TRAYEE by Neela Vermeire
11 years ago
In this complex perfume, I feel that ancient Hindu cosmology has been realized in scent. It brings to mind SHIVA NATARAJA. Here is a 12th century Indian bronze statue depicting the deity.
At the most fundamental level, the image tells the story of Shiva, the god who presides over the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction. The dancing Shiva is enclosed within a circular mandala of flames (prabhamandala) shown on a flat, two-dimensional plane, while the gestures of Shiva’s arms and legs describe a circle in space, in three dimensions. With your imagination, you need to supply the fourth dimension — time — which cannot be expressed in the static image: if you stare at the image and let the dancer begin to move, he will start to whirl in a circle, in the direction shone by his left leg which is lifted up and moving towards the right, as is his lower left arm.
So what we see here is a cycle, a circle, a whirling dance in which opposed forces are in perfect balance. To read the story of the forces that are both unleashed here and held in check, we need to look at Shiva’s arms (four of them) and his legs. They tell the story of creation and destruction which has happened not just once but over and over again, and not just in the world outside, but in the world within, especially within the hearts of Shiva’s worshipers.
