Tamil village goddesses are renowned for their associations with vengeance, blood sacrifice, violence, and intensely frenzied festival worship, featuring spirit possessions. What scholars have less directly addressed is the extent to which these goddesses appear in Tamil literary and palm-leaf manuscripts. Schuler traces the goddess Nili/Icakki from at least the fourth century CE in the Cilappatikaram, and possibly further if, as the author suggests, the term “Icakki” is a derivative of the ancient yaksis, foreboding goddesses of the forests. Building on the pioneering work of Stuart H. Blackburn's Singing of Birth and Death: Texts in Performance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), a study of bow song traditions, Schuler's work is nothing less than a tour de force: a carefully documented analysis of the creative interaction between pan-regional mythic traditions, their localized elaborations, and the rituals associated with these stories. This is a complicated, but gripping, account...
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