The NiND Commissions #3: Nepalese Frog Worship

I said in exchange for a donation you could have four hundred words on any subject. My dear twitter friend Jon Beech has gone for Nepalese Frog Worship, because he's, well, cussed like that.

If you'd would like to commission 400 words on any subject (even one as boring as this), here's how to go about it.

If you really want the full SP on Nepalese Frog Worship, read on. And, er, thanks Jon.

Turn my head slightly to the left you say? Like that? You sure?

The Worship of Frogs in Nepal: Nepalese Frog Worship

Yes, this is actually a thing. But why? Why would them Nepalese, normally the first people you'd trust with your luggage, spend their downtime deifying 'umble amphibians?

Well that's where you go round making a fool of yerself with yer rayyycist assumptions, innit. Because it's the Sherpa Nepalese what do the shovin' anna humpin' whereas it's yer Jyapu Nepalese what worships the frogs.

According to a cheerfully loquacious treatise on the subject:

"Frogs… are scavengers in nature and play a very useful role in the eradication of pests… that damage the paddy crop… Rice was the principal food and the Jyapu peasants were the main rice growers in the Kathmandu Valley, even in the distant past... Life was sustained by a good harvest of it; if the harvest failed, the tribe starved. So the frogs that protected the rice crop began to be venerated as godlings.”

Note excellent use of the semi-colon in the above excerpt. It's a dying art.

So for the Jyapu farmer, Nepalese frog worship is a relatively uncomplicated thank you to their mystically helpful croaky friends for keeping them alive. The frogs stop doing what they do and the farmers die. This is a theologically transferable concept.

1) Does it keep you alive?

Yup.

2) Would you be fucked without it?

Uh-huh.

3) Any idea how to stop it fucking off and leaving you in the shit?

Nope.

4) Well, pray it fucking doesn't then. And look grateful about it.

'kay.

The big world religions tend to think they're cleverer than that because they've gone beyond the animalistic and elemental into worshipping abstract notions:

Judaism - God is an expression of who we are us as a people and will stay with us and within us down the generations, providing we stick to the rules and stop mucking about.
Christianity - God is love, man. Stick that in your pipe.
Islam - Toughen up dudes, it's a mad, bad world out there.
Hinduism - Life is One Many Crazy Rides.
Buddhism - … and, relax.

Possibly. To be honest I wasn't paying much attention during this phase of my education.

So there we go. How did a meditation on Nepalese Frog Worship end up demonstrating the paucity of my theological competence? I blame you, Jon Beech.

That must be 400 words.

Christ - 397.

Ach, sue me.