Ganesh, the elephant headed God

Curious character with elephant head, Ganesh is one of the most popular Hindu gods, with both Indian and tourists.

He is the god of the knowledge and virtue, and is invoked before to start important enterprises. He is also prayed at the beginning of a day of work or school. Ganesh is also considered as a guardian that’s why we find him over most of Indian houses’ doors.

If the main attribute of Ganesh is his elephant head, he was not born with it. Stories of this head differ from a region of India to another. I will tell you two of them:

First of all, it has to be known that Ganesh parents are Shiva and Parvati, two other very important gods of the Hindu pantheon. Shiva, the god of the yogis, was gone in the mountains for a meditation that lasted, according to the legend, several decades. Parvati, who stayed alone in their house, decided to find a guardian, in order to take her bath without being disturbed. Thus, she took the secretions of her skin and shaped it in a man. Ganesh was born. It was at this time a handsome man. Parvati told him to stay in front of the door and don’t allow anyone to enter in the house. Some time later, while Ganesh was executing the order of his mother, Shiva went back from his meditation. But while he wanted to enter in his house, Ganesh, who was unknown to him, refused to let him go inside. Outraged by this, Shiva cut the head of Ganesh to enter. On seeing his son beheaded, Parvati fell into a fit of rage and sorrow so big that Shiva promised her to replace the head of the boy with the head of the first living being he would see. And it was an elephant.

Another version tells that Shiva created Ganesh following the gods’ request who wanted to distinguished the good from the bad in order to assure the success of the good enterprises and the failure of the bad ones. Shiva made him at his image, very handsome. Thus Ganesh spent his time to seducing girls. To stop that, Parvati condemned him to have an elephant head and a big belly.

If those two stories can be seen as cruel, we must know that, it was this decapitation that gave Ganesh a huge divine power. Indeed, in the first version, Parvati was inconsolable to the idea that his son had become ugly and fat. Thus Shiva promised her to make him the guardian of the superior deities, so that everybody, even the gods, would have to show their respect to the god Ganesh.

If you already had admire the representations of Ganesh, in India or elsewhere, maybe have you noticed that the god has always a broken tusk. Once again, the explanations to this are various. One of them is saying that Ganesh broke it himself in order to write the Mahabharata (one of the sacred texts of Hinduism) during the dictation of the wise man Vasya, because he had no pen at this time.

As said before, Ganesh is really popular in India, especially in Mumbai, where people consider him as a confident. Lot of people brings offerings to him, often bakeries and sweets as the god is really greedy. His favorite cakes are the modakas. Know you know now how to have the god on your side.

 

To speak about family, Ganesh’s spouses are Sidhi (the realization) and Buddhi (the intelligence), Brahma’s daughters; who will give him one son each. He also has a brother named skanda.

In India, the representations of Ganesh are diverse and multiple. However they are not being left to chance and all Ganesh’s attributes have a symbolic.