Mistress of the thunderbolt, mother of the adepts

Vajra is the hard thing: the diamond, and Indra's weapon, which the Purāṇic accounts say was forged from the spine of the sage Dadhīci after he gave up his body so that the gods would have something to fight with. Both senses are alive in the name. As adamant it is what cannot be cut and cuts everything else; as a weapon it is the instrument of a decisive strike. Vajreśvarī is a tatpuruṣa, the sovereign of the vajra, which claims the weapon as hers rather than Indra's. She is also a person in her own right in this school: Mahāvajreśvarī is one of the sixteen nityās, the goddesses correlated with the sixteen lunar days of the bright fortnight, who surround the central deity in the Śrīcakra liturgy and whose worship on their proper days is a standing element of the practice. The hymn will name several of the nityās in passing, and readers who meet them here first should know that they are not epithets but distinct figures with their own mantras.

Vāmadeva is the second of the five faces of Śiva — Sadyojāta, Vāmadeva, Aghora, Tatpuruṣa, Īśāna — a scheme that organises much of Śaiva iconography and liturgy, with each face turned to a direction and governing a set of tattvas. Vāmadevī is the goddess who corresponds to that face. The adjective vāma is genuinely double in Sanskrit: it means lovely, dear, pleasing, and it also means left, the left hand and the left side. Both meanings matter here. The gracious reading gives the ordinary sense of the epithet; the left-hand reading connects it to vāmācāra, the class of tantric practice that uses what orthodox ritual excludes. Commentators also like to derive vāmā from the root vam, to emit or pour forth, and so read it as the goddess in her aspect of emitting the world — a play rather than a philology, but a play the tradition takes seriously, since Vāmā is elsewhere the name of the emissive power in a triad with Jyeṣṭhā and Raudrī.

The third name uses two ordinary words with precise senses. Vayas is age, any stretch of life; avasthā is a state or stage. Their combination names the sequence a body passes through — childhood, youth, maturity, decline — and vivarjitā, from vi-vṛj, means cut off from, destitute of. The claim is not that she is young but that the succession does not apply to her, and this bears on how the hymn describes her elsewhere. It has already presented her as a girl in the first flush of youth and will do so again, and it will call her the eternal sixteen-year-old. This name is what keeps those descriptions from being biography: the youth is not a stage she is passing through. Behind the phrasing lies the old grammarians' analysis of what it is to be a thing in time — Yāska's Nirukta reports a list of six transformations that everything undergoes, coming into being, existing, growing, altering, wasting and perishing — and the name places her outside all of it.

The three siddha names in the second line work on one word. Siddha is the past participle of sidh, to succeed or be accomplished, and it does triple duty: a thing brought to completion, a person who has attained, and a class of semi-divine beings who move through the sky. Siddhi, the corresponding noun, names the eight classical powers — becoming minute, becoming vast, becoming weightless, reaching anywhere, and the rest — which yoga literature treats with a mixture of respect and suspicion. Siddheśvarī and siddhamātā together say something careful about these: she is at once the ruler the adepts answer to and the source they came from, so their powers are neither their own achievement nor a threat to her.

Siddhavidyā is the technical one. Vidyā in tantric usage means a mantra, specifically the mantra-body of a goddess, and manuals of mantra practice sort mantras by their relation to a particular practitioner, examining whether a given formula will be accomplished, difficult, readily accomplished or hostile for him before he takes it up. To call her siddhavidyā is to say that her vidyā stands outside that examination: it is already accomplished, and it works from the day it is received. The manuals of this school generally do exempt the fifteen-syllabled vidyā from the preliminary tests, though the reasons given for the exemption differ from text to text.

The verse is built on two blocks of alliteration, and hearing them is the whole of learning it. The first line runs on v: vajreśvarī, vāmadevī, vayo, avasthā, vivarjitā — six labiodental v-sounds in eight words' worth of syllables. The second line runs on s: siddheśvarī, siddhavidyā, siddhamātā, and then yaśasvinī, which keeps the sibilant but changes it. Say the first line with the lower lip lightly at the upper teeth and the second with the tongue-tip at the teeth, and the two halves will hold their shapes apart.

The Sanskrit v is not the English v and not the English w. It is made with the lip near the teeth but without the hard buzz of English v, closer to the sound at the start of the word in a soft, unemphatic reading. Overdo it and the line grinds; underdo it and vajreśvarī collapses into wajreshwari.

Two clusters need attention. In vajreśvarī the jre is j followed by r followed by the vowel e — the palatal j released before the r begins, not a single sound as in English jr. In siddheśvarī and its two neighbours the ddha is a geminate: a dental d held, then released as the aspirated dh. English has no long consonants inside words and will want to give you a single d. The remedy is to say the syllable slowly as sid-dha with a real pause on the closure, then speed it up without losing the length. Both siddhavidyā and siddhamātā repeat the same cluster, so the drill pays three times.

The avagraha in vayo'vasthāvivarjitā marks an a that has been swallowed. The underlying words are vayas and avasthā; the s of vayas becomes o before a voiced sound, and the initial a of avasthā is then absorbed. In recitation you do not pronounce anything at the mark — you simply run vayo straight into vasthā. Learners who see the sign and insert a glottal stop break the word in half.

The first line is unusual in that a single name takes up nine syllables. Do not hurry it to make up time. The anuṣṭubh break falls after the sixteenth syllable, at the end of vivarjitā, and that is the one place to breathe.

For recitation as archanā, where each name is turned into the dative and followed by namaḥ, this verse contains a trap worth knowing in advance. The ī-stems take -yai: vajreśvaryai, siddheśvaryai, yaśasvinyai. The ā-stems take -yai as well, through a different route: vāmadevyai, siddhavidyāyai, vayo'vasthāvivarjitāyai. But siddhamātā is not an ā-stem at all. It ends in the kinship word mātṛ, and its dative is siddhamātre. The eye sees a long ā at the end of the nominative and expects the same ending as its neighbours; the ear of anyone who knows the language does not. It is the single most commonly mispronounced dative in this stretch of the archanā.

As for what the verse asks: it sets a weapon, a face of Śiva, and a denial of ageing beside three names about spiritual attainment, and then ends on fame. Read in order, the sequence subordinates the powers to their source. Whatever is accomplished in the practice was hers first.