Blades

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BLADES

BLADES , such as those of swords, knives, axes, scythes, scissors, and saws, are instruments for cutting things apart. As hierophanies of divine power, blades manifest the instrumental function of intentional or purposeful cutting, dividing, separating, splitting, cleaving, or articulating.

The divine cutting power epiphanized by blades acts creatively or constructively when it differentiates a primordial entity; multiplies one into many by cutting something into parts; releases or receives some fructifying substance by cutting something open; orders a confused state by dividing it into parts; or purifies or brings something to its perfected form by cutting away a nonessential admixture. The same cutting power acts in a negating, limiting, or destructive way when it brings about a premature end by cutting off further development, by establishing an impassable boundary, or by destroying the necessary integrity or organic unity required for the continuance of something.

Blades are manmade instruments designed for implementing conscious intentions; they require craft for their manufacture and both training and discipline for their use. This quality of consciousness enables them to symbolize the divine intellect, purpose, will, judgment, craft, cunning, or wisdom that wields or guides the cutting power.

Blades manifest their divine power in all domains of existence—agriculture, warfare, civil administration, service to the gods, and meditative disciplines. For instance, cutting power in the form of the sickle is an attribute of divinities connected with agriculture as a sacred institution. The ancient Italian god of seedtime and harvest, Saturnus, carries a sickle. The Greek earth goddess, Gaia, invented the sickle and urged her son Kronos to castrate his father with it because he was preventing her children from coming into the light.

Cutting power in the form of a sword is an attribute of divinities connected with meditative disciplines. In Hinduism, for example, the sword Nandaka ("source of joy"), which is held by the god Viṣṇu represents pure knowledge (jñāna ), whose substance is wisdom (vidyā ). The flaming sword of knowledge is the powerful weapon that destroys ignorance. Generally, in whatever domain of existence the divine cutting power manifests itself it does so as the sacred blade of a numinous agent who wields the blade and whose essential nature is represented by it.

Blades as attributes of the ruling gods of the sky in various religious traditions manifest cutting power in both its constructive and its negative connotations. The blades of the sky gods have their natural analogue in the phenomenon of lightning. For example, the Vedic ruler of heaven, the cloud-dwelling god Indra, is deity of space, dispenser of rain, thrower of the thunderbolt (vajra ), and principle of lightning—the energy of cosmic and animal life, which is stored as the semen (vīrya ) of all beings. When the priest of Indra brandishes the ritual wooden sword (sphyha ), he is regarded as raising the thunderbolt used by Indra to behead Vṛtra, the dragon (or demon) that caused drought. In the epic Mahābhārata, Indra's thunderbolt is equated with the penis, and in the Tantras it is equated with sexual power as the fundamental energy.

According to Ananda Coomaraswamy, "the Japanese sword, Shinto, royal, or samurai, is in fact the descendant or hypostasis of the sword of lightning found by Susa-no-Wo-no-Mikoto in the tail of the Dragon of the Clouds, whom he slays and dissevers, receiving in return the last of the daughters of the Earth, whose seven predecessors have been consumed by the Dragon" (Selected Papers, Princeton, 1977, vol. 1, p. 434).

Lightning is also a metaphor expressive of the flashing sword of judgment wielded by Yahveh. "I have posted a sword at every gate to flash like lightning, polished for havoc" (Ez. 21:20). After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, Yahveh posts "the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life" (Gn. 3:24).

The ax is also an attribute of sky gods. Indra is incarnated as the god Rāma-with-the-Ax, Parasic-Rāma. Rāma's ax is the cutting power in the service of reestablishing the proper social order by means of war. Rāma was given the ax and trained in its use by Śiva, the god or principle of disintegration, dispersion, and annihilation. Zeus is another example of a sky god whose warrior power is represented by the ax. At the time of his birth on Mount Ida in Crete the mountain brought forth the Kouretes, youths armed with battle-axes and shields, who danced around the divine child to conceal his cries from Kronos, his murderous father. The birthplace of Zeus on Crete is also a major site of the cult of the double ax. Apparently the double ax itself was worshiped, and in later representations Zeus is shown shouldering the ax.

Blades are attributes of sun gods and solar heroes. These blades have their natural analogue in the form and activity of sunbeams and rays of sunlight. The Babylonian sun god, Shamash, who was a judge, lawgiver, and fertility deity, is depicted holding a saw with which to cut decisions. His heroic and kingly agent, Gilgamesh, carries a battle-ax and a sword with which he kills both the monster Huwawa, who rules the wilderness, and the Bull of Heaven, sent against him by the goddess Ishtar, whose seduction he rejects. In general, the blades associated with sun gods and solar heroes manifest the divine cutting power serving the interest of establishing the human order, civilization, and kingship.

Swords are almost universally found as a part of royal regalia, for the sovereign is the temporal counterpart of the divine principle that rules through cutting power. For example, there are five swords in the regalia of the British monarch: the sword of state, a smaller sword substituted for it that is used during the coronation ceremony, the sword of spiritual justice, the sword of temporal justice, and the sword of mercy, which has a blunted tip.

Scissors are particularly connected with the power of terminating or cutting something off. For example, the Moirai or goddesses of fate in the pre-Olympian Greek religion spun and determined the length of the threads of human lives. One of them, Atropos, snipped off the threads with scissors. In Hindu iconography the goddess Kālī is sometimes depicted with scissors, which she uses to snip the thread of life.

Kālī or Mahā-Kālī, the transcendent power of time that dissociates all things, is often shown holding a sword, which represents the destructive power of time to cut off life. The sword is also an instrument of sacrifice in the rites of Kālī.

Blades are also attributes of gods of the underworld. For instance, Yama, the Hindu sovereign of the infernal regions and judge of the dead, carries a sword, an ax, and a dagger. The name Yama means "binder, restrainer." When Yama is identified with the principle of time (Kālā) he is shown as an old man carrying a sword and shield, as this concept has to do with endings.

In the biblical Book of Revelation (15:14–16) the end of time is represented by the image of the Son of man appearing on a cloud with a sickle in his hand. "Then another angel … shouted aloud to the one sitting on the cloud, 'Put your sickle in and reap: harvest time has come and the harvest of the earth is ripe.' Then the one on the cloud set his sickle to work on the earth.…" The judging Word of the Lord is also represented in the image of the Son of man with the double-edged sword coming from his mouth (Rv. 1:16).

Thus the divine cutting power manifested in blades works toward a multiplicity of ends in all domains of existence. Depending upon the context in which it appears, the blade traditionally symbolizes the instrument of creativity, liberation, justice, power, authority, fertility, purification, enlightenment, punishment, death, execution, destruction, martyrdom, and limitation.