Katyayani Ji

Katyayani is the sixth of the Navadurga, the warrior form credited in scripture with slaying the buffalo-demon Mahishasura, the same central myth carried by Durga's own Mahishasuramardini identity. She is first named in the Taittiriya Aranyaka of the Yajurveda, well before the Puranic myths built around her.

Her name means "daughter of, or created by, the sage Katyayana": the Vamana Purana holds she took form in his hermitage, while the Kalika Purana holds he was simply the first to worship her. She is also called Mahishasuramardini, "slayer of Mahishasura," after her defining feat.

She is shown with four arms, riding a lion, holding a sword and a lotus, with her other two hands in the abhaya and varada mudras of protection and boon-giving. Her complexion is golden and radiant. She is traditionally associated with the colour red, and in yogic and tantric traditions with the ajna, or third-eye, chakra.

Per the Vamana Purana, when the gods' collective fury at Mahishasura's tyranny blazed from their faces as flame, the combined light coalesced into a mountain of radiance in the hermitage of the sage Katyayana, from which Katyayani emerged, three-eyed, black-haired and eighteen-armed. Each god armed her with his own weapon: Shiva's trident, Vishnu's Sudarshana Chakra, Varuna's conch, Agni's dart, Vayu's bow, Surya's quiver of arrows, Indra's thunderbolt, Kuvera's mace, Brahma's rosary and water-pot among them. Thus armed, she went to the Mysore hills, where Mahishasura, taken by her beauty, sought her hand; she told him she could only be won in battle. He fought her in his buffalo form, and she killed him with her sword, earning the title Mahishasuramardini. A separate account, carried in the Skanda Purana, credits her with swallowing all of the self-replicating demon Raktabija's blood to stop his clones from multiplying, aiding the god Bhairava in that later war. In the Bhagavata Purana, the gopis of Gokul keep the Katyayani Vrata through the month of Margashirsha, praying to win Krishna as their husband, a vow followed by the well-known episode of Krishna taking their clothes while they bathe in the Yamuna.

Consort Shiva. In Shaktism she is grouped with other fierce Shakti forms such as Bhadrakali and Chandika, and is also regarded as sister of Surya, worshipped alongside him during Chhath Puja in eastern India. Devi Kanya Kumari, worshipped at India's southern tip, is held to be her avatar (or Parvati's).

She stands at the heart of Durga Puja's central myth, the slaying of Mahishasura. Her Tulja Bhavani form at Tuljapur, second among the Shakta Pithas, is the family deity of the Bhosale Maratha royal line; tradition holds she gave Shivaji the Bhavani sword for his campaigns.

Worshipped as family deity at Tuljapur by the Bhosale line; honoured during Tamil Pongal through sand-idol worship; held temples at Cherthala and Kumaranalloor in Kerala; and central to the Braj tradition of the gopis' vow during Margashirsha.