166. performance
At any given time during the festival season, and occasionally at other times, one can
see several of these performances going on at once amidst the other temple activities:
puja(ritual offerings), arati(waving of the flame), ecstatic dancing and singing, the
ritual shaving of childrens’ heads, and the worship of virgin girls. Pilgrims eat and
distribute prasad (consecrated food), priests recite the DeviMahatmya, and people
shout the ubiquitous cry of joy, Jay matadi(“Victory to the Mother”).
The goddessFerajvaliis like the great gods Visnu andFiva in her power, purity, and
universality. At the same time, she shares characteristics such as accessibility, imma-
nence, and intimacy with the lesser deities and saints. While the great male gods of the
Hindu pantheon do not generally possess their devotees, the more minor divinities do.
When I asked informants why the Goddess possesses people, whereas Visnu andFiva
do not, they were usually unable to provide a reason. One informant, however, the sec-
retary of the newly built BabaBalak Nath temple in Chandigarh, gave this explanation:
BabaBalak Nath and Devican both enter a man or a woman. Just as there are dif-
ferent branches of the government, so do different gods have different functions.
Full avatars [incarnations of the Divine] do not enter people. Visnu and so forth
do not. But Mais fakti;she is everywhere. Therefore, she does not fall into the cat-
egory of avatar.^9The monistic identification of spirit and matter found in Fakta theology may help
explain why possession by the Goddess occurs far more frequently than possession
by such supreme male deities as Visnu and Fiva. As we have noted, male deities do
possess human devotees, but these tend to be lower-level functionaries such as Baba
Balak Nath or GuggaPir, with the occasional exception. The cults of Narasimha in
Himachal Pradesh and Venkatefvara in Andhra Pradesh—both incarnations of
Visnu—involve divine possession, but these are atypical.
The general understanding of possession is that the Goddess plays in people and
speaks through them as a means of helping her devotees and revealing her fakti. She
may also wish to castigate those who have committed some evil or issue a demand
that she expects her devotees to fulfill. It is not unusual for new temples to be built
or old images to be “rediscovered” as the result of a command from the Goddess
speaking through a possessed medium. A small temple in a village that is now part
of the city of Chandigarh, for example, was built in the late nineteenth century after
a young girl became possessed by the Goddess and told the villagers that only by
building a temple could they eradicate a severe epidemic. Similarly, NainaDevi
temple was built on a hillside outside Kalka in 1950 on the orders of the Goddess,