Lord Saturn
Digital painting of Lord Shani, Hindu lord of Saturn, tragedy, transformation, past lives, reincarnation, Time, old age, the poor, the elderly, black animals, and ripping open old wounds. His kiss burns; he is the alcohol on an open sore, enemy of the prideful, whose voice is heard in the calls of crows, whose black cat kin were killed in Europe, who walks with a limp, whose skin is covered in burn marks. He is the main deity I commune with in my spiritual practices and I think his influence is greatly needed at this time. . I think I'm drawn to him because he is a canonically disabled deity, deeply misunderstood and thus feared, he has a difficult relationship with his father, and he is essentially a wounded healer archetype. I am also drawn to Chiron the centaur for this reason. . Lord Shani is an oil presser by trade: a lower class occupation, but also a signifier of his role as Lord Time, as both the oil presser and the Earth spin on an axis. Refinement into something precious like oil is a painful process, but good for the spirit. Oil pressers use cloths to keep their materials from overflowing out of the cup, so I've given him a cloth, which also represents the fabric of reality. I like to portray him as androgynous, hence the long hair and no facial hair, though this is not the traditional way he is portrayed; it is how he appears to me. . Like all Hindu deities, he is merely one aspect of the One God (Hinduism is a monotheist religion: picture white light being divided by a prism into multiple colors; these colors are the Hindu pantheon), so I have portrayed him as the Universe itself. . Made in Procreate.
