Observations placeholder
Mircea Eliade – We plough the fields and scatter
Identifier
001902
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
'We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.......' We used to sing this hymn at school, little did I know the real meaning or indeed that one day I would myself become a furrow. A good hymn for little boys.
Note that there is a literal use of rain here as well as a symbolic one, as Indra controls the systems of water
A description of the experience
Mircea Eliade – Patterns in Comparative religion
Storms are the supreme unleashings of creative force; Indra pours down the rain and governs moisture of every kind, so that he is both the god of fertility and the archetype of the forces that originate life. He is urvavapati, 'master of the fields' and siraspatiI, 'master of the plough', …., he makes fields, animals and women fruitful, he is invoked at weddings that the bride may bear ten sons, and innumerable invocations refer to his inexhaustible power of generating life.
All Indra's attributes and powers are inter-related, and the spheres he governs correspondingly so. Whether we see him sending thunderbolts to strike Vrta, or setting the waters free, or sending the storm that goes before rain, or absorbing fabulous amounts of soma, whether we see him fertilising the fields or see his fantastic sexual powers, we are faced with some manifestation of the life force.....
Indra keeps the cosmic forces constantly in motion to circulate biospermatic energy through the whole universe. He has an inexhaustible reservoir of vitality, and it is upon this reservoir that the hopes of mankind are based. But Indra is not a creator; he promotes life and diffuses it victoriously all over the universe, but he does not 'make' it. The creative function with which every sky divinity is endowed is specialised in Indra's case, into a generative and vitalising mission