The Goddess Takes the Field

The gods had lost. The buffalo-demon Mahishasura had defeated Indra and the host of heaven and seized the three worlds, and the gods, cast out and powerless, went to Vishnu and Shiva for help. And then something happened that had not happened in Sanskrit scripture before. Out of the anger of the assembled gods, a great light poured from each of them, from Shiva and Vishnu and Brahma and all the rest, and the lights streamed together and fused into a single blaze, and the blaze took form, and the form was a woman. Armed by every god with his own weapon, mounted on a lion, she filled the sky. She was their combined power made one and made conscious, and she would do what none of them could. She would take the field.

The text that tells this is small, a few hundred verses inside one of the Puranas, and it changed the shape of Hindu devotion. This chapter is about the moment the Goddess stepped to the centre.

Seven hundred verses

The Devi Mahatmya, the Glory of the Goddess, is not a whole Purana. It is a passage of about seven hundred verses, in thirteen chapters, set inside the Markandeya Purana, occupying chapters eighty-one through ninety-three in the standard translation. But no embedded passage in the entire corpus has had a life so independent of its host. It is known by several names, the Durga Saptashati, the seven hundred verses, and the Chandi, after a fierce name of the Goddess, and it is recited and worshipped as a complete scripture in its own right, every verse treated by the devout as a mantra.

What makes it matter is a claim it makes simply by how it is written. Before it, the great goddesses of the tradition were largely consorts: Lakshmi beside Vishnu, Parvati beside Shiva, the feminine as the partner of a male god. The Devi Mahatmya puts the Goddess at the centre and the top. She is not anyone’s wife in this text. She is Mahamaya, the great power of illusion that moves the cosmos, the ultimate reality, the source from which the gods themselves draw their strength. The scholar Thomas Coburn, whose study is the standard one, calls the text the “crystallization” of the goddess tradition, the moment when older, scattered strands of goddess worship were gathered into a single, unified theology of one supreme Devi. It is widely regarded as the first text in Sanskrit to do this, and it became the founding scripture of Shaktism, the worship of the Goddess as the highest divinity.

The power behind the gods

The theology is stated openly, not left to be inferred from the stories. In F. E. Pargiter’s public-domain translation of 1904, the very first chapter declares of the Goddess that “by her is created this whole universe both moveable and immoveable,” that “she is Knowledge supreme,” and that she is “the eternal cause of final emancipation, and the cause of the bondage of worldly existence; she indeed is the queen over all lords.”

And in the great hymn near the end, the gods praise her as the one in whom everything subsists. Pargiter again: “Thou alone hast become the support of the world… Thou art the germ of the universe, thou art Illusion sublime. All sciences are portions of thee, O goddess; so are all females without exception in the worlds. By thee alone, as mother, this world has been filled.” That last line is the heart of Shakta theology in a sentence: every woman in the world is a portion of her, every power is her power, she is the mother in whom all things stand. The text returns again and again to a refrain that Hindus still chant, saluting the Goddess as the one who abides in all beings, as consciousness, as intelligence, as power, as mercy, as the very faculties by which we live, with the bow repeated after each: salutation to her, salutation to her, salutation.

This is what was new. Here the Goddess is the absolute itself, conceived as feminine, the power without which the male gods are inert, no longer one deity among many but the ground of them all.

Three battles

The theology is carried, in the Puranic manner, by story, and the Devi Mahatmya has three great battle-episodes, each revealing a form of the one Goddess.

In the first, the Goddess as the cosmic sleep that has overtaken Vishnu withdraws at the right moment so that he can wake and slay the demons Madhu and Kaitabha, who had risen to threaten the newborn creation. In the second, and most famous, she fights Mahishasura, the buffalo-demon who had conquered heaven, and after a long battle, mounted on her lion, she slays him as he shifts between buffalo and man, becoming forever Mahishasura-mardini, the slayer of Mahishasura, the image carved and painted and worshipped across India to this day. In the third she confronts the demon brothers Shumbha and Nishumbha, and here the text produces its most vivid invention: the demon Raktabija, every fallen drop of whose blood instantly became a new demon, so that the more he was wounded the more numberless his army grew, until the Goddess, in her terrible form as Kali, spread her tongue across the battlefield and drank the blood before it could touch the ground.

These are not gentle stories, and they are not meant to be. The Goddess of this text is fierce, a warrior, the power that acts when the ordered male cosmos has failed and been overrun. The gods could not hold the field. She could.

When, and how it lives

On the dating, the record is unusually firm for a Puranic text. Scholars place the Devi Mahatmya in roughly the fifth or sixth century of the Common Era, among the earliest datable portions of any Purana, and there is a hard lower limit: an inscription of the year 608, the Dadhimati Mata inscription, already quotes it, so it must have existed by then. The tradition, for its part, receives it as it receives all scripture, as timeless revelation, and treats its recitation as a living act of power rather than a literary reading.

For the Devi Mahatmya is, more than almost any text in this volume, alive in practice. It is the scripture of Navaratri, the nine nights of the Goddess, when across India it is recited in full, chapter by chapter, its verses taken not as description but as invocation, calling the very power they praise. A text that first set the Goddess on the field some fifteen centuries ago is chanted every autumn by people who would never call themselves scholars of anything, because for them it is not history. It is the mother, addressed directly.

The previous chapters of this volume followed the Puranas as cosmology and as the life of a beloved God. This one has followed them to the feet of the Goddess. The last chapter steps back to ask what the Puranas, as a whole, have been for, and why this miscellaneous, ever-growing, unfixable body of texts became the scripture through which most Hindus have actually known their tradition.