Ayyanar
ஐயனார்
Also Aiyanar, Sastha, Karuppasamy as his lieutenant.
Village and folk
Who this is
Ayyanar is the guardian of the village boundary, and he is on a horse because he rides the limits at night. His shrines stand outside the settlement, under a tree, in the open, with a line of enormous terracotta horses facing the fields: the horses are given by villagers for a vow fulfilled, and they are for him to ride on patrol. He takes no roof and usually no Brahmin priest; the potter who makes the horses is often the one who performs the rite. He is one of the oldest continuous forms of worship in the Tamil country and is almost entirely outside the puranas.
How to recognise them
A seated or mounted figure with a whip, often white, with huge eyes, flanked by his lieutenants Karuppasamy, dark and armed with an aruval, and Muniyandi. Around him stand ranks of terracotta horses, sometimes several times life size, in various states of weathering, because a horse is given and then left to the rain.
Family and companions
Two consorts, Poorna and Pushkala, in the shrines that give him any. Karuppasamy, Muniyandi and the other veerans are his attendants and are worshipped alongside. The identification with Ayyappa as Sastha is made in Kerala and in the agamic temples, and the village shrine does not depend on it.
How they are worshipped
The village festival before the rains; new moon and full moon nights; Saturday.
A terracotta horse is given for a vow fulfilled, commissioned from the local potter and installed at the shrine. The offerings are what the village has: rice, country liquor and a cockerel or a goat in the shrines that take them, and in the vegetarian shrines pongal and plantain. The festival is in the hot months before the rain, with the whole village walking the boundary.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
Why the horses are given
A villager in difficulty, with a sick child or a failing crop or a case in court, promises Ayyanar a horse if it comes right. When it does, the potter is paid to build one, as large as the promise felt, and it is carried out and set facing the fields with the others. Nobody repairs them. A shrine therefore shows the village’s troubles in order, the newest horse bright and the oldest crumbling back into the earth it was dug from, and the row of them is a record of what the village has been through and of what was granted.
The boundary ridden at night
He is said to ride the limits of the village after dark with his lieutenants, and the shrine is placed where it is so that he can. The practical shape of the belief is that his ground is the edge, not the centre: a stranger coming at night meets him first, and so does anything else. Villages traditionally fixed their boundary disputes by reference to where his shrines stood, and a new settlement would establish his shrine before its own temple, because the limit had to be guarded before the middle was worth anything.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Shrines at the boundary of villages across the Tamil country, with the terracotta horses of Pudukkottai, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram the best known.
- Kerala
- Kept as Sastha in the older temples, which is the agamic end of the same stream, and the Ayyappa of Sabarimala is read as his form.
- Karnataka
- The Malnad keeps Aiyappa and Sastha shrines of the same family, and the bhuta shrines of the coast do similar work for the boundary.