Durga and the buffalo-demon: how the gods poured their fury into one goddess

A demon who studied the fine print

Mahishasura was born of a buffalo and an asura, and he inherited the stubbornness of both. He wanted what most of the great demons wanted, which was not gold or land but an exemption from death. So he sat down to earn it the way it was always earned, through penance so severe that the heat of it climbed all the way to Brahma's seat and forced the creator to come down and offer a boon.

Mahishasura had thought about the wording. He did not ask to be immortal, because Brahma never granted that outright and every demon before him had been ruined by asking for the impossible. Instead he asked that no man and no god be able to kill him. He left out women. Why would he include women. In the whole span of the three worlds, what woman had ever led an army against a demon king. The gods fought. The sages cursed. The women, in his reckoning, did neither. Brahma heard the request, saw the loophole the way a tired judge sees a clever contract, and granted it exactly as spoken.

That was the mistake that would take a hundred years to come due.

Heaven falls

With his boon in hand, Mahishasura did what such boons are always used for. He raised an army and went to war against Indra and the devas.

The war lasted a hundred years. The gods fought with everything they had, and it was not enough, because every soldier they put in the field was a man or a god, and the one thing settled beyond argument was that no man and no god could kill this buffalo. They could wound him. They could drive him back for a season. They could not finish him, and he knew it, and he simply kept coming. In the end Indra lost his own throne. Mahishasura took the seat of the king of the gods and installed himself there, and the devas who had ruled the sky since the churning of the ocean were turned out of their own halls like servants dismissed at the end of a bad harvest.

They went, because there was nowhere else to go, to Vishnu and to Shiva.

The council of the defeated

Picture the scene the Devi Mahatmya draws. The immortals, who are not used to losing, stand in a ragged crowd and tell the whole humiliating story, how the buffalo took the sun's office and the wind's office and the office of the god of death, how each of them had been reduced to wandering the earth like a mortal. They finish, and they wait, and what happens next is the strange and beautiful hinge of the entire tale.

Vishnu listens, and Shiva listens, and both of them grow angry. Not a mild divine displeasure. A real and rising fury. And that fury does not stay inside them. It comes out.

From the face of Vishnu a great light broke loose. From the face of Shiva another. Then from Brahma, from Indra, from all the assembled gods, the anger poured out of each one as raw tejas, radiance, the pure energy that sits behind a god's power. It streamed out of every one of them at once, and instead of scattering it drew together. The separate blazes met in the air and fused into a single mountain of light, burning in every direction, filling the horizons, hotter and brighter than anything the three worlds had held.

And then the light took a shape. The energy of the gods, gathered into one body, became a woman.

The making of the goddess

The Devi Mahatmya is almost anatomical about how she was assembled, and the detail is the point. She was not created by one god and lent to the others. Each god's radiance became a specific part of her, so that she was made of all of them and belonged to none of them.

Shiva's light became her face. Yama's became her hair. Vishnu's became her arms. The moon shaped her breasts, Indra her waist, Varuna her legs, the earth her hips. Brahma gave her feet, the sun her toes. Her fingers came from the Vasus, her nose from Kubera, her teeth from Prajapati. Fire itself formed her three eyes, and the twin evening lights became her eyebrows. She stood there blazing, a woman built out of the concentrated wrath of every power in heaven, and the gods who had made her fell silent looking at her.

Then they armed her. This is the part that gets carved on temple walls. Each god took a copy of his own weapon and gave it to her hand, and she had the hands to hold them all. Shiva drew a trident out of his own trident and set it in her grip. Vishnu gave her a discus spun from his. Varuna a conch, Agni a spear, Vayu a bow with a quiver that never emptied. Indra gave her a thunderbolt and the bell that hung from his white elephant. Yama gave her a staff, Brahma a water-pot and a string of prayer-beads, Kubera a mace, the ocean a necklace and unfading garments, the mountain Himavat a lion to ride. Vishvakarma gave her an axe and armor. She stood dressed for war in the arms of the entire pantheon, and she laughed, a laugh so loud and so deep that the earth shook with it and the seas heaved and the mountains trembled on their roots.

Down in the stolen palace, Mahishasura heard it.

The buffalo goes to war one last time

He sent his generals first, the way confident kings do. Chikshura went out, and Chamara, and Udagra and Mahahanu and a dozen more with armies behind them, and she cut through all of it. The Devi Mahatmya lets the battle run long and loud on purpose. Arrows went out from her bow in numbers no counting could follow. Her lion leapt through the demon ranks and broke them the way a strong wind breaks standing grain. Her trident found chest after chest. From the sighs of her exhaustion, the text says, whole battalions of her own soldiers sprang up to fight beside her. The generals fell one after another until the field was empty of everyone Mahishasura had trusted, and the buffalo understood that he would have to come himself.

Here the boon that had made him unkillable curdled into a trap, because he could not touch her and could not stay away. He charged in his own buffalo form, huge and black, and where his hooves struck, mountains were flung into the sky and his tail lashed the oceans over their shores and his horns tossed the clouds around like straw. Her lion met him. They fought, and he could not hold one shape. When she pressed him hard he burst out of the buffalo body and became a lion himself, and she struck the head off it, and out of the falling body a man leapt with a sword, and she filled him with arrows, and the man became a great elephant that seized her lion in its trunk, and she cut the trunk away, and the elephant became the buffalo again, bellowing, tearing up the earth.

That was his whole nature laid bare in one exchange. Endless changes, endless escapes, no single form to pin down, a boon spent entirely on refusing to die.

Mahishasura-mardini

She finished it the way these things must be finished, all at once. She drank, the text says, from a divine cup, her eyes reddening, and she laughed at him again as he raged and threw mountains in his changing shapes. Then she sprang, and she pinned the buffalo down under her foot, one heel on his neck, and she drove her trident into him.

At that last instant, caught between forms, the demon began to come out of the buffalo's mouth, half-emerged, a man rising from the animal's throat trying one more transformation. She did not let him finish it. Her sword came down and took his head while he was still half in and half out of the beast, and the boon that had guarded him for a hundred years turned out to be worth nothing at all, because the one who killed him was neither a man nor a god. She was a woman, made of the gathered light of both, and she had walked straight through the one door he had left unlocked.

The three worlds went quiet. Then the gods who had poured themselves into her, the sages, the whole company of the sky, lifted their voices and praised her, and the hymn they sang is still sung, the one that names her the remover of every affliction. They called her Mahishasura-mardini, the crusher of Mahishasura, and that name stuck harder than any throne.

The fire that still gets lit

If you stand in Kolkata in autumn, or in any of a thousand towns from Bengal to the western hills, you can watch this story get told again with clay and straw and paint. Every year around Navaratri the image-makers build her fresh, ten arms full of borrowed weapons, one foot on the buffalo, the trident going in, the demon caught forever at the moment of his last failed change. That is Durga Puja, and its whole visual grammar is lifted straight from these three chapters of the Devi Mahatmya. The lion, the eighteen or ten arms, the calm face above the violent hands. People who have never read a line of the Markandeya Purana still know exactly what they are looking at, because the scene was carried down not in a book but in an act repeated once a year for longer than anyone can trace.

The demon is burned or immersed at the end of the festival, and the following autumn he is built again, so that he can be beaten again, which is perhaps the honest thing the whole story admits. The buffalo is not gone for good. He comes back with the season. And each time, the answer is the same as it was the first time, which is that no one god can manage him, and the sky only wins when it stops being a crowd of separate powers and becomes, for the length of one battle, a single one.

Sources

• Devi Mahatmya (Durga Saptashati), part of the Markandeya Purana, chapters 2 to 4: the slaying of Mahishasura.
• The Markandeya Purana, translated by F. Eden Pargiter (public domain English text).
• Devi Mahatmyam, Sanskrit text with English translation by Swami Jagadiswarananda (Ramakrishna Math).