Ganesha - the most popular God

Ganesha is the god you pray to first. He is the god in the body of a man with the head of an elephant. What's more, Ganesha is considered the god of obstacles, he can set and remove them. He is considered a gracious, pixyish god and is one of the most important deities of all in Hinduism.

On every street corner you can find shrines and temples to worship him. And also for our inauguration ceremony we got several Ganesha statues. He stands for new beginnings and brings luck into the house.

But how does Ganesha actually get his elephant head?

One finds several stories of how Ganesha came to have his head. I describe it here as I understood the story from my colleague: Ganesha is the child of Parvati, Shiva's wife. Shiva is one of the three main gods of Hinduism: Brahma the creator, Shiva the preserver and Vishnu the destroyer.

Parvati had to live in the forest for some time without Shiva. There she formed a child out of clay and breathed life into him. Little Ganesha was born. He should guard the rooms of the mother. When Shiva came at some point, Ganesha would not let him pass. Enraged by this, Shiva chopped off his head with his sword.

When Parvati saw this, she was immensely sad and made it clear to him that Ganesha was her son. Dismayed, he ordered his servants to cut off the head of the first animal they saw and bring it to him. They brought him the head of an elephant. Shiva placed the head on the child's body and breathed life back into it. And so Ganesha also became Shiva's son.

Ganesha's means of transport is a white mouse or rat, it is mostly also shown on the pictures. Quite funny, I wonder if there are parallels to the statement 'don't make an elephant out of a mouse' or the alleged fear of elephants of mice?!

 
Also, if  you look very closely, you can see Ganesha with only one tusk in the pictures. What happened to the other one?

With his rat, Ganesha was still walking late at night when they stumbled. Ganesha was full of food and his belly burst open in the accident. The moon found this hilarious and mocked and laughed loudly at Ganesha. Because of this Ganesha became so angry that he tore out a tusk and threw it at the moon god. The moon then darkened. Now there was no more moonlight. The gods asked Ganesha to take back his curse and so the eclipse was softened to a sporadic dimming. And so the phases of the moon came into being.

Hindu mythology is as diverse as the country of India. If you want to find out more about its myths, then follow us into the mountains of the Himalayas: We hike for 5 days to the source of the Ganges, the holiest river of the Hindus.