Made of the root mantra, sworn to the kula

Mūlamantra is a technical term: the root mantra of a deity, the one from which the ancillary formulas of a rite are derived. For this school it is the fifteen-syllabled mantra whose three clusters have just been mapped onto her body. What the first name adds is the suffix -ātmaka, which the dictionary glosses as having or consisting of the nature of. She is not the deity of the mantra, not the meaning of the mantra, not what the mantra is about. The mantra is what she consists of.

The second name says the same thing in a coarser register, and the choice of word is worth noticing. Kalevara is the ordinary word for a bodily frame — the physical carcass rather than the honorific vapus or the neutral śarīra — and in later usage it drifts toward meaning a corpse. To say that her kalevara is the three clusters is to make the identification physical and slightly blunt. This is characteristic of the hymn. It has just spent two verses on an elegant tripartite scheme, and it closes the argument with a word you might use of a body being carried out.

With the third name the hymn crosses into the vocabulary that will dominate the next verse, and kula is a word whose difficulty is worth facing squarely rather than glossing over. Monier-Williams gives it first as a herd or flock or swarm — a collection of like things — then as a race, family, community, tribe, caste, and then as the house that such a group lives in. In tantric usage it carries all of that and more: the assemblage of powers that make up the manifest world, the lineage of teachers and initiates through which a practice is transmitted, and, in the Kashmirian traditions, Śakti herself as against Śiva. Read the third name with the first sense and it says she relishes the nectar of the totality. Read it with the second and it says she relishes what the lineage possesses. Both are current and neither excludes the other.

Kulāmṛta, the nectar of the kula, is where the tradition's internal disagreement becomes visible for the first time in this hymn. One reading takes it as the flow of amṛta in the crown of the head — the flood the stotra will reach in three verses at name 106, sudhāsārābhivarṣiṇī. The other takes it as the ritual substances of the left-hand rite, of which wine is one. Commentators have gone both ways, and a good many have gone both ways at once, which is not evasion so much as house style: this is a tradition that likes a word to be doing two jobs. It is worth registering the ambiguity here rather than resolving it, because the next verse will name both parties to the argument by name.

Saṃketa in the last name is a similarly double word. The dictionary's first sense is an agreement or stipulation, its second is an assignation, specifically with a lover, and its third is a preconcerted sign or signal. All three are alive in this compound. The kula has a doctrine held under agreement, it has passwords and gestures by which its members recognise one another, and its central rite is a meeting. And she is its pālinī, its guardian: the one who keeps the secret, which in this tradition means the one who decides who is told.

That last point is not abstract. The frame narrative of this very hymn turns on it. Agastya asked for the thousand names and Hayagrīva refused, and when he finally gave them he said he was doing so because Agastya had asked twice and asked in devotion — the text calls it rahasya, secret, in so many words. The fifteen syllables themselves are still not printed in most editions of the ritual manuals and are given at initiation. Calling the goddess the guardian of the compact is the hymn's acknowledgement, in the middle of a public recitation, that the recitation is not the whole of what there is.

The first thing to notice about this verse is its rhythm, because it has changed. For eleven verses running each line has been a single sixteen-syllable name, and the caesura at the eighth syllable has fallen inside a word every time. Here each line is two names of eight syllables, and the caesura falls exactly at the join. For the first time in a long while you may take a real breath in the middle of a line. Mūlamantrātmikā, breath, mūlakūṭatrayakalevarā; kulāmṛtaikarasikā, breath, kulasaṅketapālinī. After twelve verses of holding, the release is very noticeable, and it is the reason this verse and the next are the two most commonly used in archanā, where each name is turned into a dative and given a flower.

The four names also alliterate at their heads in pairs: mūla, mūla, kula, kula. Two long ū's and then two short u's, in the same position, four times. Let that pattern carry the verse.

Mūlamantrātmikā has one sandhi and one cluster. Mantra plus ātmikā merges an a and an ā into one long ā; and ātmikā contains tm, a dental t immediately followed by m, which must be released as two consonants rather than collapsed. Āt-mi-kā.

Kulāmṛtaikarasikā has two seams and both are worth reconstructing. Kula plus amṛta merges two a-sounds into a long ā; then amṛta plus eka strengthens an a and an e into ai — the vṛddhi merger for the third time in three verses, and by now it should be recognisable on sight. There is also the syllabic ṛ of amṛta in the middle, which stays short.

Kulasaṅketapālinī gives you ṅk, the guttural nasal made at exactly the place of the k that follows, so the tongue does not travel. The same cluster appeared in mukhapaṅkajā two verses back. And the final ṇ of pālinī is one of the few in this batch that is not retroflex: there is no r or ṛ or ṣ earlier in the word to trigger the rule, so it stays a plain dental n. Compare it directly with svarūpiṇī and dhāriṇī in the previous verse, where the rule did apply. Pā-li-nī against dhā-ri-ṇī: the difference is audible and it is the rule made visible.

One more small thing. Kalevarā is easy to rush because it has no clusters and no long vowels until the end. Give the l and the v their full value and let the final ā take its length; the line needs the weight.

On what to hold: the verse turns, in the middle, from what she is made of to who is allowed to know. Chanting it aloud in a room is a mild paradox, and the tradition is aware of the paradox — the hymn is public and the mantra it is built out of is not. The traditional counsel is not to resolve that but to notice it: you are saying, out loud, the name of the one who keeps the thing you are not saying.