Shrines to an ET

Hugh & Colleen Gantzer piece together the story of Lonar, a lake that was born when a shining star met the earth briefly...

We stood at the rim of the crater and looked down.  There, 137 metres below us, the blue-green cyclopean eye of the lake winked back and gazed beyond to the place of its birth: the cold, black, vastness of outer space, the home of its dark creator.

For millennia that million-tonne entity had circled the sun along with its host of strange companions. Then, our orbiting Earth had come close, ensnaring it in its gravity. Captured, this 60m-long star-thing sizzled in our atmosphere, and flamed by the friction of our air, hurtled down out of our pre-historic sky.

There were forests and grasslands, below, where scattered groups of early humans, hunter-gatherers, foraged and lived in rock shelters and animal hide tents. They must have cringed and gibbered in fear as that ball of incandescence flared in the sky, and grew and grew.

Animals fled, in fear, white-eyed and foam-speckled. Great trees toppled in showers of earth and crackling branches as a searing heat hit them. There was no sound from the fearful fiery apparition plunging at super-sonic speed, preceded by an enormous shock-wave of flaming gas. When it hit, rocks melted and vaporised, silica sand fused into little shards of glass called tektites.

A gigantic plume of lava and rocks spouted out of the tortured earth, then cascaded down just as a monstrous sonic boom exploded, and a roaring, singeing, wind swept in, flattening and scorching everything in its path. Flocks of screeching birds popped and exploded like firecrackers, great fissures opened in the ground swallowing everything in their path. When it had settled and the aftershocks no longer trembled, the acrid smell of death rose from the cauterised earth. For many months after that the sky remained covered in a dust haze, till successive rains cleared it and water began to fill the deep hole gouged out by the meteorite and the chunk of it that had sheared off, flipped out, landed beyond the rim, and scooped out its own smaller crater.

This cataclysm was branded into human memory and, because our traumatised ancestors had to explain it to themselves,  they built their own reality around it, passing it down the generations.

Place of peace

That is the way many tales become myths, form into legends, are firmed into faith. To discover more about the beliefs built around this wondrous place, we stepped over the edge of the crater and, very carefully, picked our way down a snaking, stony,  path.

Initially, it wasn’t difficult to descend because flat rocks, probably ejected by the explosion, had formed giant steps, but, about a third of the way down, it became more difficult. To defy dizziness we began to concentrate on the boulders before us and avoided looking beyond.  It took us about 20 minutes to reach the lake-level!

  Here, at last, at the bottom of the crater, we were in another world: a cool, green, serene forested Eden with custard apple and bull’s-heart trees, water birds stalking the shallows and swimming on the lake, and a number of ancient stone temples, many ruined and partially submerged.

We walked along the water’s edge and a group of black-winged stilts flew off as we approached the clearing with the living Kamal Devi Temple.

A Navratna Mela is held every year when over a lakh of pilgrims descend into the crater to celebrate the arrival of that shiny, alien visitor. The other temples are in ruins, sad reminders of a religious zeal that once spanned the 11th to 14th centuries.

We paid our respects to the red-faced Devi, noticed that the sunlight, filtering through light clouds,  had assumed a ruddy hue as if to remind us  of the fires of this lake’s creation.  We asked a few devotees about the mystique of the place. They said, in the very distant past, a man-eating demon named Lonasura had started disturbing, then preying on, the revered seers who had their hermitages in the forests that once covered this place. Unable to tolerate his harassment any longer, the rishis appealed to Lord Vishnu, the Preserver. He, in turn, asked the invincible Mother Goddess, Kali, to intervene. She did. There was a great battle in the heavens, fire rained down on the world and, eventually, with a devastating roar which flattened the forests for miles around, Lonasura was thrown into the depths of the earth, where he is still held in eternal captivity. But, as a last boon to this immortal being, Lord Vishnu decreed that this place of the asura’s incarceration will, henceforth, be known as Lonar.

Story & reality

That ancient tale kept echoing in our minds as we trudged around the saline lake. Water can escape from it only by evaporation, but the shallows still support aquatic life and water birds. A gentle breeze cooled us before we started to climb to the top. We forded a rill and then, slowly, scrambled back up the bare, 30-degree slope, eroded and riven by that ancient falling star. When it had impacted into the earth, a chunk of it had been ejected high up on to the rim. It had formed a smaller crater into which a spring trickled. Around its cleansing waters, worshippers had built the impressive Gomukh Temple.

That night, after dinner, refreshed and sitting on a terrace under a starlit sky, a curious thought welled up in our minds. Our Bible holds myths and legends dating back to the first records of mankind, written in the cruciform script of ancient Mesopotamia. We found a description of a great war in heaven. The war was lost by a being called ‘The Light Bearer’. It goes on to say that this ET fell as lightning as if ‘a star had fallen from heaven upon the earth’. The name of this fallen star, this Light Bearer, was Lucifer.

Interestingly, the name Lucifer bears a strange similarity to that of the demon Lonasur.