Devi

A war of a hundred years has been lost, and Mahishasura sits on Indra’s throne. The gods come before Vishnu and Shiva with Brahma at their head and tell the whole of their ruin, and as they speak the brows of the two great gods draw tight. The Devi Mahatmya, which sits inside the Markandeya Purana, tells what follows in chapter 2: from the faces of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, and then from the body of every god who had lost a throne, a splendor pours out and flows together into one mass, blazing like a mountain on fire, and out of that mass a goddess takes shape. Shiva’s light becomes her face, Vishnu’s her arms, Indra’s her waist, and when she stands complete each god arms her from his own hand, and Himavan gives her the lion. Nothing in her is new. She is the power that had lain all along inside every one of them, gathered on the day of crisis into a single place. Her first roar fills the sky, the seas heave, and in that same trembling the gods draw an easy breath for the first time in a hundred years.

The Devi Mahatmya runs in three charitas, three movements, and Devi carries herself differently in each. In the first she is Yoganidra, the sleep lying over Vishnu as he rests on the serpent Shesha. Madhu and Kaitabha rise to kill Brahma on his lotus, and Brahma praises the sleep itself until she withdraws from the god’s eyes and limbs and he wakes to fight. Her whole work there is to lift, and the lifting wins the war. In the middle charita she is the warrior before Mahishasura, who fights, in chapter 3, by changing shape. Her noose binds him as a buffalo and he slips it as a lion; she reaches for the lion’s head and finds a man with a sword; her arrows cut the man down and an elephant stands in his place, its trunk around her lion, and her sword takes the trunk; then he is the buffalo again. She springs, her foot pins his throat, her spear goes in, and as his man’s shape forces its way out through the buffalo’s mouth her sword takes his head. In the final charita, against Shumbha and Nishumbha, Raktabija comes forward, and from every drop of his blood that reaches the earth another asura springs up. Then Chandika turns to Kali with the command chapter 8 records: whatever drops of blood my weapons draw from him, take them into your mouth. Kali spreads her mouth wide, the Devi strikes, and each drop vanishes before it can land, until Raktabija, emptied, falls on bare ground.

The last duel opens on a taunt. Nishumbha is dead, and Shumbha, standing in the wreck of his empire, tells her she has won nothing, that she fights propped up by the strength of other goddesses. Her answer in chapter 10 is the key to the whole text. “I alone am in this world. What second is there beside me? What you call other powers are splendors of mine, and even now they are pouring back into me.” As she speaks, the Mothers, Kali among them, thin into light and sink into her body, and one figure stands alone on the field. After the victory the gods sing the Narayani Stuti, chapter 11, and the same salutation closes verse after verse, seventeen times from verse 7 to verse 23: Narayani, salutation to you. Earlier in that hymn comes a line that reaches past the battlefield: every branch of knowledge is a form of you, and every woman in every world is you. The power that rode out on the lion is the same power seated in every body the world mistakes for weak, and it comes from nowhere outside.

Devi beyond the battlefield

Devi belongs to more than the battlefield. In the Yoga Vasistha the same feminine power turns to a different work, which is to wake. Queen Lila, frightened for her young husband Padma, asks the Brahmins how a man becomes immortal on earth, and is told that no one ever has. Through a hundred three-night fasts she worships Sarasvati, the goddess of intelligence, and when the goddess comes Lila asks two things: that when Padma dies his spirit never leave their palace, and that Sarasvati come whenever she calls. Both are granted. Only afterward does Padma die, his body laid under flowers in the inner apartment, and Lila calls. Sarasvati takes her through the three skies and shows her, inside the space where the corpse lies, a king ruling another realm, a Brahmin’s house in the hills, a second Lila, worlds running at different speeds inside one small room, until the death she feared stands exposed as a habit of thought and Padma breathes again. Chudala, in the same text, becomes the guru outright. She finds the Self while governing beside her husband Shikhidhvaja, and when she tells him he laughs. He leaves the palace at midnight for a forest on Mount Mandara, she rules in his place for eighteen years, and then she goes to him as Kumbha, a Brahmin boy who claims the sage Narada for a father. The king who could not hear his wife listens to the boy, because the one listening hears according to the form he sees. Kali and Chudala stand at two ends of a single truth: shakti takes whatever shape will let it be received. The Brahmanda Purana carries the same power as names in the Lalita Sahasranama, a thousand names of one goddess, Lalita, she who plays.

The Devi Mahatmya also ends with a boon, in chapter 13. King Suratha, who lost his kingdom, and the merchant Samadhi, thrown out by the wife and sons he still loves, have sat on a riverbank for three years before a clay image of the goddess shaped with their own hands. When she comes she tells them to ask for whatever they wish. The king asks for his kingdom back in this life and one that can never slip from him in the next; the merchant asks for the knowledge that cuts the clinging of “I” and “mine”. She grants each exactly what he asked, with the same affection in her voice. Whoever wants the world receives it from the Mother’s hand; whoever wants release receives that from the same hand. The door is one. The asking is each one’s own.

Her path

The slaying of Madhu and Kaitabha · Yoganidra withdraws from the sleeping Vishnu so that he can wake and fight, the first darshan of a power that wins without striking.

The birth of Devi · The massed splendor of every god rises like a mountain on fire, and out of it a goddess takes shape and mounts the lion.

The slaying of Mahishasura · Noose, arrows, sword and spear, one answer for each shape of the shape-changing asura, the story at the center of Navaratri.

The slaying of Raktabija · Every drop that touches the earth rises as another asura, until Chandika tells Kali to open her mouth.

The Narayani Stuti · One salutation returning seventeen times, and the line that sees Devi in every woman in every world.

The boon to Suratha and the merchant · A kingdom for one, the knowledge that cuts “I” and “mine” for the other, both heard at the Mother’s door.

Lila and Padma · Two boons won before a death, and after it a queen’s journey in Sarasvati’s company through world within world.

Chudala · The queen who ruled for eighteen years, then walked into her husband’s forest as a Brahmin boy to teach him.

The Lalita Sahasranama · One goddess in a thousand names, a path laid out for those who chant.

The Devi Mahatmya · All thirteen chapters of the Saptashati, the three charitas in one courtyard.

An answer to the measure of the crisis

What stands out across Devi’s stories is the exactness of each answer. Every response is cut to the size of the crisis in front of her. Madhu and Kaitabha needed a waking, so a waking was given. Mahishasura fought with force and with shape, so force met him and a weapon met every shape. Raktabija fought with arithmetic, so arithmetic met him, a mouth placed between the wound and the earth. When Shumbha jeered at her for standing on borrowed strength, her aloneness itself became the answer. The Devi Mahatmya was composed, by the common scholarly dating, in the fifth or sixth century CE, and across some fifteen centuries of reading its teaching about fear has stayed this small: the gods lost for a hundred years one by one, and in the moment they became one they became Devi. To gather scattered power into a single place is already to appear. Chudala’s side of it is gentler: the teaching her husband could not take from the queen he accepted from a Brahmin boy, and she let him have it in that form. To recognize the shakti already seated in every woman, in every house, in every breath: that is Devi’s own darshan, and the Narayani Stuti gives it in a single line.