Seven great-names, from mortal sin to the great delight

A run of names sharing an initial element is not an accident of composition. A litany of a thousand names has to be memorised, and the composers of these texts group names into alliterative blocks for the same reason that oral literature everywhere uses formula and repetition. This verse sits inside such a block: the great-names begin in the previous verse and continue for several more. It follows that the mahā- of any given name is doing whatever the block requires as much as whatever the name means, and mahā-, which is the form the adjective mahat takes at the head of a compound, is elastic enough to bear it — great, supreme, vast, or merely intensive, depending on what it is attached to. Reading seven consecutive great-names as seven precise doctrinal claims of equal weight will strain them.

That said, several of them are precise. Mahāpātakanāśinī rests on a technical term of the legal literature. Pātaka comes from √pat, to fall, with a causative sense: that which makes one fall. The mahāpātakas are a defined and short list, and the dharma texts are consistent about its membership — killing a brahmin, drinking liquor, theft of a brahmin's gold, intercourse with the wife of one's teacher, and keeping company with anyone who has done these things. These are the offences for which the same literature prescribes expiations that are frequently indistinguishable from execution. To say that a goddess destroys them, in four words and without qualification, is a substantial claim, and it is one that the devotional and tantric traditions made repeatedly against the ritual and legal establishment. The hymn does not argue for it. It simply lists it among her attributes and moves on, which is its own kind of argument.

Māyā is the word in this verse with the longest and most contested history. Its root is √mā, to measure or to fashion, and in the Ṛgveda it means the wonder-working craft of a god — Indra's māyā is his power to take shapes and produce effects, and it is admired rather than deplored. The pejorative sense, in which māyā is the cosmic illusion that must be seen through and dispelled, belongs mainly to Advaita Vedānta and to a much later stratum of thought. Śākta usage keeps closer to the old meaning. Mahāmāyā is a standing title of the goddess in the Devī Māhātmya, where the work's first episode turns on her: she holds Viṣṇu in the sleep of yoga while two demons threaten Brahmā, and must be praised into withdrawing before Viṣṇu can wake and fight. In that hymn she is called both the seed of the universe and the cause of liberation, and the two are not treated as different jobs.

Mahāsattvā, immediately after, complicates this. Sattva has at least three live senses. It is being or existence, formed from sat; it is the first of the three strands of primal matter in Sāṃkhya, the clear and buoyant one as against activity and inertia; and it is spirit or courage, which is why a mahāsattva in ordinary Sanskrit is a great-hearted person or simply a large creature. All three are defensible here and the commentators take it in more than one way. If the Sāṃkhya sense is pressed, the name sits oddly beside mahāmāyā, since māyā in that system comprises all three strands and singling out one would restrict her; most readings therefore take sattva in the wider sense of being or of strength. It is worth adding that editions differ in spelling the word with a doubled or a single t, and the ritual form given for this name in many books has the single t.

Śakti is from √śak, to be able, and it is the pivot of the whole theology. The claim is not that she is powerful but that ability as such is hers, so that the transcendent principle is inert without her — a point the Saundaryalaharī makes in its opening verse with a pun that cannot be reproduced in English, since śiva joined to śakti becomes śakta, able. Rati is from √ram, to rest in or to take pleasure in, and it means delight, the enjoyment of something loved, and specifically sexual pleasure; Rati is also the proper name of Kāma's wife, who in the mythology is widowed when Śiva burns her husband and later has him restored. Ending the verse on this word, four names after the destruction of mortal sin, is the most characteristic thing the verse does. The tradition that produced this hymn declined to treat enjoyment and liberation as competitors, and here it declines within a single line.

This is the most dangerous verse in the whole stretch for anyone reciting from memory. Seven names, all beginning with the identical two syllables, and if you drop one nothing will sound wrong. The line will simply be short, and the ear, hearing mahā over and over, will not report it. The only reliable defence is to fix the order by sense rather than sound. The first three are about you and her: her form, her worship, your sins. The last four are two pairs: appearance and being, then capacity and enjoyment. Seven names, three plus two plus two.

The metre helps once you know it. The first line is four, four, eight — the long name is third and occupies the whole second quarter by itself. The second line is four fours, evenly spaced, with the break falling after mahāsattvā. Both quarters and both half-lines therefore end cleanly at a name boundary, so unlike the previous verse there is no risk of breathing in the middle of a word.

The verse contains fourteen instances of mahā and the metre depends on all of them being said correctly. The two vowels are of different length: a short a, then an ā held twice as long. Under speed the natural tendency is to level them into two equal short syllables, and a line of four names then loses four morae and starts to sound like prose. If you are going to drill one thing in this verse, drill that inequality.

Mahāsattvā carries the hardest cluster: a doubled dental t followed by v. A geminate consonant in Sanskrit is genuinely held, so the closure lasts about twice as long as a single t before it releases into the v — ma-hā-sat-tvā, with an audible stop in the middle. Mahāpūjyā has jy, voiced palatal j into the palatal glide y, both made at the same place, so the tongue does not move between them. The ś of mahāśaktiḥ and of nāśinī is the palatal sibilant, made well forward with the blade of the tongue near the hard palate, and it should be clearly distinguishable from the retroflex ṣ that appears elsewhere in the hymn.

The last two names are joined by the same sandhi that closed the previous verse. Mahāśaktiḥ ends in visarga, which becomes r before the voiced m of mahāratiḥ, giving mahāśaktir mahāratiḥ. That r belongs to neither name, and when the verse is used for archanā it disappears: mahāśaktyai namaḥ, mahāratyai namaḥ. The remaining forms are mahārūpāyai, mahāpūjyāyai, mahāpātakanāśinyai, mahāmāyāyai and mahāsatvāyai — four ā-stems in -āyai, one ī-stem in -inyai, two i-stems in -tyai. Almost the full range of the feminine dative in a single verse.

On what the verse asks, two things are worth saying plainly. The third name is not a general assurance about wrongdoing; it names a specific and very short list of crimes for which the surrounding legal culture prescribed ruinous penance, and reciting it lightly empties it. And the last name is not a metaphor waiting to be decoded. A reciter who has absorbed the idea that seriousness means renunciation will want to spiritualise rati into something safer. The verse puts it in the same breath as mortal sin and great power and leaves it there.