Bhuvaneshvari: The Fourth Mahavidya, Queen of the Worlds, Form and Worship

Bhuvaneshvari is the fourth of the ten Mahavidyas. Her name is made of bhuvana, a world or realm, and ishvari, a queen or ruler, so she is the queen of the worlds. She is among the gentler Mahavidyas, and in the Devi Bhagavata Purana she is the supreme form of the Goddess herself, the one who rules the whole of creation. This page sets out her image, her place in the texts, her temples and her festival, as tradition tells them.

The name and the idea

The word bhuvana is used for the three worlds, the earth, the sky and the heavens, and also for any realm of existence. Bhuvaneshvari is therefore not the queen of one place but the power that makes space for all of them. In the Tantric reading she is the goddess of akasha, space or ether, the first of the five elements, which holds all that exists. Several teachers say that she is the Goddess in the aspect of “room”: the wide, open ground on which the other Mahavidyas appear.

Some Tantric lists treat her as the second in the order of creation, after the primal seed, and she is the Goddess in the sense of the whole world and of the sovereignty over it. In a few texts, Bhuvaneshvari and Tripura Sundari are described in very similar terms, and it is sometimes hard to tell the two apart. The placing of each differs between the schools.

Form and iconography

She is shown with a golden or red complexion, as radiant as the rising sun, with three eyes and a face that is full of smiling grace. A crescent moon is set on her crown. She has four arms: the two upper hands hold a noose and a goad, and the lower two make the gestures of fearlessness (abhaya) and of giving (varada). In some images she has a lotus in a hand in place of one of these. She sits on a lotus, or on a lion throne, and wears a red or saffron sari and many ornaments.

The noose and the goad are the same objects that are held by Tripura Sundari and by Ganesha, and they are read in the tradition as the means by which the Goddess draws the devotee near and drives away what hinders. The scholars of the iconography point out that her image is among the most regal of the ten: she is a queen on a throne, and not a figure of the cremation ground.

The story as tradition tells it

The Devi Bhagavata Purana gives her a place that is higher than a Mahavidya in a list. In its account the Goddess is the Supreme, and she is called Bhuvaneshvari in the great hymns of the text. Her abode is Manidvipa, the “island of jewels”, a place beyond the realm of Vishnu, which is described at length as a land of jewel mountains, gardens and palaces, with the Goddess in the centre on a throne whose legs are the gods. The same Purana holds that the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva themselves arise from her, and the text includes the Devi Gita, a teaching spoken by the Goddess to the mountain king Himavan. A reader of the text will see that the Bhuvaneshvari of the Purana is a much larger figure than the one in the list of ten.

The Tantric tradition also links her with the rising sun, which is the red of her complexion, and with the light by which the worlds are seen.

What the form means

In the readings of devotees, Bhuvaneshvari is the answer to a plain question: where does everything happen? She is the space in which it happens. A teacher of the tradition may say that she is both the world and the one who holds it, and that she is gentle because space does not push anything away. A quieter reading is simply that she is the goddess of order and of the right place for each thing, and that a person is invited to feel at home in the world.

Where she is worshipped

Bhuvaneshvari is worshipped at the Kamakhya complex in Assam, where there is a shrine to her among the Mahavidyas. In western India, she is the family goddess of many communities, and a well-known Bhuvaneshwari temple stands in Gondal, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. Shrines to her are found in several other regions. We do not give visiting hours or rules; check each temple’s own site.

Festivals

Her jayanti is commonly given on the twelfth day of the bright half of Bhadrapada, though calendars differ and we give no date. She is also honoured in the Navratri festivals; see the Sharad Navratri page and the Chaitra Navratri page. In many places the Goddess as queen is worshipped on the eighth and ninth day of Navratri, along with the Navadurga; the Navadurga guide describes the nine forms of that scheme.

A hymn that fits is the Devi Suktam, in which the Goddess herself declares that she is the queen, the gatherer of wealth, and that she pervades the heavens and the earth. The Bhavani Ashtakam is a shorter prayer to the mother. Tantric worship of Bhuvaneshvari is passed on by teachers and is not set out here.

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