4. Siva as one of the group of ordinary gods.

At this level Siva is one of a community of divinities related by the ordinary social ties of family and friendship. The central group of ordinary gods are Parvati, Ganesa^[*] , Visnu^[*] , Laksmi, Sarasvati, and some secondary divinities associated with Visnu^[*] . Parvati is Siva's wife or consort, Ganesa^[*] is his son, Visnu^[*] is Siva's essential friend, and Laksmi is Visnu's^[*] wife. Sarasvati

stands outside these relations. Siva is sometimes represented as a young man with a moustache (see color illustrations). In this form he is thought of as an unattached and dreamy young bachelor. Sometimes he is shown with his consort Parvati to his left, his arm tenderly around her shoulder. He is absent-minded, a dreamer, stumbling in his abstraction into socially dangerous errors from which his friend Visnu^[*] must extricate him. He dresses improperly, like a jungle dweller, and sometimes goes naked. He moves at whim from place to place. He is usually gentle and benign in his abstracted way unless roused to fury, and that fury is elemental and potentially randomly destructive. Sometimes he incarnates his vehicle, the bull Nandi. Sometimes he is found in deep meditation on Mount Kailash in the mountains to the north of Bhaktapur. Sometimes he is found in the cremation grounds, or even in the refuse dump in the inner courtyard of the house. His destructive power can be focused and put to use against impersonal and external dangers to the city, but in this transformation we are soon no longer dealing with Siva, something new arises.

Siva represents the human tension between self-absorption and asocial sexuality on the one hand and social involvement taming such problematic states and passions on the other. As Parvati's consort and Visnu's^[*] friend, he is under the socializing restraint of those social relations, he needs them. Siva alone—adolescent, yogi-like, alternating between sexual passion and ascetic self absorption—is recognizable both as forest dweller who has escaped from the city and as one important aspect of the man of the city. As the Mahabharata says of this Siva (quoted in Atkinson 1974, 721) [from the Mahabharata , Anusasana Parva, chap. 14]; cf. Mani 1974, 808).

He assumes many forms of gods, men, goblins, demons, barbarians, tame and wild beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. He carries a discus, trident, club, sword and axe. He has a girdle of serpents, earrings of serpents, a sacrificial cord of serpents and an outer garment of serpents' skins. He laughs, stags, dances and plays various musical instruments. He leaps, gapes, weeps, causes others to weep, speaks like a madman or a drunkard as well as in sweet tones. With an erect penis he dallies with the wives and daughters of the Rishis.

Siva's essence is in his transformations, which make him both elusively shifting and generative. As O'Flaherty (1973, 36) notes, he is both a yogi and its antithesis, the lover of Parvati. She adds, however, in regard to this and other apparent oppositions in his mythology:

The mediating principle that tends to resolve the oppositions is in most cases Siva himself. Among ascetics he is a libertine and among libertines an ascetic; conflicts which they cannot resolve, or can attempt to resolve only by compromise, he simply absorbs into himself and expresses in terms of other conflicts. . . . He emphasizes that aspect of himself which is unexpected, inappropriate, shattering any attempt to achieve a superficial reconciliation of the conflict through mere logical compromise. . . . Siva is particularly able to mediate in this way because of his protean character; he is all things to all men.

But this protean character in itself limits the semantic possibilities of Siva in Bhaktapur. There is one thing he cannot be to all men, that is a fixed character, and that provides his major contrast to Visnu^[*] , who is fixed in his purposes and his conventional forms.

Yogi , bachelor, friend, and husband are all Siva, but Siva disappears in his supernatural transformations. When he has been transformed into his dangerous form, Bhairava, when he emits his sakti ("power"; see chap. 9) or the goddess Devi, these dangerous forms are immediately thought of as independent actors. They have their own myths, legends, and histories. In thought and action they are for the most part disconnected from Siva, except for vestigial traces and markings—a Siva mask carried but not worn, Siva's vertically rotated third eye sometimes, but not always, placed on their foreheads (see color illustrations). And in a further limiting and bounding of the protean Siva to his proper human-like area, it is the "goddess" herself—although in some contexts thought of as generated by Siva—who becomes the shifting, generative force. While Siva's generative activities, the center from which he moves are in the social world, and are related to recognizably human activities and modes of a certain sort—the lover, the adolescent, and ascetic, intoxicated or ecstatic states—it is another figure, the "goddess," who is the center of generation in a much more radically extrasocial world, the world outside the city and its order. Thus, although Siva represents a bridge to the world beyond the city, and beyond all cities, those bridges become burnt for the most part once crossed, and as his transformations come to life, Siva, overtly in Tantric imagery, becomes a corpse. His ongoing and continuing life in Bhaktapur is as a representative of that dimension of the social person which is valued, although in tension with social and moral order. In his transformations to representations of the extrasocial world, Siva becomes almost forgotten. Similarly, when thought of as a creator God, this cosmic Siva is also lost from view when his creation is being considered. In his own anthropomor-

phic right, however, he represents a complex of traits which are unified in being thoroughly human, but in one way or another problematic for social order. This Siva provides problems which must be dealt with by his friend Visnu^[*] at the service of the moral community. It is important to emphasize that from the point of view of the corpus of South Asian myths about the relations of Siva and Visnu^[*] this is a local choice of emphasis. There are, for example, South Asian stories where it is Siva who must free Visnu^[*] from some passionate bondage (e.g., O'Flaherty 1973, 41). Bhaktapur, in fact, develops selected meanings suggested by the major persisting myths and representations of the two gods. Their relation is epitomized in one of the local interpretations of the complex symbol of Siva's power, the linga^[*] , whose more central meanings are related to the idea of Sakti (below here, and chap. 9). The linga^[*] consists of a column at whose base is an encircling band. In this interpretation of Siva as a component of civic order (rather than as the generator of cosmic forces), the upright column represents Siva and his explosive and expanding energies and the encircling band at the base represents a restraint placed by Visnu^[*] around that column of energy to protect, control, and channel it.

There are about thirty active Siva shrines and temples in Bhaktapur. Of these, fourteen are found m four clusters outside the traditional boundaries of the city to the south near each of the bridges to which the city's southern and southeastern roads and paths lead. Another nine are grouped in the two central squares of the town, the Laeku Square in front of the palace and the Ta:marhi Square, both of which, it may be recalled, are (in different contexts) centers of the city. These central shrines and temples were built by the Malla kings and by wealthy families and thar s (such as one group of shrines built by the Kumha:, the potters) as variously motivated acts of private devotion to Siva. Many of the structures outside of the city are of relatively recent post-Malla origin, and it is said they were built there because there was more available space on which to build. Some of these shrines and temples have attendant priests whose stipend is funded by grants of land that were set aside for this purpose at the time of the building of the structure, but may have no other worshipers. Others are the object of worship of descendants of the founding group, or sometimes by people who have made a pledge to worship Siva, perhaps at that particular shrine, in exchange for the fulfillment of some wish. One of the largest and most visually impressive temples in the northern half of the city is devoted to the divinity Dattatreya (Newari, Dattatri), who is thought of as a corn-

bined incarnation of Visnu^[*] , Brahma,^[4] and Siva. In the Dattatreya temple Visnu^[*] is iconographically dominant, but Siva is thought of as the main power embodied in the temple. The temple priests are non-Newars (Jha Brahmans), and the inner sanctum is closed to Newar Brahmans. The temple's main function is as a pilgrimage center for non-Newar Shaivite devotees from India and other parts of Nepal.

For the Newars of Bhaktapur, the Siva shrines and temples, in marked contrast to those of certain other major divinities, are not used to designate any of the internal structural features of city organization. Correlated with this is that there is only one minor annual festival (Madya: Jatra; see chap. 13), specifically devoted to Siva. The great Siva festival for the Newars of Bhaktapur and elsewhere, as well as for Nepalis and for many Indians, has its center out of Bhaktapur (and of the other major Newar cities) at the great Valley shrine complex of Pasupatinatha devoted to Siva as the "Lord of the Beasts," during the major South Asian Shaivite festival, Sivaratri, in the late winter. Bhaktapur itself on that day is a secondary focus for some Shaivite pilgrims, and some of the city's men perform an unusual—in contrast to other forms of local worship—type of devotion to Siva spending the night by fires along the city's public streets, sometimes smoking cannabis, in an enactment that, with its associated legends (see chap. 13, "Sila Ca:re" and our discussion there) illuminate Siva's meaning as a bridge to a transcendent realm.

In Bhaktapur there are several divinities with limited functions, and with names and attributes of their own sometimes said to be "forms" of Siva. There are some statues in stone of a figure with an erect penis locally identified as Siva which are worshiped by families who wish children or specifically a son (fig. 11). Siva is worshiped in the rite of passage of people in their seventy-seventh year as Mrtyum^[*] Jaya, the god who conquers time and prolongs life. He is sometimes said to be Nataraja, the god of the dance, who is worshiped by musicians and actors. (Nataraja as the Newar god Nasa Dya: has accumulated, as we will note, other meanings and uses.) Siva is the god buried in the inner courtyard of houses who destroys the wastes thrown there. He is Visvakarma (Newari, Biswarkarma), the god of crafts and trades, who gives power to the tools and implements of the various traditional and modern crafts: the barber's razor, the driver's truck, the farmer's tools.

Siva's meaning in Bhaktapur's supernatural domain is deeply affected by his position in the larger system. We have introduced some

of this, but we must turn to the other members of the domain, each of whom provides context for the others.