Seven Hundred Verses Recited for a Thousand Years
What the Devi Mahatmyam is, its place in the Markandeya Purana, and why it is the Navaratri text. Why a book of battles is really about you.
What the Devi Mahatmyam is, where it sits inside the Markandeya Purana, and why its seven hundred verses are the text recited through the nine nights of Navaratri. And the question the whole course turns on: why a book of gods and demons is really a book about you.
The Ninth Night
Picture an old priest on the ninth night of Navaratri, in a small shrine to the Goddess on the banks of the Ganga at Varanasi. He is one of thousands doing the very same thing tonight, across India, in the same hours. An oil lamp throws his shadow onto the wall. Marigolds lie heaped at the feet of the image of Durga, and the air is thick with camphor smoke.
He opens a worn book. Its pages have been turned on this night every year for as long as he has been a priest. When his voice begins, it is low and sure. He is reading seven hundred verses that have been recited, out loud, for more than a thousand years.
The book is the Devi Mahatmyam, "the Glory of the Goddess." Most people know it by other names. In Bengal they call it the Chandi, and the act of reciting it the Chandi Path, the reading of the Chandi. Across much of India it is simply the Durga Saptashati, the "seven hundred verses of Durga." Saptashati means seven hundred. By tradition the text holds exactly that many verses, and that number is part of how it is counted and revered.
What is this text, where did it come from, and why is it the one book above all others read through the nine nights of Navaratri? That is what this first lesson is for. And there is one more question underneath it, the one the whole course turns on: why is a book of battles, of gods and demons and severed heads, really a book about you?
A Text Inside a Text
The Devi Mahatmyam does not stand alone. It sits inside a much older and larger work, the Markandeya Purana, one of the eighteen great Puranas. Within that Purana, the Devi Mahatmyam is chapters eighty-one to ninety-three, thirteen chapters in all. At some point, more than a thousand years ago, these thirteen chapters were lifted out and treated as a scripture in their own right: recited, memorised, and worshipped on their own. Few passages in any tradition have travelled so far from their parent book.