Introduction

The city of Bhaktapur contains many material representations of gods, a witness to its long history and to close contacts since its earliest days with India, that great incubator of forms of divinity. The multitude of gods whose representations have persisted in Bhaktapur and the Kathmandu Valley are of great importance to the historian of South Asian religion and of art,^[1] but only some of them are alive at present, foci of action, meaning, and emotion. The others are dormant, perhaps to be revived for some future fashion or need.^[2]

It is precisely because Hindu deities can be induced into material objects, the "idols" of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic iconoclasts, that they are able to serve the purposes they do in the construction of Bhaktapur's mesocosm. Those objects can be anchored in space or moved through it. They are constructed of meaningful elements and emerge as units of meaning in themselves. They have their own semantic import, their direct implications for meaning, but they are so constructed that their various similarities and contrasts can be used to build a structure of meaning within an overall civic pantheon, the coherent total domain of the gods. That structure helps map the city's symbolic space and its conceptual universe. The crafted gods, the "idols," are joined by more shadowy supernatural figures, some vaguely represented in astral bodies, some in natural stones, and some m the shifting and vague form of ghosts and spirits. These latter figures have their own uses—the

various kinds of embodiment that the members of the large realm of divine and spooky beings have, considerably influencing their meanings and uses.

As usual, we are primarily interested in the level of civic order; hence we are concerned here in the way the deities are used by the public city. Many of Bhaktapur's component units have their own internal deities; most, but not all, of them (an exception, for example, is the deified figure Gorakhnath, the tutelary deity of the Jugis) are versions of the same deities used as the city's public deities. We will comment on some of these component units, on the interior deities of the household and the phuki , and have included some remarks on the special deities of the Brahmans and of the "royal center" and on the ghosts and spirits of importance to individuals.

We will begin by presenting the city's urban divinities in considerable detail. This will give us a basis for considering exactly what it is they contribute to Bhaktapur's mesocosmic organization and how they are able to do it.