Brahmani

Brāhmaṇī Mātṛkā

The mother at the head of the ring

This entry concerns Brāhmaṇī as the first member of the Aṣṭa Mātṛkā ring, and it is deliberately narrower than the general article on the group. The Mātṛkā are the female counterpart of the male gods: Brāhmī of Brahmā, Mahālakṣmī of Viṣṇu, Vaiṣṇavī and Śivānī as the attendants of Viṣṇu and Śiva, and then Kubjikā, Aghorī, Caṇḍikā and Yoginī, who belong to the fierce and śākta end of the range. Their function in temple architecture is as a band on the outer wall, a ring of faces watching the street and the worshiper as they enter, and their function in ritual is collective — the Aṣṭamī Pūjā with the eight installed together in a vessel, and the offerings of the saptamātṛkā at the seventh and eighth nights of the Navarātri.

Two distinctions about Brāhmaṇī are worth making because they are usually lost. First, the sapta/aṣṭa distinction is a real historical development and not a detail: the seven-mother group around Skanda is attested in early-medieval sculpture, and the eighth — the fierce Cāmunda — is the tantric completion, so that a seventh-century relief should not be described as "the Aṣṭa Mātṛkā" without an argument. Second, Brāhmaṇī within the group is śānta: she is not the threatening member, and an image of her is the calm one, generally seated, holding the manuscript, the rosary and the pot. Her māyā is said to be sixteenfold and her vibhūti twenty-four-armed; that is the formal statement; the ritual statement is that her ṇāda-bindu is held to be the source of the maṇḍala sound.

Whether the deity at the centre of the eight is Skanda (with the sapta-mātṛkā) or the Buddha — as in the post-Gupta Buddhist versions of the same ring — is a question that the architecture answers differently in different places, and the corpus frontmatter's flat "2nd c. CE Kushan sculptural programs" asserts an origin for the group that the archaeology does not support in that form.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The Śāradā-tilaka and the tantric Mātṛkā chapters — work level; none located.
• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for the group's social and cultic setting.
• A study of the Mātṛkā band in temple architecture, with a dated monument list — required; not on file in this corpus.
• Unverified: the "2nd c. CE" origin, the "7th c. tantric canon", and all festival dates.