Julian Peters “I Have Come to Consume the World”

This watercolor by Julian Peters, called “I Have Come to Consume the World,” illustrates beautifully a central moment in the Hindu epic, _The Bhagavad Gita_. The _Gita_ is the most famous sacred scripture in Hinduism, dating to perhaps the second century BCE. This particular point comes in the eleventh chapter, when the hero Arjuna begs to see the real form of the God he had been conversing with, Krishna. Krishna grants the request, revealing himself to be not a single deity, but the actual divine universe. The vision ultimately overwhelms Arjuna, as he is overcome by the dazzling array of the infinite, one that both creates and destroys. This quote gives a sense of where Arjuna’s terror came from: “As moths, in bursting, hurtling haste/ Rush into a lighted blaze to their destruction,/ So do the worlds, well-trained in hasty violence,/ Pour into the mouths to their own undoing. . . On every side thou lickest up, -devouring -/ Worlds, universes, everything- with burning mouths . . .” This is the context of the quote that Oppenheimer later thought of during the detonation of the atomic bomb, which in the _Gita_ runs “I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” The _Gita_ might be considered supportive of the Vedanta tradition in Hinduism, which stresses the inseparable nature of the divine from the universe.