Kālarātri's host, buttered rice, and the seal of identity

Kālarātri is the night at the end of time. Kāla is time in its consuming aspect, the word behind Kālī, and rātri is night; together they name the darkness that falls when a world-period is finished. She is a figure in her own right — the seventh of the nine forms of Durgā worshipped through the nine nights of the autumn festival, and named in the Purāṇic hymns to the goddess among the terrible nights that are her aspects. Her appearance at the head of the heart-wheel retinue is not softened by anything. The heart lotus in this hymn has already been given a dark two-faced goddess with tusks, and the powers surrounding her are led by the night of dissolution.

The word for the retinue is worth attention. Ogha means a flood, a torrent, a rushing mass of water, and by extension any overwhelming multitude. The throat-wheel powers were saṃvṛtā, enclosed around her; these are an ogha, poured around her. The term also has a specific technical life in this school, where the lineage of teachers is divided into three streams — the divine, the perfected and the human — each called an ogha, so that a practitioner receives the teaching as something flowing rather than as something handed over. Whether or not that resonance is intended here, it establishes the word as a term for a transmitted current rather than a static assembly.

Odana is boiled rice, the plainest possible food, and snigdha means oily, unctuous, glossy — rice with ghee poured over it. The choice of adjective repays a moment. Snigdha is built on the same root as sneha, and sneha in Sanskrit means both grease and affection: what makes a thing oily and what makes a person fond are the same word, on the reasoning that both stick. Classical poetry uses snigdha of a tender glance as readily as of a well-oiled surface. At the wheel of the heart, the food that is offered is the oily one, and the pun is unlikely to be accidental in a text this careful about its vocabulary.

Vīra is the hero, and in tantric usage it is a technical grade. Kaula literature ranks practitioners as paśu, the conventionally bound; vīra, the one fit for practices that break convention; and divya, the one for whom the categories no longer apply. The throat-wheel verse gave the goddess as terror to the world of the paśu. Here she gives boons to the mahāvīrendra, and the two names should be read as a pair. The same approach that frightens the bound is a gift to the one prepared for it, and nothing in the goddess has changed between the two descriptions.

The grammar of mahāvīrendra is a common Sanskrit idiom that catches beginners. Indra at the end of a compound has nothing to do with the Vedic god; it simply means the chief or the best of whatever precedes it, as in narendra, chief of men, for a king. The compound therefore says the foremost among the great heroes, in the singular, not a hero named Indra.

The closing name is the formula that will now be repeated at every remaining wheel: the yoginī's name, plus ambā, mother, plus svarūpiṇī, having the essential form of. Svarūpa is sva, own, and rūpa, form — a thing's own form as distinct from any appearance it takes on. To say that the central goddess is the svarūpiṇī of Rākiṇī is to deny that Rākiṇī is a lesser deity delegated to a station in the body.

One further pattern is worth seeing, since the section makes no comment on it. The seven yoginīs of this scheme are Ḍākinī, Rākiṇī, Lākinī, Kākinī, Sākinī, Hākinī and Yākinī. They differ from one another only in the opening consonant. This is not a list of separately attested goddesses collected from different sources; it is a set generated from a single template by running through a series of sounds, which is exactly the procedure the tradition uses to generate mantras. The names are constructed the way the wheels themselves are constructed, and the sixth and seventh of them — beginning with h and y — belong to the same set of sounds used elsewhere in the school's seed-syllables.

The first line contains the hardest single word in this part of the hymn, and it is hard for a reason that can be fixed: kālarātryādiśaktyaughavṛtā is not one thing but five, and once the seams are visible the word says itself. The pieces are kālarātri, ādi, śakti, ogha, vṛtā. Two of the joins alter vowels. Kālarātri ends in short i before the ā of ādi, and an i before a dissimilar vowel becomes the glide y, giving rātryā. Śakti ends in short i before the o of ogha, and the same rule applies, giving śakty-; then a plus o gives au, so the syllable comes out as śaktyau. That au is a full diphthong of two morae, not a short o, and getting it right is what keeps the metre intact.

So the word is kā-la-rā-tryā-di-śa-ktyau-gha-vṛ-tā, ten syllables. Say it in two halves at first — kālarātryādi, then śaktyaughavṛtā — and join them only when both are secure. The clusters tryā and ktyau are three consonants each and share the same final glide y, which gives the word its internal rhyme; hearing that rhyme is the best mnemonic available for it.

Snigdhaudanapriyā has a parallel join: snigdha plus odana, a plus o giving au again. Two aus in one line, both created the same way, and both metrically long. The opening cluster sni is s followed by the dental n before the vowel; the gdhau that follows is a voiced g running into the aspirated dental dh. English will want to break the word after snig. Do not.

The second line is easier and should be allowed to move. Mahāvīrendra has one cluster, ndra, three voiced sounds in a row — dental n, dental d, then r — made without resetting the tongue, which stays at the teeth for the first two.

Rākiṇyambāsvarūpiṇī is a mouthful of nasals but a regular one. Both n-sounds in it are retroflex ṇ, not dental n, caused by the r earlier in the word — the same rule met in varṇā and praharaṇā at the throat wheel. The ṇya is that retroflex nasal followed by the palatal glide, tongue curled back and then forward, and the mbā that follows is m plus b, both labial, so the lips close once and release into the b. Say ṇya-mbā slowly; the whole word turns on that pivot.

In the archanā the first three names are ā-stems taking -āyai, and the last is an ī-stem: rākiṇyambāsvarūpiṇyai namaḥ. Because the same ending will recur at every wheel, this is where to fix it.

What the verse asks is a change in how the section is being held. Up to this point a reader could take the wheels as a tour of interior scenery, with a different deity at each stop. The final name forbids that reading. It says that the figure just described in the chest — dark, fanged, flooded with the powers of the night of dissolution — is not a resident of the body being visited but the same goddess the hymn has been addressing since its first line. If the section is recited as a descent through the body, this is the point at each wheel where the descent turns back into an address.