Gayatri Ji

Gayatri is the personification of the Gayatri Mantra, the most revered verse of the Vedas, and is honoured as Vedamata, the "mother of the Vedas." To worship her is essentially to worship sacred sound and knowledge given a form.

Vedamata ("mother of the Vedas") and Savitri (linked to Savitr, the Sun as the vivifying power the mantra invokes) are her principal names. She is also identified with the sacred verse-metre, the gayatri chhanda, from which she takes her name.

She is most often shown as Panchamukhi, five-headed, seated on a red lotus, with many arms bearing the emblems of the gods. The five faces are read as the five vital breaths (pranas) and five elements, and as the four Vedas together with the supreme knowledge beyond them; the imagery presents her less as a personality than as the ordered totality of Vedic wisdom.

Unlike deities with rich narrative cycles, Gayatri's "story" is really the story of her mantra: a verse from the Rigveda addressed to the solar Savitr, praying that the divine light illumine the intellect. In Puranic tradition she is associated with Brahma as the goddess of the Vedas, and at Pushkar she is enshrined beside him. Much of her prominence as a distinct goddess is comparatively late, growing from meditation on the mantra rather than from epic legend.

She is associated in Puranic accounts with Brahma the creator, as the embodiment of the Vedic knowledge through which he creates. These associations are theological rather than narrative, and she is sometimes identified or grouped with Saraswati and Savitri as aspects of one goddess of sacred learning.

The Gayatri Mantra is recited daily in traditional practice, especially in the sandhya rites at dawn and dusk, and is central to the sacred-thread (upanayana) initiation. Gayatri as goddess embodies that daily discipline of turning the mind toward light and clarity; she is invoked for wisdom, purity and spiritual growth.

In the twentieth century the Gayatri Parivar movement, founded by Shriram Sharma Acharya and centred at Shantikunj in Haridwar, made Gayatri worship and mantra practice into a large, organised, reformist movement, deliberately opening a mantra once guarded by ritual restriction to a much wider public. This modern, mass form of Gayatri devotion sits alongside her older, more strictly ritual Vedic use.