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Tales of the Gods
She was there before the Vedic gods arrived - already the figure Tamil villages turned to against rain, drought and disease.
She was there before the Vedic gods arrived.
Mariamman was already the figure Tamil villages turned to for protection from the forces most likely to destroy a farming community.
Rain. Drought. Disease.
Scholars put its roots more than four thousand years back. That is far older than the wider Sanskrit tradition, which in time came to sit alongside it rather than replace it.
Ammai. The catching diseases - smallpox, chickenpox, measles - that swept through villages now and then and killed in numbers. Before modern medicine there was almost no way to stop them.
Villages facing an outbreak prayed to her.
Not as a distant figure in the sky. As the one power you could actually speak to, standing between a village and a sickness that was already killing people in the next settlement along.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.