Sthalapurana of Somnath — The First Light of Shiva

The Curse of Daksha

Soma, the moon-god, married the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha — the twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions. But he loved only one of them, Rohini. The neglected wives told their father, and Daksha's curse fell like winter: may Soma's light waste away.

Night by night the full moon thinned to a sliver, then to nothing. Crops failed, plants paled, the gods grew anxious — for the sap of all growing things was said to ride on the moon.

Penance at Prabhasa

The sages pointed him to Prabhasa tirtha, where the Saraswati river meets the sea at the western edge of the land. There Soma bathed, wore bhasma, fed thousands of brahmins, and worshipped Shiva with a shrine built first of gold, then of silver.

Shiva was pleased. He lifted the curse in part — the moon would still wax and wane, but never again vanish entirely — and remained at that spot as a self-born pillar of light: Somanatha, Lord of the Moon. This is counted as the first of the twelve Jyotirlingas; every list of Shiva's great light-shrines begins here, at the shore where the land runs out.

Waves of History

Prabhasa Patan became one of the wealthiest shrine-cities of medieval India — and therefore one of the most attacked. In 1026 Mahmud of Ghazni broke the temple and carried off its treasury; in the centuries after, the liṅga was hidden, the shrine rebuilt, torn down, and rebuilt again by dynasties that rose and fell around it.

In 1950–51 Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the unifier of modern India, took the vow to rebuild it once more, saying the shrine would now stand not on hoarded gold but on the faith of the people. President Rajendra Prasad presided over the installation. The present temple rises about 400 feet above sea level; its shikhara carries no load-bearing steel — the architects relied on interlocked stonework, as the old builders had.

Today

Every evening the Sound-and-Light aarti plays across the Arabian Sea, retelling a thousand years of loss and return. Pilgrims completing the all-India Jyotirlinga circuit traditionally begin here — with the light that waned, and came back.