5. Divine actors.

The central deities in this festival are the powerful dangerous deities Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] . The Mandalic^[*] Goddesses and the remainder of the city's important dangerous deities are foci of important but secondary parallel activities. The Yasi(n) God has no independent existence in Bhaktapur aside from this special festival use and is rather a focal sacralized collection of important images, signs, and ideas, a kind of ad hoc deified object. While other deities contribute meaning because their identities transcend Biska: (although Biska:, in turn, contributes to their meanings), the Yasi(n) God is no more than a component, albeit an important one, in the festival sequence.

As in Mohani and in the Devi cycle the divine actors in Biska: are dangerous, not ordinary, gods. As we have repeatedly argued, they represent—in their contrast to the benign, personal, and familial moral and dharmic deities—forces that threaten the moral order on the one hand, but that can be captured through power and made to protect it on the other. In Biska: the male dangerous deities—Bhairava and the Yasi(n) God)—predominate. In Mohani the female deities are central. In keeping with the balance of male and female deities, which distinguishes the benign from the dangerous deities (chap. 8)—although here unusually represented within the realm of dangerous deities—Biska:'s

deities are portrayed as powerful but limited beings, rather like humans in the social world, in their irritations, ineffectual attempts to escape, and passivity. Instead of the complex rites that will bring the dangerous goddesses of Mohani into some useful relation to the city, Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] and the Yasi(n) God are, like the chariot's representative social microcosm, simply manipulated and moved through space like puppets. The "deities" at issue here, far below the surface and beyond anthropomorphic gods, are order and chaos.