Goddess and Disease ( A repost)

[Guest guest]

I know this might sound strange to some people to associate Goddess

and Disease, but in many parts of India especially in the rural areas

( where they live in villages ), the believe is very strong up to the

present day. Even in a Cosmopolitan City like Singapore, these

believe still runs deep in the minds of the Indians/Hindu community.

 

What is the difference between disease as a curse and disease as a

blessings? This brings me back to my previous quotation in the

article about Matrkas : What does not kills us makes us strong.

 

Disease is a way of making us strong, especially if we are able to

pass through it and recover. It does makes sense right, especially if

there is lack of immunization and medical facilities, disease does

cause your body to produce antibodies which will last a life time. So

there is a believe that if you do survive the disease, you are more

able to deal with the rest of the life can throw at us. But there are

some who never make it. They stay sickly, weak and eventually dies.

So the disease is the Goddess form of training for us, to prepare us

for the harsh world. Some of us just aren't ready.

 

Worshipping disease is a way to try to appease it. Plagues appear as

if they have a will of their own. They will take one person and not

another, wipe out entire towns, or only take some. They may skip over

the house, an only take one in that house, but take everyone in the

next house. Disease is fickle and seems like having its own agenda.

It can rise from its own ashes years later. Therefore it does make

sense to have a goddess of disease. She give order to an otherwise

orderless process, disease gives and takes, and looks like it have

mind behind it.

 

There are two goddess often associated with disease. Both these

goddess associated with Small Pox and are also considered as Village

Goddess.

 

a) Sitala

 

b) Mariyaman

 

 

Goddess Sitala is said to be a beautiful but a harsh goddess. She has

a temper ,unforgiving and will do with you as she wishes. She

desires worship and those who did not worship her should dearly fear

her wrath. But most of the time she comes through for you. Sitala is

often associated with Plague.

 

 

Goddess Mariyamman is popular in the South India. There are two

version to the myth of Mariyamman

 

 

a) She as a young Brahmin girl who are being tricked into marrying an

untouchable; who disguised himself as a Brahmin. When she found out,

she became furious and kills herself. She is transformed into a

goddess and in her divine form punishes the untouchables by burning

him to ashes and other myths depicting her humiliating and humbling

the husband.

 

 

b) As a pious and pure wife who is married to a devout holy man. She

is so pure that she can perform miraculous task. One day she sees two

gandharvas making love and feels envy for them. Thereupon she loses

her miraculous powers. Suspecting that the wife have had sexual

disloyalty, her husband command her son to kill the mother. The son

obeys his father and decapitated his mother. Eventually she is

restored to life, but in the process her head an body get transposed

with those of an untouchable woman. Mariyamman is thus understood to

have a Brahmin head and an untouchable body.

 

 

 

With regards to disease and villages, these goddess play dual role,

namely

 

a) as protector of the village against disease

 

b) as the inflictor of disease it self.

 

 

 

Richard Brubaker in his book ""The Ambivalent Mistress" sum

up the

dual role of these goddess

 

".. the goddess is the one who manifests herself in epidemic

disease,

who guards against it and keeps it at bay, who inflicts it upon her

people in wrath, who joins her people in fighting an conquering it,

who suffers it herself; she it is who invites its appearance and then

struggles against it; she enters people's bodies by means of it,

but

sometimes heals them by taking it upon herself; she uses it as a

means to enhance her own worship; she is enflamed by its heat and

needs to be cooled, and may be cooled by the fanning of disease-

heated humans, while the latter may also be cooled by pouring water

on her image; she is both the scourge and the mistress of disease

demons, and perhaps even their mistress in both sense of the term;

she mercilessly chastises her people with the disease, but holds its

victims especially dear; she delights in the disease, is aroused by

it, goes mad with it; she kills with is and uses it to give new

life"

 

 

Om ParaShaktiye Namaha