Śiva | The Ascetic and the Householder

Śiva Pūjā: The Worship of the Ascetic Who Is Also a Husband

On the strangest and most beloved figure of the whole pantheon: a matted-haired meditator who is also a faithful husband, an ash-smeared hermit who is also a father, and on why his worship is so dearly kept by families across the world.

 

Of all the great figures one might honour, none holds together so impossible a pair of qualities as the one met in Śiva Pūjā. He is the wild ascetic on the mountain, hair matted, body smeared with ash, withdrawn from the world entirely into the deepest meditation. And he is, at the very same time, the loving husband of Pārvatī, the father of Gaṇeśa and Skanda, the patient head of perhaps the most adored sacred household in any spiritual literature. No other major figure is allowed to be both these things so completely, and to grasp him at all is to grasp how the two go together.

This piece is not a list of procedures (those have their place, and are kept by the priest who conducts the rite). It is an introduction to the figure himself, because his worship makes a different kind of sense once one has seen who he actually is. What looks at first like a contradiction, ascetic and householder, hermit and husband, turns out to be the whole teaching: that the deepest stillness within a person is also what makes them capable of the deepest love, and that to honour Śiva is to honour the unity of these two things in oneself.

A Figure of Two Worlds

Look at almost any image of him and you will see both worlds at once. The matted hair piled high on his head and the ash across his body belong to the world of the great renouncers, the wandering yogīs and forest-dwelling sages who put aside everything to seek the absolute. The crescent moon caught in his hair, the cobra coiled at his throat, the trident in his hand, all of these are the marks of one who has gone beyond ordinary fears and ordinary attachments, who lives in a register quite different from the householder’s. And yet beside him, in the very same image, sits Pārvatī, his wife, often with one of their sons in her lap, the family as ordinary in their love as any.

Other traditions tend to separate these two ideals. The hermit goes one way, the householder the other, and rarely shall they meet. The Indian imagination did something more interesting: it placed both in a single figure and asked the heart to take him in whole. Worshipping Śiva, then, is not a matter of choosing between renunciation and life in the world. It is meeting a presence in whom both are held without contradiction, and slowly learning that one’s own life can hold them too.

The Matted Hair and the Ash

Begin with his ascetic side, which the iconography puts directly in front of us. The matted hair, the jaṭā, is the hair of one who has stopped grooming himself for the world’s eye; it is wild because he is no longer trying to please anyone, and there is a freedom in that which most of us only sense from afar. The ash that whitens his body, the vibhūti, is gathered from the cremation ground, and it carries an unflinching message: the body that we so anxiously preserve is, in the end, ash, and one who has truly faced this no longer needs to flatter the body, his own or anyone’s. The ascetic side is not morbid; it is honest, and the freedom of it is enormous.

The cobra at his throat tells the same story. The serpent is what we most fear, and he wears it like a garland; he has met that fear and made friends with it. The trident he carries, with its three prongs, points to the three great qualities of nature, restless energy, dull inertia, and clear light, and the ascetic stands above all three, mastered by none. Every detail of how he is shown insists on the same thing: this is someone who has seen through the games the world plays and is no longer played by them. To stand before him is to feel, for a moment, what such freedom might be like.

The River Caught in His Hair

A particular old story tells how the great river Gaṅgā, descending from the heavens to bless the earth, came down with such force that her fall would have shattered the ground. So Śiva offered his head to receive her, and the river was caught and gentled within the labyrinth of his matted hair, from where she released slowly and safely onto the earth as the gentle current we know. The image is exquisite. The wild ascetic, far from being uninvolved with the world, is in fact the one strong enough to take the world’s most overwhelming gifts and let them land softly on us.

This is worth holding in mind, because it changes how one sees his withdrawn side. Worship is sometimes thought of as the petitioning of a remote figure to come and help. The Gaṅgā story turns this around: the very depth and stillness of him is what allows him to receive and gentle what would otherwise destroy us. The ascetic is not less involved with the world than the busy householder; he is more deeply involved, but at a level the busy life cannot reach. To worship him is to draw near to that kind of depth, the capacity to hold even what is overwhelming, in oneself.

Pārvatī, and the Mountain Household

Now to the other side, the surprise that has charmed generations of devotees. Beside this remote ascetic stands his wife, Pārvatī, the daughter of the mountain, who is held by the tradition to be his perfect equal, his beloved, and his partner in a marriage of legendary depth. The stories of their courtship are tender and human; she pursued him through long austerities not because he was distant but because she recognised in him something her own heart was made for, and he, in turn, recognised her. Their union is the pattern of all sacred marriages, the meeting of two who are each fully themselves and who, precisely because of that, can be fully one.

From their love came the two best-loved divine children of the whole tradition: elephant-headed Gaṇeśa, who removes obstacles and is invoked at the start of every undertaking, and warrior Skanda, the young general of the celestial armies. The family scenes are everywhere in the old art and the old stories, the four of them together on Mount Kailāsa, the parents amused and tender, the boys playful. No other figure in the great religious imaginations of the world is shown so unselfconsciously as a husband and father. This is, frankly, astonishing for a renouncer, and it is the heart of why this worship is so dearly kept by families. The wider devotional life of the home is treated in the account of Pūjās and Homas.

Why Both Sides Matter

Here is the heart of the matter. The two sides of him are not in tension; they explain each other. Only because he is so deeply rooted in inner freedom can he love so completely without grasping. The husband and father is possible because of, not despite, the ascetic; and the ascetic is shown to us not as someone who has fled from love but as the one whose love is freest, kindest, least anxious. The renunciation is not the rejection of relationship; it is what makes relationship clean. This is a hard teaching, and a beautiful one, and the whole figure of Śiva embodies it.

For an ordinary person, who is neither a hermit on a mountain nor a perfect spouse, this is a kindness. It says that the inner work of becoming free and the outer work of loving one’s family are not two paths but one. The depth one cultivates in quiet is what gives one the patience and tenderness to be a good husband, wife, parent, friend. The freedom from grasping that meditation slowly grants is what makes love generous. Worshipping him is, in part, asking to grow up in this direction, becoming, even a little, the kind of person who is at once more inwardly free and more outwardly loving, because the two grow together.

How He Is Worshipped

With all this said, the rite itself is touchingly simple. A small upright form of stone or metal, the Liṅga, stands as his aniconic emblem on the home altar or in the temple, chosen for its very plainness, since he is finally beyond any particular shape. Cool clean water is poured slowly over it, sometimes with milk and curd and honey, while ancient verses are spoken. A leaf of the Bilva tree is laid upon the bathed Liṅga at the close, often three small leaves on a single stem. The whole offering can take five minutes or two hours; both are equally received.

A small whispered prayer of five syllables, Namaḥ Śivāya, “Salutations to him,” is the most beloved of all his addresses, and many devotees keep no other practice than the soft repeating of these five sounds through their day. The greatest of his Vedic hymns, the Śrī Rudra, is more elaborate and more ancient, sung in temples and in elaborate priestly ceremonies. But the small worship at home, water poured over the smooth stone, a Bilva leaf, the five syllables, is as fully his rite as the most magnificent temple ceremony, and the household that keeps it daily comes to feel his presence as something quite ordinary, in the best sense, in the rhythm of the home.

The Great Night

Once a year, in early spring, comes Mahāśivarātri, the Great Night of him, and it is among the most beautiful observances of the whole year. Devoted hearts keep a fast through the day and a vigil through the dark hours, bathing the Liṅga at intervals across the night, singing his name, telling the old stories, and waiting through to the dawn. There is something fitting about honouring him by staying awake through the night; he is the meditator, the one whose deepest moments are in the quiet hours when the world has fallen asleep, and to keep vigil with him is to share, for one night a year, in that watchful inwardness.

The week has its day for him too, Monday, and the month has its quiet hour, the Pradoṣa, the soft time just before dusk on a particular evening of each fortnight, when his ceremonies are said to be most freely received. A family that keeps these returns through the year, weekly, fortnightly, and the great vigil once a year, finds the year quietly shaped by him, and the figure who at first seemed remote becomes, over time, an intimate presence in the household, both the wild ascetic on the mountain and the tender father at home.

In a European Home

His worship is whole wherever it is kept. A small Liṅga on a home altar in Vienna receives the same water and the same whispered prayer as one in Vārāṇasī; the great hymn sung in a Lisbon flat reaches him as truly as anywhere; the Great Night of him is kept under European skies as faithfully as elsewhere, only by the local calendar. The figure who is the meditator on the mountain and the father at home is no more Indian than the moon caught in his hair; he is everywhere a depth and a tenderness can be honoured together, which is everywhere a sincere family chooses to honour them.

For a household far from the older shrines, then, nothing essential is wanting. The figure honoured here was always less a deity tied to one land than the pattern of an inner possibility, the marriage of stillness and love in one life, and that pattern is portable. Water poured slowly over a smooth stone, a leaf, the five syllables, and the year’s great vigil kept once a year, this is his rite, kept in any home, on any continent, under any sky, by anyone drawn to the strange and beloved figure at its centre.

The hermit on the mountain and the father at home are one figure: the inner freedom and the outer love grow together, or not at all.

It is, in the end, fitting that the most loved address to so vast a figure should be the smallest possible: five syllables, five sounds, breathed quietly into the air by a heart that has nothing else to say. The whole layered worship of him, the bathing of the Liṅga, the leaves of Bilva, the great hymns, the year’s vigil, distils finally to this: a quiet word, offered without ceremony, to a presence one has come to love. Both sides of him meet in those five sounds. The depth he embodies is honoured by their unforced simplicity; the love he holds out to the householder is received in their unhurried tenderness. Many devotees pass into old age with no other practice than this, and they pass with peace.

The understanding described here rests on the Śaiva literature of the lineage; the Śrī Rudra is from the Taittirīya Saṃhitā, with the stories of his family preserved in the Śiva Purāṇa, the texts gathered at Sanskrit Documents and scholarship on the Śaiva schools through the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.