lunedì 23 gennaio 2012

Khajurhao and its erotic sculptures

Khajuraho is famous, especially in the West, for the incredible erotic depictions carved on the towers and steeples of some twenty-five temples which make this place unique.
This is one of the most beautiful monuments of India, preserved iconoclastic Mughal invaders idiocy only because it was abandoned and unknown until the mid-800.
We are in north India, specifically in Madhya Pradesh about 600 km south of New Delhi and 450 west of Varanasi.
Well in some of these Hindu temples - dating back to a period from the ninth to twelfth century AD - external walls and towers are inlaid with thousands of scenes of everyday life, there is not only sex, but there are several moments of life, people who work, others who write, hunting scenes and dances.
On the one hand, the western sex addict (phobia) other the actual surprising to find that type of scenes in a religious monument, make to remember Khajurhao only for the erotic positions.
Well let's talk about it because those scenes are very beautiful and delicate and artistically and narratively very curious. Even in the most daring positions, erotic contortions of hard practicality, never fall into the vulgar pornography.
But what is the point that in a cult building men and women are represented in the most daring and amazing erotic positions?
We do not know for sure. The experts (and novices) are committed to giving explanations more or less logical.
Some experts think that the temple is intended as a 'palace of the gods' and that parallel is represented outside the residence of the kings of the earth, the palace of the Chandela, Rajput kings who built these temples. For this reason the various moments of court life are shown outside including the erotic activity at crowded harem of the palace which had evidently a significant role in that time.
Others argue that the temples were devoted to tantric cults that seek the annihilation and the exasperation of intellectual passion to promote contact with the divine. This explanation is suggestive but not convincing especially with the character very secret of tantric practices.
Someone thinks that those representations of erotic practices performed as rites of fertility and ward off negativity.
Others have tried more philosophical explanations arguing that the erotic scenes are reminiscent of the irresistible tendency of man to join his half to build the perfect unity with the One unmanifested. The sexual act is the act that emulates the creator not only because it generates, but because it restores the unity of Brahman. The sexual act is the elimination of differences between males and females, men and women. The desire to join, and the need to unite and to create is nothing but a tendency to be similar to the Brahman, to return to Brahman. As the lingam and the yoni are united in their cosmic creation, so man and woman are in the creative act more human. Eroticism is then represented as a simple act that elevates the carnal. There is an exaltation of the erotic act in its cosmic dimension. The erotic act - they say - is fed into the rhythm of the universe.
But then why, however, the representations of group sex or sex with animals?
Some people though believes that all the sculptures of everyday life including the erotic life, were a warning to the faithful, who going to the temple, had to take out of it (and from their hearts) and material reality the passions that bind man to the illusion of Maya and distract from the truth.
Someone reconnected to those erotic positions the Kamasutra, the famous treatise on social behavior, that dedicates a space for the sexual practices and erotic positions. In fact many of the positions represented in the temples of Khajurhao not found among those explained by the Kama Sutra, but certainly they are to prove that India was developed in the scientific attention to the sexual practice considered a very important aspect of human life.

















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