Both paths, and the steadiness they ask for

Savya means left and apasavya is built by negating it, not on the ordinary word for right. Before either term had anything to do with tantric schools, both were terms of Vedic ritual practice describing where a cord sits and which way a man walks. The sacrificial thread worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm is the normal arrangement, used for rites directed at the gods; reversed, over the right shoulder, it marks the rites for the ancestors, and the ritual manuals call that reversal by the name that appears in this compound. Circumambulation works the same way, clockwise with the right side to the object for auspicious occasions and counter-clockwise for funerary ones. So the first name of this verse begins its life describing two positions of a piece of string, and two directions of walking, both of them entirely orthodox.

On top of that the tantric traditions laid the distinction that modern readers usually meet first: the right-hand observance and the left-hand one, dakṣiṇācāra and vāmācāra. What the distinction actually amounts to is narrower than the popular account suggests. Both wings work with the same deities, the same diagram and largely the same liturgy. What separates them is whether the rite is performed with substances and acts that ordinary purity rules exclude, or performed inwardly with those elements replaced by their contemplative equivalents. The vocabulary in the primary sources is looser than the textbooks, and different texts draw the line in different places. Śrīvidyā itself has never settled the question internally: it contains lineages that keep the whole rite interior and Brahminically pure and lineages that do not, and the two have argued for centuries. The stotra's response is to decline the argument. It says she is standing on both roads, and two verses later it will say the same thing again in the other pair of words.

Āpad, in the second name, is a formation from ā-√pad, to fall upon: a calamity is something that comes down on you. The prefixes on the verb pile up in the opposite direction — vi-ni-vāraṇa, a holding back, a warding off, from √vṛ. This is one of a small group of names near the end of the thousand that promise something specific to the reciter, and they cluster here because the phalaśruti is coming; the hymn is beginning to make explicit the transaction it has so far only implied. How to take such a promise is a fair question and the tradition has an answer, though it is a chastened one: the commentators generally read the averting of calamity as a change in the person to whom calamities happen rather than as a guarantee about events. The very next name is evidence that this is not special pleading, because it substitutes a description of her own state for anything she might be expected to do.

Svasthā is sva, one's own or one's self, plus the root √sthā, to stand. In medical and ordinary usage svastha means healthy, comfortable, at ease — the abstract noun svāsthya is the standard word for health — and the sense is that of a person who is where he belongs. The philosophical schools took the same image and made it technical: liberation is repeatedly described as standing in one's own form. The Yoga tradition's definition of the final state uses exactly that phrase. So the name manages to be simultaneously the humblest word in the verse and one of the largest claims in it, which is a trick this hymn performs often enough to be a signature.

Dhīra, twice at the end, is from dhī, thought or insight, and the adjective covers a range that English cannot hold in one word: steady, constant, resolute, deep, wise, grave. The Upaniṣads use it of the person who can tell the good from the merely pleasant, which is a matter of discrimination and of nerve at once. The handbooks of dramaturgy use it as the base term for their classification of heroes, dividing them into the dhīra who is exalted, the dhīra who is violent, the dhīra who is playful and the dhīra who is calm — four temperaments sharing one quality of not being blown about. When the last name of the verse says she is thoroughly worshipped by the dhīra, it is naming a qualification for this practice that is neither birth nor learning nor fervour. Sam-arcitā, with the prefix that means completely and together, suggests worship carried through rather than begun, which is the same virtue described from the outside.

Four names in a row begin with s and the last two begin with dh, and the change of consonant is the structure of the verse. If you can hear the line as four then two, you will not lose your place, which is the real risk in the first half: savya, sarva, sva, sva, four openings so alike that the ear stops distinguishing them.

The first name contains a sandhi that carries its whole meaning. Savya ends in short a and apasavya begins with short a, and two short a sounds fuse into a single long ā. So the long vowel in savyāpasavya is the seam between left and right, and a reciter who shortens it has deleted the negative prefix and left the goddess standing on one road. This is the same rule you met in the previous verse at tattvādhikā, and it is worth recognising both times.

Savya also gives the cluster vy: the labiodental v straight into the palatal glide y. Say it as one movement, not as v-uh-ya. The same cluster returns in the second half of the compound, so the word gives you two attempts at it in nine syllables.

Sarvāpadvinivāriṇī has the join dv, a voiced dental into a v, and then a small grammatical marvel at the end. The suffix is -in with the feminine ī, and the n has become retroflex ṇ because of the r earlier in the word. Sanskrit turns a dental n into a retroflex ṇ when certain sounds precede it in the same word, and r is the commonest trigger. The rule is worth knowing because it explains a dozen names in this hymn where a ṇ appears for no visible reason, including taruṇa in the next verse and kāruṇya elsewhere.

Svasthā is two syllables and four consonants. Sv is a dental sibilant into that soft v; sth is the same sibilant into an aspirated dental t, where the aspiration is a puff of breath released after the stop and not the English th of think. Take the word slowly enough that both clusters are audible, then say it at speed and see whether they survive.

Dhīrā opens with a single sound, not two. Dh is a voiced dental stop with breath released through it, and the temptation for an English speaker is to produce d followed by a separate h. Set the tongue for d, and let the release be breathy. Then the long ī, then a tapped r. The word occurs twice at the end of the verse, in dhīrā and again at the head of dhīrasamarcitā, which makes the close of the line the best drill in the verse for that one consonant.

In archanā the datives are straightforward: savyāpasavyamārgasthāyai namaḥ, sarvāpadvinivāriṇyai namaḥ, svasthāyai namaḥ, and so on. The ā-stems take -āyai and the two ī-stems, vinivāriṇī and nothing else here, take -yai. Note how much longer the first name becomes in the dative, and give it room.

What to hold while chanting it: the verse offers protection in its second name and then spends the whole of its second half describing a temperament. The order is not accidental. What it recommends is not that you should stop meeting trouble but that you should meet it the way she does.