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The south‐facing panels represent afternoon moving toward twilight, a time of ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. Bharata's ambiguous and compromised history told in Book Nine of the Bhagavata Purana may be described as written in “language in the manner of twilight.” The first corner panel depicts Dattatreya with Soma and Durvasas, and assumes knowledge of the Ramayana and Mahabharata; it signifies the tejas of Aniruddha the Unobstructed. In the other corner panel Mohini serves the devas amrita as the asuras watch; tantric rites using the “five m's” are referenced. Two of the bracketed panels illustrate Krishna's long “Summary of the Brahman Doctrine”: Krishna teaches Uddhava at Dvaraka, and Dattatreya as an avadhuta teaches Yadu. The latter alludes to the stories of Taravaloka and Vessantara. The next panel depicts Prahlada worshiping Man‐lion; the meaning of Sudarshana, the wheel‐weapon that embodies Shakti's will, is explored. The “Man‐lion Consecration” is implied. Finally, the Goddess Earth worships Boar, who rescued her from Hiranyaksha.

The development of multicellular organisms involves a balance between somatic and reproductive tissues. This chapter outlines how the action of selection is influenced by the age at which structures and behaviours are expressed. This chapter's first section is called Reproductive allocation and it explains all about the correlated response to selection; antagonism of fitness components; the evolution of genetic correlation; and the optimal allocation. The second section, entitled Life histories, details selection in age-structured populations; depreciation of later reproduction; artificial selection for early reproduction; senescence; soma and germ; the nature of senescence; the evolution of senescence; selection for delayed senescence in Drosophila; endogenous evolution; and the disposable soma.

This chapter discusses Hindu origins. The Indo‐Aryan controversy is examined: Did Hindu scriptures emerge as an indigenous product or did they arrive with migrating foreigners? The chapter discusses the religious thought of the Rig Veda with a special focus on the sacrifice and its intellectual foundations.

This chapter looks at examples of biological approaches to understanding two mental disorders: schizophrenia and addiction. It shows that biological models in psychiatry depend on an implicit concept referred to as “soma”. Soma is what holds together biological psychiatry's conception of the body—an overarching conception of the kind of thing a body is. As such, it sets the agenda for psychiatric research on bodies: given that the body is such and such kind of thing, psychiatrists expect to find these other kinds of things as part of the body or related to it. It is argued that soma functions in a manner analogous to a Sellarsian Given. As a result, it also suffers the problems of the Given. Biological psychiatry would do better to approach soma in a different way, thereby opening a genuine place for the mind in neural explanations.

Chapter 4 focuses on the way that ritual practitioners strengthen the bodies of men, whether divine or human, through ritual praise (stóma) and drinking the sacred beverage sóma. A close study of the discursive representation of physical strength (ójas) not only reveals the circumscribed way that Āryan men were supposed to understand and use their bodies, but also the way they embodied social and political ideals. Ritual practitioners thus naturalize the androcentric martial ideology by encoding it within a man’s very sense of his physical self. The poetic construction of Indra’s body highlights then a ritual strategy whereby poet-priests negotiate and control individuals and political realities, while reproducing the importance and centrality of their ritual tradition. This chapter further suggests that a critical appreciation of the strengthening process raises theoretical issues about the nature of R̥gvedic sóma rituals and the reason for their very existence.

The principal traits of Aryan culture are started by Vedic, Iranian, and Greek literary texts and cognate terms found in the proto-Indo-European languages. The texts that help to reconstruct the material and other aspects of Aryan culture comprise the Rig Veda, Zend-Avesta, and Iliad and Odyssey. These texts present agriculture and pastoralism as the principal sources of livelihood. The horse plays a crucial role in the life of the early Indo-Europeans. War chariot with spoked wheels also appear. The pit-dwelling may have developed in cold conditions. The use of birch-wood appears to be an Aryan feature along with underground houses. The fire altar is mentioned in the Rig Veda, and fire worship is very important in Avesta. Animal sacrifice was an important Aryan ritual. The cult of soma was confined to only the Iranian and Vedic peoples. The migration of the Indo-Aryans is finally described.

The Indo-Iranians came from two areas of Central Asia. The Aryans in India are known from the Rig Veda. This text is the earliest text of the Indo-European languages. The Indo-Aryans were engaged in fighting with the pre-Aryans and amongst themselves. The Rig Vedic people had a superior knowledge of agriculture and they were a predominantly pastoral people. The administrative machinery of the Aryans in the Rig Vedic period functioned with the tribal chief. The Rig Veda does not mention any officer for administration of justice. The practice of levirate and widow remarriage was also shown. It then displays some consciousness of the physical appearance of people in north-western India. The significant divinities addressed in the Rig Veda include Indra, Agni, Varuna, Soma, Maruts and Sarasvati. They have many deities who represent the different forces of nature in one form or another but are also assigned human activities.

This chapter discusses the prehistory of the Indo-Aryan peoples ancestral to those who composed the Ṛgveda. On the basis of shared linguistic and cultural evidence it defends the view that these peoples migrated into northwest South Asia, splitting off from the larger group of Indo-Iranians, a branch of Indo-European, who migrated south and east from the steppes. In particular it takes up the shared heritage of Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic) and Old Iranian (Avestan) language, literature, and religion, specifically comparing the poetry and ritual practices of the Ṛgveda with those found in Avestan, particularly the hymns, called Gāthās (songs), attributed to Zarathustra. It also examines the soma/haoma cult that dominated the ritual practice of both Vedic and Avestan elite populations.

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category of the body itself as historically emergent. Bruno Snell argued that Homer lacked a concept of the body (sōma), but it is the emergence of body in the fifth century BCE rather than the appearance of mind or soul that is most consequential for the shape of ancient dualisms. The body takes shape in Hippocratic medical writing as largely hidden and unconscious interior space governed by impersonal forces. But Plato’s corpus demonstrates that while Plato’s reputation as a somatophobe is well grounded and may arise in part from the way the body takes shape in medical and other physiological writing, the Dialogues represent a more complex position on the relationship between body and soul than Plato’s reputation suggests.

This chapter develops the idea that the germ-soma split and the suppression of individual fitness differences within the corporate entity are not always essential steps in the evolution of corporate individuals. It illustrates some consequences for multilevel selection theory. It presents evidence that genetic heterogeneity may not always be a barrier to successful functioning as a higher-level individual. This chapter shows that levels-of-selection theorists are wrong to assume that the central problem in transitions is always that of minimizing within-group competition. Evidence of intralevel conflict does not qualify as evidence against the existence of a higher level of selection.

In this chapter, the author deploys a psychoanalytic hermeneutic to interpret the life of St. Teresa. The author develops three characteristics of Theresa’s thinking: the ideal father, the re-sexualization of the ideal father by the mystic (a pere-version), and the oral gratification of the Eucharist. Teresa’s “incarnated fantasies” of the ideal father who persecutes her are transformed into a loving father, expressed in a unique narrative in which Teresa becomes a “psyche-some” below the threshold of consciousness. These visions re-emphasize the denigrated senses, such as touch.

This chapter presents three important reasons why evolutionary biologists dismissed Lamarckism or soft inheritance from the Modern Synthesis. The first is the legacy of adhering to August Weismann's ideas of the separation of germ line and soma. The second is the absence, from the 1920s through the 1940s, of convincing for strong evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The third reason came from the assumptions of population and quantitative genetics, which were developing at the time.

This chapter discusses the transcontinental travel of several South Asian lay Buddhists to Japan, where, working with a Nichiren denomination cleric, they translated the work The Path of Freedom from the Chinese text, the Jietuodaolun (Japanese,Gedatsudōron) into English. The chapter details the various exchanges that occurred between Japanese scholars who studied and, subsequently, taught in Japan at the University of Calcutta, and English-language Buddhist studies publishing by Japanese Buddhist clerics residing in India.

In this chapter, the author examines somatic practices with dream images from the perspective of Jungian psychology. A registered somatic movement therapist and depth psychologist, the author reflects on her personal experiences of working two somatic dreams. In particular, she describes her application of the Shin Somatics approach to self-reference touch, teaching through touch, and dance improvisation, as she uses it when working with archetypal dreams. She discusses the relationship between the soma, somatic dreams, the chakra system, and archetypal imagery, and defines these terms in connection with the therapeutic exploration of dreams. She says soma includes the sensations that she experiences—while asleep and awake—that she can identify with her eyes closed. The author concludes by sharing how her work with somatic dreams and dancing the chakras has saved her life on more than one occasion, including her passage through a chaotic midlife crisis.

This section discusses Dance Maps, user-friendly maps that present simple structures for use as a guide for dance experiences. Designed for those who want to claim the dancer within, from the professional dancer to the novice, Dance Maps are performance templates not only for the studio but also for natural and architected environments. They are intended to help spark creative uses of transformational dance somatics. Several authors of this book provide examples, including a version of “Be a Stone” and “Be Spinach and Stone Butoh” mapped by Sondra Fraleigh; Back-to-Back exploration for Catherine Schaeffer’s “Motional Baggage”; Ecodances mapped by Alison East; a memory-based transformational Dance Map mapped by Kelly Ferris Lester; and a movement meditation mapped by Robert Bingham. These examples show how teachers of dance in somatic contexts can engage in community building through exploration of choreographic and improvisational structures based on Dance Maps.

This introductory chapter analyzes Lois Ann Yamanaka's poem series, “Parts” and the contemporary cadaver exhibits popularly known as “Body Worlds.” Both of them confront audiences with the human body as fragment, and with the idea of corporeality as divisible and biology as plastic and manipulable. The chapter argues that Asian Americanist critique and certain strains of bioethics have made ethical, political, and moral claims vis-à-vis these body parts; and they have done so through a distinctive rhetorical move that putatively returns the extracted body part to the violated racialized whole—a move that naturalizes a prior state of organic intactness and individuality to that racialized body. It alsoinquires whether literary criticism and performance studies remains humanist if they think in terms of distributed parts rather than organic structures, or, turn fragment and substance into patterns—circulations of energy, affects, atoms, and liquidity in its accounting of the soma.

This chapter discusses somatic movement arts and provides an extensive definition of movement-based somatic practices. The chapter describes somatics as a kinesthetic field for study and cultivation of movement arts, including the author’s experiences and conceptualizations of somatic methods in dance performance. The chapterbegins with a thumbnail sketch of somatic history, noting how somatic inquiry was buoyed by growth of existentialism and phenomenology, before considering the relationship of somatics to affect attunement, kinesthesia, and matching through touch. It also explains somatic methods, including those based on movement, and possible selves; the somatic affects of butoh; haptic perception, clearing processes, and repatterning; and the ways that soma promotes healing. The chapter concludes by outlining some Shin Somatics movement-based experiences and methods that the author and her colleagues explore with students and clients.

This chapter examines early Japanese translations of foreign detective novels, with particular emphasis on the works of Kuroiwa Ruikō. Pirating most of his material, Ruikō published dozens of serialized translations and adaptations of American, French, and English detective novels in his newspaper Yorozu chōhō (Morning Report for the Masses). This chapter first provides an overview of Ruikō's career, along with his translation methods and aims, before discussing three of his works: Émile Gaboriau's L'affaire Lerouge (Man or Devil?, 1888), Hito no un (People's Luck, 1894), and Les suites d'un duel (Consequences of a Duel). It also considers Ruikō's coverage of the scandal known as the Sōma Affair. Finally, it highlights the complexity of Ruikō's acts of cultural borrowing.