Sati's Fire and Shiva's Grief

Sati stood in her father’s great hall in front of the assembled gods, and her father did not greet her. The whole court watched.

“Father,” she said. “Why was my husband not invited to this rite?”

Daksha looked her over coldly. “Because your husband is not someone I invite to my house,” he said. “I have told you what I think of him. He lives in cremation grounds. He covers himself in ash. He is ungroomed and ill-dressed. He has no household. He is not a person to invite to a sacrifice.”

The court was silent.

Sati did not weep. She did not raise her voice.

“You may speak of me as you like, Father,” she said. “You may insult me. I have given you that right because I am your daughter. But I will not stand here and let you insult my husband in front of the gathered worlds. Not him. Not Shiva. He has done nothing to you. He has done nothing to deserve any of the things you are saying.”

She looked around the hall. The other gods looked away. Even the ones who knew Shiva well, who would have defended him in private, said nothing. Daksha’s anger was loud. No one wanted to attract it.

“I see,” Sati said. “No one here will speak for him. So I will not stand in this hall. I will not speak for him with my voice. I will speak for him with my body.”

She walked to the centre of the hall. There was a fire already burning — the sacrificial fire, the rite’s central altar. She walked up to it.

Her father saw what she was about to do, and at last he opened his mouth — but no useful words came out. Just his name in a panicked shape.

Sati sat down by the fire and closed her eyes. She drew the fire of her own austerity, which she had built up over years and never spent, into her body. Her body began to glow. She lifted her arms — and let the fire of her body take her.

She did not scream. She did not move. The fire that had been on the altar and the fire that had been in her became one fire. The body of Sati ended in it.

The hall went silent.

A great wind came in from the north. Then a louder wind. Then the ground shook. Word had reached Kailash.

Shiva was coming.

What came down from the mountain was not the calm ascetic the court had insulted. It was a form they had never seen — wrath embodied, hair flying loose, the third eye open. With him came an army of his ganas — small fierce attendants — and at their head a being he had just created out of his own grief, named Veerabhadra: vast, black-skinned, with a thousand arms and a thousand weapons. Veerabhadra had been born for one job and he was going to do it.

The army arrived at the hall. The rite was destroyed in minutes. The fire was broken open. The offerings were scattered. The invited gods fled. Veerabhadra found Daksha and struck off his head. The patriarch of the worlds, the one who had thought himself untouchable, lay dead on the floor of his own hall.

Shiva himself did not strike anyone. He went only to where Sati’s body had ended. He sat there and did not move.

When the rage was spent and the army was still, Shiva — calmer now, sadder — looked around at the wreckage. He raised Daksha back to life (with a goat’s head replacing the one Veerabhadra had taken — the Purana lets that detail stand). He restored the gods who had been wounded. He let those who had run come back. He even let the rite, in some accounts, be completed.

But Sati was gone. And Shiva picked up her body and walked away with it. He did not say where he was going. He carried her himself.

The next story is what happened as he carried her, and the fifty-one places on earth where pieces of her body fell.