“The Hindoos,” says M. Sonnerat, “adore three principal deities, Brouma, Chiven, and Vichenou, who are still but One; which kind of Trinity is there called Trimourti, or Tritvamz, and signifies the reunion of three powers. The generality of modern Indians adore only one of these three divinities, but some learned men, besides this worship, also address their prayers to the Three united. The representation of them is to be seen in many pagodas, under that of human figures with three heads, which, on the coast of Orissa, they call Sariharabrama; on the Coromandel coast, Trimourti; and Tretratreyam, in the Sanscrit. It is affirmed by Maurice that this latter term would not have been found in Sanscrit had not the worship of a Trinity existed in those ancient times, fully two thousand five hundred years ago, when Sanscrit was the current language of India.”
There have been found temples entirely consecrated to this kind of Trinity; such as that of Parpenade, in the kingdom of Travancore, where the three gods are worshipped in the form of a serpent with a thousand heads. The feast of Anandavourdon, which the Indians celebrate to their honour, on the eve of the full moon, in the month of Pretachi, or October, always draws a great number of people, “which would not be the case,” says Sonnerat, “if those that came were not adorers of the Three Powers.”
Mr. Forster writing, in 1785, on the Mythology of the Hindoos, says:—“A circumstance which forcibly struck my attention, was the Hindoo belief in a Trinity. The persons are Sree Mun Narrain, the Mhah Letchimy (a beautiful woman), and a Serpent, which are emblematical of strength, love, and wisdom. These persons, by the Hindoos, are supposed to be wholly indivisible. The one is three, and the three are one. In the beginning, they say that the Deity created three men to whom he gave the names of Brimha, Vystnou, and Sheevah. To the first was committed the power of creating mankind, to the second of cherishing them, and to the third that of restraining and correcting them.” The sacred persons who compose this Trinity are very remarkable; for Sree Mun Narrain, as Mr. Forster writes the word, is Narayen, the supreme God; the beautiful woman is the Imma of the Hebrews; and the union of the sexes in the Divinity, is perfectly consonant with that ancient doctrine maintained in the Geeta, and propagated by Orpheus, that the Deity is both male and female.
Damascius, treating of the fecundity of the divine nature, cites Orpheus as teaching that the Deity was at once both male and female, to show the generative power by which all things were formed. Proclus upon the “Timæus of Plato,” among other Orphic verses, cites the following: “Jupiter is a man, Jupiter is also an immortal maid.” In the same commentary, and in the same page we read that all things were contained in the womb of Jupiter.
The serpent is the ancient and usual Egyptian symbol for the divine Logos.
M. Tavernier, on his entering one of the great pagodas, observed an idol in the centre of the building, sitting cross-legged in the Indian fashion, upon whose head was placed une triple couronne; and from this triple crown four horns extended themselves, the symbol of the rays of glory, denoting the Deity to whom the four quarters of the world were under subjection. According to the same author, in his account of the Benares pagoda, the deity of India is saluted by prostrating the body three times, and he is not only adorned with a triple crown, and worshipped by a triple salutation, but he bears in his hand a three-forked sceptre, exhibiting the exact model of the trident of the Greek Neptune.
Now here we must allude to some very remarkable discoveries respecting the Trident of Neptune and the use of a similar symbol of authority by the Indian gods.
Mr. Maurice points out that the unsatisfactory reasons given by mythologists for the assignment of the trident to the Grecian deity, exhibit very clear evidence of its being a symbol that was borrowed from some more ancient mythology, and did not naturally, or originally belong to Neptune. Its three points, or tines, some of them affirm to signify the different qualities of the three sorts of waters that are upon the earth, as the waters of the ocean, which are salt; the water of fountains, which is sweet; and the water of lakes and ponds, which, in a degree, partakes of the nature of both. Others, again, insist that this three-pronged sceptre alludes to Neptune’s threefold power over the sea, viz., to agitate, to assuage, and to preserve. These reasons are, all of them, in his estimation, mighty frivolous, and amount to a confession of their total ignorance of its real meaning.
The trident was, in the most ancient periods, the sceptre of the Indian deity, and may be seen in the hands of that deity in one of the plates (iv.) of M. d’Ancarville’s third volume, and among the sacred symbols sculptured in Elephanta cavern, as pictured by Niebuhr in his engravings of the Elephanta antiquities. “It was, indeed,” says Maurice, “highly proper, and strictly characteristic, that a threefold deity should wield a triple sceptre, and I have now a very curious circumstance to unfold to the reader, which I am enabled to do from the information of Mr. Hodges, relative to this mysterious emblem. The very ancient and venerable edifices of Deogur, which are in the form of immense pyramids, do not terminate at the summit in a pyramidal point, for the apex is cut off at about one seventh of what would be the entire height of the pyramid were it completed, and, from the centre of the top, there rises a circular cone, that ancient emblem of the sun. What is exceedingly singular to these cones is, that they are on their summits decorated with this very symbol, or usurped sceptre, of the Greek Ποσειδων. Thus was the outside of the building decorated and crowned, as it were, with a conspicuous emblem of the worship celebrated within, which from the antiquity of the structure, raised in the infancy of the empire after cavern-worship had ceased, was probably that of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva: for we have seen that Elephanta is, in fact, a temple to the Indian Triad, evidenced in the colossal sculpture that forms the principal figure of it, and excavated probably ere Brahma had fallen into neglect among those who still acknowledge him as the creative energy, or different sects had sprung up under the respective names of Vishnu and Siva. Understood with reference to the pure theology of India, such appears to me to be the meaning of this mistaken symbol; but a system of physical theology quickly succeeded to the pure; and the debased, but ingenious, progeny, who invented it, knew too well how to adapt the symbols and images of the true and false devotion. The three sublime hypostases of the true Trinity were degraded into three attributes; in physical causes the sacred mysteries of religion were attempted to be explained away; its doctrines were corrupted, and its emblems perverted. They went the absurd length of degrading a Creator (for such Brahma, in the Hindoo creed, confessedly is) to the rank of a created Dewtah, which has been shewn to be a glaring solecism in theology.
“The evident result then is, that, nothwithstanding all the corruption of the purer theology of the Brahmins, by the base alloy of human philosophy, under the perverted notion of three attributes, the Indians have immemorially worshipped a threefold Divinity, who, considered apart from their physical notions, is the Creator, the Preserver, and the Regenerator. We must again repeat that it would be in the highest degree absurd to continue to affix the name of Destroyer to the third hypostasis in their Triad, when it is notorious that the Brahmins deny that anything can be destroyed, and insist that a change alone in the form of objects and their mode of existence takes place. One feature, therefore, in that character, hostile to our system, upon strict examination vanishes; and the other feature, which creates so much disgust and gives such an air of licentiousness to his character, is annihilated by the consideration of their deep immersion in philosophical speculations, of their incessant endeavours to account for the divine operations by natural causes, and to explain them by palpable and visible symbols.”