Half of Him

Before there was a daughter of the mountain, before there was a Sati, there was a creator with a problem.

Brahma had made the world as he had been told to. He had made it out of his mind: the gods, the sages, the lords of creatures, every one of them thought into being and set down whole. And every one of them stood where he had set it. They did not multiply. He made more, and the number did not grow; he made more again, and the world stayed exactly as full as he had left it. He was the creator, and nothing he had created could create.

So he did what the gods do when their own power runs out. He sat down and meditated on Shiva, and on the Mother with him, and the penance went on a long time.

Shiva came. He was pleased, and he smiled, and his voice was like thunder.

"You did this penance to increase your creatures. I know the weight of what you are asking. I shall grant you what you desire."

Then he showed Brahma what Brahma had never seen. Out of his own body came a goddess, made from a part of himself: the supreme Shakti, as those who know the Vedas call her, with every one of his qualities, and no birth, no death, no old age. She was beyond the reach of speech and of thought. Unborn, she seemed to be born of him. She filled everything there was, and the whole universe was drunk on her illusion. Not even the gods could see all of her. What Brahma could see was this: she was in the body of her lord, and divided there, one half of him.

He bowed to the ground.

"You are everywhere and you know everything," he said. "You are too fine to be seen, and beyond being and not being. I bow to you."

Then he told her his trouble.

"The lord made me to create, and I have created. I thought the gods into being, and the sages, and my sons. I have done it again and again, and they do not increase. I want them to grow the way the creatures of the earth should grow, pair by pair. But I cannot, because there is no female kind. It has not come from you, mother, and without it nothing I make will last."

He had worked it out on the long road of his penance, and he said the rest carefully.

"Every power there is comes from you. That is why I worship you and not another. Give me this one. Be born, with a part of yourself, as the daughter of my son Daksha, so that everything that moves and everything that stands still may multiply."

The goddess did not answer him in words. From the space between her brows came another Shakti, her equal in every way, and stood there bright in front of the creator. Shiva, watching, laughed.

"Win Brahma over with penance," he told the new one, "and then do what he wants."

She bowed and went. In time she was born as Daksha's daughter, and her name there was Sati. The Goddess, having given Brahma the power he had come for, went back into Shiva's body, and Shiva was gone. From that hour there were women in the world, and the creatures of the earth began to come two by two, and Brahma was content.

Ages later, on a mountain, a wandering sage would turn over the palm of a small dark girl and tell her frightened father that one day half of Shiva's body would be hers. The king of the mountains heard it as a prophecy. It was older than that.

On the red hill at Tiruchengode they say the two became one body because of a man who would not walk round a woman.

Brahma and Indra came up to Kailash one day to worship, and the sage Bhringi came with them. Everyone who came to the lord's house went first to the lady of it. Brahma bowed to Parvati; Indra bowed to Parvati. Bhringi walked straight past her to Shiva. He had given his worship to one god and he meant to keep it there, and when he circled the lord he circled the lord alone.

"We are two halves of one being," Parvati told him. "Walk round both of us, or round neither."

He would not. So she went and sat on Shiva's lap, so that there was no way round the one without the other. Bhringi made himself a beetle and flew through the gap between their bodies.

That was the end of her patience. She drew the flesh and the blood out of him, and the sage who had been circling a god a moment before went down on his bones and could not stand. Shiva did not undo what she had done. He gave the man a third leg, so that the three stood like a tripod and held his devotee up.

Parvati went away to do penance. Adi Kesava Perumal, the Vishnu who lives on the hill, taught her the vow of Kedara Gauri, and she kept it, and by it she won what she had asked for: a place in Shiva's own body. The left half of him was hers now, the right half his.

"Let him circle you now," she said.

Bhringi tried. He made himself a beetle again and tried to bore between the two halves, to go round the one he had chosen, and found that there was no line where one ended and the other began. The goddess, they say, was moved by so much stubbornness, and blessed him.

The image on the hill stands about six feet high, the right side male and the left side female, on ground the tradition says was reddened long ago by the blood of Adi Shesha. Every year in the month of Vaikasi, when the chariots go out, the third of the four, the largest, carries the lord who is half woman through the streets of the town.