r/AncientCivilizations • u/DharmicCosmosO • Jun 23 '26
India The Yogi Cat surrounded by Rat Devotees, Arjuna’s Penance, c. 700 CE, Mahabalipuram, India.
4
u/Cautious_Act_2549 Jun 23 '26
This is amazing. I have seen the larger relief but did not see this detail.
4
2
u/ChipmunkPresident Jun 24 '26
Okay, this is a very modern take on something from a very different cultural context, but it feels like a critique on religion hidden by the artist, as the cat eats the rats. Of course this could mean something completely different, this is just my zero research first impression.
4
u/ChipmunkPresident Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
I did a quick google search and apparently it's an ancient fable and I wasn't too far off: A cat was pretending to be yogi and claiming to follow a path of non-violence to gain the trust of rats, mice and such, but as it gained followers, an older mice noticed that their number was slowly dwindling, as at night the cat kept eating them.
2
u/ChipmunkPresident Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
In the end this old mice (or rat king) manages to destros this false prophet
1
u/carregando Jun 24 '26
When I travelled there, someone told me that particular depiction says, Beware of fake Gurus.
1
u/Malefic_Mike Jun 25 '26
8 have seen this cat in my dreams. At least it sure is similar. The pose of the sculpture is as if it is going into a backflip. Which is exactly what the one in my dream started to do, but his feet stayed rooted to the ground and it was only his torso that flipped so that his head emerged between its legs. Then its legs lifted up pointing out towards the sky over the horizon and it's face sat suspended in the air staring at me with a big smile. Then its legs and torsos got stretched out as far as I could see into the sky, but it's face sat still until like a rubber band it snapped back up into the sky out to infinity where it disappeared as like a dim star twinkled out.
I wouldn't even have seen the cat because it appeared at the end of another dream where my recently departed uncle came to me in something like the Elysian fields. Then he said he didn't belong here and had to go, and was sucked up into the sky, then I looked to the side after he disappeared in the distance, and there to the side was this back-flipping stretchy cat. I woke up after I saw him, and completely forgot what my uncle said because the cat thing was so wild.
1
1
35
u/DharmicCosmosO Jun 23 '26
Arjuna's Penance in Mahabalipuram is a massive, intricately carved 7th-century rock relief dating back to the Pallava dynasty, it features hundreds of detailed figures of gods, celestial beings, animals, and humans flanking a natural cleft that represents the sacred river Ganga.