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Chapter Fifteen The Devi Cycle
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The Significance of the Nine Durgas" Pyakha(n): Some Speculations on How The Nine Durgas Protect Bhaktapur

In Bhaktapur's characteristic "religious" language the Nine Durgas are said to be of major importance in the protection of the city. In our analytic language this is, indeed, what they are doing in their neighborhood pyakha(n) s through the significance of their performances to the people of the local neighborhoods. They protect the city by helping to assure the proper relation of individuals to the city's society.

As always, we are concerned with the significance of the Nine Durgas" performance for Bhaktapur's symbolic ordering, that is, with its impact on Bhaktapur's people. Much of the form of the Nine Durgas has no direct significance in this sense—although it would be significant analytically to, say, historians of South Asian culture. We must note, however, that many aspects of the Nine Durgas" form and action are indirectly significant in our limited sense even if the meaning of those forms and actions is, in some sense, unknown to most or all of the Newars who witness and engage in the performances. These aspects are significant in part precisely because their meaning is unknown. It is sufficient that the spectators have the conviction that there is meaning even if they do not know what it is. Thus the spectators to the Nine Durgas" pyakha(n) do not know what the overall sequence of visits by the Nine Durgas is in the spatial mandala[*] they create over nine months, but they do know that the visit to their neighborhood is an essential part of this pattern. They do not know what many of the iconic details of the masks signify, nor which of the minor goddesses is which. They do not know what the mask makers or the Gatha actually do to give proper siddhi to the performances. They do not know what the formal yantra dances of the Nine Durgas signify. Such unknown matters are in contrast with the very accessible and direct implications of other aspects of the masks, sacrifice, pyakha(n) , and so on. But the things they do not understand


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have their own meaningful implications, they contribute to the performance's special sacred force.[103]

Although the great majority of the spectators to the local pyakha(n) may not understand such matters, they know that they are correct and necessary. The dances, masks, and procedures represent an order that is organized and guaranteed by something beyond ordinary contingent local human action, improvisation, and decision. This helps give the performance, in spite of its sometimes comic style, a deep seriousness and relates it to the sacred realm of Hinduism—a seemingly eternal and transcendent realm beyond the here and now. The forms that spectators do not understand, to a certain degree just because they are not understood, evoke—as do the transcendent ritual and ceremonial forms and sequences and their contexts—this other mysterious world. All that the spectator has to know or believe is that something is being done properly, that it is generated out of a sacred tradition, where it is rooted in myths and legends, and that it is properly passed down from generation to generation of priests, mask makers, and dancers through proper initiation, teaching, and mantras . The audience sees a performance that is a manifestation of something beyond the ordinary, something organized in some other order beyond the whims of the Gathas. These properties of the performance, allied to references to ultimate macrocosmic realms of order, powerfully evoke ideas and emotions characteristic of encounters with the "sacred."

Yet, within this larger frame is the pyakha(n) 's drama and the game-like "fishing" episodes of the pursuit of the mocking boys and young men by the gods. The messages here are direct and specific, completely dependent on peoples' understanding of the pyakha(n) 's symbolic forms. The dramas and fishing chases have a central theme or motif, which is elaborated in various ways. This theme is the violation of hierarchy, shown concretely through the violation of proper respect toward a superior. The young boys mime this to Sima and Duma, the older boys to Seto Bhairava, and Seto Bhairava to Mahakali. This violation of hierarchy and the response to that violation illustrated in the drama and fishing pursuit does not concern ordinary violations of the moral law, the dharma of civic life, any more than the struggle between the gods and the Asuras in the Devi Mahatmya concerns ordinary moral relations among deities. Ordinary moral violations, the arena of shame, loss of face, and the generation of bad karma , have their own symbols and myths, their own spatial location, their own religious modes and divinities. This pyakha(n) and its context


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does not concern the moral problems of human beings with each other. In its offending of superior dangerous gods it concerns the violation by humans of the very order that makes the moral realm possible, and it shows the consequences of such a disruption.

Hierarchy, the central principle of social order in traditional Hindu societies, is, as we have shown in chapters 5 and 6, greatly elaborated in Bhaktapur's complex urban organization. The violation of the conventions of hierarchical relationship, therefore, strikes at the central organizing principle of Bhaktapur's society. Thus the Nine Durgas" pyakha(n) can be interpreted as being about the struggle between disorder and order, about what happens to individuals who violate order, and, finally, about what has to be done to restore that order. The contextual meaning of the Nine Durgas in the larger Devi cycle indicates that although this disorder is dangerous both to the ordinary moral gods and to humans as social beings it is at the same time a source of fertility and energy. Thus the boys and young men who mock the gods are admired for their courage and Seto Bhairava is a sympathetic Chaplinesque figure with whom one must empathize as he struggles against the terrifying Mahakali. Similarly, the boys and young men who called out order-threatening and immoral obscenities at the proper phase of the annual cycle were also doing something positive, amusing, and vital. The children and young men are pursued by the gods whom they mock and are sometimes caught without particularly serious consequences, but the potential consequences for the acts of rebellion that they have mimed are shown graphically in Seto Bhairava's encounter with Mahakali. He fails to show respect for the superior deity, who becomes enraged. He tries to restore relationships with her by the kinds of exchanges that are effective with the ordinary, the non-Tantric gods— gestures of respect, the offering of money or daksina[*] . But only an offering of blood sacrifice appeases this kind of a deity. The biting off of the head of the cock and the drinking of its blood signifies to the onlookers that it was Seto Bhairava who was to be killed, or at the very least castrated, if it were not for this convenient substitution. The sacrifice enables the return of the shawl and some social dignity to Seto Bhairava and atones for his violation of hierarchy.

The Nine Durgas are dangerous deities, and Mahakali is the dangerous goddess in her most frightening representation. As we have argued throughout, such deities have a special position in the maintenance of order in Bhaktapur, where Tantra and the worship of dangerous deities (as is widely the case in the history of South Asia) has been captured and


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put to use by the social order as the legend of the origin of the Nine Durgas attests, rather than representing attempts by renouncers, magicians, and peripheral social groups to escape from that order. Like the traditional Hindu ruler in his ideal relationship to the priest, the dangerous deities are responsible for the protection of the traditional ritual and moral life, although they are beyond morality themselves. They are ambivalently made use of when that moral order is being threatened either by some internal force or by some external danger. Seto Bhairava's rebellion threatens the hierarchical basis of urban order, and a dangerous deity becomes activated.

The way Mahakali's threat is both manifested and avoided is in the blood sacrifice of the cock. This is in the context of the massive blood sacrifices of Mohani, the blood sacrifices by the Nine Durgas at other times, the legend of the Nine Durgas" murder and eating of humans before they were captured by Tantric priests, and the accounts of human sacrifices performed by the Gathas in the past. We have noted (chap. 9) that animal sacrifices are for some informants, at least, consciously and with deep emotion associated with vivid memories from their boyhoods when they felt that the sacrifices were in fact selfishly motivated murder, that they might be directed toward them if the adults became angry at them, and that the animals were somehow equivalent to themselves. "I could feel the knife on my own throat," as one man said in reminiscence.

The pyakha(n) thus makes use of a particularly powerful and complex local constellation of meanings. Its message is directed directly at males.[104] Men are the critical actors in the public social organization of Hindu communities, and the largest component of the civic symbolic system is devoted to the expression and control of their problems, emotions, and orientations in the performance of their social roles. It is striking in view of this male prominence in the public life of the city, that that force which is represented as external to the city but vital to it, both as the energy of nature and as the force that both threatens and which, if properly placated and controlled, will protect the city against disruption, is represented primarily by the nonsocial, dream-like "Mother Goddess" and the images, concepts, and emotions associated with that powerful symbol.

Sacrifice is not only a powerful symbol of a threat, a potential punishment for violation of hierarchy, but as we have argued in chapter 9, an important motivation for accepting the social order, for identifying with and becoming one of the sacrificers, to escape the fate of being


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one of the creatures that are sacrificed. This acceptance of order under the pressure of sacrifice is manifested in the acceptance, the "understanding," of the particular ideologies and dogmas of the group that would be hypocritical, problematic, and perhaps nonsensical to an innocent eye. Such items requiring faith are vividly represented in the mystifying dogmas about sacrifice itself.

The pyakha(n) plays with the theme of the vital impulses of the city's citizens that are socially disruptive and, making use of blood sacrifice, one of the very most powerful symbolic resources for restoring and maintaining individual assent to Bhaktapur's culture and society, restores order both within the drama, and, ideally, in the minds of its spectators. Seto Bhairava is not only the ineffectual protagonist who blunders into trouble with Mahakali and is saved only through a substitution of a sacrificial animal; in another phase of the pyakha(n) , the "going fishing," after which the whole event is significantly named, he is the one who is mocked by his inferiors and becomes, in turn, the agent of punishment. Similarly, the people of Bhaktapur are not only the passive objects of potential destruction in the face of violations of order. They themselves offer the sacrifice, perform them themselves on other occasions, share in the blood by feasting on the sacrificial animal, and, during the course of the Nine Durgas' performances, eating the bloodstained prasada . The people identify, then, not only with the victim but also with the dangerous deities, both in their wildness on the one hand, and as collaborators in slaughter for the sake of social order on the other, which results in a sense of community that psychoanalytically inclined observers might argue not only represents the mastery of switching from a passive to an active role and an identification with the punitive forces but also has something to do with a sense of shared guilt.

The last part of the drama may be thought of as a kind of moving downward from a more cosmic scale to a more domestic one, thus providing another bridge to the audience.[105] Here Seto Bhairava is healed through his wife in a common magical healing procedure known to all people. The grain that he throws in the face of Sima and Duma has perhaps an added bit of meaning insofar as those two personages are also thought to represent Death's messengers. But in this little episode of healing domesticity, of Seto Bhairava having to turn to his wife for help, the wife, Kumari, is herself merely an attenuated form of that violent natural force, Mahakali. This reminder of the danger that persists even in domesticated women, the Kali that is said to dwell within


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all women, crops up as we have seen, from time to time in Bhaktapur's stories, as a subdued and faintly comic counterpoint to the grand theme of the cosmic Devi. But with the help of Kumari Seto Bhairava is cured. Like Somara, the Tantric Brahman in the Nine Durgas legend, after the escape of the Nine Durgas brought about by the interference of his wife, Seto Bhairava is returned to ordinary civic life. He is safe, but as his inability to get Sima or Duma to wash his shawl for him reminds the audience, he is without power to alter the conventional order of things, and thus without, in fact, much power at all.


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Chapter Fifteen The Devi Cycle
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