: Feeding divine guests and eating of children: Wendy Doniger on the horrors of hospitality in myths #IndiaNEWS Stories told in South India in the twelfth century CE combine the nightmare of Thyestes’s

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Feeding divine guests and eating of children: Wendy Doniger on the horrors of hospitality in myths #IndiaNEWS
Stories told in South India in the twelfth century CE combine the nightmare of Thyestes’s feast, in which the guest unwittingly eats his own children, with the ancient Hebrew and Greek and Indian myths in which the disguised god rewards the good host only after endangering the host’s children, and the ancient Indian lesson taught by the myth of the son’s vision of retribution in the underworld. The result is a story in which the god, disguised as a guest, demands that his good host kill and cook and eat his own son, but ultimately rewards him. There are many variants of this story, but this is one of the earliest: Ciruttontar and Ciralan Ciruttontar was a good man, and a devotee of Shiva, whose greatest pleasure was in feeding other devotees of Shiva. He and his wife had a son, Ciralan. One day when the boy was five years old, Shiva came down to earth in the form of one of his own ascetic devotees. Ciruttontar was delighted and asked him what food he would like to eat. The ascetic said he would like to eat the meat of a five-year-old human boy, the only son of a good family. “The father must...Read more

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