The kav of Kerala are considered to be part of a pan-India belief system associated with sacred groves established by the ancients presumably to protect biodiversity and stave off environmental cataclysm: “sections of forest where spiritual beings were believed to reside, and where ordinary activities such as tree felling, gathering of wood, plants and leaves, hunting, fishing, grazing . . . were prohibited.” Yet, unlike these pan-India sacred groves, which are held sacrosanct, their very trees considered holy, forbidden to be touched, in Kerala, the kav are something more: they refer to any temple, small and large, devoted to the worship of goddesses, lesser gods, ancestors, and serpents. Some of these temples have associated groves, but others do not. It is only the pambinkav, also called sarpa kav, devoted to serpent worship, that are associated perhaps exclusively with sacred forests.
At first blush, these pambinkav also appear to belong to India’s long tradition of shrines dedicated to snake worship going back to pre-Vedic times, the earliest evidence being pictorial representations from Harappa, Mohenjo‐Daro and Lothal ca. 2000 BCE. The worship of snake deities in sacred groves in Kerala is thought to be “the resulting blend of deeply rooted indigenous folk traditions with later rituals and beliefs of devotion towards [Puranic] Nāgas.”
However, the traditional pambinkav of Kerala are not typically dedicated to any particular Puranic serpent deity, such as Adishesha (worshiped in Aadimoolam Vetticode Sree Nagarajaswami Temple near Kayamkulam), Vasuki (worshiped in Pambumekkat Temple in Thrissur), Manasa (worshiped in Kamakhya Temple in Assam), or Bhavani (worshiped in Periyapalayam Temple in Tamilnadu). Indeed, compared to the temples consecrated to other Puranic deities worshiped in Kerala, the pambinkav is a diminutive shrine — small, homely, and casual. “These serpent‐gods . . . are not necessarily synonymous with actual living snakes [either], but are divine beings or deities which are depicted as displaying the same physical features as snakes, with a specific allusion to cobras.”
More intriguingly, the traditional pambinkav are not located in or near forests, as one would expect from “nature worshiping,” “primitive,” “tribal,” or “animistic” rituals. Rather, they are situated within compounds or near the traditional family home, especially the homes of the elite, for they held an important place in the domestic sphere as the household shrine of the Nayar tharavad. The serpents were considered tutelary deities of the family, their propitiation essential to the prosperity and well-being of every householder. Worship at the pambinkav comprised offerings of noore (a mixture of starch in water) and milk, pulluvan patt (also called kalamezhuthu patt) ‘pulluvan songs’ and pambu thullal ‘snake dance.’
According to Keralolpatti, a folklore that describes Kerala’s origin myth, the pambinkav were created during the early days of human settlement as a means to appease fearsome serpents infesting the uninhabited forests and swamps of those ancient times. The serpents were made gods of the domain, protected, respected, and venerated by the human settlers. A portion of land in every household was set aside for them, so that they could live undisturbed. While the lore perhaps gives a colorful explanation for the presence of the pambinkav in the gardens of the elite, it does not explain the domestic veneration of the serpent as the tutelary household deity. Neither does it explain the connection of the serpent deity with many goddesses of Kerala, along with associated attributes of fertility. Indeed, in every aspect of ritual, faith, and setting, the pambinkav of Kerala is different from sacred groves and serpent worshiping cults in other parts of India.
Yet, there was another ancient civilization that followed identical customs in matters of serpent shrines, in every aspect of ritual, faith, and setting: the natives of pharaonic Egypt worshiped a snake deity in the domestic sphere exactly as did the natives of Kerala. The deity, an ancient Egyptian cobra goddess from the Nile Delta area, was called Renenutet, written in hieroglyph consonants as Rnn-wt, probably pronounced Rennu, Renno, Ranno, or Rennuti.
The ancient Egyptians considered all goddesses as having attributes of the serpent. In some representations, they were shown as serpents with human heads, in others as humans with serpent heads, and in yet others as humans with serpent crowns. They were also worshiped in serpent form entirely, carrying a crown of a solar disk or ostrich features. The patron deity of the Nile Delta in Egypt’s ancient times, ca. 2900 BCE, was a serpent goddess, under whose divine authority, symbolized by the uræus, the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2900–2200 BCE) presided over temples and ruled the land. The snake was indeed a holy beast in their religion, “God Greatly Feared,” one of several divine entities that protected their temples and the throne.
The ancestral function of Renenutet, a variant of the uræus cobra, was as keeper of divine linen and other precious artifacts, provider of food and abundance, and fierce guardian of households. She was a benevolent snake protecting the precinct and its riches. According to the Pyramid Texts, the oldest corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts found to date, Renenutet was the goddess of plenty and good fortune. She was considered to protect the harvest and given the epithets “Goddess of the Double Granary,” the “Lady of Fertile Fields,” and the “Lady of Granaries.” Shrines were set up in the field for her; her statues were specially erected in the gardens of the elite. Attesting to this practice, archeological digs have unearthed clay figurines of cobras from domestic, military, funerary, and temple contexts in pharaonic Egypt, encompassing both formal temples and domestic shrines, just as one can find snake figurines worshiped in large temples and domestic shrines all over Kerala. Renenutet was also associated with milk — she was a nurse of gods and kings — and through its nourishing aspects, with fertility, as the source of all life.
In Egyptian, she was Rnn-wt.t nb.t ka.w ‘Renenutet lady of food.’ According to current conventions in Egyptological linguistics, derived from Late Egyptian/Coptic and from the Euro-centrist bent of most Egyptologists (for further linguistics notes, see my previous article on Words), a vowel is presumed to exist between two adjacent consonants. However, the dissenting view suggests otherwise. It is highly possible that, as James Allen stated, the “phonological reality lay somewhere between these two views.” Under the conventional view, nb.t ka.w is pronounced as nebet kav. According to the dissenting view, nb.t ka.w would be pronounced as anbi kav (with a consonant cluster nb and i sound at the end of the word for a feminine [.t] hieroglyph ending), leading to the conclusion that fy-anbi-n-kav, phonetically similar to Malayalam pambinkav, translates in Egyptian as ‘snake-lady-of-food,’ an epithet of the household serpent deity Renenutet (see Notes below).
Thus, based upon the remarkable similarities in rituals and significance between the pambinkav of Kerala and the worship of fy-anbi-n-kav ‘snake lady of food’ in pharaonic Egypt, it appears quite likely that the creed of the household serpent goddess traveled across the Indian Ocean and settled in Kerala. Down the centuries, perhaps through a linguistic evolutionary process called metathesis, whereby under certain conditions, sounds switch positions with one another, Rennu became noore, and in an ironic reversal of roles, the deity merged with her devotees’ offering.
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Notes:
In contrast to the small, domestic pambinkav, Pambumekkat is a prominent snake temple near Thrissur. It is consecrated to the Puranic male serpent deity Vasuki according to current Hindu beliefs. Pambumekkat may correspond in Egyptian to pa-nb-m-kht ‘The Master Companion,’ likely referring to Nehebkau (nhb-kau), a powerful male serpent deity, divine companion of the sun god Ra, worshiped in the Temple of Heliopolis during the Old Kingdom (ca. 2900–2200 BCE).
