NAVARAATHRI SPECIAL SERIES #3 Lalita Tripura Sunthari (Raaja Raajeswari)

Paarvathi now desires to become a mother, but the celibate Shiva doesn’t seem to be remotely interested in reproduction. So, now, Paarvathi becomes Lalita.

People say that when you enter Lalita’s temple in Vaaranaasi, you can feel her radical power of attraction. Supposedly no one has ever been strong enough to spend the night there. Even her priests go crazy with love for her–and as a result, there’s a lot of turnover among the temple personnel. Lalita is the form of the goddess who most successfully holds together the apparent opposites of executive power and sexuality.
She is unabashedly sexy; but as an archetype of the feminine, Lalita’s freedom offers a concrete example of queenly sovereignty. She appears to personify the fully alive, balanced, unashamedly enlightened feminine that is never subordinate and is supremely confident. She gives life and fortune but reserves the right to take it away; she embodies enjoyment, sensuality and playfulness as well as restraint in her role as a chaste wife devoted to her husband. In her worldly aspects, Lalita can seem like a divine queen bee: the goddess who has it all, a diamond-bedecked aristocrat, a queen surrounded by male worshippers, the beauty whose erotic allure so seduces the patriarchy that the male gods bow down to her.
Shiva, you’ll remember, has incinerated Kama because Kama was unwise enough to disturb his meditation. A demon called Bhanda arose from Kama’s ashes and because he arose from Shiva’s anger, Bhanda is dangerously violent. Bhanda personifies what happens when erotic energy is violently repressed, especially through ascetic denial, as Shiva is doing at this point in his cosmic biography. Lalita defeats the demon and restores Kama to life. Lalita provides the necessary balance that lets Shiva’s ascetic potency take a creative form as love rather than as lust. She is the queen who rules through love, standing in her independence but never sacrificing pleasure; she is soft and delicate, yet invincible.
Lalita’s secret is that the woman remains powerful only when she is always available but never available, so close and yet so far away. If she immediately falls into your lap, then her power is gone. Once man has exploited her sexuality, used her, she is finished; she has no more power over him. So Lalita attracts you and yet keeps aloof. She provokes you, seduces you and when you come close to her, she simply says ‘No’! If she says ‘Yes’, you reduce her to a mechanism; you use her. No woman wants to be used but men have been doing that down the ages and women naturally resist it. Love has become an ugly thing; it should be the greatest glory, but it is not–Lalita is thus a reminder for men that women’s love should not be reduced to a commodity. By selecting only a man as competent as Shiva, Lalita also teaches women to set high standards for their husbands.
If, whenever you’re turned on sexually, you tend to collapse into a kind of a swoon, giving up boundaries, losing the protective armor that’s crucial for dealing with machas nowadays, if the peremptory and coercive ways that machas express their wanting is disturbing to you, if you feel you’re not beautiful enough, Lalita challenges you to embrace a kind of triumphant femininity that is almost extremely confident. She makes you examine the ways in which you have sold out your own femininity, your natural feminine power. For a man, she forces him to confront the aspects of feminine beauty and sexual power that frighten him and make him feel inadequate. For a woman who longs to embody her innate erotic power, yet is afraid of losing her power in marriage, Lalita can be a powerful key