How monsters become gods

Alli and Nambi - AI-generated

Question: When does a monster become a goddess?

Answer: When society realises it created the monster.

Neeli was Kerala’s very own vampire. Her full name in the various legends of the state is Kalliyankattu Neeli. She is not a ‘vampire’ in the Western sense. The idea of a blood-sucking undead being, like Dracula with his ruined castle in a dark forest, comes largely from European Gothic imagination. In Kerala’s folklore, Neeli is a yakshi. A yakshi is a wronged woman who dies unjustly and then returns as a powerful and vindictive spirit.

Neeli was originally Alli. She has different names in different legends. I’m taking the version given in Sreekumari Ramachandran’s book, The Evergreen Legends of Kerala. Alli was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, daughter of a Devadasi in the village of Pazhakannur on the border of ancient Thiruvithamkoor (what the British called Travancore) and the Chola kingdom (9^th-13^th century CE).

Alli fell in love with Nambi, the priest of the local temple. Nambi was a cunning and greedy man whose real interest lay in the Devadasi’s wealth. When the Devadasi understood his evil motives, she asked him to get lost. Alli chose to accompany him because her love for him was genuine. Her mother gave her all her gold so that her future would be secure.

Nambi killed Alli and took possession of all her gold.

Genuine love was cruelly deceived and killed. Neeli had reasons to become a yakshi.

There are many other details added to this story in the diverse legends that Kerala has created around this fascinating supernatural woman who eventually became a goddess too in a few temples.

I was aware of Neeli’s story because it appeared in many novels, dramas, and movies. But her divinity revealed itself to me only today as I was reading a Malayalam weekly, Deshabhimani. The periodical mentioned that Neeli was worshipped in many temples in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. A yakshi is a cruel blood-sucking monster driven solely by vindictiveness. How does she become a goddess in temples? 

Temple of Neeli in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu

Two months back, I wrote about another fascinating deity in Kerala, Kappiri Muthappan. Fear and guilt feeling drove people to deify some African spirits (souls of Negro slaves in Kerala).

Something similar happened with Neeli the yakshi too.

Neeli was betrayed, abused, and killed unjustly. Then she became a diabolic supernatural power. People were afraid of her. But they were also aware of the injustice perpetrated against her. The recognition of monstrous injustice, together with fear of the evil spirit engendered by that act of injustice, stirs a community’s need to restore moral balance. The monstrous spirit thus becomes a supernatural guardian.

I guess there can be a lot of other motives too. Like, we humans tend to ritualise what we cannot eliminate. If you cannot destroy an evil spirit, you give it a shrine, worship it, and integrated it into the sacred order.

The society creates monsters. The same society creates gods out of those monsters.

An afterthought: It is quite scary to enter the social media nowadays. Too many monsters are being created there. Will India have enough space to construct temples for all these monsters after the right-wing politics implodes under its own weight in the due course of time?