From the New York Daily News:
Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills, Queens man says
To most people, the purple flower that sprouted between two concrete slabs in a Queens backyard would be just a hardy vestige of summer.
Sam Lal sees something more.
The Jamaica [neighborhood in Queens] man is convinced the mysterious blossom is an incarnation of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh — and neighbors and friends are flocking to see it.
…
Lal believes the flower’s position — growing through concrete, facing a garage he converted to a prayer space — is evidence of a connection to Ganesh, revered as the Remover of Obstacles.
(Be sure to see the sidebar photo gallery, too. Capsule summary: “The Virgin Mary in a Funyun? ‘Allah’ in an eggplant? Pope John Paul II in a bonfire? Check out more sightings.” And yes, it really does put Allah’s name in quotation marks.)
What is it that drives people to see their god-figures in everyday objects?
I want to read a story set in ancient Greece or Rome — or India, for that matter — a time when people’s daily lives were ruled by a hundred gods all at once, tinkering concurrently with a hundred different human preoccupations.
It must have been dizzying walking through a street marketplace. Every time a vendor seeking buyers held up a bolt of fabric, a rock, a zucchini or kumquat, a hand-hammered item of metal dinnerware, a leather pouch or wineskin, a handful of rice or spices pouring through his fingers, anything: a gods-sensitive individual must have wanted to drop to his or her knees a dozen times, trembling with gratitude or fear, never knowing if the everyday world was about to end or wobble on its axis, or if his bad back would be healed, or her eyes struck blind…
Or is this really as strange as a cynic might insist? What about a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower? Why should we think of William Blake as a mystic, and Sam Lal as a mere crackpot?
(News article courtesy of a commenter on Ursula Vernon’s Bark Like a Fish, Damnit! Livejournal. Early on, Ganesh figured prominently in Vernon’s webcomic, Digger. See, e.g., this strip et seq.)
cuff says
I love these stories of [insert divinity of your choice here] appearing in common objects, although that Ganesh flower is beautifully uncommon. Surely better than Jesus on toast.
John says
@cuff – Funny you should say that. I actually agonized over the “as good as” title, changing it to “better than” and back again several times before finally saying the hell with it and clicked the Publish button.
marta says
Well, to be scientific I seem to remember listening to an episode of RadioLab.org that talked about the brain finding patterns where there is none. I don’t think the clouds chose shapes to entertain us with and yet I can spot some pretty nifty rabbits and dragons up there.
But at the same time I’d venture this same quality allows people to make art–and that can’t be bad.
Ha. Look at me–I look at a page of words and see a tree or a city street. Color me crackpot.
John says
@marta – Right. OTOH, what’s really magical is to look at a tree or city street (or a photograph, or a dilemma) and see a page of words. That seems a much finer, subtler sort of insight.
Sarah says
It’s just such a literal way of “seeing” God. That the toast must look like some commercially accepted image of Jesus, or a plant must look like Ganesh’s trunk. Whereas God can be seen in a soldier’s amputated legs legs or a empty beer bottle- a pink bow in a prostitute’s hair or a child’s abandoned toy. Everywhere we look.
John says
@Sarah – Agreed. For the same reason, I tend to look askance at any past-life regression therapy or technique which always concludes that the client was (say) Cleopatra, instead of one of her nameless slaves.
Sarah says
So true! Give me the nameless, blameless life every time! I’d be rather have been hiding in the one of the back rooms of the temple or out in the fields than dying a famous, painful death! :)