P.V.Anandpadmanabhan

 

The holy hillock of Sabarimala has begun reverberating with the devotional chant of thousands of devotees as the two-month-long annual pilgrimage season of the Lord Ayyappa temple got underway on November 17, at the dawn of the auspicious month of ‘Vrishchikam’ in the Malayalam calendar  Dewasom Minister  VS Sivakumar had participated in Nirmalya darshana pooja at sabarimala .

 

The two-month-long pilgrimage to the Lord Ayyappa temple here got underway with hundreds of devotees trekking up the holy hillock as the shrine opened. The temple portals were opened by priests for the first batch of pilgrims who started reaching the base camp on the banks of the river Pampa by morning and walked up the steep hill covering a distance of about 5 km to reach the ‘Sannidhanam’ atop where the temple is located

The first leg of the pilgrimage, the 41-day ‘Mandala’ phase, will be followed by the ‘Makaravilakku” festival lasting till mid-January next year, attracting pilgrims from different states and abroad. One of world’s largest religious events, the shrine attracts every year an average of 30 million devotees, who trek up the hill from the foothills on the banks of the river Pampa. The first leg of the pilgrimage will culminate with the ‘mandala’ poja. It will be followed by ‘makaravilakku’ with the ‘jyothidarshan’ as its highpoint.