Manasa

Manasa

The snake goddess of Bengal, and the goddess of the eighth day

Manasa is the serpent goddess of Bengal, and she is worshipped for one thing above all: protection from snakebite. That is a much narrower and more urgent jurisdiction than it sounds. In a river delta with dozens of species of snake, a good fraction of them venomous, and a population that works barefoot in the rice fields, snakebite was a leading cause of death well into the twentieth century. Manasa is a practical goddess. Her shrines are numerous, small and local, and they cluster where the risk is real.

She belongs to a family of Bengali deities whose names overlap and whose identities are not always cleanly separate — Manasa, Manasha, Maniprabha, and the local snake deities of particular villages and river islands. Descriptions of her appearance differ according to where the description comes from: in the more literary accounts she is of the Nāga line and rides a snake of her own; in the more local ones she is a modest village woman with a sari and a great deal of anger in her. A shrine in the delta may hold nothing recognisable as a snake at all.

Her best-attested textual home is not the Sanskrit Purāṇas, where she is thin, but Bengali vernacular literature — above all Biserā (Virasa), the fifteenth-century poem by Kavirāja Śrīdhara, which tells at length of the goddess's anger with the world and its ending in a marriage and a settled worship. The snake and Nāga material of the Mahābhārata is part of the background against which that tradition grew, and it is legitimate to cite, but it should not be presented as the source.

Ritually, Manasa's great day falls in the bright fortnight of Karttika, is kept with a fast, and is also marked on a Tuesday. The observance is especially strong in the Jessore and Kolkata region, where snake-worship cult figures are still made and kept in household shrines. One corner worth flagging: Manasa's cult sits inside a wider Bengali ecology of deities of disease, including the śitalā and haritalā goddesses, who are held to cause smallpox and chickenpox rather than to cure it. Manasa's position in that ecology is a matter of local arrangement rather than of fixed doctrine.

Sources and what is still unverified

Virasa and the Bengali vernacular tradition are the first things to read, followed by the modern Bengali studies of the snake cults. The Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) gives the standard and possibly misleading short account, so it is a cross-check and not an authority. The previous revision's source list said only "Puranas", which is too vague to be useful. Still unverified: the shrine behind this entry, the local cult of the image, the current state of the practices, and the relation to the smallpox goddesses. Left .