Mahadevaमहादेव

Mahadeva (महादेव), the Great God, is the title by which Shiva is invoked as supreme — not one deity among the many but the whole of divinity: source, sustainer and dissolver of the universe, and the ground beyond all three functions. Within the Trimūrti scheme Shiva is assigned destruction, but for the Śaiva traditions the term is too small; dissolution is only one gesture of a god who is also creation's cause, the inner controller of every soul, and the silent absolute in which all activity rests. Across India, Mahadev is the name on the lips of his worshippers, from the greatest temples to the smallest roadside liṅga.

From Rudra to Mahadeva

Shiva's ascent runs through the whole of Indian religious history. The Ṛgveda knows Rudra, the fierce, remote archer whose arrows bring disease and whose mercy heals; the name Śiva, the auspicious one, began as a placating epithet. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad marks the decisive step, addressing Rudra-Śiva as the one God, Maheśvara, the lord of all — among the earliest full statements of theism in Indian literature. The epics and Purāṇas complete the elevation: in the Śaiva Purāṇas Mahadeva grants boons to gods and demons alike, and even Vishnu and Brahmā appear as his devotees, the myth of the endless liṅga of fire — whose top and bottom neither could find — asserting his measurelessness.

The five acts

Śaiva theology systematised the Great God's totality as the pañcakṛtya, the five acts: creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment and grace. The last two are the distinctive pair — the god who veils himself from souls also, in his own time, reveals himself and liberates them. The Naṭarāja image dances all five at once: the drum of creation, the gesture of protection, the fire of dissolution, the foot planted on the demon of forgetting, and the raised foot of release. Schools from the Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta to the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir dispute the metaphysics — whether the soul is finally distinct from Shiva or identical with him — while agreeing on the name: Mahadeva, the God beyond whom there is nothing.

Iconography and worship

Mahadeva's images hold opposites together: the matted-haired ascetic of Kailāsa smeared with ash, and the householder enthroned with Pārvatī, Gaṇeśa and Kārttikeya; the third eye that burned Kāma, god of desire, and the tenderness that makes him easily pleased — Āśutoṣa — by a leaf, a little water, a sincere gesture. He bears the crescent moon and the descending Gaṅgā in his hair, the serpent at his throat blue from the poison he swallowed to save the world, the trident in his hand; the bull Nandin waits before every shrine. Above all he is worshipped in the liṅga, the aniconic pillar that refuses to give the measureless a face. His night is Mahāśivarātri, kept in vigil across the subcontinent, and the twelve jyotirliṅga shrines map his presence onto the land itself — the Great God diffused through the geography of India as thoroughly as through its thought.