The Sacrifice of Sati

The sages told the Pandavas of Sati and her father Daksha - a tale of a proud man's contempt for the holy, of a wife's unbearable shame, and of the terrible wrath of a grieving god.

Daksha was a great Prajapati, a lord of creatures and a son of the creator, powerful and proud, and he had a beautiful daughter named Sati. Sati loved the great god Shiva with her whole heart and set her mind upon him as her husband. But Daksha disdained Shiva. To Daksha's proud and worldly eyes, Shiva was no fit son-in-law: a wild ascetic who dwelt in cremation grounds, smeared with ash, clad in skins, his hair matted, attended by ghosts and strange beings, owning nothing, keeping none of the conventions that Daksha prized. Daksha could not see the supreme god beneath the unconventional form, and he despised him. Yet Sati would have no other, and in the end she was wedded to Shiva and went to live with him in his mountain home, devoted and content. But her father's contempt for her husband did not cool; it festered, and waited for an occasion to show itself.

In time Daksha resolved to hold a great sacrifice, a magnificent rite to which he invited all the gods and sages and the great ones of the worlds, who came in their splendor to attend. But out of his contempt, Daksha deliberately did not invite Shiva, nor his own daughter Sati - he left out the great god and his wife alone, of all the worlds, as a calculated insult, to show his scorn before the whole assembly.

Word of the grand sacrifice reached Sati in her mountain home, and a great longing rose in her to attend it - to see her father and mother and sisters again, to be present at her own family's great rite, as a daughter naturally wishes. She went to Shiva and asked his leave to go.

But Shiva counseled her gently against it. "We have not been invited," he said, "and that is no oversight - it is a deliberate slight from your father, who despises me. To go uninvited to a sacrifice, especially where you know you and your husband are unwelcome and may be insulted, is unwise and beneath your dignity. No good will come of it. I beg you, do not go." But Sati's longing for her family home and her family's company was too strong, and she could not believe her own father would truly shame her. She pleaded, and at last, against his own better judgment and his warning, Shiva let her go - sending some of his attendants with her.

Sati arrived at her father's great sacrifice, but she found no welcome there. Her father Daksha received her coldly, and worse, before the whole assembly of gods and sages he began to heap abuse upon her husband Shiva - mocking him as a filthy ascetic, a haunter of graveyards, a beggar attended by ghosts, unworthy of the company of the respectable gods, unfit to have been given his daughter. He poured out his contempt for the great god in the hearing of all, sparing nothing, shaming Shiva and, through him, Sati, in the most public and humiliating way.

Sati stood and heard her husband - the supreme Lord, whom she loved and revered above all - reviled and degraded by her own father before the whole gathering of the worlds. And she could not bear it. The shame and the grief and the outrage of it overwhelmed her: shame that her own father should so insult her husband, grief that the god she worshipped should be so degraded, and a burning sense that the very body she wore, born of such a father, was now a thing of disgrace to her.

Sati could not live with the shame of it. She would not return to her husband carrying the insult, nor remain in the body given her by a father who had so degraded the Lord. She rebuked her father before the assembly for his unforgivable contempt, declaring that she could no longer bear to wear a body born of him, and resolved to give up that body then and there.

Then, by the power of her own yoga - kindling an inner fire within herself, or casting herself into the sacrificial flames - Sati gave up her life at her father's sacrifice, immolating herself before the horrified assembly. The faithful wife, unable to endure her husband's humiliation, ended her own life rather than live with the disgrace, and her death cast a pall of horror over the whole grand rite. From this act - a chaste and faithful wife giving up her life upon a fire of shame and grief - the very word 'sati' took on its later weight in the memory of the world.

The attendants of Shiva who had come with her, seeing their mistress dead, rushed back in horror to the mountain to carry the dreadful news to their lord.

When Shiva learned of Sati's death - that his beloved wife had given up her life at her father's sacrifice, driven to it by Daksha's public insult to him - his grief was beyond all bearing, and his grief turned to a wrath such as the worlds had never seen.

In his fury, Shiva tore a lock of his matted hair and dashed it to the ground, and from it sprang up a being of terrible power and rage: Virabhadra, a fierce and gigantic warrior, born of Shiva's wrath, together with a host of fearsome attendants. Shiva commanded Virabhadra to go to Daksha's sacrifice and destroy it utterly, and to punish the proud Daksha who had insulted him and driven Sati to her death.

Virabhadra and the ferocious hosts of Shiva descended upon Daksha's great sacrifice like a storm. They fell upon the assembled gods and sages and scattered them, overturned the sacred fires, smashed the vessels and the offerings, and laid waste the whole magnificent rite, throwing the proud gathering into terror and rout. The gods who had come in their splendor fled before the wrath of Shiva's hosts, and the great sacrifice of Daksha was wrecked and ruined.

And Virabhadra came for Daksha himself, the proud lord whose contempt had begun the whole catastrophe. For all his power, Daksha could not stand against the wrath of Shiva embodied, and Virabhadra struck off his head, so that the arrogant Prajapati who had despised the great god and insulted him to his daughter's death lay slain amid the ruin of his own sacrifice.

So the contempt of Daksha had brought him to destruction. He had scorned the holy, mocked the supreme Lord out of his pride and his attachment to convention and respectability, and refused to see the divine beneath an unconventional form - and his arrogance had cost him his daughter, his sacrifice, and his life. The wreck of his great rite lay all about him, the gods scattered, his own head struck off, and his pride brought utterly low.

When Shiva's wrath had spent itself and the destruction was done, the gods and sages came to him, trembling, to plead for mercy and for the restoration of the order that had been overturned. They praised the great god, acknowledged the wrong that had been done him, and begged him to relent, to restore the ruined sacrifice and to bring back the slain to life, for the world could not prosper while the great rite lay wrecked and the gods scattered.

And Shiva, whose wrath, however terrible, is not without mercy, relented. His anger cooled into his deeper nature, which is compassion. He agreed to set right what his wrath had broken. He restored the wrecked sacrifice and revived those who had fallen. And he brought even Daksha back to life - but since the proud lord's own head had been destroyed and could not be restored, Shiva gave him in its place the head of a goat, or a ram, so that Daksha lived again, but bearing a goat's head upon his shoulders, a permanent and humbling reminder of his arrogance and its terrible cost.

Daksha, restored to life and chastened utterly, his pride broken at last, bowed before the great god he had despised, acknowledged his wrong, and worshipped him - seeing now, too late but truly, the supreme Lord he had mocked. The sacrifice was completed at last, with Shiva himself now honored in it, as he should have been from the first.

Sati was gone, but her story was not ended. She who had given up her life at her father's sacrifice was born again in a later age as Parvati, the daughter of the Himalaya, the lord of mountains - and in that birth, by long devotion and penance, she won the great god Shiva once more as her husband, and was united with him again, as Sati had been. So the bond of love between the goddess and the god, broken by Daksha's contempt and Sati's death, was restored in another life, and Sati became Parvati, the beloved consort of Shiva and the Mother of the worlds, mother of Ganesha and of the war-god Skanda.

The sages drew the lessons for the Pandavas. "See the terrible cost of contempt for the holy, son of Pandu. Daksha was powerful and proud, but he could not see the supreme Lord beneath an unconventional form, and out of his arrogance and his attachment to mere respectability he mocked the great god, and so destroyed his daughter, his sacrifice, and himself, and was left at last with a goat's head as the mark of his folly. Do not despise the holy because it does not wear the form you expect; the divine often comes in shapes that the proud and conventional scorn, and to mock it is to court ruin.

"See, too, the dignity of devotion: Sati would not live to hear her husband and her Lord degraded, but gave up her very body rather than bear the shame, and her faithfulness is honored forever. And see, beyond the wrath and the grief, the mercy of the god, who restored even the one who had wronged him most, and the constancy of love, which found its way back across death and rebirth, when Sati returned as Parvati and won her Lord again. Wrath has its hour, but mercy and love endure."

And the Pandavas took to heart both the danger of contempt for the holy and the constancy of true devotion, which not even death could break.