Archeologists have made extensive studies of the ancient rain forests along the Indus River. Although not in the same category as the Amazon, the river once called Trisaris was a vast eco-system which served as home, food and climate for a stable population mostly in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Like the Amazon, the basin even created its own weather.
Indra’s First Trial - (A)Vritra
Four thousand years ago, along the Avalitic Sea, lived the daughter of an elemental being named Tvashtri. Elemental Tvashtri loved her daughter greatly and so did her grand-mother, the sky goddess, Avritra, for the daughter was beautiful, thoughtful and strong.
The daughter's name was Trisaris, a riverine goddess who provided wonderful abundance to all who lived along her long, wide valley. To wild creatures and humans alike she gave sustenance, protection and benign love amidst the thickly forested bends of her body and from three lush heads she gushed treasured blessings into the deep blue sea. For as long as anyone could remember, this had been so.
But one day a strange new deity came and claimed Valley Trisaris. He was a northern god, accustomed to bleak winters and vast open plains. To his followers he had given but two commandments - to multiply and to subdue the Earth.
His name was Brahma (called Abrahmin farther west) and in his own realm, he was omnipotent.
Beautiful Trisaris was too busy to notice this new god and he, favored so long with worship and obedience, was greatly offended. He spoke to her in a deep, arrogant voice, but she seemed deaf to his demands. He tried a rumbling rage, but she would not acknowledge him. Angry, the god followed his own commandment, creating a great hero-self to make war upon Trisaris.
He named this hero Indra and was pleased. Dutiful, Indra fought bravely to defeat Trisaris, to bend her to his will. But no matter what he did, Trisaris continued in her own way, The Old Way. 'She is incorrigible,' Indra told his father. 'I believe that, unbound, she will dominate our entire world.'
Indra's father agreed, and so dutiful Indra killed her with his thunderbolt. The people were stunned with dread and admiration, but the elemental mother of the river goddess was furious with outrage.
Tvashtri breathed new life into her daughter, making her even more powerful than before, and, it seemed, fully conscious of her enemy. With natural cunning she began to oppose Indra, to frustrate his ambitions.
Indra attacked again. This time he commanded his woodsmen to cut off the three brilliant heads of Trisaris with their axes. The instant this was done great clouds of flashing birds rose out of the writhing corpse and fled skyward.
The body of Trisaris, deprived of its life flow, lay swollen and putrefying. In a very short time it grew poisonous.
The fleeing birds awakened Avritra, the Sky Serpent, and Tvashtri, her daughter came crying with sorrow. 'See what Indra has done to my daughter, O Mother!'
Avritra saw and was horrified. 'I will avenge your daughter!' she promised Tvashtri, and at once lay siege to the constricted valley.
'Father,' Indra said, 'it is just as we feared. Not Trisaris, but her grandmother has become the Enveloper, the Obstructor. For she withholds the rains and blows fierce dry winds upon the land. Your people cower in their cities. I must fight this sky demon.'
And so Indra came skyward to challenge Avritra and a terrible fight raged upon Earth and in the heavens. In this battle Avritra was victorious. She seized the Avatar of Brahma and stuffed him into her huge mouth, then swallowed him into her coils. Still, her vengeance was incomplete. She refused to stop the raging dust storms or ease the blistering heat. She kept the rains away and all down the great valley life of every kind was hard pressed to survive. Brahma's priests and nobles were terrified. What could they do now?
After much recrimination and debate they came up with a plan. It was risky, but gods had been neutralized before by similar activities. Relentlessly, by rite and celebration and prayer, all in praise of Avritra, the people sought to appease the great monster.
For months, perhaps years, they wept and made themselves prostrate. They threw flowers into the sky and sang in sweet voices. At last Avritra grew bored, and her eyes became heavy with slumber. She made a great yawn and when she did an enraged, vengeful Indra erupted from her mouth.
The battle began all over again. But Indra was defeated again and he fled back to his father-self in humiliation. Another great conference was held and these were the results:
1. Brahma, The Creator, was forced to create two other aspects of himself, both of equal power and authority. They were Vishnu, The Preserver and Siva, The Destroyer. As a Trinity-in-Tension, they would rule the Cosmos.
2. Avritra was persuaded to make peace, but she laid down these conditions -
a. The Brahman must give their solemn promise that Indra wouldnot attack her with anything made of wood or stone or metal ...
b. ... or anything wet or dry ...
c. ... or during daytime or nighttime ...
Satisfied, the Brahmans agreed and thus the Great Treaty was concluded. For a time peace did indeed reign in the valley, but it was an uneasy peace.
For Indra could not forget the reason he had been created. He sulked and schemed and bristled at the restrictions Avritra had placed upon him, yearning to fulfill his intended destiny. Then one day, as he was kicking sand on the poisoned delta of Trisaris' slain heads he was suddenly inspired. Sea breezes were blowing hard and surf pounded upon the beaches. Foam formed and blew around.
Indra picked it up.
'Odd', he thought, 'it is neither wet nor dry'.
He looked around. It was that crepuscular time, neither light nor dark. Quickly he gathered up the foam, mixed it with Trisaris' acid poison as he ran, and without warning, leapt into the sky and wrapped the foam, like a necklace around the neck of Avritra as she arose from her sleep. The acid burned her flesh and kept on burning.
The Climate Goddess thrashed about, of course, and bellowed from the heavens, but it would not save her. Slowly the acid severed her neck, just below the cowl, and forever since she, like her daughter and granddaughter, has been slain. Only her corpse remains, vivid on the summer night. She is a ever present reminder of Indra's determination and craftiness.
She is also a testament to the awesome ambitions and authority of Brahma, Siva and Vishnu, a trinity ancient beyond all others, except that of Osiris, Isis and Horus, who fought their own monster, Set.
But the Vedic gods have survived much longer and the tale of Indra and Avritra is central even today in the main religion of India, a people nearly a billion strong.
The people also remember Avritra, the Great Serpent, her sky children, the Naga and Nagini, and those who populate the Earth, cobra kings. Nor have they forgotten that the lands of India were once domains where natural forces ruled over a primitive and paradisial place.
This legendary epic, like so many others, is based upon actual events. In it the complex is greatly simplified, time is compressed and the principal characters have been given 'other-worldly' talents in order to entertain, amaze and inspire those privileged to know the story.
Historically, the tale has its genesis in the great invasions and migrations of between 2000 and 1500BCE, when brother tribes of Aryans swept down out of the steppe regions of North and Central Asia into the Balkans, Anatolia, Iran and India, even China. These 'Ari' are known dimly to historians as D'Ori, Chim'Ari, As'Ari, Am'Ari, K'ari, H'Uri, etal.
They were, in a general way, nomadic peoples who herded animals like sheep, goats, cattle, and for the most mobile and warlike, the horse. The restless Ari, for countless generations, had moved into an area, practiced slash and burn agriculture, overgrazed the grasses, then moved on as the harsh climate dictated. Eventually, their herds and human population outgrew available resources and the only place left to go was south, over the great mountain barriers, into the sweet water river worlds.
It was a classic clash of cultures. One, which we loosely call 'civilization', thrived upon limited land and water. They carefully controlled their population and worshiped deities which helped them do so. These divinities can be generally classed as 'serpentine', for the winding, replenished rivers are mirrored in the night sky and below, in the earth, by whatever subterranean beast writhes convulsively within the ground. Serpents, from Ethiopia to China and the Americas, reigned supreme during the Second Millennium Before the Common Era.
The other category of gods found rivers quite fickle, even adversarial. Either they raged destructively or were unaccountably dry. In both cases they were impediments to free movement of herds and dangerously uncontrollable, an anathema to dwellers of the wide open, arid plain.
Unable to sink roots into the land, this culture instituted stability through rigid class distinctions, later called castes, composed of a ruling priesthood, nobles, artisans, and to support them all, a vast class of slaves. The most famous and widely worshiped of Ari deities was The Forefather, called Brahma, (farther west Ab'arim) who had commanded his children to 'go forth and multiply', 'subdue the Earth'.
The tribes which invaded Western India (now Pakistan) called themselves H'ari'ap. It had taken them longer to arrive than some, the Huri for example, who became founders of the Hittite Empire by about 2000BCE. Most historians believe the Harappans entered the Indus Valley around 1500BCE, or perhaps a couple of centuries earlier. Harappan warriors found it simple enough to conquer those who lived in the rich river valley and to impose their caste system. But the river could not be controlled. In keeping with their prime directives, to multiply and conquer, the Harappans began to clear more land, for the new slaves must also multiply and they preferred a diet of long water grass, rice. More slaves required more land, and more land.
And so the Indus Valley rain forest was steadily attacked and by about 700BCE, completely laid to waste.
This relentless destruction caused several serious problems. First the reduced area of transpiring trees caused an erratic amount of moisture in the air over the valley, moisture which routinely had caused self-generated rainfall over a considerable region, as far away as Arabia. Secondly, without the walls of trees which lined the Indus, rainfall and snow melt off the Himalayas, a huge quantity of water, the river could not be kept within its traditional banks.
Each year new and fickle channels were cut all down the valley, stripping fields and river bottoms, depositing almost none of the rich soil and silt - nutrients essential to crude agriculture - as it had for millions of years. Almost all it raged on to the sea where even the deltas and salt marshes were damaged again and again.
Third, without the deep shade of trees the sun began to bake and blister the ground, sucking its remaining moisture away and leaving withered crops, cracked mud and blowing dust.
Disaster struck again and again. The great river of Arabia, once comparable to the Tigris, dried up, was covered with blowing sand and, until satellite images revealed its hiding place, never seen again. Desert spread rapidly to Iran and Afghanistan.
Without the daily showers of primal Indus (Tvastri) the climate of an entire continent changed. All that remained was the annual monsoon (Avritra), and her violent storms swept far inland, hard against the Himalayas, dumping as much as 200 inches of rain in a six week period. Very little of it soaked into the parched, rock-hard ground.
Monsoon became a season of terror, causing vast floods, furious destruction of crops and towns. And then the sun came out and boiled away what little remained. Harappan cities, such as Monenjo-Daro and Amri, with continuous rebuilding, began to resemble mountains of dry mud-brick.
Weakened by sun as well as water, the cities proved unable to resist either one. Moreover, it took a whole new category of slaves to create these control centers and consequently, more priests and soldiers to enforce that servitude ... and, of course, ever more grain to feed them all.
Most discouraging for the Harappans was that they must have been terribly unhappy. Always bound by caste, they now found themselves trapped in a strange land, in cities, assailed by the very territory they had conquered. Or perhaps it is fairer to say the land which had ensnared them. Surely they must have longed for the wide grassy lands of their Ancestor, where movement and change were not just possible, but mandatory.
Didn't they, deep inside their psyches, yearn to camp beneath the star sign they called 'bear' and despise it in their luxurious cities because there, by tradition and utility, those same stars were named 'plow'?
Fittingly, the Harappa did not survive long beyond 700BCE. As was common-place among the wandering nations of the north they were displaced by a kindred band who called themselves D'Aro.
The richest remnant of the Harappans is their lore. Brahma and Siva and Vishnu still struggle with elemental problems, most recently a nuclear arms race. Indra, like his European counterpart, Heracles, and Sumer's Gilgamesh, went on to have many adventures among the stars. Trisaris is there, too, denuded even of her name, for she has been called Indus, after her slayer, for nearly three thousand years.
In those three or so millenniums since Avritra's death nothing much has changed. Monsoons still ravage the Indus Valley, trees are cut down as fast as the skinny whips can be planted, and the region remains the most heavily populated desert in the world.
(Excerpted from Tales of a Clear, Dark Night - c 1999)
Author's note: The star formation Vritra is the same as that named King of Punt by Egyptians, Hydra by Hurrio/Akkadians, Typhon/Orontes by Greco/Anatolians, etc. It stretches across the Zodiac from Beehive (Cancer) to Virgo and its tree shaped cowl with the 'yellow' eye is the origin of the 'apple' in Eden, Golden Apple of Heracles' fame, even Asgaard in the Germanic myths. This 'cobra' is probably the shelterer of the Buddha, and so often mirrors important earthly rivers that it is impossible to ignore their importance to ancient (and modern) people.
It's amazing how archaeological study along with geology is helping us unravel the origin of many of these myths. Thank you for taking the time and effort to study these interesting results and bring them to us.
In January 1978, I was fortunate enough to take a day long outing to a beautiful lake (it may have been a reservoir) inserts of fish with my friends from Karachi. Along the way we stopped at Banbhore. What amazed me about place were the millions of pot shards strewn about, indicating that many people had lived there along the Indus whose banks were several miles away at my visit. Thanks to Wikipedia, I have learned that this city was much later than those of the Harappa.
Ron