Sky for hair, thunderbolt in hand, five gods for a couch

Vyoman is space, sky, the open expanse, and Vyomakeśa is a name of Śiva, whose matted hair is imagined as spreading through the heavens or as the place where the descending Gaṅgā is caught. Making it feminine transfers the whole image. It is worth registering that space is also the first and subtlest of the five elements in the standard cosmology, and that the number five is about to take over this verse and the next; a reader coming back to vyomakeśī after pañcabhūteśī will find that the verse has begun with an element before beginning to count them.

Vimāna is one of those Sanskrit words whose several senses are all live at once. Formed from vi and māna, measured out, apportioned, it names a structure laid out in parts: a palace or great mansion, then in the epic and purāṇic literature the aerial car in which gods and accomplished beings travel, and in South Indian temple architecture the tower that rises over the sanctum. The last sense is not a curiosity for this hymn, which comes out of a South Indian milieu; a worshipper who hears vimānasthā in a Tamil or Telugu temple is standing under a vimāna while hearing it. The reading vi-māna, without measure, is a secondary play on the same elements, and the tradition uses it.

Vajriṇī takes Indra's title. Vajrin, the thunderbolt-bearer, is Indra's standing epithet from the Ṛgveda onward, and vajra means both the weapon and the diamond, the substance that cuts everything and is cut by nothing. The Devī Māhātmya supplies the narrative background that most readers will have in mind: in its second chapter the gods, unable to defeat the buffalo demon, pour their energies into a single female form and each hands over his own weapon, Indra among them giving a duplicate of his vajra. Whether or not this hymn is alluding to that episode, the logic is the one the name assumes — the weapons of the gods end up in her hands.

Vāmakeśvarī is the name in this verse with the most history attached. Vāma in Sanskrit means left; it also means lovely or dear, and it also means adverse or crooked, and lexicographers list all three without much apology. In tantric usage the left is the marker of the vāmācāra, the left-hand observance, distinguished from the dakṣiṇa or right-hand one by its ritual use of substances and acts that ordinary brahminical practice excludes. The distinction is real but has always been less tidy in practice than in description, and much of the literature that outsiders classify as left-hand is emphatic that the substances are subject to elaborate constraints. What makes the name specific rather than general is that the Vāmakeśvara Tantra, also transmitted under the title Vāmakeśvarīmata, is one of the foundational scriptures of this school; its second portion, the Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava, carries commentaries by Jayaratha in Kashmir and by Bhāskararāya in the south. To call her Vāmakeśvarī is to name her as the deity of that revelation, in the same way that mahātantrā earlier in the hymn named the tantra as hers.

The five sacrifices of the second line are the pañcamahāyajña of the domestic ritual codes: the offering to the gods, the offering to the ancestors, the offering to beings, the offering to human guests, and the recitation of the Veda, which counts as an offering to the sacred word. They are laid on the householder as daily obligations, are described in the Gṛhyasūtras and codified in the third chapter of Manu, and they are as far from the world of the cremation ground as Indian religion gets. Their appearance here, in a hymn full of tantric technical vocabulary, is one of the clearest signs of the synthesis this text belongs to: the goddess of the left-hand tantra is also pleased by a brahmin householder feeding crows on his doorstep.

And then the couch. Preta is pra plus ita, gone forth, the past participle of √i with a prefix — the polite word for the dead, the one who has departed. The tradition generally identifies the five as Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Rudra, Īśvara and Sadāśiva, four of them forming the legs of the couch and the fifth its plank, and the image is standard in the iconography of Lalitā. The hymn has already seated her on this couch once, earlier in its course, so the name here is a reprise rather than an innovation. What the image asserts is not the defeat of the gods but their dependence: without the power she is, they cannot stir, and the poem that says this most memorably is the opening verse of the Saundaryalaharī. That she alone is awake on a bed of the inert is the same proposition stated as a picture.

The first line divides four, four, then three and five. The second line does something the hymn rarely risks: pañcayajñapriyā takes six syllables and pañcapretamañcādhiśāyinī takes ten, so the sixteen-syllable half falls two syllables into the long name, and the caesura lands inside a word. You cannot breathe at the middle of the second line. Take the breath at the end of the first line instead, and carry the whole of the second on one span.

That long name is the hardest single word in this part of the stotra and it is best learned in pieces that mean something: pañca-preta, the five departed; mañca, the couch; adhiśāyinī, she who lies upon. The join is mañca plus adhiśāyinī, where a final short a meets an initial short a to give a single long ā, which is why the written form has mañcā. Knowing the join keeps the vowel long, and the metre needs it long.

The palatal nasal ñ appears five times in the second line and English has no independent version of it. It is made with the middle of the tongue against the hard palate, the same position as the c that follows it in pañca and mañca; the pair should be a single gesture with the nasal released into the stop, not an n followed by a ch. The jñ of pañcayajñapriyā is the same palatal position with a voiced stop before the nasal, and it is pronounced differently in different regions — palatal j plus ñ in most southern recitation, gya in much of the north. Choose one and hold to it.

In the first line the cluster vy of vyomakeśī begins the verse and is easy to soften into a vowel. Sound the v as a labiodental with the lower lip at the teeth, then the palatal y, then the o, with no vowel inserted between the consonants. Vajriṇī has jr, palatal stop into the r, and then a retroflex ṇ, the tongue curled back — not the dental n of English "knee". Vimānasthā ends in sth, a dental sibilant into an aspirated dental stop, three articulations at the teeth in a row.

For archanā the datives are vyomakeśyai, vimānasthāyai, vajriṇyai, vāmakeśvaryai, pañcayajñapriyāyai and pañcapretamañcādhiśāyinyai — the last a mouthful of eleven syllables that most reciters will want to rehearse on its own before attempting it in sequence.

What the verse asks is a tolerance for its own range. The reciter is being told in one breath that the goddess is pleased by the most ordinary daily duties a householder performs and that she is depicted reclining on the bodies of the gods who preside over creation and dissolution. The tradition does not treat these as competing pictures to be reconciled, and the reciter is not asked to reconcile them either; only to say both without flinching from the second or condescending to the first.