The Vedas and the UpanishadsThe word
lingam does not occur in the Rig Veda (RV), the most ancient Hindu text (c. 1500 BCE), nor does the god Shiva. But the deity Rudra, in many ways an antecedent of Shiva, does make a brief appearance, and the male organ, by another name (
kaprith, perhaps meaning "expanding" or "extending pleasure"), also appears in the Veda, in an obscene hymn about a sexual competition between a male monkey and the god Indra (RV 10.86.16-17; Doniger O'Flaherty 1981: 257-63). (The term also occurs at Rig Veda 10.101.12; Doniger O'Flaherty 1981: 66-67.) Indra is a virile god, a distant cousin of Zeus and Jupiter, who bequeaths to Shiva some aspects of his mythology, including myths of castration (Doniger O'Flaherty 1973, 85-86, 130-135). The male organ also appears, by yet another name (
shishna, "piercer" or "tail"), in two Vedic hymns imploring that same god, Indra, to strike down "those whose god is the phallus" or "those who play with the phallus" (shishna-devas) (RV 7.21.5, 10.99.3). Some scholars have suggested that this phrase may refer to an "early Indus cult" of the lingam (Hopkins 1971:9-10). But there is no evidence that the Indus Valley people had such a cult, let alone that the people who composed the Rig Veda knew about it, or that they disapproved of it instead of assimilating it to their own worship of their own phallic god, Indra -- no lawyer would go into court with such shaky evidence.
The word
lingam appears in the Upanishads (mystical texts from around 600 BCE) only in its general sense of a sign, as smoke is a sign of fire. But the male organ does appear, under still yet another name, in one of the oldest Upanishads, which calls it "the Thing" (
artha) (BA 6.4.11). The same text also describes the female organ in considerable detail, analogizing the Vedic oblation of butter into the fire to the act of sexual procreation (BA 6.2.13, 6.4.3). The worshipper in a sexual embrace with his wife imagines each part of the act as a part of the ritual of the oblation, while presumably anyone making the offering into the fire could also imagine each action as its sexual parallel. This is a very early instance of the interpretation of human sexual matters in terms of nonsexual, sacred matters (or, if you prefer, the reverse).
The MahabharataGradually the word
lingam took on the more particular meaning of a sign of gender, then the sign of the male gender, and finally the sign of the male gender of the god Shiva. In the Mahabharata, the ancient Sanskrit epic (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE), we first encounter the word
lingam unequivocally designating the sexual organ of Shiva:3 [Shiva in this text is called Harikesha (the Tawny-Haired), the Lord of the Mountain, the Eldest, the Lord Rudra, Bhava, and the Guru of the World; I have simplified the text by calling him Shiva throughout, and I have also condensed it somewhat, but added nothing.]
The creator, Brahma, wishing to create creatures, said to Shiva, the first being, "Create creatures, without delay." Shiva said, "Yes," but seeing that all creatures were flawed, he who had great ascetic heat plunged into the water and generated ascetic heat. Brahma waited for him for a very long time and then created another creator, a Prajapati ("lord of creatures"). The Prajapati, seeing Shiva submerged in the water, said to his father, Brahma, "I will create creatures, if there is no one who has been born before me." His father said to him, "There is no other male (purusha) born before you. This is just a pillar (or, Shiva who is called The Pillar) submerged in the water. Rest assured, and do the deed." And so the Prajapati created creatures. They were hungry and tried to eat the Prajapati, until Brahma provided them with food, plants, and animals, and then they began to procreate and increased in number.
Then Shiva stood up from the water. When he saw those creatures of various forms, increasing by themselves, he became angry, and he tore off his own lingam and threw it down on the ground, where it stood up just as it was. Brahma said to him, hoping to conciliate him with words, "What did you accomplish by staying so long in the water? And why did you tear out this lingam and plant it in the ground?" Then Shiva, becoming truly furious, said to Brahma, "Since someone else created these creatures, what will I do with it? The creatures can go on recycling forever, eating the food that I obtained for them through my ascetic heat." And Shiva went to his place on the mountain, to generate ascetic heat (M 10.17.10-26 [parentheses added]; see also Doniger O'Flaherty 1973: 131).
The "flaw" in the creatures seems to be their need for food, though later retellings say that Shiva hoped to produce, through his ascetic heat, creatures who would never die; to that degree, his powerful asceticism makes him more, not less, creative. What is significant for our question here is the ambiguity of the word for pillar (
sthanu): it is a name of Shiva, signifying the immobile, ascetic, desexualized form of the
lingam: but it also designates an inanimate pillar, which is what Brahma implies in his answer to the Prajapati, not exactly lying but drawing on the wrong meaning of the word in order to avoid admitting that there is, in fact, already another creator at work, precisely what the Prajapati did not want. Shiva in this myth is both a potentially procreative phallus (a fertile
lingam) and a pillar-like renouncer of sexuality (an ascetic
lingam). The word
lingam has the same double edge as the word "Pillar."
The Gudimallam LingamA
lingam (see figure 3) that scholars generally regard as the earliest physical depiction of the god Shiva was made sometime between the third and first centuries BCE in Gudimallam in southeastern Andhra Pradesh. Its anatomical detail is highly naturalistic (apart from its size: just under five feet high), and on the shaft is carved the figure of Shiva, also naturalistic, two-armed, holding an axe in one hand and the body of a small antelope in the other. His thin garment reveals his own sexual organ (not erect), his hair is matted, he wears large earrings, and he stands upon a dwarf. The details of its carving define this image unequivocally as a iconic representation of the male sexual organ; the hypothesis that it is a form of the god Shiva is suggested by the iconography of the axe, antelope, matted hair, and dwarf, and supported by the three horizontal lines, the sign of Shiva, that were painted on it some time after its original creation. Visitors to the Gudimallam
lingam in the early twenty-first century noted that while the large
lingam as a whole remains entirely naked, with all its anatomical detail, a chaste cloth was wrapped around the small image of the naked Shiva on the front of the
lingam, a kind of loincloth (or fig leaf) simultaneously covering up the middle of the figure in the middle of the
lingam and the middle of the
lingam itself. Here is a tradition driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake.
Stories about Shiva-Lingams in Later Sanskrit TextsThere is convincing textual evidence that people in ancient India associated the iconic form of the
lingam with the male sexual organ. A verse from the "Garland of Games" of Kshemendra, a Brahmin who lived in Kashmir in the elventh century CE, refers to the human counterpart of the divine Shival
lingam: "Having locked up the house on the pretext of venerating the
lingam, Randy scratches her itch with a
lingam of skin" (Narmamala 3.44). The first
lingam in this verse is certainly Shiva's, and there is an implied parallelism, if not identity, between it and the second one, which could be either a leather dildo (of which a number are described in the Kama-sutra, the great third-century CE Indian textbook of eroticism (KS 5.6.2-5, 7.2.4-13]) or its human prototype.
The human and divine levels of the
lingam were explicitly compared in a rather different way in a Sanskrit text that argued that all creatures in the universe are marked with the signs of the god Shiva and his consort, since all females have
pindis (the term for the base in which the sculpted form of the
lingam is set) and join with males, who have
lingams (like the Shiva-lingam set in the pindi) (SP 1.8.18-19; Doniger 2000: 397). In a sixteenth-century Marathi text, the Kali Yuga (the embodied spirit of the present Dark and Evil Age) grasps by one hand his
lingam (representing unrestrained sexuality, a synecdoche for wrong action of all kinds) and by the other hand his tongue (symbolic of lascivious speech), and he says, "I will be defeated only by those who guard this
lingam and their tongue."4 [Verse 2.82 of the Gurucaritra of Sarasvati Gangadhara, c. 1550 CE, composed in Marathi Ovi verse in Ganagapura, a partially marathi-speaking area of Northern Karnataka, Gulbarga district. I am indebted to Jeremy Morse for this text and translation.] The nineteenth-century sage Ramakrishna used to worship his own male organ because, he said, it reminded him of the Shiva-lingam; he had learned this "jivantalingapuja," or worship of the living
lingam, from his guru (Kripal 1995: 159-163).
The many Sanskrit myths that explain the origin of the worship of the Shiva-lingam can be divided into those that do regard the
lingam as part of the god's sexual anatomy and those that do not. Of the texts in which the
lingam is obviously the phallus of Shiva, like the myth about the Pillar that we have already considered, some -- most, but not all, told by worshippers of Shiva -- regard the
lingam as an entirely glorious form in which Shiva appears and accepts worship. But other texts -- some, but not all, told by worshippers of gods other than Shiva, particularly Vishnu -- regard the
lingam as an object of scorn and shame (Doniger O'Flaherty 1975: 137-53; 1990: 85-87). These texts are early evidence of the discomfort caused by the phallic meaning of the symbol, though they do not yet attempt to deny that meaning.
That discomfort can be traced back to ascetic and renunciant traditions that began in the Upanishads, alongside the very passages that praised the sexual act as inherently sacred. And this ascetic strain, often misogynist, often expressing a deep anxiety about the human body, challenged the other sort of Hinduism, the one that gloried in the body both for its fertility and for its eroticism. The two traditions remain in tension to this day.
The stories of Shiva in the Pine Forest occur in two sets of variants along this divide. In both sets, Shiva enters the Pine Forest naked, often "with his seed drawn up" ("upward seed," a variant of "upward-phallus"), either in order for his seed
not to fall down in the act of procreating, or in order to procreate, or both at once -- another striking instance of the sort of ambiguity that haunts this debate. The women of the Pine Forest fall madly in love with him, which infuriates their husbands, and Shiva's
lingam falls to the ground. But sometimes it falls as a result of the sages' curse (when the text regards the
lingam as shameful), and sometimes through Shiva's own volition (when the text regards the
lingam as a source of desirable power). In both cases, dire consequences follow, and the sages, having learned their lesson, agree to worship the Shiva-lingam forever after (Doniger O'Flaherty 1973: 172-209; 1990: 87-91; Shulman 2004).
Lingam-worship is cast in a definitely negative vein in a group of stories in which the sage Bhrigu visits the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva in turn; the first two welcome the sage, but Shiva happens to be alone with his wife and refuses to be disturbed. The furious sage curses Shiva to be worshipped in the form of the thing that he seems to care most about, the lingam (PP 6.282.20-36; Doniger O'Flaherty 1973: 305-6). But
lingam-worship is a positive factor, and Shiva is superior, rather than inferior, to Brahma and Vishnu, in another myth in which the
lingam does not seem to have anything at all to do with any part of the male anatomy. In this myth, usually called "the ephiphany of the
lingam" (lingodbhava), Shiva appears in the form of a pillar in the water, the form that he takes in the Mahabharata story of self-castration, and indeed this episode of the epiphany is often told as a direct sequence to that story of self-castration (Doniger O'Flaherty 1973: 130-32). While Brahma and Vishnu are arguing as to which of them fathered the other, Shiva appears before them as a pillar of light and flame, infinitely high and infinitely deep. The two gods try in vain to find its top and bottom, Brahma in the form of a goose and Vishnu in the form of an aquatic boar, and sometimes Brahma lies and says he's found the top when he hasn't, for which he is cursed never to be worshipped in India any more (see figure 4). Then Brahma and Vishnu humbly protrate themselves before Shiva, recognizing that he had created both of them, as well as everything else in the universe (Brahmanda Purana 1.2.26.10-61; Doniger O'Flaherty 85-87). There is nothing sexual about this
lingam, though it is perhaps significant that it is the star witness in a debate about fatherhood.
The Lingam in Vernacular TextsLater Sanskrit and vernacular texts depict the Shiva-lingam alternatively, and in combination, as a part of his body and as an abstract symbol of the god, worshipped with offerings of fruits and flowers. Hindus for many centuries have seen their god simultaneously in two forms: the true form of god is without any qualities (nir-guna), unimaginable; but out of compassion for us, and so that we can love him, the god also manifests himself in a form with qualities (sa-guna), perhaps as a human with two arms, or with particular features (a blue skin for Krishna, a third eye for Shiva). Each is real in its own way; sometimes you reach for one, sometimes for the other. In this way, too, many Hindus have regarded the
lingam as both abstract, without (sexual) qualities, and particular, with (sexual) qualities.
The lingam can also be real, and human, and particular, without being sexual. A number of South Indian texts in Tamil tell of a miracle: a stone image of Shiva, with a face, bleeds in response to, or to test, the devotion of a pious worshipper. Some versions of this story refer to this image simply as "the Lord," that is, Shiva, but other versions assume that what is meant is a statue of the Lord, a lingam. The many representations of this episode in both paintings and sculpture depict the form of a Shiva-lingam with a face and eyes. Such an image seems to be assumed, but never named as such, in this story about Shiva told in the Periya Puranam, a popular South Indian Tamil text from the twelfth century:
One day, Kannappar, the chief of a tribe of hunters, found Shiva in the jungle. Filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannappar resolved to feed Shiva. He kicked aside the flowers that a Brahmin priest had left on the head of Shiva and gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head. His feet, and his dogs' paws, left their marks on Shiva. He stayed with him all night, and left at dawn to hunt again.
In order to demonstrated to the Brahmin priest the greatness of Kannappar's love, Shiva caused blood to flow from one of his eyes. To staunch the flow, Kannappar gouged out his own eye with an arrow and replaced the god's eye with his. When Shiva made his second eye bleed, Kannappar put his foot on Shiva's eye to guide his hand, and he was about to pluck out his remaining eye when Shiva stretched out his hand to stop him, and placed Kannappar at his right hand (Periya Puranam 16; McGlashan 2006: 71-86).
Since at least the seventeenth century, the common Tamil term for Shiva's
lingam has been
kuRi (mark, or sign), a direct translation of the original, nonsexual meaning of
lingam. (An-kuRi and peN-kuRi -- "male sign" and "female sign" represent the Sanskrit
pum-lingam and
stri-lingam). The term kuRi is still common today as a respectable or medical term for the sign of sex. But this text never uses the term
lingam (or KuRi) at all, merely saying,
"The eyes of the Lord were bleeding." Nevertheless, many scholars subsume the Kannappar story under the category of bleeding
lingams (Ferro-Luzzi 1987; Cox 2005), and
the Tamil tradition assumes that the stone has the form of a lingam. Yet that stone has nothing to do with any part of Shiva's body but his eyes. (Of course, Freud would have something to say about the upward displacement of the genitals to the eyes, as in the blinding of Oedipus -- standing in for his castration -- but we need not follow there.)
-- God's Body, or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva, by Wendy Doniger