Weaving Nature into Myth

Abstract

At Puri, every twelve years or so, the wooden statues of the deities in the great Jagannath Temple have to be ritually renewed. In a carefully scripted and partly secret procedure that may take as much as ninety days, four sacred trees are selected, cut, transported, and sculpted into images for the main altar. After a description of the factors that may have determined the tradition of continuing the wooden images, a detour is made by introducing a newly built temple in Bhadrak district which claims to follow exactly the same procedure. This finally leads me to some remarks on the uneasy relation between religion, nature, and violence.