Abstract
Modern Wicca, echoing nineteenth-century sources (Balfour 1873: 277), conflates many outsider
goddesses — 'She is known as Kali, Hecate, Cerridwen, Lilith, Persephone, Fata, Morgana, Ereshleigal,
Arianhrod, Durga, Inama, Tiamat, and by a million, million other names' Indological scholarship
has been more self-contained, although the possibilities of iconographic assimilations and associations
from outside India are an acknowledged pan of the search for origins of early Indian representations
of divinity (Mukherjee 1969; 1985).
The complexities of South Asia as a 'crossroads' during early years when images of divinities
were taking form and beginning to be used in that region have been well framed in a recent article
by Suchandra Ghosh in Studies in History (Ghosh 2007). She cites Romila Thapar's observation
that 'Those who came were initially alien in custom and belief, but the mutations that had occurred
among them and among the host societies expanded the cultural experience of both' (Ghosh 2007: 302;
Thapar 2002: 223). She illustrates an important type of square coin found at Ai Khanum, Afghanistan,
issued by the Greek Bactrian king Agathocles in the second century BCE, which bears the first
anthropomorphic representations we have of two Indian divinities, Visudeva-Kry1a and
Balaräma-Sa1ikar:5ana, both two armed and with a single face (Fig. l). 'It is the oldest depiction of
Indian deities that we have, and as such are symbolic of an intermingling of Hellenistic with Indian
cultures', according to Ghosh (Ghosh 2007: Narain 1973; Holt 1988: 1-7).
MICHAEL W. MEISTER . (2010) Multiplicity on the Frontier: Imagining the Warrior Goddess , Pakistan Heritage, Volume 2, Issue 1.
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