While pausing from my daily shenangians to check my email (Welcome back to the pages of Counterforce, Yahoo! front page), I noticed this story: Nepal appoints 3-year-old as new living goddess. And I thought to myself, Wow, that’s fucking ridiculous.

More details here from the article itself:

The selection process for picking a living goddess, or kumari (which literally means “virgin” in Nepali), is bizarre and fascinating to say the least. The girls must be at least 2 to 4 years old and have perfect hair, eyes, teeth, and skin without scars, as well as having “thighs like a deer” and a “chest like a lion.” Their horoscopes are scanned for imperfections. They must not be afraid of the dark and their final test in a battery of tests and ancient ceremonies is to spend a night alone in a room with the heads of ritually slaughtered goats and buffaloes without showing fear.

From there the young woman will go to live in near isolation in a ancient palatial temple in Katmandu and worshiped by Hindus and Buddhists alike as the most recent incarnation of Hindu deity Taleju. (I’m trying to paraphrase the admittedly short article for you and not copy it outright, but it refers to Taleju there as “the powerful Hindu deity,” and I somehow have to wonder how “powerful” some of these myths and legends are, especially the kind that snatch up little girls and turn them into a Nepalese JonBenet.)

The girl will only be allowed to return to her family when she begins menstruation. Apparently once she enters puberty, her divine status will be lost, and a new goddess will be selected. It’s believed, from what I can gather, that the goddess resides in her blood so when she menstruates the goddess leaves her, so likewise, any sickness or injury that results in major blood loss is also considered the end of her divinity. ”I feel a bit sad, but since my child has becoming a living goddess I feel proud,” said her father Pratap Man Shakya.

The article ends with telling us that not only has this been critically called a violation of both international and Nepalese child rights, but that most of the girls have an extremely hard time adjusting to normal life when they return home and stop being goddesses but that Nepalese folklore holds that many men who marry former kumari die young, increasing the hardship the young woman will face in her life.

There was a bit of controvery as the previous kumari, Sajani Shakya, was almost fired from her position for visiting the United States in 2007 and attending the release of the documentary Living Goddess at Silverdocs: The AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival. According to elders, her purity had been tainted by the visit, but they later recanted their statements when Sajani consented to undergoing a “cleansing” ceremony to remove any sins that she may have committed while traveling abroad. Then, earlier this year, 6 year old Shreeya Badrucharia was selected as the new kumari, but the collapse of a monarchy and the shifting of power lead to the stripping of authority of the royal priest who picked her. That’s what lead to today’s crowning of a new Goddess. One girl, in all the world, the chosen one…

Forget what I said up above. Taleju is considered the “sexually mature MotherGoddess,” so I have to assume that would make her pretty powerful.

This is the technorati listing for Taleju.

And this is something on the temple of Taleju.

And here is some more information on the kumari at the Visit Nepal page.