Among the one hundred and eight temples founded along the western shores of Kerala by its first settlers from across the ocean is Sree Kurumba Bhagavathy temple, in present-day Kodungallur. This temple is the chief of sixty-four Bhadra Kali temples in Kerala.¹ As originally consecrated, the presiding deity of the temple was ‘guardian of the seas,’ protecting the land and its people from evil arriving by way of the ocean.² She is a virgin goddess, believed to have sprung from her father’s eye in a state of rage no quantity of blood could slake.³ In her incarnation as Vasurimala, she can inflict diseases, particularly smallpox, and cure them too.⁴ She is also a warrior par excellence, hunting down evil on her trusty lion. Her idol in the temple has eight hands holding various things: a sword, a trident, a club, another weapon called kheta, a pot, a snake, a bell and the head of her quarry — the evil demon Daruka.⁵
To current-day observers, she is undoubtedly a Hindu deity. But Hinduism in Kerala is fairly new, having arrived from across the Western Ghats with immigrant Nambudiri brahmins in the fourth century CE. The land was already settled by then, which means the Sree Kurumba temple already existed at that time. So, who was she before she took on the mantle of Hinduism’s Bhadra Kali? This question is not meant to be controversial. All religions extant today evolved from a different form in the past, and most, if not all, have enriched each other by mutual give-and-take, evincing a common cultural ancestry, and more importantly, showing unmistakably what the community holds as immutable in the face of inevitable change. Kerala’s historians have a myopic tendency to see the natives as immigrants from across the mountains, whereas the land is most easily accessed by the sea. That its first settlers came by way of the ocean is well-known from its creationary folktale Keralolpatthi. Thus, to trace the origins of Sree Kurumba Bhagavathy is to uncover the identities of her devotees and through them, the cultural history of human maritime activity on the Indian Ocean.
Based on the rituals of the Bharani festival as practiced today by Sree Kurumba’s devotees, I have shown in a previous article that she was originally the ferocious lioness-headed Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. Sekhmet could send plagues against those who angered her as well as cure those who befriended her, similar to Sree Kurumba’s powers in her incarnation as Vasurimala.⁶ Born from the eye of the sun-god, similar to Sree Kurumba’s birth from the fiery eye of Lord Shiva, Sekhmet held the title ‘Eye of the Sun.’⁷ She was the sun’s red glow, representing the solar deity’s fiery power; she was the avenger who shot fire into the enemies of the cosmic order, whose rage no amount of blood could slake.⁸
She was an ancient goddess, worshiped in Egypt since at least 2400 BCE. Down the years, she assimilated attributes of various other goddesses, her identity morphing according to her devotees’ beliefs. As the goddess herself is alleged to have said: “My divinity is one, worshipped by all the world under different forms, with various rites, and by manifold names. In one place, the Phrygians, first-born of men, call me Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, in another the autochthonous people of Attica call me Cecropian Minerva, in another the sea-washed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus; to the arrow-bearing Cretans I am Dictynna Diana, to the trilingual Sicilians Ortygian Proserpina, to the ancient people of Eleusis Attic, Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, others Hecate, and still others Rhamnusia … the Egyptians who excel by having the original doctrine honor me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis”.⁹
Sekhmet was variously Wadjet the snake goddess, Hathor the virgin mother, Isis the guardian of the seas, and between 1500 BCE and 600 BCE, she was also the Phoenician goddess Astarte, the ferocious warrior who hunted on a lion, the healing goddess whose name could neutralize poisons.¹⁰ In a demonstration of Egyptian and Phoenician influence in Kerala at that time, Sekhmet-Astarte was called by her Egyptian devotees as Aastri Kharuwe ‘Astarte of Phoenicians’, which was Sanskritized in modern times under brahmin influence into Sree Kurumba.¹¹
Notes
[1] https://kodungallursreekurumbabhagavathytemple.org/pages/abouttemple.
[2] Keralolpatthi: The Origin of Malabar, 1868, [In Malayalam], Mangalore: Pfleiderer & Riehm, 9.
[3] Gentes, M. J., 1992, “Scandalizing the Goddess at Kodungallur,” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 51(2): 299; Panikkar, Gopala T.K., 1900, Malabar and its Folk, Madras: G.A. Natesan and Co., 129; Menon, Padmanabha, 1924–37, A History of Kerala written in the form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar, 4 vols., rev. ed. 2013, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 4:236.
[4] Menon, History of Kerala, 4:339.
[5] https://kodungallursreekurumbabhagavathytemple.org/pages/abouttemple.
[6] Sekhmet sent sickness, death, and destruction to the enemies of the cosmic order. Darnell, John Coleman, 1997, “The Apotropaic Goddess in the Eye,” Studien Zur Altägyptischen Kultur, vol. 24: 42; Lesko, Barbara. 1999, The Great Goddesses of Egypt, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 139. Her priests were trained in medicine to counteract her destructively powerful effects. Fletcher, Joann, 2010, Exploring the Life, Myth, and Art of Ancient Egypt, New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 61.
[7] Darnell, “Apotropaic Goddess in the Eye,” 35, 38, 40.
[8] The red glow was described as chemes ṯms [ʧəməs], alternatively dsher dšr [dʃər] ‘redness,’ and it represented the blood and gore with which the goddess satisfied her rage when she attacked the enemies of the cosmic solar order. Darnell, “Apotropaic Goddess in the Eye,” 42. chemes ṯms [ʧəməs] corresponds to Malayalam chempichha ചെമ്പിച്ച [ʧempiʧʧɑ] ‘copper (red) colored,’ and dsher dšr [dʃər] to chora ചോര [ʧoːɾɑ] ‘blood.’ Variyam, 2022. Malayalam Egyptian Comparative Dictionary.
[9] Smith, Mark S. 2014. “‛Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts.” In Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar — Astarte — Aphrodite. Edited by David T. Sugimoto, 76 n 195. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg.
[10] Tazawa, Keiko. 2014. “Astarte in New Kingdom Egypt: Reconsideration of Her Role and Function.” In Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar — Astarte — Aphrodite. Edited by David T. Sugimoto, 110, 118. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg.
[11] Aastri Kharuwe ꜥꜣstjr ḫꜣrw.j [ɑːʔstri xʔruʋə]. See LabEx Archimede (ANR-II-LABX-0032–01), CNRS and University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Vocabulaire de l’Égyptien Ancien (VÉgA), https://vega.vega-lexique.fr/, updated July 20, 2022.
