Introduction

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 From the Introduction to 

Canto to the Lord of Love

Introduction

by Michael Dolan/Mahayogi

At the beginning of the 16th century the world was in flux. With the fall of Constantinople the Islamic nations led by the Emperor held sway over the Mediterranean. Now that the old capital of the Eastern Roman Empire had fallen to the Muslims, now that Jerusalem and the Middle East were no longer in Christian hands, Catholic Europe turned to the West. As their path to India was closed, they sought new worlds. And with the conquest of the Americas they found them.

Meanwhile the first of the Mughal  emperors, the great Babur  invaded India from Afghanistan and swept across the low lands to the Dells of the Ganges River, Bengal, and it’s green and fertile  Lands. The Portuguese for their part found their way around Africa to India’s Malabar coast and from there to Chittagong and Bengal.

So it was that 100 years before Shakespeare and Cervantes would give the crowning achievements in Spanish and English literature, while   Leonardo da Vinci was painting  the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo adorning the Sistine Chapel with his version of the Old Testament’s angry God, different religions converged  in Bengal.

 There was old school  Hinduism with its caste system and strange pantheon of gods which excluded the untouchables from worship.  But Bengal had long been ruled by Muslim Sultans  who in establishing Sharia law  promised an  end to discrimination on the basis of caste. Islam promised equality where Hindu society maintained a rigid hierarchy.  Meanwhile Portuguese Jesuits entered the Bay of Bengal and sailed up the  Ganges River explaining the message and gospel of Jesus Christ, and destroying both mosques and Hindu temples in their wake.

And many of the old religions were corrupt. Simple people  yearned  for a message of faith and hope; the time was ripe for a new path. It is  written that in times of great crisis divinity appears. And so it was that in 1486 a few years before the dawn of the 16th century  the golden avatar appeared on the banks of the sacred River  Ganges during a lunar eclipse.

His avatar was known as Sri Krishna Chaitanya,  or the golden one, Gauranga.