Prakrithi-Maatangi Part One

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Those who know how I work are familiar with my openness to what comes with each term. I know that the contemplation focus that will suggest itself will be one that is important to me and to those who feel moved to join me in the inquiry.

And so it was when Prakrithi emerged as the theme for Term 4 courses. As I hold Prakrithi in preparation for the term, I was taken by the deity Maatangi, one of the ten forms of the Goddess. Of all the forms, Maatangi is one that is closest to the untamed wildness and generosity of nature. She also reinforces the positioning of contemplative inquiry outside of the usual social contexts.

Maatangi literally means the mother of all elephants, connecting us immediately to the elephant symbol of earth (also present in the earth chakra or Mooladhaara). Maatangi is the domain of the weighted pull of the earth—deliberate, slow, ever gracious but magnificently powerful. The lumbering, gentleness belies the strength and power of the elephant space.

One of the more curious aspects of Maatangi is her association with remnants, or uchchishta, as it is called in Sanskrit. Uchchishta literally means the leftovers of someone’s eating, offal or food that is rejected because it is somehow “impure”. This is the most powerful inquiry in the Maatangi domain.

Uchchishta is an invitation to consider that which is left after our gluttonous consumption of the earth. Where we are focused on further consumption, Uchchishta asks that we turn our senses to what is left, the remnants that we rush away from in our aspirational perception. While we think that contemplative inquiry is about something we do not have as yet, Uchchishta draws our attention to the humble rejects of our consumption.

The Uchchishta attribute flows into the evocation of Maatangi as the outcaste deity. In traditional Indian texts, Maatangi is explicitly said to be of a “lower caste” or tribal, forest-dweller people. This sets her aside from the high case Brahminical and Sanskritic culture. Maatangi knows the forest intimately, and is intimate with the song of the parrots and fearless of the wild animals. Her realm powerfully situates contemplation outside of known and affirmed structures and practices. Maatangi’s inquiry is amongst nature that is not domesticated or moulded to suit human self-interest.

Maatangi is about simplicity. As a dweller of forests and hills, she sets the context of contemplation outside of built environments of temples, palaces and cities. She asks that we pay attention to the simplest movements of nature—birdsong, the swaying of the trees, the rush of clouds in the sky—and to find those movements within us as we are of the same nature as all else. She suggests that the selfsame feelings that move the wind across the hills, the water in the streams and the leaves on the trees, also move us. In dancing with them, we know Consciousness or Brahman as that which moves within everything.

Maatangi is often called the Tantric aspect of Saraswathi, who is the deity of wisdom. The Tantric side of Maatangi is in her connection with the earth, body, senses and the ordinary movements of all these domains. We chew through life, spitting out that which we think is the roughage that offers no nourishment. Yet Maatangi proposes that in this relentless focus on consumption we in fact reject exactly those spaces wherein revelation is held.

Postscript:

Decades ago, when I first arrived in Australia, a dear friend who was an artist, gifted me a painting of Maatangi for my birthday. He said to me that it was my archetypal deity. I was perplexed at this because I come from a temple tradition which is very Sanskritic and classical, so the forest dwelling outcaste Maatangi seemed very distant. Today I look at the painting hanging on the wall of my drawing room and I realise that my dear friend saw something all those years ago that I am only seeing now.

Maatangi is here, and what a moving, enigmatic deity she is!