The bottom of the descent: five faces at the root wheel

Mūlādhāra divides cleanly into mūla, root, and ādhāra, a support or foundation, from ā-√dhṛ, to hold up. It is the lowest of the wheels, placed at the base of the spine, and its name simply describes its function: it is what the rest stands on. The whole of this section of the hymn is built out of words like it — niṣṭhā and saṃsthitā from √sthā, to stand; adhiṣṭhāna in the wheel-name two verses back; ādhāra here — and the accumulation makes a point that no single name makes on its own. The goddess is being described as what holds a body up.

The verb attached to her here is different from the ones used before. Earlier panels said she has the lotus as her abode, or that she has gone to it; this one says ārūḍhā, from ā-√ruh, mounted, climbed onto, as one mounts a horse or a throne. The same participle occurs early in the hymn in a sequence that every reciter knows, where the goddess ascends from this wheel through the knots of Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Rudra and is at last mounted on the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown, raining nectar. Whether the echo is deliberate cannot be shown, but the two passages sit at opposite ends of the same journey, and a reader who has the earlier verses by heart will notice that the word for the summit is being used again at the base.

Five faces continue the count that has been running since the first yoginī: one, two, three, four, and now five, with six and then all-facing to come. In Śaiva iconography five faces are Sadāśiva's, and they are not decorative. The five are named — Sadyojāta, Vāmadeva, Aghora, Tatpuruṣa and Īśāna — and they carry the doctrine of the five acts by which the lord is said to run the world: emitting it, maintaining it, withdrawing it, concealing himself in it, and releasing what he has concealed. They are also mapped onto the five elements. Giving five faces to the goddess of the lowest wheel therefore places a complete Śaiva theology at the bottom of the body, and the commentators generally read the number in exactly that way, as the gathering of the five elements at the wheel where the coarsest of them, earth, has its seat.

Bone is the fifth of the seven bodily constituents in the medical sequence, and the choice is not arbitrary once the elemental correspondence is in view. Earth in the Indian systems is the principle of solidity, and bone is the solid tissue; the wheel of earth and the hardest layer of the body are matched. Asthi carries a further weight in ritual: after a cremation it is the bones that remain, and their gathering, the asthi-sañcayana, is a named rite with its own procedures. Of everything the seven yoginīs are distributed through, this is the part that outlasts the person. To say that she abides in the bone is to place her in the one tissue that will still be there when the rest has gone.

The goad is the short hooked implement a mahout uses to steer an elephant, and it is one of the four things Lalitā herself holds in the hymn's opening verses, where the noose is said to be desire in visible form and the goad to be anger given a shape. The two are a pair and their functions are opposite: the noose binds and draws in, the goad prods and directs. What the early verses do with them is turn two passions into instruments of government, so that what drives a creature helplessly is, in her hands, a tool for driving. When the goad reappears here at the head of the fifth yoginī's weapons, it brings that reading with it. The compound is once again a summary — aṅkuśādi, beginning with the goad, then praharaṇa, an instrument for striking — and the tradition fills in the remainder according to the lineage.

Varadā, the last of the five names, means giver of the boon, and it is also the name of the mudrā in which an open palm is turned outward and down, the gesture of granting. She heads the attendants of this wheel, which the handbooks describe as a lotus of four petals; the hymn names the first of them and covers the rest with ādi, as it has done at every station. It is a small elegance that the retinue of the wheel called the root support should be led by a goddess named for giving, and that a verse otherwise made of hard things — bone, a goad, the floor of the body — should end on an open hand.

For the second time in three verses a single written word holds two names. Pañcavaktrā ends in a long ā, asthisaṃsthitā begins with a short a, the short a is swallowed, and the Devanagari marks the loss with the avagraha. In continuous recitation nothing is heard but a long vowel; in archanā the two must be separated, pañcavaktrāyai namaḥ and asthisaṃsthitāyai namaḥ. All five names are feminine ā-stems and take -āyai, so there is nothing else to remember.

Asthisaṃsthitā is the hardest thing in the verse and one of the harder words in the hymn. It contains sth twice, with an anusvāra between them, and every consonant in it is made at or near the teeth: s, then aspirated th, then a nasalised vowel, then s and th again. There is no retroflexion anywhere in the word, which is the difficulty for anyone who has just been drilling ṣṭh in the preceding verses. Keep the tongue tip at the base of the upper teeth throughout and let the aspiration out after the stop.

The verse also offers the cleanest possible lesson in how Sanskrit nasals work. Pañca has ñc, a palatal nasal before a palatal stop, and aṅkuśa has ṅk, a velar nasal before a velar stop. English produces both of these without thinking — inch and sink — and the point is that Sanskrit spells the difference out because the nasal always takes the position of the consonant that follows it. Once that is grasped, the five nasal letters of the alphabet stop being five things to memorise and become one rule.

Mūlādhārāmbujārūḍhā is four elements joined into eight syllables: mūla, ādhāra, ambuja, ārūḍhā. Every join produces a long ā, which is why the word has five long vowels and only three short ones, and letting any of them shorten will collapse the metre. Its last consonant, ḍh, is a voiced aspirated retroflex — tongue curled back, voice on, breath released after the release of the stop — and it is the single most difficult sound in this verse for a speaker of English, who has no voiced aspirates at all. Niṣevitā in the final name has the retroflex ṣ where a dental s might be expected; the i of the prefix ni- has pulled it back, which is the same rule that gives ṣṭh in niṣṭhā.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a kind of unhurried descent. Whoever is chanting has spent four panels moving down through the body and has now arrived at its base, and the hymn does not treat the arrival as a low point or an embarrassment. The mūlādhāra is where the tradition locates the coiled power that the early verses of this same hymn describe rising to the crown, so the reciter is naming a place he has already, in the course of the same recitation, been told is a beginning. Used in nyāsa, this verse has him touch the base of the spine and install there a five-faced goddess with a goad, seated in his bones, served by a boon-giver. Chanted straight through, it holds the attention at the floor of the body for four quarters of a verse — long enough to notice that the hymn thinks there is a goddess down there too.