A to Z: Hanuman

Today, we’ll be looking at Hanuman, the monkey god of India.  (And other places strongly influenced by Hindu and Buddhist traditions.)

Image copyright Atlus, but provided by the MegaTen Wiki. Click for link.

Hanuman appears in a lot of the MegaTen games.  I’ve got two versions of his demon compendium text.  From Devil Survivor Overclocked:

A heroic monkey god of Hindu descent who is renowned and popular.  He is extremely nimble and has extraordinary knowledge.

He is known to have helped Vishnu in the guise of Prince Rama and performed many heroic deeds in the Ramayana.  His name means “jaw,” and he has golden skin, a red face that shines like a ruby, and an extremely long tail.  Since he is the son of the wind god Vayu, he can fly and change shape into many forms.

And from Shin Megami Tensei IV/Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse:

A hero of Hindu descent.  He can transform into anything, fly, and has great strength.  He performed many heroic deeds in the Ramayana.  He is depicted as a monkey.

Again, image copyright Atlus, but provided by the MegaTen Wiki. Click for link.

(His Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne appearance, above, is more like his other portrait, but since I’ve actually encountered him in Nocturne, and didn’t get far enough in the original Shin Megami Tensei to meet him, I thought I’d use the 3D version.)

As to the original Hanuman, there’s a lot there to talk about.  Hanuman is one of the major characters in the Hindu epic the Ramayana.  I have actually read a translation of that, many years ago, but mostly all I really remember about it was how much Hanuman reminded me of Sun Wukong (Son Goku in Japan), from The Journey to the West.  (Despite that I haven’t actually read the latter.  I’ve just read a lot about it.  Because it’s very, very long.  And hard to find in translation unless you want a butchered version from the 1940s.)  According to Wikipedia, I’m not the only one to see the similarity between Hanuman and Sun Wukong:  it says that “scholars” say unreservedly that Hanuman absolutely was the inspiration for Sun Wukong.

S is for Sita

King Janaka wanted children.  Before he offered up sacrifices to the gods to ask them for children, he marked out a small furrow in the earth.  It was from this furrow that Sita was born, fully formed and the most beautiful woman on earth.

The archery contest. Wikimedia Commons.

As such a beauty, Sita had many suitors, so many that it was impossible for her father to simply choose one.  But he had a bow that had been given to him by Shiva himself, so he decided to use that bow to pick his daughter’s husband-to-be.  A contest was set up so that each suitor should try to string the bow.  The one who succeeded would get to marry Sita.  Many tried, but only Rama, the son of King Dasaratha, was able to string the bow.  (This, no doubt, was the bow’s intention, for — though no mortal realized it — Rama was an avatar of Vishnu, and Sita was an avatar of Vishnu’s wife Lakshmi, and it would have been most wrong for her to marry anyone other than Rama.)

Rama’s father wanted to step down and make Rama the next king, but his second wife tricked him into exiling Rama and making her own son king instead.  Rama and Sita left the kingdom obediently, but when Dasaratha died, Rama’s half-brother declared that he was only regent, for Rama was the true king.

But Rama didn’t hear this news right away, and continued in his exile.  During his exile, he met a demon named Surpanakha, who fell madly in love with him, and begged to become his wife.  Rama explained to her that he was satisfied with Sita, and needed no additional wives.  When Rama’s friend Lakshmana also rejected her, Surpanakha became enraged and attacked them, though her primary target was poor Sita.  Rama and Lakshmana drove off Surpanakha’s attacks, leaving her mutilated but alive.

That was their greatest mistake, for Surpanakha went to her brother Ravana, a monstrous demon with ten heads, desperate to avenge herself.  But her anger was still more at Sita than at Rama, so she filled her brother with desire for Sita’s beauty.  Soon enough, Ravana felt he had to have Sita for his own, and he used trickery to separate Sita from her husband and his friend, then he carried her off to his palace, despite that Jatayu the vulture king tried to stop him.

Despite being mortally wounded by Ravana, Jatayu managed to live just long enough to tell Rama what had happened.  Then began an epic quest to regain Sita from the monstrous Ravana.  Rama had no human army, but gained an army of monkeys, led by the powerful Hanuman, and after much difficulty, he and his army made their way to the island where Ravana’s palace lay.

K is for Kamadhenu

Kamadhenu is a cow who symbolizes fertility and creation in the Hindu belief system.  I’ve found two alternate versions of her origins:  in one, she’s the daughter of Rohini, the sun goddess, and in the other she’s the first being to emerge from the Sea of Milk after it’s been churned.  (The churning of the Sea of Milk was in order to create amrita, the divine food that makes the gods immortal.  So amrita is much like Idun’s golden apples, except that as far as I can tell the churning of the Sea of Milk was from the beginning the gods putting one over on the demons, rather than the tale of Idun’s abduction by Thiazi, where the gods deceiving the Jotunn only comes up late in the story…not that the Norse gods would ever be slow to kill a frost giant.)

Although the churning of the Sea of Milk is not a cosmogony, the Sea of Milk is the primal sea, so there may well be cosmogonic overtones, or at least hold-overs from some earlier cosmogonic tale.  (Hm.  Is that actually a word?  Maybe the word is “cosmogonical”?  No, that looks worse.  Well, even if it’s not a word, it’s formed the right way from an actual word…)

An illustration from the Mahabharata. Wikimedia Commons.

One of my sources describes Kamadhenu as “the cow of plenty.”  Presumably, since she’s from a Hindu tradition, that doesn’t mean that her meat can literally be carved out as many times as one wants and it’ll always grow back again.  (Don’t laugh:  Thor had goats that could do that.  He’d have them killed, cooked and served, and as long as the bones weren’t damaged, he could bring them back to life again, fully-fleshed, the next day.)  I’m not sure if her “cow of plenty” function meant she had an ability to make all plants in her vicinity grow to abundance, or if it just meant she could give a never-ending supply of milk.

In any case, no matter what function “cow of plenty” describes, I came across a Ugandan myth involving a magical cow with powers of plenty, though in this case I think they absolutely mean the ability to provide endless milk.

This Ugandan cow of plenty belonged to Kintu, the original (and, at that time, only) human.  Eventually, Kintu fell in love with Nambi, the daughter of the sky god Gulu.  Kintu asked for his beloved’s hand in marriage, but her father wasn’t eager to have a human son-in-law, and didn’t want to play fair about it, either.  First, he stole Kintu’s magic cow and hid it among his own herds in the sky.  If that was a test to see if Kintu could figure out what happened to his cow, Kintu failed it, because he just tried to live quietly and patiently without milk, until Nambi told him where his cow had gone.

When Kintu showed up in the sky to reclaim his cow, Gulu set him four tasks, each one impossible.  Kintu was led to a hut filled with enough food for a hundred men and told to empty it by morning; when Kintu couldn’t eat it all, he dug holes in the floor and dumped the rest through the floor, letting it plummet back to earth, bringing life and fertility to the land and sea.  The second task was to split rocks with a soft axe made of copper, but Kintu was able to use wooden wedges and water to split the rocks, using the axe as a hammer instead of as an axe.  The third test was to fill up a bottomless water pot; Kintu used the clinging properties of dew to get around the inherent difficulties there.  The last task was for Kintu to pick out his cow from the herd as it was driven past in front of him.  Nambi didn’t wait to see if Kintu could do it; she turned into a bee and told her lover to choose the animals on whose horns she landed.  Then she landed not only on the horns of Kintu’s cow, but also on the horns of the three calves the cow had given birth to during her time in the heavens.

Kintu won his bride, but he also won the unpleasant attentions of one of her brothers:  Death, who started by hunting Kintu, and then continued to hunt his descendants ever after.

Most of that doesn’t actually tie in with Kamadhenu in the least, I realize, but once I started the story, I wanted to finish it.

Kamadhenu’s status as a cow with the power of fertility is reminiscent of Geush Urvan, a bull that embodied the power of the earth itself in ancient Iranian beliefs.  It lived for three thousand years, only to be killed by Mithras.  Once Geush Urvan was dead, the power that had once been housed in the earth passed the sky and the gods who lived there, while what little power remained in the bull’s body was broken down and made into all the plants and animals of the earthly realm.  (It was because of his killing of the universal bull that the Mithraic ceremonies in Roman times always centered around the ritual slaughter of a bull, of course.)

From Geush Urvan we can get to another primal bovine, another cow this time.  Specifically, Audumla, the second being ever to exist, according to the Norse story of creation.

Apparently, before there was life, there was the ice of Niflheim.  From that ice emerged Ymir, the primal frost giant.  He was soon followed by Auðumbla, a cow who must have been of quite prodigious size, because the primal frost giant — much larger than the garden-variety Jotunn of the later tales — was able to nourish himself by suckling directly at her teats.  While she was thus feeding the first giant, Auðumbla was licking away at the ice, and eventually revealed Buri, who would go on to father Odin and his brothers.  Eventually, Odin and his brothers slew Ymir (there’s a shock, right?) and the world was created from his corpse.  (But I don’t know what happened to Auðumbla.  Probably ended up in Odin’s stables…)

Okay, so that wasn’t so much “comparative cow mythology” as “a random collection of cow-related myths” but…okay, actually, I think I really like the term “comparative cow mythology.”  I need to find a place to use that in a story.  That’s fun.