Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Let's kill the Ravan within

I found this by chance while searching for (of all things) a picture of Donald Duck playing a trumpet.


I had to look it up, but the reference is to the Hindu holiday of Dussehra (Vijayadashami), which commemorates the god Ram's victory over the 10-headed demon king Ravan. (The forms Rama and Ravana are also common.) What it made me think of, though, was the Red crows of the Sun. In that post, I quoted this story about the solar crows of Chinese legend.

According to folklore, there were originally ten sun crows which settled in 10 separate suns. . . . Folklore also held that, at around 2170 BC, all ten sun crows came out on the same day, causing the world to burn; Houyi the celestial archer saved the day by shooting down all but one of the sun crows.

Ravan sounds like raven, which isn't much different from a crow. Just as there were 10 sun crows, the picture above shows seven Ravan-heads, each with what looks like a sun on its helmet. And Ram, like Houyi, is a "celestial archer."

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