> A Waghoba temple is seen at Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Tribals worship Waghoba, a deity in the form of leopards a

> A Waghoba temple is seen at Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Tribals worship Waghoba, a deity in the form of leopards and tigers, in the belief that they protect them and their livestock from evil. It's always interesting to see concrete religious symbols developing as a result of human beings interactions with nature in this way. In many ways this doesn't seem so different from the ancient lions of Sumerian reliefs or the various creatures depicted at Gobleki Tepe (the oldest known religious structures). The sheer honesty of that concrete depiction of human survival plight in a natural environment gets reduced to a shadow of itself in most mainstream religion, whether now or in antiquity. Tangentially, this particular example of a deity fashioned after a dangerous wildcat is one reason why Hinduism is sometimes described as having thousands of gods. Many of them are just "functional", representing protection against or assistance of specific natural phenomenon, and have little to do with political identity or salvation. The Hindi inscription above the idol in the photo is even more interesting, translating as: "King of the Jungle, Waghobadev". "Waghobadev" itself translates to something like "tiger/leapord god".