At the British museum at the moment there is a tableau of the Hindu goddess Durga under construction by some Bengalese traditional sculptors who've been shipped over especially for the purpose.
You can see here that her eight extra arms have been set in place but the gap between them and the Durga's body has not yet been filled in. Two very knowledgeable women were on standby to answer people’s questions. Firstly they told me that usually those arms would be constructed along with the armature of the rest of the body, but since this one was to be moved to a smaller space for a ceremony it was necessary to construct them separately.
I began to ask further questions about the anatomy of the Gods – how does their skeletal structure fit together? This is a question I have previously quizzed people on regarding angels; if you have both arms and wings, each needing a pair of collar bones and shoulder blades, as well as everything else necessary to enable the mobility of forearms, how do you fit them all into one torso? I’m not just being facetious, this leads to a serious point about the way people are willing to discard certain aspects of their understanding of reality in order to embrace their faith more completely, and to why people like me have difficulty embracing faith – it’s a question of suspending disbelief.
She told me that the skeleton is straw and string wrapped in bundles. The flesh is clay, covered in pigments. I pushed further – those are the materials from which the representation is made, but what physical structure do the gods possess?
She was firm with me now: It is just a representation. Originally they would have worshipped a pot – a vessel filled with water, Devi, a vessel, the female divinity.
The physical forms of the gods are described in scripture, which describes the anatomy of their power, and these representations are interpretations of those descriptions; normal men and women cannot stretch their imagination to embrace their god as a pot.
They really gave me a lot in the end, those women. To me what they were saying, although they did not really agree with one another, was that you must decorate the ideas you hold dear; give them limbs aplenty and fantastic clothing – do not let them languish in a puritan sessile phase (like the pupa of a deity), which gives nothing to the eye to feast upon, because in their plainest, purest form, the one which may be closer to the truth, they are so much more difficult to appreciate.
Another part of me disagrees entirely, preferring the somber frankness of the pot.