Muthappan

Muthappan

The hunter-god who is fed dogs and given toddy

Muthappan is one of the largest and most distinctive of the village gods of the Malabar coast, and his shrine at Parassinikkadavu in Kannur district is the best known. He is worshipped through Theyyam, the possession-dance of north Kerala and the neighbouring Tulu country, in which a consecrated performer becomes the god in front of the community and answers petitions. The Muthappan of the Parassinikkadavu shrine is a hunter-warrior figure rather than a god of a temple, and his establishment is a small forest-shrine (kāvu) with an open-air ground in front of it, not a sanctum.

Two things distinguish this shrine from the great temples of the region and both matter. First, the food. Muthappan is given toddy, fish and meat, and dogs are fed at the shrine — the animal that accompanies the hunter is honoured at the god's table. Second, the ritual position. The performers of Theyyam belong largely to the Vaṇṇan, Malayan, Pulayan and Velan communities, historically outside the Brahminical temple order, and the possession inverts the ordinary hierarchy for its duration: the performer is the god and blesses the assembly, including Brahmins present. A reader coming to this from the temple order has to be told that this is not a lesser version of a temple rite. It is a different institution with its own logic.

Muthappan is also told to have a human origin story in which a foundling is raised by a couple and turns out to be more than human, the divinity showing when he deals with the tigers or wild animals that threaten the settlement. That kind of story is standard in the hero-god cults of the region, where a vīra is deified after death and becomes a protector. The details of Muthappan's foundling story differ between accounts, and the shrine is said to be worshipped in more than one Theyyam form — one associated with Śiva, one with Viṣṇu — which is itself a reminder that the categories of the temple order are being applied to a god who does not need them.

This entry covers Muthappan in general. The shrine at Parassinikkadavu has its own file, deities/muthappan-parassinikkadavu, which goes further into the specific offerings, the festival and the two forms. A human editor should reconcile the two rather than let them drift apart; they were written independently and overlap.

Sources and what is still unverified

K. K. N. Kurup's work on the Theyyam cult, including the annotated bibliography, is the place to begin, and A. K. Ramanujan's writing on the language of the gods in Kerala explains why Muthappan names what it names. The previous revision's Wikipedia citation was removed as unsuitable authority for a folk cult. Still unverified: the origin story, the two forms, the founding of the shrine, and the relationship between this entry and the Parassinikkadavu file. Left , and flagged as one of the two entries a human editor should merge.