The Hindus (71 page)

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.
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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 skull
²³
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 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 forever
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.

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:

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 Daksha
³⁵
) 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

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:

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
.

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: