Pechi Amman

Pechi Amman

The fierce one at the edge of the village

Pēchi Amman is a village guardian goddess of Tamil country, and what makes her worth a page is the combination of her position and her temper. She is worshipped at the boundary of the settlement — frequently near the cremation ground, which is the one piece of ground a village sets apart and then does not want to look at — and she is fierce. The flat-faced, heavy-browed, wide-mouthed images associated with goddesses of this kind are not decorative aggression; they are a declaration of what the goddess is for. The village gives her the worst ground it has and asks her to stay on it.

Her work is boundary work in the full sense: epidemics, sudden deaths, and the unclassified ill fortune that a village attributes to nothing in particular. That puts her in the same family as Mariamman and Mariyai and the other disease and pestilence mothers, though she is not the same goddess as any of them and the corpus keeps them on separate pages for that reason. She is also a protector, and shrines to her are among those to which a village will turn in a crisis, which is a different office from a goddess who is given the disease in order to feed her.

The offerings in this family are the non-vegetarian ones — eggs, meat, and in some traditions liquor — served at a shrine that is frequently outside the temple boundaries in every other sense, kept by a non-Brahmin family or lineage, and visited at particular times rather than at a fixed daily round. The previous revision of this file listed "dishevelled hair", "spirits", and "eggs, meat" as though these were general attributes of Pechi Amman. They are local to particular sites and were carried over without a source. They are given here as what some shrines receive, and a guardian with a named shrine should replace the general statement with that shrine's practice.

The honest framing of the whole entry is this: Pēchi Amman is a name in wide circulation, and this page cannot tell you which goddess it means. There are many. Each village that keeps a Pēchi Amman has a goddess with her own history, her own priestly family and her own story of what she was for, and the difference between two of them may be as large as the difference between a goddess of a South Indian temple and one of a Himalayan village. The one honest generalisation available is the office: fierce, at the edge, associated with cremation ground or waste land, and asked to contain what the village cannot otherwise contain.

Sources and what is still unverified

Robert Culp's Village Gods of South India is the right model and the obvious starting point. A named study of Tamil boundary and disease goddesses is what should be added; the previous revision's sources were "Local tradition" and "Village records", neither of which is a citation. Still unverified: which shrine this entry means, the image and its attributes, the festival calendar, the priestly line, and the specific offerings. Left , and flagged as one of the entries where a named local shrine would transform the page.