Fortune, the full moon, and a goddess greedy for her lover

Ramā is Lakṣmī's name, and it is being used here without apology or explanation. Śākta hymns absorb rather than argue: the goddess who is Lalitā is also the goddess of good fortune, and a few hundred names later the same text will hand her Sarasvatī's functions too. What makes the annexation graceful is that ramā earns its place in the alliteration honestly, since it comes from √ram, to delight or take pleasure, the same root as ramyā and ramaṇī in the verse before and rāmā and ramaṇa in this one. Six of the sixteen names in this pair of verses are built on that one root. The Śrī Sūkta, the old Vedic appendix-hymn that is still the standard liturgy for Lakṣmī, describes her as moon-like and golden, which is exactly the pairing this verse makes in its first two names.

Rākā is not a general word for fullness. The dictionary's first sense is a goddess: the deity who presides over the actual day of the full moon, with her sister Anumati presiding over the day before it. She is invoked by name in the Ṛgveda. So rākendu is not simply the full moon, it is the moon of the night that has a goddess of its own, and the compound quietly puts one goddess inside another. It is also a correction of scale. Verse 5 of this stotra gave her the moon of the eighth night, exactly half a disc, for a forehead. Sixty-seven verses later the disc has filled.

The two Rati names are grounded in the narrative this hymn belongs to, and the connection is specific. In the Lalitopākhyāna, the section of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa that carries this stotra, Bhaṇḍāsura — the demon Lalitā takes form in order to destroy — is made from the ashes of Kāma after Śiva burns him. When Bhaṇḍa has been destroyed, the gods bring Rati, widowed by the same fire that eventually produced the demon, and ask Lalitā to give her husband back. She does. The chain is worth holding in mind: the god of love is burnt, his ashes become the enemy, the goddess destroys the enemy, and then she restores the god of love to the wife who lost him. Ratipriyā, the pleasure of love is dear to her, is not a decorative compliment in that story. It is what she actually did.

Rakṣākarī and rākṣasaghnī are the same root turned in opposite directions, and this is visible in the words rather than merely available to a commentator. Rakṣā is protection, from √rakṣ, to guard. Rakṣas, from which rākṣasa is formed, is glossed by the dictionary as anything to be guarded against or warded off — harm, injury — before it means a demon at all. So the pair says: she is the guarding, and she is the destruction of the thing one guards against. Sanskrit gets to make that argument in two words because the vocabulary of protection and the vocabulary of monsters share an origin, and the purāṇic literature has an old story that turns on exactly this, deriving one class of beings from the cry rakṣāma, let us guard, at the moment of their creation.

Ramaṇalampaṭā is the name that stops readers. Lampaṭa is not a polite word. The dictionary gives covetous, greedy, lustful, addicted to, and as a noun a libertine or a lecher; it is the word for someone whose appetite is a character flaw. Applied to the supreme goddess, in the accusative of her own consort, it is deliberate. The Śrīvidyā reading is that the eagerness is metaphysical rather than merely amorous: Śiva without Śakti cannot so much as stir, and Śakti's inclination toward him is the tension that holds the manifest world in being, so a word for insatiability is exactly right and any milder word would be false. But it is worth noticing the plain fact first, before the metaphysics arrives. This hymn is at ease with a language for the divine that a Vaiṣṇava thousand-name hymn would not use, and it is at ease with it in the same verse in which the goddess kills demons.

The verse's difficulty is not in any single hard cluster but in vowel length, and it is unforgiving. Ramā, the second name, is short-long. Rāmā, seven names later, is long-long. They are different words: ramā is Lakṣmī, rāmā is simply a beautiful woman. Between them sit rāka- with a long ā, rati- with a short a twice, rakṣā- with a short a and a long ā, and rākṣasa- with a long ā and a short a. Take the eight names slowly in a row and mark each vowel long or short before you chant the verse at speed; nothing else in these fifteen verses depends so completely on getting quantity right.

Rākṣasaghnī has the hardest consonant sequence. The kṣ is k followed by the retroflex ṣ — never an English x — and then ghn is an aspirated voiced g running straight into n, which English never asks a mouth to do. Break it as rāk-ṣa-sagh-nī and let the breath of the gh carry into the n rather than stopping between them. The -ghnī ending is a real feminine agent noun from √han, to strike or kill, with the h and n changing places in the way that root always does when it forms compounds; you have already seen the same root in the meditation verses and will see it again in tamopahā at name 361.

Rākenduvadanā hides a sandhi that the Devanagari shows plainly once you look for it. Rākā plus indu, moon, gives rākendu: a final ā and an initial i have merged into a single e, written with the stroke े over क. This is the same fusion that produced manorūpekṣu in the third verse. If you cannot hear a word-boundary there it is because there is not one any more.

Two smaller points of articulation. In lampaṭā the m assimilates to the labial p that follows — the lips are already closed for the nasal and stay closed — and the ṭa is retroflex, made with the tongue-tip curled back, not the dental t. In ratirūpā and ratipriyā the two names are rhythmically identical apart from the pr cluster, so they should sound like a matched pair; reciters often run them together, and the metre allows it.

The caesura falls after rākenduvadanā in the first line and after rākṣasaghnī in the second, which means the line break lands exactly on the verse's change of subject, from beauty to violence and back. If you take a light breath at those two points you are also marking the argument.

For contemplation: this is a good verse on which to stop resisting the hymn's range. Nothing in it is arranged to make the goddess consistent by the standards of ordinary decorum. Fortune, the full moon, erotic pleasure, armed protection, killing, and unembarrassed desire are given eight names and one letter, and the text plainly considers them one subject. Chanting it as though the middle two names belonged to a different deity from the last one is a way of not hearing it.