The Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana are the two late Puranas (c. AD 1300–1600) produced by the Ganapatya (gāṇapatya) sect. These two Puranas are considered authoritative by devotees of Ganesha and include material not found in earlier sources.
During the medieval period the followers of Ganesha, known the Ganapatyas, formed an independent religious movement dedicated to the worship of Ganesha as their preeminent deity. They considered Ganesha to be the qualified (saguṇa) form of the ultimate unqualified (nirguṇa) Brahman. The Ganesha Purana is pervaded with this concept and interprets well-known Puranic stories in new ways to emphasize the importance of Ganesha and to explain his relationships with other divinities.
The Purana specifies many methods of worship, key beliefs, and philosophical positions of the Ganapatya sect. The contents of the Ganesha Purana are difficult to summarize because they include a variety of stories and devotional material. The general purpose of the work can be inferred from this set of questions that Vyāsa puts to Brahmā in the tenth chapter of the first Book (I.10.29–30 in Bailey's English edition):