Bagalamukhi

Bagalāmukhī

The goddess who stops the tongue

Bagalāmukhī — "she who holds the tongue" — is one of the ten Mahāvidyās, the great goddesses of the tantric and Śākta repertoire. She is imagined as a fierce deity with a terrible face, black in one aspect, standing on a corpse, and her characteristic act is to seize and hold the tongue of an enemy so that the enemy cannot speak: a power understood as the removal of the power to injure through speech, and therefore as protection. Her mantra, the bagalāmukhiṅ mantra, is one of the most widely recited in Śākta japa and is used against slander, litigation, poison, fear of enemies and black magic, in a cluster of uses that differ by text and by practitioner.

Her principal shrine is at Bāgālāmukī in Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh, a hillside temple above the Kangra valley which is a centre of Śākta pilgrimage in the North, and which attracts a substantial winter congregation. The shrine's māhātmya in the Śākta corpus and the Brahmayāmala-class tantras give the myth of her birth from the kāmadhenu ("the cow of desire"), the story of the demon named Bāgala whose tongue she tore out — the origin of her name — and her quarrel with the god Skanda. The temple's own kalṣepa (age tradition) and its early history are not documented in the sources consulted here; the shrine is often said to be ancient, and its present building is not.

The wider Mahāvidyā scheme — ten goddesses, or in the śāradā-tilaka the group of ten whose order and number vary between texts — is a classification and not a pantheon, and it is a mistake to read it as a canonical list of "the ten great goddesses" with fixed seat and function. Mahāvidyās are also equated with the saptamātṛkā in some Śākta framing, and the relationship between the two groups is a further matter on which texts differ.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Śāradā-tilaka and the Brahmayāmala-class tantras — work level; no chapter or verse cited.
• The standard secondary work on the Mahāvidyās — cited properly by a guardian; it is not on file here.
• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for the wider Śākta context.
• Kangra District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the shrine.
• Unverified: the shrine's foundation, the frontmatter's 16th–19th c. dating, and the specific demon-name etymology, which differs between tellings.