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God of the Earth...

Saturday, 6 June 2009

There are few times in life when you can be so stupefied by a story that you start to question the nature of things... While this story doesn't quite fit into that category for me, it did for all the villagers and Ganesh's brother, Ram, who experienced it first hand - and of course I'm starting to be swayed!

Ram recently went home to his place of birth - a small village in Nepal called Dadheldura for a special ceremony - sapthah. This is a seven day festival dedicated to worshipping the family God, Bhumiraj (yes! I wish I grew up with a family God too!)... The ceremony was a success and the family God acknowledged that all went well and promised to look after the family. At the same time Ram and another boy from the same village had their 'coming of age' ceremony - bharta bhanda - where a scared thread is placed around the chest and must be worn at all times. The other boy's father had said he would provide meat for everyone to celebrate the occasion, however the celebration rapidly expanded into a combination of 12 villages and he had to pull out...

The celebration was looking like it was going to be meatless, when out of the blue a deer leapt from the roof of Ram's family's place and committed suicide! There was enough meat for everyone in attendance.... Strangely enough the house is in the middle of the village surrounded by other houses, the village itself is surrounded by rocks and desert and there hasn't been a deer sighting in those parts in living memory!

I'm told that in order to give thanks to Bhumiraj, we say:
dain vaya pravu
rakshya arai mati

Thank-you for looking out for the village and the family!

Labels: culture, god, nepal, religion

posted by genloz at 9:40 AM 2 Comments