Patterns in the Year
What happens if we reassemble the three cycles that we separated from each other in previous chapters and attempt to examine the narrative movement of the annual cycle as a whole (see app. 5)?[7] We must now look for disjunctions suggesting phases and movements in the year's course, for frontiers indicating some difference in the festivals that precede and follow them. Let us begin by making a cut into the annual cycle after the ending of Mohani in early October. Although the successful rice harvest had been compellingly represented in the themes of Mohani, the actual harvesting continues. The work of Devi has now been given over to the Nine Durgas. Taleju returns to the secret inner recesses of her temple, and there will be no more festivals of the Goddess nor of any other dangerous deity (except for the merchants' Bhisi[n] festival)[8] for a span of six lunar months, when the solar festival, Biska: will reintroduce the Dangerous Goddess and her consort Bhairava. Then, beginning with Biska:, will come the six months during which all the public festivals of Devi and her various forms and associates and
those few of the unaccompanied Bhairava will occur, as well as, in fact, the great majority of the year's festivals. The ending of Mohani, the symbolic culmination of the cycle of rice agriculture, then, returns Devi to the city in the form of the wandering Nine Durgas, but marks the end of her public presence in the annual calendrical events for the next six months.
The first annual event after Mohani is the lunar new year sequence, Swanti [77-2]. When considered in its contrast to the year's other events, Swanti begins the lunar calendrical year with a turning in and centering on the household and its members. Swanti's interactive solidarity is internal to the household, with a secondary parallel solidarity relating each household to all Hindu (and with Mha Puja to all Newar) households as well as to the households of Bhaktapur itself. The Swanti sequence uses as the antistructure that serves to define the household, not the city in which the household is embedded, but still another realm beyond the household, that of death personified as Yama, at the threshold of an afterlife determined by an individual's moral and ritual activities. The environing city is irrelevant to this opposition and to the resulting dialogue between household and Yama. The lunar New Year thus constitutes still another sort of annual frontier, beginning the voyage through the year that follows it with the positioning of individuals in the basic moral cell of the city, the household.
Swanti is followed first by a pilgrimage and mela at a Visnu[*] shrine out of the city [3] and then—nine days after the end of Swanti, and ten days after the New Year's Day itself—by Hari Bodhini [4], the day of Visnu's[*] awakening from his four month's cosmic sleep, which is celebrated by still another out of the city mela . Gaborieau (1982 [summarized above in chap. 12]) had proposed the falling off to sleep and awakening of Visnu[*] as marking off an annual period of four months, dividing off from the rest of the year a special segment, an out of the ordinary time, a period beginning with profound disorder and culminating in regeneration. In Bhaktapur Hari Bodhini in itself does not mark a shift in the year's activities from the extradordinary to the ordinary—Mohani did that. Nor does the day of the onset of Visnu's[*] sleep, Hari Sayani [42]. Yet, aside from its exact timing and duration, Gaborieau's proposals about the year's phases have some relevance to Bhaktapur and we will return to them.
From the end of Mohani in Kaulathwa through the lunar New Year some two weeks later and then on through the succeeding nine fortnights there are relatively few annual events, all of them, except for the
Suku(n) Bhisi(n) God Jatra, focused on the city's benign moral deities. This changes with Pasa, Ca:re on the fourteenth day of Cillaga (March), when, with an emphasis on protection from evil spirits, the first animal sacrifices since Mohani—again with the exception of those made by merchants to Sukhu(n) Bisi(n) God—are made to Taleju in the Taleju temple and to some Aga(n) Deities, initiating a "period of anxiety" that will last through the remainder of the year until the end of the following Mohani. In this period the festivals of the dangerous deities will take place. Thus Pasa Ca:re is or anticipates still another frontier for the year. That frontier is more clearly signaled in the elaborate public festivals of the Biska: sequence, which comes (depending on the relation of lunar and solar calendars) some twelve days later. Biska:, which comes about six months after the end of Mohani, is the first of the public urban festivals that after the six intervening months center once again around the dangerous deities. Biska:, the solar New Year festival, contrasts sharply with the lunar New Year sequence. While Swanti emphasizes the household and the relations of individuals in the household, and is characterized by a sort of withdrawal from the city into the household, the solar New Year festival—with its themes of urban division and reunification and of the sacred legitimization of the city's space—emphasizes the city itself. In the solar New Year the household is secondary. The deities emphasized in the lunar New Year's sequence are the benign moral gods—Laksmi and quasi-deified family members in the interior of the family and at its exterior and, in fact, continuation, death as Yama, the judge and executor of each individual's morally created and deserved fate. In Biska:, in contrast, the deities are the amoral dangerous one. In contrast to Swanti, what is contrasted with the household and given primacy in Biska: is the larger nested set of urban units that surround the household and enable its survival as an element in Bhaktapur's society. Thus, Biska: begins a six-month phase of the year when the ordering of the household's sustaining "lateral" environment,[9] the public city and its environment is explored. This exploration has, in turn, two phases.
In the weeks following Biska: there are a few heterogeneous events of varying importance—worship of mothers in the household, jatra s of forms of Devi, and one especially auspicious day. Three fortnights after the end of Biska: comes Sithi Nakha [36], the first event with a reference to the annual rains and the rice growing cycle. Sithi Nakha is preparatory; it will be the second event in the Devi cycle, Bhagasti [40] in June, which marks the beginning of rice planting, and which is another im-
portant transition in the year. The annual festivals of dangerous deities had begun again with Biska:. Now on Bhagasti, Devi's agents in the city, the Nine Durgas who had begun their cycle nine months earlier with the last of the Devi festivals, the focal Mohani, disappear—in some versions go into the ground—for seven fortnights.[10] With the disappearance of the Nine Durgas there is a shift of concern among the important "anxious festivals" of the period from the internal dangers to the integration of the city to the external environing dangers so clearly represented in the successes and failures of the monsoon rains and the rice cycle. These concerns with the city's external and supporting realms will endure for three-and-a-half months, during a period of an increasing density of annual events, until the end of Mohani. Bhagasti is followed by a five-week period of licensed obscenity, culminating in Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45]. During this period there is a minor jatra of an avatar of Visnu's[*] and then Hari Sayani [42], the beginning of Visnu's[*] four-month cosmic sleep. Like his awakening on Hari Bodhini, this is not in itself a transitional event in the annual cycle. Hari Sayani is followed by a minor event, Tulasi Piye [43], related to Visnu[*] (which gives an omen about the length of a worshiper's life), a minor household puja (Guru Puja [44]), and then by Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45], marking the ideal completion of the transplanting of rice to the flooded paddy fields.
Gatha Muga: Ca:re is followed by a fortnight with only one event. That one, Naga Pa(n)cami [41], is intended for the protection of houses and households from dangerous nagas . Then the next four lunar fortnights become filled with events; they contain thirty-one of the year's seventy-nine festivals and thus constitute the most concentrated festival span of the year. This period contains a mixture of types of events—public and household, devoted to both benign and dangerous deities. However, within this diverse group there are two major events. First comes Saparu, with its active support of the progression of the spirits of the recently dead into King Yama's realm and its accompanying "anti-structural" carnival. Second is the focal structural Mohani, culminating the year, celebrating and miming the power of Devi in Bhaktapur's supporting world, and drawing her into the city's center of royal power.
The festival cycle as a whole does, then, seem to have some overall patterning. One of its most striking aspects is the division of the year so that in the six months from Mohani until some twelve days before Biska: there are relatively few events (twenty of the year's seventy-nine). These are with one exception—the generally anomalous Sukhu(n) Bhi-
si(n) God Jatra [8]—devoted only to benign deities and lack the anxious themes of many of the annual events that will follow. Then, after an anticipation in events with reference to dangerous spirits and protection of the body (Pasa Ca:re [18] and Cika[n] Buyegu [19]), Biska: introduces the long season of the festivals of the dangerous deities, of the Devi cycle, and of events with primary and central references to protection and to death. Aside from the festivals of the Devi cycle, there are some fifteen additonal such events during this period. Mixed in with these events exclusively characterizing these six months are thirteen "ordinary" festivals, primarily minor ones "in honor of the gods" of the sort found throughout the other half of the year.
Within the span of six anxious months between Biska: and Mohani, the death and disappearance of the Nine Durgas during Bhagasti some two months after Biska: marks a shift in the emphasis on the dangerous deities, primarily Devi, from their roles as the representatives and protectors of urban spatial units (epitomized in Biska:) to their use in the representation of—and the mediation with—the noncivic encircling en-viroment. In this perspective there is a movement from household in Swanti to the public city in Biska:, and then to the city's vital environment after Biska:, this final shift having its resolution in Mohani.
To return finally to Gaborieau's specific suggestions about the structure of the Indo-Nepalese festival year (see chap. 12), the shifts within the six-month Biska:-Mohani, period, starting with Bhagasti and ending with the end of Mohani, three-and-a-half months later, correspond roughly, that is, within a few weeks, to the period of Visnu's[*] cosmic sleep. Visnu's[*] sleep and awakening do not in themselves delineate any shift, however, nor is the period of that sleep (Caturmasa) of the same significance in Bhaktapur as an "inauspicious period" as it is, reportedly, elsewhere. The span from Bhagasti to Mohani can, nevertheless, certainly be characterized (as Gaborieau does for the period of Visnu's[*] sleep) as a time when "the earth is left to the demons." In addition (further paralleling Gaborieau), there are major festivals of "reversal" early in the period (the five weeks between Bhagasti [40] and Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45], Gatha Muga: Ca:re itself, and the carnival phase of Saparu [48]) and a major festival of "regeneration" (Mohani itself) toward its end. The span does not divide neatly into a "reversal" half and a "regenerative" half, however, being full of a miscellaneous variety of festivals. It is really only certain events that are clearly (the first ones) reversals and (the last) regenerative. What Bhaktapur seems to show, in
contrast to Gaborieau's proposal of an Indo-Nepalese "normal" period of eight months followed by an "out of time" period of four, is an addition to the "normal" festival cycle that had held undisturbed for the prior six months of something more in the remaining six, an addition first of the urban ordering festivals of the dangerous deities, and then of a span that is "out of time" in the sense that attention turns to the exterior of the city, and its actors and its order. The last move seems prodded by the obsessions of the rice growing cycle and to be related to that cycle, as much as to the kind of abstract structural considerations argued by Gaborieau.