What is Saptashrungi?

There was a war between the gods and the asuras that went on for a hundred years. Mahisha was the king of the asuras, a buffalo — Mahishasura, the buffalo asura — and by the end of it he had won. He threw the gods out of heaven and sat in Indra’s place and did Indra’s work, and the Sun’s, and Agni’s, and Vayu’s and the Moon’s, and the gods wandered about on the earth like ordinary people.

They went, with Brahma at their head, to where Shiva and Vishnu were, and told them the whole thing. Mahisha has taken everything. We have nowhere to go. Find a way to kill him.

Vishnu heard it and his face went dark with anger, and so did Shiva’s. And out of Vishnu’s mouth came a light, a great burning force, and the same came out of Brahma’s mouth and Shiva’s, and out of the bodies of Indra and all the other gods, and it all ran together into one place. The gods stood and looked at it. It was like a mountain on fire, and it lit up the whole sky. And as they watched, that light, made of all of them at once, took the shape of a woman.

Her face came from Shiva’s light. Her hair from Yama’s. Her arms from Vishnu’s. Her waist from Indra’s, her legs from Varuna’s, her feet from Brahma’s, her fingers from the Vasus’, her nose from Kubera’s, her teeth from the Prajapati’s, her three eyes from Agni’s, her eyebrows from the two twilights and her ears from Vayu’s.

Then they gave her their weapons. Shiva pulled a trident out of his own trident and gave it to her. Vishnu pulled a discus out of his discus. Varuna gave her a conch, Agni a spear, Vayu a bow and a quiver full of arrows. Indra pulled a thunderbolt out of his thunderbolt and gave her a bell off his elephant Airavata. Yama gave her a rod from his own rod, Varuna a noose, the Prajapati a string of beads, Brahma a water pot. The Sun put his rays into every pore of her skin. Time gave her a sword and a shield. The ocean of milk gave her a necklace of pearls and two robes that would never wear out, and Vishwakarma gave her a jewel for her hair, earrings, bracelets, anklets, rings for every finger, a polished axe, and armour nothing could go through. The ocean gave her garlands of lotuses that would never fade. Himavat, the Himalaya, gave her a lion to ride. Kubera gave her a cup full of wine. And Shesha, the serpent who holds up the earth, gave her a necklace of snakes with great jewels in it.

She stood there with all of it on her and roared, and laughed in the middle of the roar, again and again. The sky filled with the sound. The worlds shook, the seas trembled, the earth shook, the mountains moved. And the gods shouted, Conquer! and the rishis bowed.

Mahisha heard the roar and came to see what it was, with the whole asura army behind him. What he saw was a woman, lit up so that she filled the three worlds, with the earth bending where her feet touched it and the top of her head scraping the sky, and the twang of her bowstring shaking the underworld.

His generals went at her first. Chikshura came in a chariot and rained arrows on her, and she cut the arrows out of the air as if she were playing, shot his horses and his driver, split his bow and knocked down his banner. He jumped down with a sword and shield and hit the lion on the head and then hit her on the left arm, and the sword broke into pieces on her arm. He threw his pike. She threw hers, and it smashed his into a hundred bits and smashed him with it. Chamara came on an elephant and threw a spear, and she knocked it down with a shout. Then the lion jumped up onto the elephant’s forehead and the two of them went down fighting, and the lion jumped into the sky and came down and took Chamara’s head off with one paw. The rest of them went down one after another — to stones and trees, to her teeth and fists, to her club, to a dart, an arrow, a trident, a sword.

Then Mahisha came himself, in his own shape, a buffalo. He knocked her troops down with his muzzle, trampled them with his hooves, lashed them with his tail, ripped them with his horns, and blew them over with his breath. He pounded the earth till it broke, tossed mountains into the air with his horns, lashed the sea till it flooded, and tore the clouds as his horns swung.

She threw her noose over him and pulled it tight. And he changed. He left the buffalo and became a lion. As she went to cut the lion’s head off he became a man with a sword in his hand, and she shot the man through, sword and shield and all. Then he was an elephant, dragging at her lion with his trunk, and she cut the trunk off. Then he was the buffalo again, and shook the three worlds.

And she drank. She lifted the cup Kubera had given her and drank, and drank again, and her eyes went red, and she laughed. He roared at her and threw mountains at her with his horns, and she shot them to dust as they came, and with her mouth red from the wine she said to him: Roar. Roar on, for your one moment, you fool, while I drink. The gods will do the roaring soon, when I kill you here.

She jumped. She landed on the buffalo’s back, put her foot on his neck and drove her spear into him. And with her foot on his neck, the asura inside the buffalo started to come out of its mouth, half of him, up to the waist, and she took his head off with her great sword.

That was the end of the asura army. The gods came pouring back. They stood in front of her with their heads bowed and the hair standing up on their bodies, and praised her — the one who is good fortune in the houses of good people and bad fortune in the houses of the wicked, who is sense in the hearts of the sensible and faith in the hearts of the good. And she promised them that whenever they were in trouble and thought of her, she would come.

This is what Saptashrungi tells.

After Mahishasura, and after Shumbha and Nishumbha and Raktabija and all the rest of them were dead, she looked for a place where nothing would trouble her, and she came here, to the hill with seven peaks, and she has been here since. The seven peaks are not empty. Seven goddesses live on them, one on each, all of them fierce, all of them armed and ready for a fight. Below the hill are the vetals, the spirits who serve her and guard the hill.

Across the ravine to the east there is another hill, and that one is Markandeya’s. Markandeya is the rishi who was meant to die young and did not, and lived on for age after age, and he came here and sat on his hill facing her and told her the stories of her own deeds, the war and the buffalo and everything that came after, and she listened with her head turned a little to one side.

Her name here is Saptashrung Niwasini, the one who lives among the seven peaks.

A शक्तिपीठ shaktipeeth is a seat of the goddess, a place where a piece of Sati fell. Here is the story of Sati and the shaktipeeths, the way the Devi Bhagavata Purana tells it.

Daksha the Prajapati asked the Devi for one thing. Be born in my house, he said. So she was born to Daksha as a daughter, and the rishis named her Sati, because she was truth itself, and everything in the three worlds was glad the day she was born — the rivers ran fuller, the sun shone cleaner, the drums of the gods were beaten. When she was grown, Daksha gave her to Shiva.

What went wrong began with a garland. The rishi Durvasa was praying to the Devi by the river Jambu, and she was pleased with him and gave him the garland off her own neck, and the bees followed it because of the smell. Durvasa went to Daksha’s house wearing it. Daksha asked where he had got a garland like that and Durvasa told him, and Daksha asked for it, and Durvasa gave it to him, because there was nothing he would refuse a man who loved the Devi. Daksha put it on his own head, and then on his bed, and that night, in the smell of it, he behaved like an animal. From that night something in him turned against Shiva and against Sati, and he began speaking against Shiva to anyone who would listen. Sati heard it. And she made up her mind that she would not keep a body that had come from a man who spoke about her husband like that, and she burnt it, herself, with the fire of her own yoga.

Shiva’s anger at that was the kind that ends the world. Virabhadra came out of it, with an army of Bhadrakalis behind him, and they wrecked Daksha’s sacrifice, and cut Daksha’s head off, and Shiva put a goat’s head on him instead and brought him back to life, so that the gods stopped being afraid. And then Shiva went to the sacrifice ground and found her body burning on the pyre, and he cried out, Oh my Sati, oh my Sati, and lifted her body onto his shoulders and walked. He walked from country to country with her body on him like a man who has lost his mind. The gods watched and did not know what to do. In the end Vishnu did it. He shot arrows at the body Shiva was carrying, and cut it into pieces, and the pieces fell in one place after another all over the land.

Wherever a piece fell, Shiva stayed, in one form or another. And he said to the gods: whoever worships the Devi in these places with a whole heart will have nothing left to want. She will be close to them there.

Those places are the shaktipeeths. Nashik counts three and a half of them in Maharashtra: the goddess at Kolhapur, the goddess at Tuljapur, the goddess at Mahur, and Saptashrungi, which is the half. अर्ध ardha is half, and that is why she is called the Ardha Shaktipeeth.

The hill is in Kalwan taluka, out past the city, with Nanduri at the foot of it. The road goes up from Nanduri to the village on the hill, and from the village the way to her is on foot.

It is a long flight of steps cut into the face of the rock, with a buffalo’s head carved in stone near the start of them. Then you climb. The steps go up the rock face with the drop on one side. At the top the rock opens into a hollow, and she is in it.

She is bigger than you expect, and redder. The whole figure is red with sindoor. Eighteen arms come out from her sides, nine on the left and nine on the right, and there is a weapon in every hand. She wears a sari, and a nose ring and a crown that are put on her every day. A कुण्ड kund is a tank or pool of water with stone sides and steps, fed by a river or a spring. The water for her bath comes from two of the kunds on the hill, the Suryakund and the Kalikund. People say nobody carved her. She was there in the rock. Her face is turned to the east, and if you look the same way from the top of the steps you see Markandeya’s hill across the ravine.

On the hill itself there are the kunds, and the lake they call the Shivalay, where people bathe. And there is the cliff. It is called Shitkada, Sati’s cliff, and it drops straight down from the edge of the hill, and there is a fence along the top of it now. Shitkada means the cliff that turns whatever goes over it into grains of rice, and there is a story that goes with it. A woman once made a vow to the goddess that if she was given a son she would climb the hill with him, stand in front of the goddess, and then go down Shitkada in a bullock cart. The goddess gave her the son. The woman’s husband would not drive the cart, so her servant did, and they prayed, and the cart and the bullocks and the servant and the woman and the boy went over the edge and came down safe at the bottom. People say you can still see the marks of the wheels on the rock.

Above the hollow where she is, the rock goes on up to the peak, and there is no path up it. Twice a year the Gavali family from Daregaon go up it anyway, the way their fathers and grandfathers did, and plant a flag on the top of it, and come down.

The hill is fullest at the two Navratris, the one in Chaitra and the one in Ashwin. And people on the hill will tell you three things you will not find there, however hard you look: no teak tree, no cobra, and no crow.

Back in the town, the temples of Nashik are along the river, and the history of Nashik tells how the town got its name.