शिवस्य गुरुः

Mytheme’s antiquity

This mytheme of the father playing along to lose to his son to enhance his glory is an old IE one. In the foundation of the Olympic games Zeus appears as a wrestler & purposely loses to Herakles to enhance his glory. Similarly, indra loses to arjuna at khANDava in order to enhance his son’s glory. Similarly, I suspect that these mytheme has been incorporated in the case of rudra enhancing kumAra.

Sub-mythemes

Now the overall myth my be traced back to several ancient mythemes in the shruti:

    1. skanda as the teacher of the secret brahman is seen in the upaniShat of the ChAndogya-s wherein he teaches nArada who claims to have mastered all lore but still misses the rahasya teaching. This role of skanda as the teacher of the rahasya-s is central to that tamiL kaumAra myth.
    1. The next element is the chastization of brahman. This element relates closely to the vaidika mytheme of rudrotpatti. In the kaushItaki brAhmaNa of the RV tradition, rudra is born from the semen of prajApati dropped in a golden bowl on seeing uShas in the form of an apsaras (parallels the birth of skanda from the semen of rudra). rudra on emerging seizes prajApati & asks him to give him names successively amounting to 8.
    • In the shatapata brAhmaNa variant of the tale after the first 8 names of rudra a 9th is given for him as boy – kumAra. Interestingly, the kaushItaki brAhmaNa adds that a son even more brilliant will be born to him if he knows the 8 names of rudra.
    • This rudra in the aitareya brAhmaNa is the punisher of prajApati – much like skanda punishing brahman during his lapse of knowledge relating to his protogonic function.
    • In the shatapata, kumAra is hidden in the sacrificial animals and is not immediately recognized by prajApati – a rahasya he has to learn to attain the yaj~na.

Thus, I think the brahma-shAstR^i form condenses these various mythemes. Since we have multiple north Indian representations of skanda in his form e.g. holding he diagnostic shruti – as the teacher of vaidika rahasya-s we might trace this to a more ancient kaumAra tradition probably stem right from that seen the ChAndogya.