The elephant-headed god of Hindu tradition, honoured as the lord of beginnings. Hindus place his image at entrances and worship him first, before any undertaking begins. He belongs to a living faith, and we show only an emblem.
Record, Folk and Modern are kept apart, and each one carries its source.
Our files do not yet hold an early text or image of Ganesha, so we give no date here. The gap is in our research, not in the tradition. We will add a dated source before this page claims one.
To verify: The earliest texts and images of Ganesha, from a scholarly source
Hindus place Ganesha’s image at entrances and worship him first, before any undertaking begins, as the Harvard Pluralism Project explains. The scholar Courtright’s 1985 study calls him “Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings”.
To verify: The page in Courtright (1985) for these titles
Some sellers in South Asia offer Ganesha as a charm for job interviews; we found no early record of that use. Ganesha belongs to a living faith: we show an emblem, never a portrait or a playful redesign, and make no promise about any new start.
