No time to summarize this now, but the relevance (slight) and novelty of this explains itself... I'm thinking esp. of the second syllable in the Hainamese temple name:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/ban ... ae-tuptim/
I've a vague feeling it's not a complete coincidence that the Khmaes also have a sea goddess that takes banana offerings as a phallic symbol. There's a crest on the road between Phnom Penh and Kampong Saom where people stop to offer her bananas. The story there is that she was a young wife whose husband had gone up the coast to set up a business. The rainy season approached and everybody started having a lot of sex, b/c the rainy season is cold by the sea and the people get a lot of protein, etc. So the young wife starts to missing her husband, so much that she gets on a boat to go up the coast and join him where he is ... the boat founders on the way and she dies at sea. Later on mariners started to report being saved at sea by a young woman...
People give her phallic fruit offerings b/c ... the reason why she took her fatal voyage was b/c she was horny.
All very 媽祖-like, except the "open libido" which is missing from the "Mahayana cultures", if U will... It seems like no one has ever researched this hard-core, but my feeling is that the 媽祖 cult as we know it is much older than it officially is.
暹京南洋媽祖
Re: 暹京南洋媽祖
Somewhere I have an article in Vietnamese about banana folklore in VN. I'll try to track it down. Not sure whether it is particularly phallus-related or not. You have to wonder about the name 媽祖 as well, since the 祖 is originally associated with ancestors on the male side.