Maa Mahamaya

Mahāmāyā — the Great Goddess of the Chhattisgarh villages

A name that is also a doctrine

Mahāmāyā is "the great Māyā", and in Śākta usage Māyā is not merely the veil of illusion — that is the Advaita sense, and importing it would be a mistake here. Māyā in the Śākta framework is the goddess's power, the force by which the world is brought into being and held in being: parā, the highest, and aparā below her. Mahāmāyā as an epithet therefore means the goddess at the top of that scale, and shrines bearing it are Śākta in orientation.

In Chhattisgarh the epithet is attached to village and small-town goddess shrines, and this entry should be read as an entry about that class rather than about one temple: the corpus holds the state, the tradition and the epithet, and no shrine, no district and no image. The Maa shrines of Chhattisgarh — Maa Bamleshwari, Maa Manikeshwari, Maa Kankali, and a great many unnamed or locally named ones — are tended by families of a hereditary priestly line, and their jatres are the year's social calendar for the surrounding villages. The same name being worn by a thousand shrines with a thousand histories is the central fact, and a single entry that pretended to describe all of them would be false.

Where the corpus can be specific, it should be: the goddess of the Shakta shrine in Chhattisgarh is worshipped with havan, jagaran and the annual jatra, and the kīrtan of the local devotional song tradition is a real part of the practice rather than a later addition. The Shakti traditions of the region also carry a tribal and non-Brahmanical dimension, and that should be stated as part of the practice rather than smoothed away.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Devī-māhātmya sections of the Purāṇas; Majumdar for Durgā in her forms; Culp for the village-god institution in comparative terms.

For a named guardian, ideally a Chhattisgarhi speaker: which shrine or shrines the slug is meant to cover; the local name and the goddess's form at each; the priestly lineage and how the position descends; and the festival calendar. Until then the entry should be read as a class entry, and the singular "Maa Mahamaya" in the corpus title should not be read as one temple.