The Garland of Letters

Look again at the most famous terrible image in Hindu art: Kali, black, naked, her tongue out, and around her neck a garland of severed human heads. The treatise on the Mahavidyas met this garland and gave its first reading: the heads are egos cut away, the false selves she destroys. That reading is true. But the Tantra holds a second meaning inside the first, and it turns the image inside out.

The garland of heads, the Tantra says, is the alphabet.

The necklace that is the alphabet

Sir John Woodroffe, the British judge who carried the Tantras into English a century ago and whose works are now public domain, states it plainly. The string of heads at Kali’s throat is, in the inner explanation, the Varnamala, the “garland of letters,” the fifty, and as some count them fifty-one, letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. The Goddess wears the alphabet. She brings the letters forth as the power that creates, and she draws them back into herself as the power that dissolves, and the necklace of “heads” is the necklace of sounds, strung on the thread of her own being.

This is not a poetic flourish. It is the doorway into the entire Tantric philosophy of language, which is the foundation of the Tantric science of mantra. To walk through it, we have to take seriously a claim even stranger than the one the first volume made. The first volume said reality is, at its ground, the Word. The Tantra says the letters themselves, the actual phonemes of the alphabet, are the living powers from which the world is woven, and that they are the Goddess.

The little mothers

The Tantric name for the alphabet-as-Goddess is Matrika, which means the “little mothers.” The word is deliberate and maternal. The letters are not marks and not conventions; they are the subtle sound-forms, the matrikas, out of which nama and rupa, name and form, are born, and from name and form the whole manifest universe. Woodroffe describes them as the subtle forms behind the gross spoken letters, operative at the inward, mental level of speech that the third chapter called madhyama. Below every sound you can hear stands a matrika, a mothering sound-power; and the alphabet entire is the womb of the world.

Recall the descent the first volume traced: from nada, the first vibration, through bindu, the seed-point, the One differentiates into the many. The Tantra now fills in the step. What the One differentiates into, first, is the letters. The varnas are the initial articulation of the undivided sound into distinct powers, and from those distinct powers everything nameable follows. This is why the Tantra treats a varna, a single phoneme, as a building-block of the cosmos and not merely of vocabulary. The letters are the elements of reality in its sound-aspect.

And there is a word for the point where these sounds touch the eternal: akshara. It means “syllable,” and it also means “the imperishable,” that which does not flow away or perish. Om is called the akshara, the imperishable syllable. The double meaning is the doctrine: a syllable, rightly understood, is a place where the perishable sound opens onto the imperishable ground.

The equation that holds the volume

Woodroffe compressed the whole Tantric theory of mantra into a single chain of identities, and because it is public domain and because it is the spine of everything that follows, it is worth quoting exactly:

“Mantras are made of letters (Varna). Letters are Matrika. Matrika is Shakti and Shakti is Shiva… the Tantra Shastra says that Devata and Mantra composed of letters, are one.”

Read it slowly, link by link, because the next three chapters are simply its unfolding. Mantras are made of letters: a mantra is built of varnas, phonemes. The letters are Matrika: those phonemes are the little mothers, the Goddess as sound. Matrika is Shakti: the alphabet is power, the creative energy of the divine. And Shakti is Shiva: that power is not separable from the Absolute itself. Therefore, the chain concludes, the deity and the mantra, which is made of letters, are one. The god and the god’s mantra are the same reality.

This is the claim that makes Tantric mantra-practice coherent and that the rest of this volume defends. If letters are the Goddess, then a string of letters, rightly assembled and rightly sounded, is the deity’s own substance in the form of sound, not a label for a deity. The seed-syllable, the subject of the next chapter, is this insight concentrated to a single grain.

A caution against the literal

It would be easy to flatten this into superstition, and Woodroffe, who wrote partly to defend the Tantras against exactly that charge, was careful, and the treatise will be too. When the Tantra says the fifty letters are present in the centres of the subtle body, it does not mean, Woodroffe insists, that the written or spoken letters are literally lodged in the flesh. The letters are present there in their subtle and causal form, as matrikas, not as the gross marks on a page. The whole philosophy operates at the level of the subtle, the level of madhyama and above, the inward sound behind the outward. To read it as a claim about physical syllables in physical organs is to mistake the doctrine for a crude magic it never was. It is a metaphysics of sound, rigorous in its own terms, and it deserves to be met as one.

The Goddess wears the alphabet at her throat. Each letter is a mother, each a power, each a place where sound touches the imperishable.

The next chapter takes a single one of those letters and asks how a god can live inside one sound.

The heads on the garland are not only the egos she has slain.

They are the letters she will use to make the world again.