Shiva as Christ in the Hindu Trimurti by Dominick Montalto

It has gone down in Church history that between His Resurrection and Ascension, Christ allotted to each of His disciples a foreign land to which each would go and preach the Gospel. Thomas, claims suggest, was the Apostle whom Christ told to preach the Word in India. Taking these suppositions as truth, I wish to expound on the similarities I perceive between Christ and the Hindu god Shiva.

Alternately called the Son of God and the Son of Man, Christ is the second Being in the Trinity of the Catholic Church. In the Hindu religion, one learns in passing that there are over 333,000 gods, and that there is a Trimurti (trinity); not unlike the Christian one in which Shiva is the third Being. Christ is the man who gave up his life as the ransom for the evil of humankind to wipe out their sins and defeat Death, whereas Shiva is the god appointed the task of burning up the world at the end of time. After he destroys the Creation, he will bring out of the conflagration and ashes a new Heaven and a new Earth, does this sound familiar? Though they occupy different positions in their respective trinities, the Book of Revelation states that Christ will return in the Second Coming in which he will destroy Satan and all evil, raze this world and from its ashes resuscitate life in a new Heaven and a new Earth. As a digression, I believe it would only be right for the Holy Spirit to be the force behind the Apocalypse and Eternal Peace seeing that its tertiary parallel Shiva is the god who will do the same in the Hindu tradition.

I wish to draw my readers’ attention to the idol of Shiva and the icon of Christ in the following manner. In the bronze cast idol of Shiva as “Lord of the Dance, or Nataraj”, a ring of fire surrounds him unto which he raises his four flaming hands while one of his legs is raised in motion to denote the “dance” of death and destruction. As serpents flame from his hair and he is burning up the world, he has his other foot on the head of the Demon of Ignorance. Aside from the belief that in both Christian and Hindu doctrine that fire will destroy Creation and that as I have stated above, Christ and Shiva will be the impetuses behind this act, I want to discuss the Demon of Ignorance and his role in this process. I think it is safe to assume that the correlation of the Demon of Ignorance in Christianity is Satan. Is it not so that Satan’s ignorance of God in His Power and Glory cost him his angelic station and dragged him into the world of sin and evil? Does not the Book of Revelation state that in His Second Coming, Christ will defeat Satan and lock him away in Hell? Will not Christ, like Shiva, in the Apocalyptic War of Good and Evil, crush the head and metaphorically the ego of this demon of ignorance, Satan? Here I hope to have delineated a parallel between Christ and Shiva, not only as destroyers of Creation at the end of Time, but also as destroyers of all vice and evil in the embodiment of Satan, or the Demon of Ignorance.

I also want to make a brief point in a further similarity between Christ and Shiva before I end my discussion, once again using the figure of Satan. I recall the image, whether it is literary or iconic, of Christ crushing the head of the basilisk, a type of serpent representative of Satan in his evil as I have pointed to elsewhere. Undoubtedly, whether or not the Hindu Demon of Ignorance has the form of a serpent anywhere in Hindu myth, I believe once can see a terribly forceful and true parallel between Shiva’s foot on the head of this demon and Christ crushing the head of the basilisk. Whether or not the parallels between Shiva and Christ asserted here are viable, I think they are viable not necessarily in themselves but to where they lead. They lead to the validity of the saying “all paths lead to God” and moreover, that from God all these paths are born no matter how heretical and distorted they may seem in the eyes of another or to their own religion or particular belief system.

Dominick Montalto is currently pursuing a career in publishing as a copy editor and writer. His interests vary from art history to literature to philosophy and religion to music. He has degrees in literature, with minors in art history and philosophy. His literary interests include the long 19th Century in Britain and France, from the French Revolution through the early Modern novel, with particular emphasis on British Romanticism, the Gothic, and British and French Decadence. His philosophical and religious interests join with his Romantic background; he is specifically interested in Catholicism and Eastern philosophy, particularly Hinduism, and to a lesser degree, Buddhism and Taoism. His written work, both poetry and critical prose, examines and explores his interest in these religions and literary worlds. His critical prose focuses mainly on mysticism–the roots of religion; the relationship between art and religion; the relationship between literature and religion; and the similarities, hidden to many, of not only all religions to each other, but in particular the similarities of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs to those present in Christianity, especially in the figure of Christ. He has had several publication credits to his name since January 2006 in print and online, in both poetry and critical prose.