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.)