Goddess Saraswati

She comes with the music of the Veena, mounted on the gracious white swan that rings her white bells of divinity. She is Saraswati, the deity of  knowledge, wisdom, speech, intelligence, consciousness, arts and music. Though she is traditionally considered to be the (younger?) daughter of Goddess Durga, the Matsyapuran tells a different story. There she is the daughter and wife of Brahma, who had created her out of his own self but later became her consort.  But the moral unease of such an interpretation has been obliterated by the more domestic image of Saraswati as one among four siblings, visiting her maternal home every year!

 In the Rig Veda she was originally a river goddess, river Saraswati being one of the main rivers in ancient Vedic culture (apart from the Indus.) River Saraswati was supposed to have 3 main triburtaries, the Sutlej, Drishadvati and old Yamuna. The deity’s association with water not only proves the importance of rivers in ancient cultures but a more primordial connection with precosmic primal water that nourished the first life in the universe. The water may also be the symbol of life in the womb, nurtured by the embryonic fluid. It can also represent any form of fluidity, that of speech, knowledge and consciousness. The flowing river is also the metaphor of a journey or transformation that evolves our consciousness. Saras…flowing, watery….and water is the mainstay of life.

Pallas Athena

The name Saraswati also has Middle Eastern associations. Etymologically, it echoes the river Haraikhati mentioned in the Persian Zendavesta. But it is debatable whether the Persian Aryans settled here and brought with them the name and memory of the river Haraikhati , or whether ancient Vedic people migrated to Iran later and called the river there with the name that echoed Saraswati! In the Avesta she is the deity of water known as Aredvi Sura Anahita and also the goddess of wisdom. She reverberates in many corners of the ancient world. The ancient Greeks had Pallas Athena as the deity of knowledge and wisdom (Athena was also associated with warfare). Just as Brahma had created Saraswati from his own self, for which she is regarded as his daughter, Athena too is supposed to have originated from the forehead of Zeus, the king of gods. This Greek symbolism has been interpreted as the creative urge that gives rise to intellectual creation and thus Zeus underwent a terrible headache at her birth. In Egypt, the deity of knowledge, wisdom, writing and language was the ibis headed god Thoth or Tehuti, the source of all secular and divine knowledge. Thoth was also the presiding deity of magic which was important in most of the ancient cultures. He was sometimes identified as Hermes Trismegistus in Greco Egyptian occult literature.

Tehuti or Thoth

With the connection of Tehuti and Hermes, we come to another aspect of Saraswati as the goddess of speech or Vac. In the occult text of ‘Corpus Hermeticum’  the Logos (word) is supposed to be the ultimate creative principle of Life and Consciousness. It was a doctrine of salvation. The same idea is found in the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Saraswati too symbolizes the creative power of sound, the personification of the Word.

Thus the magical aspect of the First Word as sacral speech or primal logos gets intertwined with precosmic primal water. Water nurtures life, Word gives it form and the ordered cosmos is created. Saraswati combines all these archetypal images and more. She is the Primordial that gives birth to reason and consciousness. After all the western psychological associations of the feminine with unreason and irrationality, its refreshing to discover that intelligence, reason and consciousness have feminine roots…but now if you choose to concentrate more on the father oriented, asexual birth of Saraswati, you are after a wild goose chase and we will be back to the old riddle of the chick and the egg!! J

© Nandini Basu 2011