All powers, all mantras

It is worth stopping to see the architecture, because this verse is the far side of it. From nirādhārā to niratyayā the hymn removed fifty-six things. From sarvajñā in the last verse to the end of the mahā- block twenty verses further on, it adds. The two movements are the standard pair in Indian theology as in every other apophatic tradition, and they are not alternatives: the negative names deny that she is any particular thing, and the sarva names deny that she is other than any particular thing. Between them nothing is left over. The Chāndogya's formula for the same manoeuvre is three words long — all this is indeed brahman — and it is followed by the instruction to meditate on it in tranquillity.

Sarvaśaktimayī picks up where the last verse left off. The Śvetāśvatara stanza behind samānādhikavarjitā had continued by calling the supreme power manifold and natural to him, and this name completes the thought in the tradition's own vocabulary. The suffix is doing precise work. Maya, at the end of a compound, means made of: annamaya, made of food; ānandamaya, made of bliss. She does not wield the powers; she is their substance. In a system where śakti is a technical term for the active aspect of the absolute, saying that she is made of all śaktis is close to a definition.

Sarvamaṅgalā is the most publicly familiar name in the verse and the one with the widest life outside this text. Maṅgala is the auspicious in the widest sense, covering good omens, blessings, amulets, festivals and the customary opening prayer of any Sanskrit work. The most recited verse of the Devī Māhātmya addresses the goddess as the auspiciousness of all that is auspicious, and that verse is said daily in more households than the whole of this stotra. When the Vāgdevatās put sarvamaṅgalā here they are naming her with a word already in every mouth.

Sarveśvarī is a reversal and the hymn means it as one. At name one hundred and fifty-five, forty-seven names ago, she was nirīśvarā, having no lord. Here she is the lord of all. The two names are not in different sections of a long text; they are within the same continuous movement, and they answer each other exactly. The Devī Māhātmya had already coined the superlative form when it said that the very goddess who is the cause of bondage in the world is the sovereign of all sovereigns, and this hymn will go one better at the end of the next batch with mahāyogeśvareśvarī.

Sadgatipradā is the quietest of the six and the most practical. Gati is a going, a course, and in the funerary vocabulary it is where the dead go; sadgati is the good destination, and the phrase is what one prays for on behalf of someone who has died. Sat also means real, so the compound can be heard as the going to what is. Placed among the great cosmic names, it is the one that a household would actually use.

Sarvamantrasvarūpiṇī needs its doctrine spelled out. In tantric thought the alphabet is not a notation but a substance. The fifty letters of Sanskrit are the mātṛkās, the little mothers, and in mātṛkānyāsa they are placed one by one on the body of the practitioner; the goddess is identified with the whole set. From that it follows directly that any mantra whatever, being made of those letters, is made of her — which is what this name says, and why it can say every mantra and not merely her own. Śrīvidyā has a narrower version of the same claim, that the fifteen-syllabled vidyā is the root of which other mantras are branches, and the frame narrative of this very stotra insists that the Śrīcakra, the mantra and the goddess are one thing under three descriptions. Two verses from now the hymn will state it more baldly still, calling her simply mahāmantrā, and the verse after that will add the yantra and the tantra. This name is where that sequence begins.

Six names beginning with the same two syllables, and the danger is a drone. The information is in what follows sarva, so give the second element of each compound its weight: -śaktimayī, -maṅgalā, -eśvarī, -mayī, -mantrasvarūpiṇī. The one name that does not begin with sarva, sadgatipradā, is in the middle of the first line and is the place to breathe mentally even though the metre does not stop there.

The first line is unusual in that both quarter boundaries fall inside names. Sarvaśaktimayī is six syllables, sarvamaṅgalā is five, sadgatipradā is five: six and five make eleven, so the eighth syllable lands in the middle of sarvamaṅgalā. As in the previous verse, do not break there. Take the line whole.

Sarveśvarī contains a sandhi that the Devanagari hides completely. The name is sarva plus īśvarī, and a final a meeting an initial ī gives a single e. What you see is सर्वेश्वरी and what is inside it is two words. The same fusion will produce mahāyogeśvareśvarī at the end of this batch, twice over in one word. Learning to see the e as a seam is one of the most useful habits a reader of this hymn can acquire.

Sadgatipradā hides a different one. The first element is sat, real or good, ending in an unvoiced dental t; before the voiced g of gati that t has been voiced to d. So sat plus gati gives sadgati, and the meaning of the name is only visible once the d is read back as a t. This is the same rule that turned cit into cid in cidagnikuṇḍasambhūtā in the very first verse of the stotra.

Sarvamantrasvarūpiṇī is the mouthful and it has three separate difficulties. The cluster ntr, dental nasal into dental stop into r. Then sv, a dental sibilant into the labiodental v, immediately after it. Then the retroflex ṇ of -rūpiṇī, pulled back by the r earlier in the word. Break it as sar-va-man-tra-sva-rū-pi-ṇī, eight syllables filling the last quarter, and rebuild it slowly. The join between -mantra- and -sva- is where nearly everyone stumbles.

Two sibilant contrasts to keep clean. Sarvaśaktimayī has the dental s of sarva and then the palatal ś of śakti, two syllables apart. Sarvamantrasvarūpiṇī has three dental s sounds and no palatal at all. The verse has no retroflex ṣ anywhere, which after the last eight verses is a relief and also a trap, since the tongue has got used to curling back.

Vowel lengths: maṅgalā has three short syllables and a long one; the ṅ before g is a guttural nasal made where the g is made. Mayī is short then long. Sarvamayī and sarvaśaktimayī end identically and both endings are long.

For what to hold: the last name is the instruction, and it is unusually specific. If every mantra is her own form, then the syllables being said are not a message addressed to somebody. The traditional way of putting this is that in japa the reciter, the recitation and the deity are not three, and the Bhāvana Upaniṣad makes the same point about the diagram and the body. Chanting this verse slowly with attention on the sound itself rather than on the meaning is the practice the name describes.