To call Shiva simply "the destroyer" is to half-understand him, and the tradition knows it — for his very name means "the auspicious one," "the kind one." His destruction is not malice but mercy: it is the clearing-away that makes renewal possible. The leaf must fall for the bud to open; the old age of the world must dissolve before a new one can dawn. Shiva presides over that great cosmic exhale, and so, paradoxically, the destroyer is also the supreme power of regeneration. In Shaivism, indeed, he is not the third of three but the absolute itself, from whom all else proceeds.

His most luminous image is Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. Within a ring of flame — the cosmos itself, blazing and passing — Shiva dances the tandava. One foot crushes the dwarf of ignorance and forgetfulness; one hand holds the damaru, the small drum whose beat is the pulse of creation; another holds agni, the fire of dissolution. One hand is raised in abhaya mudra, the gesture that says do not fear. Creation and destruction are held in a single, perfectly balanced gesture, and at the very centre of the whirling figure the face is utterly serene. That is the secret the image teaches: stillness at the heart of all change.

For Shiva is also the great ascetic (Mahayogi), the wild renouncer of the Himalayas. He sits in deep meditation on Mount Kailash, smeared with ash, clad in a tiger skin, a serpent coiled fearlessly at his throat. A crescent moon rests in his matted hair, and from those locks pours the sacred river Ganga, which he caught upon his head to spare the earth the force of her fall. His third eye, usually closed, can burn the world to ash when it opens — but it is also the eye of inner vision. He is the master of opposites: the naked hermit who is also a devoted husband.

That devotion centres on Parvati, daughter of the mountain, who won the great ascetic through her own fierce austerities and love, and who draws him from his solitude into the warmth of family. Their union is itself a teaching — the meeting of renunciation and the world, of stillness and energy. Their children, the elephant-headed Ganesha and the warrior Kartikeya (Murugan in the south), are beloved across India. Shiva's worship spans an immense range, from the philosophy of Kashmir to the vast temple-cities of the Tamil south, where as Nataraja at Chidambaram he dances still. The lesson he leaves is bracing and tender at once: that endings are woven into beginnings, and that in the very midst of all that passes, something perfectly calm looks out without fear.