Dear Kumar ul Islam,
How many arrows, indeed. The Greeks thought of Apollo as the dispenser of plague, but also of light and poetic inspiration. In Homer's
Iliad, for example, King Priam of Troy prays to Apollo about an injustice, beseeching the god's dreadful fury.
quote:
Thus did he pray, and Apollo heard his prayer. He came down furious from the summits of Olympus, with his bow and his quiver upon his shoulder, and the arrows rattled on his back with the rage that trembled within him.
He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them. First he smote their mules and their hounds, but presently he aimed his shafts at the people themselves, and all day long the pyres of the dead were burning.
In fact, the Greek word that is used to denote sin in the New Testament is
hamartanein, which means "to miss the mark." So can our actions and intentions stray from our ideals and what is right. Even in the Hindu mythology, Saraswati, the goddess of poetry and knowledge, is sometimes compared to Sukracharya, the demon muse. All the karmas of perception and action are mixed in God's poem and in us, singing out.
Please let me share this poem I wrote two weeks ago for another website. The challenge was to pick a random word in a book and use it in the first line of a poem. I picked from a Sanskrit book.
quote:
Bow (kaarmukam)
I have never loosed a bow,
Sailing forth its deadly streams,
With an expert, godly aim,
As never to have missed a mark.
Borne upon my back to show
Some surety within a dream,
It is really strung in vain,
Binding ends amidst the dark.
[But that dark is eternity, and is good: at least, I think so! The poem presents weapons of identity as delusions.]