Mohiniमोहिनी

Mohini is Vishnu in female form: the enchantress, her name built on moha, delusion, whose beauty is itself the divine instrument. She enters the tradition at the climax of the churning of the ocean, when the nectar of immortality, the object of the whole labour, fell into the demons' hands and force could not retrieve it. Vishnu became Mohini, and what armies could not take, fascination did. She is the tradition's most consequential statement that the divine is bound to no single sex, and her small but potent mythology has left marks from South Indian temple ritual to the classical dance of Kerala.

The story

In the churning narrative, told from the Mahābhārata onward, Mohini appears among the quarrelling asuras and offers to distribute the amṛta. Entranced, they consent; she serves the gods first, and the demons' share never comes. One asura, Rāhu, slips into the gods' line and is beheaded by Vishnu's discus even as he drinks, his immortal head becoming the eclipse-maker who pursues sun and moon in revenge. A second famous episode concerns Bhasmāsura, the demon who won the power to burn to ash whatever his hand touched and turned at once on Shiva, the giver of the boon. Mohini drew the demon into imitating her dance, step for step, until the choreography brought his own hand to his own head. In the southern tradition, Shiva himself was not immune: from the union of Shiva and Mohini was born the celibate warrior god Ayyappa, called Hariharaputra, son of Vishnu and Shiva together.

Legacy

Mohini's theology is a meditation on māyā: the same power that veils reality serves, in the god's hands, to protect it, and the demons are undone not by strength but by their own grasping. She is not the object of a broad independent cult, though she figures in South Indian temple festival traditions, and her name is carried by Mohiniyattam, the graceful female classical dance of Kerala, danced in the swaying idiom her legend suggests. In the avatar literature she stands apart from the ten canonical descents, an occasional form assumed for particular ends, and for modern readers she has become a touchstone in discussions of gender fluidity within the Hindu imagination of the divine.