Bhairava

by

Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam

• LAST MODIFIED: 28 May 2013
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0019

Introduction

Bhairava, literally “the terrifying,” hence the god of terror, has intrigued students of South Asian religion because of the challenges he poses to any totalizing conceptual framework for approaching his underlying system of values and worldview. As the lowly impure guardian of the local territory subordinated to a central pure divinity, the public worship of Bhairava confirms the hierarchical nature of the caste society opening out above to renunciation (of sexuality, violence, earthly attachments, etc.) as the ultimate goal of life. His identity overlaps with countless regional deities, some of whom can be traced back anthropologically to “pre-Aryan” tribal origins. At the same time, as the privileged embodiment of the all-encompassing metaphysical principle (anuttara) taught by mainstream exemplars of classical brahmanical culture (above all Abhinavagupta) this tantric deity par excellence seems to violate this socioreligious order by turning it completely upside down. Relegating his antinomian proclivities to esoteric cults, folk practices, and sectarian identities intruding from the fringes has not sufficed to explain his ambivalent status, because the central deed that defines his very birth is publicly celebrated in the mythology of the Purāṇas: the violent decapitation of the god Brahmā, the embodiment of the Vedic sacrifice. He is typically represented in religious sculpture and art bearing this decapitated head dripping with blood—lapped up by his faithful dog—or using the skull as a begging bowl. Yet he remains the policeman-magistrate of Banaras, the Hindu sacred city, to whom all pilgrims must pay obeisance and where he confers salvation at the moment of death. Royal festivals, particularly well preserved in the Katmandu Valley, identify this trance-inducing ancestral, even aboriginal, clan-deity with the transsectarian Hindu king, who is otherwise the pivot of the socioreligious order. Deeper scrutiny reveals this criminal god to be, in many ways, the divinized projection of the consecrated (dīkṣita) Vedic sacrificer, thereby conserving and extrapolating the antinomian values of the latter into classical Hinduism. Bhairava’s relevance to the human predicament overflows the confines of the Hindu caste-order because he has also been worshipped by Buddhists, Jains, and Muslims, thus becoming a privileged locus for the study of syncretism and acculturation. He offers striking parallels with the Greek Dionysus vis-à-vis the Apollonian ethico-rational order of the polis. Attempting to make nonreductive sense of all these contradictory aspects of Bhairava—against the backdrop of similar anomalous figures within the Hindu tradition—has resulted in the formulation of a theory of transgressive sacrality as the basis for comparative religion. Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam with the collaboration of Sunthar Visuvalingam.

General Overviews

Though the Origin-Myth of Bhairava is the indispensable starting point for any attempt to understand his pan-Hindu significance and for comparative religion, contradictions embodied by this “god of terror” typify a far more widespread theological paradigm surviving to this day. The collection of essays brought together in Hiltebeitel 1989 comprises extensive fieldwork in far-flung regions of the subcontinent. A recurring religious pattern under multiple guises is that of the demon devotee, committed to transgressive deeds, who subsequently undergoes (especially capital) punishment before repenting to become the foremost worshipper and official guardian of the supremely beneficent deity (see the Pantheon). Erndl 1989, for example, is an account of the pilgrimage circuit to the chaste vegetarian Vaiṣṇo Devī (also see Vaiṣṇavism) that shows how the left-handed tantric adept Bhairava-nātha attempts to rape the virgin Goddess, but is decapitated as he emerges from her womb-cave (see Embryogony) before receiving her gracious pardon. Deified into a “criminal” god of sorts, his exemplary conversion is revealed to be that of the ordinary participants in the cult, of the devout pilgrims. Several of the regional gods, such as Khaṇḍobā, are covered by Sontheimer 1989 and Stanley 1989 (the latter cited under Bhakti). These gods are explicitly or implicitly identified with Bhairava, or as Śiva’s errant untouchable “son” who weds a tabooed brahmin virgin at the sacrificial stake, as discussed in Masilamani-Meyer 1989 and Shulman 1989. Even when the discussion is not of a (demi-)god but of transgressive saints, as in Hudson 1989 (cited under Bhakti), the theological problem posed remains that exemplified by this criminal god par excellence. This anthology was originally intended to resituate divergent theoretical approaches to this conversion scenario against the totalizing framework for Hindu civilization elaborated over a lifetime by Biardeau 2004: the socioreligious order derived from the brahmanical sacrifice, subsequently challenged by (especially Buddhist) renunciation, would have been universalized, subsumed, and surpassed by the pan-Indian religion of Bhakti (devotion). While sympathetically developing this perspective, Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 demonstrates how the brahmanicide god, by conserving the antinomian dimension of the preclassical dīkṣita, has facilitated the acculturation of pre-Āryan and tribal communities into the Hindu fold through assimilating their savage deities (see the Tribal Substratum). Lorenzen 1989 provides inscriptional evidence for “outcaste” Kāpālika (see Brahmanicide) ascetics having been brahmins engaged in Vedic (soma) sacrifices. In its concluding essay, Visuvalingam 1989 reviews all the contributions, especially those relating to Bhairava, within the framework of transgressive sacrality—derived from the Great Brahmin clown of the Sanskrit theater—that he generalizes into a full-fledged theory of comparative religion.

• Biardeau, Madeleine. Histoires des poteaux: Variations védiques autour de la Déesse hindoue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  More than Biardeau’s modest essay in Hiltebeitel 1989, this magnum opus brings Sanskrit epics, Great Goddess, Vedic ritualism, (South Indian) village ethnography, royal iconography, and buffalo sacrifices into a coherent unified understanding of Hinduism around this demon devotee thematic, whose multiforms including Bhairava are often (mis-)represented as “tribal” posts and stones.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Beginning with an overview, this long essay addresses origin myth, Kāpālika doctrine and practice, the relation to Viṣṇu compared to Dionysos-Apollo, Brahmā’s fifth head, antecedents in Vedic dīkṣita and royal Indra, scapegoat role in Benares, underlying sacrificial ideology, radical tantricism, outsider status, implications for Vedic-Hindu pantheon, and contemporary developments.

  Find this resource:

• Erndl, Kathleen M. “Rapist or Bodyguard, Demon or Devotee: Images of Bhairo in the Mythology and Cult of Vaiṣṇo Devī.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 239–250. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Erndl shows how this mythic cycle juxtaposes the conflicting images of the goddess: apparently chaste and benign in the public Vaiṣṇava pilgrimage cult and bloodthirsty in the left-handed tantricism exemplified by her would-be rapist Bhairava-nātha.

  Find this resource:

• Hiltebeitel, Alf, ed. Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Individual monographs adapted to the particularities of the worship of Bhairava (-like divinities) in specific regions, texts, festivals, and contexts hardly do justice to his many-sidedness. This collection has the merit of posing the theological problem of evil within the empirical (as opposed to simply speculative) framework of anthropological fieldwork.

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David. “New Data on the Kāpālikas.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 231–238. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Lorenzen, who pioneered the historical study of the Kāpālika sect of Bhairava-worshippers by discerning their distinctive identity, had worked on the received assumption that they were nonbrahmanical in constitution. This update provides evidence to the contrary that Chalier-Visuvalingam reinterprets as conserving the transgressive sacrality invested in the Vedic dīkṣita.

  Find this resource:

• Masilamani-Meyer, Eveline. “The Changing Face of Kāttavarāyan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 69–103. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though the Tamil Kāttavarāyan is not explicitly identified with Bhairava, he is likewise a guardian deity, Śiva’s son with symbolic links to Banaras, and is committed to transgressive acts. She recounts his story based on the versions found in two different Tamil manuscripts juxtaposed to his village cult.

  Find this resource:

• Shulman, David Dean. “Outcaste, Guardian, and Trickster: Notes on the Myth of Kāttavarāyan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 35–67. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Unlike the pan-Indian Bhairava—typically defined by his Brahmanicide, being decapitated himself, slaying demons, or esoteric worship by radical tantric currents—Kāttavarāyan is a specifically Tamil folk-deity who willfully undergoes sacrificial death at the stake. His antinomian affinities with Bhairava derive from both being projections of dīkṣita (see also Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989.

  Find this resource:

• Sontheimer, Gunther Dietz. “Between Ghost and God: A Folk Deity of the Deccan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 299–337. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Based on fieldwork on the various forms of the popular deity identified with the solar Mārtaṇḍa Bhairava in Maharashtra (Khaṇḍobā, Malhārī, Mailār), Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka (Malanna). The gods described here have striking parallels to other Deccan folk deities: Jyoyibā, Mhaskobā, Bhairobā, Aiyappan, etc.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Visuvalingam builds on the dialectical approach to the sacred: an approach formulated by Western theorists such as Laura Makarius, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and René Girard. But this author adapts these Western theories to the specifically Indian context by drawing on the Śaiva metaphysics and soteriology of Abhinavagupta centered on Bhairava. He provides the basis for Chalier-Visuvalingam’s grand synthesis.

  Find this resource:

Origin-Myth

Bhairava’s iconography and cult cannot be understood without his origin myth recounted by various Purāṇas. While creator Brahmā and preserver Viṣṇu, the other two gods of the Hindu trinity, dispute the status of supreme Lord (see the Pantheon), destroyer Śiva suddenly appears as the fiery pillar (see Cosmic Liṅga) from which springs Bhairava to decapitate the embodiment of the brahmanical sacrifice. Because brahmanicide—now personified as his orgiastic sex-partner—is the most heinous crime in Hindu tradition, the skull-bearer must undergo rigorous penance before absolution in holy Banaras. Trailed by his impure black dog, the naked ascetic seduces the chaste wives of the outraged Vedic forest sages: his castrated phallus is worshipped as the Śiva-liṅga. Bhairava then slays Viṣvaksena, brahmin guardian of Viṣṇu, only to be recognized by the latter as the hidden ultimate principle of the universe; the brahmanicide reciprocates by endorsing Viṣṇu’s beneficent reign at the summit of the socioreligious hierarchy. Among the variations across this corpus of myths: the cosmic liṅga might provide the context for the dispute, Brahmā’s depiction as Rudra’s condescending father, Viṣṇu might be omitted, Rudra may decapitate Brahmā directly without engendering Bhairava, and the fifth-head may be represented with either ascetic or transgressive traits. These internal oppositions were initially seen as expressing sectarian conflict between followers of Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, and in relation to brahmanical orthodoxy, with attempts to find systemic bias depending on the affiliation of the Purāṇa, as seen in Stietencron 1969. Doniger O’Flaherty 1981 and Kramrisch 1994 have analyzed the mythic cycle as grappling with the fundamental nature of the world. Doniger O’Flaherty 1981 focused on the contradiction (or playful juxtaposition) of asceticism and eroticism, and hence the endless attempts to resolve irreconcilable values. Kramrisch instead stresses their transcendence within a metaphysical “unity of opposites” (coincidentia oppositorum), for Śaiva theology ultimately aims to go beyond good and evil: Vedic Antecedents in sacrificial year, transcendence of Time-Death, meaning of liṅga-worship are articulated with the mythic cycle. Ladrech 2010 summarizes more than twenty-two versions of the Purāṇic origin-myth, catalogues variations as to key details, before presenting ancillary narratives. Lorenzen 1972 had already shown how the “supreme penance” (mahā-vrata) of Bhairava’s ascetic Kāpālika worshippers corresponds to his prescribed punishment: roaming cremating grounds, carrying a skull-staff, begging from a skull-bowl, etc. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 and Chalier-Visuvalingam 2003 instead decipher a deliberate and systematic dialectic of transgression—deftly encoded into the minutest details of the narrative—that would nonreductively encompass the above perspectives. Brahmā’s decapitated incestuous fifth-head encapsulates the antinomian orientation of the “preclassical” Vedic dīkṣita that would have been bequeathed to the tantric and ostentatiously anti-orthodox Bhairava.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Part A on the “Origin Myth” demonstrates the encoding of a transgressive ideology that publicly affirms socioreligious norms founded on ritual purity, even while transcending the system of interdictions through exploiting impurity. The left thumbnail used to decapitate, the nature of the penance, Brahmā’s incestuous fifth head, etc., all underline its tantric underpinnings as a prolongation of Vedic esotericism.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. Bhairava, Terreur et protection. Mythes, rites et fêtes à Bénarès et à Katmandou. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This abridged reworking of a French “these d’état” was first submitted at the University of Paris in 1994. This is the first book attempting a comprehensive approach to Bhairava combining philosophical, textual, ethnographic, and history of religions perspectives. Its principal findings and arguments were already summarized in English in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989.

  Find this resource:

• Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. Siva: The Erotic Ascetic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Doniger’s PhD thesis, originally published as Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva in 1973, applies Lévi-Strauss on mythmaking as the impossible, hence perpetual, attempt to “resolve” cognitive contradictions to opposing Hindu values. Explanatory (e.g., Freudian) concepts are freely mixed and matched on the “monkey-and-toolbox” approach of whatever fits the immediate problem.

  Find this resource:

• Kramrisch, Stella. The Presence of Śiva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Attempts to read mythic cycles of Śiva-Bhairava, including the Vedic Antecedents, sympathetically and poetically through the eyes of their composers and believers. Intuits significant links between themes and ideas—for example, between Cosmic Liṅga, Time, and Brahmanicide—but sometimes it is difficult to distinguish the literal meaning of the original text from author’s overlay.

  Find this resource:

• Ladrech, Karine. Le crâne et le glaive. Représentations de Bhairava en Inde du Sud (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles). École Française d’Extrême Orient, Collection Indologie 112. Pondichéry, India: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Part 1 systematically records variations in the decapitation scenario: pretext, agent (Śiva or Bhairava), which head, manner, who metes out punishment, personification of brahmahatyā, inclusion of Viṣvaksena episode, place of final liberation, etc. She also narrates the ancillary myths of Bhairava relating to Andhaka, Damanaka, Kālakṛtyā, the Goddess, etc.

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David. The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaiva Sects. Delhi: Thomson, 1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This pioneering work discusses the origin myth primarily in relation to Kāpālika doctrine, praxis, and imagery (see Aesthetics and Laughter) and attempts to replace the latter in proper historical context from Deccan inscriptions. Antecedents of the brahmanicide motif and the expiation prescribed by the Dharma Śāstras (legal codes) are also discussed.

  Find this resource:

• Stietencron, Heinrich von. “Bhairava.” In Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1969). Supplement 1, Part 3. 863–871. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1969.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This German article is the first to see the iconography of Bhairava systematically through his origin myth in the Purāṇas. Concludes by interpreting his transgressive essence in terms of the Kashmir Shaiva metaphysics of transcending good and evil.

  Find this resource:

Banaras

Bhairava’s centrality to Hinduism is underlined through his suzerainty over Banaras (see Origin-Myth), which in turn clarifies the ultimate significance of the sacred city, former Kāpālika center. The policeman-magistrate (Kotwal) consumes sinful karma of dying denizens by administering liberating “punishment of Bhairava” (bhairavī-yātanā) at Lāṭ Bhairo (see Cosmic Liṅga). This stone pillar is beside the Kāpālamocana tank, where the criminal bathed to be absolved of Brahmanicide. This happened during exceptionally heavy monsoon floods, when the maternal Ganges flowed backward to transform Oṁkāreśvara’s ancient site into a primordial mound, engulfing the city within its rare “fish-womb” (see Embryogony). His birth is celebrated annually in Mārgaśīrṣa (see Time) at his nuclear Kāla-Bhairava temple, which—with his eight subsidiary manifestations around the city in each direction—provided the spatio-temporal template for his cult across the subcontinent. Sukul 1977 attempts to identify original pre-Muslim sacred sites that have since been relocated without entirely effacing topographic relations and their symbolic significance. This mythico-ritual complex and theological problems posed by bhairavī-yātanā are elaborated in Eck 1983. Parry 1980, Parry 1981, and Parry 1982 describe death’s centrality to Kāśī in relation to the mystic physiology encoded in its topography, before interpreting its funerary rituals as constituting an uninterrupted Vedic fire sacrifice assuming cosmogonic proportions. The son, as chief mourner and officiant, offers his father’s corpse to the fire: his parricidal “breaking of the skull” to release the entrapped vital consciousness mirrors Bhairava’s liberating decapitation. Bhairava’s still-thriving Aghori worshippers exploit disgusting impurities to root out worldly attachment and interiorize death through necrophagous cremation-ground practices (see Aesthetics). Conjoining brahmin status and brahmanicidal pollution, the funerary priest—so central to the Banaras cosmogony—“eats” the deceased (see the Great Brahmin). Chalier-Visuvalingam 1986 and Chalier-Visuvalingam 2006 demonstrate, by juxtaposing his contradictory identities as criminal, scapegoat, and Kotwal, that Bhairava is both executioner and victim of the liberating punishment, which corresponds to the excruciating experience of initiatic death underlying both orthodox brahmanical and antinomian tantric paradigms. The phallic Lāṭ’s annual marriage to the adjoining maternal well, when it is “crowned” with Kāla Bhairava’s head, reveals the sexual dimension of this self-sacrifice. This “Sin-Eater” (Pāpa-Bhakṣaṇa) for the constant throng of pan-Indian pilgrims to Banaras, as discussed in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989, reflects the deformed scapegoat (see Vedic Antecedents), who took on the evil of the royal sacrificer as the latter emerged from his purifying bath at the end of the consecration (dīkṣā). Seemingly subordinated to (Kāśī-) Viśvanātha, Bhairava embodies the transgressive dimension of the “Lord of the Universe” (see Vaiṣṇavism).

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava, Kotwāl of Vārānasī.” In Vārānasī through the Ages. Edited by T. P. Verma, 241–260. Varanasi, India: Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalan Samiti, 1986.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The criminal’s continuing role of Sin-Eater—even after absolution, purification, and promotion to policeman-magistrate—serves to justify a synchronic reading of the diachronic conversion proposed by the myth. Lāṭ’s cosmogonic marriage is analyzed in greater depth and in relation to Hindu-Muslim syncretism in Chalier-Visuvalingam 2006 (cited under Cosmic Liṅga).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. Parts C and F of “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Just as the origin myth recognizes Viṣṇu’s primacy over the socioreligious order in return for Bhairava’s supremacy in the initiatic hierarchy, ritual practices at the central Kāśī Viśvanātha temple identify the pure Śiva with his brahmanicide emanation. Bhairava’s absolution at other sacred sites (Ujjain, Kāñcī, etc.) is modeled on his dip in the Ganges at Banaras.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava in Benares: Negotiating Sacred Space and Religious Identity.” In Visualizing Space in Banaras: Images, Maps, and the Practice of Representation. Edited by Martin Gaenszle and Jörg Gengnagel, 95–128. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Through comparisons with Indra and Bisket festivals of the Katmandu Valley and the Indo-Muslim cult of the martyred Ghazi Miyan, demonstrates that Lāṭ Bhairava’s marriage with the adjacent maternal well is the post-Islamic vestige of a royal cosmogony reenacting the sacrificial death-and-rebirth of the Hindu king.

  Find this resource:

• Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Still the most readable comprehensive introduction to the holy city of the Hindus, presided over by Śiva as Kāśī Viśvanātha, the book also describes the role of Bhairava and his various shrines. Most of Sukul’s materials on Lāṭ Bhairo are reproduced here along with the confusion on the Ashokan pillar.

  Find this resource:

• Parry, Jonathan. “Ghosts, Greed and Sin: The Occupational Identity of the Benares Funeral Priests.” Man 15 (1980): 88–111.

  DOI: 10.2307/2802004Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Consubstantial with the deceased and impersonating his ghost (bhūta), the “great brahmin” (mahābrāhmaṇa) symbolically consumes his intestines at the final meal. Scapegoated funerary priest is actually fed ground-up bones of the Nepali royalty before being banished from the kingdom. Though Bhairava is likewise Bhūtanātha (“lord of goblin-hosts”), his simultaneous equation to both mahābrāhmaṇa and Aghori is not applied by Parry to resolve the significance of Benares.

  Find this resource:

• Parry, Jonathan. “Death and Cosmogony in Kāśī.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 15 (1981): 337–365.

  DOI: 10.1177/006996678101500118Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes the centrality of death to the sacred city and its experience in terms of the mystic physiology encoded into its topography, before interpreting the funerary rituals as a fire sacrifice of cosmogonic proportions. Provides the conceptual background for appreciating the relationship between Bhairava, sacrificial death, and tantric practices in Parry 1982.

  Find this resource:

• Parry, Jonathan. “Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic.” In Death and the Regeneration of Life. Edited by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, 74–110. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607646Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Whereas the devout householder regenerates the self and renews the cosmos through self-sacrifice on a funeral pyre, the transgressive Bhairava adept seeks to transcend Time: their austerities share the same symbolic and ideological framework. Bhairava-incarnate, the Aghori ascetic consorts with a menstruating prostitute elevated to the Goddess, blesses supplicants by beating, worships in the cremation-ground, consuming impurities from a skull-bowl.

  Find this resource:

• Sukul, Kubernath. Vārānasī Vaibhava. Patna, India: Bihar Rastrabhasa Parisad, 1977.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  An abridged English version of this Hindi book was published in 1974 under the title Varanasi Down the Ages. Omits details of his pioneering fieldwork and reconstructions to focus more on his findings. Because the Lāṭ had been identified as an Ashokan pillar, Sukul mistakenly assumed the existence of a separate Kula Stambha.

  Find this resource:

Vedic Antecedents

Tantric Bhairava cannot be dated with certainty before the 7th century CE. But many elements of Origin-Myth and associated ritual practices can be traced to Vedic antecedents, as explored in Kramrisch 1994: Brahmā’s incest, severed head, willful brahmanicide, dog-companion, skull-bearing penance, representation as pole (pillar, staff), etc. Prajāpati’s incest with his daughter, Dawn or Sarasvatī, is punished by Rudra (-Śiva), the outsider god of the Brāhmaṇas, which is discussed in Deppert 1977. The decapitation was inherited from soma-drinking Indra, king of the gods, who slays his chaplain (purohita), Viśvarūpa, as discussed in Doniger O’ Flaherty 1981. Kane 1973 collates and analyzes extracts from brahmanical law books that prescribe such skull-bearing penance: the alternative of retracing the maternal Sarasvatī River back to her hidden source points to Vedic origin of the Kāpālika pilgrimage to Kāśī, engulfed by backward-flowing Mother-Gaṅgā (see Banaras). Ancient mystery surrounding the severed head—its relationship to soma, beverage of immortality, Vedic Fire-Altar (agni-cayana), and ritual enigma contests (brahmodya)—has been discussed by Heesterman 1985. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 shows how Indra’s brahmanicide has been subtly recoded into epic figure of royal Arjuna and how noose-bearing Bhairava has likewise inherited “underworldly” aspects of Vedic gods Yama and Varuṇa. The fiery pillar, Cosmic Liṅga, from which the brahmanicide emerges, mediates between and equates bloodied tribal posts to the purified sacrificial stake (yūpa). Thus, Bhairava’s pole erected at the Bhaktapur festival echoes Indra’s banner in Katmandu. Biardeau 2004 systematically derives the postdeity—standing alone at the center of the village and also facing the bloodthirsty the Goddess at the periphery—from the Vedic yūpa (see also General Overviews). Visuvalingam 1989 derives this fragmented mythico-ritual universe from the central figure of the consecrated (preclassical) sacrificer (dīkṣita) within a broader theory of comparative religion that assimilates obligatory killing of the (animal) victim (substituted for the human sacrificer) to a (ritualized) crime. Bhairava, the grotesque Sin-Eater at the liberating Kāpālamocana shrine, is modeled on the deformed brahmin scapegoat on whom the royal dīkṣita followed by the entire community shed their evil during the Horse-Sacrifice. His secularized counterpart in the Sanskrit theater is the ugly clown (vidūṣaka), the “great brahmin,” likewise stereotyped as “beyond the pale of the Veda” (avaidika). Left-handed tantricism subsequently conserved and elaborated this transgressive ideology after its overt manifestations were effaced—leaving only the symbolic superstructure intact—from reformed classical Brahmanism. Hence brahmin stalwarts publicly steeped in “orthodoxy” could identify wholeheartedly with the brahmanicide: for Abhinavagupta, Bhairava’s antinomian Kula-Yāga encapsulates the original meaning and intention of the Vedic sacrifice.

• Biardeau, Madeleine. Histoires des poteaux: Variations védiques autour de la Déesse hindoue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The androgynous post uniting the “demon devotee” (Potu Rāju, Karuppan, Kāttavarāyan, etc.) with the village goddess, reflects the yūpa to which Vedic (self-)sacrificer was bound as (blood-)offering to fiery womb-altar. Whereas Bhairava as victim does correspond to the “Buffalo-King,” assimilated to Mahiṣāsura slain by the Goddess, the brahmanicide more typically embodies the executioner. Originally published in 1989.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Indra’s son, Arjuna, discussed in Part E, conforms through self-restraint and austerities to the classical image of the dharmic king (Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata), but symbolic notations assimilate him to the transgressive aspect of his Vedic progenitor (the Pantheon). The schematized diachronic model proposed in Part I juxtaposes the later acculturation of tribal deities through Bhairava to the demonization of Rig Vedic Asuras, especially Varuṇa.

  Find this resource:

• Deppert, Joachim. Rudra’s Geburt: Systematische Untersuchungen zum Inzest in der Mythologie der Brāhmaṇas. Beitrage zur Sudasien-Forschung, Südasien-Institut, Heidelberg University 28. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1977.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Unavailable in English. Deppert notes the kinship between Brahmā’s head and that of Namuci, decapitated by Indra, which he compares to the rolling head of Amerindian mythology studied by Lévi-Strauss. The analyses are, however, vitiated by a marked preoccupation with psychoanalysis and the incest taboo.

  Find this resource:

• Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. Siva: The Erotic Ascetic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Doniger’s doctoral thesis was originally published as Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva in 1973. In some variants, Śiva decapitates Brahmā, undertakes the Kāpālika vow, etc. The mythological treatment here of brahmanicide and sin, with its Vedic antecedents and parallels in folktales, are taken up again in Doniger O’Flaherty 1976 (cited under the Great Brahmin).

  Find this resource:

• Heesterman, Jan C. “The Case of the Severed Head.” In The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship and Society. By Jan C. Heesterman, 45–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though Heesterman does not discuss Bhairava, he does focus on motifs, issues, and perennial concepts that are crucial for understanding the god. The most enthusiastic examiner at Chalier-Visuvalingam’s thesis defense, he insists that transgressive sacrality could be entirely derived from the “inner conflicts” within the Vedic sources without recourse to tribal acculturation.

  Find this resource:

• Kane, Pandurang Vaman. History of Dharmaśāstra. 2d ed. Vol. 4. Govt. Oriental Series. Poona, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  See pp. 10–31, 87–96. Here you learn that even minor infractions of brahmanical purity rules—involving fingernails, hair, leftovers of a meal, use of left hand, saliva, consumption of alcohol, etc.—were assimilated to a brahmanicide (brahma-hatyā). What emerges is an understanding of crime and punishment in which the legal dimension is still overshadowed by ritual considerations.

  Find this resource:

• Kramrisch, Stella. The Presence of Śiva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Replaces Origin-Myth within the Vedic context of Rudra’s piercing of Prajāpati, including Raudra Brahman, Paśupati, Yoga, fire, sex and violence, severed head, astronomical correlates of archer-hunter and hound (Time), Rudra’s birth from Prajāpati-Brahmā, Cosmic Ling (Sthāṇu), etc. Especially relevant are intimate links with the Sacrificial Year and Fire-Altar that are obscured in the Purāṇic Bhairava.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The argument in Part B is directed against Heesterman’s central theme of the unresolvable “inner conflict” of tradition stemming from the systematic expurgation of violence, evil, death from the henceforth “transcendent” Vedic sacrifice: the archaic sacrifice sought instead to contain the inner conflict of man that also resurfaces in other traditions and the contemporary world.

  Find this resource:

Cosmic Liṅga

The immeasurable fiery pillar from which the Brahmanicide emerged is the universal (viśva-) liṅga, form in which Śiva is worshipped at Kāśī-Viśvanātha, Paśupati-nātha, and Tiruvannāmalai. Though its pedestal is termed yoni (vagina) for its shape, bitter controversy rages on whether Hindus unwittingly adore a phallic symbol, as seen in svAbhinava 2003. Purāṇas narrate how Bhairava’s erect member—castrated by the Vedic sages for seducing their wives—mutated into the all-devouring axis mundi to be worshipped by his revilers, discussed in Kramrisch 1994. Nepali 1965 observes how Unmatta-Bhairava’s imposing erection at Paśupatinātha in Katmandu is reverently stroked by newlyweds desirous of their first son. Earliest liṅgas, foregrounded by club-wielding ascetic (Guḍimallam, ithyphallic at Mathurā), perhaps representing the Vedic sacrificer, are sculpted realistically. Made of fiery wood of maternal Śamī, the yūpa stood on the edge of the Vedic altar equated to the vulva, which is discussed in Biardeau 2004. Identified as both sacrificial post (yūpa) and liṅga—discussed in Toffin 2010—the erected Newar New Year pole “copulates” with its supporting earth-mound, elaborated in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989. For Tamils, the sacred red mountain of Tiruvannāmalai reverts to the cosmic liṅga when the blazing fire lights up its summit during the Kārttika festival. In Buddhism, Bhairava becomes Indra’s “Thunderbolt” (vajra), crypto-phallus like his flagpole (dhvaja), to be coupled with the bell. Bhairon’s annual wedding as Lāṭ (“Club”) pillar to the adjacent maternal well in Banaras is the vestige of a royal cosmogony (Chalier-Visuvalingam 2006). For Panda 2004, the ithyphallic (ūrdhva-liṅga) Bhairava figures from medieval Orissa—occasionally prostrate while engaged in coitus with the Goddess astride—relate to the tantric retention and sublimation of semen. Psychoanalysis sees innocent objects—pole, sword, club, lance, mountain, serpent, snout, etc.—as “phallic symbols” circumventing the founding repression that clothes (the dream language of) civilized society. In Hinduism, where naked ascetics are still publicly revered, as during the Kumbha-Melā, the “offending” member becomes an unabashed signifier and privileged icon: Śiva’s “phallus” does not penetrate but protrudes vertically from the yoni. For Abhinavagupta, explained in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1994, the spinal column is the liṅga standing upright on its “sacral foundation” (mūlādhāra). Uniting this inner womb with the cerebral lotus—by kindling and raising the fiery serpentine energy through its central conduit called “cremation-ground”—is facilitated by the Kaula coitus. Brahmā’s decapitation corresponds to the sacrificial death of the constricted ego. The body as microcosm is transformed into the Supreme “Phallus”: beyond all erotic notations, the nongendered “sign” (liṅga) that indicates—for most practicing Hindus, modern and traditional—the unity transcending all language.

• Biardeau, Madeleine. Histoires des Poteaux: Variations védiques autour de la Déesse hindoue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This sexual polarization is already inherent in the “phallic” yūpa—symbolically identified with the sacrificial couple as constituting a biunity (dampatī)—for the ring (caṣāla), through and beyond which its knob protrudes, again represents the vagina. Immolation at the ubiquitous Hindu stake translates externally the “torture” of (inner) death, as through hook-swinging (e.g., around Kāttavarāyan’s kalu). Originally published in 1989.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Part G shows how the Bisket festival symbolically equates three modes of copulation: this fertilizing Bhairava-pole, from which two serpent-banners flutter, with Mother Earth; a royal suitor’s deadly union with a voracious princess, from whose nostrils two snakes emerge to be slaughtered (see Time); and the repeated collision, greeted with gusto, between the chariots of Ākāśa-Bhairava and Bhadra-Kālī.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism.” In Between Jerusalem and Benares. Edited by Hananya Goodman, 195–222. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Explains that unity is realized through union on three correlated levels: sun-moon (duality) friction within the median channel (suṣumnā) engendering fire as the knowing subject; external union of sexual organs; and kuṇḍalinī-awakening as the fusion of opposing poles of the suṣumnā. This reciprocal “sexualization” of suṣumnā and “spiritualization” of the coital exchange expresses identity of axis mundi with liṅga.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth, and Sunthar Visuvalingam. “Bhairava in Banaras: Negotiating Sacred Space and Religious Identity.” In Visualizing Space in Banaras: Images, Maps, and the Practice of Representation. Edited by Martin Gaenszle and Jörg Gengnagel, 95–128. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The wedding procession (culminating in the “crowning” of the pillar with Kāla-Bhairava’s head) coincides calendrically with Indra’s royal pole-festival in Katmandu. Bhairava (alias Kāśī-Viśvanātha) from Banaras was beheaded to placate the Mother-Goddess while sinking underground at the Bisket festival. Taken together, this betrays the commonality of the underlying sacrificial paradigm.

  Find this resource:

• “Is the Śiva-Liṅga a Phallic Symbol? Primitive Sexuality, Symbolic Anthropology, and Transgressive Sacrality.” In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta. 2003.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Sparked on 5 July 2003, this ongoing debate—covering related topics such as Purāṇic mythology, serpent symbolism, primitive religion, psychoanalysis, tantric sexuality, triune brain, etc.—dovetails into the more politically charged controversy over the hermeneutics of the elephant-headed god Gaṇeśa’s trunk, also archived at the website.

  Find this resource:

• Kramrisch, Stella. The Presence of Śiva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes what happens to the erect phallus, which is distinctive of Bhairava’s iconography, when castrated: descends to the underworld before shooting upward (“sign” of [retained] semen’s ascension) and burning up the whole universe; transported by an elephant’s trunk to the world-tree; emanates AUM in the form of thunderous laughter; and liṅga’s four faces as representing the Ages of Time transcended by Mahākāla’s (invisible) fifth face. Other topics covered: Mārkaṇḍeya vanquishing Death, Guḍimallam, and Mathurā liṅgas. Originally published in 1981.

  Find this resource:

• Nepali, Gopal Singh. The Newars: An Ethno-sociological Study of a Himalayan Community. Bombay: United Asia, 1965.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Observes how women embrace Śiva’s five-foot-high stone phallus in the Jaisi Dewal quarter to ensure childbirth and how frigid women or those suffering from menstrual irregularity worship Unmatteśvara-Bhairava’s erection at Paśupatinātha. Also covers Newar Buddhist assimilation of liṅga-yoni to the primordial lotus and the goat-sacrifice to the tree before it is cut down and hewn into the Bisket pole.

  Find this resource:

• Panda, Sasanka S. “Bhairava Worship in the Upper Mahanadi Valley.” Orissa Review (January 2004): 37–51.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Extensive illustrated report, with historical background, on Bhairava sculptures dating back to 8th and 9th centuries. Almost all are ithyphallic (like those found in neighboring Bengal and Assam), and some are also dancing. Panda attributes their location and popularity to left-handed tantric assimilation of (Orissa’s) forest deities from Tribal Substratum.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. La fête-spectacle: Théâtre et rite au Népal. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences Humaines, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though the book focuses on the Indra festival of Katmandu, the symbolism and significance of the royal pole (Newari yahsim) is the same as for Bisket Bhairava in Bhaktapur. Yahsim derives from yala meaning “sacrificial post” and sim “wood,” thus corresponding to the Sanskrit yūpa, identified with the central axis uniting heaven and earth.

  Find this resource:

Brahmanicide

Immolation of the human, so central to the sacrificial ideology and praxis of archaic religion, is translated into brahmanicide (brahma-hatyā) within the Hindu context of the Origin-Myth. The ideal victim—virtuous, pure, and physically unblemished—was a great brahmin willing to assume the cosmogonic role of “Man” (Puruṣa), whose dismemberment constitutes the Vedic universe. Lorenzen 1972 shows how Kāpālikas have always been associated with human sacrifice in classical theater (see Aesthetics), hagiographies, popular perception, and even offered their own flesh as oblation. Śaṅkarācārya gained true enlightenment only after surrendering his head to the “fierce” Ugra-Bhairava. Kane 1973 records how (even minor) infractions of brahmanical purity rules—involving fingernails, hair, leftovers of a meal, use of left hand, saliva, consumption of alcohol, intercourse with low-castes, etc.—were assimilated to brahmanicide. What emerges is an understanding of crime and punishment in which the legal requirements remain impregnated with and overshadowed by ritual considerations: killing a brahmin is a capital offense because it is the most impure infraction conceivable. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 demonstrates through the minutest details of Brahmā’s decapitation—by Bhairava’s left thumbnail—that brahmanicide here is primarily a cipher for (the valorization of) transgression. Hence other Śaiva currents, like the Kaula and even Kālāmukha, could adopt the divinized Mahāvratin, with all his gruesome imagery, as supreme god regardless of the actual practice of human sacrifice. Because Brahmā’s fifth head was already characterized by incest, asinine braying, gluttony, obscenity, lying, malicious laughter, etc., its decapitation highlights the centrality of “brahmanicide” within Vedic ideology, especially as embodied by the consecrated (preclassical) sacrificer (dīkṣita). Yajña provides the mechanism for offering oneself to the divinity through a substitute victim, by equating all three symbolically: hence the recurrent motif in folklore, since taken up by Hindu movies, of the would-be executioner being tricked into assuming the role of the designated victim. Visuvalingam 1989 bases this theory of self-sacrifice on the brahmanical definition of “Man” as the only sacrificial animal (paśu) that is also capable of sacrificing. The metaphysics of Śaiva Bhakti insists on shattering our invisible fetters (pāśa), by immolating the inescapable beast within, in order to reclaim our original identity with the Lord (pati). The Vedic counterpart of (Rudra-) Paśupati (“Lord of beasts”) is (Brahmā-) Prajāpati (“Lord of people as progeny”). The enigma of the great Bráhman revolves around the sacrificial column from which Bhairava emerged to commit the crime of brahmanicide.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Parts E and I show that, though Arjuna, Indra’s epic son, conforms through his self-restraint and austerities to the classical image of the dharmic king, there are symbolic notations that assimilate him to the transgressive aspect of the Vedic Indra.

  Find this resource:

• Kane, Pandurang Vaman. History of Dharmaśāstra. 2d ed. Vol. 4. Govt. Oriental Series. Poona, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  See pp. 10–31, 87–96, and see also Part 2 (1974), pp. 147–151. Even minor infractions of brahmanical purity rules—involving fingernails, hair, leftovers of a meal, use of left hand, saliva, consumption of alcohol, etc.—were assimilated to a brahmanicide (brahma-hatyā). What emerges is an understanding of crime and punishment in which the legal dimension is still overshadowed by ritual considerations.

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David. The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects. Delhi: Thomson, 1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering work on the inscriptional history of Bhairava worshippers undertaking the Mahāvrata from 9th to 13th century. Because the Kālāmukhas were steeped in the Lākula-Pāśupata teachings enjoining extreme purity, nonviolence, nonpossession, etc., Lorenzen assumed that their “supreme penance” must have been the exaggerated adherence to the self-restraint (yama) of the Yoga-Sūtras.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. Section “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section B explains how the execution of the victim in the archaic sacrifice was universally considered and treated as a criminal deed requiring preliminary purifications and subsequent expiation. Brahmanicide would be its specific reformulation in brahmanical thought, where the pure-impure opposition remains the fundamental structuring principle (unlike in Christianity centered on the crucifixion).

  Find this resource:

The Great Brahmin

By making Brahmā’s head so central to the (self-)definition of Kāpālika-Bhairava, the Origin-Myth short-circuits the linear caste-hierarchy to establish an intimate exclusive bond between Brahmin and Untouchable. In Hindu ritual transactions, the “poisoned” gift (dān = Vedic dakṣiṇā) transfers evil from generous donor to inauspicious recipient. The Brahmanicide is thus ideally qualified to become the Sin-Eater, who redeems pilgrims to Banaras and Kāñcī. However, Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 shows Brahmā’s head playing the same role. Viṣṇu liberates Bhairava at Tirukaṇṭiyūr by enticing the insatiable skull with “blood” before sending it to Banaras to consume offerings for those who die at an inauspicious (pañcaka) moment. The paradoxical conjunction of the extremes of purity and impurity is consecrated in the enigmatic figure of the “great Brahmin” (mahā-brāhmaṇa), who performs funerary rites in Banaras in exchange for (obligatory) gifts, as seen in Parry 1980. Doniger O’Flaherty 1976 recounts how the brahmanicide Indra discharged, through a golden self-image, the Evil Man within onto a reluctant brahmin, who is forever reviled by the citizens of Banaras. Unbescheid 1980 describes how the low-caste Kusle-Jogi, Newar successor to the Kāpālika, accepts the clothes of the dead at the stone where the quarter’s life-cycle impurities are deposited and food offerings including meat, fish, etc., on the seventh day after death. The mythical justification is Brahmā’s decapitation during the inauspicious Pañcaka, the depositing of his clothes to be taken by Gorakhnāth, who revives the Creator on the seventh day in the Baṭuka Bhairava temple. The Newars deposit a five-headed Brahmā-figurine at the stone to neutralize a possible chain reaction of five deaths. Skull-bearers (mahāvratin) known from inscriptions are mostly brahmins, even Soma sacrificers, as shown in Lorenzen 1989. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 concludes from Vedic Antecedents that the Mahābrāhmaṇa, consubstantial with the deceased and impersonating his ghost, is the funerary transposition of the initiatic death of the dīkṣita. This “sacrificialization” of natural death is expressed by Bhairava conquering Death to usurp Yama’s reign over Kāśī, the cremation-ground of the Hindu universe. Ever soliciting and pampered with gifts yet boasting his Vedic pedigree, as compiled in Bhat 1959, the clown-scapegoat of the Sanskrit theater is a greedy Mahābrāhmaṇa. For Visuvalingam 1984, this ridiculous “non-Vedic” (avaidika) transgressor corresponds to the pot-bellied elephant-headed god Gaṇeśa, propitiated before all auspicious undertakings. Both embody the all-devouring Fire (of Consciousness) that reduces our world to Soma: their inseparable rounded sweetmeats (modaka) correspond to the funerary rice-balls (piṇḍa) offered to dead ancestors. Like the sin-eating Bhairava, the Great Brahmin transcends good and evil, pure and impure.

• Bhat, G. K. The Vidūṣaka. Ahmedabad, India: New Order, 1959.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Compiles instances from the different Sanskrit plays to characterize the Mahābrāhmaṇa as a clownish parody of Vedic brahmin (pp. 63–66, 85–87), pampered with gifts (pp. 59–61), food and rounded sweetmeats, even soaked in wine (pp. 67–73). Cārāyaṇa, in Rājaśekhara’s Viddhaśālabhañjikā, dons the king’s leftover clothes and ornaments (p. 265). Kapiñjala’s “priestly” collusion with Bhairavānanda (in Karpūramañjarī, see Laughter) suggests a deeper ritual and ideological affinity.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section F explains how the funerary priest, orthodox brahmin, and untouchable Ḍom who undertakes cremation form a continuum deriving from and revolving around the paradox of the Vedic brahmán-officiant reluctantly assuming the sacrificing donor’s sins. Hence, we have the image of the “brahmin-demon” (brahma-rākṣasa), such as the former priest (purohita) who receives offerings to the manes in Banaras from pilgrims en route to Gaya.

  Find this resource:

• Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Discusses (Indra’s) brahmanicide, death as polluting, transfer of sin, Kāpālika transgression, etc., within the larger context of Hindu theodicy. Guilt of brahmanicide is discharged onto women as menstrual stain (see Embryogony).

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David. “New Data on the Kāpālikas.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 231–238. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Lorenzen, who pioneered the historical study of Kāpālikas, has always assumed that these “heretics”—reviled (see Aesthetics) and ridiculed (see Laughter) in mainstream literature—were necessarily beyond, if not opposed to, Vedic orthodoxy (see Origin-Myth). This update would confirm the ideological continuity between the brahmanical Soma dīkṣita and the transgressive sacrality invested in Bhairava.

  Find this resource:

• Parry, Jonathan. “Ghosts, Greed and Sin: The Occupational Identity of the Benares Funeral Priests.” Man 15 (1980): 88–111.

  DOI: 10.2307/2802004Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Mahābrāhmaṇa embodies the central paradox of the sacrificial underpinnings of Hindu caste-society: whereas only the pure (Vedic) brahmin (equated to the world renouncer) could in principle consume “gifted” sins with impunity, the avaricious priests who “exort” the generosity of grieving patrons are admittedly degraded thereby and liable to ghastly death. Definition of (“great”) brahmin is left unresolved.

  Find this resource:

• Unbescheid, Gunther. Kānphaṭā: Untersuchungen zu Kult, Mythologie und Geschichte śivaitischer Tantriker in Nepal. Beiträge zur Südasienforschung, Südasien Institut, Heidelberg University 63. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1980.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Bhairava-worshipping Nāths are generally known in India as roaming ascetics, whereas the Kusles are a householder caste within Newar society. However, the latter assuming the role of Mahābrāhmaṇa points back to the paradox of the brahmán Kāpālika. Bhairava’s canonized “boy” (baṭuka) form likewise reflects the notion of sacrificial rebirth.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology and Spiritual Praxis.” PhD diss., Banaras Hindu University, 1984.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Derives Bhairava and Vidūṣaka as reworked transpositions of the Vedic Soma-dīkṣita within tantricism and theater respectively. The blatant paradox of the censurable “Great Brahmin” is the refraction within the exoteric caste-hierarchy—with the pure brahmin at its ritual summit—of the same transgressive dialectic that esoterically elevates the brahmanicide Bhairava to supreme principle.

  Find this resource:

Śaivism

Śiva engenders Bhairava only to impose his own supremacy; he sometimes commits the brahmanicide and suffers its consequences (see Origin-Myth). Scholars nevertheless attempt to distinguish the polluting Bhairava—his texts, doctrines, practices, and historical traces—from other Śaiva sects. Despite Śiva’s wild asceticism, it is the auspicious (Śaṅkara) public face—pacific, pure, restrained, respectable, even vegetarian—of the supreme Yogi that is adored by most Hindus. Bhairava’s punishment, imposed by Śiva (on) himself, is to become an errant out-caste beggar on the fringes of human settlement proclaiming his crime, reside in cremation grounds, and eventually reach Banaras to be absolved. Lorenzen discusses how hedonistic skull-bearers (kāpālika) imitated his self-degrading “supreme penance” (mahā-vrata) to attain spiritual liberation and supernatural powers through such praxis. Their soma doctrine assimilated wine and other refuse consumed out of his skull-bowl to ambrosia. Relentless guilt that assumed female form to pursue the brahmanicide is elevated into the Kāpālika’s orgiastic sex partner. But the Kālāmukhas of medieval Deccan were a venerable expanding monastic order that worshipped Bhairava, assumed his name, and celebrated his Great Penance. Sanderson 2006 identifies these Mahāvratins as staunchly celibate Lākulas, intent on liberation alone, to be distinguished from subsequent adepts of Mantrayāna: such as the Kāpālikas, who pair Bhairava with and enjoy a female consort. For Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989, these “sects”—each with its own center of gravity—form a continuum ranging from the rigorous observance of interdictions to flagrant transgression. Pāśupata praxis with its “paranoid” avoidance of impurity was coupled with ostentatious symbolic violations culminating in the deathly pollution of the cremation ground. The Pāśupata ascetics were purity-conscious brahmins who merge into Kāpālika antinomianism within the confusing category of the “Great” or Mahā-Pāśupata. “Brahmā’s head” (brahma-śiras), the ultimate weapon wielded by the royal Arjuna, is equated to the Pāśupata missile bestowed by the “tribal” (kirāta) Śiva. Visuvalingam 1989 posits the enigmatic Pāśupata at the center of a conceptual quadrangle, where the diagonal uniting the Vedic sacrificer and the tribal shaman intersects another uniting the pure Śaiva bhakta and the brahmanicide Kāpālika. Pāśupata devotion to Rudra was infused with both Vedic ritual elements and “epileptic” trance. The Great Brahmin clown acts out the same dialectic center stage in Sanskrit theater. The Kaula householder remained an orthodox Veda-conforming Śaiva in public while identifying inwardly with the divinized Skull-Bearer. Abhinavagupta’s claim that the overlapping hierarchy of competing traditions finds its hidden finality in Bhairava is vindicated through the semiotics of transgression.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Explains the discrepant continuities—from pure Śaiva householder, through Pāśupata ascetic, to impure Kāpālika hedonist—semiotically through their shared symbolic universe, which includes Brahmā’s fifth-head and the Pantheon. Offers a dynamic schema in which Rudra, the violent transgressive face of the Hindu Trinity who links the (royal) sacrificer to the underworldly impure (represented by Varuṇa) pole of Brahmā, is projected as the auspicious Śiva toward Brahmā’s pure (represented by Mitra) pole.

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David. The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects. Delhi: Thomson, 1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Inscriptional history of Bhairava worshippers undertaking the Mahāvrata from the 9th to 13th century. Because the Kālāmukhas were steeped in Lākula-Pāśupata teachings enjoining extreme purity, nonviolence, nonpossession, etc., Lorenzen assumed their “supreme penance” to be an exaggerated adherence to the self-restraint of the Yoga-Sūtras. For Sanderson, Kālāmukhas were Mahāvratins, who were between pure Pāśupata and hedonistic Kāpālika in that they remained celibate even while imitating the Skull-Bearer (Sanderson 2006).

  Find this resource:

• Sanderson, Alexis. “The Lākulas: New Evidence of a System Intermediate between Pāñcārthika Pāśupatism and Āgamic Śaivism.” Indian Philosophical Annual 24 (2006): 143–217.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  From the Ramalinga Reddy Memorial Lectures, 1997. Integral to Sanderson’s larger attempt to formulate a historical-cum-soteriological matrix of interacting currents of tantric Śaivism charting their distinguishing features, interferences, and borrowings. There is no real attempt here to rethink Śaivism and Tantra within an extended model that integrates the Vedic symbolic universe despite the prominence of brahmins in these Bhairava traditions.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  By situating the Pāśupata center stage as the conceptual mediator, Part A clarifies Śaivism’s acculturating role while dissolving the above religious antinomies: Vedic sacrifice would be the dramatized ritual encoding of the inner experience of “possession” (ecstasy). Part D shows that (Southern) temple-worship based on the vegetarian Siddhānta—with its sometimes transgressive outbursts of bhakti—is the domestication of radical tantric practices reduced to symbols.

  Find this resource:

The Tribal Substratum

Despite Vedic Antecedents shown by Biardeau 2004 and the perennial bond between Bhairava and Banaras, numerous traits underline tribal origins: stone and pole worship, frenzied possession, blood and even human sacrifice, popularity among nomadic communities, residence in termite mounds, a predilection for the forest, union with wild goddesses, beer-drinking, conservation as ancestral clan-deity, and aboriginal dancers and priests. In the Deccan, his manifestations as Mhaskobā, Birobā, and Khaṇḍobā are worshipped mostly by pastoral and tribal groups, studied in Sontheimer 1976. Assimilated to the Vedic Mārtāṇḍa, Bhairava receives blood offerings in the womb of the termite mound and is identified with natural phenomena such as the sun. Legally married to a respectable wife from a dominant agricultural caste, he remains partial toward a less inhibited mistress from among hunter-gatherers. The brahmin priest confirms to the aborigine that the mysterious presence experienced in wild solitude is the Hindu god he has been worshipping in vain in the man-made temple. The recurring split between his fundamentally “black” nature and “white” manifestations reflects the diachronic purification of his savage ways. In predominantly tribal Orissa, the ithyphallic one-footed Ekapāda Bhairava would have easily assimilated, through his very iconography, wooden-post divinities accepting blood sacrifices—as argued by Stietencron 1978. This is often a savage nameless the Goddess, dubbed “Mistress of the Sacrificial Post” (Khambeśvarī, Stambeśvarī) before undergoing a sex-change operation to be promoted into the patriarchal Hindu order as Śiva-Bhairava—as argued in Eschmann 1978. Lord Jagannātha of Puri, object of pan-Indian pilgrimage, was originally a pre-Āryan deity still represented only by a crude wooden statue whose death and resurrection are handled by former tribal priests since elevated to “Brahmin” status, a topic explored by Tripathi 1978. When uniting with the temple courtesan, the royal divinity—officially Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa—reveals his inner identity as Bhairava and as the Goddess Kālī, his consort, as revealed in Marglin 1985. Bhairava’s secret worship and public veneration as trance-inducing “grandfather god” by farmer clans points back to the “tribal” (śavarī-dyaḥ) component of Newar miscegenation, as argued by Nepali 1965 and Toffin 1996. Katmandu Valley’s first ruling dynasty was from the “cowherd” community that still worships “Tiger” (Bāgh) Bhairab. The world-tree (erected as a pole) and the motif of neutralizing duality through the equinoctial Bisket festival have abundant mythic parallels in the Amerindian world, where menstrual blood (“honey”)—used in transgressive Kaula worship—is the most tabooed substance. Such aboriginal motifs (see Embryogony and Laughter) already abound in the (preclassical) brahmanical sacrifice that has encoded and still conserves shamanic “ecstasy” enshrined within the Vedic yūpa. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 shows that the nondual Absolute (anuttara)—supreme metaphysical principle of the Trika—is experienced as direct possession (āveśa) by Bhairava: Abhinavagupta’s self-realization is an Eliadean return to our primitive roots.

• Biardeau, Madeleine. Histoires des poteaux: Variations védiques autour de la Déesse hindoue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Heidelberg school’s subaltern ethnography of Jagannātha (-Bhairava) and savage goddesses is sharply critiqued. With unifying conceptual roots in “patriarchal” Brahmanism, the Great Goddess of bhakti cannot be reduced to her multiple regional and tribal avatars. Worship of her demon-devotee through blood-sacrifice to amorphous stones and wooden posts derives from the Vedic yūpa-vedi configuration. Originally published in 1989.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section H argues that the stubborn retention of pre-Aryan elements—even after the pan-Indian Lord of the Universe has become Viṣṇu—reflects continuing centrality of the uncultivated forest as representing the womb (see Embryogony). Hence the royal sacrificer dwells in the wilderness as an ascetic (Rāma, Pāṇḍavas) before accomplishing the sacrifice of battle in the epics (Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata). Bhairava, the outsider-god, is a transgressive fusion of the Vedic dīkṣita and the tribal shaman.

  Find this resource:

• Eschmann, Anncharlott. “Hinduization of Tribal Deities in Orissa: The Śākta and Śaiva Typology.” In The Cult of Jagannātha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa. Edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi, 79–97. Delhi: Manohar, 1978.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Live possession and irregular blood sacrifice is contrasted to the regular, frequent, and elaborate temple-worship of anthropomorphic images. Argues that Hinduization is a two-way continuum transforming both poles. Illustrates how a Brahman priest, periodically revivifying the tribal post, addresses this Khond goddess as Vana-Durgā, who retains aboriginal traits even after her induction into the village cult. Bhubhaneswar Liṅgarāja temple has both brahmin and ex-tribal priests.

  Find this resource:

• Marglin, Frédérique Apffel. Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadāsīs of Puri. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Whereas the courtesan’s evening erotic singing symbolizes the (androgynous) union of Bhairava-Bhairavī, her morning dance assimilates the Lord of the World (Jagannātha) to the Goddess Kālī. Given the crucial cultic role played by (former) tribal priests, this reversion to the deity’s primitive identity may be understood both ontologically and (pre-)historically.

  Find this resource:

• Nepali, Gopal Singh. The Newars: An Ethno-sociological Study of a Himalayan Community. Bombay: United Asia, 1965.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering book by first native Newar ethnographer. Here, Bagh-Bhairab resembles Vaghdeo of the Kolis in the Deccan. Aju-dyaḥ conflates grandfather (aju) and Sanskrit deva: for there is no native word for “god.” Divinization of elders as Bhīma-Bhairava is followed by their elevation to heaven (svarga) and apotheosis. Looks at how tribal actors from fringes play key roles in Newar Bhairab festivals.

  Find this resource:

• Sontheimer, Gunther Dietz. Biroba, Mhaskoba und Khandoba: Ursprung, Geschichte und Umwelt von pastoralen Gottheiten in Maharastra. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1976.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering fieldwork on Bhairava-worship across Deccan and on the transsectarian acculturation of tribal deities. Remains the point of reference for other ethnographers—Nepali, Eschmann, Stietencron, Hiltebeitel, Stanley, and Chalier-Visuvalingam—attempting to specify the distinctive nature of Hinduization in their respective regions. Sontheimer’s visceral antibrahmanism results paradoxically in attempting to reduce the Vedic Mahāvrata, etc., to “tribal” rituals.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. “A Wild Goddess Cult in Nepal: The Navadurgā of Theco Village (Kathmandu Valley).” In Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal: Proceedings of an International Symposium, Berne and Zurich (November 1994). Edited by Axel Michaels, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke, 217–249. New York: Peter Lang: 1996.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Newar secret organizations (guthi) for dance and possession conform less to the enveloping Hindu caste-order than to shaman associations among hill tribes, especially Northern Magars. Curiously, Chalier-Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 1996 (cited under the Goddess) defends this very position in same volume for Bhairava against Toffin, who had earlier objected to her acculturation thesis.

  Find this resource:

• Tripathi, Gaya Charan. “Navakalevara: The Unique Ceremony of the ‘Birth’ and ‘Death’ of the ‘Lord of the World.’” In The Cult of Jagannātha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa. Edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi, 223–264. Delhi: Manohar, 1978.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes exclusive role of former tribal (daita) priests in renewing the wooden body of Lord Jagannātha through secret rituals. A similar role is played by tribal (Baḍu) priests at Liṅgarāja temple in Bhubaneswar. Though considered too impure to partake of brahmanical offerings at the sanctum, they remain in intimate contact with the idols.

  Find this resource:

• Stietencron, Heinrich von. “The Śaiva Component in the Early Evolution of Jagannātha.” In The Cult of Jagannātha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa. Edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi, 119–123. Delhi: Manohar, 1978.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Shows how Ekapāda-Bhairava—represented as a nonanthropomorphic pole and with Vedic Antecedents in Aja Ekapāda—could have assimilated tribal deities receiving blood sacrifices. Narasimha worship, which is the most popular after that of Jagannātha-Kṛṣṇa, became dominant only from the Ganga period, whereas Śaiva acculturation could have occurred already in the pre-Somavamśī period.

  Find this resource:

Vaiṣṇavism

Sectarian rivalry between Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism is contextualized in the Origin-Myth by the dispute between Brahmā and Viṣṇu for supremacy (see the Pantheon). Viṣṇu prolongs and universalizes the pure, conservative pole of the Vedic sacrificial order; whereas Rudra (-Śiva) participates in and extrapolates its central element, impure, violent, dangerous, assimilated to all that was destructive and menacing from outside the sacrifice, as outlined in Biardeau and Malamoud 1976. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 shows how the Kaṅkālamūrti-episode confirms this contrast between the two gods of bhakti, their relative proximity and opposition to the sacrificial dharma incarnated in the classical brahmin: it is again by killing the brahmin Viṣvaksena—guarding the threshold and barring Bhairava’s access—that the Brahmanicide bearing the corpse comes face to face with the benign Viṣṇu. The Hindu Apollo rewards the impetuous Dionysus in a radically tantric mode: splitting his forehead in the vain attempt to fill the outstretched begging bowl with his own blood. The degraded criminal is recognized as the Absolute beyond good and evil, in return for the brahmanicide acknowledging the royal Viṣṇu as his foremost disciple, grantor of boons to all the gods. The myth thus reveals two complementary faces of the Bhakti ideology incarnated in Viṣṇu: an orthodox public face linked to Brahmanism and preoccupations with purity; the other, secret, face turned toward the transgressive valorization of impurity symbolized by Bhairava. In his bloodthirsty “Man-Lion” (nara-simha) form, popular with the esoteric Pāñcarātras, this Preserver of the Universe likewise emerged from the sacrificial (stake-) pillar to disembowel a haughty demon-king for refusing to acknowledge his omnipresence. Narasimha’s iconography allowed Vaiṣṇavism to compete with Śaivism and Śāktism in assimilating bloody pole-divinities intruding from the Tribal Substratum in Orissa, as argued in Eschmann 1978. The Narasimha-Bhairava popular among Srilankan Tamils ambiguously conflates earlier sectarian conflict with their conceptual fusion. Vāmanapurāṇa describes Mahāpāśupatas bearing trident and conch, worshipping Bhairava as Viṣṇu; Vaiṣṇava temples in Karnataka abound in Bhairava images, as detailed in Ladrech 2010. Where the criminal god manifests primarily as the demon devotee, bhakti can effect a reversal such that Bhairava’s own decapitation attests instead to the reign of Vaiṣṇava purity, as shown in Erndl 1989. The chaste, vegetarian, benign Vaiṣṇo Devī slays and converts the would-be tantric rapist into her exemplary worshipper. For Chalier-Visuvalingam 1985, their ambivalent encounter is nevertheless the opportunity for the Goddess—earlier incarnated as the submissive Sītā and still accompanied by a devoted heroic long-tailed monkey—to reveal the hidden bloodthirsty aspect of the effeminate Viṣṇu as Sacrifice.

• Biardeau, Madeleine, and Charles Malamoud. Le Sacrifice dans l’Inde Ancienne. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 78. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  For Biardeau, Bhakti surpasses and suspends the exclusivism of brahmanical sacrifice by generalizing its complementary pure and impure poles, making them accessible in differentiated ways to whole of society. Purāṇic mythologies, temple worship, pilgrimage circuits, the aesthetics of devotion, the two national epics, and other popular expressions served to counter the appeal of (especially heterodox) renunciation (Jainism and Buddhism).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Adepts of the God Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition.” Paper presented to Assembly of the World Religions, New York, December 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Published only in Serbian translation. The hermeneutics here of Vaiṣṇo Devī was dropped from Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 to be integrated within Erndl 1989. Though the tantric adept is portrayed as a rapist punished by the Virgin, pilgrims retrace his “demonic” itinerary to voluntarily surrender their coconut-heads to the Mother-Goddess. This union of Bhairava-Vaiṣṇavī dramatizes the pure sacrificer’s feminized regression back to the womb as the evil dīkṣita (see Embryogony).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The collusion of Bhairava and Viṣṇu superposes and validates both exoteric and esoteric readings of Brahmanicide. With the rise of independent Āgamas as alternatives to the Vedic tradition, Śiva rendered auspicious ascends to Viṣṇu’s conservative role. Section C shows that public Cosmic Liṅga worship in nuclear temples—such as at Kāśī-Viśvanātha—is nevertheless complemented by secretive transgressive rituals that continue to identify Śiva with Bhairava.

  Find this resource:

• Erndl, Kathleen M. “Rapist or Bodyguard, Demon or Devotee: Images of Bhairo in the Mythology and Cult of Vaiṣṇo Devī.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 239–250. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Her bhakti-focused approach incorporates Chalier-Visuvalingam’s interpretation (1985) of this pious pilgrimage near Jammu (Kashmir) as reenacting carnivorous Bhairon Nāth’s relentless pursuit of the chaste vegetarian Goddess. Historically, the present purified cult might reflect the appropriation and popularization by Vaiṣṇava bhakti of a tantric, even aboriginal, goddess-cult that has remained a covert expression of transgressive sacrality.

  Find this resource:

• Eschmann, Anncharlott. “Varāha and Narasimha, and Narasimha’s Relation to Śaivism and Tribal Cults.” In The Cult of Jagannātha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa. Edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi, 101–106. Delhi: Manohar, 1978.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Both have theriomorphic and nonanthropomorphic iconographies, fierce female manifestations included in the “seven mother-goddesses” (sapta-mātṛkā), and are often the only Vaiṣṇava representations in Orissan Śiva temples. Jagannātha trio is treated during Navakalevara as Narasimha, whose mantra is employed in all rites, suggesting Jagannātha was previously identical with the Vaiṣṇava Man-Lion (Tribal Substratum).

  Find this resource:

• Ladrech, Karine. Le crâne et le glaive: Représentations de Bhairava en Inde du Sud (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles). École Française d’Extrême Orient, Collection Indologie 112. Pondichéry, France: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Vāmana Purāṇa describes these Mahāpāśupatas as the last of the Śaiva ascetic orders rushing to Bhairava’s aid in his fight against the demon Andhaka. In Karnataka (unlike Tamil Nadu and Andhra), Bhairava appears in numerous Vaiṣṇava temples and at all levels.

  Find this resource:

Buddhism

Vajra-Bhairava is the principal meditational and protective divinity of the Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa school. The transgressive Bhairava found acceptance in radical Buddhist tantras, where he is assimilated to similar terrifying divinities such as Heruka, Cakra-Saṁvara, and Yamāntaka (see Snellgrove 2003). Circulating between Śaiva and Vajrayāna initiates, such esoteric doctrines and forbidden texts were continually adapted to the otherwise incompatible metaphysical frameworks of the opposed traditions, sustaining continued scholarly controversy as to historical precedence, seen in Sanderson 2009. Kāpālika motifs going back to Vedic imagery (tree of life, etc.) are abundant in radical Tibetan tantras, in which liberation is conferred on the demoniac Rudra through his ritual murder by a Bhairava-like divinity, as elaborated in Stein 1971–1972 and contextualized in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989. The unorthodox iconography of the imposing Kāla Bhairab before the Katmandu royal palace reflects Tibetan Buddhist conventions, as stated in Slusser 1982. How such elite symbiosis was reflected in popular worship and social organization is best revealed by the royal festivals of Katmandu and Patan, reconstituted in Chalier-Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 2004. From the earliest times, monarchs from Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava dynasties patronized Buddhism and several ended up renouncing their thrones and retiring to a monastery. Pacali Bhairab, the ancestral deity of the staunchly Hindu farmer clans, is impersonated, along with the rest of the Aṣṭamātṛkā, by a low-caste Buddhist dancer who empowers the Nepali king and rejuvenates the kingdom through an exchange of swords. The actors involved—painters and other artisans responsible for preparing the Pacali jar, the co-officiant at the annual festival, the legitimizing Kumārī who incarnates the royal Goddess, and the Vajrācārya priest who supervises the king’s empowerment—span the hierarchy of Buddhist castes. The royal festivals are, as a rule (e.g., also at Nuwakot), officiated at the highest level not by a Hindu court brahmin (Rājopādhyāya) but by Buddhist Vajrācāryas, who alone conserve his most potent secrets. However, Bhairava, at least in his Hindu aspect, is rarely the family or personal deity of these key actors who worship specific Buddhist gods and goddesses. Most paradoxical is that these transsectarian festivals conform to a brahmanical sacrificial schema centered on the fire and (theft of) the soma. When juxtaposed to the parallel symbiosis at the level of doctrine and spiritual practice evidenced by the Trika currents of Kashmir and Śaiva patronage by the Buddhist rulers of Pāla Bengal, a dialectical process of Hindu-Buddhist acculturation may be discerned whereby the consecrated Vedic sacrificer (dīkṣita), Buddhist Tāntrika, and tribal shaman have converged onto the figure of Bhairava, as seen in Chalier-Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 2004.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Part G not only summarizes the relevant points dispersed across R. A. Stein’s several French articles but also demonstrates how the Buddhist soteriology formulated in these radical tantric practices clarifies the meaning of the Hindu death rituals and the role of Bhairava in Banaras.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth, and Sunthar Visuvalingam. “Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Relations: Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu.” In EVAM Forum on Indian Representations. Vol. 3. Edited by Makarand Paranjape, 119–166. New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Chalier-Visuvalingam’s middle section on the “The King and the Gardener” describes the Buddhist actors and their respective roles in the daily ritual, annual festival, and exchange of swords with the king every twelve years. Visuvalingam’s opening section “A. Between Veda and Tantra,” and concluding section “C. Between Lhasa and Benaras: Vedic Sacrifice, Buddhist Tantricism and Tribal Cultures” develop a full-blown model of Hinduism through a historical logic of acculturation.

  Find this resource:

• Sanderson, Alexis. “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period.” In Genesis and Development of Tantrism. Edited by Shingo Einoo, 41–350. Special Series 23. Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Sanderson’s work as a whole relies on manuscript traditions corroborated by epigraphy to underline the primacy and precedence of the Śaiva over the Buddhist tantras. The complex overdetermination of the Newar Bhairava festivals would instead suggest a Vedic-Shamanistic (tribal) matrix from which shared tantric practices would have emerged.

  Find this resource:

• Slusser, Mary. Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Volume 1 is a readable and comprehensive overview of Newar history, religious denominations, oral traditions, temples, festivals, and customs, with much emphasis on the Katmandu Valley as a living laboratory of Hindu-Buddhist symbiosis. Volume 2 is a rich gallery of photography. Slusser offers much material relating specific Bhairava shrines to various kings.

  Find this resource:

• Snellgrove, Llewellyn David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors. Boston: Shambhala, 2003.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering exhaustive exposition of development of Buddhist philosophy and practice from world-renouncing beginnings through Mahāyāna to Mantrayāna. Part 3 describes the formative Indian period of Vajrayāna—assimilated in latter form by the Tibetans (Part 5)—its transgressive (sexual) practices (equivalent to Bhairava’s Kula Sacrifice) and the deities that presided over them. Originally published in 1987 (London: Serindia).

  Find this resource:

• Stein, Rolf A. L‘Annuaire du Collège de France. Paris: Collège de France, 1971–1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The relevant points, reworked from Stein’s lecture notes and difficult to obtain, have been condensed in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989, which provides full bibliographic details. Stein closely examines ritual artifacts such as the skull-staff (khaṭvāṅga) and furnace, used in the Tibetan ritual, and recounts the associated myths of Rudra’s liberation.

  Find this resource:

Islam

The widespread violence of the initial encounter with monotheistic iconoclasm, embodied by the proselytizing zeal of Salar Masud (nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni) gradually gave way, after the Islamic conquest of the 12th century, to a competitive symbiosis around other shared values. Muslim rulers built splendid mosques on the sites of ancient Hindu temples, transforming or transplanting their sacred pillars into victory monuments. The Lāṭ Bhairo pillar of Banaras now stands as a solitary vestige in the middle of an open-air prayer ground (îdgâh), where goat sacrifices are offered during Id. Uneasily accommodating worship by both communities, it has been the recurring focal point of religious confrontation, as recounted in Irwin 1983. Lower-caste Muslims had, however, participated in the Lāṭ’s annual marriage, just as their Hindu neighbors joined them in celebrating that of the martyred Ghāzi Miyan (Salar Masud). Such syncretism is explicable through lower-caste Hindus retaining their customs even after conversion and Muslims assimilating traits of local Hindu worship. Religious symbiosis around (regional forms of) Bhairava is seen in Khaṇḍobā as being equated to Mallu or Ajmat Khān, or having a Muslim wife, in the Deccan, as detailed in Sontheimer 1976. Draupadī’s popular cult has Muslim devotee-turned-demigod in Muttal Ravuttan, which is explored in Hiltebeitel 1988. The Bhairavnāth procession at Rajauri in Jammu-Kashmir enjoys joint celebration and patronage, archived at Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. Such convergence was facilitated by the Bhairava-worshipping Nāth ascetics, who had regular exchanges with their counterparts among the Sufi orders and whose esoteric physiological practices found their way into South Asian Islam and thence, through successive manuscript translations to the Middle East, as reconstructed in Ernst 2003. Gaborieau 1975 shows that the Muslim celebration of Ghazi Miyan, represented by a phallic pole bearing his decapitated head, is to all appearances the grafting of the Hindu solar worship at Bahraich onto the martyred iconoclast. Systematic comparison with the popular celebration of Muharram, again with massive Hindu participation, reveals its sacrificial and sexual notations to have twin roots in both the pagan Bhairava cult and esoteric Shiʿa notions that go back to Iran and eventually to the Abrahamic sources, which are pursued in Visuvalingam and Chalier-Visuvalingam 1993. Seen against the ritualized backdrop of Shiʿa-Sunni conflict and of intra-Hindu conflict during festivals such as Bisket, even the real outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim violence around the Bhairava pole illustrate a shared theory of sacrifice that has been translated into jihad and martyrdom in the Islamic context. For Visuvalingam 1989, Bhairava offers a privileged handle for understanding religious conflict and the contemporary problem of generalized violence in a terrorized world increasingly deprived of traditional methods of containment.

• Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Includes links to videos and news articles of this procession that ushers in the carnival of Holi. Black-clad, almost nude, Bhairavnāth blesses taunting devotees by striking them with tongs. The festival is credited with maintaining communal harmony in this otherwise violence-prone border town with Pakistan.

  Find this resource:

• Ernst, Carl. “The Islamization of Yoga in the Amṛtakuṇḍa Translations.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13.2 (2003): 199–226.

  DOI: 10.1017/S1356186303003079Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This article is part of the book, The Pool of Nectar: Muslim Interpreters of Yoga. Esoteric psycho-physiological practices of the Nāths, with attendant tantric Hindu symbolisms, were recorded and translated by Sufi enthusiasts into Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, etc., and adapted to Islamic doctrine and cosmology. Sometimes the esoteric manuscript for initiates retains original readings expunged from its exoteric version. Ernst tends to minimize the significance of such borrowings.

  Find this resource:

• Gaborieau, Marc. “Légende et culte du saint Musulman Ghazi Miyan au Népal occidental et en Inde du Nord.” Objets et Mondes 15.3 (1975): 289–318.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This French article, by the foremost anthropologist of South Asian Islam in France, provides ethnographic details of the popular worship as practiced at its epicenter in Bahraich, and elsewhere in North India and Nepal. He notes its syncretic character, the massive Hindu participation, and the likelihood of its having been a Hindu solar cult.

  Find this resource:

• Hiltebeitel, Alf. The Cult of Draupadī. Vol. 1, Mythologies: From Gingee to Kurukṣetra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Plied with liquor and intoxicants (opium, marijuana), possessing his devotees, Muttāl Rāvuttan has links with Khaṇḍobā especially through their association with horse, dog, and tiger. Hiltebeitel links the emplacement of this protector of territory (kṣetrapāla) in the northeast and his neutralizing role to Bhairava and the Vedic butcher (see Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata).

  Find this resource:

• Irwin, John. “The Lāṭ Bhairõ at Banaras (Varanasi): Another Pre-Ashokan Monument?” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (1983): 321–352.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  After the 1811 riots reduced the original pillar to a stump, Muslims claimed it had been erected by Feroz Shah Tughlaq. Irwin’s subsequent “Akbar and the Cosmic Pillar” in 1986, “Islam and the Cosmic Pillar” in 1987, etc., show how Islamic rulers transformed them into victory monuments but remained aware of their original cosmogonic significance.

  Find this resource:

• Sontheimer, Gunther Dietz. Biroba, Mhaskoba und Khandoba: Ursprung, Geschichte und Umwelt von pastoralen Gottheiten in Maharastra. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner, 1976.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering fieldwork on Bhairava-worship across the Deccan that documents the transsectarian acculturation of deities from Tribal Substratum. Such Muslim participation is restated in Sontheimer 1989 (cited under Embryogony) and interpreted in Visuvalingam 1989: Mallana, alias Malkhān, appears as a Pathān on horseback, and converts the Muslim Śiva bhaktas of Mecca by corrupting their traditions and working miracles through cow slaughter.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The final section on “Sacrifice, Bhakti and Terror” develops a general theory of violence from the overlapping Hindu-Muslim images of the terrifying Bhairava in relation to the archaic sacrifice, somewhat along the lines of René Girard’s paradigm of the scapegoat as a ritual mechanism to contain innate human aggressivity.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar, and Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam. “Between Mecca and Banaras: Towards an Acculturation-Model of Muslim-Hindu Relations.” Islam and the Modern Age 24.1 (February 1993): 20–69.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The authors draw on Gaborieau 1975 to show that Ghāzi Miyan is the transposition of a solar Bhairava cult linking Benares to Bahraich that has thereby reshaped the South Asian celebration of Muharram, before arguing that the shared assimilation of (sacrificial) death to sexual union can be traced back simultaneously to classical Sanskrit and Islamic sources.

  Find this resource:

Jainism

Relatively little has been written on the role of Bhairava in Jain traditions and contemporary worship. The ideal of self-purification embodied by the ascetic Mahāvīra and the extreme commitment to nonviolence would seem to allow little place for the impure and often hedonistic criminal-god in the literature and pantheon of a vegetarian religion, described in Guerinot 1926, that does not recognize a God-like supreme being. Faced with the insecurities and hostilities of life-in-this-world, however, Jain communities, particularly of the sky-clad Digambara sect, have long since conformed to pan-Indian practice, by integrating Bhairava as “gate keeper” (dvāra-pāla) or “protector of the territory” (kṣetra-pāla) within their temple complexes. In this modest role, he is sometimes confused with Maṇibhadra (or Mānabhadra), an ancient chthonic fertility spirit (yakṣa). Jain institutions in Rajasthan, for example, repeatedly fell prey to Islamic iconoclasm and were subsequently able to rebuild and reinstall their Tīrthāṅkara images only under the protection and patronage of native kings. The origin myth of the Nakoda Bhairava claims the warrior-god came to the village to protect the Jain temple of Pārśvanātha from Moghul destruction. This most renowned of Jain Bhairavas overshadows the principal idol and is propitiated by a constant stream of pilgrims, including Hindus, from all over India to grant material boons, particularly to the childless. Jain temples elsewhere, even across the worldwide diaspora, for example, Chicago, include replicas of Nakoda Bhairava that receive regular worship, which is documented at Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. At Nakoda, his devotees frequently fall into a trance, a phenomenon also seen during nights of the new moon and the Navarātra festival at the magnificent Jain temple complex at Ranakpur (Rajasthan) before a beautifully sculpted Bhairava image flanked by a nude Mistress of Yoga (Jogeśvarī), despite their being simply part of the decorative architecture, as noted in Chalier-Visuvalingam 2003. Just as brahmanical tradition domesticated and promoted tribal deities that were too popular to be ignored, Nakoda Bhairava probably reflects Jaina acculturation, which was not immune to transsectarian tantricism with its recourse to mantras as the source of miraculous powers (siddhi). Jains worshipped the Hindu goddess Pūrṇeśvarī flanked by her consort Mahānātha Bhairava described by the Śripadmāvatī Pūjana, and had their own tantric manuals such as the Bhairava-padmāvatī-kalpa attributed to Mallisena (11th century) and translated by Jhavery 1944. Though Jain adepts propitiated Bhairava through apparently transgressive methods—such as harnessing the attraction to another’s wife in a sexually charged situation as described in Sanderson 2009—these are justified as feats of ascetic endurance reminiscent of Mahātmā Gandhi’s experiments with truth.

• Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Includes links to videos of the worship of Nakoda Bhairava and to a web page reproducing his replicas in Jain temples across the world. Fuller understanding of Jaina doctrine in historical (even diasporic) context must defer to such institutional sanction of otherwise unorthodox forms of popular devotion.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. Bhairava: Terreur et protection; Mythes, rites et fêtes à Bénarès et à Katmandou. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though chapter 18 introduces Bhairava worship in Jainism, the popular and tantric aspects of his cult that do not conform to orthodox self-representation require more systematic research.

  Find this resource:

• Guerinot, Armand Albert. La religion djaïne: Histoire, doctrine, culte, coutumes, institutions. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste P. Geuthner, 1926.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This comprehensive overview of Jaina history, doctrines, worship, customs, and institutions, though available only in French and dated, remains an excellent introduction to Jainism and its self-representation.

  Find this resource:

• Jhavery, Mohanlal Bhagwandas. Comparative and Critical Study of Mantrashastra: With Special Treatment of Jain Mantravada Being the Introduction to Shree Bhairava Padmavati Kalpa. Ahmedabad, India: Sarabhai Manilal Nawab, 1944.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The first English work, with translation, on the tantric aspect of Jainism had an initial print run of only four hundred copies but is available online in its entirety. Given its early date, much of the introduction is an apology for tantricism that could be usefully skipped by the modern reader.

  Find this resource:

• Sanderson, Alexis. “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period.” In Genesis and Development of Tantrism. Edited by Shingo Einoo, 41–350. Special Series 23. Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In the section on “Jains’ Adaptation of Śaiva Mantraśāstra,” three reputed teachers successfully propitiate the Siddha-cakra-mantra in seclusion with the help of the wife of a village headman or the daughter-in-law of a farmer. Hemacandra repeated the mantra for three days on his consort’s vulva without his mind being disturbed.

  Find this resource:

The Goddess

The Great Goddess, subsequent construct of the Hindu patriarchal order from myriad independent village and tribal goddesses, inspires the agendas of contemporary feminism, while interrogating its Western presuppositions, as attested by Hiltebeitel and Erndl 2000. Transcending the opposition of the sexes, the nondual Absolute could be represented equally by Bhairavī, who reunites with her male namesake in the “primordial” sacrifice of Kula-Yāga, their compenetration being referred to also through the neutered gender, as noted by Chalier-Visuvalingam 1994. Even in radical tantras, however, their shared enjoyment is more often the means to liberate male consciousness (puruṣa), which remains still inwardly detached at the climax, as in the ancient Sāṅkhya dualism that insists on ultimate rejection of the inscrutable female (prakṛti), our own seductive nature, as analyzed in Collins 2000. In his aesthetics of love-in-union (sambhoga), Abhinavagupta typically refers to the male as “enjoying subject” (bhoktṛ) with the female as “object of enjoyment” (bhogyā). The social independence or equality of the South Asian woman is to be found mostly on the fringes and beyond within the Tribal Substratum, before her domestication into the Hindu caste-order. Bhairava—ubiquitous guardian, chaperon, and alter ego—has been instrumental in usurping her dangerous powers. Several operations converge to masculinize the wild goddess: her enshrined sex becomes ambiguous, her wooden post becomes the Cosmic Liṅga, her festivals now revolve around a sacred male possessed by Bhairava, though their origin-myth explicitly states that the bloodthirsty Amazon reigned alone before being seduced, subjugated, and espoused by the intrigued Lord of the Universe (Viśvanātha) from Banaras, as detailed in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1996. Yet, feminine attire is worn by male Śākta adepts in secret rites and by her priests during public worship. Panda 2004 notes how royal dynasties in Orissa adopted the tribal “mistress of the post” (Skambheśvarī) as tutelary divinity. She was assimilated thereby to the Vedic yūpa erected on the edge of feminine (vulva-) altar. The wood for this “phallic” sacrificial post was from the maternal Śamī tree, as shown in Biardeau 2004 (see also General Overviews and Vedic Antecedents). Jagannātha and his temple-courtesan unite as Bhairava-Bhairavī to reveal his inmost Kālī-identity, as revealed in Marglin 1985. Theme of the erect (ūrdhva) phallus is inextricably linked to castration already in the Origin-Myth of Bhairava, and obligatory transvestitism becomes remedy for impotence in Goddess worship, as seen in Pattanaik 2002. Their transgressive reunification aims to achieve the inner androgyny divinized as Śiva-Ardhanārīśvara and the “effeminate” long-haired Kṛṣṇa. Perhaps the male “phallocrat” (XY) is just a specialized mutation that protected the reproductive survival of an essentially feminine (XX) species, thereby incidentally acquiring the possibility of self-consciousness.

• Biardeau, Madeleine. Stories about Posts: Vedic Variations around the Hindu Goddess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Here we see the polarized gender of the village post reflected in behavior of the possessed devotee: offering her the flame (ārati) while dancing on the back of the buffalo to be sacrificed, Potu Rāju at Solārpur is simultaneously his own executioner, Mahiṣāsuramardinī, dancing astride the buffalo-demon. This symbolic fusion—already in Vedic sacrifice—of sex, death, and androgyny remains unexplained.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism.” In Between Jerusalem and Benares. Edited by Hananya Goodman, 195–222. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Shows how the external sexual coupling of Kaula sacrifice reproduces androgynous union internally within each partner, hence the Bhairavian Octave (bhairavāṣṭakam) is rendered in the neuter gender. Orgasm is polarized between transcendence (śānta) and emergence (udita). Liberated women are seen as privileged depositories of erotic wisdom, the symbolic and conceptual roots of which derive from esoteric core of the patriarchal Vedic sacrifice.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth, and Sunthar Visuvalingam. “Bhairava and the Goddess, Tradition, Gender and Transgression.” In Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal: Proceedings of an International Symposium, Berne and Zurich (November 1994). Edited by Axel Michaels, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke, 253–301. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Shows that the converse of the esoteric feminization of the male adept through tantric sex is the masculinization of the tribal goddess. Hence his possession by Bhairava in Bhairavī’s Nuwakot royal festival. Contrasts the male and female modes of spiritual experience to argue that gender polarization is the precondition for transgressive androgynous reunion.

  Find this resource:

• Collins, Alfred. “Dancing with Prakriti: The Samkhyan Goddess as Pativrata and Guru.” In Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl, 52–68. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Supplements classical Sāṅkhya’s repudiation of prakṛti with traditional tales—replete with tantric notations—of a faithful wife enlightening her deluded puruṣa. Shows how the ambivalence of the purified (sāttvika) ego (ahaṁkāra) as (illusory) self-object reflects and arrogates the independence of the detached Puruṣa: hence enlightenment is attained through sacrifice to the Goddess. This scenario corresponds to Bhairava’s decapitation by Vaiṣṇo-Devī (Vaiṣṇavism).

  Find this resource:

• Hiltebeitel, Alf, and Kathleen M. Erndl, eds. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Several contributors, including Hiltebeitel and Erndl, have studied Bhairava’s avatars. Explorations here of the blatant contradiction between Hindu patriarchy and adoration of the feminine are tempered with cross-cultural ethics of using Western feminism as comparative yardstick.

  Find this resource:

• Marglin, Frédérique Apffel. Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadāsīs of Puri. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Comprehensive study of temple courtesans in relation to public bhakti and dissimulated transgressive sexuality. During the evening erotic singing (from Gīta-Govinda)—symbolizing the union of Bhairava-Bhairavī—Śiva-Ardhanārīśvara’s statue is placed at the entrance to the dance hall: this scenario is assimilated to Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa’s dance-dalliance (rāsa-līlā) “without shedding seed” (Acyuta). Courtesan’s morning dance assimilates Lord of the World (Jagannātha) to Kālī.

  Find this resource:

• Panda, Sasanka S. “Bhairava Worship in the Upper Mahanadi Valley.” Orissa Review (January 2004): 37–51.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Extensive illustrated ethnohistorical report on Bhairava sculptures dating back to the 8th–9th centuries. Almost all are ithyphallic (as in neighboring Bengal and Assam), some also dancing, or supinely engaged in coitus with the goddess standing astride. Panda attributes their location and popularity to left-handed tantric assimilation of deities from Tribal Substratum.

  Find this resource:

• Pattanaik, Devdutt. The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales of Hindu Lore. New York: Harrington Park, 2002.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Underlying theme of Arjuna’s androgynous (virāṭ) regression to the Matsya fish-womb (Embryogony) is translated into his sojourn as a virile (bṛhan-naḍā) eunuch in the royal harem, which is a punishment for refusing Urvaśī’s maternal advances. Impotent males regain their virility by worshipping Bahucara Mātā, goddess of eunuchs (hijra), through transvestite behavior as (symbolic) castration. Her cock-vehicle (kurkuṭ) is the two-mouthed kuṇḍalinī-serpent (Cosmic Liṅga).

  Find this resource:

Embryogony

Bhairava is persistently associated with womb symbols: river, cave, anthill, well, pool, fish, stone, and water pot. Kāśī’s sacred location is at a bend where the Ganges flows northward as if back toward her source. The Brahmanicide of the Origin-Myth is absolved during and within her fish-womb (matsyodarî). Eck 1983 describes this conjunction (yoga): flooding reversed the flow of her tributary Varuṇa transforming the City of Light—its central Omkāra temple beside Kāpālamocana—into the primordial mound. Hindu kings imitated the Skull-Bearer, for the 12th-century Govindacandra bathed in the Ganga at Kāpālamocana during Matsyodarî before making a land donation to a Brahman. Bhairava is worshipped at the bottom of stepped wells in Rajasthan. In the Deccan, Khaṇḍobā, etc., reside within termite mounds where turmeric and other offerings are made to solar Mārtāṇḍa-Bhairava—see Sontheimer 1989. Newar Bhairab is typically worshipped as a masked pot from whose mouth alcohol—including a tiny fish—flows in abundance, which is discussed in Toffin 2010. In an origin-myth of the Nuwakot royal festival, as recounted in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1996, the stone representing the Goddess at her Devī Ghāt temple was retrieved from the riverbed by a fisherman, who still offers a commemorative fish to the Dhāmi at this confluence of two rivers. The original Dhāmi, while offering the stone a goat, was possessed by Bhairava and drank its blood. Bhairava became a fisherman to retrieve from a fish-belly the submerged Kaula doctrine, whose founder is Matsyendranātha, as is discussed in Ladrech 2010. Stein 1988 shows grottos across Asia identified as the womb of the Goddess. Erndl 1989 (cited under General Overviews) recounts how Vaiṣṇo Devī hid in a cave: when would-be rapist Bhairo penetrates in hot pursuit, the now-frightful Goddess decapitates the tantric adept as he emerges from within. Pilgrims may be seen still following his itinerary through her womb-cave on YouTube, as seen at svAbhinava (cited under Laughter). For Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 and Chalier-Visuvalingam 1994, transgressive regression to the primordial chaos, which underlies both Vedic sacrifice and Tantric initiation (dīkṣā), is exteriorized through the annual cosmogonic festivals of Indra and Bhairava. The dīkṣita’s corresponding feminization is expressed through the goddess spending nine months in her own womb. Ultimate aim of embryogony would be to inwardly relive the moment of conception and forge a new self. The primordial mound is the ovum being anchored to the uterine wall of Mother Ganga, who is said to menstruate during her monsoonal flow. “Born of the Yoginī” (yoginībhū) and attaining immortality in Bhairava’s cave, Abhinavagupta would have experienced the Absolute (Anuttara) through this fish-womb.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Interprets the primordial mound as bisexual embryo and also the world-egg (brahmāṇḍa) as the ovum before its fixation to the uterine wall; see F. B. J. Kuiper, “Cosmogony and Conception: A Query,” Ancient Indian Cosmogony. Edited by J. Irwin (Delhi: Vikas, 1983), pp. 90–137. Omkāra and Kāśī also symbolize Bhairava as primordial unstruck sound (anāhata-nāda) and as light, respectively.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism.” In Between Jerusalem and Benares. Edited by Hananya Goodman, 195–222. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Yoginībhū is the fiery consciousness born of internal unification (within each partner), and only secondarily the physical child of their external sexual union. “Creating an embryo” is being initiated at supreme level where the Bhairava-adept has appropriated Lord’s function of universal creation. For Kuiper, (Vedic) cosmogony (see the Pantheon) relives the moment of conception.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava and the Goddess: Tradition, Gender, and Transgression.” In Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal. Edited by Axel Michaels, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke, 253–301. Studia Religiosa Helvetica 96. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The origin-myth of the Nuwakot royal festival: the Goddess commanded a fisherman who kept retrieving a mere stone to install it as her manifestation at the Devī Ghāt temple. When the original Dhāmi offered a goat to this stone from the riverbed, he was immediately possessed by Bhairava and drank its blood. In commemoration, a fisherman offers a fish to the current Dhāmi at this confluence of two rivers.

  Find this resource:

• Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Reconstruction of matsyodarî-yoga from texts and fieldwork is found in Sukul 1977 (cited under Banaras). But relevant findings and related materials on Ganges and Bhairava are more accessible in Eck’s English classic. Embryogony is linked to Viṣṇu’s foot in the highest heaven and his three strides in Vedic sacrifice.

  Find this resource:

• Ladrech, Karine. Le crâne et le glaive: Représentations de Bhairava en Inde du Sud (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles). École Française d’Extrême Orient, Collection Indologie 112. Pondichéry, France: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This origin-myth recorded in the Kaulajñānanirṇaya adds that Bhairava was unable to drag the fish up to the light of day until he surrendered his brahmin identity for that of (an invariably impure) fisherman. “Indra Lord of the Fish” (Matsyendranātha, also called Macchendra, Macchanda, etc.) is identified with Bhairava.

  Find this resource:

• Sontheimer, Gunther Dietz. “Between Ghost and God: A Folk Deity of the Deccan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 299–337. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Here golden turmeric offered to Mārtāṇḍa-Bhairava’s anthill residence is also a substitute for blood (sacrifice). Sontheimer notes the Vedic origins of this symbolic complex that he interprets rather as reflecting the “popular” and Tribal Substratum. See John Irwin, “The Sacred Anthill and the Cult of the Primordial Mound,” History of Religions 21 (1982): 339–360.

  Find this resource:

• Stein, Rolf A. Grottes-matrices et lieux saints de la déesse en Asie Orientale. Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient CLI. Paris: Adrien-Masonneuve, 1988.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though this monograph (106 pages) is available only in French and does not discuss Bhairava, its implications for understanding cave shrines in South Asia are worked out in Chalier-Visuvalingam’s various essays cited in this bibliography. Sanctum sanctorum (garbha-gṛha) of the Hindu temple reflects a womb-cave within a man-made mountain aspiring to heaven.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. La fête-spectacle: Théâtre et rite au Népal. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences Humaines, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes how Pacali, Sweto, and Ākāśa Bhairabs are worshipped as imposing alcohol-filled pots harboring luck-conferring minnows. Sweto Bhairab’s dance, when he playfully grabs apprehensive infants, is called “catching fish.” Indra Chowk, where Ākāśa Bhairab’s temple is situated, was formerly a confluence of rivers named Kālmocan (Kāpālamocana), linking his decapitated head (Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata) to the Origin-Myth.

  Find this resource:

Bhakti

Bhairo is the archetypal “demon devotee,” repenting while slain to be resurrected by the supreme deity: the chaste Vaiṣṇo Devī thus elevates her would-be rapist into the very model of the divinized bhakta who “partakes” in her own worship, as seen in Erndl 1989. Despite this “protector of the territory” flaunting the heinous crime that defines his ultimate identity, the terrifying Brahmanicide remains the boon-granting object of devotion (bhakti), capable of superseding even the benign Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Goddess. The Kāla Bhairava Octet—attributed to the triumphant Śaṅkarācārya, philosophically defeated and obliged to surrender his brahmin head to the Fierce-Bhairava—glorifies his suzerainty over Kāśī (Banaras). Popular all over India, his polyglot hymns are going viral through eclectic remixes on YouTube, where virtual pilgrims to remote shrines pay homage to multiplying scenes of his local worship, viewable at Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. Abhinavagupta’s celebrated “Hymn to Bhairava” (bhairava-stotram), musically rendered, is illustrated with word-by-word exegeses from Western scholars, who systematically interpret his tantric legacy. This brahmin par excellence exultantly identifies himself as the terrible death-defying power of the Untouchable god: the fullness of his finite existence is recognized as a living “Hymn to Bhairava.” The Pratyabhijñā is a sustained apologetics for devotion toward the supreme nondual God, identical with the Self as Consciousness: hence the variegated emotional outpourings of the Stavacintāmaṇi, as translated by Silburn 1964 and Marjanovic 2011, and the Śivastotrāvalī by Bailly 1995. The sacrificial and transgressive underpinnings are conserved and exhibited especially in the folk substratum imbued with Bhairava’s mythical imagery: otherwise impure dogs, typically black, roam freely within his temples to be fed and even worshipped; devotees of Khaṇḍobā wear chains, imitate his dogs, and bark, as seen in Stanley 1989; invoked affectionately as the “crazy” god from Banaras, forbidden alcohol is offered and partaken of. Entertained by dancers, including prostitutes, onlookers are suddenly seized by the trance-inducing god, and worshippers become his “beasts” (paśu) of burden (e.g., horses). In Rajasthan, Rajauri, and elsewhere, the policeman-magistrate strikes eager devotees with a black fly-whisk, peacock feathers, tongs, chains, or sword, and his blessings are modeled on the salvific but deadly punishment meted out by Kāla Bhairava in Banaras. The perverse, even violent, devotions of saints (Nāyanmār) canonized by the Śaiva Siddhānta, as presented in Hudson 1989, make sense only against the antinomian background of radical tantricism that is explored in Sanderson 2006 (cited under Śaivism). Śaiva bhakti presupposes that we are all “demon devotees” who regain our transcendent identity only through the self-sacrifice of which the “criminal god” is both the object and the exemplar, as developed in Visuvalingam 1989.

• Bailly, Constantina Rhodes. Meditations on Shiva: The Śivastotrāvalī of Utpaladeva. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta’s teacher’s teacher and founder of the highly sophisticated and wide-ranging Recognition (Pratyabhijñā) school of nondual Śaivism, was highly devotional by temperament. The Pratyabhijñā doctrine may be construed as a comprehensive defense of bhakti toward a supreme personal God identical with the ultimate Self.

  Find this resource:

• Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Annotated hyperlinks to video remixes of hymns, commentaries, worship (Nakoḍa, Sonāṇā Khetlāji, Jaffna, Vaiṣṇo-Devī, Caribbean, etc.), festivals, all over India and the diaspora. Some hymns are illustrated with innocuous images of the ascetic Śiva in deference to the sensibilities of viewers unfamiliar with (the Hindu understanding of) Bhairava’s imagery.

  Find this resource:

• Erndl, Kathleen M. “Rapist or Bodyguard, Demon or Devotee: Images of Bhairo in the Mythology and Cult of Vaiṣṇo Devī.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 239–250. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This bhakti approach incorporates Chalier-Visuvalingam’s interpretation (1985) of this pious pilgrimage near Jammu (Kashmir), reenacting the carnivorous Bhairon Nāth’s itinerary in relentless pursuit of the vegetarian Goddess, as a covert expression of transgressive sacrality: Śridhar, the devout pilgrim, and Bhairavnātha are the two faces of bhakti; see Vaiṣṇavism.

  Find this resource:

• Hudson, D. Dennis. “Violent and Fanatical Devotion among the Nāyanārs: A Study in the Periya Purāṇam of Cekilār.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 373–398. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes the impetuously transgressive behavior of several Nāyanmārs (Cirutonḍar, Kannapan, etc.) difficult to reconcile with purified temple bhakti of Āgamas (Śaivism).

  Find this resource:

• Marjanovic, Boris. The Stavacintāmaṇi of Bhaṭṭanārāyaṇa: With the Commentary by Kṣemarāja. Varanasi, India: Indica, 2011.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  By a scholar of Kashmir Śaiva philosophical thought who has also been interpreting its expression through bhakti—especially a word-by-word exegesis of Abhinavagupta’s Bhairava-Stotram (see Bhairava: Multimedia Resources) online at YouTube.

  Find this resource:

• Silburn, Lilian. La Bhakti: Le Stavacintāmaṇi de Bhaṭṭanārāyaṇa. Paris: Boccard, 1964.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This is a poetic rendering of the verses that takes some liberties with the literal Sanskrit to better bring out the spirit and tenor of the devotion. Silburn harnesses her wide and deep familiarity with Kashmiri Śaivism to bear on bringing out the nuances. English translations are now also available.

  Find this resource:

• Stanley, John M. “The Capitulation of Maṇi: A Conversion Myth in the Cult of Khaṇḍobā.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 271–298. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Devotees imitate Khaṇḍobā-Bhairava’s dog, which turns the tide in the battle against Maṇi by lapping up the blood spilling from the demon’s wounds, in the myth described here. Whereas Bhairon genuinely converts as he is being decapitated by Vaiṣṇo Devī, here Maṇi despite his conversion is often confused with the unrepentant decapitated Malla, merging into the composite figure of Maṇi-Malla.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Preliminary attempt to read the triangular relation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the problematic of transgressive sacrality within Abrahamic tradition. Draws upon themes of sacrificial violence, identity of executioner and victim, transgression of ritual purity, suspension of religious law, acculturation of the Other, etc., covered by this Criminal Gods anthology, to extend this interpretative schema to the understanding of contemporary terrorism.

  Find this resource:

Festivals, Dances, and Masks

The all-inclusive character of Bhairava worship in pre-Islamic times is preserved in his Newar festivals, especially in the Katmandu Valley. The entire community—from purest court brahmin to lowest untouchable, from Buddhist and Hindu castes—participates in an intricately structured drama to reaffirm the unity and integrity of the whole. These festivals may be dedicated to (Pachali, Bāgh, Ākāśa, etc.) Bhairava, to his often indistinguishable consort (Bhairavī), or to other gods (e.g., Indra, and as their chariot-wheels), but his role remains crucial. Masked dancers, purportedly in a trance, impersonate (Sweto, Kāla, etc.) Bhairab and his (female) companions (Nava Durgā, Aṣṭamātṛkā) during and outside such festivals. Discrete episodes reenact mythical scenes, reinforcing and clarifying each other to bring to life a symbolic universe. Since around 2005, South Asians—at the risk of seeing their living traditions gradually disappear—have begun adding extended video clips to those earlier posted by foreign tourists on YouTube, as seen at Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. Because these Newar celebrations of the Pantheon are symbolically intertwined across space (sacred geography) and Time (ritual calendar), the best approach is through books describing all major festivals with chapters on those dedicated to the ubiquitous Bhairava, including Vézies 1981 and Anderson 1975. Detailed and ethnographically informed studies of Newar Bhairava festivals began with Nepali 1965. The only sustained and consistent attempt at an overarching framework for deciphering the meaning of Bhairava across these festivals (while remaining respectful of local and regional differences) has been by Chalier-Visuvalingam. The Pachali Bhairab festival, as studied in Chalier-Visuvalingam 2004, celebrated by the Hindu farmer caste of the southern half of Kathmandu, includes masked dances by low-caste Buddhist gardeners, and a royal dimension reflected in the god’s role in the Indra festival. The central actor of the Nuwakot Bhairavī festival, as seen in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1996, impersonates Bhairava to undertake the pilgrimage downhill to the confluence of two rivers at Devīghāṭ (see Embryogony), where in a trance he offers oracles for the Nepali state. In the Bisket New Year festival of Bhaktapur, the decapitated Kāla-Bhairab from Banaras is erected as the phallic pole to copulate with Bhadra-Kālī and presides over a violent tug-of-war between the two halves of the city. Though the organic communitarian dimension has been lost in post-Islamic India, remnants are found resisting the corrosive urban skepticism of the postcolonial era. Chalier-Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 2006 argues that the annual marriage of the Lāṭ pillar (liṅga), crowned with Bhairava’s head, to the adjacent well in Banaras, for example, makes complete sense only when juxtaposed to his royal festivals in Hindu Nepal.

• Anderson, Mary M. Festivals of Nepal. New Delhi: Rupa, 1975.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Covers Bisket, Macchendra (Embryogony), Pachali, Indra, Aṣṭamātṛkā, Nava-Durgā dances, dog-worship on Tihar, Bhairab as beer-pot and mask, Guhyeśvarī, Bhīmasena (see Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata), Śivarātrī, Cosmic Liṅga, Brahmanicide, Origin-Myth, and the buffalo sacrifice to the demoniac Bhairab during the Holi carnival. The pole-erection and tug-of-war for Bhairava’s chariot during the equinoctial festival corresponds to the neutralization of twin serpent-breaths and initiatic death during royal sex encoded into the founding myth of Bisket (see Time).

  Find this resource:

• Bhairava: Multimedia Resources. In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Begun on 28 June 2011, this growing compendium of links to online videos and images of festivals, dances, statues, and worship across South Asia provides scholarly annotations that are missing or inaccurate at the original source. These clarifications are often added back to the source pages at YouTube, etc., as a form of public service.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava and the Goddess: Tradition, Gender, and Transgression.” In Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal. Edited by Axel Michaels, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke, 253–301. Studia Religiosa Helvetica 96. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though focused on the feminine dimension, this firsthand account and interpretation of the Nuwakot festival, based on interviews with the dhāmi, also summarizes the Pachali Bhairab, Bisket, as well as the Indra Jātrā.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Relations: Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu.” In EVAM: Forum on Indian Representations. Vol. 3. Edited by Makarand Paranjape, 119–166. New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Originally presented as a talk in 1989, the ethnographic section B, which forms the core of a larger joint-paper titled “Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Relations,” details the caste-structure underlying his worship; the symbiosis of Hindu, Buddhist, and shamanistic elements; and the central role and meaning of kingship.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth, and Sunthar Visuvalingam. “Bhairava in Banaras: Negotiating Sacred Space and Religious Identity.” In Visualizing Space in Banaras: Images, Maps, and the Practice of Representation. Edited by Martin Gaenszle and Jörg Gengnagel, 95–128. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes the celebration of the marriage of Lāṭ Bhairon’s pillar with the adjacent well, interpreted as the remnant of a royal cosmogony that would have originally provided the ritual paradigm for not only the various Bhairava festivals but also the Indra Jātrā of Nepal.

  Find this resource:

• Nepali, Gopal Singh. The Newars: An Ethno-sociological Study of a Himalayan Community. Bombay: United Asia, 1965.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Pioneering study by first native Newar ethnographer. Inscribes Bhairab in the Pantheon before describing his processional festivals: Bisket, Nuwakot, and (in Katmandu) Naradevī, Pahan Chare, especially Pacali, and his role in Indra Jātrā. Characterized by abundant blood sacrifice and beer drinking, the unifying role involving the entire conglomeration is even more apparent in rural festivals.

  Find this resource:

• Vézies, Jean-François. Les fêtes magiques du Népal. Paris: Cesare Rancillio, 1981.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Thin French illustrated book provides overviews of Indra, Bisket, Nuwakot, and Pachali Bhairab festivals. Provides but few additional details missing in the larger English work of Anderson 1975. The vivid descriptions and personal style of both these books will appeal to general readers, especially tourists, even while remaining useful references for the scholar.

  Find this resource:

Kingship

Śiva’s promised suzerainty over Hinduism’s sacred city (Origin-Myth) translates into the Brahmanicide being promoted to policeman-magistrate (kotwal) of Kāśī-Viśvanātha. Bhairava is the typical “protector of the territory” (kṣetra-pāla) throughout India, assimilating minor guardian deities such as the Tamil Kāttavarāyan. Shulman 1989 narrates how this outcaste trickster son of Śiva, who defies the Rājā of the Āryan city by seducing the virgin daughter of the Vedic brahmins and consummating their forbidden love on the fatal stake, is nevertheless enacting a self-sacrificial ritual of kingship. For Sontheimer 1989, folk deities of the Deccan such as Khaṇḍobā, consecrated by subsequent Purāṇic mythology as upholders of hierarchical Hindu order, correspond to intrusive robber barons indifferent to caste distinctions while carving out their petty kingdoms. Toffin 1979 and Toffin 1986 argue that the Newar king, identified in turn with Indra, Viṣṇu, and Śiva as sovereign gods—intriguingly, also with Bhairava and the Goddess—challenges the Indian secularization of the royal function, theorized by Dumont 1980 (cited under the Pantheon). Already the Vedic consecration (dīkṣā) had ambiguously elevated the soma-entitled (warrior-)king above his brahmin officiants, as shown by Heesterman 1957. Chalier-Visuvalingam 2004 unearths the sacrificial schema underlying the Pachali Bhairab and related royal festivals of the Katmandu Valley: the polluting trance-inducing god of the cremation-ground reenacts the death-and-rebirth of the king-dīkṣita. The servant of the gods before his segmented polity, the transsectarian Hindu sovereign inwardly encompasses the entire Pantheon through the dialectic of transgressive sacrality, whereby the ”tribal” Bhairava inherits the mantle of the Vedic Varuṇa. Festivals that apotheosize the autocratic dominator simultaneously suggest, through ritual synchronization, the individual autonomy of participating commoners. Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 showed how this complex indigenous theory of kingship is expressed in the Mahābharata through the Pāṇḍava brothers, especially Bhīma (‑Bhairava), Arjuna‑Dhanañjaya (Indra), and Dharma‑Yudhiṣṭhira. Despite the loss of political sovereignty to Islam since the 12th century, the annual marriage of the Lāṭ Bhairo pillar of Banaras (see Chalier-Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 2006) reenacts the sacrificial reign of the “Lord of the Universe” over the Hindu symbolic universe. Local origin myths conflate them: the Newar Bhairava, the king who flies back and forth between Banaras and Lhasa, sometimes shows up elsewhere as Kāśī-Viśvanātha. Folk-guardians such as Kāttavarāyan popularize the hidden antinomian dimension of kingship by entertaining even the lowest levels of the caste society. The Great Brahmin clown (vidūṣaka) of the Sanskrit theater (see Visuvalingam 1984) forms a biunity with the royal protagonist to embody the same principle of sovereign autonomy (svātantrya) that metaphysicians such as Abhinavagupta recognize most fully in the brahmanicide Bhairava.

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section E distinguishes the various aspects of Hindu kingship: passive Yudhiṣṭhira is the brahmanized king, who performs the Rājasūya and other sacrifices. But “Crowned” (Kirīṭin) Arjuna, the “Conqueror of Wealth” (Dhanañjaya), corresponds more closely to the enterprising yet chivalrous aristocrat (kṣatriya), who seizes the reins of power (Jaya). Nevertheless, both Yudhiṣṭhira and Arjuna betray transgressive notations that become explicit in popular perceptions of Bhīma-Bhairava and Draupadī-Kālī (see Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Relations: Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu.” In EVAM: Forum on Indian Representations. Vol. 3. Edited by Makarand Paranjape, 119–166. New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Elaborated in Section B: “The King and the Gardener: Pachali Bhairava of Kathmandu.” By superposing and integrating the three levels of his cult—commoners’ daily worship, annual rotation of Bhairava-pot among twelve farmer-clans, and the royal exchange of swords every twelve years—Pacali Bhairab reenacts the unity of Newar society, while revealing the king-dominator to be (merely) the sacrificer par excellence, in whose autonomy everyone participates (see the Pantheon).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth, and Sunthar Visuvalingam. “Bhairava in Banaras: Negotiating Sacred Space and Religious Identity.” In Visualizing Space in Banaras: Images, Maps, and the Practice of Representation. Edited by Martin Gaenszle and Jörg Gengnagel, 95–128. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The Lāṭ’s wedding with the maternal well, celebrated by crowning the pillar with Kāla-Bhairava’s head, coincides calendrically with Indra’s flag-staff festival in Katmandu. It also corresponds to the New Year erection of the Bisket liṅga at Bhaktapur, which is symbolically linked to Kāla-Bhairava’s decapitation. The three festivals form a single matrix. Celebration of Ghāzī Miyan’s martyrdom (see Islam) also conserves elements of this royal cosmogony.

  Find this resource:

• Heesterman, Jan. The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration: The Rājasūya Described According to the Yajus Texts and Annotated. The Hague: Mouton, 1957.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Seemingly subordinated to his brahmán officiants during the Vedic sacrifice, the otherwise profane king is elevated—through the surreptitious symbolism of his consecration—into the central and all-inclusive pillar of the cosmos. Reconciling such “anomalies” with Dumont 1980 (cited under the Pantheon) and its secularization thesis animates ongoing debates over Hindu kingship, including Bhairava’s role in the established pantheon and in royal festivals.

  Find this resource:

• Shulman, David Dean. “Outcaste, Guardian, and Trickster: Notes on the Myth of Kāttavarāyan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 35–67. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Assuming disparate disguises, this protean “guardian-king” (kāttava-rāyan) who marries women across the caste spectrum, incorporates the entire social order. For Visuvalingam 1989, Kāttavarāyan, whose brahmin birth is ultimately revealed, represents the (royal) dīkṣita, whose death is the precondition for Śiva’s androgynous reunification with mother Pārvatī, that is, regression to the womb (see Embryogony).

  Find this resource:

• Sontheimer, Gunther Dietz. “Between Ghost and God: A Folk Deity of the Deccan.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 299–337. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Claims that paradigms of the righteous king, legitimizing and upholding the brahmanical axiological schema (varṇāśrama-dharma), are hoisted upon and embraced by tribal chieftains of egalitarian communities intruding from beyond the pale of such hierarchies, as they capture and consolidate political power. Sontheimer’s ethnography, which minimizes the “hegemony” of Hindu references in contemporary practice, is often questioned by Stanley (see General Overviews).

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. “Les aspects religieux de la royauté néwar au Népal.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 48.1 (1979): 53–82.

  DOI: 10.3406/assr.1979.2189Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Reexamines Louis Dumont’s alleged secularization of Hindu kingship. Though the Newar sovereign assumes the public role of serving the gods, he is also identified with each of the major divine actors: (Vedic) Indra, (the “walking”) Viṣṇu, Śiva (Paśupatinātha), (the transgressive) Bhairava, and even with the terrifying Kālī (tutelary royal Taleju). The rationale behind the Pantheon is implicitly posed.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. “Dieux souverains et rois dévots dans l’ancienne royauté de la Vallée du Népal.” L’Homme 24.3 (1986): 71–95.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Develops further the arguments made in Toffin 1979.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology and Spiritual Praxis.” PhD diss., Banaras Hindu University, 1984.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Explains biunity of king (Indra) and “great brahmin” (Brahmā) as deriving from couple constituted by sacrificer and brahmán priest/purohita (who embodies Brahmā = Mitra-Varuṇa). Because vidūṣaka exteriorizes the antinomian dimension of the dīkṣita, he becomes on stage the caricature of the purohita through whom the king has access to Agni (gluttony) and Soma (modaka). Just as Bhairava inherits Varuṇa’s transgressive role (Pantheon), vidūṣaka despite his Vedic pedigree takes on Tantric notations.

  Find this resource:

The Pantheon

Uneasy integration of the Kāpālika outsider, having shamanistic roots in the Tribal Substratum, into the sociocosmic order challenges our understanding of the Hindu pantheon. The demon’s conversion into a protector of territory reflects the caste hierarchy, as shown in Dumont 1980: the subordination of carnivorous alcoholic deities (e.g., Tamil Karuppan) to pure vegetarian high-gods consolidates brahmin supremacy. But how was the abject criminal elevated into the supreme magistrate policing, noose in hand, Hinduism’s sacred center (see Banaras)? Opposition between the warlike Deva Indra and sovereign Asura Varuṇa, with (even etymological) affinities to the dragon-Vṛtra, is the core of Vedic dualism, as demonstrated by Bergaigne 1978. The Āryan pantheon exemplified Indo-European tri-functionalism, as theorized by Dumézil 1968: priestly sovereignty (brahmán), split between contractual fellowship and magical nemesis, through Mitra-Varuṇa; military might (kṣatriya) through Vāyu’s brute force (Maruts) and Indra’s often errant heroism; and agricultural and mercantile productivity by Aśvin twins. For Kuiper 1979, their foundation is Indra’s (annual) cosmogonic separation of heaven and earth, releasing waters and light, by slaying life-constricting Vṛtra. Mitra, allied with Indra’s expansive upperworld, is the benign face of the awesome Varuṇa (‑Mṛṭyu), the tabooed underworld. Though Vedic dualism recedes before the Hindu Trinity, the deformed Vidūṣaka of the Sanskrit theater conserved Varuṇa’s cooperative rivalry with hero-Indra. Gods of Totality are differentiated by their apportioned roles in the Sacrifice, as outlined in Biardeau and Malamoud 1976: nonworshipped creator Brahmā embodies the primacy of aniconic ritual; the preserver Viṣṇu universalizes its beneficent pure pole; and the destroyer Śiva extrapolates the violence and sexuality at its core. Viṣṇu, Śiva, and the Goddess—born of its vaginal altar—reign over the pantheon of Hindu Bhakti, which suspends, surpasses, and generalizes the otherwise exclusive Vedic religion. For Visuvalingam 1984, the otherwise profane aggrandizing king becomes the all-encompassing Consciousness (Agni-Fire) through his hidden identity with soma-relishing Great Brahmin clown-purohita, representing Brahmā = Mitra-Varuṇa. As outlined in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 and Chalier-Visuvalingam 2004, Bhairava encompasses the entire pantheon through a transgressive dialectic, originally enacted by the brahmanicide Vedic sacrificer (Indra): having undergone ascetic purification (Mitra), the dīkṣita regresses into the evil (Asura), deathly (Yama), netherworld of the (forest‑) womb (see also Goddess), before redeeming himself through a substitute victim (Vṛtra). Viṣṇu is the vector connecting twice-born (royal) sacrificer with Brahmā’s interdictory pole, Rudra with his antinomian pole. Exchanging swords with Bhairava, incarnated by a lowly Buddhist dancer-gardener, the Nepali sovereign renews the kingdom and universalizes himself, encompassing the whole pantheon (see also Kingship). The god-king could easily assimilate tribal shamanism: the conservative values of Vedic Mitra are retained in the “brahmin” Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, the ascetic Śiva-Paśupati, even in the Buddha as renouncer, but the values of transgression, once the prerogative of Asura Varuṇa, were simply taken over by Bhairava.

• Bergaigne, Abel. Vedic Religion. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Four French volumes (published separately 1878–1897, and available online) bound together in this English translation. Dumézil reduced Bergaigne’s contrast between sovereign (Mitra-) Varuṇa and the warrior Indra into first and second social functions. Kuiper elaborated the cosmogonic opposition between order (deva) and chaos (asura). Newars celebrate the Indra festival as an Āryan victory over their own tribal Bhairava.

  Find this resource:

• Biardeau, Madeleine, and Charles Malamoud. Le Sacrifice dans l’Inde Ancienne. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 78. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Building on Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, Biardeau nevertheless sees the pantheon of Bhakti as more inclusive: generalizing, surpassing, even suspending the ideal of purity embodied by the classical brahmin. Though recognizing the transgressive reversal of values espoused by radical tantricism, no attempt is made to reread the sacrifice from this perspective.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section I attempts to reconcile genetic and structural perspectives by proposing that the D “demon” (asura) Varuṇa was integrated into the Vedic pantheon from an alien civilization, just like “outcaste” Bhairava from aboriginal India through the self-conscious dialectic of transgression translated through a vectored schema into the diachronic process of Hindu acculturation. Projecting onto the opposing (pure Mitra) apex as auspicious Śiva, Rudra too becomes a God of the Totality.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Relations: Pachali Bhairava of Katmandu.” EVAM: Forum on Indian Representations. Vol. 3. Edited by Makarand Paranjape, 119–166. New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2004.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Section B.7: “Pachali Bhairava in the Hindu Pantheon: Kingship and Transgression” builds on Toffin’s critique of Dumont’s secularization of Hindu Kingship and on Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989 by exploring symbolic spatio-temporal relations of this tribal intruder with other deities involved in the Pachali Bhairab festival in terms of calendar, location, actors, related festivals, etc., understood as dynamic nodes—regardless of Bhakti—within the sacrificial paradigm.

  Find this resource:

• Dumézil, Georges. Mythe et Épopée I: L’Idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Internal structure of the five Pāṇḍava brothers married to Śrī-Draupadī (see Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata) confirms and conserves Vedic tri-functionalism. Toward the end of his life, Dumézil became increasingly receptive to Kuiper’s cosmogonic approach but left it to others to reconcile their divergent paradigms. Caillois and Bataille elaborated Dumézil’s Varuṇa into a full-fledged theory of transgressive sacrality.

  Find this resource:

• Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Like Kāttavarāyan, night watchmen were recruited from the lowest strata. For Dumont, the coercive transsectarian Indian ruler, intent on accumulating wealth and maintaining public order, was secularized. The politico-economic domain of calculating self-interest (artha) was subordinated to the authority of socioreligious framework (dharma). But Bhairava, with whom Karuppan, etc. are identified, overturns this hierarchy while apparently confirming its ranked pantheon.

  Find this resource:

• Kuiper, F. B. J. Varuṇa and Vidūṣaka: On the Origin of the Sanskrit Drama. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1979.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This magnum opus brings together Kuiper’s earlier essays on Vedic and epic mythology. Here the clown’s deformity is derived from the brahmin scapegoat representing Varuṇa-Mṛtyu (Death) and taking on the evil of royal dīkṣita in the horse sacrifice. The vidūṣaka carries Varuṇa’s pot and demolishes Indra’s theses in the ritual preliminaries; he bungles the purpose of the hero (= Indra) in the love dramas.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology and Spiritual Praxis.” PhD diss., Banaras Hindu University, 1984.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Kuiper’s proposed Varuṇa identity in the ritual preliminaries is accepted but integrated into the Brahmā (= Mitra-Varuṇa) identity of the vidūṣaka in the play proper. For the clown is presided by Omkāra, bears Brahmā’s crooked staff, is always called “great brahmin,” etc., scapegoat and comic roles are both derived from his transgressive function.

  Find this resource:

Bhīma-Bhairava and the Mahābhārata

In Nepal, as in Bali, Bhairava is identified with Bhīmasena and Draupadī with Bhairavī, as detailed in Anderson 1975. In their multistoried temples, Draupadī and Bhīma on her left receive blood sacrifices, whereas Arjuna on her right receives only vegetarian offerings. The worship of Bhīma’s image in traditional eateries, which often stand across from his temple, derives from this gluttonous Wolf-Belly (Vṛkodara) playing the cook during the Pāṇḍavas’s incognito thirteenth year. Every twelve years a Newar farmer visits Lhasa—impersonating this founder-patron of Nepal-Tibet trade—an exile incurring loss of caste. Bhīma’s popularity among Tamang, Tharu, Gonds, etc., is congruent with Bhairava’s Tribal Substratum, as seen in Nepali 1965. The bestial adventurer weds beyond the Āryan fold, as with the demoness Hiḍimbā, as explored in Moreau 2008–2009. Bhairava remains the ancestral grandfather of the Newars, who mount their elders, divinized from age seventy-seven, on Bhīma’s chariot for public procession. The five Pāṇḍava siblings represent the three hierarchized social functions (see Dumézil 1968): the eldest Dharma-Yudhiṣṭhira represents priestly sovereignty; Bhīma and Arjuna are the contrasting faces of the deadly warrior, brute force versus aristocratic discipline; twins Nakula and Sahadeva represent agro-mercantile productivity; and their shared wife Śrī-Draupadī represents the prosperity of the Āryan kingdom. For Biardeau 1976, the model-king Arjuna, though partaking of Bhīma’s physical prowess, is imbued with ascetic self-denial, yogic concentration, and the whiteness (arjuna) of brahmanical purity implied in his very name. Bhīma distinguishes himself from their leading Kaurava cousin, Duryodhana, through subservience to Dharma and Arjuna, the latter synthesizing as “Crowned” Kirīṭin the antithetical brahmin and warrior embodied by his elder brothers. This impetuous son of Vāyu-Kāma is nevertheless identified with his demoniac-victim, Duryodhana, through simultaneity of birth. Like Bhairava killing Andhaka for lusting after the untouchable Mother-Goddess, Bhīma transforms (would-be) sexual violators into sacrificial animals, as recounted in the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: during their dīkṣā-exile in the Fish-Country (see Embryogony), the cook impersonates Draupadī to reduce Kīcaka into a meatball; Duryodhana—battered “below the belt,” his thigh crushed—attains heaven; and Duhśāsana’s intestines—chewed upon live in Kathakali dance-drama—adorn Newar shrines of the Goddess. Bhairava is both fierce warrior and sacrificial victim, as discussed in Toffin 2010. The impure, transgressive consecration (dīkṣā) permeates the Pāṇḍava quintuplets, who are reputed to be sinister Gandharvas, as shown in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989. Disheveled, as if menstruating, “hair-dresser” Kṛṣṇā-Draupadī is worshipped as Kālī in her southern festivals. Kṣetra-pāla Bhairava’s sanctuary at the northeast corner of Hindu temples (see the Pantheon) corresponds to the butcher’s emplacement in Vedic sacrifice, as noted in Hiltebeitel 1988. Bhīma-Bhairava reveals the multivocal, dialogic Mahābhārata to be the narrative template for the continual acculturation process that has been Greater India.

• Anderson, Mary M. The Festivals of Nepal. New Delhi: Rupa, 1975.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Bhīmasena’s worship was introduced to the valley from Dolakha by descendants of Thakuri kings, patrons also of the Pachali Bhairab festival in Katmandu. Merchants observe the glutton’s fast on Ekādaśī (eleventh of bright fortnight of January to February). Merchant settlements along the ancient trade routes celebrate his festivals as their greatest annual event.

  Find this resource:

• Biardeau, Madeleine. “Études de Mythologie Hindoue (IV): Bhakti et Avatāra.” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient 63 (1976): 111–263.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  See pp. 231–236 on Bhīma. See also part 5 in Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient 65 (1978): 87–238 (pp. 116, 121–124 on Arjuna). It is because this renunciatory dimension is integral to Hindu kingship that it is the “Brahman” Dharma-Yudhiṣṭhira, and not the kṣatriya-Arjuna, who is consecrated king by the Mahābhārata to perform its sacrifice of “Royal Consecration” (Rājasūya).

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  All five Pāṇḍavas—dīkṣitas in the fish-womb (see Embryogony) of the Matsya-Country—share this transgressive dimension: Brahmin Yudhiṣṭhira gambles with dice, becomes a scavenging heron (Kaṅka) in fish country, attains heaven through an unclean dog, and his alter ego in Dharma is the śūdra Vidura. Left-handed Arjuna-Indra, wielding Brahmā’s head as supreme weapon, is complicit in the Brahmanicide of Guru Droṇa-Bṛhaspati.

  Find this resource:

• Dumézil, George. Mythe et Épopée: Parti 1, L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This sociological approach interprets Bhīma’s savage and brutish aspects entirely within the warrior (second function) role of the classical Mahābhārata in relation to Indo-European mythology. It does not take into consideration his characterization and worship in popular religion and folk performance, nor Śri-Draupadī’s dark side as Kālī.

  Find this resource:

• Ganguli, Kisari Mohan, trans. The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This public domain translation is readily accessible online and includes Kīcaka’s slaughter; the smashing of Duryodhana’s thigh; and the drinking of Duḥśāsana’s blood. Sacrificial notations are often further elaborated through ritualized performance of such epic episodes.

  Find this resource:

• Hiltebeitel, Alf. The Cult of Draupadī. Vol. 1, Mythologies: From Gingee to Kurukṣetra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Recounts relevant epic episodes and ritual enactments, then discusses the interlocking motifs and intermediaries brought into play relating Bhairava to Duḥśāsana and Bhīma, (including Baka, Hiḍimbā, Kīcaka), Draupadī’s humiliation and revenge (even cannibalism), and the felling of Duryodhana. Clarifies how the Vedic butcher’s role was assumed by the Muslim Muttālarāvuttan.

  Find this resource:

• Moreau, Ronan. “Bhima Vrkodara: Homme ou animal?” Bulletin d’études indiennes 26–27 (2008–2009): 69–91.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Solitary and wild, despite his divine ancestry, the ferocious Wolf-Belly is compared to the lion and the elephant in his prowess as warrior. He encounters and even bonds with demons (rākṣasa) and snake-deities (nāga) in the jungle and partakes of their nature. His figure resembles most closely the “lord of the beasts” in other cultural traditions.

  Find this resource:

• Nepali, Gopal Singh. The Newars: An Ethno-sociological Study of a Himalayan Community. Bombay: United Asia, 1965.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Tamang evidence suggests that Bhīma was adopted primarily by tribal populations neighboring already Hinduized Newar settlements. Confined to specific social segments within the Katmandu Valley, Bhīma’s worship at Dolakha (and Cherikot) extends to the whole community and beyond: this is their principal festival. Bhīma, like Bhairava, reigns over the Hindu-tribal symbiosis.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. La fête-spectacle: Théâtre et rite au Népal. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences Humaines, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The street masks spouting beer during Indra’s festival represent the decapitated head of (Ākāśa) Bhairava, who is assimilated to tribal (kirāta) Yālambara, outcaste (niṣāda) Ekalavya, or demonic (rākṣasa) prince joining the losing (Kaurava) side in the Great War. Bhairava’s agricultural (Jyāpu) worshippers are commoners who celebrate Indra’s sovereignty and would have soldiered for the Newar kings.

  Find this resource:

Aesthetics

“Terrifying” is his very name: Brahmanicide provokes fear, disgust, outrage, sorrow, the emotions underlying the four painful among the nine sentiments (rasa) governing Indian art. Sculpture depicts him with skeleton, fangs, dog, serpent, scorpion, etc., dancing amidst a host of deformed hobgoblins. Lorenzen 1972 describes the Kāpālika’s literary treatment to such effect. Heroine of Mālatīmādhava is barely saved from cremation-ground sacrifice to Cāmuṇḍā, her executioner is killed instead, as seen in Kale 1983. Stories from Kathāsaritsāgara, recounted in Penzer 1924, depict the Skull-Bearer deriving his powers from a dancing skull-staff, restoring the lost fortune of a gambler, abducting and seducing women with spells, reviving a corpse that kills the malefactor instead, spies disguised as Kāpālikas who fulfill their own predictions. Jain literature paints an especially unflattering portrait, including the role-reversal between executioner and victim. Somasiddhānta in Prabodhacandrodaya oscillates between the macabre and the comic. So vivid in the Indian imaginary, the Kāpālika inspired metaphor and other figures of speech even in unrelated poetic contexts. Slave to an Untouchable (Ḍom) in the Banaras cremation-ground, king Hariścandra, in the play Caṇḍa-Kauśika, is tested by Dharma appearing as the consummate Kāpālika in quest of immortality, adept of the “Supreme Vow” (see Origin-Myth) steeped in esoteric lore and magical prowess. When the king insists on the queen surrendering to his Ḍom-Rāja the funeral shroud of their dead son, the latter is revived and consecrated to the imperial throne. Oversolicitous in maintaining Vedic ritual traditions, Bāṇabhaṭṭa nevertheless attributes Harṣa’s subsequent empire to his ancestor’s participation in Bhairavācārya’s horrific sacrifice into the corpse’s fiery mouth, as narrated in Cowell and Thomas 1897. Bhairava, with the virgin Goddess, plays a key ritual, theatrical, and aesthetic role—reflecting Newar collective identity—in the royal Indra festival of Katmandu, as discussed in Toffin 2010. For Abhinavagupta, the “corpse-eating” Bhairava is the all-devouring “crematory” fire of Consciousness “re-descending” to assimilate our universe by deliberately transgressing the system of brahmanical interdictions encoded as ritual purity, as formulated in Visuvalingam 1985, Visuvalingam 1989, and Visuvalingam 2006. The same gluttony is embodied by the pot-bellied elephant-headed Gaṇeśa and the Great Brahmin clown for whom all experience is reducible to soma (modaka). Fear is ancillary to disgust—one of four primary emotions canonized by the Nātya Śāstra—which, directed toward one’s own body, becomes correlated subjectively to the pursuit of liberation (mokṣa) in the ascending mode. To decapitate Brahmā with the left thumbnail is to unflinchingly sacrifice the pure self-image of the still-constricted ego. The tranquil (śānta) heart of the ultimate connoisseur (sahṛdaya) is a spotless mirror capable of reflecting the world, even in its most hideous aspects, as an ocean of Rasa.

• Cowell, E. B., and F. W. Thomas, trans. The Harsa-Carita of Bana. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1897.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  While the black-clad Bhairavācārya sits on a corpse’s chest offering oblations, the king stands guard wielding his preceptor’s miraculous sword Aṭṭahāsa (see Laughter). This provokes the apparition of a horrifying “serpent-crow” discovered wearing the sacred thread. Aṭṭahāsa was acquired by a brahmin disciple named “Lord of Hell” (pātāla-svāmin) from a “brahmin-demon” (brahma-rākṣasa).

  Find this resource:

• Kale, M. R. Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava: With the Jagaddhara Commentary. Edited by M. R. Kale. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The hero Mādhava was himself offering human flesh as oblation to ward off obstacles to his desired union with the heroine Mālatī. In this “Description of the Cremation-Ground” (Act 4), the bloodthirsty female disciple attempts to avenge her Guru’s death by re-abducting Mālatī.

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David N. The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects. Delhi: Thomson, 1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Hedonist aspects are highlighted in the farce and sadistic proclivities in other dramatic genres and literature: though both attitudes sometimes alternate in a single character as in Prabodhacandrodaya. Whereas Lorenzen sees mainstream literature as unambiguously reproving Kāpālika practice, Veda-lauding Bāṇabhaṭṭa attributes Harṣa’s empire to Bhairavācārya’s ghastly cremation-ground sacrifice described in knowledgeable detail (see Laughter).

  Find this resource:

• Penzer, N. M. The Ocean of Story, Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara (or Ocean of Streams of Story). London: Privately printed, 1924.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  All volumes are available, with individual links, online. Tawney’s original translation dates to 1880. All the dispersed references to Kāpālikas are most readily accessible with relevant notes and context condensed within a couple of pages in Lorenzen.

  Find this resource:

• Toffin, Gérard. La fête-spectacle: Théâtre et rite au Népal. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences Humaines, 2010.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Generalizes the ludic and theatrical excess of (Indra) festival into a socio-aesthetic theory. Discusses the following: the sacrificial pole as Cosmic Liṅga, the virgin Goddess, Bhairava masks spouting alcohol, the conflict with Indra, death, dances, cannibalism, representation of the god by a pot, and the Apollo-Dionysus parallel.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition.” Paper presented at the Assembly of the World’s Religions, December 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Seminal paper presented at an interreligious conference. In print only in Spanish, Serbian, and Hindi. Section on “Ethical Problem of Transgressive Sacrality” juxtaposes moral imperatives to brahmanical purity to argue that the exaltation of the disgusting, terrifying, and quasidemoniac Bhairava can be understood only from a ritual and metaphysical perspective.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Argues that ritual purity is the hypostatized “objectification” of a system of interdictions that has fearful disgust as its subjective counterpart; these are precisely the constricting emotions that Bhairava-worshipping adepts of transgressive sacrality seek to overcome. Such behavior when exteriorized, disguised, generalized onto public awareness engenders the Laughter toward and of the Pāśupata and clown.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Towards an Integral Appreciation of Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics of Rasa.” In Abhinavagupta: Reconsiderations. Edited by Makarand Paranjape and Sunthar Visuvalingam, 7–55. Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  All eight traditional rasas can be harnessed toward the goal of mokṣa, especially disgust toward embodied existence, which Abhinavagupta replaces with Buddhistic “cessation” (śānta = “tranquility”). Assimilation of disgusting substances, especially in the Kaula Sacrifice, is aimed at achieving embodied liberation understood as fulfilling the ultimate raison d’être for such interdictory sacrality.

  Find this resource:

Laughter

Omkāra, all-encompassing sound-syllable and essence of the Vedas, resonates with laughter while proclaiming Śiva’s supremacy (see Origin-Myth). Traditional dances and Hindu movies, referenced at svAbhinava, characterize Bhairava and his adepts with terrifyingly explosive laughter (aṭṭahāsa). The Pāśupata ascetic indulged in obscene laughter while courting public ridicule to cultivate dispassion. Though revulsion underlies Bhairava’s Aesthetics, stereotyped depictions provide grist to the mill of Sanskrit comedy, as illustrated in Lorenzen 1972. The farce (prahasana) celebrates the follies of Kāpālika entangled in hilarious brawls with lunatics and other heretics such as the Jain ascetic and Buddhist monk. In Mattavilāsa, the “Great Brahmin” (Pāśupata) repudiates the lost skull-bowl, retrieved from a dog, proffered by the madman; instead the monk directs him to the rightful owner, the inebriated “Great Pāśupata” (Kāpālika) slurring the salvific name of his beloved, as seen in Unni 1998. In Prabodhacandrodaya, Somasiddhānta, who gratifies Mahābhairava through human sacrifices, expounds dharma to Jain and Buddhist renouncers, who lust for initiation when embraced by Faith, his beautiful soma-procuress (see Nambiar 1971). In procuring Karpūramañjarī for the king, as discussed in Bhat 1950, Kaulācārya Bhairavānanda colludes with the “great brahmin” jester, who becomes the officiating priest at their wedding. In Harṣacarita, as seen in Cowell and Thomas 1897 (cited under Aesthetics), Bhairavācārya makes a sacrifice into a corpse’s flaming mouth, provoking a twice-born demon that the royal ancestor almost slays with his Guru’s miraculous sword, Aṭṭahāsa. Comic behavior and laughter accompany and become aesthetic substitutes for the violation of interdictions within the semiotics of transgressive sacrality, elaborated in Visuvalingam 1985, Visuvalingam 1989, and Visuvalingam 2006. Laughter is an automatic reflex to a “bisociative” stimulus that triggers and neutralizes the internalized taxonomies implicitly conditioning our habitual perceptions. Traditional etiquette, codified in the Nāṭya Śāstra, depreciates laughter such that noble characters barely smile. Abhinavagupta advocates laughing at the whole world as incongruous (vikṛta “deformed”) as a means to spiritual liberation. The “Octet to Kāla-Bhairava” (see Bhakti) extols the Brahmanicide’s aṭṭahāsa as exploding the whole ontological chain of creation emanating from Brahmā’s primordial egg. The infectious “sacred” laughter of the Kāpālika and Great Brahmin is echoed by our profane reflex to their antics on stage. Whereas fear, disgust, and other negative emotions disassociate the spectator, bisociative humor relies on involuntary half-participation in censurable acts. Sacrificial murder was universally accompanied by sardonic laughter on the part of the executioners and even the victim. Torn in half by jackals, the yawning corpse that greets the brahmin hero of The Little Clay Cart—proceeding to his own capital punishment at the stake—is the gaping aṭṭahāsa of Death.

• Bhat, G. K. The Vidūṣaka. Ahmedabad, India: New Order, 1950.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A Prabodhacandrodaya commentary identifies Rājaśekhara’s Bhairavānanda as a Kāpālika. A claim that Lorenzen contests because of this Guru’s respectable stature. The traditional perception seems to be of continuity between sects sharing the Bhairavāgama. Similarly, the poorly integrated roles of professional buffoon and king’s counselor point to Vidūṣaka being the comic transposition of the purohita (priest).

  Find this resource:

• Lorenzen, David N. The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects. Delhi: Thomson, 1972.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In Laṭamelaka, “Ignorance-Heap” disputes with a naked (Digambara) Jain monk. Lorenzen assumes throughout that, being marginal heretics, the Kāpālika soteriology could not possibly derive from and elucidate Vedic orthodoxy and mainstream Hinduism. The moral purpose of their comic depiction is thus reduced to repudiation and censure by mainstream society.

  Find this resource:

• Nambiar, Sita Krishna. Prabodhacandrodaya of Kṛṣṇa Miśra. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This Kāpālika, who boasts supernatural powers, also claims to obey the Veda but in conformity with the Bhairavāgama as final authority. The disgusted Jain condemns his religion as vulgar black magic. Titled “The Rising of the Moon of Enlightenment,” the farce dates to the late 11th century.

  Find this resource:

• svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Bhairava resource page. See entry on dances, for links to video clips of Newar Sweto Bhairab comically attempting to catch squealing “terrified” children-fish (see Embryogony) and acting as though he has an upset stomach. See also entries titled “Tāṇḍava” for dance performances on stage and, in the regional movies, by Shivaji Ganeshan, Minakshi Seshadri, Hema Malini, etc.

  Find this resource:

• Unni, N. P., ed. and trans. Mattavilāsa Prahasana. Delhi: Nag, 1998.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Mahendravarman, the Pallava king who authored this play, reigned from 600 until c. 630 AD, which means that Bhairava’s Origin-Myth—which is invoked to justify this Kāpālika’s Supreme Vow (Mahāvrata)—was already known by then. Moreover, the Skull-Bearer resides in the Śiva temple at the Pallava capital, Kāñcī, suggesting the centrality of his “criminal” doctrine.

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition.” Paper presented at the Assembly of the World’s Religions, December 1985.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Ostentatious violation of norms transforms transgressor into (ritual) clown: hence the parallels between Pāśupata ascetic, vidūṣaka of Sanskrit theater, and the humorous depiction of pot-bellied Gaṇeśa. Repression of the laughter reflex elevates (cacophony of) aṭṭahāsa into a signifier of transgression (of structured meaningful speech). The opposing cognitive fields underlying bisociation correspond to cosmic dualisms that are transcended through the viṣuvat principle (see Time).

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita: Sacrifice, Criminality, and Bhakti in the Hindu Tradition.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 427–462, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Close reading of the Pāśupata aphorisms that replaces the ascetic’s obscene laughter within the overall logic of his characterization: including nonsensical babbling, limping, snoring, left-handed worship, courting censure, wielding liṅga, meditation on Omkāra, epileptic trance, song-and-dance, self-smearing with cremation-ash, reversion to animal behavior, etc. Such traits relate back to the Vedic Gandharva and are compared to primitive ritual clowning (Koyemshi).

  Find this resource:

• Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Towards an Integral Appreciation of Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics of Rasa.” In Abhinavagupta: Reconsiderations. Edited by Makarand Paranjape and Sunthar Visuvalingam, 7–55. Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2006.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Though any universalized emotion can emancipate, laughing at the whole world as incongruous deconstructs the “the order of things” or implicit taxonomies that undergird our constricted self-image. The Great Brahmin and his “nonsense” playfully juxtaposes seemingly unconnected domains to communicate veiled esoteric wisdom, whereas the Great Pāśupata’s cognitive schemas dissolve in grotesque humor to liberate his own “nihilist” Consciousness.

  Find this resource:

Time

Bhairava receives the epithet Kāla- (Origin-Myth) because he “terrifies” even Time-Death, usurping Yama’s suzerainty over Banaras to ensure that all who die there are liberated, as described in Eck 1983. The Gaṅgā, to whose fish-womb the Kāpālika returns (see Embryogony), is the Milky Way, represented in Vedic religion by the maternal (ambā) Sarasvatī River, as shown in Witzel 1984. The Seven Sages with their wives are identified with the Great Bear and Pleiades revolving around the pole star (as seen in Kramrisch 1994) and the Cosmic Liṅga is the axis around which the earth rotates. Prajāpati or his “deer’s head” (mṛga-śīrṣa) became Orion, his ruddy daughter Rohiṇī became Aldebaran, Rudra the Dog Star (Sirius), and his fatal arrow the three stars forming Orion’s belt (see Vedic Antecedents). Calendar, geography, astronomy, psychophysiological practices converge to map the escape-route for consciousness from spatio-temporal embodiment, as elaborated in Chalier-Visuvalingam 1989. Bhairava’s birthday on the eighth (āṣṭamī) of the dark fortnight of Mārgaśīrṣa might correspond to a Vedic New Year starting on its first lunar day. Lāṭ Bhairo’s cosmogonic marriage with the adjacent maternal well in Kāśī coincides with the Katmandu celebration of the Indra pole, which is in turn the model for the equinoctial (viṣuvat) Bisket liṅga festival. Abhinavagupta equates the outer equilibrium of light and darkness (twilight, equinox) to the inner neutralization and transcendence of the duality that underlies all cognition. Such “dissolution of duration” (tuṭi-pāta), transcending the laws of causation, was facilitated by regulating and retracing the subtle breath (prāṇa). The Buddhist “time-wheel” vehicle (kāla-cakra-yāna) corresponds to the Hindu worship of the twelve “time-devouring” Kālīs in Krama tantricism, as detailed in Silburn 1975. Felled by Mother Ambā, the terrible Bhīṣma, the epic Grand-Sire awaits the northward solstice to surrender his last breath: this arrow-quilled “porcupine” son of Gaṅgā (see the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa) resembles the dead solar-egg (mārtaṇḍa), its sense-rays retracted in Kālī’s womb. Androgynous Śiva’s addiction to the deceitful dice-game against his better half, within the cave, elevates unpredictability into a metaphor for transcending causality: gambling is constitutive of kingship in the Mahābhārata and Vedic sacrifice. Elaborating the Buddha’s teaching of conditioned coorigination, instantaneity, and four-tiered logic, Raju 2011 rediscovers spontaneity and free will (svātantrya) through critiquing (persisting theological constraints on) Western mathematics and physics. The Brāhmaṇas labored to construct the Year-as-Prajāpati identified with the “Self” that the Upaniṣads hypostatized and Buddhists negated, as seen in Silburn 1955. The esoteric Vedic understanding of implacable Yama as Time-Death is conserved in Bhairava’s identification with Mahā-Kāla. Bhairava worship is promoted on YouTube as bestowing superior “time management” skills on overworked professionals, as seen at Bhairava Multimedia Resources.

• Bhairava Multimedia Resources. In svAbhinava: An Exegesis à la Abhinavagupta.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  See entry for links to Kāla-Bhairavāṣṭakam. Devotees, who upload video remixes of the Octet to Bhairava, are aware of his defining relationship to Eternity; but, unsure of the ultimate meaning, they vaguely apprehend that he confers some kind of mastery over time.

  Find this resource:

• Chalier-Visuvalingam, Elizabeth. “Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahābrāhmaṇa.” In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, 157–229. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Erection of Bisket liṅga is assimilated to the raising of kuṇḍalinī by slaying (neutralizing) the two serpent-breaths—twin banners fluttering from the pole—in the death-and-rebirth context of royal incest. Lāṭ’s cosmogonic marriage is equated to Kāla-Bhairava’s decapitation at Bhaktapur for “his real head is no longer at his Banaras temple.”

  Find this resource:

• Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Eck relates Bhairava’s usurpation of Yama’s jurisdiction to the belief that death in Banaras automatically confers salvation even upon the worst sinner. The problem this poses with respect to the implacable law of moral retribution (karma), and the implied nature of such salvation is discussed but not as a function of Bhairava’s Brahmanicide.

  Find this resource:

• Kramrisch, Stella. The Presence of Śiva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Originally published in 1981. Due to precession (Balgangadhar Tilak), Orion, Aldebaran, Pleiades marked successively the equinoctial start of the sacrificial year, identified with Prajāpati, whose “unexpected intrusion” upon Rohiṇī would have provoked the incest theme. Cited textual evidence (Brāhmaṇas, Mahābhārata, etc.) suggests that Prajāpati represents the “regressive” deer-skinned dīkṣita, who undergoes sacrificial death upon incestuously reuniting with his womb (Embryogony).

  Find this resource:

• Ganguli, Kisari Mohan. The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Narrates how the eight Vasus, though hating earthly life, were born as Gangā’s sons. She drowned the first seven in her waters at birth, letting Bhīṣma-Gāṅgeya lead his full life: this is an epic “inversion” of Vedic myth of Mother-Aditi, Infinite Space, where her eighth is instead the “aborted solar-egg” (mārtaṇḍa, see Embryogony). Gangā gushes out from the earth to quench dying Bhīṣma’s thirst.

  Find this resource:

• Raju, C. K. “Probability in Ancient India.” In Philosophy of Statistics. Edited by Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster, 1175–1195. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science 7. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Raju makes a clear distinction between statistical probabilities (in gambling), associated with entropy, and (creative) spontaneity that would arrest such entropy. The paper does not consider the use of the dice game as mythico-ritual metaphor for unpredictable freewill. This Indian philosopher of science has earned laurels for correcting flaws in Einstein’s work.

  Find this resource:

• Silburn, Lilian. Instant et cause: Le discontinu dans la pensée philosophique de l’Inde. Paris: J. Vrin, 1955.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Scholar-practitioner of both Śaiva and Buddhist tantricism, Silburn’s analysis of the year-long construction of the fire-altar sees their symbiotic rivalry as stemming from two opposed readings of brahmanical sacrifice. This landmark contribution to the history of Indian thought is unavailable in English but essential for understanding time, self, (ritual) action (karma), entropy, etc.

  Find this resource:

• Silburn, Lilian. Hymnes aux Kali, la roue des énergies divines: études sur le śivaisme du Cachemire, école Krama. Paris: Institut de Civilisation Indienne, 1975.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  One Kālī is visualized as fierily consuming Time (kāla-kalendhanāya) in the form of the dead egg (mārtaṇḍam), like the sun-bird (pataṅga-vat) having retracted its circle of arrow-rays (āpīta-pataṅga-cakram). Residing in the anthill-womb and worshipped with golden turmeric, Mārtāṇḍa-Bhairava inherits this symbolic amalgam, which the Mahābhārata already encoded into Bhīṣma’s death agony. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Find this resource:

• Witzel, Michael. “Sur le chemin du ciel.” Bulletin des Études Indiennes 2 (1984): 213–279.

  Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Describes the sacrificial pilgrimage to the hidden source of (the terrestrial river) Sarasvatī—associated with fertility, umbilical cord, and embryo—to undergo the dīkṣā and possible suicide there at the world-tree, Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa. This symbolic complex, which is later transposed onto Gaṅgā-Yamunā confluence at Prayāga, corresponded to the particularities of the Vedic night sky. Shows how Varuṇa emptied the golden pitcher holding the celestial roots of the inverted world-tree.

  Find this resource: