So, this being Valentine’s day, you’d think I’d write something about that. Did that last year. Found out that Saint Valentine, aside from probably never having existed, was a bit of a wandering corpse after his theoretical martyrdom. You can check my blog or YouTube channel for more information on that.

It looks to me like the main reason he got invented was so’s he could take over a pagan Roman holiday, Lupercalia, that was celebrated in the middle of February. Christians were big on doing stuff like that. You know, burn down a pagan temple and build a church on where it used to be, come up with a Saint and snarf up a pagan holiday for him, and similar hooliganry.

Then I remembered that it’s a new moon about now, tomorrow, actually. And this being the Hindu month of Phalgun, that means today and tomorrow are Mahashivratri, my favorite holiday!

Shiva is the third person in the Hindu version of the Trinity, the other two being Brahma and Vishnu.

Mahashivratri celebrates three things that Shiva did: got married, drank poison, and stomped a dwarf into submission with a dance. He didn’t do all of this in one day, of course.

Lots of gods get married, so let’s look at the other two things.

All the Hindu gods and demons, except for Shiva, decided they wanted to be immortal, so they decided to churn the ocean of the cosmos to extract the nectar of immortality out of it and then drink it.

Okay, so you’ve got gods and demons cooperating, sort of. Internally, though, the gods were pissed at the demons, and vice versa. What should have been the nectar of immortality came out as poison, which threatened to kill everything. Shiva had been sitting in meditation on his mountain, serene and calm, not concerning himself with the silly bickering going on. The rest of the gods and demons, wanting to save everything, went to him with all the poison in a cup, and asked him what to do.

Shiva took the cup and drank it. His wife, Parvati, quickly grabbed him around the neck tightly, so he wouldn’t swallow it, thereby demonstrating that wives can be useful. Shiva, being the Mahadeva, the greatest of the gods, neutralized the poison with no trouble whatsoever, except that his neck turned blue.

As to stomping on the dwarf, the dwarf symbolizes the little, selfish, egoistic part of ourselves. Best to let our higher self, represented by Shiva, stomp that little bugger to nothing. Dance on it.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: