Sanskrit textual tradition identifies Yellamma with Renuka, the wife of the sage Jamadagni and mother of Parashurama, sixth avatar of Vishnu. In the myth, Jamadagni orders Parashurama to behead his mother after perceiving impurity in a fleeting desire she experienced, and Parashurama, alone among her sons, obeys; when Jamadagni later grants him a boon for his obedience, Parashurama asks that his mother be restored to life.
Regional retellings connected to Yellamma's own worship add further complication to this base story, including versions in which the restoration goes wrong and a substitute body or head is used, an element some traditions use to account for dual or composite features in her temple iconography. The identification with a pan-Indian Puranic figure gives a regional Deccan goddess a Sanskritic pedigree, a common pattern by which local goddesses across India have been linked to figures from the wider textual tradition without those two layers, the regional cult and the Sanskrit myth, necessarily originating together. Some regional tellings connected to Yellamma add a further, locally specific episode not found in the pan-Indian Renuka material, in which the goddess is cursed with a skin affliction after Parashurama's intervention, an addition scholars read as the local cult explaining aspects of its own iconography and ritual through an extension of the borrowed Sanskrit story.