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Brief description of natraja

Answer» Shiva, (Sanskrit: “Auspicious One”) also spelled\xa0Śiwa\xa0or\xa0Śiva, one of the main deities of\xa0Hinduism, whom\xa0Shaivites\xa0worship as the supreme god. Among his common epithets are Shambhu (“Benign”),\xa0Shankara\xa0(“Beneficent”), Mahesha (“Great Lord”), and Mahadeva (“Great God”).Shiva and his family at the burning groundShiva and his family at the burning ground. Parvati, Shiva\'s wife, holds Skanda while watching Ganesha (left) and Shiva string together the skulls of the dead. The bull Nandi rests behind the tree. Kangra painting, 18th century; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.Shiva is represented in a variety of forms: in a pacific mood with his consort\xa0Parvati\xa0and son\xa0Skanda, as the cosmic dancer (Nataraja), as a naked\xa0ascetic, as a mendicant beggar, as a yogi, as a Dalit (formerly called untouchable) accompanied by a dog (Bhairava), and as the\xa0androgynous\xa0union of Shiva and his consort in one body, half-male and half-female (Ardhanarishvara). He is both the great ascetic and the master of fertility, and he is the master of both poison and medicine, through his ambivalent power over snakes. As Lord of Cattle (Pashupata), he is the\xa0benevolent\xa0herdsman—or, at times, the merciless slaughterer of the “beasts” that are the human souls in his care. Although some of the combinations of roles may be explained by Shiva’s identification with earlier mythological figures, they arise primarily from a tendency in Hinduism to see complementary qualities in a single\xa0ambiguous\xa0figure.ShivaThe god Shiva in the garb of a mendicant, South Indian bronze from Tiruvengadu, Tamil Nadu, early 11th century; in the Thanjavur Museum and Art Gallery, Tamil Nadu.Shiva’s female consort is known under various\xa0manifestations\xa0as Uma,\xa0Sati, Parvati,\xa0Durga, and\xa0Kali; Shiva is also sometimes paired with\xa0Shakti, the embodiment of power. The divine couple, together with their sons—Skanda\xa0and the elephant-headed\xa0Ganesha—are said to dwell on Mount Kailasa in the\xa0Himalayas. The six-headed Skanda is said to have been born of Shiva’s seed, which was shed in the mouth of the god of fire,\xa0Agni, and transferred first to the river\xa0Ganges\xa0and then to six of the stars in the constellation of the\xa0Pleiades. According to another well-known\xa0myth, Ganesha was born when Parvati created him out of the dirt she rubbed off during a bath, and he received his elephant head from Shiva, who was responsible for beheading him. Shiva’s vehicle in the world, his\xa0vahana, is the\xa0bull\xa0Nandi; a sculpture of Nandi sits opposite the main sanctuary of many Shiva temples. In temples and in private shrines, Shiva is also worshipped in the form of the\xa0lingam, a cylindrical votary object that is often embedded in a\xa0yoni, or spouted dish.sandstone\xa0lingaSandstone\xa0linga,\xa0c.\xa0900; in the British Museum, London.Courtesy of the trustees of the British MuseumShiva is usually depicted in painting and sculpture as white (from the ashes of corpses that are smeared on his body) with a blue neck (from holding in his throat the poison that emerged at the\xa0churning of the cosmic ocean, which threatened to destroy the world), his hair arranged in a coil of matted locks (jatamakuta) and adorned with the crescent moon and the Ganges (according to\xa0legend, he brought the\xa0Ganges River\xa0to earth from the sky, where she is the Milky Way, by allowing the river to trickle through his hair, thus breaking her fall). Shiva has three eyes, the third eye bestowing inward vision but capable of burning destruction when focused outward. He wears a garland of skulls and a serpent around his neck and carries in his two (sometimes four) hands a deerskin, a trident, a small hand drum, or a club with a skull at the end. That skull identifies Shiva as a Kapalika (“Skull-Bearer”) and refers to a time when he cut off the fifth head of\xa0Brahma. The head stuck to his hand until he reached\xa0Varanasi\xa0(now in\xa0Uttar Pradesh, India), a city sacred to Shiva. It then fell away, and a shrine for the cleansing of all sins, known as Kapala-mochana (“The Releasing of the Skull”), was later established in the place where it landed.


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