5. Divine actors.

In Biska: the main public deities are Bhairava and the vaguely deified Yasi(n) God, both masculine figures. Bhadrakali^[*] is a very secondary figure in Biska:'s action—although in the legends associated with that festival sequence she stands in the shadows as a much more powerful figure than Bhairava. The Goddess must await Mohani to come from her shadowy presence in the wings to center stage. Both Bhairava and the Yasi(n) God are, like the human actors in Biska:, passive figures who are manipulated in space and time and, aside from whatever active participation Bhairava may possibly be thought to have in his sexual-aggressive encounter with Bhadrakali^[*] , represent much but do little.

The deities in the public narrative of Mohani are Devi and her man-

ifestations and emanations. These forms are very active, indeed. They battle the Asura forces of disorder, cause the rice and barley to grow, inhabit the children of the Gana^[*] Kumari and the Ekanta Kumari in order to bring oracles to king and city, and eventually embody themselves as the Nine Durgas. Bringing Devi and her forms into useful contact with the city requires the powerful ritual of Tantra, rather than the devotional ritual more or less appropriate to the comparatively tamed Bhairava of Biska:. Mohani is about the capturing of "natural" forces represented by Devi for civic use; Biska:, about the deployment of these already captured forms.

The Devi Mahatmya , tells of the alternating gathering together of components of the Goddess into her forms of maximum power, and their subsequent emanation and differentiation in order to do specialized tasks. In the sequence of Mohani the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses of the city, Bhagavati, Kumari, several esoteric goddesses, the tutelary lineage Aga(n) Goddesses, and Taleju are repeatedly joined as one goddess, Devi, and then differentiated as special manifestations.

While the Devi Mahatmya 's Devi is the focus of Mohani's mythic realm, in the course of the events of the sequence it is Taleju who becomes progressively established as the central reference point for the gathering in and centralization of forces, and it is through Taleju that the momentum of the festival is handed over—from her point of view, delegated—to the Nine Durgas at its end. Taleju is the Malla king's lineage deity; her home is the united palace/temple complex. The in-gathering of powers on the completion of the harvest is a validation and renewal of the power of the king.

Biska:'s passive Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] are powerful but limited, resembling socially limited humans in their irritations and ambivalences, their ineffectual attempts to escape, and their susceptibility to teasing. The goddesses of Mohani are quite different. They are uncanny and powerful beings, whose transformations and powers belong to some other than ordinary social world. In Hinduism's view of Royalty in its transcendence of the ordinary dharma (chap. 9) the king and these goddesses are natural allies.

Devi as the focal deity of Mohani is not the Sakti of Siva-Sakti theory, whose symbolism and manipulations are central to Bhaktapur's ordinary Tantric religion. Siva is here, as he is among the Nine Durgas, a faint, peripheral figure. This Devi, the full, creative Goddess, is in this harvest context the supreme, the only significant deity.