Postscript

Contents
Samkhya and Poetry......................................................................5

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. Prologue
4. Pre-Marital Love
5. Post-Marital Love
6. Anthology
7. Sexual Union
8. Siddhi Immortality
9. Epilogue
10.
Postscript
Ann 1 Kamasutra chapter on Sexual Union
Ann 2: Tamil Poets
Ann 3: Sixty-four Arts
Plan A
Additional Chapter: Music and Dance
Epilogue: Decline and Fall
Postscript: Remaining
Postscript: Proposed Contents
1. Sources
2. Social and Historical Perspective
3. Early Poetry
4. Paripatal, Late Poetry
5. Concept of Ananku
6. Bio
7. Tamil Concept of Love
8. Decline and Fall of Tamil Love Poetry
9. Music
10.Dance
11.Siva/ Saivism/ Tantra/ Samkhya Philosophy
12.Rise and Fall of Goddesses
13.Samkhya and Poetry
14.Tantra and Tamil literature
15.Saiva Siddhanta and Samkhya
Notes on Content (earlier)
Introduction

Concept of Ananku / Cankam and related (very brief)

Sivaism / Tantra / Yoga / From Sivaism Cosmology book /
Language from gods play book

Prologue

Womans many faces/gods according to time of the day

goes to prologue
o Connection between sex and geography
o Gods of various landscapes

Flora, fauna and gods connection

Epilogue

Decline and Fall of Erotic Poetry / Kalibhari break / Early vs

late poetry / pre-k vs post-k

Postscript

Sources
Social and Historical Perspective
o (History -- from Mahadevan epigraphy book
o Each of Eight anthologies and tolk, IA etc
o 3 periods -- from Drama book
o Origin of poems / Reconstructing earliest literature,
religion, etc)
Music and Ragamala Painting
Dance
Paripatal / Bhakti
Saivism
Tantra
Sakti and Goddesses / Rise and Fall of Goddesses / Five gods
and Five goddesses connection to woman

Appendix

Kamasutra chapter on Sexual Union

Tamil Poets
Sixty-four Arts

Note

Tamil Concept of Love should go to relevant chapter

From Bio Tamil Life then should go to relevant chapter

Web site

Additional material full chapters

Samkhya and Poetry

Samkhyan theories appear to have a direct bearing on the ancient
Tamil poetry and poetics.
But firstly, what is Samkhya?
For the Samkhyas, the universe develops starting from elementary
formulas ... expressible in mathematical or geometric terms (in this
case known as Yantras), common to all aspects of creation. There is
no difference of nature between the formulas at the basis of the
structures of the atoms of matter, the order of the stars, the
principles of life, or the mechanisms of perception and thought,
which are all parallel and interdependent manifestations of energy.
The relation with comparative poetry appears immediately, if one
thinks of Clip, which in our own time seems much more than a
poem and much more than a theory, starting from its very first
words. Its splendor contains a kind of message and even a warning
for infinite meditation:
Poem .
Much could now be said about this poem:
Interpretation .
Danielou specifically explores the connections between Samkhya
theories and literary research in a chapter of While the Gods Play
entitled "The Nature of Language," from which the following
quotations are taken:

Language, by means of which we are able to materialize thought

and describe the apparent world as perceived by our senses, must
therefore present to us characteristics analogous to those of the
process by which the universe develops. ... By delving back to the
sources of language, and to the process by which thought is
transformed into speech we should be able to uncover something of
the way in which the creative principle that is the divine "Word" is
manifest in creation.
The simplest form of vibration that our senses can perceive is the
vibration of air, which, within certain limits, we sense as a sound.
We can use sound vibration as a starting point and means of
comparison for an understanding of the other, more complex
vibratory states - whether they concern the structures of matter or
nature of life, or the phenomena of perception and thought.
The organ of speech is constituted as a yantra, a symbolic diagram.
The palatal vault (like the celestial vault) forms a hemisphere with
five points of articulation allowing the emission of five groups of
consonants, five main vowels, two mixed vowels, and two
secondary vowels, assimilated to the planets.
Likewise in the musical scale, there are five main notes, two
secondary ones, and two alternative notes, which are not arbitrary,
but correspond to fundamental numerical relationships between the
sound vibrations that we find at the basis of all musical systems.
Our perception of colors has analogous characteristics."
Such notions are strangely close to certain ideas in Clip when, on
the subject of music, the author establishes a link between "God

who articulates the world as a complex and indivisible totality" and

"the reciprocal analogy" that lets a sound suggest color, colors
suggest a melody, and both sounds and colors translate ideas.
There is, however, a further very distinct parallel between Samkhya
theories, as expounded by Danielou, and the poetry of Clip,
particularly the following:
Poem on dance/ragas
In discussions, reviews, and critical editions on Clip, a wide variety
of propositions are put forward to find the "key" to this sonnet,
which has particularly excited the imagination. I feel that nothing
serves better than these passages from Alain Danielou's comments
on the Samkhyas:
Particular vowels are associated with specific colors. Color
differences are due to the frequency ratios of light waves, just as
musical sounds are defined by the frequency of sound waves. . . .
According to Ragunandan Sharma's Akshara Vijnana, the fourteen
vowels correspond to the following colors:
A = white
I = red
U = yellow
E (ri) = bluish-black
O = black, etc.

These vowels and colors correspond to those that characterize the

cycles in which new human species are born and die.
Poems
These poetic intuitions, heirs of a persecuted tradition, are
answered by the theories of Shaivite cosmology and the Tantras, so
eloquently given voice to by Alain Danielou.