The history, and the shadow it works on

A god is also a history, and the remnant-lord’s history is a long descent through changing fortunes, from a thing feared, to a god beloved, to a form hidden, to an embarrassment, to a curiosity, and finally, perhaps, to something that can be understood. This last chapter walks that road to the present, weighs what a modern eye can fairly say about him, and then returns the treatise to the place it started.

The long road

The road begins, as the second volume showed, at the margins, with the Vinayakas, the obstacle-spirits to be propitiated in the old ritual manuals. From that troublesome plurality the single benevolent Ganesha rose, taking clear form by the Gupta period and spreading across the subcontinent in the centuries after, until he was the god invoked first before all others.

The tantric and esoteric forms came with the medieval flowering of Tantra. By the time of the great digests, the Sharada Tilaka and, in the sixteenth century, the Mantra Mahodadhi, the remnant-lord had his recorded mantra and worship, and the doxographers who catalogued the sects, Anandagiri among them, noticed the Ucchishta-Ganapatyas as a distinct and disreputable current. From there his life was the life of an esoteric deity: carried in lineages and manuals, carved in the complete form-sets of the south, cultivated in Nepal, kept, in keeping with his nature, out of the public eye and on the inner circuits.

Then came the long eclipse. Under colonial scrutiny, and under the gaze of a reforming Hinduism eager to present itself as rational and respectable, a god of the saliva-soiled remnant with a naked goddess on his thigh was exactly the sort of thing best not mentioned. He was an embarrassment to be left in the dark, and for a century and more he largely was. His recovery has come, in the modern period, mostly through scholarship, the patient work of historians and art historians, Buhnemann on the forms, Courtright and Brown and Krishan on the wider deity, who have made it possible to see him clearly again, neither hidden nor sensationalised.

It is worth laying the dates in a line, because the shape of the history is itself an argument. The Vinayaka spirits belong to the centuries around the turn of the common era; the benevolent elephant-headed god to the Gupta age, the fourth and fifth centuries; the Ganapatya sect to the post-Gupta centuries, the eighth to the tenth; the tantric digests that fix the remnant-lord’s mantra and rite, the Sharada Tilaka and later the Mantra Mahodadhi, to the medieval and early-modern period, with the two Ganesha Puranas dated by Heinrich von Stietencron as late as the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The remnant-form sits at the far, late end of that line, an esoteric refinement of a very old god. Then the line nearly breaks. Under colonial scrutiny, and under the gaze of a self-consciously respectable reforming Hinduism, the form became an embarrassment to leave unmentioned, and it slipped toward oblivion, surviving in initiatory lineages and in the technical literature more than in open worship. Its return has been a scholar’s return, the academic recovery of the last hundred years setting it back within reach of an honest reader.

The modern eye and the shadow

A reader today, meeting this god, will almost certainly reach for a particular interpretation, and it deserves both a fair hearing and a clear limit.

The modern eye, trained on depth psychology, sees in Ucchishta Ganapati an image of integration: the taking-up of what the self rejects, the desire and the disgust and the fear that ordinary life walls off, and the turning of that rejected material into a source of power rather than a source of shame. The remnant becomes the shadow, the discarded part of the psyche, and the worship of the remnant becomes the embrace of the shadow, the making-whole of a self that had split off everything it could not bear. Read this way the god is a figure of psychological wholeness, and the reading is genuinely illuminating. It is not wrong about something real.

But it is a lens, and the treatise will name it as one. The tradition that made this deity was not doing therapy and was not talking, in its own terms, about the integration of the personality. It was making a metaphysical claim, that there is one consciousness and nothing outside it, and a soteriological one, that recognising this is liberation. The psychological reading translates that into the register of the modern self, and something is gained in the translation and something is lost. What is gained is a bridge for the contemporary reader. What is lost, if the lens is mistaken for the thing, is the tradition’s own scale, which was the recognition of the absolute rather than the healing of a person. The treatise offers the lens to whoever finds it useful, and sets it down again, because the deity is older and stranger and larger than any one of our frames for him.

The remnant, again

And so the work ends where it began, with the leftover on the leaf.

This treatise set out to take seriously the form of Ganesha that orthodoxy would rather forget, and to do it without prurience and without embarrassment, the two failures that have always attended this god. It found that the reversal at his heart was older than Tantra, sung already in a Vedic hymn to the residue. It found that the god of thresholds was the natural lord of the most forbidden threshold, that his image is a careful argument about desire and non-duality, that his philosophy is the most consistent application of the one claim the tradition stakes everything on, and that he is surrounded by kin who worked the same logic across the goddess traditions, the Shaiva fold, and the Buddhist world. And at his operative core, the mantra and the rite, it stopped, because that core belongs to the living lineage and not to the page.

What remains for a reader who will never be initiated into his worship is not nothing. It is the idea the god exists to carry, and the idea is this. There is no part of the world, and no part of yourself, so used or soiled or cast-off that the sacred is not already there, waiting, in it. The tradition put that idea in its most uncomfortable possible form on purpose, so that it could not be received cheaply.

The leftover goes back to where it came from.

What the tradition saw in it does not.