Tag: Ayyanar temple

Ayyanar is a village god, loosely affiliated with Hinduism, but emerging from a folk tradition of protective deities that keep disease and misfortune away from small rural villages. In one area of Tamil Nadu, the Ayyanar cult is particularly strong and many villages have Ayyanar shrines on the outskirts of town, where, for hundreds of years, villagers have offered terracotta horses to Ayyanar as t...