A lot of people probably have a fairly passing acquaintance with depictions of various mythological figures from the Indian subcontinent having hundreds of arms or heads, and while reading Section 6 of the Sauptika Parva of the Mahabharata, I was struck by this passage:
His face was adorned with thousands of beautiful eyes. His body was incapable of being described, as also his attire. The very mountains, upon beholding him, would split into a 1,000 fragments. Blazing flames of fire seemed to issue from his mouth and nose and ears and all those thousands of eyes. From those blazing flames hundreds and thousands of Hrishikeshas issued, armed with conchs and discs and maces.
That kind of sheer multiplicity seems to happen a lot in the Mahabharata, and stands in contrast to other Indo-European epics like the Iliad. Have people ever remarked on this as a trait of Indian epic, and have there ever been attempts to explain or interpret it?
I think this might be more appropriate in /r/askanthropology. I'd like to note that giant numbers aren't limited to just Indian mythos. The Greek myths involve Hekatonkheires, titans of the storms with 100 hands and 50 eyes, or Typhon who has 100 heads and body was covered in a vast multitude of serpeants. Jew's have the Leviathan, a sea monster 300 miles long( for most, the horizon at sea is under 3 miles away). Even Christianity has gigantic numbers. Revelations 5:11 says the armies of angels number ten thousand times ten thousand, 100 million, a parrallel to the Hrishikeshas in the above passage.