Somnath and Mallikarjuna: Origin and Restoration

The moon's grief, the father on the mountain

The chapter on the twelve Jyotirlingas opens with two paired stories. Chandra, the moon, loses his light through a curse and regains it through worship. A devotee builds the first Somnath. The second Jyotirlinga, Mallikarjuna, holds the story of how Shiva and Parvati followed their son Skanda to the Srisailam hills and chose to stay.

A Chapter With Two Doors

The Shiva Purana's eighth chapter is dedicated to the twelve Jyotirlingas, the twelve self-manifest pillars of light in which Shiva is believed to have appeared on the soil of Bharat. The Kotirudra Samhita, the section of the Purana that holds these origin stories, opens with two stories at once. The convention of the chapter, set by this lesson, is that the twelve Jyotirlingas will be told in pairs, each pair held together by a shared theme.

The first pair, Somnath in the west and Mallikarjuna in the south, are the Jyotirlingas of origin and restoration. Somnath is the temple where Chandra, the moon, was restored to partial life. Mallikarjuna is the temple where Shiva, as a father, climbed a mountain to restore his bond with an estranged son. The chapter places these two stories at the start because they name what the Jyotirlinga tradition is fundamentally for. It is the geography of restoration. Twelve places where something that had been broken was set again into motion, and where the place itself remained as the durable proof.

Daksha's Twenty-Seven Star-Daughters

The first story begins, like so much in this Purana, with Daksha, the Prajapati. Daksha had many daughters. Twenty-seven of them, the nakshatras, are the lunar mansions of the night sky, the constellations through which the moon passes during its monthly cycle. The Sanskrit names of these twenty-seven daughters, from Ashwini to Revati, remain the names of the lunar mansions in Indian astronomy and in Vedic and Puranic ritual to this day.

Daksha gave all twenty-seven daughters in marriage to a single husband, Chandra, the moon. The arrangement was unusual but not unheard of in the Vedic context, and Daksha's intent was that the moon, passing through the sky each month, would visit each of his wives in turn and give each her share of his light.