Vaishno Devi Ji

Vaishno Devi is the goddess worshipped at a cave shrine in the Trikuta Hills above Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in India. She is understood as the combined form of Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, three goddesses united in one being.

Devotees call her Vaishnavi and simply Mata Rani, "Mother Queen." Before her assimilation into pan-Hindu worship she was venerated locally as Trikuta Devi, named for the three-peaked mountain associated with her presence.

Unlike most major goddesses she is not represented by a sculpted image. The sanctum of the cave shrine holds three natural rock formations, or pindis, at its innermost point, understood as the self-manifest forms of the three goddesses whose combined power she embodies.

Tradition holds that the demon Bhairavnath pursued her through the mountains until she beheaded him near the cave; as he lay dying he repented, and she granted him the boon that no pilgrimage to her shrine would be complete without also visiting the Bhairon temple where his head fell. The cave's location is said to have been revealed centuries ago in a dream to a devotee, Pandit Shridhar, whose descendants, the Baridars, still hold a customary role in the shrine's worship.

She is worshipped as the joint manifestation of the Tridevi, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati and Mahakali, rather than as a goddess with an independent family lineage. Her identity absorbed the earlier local goddess Trikuta Devi as devotion to her spread beyond the region.

The earliest textual reference associated with her worship traces to the Mahabharata, where Krishna advises Arjuna to invoke the Mother Goddess before the battle of Kurukshetra. Today the pilgrimage, a steep trek to the cave shrine, draws several million devotees a year and is administered by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board.

Her cult is centred on Jammu and Kashmir but her devotees are drawn from across India. The shrine's modern organisation dates to the Dogra ruler Maharaja Gulab Singh's 19th-century religious endowment, which formalised what had been a more informal local pilgrimage into its present large-scale form.