years. At the end of this “night,” the
cosmos is recreated. Lesser dissolutions recur at
the end of every mahayuga.
The dissolution of the cosmos into pralaya is
not to be confused with the deluge and the accompanying
universal flood that occurs fourteen times
each kalpa at the end of temporal periods called
manvantaras, or “Manu-intervals.” The events of
each kalpa recur exactly during each day of
Brahma. Each Brahma, in turn, lives 100 years that
are constituted by 360 days of Brahma—very longlived
indeed! Furthermore, successions of different
Brahmas become the building blocks for even
longer time periods. Scholars such as the late
Heinrich Zimmer have speculated that at least
part of the purpose behind delineating such
incomprehensibly long cycles is to relativize ordinary
human existence, overwhelming the mind
with the insignificance of our everyday concerns.
In other words, reflecting upon the brevity and
transitoriness of life helps one renounce the world
and motivates one to seek liberation from the
cycle of death and rebirth.
Although there are variations in detail from
text to text, the endtime events outlined in the
Puranas are remarkably consistent, and the basic
puranic scenario has persisted in contemporary
Hindu accounts of the eschaton. The agent of
destruction is Shiva or Vishnu in the form of
Shiva. In the classical formulation, Brahma,
Vishnu, and Shiva constitute a kind of trinity, with
Brahma creating the world, Vishnu maintaining
the world, and Shiva destroying the world.
At the close of a day of Brahma, the worlds are
first dried out by a scorching sun. This drought is
so severe that even the waters of the netherworld
are dried out. When everything is so dried out that
the earth is parched and cracked, a terrible wind
blows through the worlds, drawing the life-breath
out of all creatures.
This wind is followed by a universal fire that
consumes all of the worlds in a frightful tornado of
flame. The source attributed to this fire varies. Of
particular importance is the widespread image of a
mare with flames issuing out of her mouth (an
image that may ultimately be derived from the
ancient vedic rite of horse sacrifice) as the source of
this doomsday fire. In a well-known mythological
episode, Shiva, in a moment of anger, slew Kama,
god of desire, with a fiery blast from his third eye.
Once set in motion, however, this fire could not be