Good and Evil. God and Devil

WORD GAME: Being with the mother, who provided both nourishment and bodily contact, was a source of joy and delight and comfort. Being away from the mother was a space of unease or danger.

By Ratna Raman

The invention of language was an extraordinary happening. Across the world sounds were shaped into syllables and shapes were conceived for them, and the humans taught themselves to make these connections. So, when did they discover that the everyday weight of the world, could only be lifted by communication and that with language things would move much faster?

Imagine for instance, a mother out foraging in the forest, who can say to her children, maybe two of them: “Yes, I can see you are hungry. I will go and get us some fruit from the water apple tree I saw yesterday, but you need to be quiet, because then you will be safe.”

I know that this is what the feral ‘she cats’, who litter in my backyard every other year, communicate to their kittens. They nurse them and then go off to forage, often bringing back a dead pigeon or a rat for themselves, while the little kittens begin feeding as soon as their mother returns.

They nuzzle and play, climbing all over her and then play among themselves. At the sound of an unfamiliar noise or movement, they listen intently and then hide themselves and remain still, till what they perceive as a threat passes.

Possibly, the human children in the wild did the same, till their mother returned, bringing them some foraged fruit.

However, unlike the cats who continue to live feral lives in varied habitats, humans have learnt to use language to move far beyond the simple communication and instruction offered by parents telling their children to remain safe while they were absent. Over the centuries, different languages travelled along with humans collecting words and experiences. emotions and ideas, and shifting from spoken form to writing. The number of words in all languages continue to increase, and words also began to form complex meanings.

However, unlike the cats who continue to live feral lives in varied habitats, humans have learnt to use language to move far beyond the simple communication and instruction offered by parents telling their children to remain safe while they were absent.

Let us go back to two the earliest concerns voiced in the two anecdotes, that of the human mother and the feral cat. Being with the mother, who provided both nourishment and bodily contact, was a source of joy and delight and comfort. Being away from the mother was a space of unease or danger. So, being with the mother was a space of ease, and in the absence of the mother the space could become dangerous.

Joy and comfort is seen and experienced as something good, both by the kittens and the little humans. This could be true of the instincts of the adult cat and the adult human as well.

Danger is perceived as bad or evil. Framing a wide spectrum from comfort to danger, language makes a shift, analysing the two different situations as good and evil. Let us pick up these two words, good and evil, and try to understand how they function.

As values they exist in a binary and occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, in language and in lived experience. Good allows for joyfulness, while evil generates fear.

At this juncture, arguably, the experts formulate a further abstraction, by defining the agents of both good and evil. These too are forged out of language.

At this juncture, arguably, the experts formulate a further abstraction, by defining the agents of both good and evil. These too are forged out of language. If we were to remove an extra ‘o’ from the word ‘good’ and compress it in order to distil its essence, we get the word ‘god’. Reversing the placement of the letters in ‘god’, we get ‘dog’, another species of animal, signifying the inversion of the ‘god principle’ and a glimpse of the dog-eat-dog universe that we currently inhabit.

Meanwhile how is evil to be stemmed (dammed)?

Look at the word evil. You do evil and you are damned, says the holy text and the akaashvanis, the disembodied voices that float in the form of oracles and voice revelations from the sky.

Just add the letter D.

?

The addition of the letter ‘d’ to evil sets the stage for the arrival of the ‘devil.’ Concentrating on the good we do, brings us face to face with God while the evil that we commit leads us straight to the Devil. What now looms before us, is the entire paradigm of human possibility and experience in a cosmic universe.

Welcome to the world of language.

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Ratna Raman is Professor, Department of English, Venketeswara College, University of Delhi. This is her first part of a series, on the heady ‘game of words’ and shifting meanings and nuances of language.