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.