The end of the fives, and a sovereignty that cannot lapse

Five is the organising number of Śaiva and Śākta cosmology, and this verse is the place where the hymn says so most plainly. The five gross elements — space, air, fire, water, earth — are emitted in that order in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad's account and remain in that order throughout later systematising. Sadāśiva has five faces, from which five mantras issue. The tradition speaks of five acts performed by the divine: emission, maintenance, withdrawal, concealment and grace. Against that background, three consecutive names counting to five are not a numerical coincidence but a compressed cosmology.

Pañcamī, the fifth, is the name in the verse on which readers differ most, and honesty requires saying so rather than choosing. It is a plain feminine ordinal, and the tradition attaches it to more than one series: to the fivefold act, whose fifth term is grace and is hers to give; to the sequence of divine forms in which she stands beyond the four; and to the fifth lunar day, an auspicious tithi. Sanskrit grammar independently uses pañcamī as the name of the fifth case, which is the sort of coincidence a commentator with an appetite for exegesis can make something of. What is certain is only the arithmetic: something has been counted to four and she is what comes next.

Pañcabhūteśī and pañcasaṅkhyopacāriṇī belong together and explain each other. The five upacāras of the short form of worship are sandal paste, flowers, incense, lamp and food offering, and the correspondence commonly drawn in the ritual manuals is with the five elements: the fragrant paste for earth, the flower for space, the incense smoke for air, the lamp flame for fire, the food offering for water. Five is the abbreviated count; the manuals also prescribe sixteen for a full domestic service and, in this school, sixty-four for the elaborate one. So the two names read together make a single statement. She rules the five elements, and the five things put in front of her are those same elements handed back. Worship on this understanding adds nothing to the world; it returns what was already hers, in miniature and in order.

With śāśvatī the verse leaves the ritual tray. The word is a vṛddhi derivative of the indeclinable śaśvat, again and again, perpetually, so its force is iterative before it is metaphysical — not a static eternity but an unfailing recurrence. Śāśvataiśvaryā then compounds it with aiśvarya, itself a vṛddhi formation from īśvara, lordship. Aiśvarya is one of the qualities that the tradition lists as constituting bhaga, the fullness that makes a being bhagavat. The point of joining the two words is precise and easy to miss: her lordship is not held on any terms. It was not delegated, so nothing can revoke it, and it is not an office she occupies but a condition she is in.

Śarmadā uses one of the oldest religious words in the language. Śarman appears throughout the Ṛgveda in prayers asking a deity to extend shelter, and it slides between the concrete and the affective — a covering, a protection, and then the well-being of the protected. The dharma literature recommends it as the ending for brahmin personal names, which is why so many are Devaśarman or Viṣṇuśarman. To call her śarmadā is thus to use a word with Vedic weight rather than a general term for happiness, and the choice sits well with the claim two names earlier that scripture hymns her.

Śambhumohinī ends the verse by undoing its calm. Śambhu is śam plus a form of √bhū, the one who produces weal, and it is among the gentlest of Śiva's names. Mohinī is from √muh, to be bewildered; the causative gives the one who bewilders. Readers will think of the Mohinī of the churning of the ocean, Viṣṇu's female form, who in the purāṇic narratives distracts the demons and in the southern tradition draws Śiva himself; that is a different figure, and the name here is not an identification with her, but the resonance is part of why the name is memorable. What it asserts is that the one who reduced desire to ashes is not exempt. The tradition reads this in two registers. In the mythological one it is a scene between spouses. In the doctrinal one it says that the power of concealment — the fourth of the five acts named above — belongs to her and is not a defect in what it acts upon. Placing it immediately after śarmadā, giver of refuge, is the verse's last piece of deliberate construction: bewilderment and shelter issue from the same source.

Three of the four half-lines divide three and five, which gives the verse an unusually regular internal pulse: pañcamī then pañcabhūteśī, śāśvatī then śāśvataiśvaryā, śarmadā then śambhumohinī. Only the second half of the first line breaks the pattern, where pañcasaṅkhyopacāriṇī occupies all eight syllables alone. Breathe at the end of that word, sixteen syllables in, and nowhere else.

Pañcasaṅkhyopacāriṇī contains the verse's one genuinely awkward cluster, ṅkhy: a velar nasal, then an aspirated velar stop, then the palatal glide, all before the o. Build it from the inside — khya first, then add the nasal in front, keeping the tongue at the soft palate for both ṅ and kh. The o itself is a sandhi vowel: pañcasaṅkhyā ends in ā, upacāriṇī begins with u, and ā plus u gives o. Seeing that join is what keeps the word from being memorised as an undifferentiated string.

The second line is four names beginning with ś, the palatal sibilant, made with the blade of the tongue near the hard palate — close to English sh but further forward, and quite distinct from the retroflex ṣ that appeared in earlier verses. Sustaining four of them in a row without letting any drift toward a dental s is the drill this line offers.

Śāśvataiśvaryā deserves separate rehearsal. It is śāśvata plus aiśvarya, and a final short a followed by ai gives ai, so the word carries a full diphthong in its middle: śā-śva-tai-śva-ryā. Two of its five syllables contain the śva cluster and the temptation is to let the second one assimilate to the first. The final ryā is a retroflex-coloured r, then the palatal y, then a long ā, with no vowel between the consonants.

Śambhumohinī opens with an anusvāra before a labial, which is realised as m: śam-bhu. The bh is a single aspirated labial, one sound, not b followed by h.

For archanā the datives are pañcamyai, pañcabhūteśyai, pañcasaṅkhyopacāriṇyai, śāśvatyai, śarmadāyai and śambhumohinyai for the ī- and ā-stems as they fall, with śāśvataiśvaryāyai the longest of them.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is set by its middle. Someone reciting the thousand names at home has almost certainly performed some version of the fivefold service — a stick of incense, a lamp, a flower, a little food — and the name pañcasaṅkhyopacāriṇī tells him that the short form is not a concession. It is the whole elemental world in five objects. The last name then removes any suggestion that this is a tidy transaction. She is the one who bewilders Śiva; whatever the reciter thinks he has understood by the end of the verse is provisional, and the verse says so on purpose.