Outward Spirals

For more than two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an integral part of ritual practice throughout South Asia. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, in the Kali Gandaki River Valley of Mustang, ritual use of these stones today has become a significant aspect of pilgrimage and worship in both India and Nepal, and among the global Hindu and Buddhist Diasporas. Considered inherently sacred not only because they are not man-made but because the workings of the landscape have imbued them with a living essence and agency of their own, Shaligrams require no rites of invocation when brought into homes or temples as presiding deities. But Shaligram interpretive traditions also use the specific characteristics of each ammonite fossil to determine which gods and spirits have become physically manifest within the stone. This book therefore details the process of reading deities within these sacred fossils and offers a general guide to identifying each of the 90+ name-types of Shaligrams, along with their defining features and concise histories.

While Outward Spirals covers several of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Bon (shamanic) traditions of Shaligram reading and offers a stone-by-stone guide for deciphering the manifest deities represented in Shaligram practice, it is the result of over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork. This book therefore also contains discussions of Shaligrams as they are described in religious texts and a list of typical puja rituals used in Shaligram care. The impetus to complete this book, however, actually comes from the Shaligram practitioners the author has worked with in India, Nepal, the United States, Australia, and the UK. For them, this work represents a giving back. Since most Himalayan interpretive traditions are oral traditions, this is the first book to record Shaligram heritage for public distribution, adding new dimensions for understanding ammonites and other fossil collections cross-culturally.