The gestures state who has come with what problem, and what the outcome will be. After this she whips her head around and around as in a bolero, scattering drops of water from her wet hair all over the room. Then she begins to speak, stating each visitor’s problem and calling the visitor up to her. There is a tightness in her voice as though she is in pain. She speaks with each visitor, ascertaining his problem and promising to cure it. At the end she emerges from the trance by opening her eyes.
People come to her for mental and physical illness, for demon possession, or for family problems, or because they cannot find work, or they are not doing well at school, or they cannot find a husband for their daughters, or for other difficulties. Māriamman will give them ashes or lemons (both cooling) as medicine, will touch the afflicted with her hair (which conveys her power) or will blow ashes upon them or brush them with neem leaves (sacred to Māriamman and used for all skin afflictions), or she may perform more elaborate ceremonies for them, or she may simply promise that she will make everything well. When she is out of trance also, the priestess may perform similar acts of healing. On festival days, she organizes celebrations for Māriamman. She also performs pūcei (puja) or worship ceremonies on behalf of individual patrons who wish to secure Māriamman’s blessing.
Although this priestess is particularly popular, there are many like her in Madras, men as well as women, though the majority are women. Similarly, the majority of the devotees of Māriamman in this city are women, who follow their own volition in coming to her temples. This priestess’ strongest supporters are well-to-do, middle-class, high-caste women, who give the priestess gifts of clothing, jewelry, and money and seem to value her friendship highly, though the priestess is of an untouchable caste and lives in what the wealthier people of the neighborhood call “the slum.” During trance sessions, the possessed priestess may sometimes be seen teaching one of her followers to enter a trance, coaching her in growling and spinning her head, and exhorting her, in the voice of Māriamman, not to be afraid. At least one of the priestess’ middle-class Brahman followers has now herself become a priestess to Māriamman and a successful trance healer, in opposition to the wishes of her husband, transforming the structure of her family to serve the needs of her new profession.5
Māriamman is often pictured as a beautiful woman seated on a throne made of a many-headed serpent, and at her feet, a disembodied woman’s head, Māriamman’s own head, which acts as an oracle, like the stone in our priestess’ temple. Therefore, when Māriamman speaks through the priestess, she sometimes refers to herself as one who has two heads.
Even as smallpox has died out, the popularity of Māriamman of smallpox has grown in recent years, as is evidenced by this priestess’s success, and on a larger scale, by the newly flourishing condition of a large temple to Māriamman near Madras, the Karumāriamman temple at Tiruvērkāḍu. Karu means black, because Māriamman herself is black. The temple at Tiruvērkāḍu has become one of the wealthiest temples in the Madras area. Since the early 1970s (about the time of the eradication of smallpox in Madras) the whole temple has been rebuilt, together with beautiful ornate temple cars and stone sculptures created by top artisans from out of state, a large tank, and a new monastery. On Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, buses to the temple at Tiruvērkāḍu are packed with people, as is the temple itself, so that it is almost impossible for all but the most aggressive to get in.
The worship of Māriamman in modern Madras is a blend of Brahmanical and lower-caste, non-Brahmanical components. The Tiruvērkāḍu temple has Brahman priests, who perform Sanskritic ceremonies for Māriamman. But associated with this temple, living separately from it, is a medium like our priestess. Our priestess also lives near a small, Brahman-operated temple to Māriamman, and such associations are the norm. South Indian Brahmans are strict vegetarians, but the mediums perform animal sacrifices to their own temples.
Our priestess is of an untouchable caste, but like some other Madras untouchables she knows the Brahman lifestyle perfectly and is able to imitate it down to the smallest detail. Unlike most untouchables, as herself she is a vegetarian. She was raised close to a Brahman neighborhood and her first name is a Brahman woman’s name. Her speech contains many Sanskrit words and borrowings from Brahman dialects. She is proud to have Brahmans among her followers. But in the state of possession, her speech and comportment alter radically. She belches, yawns, scratches her body, rolls in the dirt, and kills chickens by biting through their necks and drinking their fresh blood.
Māriamman is said to be born of earth. The small hillock that she was born of is enshrined at Tiruvērkāḍu. Women have a saying, it is better to be born as mud than to be born as a woman. Earth is the strongest and humblest of elements; it bears everything, accepting excrement, yielding fruit. People also say that Māriamman has a form of wind, that is, she has no solid body of her own and must take the body given by people, either by possessing them or by entering the stone or earthen images that they make for her. Wind is the embodiment of motion and restlessness and is associated in popular thought with free-wandering spirits and unsatisfied demons, and contrasted with the peaceful higher deities. Wind is also the form of breath and of the soul. It is invisible, and so its color is black.
The name of the smallpox deity, Māriamman, has different meanings. Amman means “mother” or “woman.” Māri means “rain.” The rain is cool, and Māriamman likes cool things, foods that are supposed to cool the body, such as milk, coconut water, buttermilk, turmeric, lemons, neem leaves. It has been suggested that she is named after rain because the pockmarks she leaves look like the craters left by raindrops in the dust. But smallpox is a disease of heat; it used to strike during the hot months, and people believe that it is caused by excess heat in the body or by the heat of Māriamman’s anger. The month sacred to Māriamman, when a large festival is held for her, is Āḍi, July–August. This is an inauspicious month, when nothing is supposed to be started, so no new houses are built, and young couples live separately during this month to avoid conception. The smallpox deity is said to hate the sight of a married couple. She is said also to hate the sight of a pregnant woman.6 According to the report of a Madras physician who studied the epidemiology of smallpox in that city, pregnant women who contracted smallpox invariably contracted the most lethal form of the disease (Rao 1972).
A homonym of the word māri is māṟi, “changed,” so that Māriamman becomes “the changed mother.” This is the interpretation of her name that our priestess chooses.
The origin story of Māriamman is an old and well-known one, with numerous variants told throughout Tamil Nadu. In one famous version of the story she begins as a Brahman woman, whose name is Rēṇukā Paramēswari, as noted above. She is married to a famous ascetic named Jatharagni. She is a perfect wife, possessing perfect chastity, as a consequence of which she has certain magical powers. She is able to hang her wet sari to dry in the air without a line. When she goes to fetch water, she is able to carry it without the aid of a pot, by forming it into a ball and rolling it back home.
One day when she goes to the river, she sees in the water the reflection of a beautiful male deity flying overhead (some say this deity is a divine musician or gandharva, some say it is the sun, some say it is an airplane pilot). She remarks to herself in her mind that he is beautiful. Then she tries to roll her water into a ball and return home. She finds that she is unable to roll it up any more. Because of her trivial and momentary mental lapse, she has lost her perfect wifeliness and with it her magical powers.
She returns home and her husband sees what has happened. In a rage, he orders her son to kill her. The son pursues her with his axe, while she flees, taking refuge in the hut of an untouchable woman. She embraces the woman in fear, and the son enters the hut and beheads both of them with a single stroke of his axe. He returns to his father with news that the deed has been done. The father in turn grants him a boon. The son asks that the mother be restored to life. The father acquiesces and the son returns to the decapitated bodies and revives them by putting the heads back on. But he switches the heads, attaching each to the wrong body. Rēṇukā Paramēswari awakes to find that she has her own head
