Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

                                            Why did Lord Shiva Let His Hair Become Matted?

Lord Shiva depicted anthropomorphically always has His hair matted and with a top knot.How to do a topr know with matted hair, I need to consult a hair stylist! No barette seen.

 

The almost invisible torrent descending from the top on to Lord Shiva’s head is the Akash Ganga that He catches in His matted hair. I trust this picture explains the myth sufficiently and leads you directly to understanding the question.

Did Lord Shiva refuse a haircut knowing a priori that He would be called on to stem the ferocity of Akash Ganga which He could do most effectively by catching the torrent in His matted hair tied into a layered top knot? Or, was He both lazy and a miser to spend the little cash He had on a haircut? His matted hair then merely became a handy coincidence in the myth.  

Which one of the above two scenarios is the mythical truth (?) is the question I am going to speculate on as an exercise in understanding evolution of life on earth. Let me begin. 

There are two distinctly different schools of thought. We may call one of them Lamarckian and the other Darwinian. Lamarck said, at the level I understand, that the reason a giraffe has a long neck was that was where it can find the food that is tasteful. It was perhaps purpose directed. 

In the state of Kentucky in the US, I visited the Mammoth Cave National Park. In there and in the natural water course that flows through it, the tour guide told us that the fish in those waters (called blind cave fish) do not have eyes. This is where Lamarck could be brought in. His idea was that for some reason (that he could not put his finger on) a fish lost its sight, but perhaps gained in acuity of its other senses that helped it find the prey in the pitch black caves and survived. It thus produced an offspring who also did not have sight but had the capability of survival in dark caves built into it – no eyes but could still hunt down its prey.

The above is pure Lamarckian. Its counterpart, the Darwinian, sets store by a random mutation (Darwin was not privy to the later discovery about genes) that provided the differential success that built up over generations to allow the blind cave fish to survive. Both these guys had no clue how the change they pegged their theories on happened. They just happened, by making a species suited to the environment, or by a random change that enabled it to survive.

It so happened that Darwin could tentatively explain under an overarching umbrella the variety of life found on the earth. Lamarck, on the other hand, needed to find an individual,and site and time specific modification in the species that enabled it to survive, like the neck of the giraffe.

Now, knowing the above, if I posed the two alternatives as regards how it came to be that Lord Shiva caught the raging torrent of Akash Ganga in his matted hair, their choices would be evident. Lamarck would choose that Lord Shiva deliberately put His hair in a fashion that could catch Akash Ganga.

Darwin? Lord Shiva wanted to save cash and was wandering in the Himalayas when AkashGanga fell into his hair and was tamed.

I go with, based on my comparison above, Lamarck. But, ignoring the myth, I am with Darwin.

On the one hand, and, on the other!

Raghuram Ekambaram