Modern Optical Illusions Fail In Front Of This 900-year-old Relic Found In Tamil Nadu Temple
Turns out, optical illusions have been around for decades, and artists and psychologists have been using them for a long, long time. We have never seen an optical illusion as old as this one - carved in stone!
Optical illusions are the talk of the season, and all of us have spent hours looking at these mind tricks to find out more about our personalities, or as they claim. However, despite them being so viral all of a sudden, they are not a new thing.
Turns out, optical illusions have been around for decades, and artists and psychologists have been using them for a long, long time. We have never seen an optical illusion as old as this one - carved in stone!
KARTY JazZ Wikimedia
Airavatesvara Temple is a Hindu place of worship in Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, and it's a jewel of the Chola dynasty built close to 900 years ago. There is beautiful 12th-century Dravidian architecture and carved ornamentations of chariots and avatars.
The ancient optical illusion looks like two conjoined creatures with one head. However, which animal do you see?
If you look at the creature on the right, you should see an elephant, but if you cover the body and legs of the elephant, the animal on the left is clearly a bull looking up towards the sky.
The bull, Nandi, is the vehicle of Lord Shiva in the Hindu faith, while Airavat is a mythological white elephant which is the vehicle of Indra, the king of heaven.
Temple Purohit
The video below separates the two creatures in the Airavatesvara Temple optical illusion to show how they would appear alone.
?Daniel Cortes, Martinez-Conde Macknik Laboratories
¡ª Vertigo_Warrior (@VertigoWarrior) December 2, 2020
Below is the creative representation of the separated elephant and bull structures. Amazing..! pic.twitter.com/H2kJKPzPx0
The optical illusion we often see are created digitally using software, but the fact that artists managed to do so decades ago using stone. It was believed that the oldest optical illusion was from a 16th-century painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, but the Airavatesvara Temple optical illusion predates that by around 400 years.
Holbein¡¯s The Ambassadors
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