The Mothers

We have met the feminine as flight — the yoginis, ringed around the open sky. Now we meet it as war, and as motherhood, and as the single clearest demonstration in all of Hindu mythology of what a divine retinue actually is. Because the Mothers do not merely serve the gods. The Mothers are the gods, turned inside out and given female form, and the great text of the Goddess shows the trick being performed in front of us, in the middle of a battle.

Seven who came out of the gods

The story sits at the heart of the Devī Māhātmya, the “Glory of the Goddess,” composed perhaps in the fifth or sixth century and recited to this day wherever Durga is worshipped; the great battle in which the Mothers appear unfolds across its eighth, ninth and tenth chapters. The gods are losing. A demon army led by the brothers Chanda and Munda, and by the monstrous Raktabīja whose every spilled drop of blood becomes a new demon, is overwhelming the field. And in the crisis, something remarkable happens. From the body of each great god there issues forth his own śakti — his power, in the form of a goddess who is his exact feminine double.

From Brahma comes Brahmāṇī, seated on his swan, carrying his water-pot and rosary. From Shiva comes Māheśvarī, riding his bull, bearing his trident, the crescent moon in her hair. From Skanda the war-god comes Kaumārī on her peacock with her spear; from Vishnu, Vaiṣṇavī on the eagle Garuḍa with discus and conch; from Vishnu’s boar-incarnation, the sow-faced Vārāhī; from Indra, Indrāṇī — Aindrī — on the great elephant Airāvata, wielding the thunderbolt. And from the Goddess’s own black fury comes the most terrible of them all, Cāmuṇḍā — gaunt, fanged, garlanded with skulls — who beheads Chanda and Munda and takes their names, and who drinks the blood of Raktabīja from the air before it can touch the ground and breed. Together these Mothers turn the battle. And as the war reaches its climax — when the demon Shumbha jeers that she fights only with the help of others — the Goddess declares that they were never other than herself, and they do not remain as seven separate powers. They are drawn back in, reabsorbed into the single Goddess from whom, at the deepest level, they had never truly been separate.

Each Mother is a god turned inside out

Stop and see what this narrative is quietly teaching, because it is the thesis of this entire treatise made visible. Look at any one of the Mothers. Māheśvarī has Shiva’s bull, Shiva’s trident, Shiva’s crescent moon and serpents — she is Shiva’s iconography exactly, rendered female. Vaiṣṇavī has Vishnu’s Garuḍa and discus and conch. Indrāṇī has Indra’s elephant and thunderbolt. Each Mother is a god analysed into his power and given a face — the retinue not as separate creatures who happen to serve the gods, but as the gods’ own energies externalised, deployed, and then taken home.

This is the answer, in its most explicit form, to the question we asked at Kailasa: why is the divine never solitary? Here is one reason made dramatic and literal. The attendant beings are frequently the deity’s own capacities, spun out as separate persons so that power can be seen, named, worshipped and set to work — and, when the work is done, gathered back into the one from whom it came. The Mothers are the retinue caught in the very act of emerging from the gods and returning to them, so that no one can mistake what they are. To worship Vaiṣṇavī is to worship Vishnu’s power wearing her own face. The many are the one, spelled out in seven fierce women on a battlefield.

The love and the terror of the mother

But the Matrikas are older and stranger than the tidy theology of the Devī Māhātmya, and this treatise’s method requires us to keep the layers apart. Before they were the marshalled shaktis of the gods, the Mothers appear in the Mahābhārata in a wilder, more ambivalent form — a fierce and swarming band of goddesses gathered around the child-god Skanda at his birth and consecration, beings of the margins and the wilderness. And in that older world the “mother” is not only protective. She is also the grāha, the “seizer”: the Mothers are bound up with the dangers of infancy, with the fevers and wasting-diseases and sudden deaths that carried off so many children, and they must be propitiated — mothers begged not to take the child. The word mātṛkā, “little mother,” carries this whole double charge. The power that nourishes the infant is the same power that can consume it; the goddess you pray to for a child’s life is the goddess you fear for the child’s death.

The tradition never resolved this doubleness, and it was right not to. Motherhood, seen clearly, is double — the most protective and the most fearsome power a person first encounters — and the Matrikas are that truth given divine form. This is why they are approached with awe as much as with love, why their images are often fierce even when their function is protective, and why they sit so comfortably beside the cremation-ground Bhairava (with whom they are frequently paired) and the flying yoginis (into whose larger companies they are sometimes absorbed). The fierce feminine of this whole movement — flying yogini, battle-goddess, seizing mother — is one power seen in three lights.

And the Mothers open, at their far end, onto the greatest development of the Goddess in later Hinduism: the ten Mahāvidyās, the “Great Wisdoms,” in whom the fierce and the terrible feminine becomes an entire path of liberation. That is a treatise in itself — The Ten Mahavidyas — and the wider question of who the Goddess ultimately is belongs to Who is the Goddess? and to Durga and Kali. Here we have needed only to watch the Mothers do the one thing that makes them indispensable to our argument: step out of the gods, fight the war, and go home — and in doing so, show us exactly what a retinue is.

That completes the court of Shiva and its fierce inner circle — the host, the guardians, the flying and mothering powers. But we have circled a single mountain for six chapters, and a treatise that claims to map the whole Hindu cosmos cannot stay on one peak. Before we descend to the wider world of spirits, we must cross to the other great centre of that cosmos, whose court is built on an entirely different principle. We leave Kailāsa for Vaikuṇṭha, and the ordered court of Vishnu.