Body, Goddess and Healing: The Tattoos of a Goddess

Abstract: The saying in local vernacular (Tamil) goes that Amman (Mother) ‘squats’ on you and is manifest through little markings of pox, as an abrasive sign of her anger. Her ‘territorialisation’ of the body and interruption (and disruption) into the devotee’s life is through the material presence of measles and the immaterial, yet tangible existential presence of her anger splayed ferociously out across the body. This essay will peel back some of the discursive constructions of body and healing and body and goddess through the prism offered by the so called ‘folk’ Goddess of the non-Brahmanic tradition, known as Mariammen.

In the instance of the measles, in incursion or appearance and in the healing or disappearance, both happen by the grace of Amman or the Mother Goddess. The healing in instance of measles, invokes and provoke a bodyscape of heat and cooling to match the temperament of the goddess. The essay will attempt to deconstruct the poly-semiotics of healing as a kind of purging and take an under the skin look at the materiality of both body and goddess in this context.

Citation: Naidu, Maheshvari “Body, Goddess and Healing: The Tattoos of a Goddess” The Jugaad Project, 27 October 2021, www.thejugaadproject.pub/body-goddess [date of access]

Introduction

The saying in the local South Indian tongue of Tamil is that the goddess Mariamman manifests in/on the person through little markings of pox, as an abrasive sign of her anger. Her ‘territorialisation’ of the body and interruption (and disruption) into the devotee’s life is through the material presence of measles/pox and the immaterial, yet tangible existential presence of her anger splayed ferociously out across the body. This descriptive and stylistically storied essay will peel back (in four metaphoric seasonal Acts), some of the discursive constructions of ‘body and healing’ and ‘body and goddess’ through the prism offered by the so called ‘folk’ or village goddess of the non-Brahmanic tradition, known as Mariamman.

In the instance of the measles or chicken pox, both the incursion or appearance, as well as the healing or disappearance, happen by the grace of amman or the mother goddess. The healing in the instance of measles, invokes and provokes a bodyscape of heat and cooling to match the temperament of the goddess in tandem with the pendulum of her ‘anger’. I deploy the term bodyscape here, in the vein of Mirzhoef (1995) who made use of the term to explain the depiction of the so called ideal/perfect body as well as Geller (2009) who troubles such an idealization.

Screengrab image courtesy of Shri Mariammen Temple Society, Mount Edgecombe, Durban, South Africa.

Likewise, the village goddess’s visitation on the body in this context, serves, I contend, to thickly complicate the ideal (sic) body within a tightly braided binary of heat and cool, consecrated and abject. There are of course as multitudinous village goddesses as there are multiple rural villages that comprise the geo-segmented boundary spaces of the sub-continent of India. I am staging these female (and not feminine) goddesses in lower case, as opposed to the upper case normally reserved for a monotheistic God or the female consort. However, this linguistic semiotic of lower case should not be confused with them being hierarchized as inferior or meeker. For these goddesses are far from denotatively docile devis (female deities). They are instead, very much ‘kick-ass’ devis and fierce mothers (amman) who command both reverential respect as well as suitable/appreciable dread from the villager or believer.

For me personally (and here I enact the anthropologist’s methodological prerogative in dismissing the theatrical ‘fourth wall’ meant to ‘sham’ the ‘researcher-writer-teller’ into non-existence), the reminder is of course that we are woof and warp woven into the telling. For me, both measles and the cure, are each deeply entangled with memories of my grandmother and mother. Both of them acted as midwife to my afflicted body, guiding the goddess through it with their traditionally inherited and intimate emic knowledge of the ritual behaviours associated with the affliction and the imbricated healing.

The essay will in turn attempt to deconstruct the poly-semiotics of healing and take an ‘under the skin’ look at the materiality of both body and goddess in this context. The essay will unfold in four short enactments on the body, played out as the temporal shifts of metaphoric seasons; spring, summer, autumn, winter and the discursive notions of territorialisation to better grasp the more elastic religious grammar of non-Brahmanic constructions of devotee, god, illness and healing. These discursive and elastic constructions hold in turn, an alternate worship ontology to that of mainstream Brahmanic religious understandings.

Spring

The measles and chicken pox, as is oft its style, arrives both surreptitiously as well as histrionically. The movement from nothing (some levels of mere bodily un-ease that one cannot quite fathom) to something (discernible visible changes), is both slow and swift, and reminds one of the materiality of the body. Like little asymmetrical bulbs pushing out from dermal soil, it shakes the body and thrusts up small reddish bumps and lumps. In its genesis, there is the whispered warmings and beginnings of fever.

Spring has arrived. She/amman is here.

The spatial-temporality referred to as the here, is the body in time (of affliction). In the local language of Tamil, one says amman vanthiruka or amman pottuiruka, literally rendered as mother has arrived (on body) or mother has been put (on the body). This is certainly the way I heard my sari-clad paternal grandmother speak of it. The corporeality of the body is of course much more than what is measured/discerned at the edge/peel of where the outermost exteriority of membrane tissue meets the outside world, or where matter meets air. Likewise, amman arrives from ‘outside’ as measles or pox, but manifests from the ‘inside’ under the dermal membrane, having quickly germinated and taken root. The body is coupled to this rooting and grows warm and flush to the touch.

She is here. Mother or Mariamman has arrived. This is also the beginnings of a seemingly ‘abject’ (Kristeva 1982) body, and certainly not a body meant for public consumption. The afflicted is meant to remain ritually indoors and shielded from outside visitors. The trope of the ambivalent mother and local religious grammar recursively plays out again in the manner in which the believer treats the afflicted, as this is a kind of hybrid body/scape that is both abject and consecrated. In more ways than one, the afflicted body whose affliction has been wrought by Mariamman, awaits and anticipates the cure from the self-same goddess-mother. This body epitomises the ‘being-in-between’ that cannot be ‘fully named or formed or explained’ in either hermeneutics of biomedical discourse or the exigencies of the greater Brahmanic tradition. This ambiguous body and bodyscape can only be grasped through the grammar of the ambivalent goddess herself.

The author with her paternal grandmother. Image courtesy of Maheshvari Naidu.

Both in the natal south Indian villages as well as in many globally scattered diasporic homes (such as mine), deep vestiges of traditional or folk understandings of healing have prevailed. The body upon whom Mariamman has arrived, is treated as consecrated body-space and kept in a ritually pure state with tumeric and neem crushed, mixed and smeared thickly over the entire body. The scent of crushed leaves in heavily infused air further invokes the green fragrance of spring and summons an equivalent visual semiosis, as freshly acquired neem leaves lie in heaps awaiting their use. My grandmother’s toothy Tamil words gently reprimanding my mother to ‘not further anger’ amman, and keep the house (ritually) pure, reprise their role in my auditory passages from when I lay with measles as a child of about eight. I hazily recall bemoaning my fate and wondering what on earth had I, or could I have possibly done to have angered the goddess, all the way this far down in South Africa, to have invited her grip of displeasure across my body.

For in the grammar of village based Hinduism, it is not the (ideologically and theistically) aloof so called great(ter) Brahmanic Gods (of Shiva or Vishnu or others of the greater pantheon) that hold sway over the immediacies and exigencies of both land and body, but the local, situated kinship goddesses such as Mariamman, who is ontologically grasped as being intimately yoked to both the fertile land and functioning body.

Summer

The pimply irritations appear in waves and grow into thinly veiled blisters filled with fluid. They grow in size, by appearing to entangle with the more firmly rooted abrasions and multiply and stake their territorialisation of the body. This is a time of high fever and the grip of heat. The aesthetics of the body are occluded by the reddish-brown splotches that begin to converge in places, mimicking (enacting) amman’s spread over the body, understood as the height/heat of her anger. The trope of the ambivalent goddess who both brings the affliction and visitation to the body of the person, as well as releases the body and person, plays out well as the (traditional) care givers rush around attempting to appease the goddess and cool the body- acts construed and enacted synonymously.

Amman is definitely here. She squats heavily now on the body, and in the body in a kind of body-border transgression.  This is the time when we may behold the afflicted as ‘abhuman’ (body). The term ‘abhuman’, meaning not-quite-human subject, is appropriated from Hyesook Jeon (2017: 35) who speaks  of the abhuman as “a subject that has morphic variability and is continually in danger of becoming not-itself (becoming “other”)”,  where “the prefix “ab” means the movement”. In borrowing this term, which is a welcome move away from the prefix “in” and  the lesser  deviant notion of “inhuman”, I liken the movement of becoming not-itself with the movement of the goddess through the body, where the body undergoes a kind of othering into abject consecration.

Autumn

 The blister walls break, leaving open sores. The days of high fever are fewer and the body begins to experience longer periods of cool. The neem leaves have dried and although they are still replaced and replenished, they too are somewhat less frequently needing to be changed and there is a grateful understanding that the goddess is preparing to leave, as she has been suitably and ritually appeased through observances of purity for the body, as well as the wider space of the home.  

The yellow turmeric and water in the copper vessel has deepened from yellow to a more autumnal brown, as each refilling drags in the sedimented dregs of the tumeric, and additively darkens the water that has been sipped since the goddess’ arrival. The smeared tumeric on the body, likewise mimics this deepening and works cumulatively to turn and stain the skin from yellow to a deeper brownish-reddish. Tumeric, a vital part of ritual pan-Hindu purification practices seems to seep to strata below the skin and like amman herself, is on the body, but also in the body. This deepening however, is a sign of her loosening the grip on corporeal body and the beginnings of cooling. There is less fever and fewer bouts of delirium.

The reciprocal loosening of the territorial grip and anger over the body can be seen in the semiotic echo of the blister walls breaking and the bounded pus-filled walls breaking their borders to the exterior. This ‘letting go’ is a necessary step before the final healing. In the context of the measles, there is a phenomenology of the body that makes its presence felt more deeply through illness and affliction. So too is the mother goddess’s arrival and immanent presence more ‘present’ in and through the affliction and in and through the (afflicted) body. Srinivasan (2019) describes this as “the immanent identification of the body as the goddess” and “her sovereign authority over the body during affliction.”

Winter

The open sores, finally crust over to become dry, brown scabs on the skin or ‘ground’. Just as the land is hard and ‘dead’, in winter, so too are the blistered eruptions that turn to scab.

Amman readies herself to leave. Her departure is on. Much like the seasons’ movements, the climatic changes have been wrought on the ground/body.

The ‘measled-body’, now darkened to a natural tumeric-brown body, is perceived by the believer, as the site of lived experience. This is not only a social body, but a religious body and site of embodied agency. However, it is a complex relationship of agency that inheres through the body of the afflicted who has been an active recipient, receiving the goddess. S/he lays back (and down) allowing traditional medicine (the neem and tumeric) to be ritually administered over the course of a week. S/he has allowed the interruption of the goddess onto the body. Deeply imbricated in the refusal of any allopathic treatment, is also the denial of the hegemonic biomedical bodyscape.

As the days pass, and winter slowly but surely gives way to spring, the tumeric stain fades. However, some of the more tenacious pox marks remain as tattooed reminders of the goddess’s visit, and as evidence of both her anger and grace.

Conclusion

Helen Lambert (1994:21) points out that in “in local Rajasthani cosmology, there is a switching or oscillation between two ‘aspects’ of the goddess that are, at a pan-Indian level, understood as one unified manifestation”. This actually holds true for the wider geographic net of the more southern goddesses, such as Mariamman as well. This oscillation is existentially present in how she is experientially grasped by the villager/believer. She is the bringer-harbinger and curer-healer of the affliction, even as her (unified) persona-ontology oscillates in commanding both reverence and fear.

Deploying a bodyscape approach allows us to get ‘under the skin’ of the materiality of both body and goddess and troubles the hegemony of ideal body and ideal god(dess). Neither are static and neat in any ontological finality. Mariamman is not the well-behaved consort goddess of the Brahmanic tradition.

The notion of bodyscapes is of course not new and has been somewhat variously operationalised (see Mirzhoef 1995; Porteous 2008; Geller 2009; Parrini 2010). From Porteous’ (2008, 2) point that bodyscape was a renaissance metaphor that understood the earth to be modelled on the human body or landscape as body, to Parrini’s (2010) notion of ‘bodyscapes’ used to comprehend the connections between the processes of globalization and emerging forms of social violence, the bodyscape notion is an intellectual and appealingly ‘thick’ lens. However, as a feminist anthropologist myself, Pamela Geller’s use of the notion transacts closer currency for me. She ingeniously adapts the term bodyscape, and in this essay, I have adopted, and have attempted to elastically adapt and stretch it further.

In Geller’s (2009) anthropological work entitled ‘Bodyscapes, Biology and Heteronormativity’ she speaks of the term bodyscape 

“[A]s encouraging thinking about representation of bodies at multiple scales—from different bodies as they move through space to the microlandscape of individual bodily differences. A hegemonic bodyscape's representations tend to idealize and essentialize bodies’ differences to reinforce normative ideas about a society's socioeconomic organization” (Geller 2009:504).

Geller (2009, 512) states that “A bodyscape can be hegemonic … But this dominant bodyscape also meets resistance and subversion from alternative visions of living, moving, experiencing.” She reminds us that this hegemonic landscape is in large part informed by bio-medicine. In the context of the village non Brahmanic religious traditions, the ideal bodyscape may hold hegemonic sway imposed by the greater (sic) Brahmanic traditions. However, as one of the alternate goddess, Mariamman and her climatic control over body, reveals a rich counter subversive bodyscape that speaks to both materiality (of body), as well as powerful existential reality for the believer.

Bibliography

Geller, Pamela L. Bodyscapes, Biology, and Heteronormativity, 2009. American Anthropologist, 504-516. DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01159

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