Parvati

Sati First

The Shiva Purana tells Sati before it tells Parvati, and in the chapter of the birth it is Narada who tells Himavan why: “In an earlier age this very girl was Sati, the daughter of Daksha, the beloved wife of Rudra.” In the Sati khanda Shiva himself appears before the girl at the end of her year of vows and presses her to ask a boon, and all she manages is, “Lord, grant me a boon that cannot be turned aside, the boon I want, or the bridegroom I want.” In the Dandaka forest she goes to test Rama in Sita’s own shape, is recognized at once, and asks him her last doubt, “How have you come to be worthy of worship even to Lord Shiva?” She comes back to find that her husband has set her aside in his mind. Then the sacrifice to which her father does not invite her husband, the hall where no share has been laid for Shambhu, and the breath drawn into the navel by yoga; the text says that no flame reached her from outside, that the fire rose within her own body in the hour she chose. The Parvati khanda carries that same light down into the house of the Himalaya.

A Line on the Palm

One day, moved by Shiva‘s will, Narada comes to the house, looks at Kali’s hand, and tells her parents the thing no parents want to hear: “She will find a husband who is a yogi, naked as the sky, without attributes and without desire; one who has neither mother nor father; who keeps no thought of honor or of dishonor, and who wears forever the garb of the inauspicious.” Her parents are shaken, and within herself the daughter blooms, because she alone has followed the description to its end and knows whom it names. “The word of Narada can never prove false,” she thinks, and from that moment her heart settles on the feet of Shiva. Mena goes to teach the girl austerity, looks at those tender limbs, and cannot get a word out; it is the child who speaks, and tells her mother of a dream in the last watch of the night, in which a kind ascetic Brahmin instructed her to perform penance for the pleasure of Shiva.

Meanwhile Shambhu, who has spent countless years in samadhi grieving for Sati, comes with Nandi and a few quiet attendants to the crossing called Gangavatarana on the Himalaya, where the Ganga first touched the earth, when Parvati is eight years old. Himavan puts his daughter forward to serve him; the yogi looks once at the girl, shuts his eyes, and answers in the manner of ascetics everywhere, that a young woman is the very thing that breaks an ascetic’s penance, “We are a yogi, forever untouched by maya; what use have we for a woman?” The father is frightened into silence, and then the girl of eight bows and says what the text itself calls her Sankhya word: “Yogin, you have come to this mountain as an ascetic, and yet what have you said?” “Without Prakriti, how could even Maheshvara in the form of the linga exist?” Shiva laughs that by the finest austerity he destroys Prakriti herself, and Kali laughs within and asks, “Yogin, this that you have just spoken, is that speech itself not Prakriti?” And then the sentence that turns the argument: “We are Prakriti and you are Purusha; it is by our grace alone that you are held to be endowed with attributes and with form, and without us you have no attribute and no power to do anything at all.” Standing in the view of Vedanta, Shiva gives her leave to serve him each day, and the great yogi, watching her come every day, resolves within himself, “When this Kali performs such austerity and such vows that not a seed of pride remains in them, only then shall I take her hand.”

Aparna

The gods, tormented by Tarakasura, send Kama against the yogi she serves, and the fire of the third eye turns the god of love to ash. She was standing a few steps away with flowers in her hands, and her whole body went white, as though no blood were left in it, and she took her companions and went back to her father’s palace. Narada teaches her the five-syllable mantra of Shiva. Mena pleads against it, and as she pleads the two syllables slip from her, u, ma, do not go, and from that day the name Uma is hers. With a girdle of munja grass at her waist she walks toward the very peak where Kama burned. Through summer she sits ringed by four fires with the sun for the fifth, through the rains she lets the sky drench her on bare rock, through winter she stands in icy water; the first year passes on fruit, the second on leaves, and then she gives up even the leaf, parna, and the gods name her Aparna. On one foot, her thought fixed on Maheshvara, three thousand years go by, and around her hermitage the lion and the cow forget their natures. When her family comes to beg her home, she answers: “The one who in his anger burned Kama to ash, who set fire even to the forest of this mountain, that Mahadeva has renounced the world, and he is tender toward his devotees as well. By austerity alone I will call him here, and I will surely win his favor.” When they are gone her penance grows fiercer than before. The three worlds begin to burn with it, and Vishnu leads the gods to the door of the god who had burned Kama, to ask him to take Girija’s hand with his own right hand.

Shiva Slandered, and Answered

In the story of the test the seven sages come first, under orders to speak only deceit, and they do: “Once before he married the virtuous Sati, yet within a few days he could not sustain the union and cast her off,” so turn back, and let us marry you to Vishnu. The mother of the worlds laughs and gives them the sentence on which the whole khanda turns: “If Shiva will not marry me, I will remain unwed forever, and I will never choose another. Though the sun should rise in the west, though Meru should shift from its place, though fire should take on coolness and the lotus bloom on bare stone, even then my resolve cannot break. This I say in truth.” Then Shiva himself comes as an aged Brahmin with matted locks and asks the girl on the altar who she is. She tells him everything: “In an earlier birth I was Sati, daughter of the Prajapati Daksha; one day my father spoke ill of my husband, and in anger I gave up my body through yoga.” Now she will enter the fire, and “wherever I am born, in that life too I will choose him alone as my husband.” She steps into the flames before the old man’s eyes, and by the power of her penance the fire turns as cool as sandal paste on her skin. Then the Brahmin draws Shiva’s own portrait of Shiva: ash over the whole body, a tiger’s hide, a skull for a begging bowl, one old bull for a mount, ghosts for company, “Of the qualities a bride looks for, he possesses not a single one.” Parvati’s anger rises. “You wicked man, you claimed to know Shankara, yet surely you have never known that eternal Shiva.” And then, “Say of Rudra whatever you will; that ever-changeless Shiva is still the god I most desire.” The instant she lifts her foot to go elsewhere, Shiva stands before her in his own form and takes her hand. “Beloved, where would you go, leaving me behind? Never again will I forsake you.” And the line that names the whole khanda: “Goddess, from this day I am your servant, bought at the price of your austerities, bought by your beauty; without you a single moment passes like an age.”

Come as a Suitor

Having won Mahadeva by the sheer force of austerity, she will not simply take his hand and set off for Kailasa. She folds her palms. “My lord, go as a suitor to the house of my father Himavan, and ask for me by the proper rite. Only then will this marriage be honored throughout the world.” The procession comes down from Kailasa with gods in the middle and ghosts at the edges. Up in her mansion Mena asks Narada to point out the bridegroom, and the gods pass one by one until Narada’s finger goes to the figure among the terrifying hosts, five faces, ten arms, a skull in one hand, serpents over every limb. Mena falls like a creeper cut from its root, and when she comes to herself she turns on her daughter: “Oh, this foolish girl has given gold and bought glass, has let a swan fly free and raised a crow in its cage, has passed over the sun and caught a firefly.” Parvati answers her calmly. “Mother, this Rudra is the cause of all that comes into being; he is God himself, and there is none greater than he. Vishnu and Brahma serve him. In mind, in word, and in deed I have chosen Hara alone, and now I will choose no other bridegroom. Do as you wish.” Mena yields only when Shiva reveals his supremely beautiful form. When Himavan asks the groom’s lineage, Narada strikes his vina and says that Shiva has no lineage, no family and no name, and the mountain king places Shivaa’s hand in Shiva’s; her brother Mainaka pours parched grain into her cupped hands. At the farewell Mena weeps and tells the god what kind of girl she is giving him: “The moment she hears talk of devotion to you, her eyes fill with tears, and if she hears you slighted she falls so silent it is as though she has died.”

The Mother on Kailasa

In the Kumara khanda the gods come up the slopes with a boy who has six faces, and Parvati’s heart cannot hold the love that rises in it; she kisses the Kumara, gives him the highest sovereignty, and makes him deathless besides. Her second son she makes herself. One day, while she is bathing, Sadashiva walks straight into the inner rooms, scolding Nandi as he comes, and that hour settles it. From the paste of her own body she shapes a living being and gives him his one instruction: “From today you are my doorkeeper. Without my leave, let no one force his way and set foot inside my house, no matter where he comes from, no matter who he is.” Keeping that command to the end, the boy stops the lord of the universe at the door and loses his head to the trident. When the news reaches her, Parvati fills with rage: either she destroys every one of them, she says, or she drowns the worlds, and she brings forth a host of shaktis and orders a deluge of destruction without a second thought. The gods and sages come with folded hands, and at last she names her price. “If my son comes back to life and is held worthy of worship among you all, then there will be no destruction. The day you grant him the office of chief over all, that day peace will come to the worlds; short of that, there will be no relief.” The head of the first creature met in the north is joined to the boy, and his mother presses him to her breast and gives him his boon: “Son, this time you have suffered greatly, yet now you are fulfilled, now you are blessed. From today your worship will come first among all the gods, and you will never have to know sorrow.” In the Yuddha khanda, on Mount Mandara, the same Girija steals up behind Shankara in play and lays her two hands over his eyes; darkness takes the three worlds for a moment, and out of the sweat of his brow comes a blind and misshapen creature. And in the story of the circling, when Kartikeya comes back from going around the earth to find Ganesha already married and leaves for Mount Krauncha in his grief, Uma asks her lord humbly to take her along and let her go there too; Shankara settles on that mountain in a portion of himself as Mallikarjuna, and on the day of the full moon Parvati still goes to see her son.

The Parvati of Other Texts

The Devi Bhagavata tells the same birth in its own way. In the seventh skandha Vyasa explains to Janamejaya that Daksha’s malice came from a garland Durvasa carried from the goddess’s own neck; Sati burns the body born of Daksha with the fire of yoga, and that same radiance appears again upon the Himalaya, and between the two comes Shiva lifting the burning body onto his shoulder and wandering from land to land, Vishnu’s arrows cutting it limb from limb, and a pitha rising wherever a limb falls, one hundred and eight by the text’s own count. In the eleventh skandha she stands before gods drunk on a victory as a yaksha, and after a hundred thousand years of Indra’s japa she appears to him at midday on the ninth of Chaitra as Uma Haimavati and tells the gods the truth about their triumph: “All of you won every victory by my grace alone. I make you dance like puppets.” Valmiki’s Bala Kanda knows her as the younger of Himavan’s two daughters, the Ganga and Uma; when the gods, afraid of the child such a pair would make, interrupt the married pleasure of the two, Uma turns on them with bloodshot eyes: “I joined my husband because I wanted a son, and you have kept me from it. From this day you will beget no children through your own wives. Let your wives stay barren.” Then she curses the earth as well. The Anushasana Parva of the Mahabharata has Narada tell Krishna the same covering of the eyes, and there the third eye opens in that very moment like a second sun and begins to burn Himavat itself; Uma cannot bear to see her father consumed, and Shiva restores the mountain and explains, “You covered my eyes without thinking what you did, and in that moment the universe was left without light.” When he asks her in turn for the duties of women, she gives them and adds one line of her own: “Maheshvara, I do not want heaven itself if you are not content with me.” And in the sixth skandha of the Bhagavata, Chitraketu flies over an assembly of sages, sees Shankara holding Parvati on his lap, and laughs aloud at the guru of the worlds; Shankara smiles and holds his peace, and Parvati does not hold hers. “So, you of the crooked mind, go. Take your birth in the womb of the demons. That way, my child, you will never again find the power to wrong someone established in spiritual knowledge.”

Her Path

The Birth of Parvati · Midnight in Chaitra, the goddess before Mena, and a line on the palm that is the writing of Brahma.

The Burning of Kamadeva · The fire of the third eye, and a girl a few steps away whose body goes white.

Parvati’s Austerity · A girdle of munja grass, five fires, and a hermitage where the lion and the cow forget their natures.

The Marriage of Shiva and Parvati · A bridegroom who came as a suitor, Mena’s fear, and parched grain poured by a brother into a sister’s hands.

The Circling of Ganesha and Kartikeya · Two sons in a contest, seven circles around their parents, and a mother’s full-moon journey to Krauncha.

What She Earns

The Parvati of the Shiva Purana gets nothing she wants as a gift; everything is earned in austerity. Narada‘s line on her palm names the bridegroom and delivers no husband; the Sankhya argument of an eight-year-old wins her leave to serve and no hand in marriage; Kama’s arrow, which the text admits found its mark, drives the yogi away from her. What comes to her comes after she has become Aparna, and even then only when she has told seven sages she will stay unwed forever and has risen to walk away from an old Brahmin. That is the hinge of the figure: the one thing she will not do for the god she wants is listen to him slandered, and on that refusal her hand is taken. The same woman shapes a son from her own body, orders the worlds drowned over his severed head, and calls it off for a single condition, his place among the gods. Valmiki’s Uma curses the gods and the Bhagavata’s Parvati curses Chitraketu; in every text her anger rises at the same point, where something that is hers is called small. The goddess who cried as an infant in Mena’s arms buys her own divinity back at the price of penance, and that is why the Shiva of this Purana calls himself a servant bought by her austerities.