“Glorification of the Goddess” is the Devi’s “crossover” text, from unknown rituals and local traditions to a pan-Indian Sanskrit text. Why does the Markandeya Purana pay attention to goddesses at this moment? Why now? For one thing, it was a time when devotional texts of all sorts flourished, and since people worshiped Chandika, she too needed to have texts. What may have started out as a local sect began to spread under royal patronage inspired by bhakti. Centuries earlier the Kushanas had put goddesses on their coins; now the stories behind the coins began to circulate too as more valuable narrative currency. At some moment the critical mass of Devi worship forced the Brahmin custodians of Sanskrit narratives to acknowledge it. The Purana goes out of its way to tell us that merchants and kings worshiped her; in the outer frame of the Purana, a sage tells the story of the Goddess of Great Illusion (Mahamaya) to a king who has lost his kingdom and a Vaishya who has lost his wealth and family; at the end of the story the goddess grants each of them what he asks for: The king gets his kingdom (and the downfall of his enemies), while the Vaishya gets not wealth, which he no longer covets, but the knowledge of what he is and what he has (and the downfall of his worldly addictions). Clearly the Vaishya is the man this text greatly prefers.
This is the story it tells about Chandika:
THE KILLING OF THE BUFFALO
Once upon a time, the antigods, led by Mahisha [“Buffalo”], defeated the gods in battle. The gods were so furious that their energies came out of them one by one, and these energies formed the goddess Chandika. The gods also gave her weapons doubled from their own weapons, as well as necklaces and earrings and garlands of lotuses. They gave her a lion for her mount, and the king of snakes gave her a necklace of snakes studded with the large gems that cobras have on their foreheads. When Mahisha, in the form of a water buffalo, saw her, he cried, “Now, who is this?” and he attacked her lion. Eventually, she lassoed him and tied him up. As she cut off the head of the buffalo, he became a lion; as she beheaded the lion, he became a man, with a sword in his hand; then an elephant, and finally a buffalo again. She laughed and drank deep from a divine drink, and her eyes shone red, and the drink reddened her mouth. Then she kicked him on the neck, and as the great antigod came halfway out of the buffalo’s open mouth, she cut off his head with her sword.49
The final moment in this story is a scene particularly beloved of artists, who often depict Chandika’s lion chomping on the buffalo’s head while the goddess disposes of the head of the anthropomorphic antigod, who comes out not from the buffalo’s mouth but from his neck after he has been beheaded. The goddess rides on a lion, a Vedic animal; in later centuries, when lions become rare in North India, Chandika and other goddesses are often depicted riding on tigers or sometimes just great big pussycats, as depicted by painters and sculptors who have evidently never seen a tiger, let alone a lion. The myth has been convincingly linked to a ritual that has been documented in many parts of India to this day, the ritual sacrifice of a buffalo, often associated with a sect of Draupadi.50 Goats too and other animals are frequently sacrificed to the goddess Kali; the animal is decapitated, and its blood is offered to her to drink. In some variants of this ritual, a man, dressed either as the buffalo or as a woman, bites the neck and drinks the blood of the sacrificial animal (usually a lamb or a goat).
We can see patriarchal Sanskritic incursions into this early textual version of the myth, the Brahmin filter as always extracting a toll as the story crossed the linguistic border. Chandika’s power in this text comes not from within herself but from the energy (tejas) of the male gods, as the light of the moon comes from the sun. She is created by re-memberment (the inverse of dismemberments such as that of the Man in “Poem of the Primeval Man”), a not uncommon motif in the ancient texts. Manu, for instance, says (7.3-7) that the first king was created by combining “lasting elements” or “particles” from eight gods.hq
A. K. Ramanujan once said that you can divide the many goddesses of India into the goddesses of the tooth and the goddesses of the breast.51 The goddesses of the breast are wives, more or less subservient to husbands, but they do not usually give birth to children (though they sometimes adopt children). Devi is the Great Mother, but we hear little or nothing about her mythological children; we are her children. The tooth goddesses (not at all like tooth fairies) are unmarried, fierce, often out of control. They are killers. They too are generallyhr barren of children, celibate mothers; indeed some of them wear necklaces made of the heads of children and low-slung belts made of children’s hands; with habits like these, it’s a very good thing that they don’t have children of their own. Chandika, whom “Glorification of the Goddess” also calls Ambika (“Little Mother”),‡ is the paradigmatic tooth goddess in India. She is also both the paradigmatic shakti (“power”) and the paradigmatic possessor of shakti.
Shakti is a creative power that generally takes the place of the power to have children; men give birth without women in many myths, while the goddesses, for all their shakti, are cursed to be barren. Shakti is generally something that a male god, not a goddess, has and that the goddess is. One Upanishad depicts Shiva as a magician who produces the world through his shakti.52 Eventually the Puranas used the word to designate the power/wife of any god, often an abstract quantity (a feminine noun in Sanskrit) incarnate as an anthropomorphic goddess. Many female deities, as well as abstract nouns, came to be personified and “wedded” to great gods as their shaktis, such as Lakshmi or Shri (“Prosperity”), the wife of Vishnu. Unlike the independent Vedic goddesses Speech and Night, who stand alone, these consort goddesses appear in Sanskrit texts almost exclusively as wives. Shiva, who inherits much of Indra’s mythology when Indra fades from the pantheon, also inherits Indra’s wife Shachi (a name related to shakti), and so, in many texts, Shiva’s wife—whether she be Parvati or the goddess Kali or Sati—is the most important shakti of all, the role model for the other goddesses who become known as the wives (and shaktis) of other gods. In one text, Shiva emits his own shakti, who then becomes the Goddess that the gods beg to kill the buffalo. 53
But the Chandika of “Glorification of the Goddess” is definitively unmarried, independent, a tooth goddess. Shiva is not her husband but merely the messenger that she sends to challenge other rebellious antigods, in the battle that follows immediately after Mahisha’s death, nor does she become the wife of Mahisha. Therefore she is not the shakti of any particular god, and her shaktis, whatever their origins, ultimately belong to no one but herself; they are the shaktis of a shakti. In the next battle, Chandika emits her own shakti (which howls like a hundred jackals) and absorbs all the gods’ shaktis into her breasts.54 In its intertextual context, therefore, “Glorification of the Goddess” stands out as a feminist moment framed by earlier and later texts that deny the shakti her independence.
The pious hope of goddess feminists, and others, that the worship of goddesses is Good for Women is dashed by observations of India, where the power recognized in goddesses certainly does not necessarily encourage men to grant to women—or women to take from men—political or economic powers. Indeed we can see the logic in the fact that it often works the other way around (the more powerful the goddess, the less power for real women), however much we may deplore it: If women are made of shakti—like Chandika, who is her own shakti, rather than like Parvati, who is Shiva’s shakti—and men can only get it by controlling women, women pose a constant threat to men. The conclusion that many men seem to have drawn from this is that women should be locked up and silenced. One defiance of this scenario is the widespread phenomenon of women who are possessed by fierce goddesses, thereby either acquiring or becoming shaktis and being empowered to say and do many things otherwise forbidden.55 But in taking the mythology of goddesses as a social charter, the goddess feminists are batting on a sticky wicca.
SATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVA
One goddess who has played an important role in the lives of real women is Sati, the wife of Shiva, who is occasionally implicate
d in justifications for the custom of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ pyres, called suttee.
The Mahabharata versions of the story of Daksha’s sacrifice do not mention Daksha’s daughter Sati at all, though sometimes they mention Shiva’s other wife, Parvati (who is not related to Daksha in any way, nor does she herself go to the sacrifice, or die, though her wounded amour propre spurs Shiva to break into the sacrifice). At that stage the conflict, about Rudra’s non-Vedic status, is just between Daksha and Shiva. Several early Puranas too tell the story of Daksha and Rudra/Shiva without mentioning any wife of Shiva’s, or mention her just in passing.56 Even in versions that name Sati as the daughter of Daksha, the conflict is still primarily between Vaishnava Brahmins and more heterodox Shaivas. This story is narrated in several of the early Puranas:
SATI COMMITS SUICIDE
Daksha, the father of Sati, insulted Shiva by failing to invite him or Sati to a great sacrifice to which everyone else (including Sati’s sisters) was invited. Sati, overcome with shame and fury, committed suicide by generating an internal fire in which she immolated herself. Enraged, Shiva came to Daksha’s sacrifice, destroyed it, and—after Daksha apologized profusely—restored it.57
Sati is not a sati (a woman who commits suttee). Her husband is not dead; indeed, by definition, he can never die. But she dies, usually by fire, and those two textual facts are sometimes taken up as the basis for suttee in later Hindu practice. The compound sati-dharma thus has several layers of meaning: it can mean the way that any Good Woman (which is what sati means in Sanskrit), particularly a woman true to her husband, should behave, or it can mean the way that this one woman named Sati behaved. Only much later does it come to mean the act of a woman who commits the religious act of suttee, the immolation of a woman on her dead husband’s pyre (for which the Sanskrit term was usually “going with” the husband [saha-gamana] or “dying after” him [anu-marana]).
PARVATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVA
Sati dies and is reborn as Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain”), the daughter of the great mountain Himalaya, the mountain range where Shiva is often said to live, generally on Mount Kailasa. Parvati is a typical breast goddess, confined and defined by her marriage. But before Parvati could marry Shiva, she had to win him, no easy task, since Shiva had undertaken a vow of chastity. She did it with the help of the god of erotic love, Kama incarnate. The Mahabharata refers, briefly, to the encounter between Kama and Shiva, the latter here referred to as a brahma-charin (that is, under a vow of celibacy): “Shiva, the great brahma-charin , did not give himself over to the pleasures of lust. The husband of Parvati extinguished Kama when Kama attacked him, making Kama bodiless.”58 An inscription of 474 CE refers to the burning of Kama by Shiva,59 so the story must have been fairly well known by then; Kalidasa tells the story in his poem The Birth of the Prince. Here is a slightly fuller Puranic version of the episode:
PARVATI WINS SHIVA
Parvati wished to marry Shiva. She went to Shiva’s hermitage and served him in silence; meditating with his eyes shut, he did not notice her. After some time, Indra sent Kama to inspire Shiva with desire for Parvati; Kama shot an arrow at Shiva, and the moment it struck him, Shiva opened his eyes, noticed Parvati, and was ever so slightly aroused. But then he looked farther and saw Kama, his bow stretched for a second shot. Shiva opened his third eye, releasing a flame that burned with the power of his accumulated ascetic heat, and burned Kama to ashes. (Kama continued to function, more effective than ever, dispersed into moonlight and the heady smell of night-blooming flowers; his bow became reincarnate in the arched eyebrows of beautiful women, his arrows in their glances). Shiva then returned to his meditation.
Parvati engaged in fierce asceticism to win Shiva for her husband, fasting, enduring snows in winter, blazing sun in summer. Shiva appeared before her disguised as a brahma-charin and tested her by describing all those qualities of Shiva that made him an unlikely suitor, including his antipathy to Kama. When Parvati remained steadfast in her devotion to Shiva, the god revealed himself and asked her to marry him. After the wedding, Kama’s widow begged Shiva to revive her husband, and he did so, just in time for the honeymoon.60
Himalaya, who is regarded as the source of priceless gems, a king of mountains, disdains Shiva as Daksha had done (though for different reasons), and their fears turn out to be well founded. Shiva is a strange god, the epitome of the sort of person a man would not want his daughter to marry: He is a yogi who has vowed never to marry, he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead, he wanders around naked or wearing nothing but a loincloth woven of living snakes, he has no family, and he lives not in a house but in a cremation ground, smearing his body with the ashes of corpses. It is therefore not surprising that both his potential fathers-in-law object strenuously to him. In one Puranic version of the story, Shiva in disguise tells Parvati’s father, Himalaya: “Shiva is an old man, free from passion, a wanderer and a beggar, not at all suitable for Parvati to marry. Ask your wife and your relatives—ask anyone but Parvati.”61 The litany of undesirable qualities is a variant of the genre of “worship by insult” that is both a Tamil and a Sanskrit specialty, and that appears in its darker aspect when Daksha curses Shiva and then worships him for the same qualities for which he had cursed him. Redolent of virility and transgression, Shiva’s qualities cast their dark erotic spell on Parvati, as on his worshipers.
The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is celebrated in texts and in ritual hierogamies performed in temples and depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout India. Their marriage is a model of conjugal love, the divine prototype of human marriage, sanctifying the forces that carry on the human race. The marriages of other gods and goddesses too, often local couples celebrated only in one village, constitute a popular theme in temple art and literature, both courtly and vernacular. As in South India, the divine couple often served as a template for the images of kings and their queens who commissioned sculptures depicting, on one level, the god and his goddess, and on another, the king and his consort, or the queen and her consort.
The conflict between Shiva and Kama is only on the surface a conflict between opposites, between an antierotic ascetic power and an antiascetic erotic power. They are two sides of the same coin, two forms of heat, ascetic heat (tapas) and erotic heat (kama).62 For it is through his tapas that Shiva generates the power that he will use first for his perpetual tumescence and then to produce the seed of a spectacular child. Some variants of the myth express the connection between Kama and tapas through an additional episode that brings into this myth a figure that we have encountered before:
THE SUBMARINE MARE
Kama deluded Shiva, arousing him, and when Shiva realized this, he released a fire from his third eye, burning Kama to ashes. But the fire could not return to Shiva, and so when Shiva vanished, the fire began to burn all the gods and the universe. Brahma made the fire into a mare with flames coming out of her mouth. He took her to the ocean and said, “This is the fire of Shiva’s anger, which burned Kama and now wants to burn up the entire universe. You must bear it until the final deluge, at which time I will come here and lead it away from you.” The ocean agreed to this, and the fire entered the ocean and was held in check.63
The fire is not just made of Shiva’s anger; it gained special power when it burned Kama, for it absorbed the heat of Kama too. The two fires released by Shiva and Kama meet and produce a fiery weapon of mass destruction that maintains a hair-trigger balance of mutual sublimation. (The Mahabharata says that Shiva himself is the mouth of the submarine mare, eating the waters [13.17.54].) But what is repressed must return, and the strain of tapas in the tradition is always poised to burst through in any monolithic construction of kama, just as kama constantly strains to burst out of extreme tapas. The three elements—Shiva’s anger, Kama’s passion, and the mare—are combined in a verse that Dushyanta, madly in love with Shakuntala, addresses to Kama, the verse cited at the start of this chapter. The balanced extremes implicit i
n this image are also evident from a Sanskrit aphorism about the two excesses (fire and flood) as well as one of the four addictive vices of lust: A king, no matter how physically powerful, should not drink too much, for the mare fire herself was rendered powerless to burn even a blade of grass, because she drank too much.64
PARVATI’S CHILDREN
The most serious problem in the marriage of Shiva and Parvati is the lack of any children born of both parents, a lack that is explicitly regarded as problematic by the gods on some occasions and by Parvati on others, but never by Shiva, who, despite his marriage, remains adamantly opposed to having children. Skanda, as we have seen, is born of Shiva alone, an event that triggers Parvati’s resentful curse that all the wives of the gods should be barren too. The widespread patriarchal belief that all goddesses are mother goddesses is contradicted by Parvati’s curse, as well as by Hindu mythology as a whole. In defiance of her own curse, Parvati in several texts begs Shiva to give her a child, but he never relents. She does want to be a mother; it is Shiva, and the gods, who keep her from being one. The closest she comes to motherhood is with Ganesha.
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