The identity of the Mahasu brothers is slowly evolving from Pahari to pan-Indian. This change in identity is reflected in the deities’ switch to a vegetarian diet; the spread of a more abstract concept of divinity; the deepening identification of Mahasu with the pan-South Asian pantheon of Hindu gods; the transition from an aggressive to a calmer character; and the decline in the practice of roaming. Each of these changes is evident at the ritual, mythological, and conceptual levels. This provides us with the opportunity to examine who is responsible for the change in Mahasu’s identity—is it Mahasu or the people who worship him?

This question is focused on the apparent gap between believers’ and anthropologists’ perceptions of the gods. While believers see gods as autonomous entities responsible for their own fate and that of humans, many ethnographers are in a quandary about the actual existence of the gods. In this book I have sought to demonstrate that the gap between the point of view of anthropologists and those they study—often termed the etic and emic perspectives—is smaller than scholars tend to realize. This can be seen in two points. First, although Mahasu followers do not face an ontological dilemma regarding the existence of the gods, as some anthropologists do, they certainly face epistemological dilemmas about them. That is, they wonder whether they are actually speaking to Mahasu when they communicate with him through mediums.

The second point relates to the question of the agency of Mahasu and other gods. In this book I have demonstrated that the research participants, like the anthropologists who study them, are aware of the dominance of humans in the decisions of the gods. For example, they state that human beings have also been involved in the decision to stop the custom of animal sacrifices. Thus the concept of distributed agency—the idea that agency does not belong to one individual, but is instead shared by a multiplicity of people, objects, and other entities—is a more adequate description of actions like the cessation of animal sacrifices.