The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  This story may be traced back to the Vedic myth in which Rudra beheads Prajapati to punish him for committing incest with his daughter, Dawn,21 and to the myth of Indra’s pursuit by the female incarnation of Brahminicide, who sticks to him like glue.22 Already many things have been cleaned up, at least a bit, to the credit of the gods: Brahma now assaults not his own daughter but Sarasvati, who is to become his wife, and who, being the goddess of speech, upbraids him for talking obscenely. Brahma, who often has four heads but is sometimes called Five-Headed (Panchamukha), in this myth is imagined to go from five to four. And now Shiva is not, as in earlier versions, forced helplessly to endure the relentlessly adhesive skull23 but is entirely in control and submits to the curse “for the sake of all people.” This retroactive justification of the god as the power of his sect increases (a transformation that Rama too went through) is an essential move in the theology of the Tantras, as we will see.

  Other texts went even further to absolve Shiva of any implication that he might have been punished against his will, by simply removing him from the scene of the crime altogether. One version begins with the familiar tale of Brahma, Vishnu, and the flame linga but then moves on in new directions:

  BHAIRAVA BEHEADS BRAHMA

  Once when Brahma and Vishnu were arguing about which of them was supreme, a flame linga appeared between them, and from it there emerged a three-eyed man adorned with snakes. Brahma’s fifth head called the man his son; thereupon the man, who was Rudra, became angry. He created Bhairava [“The Terrifying One”] and commanded him to punish Brahma. Bhairava beheaded Brahma, for whatever limb offends must be punished. Then Shiva told Bhairava to carry Brahma’s skull, and he created a maiden named Brahminicide [Brahma-hatya] and said to her, “Follow Bhairava as he wanders about, begging for alms with this skull and teaching the world the vow that removes the sin of Brahminicide. But when he arrives at the holy city of Varanasi, you must leave him, for you cannot enter Varanasi.” And she said, “By serving him constantly under this pretext [of haunting him in punishment], I will purify myself so that I will not be reborn.” Then Bhairava entered Varanasi with her still at his left side, and she cried out and went to hell, and the skull of Brahma fell from Bhairava’s hand and became the shrine of the Release of the Skull [Kapala-Mochana].24

  Bhairava first appears as a replacement for Shiva in the Daksha myth, where several texts state that Shiva created him and sent him to do the dirty work of creating mayhem in Daksha’s sacrifice.25 Here he frees Shiva both from the stigma of having committed the original crime of Brahminicide and from submitting to any punishment at all; Shiva creates the avenger himself and even arranges for the punishment incarnate to serve her own vow of penance and find Release. The Release of the Skull thus has a triple meaning; it is the place where Bhairava was released from the skull but also where the skull itself—indeed the very crime of Brahminicide incarnate—was released from its own pollution and became a shrine.hw And it is the place of Release (mochana is closely related to moksha) for those human worshipers who know the myth and/or make a pilgrimage to the shrine. Brahma is saved from the embarrassment of a sexual crime (however bowdlerized) by the substitution of another familiar myth, the myth of the argument between Brahma and Vishnu that we have encountered before. Most important, the myth accounts for the creation of what remains one of the great Shaiva shrines, the Release of the Skull in Varanasi.

  The reverse savior myth of Indra’s Brahminicide is here reversed back in the other direction so that it becomes a savior myth after all, reformulating the Vedic faith in divine intervention, the worshiper asking the god for help: The god Shiva, or his creature, commits a sin expressly in order to establish a cure for other people who will commit that sin, or other, lesser sins, in the future. According to many versions of the story, Shiva could have rid himself of the skull if he wanted to, but he kept it on his hand until he reached Varanasi, delaying his own salvation, in order to pave the way for humans in need of salvation; his role as savior may have taken on some new qualities at this time as a result of contact with the Mahayana Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva (potential Buddha) who willingly postpones his own final Release in order to help others to find theirs. Shiva also acts as a savior in the many bhakti myths in which he brings salvation to sinners and in the Mahabharata myth of the churning of the ocean: When a fiery poison comes out of the ocean and threatens to burn the universe to ashes (yet another form of the submarine mare fire), Shiva swallows it and holds it forever after in his throat (1.15-17). Shiva’s bhakti toward his worshipers also explains why he marries despite his vow to remain a chaste yogi forever26 and, on the other hand, why he persists in generating ascetic heat even when he has decided to marry; in both cases, he does it to keep the universe alive or for the sake of his devotees.27 The Skull Bearer may also represent a Shaiva response to the avatars of Vishnu. The transition from the pattern of the Indra myth to that of the Shiva myth is made possible by the shift from the second alliance, in which Indra fears or even hates humankind, to the third alliance, the bhakti alliance, in which Shiva loves humankind.

  The logic of the myth of a god who commits a sin in order to establish a cure for other people who will commit that sin in the future is made more circular in yet another variant of the story:

  THE SKULL BEARER BEHEADS BRAHMA

  Once Brahma’s fifth head said to Shiva, “Be a Skull Bearer” [Kapalika or Kapalin], addressing Shiva by his future name. Shiva became angry at the word “skull” and cut off the head, which stuck to his hand.28

  The myth seems aware of the confusion of time cycles, for it notes the incongruity of Brahma’s use of Shiva’s “future name.” Shiva becomes a Skull Bearer because he is a Skull Bearer, apparently deciding to have the game as well as the name. Since the name is the person, the word the thing, in the Hindu conception of speech acts such as curses, by naming Shiva, Brahma makes him what he calls him, a Skull Bearer, just as Daksha cursed Shiva to be a heretic because he was one. Shiva, who committed the prototypical Brahminicide—beheading not just any old Brahmin but Brahma himself—also invented the vow to expiate Brahminicide.

  Daksha often accuses Shiva and his followers of being, or curses them to be, “Skull Bearers” and “Death Heads” (Kalamukhas).29 The myth of Daksha sometimes involves the mutual exchange of curses, as the result of which two groups of sages are cursed to become followers of reviled religious sects or false doctrines.30 Daksha curses all of Shiva’s servants to be heretics, Pariahs, beyond the Vedas, and Shiva’s servant Nandi (the bull in anthropomorphic form) or Dadhicha curses Daksha and his allies to be hypocrites, false Brahmins,31 or to be reborn in the Kali Age as Shudras and to go to hell, their minds struck down by evil.32 Once again the apparent results of the curses are actually their causes: Because Shiva was already a Pariah, denied a share in the sacrifice, Daksha curses him and his followers to be such, and because Daksha heretically denies the true god, Shiva’s servant curses him to be a religious hypocrite.

  SATI, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTA SHRINES

  The story of Sati and Daksha from the early Puranas was now retold, combining that story with the myth in which Shiva wanders with Brahma’s head. The result was a myth in which Shiva beheads Daksha and wanders with the corpse of Sati:

  SATI’S CORPSE IS DISMEMBERED

  Daksha conceived a hatred for Shiva and also for his own daughter Sati, who had married Shiva. Because of her father’s offense against her husband, Sati burned her body in the fire of her yoga, to demonstrate Sati-dharma. Then the fire of Shiva’s anger burned the triple world, and Shiva beheaded Daksha; eventually, Shiva gave Daksha the head of a goat and revived him. But when Shiva saw Sati being burned in the fire, he placed her on his shoulder and cried out over and over again, “Alas, Sati!” Then he wandered about in confusion, worrying the gods, and Vishnu quickly took up his bow and arrowhx and cut away the limbs of Sati, which fell in various places. In each place, Shiva took a different form, and he said to the gods, “Whoever worships
the Great Mother with devotion in these places will find nothing unattainable, for she is present in her own limbs. And they will have their prayers answered.” And Shiva remained in those places forever, meditating and praying, tortured by separation.33

  Again, “Sati-dharma” means both what Sati did and what any Good Woman should do. Daksha is beheaded in place of the goat that is the usual sacrificial animal, and when he is revived, he is given the goat’s head, for his own is lost. The idea that the sacrifice itself was in essence already a substitute,34 the victim in the sacrifice substituting for the sacrificer, eventually developed into this myth in which the sacrificer, Daksha, was himself substituted for the goat who was to be the substitute for him, another myth about a sacrifice gone disastrously wrong by being literalized.hy

  Sati is dismembered, as the Primeval Man was in the Vedas. And just as the place where the skull of Brahma (the antecedent of Daksha35) falls becomes the great shrine of the Release of the Skull in Varanasi, so Sati’s limbs, as they fall, become the plinths (pithas) of pilgrimage shrines,36 with both Shiva and Sati eternally present to answer prayers. Other texts say that Shiva took the form of a linga in each pitha, and the place where her yoni is said to have fallen became the central Tantric shrine in Assam (Kama-rupa).37

  PROTO-TANTRIC GODDESSES

  CHANDIKA /DURGA, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTI BHAKTI

  In “Glorification of the Goddess,” Chandika was said to have been created from the gods’ energies (tejas), though she quickly assumed command. Now she is created from her own power, and she is eroticized. Indeed, this process began indirectly even in “Glorification of the Goddess,” when, after killing the buffalo, Chandika seduced and killed another antigod:

  CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS SHUMBHA

  Shumbha fell madly in love with Chandika and proposed marriage. She replied that she would only marry someone who vanquished her in battle. There was a battle, in which the shaktis came out of the gods Brahma, Shiva, Skanda, Vishnu, and Indra to aid her: whatever form, and ornaments, and weapons, and animal vehicles each god had, his shakti took that very form. Even Chandika emitted her own shakti, howling like a hundred jackals. And after she had absorbed all the gods’ shaktis, she killed Shumbha.38

  Shumbha has an ally, Nishumbha, whom Chandika kills too; the names suggest that this myth is modeled on the earlier story of the seduction of the antigods Sunda and Upasunda by the nymph Tilottama, who leaves their killing to the gods. This myth is then a combination of the older theme of “dangerous upstart seduced by nymph” with the new theme of “d.u. killed by goddess.” Chandika gives Shumbha death in lieu of sex; he dies in the battle that she demands as a prelude to marriage, a marriage that never happens, and goes straight to heaven, since his love-war relationship with the goddess is regarded as a form of dvesha-bhakti , devotion through hatred (as well as love). Though dozens and dozens of antigods who lack Shumbha’s passion are vanquished by the gods on every page without seeing the light, his passion makes his death in combat a form of enlightenment, a popular Hindu theme that is foreshadowed by the heaven-guaranteeing heroic battle deaths in the Mahabharata.

  THE SEDUCTION AND KILLING OF MAHISHA

  Most Sanskrit texts play down the erotic relationship between the goddess and the buffalo, and some (beginning with “Glorification of the Goddess”) omit it altogether. But other texts revel in it, and it bursts out again and again in the art-historical traditions, in both paintings and sculptures, which emphasize, as do the texts, the extraordinary beauty of Chandika or, rather, of Durga, as she is now usually called. Even “Glorification of the Goddess” tells us that the gods give her some rather good jewelry and specifies that of all the parts of her body made from parts of the gods, her genitals were made of energy itself.39 But a later Sanskrit text, the Skanda Purana, states that Durga was already a powerful goddess when Mahisha defeated the gods and that the gods went to her to beg her for help in dispatching him.40 Another text from roughly the same period brings out the erotic element more vividly:

  CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS MAHISHA

  Mahisha had forced Brahma to promise that if he had to die, it would be at the hands of a woman; he asked this in order to ensure that he would not die, since he regarded it as unthinkable that a mere woman, beneath contempt, should overpower him. The gods created Durga. She enticed Mahisha, who proposed marriage. But she replied that she wanted to kill him, not to sleep with him, that she had become a woman in the first place only in order to kill him; that although she did not appear to be a man, she had a man’s nature and was merely assuming a woman’s form because he had asked to be killed by a woman. Moreover, she said to Mahisha’s messenger, “Your master is a great fool, and certainly no hero, to want to be killed by a woman. For to be killed by one’s mistress gives sexual pleasure to a pansy (kliba) but misery to a hero.” The besotted Mahisha, however, was persuaded by a counselor who suggested that this clearly antierotic speech was the amorous love talk of a passionate woman: “She wishes to bring you into her power by frightening you. This is the sort of indirect speech that enamored women use toward the man they love.” Mahisha then dressed up in his best suit and boasted to Durga that he was a man who could make a woman very happy. She laughed and killed him by beheading him.41

  Mahisha’s boon is a variant of Ravana’s, narrowing the field of his killer to someone regarded as impossible, a mere woman. And so once again the gods had to create someone to kill the upstart without violating the fine print of the demonic contract. Though Durga here is so beautiful that she inspires the antigod with a destructive erotic passion, she herself is so devoid of erotic feelings that she insists not only that she is a man rather than a woman but that her would-be consort is not a man, but a mere pansy. To clinch this argument, she insists that only a pansy would wish to experience a Liebestod with a woman. The aggressive woman rides astride the buffalo, and her sexual supremacy is expressed through a martial image: She holds an erect phallic sword in paintings and sculptures depicting the slaying of Mahisha.

  The explicit meaning of this image is that the proposed battle is, by implication, a sexual union. But the image also plays upon the notion (which it self-consciously inverts) that every actual sexual act is, by implication, a fatal battle, a notion basic to Indian thinking about the dangers of eroticism and the need for the control, even the renunciation, of sensuality. In a more positive vein, the fact that Mahisha desires to marry and/or battle Durga, despite her clearly antierotic warning, implies that either marriage or battle may be a way of achieving unity; that either may serve as an initiatory death leading to a desired transformation; that strong emotion, be it lust or hatred, seeks a conflict that leads ultimately to the resolution of all conflict in death. It is this deep intertwining of sex and violence that seems to underlie Durga’s extraordinary appeal, for she is one of the most popular Hindu deities, worshiped by both men and women.

  The image of Durga on top of the helpless Mahisha, placing her feet on shoulders and head as she beheads him or on the back of the cowering buffalo, an image much reproduced in both sculpture and painting, seems to me to be mirrored in the well-known Tantric image of the goddess Kali dancing on the (ithyphallic) corpse of Shiva, with her sword in her hand, often holding in another hand a severed head, an inversion of the myth in which Shiva dances all around India carrying the corpse of Sati. Often the goddess Kali stretches out her tongue to drink the streams of blood spurting from the severed heads or necks; in this she is the descendant of the female antigod Long Tongue in the Brahmanas. Some contemporary Hindu glosses of this icon (particularly in Bengal) attempt to minimize the violence inherent in it; they say, “She sticks out her tongue in shock when she realizes that she is trampling on her own husband,” and they say that the severed head represents the severing of the ego, interpretations that reduce the dominating demonic goddess Kali to the properly submissive wife Parvati. But others say that she is the letter i that turns the corpse (shava in Sanskrit) into Shiva; she brings him to life. Inde
ed sometimes the Goddess holds the severed head while she straddles a copulating couple.

  Whose is the severed head that the goddess holds in many of these icons? Sometimes she herself is headless, Chinnamastaka (“The Severed Head”), and we might think that the head she holds is her own, for it matches her headless body in color and other qualities. One strange variant of the Mahisha myth, which appears in texts in both Sanskrit and Tamil, suggests that the head might be Shiva’s. In this myth, after the goddess has killed Mahisha, his head sticks to her hand just as Brahma’s head sticks to Shiva’s after Shiva beheads Brahma. After bathing in a river shrine (tirtha), the goddess discovers that there is a Shiva linga on Mahisha’s headless torso—that is, in the place where his head was.42 In the context of this particular story, the main function of the epiphany is to identify Mahisha as a devotee of Shiva and hence to plunge the goddess into an agony of guilt, necessitating a complex expiation. But in the context of the patterning of the myth as a whole, this linga functions to demonstrate the fusion of Mahisha and Shiva and, moreover, of Mahisha’s head and Shiva’s phallus.hz

  Yet another possible victim as donor of the severed head may be the devotee of the goddess. Puranic and Tantric mythology, as well as contemporary local mythology and early Tamil literature, abound in tales of male devotees who cut off their own heads in an act of devotion to Durga, and Mahisha himself is such a devotee.

  TANTRICS

  With this mythological corpus as a prelude, let us now consider Tantra itself.