Historical PeriodEra
Pre-historic Meitei
📷 Navaneethpp · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Deities
Leimaren Sidabi
Leimaren — the Meitei mother-earth goddess
Leimaren — the Meitei mother-earth goddess
This entry honours the self-representation of Sanamahi tradition. India's sacred landscape includes hundreds of traditions beyond the Brahminical-Vedic canon. Each has its own cosmology, priesthood, ritual calendar, and relationship with the sacred landscape. Each deserves first-person recognition.
Leimaren Sidabi (lit. "mother-earth-eternal") is the earth-goddess consort of Atingkok Maru Sidaba in Meitei cosmogony. She is the mother of Pakhangba, Sanamahi, Nongpok Ningthou, and all other Meitei deities. Worship is aniconic — invocation, libation, offering of sacred foods. Every Meitei ritual involves the invocation of Leimaren. During Lai Haraoba (April–June), she is honoured with special dances and pōṅ (drum) rituals.
Oral Meitei invocations
Drawn from scholarly ethnographies of Indian tribal and regional religions (Roy, Vidyarthi, Sinha, Fuchs, Sarkar, Sontheimer, Kinsley), colonial-era gazetteers, and contemporary community documentation.
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