Bhagasti [40]
Bhagasti, short for Bhagavati Astami[*] , "Bhagavati's eighth day," falls on the eighth day of the waning fortnight, Tachalaga, that is, in June, seventeen days after Sithi Nakha. In the period between Sithi Nakha and Bhagasti the seed rice is being planted and time rains are anticipated. During this time many people go to the god-house of the Nine Durgas to do pujas and to offer sacrifices. This is a respectful gesture of farewell. Soon the Nine Durgas will be disappearing.
The disappearance of the gods is signaled by the "cremation" of the masks that had represented them during the previous year. On the Sunday or Thursday Before Bhagasti (whichever is the closest) the Gathas go to each of the major and minor twa: s throughout the city where they had performed throughout the course of the year (map 14, below). They wear their masks turned to the side of their heads and thus not covering their faces, as they had done during their previous performances. They visit the twa: s by walking around the city's main jatra route, and proceeding to them in the order in which they lie on that route not in the formally prescribed order in which they had visited them during the course of the previous nine months.
When in the course of their procession around the city they reach the Taleju temple, they enter it. A secret ceremony is performed there, indicating that they have completed their work for the year. In the minds of the Gatha performers and of people in general (cf. Teilhet 1978, 95) it is thought that this represents the withdrawal of some of the power from the masks, a power that had been given to them at the beginning of the yearly cycle, but this is not the understanding of the priests who administer the ceremony. The ceremony is called the "Sija Nakegu," that is, "feeding the 'death rice'"[11] , The exact meaning of this is not clear now to the priests, but seems to refer to the approaching death of the Nine Durgas. When the Nine Durgas troupe leaves the Taleju temple they continue on the jatra route and finally return to their god-house. When they reach there, in a significant contrast to what had always happened on the occasions of their return after performing earlier in the year, they are not met by their Naki(n), the senior Gatha woman ceremonially attached to the group, who would have led them into the god-house with a purifying and welcoming ceremony, the du kaegu , but they simply and unceremoniously enter the house.[12]
On the evening of Bhagasti the masks are secretly cremated at the Brahmani pitha , a pitha that has a particular importance in the ten-day
Mohani sequence and in the beginnings of the Nine Durgas' activities at the end of that sequence. Jehanne Teilhet (1978), on the basis of observations of the mask-making process and of interviews with the Pu(n) mask maker who was in charge of making the Nine Durgas masks each year, recorded many details and interpretations concerning the masks.[13] According to Teilhet's informant, the ashes of the masks are collected and stored in a copper vessel that is placed in a secret spot on the river floor near the pitha (Teilhet 1978, 96f.).[14] This is the "going into the water" of the Gods, dya: jale bijata . The vessel is left in the river until a month before Mohani, when it will be withdrawn and the ashes then used in the creation of new masks. According to the mask maker, the Nine Durgas "leave their masks and their Gathas [i.e., their vehicles] to go into the water because the water is necessary for the planting of rice; they help increase the water for the rice crops" (Teilhet 1978, 97). Their disappearance out of the city and back into "nature" underlines one of the important themes of the larger cycle.[15]
The idea of deities going into the earth for a four-month's sleep is a general one in Hindu South Asia (e.g., Stevenson 1920, 59; Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, pp. 110f., 158). Devi herself is traditionally thought to begin her sleep on the eighth day of the bright half of Asadha, that is, the eighth day of the Newar Dillathwa, which has no corresponding annual event in Bhaktapur's calendar. As she appears again only three months later in the autumnal harvest festival she must, in some local versions of that festival, be awakened (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 158; Shastri 1949, 259). The Nine Durgas' "sleep" or death or going into the waters precedes their reappearance in Mohani by only three-and-a-half months, and although their life will be renewed at that time, there is no overt reference to awakening, bodhana , as there is elsewhere in South Asia for Devi, or, as there is, for example, in Bhaktapur for Visnu[*] on Hari Bodhini [4]. Sithi Nakha [36] is, in fact, the event that precedes the reappearance of the Nine Durgas by four months, but this span does not seem related, now at least, to the general idea of a divine sleep of exactly one quarter of the year.