Adi Shakti

Adi Parashakti, Mahadevi, Devi, Mahamaya: Shaktism draws no distinction between these names, because they name the same principle. That current understands the Goddess as Para Brahman, ultimate reality, and every Hindu god and goddess as a manifestation of her; she is not one more deity within a pantheon but the stuff the pantheon is made of. The name Adi Parashakti stresses what is first (adi) and what lies beyond (para) energy (shakti); Mahadevi, the Great Goddess, stresses sovereignty. Anyone looking in the texts for a hierarchy between the two names will not find one: they are used interchangeably, and the idea that one denotes a manifested phase and the other an unmanifested source comes not from the classical sources but from modern popularisation.

The theology that upholds her is founded on the Devi Mahatmya, seven hundred verses also known as the Durga Saptashati, which occupy chapters 81 to 93 of the Markandeya Purana and are dated to the fifth or sixth century. It is the oldest treatise to present the Goddess as supreme truth and creator of the universe, and not as anybody's wife. In its first episode she is Mahamaya, the sleep that keeps Vishnu under and that must withdraw for the god to wake. In the second, the gods defeated by the buffalo Mahisha pool their radiance, and from that mass of light Durga is born, who kills him. In the seventh, when the Goddess grows angry, Kali steps out of her blackened brow. That is the mechanism the text repeats again and again: the other goddesses are not independent creatures she rules over, but forms she emits and reabsorbs.

Her relation to Shiva is not one of subordination. The first verse of the Saundaryalahari, ascribed by tradition to Shankara, puts it bluntly: joined to Shakti, Shiva is able to create; without her he cannot so much as stir. Energy is the active principle and consciousness the passive one, so the pair divides function rather than power, and that is why Shaktism can call her supreme without denying anyone. In the Shrividya school this same Goddess is worshipped as Lalita Tripurasundari, and the Lalita Sahasranama, her thousand names preserved in the Brahmanda Purana, runs through her entirely: it calls her without origin, without support and without equal. Her visual support is not an image but a diagram, the Shri Yantra, whose nine interlocking triangles converge on a central point, the bindu, from which everything else is said to proceed.

Sati, Parvati, Durga and Kali are usually presented as four parallel emanations of hers, and they are not: each has her own thread. Sati, daughter of Daksha, throws herself into the fire of her father's sacrifice when he humiliates her husband, and is reborn as Parvati, daughter of Himavat; she is the same goddess in two lives, not two branches of one trunk. Durga is born of the gods' pooled radiance for one specific task and returns into them once it is done. Kali steps out of the angry Goddess's brow and has to be calmed afterwards. Gathering the four into a list of simultaneous outflows from one source flattens a theology considerably more precise than that.

As for her image, there is no fixed iconography and no obligatory attribute. She is shown with several arms (four, eight, eighteen, depending on the form invoked) seated or standing on a lotus, holding the weapons the gods handed her in the Devi Mahatmya. The thousand arms sometimes attributed to her are not hers: they belong to other figures of Indian religious art, and hanging them on her is a popularisers' error that her own iconography contradicts.