Sri Kamakshi Amman Temple
It is within this gated area that we saw a few temple cows and a baby elephant. All devotees, in the special puja and generally visiting the temple, were able to take blessings from the animals and feed them some prasadam, which included bananas. The elephants in this slide were actually resting and getting bathed after the pujas in an open-aired and shaded part of the temple, where they spend most of their time greeting the devotees. In fact in many temples in Tamil Nadu it is common to see a ‘cow shed’ and other shelters housing other temple animals, including elephants.
Returning back to the morning schedule, after getting the blessings of the temple cows and elephants, we started the puja. Pujari took our names for archana. My friends gave me the name ‘Jayashree’ which was used for all the archanas. After archana, they did abhishekam. In the abhishekam they bathed Kamakshi 13 times in this order: water, milk, water, milk, milk, water, water, water, diluted sandal water, water, thick sandal water, thick sandal water, and finally plain water.
Kamakshi murthi is made of black stone. As they bath her with milk, she becomes white. As they bath her with thicker and thicker sandal water and paste, she becomes golden and appears to glow. The sandal water is so thick, we can not see the black stone underneath. At that point, the pujari draws eyebrows on her to open her eyes. This is a magnificent sight. This entire process of bathing takes around 45 minutes.
After abhishekam, pujas were performed to the gods surrounding Kamakshi inside the grabha graha. These murthis are smaller than the main Kamakshi murthi. We were given kum kum or red powder by the pujari, which we place on the forehead of Goddess Lakshmi, Varagalakshmi (this is Goddess Lakshmi with a cow’s face), Ganesha and Vishnu. Upon completing this, all devotees in the grabha graha exited and circled the graba graha thee times, keeping Kamakshi amman to our right. Completing this, we received blessings from pujariji by touching his feet.
End of Part 1 of 7.
1. Introductions | 2. Sri Kacchapeswarar Temple | 3. Sri Kamakshi Amman Temple | 4. Nagareesam, Sri Vazhakkaruntheswara Temple 5. Ekambareswara Temple | 6. Sri Varadharaja Swamy Temple | 7. References
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