śūlajana-kāvya: Das Riesenspielzeug

Somakhya’s and Lootika’s families were returning from a ritual at the less-known temple of the goddess Bhuvaneśvarī. They were there to worship a mysterious yantra, which is one of the rare examples of the depiction of a curve known as the astroid in Hindu tradition. On the way back Somakhya’s family was invited to for lunch at Lootika’s house. Lootika wanted Somakhya to show her how to construct the astroid used in the yantra without using one circle rolling inside another – the method used by the śaiva tāntrika-s of yore who composed the Bhuvaneśvarī lore. But before they could begin Somakhya was distracted by the lines Lootika was humming: “Hey, you seem to be humming a śūlajana-kāvya. That too a poem I was reading last night.”
Lootika: “What? I was reading the same last night too … talk of the Über-geist.”
Somakhya: “Why that poem?”

Lootika: “It is an interesting reason why I picked it up. I had gone to the university yesterday to do some experiments. There a professor asked me if I might be interested in studying some strange basal chordates, salps, which he had obtained from the sea. These salps with an interesting alternation of sexual and asexual cycles were described long ago by Adelbert von Chamisso in course of his explorations – one could after all call him a lesser von Humboldt. I recalled that there was a poem of his in the collection of śūlajana-kāvya that we have for reading. So on returning home I read it and was captivated by it. If there is a non-Aryan kāvya that has dhvani then then this one exemplar from the śūlajana-s.”

Somakhya: “dhvani … yes, that’s exactly what I feel with that padya. Our resonance reinforces that. The opening itself has a special quality to it. Read out the first verse Gautamī.”

Lootika picked up her book and read it out:
“Burg Niedeck ist im Elsaß der Sage wohlbekannt,
die Höhe, wo vorzeiten die Burg der Riesen stand;
sie selbst ist nun verfallen, die Stätte wüst und leer,
du fragest nach den Riesen, du findest sie nicht mehr.”
[The castle Niedeck is in Alsace, its saga is well-known,
On its heights, aforetime the castle of the giants stood,
it is now all ruined, the place itself is empty and bare,
if you ask regarding the giants, you find them no more.]

Lootika then continued: “Somakhya, this looks like a memory filtering down from the time before pan-Germania fell to the pretonmāda. The Riese seems like a remnant of the lore of the giants that was at the base of the northern Germanic genesis. In a sense the passing of the time of the giants is in built into the Germanic genesis with *Wodin, Wili and We, the first of the Æsir gods slaying the ancient giant Ymir and fashioning the world from his various parts even as in our tradition the world is fashioned from the parts of the puruṣa sacrificed by the deva-s or the slain aśvamedha horse. But what is the link between the jotunn of northern Germanic and the word Riese?

Somakhya: “Indeed this is a memory from prior to the coming of the Abe’ disease to these peoples. Jotunn is an interesting word. It appeared in early Niederdeutsch as Etennine meaning a giantess. It appears in the vāk of the kṛśajana-s as ettin all descending from proto-Germanic *etunaz. While the ettins of pan-Germania resemble the Titans of the yavana-s or the post-RV asura-s of our tradition very few know that their actual etymological cognate in our tradition are the attrin-s. These demons are only known to those who know the spells of our ancestors, the bhṛgu-s and aṅgiras-es. The Deutsch Riese seems to be a cognate of the northern Germanic risi of which one type was said to live on the high hills like in von Chamisso’s verse. He was accompanined by the troll girls Fenya and Menya, who may have even been his daughters. The people of the frigid northern Norway were said to have descended from the risi via a Viking warrior chief Halogi. The other risi, the sjórisar (sea risi-s), were Ægirt he god of the ocean, Ran the fierce goddess, and their nine daughters. When a viking drowned he was supposed become an offering for Ran.”

continued…