The legends of the Veda

Would you ever guess that your avatar, the image you choose to represent you in the virtual world, comes from avatara, literally the embodied form of a god? Or that Nagini, Lord Voldemort's faithful serpent companion in the Harry Potter saga, owes her name to the Naginis, the female counterparts of the Nagas, a race of snakes in Hindu mythology who can choose to appear in fully human or reptilian form?

There are stories and words that are part of our imagination and common usage that actually lead to places far away from us. For example, India, the country to which this sixth volume of the "Mythologika" series refers, in which the captions by the writer Alex L. Mainardi are accompanied by illustrations by Miriam Barbieri, Morena Golino, Ilaria Preato, Elena Saluzzi, Anna Schilirò and Ilaria Trombi, some of the Mahadevi, the Great Ladies, emblems of the Shakti at the heart of the Casa Ailus collective.

Between divinities with extraordinary features and fairy-tale plots, curses, revenge and monstrous animals, a journey winds through the myths and legends that are at the origin of today's multifaceted Hinduism.

A story in images, one of the many chapters of which is devoted to the Kama Sutra, understood as a profound and complex concept of love in which body, mind and soul are inextricably linked, so much so that they cannot exist apart from each other.