Murugan, the Red God of the Hills

Picture the high hill country of the Tamil land. Cool slopes, blue peaks, the white flower of the kurinji that blooms only once in many years. This is a place of meeting, where lovers first find one another. And every such place, the Tamil poets felt, has its own god.

The god of these hills is Murugan. The name means the beautiful one, the young one. He is also called Seyon, which means the red one. Hold that colour in your mind: he is bright, hot, and full of life, the way a young flame is.^[2]

Murugan is a god of many things at once. He is the god of youth and of beauty. He is a god of war, swift and brave. And he is a god of love. In his hand he holds a bright spear, the vel. He rides upon a peacock. He has two beloveds: Valli, a girl of the hills, and Devasena.

The Tamils loved this god more than any other. In time they gave him a tender name. They called him the Tamil god, the god of their own land and their own tongue. No other people could claim him in quite the same way. He was theirs.

Now here is a thing to remember. The worship of Murugan in this early age is not the worship you may picture, with tall stone temples and set rites. That comes much later. Here, devotion is open-air and wild. It is danced more than it is built.

The poems show us this. When a young woman grew pale and sick with love-longing, her family did not always read it as love. They sometimes read it as the touch of Murugan upon her, a kind of holy fever. So they would send for a special priest, the Velan, the man of the spear.

The Velan would come with offerings. Then he would dance. It was a wild, whirling, ecstatic dance, the veriyattu, until the god was felt to be present and speaking through him. Through this trance, the girl's trouble would be named, and the cure sought. This is devotion in its rawest, most living form: the god come down into the dance, here and now.^[1]

There is a seed here worth marking. This warm, this-worldly love of a god, felt in the body and the heart, has a name that will grow great in our story. It is the seed of bhakti, loving devotion. You are meeting that seed, in Tamil soil, for the very first time. Hold the word. It will flower into a mighty tide, many ages from now, in the songs of the Tamil saints.

In later ages, the Tamils would come to see their Murugan as one with a wider Hindu god, Skanda, the war-god who is a son of Shiva. That joining is real, and it is beautiful, and we will watch the streams braid together soon. But do not let it hide the first thing. Before he was anyone else, Murugan was the red lord of the Tamil hills, the beloved god of this land.