Isis In India

Isis In India
fasicule 1

by Mogg Morgan

Copyright Katon Shual and Mandrake of Oxford, 04 First edition All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including xerography, photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage system without permission in writing from the author. Published by Mandrake of Oxford PO Box 250 OXFORD OX1 1AP (UK) A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the US Library of Congress.

ISBN 1 869928

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Chapter One

urugan was a Tamil guru of absolute integrity and honesty, great and critical knowledge and a very kind heart. Who was your guru? I asked He thought about the question for a moment. My teacher and his teacher before him, and before that all belonged to the line of Yakkupo Back then my knowledge of Tamil was rudimentary and the name meant very little to me. I nodded inanely. You have never heard of this person? I had to admit that I had not. Then, he said, let me translate that into English. Yakkupo is not a Tamil name. What I am saying is that the siddhas of my tradition come from the line of Jacob. Now do you understand? I wasnt sure. Could Murugan be talking about a character from the Bible? The only Jacob I know about, I said, is from the Old Testament. Precisely! he interrupted, and what do you know about this Jacob? I thought for a moment. It had been a long time since I read the Bible. Jacob was a patriarch of the Hebrews before they became the nation of Israel.

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Yes. Urr, I was stumbling for something relevant to say. Then something I learnt at Sunday school popped into my head, Jacob, I said rather lamely, blessed the Pharaoh.1 He was the father of Joseph who during a long period of famine settled his people to Egypt. That the Egyptians could shelter these ancient victims of a great famine is a fact overshadowed by the later accounts of the eventual servitude of the Jews as told in the story of the Exodus. At the end of the Book of Genesis. . . Murugan now took over the conversation, talking long and excitedly, of how the story of Jacob is full of arcane knowledge of magick and medicine. He reminded me of Josephs skill in the interpretation of dreams. Even the story of the Exodus was really an account of a magical battle in which the Hebrew priests routed their Egyptian colleagues. Yes, I said, I know all this, but has it really anything to do with the holy men of south India? Murugan paused. Well, he said, its up to you what you believe. I am merely answering your question. That is where the Siddha doctrine, as taught to me by my teacher, originates. In this I have no doubt. If you have doubts then you must go to your books. But you will find that what I am saying is true. Knowledge is like a river, its origins are obscure. I told Murugan that I did not doubt what he was saying but that it was the Western way to always seek corroboration. He nodded in agreement. Go to your books, he said, and if I were you I would start by reading about the Romanaka - the Romans. The Romans? I replied, unable to suppress the scepticism in my voice. Yes, my guru said, the Romans. Have you not heard of Sir Mortimer Wheeler? I nodded The greatest discovery of his life was the presence of the Romans

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here in this part of India. You will see. And indeed I did. The eminent Tamil scholar Professor Kamil Zvelebil was one of the first to record the extremely heterodox beliefs of the south Indian sadhus.2 In Tamil Nadu these people are members of secret societies called Siddhas. Siddhas are holy men and women, followers of a panIndian mystical tradition. These people are beyond the traditional strictures of caste and class. Their rites are strange and include much that we would call magick or witchcraft. These people have their own definitions of the meaning of social class. And these traditions are about as far away as it is possible to get from the po-faced priests of traditional Hinduism. They also acknowledge the existence of several international sodalities of magi, including one called The Ekiptaya or the Egyptians. Where do these ideas originate? Are they a modern invention? When I set out to investigate the origins of this tradition I had little idea where it would lead me. I came upon a story, largely buried in academic journals that was extremely fascinating in its own right. I discovered a theme that seemed to provide a unique insight into Indian culture. As the great mythographer Mircea Eliade wrote: There is no more absorbing story than that of the discovery and interpretation of India by Western consciousness. But the reward was to be even greater. The survival of a truly Egyptian magical tradition in India, opens out new possibilities of understanding ancient Egypt and its religion. The odd twist of history that brought both the ancient Egyptian and ancient Indian cultures together in such a direct way, enables us to apply the comparative method in which light will be shed on both traditions. For example the facts presented in this book fill important gaps in a tradition sometimes known as Hermetic. Hermeticism is a syncretic religion whose central tenets came together in Alexandria; the ancient city founded by Alexander the Great in the Nile Delta. To call Hermeticism or magick a religion is

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controversial, but I hope the reader will bear with me until a later chapter when I shall have the opportunity to argue the case for such a view. Hermeticism combines elements of ancient Egyptian theology, the gods and goddesses of Egypt with other religious themes totally foreign to that land. In the early centuries after Christ, Hermeticism was steadily surpressed. With a few important exceptions, the body of Hermetic knowledge was, as far as we know, lost and forgotten until it began to reemerge in the European Renaissance fifteen hundred years after its disappearance from history. Hermeticism was lost, or so it seems, when one of those dark ages descended upon human intellectual history. The end of Egypt coincides with the disappearance of the Hermetic philosophy. Our story, in part, traces what happened to this and several other doctrines, when the lights in the sanctuary were extinguished. For as it happens, at the time of Christ, there was a Greco-Roman merchant colony in south India. These merchants made their first landfall after an epic sea journey of two thousand miles across the Arabian Ocean, at a port known in the ancient world as Musiris. Musiris is long gone but it is almost certainly once stood quite close to modern day Colchin, in Kerala. Although Roman speculators usually bankrolled the ships Greek seamen almost invariably navigated them. Those ancient Greek mariners, often natives of Alexandria, worshiped the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. The cult of Isis had become a world religion, with pride of place amongst the people of the classical Mediterranean. Isis was particularly important as the protector of people on dangerous sea voyages. Isis has many names, and one of them, as I shall prove in this book, is the Tamil Pattini. Near Colchin there is an ancient temple which has the remains of a secret underground shrine to Pattini. This temple has seen many changes since it was first founded at the time of Christ. In the Indian middle ages (c.9th century in the modern calendar) the temple was the target of fanatical Hindu reformers. The original rites were either discontinued or driven underground and Kali, a wholly

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Indian goddess, replaced Pattini. But, miraculously, some of the original descendants of the Isis worshippers are still connected as administrators with the temple although they do not act as priests (pujaris).

The opening of the ways

This remarkable transference of Egyptian ideas to South India, was only made possibly by an equally remarkable feat of navigation. Contact between India and the Middle East started in the dim mists of history and prehistory. We need only look to the writings of Greek philosopher Plato, for several examples, including, a description of a medical system that has been identified as an early form of Indian medicine (Ayurveda)! But things really got going when in 336BC, Alexander, an unknown Macedonian was called to the throne of his murdered father Philip. Macedonia was a province of Northern Greece but it soon became the hub of an international empire stretching from Egypt to the banks of the river Indus. Alexanders conquest of the North Western reaches of the sub continent (modern day Pakistan), in the fourth century before Christ established a land bridge. Take a look at a modern map and think of the geopolitics of this route. The route into the north west of India via Afghanistan is dangerous today and it was hardly less so in ancient times. For those that followed the land bridge between east and west, it was long, hard, expensive and dangerous. Alexanders famous retreat from India, established a coastal route. Ships soon retraced this route but for safety they sailed strictly within sight of the land. Consequently all cargoes were taxed as they entered the coastal waters of the many small kingdoms that ringed the coast. Mediterranean merchant ships could in this manner reach the rich marts of the extreme South of India but it was a very long voyage often of more than two years duration. Sometimes these ships never returned. This is hardly an attractive investment for a Roman entrepreneur!

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Even so the Romans wanted to buy diamonds. pearls, sapphires, agate, onyx, rubies, ivory and muslins. They also wanted Chinese silks, Indian cottons, peacocks, large tigers for the amphitheater, carnelian, cardamom and above all pepper. The Romans were particularly fond of pepper. Indeed so much did a taste for this precious commodity spread to the rest of their empire, that even Alaric the Goth demanded 3,000 lbs. of pepper in his treaty with the Romans of AD 408.3 Pepper was more than a culinary herb, its excellent medicinal qualities had been described in Indian medicine (Ayurveda) for millennia. The lands in the south were particular rich and the Romans with their Greek vessels regularly plied their trade along this coast. The journey may be long but the rewards were sufficiently great to make it just viable to follow the long route, coasting around the rim of the Arabian/Indian Ocean. Port taxes, nowadays called cabotage, were steep and probably too frequent. But the bottom line was that at journeys end the ships cargo would provide more than enough profit to make the whole enterprise worth while. Before AD 21, the historian Pliny estimates that 120 ships had made the trip. Although the South of India was never part of the Roman Empire, the Romans established several trading stations on its Western and Eastern Coasts. With the benefit of modern maps we can see that there is a direct route across the Arabian Ocean to the rich trading centres of the South. But the journey is one of more than 2000 miles of open ocean. Under the emperor Augustus (23BC - AD14) there are records of at least two Indian delegations. Either at that time or a little later during the reign of Claudius, Greek navigators learnt from them of the direct route to the south. Only during the reign of Augustus was maritime technology sufficiently well organised to make the open ocean route a viable one. It took advantage of a monsoon wind that later came to be known as 'hippalos' after its first pioneer. Using this wind, a trading ship could, in forty days, sail directly across the ocean from Ocelis, modern Aden, to the ancient port of Musiris, or Cochin

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in modern Kerala. The mechanics of the monsoon meant that for several months of the year the wind blew continually west to east, from the Red Sea to the tip of India. In another part of the year it reversed its direction. Merchant ships, having sold their cargo of copper, lead, tin, wine, slaves, silver and gold cash; could sail making landfall at Ocelis (Aden) on the Arabian coast. From there is was a relatively straightforward trip to the Red Sea port of Berenice where the cargo could be taken across the desert to be reloaded on the Nile for transport to Alexandria and thence to Rome. A skilled navigator, with knowledge of this pattern of ocean winds could make the hardest part of the journey in forty days. When the pioneers had done their work, the route became as predictable and therefore as safe as crossing the Mediterranean itself. The great Tamil scholar Professor Kamil Zvelebil has written a lively account of the impact of one of these early speculative voyages. As this trade wind still bears the ancient Greek name Hippalos, Professor Zvelebil, with a little poetic licence, gives the name Hippalos to the novels central character the vessels Alexandrian captain. The Tamil language is peppered with words taken from European tongues. And indeed there are many words in Greek, Latin and even Semitic parlance derived from Asian technical terms. In linguistics such terms are known as loan words. The Indian term Yavana or Yonaka in the following passage are from the Greek Ionian. Muziris, the great Chera mart, and the main sea-port of the ancient kingdom of the Seres, on the western coast of southern India, always lively, always crowded, never dull, never quiet, was on that particular day in the grip of feverish excitement. Along the banks of the river Periyar lingered groups of tired harbor serfs, filling their bellies with turtle fat enjoying the rich roasted flesh of lampreys, and flushing that heavy treat down with strong, hot palm wine. They were probably the only ones who failed to be thrilled by what was happening that late afternoon out on the sea. On the mole, on the pier, and along the shore, throngs and crowds of dark-skinned men, women and children were watching the monstrous apparition of a huge ship which was emerging

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from behind the horizon; in a straight line ahead towards the West, where the endless ocean spread out from India into unknown, unseen regions. Bullock-carts along the paved roads stopped, palanquins and sedan-chairs were lowered onto the sand, still warm, and even the light, swift chariots stood immobile, their passengers watching the approaching sea-monster. An elephant, halted in its progress, knelt down expecting its mahout to descend, but the man preferred to remain sitting in the howdah, since from the elevated post of observation he had a better view of what was happening. A pirate! Nonsense. Pirate boats are smaller and faster. I say a pirate from Nitra. What a monster! Huge, isnt she? Must be a Yavana vessel! A Yavana vessel? Rubbish! They always come coasting from the North. I told you, its a pirate from the islands. No, its not a pirate, its a makara fish, a leviathan, a whale! Laughter all around at the attempted joke. Then: look - look, I can see the mastheads now! One, two - three! Its a ship of the Romanakas! It must be! Now they could see it was a Yavana ship, incredibly large, with three masts, and, what was utterly unexpected, it approached the port of Musiri straight from across the seas, not, as usual, from the northern quarter along the narrow coastline of the Chera kingdom, what even then was called Keralam. Alexandria to Coptos, from Coptos to Berenice, from Berenice to Ocelis - and then, on July 15, from Ocelis at the southern tip of Arabia straight across the Mare Erythraeum

Gods of the Greek mariners

We shall have a great deal to say later on about the characteristics of

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the cult of Isis. Indias first news of the goddess very likely came from the captains and crew of merchant ships. 2000 years ago the cult of Isis had reached its final Hellenic form. It is unlikely that the ancient Egyptians would have recognized their own ancient goddess in the cult put together by the Greeks. But although the Greek cult would be anathema to the ancient Egyptian priests, it is this Greek version of the cult that we should expect to find represented in the Indian setting. But that is not the whole of the story and later on we will have to examine in great detail the Hellenistic and purely Egyptian elements of the cult, for both strands of belief survive in India. To really understand what is going on we need to follow the cult from its beginnings at a time before the building of the pyramids, when the Goddess Isis transformed from a local deity to become the focus of the first national religion in human history. As her message travelled beyond Egypt Isis became arguably the centre of the first world religion, with temples as far apart as South India and the Roman trading station on the banks of the Thames in London. Isis started life as a player in the most famous religious drama of all time. The story is that of the holy family of Egypt, of Isis, Osiris, Nepthys and Seth. It tells of their internecine struggle and how this provokes the two brothers, Osiris and Seth to jealous rage. Like Biblical Cain, Seth kills then dismembers his brother Osiris. After this Seth tries to hide his crime by scattering and concealing the body parts of his slain brother. In the drama Isis discovers her vast magical prowess, searches for and eventually finds the body of her dead husband. Isis revives the god, one of the earliest eruptions of the myth of the dying and resurrecting god. But her work is only temporary, just enough time to engender a magical son who will eventually grow, protected by his mother, to avenge his father and take his rightful role on the thrown of Egypt. This is what Joseph Campbell calls monomyth, a perennial myth that has entered into the web of almost all the current batch of great world religions. From these simple beginnings as consort to the god Osiris Isis accumulates more and more attributes or powers. By the Hellenic period the list of her powers is so long it comprises a long

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hymn or doxology In the Doxology of Isis we learn for the first time of Isis as patroness of seafarers. Isis as a goddess of the sea is not something one would find in the classical Egyptian accounts but by the time of the maritime empires of the ancient Greeks one reads: Doxology of Isis (abridged and amended) Distinguish for us earth from sky, sky from the pathways of the stars How the sun and moon shall go arry Lady of rainfall, reveal the tides For you are within the rays of the sun closely you attend its courses Hail your native Egypt The ways of the sea are yours to tell mysteries too of rivers and of the storm, Lady of the thunderbolt, if you can swell and calm the sea, for navigation Make possible a journey over water Lady of rivers, Lady of the sea, lady of the winds Hail your native Egypt The ancient historian Pliny recalls that the Romans built a temple at Musiris. Just what kind of temple this might have been is discussed in detail in the next chapter. But it is fairly certain that it would have included some dedication to Isis, paid for by the colony of traders. Traces of her worship are still to be found in the remaining institutions. During the time that the cult of Isis came to India, Buddhism was very strong and for a variety of reasons it seems very likely that it was the Buddhists and other unorthodox sects who first welcomed and sheltered the foreign goddess worshipers.

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Hindu Temple
The shrine to the Roman emperor or to Isis would have to have been one of the earliest religious buildings of any kind in Indian. There really are very few surviving structures such temples in India before this time. The first stone built structures in India are roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Buddhism. Whereas early Hinduism had very little use for preaching, the formal sermon is the distinguishing mark of Buddhism. This may explain the fact that the first religious buildings in India were Buddhist monasteries, stupas and prayer halls. Buddhism required the construction of large covered prayer halls for the faithful to gather for meditation and to hear a sermon. The earliest Buddhist prayer halls were artificial caves.4 A stupa is a Buddhist burial mound, often purely symbolic with a chamber housing a temple for the living. This hybridization of two

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functions, temple and tomb, makes the Buddhist stupas conceptually very similar to the Egyptian pyramids. Buddhist burial practice is in marked contrast to orthodox Hindu taboo concerning the dead. Hindus cremate the dead as far away from a temple as possible. Any orthodox Hindu would find it hard to countenance a combined temple and burial space, even if it were purely symbolic. But in ancient times burial, not cremation, was the accepted method for disposal of the dead. If a modern Indian citizen desires burial he or she could appeal to the ancient practice as a precedent. And some contemporary Hindus have made such a claim. The evidence of the ancient practice of entombment is widely scattered throughout the South of India in the form of a large number of

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megalithic burial sites, dolmens and cyst burials. These structures, although they resemble similar dolmens of the European stone age are in fact Iron Age, built sometime between 1000BC and the time of Christ (see picture).5 These megalithic structures are always built on high ground near important water management resources such as canals, dams and reservoirs. It is extremely likely that the people honored in these structures were in some way responsible for the dissemination of the knowledge of irrigation and water management that transformed Indian agriculture at this time. And this is a startling point of contact between south India and ancient Egypt where Osiris, the consort of Isis, is also linked with the knowledge of irrigation and the control of the Nile, the river that built Egypt. The strange fact is that these anachronistic megalithic structures

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provide the model ground plan for the later Buddhist stupa. And from them sprang the entire spectrum of religious architecture in India, which reached its apogee in the famous South Indian style. Although Buddhists were the pioneers of stone temple building in India, the Hindus soon copied the Buddhist models. From these beginnings Hindu temple developed its own independent style. Although Buddhism and Hinduism once coexisted quite peaceably, by the time of Christ inter-communal disputes were the norm. And by the Indian Middle ages, Buddhism had been driven from the land of its birth and many of its former structures had been rededicated or destroyed.6

The Temple of Isis in India

The remains of the first Isis temple in India are to be found in the temple of Kodungallur or Kotunkolur (Cranganore) near modern Colchin. This almost ceetainly was Musiris, the first landing point for vessels plying the Hippalos trade wind. There are still many other alien religious communities in Colchin. Students of the apostle Thomas founded there the oldest Christian church in India in AD 50. There is also a very old Jewish community. Medieval maps still show the site of the original temple to the Roman emperor close to the site of a modern day Hindu temple. Nowadays this temple of Karumba Devi is dedicated to the goddess Bhagavati, a form of Kali. However recent research shows that the temple may have had an earlier or perhaps additional dedication to Pattini also known by the secular name Kannaki.. The worship of Pattini has all but died out in India and the cult has been assimilated to either Kali or Draupadi, interesting goddesses in their own right. The Karumba Devi built in the undistinguished Malayam style, does not often appear in books of Indian architecture. However when a local Brahmin was commissioned to write a history of the temple he called it The Secret Chamber.7 He gave his book this rather startling title because of a continuing mystery in the temples construction. On Kali festival days, a door is opened to the west of the shrine which allows certain 'VIPs' to see a red cloth draped over a

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secret chamber. This secret chamber is completely sealed and can only be entered via a subterranean passageway whose entrance is found outside of the temple on the eastern side. Secret chambers and tunnels are not normally associated with the structure of Hindu temples although significantly for our quest they do play a major role in the mystery cults of ancient Egypt. The entrance tunnel to the chamber is orientated east-west therefore sharing yet another feature with similar structures found in Egyptian temples. Nowadays infested with snakes, symbol of the goddess, it has been sealed for several years. Two houses guard the passage and the people who live in these houses are called Atikals. In ancient times, especially within the Jaina religion, Atikal meant saint. Today Atikals are a caste of degraded Brahmins, who play no part in the rituals of Karumba Devi temple but still act as administrators and secular management. Could it be that the Atikals are the descendents of the original owners of this temple? And what of the secret chamber, the passageway and the countless strange practices, to be discussed later, associated with its presence? Could it be true, as some say, that the remains of Pattini, a goddess whose rites closely resemble those of Egyptian Isis, are kept there? Who is Pattini? Pattini is said to be the only veiled goddess in Indian iconography. Uniquely in Indian iconography, Pattinis consort is killed, dismembered and resurrected through his wifes magical power. Scholars such as Richard Fynes have advanced powerful arguments that this Pattini is yet another formely unknown name of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Outside of the temple, the rites of Pattini have spread far and wide throughout South India. Our quest for this goddess will lead us amongst spirit mediums and folk magick practitioners. But it will not end there, through her we will also find comprehensive details of a ritual that started life on the banks of the Nile, three thousand years earlier. Even Tamil Nadus national epic the Cilappattikaram - The Lay of the Anklet will be shown to contain recognizable elements of that rite. So far I have only laid out a few bare facts of our quest, in the

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chapters that follow I will need to retrace the steps in greater detail. Only then will the full significance of the strange story I am about to tell become clear I hope you are ready for a ride as fascinating as that original journey by the priests of Isis in India more than two thousand years ago.

Notes 1 Genesis 47:10 2 Professor Kamil V Zvelebil, The Poets of the Powers, Rider 1973 3 Mortimer Wheeler, My Archaeological Mission to Indian and Pakistan. (Thames & Hudson 1976) p. 55 4 Andreas Volwahsen, Living Architecture: India, Macdonald 1969. This wonderful book is the source of many of the temple diagrams. 5 Mortimer Wheeler, My Archaeological Mission to India and Pakistan, Thames & Hudson 1976. The photographs of the Cyst burial at Brahmagiri the Megalithic tomb from Vengupattu, Arcot are from his book. He is also made first major publication of the Roman presence in India, the big discovery of his day. 6 Shankara was born in Cranganore, ie Kotangallur site of the famous temple 7 Induchudan, V.T. (1969), The Secret Chamber: a historical anthropological and philosophical study of the Kodungallur Temple, Trichur: Colchin Devasan Board.