Ammāvaru

According to at least one traditional summary, Ammāvaru is an ancient mother-goddess who is thought to have existed before the beginning of time and to have laid the egg that hatched Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. This cosmogonic portrayal frames her as a primordial generative principle in those accounts; the sources make clear this is one strand of description and that the name is also used as a reverential title for local mother-goddesses in temple practice.

No pan-Hindu standardized iconography is provided in the sources. Contemporary temple usage includes anthropomorphic images and modern large-scale representations: an online account reports a 40 ft. painted statue of 'Ammavaru' in a Bangalore temple dressed in a red sari, and local manifestations (for example Padmavathi Amma, Nookambika Ammavaru) are depicted according to their regional iconographic conventions. Sources do not supply detailed canonical iconographic descriptors.

The sourced material attributes a cosmogonic creative act to Ammāvaru in some accounts — the laying of an egg from which the principal gods emerged — situating her as a progenitor figure in those narratives. In temple and civic contexts Ammāvaru functions as a maternal tutelary deity who receives votive offerings and ritual garments (pattu sarees/pattu vastrams) during festival cycles; government orders document formal presentations made to her image as part of festival observance. The available sources emphasize generative, maternal and cultic roles rather than enumerating other supernatural faculties.