KAMA, amongst the Hindu deities, takes the place of Cupid. Ananga is a poetical epithet, literally incorporeal ; from a, privative, and Anga, a body. Endeavouring to influence Siva with have for his wife Parvati, he discharged an arrow at him, but Siva, enraged, reduced him to ashes by a beam of fire darted from his central eye. Hence his name Ananga. According to the Tattiriya Brahmana, he is the son of Dharma, justice, by Sraddha, faith. Kama was scarcely created before he thought proper to make Brahma enamoured of his own daughter.
In the Tamil country this Hindu deity is usually called Manmatha, or heart agitator ; Manasija, or heart-born ; Ananga, or the bodyless. This Hindu deity appears to be the same with the Grecian Eros and the Roman Cupido ; but the Indian description of his person and arms, his family, attendants, and attributes, has peculiar beauties. He is represented as a beautiful youth, some, times conversing with his mother and consort in the midst of his gardens and temples ; some times riding by moonlight ou a parrot or Tory, and attended by dancing girls or nymphs, the foremost of whom bears his standard, which is a fish on a red ground. His favourite place of resort is a tract of country around Agra, and principally the plains of Muttra, where Krishna also and the nine Gopi, who are clearly the Apollo and Muses of the Greeks, usually spent the night in music and dancing. His bow of sugar-cane or flowers, with a string formed of bees, and his five arrows, each pointed with an Indian blossom of a beating quality, are equally new and beautiful. He has at least twenty-three names, most of which are introduced in a hymn by Sir W. Jones ; that of Kam or Kama signifies desire, a sense which it also bears in ancient and modern Persian. And it is possible that the words Dipuc and Cupid, which have the same signification, may have the same origin, since we know that the old Etruscans, from whom great part of the Roman language and religion was derived, and whose system had a near affinity with thatof the Persians and Indians, used to write their lines alternately forwards and backwards, as furrows are made by the plough.
The Rig Veda (x. 129) says that desire `first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind.' Greek mythology connected Eros, the god of love, with the creation of the universe, something in the same way.
A curious hymn in the Atharava Veda exalts Kama into a supreme god and creator ; another part makes Kama to be desire, then the power which gratifies desire, also identifies Kama with Agni.
The Indian Maya, or, as the word is explained by some Hindu scholars, the first inclination of the godhead to diversify himself by erecting worlds, is feigned to be the mother of universal nature and of all the inferior gods. But the word Maya, or delusion, in the Vedanta philosophy, signifies the system of perceptions, whether of secondary or primary qualities, which the deity was believed, by Epicharmus, Plato, and many truly pious people, to raise by his omnipresent spirit in the minds of his creatures, but which had not, in their opinion, any existence independent of mind. Maya or Ada Maya is a name of Lakshmi. She is thus the general attracting power ; the mother of all, the sakti or energy of Vishnu, the personi ficatien of spirit ; she, as attraction, unites all matter, producing love in animated nature, and in physics, the harmonization of atoms. Kama or Love is her offspring, and is united in marriage to Reti or Affection, the inseparable attendant on the tender passion ; and in friendship to Vasant'ha (commonly pronounced Bassanth) or Spring, denoting Love's season, but literally in regard to the time when many animals are impreg nated and vegetables burst into existence, and metaphorically touching the early portion of man's passage through life. There is an allegory of Kama being an avatara or son of Krishna, by Rukmeni, other names of Vishnu and Lakshmi, and this is a further instance of the correspondence of that goddess with the Roman Venus, the mother of Cupid. His riding or dancing by moonlight allude to the love-inspiring serenity of the time ; such nights, about Agra and in the southern parts of India, affording, after the heat and tumult of the day, a delicious quiet feeling of happiness not easily communicated nor conceivable by the mere experience of the unsettled cloudy skies of northern latitudes. The banner of Kama, a fish on a red ground, and his vahan or vehicle, a parrot or lory, have doubtless their allusions, the former possibly to the stimulating nature of that species of food, stirring the blood to aid Kamdeo's ends ; and perhaps the colouring and extreme beauty of the lory, and, like the fish (and the dove of western mythology, its supposed aphrodisiac tendency as food malk -have had a share in guiding a selection of attributes for the ardent deity. The soft affection 'and fabled constancy of the dove may have weigh with the Greeks, although constancy may not, pe Japs, be, in strictness, a striking characteristic of love.