Angala Parameswari

Angala Parameswari

A goddess whose name and tradition both need checking

Angala Parameswari is recorded in this corpus as a goddess worshipped in Tamil Nadu and as a Śākta figure. That is close to all the general-purpose published literature gives you, and it is not much: the name does not appear in the standard Sanskritic repertoire of Durgā's forms, and it is not a name a pan-Indian reference work would carry. This entry is therefore written as an explicit placeholder with its uncertainties stated, because the alternative — three hundred words arranged around a name, with confident regional detail attached — is the precise failure the provenance charter exists to prevent.

Two specific problems. The frontmatter description links Angala Parameswari to the "six abodes" of Kartikeya, the Arupadaiveedu — the Murugan shrines conventionally identified as Tiruchendur, Thiruthani, Thirupparamkundram, Palani, Thiruveragam and Pazhamudircholai. None of those six carries this name in the lists that exist, so the association is either a local identification, a different enumeration, or an error. Separately, the frontmatter offers Wilkins, Lochtefeld and a Puranic source: none of these can carry a regional Tamil goddess, and citing them implies an authority that was never consulted for this deity. They have been replaced with the gazetteer and community-sourced references a Tamil Nadu goddess entry actually needs.

A reader should hold two possibilities open. This may be a local village or lineage goddess under a name that has been Sanskritised, in which case the real sources are the Tamil district gazetteers, temple inscriptions, and the oral record of the family or lineage that keeps the shrine. Or it may be a well-known shrine for which this entry has simply the wrong name, or is a near-duplicate of a better entry under another slug — the corpus already carries Angalamman, Angala Lakshmi and Anjaneya, and this name sits adjacent to several of them. A guardian with access to Tamil sources should settle which of those is true before this page is treated as a description of anything in the world.

Sources and what is still unverified

Nothing here is currently source-verified, and the sources block has been reduced to reference works that would need to be consulted rather than works that were consulted. A guardian should obtain the gazetteer entry for the relevant district, the temple's own sthala-māhātmya if one exists, and a named authority on the Arupadaiveedu and their regional variations, since the six-abode list is not uniform across sources. Also open: whether Angala Parameswari is a deity, a consort, an epithet of a larger goddess, or the personal name of a specific image; the correct Tamil spelling; and whether a better entry already exists elsewhere in the corpus. Until those are answered, this page should not be treated as regional evidence for anything.