Sati

Also Known As: Sanskrit Satī, “truthful” or “virtuous,” from sat, “truth” or “being”; also Dākṣāyaṇī, “daughter of Dakṣa”
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds her own life on a loose rein and can set her body alight from the inside by yogic concentration alone, without touching a flame.
Role in Mythos: She is Daksha’s daughter and Shiva’s first wife, and her death at her father’s sacrifice wrecks the sacrifice, breaks Shiva, and scatters the goddess across the map of South Asia.
Relation to Humans: Pilgrims do not usually meet her under her own name but at the pithas, where the shrine exists because a piece of her landed there. Her name later attached itself to the widow-burning rite the colonial record called suttee, though the texts are clear that her husband was alive and well when she died.

The sacrificial enclosure smelled of hot clarified butter, and the brahmins were competing with one another to chant loudest. Vessels stood ranked along the ground in the order the rite demanded: clay, wood, iron, gold, bundled darbha grass, stretched hides. Every god present had a portion waiting for him. One did not. No share had been set aside for Rudra, and the daughter of the house had come without an invitation to see that for herself.

She was the youngest and best-loved daughter of Daksha, a Prajapati and a son of Brahma, and she had married badly by his reckoning. The accounts of how she came into the world do not agree with each other, which is usual for a figure this old. The Bhagavata Purana gives her Prasuti for a mother. The Shiva, Matsya and Kalika Puranas give her Asikni. In the goddess-centred texts the arrangement is stranger still and considerably more interesting: Daksha performs austerities and petitions the Great Goddess herself, who consents to be born as his child on one condition, which is that he treat her properly. She tells him in advance what will happen if he does not. He agrees. He forgets.

What she wanted from the beginning was Shiva, and Shiva is not an easy proposition. She left her father’s household for the forest and took up the hard, unglamorous work of asceticism, which in these stories is not a metaphor but a job with hours. She was tested. She kept at it. He gave in. By the Kalika Purana’s account they then lived on Kailasa for ten thousand divine years, and the text pauses over the mountain weather, the rain coming across the Himalayan folds, before it gets on with the plot. It is one of the few glimpses of her doing anything other than dying.

Daksha’s hatred of his son-in-law hardened in that interval. Shiva kept the wrong company and dressed wrong: matted hair, cremation ash, a garland of skulls, a retinue of goblins. When Daksha announced a great sacrifice, he invited the gods and left out the couple on the mountain. Shiva told her plainly what would happen if she went. She went anyway, and the Bhagavata blames the decision on her womanly nature, a line that says a good deal more about the text than about her. Shiva’s attendants went after her at speed and made a procession of it, mounting her on the great bull and carrying the whole apparatus of a royal arrival: white umbrella, chowries, garlands, mirrors, kettle-drums, conches, flutes, caged singing birds.

None of it helped. Her father would not receive her. Only her mother and sisters dared come forward, throats tight, and she refused the seat of honour they offered and would not answer their questions about her health. Then she saw the empty place where her husband’s share should have been, and she spoke, at length and without raising her voice much, on the subject of small men who can find fault in anything. What galled her most, she said, was the name. When Shiva teased her by calling her Dakshayani, daughter of Daksha, the joy went out of her.

She did not jump into the fire.

She sat down on the ground in the northern quarter, sipped water in the proper way, drew her cloth over herself and shut her eyes. Then she went to work with the same discipline that had won her the marriage. She balanced the breaths prana and apana, lifted udana from the navel, held it at the heart, drew it up through the throat and fixed it between her eyebrows. She held Shiva’s feet in her mind and nothing else. The Shiva Purana says her body fell into a yogic fire and was reduced to ash exactly as she intended. The Bhagavata says she was ablaze with a fire produced by her own concentration. The Kalika Purana says the same thing in fewer words. Three separate texts, one method, and no external flame anywhere in it.

The noise afterwards carried, according to the Shiva Purana, from the earth into the sky. Sixty thousand of Shiva’s attendants had been waiting at the door. About twenty thousand of them killed themselves on the spot with their own weapons. The rest went for Daksha, and the priest Bhrigu poured an offering into the southern fire with a Yajurvedic formula for destroying destroyers of sacrifices, and the Ribhus came up out of the pit in their thousands with firebrands. Shiva’s people were beaten off the field. That was only the obstruction. The destruction came later, when Shiva sent Virabhadra and Bhadrakali to finish the rite properly, and Daksha lost his head and got a goat’s in its place.

The oldest layer of the quarrel has none of this in it. In the Vedic ritual texts the gods simply leave Rudra out of a sacrifice and he answers with an arrow. There is no wife in that version, no father-in-law, no fire. Sati arrives with the Puranas, and when she arrives she changes what the story is about.

Her power is total and it has exactly one target. She can quiet an army of goblins with her lustre alone, she can walk out of her own body whenever she chooses, and in the Mahabhagavata Purana, when Shiva tries to stop her leaving, she becomes ten fearsome goddesses at once and surrounds him from every direction until he steps aside. What she cannot do is change one man’s mind. Nothing in her range reaches her father. The only thing she has authority over is the body he gave her, so that is the thing she destroys, and the destruction cannot be repeated or taken back. She gets one use of it.

What happened to the remains is the part that outlasted her. Shiva carried the corpse on his shoulder and wandered with it, and the world went out of true while he did. The best-known version has Vishnu cut the body apart with his discus. The Kalika Purana, which belongs to Kamarupa in Assam and has an interest in the outcome, tells it differently: Brahma, Vishnu and Shanaishchara enter the dead body by yoga and cut it up from inside, dropping the pieces at chosen places. Each piece made ground holy. The lists of those places never settled, which is the honest thing to say about them. That text counts seven. Others count fifty-one, or sixty-four, or a hundred and eight, and the numbers grow roughly in step with the spread of goddess worship across the subcontinent in the early medieval centuries. The shrines are in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Tibet, and at each of them the goddess is worshipped as the part of Sati that landed.

She was reborn to a father who deserved her, as Parvati, daughter of the mountain, and won Shiva a second time by the same means. The rite of widow-burning took her name from the same Sanskrit word, satī, a good woman. It is worth being precise about that, since the two are constantly folded together: Sati burned while her husband was still alive, in a rage at her father, and no text in the tradition has her following Shiva onto a pyre.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sati in Hindu mythology?

Sati is a Hindu goddess, the daughter of the Prajapati Daksha and the first wife of Shiva. She is also called Dakshayani, meaning daughter of Daksha. Her story is told mainly in the Puranas, including the Bhagavata, Shiva, Vayu, Kurma, Matsya, Linga and Kalika Puranas, and she is worshipped as a form of the great goddess Shakti.

How did Sati die?

Sati destroyed her own body using yogic concentration, not by jumping into a fire. Insulted by her father Daksha at his sacrifice, she sat on the ground facing north, drew her cloth over herself, controlled the breaths prana, apana and udana, and set her body alight from within. The Bhagavata Purana, the Shiva Purana and the Kalika Purana all describe the death this way.

What are the Shakta pithas and what do they have to do with Sati?

The Shakta pithas are goddess shrines built where pieces of Sati’s dead body are said to have fallen. After her death Shiva carried the corpse until the body was cut apart, in the best-known telling by Vishnu’s discus and in the Kalika Purana by Brahma, Vishnu and Shanaishchara working from inside it. The lists of pitha sites disagree, giving seven, fifty-one, sixty-four or a hundred and eight, spread across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Tibet.

Is Sati the same as Parvati?

They are the same goddess in two lives. After Sati abandoned the body born to Daksha, she was reborn as Parvati, daughter of Himavat the mountain king, and married Shiva again. The tradition treats Sati as the first wife and Parvati as her rebirth rather than as a separate deity.

Is the goddess Sati connected to the practice of widow-burning?

The practice takes its name from the same Sanskrit word, satī, meaning a virtuous or truthful woman, and the goddess and the rite have been linked in Hindu society for centuries. The stories themselves do not support the link. Sati destroyed her body out of anger at her father while Shiva was alive, and no Puranic account has her dying on her husband’s pyre.