Thursday, October 29, 2009


I compiled it from various sources and found this extremely interesting.

Amphibians in Indian culture:

In India, frogs were believed to personify thunder. In the Sanskrit language, the word for frog is also the word for cloud.

As a part of a centuries-old "Pongal" harvest tradition to "prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village" a remote village in India Marries young girls to frogs. The ceremony has its roots in the story of the Hindu God Shiva who turned himself into a frog following a quarrel with his wife Parvati. She cried for days causing disease to spread throughout local villages. When the villages asked for help she sent them to find Shiva and plead with him to marry a young girl. She herself posed as the girl, and when Shiva agreed to marry her they returned to their original god forms and the outbreak was cured.

The word Salamander means fire lizard when translated from its Greek origin. Linked with fire, Salamanders were thought to be immune to fire and able to put off flames with special secretions from their skin. Collected and burned to ashes salamenders have been used in medicinal purposes. The skins, bodies and body parts of salamanders are used in traditional Asian medicine even today.

Newar community in the Bagmathi River Valley of Nepal (an ancient land situated in the southern lap of the central Himalayas) has a strange practice of worshipping a frog. The Jyapu farmers form a majority in the Newar community and are cultivators connected with frog worship since time memorial. The frog worship takes place annually on the full moon day of Shrawan (July) during the rainy season. On the particular day they worship the frogs in their lush green rice fields, with flowers, sandalwood paste, and dry rice and also make an offering of boiled rice plus the soup of nine varieties of legume seeds for their consumption. This religious rite is called Byan Janakegu (Feeding rice to the frog) in the local dialect. The frog is a godling of rain.

The Rig-Veda the oldest existing work in Sanskrit, we find a panegyric of the frogs being compared with the Brahmin priests. The hymn is a satire to the Brahmins but an encomium to the frogs. They even believed that frogs were the givers of hundreds of cows to them and also lengthened their life in the rich autumn.
The principal of frog worship is the essence of Frog Conservation.

The peasants in the Bihar state in India also believe that the crocking of frogs is heard by Indra, the rain god, who sends timely rain. But they do not worship the frogs.

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