Expert at hauling out the mired, and every role in the sacrifice at once

Saṃsāra is sam plus √sṛ, to flow: a flowing together, a wandering through, the running of a life on and on through births. The previous verse ended with sudhāsṛti, the flowing of nectar, built on that same root √sṛ. The two words are next to each other in the recitation and are the same motion described twice, once as the circulation that will not stop and once as the outpouring that does not run out. Whether the poet intended the echo cannot be shown, but a reciter who says the two verses in sequence will hear it.

Paṅka is mud, and specifically the kind that grips. It is not the neutral word for earth or clay but the mire of a churned road or the bottom of a drying tank, and its literary force is that a creature in it cannot get purchase to escape. The same noun sits inside paṅkaja, the commonest Sanskrit word for a lotus, which means simply mud-born — the flower this goddess is repeatedly seated on takes its name from the substance this name says people are drowning in. Nirmagna, from ni plus √majj, means sunk right under, and the root's other derivative is majjana, the ordinary word for a ritual bath. Sanskrit uses one verb for immersion that purifies and immersion that kills.

Samuddharaṇa is sam plus ud plus √hṛ, a carrying up and out, and the Gītā uses the agent noun from the same three elements when Kṛṣṇa promises to become the lifter-out for those whose minds have entered him. The difference in the two images is instructive. The Gītā speaks of an ocean, where the danger is depth and the rescue is buoyancy; the hymn speaks of mud, where the danger is adhesion and the rescue is traction. The Gītā also, elsewhere, tells a man to lift himself by himself and says that the self is its own friend and its own enemy. Against that, the hymn's word paṇḍitā quietly concedes that the operation requires a specialist.

That word is the oddest thing in the verse. Paṇḍita is the ordinary term for a learned man, someone who has mastered a discipline, and its application to the work of salvation makes deliverance sound like grammar or surgery — a body of technique in which one can be more or less accomplished. The commentators generally take it in the weaker sense of clever or skilful, but the stronger reading is available and is more interesting: she is not merely willing to pull people out, she is good at it, and the difference between willingness and expertise is the difference between a rescuer and a rescue service.

The three yajña names then do something the Vedic tradition had already done to itself. The Puruṣa hymn of the Ṛgveda ends by saying that the gods sacrificed the sacrifice with the sacrifice, collapsing the offering, the offered and the act into one another; the Gītā has Kṛṣṇa declare in a single verse that he is the rite, the oblation, the formula, the clarified butter, the fire and the act of offering. What this hymn adds is the yajamāna. That word is a present middle participle of √yaj, and the middle voice is the whole point: it means the one sacrificing on his own behalf. In the solemn ritual the yajamāna is technically the sacrificer even though the priests perform nearly every action; he is the one consecrated for the rite, he bears its cost, and its merit accrues to him. He is, in other words, the only person in the enclosure who has something at stake. To call her yajamānasvarūpiṇī is to say that even that position — the beneficiary, the one with an interest — is hers.

There is a historical reason these names matter beyond their content. Śrīvidyā as it developed in South India took pains to present itself as continuous with Vedic orthodoxy rather than opposed to it, and the strand of the tradition that prevailed there argued its case partly by pointing to material of exactly this kind. A hymn embedded in a Purāṇa, spoken by Hayagrīva to Agastya, which declares the goddess to love sacrifice and to be the sacrificer, could be recited by brahmins who would not have handled a tantra. The next verse continues in the same direction, and the two together are among the reasons this text travelled where other Śākta literature did not.

This verse is unusual to recite because its first half is one name. Sixteen syllables run from saṃsāra to paṇḍitā without a break for sense, and the caesura that normally divides an anuṣṭubh here falls in the middle of a compound, between nirmagna and samuddharaṇa. Take the breath there anyway — the metre requires it — but do not let the pause turn into a boundary, because the words on either side of it are governed by each other.

A note about what you will see printed. Most namāvalīs give this as a single offering, oṃ saṃsārapaṅkanirmagnasamuddharaṇapaṇḍitāyai namaḥ, and that is the form generally recited. Listings that shorten it to samuddharaṇapaṇḍitā, as this one does, are abbreviating for the sake of a manageable label rather than recording a different reading; the qualifier is part of the name.

The consonants in that long compound are worth taking one at a time. Saṃ has an anusvāra before a sibilant, which means the nasality is carried in the vowel rather than closed off by a consonant. Paṅka is the velar nasal followed by k. Nirmagna ends in gn, a velar stop followed by a dental nasal, a cluster English never produces at all — hold the g closed and release it directly into the n. Samuddharaṇa contains a doubled d followed by an aspirated dh: ud plus dhara, so the tongue stays at the teeth through d, d and dh, and only the last of the three carries breath. And paṇḍitā is two retroflexes in contact, ṇ and ḍ, with the tongue curled well back for both.

The second line hammers on ya. Yajñapriyā, yajñakartrī, yajamānasvarūpiṇī — and the third one breaks the pattern it seems to be following, since it is yaja- and not yajña-, and it is longer than the other two put together in the recitation. Reciters who let momentum carry them often produce a fourth yajña- that is not there.

The conjunct ñ in yajña is the one sound in this verse on which practice genuinely differs by region: it is commonly heard as gy in the North, dny in Maharashtra, and something like gnya in the South. The phonetic value described by the grammarians is straightforward — the palatal stop j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, both made with the body of the tongue against the hard palate. Adopt whichever your teacher uses, but know what the letters say.

The four offerings are saṃsārapaṅkanirmagnasamuddharaṇapaṇḍitāyai namaḥ, yajñapriyāyai namaḥ, yajñakartryai namaḥ, yajamānasvarūpiṇyai namaḥ. The first of those is among the longest single utterances in the whole thousand and should be practised on its own before it is met in sequence.

What the verse asks of the person saying it is a double placement. The first line describes you: sunk, stuck, unable to get traction. The last name describes you as well, since the yajamāna is whoever undertakes a rite for his own benefit, and that is precisely what a person reciting a thousand names for a stated purpose is doing. The verse tells you that both the one in the mud and the one commissioning the rescue are her.