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Dhumavati: The Goddess of Silent Inertness
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-
 Dhumavati is the eldest
among the Goddesses, the Grandmother Spirit. She stands behind the other Goddesses
as their ancestral guide. As the Grandmother Spirit she is the great teacher
who bestows the ultimate lessons of birth and death. She is the knowledge
that comes through hard experience, in which our immature and youthful desires and
fantasies are put to rest. - Dhuma means “smoke.” Dhumavati is “one
who is composed of smoke.” Her nature is not illumination but obscuration.
However, to obscure one thing is to reveal another. By obscuring or covering
all that is known, Dhumavati reveals the depth of the unknown and the unmanifest.
Dhumavati obscures what is evident in order to reveal the hidden and the profound.
- Dhumavati is portrayed as a widow.
She is the feminine principle devoid of the masculine principle. She is Shakti
without Shiva as a pure potential energy without any will to motivate it.
Thus she contains within herself all potentials and shows the latent energies that
dwell within us. To develop these latent energies we must first recognize
them. This requires honoring Dhumavati.
- Dhumavati shows the feminine
principle of negation in all of its aspects. On an outer level she represents
poverty, destitution, and suffering, the great misfortunes that we all fear in life.
Hence she is said to be crooked, troublesome, and quarrelsome – a witch or a hag.
Yet on an inner level this same negativity causes us to seek a greater fulfillment
than can be achieved in the limited realms of the manifest creation. After
all, only frustration in our outer life causes us to seek the inner reality.
Dhumavati is whatever obstructs us in life, but what obstructs us in one area can
release a new potential to grow in a different direction. Thus she is the
good fortune that comes to us in the form of misfortune.
- Dhumavati represents the darkness
on the face of the deep, the original chaos and obscurity which underlies creation.
She is the darkness of primordial ignorance, Mulavidya, from which this world of
illusion has arisen, and which it is seeking to transcend.
- Dhumavati represents the power
of ignorance or that aspect of the creative force which causes the obscuration of
the underlying light of consciousness. While Maya is the magic or illusion
power of the Lord that makes the one reality appear as many, ignorance is a form
of darkness which prevents us from seeing the underlying reality.
- Dhumavati is the void, wherein
all forms have been dissolved and nothing can any longer be differentiated.
Yet this void is not mere darkness. It is a self-illumining reality free of
the ordinary duality of subject and object.
- Dhumavati represents the negative
powers of life: disappointment, frustration, humiliation, defeat, loss, sorrow and
loneliness. Such experiences overpower the ordinary mind, but to the yogi
they are special doors of opportunity to contact the reality which transcends desire.
- Dhumavati is the elder form of
Kali, Kali as an old woman. She represents time or the life-force dissociated
from the process of manifestation. She is the timeless which never really
enters into the process of time.
- Dhumavati is portrayed as a tall and thin old
woman with disheveled and matted hair. She is fearful, unattractive and dark
in complexion, with a wrinkled face, and her limbs are red. She has a harsh
look in her eyes and she is missing a number of her teeth, which are otherwise large
in size. Sometimes she is portrayed with fangs and her nose is long and snout-like.
She is dressed in old or dirty clothes and her breasts hang down. She rides
a chariot whose insignia is a crow. In her left hand she carries a winnowing
basket and with her right makes the gesture of knowledge (Cinmudra). In other
accounts she carries a skull-cup and sword in her two hands. She wears a garland
of severed heads and is ever hungry and thirsty, always provoking quarrels and misunderstandings.
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