Mari Amman

Mari Amman

The goddess who is given the disease so that it will leave

Mariamman is a disease goddess of Tamil country, and the logic of her cult is one of the stranger things in the corpus. She is not only invoked against illness. She is given illness — the pox, in the classical understanding — and the village gives it to her, so that she is fed and housed and therefore does not feed on the village. This is a settlement, not a supplication: the deity is given a domain in exchange for staying inside it. The same logic runs through much of South Indian disease worship, and understanding it prevents a great deal of misreading, most of it in the directional sense of Western observers describing these rites as appeasement of a danger.

Her most usual form is a woman with a terribly marked face, the pox itself made visible in the image. Images of this kind are not common in temples but common in small shrines and in the margins of settlements, and they are frequently renewed — the image is repainted, the disease being understood as something that has used up the representation. Mariamman shrines are often tied to the village boundary, to a tank, or to a piece of waste ground, which is exactly where a goddess assigned to disease belongs.

The name is contested and this entry will not pretend otherwise. It is plausibly related to a word for disease, and plausibly to a root meaning to kill or to waste, and the two senses sit awkwardly together in a goddess whose whole job is to stop the killing. That tension may be in the tradition itself rather than in the etymology. A reader with the Tamil material should record both possibilities rather than pick one.

Two boundaries worth keeping. First, Mariamman in Tamil Nadu and Māriāī Āī in Maharashtra are parallel institutions — both village goddesses of disease, both with marked faces, both outside the Brahminical temple order — and they are not the same deity with a different spelling, and neither is derived from the other without argument. Second, the "disease goddess" label describes a role, not a taxonomy: within Tamil country there are several distinct goddesses with distinct disease portfolios and distinct local arrangements, and a single page cannot stand in for them.

Sources and what is still unverified

Robert Culp's Village Gods of South India is the right methodological model here and the obvious place to start. A specific study of smallpox and disease goddesses in Tamil country — one that can name the shrines, the local calendars and the offering-practices — is what a guardian should add; the previous revision's only source was the word "Local tradition", which is not a citation. Still unverified: the etymology, the image and its attributes, the festival calendar, and the specific shrine behind this entry, which the frontmatter does not identify. Left .