Legend
Legend says that Saint Parasurama threw his battleaxe into the sea and reclaimed the narrow strip of land from Kanyakumari to Gokarnum. He divided this into sixty-four settlements, thirty-two of them in kerala; story of the chandragiri river. However fanciful this story might be; Kerala, rolling merrily down from the mountain range in the act to the playful waves of the western; sea did indeed have great centers of civilization. Torrential rains nourished evergreen forests and an enthusiastic race prospered on the bounties of nature. Small wonder that intellectual giants stamped these cultural centres. For several centuries, the Peruvanam settlement was the greatest of them all.
Life; in the settlement centered on the magnificent Eratttayappan Siva temple of Peruvanam and the exquisite Sastha; temple of Thiruvullakkavu. The settlement enjoyed a large measure of autonomy land the village council which periodically met in the Peruvanam temple directed the destiny of Central karalla. The temple owned a large part of the land and the pious tenants paid their rent faithfully so that it was very rich. The benevolent Lord supported a large number of employees fed the hungry and provided for the needy. All forms of art flourished in this fertile region. More ;important, great scholars of Yajurveda provided the melody for the divine couple, Siva and shakthi, to perform the dance of bliss. But it was at Thiruvullakkavu that the ancient masters perfected third recital by making hymn-offerings to Sastha, the deified Vedas.
The settlement worshipped Lord; Erattayappan of Peruvanam as the supreme tutelary deity and Lord Sastha of Thiruvullakkavu as the Grama Paradevatha, the personal deity of all the people living there. This dual worship is rather unusual and confusing to the layman but it is not unique. The Sukapuram settlement too had two deities, Lord Siva; as the tutelary God and His own manifestation Dakshinamoorthi as the personal God. While the Lord of Peruvanam, gracing the tallest sanctum sanctorum in India showers benediction, Sastha, His active principle, rides the settlement as the protector. He has small shrines at the four Boundaries of the settlement at Akamala, Kuthiran, Oozhath and Edathirithi as also innumerable temples scattered around the region.
Lord Sastha of Thiruvullakkavu is deified Wisdom whose blessings make the [devotees intelligent enough to achieve wordly success and paradoxically, great enough to realise the fickleness of prosperity. Hindus usually worship goddess Saraswathi and Lord Dakshinamoorthi as the Gods of knowledge; all arts, sciences and philosophy. Sastha is the divine Hunter, the fiery deity who protects the virtuous and destroys the vicious, not a smiling god full of benevolence only. But the people of Peruvanam worship Sastha as the god of wisdom. The forest where He hunts is the dense human mind where insatiable carnivorous desires loam about. Sastha stalks the base qualities of man, sins like atheism and laziness and destroys them. So, he is the guide leading His children through the dangerous hills and dales of life to the lord of lords at Peruvanam. But that is the final step; first, he gives. Them material pleasures to the point of satiety to prepare them for the blissful release and renunciation. In his allegorical manifestation. He gives wordly happiness and in His trasscedental Omnipotence, He folds the devotee to His blissful bosom. That is the unique concept of personal deity. Sastha has to manifest Himself as the God of wisdom! The people of Peruvanam have always realised the extraordinary effulgence of Thiruvullakkakvu but others learned about it only through the surprising story of Pattath Vasudevan Bhattathiri.
Vasudevan Bhattathiri was an imbecile. The members of his family, traditionally, were very intelligent. Small wonder, they had the hereditary right to act as the presiding deity was the personification of Omniscience and invariably blessed every devotee with sharp wilts. His priests, His favoured servants could not be idiots. Incredible, but vasudevan Bhattathilri was.
