Lord Shiva definitely is the oldest god known to mankind, and more interestingly is perhaps the ONLY GOD, tracing a genealogy of worship that is easily five thousand years old. Naturally, therefore, he is described as the God with no lineage. This god is perhaps the single most important influence on the arts and culture of the Indian subcontinent. In a very real sense, you find Shiva all over the country, he is in fact the country, so closely interwoven are the myths of his actions with the culture and geography of the land.
The mythologies surrounding Shiva are immense. It must be remembered that the Shiva story has been going on for five thousand years now and they only too obviously reflect the concerns of people at the time they were being composed. Shiva Himself is a composite god today, involving many local gods and little tradition mythologies into his all-embracing grasp. Shiva is more or less what you want Him to be, as in Him all contradictions casually coexist. The notion of Shiva as exclusively a Wild Man of the forests and mountains, traveling with a band of ghosts and ghouls as their leader, Bhoothnath, is a recent phase of his worship. For while He was always capable of peculiar behavior, Shiva used to live outside of society not because He had rejected it but because He had transcended it. Shiva is repeatedly described as the Supreme Master of all the Arts, and that indicates a highly socialized being, the Nagarika of ancient India, not a rustic...!
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