Prabhas (Chandrabhaga)

The origin of every Shakti Peetha is the story of Sati and Daksha. Daksha, the great progenitor, held a sacrifice and did not invite his daughter Sati and her husband Shiva, or invited them only to insult Shiva before the assembled gods. Sati, unable to bear the dishonour of her lord, cast off her body in the sacrificial fire, or by her own yogic power. When Shiva learned of it he was consumed with grief and rage; he took up her body and began the tandava, the dance of destruction, carrying her corpse across the worlds, and the shaking of his dance threatened to unmake creation.

To end the danger and to release Shiva from his grief, Vishnu followed with his Sudarshana chakra and cut away the body of Sati piece by piece as Shiva carried it, so that the parts fell to earth across the land. Each place where a part of the goddess fell became a Shakti Peetha, a seat where the goddess is present in the ground, worshipped as a particular Shakti and guarded by a particular form of Shiva as her Bhairava.

At Prabhasa, the shining tirtha on the Saurashtra coast, the traditional lists hold that a part of Sati's body fell, given in the common accounts as the stomach, and the goddess dwells here as Chandrabhaga, with the Bhairava Vakratunda. The seat lies within one of the most sacred landscapes of Gujarat, beside the Somnath Jyotirlinga, at the Triveni Sangam where the Hiran, the Kapila and the vanished Saraswati are held to meet the sea, and near the place where, in tradition, Krishna departed the world. As with all the peethas, the lists vary in their attributions, some giving other body parts and other names, but the sanctity of the goddess at Prabhas is held to reach back to the falling of the body itself, layered upon a tirtha already ancient.

Prabhasa is one of the Shakti Peethas, the seats of the goddess linked by the myth of the fallen body of Sati, located at Prabhas Patan on the Saurashtra coast of Gujarat, beside the great Somnath temple. The traditional lists hold that a part of Sati's body fell here, and the goddess dwells as Chandrabhaga, with the Bhairava Vakratunda.

Prabhas, the shining tirtha, is of the deepest antiquity in the sacred geography of Gujarat, holy long before the tradition reckons the falling of the body. It is the seat of the Somnath Jyotirlinga, the first of the twelve lights of Shiva, whose temple by the sea has been destroyed and rebuilt across the ages and stands today as one of the great pilgrim shrines of India. It is the Triveni Sangam, where the Hiran, the Kapila and the vanished Saraswati are held to meet the Arabian Sea, a confluence sacred for the rites of the ancestors. And it is the place associated in tradition with the departure of Krishna from the world, whose Bhalka Tirtha and Dehotsarga lie close by. The Shakti Peetha of Chandrabhaga is set within this layered kshetra, its sanctity joined to that of Somnath, the confluence and the memory of Krishna.

As a Shakta seat of Gujarat, Prabhasa stands within the goddess tradition of the region, its worship following the Gujarati Shakta manner, and its calendar marked by the great goddess festivals, above all Navaratri, the height of the Gujarati devotional year with its nights of garba and the worship of the Devi. The peetha's attributions, like those of all the Shakti Peethas, vary between the traditional lists, but its standing as an ancient seat of the goddess within the Prabhas kshetra is secure in the tradition.

Prabhasa remains a living seat of the goddess, drawing devotees of the Devi and pilgrims of the Shakti Peetha tradition who come to the place where a part of Sati is held to have fallen, most of them combining it with the darshan of the Somnath Jyotirlinga and the tirthas of the sacred coast. It joins the vast antiquity of Prabhas to the tradition of the goddess, a place where the Devi has been worshipped, the tradition holds, since the body of Sati came to earth here, within a landscape already ancient and holy.