Kamakhya
কামাখ্যা कामाख्या
Also Kameswari, Nilachala Vasini, Mahamaya.
ShaktaVillage and folk
Who this is
Kamakhya is the goddess of desire and of the earth’s own fertility, and her shrine on Nilachal hill in Guwahati is the first of the shakti pithas. There is no image in the sanctum. There is a cleft in the rock, kept moist by a spring, covered in cloth and flowers, and it is worshipped as the yoni, the part of Sati that fell there. She is the one great Indian shrine where menstruation is the festival rather than the disqualification: for three days in Ahar the temple closes because the goddess is in her courses, and when it opens the cloth is given out as the greatest of her prasads.
How to recognise them
No anthropomorphic image in the main sanctum: a stone cleft, moist from a spring beneath, draped in red cloth and sindoor, approached down steps in the dark. In painting she is shown red, seated on a lotus over Siva, with Brahma and Vishnu attending. Ten Mahavidya shrines stand around the main one on the hill.
Family and companions
Sati, in the part of her that fell here when Vishnu cut the body Siva was carrying. Siva is Umananda on the island in the Brahmaputra below. The Mahavidyas, the ten wisdom goddesses, occupy the hill around her.
How they are worshipped
Ambubachi in Ahar, usually late June; Durga Puja; the Tuesdays of the month.
The temple is tantric and the worship is in the left hand tradition in part, with animal offering still made, though not of female animals. The Ambubachi Mela brings sadhus in their hundreds of thousands to wait out the three days of closure. The red cloth, the angabastra, is given afterwards and kept in the house through the year. No ploughing or sowing is done in Assam during the three days.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
Where the body fell
Sati gave up her life at her father’s sacrifice and Siva carried the body across the world, refusing to put it down, and the worlds began to fail under his grief. Vishnu followed and cut the body with the discus piece by piece as it was carried, and where each part came down a shakti pitha stands. The yoni fell on Nilachal. The list of pithas is counted differently by different texts, between fifty one and a hundred and eight, but Kamakhya is first in nearly all of them, and the sanctum keeps no image because what is there is the part itself.
The three days the earth rests
The goddess is held to menstruate for three days each year in the month of Ahar, and the temple closes, the shrine is covered and no worship is offered anywhere in Assam. The ground is not ploughed and nothing is sown. Widows and the devout eat no cooked food. On the fourth morning she is bathed and the doors open, and the cloth that covered her is cut up and given out. In a tradition that elsewhere treats the same thing as a bar to entering a temple, Kamakhya treats it as the holiest event of the year, and Assam has not reconciled the two views so much as kept both.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Assam
- Nilachal hill above Guwahati is the shrine, with the Ambubachi Mela, the ten Mahavidya temples around it, and Umananda on the island below.
- Bengal
- Counted as the first of the shakti pithas and visited by Bengali Shaktas, with the Tarapith and Kalighat traditions reading from the same tantric stream.
- Nepal
- The Nepali tantric tradition counts her among its pithas and sends pilgrims for Ambubachi.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
Where to see them
From the temple directory
- Kamakhya Devi Temple, Nilachal Guwahati, Assam
What is said
From the mantra library