Hindu Mythology in Context

Hinduism, which has millions of followers in India and around the world today, is one of the world’s oldest religions. For well over three thousand years, it has been accumulating the sacred stories and heroic epics that make up the mythology of Hinduism. Nothing in this complex and colorful mythology is fixed and firm. Pulsing with creation, destruction, love, and war, it shifts and changes. Most myths occur in several different versions, and many characters have multiple roles, identities, and histories. This seeming confusion reflects the richness of a mythology that has expanded and taken on new meanings over the centuries.

Around 1700 bce, peoples from the area to the northwest of India began migrating to India. Called Aryans or Indo-Europeans, they brought a mythic tradition that became the basis of an early form of Hinduism. Over the years, as the Aryans mingled with the peoples and cultures of the Indian subcontinent, the mythology grew increasingly complex.

Hinduism has gone through various stages, which can be linked to the most important texts surviving from each period. The earliest stage is associated with the Vedas, the oldest Indian documents. One of them, the Rig-Veda, is a collection of 1,028 hymns of praise and prayers to the gods with references to myths. The Vedas are based on ancient Aryan traditions that were long communicated only in oral form.

The next group of texts, the Brahmanas, date from 900 to 700 bce. Though concerned mainly with the rituals of Hinduism, the Brahmanas contain many myths. The Upanishads, written around 700 bce and after, focus on ideas communicated through myths. The two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, written down sometime between 300 BCE and 300 ce, contain stories about a number of major Hindu deities or gods. After that time, the chief expression of Hindu mythology and religion was in texts called Puranas, “stories of the old days.” Most of the stories are devoted to one god or another. The Puranas often retell earlier myths, sometimes in the voices of the gods themselves.