The Goddess Born from Every God’s Power

This is the story of how Durga came into being. When the buffalo demon Mahishasura had defeated every god and taken over heaven, the gods’ combined anger became a blaze of light, and that light took the form of a goddess — one being made from all their powers together. It is one of the central stories of Hindu goddess worship, told in the Devi Mahatmya, and it is the story at the heart of the autumn festivals of Navaratri and Durga Puja.

Who is who

• Mahishasura (Mahiṣāsura) — “the buffalo demon”, from mahiṣa, buffalo, and asura, a demon or anti-god. A shape-shifter whose primary form was a great dark buffalo.
• The devas — the gods of heaven, led by Indra, their king. Each has a sphere: Agni is fire, Varuna the waters, Vayu the wind, Yama death, Surya the sun, Kubera wealth.
• Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva — the three great gods associated with creation, preservation and dissolution.
• The Goddess — called in the text Devi, Ambika and Chandika, and known everywhere as Durga. After this battle she is also called Mahishasuramardini, “she who crushed Mahishasura”.

The boon and its gap

The problem had been growing for years. Through intense austerities (tapas), Mahishasura had won a specific boon: he could not be killed by any man or any god. Any male being in the three worlds was powerless to kill him. The boon is described most fully in later tellings such as the Devi Bhagavata Purana; the Devi Mahatmya itself begins with the war already under way.

His boon had a gap in it, as these boons often do — the gap left by assumption. He had not mentioned women when naming what could not kill him, because the idea that a woman could threaten him was so far from how he saw himself that it did not seem worth asking protection against.

Heaven falls

Mahishasura made war on the gods. The Devi Mahatmya says the battle between gods and demons lasted a full hundred years, and at the end of it the gods were routed. Mahishasura took Indra’s throne and made himself lord of heaven.

Indra’s heavens fell. The gods were driven out of their positions, their domains occupied by the buffalo king’s armies. The sun, the moon, fire, wind and the rest could no longer carry out their own functions; Mahishasura had taken them over. The gods, homeless and diminished, wandered the earth like ordinary mortals.

The gathering of light

Led by Brahma, the defeated gods went to Vishnu and Shiva and told them everything. As Vishnu and Shiva listened, their anger rose, and their faces became fierce. From Vishnu’s face, filled with wrath, came a great light (tejas — radiance, fiery power). Light came out of Brahma and Shiva too, and then out of Indra and every other god.

The streams of light flowed together into a single blazing mass, like a mountain of fire filling every direction. The light gathered. It condensed. It took form.

A woman appeared.

She was immense and radiant, and her light filled the three worlds. Her face was at once serene and fierce — the calm of someone completely at peace with the necessity of what she is about to do. Each god recognised in her something of his own power:

• Shiva’s light became her face;
• Yama’s became her hair;
• Vishnu’s became her arms;
• the Moon’s became her breasts;
• Indra’s became her waist;
• Varuna’s became her thighs and legs, and the Earth’s her hips;
• Brahma’s became her feet, and the Sun’s her toes;
• Agni’s became her three eyes.

The point of the list is plain: she is not one god’s power but every god’s power combined into a single body.

The weapons

Then each god gave her a copy of his own weapon or emblem, drawn out of his own. The list in the text is long; the best-known gifts are:

• Shiva — his trident;
• Vishnu — his discus, the Sudarshana Chakra;
• Varuna — a conch, and also a noose;
• Agni — a spear (śakti);
• Vayu — a bow and quivers full of arrows;
• Indra — his thunderbolt (vajra), and a bell from his elephant Airavata;
• Yama — his rod of death;
• Brahma — a string of beads and a water pot;
• Kubera, lord of wealth — a drinking cup filled with wine;
• Himavan, the mountain — a lion as her vehicle, along with jewels.

Others gave a sword and shield, an axe, armour, ornaments and garments. Popular retellings sometimes vary the list — for example giving Kubera a mace — so it is best not to treat any single list as the only one.

She was armed, mounted, and complete. The gods praised her, and she laughed a great roaring laugh that shook the earth and the mountains.

The armies and the generals

The demons heard the sound and rushed toward it. When Mahishasura learned that a single goddess stood in the field challenging his forces, he sent his generals first — among them Chikshura, Chamara, Asiloma, Vidalaksha and Baskala — each with a vast army. Each was destroyed.

The goddess fought on every side at once. The Devi Mahatmya describes her with a thousand arms filling the sky; images most often show her with eight, ten or eighteen. Her lion tore through the demon ranks, and from her breath sprang troops of attendants who fought beside her. In later tellings such as the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Mahishasura’s first reaction to news of a woman on the battlefield is dismissal, and then desire — he sends messengers proposing marriage before he sends soldiers.

The battle with Mahishasura

At last Mahishasura came himself, in his buffalo form, trampling the goddess’s troops, tearing up mountains with his horns and lashing the oceans with his tail. When she caught him with her noose, he shape-shifted — into a lion, then a man with a sword, then a huge elephant, and back into a buffalo — each form taken up as the previous one failed.

The goddess pursued him through every form. Before the final blow, she drank from a cup and laughed, telling him to roar while he still could, because the gods would soon be roaring in triumph over him. Then she leapt upon him, pinned the buffalo with her foot on its neck and pierced him with her trident. As Mahishasura tried to escape by emerging from the buffalo’s mouth in his own form, she caught him between forms — half out, in the moment when the shape-shifter was most vulnerable — and cut off his head with her great sword.

He fell. The demon army fled or perished. The gods, who had been watching, rained flowers on the battlefield and on the goddess standing in the middle of it, the lion calm beneath her. They sang her praises, and before disappearing she promised to return whenever they called on her in distress.

Who she is: the meaning of “Durga”

This is Durga. The word durga in Sanskrit means a fortress, or a place that is hard to reach or pass through. Durga is the one who is herself durgam — the difficult crossing, the impossible fort — and also, in a common reading, the one who carries her devotees across difficulty.

The tradition draws several meanings from the story. These are interpretations, not doctrine:

• Unity of divine power. She is not one god’s power but every god’s power combined into a single purpose — the answer that arises when every separate solution has failed and something beyond any one being’s capacity is required.
• The Goddess as source, not product. Although she seems to be made from the gods, the Devi Mahatmya treats her as the supreme power who was always there; the gods’ energies are a way of her becoming visible, not the origin of her being.
• Arrogance and blind spots. Mahishasura’s downfall comes from what he never thought to guard against. His shape-shifting is often read as the restless, changing forms of ego and ignorance, which have to be caught and ended.

Where this story comes from

The main source is the Devi Mahatmya (Devī Māhātmya), a Sanskrit text within the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, recited widely as the Durgā Saptaśatī (“Seven Hundred Verses to Durga”) or Caṇḍī. Its second chapter tells the gods’ defeat, the birth of the goddess from their combined light, her weapons and the destruction of Mahishasura’s armies; its third tells the slaying of Mahishasura himself; its fourth is the gods’ hymn of praise.

The story is retold, with added detail, in the Devi Bhagavata Purana, and in many regional versions. The number of the goddess’s arms, the list of gifts and the details of the final battle differ between texts and between artistic traditions.

Festivals and worship

She is celebrated every year in the autumn. Across much of India this is Navaratri, “nine nights” of worship of the Goddess, ending with Vijaya Dashami, the day of victory. In Bengal and eastern India it is Durga Puja, the great autumn festival of Bengal and beyond, where the season runs across the same nine nights to the tenth day — ten days in which the goddess comes home, is worshipped, and returns to the mountains. Durga is imagined there as a married daughter visiting her parents’ home. Images of her slaying Mahishasura are installed and worshipped, and on the last day they are immersed in water. The coming and going echoes her nature in the story: she appears when she is needed, she destroys what needs to be destroyed, and she returns to the source when the work is done.

The Devi Mahatmya is recited in full by many households and temples during these days.

Read on AdiVeda

• Durga Saptashati — Adhyāya 2 — the chapter in which the goddess is born from the gods’ light.
• Mahishasura Mardini: The Slaying of the Buffalo Demon — the battle in more detail.
• Nine Nights: The Nine Forms of the Mother
• The Emergence of Kali — the goddess’s later battle with Chanda and Munda.
• Durga — hymns, mantras and texts to Durga published on AdiVeda.