Mansa Devi Haridwar

Manasā Devī of Haridwar — the serpent goddess on Bilwa Parvat

The snake goddess, and the day she is fed

Manasā, the serpent goddess, is the deity of the Nāgas — the snake clan of the Mahābhārata, and the book gives her a full narrative. She is the daughter of Vasuki and the queen of the serpents; her son, the sage Astika, is born to end a destruction of serpents that her grief had set in motion, and in the telling she wreaks a plague of serpent deaths on the world until Siva accepts her as his consort and she is calmed. That is the whole of the Mahābhārata story, and it explains what she is worshipped for: protection from snake bite, and from the poison of which snakes were the emblem.

Her worship is held to fall on the fifth day of the bright fortnight of Bhādrapada — the day after the Pitru Paksha, the fortnight of the ancestors — and the śrāddha at that boundary makes her temple a natural place to be remembered. The serpent-feeding that accompanies it is not decoration: it is the offering her own kind receives.

At Haridwar, the shrine stands on Bilwa Parvat, the hill above the river town, and the corpus description of a three-headed, five-armed image should be taken as one iconographic form among several — Manasā is depicted variously, and a single temple's image should not be generalised into the goddess's appearance. The hill approach has been modernised with a ropeway, which has changed the character of the visit as surely as it changed the view.

The larger Shakti Pīṭha framing here needs a caveat too. Manasā is honoured as a Śakti goddess and her shrine is treated as one, but her inclusion in the standard enumerations of the Pīṭhas is not the usual one, and the corpus's description of the site as a major Pīṭha should be checked against the text rather than repeated.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Mahābhārata and the Purāṇic Devī material; Majumdar for the iconography; the Haridwar gazetteer for the shrine.

For a named guardian: the shrine's own foundation and rebuildings, which the corpus records only as "1811 CE"; the local name of the hill's temple and of the ropeway station; the iconography of the image actually installed there; and the contemporary serpent-feeding arrangements, which now sit inside a public-safety regime and are regulated.