Paper short abstract:

The paper explores perceptions of and interrelations between landscapes, the divine and individuals of the worldly sphere. My focus is set on vernacular narratives of the divine’s mythology and individual experiences of dedicated devotees in the context of a regional living tradition in South India.

Paper long abstract:

On top of a hill near Saundatti, Karnataka, South India, we find a landscape of temples, shrines and wells, which tells the mythologies of Reṇukā-Ellamma, a princess who became a deity. Today she protects villages against hazards from areas beyond the boundaries of settlements. But being from the outside herself she is ambivalent and can turn against her own people: she afflicts individuals by taking control of their bodies and playing a dangerous and painful game with them. Sometimes she even transforms a man's gender into female. Then only their initiation into Reṇukā-Ellamma's service and becoming a jōgamma or jōgappa pacifies the goddess. In this paper I analyze Reṇukā-Ellamma's vernacular mythologies together with life stories of her devotees, which I collected during ethnographic fieldwork. To explore interrelations between unsettled area, aspects of Reṇukā-Ellamma's character and her dedicated devotees, I trace motives of the wild and aspects of moving through spaces. This reveals mutuality, but also ambivalence and hierarchy in these relationships. Wilderness, threatening from the outside and being one aspect of Reṇukā-Ellamma's character, can be tamed or even reversed to become empowering and deifying. By crossing geographical borders, blurring social boundaries and abandoning family ties, jōgammas and jōgappas impersonate the divine and at the same time represent and perform wilderness, however in a ritualized and regulated form.