Goddess of Flames

Jwalamukhi

The flaming mouth at Kangra

Jwalamukhi is a goddess-shrine of the Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh, held by devotees to be one of the fifty-one Shakti Pithas — the sites of Sati's body, and the points at which her power is understood to have entered the earth. She is worshipped without an image. What the devotee worships is a set of natural flames issuing from fissures in the rock floor of a covered shrine in the town of Jwalamukhi, above the Kangra valley. The name means "flaming mouth": the shrine is held to be the mouth through which the goddess's fire comes out of the earth. The flames are fed with ghee, and the priests tend them continuously; a lamp-room keeper's office exists, the shrine being kept alight without interruption.

The Kangra site is only the best known of several fire-goddess shrines in the Himalaya. The important point about all of them is that they are not aniconic by absence but aniconic by nature: the deity is the fire itself, and the shrine is built over the vent. At Jwalamukhi the flames come from fissures; at other Himalayan fire-sites the manifestation is a spring that is said to be hot, a jet of gas, or a chasm. In each case the shrine is constructed so that the natural fire is the object of darshan. The claim that the flames have burned without interruption "for thousands of years" is traditional and is not independently verifiable; the flames can and do die out, and are relit, which is itself part of the shrine's ritual life. Nor is the geological cause established in a way that explains the persistence; natural gas seeps in the Himalaya, and the exact mechanism at each site is a matter for local and geological investigation.

The Kangra site is also a Shakti Pitha in the Shri Char Dham and Shakti Pitha pilgrimage circuits, and it stands in a wider Himalayan religious landscape of temple and shrine, of which Kangra and the surrounding valley temples are a part. The goddess is honoured with the ordinary ritual of the region — aarti, offerings, and the recitation of mantras — but her "image" is the fire.

The Kangra story

A widely known account concerns the Chandraghanta and Ambe shrines in the Kangra area, and the fierce rivalry between them; in the local telling, the two goddesses were sisters who quarrelled over their serving of a dhoka (a devotional offering song) to a common father, and in anger set the Kangra valley ablaze, until they were reconciled. This is a local legend of the Kangra valley, attached to the two hilltop shrines, and it is told with local detail. It should be presented as such, and not as part of a pan-Indian Durga myth. Whether the Chandraghanta and Ambe shrines, which are near Jwalamukhi, share a single cult or two related ones is a question for a Kangra source.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is grounded in the Shakti Pitha and temple literature, the Kangra district gazetteer, and local Kangra-valley tradition. A human guardian from the Kangra or Himachal tradition should supply and check: the local account of how Jwalamukhi became a Shakti Pitha and which limb of Sati is said to have fallen here — the lists differ, and Kangra's own claim should be taken from the shrine, not from a printed Shakti Pitha list; the Chandraghanta–Ambe story as it is actually told in Kangra; and the shrine's present arrangements for the aarti and the upkeep of the flames. The claim that the flames have burned continuously for two thousand years is a traditional assertion, not a documented fact, and is marked as such. Any date for the shrine's building is not established here.