Weaving Nature into Myth
Continuing Narratives of Wood, Trees, and Forests in the Ritual Fabric around the God Jagannath in Puri
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i2.159Keywords:
cultural geographyAbstract
At Puri, every twelve years or so, the wooden statues of the deities in the great Jagannath Temple have to be ritually renewed. In a carefully scripted and partly secret procedure that may take as much as ninety days, four sacred trees are selected, cut, transported, and sculpted into images for the main altar. After a description of the factors that may have determined the tradition of continuing the wooden images, a detour is made by introducing a newly built temple in Bhadrak district which claims to follow exactly the same procedure. This finally leads me to some remarks on the uneasy relation between religion, nature, and violence.
References
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———. 1978. ‘Jagannatha as the State Deity under the Gajapatis of Orissa’, in A Eschmann, H. Kulke, and G.C. Tripathi (eds.), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (New Delhi: Manohar): 199-208.
Kulke, H., and B. Schnepel (eds.). 2001. Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and the State in Orissa (New Delhi: Manohar).
Misra, B.M. 2007. ‘Orissa: Shri Krishna Jagannatha: The Mushali-parva from Sarala’s Mahabharata’, in Edwin F. Bryant (ed.), Krishna: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 139-61.
Nugteren, A. 2005. Belief, Bounty, and Beauty: Rituals around Sacred Trees in India (Leiden/Boston: Brill).
———. 2009. ‘From Cosmos to Commodity…and Back: A Critique of Hindu Environmental Rhetoric in Educational Programs’, in Cathrien de Pater and Irene Dankelman (eds.), Religion and Sustainable Development: Opportunities for Higher Education (Berlin: LIT Verlag): 159-68.
Patton, L.L. 1997. ‘Nature Romanticism and Violence in Rig Vedic Interpretation’, paper presented at the Hinduism and Ecology conference, Harvard University. Abstract at www.hds.harvard.edu.cswr/research/ecology/bio_patton_l.htm (accessed 1 April 2008).
Tomalin, E. 2002. ‘The Limitation of Religious Environmentalism for India’, Worldviews 6.1: 12-30.
———. 2009. Bio-Divinity and Bio-Diversity: The Limits of Religious Environmentalism for India (Aldershot: Ashgate).
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Published
2010-07-11
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Articles
How to Cite
Nugteren, A. (2010). Weaving Nature into Myth: Continuing Narratives of Wood, Trees, and Forests in the Ritual Fabric around the God Jagannath in Puri. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 4(2), 159-172. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i2.159
