A map of the goddess: walking the fifty-one places her body fell

Hinglaj in the desert

The road to Hinglaj runs for two hundred kilometres through the desert of Balochistan, past the dry riverbeds of the Hingol and the cone of a mud-volcano that pilgrims climb on their last morning before reaching the cave. The cave is small. Inside is a smear of red ochre on a wall and a flat stone. There is no priest in the conventional sense. The shrine has been kept, for as long as anyone has documented, by the local Zikri and Sunni families of the desert villages around it.

Hindu pilgrims have walked through this Muslim country for a thousand years to touch the stone in the cave. The Muslim guardians have, for almost as long, fed them, sheltered them, and pointed them toward the next water-hole. The annual pilgrimage is called the Hinglaj Yatra, and in some Baloch dialects the goddess inside is called Nani, grandmother.

This is the first piece of Sati that fell. The texts say it was her brahmarandhra, the crown of her head. The country it fell into was not yet called Pakistan, was not yet Muslim, was not yet Hindu in the modern administrative sense. It was simply the western edge of the Goddess's body.

She is still there.

Why the body fell apart

The classical frame story is brief, and most pilgrims know it before they set out. Sati, daughter of the Prajapati Daksha, married Shiva against her father's wishes. Daksha held a great yajna and pointedly did not invite his son-in-law. Sati went anyway. When her father insulted her husband in front of the entire assembly, she generated an inward fire from her own body and was consumed in the yajna-flame. (The longer version of that episode is told in the Shiva-tales companion to this story.)

Shiva, finding her body in the ashes, refused to put it down. He carried her across the sky in a tandava that began to unmake the universe. To save creation, Vishnu followed with his discus and, piece by piece, severed her body from Shiva's grasp. Each fragment fell to earth. Where each fragment fell, the earth kept the mark.

That is the frame. The story this piece tells is what happened next, over the next four thousand years, as fifty-one separate landings became fifty-one separate cults, fifty-one local goddesses, fifty-one architectures, fifty-one foods offered at fifty-one altars. The Shakti-Pithas are not one tradition. They are the family resemblance between a network of older, fiercer, often pre-Aryan local mothers, gathered into a single map by the medieval Tantra-chudamani and never fully unified afterward.

Kamakhya in Assam

In the eastern hills above the Brahmaputra sits the temple of Kamakhya. The image inside is not anthropomorphic. It is a cleft in a rock that fills, in the monsoon, with a natural reddish spring. For three days each year, in the month of Ashadha, the priests close the temple. They say the Goddess is in her menstrual period. The spring water turns visibly red. Geologists who have examined the spring point to iron oxide in the rock. The Khasi and Bodo tribes who have been associated with the shrine since pre-historical times say something older.

Kamakhya is the yoni-pitha, the place where Sati's womb fell. It is also the spiritual headquarters of the left-handed Tantric traditions of eastern India. The temple's morning rite includes offerings that no mainstream Hindu temple permits, and the pilgrims who come to Kamakhya range from south-Indian Brahmins doing the strict Shakta yatra to Aghori ascetics who arrive with skulls.

The festival of Ambubachi, when the spring turns red, draws a crowd of millions. The temple shuts for three days. The country waits.

When it reopens, the cloth that was placed over the rock during the three days is cut into small pieces and distributed. Pilgrims keep these scraps wrapped in silk in their household shrines for years.

Jvalamukhi: the flame without fuel

In the hills of Himachal Pradesh, north of the plains, a natural gas-vent rises through the rock in the village of Jvalamukhi. It has been burning, by all available records, since before anyone began keeping records. The flame is small, blue, steady. It cannot be extinguished by water and cannot be relocated.

This is where Sati's tongue fell. The temple built around the vent is small and old. There is no idol inside. The deity is the flame itself.

Mughal emperors are recorded as having tried to extinguish the Jvalamukhi flame on at least two occasions. Akbar himself, according to a chronicle of his Punjab campaign, sent engineers to channel water over the vent. The flame did not go out. He is said to have left a gold canopy at the shrine and never spoke against the place again.

The local custom is to offer the goddess sweetened milk and to keep your hands away from the flame.

Tarapith in Bengal

In a small forested village in West Bengal, beside an old cremation ground, stands the temple of Tara, one of the Mahavidyas, who is associated with this Pitha because Sati's eye is said to have fallen here. The image inside is a small black stone in the shape of a seated woman nursing Shiva at her breast. The story attached is that Shiva, having drunk the poison Halahala, was burning from within, and Tara took him onto her lap and nursed him with her own milk until the burning stopped.

Tarapith is most famous, however, for the sadhus who live in the cremation ground outside the temple. The most well-known of them was Bamakhepa, a nineteenth-century saint who lived under a tree by the river, performed his rites among the burning pyres, and is said to have spoken to the goddess directly. Pilgrims today still leave offerings at his samadhi shrine, twenty paces from the main temple.

The food offered to Tara at this shrine is unusual: rice, lentils, a small portion of cooked fish, and country liquor. Most Indian temples would shut their doors to such an offering. Tarapith accepts it. The Goddess here is older than the rules.

Kalighat in the city

In the heart of what is now Kolkata, beside a small creek that has long since been incorporated into the city's drainage, sits the temple of Kalighat. The image inside is a small black image with three large eyes and a long red tongue. Pilgrims see her by lamplight for ten seconds at a time, in a queue that on a major puja day stretches for kilometres.

Kalighat is where Sati's right toe fell. The temple is one of the oldest continuously functioning Devi shrines in the subcontinent. The British called the city around it Calcutta because they could not pronounce Kalikkhetra, the field of Kali. The name of the modern megacity is, in its origin, the name of this small Pitha.

The temple is small, dark, hot, smoky. The priests are loud. The offerings include hibiscus flowers, sweetmeats, and on certain days the blood of a sacrificed goat. The animal sacrifice is conducted in a side courtyard before sunrise. Most middle-class Bengali pilgrims now visit only in the daylight hours, after the morning rite, and many have begun to ask, quietly, whether the older practice should continue. The temple priests, who descend from a lineage older than the city, have not yet changed their minds.

The map as a whole

The classical lists differ. The most cited is the Tantra-chudamani, which names 51 sites. Other texts give 52, 108, or even 64. The accepted core, the Pithas that appear in nearly every list and where the local cults have remained continuously active, are these.

In Pakistan: Hinglaj in Balochistan (Sati's crown), Sharada Pith in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (her right hand, though the temple is now in ruins).

In Bangladesh: Sugandha in Barisal (her nose), Karatoyatat on the Karatoya river (her left ear).

In Sri Lanka: Lankayam Shankari in Trincomalee (her anklets, though the temple was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1622 and the exact location is now contested).

In Nepal: Guhyeshvari at Pashupatinath in Kathmandu (her knees), Manakamana on a hill in Gorkha (her cheeks).

In India, across nearly every state: Kamakhya in Assam (womb), Jvalamukhi in Himachal (tongue), Naina Devi also in Himachal (eyes), Jalandhar in Punjab (left breast), Vaishno Devi in Jammu (skull, in some lists), Kalighat in Bengal (toe), Tarapith in Bengal (eye), Bhairavparvat near Ujjain (upper lip), Mahalakshmi at Kolhapur (eyes), and so on through the body.

Some of these temples are vast pilgrimage complexes drawing millions a year. Some are small village shrines maintained by a single priest's family. A few are simply roadside markers, a stone and a stripe of vermilion, that the local population insists is the real Pitha and that the Tantra-chudamani does not name.

What they share, when you read them across the map, is unsettling. The Goddess as worshipped at Hinglaj does not look much like the Goddess as worshipped at Kalighat. The food, the language of the priest, the form of the image, the gender of the visitors, the rules of approach, even the colour of the offering cloth: each Pitha has kept its own local tradition. And yet on a Devi Bhagavata pilgrim's map, they are one body.

What a pilgrim sees

Almost no one has walked all fifty-one. The geography includes the desert of Balochistan, the cold passes of Kashmir, the hills of Assam, the swamp delta of Bangladesh, the dry coast of Tamil Nadu, and pockets of the eastern Himalayas now closed by political borders. A serious pilgrim of the full circuit can expect to spend years on the road.

The pilgrims who do walk a long stretch of the circuit, who do twenty Pithas in a season and then twenty more the next year, describe the experience the same way. The Goddess at each shrine is recognisably the same person and recognisably a different person. At Hinglaj she is the grandmother of the desert who keeps a Muslim and a Hindu fed equally. At Kamakhya she is the bleeding mother of the eastern hills, ancient and unembarrassed. At Jvalamukhi she is a small blue flame that does not need fuel. At Tarapith she is the dark mother who takes the liquor with the rice. At Kalighat she is the city's old tongue, fierce, urban, impatient. At Hinglaj again, on the return leg, she is grandmother. The pilgrim begins to suspect that the Goddess is older than any one of her temples and that the temples are the places where she has consented to be seen.

This is the older meaning of shakti. Not the power that destroys demons. The power that survives loss, that distributes itself, that keeps fifty-one different fires burning in fifty-one different languages and recognises each of them as her own.

What did you come to her body to find?