Pattini

Pattini is a goddess popular among Buddhists of Śrī Lanka and Hindus of that island's east coast. The goddess is the deified form of the woman Kannaki, who was renowned for her chastity. Pattini's life is the theme of the Tamil poem Cilappatikāram, composed during the sixth to ninth centuries. In medieval times, both Hindus and Buddhists assimilated the Pattini cult, suggesting close ties among Sinhalese and Tamils on the island at the time.

Foremost a mother goddess, Pattini does not have the duality of mother goddesses in other parts of South Asia, passive and nurturing or terrifying and vengeful; she is primarily a stern but benevolent mother. Pattini is married to Pālanga (or Kōvala), but remains a virgin. Her sexual purity is essential in maintaining the polarity between harlot and wife, thus rendering the ideal status of wife and mother, in the Pattini cult, essentially undefiled. This requires, however, the impotence or castration of Pālanga, made possible by practices of the cult.

There are two main ritual cycles. The first, the gammaḍuva, includes annual performances by villagers enacted after the harvest to offer thanksgiving, or in response to drought and disease. The second, the aṇkeḷiya, is performed primarily by the male population of the village. The gammaḍuva comprises offering plants (betel leaves and festival boughs) and lights, planting the torch of time, and performing fire trampling rituals and ceremonial dances for the participating gods. Through these acts, Pattini's status as mother goddess is reaffirmed.

The second cycle, the aṅkeḷiya, involves cathartic participation by the audience around horn game rituals, in which two teams pull on ropes attached to sambar (deer) horns and or to wooden hooks representing horns until one of the horns breaks. In the course of these games, men are thought to release impotence and castration anxieties, involving damage and injury to the penis; the winning team with the broken horn represents successful intercourse with the wife (mother), and the team with the unbroken horn is publicly shamed by its failure to engage in intercourse.

The Pattini cult is also a medical system, of Hindu/Buddhist origin, in which the patient solicits the aid of the deity to respond to the doṣas or faults of the organism. The three faults of the Āyurvedic medical system (vāta/air/breath; pitta/fire/bile; kapha/water/phlegm) indicate the upset of human homeostasis, which is believed to be caused by physical influences or the agency of spirits, both of which are caused by planetary misalignment and karma. One of the goals of the gammaḍuva is to cure, control, protect against, and exorcise the negative effects of the doṣas. Thus, for example, ritual fire trampling controls an excess of fire (pitta), and ritual cutting of water controls an excess of water (kapha).

Pattini is also known for the sacred anklet she wears, an amulet thought to have special curative powers that can rid people of such conditions as smallpox, chickenpox, whooping cough, measles, and mumps. In the form referred to by Tamils, Kannaki, the goddess is a guardian deity who protects people from diseases and calamities, and interacts favorably with nature, bringing rains and promoting fertility and the growth of vegetation. Essentially, Pattini represents maternity, purity, healing, and piety embodied in feminine, yet divine, form.

see also Buddhism; Hinduism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tanaka, Masakazu. 1997. Patrons, Devotees and Goddesses: Ritual and Power Among the Tamil Fishermen of Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers.

                                     Ellison Banks Findly