Earlier, I had written about the influence of the Indian Ocean trade routes on the festival of Onam in Kerala. I had suggested that the traditions of Onam originated thousands of years ago across the Indian Ocean in pharaonic Egypt, and they are now celebrated in Kerala with the same rituals but under different gods. This article showcases another example of the same phenomenon: ancient pharaonic Egyptian practices surviving in Kerala in changed guise under Hindu Brahmanism’s beliefs and gods.
Thiruvathira is a festival unique to Kerala, along with Onam and Vishu. It is celebrated on the full moon day of the fifth month of the Malayalam calendar, around December or January. It is a festival centered mainly on women. Its origins date back into antiquity, “back to times almost out of mind.” Although these days it purportedly celebrates a happily married life in the model of the holy matrimony between the Hindu god Shiva and his consort goddess Parvati, the popular conception of it even as recently as a hundred and fifty years ago was as commemoration of the death of Kamadeva, the Hindu Puranic god of love, who was destroyed in the fire of Shiva’s third eye.
According to Puranic lore, Kamadeva incurred Shiva’s displeasure and was reduced to ashes as a result. His distraught wife Rati collected his remains, cursing the gods in rage and grief. In time, her grief mellowed into prayers. In one version of the story, her single-minded devotion and love for her husband finally appeased the gods and Kamadeva was resurrected from the dead in his original form as a gana (ghostly follower) of Lord Shiva. In another version of the story, Kamadeva was reborn as Pradyumna, son of Lord Krishna and Rukmini. Pradyumna was seized by the demon Sambara, locked into a chest, and thrown into the sea. Rati found the infant and raised him as her son. The boy grew up, killed Sambara in battle, regained his memory as Kamadeva and was reunited with his wife Rati for all eternity.
Gopal Panikkar writing in 1900, described the rituals of Thiruvathira as a commemoration of this unhappy tragedy, a “memory . . . still kept alive amongst us, particularly the female section, by means of the annual celebration of this important festival.” On the festival day, young women of native families bathed all together in a pond just before the early hours of dawn to the accompaniment of many water games called thudi, which involved beating the water rhythmically with open palms to the tune of a song sung in praise of the god of love. Afterwards, they dressed grandly for the day, darkening the fringes of their eyelids with kohl and stibium. Then they proceeded to games on a swing hung from the branches of a sturdy tree, and afterwards danced a traditional dance called kai-kotti-kali and played till evening.
The water games with the rhythmic beating apparently symbolized the grief of goddess Rati beating her chest in lamentation upon the death of her husband and the swing symbolized her desire to put an end to her life by hanging. Unlike these sorrowful rituals, the kai-kotti-kali dance was one of joy, symbolizing Kamadeva brought back to life by Rati’s earnest prayers. Thus, according to Padmanabha Menon in 1937, the festival was “of the nature both of mourning and a rejoicing ceremony.” Nowhere else in India was the god of love so beloved or his death so lamented.
Such symbolism is remarkably reminiscent of the lamentations of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis upon discovering the death of her husband Osiris and her later jubilation upon his resurrection, celebrated every year in pharaonic Egypt as the “Festival of the Two Goddesses” around the fourth or fifth month of the Egyptian calendar, in December or January. According to the Egyptian myth as described by the Greek writer Plutarch (ca. 45–120 CE), the demon Set imprisoned his brother Osiris in a chest and set it out to sea. The goddess Isis, Osiris’s wife, was overcome by grief and rage upon hearing the news of his death. She eventually found the chest in Byblos and brought it back to Egypt. But it was discovered by Set, who dismembered Osiris’s body and scattered the pieces all over the land. Isis collected her husband’s remains and brought him back to life with her prayers. She then raised her son Horus, who grew up to defeat Set in battle.
During the Egyptian festival dedicated to this myth, a passion play was performed all over Egypt depicting the death of Osiris and the magic of Isis returning him to life. The drama, dating at least to around 1800 BCE, played out the lamentations of the goddess upon her husband’s death and her jubilation upon his resurrection. The chants sung by female priestesses during this play are preserved in a papyrus (ca. 400 BCE) called “Songs of Isis and Nephthys,” currently in the Bremner Rhind collection at the British Museum. It is a song of love and yearning, of grief and rapture, of utter devotion.
Thiruvathira as it was celebrated in Kerala in the early 1900’s remarkably mirrored the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris in its every ritual despite being dedicated to Rati and Kamadeva, who presumably entered Kerala’s pantheon of gods only after Hindu Brahmanism became prevalent around 500–1100 CE. Thus in Kerala, the pedigree of the captivating story celebrating the eternal cycle of birth, death and resurrection through immortal conjugal love predates Rati and Kamadeva — and Parvati and Shiva for that matter — by more than a thousand years, suggesting perhaps that people can relinquish their gods, but not their stories of love.
Bibliography
Faulkner, R.O. 1937. “The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus — I,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology, vol. 22, no. 2: 121–40.
Menon, Padmanabha. 1937. A History of Kerala written in the form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar, vol 4, rev. ed. 2013. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
Nair, P. G. R. 2010. “Thiruvathira Thoughts,” Boloji.com. December 20, 2010. https://www.boloji.com/articles/10347/thiruvathira-thoughts .
Panikkar, Gopal. 1900. Malabar and its Folk. Madras: G.A. Natesan and Co.
Plutarch. 100. Moralia. Translated by Frank Cole Babbit. 1936. The Loeb Classical Library: Plutarch Moralia V. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.