Consecration, the quelling of demons, and being itself

Dīkṣā is one of the oldest technical words in Indian religion, and its Vedic sense is not the modern one. Before a soma sacrifice the patron underwent a consecration that the Brāhmaṇa literature describes without embarrassment as a gestation: he was installed in a hut treated as a womb, wrapped, girdled, made to keep his fists clenched like a foetus, put on a diet of milk, and at the end of it said to be born a second time, now qualified to sacrifice. The dīkṣita is not simply someone who has been given something; he is someone put under constraint who cannot leave it until the work is done.

Tantric usage keeps the constraint and adds a transmission. Dīkṣā in these schools is the initiation by which a teacher conveys a mantra and the eligibility to use it; the traditional etymology, repeated widely in the tantric literature, splits the word into a giving and a destroying — what confers knowledge and consumes the residue of past action. Calling the goddess dīkṣitā admits two readings the tradition does not separate: she is the reality present in every consecration, so that the transmission is finally hers rather than the teacher's; and she is herself under vow.

Daityaśamanī reads differently once dīkṣitā is in place. Daityas are the sons of Diti, opposed in the old cosmology to the Ādityas. The verb is what to notice. Śamanī is from √śam, whose primary sense is to become quiet and whose causative means to pacify — but Vedic ritual language also uses it as the standard euphemism for killing the sacrificial animal, and the officiant who performs the killing is the śamitṛ, the quieter. The word sits on the seam between calming and slaughter. Placed immediately after a name meaning consecrated, it lets the first line be heard as a sacrificial sequence: the patron takes the vow, and then the victim is quieted. Reading battle as sacrifice is old and widespread, and the campaign against Bhaṇḍāsura in which this hymn is embedded is told in exactly that key.

Sarvalokavaśaṅkarī brings in a further technical vocabulary. Tantric ritual manuals classify the applied uses of mantra into six acts, and though the lists vary in wording they consistently begin with pacification and subjugation — śānti and vaśīkaraṇa. Śamanī and vaśaṅkarī answer to the first two in canonical order, unlikely to be accidental in a hymn this saturated with ritual terminology. Vaśīkaraṇa is a coercive rite performed to bend another person's will. The hymn takes the technique out of the practitioner's hands: it is not that she can be used to subjugate the worlds, but that the worlds are already subject to her.

Sarvārthadātrī reverses the direction. Artha is elastic in Sanskrit — an object, a purpose, wealth, a meaning — and it is the second of the four human aims. After two names about power exercised over others, this one describes power given away.

Sāvitrī is a name with three distinct referents. It is first the verse of the Ṛgveda addressed to Savitṛ, the impeller, which an initiated twice-born recites at dawn and dusk throughout life; because that verse is composed in the twenty-four-syllable gāyatrī metre it is usually called the Gāyatrī, though strictly gāyatrī names the metre and sāvitrī the verse. It is second the goddess personifying that verse. And it is third the heroine of the episode in the third book of the Mahābhārata, who followed Yama when he took her husband's life and argued him out of it by holding the god of death to his given word — worth remembering one verse after satyasandhā. The first sense closes a loop: the sāvitrī is conferred at the upanayana, the initiation that makes a boy twice-born, so the name at the end of the line names what makes the dīkṣita of the first line possible.

Saccidānandarūpiṇī is the formula of Vedānta. The three words are Upaniṣadic separately, and the Taittirīya Upaniṣad's definition of brahman as truth, knowledge and the infinite is its clear ancestor, but the fused compound saccidānanda is a later crystallisation, current in Vedāntic and tantric writing rather than in the earliest texts. The hymn attaches rūpiṇī, having that as her form — so what for the strictest Advaita characterises an impersonal absolute is here predicated of somebody with a name, an army and a city. Three verses earlier the hymn called her free of being and non-being alike. Here it calls her being. The two are not reconciled anywhere in the text, and the tradition has preferred to keep both.

The verse is symmetrical in a way that makes it easy to hold: three syllables, five, eight in the first line; five, three, eight in the second. Both lines end on an eight-syllable name, so the verse falls into two matched halves. The second line is also heavily alliterative on s — sarvārtha, sāvitrī, saccidānanda — continuing the run of s-initial names begun in the previous verse.

Dīkṣitā opens with the conjunct kṣ, which is one sound rather than two in practice: the tongue makes the velar closure and releases directly into a retroflex sibilant. The word is three syllables, dī-kṣi-tā, long, short, long. Daityaśamanī begins with the diphthong ai, which is a full long vowel and not the quick glide of English eye; the vṛddhi of dai- marks daitya as a patronymic, son of Diti, so the length carries grammatical information.

Sarvalokavaśaṅkarī has a nasal worth attention. Written with the velar ṅ before k, it is the sound at the end of English sing. The name is often printed with an anusvāra instead — vaśaṃkarī — and the two spellings represent the same pronunciation. The nāmāvalī form given in the present edition, sarvalokavaṃśakaryai, has the nasal in the wrong place and has lost the vaśaṅ- of the stotra reading; the expected dative is sarvalokavaśaṅkaryai, and that is what most printed nāmāvalīs give.

Saccidānandarūpiṇī rewards being taken apart, because the assimilations that make it look forbidding are entirely regular. The elements are sat, cit and ānanda. A final dental t before an initial palatal c becomes c, which gives sac-cit; then cit before a vowel voices its final to d, giving cid-ānanda. The doubled cc in the middle is nothing but a t that has taken on the colour of its neighbour. Say sac-ci-dā-nan-da-rū-pi-ṇī with the doubled consonant held and the ṇ of rūpiṇī retroflex; an ordinary n there is the commonest error in the name.

In the archanā form, where each name takes the dative and is followed by namaḥ, this verse is nearly uniform: five of the six names are ī-stems and contract the long ī to y before the ending. Daityaśamanyai, sarvalokavaśaṅkaryai, sarvārthadātryai, sāvitryai, saccidānandarūpiṇyai. Only the first is an ā-stem, dīkṣitāyai. Sarvārthadātrī is a feminine agent noun on the -tṛ suffix that also gives dātā, giver.

What the verse asks is a particular attentiveness to its first word, because everything else depends on how dīkṣitā is heard. Taken as a description of a status she confers, the verse is about her power. Taken as a description of a vow she has entered, the verse is about her obligation, and the three names that follow become the terms of that obligation rather than a display of capacity. The second reading is the one that makes sense of the movement from quelling to giving. Either way, the name at the end resets the scale. Having spent five names in the vocabulary of ritual and power, the hymn finishes by saying she is what is, what knows, and what is glad — and then goes on to the next verse without comment.