Kin and cousins

A deity who looked truly alone would be a problem for the argument of this treatise. A single transgressive god, with no kin and no parallel, might be dismissed as an aberration, a local oddity the tradition produced once and never repeated. Ucchishta Ganapati is the opposite of alone. He stands in a wide family of deities who work the same logic, in the goddess traditions, in the Shaiva fold, and across the mountains in the Buddhist world, and seeing the family is the final proof that the sacred remnant is a recurring intuition of the whole tradition rather than a stray.

The goddess of the remnant

His closest relative is a goddess, and the parallel is almost exact.

Among the ten Mahavidyas, the great goddesses of the Shakta tantric tradition, is Matangi, also called Ucchishta Chandalini, the outcaste goddess. Where the other goddesses are offered pure food with washed hands, Matangi is offered, uniquely, the ucchishta, the leftover from the mouth, and worshipped in a state that sets aside the usual purifications. She is the feminine form of the same reversal: the divine that accepts precisely what the codes reject, met through the remnant and the breaking of the purity rule. Her very name carries the word this treatise began with.

The scholar David Kinsley, whose study of the ten Mahavidyas remains the standard account, describes her worship closely: she is the goddess of the outcaste and the polluted, associated with the leavings of the feast, approached in deliberate disregard of the purity her sister-goddesses require, and offered food already tasted. She is bound to speech and music, and to the parrot she holds, the goddess of the word that issues even from the margins. The symmetry with the remnant-lord is close enough to startle. A god of the leftover in the Ganapatya stream; a goddess of the leftover in the Shakta. The tradition built the same shrine twice, once for him and once for her, in its two great tantric houses, and the doubling is the surest sign that what it enshrined was a principle and not a peculiarity.

That the tradition produced both a god of the remnant and a goddess of the remnant, in its two great tantric streams, the Ganapatya and the Shakta, is the single most telling fact in this chapter. Two independent currents reached for the same forbidden substance and built a deity on it. A one-time aberration does not happen twice in two traditions. A deep intuition does.

The transgressive company

Around the remnant-lord stand the other deities through whom the tradition handled the dark, the forbidden, and the boundary.

There is Mahakala, great time, the devouring darkness in which all things end and Shiva as the lord of that dissolution. There is Bhairava, the fierce, terrible form of Shiva, haunter of cremation grounds, before whom the conventions of purity fall away, the very deity of the tantric transgression of limits. There is Dattatreya, the wandering avadhuta, the realised being who has gone beyond all rules and observances, naked to convention, the living image of the state in which pure and impure no longer apply. And there is Hayagriva, the horse-headed god of knowledge, another deity in animal form carrying esoteric power. Ucchishta Ganapati sits naturally among these. They are the faces the tradition gave to everything ordinary religion keeps at its edge, and the remnant-lord is the one who wears the mask of the impure remnant in particular.

The cousin across the mountains

The strangest and most beautiful kin lie outside Hinduism altogether.

The elephant-headed god travelled with Buddhism across Asia, and in the Buddhist world he took on a doubled character that the comparative eye finds illuminating. As Vinayaka or Ganapati he appears as a protector and a bringer of success, understood in places as an emanation of the great bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion. He also appears as the obstacle to be overcome, and in one Tibetan form he is shown trodden beneath the feet of Mahakala, the obstacle-god subdued by the greater power, his old character as the spirit of obstruction surfacing once more, now in a Buddhist key.

And in Japan he became Kangiten, the god of bliss, and here the parallel to the remnant-lord becomes uncanny. Kangiten is frequently worshipped as a dual form, two elephant-headed figures, male and female, locked in embrace. The conjugal image carries, in the Japanese Buddhist setting, the meaning of non-duality and bliss, the same union of opposites that the embracing icon of Ucchishta Ganapati carries in India. Two traditions, separated by thousands of miles and centuries of difference, gave the elephant-headed god a body of embrace to say that opposites are finally one. The remnant-lord has a twin in Japan, and the twin is in his own arms.

Set against these cousins, the kinship sorts itself by closeness. Mahakala, Bhairava and the avadhuta Dattatreya share the remnant-lord’s posture toward purity, the refusal to grant any object the power to defile, yet none is built on the remnant itself. The Buddhist Vinayaka shares his form, the elephant head and the doubled, embracing body, but reads it within a different soteriology. Only Matangi shares his actual substance, the ucchishta, the tasted leftover made the very means of worship. That is why she, of all of them, is the true twin: the same idea wearing a goddess’s body, rather than a cousin who merely resembles him. David Kinsley’s reading of her as the deity of the polluted margins, offered the leavings and worshipped past the purity rules, is the closest thing in the scholarly literature to a description of the remnant-lord seen from the far side of the divide between god and goddess.

The family, traced, makes the point the chapter set out to make. The sacred remnant, the embrace of opposites, the divine met at the forbidden edge: these are not the private invention of one obscure sect. They are intuitions the tradition, and the traditions beyond it, returned to again and again, in goddess and god, in Hindu and Buddhist, in India and far past it. The last chapter brings the lone figure of the remnant-lord back down his own long history, and asks, at the end, what he has to say to a reader who will never be initiated into his rite.