Dhumavati: The Widow Made of Smoke

Every other Mahavidya is, in some register, glorious. Kali is terrible but magnificent; Tara saves; Tripura Sundari is beauty itself; even Chhinnamasta, drinking her own blood, blazes. The seventh is different. The seventh is everything a goddess is not supposed to be, and that is exactly the point of her.

She is Dhumavati, “she who is made of smoke,” and she is an old, ugly, widowed woman on a crow.

The form that breaks every rule

Her dhyana, preserved in the Todala Tantra and elsewhere, is a catalogue of the inauspicious. She is tall and gaunt, smoke-coloured, her skin the grey of ash and old fire. She is dishevelled, her hair unkempt, her clothes dirty and torn, the dress of a poor widow. Her teeth are crooked or missing, her nose hooked, her eyes squinting or harsh, her breasts pendulous, her hands trembling. She is perpetually hungry and perpetually thirsty, restless, quarrelsome. She rides in a chariot with no horses, going nowhere, bearing a banner with the emblem of a crow, or she is mounted on the crow itself, the carrion bird that haunts the cremation ground. In her hands she holds a shurpa, a winnowing basket. And she is a widow, which in the symbolic grammar of the tradition is the most inauspicious thing a woman can be, stripped of the ornaments and the auspicious marks that married goddesses wear.

Alone among the ten, she has no consort. The Todala Tantra makes the point precisely by giving every other Mahavidya a form of Shiva as her lord and giving Dhumavati none. She stands, or trembles, by herself.

The widow who swallowed her husband

How did a goddess come to be a widow? The Pranatoshini Tantra gives the startling answer. Sati, the Goddess, is overcome one day by a terrible hunger and asks Shiva for food. He puts her off. Her hunger grows past bearing, and at last she does the unthinkable: she swallows Shiva himself, her own husband, to fill the void in her. At Shiva’s request she disgorges him, but the deed cannot be undone, and Shiva curses or abandons her, leaving her in the form of a widow. She is, in the tradition’s unforgettable phrase, the widow because she swallowed her own husband.

The myth is grotesque and exact. Her defining hunger is the hunger of the void, the emptiness that, unfilled, will consume even God. And the result is widowhood: the state of lack, of having lost the source of auspiciousness, of being left with smoke after the fire has gone out.

The genealogy of misfortune

Dhumavati does not appear from nowhere. Scholars trace a long descent for her, and it is worth giving as scholarship, not as scripture. Behind her stands Alakshmi, “non-Lakshmi,” misfortune, the dark elder sister of the goddess of fortune; behind Alakshmi stands Jyeshtha, “the elder,” the inauspicious goddess of an older stratum of worship; and behind Jyeshtha stands the Vedic Nirriti, the personification of decay and dissolution, the negation of cosmic order. Dhumavati gathers up this whole lineage of the unlucky and the dissolving and stands at the end of it as a Mahavidya, the inauspicious raised, astonishingly, to the rank of a great wisdom.

The teaching in the smoke

Here is where a careless reader and the tradition part company. The popular internet files Dhumavati as “the goddess of bad luck” and stops, dwelling on her ugliness as a curiosity. The texts mean something far harder and far better. She is the void and dissolution itself, set up as a teacher. She is old age, which comes for everyone; loss, which spares no one; hunger, disappointment, the great “no” written into existence. And precisely because she is all of this, she is the supreme teacher of vairagya, dispassion, and of detachment from everything that was always going to be taken.

Her winnowing basket is the key to her, and it is a tool of viveka, discrimination. The winnow separates the grain from the chaff, the heavy from the light, the lasting from the worthless. Dhumavati holds the instrument that separates the eternal from the perishable, and her whole grim person is a lesson in making that separation while there is still time. The smoke she is made of is the smoke that remains after the fire of manifestation has burned out; it points past every form to the formless, the unmanifest, the void that is also the ground.

She is, in the architecture of the ten, the dissolution-pole of the Goddess. Where Kamala, the last, is fullness and abundance, Dhumavati is the necessary emptiness, and the treatise’s final chapter shows how the two answer one another.

Worship, and the honest caveat

Her worship is esoteric and unusual. She is classically invoked by renunciates and tantrikas rather than by householders, for whom her inauspiciousness makes her a difficult goddess to bring into the home. There is a rare public shrine to her in Varanasi, where, fittingly, offerings can include things that are elsewhere taboo. Most of her practice is initiatory and not for casual emulation, and this treatise, as throughout, describes and does not instruct.

It would be easy to flinch from her. The tradition asks the opposite. It asks the devotee to look at the trembling widow on her crow, at age and loss and the void, and to find there a teacher rather than a curse, the Mother in the one form we spend our whole lives refusing to see.

The smoke is what is left when the fire goes out.

She is asking whether you have understood what the fire was for.