Nestled in a small clearing against a backdrop of blue-green peaks of the Sahyadri mountains, near Muzhakunnu in Kannur district of Kerala, stands the ancient Mridanga Saileshwari Temple dedicated to the Hindu Puranic goddess Durga in her avatar as the patron deity of learning, Saraswathi. The temple is believed to have been established when the region was first settled, its origins lost in the hoary mists of time. The goddess is the tutelary deity of the Kottayam royal family, erstwhile rulers of the region called Pazhassi. While the family and the place name have relatively recent historic significance in the person of Pazhassi Raja, the patriotic ruler who resisted Hyder Ali’s military advances and British colonial rule during the late 1700’s, the temple and the goddess have an antiquity that may be no less interesting.
The name of the region, Pazhassi, has no meaning as such in Malayalam. On the other hand, its import may be derived from an ancient Egyptian phrase pdj-zsh.t (written in hieroglyph consonants without intervening vowels) translated as ‘stretching the cord,’ a ceremony associated with founding a temple. The unwieldy combination of sounds dj+z+sh in pdj-zsh.t likely slurred into zhass either in colloquial Egyptian itself, or clearly in Malayalam, for with the [.t] ending that makes the word terminate in a [i] sound, the term pdj-zsh.t would be pronounced as pazhassi. This pdj-zsh.t ‘stretching the cord’ ceremony was intimately associated with the Egyptian patron deity of learning, goddess Seshat, suggesting a pharaonic Egyptian link to her Hindu Puranic counterpart consecrated in the Mridanga Saileshwari Temple at Pazhassi.
Seshat was not just the goddess of learning; she was also the goddess of building. It was in the latter capacity that she was associated with the pdj-zsh.t ‘stretching the cord,’ ceremony, which was part of the rituals of founding a temple, going back to the First Dynasty, ca. 2900 BCE in Egypt. The founding of a temple in ancient Egypt was performed by the king or in his stead, the chief priest. After a temple site had been designated and laid out, the king drove stakes into the ground at four corners and connected them by a measuring cord in the pdj-zsh.t ‘stretching the cord’ ceremony. The king and his retinue then followed the lines formed by the cord and with a hoe, hacked a foundation trench deep enough to hit groundwater. The king molded mud bricks, shoveled sand into the trench and placed the bricks on it at the four corners, or in their stead, a cornerstone. Models of carpentry tools and other foundation offerings were then placed in the trench and covered.
Remarkably, founding a temple in Kerala, as also almost everywhere else in south India, follows along very similar lines. After the site for the temple is determined, stakes are driven at the four corners by the chief priest, thantri, using an iron hammer, and a cotton thread used to connect them all. A foundation trench is dug deep enough to hit groundwater. The thantri then carefully selects five or nine bricks to lay in the trench. A potful of riches consisting of jewels in some cases is then placed in the trench and covered.
These similarities between the temple founding rituals of Kerala and pharaonic Egypt are incredibly astounding, especially considering the prevailing theory about Kerala’s history, according to which, these temple rituals were Hindu in basis, introduced from Tamil Nadu with the immigration of Vedic brahmins to the wild, uncivilized, and tribal land that once was Kerala, where the natives practiced a primitive form of religion, worshiping demons, ancestors, trees, and snakes. The Vedic settlers who spoke a different language, wielded no weapons, had no economic influence, and practiced no trade somehow persuaded the local natives to abandon their coarse ways and adopt the “refined” and “ennobled” religion of Brahmanism.
Tribal ways astoundingly changed for the most part, but some vestigial remnants allegedly refused to be shaken, leading to the modern form of rituals in Kerala’s temples today. It was apparently the “elasticity” of Brahmanism, its ability to take within it the “lowest forms of animism, fetishism, ancestor-worship, and what not” according to Padmanabha Menon in 1937, that allowed these vestigial remains to continue. Later scholars agreed with the hypothesis, albeit a bit incredulously, asserting that temple rituals along with a rising tide of devotion, termed the bhakti movement (ca. 800–900 CE), reflected in festivals, art and literature served to miraculously elevate brahmins to the richest aristocracy.
However, Pazhassi and its patron deity in the Mridanga Saileshwari Temple stand testimony to the incompleteness of this theory. The ‘pazhassi’ temple-founding rituals blessed by goddess Seshat were established in Egypt around 2900 BCE and continued to the end of the Ptolemaic Era in 30 BCE, suggesting that the rituals and the temple consecrated to the goddess of learning existed in Kerala more than 300 years before Vedic brahmins arrived with their fire altars. It cannot be otherwise, for it is well-nigh impossible that Vedic brahmins would establish a temple using their own community’s rites, yet give the place a non-Sanskrit name that coincidentally corresponds to a phrase describing the very same rites performed by an ancient culture across the Indian Ocean. Indeed, given the evidence, it is more probable that Kerala’s temple culture spilled over into the rest of south India, rather than the other way around, and the original deity of the Mridanga Saileshwari Temple later transformed under the influence of Brahmanism to her Hindu Puranic counterpart, Saraswathi.
Such a phenomenon has happened many times in history in different cultures elsewhere. For example, Eshmun, Phoenician god of healing worshiped at Sidon in modern-day Lebanon, was transposed with Asclepios, Greek god of healing, during the Greek conquest of the Levant ca. 300 BCE. Despite the change in identity of the idol inside the temple, the rituals in the temple and mode of worship by the local population did not change. A similar kind of transposition happened in Egypt itself, where the identity of the deity worshiped in many temples changed from goddess Hathor to other goddesses such as Isis and Mut according to the needs of the times.
Pharaonic Egypt was one of the foremost civilizations of the ancient world. Pazhassi and Mridanga Saileshwari Temple, along with Kerala’s snake shrines, divinities, traditions, myths, culture, and language stand testimony that a part of this ancient civilization touched Kerala long ago. The Vedic brahmins were part of another ancient civilization, one that captivated India’s heart and mind over the long term. Kerala is evidently a child of these two remarkable cultures, like Hariharasuta born of Shiva and Vishnu. It was not primitive; perhaps it never was.
Yet, unanswered questions remain: if the natives of Kerala were part of a sophisticated society with their own complex religion, how did the transformation to Brahmanism happen without any violence, and why? I will be exploring these issues in later articles.
Nowhere else in the world, not even in Egypt, does pharaonic Egyptian culture survive as it does in Kerala. Nowhere else is it this respected, this venerated, this cherished for its own sake. Nowhere else are its ancient words spoken, its ancient rituals fastidiously observed, its ancient ways of life remembered with such obliviousness to their original identity. Which brings to mind these lines from Wordsworth’s poem, Immortality Ode: “The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.”
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