Our gaze through the sands of time is sometimes blurry, and with each telling, a tale changes, especially after the language by which we describe phenomena also undergoes linguistic transformation. This is one of the reasons why popularizing the metaphysical structures through story-telling is a good (albeit imprecise) way of transmitting knowledge that transcends the boundaries of common understanding.
The ‘Burning of Kama’ is a Hindu myth in which the god of love and desire, Kama, was sent to disturb Shiva, who was minding his own business with meditation and austerities. The gods wanted to disturb him so that he would attend to more mundane matters like getting married and ensuring night and day arrived on time for the harvest.
Upon being struck by Kama’s arrow of flowers, Shiva fell in love with a dual aspect of himself, Parvati, as had been foretold, and thus united the female (prakrti) and male (purusha) principles that represent the creative (transforming) and destroying qualities of the universe respectively.
Someone seems to have forgotten to tell Kama that Shiva was called the Destroyer for a reason. We’re not talking about someone who destroys a toy when he throws a temper tantrum, we’re talking about whole worlds. So the enraged Shiva gazed at Kama with his third eye and burned the god’s corporeal body to smithereens.
For his part, Shiva remained in his cosmic duality, which is represented by the Lingam-Yoni symbol common throughout India. The lingam is phallic in nature and usually made of stone like granite, basalt, or other types of stone. It represents the divine primordial energy of Shiva, and on it, one can see the trivali folds and Shiva’s third eye near the tip. Although it’s a phallic symbol, it is always placed on top of a pedestal that represents the yoni, vagina, which is a representation of the female creative energy.
While there are variations in the manner and techniques of love and desire, the experience is important to everyone for survival and existence. Now that Kama didn’t have a body, chaos broke out in the world. So Shiva’s new wife, Parvati, pleaded with him to do something. Shiva mulled it over and decided to bring Kama back but would not give him a corporeal body, so the god of desire and love became known as Ananga- the bodiless god. When he wishes to become manifest, he takes possession of unwitting humans, causing them to fall madly in love. He can only be appeased by performing the right rituals/procedures that lead to a warm discharge from Shiva's third eye.
I wanted to recreate the Shiva lingam using the basic parameters of stable of diffusion and also ControlNet which is “a neural network structure to control diffusion models by adding extra conditions.” (as described in the home site). In theory this should make the images even better... somehow...
I decided to create the images based on three general conditions: text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-image + ControlNet. I simply prompted SD to provide me with a Shiva lingam bathed in milk and Indian temples in the background during sunset, then I muttered a few arcane words that may or may not have made a difference.
1. text-to-image
In this condition, I simply entered the prompt and altered a few standard parameters in the text-to-image function. These are a few of the results.
The general elements of the lingam are there, but it's not quite right. The shape is phallic, or at least can be construed as such. The system did all kinds of odd things with the word milk, so I could've worked more with that element.
2. image-to-image condition
In this condition, I took a picture of the lingam that I brought from India.
I entered the lingam image as input for the image-to-image function, altered some parameters, and these are the results:
Ahem!
The general shape is there, but it's not accurate. It's like SD does not really know what a real Indian lingam looks like. Fascinating!
3. image-to-image + ControlNet.
This is the part where I ran into trouble. The ControlNet extension has a capricious nature. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It has several models but for this session, I couldn't get it to work even after I waved my hands frantically over the keyboard. Then strangely, when I put 'none' as the model, it worked.
I did not succeed in creating a proper lingam using SD. Mind you, I didn't try very hard as I just wanted to do a quick test of the process for later mayhem. I do think that these images are interesting. They capture some of that profound new-agey stuff we're all fond of. It is somewhat haunting when I think about how these objects are not real, just the dreamed up sequences of a Hiver and his friendly AI. It does bring me pleasure thinking that in spite of the training data, these are unique creations imbued with the essence of a myth.
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