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<span style="font-weight:normal;">Manikam, 87 years old when this photo was taken (2010), in his workshop.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">One of the numerous steps in preparing the earth to become workable clay.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Creation of a body: tapping and smoothing the sides on the inside.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Creation of a body: smoothing out the outer surfaces.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In 2007, Subash, at four years old, was already an accomplished sculptor. Today, Subash barely touches clay any longer.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Jaganathan is the head potter for the festival at Alianeley. The <i>ure-kuthirai</i> (village horse) he has just finished modelling for the annual festival, towers above him in the shelter of his workshop. The horse will dry for more than a week before Jaganathan brings it into the oven to be fired.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">An old potter sitting beside the horse's head he has created. To keep it steady while it is drying, the head is balanced in a dish of sand.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">With a light caress, Jaganathan applies a thin coat of wet clay on a newly-completed cow.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Just as the season of Ayyanar festivals closes, the potters in Aranthangi make hundreds of clay effigies of Ganesh for the <i>Ganesh Chaturthi</i> that falls between late August and mid September. The statues are dried, never baked, for they will ultimately be immersed in a body of water (river, lake, sea...) where their decomposition is immediate and total.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Palaniappan is the chief potter for the festival in Thekkur and is responsible for the creation of the <i>ure-kutherai</i>.The village horse, made in two parts, will be close to four-metres high when assembled. Because of intermittent summer showers, Palaniappan has put fans in his workshop and keeps them whirring all day for one week, to insure that the clay is sufficiently dry before the pieces are fired.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">When a piece is fully dried, it is carried to the oven for baking.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">This potter loads an oven with dozens of <i>drishti bommai</i> (literally “vision doll”). This demonic stylized head - with its bulging eyes, sharp horns and fangs, protruding tongue and thick moustache - is put atop new buildings (homes, factories, offices…) and in laboured fields to drive away the evil eye. Though not part of Ayyanar worship, <i>drishti bommai</i> are part and parcel of Tamil villages and its countryside.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Jaganathan has started arranging the dried pieces and the combustible material (wood and coconut shells and husk) in the oven. The clay pots and shards are used as air ducts for the easy circulation of heat.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Preparation of a make-shift oven: the pieces will be covered and interspersed with the clay shards and combustible material brought to the site.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">This make-shift oven was lit just five minutes before and billows of smoke escape from the top, where an orifice, like a chimney, was left open. The fire cannot be stoked, obviously, but must stay evenly distributed along the outer edges of the heated mound to ensure even baking of the clay pieces inside. Subbaiya stays at hand during the entire baking process (which takes only about an hour), making sure that the fire stays constant.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Stoking the fire. Proper baking is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks in the successful creation of statues.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Due to the intense summer heat, the pieces are baked in the early morning, just after sunrise. The combustible material is totally consumed and the pieces are entirely baked in about one hour, and the pottery is left to cool down until the next day. The morning after, the wood, coconut shells and straw have turned into a fine ash blanketing what has now become terracotta.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">After baking and before the first coat of white-lime is applied, this gigantic horse is given one last caress: its body and legs are covered with a mixture of wet mud and banana fibre, reinforcing it for its journey to the shrine using long bamboo poles tied to its haunches.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The legs and bodies of a line of freshly baked offerings are given their final caress with mud made from earth, cow dung, rice hulls and some millet flour. Small handfuls of banana fibre are patted into the mud and finally the reinforced pieces are left to dry before they are painted.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Before they are painted (with either water-based or acrylic paint), the offerings are given a first coat of lime white-wash.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A gigantic horse, the principle offering at Kuthadivayal, is the largest currently made in Tamil Nadu, measuring around 6 metres in height. Kashirajan, the chief potter, puts the finishing touches on the extraordinary beast just hours before the festival commences.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A child plays near four "Periya Karuppu" statues that will be among the offerings in a festival the week after.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The morning of the Kuthadivayal festival in Aranthangi. The 6-metre-high <i>ure-kuthirai</i> (village horse) was created, fired and painted inside the oven. This afternoon, it will be decorated, lifted out of the oven and carried from the village directly to the shrine, five kilometres away.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Morning of the Panjati festival in Aranthangi. The unpainted horses must wait their turn; in ten days, they will be offered to the same god at the same shrine, but at a festival organised by a "rival" village.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The first day of a three-day festival, about an hour before the devotees arrive to take their statues from the potters' quarters. Next to the offerings, the potters have begun to put the straw and bamboo poles that will be tied into place and used to carry the offerings from the village to their final destination, Ayyanar's shrine.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Just an hour before the festival begins, this small potters' village is spick and span as it awaits a small crowd of devotees. A beautiful <i>kolam</i> has been traced on the street where the cortege will pass, and metal urns filled with drinking water are on hand to quench the thirst of Ayyanar's devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Hundreds of small (not more than twenty centimetres high) cows are among the thousands of offerings given at the Shenganem festival.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Bommai</i> waiting to be purchased as offerings for the festival in Shenganam.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Not so long ago, paint was water-based and available in just five colours: black, white, blue, red, saffron. The palette of colours used nowadays in some villages creates an esthetic bordering on pop-art.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Now that these hues are readily available, flamboyant, vivid paint is applied unsparingly to decorate offerings. Like the bright paint used to beautify temples in Tamil Nadu, vibrant colour is one way of celebrating the divine.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A line of cows, poles securely tied to their haunches, just a short while before they will be lifted and taken into the shrine. Each is similarly decorated with a white <i>vesti</i>, lemons pierced onto its horns and a multi-coloured flower garland draped over its neck.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The gigantic horse-offering for the Kuthadivayal festival being taken out of the oven in the potters' quarters in Aranthangi by more than one hundred devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Devotees leaving the potters' village carrying offerings on their shoulders.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">After the first rituals that inaugerate the festival of worship to Ayyanar, women and youngsters hoist their decorated offerings onto their heads and ready themselves for the procession from the potters' quarters to the "intermediary grounds," 6 kilometres away.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Carrying offerings through the dried paddy-fields towards the shrine.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The smaller offerings are carried by the women and children inside the shrine at Uruvayal in the late afternoon.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Small offerings are carried by women and children.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Bommai</i> decorated with <i>neem</i> leaves being carried into the shrine.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The principle offering of a festival is called the <i>ure-kutherai</i>, literally "village horse." The largest and most prestigious of all the offerings, it receives the greatest honours and decorations by the devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">After leaving the potters' quarters, and before being carried into the shrine, the pieces are placed on the "intermediary grounds," in this case, near unusually flooded paddy fields. The paraphernalia in the forefront is used for the rituals.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The day before this photo was taken, these three <i>ure-kutherai</i> (village horses) and numerous smaller offerings left the potters' village and were placed just outside the shrine's gates. They will be carried into the shrine the following evening.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">After leaving the potters' quarters, and before being carried into the shrine, the pieces are placed on the "intermediary grounds," in this case, near flooded paddy fields.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Four men are needed to carry this cow from the "intermediary grounds" through dried-up pasture land and into the shrine hidden inside a luxuriant sacred grove.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Devotees carrying offerings into the shrine. The summer of 2011, when this photo was taken, was unusually rainy, and the paddy fields - habitually dusty and arid - were flooded to the brim.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Once the offerings are carried into the shrine, the devotees place them in their permanent place and remove the bamboo poles.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Two <i>sami-adi</i> waiting for the rituals to begin.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A <i>sami-adi</i> waiting for the rituals to begin, sits next to a sacred trident and flower garlands. The silver bracelets he is wearing are traditional and common elements of his station.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A view of a festival in a small village square: the women and men sit separately, and wait and watch the two <i>sami-adi</i> being dressed and prepared for the rituals that will see them “receive” and thus be transformed into Ayyanar and Karuppu. The terracotta horses, too, wait patiently for the rituals to begin.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Though each festival's manner of celebrating Ayyanis is unique, certain items are used in the majority of rituals, like the ones we see here: chains of bells, clubs, lances and sticks.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A <i>sami-adi</i> inhaling <i>sambrani</i>, a resin that when lit creates a strong and fragrant smoke that is said to ward off evil. Inhaling <i>sambrani</i> is a commonly used means of inciting god to enter into a mortal's body.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A <i>sami-adi</i> ready to receive god by inhaling <i>sambrani</i>.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A devotee places a <i>mala</i>, a flower garland, around the neck of this <i>sami-adi</i> who will soon receive the god Muni.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Weighed down by dozens of garlands given as offerings, the <i>sami-adi</i>’s transformation is complete: where a man stood just minutes ago, the god Ayyanar has taken his place among his followers.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Sami</i> speaks with his devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Sometimes the force of <i>sami</i> is overwhelming and potentially dangerous. Assistants are always close by to contain his unbridled power and keep devotees safe from flailing blades and unintentional harm.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The god Saniyasi (the Renunciant), walking on copper <i>paduka</i> (sandals), is supported by his assistants during a <i>sami-attam</i> (dance of the gods).</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">During this ritual in the potters' quarters, three <i>Sami</i> have taken their place among their devotees to drive away evil coming from outside the village. From left to right, they are Ayyanar, Saniyasi and Karuppu-sami.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Sappani Karuppu is a particularly fierce god: demons and other evil spirits are no match for him. Some devotees, like this woman, seek his intervention if they are plagued by malevolent forces.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">On the second day at this festival, a <i>sami-attam</i> (dance of the gods) called <i>Elle Sami</i> (Seven Gods) is carried out, where Singaravel incarnates, one by one, seven gods specific to the shrine. This photo was taken of the god Sarimuni, who dances on nail-studded sandals with a <i>pujari</i>.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Sami</i> speaking to one of his devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Sami</i> blessing one of his devotees.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Sami</i> blesses one of his devotees by slapping her on the head with <i>vibhuti</i>, while other devotees hold out their hand to receive the sacred ashes as a benediction from god.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A young mother cradling her newborn right after <i>Sami</i> has blessed them by marking their foreheads with <i>vibhuti</i>, sacred ashes.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">One of the most important rituals of the festival is called <i>kaan torikal</i>, (literally "eye opening") and occurs just before the offerings are carried into the shrine. <i>Kaan torikal</i> is performed by the chief potter for the festival, who dabs a drop of fresh rooster blood onto the eyes of the principal offerings and by doing so, gives them life. Only then are the previously inanimate statues worthy to enter the shrine and find a place next to their god.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">At this festival, all of the numerous rituals are completed in one afternoon in the potters' village. After the "eye opening" ceremony, Ayyanar rides on his horse from the potters' village to the shrine. Once there, Ayyanar will continue to bless his subjects and the offerings will find their permanent home next to the previous years' pieces.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">This photo was taken the morning after the completion of a (two-day) festival. In front of a row of old cows, newly-offered bommai are illuminated by the morning sun, their bright faces enhanced by dazzling pink scarves. Many have small squares of paper tied around their necks with the name of the donor written upon it.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Horses and bulls stand tightly together in neat lines in this shrine. Most are in excellent condition, although years under the sun have begun to wear away the paint, and some have seen their legs destroyed, in all likeliness due to combined factors of inherent structural weakness and grazing goats.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The creation of man and the hand of nature in perfect harmony.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Tucked into sacred groves that are often in isolated areas of the countryside, some shrines, like this one, turn into veritable islands when rains flood the adjacent pasture-land.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A line of horses and cows inside a small walled temple complex. The flamboyant tree has shed many of its appropriately named flowers, creating a vivid red carpet.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In many shrines, after the monsoon rains have fallen, the animals - usually on dry land - find themselves knee-deep in water. The smaller <i>bommai</i> get even wetter!</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In this shrine of more than a thousand offerings positionned on either side of a dirt track leading to the main altar, new offerings are placed in spaces where the very old (and very dilapidated) used to stand.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Since no written records exist, nobody knows for sure the age of these outstanding horses. The chief potter for the shrine insists they are more than one hundred-and-fifty years old. Most of the heads have fallen and disintegrated, but the ones that are still attached to the sculptural bodies reveal outstanding craftsmanship and attention to detail that have, alas, disappeared from the pieces created nowadays.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A small shrine with just four three-metre-high horses. The most recent one, upon which the young man is leaning, was offered by the entire village two years before this photo was taken.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">This shrine is located about ten kilometres from the sea (the Bay of Bangal). The older statues are coated with a fine layer of sand.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">This shrine is composed of four distinct sub-shrines, the most surprising dedicated to Kaliyamman-pillai (the Tamil goddess Kaliyamman, an ambivalent deity, with a <i>pillai</i> = child). Behind the first row of statues (offered three years before this photo was taken) are hundreds of others that get older as they get further from the front, the most ancient (about a century old) nearly hidden by the trees and bushes that have grown all around like wild-fire.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A "portrait" of Kaliyamman, with a Mona Lisa smile, fangs and her red tongue sticking out - telling attributes of her ambivalent nature. On her trident are glass bangles given as offerings by devotees - gifts to please her, appease her wrath and plead for fertility for women, and health, healing and protection of children.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In Karur, which is less a shrine than a group of statues in the middle of paddy fields and pasture, only two sorts of offerings are given at a small yearly festival: two life-sized horses and a few dozen double-headed cows. (This unusual creature represents the pair of bullocks needed to pull a bullock-cart, a ubiquitous vehicle in rural Tamil Nadu.)</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">These cows, about two feet high, had been offered two months before this photo was taken. The paint is still fresh and intact, and attests of a particularly keen sense of fantasy, form and finesse.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In this shrine, the realism of form is enhanced by the choice of paint: all the animals - cows and horses alike - have been given white coats, pink ears and tongues, and black horns. The simplicity of colour and the patina of a few years of weathering have given this cow an appearence so lifelike that he's hypnotizing!</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Looking way up at the head of a ten year-old, twenty foot-high horse at Kuthadivayal.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Umpteen rows of umpteen horses and cows, all squeezed tightly together and facing the entrance to the main altar at this shrine in Panjati.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">An old shrine tucked away in a valley surrounded by boulders near Narthamalai. Despite its inaccessibility, it is very much alive and every year devotees from a nearby village celebrate Ayyanar at a small but dynamic three-day festival and give offerings of terracotta horses, elephants and cows.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">These huge and very old (perhaps the oldest existing) offerings at the Ayyanar shrine in Panruti have been reinforced with cement, giving them added endurance against destruction due the passage of time and animals.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The fate of all terracotta statues is one of dilapidation and, finally, disintegration. Some offerings know an early demise due to stuborn goats, lively monkeys or playful children.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">In this remote shrine, a grazing cow finds edibles growing on the parched land where offerings were placed three years before...</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Tons of earth and sand had been brought to this shrine in order to raise the ground level (that was starting to sink as the surrounding marsh land gained territory during the heavy rains). One year, and one monsoon later, this new earth had flattened and dried out, burying legs and bellies and freezing the offerings as if they had been found in Pompei.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A <i>kumbavishegam</i> (a ritual performed for the rejuvenation and regeneration of divine power) was performed at this shrine in Ilyangudipatti about four months before this photo was taken. For the ritual, the shrine’s walls were whitewashed and striped with red, and the central offerings – for the most part naked of their original water-based pigments and clothed in their original terracotta skin - were repainted with an unusual mixture of yellow, blue and orange!</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A devotee sits outside a small Muthurakash shrine where women are not permitted to enter. The grounds surrounding the enclosed shrine are crowded with effigies of the Tamil goddess Kaliyamman who has been lavished with bangles and silk saris.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A view of a shrine in the late afternoon as a storms brews just over the horizon.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">These old offerings, their paint totally worn away and their bodies coated with lichen, remain standing with the fragile equilibrium of a line of dominos.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">The temple walls are like a backdrop of a <i>Commedia dell'arte</i> performance, and the old <i>bommai</i> like the actors ready to bow during the curtain call.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">At the Mookambikai temple shrine, the <i>bommai</i> offerings (given only ten days before this photo was taken) were collected and grouped tightly together under a sacred <i>neem</i> tree.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;"><i>Bommai</i> from years past are piled up outside the Mookambikai temple grounds where they continue to live their lives and die their deaths surrounded by and covered with the eternal natural world.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A view of the Panjati shrine. Hundreds of horses and bulls surround an inner core of dense vegetation, within which lies two altars: one dedicated to Ayyanar and the other to Karuppu.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A lone horse and rider (<i>kutherai-karan</i>) guards the boundary between flood-lands and (very arid) pasture.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Aside from eighteen horses and one elephant given as offerings every two years in Kumbur, are a slew of smaller statues - dogs, devotees, snakes and four different gods - painted with the vibrant palette of traditional colours.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">A view of Pullikutti, a shrine close to Avurdayarkovil.</span>

<span style="font-weight:normal;">Mayakrishna, the priest at Kuthadivayal, walking toward the shrine's small temple. Leading up to the shrine are the largest terracotta offerings currently made in Tamil Nadu: each year, a six-metre-high horse is created by the potters in Aranthangi and given to Ayyanar.</span>

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