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She bought a guidebook that pointed out that the temples were a thousand years old and were all built within a hundred year period that is centered at the end of the 1st Millennium and the beginning of the 2nd. The guidebook called them dryly "the best-preserved architectural antiquity of the Chandela period."
"Is this what we have come to see, an architectural antiquity?" I asked.
"Wait till tomorrow and you'll rewrite the guidebook," said Indira and began to grin.
Obviously I had to be patient; patient in a night with some dancing in a quaint place; a night of dining with food of exotic names that no westerner could pronounce; a nigh of wine that was rather inexpensive; and a night enriched with local entertainment in the hotel of traditional Indian music that sounded as magical as a dream. And after all that we had our own festival of cunninglus.
She was right about me rewriting the guidebook, at least in my mind. The temples were a bewildering collection of fascinating shapes that challenged the imagination of the beholder in the modern age as much as it must have challenged the builders and their skill and endurance in creating such works of beauty with a freedom in construction that seemed to challenge the physical constraints. And yet I had to remind myself that those temples have stood for a thousand years, built merely of sandstone. They were created of varying shades of sandstone, some buff, some pink, some pale yellow.
The guidebook indicated the different sect that the individual temples represented. Some belonged to the Shiva Sect, others to the Vaishnava Sect, and others again to the Jaina Sect. I couldn't see the difference. I found them indistinguishable from one-another. I saw them as lofty monuments, generously laid out with ample walking space separating them.
The guidebook pointed out that the interior rooms are interconnected in an East/West line, and that all contain a magnificent entrance oriented towards the East, towards the sunrise. The great interior hall seemed to be a kind of vestibule for a sanctum. Windows have added to the larger temples to add a feeling of space and light.
The guidebook also pointed out that all the openings face East. I only saw them as lavishly carved archways. Still I found it interesting after a while that they were all oriented towards the sunrise, since the sunrise is repeated each single day. I found this significant, because Mary had associated her second development stream with the East, the direction of the sunrise, and had dedicated the flow of development in that stream with the development of the rights of woman, the rights of the spiritual idea of humanity, the new image of mankind that John the Revelator saw as "a woman clothed with the sun and moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars," the stars in the crown of rejoicing. It seemed as if these temples were aligned towards this development. I wondered if the builders realized that it would take mankind a thousand years before it would actually have the moon under its feet, and that this miraculous ability would flicker like a star and then become lost again in an age of war and a fast-rising darkness. It occurred to me that the temples were built between two dark ages, between the end of the Brahmanic Dark Age and the lesser Dark Age of the Islamic Moghul emporium.
The interior ceilings of the temples displayed many renaissance features in their design. Except that renaissance wasn't Islamic. An erotic Islam is a contradiction in concept. The temples were definitely profoundly Hindu in design. The temples spoke to me of a Hindu Renaissance, the kind of renaissance that the history books don't seem to mention. Of course the renaissance that arose out of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 isn't acknowledged in the history books either as a great renaissance, though it shaped the world in a profound way. I wondered if the temples of Khajuraho had the same effect in their time.
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