Marrow, the swan, turmeric-rice, and the letter ha

Majjā is the sixth of the seven bodily constituents, the marrow, produced according to the medical texts out of bone and producing in its turn the generative essence that the seventh and last goddess will occupy. Placing this yoginī there completes a movement begun in the previous verse: bone and then what is inside the bone, the container and the contained, assigned to two goddesses in succession. The medical tradition also brings the contents of the skull under this heading, which sits well with a goddess stationed between the eyebrows, though the hymn says nothing about the fit and leaves the reader to notice it.

Haṃsavatī heads the attendants, and to see why she is named at all one has to know how the wheels and the alphabet are connected. In the standard yogic scheme the six wheels have four, six, ten, twelve, sixteen and two petals — fifty in all — and the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are distributed one to a petal, running from the four petals of the root support up to the two of the wheel between the brows. The last two letters in that reckoning are ha and the conjunct kṣa, which is conventionally appended at the end of the alphabet, and they belong to the two petals of this wheel. The attendant powers of the petals are named from their letters, and the hymn names the first of the pair and passes over the second. Once this is in view, the goddess's own name stops looking arbitrary: Hākinī is named from the letter written on the petal she sits on, and the section has been proceeding through the alphabet's end.

The swan in her name carries more than heraldry. Haṃsa is the goose or swan of Sanskrit poetry, credited in a stock conceit with the ability to drink the milk out of a mixture of milk and water and leave the water behind — the standard emblem of discrimination, which is a suitable thing to find stationed at the wheel called command. It is also a syllable. Read as ha and sa, the word is heard in the breath itself, ha going out and sa coming in, and the tradition calls this the unrecited recitation, a mantra the body performs some twenty-one thousand times a day without anyone deciding to. Reversed, the same two sounds give so'ham, that I am, which is why the swan became the emblem of the renunciate and why the highest grade of them is called paramahaṃsa. The Upaniṣads had already made the bird a figure for the self at large in the world, dwelling in the sky, in men, in the gods, in truth. All of that arrives with the name of a petal-goddess who is mentioned once and not described.

Haridrā is turmeric, and in Indian usage it is three things at once: a dye, a medicine, and a substance of auspiciousness. It colours the thread tied at a wedding, it is smeared on the bride, and the rice tinted yellow with it is what gets distributed at ceremonies and carried home. Rice cooked with turmeric is therefore not simply another dish in the series but the festive one, the plate that means a good occasion. The hymn gives it to the goddess of the wheel between the brows and marks the gift with a word it has used nowhere else in the section: ekarasikā, having one relish only. Every other yoginī is said to be pleased, or gladdened, or attached; this one is exclusive. Rasa, the noun behind rasikā, is among the most overworked words in Sanskrit — sap, flavour, the aesthetic savour of a poem, mercury in the alchemists, the first of the seven bodily constituents in the physicians — and a rasika in literary usage is a connoisseur, someone whose taste is educated enough to be narrow. The name says she has that kind of taste, and that it settles on one dish.

The closing name uses the same formula as the fourth panel: bearing the form of, rather than the mother and her own being that the third, fifth and last panels use. Whether the variation carries weight is doubtful, and the metre alone will account for it. What is not accidental is the sound. Haṃsavatī, haridrānna, Hākinī: the panel comes to rest three times on the same aspirate, the letter of its own petal, and it is the only one of the seven where the hymn does anything of the kind.

One station remains. The seventh goddess sits at the thousand-petalled lotus above the six, is not counted among the wheels that carry the alphabet, and receives no number of faces and no single dish — only the words for all directions and all food. The section that began at the throat with one face and a bowl of sweetened milk-rice will end by running out of things to count.

This verse breaks a habit the section has kept for ten verses. Every name so far has been four syllables or eight, and every one has fitted inside a quarter of the verse. Haṃsavatīmukhyaśaktisamanvitā is twelve syllables long and runs through the boundary between the second and third quarters, so the customary breath after the eighth syllable would fall in the middle of a word. The first line has to be carried in one span, and reciters settled into the section's rhythm are apt to be caught out.

Majjāsaṃsthā rewards being set beside the tissue-names of the earlier panels. Māṃsaniṣṭhā and medoniṣṭhā have the retroflex cluster ṣṭh; this one and asthisaṃsthitā have the dental sth. The difference is not a matter of taste. Niṣṭhā is ni plus sthā, and the i of the prefix pulls the s back into a retroflex ṣ, which then drags the following stop back with it; saṃsthā is sam plus sthā, and the vowel a does no such thing. One rule accounts for every instance in the section. The other thing in the word is the doubled jj, two palatal stops held long, tongue flat against the palate for both.

The long attendant-name is a chain of clusters: khya, an aspirated velar plus the palatal glide, in mukhya; kti in śakti; nvi in samanvitā. None is individually hard; the difficulty is stamina, so practise the word alone until it can be said through without a break.

Haridrānnaikarasikā contains two different vowel fusions and is the best single illustration of them in the hymn. Haridrā ends in a long ā and anna begins with a short a, and long plus short gives simply long ā. Then anna ends in a short a and eka begins with e, and a short a plus e gives the diphthong ai — which is why the word has nnai in the middle where nothing in its components suggests one. The previous verse showed the companion rule with mudga and odana producing au. Learn the pair together: a plus e gives ai, a plus o gives au, and a great many puzzling Sanskrit words come apart at once.

For archanā, three names take the ordinary feminine ending — majjāsaṃsthāyai, haṃsavatīmukhyaśaktisamanvitāyai, haridrānnaikarasikāyai — and the fourth, being an ī-stem, does not: hākinīrūpadhāriṇyai namaḥ. The first syllables of that name are long then short, hā then ki, and levelling them is the standard fault.

The verse gives the person chanting it two things to hold, and they pull in opposite directions. One is the marrow, the deepest and least accessible tissue in the body, the part no one has any sensation of, named as a place where the goddess lives. The other is the swan in the attendant's name, which is the breath going in and out of the reciter at that very moment. Between them the verse covers the whole distance from what is entirely hidden to what could not be more immediate, and it makes no distinction between the two as places to find her. Used in nyāsa, the verse is spoken with the hand at the point between the brows. Chanted straight through, it is over in ten seconds and leaves one station left.