happy Mahāśivarātri! 🙏 reflecting today on the need to destroy within that which is familiar to be reborn as new. a poem inspired by the homam witnessed at the Chidambaram Temple (pictured):
Agni
is starved
mantra pours into the fire
ghee pours into the fire
milk pours into the fire
curd pours into the fire
sugar pours into the fire
silk pours into the fire
fear pours into the fire
past pours into the fire
doubt pours into the fire
attachment pours into the fire
woe pours into the fire
ire pours into the fire
Agni
licks his lips
quenching the homam within,
i wear the embers on my eyelids
with each blink
i regenerate.
Har Har Mahādeva!
🔱 further context: scholar Richard K. Payne explores homa as symbiosis between fire, the deity invoked in and concomitantly identified with the fire, and with the practitioner, who themselves becomes ‘ritually identified with both the deity and the fire’. in this, the offerings immolated in the fire are connoted with ‘spiritual obstacles that impede the practitioner from full awakening’. most significantly, ‘the practitioner’s own inherent wisdom is identified with the fire, and just as the offerings are transformed and purified, the practitioner’s own spiritual obstacles are, as well’. (2017)
Payne interestingly identifies two strains of interpretation of the ritual: first, ‘the yogic interiorization of ritual found in post-Vedic Indian religion, more as a form of esoteric physiology than as a psychologized understanding of visualization’; second, ‘the sexual symbolism’ ‘attached to all aspects of fire rituals’. (2017)
amaryllis 