Jyotirlingas

The twelve Jyotirlingas are the sites across India where Shiva is held to have manifested as a column of light. The list is fixed by a verse, recited as a set, and the sites run from Somnath on the Gujarat coast to Rameshwaram at the southern tip, and up to Kedarnath in the Himalaya.

What the list does is unusual. It binds the subcontinent together as a single sacred geography, and it did so long before the subcontinent was politically one thing. A pilgrim completing the circuit crosses most of India.

The individual sites have complicated histories. Somnath was destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, and its modern reconstruction is as much a political statement as a religious one.

These pages give the twelve, the verse that fixes them, and the history of each, with the traditional account and the documentary record kept distinct.