Thingalur Kailasanathar (Moon)

Two stories meet at Thingalur, and the tradition keeps both.

The first is the Moon's. Chandra, cursed to wane by Daksha for neglecting his other wives, is said in the circuit tradition to have worshipped Shiva at this place to be relieved of the waning that threatened to consume him entirely. He was not restored to permanence but to a rhythm: the waning was made to alternate with waxing, so that he empties and fills rather than simply disappears. The relief he received was not the removal of the affliction but its conversion into a cycle he could survive.

The second story is human, and it is why Thingalur is loved beyond the circuit. Appudhi Adigal, a Brahmin of this village, was a devotee of the saint Thirunavukkarasar, whom he had never met. He revered him so completely that he named everything in his household after him: his wells, his sons, the vessels in his house. When Thirunavukkarasar, travelling, at last came to Thingalur and discovered a stranger who had built his whole life around a man he had never seen, he was undone by it.

The two accounts sit together without strain. One is about a god learning to survive by cycle rather than by permanence; the other about a man who gave his whole household to a devotion he expected nothing back from.

Thingalur is a temple of the Cauvery delta of the kind the Tamil Shaiva tradition holds in particular affection: an ancient Shiva shrine praised in the Tevaram, the body of hymns composed by the Nayanar saints between roughly the sixth and eighth centuries. Inclusion in that corpus, as a paadal petra sthalam, is the highest antiquity a Tamil Shiva temple can claim, and it places Thingalur's importance long before the medieval structures now standing.

The village's own claim to fame within the Shaiva tradition is Appudhi Adigal, counted among the sixty-three Nayanars, whose story of devotion to Thirunavukkarasar is told in Sekkizhar's Periya Puranam. That the temple produced a canonised saint of its own gives it a standing in Tamil Shaivism that its modest scale would not otherwise suggest.

The Navagraha association came later. As the circuit of nine planet temples took shape across the delta, Thingalur was assigned the Moon, and the Chandra shrine within the temple became the focus for pilgrims addressing lunar afflictions in a horoscope. The temple thus carries two identities that developed in sequence: the older Shaiva shrine of the Tevaram and the saint, and the later Moon station of the Navagraha circuit.

Like the other temples of the delta it has been renovated and reconsecrated at intervals, and it now comes under the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department. Its visitor numbers rose considerably as the Navagraha circuit grew into an organised pilgrimage in the later twentieth century.