Chapter Eight
Bhaktapur's Pantheon

Introduction

The city of Bhaktapur contains many material representations of gods, a witness to its long history and to close contacts since its earliest days with India, that great incubator of forms of divinity. The multitude of gods whose representations have persisted in Bhaktapur and the Kathmandu Valley are of great importance to the historian of South Asian religion and of art,^[1] but only some of them are alive at present, foci of action, meaning, and emotion. The others are dormant, perhaps to be revived for some future fashion or need.^[2]

It is precisely because Hindu deities can be induced into material objects, the "idols" of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic iconoclasts, that they are able to serve the purposes they do in the construction of Bhaktapur's mesocosm. Those objects can be anchored in space or moved through it. They are constructed of meaningful elements and emerge as units of meaning in themselves. They have their own semantic import, their direct implications for meaning, but they are so constructed that their various similarities and contrasts can be used to build a structure of meaning within an overall civic pantheon, the coherent total domain of the gods. That structure helps map the city's symbolic space and its conceptual universe. The crafted gods, the "idols," are joined by more shadowy supernatural figures, some vaguely represented in astral bodies, some in natural stones, and some m the shifting and vague form of ghosts and spirits. These latter figures have their own uses—the

various kinds of embodiment that the members of the large realm of divine and spooky beings have, considerably influencing their meanings and uses.

As usual, we are primarily interested in the level of civic order; hence we are concerned here in the way the deities are used by the public city. Many of Bhaktapur's component units have their own internal deities; most, but not all, of them (an exception, for example, is the deified figure Gorakhnath, the tutelary deity of the Jugis) are versions of the same deities used as the city's public deities. We will comment on some of these component units, on the interior deities of the household and the phuki , and have included some remarks on the special deities of the Brahmans and of the "royal center" and on the ghosts and spirits of importance to individuals.

We will begin by presenting the city's urban divinities in considerable detail. This will give us a basis for considering exactly what it is they contribute to Bhaktapur's mesocosmic organization and how they are able to do it.

Approaches

In the course of the field study we began our investigation of Bhaktapur's divinities with attempts to locate and list as many of the city's active shrines and temples as we could. By "active" we mean those locations that are regularly used by some group of people in Bhaktapur, and that may have some attendant priest. (Some shrines with a priestly attendant have no significant public use or meaning.) Any of the many "inactive" shrines and temples, relics of some past period, may be loci of casual or private devotion by passersby, but they are not important to the city in the same way as the active ones that concern us. The active shrines and temples were mapped on detailed aerial maps of Bhaktapur, which gave us a first basis for approaching the spatial location and implications of groups or categories of divinities. Subsequently, Niels Gutschow put at our disposal maps that he and his associates prepared of temples and shrines, and we have used them, when noted, to amplify, supplement, and correct our own materials. These surveys were supplemented by discussions with religious experts on various aspects of the divinities and by materials on their use (presented in later chapters and appendixes) and on their personal meanings to various individuals.

In this chapter, and throughout the book, we have chosen to give divinities their Sanskrit names, rather than either the Newari approximation of that name or the popular Western equivalents. We use the Newari form in a few special cases where it has only an attenuated connection or no connection with a Sanskrit form.

Divinities: Housing and Setting

We have used "temples and shrines" as a covering phrase for the various settings in which the divinities are found, but that setting is more complex. Local usage differentiates "temples" (dega :, from Sanskrit, devagrha^[*] ); "god-houses" (dya: che[n] ); pith (Sanskrit, pitha ) "hypaethral shrines"; and an otherwise nonspecified residual of "gods' places"—stones, fountains, trees, and so on. There is also a class of supernatural beings, ghosts, and spirits who have no anchored setting, airy nothings lacking a local habitation, if not a name. This lack of a home, like the vagueness of their form, is an essential aspect of this latter group's meaning and use.

1. Temples, dega:s.

These are buildings of various degrees of elaborateness (see fig. 10), acting as foci for the worship and the spatial influence of the particular god (or gods) they contain. They add to the meaning of their contained god their own symbolic meanings (Kramrish 1946). The historical connections and stylistic and structural features of Newar (and Nepalese) temples have been treated in monographs by Weisner (1978) and Bernier (1970) and as part of larger studies by Korn (1976) and Slusser (1982). Bhaktapur has two kinds of temple buildings with very different external appearances: the traditional Indian form and the tiered-roof "Nepalese" temple, which somewhat resembles the "pagoda" temples of China and Japan. These two local styles are not differentially named, and they do not differ in function.^[3]

Mary Slusser (1982, 128) writes of the Newar temple (her remarks applying to Hindu temples in general):

The dwellings of the gods of Nepal are quite unlike those in many other parts of the world that are designed to house both the divinity and a congregation assembled to worship. Despite many collective sacred rituals, Nepali worship is fundamentally an individual matter. The temple, therefore needs to make no provision for a congregation. With notable exceptions, the worshiper ordinarily does not penetrate the temple at all. He tenders his offerings

Figure 10.
A Newar-style temple. The Natapwa(n)la temple m Ta:marhi
Square.

through a priestly intermediary from whom, in return, he receives the physical sign of the god's blessings (prasada ). Further, not only is the god within the temple an object of worship so is the temple itself.

The "notable exception" for Bhaktapur includes some of the events at the royal temple complex, Taleju, where large numbers of people are involved as actors and congregation. But Slusser's remarks generally characterize Bhaktapur's other dega: s. In Bhaktapur, as we shall see, the proper loci for "congregations" are in other spaces.

2. God-houses, dya: che(n)s.

Although dega: , "temple," is ultimately also derived from a Sanskrit phrase for "god's house," the dya: che(n) (literally in Newari "God's house," dya: , god, plus che[n] , house) is where portable images of divinities are kept. These images are carried outside for various rituals, processions, or festivals, and then returned to the house. Some of these buildings are quite elaborate in themselves. Although many important portable gods have their own god-house, many portable images are kept within a temple, where they are separate and distinguished from the fixed temple image of the divinity.

3. Shrines.

There are many figures representing divinities in Bhaktapur that are not enclosed by buildings. These may be free standing statues or simply carved or natural stones. The latter shrines are "aniconic." Often arches or canopies are placed behind or over these representations. Included here are the "hypaethral" or open-to-the-skies shrines of the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses. These shrines are pith (Sanskrit pitha ), a class of shrines of certain Tantric goddesses in the classic Hindu tradition marking places where pieces of the goddess Sati's dismembered body fell from the sky (see below). Slusser (1982, 325) claims that some temples of the Newar Tantric goddesses reflect such hypaethral origins:

Many [goddesses] have only hypaethral shrines. Still others have had temples built over what were obviously once typical hypaethral shrines. Characteristically, the sanctums of such later-day enclosures are very open, the temple's multiple doorways or colonnades permitting an unobstructed view, and the sanctum itself often sunken well below the present ground level. These sunken and airy sanctums have much to say about the antiquity of many of these goddesses and their ultimate chthonic origins. Symbols of such divinities should be open to the skies and woe to the misguided votary who closes them in.

4. Non-Newar Hindu structures.

Bhaktapur has many Buddhist religious structures—stupas, vihara s (religious centers derived from monastic precursors), and god-houses, as well as non-Newar Hindu centers (matha^[*] s) for holy men, which are peripheral to our present concerns.

Gods With Temples and Shrines—Some Numbers

Shrines and temples are the seats of one segment of Bhaktapur's super-naturals, the "Puranic^[*] deities" of classical, post-Vedic Hinduism. By our count and criteria there are about 120 active shrines and temples within or just outside the boundaries of Bhaktapur. They are one of the two sets of spatially fixed representations in the public city; the other is a numerous and heterogenous class of "deified stones." The shrines and temples are distributed among these deities as follows, with the number of shrines and temples given in parentheses: Visnu^[*] (29), Siva (28), Ganesa^[*] (24), Sarasvati (3), Bhimasena (3), Nataraja (2), Hanuman (2), Krsna^[*] (2), Rama with his consort Sita (3), Bhairava (1), Jagannatha (2), Dattatreya (now regarded primarily as a combination of Siva and Visnu^[*] ) (1), and the group of dangerous or Tantric goddesses that includes some fourteen major named forms (26). We thus have some twenty-six classical Hindu divinities represented in public urban space. Eighty-two of these shrines and temples have various kinds of temple priests, pujari (see chap. 10). The other structures do not have pujari. s We will discuss the spatial locations and the uses of the various temples and shrines later in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, but we may note here that about one-quarter of the temples and shrines are primarily related to the city as a whole, while the rest are related to one or another of the city's major constitutive spatial divisions.

Sorting Supernaturals—Some Preliminary Remarks

To consider a particular divinity as a member of a pantheon or of some larger domain of supernaturals in a certain community during a certain segment of that community's history is radically different from considering that divinity throughout its long history and its South Asian (and beyond) areal variations. Siva as a member of Bhaktapur's pantheon is not the same as the Siva considered in a general and unrooted

sense, through, say, a compendium of his various mythological accounts and his historical usages and forms throughout South Asia.

When Hindu divinities are considered from an historical or South Asian areal viewpoint, they have a very great number of accumulated forms, names, meanings, myths, aspects, philosophical implications, and contradictions. Several attempts have been made at encyclopedic approaches to the whole Hindu pantheon (e.g., Banerjea 19.56; Mani 1975; Rao 1971; Daniélou 1964) and to individual divinities or to some of their aspects (such as O'Flaherty's exhaustive survey of materials on asceticism and eroticism in the mythology of Siva [1973]). Bhaktapur has selected only certain deities from the Hindu tradition for emphasis. For the particular deities it has selected, it further selects and emphasizes only certain aspects of their potential—variously realized elsewhere—for meaning, form, and use. For some of them Bhaktapur sometimes even adds its own attributes, perhaps borrowed from other deities, sometimes ancient local ones.

It is possible for some purposes to consider Bhaktapur's pantheon as a sort of museum, a collection of divine South Asian flotsam that has drifted into the Valley. We cannot avoid our general knowledge of important aspects of the meaning of the divinities in space and time beyond the city, a knowledge shared by the people in Bhaktapur who introduced these figures and who continue to use them, but what is important for us is what is done with the deities in Bhaktapur, their local uses and relations.

The sorting of Bhaktapur's divinities and other assorted "supernatural" figures that follow in this chapter is a sorting, then, for that purpose. We will sort the supernatural beings into several large groups that have morphological and functional contrasts. The groups are:

1. "Major city gods."

These are familiar major gods of Puranic^[*] , post-Vedic, Hinduism. They have, at least in some of their important city forms, anthropomorphic or creatural forms, and are located in named temples and shrines known to the city as a whole. These "major city gods" are divided into two contrasting groups, "ordinary gods" and "dangerous gods." The latter require blood sacrifice, are attended by a special class of priests, and are the loci of a special set of ideas and procedures (chap. 9).

2. "Stone gods."

This is a group of deities represented by natural stones. They are related to other natural objects (as opposed to objects created through human craft, like statues) that have divine properties

(springs, lakes, ponds, trees, etc.) but, in contrast to such other natural divinities, have systematic placements and usages.

3. "Astral divinities."

These are associated with the sun, moon, and various heavenly objects and events; are associated mostly with astrological ideas and practices; and have their own special priests.

4. "Ghosts and spirits."

These are a miscellaneous group of vague entities that may be usefully introduced here, and that have some significant contrasts with the other supernaturals.

Major Gods: The "Ordinary" Deities

We have characterized the "major gods" of Bhaktapur as being derived from the most salient and important gods of the early Hindu Puranic^[*] tradition, of being situated in temples and shrines of city-wide importance, and of having anthropomorphic forms (some having a mixture of anthropomorphic and animal features). These gods are foci of ideas and symbolic enactments concerning the representation and integration of the city as a whole and of its larger constituent units.

Within this group of "major gods" there is an essential and sharp contrast of two subgroups. One of these is a group of gods who are (when necessary) attended by Brahmans or "Brahman-like" priests (chap. 10). These gods are never offered blood sacrifice or alcoholic spirits. Their icons are in the form of idealized human types, or humanized animal forms. The central divinities in this group are male. The other group of major gods are (when necessary) publicly attended by a special class of priests, the Acariya. These gods are offered blood sacrifice, meat, and alcoholic offerings. Their icons are often in the form of demonic, bestialized human forms, marked by bulging eyes, fangs, and sometimes extreme emaciation. They are sometimes represented gar-landed with necklaces of human heads or skulls, and carrying a human skull cup for drinking blood in one of their many hands. Sometimes these gods are represented as exaggeratedly erotic forms with the faces of beautiful young women and with full breasts. These kinds of gods are predominantly female. When it is necessary to distinguish these two groups in speech, the first are sometimes called "ordinary" gods, and by some Brahmans (mistakenly in historical perspective) "Vedic" gods. The second group are sometimes called "dangerous" gods (in contrast to "ordinary") or "Tantric" gods (in contrast to "Vedic"). There are other significant contrasts in the nature, internal relations, uses, and

significance of these two groups of major divinities, but these remarks will serve to introduce them.

Within the two groups of major gods (as within the other groups of divinities) each particular divinity has his (or her) own personality and significance derived in part from his history, from his present relations with others of Bhaktapur's divinities, and from the uses to which Bhaktapur puts them.

Siva

When people in Bhaktapur are asked which of the Newars' two "religions" they adhere to, a question that is usually phrased as which path, or marga they follow, those whom we have been designating as "Hindus" in contrast to Newar "Buddhists," answer by saying they are Sivamargi, followers of the path of Siva ("Siba" in local pronunciation). Siva (see fig. 11) is most commonly referred to in Bhaktapur as Mahadya :, the Newari version of the Sanskrit Mahadeva , the great god. He is represented in a variety of anthropomorphic images, and as the abstract phallic linga^[*] . Siva's status in Bhaktapur is considerably more complex than that of the other benign gods in that he has several levels of meaning. His most striking aspect is that while he is pervasively present as an "idea," as one of the central references helping to locate and explain in various ways the other city gods, he is in comparison to them distant, relatively absent from the concrete arrangements and actions of city religion. Siva's meanings may be distinguished approximately as follows.

1. Siva as the creative principle.

For some more theoretically inclined people in Bhaktapur Siva is the creator god, out of which all the forms of gods (including a particular concrete divinity also called "Siva") are generated. This is a theoretical and philosophical position. In other contexts, as we will see, Devi, the "Goddess," is thought of and praised (by the same people) as the supreme creative force. For the most part the basic, divine, creative principle, called the brahman or paramatman in sophisticated theological discussion, is amalgamated to a general featureless deity, neither male nor female, neither Siva nor Goddess, vaguely conceived as a combination of all gods. This condensed divinity is what some, at least, people have in mind when they think of "god" in some general way, often in such thoughts or phrases as "god help me," in the face of some problem. This generalized deity is called

Figure 11.
Siva as a fertility god.

simply dya:: , or sometimes addressed with some honorific Sanskrit appellation, as Paramesvara, Isvara, Bhagavan, and the like. This generalized deity—unlike the traditional idea of the brahman —is aware of the individuals who call on it, and may help. It is not represented in civic symbols or ritual enactments, and represents a "monotheistic" potentiality that must in all likelihood wait for the breakdown of Bhaktapur's present religious system and its eventual "modernization" to realize its social potential.

2. Siva, first among the gods.

A more common phrasing of Siva's greatness is that he is the most important of the gods, the one whom the others respect. This importance is not based on his power, however, nor on his concrete uses in Bhaktapur. He is not like Indra had been in an earlier stage of Hindu belief, the "king" of the gods. His importance, like that of the central, "full" form of the Tantric goddess seems to have something to do with his centrality as a generator of or container of the contrasting meanings of the lesser divinities.

3. Siva as the generator of the dangerous gods.

Siva is, in ways that we will note below, one of the "ordinary" gods. However, he is the agent by which in one context and conception the "dangerous" gods are generated. Many prominent symbolic forms in Bhaktapur concern this generation. They include the idea of Siva's emanation Sakti (below) as well as other types of transformation. Much, but not all, of the symbolism of the linga^[*] is related to this transformation, as is much of the symbolism of Tantra. We will return to this in our consideration of Sakti, the dangerous divinities and Tantra (chap. 9). In other contexts, as we shall see, the "dangerous gods," particularly the central, generating forms of the goddess, are conceived as existing independently of Siva. In such contexts Siva becomes quite peripheral, the goddess becomes the central creative force, and Siva's importance or presence becomes greatly attenuated.

4. Siva as one of the group of ordinary gods.

At this level Siva is one of a community of divinities related by the ordinary social ties of family and friendship. The central group of ordinary gods are Parvati, Ganesa^[*] , Visnu^[*] , Laksmi, Sarasvati, and some secondary divinities associated with Visnu^[*] . Parvati is Siva's wife or consort, Ganesa^[*] is his son, Visnu^[*] is Siva's essential friend, and Laksmi is Visnu's^[*] wife. Sarasvati

stands outside these relations. Siva is sometimes represented as a young man with a moustache (see color illustrations). In this form he is thought of as an unattached and dreamy young bachelor. Sometimes he is shown with his consort Parvati to his left, his arm tenderly around her shoulder. He is absent-minded, a dreamer, stumbling in his abstraction into socially dangerous errors from which his friend Visnu^[*] must extricate him. He dresses improperly, like a jungle dweller, and sometimes goes naked. He moves at whim from place to place. He is usually gentle and benign in his abstracted way unless roused to fury, and that fury is elemental and potentially randomly destructive. Sometimes he incarnates his vehicle, the bull Nandi. Sometimes he is found in deep meditation on Mount Kailash in the mountains to the north of Bhaktapur. Sometimes he is found in the cremation grounds, or even in the refuse dump in the inner courtyard of the house. His destructive power can be focused and put to use against impersonal and external dangers to the city, but in this transformation we are soon no longer dealing with Siva, something new arises.

Siva represents the human tension between self-absorption and asocial sexuality on the one hand and social involvement taming such problematic states and passions on the other. As Parvati's consort and Visnu's^[*] friend, he is under the socializing restraint of those social relations, he needs them. Siva alone—adolescent, yogi-like, alternating between sexual passion and ascetic self absorption—is recognizable both as forest dweller who has escaped from the city and as one important aspect of the man of the city. As the Mahabharata says of this Siva (quoted in Atkinson 1974, 721) [from the Mahabharata , Anusasana Parva, chap. 14]; cf. Mani 1974, 808).

He assumes many forms of gods, men, goblins, demons, barbarians, tame and wild beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. He carries a discus, trident, club, sword and axe. He has a girdle of serpents, earrings of serpents, a sacrificial cord of serpents and an outer garment of serpents' skins. He laughs, stags, dances and plays various musical instruments. He leaps, gapes, weeps, causes others to weep, speaks like a madman or a drunkard as well as in sweet tones. With an erect penis he dallies with the wives and daughters of the Rishis.

Siva's essence is in his transformations, which make him both elusively shifting and generative. As O'Flaherty (1973, 36) notes, he is both a yogi and its antithesis, the lover of Parvati. She adds, however, in regard to this and other apparent oppositions in his mythology:

The mediating principle that tends to resolve the oppositions is in most cases Siva himself. Among ascetics he is a libertine and among libertines an ascetic; conflicts which they cannot resolve, or can attempt to resolve only by compromise, he simply absorbs into himself and expresses in terms of other conflicts. . . . He emphasizes that aspect of himself which is unexpected, inappropriate, shattering any attempt to achieve a superficial reconciliation of the conflict through mere logical compromise. . . . Siva is particularly able to mediate in this way because of his protean character; he is all things to all men.

But this protean character in itself limits the semantic possibilities of Siva in Bhaktapur. There is one thing he cannot be to all men, that is a fixed character, and that provides his major contrast to Visnu^[*] , who is fixed in his purposes and his conventional forms.

Yogi , bachelor, friend, and husband are all Siva, but Siva disappears in his supernatural transformations. When he has been transformed into his dangerous form, Bhairava, when he emits his sakti ("power"; see chap. 9) or the goddess Devi, these dangerous forms are immediately thought of as independent actors. They have their own myths, legends, and histories. In thought and action they are for the most part disconnected from Siva, except for vestigial traces and markings—a Siva mask carried but not worn, Siva's vertically rotated third eye sometimes, but not always, placed on their foreheads (see color illustrations). And in a further limiting and bounding of the protean Siva to his proper human-like area, it is the "goddess" herself—although in some contexts thought of as generated by Siva—who becomes the shifting, generative force. While Siva's generative activities, the center from which he moves are in the social world, and are related to recognizably human activities and modes of a certain sort—the lover, the adolescent, and ascetic, intoxicated or ecstatic states—it is another figure, the "goddess," who is the center of generation in a much more radically extrasocial world, the world outside the city and its order. Thus, although Siva represents a bridge to the world beyond the city, and beyond all cities, those bridges become burnt for the most part once crossed, and as his transformations come to life, Siva, overtly in Tantric imagery, becomes a corpse. His ongoing and continuing life in Bhaktapur is as a representative of that dimension of the social person which is valued, although in tension with social and moral order. In his transformations to representations of the extrasocial world, Siva becomes almost forgotten. Similarly, when thought of as a creator God, this cosmic Siva is also lost from view when his creation is being considered. In his own anthropomor-

phic right, however, he represents a complex of traits which are unified in being thoroughly human, but in one way or another problematic for social order. This Siva provides problems which must be dealt with by his friend Visnu^[*] at the service of the moral community. It is important to emphasize that from the point of view of the corpus of South Asian myths about the relations of Siva and Visnu^[*] this is a local choice of emphasis. There are, for example, South Asian stories where it is Siva who must free Visnu^[*] from some passionate bondage (e.g., O'Flaherty 1973, 41). Bhaktapur, in fact, develops selected meanings suggested by the major persisting myths and representations of the two gods. Their relation is epitomized in one of the local interpretations of the complex symbol of Siva's power, the linga^[*] , whose more central meanings are related to the idea of Sakti (below here, and chap. 9). The linga^[*] consists of a column at whose base is an encircling band. In this interpretation of Siva as a component of civic order (rather than as the generator of cosmic forces), the upright column represents Siva and his explosive and expanding energies and the encircling band at the base represents a restraint placed by Visnu^[*] around that column of energy to protect, control, and channel it.

There are about thirty active Siva shrines and temples in Bhaktapur. Of these, fourteen are found m four clusters outside the traditional boundaries of the city to the south near each of the bridges to which the city's southern and southeastern roads and paths lead. Another nine are grouped in the two central squares of the town, the Laeku Square in front of the palace and the Ta:marhi Square, both of which, it may be recalled, are (in different contexts) centers of the city. These central shrines and temples were built by the Malla kings and by wealthy families and thar s (such as one group of shrines built by the Kumha:, the potters) as variously motivated acts of private devotion to Siva. Many of the structures outside of the city are of relatively recent post-Malla origin, and it is said they were built there because there was more available space on which to build. Some of these shrines and temples have attendant priests whose stipend is funded by grants of land that were set aside for this purpose at the time of the building of the structure, but may have no other worshipers. Others are the object of worship of descendants of the founding group, or sometimes by people who have made a pledge to worship Siva, perhaps at that particular shrine, in exchange for the fulfillment of some wish. One of the largest and most visually impressive temples in the northern half of the city is devoted to the divinity Dattatreya (Newari, Dattatri), who is thought of as a corn-

bined incarnation of Visnu^[*] , Brahma,^[4] and Siva. In the Dattatreya temple Visnu^[*] is iconographically dominant, but Siva is thought of as the main power embodied in the temple. The temple priests are non-Newars (Jha Brahmans), and the inner sanctum is closed to Newar Brahmans. The temple's main function is as a pilgrimage center for non-Newar Shaivite devotees from India and other parts of Nepal.

For the Newars of Bhaktapur, the Siva shrines and temples, in marked contrast to those of certain other major divinities, are not used to designate any of the internal structural features of city organization. Correlated with this is that there is only one minor annual festival (Madya: Jatra; see chap. 13), specifically devoted to Siva. The great Siva festival for the Newars of Bhaktapur and elsewhere, as well as for Nepalis and for many Indians, has its center out of Bhaktapur (and of the other major Newar cities) at the great Valley shrine complex of Pasupatinatha devoted to Siva as the "Lord of the Beasts," during the major South Asian Shaivite festival, Sivaratri, in the late winter. Bhaktapur itself on that day is a secondary focus for some Shaivite pilgrims, and some of the city's men perform an unusual—in contrast to other forms of local worship—type of devotion to Siva spending the night by fires along the city's public streets, sometimes smoking cannabis, in an enactment that, with its associated legends (see chap. 13, "Sila Ca:re" and our discussion there) illuminate Siva's meaning as a bridge to a transcendent realm.

In Bhaktapur there are several divinities with limited functions, and with names and attributes of their own sometimes said to be "forms" of Siva. There are some statues in stone of a figure with an erect penis locally identified as Siva which are worshiped by families who wish children or specifically a son (fig. 11). Siva is worshiped in the rite of passage of people in their seventy-seventh year as Mrtyum^[*] Jaya, the god who conquers time and prolongs life. He is sometimes said to be Nataraja, the god of the dance, who is worshiped by musicians and actors. (Nataraja as the Newar god Nasa Dya: has accumulated, as we will note, other meanings and uses.) Siva is the god buried in the inner courtyard of houses who destroys the wastes thrown there. He is Visvakarma (Newari, Biswarkarma), the god of crafts and trades, who gives power to the tools and implements of the various traditional and modern crafts: the barber's razor, the driver's truck, the farmer's tools.

Siva's meaning in Bhaktapur's supernatural domain is deeply affected by his position in the larger system. We have introduced some

of this, but we must turn to the other members of the domain, each of whom provides context for the others.

Visnu-Narayana^[*] And His Avatars

Visnu^[*] is usually referred to in Bhaktapur by one of the names historically associated with Visnu^[*] , Narayana^[*] (Newari, Narayan). Visnu^[*] (as we will here refer to this divinity for comparative convenience) belongs centrally to what we will call the "moral interior" of Bhaktapur. Although other gods may be addressed on their special days or for particular unusual problems, Visnu^[*] and Laksmi, his consort, are at the loci of ordinary household prayer. Visnu^[*] is that fragment of divinity that dwells in individuals as their soul or atma , in the Newar version of the ancient South Asian correspondence of soul and cosmic divinity.

Although there are several and conflicting ideas about the possible fates of the soul after death and about various heavens, and a number of theories as to what determines a person's postdeath state, the focus of most belief and action in regard to personal fate after death centers on Visnu^[*] . In the ceremonies devoted to dying, attention is focused on Visnu^[*] , and the dying person must pray to Visnu^[*] , meditate on him, and address his or her last words to him. In the kingdom of the Lord of the Dead, Yama Raj, it is Visnu's^[*] representative who argues the case for the deceased in front of King Yama. This case is based on the individual's merits and sins, virtues and vices, in relation to his following or violating the moral law, the Dharma. Those who follow the Dharma can expect to go to Visnu's^[*] heaven. To get to Siva's heaven one must make Siva a focus of meditation, another and radically different path to salvation from the moral path of following the social Dharma. In Visnu's^[*] heaven one keeps one's social identity and is joined with one's family in reward for one's social virtue. The salvation associated with Siva and the Tantric gods, moksa^[*] , has, in contrast, a problematic and uncanny relation to the social self.

Visnu^[*] is represented in Bhaktapur by idealized, princely human forms. Occasionally he is represented in the forms of one of his incarnations, or avatars . He is also represented occasionally by small, rounded stones, locally called salagrams.^[5] In contrast to other places in South Asia, Visnu's^[*]avatars (Sanskrit, avatara ) in Bhaktapur have minimal cultic significance in themselves and are of major importance only as aspects of Visnu^[*] .^[6] In contrast to Visnu's^[*] twenty-nine active temples and shrines in Bhaktapur, only two temples are actively devoted to Krsna^[*]

and three to Rama and his consort Sita (see fig. 12). One of the two Krsna^[*] temples is in Laeku Square, and was one of the temples built by the Malla kings for their personal merit. It is attended by a Rajopadhyaya Brahman and contains a portable god image, which is carried around the city once a year. The other temple, in the northern part of the city, has no priest and is used in a casual way by some local people or passersby. Both of the active Rama temples are outside the city boundaries at places where roads meet the river. One of them is part of a complex of temples built by the potter thar , the Kumha:s, living in the southern half of the city, and is attended by Kumha:s and people living in nearby areas. The other, to the southwest, is of some general importance once a year, in connection with the worship of one of the Eight Astamatrkas^[*] , Varahi.^[7] There are two Hanuman temples associated with the southwestern Rama temple that are visited by many people on the same day of the annual festival calendar as that temple. Hanuman, a divinity in monkey form associated with Rama in the Hindu epics, is also represented in other Visnu^[*] temples. Newari art represents still other of Visnu's^[*] avatars (particularly Vamana, and Narasimha^[*] ), as it also represents Visnu^[*] in relation to his cosmogenic aspect,^[8] but these representations have no contemporary uses.

The conception of Visnu's^[*] avatars is closely related to the idea of Visnu^[*] as the divine portion, the atma , of each individual. The avatars represent the incarnation of a portion of Visnu^[*] into the ordinary world, as part of a mixture that is in part human (or animal) and part divine.^[9] Visnu's^[*]avatars are not only incarnated in human or animal forms, but by and large they lead recognizable social lives, albeit with legendary heroic powers.^[10] The lives of the incarnations were furthermore located in real space and historical time. These lives were lived for the purpose of reestablishing some desirable social order for humans or for the gods after that order's derangement through some antisocial force usually personified as a "demon" or antigod, an Asura . This is in marked contrast to the case of Siva, whose transformations, such as Bhairava and the Goddess, are emanations in which Siva's identity is transformed and lost, and which are themselves "demonic" forms of the same sort as Asuras . Rather than exist through a unique lifetime, as Visnu's^[*]avatars do, Siva's transformations appear and are "reabsorbed" in some contexts or, in others, are as eternal as Siva himself. Although they can defeat the Asuras and other forces of disorder, they are, in themselves, dangerous and problematic to the orderly social world, and must be controlled in turn. In another significant contrast, while Siva's emana-

Figure 12.
Rama and his consort Sita. Note the difference in size.

tions (or in some versions the emanations of Parvati herself) defeat other demons through brute magical force, Visnu's^[*]avatars characteristically restore order through cunning and other social skills allied to their divine power.

In Bhaktapur's stories it is Siva in his wanderings and absent-mindedness who is either sometimes dangerous himself, or who allows some devotee to accumulate through meditation and austerities some god-like power, which he then uses in defiance of the gods' order for his own selfish purposes. Visnu^[*] must undo the damage, calm Siva, overcome the magic power of Siva's devotee, and restore order. In this contrast Siva is the passionate, romantic dreamer for whom social propriety is a burden. Visnu^[*] represents sobriety, decency, and order. The pair represent a familiar universal tension within societies and within individuals.

The twenty-nine Visnu^[*] temples and shrines are distributed around the city in close proximity, for the most part, to the city's main processional route. Of these, two are large temple complexes—one immediately south of the upper-lower city axis, and the other in the eastern part of the upper city. Although these two largest temples are located in the lower city and upper city, respectively, they are not considered representative of these city halves in the way that other space-marking deities represent spatial units, and there is no special religious activities that tie them to the halves as such. All these temples are attended optionally by people in their vicinities, sometimes for casual prayer, sometimes in quest of support in some undertaking. Usually Visnu^[*] is worshiped not in a temple or shrine but at home. Visnu^[*] , along with his consort Laksmi, is, as we have noted, the usual focal god of the household, the focus of most of the ordinary household puja s. They represent the ordinary relations, the moral life of the household, in its inner life. As we will see, for the family Visnu^[*] contrasts with another quite different kind of deity, the lineage deity, most often a form of the Dangerous Goddess, which binds the households of the phuki group into a unity and protects them against the dangers of the outside (chap. 9).

Visnu^[*] resembles Siva in not being used, in contrast to certain other gods, to mark off the city's important spatial units. He is, as we shall argue, not the proper kind of a divinity for this for Bhaktapur's purposes. Visnu^[*] has no major festival in the public city space. He is a major focus of household worship throughout the year, and of special household and temple worship and of out-of-the-city pilgrimages on some

annual occasions, particularly during the lunar month of Kartika (Newari, Kachala, October/November) as he is elsewhere in South Asia at this time.

In recent decades the worship of Visnu-Narayana^[*] at the two major temples with music and dancing and without the mediation of a priest in expression of an individual direct devotion to the god free from the spatial, temporal, and social orderings of Bhaktapur as a city, has been growing. Visnu^[*] and his avatars have become the object of bhakti , loving devotion, a focus for private salvation and private emotion. Here he is not functioning as a component in a complex system of urban order, but as the kind of personal god who arises when such a city-based system begins to break down. This is no longer the Visnu^[*] who is Siva's complement. This is, to recall our conceits of chapter 2, a transcendent "postaxial" Visnu^[*] .

Ganesa^[*]

Siva in Bhaktapur is a bridge joining different forms of divinity. Ganesa^[*] (Newari, Gandya:), an elephant-headed god, is a bridging and transitional figure of a different kind; he provides in several ways for human entrance into the area of the divine. As such, we may contrast him with other divinities, dangerous and uncanny, who are at the threshold of the human moral world and the orderly divine world into areas of chaos and danger. Properly for such uses, he is as attractive in his person as they are horrifying.

Let us consider some aspects of Ganesa^[*] as an entrance. As is generally the case in South Asia, one prays first to Ganesa^[*] before praying to any other god or before undertaking any important religious activity. The worship of Ganesa^[*] is necessary for effectiveness, siddhi , in the worship and manipulation of other divinities. This is an aspect of a more general attribute of Ganesa^[*] as "the overcomer of obstacles" (Mani 1975, 273):

Ganapati^[*] [Ganesa^[*] ] has the power to get anything done without any obstructions [and has] also the power to put obstacles in the path of anything being done. Therefore, the custom came into vogue of worshiping Ganapati^[*] at the very commencement of any action for its completion . . . without any hindrance. Actions begun with such worship would be duly completed.

It is necessary to worship Ganesa^[*] before both ordinary and Tantric puja s. This is connected with one of his unique features in Bhaktapur,

specifically, that he can be either a dangerous or an ordinary god.^[11] Any image of Ganesa^[*][12] may receive either the worship and offerings that are proper for the ordinary divinities (e.g., grain, yogurt, cakes) or the blood sacrifices and alcoholic offerings that are proper for the dangerous divinities. (He has, however, a particular animal that is uniquely proper for sacrifice to him: the khasi , or castrated male goat, another image, perhaps, of his marginality.) He is the entrance to these two different realms, otherwise often placed in opposition.

In some settings his image^[13] may indicate, represent, or suggest a Tantric emphasis. It may show Ganesa^[*] with many arms, and he may be seated next to his Sakti, variously identified as Siddhi (the personification of his power for effectiveness) or Rddhi^[*] , "prosperity, wealth, good fortune." In his dangerous form he is sometimes called "Heramba," and thought of as a guru who instructs and therefore introduces students in Tantric knowledge.

There is still another sense in which Ganesa^[*] is the entrance into the religious realm. As a benign, humanized animal, a sweets-loving child, the child of Siva and Parvati in their domestic imagery, he is a favorite of children, and in the memory of some respondents was the first god form to whom they became attached—in contrast to others whom they feared as children—and it is Ganesa^[*] who (at certain specific temples) is prayed to for help to children who are slow in learning to walk or talk.

As he is elsewhere in South Asia,^[14] Ganesa^[*] is the divinity of entrances in space as well as in temporal sequences. He is conceived to reside on one side of gates and arches (usually on the right side) while his "brother," Kumara (who has little other significance in Bhaktapur, except in connection with the Ihi , the mock-marriage ceremony) is imagined to be on the other.

Ganesa's^[*] shrines and temples are the main fixed divine markers of the twa:s , the village-like units in the city and of some of their component neighborboods (map 13). This local areal Ganesa^[*] , or sthan Ganesa^[*] (from sanskrit sthana , place, locality), is considered common to the twa: . Although, as we have noted, a particular twa: may have one or more other divinities that in some sense "belong" to it and are its particular responsibility and that may be celebrated in some annual twa: festival, every twa: has its sthan Ganesa^[*] . Everyone in the twa: worships here before important out-of-the-house ceremonies and during all rites of passage for members of the household. Thus Ganesa^[*] is one of those divinities who have an important relationship to a significant component of urban space, as Visnu^[*] and Siva do not. The great majority of

Map 13.
The distribution of Ganesa^[*] shrines in the city. The shrines are distributed throughout the city, with most of them on or near
the pradaksinapatha^[*] . Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.

these twa: shrines are located on the city processional route (see map 12) which connects the twa: s, and thus these individual centers are tied into the larger city.

There are a number of Ganesa^[*] temples and shrines, some within the city boundaries and some without, which have specific purposes that can be accomplished only at that particular location with its particular Ganesa^[*] . People go to Balakhu Ganesa^[*] if they have lost something and wish help in finding it. Children who are slow in learning to talk are taken to a temple just outside of the city to the northeast, Yatu (Nepali, Kamala) Ganesa^[*] . One shrine, that of Chuma(n) Ganadya:, is worshiped by the entire city during the solar New Year festival, Biska: (chap 14). All these shrines are also worshiped by local neighborhood people.

The most important Ganesa^[*] shrine outside of the city for the people of Bhaktapur is Inara Dya: (Inara God),^[15] known in Nepali as "Surya Vinayaka." This shrine, set on a forested hillside south of Bhaktapur, is visited regularly once a week by many people on one of Ganesa's^[*] special days of the week, Tuesdays or Saturdays. These trips are considered as both a religious undertaking and an outing. Family members or a group of young friends will go to the shrine taking food with them. In addition to his general function as an overcomer of obstacles ("Vinayaka"), and a first object of worship before approaches to other gods, Inar Dya: can also help children who are slow in learning to walk. According to Slusser, Surya Vinayaka is also "widely consulted as a curing god by the deaf and dumb" (1982, 263). This shrine is not only attended by people of Bhaktapur but also is an important shrine for the Kathmandu Valley both for Newars of other places and for non-Newar Hindus. It is sometimes considered one of four Ganesa^[*] temples forming a kind of mandala^[*] in the Kathmandu Valley, and which are sometimes visited in sequence (Auer and Gutschow n.d., 17; Slusser 1982, 263).^[16]

A Note on Yama

Yama Raja, the ruler of the "kingdom" where in some versions of the adventures of people after death they go to await the fate that the results of their moral behavior, their karma , and/or the proper performance of death rituals secures for them, and who presides over the hell where the perpetrators of some enormous sin must remain for some equitable period, is not properly a member of the urban pantheon in the same way as the other figures we are considering here. He is the personification of death, but a certain kind of death or of death viewed

in a certain way. As such, he belongs among the "ordinary" deities, is in contrast to the dangerous deities, and should be noted here. The dangerous deities can kill, but that is not associated with the sort of dying that Yama is concerned with. Yama, or his messengers, come to collect people in "ordinary" dying. He is a moral agent, part of the ordinary religion of Bhaktapur and is related to the worship and meanings of the ordinary deities (some of whom preside over the heavens where Yama will most likely send the dead individual if he or she is not to be reincarnated back into this world). In either one of the various heavens or the usually foreseen rebirth, the individual will live a pleasant social life, in consort with his or her loved ones (if in heaven) or perhaps with their transformations (in a rebirth). There are other "religious" representations of death—or, more precisely, of being killed—in Bhaktapur that are not within the moral realm. These are within the realm of the dangerous deities or the malignant spirits, within realms where accident and power, not moral behavior, prevail. Against them only avoidance or powerful "magical" devices (chap. 9) might prevail. Yama's judgment and the timing of his visit can, however, be affected not only by good behavior, but also by affection and solidarity in the family, and various kinds of distractions and social deceits can be used to confuse or distract him or his messengers and deflect him.

Yama is variously represented in the annual calendrical sequence, most centrally in the course of the lunar New Year's sequence (chap. 13). He is there representative of what we will call the "moral beyond" of the household, not the "amoral outside," which is vividly represented in other annual symbolic enactments in relation to other deities.

The Ordinary Female Divinities: Laksmi, Sarasvati, And Parvati

In a later section we will be concerned with a cluster of ideas about "the goddess," a form sometimes conceived of as an emanation of Siva, as his "Sakti," and sometimes as an independent divinity having many names and forms. The word "Sakti" is often also used in Bhaktapur to refer to the consort, the female companion, of a male god. In this sense it means little more than wife, constant companion, or lover. There is a sharp distinction in cultural definition, personal meaning, and associated religious action between those ordinary goddesses who are the consorts of ordinary gods and important foci of ordinary religion, and those other goddesses, emanations of Siva or aspects of some form of

the Tantric goddess, the Saktis par excellence , the objects of Tantric worship.

The three ordinary goddesses are Laksmi, Sarasvati, and Parvati. Of these, only Sarasvati has her own temples. Laksmi and Parvati are respectively represented m the temples of Visnu^[*] and his avatar s (with the consort of the particular avatar being sometimes considered an incarnation of Laksmi) and of Siva in his anthropomorphic forms. In contradistinction to Sarasvati and to the Tantric goddesses, they are secondary figures in the external city religion. Their abode and realm is in the household.

Sarasvati (Sasu Dya: Sasu God, in Newari) has four major shrines in Bhaktapur. These shrines may be worshiped as a personal act of devotion by local people and passersby, but her main special meaning is as the goddess of learning, to whom all people who are engaged in studies of one kind or another (in recent times particularly modern school studies) come to pray. Sarasvati can grant them effectiveness or siddhi in learning, as Ganesa^[*] does to children for walking or talking. Her main temple is just to the south of the city across the river. All school children go to this shrine, the Nila (Blue) Sarasvati on the same day, or Sri Pa(n)cami, once a year (chap. 14). Sarasvati is usually represented in an ordinary, if idealized, human form, like the other ordinary goddesses (identifiable by her swan vehicle and her "lute," the vina^[*] ). She was formerly embodied in all books, and now still in those that are not specifically modern and secular. In a major Puranic^[*] tradition Sarasvati is considered as the daughter and sometimes the consort of the god Brahma. In Bhaktapur she is conceived of as an independent goddess.^[17]

Laksmi (Newari, Lachimi) is a major household divinity, but she has no public shrine or temple, although she is understood to be present in Visnu's^[*] temples as his consort, or as incarnated as Radha or Sita, the consorts of his major avatar s. She is understood to be nevertheless a goddess in herself, although she has in Tantrism some theoretical and cultic connections with goddesses such as Vaisnavi^[*] and Varahi through shared associations with Visnu^[*] . As everywhere in South Asia, as a household goddess, Laksmi is the promoter of the proper ends of the household—fertility, success in the household's economic activities, accumulation of food and wealth. She is the object of daily prayer and must never be neglected. She, like Visnu^[*] , is a protector of ordinary life. She has one annual festival in Bhaktapur, which is during one day in the course of the five-day lunar New Year festival (chap. 13).

With Parvati (Newari, Parvati or Parbati) we approach the complex

web of ideas joining Siva, Sakti, and Newar Tantrism. Although Parvati is, as we shall see, one bridge to these ideas, she is for the most part an independent Goddess in her own right, one who belongs firmly to the ordinary realm. Parvati as a household figure is Siva's loving bride—the ideal wife—and the daughter of Himalaya, the personified mountain range. As Himalaya's daughter, the Kathmandu Valley, that is, the traditional Nepal of the Newars, is her paternal homeland, and she has special concerns with it, particularly with its Newar women. Like Laksmi, Parvati has no independent external representation in her own shrine, nor any external ritual significance for the public city.^[18] She is a focus of some romantic fantasy (as is Krsna's^[*] consort Radha in other parts of South Asia), represents married romantic love for the household, and is prayed to by women for the welfare of the household (with perhaps a less material emphasis than Laksmi) and for the birth of sons. Although she may change into dangerous forms in the legends of the Goddess she, like Siva when he emits his Sakti, is lost in the form, and (as we shall see below, as the Devi Mahatmya , one of the main sources of Bhaktapur's ideas and imagery about the Goddess suggests) is unaware that she has an alternate wild and demonic state.

The Transition to the Dangerous Divinities

The dangerous deities, which we are now ready to discuss, are in many contexts and for many purposes considered as independent deities. The "Goddess" who in some contexts is thought to derive from Siva, in others is not only independent and self-created but also usurps his role as the creator deity. For certain purposes in Shaivite and Tantric Bhaktapur, however, Siva is considered as their source. One aspect of this idea is related to the conception of Siva/Sakti, which is of basic importance in Tantric theory (chap. 9). Sometimes Siva is thought to transform himself into another god, such as Bhimasena. Sometimes Siva is thought to be first transformed into his dangerous form Bhairava, who may then, in turn, generate other dangerous gods. Siva's transformation into Bhairava is described as not a transformation of himself, but rather as a sending out of a force or power from within himself, an emanation, a ni:saran . Emanation is also the way in which the dangerous goddesses are said to be generated, as Siva is conceived as generating a powerful form of the goddess, who then, in turn, generates or is transformed into subsidiary forms.

We are now concerned with relations of a different kind than those that obtain between the "ordinary" gods. Those were familiar and relatively fixed social relations: spouse, child, friend. These relations are relations of metamorphosis and emanation and are often shadowy and uncanny. Their proper worship, uses, and meanings differ from those of the ordinary deities. They belong to a different realm of the world and of the mind.

Major Gods: The "Dangerous" Deities

The major divinities that we are categorizing as "dangerous" have many features of representation, conception, and usage, that separate them from the residue of "ordinary" gods. We have borrowed a salient Newari verbal distinction where when it is necessary to refer to the set as a whole they are refered to as gya(n)pugu , "dangerous." When such distinctions are necessary, the "nondangerous" divinities are often distinguished from the gya(n)pugu ones by one or another term for "ordinary," such as the Sanskritic term sadharan .^[19] The contrast between the two sets, "ordinary" and "dangerous," responds to, reflects, and helps create important distinctions and complementarities. As we will see throughout this study, the two sets of deities are related to distinctions of inside and outside, of morality and power, of Brahmans and kings, of civil logic and dream logic, and of realms in which purity and pollution create distinctions and those within which they are irrelevant—in short, to some of the fundamental distinctions in Bhaktapur's conceptual world. The two sets not only represent these tensions and contrasts, they can be used to show relations of various sorts among them.

There are many more or less concrete markers of the contrast between the two sets of deities, their appearance, positions in the city, associated myths and legends. Some of these markers might (extremely rarely) be ambiguous; a benign deity may, for example, have a horrible form (such as Visnu's^[*]avatar Narasimha^[*] ). But there is one differentiating sign that people are forced to pay attention to, and that ensures the proper classification of any of these deities that they may have to encounter. This is what they are to be offered in proper worship. The dangerous gods should be given animal flesh and alcoholic spirits,^[20] the ordinary gods, (including Ganesa^[*] in his non-Tantric aspect) must never be given such foods. In ordinary speech the emphasis is on the "deities who drink alcoholic spirits," rather than on their acceptance of meat.

Alcoholic spirits in this context are specially named, nya (n ) rather than the usual term aela .

We will begin our discussion with the dangerous female divinities. Among the ordinary gods, the male gods are central and predominant and the female goddesses are peripheral to them; among the dangerous gods, the female divinities are predominant in quantity, complexity, and centrality in symbolic action.

The Dangerous Goddess and Her Transformations

Among the community of ordinary divinities are female divinities, various "ordinary goddesses" including Siva's consort Parvati. However, South Asia has had goddesses of a different sort who separate and coalesce in the course of history, in the course of individual mythic accounts, and in the conception and action of Bhaktapur. The coalesced figure is the Goddess, whose names, aspects, forms, and allies in Bhaktapur we will sketch in the following sections. In her most powerful and dangerous form as depicted in the Markandeya Purana^[*] , a scripture that contains one of the major sources of Bhaktapur's imagery of the Goddess (P. K. Sharma 1974, 46 [emphasis added]):

She is a goddess warrior, incarnating herself on earth by using various devices at various crucial moments m order to destory the demons who were formidable challenges to the denizens of heaven. Indeed, in her perfect nature, she has been described as the most beneficent; but her fierceness as a martial goddess, equipped with the sharpest weapons and reveling in her terror-striking war-cries, is definitely a different tradition from that of Parvati-Uma, whom we always find fir an altogether different setting .

The goddesses whom this goddess spawns or is ready to absorb are often represented as similar to the "formidable" demonic forms that they oppose, a similarity that helps explain their effectiveness in combating them. In some conceptions, such as the legends associated with the Nine Durgas (chap. 15), it is clear that the dangerous deities are sometimes, in fact, demonic entities that have been captured by "magical" power, often by some expert in Tantric spells, and then eventually forced into the service of the human community. As such, they may have fangs, cadaverous sunken cheeks and bodies, garlands of skulls or decapitated human heads around their necks, or cloaks of flayed animal or human skins over their shoulders. They have multiple arms, bearing weapons and carrying a human calvarium as a drinking cup, understood to be full of blood. Sometimes they are represented as beautiful, full-

breasted figures of an almost hallucinatory sexual desirability, but the many arms of these representations bear the same murderous weapons as the frankly horrible forms, and like those forms, they, too, demand blood sacrifice. The beautiful forms are simply another manifestation of the same dangerous kind of goddess.

There are at least twenty-five major temples and shrines devoted to these goddesses, who have eleven major forms and a number of minor ones, all systematically related in a number of conceptual schemes activated in various contexts. Classification is complicated in that the same manifest goddess may have different names (as do most important Hindu gods), and conversely by the fact that the same name (Mahakali, for example) may represent different aspects of the Goddess in different contexts. The goddesses' main usages in Bhaktapur's civic religion may be divided into four interrelated emphases, each with its centers, members, and ritual forms and each with its particular major implications for Bhaktapur's civic organization. We will designate them as (1) the goddesses of the mandalic^[*] system, (2) the goddesses of the Nine Durgas' annual dance cycle, (3) the generalized protective goddess usually referred to as Bhagavati, and (4) the political goddess Taleju and her related goddesses. Some individual goddesses, or at least some individual names of goddesses, may belong to more than one set, but much of their significance is largely determined by their membership in the particular set under consideration.

Each group of goddesses has a central member who represents a maximum concentration of what we may term "potential power." This goddess form is most general, full, and abstract. When there are other goddesses around her, they are more limited. Their manifestations, functions, and power are more shaped to the concrete needs of a particular event, a subsection of space, a particular set of ritual and symbolic functions. They are less omnipotential; they do some specific work in the world.

The Mandalic^[*] Goddesses

In the previous chapter we introduced the eight goddesses who protect the boundaries of Bhaktapur while also each one having a special segment of the city under her protection—the city being divided for this purpose into eight peripheral octants and a central circle with its own, a ninth, protective goddess (see maps 1 and 2 above). These goddesses protect the city, in the words of one humble citizen, from "ghosts, evil

spirits and diseases like cholera." Others add earthquakes, invasions, destructive weather, and other disasters. As do all the dangerous gods, these goddesses protect the city against those external disorders that threaten the ongoing life of the city. That ongoing life has within itself its own protective resources, resources that may most generally be thought of as "moral." We have discussed these goddesses in relation to space, here we will, with some overlap, consider them as members of the pantheon.

The eight peripheral goddesses are often referred to in Bhaktapur as the Astamatrkas^[*] , the "Eight Mothers."^[21] In less elegant Newari they are sometimes called the pigandya: ,^[22] the group (gana^[*] ) of gods (dya: ) living in the pitha , a special sort of open shrine. The ninth goddess at the center of the city when it is conceived as a mandala^[*] , is included or not in the set, depending on whether the emphais is on the outer protective boundary or on the internal space that is being protected.

The eight goddesses at the periphery have each the same basic function in her proper space, although some have additional specialized functions. They are, to introduce an important classificatory principle for the dangerous gods, all at the same level. The goddess at the center has the same protective function as the peripheral goddesses for her central mandalic^[*] section, but in addition, as we have noted in chapter 7, she concentrates their individual powers in an eightfold increase at the center of the mandala^[*] . She is thus, in this way, something more than any of them separately, she is at a higher level. This contrast is reflected in the traditional characteristics of the particular goddesses chosen for placement at the center and at the periphery. The central goddess, Tripurasundari, is (in contrast to the peripheral goddesses) not one of those goddesses designated as "mothers," matrka^[*] s, in the Hindu Puranic^[*] tradition. As we will see (below here and chap. 15), the legends and scriptural accounts of the Matrkas that are significant in Bhaktapur (and elsewhere in South Asia) treat the Matrkas as components or limited or lesser aspects of some complete, full, maximal form of the goddess, often called "Devi." Tripurasundari is a version of that complete, omnipotential goddess, characterized in some of the Upanisads^[*] (the Tripura Upanisad^[*] and the Tripura Tapini Upanisad^[*] ) as the "primeval embodiment of Sakti that gives birth to the world" (P. K. Sharma 1974, 21).

We will introduce the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses in the order in which they are worshiped during the succeeding days of the autumn harvest festival of the Goddess, Mohani, an order that begins with the eastern goddess

(map 2), follows the boundary of the city in the auspicious clockwise processional direction, and proceeds on the ninth day to the central summating central shrine of Tripurasundari.^[23] The goddess to the east, the first in the sequence, is Brahmani (Newari, Brahmayani); to the southeast, Mahesvari (Newari, Mahesvari); to the south, Kumari;^[24] and to the southwest, Vaisnavi^[*] (Newari Vaisnavi^[*] , often written and pronounced "Baisnabi"). The goddess of this particular location is on one occasion during the year—the complex spring solar New Year festival, Biska:—taken to be a quite different goddess, Bhadrakali^[*] . To the west is Varahi (Newari, Barahi:), to the northwest is Indrani^[*] (Newari Indrayani:), to the north is Mahakali, and to the northeast is Mahalaksmi^[*] (Newari Mahalachimi).

These peripheral goddesses are, with one only apparent substitution, familiar representatives of the various Puranic^[*] sets of "mothers" (P. K. Sharma 1974, 234), but are for the most part connected in their membership and in the exact order in which they are arranged to a particular traditional Hindu text, which is the basis for much of Bhaktapur's imagery of the Goddess, the Devi Mahatmya . In the account of the Devi Mahatmya the Saktis, goddesses emitted from the various gods of the pantheon, either fight as assistants to the goddess Candika^[*] , considered a transformation of Parvati, or become absorbed into her to augment her power.

In one passage of the Devi Mahatmya (VIII, 12-20), which we will discuss at some length below, the Saktis of various gods who come to join the full goddess, Devi, are listed in sequence. The first five goddesses in the protective ring formed by Bhaktapur's Astamatrkas^[*] (starting with Brahmani to the east and proceeding in a clockwise direction), are arranged in the same sequence: Brahmani, Mahesvari, Kumari, Vaisnavi^[*] , and Varahi. Bhaktapur leaves out the Devi Mahatmya 's sixth goddess (Narasimhi^[*] ) and proceeds to its seventh, Indrani^[*] . The Devi Mahatmya , like many of the Hindu sources, lists only seven mothers. Bhaktapur uses six of them and adds at the end two more, Mahakali and Mahalaksmi^[*] , commonly listed members of the Matrkas as given in other Puranas^[*] . Mahakali is also known in Bhaktapur as Camunda^[*] , a form of the goddess in her most terrifying aspect who also appears in the Devi Mahatmya as an honorific title given to the goddess form Kali as the slayer of two powerful Asuras Chanda^[*] and Munda^[*] (Devi Mahatmya , VII, 25; Agrawala 1963, 101). Mahakali and Mahalaksmi^[*] , among the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, are just two ordinary Matrka^[*] , although in other uses of the Goddesses in Bhaktapur, Mahakali's asso-

ciation with Kali-Camunda^[*] and some of the legendary attributes of Mahalaksmi^[*] are given some special significance.^[25]

Like several other divinities in Bhaktapur, the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses have "houses," literally, dya che(n) or "god-houses" situated within the city (map 2). Portable images of the goddess are kept at these buildings, and daily puja s are held there, conducted by a Tantric temple priest, an acaju . These dya che(n) images are carried in various processions during the year, particularly during the course of the solar New Year festival, Biska: (see chap. 14). Sometimes there is worship by a group of worshipers in the god-house rather than the pitha shrine, if the participants wish to keep the ceremonies secret, as is often the case in Tantric worship.

However, the proper and usual seats of the worship of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses are their pitha s, open, roofless, imageless shrines, which are the mandalic^[*] markers. The nine mandalic^[*]pitha s are very vaguely associated with the idea of the Devi pitha s, the 108 places in South Asia where pieces of Siva's wife Sati fell to earth (cf. Banerjea 1956, 495n.; Mani 1975, 219). These places became sacred to the Goddess. While the mandalic^[*]pitha s are associated only by some metaphorical extension with the Devi pitha s, for the Newars the important "true" Devi pitha is that of Guhyesvari^[26] in the major Valley cult center Pasupatinatha, where in esoteric doctrine Sati's vagina fell to earth.^[27] There is no esoteric connection between the Guhyesvsari Devi pitha and the mandalic^[*]pitha s.

The mandalic^[*]pitha , as we have noted, are the required foci of attention and worship for families during important rites of passage, and for the city as a whole during the course of the Mohani festival sequence.

The Nine Durgas

Historically in South Asia, various groups of dangerous goddesses have been grouped together as the Navadurga, the Nine Durgas (Banerjea 1974, 500n.; P. K. Sharma 1974, 231-233). Slusser has written that, "in practice . . . the Nepalese Naudurga [Navadurga] are synonymous with the Astamatrkas^[*] , to which a variable ninth manifestation is joined to complete the set. Thus, when the Nepalese speak of the Naudurga, they in fact refer to the Astamatrkas^[*] " (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 322). This is not true for Bhaktapur, where the distinction is essential. There the Nine Durgas refer to a group of divinities, represented primarily as masks (see color illustrations) who possess the bodies of a group of

dancers during an annual sequence that each year begins at the harvest festival of Mohani and lasts for the following nine months. We will be concerned with this sequence at length in chapter 15. The Nine Durgas have close relations with the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, as they do with the other major forms of the goddess in Bhaktapur, but they have, as we will see, their own legends, meanings, membership, and iconography. Although they share some of the same names with the Astamatrkas^[*] and some of their reference to the Devi Mahatmya they differ in the meanings of the deities common to both sets, in other of their members, in their legends, and in their uses.

The Nine Durgas group share seven members with the Astamatrkas^[*] : Mahakali, Kumari, Varahi, Brahmani, Vaisnavi^[*] , Indrani^[*] , and Mahesvari.^[28] Of these the last five have very subsidiary roles, and are peripheral to the main actions of the cycle. The group also includes the male divinities Ganesa^[*] , Bhairava, and Seto Bhairava and the goddesses (often thought of, however, as a male and a female) Sima and Duma.^[29]

These twelve deities are represented as masks, and are worn by the dancers who through possession become the gods they represent. There are also two other gods associated with the group of the Nine Durgas. One is Siva, who is represented as a small mask without eyeholes that is carried by one of the dancers. He is not present as a possessed dancer nor as a performing god. Finally the entire group of gods have their own god, whose portable image they worship. She is generally known as the Sipha goddess, after the red leaves of oleander (sipha ) placed as a garland around her metal image. She is known to religious specialists as Mahalaksmi^[*] . Mahalaksmi^[*] is one of the equally ranked peripheral goddesses of the Asttamatrkas^[*] —although, as we have noted, she is not one of the Devi Mahatmya s "seven mothers"—and is placed in the eighth and last peripheral position. As the Nine Durgas' own goddess she is in a superior position to them, as Tripurasundari is to the Astamatrkas^[*] represents the "full goddess"; the other performing members of the group are special manifestations. There is another important hierarchical distinction within the Nine Durgas. As we will see when we discuss them in detail, the predominant form In the group of mask-gods is Mahakali, the "Goddess" in her most frightening form. We will return to these hierarchical relations later.

The Nine Durgas, in contrast to the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, are characterized by movement (map 14 [below, chap. 15]). Their original home (chap. 15) was, in legend, a forest outside Bhaktapur. They have now, however, an elaborate temple-like god-house in the city. During

Map 14.
The sites for the sequential Nine Durgas dances dramas or pyakha(n)s within Bhaktapur throughout the year. The numbers
show the sequence in which the dances take place. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.

the nine months of their annual existence, the masks of the dancers and other ritual equipment are kept there when not in use in their sequential visits to the city's neighborhoods.

Taleju, Bhaktapur's Political Goddess

An integral part of Bhaktapur's Malla palace complex of buildings and courtyards^[30] is the temple of the goddess Taleju. The temple is approached through an elaborately decorated outer "golden gate" leading from Laeku Square, and is built around a set of inner courtyards which are closed to non-Hindus.^[31] Taleju was the lineage goddess of the Malla kings. As such, she was one of the many tutelary divinities of the bounded and nested units of which Bhaktapur is constructed, divinities chosen by individuals or "given them" by their guru s, lineage divinities, divinities of guthi and associations of various sorts, special thar deities, and so forth.

As the Malla king's lineage deity and located in his palace compound, Taleju became a dominant city deity as manifest in the various symbolic enactments centering on her temple, reaching a dramatic climax during the festival that most clearly and dramatically portrays the various aspects of the Goddess and their relations, the harvest festival Mohani. Taleju is the dominant goddess and, in fact, deity, of Bhaktapur in those contexts where the centrality of royal power is being emphasized. She has survived the replacement of the Malla dynasty by the Gorkhali Saha dynasty as, for Bhaktapur, a powerful symbolic representation of traditional Newar political forms and forces, one that persists alongside of the new symbols and realities of modern politics.

There are extensive legends about the introduction of Taleju into Bhaktapur combining aspects of history, myth, and explanatory speculation about local topography and about aspects of the symbolic enactments that are associated with Taleju. The sketch of a version of the story that follows is derived from a lengthy written version provided by a Bhaktapur Brahman who works as a public storyteller, and is based on his public stories. His account begins with a short summary statement situated within the secular realm, and having to do with power and politics. "The Sultan Gayasudin Tugalak," the account begins, "having gained power in Bengal, attacked the town of Simraun Gadh^[*] . The king of Karnataka^[*] , Harisimhadeva^[*] , having been defeated by Gayasudin, ran away to Nepal with his soldiers and captured Bhaktapur from King Ananda Malla, who had been its ruler. Then Hari-

simhadeva^[*] established the goddess Taleju in her [supernaturally determined] proper place in Bhaktapur. The place where the Goddess was ritually established is called the Mu Cuka [the main courtyard of the Taleju temple]. The goddess Taleju was brought by King Harisimhadeva^[*] from Simraun Gadh^[*] ."

Now the account abruptly shifts from legendary history to the mythic and epic realm of Hindu tradition. "Once the Yantra of Taleju had been kept in Indra's heaven. [The Yantra is the powerful mystic diagram that embodies the goddess in this account, and is the only way she is represented in this account aside from her appearance as an anthropomorphic form in dreams]. There the god Indra worshiped her properly [her proper worship is an issue in the account]." Now (to continue in a paraphrase of the account) Taleju was stolen from Indra by Meghanada, the son of Ravana^[*] , the demon king of Lanka, in the course of Ravana's^[*] attack on heaven. Taleju was taken to Lanka and worshiped there. When Ravana^[*] was defeated in Lanka by Rama, the hero of the Ramayana , Rama took Taleju, in the form of her yantra , to Ayodhya, his capital in India. In time the goddess Taleju appeared to Rama in a dream and told him that be must throw the yantra in the river Sarayu, which flowed past Ayodhya because no one would worship and sacrifice properly to her after his approaching death. After five or six generations a descendant of Rama, King Nala, found Taleju's yantra in the water, and brought it to his palace, but he did not worship her properly (which would have been with blood sacrifice), and had to return her to the river. Subsequent kings of Ayodhya, Nala, Pururava, and Alarka, had the same experience, each finally returning her to the river. The kings of this dynasty, the Solar Dynasty, were finally defeated by the Mlechhas (non-Indo-Aryan barbarians).

Now the story's mode shifts into a sort of fairy tale, as it is recounted how through wondrous signs the goddess comes into Harisimhadeva's^[*] possession, in a turn of events that will lead to Bhaktapur. Now, according to the story, King Nanyadeva, a king of the Solar Dynasty, had "lost his country" and become a servant of the Mlechhas. One day wandering restlessly here and there he happened to stop to rest at the bank of the Sarayu river. He dreamt there of a beautiful girl who said to him, "Oh, King Nanyadeva, your lineage god is in the Sarayu river. You must find her in order to worship her. I am she, your lineage goddess. Black insects will be flying around the surface of the river where I am hidden." The king awoke immediately and went to search for the goddess in the early morning. He found her by means of the black insects.

He found a copper casket. Inside it was a smaller box of gold. On the golden box was an inscription saying that it contained a hidden treasure that had been Rama's and Nala's and was to be Nanyadeva's. The treasure, contained m the box, was Taleju's yantra , that is, Taleju herself. The story then continues in its wondrous mode to recount how with Taleju's council given in a dream, Nanyadeva has encounters with wondrous serpents, hidden treasure, twelve architects, a host of workers, and a female demon (raksasi^[*] ), resulting in the magical construction in one night of a city that came to be called "Simraun Gadh^[*] ". The legend begins to correspond to history here.^[32]

The story goes on to recount that Nanyadeva worshiped Taleju properly, that is, with Tantric worship and with flesh-and-blood offerings, and that after his death she was so worshiped for another five or six generations. During the time of Nanyadeva's descendant Harisimhadeva^[*] , however, the Muslims were expanding their territories and thus came to Simraun Gadh^[*] . Then, following the orders of the goddess Taleju, King Harisimhadeva^[*] , having fled Simraun Gadh^[*] , entered Nepal through the forest carrying Taleju.

Now the story begins an attempt to explain certain aspects of Taleju's cult in Bhaktapur and to record and to account for her historical displacements within and near Bhaktapur. On their trip through the forest, Taleju informs Harisimhadeva^[*] that if no proper sacrificial animal can be found, such as a goat, then it would be permissible to sacrifice a water buffalo, an animal that had previously not been acceptable to her—and that is now the main sacrifice, along with goats, offered to her during Mohani.^[33] The king, having found a buffalo, then noticed a man defecating facing east (a sign that he was not of twice-born status) and selected him to kill the buffalo.^[34]

Then, the story continues, Harisimhadeva^[*] came to Bhaktapur and became king. He established the goddess Taleju in the "Agnihotra Brahman's" house in Bhaktapur. (This is her present site. "Agnihotra Brahman" refers to a particular Rajopadhyaya Brahman; see below here and chap. 9.) The story now moves backward a little in time to tell of the prior search for the proper location. Taleju has told the king that the proper place for the installation will be known when a hole is dug and the soil removed from it will, upon being returned to the hole, fill it exactly to the surface. The story tells of the various places where Harisimhadeva^[*] tested the ground unsuccessfully. First he tried in the village of Panauti (just outside the Kathmandu Valley, to the southwest of Bhaktapur). "He dug there in the Dumangala Twa:." The soil did not

fill the hole. Nevertheless he established a temple to her there (from the point of view of Bhaktapur and this story, a secondary temple). "The people of Panauti still say that the goddess Taleju came to Dumangala from Simangala, which is Simraun Gadh^[*] ." Next he began to dig in Bhaktapur, first at the Dattatreya temple area in northeastern Bhaktapur. This time the soil overflowed the hole. He then went to dig in a "garden," called "Megejin," but the replaced soil overflowed the hole. He went on to the Kwache(n) Twa: in eastern Bhaktapur (where there is now an important Bhagavati temple associated with Taleju), but this also proved not to be the proper place. Finally he went on to the home of the Agnihotra Brahman, in the area of the present Laeku Square. Here he dug, and the soil exactly refilled the hole. "Therefore the king established the goddess Taleju in that place."

The story now introduces another theme, which seems to echo some now obscure past events, perhaps the establishment of a new group of Royal Brahmans (see chap. 10). The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans who had lived in the place did not want to leave their homes. King Harisimhadeva^[*] gave them money and a substitute house. This substitute house still exists; it is still called the palisa che(n) or palsa che(n) , literally "substitute house." The Agnihotra Brahman (whose name in the story is "Agnihotra") was a Tantric practitioner. He did not want to leave his family land, even if he were given money and a substitute home, he was not a greedy man. He always sat on Chetrapal Bhairava's stone (an area-protecting "stone god" in the Taleju main courtyard) which was then bordered by four stone pillars, each with an image of Ganesa^[*] and Durga. The Brahman wanted to kill himself rather than leave his own ancestral home. King Harisimhadeva^[*] finally chased Agnihotra away from his ancestral home by force. Agnihotra committed suicide in his temple there, a temple of Siva (Mahadeva), because he had lost his public prestige. Agnihotra became a ghost (preta ) because he had killed himself. The ghost gave Harisimhadeva^[*] trouble every day. Thus, Harisimhadeva^[*] had the Siva temple entirely destroyed. He then did the necessary pacifying rituals.

Then, the story concludes, the four pillars with the Ganesa^[*] images were sent to various places. One, a dangerous form of Ganesa^[*] , was placed at the left side of the Golden Gate (the entrance to the Taleju temple complex). Another is at Bidya pitha (Tripurasundari's pitha ). Another was brought to the Indrani^[*]pitha .^[35] (Our story doesn't mention the fourth pillar.) Then, the story concludes, "In the Beko courtyard (the courtyard just outside the inner gate and compound of the Taleju

complex) the Bhairava Chetrapal stone where that Brahman used to sit exists, still, until now."

It seems likely that Taleju had, in fact, been introduced to the Kathmandu Valley from Mithila, although not by Harisimhadeva^[*] , who never reached it (chap. 3), and that the pressures of the Turkish Muslims on Mithila with the consequent movement of Maithili Tantric Hindus into Nepal contributed to the subsequent importance of the goddess and of Tantrism to the valley. Slusser summarizes the historical evidence as follows (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 318):

That Taleju's cult in the Kathmandu Valley antedated Harisimhadeva^[*] is documented history . . . but Taleju appears to have been held in high regard in that country [Mithila], and it is not improbable that she was the tutelary of Nanyadeva's dynasty. She was almost certainly well-known to Harishimha's^[*] queen, the omnipotent Bhaktapur refugee, Devaladevi. It is abundantly clear that Taleju was favored by Sthitirajamalla [Jayasthiti Malla] and with his subsequent eruption into the affairs of Nepal Mandala^[*] , the goddess was apparently raised to an eminence she had previously not enjoyed in Nepal. As we know, on Sthitimalla's visit to Patan, the fractious nobles made haste to please the new Valley strong man by restoring the run-down temple of Taleju. . . . That many of the Newars associated with Taleju's cult claim Maithili descent [as do the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of Bhaktapur] is also suggestive of the deity's ties with Mithila.

Whatever its historical relevance, the story as it is still told in Bhaktapur also suggests some special aspects and qualities of this particular goddess in the domain of Bhaktapur's goddesses. She is located first in a traditional Hindu heaven, in contrast, say, to the members of the Nine Durgas troupe whose legends identify them first as forest-dwelling demonic figures (chap. 15). She is the favorite goddess of a particular god; as a divinity's divinity, this places her in a hierarchy—her devotee is a figure remembered as the "king" of the gods. Her subsequent history is associated with invasions, thefts, and dynasties, and with politics and power struggles. From the start she is embedded, available for use by humans and quasi-humans, in a concrete form, a diagrammatic representation on a piece of metal. The form when properly worshiped is protective. The proper worship is Tantric with blood sacrifice. This captured divinity, with its history and functions relating it to power, belongs to a political dynasty, a legitimate form of power. The legend associates it not only with Indra, but with Rama, an avatara of Visnu^[*] , a divinity closely associated with Newar (and Hindu) royalty and with

civic moral order. When Taleju was established in Bhaktapur, she necessarily took precedence over other deities with similar political claims, which may perhaps be part of the significance of the displacement of the Agnihotra Brahman, the destruction of his Siva temple, and his suicide.^[36] We may note that in contrast to other forms of the Goddess, Taleju is not conceptually related to and in a sense dependent on Siva, but is the Tantric goddess as independent and self existing and fully powerful.

Taleju is kept in a secret inner part of the Taleju temple. The nature of her image is also secret. Only a very few Rajopadhyaya Brahman priests from households traditionally providing Taleju Brahmans, and who have special initiation are allowed to see the image. Outsiders generally follow the description in the legend and assume that it is a yantra . Hamilton was also told at the beginning of the nineteenth century that "there is no image of this deity which is represented by a yantra " ([1819] 1971, 210f.).^[37] In worship in the Taleju temple, Taleju is represented by various forms—yantra , the metal vase-like container called the Thapi(n)ca (or alternatively Ku(n)bha, a vessel that also represents the true Devi pitha goddess, Guhyesvari), sometimes by a metal vessel with a pouring spout (a Kalas), and sometimes by an anthropoid image.

Like most of Bhaktapur's component organizations the Taleju temple has its esoteric internal ceremonies and public external ones related to the larger city organization. The internal functions center around the worship of Taleju by her attendant priests^[38] during the course of the year. Many of these take place during city-wide calendrical festivals, but there are some thirty-five important annual internal worship ceremonies unconnected to external urban events. Many of these commemorate Taleju's functions as the Malla kings' lineage goddess. These acts of worship or puja s are called tha (Kathmandu Newari tha ) puja , or tha taegu , "elevation worship," or "elevation producing and maintaining" acts. Tha taegu is thought of as a kind of initiation, dekha (chap. 9). It lacks some features of a full Tantric initiation, and is sometimes thought of by those who have such full initiation as a baga dekha , a "half-full" initiation. Those tha puja s that commemorate the Malla king and, in fact, treat him as if he were still present, take the Malla king (represented by a priest) through three successive levels of initiation, during each of which he is presented new mantra s, new secrets, and new instruction on ritual procedures. There are other tha puja s as well as full initiations given at Taleju, all necessary for Taleju temple's internal functions. These are necessary not only for the staff and for the

"king" but also for all those for whom Taleju is in one way or another a special deity. Descendants of the Malla kings, that is, members of the present Malla and Pradhananga^[*]thar s, have Taleju as their lineage goddess, and male thar members have some of their initiations at the Taleju temple, although they do not receive the highest levels of initiation in Taleju's mysteries. Those are reserved to the chief Taleju Brahman. He is considered to be the surrogate for the Malla king in many rituals, and the king was entitled to higher levels of initiation than his male kin and descendants (who are furthermore now considered by the priests to be no longer "pure Mallas"). The Taleju principal priests who were the king's guru s, had even higher levels of initiation than the king himself, a fourth level, one beyond the Malla king's three. Taleju is also the object of special devotional rituals of the other temple priests. She is considered a sort of lineage goddess for them, in the limited sense that the temple priesthood is inherited in their families' lineage. All these priests also have in all other contexts another Tantric lineage divinity, for ordinary family rituals and rites of passage (see below and chap. 9).

In addition to the two thars of Malla descendants and three priestly thar s attendant at the temple, there are about twenty thar s throughout the macrostatus system, some of whose members (as we have noted in chap. 5) have some special assigned ritual function at some time or other during the year at the Taleju temple. Many of these people must be given tha taegu initiations, in which they must swear secrecy about their duties and about what they see in the temple.^[39]

Taleju's external function is uniquely important to the Tantric component of Bhaktapur's symbolic system. Through her priests and by means of her mantras , she is understood by initiated practitioners to empower all city-level legitimate Tantric procedures in Bhaktapur.^[40] The Brahman Taleju priest is in this context considered the ultimate guru of all who have Tantric power. Some of this power must be transmitted annually. For the rest, the great majority, such as the special knowledge and efficacy of various Tantric priests (chap. 9), or the effective ritual knowledge of the people who make religious paraphernalia, it is said that the special knowledge, initiation, and mantras were originally given to ancestors by a Taleju priest, but then passed down within the family or the thar from father to son or guru to student in repeated internal initiations.

Taleju's external relation to the city is manifested and enacted at length in the course of the harvest festival, Mohani. In the course of this festival Taleju, as we shall see (chap. 15), is brought into relation with

several forms of the Goddess—with all the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, with Kumari (as another deity than the similarly named Kumari of the Mandalic^[*] group of goddesses), with the Nine Durgas group of deities, and with the Goddess Devi herself in her form as Bhagavati. In this festival Taleju is seen as participating in the basic myth of the Dangerous Goddess and, in fact, temporarily becoming Mahisasuramardini herself (chap. 15). During Mohani, Bhagavati/Taleju represents the maximally powerful and full form of the Goddess. This maximal Taleju then becomes manifest in certain ways, controlled and mediated by her temple priests. She possesses a maiden to become manifest in the form of Kumari, in which form she can give oracular advice to kings. She provides the mantra that empowers the partial forms of the Nine Durgas troupe to begin their annual nine-month cycle of manifestations of the Goddess throughout the city. Taleju is a central focus in the interrelated set of symbols and symbolic enactments associated with the dangerous deities of Bhaktapur.^[41]

Bhagavati

In her anthropomorphic representations Taleju is usually represented as a form of the goddess that people in Bhaktapur in other contexts identify as "Bhagavati." This is a female form with many arms, clearly a dangerous goddess, but lacking any further identification (through location or specific iconographic features) as one of the "partial" goddesses.^[42] The representation identified as Bhagavati is also very often (in both temple and household images) that of the Devi of the Devi Mahatmya account in the form of the slayer of the buffalo Asura, that is, as Mahisasuramardini.

Bhagavati is a traditional title for what we have been calling the full goddess. She is equivalent to "Devi," to "Sakti," to "Prakrti^[*] " (Mani 1974, 113). For people in Bhaktapur, however, Bhagavati is a separate goddess, a divinity in her own right. She has three temples. All of them have Taleju staff priests as temple priests, and are closely connected with Taleju's internal rituals. One of these is housed at the Natapwa(n)la ("Nyatapola") Temple (fig. 10), a large five-tiered temple, one of the most striking traditional buildings in Nepal. The Natapwa(n)la goddess is in the same square as the main temple of the city's major male dangerous divinity, Bhairava, with whom she has an esoteric connection for the purpose of "controlling him." The story of the temple is presented in one of the chronicles (Wright [1877] 1972, 194f.):

Bhupatindra^[*] Malla built [in Bhaktapur] a three-storied temple, the length of which ran north and south, and placed in it, facing west, a Bhairava for the protection of the country, and the removal of sin and distress from the people. This Bhairava gave much trouble, and the Raja ,n consequence consulted many clever men, who told him that if the Iswari [goddess] of the Tantra Shastra [texts], whom the Bhairava respected, were placed near him, he would be appeased. He therefore, at an auspicious moment, laid the foundation of a five-stoned temple. . . . The pillars were of carved agras wood, and there were five stones of roofs. This temple is the most beautiful, as well as the highest in the whole city. In building it the Raja set an example to his subjects by himself carrying three bricks, and the people brought together the whole of the materials in five days. When the temple was finished he secretly placed in it a deity of the Tantra Shastra, who rides on Yama-raj whom no one is permitted to see, and who is therefore kept concealed.

This goddess has a secret name and form, and is supposed by some experts to be "Siddhi Laksmi" However, she is known publicly as "Bhagavati." The two other Bhagavati shrines in addition to their use by Taleju Brahmans have some local worshipers.

Bhagavati has only one minor processional festival, which had been inaugurated in Bhaktapur only some ten or fifteen years before this study. In spite of this sparse representation in public space, however, Bhagavati is one of the principle divinities of Bhaktapur. She is the most common local name for the goddess in her full power, in the form where she has incorporated the power of all lesser forms of the goddess. She is thought of as a warrior goddess, as most clearly portrayed in her Mahisasuramardini representation and legend (see section on principles of classification of dangerous goddesses, below). Her main concrete presence is in the household. Bhagavati is the name and form of the household image in which the Dangerous Goddess is worshiped in home puja s as one of the group of household gods. She is at the focus of home worship during the important household ritual components of the Mohani festival. Bhagavati is also the main deity worshiped in many Tantric puja s. She is also the secret Tantric family goddess, aga(n) dya: , of the majority of upper-status households (chap. 9). For Bhaktapur's people Bhagavati is the city's main protective goddess when they are thinking of the city as a whole, rather than the protection of its boundaries. For the Taleju priests she is sometimes conceived of as "Taleju's older sister," because they believe she long preceded Taleju in Bhaktapur's history and in legendary status. But she is also alternatively conceived of by them as Taleju's "assistant," for she protects the city at Taleju's wish and direction.

Miscellaneous Dangerous Goddesses

There are some dangerous goddesses in Bhaktapur of circumscribed present importance. Some of these are auxiliary forms associated with Taleju in the Taleju temple, and others are goddesses located elsewhere in the city, where they have some specific and limited functions.

Taleju temple contains a number of Tantric images of various degrees of secrecy. These include Mahesvari (whom we have mentioned above) represented by a stone, Guhesvari considered as secondary to the major Guhyesvari Devi pitha goddess at the Pasupatinatha shrine, and Dui Maj.. Dui Maju is said to be the goddess of an internal pitha in Taleju temple, and to be "Taleju's own pitha goddess." In the Padmagiri chronicle Dui Maju is said to be the lineage deity of a "caste" of Maithili invaders, and to have helped King Nanyadeva take possession of Bhaktapur. In time, the account says, when Harisimhadeva^[*] in turn captured Bhaktapur as "he had received immense wealth from Dwimaju Deva whom he regarded as his Penate [lineage god] [he] established a Devali Puja [lineage puja ] to her" (Hasrat 1970, 50, 52). The dim reflection of some historical reality distorted in the chronicle, and the special esoteric position of Dui Maj. now in Taleju temple suggest something of her possible historical identity.^[43]

Another important esoteric form associated with the Taleju temple is Ugracandi, who is represented in some of the events there during Mohani, and who is thought by some to have an esoteric relation to the Nine Durgas.

There are some goddesses represented in the collection of shrines and temples built by the Malla kings in proximity to their palace, which we will discuss below as "gods of the Royal Center." The two goddesses in this group, who have no relevance to the rest of the city, are Baccala^[44] and Annapurna^[*] .

Of the few miscellaneous goddesses scattered throughout the wider city, some have special functions, and others had some past function and meaning and are now dimly remembered as a shrine or image that has some residual power. Kulachimi (or Ku Laksmi) (located in the Tulá che(n) twa: ), identified as Laksmi's^[*] "older sister," is considered to be a "bad god."^[45] She is worshiped daily by an assigned temple priest, probably, in a pervasive idea about such deities, to keep her from doing harm.

The Palu(n)palu(n) goddess, identified with Kumari and represented by a stone, is located in the Inaco Twa:. It was popularly used in the past as part of a curing ritual for children—rice held first to a sick

child's head, was then brought to this shrine and offered to the goddess.

Sitala (Newari Si:tala), a goddess of frightening mien whose vehicle is a donkey, is found at the river at Hanman Ghat^[*] . She is the goddess thought to have been efficacious for curing or preventing smallpox. On the twelfth day^[46] after the first signs of infection people went there to pray for cure and for protection from disfigurement. She is a well-known goddess in South Asia and can produce smallpox as well as cure it (Stutley and Stutley, 1977, 278; Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 328). Bhaktapur's Sitala has a broken nose, reportedly broken by a father whose son died in spite of his prayers.

Another goddess with curative functions is represented by a hole with a stone at its bottom in the Inaco Twa:, which is identified as Balkumari. People go here to pray for the cure of someone with a bleeding nose or who is coughing up blood.

In the Sukhu Dhwakha neighborhood there is a goddess called the "Durupo" or "Durupwa:" goddess, literally the "breast" goddess. She is also considered to represent Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata epic, and to be at the same time one of the ten Tantric goddesses of the Mahavidya. These varied attributions attest to her historical interest, but she now has no function or worship. Another such historical remnant is the Tantric goddess, Chinnamasta, also one of the Mahavidya, but of no present significance.

Dangerous Goddesses: Some Principles of Classification

After we have introduced the remaining classes of divinities, we will attempt to distinguish some of the important contrasts among the classes that are made use of in Bhaktapur to build a symbolic order. In this section we will introduce some of the "ordering potentialities" of the dangerous goddesses. They share most of these with the dangerous male divinities, but as the goddesses are a much more numerous and salient set and as they have some distinctive features of their own, they warrant discussion at this point.

Although Bhaktapur selects aspects of the goddesses as they are portrayed in South Asian tradition for its special purposes, it follows closely the ideas and specific forms (as we have seen in the placement of the Astamatrkas^[*] , for example) presented in the Devi Mahatmya .^[47] We can therefore begin with some passage from that text that convey these ideas. The Devi Mahatmya describes in various ways what we may call a maximal or full form of the goddess (see fig. 13) whose power is in the

Figure 13.
The Goddess in her supreme manifest aspect.

concentration of other divine principles, principles that are partial in relation to the full form. (Devi Mahatmya , II, 9-17; Agrawala 1963, 45f.):^[48]

From the face of Visnu^[*] filled with intense indignation as well as from that of Brahma and Siva sprang forth fierce heat. From the bodies of other Devas also headed by Indra issued forth a resplendent luster. All this light became unified into one. The Devas saw in front of them a Pile of Light blazing like a mountain whose flames filled the whole space. Then that matchless light born from the bodies of all gods gathered into a single corpus and turned into a Woman enveloping the three worlds by her luster. Her face was produced from the light of Siva, her hair from that of Yama, her arms from the luster of Visnu^[*] , her breasts from that of the Moon; her bust from that of Indra; her thighs and legs from that of Varuna.

The Devi Mahatmya goes on to list the derivation of other parts of her cosmically inclusive body. In this particular description she is being generated to fight a demon who has also, significantly, concentrated power of other more limited divinities into himself, and is thus beyond the control of any of the ordinary gods. Mahisha, the king of the Asuras, had "taken over the authority of Surya, Indra, Agni, Vayu, Chandra, Yama, and Varuna^[*] as well as other gods. The wicked Mahisha has turned out all the gods from heaven who are now stalking their life like mortals" (Devi Mahatmya , II, 5, 6; Agrawala 1963, 45).

For another battle against the Asuras, the Goddess absorbs into herself the other dangerous goddesses, themselves the emanations or Saktis of gods, who had fought together in an earlier battle. The Asura Sumbha taunts the Goddess for winning a battle with the help of these other goddesses (Devi Mahatmya , X, 2-5; Agrawala 1963, 123):

O Durga, you are puffed up with the pride of strength. Do not be haughty, you are exceedingly proud but fighting with the strength of others. The Devi said: "I am all alone in the world here. What other is there besides me, O you wild one. See that these goddesses are my own powers entering into myself." The Rishi said: "Then all those Matrka^[*] , Brahmani and others, became absorbed in the body of the Goddess. Thereupon Ambika alone remained." The Devi said: "Through my power I stood here in many forms; all that has been withdrawn by me [into myself] and now I stand alone."

In still another passage the full Goddess is represented as springing directly from the body of Siva's consort, the benign goddess Parvati (Devi Mahatmya , V, 38-40; Agrawala 1963, 85):

O Prince, while the gods were thus engaged in invoking the Goddess through praises and m other ways, Parvati came there to bathe in the waters of the

Ganga^[*] . She of the lovely brows said to the gods, "Who is being praised by you here?" Then sprang forth from her physical sheath Siva Kausiki [an appellation of the goddess] who replied, "This hymn is being addressed m me by the assembled gods vanquished by the Asura Sumbha and routed m battle by Nisumbha." Because that Goddess came out of Parvati's bodily sheath, she is sung as Kausiki amongst all men.

It is important to note here that the benign goddess Parvati seems, as Lynn Bennett puts it in a comment on this passage, "unaware of her powerful war-like ego"—and that after the Dangerous Goddess appears "Parvati withdraws and has no part in the ensuing battle scenes" (1983, 268). The Dangerous Goddess seems, however, to be aware of Parvati. The Goddess as portrayed here can absorb other subsidiary goddesses into herself, can emit subsidiary goddess forms, and is capable of taking different forms at her own full level.

The Devi Mahatmya also deals with the Goddess in another and very different way as the ultimate creative force. Here she is no longer produced by Siva or the other gods, or through a transformation of Siva's consort. The Goddess as creative force is the subject of some of the stotras , the hymns of praise, to the Goddess, which introduce and intersperse the accounts of the heroic cosmic battles of the Devi Mahatmya . Here she is called simply Devi, Goddess, or sometimes Mahamaya, the generator of the concrete and illusionary forms of what is taken to be reality, who "forcibly seizes the minds of even those who have knowledge and leads them to delusion. . . . This animate and inanimate world is created by her. . . . She is supreme eternal knowledge being the cause of moksa^[*] [escape from delusion]. . . . She is eternal having the universe as her form . . . the supreme knowledge, the supreme power, the supreme mind, the supreme memory and the great delusion . . . the giver of manifest form to the gods Brahma, Visnu^[*] and Siva . . . the supporter of the world, the cause of its maintenance and dissolution" (Devi Mahatmya , I passim; Agarawala 1963, 37-43). Devi in this aspect has various titles or equivalences besides Mahamaya, such as Sri, Isvari, and Prakrti^[*] . These titles and names are different than those given to the "manifest" goddesses, either full or partial. This cosmic creator Goddess is referred to in Bhaktapur; for example, she is represented in the central point of the city as a mandala^[*] under her name of Tripurasundari. But much more salient to Bhaktapur is what we have called the "full goddess," the manifest form of Goddess, who is different from the creator Devi of the stotras .

This form, the central protagonist in the drama of the Devi Mahat-

Figure 14.
The Dangerous Goddess in her horrible form.

mya , is manifest at a position in space and a moment in time, albeit mythic space and time. This is the goddess who combines the forces of all the other and separate divinities, who freely yield them to her for their defense. As she fights for the defense of the divine order, she is described as a warrior, "filling the three worlds with her splendor, bending low the earth with the force of her strides, scratching the sky with her pointed diadem, shaking the nether worlds with the twang of her bowstring and standing there filling the ten directions of space with her thousand arms" (Devi Mahatmya , II, 37-38; Agrawala 1963, 51). In the Devi Mahatmya this full form of Devi is most commonly called "Chandika." However, she is given various other names and titles, such as Ambika, Bhadrakali^[*] , Mahadevi, and Durga. She also shares some appellations with the creator Goddess such as Sri and Prakrti^[*] . The full form has as her vehicle a lion. In some battles Chandika fights as herself, but in others she emits another form, Kali, who has a terrifying aspect and who does the fighting. This special terrifying form has a description which is repeatedly represented in Bhaktapur's art, icons and masks, and which is of great ritual importance (Devi Mahatmya , VIII, 5-8; Agrawala 1963, 98):

Kali of terrible countenance [see fig. 14], armed with a sword and a noose, carrying a . . . skull-topped staff decorated with a garland of human heads, clad in a tiger's skin, looking terrible . . . [with] emaciated flesh, with a widely gaping mouth, . . . with lolling tongue, . . . deep sunk reddish eyes, and filling the quarters of space with roaring voice, she impetuously fell upon the great Asuras, killing them and devoured the army of those enemies of Devas.

In some passages Chandika fights alongside of Kali (e.g., VIII, 52-62). Yet, repeatedly in the Devi Mahatmya Chandika gives orders to Kali, and confers praise and titles on her. Kali in this account is not just an aspect of Chandika; she is a subordinate, a more limited, more specialized being.

A rank still lower than Kali, still more limited and discrete in their forms are the Matrkas, the gods' Saktis, who fight in one episode alongside the Goddess as Chandika. Kumari fights with her spear, Brahmani by throwing water that is given power through her mantras , Mahesvari with a trident, the boar-goddess Varahi with her tusks, and so on (Devi Mahatmya , IX). However, as the stotra that follows this account (which we have quoted above) insists, these various Matrkas are all aspects of the one Goddess, Devi.

These relations of whole to part allow for the two dimensions of

classification that we have suggested in relation to spatial units, and, following the approaches of others, in relation to social hierarchy. The whole includes the part, but may emit it in some way so that the part can be considered as a unit in itself. In this case the part and the whole are in a vertical relationship, share some of the same qualities, and are hierarchically arranged, with the whole superior to the part. Furthermore, the whole tends to be more abstract and less specified, whereas the parts is more concrete and more specialized in its function and meaning. This arrangement also allows for horizontal relations because entities at the same level of inclusiveness are equal to each other. We have noted a distinction in the Devi Mahatmya of the full goddess Chandika from a cosmic creative Goddess of a still higher order, the absolute divinity prior to all manifestation. The manifest form of the Goddess in her full power was differentiated from the cosmic form in name, and sometimes was described as a form created by the male gods in concert. Bhaktapur's city religion puts four goddesses in different contexts at the same highest level (and makes no use of a distinction between the rank of a cosmic and a full manifest goddess). Two are related in tradition to names of the creator Goddess, Tripurasundari and Mahalaksmi^[*] (who is a supreme goddess in her context as the Nine Durgas' own deity). One refers to the full manifest form of the Goddess—Bhagavati in Bhaktapur's usage. The fourth, Taleju, is both in her legend a god's god (and thus in a rank above "ordinary" gods) and also, through her participation in the symbolic dramas of the harvest festival, a version of the fully manifest warrior goddess.

Three of these goddesses, Tripurasundari, Mahalaksmi^[*] , and Bhagavati, show their equivalence by having as their identifying Vahana or "vehicle" the lion, as does the manifest Devi in the Devi Mahatmya . So do, significantly, the two goddesses within the Taleju temple who are thought to be royal or warrior deities absorbed by Taleju, namely, Dui Maju and Manesvari. Taleju is, however, popularly said to have a horse vehicle. This probably refers to the white stallion that is used during the procession of Taleju during the Mohani festival. Slusser suggests plausibly that this white horse derives from the "sanctified horse required in ancient Indian coronation ritual, as it was in ancient Nepal, and is in the coronation of the kings of Nepal today" (1982, vol. I, p. 317). Whether the horse is considered the vehicle of the goddess in her Yantra representation is dubious, but that vehicle is an esoteric secret.^[49] The other dangerous goddesses, like the other ordinary goddesses, have each their own particular vehicle. Vaisnavi^[*] has (like Visnu^[*] ) the half-bird Garuda^[*] ,

Varahi, a water buffalo; Indrani^[*] , an elephant; Brahmani, a goose; and Mahesvari, a tiger. The ordinary goddess Sarasvati, like Brahmani (because of her traditional associations with the god Brahma, whose vehicle it also is) has a goose vehicle.

There is one figure whom we encountered in the Devi Mahatmya as the special agent of the full manifest goddess Chandika. This goddess, Kali in the Devi Mahatmya , is in Bhaktapur called "Mahakali." She represents the most frightening form of the Goddess and is used as such in the powerful symbolic enactments of the Nine Durgas group. Here she is below the full Goddess (as the Nine Durgas' supreme goddess Mahalaksmi^[*] ), but in a superior position to the remainder of the goddesses in the group. This Mahakali is a flesh-devouring, blood-drinking, intoxicated, cadaverous form. She has a male equivalent, whose consort she is, the god Bhairava, whom we shall discuss below. Mahakali does not have the full goddess' lion vehicle. Her vehicle is an anthropomorphic male form, supine at or under her foot, which is locally identified as a Kali preta , a kind of dangerous spirit.

The lesser goddesses are thus distinguished from the full manifest form, the Devi, in several ways. They are sometimes literally described as a(n)sa (Sanskrit, a[n]sa ) Devi, as "partial Devis." "Partial," we must emphasize, has a particular meaning here. It does not mean imperfect, but more concrete and more specialized, and in being more specialized, therefore limited. The lesser goddesses as a group are generally of equal status, although in some domains, such as the Nine Durgas, some of them may have special salience. In a few contexts a form that is a full goddess in another context may be conceived of as a partial goddess. This is the case of Mahalaksmi^[*] as one of the peripheral Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, and of Tripurasundari when she is thought of as only the central mandalic^[*] area's protective local goddess, and not the concentrating center of the mandala^[*] . However, in these two particular contexts, while goddesses may be treated in more limited ways, the reverse, the treatment of a limited goddess as a full goddess, does not occur. Each of the full goddesses is located in a different context, within which are clustered her own dependant partial goddesses, in the cases where these exist. Relations and equivalences among the full goddesses in the various sets, horizontal relations, are signaled in various ritual actions. All of the relations between the full goddesses are enacted during Mohani, which is one of the reasons that the festival will be of special interest to us (chap. 15). Finally we have noted the barrier between Parvati and the forms of the Goddess we have been considering here. The same barrier

separates the other "ordinary" goddesses from the Goddess. They belong to a civic, although heroic, sunlit world, she to a peripheral world of shadows.

The dangerous goddesses are used in differentiated ways to create a structure to represent and create order in Bhaktapur. This must be emphasized in the face of a tendency within the Tantric segment of Newar religion to absorb and blend all divinities, particularly the goddesses, and such resulting claims as David Snellgrove's that "there is no need for us to follow the development of these different goddesses, for they all tended eventually to accord with one basic form, that of the Great Mother Goddess, in whom they all more or less lost their separate identities" (1957, 81).

Dangerous Male Gods

There are a few male divinities in Bhaktapur who must be offered meat and alcoholic spirits, and who have frightening representations. Compared to the female dangerous divinities, they are fewer in kind, much less systematically related, and of more limited civic function. In another contrast with both the dangerous female divinities and with the ordinary gods, the male dangerous divinities seem to be further from the classical traditions of South Asia, comparatively more locally adapted and transformed. For that reason we prefer to use their local names, rather than the names of their distant classical ancestors. We have already mentioned that Ganesa^[*] may be a dangerous divinity when he is used to "enter" and give siddhi to the worship of a dangerous divinity, usually in Tantric ritual. In addition there are three exclusively dangerous male divinities who are prominent in Bhaktapur's urban religion—Bhisi(n), Nasa Dya: and a somewhat complex category, Bhaila Dya:.

Bhisi(n) (Bhima)

Bhisi(n), or Bhisi(n) Dya:, "Bhisi(n) God (see fig. 15)," as he is usually referred to, is related tenuously to the Mahabharata's epic hero, Bhima or Bhimasena, one of the five Pandava brothers. He is included in most households' sets of gods (discussed below), but he is in Bhaktapur the special divinity of shopkeepers.^[50] He has three major city shrines, two of which are significantly located along that portion of the city festival route that follows the bazaar. The third one is just to the south of the

Figure 15.
The merchants' special deity, the Bhisi(n) God.

city. Shopkeepers worship him at home and in his temples for good fortune in their commercial affairs. He is also the focus of one annual festival, centering on the temple of Suku Bhisi(n) Dya: in Dattatreya Square in the northeastern part of the city. Representations of Bhisi(n) show him as a powerful man with a full moustache, usually subduing a kneeling vanquished figure, said to be the epic's Kaurava King, Dussasana.

Slusser notes D. R. Regmi's claim (1965-1966, part II, p. 612) that the earliest reference to Bhisi(n) in the Kathmandu Valley is 1540 A.D. , and remarks that all of his images are works of the late Malla period, suggesting a relatively recent (in terms of Newar history), introduction of the figure as a separate god, independent of his position as one of the five Pandava brothers. How he became a god of commerce is unclear. Slusser surmises that he may have been "first associated with the fields as a heroic guardian figure, and later, by extension, guardian of the granary and of trade" (1982, 258f.). It is not clear whether any of the special characteristics of Bhima as portrayed in the Mahabharata, where he is a kind of marginally socialized figure of great strength, facilitate his semantic appropriateness for the merchants. One may, perhaps not entirely frivolously, note the following. When Bhima fought and killed the Kaurava King Duryodhana "the two were well matched, but when Bhima was losing he struck an unfair blow with his mace, thus disregarding an ancient rule that a blow should never be dealt below the navel. This blow broke his adversary's thigh, and hence his epithet Jihmayodhin, the 'unfair fighter'" (Stutley and Stutley 1977, 45). Whatever his specific appropriateness to commerce may be, there are considerations that make a dangerous god more appropriate to the sphere of commerce than an ordinary god, as we shall argue in the summary section of this chapter.

Nasa Dya: (Nrtya^[*] Natha)

Throughout Bhaktapur are a large number of shrines associated with a divinity locally called Nasa God, Nasa Dya:. Niels Gutschow mapped twenty-one of these shrines in a 1975/76 survey (personal communication). Of these, one in the southwestern part of the main festival route is considered the main one, and is a center for sacrifice and worship to him. Nasa Dya: gives skill and effectiveness to public performers; thus people who are to take part in dance or drama or musical performances pray and offer flesh and alcoholic offerings to Nasa Dya: before the

performance. Similarly people who are learning one of the performing arts, including those whose traditional thar profession is music of one kind or another, worship Nasa Dya: in the course of their training. Jugis, for example, on the completion of their formal study of their special musical instrument, a double-reed woodwind, make a flesh and alcohol sacrifice to Nasa Dya:" Nasa " means grace and skill in social as well as "artistic" performances. Someone who has nasa is "cultivated, delightful in social intercourse, . . . entertaining, the life of the party" (Manandhar 1976, 253). Thus people also worship Nasa Dya: for such social skill. Nasa Dya: is represented by holes in the wall of a shrine (or often in private homes). These may be single or in sets of three, and of various shapes, sometimes as triangles with the apices pointing downward. Brahmans identify Nasa Dya: with the South Asian Siva in his aspect as Nrtya^[*] Natha Raja, the "Lord of the Dance," but there are probably no shrine images of him in this form in Bhaktapur. Mary Slusser had identified one such image, of "exceptional interest" precisely because of its unusualness, in the Pasupatinatha shrine complex (1982, vol. 1, p. 233, n.76; vol. 2, pl. 356). She notes that most Nasa Dya:s "are inconsequential images . . . or they decorate the toranas^[*] [decorated arches placed above major shrine icons] of Siva temples" (1982, vol. 1, p. 233, n.76). Like Bhisi(n) Dya:'s relation to Bhima, Nasa Dya:'s to Nata Raja is very distant.^[51]

Bhaila Dya: (Bhairava)

Bhaila Dya:, "Bhaila God," the Newar version of the Hindu deity Bhairava (see fig. 16), is a divinity, or group of divinities, whose images, supremely dramatic in some of their anthropomorphic representations, are widely represented in Newar communities. In the Puranas^[*] Bhairava is sometimes a son of Siva and Parvati, sometimes an emanation emitted by Siva when infuriated. The Newar's Bhairava is associated with this emanation. In his anthropomorphic form he is represented with fangs, bulging eyes, dark blue or black coloring, carrying destructive weapons in his many arms, and wearing garlands of shrunken decapitated heads or skulls. He is thus an iconographic male equivalent of the Kali or, for Bhaktapur, Mahakali aspect of Devi. Bhaila Dya: is also present in a vague nonanthropomorphic form. Here he is a spirit-like creature who is located at or below the surface of the ground—in the cremation grounds or within the city in association with certain powerful natural stones. Finally he is theoretically related to the genesis and classification

Figure 16.
An image of the dangerous deity Bhairava in front of the city's main
Bhairava temple.

of the other dangerous male deities who are in certain contexts considered as "kinds" of Bhaila Dya:s.

The anthropomorphic Bhairava has two main presences in Bhaktapur, Akasa (Sanskrit akasa ) "Sky," Bhaila Dya: and as the Bhairava of the Nine Durgas cycle. The Akasa Bhaila Dya: is housed in one of Bhaktapur's major temple structures located in Ta:marhi Square, a square located on the axis that divides the upper half of the city from the lower half, and which is one of the ritual centers of the city. This is the center that becomes the pivot of the drama of the division and reunification of the city during the spring solar New Year festival, Biska: (chap. 14). Akasa Bhairava and his consort, the dangerous goddess Bhadrakali^[*] , are one of the symbolic foci of the dramatic sequence of the festival that dramatizes in their separation and coupling—in concert with a variety of other vivid symbolic enactments—the conflict and unification of the divisions of the city. The Akasa Bhaila Dya: temple has several representations of Bhairava. In front of the temple, in a recess on its front wall, is a small frightening figure (see fig. 16), sometimes given the name of Kala Bhairava or Kala Bhaila Dya: (because, in one explanation, "even Kala, the Lord of Death trembles before him" [Sahai 1975, 119]). Within the temple are images used in the festival procession, and the major fixed temple image, which is a head without a body. This image is related through various legends (chap. 14) to a headless image of the god in Benares (Varanasi) in India.^[52]

Akasa Bhaila Dya:'s vehicle is Beta Dya: (from the Sanskrit Vetala). In those Puranic^[*] accounts where Bhairava is the son of Siva and Parvati, Vetala is Bhairava's brother (O'Flaherty 1973, 69, 106), but in Bhaktapur he approximates more the South Asian idea of Vetala as "a class of demons, ghouls or vampires who frequent burial grounds, and are said to re-animate the dead" (Stutley and Stutley 1977, 331), a conception that is related to Bhairava's attributes as a stone god (below). Beta Dya: himself is conceived as a sort of agent for Bhaila Dya: in the exercise of his powers. Like many other deities in Bhaktapur, Akasa Bhairava is balanced by another deity. In this case it is the goddess "Bhagavati" in the nearby Nyatapwa(n)la^[*] temple as we have discussed above. In the account of the building of the temple and the installation of "a Bhairava for the protection of the country, and the removal of sin and distress from the people" it was the Bhairava itself that gave people trouble (which is a general potential of the dangerous gods), and it was necessary to balance him with a complementary dangerous goddess. This conception of the goddess of the Nyatapwa(n)la^[*] temple as calming the

dangerous Bhairava is still the popular explanation in Bhaktapur for the juxtaposition of the two temples.

The anthropomorphic Bhaila Dya: has a second dramatic presence in Bhaktapur's civic symbolism and ritual in the Nine Durgas sequence (chap. 15). Here he is represented in his fully powerful and frightening form, as a mask that is the symmetrical complement of the mask of the sequence's most frightening goddess, Mahakali (see color illustrations). Among the group of divinities who make up the Nine Durgas group, Bhairava and Mahakali have the predominant roles. In some of their performances he is the most prominent character, particularly in his presiding over certain animal sacrifices. In the most important of their performances, however, the calendrically determined sequential twa : performances, Bhairava is peripheral to Mahakali. There is also in the Nine Durgas troupe of divinities a god form called "Seto Bhaila Dya:," the white Bhairava, who is in his relation to the female deities of the group a clown-like, ineffectual figure. In his iconographic representation the mask of this Seto Bhaila Dya: is a transformation of Siva, who is also represented as a mask in the performance (see color illustrations). He reflects Siva's ineffectiveness in relation to the Saktis, who have become independent dangerous goddesses.

Bhairava as a vague demonic spirit inhabits the cremation grounds. He is found sometimes located in buried stones under the cremation pyres and is the focus of some Tantric pujas , and in popular assumption, at least, of pujas by spirit doctors, Tantric magicians, and witches. This sort of Bhairava is also thought to be the power in certain stones that "protect" the areas in which they are located. He is related both to ghosts and spirits and to the divinities of such stones, and we will return to him and some of the details of his cremation ground and stone habitations in a later section. Gutschow and his associates have reported eight Bhairava shrines in the city that appear on some paintings as part of a set of mandalic^[*] circles in Bhaktapur's city space (Kö1ver 1976, 69-71; Gutshow and Kö1ver 1975, 21f.; Auer and Gutschow n.d., 38). These are all natural stones. The same set is represented by anthropomorphic statues within the Taleju temple complex. These Bhairavas are considered as consorts of a corresponding set of goddesses.^[53] They have no meaning for public urban symbolic enactment, and little for contemporary Tantric esoteric religion.

The other dangerous male gods of Bhaktapur are vaguely related to Bhaila Dya:. Nasa Dya: is said by some to be an emanation of Bhaila Dya:, and Bhisi(n) Dya:, with his human attributes, to be a sort of ava-

tar of Bhaila Dya:. In spite of such ideas, however, they are treated for the most part as independent divinities.^[54]

Bhairava/Bhaila Dya: encompasses a fairly diffuse class of beings in comparison with the elaborately formulated relations among the dangerous goddesses. There are fewer forms, and many of them are quite vague, which, as we will argue, give those aspects of Bhairava some of their semantic force. While the frightening form of the Goddess, most clearly exemplified by Mahakali, is only one of the forms of the Dangerous Goddess, Bhairava exists only in his frightening form and is in many ways a lesser figure than the Dangerous Goddess. She may be the supreme deity, whereas he never is. Furthermore, his theoretical relation to Siva is even more vague than the relation of the Dangerous Goddess to Siva, for even if in many contexts she has separated herself from Siva, in Tantric theory and practice the relation of Siva and the Goddess as Sakti are obsessively investigated and enacted. And, finally, while the Goddess as Bhagavati is a usual member of collections of household gods, Bhairava is only very rarely included, and that only by upper-status households who have special Tantric initiations and, therefore, powers. These asymmetries are significant.

Natural Stones As Divinities

The figures that we have been calling "major gods" in the previous sections are so referred to because of the overlapping of two qualities: (1) they are major and widely shared figures in South Asian Hindu oral and scriptural traditions, particularly that of the Puranas^[*] , and (2) they are made use of in the integrations of the city as a whole. In addition to such "major gods," however, there are other classes of supernatural figures, with special characteristics and special urban uses. We will discuss them here and in the following sections.

In the previous sections we have been concerned with divinities whose anthropomorphic (or on occasion diagrammatic) forms can be indifferently represented in "man-made" forms in carved wood, cast metal, painting on cloth, paper or wood, masks, or possessed human bodies, or in the case of some Tantric worship (chap. 9), clear mental images. We have noted in this and previous chapters that some divinities were represented and embodied by unworked "natural" stones. Some of these stones may be marked with some kind of symbol carved on them, but it is their "naturalness" that mostly seems to characterize them and give them some special possibilities of use and meaning.

Pithas

In his book on Hindu iconography, J. N. Banerjea notes that from very early periods in India "aniconism" existed along with iconic forms, anthropomorphic and, more rarely, theriomorphic images. Among these aniconic objects were, and are, sacred stones "scattered over different parts of India, which are taken to stand for one or [an]other of the cult divinities. . . . The well-known Sakta tradition about the severed limbs of Sati falling in different parts of India and about the latter being regarded as so many pithasthanas^[*] , particularly sacred to the Saktiworshipers^[*] , should be noted in this connection. In modern times, the most important objects of worship in many of these shrines are usually stone blocks covered over with red cloth" (1956, 83). At the core of Bhaktapur's pithas are such unworked stones, and the pitha goddesses we have discussed are located in them. Almost all pithas are marked by stones, but an apparent exception is Guyesvari, the true Devi pitha located in the Pasupatinatha shrine complex, which is "a water-filled pothole surrounded with the carved stone petals of a lotus" (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 327). In such apparent exceptions there is often a popular or an esoteric understanding that somewhere beneath the surface there is, in fact, a stone that is the seat of the divinity. There are various groups of deities associated with pithas . These are manifestations of the Tantric Goddess and groups of gods associated with her in Tantric theory and imagery among the Newars. Several of these are present as esoteric or lost historical residues in Bhaktapur (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 326; Kölver 1976), but the important persisting ones in Bhaktapur are the pithas of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, and, for the internal religion of Taleju, those of superseded royal lineage goddesses, as we have discussed above.

The Digu God, Lineage Gods

Outside the city boundaries in several directions (chap. 7) are natural stones,^[55] which are the divinities that various extended family groups (phuki ) worship once a year as their lineage god. These stones are called "Digu Gods," or, popularly, "Dugu Gods," after the goats, dugu , which are often sacrificed there. Phukis also have shrines and icons of their lineage gods within the city. In those groups in the upper levels of the macrostatus system, those that are entitled to Tantric initiation, the images, called the "Aga(n) God," are elaborately housed and wor-

shiped. The Aga(n) Gods are usually anthropomorphic forms of the Tantric Goddess. The pairing of an external open shrine with its aniconic stone divinity and an internal anthropomorphic or sometimes yantra god-form housed within the city, is parallel in both structure and certain aspects of worship to that of an Astamatrka's^[*] external pitha Goddess and her iconic image in her god-house within the city. The Digu God's shrine is sometimes referred to as a "kind of pitha ." The Digu Dya: stone is usually backed by a carved arch or torana^[*] .^[56] Rarely there is no stone visible in front of the torana^[*] , and the ground is considered the sacred spot, with the stone often assumed to be beneath it. The Digu God is sometimes considered as the lineage god in itself, but for upper-status families it is generally considered as the seat of the particular form of Devi which is their lineage divinity. Whatever the conception of the Digu divinity, it is necessary to offer it blood offerings and alcoholic spirits. We will return to the uses and worship of the Digu God and the Aga(n) God in chapter 9.

Protectors of Local Space, Chetrapal and Pikha Lakhu

Everywhere in Bhaktapur are natural stones, some lying flat, some protruding from the ground, which are identified as "area protectors," chetrapals , from the Sanskrit ksetra^[*]pala , a guardian of a field or place, or, within the realm of divinities, a "tutelary deity of the fields" (Macdonnell 1974, 79). These are popularly called chelpa gods. They are found near all dya: che(n) (god-houses), all Aga(n) che(n) (the special houses for upper-status thar s' Tantric lineage deities), near many private houses, and near or within the grounds of many temples. Each twa: or important sub-twa: has its own central twa: chetrapal . The various chetrapals are regarded as distinct individual divinities, and may have local names. Some of the chetrapals in public city spaces are identified with Bhairava or Kumari. In theoretical discussion all chetrapals are said to be a "kind of Bhairava," following a general South Asian association of such area protectors with Bhairava, or with a "portion of Siva" (cf. Stutley and Stutley 1977, 153; Mani 1974, 434). Some chetrapals have a yantra , or "mystic diagram" engraved on them—a lotus, a triangle, a six-pointed double triangle, or a more elaborate Sri yantra —but others are left uncarved. Chetrapals protect the nearby structure or the area around themselves from thieves, from illness, and from misfortune caused by evil spirits. They are the kind of divinity (typical of the dangerous divinities) that can cause trouble if inadvertently neglected or

mistreated, and can thus in themselves cause illness or misfortune. Tantric physicians will sometimes ascribe illness to the inadvertent stepping on, spitting on, or otherwise offending some chetrapal . The major chetrapals in each twa: must be given offerings of food by each household at the finish of major household feasts. Some households make an optional additional offering before the beginning of the feast. Chetrapals protecting god-houses and Aga(n) houses may also be offered food offerings in conjunction with feasts in honor of the particular deity whose house they protect. Sometimes people worship local chetrapals in hopes of propitiating an offended chetrapal or curing or preventing some misfortune. The major areal and neighborhood chetrapals are sometimes covered with a decorative honorific canopy and smeared with colored pigments.

Several of the chetrapal have particular legends associated with them. Two are of general city importance. One is associated with the Bhairava who inhabits the cremation grounds. Another, called "Swatuña Bhairava," is of importance as the spot where the power of the goddess Taleju is transferred to the Nine Durgas performers at the beginning of their annual cycle (chap. 15). We will discuss these two figures further in the next section.

There is a kind of aniconic stone divinity that is sometimes regarded as a kind of chetrapal and sometimes as an independent and different form that is of considerable importance for symbolic action. This is a stone placed in front of the main door of every house, between that door and the road (chap. 7). This is called the pikha lakhu ("pikha " has the sense of moving or depositing something "outside"; "lakhu " [lakhu in Kathmandu Newari] is an old Newari word for path or road). This stone, embedded in the ground, may have been found there, but usually is brought from somewhere else during the construction of the house. It is usually engraved with the same kinds of figures sometimes carved on chetrapals . It is sometimes theoretically identified as Kumara, thought of as Ganesa's^[*] brother, a god who has little significance in Bhaktapur. In its use, the pikha lakhu , popularly called the pila laki god, is in each of its locations an individual god in itself. This stone marks the point in front of the main entrance, which locates an imaginary line at some distance from its actual external walls, separating its symbolic interior from the exterior public space. We have noted in chapter 7 something of the uses of that boundary.

Finally, the chwasas , the stones marking major crossroads whose principal functions ally them to the group of pollution-disposing stone

divinities that we shall consider in the next section, are also sometimes secondarily considered as area protectors, and thus as chetrapals .

Mediators to the Underground—Disposers of Pollution

An important use of stones as deities is in the marking and protection of boundaries. The forces of the boundary protectors are directed to the outside of the boundary. They keep things out, rather than in. As we have noted in the last chapter, Bhaktapur has another boundary, that with whatever it is that lies beneath the city. While the space above the city is open to the sphere of the astrologically important "astral deities" and to the vaguely conceived heavens of the various gods, it is not conceived as separated from the city by a boundary. What is below is somewhat more problematic. It joins with the outside of the city beyond its encircling boundaries as a realm of somewhat nebulous forces, such as the nagas , which may be dangerous if disturbed or inadvertently encountered.^[57] The underground, like the area outside the city is a realm into which waste and pollution can pass. Stones that are the loci for the passage act as a kind of valve, which consume the dangerous pollution and/or prevent its return. Like all deities of similar function, the stone deities involved are dangerous in themselves. In the last chapter we discussed the chwasa , stones placed at the major crossroads in each neighborhood. Portions of the head of a sacrificial animal which were used ceremonially at feasts must be brought there by the senior woman of the house. Clothes worn by a person at the time of or just before death are also brought to the chwasa . It is the traditional responsibility of designated members of the Jugi thar to remove these clothes from the chwasa . We have noted in the last chapter other polluting materials deposited at the chwasa in Bhaktapur and other Newar communities. For some religious theorists the god of the chwasa is the dangerous goddess, Matangi^[*] . Matangi^[*] (or more popularly the "Chwasa god," or the "Kala god") consumes the dangerous pollution of the materials left on it.^[58]

Food left over from a feast and thus polluted may be given to a Po(n), as a human pollution remover, or it may be thrown into a garbage pit in the courtyard at the rear of the house. The courtyard is the seat of a form of Siva,^[59] Luku Mahadya:, the "hiding Siva." This is a stone buried in the courtyard and worshiped once a year on Sithi Nakha, the day that ceremonially marks the end of the dry season and the anticipation of the annual rainy season (chap. 15). According to Vogt, Siva as

Luku Mahadya: "feeds upon the waste of the houses and transmutes it into creative power. To do this he takes the form of a ghoul. Otherwise the pisaca [a dangerous spirit, see below] . . . would come and feast on it. They [pisacas ] are evil ghouls with only skeleton frames who are associated with decay and madness" (1977, 103).

A third set of disposers of symbolic waste or pollution are found outside the city in the cremation grounds, and are also natural stones. These are the Masan (cremation ground) Bhairavas. In the main dipa or masan (Nepali, from Sanskit smasana^[*] ), the Cupi(n)ga:, the Masan Bhairava or Masan Bhaila Dya: is represented and focused in a stone believed to be under the ground at the place where the cremations are done. In the other two dipas there are visible stones at the surface of the earth, representing and embodying the divinity. During cremations Masan Bhairava is conceived as being below the burning body. The body must be consumed before the spirit is free to leave the locality. The fire does this, but Masan Bhairava also is associated with the destruction of the body and the liberation of the spirit. In his main location at the Cupi(n)ga: dip , Masan Bhairava is worshiped or at least thought to be worshiped by various peoples whose powers are independent of the ordinary priestly system of the city. These include non-Newar Shaivite pilgrims and sadhus, shaman-like spirit doctors, members of the Jugi thar , and witches. Some Tantric pujas are rumored to be offered to him there. These are all quests for religious/magical power or siddhi beyond the ordinary interior moral controls and institutional arrangements of the city.

The taming of Masan Bhairava is reflected in a legend. The Bhairava of Cupi(n)ga:, whose stone is supposed to have a yantra engraved on it, is associated with an anthropomorphic form of the deity that roamed the city in the past and was the cause of much trouble, including the death of many young people in Bhaktapur. A Tantric priest of great power, understanding the cause of Bhaktapur's troubles, seized Masan Bhairava and pulled out his tongue and cut it into three parts. The three pieces of the tongue are now three contiguous stones, named "Swatuna Bhairava," which function as a chetrapal in the Inaco Twa: in the eastern part of the city, and as important markers for certain important festival actions during the Mohani and Biska: festival sequences.^[60] The remainder of the Bhairava remains now usefully fixed in the cremation ground.

Masan Bhairava is a clear example of the theme common to many stories and ideas about the dangerous deities—that they are destructive

forces captured (more or less tentatively) through power for some special purpose, and put to the use of the city as a city divinity (compare the Nine Durgas legend, chap. 15).

Astral Deities

Bhaktapur, like all South Asia, has a body of astrological theory centered on the Navagraha, nine heavenly bodies and events,^[61] which are also thought of as divinities of benign or malignant influence. In the course of Hindu and Newar iconography these Navagraha have been given iconic representations, sometimes, particularly for Surya the sun god, elegant ones (Pal and Bhattacharyya 1969). The Navagraha are studied by astrologers (chap. 10)—with the help of detailed printed annual astrological charts and calendars—in their relation to the time of an individual's birth for the purpose of guiding decisions about important undertakings of many kinds and to diagnose and recommend treatment for certain illnesses and misfortunes.^[62] Astral considerations are also used in some pujas and festivals to determine their exact proper timing. In general, astrological procedures are used, particularly in the anticipation of risky undertakings or in problems arising out of errors in previous undertakings, to adjust individual action to impersonal cosmic order. The action at issue must be, of course, one where choices are free in some sense—aspects of a journey, a marriage, a business undertaking, or the timing of a ceremony, which are not specified by some other aspect of urban order. Astrology fills a gap, where the more common kinds of ordering of action, that determined by role, city area, annual calendar, or phase of the life cycle, do not operate.

Astrological considerations are important throughout the life cycle starting with the astrologically orienting time of birth. Worship of the sun, sometimes taken as the representative of all the Navagraha, is part of each of the life-cycle ceremonies. In one set of ceremonies, those associated with a girl's first menses (app. 6), the sun has particular importance, as the girl is "presented" to it and worships it after a prolonged period of seclusion in darkness.

The sun, and to a much lesser extent the moon, have other symbolic usages drawn from other aspects of the Hindu tradition, particularly those remnants of early Vedic religion that are parts of Brahmans' internal thar religion, and the Vedic component of their service to high-status clients such as the Homa ceremony. Ordinary people pray to the sun in a perfunctory manner on Sundays from the open roof porches of

their houses. Finally, many collections of household gods also include an image representing the sun.

The Navagrapha have no special shrines and are not used to mark city space. As we have noted above in the discussion of the peripheral Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, the Pujavidhi section of the Agni Purana^[*] contains a diagram associating the Navagraha each with a specific Matrka^[*] (Pal and Bhattacharyya 1969, 39f.) in a sequence that has some correspondence to the sequence of those goddesses at Bhaktapur's perimeter. The circle of peripheral Mandalic^[*] Goddesses in Bhaktapur, which are thought of and dealt with as arranged starting at the east and moving clockwise in almost exactly the same order as the listing of the Saktis of the gods in the Devi Mahatmya , corresponds at the same time—with one problematic position interposed—to the order of the planets as days of the week when the Matrka-planetary^[*] correspondence noted in the Pujavidhi is taken account of. This dim possible echo of astrological associations has no contemporary meaning.

The Brahmans' Vedic Gods

The term "Vedic" is sometimes used in Bhaktapur to separate the "ordinary" gods and religious practices from the dangerous gods and their associated worship, which are then sometimes called "Tantric." In this usage "Vedic gods" are for the most part the Puranic^[*] gods of later Hinduism. However, there are many ancient truly Vedic gods, who are invoked in the litanies, mantras, and practices of some ceremonies of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans for their own internal thar and family uses, and for aspects of ceremonies performed for their clients. As Michael Witzel writes in an article entitled "On the History and the Present State of Vedic Tradition in Nepal," "the Vedic religion, which preceded both Buddhism and medieval Hinduism, had already in Licchavi time largely been superseded by Puranic^[*] and Tantric elements, yet this oldest form of Aryan worship and learning has come down to the present age" (1976, 17). Witzel traces the history of Vedic practices and texts in Nepal, and (for our present purposes) notes the continuing performance of some ancient rituals such as the Agnihotra through the centuries. He also reports the persistence into the present of an annual Vedic Soma sacrifice. Bhaktapur Brahmans still learn and chant the Yajurveda , although (as Witzel notes) the knowledge of the other Vedas is dying out and there has been a diminution in Vedic studies among the Brahmans in recent generations.

The persistence of these rituals and their associated gods is of considerable historical interest, but from the point of view of Bhaktapur's city religion, these Vedic gods are the internal gods of the Brahmans and a canonical reference in some phases of Brahman conducted worship for others. These Vedic gods are the gods that add special supernatural effectiveness to the Brahmans' practices. Many other thars also have special, internal divinities of diverse origin, who are of importance to the life of the city insofar as they guarantee the effectiveness of the thar 's output into the city system, although for these other thars they have later historical origins. Thus, for city religion the true Vedic gods have become the internally validating thar deities of the Brahmans as one cell in Bhaktapur's complex religious system.

Pilgrimage Gods of the Royal Center

There are a number of shrines and temples that are found for the most part in the large square in front of the Malla palace and within the Taleju temple complex which represent gods that are not important to the public ritual or symbolic life of the city. These include such forms and appellations as Pasupatinatha, Guhyesvari, Annapuna^[*] , Jagannatha, Ramasvara, Kedarnatha, and Badrinatha. These shrines were erected by the Malla kings to represent gods found at famous pilgrimage centers in India^[63] and in other parts of Nepal, particularly the Valley shrine complex, Pasupatinatha. These shrines are now maintained and worshiped in a perfunctory way by Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in their continuing function as the Malla kings' priests. They were conceived of as places where worship could be a substitute for pilgrimages for the convenience of the court. The Malla kings, local Brahmans say now, could get as much merit from erecting them and in subsequent generations praying at them as by going on a pilgrimage. It is also said that such shrines were especially important when war or other external conditions made such pilgrimages impossible. These sites are now sometimes worshiped by passersby or local residents, and sometimes the local Pasupatinatha and Guhyesvari may still be worshiped as a substitute for a visit to their main shrines at the Pasupatinatha temple complex.

The structures are of interest to our present study in that in contrast to most of the temples and shrines and associated gods of Bhaktapur, they have a reference to real space and location elsewhere than Bhaktapur and its immediate environment. The placement of these sites at

Bhaktapur's Royal center, their Royal use, and their identification with "foreign" shrines, echoes, perhaps, a symbolic device for relating a city as a "cosmo-magical" symbol, as Paul Wheatley phrases it, to an "empire." Wheatley illustrates this with a summary of Paul Mus's (1936, 1937) study of twelfth-century Bayon in Cambodia, a city that contained statues of provincial gods, "so that Bayon as a whole constituted a pantheon of the personal and regional cults practiced in the various parts of the kingdom. By thus assembling them at the sacred axis of Kambujadesa, the point where it was possible to effect an onto-logical passage between the worlds so that the royal power was continually replenished by divine grace from on high, Jayarvarmin, the King, brought these potentially competitive forces under his own control" (Wheatley 1971, 432).

Traditional Bhaktapur's "imperial" impulses began to fade rapidly beyond the boundaries of the Valley, but they were, in however attenuated form, an aspect of royalty and its symbolism, as we will see in other contexts. The loss of Bhaktapur's Malla kings, that is, of its "own kings," exaggerated and distorted the balance toward Bhaktapur's inner orientations. The "Gods of the Royal Center" are, perhaps, a wistful sign of past Royal conceits.

Household Gods

One of the cellular units in Bhaktapur is the household. Like other such units, households have their own internal gods. Daily household worship, puja , in households are offered to "all the gods" (usually, as we have noted, with Visnu^[*] as the central figure), but these gods are really a limited group, as represented by the images that may be present in households. On special occasions, however, one or another of these household gods is the focus of worship. Upper-status households (in the past only the groups higher than the farming thars , but now including also most of the economically comfortable farming families) have in the puja kuthi , or puja collection, not only a variety of equipment for pujas but also collections of images of gods usually as bronze or brass statues. There are, according to Brahman family priests, some god images that are virtually always included in these collections, and others that are only occasionally found there, at the whim of the household.

All puja collections in households able to afford a collection of metal god images will include images of Ganesa^[*] , Visnu-Narayana^[*] , Siva, Bhagavati, and among shopkeepers and those engaged in commercial enter-

prises, Bhisi(n) Dya:. Visnu^[*] may be represented by an anthropomorphic image either alone or with his consort Laksmi, or by a stone or fossil salagrama . Siva is represented by an anthropomorphic figure, by himself or with his consort. In these combined figures of Siva and his consort as household deities, Siva is generally called "Mahesvara" and his consort, "Uma." Siva is also represented commonly by some form of the linga^[*] . Other deities commonly represented are Sarasvati, the Sun and Moon (usually in a combined image), and certain of Visnu's^[*] more popular avatars and their associates—Rama and Krsna^[*] , with or without consorts, and Hanuman. Upper-status families with Tantric initiation may also have a metal plate with an engraved yantra representing Siva and Sakti and an image of Bhairava in their ordinary household collection. (They will also have special Tantric lineage images kept in a separate room with restricted access.)

Among the less common images found in some collections are images of the gods' consorts by themselves—Laksmi, Parvati (often in this form called "Annapurna^[*] "),^[64] and Rama's consort Sita. Among the rare images are vehicles associated with gods, such as Siva's bull and Indra's elephant. These latter seem to be of aesthetic or novelty interest as much as for their connection with a god. There are also rare images of major gods in unusual forms such as the cosmic Visnu^[*] reclining on a serpent, and images of the minor avatars of Visnu^[*] , such as the dwarf, turtle, fish, or boar avatars . There may be images of Rsis^[*] , Vedic "seers," and of the minor god (for Bhaktapur) Kumara. The collection may also include other kinds of divinized objects—images of nagas , river stones representing various gods, books divinized as Saravati, and so forth.

The common household pantheons consist for the most part of the major ordinary gods, the gods that represent, as we will argue, ideal and representative images of civic persons. To this group an image of the goddess in her protective warrior form is added. Then there are the various idiosyncratic household choices, which are generally representatives of the benign, ordinary deities. In these collections some images can represent any subsidiary gods that they "contain"—Visnu's^[*] image can represent his consort and his avatars and their consorts; Bhagavati can represent all the forms of the Tantric Goddess.

Ghosts and Spirits

The various supernatural beings we have been discussing are all called "dya: " in Newari, a term that we have variously glossed by the histor-

ically cognate terms "divinity" and "deity," as well as by "gods." In addition, Bhaktapur also has a diverse assortment of beings that are not dya: , nor in Western conception "gods." These beings are heterogeneous nebulous forms having wills, understanding, motivations, and some sort of corporal identity. They are usually, but not always, malignant, and of various degrees of potency. All of them are uncanny, the subjects of thrilling accounts and horror tales. In comparison to the divinities with their canonical representation and traditions, these forms, "ghosts" and "spirits," are more vaguely defined and there is much less agreement on their nature and proper names. The social and psychological implications and uses of these creatures differ in important ways from those of the dya:s . Our purpose for introducing them in this chapter is a limited one—to see what light they may throw on the nature of Bhaktapur's aggregate of supernatural actors. These beings may be roughly sorted into those that are somehow derived from some spiritual substance left by humans after their deaths, and those that are independent beings in their own right—as are other living creatures in general, including gods. There is not always agreement if a particular kind of uncanny creature belongs in one or the other category. Most of these beings are familiar South Asian forms, some few are perhaps of Northern origin.

The ghost-like creatures, associated with spirits of the dead, are often called preta or bhut-pret (from the Sanskrit preta , locally pronounced "pret "). "Preta " refers to the particular spiritual principle or entity that represents the continuation of a person after death, and that undergoes various transformations. For the first twelve days after death the spirit is conceived to be in a preta form, after which it is variously conceived as becoming an ancestor spirit or pitr^[*] , or of being safely on its way to some place of judgment, or state of reincarnation (app. 6). The corpse itself is also referred to as a preta . There are various mishaps that can prevent the proper passage through and beyond the preta stage, and the preta then will become a troublesome earth-bound ghost. A person who was not "ready" to die or did not want to may become a permanent preta . Someone who dies in such a way that the proper rituals cannot be done—such as in an accident away from home or whose death is considered "unnatural"—can also become such a preta (cf. G. S. Nepali 1965, 124f.). The presence of these ghosts is often harmlessly manifested in such events as a window or door moving by itself or a chair shifting position. They stay around their former homes usually, and will not harm family members if as many as possible of the proper postdeath

rituals have been performed. There are, however, more malevolent varieties that may enter a person and consume them from the inside,^[65] causing them to lose weight and become ill, and which require the services of a special spirit exorcist.

Bhutas (from the Sanskrit bhuta , in Bhaktapur pronounced "bhut ") are differentiated from pretas (by more theoretically inclined Newars at least) as being uncanny forms that are not derived from human spirits and that are independent beings.^[66] They are responsible for the same kinds of phenomena as pretas —unexplained movements of inanimate objects, illness, apparitions, and sleep disturbances. There are still other beings that for some people are kinds of bhutas , for others kinds of pretas , and for still others neither pretas nor bhutas but independent beings. Among these is the Khya,^[67] which exists in two forms, white and black. The white is benign and guards the house from other spirits. It sometimes may snuggle up to a person, and produces a tickling feeling. Black ones may produce frightening nightmares. They may press on people's chests during sleep, making it difficult to breath or to move. While for some people Khyas are independent spirits, but not bhutas , for others they are a kind of bhuta ; for still others they arise from a body that has not been thoroughly cremated so that some flesh. remains. Another group of spirits are Twa(n)s, which shriek at the moment of the death of someone in the area, and whose shriek may cause the death of people who hear it. Another is the Kini or Kikini, which has the form of a beautiful woman who tries to seduce young men. If they yield they will sicken and die. The only clue to her spirit nature is that her feet are placed backwards on her legs. There is also the Kawa(n), a particularly dangerous spirit, which looks like a skeleton and makes a rattling sound when it moves. If you run into one, it will kill you. Kawa(n)s help guard the goddess Mahakali, and are represented by boys in the Nine Durgas dance dramas. People talk of actual encounters, their own and others, with such spirits. Legends and "literary" tales told in the city tell of still other demonic forms—such as the giant Raksasas^[*] and goulish Pisacas who are not, however, thought to be encountered in the ordinary life of Bhaktapur as the other spirits and ghosts may be.

The ghosts and spirits cluster at crossroads, inhabit the woods and fields outside of the city, lurk in the dark, and are driven away by bright lights. Sometimes they may invade a home but usually lurk in outside shadowy areas. An encounter with them is usually a matter of some accident or inadvertent mistake. There is a period lasting about one month in the spring of every year when rice planting is under way in the

fields around Bhaktapur when the "bhut-prets " are free to enter the city (chap. 15). This freedom is explained in that the protective Nine Durgas have completed their annual cycle, and have left the city. The spirits must be chased out of the city during the subsequent Gatha Muga: Ca:re festival. Usually, however, ghosts and spirits are the private concerns of individuals or families. This, we shall argue in the context of the other supernatural beings in this chapter, is reflected in the attributes that are ascribed to them.

Nagas

There is one creature that is difficult to classify. It is spirit-like but also is like a powerful "natural" serpent. It usually dwells beneath the earth, but may shake the foundations of people's houses, or leave its underground domain and enter them. These are the nagas , "supernatural snakes." They are most important in considerations of new building on previously undisturbed ground, and astrologers must determine how to avoid disturbing them and how to placate them chap. 7). The shaking or collapse of houses may be ascribed to them, as are some episodes of disease among household members. Sometimes people glimpse a naga moving in snake-like form within the house. When the naga of the foundations is in harmony with the house, it serves to protect it from harmful influences. As we have noted, holes are placed in the walls of houses so that the nagas can easily get out.

Bhaktapur's Pantheon As A System of Signs

Underlying our presentation of Bhaktapur's deities and supernatural figures is the assumption that the many individual deities, objects, and creatures we have discussed are imagined, created, and arraged in such a way that they can be comprehended by people in Bhaktapur and that they are able to make, each in its own way, their special contribution to the representation, creation, and maintenance of the city's mesocosm. We have noted that the active members of the pantheon are, for the most part, selected from the great South Asian historical and areal lending library of god forms. There are both economic and semantic reasons for the selection.

In a study of the meaningful (as opposed to "known about") deities in the "personal pantheons" of a Chinese and a Hindu informant,

Roberts, Chiao, and Pandey (1975) found that although the Chinese informant knew in some detail about some sixty deities and the Hindu informant about more than one hundred, their "meaningful god sets"—the ones that had "personal significance and salience" for them—was, for each, fifteen deities. After examining some of the aspects of meaning by which each informant compared, contrasted, and sorted the members of his pantheon, they concluded that "Meaningful god sets appear to be symbolic small-group networks, with believers ordering their thoughts about their gods in terms of a relatively small number of major dimensions. Since they seem to have few members, it is probably the case that every god within this limited number must carry his full religious and psycho-cultural weight" (Roberts, Chiao, and Pandey 1975, 145f.). The number of active gods in Bhaktapur's urban pantheon that are of general urban importance are also limited in number, although there are more of them than the fifteen in those two sample private meaningful pantheons.^[68] There are somewhat more than forty if the ghosts and spirits are included, and less than forty without them. That quantity is probably small enough so that each deity may carry a "full religious and cultural weight" for city dwellers. This is to argue, following Roberts et al., that the civic pantheon is a "meaningful god set" to the city's individuals , for the numerical constraint has something to do with individual cognitive capacities. However, the gods' identification, meaning, and use are made easier by their location in a few more general meaningful classes . Those classes, in fact, contribute importantly to the deities' differential "religious and psycho-cultural weight" in the public urban order.

In his summary work on ancient Greek polytheistic religion, Walter Burkert writes of Greek ritual that "the same repertoire of signs is employed by various groups in various situations" (1985, 55). The Greek pantheon, in contrast to, say, the vast Hittite and Babylonian pantheons, is distinguished by its "compactness and clarity of organization . . . the Greek gods make up a highly differentiated and richly contrasted group." And, he adds, "The primary differentiations are taken from the elementary family groupings: parents and children, male and female, indoors and outdoors" (1985, 218).^[69] If a common "repertoire of signs" is to be put to concrete uses in a community and thus to be understandable and learnable, it must, as the paper of Roberts and colleagues suggests, be sufficiently compact and differentiated for such uses.

There have been some anthropological approaches to Hindu pantheons as "repertoires of signs" (Babb 1975; Wadley 1975; Harper 1959) in comparatively simpler Hindu communities which will later provide some useful comparisons with Bhaktapur. As Babb put it for the area of Madhya Pradesh that he studied, "The pantheon is not a haphazard congeries of gods and goddesses but a system of symbols that formulate a view of reality. The pantheon symbolizes a world, the world in which ritual action takes place" (1975, 215). When we consider a deity (or any other type of cultural object or event) as a "sign" and as a member of a domain of signs, we are interested in its meanings and uses to a particular community of sign interpreters and its meaning for certain purposes—here, as throughout this book, for the most part for the purposes of urban integration. The deity's history is of interest in such an analysis only as it is "living" and informs present meaning and use. In a sense "extra" history clings to it, however, and makes it something more than present systematic community usage may require^[70] and gives it a creative potential for some emerging future conditions.

But to what do those meanings cling?

Bhaktapur's Pantheon As A System of Signs: Some Notes on Idols

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois, carefully considering the question of "idolatry," wrote that Hindu idolatry was "grosser" than pagan idolatry, in that while the pagans worshiped fauns and naiads, the beings who presided over the forests and the rivers, Hindus worshiped the "material substance itself, . . . water, fire, the most common household implements" (1968, 548). "Idolatry" here means the violation of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic profoundly transforming program and dictate to pagan and "primitive" religions to worship the distant creator rather than the environing creation.^[71] But, Dubois continues, "It is true that they admit another kind of idolatry which is a little more refined. There are images of deities of the first rank which are exposed to public veneration only after a Brahman has invoked and incorporated in them these actual divinities. In these cases, it is really the divinity that resides in the idol, and not the idol itself, that is worshiped" (1968, 548). This is what sophisticated—and probably most—people in Bhaktapur still hold. This does not allow us to dismiss the "idols" themselves, however, the "idols" that, as Dubois reminds us, embody specifically "deities of the first rank."

The "idols" are, that is, only one of several kinds or classes of forms of deities. Those classes of forms are centrally important for carrying, each in its way, an important category of significance. Within the class of "idols" their members' differentiated identities are constituted by their own iconographic components—the gestures, postures, paraphernalia, associated "vehicles," crowns, arrangement of hair, and so on, which are the subject of iconography, and which serve to identify the particular divinity. These components, which turn, for example, a carved piece of stone into an adequate representation of Siva, are for the most part neither our concern nor the concern of the people of Bhaktapur once the minimal adequacy of the image to represent what it is supposed to represent has been assured. The central problem in the urban uses of the pantheon is to know that an image is or is not Siva. The constituting parts of the image are of concern only where they may have some direct semantic import and thus contribute to the meaning as well as the identification of the image, and in the rare cases where the iconographic details of a particular version of a divinity may give the image one rather than another of its possible significances and uses.

Bhaktapur's Pantheon As A System of Signs: Classes of Meaningful Forms

Each of Bhaktapur's urban supernaturals is from one point of view a somewhat fuzzy clump of ideas and feelings and urges to action in peoples' minds. These are usually manifest in or focused on concrete material objects or, in the case of spirits and ghosts, an imagined object. Whatever the ideas, emotions, and calls to action understood to be associated with these objects, it is the concrete objects that exist in some sort of external space, make an impact on the senses, and have perceivable boundaries. Many of these objects can be manipulated, placed and fixed in space or moved through it and used as central references for action. The object is a part of the meaningful deity considered as a "sign," but it is important for our purposes to distinguish it from other meaningful aspects. It is something like what Charles Morris (1938) called a "sign vehicle." The sign vehicle, in concert with the other sorts of meanings that it focuses makes up a sort of "god sign," which, following the semiotic analogy somewhat further, can be combined and contrasted with other such signs in various ways making possible an infinite variety of symbolic statements.

The meaning of a city god, like all "natural" sign systems (in contrast

to logically constructed ones) is a multilayered, context-dependent, and sometimes ambiguous fabric. The god-bearing objects and man-made images not only carry great quantities of history, myth, and legend but also absorb the implications of their uses, their relation to status, space, time, and specific symbolic enactments, and that absorbed meaning, in turn, makes them fit for new relations from which they again absorb meaning in a continuing process. However, the objects and images are not just sponge-like units absorbing any meaning of placement and use, Humpty Dumptyish terms that can mean anything one chooses to make them mean. Certain aspects of their meaning are more central, less fluid than others, and give to the gods as signs their adequacy to be used or located in certain ways. This can be called, for want of a better term, their "primary contribution" to the field of meaning. These "primary" aspects include the major legendary characteristics ascribed to the god in Hindu tradition. Much of their "primary contribution" comes from very general aspects of their form, however, and that form is at the same time—and in specific relation to its context-resistant contribution to their meaning—an important aspect of their classification.

The formal aspects that may be used to sort the pantheon into classes of deities are different from those that differentiate the members of the various typological groups. The members are usually differentiated by conventional iconographic features. Hierarchical relations among members, where they obtain, may be indicated by relative features—comparative size or position (right vs. left, center vs. periphery). The classes of gods are distingusihed by neither conventional iconographic signs nor relation, but by discontinuous and "directly meaningful" (rather than "conventional") contrasts.

The classes of deity differentiated by "directly meaningful," easily understandable, contrasts of form are those fundamental contrasting sets we have discussed throughout the chapter, the sets that are put to extensive symbolic use in the city. Let us recall those classes, rearranged for present purposes in an order different from that in which we presented them above. These classes are: astral deities, ghosts and spirits, stone deities, and major civic deities (of which there were two sub-classes, benign and dangerous). The other deities we discussed (e.g., royal pilgrimage gods, household gods) belong in their form to one or another of these groups.

The contrasts that serve to sort the types of supernaturals and bear on their meaning and use are in the following dimensions:

1. Proximity.

Proximate forms are present in city space (including its bordering outside where they may be directly encountered, and are in contrast to the distant impersonal forces represented by the astral deities, who are for the most part, the distant heavenly bodies.

2. Materiality.

Among the proximate beings are those having a fixed material form, which may be contrasted with those whose forms are immaterial , the ghosts and spirits.

3. Artifice.

Among the beings with material forms, there are those whose forms are humanly worked in contrast to those whose forms are aniconic "natural " forms.

4. Ordinary versus uncanny humanly worked forms.

Among forms that are humanly worked there are the ordinary forms , whose imagery is closely derived from the forms, logic, and relations of the social world of objects and persons, in contrast to the dangerous forms , whose imagery is derived from dream-like or hallucinatory forms, logic, and relations. A diagram of these contrasts indicates certain aspects of this branching typological schema:

The main movement of this classification as the contrasts at each level are isolated—the right-hand terms above—is a progressive movement toward the everyday moral life of the city, ending with the ordinary deities, those deities that are thought of and dealt with as "persons," and who represent community ideals and norms. They are proximate, material, shaped through culture, and not demonic. Let us recall some of the aspects of the formal sets distinguished by these contrasts to suggest their contributions to meaning.

1. Proximate versus distant.

This first distinction separates the astral deities from all the rest. The astral group are essentially impersonal cosmic forces. Their movements are regular and they provide the external rhythm and tempo that must be understood and adjusted to, as opposed to the manipulations and avoidances possible within other realms. This is true of both the calendar-determining phases of the moon and movements of the sun and the influences on "luck" of the whole astral set. The function of the astrological expert, the Josi, is to map the exact state of the astral realm and help individuals and priests adjust to it. Most ritual activities addressed to other kinds of deities are fitted in various ways to one or another indication of cosmic rhythms given by the astral bodies. Although they may have some iconic representations, the astral deities are embodied in their existent forms as distant astronomical forms and events in the skies. In contrast to the astral deities, all the other divinities and ghosts and spirits are immediately present and closely encountered in and around the city, and in contrast to the regular clockwork movements of the distant deities, the proximate beings have minds and passions and whims and thus have some freedom of action, make decisions, and can be influenced by individuals in one way or another.

2. Material versus immaterial.

The proximate beings can be divided into those that are embodied in some concrete form for most city purposes, and those that are not so embodied, which remain "immaterial." The nonembodied forms are the spirits and ghosts. The identification and classification of the nonembodied forms are, as we have noted, comparatively vague. These beings have relatively little cultural construction, local tradition providing only vague identifying sketches. They are not objects of any cult or community religion, and are the only beings we have listed here who are not in one or another context referred to as dya : or "gods." They are of personal and immediate local concern only. They are only rarely, fleetingly, and haphazardly encountered, although they provide the basis for many exciting accounts. The work they do for the community is to give some shared name and vague form to a range of vague private encounters, perceptions, and psychological states. The embodied beings, in contrast, constitute the working civic gods. Because of their embodiment in material objects they can be perceived in common, and can be related to significant space, either as fixed in a particular spot or carried through some particular area. The embodied deities are public objects, and as they are objects that affect

the senses in a discrete and controllable way, they serve perfectly as civic "sign vehicles."

3. Worked versus natural.

The embodied material beings can, in their turn, be sorted into two groups, "worked"—those that are given some conventional form through the efforts of artists and craftsmen following the traditional canon for the production of valid images—and "unworked"—naturally occurring objects that are credited with embodying a divinity. The unworked objects of importance in the public city religion are, for the most part, stones, almost always embedded in the ground. These unworked stones represent in local conception as they do in their form something intermediate between the formless spirits and the crafted deities, having both spirit-like features and god-like features. The gods they represent are vague in their conception and classification when compared to the gods of the worked images. The stone gods are never portable, and thus never used to mark out an area through their movements; they mark or protect fixed boundaries between some socially differentiated interior unit and its less social or nonsocial outside. They belong mostly to that vague outside, and mark the outer, the relatively nonsocial face of the boundaries at which they are fixed. They share some features with one division of the worked divinities to form a crosscutting group of "dangerous" divinities.

4. Benign versus dangerous.

When we turn to the divinities who are represented by humanly worked and formed images, icons, we enter the realm of the major gods of Hinduism, those that are usually considered as constituting a pantheon. These gods all have anthropomorphic images, although some part of the image, usually the head, may have an animal form. We are now encountering figures that not only are sentient beings but also have at least external human characteristics. They represent a movement away from uncanny beings, toward something more understandable—understandable, that is, in a particular way, the way we understand humans as "persons." It is this group that is the focus of most calendrical festivals, whose myths, legends, and relationships order most ritual action. These divinities have houses and temples, and may be fixed in a position in space or be carried in festival processions or embodied in human agents. They are present in the city at rest or in movement as anthropomorphic, embodied beings, very much as the citizens of Bhaktapur are so present.

This final division of classes of divinity is within the set of culturally

worked anthropomorphic gods. Here the distinguishing formal contrast is the appearance of the images themselves. One set has various features that suggest emotionally driven dream-like images, features that escape from the constraints of ordinary everyday reality. They include fangs, cadaverous bodies, bulging eyes, garlands of decapitated heads or skulls, mantles of flayed human skin, and multiple arms. The arms carry human calvarias (understood to be drinking cups full of human blood) and various destructive weapons. The female forms of this type (and not the male ones, which, when shown as being sexually aroused, maintain their demonic forms [fig. 17, chap. 9]) included images of exaggerated seductive sexuality, with exaggeratedly rounded, youthful faces, hips, and breasts. Their hands, however, bear the same objects as those of the frightening figures. Both versions—beautiful and horrible—may be conceived of as dream-like and hallucinatory images. This group represents the "dangerous anthropomorphic gods"—"dangerous anthropomorphic gods" because the group of "dangerous gods" also includes the stone gods, with whom these deities share some characteristics. These anthropomorphic dangerous gods are the foci of many city festivals. They and the associated stone gods are the major symbolic resources for the marking of significant city space. The anthropomorphic dangerous gods have potentialities beyond the stone gods. They, like the benign set, may be arranged in differentiated sets; they can move through space, and they thus allow for differentiated and specialized statements in their use in the various symbolic enactments that mark, relate, and protect various units of the city.

With the group of culturally crafted anthropomorphic gods, we begin to have identified individuals who are embedded in characterizing relations with similar beings. We have something like a socially created, morally controlled person . The dangerous deities, however, as we have noted in earlier sections, are uncanny persons; they are too dream-like, shifting and flowing in their forms and in their logical relations with each other. When we have followed our main axis from distant to proximate, to materiality, to anthropomorphic form, and finally to ordinariness , however, we are at the end very close to full "persons," as defined by the roles, needs, and possibilities of a social community. These residual "ordinary" anthropomorphic gods are heroic persons, with extraordinary—albeit not unlimited—powers and with graspable minds. This is manifest in their prevalent imagery as idealized human types. Even if they are partially animal in form, such as Ganesa^[*] , Hanuman, or Visnu's^[*] vehicle Garuda^[*] , they are humanized animals, in con-

Figure 17.
An esoteric image of a Bhairava.

trast to the frequently bestialized humanoid forms of the dangerous anthropomorphic gods. They represent the moral interior of the city and both represent and are models for the moral dimensions of human relations (above all, those of the household and other intimate relations) and of the self.

Walter Burkert argues that the Greek Homeric gods move beyond the anthropomorphic gods of the Near Eastern and Agean neighborhoods of Greece. Those gods "speak and interact with one another in a human way, . . . love, feel anger, and suffer, and . . . are mutually related as husbands and wives, parents and children." But the Greeks, he says, add something to this. "The Greek gods are persons , not abstractions, ideas or concepts. . . . The modern historian of religion may speak of 'archetypical figures of reality,' but in the Greek, locution and ideation is structured in such a way that an individual personality appears that has its own plastic being. This cannot be defined, but it can be known, and such knowledge can bring joy, help, and salvation. These persons as the poets introduce them are human almost to the last detail" (1985, 182-183 [emphasis added]). Jean-Pierre Vernant, on the contrary, asserts that "the Greek gods are powers, not persons" (1983, 328). He argues this on the basis of their difference from what he takes to be the essence of social persons—namely their being as "autonomous focuses of existence and action, ontological units." Claiming that "a single person cannot be several," he calls attention to the various states and conditions referable by term such as "Zeus." However, this does not affect the argument that in particular temporal and spatial contexts and uses these gods are "persons" in a way that the members of some other pantheons are not, and that this quality as manifest in these contexts is of considerable importance for understanding the ancient Greeks and their religion. It is their person-like aspects that most clearly locate the forms, meanings, and uses of the ordinary gods as members of a particular class in Bhaktapur's civic pantheon. When, in contrast, a member of this set is considered in historical perspective, and its uses in other settings and conditions and in differently arranged pantheons are all added to the identity of the divinity, another type of figure, of great mythic complexity, emerges. As we have noted, such histories surround all the gods of the pantheon but are distant background to the choices and simplifications that must be made for the god's synchronic civic uses.

"Person" refers to a universal social invention, "someone" as the

legal definition has it, "who is capable of having rights, and being subject to duties and responsibilities," that is, a relatively fixed actor in the give and take of a moral system. Not all individuals in a community are "persons" in this sense; infants and often the mentally ill and defective are not. The benign gods have many of the characteristics of persons in this sense. They look like humans, and their special differentiating aspects are all social. They are embedded in and defined by social relations, out of which a larger community of related divine individuals is built. Their relations to each other are in part moral, matters of understood obligations and limits, and in part passionate. But their passions and motives—annoyance, rage, lust, compassion, respect, and fear—are ordinary social ones. The benign gods are in large part fixed in their forms and in their relations, and usually work things out within the constraints of logic and ordinary reality to which is added a superhuman (but limited) power that they use in times of special need. Like ordinary persons, they are subject to pollution (compare the discussion of the Nine Durgas in chap. 15), which indicates that they must, like all mature citizens of Bhaktapur, take care in order to maintain their social definition as persons (chap. 11). The dangerous gods have no such concern.

The benign gods as persons represent, as Babb has proposed, "certain key values of Indian civilization" (1975, 224). But they represent not only ideal values but also aspects of "normal" behavior, that which is tolerable for humans. What they do not represent (except transiently in the history of that generative and bridging form, Siva) is "insanity" and other modes of operation and understanding of the mind peripheral to the "person." This is done by the dangerous deities in various ways. As representations of the ideal and "the human," the benign deities become foci of identification and guides for proper behavior and moral standards, and also for tolerant understanding. Their soteriological functions have to do with reward or punishment of the atma , the particular spiritual entity that is for most people closely connected with the idea of the self and its persistence after death. This reward or punishment is based on moral performance within everyday life and with the proper devotion or "service" to the god and, in marked contrast to the effects of encounters with the dangerous gods, with inner intentions as well as external behavior. The benign gods, like all the gods, are subject to ritual manipulation. But their proper devotion and ritual manipulation consists primarily of a mimesis of honorific and respectful behavior, in the course of which they are offered the same honor, hospi-

tality, gifts, and services that would please any honored guest or person of high status. Such rituals reinforce and reaffirm the worshiper's social relation to the benign deity. All this does and can go on only within a rational, dependable world. These gods are "ordinary" and not "dangerous" precisely because they respond dependably to anyone with adequate social and moral skills, anyone who has, in part with their help, become a competent person by Bhaktapur's standards.

For other tasks and meanings Bhaktapur employs other types of divinities, divinities who are much more peripheral to the moral world of persons than the ordinary gods, and who thus represent other realms and ideas and who must be dealt with in other ways. The dangerous anthropomorphic gods vividly represent this nonmoral realm precisely because they have some characteristics of persons—names, forms, and anthropomorphic embodiments. They are radically peculiar and unacceptable persons, however, persons in flux—to recall Vernant, they are not quite "ontological units." They are outside the constraints of both logic and morality that are the essence of true persons. They represent the bordering outside of the ordinary world in a variety of ways—they are related to the forces and forms of "nature" beyond the city, wild and dangerous but at the same time vital, and also to certain psychological modes—dream, insanity, and those passions and impulses (e.g., cannibalism) that are beyond what are acceptable even to a tolerant view of what a person is or should be. As they do not operate through moral interactions and manipulations, they operate in the only other available mode, through power, and that is the way they, in turn, must be dealt with. This constellation of characteristics used to portray the hinterlands of any moral community has many familiar echoes throughout the world,^[72] but the uses of the dangerous gods have a particular development, force, and legitimacy in Bhaktapur. In contrast to many other Hindu communities (below), the dangerous gods have a special status in Bhaktapur as legitimate and high-ranking members of the pantheon, and as Tantric gods they are (as we will see in the next chapter) in many ways the foci of aristocratic and royal worship.

The dangerous deities represent not only the nonmoral exterior of the city but also the relatively nonmoral aspects of the exteriors of various of the city's component units. In some contexts, they are associated with individual's bodies and, particularly, with danger to those bodies in contrast to people's selves, souls, or "personhood," all associated with the benign moral deities. Most generally the dangerous gods protect the perimeters of the community, of its components, and of its

members, within which the ordinary moral life, represented by the ordinary gods, can go on, while at the same time representing aspects of the external dangerous forces. In protecting the boundaries of moral units and civic spaces, however, they also represent and protect such units as a whole . It is in this way that they can be made to represent the city as a whole, a lineage, guthi , or a neighborhood.

The use of dangerous deities as the representatives of a moral maximal unit warrants more comment. Let us recall the emergence of Devi in the Devi Mahatmya . When the world of the gods is threatened by danger from the Asuras—that is, when that world emerges as an entity precisely and only because it is set against a dangerous, contrary world—the Devi arises. She uniquely represents the world of the gods, even though she is not a "normal" member of that world. if she were, she could not protect them. She can protect them only by sharing in the nonmoral power of the external forces she has to defeat. In analogous ways Bhaktapur uses nonmoral deities to represent, as well as protect, moral units.

There is another important aspect of the use of nonmoral dangerous deities to represent a moral unit. They protect that unit in a very real way (as we will discuss in later chapters, particularly in relation to the Nine Durgas in chap. 15) by helping to ensure the adherence of its members to its moral system. The dangerous deity, usually a goddess, in concert with the meanings of blood sacrifice offered to her, represents the destruction that will overtake members of a group if they violate their adherence to the moral system and moral solidarity of the group. She binds members into the group as well as defending the group's boundaries and representing it as a whole.

Insofar as the dangerous deities themselves represent the kinds of external dangers they protect against, they must first be captured in order to be put to work for the community. As we will see in later chapters, this is done in local legend through the Tantric power of exceptional individuals. For ordinary individuals the dangerous deities can be controlled, albeit somewhat tenuously, not through social deference and good behavior as are the ordinary gods but through an individual's initiation into secrets of power, and the use of spells (mantras ) and, above all, through the use of one of the most important ritual resources in Bhaktapur, blood sacrifice, whose meaning in relation to the dangerous gods we will discuss in later chapters. Most of the time one deals with these powerful and erratic deities by trying to avoid them, or not to anger them or—if one has reason to assume that they

are angry—asking forgiveness and making restitutive offerings, even if (in contrast to the moral deities) they may have become angry "without cause." As the dangerous deities do not represent moral values, they cannot be, as the ordinary deities are, models for ideal or tolerable behavior. Their psychological functions for individuals, like their uses for th city, are quite different from those of the benign deities with whom they contrast within the formal supernatural class of humanly worked deities.

A few classes of deities differentiated among themselves by a few structural features do, as classes, much of the work of organizing realms of meaning in Bhaktapur. Their contrasts use kinds of meanings—near versus far, vague versus clearly formed—which are easily apprehended, and require minimal special cultural knowledge. The situation changes radically in relation to the organization and uses of the differentiated supernaturals within the classes of deities.

Bhaktapur's Pantheon As A System of Signs: Distinctions Within this. Types of Gods

The differences among the sets of gods, essentially the differences in their mode of representation, are, we have argued, based on certain contrasting structural features and are the basis for much of their meaning. Within the sets the distinctions are not the distinctions of classes or types, but, for the most part, distinctions among individuals . These distinctions are generally made on the basis of the clusters of iconic signs that identify each individual, usually redundantly—any one of several features will sufficiently identify the deity—as long as the other features are not too anomalous. These differentiating features are the usual ones emphasized in treatises on the iconography of the Hindu god images^[73] —crowns, vehicles, markings on foreheads, objects held in the hands, vehicles, aspects of dress, color, and the like. Without considerable interpretation based on knowledge of their myths and histories, the meanings of many of these features—beyond their identifying uses—may (with exceptions to be noted below) seem more or less arbitrary as direct indications of the paricular individual's present meaning or use. The individual stone deities (helped by some associated markings) and most of the astral deities are identified by their positions.

In most sets of deities the different deities—Indrani^[*] , say, in her contrast to Brahmani—do not contrast in their general meaning and use, in

which they are often identical, but in the portion or component of some larger whole made up of equivalent or near-equivalent parts—such as the mandalic^[*] segments of the city, the aspect of the full Goddess emphasized for some special purpose, the days of the week of astrological concern, or the set of all tutelary phuki deities—which they stand for. Each of these member deities in a set must be identified as an individual, but an individual whose particular individuality has little differentiating significance beyond their relevance to some specific sector of space or time or society. Often people who are not specially concerned with one of these individual member deities may not be entirely certain as to which member of the group they are, and may misidentify them or identify them with some lumping collective term.

The relation of deities within groups insofar as they mark equivalent divisions of space, time, or status is generally "horizontal" and more or less equal, but there are also some hierarchical relations within groups. These are sometimes indicated by size (anthropomorphic statues of an ordinary god and his consort usually depict him as larger (see fig. 12); the masks of Mahakali and Bhairava are larger than the less powerful figures in the Nine Durgas group (see color illustrations), and so on), or by central versus peripheral positions. (Tripurasundari is at the center of the city mandala^[*] , the vehicles of Siva and Visnu^[*] may be placed at the periphery of a temple, they at its central axis.) Above and below may also be used to indicate relative status, with a god's vehicle sometimes shown as kneeling at his feet, or placed below them. Among the benign gods the relation of the male gods and their consorts is shown by the consort being placed to the male god's left. Such relative features are not used in contrast between the different classes of gods who do not have hierarchical or consort relations across types.

Against these general features of the differentiation of the members of sets there is a very significant exception within one particular set, the benign deities. Within the set of the ordinary gods directly understandable implications in the images become, as they were in the case of classes of deities, once again salient for a differentiation of the meanings represented by each deity. Here the distinguishing features are the dusters—among the background of presently otherwise meaningless identifying iconographic features—which identify social behaviors and qualities. The tiger skin and yogic costume of Siva in some of his moods, the modest beauty of Parvati, the cuteness of the benign Ganesa^[*] , and so on, are such easily apprehensible meaningful features.

The benign deities in contrast to all the others are persons, and their forms help remind people of the kinds of persons they are. There local uses are rooted in these meaningful personal differences.

Bhaktapur's Pantheon As A System of Signs: Some Contrasts With Other Hindu Systems

A comparison of the organization of Bhaktapur's pantheon with reports from other Hindu communities highlights some of Bhaktapur's special features. Edward Harper, in a study (1959) of Totagadde, a village in Mysore State, found a local hierarchy of three levels of supernatural beings. The highest level were the familiar "vegetarian" gods of the major Hindu tradition ("Sanskritic gods"). These gods, locally called "Devarua," are "generally iconographically represented." They are most frequently worshiped so that the devotee will obtain punya^[*] ("merit"). This may be in the hope of good fortune in this life, or a good fate after death (1959, 228f.). We recognize in this group some of the characteristics and uses of the "ordinary" segment of Bhaktapur's pantheon. Harper's second class of deities, second in a hierarchy of purity, are locally called "devates. " These gods demand and accept blood sacrifices. They protect the village in various ways. They patrol the village boundary or guard designated parts of the village. They also protect various social segments, families, and lineages in the village. Some are attached to houses, where they "protect adults, children and livestock from spirits . . . who cause minor illness" (1959, 231). The same class of deities can possess individuals, and cause illness. While the first group of deities are responsible for trouble only in the sense that they withhold aid that might have been granted, this class may actively cause harm, and part of their worship is intended to prevent this. These deities resemble in nature and use Bhaktapur's dangerous deities, but there are important differences. For the Mysore village these "local gods" do not derive their names and legends from the high Hindu tradition. They "almost never" have iconographic representations. They are less pure, and thus lower than the "Sanskritic gods." Finally, within their ranks are some of the forms and functions (illness-causing possession) that are proper to some of the members of Bhaktapur's "ghosts and spirits."^[74] Harper's village has a residual third group of supernatural beings "devvas, " "free floating marauding spirits . . . malicious and destructive [which] perform no protective functions" (1959, 232). The main contrast with Bhaktapur suggested by Harper's sketch of Tota-

gadde's religion is that there the dangerous deities are much closer to the realm of the immaterial ghosts and spirits than they are in Bhaktapur. The Tantric tradition has facilitated the capturing, embodiment, control, and legitimate civic use of a large segment of supernaturals of this kind in Bhaktapur, and does not place them in an inferior hierarchical relation to the "Sanskritic," that is, the benign Puranic^[*] deities.

In Susan Wadley's study (1975) of Karimpur in Uttar Pradesh, the supernatural beings in the "village experience" (that is, in contrast to the unknowable divine principle, the brahman ) were the category of gods, "devas " and a set of spirits and ghosts that, as in Bhaktapur and like Totagadde's "devvas, " were considered outside the class of "gods." The class of devas includes, according to Wadley, both "normally" benevolent and always malevolent deities. The normally benevolent deities (which would include Bhaktapur's dangerous gods) she calls the devata , the remainder "demons." Wadley's main concern is with the differentiations within the class of "normally benevolent devas, " where she suggests (as does Babb, whom we will consider presently) that a central distinction for functional differentiation within the group is the gender and gender relations of the various members. The male devas are referred to as "bhagavan "; the female, as "devi ."^[75] The male bhagavan and his concrete manifestations such as Visnu^[*] , Siva, and Ganesa^[*] , can help people if they are devoted to them. Devotion sets up a social relation, "a relationship based on hierarchical exchange because the gods and men have a commitment to each other" (1975, 117). This set of gods, male gods, can be helpful in gaining "relief from existence and the troubles of existence." These gods can help in getting through the problems of life, but they do not hurt, except presumably by failing to help. These are, thus, similar to Bhaktapur's benign gods, and to Harper's "Sanskritic gods." According to Wadley, the female devatas , the Devi and the component devis , "to a much greater extent than the male gods categorized as bhagavan are potentially malevolent." She cites Babb (1970) and Beck (1969), agreeing that "there is an ever present awareness that female power may become uncontrolled. And when male authority (usually a consort) is absent, the malevolent use of female power is almost assured" (Wadley, 1975, 121). She claims for Karimpur that male deities can always dominate the female deities while female deities have a "potential for malevolent action [that] makes them more suspect than male deities" (ibid., 121). Among the devis there are "some who are almost totally malevolent and act positively only to remedy their own actions" (ibid., 121f.).

Before discussing these observations in relation to Bhaktapur's use of divine gender, we may note Lawrence Babb's extended consideration of the pantheon of various communities in the Chhattisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh. He begins with the familiar distinction about the "philosophical" status of the undifferentiated "world-soul" of Hindu tradition, which he calls the paramatma . This is "an object of contemplation not of worship. Divinity becomes active in the affairs of the universe and men only when it is differentiated into particular divine entities. With this differentiation we move into the world of everyday religious practice. Of all the different kinds of differentiation found within the pantheon, one seems to be particularly stable, that of sex" (Babb 1975, 216). Gender, he argues, sorts two basic qualities of the pantheon. The male "devtas " are "essentially protective and benevolent." The female devis are "the very embodiment of malevolence when unrestrained or unappeased" (ibid.). Babb, starting with suggestions from the Devi Mahatmya , recalls the association of the female goddess as Sakti with "energy" or "force." He notes that in the male-female polarity as conceived in Hindu Tantrism, "the 'female principle' is conceived as the active, dynamic component of reality, while the male principle is regarded as static and passive" (ibid., 220). Taking the angry, destructive, embattled Devi of the Devi Mahatmya in her Kali form as emblematic of that force whose "only discernible emotion is anger—black, implacable and bloodthirsty," he finds female deities in such benign and non-Tantric manifestations as Laksmi problematic, that is, as secondary, and asks, "what is the context in which the Goddess becomes Laksmi?" He suggests that when the male and female deities are related in the ordinary social relation of marriage, with the god dominant—as husbands are—and the Goddess dutifully subordinate, this "imposition of social order" yields deities embodying key values of Indian civilization. He also notes that these social relations allow for "the elaboration of divine attributes in accordance with basic order-producing values—hence the great variety in this sector of the pantheon." In contrast, where the goddess is either alone or dominant, and "if the god appears at all, it is not in the role of husband but of henchman and servant, [then] . . . the pairing as a unit takes on the sinister attributes of the goddess herself. The goddess in this form is not conceived primarily as an exemplar of values and principles, but as the embodiment of an impersonal force—one that can be used, but that may be dangerous to the user, as indeed it endangers the gods themselves until it is contained" (ibid., 225). In a summary he argues, "With-

in the pantheon a very dangerous force is symbolized, but this is a force that seems to undergo a basic transformation into something almost anti-sinister, the loving wife, the source of wealth and progeny, when placed within the context of a restraining social relationship, that of marriage. An appetite for conflict and destruction is thus transformed into the most fundamental of social virtues, that of wifely submission which, on the premises given in Hindu culture, makes the continuation of society possible" (ibid., 226).

These suggestions of Wadley and Babb illuminate a powerful component of the pantheon's semantic force, and are congruent with other meanings of male and female persons and their relations in many societies and as particularly emphasized in Hindu social systems. But these suggestions are not fully applicable, at least in Bhaktapur's version of things. The creative Goddess in her absolute, full form is not malevolent or sinister, and no more uncanny than concepts of Visnu^[*] or Siva as creative gods, and certainly no more destructive. She seems to represent a component of a maternal image that is prior to the submissive role of a wife, one worthy of trust and adoration. There are also male forms of considerable malignity, Bhairava, and to a lesser extent the minor dangerous male gods, who are not "henchmen or servants" of a goddess. In some cases the relation to a goddess (as in the case of the Akas Bhairava) helps to make the male dangerous god, less dangerous—in some reversal of the argument. Furthermore, there is at least one female goddess of complete benignity who has in Bhaktapur no present reference to a male controlling and socializing consort, namely, Sarasvati. Furthermore, Siva, when not controlled by social relations, either as a husband or by his friendship to Visnu^[*] , is a potentially wild and dangerous being. Finally, the dangerous ghosts and spirits of Bhaktapur are not predominantly female. Granting such qualifications, however, the predominance of the male deities in the domain of moral and social order, on the one hand, and the predominance of independent female ones at the boundaries of that order on the other, is, of course, also characteristic of Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur's imagery and symbolic action treats these independent goddesses as not only dangerous but also as necessary, vital, and protective.

Insofar as Bhaktapur's use of divine gender is less categorical and oppositional than the forms proposed in the studies we have cited, this is congruent with the way Bhaktapur's social system and culture has allowed for the comparatively independent position of women in the family within a Hindu perspective and the resulting modification of

the role and meaning of wife and mother in that perspective. Some of that different emphasis may also be related to the movement of the dangerous female deities from a "non-Brahmanical" social and spatial periphery, as the "folk goddesses" characteristic of Indian villages, to the high-status central position in a socially integrated Tantra (chap. 9), which they have in Bhaktapur.

A Final Remark

We have added the supernaturals to our static collection of elements of Bhaktapur's mesocosmic ballet. Status, space, and deities are variously combined in action in progressively more complex structures of meaning. We will in the following three chapters consider some aspects of action, concept, and role bearing on the manipulation of aspects of the symbolic order before, finally, adding time and tempo and considering the ballet in its full action.