The specific problem posed by the cult of Ankâlamman is the explanation of its cremation-ground ritual in terms of two key founding-myths which, at first sight, seem to have no relation with one another.[1] The more prevalent myth narrates the ripping of the womb of the ten-month pregnant Nisâsini, queen of Vallâlarâjan, by Pârvatî in the visvarûpa form of Ankâlamman, in order to remove, and often kill, the fetus, which is Siva himself (17,187,189,191-2,196), before destroying Vallâlan's fort reducing it to a cremation-ground (126). Likewise, her child Vîrabhadra, created for the very purpose, also assumes a "universal" form to decapitate the king and bear his head. This bloody obstetrics is ritually enacted not only during the pillaipâvu, when the men impersonating the goddess carry a figurine of a child or fetus in a winnowing fan with intestines trailing from their mouths, but also in the mayâna-kollai or "plundering of the cremation-ground," when a figure of a pregnant woman is made from the ashes of burnt corpses, and is torn apart by the often possessed devotees as soon as the kapparai is deposited at the head of the victim. This kapparai (Sanskrit kapâla) is none other than the decapitated head of Brahmâ which, in the second key myth, was brought by Siva-Kapâlin to the cremation-ground at Mel Malayanûr where Ankâlamman was already residing in the form of a termite mound. There, as soon as the kapâla was tricked into falling from Siva's hand, the god assumed a diminutive (child) form to fuse with the goddess to form the primordial androgyne Ardhanârîsvara (36-7, 41, 178). The crucial difficulty is the persistent identification of the pregnant cremation-figure not only with the victimized queen but also and especially with Ankâlamman, the goddess of infanticide (159, 167-71, 205, 214-6, 223).

At Vâlântûr the evidently female figure, corresponding to the pregnant queen-goddess, is called Mayâna-karuppuçâmi or "the black god of the cremation-ground" (148, 170-1). The androgynous fusion of the male dîkshita and the maternal womb during the embryonic regression is such that the initiatic death is expressed not only through his being slain by the mother but alternatively through the death or slaying of the mother herself, or again, as is the case here, through both. The splitting of the mother into pregnant queen-victim and blood-thirsty goddess, responsible for the ambiguity of the pregnant figure often made of clay from a termite-mound, also permits Siva, the goddess' husband to undergo his embryogonic death in a surrogate womb—the winnowing fan in which the goddess places the disemboweled fetus is a replica of her own womb (173ff, 213-4), like the termite-mound itself. This is confirmed by notations like Ankâlamman implanting her own child in Nisâsini's womb, treating the latter's child as her own (197), or instructing Vîrabhadra himself to take birth in the queen's womb. Indeed, in the Andhra Vîrabhadra cult centering on the termite-mound, that is still celebrated at Rajahmudry also during Mahâsivarâtri, there is likewise a nightly procession involving impersonation and possession by this Bhairava-like deity who rather represents real children who have died an early and untimely death.[2] The palace is itself an image of the womb for, apart from various other symbolic indices, the guardian deities around the pregnant figure are tied with string to "represent the ramparts of a fort in the middle of which the goddess lies" (134) and "the guards are sometimes called the goddess' children" (167,172). The occasional identification of the demonic Vallâlarâjan with Siva (154), suggests that it is the king himself who dies as Siva in the womb of his own wife, in order to undergo the universalization of the dîkshâ which, in our eyes, is also the essential meaning of the mayânakollai. The darkness which enveloped the universe when Siva descended into Nisâsini's womb, as on other occasions when Pârvatî playfully blinds him, is but a mythico-literary projection of the chaotic embryonic obscurity into which the dîkshita descends and it is for this reason that her child is called Irulappan (the "dark one"). The doubling of the dîkshita, corresponding to the splitting of the mother, also allows the tension between the sacrificer and his own evil initiated condition to be represented in terms of murderous antagonism between Vallâlarâjan and his queen on the one hand and Vîrabhadra and Ankâlamman on the other. But the regenerative potential of this violent dîkshâ is expressed in condensed ritual gestures like the offering of termite-mound clay mixed with ashes from the ashes of the pregnant cremation-figure as medicine, to be taken while repeating Ankâlamman's name thrice, to cure all ailments (30), and pieces of the mound in the Malayanûr sanctum are regularly distributed as prasâdam.

The importance attached to the pampai, a twin-drum of conjoined metal male upper half and wooden female lower half, and to its players (pampaikâran) during the core-rituals, further attests to the androgynous precondition for the embryonic regression to the womb-fortress. Apart from being made from the skin of an androgynous demon (or Vallâlarâjan himself) killed by the goddess, the twin components are fashioned by her son (or herself) respectively from a male and a female demon who were guarding the entry to the fort (cf. 186). The goddess promised that she would dance only to the sound of the pampai, often said to be the only instrument allowed to be played in the cremation ritual (3-4). The effeminate Pâvâtairâyan, "king of the long skirt" (Shulman: 1980, p.299) who "wears the lower garment of a woman," and who exemplified himself through his bloody sacrifice to his mother Ankâlamman, is replaced in the Coimbatore district by Irulappaçâmi "identified with the child (Siva) which Ankâlamman or Pecci removes from Nisâsinî's womb" (81-2; cf. 139). The men impersonating the various ritual roles like Ankâlamman, Pâvâtairâyan, Kâtteri, are dressed as women and often get possessed in this transvestite condition (114-5,138-9,127-9,131,145). It could be shown that the kapparai, made of winnowing fans supported by a pot, and sometimes representing Ankâlamman herself, is likewise androgynous and it is affirmed that Ankâlamman herself takes the incarnation of Brahmâ and goes to the cremation-ground (165). In fact, the pregnant figure is itself explicitly identified as the corpse of a brahmin-woman (145,149,168,215), as already suggested by the placing of the kapparai at its head, which refers back to the brahmanization of both the dîkshita and his wife. In the final analysis, the severed head, which in the Agnicayana is replaced by a 7-holed termite-mound and also contains the hidden Soma and Agni, is itself a womb-symbol. For the transgressive decapitation of the "head of the sacrifice" is at the same time a regressus ad uterum.

The profession of the Tamil Cempatavar, custodians of her cult (98-104), as inland fishermen, is also sacralized by equating the dîkshita to the (dead) fish offered in sacrifice to Ankâlamman (37,100). Ankâlamman made a net of all the divinities and a copper-boat so that her father, their mythic ancestor Malaiyaracan (Parvata-râjan) could kill the oppressive demons hiding as fish but, since the fish were jumping back into the sea, she was obliged to open her mouth as wide as the boat in order to swallow the fishes (34-35). The net, made with the rope of Yama's noose (= death) and whose top pulled together to trap the fishes is Visnu's cakra (= womb), is clearly equated with Ankâlamman, whose "eyes" (kan) form its interstices. Though the fish, like the dîkshita charged with evil, are Asuras or Râksasas, their assimilation to the fish-tailed Mînamaharsi also caught in the net underlines by contrast the positive function and valorization of the dîkshâ. Also equated with the goddess' mouth/stomach, the copper-boat inscribed with the Veda, not only alludes to the embryogonic foundations of Vedic religion, but also assimilates the fisherman Malaiyaracan inside the boat, to the (fish-)dîkshita. Their mythic ancestor, addressed as "yâr cempatakâ (or cempatavâ)?" (who is the one in the copper-boat?) and whence their caste-name, was indeed cursed by Mînamaharsi to be ever fishing without catching enough fish. Two other versions have Ankâlamman fashion a box in which Parvatarâjan's fishes were kept, fishes which are also offered to the severed head of Brahmâ in the myth.

A proper sacrificial hermeneutic of the Ankâlamman cult can provide valuable insights into not only its sociological determinants but even into its historical origins, development, and diffusion. The cremation-ground at Mel Malayanûr, where the Vallâlarâjan myth is well-known and where her 11 other myths were all recorded from Cempatavar pûcâri, is no doubt its mythical centre where Ankâlamman established herself as the (one-eyed) termite-mound in the brahmanicide myth, and also the ritual centre for her other Tamil Nadu temples which are often consecrated with clay brought from the ant-hill at Malayanûr. Nevertheless, both the Vallâlarâjan and the brahmanicide myths refer back, directly or indirectly, to a former royal cult, far removed from the impure violence of the cremation ground, at the great Siva temple at the foot of the nearby Tiruvannâmalai, vestiges of which still persist in the ritual cycle. The Malayanûr version the Vallâlan myth identifies him with the historical Hoysala Ballâla III who built one, named after him, of the 9 gopurams of the Tiruvannâmalai temple in the first half of the 14th C. According to the Vallâla-makâ-râjan Carittiram of the Arunâcala-Purâna (199; cf. Shulman:1985,331-39), the younger queen of the childless but perfectly virtuous Vallâla had to substitute herself for a courtesan (often representing the mother-goddess) to embrace the Lingâyat-Siva, who transformed himself into a child and promised, before disappearing, to perform Vallâlan's funerary rites and succeed him as his own son. Once every year Siva-Annâmalaiyâr is informed that Vallâlan has just died, and the deity is shortly thereafter taken to quarter of his "descendants", the Vanniyar, where they participate in a ceremony marking the end of mourning. The next day Siva is crowned king within the temple. This annual re-enthronement of Siva in the absence of a real human king is explicable only in terms of the sacrificial death/rebirth of the single royal divinity on the model of Jagannâtha at Puri, and suggests that the dîkshâ symbolism invested in the historical childless (Siva-)Ballâla has been split so as to translate his rebirth from the womb of his own queen into the birth of the so ardently desired (Lingâyat) son-Siva. Vallâlarâjan's seven-walled palace, equated with the cremation-ground at whose centre lies the pregnant queen-goddess, is but an image of Annâmalaiyâr within the womb (garbha-grha) of the Tiruvannâmalai temple with its seven concentric enclosures. In the corresponding myth of Ankammâ, current also in Andhra Pradesh, the child destined to kill the goddess grows for twelve years in the womb of her homonym queen Sukhasthâna Gangammâ before his bloody and fatal extraction (191), just as Bhairava is reborn in the thirteenth year of his embryogonic expiation from the womb of the Gangâ at Kâsî. And it is precisely because the dîkshâ underlies all legitimate kingship that Ankâlamman has Kâsî-Visvanâtha-swâmi for consort at Cûlai (Madras; 83,144), and at Kumbhakonam her victim is even promoted to Kâsî-Vallâlarâjan (185,196), king of the embryogonic centre of the Hindu sacrificial universe.

Just as Tamil sacred geography has transposed the fiery Kâsî-linga to Tiruvannâmalai, it would appear that Malayanûr was likewise substituted for the mahâ-smasâna where Siva-Kapâlin was released from Brahmâ's skull. It is in the polar axis formed by the epi-central Tiruvannâmalai temple-capital and the peripheral Malayanûr cremation-ground that the pan-Indian brahmanicide myth centered in Kâsî (kapparai) and the local historically determined myth of Vallâlarâjan (pregnant cremation-figure) would have fused to provide the mythical background to the ritual complexities of the cult of Ankâlamman. As reformed successors to the earlier Kâlâmukhas, whose Vedic affiliations do not belie their links with the more extreme Kâpâlikas, the chief agents in shaping the Ankâlamman cult must have been, to our mind, the Lingâyats, charged with the symbolic role of (Tantric) dîkshita, with which they have infected all the other social agents implicated in the cult. The truly priestly (pûcâri) section of the Cempatavar identify themselves with Siva by wearing lingams, which they claim to have received from a Vîrasaiva Guru called Kuhainamacivâya who lived in a Tiruvannâmalai cave in the late 15th C. Like the householder Kusle descendants of the Nâths/Kâpâlikas in Nepal and like the Lingâyats (104), the linga-bearing pûcâris still bury their dead in sitting posture. The Cempatavar still hold special hereditary rights in the ritual cycle of several Tamil Saiva temples, particularly in the Arunâcala temple-festivals, like the annual lighting of the kârttika flame on the summit of the mountain at exactly the same time as the fire-offering (ârati) is made to the divinity in the temple below. The Arunâcala Mâhâtmya treats the Cempatavar charged with the sin of killing (fish) as ritual substitutes appointed by Sankarâcârya for the temple-priests who were unwilling to incur the comparable sin of treading on the god in mountain-form (102-3,180). It is the impurity of the Cempatavar fisherman, the mythical pampaikâran playing the androgynous drum made of deer-hide and hung around his neck with its intestine-rope and who is barred entry into the mandapa of the Siva-temple (4), that would have rendered them ideal recipients of the linga, so charged with the ritual impurity of the dîkshâ. By transporting the transgressive fifth-head of Brahmâ to the impure cremation-ground at Malayanûr, Siva-Bhairava indeed mediates between the purified brahmanical milieu of the Annâmalaiyâr temple and the blood-thirsty Ankâlamman of the low-caste Cempatavars.

The relation between the "Saiva" king and the "Sâkta" Cempatavars, so favored by the Goddess, is best suggested in his mythical relations with Ankâlamman herself. Whereas in the brahmanicide myth, the (royal) dîkshita is drawn to the termite-mound in the cremation-ground and is transformed into her child before fusing with her to form the androgyne; and whereas in the Vallâlan-myth Ankâlamman herself comes from Malayanûr to transform his temple-palace into the cremation-ground, where she becomes indistinguishable from the queen-mother upon whom she performs her fatal obstetrics; in myth 10 (27-33) she shows greater benevolence in transforming herself into a termite-mound in Malaiyaracan's flower-garden (pûnkâvanam), where again it is the Cempatavars whom she, and finally the king, charge with her worship. It is emphasized that Malaiyaracan's kingdom prospers precisely because he lets her remain in his flower-garden administered by the Cempatavar, whose royal pretentions no doubt derive from their ritual role being cast in the symbolic image of the dîkshâ which underlies all legitimate kingship.