How ancient Hindus devised such a system which could keep a Shiva-Linga floating in air without the aids?
Dr Nishit Sawal
Shri Somnath, located in the Prabhas Kshetra near Veraval in Saurashtra on the western coast of Gujarat, is among the 12 Jyotirlinga shrines of Lord Shiva. The temple is considered very sacred for the Hindus due to the various legends connected to it. Somnath means “Lord of the Soma”, an epithet of Shiva. The very mention of this ancient, revered Jyotirlinga brings to memory of every Indian the infamous raid of Mahmud of Ghazni on the famous temple. Mahmud of Ghazni, taking advantage of the bitter, internecine fighting among the Indian Kingdoms at that time, managed to defeat the Indian Kings and storm Somnath, looting the temple and breaking the famous idol in 1025–1026 A.D. History chiefly remembers Mahmud of Ghazni for this destructive deed and even the textbook history of the ancient Somnath temple usually centers around this infamous looting raid.
However another forgotten aspect of the Somnath temple has been the floating Shiva-linga in the temple. About it, the famous Persian geographer Al Kazvini wrote the following interesting account –
“Somnath is a celebrated city of India, situated on the shore of the sea and washed by its waves. Among the wonders of the place was the temple in which was placed the idol called Somnath. This idol was in the middle of the temple without anything to support it from below, or to suspend it from above. It was regarded with great veneration by the Hindus, and whoever beheld it floating in the air was struck with amazement, whether he was a Mussulman or an infidel. The Hindus used to go on pilgrimage to it whenever there was an eclipse of the moon, and would then assemble there to the number of more than a hundred thousand. Everything that was most precious was brought there as
offerings and the temple was endowed with the taxes gathered from more than ten thousand villages. There is a river, the Ganges, which is held sacred, between which and Somnath the distance is two hundred parasangs. They used to bring the water of this river to Somnath every day, and wash the temple with it. The edifice was built upon fifty-six pillars of teak, covered with lead. The shrine of the idol was dark, but was lighted by jewelled chandeliers of great value. Near it was a chain of gold weighing two hundred mans. When a portion, or watch, of the night closed, this chain used to be shaken like bells to rouse a fresh lot of Brahmans to perform worship. When Sultan Mahmud, the son of Sabuktagin, went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath, in the hope that the Hindus would then become Mohammedans. He arrived there in the middle of Zu-l-ka’da, 416 A. H. (December, 1025 A.D.) The Indians made a desperate resistance. They kept going in to the temple weeping and crying for help; and then they issued forth to battle and kept fighting till all were killed. The number of the slain exceeded fifty thousand. The king looked upon the idol with wonder, and gave orders for the seizing of the spoil and the
appropriation of the treasures. There were many idols of gold and silver, and countless vessels set with jewels, all of which had been sent there by the
greatest personages in India. The value of the things found in the temples of the idols exceeded twenty thous
and dinars.
When the king asked his companions what they had to say about the marvel of the idol, and of its staying in the air without prop or support, several maintained that it was upheld by some hidden support. The king directed a person to go and feel all around and above and below it with a spear, which he did, but met with no obstacle. One of the attendants then stated his opinion that the canopy was made of loadstone, and the idol of iron, and that the ingenious builder had skillfully contrived that the magnet should not exercise a greater force on any one side – hence the idol was suspended in the middle. How did ancient Hindus devise such a system which could keep a Shiva-Linga floating in air without the aids?
The Mahabharata, the core kernel of which has been dated by the noted historian Pargiter to around 950 BC, refers to the Prabhasa Kshetra and the legend of the moon worshipping Shiva. Although no temple at Prabhasa is mentioned in the Mahabharata, it is mentioned as a place of pilgrimage. According to a legend narrated in the Shiva Purana (10-11th Century AD ), once Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu had an argument in terms of supremacy of creation. To test them, Shiva pierced the three worlds as a huge endless pillar of light, the jyotirlinga. The Jyotirlinga shrines are places where Shiva is supposed to have appeared as a fiery column of light. Applying scientific logic, it is clear that the Jyotirlinga shrines are temples where the Shiva-linga is actually a meteorite which appeared as a fiery column of light.
The Skanda Purana (7-10th Century AD ) describes the Sparsa Linga of Somnath as one bright as the sun, the size of an egg, lodged underground. Now this description of size of the Shiva –Linga at Somnath, it being bright as the sun and being lodged underground all tally with it being a meteorite. Meteorites usually appear in a very bright flash as they traverse the atmosphere – hence being compared to the sun in its brightness and since most of the bulk of a meteorite is vaporized in the atmosphere, its size would have been comparable to an egg, albeit probably slightly bigger as per testimony of other historical accounts of the floating Shiva-linga. When meteorites crash on earth, most of the meteorites disintegrate with force of impact into dust. Rarely fragments from iron-nickel meteorites survive this fiery journey through the earth’s atmosphere and can be found intact. These fragments may get embedded in the ground – probably that is what the Skanda-Purana alludes to when it says that the Sparsa-Linga of Somnath was lodged underground.
Thus a plausible guess would be that the Shiva-Linga of meteorite origin was being worshipped in the Prabhas region by 900 BC and probably it was improvised upon to become the floating Shiva-Linga of Somnath by some ancient genius at a later date.
There is more evidence contained in the historical accounts itself about the Somnath Shiva-linga clearly pointing it to being a Iron-nickel meteorite remnant. The Arab Historian Abulfeda, who wrote at the commencement of the thirteenth century, in his description of the raid of Mahmud Ghazni on the Somnath temple writes that Mahmud lighted a fire around the Somnath Shiva-linga to split it on account of hardness of stone. Iron-Nickel meteorites are very hard, harder than common rocks found on earth’s surface and strongly magnetic. Farrington in his article “The constituents of meteorites “in the Journal of Geology writes that Nickel-iron meteorites are strongly magnetic, have a specific gravity between 7.6 and 7.9 and are harder than steel. Thus during his raid on Somnath , Mahmud must have tried to smash the Shiva-linga using hammers or stones but being very hard, it resisted those efforts. Being in hostile enemy territory with time running short, Mahmud would have then turned to the age-old technique of rock splitting using fire and water which worked.
As to how the ancient Hindu craftsmen had managed to devise a system through which they could keep the Shiva-linga afloat in air without support , one has to understand the following things-
The mechanism used for making the Shiva-linga float was a magnetic levitation mechanism. However magnetic levitation is not an easy task and was never achieved in pre-modern world except at Somnath A glance at a few basics of magnetism can make us realize the importance of the levitating Shiva-linga at Somnath. Earnshaw’s theorem prohibits the stable levitation of one magnet by other(s). So if one tries to make one magnet ‘hover’ using the magnetic attraction of another, the ‘hover’ magnet either sits limply on the tabletop or snaps quickly to the other one. It is not possible to make a bar magnet levitate in a stable position only through the use of other bar magnets as stipulated in Earnshaw’s theorem.
If we pretend we have a collection of bar magnets arranged in a square, another bar magnet placed in the center of the square will not be in a stable position, and will be pulled (and twisted around) out of the center, and likely towards one of the other magnets:
It would be best to imagine the bar magnets standing up, i.e. the north pole of the magnet pointing out of the paper/monitor. Using vector calculus, one can show that a levitation device composed of any set of point charges/fixed magnets will have a ‘leak’ and the magnetic levitation will be unstable.
Because of this instability when using static fields, one can only create magnetic levitation with permanent magnets if the magnetic fields are time-varying or the levitating magnet is spinning. This latter possibility is used in the modern toy called the Levitron. Magnetic levitation trains which rely on permanent magnets use dynamic feedback to keep the train stable and running. However none of this was probably available at the time when Somnath was built, then how was the Shiva-linga at Somnath kept levitating?
The answer to this lies in their clever use of bismuth as diamagnets. Diamagnets can be levitated in stable equilibrium in a magnetic field, with no power consumption. As to how use of diamagnets allowed the artisans of Somnath to violate the Earnshaw’s theorem, the following points are illustrative. Returning to our square arrangement of magnets, let us now replace the bar magnets in the corners with diamagnets. When the permanent magnet is right in the centre of the square, the diamagnets all have ‘effective bar magnets’ of equal strength induced by it:
When we move the bar magnet from the centre, its magnetic field will be weaker in the diamagnets it moves away from and stronger in the diamagnets it moves towards.
For instance:
The net result is that the diamagnets closest to the bar magnet push it away very strongly, while the diamagnets far away push it very weakly. This increasing and slackening of force keeps the magnet stably near the centre of the system. The ‘leak’ that we had found earlier in our four point charge/bar magnet system has been ‘sealed’ by the varying strength of the diamagnetic response.
In the diagram below, a strong collection of permanent magnets is supported by a wooden frame above the ‘levitation’ area, and provides the ‘lift’ for the levitating magnet. The levitating magnet itself is supported between a pair of plates made of bismuth which — and this is in fact the key point — is a strongly diamagnetic material (Data from www.scitoys.com, www.sparkbangbuzz. com).
We can understand the configuration of the magnets and the diamagnetic material in the ancient Somnath temple in the given diagram. The stack of permanent magnets (the
loadstone canopy as described by Al Kazvini) provided the lifting anti-gravity force to the levitating magnet (the levitating iron-nickel meteorite Shiva-linga), while the diamagnetic plates (Bismuth) maintained the position of the levitating magnet and provide its stability. The diamagnetic plates act very much like a pair of fellows escorting a drunk friend home: whenever their friend ‘wobbles’ in their direction, they apply some gentle pressure to direct him back upright!
Al-Kazvini specifically mentions in his description of the Somnath temple – “The edifice was built upon fifty-six pillars of teak, covered with lead”. That Al Kazvini’s account of Somnath was accurate is also verified by other sources. Al Kazvini described that the original temple stood on teak pillars covered with lead. This is also corroborated by the Jaina Texts which mention Hemachandra, the trusted Minister of Chaulukyan (Solanki) King Kumarapala (1143-1172 AD) advising Kumarapala to replace the dilapidated wooden temple at Somanath with a stone to make one to attain salvation.
In no other ancient or modern Hindu temple has the usage of lead been described except Somnath. Al-Kazvini specifically stated that the temple stood on pillars coated with lead. Now one may say that probably lead was used to protect the wood from pests, termites etc but Somnath does not have a tropical climate where such measures would be required and even if a protective metal encasing for the teak pillars was required, lead would hardly be the metal of choice. Brass, silver etc would have been the preferred choices. Then why was lead used in the Temple of Somnath. The answer to this is that what Al-Kazvini described was not lead but Bismuth. Bismuth is physically similar to lead and is as heavy as lead – hence the confusion between the two in ancient times was very common.
Now as to why Bismuth was used in the Somnath
temple, one has to realize that Bismuth is the most strongly diamagnetic metal–a property that was essential for making the Shiva-linga levitate. Although Bismuth and lead may physically be alike, they differ greatly in their diamagnetic properties.
One also has to keep in mind that since bismuth is a bit brittle, hence the use of teak pillars in the ancient Somnath temple as an internal support for the Bismuth and also the fact that Bismuth was not as plentiful as other metals and hence not readily available in ancient times. Using teak pillars as internal struts along with Bismuth would have cut down the amount of Bismuth required for making the Shiva-linga levitate. Another interesting point is that even Ibn Zafir has quoted in M Nazim’s “The life and times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna” says that the floor of the Somnath temple was also made of planks of teak, the interstices being filled with lead. Again this was not lead but Bismuth.
Unlike other metals like silver , it would have been impossible to make the floor of the shrine itself from Bismuth as Bismuth is very brittle. Hence the clever builders of the Somnath temple used teak planks for
making the floor of the shrine but since they needed more diamagnetic force for levitating the Shiva-Linga, they filled the gaps deliberately left between the teak planks with pieces of Bismuth.
Also for making the Shiva-linga levitate, as illustrated in the simplified diagram, bismuth would be required above as well as below the Shiva-linga. No account is given by Al-Kazvini of the use of lead (bismuth actually) above the Shiva-linga but one can surmise that either the parasol (Chattra – a type of ornamental umbrella constructed above the idols of chief deities in Indian temples ) of the Shiva-linga was of bismuth or a perforated low roof made of bismuth (or more likely of teak covered with bismuth) was employed for providing the diamagnetic force above the Shiva-linga. The Arab historians probably thought it insignificant as they were dazzled with the floating Shiva-Linga and hence it is not mentioned.
Having understood how the builders of the ancient Somnath temple had used the magnetic properties of the iron-nickel meteorite Shiva–linga and the diamagnetic properties of bismuth in making the ancient wonder of the levitating Shiva-linga at Somnath , one now turns to answer the question as to how the Builders of Somnath acquired bismuth – a metal which was known since ancient times but not used very frequently on a large scale in the ancient world. For this we have to understand the high skills of the ancient Indians in the field of metallurgy .
Ancient Indian Metallurgists were way ahead of their time . The process of making Zinc was known to them since 2nd century AD . Nagarjuna (166-203 AD) in his book Rasratnakar describes in detail the method of Zinc extraction from its ore. Zawar, Udaipur district, Rajasthan, is now considered to be the oldest site of industrial zinc production in the world. Radiocarbon age determinations of launder wood from the old lead-zinc mines of Zawar Mala yielded an age of 2180+/- 35 years. The method of zinc smelting independently developed and patented by William Champion in 1738 was almost identical to the one used by ancient Indian Zinc smelters.
Thus we see that ancient Indians had attained a very high level of proficiency in their metallurgical skills. Now as to how and where the bismuth used in the ancient Somnath temple was procured?
Bismuth as a metal is rarely mined and extracted from bismuth ore. The only mines which use bismuth ore as a source of bismuth are the Tasna mines in Bolivia and a few mines in China. Bismuth has always been produced as a by-product of lead smelting from its ore. Crude lead can contain up to 10% of bismuth. Lead has been smelted and used by Indian metallurgists since times immemorial. The open cast lead mine at Rampura-Agucha in Bhilwara district in Rajasthan which is geographically near to Somnath provides evidence of being worked in Mauryan times (3rd century BC). Bismuth too was known in ancient India, It is mentioned as Capala in the Sanskrit alchemical text Rasa-Ratna-Samuccaya (12th-13th century AD), although it is likely that it was known much before this date. Concentrated Bismuth-lead deposits are also found at Narda, Neem-ka-Thana tehsil, Sikar district which is not very far from Somnath. It is likely that the builders of Somnath procured the bismuth used in the temple from either of these two ancient mines. Bismuth was probably
produced as a by-product of lead smelting by ancient Indian metallurgists. The priests at Somnath who must have become aware of the magnetic properties of the iron-nickel meteorite Shiva-linga while handling it during the daily pooja and other ceremonies recognized that using the diamagnetic properties of bismuth, they could make their revered Shiva-linga levitate like a magnet bar. They must have thought it to be a method to honour their chief deity by making his main Siva-linga idol float in the air.
(The writer is DM(Neurology)
AIIMS New Delhi)
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