Disease Goddesses and Scapegoats

In India, a rich tradition of Disease Goddesses assigned a female deity to each illness. From Hariti and Shitala for smallpox to Ola bibi and Ola devi for cholera — and Corona devi for our current pandemic — the goddess was believed both to cause the disease and to protect those who prayed to her. Sometimes the rituals went beyond prayers and pujas to a practice called scapegoating — symbolically capturing the disease in an object, animal or person and removing them to another location. David Arnold, professor emeritus at the University of Warwick in the U.K., has been studying the history of disease and medicine in South Asia for many years, and explains the phenomenon of the Disease Goddess.

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