Somasi Mara Nāyanār was a brahmin of Ambar in the Chola country, counted among the sixty-three Nāyanārs. His title records his distinction: a somayaji, one who had performed the exacting Vedic sacrifice of soma.
The story
The tradition remembers him for a redirection rather than a renunciation. He did not abandon the Vedic rite; he completed it — and dedicated its entire fruit, the merit that the sacrificer ordinarily claims for himself, to Shiva. The Periya Puranam holds that the god accepted the offering, honouring the sacrifice as an act of love. Somasi Mara is also remembered as a devotee of Sundarar, revering the poet-saint as the living way to the god — a pairing of Vedic orthodoxy and personal bhakti that the canon records without any sense of contradiction.
What the tale carries
Like Rudra Pasupathi with his daily Rudram, Somasi Mara stands at the seam between the Vedic and the devotional. The Tamil Shaiva canon, often read as a revolt against ritualism, in fact absorbs the ritualist whole: the soma sacrifice is neither mocked nor required, only re-addressed. Merit, the story says, is not diminished by being given away.
Further reading
- Clothey, Fred W. The Many Faces of Murukan. Mouton, 1978
- Cutler, Norman. Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion. Indiana University Press, 1987
- Dehejia, Vidya. Art of the Imperial Cholas. Columbia University Press, 1990
- Peterson, Indira Viswanathan. Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Princeton University Press, 1989
- Ramanujan, A. K. Speaking of Siva. Penguin, 1973
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.