Religious & Spiritual Figurines & Sculptures

Features

• Light is a divine phenomenon, and hence spreading light, is a spiritual act manifesting one's reverence to light and thereby to the lights Creator. A lamp being its simplest mode, conceiving a lamp, casting, molding, or gifting it, has been venerated, always, everywhere, and in every system of thought, as one of the man's most pious impulses. The lamps divine contexts being inherent, the artists/artisans, while innovating a form for a lamp often sought to discover its spiritual/mystic image and aesthetic beauty by blending into its form a divine icon itself, a mystic graphic, an auspicious symbol or object, or an aspect of nature. Some forms of Ganesha divine icons, in mystic graphics, an elephant form, peacock, lion or another bird in animals, and a lotus or a conventionalized flower form as aspects of nature, are the features most usually associated with forms of lamps. Such decorative/mystic lamps have been in vogue in India since times immemorial.
• As evolved in long tradition a lamp-stand or lamp-tray might consist of any number of lamps, usually, one, three, five, seven, nine, eleven, or any but usually uneven, each endowed with one symbolic dimension or other, one, dedicated to one Brahma, the entire visible and invisible cosmos being just His manifestations; three, to the Great Trinity: Brahma, VishnuandShiva; five, to five cosmic elements, five directions, the fifth being the sky, and to five manifestations of Shiva; seven, to Sapta-Matrikas and Sapta-rishis seven great sages that seven stars represent; nine, to nine forms of goddess Durga, nine planets, and so on. This lamp-tray consists of five lamps considered as illuminating Pancha-bhutas five cosmic elements or constituents of the cosmos: earth or creative function, water, fire, space, and wind, that is, these five lamps illuminate all five constituents of the cosmos, and thus the cosmos. Sometimes such lamp-stand is contended to illuminate with its four lamps four directions: east, west, north, and south, and with the fifth, sky.
• A predominant deity of South India, the worship of Murugan has been traced back to the Vedic period as the ever-youthful god who was the son of Parvati and Shiva and brother to Ganesha.