{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02323503127792672, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00044682752457551384, 'mean_word_length': 5.100817438692098, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Myths of Metals and Myths of Sight

reductionistic in nature. However, central questions regarding the religious meaning of the Pattini cult are left unposed. Pattini, as Obeyesekere has skillfully shown, reflects images of virgin, wife, and mother; but she is also fundamentally a goddess who, at least to her devotees, is more than the sum of these parts. In part 6, Obeyesekere again returns to historical issues by arguing that the mythic biography of Pattini is rooted in the heterodox Buddhist, Jain, and Ajivika traditions, that the cult was maintained in South India by a class of merchants with trading ties to West Asians who might have contributed new patterns of worship to the cult (particularly mater dolorosa), and that when these merchants were pushed out of South India between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, the cult was introduced to the west coast of Sri Lanka. A later immigration of Indians from Kerala to Sri Lanka's east coast helps to explain the idiosyncracies of the respective Buddhist and Hindu cults. The final sections focus on the Sanskritization of Pattini and Kovalan in the east coast cult, a development in which Pattini has become more like Kall while Kovalan has become increasingly unimportant or forgotten. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini is a complex, sometimes controversial, and brilliant book. Its correctives to previous scholarship are numerous, and it raises a great many questions. For example, according to Obeyesekere the central episode in Pattini's mythic drama is her husband's (Kovalan alias Palafga alias Alut Deviyo) death (at the hands of the Pandyan king) and his subsequent "resurrection" by Pattini. The author has made the case that symbolically this event represents justice triumphing over injustice (as it does in the Greco-Roman myth of Attis) on the part of a mater dolorosa (Pattini). Beyond the psychoanalytic explanations provided by the author, though, one is left wondering about the ethnotheological significance of this event. The book's bold originality and the way it incorporates historical, psychological, and anthropological approaches to a wide variety of source materials makes it a monumental contribution to the study of Sri Lankan religious culture.