Four faces, a trident, and a pride that is not a fault

The section running through these verses names seven yoginīs, one to a wheel of the yogic body, and gives each of them the same list of particulars. This verse opens the fourth panel. The wheel is the svādhiṣṭhāna, the goddess is the one the hymn will call Kākinī at the close of the next verse, and the four names before the extra one are the fixed items: where she sits, how many faces she has, what she holds, and what colour she is.

Svādhiṣṭhāna is the most transparent of the six wheel-names and also the most argued over. It divides as sva, one's own, and adhiṣṭhāna, from adhi-√sthā, a standing-over: a base, a support, a governing seat, and in philosophical usage the substrate on which something else is superimposed. So, one's own seat — but whose own, and seat of what, the tradition does not settle. Some read it as the seat the individual self occupies, some as the goddess's own station, some take sva in the sense of the vital breath. The hymn works the same root three times in three consecutive verses: māṃsaniṣṭhā, from ni-√sthā; svādhiṣṭhāna here; and medoniṣṭhā in the verse that follows. The vocabulary of this section is the vocabulary of standing somewhere. The yogic handbooks describe the svādhiṣṭhāna as a six-petalled lotus low in the trunk, at the root of the generative organs, and associate it with water; the six petal-goddesses are named in the next verse.

The face count is the clearest evidence that the seven panels were composed as a set. The first yoginī has one face, the second two, the third three, this one four, the fifth five, the sixth six, and the seventh is called simply all-facing. Nothing in the doctrine requires this. It is a compositional device, and once seen it makes the section much easier to hold in the mind. Four faces in particular carry an inherited resonance: they are Brahmā's, one for each direction and one for each Veda, and to give them to a goddess of the lower body is to lend her a creator's completeness of outlook. What the hymn then does with them is characteristic. Manoharā means heart-stealing, from manas plus √hṛ, to carry off; the compound says that all four of those faces are beautiful, that there is no angle from which she is not attractive. A four-faced armed figure could easily have been made terrifying. The hymn makes her captivating instead, and immediately afterwards puts a trident in her hand.

Śūla is the spike or spear, and above all Śiva's trident. The compound is honest about being a summary: śūlādya, beginning with the trident, followed by āyudha, weapons, so the name says she is furnished with the trident and the rest without committing to a list. Each yoginī is armed with a different implement plus an unnamed remainder — the skull-staff for the first, the thunderbolt for the third, the goad for the fifth, and every weapon there is for the last. Behind the whole convention lies the scene in the Devī Māhātmya in which the assembled gods each draw a duplicate of their own weapon out of the original and hand it to the goddess, so that she goes into battle carrying the collected armament of the pantheon. When a Śākta text arms a goddess, that episode is the precedent, and the trident is the weapon that comes from Śiva himself.

Pīta is yellow, the shade the lexicons illustrate with turmeric and clarified butter. The colours of the seven are simply given and do not track the elemental schemes of the yogic handbooks — one more sign that this hymn keeps its own version of the system rather than borrowing one wholesale.

That leaves atigarvitā. Garva is pride, and in the moral literature it is unambiguously a defect — the Bhagavad Gītā files darpa and abhimāna among the marks of a demonic inheritance, and the whole didactic tradition treats swollen self-regard as the thing a spiritual life is meant to dismantle. The hymn makes it a name of the goddess and intensifies it with ati, exceedingly. This is not carelessness. The logic is the one that governs Śākta theology generally: what is a fault in a bound creature, because it is a false estimate of a dependent thing, is simply accurate in the one on whom everything depends. The hymn has already used the vocabulary of flushed intoxication of her elsewhere, in the verses describing her face, and it will not scruple to seat her in the wheel at the root of the generative organs either. A tradition that took the body seriously enough to distribute her through its tissues was not going to draw the line at temperament.

The most important thing to know about this verse is that its last word contains two names, not one. Pītavarṇā ends in a long ā and atigarvitā begins with a short a; a long ā followed by a short a absorbs it, and the elided vowel is marked in the Devanagari by the avagraha, the small hook that looks like an S. So what is written and chanted as a single run, pītavarṇā'tigarvitā, is pītavarṇā plus atigarvitā. In continuous recitation this makes no difference. In archanā it makes all the difference, because the two must be offered separately: pītavarṇāyai namaḥ, then atigarvitāyai namaḥ. All five names here are feminine ā-stems, so all five take the same dative ending.

Svādhiṣṭhānāmbujagatā opens with sv, a cluster English can manage, and then repeats the ṣṭh of the previous verse. The join is the long ā in the fifth syllable: svādhiṣṭhāna ends in a short a, ambuja begins with a short a, and the two fuse. The dh in dhi is a single aspirated voiced dental — the tongue at the teeth, voice on, breath released — and not a d followed by a separate h.

Caturvaktramanoharā holds the hardest cluster in the verse, ktra: a guttural stop, a dental stop, and then r, three articulations in three different places with no vowel to rest on. Take it slowly as k-t-ra with the release of each stop audible before the next begins; speeding it up later is easy, and unpicking a slurred version is not. The other thing worth seeing in this word is the join manas plus hara, where the final s of manas becomes o before a voiced sound, giving manohara. Sanskrit does this constantly and it is the reason so many compounds seem to sprout an o in the middle.

Śūlādyāyudhasampannā is four long vowels in its first four syllables and then a run of short ones, and the temptation is to level them out. Hold them. The word is śūla plus ādya, which gives śūlādya, plus āyudha, where ā meets ā and produces a single long ā again; the string of long syllables is the sandhi showing through. Sampannā ends in a doubled n that must be held, and the ś at the very beginning is the palatal sibilant, made further forward than the retroflex ṣ of the previous verse.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is a certain steadiness in front of two things a devotional text is not expected to say. The first is the location: the wheel at the root of the generative organs is named without euphemism and without apology, in the same tone used earlier for the throat and the heart. The second is the pride. Atigarvitā is not to be softened into confidence or majesty when it is chanted; it is the ordinary word for the thing the moralists condemn, deliberately intensified, and it is being offered as praise. The section as a whole is used in nyāsa, where the practitioner places each yoginī at her station in his own body while pronouncing her names. Done in that spirit, this verse asks him to install, low in his own trunk, a four-faced goddess who is armed, yellow, beautiful from every side, and unembarrassed.