Random Meditations Through Her 1000 Names - IV

Her fourth name is Chidagnikundasambhuta. Chit is consciousness. Agni is fire. Kunda is the Vedic fire altar. She, the goddess, emerges from the fire of consciousness that is nurtured in the kunda.

In the Puranic context of Sri Lalita Sahasranama, the devas needing to stop Bandasura did a fire sacrifice in order to make the goddess appear and kill the asura. Eventually, they cut out their organs and started offering them in the fire. At this point, the goddess emerged from the agni-kunda. It should be remembered that the Puranas are not fictional or exaggerated stories of the past. They are not past histories. Though they may or may not contain what happened in the historical or physical time. The bifurcation we see between mythology and history in the Euro-centric academia is a result of the history-centric approach of the expansionist religious systems of Christianity and Marxism.

In the Indic approach to this Puranic event, the account of devas offering their body parts into the fire implies the offering of the subtle-gross-causal body, which creates the ego-related pathos, to the fire Divine. It is at this point that the Divine Feminine emerges from the centre of the Sri Chakra, which, in turn, arose in the midst of “a great blaze of light, bright as millions of suns and cool as millions of moons put together”.

She not only emerges from the fire of the yajna, she also loves the yajna (Yajnapriya 881). She is the one who does the yajna (Yajnakathri 882), the embodied owner of the yajna (Yajamana Swarupini, 883). Above all, she is the yajna itself (Yajnarupa, 769).

Actually, contrary to popular perception, fire altars have been discovered in Harappan sites. Here is a detailed description of these Harappan fire altars as found in Kalibangan by the noted archaeologist B B Lal:

This rather long passage is needed to be quoted here because it brings out a fundamental concept in Indic spirituality that may seem so paradoxical – the basis of the process, the process itself, and the culmination of the process – all are she. In this context, the fire sacrifice, the fire of consciousness, and the emergence of the Divine Feminine that reveals herself in that fire of consciousness – all are one in a fundamental way.

The worship of flame that symbolises the jnana or chit-agni permeates Indian culture thoroughly. The symbolism of the act of lighting and nurturing the fire is repeated in many religious literary cultures of India. Azhwars famously sang of lighting the flame where the whole physical earth becomes a lamp, and lighting the inner lamp where the flame is jnana. In the village and domestic worship of the goddess, it becomes the lighting of mavilakku – or the lamp made of sweet flour. A very popular song sung collectively by common Tamil Hindus explain the significance:

Brighid is the Celtic goddess of flame. She was worshipped as the flame. She was the inspiration of the poets. In her own way, she was chit-agni and her name relates to another name in the Sahasranama – Brhati (673). When Christianity came to the land of Celts and Druid, it tried to tame her into the cult of Jesus by making her a mere saint of the sky-god and his son. So, by 450 CE, she became St Brigid of Kildare. Yet, the church could not extinguish the fire of her worship for almost 800 years. Her holy well, which no men should visit, and her eternal flame continued to burn near Kildare, Ireland, till 1220 CE, when the local Bishop ordered it extinguished. However, it was lit again by local devotees and was again put down in 1550. Then, it was only in 1993, with the revival of Pagan religions in Europe, that her fire would be lit up again.