A two-year-old girl, Aryatara Shakya, was recently chosen as Nepal’s living goddess in another display of the country’s centuries-old custom. The little girl was carried by her family from their home in a Kathmandu alley to the temple palace during Nepal’s biggest Hindu festival.
The selection, rooted in religion and tradition, has once again drawn global attention to Nepa l’s living goddess tradition, a practice that continues to interest and puzzle people around the world.
The living goddess, also known as the Kumari or living virgin, is revered by both Hindus and Buddhists and believed to represent divine feminine energy.
A Kumari is a young, prepubescent girl chosen from the Shakya clan within Nepal’s Newari Buddhist community. It is believed that the girl is possessed by the goddess Taleju or Durga.
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However, behind the calm and ceremony lies a system of beliefs, selection rules, and emotional effects that make this one of the world’s most unusual traditions.
In this article, Tribune Online takes a look at five facts about Nepal’s living goddess tradition.
One striking part of Nepal’s living goddess tradition is that candidates are often selected between the ages of two and four. The selection is carried out by priests who look for 32 qualities, including clear skin, calm behaviour, and physical balance.
This means that before they can fully understand the world around them, these young girls are made symbols of holiness and begin a new life inside the temple palace.
After selection, the Kumari lives almost entirely inside the temple palace, meeting only a few caretakers, family members, and priests. She is rarely allowed outside except during major festivals when she is carried through the streets for people to worship.
While this isolation is meant to preserve purity, it also keeps the child from everyday experiences like going to school, playing outdoors, or meeting other children.
In Nepal’s living goddess tradition, the Kumari’s divine role ends as soon as she reaches puberty. Once her first menstrual cycle begins, she is believed to lose her purity and must step down immediately.
After this, she returns to ordinary life, learning to do chores, attend school, and live outside the temple. Many former Kumaris find this change difficult because they move from being worshipped to living like everyone else.
Many former Kumaris struggle to adjust to normal life after years of being kept indoors and treated as sacred. Doing everyday tasks, making friends, or walking freely in public can be hard at first.
Some also face emotional struggles as they try to adapt to a world that once saw them as goddesses but now treats them as ordinary people.
A well-known Nepalese belief warns that any man who marries a former Kumari will die young. This fear has led many former living goddesses to remain unmarried for most of their lives.
Although Nepal is becoming more modern, this old belief still affects how people see former Kumaris, making it hard for many of them to live freely after leaving the temple.